Nuclear Philippines is a future full of costly risks, Inquirer.net, By: Laurence Delina @inquirerdotnet, 13 Sept 16 CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts—The Duterte administration recently floated the revival of a white elephant of the martial law period—the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP)—to meet the country’s burgeoning energy needs. “Revival” actually is an inapt word; the facility never went online in the first place.
Going nuclear is a highly inappropriate option because of its potential to cause catastrophic damage due to accidents, sabotage or terrorism; to produce very long-lived radioactive wastes; and to exacerbate nuclear proliferation. It is also water intensive, slow to construct, and very expensive. With many countries already phasing out nuclear power in favor of renewable energy technologies, the nuclear option is but a costly and risky diversion for the Philippines……..
Large-scale property damage and evacuation costs from nuclear accidents are the key liabilities of having a nuclear facility in an earthquake-prone country like the Philippines. In a matter of hours, a nuclear disaster could generate global fear and horror; this has been illustrated in the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, that brought about the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
Managing radioactive waste produced by nuclear reactors is another challenge. If we cannot even effectively attend to simpler solid waste management problems, how can we ensure that we will have the capacity to store radioactive wastes for thousands of years?……
The best energy option for the Philippines is not nuclear but the already proven and demonstrated renewable energy technologies. These are relatively less risky, environmentally benign, socially acceptable, and economically plausible options. These include utility-scale and distributed solar, wind, micro-hydro, and geothermal installations. Our equatorial, geographic and archipelagic location, which translates into a tremendous renewable energy potential, is a natural blessing many countries are envious of.
Projects that transform our huge wind, water, sunlight and geothermal resources into our much-needed energy can be constructed quickly, within two to five years, but without the risks and costs attached to nuclear. Wind farms, for example, take one to three years in the development stage—that is, the time required to identify a site, purchase or lease a land, monitor winds, install transmission, negotiate a power-purchase agreement, and obtain permits—and between one and two years to construct. Solar farms take almost the same time………
Bringing the BNPP—or any nuclear energy facility for that matter—online is nothing but a risky and costly digression to an effective approach to our energy supply problem. Adopting this most expensive and very risky remedy only curbs what we can (and must) spend on the more promising approaches. For this administration to be truly concerned about the future of energy in the Philippines, renewables, not nuclear, is the way forward. http://opinion.inquirer.net/97258/nuclear-philippines-future-full-costly-risks
September 13, 2016
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EDF may have to cut output or walk away, The Times, Robin Pagnamenta, A nuclear power station being built in France using the same design earmarked for Hinkley Point in Somerset may have to restrict its output or could be abandoned because of the costs of correcting safety flaws, experts have warned.
France’s nuclear safety regulator, the ASN, is testing the strength of steel used in the reactor pressure vessel at the plant in Flamanville in Normandy.
Last year, it warned of “very serious anomalies”, including weak spots in the steel component which houses the reactor. An investigation is under way and a decision is expected next year.
The same design has been…(subscribers only) http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/business/hinkley-style-reactor-has-serious-safety-flaw-wg50jzxhd
September 13, 2016
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Even the Most Remote Islands Harbor Human Messes Biologists are trying to clean uninhabited U.S. Pacific Islands that are covered in nuclear waste, bird-eating mice and yellow crazy ants By Jesse Greenspan | Scientific American September 2016 Issue “…….For Plentovich and other researchers focused on remote U.S. Pacific islands—most of which have no permanent residents and are off-limits to the public—such adventures are par for the course. All their conservation projects share a common theme: undoing damage caused by careless humans….
U.S. PACIFIC ISLAND CONSERVATION PROJECTS……….
September 12, 2016
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Sellafield ‘riddled with safety flaws’, according to BBC investigation Panorama programme claims there are numerous, potentially lethal safety flaws at the Cumbria nuclear plant Guardian, Ruth Quinn, 6 Sept 16, The Sellafield nuclear site is riddled with potentially lethal safety flaws, according to a BBC investigation.
The Panorama programme, broadcast on Monday night, uncovered a raft of safety issues on the site in Cumbria which stores almost all of the country’s nuclear waste.
The investigation was prompted by a whistleblower, once a senior manager in Sellafield, who revealed a litany of safety concerns including degraded infrastructure, improper storage of highly radioactive materials and chronic under staffing across the site……
The whistleblower said that his biggest fear for the site was for one of the nuclear waste silos to go up in flames – the consequences of which would be dire. He said: “If there is a fire there it could generate a plume of radiological waste that will go across western Europe.”
