Switzerland on Dec. 20 shut down one of the world’s oldest nuclear power plants, as part of its plan to shutter all its reactors by 2050.
Muehleberg Nuclear Power Plant, the smallest of the country’s four remaining plants, began operating in 1972. The 355-MW facility operated by Bernische Kraftwerke AG (BKW) and majority-owned by the canton, or state, of Bern, the nation’s capital, featured boiling water reactor technology.
Switzerland’s three remaining nuclear plants include Beznau, with two 365-MW pressurized water reactors; Gösgen, with a 970-MW pressurized water reactor; and Leibstadt, with a 1,165-MW boiling water reactor. Unit 1 at Beznau came online in 1969 and is the world’s oldest operating reactor, though it is scheduled to be closed by year-end 2029. The reactor was restarted in 2018 after being offline for three years when anomalies were found in its steam generator.
The Gösgen and Leibstadt plants are expected to close by 2040 and 2045, respectively.
BKW said it will begin dismantling the Muehleberg plant next month, and said it expects that part of the decommissioning process will last until 2034. BKW has estimated the cost of decommissioning the plant, including the disposal of nuclear waste, at about $3.1 billion.
Swiss lawmakers decided to phase out nuclear power in the country after the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan. The country plans to significantly increase its use of renewable energy resources such as wind and solar to replace the lost nuclear generation. Switzerland produces about 60% of its electricity from domestic hydropower resources. The country also buys power from neighboring countries, including nuclear generation from France and Germany, though Germany plans to close all its reactors by 2022.
—Darrell Proctor is a POWER associate editor (@DarrellProctor1, @POWERmagazine).
Credit to Author: Derrick Penner| Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2019 22:06:44 +0000
Penticton-based Structurlam Mass Timber Corp., a B.C. pioneer in turning plain lumber into engineered structural timbers, is taking its expertise stateside with a $120-million expansion into the southern U.S.
A decade ago, Structurlam was the cutting-edge producer of structural components for the wave-shaped ceiling in the daring design of the Richmond speed-skating oval for the 2010 Olympics.
Now, mass-timber construction is mainstream enough that U.S. retail giant Walmart has picked Structurlam to supply the engineered timber components for a massive new home office complex in Bentonville, Ark.
Hence Structurlam’s announcement Dec. 9 that it will purchase, retrofit and equip a 288,000-square-foot former steel plant in Conway, Ark., about 50 kilometres northwest of the state’s capital Little Rock, to produce mass-timber components.
“This is still very much a nascent industry” in the overall scheme of commercial construction, said Structurlam CEO Hardy Wentzel, “but the critical-mass snowball is building.”
It is building because of the increasing attraction of wood’s sustainable properties to businesses and developers focused on reducing the climate impacts of their buildings.
More architects are also being drawn to the aesthetic appeal of wood as engineers learn more about how to use it in larger structures and governments make it easier by updating building codes to allow for taller buildings.
B.C., for instance, announced this spring that it would allow for mass-timber buildings as tall as 12 storeys before changes in the Canadian building code were to take effect.
Promoting mass-timber construction is a priority for the provincial government as a way to create higher-value forest products at a time when B.C.’s Interior lumber sector is struggling with timber supplies that have shrunk the volume they can produce.
The province is looking to mass timber as a way to get more value from B.C. lumber, such as the structural components in the Telus Garden office building, made by Structurlam, pictured here.Submitted / PNG
Premier John Horgan characterized it as a strategy of “moving away from (a) high-volume to a high-value” forestry sector in a speech to the Council of Forest Industries last spring, and promised to use engineered timbers in high-profile public projects such as the new St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver and a major renovation of the Royal B.C. Museum in Victoria.
In the U.S., even major corporations are turning to mass timber, such as Microsoft, which plans to use cross-laminated timber panels to reduce the carbon footprint of a new corporate campus in Mountain View, Calif.
“What we’re seeing in this nascent industry, what’s coming at us, I have never seen a revolution like this before,” Wentzel said.
And the U.S. expansion into Arkansas is about securing business in the southern U.S., where competitors are starting to manufacture engineered-timber products closer to markets that Structurlam can’t sell into economically from its base in southern B.C.
Wentzel said the company has calculated that trying to ship cross-laminated timber panels and glue-laminated beams to a project in Nashville, Tenn., from B.C. would be 15-per-cent more expensive than doing so from the new Conway plant, which Structurlam is aiming to have online by mid-2021.
“Part of making mass timber a real thing is (that) it has to be economic,” Wentzel said.
He added that Structurlam continues to expand in B.C. and has hired 70 people over the last year, but “the mass-timber market, if we don’t expand, it’s going to outgrow us.”
“As a leader in the industry, I don’t think you want to let that happen.”
That Structurlam has decided to proceed with such a substantial expansion in the southern U.S. is a sign of the momentum that is building for mass-timber construction, according to Lynn Embury-Williams, executive director of Wood WORKS! in B.C., an offshoot of the trade group Canadian Wood Council.
“It takes a sustained increase in demand to actually develop the right kind of investment environment for firms to invest in (new) production facilities,” said Embury-Williams.
And in B.C., she estimated that production of engineered-timber products, such as cross-laminated timber panels and glue-laminated beams, has more than doubled with expansions at Structurlam and new production plants opened by competitors.
Two years ago, StructureCraft Timber Engineering and Construction, a B.C.-based design-build contractor that works in mass timber, opened its own production facility in Abbotsford to make engineered-timber panels that use dowels to hold their elements together — called, aptly, dowel-laminated timber.
“We’re fully booked with our DLT plant,” said Gerald Epp Jr., business development engineer with the firm.
The company makes the panels for its own projects, Epp said, and “we’re seeing an ever-increasing demand, people wanting to explore it and use it in their buildings.”
And in the Kootenays, venerable family-owned sawmiller Kalesnikoff Lumber has begun initial production of engineered timbers at a new $35-million facility it has built near the rural outpost of Thrums, which lays between Nelson and Castlegar.
“We’ve always been focused on value-added (lumber) production from the get-go,” said Chris Kalesnikoff of their 80-year-old firm.
The decision represented a big risk, Kalesnikoff said, but they are confident they have built a state-of-the-art plant that represents new jobs for 50 people in the region once they have ramped up to full production.
“To continue to grow and try to stabilize your business, you have to do more with the resource,” Kalesnikoff said.
