Skip to main content

Home/ Open Intelligence / Energy/ Group items tagged progress

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
D'coda Dcoda

Nuclear Engineer shares concerns about Brunswick Nuclear Leak [19Nov11] - 0 views

enformable.com/...ut-brunswick-nuclear-leak-from

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 21 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission will begin a special inspection at Progress Energy‘s Brunswick-2 unit in North Carolina after the utility said Friday the reactor pressure vessel’s lid was not adequately tightened when it restarted earlier this week.  Most of us are also paying close attention to the events at Brunswick Nuclear Power Plant, and today I talked with a former nuclear engineer  Chris Harris about the recent developments.
  • Refueling procedures are elaborate and well documented procedures, and one of the biggest questions is why the proper procedures were not followed, or were carried out incorrectly. The bolts need to be tensioned in a specific Torque Pattern, which generally includes multiple passes.  Refueling procedures require a crew of  at least 6 engineers, and additional Quality Control inspectors.
  • The unit had been in a maintenance outage, was in the process of restarting and was operating at 7% power when workers discovered the leak in the reactor coolant system, Progress said in an event report filed Wednesday with NRC. When the leak exceeded 10 gal/minute, the unit was shut, Progress said.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The Brunswick Nuclear Plant has two boiling-water reactors that generate 1,875 megawatts of electricity. Each of the Brunswick reactors is refueled once every 24 months, usually in the spring when the demand for electricity is relatively low. At the Brunswick Plant, 1 million gallons of water per minute are pumped from the Cape Fear River where it passes through the plant’s cooling system and then drops approximately  15 feet to the head of the outflow canal.
  • The unit shut Wednesday morning after the reactor leaked. An investigation showed the inadequately tightened reactor vessel head was a potentially “significant” safety issue, Progress said in a report filed Friday with the NRC. Workers seeking the source of the leak found that at least 10 of the 64 bolts that secure the reactor vessel head to the pressure vessel were not fully tightened, Progress spokesman Ryan Mosier said in an email Friday.
  • The Tensioning Tool is inspected and maintained, and is also part of the QC checklist.  This is not a simple situation where someone didn’t torque down the bolts correctly, as multiple personnel would have had to check and confirm the status prior to restart. In fact, according to Progress Energy’s 35 day outage schedule, the reassembly and reactor test are the 9th, and 10th steps of the process, and one can’t help but wonder why this was not detected before the reactor was re-pressurized. Chris had some very good questions regarding the Brunswick event, that I felt were worth sharing.
  • What testing was performed to determine that the RPV Head was Tensioned properly? What caused the improper Tensioning ? Procedure, Skill of the Craft? Aggressive Schedule? What are the Acceptance Criteria in the procedure for a properly tensioned head” How do you know that you meet the Acceptance Criteria?
  • Not only are the procedures and QC process in question, but the event also impacts operations and reliability of reactor components.  Chris highlighted a few questions that he felt were critical to ensure safe restart and operation.
  • Could there have been Foreign Material on the RPV Head Flange? What damage to surrounding equipment in the Drywell was sustained by the Steam/Water Leak? What is the condition of the Refueling Seal, now that it has been sprayed with Steamy/Hot Water? Did Hot/Steamy water find its way on the Outside of the Containment such that Corrosion in the future will be a problem? Did the steam leakage affect the Reactor Vessel Head Studs and their Threaded Holes (in the Reactor Vessel Flange) such that they will fail at a future date? At this point, Progress Energy is keeping fairly quiet about the specifics, and initially only revealed information of a “possible leak at the top of the reactor vessel”.  Monday morning should prove eventful not only for the Utility, but also for regulators.
D'coda Dcoda

Florida approves 2012 FPL, Progress nuclear charges [25Oct11] - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...-florida-idUSN1E79N1ZV20111024

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 26 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • FP&L to recover $196 million in 2012 * Progress Energy Florida request cut to $85.9 millionHOUSTON Oct 24 (Reuters) - Florida electric regulators on Monday approved requests from the state's two largest utilities to charge customers more than $280 million next year for work to develop four proposed nuclear reactors and to expand output at two existing plants.Florida is one of a handful of U.S. states in which laws were passed in the mid 2000s to revive the stagnant nuclear industry by offering utilities incentives to reduce the risk of building costly new reactors which take years to site, license and construct.The laws typically allow utilities to charge customers for certain project-related costs during the development and construction years in order to reduce long-term project financing costs.
  • The Florida Public Service Commission approved NextEra Energy's Florida Power & Light's full request to recover slightly more than $196 million from customers next year.Commissioners also agreed to allow Progress Energy's Florida utility to recover nearly $86 million next year for costs associated with a plan to build two new 2,200-MW reactors in Levy County, Florida.FP&L's amount includes costs related to the proposed 2,200-megawatt Turkey Point Units 6 and 7 and costs to add 450 MW of capacity at existing reactors at FP&L's Turkey Point and St. Lucie nuclear stations.That's up from only about $31 million approved for recovery in 2011 after a protracted dispute between the commission and the state's largest utility which has more than 4 million customers.
  • An FP&L spokesman said 90 percent of the funds requested for 2012 will pay for work to increase output at FP&L's existing reactors. About 29 MW is already in service with work to add the remaining 400 MW set for completion in 2013.Commercial operation of the new Turkey Point reactors, expected to cost between $12 billion and $18 billion, has been delayed about four years until 2022 and 2023 after FP&L said growth in power consumption slowed in the state during the economic recession.Progress Energy Florida initially sought $140.9 million, but the commission reduced that amount by more than $50 million under a 2009 plan deferring some early Levy costs due to the state's worsening economy.The proposed Levy County reactors, expected to cost about $20 billion, were originally set to begin operating in the 2016-17 time frame, but Progress delayed the timeline until at least 2020."We're pleased the commission confirmed our plan to make state-of-the-art nuclear power available to our customers in the state of Florida," Progress spokeswoman Suzanne Grant said.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Progress Energy's 1.7 million Florida customers will pay about $2.93 per month for the first 1,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity for early Levy costs, down from more than $5 a month this year.FPL customers will pay about $2.20 per month for the first 1,000 kwh used.The Florida Legislature passed a law in 2006 to encourage development of new nuclear plants and the PSC adopted a rule to evaluate project-related costs each year. The nuclear-related charges were added to customer bills beginning in 2009.
D'coda Dcoda

