AFP

The departure of a shipment of reprocessed nuclear fuel from France to Japan has been delayed due to the breakdown of loading equipment, a French nuclear technology company announced Wednesday.

The setback came as environmental campaigners denounced the practice of transporting such highly radioactive materials.

The shipment arrived on two separate lorries under heavy security in the small hours of Wednesday morning at the French port city of Cherbourg. It was bound for Japan for use in a power plant.

But French nuclear technology group Orano, which is handling the transport, said Wednesday that the breakdown of one of its lifting gantries had prevented the loading of one of the two packages.

It would therefore be returned to the Orano site 20 kilometres (13 miles) from the port. 

The company was doing what it could to organise a fresh sea transport as soon as possible, Orano added.

The previous transport of Mox fuel to Japan, in September 2021, drew protests from environmental group Greenpeace. 

Yannick Rousselet of Greenpeace France had already denounced the latest planned shipment.

“Transporting such dangerous materials from a nuclear proliferation point of view is completely irresponsible,” he said.

He described the latest development, in which part of the shipment had had to be returned to the Orano facility as unprecedented.

“A boat loaded with Mox is going to circle in the water while they make a round trip (of 40 kilometres) with a container of Mox,” he said.

– Highly radioactive –

Japan lacks facilities to process waste from its own nuclear reactors and sends most of it overseas, particularly to France.

The load of highly radioactive Mox, a mixture of reprocessed plutonium and uranium, was transported overnight from a plant in the Hague in secure containers on two trucks, Orano said.

The convoy arrived around 3:45 am (0145 GMT) at the port surrounded by law enforcement vehicles, according to an AFP photographer. 

Shortly after 6:00 am, the first fuel package was loaded aboard a specially designed ship from British company PNTL, which has extensive experience with this type of transport, Orano said.

That ship has taken up a holding position out at sea, said the company. Armed British police were still on board the vessel, it added.

It will take a little more than two months for the ship to reach Japan, said Orano — the eighth such shipment from France since 1999. 

Mox is composed of 92 percent uranium oxide and eight percent plutonium oxide, according to Orano. 

The plutonium “is not the same as that used by the military,” it said.

Reality TV star-turned-entrepreneur Kim Kardashian announced Wednesday she is branching into a new business arena with the launch of a private equity firm co-founded with a former partner at industry giant Carlyle.

“I’m pleased to announce the launch of @SKKYPartners with private equity veteran Jay Sammons as co-founder and co-managing partner,” Kardashian wrote on Twitter.

Kardashian said her mother, Kris Jenner, would also serve as partner.  

According to the new firm’s Instagram account, SKKY Partners will focus on investments in consumer and media companies in sectors including “consumer products, digital and e-commerce, consumer media, hospitality and luxury.” 

It is the latest of a series of business ventures for megastar Kardashian, who came to fame with the US reality show “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” which tracked the lives of her family members in Los Angeles.

The 41-year-old has steadily built her business empire in recent years — most visibly with her apparel and beauty brands — and has a net worth of $1.8 billion, according to Forbes. 

Jay Sammons, who in the summer left his long-time role as head of consumer, media and retail at Carlyle — one of the top private equity companies in the world — told The Wall Street Journal he approached Kardashian and her mother about launching the firm this year.

Kardashian told the Journal she liked the idea of working closely with entrepreneurs to help them grow their vision.

“The exciting part is to sit down with these founders and figure out what their dream is,” Kardashian told the paper, adding the firm plans to make its first investment before the end of 2022.  

“I want to support what that is, not change who they are in their DNA, but just support and get them to a different level.”

SKKY did not immediately respond to AFP’s request for comment. 

Britain’s Cineworld, the world’s second biggest cinema chain, announced Wednesday that it has filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States as it seeks to restructure after facing low audience numbers.

The group, which operates hundreds of movie theatres in the United States, said in a statement that it filed for Chapter 11 at a bankruptcy court in Texas.

Chapter 11 of the US bankruptcy code is a court-supervised restructuring process that provides companies time to negotiate with its creditors to reach a settlement on the reduction of debts.

Cineworld said it “will seek to implement a de-leveraging transaction that will significantly reduce the Group’s debt, strengthen its balance sheet and provide the financial strength and flexibility to accelerate, and capitalise on, Cineworld’s strategy in the cinema industry.”

