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YONHAP NEWS: S. Korea signs nuclear deal worth potential US$40 bln with UAE
South Korea signed a US$20 billion deal with the United Arab Emirates to build four nuclear power plants in the oil-rich country, a deal expected to generate contracts for South Korean companies worth an additional $20 billion for decades to come, South Korea's presidential office said Sunday.
The agreement marks South Korea's first nuclear power plant export deal.
The biggest energy deal contracted ever either by South Korea or UAE was signed by a consortium led by South Korea's state-run Korea Electric Power Corp. and Emirates Nuclear Energy Corp. shortly after a summit between South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and his UAE counterpart Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan here.
Cement makers see huge opportunity in UAE nuclear plants
Cement and ready-mix companies in the UAE are gearing up for a massive opportunity for supplying cement and concrete for nuclear power plants in the UAE.
The UAE is expected to award contracts estimated to be worth $40 billion (Dh147bn) to build several nuclear reactors.
According to a senior industry official, the contract for nuclear power plants would be a blessing for cement companies already struggling with falling demand and reduced profits.
A nuclear reactor in Egypt? - Haaretz - Israel News
"Egypt will not enjoy its sovereignty unless it has the strength to implement a just peace, and therefore developing a nuclear program is part of national security," says Dr. Rashad Al-Qubaisi, the former head of the International Center for Nuclear Weapons at the United Nations and the person responsible for preparing a report on establishing a nuclear reactor in Egypt. "I am of the opinion that possessing an atom bomb is essential if you want to enjoy power and sovereignty. I will not forget what the Indian ambassador said to me when we discovered that India was holding nuclear experiments in 1997 - 'Our national security is more important to us than water or food.'" Qubaisi, who criticizes the Egyptian government for not approving nuclear supervision in its territory, says no country in the region, including Israel, has conducted nuclear experiments because they are so simple to trace. "Israel conducts its experiments via computer simulations - impossible to detect," he says.
Israeli Whistleblower Helped Us Daunt Others
Former head of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission says the Israeli nuclear whistleblower has served the regime because his revelations helped Tel Aviv intimidate others.
Yet Uzi Eilam, a retired army brigadier-general who ran the commission between 1976 and 1986, says the whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu did a service by alerting foes to the country's military might.
Vanunu was sentenced to 18 years as a traitor in a secret trial in 1986. He was abducted at that time from Italy after revealing information about an illegal nuclear program at Israel's Dimona reactor to Britain's Sunday Times newspaper.
AFP: Areva wins 200-million-euro Dubai contract
French nuclear energy giant Areva said Monday it would supply Dubai with 11 electricity substations for 200 million euros (286 million dollars), as the emirate grapples with a serious debt crisis.
"The order is the largest ever for Areva T&D (Transmission and Distribution) in the United Arab Emirates," Areva said in a statement.
Philippe Guillemot, chief executive of Areva T&D, called it a "prestigious contract" that would strengthen his company's presence in the region.
Global energy giants win contracts for 2 Iraqi oil fields _English_Xinhua
The world's leading energy companies won rights to develop two major oil fields in Iraq at an auction on Friday.
Royal Dutch Shell and Malaysia's Petronas were awarded the contract to exploit the Majnoon oil field in southern Iraq, one of the world's largest untapped oil fields with more than 12 billion barrels of proven reserves.
They accepted a fee of 1.39 U.S. dollars per barrel.
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.
French consortium bids for Abu Dhabi nuclear deal | Markets | Reuters
A consortium of French energy companies made a final bid on Wednesday night to sell at least two nuclear reactors to Abu Dhabi, the Chief Executive of state-owned EDF (EDF.PA) said on Thursday.
"We submitted the bid last night," Henri Proglio told reporters on the sidelines of a news conference at the Finance Ministry.
He did not say when he expected to hear from the government of Abu Dhabi on the outcome of the bid.
Daewoo to build Jordan's first nuclear reactor
Amman Daewoo Engineering & Construction Co. and the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute received an order to build Jordan's first nuclear reactor.
The five-megawatt reactor, for research and training purposes, will be completed by 2014, South Korea's science ministry said yesterday in an official statement.
According to the Seoul daily Korea Times, the deal is valued at $173 million and represents Korea's first export of a locally-designed nuclear plant. Daewoo edged out Argentina's Invap, China's CNNC and Russia's Atom Story Export (ASE).
Iraq sees alarming rise in cancers, deformed babies | Reuters
Incidences of cancer, deformed babies and other health problems have risen sharply, Iraqi officials say, and many suspect contamination from weapons used in years of war and accompanying unchecked pollution as a cause.
"We have seen new kinds of cancer that were not recorded in Iraq before war in 2003, types of fibrous (soft tissue) cancer and bone cancer. These refer clearly to radiation as a cause," said Jawad al-Ali, an oncologist in Iraq's second city of Basra.
In the city of Falluja in western Iraq, scene of two of the fiercest battles between U.S. troops and insurgents after the 2003 U.S. invasion, a spike in the number of births of stillborn, deformed and paralyzed babies has alarmed doctors.
IAEA not the best solution to the Iran nuclear problem -- latimes.com
Critics say Director General Mohamed ElBaradei was unduly cautious on accusing Tehran of working toward nuclear weapons. But even if he made the right decisions, the process isn't working.
