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IEA urges world to build more N-plants
Carola Hoyos, Financial Times
For the first time in its 32-year history, the International Energy Agency will next week urge governments around the world to help speed the construction of new nuclear power plants.
Although several countries, including India, China, the US and France, are already planning more nuclear plants, and others such as the UK are in the early stages of backing new reactors, others oppose any addition to nuclear capacity, including Germany and Spain.
However, Fatih Birol, IEA chief economist, said: “We need a decision almost tomorrow if we are going to act before we reach a point of no return in climate and security of supply.”
The IEA report [is] the first to offer advocacy rather than analysis.
(1 Nov 2006)
Nuclear power will ‘worsen drought’
AAP via Daily Telegraph (Australia)
AUSTRALIA’S crippling drought will worsen if the Howard government succeeds in its push for nuclear power, Queensland Premier Peter Beattie has told a conference.
Addressing the New Zealand Labour Party conference in Rotorua today, Mr Beattie said an independent study commissioned by the Queensland government showed a nuclear power station would use 25 per cent more water than a coal-fired power station.
“At a time when our farming communities are hurting badly, it is a folly for (Prime Minister John) Howard to be entertaining the thought of nuclear power stations in Queensland or anywhere else,” he said.
“Many towns and shires in our state are struggling to get enough drinking water, let alone enough to satisfy the amount a nuclear station would need to guzzle.”
(29 Oct 2006)
Thorium: Safe nuclear power can avert the energy crisis
Lars Holger Ursin, PÅ HØYDEN
Thorium reactors could solve the current energy crisis and the world’s energy problems for the foreseeable future. This is the opinion of Physics Professor Egil Lillestøl, who travels around Norway with this message, meeting few counter-arguments. So why didn’t we built these reactors a long time ago?
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“The technology has not been available until now, and a major initial investment is required in order to test this type of reactor,” says Mr Lillestøl. He has spread information for years about accelerator-driven nuclear reactors which use thorium. And he hopes that Norway will build the first one.
“I’m an optimist, but I believe it’s now or never,” he continues.
(1 Nov 2006)
This proposal is based on a particle accelerator, a model not addressed by David Fleming’s Why Nuclear Power Cannot Be A Major Energy Source. The Uranium Information Centre has an round up of Thorium based technologies, and concludes
Problems include the high cost of fuel fabrication due partly to the high radioactivity of U-233 which is always contaminated with traces of U-232; the similar problems in recycling thorium due to highly radioactive Th-228, some weapons proliferation risk of U-233; and the technical problems (not yet satisfactorily solved) in reprocessing. Much development work is still required before the thorium fuel cycle can be commercialised, and the effort required seems unlikely while (or where) abundant uranium is available. Nevertheless, the thorium fuel cycle, with its potential for breeding fuel without the need for fast-neutron reactors, holds considerable potential long-term.
-AF
Nuclear Cleanup Site Has Cities Cleaning Up Financially
Blaine Harden, Washington Post
Effort That Began In 1989 Has Been An Economic Boon
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Out on the Hanford nuclear reservation, a fantastically poisoned plateau where the federal government brewed up most of the plutonium for its nuclear arsenal, the cleanup is going rather badly.
Now in its 17th year, the nation’s largest and most complex environmental remediation project is costing many billions of dollars more than expected and will continue far longer than experts once predicted.
That dismal forecast is music to the ears of local residents.
“The silver lining is all local, where there are no consequences for failure and no misdeed goes unrewarded,” said Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and a former Energy Department official who monitored the cleanup during the Clinton era.
(1 Nov 2006)
