Are we still dealing with the fallout of the energy crisis?

The recent failure of Solyndra, a solar power equipment manufacturer who had received from the US Government $527.8 million dollars (Jim Snyder / Bloomberg, September 9) to manufacture solar panel equipment and which declared bankruptcy with liabilities of $783.8 million dollars, brings much of the US energy policy .. such as it is .. into sharp focus for us today. The decision by the Federal Government to investigate this firm for ties to the Obama administration further shines the spotlight on the situation not just for solar power manufacturers, but for the focus of the future energy policy of this country.

Even prior to the Three Mile Island accident, a growing segment of the US population felt that solar energy would be the most desirable power source for the future. If we look at a thorough work of the time, "Public Opinion and Nuclear Energy," Nealey / Melber / Rankin, Battelle Human Affairs Research Center 1983, we find, after very detailed information on many survey questions relating all kinds of energy production in the US, the summation in part reading thus:

"Since 1976 the public has given more support to solar energy compared to all other energy sources; there is strong majority consensus that efforts should be made to develop this energy source. Solar energy is selected most often as the best source for the future by the general public."

We might attribute this feeling, at this time, to the energy crisis - whether real or perceived. In this same volume on page 163 we see clearly that the public, in the 70's and early 80's believed in a real shortage both in energy supply and in raw materials. Many had felt that solar was the best answer prior to Three Mile Island; many more felt so after, even though as pointed out on this blog before at least twice, public opinion in favor of nuclear energy actually DID recover toward the positive beginning within a few years after the Three Mile Island accident. Regardless of where it was going to come from, though, the public at the time did believe everything was in short supply - except for oil, which we could not possibly control the prices of. Solar seemed the best answer for those who were averse to supply shortage (the sun still has well over three quarters of a tank of fuel left, if I may say) and were thinking in environmental terms as well.

Of course, one wonders immediately, given the strong positive feeling back then about solar energy, whether or not the public were being fed pipe dreams by either some industry components, universities with large grants to study solar, or the government. We might easily point, for such an example, to the continuing story of the perpetually "about twenty years away from practical power" area of fusion energy. The United States launched Project Sherwood prior to the end of the 1950's to work on fusion power; at that time, it was thought to be about 20 years away. Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Co. and RCA had been given a contract to build a large experimental device called a Stellarator, and C-Stellarator Associates Inc. was formed with these companies to build it. Fast forward to now, today, in the year 2011; we're still said to be roughly 20 years away. This is what we call a moving target, or better yet a pipe dream.

Solar is another less severe example of a pipe dream. Certainly, very much was being pushed in favor of solar energy during those years. "The Economics of Nuclear and Coal Power," Saunders Miller / Praeger 1976, which is really a volume that attempts to make no pretense about being wholly PRO-coal and anti-nuclear, includes the following statement discussing solar power:

"Because solar power will present the consumer with at least a partial alternative to the purchase of energy from a central distribution system, the sale of electrical units by power companies may begin to decline from the future levels currently projected; as discussed in Chapter 10, this may seriously impact the financial stability of utilities."

Anyone who remembers those years remembers the fairly constant flood of information on television and in magazines about the future of solar energy - and as such, in that context, it might have been possible to believe the last statement of the above quoted paragraph.

In today's context, and knowing what has actually happened in the last thirty years, that statement is ludicrous. No one would make such a claim today. While some people are installing solar heating and solar cell electric power equipment, and some factories are doing so as well, no utility is today threatened in its core stability by scores of thousands of homes and businesses "going off the grid," which is what this statement references.

Incredible - in the original sense of the word - as that 1976 perception seems now, it is that very type of thinking that appears still to be coloring much of our energy policy. All of the intervening years of safe and reliable nuclear plant operation in the United States since Three Mile Island have incredibly increased public opinion in favor of nuclear energy but apparently the failure of solar energy to really deliver on any promises in the widest, broadest sense implied by these now thirty plus year old works seems not to have dawned on anyone.

Perhaps now it will given the failure of three solar equipment manufacturers in one year.

