NEI Nuclear Notes

Germany is a big country with a big problem when it  comes to closing its nuclear plants. Belgium is a smaller country with the same problem and somehow it’s still a pretty big one : With just three years to go before Belgium is due to begin phasing out nuclear power, the country is still grappling with basic questions about its plans, including whether the 2015 deadline has to be adjusted to ensure electricity supplies remain reliable. To be honest, if you want to close nuclear plants, you have to prepare for the loss of a lot of electricity and the very real possibility that the price to customers will go up, in some cases considerably. Belgium hasn’t prepared for any of this. Melchior Wathelet, the country's new state secretary for energy, said in an interview that a study currently being prepared, for presentation by July, will assess whether there is "an alternative that would guarantee the security of supply at an acceptable price and respecting the environm...

We return, once more, to Germany where details are starting to emerge on the real costs of their nuclear phase out. Let’s start with emissions. According to an estimate by Laszlo Varro, the head of the gas, coal, and power markets division at the International Energy Agency emissions will rise significantly . Varro estimates that the nuclear phase out in Germany has caused a 25-million-ton annual increase in carbon dioxide emissions. The culprit, in large part, is the new coal power that has come online to meet the shortfall. 25 million tons is sort of abstract, but EPA has a pretty cool tool: the Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator . It finds more concrete alternatives to “tons of carbon dioxide” like “emissions from passenger vehicles.” Turns out 25 million tons of CO 2 emissions per year is equal to (pick your favorite one of the following): Annual greenhouse gas emissions from 4,446,984 passenger vehicles or CO 2 emissions from 52,743,297 barrels of oil. ...

In Belgium, the local chapter of Greenpeace is calling on the government to close that nation's nuclear power plants earlier than scheduled . Luckily, not everyone is buying it. One professor ran the numbers, and had this to say: Professor Jacques De Ruyck, specialist in renewable energy, disagrees with the reasoning that Greenpeace puts forward to encourage the closing of the old nuclear power plants. The oldest nuclear power plants are producing just a small share of the electric energy we use, he says. Meanwhile, Greenpeace is not taking the rising demand for electricity into account. Instead, they estimate that the consumer will cut down on usage by 2.5 to 3 percent a year. “That gigantic percentage is unrealistic”, De Ruyck says. If we try to both decrease our CO2 production and close the nuclear plants, we may face serious shortages. Electricity will become five times more expensive, De Ruyck says. Currently, nuclear energy accounts for 55 percent of Belgium's electricit...