Good News from Iowa and India

Out of Iowa:

A bill allowing MidAmerican Energy to seek permission from regulators to move forward with a nuclear power plant passed a Senate committee Tuesday night.
The panel approved the measure 8 to 7. It would allow MidAmerican to ask the Iowa Utilities Board for a rate increase from the company’s customers to fund the cost of permitting, licensing, and building a plant. Costs for such a project have been estimated at $2 billion.

This is good news, a move that, if it continues apace through the legislative process, will solve some notable problems with the Iowa energy mix.

He [state Sen. Matt McCoy(D)], said Iowa could lose as much as 40 percent of its electricity generation from coal plants in the coming years and the only other option would be to build natural gas plants, which he said would not offer stable future prices.

It’s a reasonable environmental choice. I’d be surprised, though, if MidAmerican isn’t looking at natural gas to spell some of those coal plants. That’s been happening in other states.
We did a post on this subject a few entries down. Still a lot more hurdles to clear. More to come on this.
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We’ve looked at the protests involving India’s Kudankulam facility that involved some rock throwing by some pro-plant political figures. Not cool – also not necessary.

The agitation against the Kudankulam nuclear power plant has fizzled out as the Tamil Nadu government gave the green signal for the commissioning of the first unit of the 2X1000 MW power plant.

Especially because it will provide considerable relief in Tamil Nadu:

Tamil Nadu is under the grip of a severe power crisis with a peak hour deficit of 4000 MW. The government has declared a power holiday for industrial units.

This would outstrip any effort to set up windmills – to solve, it requires a full scale energy facility, be it coal, natural gas or nuclear. The most responsible choice in a rapidly developing nation isn’t tough to make.

Other than Chennai, all districts undergo load shedding ranging from six to eight hours a day. The capital city itself goes without power for two hours daily.

Not a tough decision at all.
There is some more information about the protests, but nothing about the rock throwing. In any event, this is a good outcome.
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Sometimes, when one reads about the knock-on effect on employment from the building or collapse of an industrial sector, one might reasonably suspect the books are getting cooked.
The argument that industrial collapse has a reach beyond the immediately effected companies was especially prevalent during the car company rescue in 2007-2008, where it was a frequent talking point that losing the automobile manufacturing industry would also have a dire effect on a untold number of companies that service the industry.
The Center for Automotive Research (yes, its acronym is CAR), put it this way:

Should all of the Detroit Three’s U.S. operations cease in 2009, the first year total employment impact would be a loss of nearly 3.0 million jobs in the U.S. economy—comprised of 239,341 jobs at the Detroit Three, 973,969 indirect/supplier jobs and over 1.7 million spin-off (expenditure-induced) jobs.

Well, it’s true enough – though you cannot pin down numbers as precisely you might like – CAR’s study points out that international auto makers would move some its operations to the U.S., mitigating some of the employment impact - but true enough.
And it works the other way. Consider:

Graham Corporation, a designer and manufacturer of critical equipment for the oil refining, petrochemical and power industries, including the supply of components and raw materials to nuclear energy facilities, today announced that it has been awarded $9.5 million in orders for nuclear energy facilities and an oil sands upgrader.

Let’s leave the oil sands to the side. Westinghouse placed these orders and it’s not for nuclear facilities in China.

James R. Lines, Graham’s President and Chief Executive Officer, commented, “… We consider the orders awarded to us over the last two quarters for the new nuclear energy facilities under construction in the Southeastern United States to be an affirmation both of our reputation for consistently delivering high quality products as well as our exceptional customer service.

And consider that the two Westinghouse reactors at the V.C. Summer facility are in the hopper waiting for final NRC approval. No word from Graham on what this means for employment there, but we may assume it means something positive.
Congratulations to Graham in this instance, but congratulations to a reviving U.S. nuclear support industry especially.
Graham’s homepage is here.
Iowa’s Duane Arnold Energy Center.

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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