Obama budget triples Nuclear Loan Guarantees.

[SirNitram]

Link

The Obama administration moved vigorously on two fronts Friday to promote nuclear power, proposing a tripling of federal loan guarantees for new projects and appointing a high-level commission to study what to do with nuclear waste.

Administration officials confirmed that their 2011 federal budget request next week would raise potential loan guarantees for the projects to more than $54 billion, from $18.5 billion. A new Energy Department panel will examine a vastly expanded list of options for nuclear waste, including a new kind of nuclear reactor that would use some of it.

The current loan guarantees were provided in the 2005 energy act but have not been disbursed because of bureaucratic delays. The Energy Department has said it would start issuing those soon. Because the loan guarantees are supposed to cover 80 percent of construction costs, the current amount of $18.5 billion would cover only about three projects.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu has been saying for weeks that the administration would seek a greater amount of guarantees; commercial investment has been hard to come by because there is so much uncertainty about the cost and schedule for building plants.

When President Obama said in his State of the Union address on Wednesday that the country should build “a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants,” it was one of the few times he got bipartisan applause.

The idea may have more support among Republicans than Democrats, but even opponents of nuclear power concede that the loan guarantees may be necessary to muster enough votes for the kind of measures that many environmentalists favor in a climate and energy bill, like firm national goals for renewable energy and a cap on carbon dioxide emissions.

In theory, the federal government could profit from the guarantees by collecting fees from power plant builders if profits from the reactors allowed utilities to repay the loans. But some experts are predicting a repeat of the experience of the 1980s, in which the costs of many projects soared until they became prohibitive and the plants were abandoned before completion.

Opponents have complained that loan guarantees for projects that cannot attract commercial investment amounted to “nuclear socialism.”

Companies that want to build reactors are also hoping to cobble together loan guarantees from the governments of France and Japan, which are home to businesses that want to sell reactor components. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission intends to begin issuing licenses for new reactors late next year, at which point financing would be a crucial issue.

Beyond cost, another big problem for the industry is nuclear waste. Mr. Obama has ruled out the use of Yucca Mountain, a site in Nevada chosen by Congress more than 20 years ago as the leading candidate for a burial site for the waste, some of which will remain dangerous for millenniums.

Mr. Chu said Friday that the Energy Department’s new blue-ribbon commission on nuclear waste would consider “interim” storage options, which are forbidden under current law, and evaluate new technologies that could make some use of nuclear waste.

The commission is to be led by Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana and co-chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, and Brent Scowcroft, a retired Air Force general and former national security adviser who has specialized in nuclear proliferation issues.

The panel’s members will also include Richard A. Meserve, a former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; John W. Rowe, the chairman and chief executive of Exelon, a major nuclear utility; Pete V. Domenici, a former Republican senator from New Mexico; Ernest Moniz, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist and former under secretary of energy; and Alison Macfarlane, a geochemist with a specialty in nuclear issues.

Officials said the commission had been told not to find an alternate site for the burial of nuclear waste.

So there you go. Of course, it amuses me that they were, legislatively, there in 2005.. Just not really funded and behind bureacratic sandbags. A promise to guarantee loans for nuclear power, as long as no one comes to guarantee a loan on nuclear power..

[Sea Skimmer]

Study what to do with nuclear waste… as if we have not fucking done that for 60 years already and come to entirely satisfactory conclusions. But god forbid we bury the crap in a mountain which casts a shadow on the place we open air tested nuclear ramjets and nuclear rocket engines, and that is one ridgeline away from the Nevada Test Site which saw a modest 1,021 nuclear devices tested, 200 of them in the open air. That’d be so dangerous we might break someone’s toe when a 100 ton cask of waste falls on it.

[MKSheppard]

Speaking of that, didn't Obama also cancel Yucca Mountain?

Course, loan guarantees are worthless without regulatory agency approval -- we'll see how the DOE/EPA's marching orders shake out.

[Sea Skimmer]

Speaking of that, didn't Obama also cancel Yucca Mountain?

It says so in the article; and this is after we spent no less then 13.5 BILLION dollars studying the site and digging test tunnels since 1983! It will cost at least that much yet again just to evaluate another site. Indeed any other site will surely be far more expensive, because unlike Yucca Mountain it won’t be able to leverage off the security apparatus already in place to protect Nellis Air Force Base and the Nevada Test Site. But you got to love when ‘criticism’ of a plan all involves shit that might happen in a time frame greater the existence of human civilization. In which case of course.. we could just take the damn waste out of the tunnels and repackage it anyway.

