“The Nuclear Option is Still There”

This comment makes sense only if Crystal River’s closing can be seen to have wider application:

Despite increasing demand for carbon-free power generation, the future of nuclear plants is clouded by the abundance of domestic natural gas, which has led many utilities to embrace that fuel for power generators. That has eased the pressure on operators to keep nuclear plants open, especially if there are questions about their safety.

“There is more of a feeling that because you have very low natural gas prices, there is another alternative out there,” Mr. Dean said.

“This has eased the pressure on operators to keep nuclear plants open.” Pressure? If there are questions about their safety? Mr. Dean is John Dean, president of JD Energy, an energy and environmental forecasting firm based in Frederick, Md.

In this instance, the main reason Mr. Dean can say this is because Duke’s plan to close Crystal River provides a basis for saying it. As we explained a couple of days ago, it’s awkward to use Crystal River for this purpose. One particular closing doesn’t portend anything in itself unless it really is the leading edge of a trend – which Crystal River does not seem likely to be.

The Times’ Jon Hurdle tries a different version of this approach and has greater success with it. That’s because he casts his net wider and does not let Dean become the sole voice of authority.

The 2011 accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant has led to more stringent safety testing at nuclear plants in the United States under changes adopted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “It increased the level of scrutiny,” said Dave McIntyre, a commission spokesman.

This is unassailably true. But it doesn’t close the circle – the facilities passed their post-Fukushima stress tests and are currently working through a list of additional NRC safety measures. That counts for something.

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And to be honest, the Times’ post isn’t trying to make hay out of Crystal River – it’s exploring a topic, not trend hunting. Facilities have closed for various reasons over the years. That’s one thing. These days, natural gas is the “natural” way to replace a nuclear facility closing during the tens. That’s another. It says something about the economics of energy today – so does the downturn that began in 2007 and so does the drop in electricity use that accompanied it. This is not a permanent state of affairs (though sometimes it may feel like it is.)

There are countervailing forces, too, with utilities taking different views based on the market forces they consider important. Take, for example, energy security, which is enhanced by maintaining a diverse portfolio.

“I’m agnostic on the fuel issue,” Fehrman said. “But what we need is a diverse mix. It’s not a good idea to put too many eggs in one basket.”

Fehrman is MidAmerican President William Fehrman. He goes on to say:

“We may propose nuclear at one of the sites or we may propose natural gas,” he said.

The article in the Des Moines Register points out that the trend is to natural gas, so what the heck is up with MidAmerican that it wants to consider new nuclear?

First, the natural gas angle:

Fehrman has been less eager to turn to natural gas. His reasoning: Natural gas looks good now when it sells for less than $3.50 per thousand cubic feet. But five years ago, gas sold for $10 per thousand cubic feet, and Fehrman said he has been unable to persuade natural gas companies to offer him long-term contracts.

Which would seem to mean that natural gas companies are not sure enough yet of the future to ensure they’ll make money under such contracts. Fair enough.

And nuclear:

“The nuclear option is still there,” said MidAmerican President William Fehrman, who said the Des Moines-based utility will add more color to its future generating plans in a report to the Iowa Utilities Board this summer.

All right, I admit that doesn’t sound incredibly enthusiastic, but MidAmerican needs the Iowa legislature to go along with a CWIP plan – which would allow the company to add a small upcharge to ratepayers to keep interest rates for the nuclear facility low - so far, no go. I cannot predict that MidAmerican will try again in the next session – but it may. Stay tuned.

The conclusion here is that one writes off nuclear energy at one’s own peril. The world isn’t participating in such a write-off and really, neither is the United States. You could argue, as the Times does, that nuclear energy is being scrutinized more closely on economic and even philosophical grounds. That’s something, but not the same as looking for excuses to write it off, whatever the future of natural gas and whatever the disposition of Crystal River.

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Then again, from Power Engineering Magazine:

Is Crystal River a harbinger of nuclear power's future?

No. Clear enough?

Note: Thanks to friend Steve Skutnick for noting my replacement of CWIP with WIPP. One’s a concept, the other a place and don’t have much to do with each other. We could probably find a joke here, but it would probably be pretty saucy. Too many WIP’Ps.

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Nuclear Emergency Planning Pays Off Big in Iowa

What becomes nuclear energy most? Many things, but surely, most of all, It has to be safety. The accident in Japan might have made this seem a folly – at first – but polls, and early ones, showed that people in the U.S. understand that the accident there was extraordinary and not reflective of the safety of U.S. plants.

