By Kennedy Maize
“The House bill [H.R. 6544] would also extend the Price-Anderson federal accident insurance subsidy, first enacted in 1957 and renewed seven times since then. The program expires at the end of 2025. It isn’t clear why this federal subsidy for nuclear in still needed when the industry insists its new, advanced reactor designs are ‘inherently’ walk-away safe.”
The U.S. nuclear industry in recent days has hit three cherries on the federal money-and-policy slot machine. The open question is whether the largess (some might call it pork) will have the intended results: revitalizing a moribund industry by hitching its wagon to the feverish fear of climate change and long-run animosity toward nuclear rivals China and Russia.
First, the money–the most tangible of the goodies Congress and the White House have doled out. On March 5, the ranking members of the House and Senate appropriations committees rolled out a consensus on six money balls, including the Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies bill funding all government nuclear programs for fiscal year 2024. Passage is almost certainly a done deal.
For nuclear, the bill includes the following radioactive goodies:
- $1.685 billion for Department of Energy nuclear R&D, including a priority for microreactors and accident tolerant fuel. This is a $212 million increase over 2023 funding.
- $2.72 billion in repurposed supplemental emergency funding for a high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) program for advanced reactor fuel development. This is aimed specifically at Russia (the only significant current supplier of HALEU).
- $280 million for an assortment of nuclear programs, such as $16 million for hydrogen produced from nukes and $137 million for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
House Legislation Passed (H.R. 6544)
The above Treasury payments followed policy victories for the nukes, including legislation and a new regulatory program.
On February 28, the House by an overwhelming 365-36 bipartisan margin passed H.R. 6544, designed to streamline safety reviews by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and give the Department of Energy some authority to buy electricity through purchase power agreements from commercial nuclear power purveyors.
In some respects, the legislation is a return to the approach of the now-defunct Atomic Energy Commission in the early days of atomic energy. In 1974, Congress abolished the AEC, and the all-power congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, in large part because the AEC viewed reactor safety as a poor cousin to promotion the atom.
The language in the House bill, as described by the Hogan Lovells law firm, would require the NRC to revise it mission statement
to ensure that, while upholding the policies of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (AEA), the licensing and regulation of nuclear activities are carried out efficiently without unduly restricting the potential of nuclear energy and to improve the general welfare and the benefits of nuclear technology to society.”
Some observers have suggested this hortatory language is unlikely to survive in the Senate. Senators are trying to combine House provisions with a separate bipartisan bill that passed last year as part of the National Defense Authorization Act but was later axed.
The legislation would also create a cadre of up to 210 Supergrade nuclear ninjas, possibly paid more than NRC commissioners in some cases. According to the bill language, under some circumstances, the NRC chairman Chairman “may, during any period when such a certification is in effect, fix the compensation for such employees or other personnel serving in a covered position without regard to any provision of title 5, United States Code, governing General Schedule classification and pay rates.” These alleged experts appear to have the power to second-guess the Senate-confirmed commissioners.
The House bill would also extend the Price-Anderson federal accident insurance subsidy, first enacted in 1957 and renewed seven times since then. The program expires at the end of 2025. It isn’t clear why this federal subsidy for nuclear in still needed when the industry insists its new, advanced reactor designs are “inherently” walk-away safe. Congress apparently believes it can assess the risks of nuclear energy more accurately than private sector actuaries.
Regulatory Favor
Then there is the third cherry on the governmental slot machine: regulation.
On March 4, the NRC rejected a staff-written draft rule developed over three years for how to regulate the potential new license applications for a variety of advanced reactors. The commission told the staff to rewrite its proposal for a new “Part 53” section of the agency’s authority embodied in 10 Code of Federal Regulations, joining the current sections 50 and 52, which pertain to large light-water reactors.
According to Utility Dive, a key change ordered by the commission “rejected ‘a strict checklist of requirements’ for probabilistic risk assessments while favoring a more flexible framework suited to simplified reactor designs with passive safety features that utilize natural forces, such as gravity or pressure differentials, rather than operator action.”
In a news release, NRC Chairman Christopher Hanson said, “This proposed rule leverages significantly more risk insights than our existing regulatory framework in making safety determinations. Applicants can use our existing regulations today, but this proposed rule will provide future nuclear developers a clear, additional pathway for licensing.” The NRC said it expects to publish the new rule in the Federal Register in about six months.
Legacy of Failure
This latest effort to revive the largely stagnant U.S. nuclear program is the third time in the last nearly 20 years that the government has tried to pump new life into atomic power. The U.S. program started grinding to a halt in the mid-1970s and was barely treading water by the 1990s. The pipeline of new reactor licenses emptied in 1974, and as the final builders of plants under construction either completed or abandoned their projects, the workforce and supply chain infrastructure hollowed out.
In 2005, Congress passed a new “Energy Policies Act,” which offered a smorgasbord of financial goodies for new plants including loans (they called them “loan guarantees” to make them look more palatable to opponents of direct federal subsidies, but the Treasury wrote the checks and received the loan payments), cost overrun protections, and extension of Price-Anderson to 2025.
The 2005 act was largely a failure. The two preeminent U.S. nuclear power developers, Westinghouse and General Electric, ended up sorely financially injured and in Japanese hands. Former NRC Commissioner Peter Bradford commented, “They placed a big bet on this hallucination of a nuclear renaissance.”
Then came the first push for “small modular reactors,” designed to downsize the financial risks and construction costs of nuclear power plants. The strategy was the reverse of the “economies of scale” that drove the first generation of nuclear power plants, where bigger was always assumed to be better, but wasn’t.
