Cost of Solar Power to Drop 75% by 2020? US Military Embraces It

Cost of Solar Power to Drop 75% by 2020? US Military Embraces It
by Stuart Burns on AUGUST 20, 2013


Not one to shy away from overstatement, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is not a writer we would normally quote extensively; well-renowned as the Telegraph newspaper is, for which he frequently writes in the Business section, but his article last week on solar power trumping shale gas even had us sitting up and taking notice.

True, many of the figures quoted in his article come from firms involved in the solar industry and as such we can expect them to put a positive gloss on the numbers, but we wouldn’t count the US Energy Department to be biased and they are quoted as saying they expect the cost of solar power to fall by 75% between 2010 and 2020.

By then, average costs will have dropped to $1 per watt for big solar farms, $1.25 for offices and $1.50 for homes, achieving what the Telegraph terms the Holy Grail of grid parity with new coal and gas plants without further need for subsidies. That’s the crunch, isn’t it – the subsidies. But if we think subsidies in the US or UK have been high, consider Germany, early starter in the solar power race.

Households have been bled dry to subsidize solar power – around €100 billion or more has been frittered away on costly feed-in tariffs. In addition, German investors have lost their shirts on a string of solar ventures that have gone bankrupt, only to see the gains leaked out to copycat companies in China which are able to undercut German rivals in their own market with cheap labor and giveaway credit.

Still, that artificially created market has spurred investment around the world; even the US defense establishment is heavily involved, with Evans-Pritchard quoting a string of projects, each of which will help bring down costs and improve efficiencies....

Nnads is a strong supporter of ALEC's agenda

A Nuclear Reactor Competitive with Natural Gas

"seeking a buyer for its stake in the plant for three to four years, without success"

Smaller, transportable nuclear reactor

The propaganda blitz is on by a sinking Nuclear Industry trying to salvage what they can from a nuclear "revival" that has fizzled and died. They pushed for access to public funds with falsehoods and distortions about the economic and safety performance of both their product and their renewable competition. Now that their lies have caught up with them, they are trying to shift away from what 10 years ago was unarguably the most economic approach to a different technology with a new set of lies.

$90 billion manufacturing order book could be required for mass production of SMRs. As the report notes: “SMR proponents claim that small size will enable mass manufacturing in a factory and shipment to the site as an assembled unit, which will enable considerable savings in two ways. First, it would reduce onsite construction cost and time; second, mass manufacturing will make up in economies of volume production what is lost in economies of scale. In other words, modular reactors will be economical because they will be more like assembly-line cars than hand-made Lamborghinis … A hundred [mPower] reactors, each costing about $900 million, including construction costs … would amount to an order book of $90 billion, leaving aside the industry’s record of huge cost escalations. This would make the SMR assembly- line launch something like creating a new commercial airliner, say like Dreamliner or the Airbus 350 … SMRs will still present enormous financial risks, but that risk would be shifted from the reactor site to the supply chain and the assembly lines. Shifting from the present behemoths to smaller unit sizes is a financial risk shell game, not a reduction in risk.”

Who pays?: China or massive federal subsidies … or both. As the report notes, the industry’s forecast of relatively inexpensive individual SMRs is predicated on major orders and assembly line production. However, “China, where 28 reactors are under construction, already has a much better supply chain than the United States. So the U.S. government subsidies to B&W, TVA, and Westinghouse and others may pave the way for an assembly line in China! In fact, Westinghouse has already signed a memorandum of understanding with China’s State Nuclear Power Technology Corporation ‘to develop an SMR based on Westinghouse SMR technology.’ .. The alternative to Chinese manufacture would be federal government subsidies to set up manufacturing in the United States.” Westinghouse has claimed that U.S. reactor orders would be sourced in the US – but would require two supply chains. Already, there is discussion of billions of dollars in additional federal subsidies for SMRs to do what the private marketplace will not.

