NEW YORK (Commodity Online): The year 2011 saw significant events in Uranium industry's mainly after the Fukishima disaster. It had wieghed heavy on the nuclear spot price and also on outlook for 2012.
With the Fukushima disaster, earthquake-related reactor shutdowns, 2011 was a year the nuclear power industry would prefer to get behind it as quickly as possible.But, looking ahead to 2012, experts see continuing challenges that will make it extremely difficult for the nuclear power industry to expand in the U.S. beyond a small handful of reactor projects that government agencies decide to subsidize by forcing taxpayers to assume the risk for the reactors and mandating that ratepayers pay for construction in advance.
The cheap natural gas price and also the high construction of nuclear reactor cost is expected to constributed heavily to down grade uranium usage in the coming years.
According to a paper presented by Mark Cooper, senior fellow for economic analysis, Institute for Energy and the Environment,Vermont Law School, the cost of nuclear power, which already had risen sharply in 2010 and 2011 before the Fukushima disaster, could climb another 50 percent due to tighter safety oversight and regulatory delays in the wake of the reactor calamity in Japan.
Many countries started reviewing their nuclear power policy after the Fukushima disaster. Some new projects were dropped.
"Before Fukushima, the mythical 'nuclear renaissance' had already proven to be a bubble with the air rapidly leaking out of it.Fukushima will make it even more difficult to inflate. Fukushima is magnifying the economic problems that the 'nuclear renaissance' faced, which are the very problems that that have plagued nuclear power throughout its history." said Cooper.
"Nuclear power suffered from high cost and continuous cost escalation, high risk and uncertainty long before Fukushima. The nuclear reactor disaster at Fukushima will increase the cost and further undermine the economic viability of nuclear power in any country that conducts such a review. The Japanese government has recently estimated that the cost of power from nuclear reactors will be 50 percent higher than estimated seven years ago. My analysis shows this increase is consistent with the impact of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl." he added.
Fukushima has stimulated vigorous reviews around the world, in part because of the severity of the accident, in part because it is the worst accident affecting a nuclear reactor in a market economy and in part because it occurred in a nation that was assumed to have a high standard of safety and superb technical expertise. The challenges perceived by those responsible for nuclear safety around the world in the wake of the Fukushima accident are quite substantial.
Perhaps for the world, Fukushima disaster was a speed breaker in race for becoming the nuclear super power
