PROJECT EASY GREEN

Have the cooling systems inside a nuclear reactor in the U.S. ever failed before?

Yes, but it didn't last long and the impact was minimal.

In March 1990, a truck backed into a transformer at the at the Alan Vogtle nuclear plant near Augusta, Georgia. The resulting local blackout caused the heat pump for one of the two reactors at Vogtle to switch off. One of the backup diesel generators was down at the time for scheduled maintenance and another failed to start. With both the regular and backup sources of power for cooling out, the temperature began to rise in the reactor.

Within 37 minutes, however, an emergency backup generator came online and restarted the cooling system.

So in total, the U.S. has had one cooling failure. It lasted 37 minutes and the accident was man-made, said Tony Pietrangelo, chief nuclear officer and senior vice president at the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's domestic trade group, during a conference call with reporters. 

The U.S. has 3,500 cumulative years of experience of operating reactors, he said. (In all, the U.S. has 104 commercial nuclear reactors and around 104 in the military.)

If you wanted to put it another way, you could say the incident constituted 0.0000482 percent of the total operating hours of the U.S. nuclear fleet.

But from another perspective, the number to keep in mind is 12 miles. That is the size of the official evacuation area around the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The unofficial evacuation area has expanded to 19 miles and the U.S. government is advising its citizens to stay 50 miles away. The Fukushima disaster occurred because of multiple failures with the cooling systems and backup generators. Only one hour passed between the time the earthquake damaged the plant and when the tsunami knocked out the backup generators. Harsh critics thus could argue that the real difference between Vogtle and Fukushima was 23 minutes.

Last year alone, the U.S. nuclear industry had 14 "near misses" — significant safety lapses which resulted in special investigations, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The Vogtle incident was also not the only time the backup cooling systems have failed in the U.S. Vogtle marked the only time that both the operating and backup cooling techniques failed. In 1998, a tornado struck the Davis-Besse plant outside of Toledo. The transmission lines to the plant went down and the diesel generators kicked in. But 26 hours later, the sweltering 90-degree heat caused the backup generator to shut off. Luckily, power had been restored only one hour before. The diesel generators were still running but thankfully weren't absolutely necessary.

"Had that not been the case, then you would have been relying on your battery capacity for the safety of Davis-Besse," David Lochbaum of the UCS recently said in testimony before Congress.

More nuclear or not? That's the big question facing the U.S. and other nations. Nuclear plants can provide baseline, carbon-free energy, say proponents. The Nuclear Energy Institute says that between four and eight new nuclear reactors might be in various states of completion in the U.S. between 2016 and 2020. Pietrangelo further added that the industry as a whole will begin to take precautions against multiple, simultaneous safety hazards. Since 2001, the U.S. nuclear industry has looked at what would happen if one reactor in a series got knocked out by a plane. Fukushima will force the industry to contemplate what would happen if two or more reactors go out due to multiple causes.

Critics, meanwhile, note that Fukushima and subsequent reviews of the U.S. fleet have underscored the risks and potential safety hazards. Investors also are wary: nuclear plants often cost more and take more time than anticipated. Interviews conducted by us with various experts on the cost of nuclear plants yielded results ranging from $4,000 a kilowatt to $10,000.

"Folks on Wall Street have long memories on cost overruns," said Pietrangelo.

Germany has already vowed not to expand its nuclear fleet. France, by contrast, promotes nuclear, although power plants in recent years have had to shut down on some days during droughts due to a lack of water to be used for cooling them.

The percentage of electricity generated by coal in the first quarter of this year was the lowest it has been in more than 30 years.

New data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration showed that coal generated about 440 terawatt hours, 26.5 TWh less than the same quarter of 2010. Overall generation of electricity increased slightly in the same time period.

Don’t be confused by the figures, however. Coal is still king, making up 46 percent of total generation — although that’s 3 percent lower than the same period last year.

There are various reasons for the decrease in coal. One reason is that as coal prices have steadily risen in many areas of the U.S., natural gas has stayed relatively cheap. Even the coal-rich Midwest is using less of its prized resource, although it still makes up nearly 70 percent of the electricity generation in the region.

