Why greens must learn to love nuclear power

82 comments from readers

Val Mainwood
18 September 2008 at 12:00

Dear Mark,

Although the views you repeat on how nuclear power can reduce carbon emissions worldwide are held by a number of constituences, I have never seen the figures on which these conclusions are based.Would you mind giving details of the reports that you have read so that I may explore the matter for myself?

Garyfromvermont
18 September 2008 at 13:11

Given the length of your article, I hope I have adequate space to respond to it. In Pa, the site of Three Mile Island, the utility settled many court cases with significant payouts to afffected individuals. An acquatintance was outside in Lancaster at 17 years old playing tennis that day. Now at 40 she has had cancer 3 tmes and many of her friends have had stillborn births and children with birth defects.In Chernobyl, people are still dying from secondary effects of the release... and a 30 mile diameter area is still considered forbidden to eat food from or to live on..the exclusion zone. Re- free fuel, according to Helen Caldicott, if every generator in the world was nuclear there would be enough uranium for about 9 years. Meanwhile in the United States, in order to enrich uranium to make it "fuel" for commercial reactors uses two 1000 Megawatt coal fired generators at the United States Enrichment Corp. in Paducah Ky. Additionally USEC releases as by product cfc 114, a far worse heat trapper and ozone destroyer than Carbon dioxide.

I live near a reactor that has had to power down 3 times in 13 months because the cooling tower collapsed, and the NRC approved fix was faulty not just once but twice. lf the only safety regulators in the country approve a faulty design and twice cannot repair a carpentry issue, are they truly adequate to be regulating the safety concerns of something when released known to change genetic structures?

tmkauffman
18 September 2008 at 15:09

Dear Mr. Lynas,

Your article was very well researched and makes good sense. The nuclear issue is near-and-dear to me as I have lived within sight of Three Mile Island for more than 30 years. In spite of all the fear the accident caused, there is no medical, scientific or environmental data that shows the accident had any effect on the people or the environment near the facility. The accident actually proved the safety of the plant design and spurred the industry to make safety its foremost concern.

I also want to add to your comments about Chernobyl.

- It is physically impossible for any US nuclear power plant to blow up like the Soviet Chernobyl reactor or explode like a nuclear bomb.

- The concentration of uranium in our reactors is so low that it is impossible for it to explode like a nuclear bomb. Can’t do it under any circumstance.

- The Chernobyl reactor design (RBMK) is unique to the former Soviet Union – none exist anywhere else in the world - for good reason.

- The Chernobyl reactor design is inherently unsafe. As temperature in the reactor goes up reactivity of the core goes up and can run out of control.

- By design, all US commercial reactors are self-limiting reactors. Reactivity cannot run out of control. As the reactor temperature approaches the designed limit – reactivity in the reactor naturally goes down. Under no circumstances can any US reactor run out of control like Chernobyl did.

- The worst thing you can do to a US reactor is to fail to provide adequate cooling following a reactor shutdown at full power, thereby allowing the residual heat to build up causing the fuel to break down or melt. This is what happened at TMI 30 years ago.

- Today, considering regulatory and procedural requirements, the number of automatic safe shutdown systems, normal and emergency cooling water supplies, and operator training all focused on protecting our reactors from overheating, it is very unlikely another TMI type accident can occur.

- And keep in mind that unlike Chernobyl all of our plants employ containment structures designed to protect vital systems inside from external threats, and to contain the effects of “worst-case” reactor accidents (examples: melted core, ruptured reactor vessel, broken main coolant pipe(s)). The TMI containment did exactly what it was designed to do. No one inside or outside the plant was harmed and there was no effect on the environment.

Thank You

T Kauffman, Pennsylvania

GRLCowan
18 September 2008 at 15:17

The oil and gas interests are threatened by the expansion of nuclear energy.

This was already true in 1972, when worldwide nuclear electricity production was 18 times less than last year. (BP keeps a nice spreadsheet.) At that time, they knew that mud always sticks, or in more media-savvy terms, deceitful framing is powerful. Some of the issues Lynas tries to address ethically, he succeeds in so addressing, but when they were first raised, it was with treasonous intent towards both the Earth and humanity.

Thus, the supposed public fear of radiation. If people did not stay indoors in the daytime, because they were not afraid of light, but a powerful lobby of panel-beaters persuaded them to shrink away from *streetlights* because they might have stayed on in daytime, and assured them that they were afraid of the *additional* light this might expose them to, it would be analogous to this fear.

Dennis Keim
18 September 2008 at 16:37

It's very nice of you to frame all the anti-nuke people as being irrationally emotional or immutably dogmatic. That certainly makes your essay target an easy one. Unfortunately, there's the work of folks like Amory Lovins who have been consistent in rejecting nuclear power based on the numbers not the emotions.

Matter of fact, most U.S. utilities have rejected new nuclear on the same basis as have the to main bond rating agencies of Moody's and S&P. Not exactly overly emotional ones in that crew.

Thus the big push for a government guaranteed loan program to make things all better in the risk department. If you like nuclear, I have some Washington Public Power Supply System Bonds you might be interested in. Frankly, we've got enough bailing out of risky business by government backed loans at the moment. I don't think we need any more of that when there are perfectly good less costly and less risky (on multiple levels) alternatives. Wind with compressed air storage for one example.

GRLCowan
18 September 2008 at 17:03

I'm glad to see Tom Blees' book getting another mention. He has been a fan of my boron-instead-of-electricity scheme for a number of years, and there's a chance the book might have a couple of words about it, or anyway there may be a capital B somewhere, perhaps an innocent-looking one at the beginning of a seemingly unrelated word. Check it out at prescriptionfortheplanet.com

Tom Blees
18 September 2008 at 17:08

Mark writes: While conventional thermal reactors use less than 1 per cent of the potential energy in their uranium fuel, fast-breeders are 60 times more efficient, and can burn virtually all of the energy available in the uranium ore.

Mark, please allow me to correct this one detail. Fast reactors are actually at least 100 times as efficient in utilizing the energy from uranium ore. The confusion arises because of uranium enrichment, which leaves behind 5 pounds of depleted uranium (DU) for every pound of lightwater reactor (LWR) fuel that's made. Then the LWR uses about 5% of the energy in that fuel. Fast reactors, though, can not only use the other 95% in the spent fuel, but the 5 pounds of DU that's been left behind, making them 100 times (or more, actually) more efficient.

Please check my website for more info at prescriptionfortheplanet.com. The book should be available for sale on Amazon within a week. Meanwhile, the beginning of the book is available to read on my site. Thanks for the article, Mark!

Tom Blees
18 September 2008 at 17:20

The two remarks above by two different people living near Three Mile Island are stunning in their contradiction of each other. The first is far from accurate on a number of levels, another topic covered in some detail in my book. What the second commenter from Pennsylvania didn't address was the assertion that uranium won't last, and that uranium enrichment will add too much CO2 to the atmosphere. With IFRs, we already have enough uranium mined and milled to provide all the energy humanity needs for hundreds of years, without mining a speck of ore or enriching any more uranium.

Tom Blees
18 September 2008 at 17:37

Dennis cites Amory Lovins' economic arguments against nuclear power, yet Lovins and many others conflate a totally broken political and regulatory environment in the USA with actual costs of reactors. In Japan, Taiwan, and China, Westinghouse and GE can build Generation III reactors for about $1-1.2 million USD/megawatt. Meanwhile, American utility companies claim it will cost up to ten times that much to build identical plants in the USA. Why the discrepancy? Because U.S. government regulations encourage private utility companies to gouge their customers. They are allowed to estimate the costs of future nuclear plant construction and begin charging their customers today based on those estimates, long before they even have a contract and years before they can even be expected to begin construction. It's an open invitation to inflate their estimates. It's not the cost of nuclear that's broken, it's the cozy and corrupt relationship between U.S. private utilities and the government. Just look up info on GE's ABWR reactors, now operating in Japan with more being built. They can build them in three years and the cost is a fraction of what the U.S. utilities (and Amory Lovins) claim.

jickemp
18 September 2008 at 17:38

I wish nuclear power was the answer (or as great a part of the answer as you say), but I remain a nuclear sceptic. To support nuclear power I would need to be convinced that:

1 enough nuclear power plants be built quick enough for nuclear to make a significant contribution to GHG emissions;

2 that the finances are in place to build them all;

3 that investment in nuclear would not divert significant resources from renewable energy technology R&D;

4 that a major security incident at a plant or targeting materials in transit would not cause the nuclear new build to halt, thereby postponing a really sustainable energy policy even more; and

5 that defence planners would not view a new nuclear build in Saudi Arabia or Syria, for example, as a potential provocation in need of response.

We need to use less energy and invest in energy efficiency on a massive scale. Investing in nuclear power is a dangerous (and exceedingly expensive) diversion. We need the imagination and build a genuinely sustainable energy policy and economy.

Tom Blees
18 September 2008 at 18:07

jickemp, please allow me to address your points:

1. We can actually build enough plants to virtually eliminate greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century with less economic stress than France went through during their conversion to nuclear.

2 and 3. It would, of course, require a commitment by government to undertake such a program, but the numbers definitely add up. The sort of buildup I propose in my book would actually save trillions of dollars over just proceeding with business as usual.

4. Moving spent fuel has been done in the USA for half a century. It is very manageable and the systems are very safe. The new plants themselves can be either built underground or covered with earth and can easily be made terrorist-proof. It's an easy engineering problem.

5. The core issue with internationalization of nuclear power is who controls fissile material. For maximum safety we have to decouple nuclear power from nationalism and create an international organization that would control every aspect of nuclear power wherever plants are built, along the lines of the autonomy of embassies. I deal with that and all these other aspects (and yes, with Mr. Cowan's boron vehicle fuel) in my book.

GRLCowan
18 September 2008 at 18:16

Lynas says, "Civil nuclear power began life as a heavily state-subsidised industry largely designed to produce plutonium for bombs". That's a little wrong with respect to its history in the UK and totally wrong for Canada and the USA.

