Completely Comfortable: Next to a Nuclear Repository

Maybe it was the collapse (this year) of an attempt to lift a ban on uranium mining in Virginia that got the Washington Post thinking about the other end of the fuel cycle, but here’s what they think regardless:

Since the president helped to kill the Yucca project, his administration has borne a particular responsibility to devise a workable way to clean up this mess.
Last month the Energy Department finally released its proposal. It is a reasonable plan for post-Yucca policymaking that nevertheless relies on a big assumption — that someplace in the country will volunteer to host some waste.

Oh, somehow I don’t think that will be so difficult. Even the people around Yucca Mountain wanted Yucca Mountain. And the President’s Blue Ribbon Commission proposed the idea of consent-based repository siting after seeing it work at New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and in Sweden, where towns competed for a repository.
But disbelief that anyone would take used nuclear fuel is really the gist of the Post’s editorial.

We are skeptical that many localities would volunteer to host waste facilities, particularly the permanent repository, no matter the economic benefits. But perhaps the administration’s staged approach might be a way to convince communities, with each step building confidence that this material can be stored safely.

Yes, it really “might be a way.”
Here’s the Carlsbad Current-Argus on WIPP:

"WIPP is one of the greatest unsung success stories around, a project with a perfect safety record and more of a game changer for our economy than even oil and gas," said Eddy County Commissioner Jack Volpato, a Republican. "I see it or maybe something else like it creating a whole new generation of jobs."
In particular, Volpato said, Carlsbad and Eddy County will push for a federal study to determine if a second repository similar to WIPP could safely bury high-level nuclear waste from defense projects.

I’m sure I could find stories about environmentalists griping like crazy about this, but the point is that county elected officials see jobs in WIPP and it’s operated so well as to preclude objection – or fear from those politicians.

The idea of taking nuclear waste from the rest of America and salting it away under the desert is not radical thinking in Carlsbad, which has been a neighbor to WIPP since 1999. For many people, nuclear-waste disposal is pure business now, not a cause for worry.
"I was a skeptic when WIPP came here. Then I educated myself and I have become entirely comfortable with it," Volpato said.

I think I’ll listen to Carlsbad on this one.

Read More

The Future in Miniature with Georgia Power

Miniature not because Georgia Power is a small provider of electricity, but because the company’s view of its own future may provide some insight into larger energy trends. We should not assume this to be true, an easy trap to fall into; instead, let’s look at it as one data point in a thesis that could be proven or disproven by more data points.

The reason we can glimpse into the future is because the Georgia Public Service Commission requires Georgia Power to submit what it calls an integrated resource plan. This IRP provides a look at the electricity landscape over the next 20 years. Georgia Power prepares a new IRP every three years, so its outlook can change based on changes in the marketplace.

Although we often refer to the two new reactors at Georgia’s Plant Vogtle as a Southern Co. project, the facility is jointly owned by Georgia Power (45.7%), Oglethorpe Power Corporation (30%), Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia (22.7%) and Dalton Utilities (1.6%). Georgia Power is a subsidiary of Southern Co. and, as you can see, owns the largest share of Plant Vogtle.

But nuclear later. First, coal (and oil): 

As part of today's filing, Georgia Power is requesting to decertify and retire 15 coal- and oil-fired generating units totaling 2,061 megawatts (MW): Units 3 and 4 at Plant Branch in Putnam County; units 1-5 at Plant Yates in Coweta County; units 1 and 2 at Plant McManus in Glynn County; and units 1-4 at Plant Kraft in Chatham County; and Boulevard units 2 and 3, also in Chatham County. In addition, the company is requesting to decertify and sell Plant Bowen Unit 6, which has a rating of 32 MW, bringing the total of retired capacity to 2,093 MW.

I don’t think the company links these closures explicitly to the two new reactors at Vogtle, but consider:

As recently as a year ago, Georgia Power and its parent, Atlanta-based Southern Co., complained about new environmental regulations to reduce toxic emissions from power plants, saying those rules could force the utility to close several coal plants and threaten peak capacity. Company officials said that is no longer a concern because long-term demand is not as high as they once predicted.

And:

Once a dominant fuel for electricity generation, coal’s use will continue to diminish as Georgia Power closes more than a dozen coal and oil-fired units.

And that’s because they do not expect to open any new coal-fired units to replace the closed units.

How about natural gas?

Also, Georgia Power will request converting units 6 and 7 at Plant Yates from coal to natural gas, and will switch from burning Central Appalachian coal to burning Powder River Basin coal at Plant McIntosh Unit 1, pending a successful test burn and further study.

So two more units will halve their carbon emissions. I have no idea of the implications of changing coal type at McIntosh – I’ll leave that to black rock mavens to explain – though I reckon it is meant to improve the facility’s emissions profile.

