COP15: Leaks, AREVA and Tree People

Our impression reading the daily news wrap-ups about COP15 is that everyone is holding their breaths over the arrival of the world leaders next week and that this first week has more the trappings of a, um, conventional convention – that is, trade show displays, break-out meetings on different topics, people dressed in Styrofoam tree costumes giving out flyers – that kind of thing.

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Probably the element gaining most attention is a leaked version of the final document, or at least Denmark’s version of same, which appears to heavily favor the developed over the developing world. (You can read the leaked document here and decide for yourself.) As you can imagine, this has gone over poorly:

[Chairman of the G-77 Lumumba Stanislaus] Di-Aping, a Somali by birth, is reported to have told an urgently-called, closed meeting of 100 countries that the draft was tantamount to asking the G-77 to ‘sign a suicide pact,’ adding that the Danish draft was ‘worse than no deal’ and urging attending countries to firmly reject the proposals.

We suspect that even if second thoughts didn’t emerge over the document and it was presented next week in this leaked version, developing countries would be as angry then as now and would not vote for it – extremely inopportune. So better to give it an airing now – perhaps why it got leaked in advance.

“If Copenhagen ends as a fiasco, the entire Scandinavian multi-lateral tradition will be in jeopardy. What your prime minister is doing runs contrary to the spirit of development aid that Denmark and the Danes have provided for Africa for many years,” Di-Aping says.

That’s pretty angry.

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The Council of Foreign Relations has done an interesting round-up of some of the countries involved in the conference and their various negotiating points. There’s one explicit mention of nuclear energy, in the entry for South Korea:

The government previously signaled (Korea Times) it will work toward achieving this reduction through the promotion of bio- and nuclear energy, energy efficient technologies, and possibly through the introduction of daylight savings.

But it’s all quite interesting and well sourced and gives you a nice scorecard to use in judging the who what where when as the final document comes together next week (assuming it isn’t the Danish one, of course).

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Where you have a conference, you have protesters. Treehugger provides a nice slideshow of some of the fun stunts and costumes activists of various stripes have utilized to make their points. We like Treehugger’s attempt to keep a balanced view:

As COP15 moves into day two things are starting to heat up a little bit on the protest side of things. Perhaps heat up is too strong. Things are starting to come to a simmer. Yesterday saw a couple activist stunts, by the likes of Avaaz. Today saw a string of them, plus a bed-in in honor of John Lennon's assassination anniversary.

That’s going to be pretty arcane to younger people, but fine. The slideshow includes the tree people, my favorites so far.

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AREVA is following the conference on its blog. As a nuclear “pure play” company, AREVA is allowed to be unconflicted about various climate change efforts, but it could also be neutral and is not.

AREVA has long been a corporate voice championing large-scale global transitions to CO2-free clean energy, and that the planet needs to wean itself off of older dirtier fuels of our past. We hope to be a vital presence at the event. And will post our thoughts and progress here.

Good stuff, even if you take your corporate shades off.

Tree people. A shame they don’t have apples to give out.

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...

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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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