[MSM Hobbes]

According to a couple articles, a consortium is interested in restarting/refurbishing a couple nuclear power plants.

One of these is in my backyard.



However, w/ that said, I am personally in favour of this work...

[sorry, couldn't resist that NIMBY connotation... ]

Anyhow, one of the main stories is thus: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7921287/

A nuclear power plant hasn't been built in the United States in two decades, but that could change in the next few years after a consortium announced locations in six states as possible sites for a nuclear renaissance.

Nuclear power consortium NuStart Energy on Thursday named the sites from which it will later pick two for which to apply for licenses to build and operate nuclear power plants. Four of the six already house operating nuclear power plants.

The sites, by location, are:
* Scottsboro, Ala. The Bellefonte Nuclear Plant, an unfinished site owned by the U.S. government's Tennessee Valley Authority.
* Port Gibson, Miss. The Grand Gulf Nuclear Station, owned by Entergy.
* St. Francisville, La. The River Bend Station, owned by Entergy.
* Aiken, S.C. The Savannah River Site, a U.S. Department of Energy nuclear weapons lab.
* Lusby, Md. The Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Plant, owned by Constellation Energy.
* Oswego, N.Y. The Nine Mile Point plant, owned by Constellation Energy.

All six sites chosen by NuStart are owned either by a consortium member or by the Department of Energy. The consortium, which hopes to work on two advanced plant designs, said it expects to name the two finalists by October.

...more...

A other links to relative info regarding this announcement are:

http://www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_e...tart/index.cfm

NuStart Energy Development is the largest and most well-funded of the three consortia, and its formation was announced on March 31, 2004. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced on November 4, 2004, that the NuStart consortium would receive an initial subsidy of $4 million, with more going to the Dominion-led consortium. In May 2005 it signed a final deal with DOE for a 50% cost-share agreement, with taxpayers contributing $260 million and the consortium putting up an equal amount for the paperwork on two new nuclear reactors. ...more...

http://atlanta.bizjournals.com/atlan...9/daily47.html

May 13, 2005 Southern Co. gets licenses extended for two nuclear facilities. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has renewed the operating licenses for 20 years for two nuclear plants owned by Atlanta-based Southern Co.

The facilities are the Joseph M. Farley Nuclear Plant Units 1 and 2, about 18 miles southeast of Dothan, Ala. The licensee is Southern Nuclear Operating Co. With the renewals, the license for Farley Unit 1 is extended to June 25, 2037, and the license for Unit 2 is extended to March 31, 2041.

Southern Co. (NYSE: SO) is also involved in the work on a new generation of nuclear power plants for the United States. As a member of the NuStart Energy Development LLC consortium of nine nuclear power companies formed in 2004, Southern Co. just signed onto an agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy to demonstrate the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing process and design the first advanced nuclear power reactors in the United States in 30 years.

http://www.electricenergyonline.com/...p?m=1&id=35890 [from page 9 of a google search... ]

NuStart Signs DOE Agreement in Support of Advanced Nuclear Plants

WASHINGTON, May 9, 2005 - NuStart Energy Development LLC, the consortium of nine nuclear power companies operating 58 percent of the nation's nuclear power plants and two reactor vendors, has signed a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy to demonstrate the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensing process and to complete the designs for the first advanced nuclear power reactors in the U.S. in 30 years.

"America needs nuclear power because it is safe, clean and domestic energy. This Agreement is the next step on the road to a new generation of nuclear energy plants," said Marilyn Kray, president of NuStart and a vice president of Exelon.

The agreement authorizes the NuStart consortium to participate in a 50-50 cost sharing program with the government to complete the detailed engineering work for two advanced reactor technologies -- the Westinghouse Advanced Passive 1000 Reactor and the General Electric Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor.

NuStart will select two potential nuclear plant sites by October of this year, one for each design. "We need the energy price stability and fuel diversity that new nuclear plants can provide," Ms. Kray said. "Our quality of life and that of our children depend on a new generation of nuclear power that does not emit greenhouse gases or other air pollutants."

The design analyses will be integrated with the characteristics of the selected sites to develop comprehensive applications for a Combined Operating License to be submitted to the NRC. Submittal of the applications is expected in 2008.

As long as everything is above board [yea, uhem, riggggggggght... ], I am in favour of this work. I'll post a couple articles/links in another post regarding the comparison of nuclear power vs. coal-fired plants. Especially when one looks at the entire picture, start to finish, IMHO, nuclear power trumps coal in regards to safety, cost, and environment issues.

[MSM Hobbes]

Another article that for the most part I agree with:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/nuclear.html

Nuclear Now! How clean, green atomic energy can stop global warming.

On a cool spring morning a quarter century ago, a place in Pennsylvania called Three Mile Island exploded into the headlines and stopped the US nuclear power industry in its tracks. What had been billed as the clean, cheap, limitless energy source for a shining future was suddenly too hot to handle.

