Here’s the other thing we would have discovered: SNC Lavalin does not need to lobby government at all. It has tentacles that reach deeply into our civil service. What SNC Lavalin wants, SNC Lavalin gets.
SNC-Lavalin got the sweetheart deal of all time when then-prime minister Stephen Harper ‘sold’ Atomic Energy of Canada to SNC-Lavalin. Over the years, AECL had received at least $20-billion in public funds for the bargain basement price of $15-million, writes Green Party Leader Elizabeth May. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
I am cursed with an excellent memory which makes me hang on to the unanswered questions. It also makes me want more sunlight, more inquiries, and more answers.
I wish we had had that public inquiry into the SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. scandal and I wish the RCMP had not dropped the matter.
My hunch is that we would have discovered two important things.
In December 2018, then-PCO clerk Michael Wernick did not inappropriately pressure former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould at the request of the prime minister. Wernick inappropriately pressured Wilson-Raybould as a favour to his old boss, former clerk of PCO, Kevin Lynch, then chair of the board of SNC Lavalin. I may be quite wrong, but this scenario better fits the facts. Wernick denied he inappropriately pressured Wilson-Raybould and said he told Lynch he would have to talk directly to Wilson-Raybould or to the director of public prosecutions about the matter. SNC Lavalin said Lynch requested a call with Wernick to convey that the company remained open to a deferred prosecution agreement.
But here’s the other thing we would have discovered. SNC-Lavalin does not need to lobby government at all. It has tentacles that reach deeply into our civil service. What SNC-Lavalin wants, SNC-Lavalin gets.
This is a statement that remains true whether the occupant of the Prime Minister’s Office is Liberal or Conservative.
SNC-Lavalin got the sweetheart deal of all time when then-prime minister Stephen Harper “sold” Atomic Energy of Canada to SNC-Lavalin. Over the years, AECL had received at least $20-billion in public funds for the bargain basement price of $15-million.
SNC-Lavalin is the driving force behind the new mania for so-called “small modular reactors”—SMRs.
The two SMRs slated for New Brunswick—ARC and Moltex—keep their promotional materials free of SNC-Lavalin references. You have to dig.
Here, for example, is the lead from this industry press release: “Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL), Canada’s premier nuclear science and technology organization, is pleased to announce that it has entered into a collaboration agreement with ARC Clean Energy Canada (ARC Canada), a New Brunswick-based team working to develop and licence its sodium-cooled advanced small modular reactor (SMR) technology.”
Looking for details in the release, you get this: Canadian Nuclear Laboratories is a world leader in nuclear science and technology offering unique capabilities and solutions across a wide range of industries. Actively involved with industry-driven research and development in nuclear, transportation, clean technology, energy, defence, security and life sciences, we provide solutions to keep these sectors competitive internationally.
It’s the same thing with the Moltex announcement. You have to go to SNC-Lavalin’s website to find its central role in CNL and CNEA: “Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) is a world leader in nuclear science and technology. … We (SNC-Lavalin) are a majority partner in a consortium which manages and operates CNL, which is currently managing its ageing infrastructure and renewing its laboratories. This investment will ensure the organization stays at the top of its field while strengthening Canada’s status in the international scientific community.”
Looking at other SMR announcements, such as the Bruce Power BWRX-300 small modular reactor (SMR) at Darlington, Ont., SNC Lavalin is again a key player with partners Ontario Power Generation (OPG), GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH), and Aecon.
Thanks to The Hill Times for publishing Ole Hendrickson’s critical research in December 2020. That article established the links between SNC-Lavalin, its commercial partners, and the nuclear weapons industry.
“In 2015, the Harper government contracted a multinational consortium called Canadian National Energy Alliance—now comprised of two U.S. companies, Fluor and Jacobs, along with Canada’s SNC-Lavalin—to operate AECL’s nuclear sites, the main one being at Chalk River. Fluor operates the Savannah River Site, a South Carolina nuclear-weapons facility, under contract to the U.S. Department of Energy. Jacobs also has contracts at DOE weapons facilities and is part of a consortium that operates the U.K. Atomic Weapons Establishment.”
It is never too late to peel back the layers and ask some hard questions. As federal and provincial governments shovel more millions into unproven technology and false claims of SMRs as a climate solution, shouldn’t we demand transparency on where the new bodies are being buried? And should we not inquire into the deeply buried responsibility of a single corporation for its continual engagement in manipulating federal and provincial policies away from renewable energy resources towards that corporation’s publicly developed, but now privately owned, nuclear technologies?
Green Party Leader Elizabeth May represents Saanich-Gulf Islands, B.C.
Negotiators from EU countries and the European Parliament hold their final scheduled round of negotiations on Wednesday, to set more ambitious EU goals to expand renewable energy this decade.
The goals are key to Europe’s efforts to slash CO2 emissions by 2030 and quit Russian fossil fuels. But the negotiations have become mired in a dispute over whether fuels produced using nuclear power should be counted towards the renewable targets.
