In desperate times, nuclear industry gets desperate

There’s nothing like the scuttling of yet another nuclear pipe dream (this time it’s the two halted V.C. Summer reactors in South Carolina, pictured) to send the nuclear evangelists scurrying to find a last ditch way to stay relevant. SC Senator, Lindsey Graham, who asked with breathtaking naivety “What the hell happened?” when confronted with the failure of Summer, has vowed to revive the project alongside Governor Henry McMaster. Maybe he missed all the obvious warnings from anti-nuclear groups and the numerous financial red flags. Meanwhile, a Columbia, SC man has brought a class action lawsuit on behalf of ratepayers who have been screwed out of more than $1 billion “for a project that may never generate a single kilowatt of electricity.” As light water reactor plans crumble, small modular reactors (SMR) continue to rear their ugly little heads, although they have been nothing more than paper plans for decades. In the UK where new nuclear plans are mired in myriad problems, British government ministers summoned the last surviving nuclear corporations to the table to pitch an SMR plan. And some are even trying to capitalize on the North Korea nuclear weapons alarm to suggest that abandoning nuclear power threatens national security (see our comments after the article.)

Update on August 17, 2017 by admin

On August 15, SCANA, the parent company of SCE&G, released a statement withdrawing its petition to abandon the project. However, this is likely just a stay of the inevitable execution. And despite backing off the shutdown for now, the company stands by its "original decision to abandon construction, even though almost $9 billion has already been spent on the project." In fact, SCANA CEO Kevin Marsh, has described the move as very much a temporary suspension. More.

Money and time wasted and no new reactor designs to show for it

The majority of pro-nuclear boosters appear finally to have swallowed a dose of reality -- and have ceased clinging to the idea that "new nuclear power plants" and even "new reactor designs" will be the energy answer of the near future. The error- and omission-filled pro-new-nuclear propaganda piece, Pandora's Promise, was out of date almost as soon as it was released. Even its producers and stars have jumped ship and instead now clamor to keep old, economically failing and technically deteriorating nuclear plants going, just to justify a continued existence.

In a telling piece of research -- A retrospective analysis of funding and focus in US advanced fission innovation -- by Abdulla et al, a look was taken at how US spending has affected nuclear power development and new reactor design. Unsurprisingly, the authors noted that: 

"despite spending $2 billion since the late 1990s—no advanced design is ready for deployment. Even if the program had been well designed, it still would have been insufficient to demonstrate even one non-light water technology. It has violated much of the wisdom about the effective execution of innovative programs: annual funding varies fourfold, priorities are ephemeral, incumbent technologies and fuels are prized over innovation, and infrastructure spending consumes half the budget. Absent substantial changes, the possibility of US-designed advanced reactors playing a role in decarbonization by mid-century is low." [emphasis added.]

As the authors also explained in their conclusion: 

"In this paper, we do not seek to present a comprehensive diagnosis of the problems facing nuclear energy innovation in the US. Rather, we have reconstructed NE’s budget history and evaluated how close the office has come to achieving its advanced reactor mission. Our research shows that, as currently structured, NE has neither the funding levels nor the programmatic focus that it needs to deliver on its mission of developing and demonstrating one or two advanced reactor designs by mid-century. This comes despite multiple strategy roadmaps and billions of dollars of appropriations."

The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that enough money and time has already been wasted on a failed technology that has zero role to play in our energy present or future.

Annual Nagasaki commemoration at Lawrence Livermore focuses on N. Korea

As SF Gate reported: On August 9, 200 protesters gathered outside the gates of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to commemorate the 72nd anniversary of the bomb that decimated Nagasaki, just three days after another atomic blast did the same to Hiroshima. The gathering was heavy with emotion: indignation, outrage and fear over a potential nuclear build-up. The mood was set by verbal threats unleashed by President Trump a day earlier. Speakers included Hiroshima survivor Takashi Tanemori, and Daniel Ellsberg (pictured.)

On Tuesday, Trump said he would unleash “fire and fury” on North Korea, the likes of which “the world has never seen,” if Pyongyang continued to issue threats against the U.S. The president supplemented his public comments with tweets on Wednesday boasting that the U.S. nuclear arsenal “is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before” and that his first order as president was to “renovate and modernize” the weaponry.

It was the last thing the protesters — from elementary-school-age children carrying posters covered in glitter to the senior citizens in wheelchairs holding “raging granny” signs — wanted to hear. 

“We are here to stand with the survivors of that nuclear attack, but we are also here to stop the next nuclear war before it starts,” said Marylia Kelley, executive director of Tri-Valley CAREs, a small advocacy organization formed in 1983 by neighbors living near the Livermore laboratory, one of the nation’s hubs for nuclear weapons research. Read the full article.

"Pushing the storage horse with a nuclear waste cart: The spent fuel pool problem"

A must read in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists by Bob Alvarez, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC  and renown published nuclear waste expert. Tens of thousands of tons of extremely dangerous highly radioactive nuclear waste is sitting in vulnerable, densely packed storage ponds at atomic reactors across the country. The consequence and cost to life, land and water from a nuclear waste pool failure, sabotage or military action is staggering to comprehend.

North Korea now making missile-ready nuclear weapons, U.S. analysts say

As reported by the Washington Post, U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the North Korean regime has succeeded in crossing another threshold toward full nuclear weapons status. It is the miniaturization of nuclear warheads, to fit in the nose cone of an ICBM. The North Korean regime also recently conducted successful tests of Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles with ranges capable of reaching much of the United States, according to some estimates. The North Korean regime also already has more nuclear weapons than previously thought, up to 60. This news comes two days after the 72nd commemoration of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, and one day before the 72nd commemoration of the U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki. The last hurdle remaining, the article reports, is an ICBM nose cone capable of withstanding the heat of re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, which U.S. intelligence agencies estimate will be accomplished by late next year.

The article quotes Siegfried Hecker, "director emeritus of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the last known U.S. official to personally inspect North Korea’s nuclear facilities...who visited North Korea seven times between 2004 and 2010 and met with key leaders of the country’s weapons programs."

“The real threat,” Hecker said, “is we’re going to stumble into a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula.”

The article reports "The options said to be under discussion [within the Trump administration] ranged from new multilateral negotiations to reintroducing U.S. battlefield nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula, officials familiar with internal discussions said." (emphasis added)

As recently reported by Mark Hertsgaard in The Nation, we need to get Trump's finger off the nuclear button! (Take action -- urge your U.S. Senators and U.S. Representative to support the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2017, introduced in January by Senator Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Representative Ted Lieu, a Democrat from California.) And, we need to abolish nuclear weapons, before they abolish us! See Beyond Nuclear's Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Proliferation website sections for more info.