White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

How to Move the Nuclear Project Forward

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Nuclear power ought to have everything going for it. It has worked extremely well for more than 60 years — a fact that will be celebrated at the Nuclear Energy Institute’s annual meeting in Washington this week.

Yet there is a somber sense about civil nuclear power in the United States that its race is run; that, as in other things, the United States has lost control of a technology it invented.

Consider: There are more than 70 reactors under construction worldwide, but only five of those are in the United States. They are in Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee. Even so, costs are rising and rest of the electric utility industry is resolutely committed to natural gas, which is cheap these days.

Once nuclear power plants are up and running, they tend do so seamlessly for decades, often operating above their original design output. It is clean power, unaffected by fuel prices, doing no damage to the air and very little to the earth, except in the mining of uranium or in immediate contact with the used radioactive fuel, when it is finally disposed of — an issue made thorny by two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.

Carter banned nuclear reprocessing just as it was about to be commercialized, and Obama nixed the Yucca Mountain waste repository in Nevada. The trigger for his devastating decision was the opposition of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), thought to be acting on behalf of the gaming interests of Las Vegas. Talk about wheels of fortune — a great technology endangered by legions of slot machines.

Overlooked when the nuclear titans gather in Washington will be two of nuclear’s greatest achievements: the nuclear Navy and the transformation of medicine. The Navy is largest maritime war machine in history with its aircraft carriers that can stay on station for more than a year and submarines that can go under the icecaps and stay submerged for months.

The utility industry seeks stability in all things, ergo it is not scientifically entrepreneurial. It embraces risk reluctantly. It accepts new technology when it is delivered with limited or shared risk.

It was that way with nuclear power, where the risk was shared with the government and sometimes the vendors. Likewise, with the development of today’s aero-derivative gas turbines, the military did the work and took the risk.

In this atmosphere it is easy to forget that nuclear is not a mature technology, but that it belongs at the frontiers of science. Today’s nuclear power plant is analogous to the black rotary phone — there is room for improvement.

But as there is no competition between electricity supplying entities, the impetus must come from elsewhere: government and incentivized private companies. Some like the General Atomics Corp. in San Diego, Calif., have reaped huge benefits by exploring the scientific frontier. While they are known mostly for the Predator drone, General Atomics' work on nuclear fusion has provided the building blocks for magnetic resonance imaging and tissue welding among dozens of medical advances and has enabled the company to use fusion science to develop the electromagnetic catapults for launching aircraft from carriers. If you get to ride a levitating train, it may be because it is suspended by electromagnetic forces pioneered in nuclear research by General Atomics.

Nuclear waste – the industry hates that term because of potential energy left in spent fuel — is the sad story of nuclear: too much yesterday (ideas codified and frozen 60 years ago), not enough tomorrow.

When aviation science has been stuck in the past, it has leaped forward by offering prizes to unleash invention: the first flight across the English Channel, the first Atlantic crossing, and now the first commercial foray into space, were inspired by prizes.

The good burghers of the nuclear industry might with their government allies think of cobbling together a really big prize that will change the thinking about how we deal with used nuclear fuel. At present, there are only two options: reducing the volume by cutting it up, leaching the useful stuff out and making glass out of the rest, and burying that or everything in a place like Yucca Mountain.

Generally in life and science, when there are only two options, there is a deficit of thinking. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

Gulf Spill Puts Energy Bill on Slippery Slope

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With energy, Senate Democrats find themselves between a rock and two hard places. Nonetheless, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., have introduced their climate and energy bill.

Its timing is awful. Its fate is uncertain. Yet its sponsors felt it had to be done now.

While the Gulf of Mexico is being damaged by a runaway well, spewing millions of gallons of oil-like bile from hell, any energy bill has the chance that it will be amended to become an anti-energy bill and will fail when hoped-for Republican support evaporates.

At present there is fairly wide industry support for the Kerry-Lieberman bill, particularly from the electric utility industry. Leaders of the industry and its affiliated groups, like the Nuclear Energy Institute, were in on the writing of the bill. Tom Kuhn, president of the Edison Electric Institute, and Jim Rogers, president of Duke Energy, stood shoulder to shoulder with Kerry and Lieberman when they announced their bill.

The three pressure sources driving the bill are:

•The November elections and the desire of endangered Democrats to show that they have done something about climate change and have tackled long-term energy problems.

•The Environmental Protection Agency plans to start regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant next year, if Congress does not act.

•The environmental disaster in the Gulf, and its effect on public attitudes to energy development and energy companies.

The bill differs from the House bill, passed last June, which emphasized cap-and-trade to control carbon emissions; although both bills introduce carbon restriction by sector over time, and could be reconciled in a House-Senate conference committee, according to Chris Holly of The Energy Daily.

The carbon-reducing provisions in the Senate bill not only rely on pollution credits but also a wide range of incentives, including carbon capture, enhanced subsidies for nuclear and alternative energy.

