Nuclear is Our Future

Bellona Waste Report

2007-06-03T13:01:00.000-05:00

Bellona has issued a report stating that there are 21,000 spent fuel assemblies in a storage system that will explode if water leaks in, and that water is leaking in.

It's kinda flawed.

1. All uncontrolled reactions are not explosions. A reaction can be uncontrolled merely because a person or mechanism is not in charge of it--there were 16 natural nuclear reactors in an African uranium deposit, and they formed in a very similar configuration to this postulated accident. How did they stop? The energy released heated the water and eventually boiled it--and without the water, there's no reaction. After it shut down, it cooled off, letting the water back in; this process was repeated for millions of years until it simply ran out of fuel. No explosions were involved--it didn't even disrupt the ore.
2. There will never be a homogeneous mixture. Ceramic does not dissolve in water, there's no way to get enough water into the fuel assemblies even if it did, and expecting every single one of those 21,000 tubes to open up, let the water in, and not let any of it out afterward is ridiculous.
3. This isn't gasoline. A critical configuration in one area does not create a critical configuration in another nearby area.

Sounds a bit like the Brookhaven Report, which was written in 1957 with no access to computers, and said that if the core of a nuclear reactor were pulverized and deposited equally into the lungs of 10,000 people, they would die. Well, yes--but what's your point? The amount of water in a filled bathtub could drown 40,000 people. Blaming nuclear power for things it didn't, doesn't, and can't do doesn't save lives. It cynically manipulates tragedy for political purposes.

That Manhattan Project Document on Aerosolized Uranium

2007-06-03T12:51:00.000-05:00

Once every few weeks, people who want to portray depleted uranium as the most dangerous substance on the face of the Earth trot out a document from the Manhattan Project stating that uranium could be aerosolized and used as a radiological weapon.

This happened recently, and doesn't have anything to do with what we know about uranium's radiotoxicity today. It doesn't prove any conspiracy theories and doesn't make uranium magically increase its radioactivity when aerosolized.

For the record.

How to Build a Nuclear Reactor, Vintage 1941

2007-06-03T12:50:00.000-05:00

The British government was given documents in 1941 describing how to build a nuclear reactor.

And they sat on them.

Until Thursday, May 31.

The Manhattan Project scientists had a plutonium bomb design ready in 1944 and had to wait for a specialized weapons-production reactor to be completed in order to actually build it. If they had known the plutonium was going to be available before 1945, they could have started work on the implosion mechanism--the most difficult part--and had it ready by mid-1943.

I'm sure the families of every person killed on both sides in 1944 and 1945 will say, "Thanks, guys."

More from We Support Lee.

Depleted Uranium and the Precautionary Principle

2007-06-03T12:48:00.002-05:00

The author of this article posted to Know_Nukes admits that their conspiracy theories about depleted uranium are probably wrong.

But what if they weren't?

That boils down to an extremely conservative attitude. It is formally known as the Precautionary Principle: don't do anything unless all the possible problems to future generations are known and solved. Since humans aren't infalliable and can't predict everything, don't do anything--even if you know the problems you'll cause are less severe than what you're currently experiencing.

How can you know that it's a net gain if you can't know everything that will happen in the future? Easy. Today's problems, if unsolved, will continue unabated into the future, indefinitely. Thus, whatever problem is eliminated, whatever net gain is made, will be projected into the future from this day forward.
I'm all for precaution--eliminating, reducing, and optimizing risks; establishing a coherent system by taking problems that will always be there and letting them work against each other. Given two two-by-fours, I'll lean them against each other instead of trying to balance them on their ends and complaining that doing so requires perfection and is inherently unstable, and mere humans cannot be trusted with two-by-fours as a result. However, I am not in favor of swinging in trees.

The Precautionary Principle has nothing to do with precaution. It is simply a reactionary philosophy that has been with humanity since our first consciousness, and is keeping humans who have the bad luck to be born in the Third World barefoot and sick when solutions are well-known and available.

Give me the real left wing. Not the left wing of Amory Lovins, but the left wing of FDR. Give every person everywhere an American standard of living, and watch their environmental impact go down as they rely less on nature for their needs. Telling a man who is up to his waist in a rice paddy in Bangladesh that he needs to use less energy is not the answer. A radical overhaul of the poverty lifestyle forced upon him by reactionaries is the answer, and doing so is our moral obligation.

Sizewell B Goes to Russian Fuel

2007-06-03T12:48:00.001-05:00

You can understand it, with the expense of keeping all that manufacturing equipment for one plant's fuel, but still--the Russians? Couldn't they get it from us?

One thing is certain: if the American nuclear industry doesn't immediately forget any illusions that it is special and start acting like an industry, they'll stagnate just like they have over the past 35 years.
The nuclear industry outside of Russia is the only industry in the world to respond to a great opportunity for growth by screaming "SLOW DOWN!" Well, guess what. You're never going to have everything you need to be perfect, and your suppliers that you so often complain about move at the normal speed for private industry--meaning a complete turnaround in two years is not unheard of--instead of yours. Don't worry about them. Get the orders, start innovating, and the workers will come as soon as there are jobs for them.

Remember: if not for Chernobyl--meaning, if they had banned the RBMK in 1950 like we did, and if the Soviet military hadn't tried to build power plants out of their bomb factories--the Russian nuclear industry would have a perfect safety record. They do have much better financial and management performance. There are lessons to be learned from the Russians; they're getting these orders for a reason.
And if you don't get going, the Russians are going to come over here, get the VVER-1000 certified by the NRC, and build a fleet. Do you really want that?

Link.

Ontario Update

2007-06-03T12:47:00.002-05:00

They've hired some consultants to do a comparison of the major available reactor designs.

I disagree with the Society of Energy Professionals, however, and fully expect that McKinsey will rate AECL's Canadian nuclear technology near the bottom. The current designs remove the CANDU's traditional commercial advantages and are competitive only if there is a requirement to consume American-style reactors' waste--which Canada doesn't have. They could build a fleet down here, but in places without a lot of LWR waste, they might as well just build fast breeders.

Link.

On the New Global Warming Proposals

2007-06-03T12:47:00.001-05:00

George Bush has proposed a series of international meetings on how to replace the Kyoto Protocol with something that works. At this point, I think it's fairly evident that:
1. The Kyoto Protocol doesn't go far enough and has set up a system which has been manipulated to obstruct real progress.
2. Global warming as a result of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere beyond the capability of natural systems to absorb it is a fact of physics.
3. We need a concrete procedure in place for an orderly, face-saving transition from the combustion era instead of more meetings and non-binding agreements.

Count me skeptical. I don't see anything here that satisfies the third point, but perhaps George Bush knows by now that any proposal of his will be rejected simply because it came from him (which is wrong, even though I don't agree with him on much), and is trying to set up an international conference where Obama or Hillary will present something nearly identical to what he would have.
Let's just hope that successor doesn't drop the ball.

Link.

American Centrifuge Plant Under Construction

2007-06-03T12:46:00.000-05:00

As of May 31.

USEC has also committed to keeping Paducah open for another five years. The American Centrifuge Plant will not be fully operational until at least 2012; they say it will start enriching uranium in 2009.

Link.

NRC, POGO, and Worker Fatigue

2007-06-03T12:45:00.000-05:00

The NRC has proposed implementing one of the few POGO recommendations I agree with: reducing hours for security guards at nuclear power plants. I'd like to take this opportunity to draw a distinction between watchdogs and attack groups. We don't like to engage either, since neither tend to know what they're doing, and the NRC's unwillingness to admit anyone to discussions who isn't a member of the good ol' boy network doesn't help, but I submit that there is a difference that we need to be aware of.

We're used to being under attack; there hasn't been a moment in the last 40 years when we weren't. We are used to ignorant arguments coming from groups that are trying to shut down the industry, and accordingly have gotten used to taking any ignorant argument as a threat to shut down the industry. This, I believe, is a mistake.

Greenpeace and NIRS are attack groups. They have campaigns, use words like "shut" and "stop," and have a stated aim of trying to destroy nuclear technology. They cannot be reasoned with; they must be exposed as fools in public, their sources of volunteers and money cut off, and the loons in charge marginalized. We are familiar with them, their message, their strategy, and their tactics.

POGO, on the other hand, suffers from exactly the same problem as the industry and NRC: nuclear exceptionalism. They are a watchdog group; they believe that the NRC and government in general are not doing the best possible job and are trying to expose problems so they can be fixed. We disagree with them a lot, but they're not out to get us. They aren't the problem. Don't attack them in the manner that Greenpeace and NIRS attack the industry.

Joe Six-Pack thinks nuclear power plants pollute, are unsafe, and produce piles of leaking, deadly waste. They want a good reason to think that nuclear power plants don't do any of those things, and we can provide it--if we act graciously and professionally, and not wimpy or suburban, and destroy these urban myths with real information. As I've said before, people are not dumb--they just have other things to worry about. Tell me an auto mechanic can't understand how a nuclear power plant works.
The key is, they can't figure it out on their own. We have to do what every other technology proponent does, and provide information and involvement. Whatever you want to say about how it should be, the public is the boss.

House of Lords on CoRWM Report

2007-06-03T12:37:00.000-05:00

They say it's "incoherent." And it is; that's the sad part.

The report does not make any concrete proposals. It recommends that more committees be set up and the issue discussed, saying that the British government is moving too fast.
That's right: telling the British government to slow down. It's difficult to think of a recommendation that lacks initiative to a greater degree.

They also are fixed on geologic disposal and do not seem to be interested in processing beyond the existing PUREX-and-storage instead of recycling or beneficial use of fission products. That's a terrible mistake; these materials can be useful and shouldn't be dumped.

Vogtle PSC Hearing Coming Up

2007-06-03T12:36:00.002-05:00

On June 12 at 10 AM in their hearing room at 244 Washington Street SW, Atlanta (via WAND).

As we saw with Shoreham, this is where a lot of decisions get made while we focus on NRC hearings. We really need a power structure analysis on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis if we are to organize effectively in support of new build.

GNEP Environmental Impact Statement Comments

2007-06-03T12:36:00.001-05:00

I recently got my hands on an anti-nuclear activist's comment submitted to the Department of Energy on GNEP's environmental impact statement. It serves as an example of a few things to do when writing public comments, as well as some things not to do.

First, don't talk about morals and ethics; talk about the legal and public relations implications of the proposed action. Morals and ethics are nice, but being immoral or unethical doesn't have an immediate negative effect on the decision-makers. Being sued or inciting a riot does, and a comment must make clear that the proposed action is either illegal or will result in negative political consequences.
If the proposed action is legal and you still don't like it, you have two options. If you have enough money, lawyers are extremely creative and can concoct an admissible contention from almost anything, and trials/settlements cost the opponents money even if you lose. If you have no money and a lot of people, get about 1,000-1,500 of them to submit near-identical comments threatening protests and media activity. And above all, be prepared to follow through if they go ahead with the proposed action; you can't be caught bluffing. If you are, that's the end of your credibility.

Do not assume that they have received "expert analyses" and that you only have to second them. Know the most important points of those analyses and echo them as though you didn't know about the expert analyses--it's much more impressive to whatever bureaucrat reads the comment if they think that there's a huge groundswell of opposition for diverse, original reasons instead of three guys and their 1,500 foot soldiers.

Don't ask them to follow the procedure. They either will follow the procedure or won't, and the only thing you can do is threaten negative consequences if they don't (or do, if you don't want them to follow the procedure).

Don't include conspiracy theories. Preferably, don't originate them or subscribe to them, but don't try to analyze people's motives or do a power structure analysis, either. They don't care about that. Again, they care only about negative consequences to them politically, legally, and financially if they proceed. If you don't want them to do whatever they're doing, make it clear that your organization will inflict those negative consequences.

There are more subtle ways to threaten the DOE with legal action than to say "if you proceed with this program, we will be forced to pursue legal action." State what exactly is not legal about what they are proposing--they'll fill in the rather obvious blank if you identify yourself as a member of an organization explicitly formed to oppose the proposal. Likewise with publicity campaigns. This is only credible, however, if a large number of people from that organization write in and identify themselves as such, and it really works when that organization has an ongoing publicity campaign that has reached the decision-makers.
This is also different from the standard protest letter or letter to the editor in that the decision-makers actually receive the letter or a summary and are obligated to at least publish it. As such, speak as a negotiator and use negotiating tactics; this is not a place to do general-public-type PR.
Likewise, don't use personal attacks and don't try to tell them about what they've done. They know what they've done and using personal attacks lessens the probability that they'll accept a face-saving compromise. I'm not advocating for the further wussification of society, just differentiating between the approach needed for PR and the approach needed for negotiation. It is in fact fatal to weasel out, or to suggest solutions that don't involve the agency you're complaining about (like legislation).

