Nuclear power projects can be problematic for members of the European Union. The EU has strict rules about the purchase of nuclear reactors, the involvement of government financing, the purchase of nuclear fuel, etc. Some members of the E.U. such as Austria are very anti-nuclear and will sue other members who don’t abide by the rules.

       The Czech Republic is a member of the E.U. The Dukovany nuclear power plant is about thirty miles from the Austrian border. It is the first nuclear power plant built in what is now the Czech Republic. The contract for the Dukovany nuclear power plant was signed between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union in 1970. Construction began in 1974 and four nuclear power reactors were connected to the electrical grid between 1985 and 1987.

       The Czechs want to build a new reactor at the Dukovany. The new reactor is intended to replace one of the old nuclear reactors from the Soviet-era. The Czech would like to purchase the new reactor from Russia but in order to do that within the framework of the E.U., the Czechs will need to have the E.U. Commission exempt the Czech Republic from their strict rules on government bids.

       When a member of the E.U. decides to purchase a product from a provider who is not  a non-member country where exports are subsidized, an investigation can be called for if another member or the industry that provides the product in the E.U. file a complaint with the E.U. Commission. The results of such an investigation can be either a duty being imposed on the imported product or the product in question can be exempted from the subsidized import rule.

     The Czech Republic is currently involved in negotiations with the E.U. Commission, but they are not sure that they will be able to get the exemption they will need. There will be another round of talks as soon as the Czechs respond to E.U. Commission questions with a deadline in March.

       The E.U. Commission reluctantly approved the recent Hungarian Paks II nuclear power reactor deal with Russia last year after a contentious debate. The final deal between Hungary and Russia was based on a deal between the Hungarian government and the Russian government which some claimed side-stepped the problem with buying products from producers in non-member countries.

       Austria is suing Hungary for violating the E.U. rules about state aid for such projects. Germany also shares a border with the Czech Republic and it is strongly opposed to the construction of any more nuclear power reactors in Europe.

       If the Czechs fail to get the exemption, they may go with a government to government deal like Hungary did for their Paks II project. Hungary awarded a contract to Russia’s Rosatom for two new nuclear power reactors. The Hungarians did not request bids for the project because they said that only Rosatom had the technical capability to replace old Soviet-era power reactors. Russia is giving Hungary a twelve billion dollar loan to help with the fifteen billion dollar nuclear project.

 

 

The U.K. still lacks the replacement rules needed to fuel its nuclear reactors after the country quits the European Union, according to an Electricite de France SA executive. Bloomsberg.com

A senior Chinese diplomat said on Saturday (Feb 17) that China is committed to the principle of non-first-use of nuclear weapon, expressing concerns about the danger of nuclear development at present at the ongoing Munich Security Conference. Straitstimes.com

Seawater is infiltrating the Runit Dome, an atomic bomb-waste repository on a remote Marshall Island atoll in the central Pacific Ocean, posing a potential risk of radiation exposure for the small, local population.  Pri.org

US and Chinese security officials reportedly tussled over the American nuclear football during a state visit that President Donald Trump later called “great” and “very productive”. Independent.co.uk

 

 

       Many of the ninety-nine operating nuclear power reactors in the U.S. were built in the 1970s with an intended lifespan of forty years. Many of those reactors have been granted an additional twenty years of life for a total of sixty years. The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) is currently carrying out research and working in conjunction with utilities to extend the life of some nuclear power reactors up to eighty years.

       Exelon Corporation and Dominion Energy Inc. have announced that they are planning on asking regulators to give eight reactors located in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Florida an additional twenty years of life for a total of eighty years.

      About twenty percent of the electricity in the U.S. is generated by nuclear power. Cheap natural gas, subsidized renewable power and stagnant demand for electricity have made it difficult for nuclear power to compete in today’s energy market. Recently, some U.S. nuclear power reactors have become too expensive to operate and are being retired before their licensed lifetimes run out.

       The ultimate authority to extend the license of a nuclear power reactors is held by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Trump administration ordered a review of the nuclear power industry and possible ways to support it last June. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry recently came out with a proposal for subsidies to support coal and nuclear power but it was not adopted by Congress. The utility industry says that they appreciate the support from the President.

      A spokesperson for the Nuclear Energy Institute lobbying group said, “You are talking about continuing the operation of a perfectly safe and reliable power plant. Make that comparison with the new construction of a plant. The cost savings are substantial.” While the cost of retrofitting an existing nuclear power reactor may run into the hundred of millions of dollars, the construction of a new power reactor will cost billions of dollars. Southern Co. is building two new power reactors in Georgia. The estimated cost of the project has doubled to more than twenty-five billion dollars during construction.

        Anti-nuclear activists point out that the old reactors are wearing out and each additional year of life granted increases the risk of major nuclear accidents. They cite the recent nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan as an example of what could happen to old reactors in the U.S. The director of the energy program at the Washington-based watchdog group Public Citizen says, “These facilities were not designed to operate that long. The longer you extend the operating life of these facilities the more things can go wrong.”

       Merely extending the lifespan of a power reactors does not help with the problem of competition from other energy sources. A former member of the NRC says that, “What you are seeing with extending the license is companies preserving an option, but it’s an option that very few will likely exercise,” said Peter Bradford, a former member of the NRC. “Unless the federal government is somehow prepared to either put taxpayer dollars into steam generator replacements or to somehow mandate that the customers have to pay for it, it’s just not going to happen.”

 

About 110 people are working round-the-clock on site and 320 meters of the new seaside infrastructure is already completed, local authorities in Pevek inform. The harbor infrastructure will house the «Akademik Lomonosov», which is due to arrive on site in June 2019. In wintertime, Pevek is embroiled in thick ice and the new harbor will be capable to withstand the tough climatic conditions, the regional administration says. Thebarentsobserver.com

As Westinghouse Electric’s bankruptcy dashed South Carolina’s nuclear ambitions, one group of people reaped the rewards: lawyers.  Postandcourier.com

Faced with a hostile, nuclear-armed neighbor, South Korea’s military has announced the creation of a “decapitation unit.” In the event of a war, the mission of the special task brigade is to take out the leadership of North Korea. Wsmv.com

Interested participants have until 30 March 2018 to submit abstracts for oral or poster presentations at the International Symposium on Communicating Nuclear and Radiological Emergencies to the Public, to be held in Vienna, Austria, from 1 to 5 October 2018. Iaea.org

 

 

 

       I have written before about the Saudi ambition to have their own nuclear power program. Countries such as China, Russia and Japan which sell nuclear power reactors have been flocking to Saudi Arabia drawn by the prospect of billions of dollars in sales. The U.S. is one of those countries and the Trump administration has been supportive of the Saudi desire to have their own nuclear reactors.

        In 2010, Saudi Arabia produced a royal decree that said, “The development of atomic energy is essential to meet the Kingdom’s growing requirements for energy to generate electricity, produce desalinated water and reduce reliance on depleting hydrocarbon resources.”

       The Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister said last week at the Munich Security Conference that “We are looking at the issue of the viability of building nuclear reactors in order to produce energy so that we can save the oil and export it in order to generate revenue. The countries that we are talking to are probably roughly 10 countries or so around the world and we have not made a decision yet with regards to which path we will take and which country we will be focusing on more.”

       Saudi Arabia consumes about a quarter of the oil that it produces. With projected energy demand increases and a corresponding lack of projected oil production increases, Saudi Arabia will consume more and more of its own oil production as time goes by. A nuclear power program could allow Saudi Arabia to conserve its oil for future export.

       Saudi Arabia plans to purchase and construct sixteen nuclear power reactors in the next twenty-five years at an estimated cost of over eighty billion dollars. Saudi Arabia has its own uranium deposits and says that it wants to develop them to produce its own fuel. It has invited U.S. companies to be a part of its nuclear program but in order for any U.S. company to export nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia, they must sign a peaceful nuclear cooperation pact. These pacts are called “123” agreements. The 123 pacts separate civil nuclear facility from military nuclear facilities. The pacts are intended to create barriers between the production of nuclear fuel and production of weapons grade nuclear materials.

       The Saudis have been reluctant to sign on to the 123 pacts which are the toughest international controls for the nonproliferation development of nuclear weapons. These controls include prohibitions on enriching uranium to the purity required for nuclear weapons or reprocessing spent nuclear fuel to obtain plutonium for nuclear weapons.

       The people fighting for nuclear nonproliferation say that if the U.S. lowers its standards in order to sell reactors to Saudi Arabia, it will send the message that the U.S. is not really that strongly committed to nonproliferation. The people who are supporting the sales of reactors to Saudi Arabia say that they are worth billions of dollars in export sales and that if the U.S. doesn’t sell Saudi Arabia reactors, someone else will.  

