Nuclear power remains expensive, dangerous and too radioactive for Wall Street.
March 5, 2012 -- Is the nuclear drought over?
When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) recently approved two new nuclear reactors near Augusta, Ga., the first such decision in 32 years, there was plenty of hoopla.
It marked a "clarion call to the world," declared Marvin S. Fertel, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute. "Nuclear energy is a critical part of President Obama's all-of-the-above energy strategy," declared Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who traveled in February to the Vogtle site where Westinghouse plans to build two new reactors.
But it's too soon for nuclear boosters to pop their champagne corks. Japan's Fukushima disaster continues to unfold nearly a year after the deadly earthquake and tsunami unleashed what's shaping up to be the worst nuclear disaster ever. Meanwhile, a raft of worldwide reactor closures, cancellations, and postponements is still playing out. The global investment bank UBS estimates that some 30 reactors in several countries are at risk of closure, including at least two in highly pro-nuclear France.
And Siemens AG, one of the world's largest builders of nuclear power plants, has already dumped its nuclear business.
Recently, Standard and Poor's (S&P) credit rating agency announced that without blanket financing from consumers and taxpayers, the prospects of an American nuclear renaissance are "faint." It doesn't help that the nuclear price tag has nearly doubled in the past five years. Currently reactors are estimated to cost about $6 to $10 billion to build. The glut of cheap natural gas makes it even less attractive for us to nuke out.
How expensive is the bill that S&P thinks private lenders will shun?
Replacing the nation's existing fleet of 104 reactors, which are all slated for closure by 2056, could cost about $1.4 trillion. Oh, and add another $500 billion to boost the generating capacity by 50 percent to make a meaningful impact on reducing carbon emissions. (Nuclear power advocates are touting it as a means of slowing climate change.) We'd need to fire up at least one new reactor every month, or even more often, for the next several decades.
Dream on.
Meanwhile, Japan -- which has the world's third-largest nuclear reactor fleet -- has cancelled all new nuclear reactor projects. All but two of its 54 plants are shut down. Plus the risk of yet another highly destructive earthquake occurring even closer to the Fukushima reactors has increased, according to the European Geosciences Union.
This is particularly worrisome for Daiichi's structurally damaged spent fuel pool at Reactor No. 4, which sits 100 feet above ground, exposed to the elements. Drainage of water from this pool resulting from another quake could trigger a catastrophic radiological fire involving about eight times more radioactive cesium than was released at Chernobyl.
Ironically, the NRC's decision to license those two reactors has thrown a lifeline to Japan's flagging nuclear power industry (along with an $8.3-billion U.S. taxpayer loan guarantee). Toshiba Corp. owns 87 percent of Westinghouse, which is slated to build the new reactors. Since U.S.-based nuclear power vendors disappeared years ago, all of the proposed reactors in this country are to be made by Japanese firms -- Toshiba, Mitsubishi, and Hitachi -- or Areva, which is mostly owned by the French government. According to the Energy Department, "major equipment... would not be manufactured by U.S. facilities."
For Southern Co., which would operate the Vogtle reactors, the NRC's approval is just the beginning of a financial and political gauntlet it must run through. Over the strenuous objections of consumers and businesses, energy customers will shoulder the costs of financing and constructing this $17-billion project, even if the reactors are abandoned before completion. If things don't turn out, U.S. taxpayers will also be on the hook for an $8.3-billion loan guarantee that the Energy Department has approved.
The Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accountability Office estimate that nuclear loan guarantees have a 50/50 chance of default.
Nearly four decades after the Three Mile Island accident, nuclear power remains expensive, dangerous, and too radioactive for Wall Street. The industry won't grow unless the U.S. government props it up and the public bears the risks.
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/inetSeries/nwJWG.html
"It is the premise of this book that if the American people knew the truth about radiation there would be no nuclear issue. In this book people who have had direct personal experience with the nuclear establishment speak out about what they have learned."
