Atomic Insights Blog

Nuclear Energy Attracting Interest From Commercial Shipping Companies

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 09:11:00 +0000

An old friend sent me a link with intriguing headline on December 2, 2009 - COSCO Investigates Nuclear Option. My first thought was "why would a big box competitor to Sam's Club be interested in a nuclear option?" That misunderstanding was quickly dispelled when I realized that Lloyds List is not terribly interested in American retailers. For the Lloyds List writers, COSCO is the trade name for China Ocean Shipping Co. (now more accurately known as China Ocean Shipping Group). That made more sense.

Cosco president and chief executive Wei Jaifu has called on international shipping organizations to begin investigating the use of nuclear power for merchant ships. He has indicated that his company will take the lead in the study and that his company has already begun discussions with the nuclear power group in China. As CAPT Wei explained, nuclear ship propulsion technically proven, but there remain some questions about acceptability and economy.

Peter Swift, the managing director of Intertanko, expressed serious reservations about the use of nuclear power on board ships. As Intertanko's "About Us" page explains, "INTERTANKO has been the voice of independent tanker owners since 1970, ensuring that the oil that keeps the world turning is shipped safely, responsibly and competitively." I am cynical about negative reactions to nuclear power from anyone who is economically dependent on trading or transporting fossil fuel.

Mr. Smith worried about the public acceptance of the technology and also quantified the challenge of finding a sufficient pool of qualified nuclear engineers to man the ships. He asserted the need for at least 5 qualified operators for each ship. With a world fleet of about 100,000 ships that are large enough to put nuclear power to beneficial use, he worried that the build out would be dependent on the development of a half a million trained operators.

The current inventory of trained nuclear propulsion plant operators should not be considered to be a barrier; instead it should be thought of as a challenging business opportunity to create and supply the educational and training programs required. Based on my own experience, you can take a person with a BS in English, put him through an intensive one-year training pipeline, and then send him to sea. After a couple of months of under instruction time, he can be qualified to stand watch on a plant and perform routine maintenance.

If you provide about 2-3 years worth of operating experience and self-study, he or she could successfully pass a rigorous oral and written test that would certify qualification to manage an entire plant. The world has an adequate seed inventory of people who have gone through similar training and served for a varying number of years at sea. The US nuclear powered Navy, which has been operating ships at sea for more than 50 years, trains about 3,000 nuclear propulsion operators every year to replace those that leave the service. There are also experienced labor pools in France, the UK, Russia and China that can serve as the teachers and mentors, so growing the necessary work force can be done at least as quickly as the plants and ships can be built.

Most of you will remember that the NS Savannah was the first and only attempt made in the US to build a nuclear powered merchant ship. She was - and still is - a beautiful piece of naval architecture with lines more reminiscent of a luxury yacht than a commercial vessel.

She served as an ambassador vessel during a promotional period under Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace program, hosting numerous groups of dignitaries on short trips. She had about 100 luxury cabins, a swimming pool, a library, a banquet hall with a dance floor, and an excellent galley. As almost an afterthought, she also had a few bulk cargo holds with some loading cranes that were positioned more to look good than to provide rapid loading.

Not surprisingly, she was an economic failure when operated as a cargo ship during the late 1960s, after her days as a show vessel were finished. Not only was her capacity limited by all of those staterooms and other accommodations, but also her operating budget included the costs of maintaining a shore based support infrastructure that was idle most of the time. Her competitors were also able to purchase fuel oil at a time when the cost per barrel was about $2-3.

I have an old book in my personal library titled "NS Savannah Safety Assessment." That yellowing technical book about the NS Savannah reveals some thought provoking information about the opportunity a reconsideration of nuclear propulsion can bring the uranium industry. She was fitted with a steam plant that produced roughly 15 MW of propulsion power. Her nuclear core used about 6800 kilograms of 4.5% enriched uranium. When she was built in the early 1960s, the standard for nuclear fuel burn-up was about 7,000 MWth-days per metric ton of uranium, so that fuel load was designed to last for a little longer than 2 years at full power, or about 3 years of operation in a typical trade profile. Modern light water fuel achieves a burn-up of about 40,000 MW-days/metric ton, so a 6800 kg fuel load for a 15 MW steam engine would last about 12 years.

It takes about 100 kg of uranium and 60 separative work units (SWU) to produce 10 kg of 4.5% enriched nuclear fuel. It would take 1.4 million tons of uranium and 820,000 SWU to provide the initial fuel load for just 20% of the world's fleet of 100,000 commercial ships. If manufacturers built a fleet of 20,000 ships over a 12-year period, they would be ordering about 113,000 tons of uranium and 68,000 SWU every year - nearly doubling today's uranium market.

There are ways to reduce the uranium consumption significantly, but there is no doubt that propelling ships with engines that fission uranium would create a significant market opportunity for the world's uranium producers, who have just recently emerged from a several decade long period of tough economic times in an industry with vast potential to exploit already known deposits. There are also technological opportunities (like the Adams Engine^TM) to improve the balance of the plant that might even include a shift away from steam propulsion, but that is a step that would require more refinement. Steam is the known and proven way to use nuclear heat in propulsion, just like it is in large central station power plants.

If cost projections from companies like B&W, which built the power plant for NS Savannah and is now working on a moderately sized reactor for land based operation, are close to correct, a power plant the size of Savannah's would cost approximately $5,000 - $10,000 per kilowatt of capacity, after accounting for the difference in scale between their proposed plant and a smaller ship sized unit.

A 15 MW ship propulsion unit with a 12 year fuel supply might cost $75 to $150 million. It would replace a 15 MW diesel engine costing $40 million, and burning bunker fuel oil costing approximately $15,000 to $20,000 per day at today's prices. After 12 years of operating at a 67% capacity factor, that large diesel engine would consume approximately $75-$100 million in fuel oil at today's prices. The cost of the nuclear fuel would be known at the time that the engine is purchased, while the cost of bunker fuel during the next 12 years is anyone's guess. With well-understood design techniques, replacing the nuclear fuel after 12 years would be a 30-60 day process. The new fuel load would cost about $7 million.

The world has accumulated thousands of ship years of operating experience for nuclear powered ships. The country with the most experience and most refined technology is the United States. Perhaps it is time for the country to have the same developmental attitude towards its submarine and aircraft carrier engines as it does towards its fighter and transport jet engines. Certain aspects of the design can be retained as militarily useful and protected, all of the rest of the design information should be shared as the basis for exceptional commercial products that create jobs and opportunities for America to compete in a lucrative global market. It appears that the Chinese are going to do it whether we decide to do so or not.

Additional reading

The Ultimate Green Ship: Nuclear Powered?

Presentation of results of economic study of nuclear powered container ships by Femina, C. R. Cushing & Co, Inc. Fall 2008

Next Big Future: Commercial Shipping Uses 9% of World Oil and is Major Air Pollution Source

90 Billion Dollars Worth of Motive to Discourage Investments in Nuclear Power By Developers of "Clean" Liquified Natural Gas

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:52:00 +0000

I noticed a headline a couple of days ago that really got my attention - $90bn natural gas deal with Japan. For the last couple of days, I have been thinking about how to explain why that particular headline means so much to me and to the rest of the world as we discuss and plan our energy future. For me, it illustrates why it is so important to "follow the money" in order to understand the words that flow from all directions when it comes to energy supply issues and prescriptions.

$90,000,000,000
Even though I deal in big numbers on a regular basis in my day job, that is truly an astounding figure to associate with a single deal. It is roughly 2/3 of the entire US Navy budget for a year. That budget pays more than a million salaries, operates about 283 ships, dozens of bases, purchases dozens of complex aircraft and pays to build 8-12 ships.

There must be tens of thousands of stakeholders associated with a $90 billion deal that have major incentives for ensuring that it goes through as planned, with as few hurdles and detours as possible. The inevitable result of efforts to bring this deal to fruition is a stronger, multi-front effort to discourage the use of nuclear energy instead of burning natural gas.

Please read the following excerpt from the article announcing the deal before you dismiss my theory. If you have ever been involved in any kind of large project sales effort, or if you are part of a company that tallies sales wins and losses, or if you simply have an understanding of human behavior, this should help to convince you that I have a reason for making that claim.

Managing director of Chevron Australia, Roy Krzywosinski, said the contract -- the largest LNG supply agreement yet made in the Australian market -- was a milestone in the Wheatstone project, as it underpinned demand for production.

"For Wheatstone it's all good news -- we've got the gas, we've now got the market and we've got partner alignment to move the project forward," he said.

"TepCo is among the most experienced LNG buyers in the world, and its willingness to commit to such significant offtake volumes demonstrates its confidence that the Wheatstone project is moving forward."

Mr Krzywosinski said the deal was a boost for the Wheatstone project, which was set to go to the Chevron board for final development approval in 2011 ahead of production starting in 2016.

TepCo is the biggest consumer of LNG in Japan, accounting for about one-third of the country's imports, and bought 20 million tonnes of LNG over the 12 months to the end of March.

Japan imports most of its energy needs and has been ramping up its use of natural gas for power generation following the 2007 closure of the Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear power plant, the world's largest nuclear electricity generator. (Emphasis added.)

Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell are all working hard to develop large natural gas fields that are not connected to the world's major energy consumers via pipelines. In order to get this gas from the source to the market, the companies are making huge bets on the complex and energy intensive technology required to turn the gas into a liquid that can be transported in ships. The economics of these projects only work when the developers can sign up credit worthy customers for long term contracts. Those contracts specify a certain pace of LNG deliveries and payments that will be large enough to support the repayment of the invested capital equipment that must be erected.

The physical capital equipment required to establish LNG fuel delivery systems include on and off shore drilling rigs, local gathering pipelines, refrigeration trains, storage tanks, port facilities, tankers, and reception ports with regasification systems. I recently wrote about a single LNG project that ExxonMobil is developing in Qatar that has a total quoted cost of $30 Billion. I thought that was huge, until I learned about this $90 BILLION Chevron project. The Wheatston project, located north Western Australia, will be an onshore gathering site for several off-shore and on-shore gas fields.

The key to the initial development of any massive capital investment is convincing lenders that you have a steady stream of income that will enable you to pay back the loan. Therefore part of the initial effort to develop a major project like Wheatstone is to establish the basic attractiveness of the product being sold and to convince customers that it is absolutely the best solution for their ongoing needs.

If you have not heard that natural gas is a "clean", "low-carbon", "abundant", "reliable" energy source that can be burned in relatively inexpensive equipment, then you have been living in a bubble, isolated from the drumbeat of advertising and public relations efforts of the oil/gas industry. If you have not heard that gas is a lot easier, quicker and cheaper than building nuclear power plants you have not been listening to cheerleaders like Al Gore, Tim Wirth, John Podesta, Joe Romm, Amory Lovins, or Big Gav (a prolific blogger who often writes anti-nuclear pieces that appear on The Energy Collective, but who also writes a lot about the economic development potential from projects aimed at exploiting abundant gas resources in his native Australia.)

Please ask yourself - would a project like this even be considered if there was less fear about nuclear energy? The earthquake that led to the shutdown at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa did little damage, but all seven reactors have remained shutdown for more than two years because of the difficulty inherent in proving a negative to "conservative regulators". Just imagine how difficult it must be to prove that nothing happened to the miles of piping and wiring, thousands of tons of building materials and thousands of components that make up seven large nuclear power plants.

No oil or gas processing facility shaken by an earthquake, despite the fact that they also are composed of high temperature, high pressure piping carrying potentially hazardous material, would have to prove that every component was in perfect condition before being allowed to return to productive operation. Instead, the owners would do an inspection, looking for obvious damage that might affect safety. Following that inspection, which might take a few days or even a week or two, the operator would start up the plant using normal procedures, perhaps supplemented by some additional inspections.

The only reason that nuclear energy is treated differently is because people are unreasonably afraid.

People do not fear things that they do not understand unless they have been carefully taught to be afraid. Teaching fear takes repetition over many years, an effort that requires a substantial amount of patience and financial support. I think that effort to teach people to fear nuclear power has been at least partially motivated by the amount of money that would either be lost or not made in the first place if more customers decided that it is better suited for meeting energy needs than other options like natural gas.

Of course, it is not enough to simply establish your product as an initially attractive solution. Even after the project gets financed the developer needs to undertake continuing effort to prevent customers from determining that there are better ways to meet their needs; defection is always a risk even if there are early termination fees involved. That effort will involve a multi-pronged approach to keeping the deal attractive, part of which will involve efforts to ensure that the competition continues to look less attractive.

Take a hard look at some of the current advertising campaigns between Verizon and AT&T with regard to cellular phone networks and then go and read some political, journalistic and web discussions on the issue. You will learn a lot about the powerful and emotional arguments that are often based on carefully selected "facts". Those arguments are an almost inevitable result when there is a lot of money and market share at stake. The same concepts apply to the energy industry, except for the fact that the stakes are far higher.

The effort to retain customers whose purchases have provided the basis for a $90 billion investment will be intense. If the income flow supporting capital repayment gets interrupted or reduced because of competitive options, many negative things can begin to happen. Most fiscally responsible people understand that calculus and know how stressful it can be if the source of income supporting a major debt falls or completely dries up before the debts are repaid.

It is very clear to me WHY those who sell the gas have a strong motive for making it as difficult as possible for their customers to be wooed by energy supply competitors who can offer a zero carbon, vice "low-carbon" fuel choice. The difference in cost and effort between operating a nuclear power plant that only needs a couple of truckloads of fuel every 18-24 months and operating a natural gas fired power plant that might require one third of a BILLION cubic feet of gas every day is very clear; the only way to sell the gas is to make it as hard and as costly as possible to build and operate an atomic fission alternative that would replace the need to buy natural gas.

Lynchburg, Virginia Has Reasons To Be Excited About Nuclear Industry Growth Prospects

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:20:00 +0000

Last weekend, I received a press release from Babcock and Wilcox describing their recent leasing of a 50,000 square foot building in Lynchburg capable of eventually hosting a team of 300 engineers, reactor designers, and support people. The entire facility will be focused on efforts to complete the mPower^TM modular reactor design work and then to complete the process of getting the system through the NRC licensing process. Initially, thirty-five people will move into the building and set it up for an ever expanding team.

(Image description: Two B&W mPower™ nuclear reactors configured as a 250 megawatt nuclear power plant.)

The Lynchburg News & Advance has taken notice of the excitement and expansion at one of its primary local employers with an editorial titled Potential for Jobs at B&W Boosts Area. That is welcome news in a town that has been through a rough patch that started well before the rest of the country entered into a recession. I am passingly familiar with the area - my college roommate lives there and I have had the opportunity to visit on a number of occasions. I have also had a lot of chats with my buddy over the years; he is a well respected systems engineer with project management experience, mainly in electronics and cellular communications.

I remember a time when his best opportunity for remaining in Lynchburg and keeping the little horse ranch that he and his wife have built into a very pleasant place to live was to find a way to get a recall to active duty for a year in Washington, DC, within weekend commuting distance of Lynchburg. During that period, I was also a geographic bachelor living in Annapolis; it gave us an opportunity to renew our friendship but it was not an easy time. He even invited me to a gathering at his home where he hosted a number of fellow engineers from Ericsson who were interested in mutual support and finding new employment opportunities. Fortunately those challenging times are quite a ways in the past for my friend, but not necessarily for the area.

With that background knowledge, however, it does not surprise me to read editorial passages like the one below in the Lynchburg press:

The expansion also means that B&W remains committed to producing the first nuclear reactor in the United States since the 1970s. The firm is competing with Areva, whose North American headquarters are located here, General Electric and Westinghouse, among others, for that distinction.

The competition to build new nuclear reactors bodes well for alternative sources for the generation of electricity across America. New reliance on nuclear power will ultimately decrease the nation’s dependence on foreign oil as a source of energy.

In June, the company announced it would design the new nuclear reactor, which it says will be less expensive and more quickly built than its competitors’ designs. Its modular design, the firm says, will allow utilities to add electricity generation capacity as needed.

The potential for B&W’s future here is significant, as Upshur pointed out. The city could reap many benefits as the work goes forward and as the reactors are licensed and built. “It could be unbelievable in terms of the types of jobs that will be available there,” she said.

The B&W news comes at a time when the economy is beginning to rebound from depression-era depths. The potential for new jobs can only help in the months ahead.

In a sign that the nuclear industry is headed for more rapid growth, I also received another press release from B&W yesterday, just 4 days after the announcement of the expansion of engineering and design activities in Lynchburg. I suspect that the timing of this one was carefully planned to follow the previous news about expansion, because it provided an exciting bit of news that B&W was spinning off from its current corporate holding company, along with the potentially scary news - for Lynchburg - that it was moving its headquarters away from Lynchburg to a new location in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The company lists the following benefits of recovering its independence from its current holding company of McDermott, though that relationship has enabled B&W to recover from a difficult period.

Better positioning to accelerate growth based on B&W’s distinct corporate strategy, market opportunities, free cash flow and customer relationships;
More efficient allocation of capital, which would allow B&W to develop an independent investment program without the constraints of a holding company structure;
Distinct publicly traded stock that could be used as currency for future acquisitions;
Elimination of the risk posed by recent modifications in the rules under the Federal Acquisition Regulations (“FAR”) that limit the U.S. Government’s ability to contract with “inverted” companies and their subsidiaries; and
Sharpened management focus and strategic vision, and closer alignment of incentives with shareholder value creation.

I have to admit that the press release amused me a bit, since I had just added the following comment on Dan Yurman's post titled Four Fearless Futures For Nuclear on the day before B&W released its the spin-off announcement:

I think that the industry would be well served by studying how the high tech industry finances the development of capital intensive, technically risky production facilities. They recognize that banks are not capable of making loans to such an enterprise and they recognize the difficulty of putting long term investment decisions into democratically controlled processes that have the risk of being captured by financially stronger, more politically connected competitors.
In general, they sell their investors on the growth prospects and build up market capitalization by meeting or exceeding sales projections on a routine basis. I believe that nuclear energy technology can be a terrific investment if devlopers would adopt that model. For example - I would love to buy a few thousand dollars worth of Hyperion, NuScale, and B&W to put in the same part of my portfolio that has done so well with Apple.
Posted at 12/06/2009 11:48 AM (Emphasis added.)

I swear - no inside information, just lucky to be thinking along the same lines as the corporate decision makers at B&W and McDermott.

Update: Apparently, I was not the only one excited by the B&W spin-off. McDermott shares rose by about 10% yesterday from $20.66 at the Friday, December 4th closing bell to $22.86 at the closing bell on Monday, December 7. Here is the two day chart - eliminating the 5-6 weekend of McDermott International. Nice reaction to the announcement.

Quantifying and Reducing Pollution from Ocean Going Commercial Ships

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 08:23:00 +0000

Ship propulsion is one of my key interest areas. It is a segment of the energy industry that gets little discussion; perhaps because of its "out of sight, out of mind" existence in a place where few people spend much time - out in the middle of the ocean. As a former (undersea) ship engineer officer, I earned my practical knowledge in energy production by working hard to master the task of providing reliable energy to propel and power the internals of a ship. Though some participants in energy discussions ignore ships, their contributions to energy related issues of energy supply and pollution should not be ignored; they represent a substantial portion of the world's energy consumption and emissions. I recently found a presentation that puts some hard numbers on the pollution challenge and decided to try sharing it with you.

Container Ship - How to reduce effect on Climate and Pollution

View more documents from Glenn Klith Andersen.

This is my first time embedding a slide show from this particular site, I would be interested in how it works for you. If you have problems, please contact me via email so we can share some information about system configuration that might help me understand the system limits.

Natural Gas - So Abundant, Even Hollywood Has Been Bitten By The Excitement Bug

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 09:02:00 +0000

Natural gas is so abundant that it can supply about 20% of the United States energy demand for the next 100 years before it runs out! (That is my translation of the recent meme being pushed by those new commercials about having a 100 year supply - at current rates of consumption.)

A friend just sent me a link to a trailer for a movie titled Haynesville that is all about the economic excitement and dislocations that are resulting from development of advanced methods of extraction of natural gas from tight shale formations like the Haynesville formation that is under a large chunk of the Southern United States. Here is that trailer:

Note: I turned off the auto-start setting. If you want to view the trailer, please click on the play arrow. Once you have seen the trailer, please think about the lengths that some people might go to if they recognize the competitive threat that new nuclear power plants pose for the development of a natural gas field that some claim contains $1.75 TRILLION dollars worth of gas - if the developers can find enough willing customers.

