There's a lot of people there who want electricity
The US nuclear industry wants to build plants everywhere. Consider the latest news from New Dehli where a delegation of 38 US nuclear firms met with their counterparts from India this week. The goal is to build nuclear plants there to meet that country's enormous demand for electricity.
India has a population of over one billion people and is expected to top 1.6 billion people by 2050 exceeding population estimates for China by that time. By comparison population in the US will grow from about 300 million to about 420 million. While the US economy is one of the most energy intensive in the world, the total demand for electricity in China and India will outclass any other nation for the rest of the 21st century. If you are in the business of building 1,000 Mw or bigger nuclear power plants to make electricity, these are the countries where you want to be selling your expertise.
The Hindustan Times reports that Tim Richards, an executive for General Electric, told a conference on Indo-US nuclear cooperation this week, "We know India's need for electric power." He added there are "huge opportunities" in civilian nuclear cooperation between India and the US. No kidding.
At the same time these meetings were occurring in India, other US nuclear energy executives cautioned their firms can't spread themselves too thin trying to build plants in the US and India. USEC CEO John Welch told an industry trade group,
"In negotiating such agreements, we must remember that the presence of a vibrant US nuclear energy manufacturing and supply infrastructure is essential if we are to successfully influence nuclear energy and non-proliferation policies in other countries."
Readers are reminded that USEC would like to sell uranium fuel for nuclear reactors to plants in the US. According to the firm's investor relations web page,
USEC Inc. (NYSE:USU) is a leading supplier of enriched uranium fuel for commercial nuclear power plants. USEC operates the only uranium enrichment facility in the United States and supplies more than half of the U.S. market and more than a quarter of the world market. Annual revenues are about $1.6 billion.
It is no surprise that USEC apparently isn't interested in waiting for the rest of the 21st century to sell nuclear fuel to reactor companies. However, others are chasing this market. Companies represented at the meeting in New Dehli included ATK, ConverDyn, EnergySolutions, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Westinghouse. Later this month Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman is scheduled to speak at a March 20-21 conference in New Delhi sponsored by the U.S. Energy Association about investment opportunities in the South Asian power markets.
While the US delegation was exploring new business opportunities abroad, at the same time an industry trade group meeting in Washington, DC, told the Department of Energy the federal government must implement loan guarantees with favorable terms for construction of new nuclear plants. Up to $9 billion in loan guarantees are on the table.
However, at a House Appropriations Committee hearing this week, Energy secretary Samuel Bodman got a skeptical reception to his request for the $9 billion in loan guarantees. Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Oh) wanted to know why the government was putting all its loan eggs in one energy basket. He said, "My concern is that loan guarantees are too focused on the nuclear industry and not on some of these emerging technologies." This is a common refrain from House Democrats who are now in charge there. They want more money poured into alternative energy sources like solar, wind, and, of course, ethanol, which generates more votes than energy in farm states.
While the fate of the loan guarantees was hung up in Congress, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued a permit for a new nuclear plant to Exelon Corp in terms of location, but did not approve construction of a specific reactor. The permit does not mean Exelon can build a new reactor at the site of its existing 1,043-megawatt Clinton Power Station, about 160 miles southwest of Chicago. What NRC approved is an "early site permit" for a new reactor at the Clinton site, an environmental review that clears the site for use as a nuclear reactor for 20 years. Exelon still has to go through the lengthy and expensive process of applying for a construction and operating license for a new reactor if it decides to build one.
The NRC is expected to make a similar decision in the next few weeks on an Entergy Corp request for an additional reactor at its Grand Gulf site in Mississippi.
All this activity has finally captured some interest in California which has a law on the books that bans new construction of nuclear plants. Assemblyman Chuck DeVore introduced legislation that would repeal the ban citing the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions. However, the big electricity producers in California said they aren't ready to go to the public with a request to build nuclear plants.
"One of them asked me not to do it," DeVore said. "They said 'We're not ready for that fight yet.' I think the time is right. I don't see how we make our numbers (reducing greenhouse gases) without nuclear being a sizeable component."
California's big three investor-owned utilities are Pacific Gas & Electric Co., a subsidiary of PG&E Corp., Southern California Edison, a subsidiary of Edison International, and San Diego Gas & Electric Co., a subsidiary of Sempra Energy.
PG&E CEO Peter Darbee said his company would welcome a partner to invest in nuclear generation outside of California. Maybe he should try India?
