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Nuclear power
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Nuclear power is an expensive, inefficient and dangerous technology. It has no future. It 's a bad investment. 10 good reasons to say no to to nuclear power, and yes to renewable energy. Nuclear power produces radioactive waste. For thousands of years.  What exactly is radioactivity and what is radiation? What radiation can do to living organisms was clearly illustrated when the Russian former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with a tiny dose of polonium-210. It killed him in a few days. Nuclear radiation occurs when unstable atoms decay. It disrupts the functioning of the cells that make up our bodies. High levels of radiation kill cells, resulting in radiation burns, sickness and death. Lower levels of radiation cause mutations, which can result in cancer and inheritable genetic dam- age. These effects are unpredictable. Like with smoking, we know there is a direct relation but it occurs at random. If a large number of people are exposed to radiation, for example as happened after the Chernobyl accident, we know that some people will get cancer and some women will give birth to children with genetic defects, but we cannot predict who will be affected. Also the effects can be delayed, with cancers or birth defects occurring many years after exposure to radiation. High levels of radiation are very dangerous. The nuclear industry believes that high-level waste can be stored relatively harmlessly. Most other sources claim that the waste is still radioactive (far above free release limits) after 240,000 years. The nuclear industry proposes long-term waste storage sites e.g. in bunkers or in deep rock formations, but has failed to realise such a long-term disposal site. It is impossible to guarantee the isolation of waste for hundreds of thousands of years. Once the waste is buried, there is no longer a possibility to check for and repair leakages. Leakages are simply a matter of time, i.e. the containers definitely will leak sometime in the future, releasing the radioactivity they contain. Aboveground storage cannot be considered safe either. Although there is a possibility to control and repair the waste containers, mankind will be responsible for its management ‘forever’. In Italy there are about 60 thousand cubic meters of radioactive waste (one of them is temporarily stored outside, it will however return to Italy) and 235 tonnes of irradiated fuel that has not yet found a secure site. One of the largest deposits of "liquid waste" (irradiated liquid) is in Salluggia, not far from old the plant of Trino Vercellese, in the middle of a floodplain. In 2000, the rivers Po and Dora Baltea have overflowed their banks, flooding in the surrounding plain. The water almost reached the Salluggia facitily nuclear where the waste is stored, the risk of contamination of the aquifers of the largest aqueduct in Piedmont. According to Giuseppe Zampini, director of Ansaldo Energia (which controls Ansaldo Nuclear) nuclear waste "are the problem, one of the points where we fell, we manage the plants in Italy, but we do not know where to put the waste."
 It costs a lot of money to build a nuclear power plant. In a competitive electricity market companies will have difficulties finding investors for such a risky, long-term, politically sensitive project. Private banks withdraw their support and doubtful and disputed public money is used to fill the gaps. Construction of the Bulgarian Belene nuclear power plant started in the 1980s, but due to environmental protests and economic doubts the project was stopped in the 1990s. The Bulgarian government brought up the Belene project again in 2003 after having agreed to close down four blocks of another nuclear power plant as condition for EU accession. A consortium of Russian AtomStroyExport and French-German ArevaNP offered to build two reactors for the price of approximately 4 billion Euros. Bulgaria’s National Electric Company (NEC) aims to keep at least a 51% share in the new plant and seeks a strategic investor for the remaining part. NEC expected to get funding from the export agencies of the chosen builders Russia, France and Germany, EURATOM, the European Investment Bank and leading global investment banks. In 2006, the UniCredit Group, HVB and Deutsche Bank withdrew their support after public protests from customers. The banks ap- pear to be aware of the economic risks and of the fact that their customers do not want any involvement in nuclear in- vestments. Around the same time investment consultancy Standard and Poor’s down- rated NEC from ‘developing’ to ‘negative’ on their corporate rating because of its participation in the project. Bayerische Landesbank and Commerzbank denied involvement in the Belene project, although the Bulgarian Energy Minister had mentioned them as “interested”. The Belgian KBC Group denied wanting to finance Belene through its Czech daugh- ter CSOB and the French Societé Générale Group withdrew its Czech daughter Komercni Banka after receiving information about the risks attached to Belene. Other banks that withdrew support include NP Paribas, Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch & Co., JP Morgan Chase and the Lehman Brothers Bank Enel announced that electricity coming from the nuclear plants will cost 3 cents per kWh. Unfortunately but this calculation does not include the cost of construction (and decommissioning) of power plants, nor the gradual increase in the cost of uranium, which is becoming rarer. According to a more realistic estimate, the electriciy form nuclear power will cost around 10 cents per KWh. Some scientists argue that the costs will rise up to 30 cents, ten times more than what was announced by Enel. According to researchers at the Keystone Center, the cost will be even higher. An investigation on city market 27 companies in the nuclear industry in the world, in June 2007, concluded that the cost of building new reactors could be between 3600 and $ 4000 per kW installed - including interest on capital invested. They also calculated that the operational costs of power plants would be extremely high: 30 cents per kWh for the first thirteen years, ie until the investments are written off, then 18 cents for the rest of life of the plant. 30 and 18 cents, compared to an average price of electricity for residential use at 10 for kWh , in the United States. Similar results were disclosed by a study of the U.S. Energy Florida Power & Light. Although they are over 50 years is called the technology of the future, nuclear power is based only thanks to subsidies. Costs of power plants construction is not the only one. There are the high coast of decommissioning. In Italy they are manage by Sogin, a state founded company. Every years Sogin spend 150 million euros of public money, for the management of the old nuclear power plants (closed since 1985). These coasts are token dirictly from the citizens, under the heading A2 of the electricity bill.
 Uranium is the sole source of nuclear power. The concentration of uranium in the earth’s crust is about the same as that of tin or zinc. Uranium occurs in many kinds of chemical compounds, minerals, and in different types of rocks in the earth’s crust. In 2005 the world nuclear fleet consumed about 70,000 tonnes of uranium. About 40,000 tonnes of this amount was actually mined. The remaining 30,000 tonnes was produced from depleted uranium and highly enriched uranium from dismantled nuclear weapons. Within a few years these reserves of highly enriched uranium will run out and from then on all uranium will have to be mined. The easily discoverable and extractable uranium sources are already known and in production. To date there are no publications which indicate new large rich uranium resources have been found. When nuclear power first became an option it was thought that fast breeders, ‘breeding’ more uranium, would lead to a closed fuel cycle and solve the problem of limited fuel resources. Fifty years of intensive research in seven countries (USA, UK, France, Germany, USSR/Russia, Japan and India), with investments of many of tens of billions of dollars have failed to demonstrate that the breeder cycle is technically feasible. The 2003 study The Future of Nuclear Power does not expect breeders to come into operation during the next three decades. Mining and milling uranium removes hazardous substances in the ore from their relatively safe underground location and converts them to fine sand and then sludge, making it possible for the hazardous materials to disperse in the environment. The uranium content of the ore is often only between 0.1% and 0.2%. Therefore, large amounts of ore have to be mined to get at the uranium.
Waiting for the fourth generation Solution trumpeted by the nuclear industry, with a fourth-generation power plants, known breeder, because making them a fertile as U-238 into fissile Pu-239 as. For this reason, these reactors, called fast-breeder reactor, generating more fissionable material than that present in the nuclear fuel and produce fewer waste products. But these plants can not be used, since they require the use of sodium as a coolant, which can explode or catch fire if it comes into contact with water or air. Sodium is also very corrosive, and has caused several accidents in the central French Superphénix.  The billions invested in the U.S., France, Germany and Russia in search of a fourth-generation power plants have failed to produce results, and is not expected that this technology can be operational before the next thirty years. In the meantime, invest in existing plants (third generation) is not a step closer to possible development of a fourth-generation power plants, since they are completely different technologies. Serves only to throw money, and increase risks. Sources: Accidents with nuclear installations are not something from the past Nor do they only occur in old reactors like the Chernobyl reactor that burned down in 1986, spreading a cloud of radioactivity over half of Europe. Accidents happen with all types of nuclear power plants, all over the world.  