NEI Nuclear Notes

Russia and the Ukraine are haggling over the rising cost of Russian natural gas , but this further item from RIA Novosti in the same story caught my eye as well: The Russian Agency for Nuclear Energy (Rosatom) plans to call for leveling off prices of uranium fuel delivered by the Russian TVEL company to the nuclear power plants in many countries, including Ukraine. TVEL buys uranium in Ukraine at world prices but provides thermal columns for its nuclear plants at a privileged price, resulting in a loss of $150 million a year. Rosatom suggests that prices of Ukrainian raw material and Russian fuel should be leveled off in 2007. This can have negative consequences for Ukraine, because TVEL is currently supplying nearly 100% of fuel requirements of Ukrainian nuclear power plants. More later, if warranted. Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy Environment Energy Politics Technology Economics Russia , Ukraine , Uranium , Natural Gas

From Reuters : South Africa has awarded Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) two contracts worth $15 million to help build a demonstration advanced nuclear reactor. The company developing the reactor said in a statement on Tuesday MHI would supply parts for the core barrel assembly, an integral component within the reactor pressure vessel of the new reactor design. It will also provide professional services for the assembly's design that will form part of the reactor's demonstration plant to be built at Koeberg, South Africa's existing nuclear facility near Cape Town. South Africa plans to build a multi-billion-rand pebble bed reactor as it scrambles to find new energy sources to meet growing demand for electricity, with demand already almost outstripping supply. For previous posts on the PBMR, click here and here . UPDATE : For a great technical explanation of the PBMR, click here . Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy , Politics , Technology , PBMR , South Africa , ...

Later this morning I'll be attending a briefing for bloggers by Interior Secretary Gale Norton over energy exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, better known around Washington, D.C. as ANWR. Though this is an energy issue that's not directly related to nuclear, many of the issues that our industry grapples with get replayed in the debate over oil and natural gas exploration. Here's an excerpt from a Q&A that Secretary Norton did with the Desert Sun last week: Q: Some argue that ANWR's not worth it because it's just a year's worth of the United States' oil needs. It's not really that much is it? A: It's absurdly unrealistic to think that all a nation's energy for several decades is going to come from one source . You need to have a variety of different sources. ANWR would provide 15 to 20 percent of domestic oil production by the time it would be fully developed. That is hugely significant. What we've just gone through in th...

If you're looking for a good real-time look at news about the nuclear energy business, you could do worse than the results you'll get from Topix.net . Click here and then bookmark the page. Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy , Energy

From Fuel Cell Today : A South Korea-U.S. joint research center opened Wednesday to study ways of using atomic power to produce hydrogen gas, officials said Wednesday. The center, tentatively dubbed the South Korea-U.S. Nuclear Hydrogen Joint Development Center, is located in Daejeon, South Korea's science mecca, about 164 kilometers south of Seoul. The research center will be jointly run by the state-run Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, U.S. nuclear technology company General Atomics and Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction Co., a South Korean manufacturer of power-generation equipment, according to the officials at the Ministry of Science and Technology. Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy , Energy , Electricity , Environment , South Korea , Hydrogen

Here's an interesting news item out of New South Wales : SCRAMBLING to catch up on years of inadequate infrastructure planning, the NSW Government gave the go-ahead yesterday for the state's biggest privately funded power station. The 400 megawatt, $350million plant will be one of two gas-fired stations the Government will race to have built before a forecast energy crunch takes hold on the state. But even as Premier Morris Iemma announced the new electricity plants, he said he could not guarantee there would be no blackouts this summer. In many ways, Australia is in the same boat the U.S. is when it comes to electrical generation: Decades of paying attention to short-term needs have led us to neglect long-term planning in the electrical sector resulting in a pending shortage of baseload power generation. What we have here is not an energy crisis per se, but rather an energy investment crisis -- something NEI Chairman and CEO Skip Bowman first pointed out in a speech he gave ...

A few months after India and the U.S. announced a pact on nuclear energy technology transfer , India announced a similar development pact with Russia : A Joint Statement issued here at the end of three-day visit of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Russia during which he held wide-ranging talks with President Vladimir Putin, said the two leaders noted with satisfaction the long-standing and steadily developing cooperation in the military-technical field. Describing the military and technical cooperation as a "vital pillar" of Indo-Russian strategic partnership and another manifestation of deep mutual trust and commonality of interests, the two leaders affirmed their commitment to continue to foster this (defence) cooperation. Singh and Putin also considered the energy sector as a high priority area in which India and Russia are fully capable in all respects to forge long-term and large-scale joint collaborations for mutual interests. India also completed a similar pact with t...