U.S. and Russia to Complete Civilian Nuclear Agreement

I'm sure we'll be hearing more about this story in the next few days:

President Bush has decided to permit extensive U.S. civilian nuclear cooperation with Russia for the first time, administration officials said yesterday, reversing decades of bipartisan policy in a move that would be worth billions of dollars to Moscow but could provoke an uproar in Congress.

Needless to say, plenty of folks are buzzing over this already. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Looks like the nuclear movement is occurring across the G8:

A mass expansion of nuclear power is planned for G8 countries and across the developing world, according to claims.

An action plan for "global energy security" is to be agreed at the G8 Summit in St Petersburg, Russia, next weekend.

Scotland's Sunday Herald newspaper said leaked documents drawn up for the summit envisage a network of nuclear fuel plants in G8 countries along with the widespread sale of reactors to developing countries, as long as a guarantee is given that they will not be used in the making of nuclear weapons.

Confidential drafts of the energy "plan of action" drawn up by the senior G8 officials who guide prime ministers and presidents towards the summit, have been passed to the newspaper. It said one of the main aims of the plan is to spread nuclear power stations around the globe.

Sounds like the diplomatic groundwork for GNEP is being laid right now.

Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, Energy, Technology, Electricity, Environment, Russia

Comments

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

Below is from our rapid response team . Yesterday, regional anti-nuclear organizations asked federal nuclear energy regulators to launch an investigation into what it claims are “newly identified flaws” in Westinghouse’s advanced reactor design, the AP1000. During a teleconference releasing a report on the subject, participants urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend license reviews of proposed AP1000 reactors. In its news release, even the groups making these allegations provide conflicting information on its findings. In one instance, the groups cite “dozens of corrosion holes” at reactor vessels and in another says that eight holes have been documented. In all cases, there is another containment mechanism that would provide a barrier to radiation release. Below, we examine why these claims are unwarranted and why the AP1000 design certification process should continue as designated by the NRC. Myth: In the AP1000 reactor design, the gap between the shield bu...

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

Several weeks ago Joshua Pearce at Clarion University in Pennsylvania released a study titled “ Thermodynamic limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology .” In the study he stated... nuclear energy production would have to increase by 10.5% per year from 2010 to 2050 to both replace fossil-fuel-energy use and meet the future energy demands. This line, of course, made the headlines and has been picked up by several outlets and blogs . When looking into his calculations for this statement, he made one assumption error that overstated the above sentence by nearly a factor of three. Page 121, Section 4.1 of the study states: Richard Smalley pointed out that in 2004, the global economy consumed the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil per day, which converted into electricity terms is the equivalent of 14.5 TeraWatts (TW), or 14,500,000 MegaWatts (MW) (2005). … With a nuclear plant having about 1000 MW (1 GW) of capacity, we would need 14,500...

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

You may have noticed over the past few weeks that a number of nuclear plants are shut down for refueling outages or are resuming operations after just returning from one. This type of routine outage usually occurs in the spring or fall when electricity demand is low so that nuclear reactors can replace about one-third of the spent fuel rods with new fuel and conduct other routine maintenance and repairs at the plant. To get a better sense of how refueling works at a nuclear energy facility, I spoke with Marcus Nichol, NEI’s senior project manager for used fuel storage and transportation, and asked him to explain the basics. Why does a nuclear plant need to replace one-third of its fuel? Nichol: The main purpose of a refueling outage is to replace older fuel that is depleted—meaning it can no longer efficiently produce energy from nuclear fission reactions—with new fuel. This “used fuel” has typically been used in the reactor for four-and-a-half to six years before it is pe...

NEI Nuclear Notes

Search This Blog