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* Daily says 13 pct of French waste dumped in Russia * EDF says radioactive waste is kept in France * EDF says only recyclable spent uranium sent to Russia PARIS, Oct 12 (Reuters) - EDF (EDF.PA) is sending to Russia spent nuclear fuel that needs to be reprocessed, the French nuclear power producer said on Monday, denying a French press report that it was using Siberia to dump nuclear waste. The world's largest nuclear energy producer said that radioactive waste was kept in France, where it was processed and stocked in dedicated facilities at Areva's (CEPFi.PA) storage site of La Hague, on the northwestern coast of Normandy.

* Daily says 13 pct of French waste dumped in Russia * EDF says radioactive waste is kept in France * EDF says only recyclable spent uranium sent to Russia PARIS, Oct 12 (Reuters) - EDF (EDF.PA) is sending to Russia spent nuclear fuel that needs to be reprocessed, the French nuclear power producer said on Monday, denying a French press report that it was using Siberia to dump nuclear waste. The world's largest nuclear energy producer said that radioactive waste was kept in France, where it was processed and stocked in dedicated facilities at Areva's (CEPFi.PA) storage site of La Hague, on the northwestern coast of Normandy.

As American concerns rise over Iran's nuclear ambitions, the UAE yesterday was once again held up as a model for countries seeking to develop nuclear energy. In a Senate foreign relations committee hearing, high-level state department officials and an outside nuclear expert praised the UAE for agreeing to rigorous international inspections and a strict ban on enrichment and reprocessing technology. Such transparency, they said, was a welcome contrast to Iran, which just two weeks ago revealed a secret nuclear site near Qom. "They want to do it right; they have seen the example of Iran," Janet Sanderson, the deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, said of the UAE Government. "They are offering the international community an alternative example of how to move forward on peaceful nuclear power."

As American concerns rise over Iran's nuclear ambitions, the UAE yesterday was once again held up as a model for countries seeking to develop nuclear energy. In a Senate foreign relations committee hearing, high-level state department officials and an outside nuclear expert praised the UAE for agreeing to rigorous international inspections and a strict ban on enrichment and reprocessing technology. Such transparency, they said, was a welcome contrast to Iran, which just two weeks ago revealed a secret nuclear site near Qom. "They want to do it right; they have seen the example of Iran," Janet Sanderson, the deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, said of the UAE Government. "They are offering the international community an alternative example of how to move forward on peaceful nuclear power."

It's been more than half a year since work stopped on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, after it was hit by the capricious winds of politics. President Barack Obama halted the project at the urging of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is up for re-election in Nevada. Yet money continues to flow into a government trust fund that Congress created in 1982 to pay for the waste repository.

It's been more than half a year since work stopped on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, after it was hit by the capricious winds of politics. President Barack Obama halted the project at the urging of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is up for re-election in Nevada. Yet money continues to flow into a government trust fund that Congress created in 1982 to pay for the waste repository.

BNP leader Nick Griffin has been refused permission to visit the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in Cumbria on security grounds. Mr Griffin said he wanted to visit the site, which sits within his North West European Parliament constituency, because he is pro-nuclear power. But Sellafield Limited, which operates the site, said it was concerned about security and possible demonstrations.

BNP leader Nick Griffin has been refused permission to visit the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in Cumbria on security grounds. Mr Griffin said he wanted to visit the site, which sits within his North West European Parliament constituency, because he is pro-nuclear power. But Sellafield Limited, which operates the site, said it was concerned about security and possible demonstrations.

"An Anglo-French consortium has clinched a deal to build a nuclear waste processing plant at Sellafield, said to be worth an eventual £1.5 billion. A group involving British firms Amec and Balfour Beatty and French outfit Areva will design and construct the new Highly Active Liquid Effluent Facility at the site. The plant will analyse and treat radioactive liquid arising from reprocessing at Sellafield before it is made safe for long-term storage."

"Disturbing reports are coming from Russia that the former nuclear maintenance vessel Severka may have sunk at the wharf of a shiprepairing yard in Alexandrovsk (former Polyarny) on the Kola Peninsula, in close vicinity to the large administrative centre of Murmansk. Russian authorities have yet to confirm or deny the information. Before the 1990s, the Severka was used to move spent nuclear fuel in Soviet-produced shipping containers of the type TK-12 from Andreyeva Bay - the former naval base in the northwestern part of the Kola Peninsula - to a transshipment site in Murmansk dubbed Area SRZ-35. There, not far from the grounds of Atomflot, Russia's nuclear fleet operator, the spent nuclear fuel was reloaded into railway cars to be shipped off to the reprocessing plant Mayak in the Urals. The Severka was also equipped with special tanks for shipments of liquid radioactive waste."

