Tag: Nuclear Power

This Will Not End Well

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Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s most senior nuclear scientist, was assassinated outside of Tehran today.

The Iranians are blaming the Israelis, but the timing of this action would imply that this may be the part of a coordinated attempt between Israel (whose Mossad, unlike the CIA, doesn’t routinely screw up such operations) and the US, specifically the Trump administration, to foment an actual shooting war with Iran before Biden takes office.

Or, it could be just some random group of dudes with an amazing intelligence network and operational experience:

Iran has vowed retaliation after the architect of its nuclear programme was assassinated on a highway near Tehran, in a major escalation of tensions that risks placing the Middle East on a new war footing.

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was ambushed with explosives and machine gun fire in the town of Absard, 70km (44 miles) east of Tehran. Efforts to resuscitate him in hospital failed. His bodyguard and family members were also wounded.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said Israel was probably to blame, and an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, vowed retaliation. “We will strike as thunder at the killers of this oppressed martyr and will make them regret their action,” tweeted Hossein Dehghan. 

There will be no claim of responsibility.  Whoever did this was a pro, and pros don’t make claims of responsibility.

The killing was seen inside Iran as being as grave as the assassination by US forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qassem Soleimani in January.

Israel will face accusations that it is using the final weeks of the Trump administration to try to provoke Iran in the hope of closing off any chance of reconciliation between Tehran and the incoming US administration led by Joe Biden.

Which is why reports of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s secret meeting with both Netanyahu, and Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is significant. 

You had three people who are all forceful backers of open warfare between the United States and Iran allegedly in a room together, with the knowledge that a less confrontational approach to the Islamic Republic was in the works with the new administration in a room together.

It does not strain credulity that they all agreed that an immediate escalation of tensions would be beneficial for them agendas.

Fakhrizadeh had been described by western and Israeli intelligence services for years as the leader of a covert atomic bomb programme halted in 2003. He was a central figure in a presentation by the Israeli prime minister, Benajmin Netanyahu, in 2018 accusing Iran of continuing to seek nuclear weapons. “Remember that name, Fakhrizadeh,” Netanyahu said during the presentation.

I don’t think that the Iranians have any hard evidence, but I do believe that their conclusions are a reasonable conjecture by the Iranian state security apparatus.

Broadening the Definition Of, “Blue Screen of Death”

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I just discovered that Bill Gates is funding a nuclear power startup.

The “Secret Sauce” is that it uses a molten salt for thermal storage, so that it can respond quickly to shifts in demand.

This from the guy Microsoft®, so if your alarm bells are going off over the thought of the inevitable system crash, it gets even better.

The reactor in question is a fast fission breeder reactor using using liquid sodium as a coolant, so it produces large quantities of Pu239 and uses a coolant that ignites upon contact with air, and cannot be extinguished with water.

All this from the mind that gave us “Blue Screen of Death”.

Delightful:

Nuclear power is the Immovable Object of generation sources. It can take days just to bring a nuclear plant completely online, rendering it useless as a tool to manage the fluctuations in the supply and demand on a modern energy grid.

Now a firm launched by Bill Gates in 2006, TerraPower, in partnership with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, believes it has found a way to make the infamously unwieldy energy source a great deal nimbler — and for an affordable price.

The new design, announced by TerraPower on August 27th, is a combination of a “sodium-cooled fast reactor” — a type of small reactor in which liquid sodium is used as a coolant — and an energy storage system. While the reactor could pump out 345 megawatts of electrical power indefinitely, the attached storage system would retain heat in the form of molten salt and could discharge the heat when needed, increasing the plant’s overall power output to 500 megawatts for more than 5.5 hours.

………

The use of molten salt, which retains heat at extremely high temperatures, as a storage technology is not new. Concentrated solar power plants also collect energy in the form of molten salt, although such plants have largely been abandoned in the U.S. The technology could enjoy new life alongside nuclear plants: TerraPower and GE Hitachi Nuclear are only two of several private firms working to develop reactor designs that incorporate molten salt storage units, including U.K.- and Canada-based developer Moltex Energy.

………

Edwin Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, suggested on Twitter that the nuclear designs used by TerraPower and GE Hitachi had fallen short of a major innovation. “Oh brother. The last thing the world needs is a fleet of sodium-cooled fast reactors,” he wrote.

Yeah, this makes me feel safe an secure.

