Nuclear news – less dramatic, but still important. In USA and UK, how to fund nuclear development is the preoccupation of the industry. The State of Ohio is just about to finalise a vote for a dodgy plan that will subsidise its nuclear plants, while ending incentives for renewable energy and energy efficiency. Meanwhile the UK plan is for consumers to pay upfront through energy bills, for new nuclear projects before they’re even built, – and might not even be built. Alas, we don’t have access to information on Russia and China, but it appears that both countries are more and more relying on selling nuclear reactors overseas, rather than making them economically viable at home.
NuScale, realising there’s no real market for small nuclear reactors, pins its hopes on mass orders from tax-payer funded military. Utah communities sign on, rather cautiously, to buy NuScale’s Small Modular Nuclear Reactors.
Ivo Daalder, Chicago Tribune July 22, 2019 For more than 50 years, the United States and Russia have agreed that their own security required negotiating agreements limiting their nuclear weapons deployments and capabilities. In that time, the two countries have successfully concluded seven major agreements to reduce their nuclear arsenals. The last of these, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, was signed in 2010 and capped each side’s deployed warheads at 1,550.
Yet, the nuclear arms control edifice that was built up over half a century is in danger of coming apart. The Trump administration has decided to withdraw from one major agreement, the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, citing Russian violations. And it has shown no interest in extending New START before it expires 18 months from now.
Behind both decisions is the idea that U.S.-Russian arms control has become an anachronism, and that future arms control efforts must now also include Chinese capabilities. While Russia’s apparent deployment of a banned ground-based nuclear missile provided the formal reason for abandoning the INF Treaty, President Donald Trump also cited China’s unconstrained deployment of intermediate-range missiles as a justification for ending the agreement. And rather than extending New START for five years, administration officials suggest that any future accord must also limit Chinese nuclear weapons.
After more than 50 years of U.S.-Russian arms control negotiations and agreements, there is scope for thinking anew about how best to reduce nuclear dangers. But abandoning long-standing agreements and conditioning any new negotiations on including China are not the best way to do that.
It took the United States and Soviet Union standing at the very brink of nuclear war, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, to understand the importance of managing their nuclear capabilities through negotiations.
After the crisis, both countries instituted a hotline so they could communicate to avert misunderstandings. They agreed to ban above-ground nuclear testing and negotiated a treaty to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. And they began the effort to limit and ultimately reduce the number and type of weapons each side could deploy. As important, both accepted intrusive inspection regimes designed not only to verify compliance with the terms of the agreements but to enhance mutual confidence that neither side was seeking a decisive nuclear advantage.
The true lesson of the Cuban missile crisis was that countries could miscalculate each other’s actions and intentions, raising the very real risk of nuclear confrontation. The commitment to dialogue, to engage in extensive talks on strategic stability and negotiate real limits on capabilities, and to open each country up to foreign inspectors, helped create confidence that for all the differences between them, the United States and Russia shared an overriding need to avoid a nuclear war.
That effort has proven exceedingly successful. Nuclear arsenals, though still far too large, have been sharply reduced. Nuclear crises like Cuba have been avoided. And while there have been questions about compliance, none of the violations ever constituted a threat so dire as to heighten the risk of nuclear confrontation.
U.S.-Russian arms control has worked in its most fundamental aim — to reduce the chance of war, especially nuclear war. That is why the decision to withdraw from the INF Treaty next month is a mistake. The new Russian missile deployment is a violation and has to be addressed, and the treaty contains procedures for doing so. If the violation persists, there are ways to punish Russia, through sanctions and other means. But withdrawing from a treaty that has served the United States and its European allies well for decades risks an arms race that is destabilizing and unwinnable.
The same is true for New START. Russia has indicated it is willing to extend its terms for five years. The United States has nothing to lose by agreeing to its extension, thus limiting Russian nuclear deployments and extending the highly intrusive inspection measures that provide real insight into Russian capabilities.