Oh, and don't make grammatical and spelling errors, or do anything else that undermines your credibility. Do not feed the 'allegators'.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

2007-06-03T12:35:00.001-05:00

"Right from the beginning of the nuclear power industry, we have been assured that the technology is safe."

-mng.org.uk

And it was, and still is. It's safer than fossil fuels, and (rather importantly) works.

Anti-Nuclear Net.Activism

2007-06-02T03:52:00.000-05:00

Anti-nuclear activists have started circulating an email alert (rather, an alert in the footer of every email they send) asking people to get a (they suggest) WordPress or MySpace blog and start blogging as a way to stop nuclear power. I see some good signs here.

First, a WordPress blog in its externally-hosted form is a technical challenge for people who aren't familiar with servers, and in its free form is not powerful enough to be effective in an actual campaign. You can't even change the HTML code. MySpace, however, is a joke. There's no point trying to use it; once you get past being a joke of a movement, you have to disassemble everything you did and start over on a real platform.
We didn't make that mistake, at least not that badly. Blogger, for all its faults, is extensible. And most importantly, we made our mistakes a while ago and are starting to recover while they dig themselves a hole. They don't know that it's easier to have a tech-savvy organization set up a community that activists can join than to try to make everything work together after six or seven incompatible systems are entrenched. It seems also that anti-nuclear pages are either sophisticated ASP jobs or hacks, with nothing in between; an anti-nuclear activist who is trying to do a good job faces an almost square learning curve with almost no help from their colleagues. They are forced to cut corners and further decrease compatibility (and thus interoperability--which is the whole point).

Second, they honestly think that NEI pays everyone off, and that we're all NEI employees. Wrong. They simply, honestly, and truly do not understand that there is a difference between the industry and the supporters of the technology. That leads them to think we aren't distributed and can be beaten easily by five or six dedicated people.

Third, they concentrate on RSS. Go chase RSS, guys. Nobody uses it. It's useful only as an aggregation tool for people with nothing else to do and when it is converted to an email alert system.

Fourth, they acknowledge that the anti-nuclear movement doesn't do blogging. The first three dedicated, sustained pro-nuclear blogs (NEI, Atomic Insights, and NIOF) started in a short period in 2005. Others came along later; a second wave came along in 2006 (Freedom for Fission, We Support Lee, Energy from Thorium, and ARDT), and a third wave came along in late 2006 to early 2007 (Pebble Bed Reactor, Idaho Samizdat, Left Atomics, Nuclear Australia, NNadir). I like the fact that that number is going up with each wave (and diversifying), and NIOF is working on making it easier for people to get started--and get started in an organization.
I don't see the anti-nuclear activists, who are new to this and learn tech more slowly, getting there any faster than we did. Accordingly, I (conservatively) conclude that the anti-nuclear activists are two years behind us.
We have a window, and we have to do something with it. This little smell of blood shouldn't lead us to believe that they're dead, but should inspire us to work even harder to kick their butts and make sure they don't get up again. We must do this by removing their base of support; using the internet's core competencies (as the UNIX-HATERS Handbook says of computers, "nitpickers with elephantine memories") as a tool (not a strategy) to accelerate the process of organizing college campuses. It is clear that to do that, we need a Nuclear Advocates' Declaration of Principles (or something else similar to the Port Huron Declaration; if nothing else, to put our opinions in writing to immunize us from allegations that we're being bought off), a web-based community platform, and an internal handbook that we can keep out of anti-nuclear activists' hands until they have their own equivalent (i.e., something we can keep close to our chest for two or three years). NIOF is actively working on the second part, after which we'll obviously do the third part, but pro-nuclear activists will need to call a conference to do the first part.

In short: they're a threat, but a foreseen threat. We know what timeline, roughly, they will be operating on. Our application of game theory to proliferation--and their disdain for doing so--helps us. We know exactly what to do to prevent this threat from materializing. We can do it, and I know we will. We must. Too much is at stake, environmentally and on a public health level, for us to not do anything about it, or to fail to do what we know we can do and operate at the high level we know we can operate at.

Get up and do something!

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

2007-06-02T00:35:00.000-05:00

"ASLB rejects new contentions...but not on their merits"

-New England Coalition

...on the fact that they were being used as a deliberate delaying tactic.

The Nuclear Power Licensing Reform Act of 2007

2007-06-01T03:51:00.000-05:00

Rep. Nita Lowey, that eminent friend of nuclear power (joined by woo-woo John Hall as well as Eliot Engel, Maurice Hinchey, and Christopher Shays), is sponsoring a bill intended to make it even more unnecessarily difficult to build a nuclear power plant--or relicense one.

-Require that the NRC determine that plants are safe. In other words, add another piece of paper onto a process that already works.
-Require that the NRC certify that each nuclear power plant doesn't have security vulnerabilities during the licensing process. In other words, the effects of a terrorist attack are the victims' fault.
-Add another level of bureaucracy to the evacuation plans requirement, and expand the EPZ to 50 miles. More stakeholders can veto the plan under this proposal than possible today--any state within 50 miles or any federal agency involved in emergency management--increasing the likelihood of Shoreham-type politics.
-Require that the NRC do the same reviews for a renewal that they do for a licensing, most of which are completely pointless, since the design doesn't change. In reality, all a renewal application should have to prove safety-wise is that a plant's designed-in safety effects won't be affected by aging.
-Require the NRC to determine in any relicensing that the population density around the plant hasn't changed to the point where it is defined as "urban siting," which is bad for some reason. In other words, shut down Indian Point.

Fortunately, the bill doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of getting past President Bush even if it did pass. But we're going to have to watch out for this in a couple years, when either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will be eager to prove that they're tough on these "problems." Indian Point is going to have a constant fight on its hands come 2009.

Oh, and four Democrats and one Republican do not a bipartisan coalition make. Maybe they put the "coal" in "coalition" (or the "mental" in "environmentalist"), but not much more.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

2007-06-01T00:34:00.000-05:00

"Nuclear or Geothermal power plants? Neither."

-'amazngdrx'

Geothermal energy comes from the heat given off when radiation from natural radioactive materials inside the Earth is absorbed by nearby rock or other materials. So it is actually a kind of nuclear power.

It is more commonly grouped with wind and solar under the banner of "renewable energy," but this quote goes to show that "renewable" actually means "unfeasible." When they realize that geothermal energy might in fact work, it becomes scum, the enemy of the environment. Energy allows us to do things, so if the objective is to starve polluting processes so that they can't operate (a perfectly reasonable and understandable tactic), any functional energy source must be opposed, existing ones must be made as expensive as possible, and the depletion of reserves must be sped up--with a ban on exploration for new supplies--until there is no alternative but to revert to the solar-powered 1600-vintage "happy peasant lifestyle." A lifestyle, I might add, which would have killed me at birth.
Thus, I ain't too happy about proposals like this. I can put two and two together, and I like my energy. To quote one of the store designs (itself a quote):

Cancer in Sweden from Chernobyl, or, Why the LNT Needs a Swift Kick

2007-05-31T03:50:00.001-05:00

A completely bogus study from Sweden purporting to demonstrate that people are more likely to get cancer if exposed to pre-industrial levels of radiation than if they were exposed to atomic bomb detonations once again raises a question about anti-nuclear groups' unwavering support of the politically-motivated Linear-No-Threshold radiation impact hypothesis (LNT):

Why on Earth do they support it?

The LNT is, at its core, an assumption. A graph is constructed, with radiation exposure on the horizontal axis and cancer deaths on the vertical axis. The Japanese atomic bombing survivors' exposure and cancer data is then plotted, and a line is drawn from there to zero radiation and zero cancer.
Seriously.
No low-dose data is included--not from pre-industrial cancer rates, which involved basically the same radiation exposure as today yet were practically nonexistent, and not from the definitive study on the matter, which tracked all the radiation ever received by maintenance crews in Navy nuclear shipyards--and found a mortality rate over 20% lower than their coworkers in non-nuclear shipyards.

But if anti-nuclear groups want a scientific investigation of the health effects of radiation, as they so often claim to do, why do they support an assumption?

Pro-nuclear, anti-nuclear, and in-between organizations all should recognize the fallacy of relying on assumptions, and insist on a well-funded NAS investigation of the health effects of ionizing radiation, with the objective of identifying whether or not there is a threshold, and if there is one, upper and lower bounds.
I call on anti-nuclear groups to show that they have confidence in their claims by submitting them for rigorous peer review.

Harris Deferred

2007-05-31T03:50:00.000-05:00

Yep.

This is the first time that's happened in the "nuclear renaissance," and it won't be the last time. Apparently a conservation program will be cheaper for the utility, since all the capital investments involved will be made by consumers.

They were originally going to submit a COL application later this year; this presumably pushes it back to 2009.

More from We Support Lee.

Olkiluoto Unit 4 Proposed

2007-05-31T03:49:00.000-05:00

They're planning to cut through the red tape by summer 2008, with construction starting around 2013 and operation in 2018. That leaves five years for the Finnish government to make a decision.

I again state my firm belief that there is nothing about a nuclear power plant that merits all this bureaucratic baloney. If the thing burned oil it'd be up and running in two years, but a nuclear power plant with less environmental impact by far must jump through hoops that include a full vote of the Finnish Parliament.

Link.

Sites Under Consideration in South Africa

2007-05-31T03:48:00.000-05:00

"-Thyspunt, near Cape St Francis.
-Bantamsklip, 10 km southeast of Pearly Beach.
-Duynefontein, next to Koeberg in the Western Cape.
-Brazil, in the Northern Cape.
-Skulpfontein, in the Northern Cape."

-Link.

Designs were not mentioned, but presumably the AP1000, EPR, and ESBWR are under consideration (PWRs are the only type mentioned).
This doesn't cover the pebble-bed reactors also proposed for South Africa.

UK Government Finances and Decommissioning

2007-05-31T03:47:00.000-05:00

The Department of Trade and Industry has sold its $4 billion share in British Energy and placed the profits in a fund to manage the dismantling of a fleet of reactors built to an ill-advised reactor design that has been compared to the Stanley Steamer. A similar design was built once in the United States (Colorado's Fort St. Vrain), with even worse results.

Link.

"Two or Three More Reactors" for TVA

2007-05-31T03:46:00.000-05:00

Presumably, Watts Bar 2 and Bellefonte 1-2. "Potentially."

Let's just hope they don't divide their attention and pull a "Whoops."

Link.

Yet Again, The Difference Between Safety and Performance

2007-05-31T03:45:00.000-05:00

This Press of Atlantic City article starts with the predictable "A month after receiving a clean bill of health from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission," neglecting the fact that they, well, did, and that determination still applies.

The plant can shut down without there being a safety problem. If there is a technical problem that prevents them from being able to efficiently generate electricity, the utility will shut the plant down, replace the part in question, and bring it back up. There is nothing about such a problem that would cause a nuclear accident--I refer you to the overblown reaction to an even less-relevant electrical problem at the Indian Point plant in New York.

Chill out.

RTGs for Mars

2007-05-31T03:44:00.002-05:00

The Mars Science Laboratory will carry a device known as a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) that converts the heat given off when radiation is absorbed by metal into electricity, with no moving parts.
All that's required is a piece of radioactive material, sealed up inside metal or ceramic, and a thermocouple. The result is a lot of electricity from a small device that takes care of itself, for as long as the material is radioactive (a slight problem being the fact that the longer the material is radioactive, the less radioactive it actually is--materials that are chosen are the best combinations of time and activity, like plutonium-238 or the "nuclear waste" substance strontium-90). See a post from July 2005 for more.

It apparently wasn't discussed very loudly until recently for political reasons, given the Moon-hoax-theorist level of ignorance surrounding the last major RTG mission, Cassini.

Browns Ferry Update

2007-05-31T03:44:00.001-05:00

Anti-nuclear activist Frieda Berryhill has left no turn unstoned in a recently-published conspiracy theory about the Browns Ferry accident in 1975.

