With resounding bipartisan, bicameral support that also achieved enthusiastic support of the Executive Branch, the US has enacted a new law announcing its support of nuclear energy. It has the potential to make an even larger impact on global atomic energy use than the combination of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program of international nuclear energy expansion.
Seventy years ago, that earlier combination of law and policy partially removed the blanket of tight security that had locked up fission energy in the years immediately following WWII. President Eisenhower’s clearly stated goal in enabling commercial atomic energy was to develop “the greatest of destructive forces” into a “great boon, for the benefit of all mankind.”
The “great boon” produced a wave of nuclear power plants that now produce the energy equivalent of Saudi Arabia’s oil production. That energy comes at a low marginal cost without air pollution or greenhouse gases, but nuclear power’s contribution to world energy production leveled off at roughly 2600 TWh/yr 20 years ago.
A growing fraction of the world’s science, engineering, environmental and political leaders agree that the situation needs to be changed. In November 2023, the United States led a coalition of two dozen nations in a promise to take action to triple world nuclear energy production by 2050.
Even before the U.S. signed that declaration of intent, House and Senate Republicans and Democrats began holding hearings, listening to constituents, debating with colleagues and engaging in what used to be considered the normal order of business to produce the ADVANCE Act of 2024. ///
Does this change anything about ALARA or LNT guiding regulations? Then I don't see it as anything more than a response to strong criticism of both. Changing the "mission" of the NRC without changing either of those is just more of the same, just "better". Which is not better for energy availability.
The mission of the NRC is still "avoid accidents", not balancing the tradeoff of "energy is dangerous, lets make sure its both available and safe."
Joe Swyers
2 hours ago edited
"the cost to Germans for being forced to rely on alternative energy sources is estimated to be $1 million per day."
Germans need to build over a hundred nuclear power plants to replace that 110,000,000,000 cubic meters per year of natural gas all four Nordstream pipelines could transport.
35,300 BTU per cubic meter
110,000,000,000 cubic meters per year
3,883,000,000,000,000 BTU per year
3,412 BTU per KWH
1,137,995,510,149 KWH
8,760 hours per year
129,908,163 KW
130 GW
1 GW average per nuclear power plant
130 Nuclear Power Plants needed by Germany.
France has 18 power plants with 56 operable reactors.
Germany will need ten times that number by the time they actually get them built and bring them online.
Better get cracking -- atoms, that is.
mopani Joe Swyers
3 minutes ago edited
If Germany had spent $580 billion on nuclear power instead of Energiewiend green energy they would have the cheapest, most reliable, lowest carbon footprint energy in the world.
With Nuclear Instead of Renewables, California and Germany Would Already Have 100 percent Clean Electricity
https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2018/9/11/california-and-germany-decarbonization-with-alternative-energy-investments
Last November, Virgin Atlantic Airways made headlines for completing the world’s first transatlantic flight using “100 percent sustainable aviation fuel.”
This week, the Advertising Standard Authority (ASA) of the U.K. banned a Virgin radio ad released prior to the flight, in which they touted their “unique flight mission.” While Virgin did use fuel that releases fewer emissions than traditional supplies, the regulatory agency deemed the company’s sustainability claim “misleading” because it failed to give a full picture of the adverse environmental and climate impacts of fuel.
Todd Lewis, a commenter on my previous article on PJ Media, put it succinctly. “It is a way for governments to advance totalitarian control of the populace, wreck the economy, and disempower the middle class.” His thesis is backed up in Joel Kotkin’s masterpiece "The Coming of Neo-Feudalism." Kotkin chronicles how the once-numerous and thriving middle class is relentlessly being phased out of existence by a power elite intent on re-medievalizing society while advancing their own social, political, and economic supremacy. Like the serf who lacked freedom of movement and was bound to the lord’s estate, the enfiefed EV owner for various reasons is tethered to a sort of manorial orbit.
