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On Life On The Ground at Fukushima-Daiichi

@Anja

Why do you think that a non fatal accident that took place more than two months ago should still be front page news? There was a lot of damage to industrial facilities and there is a lot of boring work to be done to clean up the sites, but why should that be on the front pages? 

Did you even read a single front page story about the explosion and fire that rocked the Chiba refinery near Tokyo and burned uncontrollably for 10 days after the accident? Have you seen a single accounting of what happened to the workers who must have been on site when that visually impressive accident occurred?

In contrast, it was a world wide news story when a man in his 60s recently passed away due to a heart attack caused by overexertion just because that rather common event took place at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and the exertion was part of the effort to clean up the facility. 

This is the internet age. If you are deeply interested in what is going on at Fukushima, you are only a few clicks away from accurate, timely updates. It is NOT news and should not have taken up so much space even when it occurred because there was much more interesting information that should have been presented about what happened to the rest of the nation following a devastating earthquake and tsunami.

The nuclear story really should have been a footnote, but the establishment (probably supported by the establishment energy industries that were chomping at the bit due to increased market opportunities) pushed the nuclear story so hard that I am sure some misinformed people thought it had something to do with the tens of thousands of dead and missing people.

On Arnie Gundersen: Fukushima Update

@David - we agree on many issues, but your reverence for established, politically appointed scientific bodies shows a certain faith that I do not possess. I happen to agree that dumping 20 billion tons per year of CO2 into the world's atmosphere is causing dangerously negative effects, but I am not so sure that 10 billion tons per year would be so bad. I do not have the interest, the resources or the background to produce accurate models, but there is readily understood logic in the notion that there is a level of CO2 emission that natural systems can handle with relative grace and a level at which they can become overwhelmed.

I also tend to side with scientists like Jerry Cuttler, Don Luckey, and Myron Pollycove in opposition to the BEIR folks when it comes to the health effects of low levels of radiation. The first three have done the research with a questioning attitude, the established committees simply go along with the established line of thought because the bureaucrats who influence the selection process pick people who will not question their program.

Finally, can you tell me what Fukushima has really demonstrated about the dangers of used fuel pools? I am one of those TEC bloggers who issued a mea culpa for being too optimistic regarding their ability to withstand draining without catching fire. I did something I had never done before and removed a post that I wrote because I feared I had given out bad information. Though I have not yet found definitive results, I have seen indications that my retraction was too hasty. Apparently, the used (spent) fuel pool at unit 4 DID not burn and did not generate excessive quantities of H2. The videos taken underwater show that some debris fell into the pool from other places, but all of the elements that were visible in the pool were intact and showed no signs of serious damage.

On Some Logic Still Prevails – Cape Wind Loan Guarantee On Hold

@starfe

Since 2009, every large but still unreliable renewable project in the US has received a 30% tax credit that is almost like cash because it comes to the project developers within a few months of financial close. They have also been given loan guarantees where the federal government picks up the tab for the credit subsidy cost. They are often built on federal land without paying any lease fee back to the owners of that land - all of the rest of us. Finally, they get renewable energy credits that can be sold for a profit.

That is what I mean - the investors are not paying for the cost of their project and the environmental damage that those projects do. 

On Some Logic Still Prevails – Cape Wind Loan Guarantee On Hold

@Nancy - first of all, I am an East Coast guy. That photo was taken during a family vacation to the Outer Banks in North Carolina and is a sunrise, not a sunset.

Japan is NOT putting nuclear plants on hold, they are reevaluating their energy plans and will announce the conclusions of that reevaluation in the coming months. I fully expect that rational people will recognize that even with seismic concerns and the threat of tsunamis that nuclear is a far better option for that relatively small, northern latitude, densely populated island nation than unreliable wind or solar energy that requires enormous material resources.

I actually support new taxes - if we are going to spend money we should stop borrowing and start paying. 

Your assertion that energy has to be expensive makes me think that you have a relationship with the establishment energy business - they LOVE expensive energy because the high prices drop right to their bottom lines. Take a good look at the profit and loss statements of companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips. While most of us suffer when fuel prices (not just gasoline, but natural gas and electricity) go up, those companies rake in the profits by the tens of billions per quarter!

Nuclear energy is very threatening to them because it is reliable, emission free and affordable. The average cost to operate existing nuclear electric facilities in the US today is about 2 cents per kilowatt hour. Sure, that does not include the cost of construction because most of the plants are fully amortized and mortgage free already. I remember when they were being built - the professional opposition told us then that they were way too expensive. I wish that the corporate and political leaders had had the foresight to continue building despite the naysayers. If they had, we would have stopped burning coal in the US by 2000 and probably stopped burning natural gas by about 2005. Our grid would look a lot more like France's does today.