In 2009, reactor vendor Babcock & Wilcox, which had substantial experience building nuclear power plants for U.S. submarines, announced it would offer a 125-MW pressurized water reactor (later scaled up to 180 MW) and a year later unveiled an alliance with builder Bechtel Corp. They called the project mPower.
In 2012, the Obama administration announced a $500 million program for development of small modular reactors. In 2013, mPower won financial assistance from DOE, with an award up to around $126 million. The same year, B&W tried and failed to sell a majority share of mPower, then cut back funding by 75%. Bechtel soon soured on the project, and it officially ran out of steam in 2017 after failure to find a customer.
During the same time frame, Westinghouse launched a 225-MW small modular reactor program. It quickly cratered, as the Pittsburgh-based company was unable to find a customer for its machines.
Will the latest government attempt to revive nuclear, driven by global warming concerns, succeed? It’s not a given. There’s lots to like about smaller nukes. They produce no CO2, have a relatively small footprint, can be sited fairly close to load.
But the economics aren’t clear, as the NuScale saga demonstrates. Some of the non-LWR advanced reactor designs will present licensing challenges, as there is little history behind them. Sodium cooled fast reactors may be particularly problematic, given the well-known problems of sodium as a coolant and the experience with Superphenix in France and Monju in Japan, plus issues of nuclear weapons proliferation.
———————-
This revised post originally appeared at The Quad Report.
During my tenure as CEO of a uranium exploration company (Calypso Uranium) I was an officially designated representative of Argentina at the 2005 IAEA Semi-Annual Redbook International Symposium, in Vienna, Austria (IAEA Headquarters). The proceedings were published as: Uranium production and raw materials for the nuclear fuel cycle-Supply and demand, economics, the environment and energy security (my name is on p.333). This gave me an opportunity to question leading experts in all phases of the nuclear issue, and the bottle-neck soon became clear. The Critical Path, for construction and commissioning a nuclear power reactor, was not predictable, due to constant environmentalist lawsuits and the dramatic changes in politics associated with election cycle results. The result, failure to assemble a realistic economic analysis, was a Fatal Flaw. All of the above report, encouraging as it is, needs to address the lawfare assault on Nuclear Energy, or the advances will be only in totalitarian regimes.
….and add State sponsored dumping by solar and wind cutting any dispatchables lunch and it’s like paddling a barbed wire canoe upstream in s*#t.
So to succeed the regulatory commission must be independant of the political framework and the process protected from lawfare? I don’t see how that can happen in the USA at all.
I don’t see how that can happen either.
As a consumer, this is not a political or environmental issue for me. It is all about what is the biggest dollar win in the cheapest energy input. Since I live in PA where there is enormous NG reserves, I am going to be dubious about Nuke guys blaming environmentalists for their inability to tell me they have a better deal for me. Frack on!
A theoretical cost benefit analysis between nuke and NG would bet better than nothing. If you are aware of one pass it on.
“There’s lots to like about smaller nukes. They produce no CO2”.
There’s lots to like about big and small nukes but the fact that they produce no CO2 isn’t an example – it’s irrelevant. In fact, if anything, it’s a drawback of nuclear energy – increased CO2 has already increased plant growth all over the world.
In operation, nukes produce no CO2.
The do produce waste heat, a contribution that is not extensively explored.
That aside, CONSTRUCTION involves concrete, steel, etc., all of which contribute CO2.
It needs to have the same critique as EVs. Not just operational outputs, but lifecycle factors.
but lifecycle factors.
Any facility that pumps liquids, involves rotating machinery and produces or uses electricity must be maintained. Parts that wear out are replaced, newer versions are installed. A nuclear generator could easily be operational for many decades with programmed maintenance, as they are today. Licensing them for a specific time period flies in the face of reality. Homeowners don’t walk away from a house with a worn out washing machine, plumbing problems or a leaky roof, they fix them.
All forms of power produce waste heat. Nuclear is not unique in that fact. Nor does nuclear produce more waste heat than do fossil fuel plants.
The UHI effects of rooftop solar arrays and the rural heat island effects of solar farms haven’t been addressed either Sparta.
And how about all that hot air that emanates from UN Assemblies?
Should we be Concerned?
Nuclear Proliferation!!!
What if Justin Truedope and his Canadian Fascists get The Bomb?
The key word is ‘produce’.
If you compare output with output, they probably involve far less emissions in construction and installation than solar or wind arrays.
If it’s solutions [to a non real world problem] that actually help the greens will be opposed.
Without the illusory ‘crisis’ they have nothing. They depend on a perpetual threat.
As evidenced by having won the Net Zero carbon war – maybe – attention has turned to Net Zero methane, cows, farms, food.
If your goal is to cripple an industry, unreasonable regulation is the way to go!
It’s a tried and true three-step process:
1) Find out how much the target process emits currently
2) Determine the level of mitigation feasible with current technology
3) Set the regulatory limit far below what can be mitigated cost-effectively
When innovators interfere by discovering cost-effective approaches, first you find some troubling concern with their technology, and if that fails, discover that the risk was ‘worse than we thought’ and adjust the regulatory limits down to half of what the new technology can achieve.
STILL repeating the ‘same old -same old’ from the 1940’s … mankind does _not_learn very fast. We really need some new thinkers on the scene, but I ask you, who or how or WHERE will the ‘mold’ (mould for Brits) be broken? Universities teach the same staid approach that has us in the present quagmire thinking/implementations that have not progressed since the 1940’s …. we are truly STUCK since ‘big science’ will ONLY fund what ‘big sci’ has FUNDED before. NO new thinking/presentation of theory (esp at a low level concerning even the electron and its relationship to the nucleus) is allowed.