The fact is that EV obsession has nothing to do with “saving the earth,” replacing fossil energy with presumably “clean” alternatives, or reducing across-the-board costs involving transportation and maintenance — all of which reasons are contra-indicated by the facts. They are delusions, mere fetishes, or outright lies that a modicum of sober research would render null and void. The real issue has to do with the ongoing battle between a market economy and a command economy, between a business-oriented system and a centripetal Marxist political organization, and between an individualistic political economy and oligarchic socialism.
The EV project is a major strategy in a political program that envisages replacing not simply fossil fuel propulsion with electrical power, which is neither feasible nor even conceivable, but swapping a free market economy, in which the law of supply and demand determines output and prices, for a centralized government authority that dictates production, prices, and distribution. Top-down control supersedes private enterprise.
In a command economy, the managerial class and state officials control the means of production, set prices, determine production goals, and limit or prohibit competition — as opposed to private individuals and joint-stock companies freely transacting business for personal profit or in the interest of stockholders, their decisions based on consumer demand. //
FrankD92
16 hours ago
“It is a way for governments to advance totalitarian control of the populace, wreck the economy, and disempower the middle class.”
These are exactly the purposes of the entire climate change hoax and associated "green new" scam.
While on the subject of Equinor, I would like to recommend a fabulous piece written by energy expert Robert Bryce. He noted that The NGOs have been shameless in their collusion with foreign corporations, including Equinor, which are collecting billions in federal tax credits to construct wind projects.
But more importantly, Bryce examines the green energy realities based on the science of physics:
…Big Wind is facing a crisis caused by simple physics. The turbines now being deployed onshore and offshore are failing far sooner than expected. Why? They have gotten too big.
Yes, bigger wind turbines are more efficient than their smaller cousins. But the larger the turbine, the more its components get hit by the stresses that come with their size and weight.
The GE Vernova Haliade-X wind turbine used at Vineyard Wind stands 260 meters high and sweeps an area of 38,000 square meters. That means the turbine captures wind energy over an area five times larger than a soccer pitch.
But here’s the critical part: its blades are 107 meters (351 feet) long and weigh 70 tons. In addition, the rotor of the massive machine spans 220 meters. For comparison, the wingspan of a Boeing 737 is 34 meters.
In other words, the turbines at Vineyard Wind are nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower and each of their blades weighs more than a fully loaded 737. piece has an eye-opening piece on the physics associated with the massive wind projects that touches upon blade size.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the president signed into law the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act, bipartisan legislation to provide a major boost to the future of nuclear energy in America. //
The ADVANCE Act will:
Facilitate American Nuclear Energy Leadership by:
Empowering the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to lead in international forums to develop regulations for advanced nuclear reactors.
Directing the Department of Energy (DOE) to improve its process for approving the export of American technology to international markets, while maintaining strong standards for nuclear non-proliferation.
Support Development and Deployment of New Nuclear Energy Technologies by:
Reducing regulatory costs for companies seeking to license advanced nuclear reactor technologies.
Creating a prize to incentivize the successful deployment of next-generation reactor technologies.
Requiring the NRC to develop a pathway to enable the timely licensing of microreactors and nuclear facilities at brownfield and retired fossil-fuel energy generation sites.
Directing the NRC to establish an accelerated licensing review process to site and construct reactors at existing nuclear sites.
Preserve Existing Nuclear Energy by:
Modernizing outdated rules that restrict international investment.
Strengthen America’s Nuclear Energy Fuel Cycle and Supply Chain Infrastructure by:
Directing the NRC to enhance its ability to qualify and license accident-tolerant fuels and advanced nuclear fuels that can increase safety and economic competitiveness for existing reactors and the next generation of advanced reactors.
Tasking the NRC to evaluate advanced manufacturing techniques to build nuclear reactors better, faster, cheaper, and smarter.
