Nuclear Free South Africa

Fears raised over pebble beds

2008-08-26T13:23:00.003+02:00

Source: http://www.thetimes.co.za/

A new foreign report casts a further shadow over SA’s troubled nuclear project, but a local research company says there’s no need for alarm. Bobby Jordan reports.

The research centre that invented pebble bed nuclear reactors has rung alarm bells over the safety of the technology — which features prominently in SA’s R350-billion nuclear energy programme.

The safety concerns are contained in a report released this week by the world-renowned state-owned German Jülich Nuclear Research Centre.

Ironically, a team of Jülich researchers is helping SA develop a commercial-size pebble bed reactor based on the prototype that Jülich operated for more than 20 years. If successful, the project could provide much-needed electricity to the local market — and the reactors could be exported worldwide.

Now the latest report, authored by a senior Jülich nuclear safety researcher, casts a further shadow across SA’s beleaguered nuclear project. The report signposts higher-than- anticipated temperatures generated by fuel pebbles used in the prototype reactor (AVR), which was closed in 1988 — but is still the subject of much research.

The chief scientist in charge of exporting Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) technology at the Jülich Centre this week denied any crisis of confidence among the nuclear fraternity, and said that although the report was important, it would not undermine confidence in SA’s nuclear energy ambitions. The report has been slated as alarmist by SA’s PBMR company, which is spearheading local research.

PBMR spokesman Tom Ferreira said that although useful, the latest report was “no basis for concern”.

Some of the fears raised in the Jülich report include:

ý The graphite pebbles in the original reactor experiment in Germany generated much more heat than expected, sending temperatures soaring to more than 1450 C — at least 300 degrees hotter than the maximum temperature allowed for in the design of SA’s PBMR;

ý The movement of the pebbles brushing up against one another inside the reactor created a dangerous level of highly radioactive graphite dust — something that was partly unexplained;

ý The risk of graphite fires, like the one at Chernobyl in 1986, cannot be ruled out; and

ý The prototype reactor in Germany is extremely contaminated by metallic fission products, which escaped from fuel elements during operation. The contamination, possibly due to unexpectedly high temperatures, is higher by a factor of more than 10000 than acceptable for modern reactors. This also creates huge decommissioning costs.

The report suggests the SA government may have jumped the gun in pushing for a demonstration PBMR plant at Koeberg, when there is still a need for a prototype pebble bed reactor to understand reasons for high temperatures.

The German report also raises questions about whether senior SA officials have been downplaying safety concerns about pebble bed technology.

Jülich scientists this week confirmed that draft copies of the latest report have been in the possession of SA authorities since December.

So far the pebble bed programme has cost the SA taxpayer about R4-billion, is years behind schedule and is over budget. SA plans to build as many as 30 pebble bed reactors, which collectively would represent about 20% of Eskom’s potential R350-billion nuclear building programme of about 20000 MW. The country’s current mainly coalfired power supply is 39000 MW.

Ferreira said the report was not a consensus position for the Jülich centre. He said many of the points raised in the report were disputed by other scientists.

Tony Stott, Eskom senior manager of Nuclear Stakeholder Management, said: “Eskom is aware of the report and its findings. Eskom has requested independent nuclear consultants, who are assisting Eskom with the safety evaluation of the PBMR Demonstration Power Plant technology, to investigate and establish the basis of the report and determine whether any aspects warrant introduction into the safety evaluation of the technology.”

He said the safety analysis process was still under way.

Source: http://www.thetimes.co.za/

PBMR contract awarded to M&

2008-08-26T13:23:00.001+02:00

Published: 22 Aug 08 - 17:16
Source: http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article.php?a_id=141477

Joint-venture company Murray & Roberts SNC-Lavalin Nuclear (MRSLN) has been awarded the contract for the provision of engineering, procurement, project and construction management (EPCM) services for the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) demonstration plant project at Koeberg, near Cape Town.

The contract for the provision of the EPCM services was signed on Friday, in Pretoria.

The PBMR project entailed the building of both the demonstration reactor project at Koeberg, and a pebble fuel plant at Pelindaba near Pretoria. The current schedule was to start construction in 2010 and for the demonstration plant to be completed by 2014.

“MRSLN's expertise is critical to the success of the demonstration reactor project. While the licencing and environmental impact assessment process for the demonstration power plant still need to be successfully completed, the signing of the EPCM contract represents a significant milestone for PBMR,” said PBMR company CEO Jaco Kriek at the signing ceremony.

He noted that there was increasing international interest in advanced generation IV technology. “Our focus as a company is on developing and using this technology for the benefit of South Africa. We have already achieved many successes in this regard. We have created a large pool of intellectual resources locally and a sizeable company. As the signing of this contract shows, we partner with the best suppliers in the world. Globally, the work we are doing is having a significant impact,” Kriek added.

TSX-listed SNC-Lavalin is said to be one of the leading engineering and construction groups in the world and a major player in the ownership of infrastructure, and in the provision of operations and maintenance services, and is currently working about 100 countries.

Murray & Roberts offers civil, mechanical, electrical, mining and process engineering; general building and construction; materials supply and services to the construction industry; and management of concession operations.

Source: http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article.php?a_id=141477

Eskom's PBMR Report Delayed

2008-08-26T13:22:00.001+02:00

20 August 2008
Source: http://www.bday.co.za/

Siseko Njobeni
Johannesburg

THE review of the environmental impact report and public meetings for the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) have been delayed, according to the project's environmental impact assessment consultant.

PBMR, a high temperature reactor with a closed-cycle gas turbine power conversion system, is central to the government's stated desire to diversify electricity generation mix. The PBMR is also central to Eskom's plan to double capacity by 2026.

It was not immediately clear yesterday if the delay would affect the deadlines for the project which has already fallen behind schedule. Construction work for the project was scheduled to commence in 2010.

According to initial forecasts, construction should have started last year and the demonstration plan should be ready by 2011.

In a newspaper advertisement, consultants Arcus Gibb and Acer Africa yesterday announced the delay which they attributed to unspecified "unforeseen circumstances" beyond their control.

The consultant said the report would be made available to the public during the comment period from last Thursday to September 30 in Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng.

Findings of the draft report and specialist studies were also scheduled to be presented in the three provinces later this month and next month.

The studies for the project are an outcome of work by a team of specialists who looked at issues such as air quality, visual impact, flora, fauna, heritage and archaeology, marine biology, radiological safety and health and seismic risk.

According to the consultants , the project would entail setting up permanent infrastructure. These include an integrated reactor and generator building, a generator and associated electrical power plant, a cooling water plant and a transmission power line.

Dalene Murie of the consultants yesterday referred queries about the delay to Eskom, owners of PBMR. Attempts to get comment from Tony Stott, Eskom senior manager for nuclear stakeholder management, were not successful.

The government has thrown its weight behind the PBMR project. Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin has in the past said the government wanted to produce between 4000MW and 5000MW of power from pebble bed reactors.

PBMR was established in 1999 with the intention to develop and market small-scale, high-temperature reactors .

Source: http://www.bday.co.za/

Earthquake Zone Threatens Indian Point Nuke Plant

2008-08-26T13:20:00.000+02:00

Source: http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2008/2008-08-21-01.asp

PALISADES, New York, August 21, 2008 (ENS) - The nuclear power plant closest to America's largest city is more likely to be hit by an earthquake than previously thought because it sits atop a newly identified intersection of two active seismic zones, earthquake scientists warned today.

The Indian Point nuclear power plant, with its two nuclear generating units, is situated 24 miles north of New York City, on the Hudson River at Buchanan, New York.

Researchers from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have located a previously unknown active seismic zone running from Stamford, Connecticut, to the Hudson Valley town of Peekskill, New York, where it passes less than a mile north of the Indian Point nuclear power plant.

The Stamford-Peekskill line intersects with the known Ramapo seismic zone, which runs from eastern Pennsylvania to the mid-Hudson Valley, passing within two miles northwest of Indian Point.

The Stamford-Peekskill line stands out sharply on the researchers' earthquake map, with small events clustered along its length, and to its immediate southwest. Just to the north, there are no quakes, indicating that it represents some kind of underground boundary.

The pattern emerged when the Earth Observatory scientists compiled a catalog of all 383 known earthquakes from 1677 to 2007 in a 15,000 square mile area around New York City. The observatory runs the network of instruments that monitors most of the northeastern United States for earthquake activity.

Their paper appears in the current issue of the "Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America." "Indian Point is situated at the intersection of the two most striking linear features marking the seismicity and also in the midst of a large population that is at risk in case of an accident," says the paper. "This is clearly one of the least favorable sites in our study area from an earthquake hazard and risk perspective."

Lead author Lynn Sykes says the data show that large quakes are infrequent around New York compared to more active areas like California and Japan, but that the risk is high, because of the overwhelming concentration of people and infrastructure.

"The research raises the perception both of how common these events are, and, specifically, where they may occur," he said. "It's an extremely populated area with very large assets."

Nearly 10 million people live within 25 miles of the Indian Point nuclear plant, including the 8.2 million in the New York metropolitan area.

Sykes, who has studied the region for 40 years, is known for his early role in establishing the global theory of plate tectonics.

Sykes and his team say the insight comes from sophisticated analysis of past quakes, plus 34 years of new data on tremors, most of them perceptible only by modern seismic instruments.

It is parallel to other faults beginning at 125th Street in New York City, so the researchers believe it is a fault in the same family. They say it is probably capable of producing at least a magnitude 6 quake, strong enough to damage structures.

Sykes said the existence of the Stamford-Peekskill line had been suggested before, because the Hudson River takes a sudden unexplained bend just to the north of Indian Point, and definite traces of an old fault can be along the north side of the bend.

"The seismic evidence confirms it," he said.

The findings come at a time when Entergy, the owner and operator of Indian Point, is trying to relicense the two operating plants for an additional 20 years - a move being fought by surrounding communities and the New York State Attorney General. Licenses for Indian Point's two reactors expire in 2013 and 2015.

Last fall New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, alerted to the then-unpublished Lamont data, told a Nuclear Regulatory Commission panel in a filing, "New data developed in the last 20 years disclose a substantially higher likelihood of significant earthquake activity in the vicinity of [Indian Point] that could exceed the earthquake design for the facility."

The state alleges that Entergy has not presented new data on earthquakes past 1979. However, in a little-noticed decision July 31, the panel rejected the argument on procedural grounds. A source at the attorney general's office said the state is considering its options.

The Earth Observatory research shows a pattern of subtle but active earthquake faults that makes the risk of earthquakes to the entire New York City area greater than scientsts had previously believed.

The evidence charts unseen but potentially powerful structures whose layout and dynamics are only now emerging, say the scientists.

Starting in the early 1970s Lamont began collecting data on quakes from dozens of newly deployed seismometers; these have revealed distinct zones where earthquakes concentrate, and where larger ones could come.

For data on the earlier quakes, coauthor John Armbruster estimated sizes and locations of dozens of events before 1930 by combing newspaper accounts and other records.

His research shows that magnitude 5 quakes - strong enough to cause damage - occurred in 1737, 1783 and 1884.

There was little human settlement in the area to be hurt by the first two quakes, whose locations are vague due to a lack of good accounts; but the 1884 quake, thought to be centered under the seabed somewhere between Brooklyn and Sandy Hook, toppled chimneys across the city and New Jersey, and panicked bathers at Coney Island.

Based on this analysis, the researchers say such quakes should be routinely expected, on average, about every 100 years.

"Today, with so many more buildings and people, a magnitude 5 centered below the city would be extremely attention-getting," said Armbruster. "We'd see billions in damage, with some brick buildings falling. People would probably be killed."

Based on the lengths of the faults, the detected tremors, and calculations of how stresses build in the Earth's crust, the Earth Observatory researchers say that magnitude 6 quakes, or even magnitude 7, are possible.

Source: http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2008/2008-08-21-01.asp

French reactors leak again

2008-07-19T15:01:00.001+02:00

France orders tests on all nuclear power stations after leak
By Henry Samuel in Paris
Last updated: 8:18 PM BST 17/07/2008

Fears over France's nuclear reactors have been raised as the government orders ground water tests at its 58 power stations, after a uranium leak at one polluted local water supplies.

The safety lapse at a plant in Provence run by French nuclear giant Areva has raised questions over President Nicolas Sarkozy's drive to roll out reactors around the world – in Britain but also in states with less stringent safety norms.

"I don't want people to feel that we are hiding anything from them," said ecology minister Jean-Louis Borloo as he announced the blanket tests.

Residents in Bollène in the Vaucluse, southern France – a top tourist area – have been told not to drink water or eat fish from nearby rivers, after 74kg of liquid uranium was spilled on July 7 at the Tricastin nuclear plant.

Swimming and water sports were also banned along with irrigating crops with the contaminated water, which reached two rivers.

French authorities last week ordered the closure of a nuclear treatment facility at the plant, which also has a nuclear reactor, after liquid was spilled during its transfer from one container to another.

The site is run by Socatri, a subsidiary of Areva, whose president, Anne Lauvergeon, is due to visit.

Areva aims to dominate the design and construction of at least eight new power stations which are to be fast-tracked in England over the next decade.

According to Gordon Brown, they are essential to reduce Britain's dependency on fossil fuels, but environmentalists have already raised safety fears, saying the Areva reactor design is 'untried and untested'.

Ben Ayliffe, head of nuclear campaigns at Greenpeace, said: "Such unpredictable and nasty side effects are the risks you take with nuclear.

"We believe the leak in France resulted from human error.

"Liquid uranium was accidentally poured onto the ground. We're not talking about dishwater here. This is a dangerous radioactive material.

"The risk of accidents like this in the UK should be enough to make reasonable people baulk at the thought of having more nuclear power stations here."

Although ranked as only a level-one incident on a scale from zero to seven, Mr Borloo said he wanted government nuclear safety inspectors to look into the environmental conditions at all sites, in particular the state of the surrounding ground water.

"I'm told that everything is under control, but I want to be sure," Mr Borloo told Le Parisien newspaper.

French environmental group Sortir du nucléaire welcomed the move, but said that tests should be carried out by an independent body not linked to the industry or the French state – its main shareholder.

France has the world's second largest network of nuclear reactors after the United States and they generate more than 80 per cent of its electricity.

While the spill at Tricastin did not affect the reactor, Mr Borloo stressed that "there is no room for negligence" in nuclear energy.
France's IRSN nuclear safety institute said it had located four areas with abnormally high levels of uranium in the ground water and that this could not have been caused by the Tricastin leak alone.

This has led to suggestions that military nuclear waste buried nearby in an underground storage site from 1964 to 1976 may be to blame.

In 1998, a study by French nuclear body Cogema estimated that up to 900kg of uranium had leaked into underground water supplies from the site, and that another 1,700 kilogrammes were still buried there.
However, IRSN said the pollution "incident" had "nothing to do with this mound of waste" – located roughly a mile further south.

It has been declared all vegetables and crops irrigated just after the leak fit for consumption, but residents around Bollène, where the power station is located, said they feared for their health.

"We've been drinking water from this water table for 20 years," said Sylvie Eymard, who cultivates herbs and vegetables on a farm within sight of Tricastin's cooling towers. Most of her plants have died due to the water restrictions.

"We've done chemical tests before, but never thought of a radiological risk.

"I can't help thinking about the possible consequences of this pollution on my children", she told Le Parisien.

The municipality is supplying tanks of drinking water and local stores have sold out on mineral water, while some residents have stocked up on iodine pills – usually taken as protection against airborne radioactive particles.

"The local population is worried and no longer believes official figures", said André-Yves Becq, the deputy mayor. He said Socatri inspectors "suspiciously" told one family that dangerously high levels of contamination in its water supply were due to a "dirty measurement instrument".

France is fiercely proud of its nuclear prowess thanks to mainly state-owned energy giants Areva, Electricité de France and newly merged GDF Suez. The country has already embarked on the construction of a new generation of higher-yield EPR reactors.

In April, Mr Sarkozy hailed French nuclear technology as "one of the safest in the world' while on a trip to Tunisia – the latest in his nuclear sales tour of mainly Muslim states including Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Saudi Arabia, but also China.

"Without energy, you will not know growth. Without growth, you will not have development. You will have poverty, under-development and unemployment, and thus terrorism. Everything is linked", he claimed.

Story from Telegraph News:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/2306113/France-orders-tests-on-all-nuclear-power-stations-after-leak.html

"LOW-LEVEL" RADIOACTIVE WASTE

2008-07-19T14:03:00.001+02:00

Source: http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/llwfct.htm

"Low-Level" Radioactive Waste is one of the most misleading terms ever created. In the U.S., it is all nuclear waste that is not legally high-level waste, some transuranic waste, or mill tailings.

High-Level Radioactive Waste is: the irradiated fuel from the cores of nuclear reactors, the liquid and sludge wastes that are left over after irradiated fuel has been reprocessed (a procedure used to extract uranium and plutonium), the solid that would result from efforts to solidify that liquid and sludge from reprocessing.

Transuranic Waste is material contaminated with radioactive elements heavier than uranium, such as plutonium, neptunium, americium and curium. These elements: have extremely long hazardous lives--hundreds of thousands to millions of years and emit alpha radiation a type of radiation that is especially dangerous if inhaled or swallowed. Some transuranic waste is allowed in the "low-level" radioactive waste category. In 1983, when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) adopted regulations on land disposal of radioactive waste (lOCFR61), it increased the allowable concentration of transuranics in "low-level" radioactive waste.

Uranium Mill tailings, resulting from mining and milling uranium for weapons and commercial reactors, are not usually included in the "low-level" waste category, but may be handled with it in some states. The large volumes of these wastes, which will emit radiation for centuries, pose serious health problems.

WHAT IS "LOW-LEVEL" RADIOACTIVE WASTE?

"Low-Level" Radioactive Waste includes:

Irradiated Components and Piping: reactor hardware and pipes that are in continual contact with highly radioactive water for the 20 to 30 years the reactor operates. The metal becomes "activated" or radioactive itself from bombardment by neutrons that are released when energy is produced. Also called Irradiated Primary System Components.

Control Rods: from the core of nuclear power plants--rods that regulate and stop the nuclear reactions in the reactor core.

Poison Curtains: which absorb neutrons from the water in the reactor core and irradiated fuel (high level waste) pool.

Resins, Sludges, Filters and Evaporator Bottoms: from cleansing the water that circulates around the irradiated fuel in the reactor vessel and in the fuel pool, which holds the irradiated fuel when it is removed from the core.

Entire Nuclear Power Plants if and when they are dismantled. This includes, for example, from a typical 1,000 megawatt nuclear reactor building floor: over 13,000 tons of contaminated concrete and over 1,400 tons of contaminated reinforcing steel bar.

The highly radioactive and long-lived reactor wastes are included in the "low-level" waste category along with the much less concentrated and generally much shorter-lived wastes from medical treatment and diagnosis and some types of scientific research.

RADIOACTIVE CONCENTRATION vs VOLUME

The nuclear industry and government commonly describe "low-level" waste in terms of volume although there can be a tremendous concentration of radioactivity in a small package and a small concentration in a big package. The amount of radioactivity, measured in CURIES, indicates how much radioactive energy is being emitted by the waste. (1 Curie = 37,000,000,000 or 37 Billion disintegrations or radioactive emissions per second from a radioactive material.)

The medical waste from diagnosis and treatment shipped in one year from most states usually gives off a fraction of one curie of radiation. In contrast, each nuclear reactor generates hundreds and thousands of curies in "low-level" waste every year.

Nuclear reactor waste is concentrated: Solidified liquid emits about 2 curies per cubic meter; Filter/Demineralizer sludges emit about 10 curies per cubic meter; Cartridge filters emit about 20 curies per cubic meter; Demineralizer resins emit about 160 curies per cubic meter. Primary Components average 1000 to 5000 curies per cubic meter.

All of this material is legally considered low-level.

HALF-LIFE and HAZARDOUS LIFE

Radioactive elements decay by emitting energy in the form of radioactive particles and rays. As radiation is given off, other elements (some radioactive and some stable) are formed.

The Half-Life is the time it takes for HALF of the radioactive element to decay (give off half of its radioactivity). Different radioactive elements have different half-lives.

The Hazardous Life of a radioactive element is about 10 or 20 Half-Lives. (It is best to measure the amount of radiation after 10 or 20 half-lives before releasing waste from active controls.)

Reactor waste remains hazardous for a very long time. Most medical waste from treatment and diagnosis is hazardous for a very short time. Research and industrial waste can contain small amounts of some long-lived radioactive materials.

Among the radioactive elements commonly found in nuclear reactor "low-level" waste are: Tritium, with a half-life of 12 years and a hazardous life of 120-240 years; Iodine-131, half-life of 8 days, hazardous life of 80-160 days; Strontium-90, half life of 28 years, hazardous life of 280-560 years; Nickel-59, half life of 76,000 years, hazardous life of 760,000-1,520,000 years, and Iodine-129, half-life of sixteen million years, hazardous life of160-320 million years.

By contrast, common medical waste elements include Technetium-99m, with a half-life of 6 hours and a hazardous life of 2.5-5 days; Galium-67, half-life of 78 hours and hazardous life of 1-2 months; and Iodine-131, with its half-life of 8 days and hazardous life of 80-160 days.

The vast majority of medical waste is hazardous for less than 8 months. Yet, it is in the same category as reactor waste that will be hazardous for hundreds of thousands to millions of years.

Clearly, the definition of "low-level radioactive waste" must be changed. It would make sense to redefine the more concentrated and/or longer-lived waste as high-level. Active recontainerization and operational control must be provided for the entire hazardous life of the waste, yet the NRC requires only 100 years of passive institutional control. Thus, waste hazardous longer than 100 years could be forgotten. Retrievability is essential.

PLANNED LEAKAGE AND "ACCEPTABLE" RISK

Waste containers and forms will not last as long as some waste remains hazardous. Therefore, waste should be placed in a manner which will facilitate recontainerization and make continued isolation from the environment possible in the future. If the waste is "disposed of" as the NRC currently requires, it will not be isolated from the environment. "Planned leakage will occur at (what NRC considers) an "acceptable" leak rate leading to "acceptable" public radiation exposures and health risks. The allowable leak rates and exposure levels are determined by federal agencies, not those experiencing the risk.

To avoid leakage, above-ground, engineered storage at or near the source of generation could allow responsible routine monitoring and repair.

STATES' AUTHORITY

States have the right and responsibility to protect their citizens' health. In 1980, Congress gave states the responsibility for "low-level" radioactive waste. How and whether states choose to take on that responsibility will be reflected indefinitely into the future.

Source: http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/llwfct.htm

Nuclearphile sabotage

2008-07-19T13:56:00.002+02:00

Jeremy Leggett 22/06/2008
Source: http://www.theecologist.org/pages/archive_detail.asp?open=y&content_id=1892#36615

The Government wilfully suppressed renewables to make space for nuclear to be reborn, argues Jeremy Leggett

The Government released its first energy white paper almost five years ago, when oil was barely $30 a barrel. The result of a thorough consultation with more than 60 energy companies, it called for deep carbon emissions cuts by 2050, to be achieved primarily by a massive programme of renewable and efficient energy mobilisation. Nuclear energy barely survived the consultation. During the Strategic Energy Review that preceded the white paper, I saw executives from nuclear companies literally laughed out of contention during debates about the economics of future energy supply. But senior officials at the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) fought a rearguard action. Nuclear was granted a place on the back burner, to be reviewed after five years.

The DTI set up a Renewables Advisory Board to advise ministers on how to execute the white-paper plan in November 2002. I was invited to join it, and at the time I was encouraged. Twelve renewable industry executives joined senior officials from all relevant ministries on the board. There was a sense that we were there to make things happen fast: to help unlock doors. But by September 2003, the industry members of the board were troubled by slow progress and issued a statement of concern. In particular, we were worried that the short tenure of the Renewables Obligation was putting off investment in wind. Faced with this rebellion by its industry advisors, the Government extended the Renewables Obligation. But other doors were proving very difficult to open, notably an early recommendation by industry that government go out and fight a strong hearts-and-minds communication campaign to persuade the public that we needed a strong mix of fast-growing renewables markets, and why.

A fellow member of the board warned me that DTI officials were deliberately going slowly, and would continue to do so, aiming to keep their hopes for nuclear alive. Renewables, he feared, would be teed up to fail. I didn’t believe it at the time. But recently I heard two of Tony Blair’s senior colleagues confirm the DTI has long suppressed renewables to make space for nuclear. The slow-motion treatment of renewables that I have witnessed in the UK during the past five years, while renewables markets abroad have grown explosively, now makes a sickening kind of sense.

In 2004, oil hit $50 for the first time. New fears about energy security meant more than $30 billion of new investment flowed into renewables globally. Very little came to the UK. Much of it went to Germany, where the Germans have created more than 200,000 new jobs since 2000 in industries now exporting globally. UK plc meanwhile has been starved of opportunities both to create new jobs and compete in new global export markets.

Along the way, the nuclearphiles have jumped the gun on their five-year review. Tony Blair called for a second energy white paper, and by July 2006 the draft already backed a new generation of British nuclear power plants. At that time, nuclear inspectors were reporting unexplained cracks in six reactor cores in the existing generation. British Energy, it seemed, did not know the extent of the damage in the reactors, could not monitor their deterioration and didn’t fully understand why the cracking had occurred. The DTI authors of the energy white paper, and their champion in Number 10, were undeterred.

Greenpeace challenged the legality of the second white paper process and in February 2007 the High Court ruled that the Government’s review had indeed been unlawful. Another consultation began. Another year had been lost.

In March, Europe agreed a union-wide target of 20 per cent renewables in the energy mix. Twenty-seven leaders signed up, Blair among them. As a result of this and other market-building initiatives, global investment in renewables companies accelerated still faster in 2007. Share prices in renewables companies soared far ahead of normal stocks, while growing numbers of experts warned oil and gas were depleting faster than expected. But in the UK it was business as usual. In August, the Guardian revealed ministers were being briefed by DTI officials (now the Department of Business and Regulatory Reform) that the UK couldn’t come close to a 20 per cent target. In a development beyond even the script of Yes Minister, options for wriggling out of the 20 per cent commitment included counting nuclear energy as renewable energy.

No doubt shamed by all this, Gordon Brown held the line, and is currently insisting the UK plays ball with the EU’s 20 per cent target. But how will he deliver it, when his government has some of the least effective market-enablement programmes for renewable energy in the industrialised world? How, surrounded by civil servants intent on seeing a re-nuclearised Britain almost at any cost?

One of those most instrumental in engineering the nuclear renaissance was Blair’s chief scientific adviser, Sir David King. People present in the crucial cabinet meeting where the 2003 energy white paper was finalised have described to me how King and other DTI officials stopped ministers shelving nuclear completely. In a Guardian interview on 12 January, King speaks with evident pride about how John Prescott became furious to the point almost of violence.

King went further in the interview and in his forthcoming books, labelling greens Luddites harming the fight against global warming. Many ‘want to get away from all the technological gizmos and developments of the 20th century,’ he professes.

Many greens I know are keen to drop 20th-century technologies, but only in that we are rather keen to progress to the technologies of the 21st century. The technologies of the present century look set to be very different from the technologies of the last, if you consider where energy investors prefer to put their money. The vast majority of venture capital investment in energy, and some of the most successful investments on stock exchanges in 2007, went to renewable and efficient technologies, and these offer at least a fighting chance of solving our energy problems.

Nuclear is one of those 20th-century technologies society has tried and found wanting. We can’t build it fast enough to make a difference either to our clear-and-present climate change problem, or our fast-emerging energy security problem. Even if we could, we haven’t found a way to deal with its hideous wastes after half a century of effort. We can’t afford it without endless blank-cheque subsidies, as opposed to the short-term, fixed-amount subsidies – or their policy equivalents – that renewables need in order to accelerate into mass markets. We haven’t found a way to stop the people that run the industry from releasing a stream of lies, falsified documents, accident- and near-miss cover-ups, and consistent, huge and almost universal cost underestimates. If we plough ahead with nuclear power regardless, we face the fact that the separation between civil and weapons programmes is wafer-thin, and so effectively issue a licence to the rest of the world to proliferate nuclear weapons. Retired nuclear bomb designers have a tendency to profess that if and when civil nuclear programmes are resurrected on any scale, it is only a matter of time before the terrorists make it into our cities with suitcase bombs. Finally, if we build a new generation of nuclear reactors, by the Government’s own admission they would need to be on existing sites: on the coast. The same government warns us, via its lead role in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are at risk of melting, which would lift global sea level many metres. Whither Dungeness then, a site where 600 tonnes of shingle already has to be dumped daily to keep the sea at bay? Some 20th-century technologies we do need to get away from. Nuclear power is one.

The book King has written to vent his rage against the greens, we are told, ends with a map of the world on which is superimposed six tiny squares. If all the light falling on those squares could be harvested, King explains, all the world’s energy needs could be met. Indeed. This remarkable fact is the product of a nuclear reactor. That reactor is more than 90 million miles from our planet, and it is called the Sun. The power it could in principle generate within those tiny squares is called solar power. David King was until recently a lead player in a government that has acted for years as though it wants to slowly strangle any prospect of solar power in Britain.

Jeremy Leggett is founder and chairman of Solarcentury and SolarAid, and author of The Carbon War and Half Gone. This article is an extended version of some of his writing on nuclear power and renewables in the Guardian

Source: http://www.theecologist.org/pages/archive_detail.asp?open=y&content_id=1892#36615

Surfers say no to 'radioactive waves'

2008-07-19T13:55:00.005+02:00

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA Jul 07 2008 16:24
Source: www.mg.co.za

A proposed nuclear power station at Thuyspunt would be a disaster for the environment and tourism in Jeffrey's Bay and St Francis Bay, the Supertubes Surfing Foundation said on Monday.

"Local and international surfers ... will not fancy a surf in radioactive waves at one of the best right-handers in the world," said the organisation, which takes care of beaches and protects sand dunes in Jeffrey's Bay.

The organisation said seawater would be used to cool the proposed plant's condensers and then returned to the ocean.

"We are not satisfied that pumping heated water back into the ocean will have no impact on sea life and water quality in the Jeffrey's Bay and St Francis Bay area," said the chairperson of the organisation, Tyrone Smith.

If Thuyspunt -- just 12km from Cape St Francis -- is chosen by Eskom as the site of its plant, a 4 000MW nuclear reactor will be built. This is more than twice the size of the Koeberg plant in the Western Cape, said Supertubes.

Vulnerable ecosystems and wetlands could be destroyed by building a nuclear facility at Thuyspunt.

Smith also said the large amounts of water sucked in at high velocity to cool the condensers could capture wildlife from the sea and destroy it. "The plant would have some kind of filter system and even large fish would be trapped and killed."

