Monthly Archives: December 2010

Why Innovation Gets a back Seat – Moral Imperitive against the Business Model

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The title says it all. When we can do something to save the planet but we sit back and watch it makes us realize that we need to change our priorities. There is a war term mostly used in recent years and that is “actionable”. It has an underlying meaning which really means doable with some serious threats but justifiable since it is war time. So rules for war were established and used in war zones that would be unacceptable anywhere else. So maybe we need to declare war on survival. It very well may be “actionable” to build LFTR’s in order to prevent the disaster of severe climate change.

DESIRE FOR PROFIT AN OBSTACLE

But those of us with innovation and original thinking need to abandon hope unless the path to profit is a clear pathway.

PUBLIC OPINION IS OVER RATED SPECIALLY AN UNINFORMED PUBLIC

The whole reason for the existence of nuclear regulatory bodies was originally to legitimize the existence of nuclear weapons. But it became the means to make safer nuclear energy plants. So now we have amazingly safe plants why can’t we forget about the regulatory process and build more safe plants. There’s a disconnect somewhere. For innovation to be held back because companies need to prove their ideas meet standards and for the same standards that nuclear be required to meet the fossil fuel industry does not need to meet. Does anybody else see a red flag here?

ACCELERATION, CRITICALITY, IRREVERSIBLE THESE ARE SCARY TERMS

It’s a basic mathematical principle and law of physics. Something set in motion that increases in speed is harder to stop or reverse once it’s path is set. We are perhaps facing a no turning back moment somewhere in the next 30 years. Why do we have to wait till it’s too late.

REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE … … … … REEDUCATE, RENOVATE, REVOLT, REVIVE

This blog proposes that people learn about the alternative approach to nuclear energy that needs revival. The Molten Salt Reactor with Thorium as a fuel was abandoned because it was not helpful during the buildup of nuclear weapons. That was a pivotal point in history. Now when third world countries want nuclear power the LFTR makes perfect sense. If this technology had been favored back in the sixties it would now be a less dangerous world. LFTR’s mean less plutonium and that’s a good thing.

Nuclear Street Report on REE Thorium for Profit March 2009

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My recent posts have been reviving lesser known freely available posts related to Thorium, LFTR’s or Nuclear Energy. This article originally posted as 
NS Editorial: The Nuclear Case For Thorium

UPDATE: Originaly posted on Resource Investor

A Report on Thorium, the Newest of the Technology Metals, for 2009

- By Jack Lifton -

I do not wish to condemn nor glorify the world’s oldest profession, but I note here that said profession has created an enduring capitalist business model, which is succinctly stated as “Why give away something you can sell?”  I was reminded of this adage when a colleague sent me the following link, http://www.bharatbook.com/Market-Research-Reports/Report-on-2009-World-Market-Forecasts-for-Imported-Thorium-Ores-and-Concentrates.html , for a report entitled” Report on 2009 World Market Forecasts for Imported Thorium Ores and Concentrates.”
Let me offer you the same information, and additional data, which I do not think the authors of the above report have, or have taken into account, for free.

ThoriumThe USGS has just released its commodity minerals summary for thorium for 2009. This can be found on the Internet athttp://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/thorium/mcs-2009-thori.pdf.  A more detailed USGS discussion of thorium market fundamentals and end-uses can be found in the USGS’s “2007 Minerals Yearbook Thorium [Advance Release]” on the Internet athttp://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/thorium/myb1-2007-thori.pdf. Although this last article is dated 2007 it was released in late 2008 and is an analysis based on information gathered by the very conservative and through USGS throughout most of 2008.

My “take” on thorium in 2009 is that it is most likely going to be the last natural element to become a technology metal.  Therefore I want to take this opportunity to expose and dispose of some myths about the potential supply of thorium and to bring you up to date on the potential for an explosive (excuse the pun) growth in demand for thorium.

The potential for thorium to be a breakout investment is based on its potential, and today more and more likely, use as a nuclear fuel component for civilian reactors used exclusively to produce electricity. There are three reasons why this will most likely come to pass.

1. Reactors using thorium in their fuel can be constructed so that they produce little or no products useful for explosive type-i.e., fission or fusion based, nuclear weapons,

2. Thorium reactors previously built and currently near operation, or in the design stage, produce far less radioactive waste material than the presently used uranium and/or plutonium based reactors, and

3. Thorium is more abundant in the earth’s crust by a factor of between 3 and 4 than uranium, and coincidentally is also found in recoverable-as a byproduct- grades and quantities in the United States, Canada, Australia, The Republic of South Africa, and The People’s Republic of China (i.e., the mainland).  It has not yet been mined as a primary ore, more on this in a moment, but is rather always produced as a byproduct of either uranium or rare earth metals primary production.

