A radical plan to dispose of Britain's huge store of civil plutonium - the biggest in the world - by "burning" it in a new type of fast reactor is now officially one of three "credible options" being considered by the Government, The Independent understands.
However, further delays have hit attempts to make a final decision on what to do with the growing plutonium stockpile which has been a recurring headache for successive governments over the past three decades.
Britain is set to tackle a 60-year-old problem that has dogged successive governments: how to resolve the deadly legacy from the country's first generation of nuclear power plants.
The UK is home to the world's largest stockpile of plutonium, with more than 100 tonnes of the highly radioactive material.
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, whose job it is to look after the plutonium, is preparing to give its recommendation on how the government should deal with the problem, with an announcement expected as early as next month.
The Mox nuclear fuel plant at Sellafield was closed on Wednesday, with the loss of around 600 jobs.
The closure is a consequence of the Fukushima incident in Japan in March, which has closed down much of the nuclear industry there and led to a rethink of nuclear power around the world. But the government said the move had "no implications" for the UK's plans for new nuclear reactors.
MOSCOW — The Russian nuclear industry has profited handsomely from building reactors in developing countries, including India, China and Iran. Now it is testing the prospect of becoming a major supplier to the European Union, too.
The world is running out of uranium and nobody seems to have noticed.
1&1 Internet - one of the world's largest web hosts - will build its next European data center inside an abandoned nuclear fuel facility.
Built in the late 1980s, Hanau, Germany's 'New MOX' plant was supposed to process fuel for nuclear reactors, making mixed oxide rods from enriched Uranium and Plutonium. But thanks to local protests, it was never turned on, and in 1995, it was abandoned by owner Siemens AG. Then, more than a decade later, after it escaped from nuclear control legislation, 1&1 came calling.
The notion that we need nuclear power to address climate change does not reflect the realities of the marketplace or rapid new developments in energy technology.
It is now generally understood that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning are at the centre of the climate crisis. In the electricity sector, that primarily means the burning of coal. China and the United States are the leading users, and Russia, Germany and India also use coal as a mainstay of power generation. Long-term assured carbon sequestration is not yet a proven technology, and it is unclear when it might become available on the required scale. In environmental terms, the world cannot afford new coal-fired power plants; indeed, even existing coal-fired power plants may have to be phased out before 2050. The nuclear-power industry, proclaiming a 'nuclear renaissance', has suggested itself as a saviour with a simple formula: if you don't like coal, build nuclear plants.
ScienceDaily (Oct. 1, 2008) — When a reactor in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded in 1986 in what was then the Soviet republic of Ukraine, radioactive elements were released in the air and dispersed over the Soviet Union, Europe and even eastern portions of North America.
More than 20 years later, researchers from Case Western Reserve University traveled to Sweden and Poland to gain insight into the downward migration of Chernobyl-derived radionuclides in the soil. Among the team's findings was the fact that much more plutonium was found in the Swedish soil at a depth that corresponded with the nuclear explosion than that of Poland.
PALOMARES, Spain: The rest of the world has mostly forgotten, but the brush with nuclear Armageddon is seared on the minds of locals here and still niggles, 42 years later.
On the morning of Jan. 17, 1966, a U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber returning from a routine Cold War alert mission exploded during airborne refueling, sending its cargo of B28 hydrogen bombs plummeting toward earth. One went into the azure waters of the Mediterranean and three others fell around this poor farming village, about 200 kilometers, or 125 miles, east of Granada.
The Vinca Institute of Nuclear Sciences, located 9 miles from Belgrade, is Yugoslavia's oldest nuclear research institute. Established in 1948 as the Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, its efforts supposedly included an attempt to build a Yugoslav nuclear bomb. For almost 45 years, it collected Yugoslavia's and Serbia's radioactive waste.
