Should Nuclear Energy be Revitalized?

Waking a S l e e p i n g Giant:
Should Nuclear Energy Be Revitalized?
by Andy Dow
Electricity flows with the flick of a switch, powering
devices that facilitate our technology-dependent
lifestyles. The ease with which we command
electricity for daily use, however, belies the complex
energy challenge that the world faces: a case of increasing
demand despite environmental and resource constraints.
While global electricity use is projected to increase 160
percent over the next fifty years, for example, failure to
decrease the carbon-intensity of our electricity supply could
easily push atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations
above 500 parts per million – a threshold beyond which
scientists fear severe damage to natural systems and the
human populations dependent on them. A potential but
debatable solution to this energy crisis is nuclear power.

The Current State of Nuclear Power
Nuclear plants already provide twenty percent of U.S.
electricity and a sixth of the world’s electricity. However, the
majority of U.S. plants were built between 1970 and 1990,
with no new plants built in the U.S. since 1990. Based on
average commissioning dates and the average plant lifetime,
Stanford Professor of Energy Resources Engineering Tony
Kovscek points out that 42 out of the 104 currently operable
nuclear plants are projected to close by 2020. These
shutdowns represent an eight percent loss of electricity
generation, a substantial portion of the U.S. energy portfolio.
“The U.S. would have to build one new reactor every four
to five months to maintain status quo nuclear energy use,”
notes Charles Ferguson, Fellow for Science and Technology
at the Council for Foreign Relations, in a seminar he recently
gave through Stanford’s Center for International Security
and Cooperation.

The barriers that have kept nuclear power stagnant over
the last decade and a half include high costs, poor public
perception, the need for radioactive waste management,
risk of nuclear weapons proliferation, and the potential
to be a terrorist target. The realization of a revitalized
nuclear energy infrastructure would largely depend on how
governments and scientists guide the industry through
policy and research into a cost-effective, low-polluting, and
publicly trusted energy option.

Environmental Benefits of Nuclear Power
A central issue of debate over nuclear power
is its environmental benefits. From a climate change
perspective, producing electricity by nuclear fission is
superior to burning fossil fuels because the nuclear fuel
process does not emit carbon dioxide. However, to say
that nuclear energy produces zero carbon emissions would
be failing to consider the total energy requirements and
associated carbon footprint of the nuclear cycle from mine
to electric grid—that is, the aggregate carbon emissions
resulting from various stages of the nuclear cycle. Many
of the processes underlying nuclear power generation are,
in fact, quite energy intensive. These include, but are not
limited to, the mining, milling and enrichment of natural
uranium, fuel element fabrication, reactor construction, and
transportation and storage of high-level waste.

However, similar life-cycle energy costs and carbon
emissions could be calculated for other non-fossil fuel energy
options, as each technology has its initial capital construction
processes. What makes such technologies significantly less
carbon-intensive is that the carbon footprint is averaged
over the life of power supply, the majority of which requires
little emission of carbon dioxide compared to coal or natural
gas. Nuclear power presents especially significant carbonemissions
improvement over conventional coal plants,
which produce more than twice the amount of carbon as
their natural gas counterparts.

Dealing with Radioactive Waste
While nuclear power may reduce emission of
carbon dioxide, it can hardly be considered environmentally
benign. Nuclear facilities routinely release small quantities
of radioactive pollutants into the atmosphere and oceans,
sanctioned under government regulations. Pools of
solid radioactive waste accumulate outside many nuclear
plants with the potential to spread into the surrounding
environment. Better temporary waste storage methods and
stricter policies on waste management and pollution would
need to be part of any nuclear revitalization. Some energy
policy experts advocate government consolidation of spent
fuel from sites across the country into interim storage sites
until more permanent storage facilities are built.

Thus, the need for long-term storage of nuclear waste
forms another critical issue. Large geological repositories
have not yet been successfully developed. Nevada’s
Yucca Mountain has long been discussed in the U.S. as a
centralized geological chamber for America’s nuclear waste,
but development efforts have been tied up by complications
in environmental assessment of the site. The presence of
unanticipated amounts of water poses a risk for carrying
radioactive pollutants from the underground repository to
the surrounding biosphere. These types of contamination
concerns form the major barriers to approving long-term
storage options.

However, scientists in the nuclear power industry point
out that the need for long-term storage could be reduced
by better fuel reprocessing technology. Only five percent of
spent nuclear fuel contains dangerously radioactive content.
In advanced fuel cycles currently under research, the most
reactive content—plutonium, other long-lived actinides, and
even waste uranium—may be reprocessed into additional
fuel for burner reactors. Such “open” fuel cycles, however,
pose a greater risk for materials diversion in nuclear weapons
proliferation.

Safety Qualms
The nuclear power industry continues to be haunted by
poor public perception of the safety of nuclear power plants
as a result of two startling incidents. The first of these was
the internal meltdown of the Three Mile Island power plant
in Pennsylvania in 1979. The plant’s reactor overheated due
to a mechanical failure and was destroyed, but the outer
shell remained intact, confining the destroyed core and
much of the radioactive material. However, seven years later
a meltdown occurred in a Chernobyl plant that released
almost all of the radioactive content into the environment,
contaminating 100,000 square miles of land in the Ukraine
and Byelo-Russia and inducing radioactive fallout over large
areas of Eastern, Northern and even Western Europe.

The gravity of Chernobyl acknowledged, poor public
image of nuclear safety has largely been shaped by a small
number of sensational events. If the safety of the technology
is evaluated in terms of its overall track record, total
fatalities related to nuclear power are significantly lower
than the number of deaths from mining accidents in the coal
industry. Chernobyl—and debatably Three Mile Island—is
in fact the only nuclear power plant accident to harm the
public. It is worth noting that the reactor in Chernobyl was
of a type that lacked the safety features that have become
standard in reactors, such as self-moderating reactivity and
containment shells.

