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What nuclear renaissance?

By Kennedy Maize

Remember the nuclear power renaissance coming any day soon now? Fugetaboudit.

While the stars seemed aligned for new nuclear power in the U.S. in 2005 when Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, it’s all turned brown and runny. The promise of some $15 billion in loan guarantees for new nukes in the U.S. in the subsequent four years turned into fool’s gold. While the cost for new nukes escalated dramatically, the Bush administration dragged its feet on loan guarantees. Nothing new has happened so far in the Obama regime.

As the promise of the 2005 act unfolded – very, very slowly — the world economy collapsed, The prospects that the private sector in the U.S. would finance new, untested nuclear plants with ever-rising price tags and uncertain markets essentially vanished. Nothing was working for the U.S. nukes. The financial markets disappeared. The regulators – the Nuclear Regulatory Commission – were characteristically slow in responding to new, allegedly-standardized, reactor designs. The U.S. Department of Energy was typically feckless in implementing the largely-incoherent 2005 energy act.

Meanwhile, the world nuclear energy industry – the French, for the most part – were establishing that they knew far less about nuclear engineering and economics than they had projected to the rest of the world over decades. Their hubris faltered in Finland, and followed in Flamanville, France.

The undoing of the French approach to the nuclear renaissance has come at the Olkiluuto project, adding a third reactor at an existing site. Areva, the French nuclear reactor builder, has been building a newly designed, 1,600-MW evolutionary pressurized water reactor at the site, with a sister station underway at the existing Electricity de France site at Flamanville. The new reactor is Areva’s nuclear future. It’s an uncertain prospect.

Areva has touted the new design as more robust, less likely to have accidents, and more capable of accident response relying on passive features such as gravity, convention, and natural circulation. While not yet approved in the U.S., Areva is pushing its third-generation reactor design to U.S. utilities, arguing that it is the only one of the new generation of reactors that is actually under construction. Baltimore-based Constellation Energy wants to put an Areva unit at its existing Calvert Cliff site on the Chesapeake Bay. But Areva’s pitch that it is the only “real” reactor among the contenders for the nuke revival may not be a really good sales point.

The reactor in Finland has long been over budget and behind schedule. The New York Times reported recently that the price of the reactor, originally pegged at $4.2 billion, is now at least 50% higher. Originally set to start up this summer, Areva is no longer willing to predict when the plant will generate commercial electricity. A clone of the “standardized” plant in France is also over budget and lagging in its schedule, the Times reported.

Noted energy economist Paul Joskow, no enemy of nuclear power, told the Times, “The rollout of new nuclear reactors will be a good deal slower than a lot of people were assuming.” The renaissance, at least in the U.S. and Europe, is largely stagnant. China and India may be a different story.

There are many aspects to why the dream of a new nuclear power revival in the West is unlikely. In the U.S., the notion of “standardized” plants is confounding. U.S. advocates and vendors of new nuclear reactors have cited the French experience, where the state-owned utility, EdF, built only one generation after another of largely cookie-cutter reactors (based on Westinghouse technology) as it rolled out its fleet of nuclear plant.

The U.S., by contrast, built one-of-a-kind plants, even with the same company’s technology. That, it turned out, was a big mistake, vastly increasing costs, complication reactor operations, and otherwise making life difficult for nuclear utilities and the federal regulators. The proliferation of nuclear technologies in the U.S. made a major contribution to the collapse of the nuclear power plant market in the late 1970s, although that was only a part of the problem.

So the U.S. vendors, as they contemplated the possibility of a new generation of reactors in the 21^st century at the end of the 20^th century, pledged themselves to standardization “down to the wallpaper and carpet” for new plants. Good idea. Hard to implement in practice.

What has that term “standardization” meant? The NRC has approve a handful of new generation of “standardized plant” designs over the past 20 years, suggesting that “standardized” means a bunch of different designs, varying by vendor. The agency has approved two pressurized water reactor designs, both from Westinghouse, two boiling water reactor designs, both from General Electric, and is considering a third PWR, Areva’s design. The Areva plant has not yet won approval for construction in the U.S.

Once construction begins, many nuclear engineers suggest that the notion of “standardization” will undergo another redefinition. “You can’t predict what real challenges a site will present. You can’t predict what will happen when it comes time to turn a blueprint into a real plant,” said one nuclear engineer. “’Standardization’ is a political term. It makes no engineering sense.”

