NEI Nuclear Notes

Generally speaking, any viable solution for used nuclear fuel deserves attention. The Blue Ribbon Commission went for interim storage units and a permanent repository, aiming to avoid the kerfluffle over Yucca Mountain by suggesting that these sites be consent-based – that is, the federal government and/or interested operators get the site approved by local communities and states. This process wasn’t used in choosing Yucca Mountain back in the 80s and look where that got us. Opposing the repository became as much an article of political faith in Nevada as protecting the Chesapeake Bay is in Maryland, with no particular partisan difference. But that’s not the end of the story The release of the final two volumes of the Safety Evaluation Report for the Yucca Mountain project, which was court-ordered, found Yucca Mountain a sound choice for a repository. Hands in the air for Yucca Mountain! But actually using the site, although dictated by the Nuclear Waste Act , is still up to th...

Writer Steven Stromberg, writing in the Washington Post Partisan blog, offers this : Some environmentalists cheer the closing of nuclear plants, even though it makes the anti-carbon effort tougher, and they argue that the country should put all of the planet’s eggs into the renewables basket. The pro-nuclear crowd predicts that a new wave of innovative technologies will make constructing new nuclear plants much more attractive, technically and economically. The country — and particularly environmentalists — should hope the pro-nuclear side is right; a renaissance in nuclear technology could offer the country a source of reliable, carbon-free electricity with safer designs than those of decades ago, all of which would be particularly helpful if renewables never burst out of their niche end of the market. The “pro-nuclear crowd'” (I think I prefer mob or cohort) actually includes a fair number of environmentalists . This is a pretty good post, though putting an ener...

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 ...

Because of the low price of natural gas, which has benefitted utilities and caused some of them to reweigh their portfolios, the prospects for coal, nuclear energy, even renewable energy sources have become considerably stiller – milkier - stagnant. Agree? If you’re looking for a simple narrative around energy, I suppose that works well enough apart from being false. But variations on it can feed news stories and editorials for quite awhile. You don’t have to like or dislike nuclear energy (or coal, etc.) to fit it to the narrative, it’s all very “factual” and non-partisan. It’s like a theory, really. You observe events and derive a larger meaning from them. Here’s the thing: theories evolve with the collection of new data, but news narratives often do not. They can be useful in a quick moving newsgathering environment, but a bane, too, because they allow reporters to lean on set storylines rather than on the relevant fact set. The latter can even become a bother if it clashes wit...

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...

Natural gas is priced lower than ever, a fair number of nuclear reactors have been sidelined with extended outages – enough to bring the fleet’s total capacity down for the year – and a couple of plants are closing albeit for different reasons. Surely, we could be excused for being a little – lachrymose, yes? Growing fearful that the nuclear energy industry will suddenly crater or more subtly wave a handkerchief goodbye as it gradually leaves the scene is not really backed up by facts. Consider: Natural gas will increase in price; the carbon emission profile between natural gas and nuclear energy has become more apparent (as we’ll see as we go along); utilities loath putting all their energy eggs in a single basket; and nuclear energy, finally, is a mature and well understood technology. All these weigh in favor of hesitating before composing an epitaph. (“You glowed brightly, but too briefly.”) No one is going bankrupt running a nuclear facility, a majority of reactors will co...

Sen. Dianne Feinstein said she might run for another term next year, but for our purposes, this stands out from a recent interview: And here's her lengthier discussion on the safety of nuclear power in the wake of the recent killer Japanese earthquakes. Feinstein said while she believes nuclear energy can be a safe form of power, "we have to be eternally vigilant'' on safety issues. Feinstein said "there has to be longterm storage'' for nuclear waste, and said that "I think there ought to be regional waste storage sites." Regional waste storage sites is an idea we’ll be hearing more about in the coming months – I expect a House hearing I’m covering later this week will discuss them – and it’ll be interesting to the hear the various views about them. Video at the link. --- Almost a month after Fukushima Daiichi, the Washington Post has weighed in again on nuclear energy. After noting that public support as reflected in polls ha...

