Who Bleeds From Introducing Cutting-Edge Nuclear Reactors?
Author
Craig M. Pease - Former Law School Professor
Former Law School Professor
Current Issue
November-December 2023
Issue
6
Craig M. Pease

Nuclear micro reactors have been deployed on U.S. aircraft carriers and submarines since the 1950s. Recently, considerable progress has been made on updated micro reactors for commercial generation of electricity. As a proof of concept example, the Defense Logistics Agency recently awarded a contract to the private corporation Oklo to build a micro reactor at Eielson Airforce Base in Alaska. Research continues forthwith, with about 75 ongoing U.S. projects to research, develop, and deploy next-generation reactors.

All the hullabaloo about advanced reactors notwithstanding, nuclear electricity in the United States is in steep decline. There are about 90 classic light water nuclear reactors operating in the United States today, producing some 20 percent of the electricity for the grid. They are immense facilities, with the familiar giant curved concrete cooling towers. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses of about 20 percent of this fleet will expire before 2030, if not renewed. About 40 reactors have already been decommissioned. By contrast, only a handful of new ones are being built. Most recently, this past summer, after over a decade of construction and at a cost north of $30 billion, a new unit at the Vogtle plant in Georgia was brought online.

The situation is even worse than declining fleet. Essentially no uranium is currently mined in the United States. The world’s largest supplier is Russia. And it is not just mines. The bankruptcy of Westinghouse, a manufacturer of reactors and their components, is an exemplar of the widespread degradation of the institutional network needed to support commercial reactors.

A nuclear renaissance will entail rebuilding nuclear logistics, manufacturing capabilities, and supply chains. That is not the realm of science or engineering; it requires a qualitatively different sort of expertise that is the providence of government, the military, and business—and all working together. A nuclear renaissance will require a rebirth of this institutional capability.

Though new nuclear reactor technologies are diverse, with inscrutable names (HALEU fuel and molten salt cooling), the unifying underlying idea is to dramatically reduce reactor size. Micro-reactor technology is not a single innovation, but rather a complex series of interlocking advances, all of which must work together. New reactors typically operate at higher temperatures, which in turn requires novel fuels. These include higher concentrations of fissionable uranium isotopes, and ways of altering the paths of subatomic particles released during fission. Also needed are different coolants and different materials to contain the reaction.

On a cost-per-kilowatt-hour basis, micro nuclear reactors are not currently competitive with light water reactors, according to a 2021 review in the scientific journal Progress in Nuclear Energy. That said, over many decades, reactor miniaturization should eventually reduce cost. For manufacturing generally, the more units produced, the lower the per unit cost. A classic example is the dramatic reduction in per unit automobile cost—and increase in comfort and safety—as manufacturing ramped up over the last century.

Most all novel nuclear reactor technologies will either fail in the research lab or fail commercially. When autos were first invented, there were hundreds of manufacturers. Eventually economic competition, and repeated innovation cycles, pruned that down to a handful of makers. On the cutting edge of technology, there is a lot of bleeding.

Because of faster innovation cycles, and the knowledge that comes with making more mistakes as more units are manufactured, I am confident we will see increased safety of any one nuclear reactor, considered standalone. But perhaps paradoxically, the overall risk of a nuclear accident may well increase.

Commercial success will entail scattering lots of small nuclear power plants across the landscape. That in turn will require uranium at more locations, and more people, institutions, mines, manufacturing facilities, supply chains, logistics, and knowhow. Even now, we have intractable systems-level problems; for example, no long-term nuclear waste facility.

It is impossible to predict the systems level harms of micro nuclear reactors. In the early 1900s, nobody had the vaguest idea that autos would eventually conjure up land use changes that devastated traditional downtowns and lifestyles, air pollution that still causes millions of deaths annually worldwide—and carbon dioxide emissions that cause climate change. Micro nuclear reactors will inevitably bring social, economic, and environmental harms that we do not now comprehend.

Micro nuclear reactors may or may not replace oil and coal. But if they do, we will reap not only the benefits of reduced carbon emissions and air pollutants but also currently unknown harms and upheavals within human society.

