Germany now generates over 35% of its yearly electricity consumption from wind and solar sources. Over 30 000 wind turbines have been built, with a total installed capacity of nearly 60 GW. Germany now has approximately 1.7 million solar power (photovoltaic) installations, with an installed capacity of 46 GW. This looks very impressive.

Unfortunately, most of the time the actual amount of electricity produced is only a fraction of the installed capacity. Worse, on “bad days” it can fall to nearly zero. In 2016 for example there were 52 nights with essentially no wind blowing in the country. No Sun, no wind. Even taking “better days” into account, the average electricity output of wind and solar energy installations in Germany amounts to only about 17% of the installed capacity. //

The question is, whether it makes sense at all to depart from the tried-and-proven model of a stable electricity system based on continuously functioning sources, a large percentage operating in base load mode.

If we want the system to be largely CO2-free, then the only available option is nuclear energy.

Renewable wind, solar, hydro and biofuels cannot fill the gap //

So you don’t like CO2? What you need to know, then, is that there’s no alternative to advanced nuclear power.

Concern about the climate effects of man-caused CO2 emissions has prompted gigantic investments into so-called renewable energy sources: wind, solar, hydropower and biofuels. Meanwhile, in a huge mistake, nuclear energy – a reliable CO2-free power source producing 14% of the world’s electricity – has been left far behind.

Germany provides a bizarre example, albeit not the only one. Here the government’s commitment to its so-called climate goals has been combined, paradoxically, with the decision to shut down the country’s remaining nuclear power plants by 2022.

Would it not be more rational, if we believe that human emissions of CO2 are destroying the planet, to expand nuclear energy as quickly as possible, rather than shut it down? //

I believe we are facing a branching point in global energy policy. What should be the priority? Assuming it should be a goal to drastically reduce world emissions of CO2 in the medium and long term – which I don’t want to argue about here – is it wise to invest so much in renewable energy sources, as many nations are doing today? Or should we allot only a limited role to the renewables, and go for a massive expansion of nuclear energy instead? //

According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, $288.9 billion was invested into renewable energy in 2018, the bulk of which went into wind and solar energy. Despite this, CO2 emissions worldwide continue to grow relentlessly.

China, for example, leads the world in the size of its investments into renewable energy, with over $100 billion invested in 2018 alone. At the same time China also leads the world in the construction of new coal power plants, which are the single biggest source of CO2 emissions by human activity. Since the start of 2018, China has brought 42.9 gigawatts of new coal-fired power plants online, with another 121.3 GW under construction and 200 GW or more in various stages of planning. //

The simple fact is, that in the foreseeable future no amount of investment into renewables, however large, will be sufficient to eliminate humans’ dependence on coal, oil and natural gas. That is, unless we are willing to collapse the world economy.

If we are really committed to reducing CO2 emissions, then there is no way around nuclear energy, and lots of it. The reasons are elementary.

Suppose that by some means we could completely eliminate the use of fossil fuels for transport and heating. This is hardly conceivable without greatly increasing the global consumption of electricity, which can already be projected to more than double over the next 25 years. Where will all the electricity come from?

Hybrid energy systems have drawn increasing attention of late but the possibility of melding the benefits of nuclear power with those of renewables harbours the potential to revolutionise energy generation as we know it.

By performing a sort of balancing act, nuclear power can enhance the efficiency of renewables while ensuring the overall system is reliable and low carbon.

Yet while some countries have already successfully adapted nuclear power plants to be load following—that is, to provide flexible operation based on energy demand and fill the gaps in output left by intermittent sources such as wind and solar—the issue more economic than technical.

Nuclear plants require significant invesment, and as such they need to run for as many hours as possible, and it’s not economic for them to stand idle for a period of time just because the wind happens to be blowing—they generate no income during that period.

Here Aliki van Heek, unit head at IAEA, speaks to Nuclear Engineering International about the feasbility of merging nuclear power and renewables into a hybrid energy system, and the impetus phenomena such as climate change have created with regard to making such a concept a reality.

