Here comes Yakutia, Russia’s newest nuclear icebreaker
Rosatomflot now has eight nuclear-powered icebreakers in operation, the highest number since Soviet times.
Thomas Nilsen, Barents Observer 30 December 2024
The flag-raising ceremony happened at the Baltic Shipyard in St. Petersburg on December 28. It took four and a half years to build the Yakutia and the icebreaker is the first made with mostly Russian-made components.
Testing took place in the Gulf of Finland earlier in December and the powerful vessel is now delivered to Rosatomflot, the state-owned company in charge of sailings and infrastructure along the Northern Sea Route.
The three previous icebreakers of the same class had both Western and Ukrainian made parts. With sanctions implemented and the engine factory in Ukraine bombed, the shipyard had to look for import substitutes domestically.
“The sanctions restrictions that we faced did not prevent us from ensuring high-quality and timely construction of the order,” said Deputy General Director Andrei Buzinov with the Baltic Shipyard at the ceremony.
The Yakutia is powered by two RITM-200 reactors and will join the fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers sailing out of Rosatomflot’s base in Murmansk.
The three sister vessels of the same class, the Arktika, Sibir and Ural are already crushing the ice along the Northern Sea Route, mainly for Russia’s LNG export to reach the markets.
The fleet also includes four older nuclear-powered icebreakers, the Yamal and 50 Let Poedy, and the two Finnish built Taymyr and Vaygash. They have all got their service life prolonged.
Not since the late 1980s have more nuclear-powered icebreakers been in operation. Out at sea, the winter season 2024/2025 will be a record as several of the icebreakers in the late Soviet times stayed at port in Murmansk although they officially were on active duty. ……………..
The flag raising ceremony took place 65 years after the Soviet Union’s first nuclear-powered icebreaker, the Lenin, was launched from the yard in Severodvinsk. Lenin became the world’s first civilian nuclear-powered vessel and is today moored in Murmansk as a museum open to the public.
The two last icebreakers of the new class will also be named after past dictators. The Leningrad and Stalingrad are expected to be put in service in 2028 and 2030. Before that, the Chukotka will come in 2026.
If no unforeseen delays happen.
Last week, the Defense Ministry’s cargo ship Ursa Major sank in the Mediterranean with two 45-tons hatches to cover the reactors on the Rossiya icebreaker currently under construction at the yard in Bolshoi Kamen near Vladivostok.
The giant icebreaker is already many years behind schedule and is unlikely to be start sailing the Northern Sea Route’s East Arctic waters in 2027 as stipulated. https://www.thebarentsobserver.com/news/here-comes-yakutia-russias-newest-nuclear-icebreaker/422559
Big tech, bigger lies
by beyondnuclearinternational, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/11/10/big-tech-bigger-lies/
Microsoft, Google and Amazon are bragging they will use nuclear energy to power their energy needs, but it’s mainly hype or worse, writes M.V. Ramana.
In the last couple of months, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, in that order, made announcements about using nuclear power for their energy needs. Describing nuclear energy using questionable adjectives like “reliable,” “safe,” “clean,” and “affordable,” all of which are belied by the technology’s seventy-year history, these tech behemoths were clearly interested in hyping up their environmental credentials and nuclear power, which is being kept alive mostly using public subsidies.
Both these business conglomerations—the nuclear industry and its friends and these ultra-wealthy corporations and their friends—have their own interests in such hype. In the aftermath of catastrophic accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima, and in the face of its inability to demonstrate a safe solution to the radioactive wastes produced in all reactors, the nuclear industry has been using its political and economic clout to mount public relations campaigns to persuade the public that nuclear energy is an environmentally friendly source of power.
Tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, too, have attempted to convince the public they genuinely cared for the environment and really wanted to do their bit to mitigate climate change. In 2020, for example, Amazon pledged to reach net zero by 2040. Google went one better when its CEO declared that “Google is aiming to run our business on carbon-free energy everywhere, at all times” by 2030. Not that they are on any actual trajectory to meeting these targets.
Why are they making such announcements?
Greenwashing environmental impacts
The reasons underlying these companies investing in such PR campaigns is not hard to discern. There is growing awareness of the tremendous environmental impacts of the insatiable appetite for data from these companies, as well as the threat they pose to already inadequate efforts to mitigate climate change.
Earlier this year, the Wall Street company Morgan Stanley estimated that data centers will “produce about 2.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions through the end of the decade”. Climate scientists have warned that unless global emissions decline sharply by 2030, we are unlikely to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a widely shared target. Even without the additional carbon dioxide emitted into the air as a result of data centers and their energy demand, the gap between current emissions and what is required is yawning.
But it is not just the climate. As calculated by a group of academic researchers, the exorbitant amounts of water required in the United States “to operate data centers, both directly for liquid cooling and indirectly to produce electricity” contribute to water scarcity in many parts of the country. This is the case elsewhere, too, and communities in countries ranging from Ireland to Spain to Chile are fighting plans to site data centers.
Then, there are the indirect impacts on the climate. Greenpeace documented, for example, that “Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all have connections to some of the world’s dirtiest oil companies for the explicit purpose of getting more oil and gas out of the ground and onto the market faster and cheaper.” In other words, the business models adopted by these tech behemoths depend on fossil fuels being used for longer and in greater quantities.
In addition to the increasing awareness about the impacts of data centers, one more possible reason for cloud companies to become interested in nuclear power might be what happened to cryptocurrency companies. Earlier this decade, these companies, too, found themselves getting a lot of bad publicity due to their energy demands and resulting emissions. Even Elon Musk, not exactly known as an environmentalist, talked about the “great cost to the environment” from cryptocurrency.
The environmental impacts of cryptocurrency played some part in efforts to regulate these. In September 2022, the White House put out a fact sheet on the climate and energy implications of Crypto-assets, highlighting President Biden’s executive order that called on these companies to reduce harmful climate impacts and environmental pollution. China even went as far as to banning cryptocurrency, and its aspirations to reducing its carbon emissions was one factor in this decision.
Crypto bros, for their part, did what cloud companies are doing now: make announcements about using nuclear power. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are now following that strategy to pretend to be good citizens. However, the nuclear industry has its reasons for welcoming these announcements and playing them up.
The state of nuclear power
Strange as it might seem to folks basing their perception of the health of the nuclear industry on mainstream media, that technology is actually in decline. The share of global electricity produced by nuclear reactors has decreased from 17.5% in 1996 to 9.15% in 2023, largely due to the high costs of and delays in building and operating nuclear reactors.
A good illustration is the Vogtle nuclear power plant in the state of Georgia. When the utility company building the reactor sought permission from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2011, it projected a total cost of $14 billion, and “in-service dates of 2016 and 2017” for the two units. The plant became operational only this year, after the second unit came online in March 2024, at a total cost of at least $36.85 billion.
Given this record, it is not surprising that there are no orders for any more nuclear plants.
As it has been in the past, the nuclear industry’s answer to this predicament is to advance the argument that new nuclear reactor designs would address all these concerns. But that has, yet again, proved not to be the case. In November 2023, the flagship project of NuScale, the small modular reactor design promoted as the leading one of its kind, collapsed because of high costs.
Supporters of nuclear power are now using another time-tested tactic to promote the technology: projecting that energy demand will grow so much that no other source of power will be able to meet these needs. For example, UK energy secretary Ed Davey resorted to this gambit in 2013 when he said that the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant was essential to “keep the lights on” in the country.
Likewise, when South Carolina Electric & Gas Company made its case to the state’s Public Service Commission about the need to build two AP1000 reactors at its V.C. Summer site—this project was subsequently abandoned after over $9 billion was spent—it forecast in its “2006 Integrated Resource Plan” that the company’s energy sales would increase by 22 percent between 2006 and 2016, and by nearly 30 percent by 2019.
This is the argument that the growth in data centres, propped up in part by the hype about generative artificial intelligence, has allowed proponents of nuclear energy to put forward. It remains to be seen whether this hype about generative AI actually materializes into a long-term sustainable business: see, for example, Ed Zitron’s meticulously documented argument for why OpenAI and Microsoft are simply burning billions of dollars and why their business model might “simply not be viable”.
In the case of the V.C. Summer project, South Carolina Electric & Gas found that its energy sales actually declined by 3 percent compared to 2006 by the time 2016 rolled around. Of course, that did not matter, because shareholders had already received over $2.5 billion in dividends and company executives had received millions of dollars in compensation, according to Nuclear Intelligence Weekly, a trade publication.
One wonders which executives and shareholders are going to receive a bounty from this round of nuclear hype.
What about emissions?
Will the investments in nuclear power by companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon help reduce emissions anytime soon?
The project expected to have the shortest timeline is the restart of the Three Mile Island Unit 1 reactor, which Constellation Energy projects will be ready in 2028. But if the history of reactor commissioning is anything to go by, that deadline will come and go without any power flowing from it.
Restarting a nuclear plant that has been shutdown has never been done before. In the case of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California, which hasn’t been shut down but was slated for decommissioning in 2024-25 till Governor Gavin Newsom did a volte-face, the Chair of the Diablo Canyon Independent Safety Committee explained why doing so was very difficult: “so many different programs and projects and so on have been put in place over the last half a dozen years predicated on that closure in 2024-25 and each one of those would have to be evaluated and some of them are okay, and some of them won’t be and some are going to be a real stretch and some are going to cost money and some of them aren’t going to be able to be done maybe”.
The cost of keeping Diablo Canyon open has been estimated by the plant’s owner at $8.3 billion and by independent environmental groups at nearly $12 billion. There are no reliable cost estimates for reopening Three Mile Island, but Constellation Energy, the plant’s owner, is already seeking a taxpayer-subsidized loan that would likely save the company $122 million in borrowing costs.
