Carnival of Nuclear Energy 205

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The Carnival of Nuclear Energy 205 is up at the Atomic Power Review.

Canadian Energy Issues – IPCC, meet Johannes Kepler; like you, he faced dogma, peer pressure, and criticism. Here’s how he responded.

On the occasion of the discovery of the planet Kepler 186f, Steve Aplin urges the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to be more like the newly discovered planet’s namesake, Johannes Kepler, in its assessment of nuclear energy as a way to reduce emissions of man-made carbon dioxide. The original Kepler laboured under illusions for years before accepting what his data and critical faculties told him: that planets travel about the sun in elliptical, not circular orbits. The IPCC labors under much worse illusions about the alleged risks of nuclear.

Next Big Future -China stockpiled about 24000 tons of extra uranium purchased at the price of about $35 per pound/ This was above the 6300 tons that China needed to run their current nuclear reactors. Total 2013 uranium imports into China reached $2.39 billion.

Nextbigfuture – A new design for nuclear plants built on floating platforms, modeled after those used for offshore oil drilling, could help avoid problems from Tsunamis and earthquakes. Such floating plants would be designed to be automatically cooled by the surrounding seawater in a worst-case scenario, which would indefinitely prevent any melting of fuel rods, or escape of radioactive material.

Plants could be built in a shipyard, then towed to their destinations five to seven miles offshore, where they would be moored to the seafloor and connected to land by an underwater electric transmission line.

Nextbigfuture – Levis Kochin provides a financial impact analysis of the Silex laser enrichment of uranium and Terrestial Energy’s Integral molten salt reactor

Levis Kochin is an associate Professor of Economics at the University of Washington, Seattle Campus. He earned my Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1975. Lester Telser and Milton Friedman were his advisors. He have taught at the University of Washington since 1973. He has also worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the Bank of Israel, and
the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

* Silex will cut the cost of nuclear fuel, a minor cost of nuclear power. Terrestrial Energy will cut the capital cost of nuclear plants-the major cost of nuclear power.

* Eighty percent of the cost of nuclear power is the capital cost of the power plant. The fuel is less than ten percent.

* Integral Molten Salt Reactor powered electricity give promise of being cheaper and safer cheaper than coal or conventional nuclear powered electricity.

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