Takahama unit 3 is the most recent nuclear reactor to attempt a restart in Japan. fukuleaks.org
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Geiger Readings for Dec 31, 2015
Ambient office = 77 nanosieverts per hourAmbient outside = 80 nanosieverts per hourSoil exposed to rain water = 93 nanosieverts per hourCarrot from Central Market = 102 nanosieverts per hourTap water = 46 nanosieverts per hourFiltered water = 39 nanosieverts per hour -
Nuclear Weapons 182 – Cold War Nuclear Bunker For Sale In Georgia
In October of 2014, there was an article in the Irish Times about a secret underground bunker in the state of George in the U.S. that could supposedly survive a twenty kiloton nuclear bomb explosion. In July of 2015, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a story about “places in Georgia that you cannot visit.” Then, in November of 2015, there was series of stories in the media about the bunker. Depending on the news source, the value of the bunker is between five million and fifty million dollars. It is reported that the bunker is currently for sale for seventeen and one half million dollars.
When reporters tried to track down the seller, they ran into a few problems. The address given as 123 Private Dr. was obviously fake. The listing on the Harry Norman real estate website gave the name of the seller as Sister Hood. Attempts to reach Sister Hood at the phone number given went to voicemail and were not replied to.
Online research yielded the real street address and more details about the bunker including the name of a real estate agent, Dany Koe of Colliers International, who had previously listed the property for sale. When contacted, Koe said that he had visited the property. He thought that the current asking price was too high. He had had the property assessed as worth nine million dollars, had listed it for seven million dollars and had only had offers up to three million over the several years that he listed it. The co-owner of the property said that they had decided to sell only part of the property where the bunker was located which was why the offers were so low. Now they are selling the entire property.
Koe posted information about the bunker in a CNN blog in July of 2014. He said that the bunker was constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1969. The bunker cost around nine million dollars to build. It was apparently part of a network of similar facilities that were intended to insure government communications in case of nuclear attack. AT&T operated the facility into the 1990s until it was decommissioned after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. In 2009, a company named Bastion Holdings purchased the property and ran it as a training facility for government and military personnel. In 2012, the property was renovated for about two and a half million dollars and then listed for sale.
This might be the ideal home for someone with a lot of money and a fear of nuclear war. Unfortunately, if nuclear war did break out, merely being in a buried bunker would not insure survival. The bunker would have to be outfitted with an independent source of power, industrial air scrubbers and filters, and sufficient stocks of water, food and medicines to sustain the people living in it for years. Eventually, after the supplies ran out or the equipment broke down, the inhabitants would have to emerge. They would find a devastated radioactive landscape with polluted water, air and soil, and billions of people dead. So much for survival.
Cutaway artist’s concept of the bunker:
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Geiger Readings for Dec 30, 2015
Ambient office = 79 nanosieverts per hourAmbient outside = 122 nanosieverts per hourSoil exposed to rain water = 131 nanosieverts per hourMango from Central Market = 43 nanosieverts per hourTap water = 115 nanosieverts per hourFiltered water = 96 nanosieverts per hour -
Nuclear reactors 316 – The Chinese Have High Nuclear Ambitions
I have blogged before about China’s ambitious plans for expanding their use of nuclear power. The latest big Chinese five year plan covers from 2016 to 2020. The plan says that China is going to invest seventy eight billion dollars to build seven new reactors each year from 2016 to 2020. China will have eighty eight gigawatts of nuclear power by 2020 under the plan. Projected further into the future, China expects to have one hundred and ten nuclear reactors operating by 2030. Beyond that, China wants to spend up to a trillion dollars to generate two hundred and fifty gigawatts with nuclear reactors by 2050. Considering estimates of other countries projected use of nuclear power, the 2050 estimate would have China generating one fourth of the world’s nuclear power.
Currently, China has twenty seven operating reactors and twenty four reactors under construction. The Chinese government has approved the construction of six new nuclear power reactors based on the Chinese Hualong-1 design. Westinghouse Electric is a U.S. based nuclear technology company owned by Toshiba, a Japanese company. Westinghouse is scheduled to begin operating its first AP1000 pressurized water reactor in China in 2016. Westinghouse hopes that China will order ten more AP1000 reactors to be constructed in the next ten years.
China has ambitions to be the number one exporter of nuclear power reactors. They hope to export as many as eight Chinese designed reactors by 2020.
China has just signed a deal to help finance a new French power reactor at Hinkley Point in England. Part of the deal is reported to be permission for China to build a Chinese designed reactor in England. It is widely believed that this reactor is being built to be a demonstration model for the Chinese reactor export business.
