Friday Follow-Ups

On Babcock and Wilcox’s announcement of new, smaller nuclear reactors:

Our friends at the Heritage Foundation like what they see:

One of the most interesting things about B&W’s entrance into the reactor market is that unlike most other designers, they have the industrial infrastructure to start building these things right now. And what’s more, this is a company that builds reactors today, multiple reactors each year, that the U.S. government uses for national security purposes. No one else has that on their resume.

True enough, though not necessarily determinative in any significant sense. Let’s call it a point in their favor.

The exciting thing about nuclear power is not what it gives us today, but what its potential is for the future.

Also true. This being Heritage, let’s let them have their moment:

It is a perfect example of why government can’t pick winners and losers among energy sources. Government subsidization of some technologies inevitably crowds out investment and innovation for others.

Or it spurs investment and innovation, depending. But Heritage will be Heritage.

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On the Republican’s American Energy Plan:

The U.K. newspaper the Guardian, much like Heritage, can be relied upon for certain go-to attitudes. For example:

America's nuclear industry and its supporters in Congress have moved to hijack Barack Obama's agenda for greening the economy by producing a rival plan to build 100 new reactors in 20 years, and staking a claim for the money to come from a proposed clean energy development bank.

Really? Hijack? Nuclear’s been puttering around the greens for over 50 years. Maybe it shouldn’t be put in a position where it can be described as hijacking an agenda? Especially since it’s so responsive to that agenda.

Ellen Vancko, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said: "The nuclear industry would like to be able to finance the next generation of nuclear reactors using the faith and credit of the US taxpayer to underwrite the expansion. They don't want to be responsible for any risk of financing these plants and neither do their lenders."

If the UCS thinks every other segment of the energy business doesn’t have much the same in mind, we’ve got a windmill we’d like to sell it – cheap. And in defense of every energy industry, including nuclear, this is a public-private partnership; government does have some ideas on how it wants energy deployed. No industry stands utterly alone. (You could say the Guardian, UCS and Heritage approach the role of government in the energy sector in surprisingly similar ways.)

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And on our mention of Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, we thought we’d be remiss not to point you to Wolfram Alpha, described as a computational knowledge engine. It’s doesn’t so much provide you with links to other sites as pull together a ton of information about your search term, derived from other sites. For, um, nuclear scientists and engineers, there’s a lot of potential here. Here’s a couple of examples, from a rank amateur:

Uranium 235

stopping power air, 0.5MeV electron

Consider playing with Alpha as your Friday Fun project. You can even download your results as a pdf or a Mathematica notebook. (You can get a free notebook viewer from Wolfram’s site. It’s worth the download - lots of great content for it apart from Alpha.)

The containment chamber of the Babcock & Wilcox reactor.

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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