OPG wraps up Darlington 1 refurbishment early

Tuesday, 19 November 2024

Refurbishment activities have been completed five months ahead of schedule at the third of four nuclear units to undergo the process at the Ontario Power Generation plant, which will soon be reconnected to the grid.

The turbine hall at Darlington 1 (Image: OPG)

The 875 MWe unit was taken offline for refurbishment in February 2022, following units 2 and 3, which completed refurbishment in 2020 and 2023, as part of a 10-year CAD12.8 billion (about USD9.7 billion) mega-project to refurbish all four Candu units at the site. The final unit undergoing refurbishment, unit 4, is currently in the reactor rebuilding phase, and is on schedule to be completed by the end of 2026.

Separately, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) announced it has removed the fourth and final regulatory hold point for the Darlington 1 refurbishment, allowing Ontario Power Generation (OPG) to exceed 35% full operating power for the refurbished reactor and proceed with normal operations. Hold points are mandatory checkpoints where CNSC approval is required before the licensee can move on to the next stage of the process to return the unit to operation.

The refurbishment will allow the units to continue generating electricity for a further 30 years. In addition, unit 1 will become the first Darlington reactor to produce cobalt-60, a vital radioisotope whose uses include sterilising single-use medical devices, such as syringes, implants, and surgical instruments. About half of the global supply of the isotope is produced in Ontario's Candu reactors.

"With the refurbishment of another unit, OPG, our employees, and our project partners continue to demonstrate that we can execute major nuclear projects not only on time, but ahead of time, and with a clear commitment to quality," OPG President and CEO Ken Hartwick said. "This latest milestone reflects our decade of preparation and planning, as well as our dedication to quality and innovation, and the hard work of our entire project team, vendors, skilled trades, and energy professionals."

"Ontario needs more electricity - 75% more by 2050 - to power new homes, historic new investments and an electrifying economy," the province's Minister of Energy and Electrification Stephen Lecce said. "Delivering this massive clean energy project five months ahead of schedule is a testament to the incredible knowledge and skill of Ontario workers and positions us for success as we build out our plan to meet the soaring energy demand over the next 25 years."

According to a report by the Conference Board of Canada, the Darlington refurbishment project and the subsequent 30 years of station operation are expected to generate a total of CAD90 billion in economic benefits for Ontario and create 14,200 jobs per year.

Norway SMR options to be explored with X-energy

Tuesday, 19 November 2024

Norsk Kjernekraft has signed a memorandum of understanding with high-temperature gas-cooled pebble-bed nuclear reactor developer X-energy to explore the deployment of small modular reactors in Norway.

A conceptual rendering from earlier this year of how a data centre with an SMR power plant and a green electrolysis factory might look (Image: Norsk Kjernekraft)

The memorandum of understanding also encompasses DL Energy and DL E&C, from South Korea's DL Group, who signed a collaboration agreement with Norsk Kjernekraft in August. The Norwegian company said the aim was to combine the Korean firm's expertise and experience in building nuclear power facilities with the US-based X-energy's reactor technology.

The August agreement included a feasibility study of constructing a nuclear power plant at the Mongstad oil refinery in the Austrheim and Alver municipality, with the Norwegian firm aiming for such a plant to be built by the mid-30s if there is "political will". In August Norsk Kjernekraft also submitted a proposal to Norway's Ministry of Energy for an assessment of the potential construction of a power plant based on multiple SMRs in the municipality of Øygarden, west of Bergen. That proposal followed proposals submitted for SMR power plants in Aure and Heim municipalities, as well as Vardø municipality.

Last month internet shopping and web services giant Amazon announced it was taking a stake in X-energy with the goal of deploying up to 5 GW of its small modular reactors in the USA by 2039.

Jonny Hesthammer, CEO of Norsk Kjernekraft, said: "South Korea has extensive experience in the efficient construction and operation of nuclear power plants, while the US has the leading technology. The recent investment by Amazon, one of the world’s largest companies, in X-energy underlines the importance of this agreement. This is simply because it increases the chances of succeeding. While the SMRs to be developed by X-energy are considered fourth generation, the technology is well-proven. Their use of TRISO fuel in the form of tennis ball-sized pebbles means that meltdown is not possible, something that many worry about."

Alistair Black, Senior Director for X-energy, said: "We’re delighted to be working with DL Energy to assess the potential for an Xe-100 advanced small modular reactor project in Southwest Norway for the nuclear development company Norsk Kjernekraft. We have projects under way in the US and could help Norway decarbonise its industrial sector and transport network and meet growing electricity demand from the booming artificial intelligence and cloud computing sectors."

In June, the Norwegian government announced the appointment of a committee to conduct a broad review and assessment of various aspects of a possible future establishment of nuclear power in the country. It must deliver its report by 1 April 2026.

X-energy's Xe-100 is a Generation IV advanced reactor design which X-energy says is based on decades of high temperature gas-cooled reactor operation, research, and development, and is designed to operate as a standard 320 MWe four-pack power plant or scaled in units of 80 MWe. At 200 MWt of 565°C steam, the Xe-100 is suitable for a range of uses and power applications including mining and heavy industry. The Xe-100 uses tri-structural isotropic (TRISO) particle fuel, which has additional safety benefits because it can withstand very high temperatures without melting.

X-energy says its design makes it road-shippable with accelerated construction timelines and more predictable and manageable construction costs, and is well suited to meet the requirements of energy-intensive data centres.

Generator stator arrives at Hinkley Point C

Tuesday, 19 November 2024

The turbine generator stator for the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant under construction in Somerset, England, has been delivered from the manufacturing plant in Belfort, France.

The stator arrives at the construction site (Image: EDF Energy)

The stator - measuring 12 metres in length and weighing 450 tonnes - was supplied by EDF subsidiary Arabelle Solutions. It was delivered to the construction site on 17 November following a journey via road, rail and sea.

(Image: EDF Energy)

The stator is a key component of the turbine generator, serving as the stationary portion of an electric generator that converts the rotating magnetic field into electric current.

(Image: EDF Energy)

EDF completed its acquisition of a portion of GE Vernova's nuclear conventional islands technology and services, including its Arabelle steam turbines, in May this year. The transaction included the manufacturing of conventional island equipment for new nuclear power plants as well as related maintenance and upgrade activities for existing nuclear plants outside of the Americas. EDF's acquisition of the business - at that time, known as GE Steam Power - was first announced in early 2022 and the final agreement was signed in the November of that year.

Construction of Hinkley Point C - composed of two EPR pressurised water reactors of 1630 MWe each - began in December 2018, with unit 1 of the plant originally scheduled to start up by the end of 2025, before that was revised to 2027 in May 2022. In January, EDF announced that the "base case" was now for unit 1 being operational in 2030, with the cost revised from GBP26 billion (USD32.8 billion) to between GBP31-34 billion, in 2015 prices.

When complete, the two EPR reactors will produce enough carbon-free electricity for six million homes, and are expected to operate for as long as 80 years.

SMRs to help decarbonise Dutch energy system, study concludes

Monday, 18 November 2024

Small modular reactors could play an important role and contribute to the Dutch energy transition, a joint report by NRG-Pallas and TNO concludes. The study shows that there is room for more than 13 SMRs in 2050.

(Image: NRG-Pallas / TNO)

The study, the partners said, utilises "NRG-Pallas' expertise in innovative reactor technologies and TNO's energy system model OPERA".

Two scenarios drawn up by TNO were used in this study: ADAPT and TRANSFORM. These scenarios are based on different visions of the future for the Dutch energy system. In both visions, the aim is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030 and to achieve greenhouse gas neutrality by 2050.

