DOE Solicits Spent Fuel Storage Demonstration Projects
Nuclear Street
November 28, 2012

 

The Department of Energy has offered a tentative sign that it may be interested in consolidated spent-fuel storage projects in the future.

 

The Augusta Chronicle noted that DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy posted a notice last week to identify potential private-sector resources for a large-scale spent-fuel-storage demonstration project. While no funding or formal program has been announced, the concept aligns with a proposal to consolidate spent fuel at regional storage facilities in the absence of a geologic repository in Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

 

In January, the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future suggested a "consent-based" approach to consolidating spent fuel at one or more interim storage facilities, and Congress considered legislation to that effect earlier this year. A coalition in New Mexico is advocating for waste storage in the south-eastern part of the state, and the Chronicle reported that another economic development organization is exploring the potential for spent fuel storage at the Savannah River Site.

 

Chairman Rogers Welcomes Six New Members to the Appropriations Committee
House Appropriations Committee
November 29, 2012

 

The House Republican Steering Committee today approved the following six Members to serve on the House Appropriations Committee in the 113th Congress:

Chairman Hal Rogers welcomed the new additions to the committee.

 

"It is a great honor and a privilege to serve on the Appropriations Committee, and I welcome these new Members and congratulate them on their approval by the Steering Committee. It is a pleasure to have these new Members on board, and I look forward to serving with them as the Committee continues its critical fiscal work on behalf of the American people," Chairman Rogers said.

 

Luján Encouraged by DOE Response to President's Tech Transfer Directives
Congressman Ben Ray Luján
November 28, 2012

 

Washington, D.C. - Congressman Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico's Third District and Co-Chair of the Congressional Technology Caucus highlighted the Department of Energy's (DOE) response to President Obama's Executive Memo on accelerating technology transfer and the commercialization of federal research in support of high-growth businesses.

 

In October of 2011, President Obama directed the heads of executive departments and agencies with research laboratories to increase the rate of technology transfer from laboratories to the commercial marketplace and to accelerate the economic impact from federal research and development investments.

 

In response to the President's memo, Luján sent a letter to Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu recommending actions for DOE to consider when addressing the President's directive.   Luján Letter to Secretary Chu

 

"Our national labs across the country, including Los Alamos and Sandia, are making important strides in a number of key sectors from health care to clean energy," Congressman Luján said.  "Helping local businesses move these innovations from the laboratory to the marketplace will spur economic development that creates jobs in our communities.  I am encouraged that Secretary Chu's response to President Obama's call to encourage technology transfer includes a number of recommendations that I highlighted with the Secretary that can help increase our economic competitiveness."

 

Luján's recommendations that were included in DOE's plan are:

 

    Including technology transfer and commercialization metrics as part of each DOE laboratory's yearly performance evaluation plan in order to communicate performance expectations.

    Including laboratory employees' technology transfer activities in their performance and promotion evaluations to incentivize and reward employees for prioritizing such activities.

    Fostering local and regional partnerships that can multiply the technology transfer and commercialization activities associated with a given laboratory.

 

These recommendations were aimed at accomplishing the three main components of the President's directive:

 

    Streamlining and accelerating the process for licensing laboratory technologies and for establishing private-public research partnerships known as Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs).

    Enhancing local and regional partnerships by participating in regional technology innovation clusters, locating applied research and business support programs - such as incubators and research parks - on or near federal laboratories, and expanding commercialization activities in each laboratory's local region.

    Instituting more accountability by directing agencies to develop a five-year plan with concrete goals and metrics to measure progress, including keeping track of how many new commercial products and successful self-sustaining companies were created.

 

Congressman Luján has been highlighting the potential benefits of technology transfer during his time in Congress. At the beginning of the year, he started the Congressional Technology Transfer Caucus along with co-chair Representative Frank Wolf of Virginia. He has also authored bills to enhance private-public partnerships through CRADAs in order to help move technologies from the basic research and dvelopment stage to a more mature state in which they will be more attractive to the private sector.

 

Another Step to Smaller Reactors
Matthew L. Wald, The New York Times Green Blog
November 28, 2012

 

Babcock & Wilcox,the nuclear technology company, moving fast after a promise of help from the Energy Department, said Wednesday that it had lined up a supplier for the towering metal shell for its mPower small modular reactor.

 

The Lehigh Heavy Forge Corporation, of Bethlehem, Pa., said it would seek to be accredited as a supplier for nuclear parts, and would expand its plant as Babcock & Wilcox moved forward with its business.

 

The idea is to build a reactor that can be assembled at a factory and shipped nearly complete on a barge or a rail car, incorporating in one 83-foot-high package components that are usually separate and assembled in the field.

