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Obama Budget To Triple Nuclear Power Loan Guarantees
Hugh Pickens writes "When President Obama said in his State of the Union address on Wednesday that the country should build 'a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants,' it was one of the few times he got bipartisan applause. Now the NY Times reports that administration officials have confirmed their 2011 federal budget request next week will raise potential loan guarantees for nuclear projects to more than $54 billion, from $18.5 billion, and a new Energy Department panel will examine a vastly expanded list of options for nuclear waste, including a new kind of nuclear reactor that would use some of it. The Energy Department appears to be getting close to offering its first nuclear loan guarantee. Earlier this week, Southern Co. Chief Executive David Ratcliffe said the company expects to finalize an application for a loan guarantee 'within the next couple months,' while Scana Corp., which has also applied, is 'a couple months behind Southern' and is hopeful of receiving a conditional award 'sometime in the next months.'"
research funding for nuclear research such as thorium reactors or pebble bed reactors?
to increase safety and/or move onto other nuclear fuels
The public's support for that particular snippet of the state of the union was rather low, as CNN reported--so kindly point out to your non-tech friends that nuclear is the best alternative right now and we can't go entirely renewable for a long time.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Why do nuclear energy corporations get loan guarantees? Is the energy not as cheap as proponents say? Is it not profitable enough for private ventures to fund it?
The nuclear power industries worldwide already get very preferential treatment by not having to insure powerplants or paying for their waste disposal, but that apparently isn't enough.
Why is big oil being subsidized, when it's already massively profitable? And if nuclear is supposed to provide a cheaper source of electricity, why does it *need* subsidies? Every nuclear project seems to take twice as long as planned and cost an order of magnitude more than orginally estimated.
If we really want to reduce energy use and carbon emissions, why not focus on conservation? It's much cheaper than nuclear, and can even save the government money. With conservation, you also don't have to worry about accidents or nuclear waste.
Barack Obama closed the Nuclear Waste storage facility that we need to open more plants!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpwGnHRv-L4
Hopefully we can inject some common sense and get funding to push forward for Liquid Fluoride Thorium reactors (Google Talks). There are so many upsides and so few downsides.
I would hope that we could poor some money into this. It makes so much sense (compared to everything else out there) and we don't seem that far off from having the kinks worked out.
I vote for my tax dollars being spent on this.
Nuclear reactors are old school since Steorn had their live working demo of Orbo, an overunity engine just this weekend.
In this context, the spellings are: guaranty, guaranties, guarantied.
This is a more environmentally friendly solution than ... wind power
What are your sources for this ?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Google it before you assume it is just like the nuclear reactors that have caused all the nuclear waste problems.
They are a "new" technology that has been proven for decades. They are smaller, safer, and tons more efficient than the currently used technology. They don't produce nuclear waste, they consume it. We could take all of what we currently consider "waste" and use it as fuel for hundreds of years. The current technology only uses less than 5% of the energy that is actually in the fuel. Fast Breeder Reactors use almost all of it. They keep recycling the fuel until there is almost no radioactivity left. They can also use plutonium as fuel so the can be used to actually reduce the weapons stockpiles.
I also think the thorium reactors might be cool too. However there are some concerns as to what extracting all that thorium out of seawater might do to the environment. Not that the oceans need the thorium, but the processing might not be so kind to everything living in the seawater. On the other hand, the processing could also be done in a way that cleans up the garbage patch at the same time.
Bottom line. Don't assume everything you think you know about nuclear power is everything there is to know.
It's pronounced nuc-u-lar.
I live in Vermont. The reactor here (and the biggest source of power we have other than HydoQuebec) is dead. It's outlived it's lifespan by 10 years, running at 110% original capacity , it's had a cooling tower collapse, and now it's leaking radioactive materials from pipes nobody knew were there.
We need a new plant. Desperately. My hope is that this will help push more companies (like Entergy) to build rather than to shut down, cut there losses, and run away.
Sure, I could google it, but it's more of a talking point than a question. France has a large number of reactors, yet I've never heard of them having problems with their radioactive waste products (then again, I don't read the French press, either).
Sure, we could build reactors which reuse more of their own waste, but presuming we will have some waste - what are other countries doing about it?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The bank will just let Lenny Leonard run it
Nuclear waste to the moon! We give both space a chance and Earth the energy! And while you are at building the waste storage, please give it a proper name. Since it is going to be the first such base, name it after the first letter of the greek alphabet. Signed, John K.
Now, mod me down freely. My karma can't get any worse...