There is a case to be made for including China in future nuclear negotiations, though its nuclear deployments of some 200 weapons is but a small fraction of what the United States and Russia still possess. Russia, moreover, will no doubt also insist on including the similarly-sized French and British nuclear forces in such a multilateral negotiation, a prospect that neither Paris nor London is likely to welcome.
It will no doubt take time, and real effort, to decide on a new negotiating framework beyond the two major nuclear powers. Until such time, both Washington and Moscow will be much better off if the nuclear framework they have developed over the past 50 years remains in place.
— Ivo Daalder is the president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former U.S. ambassador to NATO.
Tepco to retire remaining reactors in Fukushima https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Tepco-to-retire-remaining-reactors-in-FukushimaDecommissioning is expected to take 40 years and cost $2.5bn SUGURU KURIMOTO, Nikkei staff writer, JULY 20, 2019 TOKYO — Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings will scrap the four Fukushima Prefecture reactors that escaped damage in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, moving to decommission all of the nuclear power plants the public utility owns in the disaster-stricken region.
The shutdown of the Fukushima Daini plant, which is located just 12km away from the Daiichi Plant crippled by fuel meltdowns, will be formally authorized at the company’s board meeting at the end of the month. This marks the first decision by the utility, known as Tepco, to decommission nuclear reactors apart from the Daiichi facilities.
Costs for decommissioning Fukushima Daini are estimated to exceed 270 billion yen ($2.5 billion). While Tepco’s reserves are not enough to cover them, the government adopted new accounting rules allowing operators to spread a large loss from decommissioning over multiple years. The company also believes it has secured enough people with necessary expertise to move forward.
Tepco soon will inform Fukushima Gov. Masao Uchibori of its decision. The utility intends to submit the decommissioning plan to Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority by March next year.
The decision means all 10 reactors in Fukushima will be scrapped. The Daini reactors will be decommissioned in roughly 40 years, sharing the same timetable as the Daiichi site. Tepco owns one other nuclear plant, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa facility in Niigata Prefecture.
The Daini plant, where each reactor produced 1.1 gigawatts of power, served the Tokyo area for about three decades. Japan’s central government sought to restart the complex but faced withering opposition from local residents in Fukushima.
Including the Fukushima Daini facilities, a total of 21 reactors across Japan are now slated for decommissioning. Recent additions include two units at the Ikata plant in Ehime Prefecture and one reactor at the Onagawa facility in Miyagi Prefecture.
22/07/2019 –PARIS (Reuters) – French utility EDF <EDF.PA> could prolong planned outages at its two Golfech nuclear reactors because of a heatwave expected across France this week, the power utility said on Monday.
EDF plans to halt production at the 1,300 megawatt (MW) Golfech 2 reactor from Tuesday until July 29 and will stop power generation at Golfech 1 on Wednesday until same day next week.
The utility had said on Friday that it could halt electricity generation at the 2,600 megawatt (MW) Golfech plant in southern France because of high temperatures forecast on the Garonne river, water from which is used to cool the reactors.
EDF said on Monday that the current forecast for the end of the outages was based on available temperature forecasts and that the outages at both reactors could be prolonged.
The company’s use of water from rivers to cool its reactors is regulated by law to protect plant and animal life. It is forced to cut output when water temperatures rise or when river levels and the flow rate are low.
Another spell of sizzling temperatures is expected in France and much of western Europe this week, the second heatwave this summer. A record temperature of 46 degrees Celsius (114.8 Fahrenheit) was set in southern France last month.
Separately, EDF delayed the restart of its 1,500 MW Chooz 2 nuclear reactor by a couple days to Aug. 1, saying that the planned maintenance outage could be extended because of the amount of work required for its second 10-year overhaul.
