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The United States’ 92 nuclear reactors currently in operation have a mean age of 41.6 years, the third oldest in the world.

As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, the only nuclear fleets that are older are those of Switzerland (46.3 years) and Belgium (42.3 years). Also older are the singular reactors in use in Armenia and the Netherlands.

You will find more infographics at Statista

The U.S. was among the first commercial adopters of nuclear energy in the 1950s, explaining the number of aging reactors today. A building boom between the 1960s and 1970s created today’s nuclear power plants in the United States. The five reactors completed in the 1990s and the one finished in 2016 were all holdovers of delayed construction projects from the 1970s experiencing roadblocks due to regulatory problems and mounting opposition to nuclear energy. The most recent construction start date of a completed U.S. reactor today is 1978 – one year before the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, which further cemented the public’s rejection of nuclear energy and the challenges of updating nuclear reactor infrastructure today. However, two reactors started at Vogtle power plant in Georgia in 2013 will join the grid soon as the newest additions to the U.S. fleet. They too experienced many regulatory and other delays, culminating in the bankruptcy of the reactor construction company. The U.S. government stepped in with a loan so that the project can now be finished almost 17 years after its initial proposal.

The U.S. today is one of only 15 countries which the World Nuclear Industry Status Report lists as actively pursuing nuclear energy. This includes new nuclear programs in the United Arab Emirates, Belarus and Iran that were started in the past decade only, as well as a younger program in China that started producing power in 1991 and today has a mean reactor fleet age of just nine years…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The U.S. May Soon Have the World’s Oldest Nuclear Power Plants

June 18, 2020

The U.S. May Soon Have the World’s Oldest Nuclear Power Plants

Preface. This is nuts. Sea level rise threatens many nuclear power plants and drought has shut plants down since they need cooling to operate.

As nuclear reactor age, they require more intensive monitoring and preventive maintenance to operate safely. But reactor owners have not always taken this obligation seriously enough. Given that older reactors require more attention from the regulator, not less, it is perplexing that the NRC wants to scale back its inspections of the aging reactor fleet and its responses to safety violations. Six years ago, the US Government Accountability Office pointed out that “NRC’s oversight will soon likely take on even greater importance as many commercial reactors … are reaching or have reached the end of their initial 40-year operating period.” (Lyman 2019).

***

Natter, A. 2020. The U.S. May Soon Have the World’s Oldest Nuclear Power Plants. Bloomberg.

In December federal regulators approved Florida Power & Light Co.’s request to let the facility’s twin nuclear reactors remain in operation for another 20 years beyond the end of their current licenses. By that point they’ll be 80, making them the oldest reactors in operation anywhere in the world.

“That’s too old,” said Rippingille, a lawyer and retired Miami-Dade County judge who was wearing a blue print shirt with white sea turtles on it. “They weren’t designed for this purpose

With backing from the Trump administration, utilities across the nation are preparing to follow suit, seeking permission to extend the life of reactors built in the 1970s to the 2050s as they run up against the end of their 60-year licenses.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Nuclear reactor issues

April 18, 2020

Nuclear reactor issues

Preface. There are half a dozen articles below. Although safety and disposal of nuclear waste ought to be the main reasons why no more plants should be built, what will really stop them isbecause it takes years to get permits and $8.5–$20 billion in capital must be raised for a new 3400 MW nuclear power plant (O’Grady 2008). This is almost impossible when a much cheaper and much safer 3400 MW natural gas plant can be built for $2.5 billion in half the time or less.

U.S. nuclear power plants are old and in decline. By 2030, U.S. nuclear power generation might be the source of just 10% of electricity, half of their 20% production of electricity now, because 38 reactors producing a third of nuclear power are past their 40-year life span, and another 33 reactors producing a third of nuclear power are over 30 years old. Although some will have their licenses extended, 37 reactors that produce half of nuclear power are at risk of closing because of economics, breakdowns, unreliability, long outages, safety, and expensive post-Fukushima retrofits (Cooper 2013).

