On 24th November, 2009, Russia Today (we are apolitical - merely using available resources) reported the following story about how eight senior scientists - believed to be advising the U.K. government - had their e-mails hacked:  

“Scientists would rather change the facts than their theories” – ex-minister 

Published 24 November, 2009, 00:31
Edited 24 November, 2009, 09:48

Hackers claim confidential mails from scientists show that climate change data has been forged. Former minister MP Peter Lilley joined RT to discuss the scandal dubbed Climategate.

 “A group of scientists are so loyal to each other that they’re determined to agree with each other even more than they are determined to agree with the facts. So if the facts no longer correspond with their theories, they try and change the facts rather than their theories. And the people who benefit from it are the scientists themselves: they feel morally superior leading a crusade apparently to save the world and they get large grants from the government,” Lilley said.

Source:  http://www.rt.com/Top_News/2009-11-24/scientists-rather-change-facts.html

Sellafield's £75,000 fine + Costs for a "catalogue of safety errors"


After a long delay, Sellafield has been fined £75,000 after two contractors were exposed to a "serious and significant" dose of radiation in an incident which occurred over two years ago.

According to the Whitehaven News, two men working for Workington building company Stobbarts were subject to an airborne radioactive contamination when plutonium escaped from a floor they were drilling at the site in July 2007.

Source: http://www.whitehaven-news.co.uk/news/sellafield_fined_after_workers_exposed_to_radiation_1_646782?referrerPath=news/

Following the floods, it would appear that Sellafield has stopped its workers from other sites, such as Warrington and Capehurst, travelling to the area.   The idea being that it would assist in relieving the pressure on the roads and protect the workers from unnecessary travel risks.   Sadly, it has also served to heighten awareness of the utter dependency the region has on Sellafield, as several hotels have discovered to their cost, after bookings were cancelled.

Amusingly, the Sellafield spokesperson is reported as saying:  “It is disappointing that our notice may be seen as having a detrimental effect on local businesses, particularly when we have been so passionate in our support for West Cumbria’s flood recovery programme, but the safety of our workforce is and will always be our number one priority."   Interesting when read in conjunction with the above article.   Not only does the story highlight the high dependency the area has on a single industry, but it also points up the paucity of a decent infrastructure - especially the lack of alternative access routes.

Source:   http://www.whitehaven-news.co.uk/news/sellafield_warning_hits_hotel_industry_1_645456?referrerPath=home

“[Glenn T.] Seaborg had the choice of picking the symbol Pl or Pu for plutonium. He remarked that it is really kind of a stinky element (complicated chemistry and unusual metallurgical properties) so it became Pu.”
Source:  R.H. Condit. "Plutonium. An Introduction".


http://www.spinprofiles.org/images/6/61/Nuclear_Waste.pdf

The Scottish Government does not accept it is right to seek to bury nuclear waste, which will remain active for thousands of years, in a deep geological facility or to expect any community to host such a facility.

http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/politics.cfm?id=994422007

Chris McDonald, the lead inspector of the 1995-96 Nirex public inquiry who said that the safety case for a dump near Sellafield showed the site is not suitable and investigations should be moved elsewhere.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,2113027,00.html

David Smythe, professor of geophysics at Glasgow University, warned the Government it would be "wrong" and possibly illegal in international law to use Sellafield in West Cumbria for nuclear waste disposal. He said ministers should have ruled out Sellafield after previous research proved the area was unsuitable because of its rock formations. There is clear evidence that West Cumbria possesses no suitable rocks. Smythe is convinced ministers are moving towards choosing a site on the basis of popular consent rather than scientific evidence.

NDA officials say there is no reason why West Cumbria should not be a frontrunner in the search for a disposal site, despite the fact that previous research proved the area was geologically unsuitable.

The British Geological Survey, which will assess all suggested sites, said that latest research suggested that 40 to 60 per cent of Britain was suitable to store reactor waste, including much of the area around Sellafield.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/what-happened-next-to-cumbriasnuclear-dump-bribe-856581.html

What happened next to Cumbria's nuclear dump 'bribe'?
By Geoffrey Lean

Sunday, 29 June 2008

Cumbria last week took the first steps towards volunteering to be the site of Britain's first underground nuclear dump, in return for a hefty government "bribe".

Its county council decided on Thursday to start talks about the implications of the deal with two local borough councils: Copeland, which has already made an "expression of interest" in hosting the dump, and Allerdale, which is expected to follow suit.

Earlier this month – as The Independent on Sunday exclusively predicted in January – ministers offered to pay councils to take in nuclear waste.

The Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn, said it was "only fair" to reward them for this "essential service to the nation".