When all costs are included, nuclear is not financially cheaper than coal. Those costs include regulatory, security, and yes, financial -- both loans and insurance. Coal plants are similar to nuclear plants in that they have long lifetimes, and tough to sell. Yet IOUs and IPPs manage to get loans to build coal and natural gas power plants, even massive ones, all the time. Banks are tight on lending to nuclear because of all of the additional risks (ranging from NIMBY to regulatory to terrorism), and to guarantee the loan is an actual subsidy, by definition. The subsidy serves to pay some of the cost (risk) of the loan, because if there is a problem the US gov't eats the loss instead of a bank. There's an entire industry build around pricing risk (the insurance industry), and so anytime a government reduces risk to others through a guarantee, they are subsidizing.
P.S. Of course a bank can foreclose on a nuclear power plant -- they could sell it to any other IOU or even an IPP. They could also structure the loan to seize some other asset instead -- a fossil fuel power plant or two, or any other asset.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
There are huge improvement gains to be garnered with more efficient use of the electricity we generate today, greatly reducing the need for more power plants of any kind. But energy conservation and efficiency isn't "business sexy" or "politically sexy", look what happened to Carter when he tried to emphasize just being more efficient with what we have, with either electricity or transportation fuels. And he is a big nuke guy himself, he just groks being more efficient as both a longer range cost savings and also from a national security viewpoint. He had a lot of faults, but as to energy he is still the top prez we ever had.
Conservation is a boring sell for the big players (outside of some niche markets now like Data Centers are taking it seriously), wall street investors don't like it that much, there are no huge short term profits to get there because of the nature of improving systems that use electricity, it is too widely diversified there, they can't monopolize it as much. In a lot of cases, there are zero new studies, patents, or anything like that required to accomplish big gains in efficiency, no "investment" potential to rake in the short term profits.
Politicians don't like it that much, no big buzzwords and it's been seriously demonized as an idea over the years, they are afraid of coming across like quality of life deniers, that you have to sacrifice comfort for efficiency. Now that isn't true, but that is what happens with these arguments "Oh noes, I don't want to sit in some cold cave with dim light".
Of course that's silly, but the anti efficiency people, the pro "just generate more power!" folks, just push that meme and mindset, and have been very successful at it.
The "generate more power"! folks, as their top (and a lot of times only) emphasis, nuke or otherwise, make as much (non)sense as the "drill, baby drill"! folks do when it comes to transportation fuels. Want to save oil? Pretty easy, here's just one way, push three or four cylinder cars over sixes and eights. Heck, I bet single person light commuter cars could be run with just two cylinder engines today. Most people and uses for basic transportation have absolutely no need whatsoever for larger six or eight cylinder engines, and vehicles that can easily do two or three times the maximum posted speed limits. Just wasting fuel, because they can.
Back to electricity, look at most homes today, thoroughly dismal levels of insulation or planned air in or out, not even built tight, wasting huge amounts of electricity to keep ACs running near non stop in the summer, or if electric heat of some kind, wasting huge amounts of electricity in the winter. How about all that massive outside huge commercial advertising that burns all night long in big cities, or all those lit up and unoccupied offices? I am always gobsmacked whenever I visit a larger city at night to see this huge lit up disneyland/vegas blinking whooshing cascading panorama of excessive ostentatious consumption. It's like every big city is in this race to see how many light photons they can transmit to the space aliens or something, when actually zero of that advertising nonsense is really needed to illuminate the streets for people. They *could* get by with non electric commercial signage, and just have to deal with people only reading their signs in the daylight.
Can't do that though, got to be massive electricity energy hogs.
There's just tons of examples there. A huge amount of this commuting that goes on to go sit in front of a computer screen, moving meatbags twice a day by the tens of millions, by any means, personal or mass transit, instead of moving electrons and having a lot more people just stay home and work with better broadband deployment. And that would, in turn, reduce this artificial "need" for so many huge office towers for those commuters to go sit in all day in front of a computer screen, that require tremendous energy to build and maintain. Big office towers came a
Let's put the funding into all the technologies that are already proven and work. The technical problems of running a Th fluoride reactor are horrible - just finding containment materials for a start - a fact that its proponents consistently ignore. History shows that new reactor types are associated with accidents well down the line, because there is only so much you can do with modeling. And thorium is truly nasty stuff.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Does this include funding for nuclear fusion projects in the US? Or just the current fission reactor based technology? One scientist said there's a 50% chance of fusion becoming a reality 20 years after it gets serious funding. I agree with him
Anything any administration does to further nuclear power and alternative energy, I am 100% in favor of.
This is my sig.
Our problem is that due to lobbyist, we have an INSANE approach to energy. It needs to be changed.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
As long as they don't blow up the planet before May, it's all good. I mean, after that last scare...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Let's see, Chicgao based Exelon, which operates one of the larger nuclear fleets in the USA, has a been a big supporter of Obama since even before he ran for Senator, and now look what the payback is.
Still, it is the hallmark of democracy that often times big political demands make for good policy.
Let Republicans remember that before we start blasting Obama on this, GEORGE W BUSH the GREAT made the essentially same demands on Congress. Let's hope that on this one deal, we can get Obama a vote in favor of it because we know the nutty left is not going to go along with nukes.
This is my sig.
...then he should propose:
1. to store the waste in Chicago
2. to have the owners of the plant fully pay for waste storage costs
3. to have the owners of the plant assume full liability for damages from accidents
While #1 is a bit sarcastic, #2 and #3 are not.
We would at times like to believe that there are surmountable technological solutions to every problem. Sometimes there aren't.
Why does the government have to give out any kind of loan guarantees? In my country at least the goverment loans nothing, and the private sector builds then. In fact, there's many companies waiting in a line to build new nuclear power plants.
"Ever since Jimmy Carter's dunderheaded executive order (in which he said the US will not reprocess spent nuclear fuel back into usable fuel ... "
Credit where it's due: the initial President directive (a specific variety of Executive order) regarding suspension of reprocessing was issued by President Gerald Ford:
"In October 1976, fear of nuclear weapons proliferation (especially after India demonstrated nuclear weapons capabilities using reprocessing technology) led President Gerald Ford to issue a Presidential directive to indefinitely suspend the commercial reprocessing and recycling of plutonium in the U.S. On April 7, 1977, President Jimmy Carter banned the reprocessing of commercial reactor spent nuclear fuel." - Source
-kgj
. . . where we don't let facts get in the way of dishonest conservative rhetoric. You will be modded down!
French nuclear firm admits uranium leaks at two plants
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/19/pollution.france
Like any geologic formation, Yucca Mountain is criss-crossed by cracks and fissures. Some of these cracks extend from the planned storage area all the way to the water table 1000 feet below. It is feared by some that these cracks may provide a route for radioactive waste a...
http://www.knowledgerush.com/kr/encyclopedia/Yucca_Mountain/
No. After the Three Mile Island incident, regulatory barricades essentially stopped the development of new nuclear plants in the U.S., almost killing the industry.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
You couldn't be more wrong. Here is why:
Financial: The reason no one has built a plant for 30+ years is not a financial one, but a political one. The accident at Three Mile Island caused the cessation of building plants in the U.S. Then when Chernobyl happened in '86, it just further rooted the blind fear in nuclear power.
Enviroment: Nuclear power is a very clean energy source. Yes, the nuclear waste has to be buried, but the strict regulations on the waste containers ensures they will not leak. The leakage in Hanford happened while they were transferring nuclear waste from one container to another. There has been no recorded event of a waste container in the U.S. actually failing and leaking nuclear waste.
Health: There is no documented proof to support that people who work in a nuclear power plant are more susceptible to health risks. There was an unreported occurrence of a nuclear reactor in the northeast that had a crack in it sometime in the late 80's early 90's. The reactor was shut down and a man jumped into the reactor to fix the crack. This crack also caused the whole nuclear power plant to fill up with radioactive gas like a balloon. To get rid of the gas, they opened all the doors and windows to the plant and there were absolutely no enviroment or health risks with doing this. I am sure you understand why it was not reported.
Security: Security surrounding nuclear power plants is more strict than at the White House. If you have smoked weed ONCE in your life, you will not get security clearance to work at a nuclear power plant. There is also no viable threat to having a plane flying into a nuclear power plant. Any plane would not get through the concrete and steel exterior walls, let alone having any chance of getting to the reactor to cause a meltdown. As far as companies that distribute nuclear materials, again, the distribution is strictly monitored by a multitude of organizations including our own government. The chances that someone would be able to successfully steal or get illegally sold nuclear materials is about as remote as the possibility of anyone on these comments getting to hook up with Megan Fox. It won't happen. Ever.
No Alternatives: There are alternative forms of power, but none of them produce NEARLY the amount of energy produced from nuclear power.
Providing loan guarantees to nuclear power plants is to ensure that the loans do not get denied for political reasons, nothing more. People who are anti-nuclear power have absolutely no understanding or viable education into how it works. I for one applaud Obama for ensuring the growth of nuclear power usage. Nuclear power is grossly misunderstood and that can only change once people stop believing whatever the hell CNN says about it. They have no idea what they are talking about.
