“We say that we will put the sun into a box. The idea is pretty. The problem is, we don’t know how to make the box.”
– Sébastien Balibar, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France), on nuclear fusion
AT THE WITCHING HOUR of 1 A.M. on April 26, 1986, after a series of grotesque accidents and management errors, one of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant near Pripyat, in Ukraine, went into meltdown and then exploded, sending a plume of radioactive contaminants high into the air. It was the worst accident, by far, in the not-very-old nuclear industry, but in the end its most serious consequence was indirect: it caused a wave of unreasoning fear to ripple through the media and the wider population, and sent the nuclear industry into a tailspin from which it is only now set to recover.
Chernobyl wasn’t the cause of the public’s panic, only the trigger. The whole idea of nuclear power had long made the environmentalist movement deeply uneasy. One reason was its dark provenance. Einstein’s stepchild became the harbinger of mass destruction, and this at a time of politics that, at least in retrospect, seems increasingly insane, with its doctrine of “mutually assured destruction,” or MAD: two arsenals of nuclear overkill that threatened the very survival of the planet. We all feared the nightmarish dystopia of nuclear holocaust, nuclear winter. Nuclear reactors, for their part, seemed the ultimate expression of technological inhumanity. Another fear was of cancers threading their way inexorably up the food chain – strontium-90, an obscure isotope no one had ever heard of before, became so much a part of common parlance it didn’t even have to be explained: it was a metaphor for death. The slogan of the Soviet nuclear power industry, “Atoms for Peace,” seemed like a sick joke. And then there was the industry’s waste, which apparently lasted forever, deadly and brooding, and would have to be guarded on timescales no human civilization had ever matched.
But that was then.
Today, James Lovelock, an environmentalist with impeccable credentials and author of the Gaia theory, is calling for a crash program to build ever more nuclear power stations, and build them quickly. David Suzuki, the nearest thing the Canadian environmental movement has to a saint, refuses to condemn nuclear power out of hand. The Guardian, that reliably lefty and green-tinged newspaper, publishes pieces suggesting that “atomic power is crucial in the fight against global warming.” Even one of the founders of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, is not only calling for a rapidly expanding nuclear industry, but actually lobbying politicians on its behalf. A meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science declared in 2009 that nuclear power is safe, affordable, and its waste problems are much more manageable than the public realizes.1
What has changed?
To a previous generation, the threat of nuclear warfare was a cause to be passionate about. To the new generation, for whom Lovelock and Suzuki and others are the Bertrand Russells of their time, climate change is its replacement. The baby boomer protesters had never heard of greenhouse gases, and carbon was, if anything, a benign substance with no known polluting effects. Radioactive contamination of living things was the issue, not the cumbersome but unseen and unfelt effects of rising carbon dioxide levels. That’s all gone. “Emissions” are the issue and nuclear power stations don’t have any. Lovelock, who is a climate pessimist (he thinks it is probably too late to do anything effective) has nevertheless written passionately about nuclear power. In The Vanishing Face of Gaia, he writes that “two important changes in our energy future supplies emerged after I started writing this book in 2008 … the public perception of nuclear energy and the recognition that solar thermal energy is the most promising of the ‘renewable’ energy options. It even seems possible that by using both of these we can significantly reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, although the greater part of the energy we use will still be drawn by burning fossil fuel for at least a decade from now.” We should regard nuclear energy, he said, as something that could be provided quickly and could see us through the troubled times to come.2
Let’s get straight to the point: Fossil fuels are dangerous for the planet, and dwindling. The main alternatives can “get us there,” but not in time and not without despoiling vast tracts of land. Nuclear technology is proven. It remains hazardous (though not as hazardous as coal), but is not unsafe. And there is a new generation of smaller reactors that can be built quickly and relatively cheaply.
They should be. Fast.
Lovelock and Moore and others make three simple points: Look at the safety record. Look at the residual waste problem. Then look at the alternatives.
