** French state-controlled utility EDF’s CEO Jean-Bernard Levy tells Ouest France daily that EDF can no longer build new nuclear reactors in France without state support.
Asked when EDF could build new reactors at home, Levy says “Henceforth, we cannot build new reactors without adequate regulation providing guaranteed income”. He said that Flamanville was launched at a time of high power prices and that now all power sources, nuclear as well as renewable, need to get the same visibility on sales prices.
** For its project to build two EPRs in Hinkley Point, Britain, EDF has obtained an EU-approved state-guaranteed price of 92.5 pounds per megawatt-hour over 35 years, which is way above current market prices.
** The centrist government of French President Emmanuel Macron is not talking about building new nuclear reactors, but about closing old reactors in order to reduce the share of nuclear energy in French power generation to 50 percent by around 2035 from 75 percent today.
** Asked when the first Areva-designed EPR reactor could start up, Levy said ”that should be in a few weeks in China. The start-up will be gradual, to make sure everything works well.
** Levy said EDF expects to get approval to charge nuclear fuel in its Flamanville reactor at the end of 2018. He said that once operational, Flamanville will be a good showcase to sell nuclear reactors in Asia.
Plans for major nuclear power station in Wales win green light, Office for Nuclear Regulation approves design for new reactor at Horizon Nuclear Power’s plant at Wylfa, Anglesey, Guardian, Adam Vaughan, 13 Dec 17, Plans for a major new nuclear power station in Wales have taken a crucial step forward as UK regulators approved the project.
The Office for Nuclear Regulation and two other government bodies gave the green light on Thursday for the Japanese reactor design for Horizon Nuclear Power’s plant at Wylfa, marking the end of a five-year regulatory process……
Attention will now turn to financing the Hitachi-backed project on the island of Anglesey, which was the site of Britain’s oldest nuclear plant until it closed two years ago.
During a visit by UK ministers to Japan last December, it emerged that London and Tokyo were considering public financing for Wylfa. This would be a significant break with the UK government’s previous approach.
Hitachi has already spent £2bn on development. Last week the consortium said it needed a financial support package by mid-2018 or it could stop funding development.
Japan’s Toshiba has bowed out of the race to build nuclear plants in the UK, confirming last week that a South Korean nuclear firm had been chosen to buy its venture to build a plant in Cumbria.
Emmanuel Macron says the world is losing the battle against climate change , ABC, The World Today By Connie Agius 13 Dec 17, French President Emmanuel Macron has told fellow world leaders that the battle against climate change is being lost.
Key points:
Macron says 2015 Paris climate accord is in a fragile state since Trump pulled out in June
Summit marks two years since accord was signed in Paris
A dozen international projects were announced at the summit
Speaking at the One Planet Summit in Paris, Mr Macron said the 2015 Paris climate accord was in a fragile state after President Donald Trump pulled the US out in June.
“We’re not going fast enough, there lies the tragedy,” Mr Macron said.
“We’ve committed to limiting the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and if we carry on along this path, we’re heading towards 3 or 3.5.
“When I say that we’re losing the battle, I would like you to realise that of the countries represented here, 5, 10 or 15 of them won’t exist anymore in 50, 60 or 100 years.
“It’s as simple as that.”
Mr Macron emphasised that the need for action was now.
“The urgency is permanent and our generation’s challenge is to act, act faster and win this battle against time, and to put in place concrete measures that will change our countries, our societies, our economies.
Independent 13th Dec 2017, Britain should retain as a close as possible a relationship with the European civil nuclear regulator after Brexit, a Commons committee has demanded ahead of a crucial vote on the issue. MPs on the committee warn that the impacts of leaving Euratom will be “profound”, putting the UK in a much weaker position to drive regulatory standards at a European level.
“We conclude that the Government should seek to retain as close as possible a relationship with Euratom, and that this should include accepting its delivery of existing safeguards requirements in the UK,” the report from the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) committee states.
Bloomberg 13th Dec 2017,France faces a decade-long struggle to upgrade its nuclear power plants, but for Natacha Piot, whose firm makes metal pipe supports for reactors, there’s little visibility beyond Christmas. She’s chief executive
officer of one of the dozens of subcontractors engaged in a 48 billion-euro ($56.4 billion) project to extend the life of Electricite de France SA’s aging atomic plants.
Like several of her peers, Piot is critical of how the state-run utility is managing the process. “I can’t afford to hire
because we don’t know what we’ll have to do in a month,” said Piot, CEO of CITA Production, based near the Saone River, north of the vineyards of Burgundy. “We’re overloaded until Christmas, but it’s a total haze for 2018. We’re in a permanent fog.”