Bowing to the Inevitable

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After the FBI arrests for corruption related to the nuclear power bailout in Ohio, Governor Mike DeWine has reversed himself and called for a repeal of the bill:

Gov. Mike DeWine reversed himself and called for the repeal of the House Bill 6 on Thursday, saying Speaker Larry Householder’s alleged bribery scheme “forever tainted” the $1.3 billion nuclear bailout law.

DeWine, who signed HB6 a year ago Thursday, reiterated that he supports the policy laid out in the bailout, saying it’s needed to preserve jobs at the Davis-Besse and Perry nuclear plants and keep carbon-free sources of energy.

“While the policy in my opinion is good, the process by which it was created stinks. It’s terrible, it’s not acceptable,” DeWine said during his televised coronavirus briefing.

The governor’s announcement marks a reversal from just the day before, when he stood by HB6 despite the federal charges against Householder and four allies regarding their acceptance of more than $60 million from FirstEnergy Corp. to get HB6 passed and thwart an anti-HB6 referendum effort.

It’s not that he has had a meaningful change of heart, he still supports bailouts for the rich and lectures for the poor, it’s just that his position in this has become politically toxic.

Republican Governance

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Ohio State House Speaker Larry Householder (R-Perry County) has been arrested for bribery involving a massive state bailout for two nuclear power plants in the state:

Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder was arrested Tuesday morning ahead of an announcement about a $60 million federal racketeering case related to Ohio’s new nuclear bailout law, according to sources and media reports.

FBI agents, who were assisted by the Perry County Sheriff’s Department, were deployed to Householder’s property in Glenford, the Dayton Daily News reported. The investigation centers on House Bill 6, the $1 billion-plus ratepayer bailout of two Ohio nuclear power plants owned by FirstEnergy Solutions (now Energy Harbor) that Householder helped push through last year with the help of millions in dark money, according to the Toledo Blade.

Besides Householder, four others have been arrested, according to sources and media reports: former Ohio Republican Party Chair-turned-consultant Matt Borges, prominent lobbyist Neil Clark, FirstEnergy Solutions lobbyist Juan Cespedes, and Householder aide Jeff Longstreth. All are currently in custody, according to a source.

………

The news comes as the FBI and U.S. Attorney David M. DeVillers called a news conference in Columbus at 2:30 p.m. Tuesday to announce charges related to $60 million bribe to a “state official” and “associates.”

The campaign to pass HB6 — as well as their brutally successful effort to stop opponents from hold a statewide referendum to overturn it — included a wave of campaign donations from FirstEnergy Corp., as well as a multi-million-dollar ad campaign paid for with dark money.

It’s not the first time the FBI has looked into Householder’s activities. In 2004, during the Republican’s first stint as speaker, the FBI opened an investigation into Householder after receiving an anonymous tip that the speaker and aides received kickbacks from vendors doing business with the Ohio House GOP’s campaign arm. That investigation closed in 2006 without any charges being filed.

The details seem to indicate that this was more of a shake-down by Householder and his Evil Minions™ rather than the graft naturally flowing from the utility:


Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder’s political operation accepted more than $60 million in bribe money from FirstEnergy Corp. to secure the company a $1.3 billion public bailout, according to a federal complaint filed Thursday.

………

“(It) is likely the largest bribery, money-laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people in the state of Ohio,” said David DeVillers, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, during a news conference Tuesday.

In all, Householder received more than $500,000 for his personal benefit, according to DeVillers.

More than $100,000 of the bribe money from FirstEnergy Corp. was used to pay costs associated with Householder’s Florida home, and at least $97,000 was used to pay expenses for Householder’s 2018 House campaign, the complaint stated.

………

DeVillers said there’s a “strong inference” in the complaint that Householder and his allies approached FirstEnergy, rather than the other way around.

“This enterprise went looking for someone to bribe them,” DeVillers said.

………

Other money went to fight an (ultimately unsuccessfully) attempt by HB6 opponents last summer to organize a statewide referendum to repeal HB6, which Gov. Mike DeWine signed in late July 2019.

Between July and October of last year, FirstEnergy Solutions wired more than $38 million to Generation Now to help defeat the referendum effort, which the group did through a barrage of TV ads and schemes to prevent opponents from collecting the necessary signatures, including hiring people to intimidate petition canvassers.

