On Army bases, nuclear energy can’t add resilience, just costs and risks
In this op-ed, Alan J. Kuperman argues that the risks of adding nuclear reactors to military bases outweigh any benefits.
By Alan J. Kupermanon October 07, 2024, https://breakingdefense.com/2024/10/on-army-bases-nuclear-energy-cant-add-resilience-just-costs-and-risks/?fbclid=IwY2xjawFxlwlleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHZAdc8iogUaPZy6lBkxZanmlnIB3-Rh3nkB6DDMNuGH1snaqLwuI5-PJWA_aem_NL8jwrpce6F1ZUFkVDIG9A
Every now and then, the US government offers a huge subsidy to an industry on grounds that make no sense to anyone with even basic knowledge of the subject. The latest example, announced in June, is the Army’s Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations (ANPI) program to install small reactors on military bases, ostensibly to increase “energy resilience.”
This is perplexing for several reasons. First, such resilience can be provided much more effectively, safely, and cheaply with non-nuclear options. Second, nuclear reactors themselves cannot provide “resilience,” because their safe operation always has required input of electricity to the reactors from other power sources. Third, the Army’s planned reactors would lack a robust containment building, so an attack or accident could disperse radioactive waste, endangering base personnel and neighboring civilians.
Both the Army and taxpayers should cry foul on this indefensible waste of national security dollars.
Of course, energy resilience is a reasonable concern for Army bases, which now get their electricity from the commercial grid that is potentially subject to blackouts from bad weather or even cyberattacks. The simple and inexpensive solution, already utilized by military bases and other essential services including hospitals, is to maintain backup diesel fuel and generators for emergency use. It costs only about $2 million to $4 million for a set of diesel generators to produce 5 megawatts of electricity — the amount the Army seeks — and the diesel fuel would be cheap since the generators would operate only during rare emergencies.
By contrast, the price of a single nuclear reactor to produce the same five megawatts of electricity would be several hundred million dollars — roughly 100 times as expensive — according to government estimates and my previously published research. Even if, as the Army hopes, the reactor could replace the commercial grid as the primary source of power for the base, the electricity produced by the reactor would cost several times more than what the Army now pays for commercial electricity. So, regardless of whether the reactor was used for primary or backup power, Army costs would spike substantially.
What about resilience, which is the supposed justification for buying these expensive reactors? Well, even though reactors can produce electricity, they have always required an external source of electricity to keep them running safely — most crucially to cool the fuel to avoid a nuclear meltdown and radioactive release. The Army’s recent request for proposals seems to acknowledge this reality by saying that in addition to an external electricity source, the reactor must have an “alternative credited independent power source as a backup.”
Therefore, an Army base reactor would almost surely depend on drawing electricity from the commercial grid. But this means the reactor would be no more resilient than the existing power source it is supposed to replace to increase resilience. In the event of a blackout of the commercial grid, what would the reactor do to get essential electricity? Of course, it would turn on its backup diesel generators. However, if the base requires backup generators anyway, it has no need for the super-expensive reactor.
It gets even worse. To prevent costs from rising even higher, the nuclear industry has decided that its small reactors — the kind the Army is seeking — will be built without a containment building that could prevent radiation from escaping in the event of an accident. This also means the reactors would be more vulnerable to attack by aircraft, missiles, rockets, and drones.
A successful kinetic attack could spread radioactivity in at least two ways. First, like a “dirty bomb,” it could disperse the reactor’s solid irradiated fuel over a wide area into a few or many radioactive chunks that would be very hazardous if approached. Even worse, if the attack interrupted the reactor’s active or passive cooling, the fuel could overheat and breach its cladding, thereby allowing gaseous radioactivity to spread more widely.
Ironically, it is not clear if the Army even wants these nuclear reactors, which originally were proposed in 2018 by Congressional advocates of nuclear energy, who also have promoted nuclear reactors for Air Force bases and forward operating bases — including in war zones where they would be even more vulnerable.
Comments from Pentagon officials about these programs indicate that at least part of the motivation is to help America’s struggling nuclear reactor companies, which have yet to find a single private-sector customer for their small but pricey powerplants. The Defense Secretary’s manager for the Army’s mobile reactor project touts it as “a pathfinder to advanced nuclear reactors in the commercial sector.” A Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Air Force says, “We’re trying to … create a playbook of how other villages or communities and cities” can pursue “energy through a microreactor.”
But even if the civilian nuclear industry deserved additional subsidies, which is questionable, that would not justify wasting defense dollars on unnecessary reactors that could endanger our troops.
Truthfully, energy resilience for military bases is a real concern that deserves safe, effective, and economical solutions — but nuclear reactors satisfy none of those criteria.
Fortunately, we live in a democracy, so there is still a chance to stop these dangerous boondoggles. Service members and their dependents, communities near military bases, and taxpayers in general can and should call on Congress to suspend the ANPI program — and instead explore how its funding could be reprogrammed more productively.
Alan J. Kuperman is associate professor and coordinator of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project (www.NPPP.org) at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin.
Sorry, AI won’t “fix” climate change.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman claims AI will deliver an “Intelligence Age,” but tech breakthroughs alone can’t solve global warming.
James Temple, September 28, 2024,
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/28/1104588/sorry-ai-wont-fix-climate-change/
In an essay last week, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, argued that the accelerating capabilities of AI will usher in an idyllic “Intelligence Age,” unleashing “unimaginable” prosperity and “astounding triumphs” like “fixing the climate.”
It’s a promise that no one is in a position to make—and one that, when it comes to the topic of climate change, fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the problem.
More maddening, the argument suggests that the technology’s massive consumption of electricity today doesn’t much matter, since it will allow us to generate abundant clean power in the future. That casually waves away growing concerns about a technology that’s already accelerating proposals for natural-gas plants and diverting major tech companies from their corporate climate targets.
By all accounts, AI’s energy demands will only continue to increase, even as the world scrambles to build larger, cleaner power systems to meet the increasing needs of EV charging, green hydrogen production, heat pumps, and other low-carbon technologies. Altman himself reportedly just met with White House officials to make the case for building absolutely massive AI data centers, which could require the equivalent of five dedicated nuclear reactors to run.
It’s a bedrock perspective of MIT Technology Review that technological advances can deliver real benefits and accelerate societal progress in meaningful ways. But for decades researchers and companies have oversold the potential of AI to deliver blockbuster medicines, achieve super intelligence, and free humanity from the need to work. To be fair, there have been significant advances, but nothing on the order of what’s been hyped.
