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This is terrifying for a utility’s creditors. The largest utilities in the United States have market capitalizations in the area of $30 billion, while most hover closer to $5 billion. If a nuclear project should fail, the utility might go completely bankrupt, leaving nothing to those foolish enough to lend them money. Accordingly, nuclear projects face higher borrowing costs than other electric projects. It doesn’t have to be this way — if reactor vendors and construction companies helped share the project risks posed by nuclear plants, borrowing costs would be lower. It is also possible for the U.S. government to shoulder some of the risk — but after Solyndra, few legislators have an appetite for letting energy companies push their risks onto the taxpayer.

Next, the United States is going to have to adopt some form of carbon tax on electricity generation, or offer a comparable subsidy to the nuclear industry. An appropriately sized carbon tax of $20/ton CO2 would raise the cost of natural-gas-generated electricity by 0.7 cents/kWh, while having a negligible impact on nuclear power

And finally, the nuclear industry is just going to have to catch some luck and see natural gas prices rise. That’s a tall order, given the new resources being opened up by hydraulic fracturing and the slowed consumption of natural gas brought about by the recession. But it’s not entirely outside of the realm of possibility — the futures market for natural gas has been wrong before.

Nuclear power is down, but not out. With a proper R&D focus, good business practices, appropriate policy, and a little luck, the gulf that separates nuclear power from its competitors may yet be bridged.

“In these shale gas plays no well is really economic right now,” the geologist said in a previous e-mail to the same official on March 16. “They are all losing a little money or only making a little bit of money.”

Around the same time the geologist sent the e-mail, Mr. McClendon, Chesapeake’s chief executive, told investors, “It’s time to get bullish on natural gas.”

Aubrey McClendon, whose name is not terribly familiar to people outside of the energy industry, has an enormous financial interest in encouraging customers to become addicted to natural gas so that they will keep buying even if the price shoots up – like it did in the period from 2000-2008. During that time McClendon and his company rode a wave that resulted in growing a company from tiny to huge based on debt-financed investments in leases and drilling rigs designed to produce gas in the midcontinent region of the US. A high portion of the company’s wells were stimulated with hydraulic fracturing.

When the price of natural gas collapsed in 2008, mostly as a result of the contraction in demand caused by the financial crisis and resulting economic recession/depression, McClendon nearly lost control of his company. He had to sell “substantially all” of shares at a dramatically lowered price in order to pay off creditors and meet margin calls.

No U.S. chief executive officer has bought more of his own company’s stock in recent years than McClendon, even as the shares reached all-time highs. His appetite for Chesapeake stock made him “a darling of Wall Street,” Tulsa money manager Jake Dollarhide said. But his purchases were made on margin, meaning he used borrowed money. As the value of the stock fell, McClendon was forced to raise cash to meet margin calls. Recent losses — Chesapeake shares have plummeted 60 percent in the past three weeks — left him unable to fulfill those requirements.Read more: http://newsok.com/market-slide-wipes-out-ceos-chesapeake-holdings/article/3310107#ixzz1QSst9NnL

McClendon responded vigorously to the NY Times’s suggestion that the gas revolution was more mirage than miracle in a lengthy letter to Chesapeake Energy employees that was published on the company’s public Facebook page. (Note: The timing of this letter with regard to the NY Times article is telling. The article appeared in the Sunday edition of the Times on June 26, 2011. The letter to employees included a time stamp indicating that it was released at 8:37 pm on the same day while the Facebook page indicates that it was posted to the world by 11:27 pm. In other words – there is no rest for the weary in the Internet era.)

McClendon’s letter blamed the NY Times article on environmental activists that proclaim a desire to supply all of the US energy needs from wind and solar energy. It also issued a call to action for Chesapeake Energy employees:

We hope that every Chesapeake employee can be part of our public education outreach. At more than 11,000 strong, we are an army of “factivists” – people who have knowledge of the facts and the personal knowledge and ability to spread them. You can do this by talking to your families, friends and others in your spheres of influence (schools, churches, civic organizations, etc) about the kind of company you work for and the integrity of what we do every day for our shareholders, our communities, our states, our nation, our economy and our environment. You don’t have to be an expert to stand up and tell folks that Chesapeake is committed to doing what’s right – and that commitment is expressed every day by you and your colleagues across the company.

You can also get involved by joining Chesapeake Fed PAC, our political action committee. Our opponents are extremely well funded and organized. We need to make sure our voice is heard in Washington, DC and with elected officials who are making decisions that affect our industry, our company and our ability to operate in the many states in which shale gas and oil have been discovered.

After describing how Chesapeake has 125 active drilling rigs and how it has developed a “swat team” with more than 100 employees that works with environmental groups to produce legislation designed to slow the development of new coal fired power plants and to hasten the closure of existing coal plants, Tom Price said the following:

“It’s been said before, but the demand side of the equation is extremely important right now. I mean this really is a zero sum game. I think that there are a number of very progressive utilities out there that recognize the challenges that they are facing with regard to climate change, but the Transport Rule, Clean Air Act and various others.”

I remain convinced that there is a market battle going on between natural gas and nuclear energy.

According to the USGS website, under the undated heading, “Can we cause earthquakes? Is there any way to prevent earthquakes?” the agency notes, “Earthquakes induced by human activity have been documented in a few locations in the United States, Japan, and Canada. The cause was injection of fluids into deep wells for waste disposal and secondary recovery of oil, and the use of reservoirs for water supplies. Most of these earthquakes were minor. The largest and most widely known resulted from fluid injection at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, Colorado. In 1967, an earthquake of magnitude 5.5 followed a series of smaller earthquakes. Injection had been discontinued at the site in the previous year once the link between the fluid injection and the earlier series of earthquakes was established.” Note the phrase, “Once the link between the fluid injection and the earlier series of earthquakes was established.” So both the U.S Army and the U.S. Geological Survey over fifty years of research confirm on a federal level that that “fluid injection” introduces subterranean instability and is a contributory factor in inducing increased seismic activity.” How about “causing significant seismic events?”

Fast forward to the present. Overseas, last month Britain’s Cuadrilla Resources announced that it has discovered huge underground deposits of natural gas in Lancashire, up to 200 trillion cubic feet of gas in all. On 2 November a report commissioned by Cuadrilla Resources acknowledged that hydraulic fracturing was responsible for two tremors which hit Lancashire and possibly as many as fifty separate earth tremors overall. The British Geological Survey also linked smaller quakes in the Blackpool area to fracking. BGS Dr. Brian Baptie said, “It seems quite likely that they are related,” noting, “We had a couple of instruments close to the site and they show that both events occurred near the site and at a shallow depth.” But, back to Oklahoma. Austin Holland’s August 2011 report, “Examination of Possibly Induced Seismicity from Hydraulic Fracturing in the Eola Field, Garvin County, Oklahoma” Oklahoma Geological Survey OF1-2011, studied 43 earthquakes that occurred on 18 January, ranging in intensity from 1.0 to 2.8 Md (milliDarcies.) While the report’s conclusions are understandably cautious, it does state, “Our analysis showed that shortly after hydraulic fracturing began small earthquakes started occurring, and more than 50 were identified, of which 43 were large enough to be located.”