In order to investigate the sensitivity of the results with respect to boundary conditions and assumptions, a few 'what-if' analyses were performed. These what-if analyses examined whether investment in and use of SMRs change when input parameters are varied.

"The results show that SMRs have a role to play in the Dutch energy transition," the study says. "The optimal contribution of SMRs to 2050 was calculated for various assumptions about future society. The results show that two to more than 13 SMRs (of 150 MWe) can be deployed with room for further expansion of this number in 2050."

It adds: "These results are contingent on policy objectives, expected market availability and realisation periods. If constraints on the potential deployment capacity are partially lifted, as is done in some of the what-if analyses, it is observed that there may even be room for more than 27 SMRs (of 150 MWe). This what-if analysis result can be interpreted as a more economically optimal solution, but is obviously conditional on the aforementioned aspects used to define the potential limits for the scenarios being sufficiently adjusted to allow for this to occur.

"On the other hand, with delayed introduction of SMRs or no nuclear at all, a carbon neutral energy system in 2050 is possible as well. The exact optimum depends mainly on the future of industry, and more specifically on the future heat demand from activities such as refineries and (bio-)aromatics production, and the degree of electrification in society. Nevertheless, it can be concluded that SMRs are an important option for decarbonisation of the industry by supplying process heat."

An earlier scenario study by TNO showed that in an energy system without new nuclear power plants, the system costs are 1% to 2.5% higher than with nuclear energy. "Although nuclear power plants are initially more expensive than wind turbines and solar panels, the loss of nuclear energy as an energy supply should be compensated for by greater use of more expensive flexibility options, such as energy storage," NRG-Pallas noted.

In April 2023, in its draft Climate Fund for 2024, the Dutch government budgeted funds totalling EUR320 million (USD352 million) for the development of nuclear energy. The funds will be used for the preparation of the operational extension of the existing Borssele nuclear power plant, the construction of two new large reactors, the development of small modular reactors and for nuclear skills development in the Netherlands.

In August 2022, the UK's Rolls-Royce SMR signed an exclusive agreement with ULC-Energy to collaborate on the deployment of Rolls-Royce SMR power plants in the Netherlands. ULC-Energy - established in 2021 and based in Amsterdam - aims to accelerate decarbonisation in the Netherlands by developing nuclear energy projects that efficiently integrate with residential and industrial energy networks in the country.

Chernobyl considered as site for new small modular reactors

Monday, 18 November 2024

The area around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is one of the places being looked at as potential locations for Ukraine's planned future wave of small modular reactors.

The former Chernobyl nuclear power plant is surrounded by an exclusion zone (Image: CHNPP

Representatives of the State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management and specialists from Ukraine's nuclear energy giant Energoatom, joined Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (CNPP) officials last month to visit several areas within the exclusion zone and around the plant, CNPP reported. "This was followed by a technical discussion on the suitability of these sites for future SMR construction," it added.

It was the second on-site meeting to "review potential locations for small modular reactors (SMRs) proposed by Chornobyl NPP and discuss land allocation matters".

The Chernobyl nuclear power plant lies about 130 kilometres north of Kiev and about 20 kilometres south of the border with Belarus. Following the 1986 accident, a 30-kilometre exclusion zone was created around it. (Read more: World Nuclear Association's guide to the Chernobyl accident)

Ukraine's big plans for SMRs
 

Ukraine has plans for as many as nine new Westinghouse AP1000 large reactors across the country, as well as developing a programme for SMRs. Progress on its new nuclear has continued amid the on-going war with Russia, which has seen its largest nuclear power plant - Zaporizhzhia NPP - under Russian military control since early March 2022.

Energoatom signed an agreement last year which could pave the way for up to 20 of Holtec's SMRs. It has also been exploring options with a number of other potential SMR providers.

On Saturday at the COP29 UN climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, US Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, Bonnie Jenkins, and Ukraine Minister of Energy Herman Halushchenko announced three project partnerships:

- To build a pilot plant in Ukraine to demonstrate production of clean hydrogen and ammonia "using simulated safe and secure small modular reactor technology". The project is being carried out by a multinational public-private consortium from Japan, South Korea, Ukraine, and the USA.
- Project Phoenix funding to help facilitate the transition of Ukraine’s coal-fired power plants to SMR nuclear power plants, carrying out siting and feasibility studies.
- To develop a roadmap and provide technical support to rebuild, modernise, and decarbonise Ukraine’s steel industry with SMRs.  The roadmap will pave the way for using clean electricity, process heat, and hydrogen from SMRs for clean steel manufacturing and production

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (AMSE) said it would be working to support the clean steel programme, with CEO Tom Costabile saying: "Small modular reactors are an important part of the clean energy future, as well as an economic redevelopment opportunity for Ukraine."

Russia places 'tit-for-tat' ban on US uranium exports

Monday, 18 November 2024

Russia has announced restrictions on exports of enriched uranium to the USA. The temporary ban is in response to US restrictions on imports of Russian uranium products which came into force earlier this year.

President Vladimir Putin said in September that Russia would consider placing restrictions on uranium exports (Image: Kremlin)

The Russian government announced the ban on its official website on 15 November as an amendment to Government Decree No 313 of 9 March 2022. It covers exports "to the United States or under foreign trade contracts concluded with persons registered in the jurisdiction of the United States". Exemptions will be made for deliveries under one-off licences issued by the Russian Federal Service for Technical and Export Control.

"The decision was made on the instructions of the President in response to the restriction imposed by the United States for 2024-2027, and from 2028 - a ban on the import of Russian uranium products," the Russian government said. "Vladimir Putin instructed to analyse the possibility of restricting supplies to foreign markets of strategic raw materials in September at a meeting with the Government."

According to the Tass news agency, Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom said the ban was legal and the expected "tit-for-tat response to actions of the US authorities". Deliveries of Russian uranium to countries other than the USA "will continue without changes, on conditions agreed with customers and subject to requirements of national laws", Rosatom said.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told Tass that "in cases where it serves our interests, Russia’s Federal Service for Technical and Export Control may decide to exclude certain items from this list of bans", but said the government had assessed the implications and consequences of the "absolutely reciprocal" countermeasures. "But the key point is that this should fully align with our interests and not undermine them. That is the basis for what has been done," he said.

US President Joe Biden signed the Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act in May after the bill was passed unanimously by the US Senate. The prohibition came into effect in August, and will last until the end of 2040. Waivers may be granted to allow the import of limited amounts of Russian-origin LEU, under certain circumstances, until 1 January 2028.

US enrichment company Centrus received such a waiver from the US Department of Energy in July, allowing it to import low-enriched uranium from Russia for delivery to US customers in 2024 and 2025. Tenex - a Russian government-owned company - is Centrus' largest supplier of low-enriched uranium for delivery to its US and international customers pursuant to a 2011 contract.

Tenex has now notified Centrus that its general licence to export the material to the USA has been rescinded under the decree, "effective through December 31, 2025", and that it is now required to obtain a specific export licence from the Russian authorities for each of its remaining 2024 shipments to Centrus and for shipments in 2025.

"Tenex has informed Centrus of its plan to seek the necessary export licences, in a timely manner, to allow it to meet its delivery obligations for the pending Centrus orders," Centrus said in a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The US company said it will be in communication with its customers whose pending orders may be affected and is assessing actions to mitigate adverse impacts.

"If TENEX is unable to secure export licences for our pending or future orders, it would affect our ability to meet our delivery obligations to our customers and would have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations, and competitive position," the company said.

