NEI Nuclear Notes

The New York Times addresses nuclear energy as part of it Retro Report video series. The story by Clyde Haberman that accompanies the video fulfills the retro side of the agenda with a look at Three Mile Island, then continues : Yet American attitudes on nuclear power, as measured by opinion polls, are far from irrevocably negative. As TMI faded in collective memory, the popularity of that energy source has waxed and waned, each rise tempered by a new cause for alarm, notably Chernobyl and Fukushima. Many power plants that had been on the drawing boards before 1979 were built. In the last few years, new ones have been proposed, encouraged by President Obama, who has described nuclear energy as necessary — along with renewable sources like wind and solar — in any plan to wean the country from fossil fuels. The need for swift action would seem greater than ever, given new warnings from a United Nations panel that time is running short for countries to adopt strategies to keep worldw...

In any large market, there are are trends that can be predicted and trends that cannot. For example, the loss of San Onofre (and some hydro plants) in California can be predicted to have an impact on the energy market, not least through an increase in carbon emissions. It would seem this is true, per this report from California ISO (the grid managers): The generation gap caused by having less hydro-electric and nuclear generation was filled, in large part, by natural gas. Natural gas generators supplied about 40 percent of ISO energy in 2013, up from 39 percent in 2012 and 28 percent in 2011. That’s not too bad – solar energy increased during the same period from 5 percent to 8 percent, so that helped stave off carbon emissions. This is the unpredictable part, with no nuclear mention whatever and put as sunnily as possible: While total wholesale electric costs increased by 31 percent in 2013, after controlling for the 30 percent in natural gas prices last year, costs r...

News from Wisconsin: Phoenix Nuclear Labs (PNL), the Monona startup that has developed a particle accelerator-based neutron generator , announced a two-year, $1 million grant from the U.S. Energy Department to design and build a “high current negative hydrogen ion source.” That description at the end sounds a lot like fusion. The project has applications for physics research, medical cyclotrons, semiconductor manufacturing, and—over the long term—trying to achieve “abundant, clean, nuclear fusion energy,” PNL said. So fusion is a misty dream of the future while more achievable goals come first. I have no particular brief on Phoenix or its prospects, but sometimes we forget that what we call nuclear energy has applications that have nothing whatever to do with making electricity. Of course, there are medical applications (a field Phoenix also wants to be in), but I’d say an understanding of its potential and actual use beyond electricity and medicine is, for many peo...

This is from an Exelon press release, but it’s the kind of thing nuclear advocate want because it’s a company touting the benefits of nuclear energy: Continuing its progress toward a clean energy future, Exelon announced today that it reduced or avoided more than 18 million metric tons of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2013, surpassing its goal of eliminating 17.5 million metric tons of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per year by 2020. And how did it do that? Retirement of fossil plants and company energy efficiency and process improvement efforts that resulted in a reduction of more than 9.8 million metric tons of GHG emissions; Addition of 316 megawatts (MW) of emission-free energy through uprates across the nuclear fleet; There’s more bullet points – these are the top two. More: Exelon’s industry-leading fleet of nuclear power plants plays an important role in its low-emissions profile, avoiding 82 million metric tons of GHG emissio...

The IPCC report on climate change is scrupulously neutral when it comes to energy types, no more supportive (or non-supportive) of nuclear energy than coal with carbon capture or wind. But our friend Rod Adams at the Energy Collective has found an ingenious way around this: Not only have I spent time smithing words for human consumption in intensely political environments, but I also have a fair understanding of Boolean logic. I admire what the IPCC authors have accomplished. In both human communications and computer programming, the operators ‘AND’ and ‘OR’ have important meanings. So do modifiers like ‘with’. (Fossil with CCS is a completely different animal than fossil without CCS.) This is more funny than convincing – it turns the IPCC authors into Paul De Man-style semiologists , looking for signs pointing to meanings. But here’s the thing: no coded message necessary. Just in stating facts and discussing energy types at all , the IPCC cannot avoid the truth. Let ...

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...

Nuclear energy plays a minor role in a minor online kerfluffle. In the New York Times, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of The Breakthrough Institute (an environmental think tank with an interest in nuclear energy) complain that Showtime’s climate change series Years of Living Dangerously does not include solutions to climate change, only depictions of possible or real disaster. For them, it’s exactly the wrong message : Still, environmental groups have known since 2000 that efforts to link climate change to natural disasters could backfire, after researchers at the Frameworks Institute studied public attitudes for its report “How to Talk About Global Warming.” Messages focused on extreme weather events, they found, made many Americans more likely to view climate change as an act of God — something to be weathered, not prevented. Messaging is valuable, of course, but when it starts to diverge from the truth, then it becomes a hindrance to communication. Climate change h...