In the early 1990s, deregulating electricity generation seemed like a good idea. Led by the UK, many markets rushed to dismantle their vertically integrated electric utilities with the goal of creating competition to benefit their customers, the electricity using public. The view was that utilities had become fat and lazy Read more…
Energy is life. We depend upon it to get from place to place, warm (or cool) our homes, cook our food and communicate with one another. Everything we need to live our lives comes from a supply chain that uses energy to mine raw materials, manufacture products and ship them Read more…
As the 11th anniversary of the Fukushima accident passed in March, there were none of the regular articles that we see in the press every year to remind us how scary that event was. Often these articles have focused more on the nuclear accident and barely mentioned the catastrophic impact Read more…
This month, as we continue our short series on energy economics, our focus is the nuclear industry’s commitment to safely managing its wastes. More specifically how this commitment ensures the cost of managing waste is included in nuclear power economics and how funds are set aside to pay for it. Read more…
In our last post, we quoted from recent reports that clearly lay out the environmental benefits of nuclear power. This month we want to start off the year by launching a short series addressing some of the issues that impact energy economics. Today we will talk about the importance of Read more…
This past year, as COP26 came and went, and the climate discussion turned from emission reductions to net zero targets; more and more governments have come to accept that nuclear power should, and in fact must, play an important role in meeting their aggressive climate goals. China is leading the Read more…
The role of nuclear power in supporting global decarbonization was discussed more at this COP than at any previous one. We have seen articles with headlines like “Nuclear Was the Quiet Hero of COP26” talking about the gains made in getting people to listen to the arguments in support of Read more…
In advance of COP26, the next important global meeting to discuss climate change, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released it World Energy Outlook 2021 (and for the first time is offering it for free). And while it notes “a new energy economy is emerging”, it is telling us what we Read more…
So far in 2021 two new countries have started producing nuclear energy for the first time. The UAE has put the first unit of its 4-unit Barakah plant into service with the second one following close behind. In Belarus, it is the same story, as the first unit of the Read more…
President Moon Jae-in of South Korea followed through on his campaign pledge to reduce Korea’s reliance on nuclear power only a month after his inauguration in May 2017. He quickly announced Korea would stop building new reactors and not life extend those in operation. The objective was to replace nuclear Read more…
When considering the sustainability of future low carbon energy sources, the focus tends to be on where the energy comes from. Renewable energy is seen as environmentally sustainable in that it is both low carbon and the resource unlimited; energy from the sun, wind and water will never run out. Read more…
Europe is fully committed to addressing the climate crisis, targeting a 55% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 (from 2020 levels) and then becoming the world’s first carbon neutral continent by 2050. Today, almost half of its low carbon electricity comes from nuclear power as Europe has the world’s largest Read more…
Ten years have passed since Japan suffered the great Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that killed 20,000 people, caused US$300 billion of damage and initiated the accident at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant. Reviewing the media reporting last month, the nature of the stories has changed. There were of course Read more…
In December we wrote about the world’s drive to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050. A laudable goal, the World Energy Outlook (WEO) 2020 illustrates a possible path to getting there. This would be achieved through electrification (using clean electricity sources), efficiency gains and behaviour changes. The first two Read more…
When it comes to the economics of electricity, there is no report more important than Projected Cost of Electricity, issued every 5 years by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA). This report (now in its 9th edition) collects electricity costs of various technologies from Read more…
What a year it has been! A year ago, we were all looking forward to the possibilities of a new decade. Today, as the year comes to a close, we are happy to see 2020 behind us. We don’t usually write about events outside the energy industry. But this year Read more…
Adopted in 2015, 196 countries signed the Paris Climate Agreement (to date 188 of them have ratified it) accepting global ambition to limit global warming to “well below” 2C and adding an aspirational goal of limiting warming to 1.5C. The Paris deal also commits signatories to balance greenhouse gas emissions Read more…
On October 22, 2020 Darlington Unit 1 achieved a milestone never achieved before by a nuclear power plant running for 1,000 days continuously without an outage, either unplanned or planned1. And it is still running. This unit, operated by Ontario Power Generation (OPG) secured the world record for continuous operations Read more…
Nuclear power can provide almost limitless economic, reliable, low carbon electricity to power the world, yet it continues to struggle to achieve the respect it so desperately seeks. For 40 years we have been hearing the same thing – that for nuclear power to achieve its potential we must work Read more…
Last year we started a 3-part series on Saving the planet with nuclear power. First, we talked about keeping the existing nuclear fleet operating as long as possible (Saving the planet step 1). Then, in step 2, we talked about building a new global fleet of large Generation III nuclear Read more…