The federal government recently made a big move to streamline the nuclear regulatory process. The ADVANCE Act, signed into law on July 9, will make building new nuclear reactors easier everywhere in the country. //
First, it will streamline the process for converting “covered sites” (land formerly used for coal plants, factories, etc.) into nuclear reactor sites. Missouri is moving toward shuttering its coal plants—meaning that many covered sites will become available. //
Second, the ADVANCE Act mandates that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) expedite the “combined license” process for applicants building at a site where a nuclear plant currently operates or has previously operated.
PJM’s capacity auction has competitively secured resources to meet the RTO reliability requirement for the 2025/2026 Delivery Year. Auction prices were significantly higher across the RTO due to decreased electricity supply caused primarily by a large number of generator retirements, combined with increased electricity demand and implementation of FERC-approved market reforms.
While the overall resource mix is adequate, two zones cleared just short of their reserve requirement, resulting in prices being set at the zonal cap.
The higher prices send a clear investment signal across PJM’s 13 states and the District of Columbia. //
The auction cleared a diverse mix of resources, including 48% of gas, 21% of nuclear, 18% of coal, 1% of solar, 1% of wind, 4% of hydro, 5% of demand response and 2% from other resources. //
The amount of supply resources in the auction decreased again this year, continuing the trend from recent auctions and underlining PJM’s stated concerns (PDF) about generation resources facing pressure to retire without replacement capacity being built quickly enough to replace them. Approximately 6,600 MW of generation have retired or have must-offer exceptions (signaling intent to retire) compared with the generators that offered in the 2024/2025 Base Residual Auction (BRA).
Meanwhile, the peak load forecast for the 2025/2026 Delivery Year has increased from 150,640 MW for the 2024/2025 BRA to 153,883 MW for the 2025/2026 Delivery Year. Additionally, FERC-approved market reforms contributed to tightening the supply and demand balance by better estimating the impact of extreme weather on load and more accurately determining resource reliability value.
These reliability concerns associated with reducing supply and increasing demand are not limited to PJM; the North American Electric Reliability Corporation has identified elevated risk to the reliability of the electrical grid for much of the country outside of PJM. To facilitate the entry of new resources, PJM is implementing its FERC-approved generation interconnection reform, with approximately 72,000 MW of resources expected to be processed in 2024 and 2025. //
The auction produced a price of $269.92/MW-day for much of the PJM footprint, compared to $28.92/MW-day for the 2024/2025 auction. Capacity auction prices fluctuate annually based on the need for investment in generation resources.
This year’s auction procured 135,684 MW for the period of June 1, 2025, through May 31, 2026. The total Fixed Resource Requirement (FRR) obligation is an additional 10,886 MW for a total of 146,570 MW.
The total procured capacity in the auction and resource commitments under FRR represents an 18.5% reserve margin, compared to a 20.4% reserve margin for the 2024/2025 Delivery Year.
The TYNDP 2024 will assess how 176 transmission and 33 storage projects respond to the TYNDP scenarios. Learn more about the projects by clicking on their location on the map below or filter projects by country, type of infrastructure or status. More information about the projects will become available with the release of TYNDP 2024 for public consultation at the end of 2024.
EU is planning power lines from the wind fields on the Atlantic down to the south – and from the sunny deserts up to the north.
A bipartisan bill that will advance the development of nuclear energy power plants in the nation was passed by the United States Senate on Tuesday. In an 88-2 vote, the Senate voted to pass the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act, which is part of the Fire Grants and Safety Act (S.8.70), according to a press release from the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW). The ADVANCE Act will now move forward to President Joe Biden’s desk to be signed. //
The Bill only needs to be 2 lines long as expressed by poster #7. However, the ADVANCE Act is 156 pages so I fear what else is in there. That said, the Union of Constrained Anxientists is already attacking it so it must be good for America. //
This wouldn't have anything to do with Bill Gates recent investment, would it?
Nuclear power could be America’s saving grace — if progressive activists would only stop kneecapping its spread.
Although it’s both clean and abundant, nuclear power is often overlooked by a misinformed public and environmental activists alike.
