EPRI, INL Announce Release of R&D Plan Focused on Near-Term Increase in Nuclear Energy Production

[bananas]

"stretch goals", lol.

Stretch Goals is a term coined by Jack Welsh at GE to denote those objectives which are seemingly unobtainable with present resources. By specifying the "unattainable", people are required to "think outside the box", and able to improve performance by a magnitude they had never thought possible.

If done right, a stretch target, which basically is an extremely ambitious goal, gets people to perform in ways they never imagined possible. But if the organization does not provide their people with the knowledge, tools, and means to meet such ambitious goals, the effects of setting Stretch Goals can be outright disastrous.

http://www.12manage.com/description_stretch_goals.html

Huh? "outright disastrous"???? RUN AWAY!!!!

Here's the press release and report pdf:

http://www.inl.gov/featurestories/2008-02-05.shtml

EPRI, INL Announce Release of R&D Plan Focused on Near-Term Increase in Nuclear Energy Production

The Electric Power Research Institute and the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory today announced the public release of a joint INL/Nuclear Power Industry Strategic Plan for Light Water Reactor Research and Development. The plan was developed by an industry-lab team and reviewed and approved by the leadership of the INL's Utility Advisory Board and EPRI's Nuclear Power Council.

The plan sets forth two strategies that must be employed for nuclear energy to play a substantial role in meeting future U.S. energy needs. The first strategy is to efficiently construct and operate dozens of new nuclear power plants, starting in the next several years. The second is to maximize the contribution from our existing nuclear power fleet by extending the operating licenses. Implementing both of these strategies will require significant investment in research and development.

"Recent analysis by EPRI shows that all low-emission electricity technologies will be required to satisfy anticipated goals for reduced CO2 emissions - energy efficiency, renewable energy, nuclear energy, and clean coal with CO2 capture and sequestration" said Chris Larsen, vice president and chief nuclear officer for the Electric Power Research Institute. "Industry recognizes that LWR technology is mature and that industry should carry a large portion of the responsibility in maintaining this technology. However, this plan demonstrates that the magnitude of the challenges facing this nation require the active engagement and leadership of the Federal Government in achieving the stretch goals identified in the report."

The proposed industry/government cost-shared R&D effort set forth in the plan is focused on 10 objectives, six of which are considered to be of the highest priority. These high-priority objectives include:

<snip>

View the plan. ( 1.1MB PDF) http://www.inl.gov/featurestories/docs/inl_07-13543_08.pdf

[NNadir]

1. And the problem with this is what, exactly?

Oh, wait, I know...

Some dumbass fundie has been reading that wizard of wizards, Jack Welch, and meanwhile can't grasp what the world's largest, by far, form of climate change gas free energ is, or the first fact about the external cost of energy.

Oh the other hand, when presented with the fact that all the cute renewable energy systems - here we mean solar power, for instance - in spite of 50 years of "research," has yet to produce a single exajoule of electricity on the planet, it is because of a lack of research.

In general, the fundie anti-nuke faith is increasingly incoherent.

The Oyster Creek nuclear reactor in my home state - the one that dumb fundies are trying to replace with dangerous fossil fuels - has produced more energy in its lifetime than all of the world's solar PV plants have produced in the last 50 years.

Moreover, that plant has injured zero people.

Further the climate change cost of building that plant is fully amortized - almost all of the climate impact of nuclear power, already trivial, is invested during reactor construction.

The number of dumb fundie anti-nukes - a fundie is a person who will not change his or her dogma no matter how much science is presented - who understand that the world cannot afford to throw away valuable climate free gas free infrastructure simply because fundies are paranoid and illiterate is zero.

In the little cargo cult fundie anti-nuke faith they seem to think that if they build natural gas terminals off shore the tankers will come.

In fact, the dumb fundie cargo natural gas cult - a wholly owned subsidiary of walmart - they seem to have grasped nothing about the external cost of running ships or how the stuff that gets into ships gets there.

Speaking of paid off fundies, it seems like the high priest, he of hydrogen hypercar fame, is back in his little fibre forge game - looking for more fellow scientific illiterates to scam.

Now he's being reported by PBS, the wonderful organization that through it's subsidiary, NPR, spent a lot of time wondering this evening if John McCain was too liberal.

