Nuclear power in Europe

Energy Solutions is adopting a new international business strategy whereby, rather than importing foreign radioactive waste for processing and disposal at its US facility, it will help overseas customers dispose of such waste in their own country.

The company – which has faced strong opposition to its plan to import waste from decommissioned nuclear facilities in Italy for processing and recycling at its facility in Clive, Utah – said that under the new strategy, no internationally generated radioactive waste would be disposed of at the site. (more…)

Brussels is against member states exporting their nuclear waste to countries outside the EU or to store it in joint sites, energy commissioner Gunther Oettinger said, as the commission is working on a set of common safety standards for this dangerous material.

“It is the duty of national politicians to do their homework,” Mr Oettinger told Financial Times Deutschland in an interview published on Wednesday (10 March). The German commissioner warned against common storage sites, as well as exporting the radioactive material outside the EU, for instance Russia. (more…)

The European Commission will table a legislative proposal on the treatment of radioactive waste before the end of the year, commission president José Manuel Barroso told a conference on nuclear energy in Paris on Monday.

Energy commissioner Günther Oettinger hinted at legislation on nuclear waste management at a European Parliament hearing in January. He said setting the “highest possible” safety standards for disposal would be a priority. “Further costs cannot be a consideration,” he warned. (more…)

Brussels – The European Commission intends to propose EU- wide rules on the disposal of nuclear waste by the end of 2010, an official said Thursday.

‘Nuclear waste management is an important area which needs to be addressed by both industry and national governments (…) the role of the EU is to set a common framework for the establishment of national waste management programs,’ said Marlene Holzner, spokeswoman for energy commissioner Gunther Oettinger, during a briefing in Brussels. (more…)

Collective nuclear waste dumps, called European Regional Repositories, are to crop up in Eastern Europe, also in Poland, in the near future.

This is a joint EU initiative, currently developed in the European Repository Development Organization, of which Poland is a member. Negotiations on the construction of the collective geological repositories and the transport routes for nuclear waste are to begin in May. The talks are expected to last two years. (more…)

High-level nuclear waste from across the European Union could be shipped to eastern Europe for burial in a central underground storage facility under plans being considered by EU member states.

The Times has learnt that the project, which comes amid a resurgence of interest in nuclear power, could be given the green light later this year by the European Commission. Ewoud Verhoef, deputy director of Covra, the agency responsible for the storage of the Netherlands´ nuclear waste, said: “The nuclear programme in Holland is small and the cost of building a geological repository is very high. We only have one nuclear reactor in the Netherlands so there would be big advantages to a shared solution.” (more…)

The Russian military allegedly dumped nuclear waste into the Baltic Sea in the early 1990s, according to a report on Swedish television.
Radioactive material from a military base in Latvia is thought to have been thrown into Swedish waters. For many the biggest shock is that the Swedish government may have known at the time and done nothing about it.

The partly enclosed Baltic Sea is known as one of the most polluted seas in the world. But now it seems it was also used as a dumping ground for Russian nuclear waste and chemical weapons. (more…)

The French nuclear industry is in turmoil as uranium supplies have dried up and the treatment of spent fuel has been blocked amid an increasingly bitter row between the heads of its two main state operators.

EDF, the electricity group that runs 58 reactors in France, said that Areva, the nuclear energy group, had stopped uranium deliveries on January 4 and was refusing to take away spent fuel for reprocessing. (more…)

The Western media reported last week on how the German company Urenco shipped nuclear material to Siberia, where the highly toxic waste was stored in containers in the open air. The company has stopped deliveries and will store the material with higher standards in Germany in the future.

The radiation warning sign was so small that few passers-by took note in the commuter rail station in Kapitolovo, Russia. Fifty-six steel canisters were sitting there on a summer day three years ago. Just a stone’s throw away, people were waiting for trains to take them to downtown St. Petersburg. (more…)

PARIS (Reuters) – France’s highly radioactive waste will more than double by 2030 mainly as spent fuel derived from nuclear reactors mounts up, the French national radioactive waste management agency (Andra) said on Tuesday.

Andra draws up every three years an inventory of sites polluted with radioactivity and details quantities per waste category as well as volume forecasts. (more…)