EDF has cut earnings forecasts as longer-than-planned maintenance and refueling halts at its 58 reactors were
compounded by safety checks demanded by the nation’s nuclear watchdog. That means the utility expects nuclear-power generation to barely rebound this year, after a shortage of skilled workers at its contractors cut output by 7.9 percent to 384 terawatt-hours in 2016.
EDF will probably miss its nuclear output goals in 2017 and 2018, lowering earnings to the bottom of the company’s latest forecasts, Olly Jeffery, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, wrote in a Dec. 6 note. “Delays could slip into 2019 as
well,” he said. As EDF wrestles to prolong the lifespan of reactors by at least an extra decade, CITA Production, the firm founded by Piot’s father in 1964, isn’t the only subcontractor struggling to keep up with the utility’s fast-changing requirements. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-12/french-nuclear-delays-escalate-as-contractors-fumble-in-the-dark
Julian Assange welcomes UK ruling that WikiLeaks is a media organisation, WikiLeaks founder welcomes ruling by UK tribunal. IBT ,By Jason Murdock, December 14, 2017WikiLeaks has been recognised as a “media organisation” by a UK tribunal in a ruling that flies in the face of claims by US officials who have branded it a “hostile intelligence agency”.
The anti-secrecy website – helmed by Julian Assange – has faced the ire of CIA director Mike Pompeo, who has compared its work to Hezbollah, Isis and al-Qaeda. Over the years, WikiLeaks has disclosed countless documents pilfered from the US government……….
The tribunal, in a section detailing the public interest for disclosing any withheld information, described Assange as “the only media publisher and free speech advocate in the Western world who is in a situation that a UN body has characterised as arbitrary detention”.
Donor nations backing the cleanup of Andreyeva Bay, one of Russia’s most deviling Cold War legacy projects, have agreed to put more funding toward removing damaged and broken nuclear fuel rods lurking at the site, which is located just 55 kilometers from the Norwegian border. Bellona, by Charles Digges
Donor nations backing the cleanup of Andreyeva Bay, one of Russia’s most deviling Cold War legacy projects, have agreed to put more funding toward removing damaged and broken nuclear fuel rods lurking at the site, which is located just 55 kilometers from the Norwegian border.
The removal of some 22,000 spent nuclear fuel assemblies left by Russia’s submarine fleet began earlier this year, constituting a major international victory toward securing radioactive hazards on the Kola Peninsula near Murmansk.
This is no small task. Spent fuel began building up at Andreyeva Bay, a Soviet nuclear submarine maintenance base, in the 1960s. Over the next two decades, many facilities at the site sprang radioactive leaks, and still more of the fuel was left out in the open air, where it degraded and threatened to contaminate portions of the Barents Sea.
Bellona and the Norwegian government took up the charge to clean up Andreyeva Bay in 1995. On June 27 of this year, their efforts finally met with success when a ship called the Rossita sailed away with the first of some 50 loads of spent nuclear fuel bound for storage and reprocessing at the Mayak Chemical Combine.
But complex problems of broken fuel elements, for which there are few blueprints in the annals of radioactive waste management, still remain
In 1982, a crack developed Andreyeva Bay’s now-notorious Building 5, a storage pool for thousands of spent fuel assemblies. The water was drained and the fuel painstakingly moved, but that created other problems. Some of those fuel elements broke, and remain at the bottom of storage pools within.
The fuel elements that were successfully removed were transferred to another facility at the site known as building 3A, where they were stuffed into chambers and cemented into place. This arrangement was only intended as temporary, but it lasted for 30 years. During that time, the cladding on much of the fuel has rusted, and the cement job makes it virtually impossible to remove them without risking further contamination.
A late November meeting of nations donating to the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development’s nuclear window project was aimed at solving those problems.
The funders, which are comprised of Sweden, Finland, Belgium, France, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Italy and the United Kingdom, have agreed to put €100,000 to prepare Building 3A for fuel removal–and another €675,000 for studies on removing broken elements from Building 5.
This funding is an addition to the $70 million these nations have already contributed toward Andreyeva Bay cleanup. Norway leads in funds contributed, however. The nation has giving $230 million toward the efforts over the last 20 years.
As unloading work continues at Andreyeva Bay’s other facilities, it is not expected that removal of the broken elements will begin before 2023.
Two loads of spent fuel assemblies have so far been removed from Andreyeva Bay since April. The fuel is first taken out by water and delivered to the Atomflot nuclear icebreaker port in Murmansk. Once there, it is loaded in railcars, and taken the remaining 3000 kilometers to the Mayak Chemical Combine.