Note the following statement from “Canadian Energy Research Institute – World Energy: The Past and Possible Futures — 2007”
“Nuclear became an important source of energy following the first oil price shock in 1973. The
main reasons for the rise of nuclear power are the low cost of fuel compared to
other primary energy sources, and abundant uranium resources located in politically stable
regions …. Total known recoverable uranium resources equal 4.7 million tonnes, half of which are
found in Australia, Kazakhstan, and Canada. Canada is currently the largest manufacturer of
uranium, producing about one-third of the world’s total.”

So, therefore, in summary, thorium reactors are non-proliferative, they produce less waste, and even though there is a lot more thorium than uranium in the earth’s crust the USGS and Canadian Energy Research Institute reports, which are current, clearly indicate that the minable resources and reserves of thorium are less than those of uranium.

Even so, it is now apparent, and cannot be overemphasized at this point that the largest minable resources and reserves of thorium are today, in order of size, in the United States,  Australia, China  and Canada. Just as with uranium resources and reserves it now turns out that the largest accessible supplies of thorium are in politically stable and reliable regions. In particular it turns out that just as Canada has the world’s largest working deposits of minable uranium it is possible to cast the United States in the same role for thorium if the political will can be found.

Why doesn’t everyone stop building uranium and/or plutonium based reactors and start building and only  build, from now on,  thorium fuel type reactors? Let’s list some facts and then analyze them to find out :
1. Economics of Uranium, Supply and Demand

a. Nations, such as France, Japan, The United Kingdom, and the United States that produce a significant proportion of their electricity using nuclear reactors have a very large investment in those reactors and a large supporting infrastructure of existing uranium supplies.  The World’s nuclear industry operates a total of 443 commercial nuclear generating units[1] with a total capacity of about 364.9 gigawatts. To put this in perspective if all of this nuclear generating capacity were in the USA it would provide just about 1/3 of our current yearly demand.   As of December 31, 2007, there are 104 commercial nuclear generating units that are fully licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to operate in the United States. Of these 104 reactors, 69 are categorized a pressurized water reactors (PWRs) totaling 65,100 net megawatts (electric) and 35 units are boiling water reactors (BWR) totaling 32,300 net megawatts (electric). Therefore the USA obtains about 10% of its electricity demand from commercial nuclear generating units. The corresponding figure for France is 80% and for Japan 34%,

b. Nations, other than G-7 members, which are financially capable of building reactors, look upon the production of weapons grade uranium and plutonium as assets to insure the security of their political systems. Even if they sincerely do not plan to build nuclear weapons with the output of their reactors the fact that they could do so gives many of them “clout” in the political world far beyond what their GDP or population size can do, and

c. The mining of uranium is a long established industry for which incremental growth is possible and for which there is still active exploration.  Most importantly no one is concerned that political instability could interrupt Canada’s output of uranium!

2. Economics of Thorium “demand”

a. There are no commercial thorium reactors in operation anywhere in the world, but

b. Thorium reactors were built at the very beginning of the “nuclear age,” for testing the concept of purely civilian reactors that did not have a military weapons use, because of the non-weaponizability of their products, and so there is an archive of engineering design and operational data for those reactors. The best known thorium reactors were built in the USA and the Soviet Union, but may also have been constructed elsewhere, such as in the UK,

c. No significant quantities of thorium have been purposefully mined or refined for at least 30-40 years, and there is at present, except perhaps in the People’s Republic of China,   and most likely in India no government or privately sponsored exploration program for thorium,

d. On the positive side, the major western and Japanese commercial reactor builders, as well as the government controlled ones in China,  all have openly announced that they have recently been looking at thorium fuel designs, and one, Atomic Energy of Canada, Ltd, AECL, has said that it already has a program being designed and tested to retrofit its well known and widely used CANDU reactors for the utilization of thorium fuel,

e. Additionally, India has announced that it is constructing or reconstructing a reactor to run principally on in-house designed thorium fuel, and that this reactor will be in operation within a couple of years and is intended to be a prototype for a future family and mass produced series of such reactors to take advantage of what is claimed to be India’s large domestic resources of thorium,

f. Other nations have evinced interest in thorium fueled reactors and seem to have made investments in their development including Norway, Russia, Canada, China, and the United States, and

g. It is, unfortunately conceivable that the People’s Republic of China, which has lately made no secret of its interest in thorium fueled reactors, and has instructed its rare earth mines-today the sole producers of these metals-to hold thorium removed during separation and purifying of the rare earths for the State Nuclear Authority, may have it in mind to conserve uranium for military purposes by switching planned civilian nuclear electric generating capacity to thorium fueled reactors. This may well also be the plan of the government of India, the world’s most vociferous proponent of thorium fueled reactors.