It was also revealed that swaths of the plant often do not have enough staff to meet basic safety levels. Investigators for the programme found that in the space of 12 months between July 2012 and July 2013, minimum levels of safe manning levels were routinely breached……..https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/05/sellafield-nuclear-plant-riddled-safety-flaws-according-bbc-panorama
September 7, 2016
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Update on Comprehensive Test Ban, & More from CRS http://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2016/09/ctbt-update-crs/ Sep.06, 2016 by Steven Aftergood The Congressional Research Service has prepared an updated account of the status of the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty (CTBT), which would prohibit explosive testing of nuclear weapons.
“As of August 2016, 183 states had signed the CTBT and 164, including Russia, had ratified it. However, entry into force requires ratification by 44 states specified in the treaty, of which 41 had signed the treaty and 36 had ratified.” The U.S. has not ratified it.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hold a hearing on the CTBT tomorrow, September 7.
See Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty: Background and Current Developments, September 1, 2016.
Other new and updated products from the Congressional Research Service include the following.
Climate Change: Frequently Asked Questions about the 2015 Paris Agreement, September 1, 2016
U.S. Textile Manufacturing and the Proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, September 1, 2016
Comparing DHS Component Funding, FY2017: Fact Sheet, September 2, 2016
OPM Announces Premium Increase in the Federal Long-Term Care Insurance Program, CRS Insight, September 1, 2016
The European Union’s Small Business Act: A Different Approach, September 1, 2016
Zika Response Funding: Request and Congressional Action, updated September 1, 2016
September 7, 2016
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Nuclear Shutdown News chronicles the decline and fall of the nuclear power industry in the US and beyond, and highlights the efforts of those who are working to create a nuclear-free future. Here is our August 2016 edition:
US nuclear industry reaches a new low with resale of decrepit nuke plant already scheduled to permanently shut down next year. On July 12, Syracuse.com in upstate New York announced, “Entergy to sell FitzPatrick to Exelon in mid-August.”
The FitzPatrick nuclear plant is located in Lake Ontario near the Canadian border. It started up in late 1974, not long after Richard Nixon’s reign over the White House permanently shut down. This means the nuke plant’s one reactor has been cranking away for almost 42 years, releasing radiation into the air and water in the Great Lakes region all the while.
US nuclear reactors were designed to operate only 40 years.
FitzPatrick’s reactor is exactly like the four ruined Japanese reactors at Fukushima, designed and built by US corporate behemoth General Electric.
Originally owned and operated by Niagara Mohawk, it is one of the most inappropriately named nukes in the nation, along with Indian Point, Millstone, Pilgrim and Turkey Point, ownership was later handed off to the likewise unfortunately monikered New York Power Authority.
Around the turn of the century, as FitzPatrick was approaching age 30, New Orleans-based Entergy began buying up a number of aging and troubled nuclear plants at (for nukes) bargain basement prices, including FitzPatrick, planning to milk them as long as they could get away with it.
Now that it can no longer make money off risky relics, Entergy has begun to shut them down, like Vermont Yankee in 2014. Pilgrim on Cape Cod in Massachusetts is on Entergy’s closure list as well.
Earlier this year, Entergy announced it would be closing FitPatrick next year as well.
Enter New York Gov. Cuomo
New York Governor Mario Cuomo has actively supported the shutdown of Indian Point’s two messed up reactors. Located in the Hudson River this nuke is less than 40 miles north of New York City.
But when FitzPatrick’s’s proposed closure went public, Cuomo turned tail, citing supposed concerns about a threat to the state’s electrical supply.
Subsequently, he led the charge in an effort in the state legislature that resulted in a multibillion-dollar bailout for FitzPatrick and several other dangerously degenerated unprofitable upstate nuke plants, to keep them going solely because of this taxpayer pocket emptying subsidy.
By the way, Entergy is the 2nd largest owner and operator of US nuke plants. Number one on that despicable list is Chicago-based Exelon. Exelon had been pressuring the Illinois legislature to give it big time bucks to bail out a number of its nukes in the region that have become chronic money losers.
But the Illinois legislature refused to defraud Illinois citizens, so last month Exelon announced it would be closing down two of its loser nukes next year, with more such closures looming in the future.
