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May 2, 2001

The Nuclear Future -- A Closer Look at Safety 

By Jon T. Brock
Director, Strategic and Competitive Intelligence 

[News item from AP] Vice President Dick Cheney says the whole nation could 
face blackouts like those that have hit California unless it finds more oil, 
natural gas, coal and nuclear energy. He also suggested federal initiatives 
to boost the use of hydroelectric dams and the construction of new nuclear 
power plants. He called nuclear power "a safe, clean, very plentiful energy 
source." Although one-fifth of the nation's electricity is nuclear-generated, 
the industry has not sought a government permit to build a new plant in more 
than 20 years, since before the accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island. 

Analysis:  What a difference a new administration makes. The Clinton 
administration was generally thought to be anti-nuclear and EPA lawsuits were 
initiated over coal-fired emission violations. Efficiency and load 
curtailment was stressed as the answer to any energy crisis. Monday in 
Toronto, Vice President Dick Cheney stressed that conservation, while perhaps 
"a sign of personal virtue," does not make for sound or comprehensive 
policy.  Rather, he supports a supply-side approach of constructing new 
fossil- and nuclear-fueled generation plants.  The main concerns with nuclear 
generation are, of course, safety and the handling of nuclear waste.  
Supporters of nuclear energy, however, believe these risks are worth 
managing, especially when compared to the long-term health risks and 
potential global climate impact of fossil-fueled generation. 

New nuclear generation designs are being developed that are expected to be 
inherently safer than predecessor designs.  There is an article running in 
today's Wall Street Journal exploring safer reactor designs for the nuclear 
power generation industry. The article tells the story of Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Andrew Kadak challenging his students 
at MIT to design a nuclear reactor which doesn't produce carbon dioxide. He 
told them it should be cheaper to build and simpler to operate than any 
constructed to date, with no possibility of a meltdown. The students must 
have done their research quite well as they returned with what is known as a 
"pebble-bed" reactor.  

A pebble-bed-nuclear reactor is currently under development by a South 
African consortium being headed by South African utility Eskom and its South 
African partner, the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC). To date, Eskom 
and IDC have attracted two international investors in their Pebble Bed 
Modular Reactor (PBMR) project. One is British Nuclear Fuel (BNFL) and the 
other is better known to the United States as PECO (or Exelon).  

The PBMR works by using uranium elements (pebbles) encased in graphite to 
form a fuel sphere (about the size of a tennis ball). In addition, helium is 
used as the coolant and energy transfer medium to a closed-cycle-gas turbine 
and generator. So why is it safer than previous nuclear reactor designs? 
According to PBMR, the safety features are described as follows: 

"Representative of a new generation of advanced reactors the PBMR is 
characterized by a series of inherent safety properties, differentiating it 
from other reactor types. It is due to these characteristics that the PBMR do 
not require the typical nuclear safety systems to actively guard the plant 
for the duration of its operational life. The use of graphite as fuel element 
cladding/moderator and core structural material/reflector means that a core 
melt situation can be ruled out because of the large difference existing 
between the normal, average operating temperature (1095&degC) and the maximum 
tolerable temperature (2800&degC)." 

To summarize, the PBMR is a safer design because it utilizes fuel pebbles 
encased in graphite and makes use of helium as a coolant. Supposedly, this 
reduces the threat of a core meltdown to a theoretical zero. Also, 
distributed generation enthusiasts should warm to the fact that this design 
would be sized to produce about 110MW, which is about 10 percent of the 
output of a conventional nuclear or fossil fuel-driven power station.  The 
modular approach makes it possible to build smaller nuclear power plants to 
serve local needs and to expand them as demand grows. 

Nuclear waste has been an issue for some time now in the United States. Yucca 
Mountain, located in Nevada is being tested as a suitable site for a spent 
nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste repository. Experts throughout 
the world agree that the most feasible and safe method for disposing of 
highly radioactive materials is to store them deep underground. Based on this 
consensus, the United States Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 
1982 that directs the Department of Energy (DOE) to find a site and 
characterize it. If the site is found suitable and a license application is 
approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the DOE is to build and 
operate an underground disposal facility. Yucca Mountain is the current site 
under investigation by the DOE. 

How much waste are we talking about here? The sources vary on their estimates 
of how much highly radioactive material waste exists in the United States. 
However, if we take the range of estimates, it would equate to a football 
field ranging from fifteen to twenty feet deep. That estimate takes into 
account all high level nuclear waste generated in the United States since the 
start of a nuclear program in the 1950s. Compared to other hazardous 
materials, the amount of nuclear waste generated per year is very small. All 
of the nuclear plants in the U.S. produce about 30,000 tons of spent fuel a 
year, whereas 300 million tons of chemical waste are generated in the U.S. 
per year.  

According to an information source managed by the University of 
Missouri-Rolla American Nuclear Society, "Nuclear wastes are, for the same 
power output, some 3.5 million times smaller in volume than the wastes from 
coal plants. High-level nuclear wastes can be disposed of by diluting them 
with twice their own volume of neutral materials as they are changed into 
glass or ceramic form. The reprocessed waste volume from a 1,000 megawatt 
nuclear power plant would fit easily under a typical dining room table. A 
coal plant of the same capacity (1,000 megawatts) produces some 10 tons of 
waste per minute." And not to bash coal, Vice President Dick Cheney also 
informed the Toronto audience that the Bush Administration has budgeted an 
additional $150 million for next year -- up from $82 million this year -- to 
support development of cleaner coal technologies.  The United States has a 
tremendous coal reserve that clearly the current administration believes must 
be utilized to meet our growing energy demand. 

So where does this lead us? It appears that as the years go by, technology is 
improving the environmental effects of our generation sources. Natural gas is 
becoming more efficient, coal is getting cleaner, and nuclear is getting 
safer. The Bush administration appears to be realizing that fuel diversity is 
a good thing for an energy policy. An over-reliance on any one type of fuel 
for power generation can cause problems in a crisis situation.  

Is nuclear making a comeback in the U.S.? The signposts seem to be inferring 
that it is. Just last week a California grassroots watchdog group proposed 
plugging nuclear-powered U.S. Navy aircraft carriers into California's power 
grid. The power from two of three aircraft carriers now on the West Coast 
could provide enough energy to power a minimum of 400,000 homes in the state. 
Also, the first demonstration PBMR unit is scheduled for commercial operation 
by 2005. Should the test prove successful and the NRC approve the design, we 
could be seeing new nuclear reactors in the United States by 2010.   

An archive list of previous IssueAlerts is available at
www.scientech.com




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