Call for Kakadu annual funding to be doubled ahead of federal budget
Call for Kakadu annual funding to be doubled ahead of federal budget The yearly operating budget for Kakadu National Park should be doubled ‘at the very least’ even before a $276m masterplan is implemented, according to the region’s peak tourism body…… (subscribers only)
The nuclear weapons issue is a women’s issue
During Women’s History Month, thank women for preventing nuclear disaster (Commentary)https://www.syracuse.com/opinion/2021/03/during-womens-history-month-thank-women-for-preventing-nuclear-disaster-commentary.html 26 Mar 21, By Wendy Yost | Syracuse Peace Council Wendy Yost, of Syracuse, writes on behalf of the Nuclear Free World Committee of the Syracuse Peace Council.
Depending on how old you are, you may remember the 1950s and ’60s “duck and cover” drills in elementary school and signs leading to the atomic bomb shelters in public buildings. Or you may remember the Cuban Missile crisis when the world came dangerously close to nuclear war. Then, and now, most of us probably had or have no true idea of the devastation that such a war would bring.
During Women’s History month, we should thank women for bringing some sanity to the insanity of the Cold War. In 1961 Bella Abzug and Dagmar Wilson founded “Women Strike for Peace.” Their goal was to stop nations from nuclear testing. The movement brought 50,000 women in 60 different cities together in protest. Coretta Scott King served as the organization’s delegate to an international disarmament conference in 1962. The public pressure brought by these women and the near-disaster of the Cuban Missile crisis helped bring the Soviet Union, United Kingdom and U.S. together to sign the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting nuclear testing underwater, in outer space and in the atmosphere in 1963. This marked the beginning of a series of hard-won international agreements that have helped prevent nuclear war since the 1960s.
Bella Abzug framed the nuclear issue as a women’s issue in saying “… We are entitled to our shared economic resources of the country. We are entitled to equal pay for comparable work … We are entitled to have some hope for our family with a decent environment. We are permanently entitled to world peace, which is the only way in which we can rebuild and restructure this society to make it for all people.”
These words ring true for our time. In 2021, women are disproportionately impacted by the pandemic in lost wages and increased responsibilities for childcare, education, and emotional support for stressed kids. While our predominantly male Congress has debated the country’s ability to afford childcare subsidies, extended unemployment benefits, child tax credits and support to reopen schools safely, our government spends approximately $67.5 billion per year on nuclear weapons. At the same time, the world has become less safe from nuclear weapons as international agreements have ended and diplomacy has been hollowed out and denigrated by the Trump administration.
There are hopeful signs as the Biden administration has recommitted efforts to end the nuclear threat by already negotiating an extension of the New START Treaty with Russia, reviving efforts to negotiate with Iran over nuclear weapons, and committing to reduced U.S. expenditures on nuclear weapons of annihilation. Notably, Biden has nominated several women to senior positions that involve nuclear non-proliferation including Bonnie Jenkins as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and Mallory Stewart as Senior Director for Arms Control and National Non-Proliferation for the National Security Council. These appointments are historic in nature for appointing women to top positions who have spent their careers working for peace, security and nuclear non-proliferation.
Let’s have Women’s History Month in 2021 be a time for women (and men) commit to making history by working for a world that is safe from nuclear weapons and a world where resources are committed to life-affirming programs and policies. This means supporting, expecting and demanding that the new administration meet and exceed its commitments to quell the threat of nuclear war. Visit preventnuclearwar.org and or peacecouncil.net/programs/nuclear-free-world-committee to learn more and take action.
Infamous Fukushima town sign praising nuclear energy to become permanent museum display
全町避難が続く福島県双葉町で、原発推進看板の撤去工事を見守る標語考案者の大沼勇治さん＝２１日
 Infamous Fukushima town sign praising nuclear energy to become permanent museum display https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210320/p2a/00m/0na/006000c, March 20, 2021 (Mainichi Japan) FUKUSHIMA — A sign hailing nuclear energy and formerly located on the main street of Fukushima Prefecture town Futaba, which was rendered inaccessible following the nuclear meltdowns triggered by the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, will go on display at the Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum in the town from March 24.
The sign measures 2 meters by 16 meters, and reads “Nuclear Power: Energy for a Bright Future.” After the 2011 nuclear disaster at the Tokyo Electric Power Co. Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, the sign became iconic nationally as a symbol of the northeastern Japan town that pushed for nuclear power and still remains entirely subject to evacuation orders. The sign was removed in March 2016 because its deterioration posed dangers, and photos of the sign were displayed at the museum. It is too large to be placed indoors, so authorities delayed its display when opening the museum in September 2020; in the meantime, discussions on how to exhibit it were held with the Fukushima Prefectural Government. Then, on March 19, the prefectural government announced the sign will go on permanent display at the museum’s outdoor terrace from March 24. Yuji Onuma, 45, who came up with the sign’s slogan when he was in elementary school, said, “I believe exhibiting the sign will symbolize a resolve to never have another nuclear accident, and to aim for a bright future this time around. It took a long time after its removal for display plans to be finalized, but I hope coming face to face with the real thing will give visitors a chance to think about the nuclear disaster.” (Japanese original by Ryusuke Takahashi, Fukushima Bureau) |
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How the world can reach net zero target without resorting to nuclear power
 IW Long Reads: Is Nuclear Energy On The Road To Ruin Or A Sustainability Silver Bullet? How the world can reach net zero target without resorting to nuclear power, Investment Week, Anna Fedorova-22Mar 21, Anyone who has seen the TV series Chernobyl knows that when things go wrong with nuclear power the consequences are dire. And while it may seem that matters have evolved since the days of the Soviet Union, the nuclear disaster in Fukushima that happened just ten years ago suggests otherwise. ……….[Elizabeth Stuart, analyst, sustainability research at Morningstar Europe], says with every other aspect of sustainability, “there is no silver bullet and nuclear is so very far from a perfect solution”.