That doesn’t mean that the Fukushima accident did not lead to a drive to improve safety, especially in the area of natural disasters such as the mammoth earthquake and flooding (the United States is not prone to tsunami per se) that overtook Fukushima. But there are other issues, too, including evacuation and access to resources to mitigate harm.

A lot of lessons are emerging from Japan and the industry and Nuclear Regulatory Commission take them very seriously.

So – then – how effective are efforts to protect against events that haven’t happened?

Let’s consider the experience of Cedar Rapids, which is about 50 miles from the Duane Arnold facility. No, there was no accident at Duane Arnold, but there was plenty of preparation for an accident.

But I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Here’s what happened:

In May and early June 2008, tornadoes and floods struck Iowa. The largest single tornado in the state in a 30-year period, an EF-54, struck the town of Parkersburg, Iowa, 85 miles northwest of Cedar Rapids on May 25 and caused millions of dollars in damage, eight deaths, and the mobilization of significant state and local emergency response resources.

Believe it or not, it gets worse and threatens the kind of double disaster that flattened the northeast section of Japan:

The water levels in the Cedar and nearby Iowa Rivers and their tributaries had risen throughout the spring as the agricultural land that covers 74% of the state, still saturated from the heavy winter snow melt and without crop cover, together with an extensive network of subsurface clay drainage tile systems, contributed extensive runoff into the rivers.

This is all from a report called Disaster Resilience recently published by the National Academy of Sciences, which explains the precision of the details. We’ll talk about resilience and what the report means by it a little later.

The narrative goes on to say that the Cedar River did not produce a “100-year flood,” as feared, but a “500-year” flood, much worse – that is, a flood that could be expected to happen only every 500 years. The Cedar River crested at over 31 feet.

What Cedar Rapids needed was an effective risk mitigation strategy, most particularly the risk to people needed to be minimized. Happily, the city already had such a plan; beyond that, essential personnel had drilled on the plan many times.

The city and county have a risk mitigation strategy in place for the nuclear power facility: the city’s emergency planners, hospital personnel, and citizens drill four times a year along established evacuation routes. These drills, including the relocation of essential medical facilities and personnel proved essential during the response to the flooding of the Cedar River into the city in the second week of June 2008.

And the result?

According to the health personnel and emergency responders with whom the committee spoke in their visit to Cedar Rapids, the preparation and planning involved in preparing for that single, human-induced hazard played a large role in the fact that no lives were lost to a different hazard that evolved into a disaster during the flooding in 2008.

I think the reference to a nuclear accident as a “human-induced hazard” means that people erected the plant not that employees there would cause an accident and, by contrast, the flood was a natural disaster.

So, in this instance, an emergency plan intended to keep people well away from radiation kept them equally well away from water run wild – and, let’s repeat from the NAS report, “no lives were lost.” (It is fair to add that, industrial accidents aside, no one died at Fukushima Daiichi, either. But it’s also not fair to minimize the impact of what happened there, so let’s keep the point parenthetical.)

Now, the NAS report is largely about natural disasters and the subject of the report is resilience in the face of them. The report defines resilience thusly:

Resilience: The ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from or more successfully adapt to actual or potential adverse events

Which sounds very much like what the nuclear energy industry is doing.

In the report’s terms, the benefits of preparing for “adverse events” is not only good for mitigating harm to life and property, it even makes sense economically.

For example, the Multi-Hazard Mitigation Council (2005)
found that for every dollar spent on pre-event mitigation related to earthquakes, wind, and flooding, about $4 were saved in post-event damages. Furthermore, the planning and preparation for one type of disaster (such as the nuclear accident planning experience in Cedar Rapids, Iowa), can reap benefits for other types of disasters or unexpected adverse events.

If it seems tacky to bring up money, consider it instead as a finite resource. Draining those resources in the face of one disaster will lead to a lack of resources for the next disaster. And we seem to face more natural disasters in recent years, not fewer.

In fact, the report is really dour about the nation’s preparedness for natural disasters.

An alternative to the resilience vision is the current path of the nation—the status quo in which innovations are not made to increase the nation’s resilience to hazards and disasters. Unless this current path in the nation’s approach towards hazards and disasters is changed, data suggest that the cost of disasters will continue to rise both in absolute dollar amounts and in the losses to the social, cultural, and environmental systems that are part of each community.

It seems to me very striking that a nuclear accident mitigation plan proved so effective in preventing loss of life and limb in a natural disaster. (And it happened in 2008, three years before the accident in Japan.)

