Archive for the ‘New Reactors’ Category

February 17, 2011
Nuclear Townhall

Still showing the affects of a 30-year plateau, the American nuclear industry is coping with the hurdle of producing enough qualified employees to work at the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility taking shape at Savannah River. 
 


“The lack of experienced nuclear equipment suppliers has resulted in a lack of competition for the work and higher than expected bids,” says this report in the Aiken Standard. “As a result, more personnel are being hired without the needed nuclear experience, and require training.”


The report relies on the National Nuclear Security Administration’s 2012 budget request, which says higher than expected employee turnover has resulted in significant changes of cost estimates. "Shaw AREVA MOX Services is also experiencing significantly greater than expected turnover of experienced personnel due to the expansion of the U.S. commercial nuclear industry," says the budget request. "Over 15 percent of the project’s engineering and technical personnel have left for other nuclear industry jobs in the last year with pay increases of at least 25 percent."
 


The $4.8 billion facility will recycle surplus weapons-grade plutonium into mixed-oxide fuel in a process that is already being practiced in France. Last summer Areva delivered the first shipment of recycled reactor plutonium to Japan, which has redesigned four of its reactors to burn MOX fuel. The plan for Savannah River is that some American reactor will do a similar conversion but anti-nuclear groups are already scurrying around the country trying to prevent it. Last week Friends of the Earth began a campaign to try to prevent Energy Northwest from accepting MOX fuel in Washington State.
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Read more about it at the Aiken Standard

Nuclear Townhall
January 21, 2011

 
The Advisory Committee on Reactor Safety confirmed yesterday what the Department of Energy thought it had proved in the 1990s – that the containment structure of the Westinghouse AP1000 could withstand a direct hit form a commercial jet liner.
 
In the 1990s, the Department of Energy strapped an F-4 Phantom to a track in the desert, accelerated it to 500 miles per hour and crashed it into a wall approximately the thickness of a containment structure. The plane “just disappeared into dust,” as the commentator says on a YouTube video that has been viewed by 35,000 visitors.   “Only the tips of the wings escaped total destruction [because they missed the wall].”  The test might be enough to satisfy any ordinary individual but anti-nuclear groups began their usual, “What if . . . ?”  and “You didn’t think of this . . . .”  The most common argument was that a jetliner would weigh about three times as much as a fighter jet and therefore the result would be different. But the impact is measured by E = ½ mv2, which means that the velocity is a much more important factor. A hijacked jet liner trying to score a direct hit on a nuclear reactor would barely achieve 200 mph, so even if the airliner weighed three times as much, the impact would be less than half.
 
Still, opponents got their usual day in court and after giving design approval to the AP1000 in 2005, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission withdrew it, asking Westinghouse to design some kind of overhead shield to protect the containment structure. When Westinghouse came back with the shield in 2009, the NRC said, “Hey, that thing might fall down in an earthquake” and rejected the design.
 
Meanwhile, China has begun construction on four AP1000s, with the first scheduled to open next year.
 
The most recent “What if . .” of anti-nuclear groups has been that debris from the atomized aircraft might get through the 32-foot opening at the top of the structure that allows water to fall onto the containment vessel if the reactor needs emergency cooling. The Committee ruled this was not a problem. It also said that there was minimum possibility that the spent fuel storage pool would be drained by an air attack.
 
All this, however, is just the beginning, since the Advisory Committee’s ruling still has to be approved by the full five-member Commission. Then there will be on to the inevitable court challenges by anti-nuclear groups, who are certainly not ready to give up.
 
Meanwhile, Plant Vogtle in Georgia, which has received a federal loan guarantee, plus at least four other projects in Florida, Alabama and North and South Carolina, which are also planning to build the AP1000, will sit and wait.

Read more about it at the Miami Herald

A Harris Poll finds the public is split about evenly on nuclear energy in the United States , Britain , and France . Majorities in Spain and Italy are opposed, though, and the hotbed of opposition is Germany , with 77 percent against nuclear.
 
Naturally, everybody’s in favor of building more windmills. Harris found large majorities nodding their heads in every country. But when it comes to paying for more expensive electricity, that’s a different story. Only one-third of the public would be willing to pay 5 percent higher electrical bills. Ironically, the strongest opposition was in Spain and Italy , two countries that don’t like nuclear power.
 
Finally, Harris posed the question, “Would you be willing to pay $220 a month more for electricity” – the amount the European Union estimates will be needed to reduce greenhouse gases to an acceptable level. Here there was no doubt. Between 65 and 75 percent of the public said “no.”
 
This is bad news for the purveyors of windmills. Google and other backers of the “Atlantic Backbone” proposed this week to harvest offshore wind say that the electricity produced by dotting the Atlantic with thousands of windmills will cost 50 percent more than the variety produced offshore.
 
