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Jan 26, 2012

By Yuriy Humber
Bloomberg News

Japan will lose its last nuclear- generated power in April at the current rate of shutting down reactors for safety checks, cheering opponents of the industry after the Fukushima disaster while adding to concern about potential blackouts and factory shutdowns.

The country has just three of its 54 nuclear reactors producing electricity after one more unit was idled for maintenance today. Another Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501) unit was shut earlier this week for scheduled checks.

With one exception, no reactors taken off-line since the March 11 disaster have been allowed to restart as they await results of so-called stress tests. The checks began after an earthquake and tsunami caused reactor meltdowns at Tokyo Electric’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi station that led to radiation fallout over an area about half the size of New York City and the evacuation of about 160,000 people.

With public opinion running against restarting reactors, Japan’s becoming free of nuclear power within three months would have a "psychological" effect, according to Yuji Nishiyama, an analyst with Credit Suisse Group AG.

"If we experience a zero-nuclear situation the argument that we don’t need nuclear power anymore will be stronger," Nishiyama said by telephone in Tokyo. "But, at the moment we cannot live without nuclear power. We may not need 50 reactors, but we do need about 10 or 20."

Fossil Fuel Costs

With atomic stations providing about 30 percent of Japan’s electricity before the Fukushima disaster, utilities have been forced to rely more on oil- and gas-fired power plants to make up the difference.

A switch from nuclear to fossil fuels based on average operating rates at atomic plants would require the equivalent of 323 million barrels of oil a year, adding about $34 billion to the country’s import bill, according to Osamu Fujisawa, an ex- Saudi Arabian Oil Co. manager and now an independent energy economist in Tokyo.

Japan relied on imports to meet 81 percent of its net energy needs in 2010, according to the latest data on the World Bank’s website. That compares with 22 percent for the U.S. in the same year and 8 percent for China in 2009, the latest data the bank has.

Japan’s consumption of liquefied natural gas jumped 32 percent in December, while crude oil use increased more than fivefold, according to the Federation of Electric Power Companies data.
Mothballed Plants

"We do have a number of mothballed power plants, but it takes time to restore those generators, sometimes years," Nishiyama said. "And these plants often have low-utilization rates. Some cannot be used at night."

The cost of burning oil to generate power is almost twice that of gas, he said.

Companies including Toyota Motor Corp. (7203) and Panasonic Corp. (6752) escaped power cuts after they were ordered to cut consumption by 15 percent in some areas during last year’s summer when demand peaked. Households were asked to regulate use of air conditioners. The restrictions were lifted as temperatures cooled.

Trade and Industry Minister Yukio Edano said Japan may have no nuclear plants operating this summer and the government is preparing measures to avoid power shortages, the Asahi newspaper reported, citing his comments in an interview. The safety issue is more important than power supply concerns, Edano told the Asahi.
Reactor Closures
Chugoku Electric Power Co. (9504) shut the No. 2 reactor at its Shimane nuclear station today, leaving 6.4 percent of Japan’s 48,960 megawatts of nuclear capacity on-line. Tokyo Electric’s No. 5 unit at its Kashiwazaki Kariwa station was idled on Jan. 25. The remaining three reactors are due to go off-line for regular checks during the next three months.

Whatever the cost to the utilities, local governments that usually approve a restart of a nuclear reactor have balked. Yuhei Sato, governor of Fukushima, where Tokyo Electric has two nuclear stations including the wrecked Dai-Ichi plant, has vowed to make the region a nuclear-free zone.

Hirohiko Izumida, the governor of Niigata, where Tokyo Electric’s Kashiwazaki Kariwa plant is located, will "never" negotiate with the power utility on restarts until all of the deficiencies exposed by the Fukushima accident are explained and corrected, the governor’s spokesman Takeshi Kumakura said by phone on Jan. 24.

Stress Tests

Tepco, as Tokyo Electric is known, has submitted to the government results of so-called stress tests on the Nos. 1 and 7 reactors at the Kashiwazaki plant, the company said Jan. 16. The tests set up by the Trade and Industry Ministry aim to show how prepared a nuclear plant is to withstand disasters.

Kashiwazaki, the world’s largest nuclear station, has yet to restart three of its seven units since a 2007 quake that led to a radioactive water spill. The work to upgrade Kashiwazaki’s earthquake defenses since 2007 would make it one of the better stations to restart, said Penn Bowers, a utilities analyst with CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets.

"If it didn’t have the Tepco name out there it would probably be on the top of the list for restarts," Bowers said. Kashiwazaki’s units have "been retrofitted to a quake prevention standard that’s probably the best out there."

