Deposits at the Fuel Bank

The IAEA approves a fuel bank:

The fuel bank would offer nations civilian atomic reactor fuel on an apolitical basis in hopes of deterring them from pursuing their own capability to produce such material -- a process that could also generate nuclear-weapon fuel.

Essentially, it does this by providing enriched uranium when there is a disruption in the commercial supply. The idea is that this limits proliferation opportunities because the host country will not do the enrichment itself.

Naturally, there are still a lot of details to work out:

Undecided aspects of the plan include the site of the fuel supply, the precise process by which the bank could acquire additional fuel and how its capacity could be increased.

This story goes into more details of Warren Buffett’s involvement, which was considerable:

"Throughout my lifetime I will be interested in this subject and I will back that interest up with money," Buffett told Reuters. "If the project sounds like a good one and has any real chance of reducing the probabilities of the terrible use of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, I'm prepared to put up significant money."

And he did back it up with money - $50 million worth, matched by the United States and other countries, with Kuwait’s $10 million kicking the total over the necessary $150 million to get started.

The Washington Post was not able to get a response from the Obama administration (though it’s known to want it), but did weigh in with a quote from former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, co-chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative:

"This is a breakthrough in global cooperation to enable peaceful uses of nuclear energy while reducing the risks of proliferation and catastrophic terrorism."

Indeed it is. Much more to come about this.

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I didn’t know what to think:

The [chair of the] Kuwaiti National Committee for Utilizing Nuclear Power for Peaceful Purposes, Dr. Ahmad Bushara, said "Kuwait seeks to build four 1,000 MW nuclear power plants, to produce electricity, by January 2011."

Well, that’s ambitious, since ground hasn’t been broken for the first plant yet. But Dr. Bushara, perhaps badly translated or perhaps just a victim of a typo, means that the committee wants to get the ball rolling then.

He added, that by 2013, Kuwait will go out on bidding for its first nuclear project and launch its first nuclear power plant by 2020-2022.

That’s more like it.

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We’ve followed the German struggles with keeping its nuclear plants open with both amusement and dismay. Amusement because the Germans are complaining despite being in a very good place – safe nuclear plants, a good head start on meeting carbon emission reduction targets – and dismay because the government dithered so long that it led to people protesting against their own best interest.

Others have the same attitude:

Putin recognized that "the German public does not like the nuclear power industry for some reason." He continued: "But I cannot understand what fuel you will take for heating. You do not want gas, you do not develop the nuclear power industry, so you will heat with firewood?" Putin then noted, "You will have to go to Siberia to buy the firewood there," as Europeans "do not even have firewood."

Putin is, of course, Russian President Vladimir Putin, showing he can bring his customary bluntness to any situation. Russia has a bad habit of turning off the natural gas spigot to the West, so there’s that. But when he’s right, he’s right.

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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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