Ambient office = 123 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 87 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Avocado from Central Market = 113 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 102 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 93 nanosieverts per hour

     On Wednesday, a Democratic U.S. senator urged President Joe Biden to include strict nonproliferation safeguards in any nuclear power deal with Saudi Arabia that might be part of a potential normalization of relations agreement brokered by the U.S. between the Saudi Arabia and Israel.
     The Biden administration has been talking with Saudi Arabia and Israel on a potential peace agreement since before the Oct. 7 deadly attacks by Hamas on Israel. The talks have continued during the Israeli war on the militant Hamas group in Gaza. An agreement to help develop nuclear power in Saudi Arabia could benefit the U.S. nuclear industry. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, stated that the negotiations with Riyadh are still underway.
      U.S. Senator Edward Markey is a longtime advocate for nonproliferation safeguards. He said in a letter to fellow Democrat Joe Biden that Saudi Arabia, “a nation with a terrible human rights record”, cannot be trusted to employ its nuclear program purely for peaceful purposes and will probably seek to develop nuclear weapons.
     Markey and other Democrats are critics of Saudi Arabia and its de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, over human rights, his intervention in Yemen’s civil war and the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi that the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies assessed was ordered by the prince. Bin Salman has said for years the kingdom will develop nuclear weapons if regional rival Iran does.
     Markey said in a letter to Biden and other officials, “I urge your Administration to ensure that the path towards Middle East peace holds Saudi Arabia accountable for its appalling human rights practices and constrains its ability to become a nuclear power.” The Saudi embassy in Washington has not yet responded to a request for comment.
     The Markey letter was first reported by Reuter. It urges the administration to adopt the so-called “gold standard” nonproliferation safeguards. These are based on the 123 agreement in US nuclear energy law that prohibit uranium enrichment and nuclear reprocessing, two pathways to nuclear weapons. The U.A.E. agreed to abide by these safeguards when it built a nuclear plant in 2021.
     Markey has also urged that the administration insists that Saudi Arabia also be held to the “additional protocol” standards of the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, which requires monitoring and inspections. The U.N. National Security Council did not respond to a request for comment on these suggestions.
     Some experts question whether the timing and political circumstances in the Middle East will allow a U.S.-Saudi deal that leads to Riyadh normalizing relations with Israel.
     Saudi Arabia has called for an immediate truce leading to a permanent and sustainable ceasefire in Israel’s war against Hamas and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected both of these proposals.
     Time is growing short for the Biden administration to guide a US-Saudi civil nuclear agreement and defense pact through the congressional approval process because lawmakers are focusing on campaigning ahead of the Nov. 5 elections in the U.S.

Ambient office = 79 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 124 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 127 nanosieverts per hour

Blueberry from Central Market = 129 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 74 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 67 nanosieverts per hour

Part 2 of 2 Parts
     Bilbao y León said that people tend to expect that the energy systems of the future will be a version of what currently exists. She went on to say that the technology is going to be very different. “Very importantly I think that we are going to see a lot of coupling of systems … electricity is obviously going to be very important as we try to electrify a lot of energy, but clearly there are going to be additional energy vectors … all these technologies are going to make this system more complex … we can have different energy products depending on what is needed at different times to ensure the reliability and the resiliency and the flexibility of the system.”

     Ballout discussed scenarios that EDF have been developing for more than fifteen years, mainly for internal use. The company has made its scenario for net-zero publicly available this year. “It’s fundamentally different from the other scenarios we’re developing because we start with the constraints and the end. We start with net neutrality in 2050 and we go backwards. So we try to find the most economically efficient pathway to achieve this neutrality. And when I say economically efficient, I think of welfare maximization, the minimization of the cost and the optimization of the resilience of the system.”