The design of the UK's Magnox power station reactors was indeed derived from that of the non-power-producing Calder Hall one, which was meant to, and did, produce bomb-grade plutonium. Conceivably the Magnox reactors could have done so too, but I know of no evidence they ever did. Too much bomb-grade plutonium was too easily producible from the dedicated non-power reactor, and the quality of the stuff from power reactors was inferior. It was same in 1950s Britain as it was 40 years later in North Korea.

American commercial power reactors design was derived from that of submarine power plants, and the only military purpose they were designed for was providing reliable power deep underwater. On land, at refuelling time, American power reactor cores are still deeply submerged, so that the crane operators above the water are not irradiated but can see what they are doing. (True, the water is not salt water.)

taghioff.info
18 September 2008 at 23:08

@Tom Blees

I would love to hear your analysis of the following article by Tom Burke, who claims that the capacity to build all this nuclear scarcely exists, and that this, along with planning laws, rule it out as an option for climate change, given the timescales we face:

"Gordon Brown does not dither about nuclear power. His commitment to it is emphatic, advancing since the start of the year from a policy of simply replacing Britain's existing nuclear capacity to one of doubling it, and now to there being no upper limit to its share of electricity generation. Brown has undertaken a radical reform of the nuclear regulatory and planning processes, aimed at clearing the path for new reactors. It is therefore particularly poignant that this is a policy doomed to fail.

Energy prices are rising, the climate is changing and power stations are closing—so we need more nuclear power. So runs the overwhelming volume of argument in the media. But what is missing is any critical examination of the case that underpins these dire warnings from ministers and utility industry nabobs about the lights going out. The lights are not going to go out. The government's nuclear policy will fail. And all that will really matter is that we will have lost precious time in switching to a more climate-friendly method of electricity generation.

We live, these days, in what Eric Hobsbawm calls a "permanent present." Even recent history is quickly forgotten. Somewhere in my personal archive are the minutes of a cabinet meeting held in October 1979, which arrived on my desk at Friends of the Earth in a proverbial brown envelope. They recorded the decision of Margaret Thatcher's newly elected government to build ten nuclear reactors. The arguments were familiar. Oil prices were rising, An energy gap was imminent. Without a crash programme of nuclear reactors we would freeze in the dark. Sixteen years later, just one reactor had been built, at Sizewell in Suffolk. It cost more than double the original estimate. No one froze in the dark.

The story of British nuclear power

There is nothing in the history of nuclear power in Britain to inspire confidence. Most of our 19 reactors, which together have the capacity to generate 12,000 megawatts (MW), are of a design unique to Britain. These Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors (AGRs) were in 1974 described by Arthur Hawkins, chairman of the then-nationalised industry that placed the orders, as "a catastrophe." Today, four are not working, reducing from 20 to 15 per cent the share of electricity that is produced by nuclear.

A popular mythology has developed that blames the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island in the US and Chernobyl in Ukraine for the demise of nuclear power in Britain. Lately, the planning system has been added to this mythology. In fact, the only obstacle in the way of nuclear power for the last 20 years has been the unwillingness of electricity generators to take the risk. By the time of Chernobyl, in 1986, no nuclear power station had been ordered in Britain for eight years and in the US for 12. And the public inquiry that considered the application to build Sizewell B began in 1983 and took two years—only six months longer than the government now expects its accelerated planning procedures to take. The government then took two further years to give the go-ahead. Sizewell B opened in 1995, having taken a further eight years to build.

What actually killed nuclear power in Britain was Thatcher's decision to privatise the Central Electricity Generating Board—the previously nationalised generation utility. The City took one look at the books and told the government that the nuclear power stations were unsellable. They were promptly withdrawn from sale. The later privatisation of most of Britain's nuclear power stations was only possible because the burden of the decommissioning and waste management costs—now standing at over £70bn—was transferred to the taxpayer. This was a good example of a practice that has been much in the news lately in relation to the banking industry: privatising profits and socialising losses. So much for market discipline. It is an irony that the government's preferred plan for a nuclear renaissance involves renationalising British Energy as a French state-controlled utility.

Thatcher was as convinced about nuclear power as Brown. She was defeated by the lousy economics. Nuclear power has few attractions for private sector investors, especially in a competitive electricity market. All long-term investment in future electricity generation involves risks and uncertainties (including the price that will be put on carbon emissions). But nuclear power's risk profile is the worst. To be economic, nuclear power stations need to be very large (at least 1,000MW) and built in a series, ideally four or six at a time, probably on the site of existing stations. They are very capital intensive at both the start and end of their lives and, because of the initial costs, much more sensitive to the cost of capital, which can add 40 per cent or more to construction costs. They take a long time to build, and, when built, have to run continuously into a market where the wholesale electricity price can change constantly. The operators have to make adequate provision for the (currently unquantifiable) costs of waste disposal.

Coal-fired stations take perhaps three to five years to build, cost a lot less per unit of generation capacity and have no back-end liabilities to speak of. They are economic to build singly and therefore each new one is less at risk of failing to sell the power it produces. Gas-fired stations can be built in smaller units much more quickly, and so are even easier to match to shifting demand. Wind turbines can be built in very small tranches, even faster than gas.

Very high, uncertain and rising capital costs on a project that will produce no revenues for a decade or more are not a compelling proposition at the best of times. Add a host of hard-to-quantify sociopolitical risks, and it is not difficult to see why nuclear power programmes have always relied on large and sustained public subsidies.

Why is nuclear power so expensive?

There are only two honest answers to the question of how much it costs to build a nuclear power station. These are "I don't know" and "I'll tell you when I've built it." Everything else is a guess. These may come in official volumes stuffed full of impressive-looking data, but they are still guesses. Some numbers will illustrate the point. Between 1966 and 1967, reactor costs in the US exceeded estimates by an average 209 per cent. Between 1968 and 1969 they went up 294 per cent. Between 1970 and 1971 they went up 348 per cent. 1972 to 1973 was a good year, they only went up 318 per cent. But by 1974 to 1975 they were back up to 381 per cent. In 1976 they only went up 169 per cent. But by then the American utilities had given up. They have not ordered a nuclear reactor since 1974. We did little better. The cost of building Sizewell B went up "only" from £1.7bn to £3.7bn during construction.

The government's commitment to new nuclear power stations is based on just such guesses. The cost of a reactor is normally quantified by what it costs to build each kilowatt (kW) of its capacity to generate electricity. To find the cost, you multiply this by the reactor's size—measured in thousands of kW, or megawatts (MW). To this must be added the cost of financing the expenditure. In its January white paper on nuclear energy, the government's worst-case analysis assumed that the construction cost would be £1,625/kW, giving a total cost (based on a reactor size of 2,200MW) of £3.6bn. But in May, the German utility company E.ON estimated the cost at just over £3,000/kW, making the overall cost of a new reactor close to £6.7bn. Other recent guesses range from $4,000/kW (£2,162) early in 2007 to $10,000/kW in January 2008 (£5,000). This certainly looks like "I don't know" to me.

Nuclear enthusiasts argue that everything is different now. Lessons have been learned, designs have been standardised and new reactors can be built on time and to budget. But the fact that none of the three designs under consideration in Britain is operating anywhere in the world might give pause for thought.

Recent events in Finland provide further grounds for caution. There, French company Areva is building the first example of the reactor design most favoured for Britain, the so-called EPR. It has not been a success. The 1,200MW reactor is more than £1bn over its original £2.5bn budget and two years late just two years after construction began. If this is the best Finnish contractors can manage, the thought of what those who brought you the Scottish parliament or Wembley stadium might accomplish is chilling.

This is not just, or even mainly, about incompetence. Nuclear costs are rising disproportionately. This escalation—14 per cent a year after inflation, according to one estimate—has many causes. Nuclear power stations are intensive in metal and concrete, and their construction requires specialist skills. So they have been hit harder than other forms of power generation by the surge in engineering costs. The nuclear supply chain has atrophied in the quarter century since there were last large programmes in the OECD countries. In the US there are now only 80 nuclear-qualified suppliers of key components, compared to 400 a decade ago.

And there is only one global provider—the Japan Steel Works (JSW)—of the heavy forging capacity needed for reactor pressure vessels. JSW is already hard-pressed by demand for new refinery equipment and can only supply five new reactor vessels a year, although it wishes to double capacity to ten vessels. But the need to fund this investment is itself contributing to rising prices, which have increased by 12 per cent in six months, and JSW now requires a 30 per cent down payment on an order. It takes six years from the date of the order to get other key components, including reactor coolant pumps and control and instrumentation equipment

The human resources needed to resuscitate the nuclear industry are in even shorter supply. Before you can even apply for permission to build a nuclear power station, you need approval for the design you plan on using. This can take several years. Yet inspectors and engineers are leaving Britain's Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII), some to retirement and others to more lucrative employment with contractors hoping to come to the nuclear party. The NII now has only 16 people to carry out the detailed safety approval of new reactors, a task estimated to need at least 40. What this means is that if you wanted to have a reactor up and running in Britain by 2020, you would need to have sought approval some time ago. Generous pay rises, relocation from Merseyside and a new management structure are all proposed to relieve this bottleneck. But these reforms will need time to become anchored if we are to avoid an unacceptable choice between speed and safety.

The government has pledged that there will be no subsidies for new nuclear construction. But this was never credible, and it is already possible to detect signs of retreat. In 2006 the government bravely promised to "make sure that the full costs of new nuclear waste are paid by the market." By 2008 this had mutated into the more nuanced: "The government will [set] a fixed unit price [for] waste disposal at the time when approvals for the station are given." This effectively caps the costs of nuclear waste disposal to the operator and transfers the risk of cost overruns on to the taxpayer. It is hard to argue that this is not a subsidy.