France is leading a campaign for “low-carbon hydrogen” – the term used to describe hydrogen produced from nuclear energy – to be put on an equal footing with hydrogen made from renewable electricity.
Backing France are countries including Romania, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, who want more recognition of CO2-free nuclear energy’s contribution to climate goals.
Germany, Spain, Denmark, Portugal and Luxembourg are among the countries opposed. They say mixing nuclear into the renewable targets would distract from Europe’s need to massively expand wind and solar.
At a meeting of EU countries’ ambassadors on Friday, countries doubled down on their existing positions, EU officials said – leaving some doubtful that Wednesday’s negotiations will succeed in finishing the law.
EU countries’ ambassadors were meeting again on Monday to attempt to unblock the talks.
Countries are also at odds over other parts of the law, including which types of wood fuel can count as renewable energy.
France, one of the most nuclear-powered countries in the world, has a particular stake in whether nuclear power is credited under the targets, given its plans to build new reactors and upgrade its large existing fleet.
French energy minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher will convene a meeting of pro-nuclear countries’ ministers on Tuesday to discuss the issue, a French ministry source said.
Paris has been disappointed by other recent EU moves to prioritise renewable technologies over nuclear.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said “cutting-edge nuclear” projects would be granted access to only some EU incentives to support green industries, while “strategic” technologies like solar panels would be granted the full benefits.
The office of French Energy Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher slammed European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s recent comments about nuclear not being “strategic” for EU decarbonisation and is planning a counter-offensive at the EU energy ministers meeting in Brussels on Tuesday (28 March).
Nuclear power, whether existing or in development, is not mentioned in the list of “strategic” technologies listed in the European Commission’s Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA), presented on 16 March.
Ahead of an EU summit last week, the French President’s office called for clarity on the matter, urging member states to decide “once and for all” whether nuclear power is an asset for the bloc’s decarbonisation or not.
Von der Leyen responded after the first day of the summit, saying: “only the net-zero technologies that we deem strategic for the future – like solar panels, batteries and electrolysers, for example – have access to the full advantages and benefits” – which is not the case for nuclear power.
These comments only stoked further tensions with Paris.
EU not ‘consistent’ on tech neutrality………………………………………………….
Speaking on Monday (27 March) before a meeting of the EU’s Energy Council in Brussels, the office of French Energy Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher drove the point home.
The Commission president’s comments were “unfortunate” and “clearly not consistent with the climate challenge to which nuclear power and renewables are intended to respond,” the minister’s office said, recalling that the strategic nature of nuclear power is recognised “without ambiguity” in the EURATOM Treaty‘s preamble…………………
Nuclear alliance
Faced with Brussels’ reservations on nuclear power, Pannier-Runacher will bring together the 11 member states taking part in the nuclear alliance set in motion at the last EU summit in Stockholm.
The Ukrainian state may be discriminating against the nation’s largest religious denomination, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), the UN’s human rights watchdog said in a report published on Friday. The government of President Vladimir Zelensky is currently in the process of kicking UOC monks out of their homes.
The apparent mistreatment of the church, which has historic links to the Russian Orthodox Church, was highlighted in a report released by the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). It cited several draft laws submitted to the Ukrainian parliament as well as the actions of the SBU, Ukraine’s domestic security agency, against the clergy.
The UN body is “concerned that the State’s activities targeting the UOC could be discriminatory,” it said. The report cited “vague legal terminology and the absence of sufficient justification” in proposed legislation, explaining why it drew the OHCHR’s negative attention.
The report covered the period between August 2022 and January 2023, but more recent acts by the government have deepened the saga of the UOC. Earlier this month, the Ukrainian Culture Ministry ordered monks belonging to the jurisdiction to vacate their homes at the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, an iconic monastery in the Ukrainian capital.
Zelensky described the move as strengthening Ukraine’s “spiritual independence” and implied that the UOC was a tool that Russia used “to manipulate the spirituality of our people, to destroy our holy sites [and] to steal valuables from them.”
The president ignored pleas by UOC clergy to meet them and try to diffuse the situation.
Kiev previously expelled the UOC from two of the cathedrals above the monastery. Within days of that decision, the government-backed Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) was allowed to hold services on the premises.
The OCU was created with the support of then-president Poroshenko in what many political observers perceived as an attempt to bolster his re-election chances. Culture Minister Aleksandr Tkachenko said the expelled monks, who have until this Wednesday to move out, could stay in their homes by leaving the UOC and joining the OCU.
We need to stop thinking of climate change as future hazard. It is happening right now, and it is damaging our national security as well as our way of life.
Global warming has not yet reached the Paris-agreed limit of 1.5C, and already the shocks to global weather are ravaging communities around the world.
Speaking as the IPCC delivered their latest assessment, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres called it a “ticking climate time bomb”. In a troubled world, with real concerns about cost of living, the creeping dangers posed by climate change are too easily ignored. But we do so at our peril.
