NEI Nuclear Notes

Let’s see if you can see what I see. It’s kind of a mystery. This is from the New York Times But with the shrinking of the industry, coal interests “are losing their clout, and they’re not going to get it back,” Mr. Goodell said. “It’s becoming clear where the future is going. The politically smart thing is to jump on the renewables bandwagon.” Goodell is Jeff Goodell, author of the 2006 book “Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future.” Let’s try another one. Same thing as above, this time from the Hill. We’re thrilled about any opportunity to replace coal directly with renewable energy, because the whole idea of natural gas as a bridge fuel has become debunked as we get more and more understanding of how bad natural gas is, and how ready to go renewable energy is,” said Julian Boggs, the global warming outreach director for Environment America. “Deploying as much renewable energy as possible is essential to solving global warming. Natural gas can’t solve global...

How has the Clean Power Plan gone over in the press? In general, pretty well, though the response tends to scan with a paper’s view of other subjects, such as their views on coal-fired energy and climate change. The New York Times, not always the best friend of the atom, rather grudgingly finds a place for nuclear energy. It [the plan] will shut down hundreds of coal-fired power plants and give fresh momentum to carbon-free energy sources like wind and solar power, and possibly next-generation nuclear plants. You know what? This -generation nuclear plants fill the bill. But we’ll take it – possibly. --- The only paper we saw that went a bit further on nuclear was the Virginia Beach Pilot, which includes a quote from Dominion’s CEO. “The compliance targets for Virginia have moved in a positive direction that fairly recognizes the role of natural gas generation in reducing emissions,” said Thomas F. Farrell the utility’s chief executive. “The administration missed an...

The Atlantic has an article called Is Nuclear Energy Ever Coming Back?. Aside from the fact that five new reactors are opening before the turn of the decade, the question seems a bit moot, but writer Celeste Lecompe does an exceptionally good job looking at subject wholly – I mean, with the Union of Concerned Scientists and NEI in the mix. We may take some pleasure in how much like sourpusses UCS seems, but it’s a fair look at different views. And Lecompte give due to new developments, such as small reactors and Transatomic’s revived interest in molten salt. A taste: In the meantime, TerraPower, the Bill Gates-backed startup, has opted to focus its attention abroad. “There are plenty of countries or regions that really are looking to nuclear as one of the ways to solve their energy needs without putting more carbon into the environment,” said Kevin Weaver, TerraPower’s director for technology integration. TerraPower is exploring opportunities to deploy its reactor design in R...

Nuclear energy plays a minor role in a minor online kerfluffle. In the New York Times, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of The Breakthrough Institute (an environmental think tank with an interest in nuclear energy) complain that Showtime’s climate change series Years of Living Dangerously does not include solutions to climate change, only depictions of possible or real disaster. For them, it’s exactly the wrong message : Still, environmental groups have known since 2000 that efforts to link climate change to natural disasters could backfire, after researchers at the Frameworks Institute studied public attitudes for its report “How to Talk About Global Warming.” Messages focused on extreme weather events, they found, made many Americans more likely to view climate change as an act of God — something to be weathered, not prevented. Messaging is valuable, of course, but when it starts to diverge from the truth, then it becomes a hindrance to communication. Climate change h...

Nathan Myhrvold, the former Microsoft technology office and current venture capitalist with a position on the board of nuclear energy startup Terrapower (whew!), makes the case : Nuclear technology is scary to some people because they fear extremely improbable scenarios while ignoring the virtual certainty of climate issues. Ironically people who argue against nuclear on environmental grounds may contribute to a far greater environmental catastrophe. Unfortunately the physics of climate change makes the here and now danger too easy to ignore. He goes on to explain that the worst impacts of climate change will happen over the course of the 21st century and beyond. He doesn’t say it, but that means many of us won’t be around to experience it and what Myhrvold implies – well, let’s let him say it: This means that if we wait until temperature change becomes an obvious and immediate problem, we’ll only be half way through the warming caused by carbon dioxide that is alread...

