Sandy-Like Situation Developing? Tropical System to Merge With Potential Record-Breaking Nor’Easter by Sunday.
It’s not yet predicted to be a so-called perfect storm. But a Sandy-like situation appears to be on tap for the U.S. Northeast this weekend. For the forecast weather coming down the pipe bears a distinctly odd combination of features similar to the climate change related hybrid hyperstorms we’ve seen during recent years. To be clear, the presently predicted hybrid storm is not expected to be as intensely ‘perfect’ as Sandy. But it could still be a record-breaker for parts of the Northeast with regards to October rainfall and minimum central pressure come Sunday.
Tropical System Predicted to Combine with a Nor’Easter
93 L isn’t even a tropical depression yet. But this stormy collection of clouds southeast of the Yucatan continues to gather and organize over warmer than normal waters. At this time, development into a tropical system appears more likely — with the National Hurricane Center predicting a 60…
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October 27 Energy News
Opinion:
¶ “Fortune 500’s, traditional utilities: Everyone is buying wind power” • Our research team ran the numbers, and the wind industry’s third quarter results paint a clear picture: wind power is in high demand across all sectors of the electricity market. American Electric Power’s Wind Catcher project in Oklahoma is just one example. [HuffPost]
Power County Wind Farm in Idaho
¶ “Joyce out, Canavan in, Roberts out – What High Court ruling means for climate, renewables” • Australia’s deputy prime minister and leader of the National Party, Barnaby Joyce, is headed for a by-election, after the High Court ruled him ineligible to hold his seat due to dual citizenship. He is just one of the climate deniers affected. [RenewEconomy]
World:
¶ Siemens Gamesa is to supply turbines totalling 281 MW to the Nordlicht wind farm in Norway. The order is for supply and installation of 67 SWT-DD-130 4.2-MW…
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White House distances itself from Puerto Rico power contract
More than five weeks after Storm Maria, most Puerto Ricans are still in the dark The White House has distanced itself from a $300m (£227m) contract awarded to tiny Montana firm to help reconstruct Puerto Rico’s power grid. The statement came as President Donald Trump met his Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who knows the chief […]
via White House distances itself from Puerto Rico power contract: — redlegagenda
Risk of ‘unacceptable war’ – if U.S.A. made a pre-emptive military strike on North Korea
US Military Strike Against North Korea Pose Risk Of ‘Unacceptable War’: Expert, International Business Times, BY A mid the ongoing tensions in the Korean Peninsula of a possible nuclear threat from North Korea, the United States had said that further provocation from Pyongyang could result in a preventive military strike. However, a renowned American expert on the North Korean issue has told Yonhap News Agency that the U.S. would not remove all of North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities.
“A preventive military strike would not destroy all of North Korea’s capabilities. It would risk a wider war that would inflame South Korea and Japan and potentially cause millions of casualties,” Michael Green, vice president for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said last week in Washington, D.C., in his meeting with South Korean journalists.
Green proposed economic sanctions as the most viable tool to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. While mentioning about other ways in which the U.S. military strike could backfire, Green said: “It would also threaten the U.S. because North Korea has an ability even without ballistic missiles to transfer nuclear weapons to terrorist groups, so a preventive military strike would not get all of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities and would risk an unacceptable war.”
Green also claimed that diplomatic negotiations with Pyongyang would also not yield any concrete result as to stopping the Kim Jong Un regime’s nuclear advancement, given the country’s track record of breaking previous agreements.
“We shouldn’t end sanctions or military exercises in order to have dialogue with Pyongyang because then we will prove there’s no cost to North Korea for the path it’s on,” Green said, suggesting that the U.S. build “infrastructure of sustained consequence” for North Korea to facilitate diplomacy work with the regime. “We now have to restore deterrence and restore credibility if we have any chance in medium to long run diplomacy.”……http://www.ibtimes.com/us-military-strike-against-north-korea-pose-risk-unacceptable-war-expert-2605939
North Korea warns of possible atmospheric nuclear bomb test
Take atmospheric nuclear test threat ‘literally’, North Korea diplomat says Washington SMH, 26 Oct 17 The North Korean foreign minister’s warning of a possible atmospheric nuclear test over the Pacific Ocean should be taken literally, a senior North Korean official has told CNN.
“The foreign minister is very well aware of the intentions of our supreme leader, so I think you should take his words literally,” Ri Yong-pil, a senior diplomat in North Korea’s Foreign Ministry, told CNN in an interview aired on Wednesday.
North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho said last month Pyongyang may consider conducting “the most powerful detonation” of a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific Ocean amid rising tensions with the US.
CIA chief Mike Pompeo said last week that North Korea could be only months away from gaining the ability to hit the US with nuclear weapons.
Experts say an atmospheric test would be a way of demonstrating that capability. All of North Korea’s previous nuclear tests have been conducted underground.
Trump next week will make a visit to Asia during which he will highlight his campaign to pressure North Korea to give up its nuclear and missile programs……
Meanwhile North Korea’s ambassador called on the UN Security Council on Wednesday to urgently discuss the recent US joint naval exercise near the Korean peninsula, calling it preparation for a pre-emptive strike and nuclear war against his country…….http://www.smh.com.au/world/north-korea-warns-of-pacific-nuclear-test-20171025-gz8cp2.html
As renewable energy costs shrink, British government wastes money on Small Nuclear Reactor fantasy
Small nuclear reactors are a 1950s mirage come back to haunt us http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2989401/small_nuclear_reactors_are_a_1950s_mirage_come_back_to_haunt_us.html, Oliver Tickell, 24th October, 2017
The government is due to announce a £250 million support package for ‘small modular reactors’ his week, just as the price of wind and solar power contracts fall 10% below UK wholesale prices. OLIVER TICKELL argues that the Britain’s ‘civilian’ nuclear power expenditure is actually a camouflaged subsidy to the UK’s Trident nuclear missile system.
It’s easy to see why Rolls Royce and other companies in the nuclear engineering business are pushing the UK government finance the development a new generation of ‘small modular reactors’ or SMRs. Whether the project succeeds or fails, there are juicy profits to be had for them at taxpayers expense.
Rather harder to understand is why the government should see the slightest merit in the idea.
According to a recent report by Rolls-Royce and its partners in the ‘SMR Consortium’ (SMRC), a UK SMR program could create 40,000 skilled jobs, contribute £100 billion ($132 billion) to the economy and open up a potential £400 billion global export market.
Nuclear Industries Association chairman Lord (John) Hutton claims in the foreword that a UK SMR programme could “help the UK become a vibrant, world-leading nuclear nation.” He asserts his belief that “it is fundamental for the UK to meet its 2050 decarbonisation targets and will deliver secure, reliable and affordable electricity for generations to come.”
The SMRC report envisages an approximate doubling of the UK’s 9.5 GW existing nuclear capacity by 2030, then another doubling by 2050 to around 40GW. That implies that come 2050, SMRs would be delivering some 30GW – the output of 100 300MW units scattered around the UK.
There are just two problems with the rosy scenario. First, the techno-optimism that oozes from every page is a fantasy. Nuclear power stations have got bigger to achieve economies of scale: it’s much cheaper to build a single 1.2GW unit than four 300MW units, or a dozen 100MW units.
As an illustration of the principle, take a look at the wind power industry. One of the main reasons why offshore wind has come down so much in cost is the move to ever-larger wind turbines. A single new 8MW turbine may now be bigger than an entire wind farm of 20 years ago.
This story goes all the way back to the 1950s …
But first we must realise – there is nothing new about SMRs! They have been powering submarines and aircraft carriers ever since the since USS Nautilus was launched in 1955, over 60 years ago. And the world’s first purely civilian nuclear plant, at Shippingport in the USA, a 60MW SMR, went live in 1957. While civilian reactors got bigger, many hundreds of SMRs have been built and deployed for naval use.
Now if there really are huge cost savings to be achieved from the mass production of SMRs, how come they have not already been achieved? What is that that generations of super-smart nuclear engineers have missed? Industry claims of less complex financing and ‘process engineering’ may ring a little hollow, but – for the sake of argument – let’s accept that all the claimed cost reductions can be achieved. On the SMRC’s projections,
“The levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) generated by a FOAK [first of a kind] UK SMR power station is forecast under £75 per MWh and this reduces to a forecast £65 per MWh by station number five. In the medium term the target is even lower at £60 per MWh.”
This is a good bit cheaper than the inflation-proof £92.50 / MWh (in 2013 money) the government has promised to pay for Hinkley C’s power for 35 years following the plant’s opening. But it’s a lot higher than current wholesale power prices of around £42 / MWh.
The ever shrinking cost of renewable energy
Last month the price of offshore wind power reached a new low of £57.50 per MWh in an auction for contracts, guaranteed for just 15 years. Onshore wind is even cheaper: contracts awarded in Germany in May reached another new low of €42.80 / MWh (£38.24) – less than current UK wholesale power prices. And Germany’s latest solar auction, a few days ago, delivered bids as low as €42.90 per MWh. Both these technologies appear viable with no subsidy at all.
