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Black Tuesday blights Brown's nuclear vision
Posted by jossc on 29 May 2008.
Sellafield: major ongoing problems have been hidden from the public
Yesterday, Gordon Brown felt compelled to go on the record to announce that the UK needs to not only maintain but to increase its nuclear power capacity. And yet the nuclear industry is not exactly hale and hearty because, let's face it, it's been a terrible week for the poor dears.
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Out of commission
Posted by John Sauven on 31 January 2008.
The cost of taking nuclear plants out of service is spiralling out of
control. Is this just poor financial management, or does it have wider
implications? Written by Greenpeace Executive Director John Sauven for comment is free.
This week, the National Audit Office released its damning assessment of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority's (NDA) ability to estimate the true financial cost of decommissioning and cleaning up the UK's fleet of ailing reactors and contaminated facilities. As costs for decommissioning appear to spiral out of control - rising sharply from £56bn to £73bn over just a few years - the burden on the taxpayer grows ever more. And it doesn't end there. The NDA has also been made responsible for disposing of the UK's stockpile of legacy wastes which is estimated at an additional £10-20bn. The industry argues these increased costs have arisen in the face of "significant challenges", but the echoes from this announcement are all too familiar from a sector that has been plagued with industrial and financial incompetence.
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Here I go again - nuclear waste costs spiral up, up and away
Posted by ben on 12 October 2007.
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.
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Greenpeace accuses government of failure to deliver as Nuclear Decommissioning Authority is born
The new Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which comes into being today, will take ownership of many of the UK's major nuclear facilities - including the controversial Sellafield site. But while the NDA was originally flagged in the Legacy White Paper of 2002 as a body that should focus "squarely on [dealing with] the nuclear legacy", it has not been designed to fully deal with the huge problem of radioactive waste. Instead the government has created a body that will:/what-you-can-do/take-action
- operate two large-scale spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plants at Sellafield, which create massive amounts of nuclear waste;
- run loss making Magnox reactors;
- possibly commission the Sellafield MOX plant, which is meant to produce plutonium-fuel for reactors overseas; and
- relieve British Nuclear Fuels of all of its nuclear waste liabilities - a matter which is currently the subject of an investigation by the European Competition Commission.
The NDA will also be heavily reliant on reprocessing and Magnox reactor operations for a sizeable proportion of its income.
"The government has squandered an ideal opportunity to tackle the urgent need for decommissioning and clean-up at some of the UK's most hazardous nuclear sites," said Greenpeace nuclear campaigner Jean McSorley. "The NDA will be dependent for half of its income on waste-creating activities like spent fuel reprocessing in order to fund its decommissioning and clean-up program. It's like paying dustmen to drop litter. The government has also squandered the public goodwill that greeted the initial announcement to create this Authority."
Greenpeace, which has closely followed the progress of the NDA, has been heavily critical of the fact that the Authority will take over all of British Nuclear Fuels nuclear waste liabilities.
McSorley added: "Although the NDA will take over BNFL's assets, these are overshadowed by the cost of its liabilities. In allowing BNFL to effectively dump these liabilities on the doorstep of the NDA, the government has given a massive state-aid bailout to BNFL. The Commission's investigation of the NDA and state aid issues is of vital concern not only in the context of UK subsidies for the nuclear industry, but for the whole of Europe. If BNFL gets away with ditching its liabilities in this way, other nuclear companies across Europe will try to follow suit. This will have major ramifications for competition in the electricity sector and will particularly hurt the developing renewables industry."
It is expected the Competition Commission's investigation, which began in January, will last until the end of the year.
For further details contact Jean McSorley on 07801 212 959 or the Greenpeace press office on 0207 865 8255.
New authority contributes to nuclear nightmare
Posted by bex on 3 November 2003.
Unfortunately, the role of the Authority has already been radically changed since it was originally proposed. The NDA is now continuing to oversee the operation of nuclear facilities which create nuclear waste - thus adding to a major problem. For example, the NDA runs BNFL's ageing, loss-making Magnox reactors, plus two spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plants and a MOX plant at Sellafield. This will mean an ever increasing bill for the taxpayer.