Open Intelligence / Energy

The water picks up enormous amounts of radiation, so you add more water and you are generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water."

"They recalculated the amount of radiation released, but the news is really not talking about this," he said. "The new calculations show that within the first week of the accident, they released 2.3 times as much radiation as they thought they released in the first 80 days."

a nuclear waste advisor to the Japanese government reported that about 966 square kilometres near the power station - an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan - is now likely uninhabitable.

far more radiation has been released than has been reported.

"We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl,"

the exposed reactors and fuel cores are continuing to release microns of caesium, strontium, and plutonium isotopes. These are referred to as "hot particles".

"We are discovering hot particles everywhere in Japan, even in Tokyo," he said. "Scientists are finding these everywhere. Over the last 90 days these hot particles have continued to fall and are being deposited in high concentrations. A lot of people are picking these up in car engine air filters."

Clearly people in Fukushima prefecture have breathed in a large amount of these particles. Clearly the upper West Coast of the US has people being affected. That area got hit pretty heavy in April.

Why have alarms not been sounded about radiation exposure in the US?

Nuclear operator Exelon Corporation has been among Barack Obama's biggest campaign donors, and is one of the largest employers in Illinois where Obama was senator

Using nuclear power to produce electricity in Japan is a product of the nuclear policy of the US

Gundersen worries about more earthquake aftershocks, as well as how to cool two of the units. "Unit four is the most dangerous, it could topple," he said. "After the earthquake in Sumatra there was an 8.6 [aftershock] about 90 days later, so we are not out of the woods yet. And you're at a point where, if that happens, there is no science for this, no one has ever imagined having hot nuclear fuel lying outside the fuel pool. They've not figured out how to cool units three and four."

"With Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and now with Fukushima, you can pinpoint the exact day and time they started," he said, "But they never end."

On June 7, there was a fire -- apparently unrelated to the flooding -- in an electrical switchgear room at Fort Calhoun. For about 90 minutes, the pool where spent fuel is stored had no power for cooling. OPPD reported that "offsite power remained available, as well as the emergency diesel generators if needed." But the incident was yet another reminder of the plant's potential vulnerability

And so, Fort Calhoun remains on emergency alert because of the flood -- which is expected to worsen by early next week. On June 9, the Army Corps of Engineers announced PDF that the Missouri River would crest at least two feet higher in Blair than previously anticipated

The Fort Calhoun plant has never experienced a flood like this before

this spring, heavy rains and high snowpack levels in Montana, northern Wyoming, and the western Dakotas have filled reservoirs to capacity, and unprecedented releases from the dams are now reaching Omaha and other cities in the Missouri River valley. Floodgates that haven't been opened in 50 years are spilling 150,000 cubic feet per second -- enough water to fill more than a hundred Olympic-size swimming pools in one minute. And Fort Calhoun isn't the only power plant affected by flooding on the Missouri: The much larger Cooper Nuclear Station in Brownville, Nebraska, sits below the Missouri's confluence with the Platte River -- which is also flooding. Workers at Cooper have constructed barriers and stockpiled fuel for the plant's three diesel generators while, like their colleagues at Fort Calhoun, they wait for the inevitable.

But critics warn that the recovery process is fraught with dangers because the plant uses large quantities of liquid sodium, a highly flammable substance, to cool the nuclear fuel.

The Monju reactor, which forms the cornerstone of a national project by resource-poor Japan to reuse and eventually produce nuclear fuel, shows the tensions between the scale of Japan’s nuclear ambitions and the risks

Under this new approach, the reactor can still be sealed and run without being reopened for 40 to 60 years, Reynolds says.

Japan has no easy options to replace nuclear power, which before the crisis supplied about 30 percent of its electricity, one reason the government is rushing to persuade communities to restart halted reactors to meet summer demand.

Promoting renewable sources will take years and burning more fossil fuel use is costly and contributes to global warming

For towns and cities such as Tsuruga, where Japan's first commercial reactor came on line in 1970, the dilemma is a more personal one after decades during which the government promoted nuclear power as clean, cheap and safe while locating reactors in rural backwaters eager for economic windfalls.

"They talked about the firm bedrock, but the reason they picked regions like this was because there are fewer people to die," said coffee shop operator Kazuya Ueyama, noting that power generated in Fukui supplied western Japanese urban centres.

with local jobs heavily reliant on nuclear plants and town finances addicted to nuclear subsidies and tax revenues, not many in host towns are willing to speak out.

