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Nuclear-test veterans' outrage as legal bill soars to £16m - mirror.co.uk
Lawyers have charged £16million in the battle to get justice for Britain's nuclear test veterans.
The money has been spent by legal teams for the UK Ministry of Defence and the veterans during a fiercely contested High Court action. It means the final bill could be much higher than any com-pensation eventually received.
The revelation comes after a judge told both sides, who are meant to have been negotiating a settlement for the past six months, to start talks. Some 22,000 men, who were sent to Australia and the South Pacific to witness atomic bomb tests, allegedly suffered a range of health problems.
Many of the 3,000 survivors have joined together in a major legal case to sue the MoD for negligence. But the case has descended into farce, with the MoD claiming a confidential offer has been made, but vets' lawyers saying they haven't received one. The High Court was told on Friday that costs are already at £15m for the three-year case, with a further £1m expected to pay for an appeal brought by the MoD which will be heard in May.
Blair Says Nuclear Weapons Weren’t Vital to Iraq War (Update1) - Bloomberg.com
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair would have favored removing Saddam Hussein from power even with no evidence that the Iraqi leader had weapons of mass destruction, he said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp.
“I would still have thought it right to remove him,” Blair said when asked if he would have backed a war against Iraq knowing that Hussein didn’t have nuclear weapons. “Obviously, you would have had to use and deploy different arguments” to justify the war to lawmakers and the public, he told the BBC.
Whitehaven News | News | Sellafield is fined as workers exposed to highly toxic radiation
SELLAFIELD has been fined £75,000 over a catalogue of safety failures that led to two workers being exposed to a “serious and significant” dose of highly toxic radiation.
Two men working for Workington building company Stobbarts were subject to “airborne radioactive contamination” when plutonium escaped from a floor they were drilling at the site in July 2007.
The men were carrying out work to remove plutonium from the floor of the site’s Central Waste Handling Facility, which was to be converted into offices.
One worker was operating the drill, while the other was spraying water on the area to clear dust.
They were both wearing PVC suits and respirators and were working inside a protective tent.
MoD unmoving on atomic veterans - politics.co.uk
The government is refusing to back down over attempts to force it to compensate British nuclear test veterans.
Armed forces minister Kevan Jones admitted he had sympathy for over 1,000 veterans of nuclear tests carried out in the 1950s who are seeking compensation.
But he said their attempts would continue to be rejected by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) because of a lack of "hard evidence" that their illnesses were caused by exposure to radiation.
Labour backbencher Siobhain McDonagh, who obtained the adjournment debate, told the Commons the husband of one of her constituents had committed suicide in 1976 "after 18 years of pain".
BBC News - Is nuclear the low carbon future?
With the Copenhagen climate conference under way, the UK government under pressure to cut carbon emissions and Wylfa on Anglesey shortlisted for a new nuclear power station, BBC Wales' environment correspondent Iolo ap Dafydd asks if nuclear is the low carbon answer to energy security in the future.
Inside the ageing Wylfa plant there are four large turbines which are part of the process to produce electricity 24 hours a day.
When fully operational, they produce enough electricity to power both Liverpool and Manchester simultaneously.
With a predicted shortage of energy by 2015, should we build more nuclear power stations?
Sellafield fined £75,000 for exposing staff to nuclear contamination | Environment | guardian.co.uk
The operator of Sellafield, Britain's biggest nuclear complex, was today handed a fine and legal costs totalling more than £100,000 following safety lapses which led to the radioactive contamination of staff.
The successful prosecution of Sellafield Ltd by the Health and Safety Executive will tarnish the reputation of an industry trying to win public confidence for a new generation of power plants.
The business, controlled by state-owned British Nuclear Group when the incident occurred in July 2007, has since been taken over by three private contractors, Amec, Areva and URS Washington, who work under the Nuclear Management Partners banner.
'Lost' uranium found in Dounreay clean-up - Scotsman.com News
NUCLEAR weapons-grade uranium, given up for lost at the Dounreay plant in Caithness, has been found during the clean-up at the sprawling site, it has been revealed.
A team of specialists found 1.5kg of the highly radioactive material over the past year during an operation to repackage waste at the site.
