Human cost of nuclear power too high - German minister

Reg Illingworth attended the AGM of the nuclear corporation RWE, at which protestors stood up and shouted, waving banners and placards saying Shut them down.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/email/idUKTRE73L1LU20110422

French nuclear subcontractors seek equal rights-union

Friday Apr 22, 2011 3:52pm GMT

* EDF subcontracts 80 percent of work on its reactors
* Radiation levels 3.5 times higher for subcontractors-union

PARIS, April 22 (Reuters) - Subcontractors in France's state-owned nuclear industry are calling for the same job security and conditions as employees of government-controlled utility EDF, the CFDT union said on Friday.

France, which is the world's most nuclear-dependent country, subcontracts 80 percent of the maintenance at its 58 nuclear reactors to firms such as Vinci, GDF Suez and Bouygues.

"The use of subcontractors in nuclear power plants means that utilities escape all responsibility of staff management, gain more flexibility and transfer professional risk and hardship," the CFDT union said in a statement.

While EDF staffers have public sector contracts, which means a job for life, subcontractors from the private sector are vulnerable to job cuts, because their firms risk losing contracts with EDF every three years.

"Workers of nuclear reactor operators have better social rights than subcontractors," the CFDT added.

EDF says it requires subcontractors to carry out maintenance of nuclear reactors because of the highly specialised aspects of the work, such as changing the fuel.

But subcontractors say they receive 80 percent of the global radiation dose during maintenance works and have more work accidents than EDF workers, CFDT said.

They also say radiation levels are three and a half times higher for subcontractors than for EDF staff and that they do not benefit from the same medical check-ups, it added.

Subcontractors have long called for a single status for nuclear workers, and Japan's Fukushima disaster last month could support their argument. (Reporting by Muriel Boselli, editing by Jane Baird)

Police fire on anti-nuclear protestors at Jaitapur, India

Statement Against Police firing on Protestors in Jaitapur, Maharashtra
New Delhi, Dt. 19th April, 2011

We, the undersigned individuals and organizations condemn the Maharashtra Police firing on protestors who were demonstrating against the proposed Nuclear Power Park at Jaitapur, Ratnagiri, Maharashtra.

The corrupting influence of the nuclear companies over the political parties has been revealed in the Indo-US nuclear deal. These are the same political players who had played dubious roles during struggle against Enron power plant.

This incident happened at the protest which was organized against the Union Environment Minister’s statement saying, come what may the Nuclear Park will be built in Jaitapur and Prime Minister’s consistent
advocacy for nuclear energy unmindful of the tragic incident in Japan.

In the police firing on 18th April, 2011, one person died and 8 others were seriously injured. This firing should not be seen in isolation.

For the past one year, the government of Maharashtra has unleashed a reign of terror in the entire Jaitapur area against farmers, fishing folks and other rural artisans who have launched a non-violent and
protracted democratic struggle against snatching away of their land, livelihood and the imminent catastrophe from the proposed Nuclear Power Park.

We oppose any forcible acquisition of land against the wishes of the local farmers.

The high-handedness of Maharashtra State Government has been evident for the last four years. A local Konkani activist Vaishali Patil and even other prominent Konkan and Maharashtra residents like Retd.

Admiral L. Ramdas and Retd. Supreme Court Justice P B Sawant were arbitrarily declared out of bounds from Ratnagiri District. This is a flagrant violation of democratic rights. This is clear example of stamping out the right to protest which is one of the sacrosanct constitutional rights in the country. It should be noted that Mr. Narayan Rane, the State Revenue Minister who also hails from the Konkan region has been going around Jaitapur area and threatening everyone who protests against the proposed Nuclear Power Park. Mr.
Rane has also openly given a call to local Indian National Congress cadres to forcibly drive out the activists who are protesting against the Nuclear Power Park.

We are seriously concerned about Shiv Sena’s role in provoking the tragic incident. Motivated hooliganism and strong arm tactics of Shiv Sena is a well known phenomena which often dissipates the possibility of peaceful democratic protests. This provides the logic to the administration for Police repression and vilifying peaceful mass protests. Shiv Sena’s opportunism in the Anti- Enron Struggle in the 1990s is well known.

We disapprove of such rank opportunism of these political outfits which attempts to divert the studied pace and direction of the ongoing struggle against the Nuclear Power Park in the Ratnagiri district.

