Alternative Energy / Nuclear Power

• Why Nuclear Power Could be the Best Solution for California’s Energy Needs

  The California Council on Science and Technology has examined the potential of nuclear energy to meet California’s electricity demand in the year 2050.  The main focus of the organization’s analysis is on the CCST Realistic Model, which assumes that total electricity demand in California in the year 2050 amounts to 510 terawatt-hours per year (TWh/y). Since nuclear electricity is capital intensive, it is most economically used as baseload power where the plants run at their maximum output all of the time.  It is also assumed that nuclear plants have a 90 percent capacity factor and that baseload power represents 67…

• Political Intrusion is Destroying the U.S. Nuclear Power Industry

  Finally, the US Department of Energy’s First Quadrennial Technology Review, released last week, identifies Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing as the technology’s primary obstacle. It would seem obvious to most anyone that better new designs and applying experience would offer a safer, cheaper and more efficient production of nuclear power.  It just isn’t so in the U.S. and that fact is a huge embarrassment for an economy, a lost opportunity for ratepayers, stockholders, and job seekers, and a major intrusion into the effort for abundant energy. Simply said, experience worldwide and intellectual progress can’t get into the U.S. nuclear power sector…

• Have Rising Costs and Increased Risks Made Nuclear Energy a Poor Choice?

  There are 440 nuclear reactors operating around the world, providing about 14 per cent of the world's electricity supply. Most were installed 30–40 years ago, when the relative cost of producing nuclear energy made it an attractive option. After 1985, lower petroleum costs, combined with concerns over nuclear safety (raised by the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island, United States, in 1979 and at Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986), stagnated worldwide expansion of nuclear-generated electricity. But more recently, concerns over greenhouse gas emissions helped spark a nuclear energy 'renaissance', stimulated by government subsidies. Unlike thermoelectric generation using coal or other fossil…

• Armenia’s Aging Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant Alarms Caucasian Neighbors

  The USSR might have imploded two decades ago, but debris from its headlong industrialization drive litter the post-Soviet landscape, and nothing more unsettles the population of the fifteen new nations carved out of the Soviet Union than its nuclear legacy. The poster child for Caucasian nuclear concerns is Armenia’s aging Metsamor nuclear power plant, which provides nearly 40 percent of the country’s electricity. The facility has not only alarmed neighboring Georgia, Turkey and Azerbaijan but begun to receive international notice as well - on 11 April National Geographic ran a story entitled “Is Armenia’s Nuclear Plant the World’s Most Dangerous?”…

• Belarus, Russia to Finalize Deal on Nuclear Power Plant Construction

  The Russian Federation’s ambassador to Belarus Alekhandr Surikov told reporters in the Belarusian capital Minsk that a draft Belarusian-Russian interstate agreement on the construction of a new 2,400 megawatt nuclear power plant for Belarus will be ready in October. The NPP will be built by Russia’s Atomstroieksport, a subsidiary of the Russian Federation’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom and will contain two reactors, with the power plant's first generating unit expected to go online in 2017 and the second the following year, Minsk’s Belapan news agency reported. Belarus has had a fraught relationship with Soviet-era nuclear power. The April 1986 Chernobyl…

• The Broken Dreams of Nuclear Electricity

  Nuclear power is no magic solution, argues Pervez Hoodbhoy — it's not safe, or cheap, and it leads to weapons programmes. A string of energy-starved developing countries have looked at nuclear power as the magic solution. No oil, no gas, no coal needed – it's a fuel with zero air pollution or carbon dioxide emissions. High-tech and prestigious, it was seen as relatively safe. But then Fukushima came along. The disaster's global psychological impact exceeded Chernobyl's, and left a world that's now unsure if nuclear electricity is the answer. Core concerns The fire that followed the failure of emergency generators…

• Iran’s Bushehr Reactor - Benign or Merely Malignant with Bad PR?

  The Iranian media is mounting a full court press against Western charges that its Bushehr nuclear power plant (NPP), which came online last week, in fact conceals a nefarious covert nuclear weapons program, a charge asserted by both Israel and the United States.Iran has vociferously denied the allegations for years. As the issue descends into increasingly murky international waters the Iranian media remains robustly nationalist. A recent editorial in Iran’s Jam-e Jam newspaper lays out Tehran’s case under the headings of “We have a nuclear power plant.” The most salient points are below: “We have a nuclear power plant so…

• Will France Also Play the Nuclear Fool?

  Many years ago, although it seems like centuries, I was sitting in a small bar-disco in a town near Stuttgart Germany, talking to an Ivy League type from the same brigade in the U.S. Army as myself, as well as a friend of his who was the son of a former German general, but whose Christian name was definitely American/English. I of course asked him how so many Germans could have jumped for joy when Adolph Hitler declared war on the United States (on December 11, 1941). Didn’t they understand what that was going to mean? Didn’t the German generals…

• Earthquake and Hurricane Irene Impact U.S. Nuclear Power Industry

  Since the 11 March Fukushima nuclear disaster, the global nuclear industry has been mounting an aggressive PR campaign to convince an increasingly skeptical public that not only is nuclear energy safe, it has a number of benefits, such as zero carbon dioxide emissions. The center of the global nuclear industry is the United States, where the first civilian nuclear power plants for generating electricity were built and which now operates 104 commercial reactors, producing roughly 20 percent of the nation’s electricity.  Until Fukushima, nuclear power advocates saw a potential renaissance of the industry – besides arguing the global warming benefits, Three…

• Kazakhstan’s Land of Death and the Soviet Union’s Nuclear Tests

  It has been 20 years since the world's most infamous nuclear test site was shuttered, but fallout from the Soviet Union's nuclear program is evident today. From 1949 to 1989, residents of the former Soviet oblast of Semipalatinsk lived under the shadow of a mushroom cloud. Over that time, at least 456 nuclear devices -- both atmospheric and underground -- were detonated at the 18,000-square-kilometer site known as Semipalatinsk-21. What began as the crown jewel in the Soviet nuclear program proved to be synonymous with tragedy. The human suffering that took place at the site was well-documented, even before testing ended in…