So now Entergy and Exelon will get their way in the Empire State with FitzPatrick, whose sale price of $110 million it will easily recoup thanks to Cuomo’s shameful move. His Clean Energy Standard act will provide $482 million per year to “financially strapped nuclear plants” in New York, excluding Indian Point. Syracuse.com reported that Entergy’s Bill Moke said, while thanking “Cuomo for his leadership.”
For his part, Cuomo said he was “pleased by the significant progress being made.”
Exelon also owns two other aged General Electric built nuclear plants on Lake Ontario in New York, comprising three reactors, Ginna and Nine Mile Point, which will likewise share in the taxpayer ripoff subsidy buck while increasing the threat of a meltdown on Lake Ontario.
Source: Syracuse.com
Vermont Yankee nuke plant to ship massive amounts of radioactive water to Tennessee.
On July 16 the Associated Press reported, “Plans to ship hundreds of thousands of gallons to Tennessee processing facility raising concerns.” As reported before, the Entergy-owned Vermont Yankee nuke plant shut down in 2014. As we are learning, since more and more US nukes are closing, a whole new set of problems are arising, because shut down nuclear reactors leave behind vast amounts of radioactive waste posing a threat to the health of humans and other living beings.
In the case of Vermont Yankee, “a huge donut-shaped space in its reactor” called a taurus, “with a capacity to hold 1.1 million gallons of emergency cooling water, has become “a giant holding tank for (radioactive) water waiting to be sent away” since Vermont Yankee’s closure, the AP reported.
“Radiation in the taurus has grown substantially,” Neil Sheehan of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission told the AP.
Arnie Gunderson, a nuclear engineer turned whistleblower, added, “”The taurus now contains a witches blend of radioactive chemicals.”
Another complicating factor is “intrusion water”, water seeping into the plant from outside. The NRC considers this water “only slightly radioactive” and plans to release it into the Connecticut River, which flows by Vermont Yankee south though into Massachusetts and Connecticut before emptying into Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean.
Paul Gunter, a longtime no nukes activist, told the AP, “I’d like to see public notification of shipments and routes, and first responders along the route notified ahead of time and placards noting contents on the outside of trucks.”
Tennessee, where Entergy wants to send the Vermont Yankee radioactive waste to, is site of the Oak Ridge nuclear facility, which was built during World War II to develop the atomic bomb. It already has vast amounts of nuclear waste.
Source: Associated Press, ap.com.
September 7, 2016
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Cape Cod.com September 6, 2016 PLYMOUTH – The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth experienced an unplanned shutdown this morning, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
A statement from the agency said it was caused by a high water level resulting from a problem with a regulating valve…….Entergy announced last year that they would close Pilgrim by 2019. http://www.capecod.com/newscenter/pilgrim-nuclear-power-plant-shuts-down-following-valve-problem/
September 7, 2016
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The cost of nuclear testing, News 24 South Africa 2016-09-04 Carien Du Plessis, City Press Johannesburg – There isn’t much to see at the former Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons test site in eastern Kazakhstan’s flat, outstretched grasslands. Much of what was there was destroyed by radioactive bombs.
The former Soviet Union government conducted 465 nuclear tests in an area the size of Gauteng between 1949 and 1989, much of it in secret and some of it underground.
It left unknowing citizens ill and newborn babies deformed. Special social grants are still given to residents of surrounding areas who suffer from above-average rates of cancer.
On Wednesday, a delegation of nuclear abolition campaigners, physicists, parliamentarians, peace activists and former military leaders travelled to the formerly top-secret Semipalatinsk Test Site, called The Polygon, as part of a nuclear disarmament conference in the capital, Astana.
Twenty-five years ago, this site was closed by President Nursultan Nazarbayev, shortly after the Soviet Union’s collapse and Kazakhstan’s independence. Kazakhstan returned the 1 400 nuclear weapons to Russia.
In 2009, that day, August 29, was declared the International Day Against Nuclear Tests by the UN.
The site is a 40-minute drive from a small town called Korchatov, built with gulag labour and which housed about 20 000 engineers, physicists, military personnel and nuclear support workers in its Soviet heyday.
It now sports a National Nuclear Centre to support the Kazakhstan government’s policy of the peaceful use of atomic energy.
At the old test site, a handful of concrete control towers, which resemble giant shark’s fins, surround a small water-filled crater, where once stood a tower from which nuclear explosions were launched. The site is still dangerously radioactive, and delegates wear plastic bag shoe covers and white safety masks. Touching the soil or plants is forbidden………..