Efficiency Improvements and Cost Reduction Efforts Related To Uranium Enrichment Cause Concern For Some "Nuclear Policy Experts"

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 08:07:00 +0000

Being a pro-nuclear activist can cause occasional frustrations, especially considering how easy it is to get stuck in circular arguments with groups holding conflicting views about the same aspect of nuclear technology.

One topic associated with nuclear energy production that can lead to frustrating arguments is the question of cost. People like Amory Lovins and Joe Romm oppose nuclear energy because they claim that it costs too much and displaces investments that should - in their opinion - be directed towards using less energy altogether and towards developing wind, solar, and geothermal sources for those energy needs that remain after all possible efficiencies have been wrung out. Lovins preaches a seductive gospel, especially for Americans who actually believe that there is a free lunch and that their neighbors are terribly wasteful.

In fact, there are some aspects of Lovins's preachings that are useful and reasonable - it is a valid part of any good engineering practice to work to eliminate waste, to refine production methods, to get rid of production path processes that add cost without adding value, and to choose production methods that reduce the energy expenditure required to produce a high quality, finished product. In fact, there are a number of engineers at General Electric (GE) who have achieved great success in their careers by working on efficiency, reducing waste, and improving production. A long time focus area has been improvements in the process of creating commercially useful fuel for nuclear reactors.

One of the major cost components of that rather complex process is "enrichment", the process that converts natural uranium, which has a fissile material concentration of just 0.7%, into low enriched uranium for light water reactors, which requires a fissile material concentration of between 3 and 5 percent.

Aside: I put enrichment into quotes because more accurate terms for the process would be "refinement", "purification" or "separation" because there is no part of the process in a traditional operation where fissile material is added to enrich a stream of material, instead, the non fertile portion of natural uranium is selectively taken out of the stream, leaving behind a material with a higher portion of fertile material. This is not unlike the refinement process used in separating crude oil into its various components. However, "enrichment" is the chosen term of art for the process of converting natural uranium to something more useful in a light water reactor. End aside.

In the early days of nuclear energy development, the United States had a global monopoly on uranium enrichment because only the United States had invested the national wealth required to build a plant using gaseous diffusion, an energy intensive process that took thousands of stages using expensive materials that had to be carefully fabricated to produce the separation membranes. Powering our early enrichment plants required the electricity output of a couple of large coal fired power plants and was the source of the early anti-nuclear argument that producing fuel for nuclear plants actually consumed more electricity than the plants produced.

There have been countless improvements to both the fuel consumption and the enrichment process since those early days, and nuclear plants currently achieve extremely low fuel costs that reflect the small amount of energy required for each unit of fuel. The current average nuclear fuel cost in the US is roughly 0.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, with enrichment costs still being a significant portion of that total cost.

GE, always looking for ways to improve processes and to find a competitive advantage, recognized that the isotope separation process developed in Australia and known as SILEX (separation of isotopes by laser excitation) offered a path that had a good probability of resulting in lower enrichment costs. They calculated that the initial plant costs might be smaller for each unit of production than the cost of the current world standard production method using very high speed centrifuges and they also determined that there was a potential operating cost savings through the use of less input power. In 2006, GE signed a development agreement with the technology researchers.

Aside: Laser isotope separation was not invented in Australia, but the US gave up on the process in the 1990s after spending upwards of $2 billion on it. End Aside.

After several years of refinement in their Wilmington, NC laboratories the SILEX team (GE, Hitachi, and Cameco), operating under both the classification system of the United States and Australian governments and the well-respected GE commercial security methods that ensure protection of trade secrets offering competitive advantage, have apparently achieved some success in their efforts to apply the techniques in commercially useful production equipment.

An article in the November 16, 2009 issue of Forbes Magazine titled GE Enriches Its Nukes Business provides some details about GE's enrichment business opportunties, but I also enjoyed reading an article titled Mom &: Pop: it's time for energy policy with nuclear as base from WickedLocal.com out of Weymouth MA. That article helped me to understand that nuclear fuel enrichment business currently earns $7 billion each year. That is a blip in the world's several trillion dollar per year energy business, but it is certainly a segment worth pursuing, especially as interest in new nuclear power plants develops significant momentum.

Now comes the frustration part. According to a recent article in Defense News titled Laser Enrichment Plan Draws Critics a couple of dozen "nuclear policy experts" have written a letter to the US Senate demanding that they hold hearings about the process. Their intention is to produce legislation that requires the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to "consider the dangers of proliferation before issuing a license for GLE to build a laser enrichment plant."

Apparently, these "nuclear policy experts" are worried that the GE Laser Enrichment (GLE) process is too small, cheap and energy efficient. Why, if this closely guarded commercially useful secret were to get out, there is a (exceedingly remote) possibility that a nefarious group would be able to afford to build a factory and hide its use while they enrich enough uranium to a high enough percentage to use it to build a BOMB!

A laser enrichment plant might be one-quarter the size of an enrichment plant that uses today's state-of-the-art centrifuges. The plant would also use much less electricity than a standard enrichment plant.

"You could hide an enrichment facility in a warehouse," said Charles Ferguson, a nuclear energy and weapons expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

And that's the danger.

"This specific method of uranium enrichment makes it easy to conceal and, consequently, extremely difficult for international nuclear inspectors to detect," said Leonor Tomero, director of nuclear nonproliferation at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

As a pro-nuclear activist, I often engage in debate with people who are terribly concerned that nuclear energy is simply way too expensive, and should not be pursued because the cost would choke off the development of other useful technologies. When skilled engineers who have made a career out of solving cost challenges for competitive advantage actually take on the challenge and make improvements that could significantly reduce costs and improve energy productivity, another group steps up. Their goal is to erect cost increasing road blocks under the guise of being worried that lower cost production methods might somehow escape and end up in the wrong hands. Senate hearings and NRC regulations can add years of delay and drive costs far higher than they would be in the absence of such activity.

It should be obvious to anyone who has ever dealt with commercial enterprises that have trade secrets offering competitive advantage that the potential of "leaks" from those enterprises is far lower than the potential of leaks from government agencies who are otherwise trusted with not only access to techniques that might be useful in weapons production, but actually finished weapons themselves. There is not a darn thing that slowing down the GLE commercialization path will do to reduce the danger of the use of nuclear weapons, but adding cost to the development process through bureaucratic actions could be of great use to the competitive suppliers in the business.

Potentially interested parties who could benefit from increasing the cost of GLE include other companies that are already established in the $7 billion per year enrichment business, foreign governments that supply enrichment services, and foreign governments that have already enriched materials that are being sold for blending down. Of course, there are also interested parties involved in the fossil fuel industry that tacitly and financially encourage ANY activity that will increase the cost of producing commercial energy using atomic fission. They only way they can continue to compete is to keep working to keep the cost of nuclear energy as high as possible.

Bottom line - I am excited by GLE's laser excitement separation process. I wish I knew more about the details, but if I did, I would not be able to share them. The idea that this process will add to the risk that of another nuclear weapon being used to kill people is exceedingly remote - to the point where I suspect the motives of anyone who is working to use that argument against the development of the process.

Scott Simons of NPR Interviews Undersecretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs Maria Otero - Her Answers Call to Mind a Song From A Old Movie Favorite

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:29:00 +0000

On December 5, 2009, Scott Simon of National Public Radio interviewed Undersecretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs Maria Otero. He asked her about the politics surrounding the US government's negotiating position at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which starts tomorrow, December 7 and runs through December 18 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

President Obama's administration has already negotiated an agreement with China for both nations to engage in significant efforts and challenging targets. There has also been talk of a goal of reducing emissions by 83% by the year 2050.

Mr. Simon based his questions for Ms. Otero on a December 4, 2009 Wall Street Journal op-ed by Richard K. Lester, head of the department of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, titled The High Costs of Copenhagen. In that piece, Mr. Lester implied that anyone who believes that an aggressive goal of an 83% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions can be met without nuclear energy is being intellectually dishonest. At the same time, Mr. Lester also pointed out that a number of powerful environmental organizations who are pushing hard on climate change actions are also adamantly opposed to efforts to expand nuclear energy. Many of those confused groups are key political supporters of the Obama Administration's legislative plans.

No matter how hard Mr. Simon tried, he could not elicit a clear response from Ms. Otero about whether or not the State Department believes that nuclear power will play an important role, even though Dr. Steven Chu, Secretary of the Department of Energy and a Nobel Prize winning physicist has stated his agreement that nuclear energy is an important part of our future energy system.

After listening to the interview, I described my frustration with the responses to my wife. She told me it sounded just like the Governor in the movie "Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" when he sang "Dance a Little Sidestep". Using the magic of Google search and YouTube embed codes, I thought I would lighten your day by sharing that number with you.

via videosift.com

BBC Report on American Nuclear Renaissance

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 08:54:00 +0000

The below audio is the result of an investigation about the prospects for an American Nuclear Renaissance produced by BBC reporter Julian O'Halloran. Mr. O'Halloran's report contains a few misconceptions - like the idea that it is only concern about climate change that is encouraging a new look at nuclear power and the idea that Mark Cooper is a reliable source of information about nuclear plant economics - but it is interesting and worth hearing. I like to look at my own situation from other people's eyes, that is one reason why I like reading and listening to news reports from other countries that are about American topics.

Is Un-Scientific American Becoming Shell American?

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 07:55:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, there were a number of reactions to a recent front page article in Scientific American titled A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables. John Wheeler produced a This Week In Nuclear episode in response to that article that he called Un-Scientific American in which he expressed his disappointment as a long time fan of the magazine and his decision to think "long and hard" before ever buying another issue.

Barry Brook wrote about the article on his excellent Brave New Climate blog in an entry titled Critique of ‘A path to sustainable energy by 2030′. That post generated 160 comments, many that were full of facts and some strong emotion from normally restrained engineers and scientists.

