Beyond Nuclear International
Sweden takes a chance on Forsmark
Nuclear waste repository site will be near nuclear plant
By Linda Pentz Gunter
“Who is going to take care of it if we’re not going to do it?” asks a Swedish official during the 2013 Swiss documentary, Journey to the Safest Place on Earth.
The councilman was attempting to justify and rationalize his municipality’s willingness to host a deep geologic repository (DGR) for Sweden’s high-level radioactive reactor waste. It was all about a sense of collective responsibility, he said.
Last week, the Swedish government approved a nuclear DGR for the Forsmark community in the municipality of Östhammar, one of two previously identified volunteer communities.
Forsmark is already home to one of Sweden’s three nuclear power plants, as well as a low-level radioactive waste repository. Sweden has accumulated more than 8,000 tons of highly radioactive waste since its six reactors first began operating in the 1970s.
Echoing the earlier sentiment, Sweden’s environment minister, Annika Strandhall, said in a press conference announcing the selection of the repository site: “Our generation must take responsibility for nuclear waste.” But there may be more to the story.
The Forsmark announcement comes on the heels of considerable political pressure to maintain or even expand Sweden’s nuclear power program. A recent story by Bloomberg — Sweden Approves Nuclear Waste Site to Keep Its Reactors Running — gives away right in the headline the likely agenda behind the repository announcement.
Currently, Swedish operators are “only allowed to build a new unit to directly replace an old one”. Meanwhile, operators had warned that they were running out of nuclear waste storage space, forcing closures.
But if a “solution” to the waste problem should suddenly manifest, such as a DGR, the argument for nuclear maintenance and expansion is considerably, if wrongly, strengthened.
Sweden’s decision is based on the same premise, in principle, that Hagen’s film takes; that a DGR is the preferable option for storing the world’s most dangerous and long-lived nuclear waste. But the journey Hagen takes only serves to highlight the near-impossibility, almost everywhere, of finding a technically, ethically and politically acceptable site.
Read MoreComfortably numb
Why are we risking nuclear war instead of saving the planet?
Note: IPPNW will be holding an emergency online briefing on the risks in Ukraine on Saturday. February 19th, 3pm GMT (10am EST). Speakers will explore topics related to conventional war, damage to nuclear power reactors, and escalation to nuclear weapons. Speakers are: Linda Pentz Gunter (Beyond Nuclear), Dr. Ira Helfand (IPPNW & ICAN), and Barry S. Levy, M.D., M.P.H. (Tufts University School of Medicine), with facilitation by Dr. Olga Mironova (IPPNW Russia). Register now.
By Linda Pentz Gunter
“Hello? (Hello? Hello? Hello?)
“Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me
Is there anyone home?”
Those echoing opening lines of the Pink Floyd song, “Comfortably Numb” keep wafting through my psyche as I watch the US, Russia, and China, amass ever more sophisticated, deadly and downright evil nuclear weapons capabilities. What are they thinking?
Meanwhile, tensions continue to mount at the Ukraine-Russia border, as Putin moves more armaments and fleets around and the US flies its elite 82nd Airborne Division into standby mode in Poland, part of 3,000 US troops now deployed to the region.
All of this has sent US nuclear hawks, sounding more and more like General ‘Buck’ Turgidson from Dr. Strangelove, chafing at the bit to justify the further escalation and acceleration of the so-called modernization of the entire US nuclear weapons complex.
Meanwhile, there is even speculation that maybe Ukraine should not have given up its nuclear weapons at the end of the Cold War as the Soviet Union collapsed. The Russian seizure of Crimea and the seemingly endless conflict on Ukraine’s eastern border has led some to urge a Ukraine nuclear rearmament.
A nuclear-armed Ukraine, goes the logic, would allow it to “deter” a Russian invasion or, at least, any possible use of nuclear weapons by Russia in a grab for Ukraine.
But this thinking further exposes the hollow argument for deterrence. Nuclear weapons in Ukraine would have only one outcome — they would make the prospect of nuclear weapons being used in any current conflict more likely. (Then, of course, there is the ever-present danger of Ukraine’s 15 operating nuclear reactors — addressed in a January 30, 2022 article on these pages.)
Read MoreNuclear baloney
AP story on states’ nuclear choice fails to point out key realities
By Linda Pentz Gunter
There are geniuses amongst us. We just didn’t know it. They are the supporters of nuclear power, who, according to the Associated Press, “say the risks can be minimized” when it comes to the perpetual and unsolved problem of long-lived, high-level radioactive waste — the main by-product of generating electricity using nuclear power.
This observation comes within an AP story headlined: “Majority of US states pursue nuclear power for emission cuts”, and which has garnered significant pickup in numerous media outlets. (However, we never do learn the secret to precisely how nuclear waste risks can be “minimized”.)
The agency surveyed “the energy policies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia,” finding that “about two-thirds” plan to use nuclear power to replace fossil fuels.
The mantra about solving the nuclear waste problem has been repeated since the dawn of the Nuclear Age, coming up on 80 years this December. That was when, on December 2, 1942, the first cupful of radioactive waste was generated, a result of the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction achieved at the Chicago Pile-1 by Enrico Fermi and his team.
At that time, scientists knew that radioactive waste was a problem, but assumed it would be solved later. Well, here we are at “later” and it’s still unsolved. Now, “minimizing” rather than solving the problem is apparently justification enough to keep using this dangerous technology.
