NEI Nuclear Notes

Earlier today, the CNN network crawler put out incorrect information about Iran’s uranium enrichment. The crawler stated that 3.67% is "roughly halfway to weapons grade." That is off by several magnitudes. The cited figure is actually well within the range of reactor grade, magnitudes away from weapons grade. Weapons grade uranium is enriched to at least 85%-90% U235, the fissile element. Quoting the Smithsonian, "U-235, however, is fissile; it can start a nuclear reaction and sustain it. The 0.7% in naturally occurring uranium is not enough to make a bomb or even a nuclear reactor for a power plant. A power plant requires uranium with 3-4% U-235 (this is known as low-enriched or reactor-grade uranium). Most importantly, a nuclear bomb needs uranium with a whopping 90% U-235 (highly enriched uranium)." Here are our tweets reacting to this major error: COMING UP: Our response to @CNN ’s botched reporting on uranium enrichment. — Nuclear Energy Inst. (@NEI)...

The U.S. District Court in Arizona sided with the Department of the Interior in its decision to withdraw one million acres of public land from new claims for uranium mining. The tract of land, called the Arizona Strip, has supported uranium mining and the support structure that has grown up around it for many years. None of that is changed by the current decision, but no new mines can be opened up for the 20 years that the land is withdrawn. The most interesting aspect of this decision is that judge ruled that the withdrawal could happen despite Interior’s recognition that it presents “a low risk of significant environmental harm.” But if mining there is not problematic, why ban additional claims? In addition, the Court was not bothered by the lack of Interior’s interest in relying on a full or even a reasonable set of facts in making its withdrawal decision. The Court’s explanation is telling but not satisfying if you believe that the government should base its decisions on avai...

In putting together our new website section on nuclear energy's unmatched reliability , we uncovered some facts that the folks who aren't familiar with our industry might find surprising. Feel free to share them, and the below infographic, on social media. 1. Nuclear power plants are the most efficient source of electricity, operating 24/7 at a 90 percent average capacity factor . 2. A nuclear plant refuels once every 18 months, in spring or fall , replacing one-third of the fuel each time—so just-in-time fuel deliveries are never an issue. 3. One uranium fuel pellet creates as much energy as one ton of coal or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas . 4. A typical nuclear plant generates enough electricity for 690,000 homes without creating air emissions. 5. Nuclear energy generates more electricity than any other source in Connecticut, Illinois, New Hampshire, New Jersey, South Carolina, Vermont and Virginia.

Here's a snippet of what went on in the energy markets last week: Electricity peak prices rose slightly last week at ERCOT and Palo Verde, averaging $32-34/MWh at those hubs. Meanwhile at the Northeast, PJM, and Southwest hubs, prices fell $2, $6, and $11, respectively, to average $38-39/MWh. Gas at the Henry Hub rose 12 cents during the week, averaging $3.38/MMBtu. “Faced with softening fall demand fundamentals, power prices for next day delivery worked mostly lower across the U.S. on Thursday, Oct. 11, even as traders looked to rising natural gas prices and climbing outages. ... Cash gas markets also worked higher, adding as much as 15 cents in parts of the West and as much as 25 cents in the East, which offered direct support to power markets. Also lending support, various generating units continue to drop offline, and the outages will accelerate in the coming weeks as units shutter operations for fall maintenance and refueling. ... Several more outages lie around the corne...

This is interesting, but it doesn’t seem quite enough: Japan developed an adsorbent that attaches the uranium-loving chemical group amidoxime to a plastic polymer. ORNL examined the binding process between the plastic and chemical groups and used that knowledge to enhance the uranium-grabbing characteristic of the amidoxime groups on the adsorbent material's surface. PNNL tested the adsorbent's performance at its Marine Sciences Laboratory in Sequim, Wash., DOE's only marine research facility. Using filtered seawater from nearby Sequim Bay, PNNL established a laboratory testing process to measure the effectiveness of both Japan's and ORNL's adsorbent materials. Initial tests showed ORNL's adsorbent can soak up more than two times the uranium than the material from Japan. Why would anyone want to do this? With the Japanese, it makes sense because the country is so light on natural resources. But elsewhere? The article – really an abstract – says th...

Nuclear energy, you may have heard, is not universally beloved and some countries would like to banish it from their shores. ( Switzerland is an outlier , of course, having no shore.) It has always been disfavored in a few countries (Australia, for example, though not as strongly these days ), some of which used it anyway and some of which never did. So be it – try as you might, that’s how it goes. After the accident at Fukushima Daiichi, there were plenty of stories anticipating a wide-scale abandonment of nuclear energy or at least a dramatic slow down. From April of last year : The future of nuclear power was bleak, even before the Fukushima disaster, said energy expert Mycle Schneider Wednesday at a press conference in Berlin, where he previewed an upcoming Worldwatch report on the outlook of nuclear power. "The industry was arguably on life support before Fukushima. When the history of this industry is written, Fukushima is likely to introduce its final chapter," s...

