Atomic Insights

Atomic energy technology, politics, and perceptions from a nuclear energy insider who served as a US nuclear submarine engineer officer

Carnival

Carnival of Nuclear Blogs #308

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Get on the nuclear technology bandwagon. It's so big, there's plenty of room for all!

Get on the nuclear technology bandwagon. It’s so big, there’s plenty of room for all!

Every week, a loosely aligned group of writers and thought leaders pick their favorite recently produced piece about nuclear energy. One member of the group volunteers to put together a single highlights article that we call the Carnival of Nuclear Blogs and publishes that article on their own blog.

Sometimes it seems like a little bit of a chore, especially during a week when there was not much writing going on, for whatever reason.

Other times it is a lot of fun to solicit articles, read through the work that others are producing, perhaps find a few common themes and produce a useful summary of the week’s nuclear news that reminds everyone of the wide variety of interesting topics under the general heading of nuclear technology.

This week falls into the later category.

Atomic Insights is pleased to host the 308th Carnival of Nuclear Blogs, which includes the following diverse contributions from individuals who each recognize that the reactions, emanations, and raw power contained inside the nuclei of certain isotopes have the collective power to change the world in numerous positive, constructive ways. (Of course, we acknowledge there are legitimate cautions associated with those same aspects of isotopes.)

Without further “throat clearing” verbosity, here is this week’s carnival.

From Jim Conca on his Forbes Energy blog

Is Fracking For Gas As Dirty As Coal?

Tougher environmental regulations, a flood of cheap natural gas from fracking, and a sudden decrease in demand from China, has pushed natural gas even further in replacing coal in generating electricity. But fears about fracking’s effects on the environment has spawned bans on fracking in some states. A new study by the University of Texas at Arlington demonstrates that groundwater quality changes alongside the expansion of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing but also suggests that some potentially hazardous effects may dissipate over time.

Andy Dawson, an energy sector systems consultant and former nuclear engineer, produced a guest post on Euan Mearns’s Energy Matters. (We hope this is just the first of many Carnival entries from this source.)

Decarbonising UK Power Generation – The Nuclear Option

“How to decarbonise UK Power generation is a topic of heated debate, with renewables enthusiasts often keen to argue that there are a range of obstacles to the use of nuclear generation to meet more than a small proportion of total demand. Reasons cited are availability of space/sites, grid integration and the challenges of meeting variable demand. So, is an all-nuclear UK grid (with the small sleight of hand of pumped storage hydro in support) potentially viable?

Andy sets out an argument that it is indeed so, and more so that it comfortably outperforms any current carbon intensity targets.

From Gail Marcus on her excellent Nuke Power Talk

Nuclear Firsts, DNFSB, and More: A Month of Personal Milestones

At Nuke Power Talk, Gail Marcus reports that her 2010 book, “Nuclear Firsts: Milestones on the Road to Nuclear Power Development,” has been significantly updated and was just published as an e-book. She also reports that she has been nominated by President Obama for a position on the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.

From Dan Yurman‘s ever valuable Neutron Bytes.

Texas firm files with NRC for interim storage site license for spent nuclear fuel

Waste Control Specialists (WCS), which already operates a radioactive waste disposal site in west Texas, has filed a license application with the NRC to build and operate an interim storage site for the nation’s commercial spent nuclear fuel.

Aside: It’s time to get rid of the notion that “we don’t know what to do with the waste.” We know how to safely handle and store radioactive material. Some of that material, especially the lightly used fuel assemblies from currently operating reactors, should eventually be recycled into new fuel forms so that the 95% of initial potential energy that remains after its first use can benefit humanity.

Even if the reuse occurs in the distant future, it would be selfish of us to attempt to make it more difficult than necessary for future generations to capture the readily apparent benefits. Safe, surface, monitored “interim” storage is all we need to worry about today. We must be humble and stop trying to impose our worries, fears and inadequate technology on our children and grandchildren. End Aside.

From Meredith Angwin‘s exceptional example of local nuclear energy advocacy – Yes Vermont Yankee. (I remain saddened by the fact that people in positions of responsibility and authority let those who said “No Vermont Yankee” win by closing the plant many years before it’s natural end of life.)

Cinco De Bye-O at Vermont Yankee

On May 5, Cinco de Mayo, 100 people were fired at Vermont Yankee. The total number working at the plant is now 150, down from 650 three years ago. It was a sad day, but the mood among the employees was far more upbeat than I expected. There were jokes and Cinco de Bye-O parties. Mainly, the people of Vermont Yankee focused on their pride in their work at the plant. Vermont Yankee people had every reason to be proud!

