U.S. Nuclear Industry Faces New Uncertainty

  WASHINGTON — The fragile bipartisan consensus that nuclear power offers a big piece of the answer to America’s energy and global warming challenges may have evaporated as quickly as confidence in Japan’s crippled nuclear reactors. 

Until this weekend, President Obama, mainstream environmental groups and large numbers of Republicans and Democrats in Congress agreed that nuclear power offered a steady energy source and part of the solution to climate change, even as they disagreed on virtually every other aspect of energy policy. Mr. Obama is seeking tens of billions of dollars in government insurance for new nuclear construction, and the nuclear industry in the United States, all but paralyzed for decades after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, was poised for a comeback.
Now, that is all in question as the world watches the unfolding crisis in Japan’s nuclear reactors and the widespread terror it has spawned.

“I think it calls on us here in the U.S., naturally, not to stop building nuclear power plants but to put the brakes on right now until we understand the ramifications of what’s happened in Japan,” Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut and one of the Senate’s leading voices on energy, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Nuclear power, which still suffers from huge economic uncertainties and local concerns about safety, had been growing in acceptance as what appeared to many to be a relatively benign, proven and (if safe and permanent storage for wastes could be arranged) nonpolluting source of energy for the United States’ future growth.

But even staunch supporters of nuclear power are now advocating a pause in licensing and building new reactors in the United States to make sure that proper safety and evacuation measures are in place. Environmental groups are reassessing their willingness to see nuclear power as a linchpin of any future climate change legislation. Mr. Obama still sees nuclear power as a major element of future American energy policy, but he is injecting a new tone of caution into his endorsement.
“The president believes that meeting our energy needs means relying on a diverse set of energy sources that includes renewables like wind and solar, natural gas, clean coal and nuclear power,” said Clark Stevens, a White House spokesman. “Information is still coming in about the events unfolding in Japan, but the administration is committed to learning from them and ensuring that nuclear energy is produced safely and responsibly here in the U.S.”

Three of the world’s chief sources of large-scale energy production — coal, oil and nuclear power — have all experienced eye-popping accidents in just the past year. The Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion in West Virginia, the Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the unfolding nuclear crisis in Japan have dramatized the dangers of conventional power generation at a time when the world has no workable alternatives able to operate at sufficient scale.
The policy implications for the United States are vexing. “It’s not possible to achieve a climate solution based on existing technology without a significant reliance on nuclear power,” said Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington and an energy and climate change adviser to the 2008 Obama campaign. “It’s early to reach many conclusions about what happened in Japan and the relevance of what happened to the United States. But the safety of nuclear power will certainly be high on the list of questions for the next several months.”

“The world is fundamentally a set of relative risks,” Mr. Grumet added, noting the confluence of disasters in coal mining, oil drilling and nuclear plant operations. “The accident certainly has diminished what had been a growing impetus in the environmental community to support nuclear 
power as part of a broad bargain on energy and climate policy.”
 
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader, said that the United States should not overreact to the Japanese nuclear crisis by clamping down on the domestic industry indefinitely. Republicans have loudly complained that the Obama administration did just that after the BP oil spill last spring when it imposed a moratorium on deepwater oil drilling until new safety and environmental rules were written.
“I don’t think right after a major environmental catastrophe is a very good time to be making American domestic policy,” Mr. McConnell said on “Fox News Sunday.”
He said that the American public and politicians had recoiled after Three Mile Island, rejecting permits for the construction of dozens of nuclear plants on the “not in my backyard” impulse.
“My thought about it is, we ought not to make American and domestic policy based upon an event that happened in Japan,” Mr. McConnell said.

Mr. Obama has been as supportive of nuclear power as any recent president as he has tried to devise a political and technical strategy for ensuring energy supplies and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Nuclear power, along with expanded offshore oil drilling, “clean coal” development and extensive support for renewable energy, are part of his “all-of-the-above energy strategy,” an approach and terminology borrowed from Republicans. But his support for coal and oil as part of a grand compromise on energy were set back by last year’s mining and drilling disasters, and today’s problems with nuclear in Japan cannot help.

Concerns about earthquakes and nuclear power have been around for a long time; new questions might also be raised now about tsunamis and coastal reactors.
In Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address and in his budget, he proposed an expansion of nuclear energy technology and $36 billion in Department of Energy loan guarantees for the construction of as many as 20 new nuclear plants.

That policy will be on the table at a hearing of the Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday, when Steven Chu, the energy secretary, and Gregory B. Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, are scheduled to testify.
“We will use that opportunity to explore what is known in the early aftermath of the damage to Japanese nuclear facilities,” said Representative Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan, the committee chairman, “as well as to reiterate our unwavering commitment to the safety of U.S. nuclear sites.”

Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and a skeptic of nuclear power who nonetheless supported expansion of nuclear power as part of the House energy and climate legislation he co-sponsored, said the United States needed tougher standards for siting and operating nuclear plants.

He said regulators should consider a moratorium on locating nuclear plants in seismically active areas, require stronger containment vessels in earthquake-prone regions and thoroughly review the 31 plants in the United States that use similar technology to the crippled Japanese reactors. “The unfolding disaster in Japan must produce a seismic shift in how we address nuclear safety here in America,” Mr. Markey said.

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Emergency Cooling Effort at Reactor Is Failing, Deepening Japanese Crisis

 TOKYO — Japan’s struggle to contain the crisis at a stricken nuclear power plant worsened early Tuesday morning, as emergency operations to pump seawater into one crippled reactor temporarily failed, increasing the risk of a wider release of radioactive material, officials said.
With the cooling systems malfunctioning simultaneously at three separate reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station after the powerful earthquake and tsunami, a more acute crisis developed late Monday at reactor No. 2 of the plant. There, a series of problems thwarted efforts to keep the core of the reactor covered with water — a step considered crucial to preventing the reactor’s containment vessel from exploding and preventing the fuel inside it from melting down.
The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power, said late Monday that efforts to inject seawater into the reactor had failed. That caused water levels inside the reactor’s containment vessel to fall and exposed its fuel rods. The company said its workers later succeeded in infusing seawater in the pre-dawn hours of Tuesday morning, but fuel rods were exposed for at least several hours.
Workers had been having difficulty injecting seawater into the reactor because its vents — necessary to release pressure in the containment vessel by allowing radioactive steam to escape — had stopped working properly, they said.
But Tuesday morning Tokyo Electric announced that workers had succeeded in opening a malfunctioning valve controlling the vents, reducing pressure in the container vessel. It then resumed flooding the reactor with water.
The company said water levels were not immediately rising to the desired level, possibly because of a leak in the containment vessel. Still, a Tokyo Electric official said the situation was improving.
"We do not feel that a critical event is imminent," he told a press conference.
The release of pressure appears to avert the immediate risk that the containment vessel would explode, creating a potentially catastrophic release of radioactive material into the atmosphere. But if the vessel is cracked and is not holding water properly, the risks of a large scale release of radioactive material would remain high.
In reactor No. 2, which is now the most damaged of the three at the Daiichi plant, at least parts of the fuel rods have been exposed for several hours, which also suggests that some of the fuel has begun to melt. Government and company officials said fuel melting has almost certainly occurred in that reactor, which can increase releases of radioactive material through the water and steam that escapes from the container vessel.
In a worst case, the fuel pellets could also burn through the bottom of the containment vessel and radioactive material could pour out that way — often referred to as a full meltdown.
"There is a possibility that the fuel rods are heating up and starting to melt,” said a Tokyo Electric spokesman told a late-night conference on Monday, televised on public broadcaster NHK. “It is our understanding that we have possible damage to the fuel rods,” he said.
By Monday night, officials said that radiation readings around the plant reached 3,130 micro Sievert, the highest yet detected at the Daiichi facility since the quake and six times the legal limit. Radiation levels of that magnitude are considered elevated, but they are much lower than would be the case if one of the container vessels had been compromised.
Industry executvies in touch with their counterparts in Japan Monday night grew increasingly alarmed about the risks posed by the No. 2 reactor.
“They’re basically in a full-scale panic” among Japanese power industry managers, said a senior nuclear industry executive. The executive is not involved in managing the response to the reactors’ difficulties but has many contacts in Japan. “They’re in total disarray, they don’t know what to do.”
The venting problems made it impossible for a time to administer the emergency remedy the plant operator had been using to control heat at the three crippled Daiichi reactors, all of which experienced failures in their electronic cooling systems. That remedy involves pumping in seawater to cool the fuel rods, then opening vents to release the resulting steam pressure that builds in the container vessel. When the vessel is depressurized, workers can inject more seawater, a process known as “feed and bleed.” 