Australia has decided to put a price on carbon in the hope that it can kick-start its renewable energy i ndustry and reduce emissions .  The Australian government has unveiled plans to impose a tax on carbon emissions for the worst polluters.  Prime Minister Julia Gillard said carbon dioxide emissions would be taxed at A$23 ($25) per ton from 2012. The country's biggest economic reform in a generation will cover some 500 companies. In 2015, a market-based trading scheme will be introduced. Households are expected to see consumer prices rise by nearly 1%, and the move has been criticised by the opposition. The announcement by Gillard has led to a healthy debate about the plan, to put it mildly, as you can see on the comment section of this article . The greater question is: Will this lead to Australia to reconsider nuclear power ? "No one will build coal-fired power plants," he [Paul Breslin]said. "It is already sending a signal to prospe...

For those of you who tend a bit more to the wonkish end of things, a new joint study from the OECD and IAEA on the world’s supply of uranium could make for some interesting reading.  The biennial OECD “ Red Book ” (officially known as Uranium 2009: Resources, Production and Demand ) on uranium supply was just released and it has some interesting tidbits on uranium mining and exploration that bode well for the health of the nuclear energy industry. …uranium resources, production and demand are all on the rise… Worldwide exploration and mine development expenditures have more than doubled since the publication of the previous edition…These expenditures have increased despite declining uranium market prices since mid-2007. It’s an odd thing for mining expenditures to increase as prices of a commodity drop. Usually as the value of a resource drops, there’s a pullback on production and exploration. After all, who wants to dig up a worthless rock? But with uranium, prices ar...

We published a sour editorial the other day from Australia to show we had to go down under for a negative view of our loan guarantee. But let’s not sell Australia short – we’ve run enough material over the last couple of years to show the country is grappling seriously with ending its long standing ban against nuclear energy. Our experience is that once the conversation gets going, it’s hard to imagine it not getting to its conclusion – which is usually to the good of the atom. Tony Owen told the Paydirt 2010 conference the "enabling investment" would allow Australia to have a serious debate on a nuclear industry. He said nuclear power was likely to be the nation's best option after 2030. Professor Owen, who heads the Australian energy campus at University College, London, said new power generation plants over the next 20 years would be fired by gas or renewables, the latter driven by government support and eventually a price on carbon. Well. on the one hand,...

We thought to call this post “Diseased Waste,” but decided it wasn’t only inaccurate but sounded like a death metal band. When we hear E. coli, we think disease, though of course, the critters live in our intestines from about three days after our births onwards and only a few strains of it prove dangerous via food contamination. You can read about E. coli here . But still, unfairly, the first thought was disease. So we were intrigued by this Science Daily article about the use of E. coli to retrieve uranium from otherwise exhausted mines and even as a vehical to clean up sites. The bacterium isn’t the key here, though – it’s efficacy for this purpose has been known for awhile – it’s the additive. Here’s how the process works : Bacteria, in this case, E. coli, break down a source of inositol phosphate (also called phytic acid), a phosphate storage material in seeds, to free the phosphate molecules. The phosphate then binds to the uranium forming a uranium phosphate precipita...

Or even wins. Note the two posts about USEC below – it’s all about the company’s American Centrifuge project and DOE’s rejection of its loan guarantee application to move it to the next stage – and USEC’s almost ferocious response to that rejection. And now, DOE issues a press release : The Department of Energy and USEC Inc. today announced an agreement to delay a final review on the company’s loan guarantee application for the American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, OH. There’s a good deal of give on both sides of the issue. From USEC: As it has indicated, the Department sees promise in the ACP technology, but USEC’s application does not meet all the statutory and regulatory standards that would permit the agency to grant a loan guarantee at this time.  Both DOE and USEC recognize that meeting these criteria will likely take six months or more. Okay, so USEC accepts that the application needs more work. From DOE: The Department plans to defer review of the ap...

We generally think protests and protesting are good things. They are ways of getting a message out and trying to bring attention to issues. We don’t even mind when a nuclear power plant is protested – after all, it’s a great opportunity to educate the protesters and even try a counter-protest. Seems so American, so small-d democratic. Even when it threatens to go small-a anarchic, we would still tilt in favor of an unruly public gathering. This came to mind while we were reading and thinking about a story in Politico this morning that talked about the increased rowdiness at political town hall meetings. It was Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) whose encounter with a disgruntled constituent brought the issue to the fore. But now, some pols are cancelling the meetings, others are ensuring there is a police presence if they do have one and getting escorted to their cars. It’s as if they’d never heard of a old fashioned free-for-all. But at least two politicians get it. “Town halls are ...