Sensitized to the issue, the oil and natural gas industry has been quick to dismiss the charges and deluge the public with a plethora of televisions advertisements about how natural gas from shale deposits is not only America’s future, but provides jobs and energy companies are responsible custodians of the environment. It seems likely that Washington will eventually be forced to address the issue, as the U.S. Army and the USGS have noted a causal link between the forced injection of liquids underground and increased seismic activity. While the Oklahoma quake caused a deal of property damage, had lives been lost, the policy would most certainly have come under increased scrutiny from the legal community. While polluting a local community’s water supply is a local tragedy barely heard inside the Beltway, an earthquake ranging from Oklahoma to Illinois, Kansas, Arkansas, Tennessee and Texas is an issue that might yet shake voters out of their torpor, and national elections are slightly less than a year away.

The information released yesterday by the EPA was limited to raw sampling data: The agency did not interpret the findings or make any attempt to identify the source of the pollution. From the start of its investigation, the EPA has been careful to consider all possible causes of the contamination and to distance its inquiry from the controversy around hydraulic fracturing. Still, the chemical compounds the EPA detected are consistent with those produced from drilling processes, including one -- a solvent called 2-Butoxyethanol (2-BE) -- widely used in the process of hydraulic fracturing. The agency said it had not found contaminants such as nitrates and fertilizers that would have signaled that agricultural activities were to blame.

Before entering into the non-profit world, he entered into the family business of oil industry analysis and claims to have achieved a fair amount of financial success. As Lundberg tells the tale, he stopped “punching the corporate time clock” in 1988 to found Fossil Fuels Policy Action.I had just learned about peak oil. Upon my press conference announcing the formation of Fossil Fuels Policy Action, USA Today’s headline was “Lundberg Lines up with Nature.” My picture with the story looked like I was a corporate fascist, not an acid-tripping hippie. The USA Today story led to an invitation to review Beyond Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades, for the quarterly Population and Environment journal. In learning for the first time about peak oil (although I had questioned long-term growth in petroleum supplies), I was awakened to the bigger picture as never before. Natural gas was no answer. And I already knew that the supply crisis to come — I had helped predict the 1970s oil shocks — was to be a liquid fuels crisis.

Lundberg tells an interesting story about his initial fundraising activities for his new non-profit group.Setting out to become a clearinghouse for energy data and policy, we had a tendency to go along with the buzzword “natural gas as a bridge fuel” — especially when my previous clients serving the petroleum industry until 1988 included natural gas utilities. They were and are represented by the American Gas Association, where I knew a few friendly executives. Upon starting a nonprofit group for the environment with an energy focus, I met with the AGA right away. I was anticipating one of their generous grants they were giving large environmental groups who were trumpeting the “natural gas is a bridge fuel” mantra.

I slept on it and decided that I would not participate in this corrupt conspiracy. Instead, I had fun writing one of Fossil Fuels Policy Action’s first newsletters about this “bridge” argument and the background story that the gas industry was really competing with fuel oil for heating. I brought up the AGA’s funding for enviros and said I was rejecting it. I was crazy, I admit, for I was starting a new career with almost no savings and no guarantees. So I was not surprised when my main contact at AGA called me up and snarled, “Jan, are you on acid?!

Here is a quote from his July 10, 2011 post titled Nuclear Roulette: new book puts a nail in coffin of nukesCulture Change went beyond studying the problem soon after its founding in 1988: action and advocacy must get to the root of the crises to assure a livable future. Also, information overload and a diet of bad news kills much activism. So it’s hard to find reading material to strongly recommend. But the new book Nuclear Roulette: The Case Against the “Nuclear Renaissance” is must-have if one is fighting nukes today.

He goes to say the following:The uneconomic nature of nuclear power, and the lack of energy gain compared to cheap oil, are two huge reasons for society to quit flirting with more nuclear power, never mind the catastrophic record and certainty of more to come. Somehow the evidence and true track record of dozens of accidents and perhaps 300,000 to nearly 1,000,000 deaths from just Chernobyl, are brushed aside by corporate media and most governments. So, imaginative means of helping to end nuclear proliferation are crucial, the most careful and reasonable-sounding ones being included in summary form in Nuclear Roulette.

Texas has been experiencing a terrible heat wave this summer - along with much of the rest of the country. According to the Dallas Morning News, this heat wave has caused more than 20 power plants to shut down, including coal and natural gas plants. On the other hand, Texan wind farms have been providing a steady, significant supply of electricity during the heat wave, in part because wind farms require no water to generate electricity. The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) noted on their blog: “Wind plants are keeping the lights on and the air conditioners running for hundreds of thousands of homes in Texas.”

This near-threat of a blackout is not a one-time or seasonal ordeal for Texans. Earlier this year, when winter storms were hammering the Lone Star State, rolling blackouts occurred due to faltering fossil fuel plants. In February, 50 power plants failed and wind energy helped pick up the slack.

Although far from the steady winds of the Great Plains, Cape Wind Associates noted that if their offshore wind farm was already operational, the turbines would have been able to harness the power of the heat wave oppressing the Northeast, mostly at full capacity. Cape Wind, vying to be the nation’s first offshore wind farm, has a meteorological tower stationed off Nantucket Sound in Massachusetts. If Cape Wind had been built, it could have been using these oppressive heat waves to operate New England’s cooling air conditioners. These three examples would suggest that the reliability of fossil fuels and nuclear reactors has been overstated, as has the variability of wind.

So just how much electricity can wind energy realistically supply as a portion of the nation’s energy? A very thorough report completed by the U.S. Department of Energy in 2008 (completed during President George W. Bush’s tenure) presents one scenario where wind energy could provide 20% of the U.S.’s electrical power by 2030. To achieve this level, the U.S. Department of Energy estimates energy costs would increase only 50 cents per month per household. A more recent study, the Eastern Wind Integration and Transmission Study (EWITS), shows that wind could supply 30% of the Eastern Interconnect’s service area (all of the Eastern U.S. from Nebraska eastward) with the proper transmission upgrades. As wind farms become more spread out across the country, and are better connected to each other via transmission lines, the variability of wind energy further decreases. If the wind isn’t blowing in Nebraska, it may be blowing in North Carolina, or off the coast of Georgia and the electricity generated in any state can then be transported across the continent. A plan has been hatched in the European Union to acquire 50% of those member states’ electricity from wind energy by 2050 - mostly from offshore wind farms, spread around the continent and heavily connected with transmission lines.

With a significant amount of wind energy providing electricity in the U.S., what would happen if the wind ever stops blowing? Nothing really - the lights will stay on, refrigerators will keep running and air conditions will keep working. As it so happens, wind energy has made the U.S. electrical supply more diversified and protects us against periodic shut downs from those pesky, sometimes-unreliable fossil fuel power plants and nuclear reactors.

According to the draft of the recommendation in July, the Food Safety Commission was aiming at setting "100 millisieverts lifetime limit" that would include the external radiation exposure from the nuclides in the air. However, based on the opinions from the general public, the Commission decided that the effect of external radiation exposure was small and focused only on internal radiation exposure from food.

If we suppose one's lifetime is 100 years, then 1 millisievert per year would be the maximum. The current provisional safety limit assumes the upper limit of 5 millisievert per year with radioactive cesium alone. So the new regulations will inevitably be stricter than the current provisional safety limits.