For example, even when nuclear reactors are running properly, they use “tremendous amounts of water to cool the reactors”, while mining and refining the Earth’s finite resources of uranium ore also requires a large amount of energy. And of course, there is the question of waste management over many generations, given that uranium rods remain dangerously radioactive for 10,000 years. “There are also second order effects to investment in nuclear energy such as the certainty that this research can be used to create nuclear weapons and that plants are a high value targets should a war break out,” Stuart adds. “Disruption in a nuclear plant invariably won’t remain within country borders so there is also the issue of diplomacy to consider. In short, nuclear is a textbook example of a controversial stock and any investor would be wise to question its place in an ESG portfolio.” ………………. the balance is expected to shift towards renewables, which is expected to lead to a decentralisation of the power grids, posing further challenges for nuclear. Jonathan Cohen, partner at Howard Kennedy, says: “Currently, nuclear power projects are being developed at very high costs and it is difficult to finance new projects without large state expenditure. ……………wide scale support from the private sector just is not there, with investors increasingly choosing to stay on the safe side and invest in renewables instead. Robeco, for example, excludes electricity utilities that generate more than 30% of their power from nuclear sources from all of its sustainable strategies, and does not invest in nuclear power at all in its RobecoSAM Smart Energy Equities strategy. This decision is driven by a combination of “unique risks”, negative environmental impacts, relatively high costs of nuclear and the “impressive technological and cost developments in both renewables and storage technologies”. Mark Campanale, founder of the Carbon Tracker Initiative, says: “Our view is that given so many cheaper renewable energy resources available, why would anyone want to go to the expense of what is an uncompetitive technology on price, one which takes hundreds of years to clear up its waste?” According to Eduardo Monteiro, co-CIO at Victory Hill Capital Advisors, even if nuclear is to play a “robust role” in a country’s energy supply, it has too many shortcomings as a sustainable investment alternative, and should therefore be avoided. “The waste generated will be a legacy for future generations to deal with and as such investors need to think about the very real negative impact these holdings will have in both the broader sense but also to financial returns,” he says. According to Eduardo Monteiro, co-CIO at Victory Hill Capital Advisors, even if nuclear is to play a “robust role” in a country’s energy supply, it has too many shortcomings as a sustainable investment alternative, and should therefore be avoided. “The waste generated will be a legacy for future generations to deal with and as such investors need to think about the very real negative impact these holdings will have in both the broader sense but also to financial returns,” he says. According to Eduardo Monteiro, co-CIO at Victory Hill Capital Advisors, even if nuclear is to play a “robust role” in a country’s energy supply, it has too many shortcomings as a sustainable investment alternative, and should therefore be avoided. “The waste generated will be a legacy for future generations to deal with and as such investors need to think about the very real negative impact these holdings will have in both the broader sense but also to financial returns,” he says. “Such managers may naturally prefer to invest in renewables to support their interpretation of ESG investing and the transition to ‘clean’ energy more widely,” he says. https://www.investmentweek.co.uk/analysis/4028635/iw-long-reads-nuclear-energy-road-ruin-sustainability-silver-bullet |
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Bill Gates backs costly nuclear reactor design fueled by nuclear-weapon-usable plutonium
Bill Gates’ bad bet on plutonium-fueled reactors https://thebulletin.org/2021/03/bill-gates-bad-bet-on-plutonium-fueled-reactors/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=MondayNewsletter03222021&utm_content=NuclearRisk_Gates_03222021 By Frank N. von Hippel | March 22, 2021
One of Bill Gates’ causes is to replace power plants fueled by coal and natural gas with climate-friendly alternatives. That has led the billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder to embrace nuclear power, and building nuclear power plants to combat climate change is a prospect worth discussing. But Gates has been persuaded to back a costly reactor design fueled by nuclear-weapon-usable plutonium and shown, through decades of experience, to be expensive, quick to break down, and difficult to repair.
In fact, Gates and his company, Terrapower, are promoting a reactor type that the US and most other countries abandoned four decades ago because of concerns about both nuclear weapons proliferation and cost.
The approximately 400 power reactors that provide about 10 percent of the world’s electric power today are almost all water-cooled and fueled by low-enriched uranium, which is not weapon usable. Half a century ago, however, nuclear engineers were convinced—wrongly, it turned out—that the global resource of low-cost uranium would not be sufficient to support such reactors beyond the year 2000.
Work therefore began on liquid-sodium-cooled “breeder” reactors that would be fueled by plutonium, which, when it undergoes a fission chain reaction, produces neutrons that can transmute the abundant but non-chain-reacting isotope of natural uranium, u-238, into more plutonium than the reactor consumes.
But mining companies and governments found a lot more low-cost uranium than originally projected. The Nuclear Energy Agency recently concluded that the world has uranium reserves more than adequate to support water-cooled reactors for another century.
And while technologically elegant, sodium-cooled reactors proved unable to compete economically with water-cooled reactors, on several levels. Admiral Rickover, who developed the US Navy’s water-cooled propulsion reactors from which today’s power reactors descend, tried sodium-cooled reactors in the 1950s. His conclusion was that they are “expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair.” That captures the experience of all efforts to commercialize breeder reactors. The United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Japan all abandoned their breeder-reactor efforts after spending the equivalent of $10 billion or more each on the effort.
