NEI Nuclear Notes

Sen. Lamar Alexander’s (R-Tenn.) speech at NEI outlined the reasons he thinks nuclear energy needs to be bolstered in the United States. He started with climate change, and interestingly, he imagined a United States without nuclear energy by looking at two countries that have foresworn it and one that has embraced it. The three-term senator , who also served as Governor of Tennessee through most of the Reagan years, compared the German situation with that of the UAE, which included a number of factoids I hadn’t seen put together quite this way: In just 12 years after notifying the International Atomic Energy Agency of its intent to install nuclear power, the Emirates will have completed four reactors, which will provide nearly 25 percent of its annual electricity by 2020. This is a nearly three-and-a-half times faster increase in emission-free green power than Germany has accomplished with wind and solar. It is true that four reactors at one site will change UAE’s emission...

From Japan : A candidate backed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe won Sunday's election for governor of Tokyo, frustrating a rival's efforts to make the vote a referendum on the Japan ese leader's pro-nuclear energy policy nearly three years after the Fukushima disaster The widely-expected victory by former health minister Yoichi Masuzoe comes as a relief for Abe, who had suffered a rare setback in another local election last month. So Abe lost one and won one – which proves only that Japanese voters are tough to move on a single issue – and that nuclear energy is not a potent enough issue, if it ever was, to sway elections. --- A striking example of how a nuclear energy facility can benefit neighboring communities: The University of Sharjah has announced that three nuclear energy laboratories worth Dh7 million will be set up in the university, with the aim of preparing highly qualified human cadres specialized in nuclear power. The first ever inte...

Well, you know, not all the rest, but a few more items. This could go on all day: 1. Small Reactors – In December, The Department of Energy selected NuScale Power as the winner of up to $226 million in funding support for a cost-shared public-private partnership to develop innovative small reactor technology. The award will be disbursed over five years and will help the company design, certify and achieve commercial operation of its 45-megawatt NuScale Power Module small reactor design by 2025. DOE’s selection criteria for this award focused on reactor technologies that have unique and innovative safety features to mitigate the consequences of severe natural events similar to those at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi. NuScale’s press statement noted that its design’s “unique and proprietary break-through technology” using natural forces of gravity, convection and conduction will allow “safe and simpler operations and safe shutdown.” DOE’s first award in 2012 focused on small reactor de...

We don’t really do Buzzfeed style listicals here at NNN because – hmm, does tacky link bait get it? Not enough cute nuclear energy kittens? The real Buzzfeed currently has up  17 Pets Who Won’t Let You Poop In Peace (spoiler: cute kittens figure in), so the bottom of the barrel is exceptionally easy to scrape. But I’ve noticed that the nuclear energy scene is busy lately. Let’s break out of a defensive crouch and look at some good news stories. In fact, let’s make a list  – some of these stories we’ll return to later with fully cooked posts, others may need a little more seasoning, and the rest are done-in-one, so to speak. 1. In a speech yesterday at the World Energy Congress in Daegu, South Korea, Mohammed Al Hammadi, Enec’s chief executive, underlined nuclear energy’s importance as an energy generation technology capable of providing continuous, safe and efficient electricity with near-zero greenhouse gas emissions. ENEC is UAE’s nuclear authority, buildin...

Just because you’re new at this nuclear energy stuff doesn’t mean you can’t have an opinion about it: "Countries with nuclear reactors continue to operate their reactors - 434 nuclear power reactors are in operation today, 69 under construction and more are planned," said Mr Al Mazrouei. "This demonstrates, despite the challenges, that nuclear energy will continue to play a significant role in the global energy sector." Mr. Al Mazrouei is UAE Energy Minister Suhail Al Mazrouei. I doubt nuclear energy was even on his radar 10 years ago, but the UAE recently poured concrete for the second of four planned reactors at Barakah. And good for him. He was speaking at an IAEA summit in St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida) and he wasn’t the only emirati there. "The reality is nuclear is indispensable as part of the global energy mix today," Hamad Al Kaabi, the UAE permanent representative to the IAEA, told The National. "It continues to...

From Canada, the least unexpected news of the day: The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) has completed a ground-breaking study on populations living near Ontario's three nuclear power plants (NPPs). The most important finding of this study is no evidence of childhood leukemia clusters in the communities within 25 km of the Pickering, Darlington and Bruce NPPs. Fine for the kids. What about the rest of us? Overall, the study found that all cancers are well within the natural variation of the disease and there is no consistent pattern across the three facilities studied. When looking at all age groups, some cancers were higher than expected and some cancers were lower than expected. The most likely causes of cancer in the communities are a number of known health risk factors. There have been a fair number of these studies and the result has invariably been the same. We should wave these in front of the Cape Codders (in the post below) and do some unseemly...