According to US Energy Information Administration data, owners and operators of US nuclear power plants purchased a total of 51.6 million pounds U3O8 (19,848 tU) of deliveries from domestic and foreign suppliers in 2023. Most of this came from Canada (27% of total deliveries), Australia (22%) and Kazakhstan (22%): Russian-origin material accounted for 12% of total deliveries. Domestically produced material accounted for 5%. But while US facilities provided 28% of the uranium enrichment services - measured in separative work units, or SWU - purchased by US owners and operators in 2023, 27% came from Russia, more than any other foreign supplier.

World Nuclear News

 

Preparations for dismantling of Italian steam generators

Thursday, 14 November 2024

Societa Gestione Impianti Nucleari SpA (Sogin) announced it has opened a dedicated area at the shut down Latina nuclear power plant for the dismantling of its six steam generators.

The Latina plant (Image: Sogin)

The Latina plant, comprising a single 210 MWe Magnox graphite gas-cooled reactor, began operating in January 1964. It was permanently shut in December 1987 as a result of the Italian referendum on nuclear power that followed the April 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Sogin - the Italian state-owned company responsible for dismantling the country's nuclear power plants - took over ownership of the site in November 1999.

Whilst in operation, the steam generators (also referred to as boilers) - positioned outside the reactor building - allowed the heat to be transferred from carbon dioxide to water, thus producing the steam needed to drive the turbines and produce electricity.

Sogin described the dismantling of the steam generators as "a particularly complex activity because it involves components positioned at high altitude of large dimensions". Each one is 24 metres high with a diameter of 6 metres, with a combined weight of 3700 tonnes.

"Work is currently under way to build the confinement structures that will allow the areas affected by the boiler cutting and material handling activities to be isolated and kept safe from the external environment for the entire duration of the operations," Sogin said.

The project involves the subsequent sectioning of each boiler into nine cylindrical parts, each weighing approximately 90 tonnes, proceeding progressively from top to bottom. The technique adopted will be diamond wire-cutting, which simultaneously allows the internal components of the steam generator to be sectioned (tie rods, spacers, brackets, sheets, etc).

The cylindrical portions will be lowered to the ground using a special crane and then transferred to the Materials Treatment Station, which has already been built, where the tube bundles will be removed, the external casing will be cut into smaller parts and decontaminated with high-pressure water. Most of the operations will be carried out using high-tech robotic systems.

The metallic materials resulting from cutting the casing will be released and sent for recycling, while the tube bundles will be treated by melting by a qualified operator, in line with Sogin's circular economy strategy based on minimising radioactive waste.

Italy's Ministry of Economic Development issued a decree in 2020 authorising Sogin to begin the initial phase of decommissioning the Latina plant. The main activities envisaged during this initial phase concern the dismantling of the six boilers and the lowering of the reactor building height from 53 to 38 metres. Buildings and auxiliary systems will also be dismantled. These operations are in addition to those already carried out or in progress at the plant.

By the end of this phase, all previous radioactive wastes generated through the operation of the plant or those produced by the dismantling of structures, systems and plant components will be stored safely at the site. These wastes will be stored both in a new temporary storage facility and in some specifically adapted reactor building premises. This initial phase of decommissioning the Latina plant is expected to be completed in 2027 and to cost EUR270 million (USD284 million).

With the availability of a planned national repository, it will be possible to start the second and final phase of the decommissioning of the plant with the dismantling of the graphite gas reactor. Once all the radioactive waste has been transferred to the repository and the temporary storage facilities demolished, the site will be released, without radiological restrictions, and returned to the community for its reuse.

Fukushima: Stumbling Through Deconstruction of Reactor Meltdowns

By John Laforge

November 2, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


Image by Fukushima Central Television.

Melted fuel still vexing test extraction methods

Thirteen years on from the catastrophic triple explosions and reactor meltdowns at Fukushima-Daiichi in NE Japan, emergency responders are still trying to observe and examine the melted fuel under the reactors (sometimes called “corium”). Contractors from Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) have repeatedly failed in attempts to robotically collect a mere three-grams (one 10th of an ounce) of the corium from reactor 2, a project that started three years ago.

The company Amentum [1] working for Mitzubishi Heavy Industries, has built some robotic machinery to try and retrieve a smidgeon of corium to find out what state the meltdown is in [2] because, as National Public Radio reported, “the exact nature of the debris is currently unknown.” [3]

Amentum is trying to build an extraction tool that can function in a radiation zone so fierce that it wrecks most machinery. A 2015 attempt to look inside Unit 1 with a device built by Hitachi-GE Nuclear failed after three hours.[4] Amentum’s first attempt in reactor 2 was stalled August 22 after the long pipe system was found to have been mis-assembled. Then Sept. 18, video problems halted the second try. The AP reported that the probe is “maneuvered remotely by operators at another building because of the fatally high radiation emitted by the melted debris.” [5]

Still, teams of workers have to do15-minute rotating shifts — to limit their exposure to the wreckage’s radioactivity level — preparing the probe for another attempt. Industry slang for the team members is “sponges.” Recovering a mere 3 grams is scheduled to take two weeks because the slow-moving robotic plucker tends to get stuck in the tangled debris and takes a tortured path past meltdown-produced obstacles.

The mission of the 3-gram retrieval program is to determine whether if it’s possible to eventually retrieve and containerize all 880 metric tonnes — 300 tonnes per reactor — of what the Associated Press called “fatally radioactive” wreckage, to keep it out of the environment for eons. Some critics have said decommissioning the whole site could take 100 years.

The idea of covering the whole radioactive malignancy with a roof — like the shed that was installed over the Chernobyl reactor site — is unpopular because of the area’s continuous earthquake activity and the risk of another major quake and tsunami.

Plutonium on the Wind

Nuclear reactors at Fukushima and everywhere smash apart uranium atoms creating a lot of heat to boil water. This atom smashing inside reactors produces radioactive poisons like cesium, iodine, strontium and dozens of others — including plutonium. In addition to this reactor-borne plutonium at Fukushima, about 6% of the fuel in reactor No. 3 was made of plutonium itself. [6]

Some of this plutonium from inside the three destroyed reactors was released to the environment by the meltdowns and explosions of March 2011. On Nov. 15, 2020, the Journal Science of the Total Environment published the report, “Particulate plutonium released from the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns” noting that plutonium-239 was dispersed widely disaster.[7]

Plutonium, the most toxic substance known to science, was dispersed “up to 230 km away” (142 miles) from the reactor site, the researchers found.

Long-distance dispersion of plutonium was the result of micro-particles being blown by the wind. Five isotopes of plutonium were released including Pu-238, -239, -240, -241, and -242. Some plutonium persists environmentally and contaminates the food chain for 240,000 years.

In 2023, the journal Chemosphere reported a study’s findings of large amounts of highly radioactive cesium-rich micro-particles (CsMPs) in an abandoned school building close to the Fukushima Daiichi site. [8]

Plumes of the microparticles penetrated the building during the meltdowns of March 2011. Phys.org reports that the contamination poses “a threat to human health if inhaled. The study shows that indoor CsMPs should be considered in safety assessments and in building clean-up efforts.”

Long-term Effects of Dumping Unknown, Scientist Warns

Japan hosted the 10th Pacific Island Leaders Meeting in Tokyo last July, which was attended by most leaders of the18-member Pacific Islands Forum.

A hot topic was Japan’s dumping of tens of thousands of tons of contaminated Fukushima wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. The dumping was protested by Pacific rim countries and many, including China and Russia have banned imports of seafood products from the region’s waters. Some 60,000 tons of the wastewater has been discharged by August 2024.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida assured the island leaders gathering that the discharge of the wastewater was being done “in compliance with international safety standards and practices.” [9] Yet the controversial dumping continues to be criticized by scientists.

In Tokyo, director of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory at the University of Hawaii, Research Professor Robert Richmond, complained that questions remain regarding the effectiveness of the water filtration system, known as ALPS, and about the radioactive contents of the thousands of storage tanks of wastewater.

In October 2018, Tepco admitted that its wastewater filter system, had failed to remove dangerous elements and the company publicly apologized. [10] Tepco promising to re-filter the wastewater, noting that 84% of the 890,000 tonnes then held in tanks (today there are 1.3 million tonnes) still contained high concentrations of iodine-129, ruthenium-106, technetium-99, and cabon-14. Levels of strontium-90, a severe human health hazard, were detected in some tanks at 20,000 times the legal limit. Tepco for years has insisted, and most media still report, that its ALPS treatment process removes everything but tritium, including strontium and 61 other radioactive elements, from the contaminated water.

“The long-term effects of this discharge on Pacific marine ecosystems and those who depend on them are still unknown. Even small doses of radiation can cause cancer or genetic damage,” Prof. Richmond said in a statement to BenarNews after the gathering.

Richmond called Japan’s current radiation monitoring system as inadequate and poorly designed, and said it’s failing to protect ocean and human health.

“The discharge, planned to continue for decades, is irreversible. Radionuclides bioaccumulate in marine organisms and can be passed up the food web, affecting marine life and humans who consume affected seafood,” Richmond said.

The professor also raised concerns about additional hazards already harming the Pacific Ocean and marine life, such as pollution, overfishing, and climate change. He urged Japan to reconsider its approach. Building the contaminated water into cement structures like sea walls is one alternative.

You can hear Prof. Richardson explain the risks of tritium contamination in an NPR interview, here.

Water Treatment Leaves Highly Radioactive Sludge in Search of Containment

Tons of highly radioactive chemicals collected in the ALPS filters are collected as sludge and transferred to heavy plastic casks called “high integrity containers” or HICs, that moved to temporary storage.

The Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun, published a report on the wastewater August 24, 2024 that clearly outlines some problems with the sludge. [11] The end of article reads as follows:

In addition to the release of treated water, there are many other issues to be tackled.

The amount of highly radioactive sludge, or “slurry,” produced in the process of treating contaminated water continues to increase, but no effective treatment method has been decided upon.

The increasing amount of slurry is stored in tanks, but since there is still a risk of leakage when it is in liquid form, plans call for it to be dehydrated to reduce its volume and then process the substance into solid form.

In 2021, TEPCO filed an application to build a device for this purpose. But the Nuclear Regulation Authority pointed out the risk of radiation exposure to workers, and TEPCO was told to review the design.

As a result, the start of the dehydration process has been delayed from fiscal 2022 to fiscal 2026.

Furthermore, no concrete method has been decided on for solidifying the dehydrated slurry.

TEPCO is aiming to determine the solidification method by the end of fiscal 2025 and start solidification around fiscal 2035.

Advocates Demand Stricter Limits on Nuclear Poisons

The Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network in Japan is an alliance of parents, concerned citizens, and affiliated organizations. The group writes:

“The U.S. FDA has set a potentially hazardous level of “allowable” radiation in food: 1,200 Becquerel (Bq) per kilogram (kg) of cesium-134 and cesium-137. “Bec-querels-per-kilogram” is a reference to the amount of highly radioactive cesium-137, which spewed in large quantities by the three burning reactor meltdowns and which persists in the environment for 300 years.

Alarmingly, this is merely a recommendation and holds no legal weight. Such a high threshold exposes a significant portion of the U.S. population, particularly children and women, to considerable health risks.

FFAN is urging the United States to lower its allowable cesium limit to five Bq/kg for food, nutritional supplements and pharmaceuticals, and that the government quickly institute widespread, transparent testing to ensure the limit. The demand aligns with a similar call by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War in Germany, which promotes a European Union-wide standard of four to eight (4-to-8) Bq/kg. To sign FFAN’s petition see here.

Kimberly Roberson, Project Director for the Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network, commented on this scandal for Food Safety News, Sept. 4, 2024. [12]

Roberson wrote, “At 1,200 Becquerels per kilogram, FDA has among the highest DILs in the world.

“Standards limiting radiation in food in Japan are 12 times more protective for adults and 24 times more protective for children than U.S. standards. Food too radioactive to be sold to Japanese consumers is allowed to be sold to U.S. consumers and served to U.S. service members and their families on military bases overseas. FDA [limits] for radioactivity in food are non-binding and unenforceable.

“To confront and mitigate the growing public health threat of radioactive contamination in food, Congress should pass the Federal Food Administration Act, establish the FFA to focus like a laser beam on food safety, and empanel independent scientists and experts who understand radiation’s environmental and health effects to advise it.”

The IAEA: International Allowances for Environmental Assaults?

The International Atomic Energy Agency, which ignored its own guidelines in approving the dumping of Fukushima wastewater into the Pacific, has granted approval to Japan’s plan to use some of the 14 million tons of cesium-contaminated soil and debris collected after the Fukushima meltdowns in construction work. [13]

The government intends to get rid of roughly 75 percent of the radioactive soil — if it’s contaminated at or below 8,000 becquerels per kilogram — by using it in road embankments, railways, agricultural land, and land reclamation.

“We are extremely concerned. The IAEA has consistently stated in the past that radioactive waste should be stored centrally and we have supported that position,” said Hajime Matsukubo, the secretary general of the Nuclear Information Centre in Tokyo. He said the limit for soil contamination was previously set at just 100 becquerels per kilogram, and has now been lifted to 8,000 Bq/Kg. “But now they are going against their own recommendations,” he said, reported the South China Morning Post. “My fear is that once they relax this rule, they can then go on and ease all sorts of other rules,” he said.

Endnotes:

[1] Fukushima-MHI, Sep. 29, 2024

[2] The Register online, Sep. 11, 2024

[3] NPR, Mar. 16, 2011, “Plutonium In Fuel Rods: Cause For Concern?” March 16, 2011,

[4] The Guardian, Apr, 13, 2015

[5] Associated Press, Sept. 15, 2024,

[6] NPR, Mar. 16, 2011, “Plutonium in Fuel Rods: Cause For Concern?” March 16, 2011,

[7] “Particulate plutonium released from the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns,” Science of The Total Environment, Vol. 743, Nov. 15, 2020; ; “Particulate plutonium released from the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns,” July 14, 2020, by University of Helsinki,

[8] Physics.org, May 29, 2023,

[9] Radio New Zealand, RNZ Pacific, July 19, 2024,

[10] “Fukushima nuclear plant owner apologises for still-radioactive water”, Reuters, Oct. 11, 2018,

[11] “60,000 tons of treated water from nuclear site discharged so far,” The Asahi Shimbun, August 24, 2024,

[12] Food Safety News, Sept. 4, 2024,

[13] South China Morning Post, Sept. 12, 2024 -and- The Independent, Sept.12, 2024,


ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.  Donate


John Laforge is Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and is co-editor with Arianne Peterson of Nuclear Heartland, Revised: A Guide to the 450 Land-Based Missiles of the United States.

 

Amentum contracted for Ignalina dismantling work

Friday, 1 November 2024

US-based company Amentum has been awarded a contract worth an estimated EUR5.5 million (about USD6 million) to consult for the first-of-a-kind dismantling of steam drum separators at units 1 and 2 of the Ignalina nuclear power plant in Lithuania.

Ignalina (Image: Amentum)

The seven-year contract with Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (INPP) will be implemented under International Federation of Consulting Engineers (FIDIC) Yellow Book Conditions, administered by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and funded by European Commission grants.

