Canadian Press: Sheep, trees - Protesters around German nuclear waste depot get creative to stop shipment
‘GORLEBEN, Germany - A shepherdess hoping to block the transport of nuclear waste to a storage site in northern Germany herded her flock of 500 sheep and some 60 goats Monday across a road leading to the site - just one of hundreds people hoping to stop the shipment from reaching its final destination Tuesday. The shipment reached a railway depot in Dannenberg on Monday, where workers spent the day transferring containers of nuclear waste from the rails to trucks that are to carry it on the last leg of its journey to the site in Gorleben, 12 miles (20 kilometres) away. By nightfall, eight of 11 containers had been moved. Greenpeace activists said they had succeeded in parking a semitrailer truck across the road just outside of the gates of the railway depot. Police said five activists had attached themselves to the truck in such a way as to prevent them from moving it without first detaching them. An estimated 3,000 people had gathered at the road outside of the waste storage site in Gorleben and hundreds of others staged protests along the main road and two alternative routes leading to the site.’
Today’s Zaman: Turkey - Deal with Koreans stalls on nuclear power plant
‘Discussions between South Korean officials and bureaucrats from the Turkish Ministry of Energy and Trade ended in a stalemate. The final hope for a breakthrough towards a solution is now left to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s visit to Seoul next month when he attends the G-20 meetings there. Speaking at a press conference in Ankara on Monday, Energy and Trade Minister Taner Yıldız said talks with the state-owned Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO) had not reached any conclusive point yet. After a meeting behind closed doors with South Korean Information and Economy Minister Kyun Hwan Choi and a delegation accompanying him, Yıldız faced the press alone. He said they had been deliberating with the South Koreans for the last six months and that the intensity of the talks had increased over 21 gatherings held in the last three weeks to focus on solving major points of difference. However, no concrete steps have been taken so far, Yıldız noted, adding that Monday’s talks also bore no fruit.’
iStockAnalyst: Radioactive leak from Knolls cleanup site
‘Nov. 08--NISKAYUNA -- Hundreds of gallons of radioactive water from a cleanup at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory spilled from a drainage pipe into the Mohawk River last month, according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation. A failed sump pump system caused about 640 gallons of tainted water -- containing Cesium-137, Strontium-90, uranium and plutonium -- to overflow into a culvert draining directly into the river, DEC reported. DEC regional spokesman Rick Georgeson said the water came from storm drainage caused by heavy rains Oct. 25 at the River Road site, where a cleanup of pollution left behind by Cold War-era nuclear weapons research has been going on since 2008. Georgeson said the spill did not present any immediate threat to public health. However, the elements in the spill are known carcinogens. Officials at the lab told DEC that the "exact composition of the discharge is unknown at this time," according to a Nov. 3 citation issued by DEC against Knolls for violation of the U.S. Clean Water Act. No penalty has yet been announced.’
Time: Fissile Material Smuggling and the Nuclear Renaissance
‘There was a very scary story out of Georgia today after two Armenian men pleaded guilty during a secret trial to smuggling highly enriched uranium into the former Soviet state and trying to sell it to an undercover agent posing as a representative of Islamic radicals. The uranium was 90% enriched, which is to say "weapons grade." There was only 18 grams of the stuff in the initial seizure, but the men – a businessmen and retired physicist - said they could supply many kilograms more - enough to assemble a fission bomb. Early in his presidency, Obama announced that preventing nuclear terrorism was his main national security priority. A security summit in April addressed efforts to secure all fissile materials around the globe. So why is this an environmental story? The nuclear industry has been boasting in recent years that it is on the verge of a renaissance, with scores of new countries interested in nuclear power as part of an "energy mix" to decrease greenhouse gas emissions (after their initial construction, nuclear power plants are virtually carbon-free). There's a security concern associated with that. The nuclear fuel cycle for reactors begins by enriching uranium until it can sustain a nuclear reaction, and it ends with the production of plutonium. Both are processes that create material for bombs. There is a line between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, but it's thinner than the nuclear industry would want us to believe.’
Bellona: Glitching safety system at Russia’s aged Bilibino NPP causes emergency reactor shutdown
‘MOSCOW – A scram of Reactor 2 at Bilibino Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) in Russia’s Far Northeast late last October took the unit out of operation for 36 hours – bringing into doubt the ongoing attempts to modernise the obsolete and worn-out equipment at this first-generation NPP, which was commissioned as far back as the 1970s. According to reports by the public information service of the Russian NPP operator, concern Rosenergoatom, and the press service of Bilibino’s production and engineering department, the scram occurred on October 27, 2010 at 07:12 p.m. local time. The reactor was taken back online on October 29 at 05:32 a.m. local time. The scram was ascribed to a “false signal generated by the protection equipment.” The reactor was thus offline for 34 hours, providing no power or heat to the Chaun-Bilibino energy system. One circumstance that causes additional concerns regarding the latest shutdown at Bilibino is that it occurred only two weeks after three-day unscheduled repairs – October 11 through 14 – ended at the reactor. There have been no reports as to why the repairs were needed in the first place. It can be speculated that the repairs had to do with modernising the very protection and safety systems which generated a false alarm signal and brought the reactor down on October 27.’