The Fair Finance Guide organisation said that of the nine banks it reviewed, only three have zero-tolerance policies in relation to economic dealings involving nuclear weapons.
One bank highlighted by the organisation, Nordea, was placed in a ‘grey zone’. The bank has publicly expressed zero tolerance towards nuclear weapons in asset management and foundations, but does not have any lending policies with regard to nuclear weapons, according to Fair Finance Guide.
Nordea has business agreements with Russian state nuclear energy company Rosatom, which also manages the country’s nuclear weapons programme, according to a report by Svenska Dagbladet.
The Swedish bank has had a “strategic partnership” with Rosatom for several years, according to the newspaper.
Nordea maintains that it only finances the company’s nuclear energy activities.
“Nevertheless, this is enough to demonstrate support for the nuclear weapons arm of Rosatom, given that profits from the energy business are used to support its weapons industry,” Fair Finance Guide project leader Jakob König said in a press statement.
The organisation states on its website that it aims to improve the corporate social responsibility of banks.
Nordea sustainability manager Sasja Beslik rejected criticism of the bank. “The conclusion is incorrect. We do not finance – either directly or indirectly – any nuclear weapons production anywhere in the world,” Beslik said.
More than two months after a mysterious radioactive cloud was detected over Europe, Russia’s nuclear industry went public Friday in an attempt to dispel fears that one of its facilities had released a plume of ruthenium-106.Russia’s
state nuclear corporation, ROSATOM, released the findings of a special commission, which concluded that the Mayak nuclear reprocessing plant, near the border with Kazakhstan, could not have been the source of ruthenium-106, a radioactive isotope.
“There is no scientific basis for the hypothesis of some of our Western colleagues that there was a big release at Mayak,” Rafael Arutyunyan, deputy director of the Nuclear Safety Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a member of the commission, said at a news conference in Moscow. European monitoring stations first picked up traces of ruthenium in the air in late September. While concentrations were too low to pose a health risk in Europe, scientists have
been puzzling over its origin. Wind patterns pointed to the south Urals, where the Mayak facility is located. The plant was the site of a 1957 explosion widely considered to be one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters.
In November, Russia’s meteorological service said that on Sept. 26, ruthenium-106 levels in a town 20 miles from the Mayak plant, Argayash, had exceeded the previous month’s by 986 times.
The same day, Mayak flatly denied that the spike in ruthenium had anything to do with its activities.
The ROSATOM commission that inspected the Mayak facility afterward reached the same conclusion. The commission said it hadn’t detected abnormal levels of ruthenium at the facility, there had been no malfunction of monitoring systems and none of the 250 Mayak employees tested had shown any trace of the isotope.
Arutyunyan rejected the suggestion that officials have been slow in informing thepublic, saying there had been no emergency situation that would have warranted an alarm. He called talk of a danger to health “nonsense.”
“Why should we come running to announce something? Mayak told us that all their systems were working absolutelynormally and routinely,” he said. “Why should they have jumped up and shouted? I think we spent the right amount of time to understand what happened.”
Environmental activists and government critics disagree.
After the findings of the commission were released, Greenpeace Russia started a petition drive addressed to the general prosecutor’s office, demanding an investigation by independent specialists and public figures into a possible release of ruthenium from Russian territory, as well as into the possible concealment of information by ROSATOM.
“The question is not only about the immediate danger, but the origin of this release,” Greenpeace energy campaigner Rashid Alimov said in a phone interview. “We think such incidents should be investigated and there must be an answer.”
Finding the source of the radioactive cloud was beyond the scope of the ROSATOM commission. But because the ruthenium-106 over Europe was found alone, that is, unaccompanied by other radioactive isotopes, the commission said nuclear power plants or spent nuclear fuel processing facilities like Mayak could be excluded as sources because they don’t produce “pure” ruthenium-106.
The commission said a satellite — or a fragment of one — re-entering the atmosphere cannot be completely ruled out as the source of the ruthenium.
According to French authorities,
the International Atomic Energy Agency found that no satellite containing ruthenium had fallen back to earth during the period in question.
The elephant in the room, of course, is the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident, when Soviet authorities lied for days about the scope of the disaster.
“What’s happening with the ruthenium cloud reminds me a lot of what went on with Chernobyl,”
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said in a recent video blog. “In no way do I want to prove there’s been a catastrophe of that scale. I just want to say that the pattern of behavior is exactly the same.”
Navalny went on to pillory the headline on state television that “safe ruthenium rain fell on Bashkiria” and the chief oncologist of Chelyabinsk region, who advised people worried about high ruthenium levels “to watch soccer and drink beer.”