The people of Jaitapur are carrying out peaceful struggle against the proposed Nuclear Power Park for the past 4 years, but Congress Party’s partisan role and Shiv Sena’s unwarranted entry into the struggle has vitiated the atmosphere.

In the aftermath of the nuclear accidents in Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, a stark rationale for the abandonment of nuclear energy has emerged. In a situation where admittedly public health infrastructure is non-existent to deal with the inevitable event of nuclear emergency, promotion of nuclear commerce cannot be approved. We disapprove of nuclear energy in such a context where countries after countries are abandoning or doing a rethink about this option.

Therefore, we demand

* Scrapping of the proposed nuclear plant in the Ratnagiri district and other states in the country

* Judicial Enquiry into the incident of police firing on 18th April

* Strong action against the district officials and the Police officers who ordered the police firing on the protesters

* Immediately withdraw the false cases against the activists, the villagers and rescind the externment orders

Several citizens groups and people’s organizations will be demonstrating against the police firing and the myopic promotion of nuclear energy on 21st April at 11.30 AM at Jantar Mantar.

Endorsed by

Organisations

National Alliance of Peoples’ Movements (NAPM)
Popular Education and Action Centre (PEACE)
Indian Social Action Forum (INSAF)
Coalition on Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP)
Delhi Forum
Programme for Social Action (PSA)

Individuals

Aruna Roy & Nikhil Dey, MKSS
Rajendra Ravi, IDS
Chittaranjan Singh, INSAF/ PUCL
Anil Chaudhary
Gopal Krishna, ToxicsWatch Alliance
Kiran Shaheen, Media Action Group
Susan Abraham, FORRAD
Prakash K. Ray, Bargad.org
P T George, Intercultural Resources
Benny Kuruvilla, Focus on the Global South
Preeti Sampat
Prem Piram, JAGAR
Amit Mahanti, Frame Works Research & Media Collective
Asit, Delhi Platform
Shree Prakash, MISAAL
Sandeep Singh, AISA
Wilfred D’ Costa
Soumya Dutta, Bharat Jan Vigyan Jatha
Priya Pillai, Greenpeace
Sundaram P
Prafull Bidwai, CNDP
Kavita Krishnan, Central Committee Member, CPI (ML) Liberation
Mona Das
S. Lahiri, NFFPFW
SOUTH ASIANS AGAINST NUKES (SAAN):
An informal information platform for activists and scholars concerned about the dangers of Nuclearisation in South Asia

http://s-asians-against-nukes.org/
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Nuclear concerns after Japan earthquake

 By Deborah McGurran  Political editor, BBC East  16 April 2011

A major disaster at Sizewell could see radiation hitting a wide area of Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex.
New concerns over nuclear energy in the East of England have been raised in the wake of the disasters which struck the power stations in Japan.

The devastating earthquake struck Japan on 11 March.
It left the nuclear reactors at Fukushima with no electricity.
An hour later the tsunami wiped out the back-up diesel generators.
The cooling system failed which caused the first of several explosions and radiation leaks.
EDF Energy, the UK's largest nuclear operator, which runs Sizewell in Suffolk, is keen to show that it could not happen in England.

The back-up systems for the pressurised water reactor at Sizewell include four separate diesel generators, which would be used if the electricity failed.
There is a 10m (33ft) barrier for sea defences, with a 5m (16ft) metre barrier behind it.
If the sea could no longer be used for Sizewell's cooling system there are two huge "car radiators" to take the heat away.

The Japanese government has placed a 20km (12 mile)exclusion zone around Fukushima.“
There is a 30km (19 mile) stay-indoors zone around Fukushima but the United States exclusion zone is 80km (50 miles).

Stop Nuclear Power has superimposed these over East Anglia to show how far they would reach if there was a disaster here.  The American zone would extend from Cromer in Norfolk to beyond Colchester in Essex.

Mell Harrison, from Stop Nuclear Power UK, said she believed the back-up plans were not good enough.
This week she joined protests outside EDF's headquarters in London.

Protest camp
Next weekend she will be at a protest camp on the beach at Sizewell which will mark the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl.

She said: "When Fukushima first occurred people said there's no way it's going to be as bad as Chernobyl and now the level is the same.  "We're not going to know the full extent of it until the next generation and to me that's scary."