Given that track record, I’d argue you need to develop a tool that does more than plagiarize journalism and help students cheat on homework before you can credibly assert that it will solve humanity’s thorniest problems, whether the target is rampant poverty or global warming.
To be sure, AI may help the world address the rising dangers of climate change. We have begun to see research groups and startups harness the technology to try to manage power grids more effectively, put out wildfires faster, and discover materials that could create cheaper, better batteries or solar panels.
All those advances are still relatively incremental. But let’s say AI does bring about an energy miracle. Perhaps its pattern-recognition prowess will deliver the key insight that finally cracks fusion—a technology that Altman is betting on heavily as an investor.
That would be fantastic. But technological advances are just the start—necessary but far from sufficient to eliminate the world’s climate emissions.
How do I know?
Because between nuclear fission plants, solar farms, wind turbines, and batteries, we already have every technology we need to clean up the power sector. This should be the low-hanging fruit of the energy transition. Yet in the largest economy on Earth, fossil fuels still generate 60% of the electricity. The fact that so much of our power still comes from coal, petroleum, and natural gas is a regulatory failure as much as a technological one.
“As long as we effectively subsidize fossil fuels by allowing them to use the atmosphere as a waste dump, we are not allowing clean energy to compete on a level playing field,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the independent research organization Berkeley Earth, wrote on X in a response to Altman’s post. “We need policy changes, not just tech breakthroughs, to meet our climate goals.”
That’s not to say there aren’t big technical problems we still need to solve. Just look at the continuing struggles to develop clean, cost-competitive ways of fertilizing crops or flying planes. But the fundamental challenges of climate change are sunk costs, development obstacles, and inertia.
We’ve built and paid for a global economy that spews out planet-warming gases, investing trillions of dollars in power plants, steel mills, factories, jets, boilers, water heaters, stoves, and SUVs that run on fossil fuels. And few people or companies will happily write off those investments so long as those products and plants still work. AI can’t remedy all that just by generating better ideas.
To raze and replace the machinery of every industry around the world at the speed now required, we will need increasingly aggressive climate policies that incentivize or force everyone to switch to cleaner plants, products, and practices.
But with every proposal for a stricter law or some big new wind or solar farm, forces will push back, because the plan will hit someone’s wallet, block someone’s views, or threaten the areas or traditions someone cherishes. Climate change is an infrastructure problem, and building infrastructure is a messy human endeavor.
Tech advances can ease some of these issues. Cheaper, better alternatives to legacy industries make hard choices more politically palatable. But there are no improvements to AI algorithms or underlying data sets that solve the challenge of NIMBYism, the conflict between human interests, or the desire to breathe the fresh air in an unsullied wilderness.
To assert that a single technology—that just happens to be the one your company develops—can miraculously untangle these intractable conflicts of human society is at best self-serving, if not a little naïve. And it’s a troubling idea to proclaim at a point when the growth of that very technology is threatening to undermine the meager progress the world has begun to make on climate change.
As it is, the one thing we can state confidently about generative AI is that it’s making the hardest problem we’ve ever had to solve that much harder to solve.
In the Woomera Manual, International Law Meets Military Space Activities
by David A. Koplow, September 12, 2024, https://www.justsecurity.org/100043/woomera-manual-international-law-military-space/
The law of outer space, like so much else about the exoatmospheric realm, is under stress. The prodigious growth in private-sector space activities (exemplified by SpaceX’s proliferating Starlink constellation, and other corporations following only shortly behind) is matched by an ominous surge in military space activities – most vividly, the creation of the U.S. Space Force and counterpart combat entities in rival States, the threat of Russia placing a nuclear weapon in orbit, and China and others continuing to experiment with anti-satellite weapons and potential techniques. The world is on the precipice of several new types of space races, as countries and companies bid for first-mover advantages in the highest of high ground.
The law of outer space, in contrast, is old, incomplete, and untested. A family of foundational treaties dating to the 1960s and 1970s retains vitality, but provides only partial guidance. Space is decidedly not a “law-free zone,” but many of the necessary guard rails are obscure, and few analysts or operators have ventured into this sector.
A new treatise, the Woomera Manual on the International Law of Military Space Activities and Operations, has just been published by Oxford University Press to provide the first comprehensive, detailed analysis of the existing legal regime of space. As one of the editors of the Manual, I can testify to the long, winding, and arduous – but fascinating – journey to produce it, and the hope that it will provide much-needed clarity and precision about this fast-moving legal domain.
Military Manuals
This Manual follows a grand tradition of prior efforts to articulate the applicable international military law in contested realms, including the 1994 San Remo Manual on Naval Warfare, Harvard’s 2013 Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research Manual on Air and Missile Warfare, and the 2013 and 2017 Tallinn Manuals on Cyber Operations. The Woomera Manual was produced by a diverse team of legal and technical experts drawn from academia, practice, government, and other sectors in several countries (all acting in their personal capacities, not as representatives of their home governments or organizations). The process consumed six years (slowed considerably by the Covid-19 pandemic, which arrested the sequence of face-to-face drafting sessions).
The Manual is co-sponsored by four universities, among other participants: the University of Nebraska College of Law (home of Professor Jack Beard, the editor-in-chief), the University of Adelaide (with Professor Dale Stephens on the editorial board), the University of New South Wales—Canberra, and the University of Exeter (U.K.) The name “Woomera” was chosen in recognition of the small town of Woomera, South Australia, which was the site of the country’s first space missions, and in acknowledgement of the Aboriginal word for a remarkable spear-throwing device that enables greater accuracy and distance.
Comprehensive Coverage of a Broad Field
Three features of the Woomera Manual stand out. The first is the comprehensive nature of the undertaking. The Manual presents 48 rules, spanning the three critical time frames: ordinary peace time, periods of tension and crisis, and during an armed conflict. There may be a natural tendency to focus on that last frame, given the high stakes and the inherent drama of warfare, but the editors were keen to address the full spectrum, devoting due attention and analysis to the background rules that apply both to quotidian military space activities and to everyone else in space.
Complicating the legal analysis is the fragmentation of the international legal regime. In addition to “general” international law – which article III of the Outer Space Treaty declares is fully applicable in space – two “special” areas of law are implicated here. One, the law of armed conflict (also known as international humanitarian law) provides particularized jus in bello rules applicable between States engaged in war, including wars that begin in, or extend to, space. But the law of outer space is also recognized as another lex specialis, and it accordingly provides unique rules that supersede at least some aspects of the general international law regime. What should be done when two “special” areas of international law overlap and provide incompatible rules? The Woomera Manual is the first comprehensive effort to unravel that riddle.
