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Moscow (AFP) Dec 1, 2010 Russia has successfully completed the creation of the world's first international nuclear fuel bank under an agreement with the IAEA, the Rosatom state atomic energy corporation said Wednesday. The fuel bank now stores 120 tonnes of low-enriched uranium (LEU) in the Siberian city of Angarsk, the Russian agency said in a statement. The fuel is enriched to between two and 4.95 percent and is kept under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The IAEA approved the reserve's creation at a two-day meeting in November. It is meant to ensure stable fuel supplies in case of disruptions of the international uranium enrichment services market. LEU is used by most of today's civilian nuclear power plants. The creation of the bank was first proposed in September 2007 by Russia, which fears nuclear fuel supply cutoffs being used by developed nations for political purposes.
earlier related report Clinton won the pledge from Belarus Foreign Minister Sergei Martynov after talks on the sidelines of the OSCE summit in the Kazakhstan capital Astana. "Foreign Minister Martynov announced that Belarus has decided to eliminate all of its stocks of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and intends to do so by the next nuclear security summit in 2012," said a joint statement. "The United States intends to provide technical and financial assistance to support the completion of this effort as expeditiously as possible." In highly-enriched form, uranium can be used to form the warhead of a nuclear bomb and there have been fears over the security of the stocks held by ex-Soviet states like Belarus. Clinton was quoted as praising the decision "as a sign of progress in efforts to advance nuclear security and nonproliferation" and said Belarus would be invited to the 2012 nuclear security summit in South Korea. Belarus' strongman President Alexander Lukashenko had been quoted as saying earlier this year that the country had hundreds of kilogrammes of highly-enriched uranium and had no intention of eliminating it.
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Study Assesses Nuclear Power AssumptionsWashington DC (SPX) Dec 01, 2010 A broad review of current research on nuclear power economics has been published in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy. The report concludes that nuclear power will continue to be a viable power source but that the current fuel cycle is not sustainable. Due to uncertainty about waste management, any projection of future costs must be built on basic assumptions that are not grounded ... read more |
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