INTERNATIONAL DARK SKY ASSOCIATION vs. FCC AND SPACEXOn December 29, 2022, the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) sued the U.S. Federal Communications Commission over its decision to approve SpaceX’s application for up to 30,000 more low-orbit satellites, in addition to the 12,000 already approved and in process of filling our skies. This is Case No. 22-1337 before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and has not yet been decided by the court.
American plasma physicist Sierra Solter implored the FCC to “please save our night sky… Please, please, don’t take away my stars. To feel that my place of comfort and calm — a starry sky — is being taken away and given to billionaires is suffocating.”
On December 18, 2023, Ms. Solter published a scientific article detailing her fear for our planet. Each of the 42,000 planned Starlink satellites, she wrote, has a design lifespan of only 5 years, after which it will be de-orbited, burned up in the atmosphere, and replaced. She calculated that this will require 23 satellites per day — each the size of an SUV or truck — to be burned up in the atmosphere forever into the future, leaving an enormous amount of toxic chemicals and metallic dust to accumulate in the air we breathe and in the ionosphere.
This is already happening, she wrote, and should be stopped if we value our lives. “Since the beginning of the space industry, approximately 20,000 tons of material have been demolished during reentry… This is over 100 billion times greater than [the mass of] the Van Allen Belts.” She estimated that if 42,000 Starlink satellites are deployed and regularly demolished — let alone the 1,000,000 satellites planned by other companies and governments — “every second the space industry is adding approximately 2,000 times more conductive material than mass of the Van Allen Belts into the ionosphere.”
“Unlike meteorites, which are small and only contain trace amounts of aluminum, these wrecked spacecraft are huge and consist entirely of aluminum and other exotic, highly conductive materials,” she explained in an April 16, 2024 article in The Guardian.
Much of the metallic dust will settle into the ionosphere where, she says, it could act as a magnetic shield, reducing the magnitude of the Earth’s magnetic field in space. If that happens, the atmosphere itself could eventually be destroyed, because the Earth’s magnetic field — the magnetosphere — is what deflects the solar wind and prevents it from stripping away Earth’s atmosphere, as she told Teresa Pulterova in an interview on Space.com.
Other astronomers involved in the litigation before the FCC and now the Court of Appeals include Meredith Rawls with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile; Gary Hunt with Action Against Satellite Light Pollution in the UK; Samantha Lawler at the University of Regina in Canada; Graeme Cuffy of Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; Mark Phillips, President of the Astronomical Society of Edinburgh; Roberto Trotta of the Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology in London; Carrie Nugent, Associate Professor of Computational Physics and Planetary Science at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts; and Cameron Nelson of Tenzing Startup Consultants in Virginia.
Other issues are also mentioned in the appeal. For example, the burned up aluminum produces aluminum oxide, which destroys ozone and contributes to climate change. So does the water vapor, soot, and nitrogen oxides in rocket exhaust.
Cameron Nelson told the FCC that “Humans, not to mention all other animal and plant life, have not given our consent for SpaceX to send the signals it is proposing into our bodies and irrevocably alter us.”
The BroadBand International Legal Action Network (BBILAN) mentioned “RF/EMF radiation from linked base and earth stations” in comments sent to the FCC. Starlink earth stations, also called Gateways, are far more powerful than the Starlink dishes that people are putting on their homes. The (as of March 2024) 2.6 million Starlink dishes each send one signal up to the moving network of satellites above them. All of this traffic is coordinated in space by thousands of lasers linking the satellites to one another, and on the ground by Gateways, which relay the thousands of signals in a large geographic area to and from the satellites. This is what a Gateway with 5 antennas (“radomes”) looks like:
Some Gateways have up to 40 radomes. Each of those domes weighs 1750 kilograms. Each aims a narrow beam at moving satellites. According to FCC filings by SpaceX, each beam can have an effective radiated power of more than 1,000,000 watts, which it can aim as low as 25 degrees above the horizon. If you are a bird you do not want to fly anywhere near a Starlink Gateway. And if you are a human you do not want to live near one either. When a satellite aims its beam containing thousands of signals at a Gateway, that beam is about 10 miles in diameter by the time it reaches the Earth.
At last count there were 277 Starlink Gateways in operation or under construction in the world: 181 in North America and the Caribbean, 26 in South America, 2 in Africa, 26 in Europe, and 42 in Asia and the Pacific.
The FCC maintains a webpage listing thousands of licenses that it has handed out to hundreds of companies to operate both fixed and mobile satellite earth stations in the United States. Some of these stations are far more powerful than the Starlink Gateways. SES’s earth station at Bristol, Virginia emits up to 1,900,000,000 watts of effective radiated power, and it is allowed to aim it as low as 5 degrees above the horizon. SES’s earth station at Brewster, Washington is allowed to emit almost 1,000,000 watts in the actual direction of the horizon! SES owns O3b mPOWER, which is the satellite system that had its first radomes on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship, the ship that had the famous outbreak of disease blamed on COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic.
On 24 April, the Security Council voted on a resolution tabled by the United States and Japan, which reaffirmed our commitment to the Outer Space Treaty. Thirteen Member States voted in favour. One, the Russian Federation, used its veto.
Outer space belongs to all humankind and space technologies are critical to our daily lives. From using maps and checking the weather on our phones, to international shipping and large-scale disaster risk reduction programmes, the far-reaching applications of space technologies are embedded in all of our economies.
For this reason, we need to protect and regulate the safe use of space, while taking appropriate steps to prevent it becoming the backdrop of the next arms race.
“We let a genie out of the bottle when we developed nuclear weapons,” he said Saturday. “AI is somewhat similar — it’s part way out of the bottle.”
The so-called Oracle of Omaha acknowledged to his audience that he has little idea about the tech behind AI, but said he still fears its potential repercussions. His image and voice were recently replicated by an AI-backed tool, he said, and they were so convincing that they could have fooled his own family. Scams using these deep fakes, he added, will likely become increasingly prevalent.
“If I was interested in investing in scamming, it’s going to be the growth industry of all time,” he told the crowd…………………………………………………………………………………..