SMRs will lose the economies of scale of large reactors. As the report notes: “Nuclear reactors are strongly sensitive to economies of scale: the cost per unit of capacity goes up as the size goes down. This is because the surface area per kilowatt of capacity, which dominates materials cost and much of the labor cost, goes up as reactor size is decreased. Similarly, the cost per kilowatt of secondary containment, as well as independent systems for control, instrumentation, and emergency management, increases as size decreases … For these reasons, the nuclear industry has historically built larger and larger reactors in an effort to benefit from economies of scale. The four designs would reduce the size of each reactor considerably: by a factor of five (Westinghouse) to a factor of 25 (NuScale) relative to the reactors now being built in Georgia and South Carolina. Such large size reductions imply significant increases in unit cost due to loss of economies of scale.” It is highly questionable whether mass manufacturing cost reduction can make up for the cost escalation caused by loss of economies of scale.

SMRs could reduce some safety risks but also create new ones, particularly if current reactor rules are relaxed. Key elements of SMRs would be underground. “These [safety] features [of SMRs] would reduce some risks. But they could create new problems as well. For instance, they could aggravate the problem of flooding … Safety improvements may be reduced because SMR proponents are already arguing for changes in regulations to reduce costs. For instance, the current mPower design would have just three personnel for operating for two reactors – an operator for each reactor and one supervisor overseeing them both. This raises serious safety questions – will three operating staff be able to adequately respond to and manage a serious accident? Reducing security requirements, the plant exclusion zone, and the 10-mile emergency planning zone are other industry regulatory goals for SMRs.”

It breaks, you bought it: No thought is evident on how to handle SMR recalls. “Millions of cars, presumably made to high quality control are routinely recalled. The most comparable example in terms of the size of the supply chain and overall order books for SMRs would be passenger aircraft. Boeing Dreamliners were presumably rigorously designed, tested, and certified before they entered into service. But battery failures, including a fire in flight resulted in a worldwide grounding of all the planes. How would a similar situation with SMRs be handled? Would they all be shut down pending resolution of an issue of comparable significance? What about grid stability, if SMRs supply almost 25 percent of the electricity by 2035 (as has been suggested).”

The Nation: Fukushima’s Invisible Crisis

Fukushima’s Invisible Crisis
Don't expect coverage of Japan's nuclear power disaster on the evening news: Unlike other environmental catastrophes, Fukushima's ongoing crisis offers little to film.

Eric Ozawa August 19, 2013




A laboratory technician uses a Geiger counter to measure radiation in fish, which was caught close to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, at Fukushima Agricultural Technology Center in Koriyama, Fukushima prefecture, May 28, 2013. Reuters/Issei Kato.
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On July 22, one day after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s pro-nuclear Liberal Democratic Party won control of Japan’s upper house of Parliament, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) revealed that contaminated groundwater from its Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was leaking into the Pacific Ocean. The head of the Soma-Futaba Fisheries Cooperative, Hiroyuki Sato, complained to the local paper, Fukushima Minpo, “TEPCO is saying that the pollution will stay inside the harbor, but the harbor is connected to the ocean, and the tide flows in and out. You can’t say there won’t be any impact. We want them to take action immediately.” The National Federation of Fisheries Cooperative Associations called the handling of the disclosure “a betrayal of the fishing industry and of the citizens of Japan.”

More than two years after the cataclysmic earthquake and tsunami, the Fukushima plant is still in crisis. TEPCO still has no sufficient explanation for when the leaks began or why it waited until after the election to reveal them. Its assurances that the contamination is staying within the seawalls of the harbor are less convincing after weeks of assurances that there was no leak at all. The government has estimated that at least 300 tons of contaminated water are being released per day. TEPCO officials would not confirm the estimate.

This disclosure is only the latest in a series of well-documented problems at the Fukushima Daiichi plant: a power outage, the release of radioactive steam and the limited space to store the contaminated water (320,000 tons to date, with plans to build more tanks to hold up to 700,000 tons of radioactive water by 2015). The cycle is now familiar: first denials and delays, then admissions and apologies from TEPCO officials. In retrospect, the December 2011 declaration of the stable cold shutdown of the reactors has the ring of George W. Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech in the early stages of the Iraq War.

