Europe remains economically dependent on Russia as long as it has nuclear energy
As long as nuclear power plants are operated in Europe, the EU will be
dependent on Russian uranium supplies, BUND’s new uranium atlas makes
clear.
Neither economically nor ecologically does nuclear power still make
sense. The new edition of the Uranium Atlas makes it clear that Europe will
not be able to detach itself economically from Russia as long as the states
continue to use electricity from nuclear power.
After all, both Germany and other European states obtain a large part of the uranium needed for this
purpose from mines in Russia and Kazakhstan. The Uranium Atlas (in German),
released last week, is published by the Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz
Deutschland (BUND) together with the Nuclear Free Future Foundation, the
Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, the environmental foundation Greenpeace and
“.ausgestrahlt”. According to the report, around 40 per cent of
European uranium imports come from Russia and Kazakhstan. Thus, in addition
to fossil energy imports, European countries are significantly dependent on
Russia.
Posteo 28th April 2022
https://posteo.de/en/news/uranium-atlas-2022-nuclear-power-increases-europes-dependence-on-russia
Ireland’s Environment Minister Eamon Ryan rules out nuclear power as option in transition from fossil fuel dependence
Irish Examiner, 23 May 22, Eamon Ryan, the environment minister, has ruled out nuclear power as an option in the transition from fossil fuel, despite mounting calls from environmental voices to consider it.
Mr Ryan told the Irish Examiner it would be too expensive and cumbersome for Ireland to build a nuclear industry, insisting offshore wind is a far better and less expensive bet in the fight against climate change……………….. https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40878437.html
The risk of Green Parties selling their souls to the nuclear lobby – Finland succumbs to the nuclear siren-song
Yes, it’s been all too much for Finland. Green Party members are finding it much easier to get along with the international powers-that-be, by simply dropping their anti-nuclear principles.
I mean – if your well-paid job depends on it , and your status, and self-esteem as an important person. well – why oppose those prestigious leaders who now greenwash the nuclear industry.?
After all, Finland has a nuclear industry, and is very proud of its coming, though rather limited, nuclear waste facility. And Finland’s joining NATO, and however much they deny this, could well be hosting nuclear weapons before too long.
Finland’s Greens will probably find it easy to forget that the full nuclear fuel cycle emits lots of greenhouse gases, that it produces toxic wastes, that it has safety risks, that it is most uneconomic, and that the nuclear industry really has one sole raison-d’etre – nuclear weapons.
It’s just too hard to press on with energy efficiency, wind, sun and wave power – when you’re up against a tsunami of pro-nuke propaganda.
No doubt the nuclear lobby is salivating at the thought that other Green Parties might follow suit, and turn dirty yellow. But Finland is in a bit of a nervous breakdown over Russia. in this time of Ukraine war, and it is more likely that the global Green Party movement will stick to reality.
3 unplanned shutdowns of French nuclear reactors due to corrosion concerns, in the Framatome-designed piping
EDF revealed on Thursday that it will shut down the 1.3 GW Paluel 2, Penly
2 St Alban 2 and Cattenom 1 reactors next year, when no shutdowns were
planned so far, to check whether their auxiliary pipes to the primary
circuit are affected by corrosion. The dates of these shutdowns, which will
occur in the second quarter of 2023, must be published imminently on Remit,
said the deputy director of EDF’s nuclear production department Régis
Clément at a press conference in Paris.
The French group intends to check the rest of these 56 reactors by the end of 2023, or even the beginning of 2024, during the planned shutdowns which will be extended and the ten-year
visits, seven of which are scheduled for the rest of this year, he added.
Earlier on Thursday, EDF on Thursday revised the dates for thirteen
scheduled outages at nuclear power plants in 2022-23 due to
corrosion-related checks and repairs. Mr. Clément also asserted that the
“preponderant” cause of cracks due to corrosion on the auxiliary piping
to the primary circuit of certain reactors in the nuclear fleet was the
design of these circuits, developed by the EDF subsidiary Framatome. “Today
what we have as a clear conviction is that the design [of the auxiliary
circuits] appears to us as a preponderant cause”, he said.
