Comment...
Carbon-free nuclear power is the ONLY way the we can meet our growing electicity demand and also retire emission-belching coal generation plants and possibly check global warming. It's just that simple. Wind and solar power cannot get near retiring coal plants because of their intermittent nature.

Pound-for-pound, nuclear power produces 3 million times as much electricity as coal, but, unlike a coal generating plant, fission produces virtually no potentially global warming CO2.

Had the environmental movement in the United States not put the kabosh on building additional nuclear power plants in the 1980s, we'd be living in a different world today. Quite possibly CO2 would be under control. Quite possibly electricity rates would not be skyrocketing.

While nuclear power plants are expensive to build, they are quite cheap to fuel and operate, and they produce an awful lot of electricity. They are safe – proven by 40 years of operation – and their waste is not the problem it's made out to be. In fact, the nuclear industry says they can go another 50 years without a permanent waste repository, such as the long-delayed Yucca Mountain. Moreover, maybe the WIPP nuclear waste storage facility in New Mexico is a better choice than Yucca Mountain.

Our current 'once through' nuclear power plants use only 1% to 10% of the energy in the fuel. If we begin reprocessing nuclear waste we can reuse it over-and-over and end up with a much smaller amount of waste that is dangerous for a shorter time.

The non-proliferation argument against the USA building more nuclear power plants makes no sense, anymore, and maybe never did make sense. Over the past 30 years, while we've not been building new nuclear power plants, the rest of the world has. There are now about 400 nuclear plants worldwide. The USA has 104. The world would be a safer place if the USA gets back into the game and, as a result, gains more sway over global nuclear resources and waste.
                                       . . .

If we have scientists address the nuclear waste problem, not politicians, we can reprocess the nuclear waste so it actually becomes a resource. Moreover, Yucca Mountain was a political solution to a scientific problem. It does not make sense to ship nuclear waste to Nevada when 96 of the 104 reactors are east of the Rockies. Nor does it make sense to store nuclear waste above the surrounding water table in the most recently formed and changing crust on earth. We should consider expanding the existing WIPP disposal site in New Mexico. It is several thousand feet under the earth in a salt deposit that's had no geological activity for a zillion years (or there abouts).

— Robert Moen, Founder        
rmoen@energyplanUSA.com

Nuclear energy named as promising future technology
Korean Times 2010
Nuclear power, which emits less greenhouse gases than other energy sources, is seeing growing demand around the world. Even the United States, which halted further nuclear energy construction since the Three Mile Island incident in 1979, plans to build 32 new nuclear reactors over the coming years. Data from the International Atomic Energy Agency said that a total of 374 nuclear plants are scheduled for construction worldwide. This is expected to create a market worth up to $935 billion, the report said.

Reactivating nuclear reactors for the fight against climate change
Scientific American 2009
Nuclear power generates roughly 20% of U.S. electricity. In order to simply maintain that portion of the generation mix, 35 new reactors would have to be built in the next few years. Already, utilities have filed 17 applications for 26 new reactors and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the federal agency charged with overseeing the nuclear power industry, expects three more applications for five more reactors this year.

"There continues to be a demand for power and a certain percentage of that power needs to be baseload" (an industry term for electricity that is always available), says Adrian Heymer, of the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), "What is it going to be? Coal is not favorable at the moment and natural gas is volatile [in price]. So people are looking at nuclear."

Nuclear power’s new debate: cost
Christian Science Monitor 2009
A new nuclear enthusiasm has now emerged quite powerfully in Congress. Yet even during the heady days of 2007, Wall Street’s seven biggest banks were remembering the ghosts of nuclear power’s past – massive construction cost overruns, utility defaults, and bankruptcies. In a letter to the Department of Energy, they advised the federal government that they would require 100 percent federal loan guarantees to help finance nuclear power

Whether a nuclear project defaults depends on many factors, but often most heavily on where costs of nuclear construction are headed. Cost estimates to build a new nuclear power plant have more than tripled in the past five years, according to industry-funded reports, industry statements, and detailed studies of new nuclear power generation by a half-dozen independent researchers. In 2008, Moody’s put the cost to build new nuclear reactors at about $7,000 per kilowatt of capacity. That estimate would put a new 1,600-megawatt nuclear generation plant at around $11.2 billion.

Nuclear less risky than renewables
World Nuclear News 2008
The UK's renewable energy targets could prove both costly and risky, and nuclear energy is the most reliable viable low-carbon alternative, according to the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee. The committee's report entitled The Economics of Renewable Energy is skeptical as to whether the target of 15% renewables for the UK by 2020, proposed by the European Union (EU), can be met.

