Storms of My Grandchildren (30 page)
Read Storms of My Grandchildren Online
Authors: James Hansen
Chances of having another accident like that at Three Mile Island have been reduced via better operating procedures and oversight, but the public is justifiably skeptical about the ability to eliminate human lapses. A more fail-safe reactor design seems essential to achieve broad public acceptance. Fortunately, human impact from the accident was small. The Kemeny Commission determined that “there will either be no case of cancer or the number of cases will be so small that it will never be possible to detect them. The same conclusion applies to other possible health effects.” Several subsequent studies have been unable to find any significant health effects from the accident, but issues about the adequacy of the data are still debated. A useful illustration of the health risk posed by the Three Mile Island accident is that the increased exposure to radioactivity suffered by people living nearby is comparable to the radiation exposure that people receive in a chest x-ray or in a round-trip transcontinental flight at the altitude at which commercial jets fly.
Nevertheless, a strong enduring negative public reaction against nuclear power ensued, probably in part because of a fortuitous event: Twelve days before the Three Mile Island accident, a popular movie called
The China Syndrome
opened. The movie, starring Jane Fonda, concerned an accident at a nuclear power plant. The real accident in Pennsylvania enhanced the credibility of antinuclear activists and engendered mass antinuclear demonstrations. One rally in New York, with speeches by Jane Fonda and Ralph Nader, drew two hundred thousand people and was followed by a series of nightly “No Nukes” concerts in Madison Square Garden. Another rally, in Washington, drew sixty-five thousand people, including the governor of California.
Then a much more serious nuclear accident occurred in Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in 1986. Unlike most Western nuclear power plants, most early Soviet reactors had no hard containment vessel. As a result, a huge cloud of radioactive material was spread over large areas of the Soviet Union and Europe after a steam and chemical explosion blew apart one of the Chernobyl reactors. The World Health Organization calculates that there might be as many as four thousand cancer deaths because of radiation released at Chernobyl, which compares with one hundred thousand other cancer deaths among the same population.
There are several serious issues with nuclear power, which I will soon note. But to be objective, the empirical data on the human consequences of the early nuclear power plants should be compared with data on the consequences of coal use.
Leading world air-pollution experts at our workshops at the East-West Center in Honolulu agreed that there are at least one million deaths per year from air pollution globally. It is difficult to apportion the deaths among different pollution sources—such as vehicles and power plants—because people are affected simultaneously by all sources. But to get an idea of the numbers, let’s first assign 1 percent to coal-fired power plants. That’s ten thousand deaths per year—every year.
Actually, all experts agree that coal is responsible for far more than 1 percent of the air pollution. In fact, recent data show that more than 1 percent of some air pollutants in the United States comes from
Chinese
power plants! I point this out to emphasize that pollution and climate change are global problems—we must work together with other countries to solve them. Assigning 10 percent of global air pollution deaths to coal is probably still conservative—that’s a hundred thousand deaths per year, every year.
Yet there are no two-hundred-thousand-person rallies against coal, no nightly “No Coal” concerts. Death by coal is probably not as sexy as death by nuclear accident. Perhaps we have greater fear of nuclear power because it is more mysterious than that familiar black lump of coal—even though we know coal contains remarkably bad stuff.
When asked about nuclear power, I am usually noncommittal, rattling off pros and cons. However, there is an aspect of the nuclear story that deserves much greater public attention. I first learned about it in 2008, when I read an early copy of
Prescription for the Planet
, by Tom Blees, who had stumbled onto a secret story with enormous ramifications—a story that he delved into by continually badgering some of the top nuclear scientists in the world until he was able to tell it with a clarity that escapes technical experts. I have since dug into the topic a bit more and observed how politicians and others reacted to Blees’s information, and the story has begun to make me slightly angry—which is difficult to do, as my basic nature is very placid, even comfortably stolid.
