“AREVA supports an integrated approach that ensures options including recycling, interim storage, and disposal,” Executive V.P. Dr. Alan Hanson today told the members of a Blue Ribbon Commission subcommittee. “Commercial recycling of used nuclear fuel has a long, successful, safe and secure history. AREVA has successfully and profitably operated and supported commercial recycling facilities for more than four decades.”

Hanson laid out the reasons why recycling is a sold option as part of an integrated used fuel management system in the United States. Today the U.S. is focused on a once-through strategy for managing used fuel, meaning that nuclear fuel is used once and then sent for disposal. However, most of the energy still remains after one cycle, and this material can be recycled.
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According to an Associated Press article published today, U.S. electric utilities are looking to buy reactors “off-the-shelf,” choosing from a few different reactor designs. The article focuses on Southern Company’s new reactor at Plant Vogtle under development in Georgia. While the Vogtle project uses the AP1000 design, the piece also mentions AREVA’s EPR technology and several other designs.

Jacques Besnainou, CEO of AREVA North America, said safety was a selling point for his firm’s EPR, which has a system to catch and cool a molten core in the event of a major accident.

Despite the challenges of building new plants, he said, AREVA is benefiting from its experience in Finland and France, and the two EPR projects are on schedule.

“The key here is to be able to demonstrate that we can build a new reactor on time and on budget,” he said. “Once we do that, the renaissance as a whole is golden.”

Click here to read the rest of the article.

And we can note how today is the 56th anniversary of the signing of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. The act declared a nuclear policy that “the development, use and control of atomic energy shall be directed so as to promote world peace, improve the general welfare, increase the standard of living and strengthen free competition in private enterprise.”

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Highly recommend that you follow the weekly nuclear blog carnival as it shifts from blogger to blogger each Friday.

This is the 16th carnival and this week’s it’s at Dan’s blog.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has published its draft safety evaluation report on the MOX (mixed oxide) Fuel Fabrication Facility, a project under construction at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

Shaw AREVA MOX Services, a joint venture of the two leading energy companies, is building the $4.86 billion facility which will help support our nation’s nonproliferation goals by converting weapons-grade material into MOX fuel for U.S. nuclear power plants.

While the report does not make a decision about licensing the plant, a decision which is still years away, it does represent the NRC’s preliminary assessment “that the facility would not pose an undue risk to worker and public health and safety.”

Click here for more information on the MOX project.

By Hector Sanchez, Executive Director LCLAA

The risks of climate change due to excess carbon dioxide in our atmosphere are significant for everyone, and are an even greater concern for working Latino families.  The majority of Latinos are concentrated in urban areas in 15 states that account for 86.5% of the total Latino population. Over 80 percent of Latinos within the United States live in counties that violated at least one federal air-pollution and our children are 2.5 times more likely to develop asthma than non-Latino children. The reduction and regulation of harmful air pollutants and heat-trapping gases is a public health imperative directly tied to the fight against climate change. The creation of a clean and renewable energy economy that protects workers and our environment must be a priority.
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Bringing industry and medicine together in the battle against cancer, AREVA Med has announced another important milestone to continue this fight.

AREVA Med, an AREVA subsidiary, is dedicated to developing medical grade lead-212 isotopes to be used in promising Radioimmunotherapy. Lead-212 is a rare radioactive isotope that lies at the heart of promising nuclear medical research to develop new cancer treatments.

In nuclear medicine, the development of new treatments is dictated by isotope availability. By utilizing AREVA’s engineering and technical expertise, in March 2010, AREVA Med announced the construction of a Lead-212 industrial production plant that will allow the creation of new targeted therapies for patients. 


Now, to support the project’s rapid development, AREVA Med has formed an Advisory Committee to provide strategic advice and scientific guidance in the field of Radioimmunotherapy.
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By Jarret Adams

Over at the Huffington Post today, Carl Pope of the Sierra Club has dished up another attack on the economics of nuclear energy that goes light on the facts and heavy on the rhetoric. Contrary to Mr. Pope’s wishes, nuclear energy’s revival already is well under way with more than 50 new plants under construction worldwide. More than 20 of these new reactors are being built in China alone.

The main question is whether Americans will see past the constant flood of disinformation about nuclear energy and support the revival as other industrial nations have done. In fact, nuclear energy is by far America’s largest source of electricity that does not produce greenhouse gases.

While new nuclear plants are expensive, the cost of electricity generated by these facilities over 60 year is relatively inexpensive. Once these costs are amortized, the operating costs of nuclear plants (at about 2 cents/kwh) are well below natural gas (at 5 cents/kwh) and even lower than coal.

Nuclear energy also has an excellent safety record in the United States. In fact (another fact), it is safer to work in the nuclear industry than in manufacturing, according the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Regarding ability to withstand hurricanes, the Gulf region nuclear plants withstood Hurricane Katrina without sustaining any significant damage and were among the first major power generation back online after the storm.

We at AREVA fully support renewable energy as another way to produce low-carbon electricity, especially if we are talking about our state-of-the-art offshore wind turbines, concentrated solar power, and advanced biopower facilities.

Why does Mr. Pope trash nuclear in an effort to promote renewables? In actuality, nuclear energy and renewables are complementary – a combination of the two is the best near-term way to remove CO2 emissions from our electricity grid. And why does he put in a plug for low natural gas prices?

We noticed with some surprise, this article in the Washington Post this week.. It reports: “Utilities across the country are building dozens of old-style coal plants that will cement the industry’s standing as the largest industrial source of climate-changing gases for years to come.”

In short, the article documents that a wave of at least 15 new coal plants will be produced in the U.S., this “despite growing public wariness over the high environmental and social costs of fossil fuels, demonstrated by mine disasters in West Virginia and the gulf oil spill.” This is the largest expansion of coal plants in two decades.

The short-term financial gain of building cheap fossil plants doesn’t have a “clean coal” solution anywhere in sight either as “widespread application of carbon-neutralizing technologies for coal plants remains at least 15 to 20 years away.” The article specifically goes into the hidden long-term costs this will bring as these new plants would “generate about 125 million tons of greenhouse gases annually, according to emissions figures from utilities and the Center for Global Development. That’s the equivalent of putting 22 million additional automobiles on the road.”

And by way of comparison, an AREVA EPR nuclear plant would avoid about 10 million tons of CO2 per year each year from being emitted into our air.