On Monday, at a government-sponsored conference themed Building a Nuclear Weapon-Free World, Nazarbayev, now in the 27th year of his presidency, told attendees: “Kazakhstan is making every effort to ensure peace throughout the Earth over a quarter century. We have initiated many new ideas for the strengthening of global security.”
There were, however, no high-level delegates from nuclear powers at the conference………
Kazakhstan’s large investment in preaching to the converted comes a year ahead of the opening of the $150 million nuclear fuel bank, under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Developing nations are critical of the plan because they believe this bank will keep them from acquiring nuclear technology for peaceful use.
Proponents, however, reckon the enriched uranium bank will help nuclear non-proliferation by preventing countries from developing enrichment processes themselves, and using them for nuclear weapons.
Experts say the increasing use of nuclear power will lead to more countries using this power bank. It will also help put the 17 million-strong nation of Kazakhstan, which by 2050 wants to be among the top 30 global economies, on the world’s political map.
It’s not by chance that the oil, gas and uranium-rich country is beautifying Astana with fancy new infrastructure for the thousands of international visitors expected here for Expo 2017, themed around the future provision of clean energy.
Activists, however, expressed reservations about such a nuclear fuel bank and its uses.
Jackie Cabasso, a nuclear abolition activist for 30 years from Western States Legal Foundation, spoke out against nuclear energy at the conference. She told City Press afterwards: “With accidents like Fukushima [in Japan in 2011], it just is not safe enough.” http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/the-cost-of-nuclear-testing-20160904
September 5, 2016
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No to nuclear power, http://www.chieftain.com/opinion/5111644-120/nuclear-power-pueblo-operations, Paul D. Conatore, 4 Sept 16 An opinion published in The Pueblo Chieftain touted nuclear power as “safe, reliant, and clean,” and proclaimed “Pueblo would be an ideal location for a new nuclear power plant.”
To believe it, nuclear power would eliminate high greenhouse gas emissions and high costs associated with providing reliable energy to Colorado consumers; create technological innovation jobs and opportunities; and reinstate uranium mining in Colorado. We shouldn’t be fooled.
A veiled attempt to resurrect a failed proposal for an NPP in Pueblo, the opinion is ill-founded and ill-considered in its assertions and omissions.
Absent are the discussions of major problems in uranium mining, milling and enrichment; fuel fabrication operations; nuclear reactor operations; radioactive waste operations that result in radioactive and chemical pollution and contamination of air, water and earth; and adverse public health and environmental impacts.
Consider this also: Nuclear power is the most water-guzzling of energy sources, but no connection is drawn between limited water resources in Pueblo County and the water requirements of an NPP built here.
Nuclear power plants consume tens of millions to a few billion gallons of water each day, depending on the type and number of reactors. They have an insatiable thirst for cooling water.
Intense competition for water among agricultural, environmental, industrial and municipal consumers already exists. Introducing nuclear power consumption would only exacerbate the situation.
Anyone honestly advocating protection of the Arkansas River water resource would be well advised to look deeply into the facts before backing a plant in Pueblo.
September 5, 2016
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ESKOM EXTENDS NUCLEAR POWER CONSULTATION PERIOD http://ewn.co.za/2016/09/02/Eskom-extends-nuclear-power-consultation-period 3 Sept 16
Interested parties in Eastern Cape have 30 days to comment on Eskom’s plan to build nuclear plants. JOHANNESBURG – Power utility Eskom said on Friday it has extended by 30 days the period for interested parties in the Eastern Cape Province to comment on its plan to build nuclear plants.
The utility said in a statement a notice of its “intention to construct and operate multiple nuclear installations (power reactors)” will be published in the Government Gazette this month and comments will be accepted for up to 30 days after that.
Environmental and civic groups have expressed concern about the two proposed sites in the Eastern Cape and Western Cape provinces, while economists have said South Africa cannot afford to build new nuclear power plants.
September 3, 2016
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The Guardian view on Pope Francis: an unlikely voice for the environment, Guardian, 2 Sept 16 Editorial We need more than enlightened self interest to save the planet It is less than a week since the International Geological Conference declared that we should recognise that we entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in around 1950. The changes that we have made to the planet are now irreversible and their effects will continue for millennia to come. None the less, this may prove to be the shortest of all geological epochs, since there is no guarantee that humans, who made it, will survive the results of their own activity.
