Nuclear industry encroaching further into USA education, thanks to DOE funding.
Department of Energy Invests $65 Million at National Laboratories and American Universities to Advance Nuclear Technologym Energy.gov
JUNE 18, 202 WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced more than $65 million in nuclear energy research, cross-cutting technology development, facility access, and infrastructure awards for 93 advanced nuclear technology projects in 28 states. The awards fall under DOE’s nuclear energy programs called the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP), the Nuclear Energy Enabling Technologies (NEET), and the Nuclear Science User Facilities (NSUF)…….
Nuclear Energy University Program ($55M)
DOE is awarding more than $38.6 million through NEUP to support 57 university-led nuclear energy research and development projects in 24 states. NEUP seeks to maintain U.S. leadership in nuclear research across the country by providing top science and engineering faculty and their students with opportunities to develop innovative technologies and solutions for civil nuclear capabilities.
Additionally, 21 university-led projects will receive more than $5.7 million for research reactor and infrastructure improvements, ……. https://www.energy.gov/articles/department-energy-invests-65-million-national-laboratories-and-american-universities
Time that journalists reported on the threat of global heating to the nuclear industry
Really? Not a mention of the ill effects that climate change has on nuclear power, nor the fact that it, and the uranium mining that feeds it, are highly water guzzling.
Therefore most nuclear reactors are sited near the sea, or near rivers and estuaries.
They have to cut back or even shut down in very hot weather. They are vulnerable to sea level rise, and extreme events – flooding, hurricanes, wildfires.
Far from nuclear power combatting climate change, it’ds the other way around.
As for Small Modular Nuclear Reactors working against climate change, you would need literally millions of them to be quickly operating around the world, to have any effect on global heating. Time that you journalists told the whole story, not just the nuclear lobby’s version
Trump govt, desperate to save the failing nuclear industry, rushes to build geewhiz new nukes
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U.S. Department of Energy rushes to build advanced new nuclear reactors, Science By Adrian Cho. 20, 2020 In the latest effort to revive the United States’s flagging nuclear industry, the Department of Energy (DOE) aims to select and help build two new prototype nuclear reactors within 7 years, the agency announced last week. The reactors would be the centerpiece of DOE’s new Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, which will receive $230 million this fiscal year. Each would be built as a 50-50 collaboration with an industrial partner and ultimately could receive up to $4 billion in funding from DOE….But even some proponents of nuclear power doubt the program will spur construction of new commercial reactors as long as natural gas and renewable energy remain relatively cheap. “New builds can’t compete with renewables,” says Robert Rosner, a physicist at the University of Chicago. “Certainly not now.”
……the U.S. nuclear industry has struggled for decades. Its fleet now comprises 96 reactors, down from 113 in the early 1990s. More reactors are slated to close and the nuclear industry’s share of the electricity supply is expected to start to fall. In spite of that dreary picture, engineers have continued to develop designs for advance reactors they say would be safer and more efficient. The Trump administration wants to breathe new life into the nuclear industry. In April, DOE announced plans to increase domestic uranium mining and establish a national uranium reserve. And it will put $160 million of the $230 million Congress provided for the reactor demonstration program toward selecting two designs to be built posthaste, most likely at DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory (INL). The program aims to incubate ideas that aren’t already well along in development, says Ashley Finan, a nuclear engineer and director of the National Reactor Innovation Center at INL. For example, DOE is already working with NuScale Power to develop the company’s factory-built small modular reactors, which means it isn’t eligible for the new program. The money also won’t go to the development of a reactor called the Versatile Fast Neutron Source, which DOE has already begun to prepare to build at INL and which will serve as a facility for materials science research. Some observers say the initiative is unrealistic. DOE officials may struggle to identify the most promising of the many disparate designs, predicts M. V. Ramana, a physicist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. “You’re be comparing apples, oranges, grapes, plums, everything,” he says. The 7-year time frame also strains credulity, Ramana says, especially as DOE wants the reactors to pass licensing reviews at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which typically takes several years. “It’s absurd to think they can do it.” … Ramana questions whether the U.S. nuclear industry can be saved. Although issues of dealing with waste and the public’s apprehension about radioactivity remain, the biggest issue confronting the nuclear industry is the high capital cost of new reactors, which can be $7 billion or more. In deregulated markets, utility companies cannot afford such capital expenses, which is why cheaper renewables may ultimately replace nuclear energy, he says. “This is a sunset industry,” he says, “and the sooner you recognize that the better.” ……. Ramana questions whether the U.S. nuclear industry can be saved. Although issues of dealing with waste and the public’s apprehension about radioactivity remain, the biggest issue confronting the nuclear industry is the high capital cost of new reactors, which can be $7 billion or more. In deregulated markets, utility companies cannot afford such capital expenses, which is why cheaper renewables may ultimately replace nuclear energy, he says. “This is a sunset industry,” he says, “and the sooner you recognize that the better.” https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/us-department-energy-rushes-build-advanced-new-nuclear-reactors# |
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Australian politician John Barilaro gets it so wrong about small nuclear reactors
But there is as yet no sign of anything being oven-ready to come to the marketplace, let alone 15 up and running. But there remain some rather disturbing connections between small reactor projects and nuclear weapons proliferation. And Rolls-Royce does offer up one of the most glaring examples. Part of the company’s current sales pitch to the British government includes the argument that a civil small-reactor industry in the UK “would relieve the Ministry of Defence of the burden of developing and retaining skills and capability” for its weapons programme. It may be true. But it is not really Atoms for Peace, , is it?