Forty-two percent of CEOs surveyed at the Yale CEO Summit last summer said AI has the potential to destroy humanity five to 10 years from now, according to survey results shared exclusively with CNN.
“It’s pretty dark and alarming,” Yale professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld said of the findings.
Sonnenfeld said the survey included responses from 119 CEOs from a cross-section of business,…………………………..
The nuclear industry has been offering so-called Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) as an alternative to large reactors as a possible solution to climate change.
SMRs are defined as nuclear reactors with a power output of less than 300 megawatts of electricity, compared to the typically 1000 to 1,500 megawatts power capacity of larger reactors.
Proponents assert that SMRs would cost less to build and thus be more affordable.
This ‘diseconomy of scale’ was demonstrated by the now-terminated proposal to build six NuScale Power SMRs (77 megawatts each) in Idaho in the United States.
The final cost estimate of the project per megawatt was around 250 percent more than the initial per megawatt cost for the 2,200 megawatts Vogtle nuclear power plant being built in Georgia, US.
Previous small reactors built in various parts of America also shut down because they were uneconomical.
The high cost of constructing SMRs on a per megawatt basis translates into high electricity production costs.
According to the 2023 GenCost report from the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the Australian Energy Market Operator, the estimated cost of generating each megawatt-hour of electricity from an SMR is around AUD$400 to AUD$600.
In comparison, the cost of each megawatt-hour of electricity from wind and solar photovoltaic plants is around AUD$100, even after accounting for the cost involved in balancing the variability of output from solar and wind plants.
Building SMRs has also been subject to delays. Russia’s KLT-40 took 13 years from when construction started to when it started generating electricity, instead of the expected three years.
One 2022 study calculated that various radioactive waste streams from SMRs would be larger than the corresponding waste streams from existing light water reactors.
The bottom line is that new reactor designs, such as SMRs, will not rescue nuclear power from its multiple problems. Any energy technology that is beset with such environmental problems and risks cannot be termed sustainable.
Nuclear energy itself has been declining in importance as a source of power: the fraction of the world’s electricity supplied by nuclear reactors has declined from a maximum of 17.5 percent in 1996 down to 9.2 percent in 2022. All indications suggest that the trend will continue if not accelerate.
The decline in the global share of nuclear power is driven by poor economics: generating power with nuclear reactors is costly compared to other low-carbon, renewable sources of energy and the difference between these costs is widening.
Nuclear reactors built during the last decade have all demonstrated a pattern of cost and time overruns in their construction.
In 2011, when the utility company building the reactor sought permission from the American Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it projected a total cost of USD$14 billion, and ‘in-service dates of 2016 and 2017’ for the two units.
In France, the 1,630-megawatt European Pressurised Reactor being built in Flamanville was originally estimated to cost 3 billion euros and projected to start in 2012, but the cost has soared to an estimated 13.2 billion euros and is yet to start operating as of March 2024.
These cost increases and delays confirm the historical pattern identified in a study published in 2014: of the 180 nuclear power projects around the world it studied, 175 had exceeded their initial budgets, by an average of 117 percent, and took 64 percent longer than initially projected.
However, the recent projects are even more extreme in the magnitude of the disconnect between expectations and reality.
The climate crisis is urgent. The world has neither the financial resources nor the luxury of time to expand nuclear power. As physicist and energy analyst Amory Lovins argued: “… to protect the climate, we must save the most carbon at the least cost and in the least time.”
Expanding nuclear energy only makes the climate problem worse.
The money invested in nuclear energy would save far more carbon dioxide if it were instead invested in renewables.
And the reduction in emissions from investing in renewables would be far quicker.
Sophie Groll is a master’s student at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada studying public policy and global affairs. Her focus is on environmental policy, low-carbon energy sources, and net-zero transition discourses.
Could a nuke be used in space? Last month, Russia seemingly took a step toward making the idea a reality. In defiance of a US and Japan-sponsored UN resolution, the country vetoed plans to prevent the development and deployment of off-world nuclear weapons.
Fortunately, the country didn’t actually threaten to launch such a device into space, an act that would violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. However, the UN representative for Russia did call the new resolution a “cynical ploy” and claimed “we are being tricked”.
But what would actually happen if Russia – or any other country – detonated a nuke above Earth? The worrying answer: such an explosion could be as devastating as one on ground level.
What happens if you detonate a nuclear warhead in space?
There are some pretty stark differences between setting off a nuke at ground level and up in orbit.
“When nuclear weapons go off on the ground, a lot of energy is initially released as X-rays,” Dr Michael Mulvihill, vice chancellor research fellow at Teesside University, tells BBC Science Focus.
“Those X-rays superheat the atmosphere, causing it to explode into a fireball – that’s what produces the shockwave and characteristic mushroom cloud that sucks up dirt and produces fallout.”
But in space there is no atmosphere. So no mushroom clouds or shockwaves are formed when you set off a nuke in space. That doesn’t mean the effects are any less terrifying, however.
“In space, a nuclear explosion releases a huge amount of energy as X-rays, gamma rays, intense flows of neutrons and subatomic charged particles. It also produces what’s known as an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP,” Mulvihill says.
An EMP is effectively a burst of electromagnetic energy; when one interacts with the upper atmosphere, it strips electrons from it, blinding radar systems, knocking out communications and wiping out power systems.
After the initial explosion, a belt of radiation wraps around the Earth that persists for months, possibly even years – no one knows for sure. The radiation can damage satellites and, as Mulvihill points out, would pose a serious risk to anyone in space at the time – such as astronauts on the ISS.
“The EMP would knock out power systems on the ISS, effectively destroying the life support systems and everything that circulates the atmosphere within the space station. And I imagine the astronauts would be exposed to high levels of radiation too,” Mulvihill explains.
“It would be highly hostile to life in orbit.”
Space is becoming more and more crowded with satellites – approximately 10,000 satellites are in low earth orbit right now, and tens of thousands more are planned for launch in the coming years. This significantly raises the stakes of unleashing nuclear energy in space, as we become more reliant on the systems we put into orbit.
From ground level, however, other than blowing power grids and disrupting communications, the effects could also be somewhat beautiful.
As charged particles from the explosion interact with the Earth’s magnetic field and the atmosphere, they would cause brilliant auroras, stretching across huge distances that could last for days. So there’s that, at least.