The Law as It Is
A second defining characteristic of this Manual is the persistent, rigid focus on lex lata, the law as it currently is, rather than lex ferenda, the law as it may (or should) become. The authors, of course, each have their own policy preferences, and in their other works they freely opine about how the international space law regime should evolve (or be abruptly changed) to accommodate modern dangers and opportunities. But in this Manual, they have focused exclusively on describing the current legal structure, concentrating on treaties, customary international law, and other indicia of State practice. This is not the sort of manual in which the assembled experts “vote” on their competing concepts of the legal regime; instead, Woomera addresses what States (the sources and subjects of international law) say, do, and write. The authors have assembled a monumental library of State behaviors (including words as well as deeds, and silences as well as public pronouncements), while recognizing that diplomacy (and national security classification restrictions) often impede States explaining exactly why they did, or did not, act in a particular way in response to some other State’s provocations.
One feature that enormously facilitated the work on the Manual was a phase of “State engagement.” In early 2022, the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense of the government of the Netherlands circulated a preliminary draft of the Woomera Manual to interested national governments and invited them to a June 2022 conference in The Hague to discuss it. Remarkably, two dozen of the States most active in space attended, providing two days of sustained, thoughtful, constructive commentary. The States were not asked to “approve” the document, but their input was enormously valuable (and resulted in an additional several months of painstaking work in finalizing the manuscript, as the editors scrambled to take into account the States’ voluminous comments and the new information they provided).
Space as a Dynamic Domain
Third, a manual on space law must acknowledge the rapidly-changing nature and scope of human activities in this environment, and the great likelihood that even more dramatic alterations are likely in the future. Existing patterns of behavior may alter abruptly, as new technologies and new economic opportunities emerge. The Manual attempts to peer into the future, addressing plausible scenarios that might foreseeably arise, but it resists the temptation to play with far-distant “Star Wars” fantasies.
The unfortunate reality here is that although the early years of the Space Age were remarkably productive for space law, the process stultified shortly thereafter. Within only a decade after Sputnik’s first orbit, the world had negotiated and put into place the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which still provides the cardinal principles guiding space operations today. And within only another decade, three additional widely-accepted treaties were crafted: the 1968 astronaut Rescue Agreement, the 1971 Liability Convention, and the 1975 Registration Convention, as well as the 1979 Moon Convention (which has not attracted nearly the same level of global support and participation). But the articulation of additional necessary increments of international space law has been constipated since then – no new multilateral space-specific treaties have been implemented in the past four decades, and none is on the horizon today.
Sources and Shortcomings of International Space Law
The corpus of international space law is not obsolete, but it is under-developed. We have the essential principles and some of the specific corollaries, but we are lacking the detailed infrastructure that would completely flesh out all those general principles. Some important guidance may, however, be found in State practice, including the understudied negotiating history of the framework treaties for space law, particularly the Outer Space Treaty. The Manual provides important insights in this area, notably with respect to several ambiguous terms embedded in the treaties.
The authors of the Woomera Manual, therefore, were able to start their legal analysis with the framework treaties – unlike, for example, the authors of the Tallinn Manuals, covering international law applicable to cyber warfare, who had to begin without such a structured starting point. Still, the Woomera analysis confronted numerous lacunae, where the existing law and practice leave puzzling gaps. The persistent failure of the usual law-making institutions to craft additional increments of space arms control is all the more alarming as the United States, NATO, and others have declared space to be an operational or war-fighting domain.
Conclusion
It is hoped that the process of articulating the existing rules – and identifying the interstices between them – can provide useful day-to-day guidance for space law practitioners in government, academia, non-governmental organizations, the private sector, and elsewhere. The prospect of arms races and armed conflict in space unfortunately appears to be growing, and clarity about the prevailing rules has never been more important. It is a fascinating, dynamic, and fraught field.
NASA’s uncrewed Artemis mission highlights radiation risk to astronauts
ABC, By science reporter Jacinta Bowler, Thu 19 Sep, 24
In short:
Scientists analysed the radiation experienced by two ‘radiation phantom’ dummies on NASA’s November 2022 uncrewed Artemis I mission.
The results suggest radiation may not be an issue for short Moon missions, but could be on longer Moon layovers or missions to Mars.
What’s next?
Scientists are trying to design ways to minimise radiation on longer space missions, including radio-protective drugs and spacecraft magnetic fields.
In September next year, astronauts will be strapped into the Orion spacecraft and rocketed around the Moon in the first human moon visit in more than 50 years.
And thanks to two space-travelling test dummies we now know those astronauts will likely be protected against dangerously high radiation exposure on their short trip.
Known as “radiation phantoms”, the specially designed dummies Helga and Zohar were included on last year’s Artemis 1 uncrewed mission.
Helga and Zohar are recreations of female humans, complete with fake organs that allowed researchers to record radiation exposure throughout the journey, and analyse results from skin, lungs, stomach, uterus and the spine to understand how radiation moves throughout the body.
The results are published today in Nature.
Stuart George, lead author and a member of the NASA Space Radiation Analysis Group, says the results suggest that radiation exposure won’t be dangerously high for short Moon missions, but problems may arise on longer Moon missions such as the “Gateway” lunar space station, and eventual trips to Mars.
“These measurements comprehensively showed we have a well-developed system for protecting the crew from radiation during Artemis I, but challenges still remain for longer duration missions such as Mars,” Dr George said.
Why is radiation an issue?
………………………………………………Items in low-Earth orbit are under the protection of Earth’s magnetic field, which shields Earth from the vast majority of radiation produced by our Sun (or from background cosmic radiation).
But outside of this field, in open space, it’s a different story.
“In general, radiation levels are higher outside of the protection of low-Earth orbit and the protection of Earth’s magnetic field,” Dr George said.
“In addition, the exposure of crew to space weather, specifically ‘energetic solar particle events’ can be much higher as the Earth’s magnetic field is very effective at shielding these.”
……………………………………………...What did the research find?
The Artemis 1 mission, which lasted for 25 days, flew 450,000 km to the Moon, looped around it and then almost 65,000 kms out into deep space before flying back to Earth.
