Hans Blix: 'We do need new reactors in Sweden...I am absolutely convinced of that.'

[wtmusic]

"New nuclear is on the Swedish agenda with moves towards revised legislation and regulatory support for new build applications. Hans Blix told a seminar he was 'absolutely convinced' of the need for new reactors.

The moves come after last year's turnaround on nuclear policy in the name of climate change. 'The climate issue is now in focus,' wrote the coalition government in February 2009, 'and nuclear power will thus remain an important part of Swedish electricity production for the forseeable future.' That policy statement, after concessions from the Centre Party, heralded the beginning of the end of phase-out conditions."

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/The_ball_gets_rolling_in_Sweden_2510012.html

[yourout]

1. Just posted a reponse in another thread about the Molten salt reactor...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor

Much, Much, safer due to the design and uses Thorium which is far more abundant and a 50 year half life.

[wtmusic]

2. The Gen 4 designs also have many advantages

Need to greenlight research in both these areas if we're to have any impact on ACC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

[yourout]

3. The MSR is one of the Gen IV designs. And I agree we need to move forward.

[wtmusic]

4. Ah so it is.

:thumbsup:

[yourout]

5. I am a big MSR supporter due to the low pressure design and the use of Thorium.

Far more abundant than almost any other fuel source and if the Thorium is suspended in the salt a Chernobyl type event would be impossible as reaction would just shut down if the salt stopped circulating.

[joshcryer]

6. Obama mentioned nuclear in the STOU address.

[kristopher]

7. "New" Nuclear Reactors, Same Old Story

"New" Nuclear Reactors, Same Old Story
By Amory B. Lovins
Originally published in Solutions Journal, Spring 2009
The dominant type of new nuclear power plant, light-water reactors (LWRs), proved unfinanceable in the robust 2005–08 capital market, despite new U.S. subsidies approaching or exceeding their total construction cost. New LWRs are now so costly and slow that they save 2–20× less carbon, 20–40× slower, than micropower and efficient end-use.1 As this becomes evident, other kinds of reactors are being proposed instead—novel designs claimed to solve LWRs problems of economics, proliferation,and waste.2 Even climate-protection pioneer Jim Hansen says these “Gen IV” reactors merit rapid R&D.3 But on closer examination, the two kinds most often promoted — Integral Fast Reactors (IFRs) and thorium reactors4 — reveal no economic, environmental, or security rationale, and the thesis is unsound for any nuclear reactor...

http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-07_NuclearSameOldStory

[NNadir]

9. Oh my goodness! It's Amory Lovins who in 1980 wrote that "nuclear power is dead."

According to Amory then, writing 5 years after the equally stupid Ralph Nader wrote that "if nuclear power plants are not shut down within 5 years, there's going to be a revolution, the continued use of nuclear power would inevitably lead to nuclear war:

This bit of stupidity from stupid Lovins - who is something of hypocrite in evoking "the same old story" since he is a tired old gas and oil company consultant who has not had an original idea in his pathetic life - can be accessed by anyone stupid enough to pay for his tripe here:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/33962/amory-b-lovins-l-hunter-lovins-and-leonard-ross/nuclear-power-and-nuclear-bombs">Oh MY GOD!!!!!!! EVERY WESTERN CITY WILL BE AFIRE.

I have accessed the paper for free at a university Library where I can also access, in the original German, the work of the Physics Nobel Laureate Johannes Stark on the wonderful scientific mind of Adolf Hitler.

