NEI Nuclear Notes

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...

These are funny : 1. Fission shmission, relax, I'll increase the water level after my coffee break. 5. Who forgot to pay the water bill? 10. It's Russian technology. 17. Is that a 60 minute film crew out there? 20. Look at the good news: we are going to find out whether people actually glow in the dark. Be sure to check out the rest !

From the Daily Express : Britain is "quite simply running out of power" and blackouts are almost inevitable within the next few years. This is the stark warning from the head of an energy think-tank who believes power cuts could be serious enough to spark civil disorder. Campbell Dunford of the respected Renewable Energy Foundation said: "It’s almost too late to do anything about it. Nothing will stop us having to pay very high prices for power in future." ... The “retirement” of a string of nuclear and coal-fired power stations will see 37 percent of the UK’s generation disappear by 2015, partly because of EU environmental directives. But here's what caught my eye: The [REF] report concludes: "A near fatal preoccupation with politically attractive but marginal forms of renewables seems to have caused a blindness towards the weakening of the UK’s power stations and a dangerous and helpless vulnerability to natural gas." Wow, I'm a bit stunned (an...

Check out which are cleaner.

The Maryland Public Television's State Circle program aired a debate last Friday over building a third reactor at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in southern Maryland. NEI's Mary Quillian Helms was interviewed along with Kevin Kamps from Beyond Nuclear. Check out the video .

From the Nuclear Regulatory Commission : The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s compilation of 2007 nuclear power plant worker doses at U.S. reactors shows the average annual collective dose per plant is 97 person-rem, the lowest ever, and is two-thirds of the dose recorded 10 years ago. To determine a plant's collective dose, hundreds of workers’ individual doses are added up and the result is expressed in person-rem. The average American receives a dose of about 360 millirem every year from all radiation sources; the average nuclear plant worker in recent years received about an additional 160 millirem each year on the job. NRC regulations allow workers at nuclear power plants to safely receive a job-related dose of up to 5,000 millirem each year. Here is a chart of the data since 1973.

We wrote a couple of days ago we may have jumped the gun on the British Energy story by declaring Electricité de France (EDF) the last company standing in the bidding for the nuclear utility. We did - or might have. While British Energy says it has more interest, it will not say who has expressed the interest or how serious the various parties are. Here's how Bloomberg puts it: Two of the three proposals received by British Energy were for more than 680 pence [about $13.29] a share, yesterday's closing price, said a person with knowledge of the offers, who declined to be identified because the matter is confidential. Centrica Plc , the U.K.'s biggest energy supplier, made one of them, a second person said. Centrica is a bit of a surprise as earlier stories had them partnered with EDF. Even more surprising is that one of the bidders is thought to be Suez, the French energy concern that complained that EDF might lock them out of the British nuclear market. We ...

An editorial in the Ottawa Citizen offers some surprises. Here's the rough: The latest fiasco in the world of nuclear is that the rehabilitation of Bruce Power units 1 and 2 is running up to 24 per cent over cost estimates. That could mean extra costs of between $350 million and $650 million on the $2.75-billion project. Ontario taxpayers are on the hook for the first $300 million of overruns and then a quarter of the cost after that. Bruce Power is owned by TransCanada Corp. and the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System. Already the provincial auditor has said that Queen's Park didn't drive a tough enough deal on the Bruce plan. Worth noting here is the differences between the U.S. and Canada, with government (and taxpayers) taking a heavier role in costs and cost overruns in the energy sector than would happen in the U.S. Add to this the difference between Canada's provinces and U.S. states, where provinces go their own way far more than states do. ...

Of course, we cannot truly recommend stocks in any company, nuclear or otherwise, since, first, doing so would fall into sketchy ethical waters and, second, we're at best ninnies at understanding the stock market and its movements - not that large careers haven't been made on Wall Street regardless. However, following the money when it comes to companies investing in nuclear energy and its infrastructure seems to be paying dividends lately. Here is Bloomberg reporting on Toshiba's stock rise: Toshiba Corp., Japan's largest supplier of reactors and chips, rose to the highest in more than a month in Tokyo trading after saying it's in talks with two U.S. utilities to build nuclear power stations. [...] Toshiba is headed for the biggest two-day gain since July 2003 on news it's negotiating the multibillion-dollar reactor deal with Scana Corp. and Southern Co. The shares rose 7 percent yesterday after Hynix Semiconductor Inc. said it will delay produc...

Last Sunday, Palm Beach Post wrote an article about students from Florida Atlantic University protesting FPL's nuclear plant expansions. What struck me about the article was this claim made by the anti-nuclear energy group - Nuclear Information and Resource Service: A nuclear power plant takes so much water and energy to build, it has to run for 15 years to offset its carbon footprint, according to the nonprofit group, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. Mary Olson, director of the organization's southeast office, was a summit keynote speaker. Fifteen years? I don't think so. This claim appears to be apart of the whole lifecycle emissions claim we’ve dealt with from Storm van Leeuwen and Smith . The two have claimed that nuclear’s lifecycle emissions are comparable to a gas plant based on the energy requirements at each stage of a nuclear plant’s cycle. In SLS' study, they mis-calculate the energy payback time for a nuclear plant at 10-15 years . What...