When Mohamed ElBaradei was selected as director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1997, he was known as a reserved bureaucrat who enjoyed the backing of the United States and was unlikely to make waves. Twelve years later, he is leaving at the end of the month with a Nobel Peace Prize to his name and a reputation among his admirers for speaking truth to power, having stood up to the George W. Bush administration over Iraq and Iran. Meanwhile, much of the world has continued to pursue nuclear weapons: India and Pakistan conducted successful nuclear tests to prove what they had, North Korea developed a nuclear bomb, and Iran acquired about 5,000 centrifuges and more than 3,000 pounds of low-enriched uranium. Critics blame ElBaradei for failing to rein in these nuclear ambitions, but we believe there is plenty of blame to go around.
BBC News - Pakistan's president hands over nuclear powers
President Asif Ali Zardari has handed control of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal to his prime minister, in an apparent bid to ease political pressure.
The move was a "giant leap" forward that empowered the PM and parliament, Mr Zardari's spokesman said.
But analysts said it was an attempt to placate political and military critics, as an amnesty protecting Mr Zardari from possible prosecution expired.
The amnesty gave him and several others immunity from corruption charges.
ElBaradei Slams Iran, Declares Probe at a ‘Dead End’ -- News from Antiwar.com
Outgoing IAEA Chief Presses Iran to Resolve 'Issues of Concern'
With just four days left in his term of office, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei lashed out at the Iranian government, declaring that their ongoing probes “have effectively reached a dead end, unless Iran engages fully with us.”
Mohamed ElBaradei
ElBaradei also expressed disappointment that the Iranian government didn’t immediately accept the draft third-party enrichment deal. Iran has called for more talks on the issue and is seeking guarantees that Western nations, notably France, will follow through on their part of the deal.
A technical evaluation of the Fordow fuel enrichment plant | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Article Highlights
* Revelations about Iran's secret Fordow fuel enrichment plant have been seen as proof that Tehran is pursuing nuclear weapons.
* But the facility's small capacity makes enriching either reactor-grade or even bomb-grade uranium extremely time-consuming and impractical.
* Although it is significant that Iran has officially declared that there are no further secret nuclear facilities such as Fordow inside the country, it's possible that this facility could be one of several that has been either built or planned.
When Iran's Fordow fuel enrichment plant first became public on September 25 at the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, the underground facility, located near the holy city of Qom, was widely portrayed as proof that Tehran was pursuing nuclear weapons. In particular, U.S. President Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown claimed that the clandestine enrichment plant's "size and configuration" were "inconsistent with that of a peaceful program."
AFP: French bid for Emirates nuclear plant at risk: report
A French attempt to win a 41-billion-dollar (27.2-billion-euro) contract to build nuclear power stations in the Emirates is at risk over pricing, the La Tribune newspaper reported on Wednesday.
The newspaper reported that the top official at the presidential Elysee Palace, Claude Geant, had held a meeting with the heads of big French companies concerned on Tuesday to discuss a further reduction in the price which the government in Abu Dhabi considered too high.
Present at the meeting were the head of French nuclear power group Areva, Anne Lauvergeon, the head of GDF Suez, Gerard Mestrallet, Christophe de Margerie who leads oil group Total and Henri Proglio of the electricity group EDF, the report said.
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.
Asia Times Online: Turkey's radioactive waltz with Russia ends
Energy-hungry Turkey's nuclear flirtation with Russia came to a painful end last week when the government, under pressure from many fronts, canceled the September 2008 tender that awarded the contract to build and operate the country's first nuclear power plant to Russia's Atomstroyexport and its domestic partners.\n\nTurkey plans to build two nuclear power plants, one in the Black Sea Sinop region and the second in Akkuyu, near the town of Mersin, on the Mediterranean coast.\n\nThe cancellation of the outcome of last year's controversial selection for the latter site came as a shock to many, including the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government itself.
AFP: Turkey scraps nuclear power plant tender
Turkey on Friday scrapped a 2008 tender won by a Russian-led consortium to build the country's first nuclear power plant -- a process that had been under threat of being invalidated by a court decision.
In a brief statement, the state-run electricity wholesaler TETAS said its board of directors decided "unanimously" to cancel the tender, citing an article in the bid specification that gave it the authority to scrap the process without any liability.
A consortium led by Atomstroyexport, Russia's state nuclear giant, had been the only bidder in the tender to build four nuclear reactors with a total capacity of 4,800-megawatts at Akkuyu, in the Mediterranean province of Mersin.
TETAS's decision comes ten days after a top administrative court suspended parts of the regulation governing the tender before moving on to review a demand by a civil society of engineers to cancel the process.
Growing concern over humanitarian situation in Fallujah
The fifth anniversary of the second attack on Fallujah by US forces has seen an upsurge in interest in the lingering humanitarian problems resulting from the conflict. Both the US and UNEP have roles to play in clarifying exactly what happened and ICBUW calls on them to accept this responsibility.
19 November 2009 - ICBUW
ICBUW is deeply concerned by press reports of a steep rise in birth defects in Fallujah, Iraq, following the two attacks by US forces in 2004. Such stories are sadly familiar to anyone who has followed the history of Iraq after the wars in 1991 and 2003, and it has long been thought that the use of uranium weapons – so-called ‘depleted uranium’ – in both conflicts has played a role in the rise in deformities among newborns.
Toxic munitions 'may be cause' of baby deaths and deformities in Fallujah - Middle East, World - The Independent
Evidence was growing this weekend that babies born in the Iraqi city of Fallujah – scene in 2004 of one of the few set-piece battles of the invasion – are exhibiting high rates of mortality and birth defects.
In September this year, say campaigners, 170 children were born at Fallujah General Hospital, 24 per cent of whom died within seven days. Three-quarters of these exhibited deformities, including "children born with two heads, no heads, a single eye in their foreheads, or missing limbs". The comparable data for August 2002 – before the invasion – records 530 births, of whom six died and only one of whom was deformed.
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