Nuclear reactors will cost twice estimate, says E.ON chief

[struggle4progress]

From The Times
May 5, 2008
Robin Pagnamenta

The Government has vastly underestimated the cost of building a new generation of nuclear power plants, according to the head of the world's largest power company.

Wulf Bernotat, chairman and chief executive of E.ON, the German energy giant that owns Powergen, has told The Times that the cost per plant could be as high as €6 billion (£4.8 billion) - nearly double the Government's latest £2.8 billion estimate.

His figures indicate that the cost of replacing Britain's ten nuclear power stations could reach £48 billion, excluding the cost of decommissioning ageing reactors or dealing with nuclear waste. “We are talking easily about €5 billion to €6 billion ,” Dr Bernotat said ...

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/utilities/article3872870.ece

At current exchange rates around 1€:$1.50, the estimated cost €3-6 billion/reactor suggests McCain's 700 reactors will cost us somewhere between $3.1-6.3 trillion

[Purveyor]

1. Order the blueprints from France. Tried and proven technology with all reactors having the same

basic design.

It is the engineering lobby that supports 'recreating the wheel' with every new plant construction. Big bucks for them but big headaches, cost overruns and unproven technology for the consumer.

France knows how to do nuclear...some 80% of their electricity is produced by it.

[struggle4progress]

2. If French nuclear is so safe, why did they start distributing iodine pills in the late 90's?

Science 28 March 1997:
Vol. 275. no. 5308, pp. 1871 - 1872
DOI: 10.1126/science.275.5308.1871b

Michael Balter

PARIS--French Health Minister Hervé Gaymard has announced that local authorities will begin distributing potassium iodide tablets to everyone living within 10 kilometers of 24 nuclear installations. In the event of a nuclear accident, the residents would take the tablets to block the uptake of radioactive iodine isotopes, byproducts of nuclear fission that could cause thyroid cancer. The decision in France has sparked considerable interest among radiation scientists in other countries, particularly the United States, where stable iodine is not generally made available to the public ...

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/275/5308/1871b?ck=nck

[struggle4progress]

3. Leukemia Clusters Near La Hague and Sellafield

The La Hague reprocessing plant in France is the largest facility of its kind in the world .. with a capacity of 1650 tons of spent fuel per year. A study, published in January 1997 in the British Medical Journal by two French scientists, showed a potential link between an increased incidence of childhood leukemia in the area around La Hague and discharges from the plant. Dominique Pobel and Jean-Francois Viel conducted a case-control study, covering a 35-kilometer radius around the plant. Their study considered 27 cases of leukemia diagnosed in people under 25 years of age between 1978 and 1993 and 192 controls matched for such factors as gender, age, place of birth, and place of residence ...

Pobel and Viel found that children who had spent time at local beaches more than once a month were almost three times more likely than the controls to develop leukemia. They also found an increased risk when mothers went regularly to these beaches during pregnancy. A similarly increased risk to children was shown from eating local fish and shellfish ...

http://www.ieer.org/ensec/no-4/lahague.html

[madokie]

4. I wonder what the number would be of people who die because of exposure to radiation

if we were actually keeping track of such.