I recently followed a link from a Twitter post from someone interested in energy that landed me on the Scientific American web site. Before I could view the article of interest, I was asked to take a survey that started with the following statement: "Natural gas is the cleanest burning fossil fuel." The poll then asked me to answer a multiple choice question selecting the largest hurdle to an increased use of Liquified Natural Gas. My problem in answering the poll, which I had to do to progress to the article I wanted to read, was that the best answer was not on the list of choices - All of the Above. (I always hated that situation when taking multiple guess tests.)

After taking the poll, here is what the page looked like.

That is what led me to asking the question in the title of this post. Just how many times can you see the logo of one of the largest companies in the world on the site of a supposedly reliable scientific publication before you start to question the publication's credibility on the topic that drives that company's business and governs its long term profitability?

I know there are people who will vociferously argue with me, but my analysis tells me that anyone who pushes the idea that there is a hope for human society to shift from fossil fuels to a narrowly defined set of "renewable" energy sources that pointedly excludes atomic fission is either hopelessly innumerate or simply lying through their teeth. Because I am pretty sure that statement is true, I understand why fossil fuel interests (broadly defined to include anyone who wants to keep making money by finding, extracting, transporting, financing, marketing, refining, or selling coal, oil, natural gas or any of their byproducts) talk a lot about their plans for development of wind, solar, geothermal and biomass energy and either ignore or discourage the use of nuclear energy.

Commercial Interest In Nuclear Renaissance in Cincinnati - 100 Firms Show Up at Areva and Duke Energy Sponsored Event

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 07:24:00 +0000

Despite the best efforts of anti-nuclear activists, who appear to be stuck on stage one of the Kubler-Ross Model of recognizing that they have suffered a loss, people are working hard to solidify the foundations needed for a sustainable nuclear industry restoration.

At a recent one day conference held in Cincinnati, 100 potential suppliers gathered to find out more about the opportunities associated with Duke Energy and Areva's plan to build a new nuclear power plant at the Piketon, Ohio site where the Department of Energy operated a large uranium enrichment facility.

As Areva described it, they are not building a plant, but building an industry that can supply all the necessary components, materials, and services needed to support a fleet of plants. Projections currently range as high as 50 units for the EPR, but there is no fixed cap on that number. People who are involved in industries as diverse as drywall, electronic components, and automatic flow control valves can get pretty interested when they read paragraphs like the below in their local business journals:

To do it, Areva will need hundreds of suppliers employing thousands, to provide everything from drywall to pipes, valves and other equipment for each plant. The Columbus meeting is the second of four Areva is holding around the United States to develop supplier interest.

While actually construction of the Piketon project could be years away, Jacques Besnainou, Areva Inc. president, said his company will need suppliers to help with geology surveys and other design details starting next year once the DOE funding is approved.

Areva says each of its next-generation pressurized water reactors will create up to 11,000 direct and supplier jobs during component manufacturing and plant construction. Each of the plants is expected to employ 400 permanently.

"We're not building a plant, but an industry," said Tom Silva, an Areva vice president, told the companies at the conference at the Columbus Hyatt Regency Hotel. "We're interested in a long-term relationship and partnership. We're looking at purchasing for multiple plants at one time."

The excitement and interest in such announcements can be especially strong at a time when a routine US Government jobs report computing that the American economy "only" lost 11,000 jobs in a month and the unemployment rate dropped by 0.1 percent to a "mere" 10.1% is reason for a stock market celebration.

As a former small business general manager, I can understand why so many firms from Ohio showed up to hear about potential sales and partnership opportunities. It is most decidedly NOT FUN to struggle to make payroll or to have to make painful decisions to reduce staff at a time when you know that your good people may be unemployed for a very long time if you let them go.

I'll admit it - I am a cheerleader for reviving what can be a solid base for job growth through producing an important enabling product required in our modern society - clean, reliable, affordable electricity. I hate the term "green" job; what I think we need are "blue" jobs that employ people who are making valuable products that make all other members of the work force more productive.

Go Blue! Go Atomic!

Who Are You Going To Believe - The Leader of A Company With an Obligation to Supply Electricity or a Gadfly Like Amory Lovins

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:34:00 +0000

Lloyd Yates, the CEO of Progress Energy, has published a terrific op-ed piece in the Charlotte News-Observer titled Coming clean on coal that clearly explains why his company has chosen to shut down coal fired power plants that supply 30% of its current electricity demand. More importantly, he explains HOW his company will continue to meet the needs of its customers for electricity in the coming years.

Unlike self described energy gurus like Amory Lovins and Joe Romm, two people who have spent decades talking and writing about energy supply options, Mr. Yates has a legal responsibility as the head of a regulated monopoly electric utility company to make prudent choices that will ensure continued reliable operation of the system that supplies a vital commodity that supports modern society - electricity. He has to make those choices under a number of constraints including human imposed rules, fuel supply limitations, and physical laws of nature. People who pontificate are not subjected to the same constraints.

Aside: I fully recognize that my current association with the electricity supply business is as a pontificator, but I have had an obligation to supply power during my career. I have at least a passing understanding of the challenge of responding to customer demands in a case when the power stops flowing. In my case, my "customers" were my fellow crew members and the two guys who wrote my fitness reports. End Aside.

In Mr. Yates's op-ed, he describes how changing laws and increased understanding of all of the effects of burning coal in old plants has led his company to make the decision to stop investing in those plants and to shut them down. It has also led them to a decision to avoid investing in new coal fired power plants. Instead, Progress Energy has decided to turn to natural gas as a bridge to a future with a legal requirement for electric power companies to continuously succeed in reducing their emissions a bit more each year.

Switching from coal to natural gas will result in significant emission reductions and the elimination of coal-ash production at the affected plant sites. Carbon is reduced 40 percent to 50 percent, sulfur dioxide and mercury emissions are eliminated, and nitrogen oxide emission rates are reduced more than 95 percent.

This is a powerful environmental story. But it's not the entire story.

The switch from coal to natural gas will help us meet the expected near-term carbon-reduction targets sought in federal climate legislation. But both the House and Senate versions of climate legislation call for reductions of 80 percent or more by 2050 (based on 2005 emission levels). So, even if we retired all of our coal-fired plants in the Carolinas and switched to natural gas, we would not meet the CO2 emission reductions targeted for 2050.

So far, there is not a lot of difference between the path that Lovins and Romm advocate and the one that Yates and his team of fact-driven analysts have chosen. In the following paragraphs, however, Yates makes a clear statement of a future path that is significantly divergent from the solar, wind, geothermal and biomass driven utopia (with a wink and nod of agreement that both gas and coal will continue to play important roles in their prescribed power supply system) that Lovins has been writing about for about 35 years and that Romm is constantly pushing on ClimateProgress.org.

Here is how Yates described the results of his company's deliberations:

Low-carbon resources, such as natural gas, are an excellent bridge for the next two decades. But getting to the proposed 2050 targets requires proven carbon-free resources. The only technology capable of providing that no-carbon power generation, on a scale capable of meeting the needs of millions of North Carolinians, is nuclear power.

Nuclear energy is already a vital part of North Carolina's energy mix. Last year, about 46 percent of the power we generated for our customers came from nuclear plants.

Wind, solar, biofuels and other technologies all have a key role in our future energy mix, and we will continue to invest in those promising energy sources. But nuclear is the only large-scale, emission-free, 24/7 source of electricity generation capable of filling the void left by retired coal-fired power plants.

Of course, there will be some in the discussion who will scoff and state that everyone is entitled to their own opinion. At the risk of suffering the slings and arrows of people who will accuse me of elitism, I disagree. Some people's opinions are more informed, and therefore more valuable than others. In addition, though everyone has a right to an opinion, there is a shared set of facts and physical laws that govern all of us.

When someone can show me a single place in the world that supplies its electricity needs using just the sources that Romm and Lovins advocate - without releasing any pollution of any kind during operation, I will publicly change my tune. In the meantime, I can confidently assure you that I have been in most parts of the Atlantic ocean with an isolated grid that was reliably supplied with power plant clean enough to operate inside a sealed ship full of people. My experience is not unique, tens of thousands of people have shared it over many decades.

I am a simple kind of guy who, though not from Missouri, will not be convinced with complex studies. My standard is simple - just show me.

Nuclear Energy Growth and Investment Opportunities

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 09:59:00 +0000

In another sign that the momentum is growing to build new nuclear power plants in the United States, Platts will be hosting a conference titled "Nuclear Energy: Opportunities for Growth and Investment" in Washington DC during the period from February 17-19.

In a sign that Atomic Insights is starting to achieve some status as a credible media outlet, Platts has asked us (yes, I do have some assistance now and then) to join them as a media partner for the event. Based on the agenda and the speakers who have accepted invitations, it looks like it will be a worthwhile gathering of people who can encourage the real decision making that needs to happen to enable construction to move forward.

Without investments, there will be no Renaissance, but as people with access to resources and responsibility for money management learn more about the potential financial returns over a very long project life cycle, the potential for growth is almost unlimited. I also hope to meet some new vendors at the conference who are interested in becoming part of the supply chain.

How can policy help overcome hurdles to nuclear power in the United States?

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 09:45:00 +0000

Over at The Energy Collective, Jesse Jenkins, who directs the energy and climate policy program at the Breakthrough Institute posed a series of questions about public policy aimed at initiating a discussion about overcoming hurdles to nuclear power deployment. His entering position for the sake of this discussion is that deploying nuclear power is a good thing, so he has made a strong effort to keep the conversation away from the discussion of whether or not the US "should" deploy new nuclear power plants. He wants the conversation to be more about "how" the US should go about the task of enabling that deployment to proceed.

Several of my friends in the blogging world, including Charles Barton at Nuclear Green, Dan Yurman of Idaho Samizdat David Walters who maintains diaries on Daily Kos and David Bradish of NEI Nuclear Notes have weighed in with responses to one or more of Jesse's nine specific questions for discussion. I have answered two of the questions that had not yet been fully addressed by some of the previous responses. Here is the first one:

Are there specific challenges to the construction of the first few power plants of any particular, and if so, how do these challenges differ from the deployment of these designs at scale?"

There are unique challenges to the construction of a "first of a kind" (FOAK) unit of any technology, whether it is a car, a computer or a sports stadium. The research in this area is deep and includes discussions of learning curves, unexpected interactions, and worker training programs. One unique obstacle that very large nuclear projects face is that the typical estimation errors for the cost of an FOAK unit of 50% or more cause some major headaches because they are very large and scary numbers. On a project estimated to cost $10 billion, a mere 10% estimation error leads to a "billion dollar cost overrun!" Electric utility companies are run by conservative people who have built large projects, they understand that such a response is almost assured, while achieving that level of performance would be quite a coup. For solid, legal "fiduciary responsibility" reasons, they are proceeding cautiously.

