Attempting to transition away from fossil fuels to an “all renewable” energy system is fraught with cost and reliability challenges. Germany is running into substantial challenges and is burned 5% more lignite – brown coal – in 2012 than it did in 2011. Recently completed studies that including a range of scenarios in Australia and California indicate the magnitude of the challenge of trying to do without both nuclear energy and fossil fuel.
Not surprisingly, we agreed that future energy systems that include a large dose of nuclear energy are more achievable and will also result in increasing human creative capabilities rather than restricting our development potential.
Additional topics included the recent final shutdown of the Kewaunee nuclear power station, nuclear tourism, growing interest in Small Modular Reactors (SMR) around the world, including Australia, and the positive responses that Robert Stone is getting at college campuses as he holds screenings for Pandora’s Promise. That well-received documentary that tells the story of people who have made a personal journey from nuclear opposition to nuclear energy support will be released in theaters around the US (and perhaps the rest of the world) in June 2013.
Guests on this episode of the Atomic Show:
Gwyneth Cravens, author of Power to Save the World: The Truth about Nuclear Energy
Ben Heard, director of Think Climate Consulting and a principal author of Zero Carbon Options
Margaret Harding, principal at 4 Factor Consulting
Steve Aplin, who blogs at Canadian Energy Issues
Paul Lorenzini, who was the CEO at NuScale Power from 2008-2012
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:28:36 — 40.7MB)
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The atom (fracturing) saved my Mum’s life.
They had been pecking melanomas out of her, where they could get to the damn things, until one showed up where they were snookered. Cant get a scalpel in there.
Not sure – Cobalt something – they set up some jigs and strapped her in. The Gamma Rays made her sick and she tells me it would have been a double bummer to put up with the illness only to get told you are gonna die soon anyhow.
Thanks to Gamma Rays my beloved Mum will be radiating Love and Light on the planet for a good few years yet.
God Bless Becquerel !!
Mark
I think congratulations are in order to all the anti nuclear greens:
We hit the CO2 400 ppm today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/science/earth/carbon-dioxide-level-passes-long-feared-milestone.html?hp&_r=0
Special mention to Germany, the pure, and their clean coal, clean arsenic, clean whatever approach.
I’m not sure if it will do much good, but for what it’s worth, I’ve started a petition calling on the Sydney Film Festival to reconsider its decisions concerning the documentaries it will be showing this year, and include Pandora’s Promise. The response from them so far after the issue was raised on their facebook page was simply to declare that it was not the policy of the management of the SFF to discuss the reasoning behind the exclusion of any particular film (in the past they hace been happy to show anti-nuclear themed documentaries, and this year they will be showing the anti-nuclear themes feature film ‘Land of Hope’). The petition is here:
https://www.causes.com/actions/1751677-screen-pandoras-promise
The facebook page created to support the campaign is here:
http://www.facebook.com/groups/111766325694473/?notif_t=group_r2j
Re: “The response from them so far after the issue was raised on their facebook page was simply to declare that it was not the policy of the management of the SFF to discuss the reasoning behind the exclusion of any particular film (in the past they hace been happy to show anti-nuclear themed documentaries, and this year they will be showing the anti-nuclear themes feature film ‘Land of Hope’)”
If you REALLY want to stir some media attention and controversy out of the shadows, headline your petition under your cogent quote above with the non-PC assertion that the Festival is a bunch of ivory-tower hypocrites.
Good luck,
James Greenidge
Queens NY
My petition was removed from the Causes site without explanation. I’ve launched another one on change.org.
http://www.change.org/petitions/sydney-film-festival-organisers-screen-pandora-s-promise-at-the-2013-sydney-film-festival?utm_campaign=share_button_action_box&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=share_petition
One comment about something Rod said…
Arkansas Nuclear, Unit 2 is already back in service. Rod seemed to imply in the podcast that both ANO units are going to be down for a while.
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/reactor-status/2013/20130510ps.html#r4
I am also hopeful that the NRC will allow SONGS Unit 2 to return to service at reduced power later this year. I believe the NRC has indicated that the restart plan does not pose a risk to safety, but they have yet to give full approval for restart.
Crystal RIver and Kewaunee, RIP…
@Pete51 – Thank you for the correction. I have not been following ANO as closely as I should have.
I may have to produce a new version of the show; I made at least one other mistake when I said that the French push to nuclear energy started in 1993 vice 1973. I knew that, I just flubbed.
@ Pete51
RIP Kewaunee ?
I am not so sure. Of the 3 strategies to decommission, the SAFSTOR approach has been selected.
Kewaunee has many years of ‘sit and wait’ before any irreversible actions are done to the facility. It could be fired up again in no time when natural gas prices go up again as Rod is predicting (within a year)
But the NRC will surely find a way to stall this perfect plant to come back online quickly once a decision is made to reserve the decommisionning.
That is great news to hear Daniel. I have not been following the Kewaunee plant closely but this is at least a bit of a silver lining.
I am not so sure about being able to start up the plant “in no time”. Obviously, the longer the plant sits idle, the harder it will be to restart. Below are a few questions that I really don’t know the answer to, but which will need to be addressed before any restart could even be considered.
Are they going to keep 4 or 5 shifts of qualified reactor operators on site to support a restart?
If not, are they going to keep enough training assets on hand to train a new batch of operators? Nuclear plant operators need to be licensed by the NRC.
Is plant management going to keep up the QA program to ensure critical systems are kept in operable condition? The QA program will need to address maintenance and testing requirements, as well as emergency preparedness staffing and training, and a bunch of other stuff I can’t even think of right now.
I am not saying it will be impossible to bring the plant back at some future date. However, SAFSTOR does not necessarily mean capable of quickly loading the fuel back in the reactor and restarting. A conscious decision will need to be made by management to allow for that possibility, which means spending on upkeep to keep the plant in an operable condition. This includes keeping adequate staffing of highly trained and qualified personnel. As I state above, I really don’t know how much effort management is going to spend to keep the options open. If anyone knows, I would be happy to learn.
@Pete51
You make some excellent points. If Dominion was willing to invest the kind of money to keep the option of restarting the plant available, one wonders why they would not also keep on running to produce electricity.
Of course, if the plant remains off of the grid and a few other things happen, the resulting supply-demand balance might result in enough price escalation to encourage utility buyers to sign the kind of long term power purchase agreement that would make the investment in a restart viable.
The process would not be all that quick; it would be more analogous to what Browns Ferry had to do, but it would be cheaper than building a new plant from scratch.