 

The Energy Department program to assist companies in developing and licensing small reactors has bi-partisan support in Congress. Anti-nuclear groups have not focused much so far on small modular reactors, partly because the reactors do not exist yet

 

Babcock & Wilcox, which is based in Charlotte, N.C., has an agreement with the Tennessee Valley Authority to locate the first of its mPower reactors near Oak Ridge, Tenn., an area where nuclear technology is popular.

 

Factory fabrication will lower costs and improve quality, advocates of the method say, and additional modules can be added as power demand rises.

 

"Historically, 70 percent of the cost and the work has been in the field, and 30 percent in the shop," said Cristofer M. Mowry, president of Babock & Wilcox mPower. "We want to turn that on its head." With 70 percent of the work done in a factory, the cost and schedule risk is more like the one for a natural gas plant, and not a reactor, he said.

 

Nuclear projects are notorious for running late and over budget.

 

The 600-ton package can be transported by rail car or ship. That could make it a good export product, for places where poor electric grids cannot handle big generating units.

 

The mPower design is for a 180 megawatt reactor, compared to over 1,000 megawatts for most reactors now under construction. It is intended to run for four years between refueling, compared to 18 months for most existing models.

 

Part of the strategy, according to advocates, is to devise a machine that the United States can produce. No American steel maker can produce vessels for the only model reactor now being built in the United States, the Westinghouse AP 1000, which is under construction in South Carolina and Georgia. The reason is that the electric utilities said they preferred reactor vessels with no welds running up and down the vessel, meaning that the vessel would have to be cast in rings.

 

But the mPower design is within American abilities. Babcock & Wilcox noted in an announcement that restoring the ability to make a reactor in this country would end "a national capability gap of more than three decades." Mr. Mowry, in a telephone interview, said it had been that long since an American company was certified to make vessels.

 

The 83-foot shell that Lehigh will make will be made of 18 separate parts, some for the top, some for the bottom, and some in the shape of rings that will be stacked to form the cylinder.

 

Pennsylvania is in many ways the cradle of nuclear power, with the deployment of a quasi-commercial-scale reactor at Shippingport, scaled up from a submarine reactor, in 1957.

 

The Energy Department says it will pay up to half the development costs, and intends to sponsor two projects. At one point it anticipated a $452 million program over five years, but so far Congress has appropriated only $67 million. The department is asking for another $65 million for the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1. Also, the department has not said how much it was providing to Babcock & Wilcox.

 

Waiting in the wings are at least two other applicants, Westinghouse, which has thus far been a champion of big reactors, and NuScale, a start-up with plans for a 45-megawatt model.

 

At a ceremony in Bethlehem on Wednesday, the governor of Pennsylvania, Thomas W. Corbett, said, "energy equals jobs." Fracking for natural gas was producing jobs in Pennsylvania but nuclear power would too, he said. "We need to have a balance in our energy. We need to have other forms of energy available to us."

 

Mr. Corbett said the choice of Lehigh Heavy Forge by Babcock & Wilcox was "the free market enterprise system working at its best." He was apparently not referring to the federal help. But he pointed out, to the amusement of the audience, "the commonwealth invested no money, no money, in bringing these companies together."

 

SRS role in future of spent nuclear fuel disposal unclear
Rob Pavey, The Augusta Chronicle
November 26, 2012

 

The U.S. Energy Department is looking for businesses to design a demonstration project for large-scale and long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel.

 

In a notice posted last week by the Office of Nuclear Energy, the department said its intention is simply to identify resources, and that no formal project has been announced or funded.

 

The announcement, however, could indicate the government - which is preparing a new spent fuel strategy for Congress - is leaning toward consolidated storage options that could affect South Carolina, said Tom Clements with the Alliance of Nuclear Accountability.

 

"This solicitation is being put out in advance of DOE delivering the spent fuel strategy report to Congress, which will likely affirm consolidated spent fuel storage," he said. "Thus, DOE has set the stage for a fight in states that may be targeted for spent fuel dumps, like South Carolina and Savannah River Site."

 

Spent fuel is currently stored at the nation's 104 nuclear power plants, including Plant Vogtle in Burke County. The nationwide inventory of 75,000 tons could expand to 150,000 tons by 2050, not including spent fuel from new reactors.

 

The long-term plan was to bury both commercial and radioactive defense wastes in a deep repository in Nevada's Yucca Mountain - a project halted by the Obama administration.

