Things to Come in Iran and Indiana

A fair number of news stories are not about what happened but what might happen soon. The story below about California concerns an as-yet unissued executive order that might (or might not) include nuclear energy. A thing to come.

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A Bad Thing to Come: War in Iran

Iran is ready to defend its nuclear facilities against any foreign attack, chief of Iran's Nuclear Energy Organization Ali Akbar Salehi said Tuesday.

"Iran has been continuously threatened with attacks on its nuclear facilities ... Tehran is confident of its capacities to defend itself," Salehi told Iran's IRINN state TV channel.

Capacity? Sure. Actual ability? Well…

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A Good Thing to Come to Forestall the Bad Thing to Come: Joint Talks with Iran:

After months of anticipation, the United States, Iran and other world powers on Monday set an Oct. 1 date to meet and potentially discuss Iran's nuclear program, which remains a source of concern to the West and Israel.

While the Obama administration has reversed U.S. policy by agreeing to meet on the nuclear issue without preconditions, Iran has all but ruled out talks over halting its production of reactor-grade nuclear fuel, the West's central worry.

What Iran says now and what it will say in October might well be quite different. But Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, actually has made some promising statements:

"But this does not mean that within a larger framework [of] discussing nuclear issues, disarmament, peaceful uses of nuclear energy, nonproliferation . . . in this regard, yes, we are open to discussion."

Which, if you wanted to be a cynic, might just be setting the table for a failure – easier to blame the United States for a bad outcome if one looks utterly reasonable now. Whether you prefer saber rattling or negotiation, history has shown both approaches have had epic fails and epic successes. So far, stalemate. Let’s see what happens in October.

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Let’s leave Iran for a truly nice thing to come:

Nuclear plants in Indiana

There are no nuclear power plants in Indiana, but lawmakers are expected to wrestle next year with whether to offer an incentive that could boost prospects for building reactors in the state.

Well, that’s promising. And for a little irony, try this:

The debate centers on whether utilities should be able to charge customers for the cost of building a nuclear plant as soon as construction begins, rather than having to wait until the reactor is operating. Current state law only allows utilities building so-called "clean coal" power plants -- those that release less carbon dioxide -- to charge customers for construction that is still in progress.

So much cleaner, or should we say “cleaner”, than nuclear.

The open road in Indiana. My dad once told me that driving through Indiana was the most boring experience of his life: straight roads through an unchanging landscape and only tub thumping preachers on the radio. (This would have been during the forties – we’re sure it’s lots better now.)

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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