Who Bleeds From Introducing Cutting-Edge Nuclear Reactors?

Chernobyl: The Roar That Changed the Energy World
Author
Oliver Houck - Tulane University
Tulane University
Current Issue
September-October 2021
Issue
5
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster

There are many reasons why nuclear power — with billions in investments and the full-throated support of Congress and the Supreme Court — has plateaued for the past forty years, but one thing that tipped the scales took place half the world away: Chernobyl.

Adam Higginbotham’s 2019 book Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster does just that, tells an “untold” story. It was at first suppressed by Soviet authorities for weeks. When that proved no longer possible, facts that came to light were buried in government files, some of them highly classified, until the present day. Midnight in Chernobyl is the product of dogged detective work, spun into a story that takes us from one harrowing moment to the next. A page-turner, a thriller.

It started with a simple maintenance test of Chernobyl’s Reactor Number Four. The hypothetical was an electrical blackout, and it went well for a few seconds and then the lid blew off … literally:

“At 1:24 a.m., there was a tremendous roar probably caused as a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen that had formed inside the reactor space suddenly ignited. The entire building shuddered as Reactor Number Four was torn apart by a catastrophic explosion. The blast caromed off the walls of the reactor vessel, tore open the hundreds of pipes of the steam and water circuit, and tossed the upper biological shield into the air like a flipped coin; it swatted away the 350-tonne refueling machine, wrenched the high-bay bridge crane from its overhead walls, demolished the upper walls of the reactor hall, and smashed open the concrete roof, revealing the night sky beyond.”

Dead silence from Moscow for three days. Then came an admission that there had been an (unspecified) “accident,” but the situation was “now under control.” Meanwhile, the government was rushing untrained and unprotected troops to the area to move out the inhabitants of Pripyat — a charming city at the time. They were all exposed to radiation in the air, the soils, the milk of cows, the leaves of plants and trees. They started to feel ill.

The most immediate fatalities were of the Reactor Four crew that night. One by one they died agonizing deaths. Their red blood cells had dropped to zero. Their hair fell out. Their radiated lungs collapsed, leaving them gasping for breath. The plume of debris and radioisotopes included strontium 90 and plutonium 239, “among the most dangerous substances known to man.” Tons of them headed west in a swath 30 kilometers wide to Sweden and then south through what is present-day Ukraine and northern Europe.

To this day there is no accurate account of Chernobyl’s mortality. Several months after the blowup the official toll stood at (an unbelievable) 31 deaths. This figure does not include those victims downwind, near and far.

Investigation into the causes was hampered by the fact that much of the problem related to the “entrenched cronyism” of the Community Party that had made a loyalist with zero experience no less than the deputy plant director at Chernobyl. Apparently, he took an evening course in nuclear physics to take up the slack.

Years later, author Higginbotham would discover that, beyond the general sloppiness of the Soviet nuclear program, there was a serious design flaw in the reactors. The rate of fission in nuclear reactors was controlled by rods containing a buffering agent, boron carbide. Should the reactor get too hot, the rods were inserted to cool it down. Unfortunately, the Soviets had decided to tip them with (less expensive) graphite, which had the opposite effect, speeding up the fission. Per Higginbotham, it was like “wiring a car so that slamming on the brakes would make it accelerate.” The operators of Reactor Four that evening were, quite unwittingly, committing suicide.

What’s left of the Chernobyl plant now lies inside a 1,000-square-mile “Special Zone” where, in Higginbotham’s words, “wildlife flourishes in a radioactive Eden.” What this all leads to generations from now remains a large, if unintended, experiment.

What Higginbotham is quite correct in concluding, though, is that Chernobyl sent confidence in nuclear power plummeting. France has remained glued to it, with no reported accidents, but that too has changed to squeamishness after the subsequent meltdown of the Fukishima nuclear reactor, which has unglued Japan as well. Perhaps the most important impacts of these disasters has been on the United States, which, too, boasted a thriving nuclear energy program.

After obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the Second World War, nuclear power strode the American landscape like a God. Congress created the Atomic Energy Commission to promote “Atoms for Peace.” As in the Soviet Union, electricity would be “too cheap to meter.” Welcome news. Promotional films in movie theatres and public schools showed children rushing to greet daddy, home from the nuclear power plant — “but wait” says the narrator, until he goes to the sink to wash his hands and arms. Reddy Kilowatt, a cartoon character, appeared on every electric bill, hand outstretched, welcoming us to an all-electric future.

The AEC and Congress advanced a suite of projects that were, even now, rather dazzling. Operation Pluto would have built a fleet of missiles propelled by nuclear power, which soon morphed into a nuclear-fueled fleet of airplanes, made more palatable by the use of aging pilots expected to die of natural causes before the radiation could kill them. Other operations would dig navigation canals and bomb open a port in Alaska. What could possibly go wrong?

Better yet, who would know if something did? A whole industry of nuclear engineers appeared, highly committed to the enterprise. Those who expressed skepticism, however, found themselves blackballed. The same say-no-evil followed near-misses at the Fermi prototype reactor in Detroit and the Damascus nuclear missile accident in Arkansas (threatening an intercontinental ballistic war). After the big scare in 1979 at Three Mile Island (which almost took out Philadelphia), nuclear bomb physicist Edmund Teller authored a two-page ad in the Wall Street Journal (guess who paid for it) entitled “I Was The Only Victim Of Three Mile Island.” In the same vein, one British expert explained in “The Tolerability of Risk from Nuclear Power Stations” that, “if there is a Chernobyl-scale accident in this country, no one will die. We shall merely suffer some degree of life shortening.”

With all of this secrecy and cover-up, how did the United States escape a Chernobyl of its own? One answer of course is simply luck, which is all we had going for us at Three Mile Island. Another answer took some courage. Despite go-along-get-along pressures in academia and industry, several highly-respected nuclear engineers began revealing the severe risks, one famously concluding that “we have struck a Faustian bargain.” Their message was picked up by the media and communities where the plants were going in, who armed with lawyers and independent experts intervened in the construction and licensing hearings that followed. Each one a little war.

At the same time, these same lawyers and experts were petitioning the AEC to resolve generic problems that plagued the field. One was the permissible risk from low-level radiation, which in response was lowered by a factor of 100. Another was water quality impacts from thermal discharges of plant cooling water, which led to cooling towers and recycled water instead. A third was an emergency core cooling system, which had been totally absent in Chernobyl. Yet a fourth was the obvious conflict between AEC’s promotional and safety functions, which led to splitting it into a Department of Energy (promotion) and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (safety). Yet a final was the National Environmental Policy Act’s requirement to consider alternative sources of energy and conservation in lieu of new construction, or even relicensing. All of these developments made nuclear power, if it had to happen, more safe, more expensive, and less viable as renewables and natural gas came on line.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was backing nuclear energy to the hilt. One academic study of 15 separate opinions, all favoring the AEC, reports that the justices found Congress’s endorsement of the program to be “determinative”; that they were concerned not to “impede technological progress”; and they were “highly influenced by the lingering mystique of the armed services.” In short, a fan club.

All the more wonder then that a citizen-based, science-based, and lawyer-based counterattack worked so well. It has been decades since a new nuclear plant has come on line in the United States. We have not had a Chernobyl, and with a little luck we never will. Lacking the transparency that American administrative law provides, Russia does not inspire the same confidence.

As if to prove this point, in a review of Higginbotham’s book posted on Amazon, a medical doctor reported that he had been a member of a UN group touring several hospitals in Kiev where “hundreds of victims” were still being treated for, inter alia, thyroid cancer and leukemia. At a visitor center they were given a speech about Russia’s outstanding record of nuclear safety. “Of course,” said the speaker, “there was this one small incident that the world tries to blow out of proportion.”

Higginbotham provides a more candid view, from the bottom. Some seven years after the disaster, a Russian engineer named Bocharov was returning from the “Special Zone” wearing the fur-collared combat jacket issued for wear there. When the train pulled into the station there was no one there to greet him, only his wife — and a soldier “just back from the Afghan quagmire,” who recognized the engineer’s jacket:

“Khandahar?” the soldier asked.

