This Friday, it will officially have been 5 years since the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami disabled Tepco’s nuclear power plant in Fukushima. But despite the passing of 5 years, we Continue Reading
The radioactive rubble has been cleared. Poured concrete has covered the toxic dust. And many workers have traded hazmat suits for surgical masks. Five years ago, a massive earthquake spawned Continue Reading
A report from Greenpeace reveals that the destruction of ecosystems caused by the Fukushima meltdown is worse than the government lets on. Radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan Continue Reading
Conservation group Greenpeace warned on Friday that the environmental impact of the Fukushima nuclear crisis five years ago on nearby forests is just beginning to be seen and will remain Continue Reading
Three former Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) executives were indicted on Monday for failing to take safety measures to prevent the nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011, a Tokyo Continue Reading
The operator of Japan’s Fukushima power plant has apologized for not announcing its nuclear reactors were in meltdown for months after a huge earthquake and tsunami devastated the facility five Continue Reading
SHENZHEN, China—China wants to shift from customer to competitor in the global nuclear industry as it seeks to roll out its first advanced reactor for export, a move that adds Continue Reading
Angela Merkel prepares to press the button to generate the machine’s first burst of hydrogen plasma. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said her government is committed to funding nuclear-fusion research as Continue Reading
Undeterred by taunts that fusion always seems to lie 50 years in the future as a commercial energy source, a growing programme of research is aimed at taming the nuclear Continue Reading
Fukushima radiation just off the North American coast is higher now than it has ever been, and government scientists and mainstream press are scrambling to cover-up and downplay the ever-increasing Continue Reading
Scientists monitoring the spread of radiation in the ocean from the Fukushima nuclear accident report finding an increased number of sites off the US West Coast showing signs of contamination Continue Reading
Humanity will wait 10 years for a major trial of a different form of nuclear energy regarded as a game changer in the centuries ahead. So far man-made nuclear energy has involved fission, the release of energy with the splitting of atoms of uranium and plutonium. However in southern France, 35 nations including the US, Russia, Korea, Japan, China, European Union countries and India have been collaborating for 30 years to replicate on earth how energy is produced by the sun. The process is called nuclear fusion and it’s one of the most futuristic projects in the world. Instead of using heavy elements such as uranium, nuclear fusion involves taking common isotopes of hydrogen, the lightest element in the chemistry periodic table, and fusing them together. The reaction involves hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, fusing into heavier helium atoms, releasing enormous amounts of energy in the process. But replicating […]
TOKYO (AP) — The operator of Japan’s fuel reprocessing plant said Monday that it was postponing the plant’s opening to as late as September 2018, citing regulators’ lengthy inspection procedures and time needed for safety upgrades. The Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd. said it was delaying the targeted completion of the Rokkasho reprocessing plant, which separates plutonium from spent fuel for reuse as fuel, by as much as 2 1/2 years. The delay-plagued plant, initially set for launch in 2000, was most recently set to open in March 2016 following a series of technical problems. JNFL president Kenji Kudo told reporters at the company’s headquarters in Aomori, in northern Japan, that a separate plant to produce plutonium-based fuel had been delayed until sometime during the first half of fiscal 2019. Japan already has about 47 tons of plutonium – 11 tons at home and the rest reprocessed in Britain and […]
For the first time in almost 20 years, federal regulators have given a new nuclear power plant a license to begin generating electricity. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave the go-ahead Continue Reading
The New Orleans-based company, which owns utilities in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, and sells power on the wholesale market, has been pressured by low U.S. natural-gas prices that have pushed wholesale power prices lower. In its news release Tuesday, Entergy said the exact timing, which depends on several factors, including discussions with regulators, would be decided during the first half of next year. Entergy said current and forecast power prices have fallen about $10 per megawatt hour, representing an annual loss of more than $40 million in revenue for the Pilgrim plant, located in Plymouth, Mass. The plant had been expected to post net operating losses ranging from roughly $10 million to $30 million for this year, next year and 2017—before accounting for additional costs related to the decision to close the plant and any potential write-downs. Once the plant is shut down, Pilgrim will transition to decommissioning. […]