It also warns that an over-reliance on intermittent power generation options, such as wind energy, could prove both costly and risky in terms of security of supply. What is more, renewables will not be cheap, the report finds, with the evidence suggesting that the full costs of wind energy, although declining over time, remain significantly higher than those of conventional or nuclear generation. The cost of nuclear power is little affected by the oil price or by the cost of carbon, by virtue of nuclear plants' very low emissions, the report noted, and found that "all the cost estimates" showed nuclear to be cheaper than renewable energy.

Nuclear is only viable clean power
Herald Sun, Australia 2008
The Australian Academy of Technological Sciences, which represents more than 700 experts, has issued a report calling nuclear power the only reliable, proven source of electricity with a minimal carbon footprint. Renewable energy is neither not baseload power or not proven, the report said.

The blossoming of nuclear power
Barrons 2009
President-elect Barack Obama has put forth a goal to reduce carbon emissions in the U.S. by 80% by 2050, using $150 billion over 10 years to create a "clean-energy" future. Nuclear plants are the biggest producers of energy that doesn't emit any greenhouse gases. In fact, 17 applicants are seeking government approval to build 26 nuclear plants, potentially ending a 30-year hiatus in the construction of new U.S. nuke facilities.

Costs of reviving Nuclear industry
Bloomberg 2008
Global warming and the rising cost of fossil fuels have boosted chances that atomic energy will supply more U.S. electricity. Congress in December authorized $18.5 billion in guarantees that cover as much as 80 percent of nuclear plant construction costs – enough to fund three typical reactors. Taxpayers are on the hook only if borrowers default. The Energy Information Administration estimated last year that adding nuclear power capacity would cost $2,143 a kilowatt before financing and inflation. That compared with $1,434 to $2,302 for clean-coal technologies.

The greening of nuclear power
NY Times 2006
Not so many years ago, nuclear energy was a hobgoblin to environmentalists. But this is a new era, dominated by fears of tight energy supplies and global warming. Suddenly nuclear power is looking better. There is good reason to give nuclear power a fresh look. It can diversify our sources of energy with a fuel – uranium – that is both abundant and inexpensive. More important, nuclear energy can replace fossil-fuel power plants for generating electricity, reducing the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute heavily to global warming. There is no reason why the spent fuel rods can't be stored safely at surface sites for the next 50 to 100 years. Nuclear power has a good safety record in this country, and its costs, despite the high initial expense of building the plants, are looking more reasonable now that fossil fuel prices are soaring.

Next generation nuclear
Scientific American 2009 & 2003
Nuclear plants crank out a fifth of the nation’s total electrical output. And despite residual public misgivings over Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the industry has learned its lessons and established a solid safety record during the past decade. Meanwhile the efficiency and reliability of nuclear plants have climbed to record levels. Now with the ongoing debate about reducing greenhouse gases to avoid the potential onset of global warming, more people are recognizing that nuclear reactors produce electricity without discharging into the air carbon dioxide or pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and smog-causing sulfur compounds. The world demand for energy is projected to rise by about 50 percent by 2030 and to nearly double by 2050. Clearly, the time seems right to reconsider the future of nuclear power.

Nuclear support gains strength
Houston Chron 2007
With no major U.S. accidents during that period, public opinion has slowly swung in favor of splitting atoms to meet the country’s voracious power demands. And in a world worried about carbon dioxide, nuclear energy stands out, because it produces virtually no greenhouse gases.

Once nuclear plants are built, operating costs are considerably cheaper than for any fossil fuel, including coal. But nuclear plants are expensive to build, costing billions, and prone to overruns, delays and environmental lawsuits. Most of today’s reactors use only a small fraction of the uranium fuel in nuclear reactions, typically less than 1 percent. Developing reprocessing techniques would greatly extend the lifetime of the world’s supply of uranium and significantly cut waste.

Another new approach involves making small “backyard” reactors. The most aggressive proponent is Santa Fe, N.M.-based Hyperion Power, which seeks to build hot-tub-size reactors that can generate 25 megawatts of electricity, or enough juice to power 20,000 homes. The idea is to deliver power at a cost of less than 10 cents a kilowatt-hour to locations — say remote areas of Alaska, military installations or industrial locations in Canada’s tar sands — where it’s difficult to obtain conventional power.

New tech could make nuclear the best weapon against climate change
Discover Magazine 2009
The fission of an atom of uranium is 10 million times as potent as burning an atom of carbon from coal, making nuclear power efficient and inexpensive – in principle, at least. The average cost of generating nuclear energy in the United States was less than two cents per kilowatt-hour in 2006, according to the utility data provider Ventyx, which puts it on par with coal.

