Scotsman 30th April 2018, The Scottish Government will this week face calls to hold a review into
concerns over nuclear weapons “convoys” travelling through towns and cities
in Scotland. The Greens have said the SNP government, which opposes nuclear
weapons, is responsible for community safety and emergency planning and
cannot dismiss the issue as being reserved to Westminster.
MSPs are preparing to debate the issue at Holyrood on Wednesday, where Green MSP
Mark Ruskell will call for a review.
Up to eight times a year, a convoy of heavy trucks containing weapon materials and nuclear warheads travels
between the Aldermaston and Burghfield atomic weapon plants in Berkshire to
the Royal Navy base at Coulport on Loch Long where the UK’s nuclear weapons
are stored. These trucks will often be carrying weapons materials for
maintenance or replacement. But a Freedom of Information request by Green
MSPs last year found that none of the relevant local authorities the trucks
pass through has conducted risk assessments in relation to the convoys. https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/greens-seek-review-of-nuclear-convoy-safety-1-4732236
Daily Record 30th April 2018, Dozens of elite gun cops tasked with protecting Britain’s nuclear weapons
at Faslane and other military sites are too unfit to carry firearms, it
emerged yesterday. A shocking report into the Ministry of Defence Police
reveals “concern” at the growing number who have been sidelined. The
crisis has emerged after tougher fitness tests equal to those taken by
other armed officers were introduced. Some MoD police – whose jobs include
guarding the nuclear submarine fleet at Faslane, SAS headquarters in
Hereford and GCHQ’s Cheltenham base – have failed the new tests. Others
have simply refused to take part, the Mail on Sunday reported. https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/gun-cops-faslane-too-unfit-12451711
Times 29th April 2018, New nuclear power plants are likely to blow their budgets and arrive late unless their designs are completed before construction starts, a report has warned. Ministers, wary of cost hikes and delays, are wrestling with how to financially support replacements for ageing coal-fired and nuclear plants across the UK.
Hitachi is trying to strike a deal with ministers to build a £10bn-plus plant at Wylfa on Anglesey, where taxpayers are likely to take a stake.
Researchers at Energy Technologies Institute found that most high-cost projects had started construction with incomplete designs, whereas work on low-cost plants had begun only once design and planning had been finalised.
Amsterdam, Netherlands – The “Akademik Lomonosov”, the world’s first floating nuclear power plant, has this morning left St. Petersburg and will be towed through Estonian, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian waters towards Murmansk, warned Greenpeace.
The floating nuclear power plant was initially supposed to be loaded with nuclear fuel and tested on site in the centre of St. Petersburg. However, due to pressure from the Baltic states and a successful petition organised by Greenpeace Russia, Rosatom, the state-controlled nuclear giant that owns and operates the floating nuclear power plant, decided on 21 July 2017 to move loading and testing to Murmansk.
“To test a nuclear reactor in a densely populated area like the centre of St. Petersburg is irresponsible to say the least. However, moving the testing of this ‘nuclear Titanic’ away from the public eye will not make it less so: Nuclear reactors bobbing around the Arctic Ocean will pose a shockingly obvious threat to a fragile environment which is already under enormous pressure from climate change,” said Jan Haverkamp, nuclear expert for Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe.
Having reached Murmansk, a city of 300,000, the “Akademik Lomonosov” — first in a series of floating nuclear plants planned — will be fuelled, tested and, in 2019, towed 5,000 km through the Northern Sea Route and put to use near Pevek, in the Chukotka Region.
According to Russian media, Rosatom is currently planning a production line, which will be capable of mass producing floating nuclear reactors. Backed by its owner, the Russian State, the company has already been in talks with potential buyers in Africa, Latin America and South East Asia.
“This hazardous venture is not just a threat to the Arctic, but, potentially, to other densely populated or vulnerable natural regions too,” said Jan Haverkamp.
There are indications that 15 countries, including China, Algeria, Indonesia, Malaysia and Argentina, have shown an interest in hiring floating nuclear plants. Among other purposes, the floating nuclear plant is intended to provide power for oil and gas exploration.
“The floating nuclear power plants will typically be put to use near coastlines and shallow water. Contrary to claims regarding safety, the flat-bottomed hull and the floating nuclear power plant’s lack of self-propulsion makes it particularly vulnerable to tsunamis and cyclones,” said Jan Haverkamp.
TOKYO — Hitachi will ask the U.K. government to take a direct stake in the company that is to build and operate a nuclear power plant in Wales which is now 100% owned by the Japanese industrial company. Hitachi expects the U.K. government will invite private British companies to participate and hopes to reduce its own stake to less than 50%.
Nikkei has learned that Hitachi Chairman Hiroaki Nakanishi will shortly travel to the U.K. to discuss the ownership issue and other project terms with British Prime Minister Theresa May.
