Rachel Maddow on Nuclear Fission and the GOP
I really enjoy watching Rachel Maddow. She's smart and fair and funny. Not much more can this observer ask for in political commentary.
She had a brief blurb on the GOP's latest fantasy energy policy that included a call for 100 new nukes in our future.
This inspired me to write her show a little note. All to be found behind the cut.
Dear Rachel!
First, I love your show. Second, I enjoyed you starting to warm up the GOP for their pro-nuclear antics. A few more tidbits on that you or your researchers might find of interest.
The fact that the French nuclear industry are almost completely state owned (AREVA and EdF in particular) seems to have blown by the big thinkers in the GOP who daily accuse Obama of being a socialist. Incredible!
Add in all the goodies from the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and the latest push to have billions more in federal loan guarantees makes it even more bizarre.
I have all the references for the notes below. I hope you find them of some interest and perhaps use for your show.
Webfarmer
1. The only reason anyone is talking about nuclear power (because of its high costs for new nukes) is because of global warming. The MIT report on "The Future of Nuclear Power" made this abundantly clear. Without global warming and incentives to support nuclear power via carbon taxes, etc., it was a goner in the marketplace.
2. Most people think that new nuclear plants will take at least 10 years to build this is too late for most tipping-point scenarios. In the meanwhile, they will be sucking up capital assets and other resources that could be more efficiently used on conservation, renewables and co-generation. What will these old nuclear plants have to face for competition from then advanced renewables once they finally go on line? Can you say white elephants?
3. Recent events have shown that without either huge federal loan guarantee programs or state legislated "pre-paid" plans (where the customers are billed for the plants years before they go into operation), the movement on market based nuclear plants is all but dead. Companies that did not make the cut on the $18.6 billion in loan guarantees put into EPACT 2005 have cancelled their immediate interest in building. Also in Missouri, a "pre-paid" policy went down in flames and the operator of Callaway decided to cancel their nuclear expansion plans along with it.
4. France actually loses money by selling power to it's neighbors because they have so much baseload they have to sell it off cheap. Because they are so lopsidedly baseloaded, they conversely have to purchase expensive peaking power from other countries and have even been forced to pull oil powered plants out of their mothballs to support load. (See Mycle Schneider reference below.)
5. France has had problems in recent years with supplying cooling water to their plants during hot spells in Europe. Not exactly encouraging as global warming intensifies to lose large chunks of baseload because your water supply has either dried up or is so hot you risk cooking the critters in it.
6. A report done by the French government shows that their plan to use reprocessing instead of once through to the dump has cost them about $20 billion. http://tinyurl.com/m6fa25 So much for the briliant reprocessing idea also being bounced around.
7. The idea that there's enough infrastructure to build as many fantasy nukes to halt global warming is a false one. There are bottlenecks and shortages not only of critical materials (large forgings for reactor vessels) but also of nuclear engineers. Add this into the need for a quick response for global warming concerns, the only reason for nuclear power, and you're going nowhere. Much of the material will have to come from Japan or France. So much for a stimulus. At least for us.
8. Moody's and S&P have reported that new nukes will run about $7,000 per kW installed. It's more like $1,800 for wind. Because nuclear plants are somewhere around 1000-1600 MW, this becomes a capital crisis for many utilities. The sole nuclear plant is a huge percentage of their book value. If it messes up, it's WHOOPS bond default time all over again. WHOOPS was the slang term for the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) that had the then largest default on government bonds of a mere $2.2 billion in 1983. Aren't we a bit fatigued at bailing out companies that are too big or critically important to fail? This is like pre-bailing them out!
9. The NYT finally got around to exposing the fiasco that's happening in Finland with the new EPR reactor. It's twice the original cost and ia over three years late (thus costing the Finnish utility money because of having to get power from other sources). The important item in this is that the Finns were smart enough to make this a fixed price, turnkey project. Thus any cost overruns are on the joint team of AREVA and Siemens. (BTW, Siemens has since decided to bail out on AREVA on any future nuclear projects and is looking for another partner in radioactivity for fun and profit.)