Today, despite about $100 billion spent on efforts to commercialize them, only two sodium-cooled breeder reactor prototypes are operating—both in Russia. India is building one, and China is building two with Russian help. But it is not clear India and China are looking only to generate electricity with their breeders; they may also be motivated in part by the fact that breeder reactors produce copious amounts of the weapon-grade plutonium desired by their militaries to expand their nuclear-weapon stockpiles.
The proliferation risks of breeder-reactor programs were dramatically demonstrated in 1974, when India carried out its first explosive test of a nuclear-weapon design with plutonium that had been produced with US Atoms for Peace Program assistance for India’s ostensibly peaceful breeder reactor program. The United States, thus alerted, was able to stop four more countries, governed at the time by military juntas (Brazil, Pakistan, South Korea, and Taiwan), from going down the same track—although Pakistan found another route to the bomb via uranium enrichment.
It was India’s 1974 nuclear test that got me involved with this issue as an advisor to the Carter administration. I have been involved ever since, contributing to the plutonium policy debates in the United States, Japan, South Korea and other countries.
In 1977, after a policy review, the Carter administration concluded that plutonium breeder reactors would not be economic for the foreseeable future and called for termination of the US development program. After the estimated cost of the Energy Department’s proposed demonstration breeder reactor increased five-fold, Congress finally agreed in 1983
Gates is obviously not in it for the money. But his reputation for seriousness may have helped recruit Democratic Senators Cory Booker, Dick Durbin, and Sheldon Whitehouse to join the two Republican senators from Idaho in a bipartisan coalition to co-sponsor the Nuclear Energy Innovations Capabilities Act of 2017, which called for the VTR.
I wonder if any of those five Senators knows that the VTR is to be fueled annually by enough plutonium for more than 50 Nagasaki bombs. Or that it is a failed technology. Or that the Idaho National Laboratory is collaborating on plutonium separation technology with the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute at a time when about half of South Korea’s population wants nuclear weapons to deter North Korea.
Fortunately, it is not too late for the Biden administration and Congress to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and to zero out the Versatile Test Reactor in the Department of Energy’s next budget appropriations cycle. The money could be spent more effectively on upgrading the safety of our existing reactor fleet and on other climate-friendly energy technologies.
Frank N. von Hippel
Frank N. von Hippel is a co-founder of the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University’s School of Public and International…
Fukushima disaster 10 years on: How long will it take to clean up the nuclear waste?
Fukushima disaster 10 years on: How long will it take to clean up the nuclear waste?
Decontamination and living with ‘black bags’
Piles of black bags were generated by the vast, painstaking clean-up and then transported from other storage places. Those black bags have occupied more than 90 blocks ranging from 180 sq m to 6,500 sq m in the northern part of Tomioka since 2015.
According to a 2018 report from Japan’s Ministry of the Environment, the estimated total quantity of decontaminated soil will be somewhere between 16 and 22 million cubic metres after volume reduction. This is 13 to 18 times larger than the volume of the Tokyo Dome.
The Ministry says the total will likely be at the lower end of the provided range, in a latest reply to The Straits Times’ query.
Limits of decontamination
The “decontamination” only involves soil removal in flatland areas – the government has said that it is impossible to clear the soil in mountainous areas, but more than 70 per cent of the hardest-hit areas are mountainous.
Mr Nobuyoshi Ito is one of those who live in the mountainous areas where vast decontamination is hard to carry out.
Mr Ito first moved to Iitate village in Fukushima prefecture in 2010 after he retired as an IT engineer, to work as an “apprentice farmer”.
He had no ties with the village before that, but the self-professed “guinea pig” ended up staying on there, in open defiance of government orders to evacuate, and against his children’s wishes for him to live with them in Niigata prefecture on the west coast.
“When the government asked us to evacuate… I asked if there would be criminal charges if I continued to live here,” he told The Straits Times in 2016. “They said no.”
He carries a dosimeter around with him all the time, measuring anything he can lay his hands on from soil, plants to animal carcasses. He also owns a laboratory-grade radiation measuring machine at his cabin, deep in the mountains in the village.
He thinks the government’s decision to not decontaminate forested mountainous areas will backfire due to factors such as rain that may spread radioactive material, and in a study last year found that 43 out of 69 locations along the Olympic torch relay route had radiation levels above the government limits.
He told The Straits Times that he fears that Tokyo is overly eager to portray that everything was “under control”, given that this could give the impression that it is “case closed”.
Non-profit Greenpeace notes that such standards in towns neighbouring the nuclear plant would not pass in other parts of the world.
The indefinite future: Where to permanently store 16 million bags of nuclear waste
The law requires that the final disposal site of high-level nuclear waste should be outside of Fukushima by March 2045.
Two fishing villages in Hokkaido are vying to host the final storage facility of Japanese nuclear waste for half a century, splitting communities between those seeking investment to stop the towns from dying, and those haunted by the 2011 Fukushima disaster who are determined to stop the project.
I cannot give a deadline at this moment. We will consider the entire schedule based on the progress at the two new potential sites, along with nationwide public relations activities.
MS MASARU KASHIMA
Need for more research into causes of increased incidence of childhood lukaemia near nuclear site
National Library of Medicine 15th March 2021, A previous investigation of the occurrence of childhood acute leukemia around the Belgian nuclear sites has shown positive associations around one nuclear site (Mol-Dessel). In the following years, the Belgian Cancer Registry has made data available at the smallest administrative unit for
which demographic information exists in Belgium, i.e. the statistical sector. This offers the advantage to reduce the potential misclassification due to large geographical scales.