(Reporting by Bate Felix; Editing by David Goodman)
Vote advances on nuclear plant rescue, Toledo Blade, JIM PROVANCE, jprovance@theblade.com 22 July 19, COLUMBUS— The Ohio House will return to the Statehouse a week earlier than originally planned to take a controversial rescue of the state’s two nuclear power plants off the shelf and try again to get it to the governor’s desk.A vote is now scheduled for Tuesday rather than Aug. 1.
The Republican-controlled chamber failed last week to muster the votes for approving House Bill 6 as the passage of the bill and the state budget dragged beyond the expected date for summer recess and ran into conflicts with planned vacations.
Four state representatives who supported a prior bill version in May were not on the floor last week, leaving Speaker Larry Householder (R., Glenford) short of the 50 needed for passage……
FirstEnergy Solutions, currently in bankruptcy proceedings, has indicated it will begin decommissioning its Davis-Besse nuclear plant by May 31, 2020, and its Perry plant east of Cleveland in 2021 without the $150 million a year House Bill 6 would generate annually through 2027. …..
The Senate passed the bill last week 19-12, and Gov. Mike DeWine said last week he will sign it.
House Bill 6, sponsored by Rep. Jamie Callender (R., Concord) and Shane Wilkin (R., Hillsboro), would require consumers to pay surcharges on their monthly electric bills — ranging from 85 cents for residential customers to $2,400 for big industrial factories — beginning in 2021 to fuel a $170 million-a-year fund.
The two power plants would get $150 million of that while $20 million would go to five utility-scale solar fields already holding state site approval —one in Hardin County and four in southern Ohio.
The bill also spreads statewide the cost of supporting two coal-fired plants owned by the multi-utility Ohio Valley Energy Corp. — one in southern Ohio and the other in southeast Indiana. The monthly surcharges, separate from the nuclear/solar surcharges, would be capped at $1.50 for residential customers and $1,500 for large industrial customers.
The bill, however, promises that the measure will result in a net decrease in customer bills by eliminating costs associated with existing state mandates that utilities find increasingly more of their power from wind, solar, and other renewable sources and reduce energy consumption……
Environmental groups — the Ohio Environmental Council, Sierra Club, The Nature Conservancy, and Ohio Citizen Action — will hold a press conference before the vote to urge the bill’s defeat.
Greta Thunberg awarded first Normandy Freedom Prize
Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg wins France’s first Freedom Prize, SBS News, A 16-year-old Swedish climate champion has received the first Freedom Prize in France, and has urged people to recognise the link between climate change and “mass migration, famine and war.”
Swedish teen climate change activist Greta Thunberg, whose Friday school strikes protesting government inaction over climate change helped spark a worldwide movement, has received the first Freedom Prize in France.
Flanked by two WWII veterans who sponsor the prize, the 16-year-old accepted the award at a ceremony in the northwestern city of Caen, Normandy, on Sunday.
“This prize is not only for me,” Greta said. “This is for the whole Fridays for Future movement because this we have achieved together.”
She said she would donate the AU$28,000 prize money to four organisations working for climate justice and helping areas already affected by climate change.
The prize was awarded before an audience of several hundred people and in the presence of several D-Day veterans, including France’s Leon Gautier and US native American Charles Norman Shay.
Greta said she had spent an unforgettable day with Mr Shay on Omaha Beach, one of the sites of the 1944 Normandy landings that launched the Allied offensive that helped end World War II.
Paying tribute to their sacrifice, she said: “the least we can do to honour them is to stop destroying that same world that Charles, Leon and their friends and colleagues fought so hard to save for us.”
Mr Shay said that young people should be prepared to “defend what they believe in.”………
She said the “link between climate and ecological emergency and mass migration, famine and war was still not clear to many people” and urged change.
New UK nuclear plants could be paid for upfront through energy bills, Consumers face financial burden of future projects even before they are built Ft.com, David Sheppard and Harry Dempsey, 22 July 19,
The UK government has thrown its backing behind proposals to finance new nuclear plants by having taxpayers pay upfront through their energy bills as it looks to reinvigorate a sector beset by cancellations and high costs. The consultation on the new financing model, which aims to lower overall costs by having consumers fund future nuclear projects before they are built, comes as the government targets cutting carbon emissions to net zero by 2050.