If you’ve read the nuclear reactor hazards paper or my summary of it, then you understand why there will continually be accidents like Fukushima and Chernobyl. That makes investors and governments fearful of spending billions of dollars to build nuclear plants.

Nor will people be willing to use precious oil as it declines to build a nuclear power plant that could take up to 10 years to build, when that oil will be more needed for tractors to plant and harvest food and trucks to deliver the food to cities (electric power can’t do that, tractors and trucks have to run on oil).

And if we are dumb enough to try, we’ll smack into the brick wall of Peak Uranium.

Nuclear Safety in the news

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Russian Sea Monsters: Rudderless Reactors on the High Seas

May 4, 2018

Russian Sea Monsters: Rudderless Reactors on the High Seas

Did you hear the one about the Exxon Valdez, Fuku-Chernobyl, Gulf Oil Titanic? Yeah: Russia floated two nuclear reactors on a bargeto power oil rigs in the Arctic Ocean and nothing went wrong!

Unsatisfied with trouncing Japan at the Winter Olympics, 14 gold medals to four, Moscow wants to topple Tokyo as Oceanic Polluter No. 1. As it stands, Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi triple reactor catastrophe which began March 11, 2011 “has caused by far the largest discharge of radioactivity into the ocean ever seen,” as the journal Nature reported Nov. 14, 2012.

To top this, the geniuses in Russia plan to drag a teetering ocean barge, carrying two nuclear reactors full of hot, fissioning not-yet-melted fuel, around the Arctic Ocean looking for icebergs, shoals or oil tankers to crash into. What better way to smoke Japan’s inglorious world record? And, instead of going to all the trouble of pouring cooling water over three smoldering melted reactor cores and watching the contamination run to sea for seven years (and counting) as in Fukushima, Russia’s sea monster can go down in a whole gale like the Edmund Fitzgerald, putting all the cesium, plutonium, strontium and the rest directly into the Arctic without all the fuss.

The April 28 launch of the barge Akademik Lomonosovpresents such an outrageous risk to sea life and seacoasts that even Newsweek said of it on April 30^th,“Russia’s ‘Nuclear Titanic’ Raising Fears of ‘Chernobyl On Ice.’” Having hoisted this petard from St. Petersburg April 28 en route to Murmansk, the plan is to have real eco-terrorists there load the two reactors with uranium fuel and set it to test at fissioning. Then the 12-story building is to be towed so far east — 3,000 miles to Pevek — that Sarah Palin might be able to see it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Nuclear Companies are Just Happy to be in There Somewhere and They’ll Gouge the Ratepayers to Get There

April 6, 2018

Nuclear Companies are Just Happy to be in There Somewhere and They’ll Gouge the Ratepayers to Get There

Photo by Lennart Tange | CC BY 2.0

That teeth-jangling noise you can hear are the fingernails of nuclear power corporations scraping across window ledges in a last, desperate attempt to cling on. It’s a lost cause. Nuclear power is falling to its none too premature death. It just won’t go quietly.

Instead, like Steve Martin’s unforgettable character in The Jerk, the mantra for nuclear corporations has become “I’d just be happy to be in there somewhere.”

The only chance for nuclear energy companies to stay relevant, and even alive, is to squeeze ratepayers. It’s their last, selfish recourse to prop up aging, failing and financially free falling nuclear power plants that should have closed years ago (and in fact should never have been built in the first place.)

Consequently, even as we tentatively celebrated First Energy’s just announced early closures of its four nuclear reactors — Davis-Besse (OH), Perry (OH) and two at Beaver Valley (PA) — we knew that something more devious was afoot.

And indeed it was. Just 24 hours after First Energy’s shutdown announcement, its subsidiary, First Energy Solutions (FES) which runs the nuclear plants, was already appealing, cap in hand, to the US Department of Energy for salvation. The shutdowns, it appeared, were conditional. The reactors would close but only “if there are no buyers or remedies found by their respective dates.”