https://electricalreview.co.uk/features-mm/13082-mystic-meg-from-down-under
‘Small Modular Nuclear Reactor’ entrepreneurs trying to revive dangerous ‘plutonium economy’ dream.
It seems that these two SMNR entrepreneurs in New Brunswick, along with other nuclear “players” worldwide, are trying to revitalize the “plutonium economy” — a nuclear industry dream from the distant past that many believed had been laid to rest because of the failure of plutonium-fuelled breeder reactors almost everywhere, including the US, France, Britain and Japan.
The phrase “plutonium economy” refers to a world in which plutonium is the primary nuclear fuel in the future rather than natural or slightly enriched uranium. Plutonium, a derivative of uranium that does not exist in nature but is created inside every nuclear reactor fuelled with uranium, would thereby become an article of commerce.
The proposed SMNR prototype from ARC Nuclear in Saint John is the ARC-100 reactor (100 megawatts of electricity). It is a liquid sodium-cooled SMNR, based on the 1964 EBR-2 reactor – the Experimental Breeder Reactor #2 in Idaho. Its predecessor, the EBR-1 breeder reactor, had a partial meltdown in 1955, and the Fermi-1 breeder reactor near Detroit, also modelled on the EBR-2, had a partial meltdown in 1966.
Admiral Hyman Rickover, who created the US fleet of nuclear-powered submarines, tried a liquid-sodium-cooled reactor only once, in a submarine called the Sea Wolf. He vowed that he would never do it again. In 1956 he told the US Atomic Energy Commission that liquid sodium-cooled reactors are “expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair.”
The ARC-100 is designed with the capability and explicit intention of reusing or recycling irradiated CANDU fuel. In the prototype phase, the proposal is to use irradiated fuel from NB Power’s Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station. Lepreau is a CANDU-6 nuclear reactor.
The other newly proposed NB SMNR prototype is the Moltex “Stable Salt Reactor” (SSR) — also a “fast reactor”, cooled by molten salt, that is likewise intended to re-use or recycle irradiated CANDU fuel, again from the Lepreau reactor in the prototype phase.
The “re-use” (or “recycling”) of “spent nuclear fuel”, also called “used nuclear fuel” or “irradiated nuclear fuel,” is industry code for plutonium extraction. The idea is to transition from uranium to plutonium as a nuclear fuel, because uranium supplies will not outlast dwindling oil supplies. Breeder reactors are designed to use plutonium as a fuel and create (“breed”) even more plutonium while doing so.
It is only possible to re-use or recycle existing used nuclear fuel by somehow accessing the unused “fissile material” in the used fuel. This material is mainly plutonium. Accessing this material involves a chemical procedure called “reprocessing” which was banned in the late 1970s by the Carter administration in the US and the first Pierre Elliot Trudeau administration in Canada. South Korea and Taiwan were likewise forbidden (with pressure from the US) to use this chemical extraction process.
Why did both the US and Canada ban this recycling scheme? Two reasons: 1) it is highly dangerous and polluting to “open up” the used nuclear fuel in order to extract the desired plutonium or U-233; and 2) extracting plutonium creates a civilian traffic in highly dangerous materials (plutonium and U-233) that can be used by governments or criminals or terrorists to make powerful nuclear weapons without the need for terribly sophisticated or readily detectable infrastructure.