The Washington Post makes a point that is easy to lose sight of while all eyes are turned to Fukushima Daiichi: History suggests that nuclear power rarely kills and causes little illness. That’s also the conclusion engineers reach when they model scenarios for thousands of potential accidents. Making electricity from nuclear power turns out to be far less damaging to human health than making it from coal, oil or even clean-burning natural gas, according to numerous analyses. That’s even more true if the predicted effects of climate change are thrown in. For sake of comparison: Compared with nuclear power, coal is responsible for five times as many worker deaths from accidents, 470 times as many deaths due to air pollution among members of the public, and more than 1,000 times as many cases of serious illness, according to  a study  of the health effects of electricity generation in Europe. The article goes into how the study calculates its figures, but the main issue here ...

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...

The Washington Post has up a collection of articles asking the question: After Japan’s disaster, will nuclear energy have a future in America? Here’s a bit from Stephen Hayward from the American Enterprise Institute, a nonpartisan think tank with a free market orientation: It is remotely possible that the aftermath of this disaster might ironically lead to the go-ahead for a new generation of smaller, safer nuclear designs that are in development. If Japan can come through the worst-case scenario, it might calm our longtime nuclear phobia. Virginia’s Gov. Bob McDonnell: Virginia is home to two nuclear facilities, in Surry and Louisa counties. They generate roughly 40 percent of our electricity. They have multiple redundant systems to provide backup electrical power. The stations were also analyzed against worst-case acts of nature, such as earthquakes, floods and hurricanes, and modified as necessary to protect them. There are 19 emergency drills scheduled for this year...

The most striking element (from an energy perspective, certainly) of the State of the Union speech was President Barack Obama’s embrace of a clean energy standard. Recognizing that nuclear energy and natural gas can play significant roles in carbon emission reduction took the idea mainstream whereas it had previously been of interest mostly to energy wonks and policymakers. The change has been noticed. Here’s the Washington Post : The first is establishing a clean-energy standard expected to require that American utilities derive a certain amount of the electricity they provide from clean sources - the president mentioned 80 percent by 2035. Last year, Democrats opposed including nuclear energy or natural gas in that mix; Tuesday night, Mr. Obama included both. The Post really isn’t right that Democrats opposed nuclear energy. There was no clean energy standard bill last year and Democrats were not opposed to including nuclear in such a mix. Both major bills in the House (Wa...

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...

Let’s take a snapshot of the legislative landscape as it relates to nuclear energy: Last week, Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Jim Webb (D-Va.) introduced a climate change bill that includes a strong nuclear title, something missing from the initial draft of the Kerry-Boxer bill. Take-away phrase: mini-Manhattan projects, which they use to refer to research initiatives such as nuclear reprocessing methods. And Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) proposed an extensive addition to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 that beefs up the nuclear provisions of the act considerably. And Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.)  bolstered Udall’s effort by introducing a self-described complementary bill to Udall’s that promotes research and development into small nuclear reactors (that is, those with 350 mW or less of capacity). Bingaman and Udall are co-sponsors of each other’s bills, with Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) as co-sponsor on both bills. This is important because Bingaman and Murkowski are...

The editorial board takes a look at the Obama administration’s decision to reduce funding for Yucca Mountain: If the president's vision for a clean energy future is to be believed or is to come to fruition, nuclear energy must be a part of the mix, and the safe disposal of its radioactive waste must be given more serious consideration. They see the politics: The president keeps a campaign promise to shut the site down. By doing so, he pleases Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). And he potentially secures the swing state's place in the blue column; the Silver State hadn't voted for the Democratic presidential nominee since 1996 until it went to Mr. Obama in 2008. And they acknowledge how President Obama might proceed: He also called for redirecting resources to improve the safety and security at plants around the country until a long-term solution is found. Those alternatives, however unlikely the first one is, are more than he offered when ...

Via Tom Toles in today's Washington Post .

This story, Little Outcry on Nuclear Reactor Proposal , in today's Washington Pos t caught our collective eye. As Maryland regulators begin hearings tonight on a proposed third nuclear reactor in Calvert County, one element in the historically raucous debate over nuclear power is notably absent: widespread opposition. The passionate anti-nuclear protests of the 1970s and '80s have largely yielded in Washington and its suburbs to alarm over rising fuel prices, global warming and a lack of quick, easy solutions to quench the thirst for power. This region could be a testing ground for the so-called nuclear renaissance. As the Public Service Commission starts a month of hearings on Constellation Energy Group's initial application to add a third nuclear plant at its Calvert Cliffs site 50 miles southeast of Washington, Dominion Virginia Power, which supplies all of Northern Virginia's electricity, is pressing ahead with plans to expand its reactors southwest of Fredericksbu...