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To Fight Russian Aggression, Build More Clean Energy Capacity

To Fight Russian Aggression, Build More Clean Energy Capacity

Russian attacks on Ukraine have spiked the already high price of oil. But going up with that are the economic incentives to ditch this primitive fuel — the environmental reasons being well known.

Russia provides about 40 percent of Europe's imported gas, and its squeeze on supply has forced some factories to cut back on production. The case for moving to renewable energy grows only stronger.

The CEO of the Portuguese utility EDP made this point on CNBC Europe. "These are (indigenous) ... resources — wind, solar — that we have in Europe," Miguel Stilwell de Andrade said. "We need to accelerate (their development) and do it much faster."

Americans, meanwhile, can dismiss conservative claims that President Joe Biden has set back America's "energy independence." Policies to replace fossil fuels with low-carbon energy have hardly shut off the flow of domestic oil and gas. Actually, the U.S. became the world's top exporter of liquefied natural gas this year.

On a related topic, Biden's infrastructure bill set aside $6 billion to stop the premature retirement of nuclear plants. Another $2.5 billion is going for work on advanced nuclear technologies. Biden backed this zero-carbon energy source while fighting off some opposition from the left.

Germany's outsized dependence on Russian oil resulted from former German Chancellor Angela Merkel's unwise decision years ago to shutter her country's nuclear plants — and replace that source of power with Russian natural gas. (Imagine Europe launching its largest fossil fuel project in the year 2022.)

In retaliation for Russia's assault on Ukraine, Germany has suspended approval of Nord Stream 2, an underwater pipeline designed to transport Russian natural gas to Germany. Good for the new chancellor, Olaf Scholz.

Some Europeans are reportedly dealing with the convulsion in fuel prices by installing solar panels and burning wood for heat. Hooray for solar. (Boo for wood-burning, though understandable in an emergency.)

Clean energy means more energy, which, when added to improving green technology, eventually means less-expensive energy. By 2020, solar already provided cheaper power than that from plants fired by coal or natural gas in most countries, according to the International Energy Agency.

The U.S. has just passed the milestone of 200,000 megawatts of utility-scale clean energy capacity, according to the American Clean Power Association. Do you know which state installed the most wind and solar power capacity last year? Texas.

Natural gas prices were, of course, surging before Russia started pummeling Ukraine. That reflected an upturn in demand as the COVID-19 pandemic started to retreat.

But companies in Europe that had made long-term agreements for renewable energy at fixed prices found themselves in a far better place, The Wall Street Journal reports. Orange SA, the huge French telecom company, for one, is securing power from nearby solar and wind farms, as well as its own installations. It plans to obtain half its energy from renewable sources in three short years.

Such businesses, George Bilicic, head of power and energy at the investment banking firm Lazard, said, "should be better positioned than others given current fossil fuel price spikes."

Steep gas prices are, of course, a great selling point for electric cars, not that they need it at this point.

Moving the world away from fossil fuels would erase Russian President Vladimir Putin's biggest nonnuclear weapon. After all, oil and gas accounted for 39 percent of Russia's budget revenue and 60 percent of its exports in 2019.

We, on our part, must make major investments in power grids to accommodate the diverse types of low-carbon energy. But there's nothing like international turmoil at the hands of a distressed country run by an unstable leader to provide a major push in that direction. Let's get pushed.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Under Investigation: Kushner’s Radioactive Mideast ‘Piece’ Plan

Under Investigation: Kushner’s Radioactive Mideast ‘Piece’ Plan

Originally published on Creators.

Often enough, the ambitious phrase “Middle East peace plan” emanates from the Trump White House, often associated with presidential son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner. Only last week, the Polish government joined with the U.S. State Department to host a major international conference on Middle East issues in Warsaw.

But now the House Oversight Committee has released a stunning 24-page report about the pursuit of certain potentially dangerous commercial opportunities in the Middle East, specifically Saudi Arabia, by Kushner and an assortment of other Trump cronies. Suddenly, the “peace plan” looks far more like a “piece” plan — as in cronies grabbing a piece of the Saudi financial action.

Based on information from alarmed informants within the government, the Oversight committee is investigating the Trump administration’s secret, reckless, and apparently illegal rush to promote the sale of nuclear power plants to the Saudi regime. On Thursday, the committee chair, Rep. Elijah Cummings III (D-MD), released an interim report titled “Whistleblowers Raise Grave Concerns With Trump Administration’s Effort to Transfer Sensitive Nuclear Technology to the Saudis.”

One such concern is the administration’s rejection of advice from lawyers, who warned that its plans to sell nuclear technology violated the Atomic Energy Act, designed to safeguard against the unchecked proliferation of atomic weapons and materials. Another is the brazen and unethical self-dealing by figures close to Trump, who sought to profit from the Saudi deals — including disgraced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Tom Barrack, the real estate executive and Trump pal who ran the inaugural committee (now also under investigation by federal prosecutors).