Nuclear safety: A dangerous veil of secrecy [11Aug11] - 0 views

english.aljazeera.net/...2011877118599802.html

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 12 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • There are battles being fought on two fronts in the five months since a massive earthquake and tsunami damaged the Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan. On one front, there is the fight to repair the plant, operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and to contain the extent of contamination caused by the damage. On the other is the public’s fight to extract information from the Japanese government, TEPCO and nuclear experts worldwide.
  • The latter battle has yielded serious official humiliation, resulting high-profile resignations, scandals, and promises of reform in Japan’s energy industry whereas the latter has so far resulted in a storm of anger and mistrust. Even most academic nuclear experts, seen by many as the middle ground between the anti-nuclear activists and nuclear lobby itself, were reluctant to say what was happening: That in Fukushima, a community of farms, schools and fishing ports, was experiencing a full-tilt meltdown, and that, as Al Jazeera reported in June, that the accident had most likely caused more radioactive contamination than Chernobyl
  • As recently as early August, those seeking information on the real extent of the damage at the Daiichi plant and on the extent of radioactive contamination have mostly been reassured by the nuclear community that there’s no need to worry.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • The money trail can be tough to follow - Westinghouse, Duke Energy and the Nuclear Energy Institute (a "policy organisation" for the nuclear industry with 350 companies, including TEPCO, on its roster) did not respond to requests for information on funding research and chairs at universities. But most of the funding for nuclear research does not come directly from the nuclear lobby, said M.V. Ramana, a researcher at Princeton University specialising in the nuclear industry and climate change. Most research is funded by governments, who get donations - from the lobby (via candidates, political parties or otherwise).
  • “There's a lot of secrecy that can surround nuclear power because some of the same processes can be involved in generating electricity that can also be involved in developing a weapon, so there's a kind of a veil of secrecy that gets dropped over this stuff, that can also obscure the truth” said Biello. "So, for example in Fukushima, it was pretty apparent that a total meltdown had occurred just based on what they were experiencing there ... but nobody in a position of authority was willing to say that."
  • This is worrying because while both anti-nuclear activists and the nuclear lobby both have openly stated biases, academics and researchers are seen as the middle ground - a place to get accurate, unbiased information. David Biello, the energy and climate editor at Scientific American Online, said that trying to get clear information on a scenario such as the Daiichi disaster is tough.
  • The Center for Responsive Politics - a non-partisan, non-profit elections watchdog group – noted that even as many lobbying groups slowed their spending the first quarter of the year, the Nuclear industry "appears to be ratcheting up its lobbying" increasing its multi-million dollar spending.
  • "In the United States, a lot of the money doesn’t come directly from the nuclear industry, but actually comes from the Department of Energy (DOE). And the DOE has a very close relationship with the industry, and they sort of try to advance the industry’s interest," said Ramana. Indeed, nuclear engineering falls under the "Major Areas of Research" with the DOE, which also has nuclear weapons under its rubric. The DOE's 2012 fiscal year budge request to the US Congress for nuclear energy programmes was $755m.
  • "So those people who get funding from that….it’s not like they (researchers) want to lie, but there’s a certain amount of, shall we say, ideological commitment to nuclear power, as well as a certain amount of self-censorship."  It comes down to worrying how their next application for funding might be viewed, he said. Kathleen Sullivan, an anti-nuclear specialist and disarmament education consultant with the United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs, said it's not surprising that research critical of the nuclear energy and weapons isn't coming out of universities and departments that participate in nuclear research and development.
  • "It (the influence) of the nuclear lobby could vary from institution to institution," said Sullivan. "If you look at the history of nuclear weapons manufacturing in the United States, you can see that a lot of research was influenced perverted, construed in a certain direction."
  • Sullivan points to the DOE-managed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California in Berkley (where some of the research for the first atomic bomb was done) as an example of how intertwined academia and government-funded nuclear science are.
  • "For nuclear physics to proceed, the only people interested in funding it are pro-nuclear folks, whether that be industry or government," said Biello. "So if you're involved in that area you've already got a bias in favour of that technology … if you study hammers, suddenly hammers seem to be the solution to everything."
  • And should they find results unfavourable to the industry, Ramana said they would "dress it up in various ways by saying 'Oh, there’s a very slim chance of this, and here are some safety measure we recommend,' and then the industry will say, 'Yeah,yeah, we’re incorporating all of that.'" Ramana, for the record, said that while he's against nuclear weapons, he doesn't have a moral position on nuclear power except to say that as a cost-benefit issue, the costs outweigh the benefits, and that "in that sense, expanding nuclear power isn't a good idea." 
  • "'How is this going to affect the future of nuclear power?'That’s the first thought that came into their heads," said Ramana, adding, "They basically want to ensure that people will keep constructing nuclear power plants." For instance, a May report by MIT’s Center For Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems (where TEPCO funds a chair) points out that while the Daiichi disaster has resulted in "calls for cancellation of nuclear construction projects and reassessments of plant license extensions" which might "lead to a global slow-down of the nuclear enterprise," that  "the lessons to be drawn from the Fukushima accident are different."
  • Among the report's closing thoughts are concerns that "Decision-making in the  immediate aftermath of a major crisis is often influenced by emotion," and whether"an accident like Fukushima, which is so far beyond design basis, really warrant a major overhaul of current nuclear safety regulations and practises?" "If so," wonder the authors, "When is safe safe enough? Where do we draw the line?"
  • The Japanese public, it seems, would like some answers to those very questions, albeit from a different perspective.  Kazuo Hizumi, a Tokyo-based human rights lawyer, is among those pushing for openness. He is also an editor at News for the People in Japan, a news site advocating for transparency from the government and from TEPCO. With contradicting information and lack of clear coverage on safety and contamination issues, many have taken to measuring radiation levels with their own Geiger counters.
