Christian Parenti Believes That Established Nuclear Plants Are "Zombies" - Don't Tell The Customers, Who Seem To Love Using The 800 Billion Kilowatt Hours Per Year That Those Plants Produce

CBSNews.com - a company whose lineage includes a period when its corporate name was Westinghouse and its basic nuclear plant design was the basis for approximately 2/3 of the plants built in the United States - has published an opinion piece by Chrisian Parenti titled What To Do With Zombie Nuke Plants. The piece originally appeared in The Nation under the title of Zombie Nuke Plants. The basic premise of the article is that existing US nuclear power plants are being run into the ground and that the situation is being enabled by a regulator that is not paying attention.

The article angered me, especially since it has no relationship to the reality that I have seen in numerous visits to US nuclear plants or in many years worth of association with nuclear trained professionals working for both industry and government agencies. There is little doubt within the nuclear industry that safety is the number one mission and no doubt at all that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a tough minded regulator that will not hesitate to halt operations or levy a fine if they believe that there is a problem.

From the day that I initially began nuclear power training, I recognized that I had entered a demanding profession with exacting standards of performance. That first impression remains strong - even in a period in our American history when most fields have adopted cost-cutting as their modus operandi and when the Wal-Mart philosophy of "cheaper is better" is endemic. Nuclear power remains an area where the participants know that performance is important, procedures are meant to be followed, and the word "shall" in a document means exactly what it says.

According to Mr. Parenti, a professional journalist and book author who cannot have spent much time at any plant or among the professionals who man those plants, our current fleet of reactors are "leaking, rickety old wrecks" that were only designed to last 30-40 years. Nothing could be farther from the truth, something that any honest journalist would be able to determine through the use of recorded facts or observation during a visit. For a good description of the conditions in a typical nuclear plant written by an questioning and critical outsider, I encourage you to pick up Gwyneth Cravens excellent book titled Power to Save the World and read her descriptions of visits to the Oconee and McGuire Nuclear power plants in chapters 11 and 12.

As a former steam plant engineer, I can tell you that it would be impossible to achieve an average capacity factor of more than 90% over a sustained 5 year period from a fleet of machines that have any resemblance to the words "leaky and rickety". Steam is an energetic and dangerous tool that must be retained in resilient piping systems - if it routinely leaks, people will get hurt, equipment will get damaged and even hardest to hide - power output will decrease. That is simply NOT happening in our nuclear plants; when a component approaches a point where it is leaky or unreliable, that component gets replaced to enable continued dependable operation. When you are operating a plant that produces a couple of million dollars worth of revenue every day that it operates - and will keep doing that for another 30-40 years, you want to take good care of that plant.

Radiation is also impossible to hide; there is a good reason why doctors like to use radioactive isotopes in medical diagnostic procedures - they can use sensitive equipment to follow those tracers through all of the body's systems. The levels that can be measured are FAR lower than the levels that will cause any negative health effects for human beings.

A good way to understand the current physical condition of US nuclear plants is to go to an old car show and talk to the owners of fine, vintage automobiles. Crawl around and look under the hood and into the nooks and crannies of the vehicle. What you will see is machinery that has received a lot of tender loving care over the years by people who take pride in what they do. You would feel perfectly safe in getting in and taking a ride, just as anyone who lives near a US nuclear plant should - and generally does, according to many surveys - feel comfortable and proud to have that plant as a neighbor. Here is a quote from a July 2009 survey titled Third Biennial Nuclear Power Plant Neighbor Public Opinion Tracking Survey conducted by Bisconti Research

Opinions of nuclear power plant neighbors toward nuclear energy and the local nuclear power plant continue to be highly favorable in 2009. Now, 90 percent hold a favorable impression of the local nuclear power plant, and 76 percent would find it acceptable to add a new reactor at the nearby nuclear power plant site. Compared to 2007, attitudes on a variety of measures are slightly more favorable.

Critical thinkers who understand the world and are not motivated by the rewards that can come from spreading fear and using sensationalism as a way to sell books and articles will recognize that surveys conducted in the neighborhoods near nuclear plants include a sample population of plant workers, suppliers, families and friends. Some will see the plant regularly, but all will be exposed to gossip and casual conversation. For Parenti to be correct, those people would have to all be hypnotized or lobotomized to be able to ignore any rumors about poor working conditions, improper maintenance or sloppy adherence to operating procedures.

Either tens of thousands of people living near the plants plus thousands of professional regulators plus thousands of professional, licensed operators are wrong about the condition of their plants or Parenti, a rather lonely voice, is wrong. I have no doubts about who to believe - Parenti is obviously a man with an agenda whose grasp of reality is questionable. (I have to admit, I almost used the word "idiot" instead of "man" in the previous sentence, but I thought that might be a bit too harsh. I could, however, be wrong on that point.)

If you want to see the man in action promoting his agenda, you can find a video clip of his interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now at As U.S. Probes Radiation at Three Mile Island, Christian Parenti on Enduring “Zombie Nuke Plants” Nationwide. My impression is that the video is a pretty fair illustration of why Parenti's work should be taken with a huge dose of salt and needs to be exposed for the claptrap that it is.

