The nuclear bottleneck

by Josh Loposer
Mar 20th 2008 @ 4:31PM

Filed under: Alternative Energy

Of all the emissions-lowering options available in the world of energy generation, it seems that nuclear is clearly the popular and practical favorite. The Bush administration, along with this year's presidential hopefuls have all expressed interest in pursuing nuclear energy as a way of lowering US greenhouse emissions. And while there is a pretty impressive wave of enthusiasm behind building more nuclear power plants, it turns out that there's a pretty big hang-up in their plans to clean the air, and it's not coming from Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne.

As it turns out, no matter how much harumphing gets done in Congress, there is only one company in the world that forges the $350M dollar reactor cores -- and, as Bloomberg reports, they're turning them out at a speed of 4 per year. Ingots, as the giant steel cores are called, are only produced by Japan Steel Works Ltd., consequently an old samurai sword producer. The CEO maintains that their closest competition is still 5 years away from matching their technology. Oops.

Representatives at JSW worry about this new resurgence in the popularity of nuclear power, saying that their capacity is not set to meet the new demand. Congress has already earmarked $18.5 billion for nuclear loan guarantees, but there's really no clear picture of how fast this money can be spent with the current bottleneck of nuclear reactor cores. According to Earth2Tech, developers are laying out deposits as big as $100M for projects as far out as 2015.