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NUCLEAR POWER
Below:
What is called the "Third Generation" of nuclear plants
is running into serious problems as countries envisage nuclear
power solving energy shortages before 2020. A recent report suggests
major setbacks for nuclear energy plans with flaws in US and French
models
Leukaemia. Evidence from
government-sponsored studies in Germany suggests that young children who live
close to nuclear power stations are twice as vulnerable to developing leukaemia. link
Note: The sole U.S.
plant that enriches uranium for civilian power reactors, located in Paducah,
Kentucky, accomplishes this via an energy-hogging process that consumes 15
billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year and uses 26 million gallons of
water per day. link
February 2010: Quarter of U.S. nuclear plants found to be releasing radioactive tritium. Vermont Yankee is just the latest of dozens of U.S. nuclear plants to be found leaking tritium raising concerns about nation's aging plants, many built in the 1960s and ’70s. Tritium, found in nature in tiny amounts and a product of nuclear fusion, has been linked to cancer if ingested, inhaled or absorbed through the skin in large amounts. link (Update Feb. 25 -In an unusual state foray into nuclear regulation, the Vermont Senate voted 26 to 4 to block operation of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant after 2012, citing radioactive leaks, misstatements in testimony by plant officials and other problems. link) BRITAIN: The BBC reported that it will take over 100 years before the toxic nuclear site at Sellafield (formerly Windscale) is safe. A spokesman for Sellafield Ltd said: "Sellafield isn't a place that can just be closed down. It is about the removal of plant and equipment from the building, it is about decontaminating and knocking them down, that takes decades. It has been estimated that it will cost £73bn ($136 bn) to decommission all nuclear civilian facilities in the UK. link April 2011: In Southeastern US, extreme heat is a growing concern for nuclear plant operators. During July 2010, eight weeks of unrelenting heat forced TVA’s Browns Ferry to run at only half of its regular power. The total cost of the lost power over that time was more than $50 million, all of which was paid for by TVA's customers in Tennessee. With river water so warm, the nuclear plant couldn't draw in as much water as usual to cool the facility's three reactors, or else the water it pumped back into the river could be hot enough to harm the local ecosystem. link
May 2012: Japanese appeal to UN Secretary General re: Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4. Recently, former diplomats and experts both in Japan and abroad stressed the extremely risky condition of the spent nuclear fuel pool and this is being widely reported by world media. Robert Alvarez, Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), who is one of the best-known experts on spent nuclear fuel, stated that in Unit 4 there is spent nuclear fuel which contains Cesium-137 (Cs-137) that is equivalent to 10 times the amount that was released at the time of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Nearly all of the 10,893 spent fuel assemblies at the Fukushima Daiichi plant sit in pools vulnerable to future earthquakes, with roughly 85 times more long-lived radioactivity than released at Chernobyl. link Fukushima update - June 2011: “Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind” says Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president. Scientific experts believe Japan's nuclear disaster to be far worse than governments are revealing to the public. “We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl," said Gundersen. "The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl." link The value of land made unusable after the Fukushima disaster, plus the cost of evacuating 80,000 people from around the stricken plant was between $70 billion and $250 billion, according to the Japan Centre for Economic Research, and that was only a small portion of what the ultimate costs would be .link (Dismantling the crippled plant is expected to take at least 30 years)  April 12: The upgrading of Japan's
Fukushima incident to a level seven - the maximum - on the International
Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) - puts it on a par with Chernobyl. A spokesman for Tokyo
Electric Power Company suggested it could even end up
being worse than Chernobyl.
