European Tribune - Community, Politics & Progress.

The real Europe ends at Oder?

by Starvid
Sun Mar 4th, 2007 at 11:46:13 AM EST

A new-generation nuclear reactor has been approved and is set for construction on the Normandy coast, one of only two new reactors being built in Europe.

Finland: 1
France: 1 (definitely planned, and included above)
Romania: 1
Russia: 3 (though Beloyarsk might be in Asia, can't recall...)
----------
Total: 2?

Grrrrrrrrr.

It's even worse as they haven't even managed to mate their text with their own graphics, which by the way also includes some (like the 2 in Bulgaria) but not all (like the 11 in Japan) planned new reactors besides those currently under construction (of which they don't include all either as for example Japan is building 2, not 1, and the US is building 1, not 0)...

The graph is total misinformation, or as it is usually called, journalism.

And I guess Bulgaria is not a European country either.

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The real Europe ends at Oder? | 17 comments (17 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: The real Europe ends at Oder? (none / 0)

Could you give us more info about new generations of nuclear power plants being developed outside old Europe?

"Ne te courbe que pour aimer..." René Char

by Melanchthon on Sun Mar 4th, 2007 at 03:49:38 PM EST

Re: The real Europe ends at Oder? (4.00 / 2)

Finland, Lithuania, Belarus and the Ukraine: http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2006/4/29/104724/135

Russia, Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania: http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2006/5/6/113233/4679

Hmm, I had forgot that little series, maybe I should continue it?

Russia update: http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2006/10/19/153457/62

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

by Starvid (arvid.hallen at gmail.com) on Sun Mar 4th, 2007 at 05:12:59 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The real Europe ends at Oder? (none / 1)

Thanks!

"Ne te courbe que pour aimer..." René Char

by Melanchthon on Sun Mar 4th, 2007 at 06:04:30 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The real Europe ends at Oder? (4.00 / 3)

EDF doesnt yet have the permit for construction for the EPR in France.

Anybody knows why they are building an EPR at Flammanville? After all the reason they always put forward, that it is a demonstration reactor is blatantly false. The reactor in Finland serves this purpose. Too bad they were a year beyond schedule after... a year.
As for preserving France's technical know-how, well, are they saying nobody who's currently working in Finland or in China is ever going to work in the field again?

So why do they build it? It can't be to replace France's nuclear plants, who aren't scheduled to be decommissionned before 2020. And I'm not sure that it's worth it, from an economic point of view, to have more than 80% of your electricity coming from nuclear plants. And this makes even less sense when you know that 4 plants are virtually coming online in 2012 with the decommissionning of the enrichment facility which used to take up a lot of power.

Rien n'est gratuit en ce bas monde. Tout s'expie, le bien comme le mal, se paie tot ou tard. Le bien c'est beaucoup plus cher, forcement. Celine

by UnEstranAvecVueSurMer (holopherne ahem gmail) on Mon Mar 5th, 2007 at 10:43:17 AM EST

Re: The real Europe ends at Oder? (4.00 / 2)

Nope, but they are bound to get it, unless Royal wins the election and then messes up royally (oh what a weak joke...).

To me it seems there are several reasons they build it. The most important, at least a couple of years ago, should be export reasons. Foreigners will be much more happy to buy EPR units if they see the French build them themselves.

Second, while there has been lots of talk about there being surplus baseload capacity on the continent, that seems not to be the case anymore, due to rising demand, German nuclear phase-out and worries about gas imports.

Witness the German plans to build half a dozen (or was it a dozen?) new big coal plants (without CSS, of course).

On top of that we have the total mess that is the UK power situation with a gas production in terminal decline, lots of new gas plants, a swiftly shrinking nuclear share without much hope of life time extensions, lots of coal plants due to close due the EU large combustion plant directive, the list goes on.

If I was going to build a reactor somewhere in France, Flamanville, Gravelines, Paluel or Penly should be the place. But Gravelines already has 6*900 MW, Paluel has 4*1300 MW and Penly has 2*1300 MW, just like Flamanville . Power exports to the UK will be a no-brainer (and EdF has said they'd like to build reactors in the UK too).

Gravelines

Paluel

Penly

Flamanville with EPR mock-up

By the way, the gaseous diffusion enrichment facility at Tricastin used the power of "only" three (3*900 MW) reactors, though there are four at the site in question.

Reactors in the foregorund. The dark buildings in the background is the enrichment plant.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

by Starvid (arvid.hallen at gmail.com) on Mon Mar 5th, 2007 at 02:37:20 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The real Europe ends at Oder? (none / 1)

To me it seems there are several reasons they build it. The most important, at least a couple of years ago, should be export reasons. Foreigners will be much more happy to buy EPR units if they see the French build them themselves.

But Areva isn't 'the French'. Unless you are telling me that a nuclear industry cannot be truly independent from a state intervention, which i doubt. There is no reason why it would bring more trust to potential Areva consumers when EDF orders reactors than when Finland does.

As for your second argument, I guess you mean that EDF needs the new EPR to either honor its long term contracts with other Europeans countries in the face of rising domestic demand, or to be able to sign new ones in the future. In both cases, these are not the arguments EDF put forward.

For the geographical location, the place where it would make more sense to build a plant is Bretagne, where the average distance from consumer to plant is 300km, as opposed to 80km in the rest of France. But that would mean picking a new site for the plant, basically starting a national debate: EDF would be unable to hide behind weak 'we promote french technology and knowhow' arguments.

So EDF builds plants in France with tacit government approval, exports the energy produced... at which point do we talk about energy policy again?

Rien n'est gratuit en ce bas monde. Tout s'expie, le bien comme le mal, se paie tot ou tard. Le bien c'est beaucoup plus cher, forcement. Celine

by UnEstranAvecVueSurMer (holopherne ahem gmail) on Mon Mar 5th, 2007 at 07:26:57 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The real Europe ends at Oder? (none / 0)

Nuke plants are such big industrial projects that there will always be politics involved, especially as energy is not just any commodity.

Consider the Swedish JAS 39 Gripen multirole fighter. Would we have managed to sell a single plane if we hadn't:

1. Bought lots ourselves

and

2. Had our government tell everyone they met what a great plane it is and that they should buy it.

Nope, not a single plane. It's not a coincidence South Africa chose Gripen when they needed a new fighter, considering the strenous Swedish opposition to apartheid.

If EdF doesn't claim they build the plant to generate and sell power, what do they claim? Maybe they want experience to now if they are going to use the EPR as the future standard reactor, instead of for example AP1000?

I can't see why new sites are needed, after all, the Manche sites are good, close to the UK, and it's always cheaper and easier (local opposition etc) to expand a current plant then to build a completely new one.

And building plants and exporting the power seems like a great energy policy to me.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

by Starvid (arvid.hallen at gmail.com) on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 09:13:01 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The real Europe ends at Oder? (none / 1)

There were two interesting articles in WSJ on nuclear. First,regarding difficulties in building nuclear plants.

The glitches highlight how an unexpected challenge is holding back a global effort to revive the nuclear industry: an acute shortage of skilled manpower.
Finnish regulators noticed a few months ago that panels of the steel cage that will encase the reactor were being welded together with a gap of seven millimeters (about a quarter of an inch), instead of the five-millimeter space required by design specifications. The mistake meant France's Areva SA and Germany's Siemens AG, the companies in charge of the project, had to conduct strain tests to make sure the welding would hold, causing delays and irritating regulators.
"Areva should have detected the wider gaps," says Jukka Laaksonen, director of Finland's nuclear-safety watchdog, Stuk. "You can't play with specifications in the nuclear sector."
A long string of technical and regulatory problems have overrun the project's schedule and budget. Completion is expected 18 months after the original mid-2009 deadline.

The article suggests it will be difficult to meet demand for future plants due to the loss of skills needed to build these plants.

Then second a discussion of a potential lack of supply of uranium ore, and the impact of hedge funds in getting into this market in anticipation of rising prices, making money as the prices have soared. The article suggests that demand will outrun supply for quite a while and that uranium could go to $200 a pound.

I'm curious if you see these as real issues for the industry, or if MSM has it wrong once again. (It's interesting to me that these two articles appeared--I've been surpised as I have commented before that the dramatic run-up in uranium prices has received so little coverage.)

by wchurchill on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 02:11:38 AM EST

Re: The real Europe ends at Oder? (none / 0)

Pricy uranium is no real problem, while lack of skilled people is a vast problem.

Not only for the nuclear industry but for oil, gas, coal mining, all other mining, welders, engineers and so on.

It's like none have been trained for 20 years. Everyone went into stock broking and marketing instead. Whoops.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

by Starvid (arvid.hallen at gmail.com) on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 09:20:56 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The real Europe ends at Oder? (none / 0)

Oh, technical people were trained all right. It's just that there were no jobs for them. 10 years ago we had a joke that when we got our physics degrees we'd end up selling washing machines.

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 09:38:04 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The real Europe ends at Oder? (4.00 / 2)

The skilled labor shortage is certainly a problem. The glory days of french nuclearization are over, and its veterans are near or at retirement age.

The uranium ore question is moot. Ore cost has a negligible impact on total kWh cost in the nuclear sector. It will always be competitive with fossil fuels. And there will be no shortage because:

most plan reactors will be delayed because of Real Problem 1 above,
there really is plenty of uranium in the ground, it's just that exploration stopped when military plutonium was dumped on the fuel market,
the rise in cost has already caused a surge in mining investments,
and there is room for producing more fuel with the tail assays (basically, ore was so cheap these past years that enrichers left plenty of fissile material in their depleted uranium, and have kept these tails for later re-enrichment should prices go up again - because they knew that the plutonium-induced crash would be temporary).

The fact is that hedge funds have been making lots of money speculating on uranium, and will continue to do so for a while (I've been looking for a uranium-tracker myself, to no avail).

I read in a professionnal paper last year that at the end of 2005, about 20% of uranium extracted worldwide was being bought by hedge funds just for above-ground storage, not by fuel enrichers. They'll dump it when it's worth 10 times what they bought it (i.e. a couple more years at present pace).

Pierre

by Pierre on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 09:26:28 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The real Europe ends at Oder? (none / 0)

(I've been looking for a uranium-tracker myself, to no avail).

what is an uranium tracker? This?

by wchurchill on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 12:03:52 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The real Europe ends at Oder? (none / 0)

I was thinking of something like an exchange-traded fund (etf) or any kind of high liquidity investment vehicle, with a market animated by the financial institution managing the fund, and a management target of replicating the spot price of uranium ore (the underlying).

Such things can be build without actually holding much, if any, physical ore: by proper assembly of ore futures and of shares and derivatives of listed uranium prospection/mining/processing companies with a track record of correlation between ore spot / share spot.

I must confess I already hold such a thing for crude oil (and I'm a peak oil believer). And lately, I bet on a leveraged put on the french stock markets (so you can count me in the "hard landing" proponents). Of course, these two investments hedge each other to some extent.

Pierre

by Pierre on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 04:12:32 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The real Europe ends at Oder? (none / 1)

Based on the wsj article, I think there are two eft's. From WSJ,

Two new publicly traded uranium investment funds are adding to the competition. The funds are similar to gold and silver exchange-traded funds, raising money from investors in initial public offerings of shares to buy uranium.

I imagine this is one of the two.

New Uranium Participation Corp. Follows Gold ETF Footprints
By David J. DesLauriers
30 May 2005 at 06:05 PM GMT-04:00
TORONTO (ResourceInvestor.com) -- Uranium is trading at 23-year highs and has been quite a hot topic in the last few months, with many well-known resource bulls and prognosticators calling for much higher prices before the end of this decade. Aside from all of the juniors rushing to stake and revive projects of dubious value, a group has come together to facilitate a direct bet on uranium for retail and institutional investors. This is similar to the various Gold ETFs in Australia, London, Toronto and New York that have taken billions of dollars of gold off of the market, with the most popular ETF, StreetTracks [NYSE:GLD] now holding more than $2 billion worth of gold bullion in trust.
UPC
Uranium Participation Corporation [TSX:U] recently raised C$100 million in an IPO at C$5. As of May 10 the company had made commitments to buy 1.85 million pounds, or 835 tons, of uranium at $27.87 a pound for a total of $52 million.
UPC follows in the footsteps of Portland, Oregon-based fund Adit Capital Management, which started buying uranium in December, and reportedly had physical uranium valued at more than $26 million.

I'm thinking about investing,,,maybe speculating is a better word here,,,,in this one. I have so far limited myself to uranium mining stocks.
They have done very well, up to 4 times my investment in some of the stocks. I've kept adding to the portfolio, so the % increase at this point is less, at 66%. It's a small part of my investing, mainly because I don't really feel I understand the market well enough, or the companies well enough. I'm more of an investor than a speculator. If I could find more data on things like capacities of current mines, requirements of current uranium facilities, new facilities on the drawing boards and anticipated commissioning dates, prospects for new mining find more uranium and the time required to scale up, etc, etc--good data would make me interested in studying it more and likely investing more.

by wchurchill on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 09:20:34 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The real Europe ends at Oder? (none / 1)

Very interesting find. Just a pity it's listed in Toronto, that would give terrible broker fees from France. Also, backing it with physical ore will probably limit the number of shares they can emit (which can lead them to overshoot the ore spot if there are many people interested - all the better for those who got in ...)

I've been very wary of putting money in uranium firms: most new ones are just exploratory start ups, and only those few which really find the richest veins will keep growing. Established mines with a track record and predictable production/reserves are under control of big companies, sometime states (Areva, parent of Cogema, one of the world's biggest, is only a few % floated, through just ADR-like stuff, the rest is french state, and it's not even a commodity pure-player: they also build the reactors and provide lots of services).

Pierre

by Pierre on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 04:27:19 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The real Europe ends at Oder? (none / 0)

Ore cost has a negligible impact on total kWh cost in the nuclear sector

I thought this also. but one of the wsj articles said it represented 25% of the cost. I'm assuming they are wrong.

by wchurchill on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 12:05:20 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The real Europe ends at Oder? (none / 1)

They are.

Maybe 25 % of O&M costs, but capital dominates nuclear power. Fuel is 5 % of the cost and one third of that is ore, one third is enrichment and one third is fuel element manufacture.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

by Starvid (arvid.hallen at gmail.com) on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 01:05:19 PM EST
[ Parent ]

The real Europe ends at Oder? | 17 comments (17 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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