The energy source has been long on promise and short on reality. Now private companies think they can succeed where the government has failed. For more than half a century governments around the world have been trying to solve the challenge of nuclear fusion. In theory it could provide a cheap, clean, and almost boundless source of energy. Consider this: One tablespoon of liquid hydrogen fuel—a mix of deuterium and tritium—would produce the same energy as 28 tons of coal. But smashing two hydrogen atoms together at 100 million degrees centigrade to create a fusion reaction has proved to be a costly and elusive endeavor. The ITER international project in France has been plagued by cost overruns—the original 5-billion-euro project is now budgeted at 13 billion euros (about $15 billion)—and its 23,000-ton Tokamak experimental reactor, three times heavier than the Eiffel Tower, is still many years from completion. In […]
The greatest fusion reactor in our neighborhood sends energy free for the harvesting from about 8 light-minutes away, where it safely burns and flares without any help at all from the small, blue marble that orbits it once a year. But expansion of photovoltaic technologies to capture that solar power has had a hard time competing against the big boys of power: petroleum, coal, and nuclear reactors. It’s no wonder scientists and engineers continue to pursue the dream of harnessing nuclear fusion here on Earth. A “ small, modular, efficient fusion plant ” designed by a team at MIT promises new hope for growth in the fusion industry. Equipment of similar scale and complexity has been constructed in “within about five years” the team notes. By comparison, August 4th marked the fifth anniversary of breaking ground on the world’s biggest nuclear fusion reactor project, the ITER* project. So far, […]
Protesters take part in a rally outside Kyushu Electric Power Co.’s Sendai nuclear power plant in Satsumasendai, Kagoshima prefecture, Japan on Aug. 9, 2015. Source: Jiji Press/AFP/Getty Images Japan is rejoining the group of nations using atomic power as it sweeps aside public opposition and fires up one of the reactors shuttered for safety upgrades after the Fukushima nuclear disaster more than four years ago. Kyushu Electric Power Co. will begin bringing online the No. 1 reactor at its Sendai facility on Aug. 11, start power generation as early as Aug. 14 and return it to normal operations next month, the company said in a statement. Two of its reactors on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu are the first to pass tougher safety checks set by the Nuclear Regulation Authority, the agency created after the Fukushima disaster, and to overcome legal challenges. “The Sendai restart is obviously a very […]
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said it successfully removed the largest piece of debris from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant’s Unit 3 reactor, which had fallen inside the spent-fuel pool following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami . According to Tepco, the company used two 600-ton cranes to lift the 20-ton fuel-handling machine , which was sitting on top of more than 500 fuel assemblies. While there were concerns that the procedure might damage the spent-fuel pool’s gates and reduce water levels, which could have heated up the radioactive fuel rods, Tepco said they experienced no trouble during the procedure. The lifting of the fuel-handling machine began at 11:55 a.m. on Sunday and ended at 1:18 p.m. A spokesman said that there was some fog in the area but that it didn’t affect the process. All other procedures at the nuclear power plant were halted while the debris was being removed. […]
Big black plastic bags containing radiated soil, leaves and debris from the decontamination operation are dumped at a seaside, devastated by the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Tomioka town, Fukushima prefecture, near Tokyo Electric Power Co’s (TEPCO)… A Japanese citizens’ panel ruled on Friday that three former Tokyo Electric Power executives should be indicted over their handling of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, Kyodo news agency said. Tokyo prosecutors in January rejected the rarely used panel’s judgment that the three should be indicted, citing insufficient evidence. But the 11 unidentified citizens on the panel forced the indictment after a second vote, which holds sway over the prosecutors’ decision. (Reporting by Osamu Tsukimori; Editing by Nick Macfie )
Building nuclear reactors out of factory-produced modules was supposed to make their construction swifter and cheaper, leading to a new boom in nuclear energy. But two U.S. sites where nuclear reactors are under construction have been hit with costly delays that have shaken faith in the new construction method and created problems concerning who will bear the added expense. “Modular construction has not worked out to be the solution that the utilities promised,” said Robert B. Baker, an energy lawyer at Freeman Mathis & Gary LLP in Atlanta and former member of the Georgia Public Service Commission, the state utility authority. The new building technique calls for fabricating big sections of plants in factories and then hauling them by rail to power-plant sites for final assembly. The method was supposed to prevent a repeat of the notorious delays and cost overruns that marred the last nuclear construction cycle in […]