Reactor Wrangles

Reactor restarts is one of three conditions set by lenders as Tepco negotiates to borrow as much as 2 trillion yen to stay solvent, covering rising fuel costs and compensation claims, two people familiar with the matter said this month. Higher power rates and Tepco accepting a capital injection from a state-run fund are the other two conditions, the people said.

Tepco’s management is resisting giving up control to the state fund even as it faces collapse under the weight of compensation claims and cleanup costs for the disaster. Tepco shares fell 1.4 percent to 210 yen at 12:28 p.m. in Tokyo today. The stock is down about 90 percent since the day before the disaster.

The company owns three nuclear stations. The Fukushima Dai- Ni station, situated close to the Dai-Ichi site, temporarily lost control of its cooling system following the March 11 record earthquake and tsunami. It remains shut down.

Without nuclear reactors, Kansai Electric Power Co. (9503), the main supplier to Japan’s second-largest industrial region, may see demand exceed generation capacity by 9.5 percent in February, the biggest shortfall among suppliers, according to a November assessment released by the government.

Kansai Nightmare

"In Kansai it’s a nightmare," Nishiyama said. "Saving energy is not enough to save the region. We need to think about restarting nuclear power plants more seriously."
Kansai Electric, which serves a region with an economy the size of Mexico’s and has Sharp Corp. and Panasonic factories, is asking customers to voluntarily reduce consumption by more than 10 percent this winter. Kyushu Electric Power Co. (9508) will also be short of capacity after it shutters its last reactor on-line for maintenance, Nishiyama said.

"I think we go to zero before we get restarts," CLSA’s Bowers said, forecasting the first nuclear units to come on-line before summer when power consumption reaches its peak. By summer Kansai may have supplies falling more than 19 percent short of demand, the government has forecast.

"It’s not going to be one switch is flipped and all of them come back on," Bowers said. "Still, if you get a certain amount back on-line you’re not going to have a horrible problem. If you have zero, that leads to a significant economic impact."

To contact the reporter on this story: Yuriy Humber in Tokyo at yhumber(at)bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Langan at plangan(at)bloomberg.net

September 18, 2011

German industrial and engineering conglomerate Siemens is to withdraw entirely from the nuclear industry.

The move is a response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in March, chief executive Peter Loescher said.

He told Spiegel magazine it was the firm’s answer to "the clear positioning of German society and politics for a pullout from nuclear energy".

"The chapter for us is closed," he said, announcing that the firm will no longer build nuclear power stations.

A long-planned joint venture with Russian nuclear firm Rosatom will also be cancelled, although Mr Loescher said he would still seek to work with their partner "in other fields".

Siemens was responsible for building all 17 of Germany’s existing nuclear power plants.

But more recently, the firm has limited itself to providing the non-nuclear parts of plants being built by other firms, including current projects in China and Finland.

The latest decision appears to imply a step back from building "conventional islands" – the non-nuclear plant in nuclear power stations – an area in which Siemens has remained active.

However, Mr Loescher also said Siemens would continue to make components, such as steam turbines, that are used in the conventional power industry, but can also be used in nuclear plants.

U-turn

He also gave his backing to the German government’s planned switch to renewable energy sources, calling it a "project of the century" and claiming Berlin’s target of reaching 35% renewable energy by 2020 was achievable.

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, announced at the end of May that all of the country’s 17 nuclear reactors would be shut down by 2022.

Before the Fukushima disaster, nuclear power accounted for 23% of electricity production in Germany.

The German government’s decision marked a complete U-turn by the chancellor, who only in September 2010 had announced that the life of existing nuclear plants would be extended by an average of 12 years.

Siemen’s move, announced on Sunday, is also a turnaround.

In 2009, the firm withdrew from an eight-year-old nuclear joint venture with French energy firm Areva, shortly before announcing its new deal with Rosatom.

"In view of global climate change and the increasing power demand worldwide, for us nuclear energy remains an essential part of a sustainable energy mix," Mr Loescher had said at the time.

Sep 18, 2011

(AFP)

BERLIN — German industrial giant Siemens is turning the page on nuclear energy in line with Berlin’s decision to agree to an end to atomic power, the group’s CEO Peter Loescher said Sunday.

"We will no longer be involved in overall managing of building or financing nuclear plants. This chapter is closed for us," he told the Der Spiegel weekly in an interview published on Sunday.

"We will from now on supply only conventional equipment such as steam turbines," he said. "This means we are restricting ourselves to technologies that are not only for nuclear purposes but can also be used in gas or coal plants."

There has been massive debate in Germany on the safety of nuclear energy after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami which knocked out cooling systems at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, causing reactors to overheat and radiation to leak.

Germany switched off several of its reactors in the wake of the disaster and has since passed legislation to phase out nuclear energy by 2022.

In the interview, Loescher also definitively buried a long-planned joint venture project with Russian group Rosatom in the nuclear sector.

