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Continued poor prospects for uranium. ERA may close its Ranger mine

Spot Uranium Grafting, 9 News Finance, 13 April 12,    ”………Activity in general remains sluggish, and while two transactions were reported last week in the term market they were both pretty small by term market standards…

..Energy Resources of Australia managed a 5% price increase over the quarter but remains in thebalance. The company has elected to spend $120m to explore the underground potential at its premier Ranger mine in the northern territory, known as the Ranger Deeps project.

If ERA decides the Deeps is not a commercially viable proposition, Ranger is destined to quietly shut down. Merrills suggests known reserves are unlikely to last beyond this year and stockpiles would be gone in 3-4 years.
Meanwhile, Merrills has ceased coverage of Extract Resources post takeover and its impending de-listing this week.

The broker has also taken the opportunity to review its uranium price forecasts to account for weaker Japanese demand now apparent one year after Fukushima. The analysts’ 2012 spot price forecast falls to US$56.25/lb from US$58.50/lb and 2013 to US$67.50/lb from US$70.00/lb. Merrills’ long term price drops to US$63.00/lb from US$65.00/lb.  …
http://finance.ninemsn.com.au/newscolumnists/greg/8449091/spot-uranium-grafting

April 13, 2012 Posted by | AUSTRALIA, business and costs | Leave a comment

Russia joins Japan in planning to make money out of Britain’s nukes

‘The British market is very attractive,’ said the group’s director of communications, Sergei Novikov…..

  An agreement yesterday between the UK government and Japan ‘will open up opportunities’ for British firms to decommission the country’s nuclear sites.

Russian nuclear giant that built Chernobyl interested in erecting generators in Britain… well, they do have glowing references Daily Mail, By PETER CAMPBELL, 11 April 2012 |  The Russian nuclear giant that built Chernobyl has confirmed interest in erecting generators in Britain. Kremlin-owned Rosatom is fundamentally the same group that built the Ukrainian reactors, one of which exploded in 1986. Continue reading →

April 12, 2012 Posted by | business and costs, Russia | Leave a comment

Exelon Nuclear company begging for taxpayer charity

State Help Needed for New Nuclear Units, Exelon Chief Says Bloomberg News, By Brian Wingfield   April 11, 2012 U.S. utilities will need government help to build nuclear reactors as other forms of electric power become less expensive, a top executive of Exelon Corp. (EXC) (EXC), the nation’s largest commercial producer of atomic energy, said.

State support may include letting companies recover costs from customers during construction, providing loan guarantees or agreeing to buy power from the plant, Mayo Shattuck III, executive chairman of Chicago-based Exelon, said today at a conference in Washington.

Building reactors may require “the sovereign support of that state, which really means it’s on the backs of the ratepayers, not the backs of the shareholders,” Shattuck said at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The Nuclear Regulatory
Commission on March 30 awarded Scana Corp. (SCG) (SCG) a permit to build two reactors at a plant near Columbia, South Carolina, and on Feb. 9 approved Southern Co. (SO) (SO)’s plan for two units at its Vogtle plant near Augusta, Georgia. Southern expects its project to
cost $14 billion. Scana will cover 55 percent of the estimated $10.2 billion for the South Carolina reactors. The plants, being financed partly by customers, may be among the last in the U.S. this decade…..
Economic conditions raise “very serious questions” about the possibility of building new reactors without government support, Shattuck said……
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-04-11/state-help-needed-for-nuclear-units-exelon-chief-says

April 12, 2012 Posted by | business and costs, politics, USA | Leave a comment

There’s gold in them thar dead nuclear reactors

Christina Macpherson's websites & blogs

And some of us thought that the nuclear industry wasn’t profitable any more!

Well, after ripping off the taxpayer all these years  they  will now be back in business with a vengeance.   The almost eternal task of buryng dead nuclear reactors could turn out to be even more profitable than ever

UK in nuclear decommissioning deal with Japan http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/10/japan-britain-nuclear-idUSL6E8FA3JP20120410    by Oleg
Vukmanovic; Edited by David Holmes  LONDON, April 10   Apr 10, 2012  (Reuters) – Britain and Japan signed a framework civil nuclear co-operation pact opening up Japan’s multi-billion pound decommissioning sector to UK companies, the UK energy ministry said.

The announcement on Tuesday came as UK Prime Minister David Cameron kicked off his tour of Asia in Japan. The tour is aimed at boosting trade and investment ties, while the nuclear pact follows the devastating Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown in March last year. Continue reading →

April 11, 2012 Posted by | business and costs, decommission reactor, Japan, UK | Leave a comment

$Billions for the Watts Bar nuclear reactor could be better spent on renewable energy

Another Multi-Billion Dollar Nuclear Gamble for TVA Clean Energy Footprints, April 9th, 2012   Simon Mahan › Hot on the heals of the biggest Mega Millions jackpot in history, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has just upped its ante on a different game of chance: completing the Watts Bar nuclear reactor at their existing nuclear plant in Tennessee. TVA announced last week that the construction cost estimates to resurrect the abandoned reactor “were wrong.”