According to the interim report, Flynn signed on as “advisor” to a firm known as IP3, which the Washington Post’s Paul Waldman accurately described as an “all-star team” of retired generals and diplomats pushing to build nukes in Saudi. This IP3 outfit recruited Flynn while he was serving as a campaign adviser to Trump, and he continued that role, despite the obvious conflict of interest, after he entered the White House. Others on Trump’s national security staff joined with Flynn to promote the Saudi nuclear sales, sparking conflict with officials who objected both on policy and legal grounds.

As soon as Trump was inaugurated, the IP3 group started pushing him to appoint Barrack as a “special representative” of the U.S. government, tasked with “implementing the plan.” At the same time, Barrack was considering an investment in Westinghouse Electric, one of the world’s largest builders of nuclear plants. Assisting him was Rick Gates — the same felon who had worked for Paul Manafort and ended up with a guilty plea and a cooperation agreement with the Office of Special Counsel.

Let’s pause here to think hard about the wisdom of constructing dozens of nuclear plants, with their potential for terrorist exploitation, in the same country that sent forth the 9/11 hijackers — never mind its recent misadventures in Yemen and its brutal murder of an American resident, Jamal Khashoggi.  It is incomprehensible that any American president would consider turning over the most lethal technology to the Saudis, with their aggressive brand of radicalized Wahhabi Islam.

But leaving aside the peril to world peace, there are billions to be made here. And that may be what matters most to the inhabitants of the Trump White House.

In that connection, the interim report notes a fascinating timeline, which begins with a holding company called Brookfield Asset Management acquiring Westinghouse Electric for $4.6 billion in January 2018. (Of course, Westinghouse Electric would have benefited hugely from the IP3 plan to build those Saudi nukes). And then just seven months, Brookfield Asset Management purchased a 99-year lease on 666 Fifth Avenue — the famous Manhattan tower whose $1.8 billion in debt had nearly ruined the Kushner family company, which owned it.

Brookfield’s decision to bail out the Kushner company by paying for that overpriced lease up front puzzled knowledgeable observers when the company first announced its purchase. After so many other potential investors had rejected that bad deal, what made Brookfield bite?

Perhaps now we will find out.

Nuclear Pitched As The New Green

Nuclear Pitched As The New Green

By Evan Halper, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — The state that spawned a generation of activists committed to shutting down nuclear reactors and crippling the industry has lately become a hotbed of advocacy and financial support for fighting global warming with, of all things, nuclear power.

Encouraged by the Obama administration, notable California innovators and financiers are looking to reinvent the industry in the mold of wind and solar power. They are betting on prototype technologies that seek to replace the hulking plants of today with smaller, nimbler units. Environmentally minded nuclear engineers argue that they can be designed so safely that they might be “huggable.” They talk of power plants that consume nuclear waste instead of creating it.

State leaders aren’t necessarily rushing to embrace the vision in a place where all but one nuclear plant have been mothballed and where old-guard nuclear safety advocates warn that so-called advanced nuclear technologies are an attempt to put shiny earrings on the same old pig.

But the investors and nuclear scientists opening startup labs in the office parks of California’s technology hubs and within the research centers of universities see a more influential ally in the White House.

Nuclear power is at the nub of the Obama administration’s “all of the above” strategy for reinventing the energy industry in an era of climate change, and its faith in the fraught power source has captured the imagination of some notable and deep-pocketed West Coast thinkers.

Investors, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, have poured about $2 billion into a few dozen small outfits, many of which are concentrated in the West. The entrepreneurs behind them are racing to design nuclear power facilities engineered to seem no more imposing than a neighborhood arts center.

“This is the place to be,” said Jacob DeWitte, chief executive of UPower, a startup that recently migrated here from Cambridge, Mass., in its quest to create modular nuclear plants with reactors small enough to fit inside a shipping container and sturdier than “a brick outhouse.”

“In other places you would tell people you’ve got a nuclear startup and they look at you like you are kind of nuts,” he said. “But here in Silicon Valley it is like, ‘That’s super cool. Can I help?’ There’s that ethos here.”

DeWitte, 30, talks in terms that make some veterans of the decades long struggle over nuclear power chafe, promising his firm will build units that could safely run on existing stockpiles of nuclear waste, all while being “meltdown-proof” and not using any material that terrorists could steal to turn into a weapon.

That may all be possible someday, say the nuclear experts at the Union of Concerned Scientists, but that day is probably several decades and many tens of billions of dollars away. The sudden excitement around nuclear makes them nervous. They say they have seen this before.

“The people who deny or downplay the risks involved are doing a disservice to the future of nuclear power that leads to complacency, and complacency leads to Fukushima,” said Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist at the organization. “This is very complex. It is hard. It costs a lot. It is slow, especially to develop advanced systems. … It seems nuclear will at most be a minor contribution over the next few decades to dealing with the climate crisis.”

That’s not the view inside the stylish, airy San Francisco offices of Thiel’s Founders Fund, where he and other venture capitalists, perhaps inspired by the views from the giant windows overlooking Presidio Park, make big bets on big ideas. Thiel made about $1 billion with an early $500,000 investment in Facebook. He got in on the ground floor with Yelp. He and his partners at PayPal, including Elon Musk, grew the online payment service from nothing to a firm that eBay paid $1.5 billion to acquire.

And lately Founders Fund is excited about zero-emission nuclear power as a solution to climate change. It has infused $3 million into Transatomic, a startup in Cambridge launched by two graduates from MIT’s nuclear engineering program who have been pitching their vision in small networking meetings and, of course, TED Talks.

“I became a nuclear engineer because I am an environmentalist,” said Leslie Dewan, the 31-year-old co-founder of Transatomic. “This is what the world needs. The world needs a cheap source of carbon-free power that is even lower cost than coal if we want to avoid the devastation caused by fossil fuels.”

Her faith in nuclear energy is underscored by the fact that she launched her company only a week after the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in Japan in 2011. The particular day also happened to be the 25th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in Ukraine.

The faith is shared by Founders Fund partner Scott Nolan, who is among the few equipped to judge the mind-bending Transatomic blueprints on their merits. Nolan is a rocket scientist. Earlier in his career, he built propulsion systems at a firm that is perhaps even more audacious than Transatomic: Musk’s space exploration company, SpaceX.

“We believe they have the right technology, that it is going to eliminate a lot of the concerns that have existed around nuclear,” Nolan said. “We think it can work.”

He talks about the anxieties around nuclear power: the potential for radioactive release at a plant, the possibility terrorists will steal material to build a dirty bomb, the dangerous waste that won’t decompose for thousands of years, the immense costs.

Then he dissects each concern, explaining why Transatomic’s technology makes the issue obsolete. He talks about a plant that would run on existing nuclear waste and be “classified as walk-away safe. There is no way for it to go unstable.”

The Sierra Club says it has all the makings of a snake-oil sale.

“There is always such a rosy picture coming from the industry of what it can deliver with these technologies, yet it has such a terrible history with over-promising and under-delivering,” said John Coequyt, the Sierra Club’s director of international climate programs. The organization would prefer the Obama administration abandon the extremely costly pursuit of advanced nuclear power in favor of greater investment in renewable energy such as solar and wind power.

©2015 Tribune Co. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Pelicans fly in formation over the San Onofre Generating Station on Tuesday, March 25, 2014 in San Clemente, Calif. (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

 

Two Reactors Declared Safe As Japan Edges Back To Nuclear Power

Two Reactors Declared Safe As Japan Edges Back To Nuclear Power

By Lars Nicolaysen, dpa

TOKYO — Two nuclear reactors in Japan passed new safety standards Wednesday, for the first time since the nuclear disaster at Fukushima three and a half years ago.

The move brings Japan closer to restarting domestic nuclear power generation after the government shut down all of its nuclear plants in the wake of the reactor meltdown at Fukushima, which followed an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.

Two reactors at the Sendai power plant in Kagoshima prefecture in the south of the country obtained safety clearance from regulators on Wednesday.

The plant operated by Kyushu Electric was unlikely to start operating before December due to unfinished paperwork, Kyodo News agency reported.

The Sendai plant would still need the approval of local authorities, with public opinion nationwide on balance opposed to the resumption of nuclear power.

Currently all 48 of Japan’s commercial reactors are idle. The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in April that it was planning a return to nuclear power.

In May a local court in the central prefecture of Fukui found in favour of anti-nuclear activists and blocked the restarting of two reactors at the Oi plant by operator Kansai Electric Power Co, ruling that the risk from earthquakes was unknowable.

But the government is still pushing for nuclear plants to come back online. Imports of fossil fuels to make up the shortfall using thermal power plants has helped drive the country’s trade balance into the red for the past two years.

The two Sendai reactors have a capacity of 1.8 gigawatts, or around 5 per cent of the former total output of the country’s nuclear power stations, which supplied around a third of the grid’s energy.

Nuclear was unlikely ever to contribute such a high proportion of the energy mix again, experts said. Fewer than half of the reactors were thought likely to pass the tightened security tests.

Any more than 40 years old were to be automatically mothballed, and Trade and Industry Minister Yuko Obuchi has ruled out the building of any new ones, at least for the foreseeable future.

Photo via WikiCommons

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