“Chernobyl,” Bocharov said.

The soldier put his arm around his shoulder. “Brother, you had a tougher job.”

Oliver Houck is professor of law at Tulane University. www.oliverhouck.com.

On Hidden Story of Chernobyl Disaster.

"Stand up for Nuclear"
Author
G. Tracy Mehan III - American Water Works Association
American Water Works Association
Scalia Law School, George Mason University
Current Issue
November-December 2020
Issue
6

A recent front-page headline in the New York Times stated, “Disastrous Wave of Climate Events Slams California. Scientists Fear Fires Are Just the Start.” Journalists Thomas Fuller and Christopher Flavelle report that “multiple mega fires [are] burning more than three million acres.” They continue, “If climate change was a somewhat abstract notion a decade ago, it is all too real for Californians.”

These are certainly disastrous events; but Michael Shellenberger, author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, demurs as to any linkage between the catastrophic fires in the Golden State and a changing climate. Actually, he rejects the notion entirely.

Shellenberger cites Jon Keeley, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist in California who has researched the topic for forty years: “We’ve looked at the history of climate and fire throughout the whole state, and through much of the state, particularly the western half of the state, we don’t see any relationship between past climates and the amount of the area burned in any given year.” Keeley and other colleagues modeled 37 different regions in the United States and found that “humans may not only influence fire regime but their presence can actually override, or swamp out, the effects of climate.” Indeed, the only statistically significant factors for the frequency and severity of fires, on an annual basis, were population and proximity to development.

Among the many interesting, controversial arguments Shellenberger makes are these: humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction,” the Amazon is not “the lungs of the world,” the amount of land we use for meat — our biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska, carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations, food surpluses exist and will continue to rise as the world gets hotter, and habitat loss and the direct killing of animals are bigger threats to species than climate change.

A stunning data point, cited by Shellenberger, drawn from the International Disaster Database, Université Catholique de Louvain in Brussels, documents, at footnote 28 on p. 292, a 92 percent decline in the decadal death toll from natural disasters since its peak in the 1920s, a period when the global population nearly quadrupled!

Michael Shellenberger has been the enfant terrible of the environmental movement for nearly fifteen years. With Ted Nordhaus he famously declared “the death of environmentalism.” They co-founded the Breakthrough Institute, an “ecomodernist think tank” focusing on the limits of carbon taxes and regulation, arguing for major public and private investments in clean-energy R&D and infrastructure designed to foster economic opportunity. They severely criticized the failed Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. “We have become convinced that modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts, and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live,” they declared.

According to Shellenberger and Nordhaus, environmental organizations spent 40-plus years defining themselves against “conservative values” such as cost-benefit accounting, smaller government, less regulation, and even free trade, then still a conservative if not populist position. Environmentalists tended to see these values as a distraction from their issues. The time had come to start framing policy proposals around core American values, they maintained.

A former vegetarian and a supporter of the Rainforest Action Network at 16, Shellenberger started his own operation, Environmental Progress, focused on promoting nuclear energy. He continues to provoke, recently writing articles for Forbes, including one apologizing for being part of the “climate scare” while still arguing for carbon reductions and economic development by means of nuclear power over renewables which he once promoted during the Obama years. “On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years,” wrote Shellenberger. “Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.”

Provocateur though he be, Shellenberger has written an interesting book, thoroughly researched. In Apocalypse Never he offers a kind of “unified field theory” of international economic development and environmental amelioration grounded largely, but not solely, on the high energy density of nuclear power. True, he has entirely too much fun skewering some environmentalists and other sacred cows. He does so, however, from a consistent, foundational view as to the necessity of linking environmental protection and economic development, especially in places such as Congo, Indonesia, Brazil, and other parts of the world.

Shellenberger describes renewables, solar for instance, as “energy-dilute fuels.” Thus, solar farms require large amounts of land with resulting negative environmental impacts. For instance, California’s Ivanpah solar farm requires 450 times more land than its last operating nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon. The solar farm had to hire biologists to pull threatened desert tortoises from their burrows, put them in pickup trucks, and take them to pens, where many died.

“The maximum efficiency of wind turbines is 59.3 percent, something scientists have known for more than one hundred years,” argues Shellenberger. “The achievable power density of a solar farm is up to 50 watts of electricity per square meter. By contrast, the power density of natural gas and nuclear plants ranges from 2,000 to 6,000 watts per square meter.” Solar panels and wind turbines also require 16 times more materials, and generate 300 times more waste than nuclear plants, including toxic materials.

“Today, humankind relies upon fuels that are up to one thousand times more power-dense than the buildings, factories, and cities they power,” notes the author. “The low power densities of renewables are thus a problem not only for protecting the natural environment but also for maintaining human civilization.” Further, “Human civilization would have to occupy one hundred to one thousand times more space if it were to rely solely on renewables.”

France spends little more than half as much for electricity that produces one-tenth of the carbon emissions of German electricity since the latter’s phaseout of nuclear and embrace of renewables, claims the author.

“Had Germany invested $580 billion into new nuclear power plants instead of renewables like solar and wind farms, it would be generating 100 percent of its electricity from zero-emission sources and have sufficient zero-carbon electricity to power all of its cars and light trucks as well.” Instead, renewables contributed to a 50 percent increase in electricity prices since 2007. Says Shellenberger, “In 2019, German electricity prices were 45 percent higher than the European average.”

Vermont not only failed to reduce emissions by 25 percent by relying on renewables, but its emissions rose 16 percent between 1990 and 2015, “in part due to the closure of the state’s nuclear plant, and in part due to the inadequacy of renewables,” writes Shellenberger.

According to the Czech-Canadian academic Vaclav Smil, author of Power Density: A Key to Understanding Energy Sources and Uses (MIT Press, 2015), an author Shellenberger cites at length, “This power density gap between fossil and renewable energies leaves nuclear electricity generation as the only commercially proven non-fossil high-power-density alternative.”

Since the United States consumes almost 50 percent of its electricity during the cold months, storage of energy becomes a significant and costly challenge, as does the perennial problem of intermittency.

“Just as the far higher densities of coal made the industrial revolution possible, the far lower power densities of solar and wind would make today’s high-energy, urbanized, industrial civilization impossible,” claims Michael Shellenberger.

This energy intensity gap results in problems such as the loss of forests to produce wood-burning biomass. If just 10 percent of U.S. electricity were to come from this source, it would require an area of forest land the size of Texas. If the nation were to replace all of its gasoline with corn ethanol, it would need an area 50 percent larger than all of the current U.S. cropland.

“Power density determines environmental impacts. As such, coal is good when it replaces wood and bad when it replaces natural gas or nuclear. Natural gas is good when it replaces coal and bad when it replaces uranium,” observes Shellenberger. “Only nuclear energy can power our high-energy human civilization while reducing humankind’s environmental footprint.”

Starting from a commitment to humanism, he sees energy intensity as essential for economic development beyond affluent Europe and North America.“Environmental humanism will eventually triumph over apocalyptic environmentalism, I believe, because the vast majority of people in the world want both prosperity and nature, not nature without prosperity,” writes Shellenberger. Moreover, “The evidence shows that an organic, low-energy, and renewable-powered world would be worse, not better, for most people and for the natural environment.”

Shellenberger discounts a climate apocalypse, but supports nuclear as the primary solution for reconciling economic growth with environmental protection. Many environmentalists envision an apocalypse but discount nuclear energy. It is nothing if not an ironic turn of events.

Shellenberger and his colleagues started organizing pronuclear demonstrations in 30 cities around the world in 2019. Evidently, the cry of “Stand-Up for Nuclear” is resonating in Germany. He was even invited to testify before Congress. Maybe nuclear power is not a lost cause. It should get a second look from the body politic.

G. Tracy Mehan III is executive director for government affairs at the American Water Works Association and an adjunct professor at Scalia Law School, George Mason University. He may be contacted at tmehan@awwa.org.

"Stand up for Nuclear".

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