The statements by Solyndra indicate that at least some in the company feel that Chinese competition cannot be beaten since it is funded by the Chinese government. One wonders what percentage of valuation constitutes "federally funded" or "nationalized," since Solyndra was into the US Government for almost $530 million dollars, had a peak valuation of roughly $1 billion or a little less than twice this (meaning the federal investment was over half) and now has debts in bankruptcy of roughly $780 million. Many people will want to know just what percentage, then, of federal funding would make the business competitive with China even if not profitable. (One wonders when the anti-dumping legislation motions will be made, if Chinese zero-profit or else sales on the loss are really the culprit.)

There can be no question that in a theoretical sense there is no better way to develop two of the things we need - heat, directly and electricity either directly or indirectly - from solar energy. There is no other source that can be placed on one's roof, the roof of one's business, on the roof of a whole apartment building, or in a field, say, to power a small town with no other effect than merely the weight of its mass and the space envelope required. At this stage of the game, that is where the long-made promises of solar energy meet the delivery; at the home and at the small factory and small community level.

Simple facts concerning long-range transmission of electric power make a giant solar farm "out West" powering the country, or most of it, a pipe dream. Weather conditions make construction of more localized solar farm power plants questionable at best in terms of the amount of time they can deliver their rated capacity (known as the 'capacity factor.') This limits, at least for now, the upper size of solar generating stations to something very flexible, very tangible, but not highly profitable for utility companies and more likely owned and installed by the end user.

Our federal investing in energy sources seems, then, upside down if our larger problems are considered either as supply related (cost of oil, total supply of oil, and others) or environmentally related (i.e. global warming.) Solar is in no position at this moment, domestically produced, to combat either of these usefully on a wide scale. (One quickly wonders what buying $500 million worth of solar equipment from China might have done in an experimental large installation.) Furthermore, as evidenced by the 1100 jobs lost when Solyndra shut down, it appears too that the ongoing job crisis cannot in any substantial way be solved by employing people in the areas of solar energy, be it manufacturing or installation.

Of course, keeping with the normal focus of this blog, nuclear energy is in the position to do all of the things solar has been either promising or has had assumed for it for these thirty years. Further, nuclear energy is "shovel ready" now, and thousands could be put to work now building new plants. Vogtle is just one example of a large mobilized work force from diverse fields having been assembled from the ether to do a very large (two plant APR1000) job. These workers will develop further experience and skill that could be expanded upon by others and spread.

In the final analysis, solar energy, unlike fusion energy, is not just on the horizon but here. We know how and where it will work. However, its myth even today stands larger than its delivery, and the risk in entering business to develop it seems far riskier given the year's events than any other energy technology. Solar energy still has yet to deliver as good as promised.

2:30 PM Eastern Thursday September 15, 2011
ATOMIC POWER REVIEW

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The effect of big media: A real conversation

I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine that interestingly turned nuclear. She's married, mother of one beautiful nine month old girl, in her late 20's and intelligent enough to have a degree in business. She has no nuclear energy involvement in any way and never has had - and we usually never talk about it specifically at all.



Recently she and her husband took a brief three-day trip up to one of the islands in Lake Erie for a short getaway. For those unfamiliar, the islands are far enough out that you must either take the ferry, one of the "Jet Express" high-speed ferries, or fly. Anyway, we were having a discussion about the trip when... let's call her "J" .. says the following.



J: "You know, we saw that nuclear plant over in Toledo from the boat. I thought about you."



Will: "Really? Did you get me a picture?"



J: "No, it was too far away. It was too small in the viewfinder."



There was some more general discussion about cameras, but I had mentioned having to write something for my blog and she told me I should write something about the plant she'd seen (which is Davis-Besse.) I had an idea at that point.



Will: "You know, when you were seeing that nuclear plant, did that bug you at all?"



J: "Yeah, it kind of flipped me out a little bit."



Will: "Why? Why did it bother you?"



J: "Because, it was close enough to f@#k me up, you know?!"