Today’s nuclear power plants are “thermal” reactors, so-called because the neutrons released in the fission of uranium fuel are slowed down by a moderating material. The moderating material used in today’s commercial reactors is either normal water (“light water”) or “heavy water,” which contains a high proportion of deuterium, the isotope of water in which the hydrogen contains an extra neutron. Slow neutrons are better able to split more of the uranium atoms, that is, to keep nuclear reactions going, “burning” more of the uranium fuel.
The nuclear fission releases energy that is used to drive a turbine, creating electricity. It’s a nice, simple way to get energy out of uranium. However, there are problems with today’s thermal nuclear reactors (most of which are light-water reactors). The main problem is the nuclear waste, which contains both fission fragments and transuranic actinides. The fission fragments, which are chemical elements in the middle of the periodic table, have a half-life of typically thirty years. Transuranic actinides, elements from plutonium to nobelium that are created by absorption of neutrons, pose the main difficulty. These transuranic elements are radioactive material with a lifetime of about ten thousand years. So we have to babysit the stuff for ten thousand years—what a nuisance that is!
Along with our having to babysit the nuclear waste, another big problem with thermal reactors is that both light-water and heavy-water reactors extract less than 1 percent of the energy in the original uranium. Most of the energy is left in the nuclear waste produced by thermal reactors. (In the case of light-water reactors, most of the energy is left in “depleted-uranium tailings” produced during uranium “enrichment”; heavy-water reactors can burn natural uranium, without enrichment and thus without a pile of depleted-uranium tailings, but they still use less than 1 percent of the uranium’s energy.) So nuclear waste is a tremendous waste in more ways than one.
These nuclear waste problems are the biggest drawback of nuclear power. Unnecessarily so. Nuclear experts at the premier research laboratories have long realized that there is a solution to the waste problems, and the solution can be designed with some very attractive features.
I am referring to “fast” nuclear reactors. Fast reactors allow the neutrons to move at higher speed. The result in a fast nuclear reactor is that the reactions “burn” not only the uranium fuel but also all of the transuranic actinides—which form the long-lived waste that causes us so much heartburn. Fast reactors can burn about 99 percent of the uranium that is mined, compared with the less than 1 percent extracted by light-water reactors. So fast reactors increase the efficiency of fuel use by a factor of one hundred or more.
Fast reactors also produce nuclear waste, but in volumes much less than slow (thermal) reactors. More important, the radioactivity becomes inconsequential in a few hundred years, rather than ten thousand years. The waste from a fast reactor can be vitrified—transformed into a glasslike substance—placed in a lead-lined steel casket, and stored on-site or transported for storage elsewhere. Plus, this waste material cannot be used to make explosive weapons (although it could be used in a “dirty bomb,” which is best described as a weapon of mass disruption, rather than mass destruction, because it can do relatively little physical damage).
“Wait a minute!” you may be thinking. “If there is a type of nuclear power that is so good, how come nobody knows about it?” Let me tell that story.
The concept for fast-reactor technology was defined by Enrico Fermi, one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century and a principal in the Manhattan Project, and his colleagues at the University of Chicago in the 1940s. By the mid-1960s the nuclear scientists at Argonne National Laboratory had demonstrated the feasibility of the concept. The nuclear experts, through the Department of Energy chain of command, informed political leaders about the situation. The leaders got the message.
Richard Nixon, in his June 4, 1970, presidential energy message to Congress, said, “Our best hope today for meeting the nation’s growing demand for economical clean energy lies with the fast breeder reactor.” The highest priority of the energy program, he announced, should be a “commitment to complete the successful demonstration of the liquid-metal fast breeder reactor.” The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy of Congress concurred with this goal.
By the way, Nixon used the adjective “breeder” because fast reactors can be run such that they produce more nuclear fuel than they consume. They are not creating energy out of nothing; they are just converting “fertile” elements into a fuel that is directly usable in a reactor, i.e., into “fissile” elements—elements that are fissionable when hit by a slow (thermal) neutron. It is necessary to supply a fast reactor with “fertile” material, but there is enough of that available in the nuclear waste piles that we are babysitting to last many centuries. Fertile material that can be burned in fast reactors is contained in by-products of past weapons development programs as well as in the waste piles from light-water reactors. The United States is presently storing about six hundred thousand tons of uranium hexafluoride, a by-product of nuclear weapons production. A reasonable assessment of the value of this material as fuel, if fast reactors were deployed as the energy source for power plants, is about $50 trillion. Yes, trillion. But it will take almost a thousand years to use all that fuel, so don’t expect a customer to buy it all at once.
“Liquid metal” refers to the coolant used in the reactor. The usual choice for the metal is sodium, which is liquid over a wide range of temperature (between 98 and 883 degrees Celsius). Liquid metals have a safety advantage over water, because they do not need to be kept under pressure, and liquid sodium in noncorrosive.
Nixon thought that fast reactors would be providing most of our electricity in the twenty-first century. What happened? Three Mile Island, for one thing. All nuclear power was lumped into one bag, a fearsome one. Substantial “antinuke” sentiment developed. Several environmental groups came out strongly against nuclear power. Most of the public was not adamantly opposed to it, but nuclear power’s contribution to U.S. electricity stopped growing, stabilizing at about 20 percent, with fossil fuels providing most of the remainder.
The Department of Energy kept nuclear power research alive. The United States had the top nuclear experts in the world, and the top laboratory was Argonne National Laboratory. A low level of support allowed steady progress to continue until, in 1994, the Argonne scientists had tested all the necessary components and were ready to build a demonstration fast-reactor power plant. At that point, the Clinton-Gore administration canceled the program. In his 1994 State of the Union address, Bill Clinton announced, “We will terminate unnecessary programs in advanced reactor development.”
That was not a rational decision in my opinion. It is hard to understand it on a scientific basis. To my mind, the most likely interpretation is that the antinuke people got worried that this next-generation nuclear power was getting too close to becoming a reality. Strange as it may seem, I doubt that Clinton and Gore, who were well aware of global warming, did an in-depth analysis of this potential energy source. At meetings of heads of state, Clinton was often described, probably accurately, as “the smartest guy in the room,” but he never seemed to take a great interest in “details” about energy. As Tom Blees points out in his book, Clinton had used antinuclear sentiment in the Democratic Party to his advantage in the 1992 primaries, describing an opponent as “pro-nuclear,” as if that were patently stupid. So perhaps it is not surprising that Clinton’s secretary of energy, Hazel O’Leary, terminated the research, either on her own or at Clinton’s direction. It was a clean kill: Argonne scientists were told not only to stop the research but also to dismantle the project—and those who had worked on the project were instructed by the DOE to
not
publicize it. In congressional debates Senator John Kerry was the principal bearer of the antinuclear flag. That may explain why Gore, when questioned about the 1994 decision on the floor of the United States Senate in 2008, had a quizzical look, as if he could not remember. It seems possible that antinuke people, who heavily support the Democratic Party, were being repaid, without a whole lot of analysis.
That 1994 decision, whether driven by politics or not, is water under the bridge. What is the sensible thing to do now? At the very least, we should build a test fast-reactor nuclear power plant. The fast-reactor approach is sometimes called fourth-generation nuclear power. The existing light-water nuclear power plants in the United States (there are about one hundred) are the second generation. Third-generation nuclear power plants are the ones that industry is proposing now, with several in the approval process. These third-generation nuclear plants are thermal reactors, mostly light-water reactors, but with an improved design to simplify operations and increase safety.
If there is to be a nuclear renaissance in the United States, it will be led by third-generation nuclear power plants, which are ready to go now. However, a substantial nuclear renaissance, able to supplant a large portion of coal power, will occur only if we are confident that fourth-generation power plants are on the way. The fourth-generation plants are needed to deal with the nuclear waste from the third-generation plants and to meet growing energy demand in the future.