"Sizewell B, when they reopened after seven months, a little while later they closed down again for another few days.  "Now, we have the Freedom of Information on that accident and it says in there that it is still vulnerable.  "To me it says we need to shut them down and we need to shut them down as soon as possible."

Andy Spurr, one of the managing directors of EDF, said: "We will review our own operation but more importantly we'll review the lessons that came out of the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate's report as well and we may decide to put additional strength and depth in place.

"It's too early to talk about any of the details but I would describe it as, our minds are very open, in terms of looking and reviewing and learning."

The BBC Politics Show in the East is broadcast at 1400 GMT on Sunday

Nuclear submarine risks the MoD didn't want you to know about

from Caledonian Mercury, 18 April 2011

The reactors that power all the nuclear submarines on the Clyde are twice as likely to suffer catastrophic accidents as US submarine reactors and civil nuclear power stations, according to a secret Ministry of Defence (MoD) report.

The pressurised water reactors, known as PWR2, are vulnerable to Fukushima-style loss of coolant accidents if they develop cracks larger than 15 millimetres. They also rely on manual cooling in an emergency, rather than a system that automatically injects coolant into the reactor.

These are the revelations that the MoD meant to censor from a report by its senior nuclear safety regulator, Commodore Andrew McFarlane. The report was released online in a form that enabled text that had been blacked out to be seen, simply by cutting and pasting it into another document.

The censored text also reveals that British submariners are more likely to drown than their American counterparts if the reactor fails while they are under water. British submarines "accept a much lower reliability from the main propulsion system" and the back-up system "will not provide sufficient dynamic lift", it says.

When the MoD's mistake was reported yesterday, an MoD spokesman said it "took steps to ensure the document was removed from the public domain". However, it was not removed from Google's online cache for about 24 hours, and so has been widely accessed.

The report, with the censored text revealed, has been posted on several websites, including banthebomb.org, cnduk.org, robedwards.com, largeassociates.com, nuclearinfo.org and cryptome.org. Britain’s 11 nuclear-powered submarines are all driven by reactors that are “unacceptable”, it says.

The PWR2 currently powers the Royal Navy’s six old Trafalgar class submarines and four Vanguard class submarines, which carry Trident nuclear missiles. It also drives HMS Astute, the first of a £10 billion programme of seven Astute class submarines, all of which will be based at Faslane on Gareloch.

HMS Astute returned to Faslane at the end of last week, after one of its sailors was charged with murdering a senior officer and seriously injuring another in an on-board shooting in Southampton. The submarine also hit the headlines last October when it accidently ran aground near the Isle of Skye during trials.

The MoD report, which was written in November 2009, was requested by John Ainslie, the co-ordinator of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and others. Heavily censored versions were released by the MoD under freedom of information law, but all the text in some of them could be easily read by anyone with a computer.

“The MoD is making a bungled attempt to keep this report under wraps not because it gives away any national security secrets but because it spells out fundamental design problems with the reactors on all Royal Navy submarines,” said Ainslie.

“The report shows that US nuclear submarines are substantially safer than their British counterparts. This makes a mockery of the claim that parts of the report should be classified because they might embarrass America. It is the poor state of British submarines that is laid bare.”

According to the nuclear consultant, John Large, the full report exposed the fact that Britain’s submarines were using out-dated and sub-standard technology. A small crack in the reactor could too easily trigger a major release of radioactivity, putting the lives of submariners and the pubic at risk, he said.

The MoD report argues that new submarines being considered to replace the Vanguard class boats must use a new, safer design, known as PWR3. The “necessary safety performance in response to a loss of coolant accident is likely to be delivered only through a PWR3 submarine,” it concludes.

Although no final decision on the type of reactor has been announced, indications are that PWR3 will be adopted. The UK defence secretary, Liam Fox, has told the House of Commons there was a “very clear-cut” case to use PWR3 in future submarines because it has “improved nuclear safety” and would give “a better safety outlook”.

http://www.robedwards.com/2011/04/the-submarine-reactor-risks-they-didnt-want-you-to-know.html

Italy’s Last Reactor Town Goes Solar in Fight Against Nuclear

April 17, 2011,

Montalto di Castro, the town where Italy’s last nuclear plant was built before a two-decade ban, is fighting against a return to atomic power and staking its future on solar energy by hosting Europe’s largest photovoltaic park.