The pro-nuclear people are claiming this is a one-off problem. If that's true and there will be no fiascos in the future, why not insist on fixed price, turnkey deals for all plants built in the USA. After all, it should be no problem now that they have all the bugs worked out of the new reactors, right?
10. The cost of Yucca Mountain was last estimated as being just short of a billion dollars per active nuclear plant before the plug got pulled on it. The utiltities appear to be paying much less for the government guaranteed storage than what it will likely actually cost. And that doesn't include the lawsuits that the utilities have been hitting the feds with to pay for short term on-site storage in lieu of a long-term site. So that pops the price per new nuke up to about $8,000 per kW installed if you add in a storage component.
And I haven't even gotten into the many other items that make nuclear power a bad, bad idea. Proliferation is huge but France needs to put plants in internationally because their local market is super-saturated with nukes. Also something people don't consider is that both AREVA, the big manufacturing and fuel monstrosity, and EdF, the utility monopoly in France are both over 80% owned by the French government.
So consider how the combination of state ownership tied with the need for international sales links together. It's like a military-industrial complex. Sarkozy becomes a salesman for AREVA and promotes the spread of EdF into non-French markets (as they have done in picking up a toehold in the US market by overpaying for Constellation Energy - to get it away from supposedly anti-nuclear (or more likely non-pro-nuclear) Warren Buffett and in buying out what remains of the British Nuclear industry (with all cleanup and other costs to still be covered by the British taxpayer).
It slays me that the GOP is so pro-nuclear and used France as the example to follow when France's nuclear power system is so socialist that you can hardly make it more so. The US industry has a constant need for government help as well. Dropping Price-Anderson alone would kill it as energy and torture expert Dick Cheney noted a few years back when it was up for reauthorization.
For more current reading on France and their nuclear industry, I'd recommend this link by Mycle Schneider.
http://www.nirs.org/nukerelapse/background/090502mschneidernukefrance.pdf
She had a brief blurb on the GOP's latest fantasy energy policy that included a call for 100 new nukes in our future.
This inspired me to write her show a little note. All to be found behind the cut.
Dear Rachel!
First, I love your show. Second, I enjoyed you starting to warm up the GOP for their pro-nuclear antics. A few more tidbits on that you or your researchers might find of interest.
The fact that the French nuclear industry are almost completely state owned (AREVA and EdF in particular) seems to have blown by the big thinkers in the GOP who daily accuse Obama of being a socialist. Incredible!
Add in all the goodies from the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and the latest push to have billions more in federal loan guarantees makes it even more bizarre.
I have all the references for the notes below. I hope you find them of some interest and perhaps use for your show.
Webfarmer
1. The only reason anyone is talking about nuclear power (because of its high costs for new nukes) is because of global warming. The MIT report on "The Future of Nuclear Power" made this abundantly clear. Without global warming and incentives to support nuclear power via carbon taxes, etc., it was a goner in the marketplace.
2. Most people think that new nuclear plants will take at least 10 years to build this is too late for most tipping-point scenarios. In the meanwhile, they will be sucking up capital assets and other resources that could be more efficiently used on conservation, renewables and co-generation. What will these old nuclear plants have to face for competition from then advanced renewables once they finally go on line? Can you say white elephants?
3. Recent events have shown that without either huge federal loan guarantee programs or state legislated "pre-paid" plans (where the customers are billed for the plants years before they go into operation), the movement on market based nuclear plants is all but dead. Companies that did not make the cut on the $18.6 billion in loan guarantees put into EPACT 2005 have cancelled their immediate interest in building. Also in Missouri, a "pre-paid" policy went down in flames and the operator of Callaway decided to cancel their nuclear expansion plans along with it.