When they say, “Hiring people to intimidate petition canvassers,” they mean paying money to get the canvassers to quit, and having people harass, and in some cases assault, petition gatherers.

Nothing the see here, just Republican Party governance in its purest form.

Who Had the 2020 over and under on Russian Nuclear Accident?

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Sensors in Finland, Sweden, and Norway are detecting a radiation spike consistent with some sort of nuclear accident.

The numbers are low, but something has happened:

Nordic authorities say they detected slightly increased levels of radioactivity in northern Europe this month that Dutch officials said may be from a source in western Russia and may “indicate damage to a fuel element in a nuclear power plant.”

 But Russian news agency TASS, citing a spokesman with the state nuclear power operator Rosenergoatom., reported that the two nuclear power plans in northwestern Russia haven’t reported any problems.

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The Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish radiation and nuclear safety watchdogs said this week they’ve spotted small amounts of radioactive isotopes harmless to humans and the environment in parts of Finland, southern Scandinavia and the Arctic.

………

But the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands said Friday it analyzed the Nordic data and “these calculations show that the radionuclides (radioactive isotopes) come from the direction of Western Russia.”

“The radionuclides are artificial, that is to say they are man-made. The composition of the nuclides may indicate damage to a fuel element in a nuclear power plant,” the Dutch agency said, adding that ”a specific source location cannot be identified due to the limited number of measurements.”

The levels are low, and the source has not been identified, but it’s 2020, so fasten your seat-belts, we are in for a bumpy ride.

Obvious to Anyone Who Worked in the Nuclear Industry

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I spent about 6 months working for a company in the nuclear energy area, and I’ve always known that nuclear power is too expensive and too slow to be a viable solution to anything, including (particularly) anthropogenic climate change:

Nuclear power is losing ground to renewables in terms of both cost and capacity as its reactors are increasingly seen as less economical and slower to reverse carbon emissions, an industry report said.
FILE PHOTO: Cooling towers and high-tension electrical power lines are seen near the Golfech nuclear plant on the border of the Garonne River between Agen and Toulouse, France, August 29, 2019. REUTERS/Regis Duvignau/File Photo

 In mid-2019, new wind and solar generators competed efficiently against even existing nuclear power plants in cost terms, and grew generating capacity faster than any other power type, the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) showed.

 “Stabilizing the climate is urgent, nuclear power is slow,” said Mycle Schneider, lead author of the report. “It meets no technical or operational need that low-carbon competitors cannot meet better, cheaper and faster.”

 ………

 The extra time that nuclear plants take to build has major implications for climate goals, as existing fossil-fueled plants continue to emit CO2 while awaiting substitution.

It should be noted that if nuclear power were accurately costed, it would cost in excess of ten times as much of any other power source.

The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189.

Over the past decade, the WNISR estimates levelized costs – which compare the total lifetime cost of building and running a plant to lifetime output – for utility-scale solar have dropped by 88% and for wind by 69%.

For nuclear, they have increased by 23%, it said.

Note that these costs do not reflect the cost of disposal of radioactive waste, or the cost of the security and non-proliferation measures required for nuclear.

Unless you want a nuclear submarine, or a nuclear weapon, nuclear power is a very bad deal.

Something Bad Happened Near Severodvinsk

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In Russian

There was some sort of event, involving a significant release of radiation, at the Nenoksa naval base:

On the morning of Thursday, August 8, something exploded at the Nenoksa Naval Base in Russia, not far from the city of Severodvinsk. This article is a good summary of what we knew by Friday. Since then, the Russian government has said that a radioactive source was involved in the explosion, along with liquid rocket fuel. Reports have gone back and forth on whether radiation detectors in Severodvinsk detected anything. Five more people have been reported dead. Sarov/VNIIEF, one of the Russian nuclear weapons laboratories, has released a statement, which some folks are rushing to translate.

The translation that I have seen of this video shows it not to be particularly informative, but it does reveal that there was an incident, and there were fatalities.

The New York Times coverage is similarly anodyne, though it does reveal a spike in radiation, albeit one that stays below recommended limits, at a nearby town.

The indications are that this is not a nuclear warhead, both Russian and US nuclear warheads have been designed to survive things like a rocket motor explosion, so it would imply that it was a test of some sort of nuclear propulsion system, along the lines of the 9M730 Burevestnik nuclear powered cruise missile announced by Putin last year.