In its efforts to develop safer, cheaper, and more efficient nuclear reactors, the Idaho National Laboratory has researched half a dozen next-generation reactor designs; the sodium-cooled fast reactor and the very-high-temperature reactor are the most promising. Both are configured to exploit the laws of nuclear physics to make a meltdown impossible, even in the face of an engineering failure or operator error.

Meltdown: a gloomy look at the economics of nuclear power
Wall Street Journal 2009
There’s a new paper out from Spanish researchers at Universidad Pontificia Comillas exploring nuclear economics. The paper poses a simple question: Does nuclear energy add up to a rational investment in a liberalized energy market?

Taking a middle-of-the-road approach to all the variables (p. 14), the study concludes that new nuclear plants would be profitable if their cost can be kept to 2,880 euros per kilowatt (or about $3,900 per kilowatt). That figure is actually within spitting distance of cost estimates from European authorities and America’s Electric Power Research Institute.

Westinghouse certain of safety, efficiency of nuclear power
Pittsburg Post-Gazette 2009
The NRC said 14 of 26 applications now pending for nuclear power plant construction will use Westinghouse technology. Half of the world's 440 nuclear power plants already use it. An 1,100-megawatt AP1000 plant would have a base price of about $4 billion, the company said. Westinghouse plants use three confined water systems. The first involves water heated by the reactor core. A second enclosed system then heats water, producing steam inside a steam generator, which powers a turbine. A third enclosed water system helps to cool steam back to water. The AP1000 design places a large tank of cooling water higher than the reactor. Should problems occur and the reactor core begin to overheat, pressure differences cause an automatic release of water, which flows downhill into the reactor to cool the core. It also requires a novel containment dome to cool resulting steam from an accident. Steam cooled back to water is funneled back through gutters to the tank that cools the core. Radioactive waste – a longstanding concern of environmental advocates and nuclear power critics – can be stored indefinitely in water on the plant site, company officials said.

Gas row may trigger new German nuclear
Guardian UK 2008
Germany must reassess its nuclear phase out plan as the Russian gas supply crisis has highlighted the need for a fresh look at all its energy options, analysts say. The eight-year old nuclear withdrawal programme for Germany's 17 reactors by 2021 is enshrined in law. Nuclear contributes a third of all power generation and

Japan eyes restarting 'dream reactor'
Todayonline 2008
Japan, an economic giant with almost no natural energy resources, is eyeing restarting its "dream nuclear reactor" this year after a raft of safety scares closed the plant for more than 13 years.

Energy secr. likes recycling nuke waste
UC Berkely News 2005
When Energy Secretary Steven Chu was interviewed in 2005, he was asked if fission-based nuclear power plants be made a bigger part of the energy-producing portfolio?

He answered, "Absolutely. Right now about 20 percent of our power comes from nuclear; there have been no new nuclear plants built since the early '70s. The real rational fears against nuclear power are about the long-term waste problem and proliferation....we've got to recycle the waste...suppose we reduce the lifetime of the radioactive waste by a factor of 1,000. So it goes from a couple-hundred-thousand-year problem to a thousand-year problem. At a thousand years, it's in the realm that we can monitor – we don't need Yucca Mountain."

Greens must learn to love nuclear power
New Statesman 2008
Being anti-nuclear is an article of faith in today's environmental movement, just as it was during the 1970s. But nuclear and wind power are the safest technologies , while oil, coal and biomass the most dangerous.

The Intl. Energy Agency looked at life-cycle costs for all power sources and concluded that nuclear was the cheapest option, followed by coal, wind and gas. While conventional thermal reactors use less than 1% of the potential energy in their uranium fuel, 4th-generation nuclear technology – better known as fast-breeder reactors – are 60 times more efficient, and can burn virtually all of the energy available in the uranium ore. Fast-breeder reactors can also run on the "depleted" uranium left behind by conventional reactors, and help reduce the proliferation threat by burning up plutonium stockpiles left over from decommissioned nuclear weapons.

Fourth- generation nuclear technology is also inherently safer than earlier designs. The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) operates at atmospheric pressure, reducing the possibility of leaks and loss-of-coolant accidents. It is also designed to be "walk-away safe", meaning that if all operators stood up and left, the reactor would shut itself down automatically rather than overheat and suffer a meltdown.