An “energy-only” model keeps wholesale prices low during fair weather. Low prices encourage customers to add devices and equipment. On a larger, longer term scale, it encourages businesses and even residents to migrate to take advantage of having low cost electricity available.

But it doesn’t provide sufficient predictable revenue to encourage investment in durable generating sources or long term, guaranteed delivery fuel supply contracts. //

If challenged about the value of continued strong support and mandates for increasing wind and solar penetration, one of their arguments is that using the wind and the sun to supply energy when it is available allows fossil fuel generating sources to burn less fuel. //

That would be a reasonable response if the only competitor to wind and solar was fossil fuel. It’s even a reasonable response in systems where large hydroelectric dams are part of the generating mix because it allows the water to remain behind the dam, ready to be used when wind and solar generation falls off.

But opportunistically displacing other sources of power can lead to unproductive consequences like eliminating enough revenue from nuclear plants to make them struggle financially. Right now, there are firm plans in place to close five operating nuclear plants in the US during 2021.

Though some industry leaders have vociferously denied that wind and solar power can be blamed for those closure decisions, the financial evidence is clear. Low grid prices and grid congestion fees in regions where there is abundant wind or solar power available create a “missing money” situation that stresses large steady-running generators that serve base load very well. //

The “energy-only” market structure has helped gas to push most coal and lignite off of the Texas grid, producing significant air pollution reduction and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Using more natural gas in power production has been beneficial to the Texas economy as well, since most of the gas burned in the state is extracted in the state. //

Without any source of revenues for power generations other than selling electricity, there are no reasons why any generator would spend money to store fuel on site to use in the rare case where there are interruptions in the fuel supply. //

If society determines that it is unacceptable to have a power grid that cuts off customers for many hours at a time during a period when being without power can be deadly, it must accept the fact that markets cannot be the decision makers.

Cheapness on a short duration scale – like 5-minute settlement markets – cannot be the sole criteria for selecting power sources.

One common misperception about nuclear energy is that it is inflexible, and thus inherently incompatible in a system comprised of variable renewables. But in reality, nuclear is already operating flexibly, and the next generation of advanced reactors will only expand this capability. There are 58 reactors in France that have been operating flexibly for more than 30 years, and that can vary their output between 20% and 100% in as little as 30 minutes. This level of flexibility balances generation and demand, allowing renewables to contribute to the grid intermittently without any additional support from emissions-producing sources like coal or natural gas.

There are also companies working to make the existing fleet and, more importantly, the next generation of reactors more flexible by allowing for even more rapid and efficient ramping. For example, the NuScale small modular reactor (SMR) design has 12 separate modules that can be individually dialed back throughout the day — or even taken offline for an afternoon — to maximize use of renewables during their peak hours and ensure energy demand is met. That means nuclear offers a great support system, giving renewables the space to shine when the sun is out and the wind is blowing, but it’s always there when it’s needed.

No outage would have occurred if a fraction of the total Texas wind capacity had instead been a combination of properly winterized natural gas turbines and nuclear plants. //

Eventually, forensics rather than finger-pointing will likely confirm what we know now: the Texas grid almost collapsed because of a domino of events. It began with a near-total loss of output from that state’s mighty wind farms. At the center of the debate about how to prevent a next time — with natural disasters, there is always a next time – we find a simple truism: For critical infrastructures, the hallmark of reserve capabilities is “available when needed.” //

for decades now, policy discussions and spending allocations for electric grids have been framed in terms of producing more green kilowatt-hours rather than more reliability and resiliency. //

Indeed, if nuclear fission were just now discovered, it would be hailed as the magical solution for producing electricity using a trivial amount of land and material. One pound of nuclear fuel matches 60,000 pounds of oil, 100,000 pounds of coal, or 1 million pounds of Tesla batteries. Consequently, nuclear machines can run day and night with refueling needed once every couple of years. //

So, here we are, with barely 10 percent of the world’s electricity derived from splitting atoms on this 65th anniversary of Calder Hall, the world’s first commercial nuclear plant, inaugurated in 1956 by Queen Elizabeth II. Instead of a massive push to find cheaper solutions for inherently reliable nuclear technology, we see a monomaniacal preoccupation with deploying inherently unreliable wind (and solar) technologies.

