Even before the September 11th tragedy, events in California foreshadowed a deeply serious shortfall of electric power in the United States, despite a vibrant U.S. and world economy, low oil prices, better technologies for electric power generation, pollution reduction, spot-electric market fluidity, and despite better cross-State electricity distribution than ever before. In fact, it may now be necessary to follow France's or Japan's example and establish means by which three-quarters of all electric power generation would be produced by nuclear plants in order to assure our very survival, should things unexpectedly backfire during the extended multi-national sweeps of the Coalition's war on terrorism.
Back in the 1950s, President Eisenhower and utility company representatives enthusiastically touted a future in which atomic energy would provide 90% of America's electricity needs by 1970 or 1980. It was even postulated that each homeowner might be able to buy a liquor-box-sized portable reactor that would provide more than sufficient electric power for the average house for several generations before refueling.
As with a similar futuristic prediction of that time (one of which prognosticated that every house would have at least one helicopter in its garage) practical implementation problems and a more sane perspective on the risks involved combined to ditch the idea of in-home nuclear power generators. Nuclear power utilities sprang up from coast-to-coast, however, and the future of nuclear power seemed assured.
At that time and given the lesser safety requirements of those decades, nuclear power was quite cheap — relative to the clean-burning but pricey fossil fuels of oil and gas, which had been consumed in quantity during the war years. Coal became king in electric power generation from then until the 1970s. As time went on, however, air pollution cleaning requirements forced electricity producers to swing to a greater share of oil and gas. Fortuitously, this happened just as huge reserves of oil were located in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. The consumption of "clean burning" fuels grew by leaps and bounds.
For a time, then, it seemed that the future of nuclear power would continue to be bright, since the oil shock of 1973 and the formation of OPEC conspired to keep fossil fuel prices relatively high. Added to this, nuclear power was the only source of electricity (realistically available in inexpensive production quantities, of course) that did not emit pollutant gasses. However, the movie "China Syndrome" and near-hysterical press coverage of the events of Three Mile Island caused the public to have serious fears and concerns about the safety of nuclear power.
As public support for nuclear power dramatically dimmed, plans for some new reactors were scrapped, but reactor construction did not immediately cease. Lead times for construction of nuclear power plants stretched upwards of ten years, as more and more safety requirements were added. Despite the skyrocketing of per-plant construction costs to figures ranging from three- to ten-times the original bids, governments and utilities continued to support their construction due to the perceived risk of another OPEC shutdown and of loss of oil supplies (and thus, potentially huge increases in the cost of gas) — not to mention the onerous impact of coal on air pollution at the time!
When the massive nuclear power plant in the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl blew up on April 26, 1986 spewing radioactive dust into the air over parts of Europe, it spelled death for any future orders for nuclear plants in the United States and most European nations. 31 people were killed in that explosion and the cleanup that followed, and thousands were exposed to high radiation levels that the Ukrainian government blames for several birth defects and a doubling of cancer rates in the area. The world-wide panic following that disaster threatened to cause American and European governments to consider dismantling the entire nuclear industry along with it. Worse, apprehensive elements of the general public turned in a vicious way on the utilities and local governments, forcing them to shut down existing construction programs for nuclear plants that were nearly completed. This culminated in the notorious financial disaster suffered by the citizens of Washington State and elsewhere. From that date forward, there have been no new orders for nuclear plants anywhere in the U.S or its territories.
Thus atomic energy, once considered the energy source of the future — offering virtually unlimited amounts of clean electric power — was dead. The dream of unlimited sources of cheap, clean power seemed truly over. Plans for new reactors were shelved all over the world. The last construction permit issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that was actually used was issued in 1973 for the Palo Verde reactors in Arizona. The last permit issued was granted in 1978 but the plant was never built.
Fast forward to October, 2001. The September 11th terrorist attacks have caused a complete U-turn on many long-held political and public policy clichés, leading to dramatic rethinking of the true value and new low-risk tradeoffs of nuclear power. Current events and a better public understanding of the once-vilified nuclear power industry now combine to make the generation of electricity by scientific means much more attractive. With far better safety systems, and supported by a less-hysterical assessment of radioactive waste risks by the media and the press, nuclear power generation is now emerging as the one economically viable, safe, and necessary choice that can the enormous future U.S. demand for electricity.
Yes, Virginia, There IS ( — will be — ) an Energy Shortage
How far the Bush Administration will go in pushing the nuclear power option is uncertain. In an early August broadcast of NBC's "Meet the Press," Vice President Dick Cheney made the statement that the DOE's annual energy review showed that the U.S. must build 65 power plants annually within the coming decade if the Nation were to avert nationwide outages on the order of what happened in California in the first half of 2001 and that "some of these ought to be nuclear." However, it's well known that, coming from the Texas oil background, it would be difficult for the President not to favor energy solutions that involve the burning of clean hydrocarbon fuels.
On the other hand, the controversy over the recent Kyoto agreement meeting could force the White House to play the "greenhouse gas" card, putting in anything from a token nuclear program to a respectable one in order to claim a serious effort by the U.S. to join the world community in reducing planetary carbon dioxide emissions. For example, Senator Pete Domenici (R — New Mexico) noted that since the 1970's, nuclear plants have spared the Earth from pollution by over 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses.
Oh, Do We Really Still Use Nuclear Power?
At present, nuclear power plants generate about 23% of the Nation's power needs. During the 1990's, and by taking measures to improve the efficiency of existing nuclear plants via reducing shutdowns, improving safety and instrumentation, and expanding power output using improved fuel systems design, the plants added the effective equivalence of building 24 new coal-fired one-Gigawatt (i.e., 1,000-Megawatt) plants, without the attendant pollution. This increase in electric output was enough to satisfy 30% of the growth in new electricity consumption during that decade.
U.S. utilities in 31 States operate 105 commercial power plants hosting 195 nuclear reactors (though perhaps only 85% are generating electricity as of this writing) to provide just over 20% of the Nation's electricity. The most nuclear-intensive state is the industrial state of Illinois, hosting 17 reactors, followed by New York with 14 and North Carolina and Pennsylvania tied for third at 11 each.
The overwhelming majority of these U.S. units are classified as "boiling water reactors" or "pressurized water reactors" using uranium-rich fuel rods in a heating core that (ultimately) creates large amounts of steam to drive enormous, two-story-high turbine generators. Neutron-moderating 'control rods', usually made of solid boron (an element like sulfur that is harmless and found in simple things like Borax soap) are inserted and withdrawn to allow the reactor to build up temperature or to cool down by regulating the nuclear reaction via soaking up a form of radioactivity called 'free' neutrons — from "a few" to "a lot" (neutrons are part of all atoms, and atoms, of course, are what everything is made up of, including us).
