Tag Archives: Nuclear Power

N.K. test fires largest Missile standing 82 feet as Kim hits ten years in office next month

Revelations 6:3-4 “ when he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” 4 And out came another horse, bright red. Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people should slay one another, and he was given a great sword.

Important Takeaways:

  • North Korea test fires its biggest ICBM yet — and it could apparently reach the entire U.S.
  • The launch extended a barrage of weapons demonstrations this year that analysts say are aimed at forcing the United States to accept the idea of North Korea as a nuclear power and remove crippling sanctions
  • CBS News’ Lucy Craft observes that Kim officially marks ten years in power next month, and observers expect his fast and furious pace of weapons development will mean more major missile and nuclear tests in the coming weeks and months.
  • The Hwasong-17, which was fired at a high angle to avoid the territorial waters of neighbors, reached a maximum altitude of 3,880 miles and traveled 680 miles during a 67-minute flight before landing in waters between North Korea and Japan

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End new oil, gas and coal funding to reach net zero, says IEA

By Nina Chestney

LONDON (Reuters) -Investors should not fund new oil, gas and coal supply projects if the world wants to reach net zero emissions by mid-century, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Tuesday, in the top global watchdog’s starkest warning yet to curb fossil fuels.

Any abrupt halt to new oil and gas projects by next year still appears unlikely, however, as energy majors’ spending plans still tilt heavily towards hydrocarbons, and oil-producing nations such as Norway plan new licensing rounds.

“The pathway to net zero is narrow but still achievable. If we want to reach net zero by 2050 we do not need any more investments in new oil, gas and coal projects,” Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, told Reuters.

“It is up to investors to chose whatever portfolio they prefer but there are risks and rewards,” he added.

The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change aims to cap the rise in temperatures to as close as possible to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change, which requires net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

The number of countries which have pledged to reach net zero has grown, but even if their commitments are fully achieved, there will still be 22 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide worldwide in 2050 which would lead to temperature rise of around 2.1C by 2100, the IEA said in its “Net Zero by 2050” report.

It sets out more than 400 milestones to achieving net zero in the report, intended to guide the next round of global climate talks in November in Scotland, and was requested by the British president of those talks, Alok Sharma.

“(This is) a massive blow to the fossil fuel industry. This is a complete turnaround of the fossil-led IEA from five years ago,” said Dave Jones, global program lead at Ember think-tank.

Environmental activists had previously said the IEA , whose analysis and data underpin energy policies of governments and companies around the world, underestimated the role of renewable power in its reports.

RENEWABLES

To achieve net zero, global investment in fossil fuel supply should fall from $575 billion on average over the past five years to $110 billion in 2050, with upstream fossil fuel investment restricted to maintaining production at existing oil and natural gas fields, the IEA said.

Asked about the IEA’s finding about no new fossil fuel projects, Gina McCarthy, the White House domestic climate adviser, said at a Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy virtual event, “I think that’s one of the things that we have to think about and struggle with.”

There should be no sales of new internal combustion engine passenger cars and the global electricity sector must reach net zero emissions by 2040, IEA added.

Massive deployment of renewable energy will be needed. Almost 90% of electricity generation should come from renewables by 2050 and most of the rest from nuclear power.

Solar photovoltaic additions should reach 630 gigawatts a year by 2030 and wind power needs to rise to 390 GW. Together, this is four times the annual record set last year for new capacity additions.

Annual emissions savings will depend heavily on investment and new technology such as direct air carbon capture and green hydrogen, according to the IEA, with around half of emissions reductions by mid-century compared to 2020 set to come from technologies currently under development.

“IEA itself regularly acknowledges that half the technology to reach net zero has not yet been invented. Any pathway to net zero must include continued innovation and use of natural gas and oil, which remains crucial to displacing coal in developing nations and enabling renewable energy,” said Stephen Comstock, vice president of corporate policy at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest U.S. industry group.

Every month from 2030, 10 industrial plants will need to be fitted with carbon capture technology, three new hydrogen-based industrial plants will need to be built and 2 GW of electrolyzer capacity for green hydrogen production needs to be added at industrial sites, the report said.

Energy investment will need to rise to $5 trillion a year by 2030 to achieve net zero from $2 trillion today, it said, which will provide a boost to global annual GDP growth.

Behavioral changes by consumers will also be needed, along with replacing regional air travel with rail, as well more energy efficient building design.