She describes the opposition to the Summit reactors, proposed in 1973 and canceled in 1975, for no reason other than the old they-don't-want-them-as-neighbors argument (which makes about as much sense as the identical argument made against racial integration in the 1960s). They were certainly safe (that type of reactor--a High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor (HTGR)--cannot even melt down), would have produced less waste than the average American reactor (approaching Canadian efficiency), and pose zero proliferation threat. They could even have run off of Hope Creek and Salem's nuclear waste, with some minor processing to change its shape. The "excess capacity" argument doesn't really hold, either, since a lot of that was oil-fired (and becoming rapidly uneconomic with the 1973 Arab oil embargo), you need some excess capacity in case a major plant breaks down, and electricity demand was growing fast enough to quickly eliminate any cushion.

But here's where it gets interesting. She says that the Browns Ferry fire in 1975 was somehow covered up by a conspiracy involving the industry periodical Nucleonics Week (which she incorrectly refers to as "Nuclearonics Week"), the industry's trade association at the time (the Atomic Industrial Forum), and the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, because somebody at DuPont had not heard of the accident (she also gets 55 Crackpot Points for her use of all-caps, but I digress). Now, if that's not a damning charge, I don't know what is.

On top of that, she apparently thinks that Browns Ferry Unit 1's startup hiccups, which happen to any newly-restarted power plant of any type, mean that the unit will be permanently shut down and decommissioned, wasting $1.8 billion but allowing them to get a license renewal (which they got before the restart) and BILK THE TAXPAYER OF BILLIONS (no specifics on how that will happen). Or maybe they'll replace a hose and fix a pump, which is what they did.

"Are you on drugs?"

-Judge Chamberlain Haller, My Cousin Vinny

Sadly, this is representative of anti-nuclear opinion--which unfortunately doesn't get published a whole lot. I have a strong suspicion that we're rebutting arguments that people don't worry a lot about (such as the proliferation potential of PUREX) without covering most people's major concerns and certainly not going on the offensive. For example, most people probably think that there aren't any nuclear power plants any more, that uranium is a fossil fuel that emits carbon dioxide, and that global warming is caused by human activity per se instead of a physical process that humans are using (carbon combustion). They certainly think that nuclear reactors can explode like atomic bombs. I've said it before, but I think the best answer overall is to explain how a nuclear reactor works in conceptual terms (especially to young people, who basically "get" the engineering design process), so that the urban myths don't get started in the first place. There aren't a whole lot of urban myths about coal burning, because people understand it. They can't design a coal burning power plant, but people have internalized the concept of combustion. And I don't see any reason why somebody who can disassemble and reassemble a Volvo carburetor by memory can't understand the very simple mechanism behind a nuclear reactor. Again, they're not designing it; they don't have a master's degree in it, but they know how it works. I can (and have) explained to a group of 50% Green, 40% Democrat and 10% Republican students what the difference is between a PWR and RBMK, in 20 minutes, without using the word "moderator," such that they knew where I was going half-way through an explanation of Chernobyl's graphite-tipped-control-rods problem. And as those who know me will tell you, I am no master communicator. We just have to abandon our nuclear exceptionalist egos and tell it like it is in ordinary terms.
If we try to make nuclear energy seem impressive and use difficult-to-understand terminology, we're going to leave the door open for people to just make stuff up. But I know we can do better than that. I know we will do better than that.

Public Meetings on Palo Verde

2007-05-31T03:44:00.000-05:00

Two are coming up:

1. There will be an observation-only meeting on June 6 from 6:30 PM until the cows come home, at the Saddle Mountain Unified School District Administration Building Board Room, 38201 W. Indian School Road, Tonopah, Arizona, to discuss performance improvements that the NRC wants.

2. On June 7th at 6:30 PM, there will be a town hall meeting in the cafeteria at Ruth Fisher Elementary School (same address) to discuss the plan.

Get out and hellraise!

Link.

On the International Fuel Bank

2007-05-31T03:43:00.000-05:00

$50 million has been approved by a House committee for an IAEA program to guarantee nuclear fuel to countries that waive their right to fuel cycle facilities. There are a number of things wrong with the concept, however:

1. There's nothing wrong with fuel cycle facilties, and there are ways to determine whether a dual-use facility (one that can theoretically be used for civilian or military applications) is being used for peaceful purposes. The problem is not the presence of the facilities; it is excess capacity at those facilities. Giving them long-term customers--nuclear power plants--is the only reliable way to ensure that they aren't used by the military. They can also be designed to not be able to handle weapons-grade material, or more advanced fuel cycles can be used that don't require enrichment or plutonium recovery. This program codifies the idea that reprocessing is plutonium recovery, which it usually is, but doesn't have to be. It does not in any way weaken nonproliferation efforts to draw a distinction between them, and actually strengthens them by removing an excuse to have a dual-use facility.
2. Taking existing military facilities and using them for peaceful purposes is a good thing. This program would ask countries to entirely dismantle them.
3. Countries opt for nuclear power largely for security reasons. Gas can be cut off and start causing blackouts within a few hours--but nuclear reactors can be run for up to two years without refueling, so there is no point to cutting off nuclear fuel shipments as a political negotiating tactic. Requiring countries to give up their "stash" of unused fuel and mandating that they maintain a "good record" with an international community dominated by radiophobe politicians or lose their fuel shipments erodes the independence provided by nuclear power. More here.

Link.

Swedish Problems?

2007-05-31T03:41:00.001-05:00

Swedish regulators (who are possibly even less rational than the NRC) ordered a work stoppage effective June 21 (?) for paperwork violations ("failure to provide sufficient evidence" and "insufficient methods").

Notice how no actual problems are involved.

Link.

McGaffigan Retrospective

2007-05-31T03:41:00.000-05:00

Terminally ill NRC Commissioner Ed McGaffigan issued the following statement on the 29th:

"This is my twelfth and last All-Hands Meeting. While I have served for about one-third of NRC’s history, I believe I have attended over seventy percent of these meetings. I enjoy them for the interaction we have with you.

Early in my tenure on the Commission, then-Chairman Jackson referred to me at a public meeting as the “fast” Commissioner, if I remember correctly because of the impatience I had already conveyed on multiple occasions that NRC needed to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of various NRC processes. Or perhaps it was because I still ran marathons and coached my children’s teams.

I am not so fast anymore as the melanoma I have been battling the last seven and a half years has advanced, particularly over the last eleven months. But I am as dedicated today as I was in 1996 to this great institution and to you, the staff who have made clear over the past decade that you wanted to move forward every bit as much as my fellow Commissioners and I did.

Together we have achieved great things in the last decade. This is probably not the time to enumerate them because I might still be talking at 3:30 p.m. But I want to thank you sincerely for your dedicated, at times approaching miraculous, efforts to bring about numerous changes that have improved safety and security while providing far more information to the public than in 1996.

Can the NRC of the future be better still? Absolutely. But it will take equal dedication from the forty percent of our staff who have been with us four years or less, and perhaps even stronger leadership from the Commission and senior staff at a time when both groups will be far less stable than over the past eleven years, as once distant retirement dates are now upon them and well-deserved retirements beckon.

My request to you, the NRC staff, in this last All-Hands Meeting I will attend is that you rededicate yourselves to excellence in the years ahead.

How do I define excellence in a regulator? Let me start with my favorite quotation. It’s from Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. During my ten months in Europe on a fellowship after graduating from college, I took advantage of the cold and wet European winter to study the history of each country I visited. Lawrence writes: “All men dream, but not equally. Some dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds and wake in the day to find it is vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible.”

For me, in all my federal service, I have been committed to being a dangerous man, a dreamer of the day. So the first step to excellence in a regulator is a devotion to being a dreamer of the day.

The second step to excellence is being committed to following the facts as they are, not as one might wish them to be. Avoid theoretical or ideological thinking, where facts not fitting preconceived models or ideas are rejected and mistakes inevitably follow.

The third step in a pathway to excellence is to avoid complacency in all of our activities. Overall industry performance is today at its highest level ever. But there are always outliers and it is our duty to the American people to do our best to identify those outliers, to avoid any future Davis-Besse type event, the only significant precursor during my almost eleven years with the Commission.

The fourth step to excellence is to dedicate oneself to lifetime learning to ensure that you remain the absolute best scientific, technical, engineering and legal regulatory agency on this planet. I learn something new almost every day and get tremendous satisfaction from that. I hope you all do.

The fifth pathway to excellence is to follow the law in all our regulatory decisions. The Atomic Energy Act specifies a “reasonable assurance of adequate protection” standard. It does not specify “absolute assurance of perfect protection” which some stakeholders would prefer and which would make pursuit of nuclear technologies and any other technologies impossible if applied to them. The Constitution makes changing laws difficult. Those who would fundamentally change our statutes do not have the votes to bring about such change. Nor should they.

The sixth pathway to excellence is a commitment to welcome full debate of issues as they arise. I am proud of those who voice differing views at this agency. Over the past decade we have made it easier to do so through new mechanisms such as non-concurrences, while still achieving timeliness in our regulatory decisions. I have not always agreed with the non-concurrences, although not infrequently the Commission has agreed with the non-concurrence. But I welcome all of them as a signal of a vibrant regulatory agency, honestly dealing with often ambiguous data.

My seventh and final pathway to excellence is a commitment to openness and honest dialogue with all of our external stakeholders. We must become better communicators of NRC’s excellence and of our deep commitment to the health and safety of our fellow citizens.

If NRC staff in the future follow these paths to excellence, the sky will be the limit in the respect the agency will garner from our fellow citizens with one exception, the anti-nuclear interest groups who have only a single goal, to prevent the use of nuclear reactors and other nuclear materials, no matter how safe and secure. They will continue to unjustly and without basis accuse you of negligence, and worse.

I have been known for the frankness of my public remarks over my tenure. Many of my so-called controversial remarks have been spoken to defend this great institution from baseless calumny. We all received an insight into one of these groups when they mistakenly issued a press release upon the occasion of the President’s visit to Pennsylvania last May. The release stated - and I quote - “[FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE].”

Safety and security policy cannot be based on factoids. When such tactics are used in my presence, I tend not to give quarter. It’s the Irish in me, perhaps. But I have no tolerance for factoids or for baseless attacks on this great institution. I have an open door to anyone in the anti-nuclear community. They have rarely taken me up on the offer, perhaps because they know I will not accept junk science, distortion of NRC information, bumper stickers, slogans and factoids from them.

I have served this government for over thirty-one years, and because I lucked out in winning my first job in the Foreign Service in 1976, I have always been at the most senior levels of government. I have been involved in many policy debates that go well beyond the mission of this institution. But my touchstone has been a commitment to as close to absolute honesty in those debates as is humanly possible. That is, and should always remain, NRC’s commitment, even if some groups do not share that commitment and resort to distortion.

It has been a great honor to serve with you, to learn from you, and to defend you. All human institutions are imperfect and we are going to make mistakes. The only significant precursor in my tenure, the Davis-Besse head corrosion event, comes to mind. But no one should ever doubt that you are the nation’s nuclear safety and security watchdogs, not those who attempt to give themselves that title. My wish is that this institution, today a shining example of excellence among all safety regulators worldwide, will constantly rededicate itself to excellence as each new generation of employees comes on board so that the nation can safely and securely utilize the enormous potential of nuclear power and radioactive materials.

Thank you and God bless you all."

-Link.

Diablo Canyon ISFSI Environmental Assessment Available

2007-05-31T03:40:00.000-05:00

This one includes an assessment of terrorism as though it were a consequence of building the facility. Obviously, terrorism is an attempt to destroy the facility, not a risk of its operation, so there's no need to evaluate it. Are riots to be used as a mark against integration?

Update: Mothers for Peace has issued the predictable press release, saying that the facility shouldn't be licensed until every possible terrorism scenario has been shown to be completely impossible, which obviously can't be done.

Link.

Kazakhstan to "Study" Conversion Plant

2007-05-31T03:39:00.000-05:00

Diversification is good, eh?

Link.

What About All Those Indigenous Populations That Are Being Used as a Dumping Ground?

2007-05-31T03:38:00.000-05:00

An Australian indigenous group has volunteered a part of their land as a low- and intermediate-level waste repository (read: for rubber gloves and used reactor parts, respectively).