I don’t quite grasp this. Got an example.
No worries, mate.
Schools are eliminating scientific method and replacing it with consensus.
But it’s consensus that identifies as the scientific method.
So it’s not up for questioning in any way.
You couldn’t be more wrong. Big science is an arm of government, the impetus for carbon sequestration, hydrogen combustion, solar power and wind farms, all experiments that are subsidized by taxes or enpixelated funds.
Enpixilated funds?
Enpixelated funds are monetary units created by keystrokes without going through mining and minting or even printing. They are abstractions and do not exist in the observable world yet are accepted as payment for debts. Many businesses do not accept “real” money, only enpixelated funds, despite the phrase on fiat paper federal reserve notes, “this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private”, Of course these businesses should be shunned by all but internet commerce requires enpixelated funds and their convenience ensnares the modern who regards the pre-digital era as a hopeless social and economic antique of the past.
General, I don’t think it’s a real word but that’s not my complaint. Fiat currency is no more or less real by being paper or base metal or a database record.
Fiat currency is what I would call an unreliable store of value. It is ‘real’ money because it is fungible and accepted as legal tender in most scenarios. It’s unreliable because it is easily and persistently debased.
But even gold is an imperfect store of value. Like fiat currency, it holds value according to supply and demand.
I understand and sympathize however with the concern for lack of privacy and potentially tyrannical control if fiat money can only be transacted in traceable electronic transactions.
It’s a real word if someone uses it and others understand it. Most people would probably figure it out if they thought about it a little. Gold or silver has a value anywhere and always has. US Confederate notes, Wiemar German bills and Zimbabwean notes are valueless except as curiosities. Gold coins were used by the Romans to pay their troops because they were accepted everywhere and those troops were stationed all over the Empire. Before and after the American revolution almost any gold or silver coins were accepted in trade as well as coins from the UK.
Yes, I am not disputing that. I would prefer that money had intrinsic value rather than being a risky promise.
I’m just saying that all forms of money depend on supply and demand setting the price of the money. Gold is useful as money because it is rare, it doesn’t corrode, and the quantity mined annually is small compared to the total amount already in circulation. It is very difficult to create new supplies of gold. Therefore it can be a relatively stable store of value.
The true value of money is tied to the goods and services produced in an economy. While you may consider gold a good when used to make jewelry, in the form of bullion it has no useful function other than to be a stable store of value. People agree to accept it in exchange for goods and services because they know that nobody can create new gold to debase its value and they know that everybody else accepts it as payment.
The ‘value’ we talk about is really how many goods and services can be obtained with the exchange of a certain weight of gold. If two starving people were in a village where one had a piece of bread and the other had a bar of gold, both people would want the bread, and the gold would be worthless.
The real “price” of money is how many useful goods and services you need to supply to receive a unit of currency, how many loaves of bread or hours of labor do you need to get a gold coin? If there is too much money chasing the same goods and services, there will be price inflation. The same unit of currency buys less.
if there was a massive meteorite of pure gold that increased the world’s gold supply by 20%, that would depress the price of gold, the same as if a government suddenly added 20% to the supply of fiat currency. Of course that’s highly unlikely to happen.
Just the same, gold has been a risky store of value over relatively short periods of time in the past half century. The reason being supply and demand for gold.
The basic problem is government…I could stop right there, but will elaborate. …government funding research instead of just buying results.
Funding research is paying for effort irrespective of results. Effort that private companies won’t fund because the probability of technical or commercial success or the cost-benefit analysis makes no sense.
Taking away the financial risk of technical failure doesn’t improve the probability of technical success. In fact, it reduces the probability of success. How, you ask? People respond to incentives.
Researchers are people. Why struggle with a difficult problem for 70-80 hrs/week when you get no more pay than if you plod along or even slack off? If they are getting paid a secure salary regardless of whether they succeed or fail, some of them spend their 40 hours browsing porn, or commenting on X.
I’m not saying that it is never in the national interest to invest in basic research. What I am saying is that when the research aims toward a practical application, there must be powerful incentives to achieve the goal.
If you want a bunch of functioning frantabulators, it’s probably far more effective for the government to promise to buy the first working prototype for whatever had been contemplated as the cost of research grants, and to buy the first x frantabulators delivered by any maker on a decreasing pricing scale. That is how you incentivize timely results and remove commercial risk.
Subsidies are not what is needed. End all the frivolous lawsuits is what is needed. As soon as they file one arrest ALL involved for insurrection, lock their asses in rundown DC jail and then wait 3 years to give them trials.
Still can’t cope that J6 didn’t work out to overthrow the government?
Grandpa’s and grandma’s taking selfies, and FBI + AntiFa agitators, … and no guns… , hardly constitutes an attempt to overthrow the government. Why did Speaker Pelosi refuse additional manpower for security?
You think the J6 riot was an attempt to overthrow the government but the multiple BLM riots were mostly peaceful civil expression?
I have no sympathy with anyone who fought with the police. That includes J6 and the Marxist-inspired riots of the summer of 2020.
And tell me, why was the J6 riot allowed to happen? The Capital Police knew there was going to be trouble, so did the FBI. Trump asked for 20,000 National Guardsmen to assist with crowd and riot control. Why was that not granted?
Trump did not sign an order to deploy 20,000 troops on Jan. 6
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-trump-order-national-guard-156055113284
In his own speech he claimed that he has won, and riled up his supporters. And after all this years he has still no evidence he won.
