Uranium, Discussion

[abner29]

New Chinese reactor in commercial operation
After completing all tests, the first Ningde nuclear reactor in northeastFujian province has been handed over to the owners. The CPR-1000 unit wasconnected to the grid in December after 58 months construction. Units 2-4are under construction and due to be completed by 2015. Total cost forfour units (4.1 GWe) was put at CNY 51 billion ($7.2 billion). They are ajoint investment of China Guangdong Nuclear Power - CGNPC (46%), China DatangCorporation (44%) and Fujian Provincial Energy Group. Datang is one ofthe four major non-nuclear Chinese generators, and Ningde is its first nuclearinvestment.
WNN 24/4/13. China NP

[abner29]

Groundbreaking at Husab 22 April 2013

Work has formally begun on Namibia's newest uranium mine, with a groundbreaking ceremony at the Husab project.


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Husab is majority owned by China Guangdong Nuclear Power Corporation (CGNPC) subsidiary Taurus Minerals following its 2012 purchase of former owner Extract Resources. The project is being developed by Extract subsidiary Swakop Uranium, in which Namibian state-owned mining company Epangelo acquired a 10% stake in November 2012.

The project received a mining licence from Namibia's Ministry of Mines and Energy in November 2012, and temporary access roads and water supplies have already been built. Construction is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2015. Production is then planned to ramp up to 5770 tonnes of uranium per year by 2017. The mine is expected to have a life of more than 20 years according to CGNPC.

The groundbreaking ceremony at the site in the Namib Desert was attended by representatives of the Namibian and Chinese governments, as well as the chairman of CGNPC.

Researched and written
by World Nuclear News

[abner29]

Olympics chief Lord Deighton to bring nuclear power stations to Britain

The man who delivered the Olympic Games to Britain has been brought in by the Government to kick-start negotiations on bringing new nuclear power stations to Britain.
By Kamal Ahmed, Emily Gosden9:30PM BST 06 Apr 2013

Lord Deighton, who was made Commercial Secretary to the Treasury in January, will lead negotiations with the French nuclear firm, EDF.

He will work alongside the Permanent Secretary at the Department for Energy, Stephen Lovegrove.

Lord Deighton, the former chief executive of the London Olympic organising committee and a former banker at Goldman Sachs, is seen as a "doer" who can get big projects off the ground.

EDF has received planning permission for a new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point in Somerset but has said it will not build the facility unless it can agree a price on the energy that it will produce with the Government. It also wants a partner to take a 20pc stake in the project.

Without the so-called "strike price" agreement, EDF said that the £14bn investment needed is not commercially viable.


It is believed that the Prime Minister and the president of France, François Hollande, will discuss the negotiations – which are at a delicate stage – as early as this week. David Cameron and George Osborne, the Chancellor, are known to be keen to seal a deal, particularly after warnings that Britain was facing an "energy crunch".
Two months ago, Alistair Buchanan, the outgoing head of the energy regulator, Ofgem, warned that the country is facing a squeeze on energy supplies that could lead to power shortages by 2016.

Treasury sources said that Mr Osborne was "pro-nuclear" but not "at any price".

Talks are believed to have stalled on the issue of the strike price, with EDF demanding £100 per megawatt hour and the Treasury keener on a figure closer to £80 per megawatt hour. A deadline set by EDF for an agreement by the end of March has already been missed.

Even if a strike price is agreed, EDF will still need to secure partners to help fund the project. Any deal with the Government will also need to secure European Union state aid clearance.

The Government is putting pressure on EDF to "bear down" on the costs of building the plant. Sources have made it clear that a number of significant issues still remain to be resolved and no deal is imminent.

The Sunday Telegraph also understands that the size of the contingency budget is another possible sticking point.

In an open letter to this newspaper today, published online, a cross-party group of MPs and dozens of British university academics call for the National Audit Office to review the negotiations "in the context of openness, transparency, fiscal and regulatory accountability, and 'best value' for the UK taxpayer and energy consumer".

They claim that a "commercial confidentiality" clause in the Energy Bill will mean "there will be very limited Parliamentary or public access to information about important details of these non-reviewable contracts".

