Which countries are turning to nuclear energy, and which are turning away? Mapping and breaking down the world’s nuclear reactor landscape.

UNUSUAL EVENT DECLARED DUE TO A LOSS OF OFFSITE POWER

At 2312 EDT, on August 4, 2020, Brunswick Unit 1 declared an Unusual Event due to a loss of offsite power. The unit was at approximately 20 percent power and was not synced to the grid when the unit automatically scrammed. All control rods fully inserted. Emergency Diesel Generators started and began powering the safety buses. Safety systems actuated as expected.

The Unit also experienced a loss of Fuel Pool Cooling and Cleanup System, but one pump was returned to service.

Unit 2 remains at 100 percent power and is unaffected.

The licensee notified State and local governments, as well as the NRC Resident Inspector.

Notified DHS SWO, FEMA Operations Center, CISA IOCC, FEMA NWC (email), DHS Nuclear SSA (email), and FEMA NRCC SASC (email).

Building a new nuclear power plant is challenging. The Nuclear Energy Agency's REDCOST report provides some tips for reducing costs and improving timelines.

Proposed new emergency preparedness rules would allow nuclear plants closer to where people live. Companies say the plants are safer, but they need the rule changes for a viable business model.

Its four reactors have the capacity to generate 5,600 megawatts of electricity, around 25 per cent of the nation's needs.

This is the only existing photo of Chernobyl taken on the morning of the nuclear accident. The heavy grain is due to the huge amount of radiation in the air that began to destroy the camera film the second it was exposed.

Isotopes produced in the original Manhattan Project reactors seeded decades of research and even a few Nobel Prizes. //

On July 16 this year, on what marks the 75th anniversary of the first nuclear bomb test, a patient may go to the doctor for a heart scan. A student may open her textbook to study the complex chemical pathways green plants use to turn carbon dioxide in the air into sugar. A curious grandmother may spit into a vial for a genetic ancestry test and an avid angler may wake up to a beautiful morning and decide to fish at one of his favorite lakes.

If any of these people were asked to think about this selection of activities from their days, it would likely strike them as totally unrelated to the rising of a mushroom cloud above the New Mexico desert three-quarters of a century ago. But each item from the list has been touched by that event.

The device that was detonated at dawn on that fateful day unleashed the energy of around 20,000 tons of TNT from a plutonium core roughly the size of a baseball. It obliterated the steel tower on which it stood, melted the sandy soil below into a greenish glass -- and launched the atomic age. //

The scan, the textbook, the genetic test and the favorite lakeside retreat represent elements of the Manhattan Project’s forgotten legacy. They are connected through a type of atom called an isotope, which was deployed in scientific labs and hospitals before World War II, but whose overwhelming prevalence in the decades after the war was enabled and pushed by the government apparatus that was a direct heir of the effort to build the bomb.

“Generally when both ordinary people and scholars have thought about the legacy of the Manhattan Project, we thought about the way in which physics and engineering were put to military use,” said Angela Creager, a science historian at Princeton University whose book “Life Atomic” chronicles the history of isotopes in the decades after WWII. “Part of what I discovered was that atomic energy had just as much of a legacy in some of the fields that we think of as peaceable as it did in military uses. … A lot of the postwar advances in biology and medicine that have really been taken for granted owe a lot to the materials and policies that were part of the Cold War U.S.”

Everyone's heard of the carbon footprint of different energy sources, the largest footprint belonging to coal because every kWhr of energy produced emits about 900 grams of CO2. Wind and nuclear have the smallest carbon footprint with only 15 g emitted per kWhr, and that mainly from concrete production, construction, and mining of steel and uranium. Biomass is supposedly carbon neutral as it sucks CO2 out of the atmosphere before it liberates it again later, although production losses are significant depending upon the biomass. //

But an energy’s deathprint, as it is called, is rarely discussed. The deathprint is the number of people killed by one kind of energy or another per kWhr produced and, like the carbon footprint, coal is the worst and wind and nuclear are the best. According to the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Academy of Science and many health studies over the last decade (NAS 2010), the adverse impacts on health become a significant effect for fossil fuel and biofuel/biomass sources (see especially Brian Wang for an excellent synopsis). //

Energy Source Mortality Rate (deaths/trillionkWhr)

Coal – global average 100,000 (41% global electricity)

Coal – China 170,000 (75% China’s electricity)

Coal – U.S. 10,000 (32% U.S. electricity)

Oil 36,000 (33% of energy, 8% of electricity)

Natural Gas 4,000 (22% global electricity)

Biofuel/Biomass 24,000 (21% global energy)

