You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap...
Former blog for NEI featuring news and commentary on the commercial nuclear energy industry. Head to NEI.org for the latest blog posts.
Comments
I think I feel a big shift coming, now we just need to continue with measured haste the long process of actually building new plants.
Senator Clinton raises two legitimate issues: the real cost of post 9/11 security that the industry/NRC have to date been unwilling to afford and the mountain of unmanaged nuclear waste including that first cupful generated more than a half century ago.
Two of the most glaring and untenable issues of nuclear power of the more which she did not allude to.
gunter, nirs
Senator Clinton raises two legitimate issues: the real cost of post 9/11 security that the industry/NRC have to date been unwilling to afford and the mountain of unmanaged nuclear waste including that first cupful generated more than a half century ago.
Two of the most glaring and untenable issues of nuclear power of the more which she did not allude to.
gunter, nirs
David Walters
leftatomics.blogspot.com
It is a really tiny mountain - if you start with a base the size of an NFL football field you would only get about 10 feet high if you put all of the high level used nuclear fuel that has been produced in the US in the same place.
Based on recent events, it seems to me that we had better increase the security patrols at municipal swimming pools. The chlorine storage areas a sources for some really nasty "dirty bombs."
A quick search of Google News reveals more than 2400 references to chlorine bombs. More than 500 of those stories have been published within the last week.
In fact she said some very nice things.
-NNadir
It is a lie to say that the industry does not manage it's waste. In fact, it is one of the few industries that does manage it's waste. You've got coal plants spewing uncounted tons of effluents to the biosphere, to be blown by the four winds to who knows where. In my state alone the landscape is dotted with abandoned coal mines, both strip mines and subsurface tunnels, to cave in on unsuspecting landowners. There are steel mills sitting around rotting away, leaching untold poisons into the water and land. There are mountains of tires and batteries piled up as the refuse of the automotive industry, and Gunter utters nary a peep about those. While nuclear plants keep their spent fuel safely sequestered, paying money ahead of time for eventual permanent disposal, and Gunter and others have the gall to say it is unmanaged. I'm getting tired of this crap going unchallenged.
We can reprocess the high level waste, separating and reusing the high level material to generate more power. The low level material can be sorted and either re-reacted in the cladding of the reactor or just safely stored until even the low level risk is gone.
France accepts spent fuel rods from all countries for reprocessing. We don't because past presidents prohibit it by presidential directive - this makes as much sense as prohibiting the reprocessing of aluminum.
We can address the safety of transport of high level waste by building reactors in clusters of 4 or more and co-locating a reprocessing facility.
The remaining low-level waste, similar to medical waste, carries a risk that can be managed. Loss of low level waste is serious - but it doesn't present a bomb threat and thus isn't as attractive to terrorists.
The United States should:
1. Begin manufacturing reactors that are built and operated by the Government - to a standard design - selling the resultant steam to utilities for power generation and process heat.
2. Co-locate four or more reactors and an on-site reprocessing plant. The policy should be "no high level material leaves the protected power company campus."
3. Build and sell fuel rods to any country that agrees to international inspection and the return of the spent fuel rods to the US (or other acceptable country) for supervised reprocessing.
4. Begin immediately to reprocess the significant amount of nuclear material no longer used by our strategic nuclear force. The cold war ending has moved a several year supply of high level nuclear material from the strategic bombers into storage. We should literally beat our swords into plowshares by using this valuable material for fuel rather than for bombs. This is the only scientifically suitable way to "get rid" of our retired bombs.
Thank you for reading this far. This proposal can truly help the US become energy independent when combined with increased efficiency and reasonable use of solar, geothermal, tide, wind and other renewal sources.
teqtom
There are risks on every form of power generation - dams fail, coal pollutes, oil creates significant risk of war and economic disruption - and obviously, nuclear has economic and environmental risks.
But, if we count the life loss of mining and waging a Gulf war - and the economic disruption caused by our balance of trade problems, nuclear is, I believe, the least bad of the good.