The anti-nuclear movement focuses
primarily on its familiar battle with the nuclear infrastructure that was built
in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The traditional foe, however, is dying a slow,
natural death due to financial constraints. The real battle shaping up is being
fought over the question of whether it is wise to invest now in a new
generation of nuclear technology (now referred to in PR campaign as “Nuclear
Power 2.0”) based on fast breeder technology and/or small modular reactors.
What few people realize is that the
proponents of the new technology are, in the traditional sense, passionately anti-nuclear. The promotion of their
plans requires them to admit that Nuclear Power 1.0 was just as dirty and
dangerous as opponents always said it was. For their marketing pitch, the
proponents of the new reactors claim exactly what anti-nukers have been saying
for decades. They now claim that the new reactors will solve all the existing
problems. The old reactors haven’t changed at all, so it’s ironic that this
transformation in perceptions of the safety of Nuclear Power 1.0 came about
only when there was an alternative on the horizon.
So it turns out that that uranium
supplies are in fact limited, and mining uranium is dangerous, so we have to
invest in the closed fuel cycle technology that will give us a perpetual supply
of energy from nuclear waste. Nuclear waste is a weapons proliferation hazard,
so we need the close the fuel cycle to “burn up” the plutonium that we have
failed to dispose of below ground. The new designs have passive safety features,
and they reduce the need to transfer and transport hazardous nuclear materials.
When they shut down, they cool off safely without need of human intervention.
It all sounds too good to be true, and indeed it probably is.
Detroit, the city that once
represented the preeminence of American industry, is bankrupt. As the news
about this sad state of affairs had the world’s attention recently, the city
attracted an interesting offer of rescue. Like a pimp on the prowl for hungry
young girls with self-esteem issues, a little-known company named American
Atomics hit on Detroit, not prosperous Seattle or San Jose, with a stunning
offer of 100,000 jobs, cheap energy, and billions of dollars of manufacturing investment.
Highlights of the press release published by PRWeb:
American
Atomics is presenting a plan to community leaders in Detroit, Michigan,
offering to locate the company's new factory and other operations in that
economically strapped city. The plan, claimed to generate between 500,000 and 1
million new jobs in Detroit over the next 10 years, includes building the
world's largest factory, as well as guaranteeing to supply Detroit with
electricity at a flat rate of 2¢ per kilowatt-hour for both businesses and
residences, beginning in 5 years.
Mutual
Benefits
·
zero to 100,000 manufacturing
workers within a 24 month period
·
job training programs beginning the
summer of 2017
·
August 1, 2018 factory opening
·
our ideal site is one that's
surrounded by that many unemployed or underemployed workers
Detroit's
vast, semi-vacant condition is a near-ideal fit for our unusual requirements.
high
points include:
·
an 8 million square-foot factory
·
a 600,000 square-foot headquarters
campus
·
a 1,600 acre or larger industrial
park for suppliers
Accommodations
sought by the company:
·
help in identifying appropriate
sites to purchase
·
delivery of city services without
undue administrative burdens
·
cooperation from Detroit Edison in
replacing the local electricity supply with that from new HOPE 40 power plants
·
American Atomics has stated that it
will pay all costs involved, including all infrastructure improvement costs and
the costs of increased city services, and that it expects to pay its fair
business taxes.
"The
price of electricity is an under-appreciated input cost to virtually all human
activities," says Tom Blees, president of the non-profit SCGI group of
nuclear reactor scientists.
The
level of cost reduction being discussed here would have an extraordinary impact
on business choices where electricity is a proportionately high input cost.
Chief
Reactor Engineer says, "The technology we are implementing in the HOPE 40
power plant is derived from over fifty years of development in the Department
of Energy laboratories. HOPE 40 combines safety and simplicity in a low cost,
truly mass-produceable commercial product for the world market. Nothing could
make a clearer statement about the future of advanced nuclear power than to
apply it to rejuvenating such a great, historic city as Detroit."
"We
demonstrated the safety of the fast reactor with our IFR project at Argonne in
1986," says Dr. George Stanford, a retired nuclear reactor physicist, and
a member of the team that developed the fast reactor at Argonne National
Laboratory. Commercialization of fast-reactor technology is long overdue. To
see it put to such good use will be a real pleasure."