The slight downturn in coal comes just after American Electric Power closed its carbon capture and storage test facility, one of the largest demonstration projects in the world for CCS. Without carbon legislation, utilities don’t want to invest in CCS, yet other regulations are still forcing at least the dirtiest of coal plants out of commission.

Coal plants are also under increased pressure to be taken offline in favor of (less dirty) natural gas plants. It is estimated that up to 20 percent of coal-fired power plants will be taken off-line this decade due to EPA regulations that call for a reduction in cross-state pollution of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide.

Renewables can’t claim a win over coal by any stretch of the imagination, but generation from wind was up 25 percent from April 2010. Although California, Texas and Illinois have had the largest gains, the EIA said the gains were widespread across the U.S. As aggressive renewable portfolio standards are implemented in the next decade, renewables (and not just hydro) will continue to increase.

The decrease in coal generation might be a window into the future, but that future is still far down the road. The EIA also noted that the second quarter of this year had coal increase again, mostly due to increased output to make up form nuclear plants that were offline. 

Musicians for Safe Energy (MUSE) will hold a benefit concert at Shoreline Amphitheater on August 7 and VantagePoint Venture Partners would like you to attend as their guest.

The venture firm — one of the leading firms in green technology investing — is one of the sponsors of the concert, which features Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Sweet Honey in the Rock and Jason Mraz, among others, and they've given us ten tickets to give away to you. Just drop me an email explaining what clean energy means to you and I will send two tickets to the best five entries. (Send them to kanellos@greentechmedia.com.)

The Doobie Brothers and Crosby, Stills & Nash will play, too. For some, it will bring back memories of Day on the Green. No cans or bottles or overnight camping.

Proceeds from the event will go to support victims of the Fukushima disaster in Japan, so if you don't win, please attend anyway.

Browne, as fellow oldsters might remember, also organized the No Nukes concert back in 1979. (The film of the concert gave many in the U.S. their first exposure to Springsteen live, as well as "The River.") Browne and Elvis Costello also played at a benefit to raise money to oppose Proposition 23, the oil company initiative aimed at rolling back California's carbon laws. The Prop 23 benefit took place at Salzman's home. Prop 23 went down to defeat.

It's refreshing to see activism return to the arts.

That annoying voice on the automated support line at AT&T will soon be greener.

The telecommunications giant has agreed to install 7.5 megawatts' worth of Bloom Energy Servers at 11 facilities in California. The Energy Servers, which sell for around $700,000 each, produce 100 kilowatts of power, so this amounts to 75 servers. The servers — solid oxide fuel cells that convert natural gas into electricity at somewhat high (50 percent) levels of efficiency — will be operational by 2012.

In June, Bloom signed a contract with a Delaware utility for 30 megawatts of servers, so the AT&T deal is likely the second largest deal for the company. Caltech has 2 megawatts' worth of servers.

Right now, Bloom largely sells its fuel cells in California because cumulative federal and state credits can come to a whopping $8.25 a watt. But the geographic footprint will expand. The Delaware deal came at the same time that Bloom announced it would retrofit an old auto plant in the state to make the Energy Servers. Delaware has set a goal of getting 25 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2025. Earlier in the year, Bloom also appointed Girlish Paranjpe to head up international sales. Additionally, Bloom has begun to sell its fuel cells as a service to take some of the sting out of the initial investment.

My personal guess is that we will see a large financial institution on Wall Street announce a Bloom installation soon. Why? Utilities are already imposing power consumption ceilings on large data centers, forcing the banks to either become more efficient or find alternative sources of power. Spending on efficiency is already underway. Bloom servers, however, remain one of the few ways to get off-grid, baseline-quality power into an urban core. Solar panels just won't cut it for running financial simulations.

Elsewhere:

–Geography is the friend of solar. That's the word from Obadiah Bartholomy (sic) from Sacramento Municipal Utility District at Intersolar. SMUD has installed sensors on a number of solar installations in its service territory to monitor power production. Right now, SMUD has 30 megawatts of solar in the area. In five years, it might have 230 megawatts. Variability in power output, therefore, is a big deal.