Furthermore, as Stephen Thomas from Greenwich University has pointed out, if you take E.ON's estimate of the cost of a new reactor of £3,000/kW, then the operating cost of that reactor is likely to be about £80 to generate a kW of electricity for an hour—a measurement known as a kilowatt hour (kWh). The current wholesale electricity price, which is causing ministers such headaches, is about £40/kWh. We already know what happens to nuclear operators when their operating costs exceed the price at which they can sell electricity. In 2002 British Energy lost money hand over fist and found itself technically insolvent. But the company did not go bust. In a prequel to Northern Rock, the government bailed it out to the tune of some £4bn, taking a large stake in the business. (British Energy is now profitable, thanks to rises in fossil fuel prices.)

This precedent helps to explain why utilities companies are looking at nuclear power. They know that once Britain has started down this road, there will be no going back, as other investment will be suppressed. The "no subsidies" rule will be a distant memory. The utilities companies will be in a strong position to extract from taxpayer and consumer alike what they need to keep going.

Closing the generation gap

The idea that the world is on the dawn of a new nuclear age is no less of a fantasy now than it was in the early 1970s. Even the nuclear-supporting International Energy Agency's projections have little more nuclear power in operation in 2030 than there is now. That is because most of our present reactor fleet was built in a rush in the 1970s. Even with extensions, these are coming to the end of their lives. Much is made of the 32 reactors now under construction around the world, mostly in Asia. But 11 of them have been under construction for more than 20 years. Just to maintain the current number of reactors by 2025, we would have to build 250 more reactors than are currently under construction—or 15 a year between now and 2025. The build rate since 2000, almost all in Asia, has been one a year. Increasing this is certainly possible, but to do so by 15 times despite shortages of materials and manpower—and during a credit crunch—seems fanciful.

Britain is a very long way from facing a choice of building more nuclear or freezing in the dark. There is a real problem—three problems to be precise—with energy security, but none can be solved by nuclear power. The most urgent is the threat of interruptions to our oil supply, which could bring Britain to a halt. But our oil for transport cannot be replaced by nuclear electricity. Preventing instability in the middle east and reducing oil dependence by more efficient transport and logistics are the solutions here.

Much has been made of the threat of becoming overdependent on imported gas, particularly from Russia. Leaving aside that Russia is more dependent on our revenues than we are on its gas, half of our gas is used for heating domestic space and water, and cannot be replaced without a big transformation of our infrastructure. More is used for industrial processes, leaving under a third for electricity generation. But much of that is used to generate electricity at peak times because gas turbines are easy to switch on and off to meet short-term demand spikes. Nuclear power stations must be run continuously to be economic.

Ministers now often invoke the "generation gap" that will emerge as some 22,000MW of existing coal and nuclear capacity is closed between now and 2020, much by 2015. If this is not replaced by new nuclear power, runs the argument, then carbon-intensive gas or coal will have to be used at the expense of the climate. The British head of EDF, Vincent de Rivas, promises that he can deliver new nuclear electricity to the grid by 2017. But the government's own nuclear consultation is more realistic. It assumes that were an order placed today under its accelerated regulatory procedures, it would still be eight years before construction started. For a wholly new design, construction would take a further five years, at least. The government has yet to explain how a power station that won't open before 2021 can meet a "generation gap" it expects to appear by 2015.

Of course, no government will let the lights go out. So this generation gap is more a rhetorical device than a genuine threat. The government is now committed to producing at least 35 per cent of our energy from renewable sources by 2020. That may fill some of the purported gap. Energy efficiency will fill more. If nuclear cannot fill the remainder—perhaps 2,500MW—then coal will do it.

Some doubt whether the renewables target is achievable. In fact, it is more likely to be met than Brown's hopes for nuclear. Last year the world added about 2,000MW of additional nuclear capacity through improving the performance of existing reactors. Photovoltaic solar energy alone, one of the least economically attractive of the renewables, added 2,300MW. Wind power, which on many estimates already delivers electricity more cheaply than nuclear, added eight times as much.

Nuclear power is a low-carbon source of electricity, and will therefore avoid whatever tax is levied on carbon emissions. But it won't help Britain meet its climate change targets. The goal is to keep the eventual rise in global average temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius—the threshold of dangerous climate change. This means that greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2020 and then decline steeply. But if building the 15 reactors a year needed to replace the world's current capacity is going to be impossible—as it is—it is difficult to see how it could play a bigger role in reducing global carbon emissions.

The top climate priority is to very quickly make coal use carbon-neutral by deploying carbon capture and storage technologies. This is mainly for geopolitical reasons. The International Energy Agency forecasts 14,000MW of new coal-fired power stations by 2030. China is building new coal-fired plants at the rate of 2,000MW a week. It also has the world's most ambitious nuclear power programme, aiming to build 40 nuclear power stations by 2030. This latter effort would still provide only 4 per cent of China's electricity. Three quarters will come from coal. If this happens without the Chinese using carbon capture and storage, the government, and the world, will not achieve its climate change objectives. We will be saying hello to a four degree jump in temperatures and goodbye to prosperity and security for 60m Britons.

If we want others to make their coal burning carbon-neutral, we must do so ourselves. Actions speak louder than words. In the next three years, Britain will spend £2.8bn a year on cleaning up its nuclear legacy. We will spend nothing on deploying carbon capture and storage—the world's most important technology for ensuring climate security.

No one should doubt the good intentions of those who are arguing for a switch of scarce capital, materials and skills into nuclear power in Britain. It is not their intentions that are in question, but their analysis. We have been here before, with equally serious people arguing that there was no alternative to a nuclear future. In 1975 the UK Atomic Energy Authority told the royal commission on environmental pollution that by 2000 Britain would have 104 nuclear reactors. This did not happen not because the nuclear industry lacked support. Then, as now, government, business leaders, the unions and the media were all onside. It failed because economic reality intruded. It will do so again—but this time the consequence of going down the nuclear cul-de-sac will be much more serious."

Original link:

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10...

taghioff.info
18 September 2008 at 23:13

If the above post falls foul of moderation, please remove the text of the article and leave the comment and link intact.

Tom Blees
18 September 2008 at 23:54

Tag, I would love to reply to that article point by point, but I'm not about to hijack this thread. That article deals with so many issues that I've dealt with in my book that I'm not about to rewrite it here. If you really want to get my response, please pick up a copy of the book when Amazon lists it (within a week).

I'll just touch on a couple of the points.

The best place to look to find actual costs and construction times using current data is to look at GE/Hitachi's performance with the ABWR. It's pointless to harp on what things used to cost. It's like saying that computers are too expensive to buy because a 64K model used to cost $5,000. If you look at the ABWR costs and construction times (3 years and about $1.2-1.4M USD/MW), you have real data for the first of the Generation III reactors. The two newer ones currently going through the licensing process by the NRC, Westinghouse's AP-1000 and GE/Hitachi's ESBWR, will be in a similar price range, yet safer yet and with even less construction materials needed. The Gen IV reactor I wrote about, the PRISM, is also in the same price range. All these are modular, with the reactor vessels and all the other parts built in factories. GE could build a PRISM reactor vessel right now in their own factory.

Certainly there is a concern that we have minimal factories with these capabilities, and few nuclear engineers to run them once we build them. But if we got off the dime and built one to demonstrate their commercial viability now, along with a government commitment to nuclear power and to the education of nuclear engineers, by the time 2015 rolls around we'd be ready to build these at a pace that could provide all the energy humanity needs from fuel we've already mined.

Clean coal is a dangerous myth, for the greenhouse gases emitted at the mining sites themselves dwarf the amount that could be sequestered. It's an expensive greenwashing tactic to keep the coal industry in business and delay taking action to eliminate emissions. Coal should be left in the ground, period.

As for reducing GHGs substantially in the short term, a crash program to design boron-fueled vehicles could quickly drastically reduce emissions from cars and trucks. The infrastructure requirements are paltry, the R&D quite workable, far easier, safer and cheaper than the much-hyped hydrogen economy. And it's 100% recyclable, thus extremely inexpensive. That fact alone would be a tremendous incentive for people to replace their old gas-guzzlers with boron powered cars. It's so energy dense that even an incredibly inefficient design would still be a vast (and zero emission) improvement over gas-powered internal combustion engines.

Getting back to your points about nuclear, though: Nationalization of the nuclear power industry is not what's needed. What we have to do is Internationalize it. This and all the other points in the article you cite are dealt with in my book. As you can imagine, though, the intro and first chapter that you can read online at my site don't contain the answers you seek. But later chapters most certainly do.

taghioff.info
19 September 2008 at 04:32

@Tom

Thanks for the answer, I will go pre-order the book. I am working on environmental activism in India, and the Nuclear deal with the US almost derailed the government, and led to a huge corruption scandal in parliament. It is interesting to hear that they are pioneering fast breeder reactors here.

Thanks, this is clearly a debate that is far from shut, I will put it on my reading list.

@Mark

Sorry for bloating out the thread with another article, hope you found it useful.

Msparks
19 September 2008 at 08:33

"Gary in Vermont"s post at the top of this thread perfectly illustrates the utter scientific ignorance of the modern antinuclear zealot. How does one begin to refute such ridiculous arguments? The fact that there were lawsuits proves the negative health impact of TMI, are you kidding me? The US is a lawsuit culture! "An acquaintance got cancer"? There's a well-designed epidemiological study for you! Helen Caldicott's work has been amply documented as shoddy science, and in any event we do not need to worry about how much uranium is in the ground, it is one of the earth's most common elements. And we'll be lucky to generate 25-30% of the world's electricity with nuclear someday, as it will never completely replace coal and renewables. We don't need to worry about running out of uranium. And the fact that the ancient USEC enrichment plant is powered by coal is hardly eye-opening when you consider that fully half of US electricity comes from coal -- thanks in large part to the so-called environmentalists in the US who have done everything they can to block clean nuclear power since 1980. But don't worry, Gary, USEC's plant will be forced to shut down soon because the rest of the world's uranium enrichers have already switched to centrifuge technologies that consume 5% of the energy of USEC's Paducah plant.

