US's $5 billion nuclear gamble with China (WTF?....nuclear power plants)

[cthrumatrix]

US's $5 billion nuclear gamble with China
By Kaushik Kapisthalam

On the surface, it's the biggest deal in the history of the Export-Import Bank of the United States - US$5 billion to finance the building of Chinese nuclear power plants by US firms in the energy-starved economic giant. But there's much more to it than big business: closer scrutiny and interviews with experts reveal a weak, inconsistent and ultimately dangerous US policy with regard to China and its past (some say present) weapons proliferation, as well as China's own efforts to acquire nuclear reactors and other Western high technology that could be passed on to less-than-responsible states.

In effect, in the interests of big business, the US is turning a blind eye to past proliferation by Chinese entities with which it deals.

China says it's clean - no more proliferation and unauthorized exports of nuclear materials and equipment to states that should not have them. Not everyone is so sure.

snip

http://atimes01.atimes.com/atimes/China/GC11Ad05.html

We can help China build nuclear power plants..but Iran can't?????

OOOPS...that's right Iran has oil and American companies are greedy for the $$$.

[cthrumatrix]

1. Westinghouse in the running....... just wonderful

Westinghouse, though considered a front-runner for the new PWR tender, is reportedly facing stiff competition from French major Framatome ANP, Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd (AECL) and the Russian firm AtomStroyExport. Such reactors are usually contracted in pairs and Westinghouse is pitching its state-of-the-art AP1,000 PWRs at $2.2 billion to $2.7 billion a pair. China formally accepted bids on February 28 and should it choose Westinghouse, the American taxpayer would be underwriting the reactor sale through Ex-Im and assuming the risk in case the Chinese buyer defaults.

At face value, this would seem to be just another example of US statecraft used to promote US companies abroad. After all, Westinghouse is unlikely to get too many new contracts to build nuclear power plants in the United States, due to the public ambivalence about and opposition to nuclear energy, and getting deals abroad could result in thousands of new US jobs.

same link

[megatherium]

12. The nuclear industry is carefully preparing to resume

nuclear development in the US. The primary obstacles are political and legal. These are being mitigated by a new procedure that expedites the licensing process: utilities will be able to obtain construction and operating permits at the same time (instead of getting permission to build, then having to get permission to operate: which makes building too risky financially). Operating permits will be simplified because standardized reactor designs will be preapproved. Site licensing is another issue but that will be finessed by building new units next to existing units. Right now, there are several applications to build new plants in the pipeline, not necessarily with the intent to begin construction on a new plant, but simply to test the new licensing proceedures (to make sure they're robust against legal challenges).

Another issue is nuclear waste. Currently, this is being stored on site at numerous plants. It was all supposed to be sent to Yucca Mountain, but doubts are increasing that Yucca will be ready anytime soon, or even if it will ever be ready. Another option is looking more likely, which involves more permanent forms of storage at various plants.

A third issue is the cost of nuclear power, perhaps the real reason it hasn't advanced in 30 years in this country: we have plenty of coal and natural gas. But the gas is getting much more expensive, and coal has some ugly issues of its own. So the nuclear industry is betting that nuclear will become more attractive, both economically and environmentally.

The current expectation is that the first new nuclear plants in this country will be under construction by 2010.

[jpak]

16. The Bush administration's Nuclear Power 2010 plan is nothing but pork

It includes:

50:50 cost sharing on the licensing process ($30-50 million).

Taxpayer subsidies of up to 50% of the cost of constructing these new plants ($6.8 billion).

Purchases of electricity from these plants at above market prices...

and much much more...

http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/pnucpwr.asp

www.citizen.org/documents/nuke2010analysis.pdf

The estimated cost of Yucca Mountain is currently $60 billion and rising.