The utility, however, is finding that geographic diversity helps smooth out the gross power output. In experiment, SMUD put 74 sensors on solar arrays and obtained data every minute. While the power output of an individual array might spike radically up and down, collectively the power output moves toward a somewhat smooth average.

"We won't solve everything with geographic diversity, but it has really smoothed out some of the concern," he said.

SMUD is also working on a pilot with SunPower and GridPoint — there's a combo for you — to combine smart grid functionality with commercial and residential solar arrays. The idea is to use smart grid technologies to help shift peak power.

–Finally, I recently returned from vacation in France and was pleased to see signs in almost every town protesting shale gas drilling. Gaz de Schiste, Non Merci, they read. Not everyone buys the "gas is great" argument.

Natural gas is cheap, somewhat clean and abundant here, but the U.S. will likely become a net importer within two decades. So much for energy independence.

MIT today released a comprehensive report on the outlook for natural gas over the next decades and there’s fodder for both supporters of expanded exploitation of methane as well as skeptics.

Natural gas is a market that has been turned upside down in the last few years with the development of technology for extracting gas from shale beds with hydraulic fracturing. The new resources made available through fracking have caused the price to drop from $8 for a million BTUs to between $4 and $5 per MBTU. The U.S. has been in the lead when it comes to exploiting shale gas.  

Worldwide, the supply of extractable natural gas has risen to around 16,200 trillion cubic feet, or enough for 200 years, according to Tony Meggs, a visiting engineer at the MIT Energy Initiative. The study further adds that this is 150 times global annual consumption and puts low and high bands at 12,400 and 20,800 trillion cubic feet.  Approximately 9,000 trillion cubic feet could be extracted now with gas at $4.

“Gas is still, generally speaking, a very young industry with a bright future,” said Meggs. “Shale gas is transformative.”

In turn, many experts — MIT, Black & Veatch, the DOE — believe that natural gas will account for a larger portion of electricity generation and heat in the future.

“Five or six years ago, you would have seen flat or declining use” between now and 2050, said Henry “Jake” Jacoby, a professor of management at MIT. “Gas is going to be a larger part of the picture than we thought before.”

Gas will help drive down coal use, which in turn will likely reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  Gas releases about half of the CO2 of coal and leads to reductions in mercury, SOx and NOx.

Melanie Kenderdine, the executive director of the Energy Initiative, posited that deploying existing natural gas peaker plants to displace older coal plants could even lead to benefits now, particularly in areas like the Southeastern U.S. where there is excess natural gas plant capacity and a lot of old coal plants.

Such a plan is the “only practical option for near-term emissions reduction,” she said.

Besides cleaning up power plants, natural gas could help reduce coal consumption in industrial boilers and in the transportation sector, she added.

Still, don’t get too excited yet. By 2030, the U.S. could well become an importer of natural gas, Jacoby said. The U.S. has the third largest reserves on a national level, but it greatly lags the Middle East and Russia.  Other nations are even further behind. Gas suppliers have never managed to form an OPEC for gas, but imports mean the oft-touted dream of energy independence remains a work of fiction.

Jacoby recommended exporting shale gas know-how worldwide to help create a more liquid, international market and further added that it would be detrimental if cheap gas lead to cuts in R&D for renewables.

“People speak of gas as a bridge to the future, but you had better have something at the other end of the bridge,” he said.

Back in the '80s and early '90s, Britain launched a “Dash to Gas” program after the discovery of deposits in the North Sea, added Meggs. Fields were exported and the U.K. salivated at the idea of selling gas to Europe.

“In 2020, 70 percent (of gas) will be imported in Britain. [...] Some will come from ‘less than reliable’ suppliers,” added Meggs, who worked on the Dash to Gas program.

U.K. energy policy is now dominated by “anxieties” about exports.

The size of the gas deposits also have to be looked at as estimates. The science around gas flows and shale deposits is “appallingly low,” said Meggs.

Increased gas consumption could also make it harder for renewables to compete.

Other notes:

–Meggs noted that some fracking wells have shown evidence of methane leaking into water supplies. But there is no evidence anywhere of fracking fluid leaking into water supplies. In part, that comes because fracking deposits exist thousands of feet below groundwater supplies.

“There is a big specter around fracking but there are no incidents” on record, he said.

