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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (140806)	12/5/2001 10:36:12 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1585849

Any Nuclear energy fans out there? 40 new reactors (but very small ones) may be headed our way: SA Success Could Expedite Reactor's Approval in US Dec 05, 2001 (Business Day/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) -- LAST week, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission held the latest public hearing on how to go about licensing the pebble bed modular reactor which Eskom is working on with British Nuclear Fuels, the giant US power company Exelon, and SA's Industrial Development Corporation. The scanty audience included a fellow with a pigtail who spent most of the session talking in whispers to neighbours. He generally made it clear that he, a lawyer, knew better than every physicist and engineer in the room. This was James Riccio, a man of changing affiliations. On Thursday he was from Greenpeace. At earlier meetings he represented Ralph Nader's Critical Mass Energy Project. Under whatever hat, he is out to kill the pebble bed reactor. If it lives up to its promise, the technology could be the antinuke lobby's worst nightmare: it threatens to make nuclear energy affordable and safer than ever. Operated on a test scale in Germany for more than 20 years, the reactor uses low-enriched uranium encased in tennis ballsized ceramic and graphite spheres. Nuclear fission makes them hot, causing inert helium gas to expand, which drives a turbine to produce electricity. Technically, a core melt-down the worst-case scenario for traditional reactors cannot occur. Each of the 440000 "pebbles" in the reactor is effectively its own melt-proof core, as well, say proponents, as its own containment vessel against radiation leaks. If the $300m demonstration unit Eskom and partners hope to start building at Koeberg in 2003 meets expectations, Exelon may order as many as 40 modules for the US, where not a single new nuclear power station has been built for 24 years. The reactors are relatively compact and can be mass-produced off-site. Each is designed to generate between 110MW and 130MW, which is feeble compared to the 1 840MW now produced by Koeberg's Westinghouse reactors, but that is precisely the point. The system, as the name suggests, is modular. The operator can decide how many modules he needs and add to them as demand grows. He does not risk price-depressing overinvestment. It is too early to tell whether the concept will fly. On the positive side, the US House of Representatives last week voted to renew the Price-Anderson Act, which caps the monetary liability of nuclear power plant owners in the event of accidents, but also requires operators to buy the maximum available insurance cover on a per-reactor basis. To help make the pebble bed reactor attractive in the US, Exelon needed, and won, an exemption allowing multiple modular reactors at a single site to be treated as one for liability purposes. Also good news was the October 31 report of a energy department advisory panel rating the chances of eight new reactor technologies being deployed by 2010. The committee liked the pebble bed reactor's prospects because it alone had a "potential customer actively involved and investing in its development". The panel's ifs? The project has to be successful in SA. Exelon has to decide to proceed and commit to procuring components even before receiving full regulatory approval, which, in turn, must be obtained on an "expedited" schedule. Several "challenging" technical issues still have to be addressed. The schedule is slipping. As the committee was finishing its report last month, Exelon Chairman Corbin McNeill acknowledged that the pebble bed modular reactor partners (Eskom, IDC, Exelon and BNFL) had decided to delay a decision to fund construction of the demonstration unit, originally due now, until late next year. McNeill indicated the partners were looking for design improvements to increase the longevity of the reactor vessel's lining. Certain turbine design issues still had to be resolved. The make-up of the consortium itself was also fluid, with two international companies looking to "dilute or buy out someone's share". Tom Ferreira, communications director for PBMR Pty Ltd, the consortium's operating company, attributes the slippage to the partners' desire to ensure the demonstration unit will need little or no modification to become to basis for a commercial design. Exelon likes the technology, but is intent on getting it right the first time in SA to use SA data to speed regulatory approvals in the US. McNeill does not want to wait for the reactor to be officially commissioned before he starts construction of plants in the US. The longer it takes to start selling power, the more that power will cost and the harder it will be to justify the reactor economically. That, of course, is what Riccio and other anti-nukes counting on. They will try to throw every spanner they can find into the US regulatory works including the argument that you can't trust a technology approved by Africans. siliconinvestor.com