The case of Areva’s Finnish plant, according to the Times, demonstrates that conundrum. The company has acknowledged serious errors in the analysis of the geology of the site and the construction of the basemat – the foundation – of the giant plant. There have also been errors in construction of the reactor vessel. According to the newspaper, Areva has acknowledged that the first-of-a-kind plant will come in at $8 billion, double the original price. Areva blames Finnish regulators for the delay and cost hikes. That’s probably bogus; the Finns have a worldwide reputation for savvy and effective nuclear regulation.

In France, according to the newspaper, regulators have found fault with the concrete basemat pourings and rebar reinforcements at the new plant. The state regulators have also charged that welders working on the reactor containment were not nuclear-qualified, the newspaper reported.

All of this is reminiscent of the bad old days of the 1970s and the first boom in nuclear power construction. A lot of bad work got done, much of it caught by nuclear regulators, but too much overlooked.

Today, far fewer new nuclear generating projects are proposed, and even fewer are underway. But the performance suggests that too few lessons from the past have sunk in.

Seeing the events of the past and the recent events, I suspect that investors will perceive what is going on in the current boomlet unfavorably. They will be unwilling to commit scarce funds in the midst of a worldwide recession to such questionable investments. Bye, bye, nuclear pie.

Polling on warming no surprise

By Kennedy Maize

As a democrat (that’s with a small “d” and a large “D”), I have a great deal of faith in the wisdom of the American people. That’s why I’m not surprised that the hysteria over alleged man-made global warming is in rapid decline in public opinion polls. It’s no longer in the top 10, or event the top 15, of issues that Americans care about.

Folks are much more concerned about their jobs, their investments, their retirement, and the prospects for the America economy. Well they should. Concerns about global warming, despite the intellectually-dishonest hypes of former vice president Al Gore, just aren’t cutting it with the public, according to a series of recent, reputable polls. Folks don’t care.

But this view among the general public, which has as much scientific backbone as the alarums of the climate catastrophists, doesn’t seem to have made much of a dent in the coverage of the issue by the conventional print and broadcast media, or the views of the policy elite, also known as opinion leaders, particularly those in Congress.

There are exceptions. John Tierney, the excellent and experienced science reporter for the New York Times, has not swallowed the man-made cooling Kool Aide, and gives skeptics an opportunity to make a contrary case on his blog. He’s not an advocate in any scenario, as befits his role as a journalist.

Generally, the media, policymakers in Washington (including electric industry trade groups who are trying to arbitrage damage), and the staff of members of Congress in both parties, seem to have accepted the conventional wisdom, and abandoned any idea of serious probing. At the Electric Power conference in Chicago this May, I heard a couple of smart industry analysts sign onto the entirely unproven hypothesis that there is some sort of physical inertia built into the climate system, and we are now seeing the effects of that in terms of California droughts and wildfires.

That’s entirely bogus, regardless of who is pushing the notion (Obama science advisor John Holdren?). How does the inertia show up in measurable terms? The global climate, by all credible measures, including those of the federal government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has declined over the last decade, and has not risen significantly since the 1950s. Nor is there any evidence – only assertions — of an inertial temperature increase.

A word about John Holdren. He’s on record going back to the 1960s as an environmental catastrophist. He and Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb, circa 1969) together ardently argued that economic growth and advancement of technology would lead to greater worldwide poverty and starvation. They are both neo-Malthusians, and have been proven consistently wrong at every turn. Yet some environmentalists, including those in the Obama administration, apparently revere their work.

Now Holdren is advising the White House on issues he has never gotten right. I confess I don’t get it. I can’t imagine a worse choice for the president’s science advisor (well, maybe Paul Ehrlich would be worse).

Similarly, I heard folks who should know better at the EP meeting in Chicago cite Al Gore’s entirely discredited, hysterical projections of drastic sea level increases caused by warming. Even if the models that Gore relies upon are close to accurate, the results are sea level rises in inches, not the multiple feet that Gore claims and too many folks in the industry have apparently decided not to challenge. Scientists have thoroughly debunked Gore’s sea level claims, yet he continues to advance them, without challenge.

Gore also continues to claim that global warming today is influencing hurricane frequency and strength. That’s also bogus. None of the major hurricane researchers in the U.S. buy that analysis, including at least one major researcher who has recanted on his original support for the hypothesis that warming is boosting hurricane activity. Nonetheless, Gore continues to push that case.

There is a political correctness aspect to warming politics in Washington, where one dare not suggest that the conventional, politically-approved, view of climate science is flawed. As a result, advocates of renewable energy and opponents of fossil fuels are driving the policy debate in ways that I believe will be disastrous: enormous increases in the costs of electricity with no benefits to the environment. Based on what I saw in Chicago — the reluctance of power generators to push back — I fear that the outcome I suggested is being teed-up in Congress.

Fortunately, the naked politics of special interests will make it nearly impossible for the Obama administration to implement any kind of serious CO2 reduction policy anytime soon. That’s a good thing. Congress is unlikely to go very far to limit existing coal-fired electric generation. Half the states in the U.S. have significant coal deposits. That equals 50 senators, plus a few on ideological grounds.

On top of that, other industries that are carbon emitters, including steel, cement, and cars, will also make their views known to Congress, as American Electric Power CEO Mike Morris made clear at the Electric Power meeting in Chicago. The likely outcome, for at least the next year or so, and I’m guessing four years or so, is gridlock.

I also suspect that as congressional staffers dig deeply into the problems of the unpredictability and remote locale of wind and solar, and the need to built lots of visible, expensive, high-voltage transmission over thousands of miles, a lot of the sizzle will depart from the argument. It will begin to concentrate more on the steak and the potatoes.

Nuke Waste Confidence: A Confluence of Ironies

By Kennedy Maize

Here’s an interesting set of ironies. The Republican majority on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has taken a position that, at least formally, blocks new nuclear reactors in the U.S., while the sole Democrat on the commission, Chairman Greg Jaczko, widely viewed as opposed to the agenda of the nuclear industry, has voted against the GOP majority and for a more open door to new nuclear reactors.

The formal issue is the NRC’s “waste confidence” finding. This is a legally-required ruling where the NRC must say that the U.S. has reasonable plans to store spent nuclear fuel in a way that assures public safety. A year ago, the NRC agreed that this was the case, approving a draft statement by the NRC staff. The staff ruling came in the face of serious doubts about the viability of the Yucca Mountain, Nev., project, the sole approach of the U.S. government toward spent nuclear fuel storage, other than on-site storage in cooling pools or dry casks.

In late September, the only two Republican members of the NRC – former chairman Dale Klein (a favorite of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) and Commissioner Kristine Svinicki (an aide to former Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig)– voted to reject the NRC’s staff’s draft 2008 finding, based on the decision of the Obama administration to dump the Yucca Mountain, Nev., waste dump.

That the vote was partisan is not in doubt. While Jaczko, a disciple of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, has been an opponent of the Yucca Mountain project, the Republicans in the Senate and on the NRC, have supported the project.

The NRC has two vacancies, both set for Democrats, but the Obama administration has not moved to fill the. Under law, the NRC consists of three members of the president’s party, and two members of the minority party.

The NRC waste confidence ruling is necessary before U.S. companies can move forward to build new nuclear projects. The NRC in 1990 formally approved a waste confidence finding. But Klein and Svinicki voted in October to revisit the issue, given that the Obama administration has essentially pulled the funding plug on the Yucca Mountain project, providing no substantial money for the project in the Department of Energy’s latest budget proposal.

Klein, NRC chairman during the George W. Bush administration, said, “I strongly believe that the commission should give the public an opportunity to comment on whether and, if so, how the administration’s recent announcements of changes in the nation’s high-level waste repository program should affect the proposed update.” Does the public have any significant views on the Yucca Mountain issue or the nation’s nuclear waste policy? Doubtful.

Jaczko, in a separate statement a day later, said he supports the earlier, October 2008, NRC staff decision, noting that the “staff paper makes it clear that the commission’s waste confidence decision is not based on the Yucca Mountain program, but rather that safe disposal for high-level waste and spent fuel in a mined geological repository is technically feasible.”

The nuclear industry lobby treated the NRC decision as a temporary anomaly. Steve Kraft, the Nuclear Energy Institute’s chief waste lobbyist, told The Energy Daily, the NRC decision “was not something we were expecting, but it is not the end of the world.” Kraft predicted that the NRC, after getting new information, presumably from the industry, “will come up with maybe not exactly the same answer, but certainly an answer that satisfies the question, and have the rule in place fairly soon, hopefully sometime in the first quarter of 2010.”

Kraft may be spinning a desired outcome of which he has no real knowledge.

Said a long-time observer of the nuclear industry, “I’d be surprised if the NRC can deal with this issue in 2010, not just in the first quarter. Klein wants to leave the commission, the White House hasn’t come up with Democrats to fill vacant seats, and the waste issue is on the way-far-back burner, where Harry Reid wants to keep it. In the meantime, there doesn’t seem to be much interest on Wall Street in financing new nukes. Don’t hold your breath on this one.”

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What nuclear renaissance?

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