The British Return to Nuclear to Keep the Lights On

Here’s the news:

The 16-billion pound ($25.9 billion) project, which was agreed on Monday with France's EDF energy and a group of Chinese investors, aims to keep the lights on in Britain amid declining supplies of North Sea gas and rapidly escalating fuel costs.

"If people at home want to be able to keep watching the television, be able to turn the kettle on, and benefit from electricity, we have got to make these investments," Energy Secretary Ed Davey told the BBC. "It is essential to keep the lights on and to power British business."

That sounds decidedly apocalyptic, but it’s a theme picked up by other stories. Here’s The Telegraph:

During her reign [Queen Elizabeth’s], our atomic expertise, which promised a future of clean, green and affordable electricity, has been handed to foreign competitors on a plate, and Britain’s grid is now under such strain that 57 years later, we find ourselves relying on China and France to keep the lights on.

And in the same language, too, borrowed from Davey. The Telegraph story, by Michael Hanlon, is very withering about Britain’s loss of dominance in the nuclear sphere and ponders gloomily that a “communist superpower” should be doing this rather than the Brits themselves. (In another era, he would be griping about the French end of the deal.)

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Here’s the outline of the deal, from The Guardian:

Britain is to embark on building its first nuclear power station for two decades on Monday as the coalition hands a multibillion subsidy to France's EDF with help from a state-owned Chinese firm.

The two planned pressurized water reactors at Hinkley Point C, Somerset, are the first to start construction in Europe since Japan's Fukushima disaster and the first in the UK since the Sizewell B power station came online in 1995.

The Guardian being The Guardian, the nuclear energy industry is a nest of asps hissing and spitting. It all could be so much easier:

The alternative to nuclear, made to appear unthinkable by the industry's lobbying, is in fact far from inconceivable. A huge effort to improve the UK's woeful energy efficiency is the first step. The UK government currently expects electricity demand to rise by 33-66% by 2050.

…

The second step is a genuine commitment to renewable energy, youthful technologies ripe for further cost reductions in stark contrast to nuclear. Even today, once you account for the much longer time for which nuclear is promised subsidies, offshore wind costs the same and it will fall.

I can’t really speak to the British industry’s lobbying efforts, but I do know that here, the industry considers itself part of a continuum that includes energy efficiency and renewable energy. if you want to be cynical about it, and why not?, you could say that there’s money in all of it. But if you want to be a little more idealistic, you could admit that it does not hurt to pursue a full range of options to answer to climate change issues and customer awareness of them. Environmentalists get a lot of mileage out of posing an adversarial relationship between energy generators, but that’s really to charge up the troops not a viable way of doing business.

The 60-year history of the nuclear industry is one unblemished by promises kept. From "too cheap to meter" to safe as houses, every pledge has been broken.

Vicious and pestilent promise breakers – the solution is so clear to some, the government must be blind.

Or perhaps it’s just trying to keep the lights on.

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Five Nuclear News Items in the Form of a List

We don’t really do Buzzfeed style listicals here at NNN because – hmm, does tacky link bait get it? Not enough cute nuclear energy kittens? The real Buzzfeed currently has up  17 Pets Who Won’t Let You Poop In Peace (spoiler: cute kittens figure in), so the bottom of the barrel is exceptionally easy to scrape.

But I’ve noticed that the nuclear energy scene is busy lately. Let’s break out of a defensive crouch and look at some good news stories. In fact, let’s make a list  – some of these stories we’ll return to later with fully cooked posts, others may need a little more seasoning, and the rest are done-in-one, so to speak.

1. In a speech yesterday at the World Energy Congress in Daegu, South Korea, Mohammed Al Hammadi, Enec’s chief executive, underlined nuclear energy’s importance as an energy generation technology capable of providing continuous, safe and efficient electricity with near-zero greenhouse gas emissions.

ENEC is UAE’s nuclear authority, building the reactors at Barakah. That part is fairly standard. This is the good part.

One of the key challenges linked to the adoption of nuclear power was the education of the public about the opportunities that nuclear power offers, together with many of the myths that still surrounded the technology in certain countries.

The UAE had been assertive in educating its population about the benefits of nuclear power technology, as well as dispelling many of the myths associated with nuclear radiation, he added.