A payment for the dump, which would take highly toxic intermediate and high-level waste, is expected to amount to at least £1bn.

Environmentalists denounce the scheme as "development by bribery".

http://www.timesandstar.co.uk/1.265202   Dump decision for council cabinet alone.  Times and Star, 5/11/08.

Cumbria County Council's Labour leadership faced accusations that democracy was being stifled by depriving the residents of a say after it said it had voted to express an interest in the proposals.  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1093594/Controversial-plans-Britains-nuclear-waste-dump-built--Lake-District.html  - ->

But Stan Collins, a county councillor with the Liberal Democrats, said he was extremely concerned the cabinet had taken such an important decision, affecting so many people, without the involvement of other councillors.Hands up all those for world's first nuclear high-level waste dump? Not the members of Cumbria County Council, who were denied a vote on what they described as 'the most important decision the council will ever take' or should that be 'never be allowed to take?'  The Cabinet's complete reversal of any semblance of democracy is worthy of the most agile acrobat. (Ref.:  http://www.whitehaven-news.co.uk/home/1.288163) (Letters page of Whitehaven News.)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jan/22/sellafield  Michael Martin to investigate rigging of parliamentary procedure allowing government to indemnify nuclear generators.

Cumbria councillors justify their support by saying that the US is building a similar one at Yucca mountain in Nevada. What the councils may not know is that Nevada wants nothing to do with the depository and the state has drawn up a 1,000-page document stating exactly why not. All Cumbrian councillors should soon receive a letter from the state governor "setting the matter straight". (Ref.:  http://www.nuclearwasteadvisory.co.uk/page.asp?Id=123)

There is little in the CoRWM report which discusses engagement with the wider community outside of the local authority. This is of particular concern in Cumbria where the County Council held a full council meeting on 20th November 2008 to debate whether to support Copeland’s expression of interest, but the final decision was taken by the County’s Labour-controlled Cabinet meeting on 9th December 2008, amid allegations democracy was being stifled. Liberal Democrat councillors expressed concern that such an important decision, affecting so many people, could be taken without the involvement of other councillors, let alone the public.

The Finnish nuclear authority has already found 2,200 "quality deficiencies".   The Areva reactor, a design it is proposed to use in the UK, is three years behind schedule.   Its cost has spiralled to $6.2bn - 50% more than the original estimate. It has been calculated that the delays will create an extra $4bn of indirect costs for electricity users."  

How then can electricity produced this way be economically viable?   How can a proper business model be created when so much is guesswork?   Decommissioning at Sellafield has been going on for years, currently costing us £1.5 billion a year (happily allowing for substantial bonuses to the management of NDA en route), but they still don't know how much the total will rise to.   So how can decommissioning costs 50 or more years in the future be accounted for?   The waste from new plants will be around seven times more toxic than the current waste ouput.   This will mean increased costs for electricity as the disposal, storage and handling costs rise accordingly.

A judge ruled that the consultation process before the decision [re. the future of nuclear development, in 2006] had been "misleading", "seriously flawed" and "procedurally unfair". (ref. BBC News, 15/2/07.  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6364281.stm)

Mr. Justice Sullivan said information given on waste had been "not merely inadequate but also misleading".

We have not been given any indication of the nature of potential waste, nor of the manner in which it will be securely and safely held or reprocessed.

"Fairness required that consultees should be given a proper opportunity to respond to that substantial amount of new material before any decision was taken."

Shadow trade and industry secretary Alan Duncan said: "This is an astonishing ruling. What it really says is that the government has been shown up as fundamentally deceitful."

(Ref.: http://www.nuclearpolicy.info/docs/news/Guardian_21-5-09.pdf)  - - >

High time this completely pointless plant was closed down for good. All the longsuffering taxpayer has to show for Sellafield's operations is an embarrassing stockpile of 100 tonnes of weapons-useable plutonium and some of the most dangerous nuclear waste in the world, neither of which we have any idea what to do with. Another £2bn has been frittered away on the Sellafield Mox plant, to add to the £75bn bill for cleaning up the rest of the mess created by this industry.   

The report reveals that the emergency plans for coping with accidents are not drawn up by the government's Maritime and Coastguard Agency but by the companies that operate the nuclear ships. For the agency to relinquish control in this way is "unprecedented", the report says.

http://www.nuclearpolicy.info/docs/news/Herald_12-04-09.pdf - - >

"In the event of a breach of containment or loss of radioactive cargo at sea, pollution response planning is non-existent."