The team used Helga and Zohar as well as radiation sensors called HERA (Hybrid Electronic Radiation Assessor) placed throughout the cabin of the Orion spacecraft to assess how radiation levels changed throughout the mission.
………………………………………………………………..it wasn’t all good news.
“The inside of the cabin was full of X-rays during the transit of the outer Van Allen belt which was something we did not expect,” Dr George said.
“The overall biological impact was minor, but this was still a fascinating observation.”
The health risk of ionising radiation is measured in millisieverts (mSv).
The research team suggested that a quick trip around the Moon, like in the Artemis I mission might set you back about 26.7 – 35.4 millisieverts (mSv), which is well below the amount that might cause damage to an astronaut.
……………………………………………………………………………. According to Dr George, travelling to, and then staying on Gateway would expose astronauts to much higher levels of radiation than what they would receive on the ISS.
Then there’s Mars, a trip which may take around nine months each way, plus any radiation you might receive on the surface.
When the team extrapolated out the Artemis results to a Mars mission, and combined it with measurements from Mars’ Curiosity rover, they found astronauts might scrape by under the NASA lifetime limit of radiation, which is 600 mSv, but not by much.
“A really big solar particle event (with appropriate sheltering) might also push you up by a few hundred mSv,” Dr George said. …………………………………………………………………..
……………………………………..further into the future, radiation protection might become significantly more high tech.
According to Anatoly Rozenfeld, a medical physicist at the University of Wollongong who specialises in space radiation, one line of research is trying to build a magnetic field for the spacecraft itself, but he warns that this is still very much in it’s infancy.
“There’s a lot of different kinds of projects and some of them are realistic, some of them are less realistic,” Professor Rozenfeld said.
“People are also developing radio-protective drugs. So when you take these pills, your cells will recover very quickly after radiation.” https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-09-19/nasa-radiation-artemis-mission-helga-zolar/104365924
Microsoft deal propels Three Mile Island restart, with key permits still needed
By Reuters, September 21, 2024
Sept 20 (Reuters) – Constellation Energy (CEG.O), opens new tab and Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab have signed a power deal to help resurrect a unit of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in what would be the first-ever restart of its kind, the companies said on Friday.
Key regulatory permits for the plant’s new life, however, haven’t been filed, regulators say.
Big tech has led to a sudden surge in U.S. electricity demand for data centers needed to expand technologies like artificial intelligence and cloud computing. ……………………………………..
Power from the plant would be used to offset Microsoft’s data center electricity use, the companies said.
A relaunch of Three Mile Island, which had a separate unit suffer a partial-meltdown in 1979 in one of the biggest industrial accidents in the country’s history, still requires federal, state and local approvals.
Constellation has yet to file an application with federal nuclear regulators to restart the plant.
“It’s up to Constellation to lay out its rationale for justifying restart, so we’re prepared to engage with the company on next steps,” said Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) spokesperson Scott Burnell.
Constellation said it expected the NRC review process to be completed in 2027.
BILLION DOLLAR BET
The deal would help enable a revival of Unit 1 of the five-decades-old facility in Pennsylvania that was retired in 2019 due to economic reasons. Unit 2, which had the meltdown, will not be restarted. https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/constellation-inks-power-supply-deal-with-microsoft-2024-09-20/
Unrealistic expectations for So-Called Novel Nuclear Reactor Concepts
Analysis and Evaluation of the Development Status, Safety and Regulatory
Framework for So-Called Novel Reactor Concepts.
For all technology lines considered, extensive research and development work has been taking place for several decades, in some cases since the middle of the last century.
Depending on the technology line, technical test stands for individual
phenomena have been built and operated, and so have smaller experimental
reactors (for SFR, for example, the U.S. EBR-I and II plants or the Russian
BR-10 and Bor-60) and larger demonstration reactors (for SFR, for example,
the French Phoenix and Super-Phoenix plants or the Russian BN-350 or BN-600
plants).
Nevertheless, until today no commercially competitive reactor
concept exists in the field of SNR. To plan, license, construct and operate
such experimental and demonstration reactors, a period of at least one to
two decades must be assumed for each reactor project, probably
substantially more based on historical experience. The knowledge gained
with these facilities needs to be evaluated and incorporated into the
technical design of an eventual prototype reactor.
The expectation, often expressed in public discourse and by developers themselves, that SNR
concepts can make a significant contribution to solving today’s problems in
nuclear technology cannot be considered realistic in view of the current
state of development of these systems and the actually proven and expected
advantages and disadvantages of the individual technology lines.
German Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management
(accessed) 18th Sept 2024
India considers joining Russia, China to build nuclear plant on Moon
Rivals India and China are said to be keen on joining a Russian project to build an atomic power plant for a human base on the Moon.
14/09/2024, By: Pratap Chakravarty, https://www.rfi.fr/en/international/20240914-india-considers-joining-russia-china-to-build-nuclear-plant-on-moon
Russia’s atomic energy corporation Rosatom says the lunar reactor will be built with “minimal human involvement” and deployed around 2036.
According to Russia’s state-owned news agency Tass, Rosatom CEO Alexey Likhachev told a meeting of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok earlier this month that both India and China have shown interest in the venture.
“The task we are working on is the creation of a lunar nuclear power plant with an energy capacity of up to half a megawatt,” Likhachev told the gathering of potential investors.
“Both our Chinese and Indian partners are very interested in collaborating as we lay the groundwork for several international space projects,” the Rosatom chief executive claimed.
Cooperation among rivals
Delhi has not commented on the purported collaboration.
While Russia is its key arms supplier and a partner on several space ventures, Indian media have been surprised by the possibility of India teaming up with China.
Alluding to unresolved border disputes which took India and China to war in 1962 and sporadic clashes in following years, local daily Business Standard called the two countries “foes on Earth, pals on Moon”.
The proposed power plant will be integrated into a wider Chinese-Russian project to set up a base called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), either on lunar soil or in lunar orbit.
ILRS will serve as a fulcrum of scientific research and will be open to all countries and “international partners” after it becomes operational between 2035 and 2045.
But it would require a stable power supply – which only a nuclear reactor can provide, as the Moon’s lengthy lunar nights make solar energy unreliable.
Nasa has been mulling the construction of similar reactors for its own future lunar bases.
India’s space ambitions
The Russian-led project is separate from India’s own ambitions to set up a space station by 2035 and launch a manned mission to the Moon five years later.
Analysts say India, with its ambitions of creating a human colony on the Moon, is actively seeking out potential opportunities to accelerate its space ambitions.