Argentina is in negotiation with China to build its fourth nuclear power reactor. This reactor would be built by the same company that is building the Chinese reactor in England as part of the Hinkley Point agreement. The reactor will be based on a Chinese design and built by Chinese technicians. The agreement will be worth about five billion dollars.
One advantage that China has over its competitors for the international nuclear power reactor market lies in the fact that China has more forges than any other country. They have invested massively in industrial infrastructure. Forges are needed to make the steel pressure vessels that contain the nuclear reactor cores.
Another major advantage that China has is that it can construct nuclear reactors much more cheaply than competing countries. Six reactors being built at Yangjiang in southern China are projected to cost about twelve billion dollars in total or about two billion dollars each. Other nuclear reactor projects being sold by other countries cost about six billion dollars each. In general, single Chinese reactors are projected to cost at least thirty percent less than reactors from other countries.
It will be interesting to watch China attempt to meet its very optimistic goals for nuclear power, domestic and exported. Big nuclear projects are having difficulty finding sufficient funding these days. Often, the country constructing the reactor will offer a substantial loan to the country buying the reactor. The success of the Chinese nuclear export program will depend on the health of the Chinese economy which has been showing signs of weakness lately.
China has very serious problems with corruption which has led to serious problems in some construction projects. If a poorly built Chinese nuclear reactor breaks down and releases radiation, the international market for Chinese reactors could cool off very rapidly
Model of a Hualong-1 Chinese reactor:
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Geiger Readings for Dec 29, 2015
Ambient office = 108 nanosieverts per hourAmbient outside = 94 nanosieverts per hourSoil exposed to rain water = 92 nanosieverts per hourRedlearf lettuce from Central Market = 113 nanosieverts per hourTap water = 121 nanosieverts per hourFiltered water = 118 nanosieverts per hour -
Nuclear Reactors 315 – The Global Price of Uranium Is Rising
Following the nuclear disaster at Fukushima in March of 2011, the price of uranium plunged as reactors with turned off in several countries and new reactor projects were suspended across the world. By 2014, the price of uranium had fallen from sixty dollars a pound to twenty eight dollars a pound which was a nine-year low. Currently there is a global surplus of up to twenty seven million pounds.
The price of some major commodities has fallen in the last year due to oversupply, slowing of Chinese economic growth and monetary tightening in the U.S. Crude oil, the commodity that is traded the most lost thirty five percent of its value this year. Copper, which is a benchmark for commodities fell twenty six percent while gold went down almost ten percent.
The price of uranium has been slowly recovering this year against the other falling commodities because the international climate agreement that was just signed in Paris which supports nuclear power to reduce carbon emissions. There is also a growing demand for nuclear power in Asia. Nuclear power supplies about eleven percent of the world’s electricity but that share is projected to rise as China and India expand their nuclear fleets.
China is suffering horrible air pollution from the burning of coal. In an attempt to reduce coal use, China plans to build up to eight nuclear power plants a year for the next five years.
India currently generates about four percent of its electricity from nuclear power. In an attempt to eliminate severe power outages and meet the unfilled demand for electricity, India wants to generate twenty five percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants by 2050.
Japan turned off all of its forty six nuclear power reactors following the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. It is slowly restarting about thirty of its forty six nuclear power reactors while planning to decommission the rest.
In the United States, rising demand and strategic stockpiling of uranium saw the spot prices paid by U.S. utilities for uranium increase eighteen percent over the past years, from and average of thirty three dollars a pound to thirty nine dollars a pound. The United States is the world’s biggest consumer of uranium followed by France and China.
Kazakhstan is the largest producer of uranium in the world followed by Canada and Australia. Kazakhstan has just signed a deal with some Chinese companies to build a nuclear fuel plant in Kazakhstan. (Public protests shut down an attempt to build a fuel processing plant in China.)
Cameco, the Canadian company which is the world’s biggest uranium mining company, has just signed a five year contract to supply uranium to nuclear power reactors in India.
It is estimated that one hundred and fifty million pounds of uranium were consumed in 2015. It is projected that this will rise almost to 200 million pounds per year by 2020.
As the global number of operating nuclear power reactors rises, the demand for and price of uranium will also rise. Merrill Lynch and BMO Nesbitt Burns forecast that uranium may rise as high as sixty dollars a pound by 2018. While the Chinese and Indian nuclear plans may be over ambitious, investing in uranium will be profitable in the near future.