Lithuania assumed ownership of the two RBMK-1500 units - light-water, graphite-moderated reactors, similar to those at Chernobyl - in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It agreed to shut down the Ignalina plant as a condition of its accession to the European Union, with unit 1 shutting down in December 2004 and unit 2 in December 2009. The reactors are expected to be fully decommissioned by 2038, with most of the cost of the decommissioning being funded by the European Union via the EBRD and other funds.

Amentum said it will provide consultancy services to support INPP's Project Management Unit and carry out the duties of FIDIC Engineer for the dismantling contract. It will help INPP to manage the removal of the steam drum separators, which are large drums installed over the graphite core to divert steam to the turbines. The Project Management Unit will oversee the design and safety justification for dismantling and fragmentation of the drums and associated equipment. These are located in the plant’s radiologically contaminated primary circuit.

"We will deploy our extensive nuclear decommissioning and waste management experience from the UK, France, Czechia and Slovakia to this ground-breaking project,” said Andy White, who leads Amentum Energy & Environment International.

Amentum was created in early 2020 from the spin-off of US-based global infrastructure firm AECOM's Management Services business. Through its heritage firms, Amentum has been working at Ignalina for more than 20 years on projects including the delivery of the New Interim Spent Fuel Storage Facility and other facilities required for decommissioning.

In September, Amentum completed a merger with Jacobs Solutions Inc's Critical Mission Solutions and Cyber and Intelligence government services businesses to form an independent, publicly traded company called Amentum Holdings, Inc. The combination was described by Amentum CEO John Heller as transformational for the company, forming a "global leader in advanced engineering and innovative technology solutions".

Dangerous Hype: Big Tech’s Nuclear Lies

M.V. Ramana

 November 1, 2024
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Small Modular Reactor, Credit Westinghouse.

In the last couple of months, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, in that order, made announcements about using nuclear power for their energy needs. Describing nuclear energy using questionable adjectives like “reliable,” “safe,” “clean,” and “affordable,” all of which are belied by the technology’s seventy-year history, these tech behemoths were clearly interested in hyping up their environmental credentials and nuclear power, which is being kept alive mostly using public subsidies.

Both these business conglomerations—the nuclear industry and its friends and these ultra-wealthy corporations and their friends—have their own interests in such hype. In the aftermath of catastrophic accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima, and in the face of its inability to demonstrate a safe solution to the radioactive wastes produced in all reactors, the nuclear industry has been using its political and economic clout to mount public relations campaigns to persuade the public that nuclear energy is an environmentally friendly source of power.

Tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, too, have attempted to convince the public they genuinely cared for the environment and really wanted to do their bit to mitigate climate change. In 2020, for example, Amazon pledged to reach net zero by 2040. Google went one better when its CEO declared that “Google is aiming to run our business on carbon-free energy everywhere, at all times” by 2030. Not that they are on any actual trajectory to meeting these targets.

Why are they making such announcements?

Greenwashing environmental impacts

The reasons underlying these companies investing in such PR campaigns is not hard to discern. There is growing awareness of the tremendous environmental impacts of the insatiable appetite for data from these companies, as well as the threat they pose to already inadequate efforts to mitigate climate change.

Earlier this year, the Wall Street company Morgan Stanley estimated that data centers will “produce about 2.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions through the end of the decade”. Climate scientists have warned that unless global emissions decline sharply by 2030, we are unlikely to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a widely shared target. Even without the additional carbon dioxide emitted into the air as a result of data centers and their energy demand, the gap between current emissions and what is required is yawning.

But it is not just the climate. As calculated by a group of academic researchers, the exorbitant amounts of water required in the United States “to operate data centers, both directly for liquid cooling and indirectly to produce electricity” contribute to water scarcity in many parts of the country. This is the case elsewhere, too, and communities in countries ranging from Ireland to Spain to Chile are fighting plans to site data centers.

Then, there are the indirect impacts on the climate. Greenpeace documented, for example, that “Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all have connections to some of the world’s dirtiest oil companies for the explicit purpose of getting more oil and gas out of the ground and onto the market faster and cheaper.” In other words, the business models adopted by these tech behemoths depend on fossil fuels being used for longer and in greater quantities.

In addition to the increasing awareness about the impacts of data centers, one more possible reason for cloud companies to become interested in nuclear power might be what happened to cryptocurrency companies. Earlier this decade, these companies, too, found themselves getting a lot of bad publicity due to their energy demands and resulting emissions. Even Elon Musk, not exactly known as an environmentalist, talked about the “great cost to the environment” from cryptocurrency.

The environmental impacts of cryptocurrency played some part in efforts to regulate these. In September 2022, the White House put out a fact sheet on the climate and energy implications of Crypto-assets, highlighting President Biden’s executive order that called on these companies to reduce harmful climate impacts and environmental pollution. China even went as far as to banning cryptocurrency, and its aspirations to reducing its carbon emissions was one factor in this decision.

Crypto bros, for their part, did what cloud companies are doing now: make announcements about using nuclear power. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are now following that strategy to pretend to be good citizens. However, the nuclear industry has its reasons for welcoming these announcements and playing them up.

The state of nuclear power

Strange as it might seem to folks basing their perception of the health of the nuclear industry on mainstream media, that technology is actually in decline. The share of global electricity produced by nuclear reactors has decreased from 17.5% in 1996 to 9.15% in 2023, largely due to the high costs of and delays in building and operating nuclear reactors.

A good illustration is the Vogtle nuclear power plant in the state of Georgia. When the utility company building the reactor sought permission from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2011, it projected a total cost of $14 billion, and “in-service dates of 2016 and 2017” for the two units. The plant became operational only this year, after the second unit came online in March 2024, at a total cost of at least $36.85 billion.

Given this record, it is not surprising that there are no orders for any more nuclear plants.

As it has been in the past, the nuclear industry’s answer to this predicament is to advance the argument that new nuclear reactor designs would address all these concerns. But that has, yet again, proved not to be the case. In November 2023, the flagship project of NuScale, the small modular reactor design promoted as the leading one of its kind, collapsed because of high costs.

Supporters of nuclear power are now using another time-tested tactic to promote the technology: projecting that energy demand will grow so much that no other source of power will be able to meet these needs. For example, UK energy secretary Ed Davey resorted to this gambit in 2013 when he said that the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant was essential to “keep the lights on” in the country.

Likewise, when South Carolina Electric & Gas Company made its case to the state’s Public Service Commission about the need to build two AP1000 reactors at its V.C. Summer site—this project was subsequently abandoned after over $9 billion was spent—it forecast in its “2006 Integrated Resource Plan” that the company’s energy sales would increase by 22 percent between 2006 and 2016, and by nearly 30 percent by 2019.

This is the argument that the growth in data centres, propped up in part by the hype about generative artificial intelligence, has allowed proponents of nuclear energy to put forward. It remains to be seen whether this hype about generative AI actually materializes into a long-term sustainable business: see, for example, Ed Zitron’s meticulously documented argument for why OpenAI and Microsoft are simply burning billions of dollars and why their business model might “simply not be viable”.

In the case of the V.C. Summer project, South Carolina Electric & Gas found that its energy sales actually declined by 3 percent compared to 2006 by the time 2016 rolled around. Of course, that did not matter, because shareholders had already received over $2.5 billion in dividends and company executives had received millions of dollars in compensation, according to Nuclear Intelligence Weekly, a trade publication.

One wonders which executives and shareholders are going to receive a bounty from this round of nuclear hype.

What about emissions?

Will the investments in nuclear power by companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon help reduce emissions anytime soon?

The project expected to have the shortest timeline is the restart of the Three Mile Island Unit 1 reactor, which Constellation Energy projects will be ready in 2028. But if the history of reactor commissioning is anything to go by, that deadline will come and go without any power flowing from it.