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Quick View of Atomic Insights Visitor Map

I got distracted this morning with doing some Analytics work on Atomic Insights, trying to figure out more about who reads this publication. If you have not tried Google Analytics and you have a web site or blog, you should. Fascinating and somewhat addicting to page through all of the different ways to look at site statistics - if you happen to be a geeky sort of person. I was particularly interested in looking at the portion of the stats page that showed me where people who read are coming from - the below is the overall summary for the period from October 26-Nov 25. With this system, you can drill down to find out a lot of the underlying details - like the fact that there were 72 visits from Largo, FL and 2 from Vicksburg, MS.

I thought you might enjoy helping me fulfill a challenge - I want to try to turn this whole map green, though it might be hard to attract a visitor from Greenland or Chad.

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Established Environmental Groups Are Grudgingly Accepting Nuclear Energy

In the November 23, 2009 issue of the Washington Post, there is an article titled Nuclear Power Regains Support that describes how some established Environmental groups and individuals have decided that nuclear power can be part of a set of tools that will enable a transition away from fossil fuels. A major reason given for what many believe is a surprising shift in politics is a sense of urgency about slowing down the emission of greenhouse gases from burning massive quantities of hydrocarbons. The waste products that are being dumped into the atmosphere are causing measurable changes in the global atmospheric chemistry.

The article details how Steven Tindale, a man who once led a group of Greenpeace activists at a protest of a UK nuclear power plant on the shores of the North Sea, has left the organization and now supports the expansion of nuclear energy as part of Great Britain's plan to combat climate change.

"It really is a question about the greater evil -- nuclear waste or climate change," Tindale said. "But there is no contest anymore. Climate change is the bigger threat, and nuclear is part of the answer."

There are other groups who have determined that their best path currently is to focus their efforts on fighting fossil fuels and supporting alternatives like wind and solar without expending their efforts in fighting against nuclear energy. They recognize that certain provisions in climate change legislation will probably result in the construction of a number of new nuclear power plants and they have decided to accept that result without weighing in on one side or the other.

But Steve Cochran, director of the National Climate Campaign at the Environmental Defense Fund -- a group that opposed new nuclear plants in the United States as recently as 2005 -- also described a new and evolving "pragmatic" approach coming from environmental camps. "I guess you could call it 'grudging acceptance,' " he said.

"If we are really serious about dealing with climate change, we are going to have to be willing to look at a range of options and not just rule things off the table," he said. "We may not like it, but that's the way it is."

That position, observers say, marks a significant departure. "Because of global warming, most of the big groups have become less active on their nuclear campaign, and almost all of us are taking another look at our internal policies," said Mike Childs, head of climate change issues for Friends of the Earth in Britain. "We've decided not to officially endorse it, in part because we feel the nuclear lobby is already strong enough. But we are also no longer focusing our energies on opposing it."

My analysis of the strength of the technical advantages of nuclear energy is that anyone who is not actively opposed to nuclear energy development is effectively FOR nuclear energy. (If you are not against us, you are for us.) That is especially true when the group that has made the shift has been working so hard against the technology for so many years. Think about a massive tug of war - if some of the people on the other side simply let go and stand up, the rope moves rather rapidly in your direction. That is, of course, assuming that your side does not stop pulling.

The article highlighted the cost of new nuclear facilities as the one remaining sticking point for some of the people who are still fighting. The funny thing about that issue is that it is one where fighting an inevitable development simply increases the cost. In a town that is going to host a facility - where the facility has strong support already, there is a credible group of companies building the facility and there is sufficient financial backing - expeditious project completion is the best way to keep costs under control. If someone adamantly opposes the project because they are sure that the plant is going to result in an increased monthly power bill, the worst response would be to put roadblocks in the way of the plant. Time is money and delays will add cost - that can be proven with plenty of examples and statistics. If any of the opposition to Shoreham, for example, came from Long Island residents worried mostly about costs, they have been paying the bills for 20 years without receiving any power at all from the plant.

A situation where cost is the last real remaining issue for a new facility is one where problem solving engineers and project managers have a reasonably good track record. So far, the engineers and managers responsible for new nuclear power plants designs have not had a chance to demonstrate that their refinements have made a significant difference in construction costs. I want to be careful about how I say this, but anyone who has ever worked in a nuclear plant can attest to dozens, if not hundreds of policies and processes that result in more expenditures than what would be required in order to operate reliably and safely. As is the case in any effective cost reduction effort, the key is steady focus and incremental steps.

Unfortunately, nuclear energy is still a business where talking much about cost can be politically hazardous. Most nukes have grown up in a business where they have been told that "cost is no object" and where they can run into trouble with their regulators if they question the cost of complying with even quite silly rules that have no impact on safety.

There is an example happening right now with the response to the very minor airborne radiation incident at Three Mile Island Unit One. Despite the fact that the effects were routine levels of exposure, the contamination has all been cleaned up and the root cause is pretty obvious to anyone who understands how cutting and grinding works, the NRC is dispatching dozens of investigators to the plant. The company will have to devote hundreds of man-hours to the process of a formal investigation, they will lose production for several more days, and they will produce reams of paper to be stored on shelves.