Half of all new nuclear projects planned in the UK have collapsed in the past year after failing to secure the necessary private financing, including Hitachi’s decision to suspend the £20bn Wylfa plant in north Wales and Toshiba’s cancellation of its development in Moorside, Cumbria. Seven of the UK’s eight existing nuclear plants are set to close by 2030.
But the proposal is likely to face criticism for loading risks on to consumers and the government at a time when renewable alternatives to nuclear like wind and solar are rapidly becoming cheaper. Boris Johnson, who is widely expected to become prime minister later this week, has in the past supported nuclear projects but also criticised their high costs.
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, which is launching a three-month consultation on the proposals, said it believed the new financing model had the “potential to reduce the cost of raising private finance . . . thereby reducing consumer bills”.
France’s state-backed EDF Energy has been a vocal champion for the proposed model, known as Regulated Asset Base or RAB, after the cost of its Hinkley Point project in Somerset was heavily criticised for its cost to consumers.
BEIS said using an RAB model for future projects was suitable as companies such as EDF would look to replicate the Hinkley Point design in future plants. EDF said on Monday that its proposed Sizewell C plant would be a “near replica” and therefore “cheaper to construct and finance”. …..
Greenpeace UK’s chief scientist Doug Parr criticised the proposal saying it would shift liabilities from private investors to taxpayers. “The nuclear industry has gone in just 10 years from saying they need no subsidies to asking bill payers to fork out for expensive power plants that don’t even exist yet, and may never,” Mr Parr said.
The government is expected to release its highly anticipated energy white paper in summer, which will indicate future electricity generation plans, with the UK’s 2013 energy strategy widely seen as defunct due to the faltering nuclear projects. https://www.ft.com/content/e2cf07ae-acaa-11e9-8030-530adfa879c2
Posted on 17/07/2019 by Elijah J Magnier By Elijah J. Magnier: @ejmalrai During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s the Islamic Republic of Iran deployed the slogan “Karbala, Karbala we are coming” ( كربلا كربلا ما دارييم مياييم) to “defend the value of Islam”. In Syria the battle cry “Zeinab shall not be abducted twice” helped mobilise Shia allies and […]
Opinion: ¶ “US Shale Is Doomed No Matter What They Do” • As financial stress sets in for US shale companies, some are trying to drill their way out of the problem, while others are cutting costs. The problems they face, however, include the continually falling prices of renewables, which are already out-competing them, and […]
Lawmakers to vote on $1B rescue for state’s 2 nuclear plants https://apnews.com/3f4d2efdf64b49cf9452c4256f534e56TOLEDO, Ohio (AP)22 July 19, — Lawmakers are planning a final vote on legislation that would give Ohio’s nuclear plants roughly $1 billion through 2026 by adding a new fee onto electricity bills.Backers say the financial lifeline for the plants is needed to prevent them closing within the next two years.
The Ohio House plans to vote on the measure Tuesday after lawmakers in the Senate approved the plan last week. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine has said he intends to sign it into law.
Critics say the state’s residents and businesses shouldn’t be forced to pay a fee that will benefit the nuclear plants’ owners. Opponents led by the natural gas industry have vowed to ask voters to overturn the legislation in a statewide referendum next year.
BÜCHEL, Germany — Eleven international peace activists entered the Büchel Air Base southwest of Frankfurt early this morning to deliver what they called a “Treaty Enforcement Order” declaring that the sharing of US nuclear weapons at the base is a “criminal conspiracy to commit war crimes.”
Upon entering the base’s main gate with a printed “cease and desist order,” they insisted on seeing the base commander to deliver the order in person.
“We refuse to be complicit in this crime,” said Brian Terrell of Voices for Creative Nonviolence in Chicago, Illinois. “We call for the nuclear bombs to be returned to the US immediately. The Germans want these nuclear weapons out of Germany, and so do we.”
