Aywa in Egypt, Nein in Germany

One of the tasks nuclear energy plants could easily do is desalination. Desalination, the process of removing salt from water to make it drinkable (potable, that is), is especially important in more arid lands – say, for example, California:

The massive project, in Carlsbad, teems with nearly 500 workers in yellow hard hats. When it’s done next year, it will take in more than 100 million gallons of Pacific Ocean water daily and produce 54 million gallons of fresh, drinkable water. While this adds up to just 10 percent of the county’s [San Diego]water delivery needs, it will, crucially, be reliable and drought-proof—a hedge against potentially worse times ahead.

In this case, the Carlsbad facility is co-located with the Encina natural gas plant, which will supply it with power. There are some 16,000 desalination facilities around the world, many of them co-located with gas and coal plants. The Technology Review article linked above provides a lot of useful data on the subject if you’re interested.

Some countries have experimented with nuclear-based desalination – notably Kazakhstan, India and Japan, but no one has really proceeded with it commercially.

So this news is exciting:

Egypt and Russia have signed an agreement for the development of a design for a nuclear power plant with a desalination facility, Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom said.

Rosatom did not release details of the agreement, but said it believes a desalination facility at a large capacity nuclear power plant with Russian-supplied VVER pressurized water reactors has “significant potential” in foreign markets.

Such a facility would be able to produce up to 170,000 cubic meters of fresh water a day from one nuclear power unit, Rosatom said.

Though Rosatom is apparently using a full scale reactor for this project, desalination practically calls for small reactors. (Many agree. The NucNet article says: “Argentina, China and South Korea have developed small nuclear reactor designs specifically to generate both electricity and fresh water. Small reactor technology may be key to expanding clean, nuclear energy-based desalination, the IAEA said.”) Obviously, as carbon dioxide emissions reduction becomes more important to energy policy, a move away from fossil fuels for at least some of these plants will gain currency (I haven’t read this, but I suspect the relative importance of desalination will allow many facilities to grandfather their way into any emission reduction plan.)

In any event, and given the issues that come from dealing with the lumbering bear, this is a great development. The Americans need to get cracking on this.

NEI has a page on desalination. It’s a subject that tends to fly low and quiet, but where it’s needed, it’s the most important thing there is.

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From the New York Times:

The European Union will fail to meet an ambitious goal of significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 unless it takes more aggressive measures to limit the use of fossil fuels and adopts new environmental policies, according to a report scheduled for release on Tuesday.

And why might this be? Ah, Germany, how we want to love you.

According to the report, Germany, whose economy is the best in Europe, was the only country not on track to meet its emissions reductions for 2020, or cut its energy consumption. According to the German Association of Energy and Water Industries, the country saw an increase of 20 million tons of carbon emissions between 2012 and 2013, instead of a reduction.

In order to meet its goals, Germany must reduce emissions annually by 3.5 percent over the next six years, a feat that will result in substantial increases in energy costs, and generate political pressure to block measures that could hurt the economy.

And why might that be?

The race to shutter the country’s nuclear reactors by 2022, for example, has resulted in many power providers using brown coal, or lignite, the cheapest and dirtiest of all fossil fuels to keep the power flowing to customers. This, in turn, has led to an increase in carbon emissions.

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Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

Below is from our rapid response team . Yesterday, regional anti-nuclear organizations asked federal nuclear energy regulators to launch an investigation into what it claims are “newly identified flaws” in Westinghouse’s advanced reactor design, the AP1000. During a teleconference releasing a report on the subject, participants urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend license reviews of proposed AP1000 reactors. In its news release, even the groups making these allegations provide conflicting information on its findings. In one instance, the groups cite “dozens of corrosion holes” at reactor vessels and in another says that eight holes have been documented. In all cases, there is another containment mechanism that would provide a barrier to radiation release. Below, we examine why these claims are unwarranted and why the AP1000 design certification process should continue as designated by the NRC. Myth: In the AP1000 reactor design, the gap between the shield bu...

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

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...

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You may have noticed over the past few weeks that a number of nuclear plants are shut down for refueling outages or are resuming operations after just returning from one. This type of routine outage usually occurs in the spring or fall when electricity demand is low so that nuclear reactors can replace about one-third of the spent fuel rods with new fuel and conduct other routine maintenance and repairs at the plant. To get a better sense of how refueling works at a nuclear energy facility, I spoke with Marcus Nichol, NEI’s senior project manager for used fuel storage and transportation, and asked him to explain the basics. Why does a nuclear plant need to replace one-third of its fuel? Nichol: The main purpose of a refueling outage is to replace older fuel that is depleted—meaning it can no longer efficiently produce energy from nuclear fission reactions—with new fuel. This “used fuel” has typically been used in the reactor for four-and-a-half to six years before it is pe...

NEI Nuclear Notes

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