Nobody said Trump signed an order. He offered the troops to Pelosi, and she turned them down. If Trump was half the dictator the socialists claim he is, he would have just overrode Pelosi and sent the troops anyway.
Nobody said Trump signed an order.
But isn’t that typical to make claims like that?
He did sign it, Pelosi and Bowser refused to enact it.
The AP having anything to do with fact checking is only in the minds of dolts….oh, wait.
AP News is the new home of Soviet Pravda.
Incitement to riot is how Biden’s fascist puppeteers are trying to nullify the 1st Amendment.
Yea, he did, stupid.
January 6th was a protest that turned violent. It was not an attempt to overthrow the government. It was an attempt to voice concerns about perceived and possibly legitimate election fraud.
Trump was still president at the time. Do you really think they were trying to overthrow him?
It was an attempt to cancel a fair election and keep trump in power.
WRONG.. It was questioning what was almost certainly a very tainted election.
Take off your right eye-patch… you might see reality better.
If he tried to see reality, he would have to change his entire world view. That’s way to painful for your average socialist to handle.
You really do seem to believe the lies you have been taught.
Still can’t handle the reality that your handlers have been lying to you?
Mark (and others) – there is no reason to reply to this troll. We can’t block him. He spews stupidity. We should ignore him – and not react in any way to his silly comments.
+1000000
Stop talking to Lusername!
If you are tired of all the replies, on the lower right corner of each post is an up arrow symbol. HOver your mouse over it to find it. Select that arrow and you won’t have to any of these responses.
I don’t seem to see that feature browsing on my phone. But anyway, it’s not a matter of me being tired or annoyed about the chatter. It’s the empowerment of Lusername that concerns me.
I am of two minds on this. Ignoring troll-bots like Lusername might allow its mind-numbed nonsense to go unchallenged. On the other hand, it’s probably best if instead of acknowledging its nonsense we just down-vote and in a separate comment make the case for the realist point of view just once, refusing to engage in a back-and-forth with a robot.
Once the comments are filled with crap from trolls, nobody is going to learn anything.
Oh, but kicking it in it’s fecal stained teeth is quite fun.
Come on Mark.
He’s 9.
Lusername: marxist stooge.
You tried to overthrow a government on 1/6/24? Didn’t hear about it. Was it a student government and all the other chi’drens ignored you and hurt your feelfeels?
I worked on the cancelled Summer 2/3 project in South Carolina. It wasn’t frivolous lawsuits that killed the project. It was Westinghouse incompetence that made a predictable construction schedule impossible and caused costs to spiral out of control. The sister project in Georgia was able to survive because they were a bigger company and took the federal loan guarantees.In that case, what was supposed to be a $10 billion project ended up around $30 billion.
Executives at Westinghouse lied to SCANA about the state of the project and SCANA lied to investors and South Carolina regulators and both went to jail over their actions.
Until a reactor vendor comes up with a design and builds the prototype on a predictable schedule at a competitive cost and shows that it can be operated reliably and economically, no one in their right mind will risk their money on it.
“Until a reactor vendor comes up with a design and builds the prototype on a predictable schedule at a competitive cost and shows that it can be operated reliably and economically, no one in their right mind will risk their money on it.” Yes, and with the endless stream of frivolous lawsuits against nuclear industry when will that happen? Hell, DoE, DoJ and BLM/DoI are participating in the dog pile of frivolous crap.
Way off topic, but going nuclear, nonetheless.
Borne out of the same religious tendencies….. would they dare do the same to the star mangled spanner? Probably.
“England’s new £125 football kit for the European Championship has sparked a row over a multicoloured St George’s Cross on the back of the shirt collar”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2024/03/21/england-multi-colour-st-georges-cross-kit-woke-nonsense/
Who on Earth came up with the idea, let alone signed it off? In short, it is the pride flag applied to the Cross of St. George and it isn’t inclusive, it’s an insult. If a nation’s flag doesn’t include someone, then, that someone has a problem all their own.
Watch NIke sales do a Bud Lite….
They already do it:
Utterly woke and bonkers stuff….
Definitely.
“If a nation’s flag doesn’t include someone, then, that someone has a problem all their own.”
Alert! Look up “Thin Blue Line”
This flag is in support of those who wear the blue — police.
The idea being that it is a thin blue line of police between safety and chaos.
Unfortunately, the divisiveness now gripping society has brought criticisms that it is a of symbol of white supremacy.
So like the multicoloured St George’s flag shows support.
It is altering the colors of a flag to further your agenda, doesn’t make a difference if you like it or not.
Look up “Thin Blue Line”
So yet again you prove to be disingenuous – why do you feel the need to do that?
Why is changing the color of one flag fine, but the other isn’t?
I never said it was fine. Show me where I did.
Are straw men your major forte? It’s all you’ve got
a
Fine, so it’s the same and we are done.
I only posted it to answer to
You must mean the Errol Morris documentary.
Never heard of E. M.
Neighbors fly the “Thin Blue Line” flag, and another puts up a “Prisoner of War (POW) flag.
Also of interest: the Behind The Badge Foundation;
a Washington State group.
Sorry strat but it isn’t our flag – it’s the national flag of Georgia. Our flag is the Union jack or flag and has been since 1707. The cross of st. George is not the flag of England.
My flag – England – is the Cross of St. George. A Red Cross on a White Background.
I appreciate your antiquated thinking
How is the union jack antiquated?