But change makers like Bill Gates are championing the technology, and should be celebrated for doing so.
The billionaire philanthropist has invested $1 billion in TerraPower, a brand new nuclear power plant which commenced construction in June in Kemmerer, Wyoming.
A 345-megawatt Natrium reactor — the next-generation of nuclear technology — it’s expected to be safer than traditional fission power plants because sodium is used to cool the reactor.
The plant, which has an estimated total cost of $4 billion, is yet to be approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but Gates said that he’s confident TerraPower will hold up to scrutiny.
To get specific, the Bureau of Land Management shows that 3,377 permits were issued in 2023, supposedly outpacing the 2,507 that Trump's admin approved in its third year in office. This would bring the total number of permits approved to 9,522, leaps and bounds over the 6,541 permits approved by the Trump admin. This was heralded as a victory by press outlets like Politico, despite them all being eco-warriors in every other situation.
But the real numbers were revealed later when technical errors they blamed on the Trump administration were fixed according to the Beacon:
The spokesman added that the agency couldn't vouch for the data from the Politico report in January. And he noted the "online reporting tool can be interpreted in various ways."
BLM's online system was undergoing a system outage at the time of this report.
In February 2023, meanwhile, BLM quietly revised separate figures, lowering the number of unused fossil fuel drilling permits it had approved. The agency changed that number from 9,000 unused permits to less than 6,700, blaming the error on a Trump-era technical change.
The actual number from the Trump administration was 10,795. I'm not a mathematician, but that seems a far larger number to "less than 6,700."
Biden’s latest grand energy plan:
President Joe Biden is prepared to release more oil from the country’s strategic reserves if gas prices increase during the summer. //
The strategic petroleum reserve was set up for a purpose:
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), the world's largest supply of emergency crude oil was established primarily to reduce the impact of disruptions in supplies of petroleum products and to carry out obligations of the United States under the international energy program. //
Dieter Schultz
6 hours ago edited
In a letter sent last month to energy secretary Jennifer Granholm, senior Republican politicians called on the administration to “ensure that the SPR is not abused for political purposes in this election year” and described Biden’s SPR release in 2022 as “a transparent attempt to influence the midterm elections”.
Discouraging the use of the SPR shouldn't be done by an appeal the the administration, it should be accomplished by law.
Sadly, I think we have too many laws but the use and abuse of the SPR by all administrations is one where Congress should be more specific about when the SPR can and can't be used as well as how to minimize the carrying costs by specifying firm requirements for buying on the cheap and selling when oil is dear.
Edit: Given that a few years ago we came very close to filling up US oil storage infrastructure, maybe we ought put a provision in the law to offer to let US oil producers use the SPR rather than building more of their own storage tanks.
Urenco is an international supplier of enrichment services and fuel cycle products for the civil nuclear industry, serving utility customers worldwide who provide low carbon electricity through nuclear generation. //
SWU stands for Separative Work Unit. It is the standard measure of the effort required to separate U235 and U238.
Choose your relevant calculator from the list below. Enter the known quantities before pressing the calculate button to see the result.
The US is still regulating some enriched uranium based on an analysis from the 1950s. //
High-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) has been touted as the go-to fuel for powering next-gen nuclear reactors, which include the sodium-cooled TerraPower or the space-borne system powering Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO). That’s because it was supposed to offer higher efficiency while keeping uranium enrichment “well below the threshold needed for weapons-grade material,” according to the US Department of Energy.
This justified huge government investments in HALEU production in the US and UK, as well as relaxed security requirements for facilities using it as fuel. But now, a team of scientists has published an article in Science that argues that you can make a nuclear bomb using HALEU.
“I looked it up and DRACO space reactor will use around 300 kg of HALEU. This is marginal, but I would say you could make one a weapon with that much,” says Edwin Lyman, the director of Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists and co-author of the paper. //
Material that’s under 10 percent uranium-235 is called low-enriched uranium (LEU) and is used in power reactors working today. Moving the enrichment level up to between 10 and 20 percent, we get HALEU; above 20 percent, we start talking about highly enriched uranium, which can reach over 90 percent enrichment for uses like nuclear weapons.
