Present at the Future (16 page)

In an effort to keep nuclear material out of the hands of countries that might want to create nuclear weapons, President George W. Bush in 2006 proposed a plan to “lease” nuclear fuels to countries that have not signed the nonproliferation agreements, such as India. In this scenario, the nuclear fuel would be watched from cradle to grave, as it is sent to countries to fuel their energy-producing nuclear reactors and retrieved later as spent fuel. The spent fuel is reprocessed so that the plutonium in it can be used again in a nuclear reactor but not used for nuclear weapons. Bush called it the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, and it is officially described as enhancing “energy security, while promoting nonproliferation. It would achieve its goal by having nations with secure, advanced nuclear capabilities provide fuel services—fresh
fuel and recovery of used fuel—to other nations who agree to employ nuclear energy for power generation purposes only.”

The partnership plan calls for hundreds of millions of dollars to be spent on this effort. New kinds of fuel-retrieving reactors must be developed too. But not everyone is impressed. “The Bush global nuclear energy program really puts nuclear energy on a much more slippery slope, much more proliferation prone,” warns Makhijani. “It creates a kind of a nuclear apartheid in the world. It talks about fuel-cycle countries, in a very polite way, which can be trusted with plutonium, and then other countries which are reactor countries. This is like a unilateral amendment of the nonproliferation treaty, which guarantees its parties that they have the ‘inalienable right’ to nuclear power. If you promote the separation of plutonium, and promote nuclear energy, you’re going to wind up with uranium-enrichment and reprocessing technologies throughout the world. Not, I think, a very pleasant future to look at.”

Furthermore, Makhijani says that it’s erroneous to assume that the reprocessing of spent nuclear wastes will not result in weapons-grade material finding its way into the hands of terrorists.

“This global nuclear energy program of reprocessing plutonium separation, being promoted as proliferation resistant—when you can make bombs out of the stuff—is really not a sensible program, and many advocates of nuclear energy are quite skeptical.

“Terrorists won’t care if they’re [using] impure plutonium, so long as you can make a chain reaction out of it. And they don’t care if it’s one kiloton or ten kilotons. A nuclear fizzle is several hundred tons of TNT equivalent. And I think for a terrorist fizzle, it would have a huge effect.”

He points out that there is no guarantee that the countries will not take their apportioned plutonium and turn it into nuclear weapons. “Look at France, the sort of model country for plutonium separation. They reprocess for foreigners.” And one of those clients is Japan, which uses separated plutonium in its commercial sector. In
2002, says Makhijani, Japan’s Labor Party leader said that if China, its historic rival, gets too uppity, “Japan should make thousands of nuclear weapons from its commercial-sector plutonium. Now, that’s the real world we are in, once we start separating plutonium. Commercial plutonium was said by Japan to be not suitable for nuclear weapons only ten years ago, but suddenly they’re saying they could make thousands of weapons out of it.”

Tom Cochran is even more critical. “India’s first nuclear weapon was produced using plutonium from their research reactor that was supplied under the ‘atoms for peace’ program. It was reprocessed in a reprocessing plant that was supposed to be part of their breeder reactor program. So the United States, under the Ford and Carter administrations, stopped commercial reprocessing in this country.

“And when President Reagan tried to renew it, there was no utility interest because it was uneconomical, as it is today. So there’s no economic reason to move ahead with reprocessing at this time. It’s dangerous if it’s pursued. And nonweapons states that are of concern, such as Iran? I mean, the last thing you would want to have in countries like Iran and North Korea are reprocessing plants and large stocks of spent nuclear power reactor fuel, because that’s a quick access to nuclear weapons capability.”

THE PEBBLE BED TO THE RESCUE?

What if instead of a giant nuclear reactor, you could build a smaller, much more efficient, modular unit that could be expanded at will and could compete with very large nuclear power stations that cost a huge amount of money? And on top of that would be much safer to operate and almost impossible to melt down? That’s the promise of a technology, decades in the making and still under development, called the pebble-bed reactor.

“Imagine a bubble gum machine full of big round bubble gum balls,” says Dr. Andrew Kadak, professor of nuclear engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Only instead of being
round, these gum balls are cylindrical, little “pebbles.” Each one of these little pebbles is packed with a load of radioactive fuel, “a cue ball containing, inside, ten thousand tiny little microspheres of uranium.” They drop into the top of a hopper and by “gravity are circulated and discharged from the bottom and then pneumatically reinserted in the top and could be operated without refueling or shutting down for about five years. Draw this little mental diagram and you’d have the pebble-bed reactor,” says Kadak, completing the picture. Kadak and his colleagues at MIT are working on developing this reactor, first demonstrated by the Germans, with other countries in the hunt. “The Chinese and the South Africans are in fact now in the process of licensing for construction two of these demonstration plants.”

You’d have to say that a nuclear power plant, built like a candy dispenser, is highly unique, to wax redundant. When compared with your standard hot-water reactor that steams water vapor out of its cooling towers down the block, the pebble bed is a radical design. Consider this: In addition to the nuclear jaw-breaker fuel, the reactor has no water. Nope. Instead, the coolant is helium, high-temperature helium gas that’s circulated instead of water. “This helium gas is an inert gas, which means it doesn’t get activated or corrode materials, which is an attractive feature,” compared with the water reactors that are eating nasty holes in the reactor walls, Kadak says. The pebble-bed reactor also promises to be much more efficient, achieving efficiencies as high as 50 percent.

And that gas design allows for flexibility. “We can either take the helium and put that helium to a gas turbine, which makes electricity directly, or we can process it through a heat exchange and either make steam as the Chinese are doing or put this device, this intermediate heat exchanger, on the nuclear side of the plant, [so] you’re able to apply that heat to many, many different applications,” Kadak says. There is even speculation that the reactor can be made to produce hydrogen, creating the basis of a hydrogen economy driven in part by nuclear reactors of the future.

Oh. And speaking of walls. This reactor does not have them, at least not the superthick concrete containment walls that prevented the contaminated water from leaking out of Three Mile Island’s melting nuclear reactor. No walls, because there is no water. The proponents of this design say the reactor is “meltdown-proof” because the reactor’s design does not let the fuel get hot enough to melt. The reactor is designed to shut itself down without human intervention if the coolant fails.

Wow. Does this idea sound hot! So to speak. Of course there are the minuses. “You’re doing away with essentially what has served as the foundation of the safety margin in the reactors that we have,” says Makhijani. “Most of the severe accidents that have happened so far have happened in graphite-moderated reactors. Reactors that can catch fire, because they’ve got carbon, Chernobyl, Winscale, and so on. And pebble bed is a graphite-moderated reactor.” It’s the graphite that slows down or moderates the speed of the nuclear particles in the reaction, so that the reaction can proceed.

Kadak agrees that the potential fire threat is something to be studied. “There’s a lot of discussion about what actually happened at Chernobyl, whether it was the graphite burning or the zirconium cladding burning. But clearly, the graphite supported the combustion, whatever fuel that was there, that was burning.

“We’re now doing studies at MIT and the Germans have done numerous tests on these things called air-ingress accidents, to assess whether there is a graphite-burning issue.” The studies to date have indicated, he says, that there is no graphite-burning issue for this particular design and for this particular configuration. “But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will be the ultimate arbiter on that point.”

Now for the real naysayers. “This is a nice research project,” says Cochran, “but it isn’t going to solve the global warming problem, because pebble-bed reactors don’t show any signs of being cheaper than the conventional reactors we have here in this country. And in fact, the only utility that was supporting R&D on this reactor in
the United States backed out when the CEO resigned from the company.”

In fact, even the White House has been reluctant to spend money on developing these reactors, spending money instead on more conventional nuclear reactors. That’s no mistake, says Kadak. “From a practical standpoint, the next fleet of reactors will have to be these advanced light-water reactors, which have significant improvements in overall safety system performance. And the pebble-bed reactor, the first two real commercial plants are going to only be demonstrated if they come online as scheduled by 2011, 2012. So once these reactors come online, then the rest of the industry and the United States for sure can look at this and say whether or not this is something that they would like to invest in for the longer term.” Those two reactors are the ones South Africa and China will be pioneering.

THE ECONOMICS: FOLLOW THE MONEY

In the final analysis, it’s all about money. One can’t speak about nuclear power in a vacuum; it is always compared, economically, to other alternative energies. “The economics is going to be the driver, relative to what new technology is developed, whether it be wind, solar, nuclear, or coal, says Kadak, reflecting the consensus of just about everyone in the energy business. “Does nuclear power offer an economic advantage over the other alternative energy options?”

That’s where the debate begins. Historically, nuclear power has not been very economical. “Quite frankly, until the beginning of the ’90s, we did not operate the plants as well as we do today,” says David Modeen, vice president of the nuclear division for the Electric Power Research Institute. “We’ve had a steady increase in the efficiency and the effectiveness today where the fleetwide average is ninety percent efficiency. It’s the lowest-cost-based generation by all metrics both industry and government.”

“They keep saying it’s very economical,” rebuts Makhijani, speaking of the nuclear power industry. “But Wall Street doesn’t agree
with that. If you include the capital cost, which is most of the cost, then government subsidies still appear to be necessary half a century after the start of nuclear power. Otherwise they’d go and order them.” And in fact at the close of 2005, the White House authorized the federal government to issue more than $10 billion for the construction of a half dozen nuclear power plants.

“But how far is that going to take us?” Not much of an impact on global warming, says Cochran, or on energy independence. “Our growth in electricity requires twenty, thirty plants every year, and we have six plants in ten years; it’s really a few drops in the bucket. There are better alternatives that will impact the global-warming pollution problem faster and cheaper and safer than subsidizing new nuclear plants.”

Putting the final coda on the French nuclear model, Makhijani sums up the feelings of many energy experts in the United States. “Nobody’s lining up to really build a lot of nuclear power plants. And to say that nuclear power plants are going to be the answer to the electricity sector’s woes and to global warming is—so far, at least—in fantasy land.”

Referring to Cochran’s emphasis on alternative energies, Kadak says, “He’s quite right that the economics is going to be the driver, relative to what new technology is developed, whether it be wind, solar, nuclear, or coal. When you start looking at the economics of new nuclear plants, it’s all quite speculative in the sense that we haven’t built one in the United States for such a long time. We really don’t know what our current costs are, and those people who are promoting the construction of these plants believe that they can build them much cheaper” than what studies like those done at MIT show. “So the proof will be in the pudding.”

“What is in short supply is not energy sources,” says Makhijani. “Wind can offset CO
₂
. Solar can offset CO
₂
. Nuclear can offset CO
₂
. What is it going to cost? Nuclear is among the more costly sources.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

IS COAL STILL KING?

Not all the coal that is dug warms the world.

—MARY H. JONES

In 2003, President George W. Bush announced that the U.S. government would spend $1 billion to finance a 10-year demonstration project “to create the world’s first coal-based, zero emissions electricity and hydrogen power plant” called FutureGen.

“We are the OPEC of coal. We have more energy in the form of coal here in the United States than the Middle East has in its entirety in oil,” says Joe Lucas. As executive director of Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, Lucas can be called America’s coal ambassador. Its coal guru. Perhaps its biggest advocate. His organization may say “energy choices,” but his choice for energy is certainly coal. And if you look at just the numbers, that makes a lot of sense.

“Today, on average, we produce three times more energy from coal in this country than we did thirty-five years ago, and we have
one third of the emissions, of the regulated emissions. Sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, those emissions have been cut by about seventy percent overall. It’s an affordable energy resource. It’s about half the cost of using other fuels. It’s a fuel that we’ve used primarily to generate electricity here in this country. Over half of our electricity comes from coal. It is an energy resource that could be looked at to do some additional things.” Such as converting it to create “clean diesel” and other transportation fuels. But what really makes coal an option for the future, boasts Lucas, is the potential to clean up the coal-fired power plants so that they emit no more pollutants.