Shareholders in Canada-based Uranium One voted yesterday in favour of a deal to sell a controlling stake in the company to Russian state-owned mining company Atomredmetzoloto (ARMZ) in exchange for cash and shares in two Kazakh mines.
The UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) today published a draft of its updated strategy and called upon stakeholders to comment on the draft’s six broad themes.
The county of Haiyan on the east coast of Zhejiang province in China has been chosen to host a nuclear energy industrial park to help with the country’s ambitious development of its nuclear power industry.
Iran has started to load Russian made fuel assemblies into its Bushier reactor. It should only be a week or two to start up of the country’s first nuclear power plant and it shoould be producing electricity by November. It has a desperately long history starting 30 years ago with an order for a 1200 MWe pressurized water reactor from Germany’s Kraftwerk Union. It was abandoned when 85% complete in 1979 after the Iranian revolution. The new fanatical rulers said initially that they did not want it. There were considerable difficulties breaking the contracts. Then when the new Iranian leaders decided that they wanted it the Germans would not renew the contracts. Finally the Russians agreed to take over the project with a 1100 MWe pressurized water reactor of their design inside the German designed containment. This was not the easiest of arrangements with the horizontal steam generators of the Russian design in place of vertical units on the German design. There were also long delays in completing the contracts and especially the fuel supply arrangements. In the end the Russians undertook to supply the enriched uranium fuel with tight conditions which required the Iranians to return used fuel to Russia with all the plutonium generated in it. This meant that the Iranians did not need to carry out any enrichment of uranium. There was then mistrust of the Iranians when they continued to develop enrichment processes.
An expert report the German government commissioned to help plan the country’s future energy policy concludes that most of Germany’s energy demand can be met with renewable energy sources by 2050, but that nuclear is needed in the meantime.
Because of successive changes, much of SONE's literature gives incorrect information about contacting us. The Acting Secretary is Sir Bernard Ingham at:
