Last Friday, two substantial representatives of the Romney and Obama campaigns debated energy before an audience at MIT, with Technology Review editor Jason Pontin acting as moderator. Oren Cass, domestic policy director of Romney for President represented the Republican; Joseph Aldy, a former White House adviser on energy and the environment, spoke for the Democrat. The whole two-hour conversation was posted as a webcast today by EE News's EETV, along with a complete transcript.

The standoff initially took a predictable course, with Obama's surrogate asserting that the president's "all of the above" energy strategy has been associated with prodigious increases in domestic U.S. oil production and big cuts in oil imports, while Romney's man argued the private sector was largely responsible for those achievements—and that the improvements would have been even bigger if the Federal government had not got in the way. Romney's Cass took Obama to task for opposing development of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and for temporizing on the Keystone pipeline, while Obama's Aldy accused Romney of being insensitive to the environment and to the needs and desires of future generations.

Overall, as far as that went, neither surrogate made an overwhelmingly convincing case that the other candidate would govern much differently as president. (Arguably, the odds are that Obama would eventually approve Keystone if re-elected, on the one hand, and that Romney would eventually find excuses for not opening ANWR to development, on the other.) To the extent the surrogates did differ significantly on oil and gas questions, the results seemed on the whole to be a draw, with one doing better on certain specifics, the other excelling on others.

Cass claimed Federal permitting was too slow, and that some states do much better, issuing permits in two weeks rather than a year; but Aldy asked if it is really in the nation's interest for us to have 50 different set of rules on drilling, even from business's point of view. On the question of what energy independence means, Aldy said it meant not having to worry about world oil prices when buying gasoline at the pump--but then proceeded to implicitly contradict himself, saying that fuel efficiency standards would make the future total cost of gasoline lower even if world oil prices were higher. (If cars are 50-percent more efficient, then even if world oil prices are twice as high, the cost of filling your car will stay the same.)

Regarding the Corporate Fuel Efficiency Standards (CAFE), which Obama has greatly strengthened, Cass may have scored a point when he said, rhetorically, that you should always be suspicious when the government says it's doing something to save you money; if the development supposedly being encouraged by the policy would save you money, he said, it will happen anyway.

It was on the four Cs--climate change and "clean coal"--that the really sharp, irreducible differences emerged. Cass asserted that the Obama administration is flatly anti-coal; tellingly, he argued that the administration's stated support for "clean coal" is essentially disingenuoous because it means the administration only supports coal if all carbon associated with combustion can be captured and sequestered. Since carbon cannot for all practical purposes be captured and sequestered, argued the Republic surrogate, Obama in effect opposes all coal.

In response to a probing question from Pontin, Cass said the Romney campaign does not see greenhouse gas reduction as a legitimate policy objective in the context of coal and clean coal, despite s Supreme Court Decision ordering EPA to regulate carbon emissions. Cass said coal should not be the exclusive focus of greenhouse gas reduction policy, and that the Clean Air Act should be modified to exclude regulating carbon as a pollutant, which Romney considers inappropriate.

Aldy, alluding evidently to statistics that are widely cited these days but evidently not yet available to the general public, said that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have decreased more than any other country's in the last five years. That echoes a statement by the Colorado governor, at the time of the real presidential debate last week, that per capita U.S. greenhouse emissions are now back at 1990 levels. Aldy stressed the role of improved energy efficiency in bringing down emissions.

Cass repeatedly accused the Obama administration of having made an anti-coal agenda the centerpiece of its climate program. He said Romney does acknowledge that the world is warming, but is unsure about the magnitude and gravity of the trend. He said Romney favors a "no regrets" approach, with an emphasis on technology innovation. He wondered musingly what Obama's climate policy actually is.

Perhaps the most interesting two points in all that are these: (1) The Romney campaign does not see carbon capture and sequestration as an answer to greenhouse gas reduction; (2) it seems to think that the United States should have an explicit climate policy.

Five billion dollars over its original budget and years behind schedule, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) deserves to be recognized as perhaps the biggest and fattest white elephant of all time. The giant laser facility at Lawrence Livermore Lab in California first was conceived as a major project to demonstrate one of two alternative paths to harnessing the "energy of the stars" for power production, which is called inertial confinement fusion (the other, somewhat more credible path being magnetic confinement fusion).

Years ago, when the energy rationale for laser fusion began to look a little implausible and the projected cost of NIF already had ballooned from $2 billion to $4 billion, its promoters began to sell it to Congress and the Department of Energy as a means of simulation-testing nuclear weapons. The idea that the reliability of nuclear warheads could be evaluated by making laser beams collide in a microscopic point may never have seemed very plausible to the average layperson. As it happens, it didn't seem very plausible to most experts either: Richard Garwin, for decades the most highly regarded independent specialist on nuclear weaponry in the United States, told IEEE Spectrum six years ago that it would be "a mistake to assume that NIF experiments are going to be directly relevant to weapons testing.The temperatures in the NIF chamber are much lower than they are in actual nuclear weapons, and the amounts of material being tested are much smaller." But that didn't stop the U.S. Department of Energy from recommending the project and Congress from funding it.

With the total tab for NIF now running to an estimated $7 billion, the laboratory has been pulling out all the stops to claim success is just around the corner. At the beginning of July, it announced that 15 years of work had paid off in "an historic record-breaking laser shot," in which 192 beams delivered more than 500 trillion watts of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to its target." The lab's leaders predict that "ignition"-—the point where the 192 lasers actually deliver more energy than they consume—could occur as early as next year.

But "next year" already is years behind schedule, and so far, as William Broad reported in the New York Times last week, NIF simply "has not worked." Donald L. Cook, an official at the National Nuclear Security Administration who oversees the laser project, told Broad—who for decades has been the Times’s leading reporter on all matters relating to nuclear weapons—that "we're going to settle into a serious investigation" of what has gone wrong.

Having sold the fusion facility in its current incarnation as a device for testing the reliability of nuclear weapons, the lab's leaders now are back to selling it as an energy machine. The lab's director told CBS's "60 Minutes" earlier this year that NIF's aim is to generate "clean, limitless power." He said that would free the United States of greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on Mideast oil, and that commercialization of the technology could begin in ten years.

Unbelievable! For decades the joke about magnetic confinement fusion--much the more plausible approach to harnessing the energy of the sun--is that the technology is always 20 years away. So when will inertial confinement fusion be delivering commercial electricity? That one is easy. Never.

At a time when so many of the clean tech startups supported by venture capital or government grants are on the ropes or failing, it's refreshing to hear of one that is doing better than ever. Bloom Energy, the Sunnyvale company that makes an advanced solid oxide fuel cell, will be selling twice the quantity of fuel cell energy  it expected to AT&T, which plans to power data centers, administrative offices and customer service operations. The company had made news earlier this year when eBay announced it would install a 6 MW fuel cell bank made by Bloom at an expanding data center in Utah, making that the biggest single non-utility fuel cell installation ever. 

An important element in Bloom's recent market successes, notes Earth2Tech's Katie Fehrenbacher, is its wilingness to sell "energy as a service," in an arrangement that permits companies to commit to fuel cell energy purchases over a ten year period without having to purchase the novel fuel cells themselves. That transfers risk associated with the new technology from the users of the energy to the provider—and so, taking that into account, the current good news for Bloom could translate to bad news down the road, if its cells do not perform as well as the company believes they will.

Right now, however, energy-devouring data centers are proving to be a boon for makers of stationary fuels cells, both new entrants like Bloom and traditional manufacturers like Fuel Cell Energy, improving prospects for an entire business that had been in the doldrums, when utility demand failed to be as strong as once hoped. Better overall prospects mean more opportunities all around. Thus, Fuel Cell Energy, based in Danbury, Conn., has just entered into a US $6 million cost-sharing agreement with the Department of Energy to develop a solid oxide fuel cell variant that will run on syngas obtained from coal.

