nuclear-news

The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope

Costly Lepreau nuclear plant refit may extend into 2010

Costly Lepreau nuclear plant refit may extend into 2010: CBC News  April 3, 2009 CBC News

NB Power says it can no longer predict exactly when the Point Lepreau nuclear power plant will be up and running again — and for every day it’s delayed it costs the province $670,000 to replace the electricity the plant would normally produce.The $1.4-billion project was supposed to be finished by this September, a date that was first pushed back to December and is now in danger of running into next year.
Gaëtan Thomas, NB Power’s vice-president nuclear, said Thursday that picking a completion date is no longer possible.

Costly Lepreau nuclear plant refit may extend into 2010: VP

April 3, 2009 Posted by | business and costs, Canada | , , | Leave a comment

Fiscal stimulus and the environment

Greenstanding

Apr 2nd 2009
From The Economist print edition

Gordon Brown’s New Deal will do little to advance renewable energy

Mr Brown’s green New Deal looks flimsy. On March 31st HSBC, a big bank, published a report ranking countries by how green their economic-stimulus packages were. The bank reckons that Britain is allocating just 7% of its fiscal stimulus to greenery, compared with 12% in America, 34% in China and a whopping 81% in South Korea (see chart). A separate report prepared for Greenpeace, a pressure group, by consultants at the New Economics Foundation (NEF) considers only genuinely new funding and arrives at a figure of just 0.6%, or £120m……………………….

………………….It has moved speedily to revive the nuclear-power industry, by contrast. From a position of cordial dislike in 2003, the government announced itself in favour of new nuclear plants in principle as early as 2006.More recently ministers have been positively prescriptive, suggesting how many plants might be built and where. A takeover of British Energy, which runs most existing nuclear plants, by EDF, keen to build more, took place last year. A new nuclear laboratory has been founded, schemes to train workers set up and the vexed issue of waste disposal re-examined.Nuclear-power stations take many years to build, so new ones will not help Britain meet its 2020 targets for curbing emissions. But the technology is well understood. Politicians may have calculated that a few nuclear-power stations will be easier to sell the public than thousands of wind turbines. And energy does not have to be renewable to be low-carbon.

Fiscal stimulus and the environment | Greenstanding | The Economist

April 3, 2009 Posted by | business and costs, UK | , , , , | Leave a comment

Financial meltdown to end “nuclear renaissance”?

U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman, speaking to reporters during an international energy conference in Paris this week, said that long-term energy projects like building new nuclear plants could be at significant risk and “the most difficult to finance” because of the growing global financial crisis. With the global financial domino effect continuing to fall out of the subprime mortgage collapse, Bodman said a “nuclear renaissance” has the most to lose. In an Associated Press report, Bodman forecasted that a failure of the U.S. to resolve the ongoing financial crisis would have “a significant impact” on energy demand and said “that’s what leads to the need to come up with a solution.”

Our View: What that “solution” might be is an open question and raises the concern that the Bush financial “rescue effort” could hide federal backing for the high stakes rollers of new atomic power plant projects. A lot of pork can be stampeded through Congress in this $700 billion financial bailout of bad loans of historic proportions. This would be particularly true for a notoriously risky nuclear power industry that cannot attract financing other than unlimited federal taxpayer dollars.

October 3, 2008 Posted by | business and costs | | 1 Comment

    Next Entries »