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In focus with Sir Bernard Ingham
Up to our ears in debt but value for money still has no appeal
Well, now we know how much Chancellor George Osborne is committed to value for money in energy policy. Not much. True, in his autumn statement he halved subsidies for solar panels but only because their cost has come down substantially. He also brought in £250m energy cost relief for intensive energy users who are supposed to be a prime target for reducing carbon emissions, thereby complicating energy policy still further while usefully helping to retain heavy industry in the UK.
In what it has called “a first for Africa”, South Africa’s Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) company has manufactured high temperature reactor fuel spheres or “pebbles” containing 9.6% enriched uranium.
The UK Atomic Energy Authority today announced it has reached an agreement with Babcock International Group for the sale of 100 percent of its commercial arm, UKAEA Limited, for 50 million pounds (81 million US dollars, 55 million euro).
Keeping old isotope production reactors operating is not the solution to the shortage of medical radioisotopes, the five-member commission of France’s nuclear safety authority (Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire, ASN) said in a position paper released this week.
The head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) has urged a UN climate change conference later this year to consider allowing the inclusion of nuclear energy as a way of helping to combat CO2 emissions.
Russia’s state nuclear energy corporation Rosatom and the French Commission for Atomic Energy (Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique or CEA) will draft a new cooperation agreement that includes increasing their joint work on fast reactor technologies.
An increasingly globalised and multinational nuclear sector is presenting an evolving set of safety and security challenges, said experts from the International Safety Advisory Group (INSAG) yesterday at a forum held during the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) 53rd general conference.
The head of France’s nuclear safety authority has said he finds it “hard to believe” that there could eventually be a “standardised” reactor design available worldwide.
There is an urgent need for “global and systematic” cooperation in the nuclear industry in order to sustain the confidence of global markets in the nuclear renaissance, the president and chief executive officer of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) has said.
The UK government’s new energy adviser said the UK could face blackouts by 2016 because the build rate of new energy sources – including nuclear – is not fast enough.*