Results confirm an increased incidence of acute childhood leukemia around Mol-Dessel, but the number of cases remains very small. Random variation cannot be excluded and the ecological design does not allow concluding on causality. These findings emphasize the need for more in-depth research into the risk factors of childhood leukemia, for a better understanding of the etiology of this disease.
The economics of nuclear power plants are not favorable to future investments
Investing into third generation nuclear power plants – Review of recent trends and analysis of future investments using Monte Carlo Simulation https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364032121001301 Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews Volume 143, June 2021, 110836
Author links open overlay panelB.WealerabS.BauerbC.v.HirschhausenabC.KemfertacL.Göke
Highlights
- •Cost escalations in the nuclear sector observed in previous research continue until today.
- •Investing into a nuclear power plant today is not a profitable business case.
- •The net present values are mainly negative, in the range of five to ten billion USD.
- •Interest during construction is a major cost driver not to be underestimated.
- •Policy debates should consider total costs including interest and construction time.
Abstract
This paper provides a review of trends in third generation nuclear power plants, and analyzes current and future nuclear power plant investments using Monte Carlo simulations of economic indicators.
We first review global trends of nuclear power plant investments, including technical as well as economic trends. The review suggests that cost escalations in the sector observed in previous research continue until today, including the most recent investment projects in the U.S. and in Europe.
In order to extend this analysis, we carry out our own investment analysis of a representative third generation nuclear power plant, focusing on the net present value and the levelized cost of electricity. We base our analysis on a stochastic Monte Carlo simulation to nuclear power plant investments.
We define and estimate the main drivers of our model: Overnight construction costs, wholesale electricity prices, and weighted average cost of capital, and discuss reasonable ranges and distributions of those parameters.
Model runs suggest that investing in nuclear power plants is not profitable, i.e. expected net present values are highly negative, mainly driven by high construction costs, including capital costs, and uncertain and low revenues.
Even extending reactor lifetimes does not improve the results significantly. We conclude that our numerical exercise confirms the literature review, i.e. the economics of nuclear power plants are not favorable to future investments, even though additional costs (decommissioning, long-term storage) and the social costs of accidents are not even considered.
New science report: advanced nuclear reactors no safer than conventional nuclear plants
Advanced nuclear reactors no safer than conventional nuclear plants, says science group https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclearpower/advanced-nuclear-reactors-no-safer-than-conventional-nuclear-plants-says-science-group-idUSKBN2BA0CP, By Timothy Gardner-18 Mar 21,
President Joe Biden, a Democrat, has made curbing climate change a priority and has supported research and development for advanced nuclear technologies.
The reactors are also popular with many Republicans. Last October, the month before Biden was elected, the U.S. Department of Energy, awarded $80 million each to TerraPower LLC and X-energy to build reactors it said would be operational in seven years.
Advanced reactors are generally far smaller than conventional reactors and are cooled with materials such as molten salt instead of with water. Backers say they are safer and some can use nuclear waste as fuel.
“The technologies are certainly different from current reactors, but it is not at all clear they are better,” said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“In many cases, they are worse with regard to … safety, and the potential for severe accidents and potential nuclear proliferation,” said Lyman, author of the report UCS released Thursday called “‘Advanced’ Isn’t Always Better”.
Nuclear reactors generate virtually emissions-free power [ if you ignore their total fuel chain] which means conventional ones, at least, will play a role in efforts to decarbonize the economy by 2050, a goal of the Biden administration. But several of the 94 U.S. conventional nuclear plants are shutting due to high safety costs and competition from natural gas and wind and solar energy.
That has helped spark initial funding for a new generation of reactors.
Also, nuclear waste from today’s reactors would have to be reprocessed to make fuel. That technique has not been practiced in the United States for decades because of proliferation and cost concerns. Other advanced reactors emit large amounts of radioactive gases, a potentially problematic waste stream.
Lyman said advanced nuclear development funds would be better spent on bolstering conventional nuclear plants from the risks of earthquakes and climate change, such as flooding. The report recommended that the Department of Energy suspend its advanced reactor demonstration program until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) requires prototype testing before reactors can be licensed for commercial use.
The DOE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Also, nuclear waste from today’s reactors would have to be reprocessed to make fuel. That technique has not been practiced in the United States for decades because of proliferation and cost concerns. Other advanced reactors emit large amounts of radioactive gases, a potentially problematic waste stream.
Lyman said advanced nuclear development funds would be better spent on bolstering conventional nuclear plants from the risks of earthquakes and climate change, such as flooding. The report recommended that the Department of Energy suspend its advanced reactor demonstration program until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) requires prototype testing before reactors can be licensed for commercial use.