In August 2023, India landed a spacecraft on the Moon and joined a select space-faring club comprising of China, Russia and the United States – the only nations to have ever reached the Earth’s closest celestial object.
India has shortlisted four military pilots to travel on the country’s first manned space flight next year.
The Indian government says the Gaganyaan spacecraft will orbit Earth at an altitude of 400 kilometres and land at sea three days later.
It will also send a humanoid robot into space later this year in line with preparations to land an Indian on lunar soil by 2040.
Air force pilot Rakesh Sharma became India’s first astronaut to go to space in April 1984, when he spent almost eight days on board the Soviet Salyut-7 space station.
Data center emissions probably 662% higher than big tech claims. Can it keep up the ruse?
Emissions from in-house data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple may be 7.62 times higher than official tally
Guardian, Isabel O’Brien, 16 Sept 24
Big tech has made some big claims about greenhouse gas emissions in recent years. But as the rise of artificial intelligence creates ever bigger energy demands, it’s getting hard for the industry to hide the true costs of the data centers powering the tech revolution.
According to a Guardian analysis, from 2020 to 2022 the real emissions from the “in-house” or company-owned data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple are likely about 662% – or 7.62 times – higher than officially reported.
Amazon is the largest emitter of the big five tech companies by a mile – the emissions of the second-largest emitter, Apple, were less than half of Amazon’s in 2022. However, Amazon has been kept out of the calculation above because its differing business model makes it difficult to isolate data center-specific emissions figures for the company.
As energy demands for these data centers grow, many are worried that carbon emissions will, too. The International Energy Agency stated that data centers already accounted for 1% to 1.5% of global electricity consumption in 2022 – and that was before the AI boom began with ChatGPT’s launch at the end of that year.
AI is far more energy-intensive on data centers than typical cloud-based applications. According to Goldman Sachs, a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity to process as a Google search, and data center power demand will grow 160% by 2030. Goldman competitor Morgan Stanley’s research has made similar findings, projecting data center emissions globally to accumulate to 2.5bn metric tons of CO2 equivalent by 2030.
In the meantime, all five tech companies have claimed carbon neutrality, though Google dropped the label last year as it stepped up its carbon accounting standards. Amazon is the most recent company to do so, claiming in July that it met its goal seven years early, and that it had implemented a gross emissions cut of 3%.
“It’s down to creative accounting,” explained a representative from Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, an advocacy group composed of current Amazon employees who are dissatisfied with their employer’s action on climate. “Amazon – despite all the PR and propaganda that you’re seeing about their solar farms, about their electric vans – is expanding its fossil fuel use, whether it’s in data centers or whether it’s in diesel trucks.”
A misguided metric
The most important tools in this “creative accounting” when it comes to data centers are renewable energy certificates, or Recs. These are certificates that a company purchases to show it is buying renewable energy-generated electricity to match a portion of its electricity consumption – the catch, though, is that the renewable energy in question doesn’t need to be consumed by a company’s facilities. Rather, the site of production can be anywhere from one town over to an ocean away………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
2025 and beyond
Even though big tech hides these emissions, they are due to keep rising. Data centers’ electricity demand is projected to double by 2030 due to the additional load that artificial intelligence poses, according to the Electric Power Research Institute.
Google and Microsoft both blamed AI for their recent upticks in market-based emissions…………………………………………..
Whether today’s power grids can withstand the growing energy demands of AI is uncertain. One industry leader – Marc Ganzi, the CEO of DigitalBridge, a private equity firm that owns two of the world’s largest third-party data center operators – has gone as far as to say that the data center sector may run out of power within the next two years.
And as grid interconnection backlogs continue to pile up worldwide, it may be nearly impossible for even the most well intentioned of companies to get new renewable energy production capacity online in time to meet that demand. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/15/data-center-gas-emissions-tech
NuScale Power Is Great. Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Buy It.
The Motley Fool, By Reuben Gregg Brewer – Sep 14, 2024
NuScale Power (SMR 12.17%) is at the leading edge of the nuclear power sector. It is doing great things and making important progress toward its goal of mass-producing small-scale modular nuclear reactors. In a world increasingly looking toward carbon-free energy sources, it is positioning itself well for a bright future. But it won’t be a good fit for every investor. Here’s why you might want to buy the stock and why you might not want to buy it.
NuScale is moving (slowly) toward the nuclear future
Today, nuclear reactors are giant infrastructure assets that cost huge sums of money to build and years of effort to get up and running. NuScale Power is working to upend that inefficient model by offering small, modular reactors that would be built in a factory and then delivered where they are needed.
If one reactor isn’t enough, they can be linked to create a larger reactor………….
Adding to the allure here is a balance sheet with zero debt and $136 million in cash. In other words, it is working from a strong financial position. Also, NuScale Power’s largest shareholder is Fluor (FLR 2.21%), a large construction company.
Clearly, Fluor has its own motives in backing NuScale, like supporting the growth of a new market (small-scale nuclear power plant construction), but it means that NuScale has a strong parent to help it along. That’s showing up right now, too, as a project from Fluor is going to help add revenue to NuScale’s earnings statement, helping the upstart nuclear power company pay for its own product development plans.
There are indeed some good reasons to like the future prospects for NuScale power, including that, as management likes to highlight, it is “the only SMR certified by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.” So, it basically has a leg up on the competition right now.
NuScale Power comes with some big risks
Despite the positives, NuScale Power is not going to be a good fit for every investor. In fact, only aggressive types should really be looking at the stock today. There are a host of reasons.
For starters, NuScale Power’s product plans are approved by U.S. regulators, but not fully approved to the point where it can start building and selling units. So, there’s more work to be done before NuScale Power even has a product to sell. And while it has inked a tentative deal to sell its first units, it can’t actually do that yet. It has to spend even more money on the effort to get the final government nod to start building and delivering a product.
That, in turn, means more red ink. NuScale Power is basically still in start-up mode, so it isn’t unusual that more money would be going out the door than coming in. The revenue from the work with Fluor will help, but the income statement is likely to look ugly for years to come. That’s because it will still have to ramp up its production abilities even after it gets all the approvals it needs. All in all, NuScale Power has a great story, but that story is still in its early chapters.
NuScale Power is an acquired taste
To highlight the risks here, it helps to look at the stock price. Over the past year, the stock has gone from a low of roughly $2 per share to a high of just over $15, and it currently sits at around $7. If you can’t handle price swings like that, you definitely don’t want to own this nuclear power start-up.