"They did not necessarily start out as proponents or opponents of nuclear power; they are people who have in common a genuine respect for hard work. In almost every case they found their integrity as workers threatened by involvement with the nuclear establishment. When they mentioned that something was done sloppily, that some regulation was being violated, that something was dangerous, their concerns were ignored, trivialized, rationalized, or twisted. Some, unable to work under such conditions and feeling their sense of decency outraged and their survival in jeopardy, began to speak publicly. Then they found out what they were up against: it wasn't just their boss, it wasn't just their boss's boss: it was the union, the utility company, the military-industrial complex that were insisting on the myth that nuclear power was "safe." No one was permitted to challenge this myth and retain credibility"
http://rense.gsradio.net:8080/rense/special/rense_Wilcox_030112.mp3
Why is this being suppressed?
http://www.heartcom.org/RadiationDanger.htm
Has good info on internal vs external emitters and the inverse square law.
http://blog.xkcd.com/2011/03/19/radiation-chart/
Here is more info on internal emitters:
http://www.naturalnews.com/031992_radioactive_cesium.html#ixzz1J2tByHwE
Regulatory capture in the nuclear industry in the US and around the world is a fact and is obvious to all but the most ignorant or those pushing the industry's agenda.
http://nuclear-news.net/2012/01/27/film-exposes-regulatory-capture-of-usas-nrc-by-the-nuclear-industry/
This film demonstrates the pervasiveness of nuclear industry capture in the US.
http://enenews.com/economist-nuclear-power-dream-failed-promise-global-transformation-gone-written-industry-safe-chocolate-factory
In the early 1980s, a Taiwan steel company accidentally mixed some highly radioactive cobalt-60 into a batch of steel rebar. The radioactive rods were then used in the construction of 1,700 apartments. As a result, people living in these buildings were subject to radiation up to 30 times the normal amount received from the natural background.
When dismayed officials discovered this enormous error 15 years later, they surveyed past and present apartment dwellers expecting to find an epidemic of cancer. Normal incidence would have predicted 160 cancers among the 10,000 residents. To their astonishment, the researchers discovered only five cases.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203370604577261341008387240.html#articleTabs%3Darticle
You didn’t mention that. Why not?
Here's the study
FD Chen et al. Chromosomal damage in long-term residents of houses contaminated with Cobalt-60. The Lancet. 355:726 February 26, 2000.
Thought you got away with that one, huh?
Here's the study
FD Chen et al. Chromosomal damage in long-term residents of houses contaminated with Cobalt-60. The Lancet. 355:726 February 26, 2000.
“We have to look at building another nuclear plant,” Christie, a first-term Republican, said at a town hall in Ocean Township. “Fifty-three percent of our electricity comes from nuclear power.”
http://webfarm.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-06/christie-says-new-nuclear-plant-would-help-solve-new-jersey-energy-needs.html
Nebraska's two nuclear plants sit below the nation's largest reservoir system — six dams on the Missouri River.
And last year, as record runoff barreled through those dams and flooding closed in on Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station, Midlanders nervously asked, "What happens if the dams fail?"
On Tuesday, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission made clear that it wants that type of question answered for reactors across the country.
Regulators point to a preliminary review begun several years ago that they say suggests damage from flooding at the nation's 104 reactors could be, in some cases, "greater than previously expected."
http://www.omaha.com/article/20120307/NEWS01/703079871
It would be like a tsunami, now wouldn't it? Nukes will be spending more money to fix it.........or close.
http://enformable.com/2012/03/flood-damage-investigation-not-over-for-us-nuke-plants/
I'm a system analyst AND know more then you have clue about.
Problem is cannot talk about somethings on a open medium, non-disclosures I signed, and don't even remember all of them anymore.....guess I need a lawyer on retainer.
I can fix it, and will never be able to
FUKUSHIMA, Japan - Yoshiko Ota keeps her windows shut. She never hangs her laundry outdoors. Fearful of birth defects, she warns her daughters: Never have children.
This is life with radiation, nearly one year after a tsunami-hit nuclear power plant began spewing it into Ota's neighborhood, 40 miles (60 kilometers) away. She's so worried that she has broken out in hives.
"The government spokesman keeps saying there are no IMMEDIATE health effects," the 48-year-old nursery school worker says. "He's not talking about 10 years or 20 years later. He must think the people of Fukushima are fools.
"It's not really OK to live here," she says. "But we live here."
Radiation is still leaking from the now-closed Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, though at a slower pace than it did in the weeks after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. It's not immediately fatal but could show up as cancer or other illnesses years later.
What's clear is Fukushima will serve as a test case that the world is watching for long-term exposure to low-dose radiation.
http://www.newsday.com/news/world/uncertain-risks-torment-japanese-in-nuclear-zone-1.3584817
A year after an earthquake in Japan (JGDPAGDP) touched off the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl, here’s the question on my mind: Who’s going to jail?
