Veille 2.1

Une coalition internationale d'activistes va manifester jeudi dès 08h00 aux abords de l'Atomium, en marge du premier "Nuclear Energy Summit", a annoncé Greenpeace EU dans un communiqué.

Le Premier ministre Alexander De Croo était l’invité de Maxime Binet sur LN24 ce jeudi 21 mars 2024. A l'occasion du premier "Nuclear Energy Summit" en Belgique, il a insisté sur la présence du nucléaire dans un mix énergétique décarboné en Belgique.

Small modular reactors (SMRs) have been the subject of endless hype in recent years but in fact, no SMRs have ever been built, none are being built now and in all likelihood none will ever be built because of the prohibitive costs. SMRs are defined as reactors with a capacity of 300 megawatts (MW) or less with serial factory production of reactor components (or ‘modules’). No SMRs have been built, but dozens of small (<300 MW) power reactors have been built in numerous countries, without factory production of reactor components.

The role of health professionals In January 2023, the science and security board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the doomsday clock forward to 90 seconds before midnight, reflecting the growing risk of nuclear war.1 In August 2022, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, warned that the world is now in “a time of nuclear danger not seen since the height of the Cold War.”2 The danger has been underlined by growing tensions between many nuclear armed states.13 As editors of health and medical journals worldwide, we call on health professionals to alert the public and our leaders to this major danger to public health and the essential life support systems of the planet—and urge action to prevent it. Current nuclear arms control and non-proliferation efforts are inadequate to protect the world’s population against the threat of nuclear war by design, error, or miscalculation. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) commits each of the 190 participating nations

There has been a strong push to promote increased investments in new nuclear power as a strategy to decarbonize economies, especially in the European Union (EU) and the United States (US). The evidence base for these initiatives is poor. Investments in new nuclear power plants are bad for the climate due to high costs and long construction times. Given the urgency of climate change mitigation, which requires reducing emissions from the EU electricity grid to almost zero in the 2030s (Pietzcker et al.1), preference should be given to the cheapest technology that can be deployed fastest. On both costs and speed, renewable energy sources beat nuclear. Every euro invested in new nuclear plants thus delays decarbonization compared to investments in renewable power. In a decarbonizing world, delays increase CO2 emissions. Our thoughts focus on new nuclear power plants (not phasing out existing plants) in the US and Europe. In Europe, new nuclear power plants are planned or seriously discussed in France, Czechia, Hu

Plutonium spike in Canadian lake sediments marks dawn of new epoch in which humanity dominates planet

« C’est un des rares secteurs de l’économie russe à ne pas être concerné par les sanctions, car l’industrie russe du nucléaire est indispensable pour faire tourner les centrales de nombreux dans l’est de (...)

In Europe, a large-scale war could cause the Baltic Sea to freeze over and severely compromise food security – potentially for decades and even centuries to come. An ever-growing body of work has shown that even a local nuclear conflict could usher in a climate catastrophe. As marine scientists, we have considered what this could specifically mean for the world’s oceans. In 1982, a group of scientists including Carl Sagan began to raise the alarm on a climate apocalypse that could follow nuclear war. Using simple computer simulations and historic volcanic eruptions as natural analogues, they showed how smoke that lofted into the stratosphere from urban firestorms could block out the sun for years.

Atmospheric soot loadings from nuclear weapon detonation would cause disruptions to the Earth’s climate, limiting terrestrial and aquatic food production. Here, we use climate, crop and fishery models to estimate the impacts arising from six scenarios of stratospheric soot injection, predicting the total food calories available in each nation post-war after stored food is consumed. In quantifying impacts away from target areas, we demonstrate that soot injections larger than 5 Tg would lead to mass food shortages, and livestock and aquatic food production would be unable to compensate for reduced crop output, in almost all countries. Adaptation measures such as food waste reduction would have limited impact on increasing available calories. We estimate more than 2 billion people could die from nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and more than 5 billion could die from a war between the United States and Russia—underlining the importance of global cooperation in preventing nuclear war.

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As the world remembers Hiroshima, it must also recommit to the increasingly fragile non-proliferation treaty. The alternative is unthinkable

France’s troubled nuclear fleet a bigger problem for Europe than Russia gas Giles Parkinson 5 August 2022 44 frederic-paulussen-LWnD8U2OReU-unsplash - optimised nuclear 669 Shares Share 669 Tweet Before Peter Dutton’s Coalition charge off into yet another inquiry into the merits of nuclear power, they might want to take a closer look at what’s happening in Europe, where the failure of France’s huge nuclear power plant fleet is causing bigger problems for EU power supplies than Russia’s withheld gas supply. France has been delivering just a fraction of its energy production potential in recent months, and overnight the situation got worse when French power producer EDF announced another three power plants would curtail output because of rising temperatures. Rivers have become too hot in the latest heatwave to be used to cool the reactors. The majority of France’s 56 nuclear reactors are currently throttled down or taken offline due to a combination of scheduled maintenance, erosion damage (worryingly, mostly a

The U.N. nuclear chief warned that Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in Ukraine “is completely out of control” and issued an urgent plea to Russia and Ukraine to quickly allow experts to visit the sprawling complex to stabilize the situation and avoid a nuclear accident. Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press that the situation is getting more perilous every day at the Zaporizhzhia plant in the southeastern city of Enerhodar, which Russian troops seized in early March, soon after their Feb. 24. invasion of Ukraine. “Every principle of nuclear safety has been violated” at the plant, he said. “What is at stake is extremely serious and extremely grave and dangerous.”

Climate change is reducing output and raising safety concerns at nuclear facilities from France to the US. But experts say adapting is possible—and necessary.

Nuclear energy is too expensive to be considered an option to help Australia reduce its carbon emissions, at least in the next decade, according to the latest report by the CSIRO.