Tuesday, September 25, 2007
NRG Energy files the first nuclear power building permit since 1978
Today, NRG Energy of Princeton, New Jersey, will file the first permit to build a new nuclear reactor in 29 years. Not only that, but the permit actually covers two new reactors located at the Bay City, Texas nuclear plant. And by filing first, NRG Energy gets to partake of the maximum benefits from loan guarantees, risk insurance, and tax credits available under the nuclear power provisions of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (fact sheet from the Nuclear Energy Institute). Considering that these benefits could guarantee loans of up to 80% of the cost of the project, up to $125 million in tax credits per year for the first 8 years of operation, and 100% coverage of all costs due to delays in licensing, legal fees, construction delays, etc. for the first two reactors, getting started ASAP makes a lot of economic sense for NRG Energy.
Now for some of the more interesting details. The reactor that NRG wants to use is known as an advanced boiling water reactor, a Generation 3 reactor design that utilizes screw drives for the control rods for improved control of the reaction level (and thus the power level) over existing U.S. reactors, uses nuclear-grade, low carbon, cobalt-free steel to reduce the long term radioactivity of the reactor vessel and increase it’s strength, internal coolant circulation pumps that reduce the number of pipes and welds (and thus the amount of radiation leakage out of the reactor itself), fault tolerant instrumentation, negative air pressure containment that directs any small leakage to a gas treatment system (negative pressure is used to contain biological agents at ultra-secure disease research centers too), and automated servicing to reduce the amount of manual work and thus radiation exposure.
If you look closely at the reactor image from GE Energy, one thing you’ll notice is this type of reactor doesn’t have is a passive safety system, i.e. a system that requires you break the laws of physics for it to melt down. However, the control rods drive system has triple-redundant backup diesel generators. But the reactor’s safety features have been designed so that the reactor will be safe for 72 hours without controller intervention even if something goes terribly wrong. And given that there are already four reactors operating in Japan, the first operating since 1996, another three under construction in Taiwan and Japan, and nine more planned in Japan alone, the common design will keep the construction costs reasonable and delays to a minimum.
Unfortunately, NRG and it’s competitors may face a significant new hurdle. Because it’s been so long since the last nuclear reactor permit has been issued, the NRC doesn’t have enough experienced people to effectively and efficiently process new permit requests. So the NCR contracted out some of this function to Information Systems Laboratories, a company that does nuclear safety modeling and analysis along with providing other services to state and federal authorities and multinational companies. But according to Representative Ed Markey (D-MA), there’s a chance that the NRC’s contract to ISL may violate the Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act of 1998. The FAIR Act requires that the federal government not contract out “inherently governmental functions”. Unfortunately, given the definition of what an inherently governmental function is, and what the exclusions include, it may take a court to make the ultimate decision:
(B) Functions included.--The term includes activities that require either the exercise of discretion in applying Federal Government authority or the making of value judgments in making decisions for the Federal Government, including judgments relating to monetary transactions and entitlements. An inherently governmental function involves, among other things, the interpretation and execution of the laws of the United States so as--
(i) to bind the United States to take or not to take some action by contract, policy, regulation, authorization, order, or otherwise;
(ii) to determine, protect, and advance United States economic, political, territorial, property, or other interests by military or diplomatic action, civil or criminal judicial proceedings, contract management, or otherwise;
(iii) to significantly affect the life, liberty, or property of private persons;
(iv) to commission, appoint, direct, or control officers or employees of the United States; or
(v) to exert ultimate control over the acquisition, use, or disposition of the property, real or personal, tangible or intangible, of the United States, including the collection, control, or disbursement of appropriated and other Federal funds.
(C) Functions excluded.--The term does not normally include--
(i) gathering information for or providing advice, opinions, recommendations, or ideas to Federal Government officials; or
(ii) any function that is primarily ministerial and internal in nature (such as building security, mail operations, operation of cafeterias, housekeeping, facilities operations and maintenance, warehouse operations, motor vehicle fleet management operations, or other routine electrical or mechanical services).
Hopefully both the NRC, the nuclear power industry, and Congress will chart a middle ground here, one that permits the NRC to use a contractor to perform the “gathering information for or providing advice, opinions, recommendations, or ideas to Federal Government officials” but that requires the NRC to carefully vet the information and make the ultimate decision. Time will tell.
On an unrelated note, though - I don’t see an exclusion in the FAIR Act of 1998 for the protection of State Department officials by Blackwater mercenaries. Last I heard security wasn’t a “ministerial and internal” function of government....
