Atomic Insights

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

Russia's New Year Gift to Nuclear Power – Another Natural Gas Cutoff

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Though I often describe Russia as a nation of skilled chess players to my colleagues as I attempt to remind them that Russia’s “Great Power” aspirations did not start or end with the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, even good chess players can make short sighted moves.

This morning, Russia, after another round of failed negotiations with Ukraine, has once again begun to cut off deliveries of natural gas. Gazprom, of course, claims that it is simply reducing the portion of its exports destined for Ukraine, but since the pipes still go through Ukraine before they get to the rest of Europe, the reduction in supply has the very real potential for causing some economic disruption in all of Western Europe.

From my point of view, there are few actions that do a better job of getting people to listen to the good news about nuclear power than heavy-handed natural gas supply cutoffs. Even nations that do not have an indigenous supply of commercial nuclear fuel should recognize that there are potential energy security benefits available from basing a large portion of their electrical power supplies on fission.

The important point to share is that it is relatively simple to store enough fuel to last several years. All that is needed is a secure building no bigger than a two truck fire station. With a fuel like natural gas, storage for more than a few weeks is quite problematic. Naftogaz, the owner and operator of Ukraine’s natural gas network, claims a total storage capacity of 32 billion cubic meters. That is technically enough to supply Ukraine’s needs for about 6 months, but the last time that Russia cut off shipments, customers started feeling the pain of shortages in just a couple of days.

The negotiating brinkmanship that is possible with gas is much less likely with commercial nuclear fuel. This gas supply interruption, like the one that occurred in 2006, may capture sufficient media attention to remind people that there is a nuclear option that enables a strong negotiation position with fuel suppliers. Perhaps German leaders will reconsider the country’s decision to prematurely shutter its well maintained and operated nuclear power plants. It might help them to remind their citizens that the political decision to limit their total lifetime power output was originally negotiated by a man who now works for the Russian gas company, not someone who was interested in Germany’s long term energy security.

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  1. Rod this one of the reasons that Russia is building *several* new gas pipelines that bypass Ukraine. Instead of having their traditional pipeline network in series, they are moving to a parallel network (to stretch the electrical diagram metaphor a bit).
    From Russia’s pov, they have no choice. The only problem they’ve had is with Ukraine, not other country. Additionally, they want to be the conduit for gas from the countries east of the Caspian. To do this, to play the role in fact that Ukraine has, they need to be able to deliver Kazakstan and Tajikistan’s natural gas to their customers with no hold ups. Thus, in part, the new Baltic and Beylorussian gas lines.
    The irony of all this is that Russia is trying to hinder nuclear development in Western Europe because they know nuclear competes with their revenue stream from gas. So they are out to kill it. The irony continues because they know countries like Belarus and Ukraine are bad revenue stream suppliers because of their very week economies. But that’s not ‘ironic’, that’s economics…
    …indeed..so Russia, even TODAY, is fast organizing the building on nuclear power plants in: Belarus and Ukraine! Europeans won’t buy Russia’s VVERs but Ukraine will. So they are purposely destroying the rather weak Ukraine gas market by selling them billions of dollars of VVERs and then allowing the Russians to shift the gas to Germany and France and Austria.
    Strange but True!
    Happy New Years!
    D

  2. And what will Obama do about this? cave in to Russia, the Islamic fascists and Red China, appoint anti-nuke NRC commissioners, stymie new nuke growth in the US, promote useless solar and wind power.

  7. I wonder if the right-wing troll is especially upset because you linked to Steph’s blog (she has some rather anti-American and pro-Iranian views, and is the only blogger I’ve seen use the word “Eurabia” who wasn’t an Islamophobe or someone writing about Islamophobes).
    Since she describes her politics as anarchist, I very much expected her to oppose nuclear power (because nuclear has a reputation as something which must be Big and Centralized – and therefore not compatible with anarchism). She pleasantly surprised me…

    • The link to Steph’s blog doesn’t work now, as she split her blog, with the original URL being used only for her self-defence related posts. “Resisting Russian Imperium” is now at Viva l’Anarchia.