And they'd use up 1/2 an acre of that land. The land could be current farmland, already productive. Then you get a ***free*** 1000MW power plant.
You may only want to take out 10 acres of that farmland for your nuclear power station (mind you figure in the size of the roads you need to lay to get all that uranium to and from the site...), but you can't have daisy chew her cud in the main reactor vessel...
Your 'dead' characterization in interesting, if confusing. For other readers I'll point out that Vermont Yankee, the 'dead' reactor the parent is discussing, is operating today. By 'dead' I suppose the parent means zombie-like.
Vermont isn't likely to get a replacement reactor under any circumstances. The state is very hostile toward industry generally, and nuclear power in particular. Vermont's governor can't wipe his ass without the resident enviros investigating it.
The license extensions + uprates of these old reactors is a huge failure waiting to happen. Whatever renaissance nuclear power is experiencing is going to end abruptly when one of these uprated, license extended reactors takes a TMI style dump and evacuates some part of a state.
Shut Vermont Yankee down and buy your power from other states/countries. Or sit in the dark and shiver. Whatever. Just stop running your decaying old zombie reactor.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
NEVER, EVER, in the US, forego oversight when it comes to things infratructural. It just doesn't work. There are too many people around that will see money and nothing else and who don't care who dies so long as it isn't them. It's a fine country, and an enormous economic catalyst, but some things can't be left to the market alone. This is one of them.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
When the loans go south, the politicians who pushed for them are no longer in office. That makes this kind of thing easy compared to bank bailouts which get you party kicked out of office.
I agree that the subsidies for current nuclear power are very high but every single one of these loans will face default so we are looking at a 100% subsidy for any new nuclear power. There is just no way that any utilities are going to keep paying for the power since in will be so much more expensive than anything else. http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E09-01_NuclearPowerClimateFixOrFolly
Or in different settings: $72Billion a year for fossil fuels and nuclear.
Remember all that government grant into building safer reactors? Well that was in the past, but that's what's going in now for renewables: RnD development to make it commercial. Just like it took 30 years to make nuclear power reactors commercial.
Here are some links, and here is a link to a video presentation given to the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Berkeley. TWR is teh bomb (well, not literally).
Yes, because space launches never go wrong... Same problem with sending waste to the sun. For that matter, just launch the waste into interstellar space. It will be like a treasure hunt for future generations of space travelers. "I can believe they just threw out all this high energy material, we can power the ship for years with this find."
As I alluded to, the problem is getting the waste into space. I wouldn't trust NASA to design a three bureaucrats to each engineer, three redundancies to each bureaucrat, explosion proof payload containment system. What if the first world gets lucky and popularizes the idea, then countries with significantly fewer engineering and construction resources start trying it. I'm sure ionizing radiation spread, as a mist, throughout the atmosphere would produce some beautiful sunsets.
Don't you mean the State of the Coonion speech? Like or not, you dimwits, you're stuck with this empty-headed africoon.
Geothermal can be that baseload.
nuclear waste is a problem for later, and will be solved by breeders, which reduce dramatically the volume of waste. It is easy and safe to burrow the final products from these reactors, the only problem being NIMBY
NIMBYs have also stopped wind farms, especially offshore from Maine to Cape Hatteras. For instance before he died Ted Kennedy opposed wind turbines in Cape Cod. Obama may be able to get one built.
As for the "real" price of nuclear, it is a bit like the US medical system, a larger part of the price comes from terrible legislation and political opposition, not from the intrinsic cost.
Ah, how far wrong can a person be? Forget the US, Neither China, France, India, nor Russia has found nuclear power profitable. In those countries politicians not the market says what gets built. Check out the "Forbes" article Hooked on Subsidies reprinted by the Freemarket CATO Institute. Especially notice where is says "How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don't. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors."
The French government owned company Areva has had large cost overruns building the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant as well as thousands of defects and deficiencies in Finland.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
This is probably the first time (that I remember anyway) where I agree with Obama on something. Great move IMO.
Yea when Southern Company built Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant the cost over runs made our electric bills jump by 3X and NEVER came back down as promised. It was the biggest rip-off job ever pulled in Georgia.
I see alot of people talking about nuclear waste and how to handle it. Wouldn't it be possible to use some of that to build RTGs or something similar? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator) Those materials are releasing energy, if we could put it to use, then this "waste" would become a useful asset.
