According to an Associated Press article published today, U.S. electric utilities are looking to buy reactors “off-the-shelf,” choosing from a few different reactor designs. The article focuses on Southern Company’s new reactor at Plant Vogtle under development in Georgia. While the Vogtle project uses the AP1000 design, the piece also mentions AREVA’s EPR technology and several other designs.

Jacques Besnainou, CEO of AREVA North America, said safety was a selling point for his firm’s EPR, which has a system to catch and cool a molten core in the event of a major accident.

Despite the challenges of building new plants, he said, AREVA is benefiting from its experience in Finland and France, and the two EPR projects are on schedule.

“The key here is to be able to demonstrate that we can build a new reactor on time and on budget,” he said. “Once we do that, the renaissance as a whole is golden.”

Click here to read the rest of the article.

“AREVA supports an integrated approach that ensures options including recycling, interim storage, and disposal,” Executive V.P. Dr. Alan Hanson today told the members of a Blue Ribbon Commission subcommittee. “Commercial recycling of used nuclear fuel has a long, successful, safe and secure history. AREVA has successfully and profitably operated and supported commercial recycling facilities for more than four decades.”

Hanson laid out the reasons why recycling is a sold option as part of an integrated used fuel management system in the United States. Today the U.S. is focused on a once-through strategy for managing used fuel, meaning that nuclear fuel is used once and then sent for disposal. However, most of the energy still remains after one cycle, and this material can be recycled.
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Highly recommend that you follow the weekly nuclear blog carnival as it shifts from blogger to blogger each Friday.

This is the 16th carnival and this week’s it’s at Dan’s blog.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has published its draft safety evaluation report on the MOX (mixed oxide) Fuel Fabrication Facility, a project under construction at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

Shaw AREVA MOX Services, a joint venture of the two leading energy companies, is building the $4.86 billion facility which will help support our nation’s nonproliferation goals by converting weapons-grade material into MOX fuel for U.S. nuclear power plants.

While the report does not make a decision about licensing the plant, a decision which is still years away, it does represent the NRC’s preliminary assessment “that the facility would not pose an undue risk to worker and public health and safety.”

Click here for more information on the MOX project.

Bringing industry and medicine together in the battle against cancer, AREVA Med has announced another important milestone to continue this fight.

AREVA Med, an AREVA subsidiary, is dedicated to developing medical grade lead-212 isotopes to be used in promising Radioimmunotherapy. Lead-212 is a rare radioactive isotope that lies at the heart of promising nuclear medical research to develop new cancer treatments.

In nuclear medicine, the development of new treatments is dictated by isotope availability. By utilizing AREVA’s engineering and technical expertise, in March 2010, AREVA Med announced the construction of a Lead-212 industrial production plant that will allow the creation of new targeted therapies for patients. 


Now, to support the project’s rapid development, AREVA Med has formed an Advisory Committee to provide strategic advice and scientific guidance in the field of Radioimmunotherapy.
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By Jarret Adams

Over at the Huffington Post today, Carl Pope of the Sierra Club has dished up another attack on the economics of nuclear energy that goes light on the facts and heavy on the rhetoric. Contrary to Mr. Pope’s wishes, nuclear energy’s revival already is well under way with more than 50 new plants under construction worldwide. More than 20 of these new reactors are being built in China alone.

The main question is whether Americans will see past the constant flood of disinformation about nuclear energy and support the revival as other industrial nations have done. In fact, nuclear energy is by far America’s largest source of electricity that does not produce greenhouse gases.

While new nuclear plants are expensive, the cost of electricity generated by these facilities over 60 year is relatively inexpensive. Once these costs are amortized, the operating costs of nuclear plants (at about 2 cents/kwh) are well below natural gas (at 5 cents/kwh) and even lower than coal.

Nuclear energy also has an excellent safety record in the United States. In fact (another fact), it is safer to work in the nuclear industry than in manufacturing, according the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Regarding ability to withstand hurricanes, the Gulf region nuclear plants withstood Hurricane Katrina without sustaining any significant damage and were among the first major power generation back online after the storm.

We at AREVA fully support renewable energy as another way to produce low-carbon electricity, especially if we are talking about our state-of-the-art offshore wind turbines, concentrated solar power, and advanced biopower facilities.

Why does Mr. Pope trash nuclear in an effort to promote renewables? In actuality, nuclear energy and renewables are complementary – a combination of the two is the best near-term way to remove CO2 emissions from our electricity grid. And why does he put in a plug for low natural gas prices?

