Michele Kearney's Nuclear Wire - Major Energy and Environmental News and Commentary affecting the Nuclear Industry. Nuclear Activities
Friday, April 18, 2025
Thursday, April 17, 2025
[SocialMedia] SCI AMER ~ Fusion Energy Needs Continued U.S. Leadership to Secure Our Energy Future
Fusion Energy Needs Continued U.S. Leadership to Secure Our Energy Future
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fusion-energy-needs-continued-u-s-leadership-to-secure-our-energy-future/
Tammy Ma
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
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Thursday, April 3, 2025
Board Letter to U.S. Congress and Secretary to Energy - March 18, 2025 - pns001vf-nwtrb-mar2025-letter-report.pdf
Board Letter to U.S. Congress and Secretary to Energy - March 18, 2025 - pns001vf-nwtrb-mar2025-letter-report.pdf
https://www.nwtrb.gov/docs/default-source/correspondence/pns001vf-nwtrb-mar2025-letter-report.pdf?sfvrsn=1c82c205
With No Program to Find a Nuclear Waste Repository Site, Success Is Unlikely
That was the not-too-shocking conclusion of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, established by Congress in 1987 to provide an independent review work by the Department of Energy to disposition defense wastes and spent reactor fuel.
The Department’s program evaluates “hypothetical disposal concepts” but is “without actions to identify one or more specific sites for consideration,” the Board said in a report to Congress. And this “will not alone be sufficient to meet the national responsibility to develop a repository for permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste.”
With spent fuel now left behind at a variety of sites where reactors have been decommissioned and removed, the current effort has been focused on finding an “interim” site, where dry casks can be guarded and monitored for the next few decades. The government is currently paying about $800 million a year to store fuel that it had promised to begin accepting for burial by 1999, and that cost could be cut simply by centralizing the casks. But "the lack of an effective repository program brings a high risk that ongoing efforts to site one or more federal interim storage facilities will ultimately be unsuccessful,” the report said.
There are other strong reasons to establish a deep geologic repository. Although dry cask storage has been safe for decades and will be safe for many decades to come, establishing a repository would deprive nuclear opponents of a talking point. And American companies that want to export reactors are at a disadvantage against countries like Russia, which can present a package deal, including fuel supply and fuel take-back.
Sweden, Finland and Canada are all making strong progress towards establishing a repository, but so far the problem in the United States is political deadlock.
Wednesday, April 2, 2025
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Monday, March 31, 2025
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Friday, March 21, 2025
Nuclear energy’s MAGA comeback in the AI era
Nuclear energy’s MAGA comeback in the AI era
To Lydia Moynihan:
We would like to correct a fact in your article regarding Diablo Canyon retirement at https://nypost.com/2025/03/21/business/nuclear-energys-maga-comeback-in-the-ai-era/.
California's Diablo Canyon Power Plant (DCPP) was given an operations extension to at least 2030 by the passage of California SB 846 (Dodd, 2022) on September 2, 2022. The plant's owner PG&E has applied for a standard 20 year extension to 2045 with the NRC regarding the plant's initial operation license.
The independent nonprofit Californians for Green Nuclear Power (CGNP) was the organization that led the effort which resulted in the passage of SB 846. Despite many obstacles, CGNP continues to fight for DCPP extended operations.
Surprisingly, Warren Buffett leads the likely effort to shut down DCPP for one of Buffett's firms financial gain. (This has parallels to the needless closure of Indian Point in 2021 which was lobbied for by fossil fuel interests.) PacifiCorp has sold about a billion dollars of mostly coal-fired power to replace San Onofre Nuclear Generation Station (SONGS) when SONGS was needlessly shut down at the end of January, 2012 instead of being repaired.
PacifiCorp recently spent well over $10 million lobbying at the state and federal level. The likely business purpose is to increase its sales of coal-fired power into the lucrative California power market. California must annually import about 100 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity where 1 TWh is a billion kilowatt-hours. This is the greatest amount of imports of any state. PacifiCorp is poised to take advantage of this structural weakness. PacifiCorp owns a fleet of coal-fired power plants in Wyoming and nearby states. Their total generation capacity is about 6,000 megawatts.
To learn more, please review several relevant articles at CGNP's GreenNUKE Substack.
Gene Nelson, Ph.D. CGNP Senior Legal Researcher and President
Californians for Green Nuclear Power, Inc. (CGNP)
1375 East Grand Ave Ste 103 #523
Arroyo Grande, CA 93420-2421
(805) 363 - 4697 cell
Government@CGNP.org email
https://CGNP.org website
https://greennuke.substack.com Substack
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