Restarting a nuclear plant that has been shutdown has never been done before. In the case of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California, which hasn’t been shut down but was slated for decommissioning in 2024-25 till Governor Gavin Newsom did a volte-face, the Chair of the Diablo Canyon Independent Safety Committee explained why doing so was very difficult: “so many different programs and projects and so on have been put in place over the last half a dozen years predicated on that closure in 2024-25 and each one of those would have to be evaluated and some of them are okay, and some of them won’t be and some are going to be a real stretch and some are going to cost money and some of them aren’t going to be able to be done maybe”.

The cost of keeping Diablo Canyon open has been estimated by the plant’s owner at $8.3 billion and by independent environmental groups at nearly $12 billion. There are no reliable cost estimates for reopening Three Mile Island, but Constellation Energy, the plant’s owner, is already seeking a taxpayer-subsidized loan that would likely save the company $122 million in borrowing costs.

One must also remember that Microsoft already announced an agreement with Helion Energy, a company backed by billionaire Peter Thiele, to get nuclear fusion power by 2028. The chances of that happening are slim at best. In 2021, Helion announced that it had raised $500 million to build its fusion generation facility that would demonstrate “net electricity production” in three years, i.e., “in 2024”. That hasn’t happened so far. But going back further, one can see a similar and unfulfilled claim from 2014: then, the company’s chief executive had told the Wall Street Journal that the company hoped that its product would generate more energy than it would use “in the next three years” (i.e., in 2017). It is quite likely that Microsoft’s decision-makers knew of how unlikely it is that Helion will be able to supply nuclear fusion power by 2028. The publicity value is the most likely reason for announcing an agreement with Helion.

What about the small modular nuclear reactor designs—X-energy and Kairos—that Amazon and Google are betting on? Don’t hold your breath.

X-energy is an example of a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor design that dates back to the 1940s. There have been four reactors based on similar concepts that were operated commercially, two in Germany and two in the United States, respectively, and test reactors in the United Kingdom, Japan, and China. Each of these reactors proved problematic, suffering a variety of failures and unplanned shutdowns. The latest reactor with a similar design was built in China. Its performance leaves much to be desired: within about a year of being connected to the grid, its power output was reduced by 25 percent of the design power capacity, and even at this lowered capacity, it operated in 2023 with a load factor of just 8.5 percent.

Kairos, on the other hand, will be challenged by its choice of molten salts as coolant. These are chemically corrosive, and decades of search have identified no materials that can survive for long periods in such an environment without losing their integrity. The one empirical example of a reactor that used molten salts dates back to the 1960s, and this experience proved very problematic, both when the reactor operated and in the half-century thereafter, because managing the radioactive wastes produced before 1970 continued to be challenging.

Simply throwing money will not overcome these problems that have to do with fundamental physics and chemistry.

Just a dangerous distraction

Although Amazon, Google, and Microsoft claim to be investing in nuclear energy to meet the needs of AI, the evidence suggests that their real motive is to greenwash themselves.

Their investments are small and completely inadequate with relation to how much is needed to build a reactor. But their investments are also very small compared to the bloated revenues of these corporations. So, from the viewpoint of top executives, investing in nuclear power must seem a cheap way to reduce bad publicity about their environmental footprints. Unfortunately, “cheap” for them does not translate to cheap for the rest of us, not to mention the burden to future generations of human beings from worsening climate change and, possibly, increased production of radioactive waste that will stay hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years.

Because nuclear power has been portrayed as clean and a solution to climate change, announcements about it serve as a flashy distraction to focus public attention on. Meanwhile, these companies continue to expand their use of water and draw on coal and especially natural gas plants for their electricity. This is the magician’s strategy: misdirecting the audience’s attention while the real trick happens elsewhere. Their talk about investing in nuclear power also distracts from the conversations we should be having about whether these data centers and generative AI are socially desirable in the first place.

There are many reasons to oppose and organize against the wealth and power exercised by these massive corporations, such as their appropriation of user data to engage in what has been described as surveillance capitalism, their contracts with the Pentagon, and their support for Israel’s genocide and apartheid. Their investment into nuclear technology, and more importantly, hyping it up, offers one more reason. It is also a chance to establish coalitions between groups involved in very different fights.

M. V. Ramana is the Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia and the author of The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India.

A Nuclear Cautionary Tale

Kelly Campell

 November 1, 2024
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Artist rendition of Bill Gate’s proposed Natrium reactor in Wyoming.

A decade ago, NuScale, the Oregon-based small modular nuclear company born at Oregon State University, was on a roll. Promising a new era of nuclear reactors that were cheaper, easier to build and safer, their Star Wars-inspired artist renditions of a yet to be built reactor gleamed like a magic bullet.

As of last year, NuScale was the furthest along of any reactor design in obtaining Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing and was planning to build the first small modular nuclear reactor in the United States. Its plan was to build it in Idaho to serve energy to a consortium of small public utility districts in Utah and elsewhere, known as UAMPS.

This home-grown Oregon company was lauded in local and national media. According to project backers, a high-tech solution to climate change was on the horizon, and an Oregon company was leading the way. It seemed almost too good to be true.

And it was.

Turns out, NuScale was a house of cards. The UAMPS project’s price tag more than doubled and the timeline was pushed back repeatedly until it was seven years behind schedule. Finally, UAMPS saw the writing on the wall and wisely backed out in November, 2023.

After losing their customer, NuScale’s stock plunged, it laid off nearly a third of its workforce, and it was sued by its investors and investigated for investor fraud. Then its CEO sold off most of his stock shares.

NuScale’s project is the latest in a long line of failed nuclear fantasies.

Why should you care? A different nuclear company, X-Energy, now in partnership with Amazon, wants to build and operate small modular nuclear reactors near the Columbia River, 250 miles upriver from Portland. Bill Gates’s darling, the Natrium reactor in Wyoming is also plowing ahead. Both proposals are raking in the Inflation Reduction Act and other taxpayer funded subsidies. The danger: Money and time wasted on these false solutions to the climate crisis divert public resources from renewables, energy efficiency and other faster, more cost-efficient and safer ways to address the climate crisis.

A recent study from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis concluded that small modular nuclear reactors are still too expensive, too slow to build and too risky to respond to the climate crisis.

While the nuclear industry tries to pass itself off as “clean,” it is an extremely dirty technology, beginning with uranium mining and milling which decimates Indigenous lands. Small modular nuclear reactors produce two to thirty times the radioactive waste of older nuclear designs, waste for which we have no safe, long-term disposal site. Any community that hosts a nuclear reactor will likely be saddled with its radioactive waste – forever. This harm falls disproportionately on Indigenous and low-income communities.

For those of us downriver, X-Energy’s plans to build at the Hanford Nuclear Site on the Columbia flies in the face of reason, as it would add more nuclear waste to the country’s largest nuclear cleanup site.

In Oregon, we have a state moratorium on building nuclear reactors until there is a vote of the people and a national waste repository. Every few years, the nuclear industry attempts to overturn this law at the Oregon Legislature, but so far it has been unsuccessful. This August, Umatilla County Commissioners announced they’ll attempt another legislative effort to overturn the moratorium. Keeping this moratorium is wise, given the dangerous distraction posed by the false solution of small modular nuclear reactors. Let’s learn from the NuScale debacle and keep our focus on a just transition to a clean energy future–one in which nuclear power clearly has no place.

This piece first appeared at Oregon Capital Chronicle.

Kelly Campbell is the policy director at Columbia Riverkeeper, an organization that protects and restores the water quality of the Columbia River and all life connected to it.

Which Countries Are on the Brink of Going Nuclear?