Yes, we know some Texas nuclear capacity was tripped offline during the Great Blackout. There was a failure to include cold-weather protection for “feedwater.” Weatherizing is an avoidable glitch, one that’s far easier to fix than the vicissitudes of wind and sunlight.

To fix green unreliability, proponents are pushing grid-scale batteries. For perspective, however, consider what would be required for the Texas grid to handle predictable occurrences of several days without wind or sunlight. The quantity of batteries needed equals a decade’s worth of the entire world’s production, at a cost well north of $400 billion, an amount of money that could build enough nuclear plants to power the entire Texas grid for the next century, not just a few days.

it turns out some of those problems may have been because ERCOT had not winterized its system properly (but more on that in a minute). The Wall Street Journal spells it out:

Between 12 a.m. on Feb. 8 and Feb. 16, wind power plunged 93% while coal increased 47% and gas 450%, according to the EIA. Yet the renewable industry and its media mouthpieces are tarring gas, coal and nuclear because they didn’t operate at 100% of their expected potential during the Arctic blast even though wind turbines failed nearly 100%.

The policy point here is that an electricity grid that depends increasingly on subsidized but unreliable wind and solar needs baseload power to weather surges in demand. Natural gas is crucial but it also isn’t as reliable as nuclear and coal power.

Politicians and regulators don’t want to admit this because they have been taking nuclear and coal plants offline to please the lords of climate change. But the public pays the price when blackouts occur because climate obeisance has made the grid too fragile. We’ve warned about this for years, and here we are.

But the best evidence that ERCOT should be investigated comes with a report indicating that the small fraction of Texas not serviced by ERCOT seems to have had few outages at all. And it would appear it’s because they took the time to weatherize their systems following a 2011 winter storm that hit the state.

in 1966, this same site was home to South Dakota’s first, last and only nuclear power plant. The plan for the plant was submitted to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and Northern States Power in August of 1959 by Allis Chalmers Manufacturing, which around here, most of us know as a tractor company. At that time Allis Chalmers had an Atomic Energy Division. //

In South Dakota just under half of our power comes from the hydro-electric plants along the Missouri River. Pathfinder might have gone on to power homes in South Dakota, however repeated failure in the steam separators caused the plant to shut down and eventually led to the decision to close the plant.

“I think we would classify Pathfinder as a research project. You know it began construction in the late ’50s, went online in 64, and then operated for 3 years, intermittently for testing purposes, for research purposes,” said Wilcox. //

“The reactor itself was removed in 1991,” said Wilcox.

The rest of Pathfinder was taken down and moved in the early 2000s.

“And the piping and all the other equipment which was at a level low enough to be handled by people physically without any protective gear,” Wilcox added.

The Nuclear Innovation Alliance (NIA) and Partnership for Global Security (PGS), two US think tanks, today released a joint report defining a comprehensive strategy for the USA to become the global leader in advanced nuclear power. They said the strategy outlines the domestic and international activities that will be required to ensure the USA can lead in the development and deployment of next generation nuclear technologies through collaboration between government, industry, civil society, and other nations.

A series of winter storms and a blast of Arctic air has put most of the United States into a short term energy supply challenge.

Texas has been the epicenter of the winter event. Its electric power grid has been under an Emergency Energy Alert Stage 3 since the early morning hours of February 15. At that stage, reserve margins are so tight that the grid operator has issued orders to transmission companies to reduce loads on the system.

The transmission companies have few remaining tools available to keep the grid in balance and prevent widespread collapse. They have reached the response stage where they need to implement rotating outages. In some cases, the margin between reserve generating capacity and demand has been so tight that the rotating outages have been substantially longer than the typical planned duration of 15-45 minutes.