Solar (rooftop) 440 (< 1% global electricity)

Wind 150 (2% global electricity)

Hydro – global average 1,400 (16% global electricity)

Hydro – U.S. 5 (6% U.S. electricity)

Nuclear – global average 90 (11% global electricity w/Chern&Fukush)

Nuclear – U.S. 0.1 (19% U.S. electricity)

It is notable that the U.S. death rates for coal are so much lower than for China, strictly a result of regulation, particularly the Clean Air Act (Scott et al., 2005). It is also notable that the Clean Air Act is one of the most life-saving pieces of legislation ever adopted by any country in history, along with the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) which established the 40 hour week, and Medicare in 1965. Still, about 10,000 die from coal use in the U.S. each year, and another thousand from natural gas.

Hydro is dominated by a few rare large dam failures like Banqiao in China in 1976 which killed about 171,000 people. The reason the U.S. hydro deaths are so few is, again regulation - specifically our Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

Workers still regularly fall off wind turbines during maintenance but since relatively little electricity production comes from wind, the totals deaths are small. Nuclear has the lowest deathprint, even with the worst-case Chernobyl numbers and Fukushima projections, uranium mining deaths, and using the Linear No-Treshold Dose hypothesis (see Helman/2012/03/10). Again, the reason the U.S. death toll is so low for nuclear is our strong Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

Two flashes of lightning in Argentina and Brazil have broken two world records: one for the longest reported distance for a single flash, and one for the longest reported duration.
Technically, the lightning records are for "megaflashes," or horizontal lightning discharges that can reach hundreds of kilometers in length.
In Brazil, the megaflash traveled a staggering 440 miles. ///

We don't need solar or nuclear, we just need to capture these!!

A new breakthrough could help engineers truly crack the next phase of nuclear energy. //

New research about chromium corrosion could help to advance molten salt reactors.

Molten salt reactors are cutting edge, with the growing pains that term suggests.

Studying each part in detail now will help engineers make better designs going forward.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on June 23 accepted for formal review Centrus Energy Corp.’s application to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) at its Piketon, Ohio, facility. The move marks a third major regulatory milestone for advanced nuclear over the past month.

The NRC’s acceptance of Centrus’ application follows a 4-0 vote by the commission on May 26 to implement a more streamlined and predictable licensing pathway for advanced non-light water reactors. The NRC on June 16 also announced it had accepted for formal review a first-of-its-kind combined license application (COL) from Oklo Power to build and operate the company’s Aurora fast reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) site in Idaho.

Part 1 of 3.

"Why Nuclear Power Should Be Defended"
This speech was given in Los Angeles on March 15, 1980.

Dr. Beckmann's newsletter archives are available at:
http://www.accesstoenergy.com/

Since September 1993, AtE has been written by Arthur B. Robinson.

Petr Beckmann was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1924 where he lived until he had to flee the Nazis in 1939. During WW-II he served in the Czech squadron of the RAF, 1942-45. After the war he returned to Prague, received a B.Sc. In Electrical Engineering in 1949, a Ph.D. in 1955, and also a D.Sc. From the Czech Academy of Sciences in 1962.

In 1963 he was invited to the University of Colorado as a visiting Professor and refused to return behind the Iron Curtain. He became a U.S. citizen, married Irene Muller in 1965, and was appointed a Full Professor of Electrical Engineering.

In 1981, he took early retirement with Emeritus status, in order to devote himself fully to the defense of science, technology and free enterprise through his monthly newsletter Access to Energy. He founded the Golem Press in 1967, publishing more than 9 books. These included "The History of Pi", "Einstein Plus 2", and "The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear". He wrote more than 60 scientific papers and 8 technical books. Dr. Beckmann spoke at I.S.I.L.'s San Francisco Conference in 1990 where he received a standing ovation for his speech in which he attacked "sham environmentalists".

Michael Shellenberger has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. He helped save the world’s last unprotected redwoods. He co-created the predecessor to today’s Green New Deal. And he led a successful effort by climate scientists and activists to keep nuclear plants operating, preventing a spike of emissions.

But in 2019, as some claimed “billions of people are going to die,” contributing to rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided that, as a lifelong environmental activist, leading energy expert, and father of a teenage daughter, he needed to speak out to separate science from fiction.

Despite decades of news media attention, many remain ignorant of basic facts. Carbon emissions peaked and have been declining in most developed nations for over a decade. Deaths from extreme weather, even in poor nations, declined 80 percent over the last four decades. And the risk of Earth warming to very high temperatures is increasingly unlikely thanks to slowing population growth and abundant natural gas.