Instead, the coal supported Carter Administration put the brakes on nuclear energy development. The coal supported Congress broke apart the Atomic Energy Commission and created the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Since that new organization was created in 1974, there has not been a single new nuclear power facility in the United States that started planning and started operation. Every one of the existing plants started its application before the NRC was formed.

I do not look at photos of wind turbines with fondness; I have visited actual wind farms to see that up close they are massive machines that are a blight on their surroundings. The typical industrial scale turbine is on a tower that is taller than a 40 story building, has blades longer than a football field and has a nacelle that is larger than a locomotive. They are annoyingly noisy for anyone within a few thousand feet and they produce some very irritating moving shadows that can stretch several thousand feet away during the morning and evening hours. They have to have flashing lights on all night to warn aircraft. In other words - perhaps pastoral from a sufficient distance, ugly when seen from nearby.

On Some Logic Still Prevails – Cape Wind Loan Guarantee On Hold

@Chris - obviously you do not know me very well. I am the publisher of Atomic Insights, and have been for the past 16 years. I started learning about the wonders of nuclear energy in 1968 when my father taught me how the new plants that his company was building would be able to produce massive quantities of reliable electricity without even needing smokestacks.

Later I spent a dozen years in training and operating assignments associated with the Navy nuclear power program. I founded a company called Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. that had a design for a greatly simplified machine I call an Adams Engine(TM) that was designed to produce reliable, emission free power with many fewer moving parts than traditional steam plants. It is not some kind of imaginary design. It was based on a reactor system that operated in Germany for 20 years and is operating in China today at the Tsingua University (HTR-10) in combination with the same kind of gas turbine heat engine that is used in burning natural gas and jet fuel.

I spent a lot of time talking to financial folks and have a pretty fair understanding of why they are not interested in financing nuclear energy - they SAY it is because they cannot handle the lengthy development time and the uncertainty of getting permission to operate. That may be true for some of them, but if the big boys were interested they could put pressure on the system to make it move more quickly.

The reality is that they fear the economic disruption that would result if we suddenly had access to massive quantities of affordable, emission-free energy. Who would keep buying expensive, filthy, explosive oil, coal and natural gas? If we all reduced our purchases of those fuels, who would be paying off their massive loans on the capital that they have invested in tankers, oil wells, drilling equipment and pipelines? 

Nuclear energy already proved that it can capture and hold energy markets in competition with fossil fuel. 440 nuclear plants on land currently produce the energy equivalent of 12 million barrels of oil per day - equal to the output of Saudi Arabia PLUS the output of Kuwait. Nuclear energy systems at sea provide 100% of the propulsion energy for US aircraft carriers and US submarines plus 100% of the propulsion energy for the Russian icebreaker fleet. 

I used to sail. Wind is a fine power source for a hobby where you are not really interested in moving to far, too fast or too reliably. It is crappy source for any industrial application because it changes all the time. Sometimes it blows way too hard when you really do not want any power and sometimes it does not blow at all over continent or ocean sized areas of the world for days at a time.

On Arnie Gundersen: Fukushima Update

@AnjaAtkinson - Arnie Gundersen is a professional opposer to nuclear energy, not a nuclear professional. He did earn an MS in Nuclear Engineering, but he was fired from his last job in the nuclear industry in the early 1990s and was sued by his former employer for libel. He was a company VP who then spent a decade or so teaching math and science in private schools while working to build a new career as an expert witness earning several hundred dollars per hour to testify against nuclear energy developments in proceedings where the source of the cash is often the company being sued.

He has demonstrated his lack of nuclear knowledge by his hyping of the tritium leaks at Vermont Yankee by implying that a total quantity of tritium would be less mass than an aspirin tablet into the ground water beneath an operating industrial facility is a health problem. Even if one person managed to drink all of the 150,000 gallons or so of lightly contaminated water that leaked, that person would not even get a high enough dose to cause minor radiation sickness. 

Bottom line - Gundersen is a disgruntled EX nuclear professional who makes his moderate living by throwing darts and misplaced arrows at the technology that employs tens of thousands of real professionals to produce more electricity each year than the entire US grid was producing in all years up until about 1960. It is extremely safe, reliable and clean electricity that does not require the destruction of mountains or the paving of square miles of desert land.