One way around this problem is to change the scale of the bet to something more manageable. This is the path that Charles has advocated and that Hyperion, NuScale, and B&W are pursuing with vigor. Even the well established nuclear power plant vendors like Toshiba, the Westinghouse subsidiary of Toshiba, GE, and Areva are taking a new look at starting with smaller plant designs that entail a smaller magnitude of risk.

There are numerous advantages to building smaller power plants in a factory setting, including the lowering of the risk for the initial units. Smaller power plants also allow vendors a more rapid path along cost lowering learning curves. Research has demonstrated that a typical learning curve for constructing the same design will provide a cost savings of 10-20% for every doubling of unit volume. (That caveat of "the same design" helps to explain why the plants constructed during the first nuclear building boom in the US did not achieve a path of cost reductions. We never got around to building a series of exactly the same design by a reasonably consistent work force.)

It is far easier to double unit volume if your units are the 125 MWe mPower™or the 45 MWe NuScale, or the 25 MWe Hyperion Power Module compared to the 1200 MWe AP1000 or the 1600 MWe Areva. I fully understand that there is an "economy of scale", but a supply chain that is producing 10 mPower™reactors each year achieves similar scale as one that produces one AP1000 each year. The difference is that the company building ten units each year has a much greater opportunity to traverse an effort saving learning curve, apply new tweaks to the design based on actual operating experience, and provide a work force with the kinds of consistent activity that provides a wealth of benefits to a growing company over many years.

The other huge advantage of going small is that you reduce the size of the required bet to something manageable by a single company. Instead of having to put together a complex partnership with many different decision makers, it is possible to build smaller units based on the "go ahead" of a single decision maker.

Some other time, I will share a bit about what I have learned through conversations with leaders at TerraPower, a start-up with a rather unique advantage over most other nuclear focused companies. They have the backing and personal interest of a man named Bill Gates. That can make a whole lot of the initial challenges associated with starting up a new industry seem far more manageable.

Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.

And here is the second question with my answer:

"What barriers to nuclear power deployment cannot be solved by policy and why? What factors are most likely to overcome these barriers (or are they intractable)?"

One hurdle - not really a barrier - associated with deploying any new energy source that is not going to ever disappear is the fact that the energy industry is the largest industry in the world. That industry is full of powerful people who do not like competitors taking away their markets and driving down prices. They have well over a century of experience in fighting interlopers; not always with open and visible tactics.

By its nature as a ubiquitous commodity where many different methods exist to produce a fungible, tradable unit (either heat or electricity) there has been a history of radical price oscillations driven by changes in the supply-demand balance.

Our recent history, which some people consider to be unique, where energy prices increased by 400% over a several year period and then fell by 75% in a month is nothing really new. Back in the Titusville era, the price of petroleum dropped like a rock once production exceeded the capacity of the barrel producers to keep up. Spindletop resulted in a time when oil cost as little as 10 cents per barrel within just a year or two after it had traded for several dollars per barrel.

The top leaders of established enterprises in the energy business recognize very clearly the risks to their existence of any new supply that will upset the balance. Over the years of working together and in competition with each other, they have formed a number of "clubs" like ERCOT, OPEC, EPRI and API that establish policies in one form or another that are designed to smooth the market and prevent price destruction. The industry has a running history of competition among fuel suppliers and fuel choices between coal, oil and gas that are often along national or regional battle lines.

There was an excellent, thought provoking article in The New York Times yesterday that discussed the entry of oil majors back into Iraq. The article discussed how disruptive it would be to the market if Iraq increased its daily output from less than 2 million barrels of oil per day to more than 7 - which some people have described as its potential production level. That increase would only represent an increase of a couple of percent of world energy supply.

Here are the "fighting words" that make up the conclusion to that article:

“The production from these three fields will surely threaten other oil-producing countries and will show the world that Iraq can match Saudi Arabia’s production,” said Mr. Hassani. “Our share has been taken by other countries, and we will gain our share again from the countries that took it.”

http://bit.ly/7S73L1

During the first nuclear building boom, the output from nuclear plants around the world steadily chipped away at fossil fuel's share of the energy market until it achieved our current production level of the equivalent of 12 million barrels of oil per day. Nuclear energy is not "the Saudi Arabia of" anything, it already has a 30% larger share of the world's energy market than the largest oil producer in the world and it has an almost infinitely larger quantity of "shut-in capacity".

It is a very safe bet to assume that there will be continued strong opposition - that may be disguised in many ways - against the deployment of energy production systems that result in compact, low marginal cost, reliable, emission-free, geographically flexible energy that can displace coal, oil and natural gas on a massive scale. (The bolded words are points of departure from other alternatives.)

It will not be a near term policy change that will overcome that opposition. My analysis has led me to the conclusion that the best way to turn over the hurdle is to keep exposing the true nature of the opposition until people recognize that the discussion is not a moral one about safety, weapons proliferation or waste longevity - it is simply an economic competition. It is one that pits a very powerful and wealthy group of energy suppliers against the interests of a much larger population of energy customers.

The emotional words of the discussion should be understood by observers in the same way that they understand Apple versus Windows ads or Coke versus Pepsi taste tests. Of course, the energy war of words has far more consequence for the future of human society.

Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.

Mark Your Calendars - Anti-Nuclear Campaigners Are Planning a Day of Action on December 12

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:58:00 +0000

Though there are many benefits of nuclear energy and many reasons to justify the claim that it is superior to fossil fuel combustion, one particular aspect of the technology is being given credit by many journalists for its recent rise in popularity - it does not produce any carbon dioxide during plant operation. It also does not produce any other air pollution - no NOX, no SOX, no fly ash, and no mercury, but those pollutants do not seem to have captured the current attention of major media sources; they are apparently old news.

I have no qualms about reminding people who are concerned about climate change that their concern should lead them to a reconsideration of any previously held negative position about using nuclear energy. One does not have to be an alarmist demanding immediate, costly action to be concerned about the long term effect on atmospheric chemistry that is an inevitable result of dumping approximately 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide into our shared air every single year.

Aside: Though I am tempted, like many lazy writers, to abbreviate the name for the pollutant of concern, I think it is important to remember that we are not discussing "carbon" emissions but "carbon dioxide" emissions. There is a very real and important difference. Carbon is a fuel source and is generally a dense, solid material. Coal is about 75% carbon. Carbon dioxide is a gas that is the result of a heat releasing chemical reaction between the oxygen in our atmosphere and the carbon fuel source. Therefore, the pollutant that needs to be captured and sequestered, if the fuel source is a hydrocarbon, is a diffuse gas that also includes oxygen, a vital component of air that all living creatures need. Does anyone really believe that we should come up with a system that will permanently remove oxygen from the biosphere and bury it underground? Does anyone really believe that we can pump a gaseous substance cheaply or that it will remain stuck in the very rocks that we have been tapping for more than a century to release oil and methane gas? End Aside.

Back to my main point, which is to let you know that some anti-nuclear activists have recognized that a focus on climate change as a near term crisis has encouraged a new discussion about nuclear energy. They have seen that there are more people who are talking about atomic fission's obvious benefits and superior characteristics when compared to burning fossil fuels. Professional anti-nuclear activists want to do all they can to squash that new discussion and to make sure that nuclear is left out of any agreements or list of tools that are officially pronounced as mitigations or offsets useful in addressing carbon dioxide emission concerns.

Those groups intent on keeping nuclear off the table are attempting to organize December 12, 2009 as a day of action that they are calling "Block the path to nuclear power!" Another slogan they are using is "Don't Nuke the Climate". They are providing interested associates with a pretty simple organizing strategy aimed at gaining the maximum possible media exposure even if there is not much participation. Here are some of the organizing hints given:

This action is easy to set up, even if you’re only 3 or 4. It consists in symbolically "blocking the path to nuclear power", by preventing access to the premises of a nuclear power utility (commercial agency, headquarters, nuclear facility, …) with ribbon reading "Don’t nuke the climate!". For instance, in France, the targeted firm is EDF, one of the biggest electric utility in the world, which runs all of the 58 civilian nuclear reactors of France. During the action, the campaign’s message will also be made very clear with a banner easily held by 2 people, and with stickers and posters, very useful to temporarily « redecorate » the targeted premises !

The closed perimeter can be relatively small (for instance a few metres in front of the show window and entrance of a commercial agency). This action aims primarily at multiplying a similar and strong picture throughout the world on this very day. Your action may of course last as long as you wish. As a rough reference, two hours can be enough if you warned the local media in advance.

One obvious response to this would be to close your eyes and ignore it. That is probably what the established industry will do - they will quietly endure the protests and wait for them to go away. My personal observation is that such a response may be tactically expedient but it is strategically short sighted because the protest photos will be used for many years as "evidence" of a great up swelling of popular opinion.

It would be better if nuclear energy supporters would plan to be ready with cameras that have wider angles to show just how tiny the demonstrations are. If anyone reading Atomic Insights takes any good photos of little groups of protesters, please feel free to send them to me. I would love to post them here.

It might also be time for pro-nuclear activists who have good relationships with local journalists to ask them to cover any protests factually - showing just how limited any opposition is and telling the other side of the story by interviewing knowledgeable employees or industry observers. Professional nuclear workers are seen by the public as credible - hard hats and work clothes are perfectly acceptable and probably far better than a suited spokesman stationed behind a podium at a press conference.

Of course, I could be wrong. Please feel free to share your thoughts.

Means, Motive and Opportunity - Who Discouraged US Nuclear Developments?

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:34:00 +0000

Conventional wisdom tells us that "Environmentalists" worried about one or more of the below complaints have influenced world opinion and encouraged the current negative investment perception that surrounds new nuclear power plants:

Nuclear plants are not completely safe
Nuclear energy technology leads to dispersal of nuclear weapons capability
Nuclear energy plants are massive and lead to centralized power
Nuclear energy plants are too expensive and cause electric power rate increases
Building new nuclear plants takes so long that nuclear cannot meet near term needs for clean power
Nuclear energy plants are tempting terrorist targets and are vulnerable to an attack that will have widespread and lasting effects
Nuclear waste lasts for hundreds of thousands of years.

