Nuclear power not a viable option
http://www.gazettenet.com/Ann-Darling-argues-that-it-s-past-time-to-stop-thinking-of-nuclear-power-as-a-viable-option-10339507 In response to the letter writer promoting nuclear power as safe and clean (“Nuclear energy safest source of power in US,” May 23): I lived a few miles north of Vermont Yankee for decades, and I made a point of educating myself about nuclear power and nuclear waste.
What I learned scared me so much that I left my beloved home and moved as far away from Vermont Yankee as I could and still keep my job.
Nuclear power is not green. Yes, it puts almost no carbon into the atmosphere while the reactor is operating. But since when do we only look at what happens in part of a fuel cycle to determine if something is “green”? Haven’t we learned that extracting, refining, and cleaning up the waste have to be considered, too, with any source of power?
The mining and refining of uranium are extremely energy-intensive and lay waste to areas inhabited mostly by indigenous peoples worldwide. The waste from both ends of the cycle is the most toxic substance on earth, and it is harmful to life for centuries.
These new types of reactors are no magic bullet, either. They still create radioactive waste. And safe? Oh please. Tell the people who lived near Chernobyl and Fukushima who will never be able to go home that nuclear power is safe.
Closer to home, tell the people who live near the nuke in Plymouth that it’s safe. And if there is an emergency, the road off the Cape will be closed. I hope they all have boats.
The more nukes we build, and the older they get, the greater the likelihood of more catastrophes. It’s past time to stop thinking of nuclear as a viable option and put our resources toward bringing truly sustainable power generation to scale.
Toshiba to present UNAUDITEDaccounts at the company’s AGM next month
Carlisle News & Star 31st May 2017 Toshiba, the key backer of Cumbria’s proposed nuclear new build, is to present unaudited accounts to its shareholders at the company’s AGM next month. The troubled Japanese giant – which has a 60 per cent stake in NuGen, which has plans for a power plant at Moorside, near Sellafield, and is taking on full ownership – has not been able to submit detailed results to officials in Japan because of ongoing discussions with its auditors over its American nuclear subsidiary Westinghouse Electric.
Toshiba is forecast to make a £6.5bn loss for the last year of business and its woes stem mainly from Westinghouse, which has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the USA, which may have overpaid – by several billion dollars – for another
nuclear construction and services business. http://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/business/Moorside-nuclear-backer-Toshiba-to-present-unaudited-accounts-to-shareholders-0b3b0a0e-d673-4d1d-afda-7171325aaa68-ds
Norway’s rapid take-up of electric cars
The Country Adopting Electric Vehicles Faster Than Anywhere Else, Fueled by cheap power and government subsidies, Norway is racing to ditch the “fossil car.”Bloomberg by
Endless growth is an unsustainable dream
Reading: ‘Energy, finance and the end of growth.’ A prescient 2013 analysis predicts Trump’s rise—and explains why his promises of endless growth can’t happen. http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/2017/may/economics-growth-trump, May 30, 2017 By Pete Myers
Environmental Health News I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how economics and environmental issues are so intertwined. And I’ve been thinking particularly hard about the conflict between our desire for boundless economic growth and the realities of our planet’s finite resources.
I’ve also—like many of us—been struggling to understand Trump.
I recently found this 2013 paper by Tim Morgan, the former global head of research at Tullett Prebon, a firm offering investment advice and risk mitigation to commercial and investment banks.
This is the last report he wrote for the research shop. It is fabulous. I particularly like the way Morgan integrates concerns about globalization as contributing to the collapse to world economies and our larger social order. It’s uncanny how he anticipates, way back in 2013, Trump’s rise.
And it’s great to have this analysis from a deeply qualified source widely separated from hippy preppers (if you want more, Morgan’s blog, Surplus Energy Economics, is worth following).
One relevant excerpt from the paper:
One would have to look back to a Spanish empire awash with bullion from the New World to find a combination of economic idiocy and minority self-interest equal to the folly of globalization. The compounding mistake, where the Western countries were concerned, was a wide-eyed belief that ‘globalization’ would make everyone richer, when the reality was that the out-sourcing of production to emerging economies was a self-inflicted disaster with few parallels in economic history.
The big problem with globalization was that Western countries reduced their production without making corresponding reductions in their consumption. Corporations’ outsourcing of production to emerging economies boosted their earnings (and, consequently, the incomes of the minority at the very top) whilst hollowing out their domestic economies through the export of skilled jobs.
