Pilgrim, Blobs of Black Oil, Fusion Part 20

We always have time for some good news:

A three-judge panel at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) denied a filing by Massachusetts to stop the relicensing of Entergy's 685-megawatt Pilgrim nuclear power plant in Massachusetts.

This had never seemed a good bet for Massachusetts, which had based its contention on events at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi. Since the NRC is working to apply lessons learned from Fukushima to the American fleet, the state’s contention seemed irrelevant. But – there are further steps to be taken:

The NRC said the state could appeal the ASLB ruling against its Fukushima contention to the five-member, presidentially appointed Commission that oversees the NRC.

The ASLB is is the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, which handles these issues. It was the ASLB that created a minor tempest when it ruled the Department of Energy could not withdraw its license application for Yucca Mountain from the NRC. This is smaller in scope, but an important step to (re)establishing where the state’s authority over nuclear facilities ends.

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A little news from Durban, South Africa, where the United Nation’s climate change conference (COP17) is taking place:

Blobs of black oil have mysteriously surfaced on the beaches north of Durban, threatening to spoil them for holidaymakers ahead of the festive season.

Residents began noticing pockets of oil on the shores of Zinkwazi, Salt Rock, Zimbali and Blythedale beaches.

Not very climate changey. Anything else?

As COP17 kicked off on Monday in Durban, several people were reported dead following flooding over the weekend.

The eThekwini Municipality said 10 fatalities were reported, with five of the cases having been confirmed following flooding that resulted in damage to property and infrastructure in Umlazi on Sunday.

The worst-hit area is the central region, with 19 reports of flooding affecting shacks at Quarry road and Puntan's Hill.

Any questions?

(h/t ThinkProgress)

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And now, for something completely different:

In the race against world governments and the wealthiest companies to commercialize a nuclear fusion reactor, a small, innovative Canadian firm is hoping to bottle and sell the sun's energy.

In a laboratory in this Pacific Coast city [Burnaby, Vancouver], General Fusion physicists and engineers in bright red smocks are busy assembling an experimental reactor.

They hope to test a prototype in 2014 and eventually become the first to commercialize the technology, offering a safe, cheap, pollution-free and virtually inexhaustible source of energy.

Ah, sweet mystery of fusion, never to die. The main problem with fusion, as the story notes, is that it takes a cup full of electricity to produce a thimble full. Forget about economy of scale – there’s no economy whatever.

But you’ve got to admire people who look at the sun and think, I can do that, and then try to do that. The only drawback is that it leads to tears – again and again.

General Fusion admits its chances of success are slim -- but backers believe in its proposal, and are pouring CAN$30 million into the project.

Good work if you can get it. Can’t help but wish General Fusion well.

One detail in the story produced a sour burp:

"The central challenge is still that fossil fuels -- getting them out of the ground and burning them -- is still so cheap to do that there is not an adequate incentive to invest in renewables or other low carbon technologies," said Matt Horne, director of the Pembina Institute.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with Pembina, a Canadian think tank – it doesn’t like nuclear energy very much, but you can’t have everything - but I do think there’s plenty of incentive to invest in low carbon technologies. In any event, it’s an odd argument from a Canadian outlet – the country generates almost 60 percent of its electricity from hydro. Go figure.

Blobs of black oil - in New Zealand, in this instance.

“Nuclear plants are too inflexible… ?”

A certain cognitive dissonance:

Building new nuclear power stations will make it harder for the UK to switch to renewable energy, said one of the top German officials leading the country's nuclear energy phase-out.

And why might that be?

Jochen Flasbarth, president of the Environmental Protection Agency in Germany, who advises the German government, said: "We are not missionaries, and every country will have to find its own way in energy policy, but it is obvious that nuclear plants are too inflexible and cannot sufficiently respond to variations in wind or solar generation, only gas [power stations] do."

“Too inflexible.” That’s a new one. What Flasbarth is trying to say is that nuclear energy doesn’t give renewable energy enough room to play a significant role in energy policy, but what he actually conveys is that nuclear energy provides many of the benefits of renewable energy, but can run at 90 to 92 percent capacity rather than the 30 to 35 percent capacity managed by renewables.

Leaving aside the other upsides and downsides of nuclear and renewable energy sources for a moment, Flasbarth is saying that nuclear energy, because it works virtually all the time, doesn’t need renewable energy sources. He knows this because Germany has until recently been a big supporter of nuclear energy.

Given Flasbarth’s formulation, you might not want nuclear energy on the same portion of the grid as renewable energy, but you can use natural gas instead and live with some carbon emissions in exchange for being able to use non-emitting renewable energy sources 35 percent of the time. You can then site nuclear energy facilities where renewable energy sources cannot function well. That’s fine.

But here’s the thing: Great Britain can organize its energy policy around these choices and use nuclear energy, wind and solar and gas wherever they work best. Germany, quite famously, can’t do this anymore.

Jochen Flasbarth – making the best of a bad situation. It’s almost a cry for help, isn’t it?

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You may want to know that COP17 is happening in Durban, South Africa right about now. The Guardian has up an informative Q&A about the United Nations’ climate change conference. A taster:

There seems little possibility that the summit will produce an emissions reduction agreement, meaning the world will soon lack any binding CO2 targets when Kyoto's first commitment period expires at the end of 2012. At best, diplomats will agree on other details, such as a "green climate fund" designed to channel billions from wealthy to poor countries to fund environmentally friendly economic development there. But with rich countries facing a financial crisis it is unclear where the money should come from.

