Article source: http://www.edie.net/news/news_story.asp?id=21772

Article source: http://www.edie.net/news/news_story.asp?id=21773

Advisers to Japan’s nuclear safety agency have said power plant stress tests do not prove that a nuclear plant is safe, as the country faces the prospect of a summer without a single nuclear reactor in operation.

Last year, the Japanese government ordered the nuclear authorities to conduct tests on all Japan’s reactors after the 11 March meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi raised questions about the safety of nuclear power, particularly in a country prone to earthquakes and tsunami.

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Earlier this week, a team of experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) began a review of the safety tests but said it was up to the Japanese government whether or not to approve the restart of idle reactors.

Currently only three of Japan’s 54 reactors – just over six per cent of its total nuclear capacity – are in operation after the Fukushima accident forced the closure of active reactors for safety checks. The latest closure came on Friday when a reactor at a plant near the Japan Sea was shut down for inspection.

Without approval for restarts, all Japan’s reactors could all be shut by the end of April, boosting the use of fossil fuels and adding more than $30bn (£19bn) a year to energy costs, according to a government estimate.

The government is pushing for the early restart of idled reactors, fearing a power crunch in several parts of the country during the long, humid summer. Although the trade and industry minister, Yukio Edano, said he believed Japan would be able to cope without imposing power cuts, even if all reactors were offline by the summer.

Attention is now focused on a plant in the town of Ohi, western Japan, which could be the first to resume operations since 11 March.

Its operator, Kansai Electric Power, has said two of the facility’s reactors are able to withstand quakes and tsunami much stronger than those predicted for the area – a view reportedly endorsed by the country’s nuclear and industrial safety agency.

But Masashi Goto, a former nuclear power plant designer, said the stress tests at Ohi and elsewhere were next to useless.

“It is a misunderstanding to believe these tests prove that a nuclear plant is safe,” he said. “The reality is that the inspectors only look at the reactors’ design and then factor in possible problems, such as earthquakes and tsunami of a certain size.

“They do not take into account the various malfunctions that can result in a disaster, including human error and equipment failure.”

Hiromitsu Ino, an emeritus professor at Tokyo University and a fellow member of the nuclear safety agency advisory panel, said the tests were flawed because they had been introduced before the full facts of the Fukushima disaster were known.

“The stress tests are being presented as a comprehensive survey of the safety of Japan’s nuclear power plants, but the reality is very different,” Ino said. “They only look at potential problems in isolation, and the process of testing is exactly the same as it was before the March earthquake.”

No one had presented definitive evidence that the fuel meltdowns in three of Fukushima Daiichi’s six reactors were caused by the magnitude nine earthquake that struck north-east Japan or the 14-metre tsunami that followed it.

Goto and Ino said it would be impossible to appraise the causes and consequences of the Fukushima disaster unless the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power, released all the relevant data that could then be used to perform a simulation.

Ino said he had little confidence in the IAEA team, which is due to present its latest report at the end of the month.

“I don’t view their evaluation as something that is trustworthy or carries any weight,” he said. “The last time the IAEA inspectors came to Japan, they simply inspected sites and documents and left saying everything was fine. They submitted a flimsy report, and I fear the same will be the case this time.”

Japan has already abandoned plans to generate more than half its electricity supply through nuclear energy by 2030, but the prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, has said it needs to retain some nuclear plants until alternative sources of energy are developed.

This article first appeared at the Guardian

BusinessGreen is part of the Guardian Environment Network

Article source: http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2141939/experts-cast-doubt-japan-nuclear-plant-tests?WT.rss_f=Home&WT.rss_a=Experts+cast+doubt+on+Japan+nuclear+plant+tests

The government has insisted it has not come to a conclusion over the future of its green schools building programme, despite industry fears Education Secretary Michael Gove is keen to scrap a requirement for schools to adhere to the globally recognised BREEAM green building standard.

Ministers from the Department for Education (DfE) are expected to shortly announce their conclusions on a review into capital spending, which includes a recommendation that local authorities should not be forced to adhere to the BRE Environmental Assesment Method (BREEAM).

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“Whilst the current move to simplify BREEAM should be welcomed, it could go further, and the expectation that it should be used at all times does not allow for local authorities to best determine the tools that they should use to ensure sustainable buildings,” the review states.

Organisations including Aldersgate Group, UK Green Building Council (UKGBC), and software developer Southfacing Services have written to the Secretary of State this week warning him that a decision to drop the requirement would harm the construction industry and undermine efforts to reduce the environmental impact of new schools. Instead they urged the department to work with BRE to simplify how school’s qualify for the standard.

They were particularly concerned that DfE had not consulted on the recommendation, voicing fears that a conclusion to drop BREEAM had already been reached.

However, a spokesman from the DfE today told BusinessGreen that it had not decided to scrap the requirement that new schools must adhere to BREEAM, maintaining that its plans focused on streamlining, rather than scrapping BREEAM for schools.

“The review recommends that the government should work to reduce bureaucracy, not to scrap it altogether,” he said. “We want to work with stakeholders and businesses to work out a way of streamlining the process.”

However, he could not rule out the possibility that BREEAM could yet be scrapped.

“One option is to remove it altogether and one is just to reduce bureaucracy,” he said.

The news was welcomed by industry players, who said they were relieved to hear that Gove was open to other options.

“If a final decision has genuinely not been taken, then that’s good news of sorts. It means there is still time to convince DfE they would be making a huge mistake by scrapping the BREEAM commitment,” John Alker, a spokesman for UKGBC, told BusinessGreen.

“If DfE wants to work with industry stakeholders, we’d be delighted to hear from them.”