John P. Ruehl

November 1, 2024
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Photo by Burgess Milner

Following Israel’s October 26, 2024, attack on Iranian energy facilities, Iran vowed to respond with “all available tools,” sparking fears it could soon produce a nuclear weapon to pose a more credible threat. The country’s breakout time—the period required to develop a nuclear bomb—is now estimated in weeks, and Tehran could proceed with weaponization if it believes itself or its proxies are losing ground to Israel.

Iran isn’t the only nation advancing its nuclear capabilities in recent years. In 2019, the U.S. withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which banned intermediate-range land-based missiles, citing alleged Russian violations and China’s non-involvement. The U.S. is also modernizing its nuclear arsenal, with plans to deploy nuclear weapons in more NATO states and proposals to extend its nuclear umbrella to Taiwan.

Russia, too, has intensified its nuclear posture, expanding nuclear military drills and updating its nuclear policies on first use. In 2023, it suspended participation in the New START missile treaty, which limited U.S. and Russian deployed nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and stationed nuclear weapons in Belarus in 2024. Russia and China have also deepened their nuclear cooperation, setting China on a path to rapidly expand its arsenal, as nuclear security collaboration with the U.S. has steadily diminished over the past decade.

The breakdown of diplomacy and rising nuclear brinkmanship among major powers are heightening nuclear insecurity among themselves, but also risk spurring a new nuclear arms race. Alongside Iran, numerous countries maintain the technological infrastructure to quickly build nuclear weapons. Preventing nuclear proliferation would require significant collaboration among major powers, a prospect currently out of reach.

The U.S. detonated the first nuclear weapon in 1945, followed by the Soviet Union (1949), the UK (1952), France (1960), and China (1964). It became evident that with access to uranium and enrichment technology, nations were increasingly capable of producing nuclear weapons. Though mass production and delivery capabilities were additional hurdles, it was widely expected in the early Cold War that many states would soon join the nuclear club. Israel developed nuclear capabilities in the 1960s, India detonated its first bomb in 1974, and South Africa built its first by 1979. Other countries, including Brazil, Argentina, Australia, Sweden, Egypt, and Switzerland, pursued their own programs.

However, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), enacted in 1968 to curb nuclear spread, led many countries to abandon or dismantle their programs. After the end of the Cold War and under Western pressure, Iraq ended its nuclear program in 1991, and South Africa, in a historic move, voluntarily dismantled its arsenal in 1994. Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine relinquished the nuclear weapons they inherited after the collapse of the Soviet Union by 1996, securing international security assurances in exchange.

Nuclear proliferation appeared to be a waning concern, but cracks soon appeared in the non-proliferation framework. Pakistan conducted its first nuclear test in 1998, followed by North Korea in 2006, bringing the count of nuclear-armed states to nine. Since then, Iran’s nuclear weapons program, initiated in the 1980s, has been a major target of Western non-proliferation efforts.

Iran has a strong reason to persist. Ukraine’s former nuclear arsenal might have deterred Russian aggression in 2014 and 2022, while Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who dismantled the country’s nuclear program in 2003, was overthrown by a NATO-led coalition and local forces in 2011. If Iran achieves a functional nuclear weapon, it will lose the ability to leverage its nuclear program as a bargaining chipto extract concessions in negotiations. While a nuclear weapon will represent a new form of leverage, it would also intensify pressure from the U.S. and Israel, both of whom have engaged in a cycle of escalating, sometimes deadly, confrontations with Iran and its proxies over the past few years.

An Iranian nuclear arsenal could also ignite a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Its relations with Saudi Arabia remain delicate, despite the 2023 détente brokered by China, and Saudi officials have previously indicated they would obtain their own nuclear weapon if Iran acquired them. Saudi Arabia gave significant backing to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, with the understanding that Pakistan could extend its nuclear umbrella to Saudi Arabia, or even supply the latter with one upon request.

Turkey, which hosts U.S. nuclear weapons through NATO’s sharing program, signaled a policy shift in 2019 when President Erdogan criticized foreign powers for dictating Turkey’s ability to build its own nuclear weapon. Turkey’s growing partnership with Russia in nuclear energy could meanwhile provide it with the enrichment expertise needed to eventually do so.

Middle Eastern tensions are not the only force threatening non-proliferation. Japan’s renewed friction with China, North Korea, and Russia over the past decade has intensified Tokyo’s focus on nuclear readiness. Although Japan developed a nuclear program in the 1940s, it was dismantled after World War II. Japan’s breakout period, however, remains measured in months, but public support for nuclear weapons remains low, given the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where nuclear bombings in 1945 killed more than 200,000 people.

In contrast, around 70 percent of South Koreans support developing nuclear weapons. South Korea’s nuclear program began in the 1970s but was discontinued under U.S. pressure. However, North Korea’s successful test in 2006 and its severance of economic, political, and physical links to the South in the past decade, coupled with the abandonment of peaceful reunification in early 2024, has again raised the issue in South Korea.

Taiwan pursued a nuclear weapons program in the 1970s, which similarly ended under U.S. pressure. Any sign of wavering U.S. commitment to Taiwan, together with China’s growing nuclear capabilities, could prompt Taiwan to revive its efforts. Though less likely, territorial disputes in the South China Sea could also motivate countries like Vietnam and the Philippines to consider developing nuclear capabilities.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has also had significant nuclear implications. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently suggested to the European Council that a nuclear arsenal might be Ukraine’s only deterrent if NATO membership is not offered. Zelensky later walked back his comments after they ignited a firestorm of controversy. Yet if Ukraine feels betrayed by its Western partners—particularly if it is forced to concede territory to Russia—it could spur some factions within Ukraine to attempt to secure nuclear capabilities.

The war has also spurred nuclear considerations across Europe. In December 2023, former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer endorsed a European nuclear deterrent. A Trump re-election could amplify European concerns over U.S. commitments to NATO, with France having increasingly proposed an independent European nuclear force in recent years.

Established nuclear powers are unlikely to welcome more countries into their ranks. But while China and Russia don’t necessarily desire this outcome, they recognize the West’s concerns are greater, with Russia doing little in the 1990s to prevent its unemployed nuclear scientists from aiding North Korea’s program.

The U.S. has also previously been blindsided by its allies’ nuclear aspirations. U.S. policymakers underestimated Australia’s determination to pursue a nuclear weapons program in the 1950s and 1960s, including covert attempts to obtain a weapon from the UK. Similarly, the U.S. was initially unaware of France’s extensive support for Israel’s nuclear development in the 1950s and 1960s.

Smaller countries are also capable of aiding one another’s nuclear ambitions. Argentina offered considerable support to Israel’s program, while Israel assisted South Africa’s. Saudi Arabia financed Pakistan’s nuclear development, and Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist is suspected of having aided Iran, Libya, and North Korea with their programs in the 1980s.

Conflicts involving nuclear weapons states are not without precedent. Egypt and Syria attacked nuclear-armed Israel in 1973, and Argentina faced a nuclear-armed UK in 1982. India and China have clashed over their border on several occasions, and Ukraine continues to resist Russian aggression. But conflicts featuring nuclear countries invite dangerous escalation, and the risk grows if a nation with limited conventional military power gains nuclear capabilities; lacking other means of defense or retaliation, it may be more tempted to resort to nuclear weapons as its only viable option.

The costs of maintaining nuclear arsenals are already steep. In 2023, the world’s nine nuclear-armed states spent an estimated $91.4 billion managing their programs. But what incentive do smaller countries have to abandon nuclear ambitions entirely, especially when they observe the protection nuclear weapons offer and witness the major powers intensifying their nuclear strategies?