Do you think they'll stop using the "environmental racism" argument? Don't hold your breath.

Link.

Online Petitions

2007-05-31T03:37:00.000-05:00

A reminder and update to the recent post about an anti-nuclear petition to start a politically-motivated investigation of the NRC: they're using an online petition. Legislators ignore online petitions, because a bot could easily be programmed to sign it a million times with random names (e.g., Geraldo Lubczynski) and no verification. They pay attention to letters from their constituents, and to a certain extent, written petitions that have been the subject of media campaigns. They pay a lot of attention to petitions to get a referendum on the ballot, in states where this is possible.

Plus, think about it: how is it going to get delivered? Isn't it a lot easier to provide people with an email form and writing tips?

The only conceivable use for an online petition is to "test the waters" about what ideas can find support on the internet. There is little use for such an exercise; any idea can find support on the internet, and the blogosphere in peer-review mode (much as Ruth Sponsler and I did a while back w.r.t campus organizing) is much faster at evaluating soundbites. Blogs combine quick response with thoroughness; webrings and link lists, while they basically create echo chambers, remove much of the requirement for physical meetings to discuss strategy. The disadvantage is that they're public, but their limited readership provides the internet equivalent of a focus group. Online petitions, on the other hand, only provide a yes/no option--and you never hear from the "no" people.

Don't use online petitions; use a letter-writing campaign, or a ballot item, with the internet as an organizing tool (i.e., as a substitute for the phone tree). These facts have been known since about 2000, but the anti-nuclear activists are showing how new they are to net.activism by using online petitions. Let them shoot themselves in the foot.

DOE Tailings Debate in the New York Times

2007-05-31T03:35:00.000-05:00

The Department of Energy has 28,000 tons of uranium left over from enrichment, which, one would think, should be auctioned. Dumping it into the market could lower the price of uranium and affect the viability of new mines, more efficient reactors, and recycling technology.

USEC, however, wants it all for free. Anti-nuclear groups want it called "nuclear waste" and dumped in Yucca Mountain instead of used. Quite predictable.

Incidentally, this article is probably the first I've read by the New York Times' resident nuclear illiterate that doesn't contain major factual errors.

Link.

Investigate the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

2007-05-31T03:34:00.000-05:00

There has been a call from several anti-nuclear groups recently to investigate the NRC for ~~heresy by thought, heresy by word, and heresy by deed~~ "endangering" the "people of the United States," subverting "the democratic process," planning "at least 50 more nuclear plants," complacency in the installation of "substandard and defective parts," "limiting public participation" and "lowering standards" "to reduce construction costs," failure to require evacuation plans [which they do require -ed.], discriminating against the elderly, allowing the production of nuclear waste, "failing to regulate," "interfering" with whistleblowers, ~~and endorsing the scandalous findings of that heretic Galileo~~.

Hey, if they can "investigate" anyone who disagrees with them as though they were criminals, why don't we start our own petition? Here are some charges I can think of off the top of my head:
1. Abrogating the responsibility of the government to defend its citizens from military attack by forcing nuclear power plant operators to hire small armies to defend their facilities;
2. Forcing nuclear power plant operators to file evacuation plans in response to postulated accidents that cannot happen;
3. Levying disproportionate fees;
4. Failing to regulate radioactive discharges from fossil fuel facilities;
5. Encouraging kludging and other bad engineering practices;
6. Recovering unnecessary costs from licensees and ratepayers;
7. Contributing to global warming by making the licensing process unnecessarily difficult;
8. Failing to consider reactor designs other than the light-water reactor;
9. Encouraging SLAPP lawsuits by anti-nuclear groups;
10. Preventing the beneficial use of byproduct material;
11. Failing to establish meaningful guidelines for the review of a reactor design;
12. Failing to accomodate integral fuel cycle facilities;
13. Requiring unnecessary components that reduce maintainability and introduce additional accident precursors;
14. Establishing technical specifications that emphasize beating a failure probability over sound engineering;
15. Discouraging the construction of test and research reactors through excessive fees and requirements that apply only to operational reactors;
16. Interfering with the doctor-patient relationship;
17. Failing to assert its statutory authority over the environmental impact of nuclear power;
18. Replacing sound management with rules and people-proofing;
19. Punishing licensees for paperwork violations;
20. Requiring multiple reviews of identical safety considerations;
21. Failing to establish a federal standard for byproduct material disposition;
22. Failing to use cost-benefit analysis for public health issues.

Any others?

Working at the State Level

2007-05-31T03:33:00.000-05:00

Open thread: ideas for more effectively working on state restrictions.

Anti-Nukes to Monitor Part Failures

2007-05-31T03:32:00.000-05:00

According to this email alert, they're looking into a database to keep track of each reactor trip. That doesn't sound like it would be too hard to counter as a pro-nuclear group; a blog would work even better as a way to analyze it.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

2007-05-31T00:56:00.000-05:00

"But the UK has a potential solution. British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL) operates a spent fuel reprocessing facility at Sellafield on the west coast of Wales, where it extracts uranium and plutonium. Should Amergen and Entergy become able to ship spent fuel rods from their U.S. nukes to Sellafield, what is now useless radwaste will be worth billions."

-Michael Steinberg

Is there something wrong with separating what is actually waste from unused nuclear fuel? Does making money from it make it bad?

BTW...Sellafield is in Cumbria...and Cumbria is in England, not Wales.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

2007-05-30T03:55:00.000-05:00

"These [decommissioning] funds are tax exempt so long as they are held by a state regulated utility. But when they transfer to non-regulated corporations like Amergen and Entergy, under present law they become taxable. So these corporations have been lobbying the IRS and Congress, so far unsuccessfully, to change the law so they won’t have to pay these taxes. They stand to avoid paying $1 billion in taxes should they succeed."

-Michael Steinberg

And...why should the IRS take money set aside by law for cleanup?

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

2007-05-29T03:55:00.000-05:00

"The sound waves penetrate the tank and the Helium Atoms are heated up and then they bounce into each other causing heat and get very hot by the agitation caused by the sound wave bombardment. This will make heat and with an interior of the tank coated with ceramic coating it will get really hot and stay hot, that heat can then be used to run a coil through the center filled with water which will be your basic steam generator on the exterior, which spins an electric motor. Therefore any power lost from the transmission line is recaptured and therefore there is no loss.

These little tanks can be placed on the ground, prevent that horrible noise that [expletive deleted] of [sic] people and hurts the wild life and disorients them from their normal and natural life cycles and daily patterns. The heat is used, the sound is used and we all win. If you have an idea, which is similar or based upon a similar concept, then maybe you should join a group of thinkers who do not close their minds, turn them off, think out side the box and would like to meet people like you."

-Power Lines Should Never Be Wasted

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

2007-05-28T03:55:00.000-05:00

"It is necessary that such a research will be undertaken by scientists independent of industrials. This is not the case today, the assessments of the Chernobyl disaster reach us only through the filter of powerful pronuclear organizations."

-Commission de Recherche et d'Information Indépendantes sur la Radioactivité

Pro-nuclear, meaning anyone who does not have a pre-existing political agenda to kill off nuclear power?
And the idea that pro-nuclear organizations--not the industry, whose agenda is to ensure that their paychecks keep coming, but pro-nuclear organizations, whose agenda is the promotion of nuclear technology--are powerful is ludicrous. For example, if NIOF were to send a representative to the WNA Symposium in September (which we're considering doing, only to suggest that the industry not step on our toes or put their feet in their mouths while we try to organize students), we would have serious problems putting an airline ticket together. We as a movement have skilled people to a certain extent, but we're not rich by any means and aren't organized politically. The power is in the politically savvy, well-organized, litigious, and vicious anti-nuclear movement and its allies in the renewables (and to a lesser extent, the fossil fuel) industries.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

2007-05-27T03:54:00.000-05:00

"The worst result thus far of these cost cutting practices occurred at BE’s Hunterston B nuclear station in Scotland. A loss of power accident there threatened to turn into a Chernobyl-scale disaster, due in great part to understaffing."

-Michael Steinberg

A power outage is not going to turn into Chernobyl, not because of staffing, but because of physics. Hunterston B is not Chernobyl, doesn't work like Chernobyl, and can't experience a Chernobyl-scale accident.

Hormesis Fungus?

2007-05-26T19:46:00.000-05:00

A species of fungus has been found to grow faster while being irradiated by Cesium-137. No, it didn't mutate and eat Tokyo.

Yes, it's a preliminary study; yes, it will have to be replicated; yes, it needs to be studied instead of ignored.

Link.

Guardian Blog on Nuclear Power

2007-05-26T19:45:00.002-05:00

Nuclear Policy? No Thanks. Apparently there shouldn't even be a policy about it.

The comment thread is about 85%-90% pro-nuclear. It points out the need to develop an effective rhetoric of opposition to the economics argument (read: nuclear power should be banned because it's expensive) and the need to have support on the Left. We have to get something out of this opportunity and do something with this support, however contingent and/or ephemeral.

The Hill on Financing

2007-05-26T19:45:00.001-05:00

Banks and utilities are apparently teaming up to support the clean energy loan guarantees from the Energy Policy Act of 2005 that still haven't been implemented.

The nuclear industry can finance these plants without a 100% loan guarantee. I understand that saying they can't is a negotiating tactic to try to get the 80% proposal raised to 90%, but come on. Don't get greedy, and don't give the loons any more ammo. Giving them misinformation about the financial soundness of new build is OK, but not giving them ready-made soundbites.

Link.

Buy Paul Newman

2007-05-26T19:44:00.000-05:00

Anti-nuclear activists are orchestrating a boycott over his recent endorsement of nuclear power (and the Indian Point nuclear power plant near New York City in particular). I don't know how much impact this will have, but let's try to offset it anyway.

If the option comes up on any upcoming grocery trips, lean towards Paul Newman.

More at Know_Nukes.

NRC Application Timeline

2007-05-26T19:42:00.002-05:00

They've released a timeline for evaluating expected applications; we're hosting it here, plus a list of expected applications here. My FTP connection (not Blogger's, just mine) is down again, so the above links will be changed in a couple of days.

The important part to remember here is that this is reinforcing the anti-nuclear conspiracy theory that the NRC is the one doing the planning for new build. If we put out documents like this without explaining what they're for (who has signed a letter of intent with the regulator), people seriously think that the NRC is building nuclear power plants. Remember, people do not know everything we do and should not be expected to learn it all; they have their own jobs and lives to worry about. Communication is our job.

Belgian Phaseout in Trouble

2007-05-26T19:42:00.001-05:00

Their Prime Minister has conceded that it will probably not be possible.
Regardless, it should not be desirable. Nuclear power is concentrated, resource-light, and socially responsible.

A report is coming in June on whether the phaseout should be continued; be prepared.

Link.

Hungarian Uprate, Possible New Build

2007-05-26T19:41:00.000-05:00

They're proceeding with an 8% uprate to their four Soviet-era reactors, and are looking for up to six gigawatts of new capacity beyond that. Nuclear power is under consideration for at least some of that; the rest will probably be coal.

Will they burn lignite, walking the fine line between coal and combustible dirt? Perhaps.

Either way, coal kills. It is an ethical imperative to keep coal fumes out of our air, coal ash out of our water, and coal dust out of the lungs of miners. I hope they build six nice, big, new nukes.

Link.

Chinese Reactor Order

2007-05-26T19:39:00.000-05:00

The first two inland reactors (of four planned) have apparently been ordered.

Nuclear power plants should not be special projects. Building any kind of power plant costs money, and there is not a reason in the world that a combined-cycle inherently-safe waste-eating LMFBR should cost more than a coal burner. Until that happens, the progress of nuclear power in China will be glacial. When it does, the orders will flood in.

GE, General Atomics, Westinghouse, Hitachi, Toshiba, Areva, AtomEnergoProm, Mitsubishi, AECL: do you want an order every two weeks? If you do, design a combined-cycle LMFBR-based nuclear power plant with a centralized pyroprocessing or fluorination-and-distillation closed fuel cycle, using four to eight modular reactors totaling 3,000 MWt (2,000 MWe) for a total cost of no more than $500 million USD. You can do it. Just don't get in your own way.

Uranium from European Coal Ash

2007-05-26T19:38:00.004-05:00

It is "being studied."

This is in addition to and in cooperation with the Chinese project from a while back. It is also made significantly easier by the dirty brown coal burned in many places in Europe, which contains more uranium (as well as other radioactive material) that would otherwise end up in the environment.

Link.

Dominion to Order ESBWR in September

2007-05-26T19:38:00.003-05:00

That would make two. Maybe they could move a little faster than this, d'ya think?

Link.

Nuclear Gauge Overkill

2007-05-26T19:38:00.001-05:00

The NRC is fining a company in New Jersey $9,750 for four paperwork violations.

The NRC is like a driver who only knows how to slam on the brakes. Eventually, they're going to do it at a yellow light--and the nuclear industry will get rear-ended. This foolishness must stop.

Link.

UK Pre-Licensing: Learning from the Lack of US-Canada Cooperation

2007-05-26T19:36:00.000-05:00

The AP-1000, EPR, ESBWR, and ACR-1000 have been submitted. The ACR has the advantage of being able to consume waste from the others, as well as some from the British nuclear weapons program; I hope they can come up with a way to coordinate these two fuel cycles. US and Canadian governments take note.

They also seem to be using a design-basis site, which is something we really need to start using in the US.

Link.

Iran Update

2007-05-26T19:35:00.002-05:00

They haven't stopped enriching uranium, even under international pressure that seeks to violate their rights under international law; good for them.

According to the IAEA (a real international body, as opposed to the "coalition of the willing":

1. They haven't diverted any nuclear material.
2. 2,132 centrifuges are running.
3. If they don't implement the Additional Protocol to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, it will be more difficult for the IAEA to find all the information they want. (Not mentioned is the fact that the Iranians were implementing it before we started to threaten them.)

Link.

Nuclear Navy Update

2007-05-26T19:35:00.001-05:00

The USS Kitty Hawk--a conventional ship--is being prepared for decommissioning. It will be replaced by a nuclear-powered one.

How about a few more like this, to significantly reduce the Navy's oil use?

Link.

"Nuclear Waste Per Capita"

2007-05-26T19:33:00.000-05:00

I didn't know it was this easy to get press. Maybe we should pour orange juice into a vacuum breaker and get the NRC's response on video, or make an inflatable of a polar bear hugging a containment structure, or something like that.

How to turn a five-minute calculation into a "major, startling new report":

1. Figure out how much nuclear waste was produced by nuclear power plants in each state from publicly-available numbers. Inflate this figure by a factor of 20-30 by ignoring the unused fuel still left in the fuel rods that are in storage.
2. Get population data.
3. Divide.
4. Give it to your state groups to make a hullabaloo, even if the number is all of two pounds.

That's right. The most nuclear waste that anyone has accumulated per capita around the country is 2.15 pounds. That's something to be proud of--how much carbon dioxide has accumulated in the atmosphere from coal burning, per capita, and how much particulate matter is in people's lungs from coal burning, per capita? And how much of that nuclear waste is in the environment?

Zero.

Perversely, this is being used to justify a subsidy for fossil fuels, paid for by the operators of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. In Anti-Nuke World, climate scientists have it all wrong: carbon dioxide doesn't cause global warming; nuclear power plants do. Sure.

Talk about social responsibility. Yes, nuclear waste is going to be around for a while; a lot longer if we don't reuse the half-used fuel that poses the biggest part of the waste problem. But so are the Pyramids; the Pyramids have no conceivable use to the generations that have had to live alongside them. Like the Pyramids, there's no way for it to magically disperse itself into the environment. Like the Pyramids, it doesn't require any nannying. Like the Pyramids--and unlike chemical toxins from coal burners--it has a finite lifetime. Like the Pyramids, people regard it as magical and not the physical entity that it is.

Let's cite this study in the future. It looks very useful, not just from the data, but from the source.

More from We Support Lee (plus background on the subsidy here).

Link.

Browns Ferry Update

2007-05-26T19:32:00.000-05:00

Unit 1 shut down during testing at 3% power due to a hydraulic system leak. The part in question will obviously be replaced and the reactor restarted.

Unit 3 is a bit more interesting. The House Committee on Homeland Security wants the NRC to investigate an incident from last August in which an overloaded computer chip in the control system caused the reactor to shut down; they think it was a denial of service attack from the internet. Ignoring the fact that the controller in question was not connected to the internet, there was no way for this to actually cause a safety problem, meaning damage to the environment or injury to the public as opposed to broken parts. Broken parts need not result in safety problems if the overall system is configured to restore itself to a safer state in case of a broken part. That's how nuclear power plants work, with the notable exception of the design used at Chernobyl and at US and Russian nuclear bomb factories.
Unfortunately, airplanes and cars don't work like that, and people tend to think that all large machines are dangerous if badly maintained and/or operated, with nuclear machines being exceptionally dangerous. They see the management incompetence of the nuclear industry as indicative of safety problems.

Young people, on the other hand, are more familiar with technology and the engineering design process from seeing them up close in the form of computers. They're more likely to be uncomfortable with nuclear exceptionalism, and while it is a very tough case that would take a book-length rebuttal to make, I think it can be done.

NRC to Cooperate with China on AP-1000

2007-05-26T19:31:00.000-05:00

Essentially, it means that they will share experience, lessons learned, and problems that come up with the AP-1000 in both countries.

Sounds good; let's see how they screw it up.

Link.

More Russian Uranium Deposits

2007-05-26T19:30:00.002-05:00

Worldwide, we "use" about 67,000 tons of uranium per year, 670 tons of which is actually used (the rest is stored). Nuclear power provides 20% of world electricity, and could provide 100%, requiring 3,350 tons per year. The US, being 5% of the world's population, uses 25% of world energy; giving everyone American per-capita access to energy using nuclear power would require another five-fold increase in uranium consumption, assuming that the proportion of electricity out of total energy is the same worldwide--totaling 16,750 tons of uranium per year.

These eight Russian deposits contain 320,000 tons of uranium.

The math is not difficult: if their contents were used sensibly, these eight new mines could provide all the uranium needed to fuel all the nuclear power plants needed to provide American-style quantities of electricity to everyone in the world for almost twenty years.

Be reminded that this is 6% of worldwide uranium reserves. That's enough to last almost 320 years. However, there are two other major sources of uranium: coal ash and seawater.
Uranium is present in coal ash at an average level of 4.5 parts per million. In the US--and this is just in the US--118 million tons of new coal ash are available every year. That comes out to 531 tons--about 80% of the world's current uranium requirement.
Seawater is the big one, though. Uranium is present in seawater at an average level of 3.3 parts per billion. The oceans have about 1,500,000,000,000,000,000 tons of water and thus about 4,950,000,000 tons of uranium, with 35,000 tons added per year by runoff from rivers. Quite simply, as long as we use less than 35,000 tons of uranium per year, uranium from seawater is being made available faster than it is being consumed. Technically, it is a renewable resource.

But let's say we only had that 4,950,000,000 tons to use at a rate of 16,750 tons per year. That will last us 295,000 years. And that's not even counting thorium, which is another nuclear fuel that can produce just as much energy as uranium. More here.

So why do anti-nuclear activists say we're going to run out of nuclear fuel?

Link.

GNEP's International Prospects

2007-05-26T19:30:00.001-05:00

The US, Russia, China, France, and Japan have endorsed the concept.

Notice how that doesn't include any potential customers. While the reprocessing part of GNEP is an excellent step, the overall assumption that Third World countries can't be trusted with nuclear technology is absolutely wrong. The laws of physics still apply to the Third World, and an inherently-safe reactor built in the United States would be just as inherently safe if it were built in Ethiopia.

Link.

France to Build New Conversion Plant

2007-05-26T19:29:00.001-05:00

It's a two-step process, which will take place partly at Tricastin. No word yet on whether the life-cycle analysts will decide that it emits carbon dioxide, even though it doesn't handle or use carbon dioxide (which is sort of the point).

Construction is supposed to start this summer, which seems unusually fast for the nuclear industry.

Link.

Comments on the Tab Layout?

2007-05-26T19:28:00.001-05:00

Does anyone have any problems (disagree with the concept or implementation as well as pure technical problems) with the row of tabs near the top of the screen?

Note: the wiki and community site obviously aren't up yet, but the others are.

Learning from the GE Fuel Fabrication Facility Hearing

2007-05-26T19:28:00.000-05:00

There was a public hearing (hat tip: Know_Nukes) on May 15 on a plan to allow GE's CANDU fuel fabrication facility to use 0.9% uranium-235 in its fuel instead of 0.71% (natural levels).

Who cares?

People will care if you make it seem important. Don't pooh-pooh it, but explain in the most down-to-earth and accessible language possible what is physically being done and why, and what the implications are; explain why it is unimportant. Don't expect instant results (depending on the audience) because people have been taught for 60 years that nuclear technology is exempt from the laws of physics, but if we start communicating this point, we might turn some people around, especially young people.
Unfortunately, the GE rep used reassuring PR platitudes ("fluffed it off" in the words of a local resident who was not fooled, should not have been, and shame on GE for trying), and made this non-event seem important. After all, it must involve a real risk if a public hearing is called, right? No--the nuclear industry would call a public hearing to discuss whether they should clip their toenails--but the answer is "yes" for every other industry. The public doesn't expect trivialities at public hearings. The linked article contains several urban myths, at least some of which were probably made up on the spot. They will take months if not years to address, and for what?

This lack of a sense of audience or context misleads the public. Period. Stop it.

Biblis A Saga Continues

2007-05-26T19:27:00.004-05:00

Under Germany's nuclear phaseout law, each nuclear power plant is allotted a certain number of kilowatt-hours; this obviously is a strong disincentive to improvements in these plants' fuel efficiency and can be manipulated in a number of ways, including temporarily suspending electricity generation until a more favorable government comes in. That is precisely what RWE should do in this case IMO; their administrative challenge to the original rejection of a completely legal proposal to transfer production allotments from another plant to the Biblis A plant has been rejected, like everyone knew it would. They are considering a legal challenge next, which will also be rejected.

However, there are risks: if these plants are all shut down before their allotments are up, a new government might just order them all decommissioned, reasoning that they evidently aren't needed. There's no doubt about it: nuclear power is not necessary to keep the lights on. Every nuclear power plant in the world could be shut down, some places (like France) requiring two or three years' notice. But nuclear power is desirable; it's a matter of what shape the environment will be in when we get done pumping coal fumes into it.

Link.

Chapelcross Decommissioning Proceeds

2007-05-26T19:27:00.003-05:00

via WNN. They imploded the cooling towers last Sunday. Unofficial video is below, with a huge raspberry to BNG for using a non-standard file format for their official "download" that not only doesn't work with any video hosts but also doesn't work with video editing software. Here's a tip: if you put a file online, don't (1) make it impossible for people to use it and (2) lie about it on said website.

This is not in fact the first time this has been done; Trojan's cooling tower was imploded last year, although they might have been referring to the four towers at Chapelcross instead of one at Trojan:

The New White Paper

2007-05-26T19:27:00.001-05:00

Well, well, well.

The Greenpeace Delay is over and the new UK Energy White Paper is out. So is the Planning White Paper, Greenpeace's rebuttal, and a CommonDreams article.

While everyone seems to be patting each other on the back about how thorough they were, the overall point is neglected that this is about permission for private industry to build new reactors. In other words, Britain has a de facto reactor ban stricter than California's. The current system of "consultation" does not even result in much public input; it only induces delays.
What would be pro-nuclear? Let private industry build reactors if they want to, set up a regulatory framework to ensure that they're safe, and buy power from them when they're done. The way it is now, the British government has succeeded only in creating more paperwork and delays, and justifying this course of action with the fact that they set up rules and are following them. Congratulations.
Unfortunately, like the NRC's process, flaws in the stupid rules governing the process aren't admissible contentions. They apparently want it to take 20 years; I hope they don't choke on their filth in the interim.

This exposes once again a dangerous and endemic reliance on rules instead of the objective; a single pipe hanger at one of the "Whoops" units was repeatedly installed and uninstalled 17 times by very intelligent and capable people--because that's what the procedure told them to do. There has been little to no improvement since.

Both the Greenpeace and CommonDreams articles seek to argue whether nuclear power is a good idea instead of whether people should have the right to build reactors if they so choose and if a regulatory framework is in place. In this case, whether nuclear power is a good idea or not isn't the issue; the issue is whether there should be a nanny agency to prevent people from spending their own money on whatever they want, as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. If that's not the British system, fine. It wasn't Soviet Russia's system either. One rotted from the inside due to a lack of infrastructure investment, and I hope the other does not follow.

Link; Link.

ACRS to Meet on June 6-8

2007-05-26T19:26:00.000-05:00

It will be held in Room T-2B3 of the NRC headquarters: Two White Flint North, 11545 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Maryland, from 8:30 AM to 7:00 PM on June 6-7 and 8:30 AM to 1:30 PM on June 8th. The topics will include new fire protection rules (Shearon Harris supporters take note).

Contact Sam Duraiswamy at 301-415-7364 if you want to make a statement during the meeting.

Link.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

2007-05-26T19:25:00.000-05:00

"Stop Hinkley is dedicated to the removal of nuclear reactors from the Bristol Channel and the Severn Estuary and is committed to the introduction of greener technologies more appropriate to the new millennium."

-Stop Hinkley

Those "greener technologies" were our first energy sources and belong in the dustbin of history.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

2007-05-25T19:25:00.000-05:00

"The internal report from the FKA reveals that the incident (amongst other things) has to do with a continuous degradation in the security culture at the plant."

-Decommission

Why should nuclear power plants have a security culture? They're not an army base.

There should be a culture of transparency and openness to the public they serve--it's not as though there are any security secrets.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

2007-05-24T19:25:00.000-05:00

"The nuclear industry asserts that the cost and time it would take to sufficiently harden or retrofit these power plants makes taking safety measures impractical. But what if there were a low-cost way to quickly improve a nuclear facility's survivability?

There is a way. It's called "Beamhenge."

Beamhenge is simply a line of steel beams set vertically in deep concrete foundations connected by bracing beams, a web of high-strength cables, wires, and netting linking the vertical beams to form a protective screen -- the nuclear-grade equivalent of fences erected around golf driving ranges."

-Committee to Blow the Bridge

Ah, yes--gimme that old time religion, eh?

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

2007-05-23T19:24:00.000-05:00

"The suit was filed over the inadequate cleanup of the contaminated Santa Susana Field Laboratory, site of one of the only reactor meltdowns in the world. Judge Samuel Conti declared that the DOE has violated and continues to violate the National Environmental Policy Act and permanently enjoined DOE from transferring ownership or possession, or otherwise relinquishing control over any portion of the nuclear area at SSFL until an Environmental Impact Statement has been completed.

This is a huge victory for the environment."

-Committee to Blow the Bridge

Amazing how it didn't kill anybody, and how they don't exactly mention that the meltdown wasn't the cause of the contamination.

And having a land sale overturned on a technicality is a huge victory for the environment. Sure.

The Radioactivity of Depleted Uranium

2007-05-22T22:20:00.000-05:00

Apparently it magically becomes more radioactive when dispersed.

Need more evidence that anti-nuclear activists have joined the creationist war on science?

TVA Restarts Browns Ferry Unit 1

2007-05-22T10:42:00.000-05:00

12:28 AM on Tuesday.

Behold thy steadfast blue light for your full license term, to paraphrase Calvin and Hobbes. Next, one presumes, is Watts Bar Unit 2.

Now, to clear up a few things, this is not the first capacity addition for nuclear power since Watts Bar Unit 1 started up in 1996. There have been many smaller increases in power and efficiency at nuclear power plants, and technically, those are capacity additions. Technically, also, this isn't a capacity addition: Browns Ferry Unit 1's zero has been counted against the industry's reliability measurements since 1985. But this is the first reactor to go from zero to producing energy since 1996, so it is very significant. Comparisons of the "cost effectiveness" of nuclear power that are based on capacity additions for wind vs. nuclear in the time since 1996 are completely invalid because (a) they're basically proving that they're building more than nothing and (b) windmills are a lot less reliable than nuclear power plants--90% for nuclear and 25% for wind, so it takes at least three times as much windmill capacity to produce the same amount of actual electricity.
Fun With Statistics, eh?

That said, I don't know about the industry. I don't think they learned anything from the First Bandwagon Market. I have a feeling that nuclear engineers basically still want to design the most complicated system possible for the fun of it, and cling to their emotional favorite reactor concepts that seem "cool." When people like Andrew Kadak design reactors explicitly for the purpose of buying off anti-nuclear groups--implicitly validating their crackpot notions and inviting them to find other fabricated "problems" in the new design--it makes me wonder if people have learned anything. Younger nuclear engineers don't seem to be trying to communicate nuclear issues, with a few exceptions; they seem to be turning into copies of Bill Nye the Science Guy in the mistaken belief that the public has taken the data, thoroughly considered it, and made value judgments about waste, proliferation, and safety. They have not. They don't have enough information to do so. This information about the basic physical mechanisms behind nuclear power should be coming from the NRC, the industry should respond to individual accusations made against facilities, and independent advocates should take the NRC's information and use it in the political arena. Unfortunately, nobody is really picking up the slack: the NRC provides little information, all in jargon and with no perspective, the industry sometimes responds to things with little consistency from effort to effort, and there is no pro-nuclear movement to speak of and never has been. We independent advocates are working on our end, but that is made much more difficult by the fact that we also have to do the industry's and NRC's outreach jobs. I submit an incident at Sequoyah as an example: I responded to it with a blog post--which would have been made much more effective with a community website that enables quick distribution of news and massive net.activist response (letters to the editor, letters and petitions to elected officials, coordination of media events, and all the basic real-life activism that can be accelerated but not replaced by the internet) on the part of pro-nuclear people--but NEI didn't pick it up, not even sending out one of their notoriously meaningless press releases that assures everyone that everything is OK instead of answering their questions. I know that the issue of professionalism in nuclear engineering or lack thereof is different from NEI's inability to do simple PR, but both are important issues. In summary, the major problem with the average nuclear engineer's approach is a UNIX-like tendency to kludge--engineers all love to solve technical problems, but only a select few in the nuclear and software fields seem to be able to solve the technical problem upon which they've been set; most simply find a way to fix what's currently broken without considering why they're doing it. I'm not talking about any "social responsibility" convenants; the aerospace engineer (for instance) has no such luxury due to weight restrictions and must simultaneously think on systems and component levels. I see no trend in the nuclear industry toward fixing this endemic problem, which could scuttle a nuclear renaissance by itself. Don't get me wrong; the problem isn't that nuclear engineers are somehow incompetent. It's that they're so competent that they feel compelled to do everything, just because they can. It never occurs to most of them that it's a good idea to figure out whether something should be done. If an anti-nuclear group said that it was a matter of imminent concern that nuclear power plants should have big pink bows on their containment structures, nuclear engineers would immediately get to work on designing one standardized Nuclear Standard Pink Bow Assembly (NSPBA) to be placed on all 104 reactors, at the cost of millions of dollars, because they can. It's possible, it won't break the bank, and those folks sure seem to think it's important, so gee whillikers, why not?
Management in the industry seems to have gotten very good at following rules. Navy types are excellent at following rules and at making sure that others follow rules. Nuclear power plants got very complex very fast in the period 1966-1974, and people who were trained to follow rules demonstrated their inability to think on their feet in the ensuing industry implosion. The response has been an overkill of due-diligence; due-diligence is important, but the nuclear industry has gotten into the awful habit of not doing anything until the cost of inaction is a couple of orders of magnitude worse than the proposed action. Even when the due-diligence is complete, they are too nervous to do anything until they have a procedure in front of them, by which time it is usually too late. They often also subscribe to the doctrine of nuclear exceptionalism--early on (1950s-1970s) because it made them feel important, and later because their fortress mentality doesn't allow them to do anything they haven't done before. Browns Ferry simply demonstrates the industry's familiarity with 40-plus years of operating history with their equipment and their ability to follow a procedure regarding it; I see no innovation, anywhere. I have no confidence in nuclear management's ability to respond if thrown a curveball by the energy market.
Furthermore, there is no sense of free enterprise in the nuclear industry. Meaning, big business is very good at evolutionary changes, but where are the startups pushing disruptive technology that we already know how to do: combined-cycle FBRs that can double electricity output while eating nuclear waste and reducing physical plant capital costs in comparison to 1200-MWe PWRs, fluorination-and-distillation reprocessing systems, chemical separation and industrial sale (at high profit!) of fission products, etc.? Why does the industry still treat itself like a special project? Why is the regulatory system built to exclude those who mean business?
Regular readers know my basic complaints about the regulatory system in the United States: regulating irrelevancies, prescriptive regulations that turn intelligent, capable people into robots, a lack of consideration of alternatives to the probabilistically safe 1200-MWe LWR with active systems, a thoroughly broken fee system, the lack of a comprehensive review of regulations since 1954 (one particularly broken example being a reg that assumes the use of zirconium cladding and requires licensees who wish to use alternatives that are safer to jump through additional hoops), NRC mission creep, plus many other problems that would require intervention by Congress (a couple examples being utility billing systems that assume the use of a large amount of fuel and the entire Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982). More here. These aren't exactly industry issues--the same Navy types who only know how to follow procedures go through the revolving door to the NRC and follow the NRC's procedures, which aren't exactly easy on the industry--but even if they were fixed, incompetent management and PR plus disconnected and unprofessional engineers will give us 1970s redux. We have a lot less leverage today than we did in 1967, yet the industry managed to throw away public goodwill and the support of groups like the Sierra Club. It can happen again and will happen again unless we all clean up our acts. NIOF is working on our end and has a plan for action. Dear industry folks, are you?

If any NEI people feel I'm way off base and want to unload on me, by all means, go ahead.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

2007-05-22T09:52:00.001-05:00

"Seems that the Ossining Chamber of Commerce is having a one sided presentation on "Where Electricity Comes From" with the primary guest speaker Entergy's own societal misfit, Jim Steets (new nick name is poop drinker). For those not familair with this Indian Point mouth piece and his work, when the news about tritium leaking into Buchanans sewer system went public, he quipped to a reporter, well, if it were not for the other stuff in the sewage, its clean enough to drink. What a guy."

-'Porgie Tirebiter, Royce Penstinger and Pinto Bean'

Way to elevate the discourse. And yes, 60 times less radiation than orange juice is safe to drink. It's not going to make sewage clean, but it doesn't make it dirty, either.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

2007-05-21T23:52:00.000-05:00

"Nuclear proliferation is the next excuse the duuhbyaist regime is using to justify another invasion, occupation, and spree of nation building, US taxpayer bankrupting contractor kleptocaracy."

-'amazngdrx'

Those of us in the reality-based community wouldn't agree.

Switching Platforms?

2007-05-20T23:41:00.000-05:00

First off, the service as it appears to you won't change, except for a different commenting system. We're not going anywhere, and the rate of posting won't change outside the normal variations. It certainly won't happen for a couple of weeks. Anyway:

Blogger seems to be intent on irritating us until we leave, so we're considering obliging them and moving the entire operation onto our own server. I said a few days ago that the leading candidate is WordPress; MovableType is also in strong consideration with TypePad as a backup. BlogHarbor/Blogware doesn't seem to offer everything and Scoop doesn't seem to fit what we do (it's a community platform instead of just a blogging platform, which we don't need...yet).

Don't get me wrong; Blogger is top-notch if you don't post as much as we do (or we'd like to), if you don't have your own server, and if you don't have your own full-time tech guy. They turn the mountain of scripting and programming and server-side stuff and xml and perl and php into an exercise in writing instead of a constant battle of wits with UNIX. It's no step down from other platforms and there should be no shame in a *.blogspot.com address; they've so far avoided AOLification.