One must also remember that Microsoft already announced an agreement with Helion Energy, a company backed by billionaire Peter Thiele, to get nuclear fusion power by 2028. The chances of that happening are slim at best. In 2021, Helion announced that it had raised $500 million to build its fusion generation facility that would demonstrate “net electricity production” in three years, i.e., “in 2024”. That hasn’t happened so far. But going back further, one can see a similar and unfulfilled claim from 2014: then, the company’s chief executive had told the Wall Street Journal that the company hoped that its product would generate more energy than it would use “in the next three years” (i.e., in 2017). It is quite likely that Microsoft’s decision-makers knew of how unlikely it is that Helion will be able to supply nuclear fusion power by 2028. The publicity value is the most likely reason for announcing an agreement with Helion.
What about the small modular nuclear reactor designs—X-energy and Kairos—that Amazon and Google are betting on? Don’t hold your breath.
X-energy is an example of a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor design that dates back to the 1940s. There have been four reactors based on similar concepts that were operated commercially, two in Germany and two in the United States, respectively, and test reactors in the United Kingdom, Japan, and China. Each of these reactors proved problematic, suffering a variety of failures and unplanned shutdowns. The latest reactor with a similar design was built in China. Its performance leaves much to be desired: within about a year of being connected to the grid, its power output was reduced by 25 percent of the design power capacity, and even at this lowered capacity, it operated in 2023 with a load factor of just 8.5 percent.
Kairos, on the other hand, will be challenged by its choice of molten salts as coolant. These are chemically corrosive, and decades of search have identified no materials that can survive for long periods in such an environment without losing their integrity. The one empirical example of a reactor that used molten salts dates back to the 1960s, and this experience proved very problematic, both when the reactor operated and in the half-century thereafter, because managing the radioactive wastes produced before 1970 continued to be challenging.
Simply throwing money will not overcome these problems that have to do with fundamental physics and chemistry.
Just a dangerous distraction
Although Amazon, Google, and Microsoft claim to be investing in nuclear energy to meet the needs of AI, the evidence suggests that their real motive is to greenwash themselves.
Their investments are small and completely inadequate with relation to how much is needed to build a reactor. But their investments are also very small compared to the bloated revenues of these corporations. So, from the viewpoint of top executives, investing in nuclear power must seem a cheap way to reduce bad publicity about their environmental footprints. Unfortunately, “cheap” for them does not translate to cheap for the rest of us, not to mention the burden to future generations of human beings from worsening climate change and, possibly, increased production of radioactive waste that will stay hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years.
Because nuclear power has been portrayed as clean and a solution to climate change, announcements about it serve as a flashy distraction to focus public attention on. Meanwhile, these companies continue to expand their use of water and draw on coal and especially natural gas plants for their electricity. This is the magician’s strategy: misdirecting the audience’s attention while the real trick happens elsewhere. Their talk about investing in nuclear power also distracts from the conversations we should be having about whether these data centers and generative AI are socially desirable in the first place.
There are many reasons to oppose and organize against the wealth and power exercised by these massive corporations, such as their appropriation of user data to engage in what has been described as surveillance capitalism, their contracts with the Pentagon, and their support for Israel’s genocide and apartheid. Their investment into nuclear technology, and more importantly, hyping it up, offers one more reason. It is also a chance to establish coalitions between groups involved in very different fights.
M. V. Ramana is the Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia. His latest book is Nuclear Is Not The Solution. The Folly of Atomic Power In The Age Of Climate Change, available from Verso Books.
As construction of first small modular reactor looms, prospective buyers wait for the final tally.
the first BWRX-300 could cost more than five times GE-Hitachi’s original target price.
emerging consensus that SMRs are not economic
“The nuclear people don’t operate in a vacuum, they operate in competition to other technologies,………… “The cost for solar is going down.”
Matthew McClearn, Dec. 27, 2024 , https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-as-construction-of-first-small-modular-reactor-looms-prospective/
The race to construct Canada’s first new nuclear power reactor in 40 years seems to have passed a point of no return. This summer, Ontario Power Generation completed regrading the site for its Darlington New Nuclear Project in Clarington, Ont., and started drilling for the reactor’s retaining wall, which will be buried partly underground. At a regulatory hearing, OPG’s chief executive officer Ken Hartwick, who will retire at the end of this year, promised that this reactor will be “the first of many to come.”
But that will depend on a crucial yet-to-be-revealed detail: its price tag.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the world is waiting for it. The new Darlington reactor would be the first BWRX-300, a small modular reactor (SMR) being designed by an American vendor, GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy, and the first SMR built in any Western country. Other prospective buyers include the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), SaskPower and Great British Nuclear. More BWRX-300s are in early planning stages in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Crucially, however, OPG is the first and only utility worldwide to bind itself contractually to build a BWRX-300. A report published by the U.S. Department of Energy in September said American utilities are waiting to see pricing and construction schedules for early units, and would “prefer to be fifth.” SaskPower also wants to avoid the risks associated with building a “first of a kind” reactor; it won’t decide until 2029 and it hopes SMRs will be less expensive than traditional nuclear plants.
Scheduled for release this winter, the Darlington SMR’s estimated cost will speak volumes about whether SMRs can deliver on their many promises. Yet there are early indications of serious sticker shock: Recently published estimates from the TVA suggest the first BWRX-300 could cost more than five times GE-Hitachi’s original target price. How will OPG and GE-Hitachi drive pricing far below the TVA’s estimate? And if they cannot, what then will be the prospects for SMRs?
Ditching the scaling law
SMRs were conceived as an antidote to the hefty price tags that brought reactor construction to a standstill in Western countries for decades.
Previously, the nuclear industry relied heavily on something called economies of scale or the “scaling law”: As a power plant’s size increases, capital costs also rise, but in a less than linear fashion. So vendors designed ever-larger reactors. Reactors under construction today average about one gigawatt, roughly three times the BWRX-300’s output. They can cost more than US$10-billion, leaving only the largest government-backed utilities as potential purchasers.
SMRs represent a promising but untested new approach to manufacturing reactors – one that emphasizes simplification and mass production techniques. The key term is modular: Rather than building monolithic, one-of-a-kind plants, the industry hoped instead to churn out substantially identical factory-built units; repetition would help drive down costs, as it had for competing technologies such as wind turbines and solar panels.
But modularity requires multiple orders, which in turn demands competitive pricing. Through early discussions with potential customers, GE-Hitachi executives understood the BWRX-300 had to be priced low, not only in absolute terms, but also relative to other power-generation technologies. They told audiences it would cost less than US$1-billion, or US$2,250 per kilowatt hour of power generation capacity – low enough to compete with natural gas-fired power plants.
“The total capital cost of one plant has to be less than $1-billion in order for our customer base to go up,” Christer Dahlgren, a GE-Hitachi executive, said during a talk in Helskini in March, 2019.
Shrinking a giant
GE-Hitachi’s designers began by shrinking a behemoth: the 1,500-megawatt Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR). Their objective was to reduce the volume of the building housing the reactor by 90 per cent, to greatly reduce the amount of concrete and steel required during construction.
This was accomplished primarily through eliminating safety systems. Pressure relief valves, common in traditional reactors, were removed. In place of two completely separate emergency shutdown systems, as is customary, the BWRX-300 would have two systems that would propel the same set of control rods into the reactor’s core. GE-Hitachi emphasized that the BWRX-300 featured “passive” safety systems that would keep the reactor safe during an accident, and its simplicity reduced the need for redundant engineered systems.
Sean Sexstone, head of GE-Hitachi’s advanced nuclear team, said the entire facility – which includes the reactor building, the control room and the turbine hall – will measure just 145 metres by 85 metres.
“You can walk that site in a minute-and-a-half,” he said.
GE-Hitachi also sought substitutes for concrete. The reactor building is to be constructed using factory-made steel panels that will be shipped to the site, assembled into modules and lifted by crane into position. These modules essentially serve as forms into which concrete is poured. These steel plates are as strong as concrete, OPG says, yet eliminate the need to use rebar extensively. This approach “lends itself to more modularity, more work in a factory, versus more work in the field,” Mr. Sexstone explained.
The Darlington SMR will be erected using a technique called “open-top construction.” The reactor building’s roof won’t be installed until the very last. The building will be constructed upward, floor by floor, with large components lowered in by crane rather than being moved through doors and hatches.
Many of the BWRX-300’s components would be identical to those used in previous GE power plants, such as its control rods, fuel assemblies and steam separators. Its steam turbine would be the same one used in natural-gas-fired plants. And the plant could be run by as few as 75 staff, far below the nearly 1,000 employed at large single-reactor Canadian nuclear plants.
Historically, utilities tended to build bespoke nuclear plants meeting highly individualized requirements. The result: In the United States alone there are more than 50 commercial reactor designs. Few designs were built twice, limiting opportunities to learn through repetition.
GE-Hitachi intended the BWRX-300 to be highly standardized, constructible in multiple countries with as few tweaks as possible. It assembled an international coterie of utility partners, including OPG, the TVA and a Polish company named Synthos Green Energy, which last year agreed to jointly contribute to the estimated US$400-million cost of the SMR’s standardized design.
Subo Sinnathamby, OPG’s chief projects officer, acknowledged in an interview that the first SMR will be expensive. But lessons learned from building it, including newly identified opportunities for additional modularization, will be applied to three subsequent units at Darlington, bringing down overall costs.
“For us, success is going to be sticking to how we have executed megaprojects at OPG, using the same processes and principles,” she said, citing the continuing refurbishment of Darlington’s existing reactors.
“The last thing we want to do is get into construction and then stop the work force.”
GE-Hitachi’s emphasis on lowering plant costs has been validated by many independent observers, who regard it as essential to SMRs’ future prospects.
In a report published in May, Clean Prosperity, a climate policy think tank, concluded that the BWRX-300 “is the strongest candidate” among SMRs to experience continued cost reductions as more were built – but only at the right price, which it pegged at about $3.3-billion. “Cost curves will only become possible for the BWRX-300 in Ontario and beyond,” it warned, “with a final price tag that is low enough to compel additional expansion.”
In September, the U.S. Department of Energy published a report examining the prospects for widespread deployment of reactors across the U.S., an expansion it strongly supported. But to drive down costs, SMR vendors needed to move more than half of the overall spending on a project into standardized factory-like production – a tall order.
Similarly, a report published last year by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences argued that if nuclear plants are to contribute meaningfully to future electricity systems, they must be cost-competitive with other low-emission technologies. It looked at so-called overnight capital costs – what costs would be if construction were completed overnight, with no charges for financing and no consideration of how long it will last. The academy said capital costs should be US$2,000 or less per kilowatt of generating capacity. At between US$4,000 and US$6,000 a kilowatt, reactors might still be competitive if costs unexpectedly rose for renewable technologies.
Enter the TVA.
In an integrated resource plan published in September, the TVA estimated that a first light water SMR would have an overnight capital cost of nearly US$18,000 a kilowatt.
At that pricing, the first Darlington SMR would cost more than $8-billion. That’s about 10 times the cost of a similarly sized natural-gas-fired plant: SaskPower’s recently completed Great Plains Power Station, a 377 MW natural-gas-fired plant in Moose Jaw, cost just $825-million.
Oregon-based NuScale Power Corp. has already discovered what happens when pricing falls in this range. Founded in 2007, its 77-MW NuScale Power Module was the first SMR to be licensed by regulators in a Western country. But last year its flagship project, undertaken with the Utah Association of Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), was cancelled after cost soared to about US$20,000 a kilowatt.
There are several important caveats about the TVA’s estimate.
Greg Boerschig, a TVA vice-president, described it as a “Class 5″ estimate. According to standard global practices, cost estimation is based on a five-level system. Class 5 is the least detailed and reliable and is intended for planning purposes; actual costs could be half that much, or double.
The estimate is far higher than the TVA would have liked, Mr. Boerschig said. But since OPG is further along in deploying the BWRX-300, he added, it has a better sense of the reactor’s cost.
“We’re a couple of years behind them,” Mr. Boerschig acknowledged.
Indeed, according to a presentation by Aecon Group Inc., a partner on the Darlington SMR, a Class 4 estimate had already been completed as of February this year. Ms. Sinnathamby said OPG is working on a Class 3 estimate.
“Our number is going to be very specific: What is it going to cost us to build, on this location, these four SMRs?” she said.
Another caveat is that the BWRX-300 was only one of several reactors represented in the estimate, which was based on the TVA’s experience exploring potential SMRs at its Clinch River site near Oak Ridge, Tenn., and by examining recently completed nuclear construction projects.
OPG might enjoy certain cost advantages over the TVA. The Darlington Nuclear Generating Station is a complex that was built during the 1980s and early 1990s on the shore of Lake Ontario, the proximity of which could make cooling reactors there cheaper. Clinch River is a greenfield site, whereas Darlington already has four operating reactors.
“That will automatically reduce the cost to OPG relative to TVA,” said Koroush Shirvan, a professor of energy studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has studied the BWRX-300’s economics.
Nonetheless, opponents and skeptics of SMRs in general, and the Darlington SMR in particular, have embraced TVA’s estimate.
Chris Keefer, an emergency medicine physician, has advocated passionately for refurbishment of Ontario’s existing nuclear power plants, which are all based on Canada’s homegrown reactor design, the Candu. He has also argued for modernizing the Candu design and building more. He said the TVA’s estimates reflect a more honest assessment of SMR pricing than Canadians received in the past.
“It points to this emerging consensus that SMRs are not economic, and that shouldn’t be a surprise,” he said.
“TVA, I think they’ve got several hundreds of millions of dollars in the development process on this reactor. I wouldn’t say that those numbers are naive.”
Prof. Shirvan said his own cost estimate for the BWRX-300 reactor is “in line” with the TVA’s.
Chris Gadomski, head of nuclear research at BloombergNEF, said TVA’s estimates are discouragingly high, and imply that reactor sales might be less than anticipated. Contributing factors might include high labour costs in North America, and recent high inflation and high financing costs, factors he expects will persist.
“The nuclear people don’t operate in a vacuum, they operate in competition to other technologies,” he said.
“The cost for solar is going down. The cost of batteries, we anticipate, is going down. And so, when you’re looking at spending billions of dollars and all of a sudden the price tag gets so large, people will say: ‘Hey, listen, you’ve got to look at other options, or buy less of this.’ ”
If there is a silver lining, the TVA estimated follow-on SMRs would cost substantially less than the first, at roughly US$12,500 a kilowatt. But that’s still more than double the upper limit the U.S. National Academy of Sciences deemed necessary to support widespread SMR adoption.
We might learn in a few months whether GE-Hitachi and OPG have succeeded in bringing the BWRX-300’s cost down. But a review of regulatory applications and other documents hint at why the original US$1-billion target price might be difficult to realize.
Prof. Shirvan said GE-Hitachi’s original plan – to slim the reactor down by removing safety systems – encountered resistance from regulators in Canada and the U.S. “When you strip out most of the safety system, you have to come up with very good reasoning how that’s justified,” he said. GE-Hitachi started adding some of those systems back in, he said, which caused the BWRX-300’s reactor building’s diameter to swell.
This dramatic increase, Mr. Keefer said, has greatly reduced the BWRX-300’s economic attractiveness.
“Proportionately, you’re actually doing a lot more civil works than you would for a large reactor,” he said. “And that actually means that the whole SMR paradigm, which is to get all the work into a factory, goes away.”
(GE-Hitachi denied that the plant had grown. “While the design has matured, the overall footprint of the BWRX-300 plant has not changed significantly,” Mr. Sexstone said.)
OPG’s regulatory documents also make clear that some modular construction techniques it seeks to employ at Darlington are in their infancy. As recently as last year, most of the walls and floors of the SMR building were to have been built using a technique developed in Britain known as Steel Bricks. GE-Hitachi recently dropped Steel Bricks in favour of a similar approach known as Diaphragm Plate Steel Composite.
Moreover, OPG’s published construction plans show that the reactor building will be built largely below-grade, requiring significant excavation including into bedrock. Tunnel boring machines will be used to excavate more tunnels, tens of metres wide, to convey cooling water to and from Lake Ontario. Make no mistake, the Darlington SMR remains a complex capital project.
To date there have been no indications that pricing might derail the Darlington SMR. Ontario’s government appears willing to pay a significant premium: It hopes that as a first mover, OPG will be well-poised to sell equipment and expertise in other countries.
During a stump speech in Scarborough in December, Energy Minister Stephen Lecce said Ontario was keen to sell its technology and expertise for building SMRs abroad.
“I was just in Poland and Estonia, literally selling Canadian small modular reactors that will be built here, exported there,” he said.
Yet Mr. Lecce has also vowed to keep Ontarians’ electricity bills low, an objective high SMR price tags might compromise.
GE-Hitachi maintains its creation’s pricing will stack up favourably.
“I think we’re in a really good spot to feel very comfortable about this unit being probably the most cost competitive SMR in the market,” Mr. Sexstone said. “I think your readers will be pleasantly surprised.”
Ms. Sinnathamby, for OPG’s part, said actual costs to construct BWRX-300s should be considerably lower than TVA’s estimate.
“The TVA numbers can only come down,” she said. “That’s how conservative, in our mind, those numbers are.”
AI goes nuclear
Big tech is turning to old reactors (and planning new ones) to power the energy-hungry data centers that artificial intelligence systems need. The downsides of nuclear power—including the potential for nuclear weapons proliferation—have been minimized or simply ignored.
Bulletin, By Dawn Stover, December 19, 2024
When Microsoft bought a 407-acre pumpkin farm in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, it wasn’t to grow Halloween jack-o’-lanterns. Microsoft is growing data centers—networked computer servers that store, retrieve, and process information. And those data centers have a growing appetite for electricity.
Microsoft paid a whopping $76 million for the pumpkin farm, which was assessed at a value of about $600,000. The company, which has since bought other nearby properties to expand its footprint to two square miles, says it will spend $3.3 billion to build its 2-million-square-foot Wisconsin data center and equip it with the specialized computer processors used for artificial intelligence (AI).
Microsoft and OpenAI, maker of the ChatGPT bot, have talked about building a linked network of five data centers—the Wisconsin facility plus four others in California, Texas, Virginia, and Brazil. Together they would constitute a massive supercomputer, dubbed Stargate, that could ultimately cost more than $100 billion and require five gigawatts of electricity, or the equivalent of the output of five average-size nuclear power plants.
Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and other major tech companies are investing heavily in data centers, particularly “hyperscale” data centers that are not only massive in size but also in their processing capabilities for data-intensive tasks such as generating AI responses. A single hyperscale data center can consume as much electricity as tens or hundreds of thousands of homes, and there are already hundreds of these centers in the United States, plus thousands of smaller data centers.
In just the past year, US electric utilities have nearly doubled their estimates of how much electricity they’ll need in another five years. Electric vehicles, cryptocurrency, and a resurgence of American manufacturing are sucking up a lot of electrons, but AI is growing faster and is driving the rapid expansion of data centers. A recent report by the global investment bank Goldman Sachs forecasts that data centers will consume about 8 percent of all US electricity in 2030, up from about 3 percent today
Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and other so-called “tech bros” who also happen to be among the world’s richest men have thought about how the energy industry can—or must, in their view—keep pace with AI’s rapid growth while also enabling Big Tech to meet its climate commitments. They have all come to the same conclusion: Nuclear energy, whatever it costs, is the only viable solution.
In a rash of recent announcements, Big Tech companies have declared that they will either be reviving existing nuclear power plants, developing next-generation nuclear reactors, or both. Dollars are also flowing to nuclear fusion projects—even though many physicists think commercial fusion power plants that generate electricity are at least decades in the future, if they ever can be built. The federal government is not only supporting this nuclear-powered vision but also subsidizing it in the name of “clean energy.” However, both the government and the tech industry are largely ignoring the known and significant downsides of nuclear power—including high costs, long construction times, accidents, nuclear weapons proliferation risks, and environmental contamination from uranium mining and radioactive waste disposal.
Betting on nuclear. Again.