In addition, the Commission pointed out that children "are more susceptible to the effect of radiation", but it didn't cite any specific number for children. The Commission explained that it would be up to the Ministry of Health and Labor and other agencies to discuss" whether the effect on children should be reflected in the new safety limits.Oh boy. So many holes in the article.First, I suspect it is a rude awakening for many Japanese to know that the current provisional safety limits for radioactive materials in food presuppose very high internal radiation level already. The Yomiuri article correctly says 5 millisieverts per year from radioactive cesium alone. The provisional safety limit for radioactive iodine, though now it's almost irrelevant, is 2,000 becquerels/kg, and that presupposes 2 millisieverts per year internal radiation. From cesium and iodine alone, the provisional safety limits on food assume 7 millisievert per year internal radiation.

(The reason why the radioactive iodine limit is set lower than that for radioactive cesium is because radioactive iodine all goes to thyroid gland and gets accumulated in the organ.)I am surprised that Yomiuri even mentioned the 5 millisieverts per year limit from cesium exposure alone. I suspect it is the first time ever for the paper.Second, the article says the Commission decided to exclude external radiation from the "100 millisieverts" number because of the public opinion. Which "public" opinion are they talking about? Mothers and fathers with children? I doubt it. If anything, the general public (at least those who doesn't believe radiation is good for them) would want to include external radiation so that the overall radiation limit is set, rather than just for food.

Third, and most importantly, if the proposed lifetime limit of 100 millisieverts is only for internal radiation from FOOD, then the overall internal radiation could be much higher. Why? Because, pre-Fukushima, the natural internal radiation from food in Japan was only 0.41 millisievert per year (mostly from K-40), or 28% of total natural radiation exposure per year of 1.45 millisievert (average). Of internal radiation exposure, inhaling radon is 0.45 millisievert per year in Japan, as opposed to the world average of 1.2 millisievert per year.Now, these so-called experts in the government commission are saying the internal radiation from food can be 1 millisievert per year (assuming the life of 100 years), in addition to the natural internal radiation from food (K-40) which is 0.41 millisievert per year. Then, you will have to add internal exposure from inhaling the radioactive materials IN ADDITION TO radon which is 0.45 millisievert per year.

Winter in the Pacific Ocean side of east Japan is dry, particularly in Kanto. North wind kicks up dust, and radioactive materials in the dust will be kicked up. The Tokyo metropolitan government will be burning away the radioactive debris from Iwate Prefecture (Miyagi's to follow) into the wintry sky. So-called "decontamination" efforts all over east Japan will add more radioactive particles in the air for people to breathe in.

For your information, the comparison of natural radiation exposure levels (the world vs Japan), from the Nuclear Safety Research Association Handbook on treating acute radiation injury (original in Japanese; my translation of labels). Japan has (or had) markedly lower radon inhalation than the world average, and much lower external radiation from the ground and from cosmic ray. It makes it all up by overusing the medical X-rays and CT scans, and even the Nuclear Safety Research Association who issued the following table says Japan tends to use too many X-rays and scans and that the medical professionals should make effort not to overuse them.

And Ahmad Al-Malabeh, a professor in the Earth and Environmental Sciences department of Hashemite University, adds: "Jordan is rich not only in solar and wind resources, but also in oil shale rock, from which we can extract oil that can cover Jordan's energy needs in the coming years, starting between 2016 and 2017 ... this could give us more time to have more economically feasible renewable energy."

Finance, rather than Fukushima, may delay South Africa's nuclear plans, which were approved just five days after the Japanese disaster. South Africa remains resolute in its plans to build six new nuclear reactors by 2030. Katse Maphoto, the director of Nuclear Safety, Liabilities and Emergency Management at the Department of Energy, says that the government conducted a safety review of its two nuclear reactors in Cape Town, following the Fukushima event.

Vietnam's nuclear energy targets remain ambitious despite scientists' warning of a tsunami risk. Vietnam's plan to power 10 per cent of its electricity grid with nuclear energy within 20 years is the most ambitious nuclear energy plan in South-East Asia. The country's first nuclear plant, Ninh Thuan, is to be built with support from a state-owned Russian energy company and completed by 2020. Le Huy Minh, director of the Earthquake and Tsunami Warning Centre at Vietnam's Institute of Geophysics, has warned that Vietnam's coast would be affected by tsunamis in the adjacent South China Sea.

Larkin says nuclear energy is the only alternative to coal for generating adequate electricity. "What other alternative do we have? Renewables are barely going to do anything," he said. He argues that nuclear is capable of supplying 85 per cent of the base load, or constantly needed, power supply, while solar energy can only produce between 17 and 25 per cent. But, despite government confidence, Larkin says that a shortage of money may delay the country's nuclear plans.

The government has said yes but hasn't said how it will pay for it. This is going to end up delaying by 15 years any plans to build a nuclear station."

The Ninh Thuan nuclear plant would sit 80 to 100 kilometres from a fault line on the Vietnamese coast, potentially exposing it to tsunamis, according to state media. But Vuong Huu Tan, president of the state-owned Vietnam Atomic Energy Commission, told state media in March, however, that lessons from the Fukushima accident will help Vietnam develop safe technologies. And John Morris, an Australia-based energy consultant who has worked as a geologist in Vietnam, says the seismic risk for nuclear power plants in the country would not be "a major issue" as long as the plants were built properly. Japan's nuclear plants are "a lot more earthquake prone" than Vietnam's would be, he adds.

Undeterred by Fukushima, Nigeria is forging ahead with nuclear collaborations. There is no need to panic because of the Fukushima accident, says Shamsideen Elegba, chair of the Forum of Nuclear Regulatory Bodies in Africa. Nigeria has the necessary regulatory system to keep nuclear activities safe. "The Nigerian Nuclear Regulatory Authority [NNRA] has established itself as a credible organisation for regulatory oversight on all uses of ionising radiation, nuclear materials and radioactive sources," says Elegba who was, until recently, the NNRA's director general.

Vietnam is unlikely to experience much in the way of anti-nuclear protests, unlike neighbouring Indonesia and the Philippines, where civil society groups have had more influence, says Kevin Punzalan, an energy expert at De La Salle University in the Philippines. Warnings from the Vietnamese scientific community may force the country's ruling communist party to choose alternative locations for nuclear reactors, or to modify reactor designs, but probably will not cause extreme shifts in the one-party state's nuclear energy strategy, Punzalan tells SciDev.Net.

Will the Philippines' plans to rehabilitate a never-used nuclear power plant survive the Fukushima accident? The Philippines is under a 25-year moratorium on the use of nuclear energy which expires in 2022. The government says it remains open to harnessing nuclear energy as a long-term solution to growing electricity demand, and its Department of Science and Technology has been making public pronouncements in favour of pursuing nuclear energy since the Fukushima accident. Privately, however, DOST officials acknowledge that the accident has put back their job of winning the public over to nuclear by four or five years.