ROSATOM insistsit is being as transparent as possible.”Russia’s nuclear industry is a lot more open than our peers’,” ROSATOM spokesman Andrei Ivanov said at the news conference.
On Friday, local journalists were let into Mayak on the first press tour since the facility was identified as a possible source of the ruthenium cloud.
Foreign correspondents will have to wait up to two months to get a security clearance.
The government has announced up to £56m in funding for the development of
mini-nuclear plants. The money will be available over the next three years
to assess the potential of designs of advanced and small modular reactors
(SMRs). It will also support early access to regulators in order to build
the capability and capacity needed to assess and licence SMRs and will
establish an expert finance group to advise how small reactor projects
could raise private investment in the UK. The first round of funding
comprises up to £4m for feasibility studies and up to £7m to further
develop their capability. Should these efforts prove successful, up to
£40m will be made available for R&D projects to bring the technology into
the mainstream. The government said it wanted the UK to become a world
leader in developing the next generation of nuclear technologies.
Egypt to sign contracts for nuclear power plant during Putin’s visit: sources, CAIRO (Reuters) 10 Dec 17 –Egypt will sign contracts with Moscow during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Cairo on Monday for the country’s first nuclear power plant, three senior sources told Reuters on Sunday.
The construction of the 4,800 megawatt (MW) capacity plant, which is supposed to be built at Dabaa in the north of the country, is expected to be completed within seven years, added the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media……
Moscow and Cairo signed an agreement in 2015 for Russia to build a nuclear power plant in Egypt, with Russia extending a loan to Egypt to cover the cost of construction.
Egypt’s official gazette said last year the loan was worth $25 billion and would finance 85 percent of the value of each work contract, services and equipment shipping. Egypt would fund the remaining 15 percent.
The trial operation of the first nuclear reactor is expected to take place in 2022……
The nuclear plant is expected not to just cover the country’s energy needs, but to produce excess which can be exported, the sources told Reuters on Sunday.
Putin is scheduled to visit Cairo on Monday to meet with his counterpart Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, where they will discuss bilateral relations, trade and Middle Eastern issues, the Kremlin said last week.
Reporting by Momen Abdelkhalek; Writing by Amina Ismail; Editing by Toby Chopra
Russia says it is fully committed to nuclear missile pact, Reuters Staff, MOSCOW (Reuters) 9 Dec 17 – Russia said on Saturday it was fully committed to a Cold War-era pact with the United States banning intermediate-range cruise missiles, a day after Washington accused Moscow of violating the treaty.
The U.S. State Department said on Friday Washington was reviewing military options, including new intermediate-range cruise missile systems, in response to what it said was Russia’s ongoing violation of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
The warning was the first response by President Donald Trump’s administration to U.S. charges first leveled in 2014 that Russia had deployed a ground-launched cruise missile that breaches the pact’s ban on testing and fielding missiles with ranges of 500-5,500 kms (310-3,417 miles).
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said those allegations were “absolutely unfounded”……
Echoing previous Russian statements, Ryabkov said Moscow was fully committed to the treaty, had always rigorously complied with it, and was prepared to continue doing so.
“However, if the other side stops following it, we will be forced, as President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin has already said, to respond in kind,” he added.
Donor countries agree to fund an additional study on how to extract the damaged spent nuclear fuel from Tank 3A. By Thomas Nilsen, December 08, 2017
Take a closer look at this photo and you will understand the scoop of the most challenging and risky work to be done at the Cold War storage site for submarine nuclear fuel on Russia’s Kola Peninsula. For 35 years, highly radioactive fuel assemblies have been stored in these rusty, partly destroyed steel pipes where concrete of poor quality was filled in the space between. Some of the fuel assemblies are stuck in the canisters, while some of the canisters are stuck in the cells.
Message is clear: Do not try to lift any of the assemblies before you are sure nothing falls out.
The experts all agree it is necessary to conduct a whole range of work to prepare Tank 3A for unloading. Additional €100,000 was granted for the study. Another €675,000 was granted to study another messy challenge in Andreeva Bay; the smashed spent fuel assembles on the floor of the former water-pool storage in Building No. 5, the information portal Russian Atomic Community reports.
Unloading work at Tank 2A and 2B will go on until 2023 before possible work on unloading the dangerous mess at Tank 3A can start.
Andrey Zolotkov, a nuclear expert with the environmental group Bellona says YES with capitalized letters when asked by the Barents Observer via Skype whether Tank 3A poses the biggest risk in the cleanup work.
