Archive for the ‘Nuclear Summit’ Category

Almost unnoticed in the Main Stream Media, James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York City, who has been sounding the alarm about global warming since 1988, has signed a letter to President Obama urging a nuclear summit.
 
The letter was signed by 46 prominent scientists and engineers. It also had the endorsement of eleven Senators, both Republicans and Democrats. The letter urged the President to call a Nuclear Energy Summit to iron out several key issues in moving the country forward in the Nuclear Renaissance.  The letter was originated by Rod Adams, blogger on Atomic Insights, also a signatory.
 
Most of the signers were prominent nuclear scientists and engineers such as Ted Rockwell and Eric Loewen, president-elect of the American Nuclear Society, plus several vocal skeptics of global warming such as S. Fred Singer. The letter from the Senators, delivered in March, was signed by Senators such as Democrat Tom Carper and Republican Lamar Alexander who had already declared their support of nuclear.
 
The presence of Hansen on the list, however, is a further indication that some of the most vocal advocates of global warming are more comfortably reconciling themselves to the idea that nuclear power must be part of the solution. Prior to this, expressing concern about global warming was almost automatically coupled with a declaration that “renewable energy” is the remedy.
 
Hansen first achieved prominence when he testified before Congress in 1988 that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would soon be warming the earth’s temperatures. He has been particularly critical of coal, calling for a complete shutdown of coal plants and calling the unit trains that transport thousands of tons of coal each day “death trains.” 
 
In 2005, Hansen claimed on “60 Minutes” that he was being censored by the Bush Administration for his climate views. In 2008 he said that oil company executives should be prosecuted for “high crimes against humanity and nature.”  In 2009, he was arrested in a demonstration against mountaintop mining in West Virginia.
 
Still, although he has expressed private support for “next generation” nuclear plants, this is the first time Hansen has gone on record urging the government to further explore the case for nuclear power.
 
Said Rod Adams on whether supporting nuclear power now means embracing global warming and vice versa:  “Believe it or not, the topic of why we need to work to develop this incredible power source did not even come up in the discussions. I believe that is because all of us believe that the reasons are self-evident. They include the ability of nuclear fission to produce vast quantities of reliable, emission free energy.”

Read more at The Energy Collective

There’s no two ways about it – the 47-nation summit that just wound up yesterday will give a big boost – maybe even permanent momentum – to the world’s conversion to nuclear energy.

Although it wasn’t emphasized at the gathering – and may not even have been President Obama’s intention – the overall impact of the summit will be that the proliferation aspects of spreading nuclear programs can be handled and with proper international supervision and cooperation the diversion of bomb material into the hands of terrorist groups does not constituter a fatal deterrence to civilian programs.

To see how much this represents progress, consider what the paradigm has been to date. I the 1970s, nuclear opponents convinced President Jimmy Carter that the mere handling of spent fuel and the separation of plutonium would be a fatal step that would inevitably lead to bomb material falling into the hands of terrorists or rogue countries. (Ted Taylor, the renegade nuclear scientist who was the subject of John McPhee’s book, The Curve of Binding Energy, predicted confidently that by the 1990s there would be “hundreds” of nuclear explosions in American cities resulting from stolen plutonium. We stopped reprocessing and got the problem of “nuclear waste” instead.

President George W. Bush, Jr. tried to remedy this mistake through his Global Nuclear Energy Partnership – GNEP – and it is amazing how that effort is now completely ignored by press and politicians alike so that it is as if it never happened. Bush proposed reviving the reprocessing industry in this country so that we could provide developing nations with low enriched uranium and then take it off their hands again when it was spent, so they could have nuclear programs without ever developing the infrastructure for handling nuclear material. This is exactly what is being proposed now, except the U.S. no longer plays the central role. (Bush did imagine the current nuclear nations – France, Britain, Canada and Russia – forming a cooperative union.)

President Obama has put the cart before the horse – emphasizing the cradle-to-grave control of nuclear material without specifying who will handle the material or where it will be reprocessed. Kazakhstan has even volunteered since they are the source of one-third of the world’s uranium and developed a reputation for trustworthiness when they surrendered their nuclear weapons after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

But even with the cart before the horse, horse-and-cart are going to arrive at the same destination sometime. Sooner or later, somebody is going to say, “Why doesn’t the U.S. develop the capability for supplying the world with nuclear material and reprocessing it when it is done?”  And then we’ll be on our way.

China Daily, the English language Chinese news agency, ran an article this week, “US Wakes from Nuclear Energy Slumber,” comparing the U.S. to Rip Van Winkle. “A thunder from China has woken up Uncle Sam, like Rip Van Winkle, from a 20-year nap, to a different world. This world is in the midst of a Green Revolution. It is the biggest sea change since the Industrial Revolution, and Uncle Sam has slept too long to take the lead in this new movement.” 

Self-congratulations aside, give credit where credit is due. The Chinese have seized on nuclear and have sprinted ahead of us on the development of new reactors, building the Westinghouse AP1000 and Areva’s EPR when those reactors haven’t yet won design approval in this country.

But remember what they used to say about China when that nation was enduring its long pre-Industrial Age slumber:  “When a sleeping giant awakes . . . . “

Read the various takes on the Nuclear Summit at these sites.  Notice the Christian Science Monitor comes to the exact same conclusion we do – the real outcome of the summit will be to facilitate the spread of civilian nuclear energy.  But it sees this as a bad outcome, not good.

Associated Press

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As President Obama convenes with the heads of 40 states over the issue of nuclear terrorism, Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazerbayev is putting forth his country as a candidate for a world center of fuel development.

The offer isn’t all that crazy, according to an analysis by Richard Weitz in the National Journal. Kazakhstan produced 60 percent of the world’s uranium last year and has rich domestic supplies. Moreover, the Central Asian Republic earned high marks for giving up its nuclear arsenal in the 1990 after the collapsing Soviet regime left it with one of the world’s largest collections of warheads.

Nazerbayev is now proposing that Kazakhstan build a uranium enrichment center and become the honest broker for developing countries willing to take nuclear fuel in exchange for giving up the right to enrich or reprocess fuel themselves. President George Bush, Jr., made the same offer in 2007, of course, as part of his Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) program. But GNEP never seemed to get off the ground and is now virtually forgotten – perhaps because nobody seriously believed that the U.S. would ever be able to build or site a reprocessing center.

Weitz argues that that there are reasons for taking President Nazerbayev seriously and reasons for doubting that Kazakhstan would be up to the job. One of the most obvious is its close relations with Iran, plus the other Islamic states of Central Asia. Also notable is the political turmoil that next-door-neighbor Kyrgyzstan has found itself in of late.

Read the whole extensive analysis here

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- William Tucker