Our word for such an occurrence when I was on a sub was "flap". This kind of thing can happen when there are people who believe that perfection is possible in any human endeavor - when something very tiny goes wrong in a system they flop and twitch until they get tired. At the end of the "flap" process the only real change is that one party has less money and many others have earned some per diem, captured some overtime, sold some replacement power, or earned some additional consulting fees. It is not surprising that there is more cost than there should be associated with building and operating nuclear facilities, but there is plenty of room for ratcheting down those costs as all of the participants involved recognize what is safe, what is not and how to react when safety is not threatened.

For now, I am encouraged by an attitude of grudging acceptance from formerly resolute opponents and excited by the opportunity to demonstrate that nuclear technology has significant room for cost improvement if that is the last remaining hurdle. The progress that nuclear plant operators in the US and many other countries have made in terms of increasing the value of their existing plants through better production without significantly increased cost gives me reason for optimism that we can apply similar process and design improvements to the task of building new plants and actually reducing the unnecessary costs associated with operating them.

Of course, like most people, I hope that the skills I plan to bring to the table are not those that will someday be considered to be unnecessary costs. I fully understand why radiation protection experts - for example - might be worried about keeping their jobs as people realize just how many of them are redundant.

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Three Mile Island Minor Airborne Radioactivity Incident Explanation

On Saturday, November 21, 2009, at about 4:00 pm installed radiation monitors inside the containment building at Three Mile Island Unit One showed higher than normal readings. The normal actions for such indications were taken. People in the area were directed to leave the building while the source of the radioactivity was located. Once they left the area, they would have been surveyed to determine if any radioactive material had gotten on their clothing or skin. All of the workers would have been wearing dosimeters - devices that measure how much radiation they receive.

Aside: Even trained nuclear workers sometimes get a little bit confused about the distinction between radioactive material and radiation. I had a trainer in my early days who had a rather earthy mnemonic - he taught me that radioactive material was like crap while radiation was like the smell that comes from crap. He said that helped him remember that getting radioactive material on his clothes and skin was a bad thing that would require washing to get rid of it - and that he would never want to ingest radioactive material. He told me that it also helped him to remember that you could stand a bit of radiation now and again, but that you would not want to get too close to a source and you would definitely want to limit your time of exposure to the "smell" coming from radioactive material. End Aside.

Since TMI Unit 1 is currently in the middle of a repair period that includes replacement of its steam generators, people at the scene suspected that the source of the airborne radioactivity causing the indication was suspended particles released during pipe grinding and cutting. Since all piping in a primary coolant system is welded, it is always necessary to cut lines during a steam generator replacement and those lines often contain radioactive materials.

Before conducting any cutting, radiation health specialists would have surveyed the pipes to ensure there were no surprisingly high readings indicating a concentration of activated corrosion products, but it would never be a surprise to find that the inside of the piping had higher than background levels of contamination. The pipes in the primary coolant system carry very hot water through a system of metal pipes and through a nuclear reactor. Inevitably, there will be some amount of corrosion inside the pipes and some of that corrosion would have been exposed to neutrons in the core and become activated. Nukes have a rather cute name for the corrosion found inside primary pipes - we call it CRUD. (Which happens to be an acronym for Chalk River Unidentified Deposits.)

People working in the maintenance area would generally be suited up in anti-contamination clothing, wearing gloves and rubber overshoes, hoods and face/eye protection. There was most likely an area outside the work boundaries where people would not be suited up. The people who were not in anti-c's would have been the primary people of concern when the radiation monitor indicated that there was some airborne contamination.

All of the work was taking place inside the reactor containment building. According to the NRC Event posting, no contamination was found outside of the reactor building. The highest dose received by any worker was 40 mrem. To put that in context, the locally assigned annual limit for an occupational nuclear worker is 2,000 mrem. The legal annual limit is 5,000 mrem. It is not unusual for a nuclear worker to receive more than 40 mrem during routine maintenance work involving primary system piping. Heck, I got more than that during several reactor compartment inspection tours when I was not even doing any system work and I was careful to avoid hot spots.

All in all, it was a pretty boring event. The plant owners took action to notify the appropriate stakeholders because they knew that there would be media interest.

Not surprisingly, there were some media outlets that engaged in a bit of sensationalism and used scary words like spills and contamination. There were even a few that tried to use the incident to stimulate memories of the events at TMI-2 in 1979.

After all, there is usually not much to fill news time on a Saturday evening other than college football results.

NRC Press Release on the event dated November 23, 2009

Additional background information (Posted November 24, 2009 0156)

I was curious about how TMI Unit 1 has been performing in recent years. Here is the plant's capacity factor data over the last three full years: (available from nei.org at the following shortened URL - http://bit.ly/5LShHy)

Capacity factor (2008) - 106.7
Average Capacity factor (2006-2008) - 102.7

(Because of the way that maximum power ratings are determined and the way that steam plants can perform if the heat sink is at a lower temperature than assumed, it is possible to operate at greater than 100% of "rated" power over a significant portion of the year. However, achieving an AVERAGE Cf of more than 100% over a three year period is very impressive and puts TMI Unit 1 in second place out of 104 operating nuclear plants in the US by that measure.)