The cost of solar PV panels continues its precipitous decline. Recent figures show the cost of panels in the Netherlands declining at 11% per year, or 50% every five years. The trend may continue for a long time to come.
Extrapolate these declining renewable cost trends to 2030, and we can expect solar power to cost around £10 per MWh, with wind at £20-30 per MWh. By 2050, wind power costs will surely have halved again, with solar around £1 per MWh. So what will be the use of nuclear power at £60-75 per MWh?
Of course there will be costs in integrating large volumes of variable, non-despatchable power supply into the grid. It will mean using ‘dynamic demand’ or ‘smart grid’ technologies, energy storage in giant batteries and hydropower stations, large scale power-to-gas and power-to-liquid-fuel conversion (in turn displacing fossil fuels from transport) … and the base cost of power will be astonishingly low by current standards, not just in the UK but all over the world.
So Lord Hutton’s hyperbolic claims are wholly erroneous. Nuclear power will be utterly irrelevant in meeting decarbonisation targets. There is no £400 billion export market. Who would want SMRs in 2050, when their power will be 50-100 times more expensive than solar?
The ‘nuclear deterrent’
We now know (thanks to Andy Stirling and Philip Johnstone of Sussex University) that the government wants to use civilian nuclear programme to generate expertise, technology, for military use, especially reactors for Trident nuclear submarines. What better way than to pour billions of pounds into SMRs under the pretence that the technology is for civilian use?
Actually Lord Hutton himself gave the game away when he wrote: “A UK SMR programme would support all 10 ‘pillars’ of the Government’s Industrial Strategy and assist in sustaining the skills required for the Royal Navy’s submarine programme.”
More recently, on 10th October, defence procurement minister Harriet Baldwin MP replied to a question by Caroline Lucas MP that, “[i]n all discussions it is fully understood that civil and defence sectors must work together to make sure resource is prioritised appropriately for the protection and prosperity of the United Kingdom.”
But there are signs that BEIS Secretary Greg Clarke may be getting tired of subsidising the UK’s nuclear missiles. In 2015 former Chancellor George Osborne announced a £250 million SMR competition for the most promising ideas. The outcomewas to be published last autumn. it wasn’t. By May 2017, the nuclear industry and its backers in the House of Lords were panicking. Then the SMRCs report ‘UK SMR: A National Endeavour‘ was issued this 20th September in a desperate attempt to ginger up the process. It has failed – so far.
Could a sudden fit of common sense, logical thinking and sound economics have come across senior UK ministers? Probably not. The Telegraph reports today that BEIS is to publish the competitions ‘results’ in a study this week, announcing Rolls Royce and its SMRC partners as the winners. “We are currently considering next steps for the SMR programme and we will communicate these in due course”, a BEIS spokesman said.
This Author
Oliver Tickell is contributing editor at Resurgence & Ecologist magazine and a former editor of The Ecologist.
Irreversible decline of nuclear power across the world
Standard & Poors Global Market Intelligence 16th October 2017, Nuclear energy is in irreversible decline across the world, with the construction of new units appearing to bottom out, a new report found. “The deterioration of the situation is accelerating,” warned Paris-based nuclear consultant Mycle Schneider at the U.S. launch of the World Nuclear Industry
Status Report on Oct. 12 in Washington, D.C. The event was hosted by the anti-nuclear Natural Resources Defense Council, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the German Green Party-linked Heinrich Böll Stiftung North America foundation.
The 10th annual edition of the report provides a grim assessment of the worldwide nuclear industry. According to the report’s 2017 edition, the mean age of the world’s 403 reactors in operation as of
July 1 is approximately 29 years while the mean age at retirement of the 169 reactors that have shut down was roughly 25 years.
https://www.snl.com/web/client?auth=inherit#news/article?id=42284954&cdid=A-42284954-123
Hiroshima Survivor Setsuko Thurlow to accept Nobel Peace Prize
Canadian who survived Hiroshima nuclear bomb to accept Nobel Peace Prize. This is her story http://nationalpost.com/news/world/canadian-who-survived-hiroshima-nuclear-bomb-to-accept-nobel-peace-prize-this-is-her-story
Hiroshima Survivor Setsuko Thurlow Recalls U.S. Bombing
‘We learned how to step over the dead bodies’: Setsuko Thurlow, 85, was 13 when she survived the attack. She has spent her life since campaigning against nuclear weapons Setsuko Thurlow will be in Oslo, Norway, on Dec. 10 to jointly accept the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of this year’s laureate, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).