Fundamentally, what had happened here was that skilled, well-paid jobs had been exported, consumption had increased, and ever-greater quantities of debt had been used to fill the gap.
This was, by any definition, unsustainable.
Talk of Western economies modernizing themselves by moving from production into services contained far more waffle than logic—Western consumers sold each other ever greater numbers of hair-cuts, ever greater quantities of fast food and ever more zero-sum financial services whilst depending more and more on imported goods and, critically, on the debts used to buy them.
Corporate executives prospered, as did the gate-holders of the debt economy, whilst the vast majority saw their real wages decline and their indebtedness spiral. For our purposes, what matters here is that reducing production, increasing consumption and taking on escalating debt to fill the gap was never a remotely sustainable course of action.
What this in turn means is that no return to the pre-2008 world is either possible or desirable
Trump govt reviving Yucca nuclear waste dump plan?
Times 29th May 2017 It may have been buried in President Trump’s first budget last week, but the irony was largely lost on the American nuclear industry and its opponents. A plan to hide nuclear waste beneath a sacred mountain in Nevada has been dusted off and is back on the table.
The Shoshone tribe has long deemed Yucca Mountain to be a holy place, but in 1987 the ridge of volcanic rock about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas suddenly became of interest to many more people when Congress decided that it should become the nation’s nuclear waste dump.
The decision met fierce local resistance and the project faltered before, in 2010 and after $15 billion had been spent, President Obama cancelled it altogether. It turns out that cancelled meant postponed. Mr Trump has proposed a levy on nuclear power providers that would fund further development of the scheme. The nuclear waste fund fee, which had been cancelled in 2014, is intended to raise $3.1 billion between 2020 and 2027. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/business/trump-to-hide-nuclear-waste-beneath-sacred-yucca-mountain-in-nevada-9z0hx5tqs
Senator John McCain left it too late to decide to support action on climate change
Speaking in Sydney on Tuesday night, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) called the death of the Great Barrier Reef “one of the great tragedies of our lives
This year, McCain voted to confirm Trump’s most anti-climate nominees, supporting Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.
Politicians who oppose climate action are now sad about the consequenceshttps://thinkprogress.org/great-barrier-reef-john-mccain-5ee85af47a93, 30 May 17,
If only the senator from Arizona had a job where he could do something about climate change. The Great Barrier Reef, which in 2016 experienced the largest die-off of coral in its history, cannot be saved in its current form, a panel of Australian experts warned over the weekend.
The culprit, according to the panel, is climate change — specifically, the rapid warming of the oceans. Last year, record-high ocean temperatures triggered a bleaching event that affected 93 percent of the reef. Almost half of the reef’s coral has died since.
The panel, which is made up of scientists and environmental experts, conceded that the best that can be hoped for is “maintaining ecological function over the coming decades.” It also argued that any response aimed at helping the Great Barrier Reef must include policies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
“Members agreed that in our lifetime and on our watch, substantial areas of the Great Barrier Reef and the surrounding ecosystems are experiencing major long-term damage which may be irreversible unless action is taken now,” the panel’s official statement read.
McCain used to be extremely outspoken about climate change, going so far as to give an entire speech on the issue in Portland, Oregon during the 2008 presidential campaign. McCain used to support a cap-and-trade system for regulating carbon emissions, authoring several bills on the issue before his unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign. Since that defeat, however, McCain has ceded ground on climate leadership, as the Republican party at large has become increasingly antagonistic towards domestic and international climate policies.
In 2009, McCain opposed the Waxman-Markey climate change bill, which would have created a cap-and-trade based system for carbon emissions. That same year, the League of Conservation Voters gave McCain a 9 percent on their annual scorecard. Every year since, McCain has scored below 32 percent — in 2016, he earned a score of 12 percent, registering just two pro-environment votes and 15 anti-environment votes.
This year, McCain voted to confirm Trump’s most anti-climate nominees, supporting Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.
McCain’s comments in Sydney come as the Trump administration continues to debate whether or not to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, which was signed by almost 200 countries in December of 2015. The agreement aims to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
McCain voiced support Tuesday for remaining in the agreement, either in keeping with the commitments made under President Obama or by suggesting “modifications which would make it palatable for us and acceptable to us to join.” (Arguments in favor of renegotiating the agreement to obtain better “economic” terms for the United States ignore the fact that climate action, according to economic experts, will save the planet trillion of dollars in the long run.)