The Nuclear Waste Fund (funded by a surtax on nuclear generated electricity) which is supposed to pay for the cost of Yucca Mountain has only ~$20 billion in the kitty and will ultimately yield only ~30 billion dollars. Taxpayers will be left holding a $30+ billion bag for the construction and operation of Yucca Mountian.

http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/yucca/loux05.htm

On top of that, the nuclear industry is suing the federal government for $56 billion dollars because the DOE hasn't disposed of the spent fuel THEY generated and made a profit on.

http://web.abqtrib.com/archives/news04/071304_news_nukewaste.shtml

http://www.westgov.org/wieb/radioact/litistat.htm

Nuclear Power's "other" wast problem: the DOE will spend 2.6 billion dollars to dispose of 750,000 metric tonnes of deleted uranium hexafluoride now stored at US uranium enrichment facilities. Nuclear plant operators will not be charged a penny to take care of this. The depleted uranium oxide will be disposed of at the Nevada Test Site.

(scroll down for DOE IG report pdf)

http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/eddoe.html

The cost of decommissioning existing nuclear power plants is $23.5 billion.

http://www.uic.com.au/nip13.htm

The DOE privatized its uranium enrichment facilities in the 1990's. The consortium that bought the plants soon went bankrupt and the taxpayers repurchased the facilities at a loss.

http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=mj02langeland

The US currently imports ~96% of its annual uranium requirements.

Global uranium demand will outstrip supply by 2013.

http://npc.sarov.ru/english/digest/142004/section4p1.html

(scroll down to bloomberg report)

http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:bH5HNh_5hfYJ:www.canalaska.com/i/pdf/URANIUMJanuary05.pdf+United+States+Uranium+Enrichment+Corporation+bankrupt&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Any way you look at it , nuclear power is a bad deal for American ratepayers and taxpayers.

The Bush Nuclear Power 2010 plan is nothing but pure pork for the nuclear industry.

[hunter]

18. I agree that it is pork, and I don't agree with jpak on many things.

jpak argues that nuclear power is too expensive.

It's my own opinion that we don't actually know how expensive nuclear power is because U.S. industry has always expected it to support the same amount of pork and corruption and "hidden" environmental costs that the oil and coal industry support.

I get VERY irritated by most arguments about "nuclear waste." The amazing thing about any nuclear waste that gets out into the environment is that it advertises itself. It is easy to detect very small particles of nuclear waste, and therefore it is very easy to talk the government out of money for huge pork-ridden "cleanups."

Other sorts of wastes that are just as dangerous are not so easy to detect -- especially wastes resulting from the coal and oil industry.

Many sorts of non-nuclear wastes are just as carcinogenic or mutagenic as nuclear wastes, but becuase they are very difficult to detect, and more difficult to clean up, we don't pay attention to them.

The fact is that it is more difficult to sucker our government out of money for cleaning up non-nuclear wastes than it is to sucker our government out of money for cleaning up "nuclear" wastes.

Some environmental toxins that are the result of coal and oil "energy production" that are just as toxic as, say plutonium, but we generally don't pay any attention to these.

Worse, the stacks and fly ash trains of our decrepit old coal fired power plants spew more radioactive waste directly into our environment than any nuclear plant.

The waste from a nuclear plant generally ends up in "dry casks" like these:



That waste just sits there, doing nothing, going nowhere, and there really is no big hurry to do anything with it, unless you are trying to sell some snake-oil disposal scheme like Yucca Mountain.

Meanwhile the toxic nuclear and non-nuclear waste that results from coal power production goes into the air you breathe, the water you drink, and the soil in your back yard.

There is no denying that any nation that can build and run nuclear power plants can also produce weapons. This was Jimmy Carter's biggest concern about nuclear power. This is probably why I got involved as an anti-nuclear activist in the late 'seventies and early eighties. I was a very serious, very hardcore activist. "Wild eyed" would have been a pretty good description of me.

I met Dr. Helen Caldicott and Dr. Hans Bethe, and (unknown to them) I was also involved in activities that were, quite frankly, illegal. Digging up hard evidence that the nuclear industry was lying to the public, and covering up a lot of dangerous and negligent things they had done was almost a religious quest for me.

At some point I burned out on the cloak and dagger anti-nuclear research, and I decided if, somehow, we humans could figure out how to live in peace, then the nuclear proliferation issue wouldn't matter. If we didn't learn how to live in peace... well then, we were simpy screwed.

"We're all going to die!" as one of my DU buddies says.