  • "They do not know how to do it," he said of some of the community groups and individuals who have taken to measure contamination levels in the air, soil and food
  • A report released in July by Human Rights Now highlights the need for immediately accessible information on health and safety in areas where people have been affected by the disaster, including Fukushima, especially on the issues of contaminated food and evacuation plans.
  • A 'nuclear priesthood' Biello describes the nuclear industry is a relatively small, exclusive club.
  • The interplay between academia and also the military and industry is very tight. It's a small community...they have their little club and they can go about their business without anyone looking over their shoulder. " This might explain how, as the Associated Press reported in June, that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission was "working closely with the nuclear power industry to keep the nationalise ageing reactors operating within standards or simply failing to enforce them."
  • However, with this exclusivity comes a culture of secrecy – "a nuclear priesthood," said Biello, which makes it very difficult to parse out a straightforward answer in the very technical and highly politicised field.  "You have the proponents, who believe that it is the technological salvation for our problems, whether that's energy, poverty, climate change or whatever else. And then you have opponents who think that it's literally the worst thing that ever happened and should be immediately shut back up in a box and buried somewhere," said Biello, who includes "professors of nuclear engineering and Greenpeace activists" as passionate opponents on the nuclear subject.
  • In fact, one is hard pressed to find a media report quoting a nuclear scientist at any major university sounding the alarms on the risks of contamination in Fukushima. Doing so has largely been the work of anti-nuclear activists (who have an admitted bias against the technology) and independent scientists employed by think tanks, few of whom responded to requests for interviews.
  • So, one's best bet, said Biello, is to try and "triangulate the truth" - to take "a dose" from anti-nuclear activists, another from pro-nuclear lobbyists and throw that in with a little bit of engineering and that'll get you closer to the truth. "Take what everybody is saying with a grain of salt."
  • Since World War II, the process of secrecy – the readiness to invoke "national security" - has been a pillar of the nuclear establishment…that establishment, acting on the false assumption that "secrets" can be hidden from the curious and knowledgeable, has successfully insisted that there are answers which cannot be given and even questions which cannot be asked. The net effect is to stifle debate about the fundamental of nuclear policy. Concerned citizens dare not ask certain questions, and many begin to feel that these matters which only a few initiated experts are entitled to discuss.  If the above sounds like a post-Fukushima statement, it is not. It was written by Howard Morland for the November 1979 issue of The Progressive magazine focusing on the hydrogen bomb as well as the risks of nuclear energy.
  • The US government - citing national security concerns - took the magazine to court in order to prevent the issue from being published, but ultimately relented during the appeals process when it became clear that the information The Progressive wanted to publish was already public knowledge and that pursuing the ban might put the court in the position of deeming the Atomic Energy Act as counter to First Amendment rights (freedom of speech) and therefore unconstitutional in its use of prior restraint to censor the press.
  • But, of course, that's in the US, although a similar mechanism is at work in Japan, where a recently created task force aims to "cleanse" the media of reportage that casts an unfavourable light on the nuclear industry (they refer to this information as "inaccurate" or a result of "mischief." The government has even go so far as to accept bids from companies that specialise in scouring the Internet to monitor the Internet for reports, Tweets and blogs that are critical of its handling of the Daiichi disaster, which has presented a unique challenge to the lobby there.
  • "The public fully trusted the Japanese Government," said Hizumi. But the absence of "true information" has massively diminished that trust, as, he said, has the public's faith that TEPCO would be open about the potential dangers of a nuclear accident.
  •  Japan's government has a history of slow response to TEPCO's cover-ups. In 1989, that Kei Sugaoka, a nuclear energy at General Electric who inspected and repaired plants in Japan and elsewhere, said he spotted cracks in steam dryers and a "misplacement" or 180 degrees in one dryer unit. He noticed that the position of the dryer was later omitted from the inspection record's data sheet. Sugaoka told a Japanese networkthat TEPCO had instructed him to "erase" the flaws, but he ultimately wrote a whistleblowing letter to METI, which resulted in the temporary 17 TEPCO reactors, including ones at the plant in Fukushima.
  • the Japanese nuclear lobby has been quite active in shaping how people see nuclear energy. The country's Ministry of Education, together with the Natural Resources Ministry (of of two agencies under Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry - METI - overseeing nuclear policies) even provides schools with a nuclear energy information curriculum. These worksheets - or education supplements - are used to inform children about the benefits of nuclear energy over fossil fuels.
  • There’s reason to believe that at least in one respect, Fukushima can’t and won’t be another Chernobyl, at least due to the fact that the former has occurred in the age of the Internet whereas the latter took place in the considerably quaint 80s, when a car phone the size of a brick was considered the height of communications technology to most. "It (a successful cover up) is definitely a danger in terms of Fukushima, and we'll see what happens. All you have to do is look at the first couple of weeks after Chernobyl to see the kind of cover up," said Biello. "I mean the Soviet Union didn't even admit that anything was happening for a while, even though everybody was noticing these radiation spikes and all these other problems. The Soviet Union was not admitting that they were experiencing this catastrophic nuclear failure... in Japan, there's a consistent desire, or kind of a habit, of downplaying these accidents, when they happen. It's not as bad as it may seem, we haven't had a full meltdown."
  • Fast forward to 2011, when video clips of each puff of smoke out of the Daiichi plant make it around the world in seconds, news updates are available around the clock, activists post radiation readings on maps in multiple languages and Google Translate picks up the slack in translating every last Tweet on the subject coming out of Japan.
  • it will be a heck of a lot harder to keep a lid on things than it was 25 years ago. 
D'coda Dcoda