Other sources not linked directly above:
Bloomberg.com - NRG Files First Full Application for U.S. Reactor (Update3)
NYTimes.com -Approval Is Sought to Build Two Reactors in Texas
CNNMoney - US Rep: NRC Outsourcing Nuclear Permitting May Be Illegal
[Crossposted: Scholars & Rogues]
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Nanotech Roundup - 9/15/07
Silver is a potent antibiotic - this has been known for literally millenia. And nanotechnology researchers have discovered that nanometer-sized silver particles are dramatically more effectively at weakening the cell membrane and disrupting enzymes that transport nutrients around the cell. Unfortunately, pure silver nanoparticles react with their environment too much, and the unique nano-scale properties are destroyed when that happens.
Thankfully, though, antibiotics researchers are working to add a totally new class of nanotech-based antibiotic particle to the arsenal - single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs).
[B]y using highly purified, pristine SWCNTs with a narrow diameter distribution, they demonstrated that direct cell contact with SWCNTs can cause severe membrane damage and subsequent cell inactivation of E. coli bacteria.
Because silver particles and SWCNTs have antibiotic properties that are fundamental to the physics of how they interact with the cell, it’s much harder for bacteria to develop resistance. And so, as the toxic properties of various kinds of nanotech are investigated to determine if they’re dangerous to human health and/or the environmental, we need to remember that sometimes toxicity isn’t a bad thing. (See also this article on antibiotic SWCNTs)
Sometimes the potential for carbon-based nanotechnology makes it seem like buckyballs (C70), carbon nanotubes, and graphene are all that’s really going on in nanotech. Because nanotechnology is an enabling technology that makes almost every other technology you use better, it’s good sometimes to learn about other nanotechnologies as well. In this case, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have demonstrated the creation of metal oxide nanotubes that may easily mesh with existing electronics technologies and manufacturing processes. These nanotubes may have properties similar to that of CNTs, but they may also have properties that are unique to the precise materials that make up the nanotubes (AlSiGeO, in this particular case). Even more impressive, though, is the fact that the production of these nanotubes takes place in water, and varying the pH, water temperature, elements and concentrations in solution, etc. makes the production of these tubes very simple and easily controlled. For now, at least, CNTs require very hot carbon plasmas (hundreds or thousands of degrees C), making metal oxide nanotubes very attractive where their properties will mesh up the the desired technological improvements.
Tying global heating and the climate to nanotechnology may seem like a stretch, but to give you an idea of the potential reach of nanotechnology, here’s an article about a company (Ecology Coatings) that’s developed a nanotech process that enables it to reduce the amount of energy it takes to coat metal, plastic, electronics, etc. by 90%. The reason? The coatings can be cured using ultraviolet light instead of high-energy electric or natural gas furnaces, and the significant savings in factory floor area when the furnaces can be removed and the area reused. In addition, since the coatings are cured in less than a minute, the process time is dramatically improved over existing coating methods. These coatings don’t use solvents so they are minimally polluting, excess coating can be filtered and reused, and the coatings are especially good for automotive and plumbing coatings, where the current processes require dangerous solvents and are very fragile. Saving energy and boosting efficiency saves carbon emissions, and that’s good for addressing global heating.
Heading back into electronics for a moment, IBM has illustrated lab-bench operations of a single molecule switch and made the first measurements of the “magnetic anisotropy” of a single atom
Finally, researchers in Switzerland have created nano-scale particles of Portland cement that have the potential to harden in minutes. The new nano-cement won’t work for most current applications because it’s too porous to create strong cement, but the researchers are confident that this is a problem that will be solved with more research. Concrete that hardens in minutes and has stopped reacting in an hour or two has the potential to dramatically increase the rate of construction of pretty much every concrete structure in existence which, if you look around you, is pretty much everything constructed these days. Instant road bed, anyone?
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Cool Technology: NASA makes long-lived high temperature electronic device
Let’s say you want need to get accurate measurements out of a jet engine or a hot battery or fuel cell. Normally you have to deal with long cables to get the measurement device’s signal out to the electronics measuring the signal. This is because the electronics will burn up, almost literally, and stop working in seconds or minutes if they’re exposed to high temperatures.
Not for much longer.
NASA has built a new electronic device called a “difference amplifier” out of silicon carbide, a very temperature stable material, and has proven that it will work for 1,700 hours at 500 degrees Celsius. For the metrically-challenged, that’s about 930 degrees Fahrenheit. Or, to put it into more perspective, that’s 5x the normal maximum operating temperature for commercial electronics like computers, 4x the normal maximum for industrial components, and it represents a 100x increase in the lifetime of the previously best high-temp electronics operating at such temperatures.
