Bellona Waste Report

Bellona has issued a report stating that there are 21,000 spent fuel assemblies in a storage system that will explode if water leaks in, and that water is leaking in.

It's kinda flawed.

1. All uncontrolled reactions are not explosions. A reaction can be uncontrolled merely because a person or mechanism is not in charge of it--there were 16 natural nuclear reactors in an African uranium deposit, and they formed in a very similar configuration to this postulated accident. How did they stop? The energy released heated the water and eventually boiled it--and without the water, there's no reaction. After it shut down, it cooled off, letting the water back in; this process was repeated for millions of years until it simply ran out of fuel. No explosions were involved--it didn't even disrupt the ore.
2. There will never be a homogeneous mixture. Ceramic does not dissolve in water, there's no way to get enough water into the fuel assemblies even if it did, and expecting every single one of those 21,000 tubes to open up, let the water in, and not let any of it out afterward is ridiculous.
3. This isn't gasoline. A critical configuration in one area does not create a critical configuration in another nearby area.

Sounds a bit like the Brookhaven Report, which was written in 1957 with no access to computers, and said that if the core of a nuclear reactor were pulverized and deposited equally into the lungs of 10,000 people, they would die. Well, yes--but what's your point? The amount of water in a filled bathtub could drown 40,000 people. Blaming nuclear power for things it didn't, doesn't, and can't do doesn't save lives. It cynically manipulates tragedy for political purposes.

Sizewell B Goes to Russian Fuel

You can understand it, with the expense of keeping all that manufacturing equipment for one plant's fuel, but still--the Russians? Couldn't they get it from us?

One thing is certain: if the American nuclear industry doesn't immediately forget any illusions that it is special and start acting like an industry, they'll stagnate just like they have over the past 35 years.
The nuclear industry outside of Russia is the only industry in the world to respond to a great opportunity for growth by screaming "SLOW DOWN!" Well, guess what. You're never going to have everything you need to be perfect, and your suppliers that you so often complain about move at the normal speed for private industry--meaning a complete turnaround in two years is not unheard of--instead of yours. Don't worry about them. Get the orders, start innovating, and the workers will come as soon as there are jobs for them.

Remember: if not for Chernobyl--meaning, if they had banned the RBMK in 1950 like we did, and if the Soviet military hadn't tried to build power plants out of their bomb factories--the Russian nuclear industry would have a perfect safety record. They do have much better financial and management performance. There are lessons to be learned from the Russians; they're getting these orders for a reason.
And if you don't get going, the Russians are going to come over here, get the VVER-1000 certified by the NRC, and build a fleet. Do you really want that?

Link.

Ontario Update

They've hired some consultants to do a comparison of the major available reactor designs.

I disagree with the Society of Energy Professionals, however, and fully expect that McKinsey will rate AECL's Canadian nuclear technology near the bottom. The current designs remove the CANDU's traditional commercial advantages and are competitive only if there is a requirement to consume American-style reactors' waste--which Canada doesn't have. They could build a fleet down here, but in places without a lot of LWR waste, they might as well just build fast breeders.

Link.

On the New Global Warming Proposals

George Bush has proposed a series of international meetings on how to replace the Kyoto Protocol with something that works. At this point, I think it's fairly evident that:
1. The Kyoto Protocol doesn't go far enough and has set up a system which has been manipulated to obstruct real progress.
2. Global warming as a result of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere beyond the capability of natural systems to absorb it is a fact of physics.
3. We need a concrete procedure in place for an orderly, face-saving transition from the combustion era instead of more meetings and non-binding agreements.

Count me skeptical. I don't see anything here that satisfies the third point, but perhaps George Bush knows by now that any proposal of his will be rejected simply because it came from him (which is wrong, even though I don't agree with him on much), and is trying to set up an international conference where Obama or Hillary will present something nearly identical to what he would have.
Let's just hope that successor doesn't drop the ball.

Link.

Olkiluoto Unit 4 Proposed

They're planning to cut through the red tape by summer 2008, with construction starting around 2013 and operation in 2018. That leaves five years for the Finnish government to make a decision.