There have been a few industrial accidents in the nuclear industry, although not many. In 1956 a military reactor at Windscale in the United Kingdom caught fire and released what the secretive British would later call “significant amounts” of radioactivity into the atmosphere. No one was told about the accident, and the British issued no warnings. Nevertheless, epidemiological studies afterwards could find no unusual deaths and no increases in cancer rates after the accident. It seemed to have no real consequences. In 1962, atmospheric nuclear tests by both Russians and Americans released into the atmosphere radiation equivalent to two Chernobyls every week for a whole year. It was soon possible to find trace amounts of a strontium isotope in the bones of pretty well everyone in the world – and yet human lifespans across the globe have continued to increase. Three Mile Island, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, remains the only nuclear accident to have happened in the Americas. The operators of the plant made a series of six grievous errors within 15 minutes, culminating in the loss of reactor coolant and a threatened meltdown. Not a single person died.
But Chernobyl? In the months and years after the accident, media reports suggested thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of Ukrainians, Russians, Belorussians, and Eastern Europeans were dying or at risk – and flocks of sheep in faraway Scotland were being scrutinized with Geiger counters, just in case. One million deaths was a figure that routinely appeared in press reports – a number still promoted by the Ukrainian Commission for Radiation Protection, the Institute of Radiation Safety in Minsk, Belarus, and the Center for Russian Environmental Policy in Moscow, among others.3 Twenty years after the event, in 2005, the World Health Organization issued a careful assessment of damage: some 56 deaths had occurred to date, and almost all of those were rescue workers, the first responders, although another 4,000 would “probably” die in due course.4 (Chernobyl’s biggest health problem turned out to be the mental health of people in the surrounding area, who suffered from a high incidence of depression and anxiety.) In 2009 wealthy Russians were buying condos in the neighborhood, partly because it was a trendy thing to do, and partly because the depopulated region had become a haven for wildlife.
Chernobyl and Three Mile Island did have one disastrous result: by paralyzing the nuclear industry and turning public opinion against nuclear power, they in effect made global warming worse by cementing our reliance on coal-fired generators.
So is nuclear power completely safe? Clearly not. But it is much safer than, say, hydroelectric power or the coal industry (there have been 31 deaths in the nuclear industry per terawatt year, compared with 4,000 in hydroelectric systems, and 56,400 in the coal industry).5 Coal-fired plants routinely cause thousands of deaths every year, mostly from breathing coal dust, but also from mining, transportation, and incineration. Hydroelectricity has perhaps killed even more – though no one notices until a dam bursts.
But what about nuclear waste? Doesn’t it last forever? Isn’t it so deadly that it has to be buried far underground? Isn’t it at risk from terrorist attacks, or simple accidents?
The first point is that nuclear plants emit no CO2. All the emissions from all the world’s nuclear industry combined are hundreds of times less than the naturally occurring radon gas most of us breathe every day. And the volume of waste produced by the nuclear industry is trivially small. Coal-burning plants worldwide have generated a mountain of waste: if piled in one place, it would form a mountain 1.5 kilometers high and 20 kilometers in circumference, almost as big as Mt. Washington. By contrast, the high-level nuclear waste left over from all of the world’s reactors over a full year would be a small cube, 60 meters on a side. The accusation is frequently leveled at the nuclear industry that it is “storing all this hazardous waste on-site.” But what this really means is that none of it is escaping into the environment. Try storing coal’s waste on-site – even with CCS, if it ever works. Coal’s waste products go straight up the stack, into the air.6
Almost all this nuclear waste (190,000 cubic meters of the 200,000 total) is called low-level waste – stuff that quickly decays to somewhere near ambient background radiation levels. Something under 10 percent is “intermediate,” with a half-life measured in years or at most decades. Only 3 percent is the high-level waste that has to be kept sequestered for very long periods – think of this as a couple of spoonfuls per person per year. (It amounts, in fact, to about one ton per reactor per year.) Most nuclear power stations have committed to keeping this 3 percent either in “dry casks” of concrete or in pools of cooling water on-site, for at least the first 40 years (after which its radiation levels have dropped a thousandfold). Then, it has to be secured for somewhere around 800 years, a very long time in human affairs. Nevertheless, Lovelock has famously offered to take the high-level waste from any reactor to bury in his backyard, where it would fill a tiny pit about a meter deep, and he’d use the heat from its decaying radioactivity to heat his home.7 Much is made of the notion that nuclear waste will last “millennia.” But there is another way of looking at it: nuclear waste fades over time, and in 800 years or so will be about as radioactive as the ore from which it was made. The lead pollution from a mine or smelter, and the mercury, arsenic, cadmium, and thallium produced by burning coal, last quite literally forever – they never get less poisonous.