3. The supply of thorium

a. Thorium has always been available as a byproduct of the mining of uranium and of the rare earths, but it has traditionally been considered either a liability or a low value material,

b. Thorium reports and commentaries without fail or exception state that thorium is more common than uranium, but usually fail to emphasize that this is a statement of the relative abundances of both in the earth’s crust. It is in no way a statement of the relative distribution of thorium versus that of uranium in known minable deposits as discussed above and below,

c. There is actually no way to verify the thorium reserves that are contained in the world’s existing rare earth mines, because to the best of our knowledge such measurements have simply not been made, and, if they have, have certainly not been made public by the world’s largest and most actively mined rare earth deposits in the Bayanobo region of Inner Mongolia in the PRC. There are today no significant rare earth mining operations anywhere outside of the Bayanobo region. The largest previous single source mine for rare earths in Mountain Pass, California, stated to a magazine writer last month that it had no thorium production associated with its hoped for reopening of operations. The two large Australian rare earth startups, Lynas and Arafura, also do not comment on any planned thorium production, and, in any case, are both in turmoil due to the current economic crisis. Lynas has suspended operations and Arafura is not only not operating but is also in the process of selling a large stake to a Chinese operator. It is not commonly known whether India, which always claims to have significantly more thorium than uranium, in fact produces any thorium from its deposits of monazite “sands” which do contain low levels of “disseminated”  thorium but are principally an ore of the rare earths of which India has very limited production. Finally Russia produces some rare earths and thus could produce some limited amount of thorium but it is not known if it does.

d. Uranium miners even in Canada have not announced any plans to produce thorium nor do any of them show thorium quantity produced in their accounts.  The same is true for Australian producers and Kazakh thorium statistics do not exist.

e. The very best opportunity today to produce thorium in quantity from a high grade deposit would be in the United States in the Lemhi Pass region of Idaho and Montana. The claims in that region are owned today by Thorium Energy, inc., a privately held company, which purchased and extended the claims staked beginning fifty years ago by a group of utilities and engineering companies starting with Idaho Power. Those companies were looking for uranium ( and thorium ) for the purpose of becoming self sufficient and vertically integrated  as nuclear power producers. But they were premature. The age of thorium was not yet ready to be born. Idaho Power and its successors noted also that the claims were rich in rare earths, but just as with thorium the birth of the age of those technology metals was still in the future.

f. Today, Thorium Energy, Inc., is in a unique position. It may be able to open the first primary thorium mine in American history with a substantial rare earths byproduct stream, if the demand is there, or it can develop a primary rare earth mining operation in the Lemhi Pass with a substantial thorium output as a byproduct. Economics and politics will determine which of the two paths is followed or if neither path is taken.

4. The conclusion at this point in time of this first Thorium Report for 2009 is that a thorium fueled civilian use only nuclear electric generating industry is looming on the economic and political horizon.  At this moment no one knows how much thorium it is possible to produce as an adjunct to rare earth or uranium mining, but we do know that one of the largest deposits of high grade thorium and rare earths in the world is located in the Lemhi Pass region of Idaho and Montana. This deposit is accessible and minable. America could become completely self sufficient in non-proliferative nuclear electric power production and reduce its carbon footprint without sacrificing its standard of living or quality of life. Let’s see of our politicians have the will and leadership skills to make this happen. Our future depends on it.

Jack Lifton

Jack Lifton

Jack has spoken all over the world on the market fundamentals and end-uses of those minor metals that he classifies as technology metals and that he believes are truly precious to the global economy. He has been, and is, a prolific writer. His web site, now under construction, www.jacklifton.com, will shortly provide a wealth of data and analyses on minor metals and list the services that Jack offers to institutional investors.


Wired article just barely a year old about Thorium

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The Wired Magazine article Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke

I remember when the author Richard Martin was lurking on the EnergyFromThorium forum researching the topic. Very good background article covers Kirk Sorensen’s early days with his first encounters with the ORNL masters and the book that taught him it’s secrets.

The enthusiasm is low-key as expected from the nerd culture of Wired Magazine but definitely worth reading.

Quantum mechanics has answer to DNA damage

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This was posted in Times of India

Now, quantum mechanics is all set to decode DNA damage and pave the way for its repair. This can, in fact, prevent the damage that causes mutation in human body and leads to different disorders like cancer, heart disease and other forms of neuro-degenerative disorders including Alzheimer’s disease.

