Archive for the ‘Nuclear Power’ Category

4 Oct

Fukushima Fallout – The EU Answer

Posted by Laura Lucas in Natural Disasters, Nuclear Power, Uncategorized.

Photo by Lynne Kirton. Some rights reserved.

Following the nuclear incident at Fukushima in the wake of a massive earthquake and tsunami, the EU moved to assess its nuclear power plants for their readiness in a similar situation, as well as other potential major incidents both natural and manmade. Today, the results of those examinations were released.

For those looking for quick, easy-to-digest data, the European Commission’s memo  laid out a short series of questions and answers: number of reactors tested (145); types of events checked (extreme weather conditions, plane crashes, and extreme natural events such as the tsunami hit suffered by Fukushima); and highlights of the findings (37% of EU reactors aren’t up to recent standards for earthquakes; 43% didn’t meet the standards for flooding).

The EC also made available both the Communication from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament  (a succinct but informative 20 pages) and the Commission Staff Working Document  (62 pages of extensive detail, including the key recommendations and a breakdown of results by country). While no EU nuclear plants were found to be in such poor shape as to require immediate closure, the findings still make it clear that more can be done to prepare for adverse events. The Working Document’s recommendations regarding “Station Black-Out” (a complete loss of power) include availability of an alternative cooling system; equipment and staff prepared to deal with an event affecting all onsite reactors at once; and supply/availability of mobile equipment including emergency lights, firefighting gear, and batteries or alternative power supplies – some or all of which could have turned the tide of events at Fukushima.

8 Aug

Update on Yucca Mountain: Abeyance Annoyance

Posted by Hester Serebrin in Department of Energy, NRC, Nuclear Power.

Photo by musicalwds. Some rights reserved.

An August 3rd Order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held in abeyance Aiken County, N.C. et al., v. NRC, a case seeking to mandate the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to act on the Department of Energy’s long-pending license application to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. The NRC is resisting, according to one of the concurring judges, “on the ground that it does not have sufficient appropriated funds to complete action on the license application (even though it has appropriated funds available to at least start).”

However, the judge continues, “[compelling the NRC] now would entail significant expenditures of government resources […and] Congress’s upcoming appropriations decisions could well affect whether those expenditures are necessary.” Therefore, in granting the abeyance, the Court asks that the parties “file, by no later than December 14, 2012, updates on the status of Fiscal Year 2013 appropriations with respect to the issues presented.”

In a recent memo, Law Firm Van Ness Feldman has a succinct recap of the project’s background – including the recent Order, as well as speculation on possible outcomes. You can also see other Green Mien posts on the Yucca Mountain saga here.

20 Jul

DOE and Nuclear: Working Together

Posted by John Renehan in Department of Energy, Nuclear Power.

Photo by rowens27. Some rights reserved.

Today’s post tells what looks like a story of the Department of Energy putting its money where its mouth is. Back in January, we wrote about DOE’s promotion of small modular nuclear reactors through industry cost-shared agreements and new engineering and design certification. On Tuesday, DOE announced $13 million of investments into nuclear energy innovation research, through both targeted research projects and university programs.

The Department of Energy awarded $10.9 million to thirteen projects selected for their potential to help solve such common challenges in the nuclear industry as improving reactor safety, performance, and cost competitiveness.

Four of these projects are focused on manufacturing methods – the production and design of nuclear plant components, including concrete construction and joining processes that can be used in small modular reactor manufacturing. Nine more are focused on reactor materials for piping, wiring cladding in reactors and across the fuel cycle.

The remaining $1.6 million go to training the next generation of nuclear energy scientists and engineers. Projects and programs based at Pennsylvania State University, the University of Illinois, and the University of Michigan are receiving DOE funding, which will go toward assessing instruments engineers use to monitor reactor material, studying properties of steel irradiated at high temperatures, and examining cracks in steel that appear after years of operation in a reactor.

The Department of Energy describes its involvement in all aspects of the nuclear industry as part of its “all of the above” energy policies, aiming to restart the nation’s nuclear industry and promote education in science and technology. With the first new reactor approved since 1978 on the way in Georgia, we might be seeing real progress.

20 Jun

New NRC Report Aims to Tighten Nuclear Power Safety Protocol

Posted by Kyle Hargus in Nuclear Power.

Photo by Lynne Kirton. Some rights reserved.

Anyone who’s seen The China Syndrome or any episode of The Simpsons that features Homer on the job at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant probably has some vague ideas of the dangers of nuclear power when things go wrong. Hell, I’ll admit to basing most of my own uneasiness regarding nuclear power plants off of these two pieces of culture. While these kinds of depictions of nuclear disaster are most certainly exaggerated, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) have admitted that their safety measures and practices regarding nuclear plant safety are indeed insufficient, and do not measure up to the magnitude of risk involved.