Montel 19th May 2022
https://www.montelnews.com/news/1322042/corrosion-edf-rvle-les-4-units-quelle-arrtera-en-2023
Leaked emails expose UK Home Secretary Priti Patel’s connection to MI6-style ‘research and influence operation’AND to extraditing Julian Assange
British Home Secretary Priti Patel is due to imminently decide on whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is extradited to the US, where he faces life imprisonment for journalistic activities.
Patel sat on the advisory council of the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society think tank alongside Lord James Arbuthnot – a former Conservative Minister of Defence whose wife, Lady Emma Arbuthnot, made two key rulings against Assange in 2018, before being forced to step aside due to a “perception of bias.”
it is safe to assume the intelligence cabal bringing its influence to bear on Patel would strongly favor his extradition to the US.
The GRAYZONE, KIT KLARENBERG·MAY 18, 2022,
A deeply anti-democratic MI6-linked cabal’s apparent influence on Priti Patel raises serious questions about her fitness to rule on Julian Assange’s extradition to the US.
- Cabal now managing MI6-inspired “research and influence operation”
- Effort may be funded by intelligence agency actors
- British Home Secretary implicated in plot
- Green advocates and perceived Chinese agents targeted
- Home Office infiltrated by cabal’s civil service mole
- Cabal seeks to seize power over energy policy and “displace” government minister
Hinkley Point C – costs soar, delays again. UK govt’s big bet on nuclear is backfiring
| The risks to the government’s plans to build another eight nuclear power plants have been underlined by the latest wave of ballooning costs and delays at Hinkley Point C. EDF, which is constructing the 3,200MW reactor in Somerset, has warned that estimated costs have jumped to between £25 billion and £26 billion, while the power station will not now start producing electricity until June 2027 at the earliest. The revised estimates are £3 billion higher than the previous cost projections in January last year, which were in turn well ahead of the group’s initial £18 billion forecast when the project was approved in 2016. Hinkley is Britain’s first new nuclear plant in decades. It is expected to power six million homes, with the government guaranteeing that consumers pay an index-linked £92.50 per megawatt hour, in 2012 prices, for its electricity. Construction costs are being met by EDF and its junior partner in the project, CGN of China. Critics seized on the latest overruns to point out the risks to Boris Johnson’s blueprint for another 24 gigawatts of new nuclear power by 2050. The Stop Sizewell C lobby group pointed out that, while EDF and CGN are on the hook for Hinkley’s “rocketing costs”, a proposed new financing model would see consumers paying upfront via higher bills for cost overruns. “The £20 billion estimate for Sizewell C is already two years out of date, with zero chance of it being delivered at that cost,” it said, noting that the risk of spiralling costs would “fall on consumers”. Doug Parr, Greenpeace’s UK policy director, said: “The government’s big bet on nuclear is backfiring with every extra billion added to the bill”. He advocated investment in offshore wind instead. Costs at the prototype for Hinkley, the Flamanville plant in France, have rocketed from €3.3 billion to €12.7 billion. Construction is running more than a decade late. Times 20th May 2022 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hinkley-point-c-nuclear-plant-to-open-a-decade-late-9vsk6w9zx |
£3 billion more, 1 year longer: EDF Energy announces latest price hike and further delay at Hinkley Point C
£3 billion more, 1 year longer: EDF Energy announces latest price hike
and further delay at Hinkley Point C. Whilst news that yet another civil
nuclear power plant is to be delivered still further over-budget and still
further behind schedule may be ‘par for the course’, the Nuclear Free
Local Authorities still find EDF’s latest pronouncement that Hinkley
Point C will cost £3 billion more and take one year longer to build
shocking.
In a media release yesterday (Thursday 19 May), the French parent
of UK nuclear operator, EDF Energy, conceded that, on their latest
estimate, Hinkley Point C will now cost £25 to 26 billion to build and
become operational no earlier than July 2027.