Equal to Chernobyl
The British nuclear engineering company Nuvia has calculated the total radionuclide inventory in the three tanks to be equal to the remains of Reactor No. 4 inside the Chernobyl sarcophagus. Some 22,000 spent fuel assemblies are stored in the tanks, coming from 90-100 reactor cores powering the Soviet Navy’s Cold War submarines sailing out from the Kola Peninsula from the late 1950s till 1982. Nuvia says it is some six tonnes of fissile uranium-235 in the fuel, about two times the amount of fissile material inside the exploded Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine.
Tank 3A does also pose the highest risk for radiation doses to working personell and ways to do the job with robotics has to be developed. Nobody want people to stay too long near the destroyed assemblies and get exposed.
Another deemed challenging job ahead is to locate and secure the six damaged spent fuel elements on the floor of Building No. 5 in Andreeva Bay. The building served as a storage-pool for the spent fuel assemblies before 1982, but due to a water-leak and rusty wires, many fuel assemblies fell to the floor. That was the reason why the assemblies were hastily moved over to the tanks 2A, 2B and 3A. In that process, however, six damaged fuel assemblies and some uranium powder from others were left on the floor. Today, they pose a serious radiation hazard risk.
Funding from Europe and Canada
The nuclear cleanup work in Andreeva Bay on the Barents Sea coast is financed by the so-called Northern Window of the Northern Dimension Environmental Partnership (NDEP), a cooperative program with Russia’s State Nuclear Corporation Rosatom.
Norway has over the last two decades financed infrastructure improvements in Andreeva Bay making the removal of spent nuclear fuel possible.
The NDEP’s funded work started in 2003. Additional to the European Union, nuclear legacy cleanup work in North-West Russia is funded by Sweden, Finland, Belgium, France, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Italy and the United Kingdom.
Andreeva Bay is located about 55 kilometers from Russia’s border to Norway in the north.
Times 8th Dec 2017.Hitachi could stop funding the development of a new nuclear plant on
Anglesey unless the government agrees a viable financial support package by
the middle of next year, the head of the project has warned.
Duncan Hawthorne, chief executive of the Horizon venture, said that its Japanese
owners had already spent £2 billion and would not keep “throwing a
bottomless pit of cash at a project without some certainty it can get to a
successful conclusion”.
Horizon is in talks with the UK and Japanese governments about possible direct state funding for its proposed plant at
Wylfa Newydd. Ministers appeared yesterday to move closer to agreeing
direct funding as the Nuclear Industry Council, a joint industry-government
body that is co-chaired by Richard Harrington, the energy minister,
recommended looking at models including the government taking an equity
stake in projects.
The National Audit Office has said that such models
could significantly reduce the cost to consumers compared with Hinkley
Point C, Britain’s first new plant in a generation. In further nuclear
industry developments yesterday The Nuclear Industry Council set targets
for reducing the costs to consumers of nuclear plants by up to 30 per cent
by 2030. The head of the Nugen venture developing reactors in Cumbria said
that its proposed acquisition from Toshiba by South Korea’s Kepco, which
plans to use its own reactor design, could delay its first power until
2030.
The government announced a fresh review into ways of financing small
nuclear reactors, and £4 million funding for feasibility studies into
other early-stage technologies. Mr Hawthorne acknowledged that the government as a whole was yet to be convinced on the idea of direct financing, with the Treasury concerned about anything that would put a
plant on its balance sheet, but said time was running out. He told The
Times: “We have been saying we need to have some confidence that the basis
of a transaction exists and we need to see some documentary evidence of
that. By the middle of 2018, we need to have something tangible to show to
our shareholders that allows them to keep funding.” https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/business/hitachi-will-stop-anglesey-nuclear-plant-funds-without-deal-mbjzk6jj2
Telegraph 7th Dec 2017, Ministers are poised to plough almost £150m into developing new nuclear
technologies even after the Government’s own investigation revealed deep
uncertainties about the economics of next generation reactors.
The Government’s plan to reboot its stalled nuclear ambitions by investing in
research and development has been mired by indecision and delay since it
promised in 2015 to provide £250m to help developers find new, cheaper
ways to invest in the low-carbon power.
Government provoked furtherconfusion today after issuing a flurry of funding announcements for small
modular reactors, known as ‘baby nukes’, alongside findings that they may
prove even more expensive than traditional nuclear plants.
The new reactors, being developed by industrial giants including Rolls Royce and
NuScale, will face another round of financial scrutiny by industry experts,
the Government said. But in the meantime as much as £460m has been
promised for new nuclear research and development by the end of the decade.
The money will come from the Government, Innovate UK, and the Research
Councils, a Government spokeswoman said. The research funding windfall
includes £86m to develop nuclear fusion technology and a further £56m
towards research and development of next generation nuclear reactors. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/12/07/nuclear-windfall-new-technologies-concerns-cost-persist/