Read more: Quantum mechanics has answer to DNA damage – The Times of India

Russian isotopes? Crown corporation failure?

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CBC News reported this below Also see comment below

Canada’s first shipment of medical isotopes from Russia has been sent in hopes of making up some of the anticipated shortfall after next year’s planned shutdown of an aging reactor in Ontario.

Isotope, a subsidiary of a Russian state-owned company, said Thursday it has sent its first sample of molybdenum-99, which is processed to produce an isotope that can be used to diagnose bone and breast cancers and measure blood flow in the heart…

Comment by sethdayal wrote:Posted 2010/12/25 at 1:05 AM ET

…Big Oil is terrified that folks will find out that it is feasable to replace their sickening pollution spewing economy wrecking product with mass produced nuclear power with a payback period on the investment of only three years.

The effort to ruin AECL started with the shut down the two Maple reactors that were working just fine just like their twin in Korea, to the surprise of the nuclear regulator on the flimsiest excuse. Then they blamed AECL for problems with a 1950′s isotope reactor even though the fault was 100% Harpo’s because he wouln’t pay for the repairs.

Next orders were cut to Dolton McGuinty and Steven “Brimstone” Harper from Big Oil HQ in Calgary to turn down AECL’s amazing $26 billion offer to supply 2.4 Gw for 60 years all costs included for 60 years – 1.5 cents a kilowatt hour.

With AECL problems with the retubing technique Big Oil thought they had it covered, but AECL fooled them, got the technique worked out is now getting looking at new contracts to redo a Korean and Hydro Quebec reactors.

That was the last straw. Now Harper has been ordered to give away AECL to anybody who will take it, just to make sure no more lucrative gas sale profits are replaced with nuclear sales at a ten to one savins to the taxpayer.

The Fiberals believe in nuclear power and a clean energy future for Canada. They will certainly restart the Maples.

Brimstone’s fascists have sold out their country for Big Oil lolly. Canada’s energy and industrial future depends on giving them the boot.

 

Once again evidence of the painfully slow process of the business of nuclear.

Could UK be first to develop MSR variant?

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Aker is planning to make a new reactor based on Carlo Rubbia’s design the Accelerator Driven System (ADS). This article was posted Dec 24,2010 on nebusiness.co.uk

Aker ‘yes’ to Jacobs Engineering Group bid
US company Jacobs Engineering Group is acquiring Stockton engineering firm Aker Solutions in a multi-billion pound deal.

Globally-based Aker, which employs hundreds of staff at its Teesside office on Surtees Way, announced the £5.5bn deal to transfer process and construction operations to the US company.

Jacobs – one of the world’s largest providers of technical, professional, and construction services – will acquire Aker Solutions E&C Ltd and Aker Process Ltd, which have UK operations in Stockton, Port Solent, Warrington and Whitehaven.

The divisions provide services across mining and metals, onshore oil, gas, nuclear energy and environmental sectors.

Bosses could not confirm whether there would be any changes to staff figures at Stockton, which employs more people than the other three sites. Around 950 employees will be affected in total.

The Teesside office is busy growing its portfolio in the emerging renewables sector, with front end engineering design, project management and engineering work on the Vivergo biofuels plant in Hull. The wheat-fed bioethanol plant will produce transport fuel and a valuable animal feed by-product.

Meanwhile, groundbreaking work in nuclear reactors by the Stockton office led to a top award earlier this month.

The team has designed the first nuclear plant of its kind, in a move that could bring hundreds of jobs to Teesside.

Their Accelerator Driven Thorium Reactor (ADTR), which could become the first commercial-scale plant to use thorium as a fuel instead of uranium, was handed the prestigious Energy Award at this year’s IChemE (Institution of Chemical Engineers) Innovations and Excellence Awards.

Bosses hope the transaction will be completed in the first quarter of 2011.

Q and A Venture Capital and Loan Guarantees with Rod Adams

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Rod Adams is a pro-nuclear blogger and writer who for (15) years has been writing and teaching others through his websites and articles about nuclear energy. He runs the blog Atomic Insights and produces the Atomic Show Podcast. He recently started working in an engineering role on the B&W mPower™ reactor development team.

He gained his initial nuclear knowledge in the navy as a nuclear submarine engineering officer. In 1993, he founded a company called Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. with the goal of designing smaller nuclear energy systems that could serve markets where extra large nuclear plants could not fit. He has become a valuable contributor to the nuclear energy support network. He gave testimony to the Blue Ribbon Committee on August 31, 2010.