Aside: I changed the submitted description of the article to use “fired” instead of laid off. Too many people have forgotten that “lay offs” was originally intended to describe a temporary condition in which employees were asked to stay home while waiting for work to return with the season or the end of a sales slump. The 100 people who left the premises of Vermont Yankee on May 5th have no prospect of returning. Their plant’s productive capacity has been destroyed. End Aside.

And from Atomic Insights, a delayed travel log about meetings and conferences during March & April.

Feeling Upbeat about Nuclear Technology’s Future

I feel better about the prospects for new nuclear technology development today (April 21) than I have for several years, based on the four conferences in four different U.S. cities I’ve attended over the past several weeks.

My travel calendar has included Washington, D.C., for the Nuclear Industry Summit / Nuclear Security Summit, New York City for the BNEF Future of Energy Summit, Atlanta for Nuclear Energy Insider’s International SMR and Advanced Reactor Summit, and Annapolis for a Technical Meeting on Nuclear Energy and Cyber Security sponsored by INMM and American Nuclear Society.

Aside: While I will continue to attend meetings because it’s my job to share thoughts and observations with you, I hope that people in the nuclear enterprise become so busy with moving forward in design, licensing, manufacturing and construction that the meeting calendar thins out a bit. There’s a time, place and need for talk and information sharing, but those activities need to be accompanied by plenty of action so we have new things to talk about. End Aside.

If I missed any great content from the past week, please feel free to let me know and I will provide an updated version.

Note about the image accompanying this post: The little girl in the photo is one of my three granddaughters. Last week, I brought a posse of four ladies (wife, daughter and two granddaughters) with me to have lunch with some friends and fellow nuclear experts (Dave Rossin and Tom Blees). Besides treating them to lunch, I felt my travel partners deserved a payback for enduring the trip and our discussion. Dave, a Sarasota resident, treated us to his expert commentary about the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus Museum.

We’re not just nuclear geeks.

Carnival of nuclear energy bloggers #303

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It’s time for another weekly roundup of the best of the pronuclear blogs.

Last week included the fifth anniversary of the March 11, 2011 twin natural disaster that included a 9.0 earthquake and a 15 meter tall tsunami. Those two closely linked forces of nature resulted in widespread infrastructure devastation over a 150 km long swath of the northeast Japanese coast. As of February 10, 2016, authorities in Japan have identified 15,894 bodies while 2,562 people remain unaccounted for.

Of those victims, not a single one came as a result of the small amount of radioactive contamination spread over a relatively narrow wedge of territory inland from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station. That station, located on the devastated coast, survived the earthquake and mostly survived the tsunami.

Three of the six nuclear power units on the site, however, were operating at full power before being shut down at the time of the earthquake. They slowly succumbed to the effects of internally generated heat after the earthquake and tsunami knocked out the electrical power needed for their primary and secondary means of cooling and because the operators at the station had been trained to wait for permission before releasing high pressure steam and gases inhibiting the use of a tertiary means of providing some cooling.

The fuel cores of three large nuclear reactors ended up melting to a still unknown extent, three hydrogen explosions severely damaged significant parts of the reactor buildings, and the power plant site is undergoing what will be a multi-decade long clean-up. Outside of the plant boundaries, the maximum first year radiation dose avoided by any member of the evacuated public was on the order of 20-50 mSv, about half as much as has ever been proven to cause a slight increase in the lifetime risk of contracting cancer.

Because the world’s attention was rapidly realigned from focusing on the victims of the natural disaster to fretting about the far less consequential events at the power station, far too many people around the world remember 3-11-2011 with the single word of Fukushima. It is unfortunate in the extreme that the Fukushima Frenzy overshadowed the real catastrophe and caused an enormous misalignment of resources.

Many of the entries in this week’s 303rd Carnival of Nuclear Energy Bloggers look back on the frenzy and the events of the five subsequent years to elucidate available lessons that can and should be learned.

ANS Nuclear Cafe

Japan Moving Forward – Needs Nuclear

Margaret Harding writes about the impact of the earthquake and tsunami on Japan, and explains why the island nation needs nuclear energy if it is to ever regain its place as the leading industrial manufacturer and exporter that it once was.

Atomic Power Review

Five Years from Fukushima – Where Are We Now?