American
Atomics seeks to discuss the specifics of its proposed commitment to Detroit
with the city's government and business leaders, and to get the process of
implementation underway as quickly as possible.
"Our
timetable is already in motion around a different site location," says
Campbell. "So, to make this work, we'll need swift cooperation with
Detroit's leaders."
The city government and business
leaders must have been skeptical about an offer that promised so much because
within a short time their rejection was tersely noted on the American Atomics blog,
without any mention of Detroit’s reasons, other than space limitations.
We
have been in discussions this past week with Dan Gilbert’s Bedrock Management
group regarding locating our factory and headquarters in Detroit, per our
recent public offer to do so — starting with identifying appropriate sites
within the Detroit city limits. Unfortunately for all parties it seems that
there simply isn’t a site near the size we require anywhere in the city.
Nothing even close.
It is easy to imagine some of the
concerns the city might have had. The promise of thousands of jobs and economic
revitalization is by no means a sure thing. In order for this rosy projection
to come true, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would have to approve a massive
expansion of this new technology, and municipal, state and national voting
constituencies would have to fall in love with this new promise of nuclear
energy. But the promise of cheap electricity has been made before, and it never
came true. More importantly, the proposal from American Atomics pretended that
Detroit hadn’t already had experience with a nearly catastrophic accident at the
Fermi 1 fast breeder reactor in 1966.
The comical aspect of the proposal
is that the wonks who put it together were rather clueless in the art of
seduction. If you’re trying to convince the purported object of your faithful
affection of your “commitment to Detroit,” that she’s special and unique, you
don’t try to close the deal by saying you need to “… get the process of
implementation underway as quickly as possible… timetable is already in motion
around a different site location.” Such charm.
The “demonstrated safety” of the IFR
project mentioned above refers to the fast breeder reactor program that was
shut down in the 1990s during the Clinton administration. People involved with
the program have protested ever since that this was a tragic decision driven,
apparently, by poorly informed politics and an obsession with budget-cutting. According
to this narrative, it deprived the nation of a technology that could have solved
the energy crisis and dependence on foreign oil.
Now that global warming is
acknowledged as a more urgent problem, there are several private investment
initiatives working to bring the technology back. They seem to prefer a
stealthy PR campaign, deliberately avoiding being a front page news item. They
can be seen establishing a beachhead at places like the TED
Conference where
they have announced their ambitions among the technocratic elite. Web searches
for “Argonne Laboratory” or “Integral Fast Breeder Reactor” will produce dozens
of blogs and journal articles lamenting the US government's tragic rejection of
fast breeder technology.
These articles describe the
advantages and successes of the IFR program, but they mysteriously omit
discussion of the reasons that Bill Clinton, Al Gore, the Department of Energy
and Congress all agreed to close it down. Rather than addressing these reasons
and providing a counter-argument, these proponents would like readers to
believe that the program was canceled for no good reason at all – supposedly just
because of short-sighted, scientifically illiterate politics. One has to search
more persistently to find analyses that explain the legitimate reasons for
ending the program.
The Integral Fast Breeder Reactor
did prove itself to be safer in some respects than first generation
“once-through” (no re-use of fuel) reactor technology. It has better passive
safety features and requires less handling of radioactive materials. It is less
of a weapons proliferation risk, but the risk is not nearly eliminated. It
withdraws energy from existing nuclear waste or decommissioned weapons, but
there would still be a socially and technically complex waste management
problem to deal with after this initial “burn-up.”
In spite of some advantages, there
is a terrible record of failures in fast breeder technology that its proponents
don't like to discuss. Fast breeder reactors failed in three different projects
in the US (EBR 1 in Idaho in 1955, Santa Susana in suburban Los Angeles in
1959, and Fermi 1 near Detroit in 1966 all had partial meltdowns), at the Superphénix
reactor in France, and at the Monju reactor in Japan. The Santa Susana accident
is notable because it was a meltdown that released more radiation than Three
Mile Island. It was covered up until the 1970s, and the contamination in the
area is still being dealt with. The accident in Detroit was a fire in the
sodium coolant that nearly caused a catastrophic meltdown. It was the subject
of a book and a soul song both entitled We Almost Lost Detroit.