It’s so old even Mick Jagger recognized it –
“Then in flies a guy
Who’s all dressed up just like the Union Jack”
(before your time, I know. But still . . . 🙂 )
Have you taken lessons in how to not understand what you are reading.
Where did anyone say anything about the Union Jack being antiquated. He said your thinking was antiquated.
In that I believe he was giving you way too much credit. Your thinking isn’t antiquated, it’s undetectable.
Thank you for that, MarkW, but strat actually called MY thinking antiquated, not mylittlepony.
No strat, you’re wrong. Since 1707 the national flag of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland has been the Union jack or flag. The cross of St. George, the Welsh dragon flag and the cross of St. Andrew (or saltire) are not national flags but can be (and have been) used as unofficial flags of national identity and that’s fine. But what it is not is the national flag of England, ok?
The Union Jack 🇬🇧 contains the ‘flag of St. George’ 🏴 specifically BECAUSE it’s the flag of the English nation, just as it contains the flag of the Scottish nation 🏴.
I’d say that strat is right about the national flag of England.
I suppose that the antiquated thinking would refer to identifying as ‘British’. I must confess that I don’t understand the nuance there. I am a Connecticutian, a New Englander, a US citizen, an American, and a Terran. Being from Connecticut doesn’t override my American-ness.
The so cheap, soon to be mass produced, total viable on the free market power plants need massive government money to work. Like in the past.
https://thebulletin.org/2023/12/nuclear-expert-mycle-schneider-on-the-cop28-pledge-to-triple-nuclear-energy-production-trumpism-enters-energy-policy/
Nuclear renaissance CCXIII: Nothing ever happens.
“Nothing ever happens.”
Just the way the ecoloons planned it. You must be pleased.
It’s a waste of money that could be used for renewables.
Building “renewables” is the same as tossing bags of gold into a bubbling volcano. The loss of wealth is the same, but the gold is gone and not cluttering up the countryside.
You are funny- the Son of Griff?
Pretty sure it’s just plain old griff.
Renewables will never be a viable form of power. Simply too unreliable. It really is sad what a liberal education does to the minds of the emotionally vulnerable.
Even better.. use it for new COAL-FIRED power stations.
RELIABLE, CHEAP, DISPATCHABLE…
… with the big plus of providing CO2 to the atmosphere.
Wasting money on renewable CRAP that is totally unfit for grid use, is a Luser’s game.
So that’s why Microsoft is hiring nuclear engineers, eh chumly. Your sad tears will be mocked when your woke corporate masters start building a lot of nuke plants. Even if they are woke like you they are not stupid and realize unreliables can’t run their cash cow cloud business data centers. Even a caveman can see it.
Every cent spent on ruinables is a waste of money that could be used for nuclear power or any other reliable power.
Mycle Schneider is a ‘nuclear expert’ only in the sense that he has opposed nuclear power since the 1980s.
Entering a market with new SMR technology where wind and solar has a huge political constituency built on receiving tax credits and other incentives worth $100’s of billions presents a challenge for the inevitable nuclear renaissance. The only question is how long we want to keep pretending that sunshine and breezes can power a modern society.
What has the value ‘213’ expressed in Roman numerals got to do with this post?
He’s trying to impress the girls.
Obviously he’s never met any or he’d know that wouldn’t impress any of them.
My point was that the year 2023 in Roman numerals is MMXXIII not CCXIII.
Numbers in any language are a mystery to leftists.
These subsidies are meaningless in the face of perpetual lawfare by the anti-nuclear folks – including the coal and natural gas industries as well as the usual suspects.
If the US really wanted to promote nuclear power – they would extend the same type of legal immunity conferred by EUA vaccines…
Change the law so that the loser in a civil case is required to pay the winners court costs as well as their own – that will very quickly sort out serious cases from the frivolous.
“Loser pay” – I’ve been hearing that suggested for at least 30 years and it never happens. Too many lawyers against it I think.
Yeah, I know – there’s too much money being made by lawyers for it to stop.
Seems to be many new nuclear job postings by G&T’s with nuclear in their portfolios. Graybeards in the industry will likely have the opportunity to make lots of money. Hopefully there are enough around to pass on their knowledge and expertise to the next generation.
Gin & Tonic? Make mine a double!
X-Energy is also investing in HALEU, which is used in their TRISO-X fuel pebbles. See https://x-energy.com/ I have no affiliation.
Using the Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity (LFSCOE) comparison method, wind plus infrastructure plus battery storage are over twice the cost of an equivalent nuclear power plant. Solar plus battery storage is over 3 times more expensive.
Yet our politicians pursue a strategy of “HOPE” that some magical fairy dust will drop battery and transmission line costs down to virtually nothing or hydrogen electrolysis, a technology known for over 230 years but still 10 times more expensive that natural gas on a heat equivalent basis, will make their current generation preferences cost effective.
We are in for a long and expensive ride as the current strategy of HOPE unravels as cost skyrocket. Only then will new nuclear development be accepted as the logical alternative.
The question is how devastating this will be on our industry. Will they come back from the China’s and India’s that are sticking with fossil fuels?
Captain, As you state, our politicians pursue a strategy of “HOPE” that some magical fairy dust will drop battery and transmission line costs down to virtually nothing”. Actually, if the batteries were free grid scale battery storage for more than four (4) hours would still be too expensive; as I suspect you fully understand. The associated “packet” cost for enclosure, overcurrent protection, switchgear, fire suppression and more costs $200/KWh of the $500+total packet.
A wholesale transition to old-tech nuke-power will only demand destruct the USA economy for decades while lining political and oligarchical pockets.