Other things being considered:
1. Using a different newsletter service. I have a strong suspicion that at least some of the current newsletter's 767 'subscribers' are bots, and while harvesting email addresses from our newsletter is not possible, it's still a waste of effort on CafePress's part. Plus, those who aren't bots are probably getting real impatient with the bold text bug. This is one situation in which I settled for a quick fix, way back in July 2005, and I apologize to people who will have to re-register.
2. Moving the forums over to phpBB. Seeing phpBB in action at Energy from Thorium has convinced me that ours isn't ready for prime time. This was another decision I made in July 2005, without any input from people who actually knew what they were doing. It wasn't really a quick fix, but it will make it hard to upgrade, as InvisionFree doesn't appear to be compatible with anything. The eventual establishment of a community site would be made much easier with phpBB, but this is not something we're willing to tank--people have put a significant amount of effort into it.
3. Taking the time to develop a store instead of just using an iframe. The store currently looks like two pieces of Silly Putty mashed together instead of a website, and that is made worse by the fact that CafePress does not make creating sections easy. I accept that, in order to have all the control necessary to effectively run the store, there have to be six or seven settings on each section and subsection, and that they have to be created manually. But I don't understand why it's not possible to copy the first parent section after it's done. It took me a full 12-hour day to set up the first one; doing that 25 times is impossible. It seems that the store is going to be our code, with our page on CafePress set up to redirect to store.niof.org in case some poor unfortunate soul stumbles across a page with 3,500 unsorted items. 3,500 sounds like a lot of work, but that amounts to about 25 batches that take about three to four hours each to fully create and edit (without having to worry about how they're presented, that can be cut to an hour and a half). The sections are the hard part, but when the store is finally fully launched, it will be navigable. We won't put up a maze, and for once, the image manipulation problems are out of the way. But, be warned, this isn't Sam's mess to clean up and I'm new to forms, so it's not going to be ready by the 2nd anniversary (June 12).
4. We aren't currently capable of doing the Nuclear NewsWire plus everything else. It, NIOF News Briefs, and Nuclear Regulatory Watch are going to stay on ice until we get more people and get a platform that can support them. Regarding Nuclear Regulatory Watch, if anyone knows a reliable person who knows the industry and regulatory system in the United States, has time to communicate regulatory developments, can write, and keeps risks in perspective, please contact us.
5. The tab layout, the code to subscribe to the comments feed, the radiobutton layout for the Nuclear Energy Search Engine, the labels section in the sidebar, subcategories, a less tedious way to do the Weekly Nuclear Poll (which means more time for content), maternity clothing at the store, the Energy Toolbar, the wider layout for the main site, transparent backgrounds on store items, the revised Go Nuclear Top 10 with its explanation, a wiki, the reindexing of the blog posts, the section of the forums for the discussion of NIOF pages, integrating the forums with the comments section, a rotating store stocking update, some sort of social bookmarking link code, the anti-nuclear links section (its nonexistence having been pointed out by a reader; I now have no excuse to dilly-dally on the reformatting), the A/V Library, resolving our email sending problems, the Nuclear NewsWire's post page redirect code, a more accurate coal fumes death counter, the nuclear stamps, the site map, the book list, the updated copyright statements (2005-2007 instead of 2006), the FAQs, the rest of the Post Queue, the final site template, the Top Posts sidebar section, the index pages for the Regulatory Reform, One-Pagers, Economics, Letters to the Editor, and News sections, the explanations and corrections on old Anti-Nuclear Quotes of the Day, the PowerPoints for large- and small-group talks, the nuclear blogosphere aggregator, an email action alert list, press releases, the report/database on the First Bandwagon Market, writing a book, tmi30.org, the community aspect, a plan to organize college campuses, as well as the minor matter of the whole informational side of the site, are coming, as I've said before (42 unresolved issues). But again, they won't be here until we switch platforms, and the last eight won't happen until the rest are fully nailed down.

I grant that I made a total pigsty of this site while setting it up. I find it exceedingly ironic that its development mirrors the nuclear industry's growth and subsequent performance problems of the 1970s (obviously on a much smaller scale), and we're trying to produce a similar final outcome.

I've been talking to Sam about what we can actually implement on a tech level; in the meantime, does anyone have any suggestions?

LaCrosse RPV Heads to Barnwell; Crackpots Up In Arms

2007-05-20T22:18:00.000-05:00

Part 1 of this anti-nuclear email alert as well as the entirety of this one are devoted to complaining about the decommissioned LaCrosse nuclear power plant's reactor pressure vessel (a tank of pressurized water that the reactor's fuel rods were once suspended in) heading to the Barnwell low-level waste site. They inaccurately call it a "core" (the core is the fuel rods and associated structure to hold them in place) and say that Barnwell will close in 2008 (it will close to low-level waste from all states except those in the Mid-Atlantic Compact).

Comments on the Palisades Security Incident

2007-05-20T22:17:00.000-05:00

Part 2 of this anti-nuclear email alert contains two major misconceptions.

1. That the security presently used at nuclear power plants is necessary. There is absolutely no point to it; a terrorist couldn't really do anything if they did get in. It reflects the nuclear industry's tendency to accomodate requests because they can (not due to necessity) and their penchant for overkill.

2.

"Nuclear plant operators can build all the walls or blast-resistant chambers they want, but if they're not screening the security personnel, none of that will matter."

-Rep. Ed Markey, perennial friend of nuclear power

Actually, yes, it all does matter, and physics overrides the intentions of those involved--good or not.

New NIRS Transportation Report

2007-05-20T22:16:00.000-05:00

This one is a set of maps showing how YOU WILL BE VICTIMIZED under GNEP, assuming a facility at the Savannah River Site. It's apparently going to come out tomorrow; if we had a PR organization to speak of, maybe we could have done something about it.

Link to email alert.

China to Extract Uranium Commercially from Coal Ash

2007-05-20T22:15:00.002-05:00

Good. Lower environmental impact all around; they've certainly got enough coal ash.

They're also obviously still pursuing conventional deposits and reprocessing.

Link.

Brazil Going Nuclear?

2007-05-20T22:15:00.001-05:00

They will probably approve the restart of the Angra 3 project in June and may eventually approve up to eight more.

Link.

Davis-Besse Rises Again

2007-05-20T22:14:00.002-05:00

FirstEnergy commissioned a report saying that the corrosion ocurred in four months instead of four years; the NRC isn't buying it. I ask why it is necessary to promote Davis-Besse in a way that makes it difficult for a member of the public to draw any other conclusion than "we were two months from a meltdown that would have destroyed Ohio and given all our children cancer." The industry and NRC--who obviously dominate the discussion--have no sense of audience. They're so afraid of being viewed as spinmeisters that they think it's a violation of professional ethics to talk to people.

Davis-Besse is a prime example of the need for proper and full disclosure. Excessive RPV head corrosion is to be avoided because it's expensive to fix; it's not going to result in a threat to public health and safety even if the head fails. Presenting it to the public in raw engineering jargon without explaining it or even how a nuclear power plant works is not honest; it is misleading. Presenting it as a criminal case is even worse; this is one of the few times I agree with the Underground Cabal of Stoners.
I see no trend among either industry or regulators away from this approach.

I guess if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

Link.

Anti-Nuclear Gish Gallop: What to Do?

2007-05-20T22:14:00.001-05:00

First: the Gish Gallop for the unfamiliar.

Second: an example of a Gish Gallop.

"Real Global Warming Solutions Are Being Nuked by the Bush/Cheney Agenda Even if there is very slight chance that the seriousness of global warming has been exaggerated, taking steps to reduce it, is a win win proposition. We can cleanse the
environment, reduce health costs, reduce inflation, ease world tensions, bolster our economy, save Americans trillions of dollars in fuel and electrical costs and put an army of people to work in jobs that cannot be moved offshore. This was reported in “America’s Energy Choices” by the highly credible Union of Concerned Scientists. (Cambridge, Mass.). Most Republicans march in lock step, following the disastrous lead of George W. Bush. Bush wants everlasting war and everlasting radioactivity for us. As a speaker for the UCS I lectured about how renewables are ready right now, fifteen years ago.

W’s s claim that Nuclear power does not pollute the atmosphere and that nuclear power is renewable energy is as false as his other claims. Poisonous radioactive gases from uranium tailings blow across the country. The harm they cause has been suppressed along with the fact that enormous amounts of coal from dirty generators have been burned to make nuclear fuel.

Decades after the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident in the Soviet Union, only 20% of the childrenborn in Belraus are healthy. Ghastly birth defects abound there and beyond. Despite whitewashing, there were thousands of victims from our own Three Mile Island partial meltdown. The routine operation of nuclear plants, allow so-called “safe” emissions of radioactivity. They are not safe. Leaks of Radioactive waste debunk claims about health and safety reliability.

There is a hidden issue of low net energy yield from the nuclear power. Years ago, the General Accounting Office reported that our energy agencies have not issued a single credible analysis of net energy yield. They said that because of unreliability, net energy yield has never been used for energy planning. Unreliability came from dishonesty. A key NRC official was caught giving false sworn testimony.

The Wall Street Journal quoted the late Dr. Carl Sagan when he said that our government has been spending about as much money each year on non-nuclear alternatives to fossil fuel as we spent during one hour of our first war with Iraq.

We have been saddled with irresponsible energy policies.

…Energy efficiency can give us four times more energy than all our nuclear plants at one-twentieth the cost of building and operating them. This is according to the Rocky Mountain Institute (Snowmass, CO), a prestigious energy-consulting firm.
...Our government reviewed the thousands of small and medium size dams built for flood and irrigation control. If available turbines were plugged into them, they would provide about as much energy as eighty percent of our nuclear plants. Reagan and Bush opposed this opportunity.
…Decades ago, the U.S. Army laboratory in Natick Massachusetts made automotive fuel from vegetation. They called it “grassoline”. It was more expensive than the gasoline at that time. Today, it would be a bargain.
...There are thousands of generating stations at small dams, in disrepair. They can be fixed.
...Cogeneration (a conservation method) could yield much of NJ's future energy costs at less than half the cost of nuclear plants, a Princeton study concluded.
...The vast sunny American Southwest can harvest immense amounts of solar energy.
...Solar energy for heat and hot water works.
...If solar cells for electricity were mass-produced, they would be cost competitive with conventional energy. Millions of small mass produced solar cells have been cheaply put in wristwatches and pocket calculators.
...Wind power is effective. We need more wind generators.
...We can make as much super clean hydrogen fuel as we want from solar energy, wind power, or biomass. Hydrogen can be used as a fuel for generating electricity, fueling fuel cells, and powering cars. I spent about three years designing fuel cells. We need a hydrogen economy, rather than the hideous plutonium economy that the Bush wants. BMW produced a fleet of hydrogen-powered cars.
…We should use natural gas as a fuel for cars, trucks and buses. There are fleets of natural gas buses in operation in NYC, NJ, California, China, and other places. They produce less pollution and less greenhouse gases than oil or coal.
…We can make instant solar gas using bio-digesters. There are millions of small bio-digesters in China and India. They put greenery in tanks and let the tanks cook in the sun. This makes methane, a fuel that burns cleaner than coal or oil.
…California adopted a “feebate” bill, which taxed the purchase of gas guzzling cars with a fee that was given as a rebate to fuel-efficient cars. Oil companies killed this bill.
…New Diesel engines are cleaner. The first Diesel engine operated on vegetable oil. Making biodiesel fuel from soy beans is a growing industry.
…The Rocky Mountain Institute calculated that a fuel economy of 150 miles per gallon could be accomplished for hybrid cars. Ford claims one of their developmental cars can do just that.
...Existing hydroelectric facilities can deliver more energy from each gallon of water going through them by increasing efficiency.
...The geothermal resource in this nation has not been fully used. In addition to electrical generators, heat pumps can heat homes. The Canadian Standards Association urged wider use of heat pumps, saying they are effective in the dead of the Canadian winter.
…The list of more energy opportunities, for a better world. is too long to fit
in this article.

The Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Atomic Energy Commission once testified to Congress. He said that nuclear power creates poisons which are a million to a billion times worse than other chemicals. Human error and equipment defects must not be tolerated he insisted. Famous last words!

Energy efficiency and renewable solutions can give us a golden age of environmental and economic benefits. Political leaders (mostly Republicans) have given 300 times more support for dangerous and poisonous energy sources. The latest Bush energy plan continues this tragedy. Change this.

P.S.
The low net energy yield of nuclear power

An independent audit with the power of subpoena by the General Accounting Office using the method developed by Morgan Gurdon Huntington will prove that nuclear power has never delivered what has been claimed. Details are in my book, “Asleep at the Geiger Counter”. Years ago, the GAO reported that our energy agencies have not issued a single credible analysis of net energy yield. They said that because of unreliability, net energy yield has never been used for energy planning. Unreliability came from dishonesty. A key NRC official was caught giving false sworn testimony. Nuclear power is not renewable. The overall efficiency of the nuclear power is arguably less than 4%. Deducing this involves very simple arithmetic using summary data from a key government document. The data, references, and the arithmetic are in my book.