The great sin the United States committed by using in anger nuclear weapons against Japan was going to be repeated again and again and again, and eventually some more worthy intelligence than homo sapiens was going to inherit the earth, just like the Bible says.

It's no coincidence that most of my academic training is in the field of ecology and geology. I am in the habit of thinking about things in the context of THE VERY BIG PICTURE, where a million years is a small period of time, and anything that we humans do today is only our concern.

Five hundred thousand years from now, none of this is going to make any difference to the survivors.

Who knows, maybe some new intelligence will be thanking homo sapiens for removing ourselves from the evolutionary tree -- for winning the ultimate "Darwin Award" by exterminating ourselves.

The links you post above do not impress me, jpak. They do not represent any real sort of accounting. For all I know, any actual accounting of nuclear power might still suck, might expose nuclear power as a bad deal, but I do not expect to find any true numbers in the United States, especially when coal and oil interests are keeping the economic books. Remember, Bush and Cheney think they are oil guys. (Of course they are actually idiots compared to any of the real oil guys I know, since Bush barely passed bonehead geology and never studied it again, but even still, Bush thinks he's an oil guy...)

If our current administration controls oil and coal they are happy, and nuclear power is important only so far as they can make more bombs or pork out of it.

For all these reasons I suspect we will keep pretending nothing is wrong until the Statue of Liberty has her toes in the water.

Thanks for setting off this rant, and peace be with you...

[jpak]

19. The people who do the real-world bean counting are in the board rooms

of real utility companies - they are the ones that have to make the decisions that effect their bottom line.

What is the outcome of these exercises????

No new nuclear power plants have been ordered in the US since 1973.

That should be proof enough that nuclear power simply does not make economic sense.

I agree with you on this, we don't know the true cost of nuclear power....

...and we won't until the last uranium mine, uranium mill, UF6 conversion facility, uranium enrichment plant, depleted UF6 cask, and reactor has been decommissioned and the last atom of 239-Pu in spent fuel has decayed away.

500 years from now all those "survivors" will have to expend time and money to monitor the legacy of nuclear waste we foisted on them. I think that is just plain immoral.

Finally, has anyone ACTUALLY measured and inventoried radionuclides emitted from coal-fired and nuclear power plants??????

There was study published in the 1970's looking at emissions from hypothetical coal and nuclear plants. They concluded that PWR's emitted slightly more radionuclides than a coal plant but that BWR's emitted more radionuclides than either the coal or PWR designs.

Based on that study, whether coal-fired power plants actually emit more radionuclides than nuclear power plants is equivocal.

I have yet to see a real comparison based on real measurements.

EPA is suppose to collect and publish that data but I can't find any of it.

[hunter]

20. Are you actually implying that accounting at modern utilities makes sense?

Hmmm.

California's PG&E went bankrupt. The nuclear plant at Diablo Canyon didn't cause that. That Diablo Canyon power plant, which I personally protested, is still humming along making about twenty-five percent of the electricity I use...

500 years from now our survivors (if there are any) are probably going to be thinking nuclear waste is a very trivial problem compared to some of the other toxic legacies we are leaving them.

I suspect our survivors' greatest concern, by a long shot, will be the loss of biodiversity. It's going to take the earth a long time to recover from that.

The current EPA is a mess. Stuff is getting lost, things are not getting done, and this is by Bush Administration design.

[jpak]

21. No utility has ordered them in 32 years - the bottom line trumps all

Utilities also considered the cost of the Three Mile Island accident - $1 billion or more...

http://stellar-one.com/nuclear/staff_reports/summary_cost_of_the_accident.htm

The actual cost and potential financial risks of nuclear power are far greater than those associated with other fuels and technologies - and will be for a long time. The only way new nuclear plants will be built in the US (in the near term anyway) is if the taxpayers subsidize them to the hilt.

Finally, another legacy nuclear power will leave to future generations is ozone-depleting CFC-114 released from US enrichment plants...

http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Uranium-Harms-Ozone-Layer.htm

These plants account of ~88% of all US CFC emissions and ~14% of global emissions. CFC-114 released from US enrichment plants will remain in the atmosphere for centuries (its also a powerful greenhouse gas with a forcing potential 2300+ times greater than CO2).

http://www.epa.gov/fedrgstr/EPA-AIR/1995/October/Day-11/pr-1117.html

The more you sniff at nuclear power the more it stinks.

