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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.

6/22/11

Huffington Post

Though global fears about radiation emissions from the heavily damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility have calmed in the weeks since Japan’s devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami, famed physicist Michio Kaku insists the situation remains a "ticking time bomb."

A professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York and the City College of New York, Kaku discussed some recent revelations about the disaster’s impact, and noted that Japanese officials still don’t have control at the site. "In the last two weeks, everything we knew about that accident has been turned upside down," Kaku says. "Now we know it was 100 percent core melt in all three reactors…now we know it was comparable to the radiation at Chernobyl."

Among Kaku’s other distressing notes: Fukushima workers are exposed to a year’s dose of radiation within minutes of entering the site, and cleanup will take between 50 to 100 years. "It’s like hanging by your fingernails," he says. "It’s stable, but you’re hanging by your fingernails."

Watch Kaku’s interview with CNN here:

December 28, 2011

Money & Company
Los Angeles Times

A new study released Wednesday said that the regulatory fallout from the Fukushima power plant disaster in Japan in March will short-circuit the U.S. nuclear renaissance of new power plant construction.

The report, "Nuclear Safety and Nuclear Economics," was written and presented by Mark Cooper, a frequent critic of the nuclear power industry. The report can be found here. Cooper is a senior fellow for economic analysis at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at the Vermont Law School.

Cooper said that past nuclear disasters, such as the one at the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania in 1979, have tended to greatly raise regulatory barriers and have also severely multiplied the cost of reactor construction. After Three Mile Island, for example, the report said, the cost of nuclear power plant construction doubled in most cases and trebled or quadrupled in some rare instances.

"This is an important moment to compare what is really likely to happen over the next 10 years with the industry’s expectations" of a nuclear renaissance, said Peter Bradford, an adjunct professor specializing in nuclear power and public policy at the Vermont Law School and a former Nuclear Regulatory Commission member.

"When that comparison is performed properly, it becomes clear that we are witnessing not a revival but a collapse in expectations for new reactor construction," Bradford added.

The report comes just days after a panel appointed by the Japanese government released a scathing assessment of the reponse to the disaster, which was caused when a huge earthquake generated a tsunami that struck the facility.

The investigative panel blamed the central government and the Tokyo Electric Power Co., saying both seemed incapable of making decisions to stem radiation leaks as the situation at the coastal plant worsened in the days and weeks after the disaster.

A recently updated online report by the World Nuclear Assn. said that as few as four of the 26 new nuclear facilities that have been proposed or planned in the U.S. will be finished by 2020. But it did not mention Fukushima and instead said the primary reason was the fact that a boom in domestic natural gas production has "put the economic viability of some of these projects in doubt."

NUCLEAR SAFETY AND NUCLEAR ECONOMICS: HISTORICALLY, ACCIDENTS DIM THE PROSPECTS FOR NUCLEAR REACTOR CONSTRUCTION; FUKUSHIMA WILL HAVE A MAJOR IMPACT MARK COOPER, PHD Senior Fellow for Economic Analysis Institute for Energy and the Environment, Vermont Law School December 2011 Download report