In the meantime, the government is trying to build capacity. The country lacks, for example, the technical expertise. Carmencita Bariso, assistant director of the Department of Energy's planning bureau, says that, despite the Fukushima accident, her organisation has continued with a study on the viability, safety and social acceptability of nuclear energy. Bariso says the study would include a proposal for "a way forward" for the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, the first nuclear reactor in South East Asia at the time of its completion in 1985. The $2.3-billion Westinghouse light water reactor, about 60 miles north of the capital, Manila, was never used, though it has the potential to generate 621 megawatts of power. President Benigno Aquino III, whose mother, President Corazon Aquino, halted work on the facility in 1986 because of corruption and safety issues, has said it will never be used as a nuclear reactor but could be privatised and redeveloped as a conventional power plant.

But Mark Cojuangco, former lawmaker, authored a bill in 2008 seeking to start commercial nuclear operations at the Bataan reactor. His bill was not passed before Congress adjourned last year and he acknowledges that the Fukushima accident has made his struggle more difficult. "To go nuclear is still the right thing to do," he says. "But this requires a societal decision. We are going to spark public debates with a vengeance as soon as the reports from Fukushima are out." Amended bills seeking both to restart the reactor, and to close the issue by allowing either conversion or permanent closure, are pending in both the House and the Senate. Greenpeace, which campaigns against nuclear power, believes the Fukushima accident has dimmed the chances of commissioning the Bataan plant because of "increased awareness of what radioactivity can do to a place". Many parts of the country are prone to earthquakes and other natural disasters, which critics say makes it unsuitable both for the siting of nuclear power stations and the disposal of radioactive waste.

In Kenya, nuclear proponents argue for a geothermal – nuclear mix In the same month as the Fukushima accident, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency approved Kenya's application for its first nuclear power station (31 March), a 35,000 megawatt facility to be built at a cost of Sh950 billion (US$9.8 billion) on a 200-acre plot on the Athi Plains, about 50km from Nairobi

The plant, with construction driven by Kenya's Nuclear Electricity Project Committee, should be commissioned in 2022. The government claims it could satisfy all of Kenya's energy needs until 2040. The demand for electricity is overwhelming in Kenya. Less than half of residents in the capital, Nairobi, have grid electricity, while the rural rate is two per cent. James Rege, Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Energy, Communication and Information, takes a broader view than the official government line, saying that geothermal energy, from the Rift Valley project is the most promising option. It has a high production cost but remains the country's "best hope". Nuclear should be included as "backup". "We are viewing nuclear energy as an alternative source of power. The cost of fossil fuel keeps escalating and ordinary Kenyans can't afford it," Rege tells SciDev.Net.

Hydropower is limited by rivers running dry, he says. And switching the country's arable land to biofuel production would threaten food supplies. David Otwoma, secretary to the Energy Ministry's Nuclear Electricity Development Project, agrees that Kenya will not be able to industrialise without diversifying its energy mix to include more geothermal, nuclear and coal. Otwoma believes the expense of generating nuclear energy could one day be met through shared regional projects but, until then, Kenya has to move forward on its own. According to Rege, much as the nuclear energy alternative is promising, it is extremely important to take into consideration the Fukushima accident. "Data is available and it must be one step at a time without rushing things," he says. Otwoma says the new nuclear Kenya can develop a good nuclear safety culture from the outset, "but to do this we need to be willing to learn all the lessons and embrace them, not forget them and assume that won't happen to us".

But the government adopted its Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) for 2010-2030 five days after the Fukushima accident. Elliot Mulane, communications manager for the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation, (NECSA) a public company established under the 1999 Nuclear Energy Act that promotes nuclear research, said the timing of the decision indicated "the confidence that the government has in nuclear technologies". And Dipuo Peters, energy minister, reiterated the commitment in her budget announcement earlier this year (26 May), saying: "We are still convinced that nuclear power is a necessary part of our strategy that seeks to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions through a diversified portfolio, comprising some fossil-based, renewable and energy efficiency technologies". James Larkin, director of the Radiation and Health Physics Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand, believes South Africa is likely to go for the relatively cheap, South Korean generation three reactor.

It is not only that we say so: an international audit came here in 2006 to assess our procedure and processes and confirmed the same. Elegba is firmly of the view that blame for the Fukushima accident should be allocated to nature rather than human error. "Japan is one of the leaders not only in that industry, but in terms of regulatory oversight. They have a very rigorous system of licensing. We have to make a distinction between a natural event, or series of natural events and engineering infrastructure, regulatory infrastructure, and safety oversight." Erepamo Osaisai, Director General of the Nigeria Atomic Energy Commission (NAEC), has said there is "no going back" on Nigeria's nuclear energy project after Fukushima.

Nigeria is likely to recruit the Russian State Corporation for Atomic Energy, ROSATOM, to build its first proposed nuclear plant. A delegation visited Nigeria (26- 28 July) and a bilateral document is to be finalised before December. Nikolay Spassy, director general of the corporation, said during the visit: "The peaceful use of nuclear power is the bedrock of development, and achieving [Nigeria's] goal of being one of the twenty most developed countries by the year 2020 would depend heavily on developing nuclear power plants." ROSATOM points out that the International Atomic Energy Agency monitors and regulates power plant construction in previously non-nuclear countries. But Nnimmo Bassey, executive director of the Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN), said "We cannot see the logic behind the government's support for a technology that former promoters in Europe, and other technologically advanced nations, are now applying brakes to. "What Nigeria needs now is investment in safe alternatives that will not harm the environment and the people. We cannot accept the nuclear option."

Thirsty for electricity, and desirous of political clout, Egypt is determined that neither Fukushima ― nor revolution ― will derail its nuclear plans. Egypt was the first country in the Middle East and North Africa to own a nuclear programme, launching a research reactor in 1961. In 2007 Egypt 'unfroze' a nuclear programme that had stalled in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. After the Egyptian uprising in early 2011, and the Fukushima accident, the government postponed an international tender for the construction of its first plant.

Yassin Ibrahim, chairman of the Nuclear Power Plants Authority, told SciDev.Net: "We put additional procedures in place to avoid any states of emergency but, because of the uprising, the tender will be postponed until we have political stability after the presidential and parliamentary election at the end of 2011". Ibrahim denies the nuclear programme could be cancelled, saying: "The design specifications for the Egyptian nuclear plant take into account resistance to earthquakes and tsunamis, including those greater in magnitude than any that have happened in the region for the last four thousand years. "The reactor type is of the third generation of pressurised water reactors, which have not resulted in any adverse effects to the environment since they began operation in the early sixties."

Ibrahim El-Osery, a consultant in nuclear affairs and energy at the country's Nuclear Power Plants Authority, points out that Egypt's limited resources of oil and natural gas will run out in 20 years. "Then we will have to import electricity, and we can't rely on renewable energy as it is still not economic yet — Egypt in 2010 produced only two per cent of its needs through it." But there are other motives for going nuclear, says Nadia Sharara, professor of mineralogy at Assiut University. "Owning nuclear plants is a political decision in the first place, especially in our region. And any state that has acquired nuclear technology has political weight in the international community," she says. "Egypt has the potential to own this power as Egypt's Nuclear Materials Authority estimates there are 15,000 tons of untapped uranium in Egypt." And she points out it is about staying ahead with technology too. "If Egypt freezes its programme now because of the Fukushima nuclear disaster it will fall behind in many science research fields for at least the next 50 years," she warned.