Update: (Posted November 25, 2009 at 0309)

Fact checked summary report available at Reuters UPDATE 1-NRC monitors Pa. Three Mile Isl after contamination

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Bingaman Promises a Bill Requiring The Department of Energy To Develop and License Two Modular Reactor Designs

On November 16, 2009, at the American Nuclear Society Winter Meeting, Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) gave a speech titled Nuclear Energy in a Carbon Constrained World that included the following intriguing paragraph:

“I plan to introduce a second bill, to complement Senator Udall’s bill. My new bill would require the Secretary of Energy to develop and demonstrate, in partnership with the private sector, two designs for small modular nuclear reactors – less than 350 megawatts electric in size. The Department would help demonstrate the ability to license these reactors by funding applications to obtain design certification by 2018, and to obtain a combined operating license for each of the designs by 2021. Having certified and licensable designs for small modular nuclear reactors would be a significant boost to the field of nuclear power, and would help nuclear energy be a cost-effective contender for a broader array of carbon-free electric generation needs in the future.

The rest of the talk is also worth reading, but everyone has their own priorities and interest areas. Small modular reactors happen to be one of my primary focus areas, so I thought that paragraph was worth highlighting for future reference.

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Update on Babcock and Wilcox mPower Modular Reactor

During the ANS Winter Meeting, I stopped by the B&W booth and had a chat with some of the booth representatives about the progress that the company is making on its mPower^TM modular reactor. We had a good conversation about steady progress and a project that is meeting its planned milestones. I received a promise for an updated set of materials and graphics, but in the meantime I also stumbled across a detailed article on Nuclear Engineering International titled B&W's Baby that provides a good deal of information that has been released in the months following the company's initial announcement in June.

The article talks about the fuel cycle, the steam generator configuration, the way that the primary system is fully contained inside the pressure vessel with no external piping, the way that the fuel storage system will work, the way that the control rods are integrated with the fuel assemblies to eliminate the need for dissolved boron, and the advantage that B&W has as an American manufacturer with the already certified capability to manufacture large pressure containing vessels the size of the one that they propose to use for the mPower^TM. (The pressure vessel for that system is essentially the same size as a steam generator for one of today's operating light water reactors.)

Here is an interesting passage from that article that made me smile and supports my optimism that the mPower^TM is on a trajectory that will lead to a successful licensing application and initial market introduction during the next ten years.

B&W’s biggest customer, the US military, continues to rely on the company for nuclear submarine reactors. Mowry says that US military technology protecting its nuclear reactors will not be transferred to the mPower reactor project, partly because they are secret, and partly because the performance requirements of civil nuclear reactors are much less stringent than in submarines. Still, the company is in a privileged position to use the same manufacturing lines, and the same brainpower, that build the Navy-spec NSSS. “The factories are already there. Our additional investment for the initial stages of market adoption are minimal,” Mowry says, adding that if the project takes off, the company would be prepared to invest in new manufacturing lines.

I can offer just a bit of color to that description that is based on my professional associations with B&W's primary customer. There is little chance that the company would have made that statement without having received permission from Naval Reactors; that relationship is too valuable to put it at risk. Despite all of the frustrations that I have had over the years in dealing with NR, it is an organization that encourages its contractors to take great care and do a lot of homework before making any delivery promises. It has also developed a solid reputation as an organization whose contractors deliver real equipment that works reliably, not paper reactors.

Image Credit: Image used with permission from B&W. Here is the caption provided - A single B&W mPower^TM nuclear reactor module inside its own independent, underground containment.

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Clean Skies News Coverage of American Nuclear Society Winter Meeting

I have had a busy week trying to time share between a day job and at least some attendance and coverage of the American Nuclear Society Winter Meeting. While searching for other views of the event that I might have missed earlier in the week, I found the below segment titled Nuclear Industry Holds Winter Meeting on Future on Clean Skies News.


One thing that might stick in the craw of long time members of the ANS is the incorrect characterization of the meeting as an "industry" gathering. The American Nuclear Society is a technical society made up of people from academia, industry and national laboratories. It has members who are interested in nuclear medicine, isotope measuring devices, and particle physics. Though people with an interest in nuclear power play a role in the society, it is NOT an industry group.

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Balanced View of Nuclear Waste Storage Issue From Wisconsin Based Television Station

Fox 11 News out of Green Bay, Wisconsin has been airing a story on the future of nuclear power. The most recent segment was a journalistically balanced view about used nuclear fuel - what most people call "nuclear waste". One part of this story that bothers me is that the plant owners and their representatives apparently refused to participate in the production by allowing interviews or camera visits.


It appears that the journalists did their job, but the end result is that the story was lacking some key facts and responses because a key player refused to engage in the discussion. I hope that someday the public relations people associated with operating nuclear power plants will be freed by their leaders to engage in what most of us consider to be an important debate.

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Neutron Doodle - a 2002 Song Whose Time Has Come to Go Viral

Gail Marcus, who blogs at Nuclear Power Talk, shared a story on Saturday November 14, 2009 about a song contest that she supported during her tenure as president of the American Nuclear Society. It was inspired by memories of the artistic work produced during the Great Depression with government support that was designed not just to provide jobs to singers and song writers, but also to help educate the public about the long term benefits of investing government money into building new hydroelectric dams.


