Spain: Addicted to Natural Gas

Spain's Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is a self-proclaimed anti-nuclear warrior.

When the aging Jose Cabrera nuclear reactor, about 100 kilometers (63 miles) east of Madrid, was shuttered in April, Zapatero refused to consider a new atomic plant. Instead, the reactor will be replaced with a generator that burns North African gas. Zapatero pledged last month to unveil a plan by the elections in 2008 to phase out all nuclear reactors.

Four decades after dictator General Francisco Franco bet on nuclear power to reduce dependence on foreign energy, Spain is Western Europe's fastest-growing natural gas importer. The shift has come with a steep price tag: The cost of energy imports rose 66 percent in two years to 32.1 billion euros ($41 billion) in 2005, the National Statistics Office in Madrid said.

``We are putting ourselves at the mercy of gas,'' Pedro Rivero, the chairman of Madrid-based Unesa, a utilities' trade group, said in an interview last month.

Gas-fed reactors produce power for about 35 euros a megawatt-hour compared with 14 euros for nuclear plants, according to Madrid-based Union Fenosa SA, owner of the Jose Cabrera plant. Spain gets 75 percent of its energy from fossil fuels, more than the 50 percent average for the European Union.

When you're addicted to natural gas in Europe, it means you're addicted to Russian, Algerian and Iranian natural gas. As we've seen, that's awfully problematic.

Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, Electricity, Environment, Energy, Politics, Russia, Spain

Comments

Anonymous said…

Has any work been done on nuclear
photovoltaic cells? The advantages
over solar photovoltaic panels would seem to drive research in that direction.

October 15, 2006 at 5:35 AM

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