graph of nuclear generating capacity for top 6 countries, as explained in the article text Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, International Atomic Energy Agency, World Nuclear Association Nuclear power currently makes up slightly more than 2% of China’s total power generation. However, the Chinese government has a stated goal to provide at least 15% of overall energy consumption by 2020 (increasing to 20% by 2030) from non-fossil fuel sources, including nuclear, hydroelectricity and other renewable sources. To help achieve this target, China plans to increase nuclear capacity to 58 gigawatts (GW) and to have 30 GW of capacity under construction by 2020. China has rapidly expanded its nuclear capacity in the past several years, which likely will increase nuclear generation in the next few years. China’s net installed nuclear capacity is 23 GW, after the country added 10 reactors totaling more than 10 GW since the beginning of 2013. […]
Germany’s nuclear phase-out plan is entering its final stage with the first of the country’s nine remaining modern reactors shutting down for good this Saturday. Plant operator E.ON decided to close the 1.3 GW Grafenrheinfeld nuclear power plant half a year ahead of its final decommissioning date, set by the government in the weeks after the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan in 2011, because it is not profitable to run. Last year, E.ON decided to retire the 33-year-old reactor in the southern state of Bavaria earlier than required because operation of nuclear power stations in Germany only makes economic sense if they can run for a sufficient length of time without the burden of the nuclear-fuel tax, it said. The brevity of Grafenrheinfeld’s remaining operating lifetime after a required annual refueling stop this June made an early shutdown unavoidable in the interests of E.ON’s shareholders, it said last year. […]
A professor from Japan’s Fukushima University Institute of Environmental Radioactivity (Michio Aoyama) told Kyodo in April that the West Coast of North America will be hit with around 800 terabecquerels of Cesium- 137 by 2016 . EneNews notes that this is 80% of the cesium-137 deposited in Japan by Fukushima, according to the company which runs Fukushima, Tepco: (a petabequeral or “PBq” equals 1,000 terabecquerels .) This is not news for those who have been paying attention. For example, we noted 2 days after the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami that the West Coast of North America could be slammed with radiation from Fukushima. We pointed out the next year that a previously-secret 1955 U.S. government report concluded that the ocean may not adequately dilute radiation from nuclear accidents, and there could be “pockets” and “streams” of highly-concentrated radiation . The same year, we noted that 15 out of […]
In their paper “Elephant in the room: overlooked plasma-destroying reaction with cross section 1012 times that for fusion necessitates redesign of International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor ITER,”* three physicists from California Science and Engineering Corp., Irvine, CA, claim that ITER designers were unaware that the ignored fusion-preventing atomic reaction known as “charge transfer” or “CT,” had a trillion times higher cross section (probability) than that for fusion, hence it will prevent the ignition of ITER, as it did in all 160-odd tokamaks within the past 50 years. CT’s cross section measurement in UK1 of a billion barn became known only after ITER was designed; fusion cross section is a 1/1000 of a barn. There no mention of CT in ITER design2. EXISTENCE OF ‘CRITICAL ENERGY’. Existence of CT gives rise to the hitherto – unknown critical energy below which reactors are inoperable; and above which – free from CT destruction […]
Continue reading the main story Video Play Video|1:09 Obama Hosts Saudi Princes Obama Hosts Saudi Princes President Obama hosted Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, a day before the Gulf Cooperation Council summit. By Associated Press on Publish Date May 13, 2015. Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times. WASHINGTON — When President Obama began making the case for a deal with Iran that would delay its ability to assemble an atomic weapon, his first argument was that a nuclear-armed Iran would set off a “free-for-all” of proliferation in the Arab world. “It is almost certain that other players in the region would feel it necessary to get their own nuclear weapons ,” he said in 2012. Now, as he gathered Arab leaders over dinner at the White House on Wednesday and prepared to meet with them at Camp […]
The Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant is seen in the early morning hours in Middletown, Pennsylvania on March 28, 2011. Photographer: Jeff Fusco/Getty Images At the edge of Humboldt Bay in northern California lies a relic from the heyday of U.S. nuclear power. The reactor was shut down in 1976. The remaining cost to decommission the plant once and for all -– cleaning up lingering radiological dangers, dismantling the remains — will be about $441 million, according to its owner, PG&E Corp. The question is who will pay — for Humboldt Bay, and for dozens of other reactors that are in the process of closing or might soon. Nuclear operators like PG&E are supposed to lay up enough money to cover the costs, similar to how corporations fund pensions. Turns out, most haven’t. PG&E’s Humboldt Bay trust fund, for instance, is currently $308 million short, according to a company […]