There is another explanation for the widespread, well-endowed effort to hobble nuclear energy development. The people with the most means, motive and opportunity for hobbling the development of nuclear energy are the people who are involved in the discovery, extraction, transportation, refinement, storage, distribution, and financing activities that supply the world's fossil fuel addiction. Both nuclear fission and hydrocarbon combustion produce the same intermediate product - controlled heat - and both can be used in similar machinery to convert that heat into useful work or high value products like electricity.

Unlike unreliable, but politically acceptable soft energy sources like wind, solar and geothermal, nuclear fission has successfully taken markets away from fossil fuels. It has increased the overall supply of accessible energy faster than demand, and has worked to increase the independence of customers from the influence of fossil fuel suppliers. Though nuclear energy has been beneficial for customers, it has harmed competitive energy suppliers. There should be no surprise in learning that individuals, corporations, and even governments have taken action to mitigate or eliminate the threat that nuclear energy poses to their wealth and power.

Some may protest that soft energy sources like wind turbines, solar panels and geothermal steam plants pose the same threat, but that assertion is illogical. Humans have understood that there is energy that can be captured in the sun and the wind for thousand of years, but technically competent designers have nearly unanimously abandoned attempts to do so as soon as they found more readily accessible and reliable sources like wood, coal and oil.

As late as December 1942, no one was sure that it was possible to split atomic nuclei to release the energy contained there. After December 2, 1942, atomic chain reactions that could release 2 to 4 million times as much energy per unit mass as hydrocarbon combustion became well known throughout the scientific community. Nuclear energy density offers the potential for concentrated, reliable, and low cost energy. Energy practitioners understand that energy dense fuel can lead to a greater quantity of energy output per unit of invested material capital.

In January 1955, a mere 13 years after the first chain reaction, the USS Nautilus reported that it was "underway on nuclear power." Within a few years, the USS Nautilus had famously transited from Hawaii to England by way of the North Pole. By 1963, less than a decade later, General Electric told the world that it had designed a nuclear power plant that could produce electricity for a price that was competitive with coal and oil, even though oil cost less than $2 per barrel at the time.

Here is a quote from Bertrand Goldschmidt's The Atomic Complex: A Worldwide Political History of Nuclear Energy: (p. 327)

"The Oyster Creek sale received wide publicity - President Lyndon B. Johnson was quick to call it an economic breakthrough - which brought about a sudden awareness of the viability of atomic power stations and a massive start up of nuclear electricity production, but also aroused the antagonism of the coal producers."

Here is another one that shows how the fossil fuel industry recognized the competitive threat from nuclear energy developments. (p. 329)

"During these early years of the American "nuclear boom," some companies even considered abandoning coal and oil and burning only uranium in their new power plants. A particularly noteworthy event was an order placed by the government-owned Tennessee Valley Authority for one of the larger nuclear power stations to be built in the very heart of American coal-producing country."

In the mid 1960s, the world's single largest oil customer was the United States Navy, but that customer was rapidly weaning itself from oil by building nuclear powered submarines, cruisers, destroyers and aircraft carriers. There were a few demonstration nuclear powered commercial ships in operation, including the NS Savannah in the US and the Otto Hahn in Germany. Here is how Mr. Goldschmidt described his ride on the NS Savannah in 1964. (p. 322)

"From the traveler's point of view - or so it seemed to me during those few hours - an atomic ship differs from a conventional ship on in its greater acceleration power and in having no funnel; the difference seems no more than that between an electric and a steam train."

In nearly every segment of the energy market outside of personal automobiles, nuclear power was making an impact and capturing markets held by fossil fuel.

In the electrical power market, nuclear plant sizes grew as rapidly as the order book. An increased number of ever-larger units indicated real market troubles ahead for coal and fuel oil suppliers. According to Goldschmidt (p. 331)

"By the end of 1973, the cost of such a (1200 MWe nuclear) station was in excess of half a billion dollars. This was higher than the cost of a conventional power station of similar capacity although, with fuel costs during the lifetime of the plant (estimated at approximately 30 years) clearly below those of the corresponding coal or fuel oil, the balance remained in favor of the nuclear kilowatt-hour."

(Note: The assumption of a 30 year operating lifetime was conservative and chosen to modestly make the point about nuclear power's lifetime fuel cost advantage. That grows the long one assumes that a plant will operate.)

Goldschmidt continues,

"However, due to the falling prices of coal and fuel oil throughout the 1960s, no doubt partly as a reaction to the nuclear breakthrough, (emphasis added) the price difference between the nuclear and conventional thermal kilowatt-hour would probably have turned in favor of conventional energy. That this did not happen was due to the fourfold increase in oil prices in late 1973, which once again and indisputably tipped the scales in favor of electricity derived from the fission of uranium."

In 1973, the Arab Oil embargo successfully demonstrated to the developed world that energy was such a valuable commodity that customers would pay three to four times as much for it as they did the year before without reducing their consumption.

That event put an unprecedented amount of money into the coffers of oil producing companies and exporting nations. It encouraged France, a famously independently minded country, to declare that it had no coal, no oil, no gas and no choice but to develop nuclear energy. In contrast, the nascent anti-nuclear movement gained strength and financial support in the rest of Europe and in the United States. That organized effort, with leading groups like the Clamshell Alliance, the Critical Mass Energy Project, and Greenpeace, began loudly questioning safety, security, nuclear weapons proliferation and used fuel storage schemes.

During the Carter years, nuclear was put at the bottom of a list of alternative power sources while switching from oil and gas to coal received official encouragement. Nuclear energy treaded water during the vocally supportive Reagan administration, but their action to turn the Nuclear Regulator Commission into a user fee generator whose costs were paid - indirectly - through fees on licensees and new project applications discouraged risk taking investment.

Though dedicated commercial marketing efforts, political lobbying efforts, and petroleum industry subsidized financing arrangements for independent power producers, natural gas became the fuel of choice for new electric power plant development throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s. That trend slowed considerably when increasing demand without increasing supply caused a methane gas price escalation that changed the competitive landscape. That did not happen until after demand destruction by the choices of energy dependent industries and those industries that use methane as an industrial raw material to move to locations outside the US where gas was cheap and plentiful.

With the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and the continued increase in the cost of natural gas and coal, nuclear projects attracted significant investment interest, with approximately 32 new plant projects reaching the stage of informing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that they needed a place on the calendar for a license application review. That interest has largely dissipated as the price of gas has fallen and as the gas industry has begun a well-funded advertising and lobbying campaign to convince decision makers that new technologies have made gas so abundant that low prices - which are fundamentally the result of demand collapse during a deep recession - will remain in place for decades to come.

The message in ads, blog posts and news articles is that gas is so abundant, cheap and clean that it is a "game-changer" which provides a rapid return on investment in both financial and greenhouse gas emission reduction. The underlying message is that there is no need to invest the time and effort required to restore our nuclear power plant construction industry.

What casual observers fail to notice is that the natural gas drilling rigs whose continued success is so important in making those newly exposed resources available to the market are no longer actively drilling. Last week there were less than half as many drilling rigs in operation in the US as there were in the summer of 2008 when natural gas sold for $13 per million BTU compared to today's price of about $3.50 per MMBTU. Many of the crews that operated those rigs and provided the technical knowledge required to reach and exploit tight shale gas deposits are no longer employed.

Current low prices in the US may soon disappear if new nuclear plants do not produce electricity and the economy begins to recover. Of course, the gas industry would love to operate in a market with higher prices as a new normal. They have intense economic motivation to do all they can to slow the development of new nuclear power plants that might compete with their product's popularity as the "cleanest fossil fuel".

Just as they did in the first Atomic Age, coal and oil industries have similar motivation, similar access to politicians and similar access to the media. Over the past several decades of anti-nuclear activity there have been plenty of people who willing stand up and claim to have succeeded in their efforts to slow nuclear power development, but those with the real access to powerful decision makers, the real money to buy advertising and favorable publicity and the real motives to hamstring a competitor have been more reticent. They are quite willing to let others bask in the spotlight as they truck their profits to the bank.

Note: This post was originally written at the request of another energy focused blogger interested in having me write something about the history of the anti-nuclear movement. It did not fit his needs; he wanted something that focused on what he called "historic opposition of "Big Environmentalism" to nuclear".

Christian Parenti Believes That Established Nuclear Plants Are "Zombies" - Don't Tell The Customers, Who Seem To Love Using The 800 Billion Kilowatt Hours Per Year That Those Plants Produce

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 01:51:00 +0000

CBSNews.com - a company whose lineage includes a period when its corporate name was Westinghouse and its basic nuclear plant design was the basis for approximately 2/3 of the plants built in the United States - has published an opinion piece by Chrisian Parenti titled What To Do With Zombie Nuke Plants. The piece originally appeared in The Nation under the title of Zombie Nuke Plants. The basic premise of the article is that existing US nuclear power plants are being run into the ground and that the situation is being enabled by a regulator that is not paying attention.

The article angered me, especially since it has no relationship to the reality that I have seen in numerous visits to US nuclear plants or in many years worth of association with nuclear trained professionals working for both industry and government agencies. There is little doubt within the nuclear industry that safety is the number one mission and no doubt at all that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a tough minded regulator that will not hesitate to halt operations or levy a fine if they believe that there is a problem.

From the day that I initially began nuclear power training, I recognized that I had entered a demanding profession with exacting standards of performance. That first impression remains strong - even in a period in our American history when most fields have adopted cost-cutting as their modus operandi and when the Wal-Mart philosophy of "cheaper is better" is endemic. Nuclear power remains an area where the participants know that performance is important, procedures are meant to be followed, and the word "shall" in a document means exactly what it says.

According to Mr. Parenti, a professional journalist and book author who cannot have spent much time at any plant or among the professionals who man those plants, our current fleet of reactors are "leaking, rickety old wrecks" that were only designed to last 30-40 years. Nothing could be farther from the truth, something that any honest journalist would be able to determine through the use of recorded facts or observation during a visit. For a good description of the conditions in a typical nuclear plant written by an questioning and critical outsider, I encourage you to pick up Gwyneth Cravens excellent book titled Power to Save the World and read her descriptions of visits to the Oconee and McGuire Nuclear power plants in chapters 11 and 12.

