Nuclear Power – The News Desk

Democrats And Industry Clash Over Controversial Energy Plan

17Dec

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Politics

Democrats And Industry Clash Over Controversial Energy Plan

OSWEGO, N.Y. — On the snowy eastern shore of Lake Ontario sits a beige metal shipping container roughly the size of a mobile home. Inside, a machine called an electrolyzer is zapping tanks of freshwater with enough volts to split the hydrogen out of H2O to harvest the gas, which the U.S. government is banking on replacing fossil fuels. Hydrogen, the lightest and most abundant element in the universe, has long been manufactured for use in fertilizers and oil refining. Virtually all the global supply today is produced through a chemical process that strips the hydrogen out of natural gas. Since hydrogen produces only water when burned, making the fuel instead with water and electricity that comes from a zero-carbon source offers something that functions like oil and gas without adding carbo...

Portugal’s Political Chaos Could Be Big For Nuclear Energy

22Nov

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Politics

Portugal’s Political Chaos Could Be Big For Nuclear Energy

LISBON, Portugal ― After nearly five hours in a stuffy, cream-walled classroom on the second floor of a college physics department last Tuesday night, Luis Guimarãis stood up and broached the metaphysical: Can something die that was never born?The audience of nearly two dozen students had been sitting in the fluorescent-lit room, which featured a tragically inactive espresso machine, since the middle of the afternoon. The sky had gone dark hours earlier, and most of the University of Lisbon’s students had dispersed to neighborhood bars. But the youths and professors staring at a projector screen at the front of the room listened intently to a lineup of speakers attempting to recruit them to what has seemed, for decades, like an impossible cause in this nation: building a nuclear reactor.J...

U.S. Nuclear Reactor Project Crumbles Into Failure

9Nov

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Business

U.S. Nuclear Reactor Project Crumbles Into Failure

The project meant to debut small modular reactors, the technology the nuclear energy industry hopes will spur a renaissance of atomic power construction, collapsed Wednesday night amid mounting financial troubles. The NuScale Power Corporation based in Portland, Oregon, whose SMR design became the first in U.S. history to win the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s approval last January, had planned to build a dozen of its small, partly factory-made atomic energy reactors at a federally-owned site in Idaho. The power plant was dubbed the Carbon-Free Power Project. The company received more than $1 billion from the Biden administration to fund the construction. Once completed in 2029, NuScale planned to sell electricity to small electrical cooperatives across the American West via the Utah Ass...

U.S. In A Bind Over Saudi Arabia’s Nuclear Plans

3Sep

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Politics

U.S. In A Bind Over Saudi Arabia’s Nuclear Plans

Saudi Arabia’s bid to build its first nuclear energy station is setting up a tough choice for the United States: relax a Cold War-era policy designed to prevent the proliferation of atomic weapons, or risk pushing one of the world’s most powerful energy exporters further into China’s orbit. It’s a question that could dictate how quickly the global economy breaks its addiction to planet-heating fossil fuels and alter the balance of power in a region that has long defined Washington’s foreign policy. But this pivot point also raises questions about whether the U.S. — which has struggled to keep atomic energy going at home, much less construct new reactors — should still command such sway over other nations’ nuclear energy ambitions. Since 1968, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear...

The U.S. Is Finally Challenging Russia’s Monopoly Over Key Nuclear Fuel

28Aug

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Business

The U.S. Is Finally Challenging Russia’s Monopoly Over Key Nuclear Fuel

At the dawn of the atomic age, the United States mined, enriched and split its own uranium in what ultimately became the world’s largest and most self-reliant fleet of nuclear reactors. As fission fell out of favor in the 1980s, the country began importing more fuel for its reactors. When Washington made a deal with Russia in the 1990s to buy uranium harvested from disassembling the Soviet bombs once aimed at Americans, the domestic industry couldn’t compete, and collapsed. Three decades later, the U.S. and its allies are scrambling to revive their declining nuclear sectors in a bid to replace planet-heating fossil fuels and, in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, cut back on imports of Russian natural gas and oil. A new generation of atomic startups are seeking to commercialize types of...

Niger Coup Raises Questions About Uranium Exports

27Aug

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Business

Niger Coup Raises Questions About Uranium Exports

It takes a long time to dig a mine, especially in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Just ask Bob Tait.The Toronto-based Global Atomic Corp. where he serves as vice president of investor relations started exploring for uranium in the middle of Niger, a landlocked West African nation roughly twice the size of Texas, some 18 years ago. It took until late last year to finally start digging the mine.The timing couldn’t have been better. Countries all over the world were announcing plans for new nuclear reactors, right as nations that already had them started seeking alternatives to Russia for buying uranium fuel after the invasion of Ukraine. By July of this year, the company finished building the access ramp to the edge of the underground ore ― putting the project, called the Dasa mine, ahead ...

The U.S. Just Achieved A Major New Milestone In Nuclear Energy

1Aug

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Business

The U.S. Just Achieved A Major New Milestone In Nuclear Energy

The first new nuclear reactor built from scratch in the United States in a generation entered commercial operation on Monday following years of billion-dollar delays.It’s a milestone moment that advocates hope will whet the nation’s appetite for more atomic power plants ― and reopen a fresh debate over what kinds of reactor technologies the U.S. should prioritize.After 14 years of construction and financial woes that at one point bankrupted the legendary nuclear firm Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Unit 3 of Southern Company’s Alvin W. Vogtle Generating Plant split its first uranium atoms in March. With its final tests completed, the 1,100-megawatt reactor began full-scale electricity production this week near Georgia’s border with South Carolina. If its sister Unit 4 enters into servi...

The Future Of Nuclear Energy Could Depend On This

7Jul

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Business

The Future Of Nuclear Energy Could Depend On This

CAMDEN, N.J. ― On a bright, humid afternoon last September, Allen Hickman made the rounds on the floor of a factory that embodies the past, present and future of the nation’s atomic energy industry perhaps more than any other site in the United States.Founded the same year as the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl catastrophe ― the only major nuclear energy accident in history with an established death toll ― Hickman’s employer, Holtec International, built a business helping utilities from New York to Ukraine to Japan manage nuclear waste.Inside the cavernous, warehouse-like facility on the eastern bank of the Delaware River, sparks flew as welders turned sheets of steel into cylindrical containers designed to seal and store spent fuel from nuclear reactors until the radioactive material can be rec...