Electricite de France SA, Europe’s biggest power producer, fell the most in five months in Paris trading after Bank of America Corp. cut its rating on the stock on concern earnings from nuclear generation will fall short.
EDF (EDF) fell as much as 5.5 percent, the biggest intraday decline since Nov. 29, and was down 4.8 percent at 17.265 euros as of 4:39 p.m. local time. Trading volumes were more than 60 percent above the three-month daily average.
The French government, which controls Paris-based EDF, is due to set wholesale prices for the company’s atomic power by the end of the year as the utility pushes for higher rates to help finance investments and cover costs. The tariff “could disappoint investors,” Arnaud Joan, an analyst at Bank of America in London, wrote in a report published today.
EDF needs funds to improve safety at its 58 French reactors after the country’s atomic authority tightened rules following the 2011 Fukushima crisis in Japan. While the regulator has pushed for an increase of almost 30 percent in tariffs over five years, President Francois Hollande has pledged to contain household energy bills.
TORNESS Nuclear power station has opened to the public for the first time since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America.
The power station unveiled its new visitor centre yesterday before taking guests on a guided walk of the power station – the first since 2001.
EDF Energy, which runs the facility, said it hoped to attract thousands of visitors, from East Lothian and across Scotland, as part of its commitment to increasing openness at nuclear power stations.
Station director Paul Winkle said the “grey box with a barbed wire fence” was an imposing sight for anyone passing it.
He said: “There’s a suspicion of ‘is it safe’ and ‘is it being run safely?’ These visitors coming gives us a way of demystifying that.”
Schoolchildren from Dunbar Grammar and East Linton Primary were invited to test the new education facilities at the official opening by MSP Iain Gray.
The former physics teacher said it demonstrated a “remarkable science” that the tours would allow people to appreciate first hand.
For years, the federal government just didn’t know what to do with its stockpile of Uranium 233. The experimental fuel had been created as an alternative to naturally occuring uranium, but was abandoned by the government in the 1970s. Since then, it has bounced around the country and wound up at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Now, officials want to dispose of it permamently in a landfill at the Nevada National Security Site. At least one expert who studies nuclear policy thinks the waste is too dangerous for such storage.
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Comment:
U-233 from the Idaho site has already been disposed of at NNSS. Something should have been said before that was done.
WASHINGTON – The White House has endorsed a plan to relax long-held standards for cleaning up radioactive material released by a nuclear power plant disaster or act of terrorism, a group of federal officials say in a new draft report.
As expected, the recently completed draft report on radiation remediation parts ways with standard U.S. practice and suggests guidelines under which as many as one in 23 people would be expected to develop cancer from long-term radiation exposure. The claim that the White House has agreed to abandon standard protocol in some instances is new.
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Pursuant to guidelines established by the EPA Superfund program during the 1980s, cleanups are usually designed so that no more than one in 10,000 people would be expected to develop cancer in a worst-case scenario involving long-term exposure to radioactive contaminants. A Homeland Security Department document published in 2008 suggested that a loosely-defined concept called “optimization” should replace the EPA guidelines for decontamination after a terrorist attack.
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The NCRP report says the relaxation of cleanup standards is necessitated by events such as the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown in Japan. It says that disaster contaminated an area the size of Connecticut and, the report claims, demonstrated that remediation as thorough as what the U.S. government usually requires would not be possible. Instead, it suggests aiming for the lower end of the 100 to 2,000 millirem per year range when possible and says that further dose reductions should continue after reaching the lower benchmark.
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At the same time, however, the report says the more stringent EPA guidelines – which have been used to clean hundreds of sites, including those affected by nuclear weapons operations and the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington — are not appropriate.
Rather than using conventional health standards for determining if an area is safe to be permanently returned to its previous use, the NCRP report advices embracing a “new normal” in the years following an incident involving radioactive materials.
According to the draft report, “one must realize that there are other important factors besides human health that should be considered in the decision-making process.” It says “public financial burdens, restoring key infrastructures, and resuming normal commercial activities, as well as balancing the roles and interests of affected stakeholders” are also important factors.
After the disastrous incident of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, various agricultural, livestock and fishery products have been inspected for radioactive contamination with cesium in Japan. In this study, radioactive cesium was measured in various edible parts of cattle to verify the current inspection method for cattle, in which the neck tissues are generally used as samples. Radioactive cesium concentration in the short plate, diaphragm, liver, lung, omasum, abomasum and small intestine were lower and sirloin, tenderloin, top round meat and tongue were higher than that in the neck. There was no significant difference between the other organs (heart, kidney, lumen and reticulum) and the neck. Ninety-five percent upper tolerance limits of the relative concentration to the neck were 1.88 for sirloin, 1.74 for tenderloin, 1.87 for top round and 1.45 for tongue.
After two years in which international attention focused on Fukushima as an emblem of disaster, Fukushima’s plans for immense floating wind farm projects have begun to attract international attention. This April 15 article “Fukushima Moves Forward With World’s Largest Wind Farm” reminds us that the prefecture’s projects are bold initiatives which could pioneer a new model of offshore and large-scale deployment. The article also lauds Fukushima’s aim of getting 40% of its power from renewables by 2020, and then fully 100% by 2040.
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I argue in detail below that if one looks closely at Fukushima, as well as Japan’s subnational governments in general, one finds plenty of political will and concrete action. This comes as something of a surprise, to be frank, as the general narrative on Japan and its power holders has been that the dominance of the nuclear-favouring Abe regime means the decline of the pro-renewable and anti-nuclear movement spawned by Fukushima. The evidence suggests, however, that Japanese power policy and politics is becoming decentralized and distributed. An antipathetic, or merely incompetent, cabinet can surely slow down this shift away from centralized and nuclear power toward decentralized renewables. But as we shall see, the momentum and scale of the shift suggest that it may be unstoppable.
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U-233 from the Idaho site has already been disposed of at NNSS. Something should have been said before that was done.
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