The repeated claim that nuclear power is safe because its poisons are concentrated means that a bomb in this concentration will scatter death and disease far and wide. Nuclear pioneer Dr. John W. Gofman estimated that a bomb could release the radioactivity of 192,000 atom bombs from Barnwell. The transportation of nuclear waste scatters concentrated shipments through our most densely populated areas. One terrorist attack can cause a multi-billion dollar disaster.

Violating the most elementary principles of physics, engineering, and common sense A basic thermodynamic principle (the Carnot principle) is that if you know the temperature of the steam going into a generating turbine, and the temperature of the steam leaving, A simple subtraction of two numbers and division by one number gives the ideal efficiency of a power source. Anyone who claims efficiencies greater than this ideal is a liar. The nuclear industry lies big time about this.

The elementary law of conservation of energy has one of the simplest equations in engineering. Applying this equation means the nuclear industry is satisfied with designing casks carrying high-level nuclear waste for an impact at between ten to 30 miles per hour. These casks travel on super highways, over high bridges, which cross earthquake prone areas.

The poisons from Chernobyl traveled thousands of miles. The poisons from Three Mile Island traveled hundreds of miles. The industry is smugly satisfied with a mere ten-mile evacuation zone, even though evacuation within those ten miles is not practical in many cases.

The industry is satisfied with siting nuclear plants and nuclear facilities near or on top of earthquake faults, and even near volcanoes.

Some of the topmost scientists were persecuted and blackballed when they blew the whistle on bad policy and fraudulent claims.

There are more design flaws and more cases of negligence by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission than a garbage dump dog has fleas.

Outrageous Risk
The industry is afraid to operate nuclear plants without their shield of the Price Anderson Act. This is a federal law that excuses nuclear operators from almost all the damage and cost they can cause. A disaster at Indian Point could easily cause a trillion dollars damage. It would seriously harm people hundreds of miles away. This law abolishes everyone’s property rights in order to protect the property rights of a nuclear utility. If this egregiously unfair law were abolished, all nuclear plants would be shut down. The industry has threatened to do just that every time the renewal of the Act came up for a vote in Congress. No other source of energy requires a Price Anderson Act."

-Link.

Every single contention made in the above is wrong; you'll find a rebuttal using the search box in the upper right corner of the blog home page. But it would take a book to debunk it in one sitting, and they can claim they've won a debate by simply saying these things over and over.

What do we do on a PR level?

US Conversion Plant License Renewed

2007-05-20T22:13:00.001-05:00

The US's only conversion facility has been relicensed for 10 years. Good news, but it would probably be a good idea to build another one from a security of supply standpoint: if the anti-nuclear activists attack it successfully, 104 nuclear reactors around the country are no more than a few years from running out of fuel. Another facility will have to be built at some point when the Russian HEU runs out, without a doubt.

With all the talk about standardization, we've forgotten diversification. The nuclear industry absolutely must stop acting like it's exempt from the normal behavior that is expected of any industry. I recognize that it's a lot harder for the industry to do things than for us to talk about what actions it should take, but they're operating as a project instead of an industry. If they are to really be successful, that must change.

Link.

GE, Hitachi to Merge Nuclear Units

2007-05-20T22:12:00.002-05:00

It's obviously not a full merger of both corporations, but the implications for the BWR market are interesting.

Link.

AP-1000 Cleared by European Utilities

2007-05-20T22:12:00.001-05:00

They apparently want to modify the existing design to make it more resistant to superjumbos like the Airbus A-380.

Incidentally, the only other reactor design that has received this certification was the Russian AES-92 (their version of the AP-1000). That design is just as good as an AP-1000, but would probably be laughed out of the NRC design certification process.

Link.

Braidwood Tritium Update

2007-05-20T22:11:00.000-05:00

Sen. Dick Durbin requested that an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services perform an independent study of the health effects of not being exposed to a material that's 60 times less radioactive than orange juice and chemically identical to water.

They've concluded that there is no effect.

What a shocker.

Link. (hat tip: Know_Nukes)

More on Indian Point from The Journal News

2007-05-20T22:10:00.000-05:00

Well, what is a spent fuel pool?

Most people's experience of "fuel" is gasoline. Thus, the image that comes into most people's heads when you say "spent fuel pool" is somebody draining spent nuclear gasoline from the reactor and pouring it into a spent fuel pool. Unsurprisingly, this image is far enough from the reality of what a spent fuel pool is that the general public does not understand how we can say that a leak from a spent fuel pool is irrelevant.
Spent fuel pools look very much like swimming pools, but with a rack at the bottom. That rack is used to store fuel rods that have already been through the reactor and are awaiting long-term storage, disposal, or the recovery of unused energy. Hence, a spent fuel pool.
The term "spent fuel pool" does not accurately describe what it is. It is more correctly described as an "underwater rack"--so why can't we call it one?
Easy. Because we don't. We always do what we always have done, simply because we always have done it; accordingly, we haven't changed our approach and the industry hasn't changed its products since about 1975. If someone had decided in 1975 that it was a violation of professional ethics to speak languages other than Romanian, nuclear engineers all would have said "OK," learned Romanian, and conducted every meeting, hearing, and public briefing in Romanian. When the public shows up to an NRC hearing and listens to two hours of rapid-fire Romanian, they (a) don't understand anything and (b) start throwing eggs at those onstage.
We can't please the loons. But we can communicate to the public in a way that they can understand; the packaging is independent of the content and there is nothing more ethical than transparency.

More important, I suppose, is "why does the industry insist on calling it a spent fuel pool?"

I agree with the article in that leaks aren't convincing. They're a lot less convincing when we're unwittingly misleading people about what's leaking.

As usual with The Journal News articles, the comments section is more encouraging; the article is a better barometer.

Link.

Tianwan Unit 2 Connected to Grid

2007-05-20T22:07:00.002-05:00

This is the second of four VVERs, two of which are now operable; there is an option at the site for four more nuclear power plants (the type has not been decided).

Link.

Myanmar to Get Research Reactor

2007-05-20T22:07:00.001-05:00

A Russian one, obviously; the military dictatorship there is under sanctions by the West--light water reactor, 20% enrichment, 10 megawatts, no electricity.

Link.

Iran Update

2007-05-20T22:05:00.002-05:00

First, it has started to appear around the media that the Non-Aligned Movement (essentially, Third World countries who were not thrilled with taking crap off either the United States or the Soviets) supports Iran's nuclear power program. This is true, and has been for a while, but as yet had only appeared in the Iranian state media, which nobody pays any attention to (and shouldn't).

Second, Mohamed ElBaradei has suggested that the Iranian enrichment program be capped instead of stopped. Finally, we have someone with a little bit of sense in this debate; unfortunately, he wants to try to slow down their program, which won't work. We would suggest that they be assured of some customers--probably domestic ones--so that the enrichment facility would be in use and could't be diverted.

Link.

NRC Authorizes Browns Ferry Restart

2007-05-20T22:05:00.001-05:00

Old news, but:

1. No word on when it will actually occur.
2. I also got the impression that the full Commission had to vote on it--I recall only the staff approving anything. Does anyone know if the vote has happened or been waived?

Link to article on the restart, Link to NRC press release.

Uranium Exploration Logjam?

2007-05-20T22:03:00.000-05:00

WNN reports that labs in Africa (they have them?) are having problems keeping up with requests for chemical analysis of uranium ore samples.

This might be something to watch for problems; perhaps this type of problem is a contributing factor for Namibia's moratorium on new uranium exploration. Maybe not, but it's a potential showslower, if not a showstopper. That might raise the price of uranium, on the other hand, which might spur reprocessing--although it doesn't really need to go up much more. I certainly don't wish economic problems on any aspect of the fight against coal.

Duke to Continue Lee Without Southern Company

2007-05-20T22:01:00.000-05:00

Cancellation was apparently a serious option when Southern Company divested from the project. Its predecessor on the same site, Cherokee (three units instead of Lee's two) was canceled in 1983.

One of the benefits of regulated monopolies in the electricity market (to infrastructure advocates, at least) is that more capacity is built than is really needed and in places that aren't really optimal. Looking at the grid as a policy analyst, it should really be nationalized and placed under the control of a TVA-style agency, with the TVA-style agency buying power under contract at set prices from anybody who can get the financing together for any size generator.
However, as a nuclear advocate, it is nice to have two companies build four nukes instead of a consortium build two. There's a much greater chance of one of them being built, obviously, and when you're running interference for an industry that's unwilling to do anything but run and hide, it's good to hedge one's bets.

More from We Support Lee.

Link.

Mitsubishi Announces New Turbine Facility

2007-05-20T22:00:00.001-05:00

Exclusively for the production of large steam turbines for 1000+ megawatt nuclear power plants.

Link.

NRC Approves New Nuclear Waste Rule

2007-05-20T21:59:00.000-05:00

"Nuclear waste" has been redefined to include material produced in accelerators, radium, and anything else the NRC feels like regulating.

Challenging it in the courts isn't really an option: this was mandated in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

Link.

New York Times' Resident Nuclear Illiterate Has a Few Snarks About Browns Ferry

2007-05-20T21:58:00.000-05:00

Basically, the $1.8 billion cost of restarting Browns Ferry Unit 1 is indicative of how poorly the industry manages projects, even though that number hasn't gone up since the start of the project, and the fact that TVA chose to spend this money on restarting an old unit shows that the new ones are going to be even worse from a project management perspective, even though the delays that TVA wants to avoid are purely regulatory. Why a safer facility should be subject to more scrutiny is another perversion of the NRC's intent for a transparent regulatory system--and another sign that we really need to reexamine how we do nuclear regulation in the United States.

Pointed out in the article is that many of the parts that were replaced were replaced not because they needed replacement, but because the NRC wanted "a paper trail." Not pointed out is that most of the costs of Generation II plants like Browns Ferry were "little things" like pipe and wires--much of which was replaced as part of this project. The Generation III, III+, and IV reactors that would be built today have far fewer "little things"--because they were designed by computer and not by back-of-the-envelope approximations, thus not requiring backup systems in the first place.

Link.

Upcoming NRC Meetings

2007-05-20T21:57:00.000-05:00

1. May 22: Ohio State University South Centers Training Room 160, 1864 Shyville Road in Piketon, Ohio to discuss the licensing of the American Centrifuge Plant. There will be "informal discussions" from 7:00 PM to 7:30 PM, with the meeting from 7:30 to 9:30. Show up if you can and counterbalance the inevitable anti-nuclear activist presence.

2. May 22: NRC headquarters (11555 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Maryland) in the Commissioners' Hearing Room from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM to discuss limited work authorizations--the NRC's way of sticking their nose into not-too-critical civil engineering and construction work. Show up if you can and counterbalance the NRC's mission creep.

3. May 24: The NRC's inspection results for the Vermont Yankee relicensing will be presented to Entergy at a public meeting at the Latchis Theatre at 50 Main St. in Brattleboro, Vermont from 7:00 PM until the cows come home. There will apparently be a short Q&A session afterward. Show up if you can and counterbalance the NRC's Spanish Inquisition.

4. May 31: The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board is soliciting comments from citizens (note: NOT organizations) on the Oyster Creek relicensing in Room 119 of the Ocean County Administration Building, 101 Hooper Avenue, Toms River, New Jersey. There's a special procedure in this case; to quote the press release:

Persons wishing to make an oral statement who have submitted a timely written request and who are present when their names are called will be given priority over those who have not filed such a request. To be considered timely, a written request to make an oral statement must be mailed, faxed or sent by e-mail so as to be received by 5 p.m. on Friday, May 25, 2007. The request must specify the requestor’s name and the session (afternoon or evening) during which he or she wishes to make an oral statement. Written requests to make an oral statement should be mailed to: Office of the Secretary, Rulemakings and Adjudication Staff, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, D.C. 20555-0001; faxed to (301) 415-1101; or e-mailed to: hearingdocket@nrc.gov. Copies of requests should be mailed to: Administrative Law Judge E. Roy Hawkens, c/o: Debra Wolf, Esq., Law Clerk, Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel, Mail Stop T-3 F-23, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, D.C. 20555-0001; faxed to: (301) 415-5599; or e-mailed to: daw1@nrc.gov.

Remember: you also have to register when you get there.

More from We Support Lee.