BNFL in talks with Washington for new $500m nuclear reactor

[struggle4progress]

By Tim Webb
13 February 2005

<snip> Westinghouse, BNFL's US-based technology and services arm, has been holding preliminary talks with the Americans about building a high- temperature, gas-cooled reactor. <snip>

BNFL is proposing to use the same Westinghouse-led consortium which is building a new generation of reactors in South Africa. The operator of the Sellafield reprocessing site in the UK is a big shareholder in the South African consortium, PBMR, which will build 10 new "pebble bed" reactors, costing around $170m each.

The news comes as Westinghouse moves closer to bidding for the largest nuclear construction contract in history. China wants to build at least 30 large nuclear reactors, at an estimated cost of $1bn each. It will offer the Chinese its AP1000 reactor model, which was recently licensed in the US. It is in competition with the French state- owned group Areva. <snip>

Washington resolved a long-standing dispute between the Department of Energy and BNFL last week. It agreed to pay BNFL around $500m to cover losses on nuclear clean-up contracts in Tennessee and Idaho which BNFL signed without doing proper due diligence. The contracts cost much more than it anticipated. Even with the pay- out, BNFL's net loss on the contracts is expected to be $1bn. <snip>

http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/story.jsp?story=610465

[vpigrad]

1. So let's get this straight....

> around $500m to cover losses on nuclear clean-up contracts in Tennessee and Idah

They require $500M (should be a capital, because 500m is 50 cents) additional money to clean-up the problems they've already created with nuclear energy, and they're asking for more money so they can create even more problems? Sigh, such is the logic of repukes.

[NNadir]

2. Well you have to understand that nuclear "clean ups" are always

more expensive than other kinds of clean-ups, like coal clean ups for instance, because first of all nuclear clean ups are technically possible, where as the alternate clean-ups are not, not for any imaginable amount of money. Therefore people simply don't do the clean ups associated with other technology. They therefore don't cost any money and are free, except (of course) for the millions of people and thousand of square kilometers destroyed.

Further, the standards to which nuclear clean-ups are held are positively absurd, mostly because people on this planet hold a completely ignorant and absurd view of how dangerous radiation actually is.

This absurdity is trenchantly and clearly explained in the following link from the brilliant health physicist Bernard L. Cohen.

http://www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/en.cost_of_lives_saved.doc

The problem lies not with the inherent danger of nuclear energy, but with the fact that people have somehow concluded that a person potentially injured by nuclear means is somehow worth several millions of persons injured by other means. This is a cultural decision, not an economic or technical one.

In short, the issue is once again, stupidity and myopia.

I have to run. There are a lot of cases of stupidity and myopia cropping up today that I need to address.

Great news on the new nuclear plant in Idaho though. I hope it's built.

[struggle4progress]

3. "Losses" in corporate America are often a book-keeping matter.

It looks like:they get: (1) a $500 million giveaway and (2) a chance at another contract.