AN Italian and a British company are the last in the running to buy Project Services, BNFL’s specialist nuclear-decommission-ing division.
Italy’s Finmeccanica and Britain’s VT Group will this week submit their final bids.
BNFL, a state-owned nuclear agency, is being broken up. Over the past 18 months it has sold Westinghouse, the power-station builder, and Reactor Sites Management, which operates nuclear plants in Britain.
Oct 11th 2007 , rom The Economist print editio
The shadow of an old accident haunts Britain's nuclear revival
THIS is a big week in the government's attempt to rehabilitate nuclear energy. Eight months after a court ruled that its first public consultation on whether to build more reactors had been misleading and unfair, its second attempt finished on October 10th. For a government with (until recently) a reputation for slick public relations, that date looks ill-judged. For it also marks the 50th anniversary of a fire at the Windscale nuclear reactor in Cumbria that was, until Three Mile Island in 1979, the world's worst atomic accident (the Chernobyl explosion in 1986 dwarfs both).
The official cost of cleaning up 20 of Britain's nuclear facilities will be more than £73bn, 16% higher than estimated last year, according to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority yesterday. The latest rise in clean-up costs came as the government completed consultation on whether to proceed with a new generation of atomic plants, with one potential operator arguing there was a "moral imperative" to allow more to be built.
03 October 2007
Operators of the Dounreay nuclear plant in northern Scotland have come up with a seven-year plan to retrieve spent fuel particles from a section of seabed around the plant’s old active effluent outlet.
The plan to remove offshore particles is to be accompanied by the ongoing legal requirement to detect and remove particles from local beaches – work that is expected to total about £18–25 million.
The 0.6km2 section lies above the site’s old effluent diffusion chamber and is believed to be the main source of particle pollution washing up on local beaches, although there are other less significant suspected sources.
By Paul Dwyer
Producer, Windscale: Britain's biggest nuclear disaster
Fifty years ago, on the night of 10 October 1957, Britain was on the brink of an unprecedented nuclear tragedy. A fire ripped through the radioactive materials in the core of Windscale, Britain's first nuclear reactor.
Big Bang Changes Cumbrian Skyline
Updated: 12:37, Saturday September 29, 2007
Four cooling towers at Sellafield's Calder Hall site in Cumbria have been razed to the ground after helping generate electricity for nearly 50 years.
The world's first commercial nuclear power station is being demolished.
Date of release: 24/09/2007
The European Investment Bank has signed a EUR 200 million loan with Urenco Ltd for the expansion of two uranium enrichment plants based in the UK and the Netherlands. This project forms part of the company’s medium-term investment programme, meeting global uranium enrichment demand by the use of Urenco’s world-leading energy-efficient technology.
Government warned that energy plans could be thwarted by shortages of skills and components
David Gow in Brussels, Monday October 1, 2007
The government's plans to build up to 10 nuclear power plants in Britain over the next decade could be thwarted by a shortage of skilled project managers, industry executives have warned.
They have told ministers that the coming nuclear renaissance in Europe and in emerging economies such as Russia, China and India - driven by the need to combat global warming and reduce energy imports - could also constrain the delivery of key reactor components unless decisions are made swiftly and the planning process is speeded up.
24 Sep (NucNet): New nuclear build in the UK does not need to be subsidised provided fossil fuel alternatives carry the cost of the carbon emissions associated with their use and that standard designs are adopted, British Energy (BE) has said.
In its submission on 20 September 2007 to the government’s consultation on possible new build in the UK, BE said private companies should be given the option of investing in new nuclear units and no restrictions should be placed on the amount of new capacity that could be built.
The company also said there is no need for restrictions on the siting
14 September 2007
The Sellafield site operator has reported that the initial 33t shearing campaign as part of the phased restart of the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (Thorp), which commenced on 4 July 2007, has been successful. The modified plant and procedures for the Feed Clarification Cell have now been fully recommissioned and tested.
The liquors resulting from the leak discovered in April 2005 and held in buffer storage since then have been reprocessed.