     He continued, “And that’s how we come to a mix that shows we have to multiply by six our renewable capacity in Europe [by 2050] – we’ve been talking about 15 Western European countries. We will have between 120 and 150 gigawatts of nuclear capacity. We will enhance significantly the production of biofuels and CCS. We see this path will take us to a significant increase of flexibility needs … it’s a very important part of the resilience of the system.”
     Wilmshurst said it was clear that nuclear and renewables will share role together in the future electricity system. He said, “If we have an idealistic view that renewables can expand and expand and expand, the transmission grid needs to expand and expand, get more complicated, and when it gets more complicated the potential for it be less reliable increases.”
     However, he continued that financing is a hurdle for nuclear deployment in most countries. “A great part of nuclear being perceived as expensive is the financing cost. So why is the financing cost so high? Because you have to build the nuclear plant – it takes a long time, it’s complicated – but that huge capital investment upfront alone then gives you the facility that runs for many decades to recoup the investment.”
     Wilmshurst added that “If we get deployment plans together with a clear picture … all of a sudden, the deployment experience increases, deployment risk goes down, the confidence in the financial markets that the projects can be delivered on time increases. Finance starts flowing. If we don’t make a decision to move, we don’t start doing things, we don’t learn as well. There’s hesitancy in the markets to invest.”
     Ballout said nuclear and hydro play a very important role because outages of plants can be scheduled during periods where the demand is lower. “But that’s why we say we have to continue financing and investing in hydro and nuclear. The nuclear fleet is capable of ramping up when suddenly you don’t have sun or wind. It’s possible technologically and technically speaking and at the same time it is possible to ramp down in order to leave room for renewables to produce and that’s really the very important message for us.”

Ambient office = 59 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Avocado from Central Market = 72 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 90 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 81 nanosieverts per hour

Part 1 of 2 Parts
     Massive growth is expected in the global demand for electricity. If it materializes it will require an expansion of both generation and the transmission systems, speakers at a side event at the World Energy Congress 2024 agreed. They said that nuclear power will play an important role in ensuring the resilience of the future global electrical system.
     The session was titled Building low-carbon resilient electricity system. It was co-organized by World Nuclear Association, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) on the sidelines of the World Energy Congress, held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, on 22-25 April.
     Sama Bilbao y León is the Director General of the World Nuclear Association. When asked about the biggest challenges to the global electricity system, she said that many developed countries have “very robust and reliable energy systems” that have been built over the years but when adding new generation, especially intermittent renewable generation, “we have forgotten to ensure the resiliency of the system. We are finding ourselves close to breaking point where any most-needed capacity … is really going to require major investment into the grid itself.”

     Neil Wilmshurst is the Senior Vice President of Energy System Resilience and Chief Nuclear Operator at EPRI. He said that in the developed world the challenge is integrating renewables, reliability, and resilience in the context of increasing demand. He mentioned that conservative estimates put future electricity demand at twice or three times the current demand. “If you look at the amount of hydrogen people say could be in demand in the US, it would take the entire current generation capacity of the US to produce it. That is the kind of magnitude of generation we’re talking about. Then you throw on top of that the coming load from data centers.” Electricity demand in developing countries is also rapidly expanding. A major challenge will be simultaneously increasing electricity supply in the developed world while electrifying the developing world.
     Iva Brkic is the Secretary of UNECE’s Sustainable Energy Division. She noted a recent International Energy Agency (IEA) report which estimated that there was a need to add or refurbish a total of more than fifty million miles of grids by 2040, the equivalent of the existing global grid. She said, “We need to double it in the next 14 years to meet our targets. So where are those resources going to come from? Where are the critical raw materials that we need to identify, to secure the supply chains, to really build that infrastructure? Now we add another layer to this – keeping the resiliency but also the reliability of that grid.”
     Brkic said that the effects of climate change are already being experienced around the globe. “How can we ensure that the system that we are now redesigning and building and modernizing can withstand those impacts of climate change – the heatwaves, the droughts. This is something that we need to pay attention to.”
     Brkic continued, “At the UNECE, we like to think also about the aspects of balancing between delivering on energy security, affordability and environmental sustainability. And when we think now about modernising the electricity system, it’s also about balancing those aspects and creating the resiliency while actually cleaning the energy system.”
    Wassim Ballout is an energy analyst at EDF’s Corporate Strategy Division. The electricity generation sector is still one of the highest emitters of CO2. Many countries rely heavily on fossil fuels for electricity production. He said, “One of the biggest challenges will be to satisfy this significant demand growth with decarbonized production. Not only decarbonizing the existing production but also to cope with the significant increase … the challenge would be to invest in all low-cost, low-emission technologies and to have a technological neutral approach and have good incentives to do that.”
Please read Part 2 next

Government awards £196m to support development of advanced nuclear fuels plant businessgreen.com

Preventing nuclear devastation: U.S. must upgrade its missile defense capabilities washingtontimes.com

Russia defends veto of UN resolution to prohibit nukes in outer space, urges vote to ban all weapons apnews.com

Iran and the UN nuclear agency are still discussing how to implement a 2023 deal on inspections yahoo.com