UK to go on Nuclear binge.

[stavros]

There's also the issue of the long-term thinking. I don't profess to be an expert in this, but I have read somewhere that the current known reserves of harnessable material won't see us through more than a few decades, not accounting for the predicted exponential growth in demand.

 

[tangentlama]

There's a lot wrong with this whole deal.
Fuel for Scandal:

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Take the plutonium produced by nuclear power stations, mix it with uranium and make it into a new fuel for reactors to burn. Call it nuclear recycling, so that it sounds environmentally friendly.... in 2001 ... the Sellafield MOX plant (SMP) ... costing an eventual £490m to build, ... was meant to convert Britain's stockpile of foreign plutonium into a mixed oxide fuel for selling back to foreign customers.

Blair took the decision against the advice of his then environment minister, Michael Meacher and environmental groups. But it was a boost for the flagging nuclear industry and, in retrospect, a foretaste of the government's current enthusiasm for a new nuclear power programme.

Seven years on, what has become of SMP? ... it is probably one of the biggest technical and economic disasters in the history of the British nuclear industry. For an industry with more than its fair share of mishaps, that is saying something.

The plant was originally meant to process 120 tonnes of MOX fuel a year, but it has yet to manage even three tonnes a year. As the Guardian reported in February, a grand total of only 5.2 tonnes have been produced in the six-year commissioning phase from 2001 to 2007.

In fact, unless the plant is shut down, it is likely to bleed British taxpayers of billions of pounds over the next few decades.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/14/fuelforscandal

Read: The Many Problems of Sellafield:

The Mox activities were further discredited when Japan sent back fuel made for it in a demonstration facility because quality-control documents had been falsified. Just the return of the fuel cost the British taxpayer £113m, while the main Mox plant lost £600m by 2004.

A second reprocessing plant, Thorp, was designed to deal with spent fuel from Britain's second-generation of AGR reactors, now run by British Energy. The facility was also meant to deal with spent fuel from pressurised and light water reactors elsewhere in the world.

The government claimed in 1990 that the £2.3bn plant would make £500m profit for the UK economy by reprocessing 7,000 tonnes of fuel in the first 10 years. Thorp dealt with only 5,729 tonnes in its first 11 years but was then closed in 2005 after a leak was found. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which oversees the clean-up, took £2m more off it for failing to meet safety standards.

Slow progress in reprocessing has caused a huge backlog of spent fuel and a major storage issue. An average of 300 tonnes a year of spent fuel from British Energy's AGR reactors have been arriving at Sellafield Ltd and space is very limited. The NDA and Sellafield say the storage space has been reorganised and there is "ample room for increasing the capacity of the storage pond".

But BE told investors last May that it might not be able to send any more spent fuel to the site and would have to halt production at some sites. BE said yesterday that "there is no short-term threat" to its operations and it was fully confident Sellafield would be able to "meet its contractual obligations".

These difficulties paint a calamitous picture of the industry and Brown has a grim view of the plan for new reactors: "Whatever the government's assurances ... nuclear newbuild will involve heavy government subsidies and unlimited liability for the British taxpayer."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/28/sellafield.background
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/may/18/britishenergygroupbusiness.nuclearpower

1) The costs of new reactors are not transparent - there are hidden costs - the taxpayer will subsidise to the tune of millions to keep them running.
They will always require subsidy. Even the £25 bn (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/apr/12/britishenergygroupbusiness.nuclear) that Greenpeace claims that 8 new reactors will cost to run is unrealistic! - more like £40bn at 5bn per plant to build minimum costs, and then running costs plus taxpayer subsidies. This doesn't include storage of waste per plant per annum, or indeed, for 450,000 years. Wild ideas of shooting nuclear waste into space are hardly going to be cheap. It costs around £250 million per mission to launch the space shuttle!
When you can go solar for around £40k per household, this is insane.

2) They haven't solved the problem of what to do with the waste from current reactors, or the stockpile of foreign waste that the Thorpe plants were supposed to deal with. Waste is stockpiling as we speak from current plants. UK is thus importing and storing of nuclear waste from overseas.