(Reporting by Nina Chestney; additional reporting by Noah Browning, Shadia Nasralla and Ron Bousso; Editing by Jan Harvey, William Maclean, David Evans and Giles Elgood)

U.S. nuclear power industry group sees reprocessing as potential waste fix

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The head of the top U.S. nuclear power group said that reprocessing of nuclear waste, a technique that has not been practiced in the United States for decades because of proliferation and cost concerns, could help address a growing problem building up at nuclear plants across the country.

“Reprocessing is a very interesting part of the solution set,” Maria Korsnick, the head of the Nuclear Energy Institute, said during an interview last week that will be part of Reuters Events Energy Transition North America on Friday. The technology “would be really closing the fuel cycle in a very useful way” because it squeezes more energy from the waste that cannot be used when it is disposed permanently.

France and other countries reprocess nuclear waste by breaking it down into uranium and plutonium and reusing it to make new reactor fuel.

But nonproliferation experts say militants could target the reprocessing supply chain, which would be far longer in the United States, to seize materials that could be used to make a crude nuclear weapon.

Former President Jimmy Carter halted reprocessing in 1977, citing proliferation concerns. President Ronald Reagan lifted Carter’s moratorium in 1981 but high costs have prevented plants from opening.

Now the United States has a growing problem with nuclear waste, currently kept at the country’s nuclear reactors, first in spent fuel pools, and then in steel and concrete casks. While about $8 billion has been spent on the Yucca Mountain permanent nuclear waste repository project in Nevada, it has never opened due to local opposition.

President Donald Trump’s administration wanted to open Yucca, but Trump began opposing it in February as the presidential campaign got under way.

Two sites in New Mexico and Texas could serve as interim nuclear waste storage sites, but local concerns are mounting that those places could become the default permanent fix.

Rita Baranwal, the top U.S. Energy Department official on nuclear power, has said it is a shame to permanently dispose of nuclear waste and that the country should look at reprocessing and potentially export the waste to countries that could do it.

Korsnick said the nuclear power industry is eager to work with the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden on energy issues including nuclear waste. Biden’s transition website lists driving down costs of advanced nuclear power and commercializing it as one way to fight climate change.

Korsnick also applauded a decision this summer by the Development Finance Corporation (DFC), a U.S. development agency, to lift a ban on funding nuclear projects.

She said the move would help the United States compete with Russia and China, which are also looking to export nuclear technology. The export market for U.S. advanced nuclear power technology could be worth up to $2 trillion, she said. The DFC’s move was criticized by some development experts who say bringing nuclear projects to poor countries would do little to address poverty.

On reprocessing, France has demonstrated it can be done safely, Korsnick said. “These are all conversations that we would have to step through as we design our final solution,” she said. “I’m confident that we have the technological expertise to do this well.”

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner in Washington; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

America’s dangerous nuclear headache: old plutonium with nowhere to go

The U.S. Energy Department's Savannah River Site, with the unfinished building which was meant to make plutonium safe but now may not be finished until 2048, is seen in this aerial image, taken near Aiken, South Carolina, U. S. January 31, 2018. High Flyer © 2018/Handout via REUTERS

By Scot J. Paltrow

AMARILLO, Texas (Reuters) – In a sprawling plant near Amarillo, Texas, rows of workers perform by hand one of the most dangerous jobs in American industry. Contract workers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pantex facility gingerly remove the plutonium cores from retired nuclear warheads.

Although many safety rules are in place, a slip of the hand could mean disaster.

In Energy Department facilities around the country, there are 54 metric tons of surplus plutonium. Pantex, the plant near Amarillo, holds so much plutonium that it has exceeded the 20,000 cores, called “pits,” regulations allow it to hold in its temporary storage facility. There are enough cores there to cause thousands of megatons of nuclear explosions. More are added each day.

The delicate, potentially deadly dismantling of nuclear warheads at Pantex, while little noticed, has grown increasingly urgent to keep the United States from exceeding a limit of 1,550 warheads permitted under a 2010 treaty with Russia. The United States wants to dismantle older warheads so that it can substitute some of them with newer, more lethal weapons. Russia, too, is building new, dangerous weapons.

The United States has a vast amount of deadly plutonium, which terrorists would love to get their hands on. Under another agreement, Washington and Moscow each are required to render unusable for weapons 34 metric tons of plutonium. The purpose is twofold: keep the material out of the hands of bad guys, and eliminate the possibility of the two countries themselves using it again for weapons. An Energy Department website says the two countries combined have 68 metric tons designated for destruction – enough to make 17,000 nuclear weapons. But the United States has no permanent plan for what to do with its share.

Plutonium must be made permanently inaccessible because it has a radioactive half-life of 24,000 years.

“A MUCH MORE DANGEROUS SITUATION”

Edwin Lyman, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a science advocacy group based in Washington, says solving the problem of plutonium storage is urgent. In an increasingly unstable world, with terrorism, heightened international tensions and non-nuclear countries coveting the bomb, he says, the risk is that this metal of mass annihilation will be used again. William Potter, director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, told Reuters: “We are in a much more dangerous situation today than we were in the Cold War.”

Washington has not even begun to take the steps needed to acquire additional space for burying plutonium more than 2,000 feet below ground – the depth considered safe. Much of America’s plutonium currently is stored in a building at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina – like Pantex, an Energy Department site. Savannah River used to house a reactor. Local opponents of the storage, such as Tom Clements, director of SRS Watch, contend the facility was never built for holding plutonium and say there is a risk of leakage and accidents in which large amounts of radioactivity are released.

The Energy Department has a small experimental storage site underground in New Mexico. The department controls the radioactive materials – plutonium, uranium and tritium – used in America’s nuclear weapons and in the reactors of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines. In a Senate hearing in June 2017, Energy Secretary Rick Perry said the Energy Department has been in talks with New Mexico officials to enlarge the site. Environmental groups there have strongly opposed expansion.

Under an agreement with Russia, the United States was to convert 34 metric tons of plutonium into fuel for civilian reactors that generate electricity. The fuel is known as MOX, for “mixed oxide fuel.” Plutonium and uranium are converted into chemical compounds called oxides, and mixed together in fuel rods for civilian nuclear power plants. The two metals are converted into oxides because these can’t cause nuclear explosions. But the U.S. effort has run into severe delays and cost overruns.

The alternative method is known as dilute-and-dispose. It involves blending plutonium with an inert material and storing it in casks. The casks, however, are projected to last only 50 years before beginning to leak, and so would need to be buried permanently deep underground.

THE MOX MESS

President Donald Trump has sided with the Energy Department in wanting to kill the MOX project because of the extreme cost overruns and delays. The Energy Department, beginning in the Obama administration, favored closing down the MOX project for the same reason, but Congress overruled it. The federal budget adopted in February, however, specifies a means for ending the project, if a study shows that dilute-and-dispose would be at least 50 percent cheaper than making MOX.

The National Nuclear Security Administration, the part of the Energy Department that oversees the nuclear sites and materials, favors switching to the dilute-and-dispose method. In recent testimony before a House of Representatives subcommittee, Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, the new NNSA administrator, said that method would “cost billions less” than completing the MOX plant.

Plutonium is a versatile nuclear bomb material. Terrorists would need only 11 kilograms or less to make a bomb, Lyman says.

Its ordinarily limited radioactivity makes plutonium safe for terrorists or other thieves to transport with little risk of radiation injury. It goes undetected by most sensors. It radiates alpha particles, relatively large on an atomic scale, which means the thin glass of a test tube, the leather of a briefcase, or even air or skin stop them. The danger from handling small amounts is inhaling plutonium dust. In that case, the dust spreads from the lungs throughout the body, causing multiple kinds of cancer.

The federal government now has no solution in sight to dispose of the plutonium permanently. Its one effort to make it unusable for bombs has turned into what the White House and Energy Department say is a costly failure. The MOX project, at the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, has been kept on life support by Congress thanks to the influence of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and other lawmakers. The MOX plant employs about 2,000 people in Graham’s state.

Graham and other Congressional backers say MOX is the best way to keep plutonium out of the hands of terrorists. They note too that the pact with Russia requires the United States to use MOX as the method for disposal.

A spokeswoman for Graham declined to comment on his behalf but sent a link to a YouTube video of a Senate hearing in March. In the hearing, Graham, referring to steps already taken to limit work on the MOX plant, said: “What I think we’ve done is ended the biggest non-proliferation program in the world, and I’m going to try and fix that.”

Today’s plutonium glut mainly is a legacy of the Cold War. The quantities now seem surreal. By 1967 the U.S. nuclear arsenal reached its apex, with 37,000 warheads. The Soviet Union’s peak came in the 1970s, with approximately 45,000. These were enough to destroy life on Earth thousands of times over.