A Tsuruga city assembly panel in late June adopted a statement urging the promotion of renewable energy but withdrew it within days after the resolution was characterised in media as anti-nuclear. "This is a town that cannot speak out," said assembly member Harumi Kondaiji.

With nuclear power out of favor, the number of academic institutions offering degrees shrank to 32 in 2010 from 77 in 1975, according to the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education. Bachelor’s degrees awarded in nuclear engineering fell to 120 in 2001, from 863 in 1978. Power companies and engineering schools redoubled their recruiting efforts in recent years to replace retiring baby boomers and staff the 34 new plants that were on the drawing boards as of 2009. Urged by two utilities with nuclear ambitions in Texas—South Texas Project and Exelon (EXC) —Texas A&M University in College Station launched the Nuclear Power Institute in 2008 to spearhead a statewide effort to train 2,000 nuclear workers, boost math and science programs at high schools, and develop a new two-year nuclear training degree with community colleges based near eight proposed new plants.

The Nuclear Power Institute has graduated its first two classes of technicians, yet Peddicord worries that the weak economy and the growing uncertainty overhanging a U.S. nuclear expansion will depress interest in the program. The partners in two new reactors planned for nearby Bay City— NRG Energy (NRG) and Tokyo Electric Power, operator of the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi power plant—yanked funding for the project after the disaster. “The real test will come in the fall, when we look at enrollment,” he says.

The bottom line: Nuclear plants in the U.S. need to recruit some 25,000 new workers by 2016. Japan’s nuclear crisis has made reaching that goal harder.

Indonesia has signed contracts for 2.3 gigawatts of plants, Bloomberg New Energy Finance data show. A gigawatt is about equal to the output of a new atomic reactor, and requires $2 billion to $4 billion of investment. “There’s a remarkable opportunity for Indonesia to increase the amount of power generated from geothermal,” says Stephen W. Green, former head of Chevron’s Indonesia and Philippines operations and now its vice-president of policy, government, and public affairs. “There are synergies between oil and geothermal and it makes sense for us to exploit that.”

Unocal negotiated Indonesia’s first foreign-partnership geothermal license in 1982 with the help of U.S. President Barack Obama’s late stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, who worked for the U.S. company as a government liaison. Chevron acquired Unocal in 2005. At the plant in Java, which lies inside a nature preserve, hot water and steam are pumped from as deep as 10,535 feet below the earth’s surface through 34 miles of pipes to turn turbines to make power. Each well takes as much as 90 days to drill and costs up to $7 million, Chevron says. The company is now planning additional plants in Indonesia, including a potential 200-MW facility in South Sumatra.

Meanwhile, Japan has a new Reconstruction Minister, Naoto Kan. He replaces Ryu Matsumoto who resigned after just a week in the job over remarks that offended survivors of the quake and tsunami

After the crisis at the Fukushima plant, the EU began safety checks all of its 143 reactors. It is urging similar inspections worldwide

During the six-hour meeting shareholders shouting at managers over their handling of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster and the company’s subsequent slide to near bankruptcy.

One attendee suggested the board “jump into the reactors and die,” before being forced by security guards to sit down. Another said the board would have been forced to perform ritual disembowelment had they lived in an era when such actions were deemed necessary to preserve honour.

The Fukushima disaster has erased close to 90 percent of the value of TEPCO stock, once considered a safe investment. In May, the company reported an annual loss of 10.4 billion euros

TEPCO’s biggest shareholders – including Japanese financial institutions – rejected the call to close all its nuclear plants which generate nearly a third of the company’s electricity.

“We lost today to the big investors, but our message was heard,” said Masafumi Asada, a 70-year-old from Fukushima, who introduced the anti-nuclear proposal on behalf of a group of 402 shareholders.

Japan’s cabinet has approved draft legislation to help the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) to compensate victims of the radiation crisis around the Fukushima plant.

In a statement on Tuesday Tepco said that it hoped the bill would be approved by parliament as soon as possible and that it will pay fair and speedy compensation payments

Ben has produced and continues to refine a PowerPoint Presentation that is worth a look. He calls it Nuclear Power from Opponent to Proponent and he is working to find ever larger audiences to hear him tell that story.