Borders are no protection against its effects and, as authoritarian states mount a challenge to the entire international system, climate change further amplifies existing threats to UK national security. Heat, drought, water shortages, food scarcity and fuel conflict drive huge numbers of people from their homes.
Changes in the climate are having a devastating social and economic effect, putting severe pressure on many of the most vulnerable countries. This can exacerbate unrest and play a role in the outbreak of war. Ethnic tensions in Sudan in 2003 were inflamed when drought and hunger took hold. As then UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon warned at the time: “The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change.” For decades before clashes erupted, the Sahara Desert had advanced a mile a year into Sudan.
Inside the ‘clandestine world’ of SNC-Lavalin’s fallen star Riadh Ben Aissa, Financial Post, Brian Hutchinson, Financial Post Staff | March 18, 2015 “……..This is one of the details revealed in a 98-page document prepared by Swiss prosecutors (called an acte d’accusation en procédure simplifiée, it is comparable to a North American plea bargain agreement) and obtained by the Financial Post. It brings to light previously unknown details of how Mr. Ben Aissa, a 56-year-old citizen of both Tunisia and Canada, and now facing charges in Canada on a different matter, directed 12.5 million euros and US$21.9 million into Swiss bank accounts controlled by Saadi Gaddafi, from 2001 to 2007.
These were kickbacks, paid to Saadi by Mr. Ben Aissa in return for certain Libyan contracts awarded to SNC. According to Swiss authorities, tens of millions more dollars moved through Mr. Ben Aissa’s own Swiss accounts, from September 2001 to March 2011. The money came from SNC……..
the Swiss proceedings raise new questions about SNC, its vulnerability, and its future, which even its current CEO, Robert Card, has publicly worried may be at risk of either breaking up, ceasing to exist or being taken over. Since it found itself embroiled in scandal, the company has seemed in perpetual crisis, with more drama this week in its boardroom, with the sudden resignation of its chairman, and in a Montreal courtroom, where Mr. Ben Aissa and another former SNC executive began a preliminary hearing over allegations of bribery in a Canadian hospital deal.
While some might question how SNC did not know about Mr. Ben Aissa’s conduct in Libya, some insiders still seem inclined to blame him alone for setting into motion the company’s stunning fall from grace.
“Good luck sorting out Riadh Ben Assia’s clandestine world,” former SNC chairman Gwyn Morgan wrote in a brief response to questions put to him by email about certain activities that allegedly took place during his leadership……..
SWwiss authorities identified five specific areas of corruption where SNC cash was used to obtain contracts in Libya. ……
Last month, the RCMP laid criminal charges against SNC Lavalin itself, in connection to allegedly corrupt activities in Libya. The charges came as a blow; sources claim the company’s management and its lawyers had negotiated with Canadian authorities for two years, in an attempt to avoid prosecution. A criminal conviction for corruption could result in the company being prohibited — “debarred” — from bidding on public works projects in Canada…….
On Monday, SNC announced the resignation of Ian Bourne, its board chairman, effective immediately. He’d been in the position just two years, having replaced Mr. Morgan in 2013. SNC did not give specific reasons why Mr. Bourne decided to leave.
The same morning, two former SNC executives walked into a Montreal courtroom for the start of a preliminary hearing on other corruption-related matters. One was Pierre Duhaime, SNC’s former CEO and president. The second was Mr. Ben Aissa, back in Canada after his Swiss incarceration and extradition. Both are charged with fraud, related to alleged construction bid-rigging in Montreal, in what one police investigator has called the “biggest corruption fraud in Canadian history.”
Mr. Duhaime, Mr. Ben Aissa, former SNC controller Stéphane Roy and five other men, among them Canada’s former spy watchdog, Arthur Porter, allegedly participated a corrupt scheme that saw an international consortium led by SNC win a $1.34-billion hospital construction and maintenance contract for the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), in 2010. Dr. Porter has publicly refuted the allegations and none have been proven in court. Mr. Duhaime has pleaded not guilty. Mr. Ben Aissa is also in court fighting the allegations………. http://business.financialpost.com/legal-post/inside-the-clandestine-world-of-snc-lavalins-fallen-star-riadh-ben-aissa
A closer look at SNC-Lavalin’s sometimes murky past CBC, 12 Feb 19 One of Canada’s biggest engineering companies is at the centre of what appears to be a growing scandal engulfing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government.
The Globe and Mail reported Thursday that SNC-Lavalin lobbied the government to agree to a deferred prosecution agreement or remediation agreement. The company faces charges of fraud and corruption in connection with nearly $48 million in payments made to Libyan government officials between 2001 and 2011.
Trudeau denies he directed his former justice minister and attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, to intervene in the prosecution. Wilson-Raybould was shuffled out of her position last month and has refused to comment on the story. Days after the story broke, the federal ethics commissioner confirmed he will investigate claims the prime minister’s office pressured Wilson-Raybould to help SNC-Lavalin avoid prosecution.