In the years since, we've searched for alternatives, pouring billions of dollars into windmills, solar panels, and biofuels. We've designed fantastically efficient lightbulbs, air conditioners, and refrigerators. We've built enough gas-fired generators to bankrupt California. But mainly, each year we hack 400 million more tons of coal out of Earth's crust than we did a quarter century before, light it on fire, and shoot the proceeds into the atmosphere.

The consequences aren't pretty. Burning coal and other fossil fuels is driving climate change, which is blamed for everything from western forest fires and Florida hurricanes to melting polar ice sheets and flooded Himalayan hamlets. On top of that, coal-burning electric power plants have fouled the air with enough heavy metals and other noxious pollutants to cause 15,000 premature deaths annually in the US alone, according to a Harvard School of Public Health study. Believe it or not, a coal-fired plant releases 100 times more radioactive material than an equivalent nuclear reactor - right into the air, too, not into some carefully guarded storage site. (And, by the way, more than 5,200 Chinese coal miners perished in accidents last year.)

Burning hydrocarbons is a luxury that a planet with 6 billion energy-hungry souls can't afford. There's only one sane, practical alternative: nuclear power.

We now know that the risks of splitting atoms pale beside the dreadful toll exacted by fossil fuels. Radiation containment, waste disposal, and nuclear weapons proliferation are manageable problems in a way that global warming is not. Unlike the usual green alternatives - water, wind, solar, and biomass - nuclear energy is here, now, in industrial quantities. Sure, nuke plants are expensive to build - upward of $2 billion apiece - but they start to look cheap when you factor in the true cost to people and the planet of burning fossil fuels. And nuclear is our best hope for cleanly and efficiently generating hydrogen, which would end our other ugly hydrocarbon addiction - dependence on gasoline and diesel for transport.

Some of the world's most thoughtful greens have discovered the logic of nuclear power, including Gaia theorist James Lovelock, Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore, and Britain's Bishop Hugh Montefiore, a longtime board member of Friends of the Earth (see "Green vs. Green," page 82). Western Europe is quietly backing away from planned nuclear phaseouts. Finland has ordered a big reactor specifically to meet the terms of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. China's new nuke plants - 26 by 2025 - are part of a desperate effort at smog control.

Even the shell-shocked US nuclear industry is coming out of its stupor. The 2001 report of Vice President Cheney's energy task force was only the most high profile in a series of pro-nuke developments. Nuke boosters are especially buoyed by more efficient plant designs, streamlined licensing procedures, and the prospect of federal subsidies.

In fact, new plants are on the way, however tentatively. Three groups of generating companies have entered a bureaucratic maze expected to lead to formal applications for plants by 2008. If everything breaks right, the first new reactors in decades will be online by 2014. If this seems ambitious, it's not; the industry hopes merely to hold on to nuclear's current 20 percent of the rapidly growing US electric power market.

That's not nearly enough. We should be shooting to match France, which gets 77 percent of its electricity from nukes. It's past time for a decisive leap out of the hydrocarbon era, time to send King Coal and, soon after, Big Oil shambling off to their well-deserved final resting places - maybe on a nostalgic old steam locomotive.

...more, much much more...

[linskyjack]

You should have a third choice--Anywhere but in my neighborhood. Mulder would vote for that one.

[MSM Hobbes]

A paper regarding the utilization of more nuclear power in Ozland is likewise pretty interesting: http://www.aie.org.au/pubs/journaldiscussion/Kemeny.doc

I particularly like this quote in this Word doc:

In a recent article (The Independent 27/5/04) the great British environmentalist, Professor James Lovelock writes –

“Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies and the media. These fears are unjustified, and nuclear energy from its start in 1952 has proved to be the safest of all energy sources. We must stop fretting over the minute statistical risks of cancer from chemicals or radiation. Nearly one third of us will die of cancer anyway, mainly because we breathe air laden with that all pervasive carcinogen, oxygen. If we fail to concentrate our minds on the real danger, which is global arming, we may die even sooner, as did more than 20,000 unfortunates from overheating in Europe last summer.

I find it sad and ironic that the UK, which leads the world in the quality of its Earth and climate scientists, rejects their warnings and advice, and prefers to listen to the Greens. But I am a Green and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy.”

[MSM Hobbes]

Linsky, there are some other options I considered for the poll... but, I desired to make it more of a cut-and-dry, black-and-white reply needed - there is very little middle ground in this issue, at least the way I see it. We need energy. As much as I am enthusiastic regarding conservation [ha! just ask the kids in my house what happens if they leave a light on in a room... or how peeved I get everytime I see a car dealer's lot w/ lights blarring, all night long ] and increasing efficiency [T5 instead of T12 fluorescent bulbs, baby! ], as the Wired article points out quite plainly: more people, and more people being more "richer" = more juice needed to run these frigs, X-boxs, computers, flat-screen TV's, lights, decorative water fountains, etc., in all parts of the world. If not nuke, then what???