1. Loan guaranty’s are meant to do what exactly?

Tough question. There is a muddled legislative history. In its original form, the program was intended to give access to lower cost capital to help alleviate some of the risks inherent in being the first new nuclear plants to be built in the United States in more than 30 years. Despite the excellent financial performance of currently operating nuclear plants, there is no quick payoff available from building first of a kind units. Most of the units operating today took a number of years to achieve financial success.

Under those conditions, banks were demanding interest rates that were several percentage points higher than those associated with other capital investments. For the companies that would be building the plants, high initial costs associated with being first, unpredictable but definitely lengthy licensing and construction periods, and high interest rates make the projects fail most investment decision tests.

Congress attempted to help out by providing access to lower cost capital, but the program as implemented has not achieved that goal.

a) Is it a matter of, after so much time, when profits are delayed or when they don’t happen that the loans kick in? Do the dollars appear in the beginning stages?

Under current law, the guaranteed loans can only reach closing after the company is granted a combined operating license (COL) from the NRC. By the time that a company reaches that milestone, they might have already invested a billion dollars for a large project in the form of engineering, license application fees, site preparation and long lead time equipment. David Crane of NRG recently told the Nuclear Energy Summit that his company started spending money in 2006 for a project that will not see its first returns until at least 2017. NRG has already invested more than $450 million in its South Texas 3 and 4 project.

2. With so many venture capital firms out there you know the economy is hurting when companies like Japan’s IthEMS asks for 300 million to start a revolutionary fleet of MSR powered ships. $300 Millions seems small in comparison to other nuclear ventures. Can you speculate as to why they have not found an investor?

I am not familiar with that effort. There are enormous political risks associated with building new nuclear power plants because there are so many ways to delay projects. Time is money. Venture capital is not patient; most people in that business expect to reach some kind of impressive payoff within 5-7 years.

Adding technical risk for “revolutionary” projects turns the effort into something that is not attractive for most venture firms because they like technology that they can see in operation. Logically enough, they are not terribly interested in investing when they do not fully understand the technology and its advantages over other alternatives.

3. You recently had a link to a nuclear powered ice breaker. I know this is still immensely dense energy compared to oil or gas but from what I keep hearing from the Thorium people is even greater density and more complete burn up of fuel. I have two related questions. The various vessels of the water that run on nuclear power include submarines, aircraft carriers and there was a cruise ship that had a short life. What is the intermediate step that runs the ships engine? I mean they could run on electric engines or on steam engines or some type of turbine. What has been the trend and have all these options been used? Am I missing anything?

Nearly all of the nuclear ships ever produced use steam turbines to directly turn the propulsion shaft. A few use steam turbines to produce electrical power that is then used to supply large electric motors that turn the propulsion shaft(s).

Thorium is interesting, but I think most of its advocates are trying to solve the wrong problem. Low fuel cost and low waste production is already one of the largest advantages that nuclear fission has over its competitors. The problem that needs solution is lowering the capital cost barriers through repetition and process improvements that reduce time to market. We also need to help some people get rich enough from being nuclear specialists that they will supply the capital required for continued improvements in the technology. Take a hard look at the history of most large industries and you will find that they are expanded by people who achieve success in that industry and then reinvest because they understand it better than any bankers ever could.

Though our current once through cycle is terribly inefficient from a resource utilization point of view, we are not actually throwing away useful material. We are simply storing it away in a form that gets easier to reuse with every passing year. In my opinion, the weapons proliferation argument is a clever distraction. Used material from power reactors is one of the least attractive raw materials for a weapons program; any group with the skill to possibly use it for a weapon has much simpler paths available. However, used material from power reactors is a reasonably attractive raw material for new reactors and that is what many “non-proliferation” specialists actually want to discourage.

4. Why are water vessels a better choice than aircraft? Technically the main argument has been nuclear aircraft would be too dangerous at airports but what if they never flew over cities? That is feasible correct? When comparing sizes airplanes seem to have reached the same size as submarines. So how they’re so different?

Weight. Airplanes may look as large as ships, but they have to be far lighter. Nuclear shielding works by putting a sufficient quantity of dense material between reactors and people. There are some intriguing paths that might produce reactors compact enough so that they could be fully shielded inside a container with small enough external dimensions to work within the available weight envelope of a long distance plane (which has to carry a lot of fuel). The nuclear aircraft project was planning to use shadow shielding that only protected the cockpit crew while accepting high radiation fields in all other directions. Obviously, that concept has no utility for a passenger plane.