EDF last updated its Hinkley
Point construction schedule in January 2021, when it stated the plant would
be delayed by a further six months to June 2026 with the cost rising by an
additional half billion pounds to £22 billion to 23 billion. NFLA Chair
Councillor David Blackburn commented: “EDF Energy have blamed COVID and
the Ukraine conflict for the price hike and the delay, but Hinkley Point C
was already way over budget and way behind schedule before either of these
calamities occurred. For the simple reality is that nuclear costs too much
and takes too long”.
NFLA 20th May 2022
UK Ministers taking the public for fools, as they tout grandiose and delusional nuclear power schemes
Betting on the French will not keep Britain’s lights on, EDF’s latest
Hinkley Point delay shows PM’s nuclear ambitions are divorced from
reality.
It is testament to the sheer incompetence of France’s
state-backed utility EDF that Hinkley Point C has become Britain’s most
radioactive construction project and it hasn’t even been built yet. In
fact, one wonders if it ever will be at this rate after yet more delays and
cost overruns.
For critics of atomic energy, Hinkley Point is the gift that
keeps on giving. For the rest of the country it remains laughably elusive.
After repeated setbacks, Britain’s first new plant in three decades was
already scheduled to be nine years overdue and £7bn over budget having
been pushed back to 2026, while estimated build costs had rocketed to
£23bn.
And now? An announcement from EDF, snuck out at 10pm on Thursday
night, reveals that the project has been delayed by another year at best,
and will cost a further £3bn, with Covid the excruciatingly predictable
excuse being provided. It is the fourth time that EDF has had to revise the
timetable and budget since construction began in October 2016.
At this point, any suggestion that the Prime Minister’s recently announced
ambition to build 24 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity, equivalent to
another six Hinkleys, each costing £20bn, have any chance of being
realised should be banished. Ministers are taking us for fools with these
grandiose yet delusional schemes.
Like so many of this Government’s plans
to transform important areas of the economy, Britain’s nuclear ambitions
are totally divorced from reality, and will remain so while we continue to
depend on the same unreliable partner with a risible track record of
delivering on its promises.
But it is in France where the major red flags can be found. EDF’s flagship Flamanville plant in
Normandy, which is being built using the same European Pressurised Reactors
(EPR) that are set to be deployed at Hinkley, was originally meant to come
on line in 2009. Instead, it won’t be ready until 2023, nearly a decade and
a half later than originally planned, and is £10bn over budget after costs
quadrupled from initial estimates in 2004.
Yet Flamanville is just one of
many plants where EDF is experiencing problems. The company has been forced
to launch a programme of checks on its entire fleet of 56 nuclear reactors
after the discovery of corrosion caused outages at some. A total of 12 are
offline, exacerbating a perilous financial squeeze as it prepares to
spearhead Emmanuel Macron’s plans to put nuclear power at the heart of
his country’s pursuit of carbon neutrality by 2050. And yet, incredibly,
EDF harbours ambitions to build another plant in the UK, at Sizewell C in
Suffolk.
Telegraph 21st May 2022
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/05/21/betting-french-will-not-keep-britains-lights/
UK’s energy policy (for a nuclear ”renaissance”) ignores the fastest and most cost-effective measure – SAVING ENERGY
| Andrew Warrant: Energy policy is big news again. Initially, because fuel prices are rocketing, and set to rise even more this autumn. Plus the invasion of Ukraine has precipitated a determination to minimise the amount of gas and oil purchased in future from Russia. These two factors have prompted Prime Minister Boris Johnson to devise a new energy security strategy. Published last month, its reception was uniformly dismissive. Not so much because of the energy supply sources it concentrated upon but mainly because it entirely omitted any serious consideration of the policy area deemed most capable of providing swift cost-effective solutions. Saving energy. The Times’ editorial was unsparingly contemptuous. The UK government’s new energy security strategy amounted to “little more than a glorified press release.” The “eye-catching announcement” of eight new nuclear power plants offers “no analysis of why Britain had succeeded in starting construction on just one new reactor in the 16 years since Tony Blair announced a nuclear renaissance.” It added: “What is certain isthis new nuclear programme will not bring energy bills down any time soon. if ever. Instead, it will push bills up as the costs of construction are passed on to consumers. Nor will it do much in the near term to