Nuclear power in Europe

The world is about to enter a period of unprecedented investment in nuclear power. The combined threats of climate change, energy security and fears over the high prices and dwindling reserves of oil are forcing governments towards the nuclear option. The perception is that nuclear power is a carbon-free technology, that it breaks our reliance on oil and that it gives governments control over their own energy supply.

That looks dangerously overoptimistic, says Michael Dittmar, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich who publishes the final chapter of an impressive four-part analysis of the global nuclear industry on the arXiv today. (more…)

Russian engineers announced plans on building high-temperature nuclear reactor with gas cooling in our country by 2020.

Existing atomic power plants are aimed at producing electricity and low-temperature heat for warming and water desalination. High-temperature reactors will expand plant workability.

Temperatures about 1000 degrees Centigrade allow using heat in other field of economy, such as hydrogen synthesis, fertilizer production, metallurgical industry and etc. Moreover, high-temperature nuclear reactors do not leave radioactive wastes, thus solving many problems with environment and nuclear weapons.

The German government is willing to spend millions of euros on atomic research in the years ahead despite a binding agreement to phase out nuclear energy completely. But with the rest of Europe banking on nuclear, German scientists don’t want to miss out on future developments.

German Research Minister Annette Schavan said this week she will increase funding for nuclear research. Her announcement may have come as a surprise to those who believe that more money to be spent on research in this field is bound to contradict an agreement to phase out nuclear energy in Germany completely. (more…)

300 tons of spent fuel in Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan’s military forces this summer held a training exercise to thwart a fake terrorist assault on a Soviet-built nuclear facility near Almaty, the country’s former capital located on its southeastern border.

In the exercise, a reactor was the simulated target of terrorists trying to steal some of the deadliest nuclear material ever made. It came, by no coincidence, as U.S. and Kazakh officials put the finishing touches on a plan to move 300 tons of used nuclear fuel from a decommissioned Soviet nuclear reactor near the port city of Aktau on the Caspian Sea not far from Iran. (more…)

HYDERABAD: Demand and supply for uranium will continue to be affected for some more years though efforts are on to get additional supplies, Chairman Atomic Energy Commission and Secretary Department of Atomic Energy, Anil Kakodkar on saturday said.

Kakodkar, who was in the city to participate in the Nuclear Fuel Complex Day celebration here today, said that currently the nuclear power plants in the country were working at half their capacity nearly of 4,000 MW due to the fuel shortage. (more…)

MILAN (Reuters) – Italy should keep its ban on nuclear power and should boost solar and wind energy instead to resolve its energy supply problems, Italian environmentalists said on Thursday as nuclear revival debate heated up.

Italy banned nuclear power in a 1987 referendum after the Chernobyl disaster. But calls for a nuclear renaissance have intensified this month under the new government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi as oil prices stormed record highs. (more…)

Robot submarines are to be used to sweep particles of plutonium and other radioactive materials from the seabed near one of Britain’s biggest nuclear plants in one of the most delicate clean-up operations ever in this country.

Each submersible will be fitted with a Geiger counter and will crisscross the sea floor to pinpoint every deadly speck close to Dounreay on Scotland’s north coast before lifting each particle and returning it to land for safe storage. (more…)

With French and German companies lining up to build new nuclear power stations in Britain, the die now seems cast for nuclear. Or is it?

The government’s goal is certainly ambitious. Ten countries – primarily the UK, US, France and Canada, but also including Japan, Korea, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa and Switzerland – have set up the Generation IV International Forum. It will develop a successor nuclear energy system to the previous Generations I (Magnox) and II (advanced gas-cooled reactors and the Sizewell B light water reactor) and follow the Generation III systems now being built. The latter includes the French Areva evolutionary pressure reactor (EPR), the prototype of which is being constructed at Olkiluoto in Finland, with another being built in France. (more…)

ENDS Europe DAILY 2489, 21/02/08

Austria is threatening to veto an EU resolution on a proposed plan to boost low-carbon technologies in Europe unless the bloc’s 27 energy ministers agree nuclear research should not receive any extra EU funds, it emerged on Wednesday.
(more…)

With increasing energy-import dependency and the quest for climate-friendly energy production at the top of the EU’s political agenda, the Commission last week (21 September) announced the creation of a new research platform to study ‘sustainable’ nuclear energy. (more…)