…but all fouled up at USEC, the company that enriches a lot of the uranium in the United States. The Department of Energy has turned down USEC’s loan guarantee application, making it difficult-to-impossible, says USEC, for it to acquire funding to finish its American Centrifuge project. This has led to a pair of dueling press releases that are fascinatingly disjunctive. Let’s look at USEC first: “We are shocked and disappointed by DOE’s decision. The American Centrifuge met the original intent of the loan guarantee program in that it would have used an innovative, but proven, technology, reduced greenhouse gas emissions and created thousands of  immediate jobs across the United States. The American Centrifuge is not a new idea. It was first ideated by the Department of Energy in the 1970s as a next generation enrichment facility and abandoned after a successful test in the 80s. USEC, which spun out of DOE as a private company, reactivated the project and, in its words, ...

Bloomberg reports on the growing realization in Australia that its ambitious carbon emission reduction goals may be hard to achieve without nuclear energy. Well, those with a horse in the race definitely think so : “As more and more Australians get involved in the whole climate change debate, as they learn about what’s happening around the world where the uptake of nuclear power is increasing quite strongly, they’ll accept the attraction of nuclear power and over time embrace it,” That comes from Ziggy Switkowski , head of the nation’s main nuclear research institute , and you really wouldn’t expect him to say different, would you? So what does the government think? “We have a very clear view that Australia is blessed with conventional energy resources, as well as renewable energy resources and our focus as a nation should be on developing those technologies in renewable energy,” Wong told reporters in Canberra. “That’s why we have got our renewable energy target, to dr...

Well, that’s going a little far – and silly, to boot. But the Russians have actually found a way to do a little nuclear business on this side of the world without setting off alarm bells. Of course, we’ve noted many times the big bear’s activities around Europe and Asia, where it has competed with every other country, including the United States, with a developed nuclear business. And, of course, there’s Iran, where Russia built the plant at Bushehr and, in so far as Iran can be leashed in its ambitions, Russia has an interest in not having its efforts corrupted . If the tests [at Bushehr; this was written in February] are successful, [Iranian official Mohsen] Shirazi said it will clear the way for the use of nuclear fuel rods containing enriched uranium that was supplied last year by Russia under a contract estimated to be worth about $1 billion. That fuel is currently under the seal of UN nuclear inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency …  [B]oth Russi...

And a lot of interesting information on uranium, too. When I worked at Scientific American during the late eighties, the rule for the magazine was that one story per issue should be comprehensible to laymen, but every other article could go into as much technical detail as a specialist could stand. This appears to have changed – while not nearly at the dumbed-down level of, say, Psychology Today, all the articles in the current set are informative and graspable to any interested party. So you can learn how long the uranium supply will last – 200 years – unless an economical method emerges that can pull it from sea water – then it’s 60,000 years. (No mention of Thorium, which may throw these numbers askew one day.) Or the first nuclear reactor – 2 billion years old and counting. Or what to look for in the next generation of plants. That last story dates from 2003, so they may be pulling some stuff out of the archives to support the newer material. Still, good reads. The cover ...

For those of us who are interested in the developments pertaining to the domestic mining of uranium, you may find it noteworthy that perhaps the largest deposit of uranium ore in the United States is located in southwestern Virginia. There won't be any uranium mining in Virginia any time soon though, since there has long been a moratorium on uranium mining in Virginia. But, recently there have been proposals of conducting a study to determine whether uranium can be mined safely and what the potential impacts may be. Last night, the Virginia Coal and Energy Commission held a public meeting in Chatham, Virginia, simply to hear public comments pertaining to the study of the feasibility of uranium mining. From some of the comments (e.g., likening mining to "brutal rape"), you would think that the study is tantamount to actually starting mining operations. More information about the public meeting can be found here (incl. video) . Some interesting (and often outrageous) com...

If nuclear energy is going to push forward to a true international renaissance, it’s not enough to apply for licenses and and clear some land for new plants. An entire infrastructure has to be exist to support them – now, of course, there is such an infrastructure, since plants have been puttering along for a long while and need replacement parts, a supply of uranium and so on. But a marked increase in plant construction and operation promises a shockwave of new activity in associated industries and suppliers. Take a look at this article from Smart Money, which offers advice(which we do not recommend you follow without a lot of additional research – you really could find that your next home is your car) on where your investment dollars might flow in the nuclear sphere. This caught our eye: Nuclear plants also need fuel, of course, and tight supplies of enriched uranium should benefit USEC, one of only four commercial uranium processors in the world. So true, and what about...

If we use breeder reactors, uranium can last for 5 billion years at double current world electricity usage .

Check out the detailed piece from CNNMoney on how Kazakhstan's uranium industry has taken off .