One final idea, which does not involve money going to or from government, is simply requiring that cleaner sources provide a certain fraction of our overall power generation. The many state Renewable Portfolio Standards (that do not include nuclear) and the Clean Energy Standard being considered by Congress and the Obama administration (which does include nuclear) are examples of this policy. While better than nothing, such policies are not ideal in that they are crude, and don’t involve a quantitative incentive based on real external costs. An energy source is either defined as “clean,” or it is not. Note that the definition of “clean” would be decided politically, as opposed to objectively based on tangible external costs determined by scientific studies (nuclear’s exclusion from state Renewable Portfolio Standards policies being one outrageous example). Finally, there is the fact that any such policy would require legislation.

Well, if we can’t tax pollution, how about encouraging the use of clean sources by giving them subsidies? This has proved to be more popular so far, but this idea has also recently run into trouble, given the current situation with the budget deficit and national debt. Events like the Solyndra bankruptcy have put government clean energy subsidies even more on the defensive. Thus, it seems that neither policies involving money flowing to the government nor policies involving money flowing from the government are politically viable at this point.

All of the above begs the question whether there is a policy available that will encourage the use of cleaner energy sources that is revenue-neutral (i.e., does not involve money flowing to or from the government), does not involve the outright (political) selection of certain energy sources over others, and does not require legislation. Enter the Dispatch Queue

There must be enough power plants in a given region to meet the maximum load (or demand) expected to occur. In fact, total generation capacity must exceed maximum demand by a specified “reserve margin,” to address the possibility of a plant going offline, or other possible considerations. Due to the fact that demand varies significantly with time, a significant fraction of the generation capacity remains offline, some or most of the time. The dispatch queue is a means by which utilities, or independent regional grid operators, decide which power plants will operate in order to meet demand at any given instant. A good discussion of dispatch queues and how they operate can be found in this Department of Energy report.

The general goal of the methodology used to set the dispatch queue order is to minimize overall generation cost, while staying in compliance with all federal or state laws (environmental rules, etc.). This is done by placing the power plants with the lowest “variable” cost first in the queue. Plants with the highest “variable” cost are placed last. The “variable” cost of a plant represents how much more it costs to operate the plant than it costs to leave it idle (i.e., it includes the fuel cost and maintenance costs that arise from operation, but does not include the plant capital cost, personnel costs, or any fixed maintenance costs). Thus, one starts with the least expensive plants, and moves up (in cost) until generation meets demand. The remaining, more expensive plants are not fired up. This ensures that the lowest-operating-cost set of plants is used to meet demand at any given time

As far as who makes the decisions is concerned, in many cases the local utility itself runs the dispatch for its own service territory. In most of the United States, however, there is a large regional grid (covering several utilities) that is operated by an Independent System Operator (ISO) or Regional Transmission Organization (RTO), and those organizations, which are independent of the utilities, set the dispatch queue for the region. The Idea

As discussed above, a plant’s place in the dispatch queue is based upon variable cost, with the lowest variable cost plants being first in the queue. As discussed in the DOE report, all the dispatch queues in the country base the dispatch order almost entirely on variable cost, with the only possible exceptions being issues related to maximizing grid reliability. What if the plant dispatch methodology were revised so that environmental costs were also considered? Ideally, the public health and environmental costs would be objectively and scientifically determined and cast in terms of an equivalent economic cost (as has been done in many scientific studies such as the ExternE study referenced earlier). The calculated external cost would be added to a plant’s variable cost, and its place in the dispatch queue would be adjusted accordingly. The net effect would be that dirtier plants would be run much less often, resulting in greatly reduced pollution.

This could have a huge impact in the United States, especially at the current time. Currently, natural gas prices are so low that the variable costs of combine-cycle natural gas plants are not much higher than those of coal plants, even without considering environmental impacts. Also, there is a large amount of natural gas generation capacity sitting idle.

More specifically, if dispatch queue ordering methods were revised to even place a small (economic) weight on environmental costs, there would be a large switch from coal to gas generation, with coal plants (especially the older, dirtier ones) moving to the back of the dispatch queue, and only running very rarely (at times of very high demand). The specific idea of putting gas plants ahead of coal plants in the dispatch queue is being discussed by others.

The beauty of this idea is that it does not involve any type of tax or government subsidy. It is revenue neutral. Also, depending on the specifics of how it’s implemented, it can be quantitative in nature, with environmental costs of various power plants being objectively weighed, as opposed certain sources simply being chosen, by government/political fiat, over others. It also may not require legislation (see below). Finally, dispatch queues and their policies and methods are a rather arcane subject and are generally below the political radar (many folks haven’t even heard of them). Thus, this approach may allow the nation’s environmental goals to be (quietly) met without causing a political uproar. It could allow policy makers to do the right thing without paying too high of a political cost.

Questions/Issues The DOE report does mention some examples of dispatch queue methods factoring in issues other than just the variable cost. It is fairly common for issues of grid reliability to be considered. Also, compliance with federal or state environmental requirements can have some impacts. Examples of such laws include limits on the hours of operation for certain polluting facilities, or state requirements that a “renewable” facility generate a certain amount of power over the year. The report also discusses the possibility of favoring more fuel efficient gas plants over less efficient ones in the queue, even if using the less efficient plants at that moment would have cost less, in order to save natural gas. Thus, the report does discuss deviations from the pure cost model, to consider things like environmental impact and resource conservation.

I could not ascertain from the DOE report, however, what legal authorities govern the entities that make the plant dispatch decisions (i.e., the ISOs and RTOs), and what types of action would be required in order to change the dispatch methodology (e.g., whether legislation would be required). The DOE report was a study that was called for by the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which implies that its conclusions would be considered in future congressional legislation. I could not tell from reading the report if the lowest cost (only) method of dispatch is actually enshrined somewhere in state or federal law. If so, the changes I’m proposing would require legislation, of course.

The DOE report states that in some regions the local utility runs the dispatch queue itself. In the case of the larger grids run by the ISOs and RTOs (which cover most of the country), the report implies that those entities are heavily influenced, if not governed, by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which is part of the executive branch of the federal government. In the case of utility-run dispatch queues, it seems that nothing short of new regulations (on pollution limits, or direct guidance on dispatch queue ordering) would result in a change in dispatch policy. Whereas reducing cost and maximizing grid reliability would be directly in the utility’s interest, favoring cleaner generation sources in the queue would not, unless it is driven by regulations. Thus, in this case, legislation would probably be necessary, although it’s conceivable that the EPA could act (like it’s about to on CO2).

In the case of the large grids run by ISOs and RTOs, it’s possible that such a change in dispatch methodology could be made by the federal executive branch, if indeed the FERC has the power to mandate such a change

Effect on Nuclear With respect to the impacts of including environmental costs in plant dispatch order determination, I’ve mainly discussed the effects on gas vs. coal. Indeed, a switch from coal to gas would be the main impact of such a policy change. As for nuclear, as well as renewables, the direct/immediate impact would be minimal. That is because both nuclear and renewable sources have high capital costs but very low variable costs. They also have very low environmental impacts; much lower than those of coal or gas. Thus, they will remain at the front of the dispatch queue, ahead of both coal and gas.