Radioactive californium was lost overboard from the SS Ardlough during a storm south of the Isle of Man in 1986, and, in 1999, an engine-room fire disabled the City of Manchester when it was carrying 10 tonnes of uranium dioxide through St George's Channel. Industry claims that the ships could resist collisions are also "not credible", the report says. The boats have been designed to survive an impact from a 24,000-tonne vessel travelling at 15 knots, but today's supertankers can be 350,000 tonnes.

New reactors could well be economically obsolete before they are even built.

. . . the capital costs of new reactors in the United States are "out of control" . . .

Nuclear carrier ships are operated by Pacific Nuclear Transport Limited (PNTL), whose major shareholder is International Nuclear Services (INS), a subsidiary of the government's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.


http://www.nuclearpolicy.info/docs/consultations/CoRWM_reponseMay09.pdf  --->

Nuclear Free Local Authorities   Committee on Radioactive Waste Management

the NDA would need to provide much more detail on its future research programme; the NDA has no clear objectives that will define whether suitable or sufficient research has been done; the EA said the proposed R&D strategy document was not forward looking and provided no linkage to research projects already underway. Where the NDA identified further research requirements, these were poorly defined. Finally, the EA said the NDA strategy gave no indication of having shifted its focus from optimization of the “Phased Geological Repository Concept” to choosing the best concept.

In other words there is no indication of significant progress on the more than 20 outstanding scientific, technical and engineering issues identified by the EA as needing to be better understood in order to have confidence in the containment of radioactive wastes over very long timescales. There is simply a strategy for carrying out further R&D.

CoRWM also specifically said it did not want its recommendations seized upon as providing a green light for new build – it warned that new build waste would extend the time-scales for implementation, possibly for very long but essentially unforeseeable future periods - yet that is exactly what the Government has been doing.

So-called radioactive waste ‘disposal’ involves the eventual dilution and dispersion of radionuclides throughout the environment, albeit after many years of containment, so this is a misnomer. Putting nuclear waste in a so-called geological ‘disposal’ facility (GDF) does not ‘get rid’ of the waste, it merely dilutes and disperses it around the environment. This goes to the heart of the fundamental difference between an environmental approach and the nuclear industry approach. Supporters of deep ‘disposal’ argue it is this generation’s responsibility to ‘get rid’ of waste we have created and not leave it for future generations to deal with. An environmental approach argues that, since it is impossible to ‘get rid’ of this dangerous waste, we have a responsibility to give future generations a choice in how to deal with it, rather than leaving a radioactive waste dump which will contaminate the environment at a poorly predictable rate.

“in the event that at some point in the future, voluntarism and partnership does not look likely to work Government reserves the right to explore other approaches”. This has led some local authorities, including those that have made an Expression of Interest, to express concerns that even if they exercised their right to withdraw, the Government may switch to a more authoritarian approach and select the site because a significant amount of work has already been undertaken in that area.

CoRWM expresses concern about the lack of publicity surrounding the invitation to express an interest, and highlights the fact that the Government has stated that the opportunity to express an interest will be left open for the foreseeable future. The NFLA believe it would be premature to seek out further volunteers. R&D work should be much further progressed first to discover whether it is possible to demonstrate the safety and public acceptability of the ‘deep geological repository’ concept.

the NFLA believes the GDIB should place all its papers and minutes of meetings on a dedicated website.

The NFLA believe the final version of CoRWM’s report should mention CoRWM’s observer status to Geological Disposal Implementation Board and Waste Management Steering Group and explain why there is no conflict of interest.

the Government has indicated the ‘fair share’ for waste ‘disposal’ will be calculated as the proportion of  nspaceuclear operators’ radioactive waste takes up in any repository. Nuclear Economist Ian Jackson says foreign utility companies with Sellafield reprocessing contracts appear to be paying about £201,000/m3 for the ‘disposal’ of intermediate-level waste. Commercially speaking it would be hard to justify charging British utilities a lower price and would risk accusations of illegal state aid. This fully commercial price would work out at around £820 million per reactor – a cost likely to kill the prospects of any new reactors.

The handling and disposal waste materials from the nuclear industry is already in excess of £80 billion (With no account taken of adverse health effects).   What state would the part of Cumbria now so adversely affected by the industry be in if that money had been spent differently?

Chapter 4 of the consultation document covers all the same areas as CoRWM document No.2426 except that the section on New Build is noticeable by its absence. The NFLA recommend that CoRWM replaces this section in the final report, and makes its views known on how the ‘fair share’ for waste ‘disposal’ from new reactors will be calculated.

The NFLA has previously described the new planning system as a ‘steamroller for major infrastructure projects’. The system appears to be intended to eliminate local opposition to a project if it is broadly consistent with national government policy.

potential host communities need information about the total quantity of waste that might be disposed of and when particular types of waste – especially high burn-up spent fuel from potential new reactors and plutonium – might be disposed of.