In Pennsylvania, Microsoft has plans to revive Three Mile Island. For people old enough to remember that name, it’s synonymous with the demise of nuclear power in the United States. Forty-five years ago, a partial reactor meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant 10 miles south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, gripped the nation and exposed nearly two million people to radiation. It was the worst accident in the history of the US commercial nuclear power industry.
The failed reactor never operated again, but a similar reactor built on the same island in the Susquehanna River was restarted six years after the accident and later received a license extension until 2034. That reactor was shut down in 2019 after its owner, Constellation Energy, was unable to secure subsidies from the state of Pennsylvania and deemed the reactor a financial albatross. Now, however, Constellation plans to reopen the reactor and sell 100 percent of the electricity that will be generated by it—enough to power 800,000 homes—to Microsoft………………………………………………………………………………………………..
The sudden interest in nuclear energy is largely due to AI, which is rapidly transforming the tech industry. Electric utilities are forecasting the nation will need the equivalent of 34 new, full-size nuclear power plants over the next five years to meet power requirements that are rising sharply after several decades of falling or flat demand.
Microsoft, Amazon, and other tech giants are not interested only in reviving existing nuclear plants. They are also funding the development of next-generation nuclear reactors. ……………………………………………………………….
Counting “compute”
Globally, electricity demand is also soaring and is now expected to be 6 percent higher in 2035 than the International Energy Agency forecast just a year ago. Electricity consumption by data centers, of which there are already 11,000 worldwide, could reach more than 1 million gigawatt-hours in 2027—about as much total electricity as Japan now uses annually, according to a recent analysis by the agency……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
An analysis done by OpenAI in 2018 found that the amount of “compute” required to train the largest AI models was doubling every three to four months. An analysis of more recent models reports that the training requirements multiplied by four to five times annually during the past four years………………………………………………………………..
Based solely on current trends, power consumption at US data centers is projected to grow by about 10 percent annually between now and 2030. By one estimate, the exponential growth of AI could consume nearly all the world’s energy production by 2050……………………………………………
In the meantime, data centers are being built faster than energy capacity is expanding. The rapid growth of this sector has not been adequately figured into climate models and is rarely mentioned as a safety concern about AI. In the March 2023 “pause” letter that called on AI labs to stop training the most powerful AI systems for at least six months, tech experts expressed concern about losing jobs—or even control of civilization—but not about climate impacts.
The AI boom is heavily dependent on power-hungry graphics processing units,…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
A dirty secret
Whether it’s chip manufacturing or bot training and chatting, where will the energy for AI activity come from? Big tech companies have been prominent in efforts to move toward a carbon-free economy. But with the rise of AI, tech-related emissions are going up.
…………………………………………………… the AI boom has pushed climate goals aside. Microsoft’s emissions, for example, are up by 30 percent since 2020. Google’s emissions have risen by almost 50 percent over the past five years. “As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute, and the emissions associated with the expected increases in our technical infrastructure investment,” Google acknowledged in its 2024 environmental report.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………… there is no solid evidence that AI can deliver a quick fix for the climate crisis. In fact, AI is also helping the oil and gas industry increase production of fossil fuels. In Guyana, for example, ExxonMobil is using AI “to determine the ideal parameters for drilling” in deep water. For now, at least, AI’s massive environmental footprint is more of a climate problem than a solution.
Is this the “nuclear renaissance”?
As AI’s energy demands grow more intense, and it becomes increasingly clear that the expansion of wind and solar power cannot keep pace, tech leaders have set their sights on nuclear energy.
So nuclear hype has flowed like champagne at a wedding reception.
Proponents of nuclear power have been predicting a “nuclear renaissance” for nearly a quarter-century. But nuclear has never been cost-competitive with other energy sources, and that is unlikely to change anytime soon. The US Energy Information Administration’s Annual Energy Outlook 2023 projected that renewable power would continue to outcompete nuclear, even in scenarios that predict aggressive cost declines for nuclear.
The Biden administration embraced subsidies to keep existing nuclear power plants online and reopen closed ones—for example, a $1.52 billion loan guarantee from the Energy Department is what made it possible for the owner of the shuttered Palisades nuclear plant to announce plans for a reopening. “In 2022, utilities were shutting down nuclear reactors; in 2024, they are extending reactor operations to 80 years, planning to uprate capacity, and restarting formerly closed reactors,” the Energy Department approvingly noted in a report released at the end of Climate Week NYC in late September.
The White House also recently offered $900 million in new funding for small reactors. In its initiative for AI, the Energy Department waves vaguely at plans to “unlock new clean energy sources, optimize energy production, and improve grid resilience.”
“We’re looking at a chance to build new nuclear at a scale not seen since the ‘70s and ‘80s,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said at the opening plenary of the American Nuclear Society annual conference in June.
The Energy Department sees potential for a “commercial liftoff” that could triple US nuclear capacity by 2050 and puts a positive spin on AI’s role in boosting nuclear: “AI and data center load growth is aligning the fundamentals for new nuclear with requirements for 24/7 power, valuing decarbonization, and investment in new generation assets.”
Despite this federal support, the nuclear renaissance so far lacks an order book for new nuclear plants that are actually being constructed. What it does have, as noted in the White House’s “liftoff” report, is “a set of customers who are willing and able to support investment in new nuclear generation assets.” Namely, big tech companies that can afford to pay big electricity bills…………………..
Although tech titans currently have ample funds to invest in energy, the cost curve for AI is going up. The expense of powering chatbots is already climbing so fast that companies are holding back their newest versions from the public.
Existing nuclear power can’t satisfy the demand for energy that is not only more abundant but also cheaper. “We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this [AI] technology,” lamented OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough.” Altman, who has warned that AI’s “compute costs are eye-watering,” called for increased investment in nuclear fusion as well as fission.
The fission (and fusion) frenzy
In addition to OpenAI, Altman also chairs Oklo, a nuclear power startup that went public last year when it merged with a special purpose acquisitions company that Altman also chairs. Oklo plans to build its first liquid metal-cooled sodium fast reactor at Idaho National Laboratory in 2027. However, the company’s initial application for a license was denied—for lack of information—by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in January 2022 and has not yet been re-submitted.
In August 2023, the Pentagon announced an “intent to award” a contract to Oklo for a small modular reactor at an Air Force base in Alaska. However, the deal was quietly revoked a month later.
Despite setbacks like these, Altman sees the future of nuclear energy and AI as inextricably linked. “I don’t see a way for us to get there without nuclear,” he told CNBC last year.
Retired Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is not as worried about AI’s energy demands as Altman is, but he too is bullish on nuclear energy. Among his multiple investments in nuclear startups is a company called TerraPower, which has received funding from the Energy Department and Los Alamos National Laboratory to develop a sodium-cooled fast reactor similar to Oklo’s.
Gates has invested more than $1 billion in a TerraPower plant that broke ground in Kemmerer, Wyoming, in June. TerraPower says the reactor will be operational by 2030. But construction of the plant’s Natrium reactor has not yet begun, nor has it been approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which is still conducting safety and environmental reviews.
Gates issued a celebratory announcement calling the science behind the reactor “super cool.” Not mentioned in the announcement is the estimated price for the 345-megawatt reactor: $4 billion, of which the federal government is contributing half. Even if the project comes in on budget (which would make it exceptional among US nuclear reactors of the past several decades), it will be more expensive than comparable gas or renewable projects.
Microsoft and Google are also placing bets on nuclear. Earlier this year, Microsoft hired a director of nuclear technologies and a director of nuclear development acceleration to lead the company’s strategy for powering AI advances with small, onsite nuclear reactors—as well as buying energy from larger conventional reactors such as Three Mile Island. Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion in OpenAI and owns almost half of its equity, plans to use AI to expedite the process of getting nuclear plants approved and has been training an AI model on regulatory and licensing documents.
Google last month signed an agreement to buy a total of 500 megawatts of generating capacity—about half the output of a conventional nuclear reactor—from six to seven Hermes small modular reactors designed by Kairos Power. Google aims to deploy the reactors next to Google data centers by 2030. This past summer, Kairos broke ground on an NRC-permitted demonstration reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It was the first non-water-cooled US reactor approved for construction in more than 50 years.
Michael Terrell, senior director for energy and climate at Google, said the agreement with Kairos could help the company support AI technologies and “reliably meet electricity demands with carbon-free energy every hour of every day.”
Wealthy tech companies and individuals are investing in nuclear fusion as well as fission. Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was the first outside investor in Facebook, joined Altman in backing a fusion startup called Helion, which claims it will begin producing electricity from its first commercial reactor by 2028 and will sell it to Microsoft.
Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a venture capital firm founded by Bill Gates, has invested in Helion and three other fusion startups. One of those ventures, an MIT spinoff company called Commonwealth Fusion Systems, is also backed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and has received $1.8 billion in second-round venture capital. Commonwealth announced earlier this week that it has leased land to build a commercial-scale fusion power plant in Virginia, but the company has not yet secured any permits or customers.
Critics such as Daniel Jassby, the former principal research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, have called the excitement surrounding these fusion projects “over-the-top and unjustified.”………………………………………………………………………………………
The downsides of nuclear
Despite massive infusions of money from corporations, billionaires, and governments, nuclear is not a sure bet. Around the world, large reactors have repeatedly come in over budget and behind schedule, and although they require lower initial capital investment, smaller reactors are likely to be even less economic than the larger ones that now exist, in terms of the cost of the electricity they produce.
“Very few of the proposed SMRs have been demonstrated, and none are commercially available, let alone licensed by a nuclear regulator,” wrote Allison Macfarlane, who chaired the NRC a decade ago and now directs the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia, in an essay published last year by IAI News.The only SMR reactor design certified by the NRC is the NuScale Power reactor, which received more than $200 million in federal support and was slated to be built at the Idaho National Laboratory. But the projected cost of building the reactor ballooned between 2020 and 2023; its only committed utility customer dropped out, and the project was canceled a year ago.