In this post, Will Davis takes a look back at what has transpired since the Great Eastern Japan (Tohoku) Earthquake in 2011, compares what’s going on now to what we might have expected, parallels earlier accident events and looks toward the future.

Hiroshima Syndrome

Fukushima Commentary 3/11/16 – Fukushima at Five Years: Rampant Radiophobia Ham-strings Japan’s Recovery

Rampant radiophobia infects millions of Japanese citizens, and it is allowed to fester virtually unabated. Its impact has reached the point of national catastrophe… not one caused by Mother Nature. But rather, a calamity fostered from fear itself.

Forbes – James Conca

After Five Years, What Is The Cost Of Fukushima?

The direct costs of the Fukushima disaster will be about $15 billion in clean-up over the next 20 years and over $60 billion in refugee compensation. Replacing Japan’s 300 billion kWhs from nuclear each year with fossil fuels has cost Japan over $200 billion, mostly from fuel costs for natural gas, fuel oil and coal. This cost will at least double, and that only if the nuclear fleet is mostly restarted by 2020. Since 2011, Japan’s trade deficit has become the worst in its history, and Japan is now the second largest net importer of fossil fuel in the world, right behind China. Strangely, the costs that never materialized were the most feared, those of radiation-induced cancer and death.

Atomic Insights

Why haven’t world leaders learned the most useful lessons from Fukushima?

Of all of the costs identified by Jim Conca in his excellent summary of the costs of Fukushima after five years, more than 2/3’s could have been avoided by a more risk informed response to the event from a public health point of view. Moving people from their homes and shutting down unaffected nuclear plants for extended periods of time have imposed enormous, virtually unrecoverable costs on the people and the communities affected.

As a society, we must learn how to more effectively and efficiently deal with radiation as a hazard with known effects. That effort must include learning how to avoid overreacting.

Canadian Energy Issues

Accurate and inaccurate predictions, garbage dumping, and death threats: an easy lesson about nuclear power, still not learned after 1,827 days

Amongst the horrendous destruction in northeast Japan caused by an earthquake so strong it knocked our planet off its axis, was a predictably innocuous event that should have been recognized as a non-event. This was, of course, the meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima-Daiichi generating plant. The earthquake raised a 10 meter tsunami which when it collided with the coastline, moving at about 100 kilometers an hour, killed nearly 20,000 of our fellow human beings and made half a million homeless. It also flooded and rendered useless the backup pumps that circulate cooling water through F-D’s reactors. This caused the meltdowns.

Having studied the outcomes of other nuclear meltdowns, notably the Chalk River incident (1952), and Three Mile Island (1979), Steve Aplin quickly realized that while the destruction of three nuclear reactors would be a major problem for the company that owned them and the millions of people who relied on their power, it was little more than a local issue. The real problem at the time, as he saw it from Ottawa Canada, 13,000 kilometers away, was helping the survivors of the tsunami.

Nuke Power Talk

NRC Principles of Good Regulation: Compliments and Critiques

At Nuke Power Talk, Gail Marcus reflects on a session at NRC’s Regulatory Information Conference (RIC) this past week (March 8-10) highlighting 25 years of the Principles of Good Regulation (PGR). The speakers at the session both complimented and criticized the PGR, sometimes for the same principles! What was clear from the session and from other discussion during the meeting is that the concept of the PGR has spread and continues to spread, both in the US and abroad.

Editor’s Note: Dr. Marcus is too modest. You have to read the full article before finding out that she played a major role in writing the internationally influential Principles of Good Regulation when she was serving on Commissioner Rogers’s staff.

Yes Vermont Yankee

The Oddness at the Heart of RTO (Regional Transmission Organizations)

Meredith Angwin summarizes some of the increasingly complicated rules that have been developed to ensure reliable electricity supplies in the differently regulated “markets” that no longer have integrated monopoly utility suppliers.

295th Carnival of Nuclear Energy Blogs

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Atomic Insights is proud to be hosting the 295th weekly addition of the Carnival of Nuclear Blogs. Here are some of the highlight posts produced during the first full week of 2016. From Yes Vermont Yankee: Vermont Yankee was replaced by natural gas: Doing the numbers By: Meredith Angwin and The replacement for Vermont Yankee […]

Nuclear Energy Blog Carnival #222

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Even dedicated pro-nuclear bloggers have been known to take late summer vacations, but the calendar did not prevent the submission of a number of excellent posts to highlight in this week’s Carnival. This event circulates among the top pro-nuclear blogs, and each week it provides descriptions and links to those items submitted to the host […]