The group included people from Germany, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. All eleven were detained by military and civilian authorities and were released after providing identification. This is the third year in a row that a delegation of US peace activists has joined Europeans and others in protesting the US nuclear weapons at Büchel. The local group Nonviolent Action for Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (GAAA) convenes the International Action Week, demanding permanent ouster of the US nuclear weapons, cancellation of plans to replace today’s B61s with new hydrogen bombs, and Germany’s ratification of the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
“Delivery of the ‘Cease and Desist Order’ is an act of crime prevention,” said John LaForge, of the US peace group Nukewatch and coordinator of the US delegation. “The authorities think the entry is a matter of trespass. But these nuclear bomb threats violate the UN Charter, the Treaty on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.” he said, adding, “Interrupting government criminality is a duty of responsible citizenship.”The activists included: (from the United States) Susan Crane, Richard Bishop, Andrew Lanier, Jr., Brian Terrell, Ralph Hutchison, and Dennis DuVall; (from the UK) Richard Barnard; (from The Netherlands) Margriet Bos, and Susan van der Hijden; and (from Germany) Dietrich Gerstner, and Birke Kleinwächter.
Susan van der Hijden of Amsterdam, who is just back from the US where she visited the Kansas City, Kansas site of a factory working on parts of the new replacement bomb, known as the B61-12. “The planning and training to use the US H-bombs that goes on at Büchel cannot be legal, because organizing mass destruction has been a criminal act since the Nuremberg Trials after WWII,” van der Hijden said.
23 July 2019byPeter Boyer Australia’s big dry is now its worst drought on record. Which is pretty much the way it is everywhere. Following a lead from our state and federal governments, today I’m going to avoid the delicate matter of future climate. Instead I’ll focus on what’s happening around us now.
Weather records tell us that June in Australia was 0.26C warmer than average and 31 per cent drier. The first half of 2019 produced the continent’s second warmest and seventh driest conditions in 120 years of records.
In those six months the Murray-Darling Basin had about half its normal rainfall. Basin residents might have coped with this in normal times, but these are not normal times. Dry, warm, high-evaporation weather since January 2017 has left them with conditions they’ve not seen before.
Now it’s official. Rainfall records reveal that today’s Murray-Darling experience is Australia’s worst drought on record – more severe than the Federation, the World War II, the Millennium or any other drought in our recorded history.
Bureau of Meteorology climatologist David Jones told a BOM seminar last week that proxy evidence indicates Australia hasn’t been as dry as this for two or three million years, long before humans existed. This puts the current state of our weather in a completely new place.
Numerous NSW and southern Queensland towns now have emergency water restrictions in place. Many towns in upper Darling catchments calculate their water storage as a few months at most. In Tenterfield they’re pumping already-depleted groundwater to try to keep storage levels stable.
Water is now being carted to the small town of Guyra, 150 km away, but for Tenterfield that’s not an option – at least not a sustainable one. Its businesses and 4000 residents would need 1400 B-double truckloads a month, or nearly 50 each day, to sustain even minimal water use.
The list of towns threatened with losing their water supply is growing, including Warwick and Stanthorpe in Queensland. The larger centres of Tamworth, Armidale, Orange and Dubbo are lining up to join them if good rain doesn’t come this year. The Bureau is not hopeful of that happening.
Running out of water is a nightmare for any community. Cape Town almost ran out a year ago and is still in a tenuous position. In much-larger Chennai on India’s southeast coast, where it hasn’t rained for six months, the situation is dire. Monsoon rain is not expected for another month or two.
This city of 10 million people consumes over 500 million litres a day. The provincial government is now using trains to transport water every day from a half-full storage over 300 km away, but if the city were to run out completely that supply would have to increase 50-fold. That won’t happen.