Nuclear Stress tests take on Fukushima lessons [19Sep11] - 0 views

www.world-nuclear-news.org/_lessons_on_board-1909117.html

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 19 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • European regulators have been publishing progress reports on the program of stress tests being carried out at nuclear power plants in response to the Fukushima accident. In the weeks following the Fukushima accident, the European Council (EC) requested a review of safety at European nuclear power plants when faced by challenging situations. The criteria for the reviews, now known as stress tests, were produced for the European Commission by the European Nuclear Safety Regulatory Group (ENSREG). Progress reports were due to be submitted to the European Commission by 15 September, and many nuclear regulators and in some cases plant operators have published summaries, including regulators in Belgium, France, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the UK.
  • The reports vary from country to country, but the take-home story emerging from the reports is that Europe's nuclear plants are generally well placed to withstand beyond-design-basis events. Some plants have already put into practice initial measures to improve safety in response to Fukushima, and the tests are bringing to light more measures that need to be taken to improve resilience on a plant-by-plant basis.   Some measures that have already been identified are simple to put into place: for example, housekeeping routines have been changed to reduce the potential for seismic interactions (where non-safety related equipment could impact or fall onto seismically qualified equipment) at UK power plants.
  • stress tests focus on three areas highlighted by events in Japan: external threats from earthquake and flooding, specifically tsunami; the consequences of loss of safety functions, that is, a total loss of electricity supply (also referred to as station black-out, or SBO), the loss of ultimate heat sink (UHS), or both; and issues connected with the management of severe accidents. The UHS is a medium to which the residual heat from the reactor is transferred, for example the sea or a river.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • While tsunami are not foreseen as a problem in Europe, the plants have been obliged to consider other external and internal initiating events that could trigger a loss of safety functions.In France, a total of 150 nuclear facilities including operating reactors, reactors under construction, research reactors and other nuclear facilities are affected. In its progress report, French regulator Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire (ASN) notes that the risk of similar phenomena to those that triggered the Fukushima accident is negligible and says that it prefers to submit a more comprehensive report for all of its affected installations later in the year. However, reports for the 80 facilities identified as priorities have been submitted and those for the country's 58 operating power reactors have already been published on the ASN's web site.
  • No fundamental weaknesses in the definition of design basis events or the safety systems to withstand them has been revealed for UK nuclear power plants from either the stress tests or from earlier national reviews, according to the progress report from the UK's Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR). However, lessons are being learnt about improving resilience for beyond-design-basis events and removing or reducing cliff-edges, and will be applied in a timely manner, the regulator says.
  • Measures under consideration in the UK include the provision of additional local flood protection to key equipment and the provision of further emergency back-up equipment to provide cooling and power, while EDF Energy, operator of the country's AGRs and single PWR plant, is preparing additional studies to reconsider flood modelling for specific sites and to review recent climate change information that arrived subsequent to recent routine ten-yearly safety reviews. The main focus for the country's Magnox reactors will be to improve the reliability of cooling systems in the face of a variety of beyond-design-basis faults to reduce or minimise the potential for cliff-edges. Evaluations of findings are still ongoing. Operators have up to 31 October to make their full report back to their national regulator, and regulators have until 31 December to make their full reports to the European Commission.
D'coda Dcoda

Fukushima Worker Tweets: No progress has been made - We don't know what is really going... - 0 views

enenews.com/ly-going-inside-reactors-1-2-3

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 14 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • “I offered a silent prayer for the 18th time today. A year and a half has passed but we don’t know what is really going on inside the R1, 2 & 3. No progress has been made.”
D'coda Dcoda

'Absolutely No Progress Being Made' at Fukushima Nuke Plant, Undercover Reporter Says [... - 0 views

www.sott.net/...Plant-Undercover-Reporter-Says

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 24 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • "Absolutely no progress is being made" towards the final resolution of the crisis, Suzuki told reporters at a Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan news conference on Dec. 15. Suzuki, 55, worked for a Toshiba Corp. subsidiary as a general laborer there from July 13 to Aug. 22, documenting sloppy repair work, companies including plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) playing fast and loose with their workers' radiation doses, and a marked concern for appearances over the safety of employees or the public.
  • For example, the no-entry zones around the plant -- the 20-kilometer radius exclusion zone and the extension covering most of the village of Iitate and other municipalities -- have more to do with convenience that actual safety, Suzuki says. "(Nuclear) technology experts I've spoken to say that there are people living in areas where no one should be. It's almost as though they're living inside a nuclear plant," says Suzuki. Based on this and his own radiation readings, he believes the 80-kilometer-radius evacuation advisory issued by the United States government after the meltdowns was "about right," adding that the government probably decided on the current no-go zones to avoid the immense task of evacuating larger cities like Iwaki and Fukushima.
  • The situation at the plant itself is no better, where he says much of the work is simply "for show," fraught with corporate jealousies and secretiveness and "completely different" from the "all-Japan" cooperative effort being presented by the government.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "Reactor makers Toshiba and Hitachi (brought in to help resolve the crisis) each have their own technology, and they don't talk to each other. Toshiba doesn't tell Hitachi what it's doing, and Hitachi doesn't tell Toshiba what it's doing." Meanwhile, despite there being no concrete data on the state of the reactor cores, claims by the government and TEPCO that the disaster is under control and that the reactors are on-schedule for a cold shutdown by the year's end have promoted a breakneck work schedule, leading to shoddy repairs and habitual disregard for worker safety, he said.
  • "Working at Fukushima is equivalent to being given an order to die," Suzuki quoted one nuclear-related company source as saying. He says plant workers regularly manipulate their radiation readings by reversing their dosimeters or putting them in their socks, giving them an extra 10 to 30 minutes on-site before they reach their daily dosage limit. In extreme cases, Suzuki said, workers even leave the radiation meters in their dormitories.
  • According to Suzuki, TEPCO and the subcontractors at the plant never explicitly tell the workers to take these measures. Instead the workers are simply assigned projects that would be impossible to complete on time without manipulating the dosage numbers, and whether through a sense of duty or fear of being fired, the workers never complain. Furthermore, the daily radiation screenings are "essentially an act," with the detector passed too quickly over each worker, while "the line to the buzzer that is supposed to sound when there's a problem has been cut," Suzuki said.
D'coda Dcoda