2. Virginia has four large nuclear plants, each a source of zero-carbon energy, whose round-the-clock production of electricity is essential for the state’s economy. The North Anna and Surry reactors are among the most efficient nuclear plants in the United States, generating electricity more than 90 percent of the time, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In contrast, wind power generates power an average of 31 percent of the time, and solar power, 24 percent of the time.

A useful corrective, an op-ed written to note that The Fourth Governor’s Conference on Energy has no sessions at all on nuclear energy, a really egregious absence given that nuclear energy supplies about 40 percent of the state’s electricity.

3. The U.S. reached an agreement to sell nuclear fuel and technology to Vietnam in a move aimed at boosting its former adversary’s civilian nuclear program while curbing proliferation of atomic weapons.

The agreement was initialed by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Vietnam Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh on the sidelines of an East Asia summit in Brunei today. It prohibits Vietnam from enriching or reprocessing plutonium or uranium while developing nuclear energy, according to a U.S. administration official who asked not to be identified, citing government policy.

Though the story stresses non-enrichment, an equally strong interest here is that the treaty allows the United States to sell nuclear materials into Vietnam. The planned reactors are coming from Russia and Japan, but there’s still a lot of room for sales of fuel and services.

4. The country’s [Czech Republic’s]new energy strategy categorizes nuclear power as “crucial” for preserving energy security, Deputy Industry Minister Pavel Solc said in an Oct. 9 interview conducted via e-mail. The strategy draft, subject to environmental assessment, is slated for the cabinet’s approval early next year.

With two nuclear-power stations and a fleet of coal-fired plants fed by lignite from local mines, the Czech Republic exports as much as 20 percent of its electricity production. Czechs will need to replace almost 3,500 megawatts of capacity by 2030, which will come mostly in the form of new atomic power, the deputy minister said.

Lignite coal! New nuclear facilities couldn’t come soon enough.

5. This development will power a future post, as it is likely to prove controversial and potentially very consequential. This is the news:

Britain said on Thursday that it would allow Chinese firms to buy stakes in British nuclear power plants and eventually acquire majority holdings.

The agreement, which comes with caveats, opens the way for China’s fast-growing nuclear industry to play a significant role in Britain’s plans to proceed with construction of its first new reactor in nearly two decades.

Here’s a sense of where the controversy might come from:

For a chancellor so keen on the defense of UK national sovereignty against democratic Europeans, George Osborne's unbridled enthusiasm for Chinese investment in the UK's critical infrastructure is striking. If all these memorandums of understanding come to fruition, Chinese entities will hold important stakes in water in the UK, airports, IT infrastructure and now nuclear power generation, all without a serious national debate on any potential risks such involvement might bring.

It seems odd for The Guardian to raise sovereignty issues, but there you are. The deal is still a little light on details and there’s been a churn of opinion mostly informed by distaste for Chinese business methods. Another couple of days at least should calm the waters and allow us to see land.

Next up: 7 Easy Ways to Make Nuclear Energy – or Applesauce, depending on the harvest. With animated GIFs.

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Jim Asselstine's Bullish Assessment of Nuclear Energy’s Future

Jim Asselstine

The following is a guest post submitted by Scott Peterson, NEI's senior vice president of communications.

SINGAPORE--Jim Asselstine has an unparalleled pedigree to assess the nuclear energy industry. He has analyzed the industry for the past 23 years at Lehman Brothers and Barclays, was a Nuclear Regulatory Commission commissioner and punched his policy credential as a congressional staffer.

“My own personal view is that we should try to keep nuclear power, as the only zero-carbon, large-scale baseload generating source at about its current level of 19 or 20 percent of U.S. [electric] generation,” Asselstine said during a clear-eyed assessment of America’s nuclear energy industry. He was speaking at the World Nuclear Fuel Conference, a global symposium in Singapore sponsored by the Nuclear Energy Institute and World Nuclear Association.

Assuming modest electricity demand growth and with the closure of existing reactors after 60 years of production, Asselstine said meeting this goal would require building 30 to 35 reactors by 2030. Whether the industry builds advanced reactor technology at that pace, he said, depends on these factors:

• Electricity demand must increase with economic rejuvenation.

• Increases in natural gas prices, forecasted by Barclays to move to $3.70 per million Btu by the end of this year, up from $2.82 per million Btu in 2012.