Less than two years ago, when Bloom launched its first press campaign and was featured on CBS television's "60 Minutes," it encountered some skepticism in the general press. London's Financial Times noted that Bloom was benefiting from big California subsidies and that some of its development had been rather secretive. For now, anyway, Bloom's position would seem to be secure..

We've reported before on the trend to massively upsize offshore wind turbines, and the Vestas V164 was slated to become the first 7-megawatt giant in the next couple of years. Vestas now says the timeline is still intact to roll out the V164, but it won't be 7 MW. Instead, improvements to the control system will up the output to a staggering 8 MW. That means a single turbine would be capable of powering more than 2000 homes, and large offshore wind farms of them would have truly massive capacities.

Interestingly, this increase (nearly 15 percent) in capacity comes without increasing the turbine's dimensions.

"As we progressed in the technology it was clear that an 8-MW version of the turbine will offer lower cost of energy and at the same time keep the reliability and structural integrity of the turbine unchanged," Vestas's executive VP and chief technology officer Anders Vedel said in a press release.

With its massive 80-meter blades—substantially longer than the wingspan of a 747—the V164 was already plenty big. The company plans on testing the first of those blades in the first quarter of 2013 at a U.K. facility on the Isle of Wight. The drivetrain will be tested at a different facility in Denmark, and the first full turbine is expected to be installed in 2014 at Oesterild, Denmark.

Other companies, including Sinovel and GE, are working on or producing turbines in the 6-MW range, but no other offshore entry approaches the 8-MW giant. There is one huge onshore turbine, Enercon's 7.5 MW E126, but there is a general consensus that such sizes are best suited to spots away from land. With European offshore wind efforts flying ahead as usual, and hints that the United States might finally start building up an offshore wind industry, these massive hulks will likely be looming over the waves all around the world within a couple of years.

Image and video via Vestas

New generations of gas turbines used in large power plants don’t come around that often.

Last week General Electric launched a set of 60 Hz gas turbines, intended for use in the U.S., Japan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, complementing a group of 50 Hz gas turbines introduced last year for use in Europe, much of Asia, and Africa. Together, these FlexEfficiency turbines represent a new generation of gas turbine technology, the first totally new design since the late 80s, said Eric Gebhardt, vice president of thermal engineering for GE Energy.

And what a difference a couple of decades makes.

The FlexEfficiency turbines will be able to rapidly increase or decrease power output. This is important when gas generation facilities are combined with renewables like wind and solar. Gas turbines designed in the 80s, explained Gebhardt, were optimized for efficiency, overall availability, and reliability; not for how fast they start up or shut down. And fast startups and shutdowns are tricky, he explained, because of the changes and stresses different parts of the turbine go through in response to the dramatic changes in temperature. The new turbines are incorporating better materials for thermal management, he said, including nickel-based superalloys and single-crystal materials along the hot gas path. They also use better cooling systems, integrate a better understanding of the clearances involved when different parts expand and contract at different rates, and rely on physics-based models for combustion control. As a result of the new design, Gebhardt said, a 750 megawatt system can reduce its power output to about 100 megawatts in about 6 and a half minutes and come back up again just as fast; previous facilities could only dial back to about 200 megawatts without fully shutting down and took several minutes longer to come back up.

Alex Trembath, a policy analyst for the Breakthrough Institute, told power company executives and journalists at a launch event in San Francisco, Calif., last Wednesday that initially people thought that the availability of cheap natural gas would be a threat to renewable energy, however, he said, it can be a boon. Gas turbines that can come online quickly when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow make solar and wind power a more realistic option for utilities focused on providing continuous power.

Celal Metin, chairman and CEO of the MET Group of Companies, Istanbul, Turkey, told the group that he has a different perspective; he sees solar and wind energy as ways of getting the most out of the use of natural gas; “when we combine these into a total plant concept, we see economics [of gas] are much better.”

When engineers at General Electric started developing this generation of gas turbines about three years ago, they had no idea that new techniques for gas extraction would suddenly make gas a more abundant and cheaper (at least in the U.S.) fuel. Instead, the company focused on creating systems that could increase and reduce power quickly, and therefore coordinate nicely with renewable forms of energy. But recent developments certainly make it a good time to launch technologies for generating power from natural gas; perhaps that’s why GE is calling this launch, with $1.2 billion in preorders at launch date, its most successful ever.

Said Gebardt, three years ago natural gas wasn’t predicted to go to $3 per million BTU, the energy portfolio shifts in Japan away from nuclear weren’t expected, so in hindsight starting this development, wound up, to put it mildly, “being the right decision.”

We picked the right product to build, he said, “and it’s even a better product today.”

The company announced that it will be shipping six new FlexEfficiency turbines to Chubu Electric Co.’s Nishi-Nagoya plant in Nagoya, Japan, where they will replace oil-fired generation equipment; eight to the Saudi Electricity Company in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in a brand-new plant; two to the Cherokee Clean Air Clean Jobs Project in Colorado, where they will replace coal-fired equipment; two to the Hess Corp. for a yet to be announced project in the U.S.; and one to another unannounced U.S. customer. The FlexEfficiency turbines will be manufactured and tested in Greenville, S.C.

Follow me on Twitter @TeklaPerry.

Photo: Scale model of GE's FlexEfficiency 60. Credit: Tekla Perry

When the two U.S. presidential candidates meet for their first debate this coming Wednesday, it is to be expected that they will differentiate themselves on energy issues, among others, and that Mitt Romney will portray President Barack Obama as anti-energy-development. Though nobody doubts that the president is indeed more attuned to environmental and public health concerns than a Republican president would be, and that he has tried harder to promote renewable energy technologies than a Republican would, Romney will be on somewhat thin ice. In the last year, Obama has increasingly described himself as sympathetic to all energy resources, and he can muster a good deal of evidence to support the claim that this indeed has been his real position all along. And now, with setbacks to oil development efforts in the Arctic, there is an inconvenient reminder that the most pro-development policies still can run up against hard physical realities.

Obama has fully embraced the revolution in unconventional natural gas, and he has done little or nothing to discourage an oil boom in North Dakota, which has leapfrogged California and Alaska to become the second largest domestic producer after Texas. During the years of Obama's presidency, domestic oi production has increased 25 percent, and dependence on petroleum imports has shrunk from 60 percent to 42 percent. Though the president became a good deal more cautious about offshore oil drilling after BP's catastrophic Gulf spill, Obama has quietly encouraged shallow-water drilling in the Arctic, as the New York Times reported last May. On that basis, Shell had hoped to begin drilling this summer, having invested $4.5 billion in exploration and development.

Two weeks ago, Shell announced it would have to postpone Arctic drilling until at least 2013 because of an accident involving a spill containment dome. The company was expecting to be in a position to drill up to five wells this summer and fall, the Times reported, but "equipment problems and persistent sea ice forced the company to cut back its program repeatedly." Meanwhile, though the Arctic is thought to contain about a fifth of the world's recoverable oil, the CEO of France's Total has expressed doubt what whether Arctic oil can be realistically extracted at all.

The Total CEO distinguished between oil and natural gas, which he thinks is more recoverable in difficult environments because spills are more easily handled. With Norway's Statoil and Russia's Gazprom, Total is highly invested in the vast Shtokman field, which is thought to contain enough natural gas to fuel the world for a year. But Shtokman is located 550 kilometers north of Russia's northern coast in the gale-swept and ice-afflicted Barents Sea. Gazprom leaders have begun to transmit mixed signals about whether Sthokman in fact can be developed, leaving Total and Statoil executives scratching their heads.

With oil and gas company leaders pondering just how hard one can realistically push oil development, one wonders just how hard Candidate Romney will be able to push President Obama on the issue.

From almost the dawn of the nuclear age, India has been among the countries with the highest ambitions for what was called "the peaceful atom." It remains firmly committed to a long-term program of conventional reactor and advanced reactor development which could, in principle, help satisfy the fast-growing nation's thirst for electricity and help quench greenhouse gas emissions. Yet no other country's actual nuclear achievements have so consistently fallen short of goals. As M.V. Ramana observed of India in a 2007 article in IEEE Spectrum, "Early on, the country's top nuclear officials forecast that by 1987 nuclear energy would generate 20 to 25 gigawatts of electricity. Later estimates inflated that figure to 43.5 GW by the year 2000. Today, India's 17 reactors generate 4.1 GW, a mere 3 percent of the country's total electricity-generating capacity."

Obviously India, with one of the world's best networks of technology institutes and a huge pool of highly qualified engineers, is capable of doing better. Yet unrealistic objectives, poorly conceived organization, and chronically inadequate management continue to dog the program. Thus, a recent review of India's Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) by the country's Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) finds drastic shortcomings.

CAG's objectives were to determine whether AERB has a strong enough legal status, has been able to develop safety policies as needed, regulate nuclear utilities effectively, and ensure compliance with its rulings, monitor and regulate radiation exposure of workers and public, put emergency plans into effect, prepare for reactor decommissioning, and maintain adequate liaison with relevant international bodies.

What did CAG uncover? In a nutshell, it found that:

• "the legal status of [India's] AERB continues to be that of an authority subordinate to the central government";
• AERB had "failed to prepare a nuclear and radiation safety policy for the country in spite of a specific [1983] mandate";
• AERB "had no direct role in conducting independent assessment and monitoring to ensure radiological protection of workers";
• AERB had "no proper mechanisms in place" to provide of safe disposal of nuclear waste, guarantee safe transport of wastes, and see that "radioactive sources did not get out of regulatory control."

Additionally, CAG concluded that AERB "was slow in adopting international benchmarks and good practices in the areas of nuclear and radiation operation."

At the heart of the problem, says Ramana in a recent commentary, is that even though the AERB is supposedly independent of the government's Department of Atomic Energy, in fact it is not. It reports to the Atomic Energy Commission, and, by law, the chairman of the AEC also is minister of atomic energy. A reform law proposed in 2011 would improve the situation only marginally, says Ramana, who is a physicist working at the Nuclear Futures Laboratory and the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University. While the AERB would be replaced by a new Nuclear Safety Council, chaired by the prime minister, the AEC chairman would continue to sit ex officio on that council. Thus, "many of the key processes involved in ensuring effective regulation will continue to be controlled by the AEC."

There's another big problem that the CAB report does not address explicitly, as Ramana observes, though its presence runs implicitly through many findings. The AERB has suffered from a lack of technical staff and technical facilities, which partly accounts for why it never prepared an overall nuclear safety policy to "give structure to practical radiation safety planning at lower levels" (Ramana), and why it has not paid any attention to reactor decommissioning.

Forbes energy blogger William Pentland has drawn attention this week to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on the near- and medium-term future of nuclear waste storage policy.

The report, "Spent Nuclear Fuel: Accumulating Quantities at Commercial Reactors Present Storage and Other Challenges," projects that the quantity of spent nuclear fuel stored at reactor sites (rather in permanent centralized repositories) will likely double by 2040, from 70 metric tons in 33 states to 140 metric tons. The quantity in temporary storage is equivalent to a block with the area of a football field and 17 meters deep.

Three things can be said about that, right off: (1) Contrary to one's likely first impression, a brick the size of a football field and 17 meters deep is actually not a large quantity in terms of physical volume; it can be easily visualized, which would not be true, for example, of the gigantic volumes of waste generated in coal mining, coal preparation, and coal combustion. (2) That compact volume contains a gigantic quantity of radiation, an amount constantly changing as new spent fuel is added and radioactive materials decay. (3) Given the small quantity but huge radioactivity of the spent fuel, there's no excuse for not handling it in the most responsible possible manner.

Of the existing spent fuel, about three quarters is in cooling ponds, while the remaining quarter has been transferred to much more secure dry casks, according to the GAO. The standing position of U.S. nuclear regulators has been that storage in pools is safe enough. But that position has run into considerable skepticism following the fire that broke out last in a spent fuel storage pond at Fukushima (photo), when the water level in the pool dropped and spent fuel rods overheated. A U.S. Appeals Court has ordered the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to take a much closer second look at temporary nuclear waste storage.

The GAO is agnostic on the question of whether the benefits of accelerating transfer of spent fuel out of ponds into dry cask storage would outweigh risks associated with movement of the wastes. As it tried to look into the matter, however, it found relevant documentation distressingly difficult to locate. "Because a decision on a permanent means of disposing of spent fuel may not be made for years, NRC officials and others may need to make interim decisions, which could be informed by past studies on stored spent fuel. In response to GAO requests, however, NRC could not easily identify, locate, or access studies it had conducted or commissioned because it does not have an agency-wide mechanism to ensure that it can identify and locate such classified studies. As a result, GAO had to take a number of steps to identify pertinent studies, including interviewing numerous officials."

The GAO has advised the NRC to get its documentation in order, and the NRC has accepted that suggestion. My suggestion is that we immediately accelerate transfer of spent fuel from wet to dry storage. The Fukushima fire showed that the risk of a catastrophic mishap in a spent fuel pond is not zero. The United States is and will remain for a long time to come under terrorist threat. A terrorist attack on a spent fuel pond could induce an environmental disaster of unprecedented proportions.

Surely a strong U.S. president in good standing could just order a change in policy and get the job done.

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Correction (9/24/12): Two readers have complained about my characterization of what happened in the Reactor 4 spent fuel pond at Fukushima, where over a period of days helicopters dropped water and firefighters sprayed water to prevent rods from being exposed and fire from breaking out. Reports as to just what was going on at the time were confused and confusing, and an impression has lingered rather widely, as one recent seemingly well-informed article reveals, that a fire actually occurred. But in fact the readers are right, and I stand corrected; no such fire occurred.

Eliza Strickland, who handled much of IEEE Spectrum's day-to-day and post-mortem coverage of Fukushima explains as follows:

“There was a lot of confusion about the status of the spent fuel pool in reactor #4. There was an explosion in reactor building #4—there was some structural damage to the building and the rods were jostled around. And then there was a lot of worry and speculation that the rods in the pool were uncovered, and there was indeed spraying and that silly helicopter business (although the targets for all that were both the cores and the pools). But subsequent investigation revealed that the rods were never uncovered, that they never caught fire and never posed a threat.”

Nevertheless, I would still add, the situation at Unit #4 vividly brought home the risks attendant to long-term storage of excessive quantities of spent fuel in ponds.

Newscasts and newspapers these days are filled with reports about a feud between Japan and China over island claims, skirmishes among many Pacific nations for position to control enormous oil and gas reserves in the South China sea, and the redeployment and buildup of U.S. military forces elsewhere in the Pacific, a region officially declared to be of primary concern.

In energy, however, the biggest recent news was the announcement two weeks ago of a US $13 billion deal between Russia and Japan to build a natural gas terminal in Japan to receive exports from Russia. Commenting on the agreement, which was unveiled during a meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Council (APEC) in Vladivostok, Gazprom chairman Aleksie Miller said that he expects the company's exports to Asia to exceed its shipments to Europe within a few years.

Gazprom, by far the world's leading natural gas company and by far the most important company in Russia, currently meets about a quarter of Europe's gas needs. Wary of that dependence, given Russia's repeated use of gas curtailments to get its way in disputes with former satellites and provinces, Europe has been seeking to diversify its suppliers. The Vladivostok agreement explicitly signals what gas market experts have been expecting, namely, that Russia can diversify too.

In interviews before the conference, Russian president Vladimir Putin said that at present Russia's economic relations with Asian countries are not commensurate with its geographic position. “Two-thirds of Russian territory is located in Asia, and yet the bulk of our foreign trade—more than 50 percent—comes from Europe, whereas Asia only accounts for 24 percent,” Putin told Russia Today. In his speech at the APEC meeting, Putin indicated Russia is now executing a pivot toward Asia, in effect an answer not only to Europe's maneuvers but to the U.S.–Asia pivot that President Barack Obama announced at the previous APEC meeting, last year in Hawaii. So notes energy specialist Michael Klare, author of a recent book on growing resource scarcity and  a professor of world security studies based at Hampshire College in Massachusetts.

Klare was an invited panelist at the APEC conference, an annual event that brings together top political leaders and corporate leaders in parallel meetings. He says the Russian delegation treated Europe as a stagnant, unpromising market and Asia as the region where the real action is. The delegation's star, and indeed the star of the whole conference, was Putin himself. Klare says he came across like a top corporate CEO playing at the of his game, completely relaxed and able to reel off reams of detailed factual information and statistics about the energy sector.

As I've written elsewhere, despite the unprecedented political opposition he is facing at home, Putin obviously is not planning to go away and, more than ever, will be a force to be reckoned with.

Japan made news this week with rumors and a subsequent announcement of a plan to abandon nuclear power by 2040. Then it made news again by backing off that promise thanks to industry pressure, instead saying the government would "engage in debate" about the issue. We've reported on the long line of countries aiming to phase out nukes in the wake of the Fukushima disaster here, but it's easy to forget that there are numerous countries building numerous nuclear plants and planning to build others. Here's a rundown of the ups and downs of nuclear reactors over the coming decades. Note that this isn't meant to break down the natural lifespans of reactors that may or may not be replaced, only those that countries have specifically stated will be phased out in recent years.

Baseline: The world currently has 435 nuclear reactors operating in 31 countries (according to August 2012 World Nuclear Association data). They provided 13.5 percent of the world's electricity demand in 2011.

Reactors on their way OUT:

Japan: The latest phaseout news came from Japan, the epicenter of nuclear distrust since the earthquake and subsequent meltdowns in 2011. If Japan follows through on the now-tenuous promise to phase out, that would mothball 54 reactors.

Germany: The other major power to abandon nukes since Fukushima is Germany. Some of the country's reactors are already offline and will stay that way, and for the remainder, their final fission will be by 2022, in spite of warnings of costs that could spiral into the trillions. That's another 17 reactors gone.

Belgium: Belgium joined the post-Fukushima European exodus, though nuclear has provided more than half the country's power. In total, Belgium will phase out 7 reactors by 2025 if a suitable power replacement can be found.

Switzerland: This country's five nuclear reactors, providing just under 40 percent of Switzerland's power, will be allowed to fizzle out at the end of their 50-year lifespans. This means that by 2034, 5 fewer nukes.

France: This one came as some surprise. After doubling down on nuclear power soon after Fukushima with big investments, news came from President Francois Hollande recently that France will scale back its massive nuclear capacity from around three-quarters of the country's total supply to closer to half. This could mean closing as many as 24 of 58 reactors by the mid 2020s, though the total will likely be lower. 

Total possible phased out reactors: 107

Selected reactors on their way IN:

China: China has an astonishing 26 reactors currently under construction, and the WNA says "many more are likely to be so in 2012." No country is more firmly in the pro-nuclear construction camp than China.

India: Another country leaning heavily on nukes for their future power supply is India, with 20 working reactors, current construction of another 7, and 20 more planned beyond that.

South Korea: This country plans to have nine new reactors online by 2021, with a general plan to jump from around 30 percent of electricity generation to 60 percent by 2035.

Russia: Ten new reactors are under construction in Russia, with 14 more planned.

Other countries with a handful of reactors under construction each include the United States, Finland, Slovakia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates.

Total reactors under construction: 60—at least, with dozens more planned.

Looking at actual construction, that's more OUT than IN, but adding the planned reactors shifts the balance the other way. So it seems at this point that nuclear power will rise rather than fall, at least on a global basis.

The latest joint report from the UN's Nuclear Energy Agency and the International Atomic Energy Agency found that nukes will expand between 44 and 99 percent by 2035. Over the next 10 or 15 years, a world map of nuclear plants will basically show a bunch of dots moving out of Europe and into Asia, with more dots added than subtracted.

Image via Bill & Vicki Tracey