Dale Klein, a former head of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission invited to serve on TEPCO’s outside advisory committee, reacted to the latest revelation by excoriating the company’s executives: “These actions indicate that you don’t know what you are doing, and that you do not have a plan, and that you are not doing all you can to protect the environment and the people.” The editorial board of the major daily Asahi Shimbun declared it had “zero faith” in the “incompetent” utility, adding that “allowing the company to handle nuclear energy is simply out of the question.”

Earlier in the month...

British nuclear plant needs 90 years for decommissioning after 26 years in operation

You must have been talking to Mr. Robinson etal

Oregon's GOP Chair Wants to Sprinkle Nuclear Waste From Airplanes
—By Tim Murphy| Fri Aug. 16, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

After months of in-fighting, the beleaguered Oregon Republican Party elected a new chairman last weekend. His name is Art Robinson, and he wants to sprinkle radioactive waste from airplanes to build up our resistance to degenerative illnesses. Robinson, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress against progressive Rep. Peter DeFazio in 2010 and 2012, took over after the previous chair resigned in advance of a recall campaign over her alleged financial mismanagement.

Robinson, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry, has marketed himself for the last three decades as an expert on everything from nuclear fallout to AIDS to climate science in the pages of a monthly newsletter, Access to Energy, which he published from his compound in the small town of Cave Junction. A quick glance at his writings, which were publicized during his ill-fated challenges to DeFazio, suggest that whatever the failings of the previous party leadership—Democrats now hold all statewide elected offices and control both houses of the state Legislature—Robinson brings with him a new set of challenges entirely.

On nuclear waste: "All we need do with nuclear waste is dilute it to a low radiation level and sprinkle it over the ocean—or even over America after hormesis is better understood and verified with respect to more diseases." And: "If we could use it to enhance our own drinking water here in Oregon, where background radiation is low, it would hormetically enhance our resistance to degenerative diseases. Alas, this would be against the law."

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/08/oregon-gop-art-robinson-nuclear-waste-airplanes

U.S. nuclear plants vulnerable to terrorists

U.S. nuclear plants vulnerable to terrorists
NRC-licensed facilities found to be susceptible to theft of nuclear material, acts of sabotage
BY JOEL GRIFFIN
CREATED: AUGUST 16, 2013


(Photo courtesy stock.xchng/gc85)
A new report from the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project has found that nuclear facilities across the U.S. are alarmingly vulnerable to acts of terrorism.


Commercial and research nuclear facilities across the U.S. are inadequately protected against the threat of terrorism, according to the results of new study released this week by the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project (NPPP) at the University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs. The two biggest terror threats facing these facilities, according to the report, are the theft of bomb grade nuclear materials and sabotage attacks aimed at causing a nuclear reactor meltdown.

The study, entitled "Protecting U.S. Nuclear Facilities from Terrorist Attack: Re-assessing the Current 'Design Basis Threat' Approach," found not one of the 104 commercial nuclear reactors in the U.S. is protected against a "maximum credible terrorist attack," such as 9/11. In fact, nuclear facilities are not required to protect themselves against airplane attacks, assaults by large teams of terrorists or even high-power sniper rifles.

Some other items of concern highlighted in the report include:
Though some power plants are accessible by sea, they are not required to protect themselves against ship-borne attacks. These reactors include Diablo Canyon in Calif., St. Lucie in Fla., Brunswick in N.C., Surry in Va., Indian Point in N.Y., Millstone in Conn., Pilgrim in Mass., and the South Texas Project.
Three civilian research reactors fueled by bomb-grade uranium are vulnerable to theft and are not defended against a "posited terrorist threat." These reactors include the University of Missouri in Columbia, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the Washington, D.C./Baltimore suburb of Gaithersburg.
According to report co-author Professor Alan J. Kuperman, Ph.D., the coordinator of the NPPP, the study came about after the Pentagon approached UT seeking to find out whether some of their nuclear facilities were under-protected or overprotected. Kuperman said the NPPP’s role was to assess the government’s reliance on the Design Basis Threat (DBT), which is used to establish requirements for protecting U.S. nuclear facilities. The report compares the DBT approach within and across three agencies – the Pentagon, the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

"The Design Basis Threat varies not only between the agencies, but between facilities within each agency," Kuperman said in a press conference on Thursday...

Vehicle to Grid Demonstration Project