Friday April 18, 2008 
Friday April 18, 2008
Westinghouse strikes deal to build first US nuclear power plants in 30 years
Westinghouse Electric, a unit of Toshiba, said Tuesday [8 Apr 2008] it had struck a deal with Georgia Power to build two nuclear power plants in the southern United States, the first such projects in 30 years. The Westinghouse AP1000 power plants would be built at a site near Augusta, Georgia which already had two existing nuclear reactors. The two AP1000 units will have an electric generating capacity of 1,100 megawatts and are expected to be built by 2016 and 2017 respectively. No nuclear power plants have been built in the United States since 1978, and the accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear facility in 1979 effectively put a halt to the country's civilian nuclear energy program. The nuclear scare turned the country's attention toward more polluting sources of energy, such as natural gas and coal, which are blamed for high levels of greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change.
Toshiba, Japan's largest supplier of nuclear power plants, rose to the highest in almost six weeks in Tokyo trading after saying it was in talks to build two reactors in Florida. Toshiba is negotiating a deal with Progress Energy to build two nuclear units in a bid to expand its market share of atomic plant construction in the US. Typically, a reactor costs $3 billion to $4 billion to build. Toshiba is targeting the US, UK, South Africa and China as markets for its atomic business. It aims to win at least 16 orders to build the smaller, cheaper AP-1000 reactors in the US. The AP-1000 reactor, developed by Westinghouse Electric Co., will be used for the first time in China, Toshiba's Oomori said. The company signed contracts to build four nuclear reactors in China in 2006, with commercial operations slated to begin by 2015.
- Looks like Westinghouse/Toshiba has leapfrogged over Hitachi/General Electric in the race to build the first nuclear power plants in the United States of America in 30 years.
From a peakoiler's point of view, reducing reliance on rapidly-depleting fossil fuels is a good thing, and from a climate change activist's point of view, an operating nuclear plant is zero-emission from a CO2 standpoint. Yep, I'm a nuclear proponent, and I should be - my parent company, Lockheed Martin, has a subsidiary which makes the nuclear reactors for the American naval fleet - nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines. The American naval reactors have a multi-decade-long record of safe and reliable operation, and remember that in shipboard conditions there is no such thing as a 10-mile safety/exclusion zone.
The next step would be recycling of nuclear "waste", and I'm a proponent of that too. It only makes sense to use up the remaining 99.3% of the embodied energy in the uranium fuel, instead of using less than 1% of the available energy as in the typical "once-through" fission cycle and putting the rest away and calling it "nuclear waste" and fretting about it. We could look at it in another way - if we do not recycle nuclear fuel, global proven uranium supplies may last only 50 years or less; if we do recycle nuclear fuel, global uranium supplies could last over 5000 years - more than adequate time for us to figure out the next, next step, which in my opinion, should be space-based solar power. Hence, in the ideal case, we transition to a Type 1 Civilization some time within this century or perhaps the next.
See also :
1. Toshiba agrees to buy Westinghouse for $5.4 bln
2. Toshiba plans to triple nuclear power sales
(2008-04-18 13:23:44 SGT)
[Energy]
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Spent fuel reprocessing will eventually be more widespread, but political and economic problems will probably hold it back for a long time to come.
Here's a fairly comprehensive report on it, from a US perspective:
http://www.fissilematerials.org/ipfm/site_down/ipfmresearchreport03.pdf
Posted by Doug on April 19, 2008 at 12:26 AM SGT #
Type 1 civilization? Interesting, but too far fetched I think. The two methods mentioned (fusion power and anti-matter production) in the wiki article by which we can achieve this level of sophistication are many decades away, if possible at all. Space-based solar power sounds good, but how scalable is it? And what are the energy returns?
Posted by TM on April 25, 2008 at 10:49 AM SGT #