Finland is already building an underground facility and is on course to become the first country to dispose of nuclear waste in such a way.

Scientists have backed the government’s plan to store the UK’s nuclear waste deep underground.
The report, from experts working across science and technology, concluded there were “no insurmountable scientific or technological barriers“ to the scheme.
It urged the government to maintain momentum in implementing the policy, but recommended key areas where more research was needed to move forward.
These included finding suitable sites and addressing skills shortages.
The report resulted from a meeting of geologists, engineers, nuclear experts and chemists that took place in November.
Professor Charles Curtis, president of The Geological Society of London, presenting the report, said, “After a long period without waste policy, the UK finally has a way to go forward, according to BBC.com.
“We concur the safest and most secure way to go is deep geological depositories, and we see no insurmountable scientific and technological barriers to this.“
However, the report highlighted a number of key issues that would need to be addressed.
It said a repository site would need to be found that was both geologically secure and also accepted by the local community.
Dr. Alan Hooper, of radioactive waste management company Nirex, said between one-third and two-thirds of the UK had the suitable geological make-up for deep nuclear waste burial.
The report also said the government would need to address whether repositories should be kept open, so the waste could be monitored, or sealed off immediately.
It also highlighted the need to establish whether different types of nuclear waste should be stored separately in different repositories or kept together.
Professor Curtis said another key concern was the decline in the UK’s nuclear skills base.
He said, “At the moment, this is a ’grey-haired profession’; we have an ageing population of nuclear professionals.
“We need a nuclear skills renaissance so the implementation of a repository can be supported for the future.“ In October 2006, Environment Secretary David Miliband said the government would follow the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management’s (CORWM) recommendation to bury radioactive waste in facilities hundreds of meters underground.
The committee had come to this conclusion after spending three years investigating a long-term solution the UK’s radioactive waste problem: for the last 50 years it has been stored at a variety of sites using a number of methods.
A spokeswoman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said Defra welcomed the report, and said a consultation on the process of site selection for the repository would begin later this year.

Pollution-free driving is still years off, but a European plan to cap cars’ carbon dioxide output will help narrow the price penalty for advanced technologies such as diesel hybrids and hydrogen fuelcells.
Alternative powertrains will look increasingly attractive if the European Commission, as expected, proposes rules on Wednesday to force carmakers to cut new cars’ CO2 emissions by nearly a fifth to an average of 130 grams per kilometer (g/km) by 2012.
The proposals--part of EU efforts to fight climate change--are likely to boost potential demand for diesel hybrid and fuelcell-powered cars, which have yet to hit the market and are significantly more expensive than conventional cars.
The cost of meeting the new CO2 standards--such as developing technology to make engines and transmissions more efficient--could add hundreds, if not thousands, of euros to prices of conventionally powered cars, industry experts say.
Diesel hybrids, which reduce fuel consumption by linking a standard diesel engine to an electric motor and batteries so it can run on electricity alone at low speeds, may no longer be priced out of the market, Reuters reported.
A diesel engine typically costs up to 10 percent more than its petrol-driven cousin of similar power--not to mention thousands of dollars more for an electric motor, batteries and the electronics to run them in hybrid form.
“Diesel-electric hybrids could move from cost-stunted concept to hot-selling technology in Europe if the European Union decides to tax cars based on carbon dioxide emissions,“ Swiss investment bank UBS said in a recent research note.

Small But Growing
French carmaker PSA Peugeot Citroen has been pressing ahead on this front. It showed a diesel hybrid Citroen concept car at the Paris car show in September and aims to sell tens of thousands of diesel hybrids a year from 2010.
A diesel hybrid can cut fuel consumption by a quarter versus a standard diesel. The challenge, PSA said a year ago, is to cut the cost difference between the two to 2,000 euros ($2,600) or less from around 8,000 euros at the time.
Rivals such as Ford and DaimlerChrysler are also embracing diesel hybrids, but for big cars such as the Jaguar S-type and the Mercedes-Benz E-Class executive car.
Non-conventional powertrains account for less than 1 percent of the overall European new car market of 15 million units, but that market share is set to rise.
Al Bedwell at consulting group JD Powers-LMC forecast sales of diesel hybrids in Europe would start in 2010/2011 and that around 150,000 would be sold annually by 2013.
Including no more than 100,000 gasoline hybrids such as Toyota Motor Corp.’s Prius, total hybrid sales would still be under 2 percent of the market by 2013, he estimated.
“From there, numbers could go up steeply assuming production costs can result in a cost premium versus regular diesel of no more than 15 percent,“ he said.