linkMarch 2011: Japan disaster - nuclear power's future compromised. The troubles of the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan have dealt a severe blow to the global nuclear industry, a powerful cartel of less than a dozen major state-owned or state-guided firms that have been trumpeting a nuclear-power renaissance. But the risks that reactors like Fukushima face from natural disasters are well-known. Indeed, they became evident six years ago, when the Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004 inundated India's second-largest nuclear complex, shutting down the Madras power station. Many nuclear-power plants are located along coastlines, because they are highly water-intensive. Yet natural disasters such as storms, hurricanes, and tsunamis are becoming more common, owing to climate change, which will also cause a rise in ocean levels, making seaside reactors even more vulnerable. The central dilemma of nuclear power in an increasingly water-stressed world is that it is a water-guzzler, yet vulnerable to water. link Many of the world's 442 nuclear power reactors are by the sea, rather than by lakes or rivers, to ensure vast water supplies for cooling fuel rods in emergencies like that at the Fukushima plant on Japan's east coast. This exposes the dilemma of whether to build power plants on tsunami-prone coasts or inland sites where water supplies are unreliable, a problem likely to be aggravated by climate change, experts say. [Map of nuclear power plants around the globe suspect to earthquakes - link]
"Despite industry efforts to frame nuclear energy as the cheapest option, the reality is that nuclear power’s very survival has required large and continuous government support,” writes Doug Koplow in a Christian Science Monitor article (no longer on line). Mr. Koplow tracks $178 billion in public subsidies for nuclear energy for the period from 1947 to 1999. Others have reached similar figures. Altogether, nuclear-industry bailouts in the 1970s and ’80s cost taxpayers and ratepayers in excess of $300 billion in 2006 dollars, according to three independent studies cited in a new nuclear-cost study by the Union of Concerned Scientists. In 2008 the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported the average risk of default on government guarantees for nuclear projects was 50%. Mark Cooper, senior fellow at Vermont Law School Institute for Energy and the Environment, said that even if no loans were defaulted on, nuclear would be too expensive: Wall Street is unwilling to finance any new capital projects without a 100% federal guarantee. (Doug Koplow is president of the Boston energy consulting company Earth Track: more here for his analysis that nuclear power is still not viable without subsidies.) Commercial nuclear power has thus far cost $492 billion dollars in the USA, $97 billion of which has been in the form of federal subsidies. This excluded costs such as health effects of radiation, accidents, adequate insurance, which could well total another $375 billion. This figure does not include the almost certain escalation in future waste and decommissioning costs. link March 2012: Decommissioning aging US reactors costly. The operators of 20 of the nation’s aging nuclear reactors, including some whose licenses expire soon, have not saved nearly enough money for prompt and proper dismantling. If it turns out that they must close, the owners intend to let them sit like industrial relics for 20 to 60 years or even longer while interest accrues in the reactors’ retirement accounts. Decommissioning a reactor is a painstaking and expensive process that involves taking down huge structures and transporting the radioactive materials to the few sites around the country that can bury them. The cost is projected at $400 million to $1 billion per reactor, which in some cases is more than what it cost to build the plants in the 1960s and ’70s. Mothballing the plants makes hundreds of acres of prime industrial land unavailable for decades and leaves open the possibility that radioactive contamination in the structures could spread. While the radioactivity levels decline over time, many communities worry about safe oversight. link March 2010: Building a nuclear reactor today will involve dealing with tremendous
financial July 2011: Nuclear power spiraling costs and delays. New delays and bumper cost overruns of EDF's new reactor in France make it very hard to believe that nuclear power can fulfil the promises its supporters make. The new nuclear plant being built by EDF in France is now four years behind schedule and €2.7bn over budget. The Flamanville fiasco shows once again that new nuclear power plants are not being built on time or on budget, diminishing the arguments in favour of them. The only other new nuclear plant being built in Europe is in Finland and like EDF a state-controlled French company where costs are now estimated at €5.6bn. That is four years late and €2.6bn over budget. link June 2011: Decommissioning a nuclear plant can cost $1 billion
and take decades. Although the usual
critiques of nuclear generation revolve around safety risks and high
construction fees, relatively little attention has been paid to what happens
when a nuclear plant powers down for good. Spent fuel also
creates new stockpiles of radioactive waste in need of disposal, with few
options available. link December 2010. Nuclear costs rise by 37% in 2010. Costs estimates for new nuclear
power have risen by 37% according to the federal Energy Information
Administration, while those for solar fell by 10-25%. link
August 2012: U.S. freezes all nuclear power plant licensing decisions. A ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit led federal nuclear regulators to freeze at least 19 final reactor licensing decisions in response to the ruling that spent nuclear fuel stored on-site at nuclear power plants “poses a dangerous, long-term health and environmental risk.” The court noted that, after decades of failure to site a permanent geologic repository, including 20 years of working on the now-abandoned Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada, the NRC “has no long-term plan other than hoping for a geologic repository.”Therefore, it is possible that spent fuel will be stored at reactor sites “on a permanent basis,” the court said. link
 March 2011: Current status of nuclear waste in USA. As
of March 2011, the U.S has 71,862 tons of hot radioactive waste, but no place to permanently store the
material, which stays dangerous for tens of thousands of years. Plans to store
nuclear waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain have been abandoned, but even if a
facility had been built there, America already has more waste than it could
have handled. Three-quarters of the waste sits in water-filled cooling pools
like those at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex in Japan, outside the
thick concrete-and-steel barriers meant to guard against a radioactive release
from a nuclear reactor. The rest of the spent fuel from commercial U.S.
