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Faster than light travel claimed for Idaho nuclear new build
Alternative Energy Holdings Inc. (PK:AEHI) wasted little time issuing a press release in an effort to ride the coat tails of the $20 billion award by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to a consortium of South Korean, Japanese, and American firms. The Idaho company claims that it is on the verge of importing South Korean nuclear reactors, based on the APR 1400 design, for two sites – one in Colorado and the other here in Idaho.
What’s remarkable about this claim is that it assumes the company has found a way to get the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to do something no other reactor vendor, or utility, has accomplished in the current era. This is to get the federal agency to power up to Warp 8, eight times faster than the speed of light, and certify a completely new LWR design, issue licenses for construction of two of them, and in less time than it takes Cmdr Spock to say “fascinating.”
AEHI CEO off to Seoul
Don Gillispie, AEHI's CEO, said Jan 4 in a prepared statement he’s gone to Seoul to complete negotiations with Korean Electric Power Company, KEPCO, to import the South Korean's APR 1400 for its Idaho and Colorado sites.
He said, "We expect the agreement to be similar to the UAE agreement announced last week, such technology should give AEHI a serious competitive advantage."
"We would like to complete our negotiations to bring the APR 1400 into the US for the first time including helping achieve NRC design certification."
NRC still in space dock
According to media reports, AEHI is claiming it will submit the reactor for design certification in 2010 and applications for licenses to build two of them in 2011. This is where the AEHI starship hits the brakes.
In November 2009, officials from KEPCO, the South Korean firm building the APR 1400s for the UAE, held their first meeting with the NRC to discuss design certification.
According to the minutes of the meeting, NRC officials told KEPCO to take a number and wait for at least two years. The agency said that with its current reactor design work it has no resources for a new project.
NRC also said in no uncertain terms that the meeting held with KEPCO engineers did not initiate a reactor design certification process.
A reasonable schedule is that KEPCO might get a place in line for reactor certification in 2012. However, no U.S. utility is likely to step up to be first. U.S. utilities are a somewhat cautious lot and new reactor designs take some getting used to before executives running multi-billion publically-traded firms buy one.
Instead, they will send engineers, lots of them, to get information on how well the plants operate, and what they cost, over at least a three-to-five year period. Bear in mind that the caution of the utilities is mirrored by their investors. No one is going to put up the money to build one until the revenue numbers are well understood. Add to this the time it takes to get a license application and the math comes out to a date near 2020 more or less.
Movie magic or reality?
Where this leaves us is that once again AEHI has made claims which are worthy of skepticism. The firm has taken a ten-year time frame, and using its previously unsuspected ability to direct the energy of cosmic black holes, proposes to compress space and time to reduce the project schedule by major orders of magnitude. It is great movie magic, but is is not reality
Don Gillispie must sincerely believe in the statements he issues to the media. This one fails the baloney test. Now I know that every time I say this it annoys AEHI all to pieces.
There is a simple remedy. The firm must stop making extraordinary claims about what it can accomplish. Given its financial resources, any claims about building a reactor in Idaho, or Colorado, need to be matched by investors. Where are they?
At market close the firm’s stock price was $0.10/share with market capitalization of $11.6 million. The firm has been through three investment bankers, and none ever raised the millions if not billions needed to start and complete the process to build a new nuclear reactor.
The nuclear industry does not work this way. If wishes were fishes, AEHI would be knee-deep in flounder, but they’re not.
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