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Rethinking China’s Fast Reactor

IN THIS ISSUE: Rethinking China's Fast Reactor, U.S. Senators Look to New Sanctions Against Iran for Missile Development, It’s About to Cost a Lot More Money to Launch a Nuclear Bomb, India, Pakistan Extend Pact on Cutting Risk of Nuclear-Related Mishaps, The Murky Future of Nuclear Power in the United States, Japan Nuclear Power Industry Set to Initiate Safety Checks

Published on February 21, 2017

Rethinking China's Fast Reactor

Mark Hibbs

 Toward the end of the first week of the new year this item appeared in my e-mail queue. The report was interesting because, in announcing a new contract for fuel to be provided by Russian fabricator TVEL for the 20 MWe China Experimental Fast Reactor (CEFR), it suggested that CEFR will continue indefinitely to use highly-enriched uranium (HEU). Since the CEFR project was launched in the 1990s, and as late as 2013, scientists at the China Institute of Atomic Energy (CIAE), who are leading the way for China’s breeder program, indicated that CEFR would after a trial period be fueled with mixed plutonium/uranium oxide (MOX), and that MOX would be chosen as the initial fuel for the first of a line of industrial-scale, power-generating breeders; construction of the first reactor was aimed to get underway before 

U.S. Senators Look to New Sanctions Against Iran for Missile Development

Reuters

U.S. Republican senators plan to introduce legislation to impose further sanctions on Iran, accusing it of violating U.N. Security Council resolutions by testing ballistic missiles and acting to "destabilise" the Middle East, a U.S. senator said Sunday. "I think it is now time for the Congress to take Iran on directly in terms of what they’ve doneoutside the nuclear programme," Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told the Munich Security Conference.

It’s About to Cost a Lot More Money to Launch a Nuclear Bomb

Marcus Weisgerber | Defense One

Estimates of the cost to maintain and ultimately replace the current planes, rockets, and submarines that may deliver them — range from hundreds of billions of dollars to more than $1 trillion over the next three decades. In a new report, the Defense Department’s office of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation — considered the gold standard of budget estimators inside the Pentagon — notes that in looking at a proposed ICBM project, “it was unusually difficult to estimate the cost … because there was no recent data to draw upon, and the older historical data was of very questionable quality or was nonexistent. This leads to considerable uncertainty and risk in any cost estimate.”

India, Pakistan Extend Pact on Cutting Risk of Nuclear-Related Mishaps

Economic Times

India and Pakistan today extended their bilateral pact, dealing with reducing the risk of nuclear weapon-related accidents, for a period of five years. Announcing the decision, the External Affairs Ministry said, "In accordance with Article 8 of the agreement between the Republic of India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan on Reducing the Risk of Accidents Relating to Nuclear Weapons, both countries have agreed to extend the agreement for a further period of five years. 

The Murky Future of Nuclear Power in the United States

Diane Cardwell | New York Times

This was supposed to be America’s nuclear century. The Three Mile Island meltdown was two generations ago. Since then, engineers had developed innovative designs to avoid the kinds of failures that devastated Fukushima in Japan. The United States government was earmarking billions of dollars for a new atomic age, in part to help tame a warming global climate.But a remarkable confluence of events is bringing that to an end, capped in recent days by Toshiba’s decision to take a $6 billion loss and pull Westinghouse, its American nuclear power subsidiary, out of the construction business. The reasons are wide-ranging.

Japan Nuclear Power Industry Set to Initiate Safety Checks

Nikkei Asian Review

A Japanese power industry group will soon begin rating utilities' nuclear operations on a five-point safety scale, providing a safety assessment separate from government standards to rebuild public trust in nuclear power. The Japan Nuclear Safety Institute will rate members such as Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings, Kansai Electric Power and Japan Atomic Power based on inspections of nuclear facilities' operations and management beginning in the fiscal that starts in April. 
 

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