SNC-Lavalin has pleaded not guilty to the charges. The case is at the preliminary hearing stage. If convicted, the company could be banned from bidding on any federal government contracts for 10 years.
But the Libya case is just one scandal among many linked to SNC-Lavalin in the past decade.
Allegations of criminal activity are what led to the resignations in February 2012 of top executives Riadh Ben Aïssa and Stéphane Roy. CEO Pierre Duhaime followed them out the door the following month.
MUHC contract scandal…….
Corruption scandal in Bangladesh …….
Libya scandal……
Elections Financing
In late November 2018, former SNC-Lavalin vice-president Normand Morin quietly pleaded guilty to charges of violating Canada’s election financing laws.
According to the compliance agreement reached with the company in 2016, Morin orchestrated a scheme between 2004 and 2011 that used employees to get around the restrictions on companies donating directly to federal political parties. Morin would get employees to donate to political parties, riding associations or Liberal leadership candidates. The company would then reimburse them for their donations through false refunds for personal expenses or fictitious bonuses.
In total, $117,803 flowed from SNC-Lavalin to federal party funds during that period. The Liberal Party of Canada got the lion’s share — $83,534 to the party and $13,552 to various riding associations. Another $12,529 went to contestants in the 2006 Liberal Party leadership race won by Stephane Dion. The Conservative Party of Canada received $3,137 while Conservative riding associations got $5,050.
Ottawa, Monday, March 27, 2023 – Environmental and civil society groups are giving a thumbs-down after the federal government announced new funding on Friday towards the development of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). The groups will be looking closely at the numbers in Tuesday’s budget.
The “Prime Minister Trudeau and President Biden Joint Statement,“ issued on Friday March 24, committed Canada to provide funding and in-kind support for a US-led program to promote SMRs.
The Canadian government’s Strategic Innovation Fund has already given close to $100 million to corporations working on experimental SMR technologies. In addition, the Canada Infrastructure Bank has committed $970 million to Ontario Power Generation’s plan for a 300-megawatt SMR at Darlington. Federal funding is benefiting US-based companies GE-Hitachi and Westinghouse, and Canada’s SNC-Lavalin, among others.
All the funded SMR projects are still in the research and development phase. Worldwide, no SMRs have ever been built for domestic use.
In addition, the federal government is giving Atomic Energy of Canada Limited $1.35 billion a year to conduct nuclear research and development and to manage its toxic radioactive waste. Nearly all this funding is transferred to a consortium of SNC-Lavalin and two US-based companies (Fluor and Jacobs) that that are heavily involved in nuclear weapons and SMR research.
Over 100 groups from all across Canada have criticized the federal government’s plan to promote SMR nuclear technology, stating that:
SMRs are a dirty, dangerous distraction that will produce radioactive waste of many kinds. Especially worrisome are those proposed reactors that would extract plutonium from irradiated fuel, raising the spectre of nuclear weapons proliferation.
SMRs will take too long to develop to address the urgent climate crisis in the short time frame necessary to achieve Canada’s goals.
SMRs will be much more expensive than renewable energy and energy efficiency. Small reactors will be even more expensive per unit of power than the current large ones, which have priced themselves out of the market.
Nuclear power creates fewer jobs than renewable energy and efficiency. Solar, wind and tidal power are among the fastest-growing job sectors in North America. The International Energy Agency forecasts that 90% of new electrical capacity installed worldwide over the next five years will be renewable.
The federal government needs to invest urgently in renewables, energy conservation and climate action, not slow, expensive, speculative nuclear technologies.
QUOTES:
“Taxpayer dollars should not be wasted on a future technology whose time is past, like nuclear reactors, when truly clean renewable solutions are up-and-running and getting more affordable all the time.” – Dr. Gordon Edwards, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility
“Let’s compete to be world leaders in renewables. Pouring public funding into speculative reactor technologies is sabotaging our efforts to address the climate crisis.” – Dr. Ole Hendrickson, Sierra Club Canada Foundation
The SMR technologies are all at the early R&D stage, yet the funding is not following good governance practices by requiring high standards of peer review.“ – Dr. Susan O’Donnell, Coalition for Responsible Energy Development in New Brunswick
JEFFERSON CITY — Utility companies like Ameren Missouri could begin billing customers for the upfront costs of building nuclear power facilities under a plan advancing in the General Assembly.
In debate Monday, the Missouri House gave preliminary approval to legislation allowing utility companies to add the cost of a new nuclear plant or renewable energy generator to customers’ rates while they’re under construction.
That’s a practice that was banned by Missouri voters in 1976 in response to the utility company’s attempt to collect costs while it was building the state’s first and only nuclear power plant in Callaway County.