We noticed with some surprise, this article in the Washington Post this week.. It reports: “Utilities across the country are building dozens of old-style coal plants that will cement the industry’s standing as the largest industrial source of climate-changing gases for years to come.”

In short, the article documents that a wave of at least 15 new coal plants will be produced in the U.S., this “despite growing public wariness over the high environmental and social costs of fossil fuels, demonstrated by mine disasters in West Virginia and the gulf oil spill.” This is the largest expansion of coal plants in two decades.

The short-term financial gain of building cheap fossil plants doesn’t have a “clean coal” solution anywhere in sight either as “widespread application of carbon-neutralizing technologies for coal plants remains at least 15 to 20 years away.” The article specifically goes into the hidden long-term costs this will bring as these new plants would “generate about 125 million tons of greenhouse gases annually, according to emissions figures from utilities and the Center for Global Development. That’s the equivalent of putting 22 million additional automobiles on the road.”

And by way of comparison, an AREVA EPR nuclear plant would avoid about 10 million tons of CO2 per year each year from being emitted into our air.

By Jarret Adams

An article in this week’s Science magazine, “Nuclear Waste: Knowledge Waste?” (subscription required) raises some very interesting questions about managing nuclear waste in the context of the nuclear renaissance now under way. Beyond recounting the history and current state of U.S. waste management (which should be well known to readers of this space), it focuses on the “often-overlooked” social science aspects of formulating a strategy for the future.

The Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, according to its charter, was formed “to conduct a comprehensive review of policies for managing the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle.” The Science article offers some advice to those involved:

The Blue Ribbon Commission, the DOE, and other responsible agencies should make the rebuilding of social trust and credibility central to their operations and their proposed strategies for waste management, then draw on the social sciences needed to fulfill these commitments.

The authors state that the panel is well positioned to begin overcoming “the problematic legacy it inherited,” but cautions that it should consider not only the technical requirements, but also take into account the social issues relative to nuclear waste. It concludes:

The strategy adopted by the commission will affect not only how its recommendations are judged but also how the public should be involved in subsequent policy and siting decisions. Addressing relevant social issues does not guarantee success, but ignoring them increases the chances of repeating past failures.

In related news, ThomsonReuters published a timely article Aug. 17 focusing on the potential for recycling entitled “U.S. nuclear waste issue could be solved if…” In fact, this article quotes yours truly saying: “It’s a perfect time to reconsider recycling for the U.S.,” and I have to say I agree with me. The piece also features some good photos of AREVA’s La Hague recycling facility.

Click here for more information on AREVA’s vision for recycling nuclear fuel in the U.S.

We blogged in the past about how encouraging it was to see discussion online between folks on nuclear power that was genuinely good debate and discussion, and that a great example was this exchange between blogger Rod Adams and Scientific American writer and blogger John Horgan.

Well Horgan writes on his continuing evolution on the subject, speaking kindly about another blogger, journalist and author (and guest blogger to this site in the past) Gwenyth Cravens.

Horgan writes today:

My belated education in nuclear energy continues. I just read Power to Save the World: The Truth about Nuclear Energy by Gwyneth Cravens, a petite, energetic novelist and journalist. Cravens contacted me after seeing my chat with Rod Adams, a nuclear-trained Naval officer, on Bloggingheads.tv last May…The 2007 book describes how Cravens morphed from a nuke-fearing greenie who in the 1980s opposed the Shoreham nuclear plant on Long Island, where she lives, into a proponent who believes that we need nuclear power to save us from global warming and other adverse effects of fossil fuels. Cravens repeats the refrain that the risks of nuclear energy have been exaggerated; nuclear power, both civilian and military, hasn’t killed a single person in the U.S. over the past half century. But she fleshes out these statements with surprising (to me) details….

And he closes:

I’ve always had a knee-jerk distrust of nuclear advocates, just as I have of right-wing Congressmen, psychiatric-drug shills and string theorists. But I trust Cravens and the experts she interviewed—including physicists, engineers and epidemiologists—over many years of reporting. If you’re agonizing over whether to support nuclear energy, read Cravens’s book and see if you find it as persuasive as I do.

Definitely go read the whole post, but we remain here impressed with folks like Rod and Gwenyth in the online blogger community and are grateful for that community and consider ourselves fortunate to be a part of it.

And we’re encouraged that when calmer, more rational discussion can prevail as it did here, we see only good things happen.