Let's pause here for a moment. The plant was far enough away that it was not possible to get any kind of photo of it even with a new digital camera with zoom.



She then offered that she'd been to the islands a few times before but it never bothered her those times... well, maybe she didn't really know what it was back then, she says.



Will: "So what happened in Japan really made you take notice now, anytime you know you're near a nuclear plant, is that it?"



J: "Yeah, before Japan I wouldn't have cared at all but now, you know, it's something you think about."



Will: "What if I told you that there are over a hundred nuclear plants all over the United States, some of them as old as the ones in Japan (I didn't go into detail on purpose here) and you never hear about them? They haven't had any accidents since TMI and no one gives them any thought most of the time."



J: "The ones in Japan didn't have any accidents either until now."



She said that like she'd just proved a point, or made one. But what it turns out she was really doing was expressing the best opinion she could based on her knowledge of the situation, which stems ENTIRELY from mainstream media.



At this point I suggested that these questions and her answers were going to be a blog post on APR. She was fine with that. I told her that one of the things we're trying to figure out is the general public's opinion on nuclear energy, and that she was a great example of the kind of demographic that's probably most misinformed. J has the TV or radio on lots, but only for background. Watches some news in and around baby care, house work, her job, time with her husband and extended family and so on. Not a TV junkie by any stretch, and oddly enough almost totally internet illiterate. In other words, as I let her know, a good candidate.



I asked her if she knew what really happened in Japan. She told me a convoluted story about the earthquake making the plant lose its air conditioning and then overheating and blowing up. There were other details, and events and so forth in her timeline which really was just kind of a hodge podge of real and purported events. She asked if that was right; I told her that her story was about 25% realistic if not perfectly factual and the rest was garbage. But I also immediately told her that I and many others of similar persuasion were really trying to get a handle on what the mainstream media had done to perception, so that her description (as best she could give it) was just what the doctor ordered.



I told her about certain "experts" who go on TV all the time, and make reports to unimportant scientific groups which always get reported on TV as well. She had no idea that such people were doing any of these things, if not all of them, for large consulting fees. I found that interesting.



Turns out she thought that the whole accident was a result of the earthquake. I told her "No, the plants got through the quake as well as could be expected; the real event that triggered this accident was the tsunami" and after a moment of trying to express essentially "well, duh" to me she did get to see that these are two different events, even if the one caused the other. My point that the earthquake was survivable by the plants while the tsunami was not did actually get across.



I asked her what could make her less scared of nuclear plants. She said she didn't know, but then added that she's not "freaked out" about it. She didn't realize there were so many more of them. She said that knowing a lot more about them may or may not help a whole lot in reality. Now here's the best part.



She told me she's far more scared at the corner gas station than she was seeing the plant from the boat, or on the islands. That's right! The gas station. "Sometimes you get a whiff of gas, you know..." she says. I add in "and you're standing right on top of all those big gas tanks underground, too!" to which she says "Exactly! I wonder about that when I have my baby in the car and I have to pull in there and you can smell gas and that's a lot more scary than some nuclear plant somewhere else."



J is not anti-nuclear. She's really not pro or anti anything in terms of policy or politics. She's open to new ideas but is most open to the truth. I think there are a lot of people like her out there... people who trust that the mainstream media will report what they need to know in a level of detail they can understand. I think she was a tiny bit surprised that there is so much money to be made on the anti-nuclear side by "consultants" who will denigrate nuclear energy.



Regardless of the proximity of the Davis-Besse plant, J plans to take her family back to the islands next year for another trip, and she intends to renew her wedding vows at a little gazebo she showed me a picture of. It looks like a really nice place. She can't wait to go back, either.



Looks like by the end of our visit the fear was gone. "Out of sight, out of mind" is perhaps a good thing for nuclear energy in some ways after all.



3:30 PM Eastern Friday August 12, 2011

ATOMIC POWER REVIEW

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Nuclear Sanity, Nuclear Insanity, Fukushima, and the NRC

It has been nearly three months since the beginning of the Fukushima Daiichi Accident, which itself properly cannot be defined as being 'over' and in fact now is proving to be an affair as protracted as anyone familiar with such scenarios (all of which have until now been only theorized) might have imagined. While the struggle to perform many crucial tasks continues on site, another struggle rages on all around the world; that struggle is for the majority opinion regarding nuclear energy.

In some places, there has been a media fueled knee-jerk anti-nuclear response the like of which has not been seen before. Witness Germany, which has announced its plans to rid itself of nuclear energy by the year 2022. While there are numerous theories about many political motivations for this plan... which is actually a revived plan temporarily stalled by Angela Merkel, who now supports it ... the fact of the matter is that it is being hailed in some quarters as indicative of that attitude which all environmentally responsible persons should strive to adopt. Italy has announced as well (some time ago, actually) that it will no longer pursue nuclear energy. Switzerland also will follow.

On the other hand, in some places the nuclear energy aspirations continue exactly as before with no change. Witness Saudi Arabia's just-announced plan to have 16 plants on its grid by the year 2030. Economic reasoning, not environmental hyperbole, is the driving factor behind this program.

Somewhere in the center, in a much more nebulous position, is the United States. The USA has no central nuclear energy policy, and has had none for decades. After it became perceived generally that the Atomic Energy Commission was in an all too powerful a position vis a vis nuclear energy, given its mandate to regulate but also its mandate to promote, and seeing that the NEPA did not have entirely the desired effect, the Congress abolished the AEC in 1974, assigning its duties to an office which now is part of the Department of Energy (the promotional and research duties) and to the newly formed Nuclear Regulatory Commission (the licensing, oversight / regulatory, and punitive duties.) At that point, with environmentalism newly developing, the Congress essentially set up a department that was as powerful in an anti-nuclear sense (the NRC) as the AEC had ever been in a pro-nuclear sense.

Following this, the only body in the country that was part of the government and which could be considered as pro-nuclear was the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, or the JCAE. After the JCAE fought on by itself with some limits (it also lost some powers in 1974) it finally fought its last after heavily promoting the Clinch River Breeder Project (an attempt to improve the fuel cycle economics of nuclear energy) among other things, and was disbanded by Congress in 1977. Its duties were spread around to roughly 24 different subcommittees.

At this point -- 1977's disbanding of the JCAE -- pro-nuclear forces in this country no longer had any hope of centralized support from the federal government, and this was absolutely deliberate. Instead, the reverse has been seen; as pointed out recently by Rod Adams, the NRC has never in its existence received an initial application for a nuclear plant, processed it, granted licenses and then seen that plant given an operating license. To be clear, the approval rate for new plants start to finish then for the NRC is ZERO; all plants ordered after formation of the NRC were cancelled. No agency or committee could be thought of then as being more obstructionist than the NRC, whose job very clearly would, given its track record, seem to be to prevent the construction of any further nuclear plants in the United States.

Recently, over the last two years, there has been a growing surge toward new nuclear plants in the USA; many including this author call this the Nuclear Renaissance. Much of the attention was given to the Westinghouse AP1000 plant as a leader in the new generation of plants, but recently some very suspicious "whistle blower" letters to the NRC caused a very public negative statement about the AP1000 and Westinghouse in general to be released. To its credit, Westinghouse responded strongly (but calmly) and publicly to this almost unprecedented NRC action.

Further, the NRC has not only issued a number of statements (and its officials have been quoted in the press) along the line that Fukushima Daiichi means we must review all plants in the United States for safety but now has released a statement indicating that there have been indications to the NRC that it is "too lax" in regulating, and this is why the new tough stance.

Let me be clear: This is a "straw man." There are no such statements. No one can possibly think for one moment that the NRC -- with a zero order-to-on-the-grid approval rating -- is too lax. The NRC is in fact quite the opposite. Its chairman, Gregory Jaczko, is not in the position he is in because he is an experienced nuclear engineer or plant operator; he is neither. It would seem that he is there because he is anti-nuclear in point of fact.

Taking all of the above into account, I now get to the heart of the matter at hand; what then is the nuclear industry as a whole, and the mass of pro-nuclear advocates to do with the NRC? Surely the NRC cannot be imagined to be PRO-nuclear at any point since clearly its duties were set up from the first to be ANTI-nuclear. Surely with appointments of anti-nuclear persons to the NRC in high places it cannot be assumed that the NRC will support, much less befriend, anyone pro-nuclear.

The plain fact of the matter is that it is vitally important that the NRC only regulate plants, provide oversight, and not have any input from any political agendas. In order that this be possible, it is essential that all of the most senior persons in the NRC have serious experience in the nuclear energy field. There is no excuse why a governmental regulatory body such as the NRC should be staffed with politically chosen appointees instead of people accomplished in, and recognized in, the field. This must be pursued.

Since this is not likely ever to happen, it then becomes essential that the pro-nuclear groups (and that can mean everyone from the large trade groups to the individual bloggers and authors) call the NRC on every politically motivated action it takes, and on every obstructionist action it leverages. It is also vital that "straw man" arguments (indicating that there is some sentiment when there is not, some statement when there is not, some accusation when there is not) be rightly identified and exposed for what they really are.

It is also essential that the NRC's gross exaggerations about supposed lapses in judgement, incapabilities of analysis, and errors in calculation by reactor vendors, architect-engineers, utilities and contractors be spotlighted for what they are.

The agency that pro-nuclear advocates need to encourage to be more vocal, more involved, and better covered in the big media really is the Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy. This is the lineal descendant of the section of the AEC that got divided off into what originally in 1974 was called the ERDA or Energy Research and Development Administration. What, you say? Never heard of it? Many have not, but it has a rather elaborate website here:

DOE Office of Nuclear Energy

Of course, 'big media' will never report on items seen in this agency's reports. They're sensible, and not panicked hyperbole. One of the reports of interest at this agency's site covers the ability to manufacture forgings of the size needed for Gen III nuclear plants.. and how we don't have that capability here in the United States. (We can still make forgings large enough for plants the size that we have now, if needed.) A number of interesting reports on development in, and the future of, nuclear energy are available at the site. Nowhere near what is at the NRC site in a negative sense, but significant in a positive sense even if small.

In the final analysis, we must see in this country that since the only presently operating and involved and vocal and publicly seen body is the anti-nuclear NRC, the chips overall in the nuclear future of our country may well fall more to the states and ongoing problems at some plants (Vermont Yankee) or the economic promises of others (Vogtle.) We know one thing; the environmentalists have no easy ground to walk, given reports such as this seen on Reuters:

40 million tonnes more CO2 per year when Germany goes non-nuclear

They cannot have their cake and eat it too. Other forms of energy cannot ever economically provide base load power like nuclear energy can, and all the figures point to that. The recent push back against the economics of nuclear energy and our growing need worldwide for electricity is purely driven by unrealistic fear of nuclear accident, specifically because of Fukushima Daiichi. The environmentalists must now either as a result backtrack on their decades of global warming diatribes if they are to allow wholesale shutdown of nuclear (recently one of their darlings, now a stepchild again) or else become better informed about the actual safety of nuclear energy if global warming is to be averted. It seems at the moment that the NRC is acting as their lap dog, which is unfortunate at best and diabolical at worst.

As pro-nuclear advocates go, we may find ourselves at a watershed moment when nuclear literacy is in demand, when the NRC is being exposed for what it really is, when the NRC and the EPA might actually be thought of as being at odds (given the CO2 emissions that will increase if nuclear is abandoned) and when little media such as the blog you are reading is getting 1200 page views a day from all around the world, or better. At the surface it seems a bad moment for pro-nuclear advocacy but in point of fact there may be no better hour to act boldly, with confidence that what the public really wants is the truth, and results.. something the EPA, global warming advocates, and the NRC cannot hope to produce.

7:10 PM Eastern Friday June 3, 2011
ATOMIC POWER REVIEW

Note: Fukushima Daiichi update to come later this evening.

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