Hitachi has recently concluded that the risk of proceeding with the Anglesey project, at an estimated cost of more than 3 trillion yen ($27.5 billion), is too great to manage on its own as a private company. It plans to withdraw from the project if restructuring negotiations fall through. Such a move would have significant repercussions for nuclear power policy for both Britain and Japan.
Hitachi acquired complete ownership of the U.K.’s Horizon Nuclear Power in 2012 for 89 billion yen as part of its plan to expand its nuclear business from Japan to foreign markets. It has spent about 200 billion yen preparing for Horizon’s first project, the construction of a plant on the Isle of Anglesey in Wales.
Hitachi hopes to lower its stake in Horizon to less than 50% before construction begins at Anglesey. It has requested that the British government take a direct stake in Horizon and then invite local enterprises to invest.
In response to Hitachi’s concerns, the British government earlier this month proposed that U.K. interests and Japanese public and private interests join with Hitachi to move Anglesey forward. The three sets of shareholders would each put 300 billion yen into the project, giving each a one-third stake. According to sources, the company and the Japanese government see it as too risky for Japanese interests to retain a majority shareholding and hope that British interests will acquire a controlling stake.
London has been leery up to now of taking a direct stake in any new nuclear construction. Hitachi will likely seek in direct talks a commitment to U.K. government investment as well as to additional support that may be necessary to sustain the operation.
Other key project terms also remain unsettled, including the degree to which London would guarantee the 2 trillion yen in loans Hitachi sees as needed to finance the Anglesey development and the price to be paid to Hitachi for the electricity from the plant. London’s proposed price is 20% lower than what Hitachi has requested. The Japanese government plans to guarantee the project’s loans.
The U.K. in December approved the design of the reactor that Hitachi plans to use in Anglesey. The project is now in its final pre-construction phase. The company has targeted to begin construction next year.
With its domestic nuclear industry still crippled by the legacy of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, Japan has been eager to promote nuclear exports. The drive for overseas orders however has struggled as many governments reconsider nuclear power’s merits.
Wild boars in Europe, parts of the former Soviet Union and Japan are too radioactive to be safe for human consumption. That sounds like good news for the boars. But only partly so.
The boars are radioactively contaminated due to fallout from the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl, Ukraine nuclear power plant explosion. They were vulnerable because they love mushrooms and truffles. These fungi absorbed the cesium-137 fallout released by the Chernobyl nuclear explosion.
Because they lack stems and roots, mushrooms and other fungi use absorption to obtain nutrition from the atmosphere through their surface cells. As a result, they are prone to absorbing radioactive substances such as cesium-137 and other radionuclides.
When the boars eat the mushrooms and truffles, that radioactive contamination moves up the food chain. The mushrooms are also too radioactive for human consumption.
Consequently, hunters in Saxony, Germany, 700 miles from Chernobyl, still have to have any boar they kill tested first for radioactivity.
Hunters in Sweden are equally wary of killing and eating wild boar, which have been found to be 10 times more radioactive than the “acceptable” (but, as always, not “safe”) limits for consumption.
Wild boars have of course been affected in Japan as well, since the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Apart from roaming at will through the deserted prefecture — where they have even been observed entering and occupying abandoned houses — these animals also carry cesium contamination. However, one study at least has shown that their cesium levels are significantly lower than those of boars affected by Chernobyl fallout.
The unsuitability of wild boars for human consumption resulting from Chernobyl may sound like a win for boars and the vegetarian cause. But this radioactive contamination may come at a price. To date, studies of wildlife in the Chernobyl and Fukushima zones have shown that even if numbers of animals appear to have increased due to the absence of human predators, the health of these species contaminated with radiation has been seriously compromised.
Birds, mice and insects have demonstrated low to zero sperm counts, a tendency to tumors and cataracts, smaller brains, and shorter lifespans. Examination of muscle tissue and bone marrow in Macaque monkeys living in the contaminated areas of Fukushima yielded ominous signs. The monkeys had significantly low white and red blood cell counts as well as a reduced growth rate for body weight and smaller head sizes. The bone marrows of these monkeys were found to be producing almost no blood cells. Instead, the bone marrow has turned almost entirely into white-looking fat.
So far, Europe’s wild boar seem to have been evaluated only in relation to their contribution as a food source. Missing from the studies is what might be happening to the health of the boars themselves, and the implications for future generations of these animals.
“Gleaning the contamination levels of boars once they are killed is not enough,” says Cindy Folkers, radiation and health specialist at Beyond Nuclear, who looked at published studies on boars and radioactivity. “There is no history of their contamination level or any comparison to any damage they may have suffered. The genes could tell us that, but it appears no one is looking.”
Such changes, especially to DNA, can take many years and several generations to manifest as disease. But if negative outcomes do occur, this could signal a decline in the species, with repercussions for other animals along the food chain as well.
“Wild boars are one of the biomagnifiers of radioactivity in the environment,” added Folkers. “They dig in soil that might be slightly contaminated with cesium, inhaling and ingesting it, and foraging for mushrooms, which they then ingest. They are part of the ecosystem that keeps the cesium circulating.”
Akademik Lomonosov, the world’s first floating nuclear power plant, left the Baltic Shipyard in St Petersburg on Saturday morning.
It is expected to reach the Swedish coast next week, before making its way through the narrow Öresund straits, across the Kattegat and into the North Sea.
“We are following this closely through our cooperation with other countries and through our own national agencies,” Johan Friberg, Director of the Swedish Radiation Safety Agency told Sweden’s state broadcaster SVT.
Russia’s development of a floating nuclear power plant has generated alarm among its Nordic neighbours, with Norway’s foreign minister Børge Brende last June warning that the plan to transport it fully fuelled raised “serious questions”.
Karolina Skog, Sweden’s environment minister, argued last June that floating nuclear power stations created “a new type of risk”.
“It is important that Russia makes every effort to fulfil the criteria of international agreements, which should be seen as applying to floating nuclear power stations as well,” she said.
After a meeting in Moscow that July, Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom relented on its plans to drag the reactor through the Baltic fuelled, saying that the plant would instead be fuelled in Murmansk after it had arrived in the Russian Arctic.
“We will carry out the transportation through the Baltic and the Scandinavian region without nuclear fuel on board,” Alexey Likhachev told the Independent Barents Observer.
Jan Haverkamp, nuclear expert for Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe, has attacked the plant as a ‘nuclear Titanic’, and “threat to the Arctic”
“Nuclear reactors bobbing around the Arctic Ocean will pose a shockingly obvious threat to a fragile environment which is already under enormous pressure from climate change,” he said in a press release.
After the plant is fuelled and tested, it will be pulled across to Pevek on the Eastern Siberian Sea, where it will be used to power oil rigs.
World Nuclear News 27th April 2018 ,A statement of intent to strengthen cooperation on fast neutron
sodium-cooled reactors has been signed between the US Department of Energy
(DOE) and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission
(CEA). The partners have also a statement of intent to begin cooperation in
the field of artificial intelligence. The documents were signed yesterday
in Washington, DC, by US Energy Secretary Rick Perry and CEA’s new Chairman
François Jacq. http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP-France-USA-to-enhance-cooperation-on-fast-reactors-2704184.html
Cumbria County Council (CCC) have recognised the fundamental flaws within the latest process to find a location to bury the nation’s nuclear waste. The CCC response to the government consultation echos many of the points which Cumbria Trust has made. In particular the failure to address the need for secure interim storage, despite the most dangerous elements within waste being too hot to bury for well over a century. They also highlight the lack of clarity over the community’s right of withdrawal, something of particular concern to Cumbria Trust. As we have previously stated this is a process which has been designed to be very simple to enter and very difficult to leave.
Five years ago it was CCC which called a halt to the search process, and their concerns have not gone away.
The News & Star has reported this week:
A NEW search to find a community willing to host an underground nuclear waste storage bunker is based on ‘fundamentally flawed’ government policy, council officials in Cumbria have said.
The nationwide scheme to identify a location for a £12 billion geological disposal facility buried at least 200 metres below the surface was relaunched by the government in January and is expected to take 20 years to secure.
It promises incentives including £1m per year for five years for the five communities that volunteer to be on the shortlist – with £2.5m a year for the two that go forward to the testing stage, which would see deep boreholes dug underground.
But experts within Cumbria County Council have instead called for more clarity on how the high level waste – the majority of which is currently kept in storage vessels in west Cumbria – will be kept safe if a suitable location is not identified within the time frame.
They also state the right of willing communities to withdraw from the process is not clear enough within the proposal, while there is no detail about how the waste could be retrieved at a later date if new technology to dispose of it more efficiently is developed.
RTBF 28trh April 2018, The reactor at the Doel 1 nuclear power plant in Beveren was shut down
earlier this week . The reason given at that time was a ” maintenance at
the level of the cooling circuit ” . Engie Electrabel confirmed to local TV
TV Oost that a leak was detected in the nuclear section during this review.
The reactor will be shut down at least until October 1st. https://www.rtbf.be/info/belgique/detail_
A human chain was formed on Thursday night in a bicommunal demonstration at the Ledra Street checkpoint against the opening of a nuclear power plant in Akkuyu, Turkey.
Greek and Turkish Cypriots from more than 40 parties, organisations, movements, trade unions and professional groups held candles and wore gas masks to honour Chernobyl victims with a minute`s silence. Banners wrote ‘Nuclear Free Mediterranean’ and ‘Not in Nuclear’.
