NEI Nuclear Notes

The following post was submitted by William Skaff, NEI's Director of Policy Development. The MIT study, “ Water-CO2 Trade-Offs in Electricity Generation Planning ,” that was recently published in Nature Climate Change Letters indicates that power sector water use increases as carbon emissions are reduced. The measure employed for water use is withdrawal. A closer look at the study indicates that this approach is seriously flawed and could lead to erroneous conclusions about nuclear power plants and cooling water. Climate change eliminates water from watersheds. It does not take water out and then put it back again. Therefore, the appropriate measurement of power plant water use in this context is consumption. This study is seriously flawed because its modeling employs withdrawal, when once-through cooling systems return 99 percent of the water withdrawn, 1  and the power sector as a whole returns 98 percent of water withdrawn, to the source water body. 2 For example, accor...

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a report on Monday that discusses the future challenges facing the U.S. electricity grid and several recommendations for how to best manage them. The researchers found that one of the most notable challenges facing the electricity grid is the threat of cyber attack. MIT writes in the report: Perfect protection from cyberattacks is not possible. There will be a successful attack at some point. This is a huge threat to the grid because a cyber attack in one area has the ability to affect other areas very rapidly, which could greatly disrupt power supply all over the country. Cyber attacks are also considered by the Pentagon to be an “ act of war ,” said the MIT researchers at a National Press Club event this week. To best manage this issue, MIT recommends that: The federal government should designate a single agency to have responsibility for working with industry and to have the appropriate regulatory authority to enhance c...

This MIT Technology Review article is good but gets off on the wrong foot: Politicians are drawing parallels between the $535 million federal loan guarantee issued to bankrupt solar manufacturer Solyndra and loan guarantees that the U.S. Department of Energy is offering to utilities building new nuclear power plants. But while those nuclear startups could also go bust, experts say U.S. taxpayers are unlikely to take a loss on them. That's because the only reactor projects moving forward are those in a handful of southern states, where laws allow utilities to offload the risk onto state ratepayers. Offload the risk? All the risk of any large electricity project redounds to the ratepayers – because they pay the bills. What those southern companies are doing is using a method that pays for plant construction as it goes along – which means less money borrowed from banks or paid back to banks – and thus less interest charges for ratepayers to eventually absorb. Here’s how So...

As the post below reminds us, NEI has a thriving YouTube channel where anything regarding nuclear energy is neatly extracted from longer talks or press conferences for your viewing pleasure. Here’s White House Science Director John Holdren during the Q&A after his speech at MIT (our transcript): I think for a whole variety of reasons the United States needs to stay at the cutting edge of nuclear technology. And in order for us to do that, it would be nice if we had a domestic nuclear industry; building nuclear power plants in this country. I would like to see that happen. Steve Chu would like to see it happen. The President would like to see it happen. Not least, because if I didn't make that clear enough in this talk, although nuclear energy is not a panacea for the climate problem, there is no panacea, it could make a significant contribution if we could make it expandable again. It would be easier to solve the climate problem with the help of nuclear energy than w...

President Barack Obama’s energy speech at MIT could have focused a bit more on nuclear energy. But he intended to cover a lot of bases and clearly did that. He noted the green jobs created by the stimulus bill, he called for bipartisanship in crafting the climate change bill in the Senate, he paid appropriate homage to the innovation and accomplishments of schools like MIT. So the actual energy portion of the speech was just that – a portion – and nuclear references, like others, were made in passing. So let’s see what he said about nuclear energy and give you a taste of the speech: Everybody in America should have a stake in legislation that can transform our energy system into one that's far more efficient, far cleaner, and provide energy independence for America -- making the best use of resources we have in abundance, everything from figuring out how to use the fossil fuels that inevitably we are going to be using for several decades, things like coal and oil and natura...

Back in 2003, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a study on nuclear power because they believed "this technology, despite the challenges it faces, is an important option for the United States and the world to meet future energy needs without emitting carbon dioxide (CO2) and other atmospheric pollutants." The 2003 study identified "the issues facing nuclear power and what might be done to overcome them." Today, MIT released its Update to the 2003 study (pdf), and while some great progress has been made over the past six years, more needs to be done: After five years, no new plants are under construction in the United States and insufficient progress has been made on waste management. The current assistance program put into place by the 2005 EPACT has not yet been effective and needs to be improved. The sober warning is that if more is not done, nuclear power will diminish as a practical and timely option for deployment at a scale that would constit...

Intellectual Ventures , an invention company, believes they've developed a "new reactor design [that] could make nuclear power safer and cheaper." Published by MIT's Technology Review magazine : a traveling-wave reactor requires very little enriched uranium, reducing the risk of weapons proliferation. ( Click here for a larger diagram). The reactor uses depleted-uranium fuel packed inside hundreds of hexagonal pillars (shown in black and green). In a “wave” that moves through the core at only a centimeter per year, this fuel is transformed (or bred) into plutonium, which then undergoes fission. The reaction requires a small amount of enriched uranium (not shown) to get started and could run for decades without refueling. The reactor uses liquid sodium as a coolant ; core temperatures are extremely hot--about 550 ºC, versus the 330 ºC typical of conventional reactors. ... As it runs, the core in a traveling-­wave reactor gradually converts nonfissile material into the...

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hosted their annual energy conference last Saturday with keynote speakers including MIT's President Susan Hockfield and Duke's CEO James Rogers . The event showcased many panelists including NEI's Vice President Richard Myers . Myers passed along the slide below from one of the panelists John Gilbertson - Managing Director at Goldman Sachs. I would say the slide is pretty self-explanatory. Obviously Wall Street investors aren't bearish on nuclear utilities.

Say hello to David Danielson of the MIT Nuclear Blog .

MIT asked that question: Americans' icy attitudes toward nuclear power are beginning to thaw, according to a new survey from MIT. The report also found a U.S. public increasingly unhappy with oil and more willing to develop alternative energy sources like wind and solar. [...] The report, "Public Attitudes Toward America's Energy Options: Insights for Nuclear Energy," was recently published by MIT's Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems. Ansolabehere conducted a similar survey in 2002 as part of the MIT study, "The Future of Nuclear Power." In the five years since the last survey, public preferences have remained fairly stable, but the percentage of people who want to increase nuclear power use has grown from 28 percent to 35 percent. That increase in popularity is likely due to concern over global warming caused by carbon emissions from fossil fuels, Ansolabehere said. For more information about the public's view of nuclear energy, click here ...

Yesterday, MIT released a study that the Globe and Mail described this way: Growing global competition for scarce enriched uranium threatens to derail a much-heralded nuclear renaissance in the United States and around the world, says an industry researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a report released yesterday, MIT researcher Thomas Neff said there has been 20 years of under-investment in uranium production and enrichment, resulting in a tightening of supply that has driven prices up eightfold. The shortfall leaves a gap between the potential increase in demand for nuclear energy -- which is particularly strong in Asia -- and the ability to supply fuel for it. "There has been a nuclear-industry myopia; they didn't take a long-term view," Mr. Neff said in his report. Others have since picked up the story. This is an issue we've looked at before , so I though I'd check in with Felix Killar , one of our internal experts on the nuclear fu...

On March 1, The Technology and Culture Forum at MIT hosted a panel discussion on the future of nuclear energy . A DailyKos diarist was there.