He also said it was a "very real possibility" that dolphins would be killed at the proposed nuclear plant.

"The risk of an accident at a nuclear plant so close to the pristine beaches of Jeffrey's Bay is unacceptable," the organisation said, adding that wind speed in the area was strong enough that if there were an accident, radiation would strike the communities of St Francis and Jeffrey's Bay within an hour.

"There would literally be no time for an evacuation as it would be impossible to warn everybody -- the local population would simply be eradicated. The agricultural land would be unusable for thousands of years."

Botanist Richard Cowling said dune fynbos in the area was endangered and that building the site would require the removal of huge amounts of sediment.

"Any disturbance of the dunes will play havoc with the complex water-flow dynamics in the area," he said.

Smith said agriculture and tourism, the two pillars of the economy in the area, would be hardest hit if the plant was built. "Would [tourists] risk their safety by spending their summer holidays so close to a nuclear plant that is spewing polluted water back into the ocean they want to swim in?"

J'Bay Boardriders' Club chairperson Andy Thuysman said many jobs could be lost. "The Baviaanskloof [40km from Jeffrey's Bay] has been declared a world heritage site and the tourism potential from this may never be realised."

Planned power lines would be driven through the wilderness area above the highway, he said.

Supertubes said it will be asking people to sign a petition at the Billabong Pro surf contest.

Eskom was not immediately available for comment. -- Sapa

Source: www.mg.co.za

Britain's nuclear clean-up increases by £10bn

2008-07-19T13:55:00.004+02:00

Bill for Britain's nuclear clean-up increases by another £10bn
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/

· A week after MPs criticise accounts, numbers go up
· Repairing broken reactors brings cost total to £83bn

# Terry Macalister
# The Guardian,
# Friday July 18, 2008

The credibility of the nuclear industry was shaken last night after the estimated cost of cleaning up Britain's atomic waste was raised by a further £10bn.

The latest clean-up estimate from the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) suggests the commonly accepted figure of £73bn should rise to £83bn. But the agency insisted that £10bn of income from generating and fuel reprocessing plants should also be taken into account.

It said the most accurate estimate of the clean-up bill over the next 130 years was £73bn, which included £10bn for the future construction of a high level waste depositary. The NDA's estimates for that project have not been revealed before.

The government agency blamed the latest rise in costs on the decision to tackle more complicated hazard problems at Sellafield along with rising inflation in the engineering sector, and a lack of income from the Thorp and Mox fuel reprocessing plants, which have been hit by a succession of problems.

The latest clean-up estimates came as a newly restarted fuel reprocessing plant was taken out of action until the end of the year and British Energy said four broken-down reactors would not be repaired on time or within budget.

But an NDA spokesman said there was good news in its annual report and accounts because the lifetime cost of running the Drigg low-level waste depositary - now under private management - had fallen by 18% and the cost of cleaning up the Dounreay site was down by 10%.

Further savings would come from placing Sellafield under private management, he said, but admitted there could be no guarantee that the clean-up bill would not rise again: "Obviously, with a civil engineering project over 130 years there will always be risks."

Last week a report from the Commons public accounts committee criticised ministers over last year's clean-up estimate and complained about the lack of certainty over the projected cost of decommissioning Britain's nuclear sites.

Greenpeace said the NDA figures were alarming. It questioned the agency's reliance on gaining £10bn of income from plants such as Thorp, which has a history of breakdowns, and pointed out that the plant had effectively been taken out of action for the rest of the year while a new evaporator was fitted.

"In just three years the estimated cost for dealing with our nuclear legacy has risen by over £20bn," said Greenpeace's senior nuclear campaigner, Ben Ayliffe. "It now stands at over £73bn and is spiralling out of control. The NDA admits that they have no idea what the final bill will be.

"They're stuck in a radioactive quagmire and as usual it's the public who will have to carry the can. It beggars belief that Gordon Brown and his nuclear stooges want to build more atomic plants when the plans for cleaning up after our existing reactors are such a drain on this country's coffers."

The latest clean-up figures came as British Energy, the UK's main nuclear power generator, admitted that the cost of bringing back on stream two key plants that had encountered problems nine months ago would be "significantly higher" than expected and would take considerably longer to fix than anticipated.

The company originally estimated that it would cost £50m to repair reactors at the Hartlepool and Heysham 1 facilities. But yesterday BE chairman Adrian Montague said a much more complex engineering solution was required and "the final costs will be significantly higher than this initial estimate".

The four broken reactors have already soaked up a million man-hours of work and while good progress has been made, British Energy said it could not be sure of bringing the units back into service until the last quarter of this calendar year. More specific details of the cost overrun would be given next month alongside first quarter earnings.

The latest difficulties to have beset British Energy were revealed by the chairman at the company's annual shareholders' meeting in Edinburgh. Montague admitted the performance of the nuclear power stations was "disappointing", with Hartlepool and Heysham's difficulties coming on top of boiler problems at Hinkley Point B and Hunterston B.

"However, these large events mask the continued improvement in what we have seen in many of our underlying operating metrics, notably the record low level of small generation losses and the strong and sustained safety and environmental performance achieved across the fleet," he said.

Turning to expectations that a new generation of atomic power plants would be constructed in the UK, British Energy said it was making prudent investments "to secure a pivotal role" in any such developments, most obviously from preparing some of its existing sites for new plant.

"We have recently held a series of public meetings with the communities around Sizewell about our proposals for a twin nuclear unit there, and we are scheduling similar meetings for our other lead sites at Hinkley Point, Dungeness and Bradwell," Montague said.

The company, whose nuclear plants generate 14% of the UK's electricity, last month rejected takeover overtures from EDF, the French nuclear power operator which is interested in British Energy primarily for the sites which could be used for its own new atomic stations. "Our dialogue is therefore continuing and a further announcement will be made in due course," the chairman said.

£73bn
The NDA's figure for clean-up costs: it says £10bn will be offset by income

130
The number of years the nuclear clean-up is expected to take

14%
Percentage of the UK's electricity generated by British Energy plants

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Nuclear power failure

2008-07-19T13:54:00.002+02:00

Gordon Brown says the UK is at the forefront of a global 'nuclear renaissance'. But despite all the rhetoric, the real picture is grim

* John Sauven
* guardian.co.uk,
* Friday July 18, 2008

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Just this week Prime Minister Gordon Brown confidently assured us that the UK was at the forefront of a global "nuclear renaissance" and that within a few years we'd be home to at least eight bright, shining new reactors. We're told a week is a long time in politics, but it must seem an absolute eternity to the ever more bedraggled British nuclear industry.

Yesterday the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) published its annual report and the predictable news was that the cost of decommissioning existing reactors and dealing with our legacy of radioactive waste has rocketed yet again. The bill now stands at a whopping £73bn, up from £53bn in 2006. That's an increase equivalent to the entire cost of the London 2012 Olympics each year.

Some experts believe that the real total might be more than £85bn. This is a staggering amount of taxpayers' money. Just to put the figure into context, it's about the same cost as the entire Apollo Programme that took man to the moon. Sadly, unlike JFK's lunar mission, in this case we have nothing to celebrate. What that money buys us is merely desperate grappling with the radioactive and toxic legacy of nuclear power.

The NDA claims the overall figure will be kept down because it will generate revenue through its commercial operations. But the idea that the NDA's commercial operations can guarantee this income is laughable. A big slice of the revenue they want to rely on for a century or more depends on two of the biggest white elephants in nuclear industry history – Thorp and the Sellafield Mox Plant. The Thorp reprocessing facility was shut for years following dangerous radioactive leaks and is now closed until Christmas while a new evaporator is fitted. Meanwhile it was recently announced to surprisingly little fanfare that the Mox plant, which cost nearly half a billion pounds, has produced next to nothing since it was built. Relying on these for a guaranteed income is like putting your faith in a sprig of flowers to ward of the plague.

The fact that the NDA is playing a central role in working out how much waste from new reactors might cost to dispose of should make all of us stop and think about the merits of any new nuclear programme. The taxpayer is picking up the tab for all these failures and cost increases now, and as the Public Accounts Committee stated recently, it is impossible to guarantee that the taxpayer will not pick up the tab for new nuclear power stations too. Government promises that there will be no subsides for its new nuclear programme are almost worthless.

Despite all the rhetoric and improbable promises about the benefits of new nuclear reactors, the real picture is grim. Much like the recent news that British Energy is paying twice as much to get two of its creaking UK reactors back on line (the bill is now more than £100m). And the rumours that French state-owned nuclear utility Electricite de France is having second thoughts about buying British Energy.

But before we conclude that this is a British malaise, this week brought the startling announcement from France that all its nuclear reactors must now be checked so that leaks of radioactive waste into local rivers, as happened at one site last week, don't happen anywhere else. This comes hot on the heels of the construction blunders at the new reactor site in Flamanville that led to the French nuclear authority suspending the project. These are the reactors and companies that are touted to deliver Brown's "nuclear renaissance", but unless stopped, the prospect is of a much more disastrous and expensive rerun.

A fall from the giddy heights of Brown's expansive nuclear dreams at the start of the week takes some beating. However, the one thing the nuclear industry really excels at is shooting itself in the foot. Which means we can probably expect more of the same before the summer's out.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Strontium 90 in Baby Teeth near Nuclear Reactor

2008-05-10T11:14:00.001+02:00

published by WISE/NIRS Nuclear Monitor on May 16, 2003
U.S.: strontium-90 in baby teeth near Florida reactors

A study on childhood cancer near nuclear power plants in Florida, U.S., was released in April. According to the study by the Radiation and Public Health Project, levels of fission product strontium-90 in the teeth of children living in southeast Florida had increased with 37% from 1986-1989 to 1994-1997. The highest levels were found near the Turkey Point and St. Lucie reactors. The amount of radioactive strontium-90 appeared to be 85% higher in the teeth of children with cancer than those without. The results might suggest a link between cancer and exposures to radioactivity from the reactors, but further studies are still needed to confirm this.

(587.5518) WISE Amsterdam - The study was conducted by the Radiation and Public Health Project (RPHP) and funded by the Health Foundation of South Florida. RHPH is an independent non-profit research organization, established by scientists and physicians to investigate the links between environmental radiation, cancer and public health. The main authors of the study are Dr. Ernest Sternglass, Professor Emiritus Radiation Physics of the Unversity of Pittsburgh, Dr. Jerry Brown, Founding Professor Florida International University and Joseph Mangano, national coordinator of RPHP.

Four nuclear reactors are in operation in southeast Florida: Turkey Point-3 and -4 in Miami-Dade County and St. Lucie-1 and -2 in St. Lucie County. Concerns have been raised about reported increases in childhood cancer. RPHP studied data on radioactive releases from the plants, radioactivity concentrations in rain- and drinking water, cancer rates in the region and levels of strontium-90 in baby's teeth in the region. The main findings of the RPHP study are:

Radioactivity emissions

Radioactivity in Miami-Dade County (Turkey Point) rainwater rose from a minimum in 1987-1988 to a plateau in 1990-1993, and later by some 60% in the last half of the 1990s. Atmospheric bomb testing by the U.S. ended in 1963 and by other countries in 1980. Accidental releases by underground bomb testing ended in 1992-1993. The releases by these test were an important source of beta-emitting radionuclides. As the activity in water still increased in the late 1990s, the persistence of (high beta) radioactivity in precipitation and drinking water near Turkey Point and St. Lucie therefore is likely to be caused by those two NPPs.

Radioactivity in drinking water

The highest levels of fission product strontium-90 in drinking water in southeast Florida were found within 5-20 miles (8-32 kilometers) of the Turkey Point and St. Lucie reactors. Fission products like strontium-90, cesium-137 and iodine-131 are always released during normal operation of a reactor. The are released by the plant by air or water discharges. The levels of strontium-90 decreased with distance from the plants. This appears to rule out past nuclear bomb tests as the source of strontium-90 in drinking water. Contamination by nuclear tests would have caused equal activity levels all over Florida instead of the highest levels found near the two NPPs.

Cancer rates in Southeast Florida

From the early 1980s to the late 1990s, cancer incidence in children under 10 rose 35.2% in the five counties closest to the Turkey Point and St. Lucie reactors. Childhood cancer in the whole U.S. had only risen with 10.8%. So, the amount of childhood cancer rose more quickly in the regions of the two NPPs. A high amount of 325.3% increase in childhood cancer was observed in St. Lucie County.

Radioactivity in Florida Baby Teeth

The authors collected baby teeth for measurements on strontium-90 concentrations. The study found that levels of strontium-90 in 250 Miami-Dade County baby teeth have been rising since the early 1980s. The current level is even as high as in the late 1950s, when the U.S., U.K., and the Soviet Union conducted atmospheric bomb tests. As the major releases of strontium-90 have ended since the atmospheric tests stopped, the authors suspect another cause for the (increased) presence of strontium-90 in teeth.
A comparison of the 461 baby teeth from six southeast counties near the two NPPs with 24 teeth from 12 other Florida counties (more than 40 miles from any NPP) showed that strontium-90 levels in the six southeast counties have a significant 44% higher concentration of strontium-90.

In 1982, the average concentration of strontium-90 in southeast Florida baby teeth was 2.23 picoCuries per gram Calcium. By 1995, it reached 5.29 picoCurie/g Calcium. That significant rise of +137% makes it almost impossible to ascribe the current levels to past atmospheric nuclear bomb tests. That is because of the fact that one would expect a decline in strontium-90 levels as the atmospheric tests had ended and strontium-90 from that cause is more and more disappearing from the natural environment.
From 17 teeth from children diagnosed with cancer and living in the counties near the NPPs, 14 were found to have strontium-90 levels above the average for those without cancer in the same counties. Furthermore, 11 out of these 14 teeth have significantly higher strontium-90 concentrations. On average, strontium-90 levels in cancer teeth were 85% higher than those found in non-cancer teeth.

Conclusions and recommendations

The authors conclude that the radioactivity releases from the Turkey Point and St. Lucie NPPs are the primary cause of rising strontium-90 levels in southeast Florida baby teeth, which is the highest in the counties near the plants.

Strontium-90 levels are significantly higher in teeth from children with cancer. The higher levels of strontium-90 in children with cancer raises the question whether exposure to emissions by the two NPPs may be a possible cause for the cancer. The authors are quite strong in their conclusions when they state that "there is now substantial evidence that exposure [...] is a significant causal factor". But as this is only a first study on strontium-90 levels in Florida they also recommend that more detailed studies on cancer rates and a relation with strontium-90 levels are necessary before full conclusions can be drawn.

The possible radiation-cancer link should also be considered in future federal policies regulating the operation of nuclear reactors, especially on renewal or extension of the licenses of aging reactors.

More information about the Radiation and Public Health Project can be found at their website: www.radiation.org. The website also includes earlier study results of the project.

Sources:
1. Environmental Radiation from Nuclear Reactors and Childhood Cancer in Southeast Florida, Radiation and Public Health Project, 9 April 2003
2. Press release RPHP, 9 April 2003
Contact: J. Mangano, National Coordinator, RPHP, 786 Carroll Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215, U.S.
Tel: +1 718 857 9825
Email: odiejoe@aol.com
Web: www.radiation.org

SA names partners for nuclear reactor programme

2008-03-06T09:25:00.002+02:00

SA names partners for nuclear reactor programme

By: Reuters
Published: 5 Mar 08 - 10:09
Source: http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article.php?a_id=128471

South Africa's advanced nuclear reactor technology programme will include US-based Westinghouse Electric as a partner and a new shareholders' contract is expected by the end of the month, an official said on Tuesday.

South Africa is currently testing elements of the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) and wants to build 24-30 PBMR reactors for its own energy needs.

Lynette Milne, CFO of Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (Pty) Ltd (PBMR) set up in 1999 to develop and market the technology, said a new shareholders' contract will also include South Africa's government, the Industrial Development Corporation and power utility Eskom.

"The status on the shareholders' agreement is that we still anticipate signing by the end of March 2008," Milne said in an email reply to questions.

"In terms of the existing cooperation agreement, PBMR is 100 percent owned by Eskom. This will change in the shareholders' agreement where the other contributors to the project, being IDC, Westinghouse and government (through DPE), will also be issued shares in PBMR in proportion to their contributions historically," Milne said.

Westinghouse in majority-owned by Japan's Toshiba Corp..

South Africa is gripped by a power shortage as Eskom struggles to meet demand.

The country's mining industry ground to a halt for five days in January as rolling blackouts intensified and millions of homes were left without power.

The multi-billion rand PBMR is part of the country's efforts to move away from coal and boost waning capacity through nuclear power. The government said in 2005 it aimed to produce a demonstration reactor by 2011 and a commercial model by 2012.

The reactor is an advanced design that claims to dramatically improve safety and efficiency, although environmentalists say it is unsafe and creates radioactive waste.

The high-temperature PBMR is a step change from conventional reactor technologies because the radioactive material in sealed in small "pebbles."

It will be built in modules, with groups of four or eight reactors sharing one infrastructure, facilitating expansion.

Although China and the United States are working on similar technology, South Africa is leading the field and plans to start construction of a demonstration plant next year, the PBMR company said last year.

State-owned Eskom plans to spend R343-billion increasing its generating capacity over the next five years and has invited bids for a new nuclear power station.

Source: http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article.php?a_id=128471

The Sham of Nuke Power & Patrick Moore

2008-03-04T09:05:00.002+02:00

The Sham of Nuke Power & Patrick Moore
by Harvey Wasserman
Source: http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0228-20.htm

Vermont was recently disgraced by an industry-sponsored visit from Patrick Moore, who claims to be a "founder" of Greenpeace, and who is out selling nuclear power as a "green" technology.

The two claims are roughly equal in the baldness of their falsehood.

But the impacts of the lies about Vermont Yankee are far more serious. Vermont is now at a crossroads in its energy and environmental future. The reactor is old and infirm. Every day it operates heightens the odds on a major accident.

In a world beset by terror, there is no more vulnerable target than an aged reactor like Vermont Yankee. Its core is laden with built-up radiation accumulated over the decades. Its environs are burdened with supremely radioactive spent fuel. Its elderly core and containment are among the most fragile that exist.

Despite industry claims, VY's high-level nuke waste is going nowhere. Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner Edward McGaffigan has told the New York Times he believes the Yucca Mountain waste repository cannot open for at least another 17-20 years, if ever. At current production levels, it will by then require yet another repository at least that size to handle the spent fuel that will by then be stacked at reactors like VY. In short: the dry casks stacked at Vermont Yankee could comprise what amounts to a permanent high level nuke dump, on the shores of the Connecticut River.

The Better Business Bureau recently recommended that the Nuclear Energy Institute pull its advertising that claims atomic reactors are clean and nonpolluting. The NEI is an industry front group. The BBB says that reactors cause thermal pollution in their outtake pipes and cooling towers, and also create substantial amounts of greenhouse gases in uranium production. In short, the Better Business Bureau has punctured the industry's claim the Vermont Yankee and other reactors are any kind of solution for climate chaos. The idea that VY is a "green" facility is utter nonsense.

Indeed, all nuclear power plants produce huge quantities of global warming gases as they are wrapped up in the mining of the uranium ore that goes into the fuel, and in the milling of that ore into fuel rods. The American West is littered with gargantuan piles of mill tailings that pour thousands of curies of radioactive radon into the atmosphere.

Fabricating fuel rods is one of the most electricity-intensive industries on earth, consuming millions of tons of coal in the process, emitting untold quantities of greenhouse gases. The radioactive emissions from the plants themselves also unbalance the atmosphere, and the heat they dump into the air and water directly heats the planet.

The alleged "renaissance" of nuclear power is nothing more than heavily funded industry hype. Wall Street financiers are not lining up to invest in these dinosaurs, and numerous utility executives have publicly doubted the wisdom of building them.

One reason is the explosive take-off of the renewable energy industry. Wind power is now very substantially cheaper than nukes. The production of photovoltaic cells, which convert sunlight directly to electricity, can barely meet demand. Investments in biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel are soaring, as are those in the cheapest form of recovered energy, increased efficiency. Shutting VY would open Vermont to the revolution that is reshaping the future. Keeping it open locks Vermont into a sorry past.

Nuclear power is a 50-year experiment that has failed. Extending the operations of Vermont Yankee will only leave the state with more radioactive waste, a Connecticut River increasingly threatened by heat and radioactive emissions, and an increasingly radioactive relic despoiling the region. Nukes cannot compete in the market, and would all cease to operate overnight if the huge subsidy of federal liability insurance was removed.

It is fitting, therefore, that the industry has insulted Vermont by sending in a spokesman of the caliber of Patrick Moore. Moore has claimed for years to be a founder of Greenpeace, an exaggeration of his actual role. Moore sailed on the first Greenpeace campaign, but he did not actually found the organization. According to Dorothy Stowe, an American Quaker, who immigrated to Canada in 1966 and founded Greenpeace with her husband Irving Stowe and other Canadian pacifists and ecologists, "Technically, Patrick Moore cannot be described as a founder of Greenpeace. He was there in early stages with a lot of others. But what he is doing now is unconscionable."

In "Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists, and Visionaries Changed the World," author Rex Weyler writes "Greenpeace was founded by Quakers Dorothy and Irving Stowe, Marie and Jim Bohlen, and journalists Ben Metcalfe, Dorothy Metcalfe, and Bob Hunter. This group organized the first campaign to sail a boat into the U.S. nuclear test zone on Amchitka Island in the Bering Sea.

"Canadian ecologist and carpenter Bill Darnell coined the name "Greenpeace" in February 1970. A year later, Moore wrote to the organization, applying for a crew position on the boat and was accepted."

Moore wrote his letter on March 16, 1971, two years after the group was founded, describing himself as a graduate student "in the field of resource ecology." Clearly, then, Moore was not a founder of Greenpeace. Founders don't write letters applying to join. After the Stowes, Metcalfes and Bob Hunter left the organization, Moore briefly served as president, from 1977 to 1979. Former members recall that his bullyism nearly scuttled Greenpeace. He launched an internal lawsuit against his rivals in other Greenpeace offices, was replaced as president in 1979, and eventually drummed out of the organization as a troublemaker.

According to Steve Sawyer, who still works with Greenpeace in Amsterdam, "Moore harbored hopes of regaining his throne. Those hopes were dashed when he was chucked off the board in 1985." Moore started a fish farm, but did not succeed. He then did public relations for the Canadian forestry industry, absurdly defending massive clearcuts as an ecologically viable logging practice.

In a newspaper column in 1993, authentic Greenpeace founder Bob Hunter, called Moore "The Judas of the ecology movement." According to Hunter, Moore "burned off his old buddies because of his hubris. He was always a Green Tory at heart."

Moore says he is the "head scientist" of his public relations firm, but has never published a peer-reviewed scientific study. Moore exaggerates his role in Greenpeace and his credentials as a scientist to serve as a public relations hack for hire.

Moore now gets big money defending the indefensible, posing as a reformed environmentalist who has seen the light ... any light he is paid to see. He has hyped genetically modified crops, PVCs, and brominated flame retardants. He has soft-pedaled dioxins and toxic mine tailings dumped by Newmont mines into Indonesia bays.

Now he wants to sell Vermont on its nuke power plant. In exchange for a paycheck, he portrays Three Mile Island as a "success story." But if a melt-down turned Vermont Yankee into a TMI-type, billion-dollar liability, would he pitch in his pitch man's paychecks to help you underwrite this "success?"

Years ago, when he worked for Greenpeace, Moore wrote: "Nuclear power plants are, next to nuclear warheads themselves, the most dangerous devices that man has ever created. Their construction and proliferation is the most irresponsible, in fact the most criminal, act ever to have taken place on this planet."

Greenpeace agrees. The "revival" of nuke power is a hype being perpetrated by phony experts. Wall Street is not jumping in to a technology distinguished only by fifty years of proven failure. Vermont Yankee must be shut, dismantled and buried. Closing it now will narrow the burden of its permanent waste dump and open the door on the booming revolution in the real energy of the future: renewables and efficiency.

Harvey Wasserman, senior advisor to Greenpeace USA since 1990, is author of "Solartopia: Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030," (available at www.harveywasserman.com). This article was written with research help from past and current Greenpeace associates. A version of this piece was published by the Brattleboro Reformer.

Source: http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0228-20.htm

What to do with 'those dangerous uranium stones'

2008-02-08T12:32:00.000+02:00

What to do with 'those dangerous uranium stones'
By Helena Kingwill, free-lance journalist and independent film-maker

Nuclear Energy is the government’s choice as “the cleaner, more eco-friendly” solution to South Africa’s increasing energy crisis. Industrialists promoting this technology use the argument that it is more environmentally friendly because in comparison to the monstrous CO2 emissions being pumped into our atmosphere by South Africa’s dinosaur coal powered power stations, the apparently slick, dinky high-tech Pebble Bed Modular reactors (PBMRs) look cleaner (in theory—they have not been built yet.) Even the controversial existing Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) at Koeberg doesn’t look like it’s contributing to global warming at the rate of her smoke-bellowing coal counterparts. However there is much more to the process of creating nuclear energy than meets the eye. The mining and processing of nuclear fuel does in fact create CO2 emissions, but that is almost beside the point. Media reports about global warming, important as they are, have given the spin doctors for nuclear energy a way to use the public’s own fear to pull wool over their eyes. What about the nuclear waste?

If Eskom's nuclear plan goes ahead, tons of nuclear waste will be produced every year. A whole radioactive industry will be built around it, from the mining of uranium to the processing of the fuel, all of which produce forms of waste. Anything that comes into contact with radiation is regarded as nuclear waste. It all has to be transported along our roads to the SA’s main nuclear waste-dump – Vaalputs near Springbok, from the city highways to the slippery gravel tracks of Namaqualand, where it is very easy for trucks to overturn.

Components of spent nuclear fuel (High-Level Waste) remain toxic for millions of years. Although we have been making it for over 20 years, South Africa still has no official plan for the safe disposal of this waste. Billions of Rands have already been spent on developing the P.B.M.R. yet the safe disposal of the waste it will produce, not to mention the decommissioning of the actual plant, have not fully been accounted for. Obviously this is much longer than any company or government can account for.

If this waste is buried, it could leak into the underground water and poison the ecosystem around it, spreading radiation like a cancer. The earth is constantly moving and shifting. According to paleontologist Dr. John Anderson, “continents drift at the rate of the growth of your fingernails.” One drop of nuclear waste can cause cancer, so by planting nuclear waste in the earth, we could be said to be planting a malignant tumor in the earth’s skin. This is the central metaphor of my documentary: “Buried in Earthskin” which has been screened at the Earthnotes Festival.

The community who are the focus of the film, and which the film constantly returns to, is a group of Namakhoi women whose husbands are workers at the nuclear waste dump Vaalputs in Namaqualand. They live in a village (Nourivier) about 100 km away from the waste dump but are extremely worried about the effects of the radiation on their health. Their greatest concern is that the nuclear waste could be seeping into the underground water supply. They are disappointed by false promises made by the apartheid government who deceived them into believing that the place was going to be a game reserve. They are surprisingly well informed about radiation and its possible effects on the environment and their health.

The Namakhoi people of Nourivier live in grass-domed homes and follow many old ways in their lifestyle. They are aware of which plants to pick for medicine and are very close to the earth. The women bake bread once a week in wood fired ovens made of clay. According to the Namaqualand Recreation and Education Centre (NAMREC) based in Springbok, although white farmers were moved off land near the dump, many "coloured" communities were not taken into account when the nuclear waste storage facility, Vaalputs, was planned. All around the world, the earth’s first peoples have been the most scarred victims of nuclear technology. In South Africa nuclear workers have suffered health problems due to being exposed to radiation, but have not been compensated due to the fact that they have not been able to prove, nor been in a position to sue or prove that their health problems are due to being exposed to radiation. “The distances are too large and the politics too big,’ one worker told me. This particular character, an ex-Vaalputs worker living in Nourivier, confided that he was never given the results of blood-tests taken one day. He felt that his body was un-naturally worn down by his work at the waste dump. (He died within a year of the interview.)

In comparison to nuclear technology, the government has paid far less interest in researching sustainable renewable alternative technologies such as solar and wind power. The reason given for this is that they will not be as reliable for big industry as centralized power stations. If they were given a chance, researchers developing this technology could find ways to store the energy generated by solar and wind technologies. More focus should be put on ways to reduce our wasteful consumption of energy. (Recent loose screws at Koeberg plunged half the Cape into darkness last year and forced us into a new awareness regarding reducing our energy consumption.)

Respected economist author and academic Patrick Bond puts us in the picture about the history of government spending with regards to energy, with the figures he has at his fingertips: “The problem of priorities appears to be getting worse, not better.” He said “Expenditure on renewable energy was less than 0.5% of the DME budget in 2002/03…. Indeed, perhaps the greatest waste remains in the area of nuclear research and development.”
He explains that historically the nuclear industry has always consumed more than its share of the national energy budget. Ironically it was started during the apartheid era, when the National Party secretly built 6 nuclear bombs. (These were officially dissembled when the A.N.C. came into power. However this new surge of interest in the technology makes one wonder if there may be a second agenda.)

“First considered in the 1960s, South Africa’s nuclear industry began in 1974 with the construction of the Koeberg nuclear station“, Bond explains. “The plant was commissioned a decade later. Nuclear development consumed two-thirds of the DME’s annual budget but only generated about 3% of South Africa’s primary energy supply and 5% of electricity in 1997”, explains Bond. “Eskom has been working on the PBMR since 1993, and therefore has a strong financial interest in keeping the programme going”, he says.

If only the present Government in its position of power on this decision about the future of our country’s energy sources would remember Nelson Mandela’s words when he spoke at the opening to the 5th session of the World Commission on the Ocean: "Our policy must rest on the solid moral foundation of dedication to the primacy of people and their long-term well being. We have to be on guard against temptations of short-term benefits and pressures from powerful forces at the expense of long-term interests of all. We cannot afford to bargain away the birthright of future generations."

The fate of future generations hangs in the balance, especially those poverty stricken communities living near the places where they will be mining, processing, burning and burying the waste from those “dangerous uranium stones’’ as Namakhoi elder, Oom Japie Dekeurs, calls them. Why not invest in even cleaner solar and wind energy projects which could be run by the communities themselves, generating revenue by selling excess power into the grid when weather is favourable, and creating far less hazardous employment for locals? Such decentralized projects would really bring power to the people thus preventing the burning of the last few trees and cutting down on lung diseases such as TB agitated by smoke, not to mention the tragic runaway fires that we see too often. Why I wonder, are we so stuck in the nuclear rut?
For more information about Buried in Earthskin, please contact Helena Kingwill at hdkingwill@polka.co.za.