The 85-year-old Toronto resident is a Hibakusha — a survivor of the atomic attacks on Japan in 1945. Her hometown of Hiroshima was destroyed by the Americans on August 6, 1945.
Thurlow’s sister, burned and bloated from the blast, lived for four days afterwards. When she spoke, what she expressed was a mother’s guilt: Her child had been badly burned. How could she have let it happen?
“It’s not easy to carry these memories,” Thurlow says. “We learned how to step over the dead bodies.” She recalls feeling numb. She couldn’t cry. All she could do was watch, as Japanese soldiers tossed the lifeless bodies of her sister, Ayako, and her four-year-old nephew, Eiji, into a shallow grave, dousing them with gasoline, throwing in a match. Thurlow was 13.
She has spent much of her life since campaigning against nuclear weapons.
Her weapon is her words — and her resolve to keep telling the story. Thurlow sat down with the National Post at her home in Toronto.
Britain’s (really uneconomic) ‘peaceful’ nuclear power is actually subsidising nuclear weapons
New nuclear power plants linked to Trident weapons http://www.tribunemagazine.org/2017/10/new-nuclear-power-plants-linked-to-trident-weapons/ By: David Hencke: October 22, 2017 Senior civil servants have revealed that the government’s decision to build a new generation of civil nuclear power stations starting with Hinkley Point is linked to maintaining enough skills to keep Britain’s nuclear deterrent.
The disclosure came at a hearing of the Commons Public Accounts Committee looking at the huge cost of building Hinkley Point power station which critics see as uneconomic and not properly costed.
It was raised in a paper submitted to the committee by Professor Andy Stirling, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and Dr Phil Johnstone, from the Science Policy Research Unit, Sussex University, which questioned whether the Ministry of Defence is being subsidized by the civil nuclear industry.
Their paper pointed out this is never publicly discussed but added: “If a UK withdrawal from civil nuclear power on grounds of uncompetitive economics were to leave these shared costs borne entirely on the military side, then UK military nuclear infrastructures would be significantly more expensive.
“If civil nuclear commitments are being maintained (despite adverse economics) in order to help cover these shared costs, then it is this that amounts to a cross-subsidy.”
The point was taken up by Meg Hillier, chair of the PAC, last week. She questioned Stephen Lovegrove, former Permanent Secretary, Department for Energy and Climate Change, on the issue.
“Mr Lovegrove, there has been an argument put forward by Sussex University that Hinkley is a great opportunity to maintain our nuclear skills base. With your hat on at the Ministry of Defence, are you having discussions with the business Department about this?”
Lovegrove replied: “We are, yes. In my last year at DECC, I was in regular discussion with Jon Thompson, former Permanent Secretary at the MOD, to say that as a nation we are going into a fairly intense period of nuclear activity … We are building the new SSBNs (nuclear armed nuclear submarines) and completing the Astutes … We are completing the build of the nuclear submarines which carry conventional weaponry. We have at some point to renew the warheads, so there is very definitely an opportunity here for the nation to grasp in terms of building up its nuclear skills.
“I do not think that that is going to happen by accident; it is going to require concerted Government action to make it happen. We are speaking to colleagues at BEIS ( Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy) fairly repeatedly about it, and have a number of forums in which we are doing that.”
The Sussex University paper also pointed out that private industry was making the link. Their paper said: “Rolls Royce acknowledged for the first time in a major public statement, that there also exists a deep interlinkage between British civil and military nuclear industrial capabilities … stating that “expansion of a nuclear-capable skilled workforce through a civil nuclear UK programme would relieve the Ministry of Defence of the burden of developing and retaining skills and capability. This would free up valuable resources for other investments.”
Historic legal case on genetic damage, leukaemia, from nuclear radiation
Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment (CORE) 25th Oct 2017 Over the coming months, in remembering this epic and historic case in theLondon High Court when West Cumbrian families sued Sellafield over cancersin children of radiation workers, CORE will be publishing the 1992/93 daily court transcripts.
The initial two test cases were brought by Leigh Day & Co. The first by Elizabeth Reay whose 10-month-old baby, Dorothy, died ofleukaemia in 1962. George Reay, the baby’s father, died of cancer in the mid- 1980s and had received one of the highest radiation doses of any of the Sellafield workers.