With the likes of Mark's original article above, it's nice to see some common sense finally emerging among the environmentalist community -- now if those who've seen the light can only convince the scientifically challenged treehuggers to abandon their religious devotion to these outdated and false stereotypes about nuclear power, then we might actually make some progress on climate change in this generation.

marklynas
19 September 2008 at 09:23

A very useful discussion - thanks to all who've contributed so far, and especially Tom Blees, for taking the time to field many of the queries. The Tom Burke article is interesting, because for him it always comes back to the need to burn more coal - though of course with the entirely economically unproven CCS bolted on at some unspecified time in the future. Too bad he works for Rio Tinto, one of the world's major coal producers. No conflict of interest there, of course.

I've posted a copy of my article with full references on my website, as Val Mainwood and others have requested. See http://www.marklynas.org/2008/9/19/why-greens-must-learn-to-...

Carl Jones
19 September 2008 at 12:04

Mark, I`m not going to knock you today. Chernobyl is still leaking, still killing people all over the world!

Lets cover a few basic....the global warming crowd warn about melting ice, although this dose not cause sea levels to rise, we are told that thermal expansion will lead to rising sea levels.

We see different numbers every week, the last one that I saw was 1 metre, but others quote many metres rise in sea levels. Of course, I don`t believe the context of this NWO construct....

....but I would like someone to explain where these new nuclear reactors will be located in context to rising sea levels and what messures/design modifications will be used to prevent nuclear power stations becoming a risk. I would also like to know the costs of this additional protection?

Come on, judging by the list of comments above, someone should be able to explain these basic issues?????lol

Note, I don`t believe in global warming as portrayed by the NWO controlled MSM and you should note that France hasn`t started building dams around its nuclear reactors.LOL

Time is "alledgedly" running out.LOL

GerryWolff
19 September 2008 at 12:25

In relation to climate change and the need to cut CO2 emissions, the case against nuclear power is straightforward:

* It is one of the most expensive ways of generating electricity (see http://www.mng.org.uk/gh/no_nukes.htm) and, since the whole nuclear cycle is a long way from being zero-carbon (ibid.), it is an even more expensive way of reducing CO2 emissions. Two good pieces about how costly it is are:

o Paul Brown's "Voodoo economics": http://www.mng.org.uk/gh/resources/voodoo_economics.pdf .

o Amory Lovins and Imran Sheikh on "The nuclear illusion": http://www.mng.org.uk/gh/resources/lovins_sheikh_article_200... .

* There are more than enough alternatives that are cheaper, quicker to build and altogether more attractive, see: http://www.mng.org.uk/gh/energy.htm .

* In other words, we get bigger cuts in CO2 for a given amount of money, and we get them sooner, if we choose renewables with energy conservation.

drdavidlowry
19 September 2008 at 12:26

Mark's article is replete with so many errors, probably because he has read too few critical studies of nuclear, and relied upon unreconstructed pro-nuclear enthusiasts such as Tom Blees, who does not match his enthusiasm for exotic, untried nuclear technology with robust facts. As Garyfromvermont points out earlier, Mark has been given considerable space to expound upon his new found enthusiasm for nuclear power: The New Statesman, which in the past has carried analytical articles critical of nuclear (including from myself) surely should allocate a similar space for a rejoinder. For now, below I past a new article by Paris-based energy consultant, Mycle Schneider, just published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It does not address the technical mistakes in Mark's article, but does demonstrate the unliklihood of the kind of nuclear industrial renaissance favoured by the the atomic enthusiasts.

Dr David Lowry

Stoneleigh

contributing author, Nuclear or Not? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/reports/2008-world-nu...

Hype over the future of nuclear power is rampant, but the facts tell a different story. The percentage of nuclear-generated electricity in the overall global energy mix is decreasing. In this three-part series Mycle Schneider, a French independent nuclear analyst, explores the difficulties facing nuclear power throughout the world and in Western Europe and Asia in particular.

2008 world nuclear industry status report: Global nuclear power

By Mycle Schneider | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 16 September 2008

Last Thursday, in the midst of the world media's constant constant nuclear revival reportage, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had an embarrassing announcement to make. While it has increased its projections for nuclear generation in 2030, nuclear's share of global electricity generation dropped another percentage point in 2007. The world's nuclear electricity generation had decreased by 2 percent in 2007--in the European Union (EU) it dropped 6 percent--more than in any other year since the first fission reactor was connected to the Soviet grid in 1954. The drop by about 60 terawatt hours corresponds to the average annual generation of 10 reactors.

Major contributing factors were the seven units at Kashiwazaki, Japan, which have remained shut down since a severe earthquake shook the region in July 2007; the up to six German reactors that have been taken off the grid simultaneously for major repairs; and the numerous French reactors that have undergone inspections and maintenance after a generic problem was identified in their steam generators. The latter issue is expected to cost the French nuclear fleet another 2-3 percent of its average load factor for 2008 and through 2009. The "Big Six" nuclear powers--the United States, France, Japan, Germany, Russia, and South Korea--saw their global share of nuclear-generated electricity drop from about three-quarters in previous years to 68 percent in 2007.

At the beginning of September, there were 439 operating nuclear reactors worldwide, five less than five years ago, with a total installed capacity of 372 gigawatts in 31 countries. No new nuclear plant has come online since the beginning of the year.

The installed capacity has increased slightly through "uprating," or technical improvements at existing plants that increase electricity generation. According to the World Nuclear Association (WNA), the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has approved 110 uprates since 1977, a few of them "extended uprates" of up to 20 percent. An additional seven uprates are to be completed through the end of the year. As a result, close to an additional 5 gigawatts were added to the U.S. nuclear capacity through uprates alone--the equivalent of about four new plants. Europe is experiencing a similar trend of uprates and life extensions of existing reactors.

The capacity of the global fleet increased between 2000 and 2004 by about 3 gigawatts per year, much of it through uprating. That dropped to 2 gigawatts per year between 2004 and 2007 and to about 0.5 gigawatts over the first eight months of 2008. These figures should be compared to the global net increase in all electricity generating capacity of an estimated 150 gigawatts for all new power plants, from fossil-fuelled facilities to renewable energy, per year. That leaves nuclear energy with an insignificant fraction in the global power marketplace.

In 2007, nuclear power plants generated 2,600 terawatt hours, about 14 percent of the world's commercial electricity (down from 15 percent in 2006 and 16 percent in 2005) or less than 6 percent of the commercial primary energy and on the order of 2 percent of final energy. Only five countries (Armenia, Romania, Slovenia, South Africa, and Switzerland), which together operate 11 nuclear plants, increased their nuclear share in the power mix in 2007 over the previous year. Fifteen countries remained stable (less than a 1 percent change) and in 11 countries the role of nuclear power declined. (See chart PDF.)

Construction sites in the 14 countries that are currently building nuclear power plants are accumulating substantial and costly delays. At the end of August, the IAEA listed 35 reactors as "under construction," which is one more than at the end of 2007, but 18 less than at the end of the 1990s. The total capacity is just under 28,300 megawatts with an average size of 800 megawatts per unit. A closer look at the list illustrates the level of uncertainty associated with reactor building:

• Eleven reactors, almost one-third of the total listed, have been under construction for more than 20 years. The U.S. Watts Bar 2 project holds the record with an original construction start in December 1972 (subsequently frozen), followed by the Iranian Bushehr plant that was started by German Siemens in May 1975 and is now to be finished by Russia.

• Fifteen projects don't have an official start-up date, including all seven of the Russian projects, two Bulgarian reactors, and three of the six Chinese units under construction. In fact, one Russian plant (Balakovo-5), which had been listed since 1987 and was to go online by the end of 2010, was abandoned and pulled off the list earlier this year. It was replaced by a new project (Novovoronezh 2-1) without any indication of a planned start-up date.

• Two-thirds of the under-construction units have encountered significant construction delays, pushing back officially announced start-up dates. Only 10 projects haven't indicated delays, they are three Chinese, one Pakistani, three South Korean, and three Russian units. They were all started within the last three years and haven't reached their projected start-up dates yet, which makes it difficult or impossible to assess whether they are on schedule.

The geographic distribution of nuclear power plant projects extends the trend of previous years. Between 2004 and 2007, 14 nuclear plants, the total number of units that started up during that time, were located in Asia or Eastern Europe. Similarly, 30 of the 35 reactors currently "under construction" are also located in those regions. The average global construction time for nuclear plants (more than nine years for the 14 most recent ones) isn't a useful metric because of great differences between countries. The four reactors that started up in Romania, Russia, and Ukraine took between 18 and 24 years, while the 10 units that were connected to the grid in China, India, Japan, and South Korea took only five years to complete on average.

Lead times for nuclear plants don't only include construction times but also long-term planning, lengthy licensing procedures in most countries, complex financial negotiations, and site preparation. In addition, in most cases, the grid system has to be upgraded, often with new power lines that have their own planning and licensing difficulties. In some cases, public opposition is significantly higher in regards to high-voltage power lines than for the nuclear plants that generate the electricity. NRC Chairman Dale Klein noted that potentially necessary grid extensions could lead to further delays of nuclear projects and indicated that he was surprised to learn that "it may take as long to site, permit, and build a transmission line for a new plant as to site, license, and build the plant itself."

In the past, nuclear planning has rarely turned out to be accurate. In an article entitled "President Offers Plans for Revival of Nuclear," the New York Times reported that the administration "today formally specified the steps it will take to revive commercial nuclear power." That piece appeared in October 1981 and the president was Ronald Reagan. Twenty years later the "nuclear revival" is once again on the agenda, with President George W. Bush promoting Nuclear Power 2010.