But the burning question is: How much criminal activity has there been at this year’s conference? Very little, it turns out,

There were no climate change summit related crimes on Monday, police said on Monday afternoon.

"Everything is going smoothly so far. Not... a single conference-related crime report has been given to me today," Colonel Vish Naidoo said late on Monday afternoon.

Whew! The roving bands of climatologists have been quelled at long last. Their sociopathic behavior almost trashed Cancun last year. Speaking of sociopathic:

Climate scientists have mounted a robust defense of their work and debates over science after more than 5,000 personal emails were leaked onto the internet in an apparent attempt to undermine public support for international action to tackle climate change.

As Rocket J. Squirrel says to Bullwinkle J. Moose when the latter threatens to pull a rabbit out of his hat, “Aw, that trick never works.”

Although the conference is not expected to carry much significance for the outside world – that would take a successor to Kyoto - the issue of climate change is no longer vulnerable to dirty tricks. Denying it at this point is just a self-indulgence.

The COP17 logo. Meant to evoke the big tree in Avatar? That didn’t end well for the big tree.

Spinning a Report, Ramping Up in South Africa

An early release of a draft of an NRC report contains good news that clearly isn’t what some folks, however perversely, might have hoped:

The conclusion, to be published in April after six years of work, is based largely on a radical revision of projections of how much and how quickly cesium 137, a radioactive material that is created when uranium is split, could escape from a nuclear plant after a core meltdown.

And that conclusion?

[A] meltdown at a typical American reactor would lead to far fewer deaths than previously assumed.

By far fewer, it means close to zero. Now, I’d rather wait until the final version is released next April to discuss it in detail, but what is interesting now is that it was the Union of Concerned Science that requested this version of the report via the Freedom of Information Act. 

I cannot imagine the report’s conclusions are what the group expected, and having gotten it, they just deny it.

Edwin Lyman, a nuclear physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, contends that the nuclear commission has consistently painted an overly rosy picture and that its latest study does as well. He noted that the study assumed a successful evacuation of 99.5 percent of the people within 10 miles, for example. The report also assumes “average” weather conditions, he noted.

You can read the article if you want to see Lyman spin like a top – some of which writer Matt Wald counteracts with contrary but truthful information – but it would be churlish not to point out that UCS requested the report and gave it to the New York Times. Since the report doesn’t really fit the UCS narrative, it might have just buried it. But it didn’t, so good for UCS.

Our good friend Rod Adams has a more thorough response to some of Lyman’s comments – it really is like watching a dream evaporate.

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On the road to nuclear energy:

However, SA was firmly on the road to nuclear generation - which at present only accounted for around 6% of electricity generated in the country.
The country has only one nuclear power station in the Western Cape constructed during the eighties.

SA is South Africa. It already has one nuclear facility, but it provides only 8 per cent of South Africa’s electricity – coal has most of the marketplace - and that’s a problem because 3.7 million people lack any electricity at all. So this is an instance where electricity generation will have to grow with infrastructure, which provides South Africa an opportunity to change course.

Public Enterprises Minister Malusi Gigaba supports the use of nuclear and renewable sources, and of course, he is more than aware of the accident at Fukushima Daiichi.

"While there is a risk that there might be delays in introducing nuclear capacity, rather have these delays than a disaster of life threatening proportions."

Amen. But he knows that the lessons learned – and the fact that any new nuclear build will be of the current generation – can mitigate concern. South Africa is ready to move forward.

The minister added that it could take up to twenty years for SA to fully supply electricity to these 3.7 million people. "But we don't think we can wait that long ... and if we do, then new challenges would have emerged."

Can’t help but like Minister Gigaba. He knows what his country needs and he makes the argument to move forward.

(A number of stories have noted that the South African nuclear market will be state-owned – I’m not sure why this is interesting, as it is true of virtually all its electricity generation now.)

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In Japan:

Prime Minister Naoto Kan said the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency was siding with the industry rather than acting as a regulator. He said that underscored a cozy relationship and the deep-rooted problem that must be corrected following the March 11 tsunami and the nuclear crisis.

What is NISA alleged to have done?

Japan’s prime minister criticized the country’s nuclear safety agency yesterday for allegedly trying to plant questions aimed at supporting atomic energy at public forums.

That would certainly cause a major scandal if done by the NRC here, but it is perhaps a little worse for Japan because NISA does not have the independent profile of the NRC. Instead, it is a department under the government’s Trade and Industry Ministry, which promotes Japan’s nuclear technology in the manner of our Commerce Department. It’s easy to see why NISA might see its role as promotional in part, but Kan is right: it leads to ethical deadlocks.

But it also means a NISA scandal is a government scandal and that’s what Kan has to knock back. (The IAEA has recommended that Japan separate the two – that would certainly moderate industry/regulatory coziness.) But still: alleged. Let’s see how this works out.

In Japan, 35 of 54 reactors are idle, causing electricity shortages in sweltering heat.

Most of those facilities could be running, but so it goes. We cannot criticize Japan for anything it chooses to do at this junction. But if the Japanese summer is anything like the American summer, oof!

Milusi Gigaba