In this regard it is interesting that the Pacific islands that were the site of so much American nuclear testing during the Cold War, especially the notorious Bikini Atoll, were recolonized by wildlife far faster than expected. And in July 2007 the U.S. government decommissioned the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons production area near Denver, Colorado (most of the trigger mechanisms for the U.S. nuclear arsenal were made there) and turned it into a wildlife refuge. It had been closed to the public for more than 50 years. The site had been contaminated with a witches’ brew of compounds, including plutonium, uranium, beryllium, and several hazardous chemicals. With some excusable hyperbole, Lovelock has suggested that, in fact, “nuclear waste is the perfect guardian against [the worst polluter of all] man.”
The volumes may be small, but the stuff is hazardous. So what do you do with it? Three options exist. You can just keep it where it is, which is what Canadian and American reactor operators do; you can find a geologically stable and reasonably secure site, and pile the stuff up there, which is what the U.S. Congress mandated as long ago as 1987; or you can recycle or reprocess the spent fuel and high-level wastes through so-called breeders (one way to produce weapons-grade plutonium), which has been the European and Russian method of choice.
In the U.S., Yucca Mountain in Nevada was chosen as the nation’s single nuclear waste depository, but the plan has long been controversial. Early in 2009 President Obama finally put it to rest – the government would no longer proceed with the depository there. The decision left the nuclear industry in disarray. There had once been four reprocessing plants in the country – one a commercial operation dating from pre-1973 days, and the other three run by the Department of Energy, which operated them on behalf of both military and civilian reactors. All those have been shut down in the wake of nuclear test bans and arms control treaties. This leaves a few unpalatable options: leave the stuff scattered in 35 states with 75 reactor sites, 10 of which have been decommissioned; consolidate the storage at one or another of the decommissioned sites; restart the politically wearying task of looking for a Yucca Mountain alternative; or start reprocessing again.
Other countries are doing better. Finland has a test storage site at Onkalo, in a forested enclave on the Gulf of Bothnia; Belgium has a similar site deep in a geological formation of stable clay, which the Belgians have called HADES (High-Activity Disposal Experimental Site); and Switzerland has a storage site at Grimsel, on a high mountain pass between the Rhône River and the Haslital, a project shared by a consortium of nuclear powers.
Reprocessing is possible, but it is difficult, dirty work, and politically sensitive. Most of Europe’s nuclear waste and spent fuel is reprocessed on an otherwise bucolic farming peninsula in Normandy, near Cherbourg. The plant reprocesses all the fuel from France’s civilian and military reactors, and takes in waste from other countries with reactors that don’t want to do the dirty work themselves. Japan, Russia, and Britain are the only other nuclear powers to reprocess their own spent fuel.
The attractive part of the nuclear recycling operation is that less than 10 percent of uranium’s potential energy has been used by the time it leaves the reactor for storage. Fully 96 percent of spent fuel is uranium that can be “refissioned,” 1 percent is plutonium, and only 3 percent unusable. The refissioning turns radioactive material into more stable products with shorter half-lives, a process that actually generates more energy than it uses, which is why the reactors that do this are called “breeders.” The process can conserve sixtyfold the amounts of uranium used up, making the nuclear process far more sustainable in the long term, while at the same time greatly reducing the volume of final waste.
The process was invented in the at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory during the Manhattan Project, but a succession of U.S. presidents discouraged its use, mostly because a byproduct, plutonium-235, is a basic component of nuclear weapons – one assessment is that Russia and Britain alone stored enough plutonium to make 15,000 bombs.