The statement said it hoped to emerge from bankruptcy proceedings in the first quarter of next year, and had $1.94 billion in financing from existing lenders to help it through that period.

The company also warned existing shareholders that their holdings would likely be considerably diluted as part of the bankruptcy process.

Cineworld’s shares had been sliding since the beginning of the year as the company’s position deteriorated when people didn’t return to cinemas in droves after Covid lockdowns were eased.

They plummeted last month when the company acknowledged it was considering filing for bankruptcy.

Cineworld shares rose 10 percent on Wednesday to 4.29 pence, but were still down 87 percent from the start of the year.

Analysts argue that Cineworld’s 2018 takeover of American peer Regal left it saddled with too much debt, putting it in a poor position to weather the pandemic.

Digital investigators from the Bellingcat group have spent eight years exposing the lies of the powerful and gathering evidence of their crimes – work that has a grave human cost, the organisation’s chief told AFP in an interview.

Bulgarian journalist Christo Grozev said he and his colleagues received regular threats but he was driven to continue by “adrenalin” and “the feeling you can do something that law enforcement does not do”.

The investigative group has been closely associated with uncovering misdeeds by Russian agents across Europe, including intelligence involvement in the poisoning of opposition figure Alexei Navalny.

“When you get stopped in the street by Russian citizens, telling you thank you for what you are doing once a day, I think that it is enough to continue,” he said.

During a meeting in Paris earlier this week, he described the organisation as the “Kremlin’s biggest nightmare” though he stressed to AFP that Russia was not the main focus of their work.

“Russia today produces a lot of government crime and that’s why a lot of our investigations are focused on Russia,” he said.

“But we equally try to pay attention to bad actors from wherever they come.”

He cites investigations into the Syrian war, EU border agency Frontex and others focused on Greece, Turkey, Hungary and the far right in the United States and Europe.

– ‘Undesirable’ in Russia –

Bellingcat was founded in July 2014 by a British blogger, Eliot Higgins, along with a band of internet “nerds”, said Grozev, who joined later and brought a wealth of journalism experience from his career in the Bulgarian media.

They used information freely available to the public –- anything from satellite images to telephone directories -– to piece together evidence of wrongdoing.

Their work on the downing of Air Malaysia flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014 — which killed 298 people and sparked global outrage — won plaudits around the world and brought the group to the attention of the Kremlin.

The investigators pieced together photos, videos and public documents that supported the theory that the plane was shot down by a Russian missile from an area controlled by pro-Russian separatists.

Since then, the group has identified Russian agents responsible for poisoning opposition figure Alexei Navalny and other dissidents, exposed alleged war crimes in Ukraine and helped uncover many more scandals.

One of its main focuses right now is the war in Ukraine, where it has a two-track approach.

Grozev said one approach uses journalistic methods to debunk false information, the other is more judicial, gathering evidence of war crimes for eventual use in the courts.

The Netherlands-based platform, which takes its name from a fable in which mice join forces to hang a bell around a cat’s neck, has rarely been out of the Kremlin’s firing line.

Russia recently described it as a security threat and deemed it “undesirable”.

– Legal challenges –

One of the main lines of attack has been to accuse Bellingcat of being funded by Western governments or NGOs, particularly the US National Endowment for Democracy.

Grozev said in its early years the group took some money from American NGOs for training, but later decided to stop.

He said it had not taken any money from governments since last year and relied instead on smaller funders.

“Most of our funders are individuals who spend 100 euros to 5,000 euros,” he said.

Beyond the financial constraints, Grozev pointed to the difficult legal environment.

“International law is handicapped because it assumes that governments look out for their citizens,” said Grozev.

Even a tribunal like the International Criminal Court, which seeks to hold individuals to account rather than countries, has long been hobbled by disagreements over its remit and powers of investigation.

And national governments are hamstrung by the idea of national sovereignty, so if a poisoning happens on Russian territory, only Russia can investigate.

It is precisely in this legal blackhole that Bellingcat finds the greatest need.

“We investigate generally bad actors, governments who commit crimes, because we think nobody else is investigating them,” said Grozev.

“There are no tribunals, no law enforcement agencies that investigate governments.”