Then, and now, consumer advocates object to the concept of forcing utility users to pay for something that is not yet in service, especially when Ameren recently obtained a rate increase and, in February, announced a 7% increase in its quarterly cash dividend, signaling healthy economic times.………………………..
The Consumers Council of Missouri is among those who oppose the plan, saying if the plant is never completed, electric customers still bear the costs.
In South Carolina, the concept enabled a utility to charge ratepayers for the construction of two nuclear reactors that were never completed. During that period, South Carolina ratepayers were charged billions of dollars until the project faltered and ultimately collapsed, the watchdog organization said.
Large industrial users of electricity, including Ford Motor Co. and other manufacturers, also oppose the plan……………………………
Rep. Doug Clemens, D-St. Ann, warned that the measure could hurt consumers.
“This particular scheme is essentially giving a blank check to our utility companies,” Clemens said. “We’ll never see productivity out of this scheme.”………………………
The proposal needs a final vote in the House before moving to the Senate for further deliberations.
Across the UK, businesses of all shapes, sizes and sectors face increasing competition for talent. But the big question is: does the country – with its long-standing skills gap in a number of industries – have the foundations to build a workforce which can meet our economic and environmental ambitions?
Nuclear faces a perfect storm in developing future talent with the combination of a historic lack of investment, an ageing workforce and the government’s aspirations for growth in civil and defence (due to the drive to reach net zero and national security concerns). This means the sector must increase its recruitment levels by 300% at a time of fierce competition for talent.
SMRs are being marketed as a solution to the climate crisis, but they’re already far more expensive and take much longer to build than renewable and storage resources – that we already have.
Utility Dive, David Schlissel, 21 Mar 23, Davis Schlissel is the Institute for Energy Economics anf Financial Analysis director of resource planning analysis.
NuScale is hoping to be among the first of about a dozen companies trying to take advantage of the much-hyped market for small modular nuclear reactors or SMR. So far, however, the Oregon-based company is looking like the first canary in the coal-mine.
Considered a leader in the new technology, NuScale is marketing its SMR project by claiming that the reactor design project will save time and money – persistent problems for traditional large nuclear plants.
But NuScale and the Utah Municipal Power Systems, its partner in an SMR project planned for Idaho, announced early in January, that the target price for the power from their proposed modular reactor had risen by 53% from $58/MWh to $89/MWh……..
The announcement has serious implications for all would-be SMR manufacturers………………
the new $89/MWh target price already means that power from the NuScale SMR will be much more expensive than renewable and storage resources even with an estimated $4.2 billion in tax-payer subsidies.
……………………………….. The gap is only going to get larger as the costs of building SMRs rise and costs of renewables and storage continue to decline.
………….. Using SMRs as backups for renewables will not be financially feasible
Already 2.4 times as expensive as very, very expensive Hinkley. First of a kind, so very likely to double or more in price. Very unlikely to be built before 2040 due to long-tailed risks.
Small modular reactors won’t achieve economies of manufacturing scale, won’t be faster to construct, forego efficiency of vertical scaling, won’t be cheaper, aren’t suitable for remote or brownfield coal sites, still face very large security costs, will still be costly and slow to decommission, and still require liability insurance caps. They don’t solve any of the problems that they purport to while intentionally choosing to be less efficient than they could be. They’ve existed since the 1950s and they aren’t any better now than they were then.
Supposedly a European energy deal has been reached in which a US firm sells a bunch of tiny nuclear reactors to European countries at an enormous price per GW. It’s hard to think that anybody would ink the deal as described.
It was a Bloomberg piece, and Bloomberg normally gets the facts right, although Bloomberg New Energy Finance gets the framing right far more often. And a bit of evaluation seems to confirm the basics. So let’s tear it apart.
Let’s start with small modular nuclear reactors (SMR). The premise is that they will be a lot cheaper than big nuclear reactors because, you know, modularity. Anything you can manufacture in large numbers drops in price, typically by 20% to 27% for every doubling of units. That’s a truism known as Wright’s Law after the first management consultant who observed it, the experience curve per Boston Consulting Group which happily stole and rebranded it or just the learning curve.
There are a bunch of problems with this premise when it comes to nuclear electricity generation. I’ve written about them, had my content peer-reviewed and included in text books, and debated them with nuclear industry proponents for audiences of a couple of hundred institutional investors likely representing funds worth close to a trillion, so I’m just going to quote myself:
Small modular reactors won’t achieve economies of manufacturing scale, won’t be faster to construct, forego efficiency of vertical scaling, won’t be cheaper, aren’t suitable for remote or brownfield coal sites, still face very large security costs, will still be costly and slow to decommission, and still require liability insurance caps. They don’t solve any of the problems that they purport to while intentionally choosing to be less efficient than they could be. They’ve existed since the 1950s and they aren’t any better now than they were then.
As I discussed with Professor Bent Flyvbjerg, megaprojects expert and author of How Big Things Get Done recently, small modular reactor firms are trying to hunt for an optimized point on the continuum between the efficiencies of big thermal generation and modularity, and I don’t think they are going to find it.