The news media are asking the obvious and safe questions ahead of March 11: How well did the government respond? Whither the devastated northeast? What’s the economic effect? When might the 52 of 54 nuclear reactors mothballed since then reopen?
This barrage of “anniversary” articles misses the point. Anniversaries commemorate events in the past, ones for which there is a modicum of closure. Radiation is still venting into the air around Fukushima. Makeshift equipment, some held in place by tape, is keeping vital reactor systems operating. Is Japan’s 3/11 history? Not unless we change the definition.
What the first anniversary of the disaster requires is a dose of accountability. We need a few good perp walks by current and past Tokyo Electric Power Co. executives, whose arrogance, negligence and corruption sent radiation clouds Tokyo’s way. Next on the docket should be the government officials who enabled what more closely resembles an organized crime syndicate than an energy sector.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-03-06/japan-s-nuclear-mobsters-escape-tsunami-pain-william-pesek
http://thoriumremix.com/2011/
Nope, its not less, it's just ULTRA concentrated.
"and instead of dumping it to the environment, you keep it, it does seem pretty simple."
Overly simple and untrue. It gets dumped into the environment ALL THE TIME
"which can be used in generation 4 reactors. "
Which exist only in theory
"We need to stop dumping our "waste" and the best way to do that is to expand the use of nuclear power,"
Convoluted reasoning. the best way to do that is to REDUCE the use of nuclear power and move to solar, which is cheaper and can exist on the free market
“Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: (1) It’s completely impossible. (2) It’s possible, but it’s not worth doing. (3) I said it was a good idea all along.”
Clarke’s three laws:
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
This article has a great environmentalists perspective on the topic:
http://www.monbiot.com/2012/02/02/nuclear-vs-nuclear-vs-nuclear/
“I heard that the UAE is planning orders for about four additional nuclear power stations,” Hong said in a press conference in Abu Dhabi on Monday, according to the ministry.
About the nuclear power plants currently under construction in the UAE, Hong said the project has great meaning in terms of job creation, as it requires about 2,000 high-skilled engineers.
Considering the expected additional orders, Korea may need about 6,000 people in 2020 for the UAE project, he said.
http://www.koreaherald.com/national/Detail.jsp?newsMLId=20120306001250
the UAE is an absolute monarchy. The people have no choice in the matter. Look at all that dessert. Solar would be perfect for the UAE. With all the instability in the Mideast, The absolute rulers of tge UAE are creating an enormous security risk for themselves with nuclear
It's pretty sad actually, google Iran nuclear program....started with "Atoms for Peace".
Google where North Korea got thier reactor. Genie is out of the bottle, Pandoras box has been opened.
UAE knows what is good for them. They know that nuclear is the way to extend their resources.
Its been thought out very very carefully
'Weiss was speaking on the sidelines of a week-long meeting of 60 international experts in Vienna to assess for the United Nations the radiation exposures and health effects of the world's worst nuclear accident in 25 years.
The March 11 disaster caused by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami wrecked the Fukushima plant on the coast north of Tokyo, triggering a radiation crisis and widespread contamination. About 80,000 residents fled a 20-km (12-mile) exclusion zone.
Weiss said Japanese experts attending the meeting had told him that they were not aware of any acute health effects, in contrast to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine.'
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/31/us-japan-fukushima-health-idUSTRE80U1AS20120131
No acute health effects. This is good news.
Further:
'Asked whether he was optimistic that the overall health effects would be quite small, Weiss said: "If we find out that what we know now is representing the situation, then the answer would be yes ... the health impact would be low."'
Carry on, though.
.........Igari's home in Kawauchi is located about 30 kilometers from the power plant. However, Igari said he and his children are unable to live safely there as their house has not been decontaminated yet.
TEPCO plans to pay the full value of houses and properties--the value before the nuclear crisis--located in areas where the amount of radiation exceeds 50 millisieverts annually. The return of residents to those areas is thought to be unlikely.
However, it is unclear whether TEPCO would compensate for Igari's home, which is located outside the 50-millisievert area. TEPCO has decided it will not compensate for houses and other properties outside the area, in principle, until the government issues a clear standard on compensation payments........
.............Igari now lives off TEPCO salary compensation given to people who lost their jobs due to the nuclear crisis and government unemployment benefits. "Unless it becomes clear whether my house will be eligible for [TEPCO] compensation, I can't decide our future, such as my job, our house, anything," Igari said.
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T120306005516.htm
Yep, sure all of our power companies would step right up and cut checks........
ROFLMAO on that image.