The Nuclear Power Solution
Barack Obama has tirelessly read from the teleprompter about America’s urgent need to reduce its reliance on foreign oil and the growing demand for alternative renewable energy sources, green jobs, and such. Surprisingly, nuclear energy — the one technology that could help the country meet all of his energy objectives — had until recently received only political footnotes in the president’s agenda. Sadly, when he mentions the word “nuclear” it is usually followed by the words “non-proliferation” rather than “clean energy.”
The usual excuses given for avoiding the nuclear answer have worn quite thin. Arguments involving safety or vulnerability to terrorist attack seem to have fallen by the wayside. The safety record of new nuclear technology renders such Jurassic objections quite obsolete.
The poster children for the anti-nuclear crowd — Three Mile Island and Chernobyl — have also been mothballed, along with the technologies which made them possible. The 1979 Three Mile Island mishap represented a series of improbable errors and failures — both mechanical and human in nature — yet few realize that there were no injuries or deaths. What’s more, the local population of 2 million people received an average estimated radiation dose of about 1 millirem — miniscule compared to the 360 millirems per year the average American receives in simple background radiation — the equivalent of a chest X-ray. Since then, however, a number of technological and procedural changes have been implemented by industry and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to make a similar mishap virtually impossible to reoccur.
The 1986 disaster at Chernobyl involved operators who inexplicably chose to deactivate automatic shutdown mechanisms to carry out an experiment. The problem was that these prehistoric reactors lacked fully enclosed containment buildings, a basic safety installation for commercial reactors in the U.S. Of the approximately 50 fatalities, most were rescue workers who entered contaminated areas without being informed of the danger.
The only remaining argument against nuclear power — where to store spent nuclear fuel — also has a solution. Every year, the nation’s 104 nuclear plants create about 2,200 tons of nuclear waste and store them in storage containers located beside cooling towers across America. At 120 locations in 39 different states, a total of 66,000 tons of used radioactive fuel is stored in concrete containers out in the open and vulnerable to the world. Clearly, it is better to consolidate the nuclear waste we already have at one site than leave it scattered above ground at nuclear reactors across the country. Nuclear power deniers argue that we have no place to go with this dangerous but renewable waste, but we do.
After 20 years of research and testing, Nevada’s Yucca Mountain has proven to be a geologically stable facility capable of supporting its intended function of securing and storing spent nuclear reactor fuel. Spent pellets will be stored in sealed, retrievable casks that can be safely monitored to ensure they are sealed and no hazardous material escapes.
New technology allows us to now separate plutonium or fissionable uranium from spent nuclear fuel and recover more than 90% of the useable fuel. The Yucca Mountain design neatly allows casks to be retrieved at a later date when reprocessing becomes the most efficient source of enriched uranium. Even the transportation process for shipping all of the waste has been tested without incident.
Yucca Mountain has been tested for seismic activity and even an unlikely earthquake will not cause any rupture of storage casks. There are multiple 26-foot diameter tunnels connected with railroads and robotic engines to move storage casks. Its original design has a capacity of 77,000 tons of waste, but includes provisions to more than double the capacity. This is enough storage to last for generations without reprocessing, and for over 1000 years with reprocessing.
Solar and wind power are not solutions to our current energy problems — and will not be in the foreseeable future. Solar panels are expensive and fragile. Each photovoltaic panel is only about 40% efficient and the initial cost of the panels is high and the return small. In order to produce solar energy the sun must be shining and there are significant problems with energy storage. The problem is a lack of continuous sunlight, not weak technology.
Wind power isn’t much better. The space needed for so-called “wind farms” can seriously alter the environment and wind power does not generate very much energy for the price. Denmark has over 5,000 turbines that produce about 19% of what the country uses, yet no conventional power plant has been shut down in that country. Because of the intermittency and variability of the wind, conventional power plants must be kept running at full capacity to meet the actual demand for electricity. People still need power when the wind isn’t blowing. To make matters worse, recent protests from a growing number of Danish neighbors of wind turbines have stopped future wind power projects in their tracks and made local politicians reluctant to approve licenses.