Oak Ridge is working on the problem. The lab’s director of nuclear technology, Sherrell Greene, told journalists in 2009 that “waste is just too gross of a term for it … I’m trying to get to the [other] 90 percent of the fuel in that rod.” He maintains that he can solve the plutonium issue by producing recycled pellets that mix uranium, neptunium, and plutonium, never creating pure plutonium. It is not a panacea, he admits, since the final waste would be highly radioactive, but that waste would decay in tens of years rather than thousands. Not everyone thinks it would be safer, and everyone admits it would be expensive – the fuel that emerged from the reprocessing plants would be six times more expensive than open-market uranium is now.8
The International Atomic Energy Association’s database listed 436 active nuclear reactors early in 2010, with a further 52 under construction, most of the new ones in Asia. Their aggregate output was a little better than 370 gigawatts, slightly more than 15 percent of global electricity generation. (Compare this with the 800 gigawatts currently generated by hydroelectric power.) France is the planet’s most nuclear-intensive country, generating 80 percent of its electricity from reactors. In the U.K., the Labour Party’s energy secretary, Ed Miliband, announced plans for 10 new reactors to be fast-tracked and put into operation as soon as possible, but the new Liberal Democrat/Conservative government immediately canned the idea – the Tories are for nukes, the LibDems against them, so they agreed to a weasely “position statement” that said nuclear power was fine but would get no government money, effectively killing progress.
In North America the situation is mixed. In Canada, which has developed its own unique reactor design (the CANDU or CANada Deuterium Uranium heavy-water reactor), now widely used in China, Argentina, and other places, nuclear energy accounts for only 14 percent of total electricity supply (48 percent in Ontario, 21 percent in New Brunswick, 1 percent in Quebec), with no new reactors planned. Until recently, no new reactors were planned in the U.S. either, and none have been built since the Three Mile Island accident in the 1970s. Despite this, the U.S. remains the world’s largest generator of nuclear power, with 104 reactors operating in the country, producing somewhere around 100 gigawatts, only about 20 percent of total consumption.
The Obama administration at first kept its nose primly above the nuclear issue, preferring to concentrate on renewables instead, but there are signs of change. Early in 2009, the Electric Power Research Institute suggested that to meet targets for emission reduction, the U.S. should build at least 45 more reactors by 2030. Some Republican congressmen went further. A proposal drafted by Mike Pence of Indiana called for more than 100 new reactors in 20 years, a goal no one thought attainable, given public hostility and regulatory uncertainty. But in August, something real happened: Florida Governor Charlie Crist approved two new 1,000-megawatt reactors, to be built in Levy County. The operator would be the energy company Progress Energy, which promised in return to retire the two oldest coal-fired generators at its Crystal River Energy Complex in Citrus County.
Japan is the world’s second-largest nuclear power, with 63 reactors generating 35 percent of the country’s electricity consumption. Bravely, Japan started its peaceful use of nuclear power very early, as far back as 1954, less than a decade after suffering the world’s first and so far only nuclear attack. In 2009 Japan also restarted its experimental Fast Breeder Reactor at Monju, shut down 13 years earlier after a massive leak of sodium coolant and the subsequent politically embarrassing coverup.
Other countries that had banned nuclear power during the Cold War and in its aftermath, such as Sweden, are also cautiously shifting ground as the realities of climate change began to sink in. Early in 2009 the Swedish government lifted the ban on new nuclear plants. The announcement was embedded in a plan to make renewables 50 percent by 2020, for all cars to be independent of fossil fuels by 2030, and the country to be carbon neutral by 2050. Supporters were gleeful. Sven Kullander, head of the energy committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, declared that nuclear power “is the most sustainable of all energy sources. It’s environmentally friendly because it is a small turnover of material. The energy consumption of Sweden is equivalent to one truck filled with nuclear material, or two million filled with coal.”9
Nuclear power is not, of course, renewable. But is it sustainable, at least for the medium term?
