NEI Nuclear Notes

Happy Earth Day 2014 to all of our readers. While there are a variety of events going on all around the world, we'd like visitors to NEI Nuclear Notes to focus on what the electric grid looked like back in 1970 when the late Wisconsin  Sen. Gaylord Nelson celebrated the very first Earth Day . Take a moment to consider the graphic below: It's pretty easy to see how nuclear has grown to account for almost 20% of the electricity generated in the U.S. since that first Earth Day . At the same time, it's impossible not to notice that the use of oil to generate electricity has virtually disappeared, clearly displaced by the incredible growth in the use of nuclear energy over the same period of time. Nuclear didn't do it alone, helped tremendously by the steady growth in the use of natural gas. The combined impact of nuclear and natural gas has been a real winner for the environment, something that The Breakthrough Institute pointed out in a study it released last Septe...

Earlier this week, the journal Nature Climate Change published a study concerning how warmer weather and reduced river flows might impact electricity generation at nuclear and coal-fired power plants. Here's how Reuters reported the findings: In a study published on Monday, a team of European and U.S. scientists focused on projections of rising temperatures and lower river levels in summer and how these impacts would affect power plants dependent on river water for cooling. The authors predict that coal and nuclear power generating capacity between 2031 and 2060 will decrease by between 4 and 16 percent in the United States and a 6 to 19 percent decline in Europe due to lack of cooling water. The nuclear energy industry isn't unfamiliar with the topic. Here at NEI Nuclear Notes, we first dealt with the issue during the Summer of 2006 when a heat wave struck Europe and forced a number of nuclear plants to reduce power. Back then, our points were pretty clear: the indu...

Yesterday afternoon, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a study that suggested that thermoelectric power plants were contributing to stress on the nation's supply of fresh water . For readers of NEI Nuclear Notes, this issue isn't exactly new. Back in 2006, we needed to push out some clarifying information (click here and here ) in the wake of the drought that struck Europe. Back then, the angle reporters would take targeted nuclear energy in isolation (speaking of reporters, see this from NEI's Steve Kerekes ), despite the fact that any steam cycle power plant has to deal with the same issues. At the time we pointed out that data from the U.S. Geological Service showed that the largest use of freshwater in the country was not electric power generation, but rather crop irrigation. NEI's Bill Skaff wrote the following response to the UCS study. Responsible environmental management must begin with a recognition of the water-energy nexus—large-scale electricity ...

Late on Friday afternoon, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) sent a letter to NRC Chairman Greg Jaczko accusing Entergy, the owner of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, of being less than truthful when it came to emissions of Strontium-90 (Sr-90) from the plant. The following comes from the Associated Press : Rep. Edward Markey, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, wrote Friday to NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko to complain that a spokesman for the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant had made statements “at odds with the factual history of the plant,’’ and that the “NRC had not appropriately responded to concerns raised about this issue.’’ Markey’s letter came nearly three months after the incident in question. On Aug. 2, the Vermont Health Department announced that the radioactive isotope strontium-90 had been found in the flesh of small-mouth bass caught in the Connecticut River about 9 miles upstream from the reactor in Vernon. The plant is about three miles from t...

Mathematically, risk is expressed as Probability times Consequences. Following a tragic accident, however, public discourse focuses only on consequences. This is understandable - after the accident, we take no comfort in knowing that it was very unlikely to occur. In the case of Deepwater Horizon, which exploded 27 days ago, the consequences have been horrific: 11 souls lost, millions of gallons of oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico, and millions of dollars in lost income for businesses dependent on the waters of the Gulf. Staggering as this toll is, for the companies and industry involved the damage to reputation and credibility may be just as great. Against the focus on earthshaking consequences, risk communicator David Ropeik reminds readers of the Huffington Post that: [F]ocusing on these high profile events...can distract us from greater risks...[We] are creating vast dead zones in the oceans off our urban coasts where runoff laced with fertilizers is feeding the growth of masiv...

On the fourth day of the COP15 conference, it entered what we might call its melodramatic phase, with various parties wanting to make points as strongly as possible. If you follow anything day-to-day – like, say, the health care bill – you know that up can become down very quickly and then back to up just as quickly. (Soap operas, speaking of melodrama, rest on this principle, but even they have a basis, however tenuous, in real life.) --- Most importantly, the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action, the negotiators charged with producing a final document, has released a draft agreement indicating some key goals. The Washington Post has the details: The Cutajar draft [Michael Zammit Cutajar is chairman of the group] stipulates that the world should seek to keep global temperatures from rising beyond a ceiling of either 2.7 or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels. It offers several possible targets developed countries could use for cutting their gr...