“If we don’t address [climate change], I am very much afraid about what the world is going to look like for our children and grandchildren,” McCain said. McCain is not wrong to worry about his children and grandchildren: Climate change is indeed an issue that, if left unaddressed, will have devastating consequences for future generations. Because solving the problem requires fundamental transformations — in the way humans generate and use energy, transport ourselves, and manufacture goods — solutions require strong leadership and innovative thinking.
Nuclear executives’ excessive pay
US News 27th May 2017 Executives of a company financing construction of two nuclear reactors in Georgia continue to be awarded millions of dollars in incentives, despite it being behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. Southern Company, the parent firm financing Plant Vogtle’s two new reactors, held its annual shareholders meeting recently to give investing companies and others the chance to discuss issues with executives. Some shareholders are not happy about the board of directors’ decision to award incentives to executives in light of losses at two of the company’s major projects:
Kemper Plant in Mississippi and the Vogtle expansion in Georgia’s Burke County, the Georgia newspaper reported.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/georgia/articles/2017-05-27/executives-earn-millions-despite-losses-at-nuclear-projects
Britain: former conservative energy minister now working for renewable energy
Scottish Energy News 26th May 2017, A former Tory energy minister in the Lords is to join the Renewable Energy Association – the UK’s biggest such body. Baroness Verma joins the REA as an independent non-executive board member. Her new job includes looking at the strategic role of renewables and clean tech in the UK and trade opportunities for British services and manufacturing in emerging markets.
As Energy Minister during the coalition Government, Verma took the EnergyAct 2013 through the Lords, before becoming Minister at the Department for International Development in 2015, with responsibility, amongst others, for
climate and environment. She said: “With storage and smart technologies already a reality, the opportunities for the UK to lead the world in these areas is one we cannot afford to waste and I look forward to working with REA members in this.”
http://www.scottishenergynews.com/
Britain stuck with Hinkley nuclear plan, as its costs known to be unreasonable
Nuclear is rightly vanishing as an answer to our energy needs UK consumers face cost of Hinkley Point plant just as the logic for nuclear fades, Inside London , Ft.com 25 May, by: Neil Collin
World Nuclear Association looks to big business for Germany, expertise in nuclear waste management
Preserving and developing Germany’s nuclear expertise, World Nuclear News, 26 May 2017
“………The topic of preserving and building up nuclear expertise by shifting operational responsibility to federally-owned companies will gain relevance particularly in the waste management sector. Taking into account all the authorities and public companies that operate in this sector, we could soon be talking about up to 4000 employees. Together with the civil servants and government employees in other areas of nuclear technology, in expert appraisal and in research, it may be assumed that in the future at least a sixth of the more than 30,000 employees in the industry will be assigned to the public sector.”
Georgia Power and parent Southern Company scratching around for nuclear bailout
Atlanta Journal Constitution 25th May 2017, Georgia’s nuclear mess is about to get way messier now that the chief 
contractor on the Plant Vogtle expansion has fled to bankruptcy court. So a new race is underway to see who can nab enough bubble wrap to insulate themselves from a fresh round of costly shocks.
So far, Georgia Power has sidestepped virtually all of the financial reckoning on its own project. Billions of dollars in past Vogtle overruns and delays will be borne by Georgia consumers or already have been by the contractor, Westinghouse
Electric Company.
I suspect leaders of Georgia Power and parent Southern Company would like to keep dodging on this one. A partial federal bailout from taxpayers perhaps? Southern CEO Tom Fanninghas been spending a lot of time in Washington D.C. talking about continuation of nuclear energy development being in “our national security interest.” http://www.myajc.com/business/kempner-radioactive-question-looms-over-georgia-nuclear-mess/LO9kYtkyPgtRfer2SpU8rL/
Renewable energy jobs could “offset” fossil-fuel job losses by 2030
Energy Voice 24th May 2017, Renewable energy jobs could “offset” fossil-fuel job losses by 2030, report shows. Jobs in renewable energy could cancel out fossil fuel-job losses and become an economic driver by 2030, according to the director of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).
https://www.energyvoice.com/uncategorized/140162/renewable-energy-jobs-offset-fossil-fuel-job-losses-2030-renewable-director-says/
Why Nuclear Power Subsidies Must End
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=9082
New York and Illinois, bowing to pressure from a powerful nuclear utility, believe the answer is yes. Several other states, including Connecticut, New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania, may follow suit, arguing that the subsidies will save nuclear power-plant jobs and help electric utilities meet environmental mandates to reduce carbon emissions.