FES quickly followed this with a late-night March 31 Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. (Parent company, FirstEnergy, is not part of the bankruptcy proceedings.) Then, on April 4, the company’s chief lobbyist reportedly dined with President Trump, just as FES was attempting to score a bailout to pre-empt the shutdowns by claiming the closures would cause a grid emergency, something the grid operator has exposed as nonsense.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Nuclear Follies in the UK: in Search of High-Cost Power without Strategy at the Wrong Time

February 8, 2018

Nuclear Follies in the UK: in Search of High-Cost Power without Strategy at the Wrong Time

Then there is the issue of long term predictions.

It was the February 4 article in the Financial Times titled, “Nuclear Hazards: struggling industry aims for power surge,” that got our attention. There’s been so much going on in the UK with Brexit and such. It’s almost easy to forget that the country remains steadily on course to build (and subsidize) multiple new nuclear power generating stations employing multiple designs and technologies.

The FT article was so polite. Author Andrew Ward pointed out that the UK is the only western nation pursuing nuclear new build on anything remotely approaching this scale. Let’s call it what it is, shall we? The policy is barking mad.

First, the consensus view is that South Korea and France have had the most successful large scale nuclear build out programs. They had one thing in common. A single reactor design relentlessly improved in each successive installation.

Labor practices and efficiencies also improved with each successive iteration as the labor force became more skilled. In addition, these countries invested considerable sums in infrastructure for fabricating plant parts (like forges), mining, uranium processing, and especially spent-fuel handling and storage.

The May government in the UK appears to neither understand nor appreciate how these strategies contributed to the successes of the French and Korean efforts. It has not laid a framework, either, to bring the employment and technology benefits that come with developing the ancillary services need to maintain the nuclear establishment.

In sum, the May government has no strategy to exploit nuclear power.

The second problem is the plant’s unattractive price tag of £20 billion. The government has guaranteed the owner/builders of Hinkley (EDF and China’s CGN) a generous contract price of £92.50 per MWH for 35 years, of course with adjustments for inflation.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Nuclear Reactors, Bankrupting Their Owners, Closing Early

February 6, 2018

Nuclear Reactors, Bankrupting Their Owners, Closing Early

On January 22, FirstEnergy Corporation announced that its faulty and nearly-self-destructed Davis-Besse power reactor east of Toledo, Ohio, will be closed well before its license expires. But the shutdown is not because the reactor represents reckless endangerment of public health and safety. FirseEnergy was fine with that. No, the old rattle trap can’t cover its costs any more, not with the electricity market dominated by cheaper natural gas, and renewable wind and solar.

Davis-Besse’s early shutdown date has not been announced, but CFO James Pearson of FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co., the corporate division in charge of the wreck, said the reactor will close if lawmakers don’t approve a taxpayer bailout.

FirstEnergy had said the financial sky was falling in March 2017. Chief nuclear officer Sam Belcher [his real name] told the Toldeo Blade then — as the firm was floating the bailout measure (SB 128) through the Ohio legislature — “In the absence of something happening, [taxpayer-funded handout to the private, investor-owned firm] we’re going to have to make some tough decisions.” So far, state lawmakers have refused to save the decrepit reactor with state taxes. They cite old-fashioned market competition, and the failure of previous subsidies to save the mature, well-established reactor industry once led by the now bankrupt Westinghouse.

Serious accidents at David-Besse in 1977, 1985, 1998, and 2002 endangered its neighbors. The most hair-raising was the discovery in 2002 that corrosion had eaten through more than 6-inches of the reactor head’s carbon steel. The corrosion went undetected by federal and company inspectors for decades. Having gouged a hole in the reactor cover the size of a football, the corrosion left only 3⁄8 inch of steel holding back the high-pressure coolant. A break would have caused a massive loss-of-coolant accident and out-of-control overheating, resulting in catastrophic uranium fuel melting (known as a “meltdown”) and massive radiation releases.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Chernobyl in a Can” – 71 Vulnerable-To-Cracking Radioactive Waste Canisters Set for CA Ocean-Front Burial at San Onofre: Donna Gilmore, NH #335

