Yesterday, the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) released their annual report and, as surely as night follows day, the news is that the bill for decommissioning and cleaning up our existing nuclear plants is rising. And rising. And rising.

In fact, we could have funded two London Olympics just from the rises in the estimated costs over the past two years.

Although no one really has a precise figure (and the NDA admits it can't tell us what the final bill will be), the estimate now stands at around £73bn - about the same amount as the Apollo Moon Landings cost*.

20 Greenpeace activists blocked the entrance to 3 quarries in Normandy that supply concrete and gravel for the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) site at Flamanville yesterday. We took this action to stop the re-opening of the construction site, which had been ordered by the French Nuclear Safety Agency (ASN). This was despite none of the safety problems the ASN discovered over a month ago having been adequately resolved by EdF, who are carrying out the project.

We've learned that the French nuclear safety agency has ordered a halt to the construction of the new EPR reactor in Flamanville, France. Only six months after work first began. The EPR is the same type of reactor that is proposed to be built in the UK.

More gloomy news from Cumbria, where yet another pall of tenebrous darkness has descended over the hapless nuclear monolith that is Sellafield. This particular cloud comes in the form of the hugely expensive and much-vaunted MOX Plant, whose job it is to turn reprocessed material (mainly in the form of plutonium and depleted uranium) into new MOX fuel.

In theory MOX, which stands for mixed oxide, can then be exported overseas and used to power some reactors in countries like France and Japan. In theory, that is. Because in practice it turns out the plant isn't producing much of anything. Apart from headaches for its operators.

Earlier in the week the nukes campaign team were lucky / unlucky (delete as appropriate) enough to be taken on a tour of Sellafield, the UK's biggest nuclear site. And it was a bit of an eye opener.

It's a massive site, covering about 4km², which meant we couldn't see everything in one go. So we spent most of our time in the vitrification plant watching high level waste being mixed with molten glass and poured into huge milk churns prior to storage (this stuff is so dangerous that if you placed a flask of it in the centre circle of a football pitch and tried to walk to it from the dug out, it would kill you before you reached it), and then in the hugely expensive Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP).

British Energy, the UK's biggest nuclear operator, has just published a report (pdf) they claim shows that new nuclear reactors in the UK could be protected from flooding and sea-level rise caused by climate change. They concluded "that all our sites can be sustained over the next 100 years." But their report doesn't cut the mustard.

A new independent report out today has suggested that plans to build new nuclear power stations here in the UK risk wandering into the realms of fantasy. The study, The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2007 (pdf), shows that the self-styled "nuclear renaissance" currently being talked up by budding Mr Burns wannabes around the world is actually nothing of the sort.

As Gordon Brown grapples with the question of whether to push the nuclear button and give the green light to a fleet of new reactors in the UK, we keep on hearing from those rum coves in the industry about how they now have a solution, or more accurately a "management strategy", for dealing with all the tonnes of lethal radioactive waste nuclear reactors produce. This state-of-the-art solution comes in the shape of the rather grandly titled "deep geological repository". To you and me this roughly translates as "a deep hole in the ground", a massive underground dump wherein our toxic legacy will be buried, back filled and then it's goodnight Vienna.

More bad news for British Energy (BE), the UK's biggest nuclear electricity generator (when their creaking fleet of reactors actually happen to produce any power, that is). They've discovered that faults unearthed at two of their reactors pose more of a "complex issue" than previously thought and so the reactors are going to be offline for the foreseeable future. This news sent BE's shares tumbling by 10 per cent. Or as The Independent put it shares "went into meltdown".

A few weeks back BE announced that during a routine inspection "an issue related to a wire winding" was found in the boiler of the reactor unit at Hartlepool nuclear power station. This was rather unexpected and BE, as a Daniel come to judgement, took what it described as "a conservative decision" and shut the reactor at Hartlepool, as well as its sister unit at Heysham 1. Just as a precaution. Things were expected to be ship shape and bristol fashion very soon, so don't panic Mr Mainwaring. Indeed.

By Ben, senior nuclear campaigner.

As a closet power ballad fan, when I heard that the taxpayers' bill for cleaning up our existing piles of nuclear waste is skyrocketing (according to the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Agency, or NDA), I couldn't help but think of hard rockin' übergroup Whitesnake's "Here I go again".

Almost every time the nuclear industry gives an estimation of their costs, whether it be for building reactors, pulling them down, storing waste or somehow disposing of it, they have this very predictable habit of spiraling higher and higher, usually in very short order.