About Buried in Earthskin:
A young female journalist sets off on a road trip to Namaqualand to see where the nuclear waste is buried. She meets a group of Namakhoi women living near the nuclear dump. In an attempt to understand the government’s decision to invest in nuclear as apposed to renewable energy, Helena visits experts and Nuclear facilities all over South Africa in what becomes a spiritual as well as picturesque physical journey which takes place over two years.

Credits: Helena Kingwill 2004 South Africa 56min

SOURCE: http://www.dlist-benguela.org/Monthly_Newsletter/Newsletter_4/What_to_do_with_%27those_dangerous_uranium_stones%27/

Small independent film upsets the powerful nuclear industry

2008-02-08T09:40:00.001+02:00

Earthlife Africa Cape Town

Tel/Fax: 27 21 447 4912

Email: coordinator@earthlife-ct.org.za

admin@earthlife-ct.org.za

7 February 2008

Press Release: Small independent film upsets the powerful nuclear industry

The South African nuclear industry has lodged a complaint with the Broadcasting Complaints Commission (BCC) over the screening on M-Net’s Carte Blanche of a documentary about the country’s nuclear industry.

Earthlife Africa is extremely concerned that this is an attempt by the powerful nuclear lobby to silence any dissenting voices.

A hearing date has been set for February 20 at the BCC’s offices in Johannesburg. The hearing is open to the public.

Entitled Uranium Road the documentary is about the history of the nuclear industry in South Africa as well as the present status of nuclear power in the country. It was screened on Carte Blanche, M-Net’s current affairs programme, in early November 2007. It sparked debate and clearly upset the powerful nuclear industry lobby. The Broadcasting Complaints Commission has received a complaint from NIASA (Nuclear Industry Association of South Africa).

“For many years now, the government of South Africa has been running headlong into a nuclear future despite the dangers and high costs of this technology and the availability of better alternatives. It is perhaps time for energy policy in South Africa to be decided upon, not by the Cabinet, but by its citizens. For this to be possible, the public needs to be informed. Clearly the nuclear industry cannot afford for an informed public to involve itself in energy choices because then the many myths and legends of nuclear power would be exposed”, said Earthlife Africa Cape Town spokesperson Maya Aberman

Earthlife Africa is staunchly against the roll-out of nuclear power and welcomes any debate that broadens the awareness about the impact of nuclear power on our environment. “We’ve spent millions of rands on researching nuclear power in the last decade but it has not been fully discussed with South African citizens.” Most South Africans are still unaware of the impact of nuclear power. The industry itself is constantly marketing ideas that nuclear power is a clean, safe and is even a renewable energy source. Nothing could be further from the truth if one considers:

· its contribution to climate change: the complete nuclear fuel chain is extremely energy intensive and dirty. The nuclear fuel cycle releases CO2 during mining, fuel production, transport, plant construction and decommissioning

· the poor economic track record of nuclear projects worldwide and in South Africa

· the fact that we are fast approaching uranium (nuclear fuel) peak

· the dangers posed by even low doses of radiation to human and environmental health

· the risk of catastrophic accident

· the fact that nuclear waste remains active and a threat to animal and human health for millions of years to come.

In addition, renewable energy can create about 27 times as many jobs as nuclear energy and jobs in the renewable energy generation sectors, like wind power, already have local people making up about 60% of their work force, and is increasing.

There are viable, safer and cleaner alternatives to nuclear power. There are sufficient renewable energy resources in South Africa to provide for 13% of the electricity demand by 2020, and easily 70% or more by 2050.

The film raises some of these concerns and has helped educate many South Africans who have little or no information about nuclear or renewable energy sources.

These developments beg the question; “Is the nuclear industry so vulnerable to open and informed debate that it finds it necessary to shut down any dissenting voices?”

For more information contact:

Maya Aberman

Earthlife Africa Cape Town

Tel: 021 447 4912

Cell: 076 754 6327

Tristen Taylor

Earthlife Africa Johannesburg

Tel: 011 339 3662

Cell: 084 250 2434

The hoax of eco-friendly nuclear energy

2008-02-06T21:15:00.000+02:00

The hoax of eco-friendly nuclear energy

By Karl Grossman

Nuclear advocates in government and the nuclear industry are engaged in a massive, heavily financed drive to revive atomic power in the United States-with most of the mainstream media either not questioning or actually assisting in the promotion.

"With a very few notable exceptions, such as the Los Angeles Times, the U.S.

media have turned the same sort of blind, uncritical eye on the nuclear industry's claims that led an earlier generation of Americans to believe atomic energy would be too cheap to meter," comments Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. "The nuclear industry's public relations effort has improved over the past 50 years, while the natural skepticism of reporters toward corporate claims seems to have disappeared."

The New York Times continues to be, as it was a half-century ago when nuclear technology was first advanced, a media leader in pushing the technology, which collapsed in the U.S. with the 1979 Three Mile Island and

1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant accidents. The Times has showered readers with a variety of pieces advocating a nuclear revival, all marbled with omissions and untruths. A lead editorial headlined "The Greening of Nuclear Power"

(5/13/06) opened:

Not so many years ago, nuclear energy was a hobgoblin to environmentalists, who feared the potential for catastrophic accidents and long-term radiation contamination. . . . But this is a new era, dominated by fears of tight energy supplies and global warming. Suddenly nuclear power is looking better.

Nukes add to greenhouse

Parroting a central atomic industry theme these days, the Times editors declared, "Nuclear energy can replace fossil-fuel power plants for generating electricity, reducing the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute heavily to global warming." As a TV commercial frequently aired by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the nuclear industry trade group,

states: "Nuclear power plants don't emit greenhouses gases, so they protect our environment."

What is left unmentioned by the NEI, the Times and other mainstream media making this claim is that the overall "nuclear cycle"-which includes uranium mining and milling, enrichment, fuel fabrication and disposal of radioactive waste-has significant greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

As Michel Lee, chair of the Council on Intelligent Energy & Conservation Policy, wrote in an (unpublished) letter to the Times, the

dirty secret is that nuclear power makes a substantial contribution to global warming. Nuclear power is actually a chain of highly energy-intensive industrial processes. These include uranium mining, conversion, enrichment and fabrication of nuclear fuel; construction and deconstruction of the massive nuclear facility structures; and the disposition of high-level nuclear waste.

She included information on "independent studies that document in detail the extent to which the entire nuclear cycle generates greenhouse emissions."

Separately, Lee wrote to a Times journalist stating that the "fiction" that nuclear power does not contribute to global warming "has been a prime feature of the nuclear industry's and Bush administration's PR campaign"

that "unfortunately . . . has been swallowed by a number of New York Times reporters, op-ed columnists and editors."

Greens for hire

In "The Greening of Nuclear Power," the Times, like other mainstream media touting a nuclear restart, also spoke of environmentalists changing their stance on nuclear power. "Two new leaders" have emerged "to encourage the building of new nuclear reactors," according to the editorial. They happen to be Christine Todd Whitman, George W. Bush's first Environmental Protection Agency administrator, and Patrick Moore, "a co-founder of Greenpeace." The Times heralded this as "the latest sign that nuclear power is getting a more welcome reception from some environmentalists."

However, "both Whitman and Moore . . . are being paid to do so by the Nuclear Energy Institute," noted the Center for Media and Democracy's Diane Farsetta (PRWatch.org, 3/14/07). In her piece "Moore Spin: Or, How Reporters Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Front Groups," Farsetta also

reported:

A Nexis news database search on March 1, 2007 identified 302 news items about nuclear power that cite Moore since April 2006. Only 37 of those

pieces-12 percent of the total-mention his financial relationship with NEI.

Whitman and Moore were hired as part of NEI's "Clean and Safe Energy Coalition" in 2006, which is "fully funded" by the institute, Farsetta noted. As for Moore and Greenpeace, his "association . . . ended in 1986,"

and he "has now spent more time working as a PR consultant to the logging, mining, biotech, nuclear and other industries . . . than he did as an environmental activist."

According to Harvey Wasserman, senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and co-author of Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience With Atomic Radiation (Brattleboro Reformer, 2/24/07), "Moore sailed on the first Greenpeace campaign, but he did not actually found the organization."

Wasserman went on to cite an actual founder of the organization, Bob Hunter, describing Moore as "the Judas of the ecology movement."

Scarce high-grade fuel

Insisting that "there is good reason to give nuclear power a fresh look,"

"The Greening of Nuclear Power" further claimed, "It can diversify our sources of energy with a fuel-uranium-that is both abundant and inexpensive."

This, too, was bogus. The uranium from which fuel used in nuclear power plants is made-so-called "high-grade" ore containing substantial amounts of fissionable uranium-235-is, in fact, not "abundant." As Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation told BBC News (11/29/05), another "dirty little secret" of nuclear power is that "startlingly, there's only a few decades left of the proven high-grade uranium ore it needs for fuel." This has been the projection for years.

Indeed, this limit on "high-grade" uranium ore is why the industry projects that, in the long-term, nuclear power will need to be based on breeder reactors running on manmade plutonium. But use of plutonium-fueled reactors has been stymied because they can explode like atomic bombs-they contain tons of plutonium fuel, while the first bomb using plutonium, dropped on Nagasaki, contained 15 pounds. Because it takes only a few pounds of plutonium to make an atomic bomb, they also constitute an enormous proliferation risk.

Blaming Jane Fonda

"The Jane Fonda Effect" (9/16/07), a Times Magazine column by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, blamed nuclear power's stall on the 1979 film The China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda, which opened days before the Three Mile Island partial meltdown. "Stoked by The China Syndrome," it caused "widespread panic," wrote Dubner and Levitt, even though, they maintained, the accident did not "produce any deaths, injuries or significant damage."

In fact, the utility that owned Three Mile Island has for years been quietly paying people whose family members died, contracted cancer or were otherwise impacted by the accident. While settlements range up to $1 million, the utility company continues to insist this does not acknowledge fault. The toll of Three Mile Island is chronicled in my television documentary Three Mile Island Revisited (EnviroVideo, 1993) and Wasserman's book Killing Our Own (which includes a devastating chapter, "People Died at Three Mile Island"), among other works.

But Dubner and Levitt continue undeterred, declaring, "The big news is that nuclear power may be making a comeback in the United States." They acknowledge the Chernobyl accident, stating that it "killed at least a few dozen people directly." They admit that it "exposed millions more to radiation," but keep silent about the consequences of this in terms of illness and death. This atomic version of Holocaust denial flies in the face of voluminous research on the disaster that puts the number of dead in the hundreds of thousands.

"At least 500,000 people-perhaps more-have already died out of the 2 million people who were officially classed as victims of Chernobyl in Ukraine," said Nikolai Omelyanets, deputy head of the National Commission for Radiation Protection in Ukraine (Guardian, 3/25/06). Dr. Alexey Yablokov, president of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy, calculates a death toll of 300,000. In the book Chernobyl: 20 Years On, which he co-edited, Yablokov writes, "In 20 years it has become clear that not tens, hundreds of thousands, but millions of people in the Northern Hemisphere have suffered and will suffer from the Chernobyl catastrophe."

The New York Times Magazine also published "Atomic Balm?" (7/16/06), by Jon Gertner; the subhead read, "For the first time in decades, increasing the role of nuclear power in the United States may be starting to make political, environmental and even economic sense." Gertner used the term nuclear "renaissance," and again forwarded the claim that "the supply [of uranium] is abundant."

Gertner told of how the "lifespan" for nuclear plants was set at 40 years because this was considered "how long a large nuclear plant could safely operate." This has "proved a conservative estimate," he states-without providing a factual basis. So the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been "granting 20-year extensions" to the 103 U.S. nuclear plants so they "can run for a total of 60 years." (Consider the safety and reliability of 60-year-old cars speeding down highways.)

"Even with such licensing renewals, though, it's doubtful the current fleet of plants will run for, say, 80 years," he continued, and "that means the industry, in a way, is in a race against time." It needs to build new plants because the "absence" of nuclear power "would probably pose tremendous challenges for the United States."

The New York Times also allows its nuclear advocacy to slip into its news stories. In an article (11/27/07) about the French nuclear power company Areva signing a deal with a Chinese atomic corporation, Times reporter John Tagliabue wrote of Areva chief executive Anne Lauvergeon's "long path from dirty hands to clean energy." The "dirty hands" referred to a youthful interest in archaeology; that nuclear power is "clean energy" appears to require no explanation.

Another story, datelined Fort Collins, Colorado (11/19/07), reported on two energy projects proposed for what the paper calls "a deeply green city."

Describing the plans as "exposing the hard place that communities like this across the country are likely to confront," Times reporter Kirk Johnson

wrote:

Both projects would do exactly what the city proclaims it wants, helping to produce zero-carbon energy. But one involves crowd-pleasing, feel-good solar power, and the other is a uranium mine, which has a base of support here about as big as a pinkie. Environmentalism and local politics have collided with a broader ethical and moral debate about the good of the planet, and whether some places could or should be called upon to sacrifice for their high-minded goals.

Other revivalists

Other media promoting a nuclear revival-their words prominently featured on NEI's website-include USA Today (3/5/06): "The facts are straightforward:

Nuclear power . . . creates virtually none of the pollution that causes climate change and delivers electricity cheaper than other forms of generation do." And the Augusta Chronicle (8/21/06): "Nuclear power-for decades perceived as an environmental scourge-is emerging as the cleanest and most cost-efficient source of energy available, a fact conceded even by environmentalists." And Investor's Business Daily (12/1/06): "We can worry about imaginary threats of nuclear energy or the real dangers of fossil fuel pollution."

Glenn Beck of CNN Headline News also joined the chorus of support (5/2/07):

"Look, America should embrace nuclear power, even if it's [just] to get off the foreign oil bandwagon." This is also common nuclear disinformation, that nuclear power is needed to displace foreign oil. The only energy produced by nuclear power is electricity-and only 3 percent of electricity in the U.S.

is generated with oil.

There are a few exceptions in the mainstream media, notably the other Times, the Los Angeles Times. "The dream that nuclear power would turn atomic fission into a force for good rather than destruction unraveled with the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 and the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986," the paper stated (7/23/07) in an editorial headlined: "No to Nukes: It's Tempting to Turn to Nuclear Plants to Combat Climate Change, but Alternatives Are Safer and Cheaper." Those who claim nuclear power "must be part of any solution" to global warming or climate change "make a weak case," said the L.A. Times, citing

the enormous cost of building nuclear plants, the reluctance of investors to fund them, community opposition and an endless controversy over what to do with the waste. . . . What's more, there are cleaner, cheaper, faster alternatives that come with none of the risks.

Staggering numbers

As to the risks, the mainstream media's handling-or non-handling-of the U.S.

government's most comprehensive study on the consequences of a nuclear plant accident is instructive. Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences 2 (known as CRAC-2) was done by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the 1980s. Bill Smirnow, an anti-nuclear activist, has tried for years to interest media in reporting on it-sending out information about it continually.

The study estimates the impacts from a meltdown at each nuclear plant in the U.S. in categories of "peak early fatalities," "peak early injuries," "peak cancer deaths" and "costs [in] billions." ("Peak" refers to the highest calculated value-not a "worst case scenario," as worse assumptions could have been chosen.) For the Indian Point 3 plant north of New York City, for example, the projection is that a meltdown would cause 50,000 "peak early fatalities," 141,000 "peak early injuries," 13,000 "peak cancer deaths," and

$314 billion in property damage-and that's based on the dollar's value in 1980, so the cost today would be nearly $1 trillion. For the Salem 2 nuclear plant in New Jersey, the study projects 100,000 "peak early fatalities,"

70,000 "peak early injuries," 40,000 "peak cancer deaths," and $155 billion in property damage. The study provides similarly staggering numbers across the country.

"I've sent the CRAC-2 material out for years to media and have never heard a thing," Smirnow told Extra!:

Not anyone in the media ever even asked me a question. There's no excuse for this media inattention to such an important subject, and it shows how they're falling flat on their faces in not performing their purported mission of educating and informing the public. Whatever their reason or reasons for not informing their readers and listeners, the effect is one of helping the nuclear power industry and hurting the public. If the public was informed, this new big pro-nuke push would never happen.

Also in the way of sins of omission is the media silence on "routine emissions"-the amount of radioactivity the U.S. government allows to be routinely released by nuclear plants. "It doesn't take an accident for a nuclear power plant to release radioactivity into our air, water and soil,"

says Kay Drey of Beyond Nuclear at the Nuclear Policy Research Institute.

"All it takes is the plant's everyday routine operation, and federal regulations permit these radioactive releases. Rarely, if ever, is this reported by media." The radioactive substances regularly emitted include tritium, krypton and xenon. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission sets a "permissible" level for these "routine emissions," but, as Drey states, "permissible does not mean safe."

Hidden subsidies

Another lonely voice amid the media nuclear cheerleaders is the Las Vegas Sun, which recently has been especially outraged by $50 billion in loan guarantees for the nuclear industry to build new nuclear plants included in the 2007 Energy Bill. The Sun demanded (8/1/07): "Pull the Plug Already."

In reporting on the economics of nuclear power, mainstream media virtually never mention the many government subsidies for it, while continuing to claim that it's "cost-effective" (Augusta Chronicle, 8/21/06). One such giveaway is the Price-Anderson Act, which shields the nuclear industry from liability for catastrophic accidents. Price-Anderson, supposed to be temporary when first enacted in 1957, has been extended repeatedly and now limits liability in the event of an accident to $10 billion, despite CRAC-2's projections of consequences far worse than that.

Writing on CommonDreams.org (9/11/07), Ralph Nader explored the economic issue. "Taxpayers alert!" he declared:

The atomic power corporations are beating on the doors in Washington to make you guarantee their financing for more giant nuclear plants. They are pouring money and applying political muscle to Congress for up to $50 billion in loan guarantees to persuade an uninterested Wall Street that Uncle Sam will pay for any defaults on industry construction loans. . . .

The atomic power industry does not give up. Not as long as Uncle Sam can be dragooned to be its subsidizing, immunizing partner. Ever since the first of 100 plants opened in 1957, corporate socialism has fed this insatiable atomic goliath with many types of subsidies.

Ignored alternatives

Yet another claim by mainstream media in pushing for a nuclear revival is the "success" of the French nuclear program. 60 Minutes (4/8/07) did it in a segment called "Vive Les Nukes." (See FAIR Action Alert, 4/18/07.) Correspondent Steve Kroft started with the nuclear-power-doesn't-contribute-to-global-warming myth:

With power demands rising and concerns over global warming increasing, what the world needs now is an efficient means of producing carbon-free energy.

And one of the few available options is nuclear, a technology whose time seemed to come and go, and may now be coming again. . . . With zero greenhouse gas emissions, the U.S. government, public utilities and even some environmental groups are taking a second look at nuclear power, and one of the first places they're looking to is France, where it's been a resounding success.

Though she was totally ignored, Linda Gunter of Beyond Nuclear told 60 Minutes of radioactive contamination in the marine life off Normandy where the French reprocessing center sits, leukemia clusters in people living along that coast, and massive demonstrations in French cities earlier in the year protesting construction of new nuclear power plants.

The Union of Concerned Scientists was upset by 60 Minutes' downplaying of alternative energy technologies such as wind and solar. UCS's Alden Meyer wrote to 60 Minutes:

In fact, wind power could supply more energy to the U.S. grid than nuclear does today, and when combined with a mix of energy efficiency and other renewable energy sources, could provide a continuous energy supply that would help us make dramatic reductions in global warming.

Dismissal of renewable energy forms is another major facet of mainstream media's drive for a nuclear power revival. As the St. Petersburg Times put it (12/08/06), "While renewable sources of energy such as solar power are still in the developmental stage, nuclear is the new green." Renewables Are Ready was the title of a 1999 book written by two UCS staffers. Today, they are more than ready. "Wind is the cheapest form of new generation now being built," wrote Greenpeace advisor Wasserman (Free Press, 4/10/07). He pointed to an "array of wind, solar, bio-fuels, geothermal, ocean thermal and increased conservation and efficiency."

Wasserman has also written about another element ignored by most mainstream media (Free Press, 7/9/07): "The switch to renewables defunds global terrorism. Atomic reactors are pre-deployed weapons of radioactive mass destruction. Shutting them down ends the fear of apocalyptic disaster by both terror and error." He stressed, again, that safe, clean energy is here and "we could replace everything with available technology that could easily supply all our needs while allowing a sustainable planet to survive and thrive."

The one green thing

What are the causes of the media nuclear dysfunction? The obvious problem is media ownership. General Electric, for one, is both a leading nuclear plant manufacturer and a media mogul, owning NBC and other outlets. (For years, CBS was owned by Westinghouse; Westinghouse and GE are the Coke and Pepsi of nuclear power.) There have been board and financial interlocks between the media and nuclear industries. There is the long-held pro-nuclear faith at media such as the New York Times. (See sidebar.)

There is also the giant public relations operation-both corporate, led by the NEI, and government, involving the Department of Energy and its national nuclear laboratories. "You have the NEI and the nuclear industry propagandizing on nuclear power, and journalists taking down what the industry is saying and not looking at the veracity of their claims,"

Greenpeace USA nuclear policy analyst Jim Riccio told Extra!.

And then there's lots of money. FAIR recently exposed (Action Alert,

8/22/07) how National Public Radio, which broadcasts many pro-nuclear pieces, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from "nuclear operator Sempra Energy" and Constellation Energy, "which belongs to Nustart Energy, a 10-company consortium pushing for new nuclear power plant construction."

The only thing green about nuclear power is the nuclear establishment's dollars.

Karl Grossman is a professor of journalism at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury. Books he has written about nuclear technology include Cover Up: What You ARE NOT Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power. He has hosted many television programs on nuclear technology on EnviroVideo.com

ATOMIC BALM: NUCLEAR REVIVAL IGNORES CASUALTIES

2008-02-04T11:05:00.001+02:00

Rachel's Democracy & Health News #936, December 6, 2007

ATOMIC BALM: NUCLEAR REVIVAL IGNORES CASUALTIES

[Rachel's introduction: In the U.S., atomic bombs are no longer being tested. However, 104 nuclear power reactors still operate here, producing the same radioactive elements found in bomb test fallout, and people living downwind are routinely exposed to low levels of radioactivity.]

By Joseph J. Mangano

Nuclear power plants employ a controlled atomic fission reaction, splitting uranium atoms to create heat to boil water to make steam to turn a turbine to generate electricity. Because nuclear power is so complex, it is accident-prone and unforgiving -- small errors can have large consequences. Because of these important disadvantages, for the past three decades it has looked as if nuclear power were a dying industry.

But now the nuclear industry has seized on global warming to promote atomic power plants once again as necessary and safe. >From politicians to corporate executives and conservative pundits, we hear that reactors are "clean" or "emission free" -- with no evidence offered to support the claims. Unfortunately, this baseless promotion emanates from a long-standing culture of deception that has plagued the industry since its beginnings. Earlier this year the British magazine, the Economist, characterized the U.S. nuclear industry as "a byword for mendacity, secrecy and profligacy with taxpayers' money.

Half a century ago, as America produced and exploded hundreds of atomic bombs (1054 nuclear tests in all, 331 in the atmosphere), public officials assured everyone that low-dose radiation exposures were harmless. But after the Cold War ended, barriers to the truth gave way. Government-funded research found that nuclear weapons workers and those exposed to fallout from atomic bomb tests in Nevada suffered from cancer in large numbers. The BEIR VII study. published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2005, ended the debate on this question: it is now firmly established that any amount of radioactive exposure carries some risk of harm. The only safe dose is zero.

In the U.S., atomic bombs are no longer being tested. However, 104 nuclear power reactors still operate here, producing the same radioactive elements found in bomb test fallout, and people living downwind are routinely exposed to low levels of radioactivity. Government regulators have established "permissible limits" for radioactive reactor emissions, declaring the resulting exposures "safe" -- contrary to the findings of the National Academy's BEIR VII study.

The U.S. nuclear power industry stopped growing in the mid-1970s. Until this year, no new reactors have been ordered in the U.S. since 1978, and several dozen reactors have been closed permanently.[1] But fears of global warming and an ardently pro-nuclear Administration in Washington have laid the groundwork for an industry revival.

The industry's revival plan has four parts:

1) Enlarging the capacity of existing reactors;

2) Keeping old reactors running beyond their design lifetime;

3) Operating old reactors more hours per year; and

4) Building new reactors.

To help promote the so-called nuclear renaissance, health risks from low-level radiation are once again being ignored or denied -- even though evidence of harm exists.

1. Expanding Existing Reactors -- Vermont Yankee

Since March 1993, utilities have submitted 99 requests to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for licenses to expand reactor capacity, and the NRC has approved all 99. The added capacity of 4400 megawatts is the equivalent of four large reactors. The NRC is considering 12 more applications, totaling another 1100 megawatts.

Most expansions have been small, but 10 of the 99 have raised capacity by 15 to 20%. Almost all sailed through with little public opposition. One exception was the Vermont Yankee reactor on the Connecticut River where Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire converge. It is the 11th oldest of the U.S.'s 104 reactors, and at 510 megawatts electrical, the 5th smallest.

Entergy Nuclear of Jackson, Miss. acquired Vermont Yankee in 2002 as part of its campaign to buy aging reactors to maximize their output and profit potential. Entergy wanted more than a 510 megawatt reactor, so it requested a 20% upgrade for Vermont Yankee -- the oldest U.S. reactor considered for an upgrade. The estimated cost was $60 million.[2]

Since 1972, when Vermont Yankee first generated power, Vermont has become an increasingly liberal state, especially on environmental issues. Hundreds of local residents opposed the expansion by packing auditoriums at several public meetings, making their fury known. Ira Helfand, a local emergency room physician, spoke up at one of them:

"My emergency room cannot deal with the casualties that would be produced by an accident at this plant... Now Entergy wants to make this plant even more dangerous by upgrading its production beyond what it was supposed to tolerate?.. . This plant should not be uprated. It shouldn't be allowed to operate. It should be shut down."[3]

Residents of Windham County, Vt., where the reactor is located, are well educated. The county poverty rate is low, and the mostly rural county of 44,000 has few polluting industries. Along with world class medical care in nearby Boston, these factors suggest that no unusually high rates of disease should exist. However, from 1979-2004 the county death rate was 7.2% below the U.S. -- except for cancer, which was 1.6% higher. These figures are age-adjusted, so the excess cancers are not attributable to an aging population. And the anomaly in Windham appears to be growing; most recently (1999-2004), the cancer death rate in Windham county has risen to 5.7% above the national average.[4]

The NRC refused to consider that radioactive emissions from Vermont Yankee might be contributing to the rise in cancer deaths in Windham county. In March 2006, the NRC approved the expansion, and an appeal by the New England Coalition Against Nuclear Power was turned down by the state Supreme Court in September 2007. Entergy is now operating an expanded Vermont Yankee reactor.

2. Keeping Old Reactors Running -- Oyster Creek, New Jersey

With Wall Street refusing to finance new reactors after the accident at Three Mile Island, utilities decided to increase profits by operating old reactors longer than originally planned. The NRC eased regulations and in this decade has approved 47 of 47 applications to allow reactors to operate past the initial 40-year design period up to a total of 60 years.[1] Dozens more applications are expected.

One exception to the federal rubber-stamping of license extensions is the Oyster Creek reactor in Lacey, New Jersey, about 60 miles from both Philadelphia and New York City. Oyster Creek is the oldest of the 104 U.S. reactors and one of the smallest (636 megawatts electrical). In the 1990s, the New Jersey-based GPU Corporation planned to close the reactor. This changed when AmerGen (a subsidiary of Exelon, the largest U.S. reactor operator) bought Oyster Creek and requested a license extension in 2005.[1]

The fight is going on now. Public hearings have been well attended by supporters and opponents of license extension. Local media has taken an interest; the Asbury Park Press, the most widely read newspaper in central New Jersey, has published numerous editorials opposing re- licensing. Governors James McGreevey and Jon Corzine have both publicly opposed re-licensing, as have many state and local elected officials. Governments in 19 local towns have passed resolutions of opposition. Legal interventions allowed by the NRC were filed by a coalition of citizen groups and by the state Department of Environmental Protection.

Information on radioactive contamination and local health became part of the Oyster Creek dialogue. A well publicized study (partly funded by the state legislature) of more than 300 baby teeth of New Jersey children, many living near Oyster Creek, found that average levels of radioactive Strontium-90 (Sr-90) had doubled from the late 1980s to the late 1990s.[5] More importantly, increases in Sr-90 near Oyster Creek were followed by similar increases in childhood cancer rates several years later.[6]

Ocean County, where the reactor is situated, has a population of nearly 600,000, up from 108,000 in 1960. Its residents are relatively well off, and have access to good medical care locally and in nearby major cities. But the low death rate for all causes other than cancer from 1979-2004 (8.4% below the U.S.) has been offset by an unexpectedly high cancer death rate (8.8% above the U.S. average).[4] With 39,000 county residents dying in the past quarter century, the number of "excess cancer deaths" exceeds 6,000.

The fate of Oyster Creek remains uncertain. In July, Exelon funded a group led by heavy-duty New Jersey lobbyists to ensure the application is pushed through. Local activist Janet Tauro reacted to the new group's formation by declaring,

"Exelon is putting its money into creating a bogus environmental group designed to lure the public's attention away from safety issues and scare us into believing that Oyster Creek's closure would hurt the region economically."[7]

3. Operating Old Reactors More Often -- Indian Point, New York

As recently as the late 1980s, U.S. reactors only ran at 63% of capacity; they were shut down 37% of the time for maintenance and repair. But larger corporations buying old reactors in the 1990s made it their mission to boost productivity, and now U.S. reactors run 90% of the time.[8] This is good news for the balance sheet, but running old reactors more hours per year raises safety and health concerns.

The two reactors at Indian Point, 35 miles north of New York City, represent a good example of this change. Until the mid-1990s, they only operated 57% of the time. But after Entergy Nuclear bought Indian Point, it raised the current productivity rate to 95%.[1]

Indian Point is in Westchester County, a wealthy area with a population of nearly one million. In the period 1979-2004, the cancer death rate in the county was just slightly below the national average (-1.8%), but well below the U.S. average for all other causes (-12.9%). If the cancer death rate in Westchester had been as far below the national average as deaths from all other causes (-12.9%), there would have been about 6,000 fewer cancer deaths in Westchester during the period.

Unlike reactor upgrades, license extensions, and new reactor orders, there are no mandated public hearings when a nuclear utility simply raises productivity. Thus, this issue has largely been ignored, at Indian Point and elsewhere.