“Historically, 20 percent has been considered a threshold between highly enriched uranium and low enriched uranium and, over time, that’s been associated with the limit of what is usable in nuclear weapons and what isn’t. But the truth is that threshold is not really a limit of weapons usability,” says Lyman. And we knew that since long time ago. //
According to his team, an amount between 700–1,000 kg of HALEU is enough to build a bomb with a 15-kiloton yield—roughly as powerful as the Little Boy bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. Building one of these bombs would be a matter of days or weeks for a rogue country or a terrorist group.
Somewhere along the way, we dropped the original Los Alamos fine print mentioning quantities and tied our security requirements to enrichment levels only. //
Lyman’s team proposes to get back to the Los Alamos study findings and simply classify HALEU as a Category I material in cases when it’s being used in an amount large enough to build a nuclear weapon. “The point of our article is to highlight that pretending HALEU is not weapons-usable could lead to very serious gaps in security if these reactors really become viable and exported to all sorts of places,” Lyman says. //
SFC Ars Centurion
14y
359
Subscriptor++
So you need 1,000Kg to build a bomb. Let's say an armed foreign adversary managed to attack one of these facilities. Exactly how long is it going to take them to both break into the area where the fissile material is being used, get it out of where it's at, and into something to transport it. That is roughly #2,200 lbs we're talking about. Could you do that with a normal moving van? Absolutely. But can you do it in under an hour, without killing everyone involved via radiation poisoning? I'm skeptical. //
GottaSaySomething Ars Scholae Palatinae
7y
1,342
Ed: I totally missed the point. The point of the article is selling it to "iffy" states where you can't control what happens to it. Not it being stolen from the producing country's reactors. //
Quisquis Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
12y
6,846
Heads up for the discussion:
1 ton of uranium is only about two cubic feet. //
Pueo Ars Scholae Palatinae
10y
1,005
jandrese said:
I think it's more of a case where terrorists also get centrifuges...
HALEU still poses more of a risk if we're worried about covert enrichment because by the time you're at 20% you've already done about 90% of the separative work necessary to reach weapons grade uranium. This means you have only 10% of the signal or 10% of the time available to catch the covert enrichment of HALEU vs the cover enrichment of natural uranium. //
Atterus Ars Tribunus Militum
6y
1,663
Time to end the technological dark ages caused by nuclear fears. Nearly every issue surrounding the tech is the result of government meddling and red tape along with lying about providing a place to store what little waste there COULD be if reprocessing was allowed. All due to unfounded fear mongering largely based on a shitty film, braindead communist planners in Russia, and a journalist that thought it was scandalous concrete had elevated radioactivity... decades of stagnation as a result. //
Nick31 Seniorius Lurkius
7y
6
I was interested in this, until I saw that the only source was from the Union of Concerned Scientists, the same group who specializes in fear-mongering and hysteria with their ridiculous "Doomsday Clock." In this case they seem to be using their hypothetical disaster scenarios to ask for the last thing the nuclear power industry needs: more government regulations.
Councilwoman Vickie Paladino @VickieforNYC
·
We must destroy the environment to save it!
Once every Joshua Tree is uprooted to make room for acres solar panels and the whales and birds are killed by windmills, and electricity is expensive and intermittent for all but the wealthiest, we’ll have saved the planet!
This is all much better than building a few modern nuclear plants.
John Solomon @jsolomonReports
Joshua trees growing for over 100 years will be cleared for solar farm in California https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/energy/joshua-trees-growing-over-100-years-will-be-cleared-solar-farm-california
8:55 PM · Jun 7, 2024
As global governments push for a rapid transition to electric vehicles and to wind and solar power, they are creating a demand for copper that threatens to undermine the very goals they seek to achieve.