And that’s really true for Last Energy if this reporting is remotely accurate. So what’s the story? Well, apparently they’ve signed a $19 billion deal to supply 34 nuclear reactors that are 20 MW each. Apparently they are going to at least Poland and the UK, although regulatory approval stands in their way.
The first thing that caught my eye was the MW capacity. 34 reactors of 20 MW each only adds up to 680 MW of nameplate capacity. That’s smaller than a billion dollar offshore wind farm that takes ten months to build.
Side note: Nuclear nameplate capacities are usually reported with units of MWe, or megawatts of electricity. That’s because their thermal energy output is perhaps three times the size, but meaningless, as all we care about is the electricity. I just stick with MW usually because the best comparison is to wind and solar which don’t create and waste a lot of heat. However, at 20 MWe, the tininess of the reactor and related thermal generation suggests that the efficiency of turning heat into electricity is probably much worse. That’s the point about thermal generation liking to scale and why everyone building nuclear went bigger in the 1970s and 1980s so that it wouldn’t be as expensive.
So, 20 MW. Is that accurate? I went to their public website, and sure enough, that’s the size. It’s their only claimed product, although they have built and delivered none of them anywhere.
The second thing that caught my attention was the eye-watering price tag, $19 billion. That seems really high even for nuclear, and especially high for only 680 MW.
Maybe this would be reasonable if nuclear normally had capacity factors of 20%, and this tech was operating at 90%, but nuclear globally runs about 90% of the time. It has high uptime, which proponents overstate as an advantage, but is the reality. You can’t actually operate nuclear less than 90% of the time and have it be reasonably priced due to the cost of building the stuff.
How does this compare? Let’s pick the British Hinkley Point C nuclear expansion, one of the most expensive and slowest in the developed world. It is so expensive that the developers demanded and got about $150 per MWh wholesale guaranteed for 35 years with inflation bumps. This when offshore wind energy is running around $50 per MWh wholesale and onshore wind and solar are running around $30 per MWh wholesale. Yeah, Hinkley is absurdly expensive electricity.
Let’s take a walk through memory lane. Hinkley was supposed to deliver electricity for about $24 per MWh when it was originally proposed in 2008, and be in operation by now. Five times the cost per MWh accounting for inflation, so a clear miss. And the current plan is pretending that in 2027 it’s going to be grid-connected, but that’s undoubtedly 2028 at earliest, 20 years after it was originally set in motion, and 11 years after start of construction. So far, so nuclear.
Hinkley’s current cost projection — five years from grid connection, so incredibly likely to rise by billions — is about $40 billion. That’s a lot of amortization per MWh, hence the remarkably high wholesale price. As a reminder, Iceland, which runs 100% on renewables, is delivering consumer retail prices lower than this wholesale price. All of Canada is providing consumer rates below this wholesale cost, although recent news makes it clear that nuclear heavy Ontario are subsidizing consumer rates by US$4.4 billion annually to prevent revolt. Hmmm, is this a trend?
Surely Hinkley must be turning out to be more expensive than this SMR deal? Well, no. Hinkley is building two big, complex, next-generation EPR reactors with 1,630 MW capacity each. That’s 3,260 MW total capacity. That’s almost five times the capacity of the Last Energy SMRs. For only two times the cost.
The ratio is pretty clear. These SMRs will be about 2.4 times the cost per MWh of the very expensive Hinkley facility. All else being equal — and the only reason we have to think this won’t be equal is that nuclear costs always rise, so the $19 billion is likely to be closer to $40 billion — this is already about $360 per MWh wholesale prices for electricity.
What’s the consumer retail price of electricity in the UK? About $340. What about coal heavy Poland? $181.
Yes, the very first announcement of a nuclear deal, probably well over a decade before anything might be connected to the grid, has wholesale rates well over consumer retail rates today.
On original – image of project categories which meet time, budget, and benefits expectations vs ones that don’t, from How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner -(nuclear is the worst!)
This is the first version of new material from Flyvbjerg and his team. They have assembled over 16,000 megaprojects’ worth of data on budget, schedule, and asserted benefits vs actuals over 25 categories of projects. This is a view by likelihood of cost overruns. The top of the chart has the least likely categories to go over budget once the shovel hits the ground. The bottom has the categories most likely to go over budget, often by multiples of the original projections. You’ll note where nuclear lies.
SMRs are attempting to fix that by making a bunch of smaller, repeatable reactors instead of big ones. As I pointed out earlier, they are foregoing the efficiencies of being big enough to receive the benefits of physics for thermal generation in order to hunt for a point where modularity optimizes costs and risks sufficiently to make it economically viable.
However, at 2.4 times the cost per MWh of one of the most expensive nuclear generation projects on the planet, clearly they are nowhere near the field, never mind anywhere near the goal. As Flyvbjerg points out several times, first of a kind projects have massive long-talked risks, and Last Energy’s announcement has first of a kind in big neon screaming signage over every part of the deal.
