Category Archives: Nuclear

Fire at nuclear reactor in France

Not just for

Plant Vogtle anymore:
this nuclear reactor site fire was at one of

EDF’s flagship plants at

Cattenom, Lorraine, France, on the Moselle River.

ENENews quoted MarketWatch yesterday,

Photo: “Fire broke out at nuclear reactor” — “Plumes of black smoke could be seen from a considerable distance”



French state-controlled power group Electricite de France SA said
Friday a fire started on a transformer at its nuclear plant in
Cattenom, eastern France, adding that it was outside the
nuclear-processing area.

A picture tweeted from France: Continue reading →

San Onofre nuke closing for good –Socal Edison

A big victory today for



anti-nuke and pro-solar activists:
the leaky San Onofre nukes will stay closed for good!
Cost to close them?
Between between $450 million and $650.
This is after

SoCal Edison and 20% owner San Diego Gas & Electric “more than $780
million replacing the steam generators several years ago, which
ratepayers are now repaying.”
The new Plant Vogtle nukes are already about
a billion dollars over and 19 months behind:
let’s

stop them now before Georgia Power and Southern Company

waste any more of our money on them.



PR from SoCal Edison today,

Southern California Edison Announces Plans to Retire San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station,

Continue reading →

Birds stop cleanup work at closed Hanford plutonium plant

Birds nested using radioactive mud from WW II-era nuclear bomb production plant,


stopping attempts to clean up some of the worst leaking atomic waste,
much of which is liquid in leaking tanks near the Columbia River.
We have nuclear plants leaking radioactive tritium next to the Chattahoochee
and Altamaha Rivers, and radiation is detectible in the Savannah River
near Plant Vogtle.
How many radioactive solar panels or windmills have you heard of?



Annette Cary wrote for the Tri-City Herald yesterday,

Birds at Hanford vit plant spread contaminated waste,

Work stopped Wednesday morning at parts of the Hanford vitrification
plant after radioactive contamination was detected under a bird’s
nest, according to Bechtel National.

The contamination is suspected of coming from mud used for the nest,
which may have belonged to a swallow, said Bechtel spokesman Todd
Nelson. Only a small amount of contaminated soil was found, and the
contamination was at a low level.



Should workers believe that?

Continue reading →

No Iowa nuke: MidAmerican will refund tax money!

Cancelling a nuke is what’s really in the best interests of utility customers:
Southern Company and Georgia Power take note.
MidAmerican Energy just added another to the long list of nukes

permanently closed or

not to be built.
Time to add Plant Vogtle to that list.



In the DesMoinesRegister.com yesterday,

MidAmerican decides against Iowa nuclear plant:
MidAmerican Energy says design plan isn’t approved; environmentalists celebrate

MidAmerican Energy has scrapped plans for Iowa’s second nuclear
plant and will refund $8.8 million ratepayers paid for a
now-finished feasibility study, utility officials said Monday.

The utility has decided against building any major power plant.
That’s because there is no approved design for the modular nuclear
plant it envisioned, and there are too many questions about limits
on carbon emissions from a natural gas plant, the company said.

“We opted for what was in the best interest of our
customers,” MidAmerican vice president for regulatory affairs
Dean Crist told The Des Moines Register.

The decision ends, Continue reading →

Kemper Coal cost overruns at Southern Company Stockholder Meeting @ SO 2013-05-22

SO CEO Tom Fanning used Julia O’Neal’s question about cost overruns
to tout the alleged benefits of Kemper Coal,
which include selling CO2 to oil companies to pump into the ground to
produce more oil.
He didn’t mention that oil is then burned to produce more CO2.

Can you justify the Kemper Plant on your metrics? --Julia O Neal
And that Mississippi lignite coal he said would otherwise stay in the ground?
Yes it and its CO2 would stay there if SO would get on with solar instead of coal.

Before her question, he had not said much about that project, mostly this about Major Projects, at
29 minutes and 28 seconds in

SO’s own video
of
the 22 May 2013 Southern Company Stockholder meeting.
You’ll have to skip there manually, because of the SO’s video format.