The letter has been signed by MPs including Alan Whitehead, a member of the energy select committee, Joan Walley, the chair of the environmental audit committee, Simon Hughes, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, and the Conservative MP for Richmond-upon-Thames, Zac Goldsmith.

It has also been signed by dozens of academics including Dr Paul Dorfman of UCL and Professor Tom Burke of Imperial and University Colleges

[abner29]

[/size] US study gives estimates of prevented mortality
A forthcoming report co-authored by the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has estimated that the use of nuclear power instead of coal and some gas has avoided emissions which would have caused air pollution and probably led the deaths of 1.84 million people between 1971 and 2009. The calculus is based on mortality estimates from fossil fuel emissions, though these mortality figures are uncertain, and the real number of deaths could be much higher.
WNN 3/4/13. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1021/es3051197

Western Australian uranium mine approved
After a long delay, Toro Energy has been granted federal environmental approval for the Wiluna uranium project in WA. State approval was given last year. Wiluna will be the first uranium mine in WA, and the first Australian mine to use alkaline leaching in the mill. Pending a final investment decision, production is expected to start late in 2015.

The mine comprises two shallow deposits, Lake Way and Centipede, and is designed to produce about 660 tU/yr over 14 years. The company expects capital costs of A$ 269 million (US$ 281 million) with unit production costs of $37 per pound of uranium oxide produced. Toro has three other deposits within trucking distance whose resources more than double potential utilisation of the mine plant.
WNN 2/4/13. Aust U deposits


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[abner29]

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3 April 2013


ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT: Life-saving case for nuclear
A landmark study has put the figure of 1.84 million on the number of lives saved by the worldwide use of nuclear power instead of fossil fuels. The report co-authored by former NASA scientist James Hansen presents a dramatic new case for nuclear energy.

EXPLORATION & NUCLEAR FUEL: Quebec imposes uranium moratorium
No permits for uranium exploration or mining will be issued in Quebec until an independent study into its environmental impact has been completed, the provincial government has stated. Such moratoriums are not supported by science, says the Canadian nuclear regulator.

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[abner29]

China starts building plant for high-temperaturegas-cooled reactor fuel
With its first high-temperature gas-cooled nuclear power plant, the HTR-PM,under construction at Shidaowan in Shandong province, China National NuclearCorporation (CNNC) with the other backers of that project have startedconstruction of a fuel plant to make the 9% enriched fuel spheres for it. Thenew plant at Baotou, part of the North Branch of Nuclear Fuel Element Co Ltd.,will have an output of 300,000 fuel pebbles per year.

The Shidaowan HTR-PM plant comprises twin pebble-bed reactors cooled by heliumdriving a single 210 MWe steam turbine, with the fuel as 520,000 spheres each60 mm diameter – about the size of a billiard ball. It is a demonstrationplant to pave the way for an 18-unit, 3780 MWe full-scale HTR plant at the samelocation. The HTR-PM is the only commercial-scale high-temperaturereactor project in the world. It follows ten years of successfuloperation of a 10 MWe HTR unit at Tsinghua University near Beijing.
WNN 21/3/13. China fuel cycle

[abner29]

MIT Develops Meltdown-Proof, Nuclear Waste-Eating Reactor
By Brian Westenhaus | Sun, 17 March 2013 00:00 | 1 Transatomic, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff is developing a nuclear reactor designed to overcome the major barriers to nuclear power. For the anti-nuclear folks the design offers to burn up the existing spent fuel from the world’s fleet of nuclear reactors in a design that doesn’t offer a chance for a meltdown. That should be nirvana for those alarmed about atomic energy and weapons proliferation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=playe...p;v=AAFWeIp8JT0



For everyone else, the first offering is we would see a reduction in spent fuel containment costs and get electrical energy, lots of it, instead. The second is the design would be factory produced cutting build costs in a huge way and the reactors would be larger than the currently trendy Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMNRs) offering the chance to install at existing locations saving on the generation and grid connection costs.Transatomic, founded by a pair of very smart and innovative young nuclear engineers, has updated the molten-salt reactor, a reactor type that’s highly resistant to meltdowns. Molten-salt reactors were demonstrated in the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Lab, where one test reactor ran for six years. What remains is raising $5 million to run five experiments to help validate the new basic design.

