"Following a review process lasting 18 months, ASN issues a positive opinion on the safety options for the Atmea1 reactor project," the ASN said in a statement.

"The safety options adopted by the Atmea company for its reactor project on the whole satisfy the French requirements," it said.

Areva and Mitsubishi have launched a joint venture to build the third-generation, 1,100-megawatt Atmea reactor, aimed for export to countries whose energy grids are not compatible with more powerful reactors such as Areva's EPR.

The design is in competition with Russian and Canadian manufacturers for a contract to build Jordan's first nuclear power station. The country is to choose a winner of the contract on March 15.

In its report, the ASN urged Atmea to "be particularly vigilant in optimising worker exposure to ionising radiation".

It also urged the project "to take into account the lessons learnt from the accident which occurred on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant" in Japan.

]]> Wed, 08 FEB 2012 08:48:11 AEST Ljubljana (AFP) Feb 4, 2012 - Slovenia's only nuclear power plant reduced output to one third for repair work, the operator said on Saturday.

The plant at Krsko, 90 kilometres (55 miles) east of capital Ljubljana, requires lubricating oil in a reactor pump, said a spokeswoman.

"The reduction was preventive and agreed in advance... there is no risk (of nuclear leaks) at all," spokeswoman Ida Novak Jerele told AFP.

She said the reduction would last some hours "to preventively add lubricating oil into a reactor's pump bearing."

The Krsko power plant -- jointly built with Croatia in 1984 when they were both part of the former Yugoslavia -- generates about 40 percent of the EU country's electricity production.

It was shut down in March 2011 when a loss of coolant in the reactor's cooling system forced an automatic shutdown.

As part of its 18-month production cycle, it is scheduled to interrupt production on April 14 for a regular one-month maintanence.

]]> Wed, 08 FEB 2012 08:48:11 AEST Paris, France (SPX) Feb 06, 2012 - AREVA, who leads the EPR Team, submitted its commercial bid for the construction of a nuclear power plant at Pyhajoki, in North Ostrobothnia, Finland.

With this commercial bid, the EPR Team's offer is now completed, following submission of the technical bid earlier in January which is currently under evaluation by Fennovoima.

The plant supplier will be selected during 2012-2013. The schedule for the project as a whole will be defined during further negotiations.

The scope of the bid covers the engineering, procurement and construction of the complete nuclear power plant - including the reactor and the turbine.

AREVA, who will be in charge of the Nuclear Island, assembled a strong delivery team made up of world-class French and German partners who have already worked with AREVA on EPR projects for both, the Turbine Island and civil works.

"The Fennovoima project will benefit from the experience the EPR Team has already gained from the four EPRTM reactors currently under construction in Finland, France and China. Obviously, having an EPR reactor already licensed and under construction in Finland is a significant competitive advantage," said Peter Wappler, AREVA's Offer Director for Fennovoima project.

Fennovoima has already demonstrated its confidence in the EPR design by selecting AREVA in 2008 as one of the two plant supplier candidates. Since then, technical development work has been carried out.

This milestone is a clear sign that new build projects are moving forward worldwide, including in Europe where AREVA is involved in projects and tenders in the UK, Czech Republic, Poland and Finland, among others.

]]> Wed, 08 FEB 2012 08:48:11 AEST Frankfurt (AFP) Feb 5, 2012 - German energy giant RWE, which has been hit hard by Berlin's decision to phase out nuclear power, said Sunday it was planning for a billion euros (1.3 billion dollars) in new cuts.

"The overall savings figure, one billion euros, has already been decided," but the firm must still work out how, and over how many years, it will implement the cuts, a spokeswoman for the firm said Sunday.

Details of the plan will be announced on March 6 when annual results are made public, she added.

Spiegel magazine said the new savings would come on top of the 1.5 billion euros already decided for 2013 and 2014.

RWE warned shareholders last month to expect a reduced dividend for the 2011 fiscal year.

]]> Wed, 08 FEB 2012 08:48:11 AEST Los Angeles (AFP) Feb 1, 2012 - A reactor at the San Onofre nuclear power plant near San Diego has been shut down after a radiation leak which was not big enough to cause public harm, the US atomic safety agency said Wednesday.