A Dollars and Cents Perspective
Energy from nuclear fission was originally hailed as a savior
technology for humanity’s energy needs, with premature
claims that nuclear energy would be “too cheap to meter”.
The excitement stemmed in large part from the extremely
high energy density of nuclear materials, much higher than
that of fossil fuels. For example, the fission of a uranium
atom produces 10 million times the energy derived from
combustion of a carbon atom from coal. However, based on
total life cycle costs and the demonstrated performance of
nuclear technology, nuclear-produced electricity is currently
more expensive than coal-produced electricity by about 2.5
cents per kilowatt-hour, according to a 2003 MIT study,
The Future of Nuclear Power. Gas power is sensitive to the
volatile and currently high natural gas prices, but is still
cheaper per kilowatt-hour than nuclear electricity. This
price discrepancy is due to the extremely high capital costs
of building new nuclear plants as well as other corollary
costs of managing pollution and insuring and protecting
power stations.

With the wounds of Chernobyl and the scare of Three
Mile Island still fresh, the nuclear industry continues to
face a dearth of private investment and relies largely on
government funding (and thus taxpayer dollars). U.S.
Congress allocated 13 billion dollars in subsidies to revive
nuclear energy in the 2005 energy bill. If nuclear power
demonstrates reliability over time, private investment and
nuclear industry momentum would likely join in mutual
reinforcement. In addition, experts predict reductions
in the cost of nuclear electricity by shortening plant
construction time and lowering capital costs, and reducing
overhead expenses through improvements in operation and
maintenance. Climate change policies such as a carbon tax
could also render nuclear electricity more economically
competitive by raising the costs of using its fossil fuel
competitors.

Weapons Proliferation and International Security
The nuclear power industry faces a persistent barrier of
concern regarding potential proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Nuclear power plants produce materials such as plutonium-
239 and uranium-235 that can be diverted and made into
crude nuclear weapons by rogue nations or terrorists. A
typical 1000 megawatt nuclear reactor produces 50 times
the amount of plutonium needed for an atomic bomb in a
year.

While the byproducts of nuclear power generation are
potential weapons materials, it is cheaper to have a special
purpose reactor for producing the plutonium isotope
desirable for atomic bombs than it is to separate the desired
isotope from the mixtures normally produced by a nuclear
reactor. Furthermore, fuel enrichment and reprocessing
plants pose a greater risk for materials diversion and weapons
proliferation than the power plants themselves. Thus,
the separate components of the nuclear power generation
process could theoretically be isolated and implemented
individually according to the stability of different countries.

With this in mind, MIT professors John Deutch and
Ernest Moniz, who have held several government positions
in energy research and technology policy and co-chaired a
study entitled The Future of Nuclear Power, advocate an
international system of fuel “supplier and user” countries.
Countries like the U.S., Russia, France and the U.K., with
mature technology and trusted roles in international security,
could sell domestically produced fuel to user countries that
would have only fuel-burning plants in place. This strategy
could save countries with small nuclear programs the costs
of constructing fuel-producing facilities, allowing them to
obtain and use nuclear power without the fabrication and
reprocessing facilities that make weapons proliferation
dangerously easy.

While such international fuel assurance schemes sound
good in theory, “many countries in the developing world
are fed up with a nuclear double standard that divides the
world into two classes of countries,” notes Ferguson. He
recommends addressing proliferation with country-neutral
rules and standards such as “near-real-time” monitoring
of bomb-usable nuclear materials to detect and deter
diversion.

Additionally, there is a widely voiced
concern that nuclear power plants
are natural targets for terrorist attack. U.S.
Homeland security is primarily concerned
about destruction of nuclear plants by
bomb, missile, plane or intruder sabotage.
Nuclear plants are built with thick steelreinforced
concrete containment shells designed to withstand natural disasters
and small plane crashes, but the effects of a 9/11-magnitude
impact are currently being studied.

Experts say that terrorist attacks by ground or projectile
would not result in nuclear explosions but could cause
conventional explosions that might release radiation into
the nearby population and environment. Helen Caldicott,
an opponent of nuclear power and author of the book
Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer, proposes that destruction
of one of the many nuclear plants close to heavily populated
areas like Manhattan or Chicago could have “catastrophic
medical consequences” including hundreds of thousands
of deaths. Many are quick to claim, however, that given
the high structural stability of nuclear plants and the
security measures already in place, nuclear opponents have
exaggerated the seriousness of the threat to stifle industry
growth. Regardless, improved security and monitoring
would need to accompany a nuclear revival to prevent both
weapons proliferation and direct attack on plants.

Considering the Advantages of Nuclear Power
Given the disadvantages of fossil fuel-derived energy in
a pollution-stressed environment and a carbon-constrained
economy, it seems that the debate is less one between
nuclear and fossil-fuel energy sources and is more a question
of whether money and efforts are better allocated toward
development of renewable energy technologies of less
questionable safety and environmental benefits. Nuclear
power technology is an established “bird in the hand” with
potential for significant technology and safety improvements.
With careful guidance, an advanced nuclear power revival
could be a stepping-stone and a viable adjunct to slowly
blossoming but more benign renewable technologies.

Author Andy dow is a sophomore majoring in chemical engineering. He is
particularly interested in energy technology and sustainable
development. He is an avid musician by hobby and sings in a
couple of Stanford groups.
To Learn More
-- Please read “The Nuclear Option” by John Deutch and Ernest
Moniz in the September 2006 issue of Scientific American.
-- Please visit the website for the MIT study on The Future of Nuclear
Power: http://web.mit/nuclearpower/