reactors has been put into
dry cask storage, but regulators only envision those as a solution for
about a century and the waste would eventually have to be deposited
into a Yucca-like facility.
May 2011: Risk from spent nuclear reactor fuel is greater in U.S. than in Japan The threat of a catastrophic release of radioactive materials from a spent fuel pool at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant is dwarfed by the risk posed by such pools in the United States, which are typically filled with far more radioactive material, according to a study just released. The report recommends that the United States transfer most of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel from pools filled with cooling water to dry sealed steel casks to limit the risk of an accident resulting from an earthquake, terrorism or other event. link November
2009: Nuclear costly and inefficient response to global warming. According to a new report, if the U.S. wants to help stop global warming,
nuclear power is not the way to go. The Environmental California Research &
Policy Center concluded that launching a
nuclear power industry nearly from the ground up is too slow and expensive a
process. Energy efficiency standards and renewable energy options are better
solutions, researchers said. Building a reactor would probably take around a
decade – 2016 at the earliest, the study suggested. Without an existing
infrastructure, manufacturing reactor parts with the dearth of trained personnel
would be difficult. But even if the nuclear industry managed to build 100
reactors by 2030, the total power produced would reduce total U.S. emissions
only 12% over the next 20 years, which Environment California deemed “far too
little, too late.” The $600-billion upfront investment necessary for the
100 reactors would slice out twice as much carbon pollution in that period if
invested in clean energy, according to the report. And given the costs of
running a power plant, clean energy could deliver five times as much progress
per dollar in lowering pollution. link August 2010:US Nuclear
giant moving to wind. After
withdrawing plans for two nuclear reactors last March, Exelon is buying into
John Deere Renewables with almost 1,000MW of wind power in place or in advanced
stages of development, making Exelon one of the nation's largest wind
operators. link February 2010: As the US government increases loan guarantees for nuclear reactors from $18.5 billion to $54.5
billion, where is nuclear power really heading? Opponents
of nuclear energy say that the power source is far from clean, and that
spending the billions of dollars on renewable sources like wind and
solar power would make a much bigger dent in carbon emissions without
problematic issues of waste disposal and nuclear weapons proliferation.