The DOE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Conclusions of safety assessment of advanced nuclear reactors – non-light-water ones
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Assessing the Safety, Security, and Environmental Impacts of Non-Light-Water Nuclear Reactors,Union of Concerned Scientists, Edwin Lyman Mar 18, 2021 “Advanced” Isn’t Always Better ” ”……….Conclusions of the AssessmentThe non-light-water nuclear reactor landscape is vast and complex, and it is beyond the scope of this report to survey the entire field in depth. Nevertheless, enough is clear even at this stage to draw some general conclusions regarding the safety and security of NLWRs and their prospects for rapid deployment. Based on the available evidence, the NLWR designs currently under consideration (except possibly once-through, breed-and-burn reactors) do not offer obvious improvements over LWRs significant enough to justify their many risks. Regulators and other policymakers would be wise to look more closely at the nuclear power programs under way to make sure they prioritize safety and security. Future appropriations for NLWR technology research, development, and deployment should be guided by realistic assessments of the likely societal benefits that would result from the investment of billions of taxpayer dollars. Little evidence supports claims that NLWRs will be significantly safer than today’s LWRs. While some NLWR designs offer some safety advantages, all have novel characteristics that could render them less safe. All NLWR designs introduce new safety issues that will require substantial analysis and testing to fully understand and address—and it may not be possible to resolve them fully. To determine whether any NLWR concept will be significantly safer than LWRs, the reactor must achieve an advanced stage of technical maturity, undergo complete comprehensive safety testing and analysis, and acquire significant operating experience under realistic conditions. The claim that any nuclear reactor system can “burn” or “consume” nuclear waste is a misleading oversimplification. Reactors can actually use only a fraction of spent nuclear fuel as new fuel, and separating that fraction increases the risks of nuclear proliferation and terrorism. No nuclear reactor can use spent nuclear fuel directly as fresh fuel. Instead, spent fuel has to be “reprocessed”—chemically treated to extract plutonium and other TRU elements, which must then be refabricated into new fuel. This introduces a grave danger: plutonium and other TRU elements can be used in nuclear weapons. Reprocessing and recycling render these materials vulnerable to diversion or theft and increases the risks of nuclear proliferation and terrorism—risks that are costly to address and that technical and institutional measures cannot fully mitigate. Any fuel cycle that requires reprocessing poses inherently greater proliferation and terrorism risks than the “once-through” cycle with direct disposal of spent fuel in a geologic repository. Some NLWRs have the potential for greater sustainability than LWRs, but the improvements appear to be too small to justify their proliferation and safety risks. Although some NLWR systems could use uranium more efficiently and generate smaller quantities of long-lived TRU isotopes in nuclear waste, for most designs these benefits could be achieved only by repeatedly reprocessing spent fuel to separate out these isotopes and recycle them in new fuel—and that presents unacceptable proliferation and security risks. In addition, reprocessing plants and other associated fuel cycle facilities are costly to build and operate, and they increase the environmental and safety impacts compared with the LWR once-through cycle. Moreover, the sustainability increases in practice would not be significant in a reasonably foreseeable time frame. Once-through, breed-and-burn reactors have the potential to use uranium more efficiently without reprocessing, but many technical challenges remain. One type of NLWR system that could in principle be more sustainable than the LWR without increasing proliferation and terrorism risks is the once-through, breed-and-burn reactor. Concepts such as TerraPower’s traveling-wave reactor could enable the use of depleted uranium waste stockpiles as fuel, which would increase the efficiency of uranium use. Although there is no economic motivation to develop more uranium-efficient reactors at a time when uranium is cheap and abundant, reducing uranium mining may be beneficial for other reasons, and such reactors may be useful for the future. However, many technical challenges would have to be overcome to achieve breed-and-burn operation, including the development of very-high-burnup fuels. The fact that TerraPower suspended its project after more than a decade of development to pursue a more conventional and far less uranium-efficient SFR, the Natrium, suggests that these challenges have proven too great. High-assay low enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel, which is needed for many NLWR designs, poses higher nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism risks than the lower-assay LEU used by the operating LWR fleet. Many NLWR designs require uranium enriched to higher levels than the 5 percent U-235 typical of LWR fuel. Although uranium enriched to between 10 and 20 percent U-235 (defined here as HALEU) is considered impractical for direct use in nuclear weapons, it is more attractive for weapons use—and requires more stringent security—than the lower-assay enriched uranium in current LWRs. The significant time and resources needed to safely commercialize any NLWR design should not be underestimated. It will likely take decades and many billions of dollars to develop and commercially deploy any NLWR design, together with its associated fuel cycle facilities and other support activities. Such development programs would come with a significant risk of delay or failure and require long-term stewardship and funding commitments. And even if a commercially workable design were demonstrated, it would take many more years after that to deploy a large number of units and operate them safely and reliably. Vendors that claim their NLWRs could be commercialized much more quickly typically assume that their designs will not require full-scale performance demonstrations and extensive safety testing, which could add well over a decade to the development timeline. However, current designs for sodium-cooled fast reactors and high-temperature gas-cooled reactors differ enough from past reactor demonstrations that they cannot afford to bypass additional full-scale prototype testing before licensing and commercial deployment. Molten salt–fueled reactors have only had small-scale demonstrations and thus are even less mature. NLWRs deployed commercially at premature stages of development run a high risk of poor performance and unexpected safety problems. Recommendations Continue reading |
Nuclear reactors – “Advanced” Isn’t Always Better”
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Assessing the Safety, Security, and Environmental Impacts of Non-Light-Water Nuclear Reactors,Union of Concerned Scientists, Edwin Lyman Mar 18, 2021 “Advanced” Isn’t Always Better ”……………………….Key Questions for Assessing NLWR Technologies It is critical that policymakers, regulators, and private investors fully vet the claims that the developers of NLWRs are making and accurately assess the prospects for both successful development_ and_ safe, secure, and cost-effective deployment. Given the urgency of the climate crisis, rigorous evaluation of these technologies will help our nation and others avoid wasting time or resources in the pursuit of high-risk concepts that would be only slightly better— or perhaps worse—than LWRs. Key questions to consider are the following:
To help inform policy decisions on these questions, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has evaluated certain claims about the principal types of NLWRs. In particular, this report compares several classes of NLWRs to LWRs with regard to safety and security, the risks of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism, and “sustainability”—a term that in this context includes the often-claimed ability of some NLWRs to “recycle” nuclear waste and use mined uranium more efficiently. The report also considers the potential for certain NLWRs to operate in a once-through, “breed-and-burn” mode that would, in theory, make them more uranium-efficient without the need to recycle nuclear waste—a dangerous process that has significant nuclear proliferation and terrorism risks. Continue reading
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Don’t believe hydrogen and nuclear hype – they can’t get us to net zero carbon by 2050
 Don’t believe hydrogen and nuclear hype – they can’t get us to net zero carbon by 2050 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/16/hydrogen-nuclear-net-zero-carbon-renewables
Jonathon Porritt, 15 Mar,21, Big industry players pushing techno-fixes are ignoring the only realistic solution to the climate crisis: renewables.