Argonne Laboratories in the US, and the South Korean government, have been developing (for more than 10 years now) a new wrinkle on the reprocessing operation which they call “pyroprocessing.” This effort is an attempt to overcome the existing prohibitions on reprocessing and to restart the “plutonium economy.”
Both New Brunswick projects are claiming that their proposed nuclear reactor prototypes would be successful economically. To succeed, they must build and export the reactors by the hundreds in future.
On the contrary, however, the use of plutonium fuel is, and always has been, much more expensive than the use of uranium fuel. This is especially true now, when the price of uranium is exceedingly low and showing very little sign of recovering. In Saskatchewan, Cameco has shut down some of its richest uranium mines and has laid off more than a thousand workers, while reducing the pay of those still working by 25 percent. Under these conditions, it is impossible for plutonium-fuelled reactors to compete with uranium-fuelled reactors.
And to make matters worse for the industry, it is well known that even uranium-fuelled reactors cannot compete with the alternatives such as wind and solar or even natural-gas-fired generators. It is an open question why governments are using public funds to subsidize such uneconomical, dangerous and unsustainable nuclear technologies. It’s not their money after all – it’s ours!
Dr. Gordon Edwards, a scientist and nuclear consultant, is the President of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility. He can be reached at: ccnr@web.ca Note from the NB Media Co-op editors: Dr. Edwards visited New Brunswick in March for a series of public talks on the development of so-called Small Modular Nuclear Reactors. The story of his talk in Saint John can be accessed here. The video of the webinar presentation scheduled for Fredericton can be accessed here.
Michael Moore’s sham attack on renewable energy has had rigorous debunking
Rolling Stone 1st May 2020, Bill McKibben: ‘A Bomb in the Center of the Climate Movement’: Michael Moore Damages Our Most Important Goal. Basically, Moore and his colleagues
have made a film attacking renewable energy as a sham and arguing that the environmental movement is just a tool of corporations trying to make money off green energy.
“One of the most dangerous things right now is the illusion that alternative technologies, like wind and solar, are somehow different from fossil fuels,” Ozzie Zehner, one of the film’s producers, tells the camera. When visiting a solar facility, he insists: “You use more fossil fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels.”
That’s not true, not in the least — the time it takes for a solar panel to pay back the energy used to build it is well under four years. Since it lasts three decades, it means 90 percent of the power it produces is pollution-free, compared with zero percent of the power from burning fossil fuels.
It turns out that pretty much everything else about the movie was wrong — there have been at least 24 debunkings, many of them painfully rigorous; as one scientist wrote in a particularly scathing takedown, “Planet of the Humans is deeply useless. Watch anything else.”
Moore’s fellow filmmaker Josh Fox, in an epic unraveling of the film’s endless lies, got in one of the best shots: “Releasing this on the eve of Earth Day’s 50th anniversary is like Bernie Sanders endorsing Donald Trump while chugging hydroxychloroquine.”
Here’s long-time solar activist (and, oh yeah, the guy who wrote “Heart of Gold“) Neil Young:
“The amount of damage this film tries to create (succeeding in the VERY short term) will ultimately bring light to the real facts, which are turning up everywhere in response to Michael Moore’s new erroneous and headline grabbing TV publicity tour of misinformation. A very damaging film to the human struggle for a better way of living, Moore’s film completely destroys whatever reputation he has earned so far.”
Inside Climate News 30th April 2020, 6 Things Michael Moore’s ‘Planet of the Humans’ Gets Wrong. The documentary’s “facts” are deceptive and misleading, not to mention way out
of date. Filmmaker Michael Moore’s new documentary purports to expose hypocrisy at the heart of the renewable energy movement. But the video, released on YouTube last week, is a mess of deceptive and outdated anecdotes, and a succession of ridiculous arguments. It will almost
certainly do far more harm than good in the struggle to reduce carbon emissions.
Observer 3rd May 2020, Planet of the Humans is an environmental documentary that has enraged
renewable energy experts and environmentalists, with some calling for its high-profile executive producer, Michael Moore, to apologise. It was released for free less than two weeks ago, and at the time of writing had had close to 5m views on YouTube. Across its 102 minutes, the film’s
producer and narrator, Jeff Gibbs, weaves a disjointed narrative that renewable energy is just as bad 
as fossil fuels, high-profile environmentalists are corrupted by capitalism and population growth is the great unspoken enemy. “It is truly demoralising how much damage this film has done at a moment when many are ready for deep change,” said the Canadian activist and journalist Naomi Klein.
nuclear-news 