Nonetheless, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and the president are making
it clear that they intend to move forward. Thus, the question arises:
After more than a decade without any new nuclear plants coming online
in the U.S., what exactly would new nuclear power look like? Funding for new nuclear plants in the USA: July 2008 - A one-sentence provision buried in the Senate’s recently passed energy bill, inserted without debate at the urging of the nuclear power industry, could make builders of new nuclear plants eligible for tens of billions of dollars in government loan guarantees. Lobbyists have told lawmakers and administration officials in recent weeks that the nuclear industry needs as much as $50 billion in loan guarantees over the next two years to finance a major expansion. link Update: Feb. 2009 - The Senate-House conference committee axed a proposal in the Obama stimulus bill to include $50 billion in federal loan guarantees that could have been utilized by the nuclear and coal industries as well as for renewable energy projects. link
 China could be taking one of the first substantial steps in a new type nuclear race. The fuel is abundant and distributed across the world, there is no real possibility of
creating weapons-grade material as part of the process and the waste remains toxic for hundreds rather than
thousands of years. (Pictured at left -
thorium pellets.) Also the power stations are small and
present no risk of massive explosions. This could fairly soon be reality
judging from a little-noticed development in China last month. China is
aiming to build a prototype within five years that can produce electricity at
for as little as 6.8p per kilowatt hour (much cheaper than the retail price of
power in the UK today). Thorium, which is found in large quantities across much
of the world, could be used to create nuclear energy in various ways. LTFR
(liquid-fluoride thorium reactor) technology was developed by the US military
in the 1950s and 1960s and was shown to have many benefits. For example,
reactors of this type can be smaller than conventional uranium reactors, partly
thanks to their low-pressure operation. Despite its early promise, research
into liquid-fluoride thorium reactors was abandoned, the most likely reason
being that the technology offered no potential for producing nuclear weaponsSeptember 2012: UK report on Thorium prospects. A British report says Thorium has theoretical advantages regarding sustainability, reducing radiotoxicity and reducing proliferation risk, but some justification for these benefits are often overstated." The report notes that thorium's advantages would be most noticeable in reactor types other than the conventional solid fuel, water-cooled reactors used in almost all of the world's commercial nuclear electricity stations today. link Meanwhile development is planned for Japan. iThEMS (International Thorium Energy and Molen-Salt Technology Inc.) a private Japanese company aims to produce a small (10 MW) reactor within five years, however they need $300 million to push ahead - link November 2011: India plans 'safer' nuclear plant powered by thorium. Officials are currently selecting a site for the reactor, which would be the first of its kind, using thorium for the bulk of its fuel instead of uranium, the fuel for conventional reactors. They plan to have the plant up and running by the end of the decade. link "The Green
Alternative" - a link to Thorium
Energy Inc July 2012: Are fast-breeder reactors the answer to nuclear waste? Plutonium is the nuclear nightmare, so science is looking – again – to fast-breeder reactors. A typical 1,000MW reactor produces 27 tons of spent fuel a year. None of it yet has a home. If not used as a fuel, it will need to be kept isolated for thousands of years to protect humans and wildlife. Burial deep underground seems the obvious solution, but nobody has yet built a geological repository. Fast-breeder technology is almost as old as nuclear power. As only fast reactors can consume the plutonium, critics argue that, even if it works properly, mox fuel is an expensive way of generating not much energy, while leaving most of the plutonium intact, albeit in a less dangerous form. Theoretically at least, fast reactors can keep recycling their own fuel until all the plutonium is gone, generating electricity all the while. Britain’s huge plutonium stockpile makes it a vast energy resource. David MacKay, Britain’s chief scientist recently said British plutonium contains enough energy to run the country’s electricity grid for 500 years. link
January 2010: Yucca Mountain's future on hold. Expert panel to examine nuclear waste options. The U.S. Department of Energy announced the formation of a blue ribbon
commission to evaluate policy options for a safe, long-term solution to America'
growing piles of spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants and high-level
radioactive waste from U.S. defense programs. The commission's
interim report is due in July 2011. The The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, ANA, is critical that membership of commission
is not balanced as there is no member of the panel who represents communities near nuclear weapons
sites. link
July 2011: After years of inaction, the EU commits itself to a final disposal of nuclear waste. EU member states agreed that radioactive waste from Europe's 143 nuclear reactors must in future be buried in secure bunkers. The new rules force national nuclear authorities to draw up disposal plans by 2015, which will be vetted by Europe's Energy Commissioner. A statement by the EU Council of Ministers said that the plans would need to cover: the management of fuel and waste, licensing, control and inspections, enforcement, public information, consultation, financing and the establishment of independent regulatory authorities. The 14 member states using nuclear power currently store their radioactive waste in surface bunkers or warehouses for decades while it cools down. link
March 2010: Utah: Nuclear waste burial scrutinized. More than 10,000 drums of nuclear waste that have been buried in Utah are likely
to include some material that is so radioactive state law forbids its burial, a
report released Wednesday by the group Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah
says. link Sweden leads the way in burying its depleted nuclear waste - more January 2010: Germany's endless search for a nuclear waste dump. As with Yucca Mountain in the USA, Germany has been looking for a permanent storage site for its nuclear waste for over 30 years. If Germany's nuclear phase-out continues as planned, at least 17,200 tons of spent fuel rods will have to be disposed of, not to mention the irradiated tubes, filters and parts of the reactor vessels of decommissioned nuclear power plants. Instead of geology and nuclear physics, partisan politics and power struggles shaped the search for permanent repositories from the start, which is why a feasible solution hasn't been found to this day. To protect future generations, a site must be found where radioactive waste can be allowed to slowly decay over hundreds of thousands of years, far away from any living creatures. This permanent repository will still have to be impervious to water in the year 8010. link West Valley [New York State] is a complex radioactive waste site with long-lasting nuclear
waste mainly from
Former vice-president Cheney, in a May 8 2008 interview with CNN: "Right now we've got waste piling up at reactors all over the country. Eventually, there ought to be a permanent repository. The French do this very successfully and very safely in an environmentally sound, sane manner. We need to be able to do the same thing." "The facts regarding the French
repository program
contradict Vice-President Cheney," said Dr.
Arjun Makhijani, president of IEER (Institute for Energy & Environmental Research), who has written widely on nuclear
waste
issues. "France has no repository, and their siting program faces huge
domestic opposition. The controversy that surrounds waste management is
a thorn
in the side of the French nuclear industry." link France's nuclear failures: The great illusion of nuclear energy - pdf October 2009: France launches inquiry into claims spent fuel from French energy giant's nuclear reactors dumped in metal containers in Siberia. link
The United States imports the bulk of its nuclear fuel, but there are large
deposits of uranium, mostly in the western part of the country, that could be
mined. link About 62% of the world's production of uranium from mines comes from Canada, Australia and Kazakhstan. link Activists warn US lawmakers of uranium mining perils. (Feb. 2009) Seventy percent of uranium-rich areas are situated on land inhabited by low-income indigenous communities in places such as Niger and aboriginal lands in Australia. link
July 2011:Germany’s phase-out of nuclear power will speed up the low-carbon economy. Germany is already able to supply its power needs on its own without nuclear. The country has been mostly a net exporter of power over the last decade. Depending on time of day and year, households and industry consume power from 40,000 to 80,000 Megawatts. Even if all 17 nuclear power stations were shut down at once, coal, gas, and renewables still provide a capacity of 81,000 Megawatts. Also the nuclear phase-out does not jeopardize Germany’s ambitious climate action efforts: reducing carbon emissions by 40% by 2020 and by at least 80% by 2050. By rules of the EU carbon market, emissions from the energy sector are capped. Even if coal were to replace nuclear capacity, emissions will have to be reduced within the entire sector, either by shifting to natural gas or by replacing old coal plants with more efficient ones. link Elsewhere in the world. As of February 2011,there are now over 440 commercial nuclear power reactors operating in 30
countries, with 377,000 MWe of total capacity. They provide about 14% of
the world's electricity as continuous, reliable base-load power, and their
efficiency is increasing. 56 countries operate a total of about 250
research reactors and a further 180 nuclear reactors power some 140 ships and
submarines. Sixteen countries depend on
nuclear power for at least a quarter of their electricity. France gets
around three quarters of its power from nuclear energy, while Belgium,
Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland,
Slovenia and Ukraine get one third or more. Japan, Germany and Finland
get more than a quarter of their power from nuclear energy, while in the USA
one fifth is from nuclear. Among countries which do not host nuclear power
plants, Italy gets about 10% of its power from nuclear, and Denmark about 8% . Recommended link for information on nuclear history etc: Mother Jones |
It's certainly not as safe as it should be. 
uncertainty. Cost projections for nuclear plants keep going up because
of variability in material costs, a new licensing process, limited suppliers for
key parts, and inevitable delays in construction projects. The projected cost
for two new reactors in Canada shot from $7 billion to $26 billion in just two years.
And in the United States, costs for two new reactors at the South Texas
Project have ballooned from $5.4 billion to an estimated $18.2 billion
since 2007. Neither of these reactors has been built, so there’s
no way to predict what the final cost will be. But cost overruns are
virtually certain in nuclear construction, which greatly increases the
risk the nuclear companies will default on their loans. Private lenders
are well aware of the risk of building new reactors, which is why
they’re unwilling to finance the projects without government support. 
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