USA nuclear industry getting too old and too expensive
Nuclear Plants, Old and Uncompetitive, Are Closing Earlier Than Expected , NYT By MATTHEW L. WALD June 14, 2013 Washington — When does a nuclear plant become too old? The nuclear industry is wrestling with that question as it tries to determine whether problems at reactors, all designed in the 1960s and 1970s, are middle-aged aches and pains or end-of-life crises.
This year, utilities have announced the retirement of four reactors, bringing the number remaining in the United States to 100. Three had expensive mechanical problems but one,Kewaunee in Wisconsin, was running well, and its owner, Dominion, had secured permission to run it an additional 20 years. But it was losing money, because of the low wholesale price of electricity.
“That’s the one that’s probably most ominous,” said Peter A. Bradford, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a former head of the Public Service Commission in New York. “It’s as much a function of the cost of the alternatives as it is the reactor itself.”
While the other three, San Onofre 2 and 3 near San Diego and Crystal River 3 in Florida, faced expensive repair bills because of botched maintenance projects, “Kewaunee not only didn’t have a major screw-up in repair work, it didn’t even seem to be confronting a major capital investment,” he said.
This is a turnaround because until recently, the life expectancy of reactors was growing. When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission began routinely authorizing reactors to run 20 years beyond their initial 40-year licenses, people in the electricity business began thinking that 60 was the new 40. But after the last few weeks, 40 is looking old again, at least in reactor years, with implications for the power plants still running, and for several new ones being built…….
Two to watch are Vermont Yankee, in Vernon, just north of the Massachusetts border, and Indian Point, in Buchanan, N.Y., 30 miles up the Hudson River from New York City. The states of Vermont and New York are seeking to close them. If they remain profitable, the owner of all three units, Entergy, seems likely to fight tooth and nail to keep them open, but Vermont Yankee’s profitability does not seem certain. It could join plants like Maine Yankee, or Zion, near Chicago, in retirement and decommissioning…While utilities in the last few years have announced plans for more than a dozen new reactors, beyond the five now under construction only another four or so seem possible in the next few years.
And all the others are getting older…..http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/business/energy-environment/aging-nuclear-plants-are-closing-but-for-economic-reasons.html?ref=business&_r=0
Opposition in Japan to export of nuclear reactors – 60% of public
60% Japanese oppose govt on nuclear tech export: Poll, Zee News 16 June 13 Tokyo: More than half of Japan’s population has opposed the government’s move to promote Japan’s export of nuclear technologies and expertise, according to a new opinion poll.
Nearly 60 percent of the survey respondents were against Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s nuclear export policy 
while only 24 percent declared their approval for the policy, the Japan Times reports.
According to the report, the poll results come after Abe’s agreement with French President Francois Hollande in cooperating to expand sales of nuclear power plant equipment and technologies to other countries. …. http://zeenews.india.com/news/world/60-japanese-oppose-govt-on-nuclear-tech-export-poll_855424.html
Japanese PM in Europe to market Japan’s nuclear reactors
Japan PM promotes nuclear exports at central Europe summit Global Post, 16 June 13 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made a push on Sunday for his country’s nuclear technologies at a summit in Warsaw with leaders of four ex-Communist European Union countries, as part of his bid to boost the Asian powerhouse’s exports.
Abe recently unveiled plans to treble Japan’s infrastructure exports to 30 trillion yen ($300 billion, 225 billion euros) a year, a target that could not be reached without nuclear reactors.
At Japan’s first summit with the so-called Visegrad Group — the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia — Abe sought to interest the four in Japanese nuclear technology.
“We stressed the necessity of strengthening cooperation, especially in the area of energy policy,” Abe told reporters.
A joint statement issued after the talks said “Japan welcomed the fact that private sectors of both sides demonstrated keen interest in concrete forms of cooperation in nuclear energy and safety”……
In his first visit to Europe since taking office in December, promoting his country’s nuclear technologies was high on his agenda for boosting overall Japanese exports….http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/130616/japan-pm-promotes-nuclear-exports-at-central-europe-summit-0
They don’t now how much it costs to bury all those dead nuclear reactors
Nuclear Decommissioning Surge Is Investor Guessing Game, Bloomberg by Stefan Nicola in Berlin at snicola2@bloomberg.net; Julie Johnsson in Chicago at jjohnsson@bloomberg.net editor responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.net 16 June 13
Nuclear utilities thrust into the spotlight after the Fukushima meltdowns have ordered 20 reactors shut, the most in a three-year span since Chernobyl’s aftermath, saddling the industry with a possible $26 billion in costs.
EON SE and RWE AG (RWE) are leading the biggest decommissioning project by European utilities ever, an effort to tear down 12 reactors in Germany over two decades. Edison International (EIX) said June 7 it will never restart its idled two-unit San Onofre Generating Station outside Los Angeles, bringing the number of U.S. reactors permanently closed in a year to a record four.