So no new coal units, a switch of two units to natural gas – and nuclear energy? Well, the story about the filing mentions it only in passing, so let’s tell that part of the story ourselves: the two new reactors will pack about 2234 megawatts capacity. Hmm – coal out, about 2061 megawatts, nuclear in, about 2234. Seems pretty quid pro quo to me, at least as a correlation.

The switchover to natural gas, the build out of nuclear energy, the development of renewable energy sources – Georgia Power expects to field 1500 megawatts of capacity by 2016 – suggests a rapidly changing, environmentally aware and nuclear-friendly energy portfolio. Just to put a cherry on it, let’s add this to our data points:

The continuing expansion of renewable energy technologies, advances in energy efficiency, and the rapid shift from coal to natural gas for generating electricity combined to bring down U.S. carbon dioxide emissions last year to their lowest levels since 1994, according to a report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. 

And it’s only going to get better when the new reactors in Georgia (and South Carolina) go online later this decade. Still, it’s all good – in miniature or life size.

Read More

NEI Statement in Response to Resignation of Energy Secretary Steven Chu

The following statement can be attributed to NEI President and CEO Marv Fertel:

“The nuclear energy industry extends our thanks to Secretary Chu for his service to the nation and our best wishes to him and his family in his future endeavors.

“The industry greatly appreciates Secretary Chu’s strong belief in the expansion of nuclear energy as a vital clean-energy technology for our nation. His leadership with regard to the construction of new nuclear energy facilities was important symbolically and substantively. This applies to the larger reactors that already are part of the backbone of our nation’s electricity grid, as well as innovative small reactor designs that offer great promise as a complementary technology.

“The energy, environmental and economic challenges confronting our nation make it imperative that Secretary Chu’s successor continue to recognize nuclear energy as a vital part of our energy and environmental policy. As a reliable provider of affordable, low-carbon electricity, nuclear energy is important both for the electricity itself and the many ancillary benefits: job creation, grid stability and energy security chief among them.

“Any future secretary must and should recognize that the agency has legal and contractual obligations to fulfill with regard to nuclear waste management. This includes continuing and completing the licensing review of the planned repository for used nuclear fuel and high-level waste from U.S. defense programs at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Our next Secretary of Energy should recognize that his or her job will be made easier by moving aggressively to implement many of the sound recommendations made last year by the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, notably development of one or more consolidated storage facilities for used nuclear fuel at volunteer sites, assured access to the Nuclear Waste Fund, and a new, congressionally chartered federal corporation dedicated solely to implementing the waste management program and empowered with the authority and resources to succeed.”

Read More

DOE Secretary Steven Chu to Resign

Politico has the story:

Energy Secretary Steven Chu is stepping down, ending a four-year tenure marked by milestones in green-energy spending along with withering attacks from Republicans and the collapse of the solar company Solyndra.

Chu announced Friday that he intends to resign once a successor is confirmed, according to a memo sent to Energy Department staff and obtained by POLITICO. He was the last of President Barack Obama’s long-serving Cabinet members to announce plans to leave or stay for the second term.

Read the rest at the link. We’ll certainly have more about this later. For the moment, a tidbit: Chu will be the longest serving energy secretary since the founding of the department.

Read More

The Swiss Turn Ever So Slightly Back to Nuclear

Switzerland's Beznau NPP

Switzerland’s energy profile is one of the cleanest in the world, with virtually no fossil fuel output in the production of electricity. About 55 percent is hydroelectric, 39 percent nuclear (from five reactors) and most of the remainder renewable energy. That profile also highlights problems going forward, as the Swiss would like to end their involvement with nuclear energy by 2034. There’s some more potential in their hydro resources, but shuttering the reactors will hurt. The decision to close the reactors is part of an energy policy and, as we’ve seen in Japan, those can change.

So whither the Swiss? Nuclear or no nuclear?

“It doesn’t make sense to burn one bridge when the other one does not yet exist or is not yet in the process of being built,” said Michael Schorer, spokesman for the Nuclear Forum Switzerland. “We reject the ban on building new nuclear power plants and urge the federal council to devise an additional scenario that includes nuclear energy.”
In this regard the Nuclear Forum is at one with business associations which have objected to the general ban on nuclear energy contained in the government’s Energy Strategy 2050. The on-going consultation procedure ends on January 31, 2013.

That’s one side of it, the side for which the Japan accident has faded in significance and the industry and regulatory responses seen as reasonable.

The Green Party has collected 109,000 signatures in support of a people’s initiative that would require caps on the lifespans of existing nuclear power plants, with decommissioning after an operating period of 45 years. If Swiss voters approve the initiative, the newest nuclear power plant, in Leibstadt, would be decommissioned by 2029.

The Green Party launched the initiative following the catastrophic earthquake and nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, Japan, in March 2011.

That’s the other side, which would prefer you sort of skip from Fukushima to today and ignore all that has happened during the two years between the two – or, maybe, to be be fair, sees industry efforts as inadequate. It could work – the Swiss, anecdotally anyway, are not big fans of nuclear energy. But there’s some doubt.