It is worth remembering the contribution that nuclear power has already made to offsetting global warming: the world's 442 operating nuclear reactors, which produce 16 per cent of global electricity, save 2.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year compared to coal. The most pressing issue is to shut down all coal-fired power plants and convert to nuclear reactors by the thousand.

Nuclear power future
MIT Study 2003
This report concludes that "the nuclear option should be retained, precisely because it is an important carbon-free source of power." The MIT study notes that during the next 50 years, "unless patterns change dramatically, energy production and use will contribute to global warming through large-scale greenhouse gas emissions – hundreds of billions of tons of carbon in the form of carbon dioxide." The nuclear scenario offered by the study would expand current global nuclear-generating capacity "almost threefold, to 1000 billion watts by the year 2050. Such a deployment would avoid 1.8 billion tons of carbon emissions annually from coal plants, about 25% of the increment in carbon emissions otherwise expected in the business-as-usual scenario."

Proposed nuclear plant comes with price tag
Bristol Herald Courier 2008
The Tennessee Valley Authority is not flinching from its goal of building the Bellefonte Nuclear Plant in Alabama, despite a projection that the facility could cost more to build than all three of agency’s current nuclear generating stations. Using estimates from the nuclear energy industry, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission found that the two pressurized water reactors planned for the site near Scottsboro, Ala., range from $9.8 billion to $17.5 billion. That’s compared to estimates of $6.4 billion to $7.1 billion a year ago. “Everybody’s costs are going up,” TVA President Tom Kilgore said. “But it’s still economical. If you take into account the fact that we also see carbon [pollution] costs in some form, we think it’s very prudent to keep looking at our next nuclear options.”

Nuclear is a cash cow
National Review 2009
Reactors have huge startup costs, of that there is no doubt. Current estimates are that plants on the drawing boards may take $8 to $10 billion to complete — more than the net worth of many utilities. But these costs are deceptive. Wind and solar installations actually cost more, since you need dozens of square miles of real estate for wind farms and sprawling solar collectors to get the same output. The advantage of wind and solar is that they don’t have to go through five years of licensing procedures at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But once construction is complete, reactors have absorbed 75 percent of their lifetime expenditures. Fuel and operating costs make up only 25 percent of total costs, as opposed to 70 percent for coal and 90 percent for natural gas, the other two sources of base-load power.

Here’s another interesting statistic. Natural gas plants now make up 39 percent of America’s total generating capacity but produce only 20 percent of our electricity. Nuclear, on the other hand, makes up 10 percent of our capacity but generates the same 20 percent. That’s because reactors are up-and-running 90 percent of the time while natural gas plants operate at only 20 percent capacity. The reason? Natural gas is so expensive that plants only run as a last resort.

Is nuclear power too expensive?
The Energy Collective 2009
Currently anti-nuclear ideologues are touting the line that nuclear power is too expensive. But too expensive in what ways? Nuclear critics have pointed to a report by Citigroup Global Markets on Nuclear Risk Factors. It states: There are five substantial areas of risk faced by developers of new nuclear power stations. Three of those risk areas are so big and significant that if they go wrong, the developer (even the biggest utilities) could be financially damaged beyond repair. These risks can be classed as Corporate Killers.

Nuclear's Model T
Mechanical Engineering 2009
The future of nuclear energy could lie in generation plants that can be factory built, shipped to a site, and operated 30 years without refueling.

Is the solution to the U.S. nuclear waste problem in France?
NY Times 2009
France reccycles the nuclear waste from its 58 nuclear power plants and reuses it again to generate electricity. But since President Carter shut down the U.S. reprocessing program in the 1970s, U.S. policy has been to take used power plant fuel and bury it.

Some think there is much to learn from the French. In a recent paper, one nuclear expert likened the U.S. process to "pulling a log out of the fireplace just because the bark has burned off." More than 90 percent of the energy in spent nuclear fuel remains available for reprocessing, while only 3 to 4 percent is "useless waste".

Zero-emission nuclear power delivers 24/7 base-load power
Scientific American 2009
The president and CEO of NRG Energy, Inc., weighs in on the hurdles facing his industry

Thirty years after Three Mile Island, nuclear power is poised for a comeback
Money Morning 2009
It’s been 30 years since the meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant also caused a meltdown in the U.S. commercial nuclear power business. Even though no one was seriously injured – and only a small amount of radiation leaked into the air above eastern Pennsylvania - the March 28, 1979 accident put the perils and mysterious nature of nuclear energy squarely in the spotlight and cast a pall over the industry from which it never recovered. Indeed, TMI served as an industry epitaph. Not a single new commercial power plant has been ordered – let alone built - in the United States since the accident, and most experts believed the rabid anti-nuclear sentiment in the U.S. market would be impossible to overcome. That was then, this is now. Today – against a backdrop of deep-seeded and growing concerns about global warming and greenhouse gases emitted from fossil-fuel plants – the nuclear power industry is moving ahead with plans to build a string of new reactors in the U.S.