The global utility industry faces its biggest test to prove enough money was saved for shutdowns, having undergone numerous cost-overruns building atomic plants. A cautionary tale can be seen with government-owned facilities. In Britain, where taxpayers are on the hook to retire the Sellafield complex’s seven reactors and fuel-reprocessing stations on the Irish Seaduring the next 100 years, the U.K. government this year doubled its estimate for the work to 67.5 billion pounds ($106 billion).
“There’s a lot of speculation how much these projects cost, but an exact estimate can only be given by utilities,” said Sascha Gentes, a Karlsruhe Institute for Technology professor specializing in atomic shutdowns. “The longer a nuclear decommissioning project takes, the more expensive it becomes.” Continue reading
Nuclear industry’s call for subsidies for SMRs must be rejected
During times of economic stress, the nuclear industry has a tradition of rushing forth to proclaim a new technology just around the corner will sweep current problems aside. Unfortunately, these visions have an equally long tradition of expensive failure, most often at taxpayers’ expense. The Department of Energy’s efforts to spend taxpayer dollars on Small Modular Reactors will simply continue this legacy of failure and must be rejected.
Taxpayer Subsidies for Small Modular Reactors Taxpayers for Common Sense February 27, 2013 Download: Golden Fleece: Taxpayer Subsidies for Small Nuclear Reactors (pdf)
The Department of Energy (DOE) is asking Congress to provide hundreds of millions in subsidies to commercialize small modular reactors (SMR). First proposed in the 2011 budget, the Administration has committed to providing more than $500 million dollars for licensing support and research and development for these downsized nuclear reactors. A fraction of the size of conventional-scale reactors, SMRs would be manufactured by assembly line and transported by truck, ship, or rail to their destinations. With designs ranging in size from one-third the size of a large-scale plant down to the size of a hot tub, SMRs will also produce significantly less power: 300 megawatts electrical (MWe) or less compared to 1,000 MWe for a typical commercial-scale reactor.
SMRs will likely never be a good investment, but in the current fiscal climate taxpayers must be especially concerned with any dollars DOE doles out. High-risk, high-cost, and highly questionable, small modular reactors don’t just look like bad investment they are a ridiculous waste. For a range of reasons, subsidies for SMRs equal nothing more than another handout for the nuclear industry. Continue reading
Obama and Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power, Part 2: Nukenomics , By Ned Madden, 14 June 13 TechNewsWorld “……..President Barack Obama, who has received throughout his political career significant campaign contributions from the nuclear industry, has consistently been an outspoken advocate for nuclear power.
In Feb. 2010, Obama pledged $8 billion in loan guarantees needed to build the first U.S. nuclear reactors in nearly three decades. Obama’s $27.2 billion FY 2013 budget request for the DoE included $770 million for nuclear energy, with $65 million for cost-shared awards to support first-of-a-kind SMRs, and $60 million for nuclear waste R&D.
Of course, what can be given can also be taken away.
An FY 2014 budget put forward by the administration in April 2013 cut funding for a key plutonium reprocessing facility in South Carolina that transforms weapons-grade plutonium into usable commercial nuclear reactor fuel, and which is a component of the United States’ international nonproliferation efforts. The budget included only $503 million — $183 million less than was provided under last year’s continuing resolution, when Congress failed to pass a budget.,,,,http://www.technewsworld.com/story/78268.html
Rosatom (builder of Chernobyl reactor) aiming to sell nukes to Britain
Russians target Britain in nuclear power deal:This is Money, 16 June 13, Builder of reactor at Chernobyl has gained a toehold in UK market Britain has signed a deal with Moscow that could pave the way for Russia’s state-owned nuclear power company Rosatom to build plants in Britain.
Energy Secretary Ed Davey has made an agreement with the deputy primeminister of Russia, Arkady Dvorkovich, to set up a joint working group between Rosatom and the UK on the future of nuclear power.
Rosatom has claimed that the deal could lead to the fulfilment of its longstanding ambition to build nuclear plants in this country.
The agreement, signed last week, comes while Britain is locked in fraught negotiations with French electricity group EDF over the terms to build a new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point in Somerset.
MPs have already warned that the Government is being held to ransom by EDF because it is the only group bidding for the contract.
Sergey Ruchkin, Rosatom’s new representative in the UK, said Rosatom was following the EDF deal closely. ‘We will learn lessons from EDF in this area,’ he said.
‘On the working level, we have been in contact with our colleagues from the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change and there is the potential at some time in the future, if the decision has been made,
to enter the British nuclear new-build market.’
Rosatom is essentially the same group that build the reactors at Chernobyl, one of which exploded in 1986. That blast was the worst nuclear power plant disaster in history. It released 400 times more radioactive material into the atmosphere thanthe atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during the Second World War….
