Jordan – Gates – Germany

Jordan – Gates – Germany - NuScale

A couple of days ago, I expressed a little disappointment that Bahrain was not joining the nuclear family – well, maybe it will, but it doesn’t seem to be on its radar right now. So let’s replace that bit of grimness:

Like many others, Jordan is not giving up on its nuclear program, which it considers an essential part of its energy plan. The country has plans to build two reactors in the next decade, and two additional reactors are planned for the next 25 years.

Jordan is at the stage where it is scoping out vendors:

The country’s atomic commission has pre-selected possible technologies from Atomic Energy of Canada, Russia’s ZAO Atomstroyexport and Atmea, a joint venture between France’s Areva and Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

Rolling right along.

---

Bill Gates has been enough a fan of nuclear energy to invest money in it. Have events in Japan changed his mind? Wired thought it would find out:

The good news about nuclear is that there’s hardly been any innovation in the past three decades, so the room to do things differently is quite dramatic. The difference between today’s designs and one from the 1960s is night and day. We understand heat pipes a lot better today. We understand what the decay of heat looks like. There’s this company, TerraPower, which former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myrhvold and I have spun out of his invention group, Intellectual Ventures. We’ve got a new nuclear design, a generation four. On paper it’s quite amazing.

Well, I can’t say I agree with everything here, but Gates is on the hunt for the next big thing (as he often is) and he’s decided that TerraPower is it. That makes everything else, in his mind, rather outmoded – out with DOS, in with OS/2.

You can read the rest at Wired. A lot of his views on energy are counterintuitive, but that makes them challenging even when you find yourself disagreeing with him most of the time.

---

Economist Ferdinand Banks takes a look at the German decision to close its nuclear plants. The piece is a little dense in style, but easily comprehensible and even amusing. A taste:

Here it needs to be appreciated that if the German nuclear retreat were a reality instead of a politically motivated and bizarre fantasy, the French nuclear sector might have already started to expand in order to receive the hundreds of billions in export income that would become available when German nuclear facilities begin to close their doors.

Not completely fair, I’m sure, but love it anyway.

---

NuScale, a prospective designer of a small reactor design, recently found itself the negative beneficiary of an investment firm heavily involved in a Ponzi scheme. NuScale had nothing to do with the bad business, but of course, suffered a stark reversal of fortune and almost collapsed. Better days ahead:

NuScale Power has been quietly recalling laid-off employees over the past two months as it slowly recovers from a financial crisis that very nearly proved catastrophic.

That’s good news.

NuScale's modular reactor technology has continued to attract attention in the nuclear industry, however, and some modest outside investment. Landrey declined to say how much new backing NuScale has raised so far, but said his company is increasingly confident about its future.

That’s chief marketing officer Bruce Landrey and that’s about what you’d expect him to say. Some of the vendors working on small reactors likely won’t last – it’s just how business works – but it would have been a shame to see NuScale go pear shaped due to the bad behavior of others.

Bill Gates

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

Search This Blog