Hopefully though, since critics made such a big deal about the 10,000-1 million fucking year time span, we can now just dump all the crap in a concrete trench as one of those banned interim measures, and let it sit in the sun for the next 9,999 years, which would be perfectly safe anyway. Or we can just let the crap pile up at power plants like we already do.

[AMT]

Study what to do with nuclear waste… as if we have not fucking done that for 60 years already and come to entirely satisfactory conclusions. But god forbid we bury the crap in a mountain which casts a shadow on the place we open air tested nuclear ramjets and nuclear rocket engines, and that is one ridgeline away from the Nevada Test Site which saw a modest 1,021 nuclear devices tested, 200 of them in the open air. That’d be so dangerous we might break someone’s toe when a 100 ton cask of waste falls on it.

Aren't there also new designs that can reuse the waste as more fuel?

[phongn]

Aren't there also new designs that can reuse the waste as more fuel?

There are old designs that can do it. We should've built breeder reactors to process this crap but didn't.

[Gil Hamilton]

It says so in the article; and this is after we spent no less then 13.5 BILLION dollars studying the site and digging test tunnels since 1983! It will cost at least that much yet again just to evaluate another site. Indeed any other site will surely be far more expensive, because unlike Yucca Mountain it won’t be able to leverage off the security apparatus already in place to protect Nellis Air Force Base and the Nevada Test Site. But you got to love when ‘criticism’ of a plan all involves shit that might happen in a time frame greater the existence of human civilization. In which case of course.. we could just take the damn waste out of the tunnels and repackage it anyway.

Hopefully though, since critics made such a big deal about the 10,000-1 million fucking year time span, we can now just dump all the crap in a concrete trench as one of those banned interim measures, and let it sit in the sun for the next 9,999 years, which would be perfectly safe anyway. Or we can just let the crap pile up at power plants like we already do.

I think your anger should go less to Obama than to the state of Nevada and alot of the states in-between. Alot of te opposition in Nevada is not that they oppose a nuclear repository, but they don't want to host the nuclear repository. In other words, NIMBYs who may support nuclear power, but don't want to be responsible for generating it or dealing with the mess. Heck, there are plenty of states who are unwilling to let nuclear waste be transported through their state, complete with politicians who say "Sure, we support nuclear power, just mail us the electricity and for god sake, don't transport the waste over our railroads".

I'm not sure its so simple as you make it. I support sticking the stuff under Yucca Mountain. However, getting it under the mountain doesn't just involve telling Nevada politicians to suck it up, but every politician between your nuclear plant and the mountain that decides to refuse to let you ship nuclear waste through his frightened constituants backyards. That can be an endless fight right there.

Besides, you know full well that Yucca Mountain WASN'T defunded. The Obama Administration proposed it, but Congress was the one with the purse strings and they kept it funded for 2010. Yucca Mountain remains in limbo.

[Wing Commander MAD]

Gils right, the main problem with Yucca was/is NIMBYs. I did a position paper on it my senior year of high school. If I recall right the casks that the stuff was to be shipped in were capable of taking an AT rocket (man portable) without breaching. Unfortunately, no amount of evidence is really going to change these peoples minds.

Honestly, I think we need to wait for the babyboomers to die before any real progress with nuclear engergy generation can be made in this country. There are simply too many people who lived through the whole Duck and Cover era of the Cold War, only to see Chernobyl and Three Mile Island validate (at least in their minds) those fears of nuclear doomsday engrained when they were children. This of course precludes any modern disaster that would scare the current generation (i.e mine) away from it. Though they might not be scared off in spite of a disaster, as they haven't lived under the boogieman of "Reds/Commies bringing Nuclear Doomsday to peaceful American life." Of course, now its the "Terrorists will bring Nuclear Doomsday" though perhaps to a lesser degree than what the babyboomers recieved. Any resident boomers care to weigh in on that particular bit? There also are the uneducated members of the environmentalist movement who tout solar, wind, tidal, hydroelectric, anything but evil nuclear power without fully understanding environmental impacts of those technologies to deal with, but they seem to not comprise a serious voting block in the US, apparently lacking both cohesion and numbers here.