According to a recent International Energy Forum report, electrifying the global vehicle fleet would require the opening of 55% more new copper mines than are already needed, and twice the total amount of copper that has ever been mined throughout human history over the next three decades. //
Since copper is a core component in electronics, raising the cost of copper makes it far more difficult for developing areas of the world to access energy. Copper is a crucial component in electric vehicles. A typical EV requires nearly 200 pounds of copper, or about four times the amount needed for a combustion-engine vehicle. //
The energy industry is facing government mandates for wind and solar. A typical 3-megawatt wind turbine requires 9 tons of copper, more than the weight of a school bus. Wind power requires more than seven times the amount of copper to produce the same amount of energy that natural gas or coal does, and five times the copper as nuclear power. //
Policymakers pushing for a rapid shift to EVs and renewables are also responsible for the red tape in mining for critical minerals. Without more mining, the planned EVs won’t be built. Even Chinese critical materials won’t get America all the way to its EV targets.
Under the terms of the sale, Amazon not only acquired Cumulus' datacenter facilities and associated power infrastructure, but has direct — behind the meter — access to a sizable chunk of the energy generated by the nuclear plant's two reactors.
Over the course of its contract with Talen, Amazon expects to unlock upwards of 960 MW of power supply. However, we'll note that the cloud titan has the option to cap this at 480 MW if it doesn't actually need all of it.
We've now learned at least 15 new datacenters will be built adjacent and connected to the fission plant over the next ten years. As we've previously reported, an AWS campus with five buildings may take up 600,000 square feet, or around 13 acres, and capacity of between 50 and 60 megawatts. //
As generative AI has taken off, it's not uncommon to see clusters of 20,000 or more GPUs capable of consuming in excess of 25 megawatts of power, deployed.
40% of US need for lithium could be covered by Pennsylvania's fracking byproduct.
Last week, leading lights of the global fossil power industry gathered at a conference in Houston, Texas, for CERA, known in the sector as the “Davos of Energy”. They reportedly got the shock of their professional careers.
They had invited the most senior executives from the biggest network owner (Chine State Grid Corp) in the biggest energy market in the world (China). The organisers fully expected their Chinese guest to endorse the “all of the above” marketing pitch, which is underpinning the “keep coal” campaign.
No such luck. Despite prodding by leading oil industry commentator Daniel Yergin, the chairman of State Grid Liu Zhenya reportedly said the “fundamental solution was to accelerate clean energy, with the aim of replacing coal and oil.”
As the network operator builds out its clean power sources, they noted, coal-fired generators could only serve as “reserve power” to supplement renewables.
“The only hurdle to overcome is ‘mindset’,” Liu said. “There’s no technical challenge at all.” //
New data bears this out. In China, thermal power plant utilisation rates (capacity factors) declined from 56.2 per cent on average in 2014 to a record low of just 50.9 per cent in 2015.
“This highlights coal is not ‘base load’, even in China,” Buckley says. “It is the marginal source of supply. Coal-fired power plants aren’t designed to run only half the time, but that is what is happening in China, and increasingly that is occurring in India as well.” //
Indeed, CLP, the Hong Kong-based owner of the Yallourn and Mt Piper coal-fired power stations in Australia, revealed this week that its “flagship” Jhajjar coal plant in India ran at a capacity factor of just 49.9 per cent in 2015.
In Australia, it was even worse. The 1,400MW Mt Piper power station near Lithgow in NSW operated at just 45 per cent of its capacity, even after its neighbouring Wallerawang coal plant had been shut down.
Other black coal generators have been similarly afflicted, so much so that the Northern power station in South Australia is to shut permanently in May. //
A study by energy consultant Energeia suggests that wind energy will become the default “base load” generation in South Australia, and dispatchable power sources – which previously dominated the grid, the markets and the business models – will have to fill in the gaps left by wind and solar. //
The gaps would be filled by flexible plant such as solar towers, or battery storage, or from gas – as long as it can compete with the new technologies.