The only new nuclear reactors that have been built in the United States in the past 30 years are Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia. These Westinghouse AP1000 pressurized water reactors were the nation’s first “advanced” reactors, but they ended up costing $35 billion (more than twice as much as originally projected) and were completed seven years behind schedule.
There are more than 50 designs for new reactors, and the tech giants investing in nuclear do not seem to be working toward a standardized design—something that many nuclear experts recommend as the best way to get plants approved and built quickly and affordably.
Cost and time are not the only obstacles that must be overcome if nuclear is to meet the AI-energy problem. The work force needed to build a host of nuclear projects has dwindled as plants have closed and not been replaced. Also, none of the proposed new projects has included any new ideas for what to do about the radioactive waste generated not only by reactors by also by uranium mining. There is still no permanent repository for long-lived radioactive waste in the United States.
Radioactive waste isn’t just a disposal problem, either. “Bill Gates should be worried about reprocessing and proliferation,” said Alex Glaser, a nuclear security expert at Princeton University and a member of the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board.
Concepts like the Oklo fast reactor would produce fissile material that bad actors could use to make nuclear weapons. Oklo and other nuclear startups propose to reprocess their waste to keep costs down. But that reprocessing produces plutonium that could be diverted for use in nuclear weapons. The United States rejected reprocessing in the 1970s after determining that the potential for proliferation made it too risky for commercial use.
n all the hype about AI and nuclear, there is scant mention of nuclear weapons proliferation to more countries or the risk that fissile material could be acquired by (or provided to) terrorists. Nor is there much attention to the vast amounts of raw materials and water required for the growth of both AI and nuclear energy, or the electronic waste generated by chip manufacturing and data centers.
A conversation of a few dozen questions with an AI chatbot may require a half-liter of water. A large data center consumes more than a million gallons of water daily, and some data centers are being built in places where water is already scarce.
Developers are loathe to reveal how much water they use, but after a legal battle with an Oregon newspaper, Google finally agreed to reveal that its data centers in The Dalles consume 29 percent of the town’s water supplies. Google plans to build two more data centers there.
No roadmap for “responsible” AI
AI has been compared to electricity—a utility that people soon won’t be able to live without. But there is currently no framework for regulating this new utility, and AI’s energy demands have been given short shrift in the many discussions of AI’s safety risks……………………………………………………………………………………….
Both incoming vice president JD Vance and Elon Musk, who have the president-elect’s ear at the moment, are strongly pro-nuclear. “Broligarchs” Musk and Peter Thiel played significant roles in the recent presidential campaign. Thiel reportedly had a hand in pushing for JD Vance, who had previously worked for him, as Trump’s vice presidential pick…………………….
The tech bros now have a clear path to the unfettered growth of AI and are already pressing Trump to review federal AI policy and weed out laws and regulations that “may be unnecessarily impeding AI adoption.”
Silicon Valley’s AI gold rush aligns almost perfectly with aspirations at Mar-a-Lago, where AI is seen as a must-win race with China. But a second race is also afoot, one in which skyrocketing US electricity demand may outpace supplies, perhaps leading to power outages and utility rate increases of up to 70 percent by 2029.
History suggests nuclear will be a slow starter in that race. https://thebulletin.org/2024/12/ai-goes-nuclear/#:~:text=Big%20tech%20is%20turning%20to,that%20artificial%20intelligence%20systems%20need.
US Space Force conducts ‘simulated on-orbit combat’ training
SPACE, By Brett Tingley, August 25, 2022
The exercise brought together Space Force members with counterparts in the U.S. Army and Air Force.
The U.S. Space Force just completed a major joint training exercise that saw participants engage in simulated orbital combat.
The exercise, known as Space Flag 22-3, took place from Aug. 8 to Aug.19 at Schriever Space Force Base in Colorado. Close to 120 Space Force personnel from multiple U.S. Space Force Deltas took part in the training alongside counterparts from the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Army, according to a Space Force statement. The training was conducted by Space Force’s training and education component, Space Training and Readiness Command (STAR Command or STARCOM).
Space Flag 22-3 presented realistic training opportunities that “challenged players to consider complex astrodynamics while maneuvering and operating during simulated on-orbit combat engagements” in a “contested, degraded and operationally-limited environment,” the statement continues. ………………… https://www.space.com/space-force-space-flag-simulated-orbit-combat
SpaceX Wants to Increase Launches at Boca Chica Without a Full Environmental Review
The Hypocrisy of Musk’s Anti-Regulation Stance
Despite Musk’s repeated calls for a smaller government and less regulation, SpaceX’s operations are heavily subsidized by the public,
If you are funded by the public, you should be regulated by the public. Musk’s calls, as the head of the DOGE to dismantle regulation are dangerously misguided.
Lynda Williams, December 12, 2024, https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/12/12/spacex-wants-to-increase-launches-at-boca-chica-without-a-full-environmental-review/
On April 20, 2023, SpaceX’s Starship—the largest and most powerful rocket ever built—exploded just four minutes after liftoff from its Boca Chica spaceport in Texas. While CEO Elon Musk touted the mission as a success for clearing the launch pad, the environmental and community fallout painted a different picture. Scorched wetlands, debris scattered for miles, and fire damage underscored the risks of high-stakes experiments in a region rich with biodiversity and human history. Now, SpaceX seeks approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to increase its Starship launch frequency or “cadence” to 25 times per year—potentially 75 events annually when accounting for booster and spacecraft recovery attempts—all without completing the rigorous Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) required by law for projects of this magnitude. Instead the FAA only requires a weaker form of environmental review, an Environmental Assessments (EA).
Although Musk has accused the FAA of regulatory overreach and declared on Twitter that “humanity will never get to Mars” under such constraints, the reality is that the FAA has granted him every Starship license for he has sought at Boca Chica, never once requiring a full EIS. Now, as the Trump-appointed head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk has the power to push anti-regulation initiatives like Project 2025, which seek to dismantle critical environmental protections. Without swift action to demand accountability, Boca Chica could become not just a testing ground, but a sacrifice zone for Musk’s megalomaniacal pursuit of a world where neither people nor the planet stand in his way. Unless his plans are stopped or slowed, communities, ecosystems, and taxpayers will bear the cost of his unchecked ambitions. Submitting testimony during the FAA’s public comment period is an important way to hold Musk and SpaceX accountable and demand a thorough environmental review with an EIS.
Boca Chica: A Community Under Siege
Boca Chica is far more than a launch site; it is a vital ecosystem and home to diverse communities. The region includes the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, wetlands and endangered species such as the Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle and piping plover. It is also sacred land for the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe, whose members have opposed SpaceX’s industrial encroachment on their ancestral lands. The Tigua Tribe, also known as the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, has argued that the development of the SpaceX launch site at Boca Chica Beach has disrupted their traditional ceremonial practices, which include the use of the beach for sacred rites, thereby violating their First Amendment-protected religious practices. Advocacy groups like Save RGV and the Center for Biological Diversity have stepped forward to challenge SpaceX’s operations, highlighting the disproportionate burden borne by the local environment and residents. Both organizations have filed lawsuits demanding the FAA require a full EIS for SpaceX’s activities at Boca Chica. Save RGV has highlighted violations such as discharging untreated industrial wastewater into surrounding wetlands, while the Center for Biological Diversity’s lawsuit argues that the FAA has violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by allowing SpaceX to operate under insufficient EAs. Ironically, SpaceX is required to do a full EIS for Starship operations at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) under the U.S. Space Force due to stricter regulations. Yet Boca Chica, with its more fragile ecosystem, is left without the same level of scrutiny. The people of Boca Chica deserve the same protections and oversight as those at KSC.
For local residents, the impact of SpaceX’s operations is impossible to ignore. Frequent road closures disrupt daily life and block access to public beaches. Loud rocket tests and sonic booms disturb both human and wildlife populations, and the April 2023 explosion left debris scattered across miles of sensitive habitat. Meanwhile, Indigenous and local voices remain sidelined in regulatory decisions. The FAA has failed to adequately consult with communities, treating them as collateral damage in Musk’s ambitious pursuit of Mars.
According to a recent NPR story, the situation has worsened due to SpaceX’s wastewater discharges. The company has been found to have violated the Clean Water Act, with both the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) levying fines totaling over $150,000. Environmentalists, including local group Save RGV, have pointed out that this disregard for environmental regulations highlights the urgent need for a more comprehensive review of SpaceX’s impact on the region. Local activist Joyce Hamilton stated, “This is potentially really damaging,” emphasizing the significant environmental consequences of SpaceX’s unchecked operations.
Environmental Risks Ignored by the FAA
Although the FAA did complete an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the SpaceX Starbase in 2014, it was only for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets—much smaller and less complex systems. Since then, SpaceX’s operations have expanded dramatically to include the much larger and more powerful Starship/Super Heavy launch system. The FAA has relied on a Programmatic Environmental Assessment (PEA) and tiered reviews, rather than conducting a full EIS specific to Starship operations. While the FAA completed a full EIS for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches at Cape Canaveral in Florida, it has failed to apply the same standard to Starship’s vastly more powerful and experimental operations in Texas. The two systems are not comparable: Starship’s unique size, power, and planned recovery operations—along with its location in sensitive wetlands near endangered species—demand a new, comprehensive review. The FAA’s reliance on outdated assessments is grossly inadequate and leaves the area unprotected from significant, unexamined risks.
The environmental risks of SpaceX’s operations extend far beyond Boca Chica. The FAA has also permitted SpaceX to blow up Starship in the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, and north of Hawaii. Even in cases where the spacecraft are intended for “soft” landings in the ocean, the explosive charge used to destroy the spacecraft results in significant pollution, including harmful chemicals like rocket fuel residues, other contaminants, and debris that can endanger marine ecosystems. In the Pacific near Hawaii, it is dangerously close to the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is considered sacred to Native Hawaiians. Despite its cultural and ecological significance, no cultural consultation has been conducted for permission to land or conduct operations near this sacred site. The monument is one of the largest marine protected areas in the world, home to over 7,000 species, many of which are endangered. The contamination of these waters from SpaceX’s operations further threatens the delicate biodiversity of this pristine marine environment. These crash landing sites are also in the direct path of humpback whale migration, potentially endangering their migratory patterns and jeopardizing their fragile populations.
