My Geiger counter is in the shop for maintenance.

        I have mentioned the economic aspects of nuclear power in many posts. I have also mentioned that nuclear nations such as France, Russia, Japan, China and the United States are trying to sell nuclear technology to other countries that do not have their own nuclear industries with a lot of these potential customers being Third World countries. Today, I am going to see how these two topics intertwine in the U.S.

        The U.S. Export-Import bank exists to facilitate trade between U.S. companies and foreign customers. It provides financing assistance and credit transaction insurance. Supporters of the Ex-Im bank claim that the financing assistance provided by  the bank can be essential to securing trade deals for U.S. companies that would have otherwise gone to the competition. Nowhere is this more apparent than in international trade in nuclear technology.

        The  Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) bills itself as the “policy organization of the nuclear energy and technologies that participates in both the national and global policy-making process. NEI’s objective is to ensure the formation of policies that promote the beneficial uses of nuclear energies and technologies in the United States and around the world.”

        The CEO of the NEI said a congressional hearing last Wednesday that ““A strong and reliable Ex-Im Bank will enable U.S. nuclear energy suppliers to compete for and win international nuclear energy tenders, add billions of dollars of U.S. exports and tens of thousands of American jobs and promote other U.S. national interests.” All that this requires is billions of dollars in direct and indirect government assistance.

        The Director of International Supplier Relations at NEI recently reported that the estimate for the value of the nuclear industry over the next decade is seven hundred and forty billion dollars. There are seventy one new reactors being built and another one hundred and seventy two reactors in advanced planning stages. He said that “export credit agency support, which 60-plus countries offer, is nearly mandatory for foreign nuclear plant tenders.”

        Critics of the Ex-Im bank complain that it is a government handout to wealthy corporations. Republican Congressmen have been threatening to defund the Ex-Im bank. I am generally not in favor of the U.S. taxpayer doing anything to help huge profitable corporations. With respect to the issue being discussed in this post, I am doubly against having the U.S. Ex-Im bank give any assistance to the export of any nuclear technology. The history of nuclear power is littered with cost overruns and cancelled projects. From a strictly economic point of view,  these nuclear projects are poor investments.

        Totally aside from whether nuclear power makes any sense in economic terms is the fact that a single accident at a single plant can heavily impact the whole global marketplace. Another Fukushima type incident and many more countries might stop using nuclear power. A major slow down in the nuclear industry would threaten the schedule and the cost of nuclear plant construction.

NEI_Coaster.jpg

On 6/26/2014, TEPCO announced that they are going to start covering the sea bed of Fukushima plant port with concrete. fukushima-diary.com

Fukushima plutonium in playground about 40 miles from nuclear plant.  enenews.com

First power has flowed from Argentina’s newest nuclear power reactor, the government said, supporting its goals for power generation diversity, fuel import reduction and ‘energy sovereignty’. world-nuclear-news.org

Plans to build Europe’s largest new nuclear project in Cumbria, U.K. have taken a step forward after Toshiba and GDF Suez signed a deal to develop the site. bbc.com

My Gieger counter is in the shop for maintenance. 

A Minamisoma citizen talked a public monitoring post shows the radiation level lower than a personal Geiger counter. fukushima-diary.com

Highest density of tritium measured from seawater of all of the crippled Fukushima reactors even outside of underground wall. fukushima-diary.com

Residents in San Luis Obispo, California were shocked and unsettled when at approximately 3:56 pm on Friday warning sirens sounded off near the intersection of Orcutt and Biddle Ranch Road. guardianlv.com

Looks like Thorium Nuclear Energy has no future in USA. nuclear-news.net

My Gieger counter is in the shop for maintenance. 

Two Japanese nuclear power utilities have received bail outs from Japan’s state backed bank. fukuleaks.org

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) has flatly refused a proposal by the Nuclear Damage Compensation Dispute Resolution Center (ADR) to increase compensation payments for psychological damage suffered by people from the Fukushima Prefecture town of Namie, near the company’s crippled nuclear power plant. mainichi.jp

Westinghouse this week announced it plans to market a modified version of its AP1000 reactor with enhancements aimed at markets with elevated earthquake risk. nuclearstreet.com

A follow-up mission has found that operators of the twin-unit Kozloduy nuclear power station in Bulgaria have achieved the level of “resolved” or “satisfactory progress” in all of the recommendations and suggestions made by an International Atomic Energy Agency Operational Safety Review Team (Osart) mission in 2012. nucnet.org

         I have posted many essays on nuclear weapons. Most people are not aware or are not bothered by the fact that the United States and Russia both have about fifteen hundred nuclear missiles aimed at each other that can launch in minutes. As I have posted before, the U.S. missile forces has low morale all the way up to the generals in charge. Russia has been carrying on with the nuclear weapons left over from the Soviet Union and the Cold War but there are reports of degradation in their infrastructure and the preparedness of missile forces.

       Twenty years ago in 1995, Norway launched a rocket to study the Northern Lights. A Russian radar station five hundred miles away detected the launch on radar. Their analysis of the trajectory suggested that the missile could have been launched by a U.S. Trident submarine to blind Russian radar as a prelude to a nuclear first strike by the U.S. The Russian military was put on high alert and the President activated his nuclear launch system. The Russians realized that the launch was a perfectly innocent sounding rocket and they did not launch their missiles. At that time, Russia still had the old Soviet system in place for monitoring U.S. continental missile launch sites.

        The Soviet monitoring system consisted of two types of satellites. One type of satellite was launched into a highly elliptical orbit. The angle of observation for the satellite makes it easy to see missile launch plumes against the backdrop of space. It was thought that this type of satellite would be able to easily distinguish missile launches from natural phenomena. However, in 1983, one of these satellites mistook sunlight reflecting off a high layer of clouds for a missile. Currently, there are two of this type of satellites in service, the Cosmos-2422 and the Cosmos-2446.

        In order to deal with the false alarms from the first type of satellite, a second type of satellite was launched. This type of satellite flies in an geostationary orbit. It orbits at the same rate of the Earth’s rotation and so remains stationary over a particular spot on the Earth. In the case of this type of Russian satellite, it is positioned directly over the continental U.S. The Russian Cosmos-2479 satellite was the only geosynchronous monitoring satellite they had. These two types of satellites in combination are much more reliable that either type alone. It was recently announced by Russia that the Cosmos-2497 has stopped functioning. With their only geostationary satellite gone, the Russians are back to relying on the two highly elliptical orbit satellites which have already been shown to be prone to mistakes.

          I appreciate all the work that has been done on nuclear disarmament, especially between the U.S. and Russia but there is a great deal more that needs to be done. As I have pointed out in other posts, only ten percent of the U.S. or the Russian nuclear arsenal might be enough to cause a nuclear winter that would end human civilization. It is critical to the future of the human race that the threat of nuclear war be eliminated as soon as possible.

Cosmos-2479 geostationary satellite:

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High level of radioactive material is measured from soil in an elementary school of Kanagawa prefecture in Japan. fukushima-diary.com

Is Fukushima radiation causing deformities in small Japanese birds? ajw.asahi.com

Russia celebrated two stand-out achievements for the world’s nuclear industry today – the launch of the most powerful fast reactor and the 60th anniversary of the first civilian nuclear power plant. world-nuclear-news.org

Sweden’s nuclear regulator proposes to almost double the fees paid by utilities in 2015 into the country’s nuclear waste fund. world-nuclear-news.org