reduce Britain’s reliance on Russian oil and gas given that it takes at least a decade to build a nuclear power station.” While no doubt well-intentioned, Rishi Sunak’s attempts to alleviate the cost of living – including through a £150 council tax rebate for most homes and a £200 loan towards energy bills – have been overly complicated and badly targeted. And, as Helen Barnard of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has pointed out, the £2.4bn the Treasury lost cutting fuel duty would have covered the cost of insulating a third of all social housing in the country. “Theconsultancy E3G has calculated that new energy efficiency measures could reduce the heating bills for poorly insulated homes by an average of £500 and end the UK’s dependence on Russian gas (which is admittedly quite limited) within a year. There is a very revealing explanation for why no new plans are being proposed. It is that “this is not being imposed on people and is a gradual transition following the grain of behaviour. The British people are no-nonsense pragmatists who can make decisions based on the information.” But if an Englishman’s home really is his castle, then why did fears for COVID 19 lock everybody inside their castle? If we want people to support delivery of a collective good like energy security or climate mitigation, then it is sensible to see it as collective action. And for Government to lead it. The parallel with the pandemic is spot on.Energy in Buildings and Industry 18th May 2022 https://eibi.co.uk/article/collective-spirit-required-to-ensure-energy-security/ |
UK Home Secretary PRITI PATEL WAS PART OF CIA-LINKED LOBBY GROUP WITH HUSBAND OF ASSANGE JUDGE
Home Secretary Priti Patel, who will soon decide whether to extradite Julian Assange to the US, has been a political adviser to – and been funded by – a right-wing lobby group which has attacked Assange in the British media for a decade. DECLASSIFIED UK, MATT KENNARD, 29 MARCH 2022
- Patel sat on advisory council of Henry Jackson Society (HJS) with Lord Arbuthnot, whose wife later made two key legal rulings against Assange
- Former CIA director James Woolsey has been an HJS patron since 2006
- HJS has hosted three other ex-CIA directors in London since 2014
- Patel was paid £2,500 by HJS to fly to Washington for a “security” programme in the US Congress
- Patel ignores Declassified’s request for clarification of her role in HJS
Priti Patel sat on the Henry Jackson Society’s (HJS) advisory council from around 2013-16, although the exact dates are unclear as neither the HJS nor Patel responded to Declassified’s requests for clarification.
She has also received funds from the HJS, and was paid £2,500 by the group to visit Washington in March 2013 to attend a “security” programme in the US Congress.
Patel, who became an MP in 2010 and was appointed Home Secretary in 2019, also hosted an HJS event in parliament soon after she returned from Washington.
After the UK Supreme Court said this month it was refusing to hear Assange’s appeal of a High Court decision against him, the WikiLeaks founder’s fate now lies in Patel’s hands. He faces life in prison in the US.
The HJS, which was founded in 2005 and does not disclose its funders, has links to the CIA, the intelligence agency behind the prosecution of Assange and which reportedly developed plans to assassinate him.
One of the HJS’s international patrons is James Woolsey, CIA director from 1993-95, who was in this role throughout the period Patel was advising the group. Woolsey’s affiliation to the HJS goes back to at least 2006, soon after it was founded.
In 2014, the group hosted General David Petraeus, CIA director from 2011-12, at a UK parliament meeting from which all media were barred.
Three years later, in 2017, the HJS organised another event at parliament with General Michael Hayden, CIA director from 2006-9, to “discuss the current state of the American Intelligence Community and its relationships with foreign partners.”
Hayden described “the relationship within the Five Eyes community as strong as ever, despite potential concerns over recent intelligence leaks between members.” Five Eyes is an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US.
‘Perception of bias’
During a visit to the UK in July 2020, then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke at a roundtable hosted by the HJS with what the Washington Post referred to as a group of “hawkish” members of the Conservative Party.
As director of the CIA in 2017, Pompeo had launched a blistering attack on WikiLeaks calling the media organisation a “hostile intelligence service” that makes “common cause with dictators”.
Pompeo did not provide evidence but added a threat: “To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now.”
On the HJS advisory council at the same time as Patel was Lord James Arbuthnot, a former Conservative defence minister. His wife, Lady Emma Arbuthnot, was Westminster Chief Magistrate from 2016-2021.
