Blatant Reality

By Jonathan Williams

A couple months ago, The Economist published a series of articles analyzing the future of nuclear energy. I had actually written this post the week these articles came out but have been holding off publishing because I didn’t feel that there was enough talk about nuclear energy. However, I now feel that the presidential primary has shed enough light on the issue that this topic of nuclear energy is now relevant. Another thing that made this article relevant is that Progress Energy has just announced that it has chosen to build a second nuclear reactor in Wake Country, NC. This is sure to bring the question about nuclear energy to the forefront even more.

 

Just to warn you, the single theme that connects these several articles seems to be the fact that they view the future of nuclear power in a positive light and I, for one, hold the same view. Therefore, don’t expect this article to denounce nuclear energy. Now that we have that disclaimer out of the way, let us begin.

 

The nuclear energy industry in the United States has been stagnant for the past thirty years with no new applications to build submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). This, however, is supposed to change over the next few months. According to The Economist, the NRC is expected to receive 12 new applications (new estimates hint that the number will be closer to 19 by the end of the year) to build nuclear power plants over this time period. The reason that there haven’t been any new applications is the fact that the price of building a plant is extremely high and can take years to wade through all the regulations. The Economist’s article “Atomic renaissance” gives an example at just how expensive and time consuming a nuclear power plant can be.

America’s most recent nuclear plant, at Watts Bar in Tennessee, started operations in 1996. But it took 23 years to complete at a cost of $6.9 billion; a second reactor at the site has been under construction, on and off, since 1973. Another plant, at Shoreham in New York, was completed and tested, but never allowed to start commercial operations because of local opposition. By the time it was decommissioned, in 1994—21 years after construction had begun—the costs had exploded from $70m to $6 billion. The local utility was able to pass most of this bill on to its customers. Not all energy firms have been so lucky: in 1988 Public Service Company of New Hampshire became the first American utility to go bust since the Depression, thanks largely to the fallout from a much-delayed nuclear project.

Many people cite that the potential deaths from possible nuclear complications as reasons against creating new nuclear power plants. However, in the article “Nuclear power’s new age,” the author gives you a cost comparison between nuclear power and our largest source of energy.

It may be that fears of nuclear power are overblown: after all, the UN figure of around 4,000 eventual deaths as a result of the Chernobyl accident is lower than the official annual death-rate in Chinese coal mines.

This example may be in China where safety concerns aren’t as important as they are in the United States, but coal mining deaths still occur in the US. Now they go on to state that there are other reasons to fear, such as nuclear material proliferation, but with other countries producing the same materials, we can really only worry about what we produce. This last quote could also be used by environmentalist as a support for using solar, wind, and bio power instead of coal, but those “renewable” sources come with their own problems that I am not going to discuss here.

 

In the article “Nuclear Dawn,” new nuclear power plants are described that utilize a different type of reactor that makes it virtually impossible to melt down.

A demonstration plant of a completely different type, a “pebble bed” reactor, is scheduled to be built in South Africa starting in 2009. Based on technology that originated in Germany, its design is unique in several ways. For one thing, its small size (165 megawatts) should make it comparatively fast and cheap to build; depending on power needs, several units sharing a single control room could be constructed on one site. And the uranium fuel is encapsulated in rugged “pebbles”, the size of tennis balls, which are designed to withstand a loss of coolant without disintegrating, making the reactor extremely safe. Andrew Kadak, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who has been developing a smaller, alternative pebble-bed design with his students, is convinced that “these reactors cannot melt down.”

This article also addresses the issue of what to do with all the nuclear waste. The answer to that is to burn it.

As part of a new multinational initiative called the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), however, America’s Department of Energy is supporting a type of spent fuel reprocessing which does not separate the plutonium from other highly radioactive materials in the waste, thus making it more resistant to proliferation than traditional reprocessing. This mixture of plutonium and other radioactive elements could then be turned into fuel suitable for use in “fast” reactors. Most reactors in operation today are called “thermal” reactors, because they use a moderator to slow down the neutrons and promote fission. Fast reactors, in contrast, do not employ moderators and use much faster neutrons to produce fissions. So they can consume many of the long-lived radioactive materials that thermal reactors cannot.

Nuclear energy is a very promising source of power for the coming years. It has evolved over the past couple decades as it has had to pass rigors of the environmental movement’s tests. With the next generation of nuclear plants being much more advanced, accidents such as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island are made almost impossible. Therefore, for an cleaner source of energy that can produce fairly inexpensive energy after startup, nuclear energy is what we should be investing in.