November 24, 2017

“Chernobyl in a Can” – 71 Vulnerable-To-Cracking Radioactive Waste Canisters Set for CA Ocean-Front Burial at San Onofre: Donna Gilmore, NH #335

This Week’s Featured Interview:

Donna Gilmore of SanOnofreSafety.org reports on Southern California Edison’s plans to bury 1,800 tons – that’s 3,600,000 pounds <!> of high-level radioactive waste a mere 36 yards from high tide in canisters that are vulnerable to cracking and leaking. Each one contains a Chernobyl’s worth of radiation on the Pacific Ocean less than 70 miles from Los Angeles!

What to do:

Download petition and info sheets HERE – it’s the top story on the page.
Get signatures on the petition and send to San Onofre Safety (hard copy signatures on paper are necessary).
Use the info sheet to engage in conversation on the issues.
CA RESIDENTS: Call your state representative; locate her or him HERE: www.findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov
CALL the California Coastal Commission: (562) 590-5071
To read the Federal Register containing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s admission of no requirements for aging of radioactive waste-containing canisters, CLICK HERE.

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

“Shelter in place” after a nuclear accident… and stay there? New study provides a great way to keep the bodies out of the streets and the clean-up to a minimum! Beware of “*NEW IMPROVED*” methods of measuring radioactive risk… and always check out who’s behind the funding for this kind of bogus pro-nuclear “research.”

Get Ready for a New Chernobyl in Ukraine

October 17, 2017

Get Ready for a New Chernobyl in Ukraine

With the onset of winter and the increasing strain on Ukraine’s energy system, the threat of a new nuclear disaster in Central Europe is becoming more than just a theoretical danger. According to analysts from Energy Research & Social Science (ERSS), there is an 80% probability of a “serious accident” at one of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants before the year 2020. This is due both to the increased burden on the nuclear plants caused by the widespread shutdowns of Ukraine’s thermal power plants (the raw material they consumed – coal from the Donbass – is in critically short supply) and also because of the severe physical deterioration of their Soviet-era nuclear equipment and the catastrophic underfunding of this industry.

Should such an incident occur, the EU would not only be faced with the potential environmental consequences, but also – given the recent introduction of visa-free travel – a large-scale exodus of Ukrainians out of contaminated areas.

Let’s start by taking a brief tour of the Ukrainian nuclear industry:

Ukraine currently has four operating nuclear power plants: the Zaporizhia (the largest in Europe, with six reactors and a combined power output of 6,000 MW), the Rivne (four reactors and a combined power output of 2,880 MW), the Khmelnitskiy (two reactors and a combined power output of 2,000 MW), and the South Ukraine (three reactors and a combined power output of 3,000 MW):

The Chernobyl plant with its four reactors was finally shut down for good in 2000.

Of the 15 nuclear reactors currently operating in Ukraine, 12 were brought online during the Soviet era, prior to 1990. All of them rely on the classic type of VVER nuclear reactors that were designed during the 1960s and 1970s at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow. Those reactors should have a maximum life expectancy of 30 years. But as of today, 10 of the 15 reactors operating in Ukraine have already outlasted their expected service life.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Does China’s Nuclear Boom Threaten a Global Catastrophe?

October 30, 2015

Does China’s Nuclear Boom Threaten a Global Catastrophe?

12-3-china-nuclear-power

“China shows the way to build nuclear reactors fast and cheap.” That was the bullish headline in a Forbes magazine article last week.

It went on to praise the scale of the planned nuclear investment in China’s new Five-Year Plan that runs from 2016 to 2020. Under the plan the government is to invest over US$100 billion to build seven new reactors a year until 2030.

“By 2050”, James Conca wrote for Forbes, “nuclear power should exceed 350 GW in that country, include about 400 new nuclear reactors, and have resulted in over a trillion dollars in nuclear investment.”

Now Conca is pretty enthusiastic about this. But the reality is a potential nuclear nightmare in the making. Experience to date shows that we should, on average, expect a major nuclear accident to take place for every 3,000 to 4,000 years of reactor operation. And with over 400 reactors running at once, it doesn’t take long to clock up those 3,000 years.