Senate's Clean Energy Deployment Plan: A Nuclear Slush Fund in the Making? That’s the title of an article on Solve Climate.com. It makes the somewhat juvenile mistake of imagining that something that works against their narrow band of interests is malignant, in this case further metastasized by evil lobbyists. Here’s a bit: U.S. lawmakers are considering legislation that would create a new independent federal agency to promote government investment in clean energy. But watchdogs are raising questions about the way the proposed agency is structured, and whether it would be unfair to taxpayers and bad for the environment. Among their concerns are its bias toward nuclear power — a critical issue for the South, which is at the center of the nuclear industry's planned revival. They’re talking about the Clean Energy Deployment Administration (CEDA) and of course nuclear energy is there – it is a clean energy. Not renewable, but that’s not CEDA’s brief – carbon emissi...

Activism should be fun, pro- or anti-whatever, since the rewards of activism are often frustration, lost friends, and learning what it is to be called fanatic. So a bow to the unbending squirrel : A French anti-nuclear activist nicknamed the "unbending squirrel" managed to stop a train carrying uranium from a German processing plant in spectacular fashion, police said on Tuesday. Cecile Lecomte, 27, rappelled down a motorway bridge near the western city of Münster late on Monday night to hang suspended over a rail line, forcing the 25-car train carrying the enriched nuclear fuel to stop. That’s probably all kinds of illegal, but as long Ms. Lecomte didn’t hurt anyone – the story doesn’t indicate it - cooling her heels for a few days in a Munster pokey will do no harm. The story doesn’t indicate if she associates with a group, but this story does : 26-year-old French climbing and Robin Wood activist, Cécile Lecomte … [was] arrested in Lueneburg on Thursday wh...

After hearing a presentation from Ariel Levite, the former Principal Deputy Director General for Policy at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, Eric Wesoff at Greentech Media is slowly changing his mind about nuclear energy: I am a knee-jerk environmentalist and have a visceral response to the word “nuclear.” But the more I learn and read, the more experts I speak with, the more my mind is changed — nuclear is a necessary part of the energy mix, albeit with enormous risk. These risks need to be confronted head-on by sound technology, policy, diplomacy and science.

  A group called Nuclear Energy for Texans (NET) is protesting the actions of another group, Texans for a Sound Energy Policy Alliance (TSEPA), who, according to NET, are up to mischief : "It is outrageous that this small anti-nuclear activist group would travel across the country to try and derail a project that the vast majority of Victoria, Texas residents whole-heartedly support." And though the story doesn't say what that mischief might be, Marketwatch has another press release to explain : TSEPA spokesperson John Figer states: "Exelon's record in Illinois is clear. We don't want to be a Braidwood, Texas. Beyond safety, this project critically impacts our state's water future. The Guadalupe River has been listed as one of the 10 most threatened rivers in the U.S. and we don't have enough water to support a thirsty nuclear power plant. A lack of freshwater inflow will critically impact the San Antonio bay, wetlands, estuaries, fish ...

Honestly, we like the folks in the environmental movement a lot, even if their more zealous activities can make some of them easy targets for fun and snark. Maybe it's that environmentalism has a high appeal to younger folk who get their first taste of activism and run wild with it. Maybe it's that the green sands are so shifty it can be hard to maintain ideological purity without tipping into a sandals-and-earnestness trap. Nothing like being hip and a bore at the same time - you can find yourself alienating all your friends at once. But fair is fair, and we think The New York Times is being signally un fair when it weighs in on green overload : Two years after “An Inconvenient Truth” helped unleash a new tide of environmental activism, green noise pulses through the collective consciousness from all directions. The news media issues dire reports about disappearing polar bears; Web sites feature Brad Pitt arriving at a movie premiere in his hydrogen-powered BMW; bookst...

One of the complaints that those who like old movies have about newer specimens is that they suffer too much from visual ADD, unable to settle on an image long enough for it to register or on a dialogue long enough to create a character in depth. Everything gets hyped until nothing carries any meaning aside from nervous excitation. So it is with considerable delight that the environmentally conscious, not to mention the culturally self-conscious, can look forward to a channel where actually focusing on an issue, any issue, might be considered taxing: Planet Green. The AP's David Bauder previews   tomorrow's debut: "The network is not only not finger-wagging, it's sexy, it's interesting, it's irreverent," [network president Eileen] O'Neill,  said. Planet Green doesn't want to be a network that appeals only to tree huggers and will always resist a heavy-handed approach, she said. Instead of scolding people not to waste paper by using juice...