[oneighty]

2. It is all about money

180

[doublethink]

3. Hmmmm

Maybe the Bush Cartel is attempting to 'pacify' China before a possible June plundering of Irans Oil Wealth? Yikes, quite the gamble indeed !!!

[newyawker99]

15. Hi doublethink!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[doublethink]

17. Thanks !

:headbang:

[ECH1969]

4. How long has China been a nuclear power?

[illflem]

7. China's first nuke plant went online in 1973

Their first nuke bomb was tested in 1964

[cascadiance]

5. So Clinton and Gore were ultimate evil people

for even associating with the Chinese, and now Bush and these same wingnut critics OK on this? WTF?

[cthrumatrix]

6. exactly...where is the "concern"....like in Iran?

[The Doctor.]

8. OK, here we go...

I have always been a Republican.
That will not change regardless of how 'un-Republican' our leaders are.
There were things that I liked and disliked about Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton.

As for Clinton;

The conservative in me was impressed that he created a surplus.
The writer in me was impressed by his ability to articulate.
The presenter in me was entranced by his wit and eloquence.
The diplomat in me was inspired by his grasp and depth of both nuance and intricacy.

I thought that whole blowjob thing was ...(pardon mon anglais)... absolute Bullshit.
(I knew about Jennifer Fitzgerald too - but no one went on an H.W. Bush hunt then because there was no reason to care.)

But the Republican in me said "WTF?!" when he gave out missle guidance tech to China prior to the fundraising issue he was 'involved' in with said country.
He pushed China into 'favored nation' trading status despite their egregious human rights violations.
He dealt them advanced rocket technology (ostensibly to help them to participate in the business of fielding satellites).
He apparently took money from them.

Was I the only one who noticed that the MSM spent less than four days on that potentially crippling issue?

Why did House and Senate Republicans go after him for a BJ instead of that?

For a while I thought it was the simple matter that no one wanted to put the lid back on the 'Chinese Cookie Jar'.

But now I hear this and am wondering.

Why have we been consistently treating China this way?

Any ideas?

[cthrumatrix]

9. IMHO ...at a "high level"..the elite call the shots and play countries off

of one another...and make more money doing this

[megatherium]

10. After Tiananmen Square, it sure didn't take us long

to look the other way and resume the rapid increase of business with the Chinese.

I have mixed feelings about this -- I'm alarmed by the vast trade deficits and job exports, and I'm distressed by China's bad human rights record (their ban on labor unions, and their active persecution of independent Christian churches in particular). But China is changing very rapidly, and they are rapidly modernizing (becoming more western in lifestyles and attitudes). The enormous increase in trade and contact between the US and China may be reducing China's xenophobia and insularity. This may reduce the chances of war.

[radwriter0555]

11. OIL COS do NOT want China dependent on NUCLEAR ENERGY, after all

since China is the number one industrial production hub on the planet, they're destined to use more OIL generated power than any other nation.

It serves the oil co industry NO profits if they're dependent on Nuclear power.

[megatherium]

13. oil isn't used to generate electricity.

Or at least, very little oil is used to generate electricity. It's coal and natural gas that are used for that purpose. Oil is primarily used for transportation (diesel and gasoline), also for chemical manufacturing (plastics, etc).

[Rose Siding]

14. Rumsfeld was on the board of the company that set up NK nuke plants

Rumsfeld was on ABB board during deal with North Korea

Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence, was on the board of technology giant ABB when it won a deal to supply North Korea with two nuclear power plants.

Weapons experts say waste material from the two reactors could be used for so-called “dirty bombs”.

The Swiss-based ABB on Friday told swissinfo that Rumsfeld was involved with the company in early 2000, when it netted a $200 million (SFr270million) contract with Pyongyang.

The ABB contract was to deliver equipment and services for two nuclear power stations at Kumho, on North Korea’s east coast.

http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/Swissinfo.html?siteSect=161&sid=1648385