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2342208/Russians-target-Britain-nuclear-power-deal-Builder-reactor-Chernobyl-gained-toehold-UK-market.html#ixzz2WVxeNBXC
Youtube: Internet service by solar powered balloon
Solar And Balloon-Powered Internet For Everyone http://www.energymatters.com.au/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=3794 17 June 13 Google hopes to bring Internet access to the two-thirds of the world’s population that does not have it with the assistance of solar power and balloons.
Project Loon is a network of balloons travelling at 20 km above the Earth’s surface; each decked out with transmission equipment able to provide connectivity to a ground area about 40 km in diameter with download speeds comparable to 3G.
Project Loon’s balloon envelopes are made from polyethylene plastic standing fifteen meters wide by twelve meters tall when fully inflated. A parachute attached to the top of the envelope allows for a controlled descent whenever a balloon needs to be taken out of service.
A small box hanging below the balloon contains the electronics and radio antennas; plus batteries to store energy so the balloons can operate during the night.
Solar panels with a total capacity of 100 watts sit between the balloon and the hardware. Between the wind and sun, Project Loon is able to power itself purely through renewable energy.
One of the major challenges Google faced was how to control the balloons’ path through the sky. One balloon would be challenging enough and there will be hundreds of these in the future. While not providing much in the way of further detail, the company says it has found a way to do that, using just wind and solar power – along with some complex algorithms and serious computing power.
The Project Loon pilot test began this month when thirty balloons were launched from New Zealand; beaming Internet to a group of 50 pilot testers. The technology will be refined based on the results before the next phase.
New Zealanders interested in registering to be a Project Loon pilot tester for future test launches can sign up here.
“The idea may sound a bit crazy,” says Google’s official blog, “and that’s part of the reason we’re calling it Project Loon – but there’s solid science behind it.”
Nukenomics: shifting nuclear costs from nuclear suppliers to taxpayers
Nuclear Power, Part 2: Nukenomics , By Ned Madden, 14 June 13 TechNewsWorld Can the nuclear industry stand on its own two feet financially? It all depends on whom you ask. “There are plenty of cost estimates out there regarding what a new nuclear power plant will cost — unfortunately, those estimates are speculative. It has been decades since anyone has tried to build a nuclear plant in the United States,” said the Cato Institute’s Jerry Taylor.
There’s no denying that safety and effectiveness are both critical concerns when it comes to nuclear power, and that’s just as true for investors in the technology as it is for those who rely on the energy it generates.
Part 1 of this three-part series describes a new generation of small modular reactor designs whose promise is undeniably compelling. What’s less certain, however, is whether they are feasible as a free-market business proposition without current levels of government-backed investment.
That’s the question at the heart of what’s sometimes called “nukenomics,” and it’s a complicated one.
Even giant corporations in the nuclear energy industry are cautious about the fiscal viability of the nuke space. Construction cost estimates for new nuclear power plants are highly uncertain.
Risky Business Continue reading
Closing of Germany’s nuclear reactors
Nuclear Decommissioning Surge Is Investor Guessing Game, Bloomberg by Stefan Nicola in Berlin at snicola2@bloomberg.net; Julie Johnsson in Chicago at jjohnsson@bloomberg.net editor responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.net 16 June 13 “………German Closings Germany closed eight units after Fukushima and will shutter another nine by 2022. Its four utilities have set aside about 33 billion euros for decommissioning their 21 reactors and handling the deadly waste from them. The utilities set up GNS, a company that supplies 125-ton Castor dry casks to store and transport spent nuclear fuel, and also employ in-house decommissioning staff.
EON is 10 years into the job on its oldest commercial-scale unit, the 672-megawatt Stade plant in Lower Saxony, slated for completion by 2014. It started tearing down its 670-megawatt Wuergassen reactor in 1995, and plans to also complete that next year.
RWE said tearing down its 1970s-era Muelheim-Kaerlich reactor will cost about 750 million euros; it didn’t give cost estimates for the two pressurized water reactors at the 2,525-megawatt Biblis plant, which was closed after Fukushima, citing a lack of permits for their deconstruction plans.
EON declined to reveal the individual bill for the Wuergassen and Stade projects. It said costs are at about 1 billion euros depending on the reactor type, citing a “benchmark report for Germany,” in an e-mailed reply to questions.
Green Opposition
The opposition Green Party, which was in government from 1998 until 2005 and helped draft Germany’s first nuclear phase-out agreement, has called for the money to be put in a government-administered fund.
“Projects are often more expensive and longer than anticipated,” Sylvia Kotting-Uhl, a lawmaker with the Greens, said in an interview. “The question is: Will the money be available when it’s needed? A public fund would ensure that.”….”