I have come to realize that hydroelectric dams and nuclear power plants have a great deal in common. They both require a significant capital investment, they both provide a large number of construction jobs, they both produce electricity without any air pollution and they both raise the ire of the fossil fuel industry.

With the help of people like Gail, who shared this story and video on her blog and Kevin McCoy who wrote the song and produced the video with help from a company singing group called "Tritium", perhaps hydroelectric dams and nuclear energy will have one more thing in common - the use of music to share their story.

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Movember Fund Raising Plea - Beneficiaries are the Lance Armstrong Foundation and the Prostate Cancer Foundation

I am highjacking the Atomic Insights feed and blog site for a brief advertisement. People who visit the site instead of receiving posts via RSS feed might have noticed a series of profile photo changes as I went clean shaven for the first time in 28 years and as I have gradually replaced my mustache with a new "mo" - as they say in Australia.

You may or may not understand the reason for that change in my face. I have been participating in the Movember fund raising campaign whose tag line is "change the face of men's health". By making a visible change, my "mo" brothers and I have been able to start conversations with people about an important research area, sort of like the pink ribbons, hat brims and gloves that you see during October.

As we enter the last third of the month, I ask you to consider making a donation to the cause. Generous friends, family and Atomic Insights readers have already given a total of $560 as of this morning. If you want to make the donation and give me credit for raising the funds, please click on the logo:


Thank you and have a happy rest of Movember.

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FACTBOX-U.S. Coal Plant captures and stores 2% of its carbon - at a cost of $3650 per kilowatt of capacity for just the CCS system

I saw a deceptive headline in my Google Alert for new nuclear power plants this morning. Can you imagine - a headline writer who chooses a deceptive headline!

The story, titled FACTBOX-U.S. Coal Plant captures and stores 2% of its carbon comes from Reuters News Service. It sits above an article that provides some interesting information about a demonstration project at a West Virginia coal plant. After reading the article, I determined that the key points were not well represented in the headline. The demonstration plant is only capturing a tiny fraction of the CO2 that the plant produces and it is doing so with a capital cost investment for the capture and storage system that is not so far from the cost per kilowatt capacity of a brand new nuclear power plant.

Though that cost might include some monitoring and testing facilities that would not be needed in a full scale model, most of the required systems are pipes, pumps and stack gas capturing systems whose cost would not appear to be something that can be drastically reduced.

*The project diverts flue gas from the plant's smokestack to a 20,000 square foot (1,858 sq metres) structure where the carbon dioxide is trapped using a chilled ammonia solution.

*Once separated from the other gases, the carbon is compressed into a liquid-like state and transported through about 1,300 feet (400 metres) of pipeline to two separate sites at the plant.

*The carbon is then injected into saline reservoirs about 8,000 feet (2,440 metres) underground.

Though some people will vociferously disagree when I state that "clean coal" is a figment of a marketing department's imagination, it might be more difficult to disagree with the statement that affordable clean coal is a very challenging goal.

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Two Meetups At ANS Winter Meeting - Value of Face to Face Interactions

Like many people who blog, I use it as a tool to communicate with people who share a common interest, but not a common location. Sometimes, however, there are wonderful opportunities to actually meet people in person with whom you have shared thoughts and ideas for several years. I had just such an opportunity last night - in fact, in a "cup overflowing" kind of way, I had two such opportunities.

The first event was a gathering of nuclear bloggers, micro-bloggers, podcasters, and even a few lurkers who read a lot of what the rest of us continue to produce. Dan Yurman of Idaho Samizdat (BTW, Dan, will you be changing the name of your blog when you make that move?) was the primary spark with the idea, but Jarret Adams of Areva Blog, David Bradish of NEI Nuclear Notes, and John Wheeler of This Week In Nuclear jumped in and worked together to make it all happen. (I am sure that there were others who made sure that the food showed up on time, that the room was arranged, and that the posters were prominently displayed. I apologize if I have forgotten to provide credit where it is due, but that is why I have comments enabled here.)

A good time was had by all, the conversation was lively, and renewed sense of fellowship was reinforced. We have a strong foundation of knowledge that we are learning to share with others in a way that makes our technology more accessible and understandable. The more that people understand why we are excited to be nukes, the more that people will be willing to allow us to do our important work of producing vast quantities of clean, reliable, affordable, energy. They might even get to the point where I am - they will be demanding an atomic energy plant in their own backyard.

I was enjoying myself immensely at the blogger get together, but I excused myself after about an hour because I had also signed up to attend a reception for Women in Nuclear (WIN). Despite the name, the organization does accept members of both genders; I joined up a few months ago. One of the the things that is really encouraging about the second Atomic Age is that it may very well be led by some of the women who have recognized a profession that builds on both interest in math and science and caring about one's effect on the world. I think that the "safety culture" that the nuclear industry encourages - actually demands - is something that is quite comfortable for women. Of course, like most men, I am kind of ignorant about what really motivates and inspires women, but as the father of two adult daughters who have already achieved significant successes, I have at least an inkling of understanding.

The WIN gathering was in the upper level of a local sushi restaurant. The food was far better than what we had at the blogger gathering (sorry, I hope that does not offend the sponsor there) and the company was just as lively. I made some good contacts that might enable some future articles or Atomic Show podcasts. I also got the sense of excitement and positive vibes that make me believe that the Nuclear Renaissance is real. I heard about several recent career moves, some job openings, and some future developments that make me glad to be planning to join the industry for real during my second (or is it third) act.

Finally, on my way back through the hotel lobby to my car, I ran into an friend that I have known for years - ever since she invited me to speak to a group of nuclear engineering students at Penn State in the mid 1990s. Madeline told me to check out the recent press release from her organization that detailed the successful results from advanced gas reactor fuel testing. The test demonstrated that TRISO coated fuel particles manufactured by B&W have been able to achieve an average burn up of 16% of the initial heavy metal loading with a peak of 19%. There were NO fuel particle failures. As Madeline told me, there were some critical observers that asked if the fission product monitors were actually functional since they showed such low numbers - of course, they had been rigorously tested repeatedly during the entire three year program.

Update: (Posted November 18, 2009 at 0549) The New York Times Green Inc. blog has a story about the AGR fuel testing. End Update.

There is no doubt - the nuclear technology field is here to stay. There is little doubt that the field is going to be making major contributions to the world's prosperity during the upcoming decades. I am just glad to be young enough to be able to participate and help many fine, intelligent and interesting people turn solid design work into real machinery that produces useful power to save the world.

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Food For Critical Thinking In Light Of Recent Anti-Nuclear Article in Scientific American

The November 1009 issue of Scientific American carried a cover story titled A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables by Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi. That article has received some pointed criticism from some of my favorite pro-nuclear bloggers and podcasters, including John Wheeler who produced an episode titled The Un-Scientific American for his This Week In Nuclear podcast and Barry Brook, whose blog titled Critique of ‘A path to sustainable energy by 2030′ has attracted 139 comments so far.

As the resident cynic and suggester of ulterior motives in the energy debates, I found it rather interesting that I was greeted with the below page when I was doing some research for a previous post that resulted in me visiting the Scientific American web site. The visit engendered one of those ah ha moments that made me say - maybe that is why the editors at Scientific American have uncritically published a screen that includes death tolls and carbon emissions that would result from atomic bomb detonations as one of the costs of an increased use of nuclear energy. Perhaps it is all about pleasing the money sources known as advertisers. After all, that sometimes happens in the commercial media - despite all protestations to the contrary.

Just in case it is not completely obvious to you what I am talking about, take a good look at the ads in the below graphic. Siemens is one of the world's largest wind turbine manufacturers and Shell, one of the world's largest oil companies, is advertising for biofuels. Both wind and biofuels receive strong marketing messaging from Jacobson and Delucchi's article.

Just in case that visit was a fluke - ads change regularly on web sites - I took another screen shot when I visited the Jacobson and Delucchi article. Here is what that visit looked like:

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ANS President's Special Session - Global Opportunities For Right-Sized Reactors. Small Or Medium Power Outputs Are Often Just What Customer Ordered

Until very recently, the understanding held by most people associated with nuclear energy has been that nuclear energy plants must be very large to achieve the "economy of scale". Yesterday a group of several hundred ANS meeting attendees heard from representatives from the USA, Jordan, Mexico, Japan, and Russia that there are customers who are interested in using nuclear energy to meet needs in places where large power reactors simply will not fit. (A scheduled speaker from Argentina did not arrive to speak due to a travel delay.) The title of the session was ANS President’s Special Session: Global Opportunities for Right-Sized Reactors.

As Tom Sanders, the current president of the American Nuclear Society (ANS), said during his special session introduction, building nuclear energy production units that match customer needs is a topic that is "near and dear to my heart". Like Tom, I started my career in nuclear energy as an trainee on nuclear reactors that produced less than 1/20th as much power at full load as a "typical" 1000 MWe central station nuclear power plants. Those "little" reactors, however, were well suited for what many might consider to be a pretty big task - they provided all the power needed to propel a decent sized ship displacing 9,000 tons of sea water plus all of the power needed to provide atmosphere control, produce fresh water, and supply lighting, cooking and computing power for 150 people.

Outside of the Navy, there are thousands of ships plying the oceans with power plants that are roughly the same size as the one where I - and tens of thousands of other American sailors and officers - cut my atomic teeth. In total, those ocean going commercial ships consume about 6% of the world's annual oil output. They also produce a substantially larger portion of the world's sulfur dioxide and particle emissions since they generally burn a grade of oil that would be illegal in most land-based power plant.

Aside: There is a myth that needs to be dispelled - there is no need to use expensive, highly enriched uranium to build a reactor that can fit on board a ship. The NS Savannah, the only nuclear powered commercial ship that the US ever built, had a reactor that worked fine with just 5% enriched fuel. The necessary technology was known and well developed by the late 1950s. End Aside.

