Decision by UK government soon on whether to build a new mixed oxide (MOX) nuclear plant

14 January 2011

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-Decision_soon_on_new_UK_MOX_plant-1401114.html

A decision by the UK government on whether to construct a new mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel plant to replace the existing one at the Sellafield nuclear complex is expected to be made before the end of 2011. 

 A cost-benefit analysis of a new MOX plant has been commissioned,

Lord Jonathan Marland, Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) parliamentary undersecretary of state, told the House of Lords Grand Committee. It comes as the country prepares to face other questions concerning the back-end of the fuel cycle. (I.e. what to do with the radioactive waste)

 

Speaking on 13 January during a debate on the UK's national policy statement on nuclear power, he told the committee: "If we have the biggest plutonium stock in the world, we must turn that liability into an asset." Marland added, "We have already had a write-round to the cabinet to ensure that we can perhaps go further on that plant. I hope that I will be able in the next few months to give much stronger assurances as to its prospect. It is madness to have it sitting there if we can make it a non-cost exercise."

(How can they talk about non-cost, when they have to build a whole new nuclear power plant in order to use up the plutonium?)

Marland said that the issue of the new MOX plant "can be resolved easily within this year - I hope within the first half of it." He noted, "A huge amount of work is going on. You do not do a cabinet write-round, as far as I understand, unless you are fairly committed to making something happen."

MOX nuclear fuel allows uranium and plutonium to be recycled as part of what is called a closed fuel cycle strategy that reduces waste and prolongs fuel supplies. The reprocessing that separates re-usable uranium and plutonium from wastes takes place at Sellafield's Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (Thorp). 

Referring to the existing Sellafield MOX Plant (SMP), Marland warned, "We must remember that we have failed at this once already. We have a MOX plant that was not fit for purpose, so we must get it right - it is very important, with new technologies, that we do that." He added, "The next generation of nuclear waste reprocessing has to carry us forward for years to come as we replace the current existing plant."

The construction of the existing MOX plant at Sellafield was completed in 1997 but, due to a lengthy justification process, operation did not commence until 2001. The plant produced its first fuel assembly suitable for export in 2005, but was then downrated to 40 tonnes per year from its 120 tonne design capacity. In August 2009, it was reported that SMP had produced only 8 tonnes of fuel (24 assemblies) in eight years.

However, in 2010, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) and ten Japanese utilities agreed on a plan to refurbish the SMP, and this work is being undertaken over three years by Sellafield Ltd, using technology from France's Areva. A new rod manufacturing line is being installed at the SMP which, as well as improving overall performance, will ultimately replace the existing one.
 

The NDA's Sellafield site – including the SMP - is managed by Nuclear Management Partners, a consortium of URS of the USA, AMEC of the UK and Areva.

Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan, who is also chairman of the Nuclear Industry Association, commented: "It should be stressed that at least some of the constituent members of the nuclear management partnership which is currently responsible for a large part of the waste management at Sellafield have considerable experience of running successful MOX plants elsewhere in the world." He added, "One of our problems was that we wanted to have a plant with a Union Jack wrapped round it when we built it. We did not quite get it right and it never operated, but there are people close at hand who can do the job if they get the right deal."

To this Marland responded, "As the noble Lord will know, I have enjoyed the fine wines of the south of France while visiting the MOX plant down there to make sure that we do this properly. Of course, part of our discussions involved meeting the Areva board to do that."

As well as the fate of the 100 tonnes of civil plutonium in the UK and its potential inclusion in MOX fuel, discussion continues over the future of Thorp. In short, the country's entire strategy on the back-end of the fuel cycle is up for review.

A document released in March 2010 highlighted that Thorp would require refurbishment or replacement to handle the complete inventory of used nuclear fuel it was built to process - all that coming from the fleet of Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors as well as international contracts. Some 6600 tonnes of AGR fuel remains outstanding, with options for storing it unclear until a permanent repository is available in about 2075.

Green investment bank could help to build nuclear reactors

The Conservatives' pre-election manifesto promised that the bank would finance 'new green technology start-ups'

•  Thursday 13 January 2011 10.13 GMT



Green MP Caroline Lucas said funding for new nuclear reactors made a mockery of the idea of the Green Investment Bank. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian The government's Green Investment Bank could fund the building of new nuclear reactors, it has emerged. It is the latest form of public financial support on offer to the industry from the government which continues to insist that the industry will not receive any more subsidies. The Conservatives' pre-election manifesto promised that the Green Investment Bank – which was also in the coalition agreement – would finance "new green technology start-ups". But documents issued before Christmas by Vince Cable's business department list new reactors, along with offshore wind farms and new electricity grids, as one of the three proposed "target sectors" on which the bank would initially focus. Justine Greening MP, the economic secretary to the Treasury, appeared before the Commons environmental audit committee yesterday and denied that financial backing from a publicly funded bank would amount to a subsidy for the nuclear power industry. Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP who sits on the committee, said: "Nuclear is not green in my view. But it's not new in anyone's mind. Funding nuclear makes a mockery of the whole idea of a Green Investment Bank and even indirect support – such as cheaper taxpayer-backed loans offered by a bank – still amounts to a subsidy." Greening also dodged questions about whether the bank would be able to make billions of pounds of cheap loans or act as a more limited fund. The Treasury is concerned that borrowings would add to the government's deficit. "I am not going to be hung up on semantics," she told the committee, telling them that a decision had not yet been made and that there were also other ways to encourage green investment. She also refused to be drawn on how much more effective a fully functional bank would be in encouraging the estimated £450bn investment needed by 2025 for the UK to meet ambitious carbon reduction and environmental targets. Senior coalition sources said civil servants who wrote the documents decided to include nuclear as a low carbon form of generation that could potentially receive funding in order to be thorough. They had not been instructed to do so by ministers, it is understood. A spokesman for the business department insisted that no final decision had been made on whether the Green Investment Bank would provide financial support for the nuclear industry. If it did, it would add to a growing list of government help for the industry, including guarantees of a minimum carbon floor price, caps on nuclear waste liabilities and a possible new "low-carbon obligation" which would guarantee a higher price for the electricity reactors generate. In an interview with the Guardian last month, Chris Huhne, the energy and climate change secretary, maintained that there will be no "support specific for nuclear for the very simple reason that it is an old and mature technology". He added: "The economic rationale for providing extra subsidy for something relies on it being an infant technology which has not come yet to commercial scale." Greening said that the model for a Green Investment Bank should be decided by May and that it would be operational in 2012. Ernst & Young estimates that traditional sources of capital such as energy companies and infrastructure finance could only provide up to £80bn of the £450bn investment needed by 2025, arguing that only a fully operational bank can fill the gap. Huhne, who together with environmentalists is pushing for a bank which can borrow and lend, admitted last month that" a fully fledged bank will take time to set up" particularly given the coalition's overriding priority of cutting the deficit. He suggested the idea that the bank could initially start off in a more limited capacity to kick-start investment as soon as possible but insisted that he wanted a bank set up as soon as possible.

Earthquake in Cumbria

Following last nights earthquake in Cumbria - just one of the increasingly frequent earthquakes to hit this area, our Cumbrian councillors should think again about their support for new nuclear build and the geological disposal of high level nuclear wastes. Earthquakes and nuclear power are not happy bedfellows with the need to retain radioactive releases compromised in unpredictable ways.

Even if this region had experienced no earthquakes at all, the Nirex inquiry of 1995 found the whole region to be too geologically unpredictable for the 'disposal' of high level nuclear wastes.

The following is an extract from an email sent by Professor David Smythe (employed by Nirex in 1995) to Allerdale and Copeland Borough Council which describes Nirex's remit- which was to explore the whole of West Cumbria.

"The REGION studied extends from north of Workington to south of Barrow, inland to Ulverston and halfway to Keswick, and offshore northwest and southwest for between 15 and 50 km. The DISTRICT is defined as Whitehaven down to Ravenglass, inland about 10 km, and offshore about the same distance".


Extract from recent email to Allerdale and Copeland Borough Council from Prof David Smythe

"Maps presented by Dr Robert Chaplow of Nirex to the Planning Inquiry in 1995, defining the scope of the £400M Nirex investigations. The site selection supposedly homed in, like opening up a set of
Russian matryochka dolls, as follows:

The REGION studied extends from north of Workington to south of Barrow, inland to Ulverston and halfway to Keswick, and offshore northwest and southwest for between 15 and 50 km.

The DISTRICT is defined as Whitehaven down to Ravenglass, inland about 10 km, and offshore about the same distance.

The SITE is a rectangle of about 55 sq km centred on Longlands Farm, including the Sellafield Works, Seascale and Gosforth. The POTENTIAL REPOSITORY ZONE comprises the 2 sq km or so of Longlands Farm.

So when the Planning Inspector deems the REGION to be unsuitable, he evidently means, using Nirex's own definition, the whole of West Cumbria, not just the PRZ. Since Longlands Farm was presented as the best site within the whole REGION, and £400M was spent in support, the bad science is in seeking to return to the REGION and waste yet more public money".

Professor David Smythe

The government isn’t telling us the true cost of nuclear waste disposal

Dr Paul Dorfman
13th December, 2010

UK plans for ten new nuclear power plants will create £80 billion worth of radioactive waste that we still have no secure way of disposing

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and the nuclear industry have a plan for 10 new ‘Generation 3’ reactors, each one containing 2.5 times the radiological inventory of the UK’s biggest AGR reactor at Sizewell B. In a recent Ministerial statement, Chris Huhne, the Secretary of State for DECC made it clear that the Coalition is not ruling out taking on unspecified nuclear ‘financial risks or liabilities’ to make this happen. Given the sheer weight of our current nuclear legacy, its' clear that this will also involve nuclear waste ‘financial risks or liabilities’.

The most recent estimates are that, once ‘packaged’, the UK already has around 1,420 cubic metres of hot high-level radioactive waste, 364,000 cubic metres of long lived intermediate-level radioactive waste, and 3,470,000 cubic metres of toxic low-level radioactive waste. The Government proposes to house the high and intermediate part of this vast inventory in a deep hole five times the size of the Albert Hall over millennia. Government officials estimate that the cost of managing this waste and decommissioning will be around £80 billion and rising – five years ago it was around £50 billion. There are no secure estimates for costing a deep disposal repository.

Waste will be five times more radioactive

And this is just what we have at the moment. Although the nuclear industry estimate that any new build radioactive waste would increase the problem by only 10 per cent in volume - they fail to mention that the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management has worked out that the radioactivity would increase by five times, which means that we would need 15 Albert Halls to house the waste.

Steve Thomas, Professor of Energy Policy at the University of Greenwich Business School, suggests that the liberalisation of the energy market in Europe has pressured the nuclear industry to become more competitive. The industry realised that a decrease in cost could be achieved if the reactor’s power could be increased, and this could happen by using more enriched uranium as reactor fuel. The logic is that this ‘super-charged’ fuel will be left in the reactor for longer in order to provide, as Jeremy Clarkson might say, ‘more power’.

Unfortunately, the Law of Unintended Consequences also means that this ‘high burn-up’ spent fuel is twice as radioactive than conventional spent fuel, and the reactor operations will have a much tighter safety margin. This is because high burn-up fuel is much hotter, much more radioactive, and performs very poorly when subject to ‘abnormal conditions’. John Large, an international consulting nuclear engineer, notes that ‘These risks persist through the nuclear cycle, as high burn-up fuel is liable to release a much higher content of its fission product inventory, known as the ‘immediate release fraction’, than fuel used in current reactors. And the situation isn’t being helped by the nuclear industries heroic safety claims: AREVA EdF’s ‘worst case’ estimate - including terrorist attack – insist that no more than 0.2 per cent of the reactor core content would be released during ‘open containment’ in ‘abnormal conditions’.

But surely things are better elsewhere? Well, not really. Although the deep geological concept is in the very early stage of testing in Finland and Sweden - in the US, Obama has withdrawn funding from the Yucca Mountain geological radioactive waste dump, saying that ‘After spending billions of dollars on the Yucca Mountain Project, there are still significant questions about whether nuclear waste can be safely stored there’. In Japan and Germany, proposals for deep disposal facilities have encountered strong opposition, and in France, 15 years of research on deep underground burial has proved ‘inconclusive’.
http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/other_comments/691982/the_government_isnt_telling_us_the_true_cost_of_nuclear_waste_disposal.html

Backdoor Subsidies Introduced to prop up Nuclear Power

The coalition government has torn up its “no subsidy for nuclear” commitment with a series of measures aimed at financially supporting the construction of new nuclear power stations.
Today’s announcement by Energy Secretary Chris Huhne on “electricity market reform” includes a range of mechanisms aimed at making low carbon sources of electricity more economic in comparison to polluting fossil fuels like coal and gas. But while generators of carbon-free renewable electricity will no doubt be pleased, the nuclear industry will be celebrating a successful lobbying exercise.

“Private companies like EdF have already said that they can’t build nuclear power stations without additional financial incentives,” said Stop Hinkley spokesman Crispin Aubrey. “These new measures are aimed at helping them make a profit from a technology that carries massive future liabilities, including dealing with dangerous radioactive waste for up to 160 years."
The pro-government Daily Telegraph newspaper describes the measures unequivocally as a subsidy for nuclear. “Years of lobbying by nuclear companies has finally paid off as the Government will today reveal plans to subsidise the price that they are paid for generating electricity”, it concludes .

The fragile economics of nuclear power are already on the line as the first European Pressurised Reactor being built - the type proposed for Hinkley C – has doubled its initial cost estimate to 5.7 billion Euros.

Nuclear power has been covertly subsidised for many years in two obvious ways - through taxpayer support for its decommissioning and waste disposal costs and through the limit set on its liability in the event of a serious accident. These new proposals will increase electricity bills - by as much as £500 a year according to one estimate - in order to help pay for nuclear new build.

The changes to the electricity market proposed today still have to be agreed by parliament and squared with European legislation, so there are opportunities for their bias towards nuclear to be exposed and ruled out of order.

Stop Hinkley will be supporting national action to push nuclear power out of the “clean energy” basket and expose it as a diversion from a genuinely green future involving energy saving and a range of renewable sources.
http://www.stophinkley.org/

Don’t nuke our climate!

Second week of the Climate Justice Convergence has started with the “False Solutions talks”, looking at some of the so called ‘solutions’ being talked about in Cancun. Here in Brussels, activists from Young Friends of the Earth and Federation of Young European Greens discussed about false solutions for climate crisis such as biofuels, CCS (carbon capture and storage) and nuclear power. Altogether we decided to act, to express our concerns and to remind people about the consequences of decisions taken today  on present and future generations.


As part of an international day of action THOUSAND OF CANCUNS FOR CLIMATE JUSTICE, called by the International peasant farmers network La Via Campesina, we targeted European institutions and corporations which support, fund and push the idea of nuclear energy as clean, renewable and possible solution for climate crisis.

Our message is simple: nuclear power is unsustainable and unacceptably dangerous.

Watch the action movie now on youtube.

Why nuclear?

Nuclear energy is promoted as a clean technology but the mining of uranium has massive social and environmental impacts and the problem of safe nuclear waste disposal is yet to be solved. We are being locked into an uncertain future where they will have to shoulder the burden of this false solution. Besides that, we are leaving an extremely toxic and unsafe waste heritage to future generations (40000 generations!!!) and in the same time we have been ignoring the real solutions that will assure safe and sustainable future.

http://www.cancun-brussels.org/?p=115
http://www.youtube.com/user/YFriendsOfTheEarth#p/a/u/0/IFaq8ibel-U

A cry from the heart about the destruction caused by nuclear new build

" Dear Sirs

I will be as brief as I can be in telling a complex story that I hope you will consider worth pursuing on any one of the issues that arise from it.

I will not pretend that I am writing exclusively to you; rather, I am writing to all and sundry on behalf of the small hamlets of Shurton, Burton and Wick and by extension, every hamlet in the country in the hope that, as one neighbour put it, “we might find ourselves to be rather more than a few voices crying in the wilderness of injustice that EDF are currently proposing to create”.

This area of West Somerset is unassuming, virtually unknown and simply, magically beautiful apart from the two nuclear power stations that squat on the coast.  A third is proposed, not least because the population already lives with the first two.  The early stages of EdF’s proposals were not resisted, partly because people felt that they had no choice and that the new station would be like the first two.  It was thought that local benefits might accrue to the host parish and the county, but as the true extent of the development and the crushing, barely mitigated impact on the locality was revealed, the residents have turned from resignation and acceptance to horror and antipathy. 

Much of the blame for this can be laid at EdF’s door.  The consultation process has failed to give the detail an informed response requires and it has ignored local feedback (as all the official responses from Local Government confirm).  The company has resisted all efforts made by local people to engage with them at anything other than the most superficial level.  The company’s representatives do this with consummate charm and very sophisticated PR support but nobody is fooled that any real modification to the company’s original scheme is contemplated.

In effect, these three small hamlets on the southern boundary of the proposed development will be crushed.  Their way  of life will vanish over-night and for ten years or more they will be marooned in a noisy, dusty, polluted and spot-lit industrial wasteland, with little more than the qualified offer of double-glazing to off-set the damage, all for the sake of what the IPC may identify as “over-riding public interest”.

It is not just us.  The rest of the county will suffer as well to a lesser but still damaging degree.  Whitehall is watching.  We are the first in the country; what happens here will happen everywhere that new nuclear power stations are proposed.   If we - few in number, far from wealthy, and without spheres of influence - cannot make our voices heard, other communities will be compromised from the outset.

Now, before the main submission to the IPC has been submitted, let alone granted, EdF proposes to begin ‘preliminary works’.  It hopes to do this beginning in March 2011.  It seeks to uproot hedgerows and copses over 500 acres, fill in a valley, excavate and level the coastal hinterland, build a massive jetty next to a fossil beach, drive roads across fields and pile mountains of spoil around the hamlets, all before the design of the reactor is approved, let alone the development itself.  The company says that if it fails to get planning permission from the IPC and the Secretary of State, it will ‘restore’ what it has destroyed. We wonder how.

There are so many issues that we wish the national press would take up – political, economic, social and community, manipulation and management of public awareness, heritage and culture, the environment.   If the country is complacent about nuclear power, it should not be complacent about nor ignorant of the true cost. 

Please get in touch, if only to discover whether or not there is anything more in this that your paper could use to sell copies.  We will organize access to all the information and support you might want. EdF of course will fall over itself to tell you how wonderful it is.

Yours sincerely 

Lesley Flash 

Myrtle Farm, Shurton, Stogursey, Somerset TA5 1QE   01278 732417"