Since Three Mile Island, both the power plant operators and the Federal government have worked closely and hard to improve reactor safety. The keys to avoiding any kind of trouble turn out to be many. Major areas of improvement were achieve in these arenas:
Excellence in operator selection, motivation, and training
Enormously complex and expensive upgrades, overhauls, and safety construction
Fail-safe shutdown measures and systems; multiple backups, et al
Careful and continuous monitoring of reactor condition, pipes, valves, gauges, and instruments by both operation centers onsite and remote backup facilities offsite.
This can be difficult, partly due to the piping machinery network's intrinsic complexity, but primarily because existing plants are (mostly) unique, one-of-a-kind, poorly-though-out (from a safety standpoint) designs patched with modifications added along the way over decades of demanding service. Every operating procedure and safety regimen had to be tailor-made to each reactor's specific idiosyncrasies and unique circumstances. The efficacy of this "tough engineering discipline" to the cacophony of designs, though, has been proven and demonstrated by the lack of any serious accidents for the 105 reactors over 50 years — with the lone exception of Three Mile Island, of course.
Particularly over the most recent decade, utilities have markedly improved safety records, as recorded by tough Federal and State safety inspections, etc., via upgrades of plant equipment, additional safety sensors, better contingency plans, improved monitoring procedures, constellations of video displays, real-time diagrams and maps, and video cameras on nearly every square meter of the generating plant. Between 1987 and 1999, the number of automatic shutdowns per plant dropped from 3.6 per year to one per year-and-a-half, according to the NRC. This is pretty good, given that these systems automatically shut down if so much as a single drop of water falls off a valve. Literally. Further, the number of safety sensor failures has been cut in half to less than one per year.
To combat the disadvantages of having over one hundred unique facilities, the nuclear power industry prepared three master-designs, based on the older, allegedly "proven" technology. These designs, one by General Electric and two by Westinghouse, were approved in advance of construction by the NRC. With an objective of standardization, highly-trained and skilled construction workers could be applied to the assembly of reactors and piping networks with multiple layers of safety features. Analogies have been drawn with the assembly of specific models of commercial aircraft by Boeing, based on (essentially) using machine aids, computer-guided and —tested hand-construction of a select group of standardized models.
General Electric has built two 1.35 Gigawatt "advanced" boiling water reactors in Japan and six more are under construction, two in Taiwan, and four more in Japan. Total construct time, including advanced safety systems, is estimated to run about five years.
The Westinghouse 600 Megawatt version incorporates more of the automatic "passive" shutdown safety features that the public associates with Hollywood's portrayal of nuclear power stations. They are activated by gravity and other natural forces, and so can shut down and protect the plant and its surroundings without human intervention (in that hopefully unlikely event!).
Boiling water and pressurized water reactors, though, are an inherently dangerous, older technology, since they totally depend on the water coolant to prevent a runaway reaction. While safety for these plants has become a holy grail of heavily layering-on new-technology safety systems "up the wazoo," nuclear engineers acknowledge that you can manage the risk of this type of design, but you can't reduce them to zero.
Competing with the expensive retrofitting of older, more dangerous reactor designs, a new technology has been developed over the years having full-and-complete safety designed in from the ground up — the so-called Pebble Bed reactor, in which there is no possibility of a run-away reaction under any conceivable circumstance short of a direct hit by a atomic bomb.
How Can Nuclear Power Still Be An Option?
To start, and without any other strategic, environmental, or safety considerations, atomic-generated power is, per kilowatt, hands down the cheapest form of electricity. Nationwide U.S. statistical averages over the last two years show nuclear power costing 1.6 cents per kilowatt-hour relative to 2.0 for coal, 3.8 for oil, and 4.1 for gas [source: U.S. Utility Industry Data Institute, 2001]. While natural gas has had some wild price swings over the last five years, it has seldom dropped below the unit energy cost for nuclear power.
Unless you've been living under a rock on Mars somewhere, everyone has by now heard about the extensive burden of new construction requirements, safety systems, and runaway micro-management regulations that have heaped huge capital cost increases upon both existing and proposed nuclear power plants.
Despite the far more sizeable fixed property, plant, and equipment costs, fully-burdened per-kilowatt costs for nuclear plants — even including the much older plants that required billions in safety upgrades — are still competitive: 4.2 c/kwh (cents per kilowatt-hour), 3.9 for coal, and 4.2 each for gas and oil. The numbers work out that way for two reasons: nuclear plants generate far more electricity per plant than typical fossil-fuel stations, and, owing to pollution and a huge amount of sulfur and proteinaceous residue in plant-burned fossil fuels, there has been an almost equal capital-cost burden placed upon coal, gas, and oil plants to meet environmental requirements — particularly those pertaining to reduction of sulfur and nitrogen emissions.
Thus, more than fifteen years after the Chernobyl disaster, attitudes towards nuclear power are changing. Vice President Cheney's championing of nuclear power during a major speech on the Administration's plan for energy strategy and policy on May 1st of this year is a case in point — and is just the most visible sign of this amazing resurrection. Despite dissention among Russia and OPEC nations and rapidly-declining prices for spot crude oil, prices for natural gas keep climbing even while national demand for electric power is rising. Shortages in California have been alleviated only due to better weather and very conscientious conservation by citizens, production facilities, and businesses.
In January, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham announced the selection of the Yucca Mountains National Storage Site in Nevada as the Nation's definitive repository for radioactive waste. Waste is to be delivered encased in the (literally) bullet-proof and crash-proof barrels that are in current use at nuclear plants and stored in huge, thick, gamma-radiation-proof concrete bunkers buried 1,000 feet deep in the earth's mantle. Even the more radical of anti-nuclear scientists agree that this should keep radioactive waste safe and from seeping into the ground for at least the first 10,000 (that's right, ten thousand ) years. This same waste material has been safely stored without incident at storage facilities in the plants themselves for over forty years. While Nevada and its citizens are seriously upset at the concept of becoming known to its fellow States as "the Radioactive State," no one has complained enough to pass State laws permanently impeding or banning the facility.
Twenty-One Reasons to Build Nuclear Power Plants
A list of favorable reasons justifying new nuclear power plant construction (despite the perceived difficulty of finding a disposal site for nuclear waste) might include the following:
To provide a strategic defense against potential retaliation from Arab, OPEC, and Muslim nations angered by any aspect of the war on terrorist, its future conduct, or actions by Israel.
To implement an enabling technology that would, in just five years (going on the basis of the PBR design), permit the U.S. to meet or exceed the requirements of the Kyoto treaty, thus placing a ceiling on increases of greenhouse-gas emissions.