Radioactive gas escaped from a pipe in a building located next to the reactor on Tuesday evening, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said.

Since the equipment-housing building into which the gas leaked is not airtight, it is possible a "very, very low level," of radioactive material escaped into the environment, said NRC spokesman Victor Dricks.

Those traces would be "barely measurable against (existing) background levels," and would pose no danger to the public, he added.

The operator of the California nuclear plant, Southern California Edison Co. (SCE), said it was investigating the exact cause of the incident and that the reactor would not be used for several days.

At the time of the incident the other reactor at the California site was shut down for essential maintenance, but SCE said it had sufficient supplies to service its customers.

San Onofre produces enough energy to power 1.4 million homes, according to SCE.

]]> Wed, 08 FEB 2012 08:48:11 AEST Tokyo (AFP) Jan 31, 2012 - The UN's nuclear watchdog on Tuesday gave its seal of approval to Japan's reactor safety checks, but said utilities should beef up plans for managing disasters in the wake of the Fukushima meltdowns.

A delegation from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is in the country at the government's invitation as officials look for ways to convince a deeply sceptical population that idled nuclear plants are safe to restart.

With just a handful of Japan's 54 reactors still operational, officials are nervously eyeing possible electricity shortfalls unless reactors are brought back online -- something that can only be done if local communities consent.

The government's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) asked the IAEA to assess the stringency of the so-called stress tests to which all reactors are subjected before being given the green light to resume operations.

"The conclusion of the team is that NISA's instructions and review process for the comprehensive safety assessments are generally consistent with IAEA safety standards," the delegation said in a statement.

But the watchdog said further tests of the reactors should also look at how the utilities operating them would deal with a worst-case scenario.

"NISA should ensure that in the secondary assessment the provisions for mitigation of severe accidents should be addressed more comprehensively," the report said.

NISA should make sure companies "develop comprehensive accident management programmes ... in the area of severe accident management," it said.

The mission also urged Tokyo to engage with people living in the shadow of nuclear plants as it tries to convince them the technology is safe.

The stress tests were introduced as a way of determining how reactors would cope with the impact of large-scale natural disasters after meltdowns and explosions at Fukushima Daiichi caused by last March's earthquake and tsunami.

Radiation was scattered over a large area and made its way into the oceans, air and food chain in the weeks and months after the disaster, reversing the mood among Japan's once nuclear-friendly public.

"In any of these processes, the more information can be exchanged with the people in the local vicinity, the better," the delegation's team leader James Lyons told a news conference.

But he noted that Japan, not the IAEA, has to decide on whether to restart nuclear power plants in the country, saying: "That's not part of our decision making process."

The energy-hungry nation has virtually no natural resources of its own and relied on atomic power for around a third of its electricity before March 11.

Since the disaster the vast bulk of nuclear plants have been shut down as local authorities blocked their being restarted following routine safety checks or maintenance.

Japan has instead had to massively ramp up imports of fossil fuels and curb power useage as it tries to make up the shortfall in power generation.

More than 19,000 people died in the natural disaster, but the nuclear emergency -- the world's worst since Chernobyl a quarter of a century ago -- has not directly claimed any lives.

However, tens of thousands of people were forced from their homes around the plant as radiation levels rocketed, with many not knowing when -- or even if -- they will be allowed to return.

]]> Wed, 08 FEB 2012 08:48:11 AEST Paris (AFP) Jan 31, 2012 - Dismantling France's nuclear reactors and storing their radioactive waste will eventually cost around 79 billion euros ($103.5 billion), the national audit office said on Tuesday.

It put the cost of dismantling France's 58 electricity-generating reactors, run by the state firm EDF, at 18 billion euros.

Storing their highly radioactive waste at a long-term site deep underground would cost an additional 28.4 billion euros.

Annual maintenance costs will more than double, from 1.5 billion euros on average in 2008-10, to 3.7 billion euros by 2025, partly as a cost of incorporating post-Fukushima safety measures, it said.

France derives three-quarters of its electricity from nuclear, the highest proportion of any country in the world.

Debate over its nuclear programme has been spurred by the Fukushima disaster and the future of reactors built after the 1970s oil shocks, most of which are now 30 years old or more.

]]> Wed, 08 FEB 2012 08:48:11 AEST Davis CA (SPX) Jan 30, 2012 - Japan used seawater to cool nuclear fuel at the stricken Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant after the tsunami in March 2011 - and that was probably the best action to take at the time, says Professor Alexandra Navrotsky of the University of California, Davis.

But Navrotsky and others have since discovered a new way in which seawater can corrode nuclear fuel, forming uranium compounds that could potentially travel long distances, either in solution or as very small particles. The research team published its work Jan. 23 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This is a phenomenon that has not been considered before," said Alexandra Navrotsky, distinguished professor of ceramic, earth and environmental materials chemistry. "We don't know how much this will increase the rate of corrosion, but it is something that will have to be considered in future."

Japan used seawater to avoid a much more serious accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant, and Navrotsky said, to her knowledge, there is no evidence of long-distance uranium contamination from the plant.

Uranium in nuclear fuel rods is in a chemical form that is "pretty insoluble" in water, Navrotsky said, unless the uranium is oxidized to uranium-VI - a process that can be facilitated when radiation converts water into peroxide, a powerful oxidizing agent.

Peter Burns, professor of civil engineering and geological sciences at the University of Notre Dame and a co-author of the new paper, had previously made spherical uranium peroxide clusters, rather like carbon "buckyballs," that can dissolve or exist as solids.

In the new paper, the researchers show that in the presence of alkali metal ions such as sodium - for example, in seawater - these clusters are stable enough to persist in solution or as small particles even when the oxidizing agent is removed.

In other words, these clusters could form on the surface of a fuel rod exposed to seawater and then be transported away, surviving in the environment for months or years before reverting to more common forms of uranium, without peroxide, and settling to the bottom of the ocean. There is no data yet on how fast these uranium peroxide clusters will break down in the environment, Navrotsky said.

Navrotsky and Burns worked with the following co-authors: postdoctoral researcher Christopher Armstrong and project scientist Tatiana Shvareva, UC Davis; May Nyman, Sandia National Laboratory, Albuquerque, N.M.; and Ginger Sigmon, University of Notre Dame. The U.S. Department of Energy supported the project.

]]> Wed, 08 FEB 2012 08:48:11 AEST Tokyo (AFP) Jan 29, 2012 - The head of the UN's nuclear watchdog said the agency will open a branch office in Fukushima to monitor efforts to contain the world's worst atomic energy accident since Chernobyl, a report said Saturday.

The government has struggled with public trust over the nuclear energy issue since the March 11 disaster and had asked the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to open an office, which will help share information on the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

"We have told the Japanese government that the IAEA stands ready to cooperate," the agency's chief Yukiya Amano told Kyodo News on Saturday in the Swiss resort of Davos, where the World Economic Forum meeting is being held.

"While the headquarters in Vienna will continue to deal with issues related to the decontamination and disposal of spent nuclear fuels, we'll be able to have close contact (with people in Fukushima by opening a local office)."

The IAEA intends to open the office by the end of this year, he added.

Tokyo wants an international seal of approval for the energy-hungry country's nuclear industry to bolster its faltering efforts at reassuring the public it is safe to resume atomic operations.

The vast majority of Japan's 54 commercial nuclear reactors are offline because popular opposition has prevented them being restarted in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear crisis.

The disaster, triggered by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, contaminated the environment and forced tens of thousands of residents around the Fukushima nuclear site, in northeast Japan, to evacuate their homes.

Many still do not know if or when they will be able to return.

Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba, whose parliamentary constituency is in Fukushima, told residents last week that he was pushing for an office after requests from local leaders.

]]> Wed, 08 FEB 2012 08:48:11 AEST Albuquerque NM (SPX) Jan 27, 2012 - Research by a team of Sandia chemists could impact worldwide efforts to produce clean, safe nuclear energy and reduce radioactive waste.

The Sandia researchers have used metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) to capture and remove volatile radioactive gas from spent nuclear fuel. "This is one of the first attempts to use a MOF for iodine capture," said chemist Tina Nenoff of Sandia's Surface and Interface Sciences Department.

The discovery could be applied to nuclear fuel reprocessing or to clean up nuclear reactor accidents. A characteristic of nuclear energy is that used fuel can be reprocessed to recover fissile materials and provide fresh fuel for nuclear power plants. Countries such as France, Russia and India are reprocessing spent fuel.

The process also reduces the volume of high-level wastes, a key concern of the Sandia researchers. "The goal is to find a methodology for highly selective separations that result in less waste being interred," Nenoff said.

Part of the challenge of reprocessing is to separate and isolate radioactive components that can't be burned as fuel. The Sandia team focused on removing iodine, whose isotopes have a half-life of 16 million years, from spent fuel.

They studied known materials, including silver-loaded zeolite, a crystalline, porous mineral with regular pore openings, high surface area and high mechanical, thermal and chemical stability. Various zeolite frameworks can trap and remove iodine from a stream of spent nuclear fuel, but need added silver to work well.

"Silver attracts iodine to form silver iodide," Nenoff said. "The zeolite holds the silver in its pores and then reacts with iodine to trap silver iodide."

But silver is expensive and poses environmental problems, so the team set out to engineer materials without silver that would work like zeolites but have higher capacity for the gas molecules. They explored why and how zeolite absorbs iodine, and used the critical components discovered to find the best MOF, named ZIF-8.

"We investigated the structural properties on how they work and translated that into new and improved materials," Nenoff said.

MOFs are crystalline, porous materials in which a metal center is bound to organic molecules by mild self-assembly chemical synthesis. The choice of metal and organic result in a very specific final framework.

The trick was to find a MOF highly selective for iodine. The Sandia researchers took the best elements of the zeolite Mordenite - its pores, high surface area, stability and chemical absorption - and identified a MOF that can separate one molecule, in this case iodine, from a stream of molecules. The MOF and pore-trapped iodine gas can then be incorporated into glass waste for long-term storage.

The Sandia team also fabricated MOFs, made of commercially available products, into durable pellets. The as-made MOF is a white powder with a tendency to blow around. The pellets provide a stable form to use without loss of surface area, Nenoff said.

Sandia has applied for a patent on the pellet technology, which could have commercial applications.

The Sandia researchers are part of the Off-Gas Sigma Team, which is led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and studies waste-form capture of volatile gasses associated with nuclear fuel reprocessing. Other team members - Pacific Northwest, Argonne and Idaho national laboratories - are studying other volatile gases such as krypton, tritium and carbon.

The project began six years ago and the Sigma Team was formalized in 2009. It is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy.

Sandia's iodine and MOFs research was featured in two recent articles in the Journal of the American Chemical Society authored by Nenoff and team members Dorina Sava, Mark Rodriguez, Jeffery Greathouse, Paul Crozier, Terry Garino, David Rademacher, Ben Cipiti, Haiqing Liu, Greg Halder, Peter Chupas, and Karena Chapman. Chupas, Halder and Chapman are from Argonne.

"The most important thing we did was introduce a new class of materials to nuclear waste remediation," said Sava, postdoctoral appointee on the project.

Nenoff said another recent paper in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research shows a one-step process that incorporates MOFs with iodine in a low-temperature, glass waste form. "We have a volatile off-gas capture using a MOF and we have a durable waste form," Nenoff said.

Nenoff and her colleagues are continuing their research into new and optimized MOFs for enhanced volatile gas separation and capture.

"We've shown that MOFs have the capacity to capture and, more importantly, retain many times more iodine than current materials technologies," said Argonne's Chapman.

]]> Wed, 08 FEB 2012 08:48:11 AEST Subscribe to our daily selection of space, military, environment and energy newsletters responseText http://visitor.constantcontact.com/manage/optin/ea?v=0016gbbKsaiGSpQFojVO8ZoHw%3D%3D