For part of her tenure, she was in charge of the Assange case and made two key rulings against him in 2018. Lady Arbuthnot eventually stepped aside from ruling on the case because of a “perception of bias” but never declared a conflict of interest.
The links between Patel and Lord Arbuthnot go further. In 2010, soon after becoming an MP, Patel was appointed one of five parliamentary officers of the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) when the group was chaired by Lord Arbuthnot.
CFI has been described as “beyond doubt the most well-connected and probably the best funded of all Westminster lobbying groups”. It also does not disclose its funders.
Patel was forced to resign as Secretary of State for International Development in November 2017 after it was revealed that she had held more than a dozen undeclared meetings with Israeli ministers and organisations while on holiday in the country.
Many of these were arranged by CFI’s honorary president, Lord Polak. Patel’s resignation letter accepted that her conduct “fell below…standards of transparency and openness”.
HJS staff have been repeatedly critical of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in the British media since 2011 when its then associate director, Douglas Murray, engaged in a combative debate with Assange.
………. Over the following years, the HJS and its staff continued to be among the most active civil society voices for impugning the motives and reputation of Assange.
This stands in contrast to nearly all human rights and press freedom organisations which argue that extraditing the WikiLeaks publisher to the US would be a grave blow to media freedom.
‘Conspiracy theories’
In October 2016, the HJS released a statement to the media, which claimed: “Mr Assange has a long track record of stealing and distributing information, peddling conspiracy theories, and casting aspersions on the moral standing of western democratic governments. He has done this whilst supporting, and being supported by, autocratic regimes.”
No evidence was supplied to support the assertions.
A number of other HJS staff—including spokesperson Sam Armstrong and then chief of staff Ellie Green—have made anti-Assange interventions in the British media.
Secrecy
In October 2019, as home secretary, Patel visited Washington again to meet William Barr, the US Attorney General who was then in charge of the Assange case as head of the Department of Justice.
Together they signed the Cloud Act which made it easier for American and British law enforcement agencies to demand electronic data on targets as they undertake investigations.
Assange’s defence team had previously raised the concern in court that Barr may be using Assange’s extradition case in the UK for political ends.
In August 2020, Declassified requested basic information about Patel’s 2019 trip to Washington. The Home Office confirmed it held the information but refused to release it because the department considered “that disclosure of some of the information would prejudice relations between the UK and the United States”.
In May 2020, Declassified also requested information about any calls or emails made or received by Patel since she became Home Secretary which concerned the case of Julian Assange, or mentioned his name.
The Home Office told us “we can neither confirm nor deny whether we hold the information you have requested” because “to do so either way would disclose information that constitutes the personal data of Julian Assange”.
The same request for Sajid Javid’s tenure as Home Secretary from 2018-19 was rejected because the department said “we have carried out a thorough search and we have established that the Home Office does not hold the information that you have requested.”
This was despite the fact Javid signed the initial US extradition request for Assange in June 2019. The shadow home secretary at the time, Diane Abbott, opposed approving the US extradition request.
Declassified previously revealed that before signing the US request, Javid had attended six secretive meetings, some attended by former CIA directors, which were organised by a US lobby group which has published calls for Assange to be assassinated or taken down.
The Home Office recently admitted it had eight officials working on Operation Pelican, the UK government campaign to seize Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
The department, however, claimed it did not know which other UK government ministries were involved in the operation.
Priti Patel and the Henry Jackson Society did not respond to requests for information and comment. https://declassifieduk.org/priti-patel-was-part-of-cia-linked-lobby-group-with-husband-of-assange-judge/
Ukraine War Has No End in Sight
Ukraine’s current status as a wartime non-Nato ally has strengthened a long-held goal of the US and Nato of neutralizing Russia as a long-term military threat to Europe — in short, by transforming Ukraine’s military into a de facto Nato proxy.
As things stand, the best Russia can hope for is a permanent state of conflict with Ukraine — which would accomplish the US goal of “weakening” Russia.