The partnership was announced in March 2009, shortly after Siemens ended a deal with France’s Areva.

"The two groups are still very interested in a partnership but it will be in another field," he said.

Loescher said his group’s decision to withdraw from the nuclear industry reflected "the very clear stance taken by Germany’s society and political leadership."

"That changed things for us at Siemens," he said.

Germany is the first major industrialised power to agree an end to atomic power since the disaster, the world’s worst since Chernobyl in 1986, with tens of thousands of people living near Fukushima evacuated.

Germany wants to boost the share of the country’s power needs generated by renewable energies to 35 percent by 2020 from 17 percent at present.

Siemens, which produces gas turbines and equipment used to produce solar and wind power, wants to develop a pioneering role in "green" energy.

Elsewhere is Europe, a recent vote against Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi’s plans to resume the country’s nuclear programme was seen as a reflection of popular unease about atomic energy after Fukushima.

The Swiss government in May, too, recommended that nuclear plants be phased out.

The new chief of the Paris-based International Energy Agency Maria van der Hoeven said earlier this month that nuclear power will have a place in the future however.

Van der Hoeven, formerly the Dutch minister for economic affairs, said: "There will be room for nuclear energy in the future.

"I think if we really want to go — and we do — towards a future where we have less CO2 emissions, there are only two real things to get there, and it has to do with nuclear, because it doesn’t produce CO2, and it has to do with renewables.

Copyright © 2012 AFP. All rights reserved.

10/26/11

By Andrew Restuccia
The Hill

Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee pressed Republicans Wednesday to broaden their loan guarantee investigation to include investments in nuclear energy projects.

Republicans are"picking oversight targets based on which administration approved the loan or loan guarantee or on whether [they] approve or disapprove of the type of energy produced," the Democrats said.

"The Committee’s goal should be to protect the taxpayer, not to single out an industry you may disfavor for special scrutiny," Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the committee, said in a letter to Republicans Wednesday.

Committee Republicans have focused much of their attention on the $535 million loan guarantee to the failed California solar panel maker Solyndra. But Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), the chairman of the committee’s investigative panel, has expanded the investigation to include a number of other loans and loan guarantees to renewable energy projects.

The letter – which was also signed by Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), the top Democrat on the committee’s investigative panel, and Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) – calls on Republicans to expand the investigation to include nuclear loan guarantees as well as a $267 million loan approved by the George W. Bush administration to a communications company that filed for bankruptcy this month.

"Oversight should be conducted with an even hand," the letter said."That requires giving a failed multi-million-dollar loan issued by the Bush Administration as much attention as failed multi-million-dollar loan guarantee issued by the Obama Administration. And it requires giving DOE nuclear loan guarantees as much scrutiny as DOE renewable energy loan guarantees."

Democrats want Republicans to examine the Energy Department’s decision last year to issue a conditional commitment for an $8.33 billion loan guarantee for construction of a Georgia nuclear plant. The Energy Department has also issued a conditional commitment for a $2 billion loan guarantee for an Idaho uranium enrichment project sponsored by Areva.

"From a taxpayer perspective, there is no reason to ignore the nuclear loan guarantees," the letter says. "Nuclear power companies are slated to receive loans significantly larger than the loan received by Solyndra."

Waxman, DeGette and Markey have long criticized the administration for moving forward with the nuclear loan guarantees, arguing it could leave the taxpayer on the hook for billions of dollars if the projects collapse.

The Democrats also call on Republicans to examine a $267 million Agriculture Department loan offered in 2008 and finalized in 2009 shortly before President George W. Bush left office. The loan to Colorado-based Open Range Communications was intended to provide rural communities with broadband Internet access.

The company filed for bankruptcy earlier this month.

"When Solyndra filed for bankruptcy in September, you issued press releases trumpeting the bankruptcy and said, ‘We smelled a rat from the onset’ and Solyndra was a ‘bad bet from the beginning,’" the letter said, referring to comments by Republicans on the committee.

"Your concern was to ‘protect American taxpayers’ and to examine whether there had been ‘disregard for taxpayer dollars.’ You made no similar comments when Open Range filed for bankruptcy."

The Democrats allege that Republicans did not investigate the Open Range Communications loan because it was approved during the Bush administration.

"The main distinction between the Solyndra guarantee and the Open Range loan appears to be that the Open Range loan was approved in 2008, when President Bush was in office," the letter said."That is not a defensible reason for ignoring Open Range."

05/30/11

JUERGEN BAETZ
Huffington Post

BERLIN — Europe’s economic powerhouse, Germany, announced plans Monday to abandon nuclear energy over the next 11 years, outlining an ambitious strategy in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster to replace atomic power with renewable energy sources.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said she hopes the transformation to more solar, wind and hydroelectric power serves as a roadmap for other countries.