4. Ordering New Reactors -- Calvert Cliffs, Maryland.

In 2005 the Bush Administration convinced Congress to enact billions in loan guarantees for new reactor construction because of continued disinterest from Wall Street; billions more in federal subsidies are currently under discussion now on Capitol Hill. With the loan guarantees put in place in 2005, utilities got serious about ordering new reactors. Over 30 have been discussed, and the dry spell of no orders since 1978 ended on July 31, 2007 when Unistar Nuclear submitted an application to the NRC for a new reactor at Calvert Cliffs, Md.

Unistar was formed when Constellation Energy of Baltimore failed to secure funds from Wall Street financiers for its new Calvert Cliffs reactor. The 2005 federal guarantees would only back 90% of costs, and private bankers have flatly refused to put up the other 10%. Constellation teamed up with the French company Areva to form Unistar. Areva put up $350 million in cash, promising to up the ante to $625 million. With financing secured, the new reactor was ordered.[9]

Unistar proposes to build a $4 billion, 1600 megawatt reactor at Calvert Cliffs. There is no precedent for a reactor this size; the average for the current U.S. reactors is about 1000 megawatts, with the largest being 1250. At the very earliest, assuming a fast, smooth regulatory review, rapid construction, and no legal holdups, the reactor would begin operating in 2014.

The Calvert Cliffs plant is on the west bank of the Chesapeake Bay, 45 miles southeast of Washington. Since the mid-1970s, two reactors have operated at the site. Until recently, the area was sparsely populated; but the Calvert County population has swelled from 16,000 to 90,000 since 1960. The county enjoys a high living standard, with a low poverty rate and good access to medical care in Washington.

Calvert County is a healthy place -- with the exception of cancer. From 1979-2004, the death rate was 9.2% above the U.S. for cancer, but 3.0% below the nation for other causes. Most recently (1999-2004), the cancer rate rose to 13.8% above the national average.

All local leaders support the new nuclear plant at Calvert Cliffs. Wilson Parran, the chair of the Calvert Board of Commissioners, sounded the clarion call that the promise of economic gain trumps any possible health hazards:

"From a national perspective, nuclear energy is our largest source of clean energy and a critical piece of our nation's energy strategy. It is imperative to reverse the growth of greenhouse gas emissions and Calvert County stands ready to share in our nation's responsibility to provide resources that produce energy."[9]

Putting Health First is Essential in Energy Policy

Unusually high cancer rates in counties like Windham, Ocean, Calvert, and Westchester should be taken seriously; they are not what you would expect among relatively well-off populations.[10] Even if a large scale reactor accident never occurs in this country, nuclear plants will still continuously emit about 100 different radioactive chemicals. The number of casualties is difficult to estimate, but it may well be in the thousands. And any expansion of nuclear power would only increase radioactive emissions.

Furthermore, threats to human health are not the only problem associated with the nuclear power industry. As we know from the recent history of India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa, North Korea, and Syria, a nation that aims to build an atomic bomb begins by building a nuclear power plant. This is where they develop the expertise, the techniques, and the experience needed to build a bomb. The only sure way to minimize the proliferation of nuclear weapons would be to shut down the nuclear power industry world-wide. So long as the civilian nuclear power industry exists, there will be a well-worn path from nuclear power to nuclear weapons, accompanied by a growing threat of terrorist attack beyond anything we have yet imagined.

Fortunately, we do not need nuclear power at all. There are many alternatives readily available. Many of these were discussed recently in Arjun Makhijani's thorough study, "Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy." Nuclear power is simply too dirty, too dangerous, and too unnecessary to warrant further support.

==============

Joseph J. Mangano MPH MBA is Executive Director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, a research and educational organization based in New York.

References

[1] U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, www.nrc.gov.

[2] Matthew L. Wald. Safety of Adding to Nuclear Plants' Capacity is Questioned. New York Times, January 26, 2004.

[3] Eesha Williams, Hundreds Attend Hearing on Vermont Yankee. Transcript of New Hampshire Public Radio broadcast, April 1, 2004.

[4] National Center for Health Statistics, Mortality -- underlying cause of death. Includes ICD-9 cancer codes 140.0-239.9 (1979-1998) and ICD-10 cancer codes C00-D48.9 (1999-2004). http://wonder.cdc.gov/mortSQL.html

[5] Mangano J.J. and others. An unexpected rise in Strontium-90 in US deciduous teeth in the 1990s. The Science of the Total Environment Vol. 317 (2003), pgs. 37-51.

[6] Mangano J.J. A short latency between radiation exposure from nuclear plants and cancer in young children. International Journal of Health Services Vol. 36, No. 1 (2006), pgs. 113-135.

[7] Janet Tauro, But Safety Issues at Oyster Creek Can't Be Ignored. Asbury Park Press, September 9, 2007.

[8] Division of Planning, Budget, and Analysis. Information Digest. NUREG-1350. Washington DC: Nuclear Regulatory Commission, annual volumes.

[9] Dan Morse. Agency Describes Process to License Calvert Cliffs Plant. Washington Post, August 15, 2007.

[10] U.S. Bureau of the census, 2000 census, state and county quick facts. The national average of U.S. residents living below the poverty levels was 12.7%, which is higher than the average for Windham County, Vt. (9.0%), Ocean County, N.J. (7.6%), Westchester County, N.Y. (8.9%), and Calvert County, Md. (5.4%). The national average percent of residents over age 25 who graduated from high school was 80.4%, but was higher for Windham County, Vt. (87.3%), Ocean County, N.J. (83.0%), Westchester County, N.Y. (83.6%), and Calvert County, Md. (86.9%). http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/index.html

Open the door for discussion."

2007-11-01T11:00:00.000+02:00

“Open the door for discussion…”

Public Enterprises director-general Portia Molefe’s letter to the FM on 12 October 2007 refers:

Dear Portia Molefe

Your 12 October letter to the FM and is noted with grave concern not only for the standard “P.R.” lines which are common from the nuclear industry itself, but for the recalcitrance of senior officials and decision-makers in this country to determine for yourselves the truth about nuclear energy and the nuked workers in our country, let alone nuked communities such as Wonderfonteinspruit and others.

The “alarmist misinformation” you write about is based on hard facts backed up by doctors, scientists and academics which volunteer-based groups with no vested interest other than environmental & social justice have literally been begging this government, from the President down, to consider.

We have a hard-won democracy which came with it a promise of transparent accountability, public participation and the best interests of a nation in terms of a precious constitution and some of the best environmental laws in the world. So why aren’t you more concerned about holding the participatory nuclear summit that was promised, and calling for truly independent Commissions of Inquiry into the abuses of the nuclear sector?

Instead, we’re seeing constitutional rights being over-ridden and our precious laws amended to suit those with vested interests. Polluters aren’t paying, and instead are getting away with “regulating & investigating” themselves with taxpayer funds. Nuked workers from the mining and nuclear sectors are seriously ill or dead and still battling for compensation. Some of these cases will soon be taken to court.

In South Africa, the nuclear industry has operated in complete secrecy in its 40 year existence. Koeberg stands accused of falsifying workers’ records, and Nuclear Energy Corporation of SA (NECSA) stands publicly accused of having deceived parliament this year with statements that no workers have been found “with abnormalities resulting from exposure to radiation”.

It is interesting to note that during the years most people in this country believed nuclear ambitions had been shelved – BEFORE the nuclear “renaissance” was announced - certain information had started becoming available.

For example, around 1999 the Council for Nuclear Safety (CNS) estimated that at least 10,000 mineworkers, or roughly one in 20 mineworkers, were exposed to radiation levels that exceeded safety limits. In 1998, according to CNS estimates, 1 000 employees at Harmony Gold mine alone were exposed to radiation levels that in some instances were three times higher than the annual dose limit of 20 mSv a year. At Nigel, workers were exposed to dose levels of up to 130 mSv a year, or seven times higher than the allowable limit. (Business Report Oct. 7, 1999).

In February this year during the National Nuclear Regulator (NNR) portfolio committee briefing of its annual budget, its CEO Mr. Magumela replied to a question that in 2002, 7 931 people had been exposed to unacceptably high doses, but this number had declined year by year to 1133, 424, and 8. He said there had been “an improvement” over the last five years but failed to mention this was as a result of a largely stagnant uranium mining industry at the time.
Necsa’s own annual report of 2003/2004 (the only one now obtainable from their entire existence since 1960) clearly states that – among 12 reported incidents of excessively exposed workers - one individual in their employ received 12.08mSv in the year under review, and that in the previous year another individual received an annual dose of above 36.38nSv. Two other individuals received an annual dose of above 10mSv/a, which is way in excess of the ALARA[1] principle which outlines international limits.
Most international companies average a report of 1 incident every 2 years – 12 admitted incidents reported in one year (2003/2004 under review) are excessive by anyone’s standards.
Has the nuclear industry succeeded in performing a complete coup d’etat over this country’s nuclear & energy policies with its own misleading propaganda? Or why are our decision-makers standing firm in not wanting to know the truth?

Volunteer groups have no vested interest in making up these stories. Over 500 former nuclear workers in the past 3 years have come forward with details about occupational illnesses. Already 17 of these known workers in the Necsa group alone have died in the past two years and at least 24 children are orphans. Are you hoping that all die and the problem goes away?
Murray Coombs, an internationally renowned specialist, examined 208 of the workers. He was barely paid from this work and is not anti-nuclear either. In at least eight cases he found that the worker had been exposed to radiation that Coombs believed had caused their diseases. Each of his diagnoses was backed up by the company’s own records he struggled to obtain. He found indications of another 72 occupational diseases that required further tests for 52 workers. Most he believed were caused by exposure to chemicals rather than radiation. But Earthlife ran out of funds and could not finance the tests. Necsa was requested to conduct the additional tests but refused to allow these workers a representative to monitor the process, instead producing their own white-washed report again at great taxpayer expense.
Dr. Coombs’ conclusion is that there will be a significant increase of disease amongst ex-workers which will only show itself over the next 20 years.

Even the scant official records of both NECSA and the National Nuclear Regulator (NNR) documents the over-exposure to radiation of workers. And now our children, genetically deformed from radioactive and chemical contamination, are being born out of the Wonderfonteinspruit.

Radiation affects all life, without exception – people, plants and animals are all affected, be it with leukemia, birth defects, mutations, sterility, or many other potential impacts. There is no debate about whether radiation kills, maims, causes mutations, is cumulative, causes leukemia (mainly in children), cancers, respiratory illnesses and attacks the immune system (with children, pregnant women and the elderly being the most vulnerable).

Stop the slander Portia Molefe! Stop the propaganda! Open your doors to some sobering discussion on the issue before you go ahead and help to prop up a seriously flawed industry which has some evil consequences for our embattled nation. We have been begging you to listen.

Yours sincerely

Dominique Gilbert
PELINDABA WORKING GROUP

Second nuclear power station in SA

2007-10-29T20:37:00.000+02:00

Second conventional nuclear power station, South Africa

By: Sheila Barradas

Published: 26 Oct 07 - 0:00

Name and location
Second conventional nuclear power station, South Africa.

Project description
The Eskom board has approved the investigation of up to 20 000 MW of nuclear capacity over the next 20 years, as part of its plans to roll out 40 000 MW of capacity over the same period. The initial phase of the investigation will concentrate on one nuclear power station of about 4 000 MW, with provision being made for future expansion.

The proposed nuclear power station will be of the pressurised water reactor type. The nuclear power plant will in many ways resemble the structure of a conventional thermal power plant; the difference will be in the manner in which heat is produced. In a fossil plant, oil, gas or coal is fired in the boiler, which means that the chemical energy of the fuel is converted into heat. In a nuclear power plant, however, energy from the fission chain reaction is used. Cooling water for the nuclear power station will be used directly from the sea. Although detailed design still needs to be completed, it is estimated that the entire development will require some 31 ha, including all auxiliary infrastructure. The proposed nuclear power station will include a nuclear reactor, a turbine complex, spent fuel, nuclear fuel storage facilities, waste handling facilities, an intake and outfall basin, and various auxiliary services infrastructure.

Value
Reportedly, the project is not part of Eskom's current five-year, R150-billion expansion plan, but will be part of the second phase, expected to start in 2012. A figure for the project has not been confirmed but the upfront capital cost will possibly be as high as R100-billion.

Duration
Should the proposed project be authorised, it is estimated that the construction of the nuclear power station could start in 2009/10, with the first unit being commissioned in 2016.

Breakdown of main contracts
Not stated.

Client
Eskom.

Latest developments
Eskom has identified the world's biggest nuclear power firm, Areva, and US-based Westinghouse, as the vendors to build South Africa's first new nuclear power station in more than 20 years, and construction could start as early as in 2010.The plant will be built at one of five possible sites along South Africa's coastline.

Eskom hopes to have a letter of intent signed with the preferred bidder sometime in 2008.

It will then submit an environmental-impact assessment for the plant's construction in 2009, and hopes for a decision from the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism in the same year. Construction for the first unit will then take "at least six years" to complete.

Participants
None stated.

Construction materials
Not stated.

On budget and on time?
Too early to state.

Contact details for project information
Eskom, tel +27 11 800 8111.
For information relating to the public-participation process contact Acer (Africa) Environmental Management Consultants, Bongi Shinga or June Mottram,
tel 086 010 4958, fax 035 340 2232 or email nuclear1@acerafrica.co.za.

Concerns Mount Over Nuclear Energy After Series of Scares

2007-10-17T18:52:00.000+02:00

Concerns Mount Over Nuclear Energy After Series of Scares

Sceptics say recent errors highlight the drawbacks of nuclear energy

Irregularities at nuclear reactors in Germany and Japan in recent weeks have rekindled safety fears and raised tough questions about nuclear energy amid increasing environmental concerns.

The nuclear plant at Brunsbüttel in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein is now the world's safest. It's not surprising considering the reactor was shut down following a technical irregularity earlier this month.

The problem at Brunsbüttel, one of 17 nuclear reactors in Germany, is by no means the only mishap in recent months that has increasingly called the safety of atomic power into question.

Earlier this month, an earthquake caused leaks at a reactor in northwestern Japan and led to low-level radiation, reviving fears about nuclear safety, and the closure of the Brunsbüttel plant in Germany followed a fire at another reactor close to Hamburg.

Around the world, there are 438 nuclear plants currently in operation. The majority are in industrialized nations -- 104 in the US, 59 in France and 31 in Russia.

How dangerous were the incidents?

Despite the recent slew of incidents at nuclear power stations, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the errors in Germany, Sweden and Japan were exceptions and certainly did not pose a danger.

That's a view echoed by Klaus Kotthoff of the GRS group, an independent nuclear assessment and research organization.

While there is no technology that's free of errors, Kotthoff pointed out that nuclear power plants are subject to a range of registration procedures and measures aimed at managing irregularities -- as was the case at two nuclear plants in Germany earlier this month.

A fire broke out last month at the Krümmel nuclear plant near Hamburg in Germany

"I believe these incidents were not noteworthy from a technical security point of view," Kotthoff said.
Critics of nuclear energy, however, don't buy the argument. Henrik Paulitz of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) said the recent German incidents were dangerous.

"The reactor protection system was activated. That only happens in serious cases," Paulitz said, adding that they weren't isolated cases.
There are several nuclear incidents in Germany about which the public is not sufficiently informed, he said. The information that is released is mostly "incomprehensible" and the controversial backgrounds are often concealed.

"Serious security deficits are usually glossed over," Paulitz said.

Experts split over nuclear safety

Experts remain divided about the safety of nuclear reactors.

While Kotthoff said German plants are generally considered the safest, a 1997 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked the German nuclear power station Biblis B second to last in an international nuclear power plant comparison. Only the Maine Yankee plant in the US fared worse, and it's since been shut down.

But Paulitz said other nuclear power stations too aren't much better.

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Germany is again debating whether to stick to a nuclear energy phase out"An unfortunate mixture of technical problems and human error can at any time cause a major nuclear meltdown anywhere," he said.

The recent string of incidents comes at a time when nuclear energy seems to be undergoing somewhat of a revival. Considered one of the most cost-effective forms of generating electricity as prices of oil and gas rise, nuclear energy is largely favored by rapidly expanding economies in eastern Europe and Asia to meet their spiraling energy needs.

"The debates about climate change and reducing emissions also play a role here," said Alan McDonald of the IAEA. "And naturally, it's about securing production."

Nuclear energy plagued by problems

Nuclear energy production, however, remains problematic as most countries using nuclear energy need to import uranium. According to the IAEA, there are only 4.7 tons of economically viable uranium reserves worldwide. Given current levels of usage, experts believe stocks will only last for another 60 years. That would mean that uranium would be depleted faster than oil and gas reserves.

Experts also pointed to the unsolved problem of disposing nuclear waste, which remains radioactive for decades.

Experts estimate that uranium stocks will only last another 60 years

Paulitz said the environmental advantages of using nuclear energy are also limited since it only provides an estimated 1.2 percent of the world's energy needs. For nuclear energy to make a real difference in cutting greenhouse gas emissions, thousands of new reactors would have to be built, he said. That is hardly possible given the nuclear industry's low production capacity.

"It's only about sustaining energy production on this low level and maintaining the technology -- also because of interest in nuclear weapons," Paulitz said, adding that the world could easily do without this marginal energy source.

Security poses biggest hurdle

IAEA's Mcdonald said that security issues increasingly pose the biggest hurdle when it comes to using nuclear energy. The Vienna-based nuclear watchdog has set up an entire department to explore ways of preventing the misuse of nuclear materials and terrorist attacks on reactors.
"Terrorists who plant to blow up a nuclear reactor can do so with relatively easy means," Paulitz said. "Protecting against such attacks is just not possible."

Lights on now, but a million years of disposal problems

2007-10-17T18:21:00.000+02:00

Lights on now, but a million years of disposal problems

The role nuclear energy can and will play in a carbon constrained future is being hotly debated – particularly by socially responsible investors.

Nuclear power is routinely excluded from socially responsible investment fund portfolios, along with other often-maligned industries including tobacco, alcohol and mining.

But with demand for energy growing, oil prices climbing and concerns about climate change on the rise, some argue it is time to include nuclear power in the responsible energy equation.

Calvert, a leading US socially responsible investor, is one fund thought to be reconsidering its stance on nuclear power. Managers polled shareholders for input in December, although to date the group still screens against companies involved in nuclear technology.

Mainstream investors have for years invested in nuclear energy, sometimes for environmental reasons. Bill Page, vice-president of asset managers State Street Global Advisors, believes nuclear should be part of the future “energy pie” because it can help avert climate change.

Nuclear fission, proponents point out, produces no greenhouse gas. The technology is gathering support from some environmentalists, including Patrick Moore, a founding Greenpeace ecologist who once campaigned against nuclear energy.

Expensive and dangerous

Nuclear power’s detractors, however, argue it is too expensive and riddled with environmental drawbacks, including high water usage and radioactive waste disposal issues.

A recent report from a coalition of socially responsible investors and environmental organisations, including Friends of the Earth, Public Citizen and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), concludes that new nuclear power plants cannot be cost-competitive with other electricity generation alternatives. The groups also raise concern over mechanisms for the disposal of spent nuclear waste and a finite supply of fuel grade uranium.

ICCR programme director Leslie Lowe says the environmental and safety risks associated with nuclear power are still too great. She is concerned the industry is too reliant on government subsidies to be a viable energy alternative.

“Investors focusing on actual market behaviour must conclude that nuclear power is not preferred,” the coalition report concludes. A similar report by Canada’s Ethical Funds agrees.

Nuclear energy will always be an explosive topic for socially responsible investment funds, whose clients are often the baby-boomer veterans of disarmament campaigns of the 1960s.

Marc Gunther, who writes about the impact of business on society, says that while he admires funds’ shareholder advocacy work, “by modifying or eliminating its screens, the SRI industry could shed its hippy image and expand its appeal to more mainstream investors”.

For now, however, most ethical funds seem tied to their “hippy roots” when it comes to nuclear power – with or without the threat of global warming.

Useful links:
www.calvert.com
www.iccr.org
www.marcgunther.com
www.ethicalfunds.com
» Debate: Nuclear power: The clean-air option
» Debate: Nuclear power: Not needed, not wanted
» Climate change - Nuclear confusion: help or hindrance?

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Write to Lisa Roner, North America Editor at Lisa.Roner@ethicalcorp.com

Erwin forging stronger links with pro-nuke France

2007-10-15T12:30:00.000+02:00

Speech by Minister Alec Erwin at the France-South Africa Chamber of Commerce and Industry luncheon, Johannesburg Country Club
25 September 2007

Thank you for the opportunity to speak at this luncheon.
France is one of South Africa's most important trading partners, and it is important for us to keep engaging on issues of mutual interest, and improve economic and trade relations between the two countries.
Europe remains the biggest source of trade for South Africa. Seven out of ten countries trading with South Africa are based in the European Union (EU), and we have seen a steady increase in bilateral relations between France and South Africa over the years. France ranks among South Africa's ten most significant economic partners in terms of trade, investment, development assistance and research and development, and has over 100 companies operating in the country, including multinationals such as Total and Lafarge.

French construction companies are also involved in the building of the stations and railway line for the Gautrain Rapid Rail Link. Bilateral trade has more than doubled over the past eight years, to R25 billion in 2006. This comprised of R8,2 billion in South African exports, and R17 billion in imports from France. We need to work harder to facilitate an increase in South African exports, and thus help support local manufacturing sectors. It is envisaged that the South Africa-European Union Trade, Development and Co-operation Agreement (SA-EU TDCA), which was concluded in 1999, will be one of the approaches which are instrumental in helping to promote local exports.
The France-South Africa Chamber of Commerce and Industry has been instrumental in providing support for South African companies wishing to set up business links in France, and this kind of assistance goes a long way in aiding local firms to increase their global footprint. Developing the country's manufacturing sector, which is the economy's second-largest, and making it more globally competitive, will give local firms a fair chance of competing with their international peers, and alleviate the pressure that a large trade deficit has on the economy.

Over the next few years government is embarking on an ambitious infrastructure investment programme (nuclear!!), which will position South Africa as an investment destination of choice, and aims to step up economic growth, which will be shared by all South Africans, through increased development and employment. This is no minor task, and requires of us an unwavering confidence in this economy, and the courage to take these daring, and sometimes even unpopular steps, to ensure that South Africa's economy is geared towards higher and more sustainable levels of growth.

The Department of Public Enterprises is responsible for about R170 billion in state-owned assets, with two of our biggest State-Owned Enterprises (SOE), Transnet and Eskom, investing approximately R240 billion in the economy over the next five years to upgrade rail, ports and pipelines as well as to ensure security of supply of energy, which is in short supply globally. France has made great advances in the generation of nuclear energy, with over 70% of its energy derived from this source, up from 8% in the 1970s, making France one of the cleanest energy producers in the world. South Africa currently derives only about six percent of its energy from nuclear, and we would like to increase this significantly in coming years.

Eskom's reserve margin, at about eight percent, remains low, and the build programme will, among other things, help us bring this figure closer to the internationally accepted level of 15%. The Competitive Supplier Development Programme, the impact of the Build Programme on the South African economy is expected to be huge, and it is important that we leverage this expenditure to develop the local supplier industry.

The programme, developed by the Department of Public Enterprises, aims to reduce the import content of infrastructure investment programmes by creating an enabling environment for the development of local suppliers who can compete with global competitors. The programme targets business sectors related to the infrastructure investment programmes of Transnet and Eskom. This includes rail, ports, pipelines electricity generation, transmission and distribution.

Transnet, Eskom and PBMR are now all participating in the programme. They are all in the process of developing their Supplier Development Plans (SDPs). Transnet and Eskom's plans will be completed by February 2008, and PBMR's by June 2008. The SDPs will provide a long-term strategic vision for the development of the local supply base of the SOE. In the meantime, the SOE are seeking opportunities for securing competitive local supply in their current procurement processes. This includes requesting Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) to provide information on local content in their tender submissions, and using local content as a criterion in the tender adjudication process.
The response from global suppliers has been positive (?), and we envisage that these procurement negotiations will result in significant foreign direct investments in South Africa, and the integration of South African suppliers into the global supply networks of international companies. The government has programmes in place to assist marginal South African suppliers to improve their capacity to participate in the supply networks of the international companies, and government agencies can assist international companies to identify local suppliers.

Empowering our youth is also a task that is close to our hearts. Developing skilled workers, trained in maths and science, is key for South Africa's advancement globally. Through initiatives such as the Denel Youth Foundation, learners are offered a second chance to improve their marks in the critical areas of maths and science. This will open up to them career opportunities in the fields of science, engineering and technology, where the country is currently experiencing a shortage of skills.

The only way we can ensure that South Africa has the necessary skills to take this country forward, is if we are willing to invest in their education and training. I therefore urge all of you here today to look at the companies you work for, and see how you can further the skills and training of your workers, so that they are better able to contribute to economic growth and development in our beautiful country.

Thank you to the France-South Africa Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FSACCI) for their hard work in helping to improve relations between France and South Africa. It is through efforts made by organisations such as yours that we can get closer to our goals of making the South African economy more competitive globally, and improving the lives of our people.

Thank you
Issued by: Department of Public Enterprises
25 September 2007
Source: Department of Public Enterprise (http://www.dpe.gov.za)

DEADLINE: Public Comment- Nuclear Energy Policy (Deadline 17 October 2007)

2007-10-12T00:16:00.000+02:00

Public Comment: Nuclear Energy Policy & Strategy for the Republic of South Africa

The Department of Minerals and Energy has invited the public to make written submissions on the Nuclear Energy Policy and Strategy.

Deadline: 17 October 2007

For Attention: The Director-General, Mr T Maqubela

Postal Address: Private Bag X59, Pretoria, 0001

Or Fax: 012 322 8570

Or Email: kedibone.theko@dme.gov.za

The document is available at HERE, HERE or HERE (PDF – Adobe Acrobat Format)

Contact Person:

Mr T Maqubela 012 317 8340

Mining vs Environment - The Battle is ON

2007-10-02T12:57:00.000+02:00

High Stakes in the Battle Between Mining and the Environment
30 September 2007

Steven Lang
Johannesburg

Environmentalists and tour operators appear to be losing the battle against mining companies in Mpumalanga, a province in the east of South Africa.

This confrontation - which also pits two ministries against each other - will determine the future of hundreds of lakes and rivers, and has implications for the economic sustainability of the province.

All parties in the long running dispute argue that they are working towards the economic development of the province in general, and of the Mpumalanga Lake District in particular. They differ fundamentally, however, over methods of achieving this goal and over the long term sustainability of their respective plans.

At a symposium held in the Lake District at the end of August, the premier of Mpumalanga, Thabang Makwetla, neatly described the problem: "One of the challenges facing any developing nation is maintaining a delicate balance between the pressures of economic development for job creation on the one hand, and sustainable environmental management on the other."

Mining companies and the national Department of Minerals and Energy (DME) say they will create jobs in an area where unemployment is a serious social problem. They argue that new coal mines will provide jobs not only in mining itself, but also in re-commissioned power stations and in the construction of new railway sidings.

South Africa's national power utility, Eskom, approved a budget of over 700 million dollars in 2004 to re-commission the coal-fired Camden power station near Ermelo, about 240 kilometres east of South Africa's financial hub, Johannesburg. Camden was completed in 1969 and then mothballed 20 years later while the country was experiencing a period of surplus capacity.

As the re-commissioning process began, Ermelo had already started dragging itself out of a 15-year slump. Today the town, strategically located close to the Mpumalanga Lake District and the Umlabu coal mine, is experiencing unprecedented growth.

The Mpumalanga Lake District has more than 270 fresh water lakes, including Lake Chrissie, the country's largest natural body of freshwater. It is also part of the eastern escarpment where four river catchment areas meet: the Vaal, Komati, uMpuluzi and the Usutu.

"Water found in the natural springs around Chrissie Lake is of drinking water quality. It could be bottled and sold," said Jennifer Russell, a University of Johannesburg student doing her master's degree thesis on the water quality of the area. "Mining would therefore pollute all of these pure water sources and we would never be able to get that back," she told IPS.

An informal grouping of conservationists, scientists and travel companies opposes the large scale increase in mining operations because over the long term the mines will pollute groundwater, lakes and rivers in the area. They argue that short term gains from mining will be lost when the mines run out of coal and the pristine environment has lost its tourism potential.

"Mining in this area is not sustainable. The life of a mine would probably be between five to 10 years, leaving a lifetime of environmental problems," said Russell.

Coal mining is particularly destructive to groundwater and lakes in the area. In many cases, the true extent of the environmental damage is only discovered after mining operations have ceased.

When mining takes place below the water table, the mining company is forced to pump water out of the ground in order to continue with operations. When the mine is depleted, pumping ceases and water floods into the empty caverns and pits.

Water then chemically reacts with metal sulphides exposed during the mining operation to produce sulphuric acid. The empty mine rapidly becomes a toxic bath of acid that soon decants out into the groundwater, rivers and lakes of the area.

This well-known phenomenon, described in scientific literature as Acid Mine Drainage (AMD), has been extensively studied in North America. Many incidents of AMD have already been recorded in parts of Mpumalanga, most notably where the Wilge River flows into Loskop Dam.

Louis Marneweck, a member of the provincial legislature of Mpumalanga, said in a letter of concern to the provincial government that "Loskop Dam is also experiencing problems and thousands of fish and crocodiles have died due to sewerage inflow and toxic mine water."

Noted Russell, "The most effective remediation for AMD is the use of wetlands, either natural or constructed. The wetlands act as a filter and are able to remove many of the heavy metals by causing them to precipitate out of the water."

Mining operations will, however, destroy a substantial part of the wetlands in the province. "A total of 584 hectares of these wetlands will be destroyed due to the impact of open cast mining," said Anton Linström of the Mpumalanga Parks Board.

In the Lake District, mining poses an additional threat to the environment because some of the mines will be opencast operations less than 500 metres from the shores of certain lakes. Miners will have to blast through a layer of sandstone in order to get to the coal seam. This sandstone layer performs the function of filtering surface water before it gets to the lakes.

Even the most determined environmental rehabilitation programme will not be able to repair the sandstone. Open cast mines near the lakes will permanently destroy an important surface-water filter.

The DME has assessed more than 300 mining licence applications for the province in the last year. Most of the licences will be granted to small operators and speculators, but some large commercial miners with more than enough resources to exploit the mines will also receive new licences.

The Department of Environment and Tourism is unable to oppose the granting of licences effectively because the DME has the authority to grant licences based on its own environmental impact studies.

The DME did not respond to several requests for comment on issues raised in this article.

Royal Bafokeng Holdings, the controlling shareholder of the Umlabu open cast coal mine near Ermelo, also did not respond to requests for information. However one of the paragraphs of the company's Code of Ethics says that, "Respecting and protecting the environment is an important value to which RBH subscribes."

