Prices rise on lower Norwegian exports, French nuclear output.  hellenicshippingnews.com

Advances in nuclear technology could hold significance for central and southwest Virginia wdbj7.com

Iranian FM: Window for nuclear talks ‘won’t always be open’ timesofisrael.com

German residents told to prepare for nuclear emergencies globalvillagespace.com

 

 

 

 

 

Ambient office = 98 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 89 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 90 nanosieverts per hour

Red bell pepper from Central Market = 79 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 123 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 102 nanosieverts per hour

Part 3 of 3 Parts (Please read Parts 1 and 2 first)
Oklo and the NRC
     Oklo is a microreactor nuclear startup which “submitted a recharged licensing project plan with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission” in September.
     In January of 2022, the NRC denied Oklo’s application to construct and operate a one and a half megawatt fast microreactor at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) “based on Oklo’s failure to provide information on several key topics for the Aurora design.”
     Venture-funded Oklo had submitted a combined application to license the design and operation of a “compact fast microreactor.” Oklo had already received a first-of-its-kind site-use permit in 2019 to construct its initial plant on a quarter acre site at the INL.
     The NRC will be receiving an increasing number of new reactor designs and will have to adapt as an institution if it’s to be effective at allowing innovation in the nuclear industry.
NuScale and the NRC
     NuScale Power has led the charge on SMRs for more than a decade but is still struggling with the NRC. It is also facing rising costs on a critical first-of-a-kind four hundred and sixty-two megawatt project in Idaho.
     The proposed project from NuScale and the Utah Associated Municipal Power System, (UAMPS), a group of fifty municipal utilities across seven Western states. It was initially scheduled to begin operation of the first of six SMRs in 2029. However, according to the December edition of the E&E News, “NuScale’s first reactor now faces sharply higher construction cost estimates, due to inflation and higher interest rates. If projected costs rise above $58 per megawatt-hour, it will trigger an up-or-down vote as early as next month from the project’s anchor customers.” E&E also reported that the costs of construction materials such as steel plate and carbon steel piping have risen sharply since the project was approved in 2020.
     In addition to cost issues, NuScale has run into regulatory problems. The company replaced its NRC-approved fifty-megawatt design. Now it needs to gain regulatory approval for the seventy-seven-megawatt module that it plans to use for the UAMPS project. It was reported in November that the NRC has concerns about the new design. In a letter to NuScale, the NRC said that the companies proposed module raised “several challenging and/or significant issues” with its draft application.
     SMRs architecture is an unproven solution to the nuclear industry’s cost and schedule overruns. Scaling down new reactors in power output and size theoretically enables SMR and microreactor solutions that can be constructed at less cost off-site using fewer custom components with total lower total project costs.
     However, even NuScale’s design, a SMR that bears some resemblance to existing light-water reactors, poses a challenge to the testing and approval processes of the NRC. NuScale says it has spent over five hundred million dollars and expended more than two million labor hours to compile the information required for its design-certification application.
     It’s not just the nuclear regulators, engineers and politicians who need to be heard from on this project. These days, it’s the nuclear accountants who have the final say. So far, SMRs and microreactors have not proven to be a financial or regulator slam dunk.
Ending the Nuclear Malaise
     The U.S. public remains evenly divided over nuclear power and the regulatory process sometimes seems to be intended to discourage the construction of new nuclear power plants. This is now a real window of opportunity to construct new U.S. nuclear power reactors after several lost decades.
     The U.S. nuclear industry finally has some political, financial and engineering momentum behind it after decades of stagnation. However, it needs to prove its viability by putting some megawatts into service in the 2020s.

