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In part 2 of my goal of teaching myself and bringing the MN blogosphere more information about the benefits of increasing our nuclear power plants , I am focusing on an article by William Tucker from Imprimus.
First a few plugs. one for Guy Collins for pointing me to Tucker, two for Imprimus which is a spectacular collection of articles and scholarly research available both online, and in a print version that is genuinely FREE for the asking if you write them here. And last for Hillsdale College for producing Imprimus and running a fine college that continues to produce some of our best and brightest thinkers through higher education without a penny of US taxpayer money.
When I last posted, I stated the case of my basic understanding of nuclear technology as exponential power excelling in cleanliness, availability, healthiness, efficiency, and low cost compared to all other fuel sources. I'll keep looking to see if this is true, or just my inflated perception. Quite a few of those modifiers are answered very well here in the affirmative by Tucker in what he calls "Terrestrial" energy. In fact he has a forthcoming book: Terrestrial Energy: How a Nuclear-Solar Alliance Can Rescue the Planet.
The excerpts below are from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on January 29, 2008, during a conference on “Free Markets and Politics Today,” co-sponsored by the Center for Constructive Alternatives and the Ludwig von Mises Lecture Series.
First, as to how many plants do we in the US have today, and if we wanted to (read if we had a president who made a big push to move the country forward with nuclear power), could we do it quickly? [all bold emphasis mine]
Right now there are 103 operating nuclear reactors in America, but most are owned by utilities (which also own coal plants). The few spin-offs that concentrate mainly on nuclear—Entergy, of Jackson, Mississippi, and Exelon, of Chicago—are relatively small players. As for a nuclear infrastructure, it hardly exists. There is only one steel company in the world today that can cast the reactor vessels (the 42-foot, egg-shaped containers at the core of a reactor): Japan Steel Works. As countries around the world begin to build new reactors, the company is now back-ordered for four years. Unless some enterprising American steel company takes an interest, any new reactor built in America will be cast in Japan.
I would ventre a large "YES we can" to my question above. With a green light from 50 states with a goal of 2 plants per state in 2 years, I would bet more than one steel company would pop up quickly to compete with JSW. Now, I know every state has their own rules on this, but a push from the top would help to wake up public perception and presentation of simple facts could go a long way to quelling irrational fears.
Next a point about the irrational fears that the nuclear power plant industry (at least here in America) has been saddled with...
This is an extraordinary fate for what was once regarded as an American technology. France, China, Russia, Finland, and Japan all perceive the enormous opportunity that nuclear energy promises for reducing carbon emissions and relieving the world’s energy problems as reflected in recent soaring oil prices. Yet in America, we remain trapped in a Three Mile Island mentality, without even a public discussion of the issue. As folk singer Ani Di-Franco puts it, the structure of the atom is so perfect that it is “blasphemy / To use it to make bombs / Or electricity.”
It is time to step back and question whether this prejudice makes sense.
More on the safety/health concerns in a future post looking at the number of deaths and injuries from nuclear power and potential for problems in management of waste. Tucker next focuses on the back story of fossil fuels and the primary benefits of alternative energy sources like hydro electric, solar, wind, and photovoltaic cells. For the fans of wind, here is one stat that does make the case very hard to argue beyond:
...In addition, windmills are large and require lots of land. The biggest now stand 65 stories tall—roughly the height of New York’s Trump Tower—and produce only six megawatts, or about 1/200th the output of a conventional power plant.
Concerning hydroelectric:
Hydroelectric dams provided 30 percent of our electricity in the 1930s, but the figure has declined to ten percent. And all the good dam sites are now taken.
A lot of warm talk about solar power from the Ed Begley Jr. set, but even the best systems have shortcomings and efficiency is not a term I'd use:
Solar energy is very diffuse. A square-meter card table receives enough sunlight to run only four 100-watt electric bulbs. At best, solar could provide our indoor lighting, which consumes about ten percent of our electricity. But keep in mind: gathering and storing solar energy requires vast land areas. Sunshine can be harnessed directly in two ways—as thermal heat or through photovoltaics, the direct production of electricity. In the 1980s, California built a Power Tower that focused hundreds of mirrors on a single point to boil water to drive a turbine. The facility covered one-fifth of a square mile and produced ten megawatts. It was eventually closed down as uneconomical.