The initiative is a means of pressuring the government and the parliament “to ensure that the withdrawal from nuclear power does not end up sidelined again,” Urs Scheuss, a Green Party expert on the environment, energy, and transportation, told swissinfo.ch.

Which suggests, at the least, that the Greens feel a moment slipping away and are determined to pin it in place. If the initiative comes off – essentially a referendum – the Greens could find they’ve lost their moment.

But Schweiger believes the initiative will not be approved at the ballot box.
“The problems that are seen as significant, such as the upcoming gap in supplies, will occur much sooner than anticipated. It’s likely that the pragmatism of the voters will play a rather large role.”

Schweiger is Rolf Schweiger, president of the nuclear energy-friendly Campaign for Sensible Energy Politics. If he wants to call the Swiss pragmatic, it saves me from perpetuating a cliché. But there it is.

Let’s say Schweiger and Scheuss have now introduced their dogs into the fight. If the Swiss don’t follow the Bulgarians (see story below) and walk away from the atrocious dogfight, we’ll see. I hadn’t imagined the Swiss might reverse their policy – now I can at least imagine it.

Read More

Taking the Nuclear Marbles and Going Home

So how did that vote in Bulgaria go? We mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Bulgaria had a referendum coming up on whether to continue to build more nuclear facilities.
So how did the vote go? Well, you can’t win ‘em all even when you, um, win ‘em all.

60.5 percent of Bulgarians who took part in yesterday’s national referendum voted in support of the development of nuclear energy. Some 6.9 million people had had the right to vote, out of which a mere 1.5 million voters went to the booths. According to the estimates of the Central Election Commission the activity was almost 22%.

Which to my mind means, nuclear energy won – by a lot. Even if 1.5 million qualifies as paltry, it’s still 1.5 million who cared enough about the issue to cast a vote. Everyone else could have voted and abdicated sharing their view by not doing so – insofar as the non-voters had any view at all. That’s how it should work, right? Well, no.
The rules of the election foiled it.

Constitutional rules mean that the referendum would only have been valid had turnout reached the same level as the last general election – around 60 per cent.

But even if it had attained that level, it’s uncertain how the government might have preceded. I’m going to guess that the referendum itself might have been rejected by people largely because it seemed a political play rather than a democratic exercise.

The referendum was forced by the opposition Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) after the right-wing government of Prime Minister Boyko Borisov scrapped the construction of the 2000MWBelene NPP on the Danube last year.

This isn’t how this subject is arrayed politically in other EU countries. but there you go. Bottom line:

“In a nutshell: there was a lot of fuss but right now we are back at square one. The direction of further development of the Bulgarian nuclear program is still not clear.”

That comes from Tomasz Daborowski, an energy analyst at Warsaw’s Centre for Eastern Studies. I guess we’ll leave it there. You win some – and sometimes it doesn’t mean a thing.

Read More

NEI's Richard Myers on the Wall Street Journal Story on Natural Gas and Nuclear Energy

NEI VP Richard J. Myers

The following statement concerning today's story on nuclear energy and natural gas ("Can gas undo nuclear power?") that appeared in the Wall Street Journal can be attributed to Richard J. Myers, NEI's Vice President, Policy Development, Planning and Supplier Programs:

Electricity production issues are not quite as cut-and-dried as portrayed in the article, certainly not from the vantage point of energy companies who must evaluate an array of factors to determine what their future generating mix will and will not be. A nuclear energy facility produces benefits well beyond the electricity it generates. They include economic benefits like jobs, taxes and procurement; grid reliability benefits in the form of voltage support and ancillary services; the environmental benefit of avoided emissions; and the energy security benefits of an electricity source that adds diversity and forward price stability to the electricity supply portfolio.

It also bears noting that extremely low natural gas prices in the United States are not sustainable. Low natural gas prices are caused by a combination of reduced demand for natural gas (due to subpar economic growth), abnormally mild weather for the past several winters and a major increase in supply (due to improved drilling techniques that have unlocked vast reserves of shale gas). As the result of low gas prices, producers of natural gas have already slowed drilling: the number of rigs drilling for natural gas in the United States has dropped approximately 50 percent in the past 12 months. At the same time, the historic volatility of natural gas prices continues to be seen in the spot market. Just last week, natural gas prices in New England and New York City topped $30 per million BTUs, the highest level seen this winter, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. For New England, this was actually the highest level seen since January 2004.

Judgments about the viability of any given nuclear power plant are business decisions made by individual utilities based on economic circumstances unique to the facility. The Nuclear Energy Institute’s long-term belief is that, beyond the ongoing construction of five reactors in Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee, new nuclear energy facilities will be built once electricity demand rebounds. Demand for electricity in the United States has not yet returned to the level seen in 2007, before the financial crisis.

For those who might have missed it, here's a table from the Energy Information Administration's Northeastern Winter Natural Gas and Electricity Alert that highlights those dizzying spot prices Richard referenced in his response.

For our earlier post on the story, click here.

Read More