NEI Nuclear Notes

You may have heard the International Atomic Energy Agency is having a ministerial conference in Vienna – ironic, of course, as Austria has no nuclear facilities. But the pastries are nice and the tourist council always appreciates the visitors. I think the most interesting part of the conference, which was called to discuss post-Fukushima Daiichi safety issues - will happen later this week, as Japan will present its initial findings on the accident. But the early part of the week brought a rather surprising proposal from the IAEA itself: In Vienna this week, opening the International Atomic Energy Agency's first major global meeting since the Japanese Fukushima reactor disaster, agency head Yukiya Amano proposed that his organisation conduct random checks on reactors. Warning that "business as usual" was not an option for the nuclear industry, he called for drafting of stronger IAEA global standards within a year and for improvements to the independence and...

Energy sources like nuclear, thermal and fuel power projects are the only way to meet India's commercial energy needs, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said here today.It will be a "romantic illusion" that India, with 1.2 billion people can meet energy requirements through biogas, Ramesh said in an indirect reply to United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Executive Director Achim Steiner. I don’t have much to say about this – Ramesh is right , but it’s not a unique thought - we’ve seen variations of it everywhere - including numerous times on this blog. But how not to appreciate a government figure who uses a phrase like “romantic illusion” to describe arguments against the importance of nuclear energy. “Wind alone can provide America’s electricity.” “A romantic illusion, surely, dear Sebastian.” See? Elegant, kindly, to the point. --- Lithuania is shopping : Lithuania received bids from Westinghouse Electric Corp. and Japan ’s Hitachi-GE Nuc...

How’s the world coping? Turkey : Speaking about a trip to Ukraine last week to mark the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster and discuss nuclear security, Minister Taner Yıldız said: “Greenpeace members had a placard there, reading, ‘No to Chernobyl.’ I agree with that placard. Still, the correct one sign should have been, ‘No to Chernobyl, yes to Akkuyu.’” Akkuyu is the town where Turkey will build its first nuclear energy plant. Austria : Austria's environment minister [Nikolaus Berlakovich] says safety tests for European nuclear power plants must be mandatory and take into account the possibility of plane crashes or terror attacks. Austria has no plants of its own. I’d be surprised if European utilities haven’t taken these elements into account – American plants certainly have (see this page for answers on these and other myths about nuclear energy plants). Pakistan : International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Monday declared the nuclear program...

In rummaging around the radiant news of the day, we often run into stories that not only don’t quite fit any particular theme that interests us, but seem determined to not fit any particular theme at all. We sometimes put these in a cold oven back near the pilot light to see if we can come back and make some sense of them later. For example: Nathan Lewis, a chemistry professor at the California Institute of Technology, has spent three decades researching another option: harnessing solar power to create fuels that can replace oil and gasoline. Well, that’s interesting and we do like to check in with our renewable cousins. But we realize that Lewis has a bit of sale to make: N&O [News & Observer]: Tell us what you'll be talking about. Lewis: I'm going to talk about where our energy comes from now. That gets at the scale of the energy problem. It's not fixing a few light bulbs in Fresno. It's not building 50 nuclear power plants. Even if you conse...

From Wiener Zeitung (Austria): Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek has called for a "renaissance" of nuclear energy throughout Europe. He said: "If Austria has decided not to produce nuclear energy, it is its decision and its problem." He has also stated that the 2000 Austrian-Czech Melk Agreement on safety standards at the Czech nuclear-power plant at Temelin has outlived its usefulness. "In my opinion, the Melk Agreement is not binding in terms of international law. The hysteria about Temelin has been artificially stimulated," he said. Austria should concern itself with safety standards at nuclear-power plants in other countries whose "safety standards are lower than ours," Topolanek added. Which reminds me, Austria does have a nuclear power plant it could restart . Heh. For more on Temelin, which welcomes 27,000 visitors a year, click here .

From Radio Praha : The drawn-out Czech-Austrian dispute over the Temelin nuclear power plant in south Bohemia, located just sixty kilometers from the Austrian border, took a new turn over the weekend when the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency Muhammad El Baradei threw his weight fully behind the Czech Republic. In an interview for Monday's edition of the Austrian paper Profil Mr. El Baradei said that Temelin posed no danger to the environment and indicated that the plant's opponents in Austria were obsessed with its existence rather than concerned about its safety. The interview was bad news for Austrian anti-nuclear activists who had been pushing their government to take the Temelin dispute to an international court. Earlier this year the Austrian government commissioned a legal study to assess its chances of winning such a dispute. The verdict was - practically none. Now, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency - Nobel Peace Prize winner - Muhammad El ...

A Czech pro-nuclear group turns the tables on their anti-nuke counterparts in Austria : The members of Start Zwentendorf, a freshly minted Czech nuclear power advocacy group, are on a bold mission. “We call for the immediate launch of Zwentendorf nuclear power plant,” the group’s Web site proclaims. “Austria’s populist, alibistic, unecological politics must stop.” Zwentendorf, Austria’s only nuclear power plant, has been inactive since its completion in 1978, when Austrians decided in a public referendum they would prefer not to launch it. Start Zwentendorf (SZ), an open-source community that operates through an online wiki site and has no organizational hierarchy, claims to be a partner organization of Austria’s Stop Temelín, an anti-nuclear group. The latter has for years been a vocal opponent of the Czech Republic’s Temelín nuclear power plant, organizing border blockade demonstrations to protests a perceived lack of safety measures. SZ says the inactive Zwentendorf is more harmful ...

Plenty of our friends in the anti-nuclear movement often go to great pains to detail many of the PR activities that groups like NEI engage in -- Sourcewatch , being just one example. But all too often, many of those same groups won't reveal the sources of their funding. Which is why this exchange between Rod Adams and one of his readers -- who isn't a native speaker of English -- caught my eye: I have a friend whose girlfriend was a speaker of Greenpeace for antinuclear matters in the Czech republic, now she does the same ... for Calla (a similar organization), that is a long story, but anyways my friend, boyfriend of this lady, told me once with a surprised face: "all this environmentalists movements in Czechia are financed from Austria, you didn't know that? I thought everybody knows that." Sounds like something somebody ought to look into.