To solve the California energy shortage once and for all by breaking the State's dependence on out-of-State electricity suppliers.
To provide unlimited, unrestricted amounts of cheap electric power to meet the rapidly increasing demands of gadget-hungry citizens and consumers across the Nation.
To reduce the per-kilowatt cost to consumers of electricity by over 40%.
To eliminate all future electrical equipment damages caused by a sudden, un-anticipated blackout or brownout associated with shortages, particularly in the peak demand periods in the summertime.
To spare the lives of persons dependent for life support on medical instrumentation, both in and external to hospitals, during blackouts.
To eliminate the trauma of being stuck in elevators, on carnival rides, becoming endangered in manufacturing operations, etc., as a consequence of blackouts.
To spare the lives of persons killed in automobile accidents when electric shortages cut power to traffic lights, etc.
To commence the phase out coal-fired utilities, which could reduce overall air pollution in major metropolitan areas by 38% in five or six years,
To reduce same by 58%, when combined with major market acceptance of hybrid electric vehicles.
To reduce or eliminate all of the problems of outdoor corrosion and lung problems caused by acid rain (which comes from burning coal).
To financially rescue New England homeowners from outrageous winter heating bills.
To financially rescue mid-Atlantic and Northwest homeowners from fuel-oil shortages and associated huge heating bills.
To give all of American manufacturers a major competitive edge over international competitors in industrial production.
To equate to an 800 billion dollar tax cut over ten years for all American consumers.
To save the environment from current and future demands and requirements for offshore drilling and the desecration and spoilage of the Alaskan wilderness with new oil wells and pipelines.
To significantly reduce the number and trip frequencies of oil supertankers and refined product ships plying the environmentally-sensitive waterways around Alaska and the Caribbean.
To eliminate 90% of coal soot and heavy tar and oily hydrocarbons emitted by both coal- and oil-burning facilities.
To drastically reduce removal and disposal costs of the mountains of sulfur extracted from crude oil prior to refining and burning.
To permanently protect nuclear plants from sabotage, theft of nuclear materials, terrorists, and airplane crashes by building the plants as high-security underground facilities.
The Kyoto Treaty and Carbon Dioxide Emissions
According to estimates by the United Nations, world energy consumption could double in the next forty or fifty years. In the United States and Japan, this doubling of demand could occur in less than twenty years. Apart from the issue of dependence on Arab and OPEC oil, perhaps the most important reason to once again consider nuclear power is the growing international concern about global warming — and the strange and disastrous new weather patterns that are emerging. Unlike fossil fuels — oil, gas, and coal — nuclear energy does not produce any greenhouse emissions.
Most doubts about the reality of global warming have been permanently laid to rest following the unprecedented barrage of destructive hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods that have deluged all the continents of the world in the past three years. Weather patterns have dramatically changed, bringing mild winters, disastrous droughts and wildfires (most recently and notably in Australia, for example), and stunningly shrinking glaciers — to the point where some which existed for thousands of centuries have disappeared altogether. The water levels of the Pacific, among the world's other oceans, have risen enough to inundate the lesser-known islands and make some disappear underwater altogether (as narrated in a recent National Geographic Special).
Beyond the direct and increasing property damage and lives lost from the crazy weather aberrations, excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may soon begin to have thermally lethal effects on human and animal life. As one scientist put it, imagine a giant looking-glass magnifier focusing sunlight on piece of paper. Pretty soon, the spot starts smoking and burns a black-edged hole in it. The thick glass lens is the higher refractivity index of CO2 and its infra-red blanket effect in the atmosphere, and the burning spot is your neighborhood and the faces of your friends and relatives. Other scientists project that by 2070, global warming — if unabated — will have a more lethal effect on vegetation and mankind (via drought, crop failure, and starvation) than the meteor which extinguished the dinosaurs did on all animal life on the planet.
Sadly, the United States, not having the same advantages as France and Japan in non-carbon-dioxide emissions, had to withdraw from the Kyoto treaty. Had the U.S. as large a percentage of its electric power generated by nuclear as France, most of the Kyoto guidelines could have been met.
Amazingly, the U.S. currently has only 105 out of 440, or less than one-quarter, of the world's nuclear power generation plants. Among the 31 countries hosting nuclear power plants, France, Japan, Canada, Germany, and Russia comprise the nations having most of the remainder. France derives three-quarters of its entire electric generation needs from nuclear power, and Japan, while not releasing figures, is estimated by the utility industry to derive 40%. Russia's total exceeds 25%, as does the nuclear share for the United States.
Public Opinion Turns On A Dime
Support for nuclear power has suddenly lurched into the majority, following the September 11 terrorist attacks. Americans are now much more sensitive to the need to defend against an Arab or OPEC oil embargo — as well as the need to cut down on greenhouse emissions and cooperate with the worldwide Kyoto agreement. Surveys by an entire spectrum of news organizations ranging from an ABC News poll to the Christian Science Monitor show that 51% responded in favor to the question, "Do you support or oppose using nuclear power to generate electricity?" 29% opposed, 18% were unsure, and 3% declined to provide an answer.
On the question of, "Do you think nuclear power plants in the United States are safer now than they were 10 years ago?", 65% said "safer," 18% said "not safer" or "more dangerous", and 17% said they did not know (or declined to answer the question).
On the question of, "Do you think radioactive waste from nuclear power plants can be safely stored for many years?", 37% agreed, 45% disagreed, and 18% said they didn't know or declined to answer.
Support for nuclear power, then, is taking a surprising upswing in light of the problems of grimly increasing figures in pollution, electricity costs, global warming, and the threat of an Arab oil embargo in response to U.S. expansion of anti-terrorist activities outside of Afghanistan. In an Associate Press poll of 1002 adults taken in April of 2001 — even before the energy crisis, fifty-two percent supported nuclear power, and 56% of those supporting also were in favor of a new power plant in their general area. One out of three were opposed to any expansion of nuclear power. Two years ago, only 45% supported nuclear power, and less than half of those supported the construction of a new plant in their general area. Four out of ten were opposed.
Not surprisingly, public support has been weakest in the most liberal states such as Massachusetts and California. For example, a poll taken in July of 2,007 adults by the generally anti-nuclear Public Policy Institute of California conflicts with AP polls in California while indicating that 57 percent of Californians believed nuclear power is too dangerous, even if building more plants would help alleviate the State's energy problems, and would oppose a proposal to build a nuclear power plant in their region. The poll, taken just after the onset of the California energy crisis was surprising, since California had only two nuclear power plants currently in operation, the 2.25 Gigawatt San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in San Clemente and the 2.21 Gigawatt Diablo Canyon twin plants near San Luis Obispo.