Still, governments need to better establish regulations around well drilling and cementing.

–You could run cars on natural gas and natural gas derivatives like methanol fairly cheaply, but oops, the cost of retrofitting cars and trucks, let alone stations, is prohibitive now. Retrofitting a single truck would cost around $70,000.  

–Industrial boilers could become a growth market. Old industrial boilers from the '80s are only 65 percent to 75 percent efficient. Even boilers from seven years ago are only around 82 percent efficient. Now super boilers powered by natural gas are 95 percent efficient. The payback for customers could be 1.8 to 3.6 years, said Kenderdine. Sixty-eight percent of existing boilers are coal fired.

RENO, Nevada — Dean Parker will soon put a couple of 250-kilowatt natural gas boilers on eBay.

Parker, the executive director of the Peppermill Casino here, replaced four boilers with a combined capacity of one megawatt at the casino last year with a geothermal system that provides all of the heating and hot water required by the facility.

In all, that’s 2.1 million square feet of real estate, two outdoor pools, spas, 1,635 rooms and 16 theme bars heated by, and provided with hot water from, energy from the bowels of the earth.

While Parker will keep two boilers for backup, two other boilers will get auctioned off.

One of the most stunning things about geothermal technology is the size. The now-silent boilers (see photo below) occupy the bulk of the interior space of a facilities building. The heat transfer unit — a set of 160 plates (see photo) that extract heat from water pumped from 4,400 feet from underground and transfer that energy to the water that circulates in the casino’s pipes — looks like it could almost fit in the back of a pick-up truck.

‘That’s it?’ is the common reaction.

The geothermal well looks even more mundane. The injection and recovery well heads are located under a steel door in the parking lot that takes up less space than two parking spots. The wells and necessary equipment together cost $9.5 million.

“We save $2.2 million on natural gas a year,” he said. 

Approximately 900 gallons of water per minute pass through the plates on average, but the entire system barely makes any sound. (See video.) Like any hotel, demand for hot water spikes at various times of the day: the Peppermill can increase the hot water it extracts to 2,200 gallons a minute.

In the coming months, Parker will connect the company’s snow removal equipment to the geothermal system. And if it didn’t require a major retrofit, he said he’d even consider getting some of the casino’s air conditioning power from geothermal.

The sticking point for expansion isn’t the lack of underground hot water but current regulations. In Nevada, consumers can only qualify for renewable credits on the first megawatt of power.  (In total, the Peppermill consumes 6 megawatts of energy.)

“I wish we could get more,” he said.

Geothermal is the cornerstone of Nevada’s plan to capitalize on renewables. The fractured geology of the northern part of the state is one of the largest, and most studied, geothermal basins in the country. The university has in turn become the epicenter for research on the topic. In all, Nevada hopes to get 25 percent of its energy from renewables by 2025, encouraged in part though tax credits and other benefits.

Unlike solar or wind, geothermal developers and users are engaged in a continual dance with the source of their energy. If you extract too much water too fast, power production declines because the well doesn’t have time to replenish itself, said Paul Thomsen, director of policy and business development at Ormat.

The wells also lose temperature over time and can lose a substantial part of their value after 15 to 20 years, although wells can be replenished through injections of hot water.

Geothermal is also admittedly partly based on luck. The casino sits right over a subterranean geothermal stream. Seven miles away, the same water resource provides the heat for Ormat’s Galena power plant, which provides 100 megawatts of electricity to the region.

The first $3.5 million spent on the deep well was something of a gamble: there was no guarantee how much water it would find and how hot it would be. The company pays a wholesale rate of 9 cents a kilowatt hour for power so the margin for error was also not tremendous.

While Galena produces electricity, the Peppermill simply extracts heat from its geothermal wells. Water cools as it travels. By the time it gets to the casino, it is only 174 degrees Fahrenheit, or not hot enough to economically generate power. Potentially, it could tap into warmer (300-plus degrees Fahrenheit) water for power generation by drilling deeper, but, again, there’s that one megawatt cap to consider.

The 4,400-foot deep well and 160-plate radiator was actually not the first geo project for the company. It was a culmination of various projects.