A building covering the Unit 1 reactor, left, is removed by a crane at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture, northeastern Japan on Nov. 12, 2014. Photographer: Shizuo Kambayashi/AFP Photo/Pool/Getty Images The reactor building of Unit 3 at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s (Tepco) Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power station in Fukushima, Japan. Source: Tokyo Electric Power Co. via Bloomberg The International Atomic Energy Agency delayed a report about meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to give Japanese officials another chance to explain radiation leaking into the Pacific Ocean. The IAEA’s report about mid- to long-term plans to decommission the stricken reactors will be published in “mid-May,” agency spokesman Serge Gas said in an e-mailed reply to questions. The report had initially been scheduled for release by the end of March on the plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. “The Japanese government invited IAEA […]
Tags: energy | european union | jordan | nuclear energy | nuclear reactor | rosatom | | vladimir putin Russian President Vladimir Putin (2nd L), his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah al-Sisi (2nd R) and Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu (L) meet onboard a guided missile cruiser at the port of Sochi, August 12, 2014. REUTERS/Alexei Druzhinin/RIA Novosti/Kremlin Russia has been notoriously brazen in using state-owned companies as instruments of national power. President Vladimir Putin’s natural-gas wars with Belarus and Ukraine made headlines and sometimes left substantial parts of Europe in the cold . But Moscow’s exploits in other energy-related areas have been less noticed. Recent revelations about the concerted Russian effort to buy up uranium resources across the globe may change that. For Moscow’s state-owned nuclear-energy company, Rosatom, has made successful inroads into markets around the world. It is Rosatom — not France’s Areva or the United States’ Westinghouse […]
A remote-controlled crawler robot, the same type as the one sent inside a nuclear reactor in Fukushima, is shown in this photo taken in February 2015 at a facility in Ibaraki, Japan. Associated Press Tokyo Electric Power Co. has sent a second robot inside one of the nuclear containment vessels at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, five days after losing complete control of the first one . The crawler robot, which started its work Wednesday, is the same model as the one Tepco dispatched last Friday. The initial machine became immovable after recording some footage from inside the reactor and covering about two-thirds of the originally planned route. The utility cut the cables connected to the machine after giving up on retrieving it. It was the first time a robot ventured inside one of the containment vessels following the 2011 nuclear crisis. According to Tepco, the second machine will […]
Employees adjust nuclear fuel rods in a fuel pool. Photographer: Timothy Fadek/Bloomberg The Obama administration supported a bill yesterday, April 14, that would give Congress a chance to review a nuclear power agreement with Iran, if the two countries clinch a deal before their June 30 deadline. In other words, if the diplomatic hurdles are surmounted, nuclear power may have a smoother ride in Iran than in the U.S. “No question,” said Judd Gregg, the former New Hampshire Republican senator and governor and current co-chairman of Nuclear Matters , a bipartisan nonprofit group that promotes keeping nuclear alive in the U.S. “There are 150 plants on the drawing board around the world. There are five on the drawing board in the United States.” Say what? The U.S. achieved fission before anybody else. It learned before anybody else to control nuclear power, train it to boil water, to spin turbines, to generate electricity. There are 99 nuclear reactors across the […]
Photo The Takahama nuclear power station in Fukui Prefecture, Japan, in 2013. Credit Kyodo News TOKYO — Fukui Prefecture, with 13 commercial nuclear reactors clustered along a short, rugged coastline, has earned the area a reputation as a political stronghold for the atomic power industry. Nuclear-friendly politicians dominate most of Fukui’s government offices, and the region is nicknamed Genpatsu Ginza, or Nuclear Alley. Fukui has now emerged as a battleground for the Japanese government’s effort to rebuild the nuclear industry and reverse the economic impact of the reactor shutdowns. On Tuesday, a local judge blocked the latest attempt to get atomic power back on the grid, issuing an injunction forbidding the restarting of two nuclear reactors at the Takahama power plant in the region. The nuclear industry has been in a state of paralysis since the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant four years ago. None of the […]
Fukushima — A litany of failures costing hundreds of millions thumbnail Four years after the earthquake and resulting tsunami that killed 18,000 people and destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plan in Japan, the tragedy is far from being over. Despite the litany of failures in cleaning up the mess, Japan carries on. The daunting task of cleanup at the Fukushima nuclear power plant site, where three of six reactors melted down, and one other is badly damaged, has been an ongoing chore that seems to have no end. And to add insult to injury, Japanese government auditors revealed this past week that over one-third of the $2.0 billion of taxpayer money earmarked for the cleanup has been wasted. But believe it or not, tourists are beginning to return to the area as radiation fears have faded, perhaps due to positive information being issued to the public by government […]