Not for the last 2.5bn years or so, since the cyanobacteria filled the earth’s atmosphere with free oxygen, poisonous to almost every other form of life at the time, has any one species had such an effect on the environment as we have done. But we are not bacteria. We are the only species capable of reflecting on our impact. We have moral agency. We can foresee the likely consequences of our actions, consider them, and then make choices. In relation to the environment, these choices have frequently been wrong and show little sign of being right in time to save us from very large and damaging climate change.
The problem is a classic one of game theory and it is one that liberal democracies are ill-fitted to handle. Trust and co-operation would lead to the best result for everyone, but each player or nation state will benefit more in the short term from a policy of selfishness and treachery. The shortness of electoral cycles in the rich world means that almost all governments need economic growth today, whatever the cost to be repaid with cruel interest in the future. That will be someone else’s problem, just as the effects of climate change now appear to be someone else’s problem, until these other people start fleeing war, starvation and disease and turn up at the edges of the richer world.
Climate change is a global problem, and it can only be countered by some kind of global consciousness and a sense of the common good that embraces the whole of humanity. This is where the efforts of the world religions become important.
…….Enter Pope Francis, who has swung the weight of his papacy behind the environmental movement in an unprecedented way. He is not alone. All of the organised world religions now have a strong environmental consciousness. All of them are affected. To be a world religion is by definition to have adherents among both the unimaginably poor and the unimaginably wealthy. However, Pope Francis has devoted considerable effort and political capital to the attempt to construct a coherent theory that can show how damage to our environment also harms us, and not just our hypothetical descendants. This really matters. Self-interest will only work to the common benefit if it is understood that we ourselves are mutually dependent creatures who harm ourselves when we harm one another…….
what his latest initiative imaginatively suggests. Care for the environment is henceforth to be considered by faithful Catholics as a “work of mercy” – what the outside world would call a charitable act. They are called to “a grateful contemplation of God’s world” as a spiritual discipline, but also to the kind of small, slightly inconvenient gestures like recycling, using public transport, or even just turning off unneeded lights, which by themselves are almost meaningless, but when practised by billions of people make a real and very necessary change.
All of these, he says, are to be understood as “simple daily gestures which break with the logic of violence, exploitation and selfishness”; and while the world undoubtedly needs huge and dramatic actions to break the cycle of exploitation and climate change, it also needs ordinary people to play their part with just such simple acts. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/01/the-guardian-view-on-pope-francis-an-unlikely-voice-for-the-environment
September 3, 2016
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The Daily Fix: Take American promises on the Nuclear Suppliers Group with heaps of salt, Scoll In, 2 Sept 16 “……..Speaking to the Times of India, Kerry claimed that the US will work harder to get India into the Nuclear Suppliers Group – an international network that controls the flow of nuclear fuel around the world. The NSG for a brief period seemed like the linchpin of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign policy efforts. But that bid failed last year after India was unable to push through its application at a plenary meeting in Seoul.
“We want to make it happen before the year end,”
Kerry said, and the joint statement between the two countries reflected that. But there are serious doubts over whether America has the capability, or even the willingness, to pull its weight in getting India into the nuclear suppliers club.
That was the technique used by former US President George W Bush in 2008, when he made a personal call and managed to get India an NSG waiver, but we are dealing with a different president, a vastly different America and an upcoming US election that will not make things easy for any side.
There was hope that there would be a special NSG session later this year, possibly in November, when India’s application would be taken up separately, but that might come up right around the time of the US elections. What are the chances that Kerry’s administration, at that point either transitioning to a Hillary Clinton’s team or enduring the lame-duck period before Donald Trump takes over, will muster the willpower to take on the Chinese on behalf of India?…….http://scroll.in/article/815498/the-daily-fix-take-american-promises-on-the-nuclear-suppliers-group-with-heaps-of-salt
September 3, 2016
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£18 billion construction cost now almost outweighs EDF’s entire market capitalisation of 22 billion euros. In other words, EDF’s management has bet the entire company on this one project.
Why Britain’s Hinkley nuclear reactor is a horror show, with or without China, South China Morning Post, Tom Holland 30 Aug 16, “…….The new British government of Prime Minister Theresa May would be right to pull the plug, regardless of any Chinese involvement……..