After the Chernobyl disaster the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) was introduced by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in order to enable prompt information in case of nuclear accidents. There are 7 levels on the INES scale indicating the seriousness of an event. Since the introduction of INES there have been many incidents that were rated as level 3 or 4, which indicate a serious accident. In many cases, design flaws, a sloppy safety culture, poor judgment under stressful conditions and a naive faith in a highly sensitive technology lead to a chain of events that only by sheer luck did not end in a major disaster involving public exposure to radiation and health and environmental effects. Commercialisation of electricity production has increased dangers because now production often goes before safety. Three European incidents, all classified on the INES scale as Level 3 accidents, are described here. In the spring of 2003 one of the four Russian designed VVER 440-213 at Paks, Hungary, was taken offline for its annual refueling and maintenance period. Parts of the fuel elements were to be cleaned with a new system, hired from Framatome ANP (a joint venture of French ArevaNP and German Siemens which is now trying to building the new European nuclear reactor in Finland). At one moment during this operation, radioactive gas discharges were detected as coming from the cleaning system. The discharges were probably due to insufficient cooling of the 30 highly radioactive fuel elements inside the system. This brought the cooling water in the cleansing tank to boil, then boiled away all the water, heated up to 1200 degrees Celsius, and finally the tank crumbled like porcelain as the operators, in an attempt to avoid disaster, unleashed a torrent of cold water over the fuel elements. According to reactor physicists, a nuclear explosion, i.e. a limited but uncontrolled chain reaction, could have occurred. Radioactive gas flowed into the reactor room, from which the operators had fled in panic. The gas was later blown unfiltered into the outside air at full ventilator strength for 14 hours to make the room accessible for personnel in radiation protection gear. In April 2005 a leak was detected in the THORP reprocessing plant at Sellafield, UK. The leak was caused by a broken pipe at a point where the pipe work feeds into one of two accountancy tanks. Then in-cell cameras pinpointed the source and extent of the leak. According to the owner of the plant 83 m3 of dissolved reactor fuel and nitric acid including some 160 kg of plutonium leaked on the floor undetected from July 2004 to April 2005. In July 2006 a short circuit occurred during repair works on an interlocking station adjacent to Sweden’s Forsmark-1 nuclear reactor. In former times it was standard precaution to take the nuclear plant off line during such repair works but that was before commercialisation. Taking a reactor off line means loss of production and so loss of income. The short circuit led to a blackout in the nuclear reactor’s control room. The automatic shutdown system of the reactor that should bring activity back to the minimum necessary for its own maintenance, failed to operate. The automatic emergency power system failed to start operating because it was interconnected with the blackout line. For 23 minutes no one in the control room could be sure what was happening in the reactor. The decision was taken to evacuate all personnel who did not absolutely have to remain on duty. However, no evacuation took place - for the simple reason that the name system was blacked out too. Eventually, an engineer from Forsmark-2 managed manually to get diesel-supported generators to kick in.. Nuclear power means nuclear weapons Nuclear energy is the civilian spin-off from the early days of nuclear weapons. A major reason for opposing a nuclear renaissance is that it considerably increases the risk of nuclear proliferation. The two most vulnerable steps in the civilian nuclear chain with regard to nuclear proliferation are uranium enrichment and the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel.  In line with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that encourages countries to develop nuclear capacity for civilian purposes, Iran is developing a programme for a complete nuclear fuel cycle. It has essentially completed a civilian nuclear power reactor at Bushehr. Russia will provide the fuel for the reactor and will take back the spent fuel for storage and possibly reprocessing. Iran also operates four small research reactors, three supplied by China and one supplied by the USA. Two other facilities are suspected of being part of a nuclear- weapon programme: a factory located near the town of Arak and two enrichment plants under construction at Natanz. Enrichment of uranium is a so-called dual- purpose process: it can be used to produce low- enriched uranium for use in nuclear reactors and/or highly enriched uranium used in atomic weapons. The plant in Iran can be used for the production of nuclear weapons. As can enrichment facilities in Brazil, China, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. In 1983 military experts already called for a moratorium on building new enrich- ment facilities. At that time only three commercial- scale enrichments plants existed, all owned by the German/British/Dutch consortium Urenco. In 2006, general director of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) Mohamed ElBaradei again called for a –temporary- moratorium (for exam- ple, for 5 or 10 years) for new uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing facilities – but only for countries that do not currently have such technologies. Reprocessing plants cannot be safeguarded effectively. Safeguarding the plutonium in spent nuclear reactor fuel elements before reprocessing is relatively simple. For many years, the elements are so hot and radioactive that they are self-protecting because they must be handled with remote equipment . However, once the plutonium is removed from spent reactor fuel elements in a reprocessing plant, safeguarding it is quite a different matter. Safeguarding agencies claim that a commercial plutonium reprocessing