Some of the material was found in drums filled with waste and other small particles were found in the "nooks and crannies" of previously inaccessible equipment.
Three years ago, an official government report revealed that 238g of highly enriched uranium – the material used to make nuclear weapons – was unaccounted for at the Caithness nuclear facility.
New fears over nuclear waste site - Lancashire Evening Post
Concerns have been raised that radioactive rubbish from across the UK will be dumped on the outskirts of a Lancashire city.
SITA UK wants permission for waste from more companies to be disposed of at Clifton Marsh.
But councillors are worried this will mean nuclear rubbish from all over the country being buried in Lancashire.
And they quizzed industry regulators from the Environment Agency for 90 minutes during a Town Hall meeting on Thursday.
UPDATE: GE Hitachi To Resubmit Reactor Design To UK In 2011 - WSJ.com
-U.S.-Japanese joint venture GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy expects to resubmit its nuclear reactor design into the U.K. regulatory process in 2011, after it completes the process in the U.S., the company's senior vice president told Dow Jones Newswires on Thursday.
Once the reactor design clears the U.K. regulatory process, the company expects to be able to have its first nuclear reactor in operation by 2020, Danny Roderick said.
"We believe we could have it licensed in the U.K. before 2014,"
Sellafield faces fine for exposing staff to radioactivity | Environment | guardian.co.uk
The safety record of Britain's nuclear industry will be tarnished tomorrow when managers at the Sellafield complex in Cumbria are fined for exposing staff to radioactive contamination.
A substantial penalty is expected to be imposed by Carlisle crown court following a successful criminal prosecution brought by the Health and Safety Executive.
Concerns about conditions at the plant come just a week after an eminent group of scientists and military experts described as "ludicrous" the manner in which 100 tonnes of plutonium was stored at Sellafield – and at a time when the wider nuclear industry is trying to build public support for a new generation of reactors.
Concerns over process for new nuclear power station at Oldbury (From Gazette Series)
SOUTH Gloucestershire Council has pledged to make the best of a bad situation when a fast-track planning body looks at giving the green light to a new nuclear power station in Oldbury.
The authority says it will work hard to maintain transparency when the newly-created Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC) considers proposals for the plant.
North West Evening Mail | We won’t build new nuclear power stations – say Tories
DAVID Cameron’s green adviser last night threw more doubt on where the party stands over nuclear power after declaring no new stations would be built under a Tory government.
Zac Goldsmith, the Tory candidate for Richmond, and one of Mr Cameron’s closest advisers on the environment, insisted no new nuclear power stations would be built if the Tories were to win the next general election.
He said Tory policy “was to give a green light to nuclear power as long as there is no call on the taxpayer, not just in terms of building, but maintenance, security and disposal of waste. In the history of nuclear power there has never been a station built without huge use of taxpayers’ subsidy.”
It is the most outspoken a Tory has been about the next generation of nuclear power stations.
Mr Cameron himself two years ago said the power source was a “last resort”.
Areva hopes nuclear option won't go into meltdown - Telegraph
Unqualified welders and badly-mixed concrete are just two among 1,700 "quality deviations" that have dogged the construction of Europe's first nuclear plant since Chernobyl. It has turned into a costly €2.3bn (£2.1bn) nightmare for Areva, the company, leading the severely delayed build at Olkiluoto, a tranquil, pine-forested island off the coast of Finland.
But Rob Davies, director of UK new nuclear for the French state-owned group, insists Britain's fleet of new reactors will not meet in the same fate.
According to Mr Davies, Britain is at the forefront of Areva's plans to show it can deliver a fleet of stations on time, in budget and without safety hitches. For the UK to meet its 2020 targets on cutting emissions – which may even be tightened at the Copenhagen summit next week – it will be vital for Areva to deliver a flawless reactor ready for EDF's first plant in 2017.
BBC News - Hinkley C plans outlined to public
Proposals for the new Hinkley Point C nuclear power station have been put on show in Somerset.
A series of public consultations begin on Saturday at the village hall, in Cannington, near Bridgwater.
Simon Dunford, the plant's project manager, said the events were about presenting the public with options.
"These could be, do we - possibly - build a bypass on one side of a town or where should we site accommodation units?" he said.
Mr Dunford also said the plans would address what the "legacy benefits" of the building process would be for the local community.
