Also by ben

British Energy melts down; British taxpayer cleans up

Posted by ben - 8 November 2007 at 12:03pm - Comments

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.

Article tagged as: british energy, nuclear power, nuclear subsidies, reactor safety

Here I go again - nuclear waste costs spiral up, up and away

Posted by ben - 12 October 2007 at 3:08pm - Comments

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.

Article tagged as: decommissioning, NDA, nuclear power, nuclear waste

Nuclear 'consulatation' ends: unjust, unfair and seriously flawed...

Posted by ben - 10 October 2007 at 3:00pm - Comments

From Ben, our senior nuclear campaigner. 

So, finally, the government’s self-styled "consultation" on the future of nuclear power has finished (by some quirk of fate on the same day as the 50th anniversary of the terrible nuclear accident at Windscale). Frankly, you'd be pretty hard pressed to find a more pointless exercise.

The crux of this rather thorny issue is that the government is obliged to run the "fullest public consultation" (pdf) before changing its policy on nuclear power. In 2006 they tried to run one of these, but without much success. In fact their first attempt was so ham-fisted that a high court judge described it as "unfair", "misleading", "very seriously flawed" and "procedurally unfair" and ordered them to do the whole thing again. Having (apparently) gone back to the drawing board, in May the government announced a new nuclear consultation that would remedy all the judge's concerns. Or at least that was the plan.

Article tagged as: energy review, gordon brown, government, legal, nuclear power, public consultations

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