Have nuclear explosions reached space before?
Unsurprisingly, during the Cold War, global superpowers (namely, the US and Russia) tested nukes in just about every scenario imaginable. On land, underwater, in a mountain – you name it, they tried blowing it up.
It comes as no surprise then, that detonating nuclear weapons in space has been done before. In total, the US conducted five space nuclear tests in space; the most famous of which, according to Mulvihill, occurred on 9 July 1962 near(ish) to the Pacific island paradise of Hawaii.
Starfish Prime was launched 400km (250 miles) above Johnston Island and had an explosive power of 1.4 megatons – about 100 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
The EMP was much larger than expected, compromising the classified nature of the test as streetlights and phone lines were knocked out in Hawaii 1,450 km (900 miles) away from the detonation point.
The ensuing red auroras stretched across the Pacific Ocean and lasted for hours.
“At the time there were around 22 satellites in space, of which around a third were knocked out,” Mulvihill says. The casualties included the world’s first TV communication satellite, Telstar 1, which had been a beacon of US technological development until Starfish Prime caused it to prematurely fail after just seven months in orbit.
In the following years, everyone came to their senses a bit and decided that testing nuclear warheads in space constituted a bad idea. Thus, the Outer Space Treaty (OST) was born.
Signed in 1967 by the US, UK and Soviet Union, the OST now has over 100 signatories and designates space as free for all to use for peaceful purposes only. The world breathed a sigh of relief and got on with using space for nice things like astronomy, space stations and WiFi for the next 60 years. So, what’s changed?
How worried should we be?
Rumours of a change in the orbital security situation began swirling when earlier this year the US House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Turner issued a vague warning about a “serious national security threat” posed by Russia.
Following this, news outlets began reporting that the threat pertained to a possible “nuclear weapon in space”.
“It’s certainly concerning, but don’t lose sleep over it,” Mulvihill says. “Russia is still a signatory of the OST, so any sort of weapon in space would be absolutely illegal.”
He also points out that as Starfish Prime demonstrated, nuclear weapons in space are indiscriminate, meaning any detonation would do just as much damage to Russia and its allies as anyone else.
“It wouldn’t just knock out Starlink [the SpaceX system of satellites that provides internet to 75 countries]. It would knock out Chinese satellites and everyone else’s too.”
Another possibility, Mulvihill thinks, is that countries could develop nuclear-powered ‘jammers’. In other words, not a bomb (phew), but something that uses nuclear power to generate a signal that could disrupt, rather than destroy, other satellites.
Ultimately, though, this could all be little more than geopolitical posturing. “Deterrence is all about messaging and trying to persuade somebody that you would do it without ever actually getting there. I think that’s probably the psychology that’s going on with this,” Mulvihill concludes.
A UK Government nuclear quango has dropped Trawsfynydd from the initial rollout of small modular reactors. Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson had said in 2022 that the UK Government are “looking to build another small modular reactor(SMR) on the site at Trawsfynydd”.
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) and Welsh Government owned Cwmni Egino had been working up plans for a new nuclear station close to the former power station, which stopped generating in 1991 and is in the long process of being decommissioned. The location had also previously been tipped by Rolls Royce SMR as a location for an SMR.
But those hopes have been dealt a blow after Great British Nuclear(GBN) said the site would not be considered in its initial rollout phase. It is understood the size of the site and the volume of cooling water counted against it. They also said it may not be able to deploy as quickly as some other sites.
It has though not been ruled out completely and could play a part in the future. A source explained that the initial rollout was looking at locations that could host four or five SMRs, which Traws does not have capacity for.
But once these larger sites are developed a further rollout would consider smaller sites that could host one or two SMRs, with would put the Gwynedd site back in contention.
On Anglesey, UK Government is buying the Wylfa site in a bid to progress nuclear development on the island after two failed attempts for a Wylfa B. This could be used for four or five SMRs or a single large scale nuclear power station…………………………………
Well, we all do know why. The small nuclear reactor (SMR)power industry – moribund though it is, is essential for the nuclear weapons industry – for a number of reasons, but importantly – to put a sweet gloss on that murderous industry.
Never mind that USA’s NuScale’s SMRs were a resounding flop – NuScale is still being touted, along with all the other little nuclear unicorns manouvreing to get tax-payer funding.
The facts remain, and apparently just need to be hammered again and again:
SMRs are not cheap, not safe, do not reduce wastes, are not reliable for off-grid power, are not more efficient fuel users than are large reactors.
The latest hyped -up push for SMRs is in Canada – with the boast that they will benefit indigenous communities . Successful bribery of indigenous people would give a huge boost to the global nuclear lobby, – as indigenous people have historically been the most distrustful of uranium mining and of the whole nuclear fuel chain.
The gimmicks this time are floating nuclear power plants – barges carrying Westinghouse’s eVinci microreactors. These would take over from the current deisal power plants serving remote communities. There are already some solar, wind and battery projects – frowned upon by the nuclear lobby, of course.
These projects are being strongly promoted, but poorly explained to indigenous communities, would bring radiological hazards along Canada’s Northern shoreline
And what really are the chances that these little nuclear power sources would be effective anyway? Recent reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reveal that while 83 small nuclear reactors are “in development”, but there are only 2 in operation.
In both cases, the development of the reactors was a very lengthy and expensive process.
The Chinese SMR HTR-PM- “Between January and December 2022, the reactors operated for only 27 hours out of a possible maximum of 8,760 hours. In the subsequent three months, they seem to have operated at a load factor of around 10 percent.”
For the Russian SMR – “The operating records of the two KLT-40S reactors have been quite poor. According to the IAEA’s PRIS [Power Reactor Information System] database, the two reactors had load factors of just 26.4 and 30.5 percent respectively in 2022, and lifetime load factors of just 34 and 22.4 percent.”
Will Canada’s remote indigenous communitites buy the duplicitous nuclear lobby’s propaganda on SMRs ? And then, subsequently, will the rest of us buy it, despite the facts. I guess that the corporate media will help, – if lies are repeated often enough, people come to believe them.