That said, investors with a high tolerance for risk might be interested in NuScale power, given that it has achieved a great deal on its path to producing small-scale modular nuclear reactors. But for most investors, the risks are likely too great at this point in time to justify hitting the buy button. https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/09/14/nuscale-power-is-great-heres-why-you-shouldnt-buy/
Why SMRs Are Taking Longer Than Expected to Deploy
Oil Price, By Felicity Bradstock – Sep 14, 2024
“…………………………………………..Several energy companies and startups, such as Terrapower – founded by Bill Gates, are developing SMR technology. The founders of Terrapower decided the private sector needed to take action in developing advanced nuclear energy to meet growing electricity needs, [?] mitigate climate change and lift [?] billions out of poverty.
Several SMR projects are also being backed by government financing. For example, in the U.S., the Department of Energy announced $900 million in funding to accelerate the deployment of Next-Generation Light-Water SMRs. In addition, many companies, such as Microsoft, have signed purchase agreements with energy companies to use SMRs, or are developing their own SMR strategies, to power operations with [?]clean energy.
While there is huge optimism around the deployment of SMR technology, many of the companies developing the equipment have faced a plethora of challenges, which has led to delays and massive financial burdens. At present, only three SMRs are operational in the world, in China and Russia, as well as a test reactor in Japan. Most nuclear energy experts believe SMRs won’t reach the commercial stage in the U.S. until the 2030s.
NuScale cancelled plans to launch an SMR site in Idaho in 2023 after the cost of the project rose from $5 billion to $9 billion owing to inflation and high interest rates. This is a common issue, as companies must predict the costs of a first-of-a-kind project. Once one SMR site is launched and companies can establish tried-and-tested methods of deployment, a second site is expected to be cheaper and faster to develop. A trend that will continue as companies gain more experience. Eric Carr, the president of nuclear operations at Dominion Energy, explained, “Nobody exactly wants to be first, but somebody has to be.” Carr added, “Once it gets going, it’s going to be a great, reliable source of energy for the entire nation’s grid.”
Another issue is access to uranium. Russia is currently the only commercial source of high-assay low- enriched uranium (HALEU), which companies require to power their reactors. In late 2022, Terrapower announced it would be delaying the launch of its first SMR site in Wyoming due to a lack of fuel availability. However, the U.S. is developing its domestic production capabilities. The Biden administration is expected to award over $2 billion in the coming months to uranium enrichment companies to help jumpstart the supply chain. Meanwhile, Terrapower announced this summer that it is finally commencing construction on its Wyoming SMR site and is working with other companies to develop alternate supplies of HALEU. https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Why-SMRs-Are-Taking-Longer-Than-Expected-to-Deploy.html
The future of new nuclear
With new nuclear stagnating and renewables soaring – the sober reality is that nuclear power is just too costly and too late amid crisis
by Dr Paul Dorfman, 10-09-2024 ,
https://bylines.scot/environment/the-future-of-new-nuclear/
Editor’s note: This article has been written by Dr Dorfman and others:
- Prof Steve Thomas (Coordinating Editor, Energy Policy; Emeritus Professor of Energy Policy, University of Greenwich, UK).
- Dr Bernard Laponche (Polytechnicien, Docteur ès Sciences en Physique des Réacteurs Nucléaires, Docteur en Economie de l’Energie, France).
- Prof MV Ramana (Professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global ANairs, University of British Columbia, Canada).
- Tetsunari Iida (Chairperson, Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies, Japan).
- Prof Amory Lovins (Civil Engineering, Stanford University, USA).
Many governments around the world are under enormous pressure to expand funding for nuclear power, usually accompanied by claims that nuclear must or will play a key role in achieving climate change targets. However, the fact is that nuclear technology is in decline, and for good reason. Nuclear energy’s share of global electricity production has decreased from 17.5% (1996) to 9.2% (2023), largely due to the high costs of, and delays to, building and operating nuclear reactors.
Governments must resist pressures from the nuclear industry to fund this declining technology. These resources should be used to fund renewables and energy storage or management options – these can and will deliver climate change objectives more abundantly, reliably, quickly, and cost-effectively.
New nuclear promotional pressure can be seen in three areas: funding for the development of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), financing new large reactors, and paying for life extension of existing reactors as they reach the end of their design life. These pressures on governments can be seen in five of the major nuclear-generating countries: the USA, France, Canada, Japan, and the UK.
Small Modular Reactors (SMRs)
When times get tough, the nuclear industry always redirects attention to new technologies it claims will solve the problems of existing designs. The latest magic bullet is SMRs. Even though no commercial order is even close to being placed, SMRs are presented in the press as quick, cheap, safe, and under construction. Yet, in reality, SMRs are years away from commercial operation, are as expensive as large reactors, and share the same safety, security, and waste problems.
Indeed, the motivation behind SMRs appears to be financial. In recent years the nuclear industry has quietly changed its business model from making and selling products to harvesting subsidies for SMR ‘development’. In Canada, various publicly owned bodies are trying to develop new SMRs using public money, while here, the UK government is running an SMR design competition with a budget of £20bn from the public purse. Ultimately, the underlying problems become obvious – as demonstrated by last year’s collapse of NuScale USA’s SMR design and EDF France’s recent abandonment of its own SMR effort.
Large nuclear reactors
Far from improving, the record of large nuclear reactor construction is in decline with the latest designs being the worst-ever record of delays and cost escalation. The nuclear industry’s recipe is always the same; claim they are learning, claim bulk orders will reduce cost, and try to ‘streamline’ planning, safety and security regulation. These have never worked in the past and won’t work now.
Meanwhile, despite the usual cost and time overruns, the UK government is struggling to build two more reactors using the frail European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) reactor design. In France, EDF (the nationalised French nuclear utility), has plans to develop new large reactors using a modified version of the EPR design – limiting a number of safety and security features – while signalling that it will need even more public financial support.
Ageing nuclear
The world’s reactor stock is ageing. In the USA, about half the operating reactors are beyond their 40-year design life, providing expensive power even though their construction costs have been paid off. There, nuclear can survive in competitive electricity markets only thanks to large new public subsidies. In Japan, 23 reactors remain closed since the Fukushima disaster – their utilities are still trying to reopen them despite these reactors being out of service for 13 years and more. In France, EDF is facing a bill of up to €100bn for mandatory safety upgrades to its ageing nuclear fleet. Globally, these old reactors fall far short of the safety and security standards required for new reactors and should therefore be replaced as soon as possible with non-nuclear options.