Weinberg’s enthusiasm for nuclear’s humanitarian potential was infectious, and spread to John F. Kennedy, who visited Oak Ridge National Lab with his wife, Jackie, and Senator Al Gore Sr., just months before being elected president.

Weinberg was more than a great nuclear engineer; he was also a dedicated activist. He championed President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace initiative with urgency in the fifties. He fought for safer nuclear in the sixties. And he warned of climate change in the seventies.

In 1979, Weinberg’s fears were realized when one of the reactors at Three Mile Island lost its coolant and partially melted. Weinberg thought there was something wrong with light water reactor designs, and his view was influential even among nuclear’s antagonists. “The Chernobyl [sic] [Three Mile Island] accident was caused by design failure not operator error,” said Ralph Nader.

Nuclear never recovered from the accident. Its share of global electricity has declined seven points since its peak in 1996. French nuclear giant Areva failed in 2015 and Japanese-American nuclear giant Westinghouse, owned by Toshiba, failed earlier this year. //

Meanwhile, the crisis facing nuclear is quickening. Asia was supposed to lead the nuclear renaissance. Now, Japan isn’t restarting its nuclear, Taiwan and South Korea are following Germany, Switzerland and France are phasing out nuclear, and all while Vietnam opted for coal rather than nuclear.

There’s no secret why. Just watch the trailer for “Pandora,” the big budget disaster movie that took South Korea by storm last fall. Greenpeace — an organization with an annual budget of $350 million— coordinated protests afterwards, which helped elect a new president who is seeking to reduce nuclear’s share of electricity from 30 to 20 percent by 2030. //

Nader crusaded across the United States training local activists on how to kill nuclear plants, or at least delay their construction. Nader was deliberately inflammatory. “A nuclear plant could wipe out Cleveland, and the survivors would envy the dead.” //

The Sierra Club joined Nader’s crusade. “Our campaign stressing the hazards of nuclear power will supply a rationale for increasing regulation... and add to the cost of the industry...” the new executive director [Michael McCloskey] said in a secret, internal memo.

They all advocated burning coal and fossil fuels instead. Nader said, “We do not need nuclear power...We have a far greater amount of fossil fuels in this country than we’re owning up to...the tar sands...oil out of shale...methane in coal beds...” Sierra Club consultant Amory Lovins said, “Coal can fill the real gaps in our fuel economy with only a temporary and modest (less than twofold at peak) expansion of mining.”

You might wonder: maybe people back then didn’t know coal was bad for health and the climate? In fact, it was such commonplace knowledge that the New York Times reported on its front page that coal’s death toll would rise to 56,000 if coal instead of nuclear plants were built. The Sierra Club pushed for coal anyway and even forced utilities to convert nuclear plants into coal plants in Haven, Wisconsin. //

After being fired in 1972, Weinberg campaigned to save nuclear power. Along with Roger Revelle, Weinberg was one of the first American scientists to draw attention to threat posed by climate change and, also along with Revelle, urged that nuclear instead of coal plants be built. “I went from office to office in Washington, curves of the carbon dioxide buildup in hand, Weinberg wrote. I reminded them that nuclear energy was on the verge of dying. Something must be done. I almost screamed.”

The people who today claim to care about climate change ignored Weinberg’s warnings. “California Governor Jerry Brown said, ‘I want the Department of Water Resources to build a coal plant.’ So we embarked on the planning of a coal plant... a dreadful prospect.” //

In the 50s and 60s, people knew nuclear power wasn’t like a bomb. It was only later that the two were deliberated mixed together such as by the organizers of the “No Nukes” concerts, putting on stage a soldier exposed to nuclear weapons testing along with a pregnant mother from near Three Mile Island. //

Anti-nuclear leaders knew what they were doing and, toward the end of their lives, were honest. “If you’re trying to get people aroused about what is going on, you use the most emotional issue you can find,” one wrote.

And when nuclear plant construction couldn’t be stopped, it could be delayed, sending costs soaring — along with the number of federal regulations. In the end, 150 percent more nuclear plants were canceled than built.

“Unless changes are made to restore public confidence,” Weinberg warned, “the Nuclear Age will come to a halt as the present reactors run their course…” //

Ralph Nader admitted to PBS News that he didn’t want to solve the waste problem ”because it'll just prolong the industry, and expand the second generation of nuclear plants subsidized by the taxpayer.”

If safety and waste were the main concerns of nuclear opponents, why would they oppose reactors that address them? To answer that question, we have to go back to 1953. In his Atoms for Peace speech President Eisenhower declared the US would work with the UN to give away nuclear energy for a very specific humanistic reason: “to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world.