1 comment:
First of all, let me say, that I consider myself an environmentalist, and I am not a proponent of our current nuclear power industry that is based on uranium/plutonium as it's source. There are plenty of sound reasons not to ever build any more of them. Poliferation and waste being the two main reasons, but also because uranium itself is in short supply just like oil and barely 1% of it is utilized by current technology.
I love photovoltaics, and I think they have a huge place in our future. However, even moderate 2%growth figures in electrical demand indicate that an an additional 6,000 gigawatts of clean power will need to be added by 2030, and 12,000 GW by 2050, and that is in addition to replacing the dirty coal plants we use today. This indicates it will take all available technological solutions to solve this problem, wind, solar, and yes, nuclear. So, the question then becomes, what kind of nuclear? Today's designs simply are not adequate.
But, what if a technology existed right now today, with the potential sustainablity to solve most of our energy problems, yet virtually nobody has heard of it? What if there was a radically different nuclear reactor design that solved most if not all of the problems inherent in todays existing designs? By using thorium instead of uranium, poliferation issues melt away. By using all of the fuel instead of only 1% as current designs do, it solves the waste storage problems. Plus, it can burn up our current waste, thereby eliminating the need for Yucca Mountain to find a place to store it.
Pie in the sky or too far into the future you say? What if that really wasn't the case, and it had already been designed built and test fired for almost a decade in the 1960's. What if the reasons research and development was stopped on it since then was because it did not produce weapons grade plutonium, or have poliferation issues, and back in the 60's people actually wanted the bomb grade material it did not produce? Dual military use drove early reactor designs, after all.
What if our nuclear industry giants like Westinghouse or GE were not currently interested in reviving it, because is only loaded with fuel at startup, and never needs any thereafter. Currently the nuclear industry does not make any profit from selling reactor designs, but rather from selling the customer the fuel, handling the waste, reprocessing, etc, and this design virtually wipes out what is now the only profitable end of their business.
What if the holder of the patent on the light water reactor, Dr. Weinburg, former director of Oak Ridge National Labratory, strongly believed that this technology was the direction we should be going? Yet the current Generation 4 DOE reactor development initiative dropped it's only funding for this technology, claiming it was "too far off" -a rationale that is pretty difficult to understand compared to what funding was kept, considering it was the only technology on their list that had already been successfully built and tested, and all the major technological issues had already been resolved by Oak Ridge National Labratory.
What if this design could be drug out of mothballs, and a modular commercial design could be produced from it in just a few short years, instead of decades?
Pretty much all the information on this subject can be found here:
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com
Before making up your mind that nuclear power will never be in the cards, I strongly encourage everyone to take the time to look into the links found there and inform others about it. If after looking into it yourself, you find I am wrong on any point, or misrepresenting this in any way, please let me know. I am convinced that this is a nuclear technology that even an environmentalist could come to love, and it is a crime against our national interest that almost no research is even being done on it.
Liquid Flouride Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) Invented in the USA in 1954
Not yet commercialized, even after 2 successful MSRs were built & operated
Meltdown proof
Does not produce weapons grade plutonium
Has inherent nonproliferation features
Thousands of years of energy
Its wastes are simpler and less toxic than current nuclear wastes
Only hundreds of years of storage versus thousands for the current wastes
Can burn the existing wastes (spent fuel)!
Higher thermal efficiencies (operates at a "Red Heat"; ~700° C [1260° F])
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2006/10/coal-chernobyl-twice-week-and-coal-9.html
Releases in 1982 from worldwide combustion of 2800 million tons of coal totaled 3640 tons of uranium (containing 51,700 pounds of uranium-235) and 8960 tons of thorium. The population gets 100 times more radiation from a coal plant than from a nuclear plant. So in 2004 by burning 4.6 billions tons of coal, we released 5980 tons of uranium into the air and 14720 tons of Thorium. This is like 80 truck size dirty nuclear bombs releasing 1 ton of radioactive material every day.
Currently, almost all new power generation on the utilities drawing boards specify coal as their fuel source. Wouldn't we all be a lot better off utilizing the thorium energy in the coal, than wasting it by burning the coal itself?
I applaud Mr. DeVore's efforts, but only if there could be something added to his legislation to encourage building a better technology reactor, such as the LFMSR, rather than merely lifting the ban and thereby encouraging more of the deeply flawed uranium designs to be built.
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