And about geothermal energy becoming our main source of energy someday. It all sounds nice, but, wouldn't it be a bit risky if we used geothermal energy for almost 100% of our energy needs? I'm not a geologist, but it seems to me like this could accelerate the cooling of the earth's core... And if it ever became solid, our planet could be without a magnetic field. Of course, we're talking about very long term consequences, but it would suck to have the earth lose its atmosphere to space as Mars did... Especially if we never even manage to leave the solar system. Of course, if this possibility is millions of years away, then I suppose it could be acceptable to use geothermal energy until we can find something better (I'm hoping we'll have managed fusion, 1000 years from now).
They are accidents. The first link even has the title "U.S. Nuclear Accidents", that's my my title. Twisting definitions don't change the facts.
If you think nuclear energy should be banned because of the excessive risk caused by such, I sure hope that you also want all cars banned. And swimming pools, and planes.
No I don't. Cars will not harm hundreds, thousands, or millions with one accident. One nuclear accident can. Planes don't harm many people all at once either. The attack on the WTC and Pentagon took 4 planes, and how many were killed? 3000? That's less than 1000 per plane. It was also a once in a lifetime event. If hijackers tried it today the passengers would not meekly go along, heck the passengers in the plane that crashed in Penn revolted once they knew what happened to the other planes. Swimming pools are not mass killers either.
I even have an excuse to ban vehicles, I was disabled because I was hit by a vehicle while riding my bike. While I was in a coma the docs even told my family it would be a miracle if I lived, do I consider it one? Not just no, but HELL NO!!! I don't consider it a miracle, my life has been a living hell. Am I calling for cars to be banned? No I'm not. I do call for people to be responsible, and if they won't exercise it then the law should hold them responsible. Even though the person who hit me had a record of causing accidents, and an arrest warrant was issued in his name, I wouldn't wish my life on him. I'm not that sadistic.
The Bopal disaster should have put the lid on chemical factories.
I'm not against chemical factories or their owners, I do support holding them responsible. That includes oil companies. Has the Alaskan fishermen been compensated for Exxon Valdez? More than 20 years later Exxon still has not paid them. Were the Navajo compensated? No. In the US the government even protects the nuclear industry from lawsuits and paying damages.
Countless deaths due to coal should have made this energy source a big no-no.
I agree. Of course that's not realistic right now. But I would end the subsidies coal gets, yes coal gets subsidies too. Here's a video where Chevron agrees to lobby with Sierra Club to end coal subsidies. Then there was TVA's Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash slurry spill. That wasn't the first one or the last one either. What's even worse is Mountaintop removal and some containment ponds are above where people live. I's also end passing on the external costs. Polluters would have to clean up and pay for damages, all not just coal plants. The same with alternative/renewable energy sources.
Do you think mining for the rare earths required by solar panels is "clean"?
And nuclear does not require mining or that mining is clean? Sure it does and it is dirty, however unlike nuclear solar can easily and cheaply be recycled as can wind turbines. Heck there are still solar panels from the '70s being used. There are also Jacobs wind turbines made in the 1930s still being used. Also with ongoing research, for which I also oppose subsides, efficiencies are improving and non-rare earth minerals and compounds are being investigated.
By the standards of energy generation, yes, nuclear is clean. By any standard, it is safe.
How many accidents has solar energy and wind turbines been involved in? Of those how many lives were put in danger, or how many were killed? And how much have they been given in subsidies? To answer that myself I googled alternative energy subsidies and found this:
Should there be a Law?
Do we really need to add any more nuclear or any kind of plants that have to do with that. Obama is spend a whole lot of money to try and get these plants opened up. Seriously he is gonna spend that much money a plant..is this part of the creating jobs idea??? I mean if its not, he could just spend that money on creating the jobs he had talked about once before. It just sounds like he wants to spend money instead improving what he said her wanted to improve. He wants to spend triple the amount he had before and no wonder the person doesn't want to be who said something about the budget change it is a lot of freaking money. It doesn't since to me and of course the democrats are gonna agree with him since he is one.They are mostly about change and all that other crap but have they even thought about the out come of all these that seem like their really not even needed in the first place. What happens something goes wrong with one or more plants whos gonna have to pay for what happens. The tax payers of course. Has he even thought about that part of his so called "plan". I mean im not a politic and i don't want to become but really, i think they should pull their heads out of their asses and think really clearly on what they are doing. Is he really gonna spend money on nuclear plants and coal???
Loan guarantees are nice. Really they are. When I see an actual reactor go online in spite of hundreds of protesters, I'll believe the President's "safe nuclear" campaign promise.
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
No denial but plenty of trolling.
While I have repeatedly provided evidence to support what I've said all I've gotten in return is trolling.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?