The cost of preparing that plan and of working out the kinks in it through drills – to the nuclear industry and to federal, state and local government agencies – paid off is a big way – and in exactly the way it should have, albeit not in response to a nuclear accident – and to the universal benefit of the people of Cedar Rapids.

The NAS report is long enough that I could have missed it, but it  seems that the nuclear energy industry points some useful directions for natural disaster planning that could be more widely adopted – even if it was created to mitigate the effects of a “man-made hazard.”

So - what becomes nuclear energy most? Safety – and the experience of Cedar Rapids.

Cedar Rapids, dangerous swimming hole.

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Good News from Iowa and India

 Out of Iowa:

A bill allowing MidAmerican Energy to seek permission from regulators to move forward with a nuclear power plant passed a Senate committee Tuesday night.
The panel approved the measure 8 to 7. It would allow MidAmerican to ask the Iowa Utilities Board for a rate increase from the company’s customers to fund the cost of permitting, licensing, and building a plant. Costs for such a project have been estimated at $2 billion.

This is good news, a move that, if it continues apace through the legislative process, will solve some notable problems with the Iowa energy mix.

He [state Sen. Matt McCoy(D)], said Iowa could lose as much as 40 percent of its electricity generation from coal plants in the coming years and the only other option would be to build natural gas plants, which he said would not offer stable future prices.

It’s a reasonable environmental choice. I’d be surprised, though, if MidAmerican isn’t looking at natural gas to spell some of those coal plants. That’s been happening in other states.
We did a post on this subject a few entries down. Still a lot more hurdles to clear. More to come on this.
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We’ve looked at the protests involving India’s Kudankulam facility that involved some rock throwing by some pro-plant political figures. Not cool – also not necessary.

The agitation against the Kudankulam nuclear power plant has fizzled out as the Tamil Nadu government gave the green signal for the commissioning of the first unit of the 2X1000 MW power plant.

Especially because it will provide considerable relief in Tamil Nadu:

Tamil Nadu is under the grip of a severe power crisis with a peak hour deficit of 4000 MW. The government has declared a power holiday for industrial units.

This would outstrip any effort to set up windmills – to solve, it requires a full scale energy facility, be it coal, natural gas or nuclear. The most responsible choice in a rapidly developing nation isn’t tough to make.

Other than Chennai, all districts undergo load shedding ranging from six to eight hours a day. The capital city itself goes without power for two hours daily.

Not a tough decision at all.
There is some more information about the protests, but nothing about the rock throwing. In any event, this is a good outcome.
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Sometimes, when one reads about the knock-on effect on employment from the building or collapse of an industrial sector, one might reasonably suspect the books are getting cooked.
The argument that industrial collapse has a reach beyond the immediately effected companies was especially prevalent during the car company rescue in 2007-2008, where it was a frequent talking point that losing the automobile manufacturing industry would also have a dire effect on a untold number of companies that service the industry.
The Center for Automotive Research (yes, its acronym is CAR), put it this way:

Should all of the Detroit Three’s U.S. operations cease in 2009, the first year total employment impact would be a loss of nearly 3.0 million jobs in the U.S. economy—comprised of 239,341 jobs at the Detroit Three, 973,969 indirect/supplier jobs and over 1.7 million spin-off (expenditure-induced) jobs.

Well, it’s true enough – though you cannot pin down numbers as precisely you might like – CAR’s study points out that international auto makers would move some its operations to the U.S., mitigating some of the employment impact - but true enough.
And it works the other way. Consider:

Graham Corporation, a designer and manufacturer of critical equipment for the oil refining, petrochemical and power industries, including the supply of components and raw materials to nuclear energy facilities, today announced that it has been awarded $9.5 million in orders for nuclear energy facilities and an oil sands upgrader.

Let’s leave the oil sands to the side. Westinghouse placed these orders and it’s not for nuclear facilities in China.

James R. Lines, Graham’s President and Chief Executive Officer, commented, “… We consider the orders awarded to us over the last two quarters for the new nuclear energy facilities under construction in the Southeastern United States to be an affirmation both of our reputation for consistently delivering high quality products as well as our exceptional customer service.

And consider that the two Westinghouse reactors at the V.C. Summer facility are in the hopper waiting for final NRC approval. No word from Graham on what this means for employment there, but we may assume it means something positive.
Congratulations to Graham in this instance, but congratulations to a reviving U.S. nuclear support industry especially.
Graham’s homepage is here.
Iowa’s Duane Arnold Energy Center.

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A Good Time to Speed Up – Vietnam, Iowa, FOE

Not getting respect:

“We also have a good chance in Vietnam,” the minister added. “The United States, France, Canada, Russia, Japan and Korea can build nuclear power plants, but the U.S. lags behind in technology as it hasn’t built one for 20 to 30 years. This is a good time for us to speed up (atomic power plant construction).”

Ouch! That stung a little.

This is South Korea’s Knowledge Economy Minister Hong Suk-woo. He’s not exactly right – falling behind in construction and in technological advance are two different things and the U.S. has not fallen behind – at all – in technology. But Hong is selling Korean capacity in both, so fine. Still – ouch!

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Land of corn and plenty:

Dueling videos debuted Wednesday on possible nuclear power expansion in Iowa.

A group that opposes nuclear power launched a television ad on the eve of today’s Senate committee hearing on a proposed compromise that advocates hope will push the bill ahead.

And minutes later, MidAmerican Energy released its own Web video, featuring Bill Fehrman, the company’s president and chief executive officer.

The opposing ad is from Friends of the Earth, our old FOEs. I generally find anti-nuclear advocates interesting if not always on target, but not FOE. It’s notably fact free.

But the pleasant surprise is that MidAmerican isn’t standing for it and has put its own ad in response. It’s simply done but that means there’s no manipulation or appeals to emotion. It’s simply Fehrman providing the company’s viewpoint:

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Hey, South Korea was talking about Vietnam above, wasn’t it? Care to know just what Vietnam is up to these days?

"The consistent view of Vietnam is to utilize nuclear energy for peaceful purposes in a responsible manner while ensuring safety and security," [Le Dinh Tien, deputy minister of the Vietnamese Ministry of Science and Technology, which] is responsible for overseeing the country's nuclear power, said in January.

By 2030, Vietnam aims to build 10 reactors and, by 2050, it hopes to generate enough nuclear power to account for 20-25 percent of its energy consumption.

Now you know.

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NEI’s main site and the Safety First site have been doing a good job of keeping you up to date on post-Fukushima information and updates (Safety First has a great infographic up right now showing how FLEX, the industry’s response to Fukushima, will work – poster worthy – really), but we’d be remiss not to note good work done by some of the nuclear companies out there.

If you have a few minutes, check out these pages by FPL (Florida Light & Power) and NextEra Energy to see how they are presenting nuclear energy, the accident in Japan and the drive to apply the lessons learned to their fleets. Both are very nicely done – corporate speak kept to a minimum, little to no attempt at spin. (We noticed FPL redid its nuclear energy launch page, too – a lot less text heavy and more inviting.)

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The French Choice; The Iowan Misapprehension

Even in the context of a political contest, it’s nice to be reminded how nuclear energy benefits people in the nickel-and-dime sense:

France's electricity bills will rise less over the next two decades if it continues to rely on nuclear power for its energy needs, a government-commissioned report showed on Monday, two months ahead of the country's upcoming presidential election.

Neither President Nicholas Sarkozy (the conservative more-or-less) nor his main opponent in the upcoming election, Francois Hollande (the liberal give or take), wants to shut down the nuclear plants. Hollande wants to close an older facility and reduce the dependence on nuclear energy from 80 to about 50 percent. I’m not sure why, but there it is.

Still, French users could pay around one quarter less at the end of the next decade if the country decides to keep relying on nuclear power for at least 70 percent of its power instead of boosting renewable energy's role and lowering nuclear output to 20 percent of its needs, figures in the report showed.

I think the story means one-quarter less than other European countries not 25 percent less than now. In any event, suspicion about a “convenient” report (for Sarkozy’s view, since he holds the levers of government) is balanced somewhat by the reality that the French do not seem all that eager to tack away from nuclear energy. And anyway, the report isn’t saying anything outlandish – you could say Sarkozy is making a case, but that’s about it.

Currently, Hollande is ahead in polls, but neither he nor Sarkozy are above 50 percent, which makes a second round likely – that happened in 2007, too. The first round of voting comes on April 22 and the run-off on May 6. (Note that Sarkozy has not announced his candidacy yet – the stories I read suggest this is tactical rather than hesitancy, so every poll counts him as in.)

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It looks like Sarkozy is taking that report quite seriously:

Nicolas Sarkozy a décidé de prolonger la durée de vie des centrales nucléaires françaises au-delà de quarante ans pour permettre à l'économie de disposer d'une énergie bon marché, a déclaré dimanche 12 février le ministre de l'industrie Eric Besson, précisant que le chef de l'Etat a demandé aux opérateurs "de procéder à tous les efforts de maintenance, de recherche des plus hauts standards de sécurité et de sûreté, pour faire en sorte que ce parc puisse être prolongé".