“We’ve come up with a better idea,” Mayor Salvatore Carai said in an interview in his Town Hall office, which has views of the old reactor between the sea and acres of farmland. “The solar panels keep us self-sufficient. We haven’t used a single kilowatt of ‘dirty energy’ since December 2009.”

Italy, the only Group of Eight nation without nuclear plants, passed legislation in 2008 to return to generation and the country planned to build its first new reactors by 2020. That was before the accident at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant prompted the government to set a one-year moratorium.

As Italy debates whether to return to nuclear generation, Montalto’s mayor is organizing protests and supporting a national referendum to stop the construction of new plants, saying they would hurt agriculture and tourism.

“There’s concern people will abandon the land for fear of leaks,” Carai said. “No compensation they can offer could make up for that.”

The Montalto reactor, which never went into service, was dismantled after Italians voted in a 1987 referendum to end nuclear generation in the wake of the Chernobyl accident. The empty shell of the facility now sits next to a thermoelectric plant run by Enel SpA, Italy’s biggest electricity producer.

Residents of Montalto are concerned that their town is a prime candidate to host new generators once the moratorium ends.

“We’re at the top of the list,” said Stefano Sebastiani, a spokesman for Montalto’s anti-nuclear committee. The Japanese accident has raised awareness on safety issues and made residents nervous about the prospect of new plants, he said. “Nuclear is like a pressure cooker and sooner or later the steam comes out and people pay the price.”

Experts agree that if plant construction goes ahead, the town of 9,000 between the sea and the hills of the central region of Lazio would offer an ideal location.

“Montalto is one of the places where it makes sense to restart nuclear,” said Giovanbattista Zorzoli, a nuclear engineer and professor at Milan’s polytechnic university. “It has the right conditions and a network already set up for distribution of the energy.” There’s also a canal connecting the area to the sea to allow for cooling, he said.

Montalto has already moved on, said Raffaello Giacchetti, regional manager for SunRay Renewable Energy, a European solar power-plant developer and operator of the town’s main 45 megawatt photovoltaic field. Producing enough electricity to power 15,000 homes, it’s the largest field in Europe.

Economic Advantages

“Montalto and other towns in the area have understood that they’re not just getting economic advantages from the fields,” Giacchetti said. “They’re are also creating an alternative to nuclear power.” The town’s solar fields combine to provide 85 MW of power, which should rise to 120 MW by the end of this year, according to Mayor Carai.

Solar panel prices will likely fall to $1.50 per watt in the second half of 2011 compared with around $1.80 in 2010, Jenny Chase, a solar analyst for Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said March 29.

Demand for solar may be supported by a backlash against atomic generators after the Fukushima accident. The WilderHill New Energy Index has gained about 8 percent since the March 11 accident as governments around the world review their nuclear plans.

Electricity Prices

Some Montalto residents remain skeptical about whether solar power can have enough of an impact. “We pay too much for electricity,” said Quinto Del Papa, a retired farmer who supports nuclear power. “I think nuclear would help.”

Italian households pay 21 euro cents per kilowatt hour of electricity compared with 13 cents in France and 14 cents in the U.K., while Italian businesses pay 13 cents, compared with 7 cents in France and 11 cents in the U.K., according to Brussels- based research firm Europe’s Energy Portal.

Environment Minister Stefania Prestigiacomo said last year that nuclear power will help balance Italy’s energy mix, reduce electricity prices and cut dependence on imported energy.

Del Papa, who remembers Montalto as a boomtown that nearly doubled in population as the old plant was built, said new reactors “would also give us jobs.” As for the dangers of having a reactor in the neighborhood, he shrugged. “I’d live near it,” he said. “Those accidents are rare.”

Zorzoli, the Milan-based nuclear engineer, said he’s more skeptical about atomic energy since the Fukushima accident. “One should not be alarmist” about the country’s power requirements, he said. “Italy’s existing capacity and renewable development will allow us to face our needs.”

--With assistance from Ben Sills in Madrid. Editors: Jerrold Colten, Dan Liefgreen

To contact the reporters on this story: Alessandra Migliaccio in Rome at
amigliaccio@bloomberg.net;
Flavia Rotondi in Rome at
frotondi@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Will Kennedy at
wkennedy3@bloomberg.net

Nuclear no-go zone in Japan

After the earthquake they cannot go back to look for their dead loved ones because this area is highly radioactive