I again state my firm belief that there is nothing about a nuclear power plant that merits all this bureaucratic baloney. If the thing burned oil it'd be up and running in two years, but a nuclear power plant with less environmental impact by far must jump through hoops that include a full vote of the Finnish Parliament.

Link.

Sites Under Consideration in South Africa

"-Thyspunt, near Cape St Francis.
-Bantamsklip, 10 km southeast of Pearly Beach.
-Duynefontein, next to Koeberg in the Western Cape.
-Brazil, in the Northern Cape.
-Skulpfontein, in the Northern Cape."

-Link.

Designs were not mentioned, but presumably the AP1000, EPR, and ESBWR are under consideration (PWRs are the only type mentioned).
This doesn't cover the pebble-bed reactors also proposed for South Africa.

UK Government Finances and Decommissioning

The Department of Trade and Industry has sold its $4 billion share in British Energy and placed the profits in a fund to manage the dismantling of a fleet of reactors built to an ill-advised reactor design that has been compared to the Stanley Steamer. A similar design was built once in the United States (Colorado's Fort St. Vrain), with even worse results.

Link.

On the International Fuel Bank

$50 million has been approved by a House committee for an IAEA program to guarantee nuclear fuel to countries that waive their right to fuel cycle facilities. There are a number of things wrong with the concept, however:

1. There's nothing wrong with fuel cycle facilties, and there are ways to determine whether a dual-use facility (one that can theoretically be used for civilian or military applications) is being used for peaceful purposes. The problem is not the presence of the facilities; it is excess capacity at those facilities. Giving them long-term customers--nuclear power plants--is the only reliable way to ensure that they aren't used by the military. They can also be designed to not be able to handle weapons-grade material, or more advanced fuel cycles can be used that don't require enrichment or plutonium recovery. This program codifies the idea that reprocessing is plutonium recovery, which it usually is, but doesn't have to be. It does not in any way weaken nonproliferation efforts to draw a distinction between them, and actually strengthens them by removing an excuse to have a dual-use facility.
2. Taking existing military facilities and using them for peaceful purposes is a good thing. This program would ask countries to entirely dismantle them.
3. Countries opt for nuclear power largely for security reasons. Gas can be cut off and start causing blackouts within a few hours--but nuclear reactors can be run for up to two years without refueling, so there is no point to cutting off nuclear fuel shipments as a political negotiating tactic. Requiring countries to give up their "stash" of unused fuel and mandating that they maintain a "good record" with an international community dominated by radiophobe politicians or lose their fuel shipments erodes the independence provided by nuclear power. More here.

Link.

Swedish Problems?

Swedish regulators (who are possibly even less rational than the NRC) ordered a work stoppage effective June 21 (?) for paperwork violations ("failure to provide sufficient evidence" and "insufficient methods").

Notice how no actual problems are involved.

Link.

Kazakhstan to "Study" Conversion Plant

Diversification is good, eh?

Link.

What About All Those Indigenous Populations That Are Being Used as a Dumping Ground?

An Australian indigenous group has volunteered a part of their land as a low- and intermediate-level waste repository (read: for rubber gloves and used reactor parts, respectively).

Do you think they'll stop using the "environmental racism" argument? Don't hold your breath.

Link.

Belgian Phaseout in Trouble

Their Prime Minister has conceded that it will probably not be possible.
Regardless, it should not be desirable. Nuclear power is concentrated, resource-light, and socially responsible.

A report is coming in June on whether the phaseout should be continued; be prepared.

Link.

Hungarian Uprate, Possible New Build

They're proceeding with an 8% uprate to their four Soviet-era reactors, and are looking for up to six gigawatts of new capacity beyond that. Nuclear power is under consideration for at least some of that; the rest will probably be coal.

Will they burn lignite, walking the fine line between coal and combustible dirt? Perhaps.

Either way, coal kills. It is an ethical imperative to keep coal fumes out of our air, coal ash out of our water, and coal dust out of the lungs of miners. I hope they build six nice, big, new nukes.