The nuclear energy situation in Great Britain has been full of drama, with Spanish and German interests dropping in and out of the mix and the government’s will to even build a new reactor brought into question. But, really, the most notable thing about the virtually daily drumbeat of news was that there was a drumbeat of news – to me, that meant the issue wasn’t going to expire until a solution was reached one way or another. Meet the solution : Energy giant EDF was today given permission to construct a new nuclear facility at Hinkley Point C in Somerset. The announcement was seen as a huge boost to the industry which ministers are relying on to keep the lights working. EDF said the plant’s two nuclear reactors would be capable of producing seven per cent of the UK’s electricity, enough to power five million homes. “Relying on to keep the lights working.” To quote Orson Welles from a notorious Paul Masson ad , Ahhhh the French. EDF just got knocked back ...

Just for fun, let’s combine a couple of topics into something miasmic – who knows, maybe even phantasmagoric. Lately, we’ve noted that despite some expectation in the press that nuclear energy would go gently into that long night, it seems be staying out in the daylight. Even countries that have notably downbeat on ever implement nuclear energy have shown at least shivers of interest. Thus, this editorial in the Canberra Times: The United Arab Emirates is not a country that springs to mind as one in need of nuclear power. The small federation on the Arabian peninsula has oil reserves ranked as the world's sixth largest, and could conceivably use this resource to generate cheap and plentiful power for decades. The news hook here is that UAE has pacted with Australia for some of its plentiful uranium to run its reactors, but I found the Canberra Times’ bluntness, which can sound a little rude to American ears, to be refreshing: Although the UAE's foreign minister...

One of the points that is made again and again about nuclear energy – on this blog, certainly, but really, in many places – is that if the world pulled away from nuclear energy, it would be very hard to achieve the carbon emission reduction goals that are wanted – needed – to stave off climate disaster. That’s not a slam at renewable energy, just a recognition of what’s currently possible and impossible, practical and not practical Still, the starkness of this article startling: A halving of a global nuclear power expansion after Japan's Fukushima disaster would increase global growth in carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent through 2035, the IEA said on Wednesday. Although the International Energy Agency has a dog in the race, it’s not the one you think. It was created after the seventies oil crisis (If you’re of an age, you may remember lining up your car - on certain days of the week – to get your rationed gasoline) to act as a stopgap if the petroleum supply is ag...

Personally, I’ve always had my doubts about Saudi oil supplies. Sure, there’s some room for strategic ambiguity here. But when someone is playing their cards too close you always have to wonder if they’re just bluffing. The following article would seem to indicate that’s just what the Saudis have been doing. This morning’s story in the Guardian that US diplomats believed Saudi Arabia to have overstated their oil reserves should ring alarm bells around the energy world. Every time there is a debate about whether OPEC should raise production to lower oil prices [subscription req’d], many commentators argue it is irrelevant: that the Middle East doesn’t have as much oil as it says and that it can’t raise production enough to bring prices down. If this is true, it has serious consequences for the oil price. If OPEC doesn’t have the slack to up production and bring prices down, they will have a lot further to go above the $100 barrier. Simply put, the argument is this: Du...

Here’s a story we certainly had no reason to expect: The United Arab Emirates said Monday it had appointed former United Nations chief weapons inspector Hans Blix as the head of a new nuclear advisory board of experts. The nine-member advisory board will meet twice a year starting this February and will help the Persian Gulf state develop nuclear energy, the official WAM news agency reports, citing the ministry of presidential affairs. Blix is Swedish. He ran the IAEA for 16 years, ending in 1998, and later became involved in the run-up to the war in Iraq when his U.N.-sanctioned commission did not locate the bruited weapons of mass destruction in that country (which, we know now, did not exist. Can’t find what isn’t there.) We haven’t seen any quotes from Blix in the stories about this, so we’re not sure why he took the job – not to imply there’s anything wrong with his doing so, we’re just curious. --- The L.A. Times has an interesting story up around used fuel r...

Reuters has put up an interesting “Fact Box” detailing which countries in the middle East and African want to knock together a few nuclear energy plants. It includes countries we’ve discussed here but a fair number we haven’t, including Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Libya, Namibia, Niger, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and UAE. Some of these are in very early stages of planning and the list is not free of red flags ready to spring up. But it’s a great overview and it’s interesting to see countries with significant supplies of uranium pursue nuclear energy. That’s energy security writ large, something uranium-rich, nuclear-free Australia should consider. ---- There have been a few news stories about the Japanese reluctance to work with India on the latter’s nuclear efforts, but we admit we steered around it because we didn’t quite get the gist of it – India has plenty of partners without worrying about Japan. But apparently, it’s important to the two countries...