Fuelcells to the Fore
Cars powered by fuelcells leapfrog the CO2 issue by using the chemical interaction between hydrogen and oxygen to generate electricity while emitting only water vapor.
Proponents insist that 5 million to 10 million fuelcell cars could be on the road within 15 years, with the number ballooning to 350 million worldwide by 2050.
But while the technology is making great strides, it still costs far too much and lacks the widespread infrastructure that motorists will need to fill their tanks with hydrogen.
DaimlerChrysler, a market leader with around 100 fuelcell vehicles on the street for testing, estimates that fuel cell cars will make their commercial debut between 2012 and 2015 in limited numbers.
Costs, reliability and durability remain serious challenges.
For instance, fuelcell cars need to have an operating life of about 5,000 hours to compete effectively but at this stage only last around 2,000 hours, a DaimlerChrysler spokeswoman said.

Petroleum Development Oman (PDO), which produces most of Oman’s oil, said on Tuesday the company’s oil output would fall by around 20,000 barrels per day this year to between 560,000 and 570,000 bpd.
’We will be in a position to produce 560,000-570,000 barrels a day this year. This is little bit lower than last year’s production ... but the pace of the fall is reducing now,’ John Malcolm, PDO’s managing director, said.
Malcolm said PDO’s production in 2006 was within the target range of 580,000-600,000 bpd.
PDO expects production levels to flatten this year or next and pick up thereafter as it invests heavily in enhanced oil recovery and waterflood techniques in several fields, to beat a decline in the output of Omani oil that began in 2001.
Oman’s energy minister, Mohammad bin Hamad bin Seif Al Rumhy, said last month PDO’s oil production should rise to between 700,000 and 750,000 bpd by 2011.
’Four major enhanced oil recovery programs are under implementation now,’ Malcolm said, Tradearabia.com said.
’There will be significant investment in the next five years. Project delivery is a real test for us in the coming years.’
Malcolm did not put a figure on the investments but Oman said last year it planned to spend $10 billion over the next five years to boost oil output to around 900,000 bpd and gas output to 70-80 million cubic metres per day.
Enhanced oil recovery projects at Harweel, Qarn Alam, Marmul and Fahud as well as the waterflood projects in few other oil fields are at different stages of implementation.
Most are expected to go on stream in the next five years.
Malcolm said the immediate increase in oil production might not be very large, but after 10 years a third of PDO’s oil production would come from enhanced oil recovery projects.
Malcolm said the company’s gas and condensate production was equivalent to 430,000 bpd last year and was set to continue growing until the end of the decade.
PDO’s Kauther gas treatment plant, which should be able to process 20 million cubic meters a day of condensates rich gas, would be ready by the first quarter of 2008.
Last month a senior energy official said Oman expects its overall oil output to fall to around 730,000-740,000 bpd this year.
Production fell by 3 percent to 750,200 bpd in the first nine months of 2006 from a year earlier, according to official figures.

Middle East oil storage operator Horizon Terminals will expand its Singapore facility by 250,000 cubic meters (cu m) by yearend as it sees strong demand, the head of its largest shareholder said.
This Phase 3 of Horizon’s construction will bring its capacity to 1.2 million cu m and the city’s state’s total to 7.5 million cu m, part of a flurry of projects to capitalize on growing fuel oil trade in Asia’s top ship bunkering port.
However, troubled Mitsui Oil Asia (MOA) has terminated its lease agreement. MOA had been due to start occupying the 130,000 cu m of tank space in stages from next month, as the main tenant under Phase 2.
Asked about the termination, Hussein M Sultan, also group chief executive of Emirates National Oil Co (Enoc), said he was not concerned.
“I’m not worried at all. There are hundreds of people queuing for the tanks. There are many, many people waiting and many requests from customers for more space,“ he said.
Major players such as Vitol, as well as Russian major LUKOIL--which currently does not have landed storage facilities in Singapore--are on the lookout for tankage, according to Tradearabia.com.
MOA is the Singapore-based unit of Mitsui, Japan’s second-largest trading house, which recently announced losses amounting to $81 million from naphtha trading.
When contacted, a Mitsui spokesman said: ’We are still negotiating the contract. We are committed to existing contracts and do not intend to cut off any contracts all of sudden.
’There is a possibility that Mitsui & Co. will take over the (tank) contract. MOA has withdrawn from all naphtha trading, including physical trade, but it is still handling fuel oil and crude. The facilities are necessary to handle physical trade.’
Mitsui vice-president Hiroshi Tada said last month that the company hoped to close its Singapore trading arm in April or May if possible, but remaining long-term contracts and other conditions had to be sorted out first.
Trading sources said chances of Mitsui & Co. taking over the lease were unlikely, adding that Horizon had been told it was free to market the tanks. But the firm has yet to decide whether to offer the tanks to its existing customers or to open them to the market.
Existing customers include US-based firms Cargill International and Koch Refining, South Korea’s SK Energy, which is also a stakeholder, and Middle East trader DNK Petroleum, a joint-venture between Enoc and Kuwait’s IPG.
Horizon’s terminal started receiving cargoes in October, with Phase 1 of its construction due to be completed by the second quarter. This phase will see 840,000 cu m of capacity at a cost of $200 million.
Phase 2 will see another 110,000 cu m by the third quarter. New projects will double commercial capacity in the city-state by next year.
Two other new projects--Singapore trader Hin Leong’s Universal Terminals and Singapore-listed Chemoil’s Helios facility--are expected to be operational by end-2007.
Universal, when completed, will be the largest commercial storage facility in Asia with capacity of 2.3 million cu m, while Chemoil’s facility has 450,000 cu m of tankage.
Existing commercial operators--Royal Vopak, Oiltanking and Tankstore--will each add about 200,000-250,000 cu m to their existing facilities by 2008.
Another 1.47 million cu m will be added by 2009 under Phase 1 of the Jurong Rock Caverns project, with another 1.73 million cu m slated for Phase 2.