In April 2023, SpaceX’s experimental launch license included a plan for Starship to crash into the Pacific Ocean just 62 miles north of Kauai. The EA claimed that fewer than one marine mammal would be harmed during the explosion, despite the spacecraft’s 100-metric-ton mass and the force of 14 tons of rocket fuel detonating on impact. The FAA’s “Finding of No Significant Impact” or FONSI ignored the area’s cultural significance and failed to consult with Hawaiian residents or agencies such as the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA), which co-manages the marine sanctuary. Local experts raised concerns that even minor deviations from SpaceX’s “nominal” trajectory could cause debris fields to drift into the protected waters of Papahānaumokuākea.
Why the Current Reviews for Starship Are Totally Outdated and Inaccessible
Right now, SpaceX’s licenses for launching Starship at Boca Chica are based on a 2022 PEA. But here’s the catch: that review relies on the even older EIS from 2014 which wasn’t written for Starship at all—it was written for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, which are much smaller and much less complicated. In fact, Starship isn’t even mentioned in the 2014 EIS.
The problem is simple: Starship is nearly twice the size of Falcon 9, ten times heavier, and far more powerful, with untested systems like mid-air recovery and deluge cooling that bring entirely new risks. While the 2014 EIS assumed far fewer launches, SpaceX now proposes up to 25 per year, with vastly greater environmental damage and disruption. The FAA’s reliance on this outdated framework ignores these realities and creates a confusing web of layered reviews that fail to provide a clear picture for the public or sufficient protection for local communities and ecosystems. It’s time to stop building on broken foundations and require a full, updated EIS that reflects the true scope of Starship’s operations.
Furthermore, the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) which oversees NEPA have regulatins that include requirements for public participation and clear communication. The current FAA Revised Draft EA spans 75 pages and refers to over a dozen additional technical documents critical to understanding the full scope of SpaceX’s proposed operations. These referenced materials total about 1,200 pages, requiring over 80 hours to read and analyze. Written in dense, jargon-heavy language, the EA and its supporting documents are nearly incomprehensible to the layperson, effectively excluding the public from meaningful participation. NEPA mandates that environmental reviews be accessible and transparent, yet the FAA has failed to provide simplified summaries or plain-language guides. Finding the place to submit comments and testimony is ridiculously complicated. This inaccessibility undermines public input and compliance with NEPA’s core purpose, leaving communities without the tools to adequately challenge or engage with the review process. The FAA must extend the public comment period and provide simpler, more accessible documents so communities can meaningfully engage.
The Hypocrisy of Musk’s Anti-Regulation Stance
Despite Musk’s repeated calls for a smaller government and less regulation, SpaceX’s operations are heavily subsidized by the public, having received over $5 billion in federal funding for projects ranging from national security launches to satellite deployments. On top of this, SpaceX benefits from indemnities under the Commercial Space Launch Act, which caps its liability for catastrophic accidents at $500 million, effectively shifting much of the financial risk to taxpayers. As SpaceX pushes for an accelerated launch cadence, the potential for accidents—and the resulting financial burden on the public—grows. This stark contradiction highlights how Musk’s anti-regulation rhetoric is at odds with the significant taxpayer dollars and protections that sustain his company.
In addition to federal subsidies, SpaceX also benefits from generous incentives provided by the state of Texas and the city of Brownsville. Texas has offered tax breaks, land leases, and infrastructure support to encourage SpaceX’s development of the Boca Chica launch site. Brownsville, a city with one of the lowest median incomes in the U.S., has also provided SpaceX with significant tax exemptions and financial incentives to attract the company to the region. These subsidies not only reduce SpaceX’s operating costs but also shift the financial burden onto Texas taxpayers and the local community. While Musk criticizes government regulation, his company is essentially a recipient of state and local welfare, further illustrating the gap between his public persona and the reality of SpaceX’s reliance on public funds.
If you are funded by the public, you should be regulated by the public. Musk’s calls, as the head of the DOGE to dismantle regulation are dangerously misguided. Those who benefit from public money and protections must be held accountable to the same level of oversight that ensures the safety, health, and well-being of the public they rely on. The people who are regulated should not be in control of deregulation. Its a conflict of interenst.
Musk’s Mars Myth and Planetary Risks
Musk’s plan to make humanity a “multiplanetary species” reflects a childish understanding of the challenges we face on Earth. His rush to colonize Mars, driven by a naive belief that it offers a backup for human survival, overlooks the fact that Mars is a hostile, uninhabitable world that couldn’t sustain a colony without Earth’s support and resources. Using his X platform, Musk is pushing the Mars survival myth to convince the public to fund his childish dream of conquering the “final frontier” of space on the taxpayer dime, all while demanding the dismantling of public agencies that protect people and the planet. Instead of risking Earth’s biosphere for an uncertain future on Mars, we should focus on safeguarding our home planet.
In addition to SpaceX, dozens of private companies and countries are ramping up rocket launches to deploy satellites, explore the moon, and mine asteroids. With thousands of launches expected annually in the coming years, the environmental impact—particularly on the ionosphere—could be catastrophic. The ionosphere plays a critical role in protecting Earth from harmful radiation from the sun and space, and the long-term consequences of rocket chemicals on this protective layer are still not fully understood. These risks have yet to be adequately addressed in the environmental review process, either domestically or globally.
We must act before the unregulated rush to space spirals out of control, leading to catastrophic unintended consequences damaging the ionosphere and the ecosystems that sustain life on Earth. Musk’s goal of making humanity “multiplanetary” could become a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the push for Mars colonization leads to the destruction of Earth’s biosphere. The future of our planet is at stake, and yet this critical issue is being ignored. There is no Planet B, and it certainly isn’t Mars.
Public Input: A Critical Opportunity
Public comments are due by January 17, 2025. You don’t have to be an expert to submit comments and it doesn’t take much time. You can read the EA here and submit comments electronically, by mail or in person or on zoom here. Here is a sample testimony you are free to use or modify:
“I am submitting this testimony to urge the FAA to require a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for SpaceX’s Starship operations at Boca Chica. The current Revised Environmental Assessment (EA) is based on a Programmatic Environmental Assessment (PEA) from 2022, which in turn relies on a 2014 EIS written for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy—rockets that are far smaller and less complex than Starship. This outdated and insufficient review fails to account for the unique risks posed by Starship, including its size, power, experimental systems, and increased launch frequency. A full EIS is critical to assess the environmental, safety, and community impacts of this project and ensure transparency and accountability. Additionally, the FAA must extend the public comment period and provide simpler, more accessible documents so communities can meaningfully engage. Other impacted communities, such as Hawaii, where proposed crash sites are located, must also be included in the review process.”
Submitting comments to the FAA is important, but it’s not enough. We must take it a step further and push the Senate, which oversees the FAA, to hold them accountable. The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, specifically its Subcommittee on Space and Science, oversees the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, which regulates commercial spaceflight. Progressives on this subcommittee, such as Senators Edward Markey (D-MA) and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), have stood for transparency and environmental protections. Senator Gary Peters (D-MI), a member of the full committee, has also championed science-backed policy. It’s critical to contact these lawmakers and demand they pressure the FAA to require a full EIS and ensure NEPA reviews are accessible to the public. We must not allow the billionaire space cowboys to turn Earth into a sacrifice zone for their ego trips to Mars.
Lynda Williams is a physicist and environmental activist living in Hawaii. She can be found at scientainment.com and on Bluesky @lyndalovon.bsky.social
Remember the dark skies?
100 researchers call out FCC on Musk Starlink launches
By Sarah Fortinsky (The Hill), December 11, 2024
https://space4peace.blogspot.com/2024/12/remember-dark-skies.html
Researchers are urging the federal government to pause further low-orbit internet satellite launches until a comprehensive review is conducted to determine the potential environmental damage that could result.
In a letter to Julie Kearney, chief of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Space Bureau, more than 100 researchers expressed concern about the rapid development of low-orbit satellites and urged international cooperation to determine the best path forward.
“The environmental harms of launching and burning up so many satellites aren’t clear. That’s because the federal government hasn’t conducted an environmental review to understand the impacts. What we do know is that more satellites and more launches lead to more damaging gasses and metals in our atmosphere,” the researchers wrote in the letter.
“We shouldn’t rush forward with launching satellites at this scale without making sure the benefits justify the potential consequences of these new mega-constellations being launched, and then re-entering our atmosphere to burn up and or create debris,” they continued. “This is a new frontier, and we should save ourselves a lot of trouble by making sure we move forward in a way that doesn’t cause major problems for our future.”
The researchers noted that, in just more than five years, tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Starlink service has launched more than 6,000 units that now make up 60 percent of all satellites.
“The new space race took off faster than governments were able to act,” they wrote, adding that regulatory agencies now lack the policies to make fair assessments about “the total effects of all proposed mega constellations.”
They criticized the FCC for granting licenses on a “first-come, first-served basis,” noting orbital space and the broadcast spectrum are not limitless and they require an “unprecedented system of cooperation” with international regulators “to share the commons of our final frontier.”
“Until extensive coordination is in place, we shouldn’t let the commercial interests first to launch determine the rules,” they wrote.
The researchers also encouraged the FCC to end the “categorical exclusion of satellites” from environmental review, writing, “that launching 30,000 to 500,000 satellites into low earth orbit doesn’t even warrant an environmental review offends common sense.”
Nuclear Stocks Were Super Hot Just A Month Ago. What’s Changed?
Oil Price, By Alex Kimani – Dec 10, 2024
- However, nuclear energy stocks have lately lost momentum, mostly because the sector was seriously overheating.
- NuScale Power Corp. has lost more than 30% of its share price in the current month.