”Over the next decade, a growing number of people began to realize that nuclear energy is limitless and humankind would thus never again be at risk of running out of energy, fertilizer, fresh water, or food. This good news came at a time of widespread fears — many of them racist, as seen here on this 1960 Time magazine cover — of overpopulation.

But something strange happened. The people who claimed to be concerned about resource scarcity from overpopulation opposed nuclear precisely because it put an end to scarcity. “If a doubling of the state’s population in the next 20 years is encouraged by providing the power resources for this growth, [California’s] scenic character will be destroyed,” warned David Brower of the Sierra Club.

Their primary fear wasn’t accidents, waste or weapons — it was people. “In fact, giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” said Paul Ehrlich. “It’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of cheap, clean and abundant energy because of what we would do with it,” said Lovins.

“I didn’t really worry about the accidents because there are too many people anyway…I think that playing dirty if you have a noble end is fine,” confessed the Sierra Club member who led the campaign to kill Diablo Canyon. //

Some say that what is really scary about nuclear accidents is that they can affect the public, but if that’s the case, then why then hasn’t anyone heard about the Teton dam collapse three years before Three Mile Island, which killed 11 people and caused $2 billion in damage? Or of the Banqiao dam, which killed 171 thousand people?

The data are clear. Nuclear is the safest way to make reliable electricity. The most dangerous nuclear plant is the one that doesn’t get built. When nuclear plants aren’t built, or are shut down, fossil fuels are burned, and people die. //

What is it that makes nuclear cheap or expensive? The French and US nuclear construction data offer a natural experiment. The French managed to keep the construction costs of their nuclear plants relatively steady while US costs shot upwards. Why?

According to NRC Commissioner Ivan Selin, “The French have two kinds of reactors and hundreds of kinds of cheese, whereas in the United States the figures are reversed.” //

Debates over reactor design, size, and construction method are irrelevant so long as demand for nuclear remains low and declining. The innovation nuclear needs must be something more radical than anything that’s been proposed to day. What’s required is atomic humanism.

What is atomic humanism? I would like to offer three first principles that are meant as the beginning, not the end of the discussion of what atomic humanism should be.

First, nuclear is special. Only nuclear can lift all humans out of poverty while saving the natural environment. Nothing else — not coal, not solar, not geo-engineering — can do that.

How does the special child, who is bullied for her specialness, survive? By pretending she’s ordinary. As good as — but no better than! — coal, natural gas or renewables.

Like other atomic humanists of his time, Weinberg knew nuclear was special. But he could not fully appreciate how special nuclear was given the low levels of deployment of solar and wind.

Now that these two technologies have been scaled up, we can see that nuclear’s specialness is due due an easy-to-understand physical reason: the energy density of the fuel.

Consider that the share of electricity the world gets from clean sources of energy over the last 10 years declined by the equivalent of 21 Bruce nuclear power plants, which powers Toronto, which produces about the same amount of electricity as 900 Topaz solar farms.

Bruce power sits on 9 square kilometers and Topaz sits on 25 square kilometers, so it would take 1,075 square kilometers, or twice the size of Toronto, to generate the same amount of energy with solar as with nuclear.

The environmental impacts are enormous. When they built another solar farm, Ivanpah, dozens of threatened desert tortoises, which can live to be 80 years old, were killed.

The energy density of the fuel determines its environmental impact. With higher energy densities, fewer natural resources are used, requiring less mining, materials, waste, pollution and land.

And it's increasingly obvious that only nuclear can significantly and rapidly mitigate climate change. This fact has done more to change minds on nuclear in recent years than anything else.

"If we're going to tackle global warming, nuclear is the only way you can create massive amounts of power,” said the formerly anti-nuclear Sting.

"It’s like half the people who were saying ‘No nukes!’ are now realizing nuclear is the best way to go for energy for the future. I think it’s natural to reexamine your beliefs as you age up,” said Robert Downey Jr. //

Fundamentally, it’s not what makes nuclear safe, it’s who makes it safe. Every accident report says the same thing. Human factors and human-machine interaction matter most. Culture, training and discipline makes nuclear safe.

And resilience. Look at what the amazing people of nuclear did. In response to Three Mile Island, they responded resiliently and brilliantly, running the very same plants better, and raising their efficiency from 55 to over 90 percent. In what other industry is operator performance over 98 percent?