I suppose The Simpsons might not help either with nuclear power generation's image. Considering how stupid the average person seems to be, they might take it as an accurate/semiaccurate view of how nuclear power plants operate. I really, really hope I'm wrong about this, but considering some of the things people were spouting about health care I've lost a lot of faith in humanity, or at least Americans.

[Sea Skimmer]

Aren't there also new designs that can reuse the waste as more fuel?

Some waste can be reused, if we also start up a reprocessing operation which won’t happen for a billion reasons, among them that Obama is totally opposed to nuclear weapons and reprocessing means restarting production of nuclear weapons materials. However some high level waste will always remain and requires a long term storage plan no matter what. Yucca mountain can’t hold all the high level waste we already have without reprocessing anyway. But it’d be a huge step in the right direction, and it would take a very long time to fill our short term storage facilities at the power plants again.

I think your anger should go less to Obama than to the state of Nevada and alot of the states in-between.

I am aware of the situation. I am also fucking aware that Obama made statements saying Yucca mountain was not an option and that he was always against it before he was even fucking elected. He made it a specific campaign promise to kill the place, and followed through on it.

Besides, you know full well that Yucca Mountain WASN'T defunded. The Obama Administration proposed it, but Congress was the one with the purse strings and they kept it funded for 2010. Yucca Mountain remains in limbo.

Bullshit. The only thing they have funding left for is a small office for answering questions about how fucked the project is. That’s after they asked for funding to do actual construction work, because that is the phasing ‘studying’ the problem had reached after over two decades of effort. Obama had all significant funding removed from his own budget proposals. He killed it, we could have pushed on and fuck it, made it a jobs program to station guards along every track mile. But no, can’t do that. Obama had to make this one campaign promise he kept even as he supports making the problem worse. And yeah, we could crush the states on this given the many years required to build the damn place. Do it the same damn way the government does everything, withhold highway and rail funding from anyone who won’t let the waste pass. Though I don't think the states even have any legal power to do that anyway.

[Simon_Jester]

Is it just me, or is this the same problem we're seeing in the manned space program: Obama cancelling a project that already has large sunk costs and is very close to showing results, and replacing it with what amounts to a vaporware/paper study that will take another five to ten years to produce any results?

[Sea Skimmer]

Is it just me, or is this the same problem we're seeing in the manned space program: Obama cancelling a project that already has large sunk costs and is very close to showing results, and replacing it with what amounts to a vaporware/paper study that will take another five to ten years to produce any results?

Well Obama is supposedly adding more money to NASA while canceling an existing project, so that’s not really the same thing. The alternative NASA rocket proposal would most likely consist of the rearrangement existing shuttle components, so they can start doing real work rather then studies very quickly. With a replacement for Yucca Mountain…. it may literally be impossible to find another site, especially since we’ve decided to make it national policy to let public scaremongering outweigh any level of actual study. Nevada only had 2.6 million people afterall. Most states have more ignorant people to bitch and whine, and NOTHING AT ALL can change the need to transport the waste through other states unless its just going to sit at the power plant sites until the end of civilization.

[Uraniun235]

Some waste can be reused, if we also start up a reprocessing operation which won’t happen for a billion reasons, among them that Obama is totally opposed to nuclear weapons and reprocessing means restarting production of nuclear weapons materials.

I really don't get this. If we really want more nuclear weapons at some point in the future, I don't see "well we don't have any reprocessing plants right now" being a big obstacle - we'd just build new ones anyway. It's not like having reprocessing plants means you're making new warheads, Japan doesn't have any (yet), and to my knowledge France isn't expanding its stockpile. It's not like this policy actually appeased any of the anti-nuclear shitheads back when Carter instated it. Where the fuck does this "bloo bloo bloo we'd better not reprocess our fuel or else it could be used for nukes" bullshit come from and why does it persist?

[Sea Skimmer]

I really don't get this. If we really want more nuclear weapons at some point in the future, I don't see "well we don't have any reprocessing plants right now" being a big obstacle - we'd just build new ones anyway.

Actually, we already have a big stockpile of surplus U-235 and Pu-239 already since we dismantled so many thousands of old bombs. But logic has never applied on this topic. However at least right now it makes slight sense, since the US is arguing against Iranian reprocessing, unlike the 1970s when Carter was really just going off the deep end with its arms control polices, most of which he was forced to backpedal on (like only selling downgraded weapons, see the J79 powered F-16) within less then two years in office.

Also reprocessing does have the downside that while it reduces the volume of high level waste to be buried by about 90%, it does so at the cost of creating a lot of mid and low level waste. Dealing with that kind of waste can be just as annoying, since it’s too not compact and a lot of it is liquid. The radiation threat isn’t too high, but it’s still toxic. High level waste is annoying, but its solid and its compact enough that just burying it is realistic. Dealing with it is straightforward, but people are just fucking stupid.

The Russian disposal strategy for that kind of nuclear reprocessing waste is literally to just drill wells and inject it underground…. I dunno what the Euros or Japan do with it. The US stores all the stuff we have leftover from our old nuclear reprocessing activities in a huge farm of 1 million gallon concrete and steel tanks at Hanford. So all and all I would not push reprocessing heavily as a 'solution' to spent nuclear fuel. It is however a good solution to reduce the scale of uranium mining we require, which produces lots of liquid toxic waste too. The US is fucked by its lack of a truly comprehensive fuel cycle plan.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I wonder what would happen if a SCIENTIST somehow got elected President. Would he keep Yucca Mountain open regardless of popular opinion?

[salm]

I wonder what would happen if a SCIENTIST somehow got elected President. Would he keep Yucca Mountain open regardless of popular opinion?

I doubt it. Chancellor Merkel holds a phd in physics and she can´t do much because the topic is so unpopular.

[Phantasee]

I think if a SCIENTIST got elected President, he or she would have spent so much time being a POLITICIAN that there wouldn't be much of a scientist left in them.

[ray245]

I think if a SCIENTIST got elected President, he or she would have spent so much time being a POLITICIAN that there wouldn't be much of a scientist left in them.

Unless a large segement of the leaderships are also scientist.

[SirNitram]

Hence why I prefer posts like the Secretary Of Energy being filled with physicists. They don't need to politic in their position.

[phongn]

Hence why I prefer posts like the Secretary Of Energy being filled with physicists. They don't need to politic in their position.

If you think Secretary Chu doesn't have to play the political game, I have nice oceanfront property to sell you.

[SirNitram]

Hence why I prefer posts like the Secretary Of Energy being filled with physicists. They don't need to politic in their position.

If you think Secretary Chu doesn't have to play the political game, I have nice oceanfront property to sell you.

In the Sahara, no doubt.
I should, perhaps, have said 'as much' as a President Physicist.

[Gil Hamilton]

I am aware of the situation. I am also fucking aware that Obama made statements saying Yucca mountain was not an option and that he was always against it before he was even fucking elected. He made it a specific campaign promise to kill the place, and followed through on it.

It may not be an option if every politician and his mother between your nuke plants and Yucca Mountain refuses to let you transport waste through their district.

Bullshit. The only thing they have funding left for is a small office for answering questions about how fucked the project is. That’s after they asked for funding to do actual construction work, because that is the phasing ‘studying’ the problem had reached after over two decades of effort. Obama had all significant funding removed from his own budget proposals. He killed it, we could have pushed on and fuck it, made it a jobs program to station guards along every track mile. But no, can’t do that. Obama had to make this one campaign promise he kept even as he supports making the problem worse. And yeah, we could crush the states on this given the many years required to build the damn place. Do it the same damn way the government does everything, withhold highway and rail funding from anyone who won’t let the waste pass. Though I don't think the states even have any legal power to do that anyway.

Those states certainly have made an issue out of it. Yucca Mountain was on shaky ground since it was started because of how many NIMBYs that refuse to let nuclear power or waste near them. You can blame Obama, but Yucca Mountain's problems started well before his career in politics even existed.

[Simon_Jester]

Hence why I prefer posts like the Secretary Of Energy being filled with physicists. They don't need to politic in their position.

If you think Secretary Chu doesn't have to play the political game, I have nice oceanfront property to sell you.

I actually know a guy who worked with him for a while... and his main concern about appointing Chu was Chu's ability to play politics, and his skepticism about whether Chu could do it.

Yes, an anecdote, but I think it's an illustrative one.