The PowerGen Conference is a gathering of power generators from
around the world sponsored by PennWell, the Oklahoma publishing
empire. Its gathering in Orlando in early December was the
largest ever, attended by 18,000 people. Energy is a hot topic
these days.
Windmill companies abounded. Vesta, the Danish supplier, had
several scale models on the exhibition floor and did a wraparound
cover over free copies of the Wall Street Journal.
“Denmark’s pretty filled up with windmills but we’re moving
offshore,” explained a Vesta salesman, standing beneath a 25-foot
replica of the 450-foot structures. “The wind over the ocean is
stronger with less variation.”
But for all the contemporary appeal of wind, however, the
underlying theme of the conference was how fast the revival of
nuclear power is taking shape. “The nuclear renaissance isn’t
something in the far-off future,” said J.M. Bernhard, Jr., CEO of
the Shaw Group, in giving the keynote address. “It’s already
happening today. With greenhouse gases in the mix, we believe
nuclear is where we need to go.”
Nuclear is coming along so fast that PennWell split out a
separate “Nuclear Power International” section with an eye to
creating a stand-alone conference in the future. (Oil and
renewables already have their own events.) The American nuclear
industry — such as it is — was well represented in the
exhibition booths. GE, the last man standing from the earlier
nuclear era, now does most of its business in partnership with
Hitachi. Newcomers such as Hyperion are blazing a trail by
building miniature reactors (60 megawatt as opposed to the
standard 1,000). But the horrible truth remains that, if there is
a nuclear renaissance going on in the world, it is happening
mostly outside our borders, pioneered by companies that never
were or are no longer American.
The most entertaining keynote speaker, for example, was Jacques
Besnainou, the puckish American director of Areva, the French
nuclear giant. (“When I first came to this country, I spent two
years living in New Jersey,” began Besnainou in his heavy French
accent. “Therefore as you see I have a very strong New Jersey
accent.”) Besnainou and Areva are on a roll of late, having
announced the construction of a uranium enrichment plant in Idaho
last May — the first built here in twenty years — and then
announcing in October that it will build a manufacturing plant
for nuclear components in partnership with Northrop Grumman
Shipbuilding in Newport News.
The French embrace of nuclear has left the Gauls paying the
cheapest electrical rates in Europe, importing only half as much
natural gas from Russia and Britain and Germany, and making money
hand-over-fist by exporting kilowatts to Germany and Italy. When
asked how Areva planned to finance the Newport News facility in
the face of a worldwide credit crunch, Besnainou answered with
one word: “Cash.”
The lag in America’s nuclear effort was reflected by a comment
heard over and over from vendors of nuclear accessories. “We’re
doing a great business,” said one after another. “But most of it
is abroad.”
HERE’S THE SCORECARD on what’s going on the in the rest of the
world:
Europe. Finland is building the first
new reactor in Europe in twenty years, a 1,200-MW unit at
Olkiluoto. The project has fallen two years behind schedule —
largely because Finnish environmental officials are taking three
times as long as planned to approve blueprints — but it
undoubtedly opens the door for other projects. The French are now
building an identical plant at Flammanville. Sweden, which is 50
percent nuclear and 40 percent hydro, has even lower carbon
emissions than France and has all but abandoned a 1980 vow to
shut down its reactors by 2010.
Germany agreed to shutter its nuclear component when Social
Democrats were admitted to the ruling coalition in 2001. Two
small reactors have been mothballed, but four more generating
4000 MW are scheduled for shutdown in 2009 and Germans are now
awakening to the possibility of losing 30 percent of their
generating capacity by 2020. Chancellor Angela Merkel has asked
for reconsideration. Italy shut its four reactors after a
referendum held shortly after Chernobyl but recently started
suffering blackouts because of electrical shortages. In May Prime
Minister Silvio Berlusconi announced plans to revive reactor
construction by 2013.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe was
discovered to be surprisingly reliant on nuclear power. Safety
upgrades — little things like the containment structures Soviets
scientists thought they didn’t need — sought to counteract the
legacy of Chernobyl but Brussels bureaucrats weren’t buying. They
have demanded the former satellite nations abandon their nuclear
reactors before entering the European Union. This has caused
considerable hard feelings.
“Bulgaria used to export electricity to the rest of Eastern
Europe,” says Ognyan Minchev, Bulgarian director of the European
Council on Foreign Relations. “Now we can’t even provide
ourselves.” The Bulgarians closed four reactors in 2002 but are
now building two new units at Belene. Atomstroyexport, the
Russian nuclear conglomerate, did the design work while Areva and
Siemens, the German giant, are providing the equipment.
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are in a similar dilemma, facing a
2009 EU deadline to close the Ignalia reactor, which provides
more than half their electricity. The Baltic republics have
appealed the decision but to no avail. (These are the same EU
bureaucrats who decided countries couldn’t win Kyoto Protocol
carbon credits by building nuclear reactors in other countries.)
A larger Areva reactor is scheduled to replace Ignalia 2 by 2015.
Asia and the Middle East. Just as the
world’s tallest skyscrapers are now being built east of Suez, so
the most intense nuclear activity is occurring there as well. The
United Arab Emirates has hired the French to build two new
reactors and Saudi Arabia wants to employ them both for
electricity and desalinization. Iran’s efforts to develop its own
nuclear technology, of course, need no repeating.
Japan gets 30 percent of its electricity from 55 reactors and is
now planning a 1300-MW mixed-oxide (MOX) facility at Ohma, which
will burn uranium and plutonium from conventional reactors,
drastically reducing the so-called problem of “nuclear waste.”
South Korea has 20 reactors providing 40 percent of its
electricity and is now aiming at the level of France, with 11 new
plants under construction. Taiwan has four reactors providing 20
percent of its electricity.
The big news, however, is in China, which has bought technology
from Russia, France and Japan and is planning to open 21 reactors
by 2014. China’s nuclear push will mitigate its embrace of coal,
which is already causing so much alarm among those concerned
about global warming. Likewise, the recent signing of a
technology agreement with the United States has stimulated
India’s nuclear effort. The country is now planning 18 to 20 new
reactors over the next 15 years, some fueled by thorium, of which
India has the world’s largest supplies.
If the nuclear revival does take hold in the U.S., we are much
more likely to be a buyer than a seller of the technology. Japan
Steel Works is now the world’s only supplier of the steel
pressure vessels at the reactor core. The company is backed up
four years and just spent $500 million to expand its annual
output from four to six. Westinghouse, which once competed
head-to-head with General Electric, is now a Japanese company,
bought by Toshiba in 2006. Babcock & Wilcox, the other major
American manufacturer, has dropped out of the field entirely.
So already a good number of the 28 new American reactors now on
the drawing boards will be built by foreign companies. Such is
the price we pay for surrendering to our fears on nuclear
technology. As Besnainou said in his keynote remarks: “If the
United States had gone forward with nuclear power twenty years
ago, you would be in much better shape economically than you are
today.”