The May issue of Nuclear Energy Insight is now available online. The cover story features the NEI-sponsored race car and driver Simona de Silvestro, winner of the Atlantic Championship season opener. Other featured articles discuss the construction of new nuclear power plants around the world, plans for small-scale reactors for use in remote locations, the nuclear industry’s strategic role in emergency response and federal grants given to community colleges for energy-related job training.

The April issue of Nuclear Energy Insight is now available online. The cover story features the Florida Public Service Commission's approval of two new reactors at Florida Power & Light Co.'s Turkey Point nuclear power plant. The issue also details two new-plant license applications and the Energy Information Administration's generation projections for 2030. Other articles include discussions of greenhouse gas emission reductions under Climate VISION, the completion of an historic construction project at Diablo Canyon, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's support for nuclear energy and an innovative approach to modeling future nuclear reactors in development at Idaho National Laboratory.

Or ranch, I guess, as in the Crawford Ranch. Hosting the third hour of the Today Show yesterday, Mrs. Bush won a sandwich-making contest, listened politely to advice about raising twins - her own, Jenna and Barbara, were on hand to cheer on their mom - and interviewed author R.L. Stine. And : ...in a pre-taped tour of the family’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, Bush touted green aspects of the home, which is partially heated with geothermal power. “We could and we’ve discussed putting one wind mill out here because, as you can tell, we have enough wind to generate electricity” she said as the wind tousled her hair. With President Bush ever so slowly acknowledging climate change issues, it was nice of the First Lady to move things along a bit in an audience-friendly way. Bush has become a bit detached from eco-unfriendly movement conservatives as his presidency moves into its final months, and it has allowed him to strike out in some new directions. It'll be in...

Christopher Paine, the Washington-based director of the nuclear program for the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, had seemed for awhile to be considering nuclear energy as a viable addition to the energy mix, especially as increased awareness of climate change altered the terms of the discussion. About a year ago, he said this : "Our position is that nuclear is not off the table as an energy source, but we believe there are cheaper, cleaner and faster ways to reduce pollution and provide reliable energy than nuclear power." But Paine has now been making the rounds in Utah with the old arguments made in the old way. Right now, at a time when nuclear power is increasingly being considered a cleaner source of energy than coal-fired plants, Paine questions the claim by some that the alternative of actually scaling up nuclear power production can be done safely around the world, even under international ownership and control. "If histor...

Our neighbor here are Blogspot, Rod Adams of Atomic Insights - tops on our blog roll - is currently debating nuclear energy as a viable solution for climate change with Matt, a sustainability consultant who writes regularly for TalkClimateChange . The conversation is happening over at Green Options and promises to be exceptionally broad ranging. Here's a taster of Rod's opening: We can build nuclear plants safely and rapidly enough to make a real different in resource availability. During the ten year period between 1975 and 1985, the amount of new energy production from nuclear plants was roughly equivalent to adding about 6 million barrels of oil per day to the world's available energy supply. Note - that is not nameplate "capacity" like you find with wind turbines that are often idle, it is actual production. And Matt's: The Royal Academy of Engineering in 2003 ("The Cost of GeneratingElectricity") put gas-fired combined-cycle gas...

Co-founder of Greenpeace and leading environmentalist Patrick Moore encouraged his former organization to support nuclear energy at a speech yesterday at Wits University in South Africa. Here is the account from The Times of South Africa: Greenpeace should now go pro-nuke Radioactive waste ‘no longer a problem’ Greenpeace was right to stop the bomb and save the whales, but should never have opposed nuclear energy, the environmental group’s co-founder and former director, Patrick Moore, said in Sandton yesterday. Moore is on a lecture tour of local universities, sponsored by the Nuclear Industry Association of South Africa. “Climate change has made me a strong supporter of nuclear power,” Moore said. Here is another account by Engineering News Online of South Africa: Greenpeace co-founder Moore backs nuclear power . A blog sponsored by South Africa's Mail & Guardian had a less sanguine viewpoint about building more nuclear power plants. Despite the wide range of opinions, nucl...

The Diane Rehm show is not on all NPR stations, but if you can get it, Scott Peterson and Jim Riccio are on the show NOW talking about what the future of nuclear should be in the United States. (Note Diane is not hosting today. The show is being hosted by Frank Sesno .) For online access, try here and then click on WFYI HD-1 (in the middle of the page).

The latest issue of Nuclear Energy Insight is now available online. In it, you'll find an article on congressional approval of an energy bill that opens overseas markets for America's nuclear power suppliers. There also are reports on new-plant plans across the globe and the important role nuclear energy will play to cut greenhouse gases in New England. Other articles discuss the new-plant licensing process and fuel sources for next-generation reactors. The issue also profiles Jamina Vujic, chair of the nuclear engineering department at the University of California-Berkeley.