Neither Russia nor Nato knows where and how escalation would end.
https://www.energyintel.com/00000180-d669-d410-aba9-f66dbd120000, Author Scott Ritter, Washington, May 18, 2022
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is grinding its way toward its inevitable conclusion, namely Russian control over the Donbas region. But this will not end the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which has expanded in scope and scale beyond the capabilities of the Russian military resources originally allocated. With no diplomatic off-ramp on the horizon, the war risks becoming a permanent state of conflict between Russia and Ukraine — with unknown consequences.
As the Ukraine conflict enters its third month, the Kremlin looks likely to achieve its major military objective of securing physical control over the eastern Donbas region. Peripheral territorial acquisition of the strategic southern city of Kherson, as well as a swath of territory connecting Crimea to the Donbas and the border of the Russian Federation, also looks likely.
While it seems clear that Ukraine will not be formally joining Nato any time soon, if ever, the reality is that the war has reforged the relationship between Ukraine and the trans-Atlantic alliance in a way that transforms the way the two entities work together. Ukraine’s current status as a wartime non-Nato ally has strengthened a long-held goal of the US and Nato of neutralizing Russia as a long-term military threat to Europe — in short, by transforming Ukraine’s military into a de facto Nato proxy.
Game Changer
Nato’s decision to arm Ukraine, combined with the willingness of several Nato nations to allow their territory to be used for training, has provided the Ukrainian military with the kind of strategic depth that was unimaginable when the war began on Feb. 24. The transition from supplying light anti-armor and anti-aircraft missiles to heavy weaponry such as artillery and armor has also enabled Ukraine to begin the process of reconstituting the heavy brigades that Russia is destroying in eastern Ukraine.
The creation of an impregnable Ukrainian strategic rear is a game changer. First and foremost, it provides Ukraine with the means to rearm, refit and re-equip its forces to Nato standards without fear of Russian intervention. This not only counters Russia’s stated military objective of “demilitarization” of Ukraine’s forces, but also steels the resolve of the Ukrainian government to reject any settlement that obliges them to embrace neutrality in perpetuity.
Russia’s efforts to disrupt the injection of Nato-provided supplies and material have proven haphazard at best. While warehouses containing military equipment have been identified and destroyed, Ukrainian units equipped with the latest US and Nato weapons are still appearing on the front lines. Likewise, while Russia has targeted Ukraine’s petroleum refining and storage capacity, the continued provision by Nato countries of refined petroleum products allows the Ukrainian military to remain mechanized. In short, while Russia will likely accomplish the objective of securing the Donbas and associated regions, unless it is willing to expand the scope and scale of its current interdiction efforts, it will not be able to bring to a successful conclusion its state of war with Ukraine.
Escalating Tensions
There currently is no identifiable diplomatic off-ramp for either Ukraine or Russia to end the conflict. Rather, all existing trends point to continued escalation. While Ukraine and Nato have constructed the strategic depth to allow Ukraine’s continued resistance, Russia’s current military configuration remains inadequate to the task of matching this mobilization. As things stand, the best Russia can hope for is a permanent state of conflict with Ukraine — which would accomplish the US goal of “weakening” Russia.
Add in expected pressures on Russia from Nato expansion in northern Europe (Finland and Sweden), and rising tensions involving Transnistria (a pro-Russian breakaway state between Ukraine and Moldova), and the current situation appears untenable for Russia without a broader mobilization of its military resources. While the outcome of any such action is impossible to predict, one thing is sure: Neither Russia nor Nato knows where and how such escalation would end.
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer whose service over a 20-plus-year career included tours of duty in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control agreements, serving on the staff of US Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf during the Gulf War and later as a chief weapons inspector with the UN in Iraq from 1991-98.
UK Public Accounts Committee warns on need to double-check on safety of aging nuclear reactors
Ageing nuclear reactors must be ‘double-checked’ for safety before
being kept going to ease energy crisis. Closure of seven nuclear reactors
by 2028 will ‘significantly reduce’ UK energy generation, the Public
Accounts Committee warns, and taxpayers face billions of pounds in extra
costs.
iNews 20th May 2022
UK Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee sets out the grim facts on costs of decommissioning nuclear reactors
Despite government already having had to provide additional funding of
£10.7 billion, there remains a strong likelihood that more taxpayers’
money will be required to meet the costs of decommissioning the seven
Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor nuclear power stations.