Source: http://allafrica.com/stories/200710010620.html?page=2

No to nuclear energy

2007-09-24T13:44:00.000+02:00

No to nuclear energy

While plans are being made for building more nuclear reactors in South Africa, on the other side of the coin are groups such as Earthyear Africa which are actively campaigning against their development.

Earthlife Africa has published a 36 page factsheet on nuclear energy in South Africa. Titled: What you need to know about South Africa's nuclear programme, the document is part of the Nuclear Energy Costs The Earth Campaign. In it they they provide an overview of nuclear energy, its efects on humans, plants and animals, climate change and tourism, seeking to gain support in declaring South Africa a nuclear free zone. They question who actually stands to gain financially from the PBMR given that the partners are international, even suggesting that South Africa is being used as a "guinea pig" for testing the PBMR. Below follows a short insert from the document providing some background to their arguments.

Eskom wishes to build more nuclear reactors, based on a full scale model that has been tried and abandoned in the North. These reactors are called Pebble Bed Modular Reactors (PBMRs). The first is planned for Koeberg, near Cape Town. The proposal is that the fuel for these PBMRs be produced at Pelindaba.

In addition there are fourteen thousand tons of radioactive weapons scrap metal at Pelindaba from decommissioned nuclear facilities. NECSA (Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa) wishes to smelt this waste and sell the metal on the open market, followed by commercialisation of the smelter process - this process is not international best practice, and could turn South Africa into the North's radioactive waste dumping ground.

The proposed reactors, radioactive fuel plant, and the proposed radioactive waste smelter, will emit many kilograms of radioactive emissions into the air, water and soil every year. Pelindaba is located within two kilometres of a World Heritage Site, The Cradle of Humankind, and ten kilometres from the townships of Atteridgeville and Diepsloot.

At full production, for all the planned reactors, there would be nine trucks carrying nuclear material, and 145 trucks carrying chemicals every day between Durban, Pelindaba and Koeberg for forty years!

There is no doubt that radiation is harmful. Furthermore, the level of what is considered a "safe" dose has been lowered consistently, and now stands at a few percent of what was originally considered a "safe dose".

One of the arguments for the PBMR is that South Africa will need massive amounts of new power. This will not be true for at least ten years. In this time, we will be able to install all of South Africa's power requirements using safe and clean Renewable Energy Technologies, which are available off the shelf, and can be installed within weeks.

Further, the planned ten nuclear reactors for South Africa in the near future will generate less than 2.5% of our current electricity generation capacity, but with hazardous consequences for hundreds of thousands of years.

Safe, clean, and sustainable alternatives exist, which are proving far more viable, from an economic and health, safety and environmental point of view.

Flogging Nuclear Energy to the African Continent

2007-09-23T11:21:00.001+02:00

NUKES FOR AFRICA?

If nuclear power is okay for South Africa, what about Zimbabwe? Or how about Rwanda, or Sierra Leone? If we are concerned about South Africa's ability to provide safe transport for nuclear fuel and waste, risks of sabotage and smuggling of nuclear materials - what about nations in Africa that have been torn by civil war? What about a neighbouring nation like Zimbabwe where inflation is now at 7000%? South Africans may not be aware that despite poverty and starvation, Zimbabwe is somehow still considering the hugely expensive option of nuclear power. How comfortable do South Africans feel about President Mugabe sitting with a potential finger on the nuclear button?

The nuclear industry's multi-million dollar marketing programme (courtesy of the taxpayer) is making security in Africa about as predictable as a game of roulette. Spin the nuclear wheel of fortune and the dial could point to any one of a number of African countries, where despite a majority of impoverished people, certain governments have still managed to spend millions on weaponry.

Countries in Africa currently prospecting for uranium, include: Algeria, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Gabon, Guinea, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Senegal, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and of course, Zimbabwe.

In Harare Zimbabwe's Minister of Energy Michael Nyambuya said nuclear energy was an option, although Zimbabwe still had to verify uranium deposits. The company responsible for prospecting uranium in Zimbabwe is Omegacorp Ltd.

However, the same names pop up in each country - like Uramin, Brinkley Mining, Paladin and Areva. And while the Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa (Necsa) has gone out of its way to reassure South Africans that an expanded nuclear programme in this country would be "safe", there is no way that they can make any guarantees concerning other nations. Despite this, Necsa and the fabled Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) project intend - not only to manufacture nuclear reactors for South Africa - but also to export to the rest of Africa.

What about the Congo? This country's uranium mines produced material for the nuclear bombs the US dropped on Japan in World War II. They were officially closed since 2000, but illegal mining continued. Negotiations between the Congo and Brinkley Mining ground to a halt when the government official who set up the deal was imprisoned on charges of illegally selling uranium.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is suspected of trying to reopen the Shinkolobwe uranium mine with help from North Korea. (In 2000, North Korea denied reports that it might be importing uranium from Congo to manufacture nuclear weapons).

In Malawi, five Non-Governmental Organisations oppose uranium mining. They are extremely concerned about Malawi's natural heritage including treasures such as Sere Stream, Rukuru River and Lake Malawi. "This is an ecological disaster in waiting," they said. They were aware of the detrimental impact uranium mining would have on the health of workers and nearby communities, radioactive mine wastes, environmental damage and water contamination.

In Niger, the uranium mining industry has been plagued by violence. In April 2007, heavily-armed men attacked a camp of uranium prospectors in northern Niger, killing a security guard and wounding three other people. Between 20-30 men from the Niger Movement for Justice raided French nuclear company Areva's camp. A Chinese employee from a uranium mining company was captured on July 6, 2007, by the same group.

Despite this, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has directed his energy ministry to establish a nuclear unit and in Zambia, Albidon Ltd and African Energy Resources Ltd have begun feasibility studies for uranium mining. The Omega Corporation wants to open up a uranium mine in Siavonga with an investment of 60 million US dollars and Equinox Minerals Ltd is considering extracting uranium from Lumwana in Zambia.

In South Africa, Uramin Inc wants to expand into the Beaufort West area of the Karoo and produce 1745 tonnes of uranium oxide per year. Interestingly, an American comapny - SRK Consulting - was to conduct the feasibility study.

The Department of Minerals and Energy (DME) granted Uranium One a new order mining right for the Dominion Uranium Project for 30 years covering an area of 14 000 hectares. First Uranium intends to produce 342 tonnes of uranium annually. This year, Uranium One produced ammonium diuranate (ADU) at Dominion Reefs Uranium Mine near Klerksdorp. This was shipped to the Nuclear Fuels Corporation of South Africa (Nufcor SA) to be processed into U3O8 (yellow cake) in Nufcor's calcining plant.

Just as there is no smoke without a fire, so there is no nuclear without the uranium fuel. Unfortunately, the nuclear industry has been selling nuclear as a "sustainable" energy source, which it obviously is not. In fact uranium reserves will be depleted before coal reserves run out and the nuclear industry is even asking for coal to power its nuclear smelter at Pelindaba.

The nuclear industry has also been marketing itself as "safe" which again has proven to be a false claim. South Africa has one nuclear reactor at Koeberg and yet at least three men have been caught and stood trial for smuggling nuclear materials. If, as the South African government intends, the nuclear programme in this country expands to include 30 nuclear reactors for South Africa and others marketed to Africa, how much illegal nuclear trade will go on?

The construction of "dirty bombs" and international terrorism is only one of the deadly faces of the nuclear industry. Wherever uranium mines are sited, radioactive contamination spreads to soils and water sources and the dust is blown by the wind into the homes of nearby communities. Primary cancers are recognized as a health hazard of uranium mining and the inhalation of uranium dust is second only to tobacco smoking for producing lung cancers.

From the cradle to the grave, the nuclear process is deadly. And for Africa - regarded as the cradle of life - this would seem to be the final desecration of a once beautiful and fertile continent.

Yours sincerely

INGELA RICHARDSON

Vodacom -Diallog Group

2007-09-20T21:14:00.001+02:00

021-409-3700

Experts will decide on nuclear information

2007-09-19T10:59:00.000+02:00

Experts will decide on nuclear information

06 September 2007

Two expert referees will decide what information should be released to the public about Eskom’s nuclear Pebble Bed Modular Reactor development, the Supreme Court of Appeal held.

Judge-President Craig Howie made an agreement between Eskom and Earthlife Africa (ELA) on how a request for information over South Africa’s nuclear energy programme must be handled an order of the court.

Representing ELA, Open Democracy Advice Centre spokeswoman Alison Tilley said Eskom’s records on the development would now be referred to expert referees.

“They are going to look at the records and read them and make a decision around whether it should be released or not.”

The referees will compile a report on what could be released as public interest, which would be handed to a court.

If no party challenged the findings of the referees’ report it would be final and information as recommended would be made public.

The ELA appealed a high court judgment which denied it access to Eskom’s board meeting minutes about the development of a Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) demonstration model at Koeberg.

The environmental lobby group launched an application in 2005 for information under the Access to Information Act. The high court ruled against them.

Tilley said the benefit of the Bloemfontein court’s finding was that ELA would now know exactly what documents there were and what they contained.

She said a better decision could now be made on what information must be public knowledge. “Up to now we did not know what documents there were.”

ELA Cape Town campaign coordinator Maya Aberman, who attended the hearing, said she was pleased with the finding.

“Today’s judgment moved us closer towards accessing the information we try to have. We welcome that step closer.”

Sapa

Source: http://www.sowetan.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=558164

The nuclear credit card

2007-09-17T14:17:00.000+02:00

THE NUCLEAR CREDIT CARD

Some people may remember the heady feeling of power when aquiring their first credit card. There is the shiny piece of plastic with the power to buy anything you want. It doesn't look or feel like money so it doesn't hit so hard when you hand it over. So people buy and buy and buy with the virtual money they don't actually have.

The nuclear industry has been marketing its product along similar appealing lines. Nuclear energy just won't run out according to its marketers - some ministers in South Africa have even called it "sustainable". This would be laughable if it were not so deadly serious. The uranium that fuels nuclear reactors will run out before coal reserves do - and ironically, the nuclear industry is now also demanding a share of that coal to power its nuclear smelter at Pelindaba.

Nuclear propaganda has even spread to schools, where children are taught that nuclear energy is "safe", "green" and "sustainable". But just like the infamous credit card, the nuclear industry is already spending millions of government/taxpayers' money on the premise that it will recoup this money - one day.

However, as all credit card holders know, that final day of payment arrives sooner than you think or want - with plenty of interest added onto those loans. Those days of carefree spending come to an end when you have to tally up your repayments, plus interest for borrowing from the bank. This is again where the nuclear industry hides some nasty surprises, because when bank loans on construction of nuclear plants are called in, interest payments can cripple third world nations that just cannot afford this expensive form of energy.

During the cold war, when Russia and the US built up nuclear munitions as fast as they could in deadly competition, President Reagan was asked who he thought would "go bust" first. Well, it turned out to be Russia; a country paying so much for nuclear weapons that in the end it could not afford food or basic consumer goods for its people. The nuclear arms race truly crippled the might of the former Soviet Union.

Nations in Africa might heed this warning. How can a country pay millions for weapons when it cannot afford to feed its people? Signing all those cheques or handing over the nuclear credit card may seem very appealing initially - but the account will be called in - sooner rather than later. And the national debt will skyrocket.

More progressive nations have come to realise that truly "sustainable" energy sources are to be found in renewables like solar and wind power. It is just unfortunate that in South Africa, these have not received the same kind of advertising or government investment as nuclear has been lucky enough to enjoy.

Yours sincerely

INGELA RICHARDSON

Gonubie

South Africa

WHERE DID ALL THE MONEY GO?

2007-09-17T14:15:00.000+02:00

WHERE DID ALL THE MONEY GO?

Money spent on nuclear weapons in the US from 1940 to 1996 "exceeded the combined total federal spending for education; training, employment, and social services; agriculture; natural resources and the environment; general science, space, and technology; community and regional development (including disaster relief); law enforcement; and energy production and regulation. On average, the United States has spent $98 billion a year on nuclear weapons. Where did all this money go?"

This crucial question was asked in a report on "The Hidden Costs of Our Nuclear Arsenal" by Stephen I. Schwartz, June 30, 1998.
Schwartz showed that from 1940 to 1996 the US spent nearly $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons and weapons-related programs. The government never tried to track all nuclear weapons costs either annually or over time and as a result records were "extremely spotty and in numerous instances non-existent".

The army discovered that nuclear weapons, far from being cost-efficient killing machines, were in fact immensely expensive. One nuclear weapon could kill or injure hundreds or thousands of troops at a time, so large numbers of reserve forces would be necessary to maintain the advantage. Large numbers of wounded would require an expanded medical corps.

From 1948 to 1996, the United States spent $165.5 billion manufacturing plutonium, highly-enriched uranium, tritium, and other materials necessary to make nuclear explosives. So much highly-enriched uranium was produced that the United States halted production in 1964 having achieved a huge surplus.

The Department of Energy proposed to spend at a least $4.5 billion a year on "stockpile stewardship" to maintain the nuclear stockpile for the future. This would be more than was spent on average over the entire Cold War (1948-1991), $3.6 billion, when hundreds to thousands of new warheads were being built annually and nuclear testing was common.

From 1945 the United States conducted more nuclear tests than all other nuclear powers combined. A great deal of uncertainty remains about how many weapons the USSR actually produced. The arsenals of Great Britain, France and China are only a fraction of the superpowers' arsenals.

The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima exploded with a force of 15,000 tons of TNT or 15 kilotons. In 1960 the US had the equivalent of nearly 1.4 million Hiroshima-sized bombs. In 1998 the US had the equivalent of 120,000 to 130,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs.

In the spring of 1958, after the Army proposed deploying the Nike Zeus missile to shoot down incoming Soviet warheads, then-Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy said, "We should not spend hundreds of millions on production of this weapon pending general confirmatory indications that we know what we are doing."

This warning still resonates today, as proposed defensive systems fail test after test.

The large, daunting "cleanup" program is because so little money was spent on this in the past. Since government placed production of nuclear weapons and weapons materials ahead of everything else, the US faces a bill of as much as several hundred billion dollars for a program stretching to 2070 and beyond to rectify past wrongs.
Most of the money in the "cleanup" budget goes toward managing existing wastes. The cost of cleaning up nuclear weapons facilities will come close to or equal the cost of producing the weapons in the first place.

The strict secrecy surrounding these programs increases the potential for officials to place production first, cut corners, look only at short-term gains and ignore real and dangerous long-term costs to the environment, and public health.

In 1998, the US was spending $35 billion to operate and maintain its nuclear force, address the legacies of the Cold War - nuclear waste "cleanup" and victims of radiation exposure from nuclear weapons - and enact and enforce arms control agreements and try to develop missile defenses.

When Admiral Arleigh Burke, Chief of Naval Operations, stated that the equivalent of 720 warheads on Polaris submarines would be enough to deter the Soviet Union, the United States already had almost six times as many deployed.

When retired Army Chief of Staff General Maxwell Taylor wrote that "a few hundred missiles" would satisfy deterrence, the United States already had 7,000 strategic nuclear weapons.

And when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara argued that within a few years the equivalent of 400 megatons would be enough to achieve destruction and hence deterrence, the U.S. stockpile had almost 17,000 megatons.

There has always been a tremendous gap between what informed military and civilian leaders thought necessary for deterrence and what was actually deployed.

Hundreds of billions of dollars were expended on programs which contributed little or nothing to deterrence, diverted critical resources and effort away from those that did or created long-term costs that exceeded their benefits.

The costs of nuclear weapons, have never been fully understood nor compiled by the government. Congress has only taken action to terminate nuclear weapons programs a handful of times and has never held a hearing, debate or vote on the cost, scale, pace or implications of the overall program even though the potential for waste, fraud and abuse is equal to that for entitlement programs, as indicated by the approximately equal share of spending for each.
With nuclear weapons still consuming a sizable percentage of the military budget, it is vital to understand how the figures in the plan were derived.

The annual congressional debate usually focuses on the minute details of a few programs at a the expense of the overall effort those programs are supposed to support. This approach can be likened to building a house by carefully examining the cost of only a few of the obvious elements, largely ignoring the rest, and rarely pausing to consider what the house will actually cost or look like, or if it will even meet one's needs.

The time has come to consider carefully the costs and consequences to the United States, and the world, of producing tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and basing national security on the threat of nuclear annihilation.

We cannot rectify our mistakes or build on our achievements if such a crucial part of our nuclear history remains incomplete. Neither can we hope to prevent other countries from acquiring nuclear weapons if we do not fully comprehend the forces that have driven our own program and affect it still.

Given the enormous sums expended and the substantial risks incurred, we owe it to ourselves and future generations to seek answers to these questions, to fill the gaps in the atomic ledger.

Eskom is blowing in the wind !!!

2007-09-13T22:52:00.000+02:00

The following article describes how Eskom will only (maybe) start construction next year of a 100 MW wind power plant but it will only (maybe) be operational by 2010. The Eskom expert then says we only have a potential of 1000 MW wind producing power along the Cape coast which is questionable. What is most disconcerting is that in other countries, they assemble massive wind power generators in a few months and countries like Germany produce over 20,000 MW from Wind power. Why will it take Eskom over 2 years just to knock out 100 MW of Wind Power? Clearly Eskom still does not want to commit to renewable energies and prefers instead to stick to their hard line, hard headed approach of multiple nuclear power stations. According to another source less than 1% of Eskom’s budget is allocated to renewable energies. They also like to continually claim that the cost of producing power from wind is still too high and this is what’s restricting its growth as an energy source, but it is okay to spend upwards of R400 Billion of taxpayers’ money on Nuclear power stations, that’s not too expensive is it?

Eskom may start building pilot 100-MW wind farm next year

Published: 12 Sep 07 - 10:33

Matthew Hill & Mariaan Olivier

State power utility Eskom could start building a 100-MW wind power plant, on the West Coast of South Africa, as early as mid-2008, to be operational by the beginning of 2010, a company spokesperson said on Wednesday.

Eskom communications project manager for new build Annamarie Murray said that the firm was expecting a record of decision from the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism by the middle of next year, after which construction on the plant, to be built opposite Koekenaap, would start.

The 100-MW plant would have the scope to be enlarged, but she said that Eskom was more likely to first investigate other sites.

Resources and strategy GM Greg Tosen said that Eskom believed South Africa had a resource base of 1 000 MW for wind-power generation along the country’s coastal regions.

It is already operating a much smaller plant than the planned 100-MW operation, but Tosen said that the new one would serve as a pilot project for future projects on the same scale.

Eskom had already built three wind turbines at an experimental wind energy farm at Klipheuwel, on the West Coast near Cape Town.

In July, Eskom called for expressions of interest from wind turbine makers with experience in the design, construction, commissioning and maintenance support of mainstream turbines.

The company was looking for suppliers to supply turbines between 1,5 MW and 2,5 MW. It was understood that it would be mainly foreign suppliers that would be able to supply the turbines.

Eskom embarked on an active programme investigating possible renewable energy options with plans to boost its power generation from these sources to 1 500 MW.

Tosen said that the company’s primary focus was on solar water heating.

The firm was currently involved in a feasibility study on concentrating solar power.

Renewable power generation would mainly be used for peaking power requirements, and coal would clearly be a “dominant force” in Eskom’s future, he said.

It also had plans to generate 20 000 MW from nuclear plants by 2025, as part of plans to double generating capacity to 80 000 MW by the same time.

Environmentalists view wind power as a renewable and clean technology to generate power, but the high cost of generating electricity by using wind technology was still standing in the way of the technology being used on a larger scale.

Murray said that it was, in general, hard to make a direct comparison between the cost of power generated from wind technology, and electricity generated by other renewable energy sources.

“The cost of the various renewable energy options vary according to the available resource and other site specific requirements, such as the distance to electrical infrastructure, roads, etcetera,” she commented.

Sure, nuclear power is safer than in the past - but we still don't need it

2007-09-11T14:20:00.000+02:00

Sure, nuclear power is safer than in the past - but we still don't need it
It's true that another Chernobyl couldn't happen in a new reactor, but the case against is as strong as ever

George Monbiot
Tuesday July 11, 2006
The Guardian

If someone had worked out how to cause a war within the environment movement, they could not have developed a better means than nuclear power. In public we will line up to attack the energy review published by the government today. But in private we will reserve some of our venom for each other, as we start to ask ourselves whether we have made the right decision.

The UK's dying nuclear power stations are, at the moment, its principal source of low-carbon energy. Electricity produced by a pressurised light water reactor, when all its carbon costs have been taken into account, emits around 16 tonnes of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour. Gas produces 356 tonnes and coal 891. If our nuclear power stations are replaced by thermal plants, the UK's annual output of CO2 will rise by roughly 51m tonnes, or 8% of the total. Zac Goldsmith, arguing against new nukes, calls this percentage "miniscule". This is breathtaking. We campaign to prevent electrical appliances being left on standby, hoping to save some 4m tonnes of CO2 a year. How can we then dismiss a cut 13 times as great?

Some groups, such as Greenpeace, the New Economics Foundation and the Sustainable Development Commission, have produced reports showing that we can meet the government's target - a 60% cut in carbon emissions by 2050 - without recourse to atomic power. They are right, but the target is now irrelevant. In the book I am publishing in September, I will show that when you take into account both human population growth and the anticipated reduction in the biosphere's ability to absorb carbon, we require a worldwide cut of roughly 60% per capita by 2030. If emissions are to be distributed evenly, this means that the UK's need to be cut by 87% in 24 years.

In seeking the best means by which this cut can be made across all sectors (transport, electricity, heating and construction), I have been forced to set aside my prejudices. I hate nuclear power, but do we need it to help prevent the planet from cooking?

Answering this question means challenging people on both sides of the debate. Anti-nuclear campaigners have a tendency to believe anything that casts the industry in a bad light. Last month's edition of The Ecologist magazine, for example, contends that 14m tonnes of concrete are required to build a nuclear power station, resulting in a massive release of carbon dioxide. Specifications are notoriously hard to come by, but I have managed to find the figures for Calder Hall A, opened in 1956. It used 72,500 cubic yards of concrete, which equates to 108,000 tonnes, or less than 1% of the Ecologist's estimate. Modern power stations are smaller.

We have made similar mistakes over the global supplies of uranium. Noting that the world possesses "assured reserves" of high-grade ores sufficient to last for 40 or 50 years at current rates of use, some environmentalists have argued that if new nuclear plants are built, they will run out of fuel before they reach the end of their lives. But they have confused assured reserves with total global resources. In other words, they have assumed that no further discoveries will ever take place. Forty to 50 years is in fact a very high level of assurance.

There's little doubt that extracting these ores kills. Last month New Scientist reported that the 400,000 uranium miners working in East Germany between 1946 and 1990 were exposed to an increased risk of lung cancer of about 10%. But it didn't say whether this is the case elsewhere, or how it compares to other kinds of mining. One tonne of uranium, according to government figures, produces as much energy as 75,000 tonnes of coal. It is impossible to believe that coal has the lesser impact.

I am forced to admit that an accident like Chernobyl's could not take place in a new nuclear power station. Secondary containment of the reactor core and new safety systems make a total meltdown impossible. Nor do I believe that new reactors would present a useful target for terrorists. It would not be difficult to make the containment buildings strong enough to resist an impact with an airliner.

But there are other arguments that do stand up. The most fundamental environmental principle - one that all children are taught as soon as they are old enough to understand it - is that you don't make a new mess until you have cleared up the old one. To start building a new generation of nuclear power stations before we know what to do with the waste produced by existing plants is grotesquely irresponsible. The government's advisers have determined only that it should be buried. No one yet knows where, how or at what cost.

This is just one of the factors that make a nonsense of the economic projections. How on earth can we say what nuclear power stations will cost if we don't even know what their decommissioning entails? The government will assure us today that there will be no subsidies and no guaranteed prices for the nuclear industry. This should allow us to forget about the cost, and leave the market to determine whether nuclear power stations should be built. But in order to guarantee public safety, the government must be ready to rescue our power stations or their waste piles if the nuclear operators are in danger of going bankrupt. To ensure that the operators don't fudge their figures, the government must make it clear that it is not prepared to rescue them. It is a paradox that cannot be resolved.

And how does any system - political or technological - cope with the timescales involved? If, as a result of slow leakage into the groundwater, radioactive materials from a burial site were to kill an average of only one person a year for one million years, those who made the decision to bury them will - through their infinitesimal and unrecorded impacts - be responsible for the deaths of a million people.

It has also become clear that we will never rid the world of nuclear weapons if we do not also rid it of nuclear power. Every state that has sought to develop a weapons programme over the past 30 years - Israel, South Africa, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iraq and Iran - has done so by manipulating its nuclear power programme. We cannot deny other states the opportunity to use atomic energy if we do not forswear it ourselves.

But perhaps the strongest argument against nuclear power is that we do not need it, even to reach the extraordinarily ambitious target that the science demands. With similar levels of investment in energy efficiency and carbon capture and storage, and the exploitation of the vast new offshore wind resources the government has now identified, we could cut our carbon emissions as swiftly and as effectively as any atomic power programme could. In North America, where natural gas supplies have already peaked and are in long-term decline, this is a much tougher challenge than in Eurasia; but while our supplies of gas persist we should use them, and bury the carbon dioxide that our power stations produce, while developing the electricity storage systems that will eventually replace them.

Some of our arguments against nuclear power have collapsed, but it seems to me that the case is still robust.

www.monbiot.com

Source: http://politics.guardian.co.uk/green/comment/0,,1817538,00.html

Waste storage dilemma crimps nuclear future

2007-09-11T07:27:00.000+02:00

Waste storage dilemma crimps nuclear future

David R. Baker, Chronicle Staff Writer
The San Francisco Chronicle
Jun 11, 2006

Avila Beach, San Luis Obispo County -- In a quiet, air-conditioned room deep inside the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant sits a small pool filled
with water colored an unnatural blue. It's packed with radioactive waste. The pool holds roughly half of all the used fuel ever pulled from the
plant's reactors. The other half sits in a second concrete tank nearby, slowly cooling beneath 25 feet of water. Some fuel rods have been there
about 20 years. Both pools are nearly full. Neither was designed to store this much waste. But there's nowhere else to put it.

The government long ago promised Diablo's owner, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., that it would haul away the waste and entomb it deep below Nevada's
Yucca Mountain. But, in the face of unrelenting opposition from Nevada residents irate over the prospect of becoming a dumping ground for nuclear
waste, the repository never opened.

With the nation's appetite for energy growing, the U.S. nuclear industry appears poised for a renaissance. President Bush has made building nuclear
plants, for the first time in decades, a cornerstone of his energy policies. And some former foes are willing to give the technology another
look, lured by the promise of generating abundant power without belching greenhouse gases from more fossil fuel plants.

But the industry and its supporters in Washington still have not resolved one of the biggest issues that derailed nuclear power in the 1970s and
1980s -- what to do with the waste, which remains radioactive for thousands of years. Yucca Mountain remains bottled up by Nevada
politicians.

One alternative would be to recycle spent fuel rods, extracting radioactive material for reuse and reducing the amount of waste that would
need to be stored. But the idea has long been blocked by fears that plutonium removed from old rods could fall into the hands of terrorists or
rogue countries trying to build nuclear weapons.

So Diablo and other nuclear plants must keep their waste on-site -- indefinitely. PG&E installed replacement racks that pack more rods into
Diablo's pools and has even started building another storage facility that could cost up to $200 million on a hillside behind the plant.
"The government hasn't lived up to its contracts, so what's happening now is Plan B," said David Vosburg, a PG&E project manager. "The extra racks
are filling up. The same thing's happening across the country."

Extra storage sites next to nuclear plants, however, won't solve the problem. They will just buy time.

"You just have to hope that there's a national solution, because this won't be a Diablo issue -- it will be a national issue," said Richard
Hagler, project engineer for the new storage facility.

Anyone living near a nuclear plant also lives near a long-term storage site for radioactive waste. Those facilities aren't long-term by the
standards of engineers, who must consider what happens to radioactive material over centuries. Homeowners, however, find themselves spending
decades close to used fuel rods, with no end in sight.

"They promised us that the waste would be removed and the government would come to the rescue," said Jack Biesek, 58, who lives in a lushly wooded
canyon about 7 miles downwind of Diablo. "I think it's going to stay there. The handwriting's on the wall."

Without a long-range solution for the waste problem, America's much-heralded "nuclear spring" may never come.

"Obviously, waste storage is the elephant in the room," said Frank Bowman, president and chief executive officer of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the
industry's main lobbying group. America now has roughly 40,000 metric tons of spent radioactive fuel, according to the institute, with another 2,000 metric tons added each
year. Even if Yucca Mountain opens, the nation would soon need another facility just like it. Reprocessing the fuel would relieve that pressure, but it's far from clear that reuse will ever happen.
"If we don't recycle, we're going to have to build a new Yucca Mountain every few decades," said U.S. Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell.

Used fuel rods are hot and highly radioactive when they emerge from a reactor. Both the heat and the radioactivity drop substantially within the
first several years, the radiation falling by a factor of 1,000 in a decade, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute. But the rods remain
dangerously radioactive for many thousands of years.

Diablo Canyon has relied on its twin spent-fuel pools to store waste since the plant began commercial operation in 1985.

They sit not far from the towering containment domes that hold Diablo's reactors, separated from the outside world by steel walls and concrete
floors. The plant refuels every 18 to 21 months, plugging some new rods into the reactors and transferring old ones to the storage pools.
Standing 12 feet tall, each rod is a metal tube filled with uranium pellets -- the source of the plant's power. The rods are narrow, about the
width of a fat pencil, and are bundled into assemblies that weigh 1,350 pounds each. Workers maneuver the assemblies into the pools through a
series of water-filled channels to keep the fuel cool, making sure it never touches open air. A crane grabs the assemblies underwater and lowers
them into waiting racks.

Each pool was designed to hold 270 assemblies. Now, the racks have been reconfigured to store 1,324.

One pool already has 1,064. The other, 1,100.

"Five percent of the state's electricity generation for the last 20 years is sitting in that pool," Vosburg said, as a current of circulating water
rippled the surface. The water, surrounded by concrete walls 6 feet thick, dissipates heat coming from the fuel rods and shields the outside world
from radiation. Boric acid, added to the water to absorb neutrons, gives the pool its deep blue tint.

Later this year, PG&E will install temporary racks in both pools to provide 154 more storage slots each. Even so, they will run out of room by
2010. So PG&E, like operators of the nation's 64 other nuclear power plants, is trying to make do.

On a shaved-off hillside overlooking the plant, workers pour the concrete floor for Diablo's next storage facility. Instead of using a pool, PG&E
will seal old fuel assemblies inside 20-foot-tall canisters lined up like squat obelisks on an open field. There will be no walls or ceiling of any
kind -- just the canisters themselves.