The extreme challenge of managing reactor No. 2 came as officials were still struggling to keep the cores of two other reactors, No. 1 and No. 3, covered with seawater. There was no immediate indication that either of those two reactors had experienced a crisis as serious as that at No. 2.
The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Monday that the Japanese government had formally asked for assistance as it responds to the crisis in Fukushima. As part of a wider response, the United States has already dispatched two experts in boiling-water reactors, the type used at Daiichi. They are in Tokyo offering technical assistance to the Japanese, the commission said in a statement. The commission is considering further assistance, including providing technical advice, it said.
The situation at Daiichi was also complicated on Monday by another problem when the outer structure housing reactor No. 3 exploded earlier on Monday. A similar explosion destroyed the structure surrounding reactor No. 1 on Saturday. Live footage on public broadcaster NHK showed the skeletal remains of the reactor building and thick smoke rising from the building. Eleven people had been injured in the blast, one seriously, officials said.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said earlier Monday evening that the release of large amounts of radiation as a result of the explosion at No. 3 was unlikely because the blast did not compromise the steel containment vessel inside the No. 3 reactor. But traces of radiation could be released into the atmosphere, and about 500 people who remained within a 12-mile radius were ordered temporarily to take cover indoors, he said.
“I have received reports that the containment vessel is sound,” Mr. Edano said. “I understand that there is little possibility that radioactive materials are being released in large amounts.”
Mr. Edano and other senior officials did not address the escalating crisis at reactor No. 2 later Monday or early Tuesday.
But the situation a reactor No. 3 was being closely watched for another reason. That reactor uses a special mix of nuclear fuel known as MOX fuel. MOX is considered contentious because it is made with reprocessed plutonium and uranium oxides. Any radioactive plume from that fuel would be more dangerous than ordinary nuclear fuel, experts say, because inhaling plutonium even in very small quantities is considered lethal.
In screenings, higher-than-normal levels of radiation have been detected from at least 22 people evacuated from near the plant, the nuclear safety watchdog said, but it is not clear if the doses they received were dangerous.
Technicians had been scrambling most of Sunday to fix a mechanical failure that left the reactor far more vulnerable to explosions.
The two reactors where the explosions occurred are both presumed to have already suffered partial meltdowns — a dangerous situation that, if unchecked, could lead to a full meltdown.

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Nuclear Plants in Europe Are Delayed

 BERLIN — With the crisis in Japan raising fears about nuclear power, Germany and Switzerland said on Monday that they would reassess the safety of their own reactors and possibly reduce their reliance on them.
Doris Leuthard, the Swiss energy minister, said Switzerland would suspend plans to build and replace nuclear plants. She said no new ones would be permitted until experts had reviewed safety standards and reported back. Their conclusions will apply to existing plants as well as planned sites, she added. Swiss authorities recently approved three sites for new nuclear power stations.
Germany will suspend “the recently decided extension of the running times of German nuclear power plants,” Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters in Berlin. “This is a moratorium and this moratorium will run for three months.” She said the suspension would allow for a thorough examination of the safety standards of the county’s 17 nuclear power plants.
“There will be no taboos,” Mrs. Merkel said.
Even when the three months is over, Mrs. Merkel warned, there would be no going back to the situation before the moratorium.
Across Europe, officials worried about the Continent’s use of nuclear power as cooling systems failed at a third nuclear reactor in Japan and officials in that country struggled to regain control.
The European Union called for a meeting on Tuesday of nuclear safety authorities and operators to assess Europe’s preparedness. Austria’s environment minister, Nikolaus Berlakovich, called for a European Union-wide stress test “to see if our nuclear power stations are earthquake-proof.”
In Germany, with Mrs. Merkel’s center-right coalition facing important regional elections this month, the move was apparently in part an effort to placate the influential antinuclear lobby and give her coalition some breathing space before making a final decision about nuclear energy.
The foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, called for a new risk analysis of the country’s nuclear plants, particularly regarding their cooling systems. He is the leader of the pro-business Free Democratic Party, which strongly supports nuclear power.
A previous government, led by the Social Democrats and Greens, pushed through legislation in 2001 to close all of the country’s nuclear plants by 2021. But Mrs. Merkel’s center-right government reversed that decision last year and voted to extend the lives of the plants by an average of 12 years.
Nuclear energy provides about 11 percent of Germany’s energy supply but its contribution to electricity output is about 26 percent.
In Switzerland, the suspension of plans to build and replace plants will affect all “blanket authorization for nuclear replacement until safety standards have been carefully reviewed and if necessary adapted,” Ms. Leuthard, the energy minister, said in a statement.
Switzerland has five nuclear reactors, which produce about 40 percent of the country’s energy needs.
Ms. Leuthard said she had already asked the Federal Nuclear Safety Inspectorate to analyze the exact cause of the problems in Japan and draw up new or tougher safety standards “particularly in terms of seismic safety and cooling.”
In Russia, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin said his government would not revise its ambitious program of building nuclear reactors but would “draw conclusions from what’s going on in Japan,” Russian news agencies reported. Nuclear power currently accounts for 16 percent of Russia’s electricity generation.

