Platts - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 http://www.platts.com ------------ Court ruling forces US nuclear industry to rethink appeal Washington (Platts)--12Oct2004 The US nuclear industry is considering whether it will proceed with a planned appeal to the US Supreme Court of an appeals court ruling remanding to the Environmental Protection Agency a 10,000-year regulatory requirement considered critical to the licensing of a high-level nuclear waste respository in Nevada, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute said Tuesday. The group was forced to reconsider its options after the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Friday rejected the organization's request to stay the remand order pending an appeal to the high court. All petitions seeking Supreme Court review must be filed by Nov 30. In its ruling earlier this year, the appeals court found that the EPA regulation, which was designed to protect humans from radioactivity for 10,000, was insufficient. ------------ UK Atomic Energy Authority to cut nuke clean up cost by $2.18-bil London (Platts)--12Oct2004 The UK's Atomic Energy Authority has cut the estimated cost of its nuclear clean up program by GBP1.5-bil ($2.18-bil) it said late Monday. Its total estimated cost of the clean up was slashed to GBP4.8-bil from GBP6.3-bil and its end-date for decommissioning its nuclear sites was cut by up to 35 years UKAEA said. In a site by site break down decommissioning of Winfrith was brought forward to 2015 from 2050 with the cost cut to GBP0.44-bil from GBP0.72-bil. Harwell decommissioning was brought forward to 2025 from 2049 with costs cut to GBP0.82-bil from GBP1-bil. Windscale decommissioning including the removal of damaged fuel and isotopes has been brought forward to 2015 with costs reduced to GBP0.6-bil from GBP0.71-bil. The Dounray clean up will be completed in 2036 instead of 2063 with the costs reduced by GBP1-bil to GBP2.7-bil. UKAEA said that the cost and time reductions were achieved by a range of measures including the use of technologies from other industries, cost effective treatment of fuels and reductions in infrastructure costs. ------------ HLW residue at Idaho DOE lab can be reclassified Washington (Platts)--11Oct2004 High-level waste (HLW) residue in tanks at a DOE lab in Idaho can be reclassified as low-level waste and left in place under provisions in the defense authorization bill for fiscal 2005 that was sent to President George W. Bush over the weekend to be signed into law. The bill extends the reclassification of HLW residue at the Idaho National Engineering & Environmental Laboratory after an agreement was reached with Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne. An earlier version of the measure cited the Savannah River Site in South Carolina as the sole site where the reclassification could occur. "This bill now lays out a process for using the standards of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission--and the regulatory control of the state of Idaho--to force DOE into the cleanup that we intended to extract from them all along," Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) said Oct. 8. Defense HLW in tanks at DOE's Hanford site in Washington state will not be reclassified under the bill. ------------ Ukraine launches new 1,000 MW nuclear power reactor Kiev (Platts)--11Oct2004 Ukraine's third-largest nuclear power plant, Rivne NPP, has put a large new nuclear reactor in operation Sunday, state nuclear power generating giant EnergoAtom said Monday. The new reactor is currently working at 15% capacity, but will be hit 100% by March 2005, the company said. The 1,000 MW reactor number 4 at Rivne NPP is the second reactor commissioned by Ukraine over the past two months as it seeks to boost power generation and exports. EnergoAtom, Ukraine's biggest electricity producer, commissioned the similar 1,000 MW reactor number 2 at Khmelnytskiy NPP in August. The company now operates 15 nuclear power reactors with total capacity of 13,835 MW. EnergoAtom, which produced 81.47-bil kWh of electricity in 2003, plans to boost power output to 84-bil kWh in 2004 and to about 100-bil kWh in 2005. ------------