Me#1You#10
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Joined: 06 May 2004
Posts: 6503
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 Posted: Fri Oct 23, 2009 7:14 pm Post subject: Planet Gore: "Our Squandered Nuclear Advantage" |
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It's getting so I don't even want to read the news anymore. What in the heck is going on with the NRC?
| Quote: | "We once led the world in nuclear technology. Now we’re bringing up the rear."
Our Squandered Nuclear Advantage
by William Tucker
Planet Gore (NRO)
Friday, October 23, 2009
Tom Sanders, the 55th president of the American Nuclear Society, is here at West Point giving a presentation at the Nuclear Renaissance Symposium — and he isn’t happy.
“Right now there’s not much left of the American nuclear industry,” he told the surprisingly large audience, numbering well over a hundred. “Westinghouse now belongs to Toshiba, the French bought a big piece of Babcock & Wilcox, and Hitachi now owns 60 percent of GE. All these companies are being backed by their governments. In ten years, we’re going to be buying our reactors from the Chinese.”
Sanders has been campaigning since 1997 to get the federal government to get behind building nuclear as an export industry. “That was the year the Department of Energy zeroed out nuclear research,” he says. He’s got the AFL-CIO lined up behind him but hasn’t gotten much interest from the Obama administration.
As far as building the big 1,000-megawatt reactors that are the staple of the utility industry, he thinks we’ve missed the boat. “France and Japan will probably come in and build them for us with our cheap labor. But they won’t really be American products,” he says. “I was in Japan recently and saw their heavy manufacturing operations. They’re way beyond anything we’ve got here. They’ve got a system that completely machines a reactor vessel with computer-aided design and manufacturing. One worker operates the whole thing. I don’t think we’ll ever catch up with them now.”
Where Sanders sees an opportunity is in “right-sized” reactors — smaller units of about 100 megawatts that can be mass produced in factories and assembled on-site like Lego blocks. “If you get one up and running, the profits from the first can pay for the next,” he says. “You only need about $1 billion to start. It solves the problem of financing.”
But the big opportunity is marketing these units abroad. “About one-third of the countries in the world don’t have a grid that can handle more than 50 megawatts. But you can locate a 100-MW reactor can on-site and you don’t need much transmission. It’s an opportunity that could help U.S. companies get back into the world market.”
Unfortunately, Sanders’s outlook is a little optimistic. The Russians already have a small reactor they developed to power Siberian villages and are marketing it around the world. Babcock & Wilcox introduced a “mini-reactor” in September but it’s still on the drawing boards and won’t be applying for design certification from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for at least another two years. Hyperion, a California company with another mini-reactor, asked about design certification two years ago and the NRC basically said, “Please go away.” They’re already hopelessly bogged down trying to deal with applications for large reactors. Industry estimates are that the NRC won’t get around to considering mini-designs until at least 2013.
Americans better get used to the idea that we are already lagging far behind in the worldwide nuclear renaissance. There are 34 reactors under construction around the globe, none of them in the United States. Last week the NRC rejected the design for the Westinghouse AP1000 — even as China is building four of them. We once led the world in nuclear technology. Now we’re bringing up the rear.
— William Tucker is author of Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America’s Energy Odyssey.
Planet Gore |
On edit: Taking a quick look at Mr. Tucker's website & intro video, while he appears to buy into the "Global Warming" paranoia, I'm not sure it isn't a somewhat opportunistic use of the controversy to promote his agenda...which, I believe, has merit. |
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