Back in the '80s, the company dug a shallow geothermal well that struck 120 degrees Fahrenheit water. The heat was used to heat swimming pools and saunas. Since then, the casino periodically upgraded and expanded its wells. In total, it has invested $9.7 million in geothermal.

General Fusion, a Canadian company that wants to harness fusion power, said it has raised $19.5 million from Bezos Expeditions (the personal VC fund of Jeff Bezos) in a second round that will help it create a demonstration of its technology.

General uses a technique called Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF). In this scenario, an electric current is generated in a conductive cavity containing lithium and a plasma. The electric current produces a magnetic field and the cavity is collapsed, which results in a massive temperature spike.

The lithium breaks down into helium and tritium. Tritium, an unstable form of hydrogen, is separated and then mixed with deuterium, another form of hydrogen. The two fuse and make helium, a reaction that releases energy that can be harvested. So in short, lithium, a fairly inexpensive and plentiful metal, gets converted to helium in a reaction that generates lots of power and leaves only a harmless gas as a byproduct. MTF has an advantage over other fusion techniques in that the plasma only has to stay at thermonuclear temperatures (150 million degrees Celsius) for a microsecond for a reaction to occur.

They also used to have a really cool picture of a dinosaur on their website. Today's picture is an artist's rendering of General's technology.

He or she who harnesses fusion power will likely get a Nobel Prize. It promises a source of cheap, clean, inexhaustible energy. Meltdowns like Fukushima can't occur because of the differences between fusion and fission. However, it's not easy. Fusion reactors have been a dream for decades. I asked Ernie Moniz in 2009 if we'd see fusion reactors anytime soon. Moniz, who runs MIT's Energy Initiative and once served as an Assistant Secretary of Energy, looked me up and down and said, "Not in your lifetime." Rear Admiral Frank Bowman, who runs the Nuclear Energy Institute, is also a skeptic.

Nearly all fusion projects must also grapple with long timelines and inevitable delays. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore lab has devised a stadium-sized laser with 192 extremely-high powered beams. The beams can be focused onto a spot about a half a millimeter in diameter in a target chamber. If the energy can be delivered onto a fuel pellet made up of hydrogen isotopes, it can conceivably cause the atoms to fuse into a form of helium, and thereby deliver more power than the lasers consume. 

A Laser Inertial Fusion Energy (LIFE) reactor could generate 1 to 2.5 gigawatts of thermal power with its 10- to 20-megawatt laser system. The NIF built its laser facility on time by 2009. A demonstration of a net energy gain from the process will come in 2012 (earlier 2011), but a full integration of how a plant might work may not occur until the mid-2020s.

Secretive Tri-Alpha Energy has raised a lot of money. It has released some papers, but no demo.

Back in early 2008, General's investors said that the company would provide data to show that fusion could be reasonably feasible in three to four years. Or in other words, now. Suffice it to say, this one could take longer.

New nuclear is a Pacific Northwest thing. Terrapower, which is creating a modular fission reactor that can run on thorium, came out of Intellectual Ventures, the think tank/patent mill created by former Microsoft chief scientist Nathan Myhrvold. Bill Gates in an investor. NuScale Power, which has a modular reactor and is working to getting a project on the books in Iowa, comes out of Corvallis, Oregon. Oregon State, in Corvallis, mints more nuclear scientists than any other U.S. university.

Kurion, a nuclear waste processing startup that emerged from stealth mode about a year ago, will participate in a consortium to treat the contaminated seawater at the Fukushima plant.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) has lined up Toshiba, Areva, Hitachi-GE Nuclear and Kurion to create a system to treat the estimated 87,500 tons of contaminated seawater that has been created as a result of the meltdown at its reactors, according to a statement from TEPCO covered by Reuters.

The deal, potentially, is a huge endorsement for Kurion. Those other companies have participated in the nuclear industry since it began decades ago. They also have billions in assets and, collectively, thousands of engineers. Kurion was incubated only a short while ago at Lux Capital, an NYC early-stage, science-heavy VC fund that yesterday announced that former CIA director James Woolsey has joined the firm. (Firelake Capital is also an investor.)