The Nuclear Liabilities Fund, which was set up to meet the decommissioning costs of these stations,
has not kept up with the increased costs of decommissioning or met its
investment targets. In response, government has chosen to top up the Fund
with taxpayers’ money, providing an injection of capital of £5.1 billion
in 2020–21 with a further £5.6 billion expected in 2021–22. HM
Treasury and the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy have
opted to maintain an investment strategy for the Fund whereby around 80% of
its assets are invested in the National Loans Fund currently earning
minimal returns.
Estimated decommissioning costs on the other hand have
almost doubled since March 2004, estimated at £23.5 billion in March 2021,
and there remains a significant risk that the costs could rise further
putting strain on the Fund.
Public Accounts Committee 20th May 2022
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5803/cmselect/cmpubacc/118/summary.html
UK nuclear power stations’ decommissioning cost soars to £23.5bn
UK nuclear power stations’ decommissioning cost soars to £23.5bn https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/20/uk-nuclear-power-stations-decommissioning-cost Failures in government’s investment strategy mean taxpayer has contributed £10.7bn in just two yearsm Sandra Laville Environment correspondent Fri 20 May 2022
The cost of decommissioning the UK’s seven ageing nuclear power stations has nearly doubled to £23.5bn and is likely to rise further, the public accounts committee has said.
The soaring costs of safely decommissioning the advanced gas-cooled reactors (AGRs), including Dungeness B, Hunterston B and Hinkley B, are being loaded on to the taxpayer, their report said.
Failures in the government’s investment strategy for the fund, which was set up to pay for the decommissioning, have led to the taxpayer topping it up by an additional £10.7bn in just two years.
The nuclear power stations are owned by EDF Energy and provide much of the UK’s nuclear power-generated electricity, which makes up 16% of the energy mix. But the stations are nearing the end of their lives and are scheduled to stop generating electricity during this decade.
The government has recently agreed that once the stations have been defuelled by EDF, which involves the removal of all the spent fuel from the reactor core and cooling ponds, ownership of the stations will be transferred to the government’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) to complete decommissioning.
“The pace at which the stations can be defuelled could have a big impact on the costs, between £3.1bn and £8bn depending on the time taken,” the inquiry report said. “Successful defuelling will depend on all parties being ready and working together, including the NDA being ready to receive and dismantle the volume of fuel arriving at Sellafield. Any delays in the defuelling process could result in costs increasing substantially.
“The handover agreement does not appear to sufficiently ‘incentivise cost efficiency and ensure a smooth transfer of defuelled stations to the NDA’.”
The public accounts committee also said it had concerns over whether the NDA had the capacity to take on the seven AGR stations in addition to its other responsibilities, which includes decommissioning the older Magnox reactors.
It will cost the UK taxpayer £132bn to decommission all the UK’s civil nuclear sites and the work will not be completed for another 120 years, according to latest estimates.
Boris Johnson has pledged to build eight nuclear power stations in eight years. But the UK has no facility for permanently and safely storing the waste from past, present or future nuclear power stations. Most is currently stored at Sellafield, one of the most complex and hazardous nuclear sites in the world.
Nuclear Waste Services, an arm of the government, is seeking a site to build a geological deposit facility deep underground for all the UK’s nuclear waste.
MPs on the public accounts committee said in their report on Friday the government must learn lessons from the rising costs of decommissioning the seven AGR reactors and be clear how the decommissioning of proposed new nuclear stations would be funded.
The seven stations were sold by the government to EDF in 2009, with the later agreement that the French company would remove the fuel from the stations when they closed, and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority would take on the decommissioning of the sites. But the cost of decommissioning the seven AGR reactors that began to close last year, plus Sizewell B, has more than doubled from £12.6bn in 2004-05 to £23.5bn in 2020-21, the public accounts committee report said.
“There remain significant uncertainties that will need to be managed to prevent further increases in costs and ease pressures on the fund,” the report said. “The cost of defuelling will depend on the stations not closing significantly earlier than planned and how quickly they can be defuelled once electricity generation ceases.”