Read MoreA big pile of PU
120 tons of plutonium is legacy of Britain’s dirty decades of reprocessing
By Paul Brown, The Energy Mix
Seventy years after the United Kingdom first began extracting plutonium from spent uranium fuel to make nuclear weapons, the industry is finally calling a halt to reprocessing, leaving the country with 120 tons of the metal, the biggest stockpile in the world. However, the government has no idea what to do with it.
Having spent hundreds of billions of pounds producing plutonium in a series of plants at Sellafield in the Lake District, the UK policy is to store it indefinitely—or until it can come up with a better idea. There is also 90,000 tons of less dangerous depleted uranium in warehouses in the UK, also without an end use.
Plans to use plutonium in fast breeder reactors and then mixed with uranium as a fuel for existing fission reactors have long ago been abandoned as too expensive, unworkable, or sometimes both. Even burning plutonium as a fuel, while technically possible, is very costly.
The closing of the last reprocessing plant, as with all nuclear endeavours, does not mean the end of the industry, in fact it will take at least another century to dismantle the many buildings and clean up the waste. In the meantime, it is costing £3 billion a year to keep the site safe.
Perhaps one of the strangest aspects of this story to outside observers is that, apart from a minority of anti-nuclear campaigners, this plutonium factory in one of prettiest parts of England hardly ever gets discussed or mentioned by the UK’s two main political parties. Neither has ever objected to what seems on paper to be a colossal waste of money.
The secret of this silence is that the parliamentary seats in the Lake District are all politically on a knife-edge. No candidate for either Conservative or Labour can afford to be anti-nuclear, otherwise the seat would certainly go to the opposition party.
Read MoreGrim(m) news
Europe writes its own fairly tale on nuclear power and fossil gas
By Linda Pentz Gunter
The brothers Grimm are alive and well and they just wrote a new fairy tale. It doesn’t have a very alluring title — The Taxonomy Complementary Climate Delegated Act (Act)— but it is packed full of fantasy.
The February 2nd European Commission (EC) document of that name is the culmination of a whole masterwork of myths that preceded it to establish what is known as the EU Taxonomy. It lays out the Commission opinion “that there is a role for private investment in gas and nuclear activities in the transition” to European climate neutrality.
The EU Taxonomy “is a classification system, establishing a list of environmentally sustainable economic activities” and “would provide companies, investors and policymakers with appropriate definitions for which economic activities can be considered environmentally sustainable.”
This kiss to turn nuclear “green” was not unexpected. France, famous for its fairy tales and who we’ll try not to refer to as the Frog Prince, had been lobbying hard for the inclusion of nuclear power for months. To mix magic metaphors, the EC happily ate the poisoned apple.
If you feel like you are disappearing down a labyrinth as we begin to untangle this here, you are not alone.
The February 2 announcement amended the earlier Taxonomy Climate Delegated Act. Feeding into all this was the Joint Research Center’s report — Technical assessment of nuclear energy with respect to the ‘do no significant harm’ criteria of Regulation (EU) 2020/852 (‘Taxonomy Regulation’) (also thankfully known as ‘The JRC Report’).
The JRC Report was reviewed in an “Opinion” by the Group of Experts referred to in Article 31 of the Euratom Treaty (yes, that’s the group’s actual name).
It was also assessed by “experts” from the Scientific Committee on Health, Environmental and Emerging Risks, known as the “SCHEER” group. (I am sure the late great Hermann Scheer, who founded the International Renewable Energy Agency and wrote that “Nuclear energy belongs in a museum” must be rolling in his grave.)
There was also a more critical view published on January 21, 2022, by the EU’s Technical Expert Group (TEG) from the Platform on Sustainable Finance, which called out the Act’s acceptance of nuclear power and fossil gas in the Taxonomy as “greenwashing.”
Who are all these “experts”? Good luck sorting that out. Christiana Maria Mauro, a legal advocate who also works with Nuclear Transparency Watch, had a go at getting the names — and declarations of interest — of the Euratom 31 group under freedom of information laws and got stonewalled for months until the Euratom Supply Agency finally coughed up the list.
Read MoreCaught between nostalgia and science fiction
Swapping one dangerous technology for another isn’t progress
By Linda Pentz Gunter
It’s starting to sound a lot like a Christmas carol as a growing chorus of voices clamors to stop the European Union from including nuclear power in its “green taxonomy.”
Six countries, five former Japanese prime ministers, four former nuclear regulators, a bunch of French hens (at least 20 protesters), and two heads of Italy’s major energy behemoth, have all spoken out in recent weeks against rebranding dangerous, expensive nuclear power as “sustainable” energy or even a bridge to an all renewable future.
The youth climate movement, Fridays for the Future, have also condemned the potential inclusion of nuclear power in the EU Taxonomy as “greenwashing”, with spokesperson Luisa Neubauer telling Euractiv that Germany “can phase out both coal and nuclear power and enter the renewable age.” Why, she asked, would you “swap one high risk technology, coal, for another high risk technology? And maybe those risks aren’t quite the same, but the risks attached to nuclear energy, people have experienced that.” In addition, the costs for nuclear power, she said are “in a different galaxy” compared to renewables.
Francesco Starace, a nuclear engineer by training and the head of Enel, the Italian multinational energy company, said of nuclear power, “we can’t stay halfway between nostalgia for the past and hope in science fiction”. Enel Green Power head, Salvatore Bernabei, said “we don’t intend to invest in nuclear, obviously.”
Said Starace: “We must act now because the red alert for humanity has gone off and the next ten years will be crucial. There is only one road and it is already marked: electrification, renewables and batteries”.
Read More
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