by Gilles Clement, Vice-President of Recycling Technologies, and Dr. Alan Hanson, Executive Vice President of Technology and Used-Fuel Management

Today we’d like to highlight a thought-provoking question about recycling that was asked recently on the AREVA North America blog.

Randal Leavitt asked:

Recycling fission fuel is better than not recycling, but there are other approaches that are better still. My preferred technology is the liquid fluoride thorium reactor. How do we shift the nuclear industry over to this technology?

Randal,
We definitely agree that recycling used fuel is much better than “throwing it away” (i.e: direct disposal). The ability to shift the nuclear industry to a new technology is really something that is determined by the success of three conditions:
1. It must be proven and demonstrated at large industrial scale
2. It must be economically justified as compared to other alternatives
3. It must be licensed by the appropriate nuclear regulatory authorities

Large scale deployment of new technology requires – as soon as the principles are reasonably well stabilized and enough data from R&D is available – the preparation of a thorough and credible business case to justify the large investments needed to develop it.

To demonstrate that a new technology is fully proven and obtain the final license, one has to go through a lengthy piloting process. This involves designing, building and operating a series of “pilot models” of progressively increasing scale. A first model is developed to evaluate and understand the basic performance of the new technology, and it takes several years to test it rigorously. This first step is followed by incremental increases in the scale and the capacity of the models, (generally two further steps) to reach full commercial production size. The final model is considered as pre-industrial and is used to demonstrate the full range of safety, security and reliability requirements. Today nuclear reactors fueled with thorium have not yet been shown to meet the three conditions.

We missed this last week because of the excitement of the Ohio announcement, but we wanted to make sure we highlighted a panel discussion of nuclear bloggers at the American Nuclear Society meeting in Atlanta that happened last week. Several of our colleagues in the nuclear energy blogging community participated: Rod Adams (Atomic Insights), John Wheeler (This Week in Nuclear), Kirk Sorensen (Energy from Thorium), and Dan Yurman (Idaho Samizdat).

From Dan Yurman’s write-up on the panel discussion at The Energy Collective, an excellent summary of how nuclear energy bloggers are changing the nuclear energy news landscape:

There are not many serious bloggers in the U.S. who cover the nuclear industry on a full time basis. There are perhaps fewer than a dozen who do blog frequently about the topic. The difference for this group is a commitment to consistent high quality content and in-depth analysis despite not being part of the nuclear trade press. That doesn’t mean we’re not capable of heavy lifting when it comes to explaining the key issues of the nuclear industry. . . .

What has happened with nuclear energy and the new media is that substantive news and analysis, often with industry thought and opinion leaders, is now available online without having to come up with the equivalent of several months of car payments. This means that some of the news and the “so what” analysis is now reaching an audience composed of mostly of the general public. What’s interesting is that according to Google Analytics, most of the same utilities and EPC firms are also reading the blogs.

The rest of the write-up includes some very interesting thoughts on the differences between nuclear energy bloggers and the future of nuclear energy blogging… but we couldn’t pass up a favorable mention of this blog by John Wheeler:

Wheeler noted that Areva’s recent forays into outreach to bloggers may cause other large nuclear firms to take a look at their efforts toward public transparency. According to Wheeler, these firms may decide they don’t need to talk to bloggers and are perfectly satisfied with how they are interacting with the public.

We’re glad our efforts in reaching out to the blogging community are being recognized, and we’re especially glad to be part of the nuclear energy blogging community. You can read the rest of Dan Yurman’s write-up on the panel here.

From Greenpeace’s Nuclear Reaction blog:

We see the US arm of French nuclear titans Areva – not wishing to be outdone by us here at Nuclear Reaction – have got themselves a blog… if you ever need any advice about blogging just give us a call.

We’re glad our blog caught their eye and hope we can spark some dialogue between our blogs (which in a small way is just now happening). Although they’re clearly in the anti-nuclear energy camp (unlike many other environmental groups), and we disagree with them in a lot of places, we have in common the desire for a U.S. energy future that moves past carbon-based fuels, and we share a deep concern over effects on present and future climate change if we fail to achieve that.

Following our launch yesterday, we were quite pleased to see welcome messages from several of our colleagues at other nuclear blogs…

From Steve Aplin at Canadian Energy Issues:

No sooner do I get off a post about the challenges the “nuclear industry” faces when it comes to strategic communication than Areva, the French giant, launches a blog dedicated to promoting its North American operations. It went live this morning. One of the first posts, by an Areva communications executive, says there are 60,000 potential new jobs in nuclear energy in the U.S.

From David Bradish at NEI Nuclear Notes:

NEI’s former blog contributor, Jarret Adams, is one of the authors for AREVA’s first blog. Welcome and best of luck!

And from Dan Yurman at Idaho Samizdat:

So far as I know Areva is the first nuclear company to launch a corporate blog with the objective of fostering dialog about energy issues. Lots of energy companies have blogs, but they are often just one-way broadcasts from the corporate PR office. . . .

The blog is just being published this week so the discussion forums aren’t live yet. I’m told they are coming soon. The story can also be told now that in developing this blog, Areva’s team reached out to a fairly diverse group of energy bloggers for ideas and input. That’s an important signal that the company plans to work hard at using its listening skills.

Dialog is welcome. Welcome to the blogsphere Areva. Do well.

Thanks for the warm welcome, friends! We’re looking forward to the conversation.

by Jacques Besnainou, President of AREVA Inc.

Jacques Besnainou

It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to AREVA’s blog for North America. We hope this blog will offer a forum on energy issues and our activities in North America. We also hope to foster discussions about energy issues and foster discussions about combating climate change, increasing energy security, and improving economic growth. It will also focus on AREVA’s solutions for clean power generation and electricity distribution in North America.

Though we are joining a diverse and exciting energy blog community, AREVA is the first nuclear energy company, and one the first energy companies of any kind to maintain a blog. This is very much in keeping with our policy of openness with our stakeholders, a policy spearheaded by our CEO Anne Lauvergeon and supported by the rest of the AREVA team.

read more…