Wind turbines are big [ie: tall], take up a lot of space, and kill massive amounts of birds...

Water via hydrodams kill people during construction, require moving of many indiginous people from their homes, floods untold numbers of plants and animals, and kills many fish [no, not "the" Fishy, but fish... ].

Coal kills miners, both directly and indirectly; while this and other fossil fuels release radiation, give off polution, and supposedly attributes to "global warming".

Solar power is just not efficient at this time to contribute to energy demands at this time.

So,,, IMHO, right or wrong, nuclear power as an option is either a Yes or a No.

Regarding energy options in other countries, and altho' somewhat dated reports, they still give a good glimpse into these parts of the worlds:
www.pnl.gov/china/chinapwr.pdf
www.globalchange.umd.edu/publications/jl9917.pdf

[Perfesser]

I have one AIMBY...Arkansas Nuclear One (no jokes about hillbilly power plants, please - unless it's a good one!) about 20 miles east of here. They've never had an accident. But my power doesn't come from there unless my co-op is buying it from them; they won't tell...but based on the uproar that starts every time someone mentions putting flouride in the water I can see why....'cain't have radioactive electric in my house'...
Seriously, we're long past time to be building new nuc power plants in this country. I hope the AEC learned from past mistakes and lets the consortium build them without constant changes in the design requirements (= cost overruns), like they were doing thirty years ago.
Every day I see long trains of coal heading for the power plant somewhere west of here...some day the coal, oil, and natural gas WILL run out. Solar and wind are good,clean; but unreliable: no wind, or no sun = no power.

[GoneForNow]

Lusby, Md. The Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Plant, owned by Constellation Energy.

Not that far from me as well.

[linskyjack]

I only brought up that third option because that seems to be the prevelant atitude among most Americans--sure we want nuclear as long as its not close to our house.

[Wino]

Had to vote no way...............although this would invigorate the uranium mining industries and give a us a good alternative to fossil fuels..........until our government can make them 'terrorist proof', instead of just lip service, and a way to safely dispose of waste, no way. I also fear Brown & Root will get the contracts and they did a pretty shoddy job building our unit in Bay City, TX (can you say cost overruns?) I would rather see hemp and garbage powered plants................and this from an ex-mining advocate that had a bumper sticker in the '70's that said, "May all the environmentalist freeze to death in the dark"................

[iltos]

there was an interesting debate in the mit teck review about six weeks ago about this very topic...snippets are available starting here http://forums.techguy.org/showthread.php?p=2535504 and over the next two or three pages

as a sidebar, i ran across this today in the nytimes, about the technology of coal fired plants...i believe the future of energy production here is inevitably gonna have to end up coming from a variety of sources...all of them obviously with advantages and disadvantages....seems the bottom line will remain cost/kwh until something changes, tho.

May 22, 2005
Dirty Secret: Coal Plants Could Be Much Cleaner
By KENNETH J. STIER
ALMOST a decade ago, Tampa Electric opened an innovative power plant that turned coal, the most abundant but the dirtiest fossil fuel, into a relatively clean gas, which it burns to generate electricity. Not only did the plant emit significantly less pollution than a conventional coal-fired power plant, but it was also 10 percent more efficient.

Hazel R. O'Leary, the secretary of energy at the time, went to the plant, situated between Tampa and Orlando, and praised it for ushering in a "new era for clean energy from coal." Federal officials still refer to the plant's "integrated gasification combined cycle" process as a "core technology" for the future, especially because of its ability - eventually - to all but eliminate the greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

Since that plant opened, however, not a single similar plant has been built in the United States. Abundant supplies of natural gas - a bit cleaner and, until recently, a lot cheaper - stood in the way.

But even now, with gas prices following oil prices into the stratosphere and power companies turning back to coal, most new plants - about nine out of 10 on the drawing board - will not use integrated gasification combined-cycle technology.

The reason is fairly simple. A plant with the low-pollution, high-efficiency technology demonstrated at the Tampa Electric plant is about 20 percent more expensive to build than a conventional plant that burns pulverized coal. This complicates financing, especially in deregulated markets, while elsewhere utilities must persuade regulators to set aside their customary standard of requiring utilities to use their lowest-cost alternatives. (A federal grant of $143 million covered about a fourth of the construction cost of the Tampa Electric plant, which was originally a demonstration project.)

The technology's main long-term advantage - the ability to control greenhouse gas emissions - is not winning over many utilities because the country does not yet regulate those gases.