Thus, in a new 318 page report released earlier this year helmed by NRC Commissioner George Apostolakis, the NRC outlines its intent to restructure and redraft its safety protocols and regulations to reflect these concerns. After a brief epigraph from The History of the Peloponnesian War (!), the report gets into its “Proposed Risk Management Regulatory Framework,” outlining its intention to minimize risk by asking three very basic questions: “What can go wrong? How likely is it? What are the consequences?” In the wake of last year’s tragic Fukushima Daiichi triple meltdown disaster, the NRC is preparing to answer these questions while considering factors (for instance a 9.0 earthquake followed by a tsunami) that would otherwise not be taken into account.

Using a variety of metrics, the report uses Probabilistic Risk Assessment to try to identify a wider berth of potential issues and to outline all possible responses to these issues. However, as the New York Times points out, some critics of the report are already concerned with the report’s findings. David Lochbaum, who has previously gone on record as being unsatisfied with the NRC’s preventative measures, worries that the risk estimates outlined in this report “sometimes ignore known safety problems. “

“Summing up all the risks mathematically yields a result that is contradicted by actual operating experience,” he continues, suggesting that, while this new report may lead to tightened regulations over the next 10 – 15 years, they may only serve as a half-measure.

 

8 Jun

House Continues Commitment to Yucca Mountain Depository

Posted by John Renehan in NRC, Nuclear Power.

The House Wednesday allocated an additional $10 million to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2013 for the commission to complete a review of the permitting process to use Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a nuclear waste storage site. Many members of an irked House said they believed the NRC did not need the funding to complete the permit, but were taking action to force the NRC to fulfill its legal obligations under a 2002 law approving the Yucca site.

As we have posted in the past, the apparent cancellation or postponement of the decades-long project, with the NRC refusing to complete the Department of Energy’s permit application to use the site, has been dogged by accusations of messy political maneuvering and stalled by opposition from the Obama administration. The DOE has spent $12 billion on Yucca so far.

The House, with overwhelming support, passed the amendment to the Energy and Water appropriations bill to ensure that the NRC is unable to use funding as an excuse to effectively cancel the Yucca Mountain project in evasion of previously passed laws. Representatives pointed out the projects’ long history of support in Congress, which has acted 32 times to pursue Yucca Mountain as a repository.

Thirty-three states host 143 million pounds of nuclear waste locally, and Representatives from nuclear-heavy states have taken the lead on Yucca. In addition, Washington and South Carolina have argued to the US Court of Appeals that the NRC must rule on Yucca’s potential as a waste site.

15 May

One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s…Affordable, Safe Form of Carbon-Free Energy

Posted by Hester Serebrin in Nuclear Power.

I listened to this podcast this morning on my way to work, and though it originally “aired” more than five months ago, the ideas were as fresh as ever.

Well, kind of fresh. Granted, TerraPower has been around for more than four years, and traveling-wave reactors were first proposed way back in the 1950s, but when issues of nuclear waste are piling up around the country, the energy surrounding the company certainly seem timely.

But let me back up. In this particular podcast, titled “Weird Recycling,” our beloved host Stephen Dubner (of Freakonomics fame) takes us to meet mathematician, physicist, inventor, and food scientist Nathan Myrhvold, who joined forces with Bill Gates and others to found the aforementioned TerraPower – a company that “began as a series of explorations related to many energy technologies.” Out of these explorations “came an advanced nuclear energy solution that presents a new path toward an affordable, safe form of carbon-free energy.”

Specifically, that solution means using traveling wave reactor technology to turn depleted uranium (a waste byproduct of the production of enriched uranium for use in nuclear reactors) into an inexpensive, stable, zero-emissions, inexhaustible power source, according to TerraPower.

Could this make our “national nuclear garbage can” a moot issue? Potentially – though we’ll have to wait a few years. A technical adviser for TerraPower is quoted in the New York Times:

“We’ve had conversations with the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, the French, [where a pilot plant may be built]” Reynolds said in an interview. “We have an aggressive schedule where we think it is important to get something built and accumulate data so that we can eventually build them in the U.S. Breaking ground in 2015, with a startup in 2020, is more aggressive than our current [U.S.] regulatory structure can support.”

4 May

National Nuclear Garbage Can Part II: The Courts

Posted by John Renehan in Department of Energy, NRC, Nuclear Power.

Yucca Mountain. Photo by GPN, some rights reserved.