HONG KONG — A sample of powdered tea imported from the Japanese prefecture of Chiba, just southeast of Tokyo, had 9.3 times the legal maximum level of radioactive cesium 137 allowed in food, the Hong Kong government announced late Thursday evening. Hong Kong’s legal limits for radioactive material in food are low and stringent. But the discovery is not the first of its kind. The government’s Center for Food Safety found three samples of vegetables from Japan with “unsatisfactory” levels of radioactive contaminants in March 2011, the month that nuclear reactors in Fukushima, northeast of Tokyo, suffered partial meltdowns following a powerful earthquake and tsunami. Other samples of Japanese food have occasionally been found to have low levels of radiation since the Fukushima disaster, the Hong Kong food center said. Some tea samples were found in Japan with radioactive contamination in the months immediately after the earthquake and tsunami. […]
Saudi Arabia’s King Salman greeted South Korean President Park Geun-hye in Riyadh last week. ENLARGE Photo: Saudi Press Agency/Reuters WASHINGTON—As U.S. and Iranian diplomats inched toward progress on Tehran’s nuclear program last week, Saudi Arabia quietly signed its own nuclear-cooperation agreement with South Korea. That agreement, along with recent comments from Saudi officials and royals, is raising concerns on Capitol Hill and among U.S. allies that a deal with Iran, rather than stanching the spread of nuclear technologies, risks fueling it. Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief, Prince Turki al-Faisal, a member of the royal family, has publicly warned in recent months that Riyadh will seek to match the nuclear capabilities Iran is allowed to maintain as part of any final agreement reached with world powers. This could include the ability to enrich uranium and to harvest the weapons-grade plutonium discharged in a nuclear reactor’s spent fuel. Several U.S. and […]
TEPCO Admits Delaying Report Of Major Radiation Leak Into The Pacific Ocean For 10 Months thumbnail While faith in Japanese ‘economics’ is starting to falter (borne out by the split in the BoJ and endless macro data disappointments) , trust in TEPCO and its governmental operators must be about to hit a new record low. Having promised and given up on the ice-wall strategy to stop radioactive water leaking into the ocean, Bloomberg reports TEPCO officials have admitted that it’s investigating the cause of a spike in radiation levels (23,000 becquerels/liter vs the legal limit of 90) in drainage water that it believes subsequently leaked into the Pacific ocean from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant. The bigger problem, as NBC reports, TEPCO failed to report the leak for 10 months! The radioactivity increase was ‘reported’ on Sunday, the company said in an e-mail yesterday, and as Bloomberg reports […]
ENLARGE Delays on the Olkiluoto-3 nuclear power plant in Finland have contributed to Areva’s losses. The power plant was scheduled to come online in 2013. Photo: Associated Press PARIS—Engineering firm Areva SA said it expects its 2014 net loss to widen to about €4.9 billion, or $5.6 billion, from a year earlier, as delays to a reactor project in Finland and low demand for nuclear projects continue to hammer the company. The French firm’s latest profit warning follows three successive years of reported losses stemming from delays to a nuclear reactor project in Finland and a big write-off after a mine acquisition went sour. The company was also hampered by the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan, when many utilities shelved or delayed plans for nuclear power plant construction. Areva, which is 85%-owned by the French state, on Monday said preliminary financial information shows a full-year net […]
It has been a disturbing week for Japan, not due to any recent economic calamity resulting from Abenomics, but because for the first time since the catastrophic 2011 earthquake, the nation has been rocked with a series of ever stronger tremors, with two 6.0+ stronger quakes recorded in just the past 2 days: The quakes come at an awkward time, just a few short months before Japan’s government aims to restart its first nuclear reactor by around June, following the Fukushima devastation. While it is unclear if it is directly related to the recent surge in tectonic activity, overnight another radioactive water leak in the sea was detected at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, the facility’s operator TEPCO announced. Contamination levels in the gutter reportedly spiked up 70 times over regular readings. The levels of contamination were between 50 and 70 times higher than Fukushima’s already elevated radioactive status, […]