plant can be safeguarded with an effectiveness of about 99%. This means that, even with the most optimistic assessments, at least 1% of the plutonium will be unaccounted for. In Britain’s Sellafield reprocessing plant THORP for example large quantities of plutonium were unaccounted for over the last years. In 1999 24.9 kg plutonium went missing, in 2001 it was 5.6 kg plutonium and in 2005 as much as 30 kilo plutonium could not be accounted for. According to the owners of the plant the figures were estimates and “gave no rise to concern over either safety or security”. But according to independent experts, the loss of enough plutonium for 7 to 8 nuclear bombs is a very serious shortfall. If there is an accounting collapse with the most poisonous product mankind can produce, there is reason for serious concern. Sources:
Nuclear power can help to to stabilize the global climate? No more than renewable energy. But with high costs and high risks. .  The advantage of nuclear power plants from a climate perspective is that they do not emit CO2 directly. However, the nuclear system is the most complex and extensive of all energy systems.It includes ore mining and processing, enrichment of uranium, fuel fabrication etc., the so-called upstream fuel-cycle, and downstream (post-plant) activities that are needed to process and store nuclear waste. Because these are complex processes dealing with highly dangerous radioactive material, lots of facilities and equipment (e.g. robots to demolish decommissioned power plants) are needed. Furthermore, steel, concrete and other materials are necessary for the construction for both the nuclear power plant and the facilities in the up- and downstream of the nuclear fuel system. The energy used for these activities partly comes from fossil fuels, which causes greenhouse gas emissions. In a life-cycle analysis the greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts of different types of energy production can be calculated and compared. International studies carrying out life- cycle analyses for nuclear energy find emissions of greenhouse gases in a range between 30 and 40 up to 120 grams of CO per kWh of generated nuclear electricity. The higher figure is based on the expectation that the ore grade of uranium will fall rapidly. This means that more energy will be needed to mine usable amounts of uranium. As high-grade uranium stocks decrease, the CO related to mining uranium will increase. Assuming that global generation capacity remains at 2006 levels, after 2016 the ore grade of uranium will fall significantly from today’s levels and after 2070 nuclear energy will fall from the ‘energy cliff’ meaning that the nuclear system will consume more energy than it will be able to produce. This effect will occur earlier if the global generation capacity of nuclear power is extended. Nuclear power only uses the electricity it generates, the produced heat is wasted. Co-generation systems producing both electricity and heat are much more favorable in reducing emissions than nuclear energy.
Nuclear power is stupid  Nuclear energy is linked to a an conception of energy production: large power, all concentrated in one single place, and distributed by an electric one-way grid. Today the electricity energy moves in both directions, balancing the peaks of consumption and production, and also the production of energy can be spread in the territory. Renewable energies such as wind and solar are adapted to this modular approach. Nuclear power will increase the concentration, is undermining the entire system. A black-out, even temporarily, in a single large power plant, can bring down the whole network, as occurred in Italy in September 2003 when a lightning strike knocked down the line connecting with Switzerland. A temporary block of one or more wind turbines brings no overhead to the network, because they are smaller but numerous plants. Pollution The uranium mines are hidden hell of nuclear plants.  The uranium content in the ore often does not exceed 0.1-0.2 percent. The large amount of waste products but is not free from contamination, as they are not water during processing. The south of France suffers from radioactive pollution as result of waste dumping until 2001 at old uranium mining sites of Cogema. It has left 27 million tonnes of mining waste that will be radioactive for millions of years. In an attempt to hold Cogema responsible for cleaning up its waste, Sources et Rivières du Limousin, a independent organisation of fishers in the Limoges region, filed a case with the Court of Justice. Although the Court ruled in March 2004 that Cogema had not violated the law, the case raised a lot of public attention and may help to raise the environmental and health standards of the way mining waste is handled. In December 2006, a pipe for the transport of radioactive waste is spoiled at the village Jadugoda in India, contaminating the stream. The toxic sludge were discharged into the river for nine hours before the flow of radioactive waste had been discontinued. Similar incidents have shown that the contamination shows its effect even from miles downstream along the rivers. The manager, the French public company Cogema is the major supplier of uranium in the world and the only company to offer the industry at all stages of the nuclear fuel cycle, and has plants from Niger to Canada to Kazakhstan.
Nuclear power:
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Nuclear energy has no future.