Link.

Chinese Reactor Order

The first two inland reactors (of four planned) have apparently been ordered.

Nuclear power plants should not be special projects. Building any kind of power plant costs money, and there is not a reason in the world that a combined-cycle inherently-safe waste-eating LMFBR should cost more than a coal burner. Until that happens, the progress of nuclear power in China will be glacial. When it does, the orders will flood in.

GE, General Atomics, Westinghouse, Hitachi, Toshiba, Areva, AtomEnergoProm, Mitsubishi, AECL: do you want an order every two weeks? If you do, design a combined-cycle LMFBR-based nuclear power plant with a centralized pyroprocessing or fluorination-and-distillation closed fuel cycle, using four to eight modular reactors totaling 3,000 MWt (2,000 MWe) for a total cost of no more than $500 million USD. You can do it. Just don't get in your own way.

UK Pre-Licensing: Learning from the Lack of US-Canada Cooperation

The AP-1000, EPR, ESBWR, and ACR-1000 have been submitted. The ACR has the advantage of being able to consume waste from the others, as well as some from the British nuclear weapons program; I hope they can come up with a way to coordinate these two fuel cycles. US and Canadian governments take note.

They also seem to be using a design-basis site, which is something we really need to start using in the US.

Link.

Iran Update

They haven't stopped enriching uranium, even under international pressure that seeks to violate their rights under international law; good for them.

According to the IAEA (a real international body, as opposed to the "coalition of the willing":

1. They haven't diverted any nuclear material.
2. 2,132 centrifuges are running.
3. If they don't implement the Additional Protocol to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, it will be more difficult for the IAEA to find all the information they want. (Not mentioned is the fact that the Iranians were implementing it before we started to threaten them.)

Link.

NRC to Cooperate with China on AP-1000

Essentially, it means that they will share experience, lessons learned, and problems that come up with the AP-1000 in both countries.

Sounds good; let's see how they screw it up.

Link.

More Russian Uranium Deposits

Worldwide, we "use" about 67,000 tons of uranium per year, 670 tons of which is actually used (the rest is stored). Nuclear power provides 20% of world electricity, and could provide 100%, requiring 3,350 tons per year. The US, being 5% of the world's population, uses 25% of world energy; giving everyone American per-capita access to energy using nuclear power would require another five-fold increase in uranium consumption, assuming that the proportion of electricity out of total energy is the same worldwide--totaling 16,750 tons of uranium per year.

These eight Russian deposits contain 320,000 tons of uranium.

The math is not difficult: if their contents were used sensibly, these eight new mines could provide all the uranium needed to fuel all the nuclear power plants needed to provide American-style quantities of electricity to everyone in the world for almost twenty years.

Be reminded that this is 6% of worldwide uranium reserves. That's enough to last almost 320 years. However, there are two other major sources of uranium: coal ash and seawater.
Uranium is present in coal ash at an average level of 4.5 parts per million. In the US--and this is just in the US--118 million tons of new coal ash are available every year. That comes out to 531 tons--about 80% of the world's current uranium requirement.
Seawater is the big one, though. Uranium is present in seawater at an average level of 3.3 parts per billion. The oceans have about 1,500,000,000,000,000,000 tons of water and thus about 4,950,000,000 tons of uranium, with 35,000 tons added per year by runoff from rivers. Quite simply, as long as we use less than 35,000 tons of uranium per year, uranium from seawater is being made available faster than it is being consumed. Technically, it is a renewable resource.

But let's say we only had that 4,950,000,000 tons to use at a rate of 16,750 tons per year. That will last us 295,000 years. And that's not even counting thorium, which is another nuclear fuel that can produce just as much energy as uranium. More here.

So why do anti-nuclear activists say we're going to run out of nuclear fuel?

Link.

GNEP's International Prospects

The US, Russia, China, France, and Japan have endorsed the concept.

