Posts Tagged ‘Nuclear Townhall’

What do you do on a slow news day?  Well, how about starting a panic over nuclear waste? 
 
Laura Hand, who anchors CNY Central’s Weekend Today out of Syracuse, filed the following breathless report on this week’s edition: 
 
“A Canadian power company plans to ship nuclear reactor components [emphasis added] from Ontario, through Lakes Huron, Erie and Ontario, then through the St. Lawrence Seaway on the way to Sweden, where the scrap will be recycled.

”Bruce Power says the 16 bus-sized cases contain the tubings that carried radioactive heavy water [Ibid], but that the cases are welded shut. A Swedish company will recycle the steel casings, with the remaining 10%, the radioactive tubes, to be shipped back to the East Coast and then trucked back to the Bruce site, where they’ll be stored.”
 
Nuclear components!  Pipes that once held radioactive water! In our broadcast region!  Sound the fire alarms!
 
Hand quickly played Paul Revere, galloping through the territory to warn the populace the radioactivity is coming. “As we contacted environmental and anti-nuclear groups here in Central New York, we found that many had not heard of the plan.”  For shame!
 
Nonetheless, Hand has no trouble turning up expressions of chin-stroking apprehension from the nuclear experts: 
 
“Environmental groups, including Save the River, based in Clayton, are concerned that the plan opens the door for much more nuclear transport.” 
 
“Mark Matson, environmental lawyer with [Lake Ontario Waterkeeper], says the concern is that this is a major shift in the way we handle environmental waste.”
 
Stay tuned for great video op of upstate environmentalists forming a human chain across the St. Lawrence to stop the shipments and preventing the Great Lakes from becoming a radioactive wasteland. Tonight at 11.

Read more at CNY Central

Let’s face it. All the glossy Power Point presentations and droning voices of corporate executives telling us about the virtues of nuclear power are never going to make much impression with the public. But how about a creative young artist in North Carolina who overcame an early indoctrination about the horrors of nuclear power and has gone on to found an entire business to change its image in the public mind?

Suzanne Hobbs, an arts graduate from Appalachian State University, has founded Popatomic Studios, “focused on making designs and public artwork that challenge commonly held fears and misconceptions about nuclear energy from a fun and positive artistic perspective.”  She has assembled an impressive board of directors and put up a website that features t-shirts, tote bags and posters decorated with her original designs.

“PopAtomic Studios is now carefully cultivating positive attention surrounding the reemerging Nuclear Energy Industry, using art as a spring board for new public dialogues about responsible energy creation,” says her bio. In her most recent blog, Suzy gives a touching account of the day her high school biology teacher informed the class of the evils of nuclear power, forcing her to go home and confront her father – a nuclear engineer – about all the horrible things he was doing to the world.

Her father had the wisdom to let her find out the truth for herself. It’s a great read. If nuclear is going to make any headway with the public it’s going to be through efforts like Popatomic Studios. Bookmark the page right now.

Read more at PopAtomic.org

Stewart Brand’s life story is almost too epic to be recounted, his accomplishments almost too extraordinary to be believed. A child of the 1950s, he attended Exeter Academy and Stanford University, then did a tour in the Army where he trained as a paratrooper and taught infantry skills. He says his army experience was “the best graduate school I could have gone to.”  
 
In the early 1960s he settled in California, studying art and becoming involved in some studies of LSD (then legal). By the mid-1960s he had become a member of the Merry Pranksters aboard Ken Kesey’s famous bus, chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. A born organizer, he produced the Trips Festival in San Francisco, one of the earliest rock concerts, featuring the Grateful Dead and attended by 10,000 hippies. It helped define Haight-Ashbury as a community.
 
In 1968, after the Apollo astronauts had returned from the first trip to the moon, Brand began asking NASA why they hadn’t taken a photograph of the whole earth. When he initiated a petition campaign, NASA responded by releasing the iconic photograph of a blue-and-white earth hanging like a gorgeous jewel in the night sky above the moon’s barren horizon. The picture defined an era. It also came to grace the cover of Brand’s first Whole Earth Catalogue (1972), a compendium of hippie commune skills, folk wisdom and high technology that sold 1.2 million copies and won the National Book Award. Next came Co-Evolution Quarterly, a journal that gave exposure to environmental and futuristic writers such as Lewis Mumford, Karl Hess, Wendell Berry, Gregory Bateson, Orville Schell and Amory Lovins. Brand also co-founded The Well, the world’s first online Internet community that anticipated AOL, Facebook and all the rest.  
 
Somewhere along the line, Brand became a convert to nuclear power. He went public in Technology Review in 2004 and is now regularly listed, along with Patrick Moore, as the world’s most prominent environmentally conscious convert to nuclear energy.
 
As prolific as ever, Brand has laid out his entire worldview in Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary, published in 2009 by Viking and due out in paperback this month. The chapter on nuclear is titled “New Nukes.”
 
How did such a transformation come about?  We emailed him aboard the 64-foot tugboat in Sausalito Harbor where he and his wife have lived for many years.
 
NUCLEAR TOWNHALL:  When and where did your conversion to nuclear energy occur?  Was it a moment of enlightenment or the result of a long process?  Was it painful?  Had you ever been specifically anti-nuclear?
 
BRAND:  I was mildly anti-nuclear, publishing some pieces that were critical of nuclear in CoEvolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Catalog. My main worry was the long-term burden I thought that storing nuclear waste would place on future civilization. When climate change became an increasing concern in the 1990s, it forced me to begin reappraising nuclear power. On a visit to Yucca Mountain in 2002 I became convinced that the political arguments about spent fuel storage were based on weird overstatements by both sides, and the technical issue was actually pretty trivial.
 
Following that changed perspective, I looked further into technical matters, such as the actual effects of low-dose radiation, and I realized my mind had changed on nuclear and I had some obligation to say so in public.
 
NTH:  What do you think constitutes the strongest argument for nuclear power right now?
 
BRAND:  It’s a question of comparing waste streams. Coal’s waste stream of carbon dioxide is turning the Earth into a solar cooker. Nuclear’s waste stream is tiny by comparison, and it’s easily contained and monitored locally. Furthermore, with 4th generation reactors the spent fuel can be reused. Coal and nuclear are directly competitive to provide baseload electricity.
 
Wind and solar are good clean supplements, but their energy source is very dilute, so they have a big footprint on the land, often to harmful environmental effect. Bill Gates makes a useful distinction between "energy farms" (wind and solar) and "energy factories" (nuclear and coal), which are much more concentrated.
 
NTH:  Your former friends and allies in the environmental movement have obviously had a lot of success in stopping nuclear in this country. Even as the rest of the world is rapidly moving ahead with nuclear (except perhaps in Germany), we seem to be falling rapidly behind. Why is environmental opposition so much more powerful in America?
 
BRAND:  They’re still my friends and allies. I think the environmental movement has been powerful in the US because we’ve been right about a lot of things and often effective in making the right thing happen—from energy conservation to wildland and biodiversity conservation.
 
NTH:  When Amory Lovins and the "soft energy" movement started out, they envisioned the renewable utopia as a much more manageable and personable world, where people would tend their backyard windmills and solar collectors and not have to deal with alien and remote utility companies running remote centralized plants. Yet at the renewable world takes shape, we find it involves building massive wind farms in Oregon or solar installations in the Mojave Desert, covering tens or dozens or hundreds of square miles with the apparati of civilization, and then shipping the electricity over huge distances that will require an entirely new transmission system to cover. Does anyone see a paradox in all this?
 
BRAND:  Not me. A lot of very sensible energy efficiency happens at the extremely local—rooftop solar, double-pane windows, good insulation, green chemistry in factories. That adds up.
 
Europe will probably get a massive amount of clean solar power from the Sahara piped under the Mediterranean in high-efficiency direct-current lines. That desert has a mineral surface. Solar farms there have scant environmental effect.
 
NTH:  The Whole Earth Catalogue and Co-Evolution Quarterly very much subscribed to the small-is-beautiful, self-help ethos. Can this be reconciled with nuclear power?
 
BRAND:  It was called "appropriate technology" then. To help manage climate, nuclear is appropriate technology.
 
NTH:  Many people feel the development of small modular reactors could eventually make nuclear much more palatable to people who are repelled its gigantism and high costs. Do you sense any movement on this front in the anti-nuclear movement?
 