The initially proposed $2.49 billion reactor now needs another $1.5 to $2 billion to be completed, according to TVA. And remember, this is on top of the $1.7 billion that utility spent decades ago on the reactor before abandoning the project. Just as we highlighted last summer when the TVA board approved billions of dollars to spend on completing the Bellefonte reactor in Alabama, we don’t think this nuclear gamble bodes well either for TVA ratepayers. Continue reading →

April 11, 2012 Posted by | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment

Many thousands of jobs created by USA’s renewable energy grants program

DOE: Renewable grant program was a big jobs creator Politico,  By ALEX GUILLEN | 4/6/12  A $9 billion Obama administration grant program for renewable energy projects has created tens of thousands of jobs, an Energy Department report out Friday concludes.

The report comes just one week after Speaker John Boehner slammed Energy Secretary Steven Chu over the claim and challenged him to provide proof of the jobs creation. The report — conducted by DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory — concludes that the program supported 52,000 to 75,000 construction and installation jobs on average over the three years it was in effect. Continue reading →

April 7, 2012 Posted by | employment, renewable, USA | Leave a comment

U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission perturbed about troubled San Onofre nuclear station

US nuclear agency head to visit troubled Calif reactors  HOUSTON, Apr 5, 2012   (Reuters) – The chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and several California lawmakers are scheduled to tour the troubled San Onofre nuclear station in the state on Friday, the agency said.

NRC Chair Gregory Jaczko will visit Southern California Edison’s 2,150-megawatt San Onofre nuclear station near San Diego, where both reactors have been shut since January due to the discovery of premature wear on tubes inside giant steam generators. Continue reading →

April 6, 2012 Posted by | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment

Cost of building nuclear plants, and the risk of time and cost overruns

 the issue of shifting the risk from the banks back to convincing consumers that they must bear the risk…. 

 the Vogtle project for two AP1000 reactors supplied by Toshiba/Westinghouse, is in a state (Georgia) where the regulator is already allowing cost recovery, even before the start of serious construction…. It is unlikely there will be many more states with regulators willing and able to commit consumers to repay all the costs, especially if things go wrong at these sites

Prospects for Nuclear Power in 2012, The Energy Report, 5 April 12 “…..Gen III+ Claims The nuclear industry would probably like to forget the claims it made for Generation III+ designs. In short, Gen III+ reactors would achieve the dream combination of being both safer and simpler, making them cheaper and easier to build. The expected overnight (excluding finance charges) construction cost was forecast to be no more than $1,000/kilowatt hour (KWh), so that a typical 1,500-megawatt (MW) nuclear power plant would cost $1.5 billion (B). This was much less than the few plants completed in the 1990s and, not by coincidence, a figure that meant power from new nuclear reactors would be competitive with power from gas-fired plants.

However, the $1,000/KWh promise quickly began to unravel, when the first order for a Gen III+ design, Olkiluoto in Finland, was priced in 2004 at more than double that level. Construction of the European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) supplied by French company Areva, and its only successor so far in the West, Flamanville in France, has descended into farce. Both plants are now five years over their expected construction time and the latest cost estimates are about double the level forecast at construction start. Most recent serious cost estimates and bids in the past few years for Gen III+ designs have been of the order of $6,000/KWh. Continue reading →

April 5, 2012 Posted by | business and costs, Reference, UK, USA | Leave a comment

10,000 new renewable energy jobs, in UK marine energy sector

 Positive Energy: Renewable Energy Sector set to Offer More Jobs, Report reed.co.uk,  LONDON, April 5, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Renewable energy sector could potentially offer up to 10,000 more jobs over the next eight years, predicts job site

Starting salaries are also set to rise in the industry Continue reading →

April 5, 2012 Posted by | employment | Leave a comment

Japan’s nuclear utilities: debts piling up, banks nervous about funding

 the latest setback over Tepco’s restructuring suggests even the mega banks are getting cold feet over providing unsecured loans to their utility clients.

Lights dim for Japan’s nuclear utilities, Reuters,  By Mia Stubbs TOKYO, April 4 (IFR) – As the future of Tokyo Electric Power remains in question, concerns are building over how other nuclear power operating electric power companies (Epcos) will fund themselves going forward. Continue reading →

April 5, 2012 Posted by | business and costs, Japan | Leave a comment

Nuclear power in China has a doubtful future

Prospects for Nuclear Power in 2012, The Energy Report, 5 April 12,  “…….China has dominated new nuclear plant orders in the past few years, accounting for 25 out of the 38 reactors on which construction started worldwide between 2008 and 2010. Six of these units were for Gen III+ designs, four AP1000s and two EPRs. Almost all the others used a design imported from France in the 1980s, which in turn had been licensed from Westinghouse in the early 1970s. This design, the CPR1000, is showing its age and there was an expectation, even before Fukushima, that the AP1000 would replace it. This would have been a huge boost to the AP1000, giving it the volume of orders that might have allowed costs to come down and for teething problems to be solved. The EPR, by contrast, appears to have no prospect of further orders in China.

However, there were signs that the strain of the rapid pace of construction was beginning to show. In 2011, no new starts were made, compared with 10 in 2010. Fukushima explains this to a degree, but some might have been expected in the first three months of 2011 before disaster struck. The reason behind the slowdown is the high cost of the AP1000. The large Chinese utilities appear to be looking at other options.

There is now talk of pursuing indigenous advanced designs developed from the CPR1000 as well as Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). China has always been adept at convincing nuclear suppliers that there was a great future for their particular technology in China. It is unclear whether talk of SMRs and new advanced designs will go any further. China is looking much less committed to nuclear power than it was a year ago.

There is also speculation that China may enter the export market on the entirely unsupported assumptions that its reactors will be cheap and that it can successfully build them away from home soil. South Africa is particularly enthusiastic about Chinese designs, but whether this enthusiasm can be turned into orders remains to be seen.

The reality is that China needs nuclear power much less than the nuclear industry needs China. ….” http://www.theenergyreport.com/pub/na/12441

April 5, 2012 Posted by | business and costs, China | Leave a comment

Cost, not just safety issues, send a toxic cloud over the nuclear industry’s future

Nowadays, a typical scheme involving multiple reactors on one site, puts you back $25bn! The money was not to be produced up-front, of course, but created by complex financial packages based on debt, not equity.  The sums involved, the “paper” floating on the underlying asset – the nuclear complex – run into the trillions. 

Nuclear industry dreams dashed by current economic reality  http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/economics-blog/2012/apr/02/nuclear-dreams-economic-reality-blog?newsfeed=true  It was the financing model and rates of return that prompted German nuclear giants RWC and E.ON to pull out of UK energy plans Martin Cohen guardian.co.uk 2 April 2012 The news that nuclear giants RWE and E.ON are dropping plans to build any new UK reactors has sent a toxic cloud not only over Wales, but over the nuclear industry itself. Continue reading →

April 4, 2012 Posted by | business and costs, UK | Leave a comment

South Carolina new nuclear reactors might have license, but costs are looking too great

Summer Nuclear Unit Already Behind As It Gets Federal Green Light, AOL Energy, By Margaret Ryan  April 3, 2012 The long-expected federal decision giving SCANA a license to build two new nuclear reactors in South Carolina came along with news that project has already encountered delays and cost overruns. …. Continue reading →

April 4, 2012 Posted by | business and costs | Leave a comment

The smart money is on energy efficiency and renewables: the dumb money on nuclear

E.on and RWE are huge, blue-chip multinationals, yet see nuclear as too big a gamble and that’s despite the substantial subsidy it would enjoy in the UK,

Contrast all this with energy efficiency and renewables. The former makes sense by definition. The latter is where costs are coming down, even with the relatively limited subsidies they receive. And neither involve the Faustian pacts of nuclear power or oil and gas: they are as safe as the houses they power…..

Nuclear and gas blow outs show where the dumb money is, Guardian UK, Damian Carrington, 30 March 12,  The smart money is on energy efficiency and renewables yet a government terrified of “backing winners” appears happy to back the nuclear, oil and gas losers Follow the money: in the billion-dollar world of the energy business that is good advice. So what do the collapse of a quarter of the UK’s new nuclear power plans and the gas still billowing dangerously from Total’s Elgin rig in the North Sea tell us about keeping the lights on and tackling climate change at a price we can afford?

It tells us first that, despite decades of lavish public subsidy, nuclear power remains uninvestable without heavy state backing. Continue reading →

March 31, 2012 Posted by | business and costs, UK | Leave a comment

Energy transition in Europe as nuclear power exits

The number of economically competitive non-nuclear options has therefore grown alongside the growing number of non-fossil options.

Europe’s Nuclear Exit Strategy The Market Oracle, Mar 30, 2012   By: Andrew_McKillop“.….NUCLEAR EXIT: THE SYMBOL OF ENERGY TRANSITION Even in France, where decades of state brainwashing on the benefits of nuclear power had created an apparent public-and-political consensus in favour of the Friendly Atom, opinion polls now indicate a straight majority of French want to quit nuclear power.

This opinion shift is powerfully aided by now much better information becoming available on the fantastic subsidies and support that have gone to French civil nuclear power since its very origins in 1957.

Also due to the sheer size of the French nuclear power system and its age, decommissioning will produce impossible to hide impacts on the power bills of all
consumers and users, in a context where new-build reactors to replace retired and dismantled reactors (in a process that can take 30 years for each reactor) are prohibitively costly, at admitted costs as high as 6500 euro per kiloWatt (close to US$ 9000 per kW) for Areva’s “Generation III” EPRs. Continue reading →

March 31, 2012 Posted by | business and costs, France | Leave a comment

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