(Bloomberg) — South African President Jacob Zuma said his priority is to solve the energy crisis in the country that’s curbing output at mines and factories and stifling economic growth, including adding more nuclear power by 2023. “We will pursue gas, petroleum, nuclear, hydropower and other sources as part of the energy mix,” Zuma, 72, said in his annual state-of-the-nation speech in Parliament in Cape Town on Thursday. “The country is currently experiencing serious energy constraints which are an impediment to economic growth and is a major inconvenience to everyone in the country.” Zuma’s speech follows nine consecutive days of rolling blackouts implemented as demand for power outstripped supply. State utility Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd., which provides 95 percent of the nation’s electricity, has warned of almost-daily blackouts until the end of April. The power crisis has soured investor appetite for South Africa’s currency and debt. The rand reached […]
As reports from individuals like Chieko Shiina, a supporter of the Fukushima Collaborateive Clinic talk about exploding rates of thyroid cancer in children, as well as an epidemic of leukemia, heart attacks, and other health problems, the Abe-led government and US continue to sweep the fall out of the Fukushima disaster under the rug. Cancer rates have exploded at an increase of almost 6000% in areas near the reactor meltdown. Aside from people-on-the-street interviews that a rare media outlet like “Hodo station” will report on, mainstream media stays completely silent. One Japanese resident, Carol Hisasue, laments that as the incident has disappeared from the media, it has also disappeared from people’s consciousness. So why does Fukushima continue to be a see no evil, hear no evil event? You can watch an over hour-long report that goes into detail, but to sum it up, people can’t even turn on their gas-stoves near Fukushima because […]
BEIJING—China’s ambitions to be a leader in nuclear technology have been dealt a fresh blow, as construction of its most advanced reactor is facing a new delay. The project—which China is developing with Westinghouse Electric Co. of the U.S.—faces new development problems and now isn’t expected to start up until 2016 at the earliest, the chief engineer at China’s state-owned reactor technology company said Thursday. “We discovered some new problems during tests so we need to delay it more until next year,” Wang Zhongtang, chief engineer of China’s State Nuclear Power Technology Corp., said on the sidelines of an industry conference. Mr. Wang didn’t specify the nature of the latest problems found at ongoing trials for the reactor, nor did he provide a more precise time frame for its launch. The delay is the second for the project, which had been slated to start by the end of 2013. […]
ENLARGE The Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Vernon, Vt., had been generating electricity since 1972. Associated Press The Vermont Yankee nuclear plant ended more than four decades of electricity production on Monday, moving to full retirement amid growing competition from cheap natural gas from the shale boom. Environmentalists, who had waged a lengthy fight to close the General Electric Type 4 boiling-water reactor, in Vernon, Vt., applauded the news. Others lamented the loss of a source of low-cost, carbon-free electricity and jobs in the region. Owner Entergy Corp. said the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station produced 171 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity since 1972—more than 70% of the electricity generated in Vermont over that period. ISO New England, the agency that oversees the area’s high-voltage electricity grid, already has determined that the region’s power system can reliably operate without Vermont Yankee given other power sources and the interconnectedness of […]
WASHINGTON — Trying to write a complicated formula to cut carbon emissions, the Environmental Protection Agency thinks it has found a magic number: 5.8. The agency is trying to complete a rule governing carbon emissions from power plants, and among the most complicated and contentious issues is how to treat existing nuclear power plants. Many of them are threatened with shutdowns because cheap natural gas has made their reactors uncompetitive. The agency’s proposal gave an odd mathematical formula for evaluating nuclear plants’ contribution to carbon emissions. It said that 5.8 percent of existing nuclear capacity was at risk of being shut for financial reasons, and thus for states with nuclear reactors, keeping them running would earn a credit of 5.8 percent toward that state’s carbon reduction goal. Since receiving tens of thousands of comments on the proposal, the agency is now reviewing the plan. It must evaluate all comments […]
ENLARGE Out of 71 nuclear reactors being built globally, China is constructing 26. The Hongyanhe power station was one of the first to come online in China after the Fukushima disaster. Zuma Press BEIJING—When a unit of North Carolina’s Curtiss-Wright Corp. won a roughly $300 million deal in 2007 to supply components for new reactors in China, industry officials trumpeted China’s nuclear boom as good for U.S. business. Today, Chinese companies are competing for that business—and foreign companies risk getting left out. Meanwhile, Curtiss-Wright’s contract is caught up in a legal dispute, while Chinese authorities blame the company in part for the delay of a landmark nuclear project. U.S. and other foreign companies are now struggling to keep their hold in China, the industry’s biggest growth market and a rare bright spot more than three years after the Fukushima disaster in Japan put many of the world’s nuclear projects […]
Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, based on U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Note: Graph does not include planned nuclear additions but does include scheduled retirements. When nuclear power plants are built, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has the authority to issue initial operating licenses for a period of 40 years. Beyond that, the reactors need license renewals, and the NRC has granted 20-year license renewals to 74 of the 100 operating reactors in the United States. These reactors may now operate for a total period of 60 years. They represent a cumulative capacity of a little more than 69,000 megawatts (MW). The NRC is currently reviewing license renewal applications for an additional 17 reactors, and expects to receive seven more applications in the next few years. With the bulk of the existing nuclear fleet licensed before 1990, nearly all existing reactors will be more than 60 years old by 2050. […]
4712 Votes Fukushima radiation found in California Very small amounts of radiation from the 2011 meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant have been detected off the California coast, a scientist who has been monitoring the fallout said this week. Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said trace amounts of telltale radioactive compounds were found 100 miles west of the northern California town of Eureka. Buesseler’s crowd-funded monitoring project has been taking ocean samples along the coast of California, Alaska and Canada. The blast and collapse of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant as a result of a devastating earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 released cesium-134 at unprecedented levels. This and other radioactive elements have been slowly making their way across the Pacific Ocean, becoming diluted as they go. The meltdown of three core reactors at the Fukushima plant amounted to the largest nuclear […]
Photo taken on October 14, 2009 shows a board indicating a contaminated area at the French electricity group EDF (Electricite de France) nuclear plant in Flamanville, western France ©Getty The bill for closing down and cleaning up the world’s ageing nuclear reactors will exceed $100bn over the next 25 years alone, the leading energy watchdog has said, warning that governments risk underestimating the cost. With almost 200 reactors due to be shut down by 2040, the International Energy Agency says in its annual report there are “considerable uncertainties” about decommissioning costs, reflecting governments’ limited experience in safely dismantling nuclear plants. In the last 40 years, only 10 reactors have been closed down. More On this topic Energy watchdog in investment warning Japan has high hopes for ‘flammable ice’ Lex LNG – Buyers beware IEA warns of future oil supply crunch IN Energy Peabody sees reprieve from US carbon rules […]
Japan quickened its pace to restarting its idled atomic reactors after local officials voted to resume operations at Sendai’s nuclear plant on the nation’s southern island. Council members for the town of Satsumasendai on the island of Kyushu voted 19 to four to restart the reactors as soon as possible in an almost 3 1/2 hour meeting interrupted frequently by the shouts of protesters opposing the measure. “If they do manage to restart these, it would obviously make the follow-on reactors a lot easier to deal with,” Tom O’Sullivan, founder of Tokyo-based energy consultant Mathyos, said before the vote. “It kind of opens up the path to further restarts in different areas.” Sendai’s two reactors are the first of Japan’s atomic plants in line to restart under tougher safety rules set by the Nuclear Regulation Authority, the agency created after the Fukushima disaster to restore confidence in the industry. […]
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Lockheed Martin Corp said on Wednesday it had made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready for use in a decade. Tom McGuire, who heads the project, said he and a small team had been working on fusion energy at Lockheed’s secretive Skunk Works for about four years, but were now going public to find potential partners in industry and government for their work. Initial work demonstrated the feasibility of building a 100-megawatt reactor measuring seven feet by 10 feet, which could fit on the back of a large truck, and is about 10 times smaller than current reactors, McGuire told reporters. In a statement, the company, the Pentagon’s largest supplier, said it would build and test a compact fusion reactor in less than […]
4581 Votes U.S. fusion plan draws blistering critique Many U.S. fusion scientists are blasting a report that seeks to map out a 10-year strategic plan for their field , calling it “flawed,” “unsatisfactory,” and the product of a rushed process rife with potential conflicts of interest. One result: Last week, most members of a 23-person government advisory panel had to recuse themselves from voting on the report as a result of potential conflicts. “The whole process was unsatisfactory,” says Martin Greenwald of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) Plasma Science and Fusion Center in Cambridge. Achieving fusion—nuclear reactions that have the potential to produce copious, clean energy—requires heating hydrogen fuel to more than 100 million degrees Celsius, causing it to become an ionized gas or plasma. Huge and expensive reactors are needed to contain the superhot plasma long enough for reactions to start. The largest current fusion effort is […]