Nuclear power is the only path forward to the future because regardless of all other resources we need base load carriers. These plants are going to be needed even more as the plug in cars flood the market, which is a good thing for many reasons. The storage of spent fuel is a red herring and a silly argument because reprocessing and alternative uses could shrink the actual waste to just a small percentage of that 66,000 tons. What the environmentalist refuse to acknowledge is that nuclear is the cleanest form of energy when you look at what goes in and what is leftover after use. We don’t need to talk about coal, but think about all the exotic metals that go into solar.
If we ever have a prayer of getting off foreign oil then nuclear is the only solution that can meet this need. This country produces plenty of oil, but the demand is so high that only solution is to decrease demand with alternatively fueled vehicles for personal driving. There are a lot of options being tossed around right now and if we want to make them work we need to have cheap readily available power supply, and nuclear is that answer.
It takes some form of energy to make hydrogen or recharge batteries, so lets use the cheapest and cleanest source available, Nuclear!
“Wind power isn’t much better. The space needed for so-called “wind farms” can seriously alter the environment and wind power does not generate very much energy for the price. Denmark has over 5,000 turbines that produce about 19% of what the country uses, yet no conventional power plant has been shut down in that country. Because of the intermittency and variability of the wind, conventional power plants must be kept running at full capacity to meet the actual demand for electricity. People still need power when the wind isn’t blowing.”
Finally, FINALLY, somebody is making a strong case for nuclear energy and saying how inefficient wind power is. I’m sick and tired of people like Obama saying that wind power is our “future” and that it will solve most of our energy problems. What rubbish. I’m also sick and tired of people saying that, “Well, our windmills work fine in rural Indiana, so why can’t everyone use it?” To those people I say, do you have any clue how much energy a city like New York or Los Angeles uses? Even smaller cities like Denver or Nashville couldn’t even come close to being fully supplied by wind energy. Sure, if you had a community of only about 10,000, maybe 20,000, wind energy would be possible. But for all of the major urban areas in the country where most of the people DO live, it just is too little and too expensive when compared to fossil fuel, let alone nuclear energy.
If we had built all of the nuclear power plants this country wanted back in the 1970s and 1980s, we would be energy independent right now. But no, Congress, especially the Democrats, always have to kiss the butts of the environmental groups who will never listen to anything with the word “nuclear” in it. Forget that it’s one of the most efficient ways to produce energy there is today. Forget that a lot more nuclear power plants would make us energy indipendent and would enable us to break away from Middle Eastern oil nations and the Muslim thugs who run them. And forget about the fact that nuclear energy is a lot cleaner than fossil fuel energy and would probably be a lot better for the environment. Nope, just because of the word “nuclear,” we now have to ditch the whole program.
And Democrats wonder why most Americans think they are nothing but a bunch of liars and hypocrites when it comes to energy policy.
YOU ARE WRONG,….They are liars about everything.
For once we ought to follow France’s example. The politically correctness will literally kill us one day. Is it time to invest in a candle company?
A coeur vaillant rien d’impossible.
If one takes that leap of faulty faith that we need to “control global warming” and/or “CO2 pollution”, then nuke plants are great. Build as many as you can. Use off hour power generation to manufacture synfuels that are super clean hydrocarbons like gasoline, diesel, etc., etc. Oh, and yes, Gary, there is excess energy produced – try turning that nuke reaction back to low sometime during the non-peak hours.
Your efficiency rating of solar cells is very high. Boeing is recently just announced new cells that reach 42% efficiency. These cells use a lense to concentrate the sunlight onto a target cell. Most solar panels deployed on rooftops are generally less than 15% efficient.
New nuclear technology is only hope of fueling our planet w/o drilling deeper in more dangerous environments.
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2006/12/solar-cell-breaks-the-40-efficiency-barrier-46765
The problem with nuclear power is the cost. At over 5 billion dollars for a typical nuclear power plant, it is simply too expensive relative to the alternatives available in the US (e.g. natural gas and coal).