There is plenty of Hydrocarbon fuel in the world to wait for the new energy tech that will truly demand destruct the Hydrocarbon markets. Classic nuke power is very expensive old tech. Do your homework on the capital costs and subsidy costs of nuke power.
As we have seen with renewable energy tech, solving political and market collusion problems with tech is a very expensive bad idea
The reality is honest cost-risk-benefit analyses are rarely or never actually accomplished.
Neither is a legitimate analysis of alternatives.
I can see nuke power application in areas where there isn’t a ample supply of natural gas pipelines but wholesale tax subsidized transition to nuke power is unnecessary and capital costs make it more expensive than multi-tiered NG powered generation.
If it ain’t broken don’t fix it. In the long run, the nuke power noise will be quenched by the rad environmentalists and the Big energy arm into Washington. There will be no major transition to nuke power.
the only problem with hydrocarbon fuel is the price and that is a political/regulatory/cartel/collusion market problem not a tech problem.
We have already seen the damage done by trying to solve a political problem with tax subsidized renewable energy tech.
If the GOP wants to do good, make the hydrocarbon fuel markets free of collusion and ensure that emerging tech like ambient SC, fusion do not get suppressed. Stop our politicians from being leveraged to make people pay through the nose for hydrocarbon fuel and stop with this nuke non-sense.
In 50 years or less the hydrocarbon market question will be moot due to emerging tech that will demand destroy the market. Isn’t this the crux of the issue now anyway.. By then it will be something else like under population and transition to anti-human economy.
The current political goal is not to end the hydrocarbon fuel markets. it is to leverage them and maintain the cash cow while wielding the propaganda weapon to instigate a dystopic anti-human world view that will lead significant depopulation in the 50 year interim…that is to ensure that we continue to consume and pay through the nose as we age out and disappear.
That’s the funny thing about Emergent Technologies that are at least 50 years down the road, they haven’t emerged yet and can’t be predicted. This is the same trap that the idiots pushing Wind and Solar as well as Lithium batteries have fallen into – “let’s go with this, a miracle will occur, then it’ll all be rosy.” No miracle has occurred in the last 50 years so what makes you think it’ll happen in the next 50?
Agree, cost benefit analysis has become an big moving target in the past 4-5 years on the internet. My reading indicates the the capital costs 14 times greater than NG fired plants putting the cost benefit win on the multi-tier NG electrical generation not nuke. This is especially true we there is a good supply distribution of NG which is a good chunk of the USA.. So it makes no sense to replace existing NG plants with nuke plants.
How would nuke power transition be a big win for the American people. I don’t see it.
What we need is CNG cars not EV’s…. EV’s with the tax subsidy are crazy expensive…. think about the impact of all that taxpayer money going down the drain for Lithium batteries that are useless in 10 years or less. The people who are pushing for nuke and EV’s are an economic wrecking crew.
CNG is 1/2 the price of gasoline and works better than gas in engines and you don’t have to ship it or refine it.
I am not anti-nuke, keep existing plants going and put up new one’s where it is a big win for the local consumers.
Classic nuke power is very expensive old tech.
Taxpayer subsidized items like humungous sports stadiums are tech as old as Imperial Rome but still go up on a regular basis in Yankeeland and other wealthy neighborhoods. These expensive monstrosities are actually just big television studios but television itself is old tech, depending on your technological time line. The Nautilus was launched in 1954 but we’re unaware of improvements to its nuclear propulsion system in the 70 years since, if any, because of paranoid secrecy.
Which leads to the issue of nuclear generation construction cost, a significant part of which is hardening the facility against an attack. Nuclear plants are engineered to make them as impervious to a suicidal aircraft or bomb as possible, since the success of the US is deemed to make every significant technological technique it embraces a target of barbarian hordes whose jealousy inspires destruction.
Tax subsidies for nuke power are pointless and backwards. Nuke is zero gain over fossil fuel. In the same way renewables are a negative gain compared to multi- tiered natural gas electrical generation. This is true for a simple reason; natural gas if the cheaper option. This is true even in the era of global hydrocarbon glut and massive global hydrocarbon fuel collusion artificially propping up fuel prices leveraging war and the climate change hysteria. I think many people on WUWT think the political movement of climate change and global press of hydrocarbon fuel prices would be solved by nuke… it won’t be. It is a political problem… not a tech problem. The rad environmentalists who are covertly funding much of the climate change propaganda have a bigger agenda than the world existing hydrocarbon fuel. They want greater centralization of power and they will leverage everything to achieve it including partnering sideways with the darlings of Davos “Big Oil” to achieve it. Frack On! These are the same people who have built their massive careers generating consumer tech that we paid and invested in with our IRA and 401Ks..which enabled the massive centralization of information, discourse and markets.
Lets talk about the last 50-60 years
The question of tech that has been emerging since 1966 (Ambient SC, cold fusion Solar, SC electrical generation, AI Quantum computing, SC motors, fuel Cells, AI, Internet, Flat Screen TV’s. Cell phones, person computers etc.). All this emerging tech was conceptualized in the 1960’s and early 70’s….anyone hanging out at Cal Tech and MIT would have heard the dreamers working up prototypes and conceptualizing a new world with new tech. And if you were hanging out at some of the top law schools you would have heard about the coming threat to human privacy and other threats to democracy empowered by coming socially integrated computer systems. The fear what that these new systems would threaten representative power via greater and greater centralization of discourse, information, distribution of good and services and markets.
I lived in the vortex of these developments in D.C. in those days. My Father being a top systems analyst and cold warrior and my friends at MIT and Georgetown, UVA, and Georgia, law and John Hopkins computer labs and me working as a research assistant.