That could be a problem for future national policy, critics say, because the plants being planned today will have a lifetime of a half-century or more. "It's a very frightening specter that we are going to essentially lock down our carbon emissions for the next 50 years before we have another chance to think about it again," said Jason S. Grumet, the executive director of the National Commission on Energy Policy.

The commission, an independent, bipartisan advisory body, has recommended that the federal government spend an additional $4 billion over 10 years to speed the power industry's acceptance of the technology. In a recent report, the commission concluded that "the future of coal and the success of greenhouse gas mitigation policies may well hinge to a large extent on whether this technology can be successfully commercialized and deployed over the next 20 years."

Mr. Grumet was more succinct. Integrated gasification combined cycle technology, combined with the sequestration of carbon stripped out in the process, "is as close to a silver bullet as you're ever going to see, " he said.

Until Congress regulates carbon emissions - a move that many in the industry consider inevitable, but unlikely soon - gasification technology will catch on only as its costs gradually come down. Edward Lowe, general manager of gasification for GE Energy, a division of General Electric that works with Bechtel to build integrated gasification combined-cycle plants, said that would happen as more plants were built. The premium should disappear entirely after the first dozen or so are completed, he added.

Even now, Mr. Lowe said, the technology offers operational cost savings that offset some of the higher construction costs. And if Congress eventually does limit carbon emissions, as many utility executives say they expect it to do, the technology's operational advantages could make it a bargain.

James E. Rogers, the chief executive of Cinergy, a heavily coal-dependent Midwestern utility, is one of the technology's biggest industry supporters. "I'm making a bet on gasification," he said, because he assumes a carbon-constrained world is inevitable. "I don't see any other way forward," he said.

The operating savings of such plants start with more efficient combustion: they make use of at least 15 percent more of the energy released by burning coal than conventional plants do, so less fuel is needed. The plants also need about 40 percent less water than conventional coal plants, a significant consideration in arid Western states.

But for some people, including Mr. Rogers and other utility leaders who anticipate stricter pollution limits, the primary virtue of integrated gasification combined-cycle plants is their ability to chemically strip pollutants from gasified coal more efficiently and cost-effectively, before it is burned, rather than trying to filter it out of exhaust.

Proponents say that half of coal's pollutants - including sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which contribute to acid rain and smog - can be chemically stripped out before combustion. So can about 95 percent of the mercury in coal, at about a tenth the cost of trying to scrub it from exhaust gases racing up a smokestack.

The biggest long-term draw for gasification technology is its ability to capture carbon before combustion. If greenhouse-gas limits are enacted, that job will be much harder and more expensive to do with conventional coal-fired plants. Mr. Lowe, the G.E. executive, estimated that capturing carbon would add about 25 percent to the cost of electricity from a combined-cycle plant burning gasified coal, but that it would add 70 percent to the price of power from conventional plants.

Gasification technology, although new to the power sector, has been widely used in the chemical industry for decades, and the general manager of the gasification plant run by Tampa Electric, Mark Hornick, said it was not difficult to train his employees to run the plant. Tampa Electric is the principal subsidiary of TECO Energy of Tampa.

Disposing of the carbon dioxide gas stripped out in the process, however, is another matter. Government laboratories have experimented with dissolving the gas in saline aquifers or pumping it into geologic formations under the sea. The petroleum industry has long injected carbon dioxide into oil fields to help push more crude to the surface.

Refining and commercializing these techniques is a significant part of a $35 billion package of clean energy incentives that the National Commission on Energy Policy is recommending. The Senate considered some of those ideas in a big energy policy bill last week, but it is doubtful whether Congress will approve the funds to enact them because they are tied to regulating carbon emissions for the first time, something that many industry leaders and sympathetic lawmakers oppose.

Still, the energy bill may have some incentives for industry to adopt gasification technology, and the Department of Energy will continue related efforts. These include FutureGen, a $950 million project to demonstrate gasification's full potential - not just for power plants but as a source of low-carbon liquid fuels for cars and trucks as well, and, further out, as a source of hydrogen fuel.

REGARDLESS of the politics of carbon caps, the Energy Department has made it clear that it intends to push the development of integrated gasification combined-cycle technology. Last month, for example, Mark Maddox, a deputy assistant secretary, said at an industry gathering that the technology "is needed in the mix - needed now."

Some industry leaders are skeptical, to say the least. "We would not want to put all of our eggs in one basket as far as a single technology is concerned," said William Fang, deputy counsel for the Edison Electric Institute, a trade association whose members, shareholder-owned utilities, account for three-quarters of the country's generating capacity.

Besides, he added, many of his members think that mandatory carbon controls, in place in much of the world since the Kyoto Protocol came into force in February, can be kept at bay in the United States - possibly indefinitely.

It's a risky strategy - for industry and for the climate. "Coal-fired plants are big targets," said Judi Greenwald of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, "and if we do get serious about climate change, they are going to be on the list of things to do quite early."