A new type of theoretical nuclear power plant design called small modular reactors (SMRs) has been in the news of late. Earlier this year, at the 2020 Canadian Nuclear Association conference, Minister of Natural Resources Seamus O’Regan announced that the federal government will release an SMR Action Plan this fall. Ontario, New Brunswick and Saskatchewan have announced their backing and possibly some financial support for the development of these reactors.
Promoters suggest that remote communities and off-grid mining operations are promising markets for SMRs in Canada. These communities and mines pay a lot for electricity because they are reliant on diesel generators, and transporting and storing diesel to these locations can be very expensive. Thus, supporters hope, SMRs might be a way to lower electricity costs and carbon dioxide emissions.
We examined this proposition in detail in a recently published paper and concluded that this argument has two problems. First, the electricity that SMRs produce is far more expensive than diesel-based electricity. Second, even ignoring this problem, the total demand for electricity at these proposed markets is insufficient to justify investing in a factory to manufacture the SMRs.
SMRs have been proposed as a way to deal with many problems associated with large nuclear power plants, in particular the high costs of construction, running to tens of billions of dollars. SMR designs have much in common with large nuclear reactors, including, most basically, their reliance on nuclear fission reactions to produce electricity. But they also differ from large nuclear reactors in two ways. First, they have electricity outputs of less than 300 megawatts (MW) and sometimes as low as a few MW, considerably lower than the outputs of 700 to 1500 MW typical of large nuclear reactors. Second, SMR designs use modular means of manufacturing, so that they need only be assembled, rather than fully constructed, at the plant site. While large reactors that have been constructed in recent years have also adopted modular construction, SMR designers hope to rely more substantially on these techniques.
A standard metric used to evaluate the economics of different energy choices is called the levelized cost of energy (LCOE). We calculated that the LCOE for SMRs could be over ten times greater than the LCOE for diesel-based electricity. The cheapest options are hybrid generation systems, with wind or solar meeting a part of the electricity demand and diesel contributing the rest.
Why this high cost? The primary problem is that the small outputs from SMRs run counter to the logic of economies of scale. Larger reactors are more cost-efficient because they produce more electricity for each unit of material (such as concrete and steel) they use and for the number of operators they employ. SMR proponents argue that they can make up for this through the savings from mass manufacture at factories and the learning that comes with manufacturing many reactors. The problem is that building a factory requires a sizable market, sometimes referred to as an order book. Without a large number of orders, the investment needed to build the factory will not be justified.
We estimated the potential market for SMRs at remote mines and communities in Canada. We drew primarily upon two databases produced by Natural Resources Canada regarding mining areas and remote communities. As of 2018, there were 24 remote mining projects that could be candidates for SMR deployment within the next decade. Currently, these projects use diesel generators with a total installed capacity of 617 MW. For remote communities, we calculated a fossil fuel (primarily diesel) generation capacity of 506 MW. But many of these communities had demands that were too low for even the smallest-output SMR under review at the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.
Even if all these potential buyers want to adopt SMRs for electricity supply, without regard to the economic or noneconomic factors weighing against the construction of nuclear reactors, the combined demand would likely be much less than 1000 MW. The minimum demand required to justify the cost of producing SMRs would be three to seven times higher.
Furthermore, we concluded that the economics of SMRs don’t compete when compared with other alternatives. The cost of electricity from SMRs was found to be much higher than the cost of wind or solar, or even of the diesel supply currently used in the majority of these mines and communities.
Of course, our estimates for the LCOEs of different sources are dependent on various assumptions. We tried varying these assumptions within reasonable limits and found that the main result — that electricity from SMRs is far more expensive than the corresponding costs of generating electricity using diesel, wind, solar or some combination thereof — remains valid. All else being equal, the assumed capital cost of constructing a SMR would have to decline by over 95 percent to be competitive with a wind-diesel hybrid system. The limited experience with SMRs that are being built around the world suggests that construction costs will be higher, not lower, than advocates promise.
Meanwhile, renewables and storage technologies have seen substantial cost declines over the past decades. Recent estimates place wind, solar and hybrid systems at costs competitive with diesel power. Successful demonstrations suggest that renewable hybrid applications are becoming increasingly feasible for heavy industry, and the implementation of numerous numerous projects in northern communities suggests a high level of social acceptance. Many northern and, in particular, Indigenous communities have an interest in self-determined decision-making and maintaining a good relationship with the land. In June 2019, for example, the Anishinabek Chiefs-in-Assembly, representing 40 First Nations across Ontario, unanimously expressed opposition to SMRs. Grand Council Chief Glen Hare announced that the Anishinabek Nation is “vehemently opposed to any effort to situate SMRs within our territory.”
Instead of focusing on SMRs, policy-makers should bolster support for other renewable generation technologies as key mechanisms to reduce carbon emissions and align with community values.
There are literally dozens of small modular reactor (SMR) and microreactor designs being developed by different companies around the world, and some of the work has been going on for decades. Yet, only two designs have actually been built and put into commercial operation. POWER takes a closer look at both of them.
Many nuclear power supporters have long thought small modular reactors (SMRs) would revolutionize the industry. Advocates expect SMRs to shorten construction schedules and bring costs down through modularization and factory construction. They often cite numerous other benefits that make SMRs seem like no-brainers, and yet, only two SMR designs have ever been built and placed in commercial operation.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) publishes booklets biennially on the status of SMR technology. In the IAEA’s most recent booklet, it notes 25 land-based water-cooled SMRs and another eight marine-based water-cooled designs are under development globally. It also lists 17 high-temperature gas-cooled SMRs, eight liquid-metal-cooled fast-neutron-spectrum SMRs, 13 molten-salt SMRs, and 12 microreactors. If you do the math, that’s 83 SMR designs under development, but only the KLT-40S and HTR-PM are actually operational.
KLT-40S
The KLT-40S is a pressurized water reactor (PWR) that was developed in Russia. It is an advanced version of the KLT-40 reactor, which has been used in nuclear-powered icebreakers. The first KLT-40S units, and, to date, the only two of these units to enter commercial operation, were deployed in the Akademik Lomonosov—the world’s first purpose-built floating nuclear power plant (FNPP, Figure 1 on original).
Main Design Features.………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Deployment Details.…………………………….