Challenging numbers Japanese investigators had already developed a detailed timeline of events following the 11 March earthquake that precipitated the disaster. Hours after the quake rocked the six reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, the tsunami arrived, knocking out crucial diesel back-up generators designed to cool the reactors in an emergency. Within days, the three reactors operating at the time of the accident overheated and released hydrogen gas, leading to massive explosions. Radioactive fuel recently removed from a fourth reactor was being held in a storage pool at the time of the quake, and on 14 March the pool overheated, possibly sparking fires in the building over the next few days.

But accounting for the radiation that came from the plants has proved much harder than reconstructing this chain of events. The latest report from the Japanese government, published in June, says that the plant released 1.5 × 1016 bequerels of caesium-137, an isotope with a 30-year half-life that is responsible for most of the long-term contamination from the plant2. A far larger amount of xenon-133, 1.1 × 1019 Bq, was released, according to official government estimates.

Stohl believes that the discrepancy between the team's results and those of the Japanese government can be partly explained by the larger data set used. Japanese estimates rely primarily on data from monitoring posts inside Japan3, which never recorded the large quantities of radioactivity that blew out over the Pacific Ocean, and eventually reached North America and Europe. "Taking account of the radiation that has drifted out to the Pacific is essential for getting a real picture of the size and character of the accident," says Tomoya Yamauchi, a radiation physicist at Kobe University who has been measuring radioisotope contamination in soil around Fukushima. Click for full imageStohl adds that he is sympathetic to the Japanese teams responsible for the official estimate. "They wanted to get something out quickly," he says. The differences between the two studies may seem large, notes Yukio Hayakawa, a volcanologist at Gunma University who has also modelled the accident, but uncertainties in the models mean that the estimates are actually quite similar.

The new study challenges those numbers. On the basis of its reconstructions, the team claims that the accident released around 1.7 × 1019 Bq of xenon-133, greater than the estimated total radioactive release of 1.4 × 1019 Bq from Chernobyl. The fact that three reactors exploded in the Fukushima accident accounts for the huge xenon tally, says De Geer. Xenon-133 does not pose serious health risks because it is not absorbed by the body or the environment. Caesium-137 fallout, however, is a much greater concern because it will linger in the environment for decades. The new model shows that Fukushima released 3.5 × 1016 Bq caesium-137, roughly twice the official government figure, and half the release from Chernobyl. The higher number is obviously worrying, says De Geer, although ongoing ground surveys are the only way to truly establish the public-health risk.

The new analysis also claims that the spent fuel being stored in the unit 4 pool emitted copious quantities of caesium-137. Japanese officials have maintained that virtually no radioactivity leaked from the pool. Yet Stohl's model clearly shows that dousing the pool with water caused the plant's caesium-137 emissions to drop markedly (see 'Radiation crisis'). The finding implies that much of the fallout could have been prevented by flooding the pool earlier. The Japanese authorities continue to maintain that the spent fuel was not a significant source of contamination, because the pool itself did not seem to suffer major damage. "I think the release from unit 4 is not important," says Masamichi Chino, a scientist with the Japanese Atomic Energy Authority in Ibaraki, who helped to develop the Japanese official estimate. But De Geer says the new analysis implicating the fuel pool "looks convincing".

The model also shows that the accident could easily have had a much more devastating impact on the people of Tokyo. In the first days after the accident the wind was blowing out to sea, but on the afternoon of 14 March it turned back towards shore, bringing clouds of radioactive caesium-137 over a huge swathe of the country (see 'Radioisotope reconstruction'). Where precipitation fell, along the country's central mountain ranges and to the northwest of the plant, higher levels of radioactivity were later recorded in the soil; thankfully, the capital and other densely populated areas had dry weather. "There was a period when quite a high concentration went over Tokyo, but it didn't rain," says Stohl. "It could have been much worse." 

The experts said the government's goal of human effort achieving a 10 to 20 percent reduction is not ambitious enough. "A 10 percent reduction doesn't really mean anything. I mean, 40 percent of the radiation would be reduced just by natural causes, so I think the government is almost saying it is just going to wait for the radioactive materials to decrease naturally," said Shunichi Tanaka, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Society of Japan. The main radioactive materials that spewed from the Fukushima No. 1 plant are cesium-134 and -137, the second of which has a half-life of 30 years. Given the relatively short half-life of cesium-134, the total radiation will naturally be halved in four years and fall to one-third in six years, although the threat from the latter will remain for a longer time. The government is now trying to reduce contamination mainly by using high-power water hoses, known as pressure washers, on structures and removing surface soil and vegetation in limited areas.

But radioactive cesium can find its way into minute cracks and crevices. It is hard to remove, for example, from roofs made of certain materials, or surfaces that are rusted or whose paint is peeling, Yamauchi said. He has monitored radiation in areas in the city of Fukushima and found that the levels were still quite high after the city performed cleanup operations. To lower the contamination to pre-March 11 levels, Yamauchi said drastic, and highly costly, efforts by the government are needed, including replacing roofs and removing the surface asphalt of roads. Tanaka meanwhile pointed out that the government has not even floated a plan for decontaminating the no-go zones where the radiation exceeds 20 millisieverts per year — areas where there isn't even a timetable for when evacuees will be able to return.

If the government doesn't speed up the decontamination work, it will be years before the evacuees may be able to return home, he said, adding that the government can't set a target date because it isn't sure how the cleanup effort will fare. The government's stance regarding the no-go zone is largely based on recommendations by the International Commission on Radiological Protection and other scientists that call for the maximum radiation exposure of between 20 and 100 millisieverts per year under an emergency situation. The ICRP theorizes that cumulative exposure of 100 millisieverts could increase the cancer mortality risk by about 0.5 percent, meaning about 50 out of 10,000 people exposed to that level could die of cancer caused by radiation.

"Municipalities need to communicate closely with residents (to solicit their involvement) . . . without the participation of the residents, they can't find space for the storage," Tanaka said.

Forty years ago, nuclear energy was actually regarded as something of a savior for our environmental dilemmas because it didn’t pollute.  And this was well before we were even thinking about global warming or climate change.  It also didn’t take up a great deal of space.  You didn’t have to drown all of Glen Canyon to produce 1,000 megawatts of electricity.  Four reactors would equal a row of wind turbines, each one three times as tall as Neyland Stadium skyboxes, strung along the entire length of the 2,178-mile Appalachian Trail.   One reactor would produce the same amount of electricity that can be produced by continuously foresting an area one-and-a-half times the size of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in order to create biomass.  Producing electricity with a relatively small number of new reactors, many at the same sites where reactors are already located, would avoid the need to build thousands and thousands of miles of new transmission lines through scenic areas and suburban backyards. 