Progress Energy announces leadership change at Robinson plant [21Oct10] - 0 views

www2.scnow.com/...ership-change-robins-ar-993723

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 29 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • The Robinson plant remains offline. The 719-megawatt plant was the first commercial nuclear reactor in the Southeast and has been producing electricity since 1971. The plant shut down early Oct. 8 because of an electrical problem in one of the reactor coolant pump motors. Inspectors from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission returned to the plant Oct. 12. NRC spokesman Roger Hannah said in an earlier report that a team of inspectors is examining the operation of the pumps that supply water to the steam generators. Robinson shut down in September after a control problem with one of the plant’s turbines, about three months after the plant re-opened. Two electrical system fires led to a nearly four-month shutdown of the plant, which re-opened in July. Those fires and a reactor shutdown March 28 did not adversely affect public health or safety, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said in June. Conditions did not rise to a level that threatened plant safety during the fires, and no measurable radiation was released from the plant’s reactor.
  • NRC inspectors did find some shortcomings in equipment, training, operator response and performance and some other areas agency officials said would require additional NRC review. The plant’s reactor remained shut down until the NRC completed most of its additional reviews, officials said. The initial fire resulted from a malfunction in a cable and circuit breaker, NRC’s Region II Branch Chief Robert Haag said. The NRC originally dispatched a three-person special inspection team to the Robinson plant in response to the fires, but further review pointed to the need for additional inspection, the agency said. An Augmented Inspection Team (AIT) is formed by the NRC to review particularly significant events or issues at NRC-licensed facilities, and the Robinson AIT included members of the original inspection team as well as five additional inspectors.
  • Haag led the Robinson AIT and said the response was adequate and the fire protection system responded as it was designed. Duncan, the plant’s new leader, has been with Progress Energy and predecessor Carolina Power & Light since 1980. He served in positions of increasing responsibility at the company’s Harris (N.C.) and Robinson nuclear plants before assuming his current role at the company’s headquarters in Raleigh in 2008.
D'coda Dcoda

EDF Starts a New Plan for Flamanville Unit 3, France [20Jul11] - 0 views

nuclearstreet.com/...-flamanville-unit-3-07212.aspx

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 23 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • This updated project, worth now some 6 billion euros, will give EDF valuable feedback and a tried and tested approach to organization for future EPR reactors, particularly in the United Kingdom. "We are faced with the demands of a major site, and we have had to put together an appropriate industrial framework for us to succeed with this ambitious project. That is what has led us to introduce a new approach to the organization of the site today" explained Hervé Machenaud, EDF's Group Senior Executive in charge of Production and Engineering, Philippe Bonnave, Deputy CEO of Bouygues Construction.
  • EDF has decided to introduce a new approach to organization with its partners, including: the definition of a new, more reliable industrial schedule incorporating all of these points. the launch of regular public "site" meetings to assess the progress of the project as well as the key advances made (positioning of the dome in 2012). the establishment of new practices in terms of management and supervision of the site. the coordination of teams and partners with, for example, the creation of the "F10 committee", bringing together the 9 main companies working on the site. the consolidation of requirements in terms of safety and preparation for intervention operations. This updated project, worth now some 6 billion euros, will give EDF valuable feedback and a tried and tested approach to organization for future EPR reactors, particularly in the United Kingdom.
  • EDF has decided to introduce a new approach to organization at the Flamanville EPR in response to recent events that have slowed down progress on the work site. As a result, the first KWh produced by the EPR will be sold by EDF in 2016.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • This delay is linked to both structural and economic reasons. Flamanville 3 is the first nuclear power plant to be built in France for 15 years. It is also the first EPR.
  • In terms of industrial management, EDF has had to review its assessment of the extent of the work to be done, particularly in terms of civil engineering (iron reinforcements and anchor plates, much higher than initial estimates, etc.).
D'coda Dcoda

Reporting from the grounds of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station [17Aug11] - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 19 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • D'coda Dcoda on 19 Aug 11
     
    An update on progress by people working at the Fukushima Daiichi site. Includes video of waste water treatment and cooling system for fuel ponds. Japanese audio with English subtitles. Courtesy TEPCO
D'coda Dcoda

Some countries make progress on nuclear energy despite Fukushima fears [25Sep11] - 0 views

djysrv.blogspot.com/...-make-progress-on-nuclear.html

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 27 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Germany’s decision to close its reactors rejected as unrealistic
  • Since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami hit the six TEPCO reactors at Fukushima Japan, anti-nuclear groups have been on a roll.  Germany’s panic attack which will result in closing 17 reactors accounting for a quarter of its electricity is widely touted as a bellwether example for other countries.   The goal of post-industrial visionaries is to get the mainstream media and the public to accept a scenario of the inevitable end to the use of nuclear energy in as many places as possible. But is this trend really taking place?  Recent developments indicate it is not.  Here are some examples.
  • China to lift ban on new projects By early 2012 China will resume approving the start of new nuclear energy projects following completion of a national nuclear safety plan.  According to wire services, the China Securities Journal is reporting that in August the government completed the inspection of its existing fleet of nuclear reactors which provide about 11 Gwe of power.  It said that plants under construction, including four from Westinghouse and two from Areva, were also part of the review.  In an unexpected move, the Journal said the government would offer greater transparency on nuclear safety issues by making the results of the safety reviews available for public inspection.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Czech Industry & Trade Minister Martin Kocourek (right) told the Bloomberg wire service  September 8 the country will not give in to anti-nuclear influences from Austria or Germany. “Czech doesn’t need ideology.  What it needs is a rational update of its energy strategy.  The current ideology-driven policies of some countries is one thing; our reality is another.” If state-owned Czech utility CEZ builds all five reactors, worth about $28 billion, it will export electricity to Germany and Poland.  CEZ is expected to release documents related to the bid process next month.  The bidders are Areva, Westinghouse, and Rosatom.  An award for the first two new reactors to be built at Temelin is expected in 2013.
  • Czech utility CEZ plans Europe’s largest reactor complexes The Czech government is planning a significant expansion of nuclear energy now that Germany has moved to shutter its 17 reactors by 2020.  A national energy strategy would call for building two or more new reactors at Temelin and three more at Dukovany. The two sites house a total of six existing reactors and grid infrastructure. 
  • On September 15 CEZ named Daniel Benes, 41, as its new CEO with a mandate to execute a national energy strategy that includes building new nuclear reactors.  On September 20 Benes told financial wire services it will be his top priority linked to the goal of energy security for the Czech Republic.
  • On September 23 Czech President Vaclav Klaus (left) spoke at the United Nations in support of nuclear energy.  According to English language Czech news media, Klaus said: . . . “We consider what happened in Fukushima did not by any means question the arguments for nuclear energy.  These arguments are strong, economically rational and convincing.” He called Germany’s decision to close its reactors an “irrational populist event.”  In a parallel statement trade minister Kocourek said that CEZ would not expand renewable energy sources beyond 13% because it is unrealistic to expect to run a modern country on them.  He added CEZ “has big doubts” about biomass.
  • South Korea to invest in Romanian nuclear plant A South Korean nuclear energy consortium may invest in a project to build a third and a fourth reactor at Cernovoda in southeast Romania. The consortium replaces an investor group which pulled out of the project earlier this year.  The project manager for the new reactors is EnergoNuclear.  Right now Romania’s state owned electric utility holds an 85% share in the project and Italy’s ENEL holds another 9%. If the deal goes through, the South Korean group could take up to a 45 % stake in the project which is estimated to cost $5.7 billion.  Romania has two CANDU reactors at the site near the country’s Black Sea coast.  South Korea has experience with the CANDU design so it is plausible it may reference it in a proposal to build the next two units. This would be a huge win for AECL which recently was split up with its reactor division sold off for peanuts to SNC Lavalin.  AECL has marketed itself in eastern Europe hoping for this kind of development.
D'coda Dcoda