Ted Jones The following is a guest post by Ted Jones, Director of International Supplier Relations for NEI. In a post published this week on the New York Times’ India Ink blog , M.V. Ramana and Suvrat Raju discussed U.S.-Indian commercial nuclear cooperation in the context of nuclear liability law. They argue that the divergence of the Indian liability law from international practices is minimal and justified by the Indian public interest.  But the authors are deeply misinformed about the attributes, purposes and effects of nuclear liability law. As a result, they misunderstand features of the Indian liability law that could undermine India’s public safety interest. A basic principle of nuclear liability law – embodied in the international conventions as well as the national laws of nuclear energy countries – is channeling of absolute and exclusive legal liability to the operator of the plant. A second basic principle is limitation of the amount of liability borne ...

Over the past few months, coincident with the release of Robert Stone's Pandora's Promise , we've seen a lot of favorable news coverage concerning how many environmentalists have begun to reconsider their position on nuclear energy. One of the places where we've seen this coverage has been in the New York Times ,  which recently ran a story by Eduardo Porter urging the nation to get moving on building new nuclear power plant in order to help constrain CO2 emissions . This apparently got under the skin of the paper's food critic, Mark Bittman, who took a radical departure from his normal area of expertise in order to question folks like Stone, James Hansen and Stewart Brand who no longer see any contradiction between being pro-environment and pro-nuclear energy: Before we all become pro-nuclear greens, however, you’ve got to ask three questions: Is nuclear power safe and clean? Is it economical? And are there better alternatives? No, no and yes. So let’s not ...

Opening Reviews? Mixed, with a tilt to the positive. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times grabbed a little harder than I did at the drubbing of Dr. Helen Calidicott got in the picture and said it showed the movie’s one-sided view of nuclear energy. This comic divide — the strident old lady environmentalist with the apparent bad dye job (Ms. Caldicott) versus a Yoda of the modern environmental movement (Mr. Brand) — makes for quite a setup. Yet such deck-stacking in movies can also be a viewer turnoff, no matter how seemingly worthy the cause. And “Pandora’s Promise” is as stacked as advocate movies get. The descriptions of Caldicott and Brand are pretty terrible - remind me not to get on Dargis’ bad side. I used to work in the independent film business in New York (briefly, ineffectually) and a positive review from the Times was very important to launch an independent picture. One of the companies I worked for went pear shaped after a poor NYT review.That’s not as true now ...

A couple of major editorials take a look at President Obama’s energy-related nominations to his cabinet: Ernest Moniz for Energy Secretary and Gina McCarthy for EPA Administrator. These are not specific to energy generation or even to the nominees, really, zeroing in on climate change mostly, but it never hurts to see if nuclear energy gets a shout out – or just shouted at. Here’s the Times’ view. It opines that Congress is unlikely to move on climate change legislation and continues: This means that his second-term agenda on climate change will run through Ms. McCarthy’s and Mr. Moniz’s agencies, and will depend almost entirely on executive actions that do not require Congressional approval. Here are three strategies that could make a big dent in carbon emissions.  Just three? You’ve got to start somewhere. They are: Use the Clean Air Act to limit pollution (good for nuclear); Make natural gas safer (neutral); Improve energy efficiency across the board (also neutral). A...

Harvard professor David Ropeik takes a look at radiation and the concept of risk and find a number of linkages that inculcate a fear of radiation beyond the actual risk from it. Particularly among baby boomers, our nuclear fears are rooted in existential Cold War worries about nuclear weapons, which transitioned into fear of nuclear fallout from weapons testing , which transitioned into environmental concerns. Beyond that stigmatizing past, nuclear radiation bears many of the psychological characteristics that research has found make any risk scarier. We're more afraid of risks imposed on us than those we choose, which is why medical radiation is accepted but nuclear power radiation isn't. A sign of a good article is that it is not afraid to tread into uncomfortable areas. The more pain and suffering they cause, the more afraid we are of risks, and nuclear radiation is associated with cancer, even though studies of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have...