What caught the imagination of investors was consumer tech because of it’s power and potential to penetrate personally into the lives of everyone globally creating enormous efficiencies and wealth. A massive revolution of consumers paying for consumable (non-capital) tech creating the capital for global centralization of information, discourse and markets Remember, we bought the products and provide the data which provided the capital for the systems we have today….double cash for the Tech world.
What didn’t capture the imagination of investors or government subsidies is emerging energy infrastructure tech .. .except solar, which is useless without viable affordable ambient SCMCS. Additionally, fusion is also being dependent on viable affordable ambient SC.
So the lynch pin for truly innovative energy infrastructure tech for highly efficient electrical generation and distribution and eventually fusion got lost in the shuffle or suppressed. This is the lynch pin that would have significantly demand destructed the hydrocarbon fuel markets and weakened the global currency of oil as a weapon of power
Even this past summer we saw the science media completely destroy a purported ambient superconductor LK-99 in 2-3 weeks. How is this science? Since then, there have been glimmers of hope for LK-99 that you have to search high and low for or manipulate a AI chat system to reveal. LOL which is fun BTW.
Is this the environment that a new Ambient SC will emerge…. heck no. It doesn’t matter if LK-99 was a total goof. The message is clear to anyone doing this research…watch your step or you will be crushed. Compare this to the endless bogus climate propagandized science the science media puts out the same journals that crushed LK-99 in 3 weeks. Read between the lines and you get my point.
From the above article:
“There’s lots to like about smaller nukes. They produce no CO2 . . .”
This is, as long as you don’t count the CO2 resulting from use of fossil fuels associated with:
— mining and refining the fissionable fuel they will use
— producing the metals needed for their reactors and other plant infrastructures (e.g., plumbing and wiring)
—producing the concrete used for building the plant (in addition to the chemical reaction production of CO2 when forming cement), and
—all the construction machinery used to clear/prepare the sites of their locations, and for piece part and integrated facility fabrication.
ToldYouSo, hasn’t anyone told you that yes, nuclear requires materials of construction, but it is less mineral intensive by orders of magnitude at >90% capacity factor and 60-year life cycle vs solar at a<30% CF and 30-year lifecycle? What about battery storage forever being too expensive for more than four (4) hours? No one ever told you about that either?
That is, as long as you don’t consider the long half-life nuclear waste produced by commercial fission reactors as being part of the life cycle.
“High-level nuclear waste consists largely of spent fuel from nuclear reactors. Though it makes up a small proportion of overall waste volumes, it accounts for the majority of radioactivity. This most potent form of nuclear waste, according to some, needs to be safely stored for up to a million years. Yes, 1 million years – in other words, a far longer stretch of time than the period since Neanderthals cropped up. This is an estimate of the length of time needed to ensure radioactive decay.
“Yet existing and planned nuclear waste sites operate on much shorter timeframes: often 10,000 or 100,000 years.”
— https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-staggering-timescales-of-nuclear-waste-disposal/
And the topic of discussion was lack of production of CO2 associated with using nuclear plants, not the amount of “minerals” required over X years nor costs for battery storage.
blah, blah France is doing fine with their partially spend nuclear, we would be too at Yucca Mountain if the late senator Harry Reid, and Obama hadn’t forced a shutdown.
Not so fast . . .
“And nobody has yet given a satisfactory answer to the question of what to do with thousands of metric tonnes of high-level nuclear waste, some of which can remain radioactive, and thereby lethal, for up to 300,000 years.
” Nowhere in the world has anyone managed to create a place where we can bury extremely nasty nuclear waste forever,” says Denis Florin, partner at Lavoisier Conseil, an energy-focused management consultancy in Paris. “We cannot go on using nuclear without being adult about the waste, without accepting we need to find a permanent solution.”
— https://www.ft.com/content/246dad82-c107-4886-9be2-e3b3c4c4f315
As discussed in the referenced article, France, like all other countries with commercial scale nuclear power plants, is just “kicking the can down the road” when it comes with how to handle and eventually store/dispose of high level nuclear waste from such reactors.
By definition, if it has long a long half life, then at any given point in time, the actual level of radioactivity is low.
Regardless, most of the long radioactivity stuff is not waste. It’s fuel. If the government would allow reprocessing, the waste problem would disappear.
Uhhhh . . . you just might want to try rephrasing that statement.
Exactly. France does well with its spent fuel rods because they reprocess them. That needs to be included as a necessity.
“In a process pioneered by France, many of the uranium, plutonium and fission chemicals have been reprocessed into new fuel at the La Hague site, while waste chemicals that cannot be reused have been vitrified, or turned into glass, for short-term storage in shallow sites underground.
“. . . critics point to the fact that the fuel can only be reused once and the process itself creates yet more radioactive waste, without providing a long-term solution.”
— https://www.ft.com/content/246dad82-c107-4886-9be2-e3b3c4c4f315
(my bold emphasis added)
Well no it doesn’t does it? The spent fuel rods are no longer waste after reprocessing so the amount of waste to be dealt with is vastly reduced, not increased. There will always be something that needs to be disposed of with nuclear fission but reprocessing is a way of reducing that waste by a considerable amount as well as reducing the amount of raw fuel that needs to be mined. More efficient.