As US President Barack Obama seeks congressional ratification for the US-Russia Peaceful Nuclear Cooperation agreement - also known as 123 Agreement - this development may yet again open the route for spent nuclear fuel (SNF) transports into Russia for storage and reprocessing. The series of bilateral deals the United States has been signing with Russia and other states - or 123 agreements, dubbed so for the relevant section of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act - outline US prospects for nuclear-related cooperation with nations, groups of nations, or regional security organisations as possible only on the condition that proper agreements are in place with such entities and that these agreements are approved by the President of the United States and ratified by Congress. "

If a nuclear power plant is built in Fresno - a highly unlikely proposition - then radioactive waste from that plant could pass through Stockton and its port on the way to France for reprocessing. Scary. Twenty years ago this month, the Department of Energy was to have begun accepting spent nuclear reactor fuel and other radioactive waste at its Yucca Mountain Repository in the desert 80 miles north of Las Vegas. The Energy Department began studying Yucca Mountain 10 years earlier, in 1978.

HOW do you manage a global boom in nuclear power while discouraging weapons proliferation? Uranium and plutonium are most likely to find their way into weapons via the enrichment and reprocessing of fuel for nuclear power plants. If all of the countries now planning to go nuclear also handle their own fuel cycles, the proliferation risk could skyrocket. The answer may be to put the fuel cycle entirely under international control. Many governments, international agencies and arms control experts are calling for the establishment of international fuel banks, and eventually fuel production plants, that would pledge to supply nuclear materials to any country so long as it meets non-proliferation rules. The US already supports the idea, at least for new nuclear powers, and last month the European Union (EU) pledged €25 million towards the first fuel bank. Yet this means countries with new nuclear programmes would have to place control of their fuel supply at least partly in foreign hands. Could it actually work?

The Norwegian-Russian project on replacing radioactive strontium batteries with solar panels in lighthouses along the White Sea and Barents Sea coast and islands is now completed. In 2009 the project might be adopted in the Baltic Sea. All of the Northern Fleet hydrographical service's 153 lighthouses along the White Sea and Barents Sea coast and islands, have now been modernized to use solar energy as power source, Russian TV company TV21 reports. The radioactive strontium batteries that used to supply these lighthouses with energy have been shipped to the Mayak reprocessing plant in Chelyabinsk, Siberia.

Individual payments of up to £1m have been handed out from the public purse as a "golden goodbye" to directors at the loss-making nuclear holding group BNFL, according to the latest set of accounts. David Bonser, executive director for human resources and a key figure in the development of BNFL's troubled Thorp reprocessing plant, received £1,046,350 compensation for ending his employment last month. That was on top of an annual salary and bonuses worth £577,112 for the 12 months to March 31, 2008. Two other directors left with well over £1m in combined salaries, bonuses and golden goodbyes as the company that once presided over a sprawling empire of nuclear assets was wound down.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry and Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd. will work together on improving a furnace for disposing of radioactive waste at the spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in Aomori Prefecture, ministry sources said. The development cost is expected to exceed ¥14 billion, of which the government will provide about ¥7 billion, they said. The project will aim for completion in the 2013 fiscal year. The decision was made because the melting furnace at the plant in Rokkasho has had technical problems, causing the plant to extend its trial period to August.

At a public hearing Thursday, the Department of Energy heard various opinions regarding how its proposed expansion of nuclear energy would benefit or harm the Southeast United States. However, they heard more just making a sales pitch for the CSRA as a site for new reprocessing reactors. The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) and its Programatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) were debated and examined by the more than 30 invested individuals who spoke out on the pros and cons of increasing the country's nuclear energy infrastructure. The PEIS specifically does not name a list of potential sites.

The possibility of the Atomic Plant site at Piketon becoming a storage and reprocessing site for spent nuclear fuel rods has brought opposition from environmental groups and a hearing by the U.S. Department of Energy for public comments. Piketon is on the short list, if not at the top, of a list of facilities around the country hoping to land the site, said Ivan Oelrich, Ph.D, vice president of the Strategic Security Program for the Federation of American Scientists out of Washington. Oelrich spoke at 5 p.m. Tuesday at the Vern Riffe Career Technology Center at Piketon. The DOE held its hearing at 7 p.m. in the same building, but in a different meeting room. Oelrich was funded by his own group and was working with the environmental groups SONG -- Southern Ohio Neighbors Group -- and the Ohio Chapter of the Sierra Club.

Princeton Professor Frank von Hippel will be in town this week to talk about the Bush administration's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership and express his views and concerns about nuclear reprocessing. Von Hippel, a theoretical physicist, has a strong background in policy areas such as nuclear nonproliferation, arms control, and energy and national security. In 1993-94, he was assistant director for national security in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He will speak at 7 p.m. Wednesday at UT's University Center Auditorium.

ENVIRONMENT Agency bosses have decided not to prosecute the operator of Sizewell A over an incident which saw thousands of gallons of water contaminated when radioactivity escaped into the North Sea. The incident, in January 2007, involved the fracture of a plastic pipe in a cooling pond building where highly radioactive spent fuel rods are stored under water prior to their despatch to the Sellafield reprocessing works in Cumbria.

Federal energy officials wrestling with the decades-old question of what to do with the West Valley nuclear site are recommending a phased-in approach that would remove contaminated buildings and soil soon, while deferring for up to 30 years the larger question of whether all waste should be removed. A revised Draft Environmental Impact Statement released this week compares alternatives for the future of the Cattaraugus County site, which from 1966 to 1972 housed the nation's first commercial nuclear reprocessing facility.

Members of a local group opposing high-level nuclear waste traveling on local roads and rail lines think the city should ban moving the material through the city. The group, Common Sense at the Nuclear Crossroads, plans to ask the City Council today to make it a misdemeanor to transport nuclear power plant waste through the city. Advertisement The federal government does not now transport the waste through Asheville, said Mary Olson, who volunteers with the local group and works for a nonprofit opposed to nuclear power. But if nuclear power use is increased, waste from current reactors could be moved from the north through Asheville to South Carolina to be reprocessed for fuel or weapons, she said.

ABOUT THIS BOOK Japan's worst nuclear radiation accident took place at a uranium reprocessing facility in Tokaimura, northeast of Tokyo, on 30 September 1999. The direct cause of the accident was cited as the depositing of a uranyl nitrate solution--containing about 16.6 kg of uranium, which exceeded the critical mass--into a precipitation tank. Three workers were exposed to extreme doses of radiation. Hiroshi Ouchi, one of these workers, was transferred to the University of Tokyo Hospital Emergency Room, three days after the accident. Dr. Maekawa and his staff initially thought that Ouchi looked relatively well for a person exposed to such radiation levels. He could talk, and only his right hand was a little swollen with redness. However, his condition gradually weakened as the radioactivity broke down the chromosomes in his cells.

PETER A. BRADFORD, adjunct professor, Vermont Law School, and former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: * For an even-handed recent overview of most nuclear power issues, see "Nuclear Power Joint Fact-Finding," a June 2007 report by the Keystone Center, a non-profit organization that brought together a cross section of parties interested in nuclear energy - including environmentalists and consumer advocates, industry representatives and government officials - to create a base of agreed-upon knowledge about the costs, risks and benefits of nuclear power. www.keystone.org/spp/documents/FinalReport_NJFF6_12_2007(1).pdf * For a responsibly skeptical look at nuclear power's rapidly rising costs in comparison to available low carbon alternatives, see "The Nuclear Illusion" by Amory Lovins and Imram Sheikh in the November 2008 Ambio, the Journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. https://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E08-01_AmbioNuclIlusion.pdf The Journal Report * See the complete Energy report. * The Web site of the Nonproliferation Education Center, maintained by WSJ op-ed contributor Henry Sokolski, features an ongoing collection of thoughtful conservative pieces skeptical of nuclear power. http://www.npec-web.org/ * For an excellent short critique of reprocessing and the Bush Administration's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, see Victor Gilinsky and Alison Macfarlane's Minority Opinion from the National Academy of Science's Review of DoE's Nuclear Research and Development Program, http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11998&page=73 * For an even-handed look at how nuclear construction went astray in the U.S. in the 1970s, the best book remains "Light Water: How the Nuclear Dream Dissolved, Irvin C. Bupp and Jean-Claude Derian. * Another good overview text is Megawatts and Megatons, Richard Garwin and Georges Charpak.