Construction and testing of the FPU was completed in 2017 at the Baltic shipyard. In May 2018, the vessel was towed 4,000 kilometers (km), around Finland and Sweden, to Murmansk, completing the first leg of its journey to Pevek. Fuel loading was completed in Murmansk in October 2018. First criticality was achieved in November 2018, then in August 2019, the vessel embarked on the second leg of its journey—a distance of 4,700 km—towed by two tugboats to the Arctic port town of Pevek, where it was connected to the grid on Dec. 19, 2019. Akademik Lomonosov was fully commissioned on May 22, 2020, and it currently provides heat to the town of Pevek and supplies electricity to the regional Chaun-Bilibino power system.
Main Design Features.…………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Deployment Details.……………………………………………………………………. The civil work for the nuclear island buildings was completed in 2016 with the first of two reactor pressure vessels installed in March that year. The fuel plant reached its expected production capacity in 2017. Startup commissioning and testing of the primary circuit were finished by the end of 2020. The HTR-PM achieved first criticality in September 2021, and was ultimately grid connected on Dec. 20, 2021.
Spotty Results at Best
While it is laudable that these SMRs—the KLT-40S and HTR-PM—have been placed in commercial operation, their performance since entering service has come under fire. In The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2023 (WNISR), a Mycle Schneider Consulting Project, co-funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety, and Consumer Protection, it says both designs have operated at low capacity factors recently.
Concerning the Chinese HTR-PM, the WNISR says, “Between January and December 2022, the reactors operated for only 27 hours out of a possible maximum of 8,760 hours. In the subsequent three months, they seem to have operated at a load factor of around 10 percent.” The Russian units’ performance has been nearly as dismal. “The operating records of the two KLT-40S reactors have been quite poor. According to the IAEA’s PRIS [Power Reactor Information System] database, the two reactors had load factors of just 26.4 and 30.5 percent respectively in 2022, and lifetime load factors of just 34 and 22.4 percent. The reasons for the mediocre power-generation performance remain unclear,” the report says.
Meanwhile, the promises of shortened timelines and lower costs were not borne out by these projects. “The experience so far in constructing these two SMRs as well as estimates for reactor designs like NuScale’s SMR show that these designs are also subject to the historical pattern of cost escalations and time overruns. Those cost escalations do make it even less likely that SMRs will become commercialized, as the collapse of the Carbon Free Power Project involving NuScale reactors in the United States illustrated,” the WNISR says………….. https://www.powermag.com/a-closer-look-at-two-operational-small-modular-reactor-designs/
Susan O’Donnell, 2 May 24 To clarify, there’s currently no enrichment plant in the US that produces HALEU (fuel enriched between 5 and 20 percent), as far as I’m aware. Any nuclear fuel enrichment happening in the U.S. would be for the existing light-water reactors that use fuel enriched to less than 5 percent. My take: the idea that the ARC reactor design could change from using HALEU fuel to low enriched uranium is frankly ridiculous. It would not be the same reactor at all, it would be a completely different design.
Quote: “It’s not something that can’t be fixed,” Sawyer said.
The article above is about the shortage of HALEU, the fuel currently only available in Russia that is needed by the designs of advanced reactors cooled by liquids other than water. The design for the ARC reactor slated for Point Lepreau in New Brunswick requires HALEU.
New Brunswick’s Telegraph Journal:
ARC might need to redesign its SMR technology: former president
Norm Sawyer points to other companies around the world that pivoted quickly to address the lack of enriched uranium available
Adam Huras Published May 01, 2024
The former president and CEO of ARC Clean Technology says the company might need to redesign its small modular nuclear reactor technology.
Norm Sawyer points to other companies around the world that pivoted quickly to address the lack of enriched uranium available.
Brunswick News reported earlier this week that ARC is still in search of a new enriched uranium supplier, after it originally planned to buy from Russia.
Meanwhile, Energy Minister Mike Holland says he has been assured that “there’s a queue for North American enriched uranium and we’re in it,” maintaining the company that the Higgs government spent $20 million on won’t be shut out.
Firms around the world developing a new generation of small nuclear reactors to help cut carbon emissions have been forced to face a big problem: The only company that sells the enriched fuel they need is Russian.
“It’s not only ARC, the industry in general is really dealing with the fallout of the war,” Sawyer said, who is now a nuclear consultant through his own firm. “Russia is the main supplier of HALEU around the world.”
High-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) is an integral component of the company’s ARC-100 sodium-cooled fast reactor, as well as a number of other advanced reactors currently in development attempting to achieve smaller designs.
But it’s not as simple as finding that enriched uranium closer to home.
While Canada mines uranium – there are currently five uranium mines and mills operating in Canada, all located in northern Saskatchewan – it does not have uranium enrichment plants.
The U.S. opened its first and only enrichment plant last year, operated by Centrus Energy in Ohio, amid a federal push to find a solution to the Russia problem.
It remains the only facility in the U.S. licensed to enrich uranium.
It currently has contracts with two American companies pursuing SMR technology, although it says it could rapidly expand production with federal investment.
One of those, TerraPower, a nuclear reactor developer founded by Bill Gates, has said Russia’s invasion would mean a delay to the deployment of its Natrium reactor by at least two years.
Other companies have pivoted.
Sawyer pointed to Denmark’s Seaborg Technologies that announced last year it would be changing its proposed SMR fuel from HALEU to low-enriched uranium “due to the risks associated with developing a sufficient supply.”
That resulted in design changes.
It was a move the company said was necessary to meet its planned timeline to see a first group of SMRs ready by 2028……………………………………………………..
What I’ve been told that there are a number of things taking place to ensure that there’s a queue for North American enriched uranium and we’re in it,” Holland said.
“That’s what I’ve been told and told definitively.”
Holland said the U.S. has a “vested interest” in aiding Canada and its SMR technology because Canada has the uranium they’re going to need as well.
“There are people saying ‘hey, if Canada is going to be your large supplier we’re going to have to work out, quid pro quo, that we don’t get excluded,’” he said.
Holland maintained that “our toe is stuck in the door so we have an opportunity to be part of that supply chain………………………………..
Sawyer said making a change to a different fuel means components will need to be redesigned.
