LEARNING TO LOVE THE BOMB

 

Turin, June14th 2021

LEARNING TO LOVE THE BOMB

why the West energy policy is a FOREIGN POLICY failure... and Putin is laughing.

As much as possible the original source material is included or linked in the article, and this doesn't represent in any shape or form “investment advice” under current EU and/or Italian regulations.

Today CNN reported that an EPR III nuclear reactor in China has some problems, of a nature that pushed its original designer and operator, French Framatome, To signal to US authorities its intention to ask for assistance under existing treaties by invoking an “"imminent radiological threat" , one of the admissible reasons.

China has been building up domestic electricity generation in various ways, Coal, Hydro, and Nuclear as well, understandably for an economy at a development stage where Energy intensity of GDP is  still high relative to more mature economies. Of course, a problem in a Nuclear plant design on which France has staked the replacement of all its aging fleet will cause a sore heart to a country Like China  that sells many solar panels to EU countries, and it will positively cause an heart attack to Russia, which sadly may have to start thinking about a Nordstream 3 pipeline hard on the heels of completing Nordstream 2 in order to satisfy the eventual additional demand.

On top of this, In the Nuclear field China has managed to start producing a third generation reactor design where it owns all the relevant Intellectual Property rights, albeit based on outside basic technology transfer; hence, that can be sold and licensed independently. But for a variety of reasons involving waning trust in the Chinese Dragon, I think that this won't become very popular in Western circles. On top of that, China is investing heavily in Molten Salt Reactor  and Thorium fuel technology, an idea whose first working model dates from …. 1965??

A number of the new models of small reactor projects started in Western Europe. Then they moved out of it. I encourage everybody to do their own very sad search through the internet as I did, but no better story to tell than the one about a company called Dual Fluid. This German company won a Green Tech award in 2013... until it didn't. When the punters saw that A NUCLEAR DESIGN had won the popular vote, they quickly changed the rules on the fly to disqualify it, only to lose in court afterwards. Yet, the awards issuers were eventually “proven right”, since the company has later relocated to Canada. The concept is an inherently safe reactor (i.e., the laws of physics ensure that no accident can cause greater damage than a conventional plant of equivalent size), able to use spent fuel from conventional nuclear reactor in the process. Mind you, some other designs do so as well... amongst them, a Chinese one.

So, to summarize, EU has engaged in an anti nuclear crusade, even at the cost of holding on to spent fuel that it will have to recycle and/or dispose of through expensive processes in one or two specialized plants, or keep in safe stowage next to the existing plants or in designated long term repositories.  OK so far? Hooray for Clean Air!!

Yet, the same EU which hates conventional nuclear plants of proven design like the seven plagues of Egypt is prepared to support a Fusion project which has never produced net electricity so far, with all in costs variably assessed at between 22 and 65 Bn. USD total, for a pitiful improvement in nonproliferation risk and/or fuel cycle on variants of a design which has been proven to work in the year when “Help” by the Beatles was the spanking new Top Ten song and Germans proudly drove their brand new Volkswagen 1500s to work while USA citizens ogled at the new Chevrolet Impala.

But as I said, my interest in energy should not swerve me off the international political angle, since there is in Europe always someone in the room, which is not an elephant at all: Russia.

The West has in fact all but abandoned the intent of being a player in Nuclear power. In recent times only Finland, as part of its bet on Nuclear, had a French design plant built but more importantly  has already planned  its permanent disposal site for nuclear waste. Sweden has some legacy reactors, it's nominally in favor of replacing them but no plans to do so are in the works.  In the US, only two greenfield plants have been authorized since 1977, while 22 plants licenses are due to expire in less than ten years. Germany is actively fighting the very concept at home and near abroad, destroying plants even with useful remaining life in them. The UK is building Sizewell C, and Rolls Royce has a tentative project, but you know, “Brexit”, it's not Europe any more. France, once Heaven to those who despise CO2 generation and dependence on hydrocarbons for energy generation, Has adopted a policy ensuring it will reduce nuclear production from 70% to 50% of demand. That will impact the neighbors, including my poor Italy, who practically PAID for a couple of them by importing energy from France. Remember, WE stopped all of our Nuclear plants in the 1980ies, beating Germany by four decades. Eat your heart out, Frau Merkel!

That leaves two and two halves countries with a complete nuclear supply chain ready to produce and deploy nuclear plants to supply on demand/baseload energy: China, and Russia (The halves are Canada and the US).

For political and industrial reasons, China is second choice. Too many political strings attached, etc.

In fact the best salesman for Rosneft has been Xi Jing Ping with his *cough* muscular interpretation of the mix of economic and “wolf” foreign policy. Plus, Russia has been a pioneer in the field due to its Cold War history: Navy nuclear submarines variously employed radical reactor designs in order to compensate with raw ship performance the advanced sensor and electronic suite advantage of the US Navy Subs. Furthermore, Russia operates a couple of ship types which due to recent environmental regulations can come in handy in international markets: CIVILIAN nuclear powered ships (Icebreakers etc.), and floating Nuclear power plants. These have a relatively low power output, provide process heat at the same time, and can be moved at will.

The only equivalent concept in the West is... in the East. An US based company called Thorcon is angling to provide a ship based system to Indonesia, and it's anyway a molten salt design.

So what's up for the EU? At some point, a political elite that with enormous effort has scared the yeomanry into thinking Nuclear will melt their faces will have to both provide energy to its citizens and dispose safely of preexisting spent fuel. As matter stands now, Russia is angling for the first need (with Luddite energy starvation as its main competitor), and China for the second.

Nuclear reactors in fact represent just a part of the nuclear waste a modern society produces (just as “oil” really means also plastic and many other products punters are unaware of, but I digress) Much of it is in medical usage, and  some of that is so harmless that the disposal procedure is literally “wait a week for radioactivity to decay then throw the liquid down the toilet”, but some has to be disposed of more carefully. As with plastic at al., our environmental conscience coupled with massive doses of technical ignorance, NIMBY effects and lack of global vision will mean one thing: Profit!

For other Countries, of course, and “profit” is not the only advantage for them. While China won't probably be able to reenter western markets with complex turnkey systems of their own build and designs, it has two income stream generators where it will make a lot of dough: Solar Panels, whose construction process is hugely influenced by its environmental impact (toxic rare metals, etc), and, eventually, the disposal of western nuclear waste, both from legacy reactors and some medical stuff as well. Indeed, given that the new designs they are researching use those as fuel, the West would be paying to provide them with energy., with the added political bonus that for China this would be a huge political lever: again, Italy has not picked its final nuclear waste repository so far, and it was one of the lone countries in Europe which signed a BRI document with China. Of course, the new government has itself been nearer the present US administration, but take into account that the US having killed Yucca mountain it's in the same spot, hence it would be unable to counteroffer should China *cough * relieve Italy of its burden. For a fee, of course.

The EU has of course provided China with a strong hint: in the March 2021 “Technical assessment of nuclear energy” the study group quoted as one of the main consideration that kept Nuclear Power out of the taxonomy in the face of its technical/economic advantages versus the alternatives in this passage:

“While consideration of nuclear energy from a climate mitigation perspective was therefore warranted, the TEG could not reach a definite conclusion on potential significant harm to other environmental objectives, in particular considering the lack of operational permanent experience of high-level waste disposal sites. Therefore, nuclear energy was not included at this stage in the EU Taxonomy. Instead, the TEG recommended that more extensive technical work be undertaken on the “do no significant harm” (DNSH) aspects of nuclear energy”.

Just to remind punters: Germany had IN COUNTRY at least one known team working on a reactor design that USED high-level waste as FUEL. Yet I heard no sobs when these went their merry way, boarded a plane and went across the Atlantic... draw your own conclusions.

But while China steals the limelight, the man singing “io triumphe” remains Putin.

 Soviet Russia, and even IMPERIAL Russia before that, angled for a couple of strategic objectives: neutralizing Germany as a possible antagonist in its eastern Europe sphere of influence, and having a permanent warm water port in the Mediterranean.

Through a combination of the EU Anti-Nuclear shift, a cavalier attitude by the West towards having a Germany – Russia UNDERSEA pipeline instead of one crossing the Baltic States and Poland, a flexible US administration and a smattering of board appointments of former leaders, he now has the first in the bag. Not only he can afford to be generous, it's in his best interest, in order to avoid push-back... now. Plenty of time to tighten the knot should the need arise. He's not as "Uncultured" as his younger communist brother.

Furthermore, thanks to some fancy footwork and adaptability, he has the second in Syria, and he will not yield that gem. Sometimes I think he seeds Russian mercenaries all over the Middle East – North Africa theater only as pawns to be sacrificed when pressed in order to keep the Queen, but from where I sit, as an amateur, rarely Putin makes a move that carries only ONE possible avenue where he gains even a small advantage.

And “where I sit”, Italy, is becoming quite an hot seat, more so down the line. For one, to some extent the Alps have become the EU border, with Libya gone. In fact for illegal immigrants it is now  as difficult to cross the Alps into France, Austria or Switzerland as it is to cross the Med, even if the second is more personally risky. I live not an hundred miles from the border and this winter there have been multiple instances of people almost freezing over, caught in the attempt to cross through mountain paths I trekked on years back.

Should the US prove unable to keep tabs on the Med, we could see the traditional Oil countries actually get friendlier with Russia, which is proving shrewd  to cut its cloth on a very limited budget according to any local point of stability it can think of: irrespective of the amount of money and manpower Iran sent to help Syria, it was really Russian air support and tactical expertise that turned the conflict there. To an old man like me, that is neither a surprising development, and it's not even new: I am old enough to remember checking the news about Slava-class Soviet missile cruisers stationing off the Libyan coast. Yet, it's one thing to anchor offshore, another one to have a port cum air bases. Plus western politics is radicalizing along a political fault line that I see, do not like, and Russia likes instead: an US-EU leftish political blob which thinks that it's perfectly kosher to act in partizan ways in venues and organization whose functioning rests on agreement between COUNTRIES. So, when just before entering into the NATO summit, Italy's president makes a disparaging remark naming Trump, I have a cold water shot through my heart and remember somebody, somewhere, calling against “foreign entanglements”... what happens if a future US administration changes, our administration  doesn't and an Isolationist US wing prevails? Europe made a point  of pride about  not being able either to defend itself or to develop a coherent foreign policy; building either is a work measured in decades, and in any case that hinges on putting a broom to the political setup, all the while boiling the stew in a very difficult economic brine... some of it, as I wrote, of EU's making.