Quoth the dumb shit Lovins:

Our thesis rests on a different perception. Our attempt to rethink focuses not on marginal reforms but on basic assumptions. ]b]In fact, the global nuclear power enterprise is rapidly disappearing. De facto moratoria on reactor ordering exist today in the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Ireland, and probably the United Kingdom, Belgium, Switzerland, Japan and Canada. Nuclear power has been indefinitely deferred or abandoned in Austria, Denmark, Norway, Iran, China, Australia and New Zealand. Nuclear power elsewhere is in grave difficulties. Only in centrally planned economies, notably France and the U.S.S.R., is bureaucratic power sufficient to override, if not overcome, economic facts. The high nuclear growth forecasts that drove INFCE'S endorsement of fast breeder reactors are thus mere wishful thinking. For fundamental reasons which we shall describe, nuclear power is not commercially viable, and questions of how to regulate an inexorably expanding world nuclear regime are moot.

Like any dumb anti-nuke with no education, 30 years after the publication of this wishful thinking drivel by someone who doesn't understand a whit of nuclear science (or for that matter, any other science) except the science of collecting "consulting fees" from companies like Royal Dutch Shell, Conoco, Chevron, etc, apparently was unable to predict that in 2007 nuclear power would produce 2,594.53 GWh of energy - note that the nuclear enterprise need not use the dumb scam of the so called "renewables industry" of citing theoretical peak capacity - whereas in 1980, when Amory the Stupid was blathering in a social science mag, nuclear power produced 684.38 GWh.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table27.xls">Science, unlike religion, is predictive. I guess therefore, Lovins 30 year old blathering tripe is more religion than anything else, sort of like the religious dogma here in this forum over the last 8 years, that wind power and solar power was about to magically bring the Kingdom of Heaven.

(Oh well, 2000 years of predicting the imminent return of Jesus has done nothing to erode the growth of Catholicism either.)

The growth of nuclear energy production since dumb Amory blathered about our solar molten salt tanks in every suburban backyard by 2000, has made it the fastest growing form of climate change gas free energy in the last 30 years, at least if you can compare the numbers 2594 and 683, although I have yet to meet ONE anti-nuke who can add and subtract or compare two numbers.

Now the driving force behind the hydrogen hypercar - http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/10/1016_TVhypercar.html">That will be in showrooms by 2005 - is so oblivious and so dishonest that he is still blathering ignorantly in spite of his demonstrable and easily viewed abysmal failure to predict a single meaningful thing about energy in a lifetime of pure stupidity and dogma.

He's pure Pat Robertson and nothing else.

[kristopher]

10. How's that "too cheap to meter" thing working out?

The Nuclear Illusion
Report or White Paper, 2008
http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E08-01_NuclearIllusion
This paper challenges the view that nuclear power is competitive, necessary, reliable, secure, and affordable. The
authors explain why nuclear power is uncompetitive, unneeded, and obsolete.

At the end of 2007, the world had 439 operating nuclear stations totaling 372 GW (billion watts) of net generating capacity with an average age of 23 years—a year older than the 117 reactors already shut down. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says 31 nuclear units were under construction in 13 countries—eight more than at the end of 2004, but ~20 fewer than in the late 1990s. All but five were in Asia or Eastern Europe; yet the Asian Development Bank has never financed one, and reaffirmed this policy in 2000, nor has the World Bank, with a minor 1959 exception. Much of the reported activity is not new: of the 31 units listed as under construction, 12 have been so for at least 20 years, some were started in the 1970s, and two long moribund projects have been re-listed.

Turning ambitions into actual investments, firm orders, and operating plants faces fundamental obstacles that are now first and foremost economic, since the political obstacles related to safety, waste, proliferation, etc., can be and in many countries have been bypassed by fiat. The economic evidence below confirms that new nuclear power plants are unfinanceable in the private capital market because of their excessive costs and financial risks and the high uncertainty of both. During the nuclear revival now allegedly underway, no new nuclear project on earth has been financed by private risk capital, chosen by an open decision process, nor bid into the world’s innumerable power markets and auctions. No old nuclear plant has been resold at a value consistent with a market case for building a new one. And two strong global trends - greater transparency in governmental and energy decision-making, and wider use of competitive power markets—are further dimming nuclear prospects.