That of course would be Walt Disney World, but in neighboring Levy county, the next most happiest, Progress Energy is set to build a new nuclear power plant. The response by Orlando Sentinel columnist Mike Thomas is exceptionally upbeat : Locally, the only major controversy comes from neighboring Citrus County, which houses the utility's Crystal River nuclear plant and is miffed it isn't getting this one. The state of Florida is gung-ho, which means no major obstacles from the Public Service Commission or Department of Environmental Protection. Nuclear power is the only option available to meet Gov. Charlie Crist 's ambitious goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A new state law will allow Progress Energy to begin collecting money for the $17 billion facility in advance. So the utility's customers could see a $9 bump in an average electric bill beginning in January. To speed up the federal review process, Progress Energy plans to use a next-g...

Several weeks ago Joshua Pearce at Clarion University in Pennsylvania released a study titled “ Thermodynamic limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology .” In the study he stated... nuclear energy production would have to increase by 10.5% per year from 2010 to 2050 to both replace fossil-fuel-energy use and meet the future energy demands. This line, of course, made the headlines and has been picked up by several outlets and blogs . When looking into his calculations for this statement, he made one assumption error that overstated the above sentence by nearly a factor of three. Page 121, Section 4.1 of the study states: Richard Smalley pointed out that in 2004, the global economy consumed the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil per day, which converted into electricity terms is the equivalent of 14.5 TeraWatts (TW), or 14,500,000 MegaWatts (MW) (2005). … With a nuclear plant having about 1000 MW (1 GW) of capacity, we would need 14,500...

Namibia is seriously exploring nuclear energy, having recently passed legislation to develop a nuclear regulatory framework, but has run into predictable opposition with a local environmental group called Earthlife. While there is nothing terribly unusual or, shall we say, accurate in Earthlife's arguments, this seemed original : Earth life said last week it was shocked at the Government's approval of plans to build a nuclear power plant because not only was nuclear energy unsafe, dangerous and very costly, but it was also not the answer to climate change. Well, not the answer certainly but an answer surely. But there's more: "The whole fuel cycle of nuclear power, from mining uranium, enrichment of uranium to the decommissioning of the power station after its lifespan, releases three to four times more carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced than renewable energy," Earthlife spokesperson Bertchen Kohrs noted. It has to be admitted that building a first nucl...

That's what this article from Reuters Canada seems to be saying: Ontario, keen to close its remaining coal-fired power plants, said on Friday it has asked four nuclear firms for proposals to replace the Canadian province's aging nuclear facilities with new reactors. The provincial government has asked AREVA, Atomic Energy of Canada, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, and Westinghouse Electric Co. for bids to replace their current stock. Read the article for more details, but it certainly seems that a golden (uranian?) age is getting underway up north.

From Reuters: Britain said on Thursday it was making 18 more sites available for the next generation of nuclear power stations and gave operators four weeks to pick the ones they wanted. "Interest in building new nuclear power stations in the UK is strong," Business Secretary John Hutton said in a statement on the Government News Network. That's putting it mildly. Currently, the U.K. derives about 19 percent of its electricity from nuclear energy and, while the goal is to increase the percentage dramatically, no target was given in the article.

The Baltimore Sun has an interesting op-ed by Jack Spencer, a research fellow in nuclear energy and Nicolas Loris, a researcher at the Heritage Foundation. Noting that Allegheny Energy suffered a slight embarrassment after sending customers two compact fluorescent light bulbs - and then charging them for the bulbs (they later relented and picked up the bill) - Spencer and Loris focus on common-sense reasons for Maryland to look seriously at nuclear energy as a way to meet Governor Martin O'Malley's goal of supplying 20 percent of their energy from renewable fuel sources by 2022. Spencer and Loris take a dimmish view of conservation - that would be the conservative Heritage Foundation talking - but the article makes an excellent case. (The article does not mention Maryland's Calvert Cliffs plant, so this may be an op-ed working its way through different local newspapers.)

Industry executives described the prudent steps energy companies are taking as they consider builidng new nuclear plants in the United States in a briefing for Wall Street analysts today. NEI's press release follows: Nuclear Energy Expansion Will Proceed Cautiously Over Next Decade, Wall Street Analysts Told NEW YORK, Feb. 21, 2008—Construction of new nuclear power plants in the United States will ramp up slowly over the next decade as project sponsors exercise caution to effectively manage business risks, nuclear energy industry leaders told Wall Street financial analysts here today. The industry’s expectations are that four to eight new nuclear plants will be generating electricity by 2016 or so, with a second wave of new power plants under construction as the first group commences commercial operation, the Nuclear Energy Institute’s president and chief executive officer, Frank L. (Skip) Bowman said during a briefing attended by more than 75 analysts. “The exact number will, of c...