ow that the whole world seems to be aligned behind the goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, the nuclear industry is straining every sinew to present itself as an invaluable ally in the ambitious aim. Energy experts remain starkly divided on whether or not we can reach this global net zero target without nuclear power, but regardless, it remains a hard sell for pro-nuclear enthusiasts. The problems they face are the same ones that have dogged the industry for decades: ever-higher costs, seemingly inevitable delays, no solutions to the nuclear waste challenge, security and proliferation risks. The drawbacks to nuclear are compounded by the burgeoning success of renewables – both solar and wind are getting cheaper and more efficient, year after year. There is also a growing realisation that a combination of renewables, smart storage, energy efficiency and more flexible grids can now be delivered at scale and at speed – anywhere in the world. While the majority of environmentalists continue to oppose nuclear power, there is now a significant minority, increasingly concerned about accelerating climate change, who just don’t see how we can get to that net zero comfort zone without it. They’re right to be concerned – it is a truly daunting challenge. All emissions of greenhouse gases (across the entire economy, including those from transport, heating, manufacturing and refining, farming and land use, as well as from shipping and aviation) must be brought down to as close to zero as possible, with all residual emissions compensated for by the removal of an equivalent amount of CO2 from the atmosphere. It’s the sheer scale of that challenge that has led a lot of people (including Boris Johnson with the government’s 10-point plan in November) not just to keep a flag flying for the nuclear industry, but to revisit the idea of hydrogen doing some of the heavy lifting. Hydrogen hype has become all the rage over the last 18 months, with some offering up this “clean energy technology”, as government officials insist on describing it, as the answer to all our net zero prayers. For those prayers to be answered, there will need to be a complete revolution in the way in which hydrogen is produced. As it is, 98% of the 115m tonnes used globally is “grey hydrogen”, made from natural gas or coal, that emits around 830m tonnes of CO2 per annum – 2% of total global greenhouse gas emissions. Beyond that, there’s a tiny amount of so-called “blue hydrogen” – essentially grey hydrogen but with its CO2 emissions captured and stored – and an even tinier amount of “green hydrogen” from electrolysing water, both of which are much more expensive than the climate-wrecking grey hydrogen. The gulf between that current reality, one rarely mentioned by hydrogen enthusiasts, and the prospect of readily available and affordable green hydrogen that could help us get to net zero, is absolutely vast. Don’t get me wrong: we will indeed need significant volumes of green hydrogen and it’s good that the government has set an ambitious target for 2030, in the hope that this will significantly reduce the costs of electrolysis to create it. But we need to be clear about what that green hydrogen should be used for: not for electricity; not for heating homes and non-domestic buildings; and not for cars, where electric vehicles will always be better. Instead we will need it for what are called the “hard-to-abate” sectors: for steel – replacing carbon-intensive coking coal – cement and shipping. Much of the hype for hydrogen is coming from the oil and gas sector, in the hope that gullible politicians, seduced by an unattainable vision of limitless green hydrogen, will subsidise the vast investments needed to capture the emissions from gas-powered hydrogen. Their motivation couldn’t be clearer: to postpone the inevitable decline of their industry. The nuclear industry is also desperate to get in on that game. One has to admire its capacity to pivot opportunistically. In February, the Nuclear Industry Council (made up of both industry and government representatives in the UK) published a shiny new Hydrogen Roadmap, exploring how either large-scale nuclear or small modular reactors could generate both the electricity and the heat needed to produce large amounts of green hydrogen. But the entire plan is premised on spectacular and totally speculative reductions in the cost of electrolysis. Rather than being the solution we have been waiting for, this nuclear/hydrogen development would actually be a disastrous techno-fix. Low-carbon nuclear power will always be massively more expensive than renewables and we can never build enough reactors to replace those coming offline over the next decade. We also know that producing hydrogen is always going to be very expensive. The truth is, you need a lot of electricity to produce not a lot of hydrogen. All of which makes pipe-dreams about substituting hydrogen for conventional gas in the UK’s gas grid, or of producing millions of tonnes of blue hydrogen, look almost entirely absurd. This, then, could lead to a double economic whammy of quite monstrous proportions. It would either have to be paid for through general taxation or through higher bills for consumers. That’s particularly problematic from the perspective of the 10% of households in England still living in cruel and degrading fuel poverty. Environmentalists who are tempted by this new nuclear/hydrogen hype should remember that our transition to a net zero world has to be a just transition. Every kilowatt hour of nuclear-generated power will be a much more expensive kilowatt hour than one delivered from renewables plus storage. So let’s just hold back on both the hydrogen hype and the nuclear propaganda, and concentrate instead on ramping up what we already know is cost-effectively deliverable: renewables. We need to do it as fast as we possibly can.