The real problem with the project is its cost. The new nuclear power station was conceived in 2008 in order to help the British government meet its aim of reducing carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, an aim that was itself a vanity project intended to showcase Britain’s supposed environmental leadership. However, the chosen design, the European Pressurised Reactor promoted by the French state-controlled company EDF, remains an untested technology. The first EPR project to go ahead, a power plant in Finland, is currently running nine years behind schedule and more than 100 per cent over budget.
£18 billion (HK$184 billion), which would make it by far the most expensive power station in the world. But that’s only part of the objection. In order to persuade EDF to shoulder the construction costs, in 2013 the British government guaranteed that Hinkley would be able to sell its electricity to the grid at a index-linked price of £92.50 per MWh. At the time, oil was trading at US$120 a barrel, and Britain’s wholesale peak power prices were as much as £80 per MWh. Since then oil and gas prices have tumbled and British electricity prices have slumped to £40 per MWh – less than half the cost of power from Hinkley.
With inflation forecast to have pushed the project’s index-linked guaranteed price up to £120 per MWh by the time it starts generating in 2023, the government itself reckons that subsidising Hinkley’s electricity would cost taxpayers £37 billion over the lifetime of the guarantee. To put that sum into perspective, it is double the cost of replacing Britain’s ageing fleet of intercontinental ballistic missile submarines with an entirely new next-generation nuclear deterrent. Hinkley will produce the world’s most expensive energy by a country mile.
Despite boasting such a gold-plated guarantee, the project has still run into financial trouble. The eye-watering cost of developing the EPR has hammered the share price of EDF, which has fallen 80 per cent since 2008 when the project was conceived. As a result, Hinkley’s
£18 billion construction cost now almost outweighs EDF’s entire market capitalisation of 22 billion euros. In other words, EDF’s management has bet the entire company on this one project. That sober realisation was behind the decision to bring in the state-owned China General Nuclear corporation as a 33 per cent co-investor. Even so, so far this year fears that the cost of building Hinkley will bankrupt EDF have triggered the resignations in protest of two of the French company’s directors, including its finance director.
August 31, 2016
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UK government could approve Hinkley Point but delay Essex project Decision on the Bradwell reactor could be stalled to allow a discussion about security, potentially endangering deal with China, Guardian, Sean Farrell, 29 Aug 16, The government is considering a proposal to detach development of the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant from an agreement allowing China to build a reactor in Essex.
The plan is one of the options under consideration after Theresa May delayed approving the £18bn Hinkley Point project last month, according to a report in the Times (£)……..
An option under consideration in Whitehall is to approve Hinkley Point but delay a decision on the Bradwell reactor to allow a discussion about its effect on British security, the Times said.
Any attempt to split Hinkley Point from the agreement to let China build reactors in Britain would endanger the whole deal because the Bradwell plant was meant to be a showcase for China’s nuclear technology in Europe.
Tension over Hinkley Point means May risks an awkward first G20 meeting of world leaders as prime minister. The meeting, on 4 and 5 September, takes place in the Hangzhou, China, and will be hosted by Xi Jinping, China’s president, who signed the Hinkley Point agreement last year.
EDF, the French state-owned energy group, approved the building of Hinkley Point in July after months of doubts about whether it was financially strong enough to take on the giant project……..https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/29/uk-government-could-approve-hinkley-point-delay-essex-project-bradwell-china
August 31, 2016
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By Trevor Timpson BBC News 29 August 2016According to the i, Chinese companies have “splurged” £3.8bn on mergers and acquisitions this year as China’s investment in UK business and infrastructure swells.
The analysis prepared for the i “shows how the Government’s cosy relationship with Beijing is reaping huge benefits,” the paper claims.
But it may not be cosy for much longer, warns the Times, which says a deal on Chinese investment in UK nuclear power may be unravelling just as Theresa May heads for a G20 summit in China next week.
Hinkley Point power station with Chinese finance may get approval after all, but the go-ahead for a Chinese-built station at Bradwell in Essex could be put off, says the paper. “However, Beijing is resisting any attempt to unpick a deal that gives it a chance to gain a foothold for its nuclear industry in Europe,” the Times adds.
In the i Professor of International Development Jeffrey Henderson says Chinese involvement in British industry should be scrutinised, and firms controlled by the Communist Party “need to be kept out of politically strategic industries such as electricity generation.”
But the Financial Times reports that unions are demanding that Hinkley Point get the go-ahead, with one, Justin Bowden of the GMB, quoted as saying “The faffing must stop now”……….http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-the-papers-37211021
August 31, 2016
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