In the annals of bad arguments, this is one of our favorites: Germany's newly elected government could hinder the expansion of renewable energy in the country with its plans to extend the lifetime of nuclear reactors, warns the German Renewable Energy Federation. Well, yes, it could do that, but we rather suspect Germany, like the United States, will look at the broad range of solutions and start implementing them. Germany’s nuclear plants may well be joined by wind farms, solar panel parks (well, maybe – Germany may not be the right territory for solar energy) and even additional nuclear units. There’s more: “A lifetime extension of the nuclear plants would slow, if not completely halt, the expansion of renewable energy in Germany,” said BEE spokesman Daniel Kluge. “There’s a simple reason for this: We have more and more renewable energy companies generating and delivering more and more electricity. So letting nuclear reactors stay on the grid longer will only lea...

A British wind utility, Ecotricity , and French nuclear company EDF are fighting for the rights to a “green” union jack to use at the 2012 London Olympics – EDF is the “sustainability partner” for the Olympics, so that’s pretty green all the way around. (EDF is the majority stakeholder in British Energy, hence their interest in this.) On the Wind Energy Planning Web site, the news story about the squabble concludes : EDF have submitted a trademark application for their green union jack - however Ecotricity is retaliating by taking the company to the high court. EDF energy are 85% owned by the French State. They are the worlds third largest producer of nuclear waste. It’s all a matter of perspective, we guess. We reckon we would support EDF if we had much feeling for the set-to, but let’s be generous – and disinterested – and wish it and Ecotricity equal luck. Either way, we’ll see a lot of green Union Jacks. --- We, of course, have no beef with anyone who believes the Ear...

The Wall Street Journal looks in at the nuclear doings on the Arabian Peninsula. We’ve looked at this before, but a lot has happened in a relatively short time: Dozens of American engineers, lawyers and businessmen have converged on Abu Dhabi in recent months to help the United Arab Emirates get the Arab world's first nuclear-power program running by 2017. Why so many Americans? The answer may surprise you: Even as the U.S. remains determined to block Iran from developing nuclear weapons, President Barack Obama sees the U.A.E. program as a "model for the world," according to a senior White House official, and by mid-April could move to present a bilateral nuclear-cooperation treaty to Congress for approval. This is the so-called 123 agreement negotiated late in the Bush administration (123 refers to the section in the U.S. Atomic Energy Act of 1954 that permits trade in nuclear materials and technologies.) And while there was some doubt Obama would conc...

We’re not terribly critical of energy end users, though our father certainly could be if we let out the air conditioning by leaving the front door open too long. But even we might find our limit. This caught our eye while we were working on a story about the proposed 123 agreement between the U.S. and UAE (we’ll have more on that later): Versace, the renowned fashion house, has defended its proposal to build the world’s first refrigerated beach in Dubai... Why defend the indefensible? Just plow ahead and hope for the best. The beach, next to the new Palazzo Versace hotel overlooking Dubai Creek, is expected to be artificially cooled to avoid Dubai’s searing summer temperatures. Proposals have included a cooling system under the sand and blowing in cooled air from the Versace hotel. That last part would really make Dad holler. One has to wonder how cold they’d have to keep the hotel to share its cooling with an open beach. As you might guess, this hasn’t gone ...

Even if we were a little more, um, self-centered, we probably  wouldn't try out a sentence like this : Nuclear power rather than renewable sources like the wind or sun are the best option for oil-rich Gulf Arab states to meet growing energy demands, especially if produced collectively, say regional experts. Not that we don't agree, but it does seem counter-intuitive: we're not sure about wind, but one thing we do know, there's a lot of sunshine in those parts. So why the focus on nuclear? [Saudi Electricity Company president Ali Saleh al-Barrack] said that while Saudi Arabia was conducting research into renewable energies, options such as wind and solar power were either limited or less attractive for technical reasons. Given the high demand for power and the population growth in the Gulf region, "I think the only immediate solution is nuclear energy," which is the best option in economic and environmental terms, Barrack said. And here'...

One thing journalist types like to do is follow up on previous stories to see where they've gotten to, if anywhere. It provides continuity for the reader and, yes, fills space in the newspaper. So, if Mayor Jones decides everyone should have a monkey, then let's see if everyone has gotten one (though avoid monkeys named Caesar - only grief will come from it.) If a cat was a rescued from a tree, let's check up on that darn cat and see if he learned his lesson. So, without further ado: We wrote recently that Bruce Power is looking to build a nuclear power plant in Alberta, though the provincial government is going to convene an expert panel to offer advice on how to proceed. Now, some University of Calgary students have beaten the panel to the punch and stirred up a little controversy: A group of University of Calgary students are causing a stir over their recent conclusion that nuclear energy is a safe and viable option for Alberta. The fourth-year environmental ...