There are numerous contributing factors, including fuel-related outages at natural gas fired power stations, a lack of wind as the cold air settles in, freezing at some wind turbine generators, and challenges at coal plants.

Approximately 35 GWe of installed thermal generating capacity was not producing electricity for a significant portion of the day on Feb 15. As of this moment, 8:15 PM central time, there is no solar electricity being provided in Texas and its 30,000 MWe of installed wind turbines is generating just 800 MWe.//

On Monday, Feb. 15, 2021, at 0537, an automatic reactor trip occurred at South Texas Project in Unit 1. The trip resulted from a loss of feedwater attributed to a cold weather-related failure of a pressure sensing lines to the feedwater pumps, causing a false signal, which in turn, caused the feedwater pump to trip. This event occurred in the secondary side of the plant (non-nuclear part of the unit). The reactor trip was a result of the feedwater pump trips. The primary side of the plant (nuclear side) is safe and secured.

German utility seeks funding for non-nuclear prototype reactor
Sweden needs new power capacity to meet electrification demand

In 2019*, from the beginning of the year up to this day in that year, all world nuclear power plants generated enough energy to supply low-carbon electricity (12 gCO2eq/kWh) to

534,564,060
French households during 1 year
(equivalent of 2,779,733,114 MWh)

If this electricity had been produced from
coal (820 gCO2/kWh)
, it would have caused the emission of greenhouse gases equivalent to those of

...
389,163,258
additional vehicles
in circulation
(equivalent of 1,945,816,291 tonnes of CO2eq)

Furthermore, this same electricity produced
from coal would have been
responsible for

68,409
premature deaths
(24.61.deaths/TWh, while the human toll of nuclear power and of modern renewable energy sources is below 0.1)

Pitzer gave the AEC a backhanded slap by calling it “reasonably efficient by general governmental standards,” and stated that its monopoly in atomic energy had delayed atomic reactor development.

He described how material production reactors, with their complex chemical processing systems, had been built in less than three years during wartime. During that time of rapid progress, he said, if there was a disagreement about which of two courses of action were best, both of them were followed.

In the succeeding years, following either route needed to be preceded by an “exhaustive series of preliminary studies” that added layers of cost to the project. Salaries, overhead and other cost components always accumulate during delays.

He noted how it took six years from the end of the war to build anything that could generate electricity, and even then it was a tiny reactor that produced just 100 kilowatts of power in December, 1951.

“The slowness,” Dr. Pitzer declared, “did not arise from a lack of designs for power reactors which reputable scientists and engineers were willing to build and test. It came rather from an unwillingness of the commission to proceed with any one of these designs until all of the advisers agreed that this was the best design.”

The speaker likened the present setup, with a multitude of committees advising the Atomic Energy Commission, to an automobile equipped with a separate brake lever for every passenger. //

Stewart Peterson says
January 18, 2021 at 12:14 PM

Conversely, from the perspective of the people conducting the approval process:

Nobody ever gets fired for doing nothing. However, people get fired for exceeding their authority all the time. Lawyers are arguing over where the line is, and the line never stops moving, and all previous decisions are reviewable and the people who made them are fireable, on the basis of a legal standard that didn’t exist at the time the decision was made.

So what do you do? If there is anything at all novel about what the applicant wants to do, you insist to the applicant that you have no authority to act on their application. This only changes once you have a directive, in writing, from someone above you. That person is unlikely to make such a directive unless they’re such a short-timer that they won’t get fired when the rules are reinterpreted. This is how political appointees get exasperated with minor and obvious decisions being kicked up to them instead of being resolved three levels below, where by any logic they should have been.

What it looks like to the applicant is that old political cartoon of the officials standing in a circle and pointing to the next guy. (You go to the Department of X. They say, “X doesn’t have authority to do that. Y does. Ask them.” You go to the Department of Y. You go there and they say, “Y doesn’t have authority to do that. X does. Ask them.”) Meanwhile, the organization as a whole drops the ball. No individual person in it has any incentive to act in the group’s interest.