Transition to renewables
Nuclear power has never been economic, and its real costs have continued to rise throughout its history. In the past, nuclear survived because electricity was a monopoly, and electric utilities could pass on the cost, no matter how high. The introduction of competitive electricity meant this option was lost, causing the finance market to turn away from new nuclear.
After more than 60 years of commercial history, nuclear is getting further from, not nearer to, being able to survive without massive public subsidies. This is a clear indication that this quintessentially mid-20th century technology is in terminal decline and should be abandoned. Doing so would help protect the climate, not least because an hour of nuclear energy production costs several times more than renewables. In other words, nuclear delivers far less power per pound sterling than renewables.
Nuclear displaces far less fossil fuel than renewables, in terms of cost and delivery time. According to the UK Government’s Regulated Asset Base Model Impact Assessment, new nuclear takes up to 17 years for the planning, regulation and construction of just one station. The more concerned you are about climate change, the more vital it is to buy cost-effective, fast, sure, renewable options rather than expensive, slow, speculative nuclear.
The International Panel on Climate Change has reported that renewables are now ten times more efficient than nuclear at CO2 mitigation. New renewable electricity provided 507 Gigawatts (GW) in 2023, accounting for 86% of global additions of generation capacity, (reaching a total renewable capacity of 3870 GW). The renewable share of total power capacity rose to 43.2%. This extraordinary surge shows that renewables are the only technology available for a rapid transition from fossil fuels. At best, new nuclear adds only as much electricity in a year as renewables add every few days. For example, China is now installing wind and solar capacity equivalent to five new nuclear reactors every week.
New nuclear has no business case
With new nuclear stagnating and renewables soaring, the sober reality is that nuclear power is just too costly and too late for the climate and energy crises.
Far from being needed to back up variable solar and wind power, nuclear plants require even more and costlier support because their failures are larger, longer, more abrupt, and far less predictable. In 2022, half of all French reactors were online with safety faults. Not only is nuclear slow and expensive, but it is also far too inflexible to keep going up and down with the swings of electricity demand. In contrast, the variability of wind and solar technologies can be more easily integrated into evolving, flexible electricity grids capable of adjusting output to fluctuating demand and providing stable power at all times.
New nuclear has no operational need and no business case. The fact is, it’s entirely possible to sustain a reliable power system by using electricity far more efficiently and expanding diverse renewable energy supply in all sectors. This can be achieved together with the rapid growth and modernisation of the electricity grid, fuller and faster interconnection, smart energy management, and swift deployment of today’s cost-effective storage technology.
We need to secure affordable, sustainable, low-carbon energy to power our industry, transport, homes, and businesses. Since all key energy international organisations and institutes agree that renewables will do the heavy lifting to achieve net-zero, the future backbone of the world’s power supply will be clean, green, safe, and cost-effective. Nuclear is none of those.
Flamanville EPR shutdown prompts fresh questions over reactor design
The first attempt to start up the process of nuclear reaction in the European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) at the Flamanville nuclear power plant, situated on France’s Channel Coast close to Jersey and Guernsey, was aborted by an automatic shutdown last week. The process was finally successfully re-engaged four days later, but the failure was just the latest in a catalogue of incidents and delays at the site, now 12 years overdue. For one specialist, the flaws in the design of the reactor, which is the same design as that planned for Hinkley Point in England, are such that it ‘will never function properly’. Jade Lindgaard reports.
Jade Lindgaard, 9 September 2024, Mediapart
French utility giant EDF was an official sponsor of the Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris, and it’s management knows only too well how embarrassing a false start can be. For that was the case with its initial announcement last week about the starting up of the European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) at Flamanville, northern France – the most awaited event in the French nuclear energy industry in recent history……………………………………..(Subscribers only) https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/france/090924/flamanville-epr-shutdown-prompts-fresh-questions-over-reactor-design
Nuclear Fusion’s public-relations drive is obscuring the challenges that lie ahead
EUROfusion’s Research Roadmap, which the UK co-authored when it was still part of ITER, sees fusion as only making a significant contribution to global energy production in the course of the 22nd century. This may be politically unpalatable, but it is a realistic conclusion.
EUROfusion’s Research Roadmap, which the UK co-authored when it was still part of ITER, sees fusion as only making a significant contribution to global energy production in the course of the 22nd century. This may be politically unpalatable, but it is a realistic conclusion.
https://physicsworld.com/a/fusions-public-relations-drive-is-obscuring-the-challenges-that-lie-ahead/, 09 Sep 2024
Guy Matthews says that the focus on public relations is masking the challenges of commercializing nuclear fusion.
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” So stated the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman during a commission hearing into NASA’s Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986, which killed all seven astronauts onboard.
Those famous words have since been applied to many technologies, but they are becoming especially apt to nuclear fusion where public relations currently appears to have the upper hand. Fusion has recently been successful in attracting public and private investment and, with help from the private sector, it is claimed that fusion power can be delivered in time to tackle climate change in the coming decades.
Yet this rosy picture hides the complexity of the novel nuclear technology and plasma physics involved. As John Evans – a physicist who has worked at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, UK – recently highlighted in Physics World, there is a lack of proven solutions for the fusion fuel cycle, which involves breeding and reprocessing unprecedented quantities of radioactive tritium with extremely low emissions.
Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Another stubborn roadblock lies in instabilities in the plasma itself – for example, so-called Edge Localised Modes (ELMs), which originate in the outer regions of tokamak plasmas and are akin to solar flares. If not strongly suppressed they could vaporize areas of the tokamak wall, causing fusion reactions to fizzle out. ELMs can also trigger larger plasma instabilities, known as disruptions, that can rapidly dump the entire plasma energy and apply huge electromagnetic forces that could be catastrophic for the walls of a fusion power plant.
In a fusion power plant, the total thermal energy stored in the plasma needs to be about 50 times greater than that achieved in the world’s largest machine, the Joint European Torus (JET). JET operated at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, UK, until it was shut down in late 2023. I was responsible for upgrading JET’s wall to tungsten/beryllium and subsequently chaired the wall protection expert group.
JET was an extremely impressive device, and just before it ceased operation it set a new world record for controlled fusion energy production of 69 MJ. While this was a scientific and technical tour de force, in absolute terms the fusion energy created and plasma duration achieved at JET were minuscule. A power plant with a sustained fusion power of 1 GW would produce 86 million MJ of fusion energy every day. Furthermore, large ELMs and disruptions were a routine feature of JET’s operation and occasionally caused local melting. Such behaviour would render a power plant inoperable, yet these instabilities remain to be reliably tamed.