A New Understanding of Nuclear Plant Safety
Safety is now universally accepted as paramount in this industry — and is more advanced in practice and results than in any other industry. In the more-than-fifty years of worldwide nuclear plant operation, none of these nations, save Russia, has ever had a serious internal plant accident. The incident at Three Mile Island can be characterized as essentially an inadvertent release of radiation, and Japan has had one similar minor release. Apart from Chernobyl, no lives have been lost, and few serious injuries have been experienced in these plants.
This is an unparalleled safety record. According to the Utility Industry Association, just within the past five years, oil- and gas-powered plants reported 86 serious injuries, and coal-fired plants 258. Nuclear power plants reported zero. The totals do not even include the over 8,000 casualties killed or wounded worldwide in coal-producing accidents and mine explosions. Despite the near-fanatical safety regulations heaped on nuclear plants by governments across the globe — as well as the far advanced age of plant construction and equipment — all of the 440 existing plants have passed safety tests with flying colors. They have, to a plant, been awarded full safety clearances and granted renewed licenses to operate for from five to fifty more years. Six of these plants were given a clean bill-of-health and renewed in recent months for another 20 years, having successfully concluded 40 years of un-interrupted, accident-free service.
Increased safety systems and better operator training have lead to a 25% increase in the output of existing U.S. reactors, according to the World Association of Nuclear Operators. Plants formerly operating at 60 to 70 percent due to the need for ad-hoc inspection are now regularly operating at 95 percent, owing to advanced telemetry and sensors covering all aspects of safety.
The Pebble-Bed Reactor
When the great Nobel-Prize-winning scientists of the World War II era postulated the possibility of the atomic bomb, the U.S. and its leaders and engineers were not concerned about either risks or frills in the design of supporting reactors. Following the War, electric power utilities were so eager to build new reactors and convert existing ones to power generation that they spent minimal time contemplating any strategic redesign for the benefit of efficiency or safety. "Trust the Professionals" was the watchword of the day, but we all know how that turned out (particularly in the Ukraine!).
As a result of being rushed into production without careful thought towards absolutely preventing radiation leaks, the design of existing U.S. reactors, while not capable of a meltdown of the kind affecting the Chernobyl plant, was vulnerable to small leaks, as the Three Mile Island incident showed. All of the Nation's nuclear reactors currently use water-cooled reactors that generate electricity produced with steam in steam-driven turbines. They use a complex system of pipes, shafts, pumps, tubes, valves, and motors that are subject to extreme stress and corrosion. Reactors are often high-temperature, high-radiation constructs using steel and concrete, both of which gradually crumble when exposed to high levels of radiation. Nuclear power reactors and heat generation vessels clearly have been long overdue for a major redesign — hopefully one involving a new technology with the power to obviate most or all of the traditional nuclear power problems.
Now the world takes the safety of nuclear power very seriously. In particularly, German nuclear scientists who did not have an opportunity to design reactors during the war put their fabled high-tech nuclear physics prowess to work in the design of a totally failsafe nuclear reactor design called the Pebble Bed reactor. But since the U.S. felt justifiably proud in being the leader in all things nuclear, it held steadfast onto the dangerous reactor designs that had their roots in the hurry-up-and-get-something-working designs of World War II. Since reactors are intrinsically dangerous to living tissue, U.S. nuclear engineers felt that the U.S. designs were tried-and-true, and thus, had to be safer than any "Johnny-come-lately" foreign design. NIH syndrome ("Not Invented Here") won the day over ration and reason, and the German design of the late 1960's suffered the ignominy of cover-up and neglect.
Along came the current pressures that the world now experiences on the energy front. The "wild and open" U.S. and Russian designs and traditional drop-rod versions have revealed their dangerous nature and safety weaknesses, and have become terribly expensive to construct with adequate protection, often taking decades of costly rework and safety and environmental studies to get from design to full operation. Worse, South Africa hires German reactor design firms to build it a true operating prototype for Johannesburg. Unlike other prototypes of the Pebble Bed, this will not be a one-of-a-kind wonder, but is intended to be the final testing-and-tweaking prototype for the design and installation of a string of nuclear power stations throughout South Africa — and hopefully, according to South African engineering firms, for the rest of Africa and the world.
Because the Pebble Bed is designed on the fundamental principle of having a reactor core that physically cannot go critical or even overheat, the safety requirements are, by comparison, quite minimal and inexpensive — though even more effective than those required for a boiling water or superheated steam reactor.
To understand how the Pebble Bed reactor can be so safe while existing designs are so dangerous, it is only necessary to note that the reactor fuel is designed to, by itself, be completely inert, safe, and incapable of run-away reactions when standing alone in a pile without any coolant, water baths, graphics rods or other moderators, or any other form of safety aid. The German scientists looked at the U.S. and other European designs, and said to themselves, "Why design a reactor with exposed rods of concentrated fuel which, were the water or reactor coolant to leak away, and/or the graphite or boron or other moderator rods were to disappear or fall away, which could result in overheating, fire, or a run-away critical reaction? Why not design the fuel as self-contained pellets covered with their own graphite and reaction-rate moderator substances and limit the size of each reactor pile so that the reactor mass cannot possibly go critical under any (reasonably, of course) anticipatable condition?" Short of an extremely calculated and sophisticate sabotage attempt, no problem could occur. Even a bombing attack would only scatter the pellets, making it even more impossible for the scattered 'pile' to go critical.
Pebble Bed: The New Meltdown-Free Reactor Technology
In a democracy, the consumer determines the relative value of any produced good or service. Generation of electric power is no exception. For nuclear power generation to overcome its unwanted legacy of fear (justified or unjustified), the design must be incredibly safe.
There are many reactor designs — some created quite recently — but none seem to have the safety issues aced as well as the Pebble Bed Reactor. This design of 1960's German origin makes it impossible to have a meltdown and impossible to spread radioactivity via the coolant — the two most critical safety design elements that a reactor can have. In contrast to light water reactors, for example, in which loss of water leads to an enormous buildup of heat terminating in core meltdown, fires, and explosions similar to what occurred at Chernobyl, the loss of coolant in the Pebble Bed design cannot cause problems, since it is designed to run totally safely in total absence of any coolant whatsoever!
This is accomplished by creating spherical fuel pellets around which is sealed graphite and radioactivity moderators. Since each fuel pellet essentially carries its own 'control rods' and safety systems, the heat and temperature of an uncooled pile of pellets is limited to a fixed temperature above which it cannot rise. Therefore, no meltdown can occur, no fires can start, no airborne radioactivity can be released.