SO prohibited “unauthorized” videoing,
so we don’t have the usual LAKE video on YouTube.

I always call out Vogtle and Kemper County.
Both projects are going to serve our customers for decades to come.
We’ve had some challenges with Kemper.
We’ll probably talk about those later.
But when I think about the value that these projects will bring,
I think our customers, and the economy of the southeast,
will be benefited for decades.
And we’re very excited about the progress we’re making on both of those.


It’s curious he mentioned SO’s flagship coal and nuclear projects
without saying coal or nuclear.
And if by “progress” he means Continue reading →

Groundwater wall at Fukushima

Same design as Plant Hatch, which is

leaking radioactive tritium into our groundwater.
And

when contamination gets into the watershed
it doesn’t go away;
there’s not even an ocean at Hatch or Vogtle for it to disperse into.

Tsuyoshi Inajima and Yuji Okada wrote for Bloomberg News today,

Japan Orders Tepco to Build Underground Wall at Fukushima Plant



The Japanese government ordered Tokyo Electric Power Co. to build an
underground wall at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant to prevent
groundwater from flowing into basements of reactor buildings.

The government plans to set up a task force with Tokyo Electric,
construction companies and plant makers by the end of June to
discuss the details, Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry
Toshimitsu Motegi said today in Tokyo. He made the remarks at a
meeting with Naomi Hirose, the utility’s president, which was open
to reporters.

Tepco has struggled Continue reading →

Kemper Coal Crashes Southern Company Rating and Stock Price



Standard & Poor’s lowered Southern Company’s rating from stable to negative
because of the risks of Kemper Coal in Mississippi, and SO’s stock price plummetted.
This was immediately after

activists grilled SO on that and other topics
at the

SO stockholder meeting.
Wait ’till S&P catches on to the risks of SO’s

19-months-late and $1 billion-over-budget nukes at Plant Vogtle in Georgia!
Or SO’s non-action so far on

the challenge of distributed solar.

Kristin Jones wrote for WSJ 24 May 2013,

S&P Lowers Outlook on Southern Co., Noting Project Risks,

Continue reading →

Video of Southern Company shareholders meeting @ SO 2013-05-22



Here’s

Southern Company’s own video
of the
22 May 2013 shareholders meeting.
More detail will follow on the record number of questions,
and CEO Tom Fanning’s answers, in addition to this one already posted.

-jsq

Owners want out of uranium enrichment company



Maybe Southern Company and Georgia Power should listen to Urenco’s owners:
the nuclear industry is flatlining after Fukushima.

Stanley Reed wrote for Dealbook.Nytimes.com 27 May 2013,

Powerhouse of the Uranium Enrichment Industry Seeks an Exit,

The company that operates this uranium enrichment center, Urenco, is
the world leader in the field. It is also plumply profitable. So why
are its owners eager to sell it?

The answer, as with many things involving nuclear power, is a
combination of economics, geopolitics and the Promethean prospect of
an energy source that is as potentially green and abundant as deadly
dangerous….

Continue reading →

Profits also link Vogtle nukes and Kemper coal



Southern Company gets substantial profits from utility customers paying in advance
for “clean coal” in Kemper County, MS and for new nukes at Plant Vogtle
on the Savannah River in Georgia.
As long as SO can keep raking in those profits, it has incentive
not to get on with distributed solar power.

Kristi E. Swartz wrote for the AJC 27 July 2011,

Southern Co.’s profits up on nuke finance fees,

A fee added to Georgia Power bills to help finance a planned nuclear
plant expansion also helped parent Southern Co. post an 18 percent
profit gain in the second quarter.

The $3.73 monthly fee offsets financing costs for two proposed
nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle.

Atlanta-based Southern cited it as one of the factors lifting net
income to $603.3 million, or 71 cents a share, in the April-June
quarter compared with $510.2 million, or 62 cents a share a year
earlier. Profits were also helped by a hot early summer, the company
said.

Back then SO CEO Tom Fanning said,

“The whole issue is to preserve schedule and costs,” Fanning said.

Continue reading →