5. Small modular reactors are appealing for a variety of reasons. What are the main advantages?

Broader market potential
Initial capital investment within reach of smaller entities
Smaller initial investment can reduce risk perception
Early adopter customers with greater needs can accept higher cost per unit of power associated with early units. ( The current price per unit of power for commercial shipping and remote areas is several times the cost of power in highly developed areas with access to hydro, existing nuclear plants, or established coal units.)
Factory production replacing site construction for a larger portion of the project
Larger unit volume to take advantage of series production techniques

6. What other applications besides electric power could modular reactors be used?

Ship propulsion, process heat generation, desalination, cogeneration.

7. Kirk Soresen recently posted on facebook how it would be possible to turn 1 metric tonne of thorium into a billion dollars. There should be incentive there. What obstacles might an investor see getting to that billion dollars?

There are no available machines that convert thorium into heat. Before thorium can be valuable, a developer has to also build an infrastructure from scratch to enable that conversion. That is a big hurdle.

If there were machines available, the investor would want to have some means of limiting the number of others with access to them. Thorium is not a rare material, if there was an available means of converting it into valuable heat, there is a real possibility of flooding the market with cheap heat. That would drive down the price. That would be great for everyone except the people who spent the money to develop the infrastructure and need to sell enough material at a high enough price to recover their investment and make a sufficient profit to make the initial risk worthwhile.

I hope you understand that I am a huge fan of nuclear energy and that I think it has the potential to be one of the most beneficial resources that mankind has ever discovered. It is a disruptive technology that threatens the wealth and power of one of the world’s richest and most powerful industries. It is not easy to make the transition from a world where there is great wealth available based on controlling limited supplies of hydrocarbons to one where clean energy has a growing abundance with ever lowering costs.

There is no easy path. The best hope is building a growing coalition of people who want cheap, clean energy. That coalition will not include many people who sell energy fuels today as their primary business and primary revenue source. It may include people who control large stocks of raw materials that could be sold, but are not currently cost effective due to the energy required to process them.

See Rod’s blog on Growing Alliance Between Renewable Energy Industry, Natural Gas Industry, Big Banks, and Political Supporters

See Rod’s post about Vinod Khosla … Khosla thinks that avoiding nuclear was biggest mistake environmentalists made -Feb 15, 2008

Possible billion dollar return from one tonne of Thorium

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Kirk Sorensen provided this fascinating look at what a LFTR could do in the not so distant future:

Each metric tonne of thorium consumed in a LFTR could produce:

9900 GWe*hr of electricity (at 45% conversion efficiency)
up to 15 kg (8400 watts*thermal) of Pu-238 for NASA space missions
20 kg of molybdenum-99 for medical procedures
5 g of thorium-229 for targeted alpha therapy medical procedures
3300 thermal watts of strontium-90 for heating sources
150 kg of stable xenon
125 kg of stable neodymium

that’s about
$600M worth of electricity
~$100M worth of Pu-238
~$200-300M worth of Mo-99
and about $300K worth of xenon and neodymium

and many lives saved through clean electricity and medical radioisotopes.

See Kirk’s talk on Google Tech Talk posted Dec 6th 2010 – Is Nuclear Waste Really Waste?

My enthusiasm for rooting for nuclear energy is wilting. Just a phase I hope.

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I have not lost my belief in nuclear but my faith in humanity has really been tested lately. I have watched my usual sources for something that would grab my attention and be newsworthy. There have been significant headlines. Billions more set aside for loan guarantees. Some states want Yucca mountain revived. Politicians who support nuclear do nothing to bring down the costs. My last blog on the problems with regulation got me thinking. It’s one of those moments that forces you to contemplate reality. I know that what I do here is serving a purpose to help raise awareness but I started to realize that it’s far more than awareness that needs changing.  I know why the green movement has become popular. It makes you feel good to think that we are standing up at least symbolically for nature. The general population does not think radiation is from nature.

Watching Obama and Chu under perform is painful. They are good men. It seems we have no politicians left that are passionate about what they believe. The closest two that I observe that consistently show a lot of integrity are Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich. But they are too far from public acceptance. Strong leaders know how to rally interest for their cause. It used to be a mans world but things have changed. The sum of a man used to be wrapped up in far less criteria. Now a man who wants to be liked needs to be too many things to all people.  I read about compromise every time a new bill needs passing.  Maybe just maybe there is a way for more effective leadership. My biggest criticism of Obama is that he’s too apologetic and maybe a little too meticulous about getting everything done. Since I had so little to say about nuclear I thought I’d be one more critic in the endless number of opinions by non-experts being expressed out there.