A RADIOACTIVE PEACE DIVIDEND

Amid the terror and aggressiveness then of government and military leaders on both sides, little or no thought was given what to do with the warheads should the risk of mass annihilation ebb.

Daniel Ellsberg, best known for leaking in 1971 the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam war, in the early 1960s was an adviser to the Air Force and White House on nuclear policy. He recently published a book detailing and criticizing the nuclear policy debates and decisions of that era. In a phone interview, he said disposal of weapons was never considered at the time.

“I don’t think one person gave one moment of thought to that,” Ellsberg said. “No one thought that the Cold War would end.”

Treaties that dramatically reduced U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals were signed soon after the Soviet Union fell. It was then that the magnitude of the problem – disposing of the surplus plutonium – dawned on the two countries.

Scientists proffered ideas, nearly all involving making the plutonium forbiddingly dangerous for malefactors to transport and burying it deep underground.

Instead, under a 2000 treaty, the United States agreed to transform the 34 metric tons of plutonium into MOX, unusable for bombs. Russia agreed to destroy the same quantity using a special type of reactor. But the United States had never before built a MOX plant. No U.S. civilian reactor had ever used MOX as fuel.

This misplaced optimism led to one of the costliest snafus ever in U.S. government construction. Work began in 2007 to build a MOX plant that was to be operational by November 2016. The Energy Department now estimates that, if allowed to proceed, it will not be finished until 2048. In 2007 the Energy Department said the total cost would be $4.8 billion. Now it estimates the cost at more than $17 billion.

Building of the plant began when detailed designs were between 20 percent and 40 percent complete. But once initial construction finished, the contractor, under instructions from the Energy Department, breezed ahead without architectural plans.

Reports from the Union of Concerned Scientists said rooms were built for laboratories and offices where none were needed. Ventilation ducts and electrical wiring were in the wrong places. Plumbing was a maze of misplaced pipes. The contractor later had to rip out much of its work and start over.

The contractor is a consortium of companies I Areva MOX Services. It includes CB&I (formerly Chicago Bridge and Iron), based in the Netherlands, and Areva, which specializes in nuclear-related and alternative power projects, majority owned by the French government.

GIVING IT AWAY

In an e-mailed statement to Reuters, the consortium said it expects to finish the facility. It said “the project is over 70 percent physically complete.”

But Gordon-Hagerty, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s new chief, testified in March before a House Appropriations Subcommittee that it is “nowhere near” 50% complete. Government Accountability Office reports criticized the Energy Department for awarding a “cost plus” contract, which guarantees a profit regardless of how much work is done.

In an emailed response to questions for this article, Lindsey Geisler, a spokesperson for the NNSA, said that in 2011, after the contract had been awarded, “NNSA recognized the need to institute project management reforms.” She said the NNSA established a new office to better oversee contracting and acquisition, and that practices have improved significantly.

Echoing other critics, Frank von Hippel, a Princeton University professor who researches nuclear arms control and policymaking, said weak oversight continues. “The problem at DOE is that the quality of managers, with some exceptions, is quite low,” he said. “Contractors just milk them for money.”

An Energy Department panel reported in 2016 that there is no US market for MOX. To use MOX fuel rods, civilian power plants would have to modify their reactors, requiring lengthy relicensing by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The report said the best the Energy Department could hope for was to give the stuff away.

(Edited by Michael Williams)

Russia must limit Iranian power in Syria: Israeli intelligence director

FILE PHOTO: Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Moscow, Russia, March 9, 2017. Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin via REUTERS/File Photo

By Luke Baker

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Russia and other world powers must move to limit Iran’s growing military strength in Syria because it poses a regional threat, the director-general of Israel’s Intelligence Ministry told Reuters in an interview.

Israeli officials estimate Iran commands at least 25,000 fighters in Syria, including members of its own Revolutionary Guard, Shi’ite militants from Iraq and recruits from Afghanistan and Pakistan. It also coordinates the activities of the powerful Lebanese militia Hezbollah.

“As we speak, relations between Iran and Syria are getting tighter,” said Chagai Tzuriel, the top civil servant in Israel’s Intelligence Ministry, who spent 27 years in Mossad, including as station chief in Washington.