The NEI coverage of the Blue Ribbon Commission final report is below this post and gives a good summary of industry response. We’d thought we’d take a look at some of the coverage in the press and see how it is playing around the country. These are news stories, so we’re not gauging reaction, as we would with editorials, just the accuracy and usefulness of the reporting. And some are better than others. The TriCity [Wash.] Herald, using the AP story as a base, sort of misses the boat with this lede: The United States should immediately start looking for an alternative to replace the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, which cost an estimated $15 billion but was never completed, a presidential commission said Thursday. It’s not wrong exactly, but the stress on Yucca Mountain suggests the commission had something to say about it. In fact, it had nothing specific to say about it and, if Yucca Mountain were determined to still be the best locale for a central used...

Even after the Fukushima Daiichi facility achieves a cold shutdown and even if no one becomes sick or dies as a result of the accident – no one has so far – the impact to the nuclear energy industry on a global basis is not yet in full focus. This lack of focus became, um, clearer after I read an interesting story in the New York Times that aims to address this issue – it’s here , called “After Fukushima, Does Nuclear Energy Have a Future?,” that does a reasonable job of surveying what different countries are doing with nuclear energy in the shadow of Fukushima. The story tilts toward what one might call the worst case scenario, but it’s not unrealistic and it points out inconvenient counter-facts, always a plus in my book. Despite this relatively dismal outlook for nuclear energy, the London-based World Nuclear Association predicts a 30 percent increase in global nuclear generating capacity over the next decade; it foresees 79 more reactors online by 2020, for a total of 514, e...

The New York Times has put up a very well implemented – and interactive – map that provides a lot of data about the Japan earthquake and about Fukushima Daiichi. Worth bookmarking. --- The Economist has posted a debate – done in classical style, a treat for us old college arguers – that proposes the following: This house  believes that the world would be better off without nuclear energy. Read through the arguments – very well researched on both sides, so even those in favor of the statement are worth attending to by nuclear advocates – and cast your vote. Currently, 32 percent favor the statement and 68 percent disfavor it. Technically, you can’t vote your conscience, but only for the better argument. Assuming the voters are doing this, what can we say? Go, nuclear energy! --- Up in Connecticut, a bill in the legislature proposes taxing nuclear energy. If the bill passes, Dominion Energy, which runs the Millstone plant, will shut it down – it cannot pass the cost to ...

The International Atomic Energy Agency starts a mission : Starting Monday, they will hold meetings with the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. and others, Denis Flory, IAEA deputy director general and head of the department of nuclear safety and security, said at a separate news conference. "The objective of this mission is to exchange views with Japanese technical experts and to get firsthand information what the current status of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant is, measures to be taken and also future plans to mitigate the accident," he said. "It is not an assessment team," he said, adding that this will also "pave the way for future missions which will be expert peer review missions." It will also be interesting to see if the IAEA will feel it needs to rethink its own role in an incident like this. I'm not implying it has or hasn't done what it should - I really don't know - but insofar as...

How are our major newspapers reporting on the situation in Japan today?  The New York Times still has it at the front of its site, but Libya and Syria have the lead positions. The story leads with comments for the International Atomic Energy Agency: The world’s chief nuclear inspector said Saturday that Japan was “still far from the end of the accident” that has stricken its Fukushima nuclear complex and continues to spew radiation into the atmosphere and the sea, and acknowledged that the authorities were still unsure about whether the nuclear cores and spent fuel were covered with the water needed to cool them and end the crisis. That would by Yukiya Adano, head of the IAEA and Japanese himself. It seems odd not to lead with TEPCO or the Japanese government, but maybe Adano gave the most dramatic comments. The Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said Saturday that a test of seawater taken on Friday from a monitoring station at the plant showed the level o...