The Telegraph: MPs 'sceptical' that nuclear power stations will be built on time
Energy companies are unlikely to build all the UK's planned nuclear power stations on time, according to an influential committee of MPs. The Energy Committee said it was "sceptical" that Britain's target of switching on two nuclear power stations a year between 2020 and 2025 would be reached. The UK needs a huge number of new nuclear power stations to make up for the coal-fired stations being switched off over the next decade. However, the committee warned that the Coalition's new planning system did not appear to be capable of making sure the 12 new stations are located in the right places to be linked up to the electricity grid. "Hooking up this amount of nuclear and other generation to the national grid poses an unprecedented challenge," said Tim Yeo, its chairman. "Two plants a year is a very high target to reach. The [system] lacks any real framework for coordinating the process of siting and linking up the new power stations." The MPs' report also cast doubt on current plans to make sure there is a deep hole for disposing of radioactive waste within 110 years. It called on the Government to insist that there are sufficient interim ways of storing the material before allowing new plants to be built.
Financial Times: India - Nuclear industry: Government bowls sector a surprise googly
When India ratified a ground-breaking civilian nuclear energy deal with the US in 2008, it was a seminal moment, ending decades of New Delhi’s pariah status, and opening the door to international co-operation for India to develop its nuclear power industry. International suppliers – including GE, Westinghouse, Bechtel, Russia’s Rosatom, France’s Areva, and Japan’s Toshiba, Hitachi and Mitsubishi – are all eyeing lucrative opportunities, as India wants to undertake a huge expansion of its nuclear energy industry to help close its vast domestic electricity deficit. But the country recently bowled the global nuclear power industry – and possibly itself – an unexpected googly by adopting a civil nuclear liability law that will hold suppliers liable for any accident for up to 80 years after a plant’s construction. Many countries with nuclear power industries channel potential liability in case of an accident to operators. India’s very different law has sent nuclear companies into a spin. They and their Indian partners warn that the rules will be a serious deterrent to sales of equipment and technology to the state-owned Nuclear Power Corporation, the only entity allowed to operate nuclear power plants in the country.
DC Bureau: Little Progress Disposing of 34 Metric Tons of Surplus Weapons Grade Plutonium
Too slow, too expensive, too risky: the multi-billion dollar Mixed Oxide Fuel (MOX) program, under construction at the Savannah River Site, continues to be controversial. A technology chosen by the United States in the mid-1990s to contribute to the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, today it is being held out as a solution for America’s energy future. In 1996, the U.S.-Russian Independent Scientific Commission on Disposition of Excess Weapons Plutonium was put in place to propose options to decrease risks of nuclear proliferation. In the framework of the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) signed by the United States and Russia, the two countries had indeed committed to dispose of 34 metric tons of their surplus weapons plutonium to reduce the threat that this material could be stolen or diverted.
Physics Today: Review finds flaws in new radiation monitor program
A National Research Council committee identified flawed testing, faulty cost–benefit analyses, and other problems with the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office's program to develop and deploy improved radiation monitors for the screening of cargo at US ports. The NRC review also found that vendors of the Advanced Spectroscopic Portal (ASP) monitors had failed to deliver a system that meets DNDO's specification for modularity, with the result that the agency is unable to match the best-performing hardware with the optimal data-analysis algorithms, or to allow upgrades as experience is gained with the system. The findings deal another blow to a program that has been bedeviled for years by performance issues. First planned as a replacement for the network of polyvinyl toluene (PVT) detectors that are currently installed at the nation's ports and border crossings (as shown here), the ASP system has since been relegated to a secondary role, scanning the shipping containers that set off the PVT portal monitors. The NRC panel, chaired by retired University of California president Robert Dynes, endorsed last year's determination by Department of Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano that ASP monitors haven't performed well enough to supplant PVTs. DNDO is a unit of DHS.