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A view of the Sellafield nuclear plant on 4 February 2013. Credit: Christopher Furlong / Getty Images.

A series of revelations about Sellafield, often considered Europe’s most hazardous nuclear site, has exposed how ongoing leaks of radioactive waste and infiltration of the site’s online systems by foreign cyber groups have been covered up by officials for years. 

A year-long investigation by the Guardian, ‘Nuclear Leaks’, has found that the Sellafield site, located on the Cumbrian coast in the UK, has been hacked on numerous occasions by groups with close ties to Russia and China. The impacts of the cyberattacks, the first of which was detected as far back as 2015, have been “consistently covered up by senior staff”. A report published in 2012 also warned that there were “critical security vulnerabilities” at the site.

Sellafield is used primarily as a nuclear waste and decommissioning site. It moves radioactive waste from storage ponds and silos, holds spent nuclear fuel from power stations in the UK and provides storage for “special nuclear materials”. 

Negotiators released the first draft of their response to the Global Stocktake synthesis report, showing the world is not on track to its climate targets to limit global warming to well below 2°C and ideally 1.5°C.

The draft text, published on Friday, included language calling for a “phasedown/out” of both “fossil fuels” and “coal”, with negotiators set to choose which words they ultimately decide on in the coming days.  

That choice is set to be a complicated one: While a group of more than 100 countries including the UK, Germany, Japan and Chile are calling on countries to agree to a phaseout of fossil fuels, other countries – including host United Arab Emirates (UAE) – are much more reticent. 

Nevertheless, external commentators were cautiously optimistic that language on fossil fuels had been included in a draft at all.  

The UK Government must take urgent action on policy to ensure the electrification of nearly half a million HGVs if it is to maintain net-zero targets, according to a new report from the Green Finance Institute (GFI), an independent research and finance organisation backed by the UK Treasury and other bodies. 

The report estimates that £100bn ($126.26bn) of investment will be required from both the public and private sectors to sufficiently electrify the UK’s HGV sector ahead of decarbonisation targets. It suggests ten financial mechanisms and policy recommendations that could support fleet decarbonisation, with the most important being the scaling-up of charging points across the country.

A “stable and supportive” policy environment is needed to drive investment in HGV decarbonisation at the pace required to meet net-zero targets. Although the UK Government has set deadlines for bans on the sales of new diesel trucks, more must be done to ensure that these deadlines can be feasibly met. 

China’s expansion of coal-based power risks eclipsing gains it has made in renewable energy, according to a new report published by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. 

In September 2022, China’s National Development and Reform Commission revealed that the country’s renewable power installations reached more than 1,100GW, making it the world’s leader. In addition, the CCP made two commitments under the Paris Agreement: to ‘strictly control’ new coal power projects from 2021 to 2025 and reduce energy intensity by 13.5% from 2020 to 2025. 

However, China is off track with its commitments. Since the beginning of 2022, authorities have granted permits of up to 152GW of coal power and started construction on 92GW of additional capacity. This was ten times the capacity permitted in the rest of the world in the same period.  

Energy Monitor, a sister publication of Power Technology, also reported that in the first quarter of 2023, China approved at least 20.5GW of new coal power for development. 

Swedish start-up Northvolt announced a breakthrough in its sodium-ion battery technology, developed for use in energy storage systems. 

The battery is free of lithium, cobalt, nickel or graphite, and could remove global dependence on China, which dominates critical material supply chains within the energy transition, the company said. It added that the new battery cell is safer, more cost-effective and sustainable than conventional nickel, manganese and cobalt or iron phosphate chemistries, principally because the minerals it uses, such as sodium and iron, are abundantly available. The technology is based on a hard carbon anode and a Prussian White-based cathode. Prussian White is a material used in the positive electrode of sodium-ion batteries, preferred for its low cost and high sustainability. Northvolt plans to be the first company to industrialise Prussian White-based batteries and bring them to commercial markets.

The batteries’ energy density stands at more than 160 watt-hours per kilogram, compared with an average energy density of 200–300Wh/kg for a lithium-ion battery.