About a year ago, we posted on the debate surrounding Yucca Mountain, the proposed nuclear waste repository in Nevada. Approved by Congress in 2002, the Department of Energy submitted a license application in 2008, and spent $12 billion on the project. Since then, the project has stalled. The agency withdrew its application, and the 2011 federal budget included no funding for the repository project.

Our previous post (with more background details) discussed the GAO study reviewing the termination of the program, that found the DOE botched many steps along the way, and that restarting another repository project would add twenty years and cost billions more. In its apparent haste to abandon Yucca as a repository, the Department sold property associated with the project and lost years of staff and contractor expertise.

Now, Washington State and South Carolina, states with a large amount of nuclear waste, are suing the federal government, saying the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a legal obligation to rule on whether Yucca Mountain is a suitable burial spot – something it has declined to do.

Theoretically, there is still potential funding for a nuclear waste-disposal project. The government has collected $29 billion from utilities for disposal of nuclear waste, but it is unclear if Congress will appropriate that money for a nuclear repository. The NRC still has $10 million for the licensing process at Yucca.

Andrew Fitz, a Washington State assistant attorney general arguing to a three-judge panel for the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, claimed an NRC ruling on the suitability of Yucca as a repository is necessary for the development of any national nuclear waste site, and that the agency is abdicating its duty. An NRC lawyer pointed out that reviewing the DOE’s application with no prospect they would pursue the project would simply be a waste of the $10 million (the New York Times has the full story here).

A Times article from last May on the politics of the program’s cancellation makes some of this mess a little less confusing, but even if Washington and South Carolina’s legal challenge is successful, we probably shouldn’t cross our fingers for a centralized repository for the 143 million pounds of nuclear waste being stored locally near reactors in 33 states.

22 Feb

Opinions on Rising Oil Prices and the GOP Effort to Use Them as a Campaign Weapon

Posted by Kyle Hargus in Iran, Nuclear Power, Oil and Gas Sector.

Photo by dynamosquito. Some rights reserved.

New York Times political correspondent Michael Shear took an in-depth look yesterday at the GOP’s effort to spin rising gas prices against the Obama administration in anticipation of attacking the administration’s economic policies at large in the looming general election. Current oil prices are hovering somewhere around $105 a barrel and #3.58 per gallon at the pumps (up 40 cents from where it was a year ago at this time), with those prices expected to spike somewhere over the $4 mark before the summer arrives. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was quick to deflect these prices away from the President, stating that “there are no magic solutions to rising oil prices” and highlighting the fact that American oil production is at the highest level that it has been in eight years.

In his piece, Shear is quick to point at the rising conflict in Iran, and international concern over its nuclear weapons arsenal. Earlier this week, Iran announced that it would cut off oil shipments to Britain and France in response to their tougher sanctions against them, and experts have also linked the U.S.’s warnings against Israel’s hostilities towards Iran as responsible for the rising oil prices.

But growing concerns over nuclear war are not the only reason for these high domestic prices (thank God). Economists have also highlighted the recent surge in the U.S. economy as perhaps equally responsible. Shear also appeared this week on PBS’s News Hour alongside John Kilduff, founding partner at the hedge fund Again Capital. Kilduff had this to say about how the improvement in the economy could negatively affect gas prices for the American consumer:

“The U.S. employment picture in particular and a lot of the coincident economic indicators, the various Federal Reserve reports that have come out over the past couple of months now have all indicated a growing U.S. economy, which speaks directly to increased gasoline demand… There’s no doubt that there’s investors of all stripes right now betting on the fact that there’s going to be a conflict with Iran, that the global economy is going to outpace available oil demand and push the price up ahead of time.”

Meanwhile, Shear goes on to speculate how the GOP will end up using these high oil prices as ammunition against Obama in the coming election:

[Republicans] think that, you know, the gas prices both affects people in the short term. And if they can, you know, blame President Obama for what people feel like when they go and pay $60 to fill up their car, that’s a winner.

He also remarks that he’s unsure how much Iran will come up specifically on the Republican side of the conversation:

“…It’s in their interests from a political perspective to talk less about kind of the underlying economic factors that are maybe outside of the president’s control, and focus more on what they claim the president could do or is not doing to fix this situation.”

Environmental blog Treehugger points out, on the other hand, that expanding American drilling efforts will do nothing to temper oil prices in the short term, because of the time it takes to approve, develop, and transport from new operations, making very little difference in the context of the larger global oil market. As so many conservationists have pointed out, this may in fact be an opportunity for Obama and Democrats to get on message about the impossibility of relying on fossil fuels in these tumultuous times.