Clare Lowe of Southfacing Services said the government would be taking a “massive step backwards” if it scrapped the requirement.

“The review did say to look at reducing bureaucracy, but a lot of people read that as a recommendation that it should be scrapped so I’m relieved to hear that the government is taking a more measured view,” she told BusinessGreen.

“The main thing is that the government is prepared to make sure that everybody has an input into the process, from schools, to designers to construction companies, in order to get a broad base of opinion on how the system can be improved.”

Article source: http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2141945/government-insists-green-school-building-requirement-survive?WT.rss_f=Home&WT.rss_a=Government+insists+green+school+building+requirement+could+yet+survive

The head of the charity that helped arrange David Cameron’s memorable husky photoshoot in the Arctic, launching the Conservatives’ rebranding as the nice-not-nasty party, has warned that the PM’s lack of leadership on environment issues risks “retoxifying” their image.

The striking images of Cameron posing on the ice with huskies on the way to visiting a melting glacier in 2006 marked a turning point for the Tories’ image, which had been seen by many voters as uncaring. After the pictures appeared across newspapers and TV back home, Cameron’s image-maker and policy guru, Steve Hilton, is said to have received a text from an ally back home: “Simply brilliant – that was worth a thousand speeches.”

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Reflecting on the 2006 trip, David Nussbaum, the chief executive of WWF UK, said, “What we were most encouraged about was it was part of his detoxification of the Conservative brand. This was a symbolic indication that the Conservative party had changed, [it] wasn’t any longer the ‘nasty party’.”

Almost six years later, however, and with Cameron having been prime minister for nearly two years, Nussbaum’s first full verdict on how the Conservative leader has lived up to that trip’s promise is mixed, at best.

While on many policies there has been welcome “progress”, Nussbaum believes there have been too many caveats – some of them “large” – that have undermined those policies, and too much “inconsistency” in both decisions and in speeches from senior Conservatives.

“Clearly at the moment the polls are pretty positive, but we know polls can move dramatically and quickly,” said Nussbaum, whose predecessor as head of WWF UK, Robert Napier, accompanied Cameron, Hilton and the now climate minister Greg Barker to the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

“The long-term future of the Conservative party David Cameron is trying to lead is the party which continues to embrace people for whom environmental sustainability, care for the natural world, thinking about what we are leaving our future generations, those are deeply held values.

“The risk of retoxification would be very serious … to the range of people who are potential supporters of a Conservative government.”

The day before he flew to Svalbard, Cameron was campaigning for local elections, urging voters to “go green, vote blue”. On the return journey from visiting scientists and seeing fast-melting glaciers, he gave a speech to Norwegian Conservatives promising to “lead a new green revolution”. He added: “This [climate change] is not a natural phenomenon. It has been caused by the way we live.”

The two-day schedule was organised by WWF – formerly the World Wildlife Fund – after Cameron’s aides said he wanted first-hand experience of the problem of climate change caused by global warming.

“[Cameron] wanted this to be based on substance, not just a nice picture of huskies: he was interested and engaged with the scientists,” said Nussbaum, who joined WWF a year later in 2007. “This trip helped reinforce his own conviction that this was the right thing to do, on the basis of the science and the evidence.”

Four years later, one of Cameron’s first acts as PM was to walk down Whitehall to the Department of Energy and Climate Change and declare that he would lead “the greenest government ever” – a pledge also made, but little noted, in the Conservative manifesto.

“What that illustrates is you can write something in a document, but when it comes out of the mouth of the prime minister it makes a difference,” said Nussbaum.

The “greenest government ever” pledge has been increasingly thrown back at the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition as disappointment has mounted in the environment movement.

Government supporters point out a number of initiatives in less than two years, despite the economic crisis, including £3bn for the Green Investment Bank, a carbon price floor to boost clean industries, tough new carbon emissions targets, the Green Deal to make homes more energy efficient, and the first natural environment white paper for over 20 years. There are reports, too, that Cameron could do a big environment speech in April.

However the intervention of Nussbaum, a divinity graduate and former accountant whose charity is often controversial in the sector because of its policy of working closely with politicians and businesses, will be taken seriously because of his usual caution. Nussbaum welcomed progress in several areas, including the investment bank, greener homes, carbon targets, and soon-to-be-announced energy market reforms. He also gave the prime minister personal credit for intervening to make sure the bank and the carbon budgets were agreed, despite claims of cabinet divisions.

However, he is concerned the bank will not have borrowing powers until 2015, it is not clear if there is enough money to pay for the Green Deal, and there will be a review of the carbon budgets. Green groups have been angered, too, by renewed proposals for airport runways.

The other big problem is with the government’s rhetoric on green issues. “Most alarming”, said Nussbaum, have been two speeches by the chancellor, George Osborne, in which he suggested the environmental policies might hold back economic development, warning “we are not going to save the planet by … exporting valuable jobs”.

Crucially, inconsistency was undermining the confidence of investors needed to spend billions on new power stations, more energy efficient homes, and better transport, said Nussbaum.

“We understand that coming into government in the economic context, those other concerns have had a bigger place in the government’s policies than was anticipated,” said Nussbaum. “What we’re disappointed about is government hasn’t held on to articulating clearly the links and opportunities of care for the environment and economic success and development.”

A Downing Street spokesman said: “The government is fully committed to this being the greenest government ever. We are driving the shift to a low-carbon economy, and have an ambitious and well-funded programme of policies to protect and enhance our natural environment, which can be seen in the action the government has taken since May 2010. As we work to get the economy back on track, we will continue to ensure that green growth is the cornerstone of the recovery.”

This article first appeared at the Guardian

BusinessGreen is part of the Guardian Environment Network

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