Complex issues
Fusion is complex – solutions to one problem often exacerbate other problems. Furthermore, many of the physics and technology features that are essential for fusion power plants and require substantial development and testing in a fusion environment were not present in JET. One example being the technology to drive the plasma current sustainably using microwaves. The purpose of the international ITER project, which is currently being built in Cadarache, France, is to address such issues.
ITER, which is modelled on JET, is a “low duty cycle” physics and engineering experiment. Delays and cost increases are the norm for large nuclear projects and ITER is no exception. It is now expected to start scientific operation in 2034, but the first experiments using “burning” fusion fuel – a mixture of deuterium and tritium (D–T) – is only set to begin in 2039. ITER, which is equipped with many plasma diagnostics that would not be feasible in a power plant, will carry out an extensive research programme that includes testing tritium-breeding technologies on a small scale, ELM suppression using resonant magnetic perturbation coils and plasma-disruption mitigation systems.
The challenges ahead cannot be understated. For fusion to become commercially viable with an acceptably low output of nuclear waste, several generations of power-plant-sized devices could be needed
Yet the challenges ahead cannot be understated. For fusion to become commercially viable with an acceptably low output of nuclear waste, several generations of power-plant-sized devices could be needed following any successful first demonstration of substantial fusion-energy production. Indeed, EUROfusion’s Research Roadmap, which the UK co-authored when it was still part of ITER, sees fusion as only making a significant contribution to global energy production in the course of the 22nd century. This may be politically unpalatable, but it is a realistic conclusion.
The current UK strategy is to construct a fusion power plant – the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) – at West Burton, Nottinghamshire, by 2040 without awaiting results from intermediate experiments such as ITER. This strategy would appear to be a consequence of post-Brexit politics. However, it looks unrealistic scientifically, technically and economically. The total thermal energy of the STEP plasma needs to be about 5000 times greater than has so far been achieved in the UK’s MAST-U spherical tokamak experiment. This will entail an extreme, and unprecedented, extrapolation in physics and technology. Furthermore, the compact STEP geometry means that during plasma disruptions its walls would be exposed to far higher energy loads than ITER, where the wall protection systems are already approaching physical limits.
I expect that the complexity inherent in fusion will continue to provide its advocates, both in the public and private sphere, with ample means to obscure both the severity of the many issues that lie ahead and the timescales required. Returning to Feynman’s remarks, sooner or later reality will catch up with the public relations narrative that currently surrounds fusion. Nature cannot be fooled.
Whoopsie, SpaceX Blew Up Two Rockets and Punched a Massive Hole in One of Earth’s Layers
We learned something, though. By Darren Orf Sep 05, 2024
- In mid-November 2023, a disastrous SpaceX launch, which saw the explosion of not one but two rockets, offered a rare opportunity to study the effects of such phenomena on the ionosphere.
- A study by Russian scientists revealed how this explosion temporarily blew open a hole in the ionosphere stretching from the Yucatan to the southeastern U.S.
- Although far from the first rocket-induced disturbance in the ionosphere, this is one of the first explosive events in the ionosphere to be extensively studied.
November 18, 2023, wasn’t a great day for the commercial spaceflight company SpaceX. While testing its stainless steel-clad Starship, designed to be the company’s chariot to Mars, the spacecraft exploded four minutes after liftoff over the skies of Boca Chica, Texas.
Filling a metal candle with more than a thousand tons of propellant and flinging it into outer space has always run its fair share of risks (and explosions), but this particular event—occurring around 93 miles above the Earth’s surface—allowed scientists to closely study one poorly understood aspect of human spaceflight: What damage do rockets inflict on the Earth’s all-too-important ionosphere?
Lying at the edge of the planet’s atmosphere and outer space some 50 to 400 miles above the surface, the ionosphere is a sea of electrically charged particles vital to global radio and GPS technologies as well as protecting us from harmful solar rays. Because of its important role in the everyday function of modern society, scientists are eager to understand how disturbances in the ionosphere can impact life on Earth, and that’s why team of researchers from institutes and universities in Russia and France analyzed the explosion of the tallest and most powerful rocket ever built. The results were published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Although bad news for SpaceX, the explosion oddly presented a rare opportunity to study aspects of the ionosphere that would, under normal conditions, be too weak to detect……………………………………………………………………………………………..https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a62047078/starship-explosion-ionosphere/
Delays, debts and false promises — inside France’s nuclear nightmare.
The energy giant EDF pledged to rebuild Britain’s atomic power sector,
starting with Hinkley Point. But setbacks to a similar project in Normandy
throw the UK’s nuclear future into doubt.
This week, the one and only EPR
that France has itself tried to build was finally switched on — 12 years
behind schedule. When work got under way on the reactor in Flamanville,
Normandy, in 2007, engineers had promised that it would be up and running
by 2012, at a cost of €3.3 billion (£2.8 billion).
The final bill is estimated to be €19.1 billion and it is not even plugged into the grid
yet. EDF says that will happen “by the end of the autumn”, signalling
yet another delay.
The project has been beset by problems. Safety
inspectors discovered “deviations” in eight welds in the reactor’s
main steam transfer pipe, for instance. It instructed EDF’s welders to do
the job again. Then the Nuclear Safety Authority, the French watchdog, came
across what it called a “manufacturing anomaly in the lower dome and the
vessel closure head”, which are also key components.
It has ordered the replacement of the head, although it agreed to allow the reactor to start
up with the existing one still in place. It will be removed after about 18
months of operation, to coincide with the first fuelling outage. The delays
and cost overruns at Flamanville have been viewed as a national
humiliation. Critics have asked how the project could have gone so wrong,
given France’s proud nuclear tradition — its reactors supplying about
two thirds of the country’s electricity.
Times 4th Sept 2024
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25 June- THE PUKE ON NUKES
Thursday, June 25, 2026
7pm Central Time (8pm ET, 6pm MT, 5pm PT) UTC – 5
From NRC & DOE Deregulation to Techno-Fascist Billionaires Going Nuclear, Plus a Few Songs from Atomic Cabaret REGISTER
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Cuba Is Not a Failed State – It Is a Besieged State
PETITION: “Global Appeal to Endorse Palestinian Right of Return of Refugees”
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