Notice how that doesn't include any potential customers. While the reprocessing part of GNEP is an excellent step, the overall assumption that Third World countries can't be trusted with nuclear technology is absolutely wrong. The laws of physics still apply to the Third World, and an inherently-safe reactor built in the United States would be just as inherently safe if it were built in Ethiopia.

Link.

France to Build New Conversion Plant

It's a two-step process, which will take place partly at Tricastin. No word yet on whether the life-cycle analysts will decide that it emits carbon dioxide, even though it doesn't handle or use carbon dioxide (which is sort of the point).

Construction is supposed to start this summer, which seems unusually fast for the nuclear industry.

Link.

Biblis A Saga Continues

Under Germany's nuclear phaseout law, each nuclear power plant is allotted a certain number of kilowatt-hours; this obviously is a strong disincentive to improvements in these plants' fuel efficiency and can be manipulated in a number of ways, including temporarily suspending electricity generation until a more favorable government comes in. That is precisely what RWE should do in this case IMO; their administrative challenge to the original rejection of a completely legal proposal to transfer production allotments from another plant to the Biblis A plant has been rejected, like everyone knew it would. They are considering a legal challenge next, which will also be rejected.

However, there are risks: if these plants are all shut down before their allotments are up, a new government might just order them all decommissioned, reasoning that they evidently aren't needed. There's no doubt about it: nuclear power is not necessary to keep the lights on. Every nuclear power plant in the world could be shut down, some places (like France) requiring two or three years' notice. But nuclear power is desirable; it's a matter of what shape the environment will be in when we get done pumping coal fumes into it.

Link.

Chapelcross Decommissioning Proceeds

via WNN. They imploded the cooling towers last Sunday. Unofficial video is below, with a huge raspberry to BNG for using a non-standard file format for their official "download" that not only doesn't work with any video hosts but also doesn't work with video editing software. Here's a tip: if you put a file online, don't (1) make it impossible for people to use it and (2) lie about it on said website.



This is not in fact the first time this has been done; Trojan's cooling tower was imploded last year, although they might have been referring to the four towers at Chapelcross instead of one at Trojan:

The New White Paper

Well, well, well.

The Greenpeace Delay is over and the new UK Energy White Paper is out. So is the Planning White Paper, Greenpeace's rebuttal, and a CommonDreams article.

While everyone seems to be patting each other on the back about how thorough they were, the overall point is neglected that this is about permission for private industry to build new reactors. In other words, Britain has a de facto reactor ban stricter than California's. The current system of "consultation" does not even result in much public input; it only induces delays.
What would be pro-nuclear? Let private industry build reactors if they want to, set up a regulatory framework to ensure that they're safe, and buy power from them when they're done. The way it is now, the British government has succeeded only in creating more paperwork and delays, and justifying this course of action with the fact that they set up rules and are following them. Congratulations.
Unfortunately, like the NRC's process, flaws in the stupid rules governing the process aren't admissible contentions. They apparently want it to take 20 years; I hope they don't choke on their filth in the interim.

This exposes once again a dangerous and endemic reliance on rules instead of the objective; a single pipe hanger at one of the "Whoops" units was repeatedly installed and uninstalled 17 times by very intelligent and capable people--because that's what the procedure told them to do. There has been little to no improvement since.

Both the Greenpeace and CommonDreams articles seek to argue whether nuclear power is a good idea instead of whether people should have the right to build reactors if they so choose and if a regulatory framework is in place. In this case, whether nuclear power is a good idea or not isn't the issue; the issue is whether there should be a nanny agency to prevent people from spending their own money on whatever they want, as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. If that's not the British system, fine. It wasn't Soviet Russia's system either. One rotted from the inside due to a lack of infrastructure investment, and I hope the other does not follow.

Link; Link.

China to Extract Uranium Commercially from Coal Ash

Good. Lower environmental impact all around; they've certainly got enough coal ash.

They're also obviously still pursuing conventional deposits and reprocessing.

Link.

Brazil Going Nuclear?

They will probably approve the restart of the Angra 3 project in June and may eventually approve up to eight more.

Link.