In October 2001, as part of Nuclear Power 2010, the Energy Department planned to "complete construction and deploy multiple commercially viable new nuclear plants by 2010," and at a minimum deploy "at least one light water and at least one gas-cooled reactor." Reality is quite different, and it's now obvious that no new U.S. plant will be up and running by 2010. Energy's July 2008 update on the status of commercial nuclear reactor licenses lists nine submitted applications for combined construction and operating licenses (COL) and a further 10 intended applications. Only one unit is currently planned to operate under a new license before 2015. NRG Energy plans to start construction at its South Texas site as early as 2009 with grid connection in 2014. NRG's COL is currently under review by the NRC. However, as Energy points out, "There is no assurance that any of these plants [which it licenses] will ultimately be built or operate commercially," and "COL filings often include a goal to 'keep the nuclear option open' rather than full commitment [to construction]."

Moody's Investor Services, which provides risk analysis to the capital markets, expects extensive legal cases: "We believe the first COL filing will be litigated, which could create lengthy delays for the rest of the sector." The Financial Times obtained confidential government documents that confirm a similar situation in Britain: "Fresh legal challenges are expected to hamper plans to build new nuclear power stations in [Britain]."

Without any significant new build for years, the average age of the world's operating nuclear power plants has been increasing steadily, now standing at 24 years. Some nuclear utilities envision reactor lifetimes of 40 years--or even 60 years. Considering that the average age of the 119 units that have already been shutdown is 22 years, the doubling of operational lifetime seems rather optimistic. If one assumes an average lifetime of 40 years for all the world's operating reactors (with the exception of 17 remaining German units that, according to German legislation, will be shut down after an average operational lifetime of 32 years) and the 20 units that were under construction as of January 2008 that have an official start-up date (down from 24 units at the start of the year), one can calculate how many plants would be shut down year by year over the next 50 years--see chart PDF.

The exercise enables an evaluation of the number of plants that would have to come online over the next several decades simply to maintain the same number of operating plants around the world. In addition to units under construction with a scheduled start-up date, 70 reactors (generating 40,000 megawatts) would have to be planned, completed and started up by 2015--one every month and a half--and an additional 192 units (168,000 megawatts) over the subsequent decade--or one every 18 days.

The achievement of the 2015 target is simply impossible from an industrial point of view, which means that the number of operating reactors will decline over the years to come unless lifetime extensions beyond 40 years become standard, which would raise safety and maintenance questions. The overall replacement of some 260 units by 2025 seems equally unlikely.

The international nuclear industry lobby, however, claims it can do that and more. The WNA has stated: "It is noteworthy that in the 1980s, 218 power reactors started up, an average of one every 17 days. . . . So it is not hard to imagine a similar number being commissioned in a decade after about 2015. But with China and India getting up to speed with nuclear energy and a world energy demand double the 1980 level in 2015, a realistic estimate of what is possible might be the equivalent of one 1,000 megawatt unit worldwide every 5 days."

Such a "realistic estimate" seems hard to believe. The situation in the second decade of the twenty-first century will be radically different from that in the 1980s. The nuclear industry will not be in the same position it was in the 1980s, when it started to harvest the early heavy investments made in nuclear. At that time, it also didn't have to deal with the nuclear waste issue, which was simply put on the back burner, nor the cost of reactor decommissioning, which was underestimated. In that earlier period, the nuclear industry still appeared progressive, attracting young and talented people. And ferocious competitors such as modern natural gas, combined heat and power, and various renewable energy sectors didn't exist.

The replacement of the aging world nuclear fleet or even the extension of the operating plants encounters three major problems:

• Limited industrial capacity. In the 1980s, there were about 400 nuclear suppliers and 900 nuclear-certified companies in the United States. These have shrunk to fewer than 80 suppliers and 200 certifications in recent years. Even if some of this is due to corporate takeovers, the decline is dramatic. Currently there is only one steel plant in the world, owned by Japan Steel Works that can fabricate the 450-ton ingots needed for so-called generation III reactors such as the Franco-German European Pressurized Water Reactor (EPR). A nuclear power plant construction infrastructure assessment PDF by Energy concluded that major equipment (reactor pressure vessels, steam generators, and moisture separator reheaters) for the near-term deployment of generation III units would not be manufactured by U.S. facilities and would result in procurement and construction delays.

• Skilled worker shortage. According to Power Engineering, Art Stall, Florida Power & Light Company's senior vice president and chief nuclear officer, told the American Nuclear Society's 2007 annual meeting that the nuclear industry's revival has been slowed down by the challenges of building new nuclear power plants, which includes finding qualified craft labor, technicians, engineers, and scientists to support both construction and operation. He said that 40 percent of current nuclear plant workers are eligible for retirement within the next five years and that only 8 percent of the workforce is less than 32 years old. While students studying nuclear engineering and other nuclear-specific technical subjects are increasing, there is much competition from other industries for talent. "[T]he nuclear industry must become creative if it is going to entice these graduates to enter and remain in the nuclear field," he told the crowd. The situation is similar in most European nuclear countries.

• Skeptical financial markets. Standard & Poor's, the credit rating company, warned in May 2007, "In the past, engineering, procurement, and construction contracts were easy to secure. However, with increasing raw material costs, a depleted nuclear-specialist workforce, and strong demand for capital projects worldwide, construction costs are increasing rapidly." In October 2007, Moody's delivered a striking analysis of the U.S. nuclear sector, saying it did "not believe the sector will bring more than one or two new nuclear plants online by 2015." It concluded that it believed many of the current expectations for nuclear were "overly ambitious." Moody's had more bad news for the industry when its June Global Credit Research paper concluded, "The cost and complexity of building a new nuclear power plant could weaken the credit metrics of an electric utility and potentially pressure its credit ratings several years into the project." Even the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade organization, admitted in an August white paper PDF, "There is considerable uncertainty about the capital cost of new nuclear generating capacity."

After thorough analysis it seems surprisingly evident that contrary to the public's perception and the industry's efforts, nuclear power will continue its long-term decline rather than move toward a flourishing future revival.

Mycle Schneider

Schneider is an independent energy consultant based in Paris. He has consulted for the Belgian Energy Minister, the French and German environment ministries, the International Atomic Energy Agency, Greenpeace, the European Commission, and the French Institute for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety. He is a member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials and founded the Energy Information Agency WISE-Paris in 1983, which he directed until 2003. Since 2004, Schneider has led the Environment and Energy Strategies lecture series at the French Ecole des Mines in Nantes.

jickemp
19 September 2008 at 13:33

Dear Tom, thanks for your reply. I look forward to reading your book: your numbers seem unusual but I'm sure they hold up. To virtually eliminate GHG in the middle of this century using nuclear power! How?Generation IV reactors - obviously. Can you point me to the evidence that there is a commercial system available sometime soon, along with the build costs. My concern is that even if your figures are right, the plants can't be built quick enough, unless there is an unprecedented effort.

Which brings me on to my second concern: support for nuclear power often rests of very favourable assumption (just like many nuclear sceptics may make pessimistic ones). Your scenario (as much as I understand it), requires unprecedented levels of international collaboration, long-term economic stability, persistent government (public) financial backing, and a major change in international nuclear non-proliferation 'policy' among all players towards NPT, FMCT and the IAEA. Belief in any of these depends upon faith, because the evidence points towards another, less sanguine place.

The precautionary principle would, surely, direct us towards the tougher challenge of developing technologies and markets in really efficient and safe energy supplies, and towards policies which enforce changes to energy use across the board. This would be the genuinely tough decision. Blair's characterisation of the pro-nuclear stance as one which is somehow credible because it was 'tough' was and is mistaken. Touch decisions would change behaviour, not just annoy a few NGOs (and weaken the market in renewable technology).

Also, you didn't address the issue I raised about the effect a major security incident may have on a nuclear revival. Or perhaps you did, but in doing so you raised the cost of an economic revival by billions of dollars. Are you seriously suggesting that all new nuclear power plants (all around the world) should be built under ground?

Nuclear power can only make a marginal contribution at great cost and risk - it is the wrong policy.

stevedawe
19 September 2008 at 13:58

Mark makes a very selective case. Focussing on key weaknesses:

The UK has the best wind energy regime in Europe and the British Wind Energy Association says we can produce 8 times as much electricity from offshore wind as we use now. Mark's selective emphasis on onshore wind appears to be a deliberate attempt to mislead. Wind farms can be built faster than any conceivable NP station and do not produce any radioactive waste. The London Array will produce electricity for 750,000 homes with no radiation whatsover and low long-term labour costs, unlike NP.

Secondly, who will take the financial risks to support NP in the current recession? Recessionary conditions killed off further NP development in the US/UK in the early 1980s. There is no reason to think they will not do so now - inspired perhaps by the 2 year delay and massive cost over-run in the new Finnish NP station and the 6 month delay in the new French one too. These are bad financial risks, before Green opposition and legal challenges are taken into account.

Thirdly, it is abundantly clear that energy efficiency is the cheapest, quickest and most cost effective response to current energy demands. A cut of 20% in energy demand is quite feasible and a consistent programme - cutting greenhouse gas emissions - could reach a 50% cut over time. This is quicker and cheaper than nuclear.

Since the UK is 20,000 engineers short and 4-5,000 retire each year, where are the skills for a new NP programme to come from Plans announced to train more nuclear staff by the UK Govt are 'predict and provide' - there is no guarantee people will take these training choices when other choices are available with less personal health risk eg railway engineering posts.

It should be noted that UK employment in renewables is c26,000 whilst Germany's is 250,000. This difference is as much about imagination as technology. The difference here is the intellectual bankrupcty of New Labour.

Finally, the sheer variety of renewables needs to be taken into account: ground source heat pumps; solar thermal heating; solar PV for all new roofs and renovations; use of biomass for creating bio-gas, either for direct use or to run power stations or vehicles; use of refined cooking oils to run some vehicles especially in agriculture; concentrated solar power options for north Africa which can be used to power an industrial revolution across this comparatively impoverished region and - using lastest available technology - be supplied to consumers in southern Europe; new passive solar options in building design, etc etc. Put these together with energy efficiency and the Centre for Alternative Technology's Zero Carbon Britain report is well-justified, without NP.

Failure of the imagination is the main message of Mark's article.

taghioff.info
19 September 2008 at 14:22

Actually there is a horrible implication to all of this.

Since China and India look set, on current running, to fry us all with coal. This is since Tom Burke's point about the Geo-politics of how much coal these two huge nations are sitting on holds, and since I also take on board the extreme un-proven-ness of CCS.

The implication of this is that if what Tom is saying holds, then Nuclear Deals such as that with India now may hold the key. Which might end up casting George Bush as a pioneer in combatting climate change, what a horrible twist.

But I have to ask Tom Blees (since I can't buy the book yet) how far is the current Nuclear Deal with India (as an example) from a regime that might be effective in his terms, and how would one get from where we are to where we ought to be?

Can the Nuclear carrot be used as a bribe to keep Chinese and Indian coal in the ground?

Carl Jones
19 September 2008 at 15:18

You all seen to know sooo much....can someone answer my questions in my comment up the thread please?

Tom Blees
19 September 2008 at 17:04

Good morning, Carl. I see there've been a lot of commentary while I slept. As for your question above, it would make sense to build new nuclear plants a bit higher than sea level, just in case you're as incorrect about global warming as you are about Chernobyl still killing people all over the world.

Tom Blees
19 September 2008 at 17:15

GerryWolff: Responses to virtually all your points are already here, either in Mark's article or in my comments. Look up ABWR costs to see that even this early Gen III reactor is very economical and has been built in three years. The newer ones can be expected to be not only safer but possibly even cheaper, especially if we build a lot of them. As for the life-cycle carbon costs of nuclear, Mark refutes that in his article with data directly from the IPCC. That dog won't hunt.

Tom Blees
19 September 2008 at 17:44

Dr. Lowry,

Since my book won't be available until next week, your criticism that I don't match my enthusiasm with facts rings a bit hollow. Fast reactors may seem exotic, but they are far from untried. There have been over 300 reactor-years of experience with them throughout the world, and among those who are actually breeder experts it's considered to be a mature technology.

As for your lengthy citations, the fact that nuclear power's share is small or shrinking and that few new plants are being built has nothing to do with the viability of new nuclear designs per se. Politics has more to do with it than pragmatism. Antinuclear activism has poisoned the well of public opinion in many countries, and elsewhere (as in the USA and, from what I read, Great Britain) the fact that private utilities have their fingers in the nuclear pie leads to all sorts of problems. The long lead times you cite have a lot to do with political obstructionism, and not with construction capability.

Horror stories about Gen II reactors have no bearing on new designs except insofar as disingenuous opponents use those stories to claim that nuclear isn't viable. The ABWR, as the first Gen III reactor to be built, has a stellar record in both cost and construction times. As for the EPR whose first iteration is being built in Finland, that will likely be the first and last ever built. The new Gen III designs have already overtaken it, and there is considerable pressure among nuclear scientists in France to scrap the plans to replace their current fleet with EPRs and opt instead for Gen III (and, dare I hope, Gen IV) reactors. As good as the ABWR has been (I note that those opposed to nuclear seem to studiously avoid ever mentioning it), the newer Gen III and Gen IV reactors will be simpler, safer, and smaller. These aren't pies in the sky. They've already been designed, and the AP-1000 is already being built in China despite some certification snafus in the USA.

As for grid route problems, 3M has developed a high-tension line capable of carrying 2-4 times the current of existing lines. Simply replacing the lines we have now with these new ones (the old being easily recycled into the new as the project proceeds) would allow us to transition to an all-electric society without having to establish new power corridors.

Most of the rest of the rather lengthy arguments in your post have been addressed in my earlier comments, albeit more succinctly. I can't and won't try to rewrite my book here. All of your points, and many more, are answered in its pages. Have a look at it when it comes out next week and then drop in on my site and let me know what you think.

Tom Blees
19 September 2008 at 18:06

jickemp,

You're right about an unprecedented effort being needed to meet my goal of near-elimination of anthropogenic GHGs by mid-century. Yet the economics of my plan are quite sound. The financial burden that would have to be assumed would be less than the one that France experienced in their nuclear build-up, and ultimately it would save trillions over business as usual.

Some will undoubtedly dismiss my suggestion of unprecedented international cooperation as a pipe dream, but isn't there some sort of tipping point where our problems (global warming, resource wars, air pollution) become so serious as to push humanity into a more cooperative frame of mind? I'm betting that there is, and that we're very close to that point now. The technology really isn't the problem, it's the consciousness and the willingness to overturn the status quo. Just how bad do things have to get before we upend the old paradigm? What I'm proposing is a global energy revolution, nothing less. But it can be done. And if we would embark upon that course, it would dramatically improve the lives of virtually everyone on the planet.

The new Gen III and, especially, the Gen IV PRISM design, are orders of magnitude safer than previously-built nuclear plants. The reason I suggest either underground building or the option of covering them with earth is simply to point out one relatively simple solution for terrorist-proofing such installations. Remotely-operated blast doors for ingress, high-tech surveillance systems—there are ample engineering solutions to potential security incidents. There are no deal-breakers here. It's all in the book.

Your last statement belies your seeming open-mindedness in the rest of your post: "Nuclear power can only make a marginal contribution at great cost and risk - it is the wrong policy." I hope you'll read my book with an open mind to understand just how mistaken you are in your parting sentence.

Craig
19 September 2008 at 18:41

Two points worth making:

(1) The IPCC figures omit the emissions from decommissioning, clean up and disposal of the nuclear waste and power station. (see www.stormsmith.nl for details). In fact, the whole notion that you can calculate 'life cycle emissions' for something which needs to be managed for 100 years or more is absurd.

(2) Offshore wind potential is far greater than suggested in the article. See 'The ZEDbook' by Dunster, Simmons and Gilbert for a more holistic analysis of the UK's renewable energy potential.

drdavidlowry
19 September 2008 at 19:02

Carl

Try these references for the UK:

http://www.british-energy.com/article.php?article=163

www.berr.gov.uk/files/file47140.pdf

However, I would caution that such protective measures may prove robust in protecting new build reactors, should they ever be built/operated, but the additional problem of on-site spent fuel stores, which are likely to remain operational for at least fifty years & more likely 100) post reactor closure, which are threatened by inundation in some eastern England coastal nuclear sites.

-Dr David Lowry

Tom Blees
19 September 2008 at 19:18

stevedawe,

So far the best capacity factor I've seen for wind anywhere in the world has been 23%, from a windfarm offshore of Great Britain. Now there's a big windfarm project called Meerwind planned for the North Sea. The cost: $1.57 billion USD for a wind farm with a 400 MW output. Given that the capacity factor of a wind farm in that area can be expected to run about 25% (giving it the benefit of the doubt that it'll be better than the aforementioned 23%), that would translate to about $15 billion per gigawatt, a staggeringly inefficient system when you consider that a 1 GW nuclear reactor would likely cost less than a tenth that much (if you build an ABWR, for instance).

You're absolutely right that energy efficiency can be quick and cost-effective, as California has proven. However, energy efficiency doesn't produce electricity. We still have to meet energy demand without coal and gas, and that means new power plants, whether nuclear or renewables.

As for the much-ballyhooed idea of building giant solar farms in the Sahara and piping the electricity to Europe via DC cables under the Med, nobody ever addresses how they plan to keep them clean. On a trough-system solar farm in California it was found that they have to be pressure-washed every ten to twenty days in order to maintain their efficiency. The Sahara is a desert, remember. There is no water for such projects, even if you could realistically pressure-wash tens of thousands of square miles of solar arrays every 2-3 weeks. Where would the water come from? You'd have to build several nuclear-powered desalination plants on the shore of the Med to provide the water to wash off your solar panels! Why not just build them where you need the electricity?

With wind, solar, or biofuels, the problem is their lack of concentration. Scaling up to supply entire nations with energy using extremely diffuse energy sources is simply untenable. On the other hand, all the energy you'll need in a normal lifetime—for electricity, transportation, heating and cooling, and the things you eat and use—could be supplied, if produced in a fast reactor, from a lump of depleted uranium the size of half a ping-pong ball.

Tom Blees
19 September 2008 at 19:34

taghioff asks: "Can the Nuclear carrot be used as a bribe to keep Chinese and Indian coal in the ground?" Actually I believe it can, and I deal with that at length in my book. The gist of the argument is this: Current stores of depleted uranium and spent nuclear fuel (aka "nuclear waste") already available around the world could supply all the energy humanity needs for several hundred years without any mining whatsoever, if they were used in Gen IV reactors like the PRISM. That means free fuel for the whole planet and unlimited energy for every nation.

The trick is to create an international organization to manage the whole nuclear energy system worldwide, including plant construction and operation. The Integral Fast Reactor concept Mark writes about would include on-site reprocessing facilities, so once fissile materials entered the plant they would never leave, and could thus easily be secured.

If just the members of the "nuclear club" would agree to pursue such a plan, it would surely be an irresistible offer for any other nation to be provided with unlimited GHG-free energy, with free fuel in the bargain. The unprecedented international cooperation to effect such a global revolution could be begun with agreement among a very small number of nations, all of which would benefit greatly. Unprecedented? Sure. Impossible? Hardly.

As for the many coal plants already in operation around the world, they could be retrofitted with modular reactors to minimize stranded costs. Thus most of the infrastructure (cooling towers/systems, turbines, switchyards, etc) could in many cases be utilized, abandoning only the burners. Coal first, gas next.

Tom Blees
19 September 2008 at 19:43

Craig,

With the IFR there is no issue with nuclear waste, for there is no long-lived waste produced. All the actinides are used in generating power, which is why you can create so much energy from so little matter. Nor is there any carbon cost from the mining, since we needn't mine anything at all. As for decommissioning, the fuel left at the end of a power plant's lifetime could simply be moved to a new plant. The radioactivity picked up by the coolant is extremely short-lived and is no issue at all.