Do You Know What Worries More than Iranian Nukes?

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The House of Saud getting nukes.

I am particularly concerned about Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud, who has shown himself to be both reckless and incompetent, having access to nuclear technology, and it appears that the Trump administration is determined to transfer advanced nuclear technology to Riyadh:

Top Trump administration officials have pushed to build nuclear power plants throughout Saudi Arabia over the vigorous objections of White House lawyers who question the legality of the plan and the ethics of a venture that could enrich Trump allies, according to a new report by House Democrats released on Tuesday.

The report is the most detailed portrait to date of how senior White House figures — including Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s first national security adviser — worked with retired military officers to circumvent the normal policymaking process to promote an export plan that experts worried could spread nuclear weapons technology in the volatile Middle East. Administration lawyers warned that the nuclear exports plan — called the Middle East Marshall Plan — could violate laws meant to stop nuclear proliferation and raised concerns about Mr. Flynn’s conflicts of interest.

Mr. Flynn had worked on the issue for the company promoting the nuclear export plan and kept pushing it once inside the White House.

But even after Mr. Flynn was fired, the proposal appears to have lingered. The initial discussions took place during the chaotic early months of the Trump administration, according to the 24-page report from the House Oversight and Reform Committee, but House Democrats on Tuesday cited evidence that as recently as last week the White House was still considering some version of the proposal. Democrats said they had begun a full-scale inquiry.

It keeps being pushed because Jared Kushner is in hock up to his eyeballs and is solvent only by dint of Saudi money, and also this:

Claims presented by whistle-blowers and White House documents obtained by the House oversight committee show that the company backing the nuclear plan, IP3 International, was working so closely with allies in the Trump political world that the company sent draft memos that would be needed from the president for the nuclear export plan to Mr. Flynn just days after Mr. Trump took office.

A week after Inauguration Day, the Democrats’ report said, a Flynn deputy for Middle East and North African affairs, Derek Harvey, met with the IP3’s co-founders at the White House, and asked National Security Council staff to include information about the nuclear power plan in a briefing to prepare Mr. Trump for a call with King Salman of Saudi Arabia.

………

Even after Mr. Flynn left the White House in February 2017 under scrutiny by the F.B.I. for his communications with Russia, officials on the National Security Council continued to push ahead, repeatedly ignoring advice from the council’s ethics counsel, the report said.

At a March 2017 meeting, Mr. Harvey tried to revive the IP3 plan “so that Jared Kushner can present it to the president for approval,” the Democratic report said, a reference to Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser. Eventually Mr. Flynn’s successor, H. R. McMaster, said all work on the plan should cease because of potentially illegal conflicts.

………

Mr. Kushner’s efforts continue. He is scheduled to travel to the region next week, with a stop in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, to brief diplomats on the economic portions of the Trump administration’s Middle East peace plan.

Here’s hoping that the House Oversight Committee is on this like white on rice.

When You Start to Believe Your Own Bullsh%$

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Rich people seem to think that simply because they have lots of money, they are knowledgeable about things completely out of their purview.

Case in point, Bill Gates, who appears to believe that he is an expert on nuclear power and global warming, so he is wringing his hands over the lack of new nuclear nuclear power plants in the US:

Bill Gates is urging the United States to invest in nuclear power research.

In his annual year-in-review Gates Notes blog post, Gates noted that, despite the consequences of climate change that people face around the globe, “global emissions of greenhouse gases went up in 2018.”

Because burning fossil fuels (oil, coal, and natural gas) releases carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, Gates wrote that we need breakthroughs in clean energy in order to curb the rise of global temperatures. Generating energy from sunlight and wind does not emit CO2; the same goes for nuclear energy.

“The world needs to be working on lots of solutions to stop climate change,” Gates wrote. “Advanced nuclear is one, and I hope to persuade US leaders to get into the game.”

First, the construction time for a nuclear power plant is on the order of a decade.

Second, one of the largest contributors to anthropogenic climate change is cement, and nuclear power uses a very large amount of that.

Third, the total life cycle costs, which are a good measure of total emissions are off the f%$#ing charts, so while fission emits no carbon, construction, enrichment, transportation of fuel, and disposal of waste, are major emitters.

So the savings are illusory, the costs are unsustainable, and the time frame is too long.