The bill’s original intent was also to give a boost to offshore drilling, thus pleasing Republicans and the oil industry. But the Gulf disaster has changed that. The bill as introduced now contains language that will allow states to prohibit drilling off their shores—a potential killer of nearly all new leasing and exploration. And drilling is pushed 75 miles out to sea.

Just weeks ago, the bill looked as though it could pass the Senate with support from at least one Republican, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of the original authors. But Graham withdrew when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, said he would put immigration reform ahead of the energy bill.

While Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the minority leader in the Senate, has come out against the bill, Graham still likes it but believes its chances of passage are slight. Kerry still believes Graham would vote with the bill, giving the Democrats that essential 60th vote, if the Democrats all stick together, which is unlikely with the bill’s nuclear and offshore leasing provisions.

A more likely result is that the bill will open old debates about big energy, like oil and nuclear, and pit it against alternative energy, mostly wind.

Comment on the bill has come slowly, as interest groups calculate the political alignment and realignment that the bill will bring about.

Offshore drilling gets more politically toxic as each day of failure to contain the situation in the Gulf passes. Nuclear gets more dubious as cost calculations rise. With or without legislation, the smart money is turning to natural gas for electrical generation and interstate trucking. At present, gas is cheap and plentiful.

There is a lot of money—$2 billion—in the bill for carbon-capture and sequestration, but this is ill-defined; and the idea of pumping millions and millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the earth remains a legal nightmare and a hard sell to some environmentalists. Clean coal, it seems, can never be pristine.

Here, then, is a bill for all seasons. Actually, more of a manifesto: an election manifesto. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Obama’s Energy Policy: A Labyrinth of Contradictions

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When it comes to energy, there is an incoherence to President Barack Obama’s policies.

This incoherence is embedded in his administration in the person of Carol Browner. She is largely regarded as the agent of a kind of reactionary environmentalism that once haunted the Democratic Party.

Browner, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton, is a special assistant to Obama for energy and environment. To a wide variety of industries, though, she is the agent of regressive, just-say-no environmentalism.

Browner’s background–from environmental jobs in Florida to working with Al Gore–dooms her to suspicion of zealotry, which is probably unjustified. Her defenders (just about all in the environmental movement), see her as a great public servant and standard-bearer.

But she is largely out of sight these days; her writ and her influence unknown.

To the energy industries, from the ever-embattled nuclear sector to the euphoric-for-now natural gas producers and the mostly happy wind farmers, Browner and her role remains a mystery. Why is she there? How much does she influence Obama? Or, for that matter, does he care more about the politics of energy and the environment than he does about the issues?

The answer, like so much that can be said of Obama, is some of this and some of that.

The administration is opening up the Atlantic coast and part of the Alaskan coast to oil drilling. But it is keeping the California shoreline free of new exploration. (There are a lot of environmental voters in California).

As for nuclear power, the actions of the administration are the most confusing. Obama looks like a host who having welcomed a guest to dine, snatches the guest’s chair away when the meal is brought in.

He has advocated nuclear power and has endorsed loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors. But in a piece of blatant political opportunism Obama has canceled all work, and even licensing, on the Yucca Mountain waste repository site in Nevada. Yet, Yucca Mountain was the cornerstone of the civilian nuclear revival.

To understand why Yucca Mountain has been abandoned, together with $10 billion of taxpayers money, look no further than the senior senator from Nevada, Harry Reid. And to understand Reid’s stubborn rejection of a national patriotic role for Nevada, look no further than the gaming tables and slot machines of Las Vegas. At least part of Obama’s energy policy is influenced by fruit machines.

Obama first declared against Yucca Mountain during the campaign. Many thought that his opposition would, in the way of campaign promises, melt in the sunshine of reality.

But the politics of the Senate triumphed. Obama’s need for Reid, the majority leader in the Senate, became utter dependence in the health-care debate. So the will of previous Congresses for a sophisticated and vital nuclear industry, was trumped by Reid. The Joker came out of the pack face up.

Good thing for energy policy that Nevada has no other big energy issues. Part of its previous attraction for nuclear was its small population and remote location. But the wheel of fortune spins in politics as well as roulette, and unpredictably Reid rose to be the most important Democrat in the Senate.

The offhand way the administration has junked Yucca Mountain should worry all in energy supply. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs dismissed the abandonment of Yucca Mountain as being done on “scientific grounds.” If you believe that, the tooth fairy is your sister.

So the administration has pushed nuclear in the full knowledge that California and other states by law cannot approve new plants without a viable repository for their spent fuel. In a stroke, the administration has converted certainty to limbo.

The squeezing of coal is similar. EPA is moving ahead with classifying carbon dioxide as a pollutant, presumably in order to pressure Congress to pass the highly criticized cap-and-trade legislation.

This giving and taking away should give pause to those who think oil and natural gas drilling will proceed apace in the Atlantic and off Alaska. Browner and the president himself must know that a slew of lawsuits will be filed and will tie up action for years, if not decades.

One foot forward, 12 inches backward. That is the Obama energy quick-step.  –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate