Via Huffington Post, an AP interview with Rafael Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency warns that the biggest nuclear power complex in Europe...
...“is completely out of control” and issued an urgent plea to Russia and Ukraine to quickly allow experts to visit the sprawling complex to stabilize the situation and avoid a nuclear accident.
I wrote up an account from The NY Times several days ago reporting that Russia is using the nuclear power complex as a fortress, launching artillery attacks from it knowing that Ukraine dare not risk striking back because of the danger of triggering a nuclear catastrophe. That’s bad enough, but the additional risk is that the IAEA is unable to visit the site to ensure that it is being operated safely.
The Associated Press interview with Grossi makes clear how unstable the situation is:
“Every principle of nuclear safety has been violated” at the plant, he said. “What is at stake is extremely serious and extremely grave and dangerous.”
Grossi cited many violations of the plant’s safety, adding that it is “in a place where active war is ongoing,” near Russian-controlled territory.
The physical integrity of the plant hasn’t been respected, he said, citing shelling at the beginning of the war when it was taken over and continuing information from Ukraine and Russia accusing each other of attacks at Zaporizhzhya.
There is “a paradoxical situation” in which the plant is controlled by Russia, but its Ukrainian staff continues to run its nuclear operations, leading to inevitable moments of friction and alleged violence, he said. While the IAEA has some contacts with staff, they are “faulty” and “patchy,” he said.
Grossi said the supply chain of equipment and spare parts has been interrupted, “so we are not sure the plant is getting all it needs.” The IAEA also needs to perform very important inspections to ensure that nuclear material is being safeguarded, “and there is a lot of nuclear material there to be inspected,” he said.
Grossi has a lot on his plate; the Ukraine reactor situation is just one of several important matters.
Grossi was in New York to deliver a keynote speech at Monday’s opening of the long-delayed high-level meeting to review the landmark 50-year-old Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and eventually achieving a nuclear-free world.
In the interview, the IAEA chief also spoke about efforts to revive the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and major powers that the Trump administration abandoned in 2018 and the Biden administration has been working to renew.
This isn’t just about making sure nuclear power plants are operating safely. It’s about the danger of more countries acquiring nuclear weapons (ie: the programs of Iran, North Korea, as well as those that already have, ie: India, Pakistan — and who knows who else.)
It has been remarked that if Ukraine had kept its share of nuclear weapons after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia would never have risked invading. That hypothetical is not going unnoticed.
There’s also the matter of responding to China’s increasingly aggressive territorial ambitions. Australia is getting nuclear technology from the U.S. and Britain to power a new set of submarines, something that the IAEA also has to review.
Bad News for Climate
On top of everything else, nuclear power is increasingly looking like a necessary part of any plan to get off fossil fuels at a speed that matches the increasing intensity of the climate emergency. It’s not just about cutting emissions. It’s also about ensuring enough power to meet the increasing electrical demand for cooling, being able to keep the grid stable, and resisting disruption from weather events.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission New Atlas reports is approving new small modular designs.
The keys to this small modular reactor's advantages lie in its small size and modularity. Rather than having to build each reactor on site, custom designed for the location, NuScale can mass-manufacture its light water reactor modules in a factory and then ship them worldwide for a relatively quick and painless installation.
Each roughly cylindrical module stands around 65 ft (20 m) high, with a 9-foot (2.7-m) diameter, and produces 77 megawatts by pushing steam out through a turbine. A given power plant could run anywhere between four and 12 of these modules, submerged in a water tank, so an overall power station will be good for between 308 and 924 MW. Nuclear will be a key baseline generator for renewables-based power grids in many areas, and NuScale says its mass production capabilities will make it cost-competitive even with some fossil-fueled options.
Like most other generation IV nuclear designs, the NuScale plant is designed to shut itself down safely in an emergency without any operator input or power requirements. The feedwater and steam exit valves will close in the event of an emergency situation, and a secondary set of valves will open to depressurize steam from the reactor core into the containment vessel surrounding the reactor. As this steam condenses, it'll be taken back into the core and circulated through this process again. NuScale says this'll put the plant in a stable, safe shutdown, and that if anything goes catastrophically wrong, the giant water tank housing the reactor modules, with its concrete roof, provides a final line of defense designed to be earthquake-proof and impermeable to aircraft impacts.
The plant's passive safety measures and tiny ground footprint compared with current nuclear plants make it possible – in the company's opinion, anyway – to put these plants much closer to where the energy's used, cutting down on transmission costs and losses.
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The new small reactor designs promise much more inherent safety than the older designs like the ones at the Ukraine complex. While there are still concerns about the dangers from nuclear waste and possible terrorist uses for radioactive materials in dirty bombs, the increasingly dire need for clean energy may turn on having a nuclear element as part of the mix.
It would be a disaster on multiple levels if the Russian invasion of Ukraine causes a nuclear incident that will make it impossible to use technology that might be a key ingredient in dealing with the global climate emergency. As it is Russia is already causing a massive step backwards on decarbonization.
An International Energy Agency report has the bad news: Global coal demand is set to return to its all-time high in 2022
Despite a slowing global economy and lockdowns in China, soaring natural gas prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are propping up the world’s use of coal this year.
The world’s consumption of coal is set to rise slightly in 2022, taking it back to the record level it reached nearly a decade ago, according to an IEA report published today, which notes that significant uncertainty hangs over the outlook for coal as a result of slowing economic growth and energy market turbulence.
Based on current economic and market trends, global coal consumption is forecast to rise by 0.7% in 2022 to 8 billion tonnes, assuming the Chinese economy recovers as expected in the second half of the year, the IEA’s July 2022 Coal Market Update says. This global total would match the annual record set in 2013, and coal demand is likely to increase further next year to a new all-time high.
How significant is this?
Worldwide coal consumption rebounded by about 6% in 2021 as the global economy recovered rapidly from the initial shock of the Covid pandemic. That sharp rise contributed significantly to the largest ever annual increase in global energy-related CO2 emissions in absolute terms, putting them at their highest level in history.
Global coal demand is being propped up this year by rising natural gas prices, which have intensified gas-to-coal switching in many countries, as well as economic growth in India. Those factors are being partly offset by slowing economic growth in China and by the inability of some major coal producers to ramp up production.
Demand for coal in India has been strong since the start of 2022 and is expected to rise by 7% for the full year as the country’s economy grows and the use of electricity expands. In China, coal demand is estimated to have declined by 3% in the first half of 2022 as renewed Covid lockdowns in some cities slowed economic growth, but an expected increase in the second half of the year is likely to bring coal consumption for the full year back to the same levels as last year. China and India together consume double the amount of coal as the rest of the world combined, with China alone accounting for more than half the world’s demand.
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So, several additional concerns. Adding energy issues to Chinese angst over Taiwan and other critical issues is only making a bad situation worse for stability in the region and action on climate. Rising prices for both natural gas and coal may help drive the move to renewables — but will also make them targets for investment in increasing production to cash in on demand.
All in all, efforts to treat Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a local matter of no great concern to the rest of the world is, to put it mildly, dangerous idiocy on multiple levels.