His most recent post is titled Why pro-nuclear has failed when anti-nuclear has succeeded. It is an intriguing essay that points out a key factor – the antinuclear message is so simple that it can be stated in a single word that can be grasped and repeated by any two-year-old – “NO”. That is a message that is easy to propagate. In contrast, Ben believes that nuclear supporters have never developed a strong sales message.

Your analysis leaves open an important question whose answer offers the key to pronuclear success – “Why?”

Here is a copy of the comment that I left on Decarbonise SA

The mission of the antinuclear movement is clear enough, as you stated. It is a simple “NO”. However, pronuclear activists hand that opposition all of the moral strength that they need by accepting the premise that the basis for the “NO” is fear of radiation or fear of the bomb or fear of the possibility of a massively damaging accident that never seems to actually happen.

The real strength of the opposition to nuclear comes from the people who derive their wealth and power from the whole range of economic activities required to extract, refine, transport, distribute and consume the hydrocarbons that produce the emissions that you want to stop. Fossil fuel pushers have a fundamental reason for disliking clean, concentrated, abundant, affordable nuclear energy. They hold sway in a LOT of decision making bodies that can delay nuclear projects and add to their cost. They have influence in the media due to their continuous use of paid advertising campaigns sustained over many decades. They have influence in foundations that have been formed from fossil fuel derived wealth and they have influence in powerful unions like those associated with the railroads that derive most of their steady income from moving bulky fuels like oil and coal.

Your message of DecarboniseSA scares the heck out of the very rich and powerful people who are rich and powerful because THEY SELL CARBON!

The real way to defeat the “NO” to nuclear energy is to find people who benefit from “YES” to nuclear energy. The fuel suppliers have concentrated strength, but the majority of the world’s population does not supply fuel; they consume fuel and have to pay high prices, accept nasty pollution, and suffer through periods of supply constraints. Some of those consumers are major corporations in their own right and have a lot of sway – they just need to be told (over and over again) why fission is so much better than combustion.

I have been involved in the financial analysis of enough large projects to know that there are two sure ways to add cost to any project. The first method is to add delay

The second method is to add lawyers to the mix; they are professionally motivated to argue and delay. After all, they bill by the minute.

Here is the response that I posted in the comment section of Ms. Smith’s Wall Street Journal article.The sad part of the story was the apparent lack of understanding by the project detractors of the impact of their actions on the cost of the project. The length of time spent building the plant will have a very real impact on the cost of the project due to the fact that more time means more salaries, more interest on borrowed money, and a greater chance of increased prices for materials and equipment purchased and installed at a later time than planned.

Maintaining projected costs and schedules is highly dependent on the actions of regulators and intervenors who continue to slow down progress with legalistic arguments that have nothing to do with safety. The issues that the regulators raised are related to a difference of technical opinion on whether or not is reasonable to neglect the impact of solar heating and cooling while modeling the behavior of the containment building after an accident that releases 600 F water and steam into the building.

Westinghouse went back and recalculated the impact of the minor term in the equation – the final result was that under absolutely worst case conditions, the final pressure inside the containment went up by about 0.3 psi and was still well below the building’s allowed maximum pressure.

The current Chairman of the NRC is a professional political staffer whose complete professional experience following college was working for two avowed antinuclear politicians. He has cost taxpayers in 31 states billions already with his decision to refuse to finish the Yucca Mountain license review; now he is aiming to cost Georgia ratepayers and GA Power investors (remember, utility investors are often widows and orphans) hundreds of millions to billions more. He took the unprecedented step of issuing a press release calling Westinghouse’s application into question over such a technical dispute regarding the significance of terms in a mathematical model.

Americans need to know just how job unfriendly the NRC Chairman is.Full disclosure – I work for a company that is designing nuclear reactors that will soon need to be licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I fear for my long term employment and that of hundreds of my colleagues and neighbors.

As Curt Stager and other researchers like him have determined, the material will be suspended in our atmosphere and affecting our climate for at least 100,000 years. Many of the effects are somewhat unpredictable and not terribly beneficial. The duration of the effect gets worse if we continue on our present course and speed. An unaltered dependence on fossil fuels also puts future generations at risk of trying to figure out how to operate an economy WITHOUT access to reliable sources of controlled heat.