Iran set to roll out advanced uranium enrichment machines [05Sep11] - 0 views

www.ynetnews.com/...0,7340,L-4118064,00.html

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 06 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Iran is making headway towards rolling out advanced uranium enrichment machines that could speed up its production of nuclear reactor fuel as well as weapons-grade material if, as the West fears, it ultimately tries to assemble atomic bombs.   But it remains unclear whether Tehran, under increasingly strict international sanctions that crimp its ability to import key components, can manufacture the machines in industrial-scale numbers that would revolutionize its enrichment activity.
  • For years, Tehran has been seeking to replace the breakdown-prone 1970s vintage model of centrifuge it now uses to refine uranium, but the changeover has been hampered by sanctions restricting access to vital components, analysts say.
  • In a sign the Islamic state may now be making some progress, a UN nuclear watchdog report says Iran has begun installing two newer versions for larger-scale testing at a research and development site near the central city of Natanz.   The confidential report, obtained by Reuters on Friday, says Iran informed the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in June that it had also started to operate 54 of these more advanced machines on an experimental basis.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • f Iran eventually succeeds in introducing them in industrial quantities for enrichment, it could significantly shorten the time needed to stockpile material that can have civilian as well as military purposes, if refined much further.   "The installation of ... IR-2s and IR-4s represents progress, for sure," nuclear proliferation expert Mark Fitzpatrick said, referring to the names of the new models.
  • But analysts said it was not evident that Tehran has the technical prowess and components to make them in bigger numbers.
D'coda Dcoda

Plugging leaks will end crisis, not cold shutdown: analysts [12Sep11] - 0 views

search.japantimes.co.jp/...nn20110911f1.html

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 12 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Ever since the nuclear crisis erupted six months ago, the public has been clamoring to know when the damaged reactors at the Fu ku shi ma No. 1 power plant will be brought under control and when the nightmare will end. The government and Tokyo Electric Power Co., which runs the crippled plant, are working to bring the three reactors into cold shutdown by mid-January.
  • Cold shutdown means the temperature at the bottom of the pressure vessel, which holds the core, has been lowered to less than 100 degrees. This critical milestone, known as "Step 2" in Tepco's road map for containing the crisis, would limit the release of radioactive materials from the plant to less than 1 millisievert per year, a level that poses no health risks.
  • Since work at the plant is proceeding relatively smoothly, it appears likely the mid-January target will be met. But Fukushima No. 1 will still have a long way to go before the flooded plant's reactors are stable enough to be considered safe, experts warn. The main reason is the abundance of highly radioactive water.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • "There are about 110,00 tons of contaminated water (in the plant) and the situation is still not completely under control because coolant water is leaking from the containment vessels. There is no guarantee that the irradiated water won't leak from the plant (and contaminate the environment)" if another natural disaster strikes, said Hisashi Ninokata, a professor of reactor engineering at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
  • After achieving cold shutdowns of reactors 1, 2 and 3, the government may declare parts of the 20-km no-go zone around the plant safe. It may even let the evacuees return, as long as the area is decontaminated and crucial infrastructure restored.
  • But the longer the tainted water leaks, the more the radioactive waste will grow, leaving the Fukushima plant vulnerable to further disasters, Ninokata said. Before the Fukushima crisis can be said contained, the holes and cracks from which the water and fuel are escaping must be located and sealed. But this extremely difficult task could take years because the radiation near the reactors is simply too high to let workers get near them.
  • "It'll be too early to say that the situation has reached a stable phase even after Step 2 is completed," said Chihiro Kamisawa, a researcher at Citizens' Nuclear Information Center, a nonprofit group of scientists and activists opposed to nuclear power. When a reactor is in cold shutdown, the water cooling its fuel is still hot but no longer boiling, which significantly reduces the amount of radioactive emissions.
  • In late July, the temperature in reactor No. 1's pressure vessel fell below 100 degrees. On Monday, the same thing was achieved in reactor 3 after Tepco activated a system that pumps water deep into the containment vessel. But on Friday, reactor No. 2 was still boiling away with a reading of 112.6. "Efforts seem to be making smooth progress, and I think Step 2 is likely to be achieved by mid-January," said Shinichi Morooka, a Waseda University professor and reactor expert.
  • Another reason for optimism is the progress being made with the water decontamination system. The cleaning rate has greatly improved in the past few weeks and exceeded 90 percent of capacity last week. If the decontamination system ever reaches its full potential, it will allow Tepco to inject coolant at a higher rate and bring the melted cores to lower and stabler temperatures.
  • The government also plans to start decontaminating soil in various hot spots so the evacuees can return once the second step is completed. But some experts are questioning whether residents should be allowed to return so soon. The cracks and holes in the leaking reactors haven't even been pinpointed yet, let alone fixed, they say.
  • "As an engineer, I am worried (about the plan to let residents return) when it is still unclear what is really going on inside the reactors," said Morooka. For the time being, Tepco can only guess where the water is leaking from and which parts need repair, because radiation has prevented workers from fully exploring the buildings.
  • Spokesman Junichi Matsumoto said that since no extensive damage to the reactors was found during inspections of the first and second floors of the buildings, any holes or cracks are probably at the basement level. But with the basement floors flooded, Tepco's top priority is just to get the water out. Plans to fix the reactors aren't even being discussed yet, Matsumoto said.
  • Asked if the containment vessels can take another quake, the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Ninokata said he believes the impact would likely be distributed evenly through the structure without widening existing cracks or holes. But if the impact somehow focuses on parts damaged by the March 11 disasters, there could be further damage, he said. "The containment vessel is what really ensures the safety of a nuclear reactor," Ninokata said, warning that if radioactive materials are still leaking out, allowing residents to return would risk harming their health.
D'coda Dcoda