Early monsoonal downpours in India’s Assam along with Nepal and Bangladesh have brought the opposite problem: too much water, displacing millions of people and killing over 100. Not far away in the high Himalayas, the rate of glacier melt has been found to have doubled in less than 20 years to more than eight billion tonnes a year. A scientific assessment published in June is a very bad omen for downstream communities depending on glacial meltwater.
Meanwhile America’s Pacific north-west is preparing for another nasty fire season. A scientific wildfire survey has just informed Californians, after their worst season ever last year, that the state’s summer fires have increased five-fold since the 1970s, with rising temperature the key cause.
Wildfire anxiety has spread northward, to the dark, dank forests of British Columbia. The Canadian province’s wildfire service has warned that abnormally high fire conditions will be experienced in coastal regions including Vancouver Island at least till the end of summer.
This comes after several summers of intense wildfires up and down the Canadian west coast, mostly started by lightning strikes. They have been especially devastating in new-growth forests, where less genetic diversity and lower tree density allows higher moisture loss.
Things are hotting up in the far north. Alert, a Canadian military base on Ellesmere Island in the high Arctic, normally has a daytime maximum around 7C in July, but it’s currently experiencing an unprecedented heatwave that has seen temperatures climb above 20C.
Canada’s chief climatologist, David Phillips, says this heatwave is just the latest indicator of what will be a long, hot Arctic summer. The main trigger, say scientists, was a dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice over the past decade that allowed the ocean to absorb much more heat from the sun.
Smoke has become a regular contributor to Arctic weather, and this year is no exception. These are not forest fires so much as peat fires. The dried-out tundra itself is now burning in Alaska and across wide Siberian expanses, sending choking black smoke into the air.
Among the many things I’ve left out are Darwin’s groundwater crisis, depleted Great Barrier Reef coral, Europe’s unprecedented June heat, vanishing Antarctic sea ice, chronic drought in Africa and the Americas and floods in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Did I mention climate change?
VICTIM of a chronic decline in government support, Hobart’s venerable environment and sustainability body, Sustainable Living Tasmania, has been forced to close its doors after nearly 50 years of quiet achievement. It will continue as a volunteer-run organisation with no office
Adani protest: French journalists arrested while filming anti-coal activities, Guardian
Journalists charged with trespassing after filming Frontline Action on Coal activists include Hugo Clément, Ben Smee@BenSmee, Mon 22 Jul 2019 Four journalists working for the public television network France 2 have been charged with trespassing for filming a protest near the Abbot Point coal terminal, in north Queensland, targeting the operations of the Adani group.
The group of journalists includes Hugo Clément, a reporter well known in France for his documentaries about climate change and environmental issues.
Clément and a crew were arrested while filming anti-coal activists from the group Frontline Action on Coal, which early on Monday morning set up a blockade outside the Abbot Point port. About 20 members of the environmental group gathered outside the port entrance from 7am. Two locked themselves to a concrete barrel on the roadway.
In a statement Frontline Action on Coal said Clément and others were told by police they were “obstructing the railway” while filming the protests.
“Without warning, all four Frenchmen were immediately placed in handcuffs and put into police vehicles,” the statement said.
The group was taken to a police station in the nearby town of Bowen. They were released on bail on Monday afternoon and ordered to face the local magistrates court in September.
Clément said he spent several hours in a cell after being arrested while filming a protest, which included two demonstrators locking their hands inside a concrete barrel.
“We were just filming the action at the blockade of the highway and police came straight to us and arrested us without a word, without saying anything,” Clément said.
“They took us into a cell for seven hours.”
He said he and his crew, who work for French public broadcaster France 2, were charged with trespassing and released on conditional bail, which included that they not go within 20km of the Carmichael site.
“We didn’t understand why they arrested us because we weren’t doing anything wrong, we were just doing our jobs by filming the action,” he said.
Advanced US nukes need a boost; is the Pentagon the answer? As proponents for the fuel seek to establish a commercial domestic market, federal PPAs are seen as key to unlocking private investments. Utility Dive By Catherine Morehouse July 19, 2019“…… the large-scale reactors that are the norm across the U.S. don’t fit in with the growing trend toward smaller, decentralized power.