BRAND:  Yeah, the argument for local co-generation plants (combined heat and power) has been a Green campaign for a while. The new small modular reactors will fit right into that argument, if they work well.
 
NTH:  Has your conversion to nuclear affected personal friendships?  Are there people who won’t speak to you anymore?  Do you still find it possible to socialize and discuss things with anti-nuclear advocates?
 
BRAND:  I think it was harder for earlier converts like Patrick Moore. For me it hasn’t been an issue. Nuclear is in fact Green, and Greens are catching on to that.
 
NTH:  You’ve said your Army experience was your real education. How did that work?
 
BRAND:  It was my real graduate school. I went from ROTC at Stanford into two years of active duty in 1961-62—peacetime years. I was taught leadership skills that I’ve used the rest of my life.
 
NTH:  Finally, what’s it like living on a tugboat?  Would you recommend it to others?
 
BRAND:  My wife and I have thrived for 28 years in a living space of 450 square feet, amid a close-knit community of 49 houseboats on our dock. I recommend living in a small space in a densely inhabited, walkable neighborhood. Being able to take your home for a cruise on the bay is probably not for everyone, but we like it.

U.S. Senate Republicans will perform a political triage of sorts today by elevating North Carolina Senator Richard Burr to their top Energy and Natural Resources Committee spot on an acting basis while stripping Alaska’s embattled incumbent Senator Lisa Murkowski of the position.

The action follows Murkowski’s resignation from a Republican Senate party leadership post last week in the wake of her decision to mount a write-in challenge to U.S. Senate Republican nominee Joe Miller, who defeated her in the primary. 

The Murkowski committee guillotining is a win-win for Burr and Miller.  Burr — who is in a relatively tight re-election bout — gets a political campaign bouquet thrown his way — and Miller gets a boost from the collateral damage to Murkowski’s claim that her seniority and influence can deliver for Alaska.

Burr represents a large cadre of key national nuclear constituencies including General Electric-Hitachi, Duke Energy and the Electric Power Research Institute as well as a state that is dependent on nuclear energy for its electricity.

Read more at the Charlotte Observer

China has a problem we might wish we had. Its nuclear program is advancing so rapidly that it’s running short of nuclear engineers.

That’s the concern raised this week by Li Ganjie, chief of National Nuclear Safety Administration and also vice-minister of environmental protection. "The training for professional staff is inadequate,” Li told Reuters. “We are short of specialized talent and also short of experience."

China has 28 reactors currently under construction, 40 percent of the world’s total. Engineering programs have exploded and China now awards 10,000 PhDs in engineering each year. We only award 8,000 and 75 percent of those go to foreign students. In 2005 the National Academies warned the U.S. was falling far short in engineering talent but so far there has been no response.

In China, on the other hand, the problem does not appear to be lack of enthusiasm for engineering courses but the breakneck pace of the country’s nuclear expansion. China has 40 more reactors on the drawing boards and is planning a Nuclear City in Haiyan, 75 miles south of Singapore.

Still Li, who handles the country’s environmental affairs, is worried. He said the country would need 5,000 to 6,000 new nuclear professionals each year instead of the current 2,000. (Not all engineering graduates, of course, are in nuclear.)

Li said that although the country had not yet experienced a significant nuclear accident, the lack of professional talent made it more likely. It will be important to maintain a perfect record, he told Reuters, because “people are mistrustful of the industry.”

Read more at Reuters

“With unfilled jobs on the line at nuclear power plants in southwest Michigan, a bachelor’s degree program at Lake Michigan College might provide a solution.”

That’s the way the South Bend Tribune introduces the story that the Michigan State Legislature may adopt a bill that would allow community colleges to offer programs in nuclear science. South Bend is in Indiana, of course, but word travels fast.

Southern Michigan has two nuclear reactors, Cook and Palisades, and both are hiring. Lake Michigan College, which is in the area, has already set up an associates’ program that turned out 52 graduates this year. The new bill would expand this effort throughout the state.

Not that it is any sure thing. A bill that has already passed the lower House of Representatives only adds programs in nursing, culinary arts, and cement and manufacturing technologies. That sounds like Michigan’s Old Economy. But Senators Michael Switalski and Jud Gilbert want to add a nuclear portion to the bill in the Senate.