6 months into Japan's cleanup, radiation a major worry [20Sep11] - 0 views

www.cbc.ca/...-six-months-after-tsunami.html

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 21 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Related Story Content Story Sharing Tools Share with Add This Print this story E-mail this story Related Related Links Japan PM feared nuclear disaster worse than Chornobyl Special Report: Disaster in Japan Japan ignored own radiation forecasts FAQ: Radiation's health effects Timeline of events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex FAQ: Nuclear reactorsAccessibility Links Beginning of Story Content TOKYO –
  •  Related Story Content Story Sharing Tools Share with Add This Print this story E-mail this story Related Related Links Japan PM feared nuclear disaster worse than Chornobyl Special Report: Disaster in Japan Japan ignored own radiation forecasts FAQ: Radiation's health effects Timeline of events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex FAQ: Nuclear reactors Accessibility Links Beginning of Story Content TOKYO –  The scars of Japan’s March 11 disaster are both glaringly evident and deceptively hidden. Six months after a tsunami turned Japan’s northeast into a tangled mess of metal, concrete, wood and dirt, legions of workers have made steady progress hauling away a good portion of the more than 20 million tonnes of debris covering ravaged coastal areas. The Environment Ministry says it expects to have it all removed by next March, and completely disposed of by 2014. 'I think Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), as well as the Japanese government, made many mistakes.' —Shoji Sawada, theoretical particle physicist But a weightless byproduct of this country’s March 11 disaster is expected to linger for much longer.  The Japanese learned a lot about the risks posed by radiation after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Now, once again, they are facing this invisible killer. This time, the mistake is of their own making. "I’m afraid," says Shoji Sawada, a theoretical particle physicist who is opposed to the use of nuclear energy .  Sawada has been carefully monitoring the fallout from the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. “I think many people were exposed to radiation. I am afraid [they] will experience delayed effects, such as cancer and leukemia.” Evacuation zone Japan's government maintains a 20-kilometre evacuation zone around the Fukushima Daiichi plant, with no unauthorized entry allowed. The government has urged people within a 30-km radius of the plant to leave, but it's not mandatory. Some people say the evacuation zone should include Fukushima City, which is 63 km away from the plant. At the moment, the roughly 100,000 local children are kept indoors, schools have banned soccer and outdoor sports, pools were closed this summer, and building windows are generally kept closed. A handful of people argue the government should evacuate all of Fukushima prefecture, which has a population of about 2 million.  Sawada dedicated his career to studying the impact radiation has on human health, particularly among the survivors of Japan’s atomic bombings. His interest is both professional and personal. When he was 13 years old, his mother urged him to flee their burning home in Hiroshima. She died, trapped beneath rubble . “I think Tokyo Electric Power Company [TEPCO], as well as the Japanese government, made many mistakes,” he says. Those mistakes have been clearly documented since the earthquake and tsunami triggered meltdowns and explosions at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi, some 220 kilometres northeast of Tokyo. Warnings to build a higher tsunami wall were ignored; concerns about the safety of aging reactors covered up; and a toothless nuclear watchdog exposed as being more concerned with promoting atomic energy than protecting the public
  • The scars of Japan’s March 11 disaster are both glaringly evident and deceptively hidden. Six months after a tsunami turned Japan’s northeast into a tangled mess of metal, concrete, wood and dirt, legions of workers have made steady progress hauling away a good portion of the more than 20 million tonnes of debris covering ravaged coastal areas. The Environment Ministry says it expects to have it all removed by next March, and completely disposed of by 2014.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Sawada has been carefully monitoring the fallout from the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. “I think many people were exposed to radiation. I am afraid [they] will experience delayed effects, such as cancer and leukemia.”
  • The Japanese learned a lot about the risks posed by radiation after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Now, once again, they are facing this invisible killer. This time, the mistake is of their own making. "I’m afraid," says Shoji Sawada, a theoretical particle physicist who is opposed to the use of nuclear energy
  • Sawada dedicated his career to studying the impact radiation has on human health, particularly among the survivors of Japan’s atomic bombings. His interest is both professional and personal. When he was 13 years old, his mother urged him to flee their burning home in Hiroshima. She died, trapped beneath rubble
  • The result: a nuclear crisis with an international threat level rating on par with the 1986 disaster in Chernobyl.
  • “The Japanese government has a long history of lying or hiding the truth,” insists Gianni Simone, citing the cover-up of mercury poisoning in the 1950s and the HIV-tainted blood scandal of the 1980s. The freelance writer and Italian teacher lives just south of Tokyo with his wife, Hisako, and their eight and 10-year-old sons
D'coda Dcoda

Short-Termism and Energy Revolutions [30Sep11] - 0 views

dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/...termism-and-energy-revolutions