Russ Wilcox, Transatomic’s new CEO estimates that it will take eight years to build a prototype reactor at a cost of $200 million. The company has already raised $1 million in seed funding, including some from Ray Rothrock, a partner at the venture capital firm Venrock.

The cofounders, Mark Massie and Leslie Dewan, who we met here in April last year, are still PhD candidates at MIT. Yet the design has attracted some top advisors, including Regis Matzie, the former CTO of the major nuclear power plant supplier Westinghouse Electric, and Richard Lester, the head of the nuclear engineering department at MIT

[abner29]

World Nuclear Assoc. March 2013

Uranium from phosphate process gets cost down
An engineering study of last year’s demonstration plant operation in Floridaindicates that the PhosEnergy process is viable for extracting uranium as aby-product from phosphate fertilizer production. The study, commissionedby Uranium Equities Ltd and Cameco, estimated a capital cost of US$156 millionfor a base case PhosEnergy plant located at the site of a phosphate facility inthe southeast USA, producing 340 tonnes per year of uranium at a cost of lessthan US$18 per pound U3O8, putting it in the lower cost quartile of worldproducers. Cameco now holds 73% equity in the process. The nextstep is to locate the portable demonstration plant at an actual production siteand carry out a definitive feasibility study. The process is asubstantial refinement of those used in Florida in the 1980s, which becameuneconomic in the 1990s. The world potential for recovering uranium fromphosphate production waste streams is over 11,000 tonnes U per year, witheasing of regulatory requirements for disposal being a side-benefit.
UEQ 5/3/13. Uranium from phosphates

[abner29]

British MPs Throw all Their Eggs in One Basket with Nuclear Power Plans
By Joao Peixe | Mon, 04 March 2013 22:42 | 0


http://oilprice.com/Market-Intelligence-Report.php
. The UK government is placing all of its eggs in one basket as it hopes that Nuclear power alone will be able to provide the 16GW it needs to install by 2025 in order to meet its renewable energy goals.



MPs from the Energy and Climate Change Committee, have released a new report which looks at the barriers to installing the 16GW necessary to meet targets by 2025.

• The nuclear industry does have 16GW of new projects in the pipeline, but concerns exist that delays would see the UK miss its targets. The report notes that industry stakeholders have claimed installing 16GW of new nuclear power capacity by 2025 is at best “ambitious” and at worst “unrealistic.”

Related article: Indian Nuclear Power Plant Sparks International Fears

Chairman of the committee Tim Yeo stated that “if new nuclear power stations are not built on time, our legally-binding climate change targets will be extremely challenging and much more expensive to meet.

Ministers need to urgently come up with a contingency plan in case the nuclear industry does not deliver the new power stations we need.”

John Hayes, the Energy Minister, is pleased with the report, but assures us that there is no need for a plan B.

“The Government is determined to see new nuclear play a role in our future energy mix, as it does today. We are working to make the UK one of the most attractive places in the world to invest in new nuclear.”

By. Joao Peixe of Oilprice.com

[moosey]

In Reply To: ScottS's post @ Jan 14 2013, 01:16 PM

Perhaps I should have been a little clearer, you can just put the waste from the LEU Boiling Water Reactors straight into the PRISM, this is what the UK might do? in that instance they get rid of the Plutonium but they don't get to recycle the Uranium, if they want to do this they will have to add an Advanced Recycling Plant on the same site as the PRISM reactor so that they can separate all of the three different substances before using the Plutonium in the PRISM reactor, the other two substances are fission waste which goes to a nuclear repository , the other is the recycled Uranium which has to be re enriched if they want to use it again in the BWR, each time the Uranium is used in this way it effectively only uses 5% of the Uranium in the enriched state, so this process could happen 20 times before all of the original Uranium was used, but it would be mixed with other Uranium that had been re enriched to make up the pellets for the bundle.