Already 2.4 times as expensive as very, very expensive Hinkley. First of a kind, so very likely to double or more in price. Very unlikely to be built before 2040 due to long-tailed risks. Who exactly signed a deal like this, and why?
UPDATE:
Comments from Lyle Morton, Vice President of Marketing & Communications, Last Energy: Reaching out to clarify an important detail regarding the Last Energy announcement. The $19bn is not a cost figure but the total value of the electricity under contract over the duration of the 4 contracts — which range from 20-24 years.
My take: That’s still a ridiculous $160-$170 per MWh wholesale by the initial terms of the deals before all of the inevitable problems with first of a kind deployments. Even at $160-$170, I’ll believe this only when I see it in operation, at the price point specified, and delivering benefits as promised. I won’t be holding my breath.
Biden has requested an obscene $886 billion for defense, but it could go higher
By William Hartung, 26 Mar 23
The Pentagon has released its budget request for Fiscal Year 2024. The figure for the Pentagon alone is a hefty $842 billion. That’s $69 billion more than the $773 billion the department requested for Fiscal Year 2023
Total spending on national defense — including work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy — comes in at $886 billion. Adding in likely emergency military aid packages for Ukraine later this year plus the potential tens of billions of dollars in Congressional add-ons could push total spending for national defense to as much as $950 billion or more for FY 2024. The result could be the highest military budget since World War II, far higher than at the peaks of the Korean or Vietnam Wars or the height of the Cold War.
The proposed budget is far more than is needed to provide an effective defense of the United States and its allies.
If past experience is any guide, more than half of the new Pentagon budget will go to contractors, with the biggest share going to the top five — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — to build everything from howitzers and tanks to intercontinental ballistic missiles. Much of the funding for contractors will come from spending on buying, researching, and developing weapons, which accounts for $315 billion of the new budget request.
he National Priorities Project gives us a look at the imbalance of government spending for 2021 with the military consuming almost half.
As suggested above, Congress will probably add a substantial amount to the Pentagon’s request, largely for systems and facilities located in the states and districts of key members. That’s no way to craft a budget — or defend a country. When it comes to defense, Congress should engage in careful oversight, not special interest politics.
Unfortunately, in recent years the House and Senate have accelerated the practice of jacking up the Pentagon’s budget request, adding $25 billion in FY 2022 and $45 billion in FY 2023. Given threat inflation with respect to China and the ongoing war in Ukraine, there is a danger that the $45 billion added for FY2023 could be the floor for what might be added by Congress in the course of this year’s budget debate.
Exceptions to the rush to throw more money at the Pentagon may come from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Representatives Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) have introduced the “People Over Pentagon Act,” which calls for a $100 billion annual cut in the DoD budget. A group of conservative lawmakers centered around the Freedom Caucus have called for a freeze on the discretionary budget at FY2022 levels. But different members have given different views on how Pentagon spending would fit into a budget freeze, from assertions that it will be “on the table” to a denial by one at least one member, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), that Pentagon cuts should come into play at all.
It has been reported that President Dwight D. Eisenhower believed that we should spend all we need for national defense and not one penny more. But the new motto of the Pentagon and the Congress appears to be “spend now and ask questions later.” Rather than matching funding to a viable national security strategy, the Pentagon and the Congress are pushing for whatever the political market will bear. The notion that tradeoffs need to be made against other urgent national priorities is a foreign concept to most members of the House and Senate, as they have routinely raised the Pentagon budget at the expense of other urgent national needs.
There is more than money at stake. An open-ended strategy that seeks to develop capabilities to win a war with Russia or China, fight regional wars against Iran or North Korea, and sustain a global war on terror that includes operations in at least 85 countries is a recipe for endless conflict.
We can make America and its allies safer for far less money if we adopt a more realistic, restrained strategy and drive a harder bargain with weapons contractors that too often engage in price gouging and cost overruns while delivering dysfunctional systems that aren’t appropriate for addressing the biggest threats to our security.
The Congressional Budget Office has crafted three illustrative options that could ensure our security while spending $1 trillion less over the next decade. A strategy that incorporates aspects of these plans and streamlines the Pentagon budget in other areas could be sustained at roughly $150 billion per year less than current levels.
A new approach would take a more objective, evidence-based view of the military challenges posed by Russia and China, rely more on allies to provide security in their own regions, reduce the U.S. global military footprint, and scale back the Pentagon’s $2 trillion plan to build a new generation of nuclear weapons. Cutting wasteful spending practices and slowing or replacing spending on unworkable or outmoded systems like the F-35 and a new $13 billion aircraft carrier could save billions more. And reducing spending on the half a million-plus private contractors employed by the Pentagon could save hundreds of billions over the next decade.
The Pentagon doesn’t need more spending. It needs more spending discipline, tied to a realistic strategy that sets clear priorities and acknowledges that some of the greatest risks we face are not military in nature. Today’s announcement is just the opening gambit in this year’s debate over the Pentagon budget. Hopefully critics of runaway spending will have more traction this year than has been the case for the past several years. If not, $1 trillion in annual military spending may be just around the corner, at great cost to taxpayers and to the safety and security of the country as a whole.
William D. Hartung is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His work focuses on the arms industry and U.S. military budget. He was previously the director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Policy and the co-director of the Center’s Sustainable Defense Task Force.
fire has broken out on the territory of a Russian factory that manufactures equipment for the Russian Army, according to state media reports.
Seven people have been rescued from a burning building and firefighters are still searching for the source of the blaze at the Yaroslavl Motor Plant, in Yaroslavl, Russia, which describes itself on its website as one of Russia’s largest enterprises producing multi-purpose diesel engines, clutches, gearboxes and spare parts.
The Russian Emergencies Ministry was quoted by state-run news agency TASS as saying that fire departments were alerted to the blaze at 1.30 p.m. local time. Photos circulating on social media show plumes of thick black smoke rising into the sky.
According to local media reports, there was an explosion prior to the fire…………………………
Russian blogger and analyst Anatoly Nesmiyan said on his Telegram channel that “something quite serious is on fire” at the factory, though did not elaborate on what that could be. Nesmiyan described the factory as one of the largest manufacturers of engines and gearboxes for equipment belonging to the Russian Army, including engines for Topol-M nuclear missile launchers.
According to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Topol-M is a Russian solid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of 11,000 kilometers (6,835 miles).
The incident is the latest in a string of mysterious fires in Russia since President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
‘nuclear submarines would be too costly to build and maintain without an “industrial base” largely funded by elevated consumer electricity bills’.
Renew Extra Weekly, 26 Mar 23
The UK spring budget announced investment of £20bn spread over the next two decades in carbon capture and support for nuclear, with a commitment to ‘spades in the ground on these projects from next year’ as energy security secretary, Grant Shapps, put it
…………………………………. boosting our own sources of clean generation is a must to shield us from future price shocks’. But it’s hard to see how investing in CCS will help- that is fossil based. And, like nuclear, it’s expensive. …………………………………………..
There was very little .. comfort….. in the Budget Red Book, even in the ‘Green Industries’ section (p.64-65). That focussed on CCS/CCUS and nuclear, with SMRs an initial target for the new Great British Nuclear programme, and nuclear ‘to be included in the green taxonomy, subject to consultation, encouraging private investment’.
No mention of the negative impact of the windfall tax (EGL) on renewables. Indeed there is no direct mention of renewables anywhere in the text, and no mention of energy saving, apart from indirectly via 2 year extension of the Climate Change Agreement scheme.
,…………………………………. Greenpeace said: ‘This misguided Budget shows the stranglehold fossil fuel and nuclear lobbies have on this government’.
……………………………………………………… For the moment, since the chancellor said in his budget speech that nuclear was ‘vital to meet our net-zero obligations’, he will be launching ‘the first’ competition for small modular reactors, to be run by Great British Nuclear and ‘completed by the end of this year’. Though Carbon Brief noted that, actually, ‘the government previously launched a £250m competition for small nuclear in 2015, but no winners were announced. Since then, it has offered various pots of money, including “up to” £210m for Rolls Royce to develop its reactor design and “up to” £170m for “advanced” modular reactors.’
In parallel, the Government will be looking to the inclusion nuclear power in the UK ‘Green Taxonomy’. But this isn’t a done deal yet, there will be consultation, and, as was pointed out in an answer to a Parliamentary Question from Carolyn Lucas, ‘with the support of the independent Green Technical Advisory Group and stakeholder engagement, we will take the time to get the taxonomy right to ensure it is usable and effective’. That may lead to quite a debate, as has happened in the EU where the inclusion of nuclear (and gas) in its green taxonomy has been very contentious.
In the UK context, would inclusion actually help? Not everyone thought so- from an investment perspective, the problems were economic not environmental. But, quite apart from being expensive, there were, actually, some environmental issues. Nuclear is low carbon, but not zero carbon. It leads to dangerous waste residues. The pro-nuclear lobby these days sets that against its assumed role in support of variable renewables, but that may not be realistic: nuclear plants are inflexible and get in the way- see my earlier post.
And so the somewhat tired old nuclear debate goes on. With though a new extension- a military and civil nuclear interaction. In the recent Defence Review, the government said that ‘we will proactively look for opportunities to align delivery of the civil and defence nuclear enterprises, seeking synergies where appropriate to ensure a coherent demand signal to our industry and academic partners.’ For University of Sussex Prof. Andy Stirling, that confirmed his view that ‘nuclear submarines would be too costly to build and maintain without an “industrial base” largely funded by elevated consumer electricity bills’.