Lessons from the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage debated
US News 2008
Over the past decade, more than 7,000 shipments of radioactive nuclear waste have been sent, without any problem, to a government repository in the southwestern United States. This crucial repository is not the ill-fated Yucca Mountain, the Nevada site that has been steeped in controversy since Congress selected it 22 years ago to store the country's civilian nuclear waste.

The functioning repository is located in Carlsbad, N.M., and it may hold some useful answers.

Nuclear power to save
the world
Book by Gwyneth Cravens 2007
"Nuclear power has its drawbacks, but the ratio of benefit to risk is the best I've seen," says Gwyneth Cravens in her book Power to Save the World. Cravens, a former anti-nuke demonstrator, says, "Nuclear power is cleaner, safer, and more efficient than fossil-fuel power."
Global Warming  "By mid-century, the world's need for energy is expected to increase by 160%. A simultaneous expansion of global nuclear capacity to around 1,350 reactors would cut the increase in carbon emission by a quarter."
Emissions "Studies of carbon dioxide emissions from the nuclear fuel cycle indicate that they are from .5% to 4% of the emissions from the equivalent generating capacity of coal-fired plants."
Operating Costs  "Nuclear power is not more expensive than other means of electricity generation. Over the long run, uranium will continue to be inexpensive."
Construction Costs  "A plant of standardized, streamlined design with many more built-in passive saftey features, and therefore fewer pumps, valves and other components, could be built in five years, as they do in France. The price per plant comes to about $3 billion – the cost of maintaining the U.S. presence in Iraq for one week."
Energy  "Uranium is more energy-dense than any other fuel. If you got all of your electricity for your lifetime solely from nuclear power, your share of the waste would fit in a single soda can. If you got all your electricity from coal, your share would come to 146 tons."
Radiation  "A person living within 50 miles of a nuclear plant receives less radiation from it in a year than you get from eating one banana."
Waste "Annual waste from one typical reactor could fit in the bed of a standard pickup."

Climate expert favors atomic power
The Times 2008
Just a month ago I had a Damascene conversion: the Green case against nuclear power is based largely on myth and dogma. My tipping point came when I discovered just how much nuclear power has changed since I first set my mind against it. Prescription for the Planet, a new book by the American writer Tom Blees, opened my eyes to fourth-generation “fast-breeder” reactors, which use fuel much more efficiently than the old-style reactors, produce shorter-lived waste and can also be designed to be “walk-away safe”. Best of all, these new reactors – prototypes of which have already been tested – can produce power by burning up existing stocks of nuclear waste. As Blees puts it: “Thus we have a prodigious supply of free fuel that is actually even better than free, for it is material that we are quite desperate to get rid of.”

According to the Intergovern-mental Panel on Climate Change, nuclear is just as low-carbon a power source as wind and solar: the world’s 439 operating nuclear reactors save the planet from 2 billion extra tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, which would have been emitted had coal been used instead. On a deaths per gigawatt-year basis, nuclear is safer than coal and oil.

Nuclear fusion-fission hybrid could contribute to carbon-free energy
Science Daily 2009
Physicists at The University of Texas have designed a new system that, when fully developed, would use fusion to eliminate most of the transuranic waste produced by nuclear power plants.

Construction costs to soar for new nuclear power plants
Standard & Poors 2008
The current heightened interest in nuclear asset construction collides head on with an unprecedented run-up in key commodity costs. Capital costs, after including interest during construction, and other escalation/inflation factors, can range from around $5,000 per kw to $8,000 per kw.

Nuclear's comeback: still no energy panacea
Time 2008
Nuclear power is on the verge of a remarkable comeback. But some little-noticed rain has fallen on the nuclear parade. It turns out that new plants would be not just extremely expensive but spectacularly expensive. The first detailed cost estimate, filed by Florida Power & Light (FPL) for a large plant off the Keys, came in at a shocking $12 billion to $18 billion. Progress Energy announced a $17 billion plan for a similar Florida plant, tripling its estimate in just a year. Ratepayers would take the main hit, but taxpayers could be on the hook for billions in loan guarantees, tax breaks, insurance benefits and direct subsidies – not to mention the problem of storing radioactive waste, if Congress can ever figure out where to put it.