AP-1000 Cleared by European Utilities

They apparently want to modify the existing design to make it more resistant to superjumbos like the Airbus A-380.

Incidentally, the only other reactor design that has received this certification was the Russian AES-92 (their version of the AP-1000). That design is just as good as an AP-1000, but would probably be laughed out of the NRC design certification process.

Link.

Tianwan Unit 2 Connected to Grid

This is the second of four VVERs, two of which are now operable; there is an option at the site for four more nuclear power plants (the type has not been decided).

Link.

Myanmar to Get Research Reactor

A Russian one, obviously; the military dictatorship there is under sanctions by the West--light water reactor, 20% enrichment, 10 megawatts, no electricity.

Link.

Iran Update

First, it has started to appear around the media that the Non-Aligned Movement (essentially, Third World countries who were not thrilled with taking crap off either the United States or the Soviets) supports Iran's nuclear power program. This is true, and has been for a while, but as yet had only appeared in the Iranian state media, which nobody pays any attention to (and shouldn't).

Second, Mohamed ElBaradei has suggested that the Iranian enrichment program be capped instead of stopped. Finally, we have someone with a little bit of sense in this debate; unfortunately, he wants to try to slow down their program, which won't work. We would suggest that they be assured of some customers--probably domestic ones--so that the enrichment facility would be in use and could't be diverted.

Link.

International Enrichment Center Advances

Russia will provide the technology and host the facility, Kazakhstan will provide the uranium ore, and Ukraine has already joined the project.

Now, I basically give the Russians the credit they deserve. Forgive me for being a bit of a Cold Warrior here, but Kazakhstan was once part of the USSR. They have a bit of uranium, and no doubt fed the Soviet nuclear weapons program as well as Soviet nuclear power. If the enrichment facility were sited in Kazakhstan, I'd have no problem with it, because (a) the Kazakhs aren't going to build a bomb if the Russians have all the manuals for their equipment (anyone who is familiar with the tooth-pulling difficulty on the part of NASA on obtaining data on the Mir space station during the astronaut exchange program of the mid-90s can vouch for this), (b) they would have orders to fill; if they have no excess enrichment capacity they might as well not have any enrichment capacity at all from a proliferation perspective, and (c) the Russians wouldn't control it lock, stock, and barrel.
In this case, however, it seems to be a xerox copy of the old model of import uranium from Kazakhstan, enrich it and manufacture LWR fuel in Russia, and sell the final product (LWR fuel) to the Eastern Bloc. Thus, I'm a bit uncomfortable with calling this an international arrangement. That's not to say that it would make people dependent on imports from Russia (which is the foreign policy aim of everything the Russians are doing with energy and what they are trying to do with nuclear fuel), because a fuel rod that is supposed to last six years can be processed to remove the waste after those six years and reused up to 20 times. Any country that has a nuclear power plant has a strategic uranium reserve in the form of unused energy in nuclear waste. And if they're doing something better than we are--say, breeder reactors or some light-water reactors (although we've caught up in the latter)--why not buy from them? It's a global economy.
I just don't like the label "international" to be applied to what is really "buy Russian." I also doubt that any Third World countries are going to run out and secure a contract--unless other manufacturers keep their fortress mentality and are too scared to take actions that they know are correct.

Link.

Turkey Passes Nuclear Regulatory Framework

As they predicted a while back.

It actually seems to manage the decommissioning fund (as well as a couple of other things) better than we do--and that should be a source for shame, not pride. American regulations have not been systematically reviewed since 1954.

Link.

Loviisa Unit 3 Canceled

E.On's land purchase from a while back, also covered by NNadir, was vetoed by the Loviisa city council, effectively killing the new build proposal. The reasons are, as usual, based on proposed consequences of accidents that physically cannot happen.

They're apparently still trying to pursue it--somehow.

Link.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"People living near reactors have higher levels of cancer and other illnesses, especially children. All radiation released into the environment will harm living organisms. Omissions [sic] are released every step of the way."

-Mary Madigan, President, Western Port Action Group (Australia) (hat tip: