Nuclear Power - If Not Now, When?

The Problem is Nuclear Waste

T. F. Stratton
La Mancha Company
Santa Fe, NM 87501
April 2001

Nuclear Generating Capacity

orn in the Twentieth Century, now middle aged in the Twenty First, nuclear power was alternately the panacea and the scourge. Hailed first as the way to perpetual free energy, it was then realized that uranium was not the most plentiful element on earth. The proposed solution was the breeder - a reactor system that produced energy and more fuel than it consumed. The superlatives were getting out of hand. Construction of nuclear reactors and power plant designs went forward in the United States, Western Europe, the USSR and the Far East. Over one hundred stations were built in the United States in the 1960's, 1970's and 1980, until approximately one-fifth of U.S. electricity was produced by nuclear power. Worldwide, the annual production of electricity by nuclear power in 1999 was 2.4 trillion kWh. If this energy had been produced from coal, an additional 3.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide would have been introduced into the atmosphere.

Country	Generating Capacity	Number of Units
United States	98 GWe (+4)	104 (+3)
France	60 GWe (+3)	57 (+2)
Japan	43 GWe (+6)	52 (+6)
Germany	22 GWe	20
Russia	20 GWe (+4)	26 (+5)
Canada	15 GWe	22
South Korea	13 GWe	16 (+4)
United Kingdom	12 GWe	33
Ukraine	11 GWe (+5)	13 (+5)
Nuclear Electric - Total Above	294 GWe (+26)	343 (+25)
Nuclear Electric - World Total	353 GWe	438

Nuclear units and generating capacity for countries with a generating capacity more than 10 GWe. [IAEA, March 2000, Nuclear News, March 2001]. The figures in parentheses are forthcoming capacity and number of units. Worldwide, nuclear power accounts for about 17% of electricity generation and 7% of all energy. There are 11 Chernobyl-type graphite-moderated reactors in Russia and 2 in Lithuania.

Acceptance of Nuclear Power

Several issues converged in the last two decades to intensify the debate over the future role of nuclear electric power. Among these were:

1) Increased fear of radiation in any form
2) Growing stress between a secure energy future and global climate change
3) Politico-economic resurgence of Russia
4) Inadequate provision for nuclear waste management

1) Fear of Radiation in Any Form

Public acceptance of nuclear power turned downward even before Chernobyl and Three Mile Island because of reminders of Hiroshima, the Lucky Dragon, a growing uneasiness with radiation, and discoveries of seemingly abundant sources of gas and oil for power and transportation. Orders placed in the U.S. after 1973 for nuclear plant construction were canceled. The completed Shoreham plant on Long Island was stopped by local opponents in 1987 and subsequently dismantled after operating at 5% of nominal power for short periods. Similar trends emerged in Europe. Nuclear power was embraced in parallel with the U.S. by much of Western Europe - France (57 units), Germany (20), Sweden (11), Belgium (7), Switzerland (5), and others. But no longer. France is the exception to the nearly universal retreat in acceptance of nuclear electric power. Three-fourths of French electricity is nuclear, and more is exported to neighbors. Even in France, there are signs that national elan and nuclear power are no longer the friends they once were. The change in heart was influenced by major discoveries of fossil fuels in the North Sea and the expectation that gas from the Caucasus and Caspian Sea will become a reliable, inexpensive, and clean-burning source of primary fuel.

Behind the Iron Curtain, the USSR developed and constructed nuclear power plants in Russia (29 units), Ukraine (16) Czechoslovakia (5), Hungary (4), Slovakia (6) and some others. The older Soviet plants (type RBMK, typified by Chernobyl) were not as safe as Western designs because of the absence of a secondary cooling loop and secondary containment of the reactor. Gross physics errors were revealed by the Chernobyl accident when complete control was lost during off-normal operation to explore low-power instabilities. The graphite-moderated reactor caught fire and burned for days. Austria - a non-nuclear state, and home to the International Atomic Energy Agency - objects to the completion of an improved Russian-designed unit (type VVER) at Temelin, in the Czech Republic, and may also oppose new reactor construction and renovations in Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia. Sweden and Germany vacillate between abandoning nuclear and realizing they do not have a long-term alternative in sight. The Far East - especially Japan and South Korea - is host to the most active nuclear power programs for the reason that there are few available and secure fossil fuels in the region. Japan obtains about 33% of its electricity from nuclear reactors, and South Korea some 36%. China also builds nuclear electric plants with U.S. help, although it is not clear whether the trend will continue in the face of major finds of gas in central Asia that will supplement its immense coal reserves.

2) Secure Energy Future and Global Climate Change

Industrialized nations seek a map to a secure energy future. Electricity, transportation, manufacturing and space heat are the principal customers. There is a worldwide shortage of electricity - not only in California, but also in Central Europe, northeast Asia, and most of sub-Saharan Africa. Global warming is the overwhelming issue in the developed world - that part of the world that most depends on central station electricity for its economic survival, that demands clean air and political stability, and that is most opposed to nuclear power. Whether or not anthropomorphic generation of carbon dioxide is, in fact, the root of global climate change, there is pressure on the industrialized world in the form of the international agreements to reduce production of carbon dioxide. Since nuclear power does not generate carbon dioxide, one would think that serious consideration would be given to increasing dependence on nuclear power, and less dependence on fossil fuels, especially for central station electric power. But, in addition to fear of radiation, strong economic forces outweigh the desire to reduce anthropomorphic generation of carbon dioxide by an increased reliance on nuclear power.

Principal among these are increased confidence on the availability of clean-burning natural gas for central power, and the absence of an established decline in recoverable oil for transportation. Estimates of found, discoverable and recoverable oil worldwide no longer increase dramatically each decade, as they did until about 1980. Although the low and high estimates diverge more than before, the mean value remains early unchanged the past twenty years at about 2,000 billion barrels.

What has changed is that estimates of found, discoverable and recoverable natural gas have, and continue to, increase world-wide. With the accepted energy equivalent conversion that 6,000 cubic feet of gas equals one barrel of oil, the present value of gas now and in the future is about equal to that of oil, thus doubling the fossil fuel outlook by the new accounting. In the U.S., eight out of ten active drilling rigs look for gas rather than oil. In contrast to established fossil fuel technologies, renewable electricity resources in the form of wind and solar power are present in only limited quantities, and will continue to be niche sources principally because there is no way to store large amounts of electricity when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. The technologies are not now, perhaps can not, be adapted for high-capacity electrical generators that compete with coal, gas and nuclear central stations. Suggestions for solutions to energy storage include pumping water, setting machinery into rotation, and charging super-conducting coils. These concepts will work, but with limited capacity and unknown cost and reliability; none match super tankers, unit coal trains, and dams for gross energy storage, available on demand.

3) Politico-economic resurgence of Russia

Russia senses an economic advantage by embracing nuclear electric power for itself and its former states, and selling the majority of its gas to central and western Europe to supply a non-nuclear energy future for those states. In return, Europe would phase out its nuclear stations and pay Russia to take the waste, which along with excess Russian weapons plutonium, would power an increasing inventory of Russian reactors. All this makes perfect sense to the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy and the government owned gas monopoly, Gazprom. In fact, the strategy has assumed the status of national policy. The fees that Russia could earn by relieving Western Europe of unwanted radioactive waste would provide the money to construct processing plants and pursue the largely-abandoned western technology of fast breeder reactors as a way to insure nuclear fuel forever.

The first phase of this concept is in place. Russian designs (VVER 440 and VVER 1000) that are based on Western principals of containment and control are being constructed in Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia, Armenia and Ukraine. Although difficult to comprehend, plans are going ahead to upgrade a Chernobyl-type unit (RBMK) at St. Petersburg and commission a new unit at Kursk. The U.S. non-proliferation program to increase the security and reduce the inventory of Russian weapons plutonium, supports a joint venture between MINATOM and General Atomics to design and develop a high-temperature gas cooled reactor that would consume plutonium in the form of mixed-oxide fuel pellets. The pellets consist of plutonium and uranium oxides combined with a refractory poison and enclosed in a high-temperature refractory coating. The pellet fuel would embrace the once-through concept that is a keystone of American nuclear policy.

The convenient altruism of Russia should be viewed with alarm because of the explicit economic dependence of the subscribing states on continuing Russian sources of fossil fuel.

4) Nuclear Waste Management

Nuclear waste is the spent fuel from nuclear reactors. The fuel began as heavy metal uranium ore, enriched in the fissionable isotope U-235 by an expensive separation process. Enriched uranium is encased in tubes of temperature-resistant metals that generate the least radioactivity when in the reactor. The fuel is inserted in the reactor core in a pattern that can be made critical, usually by manipulating control rods. The fuel generates two classes of radioactive materials: fission products, such as strontium and cesium, that are about half as heavy as uranium, and a small fraction of new elements that are heavier than uranium itself - transuranic elements. Both products are intensely radioactive - much more so than the original uranium - and are a profound complication to nuclear power engineering. The volume and mass of spent fuel is truly great. Estimates of the total inventory of spent fuel from the full life cycle of installed U.S. power reactors range from 80,000 to 90,000 tons. The U.S. number is so great because our policy is once-through, no reclamation - principally because of concerns over proliferation - even though the unburned uranium retains more than 98% of the original energy. Other nations have different approaches. Most Western European nuclear states engage plants in France and the U.K. to recycle spent fuel, separating plutonium from uranium, which is then recharged, into current generation reactors. Russia supports the notion that the costs of its uranium enrichment and plutonium production for weapons should be recovered as an economic asset of the State, but for the most part this policy has taken the form of spent fuel storage until breeders, or some other economic opportunity, appear.

Canada, Sweden, Spain and Italy also embrace the U.S. once-through approach in which discharged fuel will be buried in a geologic repository. In the U.S., this means storage in a repository with geologic integrity, in which stored material can be monitored, and from which spent fuel can be recovered. The U.S. government convinced the power utilities to contribute $10B so that the government could design, evaluate, and construct a repository by 2000 at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert that will accommodate up to 70,000 tons of commercial spent fuel. Perhaps not unexpectedly, progress at the storage site is not far along - still in the evaluation stage - and collecting vociferous opponents. Much of the opposition is deserved because the site is expected to store some 7,000 tons of defense waste, naval spent fuel, and materials from production reactor operations - none attributable to electric power production. Nothing proceeds very fast in the waste management business, and it will require 35 years or more to load Yucca Mountain after it is approved. In the mean time, the nuclear power industry is compelled to store spent fuel rods in air-cooled racks for decades at its generating sites. Until some publicly acceptable and transparently desirable method of disposing of spent fuel becomes to light, the prospect for increased electric power production in the U.S. from nuclear power plants seems remote.

New initiatives to find technical solutions that could reduce the volume and activity of waste from nuclear power production were proposed in 1990 by scientists in the U.S. and Europe. The most prominent is ATW - Accelerator Transmutation of Waste. The concept is to reduce the activity of dangerous radioactive waste by neutron irradiation: convert fission products with intermediate half lives, and therefore high specific activity, to either short-lived or stable isotopes, and convert transuranic elements to long-lived isotopes. Complex chemical separations must be performed before irradiation of the waste in order to separate out elements that would be converted from less dangerous to more dangerous matter. Primary neutrons would be generated by bombardment of a liquid, heavy metal target with high energy protons from an accelerator (linear or circular) and then multiplied in a configuration of uranium and waste that is just sub-critical, thus resulting in further multiplication of the neutrons by a factor of twenty or more. Neutron absorption would convert the waste material to a more benign state. Most proposals include provision for concurrent electric power production to run the accelerator and pay the costs of the chemical separation. It is plain to see that the concept includes all the complexity of a nuclear power plant with the addition of chemistry and accelerators.

The U.S Congress, through the mechanism of the 1999 Energy and Water Appropriations Act, directed the Department of Energy to develop a roadmap for the proposed technology. DOE reported back with a report prepared under the direction of a steering committee composed of four DOE officers, three National Laboratory representatives, and three members nominated by the National Academy of Science. Key elements of the roadmap are:

1) Engage technical experts from around the world to study the problem for six years at a projected cost of $280M (average cost of $50M/year). The guidelines are to study a complex of facilities that would partition and transmute 87,000 tons of spent fuel in 90 years.

2) If the studies warrant, commence a R&D plan that would culminate in the construction of a full-scale demonstration facility that should become operational in 2035. The R&D plan proposes an eight-year program at $2B (average cost of $250M/year) followed by thirteen years to construct and evaluate a demonstration facility costing $9B (averaging $700M/year).

3) Construct eight full-scale plants to transmute 87,000 tons of civilian waste at a projected cost of $270B over 90 years (average cost of $3B/year).

The DOE study suggests that if the ATW program is successful it would

a) develop, demonstrate and operate an ATW program that lasts 117 years and costs $281B;

b) reduce the radioactivity of commercial waste by a factor of 10;

c) not treat 7,000 tons of defense (weapons, production, naval and research) waste and waste generated by ATW operations, which would then dominate the radioactivity in the repository.

At face value, the Energy Department study assures the demise of ATW, except as a low level, low priority, research project because it projects such a long drawn-out program of study, development and implementation that all U.S. nuclear plants will have outlived their licenses before the proposed technology is available.

Finding

There are many pluses for nuclear electric power. Reactor designs are better - safer and more efficient - because of operating experience and convergence of design. Uranium fuel does not generate carbon dioxide, mercury or smog. Found uranium reserves will allow 50 years of reliance on nuclear power without breeding; fuel recycling and fast-spectrum breeders can extend the nuclear future for a very long time. But fear continues: fear of accidents during plant operation and fuel reprocessing, fear of radiation while mining, fear of nuclear plants exploding, fear that reactor fuel will become terrorist bombs, fear of proliferation of nuclear weapons - in short, fear of intended and unintended nuclear radiation and its consequence to health, political and economic stability.

It is unclear when nuclear power will step up and play a role in assuring a reliable and secure energy future for the U.S and the world. The anti-nuclear community realized some years ago that in addition to fear, there is an additional, universal, and unsolved issue - what to do with radioactive waste. Almost no progress has been made to eliminate this issue, which was characterized to me personally in 1965 as a "pedestrian engineering detail." How wrong.

Before the issues of fuel recycling and radioactive reactor waste management are solved to the satisfaction of the public, some nation must demonstrate the resolve to test a solution by selecting one of the many options, build a pilot storage facility, and learn by experience. The construction of WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, NM) is instructive of the determination required. WIPP is an underground complex of cavities mined in salt structures some 2,000 feet under the surface, which when filled, will store for a stipulated 10,000 years much of the plutonium that resulted from U.S. nuclear weapons development and fabrication. ERDA applied to withdraw 17,200 acres in Eddy County, NM in 1976. WIPP was authorized three years later and excavation began in 1982. The facility was ready to receive waste in 1988, but it took an additional ten years of litigation before the first shipments actually arrived in March 1999. The facility is scheduled to be filled in 35 years.

It was a long and difficult struggle, but for the first time, at WIPP, we are able to derive experience in the management of transuranic waste. It is essential we do the same for radioactive waste from nuclear electric power plants by selecting a process and a place to begin learning by experience how best to treat and isolate spent nuclear fuel. We need not attempt to solve the entire issue with the first step. Intermediate scale steps will do. If we do not begin soon, the U.S. and the world will become more dependent on coal and gas for central station power, uncertain about assured supplies of oil for transportation, subject to the human consequences of carbon dioxide and other emissions from fossil fuels and the answer to When? in the title may be Never.

Selected References

1. "Nuclear Energy: Principals, Practices and Prospects," David Bodansky, American Institute of Physics Press, Woodbury, NY (1996)

2. "World List of Nuclear Power Plants," Nuclear News, v. 44 #3 (March 2001)

3. "U.S. Geological Survey World Petroleum Assessment 2000 - Description and Results," U.S. Survey Digital Data Series - DDS-60 (2000)

4. "The Energy Crunch," TIME Europe, Vol. 156 No. 12 (September 18, 2000)

5. "Nuclear Power May Get Its Second Wind in the 21st Century," Yevgeny O. Adamov, Nuclear News, v. 43 #12 (November 2000)

6. "A Roadmap for Developing Accelerator Transmutation of Waste (ATW) Technology," DOE/RW-0519 (October 1999)

Thomas F. Stratton is a retired Los Alamos physicist.

He can be contacted at stratton@sumnerassociates.com

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