The 'ultimate temperature' that a pile of Pebble Bed pellets can reach is set simply by the diameter of the pellets and the size of the pile. In the Pebble Bed design, both are set to provide maximum, bullet-proof safety for a reactor size of 310 Megawatts, which explains why the Pebble Bed system is comprised of multiple modules feeding into a turbine power generation plant in a 'star pattern' of selectable total generation size, usually consisting of up to five reactors per central generation facility (up to ten multiple 'stars' can be hosted in a single site for a total plant capacity of 1.5 Gigawatts — the largest total plant size of any kind that FERC will normally license). The temperature of a pile of that size never exceeds 1250 degrees — the temperature of a very hot pottery kiln — and that is too low to cause problems, or even to damage or degrade its fuel. The fuel does not experience any melting or degradation problems until it is placed into a recycling furnace kept well above 3,000 degrees.
The coolant in a reactor is the fluid that is used both to keep the reactor's temperature down to safe levels and to conduct heat away to the turbines or other power generation machines to generate electricity. In the case of the PB design, the actual cooling effect is irrelevant (at least as far as safety is concerned, since loss of coolant cannot cause the fuel to melt or experience any degradation or harm), but there is another critical safety feature of coolants: prevention of the spread of radioactivity or of particulate waste.
Water and steam have three strikes against them as coolants. First, the oxygen in water can become radioactive. Second, because of its viscosity, water and steam cannot be readily filtered for ultra-fine materials under the required flow rates. Third, this same viscosity very easily 'floats' dust and materials and deposits them where they cause trouble.
Metal coolants, e.g., liquid sodium or mercury, can easily create bad fires in contact with air and explosions in contact with rain or water — not smart! Mercury vapor is hugely poisonous at any temperature. Viscosity problems, radioactivity vulnerability, and particulate transport negatives abound.
Gas coolants, on the other hand, do not have a high-viscosity problem. Helium, the lightest of all gasses, has incredibly low viscosity, is inert and harmless under all circumstances, and — most important of all — is totally immune to radiation. Unlike sodium, et al, helium does not cause fires, but actually extinguishes them. Unlike mercury and radioactive water, helium is not poisonous and does not condense into a liquid that can penetrate and infect a water table or sources of drinking water. And when helium escapes, it really escapes. Just as helium-filled children's and party balloons rise up into the sky, helium, when released into the air, finds itself rising to the upper atmosphere — and from there, blown away by the light pressure of the sun — within just a few hours!
Even better, the helium is kept dry, and bathes the outside of the reactor vessel and the inside of the building housing the entire apparatus of pipes, valves, pumps, and controls so that there can be no possibility of corrosion of pipes, etc. — ever! Not only does this absolutely minimize repair costs, but it provides real safety in the prevention of leaks. And also since helium is chemically inert, no fire or flame can start (or even be made to continue, if brought in from the outside) under any circumstance — unless someone were to crawl inside with a bomb, which is most unlikely, since such a terrorist would have to go in with scuba tanks or an oxygen bottle in order to breathe. Further, since there is no water in a helium-bathed Pebble Bed reactor, it is impossible to explode.
Helium also turns out to be a godsend in terms of reducing generator and turbine wear. Magnetic and helium-pressure bearings last centuries without repair. Ultimately, liquid-helium-cooled conduits carry the newly-created electricity away from the generators without any loss or resistance. Field coils and powerful magnets can be operated at up to nearly 100% efficiency.
One could not ask for a safer fluid for the transport of heat away from a reactor core and to the power generation facilities. Because its specific heat is so low, though, a lot of helium — at a fairly high flow rate — is required. For small, modular reactors like the 310 MW Pebble Bed reactor, this is perfect, however. Heated helium expands, and so can drive turbines directly, or can be used to boil water for steam turbines, or some combination of both.
Owing to the legendary safety of helium coolant, hugely-expensive "bulletproof" and earthquake-proof containment vessels and distribution systems aren't at all required for helium. Leaks, large or small, are harmless, easily detected, and easily repaired.
Even control rods aren't required. When full power plant electricity output isn't required, hot helium from fixed-rate plants can be directed to cooling towers instead of the generators. However, building these cooling towers is extra expense, and it is usually cheaper just to design-in the rods to turn the output down when full electricity output isn't needed.
Because Pebble Bed systems are safe, they don't have to be located in remote wildernesses, unlike the older water-cooled and steam-generating designs — and placing them underground with absorptive foundations will permanently protect them from any terrorist attack and all but the most extreme earthquakes. Three of the Pebble Bed 'star' formations can fit into a football field, so utilities can place them relatively close to where power is needed. Because their design is safe and modular, additional units can be added as power demand grows with time.
The first successful gas-cool reactor designs — as used with the older, non-PB cores — were built and evaluated in two reactors constructed by General Atomics in San Diego, California. Peach Bottom One was a demonstration plant built in Pennsylvania that ran from 1967 through 1974. The Peach Bottom gas-cooled design was accepted and the principle licensed later that year.
The success of the helium-cooled design, plus the eminently mass-manufacturable modular PB design, results in safety standards exceeding all current Federal regulations with a plant capital cost of $840 of construction per generated kilowatt in mass-produced quantities (or estimated $1,200 in building-cost for single-quantity demonstration plants). This compares very favorably to the $2,000 to $3,000 per kilowatt required in construction capital costs for the next-least-expensive nuclear plants that the DOE, AEC, and FERC will license.
So Pebble Bed designs certainly get a 'clean bill of health' on safety, but how about fuel processing and waste disposal? These residual aspects of all nuclear power plants are currently what concern the environmentalists the most.
Excelon Corporation of Chicago, Illinois (not to be confused with Enron!) is building a design which is expected to be operating in commercial use near Cape Town, South Africa by this summer — onstream and online by August, 2002. Excelon is the largest operator of nuclear plants in the U.S. The Excelon Cape Town plant is being constructed under contract to Eskom, South Africa's state power agency. Each reactor consists of a 20-foot diameter reactor vessel standing 60 feet high. The vessel is in turn contained in a 150-foot high safety-containment reactor building housing piping, pumps, control valves, et al.
The fuel pellet design is based on work done both in Germany and the U.S. and is constructed from tiny chips of uranium dioxide coated with graphite. A scoop of these chips (about 15k or so) are pressed together and encapsulated in a protective graphite coating to form a two-and-one-half-inch 'pebble'(in this new design, actually about the size of a tennis ball — something a little larger than what most of us would consider a "pebble"). A fascinating effect of this pellet design occurs when someone tries to heat the pebbles above their maximum operating temperature: the tennis-ball-sized pebbles expand, separating the tiny uranium dioxide chips inside (the reactor vessel is only half full of loose pebbles, so there is plenty room for the pile to expand as a result). As the little fuel chips separate from each other during the expansion (i.e., the distance between them increases), this shuts down the nuclear reaction all together. Consequently, even a terrorist with a thermite bomb (chemical heat bomb for melting) could not cause a runaway reaction (and further, airplane fuel and flamethrowers do not burn or work in the inert helium atmosphere that surrounds the reactor).