The twin attributes of supply sustainability and climate change mitigation are nuclear fission power advantages topics that have attracted some high profile converts (Mark Lynas, George Monbiot, James Hansen, Stewart Brand, Gwyneth Cravens, and Patrick Moore, for example) to the cause of pronuclear advocacy. If nuclear energy’s potential as a climate change mitigation strategy is something that attracts former antinuclear protesters and causes them to reevaluate their opposition, that alone makes it something worth emphasizing

It was interesting to hear that the primary nuclear technology that Curt mentions as being worth aggressive pursuit is based on thorium, but I am pretty sure that is mainly because thorium evangelists have done a better job of guerilla marketing since 2005 than the people who have been refining uranium-based nuclear reactors for the past 5 decades.

As I often to tell my thorium enthused friends – you cannot build or operate a thorium reactor without uranium. I also tell both my buddies who are thorium advocates and my integral fast reactor (IFR) friends that any atomic fission power plants is better than any hydrocarbon based power plant. I hope that someday soon, fission fans will stop engaging in fratricidal attacks on each other, but I guess I have always been a bit of a dreamer

A careful reading of that resume reveals only one mention of any kind of license to operate a reactor. In the section of his resume headed Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) 1971 to 1972, there is the following statement: “Critical Facility Reactor Operator, Instructor. Licensed AEC reactor operator instructing students and utility reactor operators in start-up through full power operation of a reactor.” Here is a quote about that critical facility from a contact who attended RPI at the same time as Gundersen did.

It operated at no pressure, room temperature, licensed to 100W, highly enriched U, open tank of water.

A second exaggeration comes in the statement that Gundersen has “almost four decades experience in the nuclear power industry.” His resume shows that he graduated from school in 1972 and that he stopped working for Nuclear Energy Services in 1990. From that point on, his full time employment was as a math and science teacher at a series of private schools. His resume lists several items under the heading of Nuclear Consulting 1990 – Present, but it would be interesting to hear the opinion of nuclear professionals about how those activities count as experience in the nuclear industry.

An Atomic Insights reader who is personally familiar with the work that Gundersen did at Northeast Utilities during the period from 1972-1976 read the posted resume and shared the following comment with me using the polite and understated language that is common among engineering professionals.

Mr. Gundersen, who has almost four decades experience in the nuclear power industry, earned his Bachelors and Masters in Nuclear Engineering from RPI. He was a licensed reactor operator and put in twenty years in the industry. He’s led teams of engineers dealing with nuclear reactors at 70 nuclear plants around the nation. He was appointed by now Governor Peter Schumlin to the Vermont Yankee Oversight Panel in 2008 and it’s his expertise that qualifies him as an expert witness on various aspects of Vermont Yankee, including plant safety, its decommissioning fund, and the suitability of the plant being extended past 2012.

I spoke to that contact at length a few days ago, he told me that Gundersen was assigned to the licensing group and did not have any real design engineering responsibilities while at NU.

In 2008, he applied to become a member of the Diablo Canyon Safety Committee. On that application, he made the following statement about his experience:

Since 1970 Arnold Gundersen has been an expert witness in nuclear litigations at the Federal and State hearings such as Three Mile Island, US NRC ASLB, Vermont State Public Service Board, Western Atlas Nuclear Litigation, U.S. Senate Nuclear Safety Hearings, Peach Bottom Nuclear Power Plant Litigation, &c. He has also testified at the Czech Senate on nuclear matters.

I went back and checked the resume linked to above. According to that resume, Mr. Gundersen earned his BS in Nuclear Engineering from RPI in 1971, so he was still an undergraduate student in 1970. That leads me to the conclusion that either there was a judge somewhere who has rather low standards for expertise for his witnesses, or that Mr. Gundersen needs someone to give him a calendar for Christmas.When noticing that, I also reread the first job listed on his resume. Here is how that job was described:

“Public Service Electric and Gas (PSE&G) – 1970Assistant Engineer:Performed Shielding design of radwaste and auxiliary buildings for Newbold Island Units 1 & 2, including development of computer codes.”

The date listed for that job was before his graduation date. My guess is that it was a summer internship since Newbold Island, NJ is 218 miles from Troy, NY, the home of RPI. That would be a long commute if the job was done during the school year

“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.