“Obviously, you design a reactor for the type of fuel you’re going to use so there’s obviously some work to be done to realign the reactor core to the new type of fuel,” he said. “Is it easy? I’m not sure if it’s easy. There is some work to be done, there’s no doubt.”
Sawyer added that there’s two components to SMRs: the reactor design, construction and deployment, and then the fuel.
“Any delay on either one of those sides of the equation could cause a delay later on,” he said.
On December 29, 2022, the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) sued the U.S. Federal Communications Commission over its decision to approve SpaceX’s application for up to 30,000 more low-orbit satellites, in addition to the 12,000 already approved and in process of filling our skies. This is Case No. 22-1337 before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and has not yet been decided by the court.
American plasma physicist Sierra Solter implored the FCC to “please save our night sky… Please, please, don’t take away my stars. To feel that my place of comfort and calm — a starry sky — is being taken away and given to billionaires is suffocating.”
On December 18, 2023, Ms. Solter published a scientific article detailing her fear for our planet. Each of the 42,000 planned Starlink satellites, she wrote, has a design lifespan of only 5 years, after which it will be de-orbited, burned up in the atmosphere, and replaced. She calculated that this will require 23 satellites per day — each the size of an SUV or truck — to be burned up in the atmosphere forever into the future, leaving an enormous amount of toxic chemicals and metallic dust to accumulate in the air we breathe and in the ionosphere
This is already happening, she wrote, and should be stopped if we value our lives. “Since the beginning of the space industry, approximately 20,000 tons of material have been demolished during reentry… This is over 100 billion times greater than [the mass of] the Van Allen Belts.” She estimated that if 42,000 Starlink satellites are deployed and regularly demolished — let alone the 1,000,000 satellites planned by other companies and governments — “every second the space industry is adding approximately 2,000 times more conductive material than mass of the Van Allen Belts into the ionosphere.”
“Unlike meteorites, which are small and only contain trace amounts of aluminum, these wrecked spacecraft are huge and consist entirely of aluminum and other exotic, highly conductive materials,” she explained in an April 16, 2024 article in The Guardian.
Much of the metallic dust will settle into the ionosphere where, she says, it could act as a magnetic shield, reducing the magnitude of the Earth’s magnetic field in space. If that happens, the atmosphere itself could eventually be destroyed, because the Earth’s magnetic field — the magnetosphere — is what deflects the solar wind and prevents it from stripping away Earth’s atmosphere, as she told Teresa Pulterova in an interview on Space.com.
Other astronomers involved in the litigation before the FCC and now the Court of Appeals include Meredith Rawls with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile; Gary Hunt with Action Against Satellite Light Pollution in the UK; Samantha Lawler at the University of Regina in Canada; Graeme Cuffy of Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; Mark Phillips, President of the Astronomical Society of Edinburgh; Roberto Trotta of the Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology in London; Carrie Nugent, Associate Professor of Computational Physics and Planetary Science at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts; and Cameron Nelson of Tenzing Startup Consultants in Virginia.
Other issues are also mentioned in the appeal. For example, the burned up aluminum produces aluminum oxide, which destroys ozone and contributes to climate change. So does the water vapor, soot, and nitrogen oxides in rocket exhaust.
Cameron Nelson told the FCC that “Humans, not to mention all other animal and plant life, have not given our consent for SpaceX to send the signals it is proposing into our bodies and irrevocably alter us.”
The BroadBand International Legal Action Network (BBILAN) mentioned “RF/EMF radiation from linked base and earth stations” in comments sent to the FCC. Starlink earth stations, also called Gateways, are far more powerful than the Starlink dishes that people are putting on their homes. The (as of March 2024) 2.6 million Starlink dishes each send one signal up to the moving network of satellites above them. All of this traffic is coordinated in space by thousands of lasers linking the satellites to one another, and on the ground by Gateways, which relay the thousands of signals in a large geographic area to and from the satellites. This is what a Gateway with 5 antennas (“radomes”) looks like:
Some Gateways have up to 40 radomes. Each of those domes weighs 1750 kilograms. Each aims a narrow beam at moving satellites. According to FCC filings by SpaceX, each beam can have an effective radiated power of more than 1,000,000 watts, which it can aim as low as 25 degrees above the horizon. If you are a bird you do not want to fly anywhere near a Starlink Gateway. And if you are a human you do not want to live near one either. When a satellite aims its beam containing thousands of signals at a Gateway, that beam is about 10 miles in diameter by the time it reaches the Earth.
Robin is a subscriber who lives in a remote area of Idaho less than 3 miles from the Starlink Gateway in Colburn. She writes about effects on her family and her animals…………………………….Robin knows many people in her area who are similarly affected. She adds that “when we first moved here in 2019 we had A LOT of birds. We now have a silent spring, it’s like a dead zone.
At last count there were 277 Starlink Gateways in operation or under construction in the world: 181 in North America and the Caribbean, 26 in South America, 2 in Africa, 26 in Europe, and 42 in Asia and the Pacific.
The FCC maintains a webpage listing thousands of licenses that it has handed out to hundreds of companies to operate both fixed and mobile satellite earth stations in the United States. Some of these stations are far more powerful than the Starlink Gateways. SES’s earth station at Bristol, Virginia emits up to 1,900,000,000 watts of effective radiated power, and it is allowed to aim it as low as 5 degrees above the horizon. SES’s earth station at Brewster, Washington is allowed to emit almost 1,000,000 watts in the actual direction of the horizon! SES owns O3b mPOWER, which is the satellite system that had its first radomes on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship, the ship that had the famous outbreak of disease blamed on COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic
1. SMRs are not more economical than large reactors.
2. SMRs are not generally safer or more secure than large light-water reactors.
3. SMRs will not reduce the problem of what to do with radioactive waste.
4. SMRs cannot be counted on to provide reliable and resilient off-the-grid power for facilities, such as data centers, bitcoin mining, hydrogen or petrochemical production.