Uhhhh . . . I believe the statement in the Financial Times article I linked about “the process itself creates yet more radioactive waste” refers to the fact that, in the reprocessing of spent fuel rods, a portion of the reprocessing facility itself (e.g., plumbing, containment vessels, rod handling equipment, storage drums, etc.) becomes radioactive, known as “induced radioactivity”. Also, the “more radioactive waste” certainly includes the chemical waste stream of fluids used in in cutting operations to open the sealed fuel rods and in chemically separating the various isotopes contained therein.
More specifically in rebuttal:
“Radioisotopes with short half-lives are dangerous for the straightforward reason that they can dose you very heavily (and fatally) in a short time. Such isotopes have been the main causes of radiation poisoning and death after above-ground explosions of nuclear weapons . . .
“Long-term isotopes are more complicated. They don’t dose as heavily, but there are a lot more issues than just that. Plutonium for example is comparatively long-lived, but some of its decay products can be quite nasty . . .
“The biggest danger from radioisotopes with mid-to-long half lives is that they can keep an entire region of earth nastily radioactive for a very long time, e.g. hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousand of years. That’s the main reason why disposing of reactor wastes, which often contain just such isotopes, is such a contentious issue.”
— https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8904/why-do-they-consider-radioactive-matter-with-long-half-lives-more-dangerous-than
(my bold emphasis added)
Facts matter.
Those nukes have cooling towers which emit huge plumes of dihydrogen monoxide. Dihydrogen monoxide is the most powerful greenhouse gas. And it kills 4000 people every year in the U.S. and thousands more worldwide. So maybe we should ban it?
Then again, approximately 1.35 million people die each year from lack of clean dihydrogen monoxide . . . causing me to think a ban on it might be problematic.
(ref: https://gitnux.org/dehydration-statistics/ )
Story Tip:
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/proof-wind-solar-disasters-energy-america-really-needs
“The House bill [H.R. 6544] would also extend the Price-Anderson federal accident insurance subsidy …”
The above post begins with that gem. It caused me to stop reading and write this refutation.
The Price Anderson Act is a subject that seems to cloud men’s minds. It is not a subsidy to the nuclear industry. To understand why read on. It is a bit complicated.
What would happen in the absence of the PAA, if there were Fukushima or Chernobyl type incident in the US? People who suffered personal injury or property damage could sue the utility.
The base line of liability for any incorporated business is the capital of the corporation. Once the capital is exhausted, claims cannot be paid. So, if claims exceeded the capital of the utility, it could file a Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding in Federal court and the claimants would be paid a prorata portion of their claims. Ex-hypotheis, the utility’s assets were destroyed in the incident and its capital would therefor be severely impaired.
If the utility were able to pay the claims from a nuclear incident its capital would be depleted and it would be forced to raise its rates to pay for additional funding to stay in operation.
What about insurance? What insurance? When PAA was passed in 1957, there wasn’t any insurance available for nuclear accidents.
PAA addressed this problem by imposing on nuclear plant operators an obligation to purchase liability insurance. It allowed the creation of an entity, n/k/a American Nuclear Insurers, which is a pool of large domestic property-casualty insurance and reinsurance companies, to sell the coverage. The required insurance is now $450 million.
But, wait there is more. If the damages exceed $450 million, every licensed nuclear plant operator is required to contribute to a fund to pay those claims up to $131 million. The total amount of these contributions is currently about $12.9 billion. There is an additional required surcharge if those funds are depleted of up to 5% of the original contribution. The act provides for federal court jurisdiction to prioritize payments.
Does the act protect the utility companies? Not really. They are protected by their corporate charters. No, it protects the rate payers from being forced to pay extra to replenish the utility’s capital so that it can stay in business. It also creates an industry funded mechanism for paying claims promptly and fulsomely.
So, where is the subsidy? There isn’t any. The Act makes the industry pay for insurance.The Federal Government is not required to pay anything. https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/nuclear-insurance.html
I stopped reading the post right there. i do not have time to read and refute poorly thought out and poorly researched posts.
I don’t know who this guy is but he doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.
We need some ground rules.
Number one we need affordable, constant and accessible energy sources for the whole population.
Number two, list the energy sources that are affordable, constant and accessible. Do wind and solar meet any of those requirements? No. Do fossil fuels meet those requirements? Yes. Does nuclear meet those requirements? Yes.
Number three, let’s talk about the energy sources that meet these requirements and do what we can to make them the best possible.
Number four, putting the government in charge is a sure path to failure no matter what path is chosen.
It has been a long time since I did the reading but if I recall properly, the Price-Anderson Act has never cost US taxpayers a single penny. It is a Federal Government guarantee demanded by the insurance and finance sectors to limit their costs in case of a major nuclear plant disaster — which has never happened. Calling it a subsidy is a convoluted though process although I suppose, if the extremely unlikely ever did happen, it might involve some taxpayer costs, depending on which way the politicians jumped.
Nuclear “waste” storage is a red herring in any rational world. Again, based of earlier reading, the type of reactor normally built in the US, perhaps all of US reactors, use less than 1% of the energy in the fuel rods. According to theory, there are design that can use about 99%, producing very little “waste”.
The leftover stuff could be very valuable in itself for other uses with some processing but I don’t know if the processing costs for most of that would be economical There are physical difficulties with the design of such reactors, such as materials that can stand up to corrosion well enough to make the designs viable, but the potential is there if there could be enough interest to do the necessary material research (perfect first, build reactors after).
Also, some other countries are not hobbled with the same stupidity as US regulations. They reprocess the used fuel, considerably reducing the “waste” to begin with. As above, this “waste” can be valuable in itself as a source of radioactive materials that have uses in industry and medicine, as well as for atomic “batteries” in locations needing moderate power for long periods without human intervention or maintenance.