policy formulation

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 07 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • The calls these days for a technological “energy revolution” are widespread. But how do you spark breakthroughs when the natural bias of businesses, investors and governments is toward the here and now? In governance, politics creates a bias toward the short term. This is why bridges sometimes fall down for lack of maintenance. That’s also why it’s so hard to sustain public investment in the research and intellectual infrastructure required to make progress on the frontiers of chemistry, biology and physics, even though it is this kind of work that could produce leaps in how we harvest, harness, store and move energy. (This is why I asked, “Are Chemists and Engineers on the Green Jobs List?” back in 2008.)
  • To get the idea, you only have to look at the sputtering state of President Obama’s mostly unfunded innovation hubs, or look once again at the energy sliver in the graph showing America’s half-century history of public investment in basic scientific research. (There’s not much difference in research patterns in most other industrialized countries.) You can also look at the first Quadrennial Technology Review produced by the Department of Energy (summarized by Climate Progress earlier this week). The review was conducted after the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology wisely recommended regular reviews of this sort as part of its prescription for accelerating change in energy technologies.
  • This excerpt from the new review articulates the tension pretty transparently for a government report: There is a tension between supporting work that industry doesn’t— which biases the department’s portfolio toward the long term—and the urgency of the nation’s energy challenges. The appropriate balance requires the department to focus on accelerating innovation relevant to today’s energy technologies, since such evolutionary advances are more likely to have near- to mid-term impact on the nation’s challenges. We found that too much effort in the department is devoted to research on technologies that are multiple generations away from practical use at the expense of analyses, modeling and simulation, or other highly relevant fundamental engineering research activities that could influence the private sector in the nearer term.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • In finding that balance, I’m not sure it’s possible to overcome the political pressures tugging agencies and officials to stress refinement and deployment of known and maturing technologies (even though that’s where industry and private investors are most focused).
  • On the left, the pressure is for resources to deploy today’s “green” technology. On the right, as illustrated in a Heritage Foundation report on ways to cut President Obama’s budget for the Energy Department, the philosophy seems to be to discourage all government spending on basic inquiry related to energy.
  • According to Heritage, science “in service of a critical national interest that is not being met by the private sector” is fine if that interest is national defense, but not fine if it’s finding secure and sustainable (environmentally and economically) sources of energy.
  • I solicited reactions to the Energy Department review from a variety of technology and innovation analysts. The first to weigh in are Daniel M. Kammen, an energy technology researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who is on leave working for the World Bank, and Robert D Atkinson, the founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Here’s Kammen: The idea of a regular review and status report on both energy innovation and deployment spending is a good one. Some of the findings in the QTR review are useful, although little is new. Overall, though, this is a useful exercise, and one that should be a requirement from any major programmatic effort.
  • he real need in the R&D sector is continuity and matching an increasing portfolio of strategic research with market expansion. My former student and colleague Greg Nemet have written consistently on this: - U.S. energy research and development: Declining investment, increasing need, and the feasibility of expansion - Reversing the Incredible Shrinking Energy R&D Budget
  • Perhaps the biggest worry in this report, however, is the missing logic and value of a ’shift to near term priorities in energy efficiency and in electric vehicles.’ This may be a useful deployment of some resources, but a range of questions are simply never addressed. Among the questions that need firmer answers are:
  • There are some very curious omissions from the report, such as more detail on the need to both generate and report on jobs created in this sector — a political ‘must’ these days (see, e.g., the “green jobs” review by the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at Berkeley) — and straightforward comparisons in the way of ‘report cards’ on how the US is stacking up relative to other key players (e.g. China, Germany…).
  • given the state-by-state laboratories we already have of differing approaches to energy efficiency, the logic of spending in this area remains to be proven (as much as we all rightly love and value and benefit from energy efficiency).
  • Near-term electric vehicle deployment. A similar story could be told here. As the director of the University of California at Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center (http://tsrc.berkeley.edu) I am huge believer in electric vehicles [EVs]. However, the review does not make clear what advances in this area are already supported through [the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy], and what areas of near-term research are also not best driven though regulation, such as low-carbon fuel standards, R&D tax credits, ‘feebates’ that transfer funds from those individuals who purchase inefficient vehicles to those who purchase efficient ones. Similar to the story in energy efficiency, we do have already an important set of state-by-state experiments that have been in place for some time, and these warrant an assessment of how much innovation they have driven, and which ones do and do not have an application in scale-up at the federal level.
  • Finally, the electric vehicle landscape is already very rich in terms of plans for deployment by automakers. What are the barriers five-plus years out that the companies see research-versus-deployment and market-expansion support as the most effective way to drive change in the industry? Where will this focus put the U.S. industry relative to China?
  • Following record levels funding made available to the energy industry through the [stimulus package of spending], what are the clearly identified market failures that exist in this area that added funding will solve? Funding is always welcome, but energy efficiency in particular, can be strongly driven by regulation and standards, and because good energy efficiency innovations have such rapid payback times, would regulatory approaches, or state-federal partnerships in regulation and incentives not accomplish a great deal of what can be done in this area? Congressman Holt raises a number of key questions on related issues, while pointing to some very hopeful experiences, notably in the Apollo program, in his 16 September editorial in Science.
  • Here’s Robert Atkinson: If DOE is shifting toward a more short-term focus, this is quite disturbing.  It would mean that DOE has given up on addressing the challenge of climate change and instead is just focused on the near term goal of reducing oil imports and modestly reducing the expansion the coal fired power plants. If DOE thinks it is still focused on climate change, do they think they are fighting “American warming”?
  • If so, cutting the growth of our emissions make sense.  But its global warming and solving this means supporting the development of scalable, cheap low or no-carbon energy so that every country, rich and poor, will have an economic incentive to transitioning to cheap energy.  Increasing building efficiency, modernizing the electric grid, alternative hydrocarbon fuels, and increasing vehicle efficiency do virtually nothing to meet this goal. They are “American warming” solutions.
  • This is also troubling because (as you point out) who else is going to invest in the long-term, more fundamental, high risk, breakthrough research than the U.S. government.  It certainly won’t be VCs. And it won’t be the Chinese who are principally interested in cutting their energy imports and exporting current generation clean energy, not developing technology to save the planet.  Of course all the folks out there who have been pushing the mistaken view that we have all the clean technologies we need, will hail this as the right direction.  But it’s doing what the rest of the market has been doing in recent years – shifting from high risk, long-term research to short-term, low risk.  If the federal government is doing this it is troubling to say the least.
  • or those seeking more, here are the slides used by Steven Koonin, the physicist and former BP scientist who now is under secretary for science at the department, in presenting the review earlier this week:
  • Rolling Out the Quadrennial Technology Review Report
D'coda Dcoda

CWIP Construction Work in Progress Law - 0 views

www.beyondnuclear.org/construction-work-in-progess

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 15 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • CWIP, or Construction Work in Progress, is a law, fortunately existent only in a handful of U.S. states, that allows a utility to charge ratepayers higher rates to cover future costs of a yet-to-be-constructed reactor, even if that reactor is never built.
1 - 20 of 63 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page