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It's Official: Brits Embrace Nuclear Power
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Channel 4 News - Snowmail (UK) - Jan 10, 2008
http://www.channel4.com
Britain is going nuclear. It's official. There seems no way around the
reality that the present nuclear reactors will be clapped out by 2020
and Ministers are committing themselves to the building of a whole new
generation. It looks like they will be built close to where they all
are now. And we've seen the potential size of Sizewell C.
Our Science Correspondent Julian Rush has unearthed some disturbing
evidence about the possible risks of nuclear power. German researchers
have done the most thorough ever study into the increased risk of
childhood leukaemia amongst those living near power stations. It can't
prove causation, of course - but it does threaten to reopen the debate
about the health risks of nuclear power - the day the government
announces that it is eager to see new power stations built. [See
below].
Buried in the language of the government statement is the usual civil
service-ese in which it very much looks as if there are going to be
price guarantees to companies for electricity supply and some sort of
insurance against spiralling waste disposal costs.
Nor does the government deal satisfactorily with what happens in the
period before 2021, when there will be a shortfall of nuclear supply.
There's little doubt that the government has done a brilliant job at
softening up the population to accept this step but there are still
many unanswered questions. We shall be talking to the minister, the
industry and the opponents tonight.
***
http://tinyurl.com/2buuz8
FactCheck: what's new in nuclear?
By Channel 4 News
Business secretary John Hutton boasts that he's 'giving the go ahead
today' to a new generation nuclear power station. Really? FactCheck
isn't so sure.
The claim
"Giving the go ahead today that new nuclear power should play a role in
providing the UK with clean, secure and affordable energy is in our
country's vital long term interest.
I therefore invite energy companies to bring forward plans to build and
operate new nuclear power stations." -John Hutton, business secretary,
House of Commons, 10 January 2008
The background
To some, nuclear power is the best proven source of climate friendly,
low-carbon power we have. To others, it's a phenomenally expensive and
potentially dangerous mistake.
No wonder politicians have tended to treat the issue as if it's
radioactive.
The bold announcement in the commons today, that the government is
'giving the go ahead' to a new generation of nuclear power stations has
unsurprisingly generated quite a few headlines.
But there's a very big gap between announcing something in the Commons
and it actually happening in real life. Indeed, does this announcement
actually contain anything new?
The analysis
The fact is that the government has been effectively pro-nuclear for
years. Power companies have been free to build new nuclear stations if
they think they can make money from them.
New planning legislation is already in place which allows them to
fast-track planning applications and override local opposition to new
build.
The obstacles to nuclear power are economic and technical - new power
stations are extremely expensive to build, and the skills to build them
are in very short supply.
The waste issue is still unsolved - leaving a potential bill of
billions of pounds to be picked up long after the last kilowatt has
flowed out of the power station.
So what is actually new in this bill?
Well, not much that we can actually see.
The chancellor has announced plans for a new body, the Nuclear
Liabilities Financing Assurance Board, to advise it on the financial
implications of decommissioning and waste.
The suspicion is that the government will need to provide some kind of
subsidy to make nuclear energy work - either in the form of a
guaranteed income stream, or some kind of incentive to reward nuclear
operations for their low emissions.
But this was announced today.
The verdict
The government hasn't given the go-ahead to nuclear power today. It has
always been in favour. It's just that the UK's power companies have not
found the nuclear option attractive.
In fact, this announcement seems to have almost no substance to it at
all.
***
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/society/health/nuclear+cancer+risk+doubled/1300847?id=news_sm_nuclear
Leukaemia risk "doubled" for children who live near nuclear power
stations - new German research.
By Julian Rush
Just as Britain decides to build new nuclear power stations, new
research, commissioned by the German government, reveals that children
under five who live within 5 km of a nuclear power plant, have twice
the risk of suffering from the blood cancer leukaemia.
In Germany it has re-opened the hugely controversial issue of the
health risks of nuclear power - which Germany is phasing out.
In Britain, discussion of the health risks has largely been absent from
the debate over new nuclear power stations, though it raged
post-Chernobyl and in the late 1980s and early 1990s when cancer
clusters were found around the village of Seascale in Cumbria, close to
the Sellafield nuclear plant, and around the nuclear site at Dounreay
in Scotland.
"What is very important about this study is its depth and rigour", says
Dr Paul Dorfman of Warwick University who was co-secretary of CERRIE,
the independent committee established by the British government in 2001
to examine the risks of internal radiation.
Scientists from the University of Mainz, who are responsible for the
German Register of Child Cancers, were asked by the German Federal
Office for Radiation Protection (BfS) to carry out the work after
earlier, inconclusive research had indicated there might be a higher
risk. It was published online last month by two well-respected
scientific journals: the International Journal of Cancer and the
European Journal of Cancer.
The German work was carefully conducted. To rule out local clustering
effects, the scientists looked at children living around 16 nuclear
plants in West Germany, slightly biasing their study areas to the east
of each plant - downwind, as the prevailing winds are westerly. They
carried out what's called a case-control study - comparing children
with cancer with those who did not have the disease.
They looked at data over 23 years, from 1980 to 2003, which gave them a
large sample, some 6300 children. And for the first time they carefully
measured the distance each child lived from the plant, to the nearest
25m.
If there was no link to the plants, they calculated there should have
been 17 leukaemia cases in children under five-years-old within 5 km of
a nuclear power station. They found 37 - double the risk.
The German team are at pains to point out they can't say whether
radiation from the nuclear plants is the cause...
"The finding cannot be dismissed", says Professor Anthony Thomas of the
Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Toronto in
Canada, who reviewed the study for the International Journal of Cancer.
The German team are at pains to point out they can't say whether
radiation from the nuclear plants is the cause because there is no
measurement of how much radiation each child was exposed to. But
Wolfram Koenig, director of the BfS, told a press conference last month
"Given the particularly high risk of nuclear radiation for children,
and the inadequacy of data on the emissions of nuclear power plants, we
must take the correlation between distance of residence and high risk
of leukaemia very seriously."
The British government's radiation advisors - the Committee on Medical
Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (COMARE) - have consistently
said there is no link, though they admit there is a "non-random"
distribution to childhood leukaemias in Britain and the known cancer
clusters around nuclear sites cannot be explained. A similar cancer
cluster has been found around the French nuclear site at La Hague.
"This study does throw doubt on those findings", says Dorfman. "They
may be right, but what happens if they're wrong?"
COMARE members I've spoken to have acknowledged the German researchers
are some of the best in the field and their work is of high quality and
significant, but they say they don't believe their committee needs to
change its position.
*
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