While nuclear lost its green credentials with environmentalists somewhere along the way, some are re-thinking nuclear energy because of our new environmental paradigm – global climate change.  Nuclear power produces 70 percent of our carbon-free electricity today.  President Obama has endorsed it, proposing an expansion of the loan guarantee program from $18 billion to $54 billion and making the first award to the Vogtle Plant in Georgia.  Nobel Prize-winning Secretary of Energy Steven Chu wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal about developing a generation of mini-reactors that I believe we can use to repower coal boilers, or more locally, to power the Department of Energy’s site over in Oak Ridge.  The president, his secretary of energy, and many environmentalists may be embracing nuclear because of the potential climate change benefits, but they are now also remembering the other positive benefits of nuclear power that made it an environmental savior some 40 years ago

The Nature Conservancy took note of nuclear power’s tremendous energy density last August when it put out a paper on “Energy Sprawl.”  The authors compared the amount of space you need to produce energy from different technologies – something no one had ever done before – and what they came up with was remarkable.  Nuclear turns out to be the gold standard.  You can produce a million megawatts of electricity a year from a nuclear reactor sitting on one square mile.  That’s enough electricity to power 90,000 homes.  They even included uranium mining and the 230 square miles surrounding Yucca Mountain in this calculation and it still comes to only one square mile per million megawatt hours

And for all that, each turbine has the capacity to produce about one-and-a-half megawatts.  You need three thousand of these 50-story structures to equal the output of one nuclear reactor

When people say “we want to get our energy from wind,” they tend to think of a nice windmill or two on the horizon, waving gently – maybe I’ll put one in my back yard.   They don’t realize those nice, friendly windmills are now 50 stories high and have blades the length of football fields.  We see awful pictures today of birds killed by the Gulf oil spill.  But one wind farm in California killed 79 golden eagles in one year. The American Bird Conservancy says existing turbines can kill up to 275,000 birds a year.

Coal-fired electricity needs four square miles, because you have to consider all the land required for mining and extraction.  Solar thermal, where they use the big mirrors to heat a fluid, takes six square miles.  Natural gas takes eight square miles and petroleum takes 18 square miles – once again, including all the land needed for drilling and refining and storing and sending it through pipelines.  Solar photovoltaic cells that turn sunlight directly into electricity take 15 square miles and wind is even more dilute, taking 30 square miles to produce that same amount of electricity.

, wind power can be counted on to be there 10 to 15 percent of the time when you need it.  TVA can count on nuclear power 91 percent of the time, coal, 60 percent of the time and natural gas about 50 percent of the time.  This is why I believe it is a taxpayer rip-off for wind power to be subsidized per unit of electricity at a rate of 25 times the subsidy for all other forms of electricity combined. 

the “problem of nuclear waste” has been overstated because people just don’t understand the scale or the risk.  All the high-level nuclear waste that has ever been produced in this country would fit on a football field to a height of ten feet.  That’s everything.  Compare that to the billion gallons of coal ash that slid out of the coal ash impoundment at the Kingston plant and into the Emory River a year and a half ago, just west of here.  Or try the industrial wastes that would be produced if we try to build thousands of square miles of solar collectors or 50-story windmills.  All technologies produce some kind of waste.  What’s unique about nuclear power is that there’s so little of it.

Now this waste is highly radioactive, there’s no doubt about that.  But once again, we have to keep things in perspective.  It’s perfectly acceptable to isolate radioactive waste through storage.  Three feet of water blocks all radiation.  So does a couple of inches of lead and stainless steel or a foot of concrete.  That’s why we use dry cask storage, where you can load five years’ worth of fuel rods into a single container and store them right on site.  The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Energy Secretary Steven Chu both say we can store spent fuel on site for 60 or 80 years before we have to worry about a permanent repository like Yucca Mountain

then there’s reprocessing.  Remember, we’re now the only major nuclear power nation in the world that is not reprocessing its fuel.  While we gave up reprocessing in the 1970s, the French have all their high-level waste from 30 years of producing 80 percent of their electricity stored beneath the floor of one room at their recycling center in La Hague.  That’s right; it all fits into one room.  And we don’t have to copy the French.  Just a few miles away at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory they’re working to develop advanced reprocessing technologies that go well beyond what the French are doing, to produce a waste that’s both smaller in volume and with a shorter radioactive life.  Regardless of what technology we ultimately choose, the amount of material will be astonishingly small.  And it’s because of the amazing density of nuclear technology – something we can’t even approach with any other form of energy

Instead of trying to explain the basis for those statements more fully, I’ll try to encourage people to consider the motives of people on various sides of the discussion. I also want to encourage nuclear energy supporters to look beyond the financial implications to the broader implications of a less reliable and dirtier electrical power system. When the focus is just on the finances, the opposition has an advantage – the potential gains from opposing nuclear energy often are concentrated in the hands of extremely interested parties while the costs are distributed widely enough to be less visible. That imbalance often leads to great passion in the opposition and too much apathy among the supporters. Over at Idaho Samizdat, Dan Yurman has written about the epic battle of political titans who are on opposing sides of the controversy regarding the relicensing and continued operation of the Indian Point Nuclear Power Station. Dan pointed out that there is a large sum of money at stake, but he put it in a way that does not sound too terrible to many people because it spreads out the pain.

In round numbers, if Indian Point is closed, wholesale electricity prices could rise by 12%.

A recent study quoted in a New York Times article put the initial additional cost of electricity without Indian Point at about $1.5 billion per year, which is a substantial sum of money if concentrated into the hands of a few thousand victors who tap the monthly bills of a few million people. Here is a comment that I added to Dan’s post:Dan – thank you for pointing out that the battle is not really a partisan one determined by political party affiliation. By my analysis, the real issue is the desire of natural gas suppliers to sell more gas at ever higher prices driven by a shift in the balance between supply and demand.

They never quite explain what is going to happen as we get closer and closer to the day when even fracking will not squeeze any more hydrocarbons out of the drying sponge that is the readily accessible part of the earth’s crust.The often touted “100 – year” supply of natural gas in the US has a lot of optimistic assumptions built in. First of all, it is only rounded up to 100 years – 2170 trillion cubic feet at the end of 2010 divided by 23 trillion cubic feet per year leaves just 94 years.

Secondly, the 2170 number provided by the Potential Gas Committee report includes all proven, probable, possible and speculative resources, without any analysis of the cost of extraction or moving them to a market. Many of the basins counted have no current pipelines and many of the basins are not large enough for economic recovery of the investment to build the infrastructure without far higher prices.Finally, all bets are off with regard to longevity if we increase the rate of burning up the precious raw materia

BTW – In case your readers are interested in the motives of a group like Riverkeepers, founded and led by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., here is a link to a video clip of him explaining his support for natural gas.http://atomicinsights.com/2010/11/power-politics-rfk-jr-explains-how-pressure-from-activists-to-enforce-restrictions-on-coal-benefits-natural-gas.html

The organized opposition to the intelligent use of nuclear energy has often painted support for the technology as coming from faceless, money-hungry corporations. That caricature of the support purposely ignores the fact that there are large numbers of intelligent, well educated, responsible, and caring people who know a great deal about the technology and believe that it is the best available solution for many intransigent problems. There are efforts underway today, like the Nuclear Literacy Project and Go Nuclear, that are focused on showcasing the admirable people who like nuclear energy and want it to grow rapidly to serve society’s never ended thirst for reliable power at an affordable price with acceptable environmental impact.

The exaggerated, fanciful accident scenarios painted by the opposition are challenging to disprove.

I just read an excellent post on Yes Vermont Yankee about a coming decision that might help to illuminate the risk to society of continuing to let greedy antinuclear activists and their political friends dominate the discussion. According to Meredith’s post, Entergy must make a decision within just a week or so about whether or not to refuel Vermont Yankee in October. Since the sitting governor is dead set against the plant operating past its current license expiration in the summer of 2012, the $100 million dollar expense of refueling would only result in about 6 months of operation instead of the usual 18 months.Meredith has a novel solution to the dilemma – conserve the fuel currently in the plant by immediately cutting the power output to 25%.

