CLINTON, Ill. -- Along the streets of this economically depressed farm town, there is optimism that a proposed nuclear power plant could bring in new jobs, give a boost to local retailers, and increase taxes for schools.

The United States has not started a new reactor project for 29 years, but President Bush is calling for a new era of nuclear power, saying it would reduce air pollution and dependence on foreign energy. If new reactors are built, the first could be in Clinton or two other possible sites nationwide.

''It's the best option for power," says Stan Winterroth, a high school shop teacher in Clinton. ''I don't agree with President Bush on anything else, but I think he's right on the issue of nuclear power."

To promote his program, Bush will visit the Calvert Cliff's nuclear power plant in Maryland on Wednesday. It is the first time a president has stepped inside a nuclear plant since Jimmy Carter rushed to Three Mile Island in 1979 to calm public fears during the reactor's partial meltdown, industry officials say.

The Senate, meanwhile, is preparing subsidies and incentives for utilities to build new nuclear plants. The nuclear industry has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into new technology in recent years. And the Nuclear Regulator Commission has hired droves of engineers to accommodate an atomic renaissance.

But the sober reality of nuclear power is that the United States will move slowly and cautiously, at best, because Wall Street financiers and the nation's utility industry have vivid memories of the legal, financial, and regulatory debacles that resulted from the building binge of the 1970s.

Even with subsidies and other incentives, few expect any construction before 2010, and only a small handful of plants to start up during the next 10 years.

Most utilities will wait to see whether the new regulatory system works as advertised, and only then would they begin a more ambitious construction effort. It could be another two decades before additional nuclear power plants have a significant impact on the US energy supply.

''There is much more confidence in the new process, but not enough yet to make a new investment," acknowledges Marilyn Kray, president of NuStart Energy Development, a consortium of nine utilities preparing an application for a nuclear construction license. ''Financiers are saying they are not yet comfortable."

Still, the industry is taking a series of preliminary steps under government sponsorship. Three utility consortiums are getting $539 million of taxpayer subsidies through the Energy Department to seek nuclear construction licenses under the new regulatory system. By going through the bureaucratic motions of applying for a license, the utilities are supposed to gain confidence in new licensing rules intended to reduce delays and litigation.

Separately, three utilities have put in early site applications for new reactors at existing plants, including ones in Illinois, Virginia, and Mississippi. The early site approval system is another reform meant to reduce risks that projects will become mired in delays.

An energy bill now before the Senate contains operating subsidies in the form of tax credits, much like the solar and wind industries receive. The legislation would also renew the Price-Anderson Act, which provides legal immunity in the case of a meltdown or other nuclear accident.

Largely unnoticed, existing plants have increased their generating capacity significantly in recent years, adding the equivalent of six new plants of output, and vastly improved their reliability.

 

 

 

 

 

Nuclear fusion boost from global warming?

Experts sense G8 leaders will select test site

 

Reuters

June 23,  2005

 

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Nuclear fusion as a future abundant energy source, and a key tool to combat global warning, could get a major boost next week if Group of Eight leaders agree to a site for the world’s first fusion test reactor.

 

Group of Eight members France and Japan have been competing for the right to build a fusion reactor — a project called ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) and expected to cost $12 billion over 20 years.

 

Nuclear fusion mimics the way the sun produces energy and could potentially provide a nearly inexhaustible supply of low-cost, clean and non-radioactive energy using seawater as fuel.

 

Global warming, a problem experts say could be eliminated if nuclear fusion becomes the favored energy source, is on the agenda at the July 6-8 summit of rich nations in Scotland —meaning the ITER project could be up for discussion too.

 

Nuclear power does not emit carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas that many scientists fear is behind global warming, because it does not burn fossil fuel.

 

 

Nations see potential, need  “ITER will be decided ... I suspect it will be at the G8 meeting in Scotland,” said Robert Aymar, director-general of the Swiss-based European Organization for Nuclear Research.

ITER — also Latin for “the way” — is backed by the United States, the European Union, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea with India and Brazil expected to join soon, Aymar said.

 

“These countries at the political level have realized that there is a potential and there is a need and they are trying to make this effort,” he said.

The fusion reactor project had been ready for launch already in 2003 but the U.S.-led war in Iraq got in the way of a decision on location, Aymar said.

 

U.S. President Bush then wanted to reward Japan for its support on Iraq, leading to a tug-of-war with the European Union over where the site would be built.

EU officials have said they believe Cadarache in the south of France will be the site of ITER.

 

Fission vs. fusion

Aymar and Carlo Rubbia, an Italian nuclear scientist who shared the 1984 Nobel physics prize, spoke to Reuters on the sidelines of an energy symposium organized by the Nobel prize foundation.

 

Nuclear and solar power look like the only viable solutions for the world’s growing energy needs without exacerbating global warming, Rubbia said, adding that a quarter of earth’s population — 1.6 billion people — have no electricity.

 

He said conventional nuclear power, obtained through fission instead of fusion, would eventually disappear.

 

Conventional nuclear reactors — in which uranium atoms are split, creating hazardous radioactive waste such as plutonium that can be used in nuclear weapons — currently produce around 15 percent of the world’s electricity.

 

Fusion reactors would “remove some of the great concern that we had in the past” such as the Chernobyl disaster, Rubbia said.

 

Scientists have not yet mastered the fusion process but are “confident that the goal will be achieved,” Aymar said, adding that a commercial fusion reactor would probably not come on stream until around 2050. 

 

Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.

 

 

 

Fusion power

Nuclear ambitions

Jun 30th 2005
From The Economist print edition

A step towards commercial fusion power. Perhaps

Get article background

THIS week, an international project to build a nuclear-fusion reactor came a step closer to reality when politicians agreed it should be constructed in France rather than in Japan, the other country lobbying to host it. The estimated cost is $12 billion, making it one of the most expensive scientific projects around—comparable financially with the International Space Station. It is scheduled to run for 30 years, which is handy since, for the past half century, fusion advocates have claimed that achieving commercial nuclear fusion is 30 years away.

 

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), as the project is known, is intended to be the final proving step before a commercial fusion reactor is built. It would demonstrate that power can be generated using the energy released when two light atomic nuclei are brought together to make a heavier one—a process similar to the one that powers the sun and other stars.

Advocates of fusion point to its alleged advantages over other forms of power generation. It is efficient, so only small quantities of fuel are needed. Unlike existing nuclear reactors, which produce nasty long-lived radioactive waste, the radioactive processes involved with fusion are relatively short-lived and the waste products benign. Unlike fossil-fuel plants, there are no carbon-dioxide emissions. And the principal fuel, a heavy isotope of hydrogen called deuterium, is present in ordinary water, of which there is no shortage.

The challenges of achieving fusion should not be underestimated. A large volume of gas must be heated to a temperature above that found at the centre of the sun. At the same time, that gas must be prevented from touching the walls of the reactor by confining it in a powerful magnetic field known as a magnetic bottle. The energy released in fusion is carried mostly by neutrons, a type of subatomic particle that has no electric charge and hence cannot be confined by the magnetic bottle. Ensuring that the reactor wall can cope with being bombarded by these neutrons presents a further challenge.

The costs involved are immense. The budget for ITER involves spending $5 billion on construction, $5 billion on operating costs over 20 years and more than $1 billion on decommissioning. Yet the reason why taxpayers should spend such sums is unclear. The world is not short of energy. Climate change can be addressed without recourse to generating power from fusion since there are already many alternatives to fossil-fuel power plants. And $12 billion could buy an awful lot of research into those alternatives.

Part of the reason why commercial fusion reactors have always been 30 years away is that increasing the size of the reactors to something big enough to be a power plant proved harder than foreseen. But fusion aficionados also blame a lack of urgency for the slow progress, claiming that at least 15 years have been lost because of delays in decision-making and what they regard as inadequate funding.

There is some truth in this argument. ITER is a joint project between America, most of the European Union, Japan, China, Russia and South Korea. For the past 18 months, work was at a standstill while the member states wrangled over where to site the reactor in what was generally recognised as a proxy for the debate over the war in Iraq. America was thought to support the placing of ITER in Japan in return for Japan's support in that war. Meanwhile, the Russians and Chinese were supporting France which, like them, opposed the American-led invasion. That France was eventually chosen owes much to the fact that the European Union promised to support a suitable Japanese candidate as the next director general of ITER.

Like the International Space Station, ITER had its origins in the superpower politics of the 1980s that brought the cold war to its end as Russia and the West groped around for things they could collaborate on. Like the International Space Station, therefore, ITER is at bottom a political animal. And, like the International Space Station, the scientific reasons for developing it are almost non-existent. They cannot justify the price.

 

 

 

 

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

 

 

 

 

Global warming is now advancing so swiftly that only a massive expansion of nuclear power as the world's main energy source can prevent it overwhelming civilisation, the scientist and celebrated Green guru, James Lovelock, says.

His call will cause huge disquiet for the environmental movement. It has long considered the 84-year-old radical thinker among its greatest heroes, and sees climate change as the most important issue facing the world, but it has always regarded opposition to nuclear power as an article of faith. Last night the leaders of both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth rejected his call.

Professor Lovelock, who achieved international fame as the author of the Gaia hypothesis, the theory that the Earth keeps itself fit for life by the actions of living things themselves, was among the first researchers to sound the alarm about the threat from the greenhouse effect.

He was in a select group of scientists who gave an initial briefing on climate change to Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Cabinet at 10 Downing Street in April 1989.

He now believes recent climatic events have shown the warming of the atmosphere is proceeding even more rapidly than the scientists of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) thought it would, in their last report in 2001.

On that basis, he says, there is simply not enough time for renewable energy, such as wind, wave and solar power - the favoured solution of the Green movement - to take the place of the coal, gas and oil-fired power stations whose waste gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), is causing the atmosphere to warm.

He believes only a massive expansion of nuclear power, which produces almost no CO2, can now check a runaway warming which would raise sea levels disastrously around the world, cause climatic turbulence and make agriculture unviable over large areas. He says fears about the safety of nuclear energy are irrational and exaggerated, and urges the Green movement to drop its opposition.

In today's Independent, Professor Lovelock says he is concerned by two climatic events in particular: the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which will raise global sea levels significantly, and the episode of extreme heat in western central Europe last August, accepted by many scientists as unprecedented and a direct result of global warming.

These are ominous warning signs, he says, that climate change is speeding, but many people are still in ignorance of this. Important among the reasons is "the denial of climate change in the US, where governments have failed to give their climate scientists the support they needed".

He compares the situation to that in Europe in 1938, with the Second World War looming, and nobody knowing what to do. The attachment of the Greens to renewables is "well-intentioned but misguided", he says, like the Left's 1938 attachment to disarmament when he too was a left-winger.

He writes today: "I am a Green, and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy."

His appeal, which in effect is asking the Greens to make a bargain with the devil, is likely to fall on deaf ears, at least at present.

"Lovelock is right to demand a drastic response to climate change," Stephen Tindale, executive director of Greenpeace UK, said last night. "He's right to question previous assumptions.

"But he's wrong to think nuclear power is any part of the answer. Nuclear creates enormous problems, waste we don't know what to do with; radioactive emissions; unavoidable risk of accident and terrorist attack."

Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, said: "Climate change and radioactive waste both pose deadly long-term threats, and we have a moral duty to minimise the effects of both, not to choose between them."

 

 

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