Over the past couple of years, the nuclear energy sector has enjoyed a renaissance in the U.S. and many Western countries thanks to the global energy crisis triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine, high power demand and nuclear’s status as a low-carbon energy source. Uranium demand has soared thanks to a series of policy “U-turns” with governments from Japan to Germany revising plans to phase out nuclear power. Uranium spot prices hit an all-time high of $81.32 per pound in February, double the level 12 months prior. According to the World Nuclear Association, demand from reactors is expected to climb 28% by 2030, and nearly double by 2040. Not surprisingly, the sector’s popular benchmark, VanEck Uranium and Nuclear ETF (NYSEARCA:NLR), recently hit an all-time high.
However, nuclear energy stocks have lately lost momentum, mostly because the sector was seriously overheating. One of the biggest losers has been NuScale Power Corp.(NYSE:SMR), with the stock crashing nearly 30% in the current month. The selloff kicked off about three weeks ago after the company disclosed an agreement with several brokerage firms in which the company may offer and sell from time to time as much as $200M in common stock. NuScale says proceeds from the sale will be used for general corporate purposes, including operating expenses, capital expenditures, R&D costs and working capital.
NuScale is a developer of modular light-water reactor nuclear power plants. Small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) are advanced nuclear reactors with power capacities that range from 50-300 MW(e) per unit, compared to 700+ MW(e) per unit for traditional nuclear power reactors. Back in October, we reported that NextEra Energy (NYSE:NEE) CEO John Ketchum revealed that he’s “not bullish” on small modular reactors (SMRs), adding that the company’s in-house SMR research unit has so far not drawn favorable conclusions about the technology.
“A lot of [SMR equipment manufacturers] are very strained financially,” he said. “There are only a handful that really have capitalization that could actually carry them through the next several years.”……………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Nuclear-Stocks-Were-Super-Hot-Just-A-Month-Ago-Whats-Changed.html
What happened to integrity and honor in the age of Technocracy?
Charles Hugh Smith, oftwominds.com, Fri, 06 Dec 2024, https://www.sott.net/article/496524-What-happened-to-integrity-and-honor-in-the-age-of-Technocracy
The hope here is that facing the reality of moral collapse frees us of the delusion that fiddling with technocratic financial abstractions and policy tweaks can reverse moral collapse.
Ours is a technocratic culture with a short attention span, and so problems and solutions are understood to be 1) technocratic and 2) instant. The problem is something that can be distilled down to a spreadsheet, formula, algorithm or legalistic policy, and the solution is some modification of spreadsheet, formula, algorithm or legalistic policy: all our problems will go away if we just end the Fed, switch to cryptocurrency, tweak some laws, get rid of the bankers, eliminate an agency, and so on.
These solutions will offer immediate relief. The problems will start melting away the minute we modify the spreadsheet, algorithm, financial settings or legal code.
But what if the problem is the collapse of integrity and honor, a moral rot that has consumed the foundations of our social order? If this is the root problem, then technocratic-financial solutions are the equivalent of excising a wart from the big toe and declaring that as a result of this procedure, the brain cancer has been cured.
What if the problem is that everything we’re cheering as Progress is actually the opposite–it’s Anti-Progress? What if all the technocratic “advances” that are constantly being hyped as wondrous are actually harming our physical and mental health?
So a product labeled as a “veggie snack” that’s nothing more than fat-soaked, sugary potato starch is lauded because it’s immensely profitable, a virtue gained by deceiving parents into thinking a “veggie snack” is a healthy snack.
That this is a culture in moral collapse is obvious, but we dare not admit it. That integrity and honor have decayed to the point of parody is equally obvious, but that too doesn’t register in a culture attuned to novelty, profit, gadgets, legalese, techno-fantasies and technocratic “solutions” to problems that aren’t even visible to technocrats.
Integrity and honor have, along with everything else, been commoditized into something we sell as a “product” or “enhancement.” Virtue-signaling has replaced actual integrity, and as the host of my latest podcast observed, the job of corporate CEOs is not to make quality products; their job is to elevate the corporation’s stock price by whatever means are available–including hollowing out quality, reliability and durability.
Seeking a Culture of Honor and Integrity with Emerson Fersch and Amy LeNoble (59 min)
In this state of moral collapse, we look to centralized authorities to solve all our problems. But the collapse of integrity and honor does not have a legal, financial or technocratic solution. We have to reverse that collapse ourselves rather than rely on centralized diktats from on high to fix what’s broken.
Before we get to the hope, let’s first review reality. Here is loneliness–soaring. – [excellent graphics here, on original]
And we all know how positive online interactions are for our collective mental health:
Every one of these graphics depicts a social order in collapse, yet this truth is greeted with silence or delusional misdirections and self-referential parodies being passed off as “solutions.”
Let’s say we want a lifestyle stripped of denial, moral rot, techno-fantasies and technocratic delusions, a lifestyle of responsibility, accountability, integrity and honor. Oops, sorry, that lifestyle is out of stock and we don’t anticipate any reordering.
The hope here is that facing the reality of moral collapse frees us of the delusion that fiddling with technocratic financial abstractions and policy tweaks can reverse moral collapse and Anti-Progress. We are then free to see the problem is spiritual and cultural, realms that we change in our own lives, not by waiting around for central authorities–the state, Big Tech, etc.–to fix for us.
We need a new way of living, not more gadgets and financial “innovations.” A restoration of basic integrity and honor cannot be achieved by technocratic “solutions”–policies, crypto, apps, algos, AI–for the belief that these are solutions has blinded us to the decay and collapse of the foundations of the social order.
Yes, it’s understandable that we all want a solution to the collapse of integrity and honor to be done for us by some new app or a new law, but that’s like thinking the wart on the big toe is the source of the brain cancer. Real social change comes from the ground up, not the top down. I explore these themes in my new book The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century.
(free sample chapter)
New podcast:Seeking a Culture of Honor and Integrity with Emerson Fersch and Amy LeNoble (59 min)
The Moltex Reactor and used CANDU Fuel
| Frank Greening, 9 Dec 24 |
From a MOLTEX Technical Report, issued May 2022:
THE FUEL
The reactor core comprises an array of fuel tubes in a graphite matrix, which fills most of the tank. Each tube sits in a separate channel, within which a molten salt primary coolant circulates.
FUEL SALT
The SSR-U is a fluoride or chloride salt reactor with separate fuel and coolant salts. The fuel is in the form of molten low-enriched uranium fluoride or chloride salt (6% enrichment).
What I find most interesting about this information on the Moltex SMR is that the fuel is enriched uranium, even though we have been led to believe that the Moltex reactor can run on used CANDU fuel, which is certainly not enriched, but depleted in U-235.
For example, consider this announcement by Moltex dated October 3, 2024:
“The SSR-W was specifically engineered to efficiently reuse and consume recycled nuclear waste,” said Moltex CEO Rory O’Sullivan. “This breakthrough research, the result of years of collaboration, clearly demonstrates that ability.” According to this research, the SSR-W can recycle used fuel indefinitely, producing a minimum of 6,000 MW of clean energy from Canada’s existing CANDU reactor fuel without the need for new fuel imports.
Unfortunately, Molex is not very forthcoming about how much fuel their reactor will use. I am going to conservatively assume that 20 tonnes of enriched uranium will be needed for the first year of reactor operation. Based on information I have found in a number of reports on the cost of enriching uranium to 6% U-235, I estimate this will cost about $1 million per tonne. By comparison, the production cost of CANDU fuel is about $250,000 per tonne.
But there are other hidden costs to the production of enriched uranium, one of the most significant being the cost of disposing of the depleted uranium generated by the U-235 enrichment process. Thus, the production of 1 kg of U-235 enriched to 6% generates 12 kg of depleted uranium tailings waste. The uranium enrichment process begins with the conversion of uranium oxide to uranium hexafluoride, UF6, which is gaseous above 64 ⁰C. UF6 is very toxic and chemically reactive so it is necessary to convert the depleted UF6 back to a solid uranium form for safe disposal – adding substantially to the cost of producing enriched fuel for the Moltex reactor.
But there’s still more bad news for the Moltex SMR! Thus, I quote from an article in the May 2023 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists by J. Kang et al. entitled: “Canadian reactors that “recycle” plutonium would create more problems than they solve”, where we read:
Moltex’s fresh fuel will consist of potassium chloride, uranium chloride, and plutonium chloride, with some unspecified actinides and lanthanides. Using the expected distribution of plutonium and uranium, and using the ratio of the atomic masses of chlorine and plutonium, one can conclude that the reactor would need about 392 kg of plutonium as fuel every year. In a 2021 presentation, Moltex also mentioned that the average fuel assembly resides for 6.3 years in the reactor. This means that the initial loading for the reactor to start operating would require roughly 2.4 tons of plutonium.
To obtain the 2.4 tons of plutonium required in the startup fuel for a single 300 megawatt-electric (MWe) Moltex reactor, around 577 tons of CANDU spent fuel would have to be processed. In addition, a further 94 tons of CANDU spent fuel must go through Moltex’s waste-to-stable-salts chemical process to produce the necessary fuel for each year of operations.
Britain’s Energy Secretary Follows Tech Giants In Pursuit Of New Nuclear Power Stations
the government is “determined to drive forward” with nuclear power through both public and private investment, despite this being a period of “immense challenge for the public finances.”
Miliband was speaking in London on Thursday at the Nuclear Industry Association’s Nuclear 2024 conference, where he told the audience that their industry has an essential role to play in the U.K.’s pursuit of achieving a [ ?] clean power system by 2030.
Robert Olsen, Forbes 7th Dec 2024
British Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has been watching U.S. tech companies striking deals with operators and developers of nuclear power plants, and now he’s eager to pursue similar projects in the U.K.
“My message is clear: if you want to build a nuclear project in Britain, my door is open,” Miliband said. “My department is listening. We want all your ideas for projects that can work and provide value for money.”
Miliband was speaking in London on Thursday at the Nuclear Industry Association’s Nuclear 2024 conference, where he told the audience that their industry has an essential role to play in the U.K.’s pursuit of achieving a [ ?] clean power system by 2030.