Obtaining the world’s most powerful weapons may be a natural ambition of military and intelligence sectors, but it hinges on the political forces in power as well. In Iran, moderates could counterbalance hardliners, while continued support for Ukraine might prevent more nationalist forces from coming to power there.

Yet an additional country obtaining a nuclear weapon could set off a cascade of others. While larger powers are currently leading the nuclear posturing, smaller countries may see an opportunity amid the disorder. The limited support for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, in effect since 2021, as well as the breaking down of other international treaties, reinforces the lingering allure of nuclear arms even among non-nuclear states. With major powers in open contention, the barriers to nuclear ambitions are already weakening, making it ever harder to dissuade smaller nations from pursuing the ultimate deterrent.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C. He is a contributing editor to Strategic Policy and a contributor to several other foreign affairs publications. He is currently finishing a book on Russia to be published in 2022.

Rising Emissions From ‘Benign’ Technologies

D Raghunandan | 01 Nov 2024

• 
  
• 
  

Digital emissions, especially from data computing, are now at 3.5% of global emissions, overtaking aviation at around 2.5%.

A data centre

Many people may naively assume that, in the era of climate change, the more modern the technologies, the smaller carbon footprint they will have. We have seen, however, that in one way or another, several technologies have gained currency by cleverly disguising their polluting nature behind apparently greener garb. Fracking for extraction of shale oil as in the US, or shifting to natural gas from oil for power generation and industrial uses in Europe, or promoting blue, grey or other such versions of hydrogen instead of hydrogen produced using renewable energy.

Much less is known, and even less appreciated, about the dangerous and rising emissions from what appears to the average person, as benign technologies that have transformed life in so many ways, and which look set to play an ever-greater role in the coming years.

Computing is one such area where companies, users and regulators are so focused on convenience, service delivery and lowering costs to consumers, that pollution in general and greenhouse gas emissions are scarcely even thought about.

Today’s laptops, tablets and smart phones have hundreds of times greater computing capacity as the room-size computers that took astronauts to land on the moon and brought them back. These devices take just an hour or so to fully charge and can be used for many hours after. People watch movies, ask questions and, nowadays, get answers not just from the search engine but from AI (artificial intelligence) services, personalised according to millions of bits of information on prior internet usage.

AI is becoming ubiquitous, used across the spectrum from science and technology, medicine and industry to cinema, the arts. Nobody thinks or worries about where large volumes of information users save are housed, they just access them with a simple click or swipe. Crypto-currencies are bought and sold with little thought given to just how these are created. Companies, which used to house large servers for their businesses, now use “cloud” services, where vast amounts of data are stored off-premises, invisible. It all seems like a magical, new world, without real environmental costs.

The “cloud” sounds wispy, other-worldly, even unreal. The reality is scary, dangerous and certainly not pretty.

Digital Emissions                 

AI services, crypto-currencies, processing of “big data,” such as consumer shopping behaviour, facial recognition, tracking of internet or social media messaging and so on, despite their apparently “invisible” nature, involve very real brick-and-mortar buildings housing enormous servers with huge computing capacity, all of which consume vast amounts of electricity, water to cool these systems, extra-large fans to aid in cooling and so on. More electricity means more emissions. Of course, if renewable energy is used, emissions would be less than with fossil energy, but that poses additional problems which we will deal with later.

It is hardly surprising that emissions from the digital sector have    skyrocketed in recent years, when one considers that there were one billion internet-connected devices in the world in 2010, increasing rapidly to a projected 50 billion by 2025 and 100 billion by 2030. Emissions from the digital sector, now at roughly 3.5% of global emissions, have now overtaken those from aviation which are around 2.5%.

Crypto-currency “mining,” a complex computing process to “create” a roughly realistic “currency” to mimic -real money, is again a data and energy-hungry process that accounts for roughly 0.7% of global emissions.

It is roughly estimated that about half the emissions from the digital sector arise from the production side and half from the use. It is expected that, with the rapid rise in internet usage, especially through smart phones and with galloping deployment of AI, emissions from use of digital services will multiply manifold.

Problems in Estimating emissions

A big problem with more accurately estimating emissions from digital services is that reliable data are not forthcoming from the industry itself. No standardised metrics or estimation protocols have been evolved unlike for other industrial emissions sources.

Some information is available about the processing side. By and large, it is known that data centres where cloud computing, data storage and AI processing takes place, not to mention crypto-currency “mining,” are energy hungry, accounting for around 2% of global electricity consumption and roughly 1% of emissions, both these figures dating to before the recent explosion in AI services and widespread deployment of AI software and related hardware by the big internet companies.

A recent study by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has estimated that electricity consumption from data centre and crypto-currency would reach about 3.5% of global electricity consumption, roughly equal to that of the fifth largest country, Japan. However, accurate assessment is made difficult by the business models used by different companies, for example outsourcing data-processing and cloud storage to other companies in different parts of the world.

However, there has been little study of emissions caused at the usage end. Some recent research at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and other places has sought to tackle this problem.

For example, creating one image using AI consumes as much electricity as fully charging a smart phone. A search using Chat GPT uses 10 times more electricity than a simple Google search which, incidentally, is getting difficult to do due to deployment of AI searches now increasingly becoming the default option on most smart phones. An AI software may consume 33 times more electricity than ordinary software. The World Economic Forum has estimated that the computer power dedicated to AI is doubling every 100 days.

The Big Five

The top five users of electricity, and largest emitters, in their data centres are, unsurprisingly, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Meta (Facebook). Amazon is by far the largest emitter, responsible for double that of the next biggest emitter, Apple. Most analysts leave out Amazon from their studies since their data usage and computing models are quite different from the others, making comparisons difficult.

An investigative study by The Guardian newspaper estimates that the emissions of these four, excluding Amazon, could actually be 7.62 times or 662% higher than their official reports have claimed, partly due to business outsourcing practices and partly due to non-transparent “renewable energy certificates or RECs,” similar to the notorious carbon offsets in climate change emissions control regimes.

Analysts say that while Apple and Meta use such “creative accounting” practices to show less emissions than are actually taking place, Google and Microsoft may be somewhat more transparent.      

Google has set a “24/7” target, that is, has promised to run all its data centres on renewable energy 24 hours a day and seven days a week by 2030. Microsoft’s equivalent promise, called “100/100/0” is a pledge to use 100% renewable energy 100% of the time, buying-in 0 or no fossil-energy, again by 2030.

AI, Data Centres go Nuclear

But as the electricity demands rise steeply with AI deployment, the challenges are mounting for the data centres. Unlike most industrial, commercial or domestic users of electricity who have at least some day-night variations in electricity use, demand by data centres and global users remain more or less the same all day and around the year.

Pressure on the grid due this huge and mounting demand is posing serious problems. Data centres, whose power demand can be as high as 800-900 MWe, therefore, require their own reliable, round-the-clock, non-fossil electricity supply which cannot be assured by solar, wind or large hydro.

Enter nuclear power, an unanticipated scenario even five years ago.

Recently, a company called Constellation Power signed a 20-year power-purchase agreement with Microsoft for electricity supply to the latter from the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. Unit 2 in the plant suffered the US’ worst nuclear accident when it had a partial meltdown of the reactor in 1979. The current agreement brings to life Unit 1, which had been shut down in 2019 due to doubts about its viability. In March, Amazon Web Services (AWS) contracted for 960 MW power from Talen Energy’s nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.

There is a burst of activity around small modular (nuclear) reactors or SMR which is seeing a revival of interest, technology innovation and investment.

So now the future of the internet is to depend on nuclear power? Watch this space.

The writer is with the Delhi Science Forum and All India Peoples Science Network. The views are personal.