As a former steam plant engineer, I can tell you that it would be impossible to achieve an average capacity factor of more than 90% over a sustained 5 year period from a fleet of machines that have any resemblance to the words "leaky and rickety". Steam is an energetic and dangerous tool that must be retained in resilient piping systems - if it routinely leaks, people will get hurt, equipment will get damaged and even hardest to hide - power output will decrease. That is simply NOT happening in our nuclear plants; when a component approaches a point where it is leaky or unreliable, that component gets replaced to enable continued dependable operation. When you are operating a plant that produces a couple of million dollars worth of revenue every day that it operates - and will keep doing that for another 30-40 years, you want to take good care of that plant.

Radiation is also impossible to hide; there is a good reason why doctors like to use radioactive isotopes in medical diagnostic procedures - they can use sensitive equipment to follow those tracers through all of the body's systems. The levels that can be measured are FAR lower than the levels that will cause any negative health effects for human beings.

A good way to understand the current physical condition of US nuclear plants is to go to an old car show and talk to the owners of fine, vintage automobiles. Crawl around and look under the hood and into the nooks and crannies of the vehicle. What you will see is machinery that has received a lot of tender loving care over the years by people who take pride in what they do. You would feel perfectly safe in getting in and taking a ride, just as anyone who lives near a US nuclear plant should - and generally does, according to many surveys - feel comfortable and proud to have that plant as a neighbor. Here is a quote from a July 2009 survey titled Third Biennial Nuclear Power Plant Neighbor Public Opinion Tracking Survey conducted by Bisconti Research

Opinions of nuclear power plant neighbors toward nuclear energy and the local nuclear power plant continue to be highly favorable in 2009. Now, 90 percent hold a favorable impression of the local nuclear power plant, and 76 percent would find it acceptable to add a new reactor at the nearby nuclear power plant site. Compared to 2007, attitudes on a variety of measures are slightly more favorable.

Critical thinkers who understand the world and are not motivated by the rewards that can come from spreading fear and using sensationalism as a way to sell books and articles will recognize that surveys conducted in the neighborhoods near nuclear plants include a sample population of plant workers, suppliers, families and friends. Some will see the plant regularly, but all will be exposed to gossip and casual conversation. For Parenti to be correct, those people would have to all be hypnotized or lobotomized to be able to ignore any rumors about poor working conditions, improper maintenance or sloppy adherence to operating procedures.

Either tens of thousands of people living near the plants plus thousands of professional regulators plus thousands of professional, licensed operators are wrong about the condition of their plants or Parenti, a rather lonely voice, is wrong. I have no doubts about who to believe - Parenti is obviously a man with an agenda whose grasp of reality is questionable. (I have to admit, I almost used the word "idiot" instead of "man" in the previous sentence, but I thought that might be a bit too harsh. I could, however, be wrong on that point.)

If you want to see the man in action promoting his agenda, you can find a video clip of his interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now at As U.S. Probes Radiation at Three Mile Island, Christian Parenti on Enduring “Zombie Nuke Plants” Nationwide. My impression is that the video is a pretty fair illustration of why Parenti's work should be taken with a huge dose of salt and needs to be exposed for the claptrap that it is.

Update: (Posted on 2 December 2009 at 0502) The Nation has published some web letters in response to Christian Parenti's op-ed about "Zombie" nuclear plants. Mine is included in the list, but Dan Yurman's got a red star indicating it was one of their favorite responses. Way to go, Dan!

Quick View of Atomic Insights Visitor Map

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:10:00 +0000

I got distracted this morning with doing some Analytics work on Atomic Insights, trying to figure out more about who reads this publication. If you have not tried Google Analytics and you have a web site or blog, you should. Fascinating and somewhat addicting to page through all of the different ways to look at site statistics - if you happen to be a geeky sort of person. I was particularly interested in looking at the portion of the stats page that showed me where people who read are coming from - the below is the overall summary for the period from October 26-Nov 25. With this system, you can drill down to find out a lot of the underlying details - like the fact that there were 72 visits from Largo, FL and 2 from Vicksburg, MS.

I thought you might enjoy helping me fulfill a challenge - I want to try to turn this whole map green, though it might be hard to attract a visitor from Greenland or Chad.

Established Environmental Groups Are Grudgingly Accepting Nuclear Energy

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:29:00 +0000

In the November 23, 2009 issue of the Washington Post, there is an article titled Nuclear Power Regains Support that describes how some established Environmental groups and individuals have decided that nuclear power can be part of a set of tools that will enable a transition away from fossil fuels. A major reason given for what many believe is a surprising shift in politics is a sense of urgency about slowing down the emission of greenhouse gases from burning massive quantities of hydrocarbons. The waste products that are being dumped into the atmosphere are causing measurable changes in the global atmospheric chemistry.

The article details how Steven Tindale, a man who once led a group of Greenpeace activists at a protest of a UK nuclear power plant on the shores of the North Sea, has left the organization and now supports the expansion of nuclear energy as part of Great Britain's plan to combat climate change.

"It really is a question about the greater evil -- nuclear waste or climate change," Tindale said. "But there is no contest anymore. Climate change is the bigger threat, and nuclear is part of the answer."

There are other groups who have determined that their best path currently is to focus their efforts on fighting fossil fuels and supporting alternatives like wind and solar without expending their efforts in fighting against nuclear energy. They recognize that certain provisions in climate change legislation will probably result in the construction of a number of new nuclear power plants and they have decided to accept that result without weighing in on one side or the other.

But Steve Cochran, director of the National Climate Campaign at the Environmental Defense Fund -- a group that opposed new nuclear plants in the United States as recently as 2005 -- also described a new and evolving "pragmatic" approach coming from environmental camps. "I guess you could call it 'grudging acceptance,' " he said.

"If we are really serious about dealing with climate change, we are going to have to be willing to look at a range of options and not just rule things off the table," he said. "We may not like it, but that's the way it is."

That position, observers say, marks a significant departure. "Because of global warming, most of the big groups have become less active on their nuclear campaign, and almost all of us are taking another look at our internal policies," said Mike Childs, head of climate change issues for Friends of the Earth in Britain. "We've decided not to officially endorse it, in part because we feel the nuclear lobby is already strong enough. But we are also no longer focusing our energies on opposing it."

My analysis of the strength of the technical advantages of nuclear energy is that anyone who is not actively opposed to nuclear energy development is effectively FOR nuclear energy. (If you are not against us, you are for us.) That is especially true when the group that has made the shift has been working so hard against the technology for so many years. Think about a massive tug of war - if some of the people on the other side simply let go and stand up, the rope moves rather rapidly in your direction. That is, of course, assuming that your side does not stop pulling.

The article highlighted the cost of new nuclear facilities as the one remaining sticking point for some of the people who are still fighting. The funny thing about that issue is that it is one where fighting an inevitable development simply increases the cost. In a town that is going to host a facility - where the facility has strong support already, there is a credible group of companies building the facility and there is sufficient financial backing - expeditious project completion is the best way to keep costs under control. If someone adamantly opposes the project because they are sure that the plant is going to result in an increased monthly power bill, the worst response would be to put roadblocks in the way of the plant. Time is money and delays will add cost - that can be proven with plenty of examples and statistics. If any of the opposition to Shoreham, for example, came from Long Island residents worried mostly about costs, they have been paying the bills for 20 years without receiving any power at all from the plant.

A situation where cost is the last real remaining issue for a new facility is one where problem solving engineers and project managers have a reasonably good track record. So far, the engineers and managers responsible for new nuclear power plants designs have not had a chance to demonstrate that their refinements have made a significant difference in construction costs. I want to be careful about how I say this, but anyone who has ever worked in a nuclear plant can attest to dozens, if not hundreds of policies and processes that result in more expenditures than what would be required in order to operate reliably and safely. As is the case in any effective cost reduction effort, the key is steady focus and incremental steps.

Unfortunately, nuclear energy is still a business where talking much about cost can be politically hazardous. Most nukes have grown up in a business where they have been told that "cost is no object" and where they can run into trouble with their regulators if they question the cost of complying with even quite silly rules that have no impact on safety.

There is an example happening right now with the response to the very minor airborne radiation incident at Three Mile Island Unit One. Despite the fact that the effects were routine levels of exposure, the contamination has all been cleaned up and the root cause is pretty obvious to anyone who understands how cutting and grinding works, the NRC is dispatching dozens of investigators to the plant. The company will have to devote hundreds of man-hours to the process of a formal investigation, they will lose production for several more days, and they will produce reams of paper to be stored on shelves.

Our word for such an occurrence when I was on a sub was "flap". This kind of thing can happen when there are people who believe that perfection is possible in any human endeavor - when something very tiny goes wrong in a system they flop and twitch until they get tired. At the end of the "flap" process the only real change is that one party has less money and many others have earned some per diem, captured some overtime, sold some replacement power, or earned some additional consulting fees. It is not surprising that there is more cost than there should be associated with building and operating nuclear facilities, but there is plenty of room for ratcheting down those costs as all of the participants involved recognize what is safe, what is not and how to react when safety is not threatened.

For now, I am encouraged by an attitude of grudging acceptance from formerly resolute opponents and excited by the opportunity to demonstrate that nuclear technology has significant room for cost improvement if that is the last remaining hurdle. The progress that nuclear plant operators in the US and many other countries have made in terms of increasing the value of their existing plants through better production without significantly increased cost gives me reason for optimism that we can apply similar process and design improvements to the task of building new plants and actually reducing the unnecessary costs associated with operating them.

Of course, like most people, I hope that the skills I plan to bring to the table are not those that will someday be considered to be unnecessary costs. I fully understand why radiation protection experts - for example - might be worried about keeping their jobs as people realize just how many of them are redundant.

Three Mile Island Minor Airborne Radioactivity Incident Explanation

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:08:00 +0000

On Saturday, November 21, 2009, at about 4:00 pm installed radiation monitors inside the containment building at Three Mile Island Unit One showed higher than normal readings. The normal actions for such indications were taken. People in the area were directed to leave the building while the source of the radioactivity was located. Once they left the area, they would have been surveyed to determine if any radioactive material had gotten on their clothing or skin. All of the workers would have been wearing dosimeters - devices that measure how much radiation they receive.