I’m not sure what it will take to wake people up to what’s going on. The signs are all there.  I think there’s a fundamental problem with thinking we can influence nature. As much as AGW is likely to be true the idea that we can stop it is almost as hard to believe as the idea we can change the weather.  We all know it’s gone out of whack all over the planet. There’s some kind of threshold of acceptability that will make the difference. Just like AIDS had to become a major epidemic and was more than a disease for homosexuals, the wakeup call has to really hit close to home to affect people and make them act against or speak out against things that need changing.  These days pleading ignorance is a poor excuse.

My best advice to everyone. Learn to live with less so that you have more time to be involved in your community and therefore the world.

Q & A with Canadian DV82XL

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Some readers who have followed http://energyfromthorium.com or more recently http://bravenewclimate.com may know a regular contributor, DV82XL and because I believe his wisdom and obvious experience should be shared I have asked him to contribute on the topic of nuclear regulations and nuclear regulatory bodies.

Q1. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has 2200. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has around 3200 employees (as of 2006). The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) currently has a total staff of around 600 people. These seem like rather large organizations. Do they need to be so big?

A1:The International Atomic Energy Agency, (IAEA) is like every other UN apparatus: it exists primarily to maintain its own existence, and has long ceased to have any utility (assuming it ever did) in regulating nuclear matters on the international level. It is clear that it has failed in its primary role of preventing nuclear proliferation, its inspectors have no authority, and its investigative branch is incompetent. It would seem that any nation that wishes to develop nuclear weapons can with impunity and without any interference at all from IAEA.  They compensate by annoying the nuclear sector in those countries like Canada, who have no interest in nuclear weapons, and good internal security with officious procedures, and grave pronouncements, pretending that they are making the world a safer place.

The American Nuclear Regulatory Commission, (NRC) the independent regulatory agency that oversees the civilian use of nuclear power in the United States, is another hide-bound and bloated bureaucracy. In 1979, the credibility of the NRC, was questioned after the accident that took place at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.  Stung by accusations of inadequate enforcement of regulations at the Harrisburg plant, the Commission has become exceedingly conservative in its approach, to the point of paralysis in some areas.

The situation for type approving new reactor designs in the States for example, is a disgrace,  and the regulator has made it clear that new approvals are unlikely in the US, for any time in the near future. This is tacitly recognizing the fact that the NRC itself is mired down in problems and political interference. In Canada the CNSC recently held hearings on the type-approval process, and there was a reasonable amount of input from the public.  We are still waiting for the formal report, but at least in the Montreal sessions that I attended, commonsense and reason seemed to be the rule.

The U.S. industry is suffering from a spectrum of problems, and it would be unfair to lay these all at the feet of the NRC, however there is no doubt in many people’s minds that revitalization of the industry in the U.S. will not occur until there is a rationalization of the regulatory atmosphere, starting with a reorganization of the NRC.

Q2. Is  Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) a regulator?

A2:Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) is not a regulator or even a government agency. It is a Crown Corporation, that conducts business like any other company, the difference being that it is owned by the Crown in Canada. Furthermore it to be broken up and its several divisions will be sold to the private sector once suitable buyer can be found, and others will be spun down and eliminated. The  high  percentage  of  state-owned  nuclear reactor  companies like AECL  (Rosatom,  Areva, and KHNP) is a simple, but powerful, symbol of the state of trade protectionism in the area of nuclear reactors.

AECL is made up of several business units, the major ones being: The CANDU Reactor Division; The Research and Technology Division (Chalk river laboratories, Whiteshell Laboratories, and the Underground Research Laboratory ); the Waste and Decommissioning Management Division; the Global Nuclear Products and Services Division; and the Nuclear Isotope Division, among other, smaller projects, and concerns.

Some of these are of interest to the private sector, and the Canadian government, wants to sell those, others will be kept, given to other agencies (the labs for example to be taken over by the National Research Council, one would think), and some others being shut down outright.

The Canadian regulator is the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC)  established in 2000 under the Nuclear Safety and Control Act and reports to Parliament through the Minister of Natural Resources. CNSC was created to replace the former Atomic Energy Control Board (AECB), which was founded in 1946.

Dr. Michael Binder, who was appointed in January 2008 as President and Chief Executive Officer, seems to be taking a more proactive role in convincing Canadians that the nuclear sector in Canada is safe and secure. Lately he wrote a rather scathing denunciation of Helen Caldicott’s utterances on town of Port Hope which has had an old uranium processing facility decommissioned and cleaned up. Caldicott had extended the opinion that the whole town was contaminated, and should be immediately abandoned, this without a a scrap of proof, not even a single measurement.

While it is too early to tell if there is going to be any sea-change in the way the Commission conducts itself, the situation with the Canadian regulator is marginally positive.