Thorium can be used as fuel in a nuclear reactor, and it is a fertile material, which allows it to be used to produce nuclear fuel in a breeder reactor.  These are some of the benefits of Thorium reactors compared to Uranium. Weapons-grade fissionable material is harder to retrieve safely and clandestinely from a thorium reactor; Thorium produces 10 to 10,000 times less long-lived radioactive waste; Thorium comes out of the ground as a 100% pure, usable isotope, which does not require enrichment, whereas natural uranium contains only 0.7% fissionable U-235; Thorium cannot sustain a nuclear chain reaction without priming,[22] so fission stops by default. The following conference by Kirk Sorensen explains a Liquid-Fuoride Thorium Reactor a next generation nuclear reactor.

References Thorium – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://bit.ly/qYwoAv Thorium fuel cycle – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://bit.ly/piNoKb Molten salt reactor – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://bit.ly/qlyAxe Thorium Costs http://bit.ly/oQRgXK Thorium – The Better Nuclear Fuel? http://bit.ly/r8xc92

In the WEO’s central New Policies Scenario, which assumes that recent government commitments are implemented in a cautious manner, primary energy demand increases by one-third between 2010 and 2035, with 90% of the growth in non-OECD economies. China consolidates its position as the world’s largest energy consumer: it consumes nearly 70% more energy than the United States by 2035, even though, by then, per capita demand in China is still less than half the level in the United States. The share of fossil fuels in global primary energy consumption falls from around 81% today to 75% in 2035. Renewables increase from 13% of the mix today to 18% in 2035; the growth in renewables is underpinned by subsidies that rise from $64 billion in 2010 to $250 billion in 2035, support that in some cases cannot be taken for granted in this age of fiscal austerity. By contrast, subsidies for fossil fuels amounted to $409 billion in 2010.

Here’s the summary of the main points, released today by the agency: “Growth, prosperity and rising population will inevitably push up energy needs over the coming decades. But we cannot continue to rely on insecure and environmentally unsustainable uses of energy,” said IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven. “Governments need to introduce stronger measures to drive investment in efficient and low-carbon technologies. The Fukushima nuclear accident, the turmoil in parts of the Middle East and North Africa and a sharp rebound in energy demand in 2010 which pushed CO2 emissions to a record high, highlight the urgency and the scale of the challenge.”

The use of coal – which met almost half of the increase in global energy demand over the last decade – rises 65% by 2035. Prospects for coal are especially sensitive to energy policies – notably in China, which today accounts for almost half of global demand. More efficient power plants and carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology could boost prospects for coal, but the latter still faces significant regulatory, policy and technical barriers that make its deployment uncertain.Fukushima Daiichi has raised questions about the future role of nuclear power. In the New Policies Scenario, nuclear output rises by over 70% by 2035, only slightly less than projected last year, as most countries with nuclear programmes have reaffirmed their commitment to them. But given the increased uncertainty, that could change. A special Low Nuclear Case examines what would happen if the anticipated contribution of nuclear to future energy supply were to be halved. While providing a boost to renewables, such a slowdown would increase import bills, heighten energy security concerns and make it harder and more expensive to combat climate change.

The future for natural gas is more certain: its share in the energy mix rises and gas use almost catches up with coal consumption, underscoring key findings from a recent WEO Special Report which examined whether the world is entering a “Golden Age of Gas”. One country set to benefit from increased demand for gas is Russia, which is the subject of a special in-depth study in WEO-2011. Key challenges for Russia are to finance a new generation of higher-cost oil and gas fields and to improve its energy efficiency. While Russia remains an important supplier to its traditional markets in Europe, a shift in its fossil fuel exports towards China and the Asia-Pacific gathers momentum. If Russia improved its energy efficiency to the levels of comparable OECD countries, it could reduce its primary energy use by almost one-third, an amount similar to the consumption of the United Kingdom. Potential savings of natural gas alone, at 180 bcm, are close to Russia’s net exports in 2010.

In the New Policies Scenario, cumulative CO2 emissions over the next 25 years amount to three-quarters of the total from the past 110 years, leading to a long-term average temperature rise of 3.5°C. China’s per-capita emissions match the OECD average in 2035. Were the new policies not implemented, we are on an even more dangerous track, to an increase of 6°C.“As each year passes without clear signals to drive investment in clean energy, the “lock-in” of high-carbon infrastructure is making it harder and more expensive to meet our energy security and climate goals,” said Fatih Birol, IEA Chief Economist. The WEO presents a 450 Scenario, which traces an energy path consistent with meeting the globally agreed goal of limiting the temperature rise to 2°C. Four-fifths of the total energy-related CO2 emissions permitted to 2035 in the 450 Scenario are already locked-in by existing capital stock, including power stations, buildings and factories. Without further action by 2017, the energy-related infrastructure then in place would generate all the CO2 emissions allowed in the 450 Scenario up to 2035. Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.

Reverse osmosis has been identified by EPA as a “best available technology” (BAT) and Small System Compliance Technology (SSCT) for uranium, radium, gross alpha, and beta particles and photon emitters. It can remove up to 99 percent of these radionuclides, as well as many other contaminants (e.g., arsenic, nitrate, and microbial contaminants). Reverse osmosis units can be automated and compact making them appropriate for small systems. via EPA, Radionuclides in Drinking Water

However, EPA designed its recommendations for the contaminants typically found in municipal water systems, so it doesn’t specify Iodine-131 by name. The same document goes on to say, “Reverse osmosis does not remove gaseous contaminants such as carbon dioxide and radon.” Iodine-131 escapes from damaged nuclear plants as a gas, and this is why it disperses so quickly through the atmosphere. It is captured as a gas in atmospheric water, falls to the earth in rain and enters the water supply.

Dissolved gases and materials that readily turn into gases also can easily pass through most reverse osmosis membranes,” according to the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension. For this reason, “many reverse osmosis units have an activated carbon unit to remove or reduce the concentration of most organic compounds.” Activated Carbon

That raises the next question: does activated carbon remove iodine-131? There is some evidence that it does. Scientists have used activated carbon to remove iodine-131 from the liquid fuel for nuclear solution reactors. And Carbon air filtration is used by employees of Perkin Elmer, a leading environmental monitoring and health safety firm, when they work with iodine-131 in closed quarters. At least one university has adopted Perkin Elmer’s procedures. Activated carbon works by absorbing contaminants, and fixing them, as water passes through it. It has a disadvantage, however: it eventually reaches a load capacity and ceases to absorb new contaminants.

Ion Exchange The EPA also recommends ion exchange for removing radioactive compounds from drinking water. The process used in water softeners, ion exchange removes contaminants when water passes through resins that contain sodium ions. The sodium ions readily exchange with contaminants.

Ion exchange is particularly recommended for removing Cesium-137, which has been found in rain samples in the U.S., but not yet in drinking water here. Some resins have been specifically designed for capturing Cesium-137, and ion exchange was used to clean up legacy nuclear waste from an old reactor at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site (pdf).