5. SMRs do not use fuel more efficiently than large reactors.
Even casual followers of energy and climate issues have probably heard about the alleged wonders of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). This is due in no small part to the “nuclear bros”: an active and seemingly tireless group of nuclear power advocates who dominate social media discussions on energy by promoting SMRs and other “advanced” nuclear technologies as the only real solution for the climate crisis. But as I showed in my 2013 and 2021 reports, the hype surrounding SMRs is way overblown, and my conclusions remain valid today.
Unfortunately, much of this SMR happy talk is rooted in misinformation, which always brings me back to the same question: If the nuclear bros have such a great SMR story to tell, why do they have to exaggerate so much?
What are SMRs?
SMRs are nuclear reactors that are “small” (defined as 300 megawatts of electrical power or less), can be largely assembled in a centralized facility, and would be installed in a modular fashion at power generation sites. Some proposed SMRs are so tiny (20 megawatts or less) that they are called “micro” reactors. SMRs are distinct from today’s conventional nuclear plants, which are typically around 1,000 megawatts and were largely custom-built. Some SMR designs, such as NuScale, are modified versions of operating water-cooled reactors, while others are radically different designs that use coolants other than water, such as liquid sodium, helium gas, or even molten salts.
To date, however, theoretical interest in SMRs has not translated into many actual reactor orders. The only SMR currently under construction is in China. And in the United States, only one company—TerraPower, founded by Microsoft’s Bill Gates—has applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for a permit to build a power reactor (but at 345 megawatts, it technically isn’t even an SMR).
The nuclear industry has pinned its hopes on SMRs primarily because some recent large reactor projects, including Vogtle units 3 and 4 in the state of Georgia, have taken far longer to build and cost far more than originally projected. The failure of these projects to come in on time and under budget undermines arguments that modern nuclear power plants can overcome the problems that have plagued the nuclear industry in the past.
Developers in the industry and the US Department of Energy say that SMRs can be less costly and quicker to build than large reactors and that their modular nature makes it easier to balance power supply and demand. They also argue that reactors in a variety of sizes would be useful for a range of applications beyond grid-scale electrical power, including providing process heat to industrial plants and power to data centers, cryptocurrency mining operations, petrochemical production, and even electrical vehicle charging stations.
Here are five facts about SMRs that the nuclear industry and the “nuclear bros” who push its message don’t want you, the public, to know.
Our ozone is pennies thick – and soon we’ll put at least an Eiffel Tower’s worth of metallic ash into the ionosphere every year.
Adead spacecraft the size of a truck ignites with plasma and pulverizes into dust and litter as it rips through the ionosphere and atmosphere. This is what happens to internet service satellites during re-entry. When the full mega-constellation of satellites is deployed in the 2030s, companies will do this every hour because satellite internet requires thousands of satellites to constantly be replaced. And it could compromise our atmosphere or even our magnetosphere.
Space entrepreneurs are betting on disposable satellites as key to a new means of wealth. There are currently nearly 10,000 active satellites and companies are working as fast as possible to get tens of thousands more into orbit – for a projected 1m in the next three to four decades.
“We could get to 100,000 satellites in 10 to 15 years,” Dr Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told me. Those satellites power hyper-connected internet services and may turn somebillionaires into trillionaires – at the cost of shrouding the planet with toxic trash.
The problem is that space, contrary to popular belief, isn’t really a giant, self-cleaning void. Space holds systems like the magnetosphere that keep us alive and supplied with oxygen by protecting our atmosphere. The space around our planet is a plasma cocoon that is cradling life.
It is easy to assume that the magnetosphere is too vast and robust for humanity to ever have any impact on it, but I don’t think that’s true.I’m a plasma physicist at the intersection of aerospace and physics and the author of recent research in peer-review that found that the space trash generated by dead and dying commercial satellites could compromise our ionosphere or magnetosphere, also known as our planet’s plasma environment.
After studying the problem for over a year, I have no doubt that the sheer vastness of this pollution is going to disrupt our delicate plasma environment in one way or another. Yet few people are discussing this potential crisis – in part,I suspect, because so much scientific research about space is intertwined with commercial space ventures, which have a vested interest in avoiding these questions.
Upon investigating just how much dust in the form of satellite and rocket debris the space industry has dumped into the ionosphere during re-entry, I was alarmed to find that it is currently multiple Eiffel Tower’s worth of metallic ash. I wouldn’t have even been able to calculate that at all without a scientist’s personally run website. Our ozone is mere pennies thick, and soonwe will be putting at least an Eiffel Tower’s worth of metallic asha year directly into the ionosphere. And all of that will stay there, indefinitely.
How could we possibly think that burning trash in our atmosphere 24/7 is going to be fine? Although some study is being devoted to stratospheric loading – the phenomenon of satellite and rocket chemicals saturating the atmosphere with ozone-depleting alumina – humanity might also be forcing “magnetospheric loading” on our planet, as well. No one else is currently studying the pollution of the magnetosphere except for myself.
We don’t even have a clear estimate of the mass of all regions in the magnetosphere, yet we are going to load it with the wreckage of countless giant spacecraft. These SUV-size satellites will soon be burning in the atmosphere on an hourly basis. Unlike meteorites, which are small and only contain trace amounts of aluminum, these wrecked spacecraft arehuge andconsist entirely of aluminum and other exotic, highly conductive materials. And highly conductive materials can create charging effects and act as a magnetic shield.
If all of these conductive materials accumulate into a huge layer of trash, it could trap or deflect all or parts of our magnetic field. The Earth is a ball magnet that we’re surrounding with fast-moving metal trash. And so far, extrapolating from open-source data, the current trash in the ionosphere shows an apparent human-made electrostatic signature. It is known that individual spacecraft can perturb their environment with plasma wakes; imagine how 100,000 or more of them and their associated trash could perturb the magnetosphere.
Even if we only induce ionospheric perturbations regionally – say, in spaceflight regions – then it could cause holes above the ozone. This in turn, could allow atmospheric stripping,which could erode our atmosphere over time and put the planet at risk of losing habitability.
Low Earth orbit is being promoted as a “destination and economy” for satellites and even low-gravity space hotels (which seem to be perpetually “coming soon” and then canceled). People like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos repeatedly state that space is the key to human longevity. But what if it isthe opposite? What if the space industry is the means to our pale blue dot’s demise? And what if all of this pollution that space entrepreneurs are creating is happening in such a multidisciplinary, inaccessible, un-studied way that we don’t even understand the risk?