However, yesterday's special session was not about ocean shipping companies's propulsion power needs; it was about the ways that nuclear energy facilities that are far smaller than 1000 MWe could supply customers on land who are currently prevented from having a nuclear option. If you take propelling the ship out of the equation, a reactor with the same power output as the ones that I learned to operate could provide a small town of perhaps 20,000 average Americans - or several small towns of 20,000 average Chinese people with all of the power they need for a decent lifestyle. Based on common agreement and definition, the category of small or medium sized reactors includes any power plant that provides less than about 300 MW of electrical power - that is enough power to supply the power needs of a city that is the home of several hundred thousand people in a developed country.

During his introduction, Tom Sanders made an important statement:

The idea is catching on. In fact, we have support in the Congress now, support in the administration, and support within the White House. And that's great. I view these as an opportunity to revitalize US industry and our first speaker is going to talk about industry revitalization.

That first speaker was Mary Saunders, the Acting Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Manufacturing and Services at the US Department of Commerce. Her portfolio includes activities designed to ensure that US companies have the opportunity to compete as suppliers in the global market for goods and services. Her organization has a growing program aimed at encouraging the development and expansion of production capabilities for small and medium sized reactors - SMRs for short. She gave a number of specifics about what the Department of Commerce is doing to help US companies to obtain access to what she called "a rapidly growing international market." It was an encouraging talk, especially considering the fact that many people who lean to the right within the political spectrum make the assumption that the current Administration is not sufficiently supportive of nuclear energy.

There is a growing sense in Washington that nuclear energy is a place where people with diverse opinions can meet - it provides reliable, affordable, abundant energy, large employment opportunities, emission free power, and power that is not solely dependent on fuel sources with an unequal geographic distribution. Within that list of attributes are traits that meet the political objectives of conservatives, liberals and libertarians - with the possible exception of expanding market opportunities for coal, oil and gas producers.

After Ms. Saunders spoke, the rest of the panel provided short talks that identified their country's reasons for interest in SMRs. Most people in the audience should not have been surprised to find that Jordan, a country with about 5 million people, a total grid capacity of about 2500 MWe, a mostly desert country with some access to salt water, and a nearly complete dependence on imported fossil fuels would be interested in small and medium sized nuclear energy facilities as part of its announced goal to become an energy producer and to create a more sustainable water supply.

Aside: Here is another myth to be busted - nuclear plants do not have to be major potable water consumers. Though nuclear heated power plants often use water for cooling (like any other thermal power plant), they also can be arranged to use the waste heat to turn salty water into potable water useful for drinking, irrigation, and other human needs. They can also use low cost, off peak electricity to power pumps in reverse osmosis plants to produce vast quantities of affordable water. Islands or desert areas with access to salty, high mineral content water have a real, demonstrated need that can be met with nuclear energy. End Aside.

What may have been more surprising to attendees was that Japan, a densely populated and developed nation with a large power grid, also has a strong interest in right sized reactors. So does Russia, whose representative - Dr. Evgeny Velikov - proposed a joint venture with the US, and recommended a system where the energy customers could purchase just the energy services from SMR suppliers without having to make the full investment in fuel cycle facilities. The floating nuclear power plants that Russia has begun constructing are ideally suited for applications where the power plant gets moved to the place where the power is needed and then gets returned to the origin when the fuel has all been consumed. Dr. Velikov pointed to the Russian experience of decommissioning more than 100 nuclear submarines as evidence that this kind of system has already been well demonstrated.

Once the panel was finished, there was a few minutes left over for questions and answers. The first questioner made what I considered to be a huge leap of interpretation and asked about the policies that might be needed to enable unmanned reactors. As a former operator and maintainer of small reactors, I wanted to answer the question by pointing out that there is a rather large continuous number line between zero (unmanned) and the several hundred people required to operate and maintain a typical central station nuclear plant.

In my case, I led an engineering department with about 30 nuclear trained people. That small group was fully capable of independently operating and maintaining a modest sized reactor around the clock for months at a time. Like any large reactor facility, we were supplemented with specialists for certain kinds of maintenance or repairs. A facility that provides enough of a valuable commodity like electricity to supply tens of thousands of customers should be able to afford a few dozen operators, maintainers and security personnel for safe and secure 24x7 operation.

As people who know me might guess, I also asked a question. I directed my question to Ms. Saunders from the US Department of Commerce. Here is the exchange:

Adams: One of the obstacles to small and medium reactors here in the United States is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing fee structure, which assumes that a reactor is 1000 MW or greater, because the annual fee is about $4 million. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission obviously cannot really change that rule. Are you involved in the potential for taking a new look at that licensing fee structure so that American manufacturers can build for America as well as export? I would imagine that nobody is going to buy reactors that we won't buy ourselves.

Saunders: That's a very good point. We haven't addressed that issue. It's certainly something that we can address at the interagency working group. One thing that Manufacturing and Services is responsible for is both domestic competitiveness as well as export competitiveness so any domestic regulatory barriers or issues that affect domestic deployment as export issues we can certainly take that up. It has not been a focus of the interagency discussions to date. It has been largely about selling nuclear reactors overseas, but it is certainly something that we can take up. I do know that at the IAEA meeting Commissioner Jaczko said and once again here, that they would facilitate the design review and quality of such reactors, even those that were not currently in the queue for domestic deployment so that is a positive development. I will certainly take this fee issue back and discuss it.

Following the session, a long time reader named Steve found me and introduced himself. (That is a side benefit of asking questions at a large session like this one - people find out that you are in the room and figure out how to find you.) It is always good to meet people who have enjoyed reading the material I share with you here - face to face interaction is at least as much fun as participating in the comment thread on a blog. He asked me if I was feeling just a little bit of justification for my long time efforts to promote the idea of SMRs. I told him that it did feel good, but that there are plenty of people who have recognized the logic of the idea for a long time. It was just nice to see such a large crowd of people.

The feeling of making progress did not last too long. In the men's room immediately after the session, I overheard a guy saying talking about the high unit cost of smaller reactors and how big reactors were big for good economic reasons. I guess we still have a ways to go to prove that economy of scale in nuclear energy does not necessarily mean big units - it can mean a large number of identical smaller units produced in a series fashion. That idea has been proven in many other industries; now it is nuclear energy's turn to show that we "get" mass production principles.

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Day -1 At American Nuclear Society Winter Meeting 2009

Today is the first official day of the American Nuclear Society (ANS) Winter Meeting for 2009. The title of this year's meeting is "Nuclear Power: Crafting Energy Solutions". During the plenary session that is scheduled for this morning at 8:00-11:30 two US Senators (James Webb (D-VA) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN)) are scheduled to provide information about their progress in crafting a framework for legislation on reducing fossil fuel emissions that are contributing to global climate change . That framework will include measures to encourage nuclear energy growth as a key component as discussed in a recent New York Times op-ed by Senators John Kerry and Lindsey Graham.

It is encouraging to see continued momentum coming from both Democrats and Republicans who have recognized that nuclear energy can provide both the reliable, affordable, abundant energy that a vibrant economy needs and can do it without producing vast quantities of gaseous waste products that are disturbing the global atmospheric mix of compounds and elements that have enabled the earth to achieve the unique status (among known planets) of supporting life and human society development.

Though the meeting officially starts today, ANS meetings have a long tradition of a very busy day at the conference hotel on the day before the actual sessions begin. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to drive over to the OMNI Shoreham Hotel on a gorgeous fall day to visit with old friends, meet some new ones and get a feel for the excitement that is building in the industry as we move towards a period of new construction activity.

There are more and more young people attending the meetings, some more mature people are deciding to stick around as mentors, and there are new companies who have decided that they have products and services that can be successfully marketed to the industry. There have been a lot of new developments in project planning, knowledge management, heavy equipment lifting, and testing that have taken place in other major industries while the nuclear construction industry has been slumbering; many of those advances offer great promise for ways to avoid some of the cost overruns and delays that plagued the industry in the later years of its first construction boom.

There was an informative workshop discussing lessons that have been learned and are still being learned in the process of applying for licenses for new facilities. People who have actually been successful in the process of obtaining Early Site Permits described some of the processes that they developed, people who are on the receiving end of the applications talked about some of their criteria and challenges, and people who are deep into the process of combined construction and operating licenses reported on their progress so far.

I had the opportunity to share lunch with three other writers at one of the numerous outside cafes on Connecticut Ave. just a couple of blocks from the conference hotel. We had an animated discussion about the competition between nuclear energy and natural gas for new electrical power stations, about the growing interest in nuclear energy on the part of Democratic Party leaders (Kerry, Webb, Klobuchar, Carper, among others) and about the ways to use online media to tell share interesting stories about the business of building and operating new power plants.

In the afternoon, I met with the Public Information Committee and heard a presentation by Ann Bisconti about her most recent public opinion survey conducted about nuclear energy. Some interesting highlights include a surprisingly low percentage of people (14%) who believe that coal will be providing a major portion of the US electricity supply in 15 years and a surprisingly high percentage of people (35%) who believe that solar will be a major source in that same time frame. That indicates the challenge that people involved in public information about energy have - things do not change very fast in the power plant world and our current generation from those sources (48% from coal and far less than 0.5% from solar) is not even close to the perception of what will be true in just 15 years.

After the PIC meeting, I joined the long and cheerful line of people waiting to get into the President's Reception and the opening of the Expo booths. It was a whirlwind of activity for me - I had just 1.5 hours to catch up with some friends and acquaintances who are doing exciting work on traveling wave reactors, small and medium sized reactors, international cooperation efforts, and new power plant licensing activities. I stopped by informative booths and learned about the status of the Toshiba 4S, the status of Areva's partnership with Constellation Energy, the interest on the part of the Navy's nuclear propulsion program in attracting new recruits, and the interest on the part of a number of first time exhibitors in the opportunities that are developing to serve a variety of product and service needs as construction projects get closer to reality.

Now it is time to get ready for my day job. Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend the plenary session speeches to find out if there is anything new to get excited about from the politicians who have the chance to smooth the path for an industry that is already building momentum for growth. I recommend that you turn to someone like Dan Yurman at Idaho Samizdat or John Wheeler of This Week in Nuclear for reports on the plenary session. If you are interested in up to the minute impressions, you can also search Twitter for the hash tags of #ans09 and #ypc09 (YPC stands for Young Professional's Congress, it is a combined group of North American Young Generations in Nuclear (NA-YGN) and the ANS Young Professionals Group. They are holding an embedded topical meeting within the ANS meeting.)

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