       The Saudis are playing possible reactor providers off against each other. They say that ten different countries are interested in helping them with their nuclear power program. Seventeen U.S. companies have visited Saudi Arabia recently to discuss nuclear reactors and support products and services.

       It is believed by many that Saudi Arabia is worried about Iran developing nuclear weapons and is actively working on a nuclear weapons plan of their own.

 

The US House of Representatives – the lower chamber of Congress – has approved two bills related to nuclear energy research and development. The bills – one for a versatile reactor-based fast neutron source and the other for research into the effects of low-dose radiation – will now pass to the Senate before they can be signed into law by the President. World-nuclear-news.org

French state-owned energy firm EDF reported falling profits, including a downturn in the UK due to falling prices for nuclear power, improved energy efficiency among its household customers and the slide in the value of sterling since the Brexit vote. Theguardian.com

EDF expects its profit to bounce back this year thanks to higher power prices and increased availability of its French nuclear units following prolonged stoppages for safety inspections in 2017. World-nuclear-news.org

The utility that owns Cooper Nuclear Station said the power plant adds $112 million a year to Nebraska’s economy. Wowt.com

 

 

       “The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, as designated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act amendments of 1987, is to be a deep geological repository storage facility within Yucca Mountain for spent nuclear fuel and other high level radioactive waste in the United States. The site is located on federal land adjacent to the Nevada Test Site in Nye County, Nevada, about 80 mi (130 km) northwest of the Las Vegas Valley.” Wikipedia

       The U.S. government began charging nuclear power plant operators for storage of their nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain beginning in 1999. However, the actual construction project at Yucca Mountain was approved by Congress and began in 2002. In 2009, Harry Reid, a senator from Nevada and U.S. President Obama worked together to end the Yucca Mountain project. All work was halted in 2009.

        The power plant operators who had paid into the storage fee fund began to sue the federal government for the return of their money because the government had failed to build the promised repository. Billions of dollars were paid back a few of the operators from the fund which had grown to over thirty billion dollars.

        The cooling pools of U.S. nuclear power reactors continue to fill up. Unless a lot of the spent fuel is moved somewhere, the pools will be totally full in a few years and the reactors will have to be shut down. Absent a geological repository, the only other option is to build concrete and steel “dry casks” to temporarily hold the spent fuel on site or at other locations. The construction of enough dry casks will not be cheap and the legal framework of the storage fund that the federal government collected prevents it from being used to construct dry casks.

      This was the situation until the election of a new U.S. President in 2016. In the President’s propose federal budget for 2017, he included one hundred and twenty million dollars to continue safety studies for storing spent nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain. The money was not allocated by Congress to restart the project. In the President’s propose federal budget for 2017, he once again included one hundred and twenty million dollars for Yucca Mountain.

        A congressional expert from Illinois says, “It’s criminal neglect that the last administration broke the law by not funding this project. Now our local communities like Zion are paying that price.” Illinois has more nuclear power reactors than any other state. There are eleven operating nuclear power reactors at six power plants. It is estimated that there are over seventy-six thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel in Illinois, most of which is stored onsite with the operating reactors. The expert believes that it is far past time to move forward at Yucca Mountain.

        Many Nevada politicians are strongly resistant to restarting the Yucca Mountain project. One Nevada Senator has sponsored bills to stop the project, saying that it would be catastrophic for Nevada, and he would “make sure that this project doesn’t see the light of day.” A Republican Congressional Representative says that “Rather than pursue a realistic attempt to develop a substantive nuclear waste management program, this is a colossal waste of funding that goes directly against the will of Nevadans.”

       Experts that support the project say that interim dry cask storage for a great deal of the spent fuel could be accomplished in five to ten years. They say that Yucca Mountain could be receiving spent nuclear fuel in fifteen to twenty years.

       There are serious environmental problems at Yucca Mountain that involve unexpected mobility in the ground water in that area. It would probably be better to find a new location for the geological repository. Current estimates say that a new repository could be sited and constructed by 2050 which is only twelve years after the estimation for opening a repository at Yucca Mountain if the project is restarted. Interim storage would take the pressure off and leave plenty of time to build a safer repository at a new site.

Diagram of proposed Yucca Mountain repository: