Supply Chains

While the vast power of one form of energy below Earth’s crust (tectonic plate shifts) doomed the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan last March, using another form—heat and steam—is getting renewed attention in the wake of the Japanese meltdown.

Uncertainty about China’s role in world trade and its current monopoly over critical rare earth minerals continues to roil supply chains in energy technology markets. Will the World Trade Organization bring China into the fold, or will China ignore the international forum that it lobbied hard to join several years ago?

Enterprise resource planning software has swept the power industry, promising to improve coordination and management. Has it lived up to the hype? One ERP vendor says the programs often underperform.

While China seems determined to exploit its current control over the market for rare earths and other minerals critical to high-tech and green energy technologies, and while governments engage in conventional hand-wringing and head-scratching, markets appear to be reacting in the ways that markets are supposed to react.

The devastation in Japan has focused new attention on supply chain issues and the impact of the partial collapse of that country’s manufacturing infrastructure on both Japanese imports and exports.

We’ve heard—endlessly, it seems at times—about "peak oil," the idea that the world is rapidly running out of oil and will face catastrophic consequences. Now talk is emerging about "peak coal."

The long-struggling uranium business, hoping that demand for nuclear fuel will increase, is slowly stretching its muscles and strengthening exploration and production efforts in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Critical minerals—such as rare earth metals—are important to many new energy technologies. However, the U.S. Department of Energy is concerned that foreign control of supply, particularly by China, could limit the ability of these technologies to develop fully, so the DOE is developing a strategy to keep the supply chain open. Meanwhile, some analysts say China is playing a losing game with its hold on the minerals.

Uranium remains plentiful around the world, says a new resource study from MIT, obviating the need to "close" the nuclear fuel cycle by reprocessing and developing breeder reactors.

The prospects of a worldwide nuclear power renaissance have spawned many plans for increasing uranium enrichment capacity. Could those plans swamp the world in SWUs?