U.S. nuclear power plant outages Nasdaq.com

Russian ship with Nuclear Power Plant cargo banned from Bangladesh fleetmon.com

Britain needs to focus on nuclear weapons, not soldiers news.am

Israeli minister sees possible attack on Iran “in two or three years” reuters.com

 

Ambient office = 87 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 103 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Lettuce from Central Market = 108 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 85 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 79 nanosieverts per hour

Part 2 of 3 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
DoE and Inflation Reduction Act
     The Biden administration is strongly committed to maintaining the existing U. S. nuclear fleet and bringing innovative, new nuclear-reactor designs to market.
     The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provides generous production credits for existing nuclear power plants. It also contains added premiums for meeting prevailing-wage requirements. These two credit programs offer a potential thirty-billion-dollar lifeline to struggling plants at risk of early retirement.
     The IRA also provides a tax credit for advanced nuclear reactors and a credit of up to thirty percent for small modular reactors (SMRs) and microreactors. Seven hundred million dollars is dedicated to the support of the development of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), which is the highly enriched fuel used in many advanced nuclear reactors.
     This IRA funding is in addition to the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s six-billion-dollar Civil Nuclear Credit program. This program allows existing U.S. reactors to bid on credits to help support their continued operations. The DoE’s Loan Program Office also has eleven billion dollars in funding for nuclear plants and the nuclear supply chains.
HALEU fuel
     TerraPower is a nuclear startup founded by Bill Gates. It has raised seven hundred and fifty million dollars to develop advanced reactors to serve as alternative to the light-water reactors that make up the vast majority of the globe’s civilian nuclear fleet. Last year TerraPower announced that Bechtel will construct its first reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming. It will be near the site of a coal-fired plant that is scheduled to be closed.
     Terra Power and dozens of other advanced nuclear startups utilize a concentrated form of fuel called HALEU. The only current commercial supplier of HALEU is Tenex, a Russian state-owned company. That was not thought to be a great source even before Russia invaded Ukraine.
     In the middle of December, TerraPower announced that it has pushed back the date for starting its new reactor because it can no longer depend on HALEU being supplied by Russia. The CEO of TerraPower is Chris Levesque. He said, “Given the lack of fuel availability now, and that there has been no construction started on new fuel enrichment facilities, TerraPower is anticipating a minimum of a two-year delay to being able to bring the Natrium reactor into operation.”
     The world’s fleet of light-water reactors runs almost entirely on fuel that has been enriched to up to five percent U-235. It is classified as low-enriched uranium (LEU). In contrast, the vast majority of non-light-water reactor designs in development run on HALEU which is enriched up to twenty percent U-235.
X-energy and SPAC
     X-energy is a developer of small modular reactors (SMRs) and nuclear fuel. It is going public with a merger with Ares Acquisition Corporation which is a publicly traded special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC). A SPAC is created to raise capital through an initial public offering for the purpose of acquiring or merging with an existing company.
     X-energy is developing an eighty-megawatt high-temperature helium-cooled SMR which burns uranium fuel enriched to about fifteen percent U-235. The fuel is packaged in carbon-coated, billiard-ball sized spheres. In 2020, X-energy received two billion two hundred million dollars in funding as part of the DoE’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program.
     In addition, investors have committed one hundred and twenty million dollars in financing for X-energy. That total includes seventy-five million dollars from Ares Management and forty-five million dollars from Ontario Power Generation and Segra Capital Management. These funders join existing strategic investors Dow and Curtis-Wright Corporation.
     Once the disreputable domain of pink-sheet over-the-counter stocks, SPACs have become a respectable way for companies to go public without the burden of revenue or the actual due diligence most public companies are subjected to. This has created a variety of public, premarketed renewable-energy startups with high valuations and big pools of cash such as Heliogen, ESS, Eos, QuantumScape and SES. With the arrival of X-energy, a nuclear startup has joined the club.
Please read Part 3 next

Analyst Looks at Relevance of Nuclear Fusion rigzone.com

Ukraine’s nuclear plants are working at full capacity news.yahoo.com

South Korea’s natural gas demand likely to dip on nuclear startups hellenicshippingnews.com

DOE to conduct radiation detection flights over Las Vegas Strip ahead of New Year’s Eve fox5vegas.com