A joint statement read in Greek and Turkish said nuclear power plants are not only a threat to the environment but affect the health and safety of people of the surrounding areas. A possible leak could pose a huge risk to both workers and residents. “Pollution of the environment (air, soil, subsoil, water) in the unfortunate case of an accident, would affect not only the area itself, since radioactivity travels by affecting large geographic areas”, it said.
Akkuyu is a highly seismic area and radiation from the ‘normal’ operation of the plant as well as any serious leak would gradually destroy the quality of life of nearby living beings, including humans, the statement said. “The eastern Mediterranean basin is a huge and interconnected ecosystem. In the instance of a radiation leak, this will harm hundreds of kilometres around the nuclear plants”.
The Chernobyl accident, which occurred 32 years ago, is still creating problems to people and the environment all around the Black Sea basin, it added.
“Nuclear waste by itself is an environmental disaster that will last for centuries and no one can claim that there is a safe way for its disposal, since the danger of a leak is always there. The cost of the disposal of nuclear waste is very high and this negates the theory that nuclear power is a cheap source of energy”. It also asked if there is anybody who wishes to keep nuclear waste for tens of thousands of years buried on their land.
Τhe power plant is only 90 kilometres off the northern coast of Cyprus.
Since the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Soviet Chernobyl reactor, one in four thyroid cancer cases has been caused by radiation in the region, UN scientists report in their first such estimate.
After reviewing various statistics and existing studies, the Vienna-based UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation said around 20,000 such cancers were registered between 1991 and 2015 in the area surrounding the reactor, which takes in all of Ukraine and Belarus, as well parts of Russia.
This figure covers people who were younger than 18 years at the time of the nuclear accident.
“Thyroid cancer is a major problem after the Chernobyl accident and needs further investigation to better understand the long-term consequences,” UNSCEAR chairman Hans Vanmarcke said in a statement on Wednesday.
Based on limited data covering only the 1991-2005 period, UNSCEAR had previously put the total number of registered thyroid cancers in the region at 7000, but had not estimated the share that can be linked to radiation exposure.
The overall number of cases has increased nearly threefold to 20,000, not only because of radiation effects, but also because the group of people being monitored has been getting older, which has increased their natural risk of getting cancer.
In addition, the high awareness about thyroid cancer in the region and improved diagnostic methods have allowed doctors to detect a higher number of cases, UNSCEAR says in its paper.
Whitehaven News 26th April 2018 , Search to find nuclear waste storage site is ‘flawed’, Cumbria council chiefs claim. Cash incentives are being offered to communities that step forward to host an underground waste bunker.
A NEW search to find a community willing to host an underground nuclear waste storage bunker is based on ‘fundamentally flawed’ government policy, council officials in Cumbria have said.
The nationwide scheme to identify a location for a £12 billion geological disposal facility buried at least 200 metres below the surface was relaunched by the government in January and is expected to take
20 years to secure. It promises incentives including £1m per year for five
years for the five communities that volunteer to be on the shortlist – with
£2.5m a year for the two that go forward to the testing stage, which would
see deep boreholes dug underground.
But experts within Cumbria County Council have instead called for more clarity on how the high level waste -the majority of which is currently kept in storage vessels in west Cumbria
– will be kept safe if a suitable location is not identified within the time frame.
They also state the right of willing communities to withdraw from the process is not clear enough within the proposal.
The authority’s official response, expected to be adopted by members of its cabinet
committee in Carlisle today, states: “The county council believes the
policy on which this consultation is based is fundamentally flawed.
In Moscow, the liquidators of the nuclear accident at the Chernobyl NPP gathered together to commemorate the anniversary of the disaster.
The meeting took place in a small museum, which has been collecting archive photos and documents of those events for 10 years now. Employees of the Belarusian embassy in Moscow donated photos from the last expedition to the exclusion zone as a gift to the museum.
Over 600,000 people participated in the liquidation of the consequences of the accident. As a result of the accident, a radioactive cloud spread radioactive materials over most of Europe. The most affected territories are those of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.
‘We’re here today to guarantee further security for Ukrainians and all Europeans to turn their attention to important projects, which we will gradually implement day by day – along with our partners. We plan to put the new safe confinement into service in December’, the president said.
The head of the state added that the mounting works on the object are almost over.
As it was reported earlier, the construction works began in Chornobyl exclusion zone in Nobvemner 2017; the nuclear waste repository will be built in the restricted area of Kyiv region. According to UNN news agency, the opening ceremony took place on November 9; Ukrainian company Energoatom will be the one supervising the construction process.
According to the Minister of Energy and Coal Production Ihor Nasalyk, by building its own nuclear waste repository, Ukraine will be able to refuse the service offered by Russia, which costs Kyiv more than 7 million dollars annually.
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