In fact, you could reasonably expect a major Chernobyl or Fukushima level accident every seven to ten years – in China alone, if it pursues nuclear build on that scale.

Just how safe is China anyway

Now if China had a fantastic record of safety in its construction and other industries, maybe the odds should be made a bit longer. Swiss-style reactors might come in at only one big foulup every 10,000 years, for example.

But that’s not China. This August past we had the massive fire and multiple explosions at the Port of Tianjin, that killed almost 200 people and devastated several square kilometres of the industrial zone.

It later transpired that over 7,000 tonnes of hazardous chemicals were stored there, among them sodium cyanide, calcium carbide and ammonium and potassium nitrate, many of them kept in breach of regulations. The owners had links to the highest echelons of the Chinese state – something that may have ensured very light touch regulation.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Can U.S. Nuclear Plants Operate For 80 Years?

July 20, 2015

Can U.S. Nuclear Plants Operate For 80 Years?

The nuclear industry in the United States has been at a standstill for several decades. After an extraordinary wave of construction in the 1960s and 1970s, the nuclear industry ground to a halt. A confluence of events killed off new construction, including high interest rates, cost overruns, delays, and the Three Mile Island incident that scared the public and turned it against nuclear power.

But despite the nuclear industry’s inability to build more than a handful of new nuclear power plants since the 1980s, nuclear power still accounts for about 19 percent of electricity generation in the United States, the third largest source of electricity behind coal and natural gas.

Yet the nation’s 99 reactors are mostly nearing their retirement age. Having originally been planned for 40-year lifespans, many of the reactors would have already been forced to shut down by now, with nearly all of the rest hitting their limits at some point within the next decade. Instead, more than three-quarters of them have already received a 20-year extension, putting off their retirements until the 2030s.

But in the nuclear sector, where everything takes a long time, the 2030s are rapidly approaching. With one-fifth of the country’s electricity fleet nearing retirement, and very few nuclear power plants under construction to replace what is expected to be lost, how will the U.S. cope with the lost capacity?

“Four reactors are being built, but there’s absolutely no money and no desire to finance more plants than that. So in 20 or 30 years we’re going to have very few nuclear power plants in this country—that’s just a fact,” the former Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory Jaczko, said in a 2013 interview.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Russia To Power Arctic Drilling With Floating Nuclear Reactors

April 28, 2015

Russia To Power Arctic Drilling With Floating Nuclear Reactors

It would sit in the icy waters of the Arctic, and provide a constant supply of electricity to a massive rig drilling for oil. They could be mass produced, potentially cutting the cost of drilling projects. The twist? The electricity on these floating power plants would come from a nuclear reactor.

Russia is looking to deploy a floating nuclear reactor that could help power ports, industries, and also offshore oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. In what sounds like a horrible nightmare for environmentalists, floating nuclear reactors could help produce more oil in the Arctic.

Russia’s reactor, called the Akademik Lomonosov, will be about the length of one and a half football fields, and will have the capacity to produce 70 megawatts of electricity. It is not self-propelled, but future mobile reactors will be. Russia plans on mass producing them once the Akademik Lomonosov proves itself. The small floating reactors will be on icebreakers, so they will be able to navigate icy Arctic waters.

Construction began on the Akademik Lomonosov in 2007, but has suffered delays. But Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said during a recent trip to the Arctic that Russia hopes to have a floating nuclear reactor running by October 2016. It will provide power to the Arctic town of Pevek in the East Siberian Sea. “It is basically an atomic reactor that can be docked to coastal infrastructure, and it will provide energy through a cable to any Arctic city,” Rogozin said.

According to Russia’s state-owned nuclear firm Rosatom, at least 15 countries, including China, Algeria, Indonesia, Malaysia and Argentina, are interested in deploying floating nuclear reactors as well. In fact, last year, during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Shanghai, Russia and China signed an agreement to cooperate on building a floating nuclear power plant.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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