As for "wind potential" please see my comment above about scaling up systems to capture diffuse energy sources, and the cost of the Meerwind project as an example.

Tom Blees
19 September 2008 at 19:48

Dr. Lowry,

On-site spent fuel stores won't be a problems with IFRs because they use all the actinides. As for spent fuel from lightwater reactors, we could easily use it all up fueling new IFRs, so you needn't concern yourself too much with what we've got scattered around right now (except for security in the interim, of course). If we build IFRs at the rate I propose in my book, we could use up all the spent LWR fuel in the world in about three years or so, and all the old nuclear weapons material we care to throw into the mix to boot.

Will07
19 September 2008 at 19:53

ML: "the sensible conclusion is that we need both [nuclear and renewables] soon.."

Unfortunately, our favoured renewable (wind) may not be compatible with nuclear power. In Denmark, wind energy has failed to lessen dependence on fossil fuel, with a recent study highlighting incompatibility with CHP as a possible explanation. Futhermore, leading industry journal Windpower Monthly has commented that running large volumes of wind and nuclear in parallel is problematic, since both require "must run" status for economic viability. The unpalatable truth is that new nuclear build would render wind energy redundant. Given the high cost of the latter (207 billion pounds - BERR's least cost scenario) - this is a further advantage of nuclear power.

Will07
19 September 2008 at 19:54

ML: "the sensible conclusion is that we need both [nuclear and renewables] soon.."

Unfortunately, our favoured renewable (wind) may not be compatible with nuclear power and other low carbon energy sources. In Denmark, wind energy has failed to lessen dependence on fossil fuel, with a recent study highlighting incompatibility with CHP as a possible explanation. Futhermore, leading industry journal Windpower Monthly has commented that running large volumes of wind and nuclear in parallel is problematic, since both require "must run" status for economic viability. The unpalatable truth is that new nuclear build would render wind energy redundant. Given the high cost of the latter (207 billion pounds - BERR's least cost scenario) - this represents a further advantage of nuclear power.

Tom Blees
19 September 2008 at 20:07

Actually, nuclear plants aren't really "must run." The French sometimes shut down some of their reactors on weekends since they have so much excess capacity (even though electricity is their 4th-largest export). New reactor designs have excellent load-following capability. But of course when you sink a large capital cost into building them you will of course WANT to run them as much as possible.

In Prescription for the Planet I propose a method of energy systems integration that would allow us to utilize the fickle wind and solar inputs along with nuclear in a synergistic way to take advantage of all of them without much idle time. I don't see wind and solar as competitors to nuclear, and I welcome every megawatt they can bring to the table. Where I disagree with many of their proponents is in the common contention that they can provide all the energy we need, and of course in the arguments that nuclear power of any kind is untenable. We should, in an ideal world, be united in our commitment to eliminating fossil fuels from humanity's energy equation. That's going to take education, wisdom, clear thinking, and a rejection of ideological passion.

richard lawson
19 September 2008 at 20:19

The most attractive point in Mark's case is the possibility of using NP to neutralise weapons grade plutonium. Fast breeders look to be the only way of getting NP to make a serious contribution, but they are still a gleam in the eye of the engineers. Meanwhile energy conservation and 1001 renewable energy projects, oven ready, are blocked by some civil servant in DBERR.

A long and thought provoking thread. There are other themes to it, covered here: http://www.greenhealth.org.uk/Nuclear.htm

How better to sum it up than by the quote from Walter Marshall, Mr Nuclear Power himself, when he said "Nuclear power is jam tomorrow".

Tom Blees
19 September 2008 at 20:29

Richard, breeders are hardly just a gleam in the eye. A breeder in Kazakhstan (then USSR) ran very well back in the Seventies. PRISMs could be built right now if the political will can be mustered. Politics is the rub, public opinion being a large part of it. Unfortunately the mistakes of the past have served as ammunition for anti-nuclear sentiment to fester. Now that we've actually figured out how to solve the problems of nuclear waste, economics, proliferation and safety, the task at hand is to educate the public away from their visceral aversion to all things nuclear. With global warming and resource wars knocking on the door, we'd better get to it.

card
19 September 2008 at 23:26

Hi,

I work with a small grass roots group in New Mexico. I deal with radiation survivors and the families of people who are sick or have died from radiation exposure every day. Some are urainium workers and their families, others are nuclear production workers and their families, others are white collar workers at our national laboratories. Very few of these workers or families receive compensation, even though we do our best to make thathappen.

There is a recent German study showing that children that live near nuclear power plants show a higher rate of leukimia. I can dig up the link if you can't find it through Google.

I have worked with the organization I described for 27 years. If you had my job you would not be promoting anything nuclear. I suggest that you review the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research website, ieer.org and especially Dr. Machijani's book (on line) 'Carbon Free, Nuclear Free', a guide to our energy future.

Tom Blees
20 September 2008 at 00:37

Unfortunately the development of nuclear power has had its share of mistakes, irresponsibility, and neglect that can be seen in the development of any other energy technology. This applies to uranium mining in particular, which though it has resulted in far fewer injuries and deaths than coal mining has nevertheless been nothing to be proud of. Recent advancements have greatly improved that situation, however. Yet if we build IFRs that point will be moot, since we won't have to mine any uranium for hundreds of years.

As for the people who work in nuclear plants dying of their exposure, here are the results of a Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health study of nuclear workers (Nov., 2004). The study involved 53,698 nuclear power plant employees, certainly the largest such study ever conducted. Compared to the general population, mortality rates were:

35 percent lower for all cancers

66 percent lower for all non-cancers

60 percent lower for all-causes of mortality.

For the 53,698 employees studied, there were 1,190 actual deaths when, compared to the general population, more than 2,900 deaths would have been expected based on factors including age and gender.

No statistically detectable correlation was found between worker doses and cancer.

How might this lower mortality be explained? There is a body of evidence that low-level exposure to some types of radiation can actually be beneficial (such as in areas where natural radon levels are high). But the usual explanation for results such as those in this study and a similar study of thousands of workers at Rocketdyne corporation who were exposed to radiation during their careers (you can find it here: http://tinyurl.com/48zedo) is simply that of lifestyle. Nuclear workers generally have a higher level of education, make more money, smoke less than the average person, and experience all the other lifestyle advantages that tend to lead to longer lifespans and better general overall health. What studies like this do show is that if there are any detrimental effects to their occupational exposure to radiation, they pale in comparison to lifestyle choices.

As for your reference to the leukemia study that you don't provide, a 1990 National Cancer Institute study, the broadest ever conducted, found no evidence of any increase in cancer mortality including childhood leukemia among people living in 107 counties that host, or are adjacent to, 62 major nuclear facilities in the United States.

Douglas Chalmers
20 September 2008 at 06:08

"...our way of life is more threatened than ever, and it's time for the environmental movement to face up to some hard truths..."

What a sickening repetition of the pro-nuclear lobby's agenda. They are in the process of establishing a global nuclear cartel to control the supply of enriched uranium (and nuclear reactors) which is inteneded for their pro-Neocon friends (US allies) alone. See http://www.nuclearsuppliersgroup.org/

Their purpose is to ensure that no uranium stays in the ground. That is, as many nuclear reactors must be built around the world as possible. That must also happen before nuclear fission is superseded by a more advanced technology such as fusion which is expected to phappen in the next 30 - 40 years.

As usual, these arguments totally ignore solar thermal power generation which is fast coming on line in the USA and dozens of new plants will soon be built in Australia and elsewhere in the world as well as the many wind powered generating systems http://www.forbes.com/afxnewslimited/feeds/afx/2008/08/12/af...

But, if one thing is obvious, it IS that our self-indulgent and self-serving "way of life" must be changed significantly - or we will all have change forced upon us. As it is, we have to learn true global co-operation in order to survive. A winner-takes-all approach will lead to inevitable nuclear warfare and total disaster.

Faithfulsceptic
20 September 2008 at 09:47

Disappointing argument, particularly in these financially chaotic times.

See http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2008/092008/slocum.htm...

for a thorough discussion of the power behind the press.

Nuclear electricity: Great publicity, poor environmentalism, worse politics, disastrous financial risk, doomsday foreign relations prospect.

A bit like Sarah Palin?

Faithfulsceptic
20 September 2008 at 10:20

GRL Cowan, 18 Sept, 1816, wrongly states that the US Nuclear electricity program did not begin as a heavily state-subsidised program.

Nuclear electricity never did and never will survive in the US without massive US government subsidies.

The item below is a transcript of an editorial written in 1952 by T Keith Glennan, then Chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission.

The editorial makes unmistakably clear that the birth of the nuclear electricity

program was necessarily based on the production of plutonium for bombs. One

key sentences states that:

" ... there now exists a basis for the creation of semirisk industrial

nuclear- power enterprise while the military demand for plutonium

continues."

Semirisk meant subsidised.

Ironically, the editorial, toward its conclusion, says:

"A multitude of other factors also must be considered, such as preferential

position, adequate security measures, suitable safety precautions, public

liability, and international relations. None of these problems admits to an

easy solution.. If such were the case, this whole matter would have been

solved long ago because many able minds have thought long and hard on these

points."

The problem of nuclear waste is not even mentioned.

The editorial can be found in "Nuclear Science and Technology". Volume 2 No 3,

published (then) 3 times a year by the (then) United States Atomic Energy

Commission. I can no longer remember how I got my photocopy of this issue of Reactor

Science and Technology, but it was no ground-breaking exercise - probably

just a letter and a money order to the US NTIS, back in the late '70's.

Meanwhile, renewable energy and energy efficiency measures have become far

more acceptable and economically competitive options than an industry which

builds giant radioactive boilers - which no-one wants in their backyard,

which are disasters begging to happen in an era of terrorist threats, which

would cause vast downwind contamination in the event of being

successfully targeted in a nuclear exchange, and which have not been shown

ameliorate global warming.

