A Ban Falls: Sweden Refocuses on Nuclear Energy

Sometimes, you focus your eyes one place while all the action is happening somewhere else. (Where would magicians be without this idea?) In our case, we’ve been patiently waiting for Germany to overturn their ill-considered nuclear ban while over in Sweden, they’re actually, um, overturning their ill-considered ban:

Sweden is a leader on renewable energy but is struggling to develop alternative source like hydropower and wind to meet its growing energy demands. If parliament approves scrapping the [nuclear] ban, Sweden would join a growing list of countries rethinking nuclear power as a source of energy amid concerns over global warming and the reliability of energy suppliers such as Russia.

While we’re still a touch wobbly on the notion of nuclear energy being used as emergency rations to fend off Russia, Sweden’s issues seem based on a desire to keep their carbon emissions down. To us, that gives nuclear energy a firmer basis for moving forward as part of a broader energy policy. Sweden already has 10 operating plants and it was doubtless the prospect of retiring them (scheduled for next year) that gave the country second thoughts.

We’re not claiming a win against wind and hydro here – we doubt the Swedes ever thought it plausible to replace the 10 plants (supplying – get this – 46% of their electricity) with those technologies. But it does remind us that between European nations banning nuclear after TMI and/or Chernobyl and now, no one seems to have figured out what might happen next. If carbon reduction had not become an issue, would Sweden have opened coal-fired plants (with carbon capture and sequestration, of course)? We can’t know – but we can know that nuclear’s use as a fear engine is just about done. Let’s let the New York Times tell us where we are:

Last year, the British government invited companies to build new reactors on existing sites. France, which already generates more than 80 percent of its electricity through nuclear power, plans to expand its installations. Finland is building a reactor scheduled to open early in the next decade that is expected to become the most powerful reactor in commercial operation.

And let’s add Bulgaria and Slovakia, which we obsessed over last week, too. Okay, that’s it: back to Germany.

Is that the soul of nuclear energy coming into focus there? Why no, it’s Liv Ullmann in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). The boy reaching to her is Jorgen Lindstrom. If you want to see someone’s head explode, have a friend watch this movie and then ask them to explain it to you. Boom!

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

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