Even then there is opposition. “The bottom line: [the bill] duplicates existing programs, and it’s costly,” Michael Boulus, executive director of the Presidents Council, State Universities of Michigan told the Tribune. “We should be doing more collaboration, not duplication. “There are no unmet needs.”

Still, it’s promising that somebody sees a future in nuclear.

Read more at the South Bend Tribune

You knew it was going to happen. After 21 months of wrestling with climate legislation, a group of Senators has thrown in the towel and decided to solve everything a national mandate for “renewable energy.”

According to Politico, the standard will be salvaged from the energy bill bounced out of Senator Jeff Bingaman’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee a year ago and therefore eligible to make it to the Senate floor. The standard will probably be that the country must get 15 percent of its electricity from “renewable sources” by 2021.

It’s hard to imagine anything that is going to sink the American economy faster than this bill.  Never mind what it will do to kill the Nuclear Renaissance. Just look what has happened in California. The Golden State has been laboring over this task since 1980, when then Governor Jerry Brown (yes, the same Jerry Brown running for governor this year) announced that California would stop building power plants but rely instead on “conservation and renewables.”  California conserved electricity and built renewables – 11 percent of its grid by 2000 – but also got the Great California Electrical Shortage because supply wasn’t keeping up with demand.

The state dug itself out of the hole by throwing up natural gas plants as fast as it could. Today California gets 40 percent of its electricity from natural gas- twice the national average – yet still fancies that it is living on “renewable energy.”  In fact, renewables (wind, solar, geothermal, mini-dams, methane from garbage dumps – you name it) now constitute a smaller percentage than they did in 2000 – down to about 10.5 percent. But the state covers this up by listing signed contracts for all the solar facilities it is going to build as part of its renewable portfolio. Meanwhile, the goal has been raised to 20 percent next year (it won’t even come close) and a ridiculous 30 percent by 2020. All this makes for breathless stories in the press about how California is leading the world to solar utopia. Meanwhile, it has made a wreck of the California economy.

As Max Schulz wrote two years ago in City Journal, California’s renewable economy is essentially “Potemkin environmentalism.”

The state now imports 40 percent of its electricity from beyond its borders – some even from Mexico. All this is coal and nuclear. Coal plants in Utah and Nevada belch huge clouds of smoke night and day just so California residents can imagine they are living on clean energy. Meanwhile the state has covered so many mountaintops with windmills that it is now building most of its new facilities in Oregon. All these wind farms, of course, are measured by their nameplate capacity rather than their actual output in meeting the renewable standards.

The effect on the economy has been devastating. Electrical rates in California are almost double that of surrounding states. Manufacturers have left in droves. The aircraft industry – once a mainstay of Southern California – is long gone. Even high-tech companies such as Google and Yahoo are moving their server farms out of state in search of cheaper electricity. Unemployment stands at 12.3 percent – third highest in the nation – and the state is losing population for the first time in its history.

So what are the chances that this delightful scenario will be imposed on the rest of the country?  To date, the key opposition to a national renewable standard has been the Southeast. The Southwest has lots of sun, so the logic goes, the Midwest has wind, the Northeast may be able to plant windmills offshore, but the Southeast has none of these and so will be stuck with higher costs. Renewable advocates have tried to buy off the South by saying it can burn down its forests as “renewable energy” – and in fact many power plants around the country are switching from coal to wood wastes on the grounds that wood is “renewable.” But the logistics are horrendous. Wood has only half the energy content of coal and is scattered all over the landscape as opposed to concentrated in coal mines. The task of gathering and hauling it will consume far more energy than is ever saved – but of course none of this figures into the the equation of a “renewable mandate.”

And so the next week will be crucial to the fate of the country. If the Senate adopts a national renewable portfolio, we’re in for a decade or more of misplaced investment, marred landscapes, serenaded by fatuous newspaper articles celebrating about how headed toward renewable utopia. Utility companies will play along, putting glossy pictures of windmills and solar panels on the cover of their annual reports, while quietly building more natural gas plants. Nuclear will be completely shunned because it’s “not renewable.”  By 2020 we’ll probably be where California is now, with 40 percent of our electricity coming from natural gas and supplies running low. Will we then importing natural gas?  Who knows?

Stay glued to your C-Span. The country’s energy future is at stake.