Nirex RCF Inquiry Inspector:  . . . "the practical difficulties of the deep disposal option were originally underestimated by the international consensus.”

Debate about whether any waste dumped in deep stores (GDF) should be capable of retrieval:

For the NFLA, the discussion about retrievability from a GDF raises several issues:
(1) The disposal option is essentially a dilute and disperse option - radionuclides are not isolated, but are eventually taken up by the surrounding groundwater and distributed in the surrounding media. Its aim is to ensure the concentration of the radionuclides reaching the biosphere is extremely low. Raising the idea of retrievability indicates there is insufficient confidence that these low concentrations will actually be achieved.
(2) Should something occur which suggests radionuclides will move into the surrounding groundwater faster than anticipated, then recovery of waste containers must be feasible (technically and politically) within a reasonable timescale, or the idea of retrievability is pointless.
(3) If accepting a GDF is to be truly voluntary for the host community, it is the community’s confidence in the facility’s ability to contain the waste for a sufficient period of time which is important. If a non-retrievable facility is imposed on a community that requested a retrievable facility, then the whole idea of voluntarism will be negated.

Monitoring will only be capable of showing there is a problem after the problem has occurred - by which time it will be too late.An examination of documents produced over the last three years have confirmed the NFLA in its view that the Government has pre-empted the evolving policy process in moving ahead to seek volunteer communities before it has been demonstrated that it might be possible to show the safety and public acceptability of the ‘deep geological repository’ concept.

http://www.corwm.org.uk/Pages/Current%20Publications/2543%20-%20CoRWM%20RD%20Report%20Consultation%20Draft%2027%20July%2009.pdf   - >

3.37
EA’s (Nuclear Waste Assessment Team) programme, while small, is highly focused and makes good use of its resources. EA has a limited R&D budget including around £1M over the next 5 years for in-house (2 scientists) and commissioned work, supplemented by industry charges levied by NWAT. This covers radioactive waste management and radioactive substances risk assessment, including new-build.

http://www.nuclearpolicy.info/docs/consultations/NFLAJustificationResponse.pdf - ->

The NFLA believe therefore that the Environment Agency would appear to be better placed to provide an unbiased justification decision, perhaps in co-operation with SEPA, whereas DECC has clearly already made its mind up.

. . . a new nuclear programme would give out the wrong signal to consumers and businesses, implying that a major technological fix is all that’s required, weakening the urgent action needed on energy efficiency.

Sir Jonathon Porritt, chair of the Commission: nuclear power is seriously diverting attention from the hard decisions required to solve the UK's energy challenges

On both criteria cost and speed, nuclear power is probably the least effective climate-stabilizing option on offer . . .  this failure of nuclear power to meet the cost effectiveness test means that investment in nuclear power will, in effect, worsen climate change because each pound we spend is buying less solution than it would do if we were to spend it on energy efficiency

A new US study puts the costs of electricity from new nuclear plants at 25 to 30 cents/kWh — triple current U.S. electricity rates!

The NFLA believes that the Government’s cost estimates for new reactors, upon which the whole basis of the NIA’s Justification Application rests, could well be wildly out. An urgent investigation into ‘out of control’ nuclear costs needs to be made before any conclusions are reached about whether new reactors are justified

The closure of nuclear, as well as fossil fuel plant over the next twenty years provides an exciting opportunity to develop a decentralised low-carbon energy system more compatible with the needs of the post Kyoto world

The NFLA believes that there needs to be an urgent Government examination of recent epidemiological studies – particularly the German KiKK study, as well as recent biological work carried out on ‘untargeted effects’ with a view to devising a new method of protecting those who are more radiosensitive, particularly women and children, before any decisions on justification are made. More detailed information on the expected discharges from the new designs of reactors should also be made available.

Harvard physicist John Holdren, recently appointed by Barack Obama as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy:  we would probably need 2–3,000 new reactors spread around the globe, not just in existing nuclear countries. Then if there is an accident, or successful terrorist attack or proliferation disaster anywhere in the world, the pressure to shut down reactors would be immense, and we could suddenly find ourselves without the 2–3,000 reactors we thought we were going to need

According to Greenpeace research, all operational nuclear reactors have very serious inherent safety flaws, which cannot be eliminated by safety upgrading.

There are concerns that safety margins will be lower to reduce costs, and there will be fewer back-up safety systems

The NFLA remains highly concerned that, given the Government’s enthusiastic and public support for developing a new nuclear build programme, it will engage with the public in later stages of the consultation only simple technical questions rather than the wider issue of whether the nuclear new build option should be considered in the first place.