3) Clean up hasn't even begun in earnest. The estimate of £73 bn is probably the tip of the iceberg of what it will eventually cost.

John Large, a nuclear industry consultant, believes British Energy might solve its storage problems but agrees it will be impossible to sell off the company without "massaging" the finances and handing financial liabilities to the public purse.

The doubts were underlined yesterday by an admission from the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority that the cost of cleaning up Britain's nuclear legacy would increase from the current estimate of £73bn. Director Jim Morse told the BBC: "I think it's a high probability that in the short term it will undoubtedly go up." The £73bn figure, published in January ,was an increase of £12bn on a 2003 estimate.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/may/29/britishenergygroupbusiness.nuclear

A damning report from the House of Commons committee of public accounts (CPA) also criticises ministers for providing no certainty over the future cost of decommissioning Britain's existing nuclear sites - estimated at £73bn.

"We cannot be confident ... that even this figure will not be significantly upped when the estimates are next revised," said Edward Leigh, chairman of the CPA. "Estimating costs far into the future is of course a precarious business; but elements of cost that might be expected to be more predictable - such as the work expected to be undertaken over three next five years - have risen steeply.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/10/nuclear.nuclearpower

Exponential increases are going to make it more like £300bn in real terms (and the rest!)
(See also: Robots scour sea for atomic waste: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/25/pollution.conservation)

4) Brown is offering councils a discount if they will store nuclear waste in their locality. Wonderful idea, Brown! Way to Go! They will pay your health bills as you get sicker and as the generations get sicker, in exchange for storing ours and foreign nuclear waste! YAY!

Ministers are due to publish controversial plans to bury Britain's massive nuclear waste stockpile, as part of a campaign to persuade investors to build new nuclear power stations.

On Thursday, Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, is due to publish a long-awaited white paper for dealing with Britain's 'legacy' of radioactive waste by asking for volunteer communities to bury the waste in deep underground vaults in return for government spending on things like health screening and infrastructure.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/11/nuclearburial

5) The fuel will rely 100% on imports: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/07/nuclearpower.energy

6) Public will be liable for any disasters - costs of any clean up will be borne by taxpayer. (See also: Robots scour sea for atomic waste: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/25/pollution.conservation)

7) Storage. People don't want noisy windmills in their line of sight or in their countryside, yet let's see how they feel about having radioactive waste in the field next door. Let's see the NIMBY reaction to being told that a farmer is going to store nuclear waste on his land.

We don't know how to store this waste for 100 years, let alone 450,000!
Check out Germany's leaks...only admitted in July 2008!

BERLIN, Jul 8 (IPS) - Confirmation that radioactive brine has been leaking for two decades from a German underground deposit for nuclear waste is yet another blow to the idea that nuclear power can safely increase electricity generation and simultaneously reduce emissions.

Radioactive leaks from the nuclear waste deposit Asse II near Braunschweig in Lower Saxony, some 225 km southwest of Berlin, were first discovered in 1988. The state-owned Helmholtz Institute for Scientific Research, which operates the centre, officially admitted the leaks only Jun. 16, under pressure from the German press.

Helmholtz spokesperson Heinz-Joerg Haury told German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung that researchers "did not consider that the leaks were worth a declaration to the press. We did not have the feeling that the public would be interested in knowing that radioactive brine is leaking in Asse II."

Asse II, a former salt mine, is the oldest nuclear waste deposit in Germany. The abandoned mine was transformed into a deposit for nuclear waste in 1967, following the scientific hypothesis that rock salt pits are the best geological structure to store radioactive waste.

But in 1988, radioactive brine started to leak through the mine's walls. The site operator never informed the public.

Germany officially has four deposits for nuclear waste. Two other sites, Gorleben and Morsleben, are also abandoned rock salt mines. A fourth, Schacht Konrad, also in Lower Saxony, is a former iron mine.

No one has yet found a durable solution for storing nuclear waste, that remains highly radioactive for centuries.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43108