Read more at Politico

To anybody surveying the landscape of nuclear energy right now, it’s becoming more and more obvious that small modular reactors are quickly emerging as a viable and necessary option.

With Progress Energy effectively suspending their reactor initiative last week and with many "First Mover" projects grinding along, it seems plausible that building a full-scale U.S. reactor could be a 10-year, $10-billion undertaking unless the current paradigm changes.

Having licensed designs on the shelf will help; however, few American utilities may willing to run this triathlon without carbon pricing in an projected era of sustained low natural gas prices.  Small reactors, however, could offer a different dynamic if developers are able to consummate their designs and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission responds accordingly.

Last week the good news was that Hyperion, the New Mexico company and leading mini-SMR pioneer, signed a memorandum of agreement with the Savannah River National Laboratory to explore the possibility of building a demonstration reactor on the site.

This week the good news is that the project is finding favorable review in South Carolina. In a column in "The State", business columnist Andrew Shain expresses enthusiasm for Hyperion’s business-like attitudes. “Hyperion impressed Savannah River National Solutions officials because the company came showing the technology first instead of asking for money,” reports Shain. 

“They were not looking for a hand out from us or the government,” Pete Knollmeyer, vice president of strategic planning at Savannah River National Solutions, tells Shain.

Comments from South Carolina readers are what you’d hope to hear:  “Sounds like a Common Sense idea that should have been explored a long time ago.”  “The Navy has been running ships the size of cities for years with small nukes.” 

It’s good to hear so much hope outside-the-beltway when sometimes there is so little inside.

Read more at The State

Following the lead of its Persian Gulf neighbors, Kuwait plans to build four nuclear reactors over the next twelve years – if oil revenues hold out.

The Kuwaitis are obviously impressed with the success the success of the United Arab Emirates, which has just awarded a $20-billion contract to Korea to build four new reactors over the next two decades. Secretary General of Kuwait’s National Nuclear Committee is quoted as saying that Kuwait will be able to develop nuclear energy as long as the price of oil remains relatively stable – meaning the Kuwaitis would have trouble paying for the project if oil revenues fall.

In reporting the story, the Kuwait Times nonetheless manages to find a whole raft of public and private officials opposing the project. Adnan Shaheen, General Manager and Managing Director of Al-Daw Company for Environmental Projects, is quoted as saying, "Kuwait does not have the capacity to maintain the safety standards of such reactors” – apparently unaware that Korea, Japan, France or whoever builds and maintains the reactors will have plenty of experience.

Shaheen also cites power cuts in the country last summer as proof that "We do not have the ability to secure the safety of such plants" – although that would also seem like proof that Kuwait needs more electricity. Tarek Al-Wazzan, Board Director of Aref Energy Company, “raised a question on the project’s sustainability amid reports of gas and hydrocarbon reserves depletion after a period of 30 years or so,” according to the Times. Al-Wannan opined that “many other energy production methods such as wind power plants, water, solar power plants can be resorted to.”

It’s nice to know that even in the heart of the Persian Gulf there are skeptics who dream of a world run on windmills and solar collectors while ignoring the awesome potential of nuclear energy

Read more at Energy Central

Progress Energy of North Carolina has been in the forefront of the Nuclear Renaissance for several years with plans to build two Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at its Shearon Harris site.
 
This week, however, Progress told the North Carolina utilities commission that the two reactors may not be necessary. Instead the company might take a partial stake in the construction of one reactor at Shearon Harris or perhaps buy into a reactor at another location.
 
"This is by no means an about-face on our nuclear strategy," Progress representative Mike Hughes told the Raleigh News & Observer. "Based on what we know right now, this is our best estimate on what nuclear will be added and when."

The challenge is slumping demand. Electrical use has been flat during the current recession and doesn’t give any indication of picking up. Whereas Progress projected it would need an additional 2000 MW by 2020, it now believes it will need only 550 MW. Progress has foresworn building any new coal plants but announced earlier this month it will build a 950-MW combined cycle natural gas plant to replace a 59-year-old 397-MW coal plant.
 
The company has always been concerned with the prospect of investing up to $10 billion in a single reactor project that might take a decade to finish. Taking a partial stake with other utilities would reduce the risk. Progress’s decision also suggests that small modular reactors that allow utilities to build in bite-sized increments could be alluring.

Read more at the News Observer