NEI Nuclear Notes

Michael Purdie The following is a guest post by NEI's Michael Purdie.  The Wall Street Journal 's Jon Keegan recently published a very interesting infographic on how long your iPhone would keep operating depending on the ultimate power source . Keegan analyzed the energy density of certain fossil fuels, batteries, and even body fat (which was pretty cool) and analyzed how long an iPhone could run based on its theoretical battery volume. Keegan looked at three scenarios: regular use, LTE browsing, and stand by time for an iPhone 6s . Under those conditions, Keegan estimated that the lithium ion battery in your iPhone should last 15 hours from regular use, 10 hours from LTE browsing, and 10 days on standby. The results ranged from an hour from a lead acid battery (similar to that of the one in your car) to 10 days by diesel fuel from regular use. In case you were curious, body fat would power your phone for 9 days. Can't fight the power. Interestingly, there...

This is startling: Lenin and Mao referenced in a pro-nuclear energy op-ed written by Eric McFarland of the Dow Centre for Sustainable Engineering Innovation at the University of Queensland: The ghosts of Lenin and Mao might well be smirking. Communist and authoritarian nations are moving to take global leadership in, and profit from, the commercial use of nuclear power, a technology made possible by the market-driven economies of the West. New research and development could enable abundant, affordable, low-carbon energy as well as further beneficial products for industry and medicine. This is published in the Wall Street Journal, so the goal may well be to wake up the capitalists from the dolorous slumber. Governments are right, of course, to monitor and tightly control the application of nuclear energy, as they do chemical and biological weapons. But the well-intentioned systems, agencies, regulations, legislation, safeguards and bureaucratic mass that have been applied ...

NEI VP Richard J. Myers The following statement concerning today's story on nuclear energy and natural gas ("Can gas undo nuclear power?") that appeared in the Wall Street Journal can be attributed to Richard J. Myers, NEI's Vice President, Policy Development, Planning and Supplier Programs: Electricity production issues are not quite as cut-and-dried as portrayed in the article, certainly not from the vantage point of energy companies who must evaluate an array of factors to determine what their future generating mix will and will not be. A nuclear energy facility produces benefits well beyond the electricity it generates. They include economic benefits like jobs, taxes and procurement; grid reliability benefits in the form of voltage support and ancillary services; the environmental benefit of avoided emissions; and the energy security benefits of an electricity source that adds diversity and forward price stability to the electricity supply portfolio. It a...

The Wall Street Journal has up a single item poll. The single item? Should the world increase its reliance on nuclear energy? Go on over to the site and cast your vote. As of Wednesday morning, the totals were 80 percent yes and 19 percent no. That’s 20 points to make up! (Not that we’re suggesting how you should vote – but then again, this isn’t Beyond Nuclear dot com either. Just saying.)

The slow pace of news coming from Japan means that reporters have to write about things in a somewhat more speculative fashion – about things that might happen. For example, the Japanese government might expand the evacuation zone around Fukushima: Japan's government said Thursday it is considering extending the evacuation zone around its hobbled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex, as the government recalculates the risk of radioactivity that continues to issue from the plant four weeks after Japan's devastating earthquake and tsunami. But there’s no set timetable for determining this while Tepco and the government take more radiation readings: Tepco said it has provided radiation figures from several locations near the complex and is awaiting government analysis before making the data public. The government hasn't said when it would make a decision on expanding the zone, what measures it would use or how it might house those it relocates. It said it h...

We’ve run a series of editorials over the last few days that take a cautious but supportive view of American nuclear energy going forward after Japan. That’s fine – the fact that writers and editorial boards are grappling with the issues is to be encouraged. Most have been judicious and measured. And we have to say that that’s true even among writers who would just as soon the entire industry close down and go away – there is a realization that shutting down nuclear means that the project of producing emission free electricity generation would take a ghastly hit. In the short run, the beneficiary of nuclear's now inevitable crisis is going to be fossil fuels. Renewable energy remains too expensive, too land-hungry, too unreliable and too small-scale to take up much slack, so cheap coal and newly abundant natural gas will do the job. This is ironic, because however high the death toll at Fukushima climbs, it is unlikely to match the casualties in the fossil-fuel ind...

Here’s a novel suggestion from Stephen Bainbridge: President Obama has a ready source of nuclear knowledge in the government that could turn its attention to the industrial sector: The Navy already operates dozens of small nuclear reactors in aircraft carriers and submarines, with an outstanding record of safety and reliability. They have an established training program that churns out nuclear-capable officers. By analogy to the Army Corps of Engineering, we could create a Navy Corps of Nuclear Engineering. It would build and operate dozens of small nuclear power plants around the country. To address security concerns, the first plants would be built on military bases, where the garrison can provide security. Licensing costs would be cut because the government would own and operate the plants. We can imagine any number of problems with this idea, but many points to Bainbridge for having it. We haven’t heard anything this ingenious in awhile. Be sure to read the rest; we ...

After receiving flowers and surviving a hail of flash bulbs, new IAEA chief Yukiya Amano officially began his four year term and made a short statement (there’s a video there, too, and Amano speaks in English): "The situation surrounding the Agency is stormy now. We have a lot of difficult challenges, but I would like to do my best. I would like to address the global issues that include non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, enhancing nuclear security, addressing the energy need, providing good health care, and water management, among others. I will try to be an impartial, reliable, and professional Director General." He isn’t kidding about stormy, but for now let’s allow Amano his flowers and photo ops. Plenty of time for the storms. --- We found this op-ed at the Wall Street Journal by Richard Lester, head of the department of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, interesting and a little troubling. Despite his title, his interest here is in determining wh...

Bob Metcalfe has an interesting futurist editorial in the Wall Street Journal: The good news is that the big names in nuclear energy -- like Areva, Hitachi, General Electric and Toshiba -- have recently been joined by a bevy of high-tech start-ups seeking to develop advanced nuclear-reactor designs for both fission and fusion energy production. So far, there are five fission and two fusion start-ups, among them Hyperion, NuScale and Tri Alpha. We don’t want to quote much – too much on Metcalfe’s mind to paraphrase. He considers current nuclear technology too expensive, though he give a kind of indirect thumbs up to the kinds of mini-reactors Babcock & Wilcox recently introduced, and perhaps oversells fusion – still essentially a lab project. Even as a peek into the future, we found ourselves quibbling a lot. But it tweaks the brain and is therefore worth a read. --- Geothermal’s in town and shaking things up. While prospecting for heat in Basel Switzerland a few y...

The Wall Street Journal has a story about Warren Buffett's pending purchase of Constellation Energy and, particularly from our point of view, its UniStar subsidiary, a nuclear consortia that includes Electricite de France , AREVA and Bechtel . The WSJ has no idea how Buffett might proceed with its Unistar subsidiary: On Thursday, MidAmerican chief executive Greg Abel sounded more enthusiastic about the technology, saying "we're committed to new nuclear." But: Mr. Buffett's sudden emergence raises questions about whether nuclear development, in general, has viability, according to Paul Patterson, head of Glenrock Associates LLC in New York, a research firm. "It's a very cloudy picture," Mr. Patterson says, "And, so far, we don't have anyone making a firm decision to go forward." [We're not sure if he means Buffett, which would be an awfully early call, or the industry, which is plainly false.] What is not fully noted in the sto...

In the world of Washington politics, one man's incentive may be another man's subsidy or boondoggle. A Wednesday afternoon posting on the Wall Street Journal's Environmental Capital blog reported the Senate's rejection of an attempt to extend tax credits given to renewable energy projects. The posting describes the on-again/off-again life of renewable energy tax credits and the punishing effect their uncertainty has had on investment in wind energy projects. Each time the production tax credit has lapsed, investment in wind energy has fallen off sharply, roiling the wind industry: The U.S. has never had long-term clean-energy subsidies in place; usually they are renewed for a year or two at a time. Lots of people in the industry blame that unpredictability for the stop-and –start pattern the clean energy industry’s developed over the last two decades. New projects generally come to a standstill the year after tax credits expire. The American Wind Energy Association, a ...

In the Op-Ed pages of The Wall Street Journal today, William Tucker provides as normalizing an explanation about nuclear energy production as I've seen in the general interest press. If we are now going to choose nuclear power as a way to resolve both our concerns about global warming and our looming energy shortfalls, we are first going to have to engage in a national debate about whether or not we accept the technology. To begin this discussion, I suggest redefining what we call nuclear power as "terrestrial energy." Every fuel used in human history -- firewood, coal, oil, wind and water -- has been derived from the sun. But terrestrial energy is different. Terrestrial energy is the heat at the earth's core that raises its temperature to 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than the surface of the sun. Remarkably, this heat derives largely from a single source -- the radioactive breakdown of uranium and thorium. The energy released in the breakdown of these two elemen...

In the unlikely event you've missed it today, The Wall Street Journal has published a special package on Energy and nuclear is the cover girl/boy. WSJ editor Michael Totty has written the lead article, The Case For and Against Nuclear Power . (Janus-like, Totty sees, and provides, both arguments.) Sidebar materials include a podcast interview with Eileen Claussen , president of the nonpartisan Pew Center on Global Climate Change . Interesting exchange at the 8:44 mark, Totty : What's your assessment? Will the [nuclear] industry succeed? Or will nuclear power, at least in the U.S., slip in importance over time as other energy sources come up? Claussen : Well, if you look at the mix of sources that we now have—I think coal is about 50% of electricity generation, nuclear is about 20%—renewables, for all the growth we've seen, particularly in wind, is still in the single digits. So even if we worked really hard to increase the share of renewables, we're still going to ne...

Conferences, campaign speeches, and media all contributed to an especially busy NEI Monday. At Brookings , Sen. Lamar Alexander (R) called for a bipartisan Manhattan project leading to "clean energy independence." The U.S. representative to the IAEA , Ambassador Greg Schulte, discussed nonproliferation initiatives at a Woodrow Wilson International Center event. Sen. John McCain (R) continued his policy tour, stopping in Oregon to deliver his address on climate change . And The Wall Street Journal published an article looking at the costs of new plant builds. Mark Flanagan responded via the NEI blog. Scott Peterson took to the airwaves, citing industry and independent analysis that shows nuclear-generated electricity to be cost-effective and competitive. Peterson also emphasized the bipartisan support for new plants in statehouses and Congress.

The argument that building new nuclear energy plants will represent ruinous expense for anyone to undertake has percolated among nuclear opposition folks without much mainstream notice. Now, however, the Wall Street Journal has taken a crack at it . It's nicely researched and written up to WSJ standards, although you've heard the argument of the piece many times. Here's the lede: A new generation of nuclear power plants is on the drawing boards in the U.S., but the projected cost is causing some sticker shock: $5 billion to $12 billion a plant, double to quadruple earlier rough estimates. $5 to $12 million? That seems a pretty big spread. Here's a longer taster, with a soupcon of that "on the one hand, on the other hand" thing journalists use to cover all bases: Several things could derail new development plans. Excessive cost is one. A second is the development of rival technologies that could again make nuclear plants look like white elephants. ...

Details from PR Newswire .

That's what the Christian Science Monitor is asking : "Saying nuclear is carbon-free is not true," says Uwe Fritsche, a researcher at the Öko Institut in Darmstadt, Germany, who has conducted a life-cycle analysis of the plants. "It's less carbon-intensive than fossil fuel. But if you are honest, scientifically speaking, the truth is: There is no carbon-free energy. There's no free lunch." Well it's good to see they are not spouting the anti's claims on CO2 emissions . They appear to do some homework on the issue. NEI's Paul Genoa is there to represent: "Yes, absolutely there's carbon," says Paul Genoa, director of policy development for the Nuclear Energy Institute, which represents the nuclear power industry in the US. "Most studies have found life-cycle emissions of nuclear to be comparable with renewable. Some show nuclear to be extremely high, but we do not find those credible." Stewart Peterson has a different vi...

That's according to The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics : The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics's March quarter Australian Commodities report, released yesterday, said despite a substantial increase in global uranium mine production this year, the spot uranium price was expected to keep appreciating, averaging more than $US94.20 ($A121.69) per pound in 2007, compared with $US85 now. "In 2008, the spot uranium price is forecast to increase by a further 10 per cent to average $US103 per pound," ABARE said. ... However prices will start to decline after next year ABARE says, as the large amounts of money being spent on uranium exploration, both in Australia and around the world, begin to translate into new mine production. Here's another take on uranium prices according to NEI's Marvin Fertel : In the long run, "I think we're going to end up with a much better situation than we even had before," he sai...

They're calling it Energy Roundup . Looks like they soft launched it in the middle of the month. Just check their archives, and they haven't covered much nuclear energy news as of yet. Needless to say, we'll be adding them to the daily reading list.