I call this the “organizational infield fly rule.”

Much of the anti-nuclear activism in the courts is effective precisely by creating this type of doubt in the minds of the NRC staff – not by changing policy. All they have to do is create that question in the back of a junior manager’s mind: “will I be fired if I sign this?”

The path of least resistance? Appoint another committee to write another report.

The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear
By: Petr Beckmann (1979)

Softcover, 190 pages

Golem Press

The ongoing demolition of the San Onofre nuclear plant has long fueled unease among locals over the periodic release of diluted, radioactive material from the reactor into this iconic surfing spot’s waters.

Such dumping has been going on since the 1960s, for years without public notice.

That was until 2019, when state regulators required the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) parent company — Southern California Edison — to publicly notify surrounding communities of such releases.

Since then, 16 such releases have occurred, with 48-hour notices to the public and nearby communities, according to the company.

Each time, Edison places potentially radioactive wastewater from the company’s decommissioning activities into a tank, circulates it through ion exchangers and filters, “highly” dilutes it, and then samples the liquid for safety before it’s released more than a mile offshore. //

These radioactive liquid releases will continue as SONGS is deconstructed and will vary in size over the years, according to Edison. The size of such releases were initially known to average around 20,000-25,000 gallons of water, and may become larger in the future.

In a 22 year period from 1977 to 1999 France built a generating system containing 58 reactors.

Its capacity was of similar size to Australia’s but generates only 40 gr CO2/kwh or less that a 20th of Australia’s emissions intensity. //

The initial scoping of the Australian Nuclear for Climate Project will reference the Westinghouse AP1000 of the type shown in Figure 1 with its electrical capacity of 1117MWe. This is based upon its recognised design merits within the Chinese and US markets, its current design approval in the US, Europe and China, its lower generating capacity and ready acceptance of US technology within Australia. This does not exclude other designs with similar power output.

HOW MANY REACTORS ARE REQUIRED?
Electricity Generation

In the remainder of this section we will provide a “broad brush” scoping of the size of the project which will be determined in detail within the actual study. The initial sites would utilise existing coal and gas generating sites and would also need to meet evolving environmental requirements.

Investors: We'd like to build zero-emissions, baseload power stations to provide affordable electricity to consumers.

Politician: There's no market for that in Australia. //

This article by James Fleay of DUNE – Down Under Nuclear Energy looks at investment in nuclear energy on the National Electricity Market.

Nuclear energy is clean, cheap, reliable and safe.

Like many advocates for nuclear energy in Australia, my colleagues and I believed that if the Federal Government would only repeal the ban on nuclear power, business or state governments would eagerly build nuclear power plants (NPPs) to rapidly cut emissions, reduce power prices and improve network reliability. In fact, this belief prompted the creation of DUNE a company formed to study the investment case and present the facts to politicians and power market participants.

After all, being thus informed, they would hasten to repeal said law…right? How wrong we were.

The federal ban is only the first challenge to deploying clean, cheap and reliable power in Australia. The second, and much bigger problem, is our liberalised, energy-only National Electricity Market (NEM) and the out-of-market subsidies that provide additional revenue to solar and wind generators. Dr Kerry Schott, the chief advisor the Energy Security Board (ESB) recently confirmed this in an article in The Australian. Among other things, she confirmed that the NEM was not functioning to attract much needed new investment in “always on” power generation. Despite high power prices and a need for investment in “always on” generation, our NEM market design will not support NPP investment[1].

Fission energy can change America's power for the better -- and we’re finally seeing progress in revitalizing the field across the country.

Kirk Sorensen stumbled across thorium while doing research on how to power a lunar community. Thorium is a cleaner, safer, and more abundant nuclear fuel—one that Kirk believes will revolutionize how we produce our energy.

Kirk Sorensen began his work with thorium while working as an aerospace engineer at NASA. In 2010, he left NASA to work as the chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering. In 2011, he founded Flibe, a company focused on developing modular thorium reactors.