Aside: Even trained nuclear workers sometimes get a little bit confused about the distinction between radioactive material and radiation. I had a trainer in my early days who had a rather earthy mnemonic - he taught me that radioactive material was like crap while radiation was like the smell that comes from crap. He said that helped him remember that getting radioactive material on his clothes and skin was a bad thing that would require washing to get rid of it - and that he would never want to ingest radioactive material. He told me that it also helped him to remember that you could stand a bit of radiation now and again, but that you would not want to get too close to a source and you would definitely want to limit your time of exposure to the "smell" coming from radioactive material. End Aside.

Since TMI Unit 1 is currently in the middle of a repair period that includes replacement of its steam generators, people at the scene suspected that the source of the airborne radioactivity causing the indication was suspended particles released during pipe grinding and cutting. Since all piping in a primary coolant system is welded, it is always necessary to cut lines during a steam generator replacement and those lines often contain radioactive materials.

Before conducting any cutting, radiation health specialists would have surveyed the pipes to ensure there were no surprisingly high readings indicating a concentration of activated corrosion products, but it would never be a surprise to find that the inside of the piping had higher than background levels of contamination. The pipes in the primary coolant system carry very hot water through a system of metal pipes and through a nuclear reactor. Inevitably, there will be some amount of corrosion inside the pipes and some of that corrosion would have been exposed to neutrons in the core and become activated. Nukes have a rather cute name for the corrosion found inside primary pipes - we call it CRUD. (Which happens to be an acronym for Chalk River Unidentified Deposits.)

People working in the maintenance area would generally be suited up in anti-contamination clothing, wearing gloves and rubber overshoes, hoods and face/eye protection. There was most likely an area outside the work boundaries where people would not be suited up. The people who were not in anti-c's would have been the primary people of concern when the radiation monitor indicated that there was some airborne contamination.

All of the work was taking place inside the reactor containment building. According to the NRC Event posting, no contamination was found outside of the reactor building. The highest dose received by any worker was 40 mrem. To put that in context, the locally assigned annual limit for an occupational nuclear worker is 2,000 mrem. The legal annual limit is 5,000 mrem. It is not unusual for a nuclear worker to receive more than 40 mrem during routine maintenance work involving primary system piping. Heck, I got more than that during several reactor compartment inspection tours when I was not even doing any system work and I was careful to avoid hot spots.

All in all, it was a pretty boring event. The plant owners took action to notify the appropriate stakeholders because they knew that there would be media interest.

Not surprisingly, there were some media outlets that engaged in a bit of sensationalism and used scary words like spills and contamination. There were even a few that tried to use the incident to stimulate memories of the events at TMI-2 in 1979.

After all, there is usually not much to fill news time on a Saturday evening other than college football results.

NRC Press Release on the event dated November 23, 2009

Additional background information (Posted November 24, 2009 0156)

I was curious about how TMI Unit 1 has been performing in recent years. Here is the plant's capacity factor data over the last three full years: (available from nei.org at the following shortened URL - http://bit.ly/5LShHy)

Capacity factor (2008) - 106.7
Average Capacity factor (2006-2008) - 102.7

(Because of the way that maximum power ratings are determined and the way that steam plants can perform if the heat sink is at a lower temperature than assumed, it is possible to operate at greater than 100% of "rated" power over a significant portion of the year. However, achieving an AVERAGE Cf of more than 100% over a three year period is very impressive and puts TMI Unit 1 in second place out of 104 operating nuclear plants in the US by that measure.)

Update: (Posted November 25, 2009 at 0309)

Fact checked summary report available at Reuters UPDATE 1-NRC monitors Pa. Three Mile Isl after contamination

Bingaman Promises a Bill Requiring The Department of Energy To Develop and License Two Modular Reactor Designs

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:08:00 +0000

On November 16, 2009, at the American Nuclear Society Winter Meeting, Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) gave a speech titled Nuclear Energy in a Carbon Constrained World that included the following intriguing paragraph:

“I plan to introduce a second bill, to complement Senator Udall’s bill. My new bill would require the Secretary of Energy to develop and demonstrate, in partnership with the private sector, two designs for small modular nuclear reactors – less than 350 megawatts electric in size. The Department would help demonstrate the ability to license these reactors by funding applications to obtain design certification by 2018, and to obtain a combined operating license for each of the designs by 2021. Having certified and licensable designs for small modular nuclear reactors would be a significant boost to the field of nuclear power, and would help nuclear energy be a cost-effective contender for a broader array of carbon-free electric generation needs in the future.

The rest of the talk is also worth reading, but everyone has their own priorities and interest areas. Small modular reactors happen to be one of my primary focus areas, so I thought that paragraph was worth highlighting for future reference.

Update on Babcock and Wilcox mPower Modular Reactor

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:15:00 +0000

During the ANS Winter Meeting, I stopped by the B&W booth and had a chat with some of the booth representatives about the progress that the company is making on its mPower^TM modular reactor. We had a good conversation about steady progress and a project that is meeting its planned milestones. I received a promise for an updated set of materials and graphics, but in the meantime I also stumbled across a detailed article on Nuclear Engineering International titled B&W's Baby that provides a good deal of information that has been released in the months following the company's initial announcement in June.

The article talks about the fuel cycle, the steam generator configuration, the way that the primary system is fully contained inside the pressure vessel with no external piping, the way that the fuel storage system will work, the way that the control rods are integrated with the fuel assemblies to eliminate the need for dissolved boron, and the advantage that B&W has as an American manufacturer with the already certified capability to manufacture large pressure containing vessels the size of the one that they propose to use for the mPower^TM. (The pressure vessel for that system is essentially the same size as a steam generator for one of today's operating light water reactors.)

Here is an interesting passage from that article that made me smile and supports my optimism that the mPower^TM is on a trajectory that will lead to a successful licensing application and initial market introduction during the next ten years.

B&W’s biggest customer, the US military, continues to rely on the company for nuclear submarine reactors. Mowry says that US military technology protecting its nuclear reactors will not be transferred to the mPower reactor project, partly because they are secret, and partly because the performance requirements of civil nuclear reactors are much less stringent than in submarines. Still, the company is in a privileged position to use the same manufacturing lines, and the same brainpower, that build the Navy-spec NSSS. “The factories are already there. Our additional investment for the initial stages of market adoption are minimal,” Mowry says, adding that if the project takes off, the company would be prepared to invest in new manufacturing lines.

I can offer just a bit of color to that description that is based on my professional associations with B&W's primary customer. There is little chance that the company would have made that statement without having received permission from Naval Reactors; that relationship is too valuable to put it at risk. Despite all of the frustrations that I have had over the years in dealing with NR, it is an organization that encourages its contractors to take great care and do a lot of homework before making any delivery promises. It has also developed a solid reputation as an organization whose contractors deliver real equipment that works reliably, not paper reactors.

Image Credit: Image used with permission from B&W. Here is the caption provided - A single B&W mPower^TM nuclear reactor module inside its own independent, underground containment.

Clean Skies News Coverage of American Nuclear Society Winter Meeting

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 08:41:00 +0000

I have had a busy week trying to time share between a day job and at least some attendance and coverage of the American Nuclear Society Winter Meeting. While searching for other views of the event that I might have missed earlier in the week, I found the below segment titled Nuclear Industry Holds Winter Meeting on Future on Clean Skies News.

One thing that might stick in the craw of long time members of the ANS is the incorrect characterization of the meeting as an "industry" gathering. The American Nuclear Society is a technical society made up of people from academia, industry and national laboratories. It has members who are interested in nuclear medicine, isotope measuring devices, and particle physics. Though people with an interest in nuclear power play a role in the society, it is NOT an industry group.

Balanced View of Nuclear Waste Storage Issue From Wisconsin Based Television Station

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 07:47:00 +0000

Fox 11 News out of Green Bay, Wisconsin has been airing a story on the future of nuclear power. The most recent segment was a journalistically balanced view about used nuclear fuel - what most people call "nuclear waste". One part of this story that bothers me is that the plant owners and their representatives apparently refused to participate in the production by allowing interviews or camera visits.

It appears that the journalists did their job, but the end result is that the story was lacking some key facts and responses because a key player refused to engage in the discussion. I hope that someday the public relations people associated with operating nuclear power plants will be freed by their leaders to engage in what most of us consider to be an important debate.

Neutron Doodle - a 2002 Song Whose Time Has Come to Go Viral

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:41:00 +0000

Gail Marcus, who blogs at Nuclear Power Talk, shared a story on Saturday November 14, 2009 about a song contest that she supported during her tenure as president of the American Nuclear Society. It was inspired by memories of the artistic work produced during the Great Depression with government support that was designed not just to provide jobs to singers and song writers, but also to help educate the public about the long term benefits of investing government money into building new hydroelectric dams.

I have come to realize that hydroelectric dams and nuclear power plants have a great deal in common. They both require a significant capital investment, they both provide a large number of construction jobs, they both produce electricity without any air pollution and they both raise the ire of the fossil fuel industry.

With the help of people like Gail, who shared this story and video on her blog and Kevin McCoy who wrote the song and produced the video with help from a company singing group called "Tritium", perhaps hydroelectric dams and nuclear energy will have one more thing in common - the use of music to share their story.

Movember Fund Raising Plea - Beneficiaries are the Lance Armstrong Foundation and the Prostate Cancer Foundation

noreply@blogger.com (Rod Adams) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:29:00 +0000

I am highjacking the Atomic Insights feed and blog site for a brief advertisement. People who visit the site instead of receiving posts via RSS feed might have noticed a series of profile photo changes as I went clean shaven for the first time in 28 years and as I have gradually replaced my mustache with a new "mo" - as they say in Australia.

You may or may not understand the reason for that change in my face. I have been participating in the Movember fund raising campaign whose tag line is "change the face of men's health". By making a visible change, my "mo" brothers and I have been able to start conversations with people about an important research area, sort of like the pink ribbons, hat brims and gloves that you see during October.

As we enter the last third of the month, I ask you to consider making a donation to the cause. Generous friends, family and Atomic Insights readers have already given a total of $560 as of this morning. If you want to make the donation and give me credit for raising the funds, please click on the logo:

Thank you and have a happy rest of Movember.