 

In June, the SRS Community Reuse Organization, an economic development consortium working to recruit new missions and jobs to the area, launched a $200,000 study to explore Savannah River Site's potential role in devising disposal solutions for spent nuclear fuel, said Rick McLeod, the group's executive director.

 

That study, to be completed early next year, is not specifically connected to the recent demonstration project notice, but would certainly explore the site's possible role in projects involving outside locations or businesses.

 

"There is a potential that SRS could play a part of it, but we haven't heard of anything specific to that proposal," McLeod said, noting that such a demonstration project would likely require participation from a utility-owned, actively operating power reactor.

 

In a report unveiled last January, a Blue Ribbon Commission appointed by Energy Secretary Steven Chu concluded that a deep geologic repository remains essential to nuclear waste disposal but also suggested interim storage sites could safely and temporarily be used to store the materials.

 

Reshaping the Department of Energy in Obama's Second Term: Institutional Reform Goals
Matthew Stepp, Forbes
November 26, 2012

 

As my colleague Clifton Yin and I have written recently, U.S. clean energy innovation policy is at an inflection point. The decisions made in the coming months and years will shape America's ability to address its climate and energy challenges as well as its international competitiveness in the clean tech industry. As such, advocates are rightly focused on creating new clean energy policies through Congressional action (see the debate on a carbon tax). Yet in the melee of federal sausage making, only minor attention has been paid to reforming the Department of Energy (DOE) as a potentially significant way of boosting support for clean energy.

 

Reforming DOE has been the source of continued, wonky debate since its creation in 1977. DOE last saw institutional change four years ago when current Secretary of Energy Steven Chu implemented a number of new programs like ARPA-E, the Innovation Hubs, and Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs), aimed re-invigorating DOEs investments in clean energy. DOE also undertook its first Quadrennial Technology Review (QTR) to comprehensively assess the state of energy technologies. And the Department continues to implement the President's Memorandum on Technology Transfer to accelerate the development of new ideas from Lab to market.

 

Without a doubt these changes have provided DOE with a new set of flexible tools to support technological innovation. Now it's time to cement these changes as part of a long-term re-shaping of the Department. The President and the Secretary of Energy should continue the reforms of the last four years, but also continue reforming DOE to make it a well-oiled engine for clean energy innovation. In particular, the following DOE "institutional reform" goals should be addressed in a second term:

 

Make Energy Innovation the Mission of DOE. Cleantech private equity investor Rob Day opined at Greentech Media that the DOE "needs to transition from a focus on technological innovation (without losing the progress made there) to a focus on commercialization and consensus-building." While Day proposes some very good policy ideas, shifting DOE's focus away from fostering innovation is the wrong overall goal.

 

Part of the problem is conceptual. Commercializing emerging energy technologies is deeply integrated in the innovation lifecycle. In other words, commercialization is still research and innovation just with an outcome in mind. For example, DOE provides a nice example here of the myriad of collaborative research support it provided to commercialize NiMH Batteries. Thus it's difficult to assess how DOE would focus more on commercialization and less on innovation.  They're one in the same.

 

The rest of the problem is organizational. Believe it or not, the word "innovation" isn't even mentioned in DOE's stated mission. The reason being - as Day correctly points out - is that the DOE is a massive organization with different missions ranging from nuclear security, science, environmental clean-up, and energy technology development, each often pulling in different directions.  Creating a more efficient DOE explicitly focused on energy innovation (and not just re-focused on commercialization) should be the top institutional reform goal of the Secretary of Energy and the President. It's no easy task, of course, and will take more than changing the mission statement on the agencies website. But it's a worthy goal for the President's second term that would have long-lasting, positive consequences for the clean energy industry.

 

Eliminate DOE-wide Energy Innovation Micromanagement. For many (but not all) DOE energy technology programs, funding decisions are broken up into relatively small packets with strings attached to very specific research outcomes. Put another way, DOE often dictates the path of energy research, which limits scientists and engineer's flexibility to solve problems and come up with the best solutions because the solutions are often attached to the funding contract. For example, instead of funding contracts to increase the energy density of lithium-ion batteries for vehicles, it's better for DOE to set the broad goal of developing cheap, scalable zero-carbon vehicle technologies and fund National Labs, Universities, and public-private partnerships on a competitive basis to meet this goal.

 

The Energy Innovation Hub's aimed to solve this very issue by leveraging larger funding contracts to support collaborative teams aimed at developing solutions to broader research goals. For example, the Sunlight to Fuel Hub is tasked with coming up with innovative ways of converting sunlight into fuel, rather than DOE funding very specific technological solutions. ARPA-E utilizes a similar project management model. This funding culture should be implemented broadly across all energy programs, not just the Hubs and ARPA-E.