EON and RWE said the current system shouldn’t be changed in favor of a state-run fund. The German system of setting aside money via utilities’ balance sheets “has proven itself,” Lothar Lambertz, a spokesman for RWE, said in an e-mailed reply to questions.http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-16/nuclear-decommissioning-surge-is-investor-guessing-game.html
June 21 indigenous anti uranium protest at Grand Canyon
Defend Havasupai Sacred Land from Uranium Mining at Grand Canyon June 2013 CENSORED NEWS Indigenous Peoples and Human Rights brendanorrell@gmail.com Protest reopening of Canyon Uranium Mine June 21, 2013 at Red Butte, Havasupai land, Grand Canyon You are welcome to a three day gathering just south of Grand Canyon National Park, with main gathering happening at dawn June 21st right on Hwy. 64. We will protest the re-opening of Canyon Uranium Mine on Native sacred lands by praying, bannering, and peacefully demonstrating. This is a call out to all peaceful warriors to come, pray, and decide how to stop the mine. A base camp has already been set up on Hwy 64, approx. 45 miles north of Williams, AZ (First right after mile marker 219). More camping is available very nearby at the prayer/ceremony site near Red Butte, and also in the high Ponderosas of the National Forest near Canyon Mine itself. Gather now to protect the Grand Canyon, the Colorado Plateau, and the waters, animals, plants and people who live here. Also on the 21st, the head of the Sierra club is to meet at 10 am with some of the Havasupai elders, who will be coming up out of the Canyon, at the mine site itself. Red Butte and the Grand Canyon are sacred to several tribes in this region. Energy Fuels must stop digging NOW! Idle No More has called for Friday, June 21st, to be International Indigenous Solidarity Day. Come and help!
This will be our first, opening action and is a three day event. Come prepared for hot days (up to 90) and cool nights (down to 40). Please bring your own water, food and banner and sign-making materials beginning as early as June 19. We do have some food and some banner-making materials, but will need more. Base camp will be open through July 2013 for further organizing and actions. We welcome individuals and affinity groups. Mama Bears Brigade is a feminist collective and as such is non-violent. We are committed to indigenous/women’s leadership. For more info please email us at MamaBearsBrigade@gmail.com PLEASE SHARE THIS CALL TO ACTION http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/defend-havasupai-sacred-land-from.html
Northern Territory of Australia hosted first World Indigenous Network Conference
…a worldwide movement of Indigenous Peoples to highlight their strong connections to ancestral territories and waters and ever greater recognition by governments and international community of the importance of these connections”.
Summary of ICCA Consortium participation at World Indigenous Network (WIN) Conference http://iccaconsortium.wordpress.com/2013/06/13/summary-of-icca-consortium-participation-at-world-indigenous-network-win-conference/ June 13, 2013 Darwin, Australia – A small yet strategic group comprising 10 delegates from countries such as Iran, Philippines, Nepal, Pakistan, Taiwan, Zimbabwe and Australia associated with ICCA Consortium participated in the first World Indigenous Network (WIN) Indigenous and Local Communities Land and Sea Mangers’ Conference, May 26-30 in Darwin, Australia. Continue reading
North Korea seeks talks with USA
North Korea makes u-turn from nuclear threat, tells U.S.: Let’s talk, The Star, 16 June 13, The caveat: No preconditions and no demands that Pyongyang give up its prized nuclear assets unless Washington is willing to do the same. By: Jean H. Lee The Associated Press, Published on Sun Jun 16 2013 PYONGYANG, NORTH KOREA—After months of threatening to wage a nuclear war, North Korea did an about-face Sunday and issued a surprise proposal to the United States, its No. 1 enemy: Let’s talk.
But the invitation from North Korea’s National Defence Commission, the powerful governing body led by leader Kim Jong Un, comes with caveats: No preconditions and no demands that Pyongyang give up its prized nuclear assets unless Washington is willing to do the same — ground rules that make it hard for the Americans to accept.
Washington responded by saying that it is open to talks — but only if North Korea shows it will comply with UN Security Council resolutions and live up to its international obligations…… http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/06/16/north_korea_takes_uturn_from_nuclear_threat_tells_us_lets_talk.html
Renewable energy program for Kuwait
Kuwait orders 2000 MW worth of renewable energy, Arabian Gazette by John Brian Shannon / June 15, 2013 Kuwait is set to spend USD 100 billion on the nation’s domestic energy sector over the next 5 years – and for the first time, some of that investment is earmarked for renewable energy. – See more at:
http://arabiangazette.com/kuwait-orders-2000-mw-renewable-20130615/#sthash.T2AZUK1u.dpuf
– See more at: http://arabiangazette.com/kuwait-orders-2000-mw-renewable-20130615/#sthash.T2AZUK1u.dpuf
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