CND Press Roundup Friday 1st April 2022

War in Ukraine

• Norway is upping its procurement of tanks, submarines, and surveillance aircraft, as well as telling citizens to “dust-off” their bunker plans, as the country reacts to the rising tensions over the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Defence Minister Odd Roger Enoksen said warning citizens to have bunkers ready within a 72 hour warning was mostly “linked to the nuclear power plants in Ukraine” and concerns over a Chernobyl-like nuclear disaster, rather than the threat of nuclear war.

• But Ukraine’s nuclear energy regulation said Russian troops have now completely left the Chernobyl nuclear facility. “According to the staff of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, there are now no outsiders on site,” an online statement by Energoatom read. The regulator has also called on the UN’s nuclear watchdog to assist in ensuring Russian nuclear officials don’t meddle in the operation of Ukrainian nuclear facilities occupied by Russian forces.

AUKUS

• APRIL FOOLS ALERT: The jokers at Naval News almost fooled me this April 1st with an exciting leak about Australia’s nuclear submarine pact with the US and UK. Apparently the new design won’t be the new American Virginia-class or British Astute-class, but an enlarged version of Australia’s very own Collins-class sub, in service since 1990.

• What isn’t a joke is that Australian taxpayers may have to pay even more for Australia breaking its submarine contract with France – a prerequisite to joining the AUKUS pact. Defence officials recently told an Australian Senate committee that the final bill for terminating the French deal could be as much as AUS$5 billion (£2.86 billion), with half of that sum already paid.

North Korea

• US officials say North Korea is paving the way for a new nuclear test, with construction work underway at its Punggye-ri underground test site just north of Pyongyang. Satellite images reported last month suggested workers were trying to dig a shortcut into the underground tunnel, after the main entrance was destroyed after NK’s self-imposed moratorium on nuclear testing in 2017. The official said the shortcut could help get the restoration work at the site completed within a month.

UK Nuclear Energy

• Nuclear energy bosses reacted positively to the news that the Nuclear Energy (Financing) Bill passed the House of Lords on Wednesday, and has now achieved royal assent. The bill will help with the development of the UK’s next big nuclear project at Sizewell C and with proposals to build Small Modular Reactors (SMR).

• Simon Nixon writes in the Times on what he calls Boris Johnson’s “fixation” with nuclear power and how it’s actually a threat to Britain’s energy supply. On household bills he says: “Not only would a decision to go for a big new nuclear programme do nothing for energy security in the short to medium term, it will do nothing to bring down bills. In fact, under the regulated asset base model that the government is legislating to introduce for new nuclear, customer bills would actually rise because this RAB model pushes the cost of construction onto customer bills before any electricity is delivered.”

• James Forsyth also writes about nuclear energy in the Times: “Government polling shows the British support nuclear power by two-to-one, but this hasn’t dispelled concerns about how voters will feel about living near a nuclear reactor. The PM has taken to joking that he wants ‘an SMR for every Labour constituency in the land’”.

• Britain should fully commit to nuclear power or drop it all together, Oxford University’s leading expert on energy policy has said. Sir Dieter Helm said developing the industry in a piecemeal fashion would harm investment in other energy technologies like wind. He told an event organised by the Policy Exchange: “It’s no accident that most nuclear power is built by governments, on government money with government-owned companies. I’m not advocating you have to have government-owned companies. I’m simply making that point…When you make nuclear decisions, what you don’t want to do is decide: ‘Well let’s try three and see which one works’ – that’s British policy.”

• Dr Charles Clement writes a letter to the Guardian, arguing for the need to “revive nuclear power.” He argues: “We need both nuclear power and power from renewables, the long-term storage of which is a real problem. It is sad that the UK government’s abandonment of support for nuclear industry development in the 1990s has led to the import of expensive foreign reactors. Our country needs a revived nuclear industry based on smaller, much cheaper reactors that are faster to build.”

• The Telegraph looks at Britain’s energy security difficulties and the choice between investing in fracking and nuclear power: “At vast cost and after seemingly interminable delays, Hinkley Point C is now “just” four years away from completion. The strike price needed to make this happen seemed eye-wateringly high at the time it was agreed; ironically, it looks cheap by the standards of today’s energy prices, but it will not always be so. The next one is Sizewell C, where the Government has agreed to act as an anchor investor by taking a 20 percent stake, with France’s EDF, pension funds and infrastructure investors coughing up the rest. This £4bn investment is already baked into the Government’s forward spending plans. It is the required commitment to the rest of the fleet which is sticking in the Treasury’s craw, and with good reason. With the possible exception of the first generation Magnox power stations, virtually all nuclear build in the UK has been ruinously expensive, costing far more than almost any imaginable alternative. The price of Britain’s unique, gas cooled nuclear technology – initiated by Tony Benn – was off the scale. What is more, credible voices have questioned whether the quantities of economically mineable uranium even exist to meet the currently projected world demand for the stuff as a “clean” source of energy. As things stand, we are as dependent on Russia as a source of enriched uranium as we are its hydrocarbons. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. The danger is that by putting our faith in what is essentially a backward looking, twentieth century technology, only with hugely onerous twenty first century safety standards on top, we are making the same mistake again.”

EU Nuclear

• Two groups of EU lawmakers – the Greens and the Socialists and Democrats – have informed the European Commission of their intention to file a motion that would reject EU plans to label nuclear and gas as sustainable investments. “Nuclear power and fossil gas are not ‘sustainable’, far too dangerous and not a bridge technology,” German Green MEP, Michael Bloss, said in a tweet.

• Greenpeace activists staged a break in of the Flamanville EPR nuclear reactor in Normandy, in protest of pro-nuclear candidates in the French presidential election.