[bananas]

2. These "stretch goals" would only reduce CO2 by a tiny fraction of what's required.

Stretch Goals:
1. Life extension of the current fleet beyond 60 years (e.g., what would it take to extend all lives to ~80 years?);
and
2. Strong, sustained expansion of ALWRs throughout this century (e.g., what would it take to proceed uninterrupted from first new plant deployments in ~2015 to sustained build-rates approaching 10+/year?).

Last year, when the Keystone report came out,
they were talking about building 20+ reactors/year:

adding on average 14 plants each year for the next 50 years, all the while building an average of 7.4 plants to replace those that will be retired, the report by environmental leaders, industry executives and academics said.

http://climateprogress.org/2007/06/18/nuclear-power-no-climate-cure-all/

To be clear, that was 14 + 7.4 = 21.4 new reactors/year.

Apparently they've decided that 20+ reactors/year is too big of a stretch,
the new stretch goal is 10+ new reactors/year,
while patching up the old reactors to keep them running.

This will only reduce CO2 by about one tenth of what's needed.
The other 90% of reductions have to come from other sources:

You would need 8 to 10 times faster growth (3 nuclear plants built each week for 50 years) — and some 100 Yucca Mountains to store the waste – for nuclear to curb global warming on its own.
<snip>
As the Keystone report makes clear — and as former Vice President Al Gore told Congress earlier this year — nuclear may be a part of the solution, but probably only a very limited part.

http://climateprogress.org/2007/06/18/nuclear-power-no-climate-cure-all/

[NNadir]

3. "Only reduce the world carbon dioxide by a fraction?"

And what larger fraction do they have in fundie land?

Let me guess...

Solar electricity?

There is NOT ONE fundie anti-nuke who compare two numbers, never mind 11 numbers:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/trends/table1.html

By your dumb ass criteria of "can't do everything" I guess we should throw the solar yuppie toys out the window.

If the world's nuclear plants shut tomorrow, 15% of the world would live in darkness.

If the world's solar facilities all disappeared tomorrow by contrast, nobody would notice. In fact, the world's servers devoted to websites promoting solar electricity could not be run by solar electricity.

A moderate sized datacentre with 100 servers and 10Tb of networked storage uses 1 300 MWh of energy per year. It is estimated that worldwide datacentres represent 2% of global energy consumption; about the same as all the world’s airlines.

I would add that if the world's wind plants shut tomorrow, nobody would notice.

The fact is that the fundies in the anti-nuke faith are against the world's largest source of climate gas free energy. Why? Because all of the fundie whiny pals in the Greenpeace circle jerk of anti-nuke fundamentalism have decided that climate change might be a problem in 2050, and because you couldn't care less about dangerous fossil fuels.

Why have they selected 2050?

Because almost everyone now living will be dead and they will not have to answer for their illiteracy and stupidity.

The fact is that illiterate boobs are trying to kill the members of my family by trying to shut the reactor at Oyster Creek, because they are scientific illiterates, every single one of them.

Meanwhile, on planet Earth, Oyster Creek, all by itself, in a tiny plot of land, produced in 2005 1/3 as much energy, about 0.02 exajoules, as all of the solar power in the United States. And Oyster Creek is a small reactor.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/nuc_generation/usreact05.xls

Now I realize that you can't be a fundie anti-nuke if you understand numbers - but for the practitioners of arithmetic, it is immediately clear that the capacity utilization of Oyster Creek in 2005 was 99.05% of nameplate capacity.

There is NOT ONE renewable facility on this entire planet that ran with that level of capacity utilization.

Only in illiterate fundie thinking can a claim of "patching up" be made.

I'm not sure that the word "boob," fully captures the dumbass vandalism and destruction being wrought by fundie anti-nukes, though. There has to be a stronger word for such stupidity, but in my anger at the direct assault on the lung tissue of my family, it doesn't come to me right now.

All I can say is that the cute little fundie anti-nuke German plan to buy South African coal isn't looking too promising right now. Like all the fundie talk, the German nuclear "phase out" is going to be dumped on a pile of coal ash, just like the rest of fundie big talk.

The continuous talk of the death of nuclear power - practiced by paid (off) fossil fuel shills like the fundie dopes Schroeder and Lovins - are awfully anxious lately and consist wholly of illiterate whistling in the dark.

In any case, Oyster Creek does not need "patching up." It is a finely tuned machine running with some of the greatest reliability in the world. It represents infrastructure that the world cannot afford to lose. Ultimately the reactor will go under water - but that will totally be the responsibility of dumbass fundies, and not the reactor itself.

Dumbasses.