They are thin wafers where solar radiation knocks the electrons off silicon atoms, producing an electric current. At present, an installation about half the size of a football field could power one suburban home—when the sun shines, of course. The problem is that photovoltaics are enormously expensive; using them to provide one-quarter of an average home’s electricity requires investing around $35,000. Their greatest benefit is that they are able to provide electricity precisely when it is most needed—on hot summer afternoons when air conditioning produces peak loads.
OK, so on to Nuclear power.
When Albert Einstein signed the letter to President Roosevelt informing him of the discovery of nuclear energy, he turned to some fellow scientists and said: “For the first time mankind will be using energy not derived from the sun.” This possibility emerged in 1905, when Einstein posited that energy and matter are different forms of the same thing and that energy could be converted to matter and matter to energy (as reflected in the famous equation E = mc2). The co-efficient, c2, is the speed of light squared, which is a very, very large number. What it signifies is that a very, very small amount of matter can be converted into a very, very large amount of energy. This is good news in terms of our energy needs and the environment. It means that the amount of fuel required to produce an equivalent amount of energy is now approximately two million times smaller.
Consider: At an average 1,000 megawatt coal plant, a train with 110 railroad cars, each loaded with 20 tons of coal, arrives every five days. Each carload will provide 20 minutes of electricity. When burned, one ton of coal will throw three tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We now burn 1 billion tons of coal a year—up from 500 million tons in 1976. This coal produces 40 percent of our greenhouse gases and 20 percent of the world’s carbon emissions.
By contrast, consider a 1000 megawatt nuclear reactor. Every two years a fleet of flatbed trucks pulls up to the reactor to deliver a load of fuel rods. These rods are only mildly radio-active and can be handled with gloves. They will be loaded into the reactor, where they will remain for six years (only one-third of the rods are replaced at each refueling). The replaced rods will be removed and transferred to a storage pool inside the containment structure, where they can remain indefinitely (three feet of water blocks the radiation). There is no exhaust, no carbon emissions, no sulfur sludge to be carted away hourly and heaped into vast dumps. There is no release into the environment. The fuel rods come out looking exactly as they did going in, except that they are now more highly radioactive. There is no air pollution, no water pollution, and no ground pollution.
Objections? Yes, as the No Nukes folks railed so loudly about in1979. The focus is on those highly radioactive rods, and a misunderstanding into fantasy proportions on: the melt downs, the explosions, the mushroom clouds, blinky the 3-eyed fish, Godzilla, Think of the children!
Settle down folks, We can agree this is serious business, but let's look at those fears critically one at a time, and as presented here by Tucker, without the guitars and emotion.
First, some fear that a nuclear reactor might explode. But this is impossible. Natural uranium is made of two isotopes—U-235 and U-238 (the latter having three more neutrons). Both are radioactive—meaning they are constantly breaking down into slightly smaller atoms—but only U-235 is fissile, meaning it will split almost in half with a much larger release of energy. Because U-235 is more highly radioactive, it has almost all broken down already, so that it now makes up only seven-tenths of a percent of the world’s natural uranium. In order to set off a chain reaction, natural uranium must be “enriched” so that U-235 makes up a larger percentage. Reactor grade uranium—which will simmer enough to produce a little heat—is three percent U-235. In order to get to bomb grade uranium—the kind that will explode—uranium must be enriched to 90 percent U-235. Given this fact, there is simply no way that a reactor can explode.
On the other hand, a reactor can “melt down.” This is what happened at Three Mile Island. A valve stuck open and a series of mistakes led the operators to think the core was overflowing when it was actually short of cooling water. They further drained the core and about a third of the core melted from the excess heat. But did this result in a nuclear catastrophe? Hardly. The public was disconcerted because no one was sure what was happening. But in the end the melted fuel stayed within the reactor vessel. Critics had predicted a “China syndrome” where the molten core would melt through the steel vessel, then through the concrete containment structure, then down into the earth where it would hit groundwater, causing a steam explosion that would spray radioactive material across a huge area. In fact, the only radioactive debris was a puff of steam that emitted the same radiation as a single chest x-ray. Three Mile Island was an industrial accident. It bankrupted the utility, but no one was injured.
This of course was not the case in Chernobyl, where the Soviet designers didn’t even bother building a concrete containment structure around the reactor vessel. Then in 1986, two teams of operators became involved in a tussle over use of the reactor and ended up overheating the core, which set fire to the carbon moderator that facilitates the chain reaction. (American reactors don’t use carbon moderators.) The result was a four-day fire that spewed radioactive debris around the world. More fallout fell on Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, from Chernobyl than from Three Mile Island. With proper construction such a thing could never happen.
Another objection to nuclear power is the supposed waste it produces. But this is a mischaracterization. A spent fuel rod is 95 percent U-238. This is the same material we can find in a shovel full of dirt from our back yards. Of the remaining five percent, most is useful, but small amounts should probably be placed in a repository such as Yucca Mountain. The useful parts—uranium-235 and plutonium (a man made element produced from U-238)—can be recycled as fuel. In fact, we are currently recycling plutonium from Russian nuclear missiles. Of the 20 percent of our power that comes from nuclear sources, half is produced from recycled Russian bombs. Many of the remaining isotopes are useful in industry or radiological medicine—now used in 40 percent of all medical procedures. It is only cesium-137 and strontium-90, which have half-lives of 28 and 30 years, respectively, that need to be stored in protective areas.
Unfortunately, federal regulations require allradioactive byproducts of nuclear power plants to be disposed of in a nuclear waste repository. As a result, more than 98 percent of what will go into Yucca Mountain is either natural uranium or useful material. Why are we wasting so much effort on such a needless task? Because in 1977, President Carter decided to outlaw nuclear recycling. The fear then was that other countries would steal our plutonium to make nuclear bombs. (India had just purloined plutonium from a Canadian-built reactor to make its bomb.) This has turned out to be a false alarm. Countries that have built bombs have either drawn plutonium from their own reactors or—as Iran is trying to do now—enriched their own uranium. Canada, Britain, France and Russia are all recycling their nuclear fuel. France has produced 80 percent of its electricity with nuclear power for the last 25 years. It stores all its high-level “nuclear waste” in a single room at Le Havre.
I will look to see if any of these facts are disputable, but on their face, this makes for a pretty strong case of super-overreaction by Carter; and what makes it far worse is that we are still doing it today over 30 years later. Did Carter get anything right?
In his conclusion Tucker gets to the bottom line of efficiency, cost, benefit and how we genuinely are BEHIND the world rather than "progressive."
The U.S. currently gets 50 percent of its electricity from coal and 20 percent from nuclear reactors. Reversing these percentages should become a goal of both global warming advocates and anyone who wants to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil (the latter since a clean, expanded electrical grid could anchor a fleet of hydrogen or electric cars). Contrary to what some critics charge, this would not require massive subsidies or direct intervention by the government. Indeed, the nuclear industry has gone through an astounding revival over the past decade. The entire fleet of 103 reactors is up and running 90 percent of the time. Reactors are making money hand-over-fist—so much so that the attorney general of Connecticut recently proposed a windfall profits tax on them! The industry is poised for new construction, with proposals for four new reactors submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and almost 30 waiting in the wings.
The rest of the world is rapidly moving toward nuclear power. France, Russia and Japan are not only going ahead with their own nuclear programs, but selling their technology in the developing world. America, which once dominated this technology, is being left behind. The main culprit is public fear. Nuclear technology is regarded as an illegitimate child of the atomic bomb, a Faustian bargain, a blasphemous tinkering with nature. It is none of these. It is simply a natural outgrowth of our evolving understanding of the universe. The sun has been our prime source of energy throughout human history, but energy is also generated in the earth itself. It is time to avail ourselves of this clean, safe terrestrial energy.
One-sided, biased? Sure, I am openly admitting that I am advocating for more nuclear power plants. By posting most of My Tucker's article, I hope to have the first of many sources for what a lot of advocates throw around: the stats on France, Chernobyl, disposal and reuse of radioactive materials. If you can find any points you think that Mr. Tucker is misrepresenting here, please let me know, I'll follow up.
In future posts, I will be focusing on why specifically Minnesota is not moving ahead on this. The answer, not to give too much away, falls along the same lines rooted in fear as set by President Carter. And if we don't, guess who will? The Dakotas? Canada? Iowa? In fact Guy Collins writes: "I'm all in, where can I sign on? I've got a pretty good chunk of land in South Dakota, if someone wants to build a plant there."
'Til next time... Give US the Power!
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