He said the government is “determined to drive forward” with nuclear power through both public and private investment, despite this being a period of “immense challenge for the public finances.”
Great British Nuclear (GBN), the government body tasked with spearheading the development of small modular reactors (SMRs), has started contract negotiations with four companies shortlisted for the U.K.’s small modular reactor program, and final decisions will be made next year.
Britain’s Rolls-Royce is competing with U.S.-based rivals GE Hitachi, Holtec and Westinghouse Electric for contracts to develop SMRs in the U.K. The competition was launched last year, as part of the government’s plan to replenish the country’s dwindling nuclear industry………………………………..https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertolsen-1/2024/12/07/britains-energy-secretary-follows-tech-giants-in-pursuit-of-new-nuclear-power-stations/
Hinkley update: mixed reaction as first reactor drops into place
Mr Vince said: “I’m really pleased to be a patron of the Stop Hinkley campaign which is working to stop the government wasting billions of taxpayers’ money on a technology which is hugely expensive and slow to develop.”
By Simon Hacker , Punchline Gloucester 6th Dec 2024
It may be delayed to the extent that existing nuclear reactors are now planning to remain operational for an extra three years, but Hinkley Point C has come a step closer to activation with an overnight operation to drop a crucial 500-tonne reactor for the process into place.
When switched on, Somerset’s Hinkley Point C, near Bridgwater, is estimated to be capable of providing 7% of the UK’s power needs – calculated to keep six million homes supplied.
The 13m-long reactor is the first of two to be put in place by French project owner EDF and each will contain the nuclear chain reaction that will generate power from a planned operational date of 2030. the 12-hour operation to manoeuvre the unit into place was the first such job in 30 years in the UK.
But the road to this landmark has been far from smooth. With the installation some five years later than was originally planned, Covid, supply chain issues and political negotiations have ensured an uphill slog on the technology’s re-introduction, while – in keeping with the original advent of nuclear power – costs have spiralled: back in 2017, the taxpayer was told that the cost of this project would be £18bn. It now stands at £46bn.
Gloucestershire businessman and energy entrepreneur Dale Vince, who owns Ecotricity and campaigns for Britain’s energy production to be brought back into the hands of British business, has argued against nuclear installations on the Severn Estuary since 1983 and became a patron of the Stop Hinkley campaign this summer.
Speaking about the decision, Mr Vince said: “I’m really pleased to be a patron of the Stop Hinkley campaign which is working to stop the government wasting billions of taxpayers’ money on a technology which is hugely expensive and slow to develop.”
Alongside Mr Vince, the Somerset campaign is urging the government to adopt a 100% renewable energy strategy which it argues is “perfectly feasible” and which, compared to the UK Government’s current strategy, would save more than £100bn on the route plan to reach net zero by 2050.
Roy Pumfrey, Stop Hinkley spokesperson, said nuclear power is “rapidly losing ground to the astonishing growth in renewables” and the campaign has wanred that there is “no scientific solutuon to safeguarding nuclear waste” and contends that while no electricity production is zero carbon, nuclear is calculated to produce between 8 and 11 times more carbon emissions than renewable sources.
EDF has also waded into controversy here in Gloucestershire this week after the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust claimed the supplier’s mitigation scheme for fish killed in the planned nuclear site was “shambolic” and threatens to create the perfect conditions for an ecological disaster in the Severn Estuary.
Hinkley Point C is financed by the state-owned French energy giant EDF Energy and China General Nuclear Power Group, which is also state-owned. https://www.punchline-gloucester.com/articles/aanews/hinkley-update-mixed-reaction-as-first-reactor-drops-into-place
Green Group Sounds Alarm Over Meta’s Nuclear Power Plans
“In the blind sprint to win on AI, Meta and the other tech giants have lost their way,” said a leader at Environment America.
Jessica Corbett, 5 Dec 24, https://www.commondreams.org/news/meta-nuclear-power?xrs=RebelMouse_fb&ts=1733449433&fbclid=IwY2xjawHAsKZleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHdKFUyPBOBTG7NW2ZlQDOh0gqS_OC0L73I44ICQNjlWw12xPlcO9omTXJQ_aem_Od_q57mbvDma_to2jfZafA
Environmental advocates this week responded with concern to Meta looking for nuclear power developers to help the tech giant add 1-4 gigawatts of generation capacity in the United States starting in the early 2030s.
Meta—the parent company of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and more—released a request for proposals to identify developers, citing its artificial intelligence (AI) innovation and sustainability objectives. It is “seeking developers with strong community engagement, development, …permitting, and execution expertise that have development opportunities for new nuclear energy resources—either small modular reactors (SMR) or larger nuclear reactors.”
The company isn’t alone. As TechCrunchreported: “Microsoft is hoping to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island by 2028. Google is betting that SMR technology can help it deliver on its AI and sustainability goals, signing a deal with startup Kairos Power for 500 megawatts of electricity. Amazon has thrown its weight behind SMR startup X-Energy, investing in the company and inking two development agreements for around 300 megawatts of generating capacity.”
In response to Meta’s announcement, Johanna Neumann, Environment America Research & Policy Center’s senior director of the Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy, said: “The long history of overhyped nuclear promises reveals that nuclear energy is expensive and slow to build all while still being inherently dangerous. America already has 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste that we don’t have a storage solution for.”
Do we really want to create more radioactive waste to power the often dubious and questionable uses of AI?” Neumann asked. “In the blind sprint to win on AI, Meta and the other tech giants have lost their way. Big Tech should recommit to solutions that not only work but pose less risk to our environment and health.”
“Data centers should be as energy and water efficient as possible and powered solely with new renewable energy,” she added. “Without those guardrails, the tech industry’s insatiable thirst for energy risks derailing America’s efforts to get off polluting forms of power, including nuclear.”
In a May study, the Electric Power Research Institute found that “data centers could consume up to 9% of U.S. electricity generation by 2030—more than double the amount currently used.” The group noted that “AI queries require approximately 10 times the electricity of traditional internet searches and the generation of original music, photos, and videos requires much more.”
Meta is aiming to get the process started quickly: The intake form is due by January 3 and initial proposals are due February 7. It comes after a rare bee species thwarted Meta’s plans to build a data center powered by an existing nuclear plant.
Following the nuclear announcement, Meta and renewable energy firm Invenergy on Thursday announced a deal for 760 megawatts of solar power capacity. Operations for that four-state project are expected to begin no later than 2027.
Why NuScale Power Stock Slumped Today
By Rich Smith – Dec 2, 2024
https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/12/02/why-nuscale-power-stock-slumped-today/
Key Points
GE Vernova is much bigger, with much more cash, and already profitable.
CNBC reported on GE Vernova’s ambitions to dominate the building of small modular reactors.
NuScale Power is a pioneer in this industry, but its business is small and unprofitable.
Will GE Vernova crush NuScale’s nuclear dreams?
NuScale Power Corporation (SMR -0.08%) stock fell 3% through 11:25 a.m. ET — and it has General Electric to blame for it.
NuScale develops small modular nuclear reactors designed to be cheaper and faster to build than traditional nuclear power plants. And as it’s fond of pointing out, NuScale is “the first and only SMR to have its design certified by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.” But leaders aren’t necessarily winners, and as CNBC reports this morning, NuScale faces serious competition from a much bigger nuclear player, GE Vernova (GEV 3.56%), the former energy arm of General Electric.
GE Vernova’s threat to NuScale
NuScale and GE Vernova both aim to develop small modular reactors, but “small” is a relative term. If a standard nuclear power plant produces 1,000 megawatts of electricity, Vernova’s BWRX-300 reactor aims to cut that output to 300 megawatts (which is still substantial, enough to power a small city of 200,000 homes), while NuScale’s Voygr reactor goes even smaller with a 77-megawatt output.
In other respects, the two companies are more direct competitors. Both Vernova and NuScale advertise their ability to deploy multiple modules of their basic SMR in a single location, to amp up total power production capacity.
Both target a global market, with GE Vernova “aiming to deploy small nuclear reactors across the developed world over the next decade,” according to CNBC.
Is NuScale Power stock a sell?
What really sets the two companies apart, though, is their financial capacity to deliver on their promises. While valued at $3 billion in market cap, NuScale boasts less than $10 million in annual revenue and is losing $80 million a year. Analysts don’t expect the company to turn profitable before 2030 at the earliest.
GE Vernova is a $92 billion behemoth earning more than $1.2 billion a year and growing its profits at 40% a year. Just the cash alone on Vernova’s balance sheet is worth twice the price of NuScale’s stock. In any direct contest, I know which stock I’d bet on to win — and unfortunately, it’s not NuScale.,
Security planning for small modular reactors ‘not where it should be’, academic says.
28 Nov, 2024 By Tom Pashby
The security planning for the forthcoming wave of small modular reactor (SMR) developments in the UK is “not where it should be” according to an academic who supports the industry.
SMRs have risen up the agenda with Great British Nuclear’s (GBN) competition for developers to get access to government support for deployment making progress, as well as other novel
nuclear energy companies like Last Energy UK saying it will deploy
micro-reactors in Wales by 2027.
Big technology companies like Google,
Amazon and Oracle have said they want SMRs to power their AI data centres,
to overcome grid power constraints.
And in the UK, the Civil nuclear:
roadmap to 2050 stated: “To deliver energy security while driving down
costs our long-term ambition is the deployment of fleets of SMRs in the
UK.” Proponents of SMRs, such as big tech companies, want them because of
the additional flexibility they offer in location. They don’t need to be
built far away from people because of their size, or near water because
SMRs can be air-cooled.
This opens up questions about appropriate security
arrangements, because traditional gigawatt-scale nuclear sites in the UK
benefit from having long sight lines and layers of physical security such
as fences, patrol paths and armed guards.
New Civil Engineer 28th Nov 2024 https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/security-planning-for-small-modular-reactors-not-where-it-should-be-academic-says-28-11-2024/
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