Small, advanced nuclear reactors better fit that mold, but have yet to enter the market. So the key question, say stakeholders, is how to spur that initial investment and establish a commercial domestic market, with a loftier goal of establishing the U.S. as a nuclear power export leader.
“……..you really are going to need to have that public involvement to persuade the private sector to roll along,” – Daniel Poneman, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy, and current president and CEO of nuclear developer Centrus
One potential solution floated at the conference was federal power purchase agreements between the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Energy (DOE).
A public-private partnership
“I think that the Department of Defense is a logical first customer for these reactors, especially micro reactors that are under development that can be deployed in remote regions,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who chairs the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, told the New Nuclear Capital audience on Tuesday……..
DOD’s ability to purchase in bulk and “underwrite an investment that may not have an immediate commercial appeal,” makes it an ideal first customer, said Poneman. And that initial investment is key.
It “really helps to have that, frankly, that initial investment from an investor that is looking at their returns not in quarterly earning statements but in the long-term security payoffs,” said Poneman. “Then when they make that initial major investment, it’s the cost of the very first one that’s always very, very high. And sometimes you find a cost curve that declines really quite steeply as you make more.”
Currently, a lot of capital being invested in the nuclear space comes from “eccentric billionaires who want to save the world,” Managing Director of Private Equity at Growth Capital Services James Magowan said at the conference. This poses a problem when trying to bring in “real venture capitalists,” whose first question is “Who’s your customer? Do you have a customer?”
To that end, “the suggestion that the DOD could step up and be a customer is a great one, I think that solves an initial customer problem,” he said. But in order to establish a domestic market, more players need to be involved.
The DOD has shown interest in advanced nuclear technology, Murkowski told reporters, making them a “likely candidate” for investment. DOD did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Building a domestic market
Many in the nuclear industry argue that establishing the U.S. as a nuclear export leader is essential to both national security as well as global decarbonization. While the Pentagon can get things rolling for small-scale nuclear, utilities will be essential to building out the market as buyers.
“I think you see utilities, particularly in Canada, stepping up with the Canadian government to take on that market-making role and we look forward to similar discussions here in the U.S.,” Donald Wolf, president and CEO of Advanced Reactor Concepts, a U.S.-based developer, said at the New Nuclear Capital Conference. “Before we, in effect, push these new designs on foreign countries, it really helps to say we built it here first. We’ve improved it at home, and it’s safe for us.”
And some developers are moving to establish those markets for small reactors with municipal power systems, which make for more attractive first customers than IOUs, according to Colbert. Municipal power systems have access to a lower weighted cost of capital, around 3%-4%, compared to IOUs’ approximately 8%-10%.
NuScale has jointly pursued both DOD and the Utah Associated Municipal Power Association (UAMP) as first customers. ……
“If you look at nuclear, the market for energy … is pretty well known,” said Chris Colbert, Chief Strategy Officer at nuclear developer NuScale. “What’s not so well known is how do you get through the nuclear regulatory process, the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] process.”
While safety remains a paramount concern for nuclear power, many in the industry say they no longer view public perception as a major problem.
UN nuclear watchdog chief Yukiya Amano dies at 72, Aljazeera, 22 July 19
The longtime Japanese diplomat held the IAEA’s top job since December 2009. Yukiya Amano, the Japanese diplomat who led the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for a decade and was extensively involved in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme, has died at 72.
Amano, who had wide experience in disarmament, non-proliferation diplomacy and nuclear energy, had been chief of the key United Nations agency that regulates nuclear issues worldwide since 2009…..
The announcement was made on the day Amano was expected to announce his decision to step down due to an illness that had visibly weakened him over the past year.
His third term had originally been due to expire in November 2021.
The IAEA said its flag over its headquarters in Vienna had been lowered to half-mast.