"We believe that we can show those countries who decide to abandon nuclear power – or not to start using it – how it is possible to achieve growth, creating jobs and economic prosperity while shifting the energy supply toward renewable energies," Merkel said.

Merkel’s government said it will shut down all 17 nuclear power plants in Germany – the world’s fourth-largest economy and Europe’s biggest – by 2022. The government had no immediate estimate of the transition’s overall cost.

The plan sets Germany apart from most of the other major industrialized nations. Among the other Group of Eight countries, only Italy has abandoned nuclear power, which was voted down in a referendum after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

The decision represents a remarkable about-face for Merkel’s center-right government, which only late last year pushed through a plan to extend the life span of the country’s reactors, with the last scheduled to go offline around 2036. But Merkel, who holds a Ph.D. in physics, said industrialized, technologically advanced Japan’s "helplessness" in the face of the Fukushima disaster made her rethink the technology’s risks.

Phasing out nuclear power within a decade will be a challenge, but it will be feasible and ultimately give Germany a competitive advantage in the renewable energy era, Merkel said.

"As the first big industrialized nation, we can achieve such a transformation toward efficient and renewable energies, with all the opportunities that brings for exports, developing new technologies and jobs," Merkel told reporters.

The government said the renewable energy sector already employs about 370,000 people.

Germany’s seven oldest reactors, already taken off the grid pending safety inspections following the March catastrophe at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, will remain offline permanently, Merkel said. The plants accounted for about 40 percent of the country’s nuclear power capacity.

At the time of the Japanese disaster, Germany got just under a quarter of its electricity from nuclear power, about the same share as in the U.S.

While Germany already was set to abandon nuclear energy eventually, the decision – which still requires parliamentary approval – dramatically speeds up that process. Environment Minister Norbert Roettgen said there are no provisions that would allow a later policy reverse.

"We don’t only want to renounce nuclear energy by 2022, we also want to reduce our CO2 emissions by 40 percent and double our share of renewable energies, from about 17 percent today to then 35 percent," the chancellor said.

Merkel said the cornerstones of Germany’s energy policy will also include a safe and steady power supply that doesn’t rely on imports, and affordable prices for industry and consumers. The plan calls for more investment in natural gas plants as a backup to prevent blackouts, the chancellor said.

Germany’s initiative received a skeptical reception abroad.

French Prime Minister Francois Fillon, whose country relies on nuclear power to produce 80 percent of its electricity supply, insisted "there’s no way" for the European Union to meet its emission-cutting targets without at least some nuclear power.

"We respect this decision, but it doesn’t cause us to change our policy," Fillon said. France operates more than one-third of the nuclear reactors in the EU.

Sweden’s Environment Minister Andreas Carlgren also criticized the German decision, telling The Associated Press that the focus on an end date was unfortunate and could drive up electricity prices across Europe.

Germany, usually a net energy exporter, has at times had to import energy since March, with the seven old reactors shut and others temporarily off the grid for regular maintenance. Still, the agency overseeing its electricity grid, DENA, said Friday that the country remains self-sufficient and that its renewable energy production capacity this spring peaked at 28 gigawatts – or about the equivalent of 28 nuclear reactors.

Many Germans have vehemently opposed nuclear power since Chernobyl sent radioactivity over the country. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets after Fukushima to urge the government to shut all reactors quickly.

A decade ago, a center-left government drew up a plan to abandon the technology for good by 2021 because of its risks. But Merkel’s government last year amended it to extend the plants’ lifetime by an average 12 years – a political liability after Fukushima was hit by Japan’s March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Environmental groups welcomed Berlin’s decision.

"The country is throwing its weight behind clean renewable energy to power its manufacturing base and other countries like Britain should take note," said Robin Oakley, Greenpeace UK’s campaigns director.

German industry said the government must not allow the policy changes to lead to an unstable power supply or rising electricity prices.

Hans-Peter Keitel, the president of the Federation of German Industries, urged the government not to set the exit date of 2022 in stone but to be flexible if problems arise.

Switzerland, where nuclear power produces 40 percent of electricity, also announced last week that it plans to shut down its reactors gradually once they reach their average life span of 50 years – which would mean taking the last plant off the grid in 2034.

Germany’s decision broadly follows the conclusions of a government-mandated commission on the ethics of nuclear power, which on Saturday delivered recommendations on how to abolish the technology.

"Fukushima was a dramatic experience, seeing there that a high-technology nation can’t cope with such a catastrophe," Matthias Kleiner, the commission’s co-chairman, said Monday. "Nuclear power is a technology with too many inherent risks to inflict it on us or our children."

Geir Moulson in Berlin, Malin Rising in Stockholm, Colleen Barry in Milan, Jamey Keaten in Paris and Cassandra Vinograd in London contributed reporting.