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Nuclear power has become irrelevant — like it or not
https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2021/03/1a9b07886b98-opinion-nuclear-power-has-become-irrelevant—-like-it-or-not.html, By Mycle Schneider, KYODO NEWS , 16 Mar 21,
Ten years went by since the Fukushima Daiichi accident began. What happened in the United States, historically leading the world’s nuclear power programs and still operating the largest reactor fleet in the world? What are global developments in energy policy increasingly dominated by renewable energy?
“The debate is over. Nuclear power has been eclipsed by the sun and the wind,” Dave Freeman wrote in the foreword to the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2017.
he renowned industry thinker, called an “energy prophet” by The New York Times, passed away last year at age 94. He had seen nuclear power coming and going. President Carter appointed him as chairman of the only fully public electricity utility in the United States, the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1977.
Construction had started on two nuclear reactors in the state in 1972. It took until 1996 to complete the first one and until 2016 for the second one. Those were the last units to start up in the United States.
Construction began on four units in 2013, but in 2017, the bankruptcy of builder Westinghouse led to the abandonment of the $10 billion V.C. Summer two-unit project in South Carolina.
Construction cost estimates for the only other active construction site in the United States, the two-unit Vogtle project in Georgia, have multiplied by a factor nearing five from $6.1 billion in 2009 to $28 billion by 2018. The startup continues to be delayed.
Meanwhile, lacking newbuild, the U.S. nuclear fleet is aging and the 94 still operating reactors now exceed an average age of 40 years. Although the U.S. nuclear industry claims to have achieved decreasing operation and maintenance costs — the only nuclear country to do so — the utilities are still struggling to compete with fierce competitors from the renewable energy sector.
Solar photovoltaic plants saw their electricity-generating costs decrease by 90 percent over the past decade, and wind power is down 70 percent, while nuclear kilowatt-hour costs increased by one third.
The global nuclear industry has lost the newbuild market. Five reactors started up in 2020, while six were closed down. While there was a net nuclear capacity increase of 0.4 gigawatt, renewables added an estimated 248 gigawatt. China, the only country with a significant newbuild program, added 2 gigawatt of nuclear and 150 gigawatt of solar and wind combined.
As Freeman stated, “These renewable, free-fuel sources are no longer a dream or a projection — they are a reality that are replacing nuclear as the preferred choice for new power plants worldwide.”
No wonder despair is reigning in nuclear companies’ headquarters. Ten years after the disaster struck Japan, nuclear power has become irrelevant in the world, an industrial reality that also Japanese policymakers need to face.
(Mycle Schneider is an independent international consultant on energy and nuclear power. He is the coordinator and publisher of the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report.)
Why Bill Gates is wrong — Beyond Nuclear International
His nuclear path would lead to, not prevent, a climate disaster
Why Bill Gates is wrong — Beyond Nuclear International
Billionaire’s nuclear ambitions would make climate disaster worse, https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/72759838/posts/3231823855 By Linda Pentz Gunter, 14 Mar 21,
In an interview for the Washington Post Magazine during his current book tour, billionaire Bill Gates, whom we are now expected to accept as an authority on climate change, said: “I’ll be happy if TerraPower was a waste of money.” TerraPower is Gates’s nuclear power company pushing so-called “advanced” reactors. His book is called How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.
Well, Bill, I have some good news for you. You can start celebrating! Because, yes, TerraPower is indeed a colossal waste of money. It’s also a waste of precious time. And the idea that nuclear power could “lift billions out of poverty” as the TerraPower website boats, is on a par with any number of outlandish theories, conspiratorial or otherwise, that are making the all too frequent rounds these days.So has Gates really drunk the Kool-Aid (OK it wasn’t actually Kool-Aid but Flavor Aid that was consumed at the 1978 Jonestown massacre)? Does he really plan to throw away $1 billion of his own money, plus an equal match from investors and possibly some state funding, too, and then just shrug it off when the whole thing proves redundant? Is that really true stewardship of the climate?
You don’t need to be a mathematician to work out what $2 billion plus would buy in renewables, and how much faster that particularly delivery would arrive at the doorsteps of the world’s poor, whom Gates claims he aims to protect.
Here is what Lazard’s estimated in terms of costs comparisons for new nuclear plants and other energy options, as laid out by Amory Lovins in his landmark Forbes article:
New nuclear power would cost $118–192/MWh (of which $29 is typical operating cost) while utility-scale solar power would cost $32–42/MWh and onshore windpower $28–54/MWh.
As Lovins has consistently pointed out: “To protect the climate, we must save the most carbon at the least cost and in the least time, counting all three variables—carbon and cost and time.”
And, “costly options save less carbon per dollar than cheaper options. Slow options save less carbon per year than faster options. Thus even a low- or no-carbon option that is too costly or too slow will reduce and retard achievable climate protection.”
Right now, a so-called “advanced” TerraPower reactor is just a glimmer in Gates’s eye. Like the prevailing fantasies about life on Mars, his toy reactor won’t materialize anywhere near soon enough to ease the agonies of the climate crisis. And even if it eventually shows up, and passes the necessary safety requirements, it will demonstrate only a triumph in physics, having by then no economical or practical utility whatsoever.
As the absence of progress on small modular reactors has shown, there is simply no viable market for new reactors, “advanced” or otherwise. Even the enticing prospect of rolling hundreds of small reactors off assembly lines (a jobs killer for on-site workers), is pie-in-the-sky, given the huge upfront costs that could never be recouped unless there were hundreds, possibly thousands, of orders.
To show just how detached from nuclear reality Bill Gates has become, he is happy to throw in the towel on TerraPower if fusion triumphs instead. Fusion, he says along with fission and “a miracle in storage” are the “only” ways to “make electricity cheap and reliable.”
Yes, this is the same fusion that has been thirty years away for countless decades. And still is. This is the fusion that uses more energy to create electricity than it delivers; that is sucking billions of dollars into research that could be applied to instant fixes in the renewable energy sector.
This is the same “cheap” that saw the costs at the two still unfinished new nuclear reactors in Georgia balloon to $21 billion in 2021, more than double the original cost and counting. And it’s the same “reliable” that resulted in Texans shivering in the dark during the recent big freeze (and no, it wasn’t frozen wind turbines, and I don’t have a fire-starting space laser, either).
There is a reason we are no longer searching for gold in them thar hills. We don’t need to waste years panning for a few elusive grams, hoping eventually to build a fortune. The Gold Rush is over. So, if there ever was one, is the Nuclear Rush.
Gates wants to save lives conquering malaria. But he’s fine with exposing people to radiation and leaving a legacy of toxic waste with no known solution.
Take a look around. In addition to the Vogtle debacle, a similar project in South Carolina was abandoned unfinished with ratepayers footing the bill. In the UK, Hitachi has fled for the Welsh hills, ditching its new reactor plans in that country. Before that, a proposed three-reactor site in Cumbria in north west England saw a similar corporate exodus. The new reactor at Bradwell, UK, is on “pause.”
Meanwhile, as nuclear costs — largely due to their equally huge risks — continue to soar, renewable prices are plummeting. Solar and wind are the cheapest and fastest forms of new energy. Nuclear power is the most expensive and the slowest. So if you choose to spend your next $2 billion on trying to invent the better nuclear mousetrap, then you are not helping to avoid a climate disaster. You are enabling it.https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/72759838/posts/3231823855
Fukushima at 2021- Aftershocks, Lies, and Failed Decontamination
Fukushima at Ten: Aftershocks, Lies, and Failed Decontamination, https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/03/12/fukushima-at-ten-aftershocks-lies-and-failed-decontamination/ BY JOHN LAFORGE It’s now 10 years since the catastrophic triple meltdowns of reactors at Fukushima in Japan. As Joseph Mangano of the Radiation and Public Health project put it three years ago, “Enormous amounts of radioactive chemicals, including cesium, strontium, plutonium, and iodine were emitted into the air, and releases of the same toxins into the Pacific have never stopped, as workers struggle to contain over 100 cancer-causing chemicals.”
There is news of the shortage of Fukushima health studies, big earthquakes (aftershocks) and typhoons rattling nerves, reactors and waste systems, novel radioactive particles dispersed, and corporate and government dishonesty about decontamination.
Very few health studies
“So far only one single disease entity has been systematically examined in humans in Fukushima: thyroid cancer,” says Dr. Alex Rosen, the German chair of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Other diseases, such as leukemia or malformations, which are associated with increased radiation exposure, have not been investigated, Rosen told the German medical journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt March 2. (Five studies have focused not on disease, but on birth abnormalities in the areas most affected: three on infant mortality rates, one on underweight newborns, and one on declining birth rates 9 months after March 2011.*)
The one disease study of the population was a screening for thyroid cancer in 380,000 local children under the age 18. In January 2018, the journal Thyroid reported 187 cases after five years. A typical population of 380,000 children would produce 12 cases in five years, reported Joseph Mangano, director of the Radiation and Pubic Health Project. The increase among children is “exactly what would be expected if Fukushima were a factor, as radiation is most damaging to the fetus, infant and child,” Mangano said.
New Earthquakes Rattle Wreckage and Nerves
Another large earthquake, magnitude 7.3, struck Feb. 13, again off the coast of the Fukushima reactor complex, and the reported 30 seconds of terror was followed by14 aftershocks up to magnitude 5.
The quake was severe enough that its Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) operators and federal regulators suspect it caused additional damage to reactors 1 and 3 where cooling water levels fell sharply, the Associated Press reported. The Feb. 13 quake was felt in Tokyo 150 miles away. Japan’s meteorological agency said it was believed to be an aftershock of the record 2011 quake.
At a Feb. 15 meeting, government regulators said the quake had probably worsened existing earthquake damage in reactors 1 and 3 or broken open new cracks causing the cooling water level drop, the AP said.
“Because (the 2011 quake) was an enormous one with a magnitude of 9.0, it’s not surprising to have an aftershock of this scale 10 years later,” said Kenji Satake, a professor at the University of Tokyo’s Earthquake Research Institute.
There have been six major aftershocks in the Fukushima area since March 2011: April 7, 2011 (magnitude 7.1); April 11, 2011 (6.6); July 10, 2011 (7.0); Oct. 26, 2013 (7.1); Nov. 26, 2016 (6.9); and Feb. 13, 2021 (7.3). All six of these earthquakes were named Fukushima in one language or another.
Earthquake shocks are not the only recurring nightmare to haunt the survivors of the record quake that killed 19, 630. Typhoon Hagibis slammed into Tamura City in October 2019, and swept away an unknown number of bags of radioactive debris that had been stacked near a river.
Since March 2011, over 22 million cubic meters of contaminated soil, brush and other matter from areas hard hit by fallout has been collected in large black plastic bags and piled in temporary storage mounds in thousands of places. (“Fukushima residents fight state plan to build roads with radiation-tainted soil,” Koydo, Japan Times, Apr. 29, 2018) Yet the volume is the tip of the iceberg: According to R. Ramachandran, in The Hindu, January 31, 2020, no decontamination activities are planned for the majority of forested areas which cover about 75 per cent of the main contaminated area of 9,000 square km.”
Cover-ups and disinformation Continue reading
Antinuclear 