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E.U.'s Latest Rescue Package Seen Falling Short-Again

LONDON — Another missed opportunity for Europe?
Over the past year, the European Union and the International Monetary fund have pledged €640 billion in bailout funds to distressed economies on the Continent’s periphery. Yet the interest rates on benchmark bonds in Greece, Ireland and Portugal remain at or near their historic highs.
Pressed yet again by a skeptical market to take action, Europe’s leaders cobbled together a new structure over the weekend that will allow its rescue fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, to disburse its entire €440 billion, or $615 billion, allotment if needed, and to buy bonds at government auctions. They also eased the conditions on Greece’s rescue loans by reducing interest rates and extending repayment terms.
Analysts and investors greeted the effort Monday with cautious approval, as euro zone finance ministers regrouped to work out more details.
But as has often been the case with grand European rescue plans, there appears to be a catch: While the European rescue facility can now buy bonds at government auctions, it will not be able to purchase paper in the secondary market. That will heap more pressure on an ever-reluctant European Central Bank to remain in its job as peripheral Europe’s buyer of last resort.
What is more, the plan states that the fund can buy bonds only from countries that have taken bailout funds, an odd stipulation that means that the country most in need of support at the moment — Portugal — does not get any.
Consequently, pressure on Portuguese 10-year bonds eased only slightly Monday, with interest rates sticking close to the 7.4 percent level at which they have traded for the past few weeks. Greek bonds rallied on the interest rate deal, but Irish bonds made only the smallest move as they did not receive a break on their interest rate. Spanish yields fell to 5.2 percent, still close to their high of 5.4 percent.
“What we have now falls short of what is required, which is a way to bring interest rates down,” said Dirk Hoffman-Becking, a banking analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein in London.
Mr. Hoffman-Becking argued that these persistently high rates only recycled fear and uncertainty via higher funding costs for banks and, ultimately, lower economic growth. He added that unless the E.F.S.F. stepped into the secondary market to buy bonds in large quantities, rates would remain high. That is because private investors remain unwilling to buy given the risk of default and the risk that austerity programs will undermine economic recovery.
Again, the example of Portugal is relevant. Last Friday, the government in Lisbon promised more spending cuts and revenue-raising measures to make good on its promise to bring the budget deficit down to 4.6 percent of gross domestic product, from 7.4 percent this year. But with one of the lowest growth rates in Europe, an uncompetitive export industry and public debt at 80 percent of G.D.P., investors see little upside in buying Portuguese bonds now, even at such wide spreads to comparable German bonds.
For the most part, the E.C.B. has been unwilling to step in aggressively — it has purchased only €77 billion in peripheral-country bonds so far. On Monday, the bank reported that it had not bought any bonds last week, for the second week in a row.
Thus, the lack of a big buyer is expected to keep rates high and continue to feed market unease. And that in many ways remains the unsolved root of Europe’s sovereign debt crisis.
Euro zone governments and the I.M.F. are asking that investors take a leap of faith and accept that the bone-crunching austerity programs in Greece, Ireland and Portugal, underpinned by tax increases and sharp wage reductions, will reduce deficits and ultimately high levels of debt.
But, as a comprehensive new report on the origins of Europe’s debt crisis by the investment bank Nomura points out, what is more likely to happen is that the debt of countries like Greece and Ireland will merely increase in what economists call a snowball effect, as the interest rate on the government’s debt grows faster than their stagnating economies.
That problem will only be compounded when the European Central Bank increases interest rates, which it has warned it will do.
The result is a Catch-22 of sorts: the faster and deeper these countries cut, the slower they grow, with the perverse effect that their debt ends up increasing as opposed to decreasing.
“In the short term, this problem is inevitable — your debt will continue to increase as long as your growth rate is below the interest rate you are paying,” said Peter Westaway, European economist at Nomura in London and one of the authors of the report.
In 2013, for example, Greece’s debt will have increased to almost 160 percent of G.D.P. from 127 percent of G.D.P. And while the country was quick to hail its improved terms, the bottom line still remains that by 2014 it must begin paying interest equivalent to about 8 percent of its G.D.P. — a huge amount by any measure.
For now, Greece has time. But with growth expected to shrink again this year, by 3.4 percent, and with unemployment now at about 15 percent, how long the Greek government, or any government for that matter, can continue to expect so much public sacrifice to pay off its bankers remains to be seen.

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