These failures are what make fast
breeder technology politically toxic. An informed public would never support
the expenditures necessary, and private investors will not put their money down
if they cannot be sure of public, regulatory and political support. The only
type of person willing to invest in this dream is a person like Bill Gates
(investor in Terra Power), someone with an enormous personal
fortune that he is not particularly attached to. He is willing to part with it
in the pursuit of a world-changing vision. History shows that such people on a
mission, the true believers, can be more dangerous than the pragmatic realists
who care most about holding onto their power and fortunes.
In addition to the record of
expensive and dangerous failures, there are more serious problems with the
long-term management of the proposed infrastructure. For there to be any hope
at all of “burning up,” rather than burying, existing nuclear waste, a large
fleet of fast breeder reactors would have to operate for over a century. In
contrast, permanent burial of waste could be achieved in the short-term, by the
generation that produced it, but proponents of fast breeder technology prefer
to believe that their complex technology and the social organizations needed to
manage it can be established and maintained long into the future. If the vision
falters or is abandoned in a few decades, we will have lost an opportunity take
responsibility for permanent disposal of nuclear waste created in our time.
More detailed discussion of these
problems is cited below in two reports, one by The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and Physicians for
Social Responsibility, and the other by The
Union of Concerned Scientists.
From
a fact sheet published jointly by The Institute for Energy and Environmental
Research and Physicians for Social Responsibility:
Of
the various types of proposed SMRs, liquid metal fast reactor designs pose
particular safety concerns. Sodium leaks and fires have been a central problem
— sodium explodes on contact with water and burns on contact with air.
Sodium-potassium coolant, while it has the advantage of a lower melting point
than sodium, presents even greater safety issues, because it is even more flammable
than molten sodium alone. Sodium-cooled fast reactors have shown essentially no
positive learning curve (i.e., experience has not made them more reliable,
safer, or cheaper). The world’s first nuclear reactor to generate electricity,
the EBR I in Idaho, was a sodium-potassium-cooled reactor that suffered a
partial meltdown. EBR II, which was sodium-cooled reactor, operated reasonably
well, but the first US commercial prototype, Fermi I in Michigan had a meltdown
of two fuel assemblies and, after four years of repair, a sodium
explosion. The most recent commercial
prototype, Monju in Japan, had a sodium fire 18 months after its commissioning
in 1994, which resulted in it being shut down for over 14 years. The French
Superphénix, the largest sodium-cooled reactor ever built, was designed to
demonstrate commercialization. Instead, it operated at an average of less than
7 percent capacity factor over 14 years before being permanently shut.
The
cost picture for sodium-cooled reactors is also rather grim. They have
typically been much more expensive to build than light water reactors, which
are currently estimated to cost between $6,000 and $10,000 per kilowatt in the
US. The costs of the last three large breeder reactors have varied wildly. In
2008 dollars, the cost of the Japanese Monju reactor (the most recent) was
$27,600 per kilowatt (electrical); French Superphénix (start up in 1985) was
$6,300; and the Fast Flux Test Facility (startup in 1980) at Hanford was
$13,800. This gives an average cost per kilowatt in 2008 dollars of about
$16,000, without taking into account the fact that cost escalation for nuclear
reactors has been much faster than inflation. In other words, while there is no
recent US experience with construction of sodium-cooled reactors, one can infer
that (i) they are likely to be far more expensive than light water reactors,
(ii) the financial risk of building them will be much greater than with light
water reactors due to high variation in cost from one project to another and
the high variation in capacity factors that might be expected. Even at the
lower end of the capital costs, for Superphénix, the cost of power generation
was extremely high — well over a dollar per kWh since it operated so little.
Monju, despite being the most expensive has generated essentially no
electricity since it was commissioned in 1994.
The
Institute for Energy and Environmental
Research has just published another
report on various light water (not fast breeder) small modular reactors now
seeking investors and government approval. This report lists many of the same
shortcomings that are found in the fast breeder SMR proposals: proliferation
risks, the difficulty of inspecting and managing a larger number of reactors
over a wider area, waste management problems, and the lack of interest from
investors who would be willing to establish the technology at the necessary
economies of scale.
…
the DOE study… charges the direct-disposal scenario with the full cost of 12
large geologic repositories, but does not charge the GNEP
[Global Nuclear
Energy Partnership, an initiative of the Bush administration which was “intended
to support a safe, secure and sustainable expansion of nuclear energy”] scenario with the cost of disposing of the 51
percent of the actinide inventory that remains in the fuel cycle. The DOE also
assumes that 100 years from now, institutions will be in place to ensure that
the GNEP system will remain fully functional. Without that guarantee, there can
be no assurance that the remaining heat-bearing actinides could be managed
safely. And the only way to provide such assurance would be to dispose of those
elements in six geologic repositories. This would cost another several hundred
billion dollars—for a total cost of more than $1 trillion (undiscounted) for
the GNEP option, compared with direct disposal. This last challenge underscores
the fact that the GNEP proposal does not satisfy a fundamental ethical
principle for the disposal of nuclear waste: intergenerational equity. This
principle can be summarized as follows:
·
The liabilities of waste management
should be considered when undertaking new projects.
·
Those who generate the wastes should
take responsibility, and provide the resources, for managing these materials in
a way that will not impose undue burdens on future generations.
·
Wastes should be managed in a way
that secures an acceptable level of protection for human health and the
environment, and affords to future generations at least the level of safety
acceptable today.
·
A waste management strategy should
not assume a stable social structure in the indefinite future, nor
technological advances. Rather, it should aim to bequeath a passively safe
situation: that is, one that does not rely on active institutional controls to
maintain safety and security.
Direct
disposal of spent fuel in a geologic repository that can contain the waste
without active intervention is the epitome of a system that meets the principle
of intergenerational equity. Although such a repository has not yet been
licensed, the scientific consensus is that it is feasible. In contrast, GNEP requires a complex system of dangerous
facilities that must be operated and repeatedly rebuilt for centuries. These
facilities include those that allow aboveground “decay storage” of short-lived
fission products, and a host of added facilities needed to reprocess and
fission highly radioactive actinides. [Emphasis added].
This system clearly fails to meet fundamental criteria for responsible waste
management.
Recommendation:
The
United States should eliminate its programs to develop and deploy fast
reactors.
This report, published in 2007, may
have had some influence in the subsequent decision, reported
by World Nuclear News, that the US Department
of Energy planned to halt the GNEP programmatic environmental impact statement
(PEIS) because “it is no longer pursuing domestic commercial reprocessing.” The
GNEP budget was cut to zero in 2009, but still the DoE wanted to “continue to
study proliferation-resistant fuel cycles and waste management strategies” with
other sources of funding. The WNN report cited a panel of the US National Academy
of Sciences which concluded “commercial-scale reprocessing facilities envisaged
under GNEP were not economically justifiable.” With this history of unfavorable
government decisions, it is hard to comprehend why organizations like American
Atomics are speaking of a large-scale rebirth of American industry based on an
imagined renaissance called Nuclear Power 2.0.
Sources:
Fuller,
John G. We Almost Lost Detroit.
Ballantyne, 1976.
Gronlund,
Lisbeth, Lochbaum, David and Lyman, Edwin. “Evaluating New Nuclear Reactor
Designs,” in Nuclear
Power in a Warming World.
Union of Concerned Scientists, 53-79, 2007.
Makhijani,
Arjun and Boyd, Michelle. “Small Modular
Reactors: No Solution for the Cost, Safety and Waste Problems of Nuclear Power.” Fact sheet published jointly by The Institute for Energy and Environmental
Research and Physicians for Social Responsibility, September 2010.
Makhijani,
Arjun. Light
Water Designs of Small Modular Reactors: Facts and Analysis. Institute
for Energy and Environmental Research, August 2013.
Mangano,
Joseph, Sherman, Janette D. “The Legacy of the Nuclear Test Ban
Treaty.” Counterpunch, August 5, 2013.
PRWeb.
“Tennessee Nuclear Power Plant
Manufacturer Offers Economic Boost To Detroit.” July 23, 2013.
World
Nuclear News. Fatal
Blow to GNEP? June 29, 2009.
More
information about American Atomics:
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