These "fuel pebbles" can be mixed to various proportions with solid graphite "moderator pebbles" to arrive at the right heat and temperature specifications for reactor vessels of various sizes and generation capacities. In the case of the Excelon Cape Town plant, each reactor vessel will be filled with a mix of 330 thousand fuel pebbles to 110 graphite moderator pebbles.
The plant can run for up to two years between downtimes for major inspections and maintenance. Excelon's design includes an automated inspection system that flows and cycles the pebbles continuously through inspection machines (fully cycled every 87 days). At every cycle, each fuel pebble is measured to determine how much of the fuel in the pebble is spent (kind of like the battery charge-remaining testers on certain AAA batteries). Spent pebbles are kicked off into a holding tank for recycling, and newly-recharged ones are dropped in to the vessel in its place. Most fuel pebbles are expected to last for 10 to 20 cycles (two to five years) before recharging or replacement, and most solid graphite 'moderator' pebbles are expected to last for 50. Pebbles exhibiting unusual damage (via scientific test instruments and video camera inspection) are dropped into a different tank for taking a closer look.
In this manner, the reactor operates continuously, without the notorious downtimes required of all other nuclear power designs. Control rods and larger graphite spheres are dropped in to reduce the temperature of the core to a level where humans can retrieve, inspect, and handle the core's contents, if necessary. The plant can run for ten to fifteen years before the reactor vessels must be shut down for periodic maintenance and overhaul, which takes approximately four to six weeks (in contrast, most other commercial reactor designs have to be shut down every year or so for maintenance lasting up to over a month).
Excelon feels that this continuous, online refueling method and inspection-and-repair design maximizes safety, efficiency, and output while minimizing capital costs and fuel costs. Fuel chips and the pebbles are manufactured by rolling the uranium dioxide chips in the material in rotating spherical-tank processes similar to making bubble-gum or hard-candy balls. Final pebble-ball pressing and sealing is performed by specialized machinery. Fabrication of the fuel pebbles is conducted in the U.S. at the same military-guarded maximum-security bases that are used to fashion nuclear warheads and other reactor fuels from enriched uranium. Safety in recycling of spent fuel and radioactive waste is accomplished through the new 'cistern-casket' methods approved by the Federal government for containment of waste at current plants and for transport and burial at the Yucca Mountain site approved by the DOE in November.
Bullet- and Bomb-Proof Cistern-Casks
But few members of the public have been informed of how current nuclear plants have been able to safely store nuclear waste over the past fifty years or so without any significant problems. Given the enormous amount of electricity generated over 60 years, the volume of high-level nuclear waste is not all that large — the total generated by the 105 U.S. plants during their lifetimes could be stacked less than 15 feet high in a space the size of a football field. Equivalent coal plants, by comparison, would have produced thousands of times more waste — more ash than the size of Mt. Ranier, enough sulfur to fill the Grand Canyon with matches, and enough carbon dioxide to volumetrically fill the Pacific Ocean bed between the West Coast and Hawaii for miles deep. Billions of tons of waste ash, tar, hydrocarbons and odiferous oil films, sulfuric acid rain, poisonous nitrous oxides, and global warming emissions that would have been dumped into our air had it not been for the nuclear power plants in the U.S. clean electricity generation program.
Commercial nuclear wastes are currently safely stored in spent-fuel pools and dry storage casks at the plants that generated them. They are protected behind fenced and walled compounds guarded by armed guards 24/7 and patrolled daily by technicians — and therefore may just be the best managed waste in the world. The U.S. may be able to learn something from France, Britain, Germany, and Japan, though, where nuclear waste is taken more seriously. These countries have the political will to recycle spent fuel rather than just setting it aside as waste after a single use. Up to 80 times more energy can be recovered from the un-recycled waste fuel while at the same time reducing the volume of the fuel waste by 91% and cutting the radioactive lifetimes of the waste that need to be stored underground to an average factor of up to one-half.
Recycling and reprocessing involves dissolving the spent fuel to separate out the uranium, plutonium, and small quantities of other heavy elements for re-use in the reactor. The remaining fission product waste, which can continue to be radioactive for several centuries — as opposed to thousands of years for uranium and plutonium — are then dissolved in melted glass for disposal (in a form which cannot leach into any water table) and placed in long-term storage in specially dense and inert alloy canisters. In the late 1970s, President Carter signed an executive order banning nuclear fuel recycling in response to general public fears of radioactivity instilled by the Three Mile Island media panic and fears that it could possibly lead to the proliferation of nuclear technologies to other nations (which occurred with Pakistan and India despite the ban, anyway). Perhaps some felt that this handicap to the efficiency of nuclear power would lead to the demise of the industry. Now, however, in light of the current buildup of nuclear waste at the plant sites, even some of the more radical environmentalists now believe this policy needs to be revisited, since it did not prevent other nations from building nuclear weapons and has caused the buildup of a far larger amount of nuclear waste than was necessary.
By recycling the fuel, the truly dangerous long-life materials (1,000 to 3,000 years) could be indefinitely recycled, and the remaining waste with shorter lifespans would not have to be buried in such extreme repositories as the mile-deep repositories at Yucca Mountain. This would not only lead to a better long-term impact on public safety, but would dramatically reduce the cost of nuclear power and the current burden on taxpayers for the program's subsidization (while the gambit of opponents of nuclear power may have been to make nuclear power prohibitively expensive by forcing a sizeable buildup of more dangerous nuclear waste and the attendant problems of disposing of the un-recycled fuel, no one anticipated that Congress would subsidize the waste disposal process and thus make nuclear power still economically competitive).
An accelerated form of fuel repository can be to set up special 'breeder' reactors which are more efficient at generating plutonium (the recyclable fuel which can be extracted each time nuclear fuel is 'burned' until spent), but this approach, too, was cancelled in the late 70's by Carter's executive order, culminating in the closing of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, allegedly due to concerns of the potential for the proliferation of bomb-making material. However, a new electrometallurgical process developed by the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois inexpensively enables the inexpensive separation of uranium, plutonium, and other fuel materials from the recyclable 'spent' fuel. Therefore, no weapons-grade material is produced in any step of the process, and the use of breeder reactors is unnecessary. If the efficient and economical practice of spent fuel recycling can be rescued from the politics of fear-mongering — unlikely in an Administration where oil is seen as king — the waste storage problem, Kyoto global warming compliance problem, growing demand-for-electricity problem, Arab oil embargo threat, and unnecessary taxpayer subsidy burden might all be solved at one stroke.