When nuclear power is made more affordable and competitive, then new units will be more common.
You are correct Mike, if you choose the old paradigm of the giant power plant. However, there is a newer generation of much smaller reactors that can be plugged in at various points on the grid. These smaller reactors do not have the same output, but are much less expensive and a lot easier to set up.
The CEO of Intel was recently interviewed in an electronics industry magazine. He said to build a new fab in CA would cost Intel $4 Billion. Of that it costs less than $1 Billion for the land and a road, the first year salary of the workers, construction, raw materials, and all of the processing equipment (which ain’t cheap.)
That leaves *over* $3 Billion for taxes and regulations and umpteen licenses and impact reports and paperwork out the wazoo and so on, expenses that have zilch to do with the fab (processing plant) or what it does. He went on to explain that a new fab in CA wasn’t going to happen. Can’t happen. Ridiculously expensive. Intel is a business and has to make money, and that doesn’t happen with $4 Billion for a fab. That’s a lot of lost jobs and revenue right there.
Can you even conceive of $4 Billion? I mean, I can get this number in some sort of distant intellectual sense, but… viscerally? Like how many twinkies one could buy? It’s a lot of cash. Cash is something we can use. And this sort of idiocy goes on every day in a blue state… yet there’s 10% unemployment!!!
Nuclear energy expenses are the same, or worse.
What the Feds need to do is put a stop to the insane red tape, but they won’t. The democrats know how to to one trick and one trick only — regulate. Think about it: everything they do is related to regulating. Why, if they could, they’d regulate your heart rate (for your own good of course.)
Nuclear is competitive with gas, today. The reason is because gas plants spend a lot of money on fuel, but fuel is a small expense for nuclear plants. The high construction cost is a down payment to reduce the periodic fuel costs.
All of what was written is true, but misses the most crucial problem we face in nuclear energy. It is a very good summary of where the US was in 1985. Our current situation is this: virtually all of our expertise in nuclear power lay in graves. Our experts are dead. Never, in the history of the world, has any society resurrected an advanced technology after it destroyed it. All of our Presidents and Congresses assume there is a latent pool of talent, sitting somewhere, about whom they can endlessly palaver. They assume that if they finally throw billions at a problem, this talent pool will produce well engineered nuclear power plants. It is true that large corporations will take the money. But we are doomed to a series of TMI, New Orleans levees, BP well disasters, collapsed bridges, systemic failures, because there is no veteran to say, “Oops. Stop.”
Some would rely on the NRC, and DOE. They have thousands of retirees who never engineered anything, during their entire career. They overview. Consider if Michael Jordan had not bounced a basketball in fifty years. Would he be excellent, over viewing from a press box?
Engineering is a professional practice. The best and brightest go into rewarding fields. After fifty or sixty years, they die off. This, not worthless windmills, is our problem.
No we actually have quite a bit of expertise here serving our own and other world markets. There are three major vendors with deep expertise in design and implementation; Toshiba, GE and Areva. GE is a US company. Much of Toshiba’s expertise in Nuclear comes from its 80% ownership of Westinghouse located here in the US.
There are 104 operating reactors here – about 20% of the world’s total. But while there are about 360 more in various stages of planning and construction elsewhere in the world, we are essentially frozen in place.
And to a prior point about it being too expensive – so was a guest quarters that I tried to attach to my house. But that was because the local regulations and codes – many of which were useless or of dubious value – added about 40% to the cost.
Plus, don’t forget the thousands of nuclear power plant operators that have been trained by the Navy to serve on submarines and carriers. Most of them (such as myself) had to find work outside the nuclear industry after finishing their service.
Dale and Geeze contribute, but I would note that no US military nuclear power plant would receive an NRC license for a civilian power plant. I have performed engineering on a score of civilian nukes, heavily participated in the GE Mark I, II, and III designs, plus the mentioned PWRs, for over 24 years, and led the first US Spent Fuel Storage engineering team. I have managed thousands of engineers. In a survey of one talented team, of 124 engineers; they had earned, on average, 2.67 technical degrees per person.
If you read, the Gathering Storm, by the National Academy of Engineering, you will comprehend the US shortfall. If you scope our national energy needs, over the next decade, calculate the engineering staffing needed to achieve this goal, then survey the number of engineering schools which dropped coursework vital to this work, during the 1980s and 1990s, due to the unemployment of their graduates because nothing was built, you arrive at my conclusions. The talent we need does not exist in the US.
The talented people exist in China, Japan, France and other nations, but none could perform to USNRC regs. China has four massive nukes under construction and all are ahead of schedule. This has never happened in the US. Currently we could not fabricate one reactor; the heavy wall equipment does not exist. It is not a question of money; it requires experienced people on the front end of the work, design engineering, fabrication, and construction,e.g a MSME, forty year old PE, who has designed six units, and seen them start up. He does not guess; he knows.
We either will run out of time, or have run out of time.
I yield to your deeper experience but in the end it is the political will that matters – or at least their willingness to get the h*ll out of the way. BTW, I am a “seasoned” ME as well.
That just means we’ll do what the Navy does- put 20-somethings in charge of the reactors, under the supervision of a couple older guys.
Great article but TMI has not been mothballed. (OK, TMI-2, where the accident happened, yes, but that has been the case since 1979. TMI-1 continues to produce clean, useful energy.)
What I would like to know is simply this: Who is the fool who decided years ago that hydroelectric generation was not a renewable resource? And another question: Whatever happened to the idea of manufacturing photovoltaic material in laminated sheets, rather than handmade glass cells? And finally, (this question is for Dale): why can’t we start manufacturing smaller nuclear electrical generators, perhaps one for each county, along the lines of the reactor units used on our submarines and carriers?
That is happening. Just not fast enough for me.
Look up the Hyperion reactor. Commercialization is 8 years out and counting. Can produce electricity for the same cost or less than coal-fired plants. No waste to dispose of. No billions in capital required and 10 year licensing nightmares to deal with. This is the future, or should be if we can get over our fear of nuclear.
If Homer Simpson can work in a nuclear power plant then most other Americans can too.
Is anyone familiar with thorium technology? I understand the process does not produce weapons grade by products and the reactors can consume spent conventional material.
Yes, the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR), or one earlier design (EBR-1), was run for several years in the late 1960′s and early 1970′s. For a complete review of who, what, when, where, how, see: http://www.energyfromthorium.com (Kirk Sorensen) and http://www.nucleargreen.com (Charles Barton – his father worked at ORNL with Alvin Weinberg and other luminaries. Charles is a die-hard AGW disciple and his blog is distracting with typos but the info is good.)
Would we make more progress in energy discussions if we talked about “energy self-reliance” or “energy security” instead of “independence”? With global supply chains and the fungible nature of commodities being sold and traded, it seems “independence” is a chimera and impossible to achieve. Also, separate electricity production and industrial process heat from transportation fuels and chemical feedstocks for plastics of all kinds. Might make for a ‘cleaner’ discussion.
Not mentioned is the possible switch to a Thorium based fuel cycle. Thorium is much more plentiful than Uranium and there is no Plutonium byproduct.
The Left, Al Gore, Obama, Reid, et al., are all against nuclear power because that would solve the “problem” of CO2 emissions. They do not want to solve that “problem.” They want to tax CO2 emissions and, in addition, set up CO2 a trading system. Just follow the money (i.e., Al Gore’s investment portfolio).
Dead on.
It is not about prosperity. It is about control. The dems need Cap N Tax and to hell with the rest of us.
Great comments! Gotta love this about PJM.
And “surprisingly”, no trolls yet.
Broke, Powerless, Tribalized and Stupid
The legacy of the 60s New Left Baby Boomers.
Care to update your “Safety Record” link now? Don’t get me wrong, I agree that we should use nuclear power as part of the solution, but to argue that we should damn the torpedoes is a weeeeeeeeee bit irresponsible, don’t you think?