Well, This is Reassuring

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Pucker factor: 11

At one of the myriad of radioactive waste dumps in Hanford, Washington, a tunnel has collapsed:

Hundreds of workers at the Department of Energy’s Hanford nuclear site in Washington state had to “take cover” Tuesday morning after the collapse of 20-foot-long portion of a tunnel used to store contaminated radioactive materials.

The Energy Department said it activated its emergency operations protocol after reports of a “cave-in” at the 200 East Area in Hanford, a sprawling complex about 200 miles from Seattle where the government has been working to clean up radioactive materials left over from the country’s nuclear weapons program.

The agency said in a statement that the 20-foot section is part of a tunnel that is hundreds of feet long and is “used to store contaminated materials.” The tunnel is one of two that run into the Plutonium Uranium Extraction Facility, also known as PUREX. The section that collapsed was “in an area where the two tunnels join together,” the department said.

The PUREX facility, once used to extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel, has been idle for years but remains “highly contaminated,” the agency said.
………

 An August 2015 report by Vanderbilt University’s civil and environmental engineering department said the PUREX facility and the two tunnels had “the potential for significant on-site consequences” and that “various pieces of dangerous debris and equipment containing or contaminated with dangerous/mixed waste” had been placed inside the tunnels.

………

Former Energy Department official Robert Alvarez said that remotely controlled rail cars once carried spent fuel from a reactor to the PUREX chemical processing facility, which then extracted dangerous plutonium. He said the plant lies near the middle of the sprawling 580-square mile Hanford site and was “a very high-hazard operation.”

Many contaminated pieces of equipment, including the rail cars, have simply been left in the tunnels, he said. The Vanderbilt report said that there were eight rail cars in the older tunnel and 28 in the newer one.

The cave-in was discovered during “routine surveillance,” according to the Energy Department. Photographs showed a gaping hole, plainly evident because the tunnels are largely above ground.

Workers near the PUREX facility were told to shelter in place, and access to the area was restricted, according to the Energy Department statement. Officials requested that the Federal Aviation Administration put a temporary flight restriction in place, according to the FAA.

We still have billions of dollars of nuclear waste to clean up from the Truman administration.

Nuclear power is a suckers game.

Rick Perry to Head Department of ……… Errr ……… Ummm ……… Oops

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What can I say, I know that this is a cheap shot, but when someone throws me a slow pitch in the middle of the strike zone, I will take a swing at it:

President-elect Donald Trump picked Rick Perry to head the Energy Department on Wednesday, seeking to put the former Texas governor in control of an agency whose name he forgot during a presidential debate even as he vowed to abolish it.

Perry, who ran for president in the past two election cycles, is likely to shift the department away from renewable energy and toward fossil fuels, whose production he championed while serving as governor for 14 years.

His nomination — announced officially by Trump’s transition team a day after sources leaked the decision — stirred further alarm from environmental groups and others worried that the Trump administration will roll back efforts to expand renewable energy and give a powerful platform for officials questioning the scientific consensus on climate change.

The Energy Department was central to the 2011 gaffe that helped end his first presidential bid. Declaring that he wanted to eliminate three federal agencies during a primary debate in Michigan, Perry then froze after mentioning the Commerce and Education departments. “The third one, I can’t. Sorry. Oops.”

I would also note that the big jobs of the DoE are nuclear power and nuclear weapons, not fossil fuels, so Perry is even less qualified than he sounds, which kind of buggers the mind.

The Stupidest Idea of the Year Doesn’t Come From Donald Trump

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It turns out that someone doesn’t know his history, and thinks that a nuclear powered hypersonic airliner is somehow a good idea.

I would suggest that a review of the attempts at nuclear aircraft propulsion in the 1950s, including the nearly catastrophic tests on the NB-36H, where there was a (thankfully) minor airborne fire during testing:

Could this be the first nuclear powered airliner?

Currently, you would have to sit in a plane for eight or more hours after taking off from London Heathrow airport bound for New York’s J.F.K airport. Even first class travelling may not be fun in this case.

Imagine if you were told that within three hours someone could rush you over Atlantic Ocean and put you at J.F.K NY in a very comfortable plane as if you were in first class. Imagine if this were done with a speed of around 2300 mph/3,682Km/h.

They article suggests to that once fusion is perfected (magical thinking) it will be all hunky dory.

While the byproducts of Fusion are far more benign than those of fission, this is still an intensely stupid idea.