Our magnetosphere keeps us alive. It should be protected as an Earth environment. Instead, we’re filling it with electronic waste so that billionaires can trade electromagnetic signals for dollars they really don’t need.
“Our technical civilization poses a real danger to itself,” Carl Sagan warned in his 1997 book Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium. The magnetosphere is our first line of defense against an otherwise lethal solar system, andany pollution of it should be intensely studied and monitored. Indeed, if an asteroid the size of a Starlink satellite was headed towards Earth, it would activate planetary defense monitoring. But since it’s a human-made object impacting the atmosphere, we don’t monitor it at all.
Spacecompanies need to stop launching satellitesif they can’t provide studies that show that their pollution will not harm the stratosphere and magnetosphere. Until this pollution is studied further, we should all reconsidersatellite internet.
Sierra Solter is a plasma physicist, engineer, and inventor who studies the intersection of heliophysics and aerospace
by Jov Onsat, Rigzone Staff, Thursday, May 02, 2024
The French government has received clearance from the European Commission to provide Electricité de France (EDF) a further EUR 300 million ($321.6 million) for the front-end design phase of a project to develop small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs).
The project by Nuward, the nuclear energy-focused subsidiary of state-owned EDF, aims to come up with a design that has a power output of up to 300 megawatts electric.
The front-end design is the third phase of the five-phase project. The Commission previously approved EUR 50 million ($53.6 million) in French state aid for the second phase, which focused on gathering new knowledge for SMR design and construction.
Under the measure, the aid will take the form of a direct grant of up to EUR 300 million that will cover the R&D [research and development] project until early 2027”, the Commission said in a statement announcing clearance for the new funding from European Union competition regulations. “The measure will support Nuward in sizing the modules and components of the SMRs and validating their integration in the SMRs by means of numerical simulators and laboratory tests.
“Nuward will also carry out industrialization studies relating to the modular design and mass production of SMRs. Finally, the measure will also support Nuward in the preparation of the required safety demonstrations for the approval of the project by the national nuclear safety authorities”.
The Commission recently launched an alliance to accelerate the development of SMRs, following moves by the United Kingdom and United States to commercially scale up the advanced nuclear generation technology.
The public-private coalition aims to come up with a working model by the 2030s. “The Alliance targets a wide range of SMR stakeholders including vendors, utilities, specialized nuclear companies, financial institutions, research organizations, training centers and civil society organizations”, the Commission said in a press release February 9 announcing the initiative…………………..
Earlier the UK government announced an investment of GBP 300 million ($376 million) for the domestic production of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), challenging Russia’s status as the only commercial manufacturer of the fuel for SMRs. The UK previously funded a program by Rolls-Royce PLCs to design an SMR model, which is currently awaiting approval for deployment in Poland, as announced by the company last week—though the product is still undergoing the regulatory design assessment in the UK.
The UK will become the first country in Europe to launch a high-tech HALEU nuclear fuel program, strengthening supply for new nuclear projects and driving Putin further out of global energy markets”, the UK Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) said in a news release January 7 announcing the HALEU funding.
The DESNZ said GBP 10 million ($12.5 million) has also been allotted to develop sites and promote skills development for the production of other “advanced nuclear fuels”.
The International Atomic Energy Agency says HALEU is only produced in the U.S. and Russia but only the latter makes the fuel at a commercial scale. SMRs need HALEU, which contains five to 20 percent of uranium-235, beyond the five percent level that fuels most of today’s nuclear power plants, according to the United Nations nuclear watchdog.
The UK move was followed by an announcement by the US Department of Energy (DOE) offering contracts worth up to $500 million in total for HALEU production, besides funding offers for SMR design development. “Currently, HALEU is not commercially available from U.S.-based suppliers, and boosting domestic supply could spur the development and deployment of advanced reactors in the United States”, the DOE noted in a media statement January 9 announcing the funding offer.
Rolls-Royce has scaled back plans to build two new factories for its small modular reactor (SMR) programme in the UK, following delays to a government design competition.
The FTSE 100 company had originally proposed one factory to make heavy pressure vessels for its SMRs and another to make the building blocks of the reactors.
It had drawn up a final shortlist of locations for the pressure vessels factory, including the International Advanced Manufacturing Park on the outskirts of Sunderland, Teesworks in Redcar and the Gateway industrial park in Deeside, Wales.
But on Friday Rolls confirmed it no longer intends to proceed with that plan because there is no longer time to build the factory and make the first pressure vessels for the early 2030s, when it hopes to complete its first SMRs.
It is still proceeding with work to build the second factory, however.
The company had been waiting for the outcome of an ongoing SMR design competition in the UK – first announced by the Government in 2015 – before it made a decision on the pressure vessel plant.
But that competition has been repeatedly delayed, with the arms length body Great British Nuclear only formally created last summer and winners not due to be announced until this June at the earliest.
Instead the engineering giant will now buy its heavy pressure vessels from a third party supplier.
The large, metal components sit at the heart of nuclear reactors and must be able to withstand extremely high temperatures and pressures. They are only made by a select group of companies, partly due to the need for specialist welding techniques.
Among their number is now Sheffield Forgemasters, which was nationalised by the Ministry of Defence in 2021.
Earlier this month, Sheffield became the sole UK company to gain the qualifications needed to make SMR reactor vessel components.
Despite having shelved its plans for a heavy pressure vessel factory, Rolls is still pressing ahead with plans to build its second factory, which will build the modular units that make up its SMRs.
It is understood that sites shortlisted for the pressure vessel factory will also be contenders for the second plant but no decisions have been made.
On Friday, a spokesman for Rolls-Royce SMR confirmed the company had now “prioritised work on our modules assembly and test facility”, adding: “Our efforts are focused on identifying the best site to support our deployment at pace.”
The company has also not ruled out reviving its plan for a heavy pressure vessel factory at some point in the future, so long as it manages to build up a healthy pipeline of orders.
A Government spokesman said: “Our world leading SMR competition aims to be the fastest of its kind, helping secure billions in investment for the UK, meaning cleaner, cheaper and more secure energy in the long-term.”
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