Antinuclear

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)

March 23, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | General News | Leave a comment

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

March 22, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | General News | Leave a comment

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…

March 22, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | General News | Leave a comment