That’s just one side of the story. The other side is this: The bailouts (subsidies by another name) reward poor management and bad judgment and would cost homeowners and businesses billions.
New York and Illinois already have bought into the dubious bailout scheme, which is being pushed by Chicago-based Exelon, the nation’s largest nuclear utility. Exelon’s plants have been losing money owing to competition from cheap natural gas and wind power. Without the financial aid, Exelon says, the plants won’t be able to operate at a profit and will have to be closed.
So close them; rather than shelling out as much as $10 billion in subsidies, close the plants and shift to natural gas.
I can’t help seeing the similarity between the Exelon bailout and what happened following the deregulation of electricity in the 1990s, when states allowed utilities to charge higher rates to cover some of the costs of “stranded assets”—capital investments made in a regulated environment that were no longer worthwhile in a competitive environment.
Propping up the utilities was wrong then and it’s wrong now.There’s no point in preventing the shutdown of nuclear plants, since the claim that they’re needed for carbon mitigation is dubious at best. Thanks to the shale revolution, which has produced an abundance of low-cost, clean-burning natural gas, carbon emissions from electric power plants have been plummeting as gas-fired plants replace coal-burning facilities.
Moreover, while gas prices are likely to stay low, the operating costs of nuclear plants are almost certain to rise in the years ahead. Southern California Edison closed its San Onofre nuclear plant after deciding it would not be worthwhile replacing steam generators that cost more than $600 million. Duke Power shuttered its Crystal River plant in Florida for much the same reason.
Since 2015, six nuclear plants have been closed, utilities have announced plans to shut down another eight, and still others may face early retirement. We should allow that to happen in an orderly, businesslike fashion.
Cost, efficiency, availability, security and other factors should determine the best energy source for electric power plants, not lobbying power and the willingness of politicians to hand out favors.
When government picks winners and losers in energy markets, consumers are stuck with the bill because regulators pass electricity costs on to them in the form of higher rates. Utilities should compete to provide electricity without government assistance.
Today’s nuclear power plants typically use technologies that are a half-century or more old. Ironically or not, keeping these plants up and running delays the introduction of more modern and much safer alternatives, such as small modular reactors, which are the nuclear industry’s future.
As for saving jobs, policymakers need to think more broadly. The United States is currently seeing a manufacturing revival. The main reasons for this are increased labor costs in China and lower electricity costs at home—the result of cheap natural gas. The best way to create even more jobs in manufacturing and other industries is to keep electricity costs down. Propping up unprofitable nuclear plants does the opposite.
Developers scale down plans for Wylfa nuclear plant
Construction Enquirer, Grant Prior, 24 May 17, Horizon Nuclear Power has unveiled a more “compact” design for its planned £10bn Wylfa power plant on Anglesey. The developer has started a new round of consultation ahead of a planning application being submitted later this year.
Horizon said: “We are making some changes to the power station layout to make it more compact and, as a result, we’ve streamlined our construction schedule and reduced construction worker numbers.”…..http://www.constructionenquirer.com/2017/05/24/developers-scale-down-plans-for-wylfa-nuclear-plant/
Nuclear chief Svinicki re-appointed to NRC
Trump names nuclear chief Svinicki to a new 5-year term, abc news, By MATTHEW DALY, ASSOCIATED PRESS, Trump had previously named her to lead the five-member panel through June. Svinicki, a Republican and a nuclear engineer, has served on the commission since 2008.
Trump also nominated two other Republicans to fill out the commission: Annie Caputo, a Senate aide and former Exelon executive, and former South Carolina Public Service Commission Chairman David Wright.
All three appointments require confirmation by the Senate.
The NRC oversees the nation’s fleet of commercial nuclear power plants, as well as storage and disposal of nuclear waste and other issues related to nuclear power.
Svinicki has worked at the Energy Department and as a GOP aide to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Trump has proposed $120 million to revive the dormant Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, and Svinicki’s appointment was seen by supporters as a boost to that project.
Svinicki is considered supportive of Yucca Mountain, which most Nevada lawmakers strongly oppose…….http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/trump-names-nuclear-chief-svinicki-year-term-47584220
1 This Month
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