The technology is called dry cask storage, and it isn't new. Its use at Diablo, however, has alarmed many of the plant's long-standing opponents.
They fear that the field, which could eventually hold 138 casks, will make an even more alluring target for terrorists than the plant itself, perched
on a rocky stretch of the central California coast. A commandeered jet, they say, could approach Diablo from the water, fly over the plant and
crash into the casks, spewing radioactive material into the air. "How is that safe from terrorism, especially when there's no 'no fly
zone' at the plant?" asked Rochelle Becker of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility. "California needs to know, how much radioactive waste are
we willing to store on our coast, for how long?"

Last week, a federal court ruled that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission should have examined the possibility of a terrorist assault on Diablo
before giving PG&E permission to build the dry cask facility. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered the commission to
study what threat an attack could pose to the local environment. However, a PG&E spokesman said construction will continue during the review, with
the first casks scheduled to be loaded with fuel next fall. The company considers the facility secure.

Standing above the field, PG&E engineer Hagler sketched out possible lines of terrorist attack. Fly a commercial airliner in from the west, over the
ocean, and the hillside would rip off the plane's right wing before it could reach the casks. Approach from the east, and the pilot would have to
hug the contours of several protecting hills before making a swift, steep plunge into the field.

Those obstacles wouldn't matter as much to a small plane. But small aircraft, he said, lack the mass to smash open the steel-and-concrete casks.
"An aircraft that size? It'd be like a bee hitting a windshield," Hagler said. "I know the cask is going to win."

To some neighbors, terrorism isn't the only issue. They object to the possibility that Diablo's waste will never leave, staying decade after
decade on the coast they love until its presence becomes permanent. "This whole area is going to be a carbuncle ruined for millennia," Biesek
said.

Since 1976, he has lived in nearby See Canyon, along a stream shaded by oak and pine trees. He and his wife, Susan, have long opposed the plant.
They keep a Geiger counter in the house, although it needs new batteries. The Bieseks question whether any storage technology can isolate nuclear
waste from the environment forever, particularly in a place prone to earthquakes and other disasters. If radioactive material from Diablo found
its way into an aquifer or the ocean, they said, who knows how widespread the effects could be?

"It's not like this backyard dump is just our dump," Susan Biesek said one recent morning, as birdsong filled the canyon's cool air. "Where do you
move that's safe?" Such talk drives nuclear engineers to distraction. Used nuclear fuel does pose risks, they say, but those risks can be controlled.
"I hate the word 'dump,' " said Mark Somerville, a PG&E physicist specializing in radiation protection. "I sympathize with people who, like
we did, thought there'd be an endgame where things would be handled long term. ... But it's anything but a dump. It's a very carefully controlled
process."

Meanwhile, the Bush administration keeps pushing to open Yucca Mountain and recycle used fuel. Storing waste on-site, Deputy Energy Secretary Sell
said, is safe but won't solve the problem.

"As an interim solution, it's acceptable," he said. "As a long-term solution, it's not." E-mail David R. Baker at dbaker@sfchronicle.com.

7 Myths of the nuclear renaissance

2007-09-09T21:11:00.000+02:00

Jim Harding

Seven Myths of the Nuclear Renaissance

Presented to Conference on the 50^th Anniversary of the Euratom Treaty Brussels, Belgium

Sponsored by the Greens, European Free Alliance, and the Heinrich Boll Foundation March 7-8, 2007

Thirty years ago, my now-deceased colleague David Comey was asked to make a presentation before the annual meeting of the Atomic Industrial Forum, then the major trade association backing expansion of nuclear power worldwide. He was asked to deliver that speech because he had built credibility with the press and with key decision makers by being scrupulously careful with his facts and analyses. The industry understood that its reputation – particularly with the media – was poor, and they wanted to understand how David had received such good results. In Comey’s view, there was an easy explanation - the nuclear industry regularly exaggerated and misled.

In the intervening years, not much has changed; the industry still seems to prefer the veneer of a splashy argument to a defensible case. Popular articles in the press, some opinion leaders and politicians, and even some environmentalists have bought the myth of a nuclear renaissance. I have not; you should not, and your job is to put this myth in its place. The Power Point slides will fly by quickly, and I do not intend to read them. All of you can do that at your leisure, and ask questions afterwards or tomorrow.

(Slide two) Of the seven myths I plan to talk about, the one that is most irritating to my ear is that nuclear power is cheap. Existing plants may be, but new ones are not, despite a number of often-cited studies claiming the opposite. (Slide three.) If you look closely at these studies, you find that, with the exception of the MIT study, they are vendor projections, reference each other, and are wildly optimistic with respect to construction time, capital cost, regulatory support, and many other factors. As you’ll see later on, these aren’t so much assumptions as a wish list. Reactors are approved based on what government think they will cost when finished – in the interim, the industry wants valuable commitments of scarce public funds. Nuclear power is therefore like a fat kid at the front of the line, insisting to be fed before anyone else, and promising in exchange to grow into another Schwarzenegger. His appetite and promises haven’t changed in twenty years, and governments would be wise to stop feeding him.

(Slide four.) The last time the United States tried to build a number of reactors, costs rose spectacularly, particularly for those plants built during the inflation plagued 1980s. (Slide five.) Whether built in the early or later years, US nuclear reactors – on average - exceeded their original construction budgets by factors of between 2-4.

So where are we today with respect to construction costs – after a period of relative stability? (Slide six.) We have seen a steep rise in costs, mainly driven by steel, concrete, and other raw materials – averaging 4 percent above inflation since 2002. (Slide seven.) If you compare the recent slope to that of the 1980s, it is steeper. To get a grasp on the cost of new reactors, we have to toss out the paper studies and begin with real data (slide eight) – average the cost of eight recent Asian plants completed before the recent run-up in materials costs, escalate those costs at recent rates, and we end up at 11 cents/kWh in the US or about 4-5 times more expensive than a December 2005 study by the World Nuclear Association, and substantially higher than for wind energy or energy efficiency investments. One might expect the World Nuclear Association to amend their recent study or drop it from the website, much like a department store running an 80% off sale stops advertising when it runs out of inventory. Instead it ranks prominently.

(Slide nine.) The industry says, “give us a chance. Trust us. There’s a lot we’ve learned, and we’ll learn more if we build lots of new plants.” That’s not the way it worked before, and two decades ago, in the US, we had 400 nuclear suppliers and 900 holders of N-stamp certificates from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Today we have 80 suppliers and 200 N-stamp holders. Only two companies in the world can do heavy forgings – Japan Steel and Creusot Forge in France for pressure vessels, steam generators, and pressurizers. We also have 6 year lead-times for reactor cooling pumps, diesel generators, and control and instrumentation equipment, plus inexperienced contractors and skilled laborers. All translate into pinch points throughout the supply chain.

(Slide ten.) While the industry talks about a renaissance, it will have a very difficult time simply keeping pace with planned retirements – eight new plants per year in this decade and twenty new ones per year in the following decade. (Slide eleven.) Of course, governments can try to subsidize new reactors, as the US did with multi-billion dollar promises in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The dollar contributions from the US taxpayer are far from trivial, but the effects are; the Energy Information Administration sees a US nuclear industry in 2030 barely larger than the one that exists today. And it will take truly heroic efforts to solve the fuel problem.

(Slide twelve.) Current uranium consumption in existing reactors is about 60% higher than uranium production, and one wonders how that can be. The answer is that current fuel supplies are supplemented by finite, but inexpensive inventories from cancelled and shutdown plants, and Russian and US government inventories – all driving prices down and mines and enrichment plants out of business since the late 1980s. These inventories will go away, and many are problematic.

(Slide thirteen.) Today, utilities have long term contracts for uranium and enrichment, typically with price ceilings. These contracts fall off substantially in the next two years and most are over in five years. With price ceilings in contracts and a relatively small spot market, mining companies aren’t raking in huge profits or expanding rapidly. The same holds true for enrichment companies. Meanwhile, the spot market uranium prices have soared – nine times higher today than five years ago, doubling in the last four months. (Slide fourteen.) This presentation was from October 2006 – today’s price ($85) is not just off the chart, but off the slide.

(Slide fifteen.) This is a complicated, but important slide and I won’t spend much time with it. It and the following are from a recent presentation by Tom Neff, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The little box in the left corner shows existing uranium and enrichment capacity. The larger box to the right shows what’s currently planned in both. We couldn’t meet today’s needs with the output of current and planned mines and enrichment facilities, and the green curves describe what’s needed in both uranium and enrichment to support reactors in existence in 2015 and beyond. To some extent uranium and enrichment can substitute for each other; by operating the enrichment facilities with less uranium wasted in the tails, uranium requirements are decreased but enriched uranium production declines by about 25%.

Utilities will soon have to enter that market, and it will not be a friendly one, as the mines, mills, and enrichment plants needed to deliver these products and services do not exist today. We hear, meanwhile, that nuclear fuel is cheap, but that is only one side of the coin. The other side of the coin tells us that there are no substitutes and no price elasticity - a nuclear operator would pay almost any price to avoid shutting down. (Slide sixteen.) I agree with Neff that heroic measures will be needed merely to meet near term demand, prices for both products will rise – perhaps spectacularly. Miners and enrichers have monopoly pricing power in this situation, and it would be a mistake to think they won’t use it.

(Slide seventeen.) The historical answer to high uranium prices has been chemical reprocessing of nuclear fuel, to extract unburned uranium 235 and plutonium 239 that can be used in existing reactors as a substitute for natural uranium. But reprocessing capacity is limited and the cost is enormous. So too is the cost of fabricating this type of fuel. Moreover, most current reactors cannot use a full core of reprocessed fuel without physical modification. (Slide eighteen.) In the best possible case, without reprocessing, there are no physical shortages, but fuel prices treble. With reprocessing, it takes no magic to calculate a septupling. One might expect parts of the nuclear industry – especially the utility operators – to recoil at such numbers. A three-fold fuel price increase for plants trying to survive in a more competitive wholesale market may be unavoidable and painful, but a seven-fold increase could be fatal. Instead we hear silence.

(Slide nineteen.) Capital cost and fuel supply are major challenging facing the industry, but so too is the waste problem. We easily forget the awful legacy on the front end of the fuel cycle – uranium mill tailings contain 85 percent of the radioactivity of the original ore body (thorium, radium, and radon gas) plus selenium, arsenic, vanadium, and lead – all quite dangerous, and sad for members of the Navajo tribe, documented recently in a six-part Los Angeles Times series.

The US approach to waste storage – the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada – is also in jeopardy. It can take no more waste from the civilian nuclear industry without exceeding its statutory volume limit, and recent statements from the former US DOE project manager and a current NRC commissioner suggest the entire project may collapse.

(Slide twenty.) Meanwhile, the Bush administration has invented a preposterously silly answer to the Yucca problem – GNEP, or the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. On the domestic side, the proposal is reprocess the waste, and store two of the hottest and most dangerous products (Cesium 137 and Strontium 90) on the surface for hundreds of years, so that more waste can be crammed into Yucca Mountain. As mentioned earlier, this approach vastly increases nuclear fuel cost, relies on unproven technologies, and increases the risks of waste storage. Abroad, nuclear power would be free to expand, but countries without either enrichment or reprocessing capacity would be forced to rely on the superpowers for fuel supply. Too many countries will reject this proposal in the near term, and turn to highly proliferative enrichment and reprocessing technologies as forms of self protection.

(Slide twenty one.) The good news in all of this, and you will not hear it from the nuclear industry, is that alternative renewable and cogeneration resources are growing very rapidly in the near term, while nuclear power – at least in the near term either declines or stays flat. You need to add all these curves together to get the full measure of the growth rate. (Slide twenty two.) Perhaps an even more important resource is the potential for energy efficiency improvements. This slide shows the difference between average per capita electricity use for the US as a whole, and for California, which has pursued that alternative aggressively - the equivalent of 22 reactors since 1970, neither possible to site nor finance.

(Slide twenty three.) Some people argue that efficiency is a limited resource, and that we’ve already grabbed the low hanging fruit. This slide shows the absurdity of that argument – the fruit can grow as quickly as we can pick it. Since 1970, US refrigerators, large then, have gotten 10 percent bigger. Efficiency improvements have cut electricity use by 75 percent, and the cost of the larger, more efficient fridge has fallen 60 percent. In short, the cost of this efficiency improvement is negative, and the slope continues to impress. The same basic chart could be shown for industrial electric motors or lighting.

(Slide twenty four.) I cannot end without talking about costs and prospects for new renewable resources. All of you know the experience with wind in Spain, Denmark, Germany, and elsewhere. Turbines are becoming more efficient, cheaper, and more reliable, and that is unambiguous good news.

We are also beginning to see truly exciting news in solar electric cell technology, and the one example I would cite here is a California firm, Nanosolar, started by Google’s two founders, and backed, among others by Swiss Re, now building two 430 megawatt per year production facilities in California and Germany, using a non-silicon material and production process they equate to newspaper printing. Those two plants increase global solar cell production capacity by nearly 50%, and should be completed this year. Their target price - $0.50/peak watt – which would bring them into competition with delivered electricity prices in a large part of the world, and certainly below the nuclear costs I’ve shown earlier. Will it work? I don’t know, but we will know quite soon, and if Nanosolar doesn’t reach its ambitious goals this year or next, it might the following year. Twenty years from today, light water reactor technology will be about the same as it is today.

So what does this mean for the nuclear renaissance? To me, it means that the renaissance may end before it even begins. Nuclear power is challenged on many fronts, and it is cannot expand rapidly without a compelling story to tell in terms of public acceptability, investor confidence, cost relative to alternatives, security and availability of fuel supply, safety, and resolution of waste issues. The industry nevertheless asks for our trust and support, in the absence of a credible case on any of these issues.

Myths survive for thousands of years throughout all our cultures, when they bring practical significance and inspiration to our lives. They are, in fact, important, and it is denigrating to call the nuclear renaissance a myth. The nuclear renaissance is a story based on a tall stack of fallacies, unsupported by past experience or future promises. This one seems to getting a second reading, but it does not deserve a third.

Nuclear Blackout - South Africa

2007-09-09T14:13:00.000+02:00

NUCLEAR BLACKOUT
by Ingela Richardson

Unless the average South African reads Mining Weekly, Creamers Weekly, The Financial Mail or trade journals related to mining, energy supplies, stocks and shares, they will have missed out on the government's national plan to "roll-out" nuclear power by next year.

It seems that in general the Department of Minerals and Energy has attempted to forge ahead with deals with multinational companies that will affect all of South Africa, but without the element of public participation that is supposed to be entrenched in law. The government seems to be following a policy of stating their plan of action and then defending it at all costs, regardless of public protest. Participation by the public by registering as IAPs or attending meetings, or even the issue of Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) seem to be given no importance at all and protesters to certain projects have even found themselves attacked and vilified through the press - as in the case of the Coega development outside Port Elizabeth.

In cases like these, industrial magnates not only have had financial backing to railroad communities into compliance, but have also used certain media groups as their own personal public relations organizations - advertising all their business and industrial developments with the highest praise. This kind of media bias then calls into question the media groups' owners allegiances - and in most cases the vested interests of media owners in mining and industry projects have caused their publications to become mere advertising pamphlets or mouthpieces for industrial developers.

In the case of South Africa's nuclear programme, the avoidance of general media to report comprehensively on issues that would affect the public and relegating nuclear to a few letters or comments, shows another bias that is of more concern. Concerned scientists in countries overseas who have seen the problems caused by nuclear programmes then refer to the "atomic mafia" as being those who have such a high financial stake in nuclear development that they will do anything to ensure the programme goes ahead. Even if it means sacrificing the rights of the people to participate in government and also moving as far from "transparent governance" as possible to the point of denying environmental groups the rights to documents affecting public health in court.

Eskom is of course notifying nuclear suppliers in advance - just not the South African people. In fact the Department of Minerals (DME) wants to push nuclear through legislation so that projects will move ahead quickly without any need for public participation. They want to be able to build nuclear reactors on sites they have chosen without public protest. How much will this cost? Only about R80 billion - but check again next month, because this figure keeps going up.

Eskom will go ahead and apply for licences and security approval - but who in the community will know that a section of land next door is earmarked for a nuclear reactor? Possibly not until it is built, and then it is too late. This is a hard lesson people around Coega have learned. They objected before the project went ahead and government departments ignored them. They objected during and after construction and were told "it’s too late now". And what role did the press play? Certain "technocrats" had a field day disguising themselves as modern day Robin Hoods who were going to "uplift the poor". But unfortunately not only did they "uplift the poor" but they uplifted themselves to the tune of a package - in the case of Coega CEO Pepi Silinga - that rivalled the president of the country. The media in this case became a mouthpiece for industrialists and turned any concerned protester (whether motivated by environment or pure survival concerns) into a whipping boy.

Now Eskom wants 20 000 MW of electricity to come from nuclear plants - 700-MW and 1 600-MW. Do you know how big this is? Have you seen pictures? Possibly because government does not want people to see what they are paying for.

Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin said nuclear energy should play a far greater role in South Africa. Why? Possibly because President Bush has a few million in this project on behalf of the American people who ironically are trying to move away from his global warming policies. The US and Australia were not party to the Kyoto Protocol that aimed to cut down on global warming industries. Erwin protests that nuclear addresses global climate change, but unfortunately when you include poisoning from uranium mining, processing, transport and waste storage, this just isn't true.

Unfortunately again, South Africa is a dry country - water is a precious resource. Yet nuclear reactors need water to cool spent fuel rods. Where does that water come from? Where does it go? Perhaps it is better for the community not to know that certain discharges from nuclear reactors are deemed fit to re-enter air and water sources. Better still not to know of examples such as the cancer cluster discovered by researchers in Wales affecting people who lived near a dam used by a nuclear reactor.

How many members are there in the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor company? The PBMR government company advertises itself as the answer to nuclear energy problems and how much has it cost? Necsa CEO Rob Adams will have us know that PhDs don't come cheap. So they have spent a few million. How cheap is nuclear power again?

Perhaps we need to try other questions like "Why not solar?" We live in a country with plentiful sunshine after all and have local developers. South African Rands would not have to go to Russia, Japan and whoever else advertises nuclear technology skills. The DME thinks it is fine to trade food from South Africa for Russian nuclear scientists. Let's think about that one. Does South Africa need food or nuclear science? Can anyone afford nuclear energy at these prices? Who knows. Someone is being selective with the truth.

Yours sincerely
INGELA RICHARDSON

Nuclear Energy is Not clean or green

2007-09-09T14:06:00.000+02:00

Not clean or green
Mike Kantey, via-mail
http://secure.financialmail.co.za/07/0112/front/letta.htm

Having read the FM for some decades now as a reliable source of business intelligence, I was disappointed with the fanfare given to nuclear power in the article by Sven Lünsche (FM Fox December 22).

How can the man fall foul of nuclear PR spin?

When he says that "the running costs are considerably cheaper" [than coal], how was this calculated? Did he take into consideration the insurance waiver; the subsidised research & development; the subsidised electricity supplies to the industry itself (astronomical); the costs of mining; milling; enrichment; fuel fabrication; decommissioning and long-term waste storage (not disposal)?

His point that "... most of the safety concerns having been addressed and nuclear power deemed cleaner than coal-fuelled power stations" is a far more serious problem. Is Lünsche aware of a multiparty European Union study that put the blame for increased cancers in the vicinity of nuclear installations squarely at the door of the nuclear industry? Does he know that every year since 1984, Koeberg has put out millions and millions of carcinogenic isotopes, such as strontium-90 and cesium-137, and that the last Pebble Bed Modular Reactor environmental impact report blithely called for an increase in radioactive isotope emissions to both air and water, as well as an increase in radioactive solid waste products per MWe, compared with Koeberg?

On the allegation of cleanness, veteran antinuclear activist and medical doctor Helen Caldicott writes in the introduction to her new book, Nuclear Power is not the Answer :

"Nuclear power is not clean and green', as the industry claims, because large amounts of traditional fossil fuels are required to mine and refine the uranium needed to run nuclear power reactors... In addition, large amounts of the now-banned chlorofluorocarbon gas (CFC) are emitted during the enrichment of uranium. CFC gas is not only 10 000 to 20 000 times more efficient as an atmospheric heat trapper (and therefore a more potent greenhouse gas) than CO², but it is a classic pollutant' and a potent destroyer of the ozone layer."

Finally, in the Weekend Argus of December 30 2006, it was reported that the UK would close down two of its oldest reactors: Magnox Sizewell A and Dungeness A. According to the article ( by Reuters), the sites would be unusable for 100 years because of radioactive contamination.

It follows, therefore, that under no circumstances can nuclear power be declared a "cleaner, safer and cheaper" technology than any other. Please, let the reputable FM first undertake a thorough investigation into all the relevant facts and then compare and contrast one technology with another for electricity-generation purposes.

FM Fox seems to have been scavenging on the shredded waste dump of nuclear spin doctors, rather than outwitting and outfoxing the industry specialists with a free-thinking and free-ranging approach to sound financial journalism.

Eskom looks to nuclear plants

2007-09-09T12:26:00.000+02:00

Note: I warn the public of South Africa not to believe a word from Eskom's mouths. They are turning out to be the biggest liars of all. They say one thing and then 3 months later they say something completely different. They do not even seem "able" to even read their own "tripe" that they fed the press in the past. They just continue to feed more bull**** into the system ... and everyone just believes it because they are Eskom "surely" they must know what they are talking about? .... nonsense !!!!! The media of this country have FAILED democracy, they have become a mouthpiece for the government and they fail to print anything from those opposing nuclear energy. Nobody can honestly be stupid enough to believe nuclear energy is just the great, wonderful, god-sent saviour ..... world-wide this industry has caused nothing but turnmoil, heartache, cancer and death. Now they want to poison South African's too so that a few men can excercise their EGO's and Bank Balances so that the rest of South Africa can suffer.

Eskom looks to nuclear plants
James Macharia | Johannesburg, South Africa
05 September 2007 07:21

South Africa's largely coal-driven power utility Eskom has hit the limits of its capacity and aims to double output by 2025, with nuclear plants supplying more than a quarter of future energy compared with 6% now.

Eskom's chief executive Jacob Maroga told a coal conference on Tuesday the state-owned firm would cut back on polluting coal-fired plants that have made South Africa the world's lowest cost electricity producer.

"The issues we're faced with are costs and lead time, but the debate around global warming is key, because coal is a big contributor to carbon dioxide emissions," Maroga told the Coaltrans conference.

"We can now finally say we have run out of surplus capacity."

Maroga said plans to boost output to 80 000 megawatts (MW) by 2025 would include adding 20 000 MW of nuclear-supplied energy as well as extra renewable capacity.

The proportion of output from coal would fall below 70% by 2025 from 86% currently.

"All over the world nuclear is coming back," he said. "Going forward the electricity prices we have will not be sustainable."

The two reactors at South Africa's Koeberg, Africa's only nuclear-fired facility, generate some 6% of the country's electricity, mainly used around Cape Town.

Maroga said South Africa, one of the biggest producers of uranium, was building a multi-billion dollar new technology pebble bed modular reactor (PBMR), and has mooted building more conventional plants to add to Koeberg.

Eskom was currently planning to expand yearly by 4%, to keep up with a projected 6% growth in the gross domestic product of Africa's biggest economy.

The company has already outlined a R150-billion spending programme from 2007 to 2011, with more to follow. - Reuters

Source: http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=318364&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__business/

Nuclear NO-NO

2007-09-09T12:21:00.000+02:00

Nuclear energy no-no
Mike Kantey, Coalition Against Nuclear Energy

Your nuclear power editorial on August 17 caught my eye not so much for its accuracy as for its supercilious tone.

You may not have heard the muttering on the street, closer to Pelindaba, and of the good citizens dying of horrible illnesses in Atteridgeville and Mamelodi.

Nuclear power may not produce much carbon but it was banned from the Kyoto Protocol for carbon trading purposes.

Everyday emissions from Koeberg nuclear power station include carcinogenic strontium-90 and cesium-137, not to mention long-lived plutonium-239 from the spent fuel.

The spent fuel has produced no lasting solution since the Manhattan Project in 1942. We're building skyscrapers globally with no toilets.

Pebble-bed technology was yanked off the German market after blowing up in May 1986 (its fallout blamed on Chernobyl) and flogged to some refugees from Armscor under the banner of IST.

Uranium reserves are not forever, therefore it is not sustainable.

As far as the funding of the nuclear ambitions is concerned, have you noticed that Eskom wants an 18% increase in electricity tariffs? This is after agreeing with Nersa last year to a 6% increase.

Why have they jumped from a projected R90bn to a projected R140bn overnight? Could it be the extra R50bn for nuclear power suggested by your own editorial?

And if you want the private sector to get involved in this fiasco, ask them why they have never taken up the offered share in this enterprise. And why no commercially driven investor has coughed up anywhere for a nuclear power programme.

Uranium is a bubble. One more Chernobyl is all we need.

Should that be in SA, where we can't even run a rail service properly?

Source: http://secure.financialmail.co.za/07/0907/front/letta.htm

Article referred to:

Let private sector in on nuclear power

No subject riles environmentalists in the West as much as nuclear power. Not so in SA. With the exception of an insignificant green movement, this week's adoption by government of a draft nuclear energy policy won plaudits all round. For government, nuclear power ticks all the right boxes: it produces little carbon, the technology is proven and uranium is fairly plentiful in SA. In Eskom it has a useful ally (some would say tool), in that half of its new power generation over the next two decades will be nuclear energy.

But there is a significant drawback: the cost of constructing nuclear power stations is significantly higher than that of building coal-fired ones, though in the long run they become cheaper to operate. Eskom currently runs a fleet of 23 coal-fired power stations - and is building a further two - which provide SA industry and consumers with the lowest-cost electricity in the world.

Preliminary estimates put the cost of Eskom's first planned nuclear plant at over R120bn, compared with the R80bn it costs to develop a similar-sized coal-based station. Similarly, enriching uranium, as the national strategy envisages, is a costly but necessary business if SA's plentiful uranium resources are used to power nuclear plants. A price tag of R10bn is the minimum to be expected. Government's draft document is conveniently short on detail on how its ambitious nuclear policy will be funded. It talks of a range of state institutions that will be used as legal entities to arrange the funding.

If there is one flaw in government's nuclear ambition it is the fact that private-sector involvement is limited to the mining of uranium. In other countries, private-sector companies are involved through the entire energy process, from uranium enrichment to running nuclear power stations. As the policy develops it makes financial and operational sense to let the private sector play a much more critical role.

Source: http://secure.financialmail.co.za/07/0817/front/bedop.htm

SA - nuclear threat?

2007-09-06T17:28:00.000+02:00

Nuclear threats, of course, have historically been at the heart of U.S. foreign policy and have proven extremely useful for justifying U.S. actions.[3] This time around, however, there is a new twist added to the more traditional threats by the U.S. to unleash nuclear devastation on any nation challenging its powers.[4] In the past, preventing nuclear proliferation had been a low priority for U.S. policymakers. Now, the U.S. claims the right to intervene militarily around the world to stop alleged proliferation. . . .

While the U.S. richly rewarded Israel, South Africa, and Pakistan, which all had extensive clandestine nuclear facilities, it used Iraq's primitive bomb-building efforts to justify a war. In that conflict, the U.S. and its allies dropped 88,500 tons of high explosives (seven times the Hiroshima bomb), killed perhaps 200,000 to 300,000 people, and according to the U.N., reduced the country to a "preindustrial" state. . .

Clearly, South Africa's vast nuclear program . . . dwarfs the puny Iraqi program by several orders of magnitude and can generously supply both its own and Israel's need for fissionable materials.[14] The exact figures on South African plutonium refinement capability are unknown because Pretoria had refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) until 1991. Iraq, by contrast, was a signatory to the NPT, allowed inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) every six months, and only possessed about 50 pounds of enriched uranium. . . .

Compare the unsubstantiated charges of imminent nuclear capability launched against Iraq with the solid evidence provided six years earlier by Israeli defector Mordechai Vanunu. The nuclear technician claimed that Israel possessed possibly several hundred atomic bombs, developed at the secret Dimona plant, and even sent color photographs of the nuclear bomb cores to the "London Sunday Times." According to Vanunu, Dimona produces 1.2 kilograms of pure plutonium per week, or enough to manufacture four to twelve atomic bombs per year. Despite this evidence, the U.S. publicly supported the convenient fiction that Israel did not possess nuclear capability.[15] . . .

A journalist once asked President Reagan whether the rightwing strategy of "spending Russia into a depression" might backfire; might not the U.S. be spent into a depression instead? In one of the few lucid moments of his presidency, Reagan answered, "Yes...but they'll bust first." For once, Ronald Reagan was correct. The Soviets indeed did bust first, but there are indications that the U.S. may be next.

The national security states of hypocritical america are well described below. Why worry about vague abstractions like "moral authority" when you can simply cop-out with rule-of-the-club/might-makes-right kind of neanderthal "thinking"? For the sake of accuracy, simply replace "may" with "will" in the last excerpted sentence above.

SA - nuclear threat?

2007-09-06T17:21:00.000+02:00

"For decades, then, while publicly decrying the spread of nuclear weapons,
the U.S. has been providing extensive covert and overt support, including
selectively proliferating bomb technology to a number of its close allies."

The following appeared in the Summer '92 issue of Covert Action
Information Bulletin, #41, and is reprinted with permission.

________________________________________________________________________

Nuclear Threats and the New World Order
by Michio Kaku

Michio Kaku is Professor of Nuclear Physics at City University of New York and co-author of To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon's Secret Plans, Boston: South End Press, 1987.

On the eve of the Gulf War, opinion polls indicated that the U.S. public was evenly split, about 45 to 45 percent, on military intervention. To tip the scales, the Bush administration unleashed a blistering torrent of accusations, branding Saddam Hussein a threat to Middle East oil, a renegade, a trampler of international law, and even a new Hitler. None of these tactics, however, proved particularly effective in rousing war fever. A sizable fraction of the U.S. people resisted administration propaganda and preferred to pursue patient negotiations, rather than to pull the trigger.

Then, the Bush administration unleashed the unsubstantiated claim that Iraq would develop the atomic bomb within one year--even though most nuclear physicists concluded it would take about ten years.[1] Within days, well meaning Americans who had grave reservations about the use of bloodshed to restore a reactionary, feudal emirate, began to wave the flag and support invasion.

Given the success of the tactic, it is not surprising that the nuclear bogeyman reared its head again. Soon after the conclusion of the Gulf War, the "New York Times" raised the specter of a North Korean atomic bomb. For 40 years the situation in Korea had been relatively stable and, in fact, ignored by the media. Within weeks, however, the Bush administration created a major international crisis by focusing world attention on the alleged atomic bomb factory at Yongbyon.[2] Similarly, it had been known for years that Cuba was building a Chernobyl-style reactor. After the Gulf War, however, the right-wing press ignited a fierce controversy by claiming that because Florida could be contaminated by a nuclear accident, a U.S. invasion of the island was justified.