The Economist observed in 2001 that “Nuclear power, once claimed to be too cheap to meter, is now too costly to matter” — cheap to run but very expensive to build. Since then, it has become several fold costlier still to build — and in a few years, as old fuel contracts expire, it is also expected to become severalfold costlier to run. As we’ll see, its total cost now markedly exceeds that of other common power plants (coal, gas, big wind farms), let alone the even cheaper competitors described below—cogeneration, some further renewables, and efficient end-use of electricity. Higher fossil-fuel prices since 2001 haven’t improved nuclear power’s economic case, for two reasons: its own costs have risen even more (its actual fossil-fuel competitors don’t include oil), and its formidable new competitors use little or no fossil fuel and generally exhibit falling, not rising, prices.

U.S. nuclear operators’ impressive success11 in improving reliability and performance (through experience, better management, ownership consolidation, shut-down lemons, and compliant regulation) have been unable to offset prohibitive capital costs. To deemphasize this hurdle, the industry emphasizes its low operating costs, often comparing the cost of just running plants already built with the total costs of building and operating other kinds of new plants. The term “generating costs” or “production costs,” widely used in such misleading comparisons, refers to bare operating costs without capital costs for construction or (usually) for major repairs.

The nuclear industry has consistently underestimated its capital costs, often by large factors, and then claimed its next low forecasts will be accurate. Of 75 U.S. plants operating in 1986, the U.S. Energy Information Administration found two-year-cohort-average cost overruns of 209–381%. This bankrupted a New Hampshire utility. In the Northwest, the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) fiasco caused the biggest-ever U.S. municipal bond default ($2.25 billion), saddled the Bonneville Power Administration with a $6-billion debt, and raised wholesale electric rates more than 500%. Seasoned investors still bear the scars. As Mark Twain remarked, a cat that sits on a hot stove lid will not do so again, but neither will it sit on a cold one. Yet some widely quoted recent studies claim new-nuclear costs will match or beat the lowest ever observed in the United States — assuming standardization and construction streamlining that so far are not actually occurring.

The U.S. experience with 1970s and 1980s nuclear construction was uniquely dismal—as Forbes put it, “the largest managerial disaster in U.S. business history, involving $100 billion in wasted investments and cost overruns, exceeded in magnitude only by the Vietnam War and the then Savings and Loan crisis.” That economic failure is the main reason why no U.S. nuclear plant ordered after 1973 was completed, and all orders placed since 1978 and 48% of all 253 U.S. orders ever placed were cancelled. Moreover, no new orders have yet been placed: recent license applications are placeholders in the queue for subsidies, which are largest for early applicants, but are not orders and are not yet financed.

The industry blames its U.S. disappointments chiefly on citizen intervention. Yet most if not all other countries with big nuclear programs but no effective citizen intervention, such as Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Japan, and the Soviet Union, also suffered substantial nuclear-cost escalation, and their nuclear construction forecasts collapsed in similar fashion. Thus whatever the political and regulatory system, new nuclear plants’ costs, compared with competitors’, are the dominant predictor of whether they will be ordered and whether, if built, they can repay their investors. Without confidence of a fair risk-adjusted return on and of their capital, capitalists won’t invest. Are they now confident that the causes of past cost overruns have been corrected and that new causes of runaway costs are not emerging?

[NNadir]

8. Sweden, some 30 years after the dumb phase out talk, doesn't need more stupidity.

The destruction of the Barseback reactor in the service of ignorance and stupidity lead to the burning of more Polish coal and more Russian gas and more waste dumping into the atmosphere.

It was a tragedy.

Every nuclear reactor on the face of the earth in the last 30 years that was destroyed by public ignorance and dumb ass "renwables will save us talk" was replaced by dangerous fossil fuels.

As such, every single nuclear reactor that was destroyed by public ignorance killed people, since nuclear energy need not be perfect to be vastly superior to all the stuff that anti-nukes don't care about.

It only needs to be vastly superior, which it is.