Ambient office = 69 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 104 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 102 nanosieverts per hour

English cucumber from Central Market = 93 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 81 nanosieverts per hour

Part 1 of 3 Parts
     In 2022 the U.S. nuclear industry continued to have serious difficulties caused by regulatory, technical and financial problems. It did enjoy solid support from the federal government.
     The global nuclear scene faced similar problems. There were plant closings and construction delays that have resulted in the nuclear share of global power generation falling to about ten percent. This was its lowest level since the 1980s, according to the World Nuclear Industry 2022 annual report.
     The U.S. generated more nuclear power than any other country on the globe last year. This amounted to about ninety-five gigawatts of capacity. China generated the next highest amount of nuclear power. Construction of new plants has been impeded by cost overruns and schedule delays. Nuclear power generation has been unable to match the plunging costs of natural gas and renewable energy sources. Nuclear power provides a critical twenty percent of U.S. electricity from the ninety-two light-water reactors that were constructed in a construction binge in the 1970s and 1980s.
     Some of these plants are struggling financially, many of them are approaching their scheduled decommission dates. The only new large reactors being constructed today are at Plant Vogtle in Georgia. There has been reports of huge cost overruns as well as incompetence and even fraud.
     Here are some of the outstanding highs and lows for the U.S. nuclear industry during 2022.
Diablo Canyon
     Diablo Canyon is California’s last remaining nuclear plant. It was granted about one billion dollars in support from the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) last November. This funding may permit the two-reactor plant to remain in business.
    The nuclear plant had been scheduled to close permanently in 2025. However, there were serious concerns about both greenhouse gas emissions and a potential lack of generating capacity in the state of California. This spurred California legislators to pass a bill in September with overwhelming support to try to extend the life of the plant through 2030. Diablo Canyon supplies approximately nine percent of California’s electricity.
     The Brattle Group carried out a study which indicated that keeping the nuclear power plant running could reduce carbon emissions in the state by about forty million metric tons over its extended lifetime. This would supplant power generation that would otherwise most likely be generated by fossil-gas plants.
     However, Diablo Canyon faces a reckoning with the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commissions with respect to its license. The plant is also faced with years of deferred maintenance in the run-up to its anticipated retirement.
Plant Vogtle
    On October 17, Georgia Power reported that the loading of fuel into the Plant Vogtle Unit 3 reactor core had been completed. This marked an overdue milestone in the bumpy journey to construct and put into operation the two new reactors. During the reported loading of the fuel, technicians, and operators transferred scores of fuel assemblies one by one to the Unit 3 reactor.
     The California Power utility issued a press release that read, “Startup testing will begin next and is designed to demonstrate the integrated operation of the primary coolant system and steam supply system at design temperature and pressure with fuel inside the reactor. Operators will also bring the plant from cold shutdown to initial criticality, synchronize the unit to the electric grid and systematically raise power to 100%.” Vogtle Unit 3 is projected to become operational in the first quarter of 2023.
     On December 7th, Vogtle’s Unit 4 reactor completed cold hydro testing. This is the penultimate step before hot function testing which is scheduled to begin early in 2023.
     The two new Vogtle reactors are the first new nuclear units to be built in the U.S. in more than three decades. Their publicized problems have not been particularly beneficial to the reputation of nuclear power. The project is six years past the original scheduled completion date, and it will cost utility customer over thirty billion dollars which is twice of the original estimated cost. The DoE’s Loan Program Office provided over twelve billion dollars in loan guarantees to help complete the construction of Vogtle’s two new reactors.
Please read Part 2 next

Doomsday warnings for 2023: Risk of nuclear war is at its ‘highest ever’ and the planet is on a ‘highway to climate hell’ dailymail.co.uk

Lapid: Israel will use force to prevent Iran from going nuclear clevelandjewishnews.com

Poland looks to nuclear power to guarantee its energy independence ft.com

Top Putin aide visits Ukraine’s Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant reuters.com