Proliferation Justifies Invasion

Nuclear threats, of course, have historically been at the heart of U.S. foreign policy and have proven extremely useful for justifying U.S. actions.[3] This time around, however, there is a new twist added to the more traditional threats by the U.S. to unleash nuclear devastation on any nation challenging its powers.[4]

In the past, preventing nuclear proliferation had been a low priority for U.S. policymakers. Now, the U.S. claims the right to intervene militarily around the world to stop alleged proliferation.

Iraq, North Korea, and Cuba are the first beneficiaries of this new "Bush Doctrine." As we shall see, the basis for calculating the extent of the threat these nations pose is a political judgment by U.S. policy makers, not an objective assessment by scientists and military analysts.

Now that the only other superpower, the USSR, no longer exists, one might conclude there is no need to threaten the use of nuclear weapons. This is not the case.

On January 14, 1991, days before the beginning of the Gulf War, the Pentagon leaked to "Newsweek" a major study on the use of nuclear weapons against Iraq. It publicized the Pentagon's varied contingency plans to use nuclear weapons and pointedly mentioned General Norman Schwarzkop's request for permission to use them in the Gulf. The plan called for neutron bombs to destroy enemy troops, nuclear "earth penetrators" to vaporize underground bunker positions, and hydrogen bombs detonated over Baghdad to wipe out its communications systems.[5] During the war itself, there were approximately 300 U.S. hydrogen bombs in the Gulf aboard U.S. ships.

This policy was further clarified by a Pentagon paper leaked to the "New York Times" in March 1992.[6] According to the secret draft, top priority for the future will be preventing the rise of another rival to U.S. military supremacy. It listed seven possible nations or combinations of nations which may threaten U.S. military domination of the world. A careful look at these seven possibilities, however, shows that the Pentagon is shadow boxing. Iraq, one of the contenders, for example, is devastated and has a gross national product that is one percent of the U.S. GNP. Nonetheless, the report unleashed a firestorm of protest, including diplomatically tempered outrage from some U.S. allies ranked as potential rivals. The Bush administration tried to distance itself from this report, calling it unofficial and low-level and not the basis of U.S. foreign policy.

Two and a half months later, according to the "New York Times," the Pentagon issued its final report in which it backed away from thwarting "the emergence of a new rival to American military supremacy"[7] as the primary goal for the next five years. Official policy or not, the report, which circulated among the Joint Chiefs of Staff, represents a major position within the military.

Ever eager to save the administration embarrassment, some commentators quickly labeled the report a "trial balloon" meant to test public opinion about a major defense strategy. More likely, however, it was deliberately released as a veiled warning to friends and foes alike that the U.S. will not tolerate threats to its military supremacy.

One of the key principles of Game Theory, developed by the mathematician John von Neumann for Pentagon nuclear war games, is that the enemy can be kept at bay by letting it know that you are prepared to unleash the "maximum level of violence" if necessary. The policy is like that of a tiger snarling in the forest; it knows that if the smaller animals ganged up, they would win. Through belligerent roaring and strutting, and a few well-timed bluffs, the tiger can intimidate the other animals and keep them in line without engaging in a single fight. Likewise, the Pentagon's nuclear snarl warns the rest of the world not to tangle with the U.S.

Selective Proliferation

Although adding charges of proliferation to the vocabulary of snarls and using it as a justification for intervention is a recent phenomenon, its inclusion is simply an extension of longstanding U.S. Cold War strategy. The U.S. has consistently dispensed support, and in this case nuclear technology, to selected right-wing governments in reward for containing the Soviet Union. As Henry Kissinger once remarked, if a nation is on its way to building an atomic bomb, then why not provide certain assistance in order to influence its foreign policy.[8]

For decades, then, while publicly decrying the spread of nuclear weapons, the U.S. has been providing extensive covert and overt support, including selectively proliferating bomb technology to a number of its close allies. The real threat of nuclear proliferation comes not so much from Iraq and North Korea, which have only a primitive technological base, but from those countries such as Israel, South Africa, India, and Pakistan, whose nuclear weapons infrastructures are quite mature and sophisticated. Interviews in 1988 with top U.S. intelligence experts indicated that Israel had at least 100 atomic bombs, South Africa had up to 20, India 12 to 20 and Pakistan 4.[9] Since then, these countries have considerably modernized their nuclear production methods and accelerated bomb production.

Double Standard

In its secret nuclear facility at Kahuta, in the hills near Rawalpindi, Pakistan has been quietly amassing advanced nuclear technology. The U.S. gave its tacit blessing to the project largely in recognition of Pakistan's role as a strategic CIA-financed staging area for the fundamentalist rebel fight against the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan. The Reagan administration, in fact, pressured Congress to grant exceptions to laws requiring a cutoff of aid to Pakistan because of its nuclear program, arguing that it had not yet technically assembled an atomic bomb, i.e., it was "one screw turn away" from constructing a nuclear weapon. A.Q. Kahn, head of the Pakistani nuclear program, acknowledged that the U.S. was fully aware that it had the bomb. "America knows it," said the "father of the Pakistani atomic bomb" in one candid interview. "What the CIA has been saying about our possessing the bomb is correct."[10] In spring 1992, after years of adamant denial, Pakistan publicly admitted for the first time that it has the capability of building the atomic bomb.

While the U.S. richly rewarded Israel, South Africa, and Pakistan, which all had extensive clandestine nuclear facilities, it used Iraq's primitive bomb-building efforts to justify a war. In that conflict, the U.S. and its allies dropped 88,500 tons of high explosives (seven times the Hiroshima bomb), killed perhaps 200,000 to 300,000 people, and according to the U.N., reduced the country to a "preindustrial" state.

Access to Fissionable Materials

An examination of the relative strengths of nuclear programs makes the double standard clear. A first step in building an atomic bomb is obtaining or purifying from natural uranium the 20 pounds of enriched uranium, or uranium-235, necessary to fabricate one atomic bomb (less for a plutonium bomb). The two most common ways of obtaining weapons-grade uranium are manufacturing it domestically or buying it abroad on the open market. Using state-of-the-art production techniques, it takes approximately 1,000 ultracentrifuges operating for one year to purify enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. (Because U-235 is slightly lighter than U-238, the ultracentrifuge, by spinning natural uranium, can separate these two isotopes.) Pakistan is known to have about 14,000 ultracentrifuges, or enough, in principle, to make 10 to 15 atomic bombs per year.[11] Having apparently assembled its first atomic bomb in 1986, Pakistan could now have a small nuclear arsenal.

By comparison, Iraq had 26 ultracentrifuges before the war, far too few to manufacture an atomic bomb within a year.[12] Meanwhile, as far back as 1968, the U.S. provided South Africa with 230 pounds of enriched uranium to power its U.S.-made 20 megawatt Safari-I nuclear reactor, which operates on weapons-grade (90 percent enriched) uranium. As early as August 1973, the South African government publicly announced that it had purified a few tons of weapons-grade fuel for its nuclear reactor at Pelindaba-Valindaba. In 1975, the South African Minister of Mines, Dr. Pieter Koornhof, announced an ambitious $4.5 billion program to build a mammoth facility capable of producing 5,000 tons of enriched uranium a year.[13]

In addition, the South African government also operates the huge 1,844 megawatt Koeberg I and II nuclear power plants. Theoretically, these plants are large enough to yield roughly 500 pounds of plutonium per year, which could then be extracted by chemical purification processes.

Clearly, South Africa's vast nuclear program, centered at Pelindaba-Valindaba, dwarfs the puny Iraqi program by several orders of magnitude and can generously supply both its own and Israel's need for fissionable materials.[14] The exact figures on South African plutonium refinement capability are unknown because Pretoria had refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) until 1991.

Iraq, by contrast, was a signatory to the NPT, allowed inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) every six months, and only possessed about 50 pounds of enriched uranium. Legally obtained under strict IAEA controls and supervision, this material was apparently the basis of the Bush administration's claim--widely disputed by physicists around the world--that the Iraqis could assemble an atomic bomb within one year. In fact, only one month before the Gulf War, the IAEA had conducted its periodic inspection and stated flatly that there was no threat from this uranium.

Compare the unsubstantiated charges of imminent nuclear capability launched against Iraq with the solid evidence provided six years earlier by Israeli defector Mordechai Vanunu. The nuclear technician claimed that Israel possessed possibly several hundred atomic bombs, developed at the secret Dimona plant, and even sent color photographs of the nuclear bomb cores to the "London Sunday Times." According to Vanunu, Dimona produces 1.2 kilograms of pure plutonium per week, or enough to manufacture four to twelve atomic bombs per year. Despite this evidence, the U.S. publicly supported the convenient fiction that Israel did not possess nuclear capability.[15]

Secret Testing Revealed

Even after it is assembled, an atomic bomb is effectively useless unless the technology has been tested; no country will risk its existence on a potential dud. To prevent testing without its knowledge, the U.S. launched the Vela satellite in the 1970s specifically to detect unauthorized detonations of nuclear weapons around the world.

On September 22, 1979, a storm brewed off the coast of South Africa near Prince Edward Island (1,500 miles from the Cape of Good Hope). Two Israeli Navy warships plied the rough waters. Unexpectedly, the heavy cloud cover broke and the Vela satellite detected the fingerprint "double flash" (called NUCFLASHES in Pentagon jargon).[16]

Apparently, the South Africans and Israelis were testing a low-yield atomic warhead that was later standardized for use by the Israeli Defense Force. Had the clouds not parted on their third test, they would have successfully evaded the Vela satellite.[17] As one Israeli official involved with the test said, "It was a fuckup. There was a storm and we figured it would block Vela, but there was a gap in the weather, a window, and Vela got blinded by the flash." This joint South African-Israeli test was the first and only known test by a country not in the Nuclear Club since India had tested its bomb in 1974.[18]

By contrast, Iraq was not only years away from getting enough enriched uranium by its ingenious (although clumsy) efforts to make a bomb, it was even further away from actual testing.

Developing Technology and a Credible Arsenal

The recent U.N. revelations that Iraq's nuclear program was concealed and more diverse than expected do not change this basic conclusion. The new information was interesting not because it showed how advanced the project was, but because it exposed Iraq's low level of technology and high level of desperation. Unable to legally obtain ultracentrifuge technology, the country had embarked on a costly search for various alternative and antiquated methods of uranium separation.

An Iraqi defector divulged that there were three previously undisclosed nuclear sites where the Iraqis even resurrected technologies long-abandoned by the West, such as the calutron (California cyclotron). The on-site U.N. team found that only 6 to 12 of the 30 calutrons in Tarmia were usable before the war and all were destroyed by the war. Iraq's admission of one pound of low-grade uranium (unsuitable for bomb use) was consistent with the state of Iraq's unfinished calutron site. Furthermore, without high speed capacitors needed for precise electronic detonation of the enriched uranium or plutonium, an Iraqi bomb would have been quite unusable. The U.N. found no indications that Iraq had mastered the technology of high speed capacitors.

The Single Bomb Fallacy

Even if Iraq had been able to manufacture a bomb, a single nuclear weapon, contrary to public perception, does not constitute a credible military threat, nor does it have much military value in an armed conflict. A substantial stockpile is another matter.

Israel has perhaps the world's sixth largest nuclear arsenal, now estimated at 300 atomic bombs. During the 1973 October War, the Israelis were poised to fire their nuclear weapons at the Arabs if the battle had turned against them. After the 1973 war, the Israeli Defense Force apparently established three nuclear-capable battalions, each with 12 self-propelled 175-mm nuclear cannons. Three nuclear artillery shells were stockpiled for each weapon, making a total of 108 warheads for these nuclear cannons alone.[19]

Adding to its nuclear potency, only Israel, of all the nations not in the Nuclear Club, has mastered the more advanced thermonuclear hydrogen bomb technology. The pictures released by Vanunu and shown to nuclear physicists at U.S. weapons laboratories revealed that the Israelis have mastered the technology of neutron bombs--highly sophisticated "enhanced radiation" weapons which are ideal for tactical or theater nuclear warfare.

Delivering The Bomb

Lastly, even after constructing, testing and consolidating a small arsenal of bombs, a nation must be able to deliver them. The Scud-B weapons launched by the Iraqis during the Gulf War had great psychological value, but almost no military value. Most of them broke up in mid-flight--a disaster in a war fought with nuclear weapons. Furthermore, crude atomic bombs are so large and bulky that they cannot be carried by conventional fighter bombers. By contrast, the Pakistani program is advanced enough to manufacture a lightweight atomic bomb, weighing no more than 400 pounds, that can be strapped onto the belly of a U.S. F-16 fighter bomber.[20] The South Africans have made their Overberg testing range available to the Israelis for tests of their Shavit (Comet) missile, which uses the Jericho-2B missile as its first two stages.[21] The Shavit missile launched an Israeli satellite into orbit in 1988 and can hurl a 2,000 pound bomb a distance of 1,700 miles. One top U.S. administration official, commenting on the close relationship between Israel and South Africa in developing these weapons said, "We know everything, names, dates, everything. We don't have any evidence that it's a plain uranium-for-missiles deal. Think of the relationship as a whole series of deals." [22]

Divide and Conquer

Puny as Iraq's nuclear program seems in comparison to that of Pakistan, Israel, and South Africa, it could not have been built in such a short time without substantial foreign assistance.

Ironically, Iraq's technological infrastructure was largely a creation of the West. In the early 20th century, British success in dominating the Middle East, controlling large parts of Africa, and running a global empire, relied on a strategy of "divide and conquer." The British sliced up what is now Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Kuwait, and much of Africa in order to pit Arabs against Arabs, Africans against Africans. The U.S., which took over as the major Middle East power after World War II, learned this lesson well. The Shah of Iran, for example, was set up by the CIA as regional "policeman of the Gulf" charged with keeping the Arab nations in line. After his overthrow, the U.S. needed a counterweight to the insufficiently tractable Iranian fundamentalists. In the interest of Middle East control, and eager to see its enemies clobber themselves, the U.S. largely sustained and then brokered the long, bloody stalemate between Iraq and Iran.

In order to neutralize Iran, which it perceived as the greater threat, the Reagan administration gave widespread military and economic support to Saddam Hussein, secretly feeding Iraq with military intelligence information on Iran's forces, in the form of satellite data.[23]

As long as Iraq was neutralizing Iran, Saddam was the beneficiary of the selective proliferation policy. As long as Iraq was perceived to be carrying out U.S. wishes, it was rewarded, like Pakistan, with substantial aid and trade concessions. Thus, much of the high technology eventually destroyed by Desert Storm came from the U.S. and West Germany.[24] The U.S. Commerce Department licensed more than $1.5 billion in sensitive high technology for Iraq before the Gulf War. About 200 major companies in the West were involved in the high technology transfer. Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, Unisys, International Computer Systems, Rockwell, and Tektronix had lucrative trade agreements with the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission and Saad 16, Iraq's missile research center. Honeywell even did a study for a power gasoline bomb warhead for the Iraqis.[25]

Nuclear Threats in Korea

Similarly, the Bush Doctrine has recast the Korean question. After three decades of relative stability and obscurity, suddenly, within weeks of the Gulf War, international attention was focused on the "nuclear threat" posed by the Yongbyon nuclear complex located 60 miles north of Pyongyang. The irony, as the North Koreans have pointed out, is that the U.S. maintains thousands of tactical nuclear weapons around the world, with approximately 600 concentrated in the Korean area.[26]

The threat presented by this arsenal is real. During the Korean War, the U.S. had authorized the use of nuclear weapons in the appendix to its secret war plan, OPLAN8-52. Recently declassified minutes of the National Security Council reveal the detailed plans by President Eisenhower and his secretary of state John Foster Dulles to exploit tactical nuclear weapons in Korea.[27] To pressure North Korea, President Bush vowed in September 1991 to withdraw nuclear weapons from South Korea. The pledge, as the North Koreans have again noted, is largely symbolic, since U.S. nuclear weapons based on ships, such as nuclear cruise missiles, can be fired into North Korea within minutes. An offshore nuclear missile is just as deadly as a nuclear missile based on land.

In any case, equating the U.S.-backed South Korean nuclear capabilities with those of North Korea is absurd. The North Korean nuclear program is qualitatively and quantitatively even more primitive than the Iraqi one, which in turn was quite backward by Western standards. The Iraqis, at least, had access to billions of dollars of advanced Western technology because of its war against Iran. The Soviets, by contrast, were historically much more tight-fisted about sharing this kind of advanced technology with their allies. In the late 1960s, they provided a small reactor. The North Koreans contracted with the British to build an old-fashioned, 1950s-style graphite reactor, called the Calder Hall, which was to be operated by the British Nuclear Fuels Company. This 20 to 30 megawatt reactor, tiny compared with the 1,000 megawatts common in the West, was begun in 1980 and was already obsolete when completed seven years later.

In 1985, although North Korea signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, it has been unwilling to allow totally unrestricted inspections of its facilities. As a consequence, the U.S. began to suspect that the North Koreans were converting the civilian reactor to military purposes. At present, the case against the North Koreans is based primarily on satellite photographs, the interpretation of which is the subject of intense controversy. The U.S. asserts the photos show that the North Koreans are completing a new reactor, possibly 50 to 200 megawatts in power, and a new reprocessing plant which could extract plutonium from radioactive waste. These admittedly speculative conclusions have even created a dispute between the CIA on one side and the Pentagon and the State Department on the other.[28] Based on its claims that the North Koreans will have the atomic bomb within a few months, the CIA recommends immediate action, possibly including force. The Pentagon and State Department take a much more relaxed view, estimating that North Korea is two to five years from an atomic bomb. This appraisal allows ample time for a diplomatic solution.

There is some indication that the stalemate is breaking up. On March 14, 1992, a new agreement was signed between the two Koreas. The South Koreans agreed to drop their insistence on a rigid timetable for inspections, and the North Koreans agreed to allow a formal inspection of the Yongbyon site--possibly in June or shortly thereafter. In April, the North Koreans even released a video of the interior of the reactor site. On May 3, they promised to hand over to the IAEA a list of nuclear-related sites for inspection.[29]

Part of the controversy has revolved around the often quoted U.S. position that satellite photographs of the Yongbyon facility show no electrical wires emanating from the site. Reactors for peaceful rather than bomb-production purposes, the U.S. argued, would necessitate a network of transformers and cables connecting the site to the power grid. It was the North Koreans' word against the West's, until IAEA Director Hans Blix and his team reported after a May 1992 visit that they found "electric distribution grids outside two large nuclear power plants, suggesting that the plants are intended for power generation... [and] supporting North Korea's assertion that its nuclear plants are strictly for peaceful power-generation purposes."

They also turned up a "a tiny quantity [of plutonium]," said Blix, "far from the amount you need for a weapon."[30] In fact, small quantities of plutonium are often extracted for reprocessing but are usually of a type not usable in weapons production. Despite exaggeration by the media about the Yongbyon site, the IAEA has been cautious in drawing any conclusions until a more complete inspection--expected soon--can be conducted.

Will the Bush Doctrine Backfire?

Ultimately, the Bush Doctrine may backfire in any number of ways, with a variety of dire consequences. The Bush administration is playing with nuclear fire, and it is easy to get burned.

For example, the U.S. has allowed the atomic bomb to proliferate so widely that, without anticommunism to keep these countries in line, proliferation may be out of its control. Already in the 1973 October War, the Israelis apparently threatened to unleash their atomic bomb on the Arabs unless the U.S. came to its aid. The U.S. was thus blackmailed and put on the receiving end of a nuclear threat.

Another potential nuclear flashpoint is the centuries-old feud between the Muslims in Pakistan and the Hindus in India. The recent crisis over Kashmir caused the U.S. State Department to express public alarm that the conflict would boil over into open warfare, with the distinct possibility that nuclear weapons could be used by both sides.

But perhaps most important, the reliance on nuclear threats to maintain U.S. military supremacy may backfire by weakening the domestic economic infrastructure. The clear implication of the leaked Pentagon report is that while other countries, such as Germany and Japan, may eventually pose a grave economic threat to the U.S., Washington's nuclear superiority will keep them in line and keep the U.S. on top.

This reliance on military domination is a tacit admission that U.S. economic strength will continue to deteriorate into the next century. Since 1945, U.S. control of 50 percent of the world's wealth has declined to 25 percent, and is still falling. Most of that wealth was squandered maintaining a world-spanning network of 395 foreign military bases in 35 countries at a current cost exceeding $210 billion annually. With such a colossal military burden, this country is undergoing a remarkable de-industrialization process, which the world has not seen since turn-of-the-century England.

If the Pentagon is relying on nuclear might to keep its rising economic rivals in line, then this expensive "solution" will ultimately exacerbate the problem of economic decline by accelerating the de-industrialization of the U.S.

A journalist once asked President Reagan whether the rightwing strategy of "spending Russia into a depression" might backfire; might not the U.S. be spent into a depression instead?

In one of the few lucid moments of his presidency, Reagan answered, "Yes...but they'll bust first." For once, Ronald Reagan was correct. The Soviets indeed did bust first, but there are indications that the U.S. may be next.

_________________________

"Unless Stopped, Iraq Could Have A-Arms in 10 Years, Experts Say," New York Times, November 18, 1990 p. 1.
"U.S. Officials step up warnings to North Korea on Nuclear Arms," New York Times, November 21,1991.
Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod, To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon's Secret War Plans, Boston: South End Press, 1987.
As early as 1948, during the Berlin crisis, President Truman authorized Operation Broiler, which included plans to drop 34 atomic bombs on 24 cities in the Soviet Union in a first strike by B-29 bombers. During the 1954 Vietnam crisis, President Eisenhower authorized Operation Vulture, which included using two to six 31-kiloton atomic bombs to vaporize Vietnamese troops at Dien Bien Phu. Kaku and Axelrod, op. cit.
Newsweek, January 14, 1991.
Patrick E. Tyler, "U.S. Strategy Plans Call for Insuring No Rivals Develop," New York Times, March 8, 1992, p. A1.
Barton Gellman, "Pentagon Abandons Goal of Thwarting U.S. Rivals," Washington Post, May 24, 1992, p. A1.
Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, New York: Summit Books, 1983, p. 148.
"Bombs in the Basement," Newsweek, July 11, 1988, pp. 42-45.
Ibid.
Ibid. Because of breakdowns, the Pakistani ultracentrifuges most likely operate at much less efficiency, perhaps producing only enough fissionable material for one to five atomic bombs per year.
New York Times, "Unless Stopped...," op. cit.
Ronald Walters, South Africa and the Bomb, Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1987.
Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, New York: Random House, 1992.
"Revealed: The secrets of Israel's Nuclear Arsenal," London Sunday Times, October 5, 1986. See also Frank Barnaby, The Invisible Bomb, London: I.B. Tauris, 1989; CAIB, "Israel's Nuclear Arsenal," Number 30, Summer 1988, p. 45; and Louis Toscano, Triple Cross, New York: Birch Lane Press, 1990.
The "double flash" is the fingerprint of a nuclear detonation. Only an atomic (not a chemical) bomb can generate this rapid sequence of flashes.
Hersh, Samson..., op. cit., pp. 271-272.
Ibid., p. 267.
Ibid., p. 276.
Newsweek, "Bombs in the Basement...," op. cit.
"Israel's Deal with the Devil?" Newsweek, November 6, 1989, p. 52.
Newsweek, "Bombs in the Basement...," op. cit.
"Bush's Iraqi Blunder," New York Times, May 14, 1992, p. A17.
"Building Saddam Hussein's Bomb," New York Times Magazine, March 8, 1992, p. 30.
Ibid.
"U.S. Officials...," New York Times, op. cit.
Kaku and Axelrod, op. cit.
"2 Koreas Agree to A-Inspection by June," New York Times, March 15, 1992, p. 3.
"North Korea to Drop First Veil," New York Times, May 4, 1992, p.A7.
T. R Reid, "N. Korean Plutonium Plant Cited," Washington Post, May 17, 1992, p. A25.

Even if you made an agreement to abolish all nuclear weapons, but you left established power structure in the U.S. and the USSR, they'd go on to research mind control or some chemical or biological thing. My view is, there exists a group of people in the world that have a disease. I call it the "power disease." They want to rule and control other people. They are a more important plague than cancer, pneumonia, bubonic plague, tuberculosis, and heart disease put together. They can only think how to obliterate, control, and use each other. They use people as nothing more than instruments to cast aside when they don't need them any more.

--Dr. John W. Gofman, from Nuclear Witnesses, Insiders Speak Out, 1982

Nuclear amnesia

2007-09-03T12:43:00.000+02:00

Nuclear amnesia

GENERATING POWER
Walt Patterson

Long-time observers of the nuclear scene are watching with mounting alarm as yet another pathology becomes all too evident. One politician after
another, one government after another, one journalist after another, one activist after another, seems to be succumbing to the insidious effects of nuclear amnesia. The symptoms are unmistakable. The sufferer expresses concern about, say, energy security, or rising electricity prices, or climate
change – understandable concern, about issues immediate and pressing. Then, inexplicably, the sufferer asserts that the appropriate response is nuclear power. To any dispassionate onlooker even slightly familiar with history, such an assertion is incomprehensible.

Those suffering from nuclear amnesia have forgotten why nuclear power faded from the energy scene in the first place, how many times it has failed to deliver, how often it has disappointed its most determined advocates, how extravagantly it has squandered unparalleled, unstinting support from taxpayers around the world, leaving them with burdens that may last for millennia.

Consider Britain. Early in the new millennium the Labour government of Prime Minister Tony Blair set up a review intended to guide policy for energy and climate. After lengthy and wide-ranging deliberations, in 2003 it delivered a White Paper considered by many to be the most far-sighted government-level assessment of the issues. The White Paper paid little attention to nuclear power, for reasons most commentators saw as trivially
obvious at the time. Yet less than three years later the government is rerunning the energy review, apparently to get a different answer, the one it wants.

Why should this be so? Why is the government reportedly so keen to resuscitate nuclear power?

EMBARRASSING

Britain has never built a nuclear power station on schedule, or within budget, or that worked to its original specifications – not once. Almost all the stations built have overrun schedules by years, at costs often at least twice those initially anticipated. Performance has at best been modest, sometimes embarrassing.

When in 1989 Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s government tried to privatise the country’s electricity system, investment analysts in the City of London refused to play, unwilling to risk the track record and open-ended liabilities of the nuclear stations. The government was forced to withdraw all the nuclear plants from the sale.

The nuclear generators, assigned to a new company called Nuclear Electric, still government-owned, then proved unable to compete in the new electricity market, even though for all but the newest, the original capital costs were already written off, and nuclear fuel costs are always
claimed to be low. Electricity users were compelled to pay a ten percent surcharge, to contribute a subsidy of more than $1.5 billion a year to Nuclear Electric.

It was not called a nuclear obligation, although that was what it was. To conceal its intent, the government called it a nonfossil- fuel obligation. The embryonic renewables industry immediately declared that it, too, was non-fossil; and the government adopted this fig-leaf with alacrity, eventually giving as much as three percent of the total subsidy to renewables. By 1995 the European Commission decreed that the obligation, as paid to Nuclear Electric, was illicit state aid, and it was terminated. The subsidy was left to renewables in a severely truncated form, a totally unintentional but effective support for what was becoming a significant industry in its own right.

Prime Minister John Major’s government then succeeded in selling off Nuclear Electric, renaming it British Energy – what some wags called ‘The
power that dare not speak its name’. Explicitly nuclear or not, British Energy rapidly lapsed into its old habits, requiring bailouts in nine figures from taxpayers almost up to the 2003 White Paper.

ALL WILL BE WELL

Despite the common impression to the contrary, Britain has never had a ban or moratorium on nuclear power. Any who want to build a nuclear station can. They just have to find somewhere to put it and someone to pay for it. No-one wants to, for entirely sensible reasons. So what could possibly have persuaded Blair and his advisors, notably the government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, that the nuclear basket-case was the best place to look for relief from climate change?

If you ask, you will probably be told that of course they will not do it that way next time. They will choose different technology, and different organisations, and next time all will be well. Well, maybe. As has been the case since the 1960s, not only in Britain but all over the world, the cheapest reactor has always been a paper reactor. Once you start pouring concrete and welding steel, the numbers tend to look less attractive.
In the United States, for example, through the nuclear order-boom decade from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, costs frequently doubled and sometimes
trebled, crippling many purchasers. That was why no nuclear power station has been ordered there since 1978, and all plants given the go-ahead after 1974 have long since been cancelled.

The situation in Britain was yet more extreme. The latest cost estimates from nuclear advocates all conform to this time-honoured pattern. All the major vendors have spanking new paper reactors eager to spring from drawingboards at truly mouth-watering, if hypothetical, prices – provided someone else will pay and insure them.

Indications are that the Blair administration and most other governments will choose the pressurisedwater reactor, another concept some five
decades old. Those who ought to know the history of that type of reactor appear to have succumbed to nuclear amnesia.

Originating in the US Navy in the 1950s, as a propulsion plant for submarines, the pressurised-water reactor became a power station by default. When
Britain opened Calder Hall in 1956 – the ‘world’s first nuclear power station’, for making weapons plutonium – the US hastily requisitioned an unused submarine unit and set it up at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, as what became the progenitor of the most widely-adopted power reactor design worldwide.

The key requirement on which it was originally based and that determined all the others was that it had to fit inside a submarine hull. All the modifications in intervening decades have been to cope with scaling up this concept, to make its economics at least tolerable and its safety
at least plausible.

The problem is that a small pressurised-water reactor is prohibitively costly per unit of output; but a large one requires safety systems, on the safety systems, on the safety systems. The tradeoff of size versus complexity historically meant that in general the larger the reactor, the poorer its performance. Many electricity companies suffered accordingly. Advocates claim the latest designs will be an improvement. Historically, however, the best performance has always come from paper reactors. Building and operating a single plant of a new design, to get practical experience of its
idiosyncrasies, would be the most sensible, albeit most expensive, approach.

But advocates appear to be proposing yet again to build a whole series of plants before accumulating any operating experience at all – a misjudgment that became a key factor in the troubles besetting the previous generation of reactors of every kind.

SPARE CAPACITY

Experience of actual operating performance also casts a different light on the security of supply associated with nuclear power. Nuclear advocates make much play with what they call the intermittency of renewables such as wind energy and solar power. But wind and solar are variable, not intermittent. A thousand megawatt nuclear station that can and may shut down in two minutes is ‘intermittent’. Losing that much generation in such a short time could easily crash an entire electricity system.

