Trump administration wants to reclassify leaking nuclear waste to avoid cleaning it up, say officials. ‘This is unacceptable, and we will not stand by while this administration plans to abandon its responsibility to clean up their mess’. Donald Trump’s administration has been accused of trying to downplay the danger of nuclear waste so it can “abandon its responsibility to clean up their mess”. A federal government plan to reclassify this waste as less dangerous has been fiercely criticised by officials in Washington state, who said the move would allow it to walk away from its responsibility to clean up millions of gallons of toxic, radioactive material.
Independent 9th Jan 2019 read more »
Last year the Trump administration’s Energy Department announced the launch of a media campaign to counter what an official called “misinformation” about nuclear power. We haven’t noticed an upsurge in pro-nuclear news—because there is none to report. On the first day of 2019, the energy industry trade journal Power asked whether new technology can save nuclear power by making new reactors economically feasible—not only to replace coal and natural gas but also to compete with the rapidly dropping cost of renewable energy. The verdict from Peter Bradford, a former member of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission: [N]ew nuclear is so far outside the competitive range. . . . Not only can nuclear power not stop global warming, it is probably not even an essential part of the solution to global warming. His bleak outlook is shared by the authors of a recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors—an engineer, an economist and a national security analyst—reviewed the prospects for so-called advanced designs for large nuclear reactors, and for much smaller modular reactors that could avoid the billions in construction costs and overruns that have plagued the nuclear energy industry since the beginning. They concluded that no new designs can possibly reach the market before the middle of the century. They cite the breeder reactor that, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, received $100 billion in public development funds worldwide over six decades and still did not get off the ground.
Ecowatch 9th Jan 2019 read more »
Nuclear: end of game for American MOX plant in Orano. The project, which was born under an agreement between the United States and Russia, has already cost more than $ 7 billion.
A painful start to the year for employees at the MOX fuel plant yard in the United States. Some 600 people (one third of the workforce) have started to leave the joint venture, which is 30% owned by the French group Orano (formerly Areva) and 70% by the American CB & I, after the notification, by the US administration in October, the end of the project.
Les Echos 9th Jan 2019 read more »