The highly controversial nuclear power plant of Garoña (NE Burgos province, near Miranda de Ebro) has failed again causing the central to stop. According to Greenpeace, a valve failed, while according to the owners, Nuclenor, the stop was caused by mere "maintenance". The obsolete plant has been working since 1971 and for long has been subject to popular demand for clausure on serious safety and environmental concerns. Greenpeace denounces that the last extension of its lifetime (was due to close in 2009) was granted on a very strict regime, including the total replacement of the electric wiring and the fixing of the systematic problems of ventilation, that has been systematically unfulfilled by the owners. The "programmed" stop was announced only the very day it had to stop. A disaster in this obsolete nuclear central would severely affect large areas of Spain and, notably, the Basque Country, including my hometown of Bilbao.Source: Gara.
The latest news in Europe are largely about how dirty the nuclear energy business is resulting to be. The big problem is, of course, residues. In Italy the Mafia has been sinking ships full of nuclear residues in the sea for may years now, meanwhile France and Germany have been exporting their own to Russia, where they are awfully stored, abandoned, in open air spaces without any sort of pollution control at a Soviet era base near Tomsk (we can imagine the Russians do themselves the same with their own residues more or less). If all that would not be dirty and scary enough, the closure of a French reactor has revealed that some weapon grade plutonium was stored with no registry in that very plant. Where they expected just a few kilos of the dangerous nuclear byproduct, they found 22, three times the registered amount. This same reactor was ordered closure in July after leaking uranium to the local water supply.The image of European nuclear industry is right now that of a total chaos and inability to manage their own production safely or in any controlled way. The "nuclear utopy" that some wanted to recycle for the Global Warming era is falling apart into pieces. And this is only what trascends to the media: the situation in Spain, famous for its lack of transparency and some very old nuclear reactors, for example, could be also awful.
Anyhow, there is not enough uranium on Earth to generate enough power for nuclear energy to be a viable substitute of anything. Once oil production peaks (and either has already done by now or is extremely close in the very near future), the only alternatives are dirty coal or more or less clean "alternative" energy sources like wind and solar power. We want it or not, we are bound to go ecological or kill ourselves.
Unless nuclear fussion happens to make a huge leap forward, something that doesn't seem likely in the next many many decades. .
Radioacive iodine has leaked in substantial ammounts from a nuclear lab in Southern Belgium (Fleurus, near Charleroi), reports BBC. The authorities, who first played down the risks, now consider the danger "serious" and have asked people not to eat locally grown food.
It's at least the third nuclear emergency in the EU in the last months, not to montion the radioactive waste dumped at Naples, sent to Germany as common trash and turned back at the border. In a time when nukes are promoted again as an alternative to generate energy, we are also witnessing once and again the major problems caused by the previous wave of nuclear energy construction: old centrals whose life is extended once and again beyond their schedule, leaks, corrupt managers and authorities that prefer to risk the life and health of citizens before assuming their responsability or risking their business, growing piles of extremely dangerous nuclear trash that has nowhere to go, etc.Now the leak has affected the rivers at the mid-Rhône basin, near Avignon. The central has been stopped but the leak is not yet under control. People has been asked not to drink tap water nor eat fish captured locally. The company, ASN, has been denounced because of delaying the alert. (More details at BBC).The other two cases I can recall happened in Slovenia and Catalonia. The slovenian alert was said to be almost routine, implying no dangers, but the one in Spain was hidden from the people for months - and it's still unclear which were (or still are) the dangers.
It happened in November but has only now been known to the public. The nuclear central Ascó I, near Tarragona (southern Catalonia) had a problem with radioactive emissions to the enviroment last November. Now, after elections, the director and the rariological protection chief of that central have been suspended in what Greenpeace describes as mere scapegoating (source: Gara).
Considering the extreme laxitude that Spanish nuclear industry is treated with, with totally obsolete centrals still at work and consumers paying arbitrarily for the "nuclear moratory" (implemented in the 80s) in our electricity bills, the cessation of two such high profile figures must mean that the problem was very serious, even if we don't know yet the exact dimension of it.
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