The known usable reserves of uranium amount to about 5.5 million tons, with the major producers being Canada, Australia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Namibia, and Niger. If you figure that each of the 436 one-gigawatt reactors uses around 160 tons per year, this would mean current reserves would run out in 80 years or so. Sooner, obviously, if the numbers went up sharply.
It is not quite as bad as that, however. Much larger reserves, perhaps 10 times as much, are available at higher prices. Furthermore, most of the planet’s uranium is not in the ground, but in seawater, which contains a few milligrams per cubic meter, for an estimated total of 4.5 billion tons. Of course, most of this water is quite inaccessible, since complete global circulation takes more than 1,000 years to cycle past any one point, but plausible estimates of recovery range from 100,000 tons to 300,000 tons per year, enough for the industry to be sustainable at current rates for thousands of years. Extraction from sea-water has been done in many experimental stations, but nowhere has it been tried on an industrial scale, because mined uranium is still too cheap to bother.
But remember recycling: so-called fast-breeder reactors can use uranium up to 60 times more efficiently than the conventional “once-through” light- or heavy-water reactors do. That’s because they consume all the uranium, the U-238 as well as the U-235, burned in conventional reactors. So the uranium now discarded (the stuff that makes up those hazardous stockpiles) is actually a potent source of energy itself. If even a third of the world’s reactors were fast-breeders, or some of the other reaction types now referred to in the industry as Generation III, Generation III+ and Generation IV reactors, then nuclear power would not be renewable, but would certainly be sustainable.
And then there are thorium reactors, which fission thorium instead of uranium. Thorium is a much more common element than uranium, about three times as abundant, and it is hard to see it running out anytime soon: even common soil contains six parts per million of thorium. India, which has no uranium but plenty of thorium, is already generating nuclear power in this way.
Despite the public hostility and consequent political apathy, reactor technology has continued to develop. At the turn of the millennium, a consortium of countries that had already deployed nuclear power got together to underwrite research into what was called Generation IV reactors. In 2003, this consortium, called GIF (for Generation IV International Forum), announced the selection of six experimental designs for further study. The announcement rashly promised that all six were “selected on the basis of being clean, safe and cost-effective means of meeting increased energy demands on a sustainable basis, while being resistant to diversion of materials for weapons proliferation and secure from terrorist attacks.” This statement was largely true, but was nevertheless met with either derision or public apathy, except in the tame business press.
Intriguingly, one of the six can be scaled down to a 50-megawatt “battery,” with a long life (20 years between refuelings) that could then be replaced entirely, as a module, but whose fuel could be replaced on its own, a sort of nuclear cassette. It could then be used anywhere, as distributed generation, either in self-contained business parks or even in large buildings or neighborhoods – or, if people were too squeamish, for desalination tasks in more remote areas.10
Most of the newer reactors, in fact, share this critical attribute: they can be scaled up or down at need. They are, therefore, relatively cheap to build and inherently modular. They can be factory built, mass produced, shipped by rail or truck – their components would fit inside a shipping container – and could be used alone or chained in series. One unit would produce around 110 megawatts, about the same output as a 36-turbine wind farm working at full efficiency, but take up an area about one-third the size of a football field. Apart from the transmission lines, the reactor might look like a single office building in the middle of a park. Ten such units, chained together and using one control room, would produce one gigawatt of power. They could be easily scaled up as energy requirements change, and because they could be located anywhere, they would to some degree lessen the need for new and stronger pylons and high-voltage cable systems. In addition, while they do produce small amounts of waste, they produce hardly any plutonium. Nor do they need emergency water-cooling towers.11
Such reactors could also, of course, simply replace fossil-fuel-fired boilers at a steam power plant. They could take advantage of the generating infrastructure, yet turn a dirty, emission-laden system into one with no emissions at all. And since they can operate for years without refueling, they wouldn’t need a continuous fuel source delivered by massive trains.
Nuclear fusion is still a dream. If achieved, it would yield more power than fission, be endlessly sustainable, and produce hardly any noxious waste. Mimicking as it does the energy conversion at the heart of the sun, it is far more difficult to do than fission, and so achieving a sustainable fusion reaction is the holy grail of energy research. Like nuclear fission, which powers all the world’s reactors to date, nuclear fusion could produce electricity without contributing to atmospheric pollution. But unlike fission, it would produce no long-lasting by-products. Since fusion is the force that powers our sun, the energy produced is substantial – for the same amount of fuel, about a million times more energy than burning fossil fuels.
In 2010, it was still unknown when, or even whether, controlled fusion would become viable. Nevertheless, in an interview, Bruce Goodwin, associate director for nuclear technologies at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, asserted that it is not only possible but that a division of LL, the National Ignition Facility, would be the first laboratory to have controlled fusion “soon.” “Nuclear weapon designers have understood fusion for 50 years,” he says. “The challenge is to harness that understanding for producing civilian energy.”12
So far, the longest anyone has ever sustained the white-hot plasma of hydrogen atoms under fusion is 300 seconds, and that has been regarded as a triumph of South Korean engineering, since the second-best is a paltry 20 seconds. And so far no human-caused fusion reaction has generated more energy than was used to fire it up. So “soon” is a slippery term; in fact, it has become a cliché of fusion industry critics that sustainable fusion power is two decades away, and always will be. The chairman of the first Atoms for Peace conference as far back of 1955, Homi J. Bhabha, got that particular ball rolling when he told the assembled scientists that “I venture to predict that a method will be found for liberating fusion energy in a controlled manner within the next two decades.”
Still, even the possibility that it may some day be achieved is enough to dizzy scientists. One of them is Richard F. Post, who celebrated his ninetieth birthday in 2008 by regaling the distinguished attendees at the Fusion Power Associates Annual Meeting and Symposium with a history of fusion, which is shorter than his own history. In his speech Post, who has spent more than 50 years chasing the dream, tried to explain why the quest was so compelling:
Even before 1952 it was beginning to be evident that within perhaps less than a century the world could no longer count on fossil fuels for its ever-increasing energy demands … and that it would have to rely on energy released in nuclear reactions, that is, either fission or fusion … It seemed obvious that the fusion of heavy hydrogen was the way to go, and we pointed to the world’s huge fusion fuel reserve – the fact that 1 in every 6500 atoms of hydrogen in water was a deuterium atom. Here was a fuel reserve that was not only virtually inexhaustible, but one that would be cheap and universally available; no fusion OPECs and no future conflicts born of competition for limited fuel resources.
Here is a thought experiment: think about the amount of ordinary water that would flow through a single city water main about a foot and half (45 centimeters) in diameter at normal pressures. Then think about putting that flow of water into a deuterium separation plant, using well-known energy-efficient separation techniques. From that input of ordinary water, there would come out of the separation plant a small stream of heavy hydrogen – deuterium. The effluent would still be … just water, without its deuterium. This small flow of deuterium, if distributed to fusion power plants and fused to completion, would represent a fuel energy input rate equal to the entire world’s energy input rate today – all the oil and natural gas wells, all the coal mines, all the hydroelectric plants – everything! And as to inexhaustibility, how long do you think it would take to pump all the water in the oceans through an 18-inch water main?13
It is not hard to see the dazzling attraction of fusion – each utility its own tiny sun, fuel abundant and cheap, no emissions, no hard radiation to worry about afterwards, enormous power from a pellet of fuel. But it would be senseless to base an energy plan on it. Fusion is not going to happen this year or next. Maybe it will never happen.
Fission, on the other hand, is a proven and mature technology. It can be hazardous if mishandled, but it represents a far smaller danger to the Earth and to humanity than a continuing addiction to fossil fuels, which will change the climate for millennia and threaten the lives of us all. So let’s get on with it. We can’t wait. We can’t wait for the invention of some savior technology. We can’t even wait while alternative fuels and sustainable technologies go through their development phases to be scaled up to the volumes already described. Swadesh Mahajan, of the Institute for Fusion Studies at the University of Texas, puts it this way: “The rate at which nuclear capacity has been destroyed is an act of monumental stupidity. If [we] don’t start aggressively pursuing this form of clean energy, we can forget about solving global warming. We will have screwed the planet royally if we don’t take action fast.”14