Let’s see if my French is up to this:

Nicolas Sarkozy will prolong the lives of French nuclear power plants beyond forty years to allow the economy [I think an American politician would have said “the people”] to have inexpensive energy, said Minister of Industry Eric Besson February 12, with Sarkozy [the chief of state] asking the facility operators "to conduct all maintenance efforts to maintain the highest standards of safety and security so that the lives of the plants can be extended."

A little clumsy, but that does the trick. I reckon this will show up in American papers soon enough.

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Some Iowans are missing the point:

Some lawmakers and advocacy groups are questioning a measure that would help MidAmerican Energy pay for a possible nuclear power plant, arguing that slow-growing Iowa produces significantly more energy than it uses and doesn't need an expensive electricity generator.

Consider that about 9 percent of electricity in Iowa is generated by nuclear energy (at Duane Arnold, to be exact). 72 percent of it is coal-fired. Iowa has done a good job with renewable energy – about 15 percent. So you may say that Iowa has filled the energy coffers, but not in the best possible way.

But there’s an elephant in the room and the new nuclear facility can help push it out. The story almost gets there:

Potthoff said the excess supply in Iowa also likely won't continue for long because expected environmental regulations could limit coal-powered electrical plants at a time when an improving economy will increase demand. Although wind power is important, it's less consistent than coal or nuclear power, she said.

But not quite. Build a nuclear facility, shut down a couple of coal plants – or more, as Iowa seems able to afford it – and it’s your classic win-win.

Potthoff is MidAmerican spokeswoman Tina Potthoff.

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Coming from Warner Brothers: The Chernobyl Diaries:

Diaries is set in the city of Prypiat that once housed the workers of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor and follows a group of friends who, while vacationing in Europe, find themselves stranded in the abandoned city only to discover that they are not alone.

Presumably, the kids get left there by a tour bus. Whether they will be set upon by giant insects or Hills Have Eyes-style cannibals remains to be seen.

Francois Hollande – and yes, France has pointing politicians.

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Nuclear Plants and Red Lights

Here’s the headline in the Sioux City (IA) Journal. I’m not sure what it means, though it seems to mean something.

Nuclear power, red-light camera bills could be on Iowa legislative agenda

I mean that nuclear power is given parity with the camera bill. Here’s what that’s about:

A bill likely to come before the House Transportation Committee Feb. 2 could be a financial risk to lead-footed drivers. That's HF 2048 sponsored by Rep. Walt Rogers, R-Cedar Falls, to ban red-light and speed cameras in Iowa. It calls for all existing cameras to be removed by July 1.

So far the debate has pitted law enforcement and city officials against personal liberty interests.

"How much of a police state do we want to have?" Rogers asked at a hearing where his bill won subcommittee backing.

What pops into my head is: how many traffic lights are there in Iowa?

But really, we came for the lights and stayed for the energy:

Example One [of controversial legislation – banning traffic light cameras is the other] is a bill that would pave the way for MidAmerican Energy to pursue approval to develop a small-scale nuclear reactor with ratepayers picking up the cost. House File 561, which was approved 58-39 in the House last year, is scheduled for action in the Senate Commerce Committee Jan. 31.

While Chairman Matt McCoy, D-Des Moines, spoke glowingly of the bill and MidAmerica's plan, Sen. Joe Bolkcom, D-Iowa City, called nuclear energy environmentally risky and said the bill places an "enormous financial risk on customers."

Iowa derives 72 percent of its electricity from coal (almost 8 percent from nuclear). If Rep. McCoy wants to get together at an Iowa City chop house, we can have a friendly chat about what’s environmentally risky.

Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, D-Council Bluffs, acknowledged there is "some support" in the Senate for the bill as well as concerns with protecting utility customers.

However, doing nothing has its risks, too, he said. "Every option will result in some increase."

Of risk, I think.

The story doesn’t tell us what Gov. Terry Branstad is thinking, but this one does:

Gov. Terry Branstad says he's open to legislation allowing MidAmerican Energy to bill customers for the cost of a proposed nuclear power plant before construction is complete.

Speaking Monday at his weekly news conference, Branstad maintained Iowa should consider all kinds of energy sources, including nuclear power.

So far, so good. Different state initiatives have been gaining some traction over the last few years. The Iowa one has just come out of committee, so who knows its chances, but it looks to be in pretty good shape.

The iconic traffic light from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-1991). It’s a symbol, but of what, we may never know. In any event, if there’s a camera on it, some Iowans want to know about it.

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