• New Environmental Protection Agency regulations affecting coal-fired power plants, including the announced closure of 25,000 megawatts of coal capacity already and up to 50,000 to 60,000 megawatts of coal capacity by 2015.

• The focused response to the Fukushima accident in Japan both by industry and the NRC. “I regard the NRC requirements and industry initiatives as comprehensive and complementary,” he said.

• Industry and NRC must effectively carry out their responsibilities under a new regulatory framework for building new reactors.

Ironically, Asselstine said this is an exceptional time for energy companies to build large capital projects.

“The industry enjoys broad access to financing at historically attractive rates,” he said. “As a defensive safe haven sector, the electric utilities—unlike many other industries—were able to access the debt capital markets during even the most difficult period in the recession in late 2008 and early 2009. This is an excellent time to finance significant capital investments in the industry.”
It’s appropriate that the industry’s fuel companies are gathering in Singapore. Seventy-one reactors are being built worldwide, with the majority of these projects located in Asia to meet fast-rising electricity demand.

The International Energy Agency predicts that electricity demand will expand by more than 70 percent by 2035, or 2.2 percent per year on average. More than 80 percent of that growth will be in non-OECD countries—more than half in China and India alone.

Growth in China’s electricity demand alone over that period is greater than the total current electricity demand in the United States and Japan combined. China has 26 reactors under construction and the country aims to quadruple its nuclear capacity from reactors now operating and under construction by 2020. India has seven reactors under construction; 20 others are planned. Asselstine said he expects the majority of these projects to be completed despite the 2011 accident in Japan.

On the U.S. response to the Fukushima accident, Asselstine said “the industry and NRC responses have been constructive and timely, and should prove effective in addressing the lessons learned for the industry. The review process helped set priorities for the various recommendations, focusing the agency’s and industry’s efforts on a set of changes that can be implemented relatively quickly to produce substantial near-term safety improvements.”

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When 51 Percent Say Yes

From the department of unlikely mind changes, India division:

An anti-nuclear forum spearheading the stir against Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant today said they would withdraw their protest if most locals favored the project and demanded that the state government constituted panel visit all villages and towns affected by KNPP.

NEI will close its doors as soon as a majority of Americans decide nuclear energy is not for them. The President will resign his position if his approval rating slips below 50 percent. My chance of surviving this disease is slightly less that 50/50. Time to reach for the bottle.

Sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do. But it’s called the  People's Movement Against Nuclear Energy for a reason. So even if what it will win will be a pyrrhic victory, with the taste of ashes on its tongue, I hope it doesn’t quit on the prospect of 51 percent going against its views. We wouldn’t. But it can make you think.

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So shrill you almost have to be a dog to hear it:

With the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) believed to be within days of announcing the final federal approval of the controversial Vogtle nuclear project, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) has asked a court to stop more than two years of stonewalling by Southern Co. and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which are resisting any meaningful public disclosure to taxpayers of the risks to which they are exposed in the massive commitment of $8.33 billion in conditional federal loan guarantees to Southern Company and their utility partners for two proposed new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia.

But really, they had me at controversial. How many more paragraphs does SACE have to go before Solyndra hits the mix? You guessed it: one. And SACE probably liked Solyndra.

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China will slow approvals of nuclear projects after the resumption, which is expected to take place this year, according to an industry expert from a national energy think tank.

Okay, I guess that makes sense.

"China will be cautious in pursuing nuclear power and is likely to approve only three or four projects each year,…" said Xiao Xinjian, a nuclear industry expert at the national Energy Research Institute, affiliated with the National Development and Reform Commission.

Oh. Wait, what?

The country had been accelerating its nuclear development since 2008, with 14 reactors approved in 2008 and six in 2009.

So there you are. It’s all relative. Wonder how SACE would take it.

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It can’t all be good news and snark, can it?

Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha recently announced that the government will postpone the construction of a nuclear power plant in the Shkoder region until issues regarding its potential impact on the environment and territory are fully resolved, AENews reported.

Albania is hesitating because the Shkoder region is seismically active. There may be surprises in the Japan lesson learned reports,  but the accident there appears to have had the tsunami as its main cause, not the earthquake.

Regardless, if Albania chooses to proceed, and it would be smart to do so, it will be with enhanced safety in mind, and that’s never a bad thing. We expect at least 51 percent would agree.

Koodankulam nuclear facility.

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