“Iran is in the process of putting together agreements, including economic agreements, with Syria to strengthen its hold, its ports and naval bases there,” he said in a rare interview. “There is a need for Russia and other powers to work to avoid the threat that Iran ends up with military, air and naval bases in Syria.”

Israel has long warned about the threat from Iran, especially its perceived desire to acquire nuclear weapons, but now sees a rising territorial squeeze, with Tehran’s influence reaching in an arc from Lebanon in the north to Gaza in the south, where it has links to Islamist groups.

Iran maintains it wants a nuclear capability only for domestic energy and scientific research purposes, and has so far largely stuck to the terms of the nuclear deal agreed with the United States and other world powers in 2015.

Tzuriel said the conflict in Syria, now in its seventh year, had created a number of imbalances in the region – whether between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims, Iran and Turkey, Kurds and Arabs, Turkey and Syria, Russia and the United States – that needed to be kept contained and shifted back into equilibrium.

A lot of the responsibility for that rests with Russia, which has become the biggest player in the region and is capable of exerting the most influence, he said.

“When it comes to Iran, the United States, Russia and other powers need to understand that (growing Iranian influence in Syria) is going to be a constant source of friction,” said Tzuriel, adding that it could reduce Moscow’s own influence in the region and set back the gains it has made in Syria.

“Russia has a vested interest in keeping that threat contained.”

‘WHAT DO WE WANT?’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has met President Vladimir Putin five times since Sept. 2015, largely in an effort to ensure communications are open and there are no misunderstandings over Syria, where Israeli fighter planes have occasionally bombed targets, including last week. Syria fired a missile in response and Moscow called in Israel’s ambassador to discuss the Israeli raid.

“We don’t view Russia as the enemy and I don’t think they view us as the enemy either,” said Tzuriel, but he suggested Russia would need to work with others, including the United States, to keep a lid on the forces at play in Syria.

“We have to assume that the Russians want stability, they want a Pax Russiana in the region,” he said.

“If they want a stabilization, they can’t do it alone. They need the United States, they need regional powers, they need opposition parties and militias, even those that are not exactly Russia’s cup of tea.”

After a career in intelligence gathering, Tzuriel drew a distinction between intelligence and strategy. After years of conflict and more than 500,000 dead, it was still incumbent on the parties tied to Syria to fix a strategic outcome.

“We have to decide what we want (in Syria) or what we don’t want,” he said. “The main strategic threat right now is what happens in Syria, it is the key arena. There’s no place in the world that has so many elements wrapped up in it.”

(Writing by Luke Baker; Editing by Pravin Char)

Iran to work on nuclear-powered boats after U.S. ‘violation’ of deal

Iranian President

By Bozorgmehr Sharafedin

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani ordered scientists on Tuesday to start developing systems for nuclear-powered boats, in reaction to what he called the United States’ violation of a global atomic deal.

The announcement marked Iran’s first concrete response to a U.S. Congress decision last month to extend legislation making it easier for Washington to reimpose sanctions on Tehran.

Rouhani described the technology as a “nuclear propeller to be used in marine transportation,” but did not say whether that meant just ships or possibly also submarines. Iran said in 2012 that it was working on its first nuclear-powered sub. http://reut.rs/2gVr80g

His words will stoke tensions with Washington, already heightened by comments from U.S. president elect Donald Trump who has vowed to scrap the deal, under which Iran agreed to curb its nuclear activities in exchange for lifted sanctions.

There was no immediate reaction from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors Iran’s nuclear work.

“The United States has not fully delivered its commitments in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the nuclear deal),” Rouhani wrote in a letter published by state news agency IRNA.

“With regards to recent (U.S. congress) legislation to extend the Iran Sanctions Act, I order the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran to … plan the design and construction of a nuclear propeller to be used in marine transportation to be used in marine transportation.”

U.S. Congress members have said the extension of the bill does not violate the nuclear deal agreed last year to assuage Western fears that Iran is working to develop a nuclear bomb. The act, Congress added, only gave Washington the power to reimpose sanctions on Iran if it violated the pact.

Washington says it has lifted all the sanctions it needs to under the deal between major powers and Iran.

But Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said last month that the extension was a definite breach and Iran would “definitely react to it”.

Iran always argued its nuclear program was for peaceful purposes.

(Reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin; Additional reporting by Shadia Nasralla in Vienna; editing by John Stonestreet and Andrew Heavens)