The energy company EDF won the go-ahead to construct the new power station a fortnight ago.
Government facing key decisions about plutonium stockpile
The UK Government is facing key decisions about what to do with what is the world's largest plutonium stock pile.
A report, published in full for the first time last night (November 26), revealed the UK's estimated 100 tonnes of plutonium is not just a potential terrorist target it's increases the 'risk of nuclear weapon proliferation'.
The report, by the highly regarded working party British Pugwash, is called The Management of Separated Plutonium in the UK.
The report is an 'optioneering study' which identifies some major issues which it believes must be tackled if the expansion of nuclear power is to be considered as a 'viable future energy option' both in the UK and worldwide.
Deputy chairman of British Pugwash, Dr Christopher Watson, said: "The strategy developed in the 1990s for utilising the UK stockpile of separated plutonium is currently in disarray.
HSE reports on nuclear reactor designs
Interim assessment reports for two nuclear power station designs being considered for construction in the UK have been made public today.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has published the reports on Step 3 of its Generic Design Assessment of the designs put forward by EDF/AREVA and Westinghouse.
The GDA process enables the HSE and the Environment Agency (EA) to assess new nuclear power station designs before an application for a site licence has been received.
The reports concerning EDF/AREVA’s EPR design and Westinghouse’s AP1000 reflect progress to date and highlight issues to be resolved during the next phase, a detailed assessment which will conclude in June 2011.
Opposition grows to nuclear power station plans at Oldbury (From Gazette Series)
OPPOSITION is growing to plans for a new nuclear power station in Oldbury on Severn.
Another round of public exhibitions on plans for the new site, which could have up to four huge cooling towers measuring between 70 and 200 metres high, was launched on Saturday and residents and local councillors turned out to see what the nuclear station might look like.
Shepperdine resident Reg Illingworth said: "There are now fairly significant objections from quite a number of people.
The Associated Press: British panel begins inquiry on Iraq war
An inquiry into Britain's role in the Iraq war kicked off Tuesday with top government advisers testifying that some Bush administration officials were calling for Saddam Hussein's ouster as early as 2001 — long before sanctions were exhausted and two years before the U.S.-led invasion.
Critics hope the hearings, which will call ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair and are billed as the most sweeping inquiry into the conflict, will expose alleged deception in the buildup to fighting. However, they won't establish criminal or civil liability.
As the inquiry began, a small group of anti-war protesters gathered near Parliament. Three wore face masks of George Bush, Blair and Prime Minister Gordon Brown — their hands and faces covered in fake blood.
"Five years we've waited for this, and finally we're getting somewhere," said Pauline Graham, 70, who traveled from the Scottish city of Glasgow to see the hearings. Her grandson Gordon Gentle, 19, was killed in the southern Iraqi city of Basra in 2004.
MP joy as bay put on nuclear back burner - Morpeth Herald
MOVES away from using Druridge Bay for a nuclear power station have been welcomed by MP Sir Alan Beith.
Campaigners have fought for years to have the area struck off a list of potential sites and last week the Government confirmed it was not being pursued as an option.
Sir Alan, who represents the area, said: "Druridge Bay is the wrong site for the wrong energy policy.
"I am not in favour of an expansion of nuclear power because we still do not know what to do with the waste it creates, but even if you accept the policy, Druridge Bay is a site of enormous scenic habitat which is too far from the grid transmission lines, as the Government has rightly concluded.
Security 'cover-up' at nuclear plants | Environment | The Observer
Ministers refuse to release details of five incidents last year
The government is refusing to provide details on five separate security breaches at Britain's nuclear power stations last year.
The breaches have prompted accusations that ministers are suppressing damaging information at a time when they are attempting to sell the idea of more nuclear power stations. Earlier this month, 10 new sites in England and Wales were approved.
The energy secretary, Ed Miliband, told MPs that nuclear was a "proven and reliable" energy source. But the latest annual report from the Office for Civil Nuclear Security (OCNS) has prompted questions about the measures being taken to protect the country's ageing plants. The report states that nuclear operators must disclose "events and occurrences which may be of interest from a security point of view". It notes: "Five reports were made which warranted further investigation and subsequent follow-up action."
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