In other words, this will eventually be a bid deal. And it’s just plain cool (er, hot?).
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Six Years On
Who’ll walk me down to church when I’m sixty years of age
When the ragged dog they gave me has been ten years in the grave
And senorita play guitar, play it just for you
My rosary has broken and my beads have all slipped through
You’ve hung up your great coat and you’ve laid down your gun
You know the war you fought in wasn’t too much fun
And the future you’re giving me holds nothing for a gun
I’ve no wish to be living sixty years on
Yes I’ll sit with you and talk let your eyes relive again
I know my vintage prayers would be very much the same
And Magdelena plays the organ, plays it just for you
Your choral lamp that burns so low when you are passing through
And the future you’re giving me holds nothing for a gun
I’ve no wish to be living sixty years on
-- Music written and performed by Elton John, Lyrics by Bernie Taupin
I don’t remember a lot about 9/11. Some people tell you that their memories are like it was yesterday. I remember the Challenger explosion like that, but not 9/11. My memories of 9/11 are far more disjointed, real memory fused with more recent reconstructions that my wife has patiently told me can’t be true because the timeline of my memory doesn’t match the timeline of the attacks.
But what I do remember....
I woke up to a beautiful September morning on the 11th. Crisp, with just enough bite in the Colorado air that I knew autumn was coming.
I remember listening to NPR’s Morning Edition as I drove my morning commute. I remember firing up NPR’s streaming news feed, in direct violation of the company’s policy against such egregious misuse of shared bandwidth. I remember my coworkers with radios putting them atop their cubes and cranking up the volume so that the entire cube farm could hear the news.
I remember listening to NPR on my computer nearly all day long, refreshing CNN more times than I could count, being impressed that CNN had gone to a minimalist format on a moment’s notice in order to supply at least some news to everyone without totally crashing their servers with the bandwidth requirements.
I remember waiting to hear whether my cousin and his wife, both of whom still work in Manhattan, were among the living or the dead. I remember hearing, several days later, how they had somehow found each other in Manhattan and then walked hours to get home.
I remember listening to my wife worry about her best friend from high school, a contractor working on upgrading the Pentagon. She was late to work that day for some reason, and I shared in my wife’s relief. And felt guilty that I would dare to be relieved that she was late when so many others were early, or on time, and their friends and families would get no relief. I have since learned to live with that dichotomy.
I remember hearing about how President Bush continued reading to a Florida classroom and being appalled at his apparent disinterest in the terrorist attack. I remember knowing, knowing that this was a terrorist attack, and knowing that Iraq wasn’t behind it, but not knowing exactly who actually was behind it.
I also remember thinking that there was a pretty good chance it wouldn’t matter.
I remember rage, unwavering, implacable rage. Rage so hot, so pure, that it burned everything else from my mind and left no char, no cinder of anything but a need for vengeance.
I remember mentally cheering when I heard that NATO and the U.S. were bombarding the Taliban and invading Afghanistan.
And I remember coasting through that day at work, and several days following, in a haze, the very haze that continues to play tricks with what I remember, and what I think I remember.
In the days and weeks and months that followed, I remember conversations with family and friends about how the world would change now that the U.S. had suffered a terrorist attack on its own soil. I remember my father telling me, when I told him that my life hadn’t really changed all that much, that my life had changed totally, and that I just hadn’t realized it yet. Six years on, I’ve found that we were both right, and both wrong.
I remember having a conversation with my sister-in-law that she didn’t expect to have a long life because the world was going to descend into conflicts, some brought to us and some of our own making.
Six years on, I discovered just how important the Constitution is to me, how it’s a part of my civic duty to dissent, how much I care about my country. I discovered that the values the United States is supposed to stand for matter more to me than any political party ever will. And I learned that my allegiance is to those ideals and values especially when the President, the Congress, and the Republican and Democratic Parties ignore their very oaths of office
It’s 2007, six years on, and we’re engaged in what is very likely our children’s children’s war. It’s our inability to learn from history and our abandonment of Afghanistan in favor of an insane invasion of Iraq. And it’s not just us - it’s Russia, China, and other powers using 9/11 as justification for suppressing their own religious minorities and, in the process, creating more terrorists who believe it’s right and proper to commit suicide if doing so takes at least one of their enemies with them.
It’s only six years on. I’m afraid of what it’ll be sixty years on.
[Crossposted: Scholars & Rogues]