Q3. It seems that Russia and China are moving forward at a rapid pace  compared to the US. Is the US political system the biggest stumbling  block to their success?

A3: Places like China and Russia do have an advantage in that dictatorships can at least, ‘make the trains that run on time,’ (as was said of Mussolini) the other costs however are often not worth it. The Russians in particular, have always had a somewhat more cavalier attitude to the subject of nuclear safety, one that would be unacceptable to us, as demonstrated by events at Chernobyl, and the jury is still out on how responsible the Chinese will be with nuclear energy.

Anthropogenic Global Warming, peak oil, and similar impending catastrophes, may spell the end of democracy as we know it, however, until then we must play by the current ground-rules we have in the West.

Q4. Why are the Nuclear reactors in Canada now so expensive and how much of that expense is approval process?

A4:The following table gives the record of recent CANDU 6 projects undertaken by Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd, you will note that in places there aren’t too many layers thing can get done on time and on budget:

    1996 Cernavoda-1 Romania On budget, on schedule
    1997 Wolsong-2 South Korea On budget, on schedule
    1998 Wolsong-3 South Korea On budget, on schedule
    1999 Wolsong-4 South Korea On budget, on schedule
    2002 Qinshan-4 China On budget, 6 weeks ahead of schedule
    2003 Qinshan-5 China On budget, 4 months ahead of schedule
    2007 Cernavoda-2 Romania On budget, on schedule 

     

Meanwhile back in Canada almost every project has gone over budget by an average factor of 2.

There is also the recent refurbishment of Wolsong-1 in South Korea, which is on schedule, compared to the Point Lepreau Refurbishment project in New Brunswick, now almost two years behind target. Both are being done by AECL through its Life Extension Projects, the offshore one is on time, the domestic one in the hole.

As for the various approval processes, this is an area too vulnerable to outside interference by those that wish to delay a new build, or generally hobble nuclear energy. Streamlining these processes into one or two would help, but also there needs to be a mechanism whereby the appeal and counter-appeal privileges of those objecting to a decision by the comission can be restricted to prevent the process being used simply to delay a project to run up the costs, and interfere with the timetable to make it late.  Forcing delays and cost overruns, is a standard tactic of antinuclear groups throughout the world.

There are any number of reasons new reactor builds, and refurbishments run over budget and over schedule in Canada, and not elsewhere, even if they are being done by the same organization. It part it is due to excessive regulation, or I should say the excessive application of regulation. It has been my opinion that the nuclear industry should be moved towards an inspection system similar to the one used in commercial air transportation manufacturing and maintenance that places more responsibility on the individual executing the job, and less on full independent inspections. As in aviation, those signing off on a job they have done need be aware that they are accepting unlimited criminal liability for their decision, and  a culture must be fostered that is supportive when they refuse to sign.

Q5. Here’s a link about an innovative small reactor and why they are  likely unable to get to market
http://www.nucleartownhall.com/blog/radix-smr-looks-beyond-conventional-markets-townhall-qa-with-ceo-paul-farrell/
“price to license a design will be $50 million and the annual licensing fees another $4.7 million”
I see this $50 million figure a lot.  Why is it so costly? How can this be justified?

A5: The cost is excessive, and the process too complex for type-approval of new nuclear reactors, not just in the States, but everywhere. Generally speaking once a design certification application has been submitted, takes between 36 and 60-plus months to complete the review and rule making, depending on whether the agency previously has reviewed and approved the technology. Some attempt has been made by several regulators to streamline the process, but it is still an overly complex procedure, and fraught with delay.

It is this last aspect that causes most of the problems. Investors are loath to invest in ideas that will take as long as five years to get approval to even start building a plant, and even then it might be rejected by the regulator and need a total redesign, and re-submission for approval, starting the process over again from scratch.

The problems seem to be internal to the agencies themselves and are the consequence of a culture that is badly in need of change.


Q6. The regulators have done some things right. Nuclear plants have an amazing safety record since the Three Mile Island incident. Have they outlived their usefulness? Are they just inventing ways to stay employed considering this record was pretty well met 20 years ago or more?

A6: I am a bit tired of regulators patting themselves on the back for doing such a good job. Somehow they seem to think that without their constant and somewhat anal attention to detail, operators and owners of large utilities would treat a very, very expensive asset so cavalierly that they would let it be destroyed. Large, dangerous assets have been managed by corporations for centuries, without the sort of over site that nuclear regulators seem to think is necessary. The illusion that the nuclear power plant twenty miles down the road is a danger, and the tanker trains running through the middle of the town filled with anything from ammonia, to propane is not, is yet another example of poor risk assessment.  The attitude of many of the world’s regulators is doing nothing to help.