The second by Vivien Hope, 28, who had been diagnosed in 1988 with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, another blood cancer. Her father, David, was a fitter at the plant for more than 20 years.
Up to 40 further cases were depending on the outcome. Legally, the case would test
for the first time the concept of genetic damage: whether radiation from
Sellafield damaged the sperm of workers, resulting in leukaemia and related
illnesses in their children (Gardner theory).
http://corecumbria.co.uk/news/down-memory-lane-25th-anniversary-of-leukaemia-high-court-case-261092/
Call to Japan’s nuclear regulator to investigate potentially flawed Kobe Steel products in the Japanese nuclear industry
Greenpeace 25th Oct 2017, Japan’s nuclear regulator must take urgent action to launch a
comprehensive investigation into the supply and widespread use of
potentially flawed Kobe Steel products in the Japanese nuclear industry,
Greenpeace and five other NGOs demanded today.
The groups submittedanalysis of Kobe Steel’s supply chain to the nuclear industry together
with a demand letter to The Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) commissioner
Toyoshi Fuketa on 24 October.
http://www.greenpeace.org/japan/ja/news/press/2017/pr201710251/
Continuing effort to remove dangerous spent nuclear fuel rods from Andreyeva Bay
Bellona 25th Oct 2017, The second bundle of 22,000 spent nuclear fuel rods are set to leave the
submarine maintenance base of Andreyeva Bay as part of an ongoing effort to
secure Cold War radioactive hazards lurking near the Russian-Norwegian
border, a Russian official said last week.
http://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2017-10-andreyeva-bay-gears-up-to-send-away-more-old-nuclear-fuel
(Nuclear’s not the only problem) – the collapse of the world’s insect populations
India-USA nuclear arrangement just an American marketing effort – “dead at the very beginning”
India-US nuke deal signed without ground work: Ex-US Senator PTI|Oct 26, 2017, WASHINGTON: The landmark India-US civil nuclear deal was “dead at the very beginning” as it was signed without ground work, a former top Republican Senator has alleged, describing the agreement as more of an “arms deal” for American defence manufacturing companies.
Former Senator Larry Pressler, who has served as chairman of the US Senate’s Arms Control Subcommittee, told a Washington audience that the deal was much-praised “but there is no chance of it being implemented as the liability issues have not been addressed and it has not been worked through.”
He said that the India-US civil nuclear deal “was dead at the very beginning.
Pressler said that there was “no groundwork done” in India or the US on the civil nuclear deal.
The India-US nuclear cooperation agreement was signed in October 2008, ending India’s isolation by the West in the nuclear and space arena. The deal has given a significant boost to India’s nuclear energy production.
Pressler was speaking at an event organised by The Hudson Institute, a top American think-tank, to discuss his latest book ‘Neighbours in Arms: An American Senator s Quest for Disarmament in a Nuclear Subcontinent’.
“…There was nothing to it really. If you look into it, it is more of an arms sale agreement,” he alleged.
Pressler claimed the then US president Barack Obama’s visit to New Delhi was “largely an arms sale trip”.
“The then president Obama’s last trip to India was an arms sales trip and the poor people of India have to pay for all of these new arms that their country is buying from the US. This is really one of us but it’s a new friendship we’re told. But we have to be very careful. I’m somewhat critical that India has accepted that on those terms,” the former American Senator said. …….https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/india-us-nuke-deal-signed-without-ground-work-ex-us-senator/articleshow/61236998.cms
South Africa Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba says large nuclear power project is not affordable
Nuclear power ‘still unaffordable’ https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2017-10-26-nuclear-power–still-unaffordable/ 26 October 2017
He was speaking ahead of his medium-term Budget speech, which did not mention nuclear power plans.
A new integrated resource plan on energy would provide more clarity, he said.
Proposals for a nuclear building project have been debated with a new urgency since weekend reports that President Jacob Zuma had recently met a Russian delegation.
Both the Presidency and the Russian embassy in Pretoria have denied that there was such a meeting, at which Zuma was said to have come under pressure to start implementing the nuclear power project with Russia.
Zuma’s cabinet reshuffle last week included the appointment of David Mahlobo as energy minister.
Mahlobo was reported to have travelled to Russia with convicts Gayton McKenzie and Kenny Kunene to facilitate a R5-billion nuclear deal with Russian company Rosgeo. Mahlobo was state security minister at the time of the trip.
Allegations that the energy sector has been captured go beyond the nuclear project. PetroSA is also being investigated.
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