The public accounts committee, in a previous report, said the cost of decommissioning the older Magnox reactors – which were the first generation of UK nuclear stations – had increased by billions of pounds because of uncertainty over the condition of the sites and how to tackle the decommissioning.
The PAC report said the closure of seven nuclear stations by 2028 would have a significant impact on energy production, but EDF has said there can be no extensions to the life of the reactors while the UK waits for new generating capacity to come online.
Nuclear Fusion Is Already Facing a Fuel Crisis
It doesn’t even work yet, but nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium, the key fuel source for the most prominent experimental reactors
” ………………… Like many of the most prominent experimental nuclear fusion reactors, ITER relies on a steady supply of both deuterium and tritium for its experiments. Deuterium can be extracted from seawater, but tritium—a radioactive isotope of hydrogen—is incredibly rare.
Atmospheric levels peaked in the 1960s, before the ban on testing nuclear weapons, and according to the latest estimates there is less than 20 kg (44 pounds) of tritium on Earth right now. And as ITER drags on, years behind schedule and billions over budget, our best sources of tritium to fuel it and other experimental fusion reactors are slowly disappearing.
Right now, the tritium used in fusion experiments like ITER, and the smaller JET tokamak in the UK, comes from a very specific type of nuclear fission reactor called a heavy-water moderated reactor. But many of these reactors are reaching the end of their working life, and there are fewer than 30 left in operation worldwide—20 in Canada, four in South Korea, and two in Romania, each producing about 100 grams of tritium a year. (India has plans to build more, but it is unlikely to make its tritium available to fusion researchers.)
But this is not a viable long-term solution—the whole point of nuclear fusion is to provide a cleaner and safer alternative to traditional nuclear fission power. “It would be an absurdity to use dirty fission reactors to fuel ‘clean’ fusion reactors,” says Ernesto Mazzucato, a retired physicist who has been an outspoken critic of ITER, and nuclear fusion more generally, despite spending much of his working life studying tokamaks.
The second problem with tritium is that it decays quickly. It has a half-life of 12.3 years, which means that when ITER is ready to start deuterium-tritium operations (in, as it happens, about 12.3 years), half of the tritium available today will have decayed into helium-3. The problem will only get worse after ITER is switched on, when several more deuterium-tritium (D-T) successors are planned.
These twin forces have helped turn tritium from an unwanted byproduct of nuclear fission that had to be carefully disposed of into, by some estimates, the most expensive substance on Earth. It costs $30,000 per gram, and it’s estimated that working fusion reactors will need up to 200 kg of it a year. To make matters worse, tritium is also coveted by nuclear weapons programs, because it helps makes bombs more powerful—although militaries tend to make it themselves, because Canada, which has the bulk of the world’s tritium production capacity, refuses to sell it for nonpeaceful purposes.
………………………………… the mainstream fusion community is still pinning its hopes on ITER, despite the potential supply problems for its key fuel. “Fusion is really, really difficult, and anything other than deuterium-tritium is going to be 100 times more difficult,” says Willms. “A century from now maybe we can talk about something else.” https://www.wired.com/story/nuclear-fusion-is-already-facing-a-fuel-crisis/
1 This Month
of the week– Nuclear Reactor Information Task Force
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
-
Archives
- May 2026 (126)
- April 2026 (356)
- March 2026 (251)
- February 2026 (268)
- January 2026 (308)
- December 2025 (358)
- November 2025 (359)
- October 2025 (376)
- September 2025 (257)
- August 2025 (319)
- July 2025 (230)
- June 2025 (348)
-
Categories
- 1
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
- business and costs
- climate change
- culture and arts
- ENERGY
- environment
- health
- history
- indigenous issues
- Legal
- marketing of nuclear
- media
- opposition to nuclear
- PERSONAL STORIES
- politics
- politics international
- Religion and ethics
- safety
- secrets,lies and civil liberties
- spinbuster
- technology
- Uranium
- wastes
- weapons and war
- Women
- 2 WORLD
- ACTION
- AFRICA
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
- Reference
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
nuclear-news 