Currently the total amount of radioactive waste generated and amassed by U.S. nuclear plants since the inception of nuclear power in the 50's has topped 40,000 tons — it's mostly peripherally-exposed pipes and materials made of very heavy metals — with most of it stored at the plant sites where it was created. The spent nuclear fuel rods, along with a far larger proportion of pipe parts and incidental items exposed within the reactor and to fluid flows, etc., are kept for a time in deep pools of water and ultimately encased in containers that are among Mankind's strongest manufactured creations — stronger and safer than space shuttles, submarines, the most advanced military tanks, the deepest bunkers at NORAD, ten times stronger per cubic inch than the largest and strongest bridges ever built, stronger by a factor of 20 in uncrackable compression strength over Saddam's 1,000-foot bunkers or Bin Laden's rocky mountain caves. For testing, these casks have even been pummeled by the same 2,000-lb JDAMs, 15,000-lb Daisy Cutter bombs that our Air Force used to blast the Serbian troops and Taliban out of existence, even placing them underground in the near-vicinity of 20-Megaton atomic blasts in underground testing. Apart from a couple of bent lids (seal unbroken), they survived without a leak — or a single serious crack.
Towering almost two stories tall, these giant casks are sheathed and rimmed in three nested cylinders of six inches each of an incredibly tough steel-and-rare-earth alloy. This alloy is secret in composition but is acknowledged by NIST and DoE scientists to be un-corrodible in any drastic or chemical environment and above the melting-point of any Man- or Nature-made fires, lasers, sources of heat ,or molten lava, save only the heat of a ground-zero nuclear blast or that of the interior of the Sun. The casket's diameter stands almost eight feet across, taller in diameter than any person. When fully loaded, they can weigh as much as 100 tons.
The metal of the inner cylinders is made of a special radiation-absorbing material that completely blocks gamma rays and the waste materials are wrapped in and intermixed with polyethylene and resin strips and beads, whose hydrogen atoms slows down neutrons so they can be easily absorbed by the inner metal cylinder. The entire contents are then bathed in helium, which is immune to radioactivity and also serves to conduct any generated heat to the metal walls to prevent any heat build-up. The helium is put in at a pressure lower than air pressure, so that if a crack ever were to develop, air would leak in rather than the helium leaking out. The entire sealed container is safe to store in either wet or dry environments. A person can stand all day six feet away from one of these casks stuffed to the brim with the deadliest radiation on Earth and not get exposed to more radiation than would be received in an ordinary chest x-ray.
Each casket can contain the waste generated by enough fuel to keep a 300-Megawatt reactor vessel going for three years. The caskets are modular and imminently suitable for local storage, long-term underground storage, or transportation via truck, rail, or sea. Even the more skeptical of the environmental scientists whose responsibility was to give the caskets the most severe critiques and checks admitted that, under normal conditions underground or on the surface, a fully-loaded casket would probably last until it is twice the age of the Sphinx (i.e., 4,000 to 5,000 years). Given the rapid advancements of science and technology that we see occurring everywhere today, surely we might be able to assume that, by then, Mankind can come up with a better place to put — or even completely neutralize, atomize, and destroy — these eternal caissons of nuclear waste.
Revamping the Older Reactors
Since Three Mile Island, both Federal regulatory agencies and existing U.S. plants themselves have heavily raised safety standards. Plant upgrades have continued extensively through the 80's and 90's until this year. An unexpected, but welcomed, spin-off of the facilities reconstruction was the resulting 25% increase in power output and plant uptime afforded by the attendant reduction in downtime and rise in operating efficiency.
Using new materials science and binding processes, nuclear wastes can now be bonded into inert glass and permanently disposed in salt deposits that have been geologically stable for over ten million years. The 'Super Caskets' are now in place for storage and transportation. Droughts and starvation in Africa, Western China, the Australian Outback, and Afghanistan, plus new evidence of melting glaciers and ice flows, particularly in Antarctica, have recently hit the headlines of world newspapers at a time when only nuclear power can supply enough clean energy to make a difference in reducing emissions and halting the spread of global warming.
Management Consolidation Makes Older Plants Safer, More Profitable
A number of newly-established energy conglomerates made a financial killing by buying up old nuclear plants with licenses nearing expiration and revamping them using common standards and scale-of-economy manufactured pipe networks, construction techniques, and safety equipment. These plants were sold for a song by their original owners in expectation that the plants would not receive renewed licenses and would ultimately have to be sold for scrap.
Several of these conglomerates are considering A number of plants are considering adding new reactor buildings on the sites of existing plants as a toe-in-the-water strategy to resurrect nuclear power, specifically:
A new reactor at the site of the existing Southern Power Company Vogtle facility near Augusta, Georgia.
An additional reactor at Dominion Power's North Anna, Virginia, plant.
One or more reactors to be added to Entergy's [sic] existing facilities in the Southern U.S.
Reactor building expansion at an existing Duke Power Co. plant.
Critics of nuclear power are quick to point out, however, that the "new economics" of revitalizing older nuclear plants are based on hidden, and some say ephemeral, subsidies:
Capital investments in reconstruction written off during the nuclear financial crises following the Three Mile Island incident
Federal and State government subsidies for liability insurance
Full government funding for subsidized waste disposal and development of permanent storage sites
Federal aid to old plants and complete coverage of decommissioning costs
Most of the subsidies are contained in the Price-Anderson Act, renewed by the House in November and up for Senate renewal in 2002. Opponents of nuclear power are supporting a new bill known as the "Nuclear Waste Independent Review Act" being introduced by Nevada congressional representatives. But clearly the Federal Government has either decided to defend nuclear power from opponents who would make nuclear electricity generation prohibitively expensive via legal means, or has decided to make nuclear power financially viable under any scenario or outcome.
The Bush Administration floated its own cut at tackling America's energy problems in another Act passed by the House, namely Securing America's Future Energy Act (SAFE, a ponderous 510-page bill providing $33.5 billion in tax breaks for traditional energy companies plus a few hundred million for alternative and experimental energy sources). Despite the earmarking of $2.1 billion of funding in the search for economical techniques of removing sulfur and other pollutants from coal for electric power generation, it is expect that sulfurous emissions and acid rain would only be cut by 38% under the most wildly successful scenario — and that there was absolutely no possibility of reducing coal's production of global warming 'greenhouse' gasses (of course). Hydrocarbons and residue ash would continue to be a problem. And drilling in the Arctic is meeting heavy resistance in the Press and from key environmentalists. Even Vice President Cheney, responding to reporters' questions in last year's Energy Conference, stated "If you want to do something about carbon dioxide emissions, then you ought to build nuclear power plants."