On Some Logic Still Prevails – Cape Wind Loan Guarantee On Hold

deleted as a duplicate by Rod Adams

On Some Logic Still Prevails – Cape Wind Loan Guarantee On Hold

@tomdurk - there has not been any money flowing in the direction of nuclear energy despite all of the talk. The $8.3 billion is a loan guarantee (essentially a cosignature) to one of the largest monopoly utility companies in the United States that is building two units in a state where the voters have agree to pay - starting in advance - for the output of the plant. That is a very safe guarantee for the federal government. In contrast to the loan guarantee program for renewable energy sources, Southern Company will also have to pay a "credit subsidy cost" fee before they close on the loan, an event that will not happen until after they have received a construction and operating license from the NRC.

The billions for storage come from a 0.1 cent per kilowatt hour fee charged against all nuclear energy production starting in 1982. That is a relatively tiny portion, but it results in a payment from the utilities to the federal government of $800 million per year because the plants generate so much reliable power. The balance of the fund is more than $20 billion, which the federal government is borrowing for other purposes, just like it does the balance on the Social Security Trust Fund.

Disaster insurance is paid for by the utility companies. They also agree to be members of a pool that can charge about $100 million per plant in the case of an accident at any of the plants. That provides a $10 billion buffer before there is any responsibility from the taxpayers. Federal payments for a nuclear accident has never been required, something that cannot be said of the airline industry, the shipping industry, the railroad industry or the oil industry. 

No comment about the oil industry - they are the competition and need to fight their own battles.

The nuclear plant accident in Japan, caused by twin natural disasters of rather epic proportions, have been a tragedy, but they have not resulted in injury from radiation exposure to a single person, despite all that you might have heard in the headlines and from the talking heads.

On Walmart: The Power–And Limits–Of Efficiency

@Marl - It seems to me that WalMart is doing what it has always been doing - using efficiency when possible, fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear when they need power, and marketing language that sounds like environmental leadership.

I know that you are a thinker - ask yourself why the EDF as a WalMart contractor and WalMart sustainability lead are not terribly credible sources of information about a well publicized but failing effort to reach "100% renewable energy".

Your search through the company's report is a little better - corporations generally will not lie in writing, but they also are free to simply not report actual numbers.

If WalMart really wanted to go emission free without adding to their costs, they could simply put pressure on utilities to allow them to pretend to buy only nuclear generated electricity like they can pretend to buy only renewable generated electricity in some jurisdictions.

I used that derogatory term "pretend" for a purpose - if you are buying power from the grid, you are using exactly the same kind of electricity as everyone else on the grid - electrons cannot be distinguished from each other. 

On MOX Fuel in Fukshima Daiichi Adds Little Risk to Public

@Anonymous - I am not sure why I am bothering to respond to someone who makes such strange assertions without claiming credit for them by using their own name.

What has happened in Japan is that there has been a tragic natural disaster caused by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake followed by a large and destructive tsunami. Those events have killed somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000 people and destroyed hundreds of billions of dollars worth of real property. Among the damaged facilities are four units at a nuclear energy plant that will most likely never operate again. All of those plants were between 36-40 years old. At those nuclear facilities, there has been exactly one reported fatality - a crane operator who was killed during the earthquake. There is NO indication that any member of the public has been exposed to a dangerous level of radiation or a dangerous quantity of radioactive material.

Every nuclear plant in the world operates with a certain amount of mixed oxides in the fuel rods because plutonium is formed when neutrons hit U-238. 

The main result of shutting down "every nuclear plant" would be to suddenly plunge the world into an energy crisis roughly equivalent to shutting down the oil production of BOTH Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The world's 440 operating reactors produce roughly 12 million barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) per day according to the most recent annual energy survey by BP.

On Stop Worrying About 'Spent' Fuel Pool Fires. Zirconium Tubes Do Not Burn

I was wrong to minimize the risk of losing water in a used fuel pool. 

On Industrial Process Heat and the SmAHTR

@Charles - Though the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor and many of the General Atomics versions of proposed high temperature reactors use high pressure helium as the coolant, that is not a fundamental feature of high temperature gas cooled reactors.

As proven in combustion boilers and the combustors in open cycle gas turbine machines, it is possible to transfer a lot of heat to a gaseous fluid flow without raising that fluid to exceptionally high pressures. The pebble bed reactors that I proposed for Adams Engines(TM) used N2 gas where the maximum pressure ever seen in the system would be somewhat less than 300 psi.

That is low enough for the same kind of reinforced concrete pressure vessels that have been successfully used at the Magnox and AGR plants, but with a much simplified heat engine compared to the steam plants those early nuclear plants used.