17 Feb

The Agencies Align for Nuclear

Posted by John Renehan in Department of Energy, Investment, NRC, Nuclear Power, Power Plants.

Secretary Chu. Photo by NNSA News. Some rights reserved.

Last Thursday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved Southern Co.’s construction of a nuclear reactor near Waynesboro, Georgia, the first new reactor to be approved since the 1978 construction of the Shearon Harris plant in North Carolina. (The Hill covers the approval in more detail here). The story of the next year’s accident at Three Mile Island and its drag on the nuclear industry has been well told, and in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, an Obama-mandated task force calling for sweeping improvements to the NRC’s “patchwork” of regulatory requirements threatened to extend what has been decades of regulatory delays. Combined with financing problems, the industry has struggled to build new reactors. On both fronts, this week’s developments point to good news for the industry.

The Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s trade group, touts NRC’s approval as recognition that nuclear energy can contribute to a low-carbon future and a diversified energy supply, while critics say that the project should face additional scrutiny and environmental review after the disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant. Those events have prompted the NRC to consider new rules to better protect the country’s 104 reactors from earthquakes and floods, but did not deter the Commission, which voted 4-1 in favor of approval. The Commission’s chairman, Gregory Jaczko, was the lone dissenter, highlighting that reactor operators have made no assurances they will incorporate lessons learned from Fukushima into their operations.

The government also has an instrumental role in financing the new plant. The Energy Department announced this week that it is finalizing an $8.3 billion taxpayer-backed loan to build the reactors. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said that though the project still has to meet a number of conditions, the loan is nearing final approval, as reported in this article from The Hill. No surprise to anyone following the story behind another government-backed loan to an alternative-energy company, that company’s subsequent bankruptcy, and a year-long House investigation, the DOE’s loan is not without its own controversy.

Rep. Edward Markey, D-Massachusetts, in his opposition to the plant, pointed to anger over a $535 million loan to California solar firm Solyndra, which House Republicans of the Energy and Commerce Committee have been investigating for more than a year, alleging that administration officials missed warning signs and mishandled taxpayer funds. Markey wants the Committee to open an inquiry into Southern Co.’s new loan, noting that it is worth fifteen times more than Solyndra’s ill-fated loan, and describing it as “exponentially riskier.” Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Florida, who heads the oversight panel, says the renewable energy loan guarantees that his panel is investigating are at a higher risk than the “proven [nuclear] industry” with its “established record.”

While the tentacles of politics are wrapped around every bit of this story, it illustrates some of the major hurdles alternative- and clean-energy projects face in the future, from regulatory uncertainty to evaluating risk in financing such projects. The Green Mien has posted about significant progress in financing clean energy, but we predict that Knowledge Mosaic’s tools in navigating the regulatory landscape will not prove obsolete anytime soon.

24 Jan

The Future of Nuclear: Small Reactors

Posted by John Renehan in Department of Energy, NRC, Nuclear Power, Power Plants.

Photo by Ayumu Kawazoe. Some rights reserved.

On Friday, we posted about the fate of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant and its safety and reliability issues. Today, we turn to the future of nuclear power, as envisioned by the Department of Energy: small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). That the Yankee plant in Vermont generates 35% of the electricity used in the state without emitting greenhouse gases is an outcome the DOE wants to encourage across the country.

These small reactors draw on the engineering expertise that was developed for the reactors powering naval vessels, and could be made in factories and shipped to sites with small electricity grids. Their economy of mass production would reduce capital cost and construction time, not to mention an easier permitting process. Utilities could have the flexibility to increase production by adding small reactors to their grid over time.

On Friday, the DOE released a draft Funding Opportunity Announcement to gather input from the industry to establish cost-shared agreements and support the design and licensing of SMRs. With the goal of deploying two reactors by 2022, the Department aims to back what it describes as “first-of-a-kind engineering [and] design certification and licensing.” Serving as a model for this plan is the certification of Westinghouse Electric’s new AP1000 reactor, which was developed with funding from the Energy Department.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu portrays the move as a way to advance America’s competitive edge in developing clean energy technologies as well as a step toward the United States regaining leadership in nuclear power. Forbes reports that this leadership has moved toward Asia recently, as startups – notably the Bill Gates-backed TerraPower – foreign governments, and industry giants alike have been working on small reactors in nuclear-friendly countries such as China, India, and Russia. Chinergy is building the most advanced modular project in China, a joint venture in South Africa is developing what is called a pebble bed modular reactor, and a corner of Siberia hosts four small units of a unique “graphite-moderated boiling water design.” The World Nuclear Association’s website describes current trends in small nuclear reactors.

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