4. France actually loses money by selling power to it's neighbors because they have so much baseload they have to sell it off cheap. Because they are so lopsidedly baseloaded, they conversely have to purchase expensive peaking power from other countries and have even been forced to pull oil powered plants out of their mothballs to support load. (See Mycle Schneider reference below.)
5. France has had problems in recent years with supplying cooling water to their plants during hot spells in Europe. Not exactly encouraging as global warming intensifies to lose large chunks of baseload because your water supply has either dried up or is so hot you risk cooking the critters in it.
6. A report done by the French government shows that their plan to use reprocessing instead of once through to the dump has cost them about $20 billion. http://tinyurl.com/m6fa25 So much for the briliant reprocessing idea also being bounced around.
7. The idea that there's enough infrastructure to build as many fantasy nukes to halt global warming is a false one. There are bottlenecks and shortages not only of critical materials (large forgings for reactor vessels) but also of nuclear engineers. Add this into the need for a quick response for global warming concerns, the only reason for nuclear power, and you're going nowhere. Much of the material will have to come from Japan or France. So much for a stimulus. At least for us.
8. Moody's and S&P have reported that new nukes will run about $7,000 per kW installed. It's more like $1,800 for wind. Because nuclear plants are somewhere around 1000-1600 MW, this becomes a capital crisis for many utilities. The sole nuclear plant is a huge percentage of their book value. If it messes up, it's WHOOPS bond default time all over again. WHOOPS was the slang term for the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) that had the then largest default on government bonds of a mere $2.2 billion in 1983. Aren't we a bit fatigued at bailing out companies that are too big or critically important to fail? This is like pre-bailing them out!
9. The NYT finally got around to exposing the fiasco that's happening in Finland with the new EPR reactor. It's twice the original cost and ia over three years late (thus costing the Finnish utility money because of having to get power from other sources). The important item in this is that the Finns were smart enough to make this a fixed price, turnkey project. Thus any cost overruns are on the joint team of AREVA and Siemens. (BTW, Siemens has since decided to bail out on AREVA on any future nuclear projects and is looking for another partner in radioactivity for fun and profit.)
The pro-nuclear people are claiming this is a one-off problem. If that's true and there will be no fiascos in the future, why not insist on fixed price, turnkey deals for all plants built in the USA. After all, it should be no problem now that they have all the bugs worked out of the new reactors, right?
10. The cost of Yucca Mountain was last estimated as being just short of a billion dollars per active nuclear plant before the plug got pulled on it. The utiltities appear to be paying much less for the government guaranteed storage than what it will likely actually cost. And that doesn't include the lawsuits that the utilities have been hitting the feds with to pay for short term on-site storage in lieu of a long-term site. So that pops the price per new nuke up to about $8,000 per kW installed if you add in a storage component.
And I haven't even gotten into the many other items that make nuclear power a bad, bad idea. Proliferation is huge but France needs to put plants in internationally because their local market is super-saturated with nukes. Also something people don't consider is that both AREVA, the big manufacturing and fuel monstrosity, and EdF, the utility monopoly in France are both over 80% owned by the French government.
So consider how the combination of state ownership tied with the need for international sales links together. It's like a military-industrial complex. Sarkozy becomes a salesman for AREVA and promotes the spread of EdF into non-French markets (as they have done in picking up a toehold in the US market by overpaying for Constellation Energy - to get it away from supposedly anti-nuclear (or more likely non-pro-nuclear) Warren Buffett and in buying out what remains of the British Nuclear industry (with all cleanup and other costs to still be covered by the British taxpayer).
It slays me that the GOP is so pro-nuclear and used France as the example to follow when France's nuclear power system is so socialist that you can hardly make it more so. The US industry has a constant need for government help as well. Dropping Price-Anderson alone would kill it as energy and torture expert Dick Cheney noted a few years back when it was up for reauthorization.
For more current reading on France and their nuclear industry, I'd recommend this link by Mycle Schneider.
http://www.nirs.org/nukerelapse/background/090502mschneidernukefrance.pdf