The wind resource off the Mid-Atlantic Coast could supply the energy needs of nine states from Massachusetts to North Carolina, plus the District of Columbia--with enough left over to support a 50-percent increase in future energy demand--according to a study by researchers at the University of Delaware (UD) and Stanford University.
Willett Kempton, Richard Garvine and Amardeep Dhanju at the University of Delaware and Mark Jacobson and Cristina Archer at Stanford, found that the wind over the Middle Atlantic Bight, the aquatic region from Cape Cod, Mass., to Cape Hatteras, N.C., could produce 330 gigawatts of average electrical power if thousands of wind turbines were installed off the coast.
The estimated power supply from offshore wind substantially exceeds the region’s current energy use--which the scientists estimate at 185 gigawatts--from electricity, gasoline, fuel oil and natural gas sources.
The study marks the first empirical analysis in the United States of a large-scale region’s potential offshore wind-energy supply using a model that links geophysics with wind-electric technology--and that defines where wind turbines at sea may be located in relation to water depth, geology and “exclusion zones“ for bird flyways, shipping lanes and other uses, Solaraccess.com said.
Kempton, the UD professor of marine policy who led the study, has worked on several public opinion surveys about offshore wind power over the past three years, including a survey of Cape Cod residents, who largely have opposed a major wind farm proposed for their coastal area, and a more recent survey in Delaware that revealed strong support for offshore wind power as the next electricity source for the state.
“In doing our surveys and watching the public debate, we saw that no one had solid empirical data on the actual size of the offshore wind resource, and we felt this was important for policy decisions,“ Kempton said.

Estimating Wind Power Resource
The scientists examined current wind-turbine technologies to determine the depth of the water and the distance from shore the wind turbines could be located. They also defined “exclusion zones“ where wind turbines could not be installed, such as major bird flyways, shipping lanes, chemical disposal sites, military restricted areas, borrow sites where sediments are removed for beach renourishment projects, and “visual space“ from major tourist beaches.
To estimate the size of the wind power resource, the researchers needed to figure out the maximum number of wind turbines that could be erected and the region’s average wind power. The spacing used between the hypothetical wind turbines was about one-half mile apart. At a closer spacing, Kempton said, upwind turbines will “steal“ wind energy from downstream ones.
Anemometer readings from the nine NOAA weather buoys in the Middle Atlantic Bight were analyzed. To determine the average wind over the region, the scientists reviewed all the wind-speed data from the past 21 years from one of the buoys. The findings were then extrapolated to the height of the offshore wind turbines currently being manufactured in order to determine the average power output per unit.
At the current 80-meter (262-foot) wind turbine height, the extrapolated wind speed of the mid-range buoy is 8.2 meters per second (18.3 miles per hour or 16 knots).
The scientists’ estimate of the full-resource, average wind power output of 330 gigawatts over the Middle Atlantic Bight is based on the installation of 166,720 wind turbines, each generating up to 5 megawatts of power. The wind turbines would be located at varying distances from shore, out to 100 meters of water depth, over an ocean area spanning more than 50,000 square miles, from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras.

Addressing Wind Power Fluctuations
While 330 gigawatts is the average output of the entire offshore wind resource over the Mid-Atlantic Bight, the researchers note that offshore wind is not uniform and offer suggestions for addressing power fluctuations.
“Over a large area like this, the wind blows stronger at some times and places, weaker at others,“ Kempton said.
To make wind power more uniform, the study shows that multiple sites could be connected through power lines to reduce the number of times of both maximum and minimum power. Changes in new and replacement energy-using devices, including automobiles, also could provide for greater power storage.