You need to remember that the "Separative Work Units" that are used in

uranium enrichment are mainly derived, in the US, from coal power. And that

when the energy used to enrich uranium is subtracted from electrical energy

output of the reactor that uses the uranium, there may well not be any net

gain - in fact, the nuclear industry ought to have to clearly and

conclusively show that it actually does produce more electricity than it

uses.

In short, the idea that nuclear electricity is carbon-free is a myth.

I have no problem with living next door to a wind farm. At least I can see

"the threat", I can see what some folks think is ugly. I want electricity

as much as you do. What I don't want is invisible, tasteless, odourless gas

released downwind on a regular basis. Or another catastrophic accident like

Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, or the intentional and successful sabotage

of a nuclear electricity plant.

If someone successfully sabotages a wind farm, they destroy a source of

electricity. If someone successfully sabotages a nuclear electricity plant,

they destroy far more than a source of electric power - they contaminate

vast areas downwind. You know that it has been 20 years now, since

Chernobyl, and there are still farms in Wales that must be monitored for

radioactivity, farmers who must monitor their produce to see if it is

marketable, if it is safe to eat. Not my dream of the future.

The article below makes very clear how nuclear electricity has always

contributed to the risk of nuclear war, from the very beginning to the very

perilous present.

=== Glennan, T. K -- Editorial -- Reactor Science and Technology Vol 2

No 3 -- October 1952 ======

Editorial

For those of us who look forward to the day when American industry will no

longer be the hired hand of government in atomic energy affairs but will

assume a role of equal responsibility this issue of Reactor Science and

Technology strikes a hopeful note. I would prefer to use the stronger

adjective promising, but I fear it would ill serve the future progress of

the industrial participation program to appear overly optimistic at this

stage. Formidable problems must be overcome before the seeds already sewn

can bear fruit. Yet when we compare these problems to those which have been

solved thus far in the atomic energy program, we have reason to believe that

given faith, time, sustained effort, money and patience, the goal of

industrial nuclear power can be achieved.

The Atomic Energy Commission and its staff, during its early stewardship of

the program, speculated at length on ways of bringing industry into the

atomic energy picture on a more realistic basis, consistent with our normal

competitive private enterprise economy. It remained however for Dr. Charles

A Thomas, then Executive Vice-President of Monsanto Chemical Co., to

crystallize this thought into a definite, concrete proposal. On June 20,

1950, Dr. Thomas sent the Commission a letter, stating that he believed the

time was ripe for industry, with its own capital, to design, construct and

operate reactors for the production of plutonium and power. This suggestion

was based on the following assumptions: that the long-term military

requirements for plutonium exceeded the then existing and planned production

facilities; that it would be desirable to reduce the cost of existing and

planned production facilities; that it would be desirable to reduce the cost

of this metal to the government; that it would likewise be desirable to make

use of the large quantities of heat attending the production of plutonium

and not being utilized under existing conditions; and, finally, that the

most nearly practicable use of such heat would be for the generation of

useful quantities of electric power. It was Dr. Thomas's contention that

the program he envisaged would accomplish these objectives and, at the same

time, would offer industry an opportunity to contribute to the reactor

program directly and to earn a profit which could be related to the effort

put forth.

Meantime a second proposal, rather similar in objective to the Monsanto

approach, had been received from the officers of the Dow Chemical Co. and

the Detroit Edison Company. The Commission addressed itself to a serious

consideration of these suggestions and arrived at a basis on which it was

willing to support the study phase of such programs. A public announcement

was issued by the Commission on Jan 28, 1951, setting forth the general

policy which had guided the consideration of these propositions and opening

the door for further proposals from qualified groups. It was emphasized

that in agreeing to such studies the Commission was not entering into any

commitment to continue beyond the study phase. This public notice elicited

further interest, and on May 16, 1951, it was announced that a maximum of

four industrial study groups would be considered for the initial program.

By early June agreements had been signed with the four groups, and the

studies which are digested in the following pages had been set in motion. A

maximum period of one year was permitted for the study. Under terms of the

agreement, the contracting parties were to carry out a survey and study of

the Commission's reactor development activities: (1) to determine the

engineering feasibility of their designing, constructing and operating a

materials- and power- producing reactor; (2) to examine the economic and

technical aspects of building this reactor in the next few years; (3) to

determine the research and development work needed, if any, before such a

reactor project could be undertaken; and (4) to offer recommendations in a

report to the Commission concerning such a reactor project and industry's

role in undertaking it and carrying it out. So much for the background

involved. What do these studies show?

It would be futile in this space to attempt an assessment of the conclusions

reached. However a few points do seem to warrant comment. First, the

sophistication and engineering excellence of these reports stand as a real

tribute to the scientists and engineers associated with the Commission's

reactor program. Because of their efforts, a wealth of technological data

was available, enabling the study groups to move rapidly on their

assignment.

Second, all parties concur in the belief that dual- purpose reactors are

technically feasible and could be operated in such a fashion that the power

credit would reduce the cost of plutonium by a considerable amount.

Conversely, all groups agree that no reactor could be constructed in the

very near future which would be economic on the basis of power generation

alone. The significance of these conclusions should not be overlooked.

They imply that there now exists a basis for the creation of semirisk

industrial nuclear- power enterprise while the military demand for plutonium

continues. In pointing up the many paths by which one can approach this

goal, it is interesting to note that each of the groups settled on a

different reactor type as holding the greatest promise from the group's

particular point of view.

As a final comment on the reports, it should be noted that all four

groups wish to continue their efforts into a second phase. This would seem

to represent a vote of confidence in nuclear power. Were this concept of a

dual-purpose reactor devoid of substance, it hardly seems likely that all

parties would continue to show interest in further association with the

field.

This now brings us to the vital question: Where do we go from here? As

this journal goes to press the problem is being debated by the Commission.

No final decision has been reached. Certainly the time is not yet

appropriate for a final answer. The second phase of this program, although

intended for prosecution at a more specific engineering level and with

somewhat greater effort, will still be operating at a relatively low rate of

expenditure. It is when we move into phase three, that is, make commitments

for the actual design and construction of a specific reactor, that weighty

financial decisions must be made. Still it is not too early to start facing

these future questions. Among the more critical seem to be the following:

1. Can and will the Commission permit private industry to construct,

own and operate a dual- purpose reactor with the electric power generated

therefrom to be sold and distributed by a private- investment-owned company?

2. Can and will the Commission make available to private industry the

fuel needed for the initial operation of such a reactor and give assurances

that continued operation will not be interrupted or curtailed by government

order?

3. Can and will the Commission establish a price policy and a contract

that will provide for the purchase of the products of a reactor in order

that such projects will be economically feasible in the near future?

4. What will be the policy of the Commission on the issue of patents

and licenses?

A multitude of other factors also must be considered, such as preferential

position, adequate security measures, suitable safety precautions, public

liability, and international relations. None of these problems admits to an

easy solution.. If such were the case, this whole matter would have been

solved long ago because many able minds have thought long and hard on these

points.

That difficulties are involved, however, cannot be used as an excuse to

ignore or side-step this pressing issue. The declaration of policy in the

Atomic Energy Act of 1946 places on us a responsibility that cannot be

evaded. This policy states that "subject at all times to the paramount

objective of assuring the common defense and security, the development and

utilization of atomic energy shall, so far as practicable, be directed

toward improving the public welfare, increasing the standard of living,

strengthening free competition in private enterprise, and promoting world

peace. It is by no means certain that "assuring the common defense and

security" is completely achieved solely through the ever increasing stock

piles of nuclear weapons.

T Keith Glennan

Atomic Energy Commission

============= other items in the issue of RS&T, from the table of contents

=

Monsanto Chemical Company - Union Electric Company

Plutonium-Power Reactor Feasability Study [page 9]

Commonwealth Edison - Public Service Company

Report on Power Generation Using Nuclear Energy [page 29]

Pacific Gas and Electric Company - Bechtel Corporation

Industrial Reactor Study [page 81]

Dow Chemical Company - Detroit Edison Company

Study of Materials-and Power-Producing Reactors [pp105 - 114]

Glennan, T. K -- Editorial -- Reactor Science and Technology Vol 2 No 3 -- October 1952

Alun W
20 September 2008 at 11:17

So glad to read an article regarding the use of fast-reactors for generating electricity--we must build them as soon as possible to power our country's needs. I welcome them !

Will07
20 September 2008 at 12:53

Tom Blees

"As for your reference to the leukemia study that you don't provide, a 1990 National Cancer Institute study, the broadest ever conducted, found no evidence of any increase in cancer mortality including childhood leukemia among people living in 107 counties that host, or are adjacent to, 62 major nuclear facilities in the United States.

Data on this issue appear to be contradictory. In the UK for example, cancer clusters identified near to nuclear facilities were also found to occur at control sites (i.e - sites suitable for the construction of a nuclear power plant, but where no such facility exists). This suggests that some feature of the site per se rather than a nuclear power plant is responsible for increased rates of malignancy. Population mixing has been proposed as a possible mechanism.

However, in Germany, cancer clusters (inversely proportional to distance) have recently been described in the vicinity of nuclear facilities - see: Spix et al: Case-control study on childhood cancer in the vicinity of nuclear power plants in Germany 1980-2003. European Journal of Cancer 44, 275 (2008).

Ironically, coal fired power stations release vastly more radioactive material into the environment than nuclear power plants. The increased risk of malignancy is ten fold greater in the vicinity of the former. Moreover, the bulk of radioactive contamination found in humans is derived from coal, not nuclear fuel.

Finally, many people claim that "I have no problem with living next door to a wind farm" such as Faithful sceptic above. Yet emerging evidence from Portugal suggests that infrasound produced by wind turbines may propagate for many kilometres and cause vibroacoustic disease - this syndrome is associated with several forms of human cancer. Thus it is po