Kurion's Modular Vitrification Process treats nuclear waste so that it can be fixed into glass rods. Once in glass rods, nuclear waste doesn't leak and hence is safer over the long haul. TEPCO in this situation is dealing with seawater, not spent fuel. Thus, it probably isn’t looking for full vitrification treatment. Instead, TEPCO will likely exploit Kurion’s ion-specific media for pre-treating spent fuel before vitrification begins.

Here's more on Kurion from a story we did last year:

Kurion, a startup that wants to make vitrification a major prong in the nuclear waste disposal strategy of the U.S., came out of stealth today by providing some information about its technology and announcing news of a testing contract with CH2MHill.

Vitrification involves sealing nuclear waste into a glass matrix to prevent it from leaching into the environment or leaking from container cylinders. (See earlier story on Kurion here.) The key is that Kurion's technology is modular, which, ideally, will reduce the costs and onerous construction times. While Japan and a few other countries have embraced vitrification, the U.S. stores nuclear waste in steel cylinders that are submerged into pools to contain it and cool it off. When these pools reach capacity, cylinders that have sufficiently cooled can be removed and stored above ground. The U.S. has experimented with vitrification for years and planned to use some form of vitrification at the Yucca Mountain site. It has even looked at the "synthetic rock" process developed in Australia. But with Yucca Mountain stuck in a permanent state of limbo, nuclear waste from the United States remains stuck in tubs in places like Hanford, Washington.

Kurion said that it has created a test line of its modular vitrification system (MVS) and will begin a series of simulated tests in December. The company has also demonstrated internally its ion specific media technology for separating higher and lower activity streams. CH2MHill Plateau Remediation Company will evaluate the use of MVS to encapsulate uranium metal bearing sludges that are presently stored at the Hanford K-Basins spent fuel pool.

Potentially, if Kurion can prove its technology, it could have a slightly easier time getting to market than the modular nuclear reactors proposed by NuScale Power, Terrapower and other startups. All of these companies will have to run a gauntlet of public interest and regulatory hearings. Additionally, the reactor startups ultimately have to sell their technology to utilities, which in turn would have to raise billions to build modular, gigawatt-scale power plants with these reactors. Even conventional nuclear plants are experiencing difficulty getting capital these days.

Kurion essentially only has a more attractive end-user in mind: the federal government, which oversees the U.S. nuclear stockpile. Engineering companies like Bechtel and CH2MHill will technically buy the technology but the federal government ultimately foots the bill and decides what techologies will get used. The feds have searched for a solution for years. Lux Capital and Firelake Partners are Kurion investors.

Kurion's management includes experts from both the nuclear and glass industries. The CEO is John Raymont, the former CEO of Nukem, an unfortunately named company that provided nuclear waste management services for 25 years before being acquired in 2007 by EnergySolutions. The vice president of technology is Gaetan Bonhomme, a former senior research engineer at French glass and industrial giant Saint-Gobain. Josh Wolfe, from Lux, is the chairman.

The advisory board includes Patrick Moore, the Greenpeace founding member turned nuclear advocate. Moore is the co-chair, along with former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman, of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, a lobbying group for the nuclear industry.

The other solution for nuclear waste that the U.S. has yet to embrace is reprocessing, which has always been something of a hot potato in the country. In 1956, Lewis Strauss, then-chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (a forerunner to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission), proposed reprocessing, and Davison Chemical Company began negotiations to reprocess fuel with the commission at the time. The company, which changed its name to Nuclear Fuel Services, reprocessed waste from weapons programs in the late '60s, but not from commercial nuclear reactors. It shut down operations in 1976.

General Electric proposed reprocessing commercial nuclear waste in the 1960s, but gave up on the idea in 1972. Exxon looked into it in 1976, but then, on October 28 of that year, President Ford announced that:

"The reprocessing and recycling of plutonium should not proceed unless there is sound reason to conclude that the world community can effectively overcome the associated risks of proliferation."

Jimmy Carter, himself a nuclear engineer, followed up with an indefinite ban. Thus, although Carter often gets the blame for putting the kibosh on reprocessing, Ford had already cast it largely to bureaucratic oblivion and the private sector had registered its doubts years before. There's your nuclear history moment for the day.

(Photo from Daveeza via Creative Commons)