Nuclear regulation requires “humbleness and openness”, Olivier Gupta, Director-General of France’s nuclear safety regulator, told OECD Nuclear Energy Agency Director General William Magwood in a WebChat yesterday. Gupta has been Director-General of the Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire (ASN) since 2016 and has been chair of Western European Nuclear Regulators Association (WENRA) since 2019. “We …
A group of South Korean firms has signed a partnership agreement with Egyptian state-owned construction company Petrojet to help train Egyptian employees for the planned El Dabaa nuclear power plant, which is to be built by Russia. A construction licence for the El Dabaa plant is expected to be issued in the second-half of 2021. …
This is the third in a series of blogs from the Global Public Affairs webinar Nuclear Power: Part of Canada’s Energy Transition. If you want to learn more from some of Canada’s top nuclear experts, don’t miss the previous blog in this series: What are SMRs? And what is their role in decarbonization and electrification? …
Nuclear energy will “absolutely” be politically palatable, billionaire philanthropist, technologist and climate change evangelist Bill Gates recently told Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” Nuclear power has to overcome a baneful reputation garnered by association with the atomic bomb and radioactive disasters, but it’s a necessary, worthy and surmountable challenge to correct the naysayers, …
The 2021 Performance Program of Turkey’s Energy and Natural Resources Ministry has drawn a road map for the completion of the country’s first nuclear power plant, the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), which says 27.5% of the plant will be completed by the end of this year. The program, which outlines the steps that will …
The IAEA hosted a virtual national seminar on topical issues of nuclear law for Sri Lanka last month. Topics presented and discussed ranged from transparency in nuclear law and the legal provisions for the safety and security of radioactive sources to benefits of the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material (CPPNM), its Amendment …
Nuclear power plants in the EU produced about 26% of the total electricity generated in the Union in 2019, according to data from the specialized Eurostat survey. Thirteen Member States, including Bulgaria, operated a total of 106 reactors, which generated 765,337 GW/h of electricity. The largest producer of nuclear energy in the EU is France …
Ukraine’s electricity grid needs the construction of new nuclear power units, Yuriy Boyko, the country’s deputy energy minister said last week. Speaking to delegates at Atomic Energy: The Future of the Industry on 17 February, Boyko described the importance of at least three new units. Nuclear power plant operator Energoatom published Boyko’s comments on its website. Energoatom …
Estonia needs to put in place the necessary legislation and competencies if a small modular reactor (SMR) is to be in operation by 2035, speakers at a conference organised by Fermi Energia agreed yesterday. The Baltic country aims to stop generating electricity from oil shale by 2035, but has yet to officially launch a nuclear …
Over the past two decades, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has been captured by the nuclear power companies it is supposed to regulate. The process of capture and resulting erosion of regulation has been driven in part by the increasingly poor economics of nuclear energy as companies struggle to avoid large costs due to …