It’s hard to say what the  Harris poll indicates, except that the public seems to be in the dark about energy and Harris doesn’t seem to understand much either. The myth seems to be that nuclear is expensive while windmills are cheap. Yet France is 80 percent nuclear and has the cheapest electricity in Europe while Denmark has achieved 15 percent wind output and pays four times as much for electricity as the United States . Even people in France don’t seem to understand that.
 
Harris didn’t specify exactly what they were asking about nuclear, either. The Gallup Poll recently found 70 percent of Americans want to expand nuclear, an all-time high.
 
Perhaps the most enlightening thing about this article comes in one of the comments:  “ China is going 100% nuclear, but encouraging us to use windpower. That should tell you something.”  Can’t argue with that.

Read more at USA Today
 

There’s a worldwide gold rush in the global nuclear energy technology market going on right now and if American "policymakers" don’t know it, the Russians do.

Sergei Kiriyenko,CEO of Rosatom, the Russian national nuclear corporation, came close to bragging yesterday as he asserted that his company will be doing $50 billion worth of business around the world by 2030. "Personally I think they may reach some $65 billion to $70 billion,” he told Bloomberg News in an interview.

Rosatom was celebrating its contract to build two more reactors in China’s Tianwan province – in addition to two already completed there. “If we’re honest, China’s not even the number one priority now as we have larger- scale partnerships in India, Turkey and in the future Vietnam," Kiriyenko told Bloomberg.The company currently has $15 billion in sales.

Rosatom is competing against Toshiba’s Westinghouse Corporation, France’s AREVA and majority American-owned GE-Hitachi, plus South Korea, which has just secured a $20 billion contract to build four reactors in the United Arab Emirates. India, South America, Southeast Asia and the Middle East are all in play. Rosatom is also a principal in the 1000-megawatt reactor project in Iran.

All this undercuts the presumption of U.S. anti-nuclear groups that we are somehow saving the world from the proliferation of nuclear weapons by bridling the development of nuclear technology in the United States,. "If you don’t play the game, you don’t make the rules" is the old adage that applies here – and so goes the U.S.’s world class gold standard in nuclear energy safety and quality.

Most significantly, Kiriyenko said Rosatom will soon be extending its efforts to fuel fabrication and the development of next-generation integral fast reactors. IFRs introduce the possibility of burning 100 percent of nuclear fuel – rather than the 5 percent consumed in current thermal reactors – and extending available fuel supplies over thousands of years.  The U.S. abandoned IFRs under the Clinton Administration in 1993. At the time, the U.S. clearly had the world’s most advanced technology. Now the world appears to be moving ahead with or without the U.S.  

Read more at Business Week

One of the most common criticisms of the Nuclear Renaissance these days is that “we can’t afford it.”  “Wall Street won’t invest,” the argument goes. “It’s too risky and expensive. That’s why it needs government help.”

But there’s a third option that naysayers never consider but is shaping up to be the answer. Foreign countries will invest. That’s what happened this week in Texas.

Tokyo Electric Company – an electric utility, not a nuclear construction company – invested $125 million for a 9.2 percent share of the South Texas project in which Nuclear Innovation North America, a consortium headed by NRG Energy of Princeton, N.J.

The 1,350-megawatt reactor is already being built by Toshiba, which has inherited the Westinghouse nuclear franchise. Tokyo Electric had been offering technical assistance and decided to take a share – an unusual move by American standards. Imagine Southern California Edison taking a share in a reactor in Japan!  They’ve got enough trouble already building useless renewable energy projects to satisfy deluded California politicians.

The deal is both good news and bad news for the American nuclear effort. The good news is foreign countries will provide the needed capital. It wouldn’t be surprising to see Middle Eastern sovereign wealth companies investing soon. This is the way we built the railroads in the early 1800s, mostly with European capital.

The bad news is the U.S. failure to develop nuclear power has put us back where we were in 1820 – a relatively undeveloped country that needs foreign assistance to build its infrastructure. It could be worse. It could be we aren’t building anything at all.

Read more at Business Week

- William Tucker

Progress Energy’s recent decision to proceed with the Levy project – two AP1000 reactors on a single site – has set off a debate in the pages of the Tampa Tribune.

The utility has already lost a bid to have the estimated $13 billion construction costs incorporated into its rate base during construction of the project. Still hopeful that it can win a federal loan guarantee, Progress has said it will slow preliminary construction on the site but continue its license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Tribune business columnist Robert Trigaux takes exception to all this. Citing far-out estimates that costs could rise to $22 billion, he predicts a return to the 1980s when reactors came in at three times their original estimates, and says it’s time to rethink the project.

What’s interesting is the reader response. In these times when wisdom is not necessarily concentrated in newspaper editorial offices but distributed throughout the population, the general response seems to be that Florida needs the electricity and nuclear will ultimately be cheaper and cleaner. Except for one latter-day Lenin who says that a Worker’s Party is the key to powering Florida, it’s a pretty level-headed response.

Read more at Tampa Tribune

- William Tucker