 

Unleash the National Labs by Strengthening the GOCO Model. The National Labs - the 17 DOE Labs largely born out of the Manhattan Project - represent America's largest investment in energy innovation. The Labs also represent a unique management model[i] in which the federal government owns, funds and stewards the Labs, but independent contractors manage them on a day-to-day basis (otherwise known as Government Owned, Contractor Operated, or GOCO). It offers management flexibility as well as consistent federal funding for research, a good recipe for innovation.

 

Yet the Labs effectiveness has started to wane overtime because of the gradual weakening of the GOCO model. Increased funding micromanagement doesn't allow Lab contractor management or scientists and engineers the flexibility needed to solve science and technology problems. And rigid DOE oversight of contractor management decisions is resulting in prolonged decision making and inefficiencies that are stopping contractors, scientists, and engineers from making the best project decisions based on research.

 

It's time for the President and the Secretary of Energy to take a hard look at the National Labs and begin implementing reforms to strengthen the GOCO model. Of course, this isn't anew topic among federal policymakers. Just last year the DOE Inspector General called for substantial changes at the Labs. Nonetheless, it's an important policy issue that is crying out for reform and comes at a key time in American energy policy, in which we need much more innovation to make clean energy cheap and viable, not less.  The status quo simply isn't working anymore.

 

 

New View from Inside Fukushima: Chaos and Uncertainty
Hiroko Tabuchi, The New York Times Green Blog
November 30, 2012

 

Even in the early days of the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in March of last year, as the reactors spiraled out of control, the terse statements issued by the operator felt like an exercise in denial. Radiation readings were "higher than the ordinary level" (about 100 times higher), and a "loud noise and white smoke" had hit the No. 4 reactor (a possible hydrogen explosion).

 

Now, footage released by the operator from the crisis's early days  -   the second set of recorded teleconferences between the command center of the tsunami-hit plant and the company's headquarters in Tokyo  -    demonstrates just how little those announcements reflected the chaos and uncertainty on the ground. The gap between the initial assurances given by company and government officials, and the ultimate scale of the nuclear disaster, has helped fuel a crippling public mistrust of government.

 

The 300 hours of grainy video made public by the Tokyo Electric Power Company on Monday pick up where a previous batch of videos left off, on March 15, five days after the tsunami knocked out the plant's power. By then, the plant had been rocked by two explosions and the cores of three reactors had melted down, prompting Masao Yoshida, the plant's unflappable chief, to warn of "acute danger."

 

In the early hours of March 15, Mr. Yoshida raised a new concern, this time about flames sighted deep within the building housing the No. 4 reactor, which was shut down at the time of the disaster. But the reactor building housed almost 1,500 highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies in a pool of water, and it was the second fire spotted there in less than 24 hours.

 

"We would go put out the flames if we could, but we don't have the tools. We have nothing," Mr. Yoshida pleaded with headquarters. He inquired whether there was any truth in speculation that the United States Army - which had a presence in Japan - might send a helicopter to help douse the flames with water.

 

With the plant's phone lines down, he enlisted the help of personnel at a neighboring nuclear power plant in alerting the local fire brigade, but its calls went unanswered.

 

Tokyo headquarters soon suggested the company would have to issue a statement: TV networks with cameras trained on the plant could broadcast fire or smoke, leading to panic.

 

After some tweaking, Tokyo Electric issued a statement saying that a fire had been spotted at the No.  4 reactor building, and that the site personnel were attempting to put out the blaze.

 

"Calling the fire department counts as attempting to put out the blaze, right?" an official at headquarters said wanly.

 

The plant personnel were just as evasive when they  finally got through to local firefighters, choosing to say nothing about high radiation readings at the plant.

 

"There's no use in us telling the fire department. That's a conversation that needs to happen at higher levels," an official at headquarters said.

 

That lack of disclosure backfired, however, when the fire brigade, learning of high radiation levels at the plant's gates, initially refused to venture in, and even pulled some men back.

 

The footage also shows that an operation to drop water from military helicopters onto another reactor at the site - hailed at the time by Tepco officials as a success - was received by plant workers with far less enthusiasm.

 

There was initially tangible excitement in the plant's control room as workers huddled to watch live TV footage of the helicopters approach one of the reactors. "There it goes" and "Go! Go!" officials can be heard shouting.

 

But much of the water appeared to miss the reactor, dissipating in a mist of white. "Uhh...," a chorus of disappointed voices cried out.

 

"That was just a quick misting," said an abject voice off camera. "It didn't hit at all."