A Blueprint for Securing America's Energy Future

The Institute for 21st Century Energy, an affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, released its Blueprint for Securing America's Energy Future [PDF] earlier today, calling for the significant expansion of nuclear power in the U.S. The Institute made nine recommendations:

Congress should increase the loan guarantee authority of DOE’s Loan Guarantee Program commensurate with the capital cost of new nuclear power facilities. Additionally, Congress should transition the function of the DOE Loan Guarantee Program to a more permanent, stable financing platform, like the Clean Energy Bank of the U.S. (CEBUS) discussed in Section V of this report.
Congress should amend the Nuclear Standby Support Program to allow for recovery of increased project costs as a result of delays, rising equipment costs, escalation clauses, and costs of litigation, and it should provide for the recovery of 100% of covered costs and debt obligations.
Congress should ensure that the Nuclear Regulatory Commisson (NRC) has the necessary resources to review and approve combined construction and operating licenses for new nuclear power plants in a timely manner.
DOE should increase the amount of federally stockpiled uranium available for use in domestic nuclear facilities and create a strategic reserve of low-enriched uranium from its existing inventory to guard against supply disruptions.
The President and Congress should authorize the Secretary of Energy to enter into agreements with willing communities to foster the development of privately owned central facilities for the temporary storage of used nuclear fuel where DOE could purchase storage services for commercial used fuel removed from nuclear power plants.
The President and Congress must commit to a permanent solution to our nation’s nuclear waste. As directed by current law, the President and Congress must act expeditiously to ensure that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Yucca Mountain licensing process proceeds and, if it is licensed, provide full funding for construction and operation of the repository as well as take legislative action to permanently withdraw the necessary land from public use, eliminate the current statutory 70,000 metric ton cap on disposal capacity at Yucca Mountain, and establish a radiation health standard for a time period that can reasonably be demonstrated through scientific evidence.
If the President or Congress will not fully commit to this path, they owe it to the American public and the utilities that have paid fees and interest in excess of $27 billion into the Nuclear Waste Fund, to pursue a parallel path of centralized interim storage, industrial deployment of advanced recycling technology, and continued governmental research and development to more quickly place the U.S. government in compliance with U.S. law.
Congress should change budgeting rules to take the Nuclear Waste Fund “off budget” and codify use of this fund for interim used fuel storage through purchasing storage services from private central storage facilities as well as used fuel recycling.
The President and Congress should expeditiously establish a program to begin the recycling of the nation’s used nuclear fuel and establish a new corporation to coordinate the federal government’s legal responsibility to safely and reliably dispose of the waste while not subsuming DOE’s R&D mission. This entity should be provided long-term contracting authority andaccess to monies from the Nuclear Waste Fund.

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...

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