Originally published in May 1967

“By the year 2030 the electric power requirement will be 10 times the present capacity. Because of the expected decline in fossil-fuel resources, and in the absence of any other large source of energy at reasonable cost, fission power would be counted on to supply about 85 percent of this need. To fill such a demand with fission plants of the present type, however, would call for quantities of uranium ore that would soon deplete reserves. Thus, the fission age would be over almost before it began. These facts make plain how heavily the ‘fission age’ (perhaps to be followed someday by a ‘fusion age’) can depend on success in developing power plants with breeder reactors that will make the most of the available resources.”

—Scientific American, May 1967. ///

Very "scientific" and very untrue.

Reserves are measured by the market price. The higher the price the greater the reserves that can be unlocked. The cost of fuel is a minor ingredient in the cost of nuclear energy.

The plans, circulated in Whitehall 'in the last few weeks', could see construction of high-tech factories to build the small reactors begin by next year. //

A consortium of British businesses led by manufacturing giant Rolls-Royce has submitted proposals to Ministers to accelerate the building of a new fleet of mini nuclear reactors in the North of England.

The plans, circulated in Whitehall 'in the last few weeks', could see construction of high-tech factories to build the small reactors begin by next year.

The consortium – which includes UK construction and engineering firms Laing O'Rourke, Atkins and BAM Nuttall – would use British intellectual property to build the reactors. It would work with partners from the US, Canada and France.

It has been estimated that exporting small nuclear reactor technology could be worth £250billion to the UK if the programme is successful.

During a virtual meeting held by Southern California Edison's Community Engagement Panel, experts considered a number of Doomsday Scenarios that could threaten the nuclear waste stored at the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant. But things got weird with fear of things like short-range missiles //

San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, or SONGS, has been inundated with this stuff for a long time. But the intensity seems to be growing, even eight years after the nuclear power plant shut down. The recent focus has been on the spent nuclear fuel, better referred to as slightly used nuclear fuel.

This fuel has been out of the reactor for between 8 and 27 years. The really hot stuff decays away before 5 years while the spent fuel is still in pools of water. The half-life of the remaining hot stuff, Cs-137 and Sr-90, is only 30 years, so these are a lot cooler than when they were in the reactor. After 200 years, the fuel isn’t very radioactive at all since all the hot gamma-emitters are gone. //

So as a scientist who has worked on nuclear waste for 35 years, has handled and experimented on this waste, measured these systems to get exact numbers, designed disposal systems, was an author of the Yucca Mountain License Application, monitored the waste, have lived beside nuclear waste for these last 35 years, have had my children and grandchildren live next to nuclear waste – I can tell you without reservation that you have nothing to worry about from the nuclear waste at San Onofre.

Compared to all other risks that you face in Southern California, the risk from nuclear waste at SONGS is vanishingly small. //

As an example, one accident scenario assumed the lid of a dry cask was completely removed, or blown off, and that all of the fuel rods were damaged. All of the volatile, or gaseous, radionulcides in the gaps and spaces around the rods, like Xe, Kr and I, are released. As bad as this is, and as unlikely as it would be to occur, the dose at 100 meters from the fuel would be only a one-time 3 mrem (0.03 mSv) dose.

Eating a bag of potato chips a day gives you more than 4 mrem/yr (Yes, potato chips are the most radioactive food with about 13,000 pCi of beta radiation per 12-oz bag, nothing to worry about, just to give some perspective) //

Just lob an RPG at a chlorine tanker car as it passes through San Diego on Interstate 5 and you’ll kill more people than Chernobyl did. Or hit a natural gas plant – that would do real damage.

And nuclear waste is orders of magnitude less risky than an operating nuclear reactor.

There’s lots of myths that add to this nuclear fear and they always pop up during any nuclear discussion:

You can’t make a nuclear weapon out of commercial spent nuclear fuel – we tried to.

You can’t even make a dirty bomb out of commercial spent nuclear fuel – we tried to.

You can’t get cancer by living next to a nuclear power plant – we’ve studied that extensively. The only time that’s happened was at Chernobyl 34 years ago, and that was a meltdown at a weapons reactor that didn’t even have a containment building. All reactors in America have containment structures and are completely different types of reactors. //

Contrary to popular opinion, nuclear energy is the safest form of energy there is, even renewables kill more people per TWh than nuclear, although renewables are really safe compared to fossil fuel.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are refining their design of a 3D-printed nuclear reactor core, scaling up the additive manufacturing process necessary to build it, and developing methods to confirm the consistency and reliability of its printed components.

Equinor among latest round of investors in MIT spin-off that aims to help show 'net energy gain' nuclear fusion by 2025

Scientists at the Department of Energy Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have their eyes on the prize: the Transformational Challenge Reactor, or TCR, a microreactor built using 3D printing and other new approaches that will be up and running by 2023. But their