That is why a system with traditional large generating units, especially nuclear units, has to carry so much redundant standby generation, so-called spinning reserve, ready to come onstream quickly if a major unit has a fault. Wind power presents no such problem. Once a nuclear unit shuts down,
restarting it can take not just hours but days or indeed weeks. The blackout of August 2003 in the northeastern US and Canada shut down nine nuclear stations with a total capacity of nearly eight gigawatts, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado. Five days passed before their collective output was back to four gigawatts; eleven days before it returned to its usual level.

In 2003, the average US nuclear outage, planned or forced, lasted 37 days – more than a month – at zero power. For major outages, lasting more than twelve days at zero power, as of November 2005 the average US nuclear plant had a mean latest-major-outage duration of 35 days, and a mean time since the previous major outage of sixteen and a half months. Now that is intermittent.

BURY IT

The track record of government decision-making on nuclear power worldwide does lead to a certain functional amnesia and a desire to bury the past. For instance, the fast breeder reactor, a plutonium-fuelled power station, preoccupied governments in the US, Britain, France, Germany, Belgium,
the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Japan and elsewhere from the late 1950s onwards for more than three decades. In Britain alone it mopped up over $7 billion of taxpayers’ money, at 1980s prices, almost the whole of the government budget for energy research and development until the end of the 1980s.

The payoff was utter futility, and a radioactive mess at Dounreay that will take decades and probably further billions to clean up. No fast breeder anywhere ever succeeded; but the plutonium fuel technology involved has delighted dubious regimes everywhere. Even US President George Bush apparently proposes to revisit the concept of reprocessing, long since abandoned in the US although stoutly defended by British Nuclear Fuels.

That company has yet to restart its vast Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant, THORP, at Sellafield, after overlooking for eight months a leak that released many cubic metres of viciously radioactive process liquid into an inaccessible cranny of the plant. As far as can be ascertained, THORP has
never worked properly. It may already be the world’s largest radioactive white elephant.

All told, if we really had to rely on nuclear power to save us from climate change, we would be doomed. Fortunately, of course, we do not. The
portfolio of more attractive opportunities both for using and for supplying energy is abundant, and expanding rapidly. People say ‘If not nuclear power, what?’ The answer should be obvious: if not nuclear power, not nuclear power.

If governments do not arbitrarily divert vast amounts of money, resources and time into a nuclear black hole, other more promising options will
eagerly seize them. In the January edition of Nuclear Engineering International, Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute argues that small-scale low-carbon and no-carbon generation and cogeneration already produce more electricity than nuclear power worldwide, and that the lead is
increasing rapidly. Improving performance of end-use technologies – buildings, lighting, motors, refrigeration, electronics – gives even faster and more certain payoff.

Governments could take the lead. To begin with, they could upgrade their own vast estates of buildings. They could install high-performance
equipment and local generation, to prime the pump for energy service companies. They could set an educational example, bring down unit costs of innovative technologies, and – of course – save taxpayers money.

History offers plenty of reasons to steer clear of nuclear power and opt instead for the abundant quicker, cheaper and safer opportunities. But
if nuclear amnesia carries the day, and we make the same mistakes all over again, let us at least be sure that our children know who to blame. In
Britain, let us call the first one the Tony Blair nuclear plant.

WALT PATTERSON is an Associate
Fellow of the Energy, Environment and Development Programme at Chatham House.
http://www.waltpatterson.org

Liquidized sea-life

2007-09-03T12:42:00.001+02:00

Liquidized sea-life

South Africa protested the idea of "canned lions", but what about liquidized sea-life? In their report "Licensed to Kill", Linda and Paul Gunter describe how cooling systems used by the nuclear industry suck in more than a billion gallons of water each day. Turtles, seals, sea lions, fish and other sea creatures are sucked along with the water into a huge pipe, shuttled through a barnacle-lined tunnel that slices open the flesh and then while mammals suffocate, smaller fish are liquidised to form a sediment that is pumped back into the sea.

In South Africa, Eskom has identified potential sites to construct a 4000 MW nuclear reactor including Bantamsklif near Pearly Beach, Brazil near Kleinsee/Port Nolloth, Duynefontein near Koeberg, Schulpfontein near Hondeklipbaai/Kleinsee area and Thyspunt near Cape St Francis. Eskom CEO, Jacob Maroga, said nuclear plants had to be close to large quantities of water and at sea temperature.

Proponents of nuclear power in South Africa have argued that the "advantage" of a nuclear reactor like Koeberg is that it uses sea water to cool its condensers. If a nuclear station were located in Gauteng - it would use fresh water, probably from the Vaal River. A typical 1000 megawatt reactor sucks in more than a billion gallons of water a day. After going through the nuclear station, the heated water is pumped back into water supplies with a caustic chemical added to prevent scale-forming compounds. In this way, the nuclear reactor uses nearby water sources as a "heat sink".

In the United States, 59 reactors are situated near lakes, reservoirs, estuaries, oceans and rivers. Some reactors have underground tunnels or pipes from the shore to underwater structures anywhere from 1000 feet to 3 miles from the reactor itself.
Marine life is sucked in through the intake tunnel at speed and trapped against screens, racks, bars and barrier nets. Larger animals drown or suffocate. Smaller fish and other organisms are burnt before being discharged into the water. Others are liquidized by the reactor condenser system and pumped out as sediment. A high destruction rate overtakes recovery rates and so entire marine communities are destroyed

Instead of applying sanctions when a nuclear plant kills more than its "allowed quota" of an endangered species, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in the US has been acting on behalf of the reactor owner to get a larger quota. A reactor may be given a lethal "take" limit of ten sea turtles a year, but then not admit responsibility for further deaths.

In 2000, the Diablo Canyon reactor operators were found to have witheld information from environmental regulators for 20 years. In that time, damage to indigenous marine life was disastrous, nearly wiping out black and red abalone. But despite the evidence, the public utility argued that no action was necessary. State regulators instead accepted a cash pay off of about $4.5 million and allowed the reactor to continue.

Nuclear utilities have made promises they had no intention of keeping once they began operation. Units 2 and 3 at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station near San Diego California were allowed to go online based on an agreement that they would compensate for environmental damage. When findings showed that San Onofre had caused damage, they instead campaigned to avoid obligations.

Four species of endangered and one threatened species of sea turtle in the US are harmed and killed by nuclear power stations. Loggerhead, green and Kemps ridley sea turtles are most common, but leatherback and hawksbill sea turtles are also taken. The Pacific leatherback is at most immediate risk of extinction.

Endangered manatees and American crocodiles have also been captured and killed at atomic reactors. A human diver who survived being sucked into a nuclear reactor tunnel at St Lucie in 1989 said the victim endures turbulence, darkness and severe tearing by large, sharp barnacles on the pipe's interior.

Various breeds of diving ducks have drowned at nuclear plants. At the Salem reactors in New Jersey, where the utility was supposed to restore the wetlands, herbicidal sprayings harmed the estuarine environment.

When reactor pipes are blocked, they are flushed out using chlorine or other biocides - which has serious consequences, since chlorines affect the ability of animals to reproduce. Sometimes, reactors are cleaned out with superheated water or sponge balls. This kills hundreds of fish and the sponge balls can be ingested by marine creatures.

Sea turtles have developed an unexplained viral disease called fibropapillomatosis (FP) in near epidemic proportions mostly near areas of heavy human use and in warmer, more contaminated near-shore waters. Dolphins in Florida's Indian River near the St Lucie nuclear reactors have developed skin lesions like papillomas.

But while larger sea creatures are easier to notice, the effect of destruction of small sea life will be most devastating and lasting. It is easy to look away from the "small, slimy and ugly" as Wilder, Tegner and Dayton wrote in their report on "Saving Marine Biodiversity", but these are what provide foods for larger creatures and enable a system to sustain itself.

Scientists such as James W. Kirchner and Anne Weil state that: "once ecosystems lose key species, they are not likely to recover their full function and biotic variety in less than about 10 million years".

The nuclear industry spent millions on advertising to portray itself as "environmentally friendly" and beneficial to wildlife. They claimed that: "sea creatures and nuclear plants get along well". When this advertising was challenged by various groups, the Federal Trade Commission agreed that these claims were unsubstantiated.

The nuclear industry is allowed to self-monitor and self-regulate to an unacceptable degree. Inconsistencies of reporting marine animal deaths at reactors, makes it very difficult for wildlife organizations to assess damage to species. The NRC is more of a "lapdog" than a "watchdog" and because of this, the marine environment has paid the price for electricity generated by nuclear reactors. Oceanic experts agree that the health of the world's oceans is in jeopardy, but instead of repairing damage, the nuclear industry takes issues to court, resulting in protracted and costly legal challenges.

Atomic reactors generate far less electricity than coal, natural gas and oil-fired stations, but they have a "disproportionate" impact on water resources. Nuclear reactors are thermally less efficient than fossil-fueled stations. For every watt of electricity generated by an atomic reactor, two watts of heat energy are rejected to the environment. This task of boiling water by splitting the atom has been compared to "using a chainsaw to cut butter" and "ringing a doorbell with a cannon ball". Reactors do not discharge heat through a chimney stack into the atmosphere - they discharge it directly into the water. In this way, the nuclear industry has made "clean air" claims, while ignoring marine damage, radioactive pollution and potential for catastrophic accident.

"Rather than wait for the environment to cry for help, the precautionary principle places the burden on fishermen, oil drillers, industry, farmers whose fields run to rivers or shores, and whomever else would exploit the sea, intentionally or not, to avoid harming this precious resource in the first place". (Wilder, Tegner and Dayton).

The threat from the routine operation of nuclear reactors to the environment is little known by the public and overlooked by regulators and policymakers. This means that depletion of resources by nuclear power harm, not only the creatures themselves, but the ability of humans to survive and prosper.

South Africans need to seriously consider the negative effects of the nuclear industry before it takes hold of their coastal waters, estuaries, rivers and lakes. Dwindling fish stocks around the world mean a disappearing food resource and a vanishing tourism and leisure industry. This is something South Africa cannot afford to lose.

"Licensed to Kill: how the nuclear power industry destroys marine wildlife and ocean habitat to save money," is
co-authored by Linda Gunter of the Safe Energy Communication Council (SECC), Paul Gunter of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), Scott Cullen, Standing for Truth about Radiaion (STAR) and Nancy Burton.

For further information, contact:
Safe Energy Communication Council: www.safeenergy.org

Nuclear Information and Resource Service: www.nirs.org

Standing for Truth About Radiation: www.noradiation.org

Humane Society of the United States: www.hsus.org

NUCLEAR ENERGY

2007-09-03T12:42:00.000+02:00

NUCLEAR ENERGY
Glowing expensive

By Nicky Smith

SA launched its nuclear energy strategy earlier this month with much fanfare; but there is a crucial missing element: just how much it is going to cost?

Senior officials in the department of minerals & energy (DME) are either unable or unwilling to provide cost estimates, but it is not going to be cheap to develop a nuclear industry in which the state will take the lead.

DME director-general Sandile Nogxina says it will be necessary to recapitalise the agencies already involved in regulating the nuclear industry - the National Nuclear Regulator and the Nuclear Energy Corp of SA (Necsa) - while new funds have to be found for the three new agencies that are being created. These are:

• The National Nuclear Security Agency, which will integrate all existing national nuclear safety responsibilities into a single agency.
• The National Nuclear Architectural Capability, which will be created to develop a national supplier network of nuclear equipment and nuclear reactors. This will include building capacity in order "to design, manufacture, market, commercialise, sell and export nuclear energy systems".
• A National Radioactive Waste Management Agency that will be launched to manage radioactive waste.

Nogxina says the major part of government's funding will go into boosting Necsa's research and development budget.
Necsa has been identified as the lead agency to develop the industry and its CE Rob Adam, a former director-general of the department of science & technology, says Necsa's current R&D budget will have to be boosted by a factor of at least five; this would give the agency R500m/year to work with.

A modest sum when contextualised against the support Necsa used to enjoy in the early 1990s. Adam says the state grant for 1991 in 2006 rand terms is equivalent to R1,7bn.

But this was when the agency was a flabby, subsidised state body that employed about 9 000 people. Necsa now employs only about 1 600.
The R500m budget will be sufficient, Adam says, particularly as Necsa plans to partner international companies in the development of a nuclear fuel industry. "We don't want to have to start from scratch," he says.

But in the unlikely event that SA is unable to secure a global partner, it will undertake the research itself and develop the capability, as it is viewed as strategic to the country's energy security.

A uranium-enrichment plant could cost R10bn to build if the costs of the likeliest technologies to be deployed locally were used.
Asked why the state is taking the lead as the implementing agency for the industry's development, Adam attributes this to the sensitivity surrounding the technology. "It is always possible that the development of these technologies has a military application," he says.

But the private sector, more specifically uranium mining companies, will be encouraged to invest in this costly technology. Adam says he has already spoken to local uranium companies about the possibility of private-sector participation.

Uranium One CE Neal Froneman says it would be of strategic benefit for the company to invest in other parts of the nuclear fuel cycle.
In return, uranium companies would be able to enjoy regulatory relief in much the same way as other mining companies will earn empowerment credits for beneficiating metals and minerals.

Nogxina says: "We want companies to propose to us what kind of incentives [they would like to see], but they have to be regulatory and financial." Only national treasury can offer financial incentives.
But another implication for mining companies could be that they might be forced to sell a portion of their production to the state to try to help ensure security of supply. The policy says that the state will pay market-related prices for any ore purchased under these circumstances.

Underlying the policy is the need for SA to diversify its energy mix. About 90% of the country's energy is generated by burning "dirty" coal, while cleaner nuclear energy accounts for only 6%.

Tsediso Makubela, the DME's chief director for nuclear energy, says government is planning on producing more than 16% of the country's energy from nuclear reactors by 2025. According to the broad timelines provided, government hopes to have encouraged the establishment of local manufacturing capacity for nuclear equipment and components within eight years.

Thereafter, the document states, SA should be exporting locally made components and "the commercialisation of advanced nuclear energy systems" will be under way.

SA's power generation infrastructure requires large investment, given Eskom's plans to start constructing two coal-fired base-load stations, each costing R80bn, over the next two years. However, the third power station Eskom plans to build is likely to be a four-unit, 4 000 MW nuclear power plant which could cost as much as R120bn. The state-owned power utility has said it will double its installed capacity to 80 000 MW by 2025; half of its new capacity (20 000 MW) will be nuclear power, which means Eskom will have to build five nuclear plants each.

Nogxina says any private-sector power company would have to partner Eskom should it want to invest in nuclear energy.
The one area where SA is already fairly self-sufficient is in uranium reserves: SA is ranked fifth in terms of uranium resources, though in 2005 it was only the 10th largest producer.

The draft policy is currently open to public input but the DME would like the policy implementation to start before the end of the year.

SOURCE: http://www.financialmail.co.za

NUCLEAR DIRTY TRICKS

2007-09-03T12:41:00.000+02:00

NUCLEAR DIRTY TRICKS
“Considering its history of accidents and near-misses, it is hard to understand how anyone could then label nuclear power as 'very safe'”. This is according to Mycle Schneider, an international consultant on energy and nuclear policy in France. The people of South Africa may well ask why it is that they have remained uninformed as to the impact that the government’s plan to build nuclear reactors in this country will have on themselves and future generations?

You walk into the car showroom. What can you afford? A budget vehicle or a flashy sports car? Your decision will be based on the price of the car, not only its running costs. This is where nuclear power industry officials have been playing a dirty trick. Their boast that nuclear is cheap power is not based on the construction of the reactors, only running them. This is like counting the cost of petrol as opposed to the price of the car.

According to Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, government loans (aka the taxpayer) are what put nuclear power on the table. In reality, nuclear power is far less economical than investing money in energy saving devices. Money spent on nuclear power takes money away from better solutions. This slows down the world's response to global warming when it needs to speed up.

According to Professor Steve Thomas of Energy Policy, Public Services International, the true cost of nuclear power “requires a large number of assumptions to be made”. He said forecasts have often been very inaccurate and are usually “far too optimistic”.

When things go wrong with nuclear power, the costs are passed on to taxpayers. The cost of “decommissioning” nuclear facilities in the United Kingdom will fall on future taxpayers. Lenders do not like to invest in nuclear power because of the risks involved.

The dangers of radioactive waste have also not been explained to the South African consumer. Schneider says radioactive isotopes or radio-nuclides of half-lives vary from hours to millions of years. “Plutonium particles inhaled can cause lung cancer in quantities of a few millionth of a gram while its penetrating radiation is low and can be shielded relatively easily. Plutonium is a highly strategic heavy metal that is very dense. The 6kg that were contained in the Nagasaki bomb would fit into a coke can. The radioactive form of hydrogen tritium has a half-life of 12.3 years.

“Tritium behaves like water, including in the human body, and is extremely difficult to contain. The radiological half life of plutonium is about 24,000 years and the biological half life is about 20 years for liver and 50 years for skeleton. Plutonium represents about one per cent of spent nuclear fuel. A standard light water reactor produces about 250kg of plutonium per year. A large scale reprocessing plant separates several metric tons of plutonium per year”.

Other radionuclides in nuclear waste include iodine-129 with a half-life of 16 million years that is released into the air and the sea in vast quantities by reprocessing plants or remains contained in spent fuel. Iodine fixes on the thyroid and the short-lived isotope iodine-131 released from Chernobyl has generated hundreds of cancer cases in children and adults.

Twenty years after the Chernobyl accident, highly contaminated game in Germany, reindeer in Scandinavia and mushrooms in various countries cannot be consumed. About 200 000 sheep in the UK have to undergo a complex pasture management scheme in order to allow them on clean pastures for the natural decay of radioactivity taken up on contaminated pastures before.

The Chernobyl-4 reactor generated power for two years, four months, and four days but human suffering goes on for generations. An “identical accident” to Chernobyl is unlikely, but an accident that releases the same amount of radiation or more is possible.

A research project into the impact of radiation on worker health in 2005 showed that one to two per cent of deaths from cancer among workers may be attributable to radiation. The results suggest there is a risk of cancer, even at low doses received by nuclear workers.

Antony Froggatt, international energy and nuclear policy consultant from the UK said nuclear power plants require large amounts of cooling water from the sea or a river. If there is a drought and high temperatures, the nuclear plant could warm the water to such an extent as to damage life in the river. The level of the water could also drop to a level that caused problems.

It seems that calculations stating nuclear power is “cheap” may not have counted all the costs to the health of people, future generations and the environment upon which we depend for food, air and water.

Public Apathy towards proposed Nuclear Power Station

2007-08-28T14:08:00.000+02:00

Apathy about proposed nuclear power station

Only about 12 people attended a public stakeholder meeting held by Eskom, its environmental assessment practitioner Arcus Gibb and public participation consultant Acer in die municipal auditorium last week to discuss the proposed nuclear power station at Bantamsklip just outside Pearly Beach.

Apart from a few concerned citizens, the rest of the audience consisted of representatives of ratepayers associations and conservation groups as well as the municipality.

Similar meetings were held in Gansbaai and Elim in June this year where fierce resistance was encountered to the idea of having a mammoth nuclear power station situated on our doorstep.

In addition to environmental concerns, the main concern among members of the public was whether Eskom still has the capacity to run more than one nuclear power station effectively.

The meetings represent the first part of a longer process to assess the socio-economic as well as environmental impact of the proposed power station on the area, to raise awareness among the public (interested and affected parties or I&APs) and to invite possible concerns at an early stage.

Five potential sites along coastline

In a pre-feasibility study undertaken by Eskom in the early 1980s, five potential sites, based on various social, economic and environmental criteria were identified for the erection of nuclear power stations.

These are Thyspunt near Cape St Francis in the Eastern Cape, Bantamsklip about 10km south-east of Pearly Beach, Duynefontein adjacent to the existing Koeberg power station, Brazil in the Kleinsee/Port Nolloth area in the Northern Cape and Schulpfontein in the Hondeklipbaai/Kleinsee area in the Northern Cape.

Eskom proposes to construct a nuclear power station of the pressurised water reactor type technology. Cooling water for the nuclear power station will be utilised directly from the sea.

It was made clear that there would be further meetings as the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process progressed.

Explaining the logic behind the proposal, Eskom's stakeholder manager Tony Stott said that there has been a sharp increase in demand for electricity over the past two years and that it is estimated that the demand for electricity generating capacity will double from an existing 36 000MW to about 77 000MW in 2025.

This additional generating capacity could come from a variety of energy resources namely, coal, liquid fuels, gas turbines, natural gas, uranium (nuclear), hydro and pumped storage schemes, wind and solar energy.

Stott said that to optimally meet the total demand, it was necessary to have both “base load electricity generating power stations? as well as peaking electricity generating power stations”.

Base load capacity forms the major component of the 40 000 MW of new generating capacity that is required in the next 20 years. According to Eskom, the only primary energy sources in South Africa that are suitable and available in sufficient quantities are coal and uranium.

Uranium will provide 50% of new generating capacity.

Arguing that nuclear power has the potential to make a substantial contribution to sustainable development and a significant contribution to reducing South Africa's greenhouse gas emissions and in the light of the country's rich resources of uranium, the Eskom Board had approved the investigation of up to 20 000 MW of nuclear capacity over the next 20 years.

The initial phase of this investigation will concentrate on one nuclear power station of approximately 4 000 MW with provision being made for further expansion. There is a possibility that more than one of the proposed sites will eventually be needed.

The entire development, including auxiliary infrastructure will comprise about 31 ha and will include a nuclear reactor, turbine complex, spent nuclear fuel storage facilities, waste handling facilities, intake and outfall basin and various auxiliary service infrastructure.

Should the proposed project be authorised, it is estimated that the construction of the nuclear power station could commence in 2009/10 with the first unit being commissioned in 2016.

In addition to the EIA process, which serves to identify, assess and mitigate potential environment impacts that may be associated with the proposed nuclear power plant, authorisation from the National Nuclear Regulator (NNR) is required to provide for the protection of persons, property and the environment against nuclear damage and to exercise regulatory control related to safety.

The construction and operation of the required transmission power lines will be subject to a separate environmental authorisation process. The processes will run as far as practical in parallel with the EIA and all information will be shared with the public as it becomes available.

Lengthy process

Independent specialists have been commissioned to do the specialist studies that will form part of the EIA investigations.

A number of potential environmental issues have already been identified, including air pollution, visual impacts arising from the nuclear power station during construction and operation, impacts on fauna, flora and avi-fauna, potential safety impacts, potential traffic and nuisance impacts during the construction phase, pollution and waste management, social and socio-economic impacts during construction relating to the influx of construction workers.

The construction of such a huge nuclear power station is estimated to also hold substantial development benefits to the local and regional economy.

The EIA includes opportunities for the public to be involved in the decision-making process by identifying issues that will help focus the process and enhance decision-making.

Information about the process can be obtained on the website www.eskom.co.za.

Members of the public are urged to register as an interested and affected party in order to receive information and to record comments.

Source: http://www.news24.com/Regional_Papers/Components/Category_Article_Text_Template/0,,486_2169585~E,00.html

Nuclear Reactors Found to Be Leaking Radioactive Water

2007-08-27T21:57:00.000+02:00

Nuclear Reactors Found to Be Leaking Radioactive Water

With power cleaner than coal and cheaper than natural gas, the nuclear industry, 20 years past its last meltdown, thinks it is ready for its second act: its first new reactor orders since the 1970's. But there is a catch. The public's acceptance of new reactors depends in part on the performance of the old ones, and lately several of those have been discovered to be leaking radioactive water into the ground.

By MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON, March 16 — With power cleaner than coal and cheaper than natural gas, the nuclear industry, 20 years past its last meltdown, thinks it is ready for its second act: its first new reactor orders since the 1970's.

But there is a catch. The public's acceptance of new reactors depends in part on the performance of the old ones, and lately several of those have been discovered to be leaking radioactive water into the ground.

Near Braceville, Ill., the Braidwood Generating Station, owned by the Exelon Corporation, has leaked tritium into underground water that has shown up in the well of a family nearby. The company, which has bought out one property owner and is negotiating with others, has offered to help pay for a municipal water system for houses near the plant that have private wells.

In a survey of all 10 of its nuclear plants, Exelon found tritium in the ground at two others. On Tuesday, it said it had had another spill at Braidwood, about 60 miles southwest of Chicago, and on Thursday, the attorney general of Illinois announced she was filing a lawsuit against the company over that leak and five earlier ones, dating to 1996. The suit demands among other things that the utility provide substitute water supplies to residents.

In New York, at the Indian Point 2 reactor in Buchanan, workers digging a foundation adjacent to the plant's spent fuel pool found wet dirt, an indication that the pool was leaking. New monitoring wells are tracing the tritium's progress toward the Hudson River.

Indian Point officials say the quantities are tiny, compared with the amount of tritium that Indian Point is legally allowed to release into the river. Officials said they planned to find out how much was leaking and declare the leak a "monitored release pathway."

Nils J. Diaz, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said he would withhold judgment on the proposal until after it reached his agency, but he added, "They're going to have to fix it."

This month, workers at the Palo Verde plant in New Mexico found tritium in an underground pipe vault.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, which is critical of nuclear power safety arrangements, said recently that in the past 10 years, tritium had leaked from at least seven reactors. It called for a systematic program to ensure there were no more leaks.

Tami Branum, who lives close to the Braidwood reactor and owns property in the nearby village of Godley, said in a telephone interview, "It's just absolutely horrible, what we're trying to deal with here." Ms. Branum and her children, 17-year-old twin girls and a 7-year-old boy, drink only bottled water, she said, but use municipal water for everything else. "We're bathing in it, there's no way around it," she said.

Ms. Branum said that her property in Godley was worth about $50,000 and that she wanted to sell it, but that no property was changing hands now because of the spill.

A spokesman for Exelon, Craig Nesbit, said that neither Godley's water nor Braidwood's water system was threatened, but that the company had lost credibility when it did not publicly disclose a huge fuel oil spill and spills of tritium from 1996 to 2003. No well outside company property shows levels that exceed drinking water standards, he said.

Mr. Diaz of the regulatory agency, speaking to a gathering of about 1,800 industry executives and government regulators last week, said utilities were planning to apply for 11 reactor projects, with a total of 17 reactors. The Palo Verde reactor was the last one that was ordered, in October 1973, and actually built.

As the agency prepares to review license applications for the first time in decades, it is focusing on "materials degradation," a catch-all term for cracks, rust and other ills to which nuclear plants are susceptible. The old metal has to hold together, or be patched or replaced as required, for the industry to have a chance at building new plants, experts say.

Tritium, a form of hydrogen with two additional neutrons in its nucleus, is especially vexing. The atom is unstable and returns to stability by emitting a radioactive particle. Because the hydrogen is incorporated into a water molecule, it is almost impossible to filter out. The biological effect of the radiation is limited because, just like ordinary water, water that incorporates tritium does not stay in the body long.

But it is detectable in tiny quantities, and always makes its source look bad. The Energy Department closed a research reactor in New York at its Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, largely because of a tritium leak.

And it can catch up to a plant after death; demolition crews at the Connecticut Yankee reactor in Haddam Neck, Conn., are disposing of extra dirt that has been contaminated with tritium and other materials, as they tear the plant down.

After years of flat employment levels, the industry is preparing to hire hundreds of new engineers. Luis A. Reyes, the executive director for operations at the regulatory commission, told the industry gathering last week, "We'll take your résumé in hard copy, online, whatever you can do," eliciting laughter from an audience heavy with executives of reactor operators and companies that want to build new ones.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/national/17nuke.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Exorbitant costs expected for nuclear power

2007-08-27T17:31:00.000+02:00

Energy costs may explode in switch to nuclear power

After painstakingly analyzing the costs of U.S. nuclear power plants built decades ago, energy experts caution that a resurrection of nuclear power could bring along some financial risk and surprisingly high electricity costs.

http://www.insidebayarea.com/argus/localnews/ci_5590033

By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER

After painstakingly analyzing the costs of U.S. nuclear power plants built decades ago, energy experts caution that a resurrection of nuclear power could bring along some financial risk and surprisingly high electricity costs.

Researchers reporting in the most recent edition of the journal Environmental Science & Technology found that construction costs varied by as much as 500 percent before the last U.S. nuclear power station was built almost 30 years ago.

"There is no other (energy) technology we're looking at where the range in cost is a factor of five," said Dan Kammen, professor of energy and resources and of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. "It means that if the nuclear industry doesn't manage itself much better than in the past, we are likely to still get this large range of costs."

The clean, carbon-free energy from splitting atoms has drawn backing among influential lawmakers and environmentalists as a way to ease consumption of fossil fuels and global warming.

But the industry and its financial backers could be vulnerable to the same cost volatility, scientists warned, especially if utilities begin trying half a dozen new kinds of reactors cooled by metals or gases rather than water.

In recent weeks, federal regulators have given the nod to new reactor sites in Illinois and Mississippi, and firms are readying applications for construction and operation of up to 33 new U.S. reactors, mostly in the Southeast and Midwest. Industry officials say soaring plant costs in the 1980s are all but irrelevant now.

"I don't think it's a good prologue," said Peter Saba, a former Energy Department official. "Past experience is not going to be a good gauge, because people are building them differently."

Ordinarily, an industry learns by producing and with learning, technology gets less expensive. But researchers at UC-Berkeley, Georgetown University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that "the case of nuclear power has been seen largely as an exception that reflects the idiosyncrasies of the regulatory environment as public opposition grew, regulations were tightened and construction times increased."

Particularly after the loss of reactor coolant at Three Mile Island in 1979, tougher new safety requirements came into play, and utilities had to upgrade their construction plans, increasing construction costs at a time when interest rates were high.

By the end of the decade, costs inflated so rapidly that the industry no longer could afford to build plants.

Saba, whose father was a nuclear engineer, said part of the problem was that utilities wanted every nuclear power station to be unique.

"They were designing them as they were building them," he said.

Starting in 1992, Congress and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission also have reworked the rules for licensing new plants, allowing nuclear firms to get the latest three basic Generation III+ reactor designs approved in advance. Saba said the advanced Generation IV reactors that concern the energy scientists at Berkeley and Georgetown are at least a decade away.

The rules also permit utilities to seek early site approvals, mostly for sites adjoining existing reactors. Utilities then can apply for a joint construction and operating license, rather than work through two costly and combative licensing proceedings. To these changes, Congress has added billions of dollars in federal liability protections and loan guarantees.

"I don't have any doubt that companies are going to do some pretty hard number-crunching before they proceed," said Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the industry's trade association, the Nuclear Energy Institute.

"It never hurts to look at what the history was in that period. I'm not sure what that tells you because the rules have changed."

Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman@angnewspapers.com or (510) 208-6458.

Source: http://www.a4nr.org