As the desirability of investment in older nuclear plants goes up, fueled by leaps and bounds in energy demand — further stoked by Federal subsidies covering the burdens of insurance and waste disposal — capital costs for the purchase of the older plants are being driven up to the point where new Pebble Bed plants can compete as an alternative to the continued operation of the older, more dangerous plants. In March of last year, Dominion Resources, Inc. a Richmond, Virginia based energy conglomerate, paid $1.3 billion to purchase the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant from Northeast Utilities of Stamford, Connecticut. The price for the Millstone unit in the best shape fetched just under $800 in capital cost per megawatt, eight times the average of just a few years ago, and within striking difference ($45) of the construction cost to date of the Eskom facility in South Africa.
The NRC has streamlined consideration of new nuclear plants and projects, creating separate reviews for plant designs and site placements. Several plant designs, including the original Pebble Bed reactor, have been pre-approved, and if a utility adapts one of these designs, it does not have to vault that regulatory hurdle again.
In view of the hugely oppressive burden of satisfying State legislatures and environmentalists, however, the most likely scenario for the Pebble Bed design (or any new nuclear construction, in fact) is, paradoxically, construction of a new PB unit on the site of an existing and older, more dangerous, plant. This obviates the onerous waste disposal and recycling requirements. However, it defeats the argument of complete safety of a pure PB facility.
A better alternative would be to set up a simultaneous construction program placing PB plants in remote areas in States not saturated with wall-to-wall suburban population. The reactors and generators can be constructed underground using 'Cheyenne Mountain' spring suspension systems, which would securely protect them from the impact of terrorist airplane strikes and earthquakes, not to mention all-but-direct hits from nuclear weapons. The irony not lost on the NRC is, separate, pure, Pebble Bed plants would be far safer, but political and legal attacks by environmentalists and nuclear power opponents, in the absence of Congressional legislation, would delay their construction for decades while building them on the sites of older plants would permit immediate construction owing to the argument of the safe history of fait accompli and to Federal protection under the principle of eminent domain.
Why Can't Nature Compete?
Environmentalists and idealists continue to pitch solar, wind, fuel cell, and biomass, etc., as the solution to America's energy problems. Unfortunately, as hard as science has worked — and despite billions in Federally- and State- (mostly Californian) subsidies, costs have not yet come down on the technologies anywhere near to the point where they can compete on cost (and economists will vouch that doubling everyone's taxes to subsidize wildly-expensive windmills in every back yard, plus the 20 million or so acres of purchased farmland upon which to put electric solar cells — which is what would be required — would collapse the economy and ruin the U.S. standard of living. Electricity would be free, but no one would have a job with which to buy that next stereo or electric SUV. Plus, your Wheaties would now be costing you $20.00-a-box!
Solar cells are handicapped, because Moore's law of the price of chips and electronics dropping to one half every year-and-a-half does not work for photoelectric cells — because it cannot. Moore's law works because you can cram more-and-more circuits on a three-inch (say) piece of silicon. The cost of the silicon itself has not come down that much. For solar power, one uses all three inches (say) to be exposed to the sun, and always has. There's nothing you can shrink to put on a three-inch silicon surface in order to reduce cost. And the scientific Holy Grail of increasing the conversion efficiency could only reduce the cost by a one-time cut of one-half, even if the efficiency went to 100%! Solar cells cannot output more energy as electricity than the sun's energy that falls on it (and if you can do this, I'll get you a starring role on the next Startrek!).
Wind is wispy and light. There's not much heavy weight in a bundle of wind. Often the wind doesn't blow. Where wind does blow all the time (e.g., a handful of U.S. mountaintops, etc.), it's so far away from civilization that 80% of the generated electricity is used up in resistance by the time the current reaches the suburbs (which is where the real demand is, not at Farmer John's farmhouse). However, I've met more than a few girls of Dutch ancestry who really like the idea of a windmill in their back yard. They tell me they can't afford it, though. (Plus, the really useful ones are 15 stories high, and that won't clear the zoning regs.)
The problem with wind power generation is that the ratio of moving mass (wind) to generator mass (thus cost) is too low. When it comes to turbines, steam, water, liquid lava, oceans, and lakes outclass wind by a-hundred- to a thousand-to-one (a power engineer I know describes wind power as "Turbine with Nothing."). No chance. (Fa-geddabbow-dit! as they say on the Sopranos.) Hydropower has had its run, and there go the environmentalists mucking up the chance for clean power again! A major hydro plant has not been constructed in the last decade or two, thanks to the darter snail and those misguided folks. They clearly prefer to see the burning of coal. Rip-tide generation holds real promise — but there are those little, nasty details: the only sites available to host the ocean's power are Alaska, Hawaii, and Florida (eh, why not throw in Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia). Only problem is, the projects are so massive they'd cost you & me a trillion each for the construction (send the bill to the Sierra Club). Any one of the three would generate enough power to supply the current needs of (pardon the pun) New York, California, and Pennsylvania. Only problem is, Hawaii, Alaska, and Florida couldn't use that much power, and there's no way to transport it to the states that need it.
OK, Who's Next? Fuel cells always seem to require catalysts and honeycombed cells that are enormously expensive per kilowatt (great for satellites, subs, and golf carts!). Biomass 'stinks' in more ways than the obvious. Landfills have been a bust — the stinky methane always seems to find a way out of the county via underground water tables and old mineshafts rather than coming up the drilled pipes it was supposed to. Manufacturers found they could make ten times the money on beer than on using the artificial "superbug" on any kind of organic mash or stuff in tanks to generate methane, etc. Oh, well.
Using the Net, anyone can read the scientific literature. When one sees someone pushing a certain alternative high-cost energy source as a solution to the energy crisis, you can tell he's not intelligently or impartially making a cost-benefit-analysis choice. Energy is an inflexible requirement for the life of Mankind. Even the most vocal of environmentalists now concede that — because of the huge relative costs of alternative fuels — and the disastrous impact that government-forced changeover to alternative energy sources would have on the economy and the voters' daily lives — the renewable energy sources such as solar, hydro, geothermal, and biomass are unlikely within the next few decades to keep the lights and appliances of entire cities and industries shining and humming.
A Touch of Realism
Just as the Dilbert cartoon about the engineer forever trapped on the "Project That Would Not Die" illustrates, nuclear power seems doomed by human politics to neither triumph over more polluting forms of energy nor be banished from the planet. Environmentalists who won't acknowledge that clean energy can solve much of the planet's pollution problems but instead fear the "boogeyman" risk that nuclear waste might still be radioactive hundreds of years from now (even though buried miles deep — they just can't stop staying awake nights, thinking about it), will never let an economy-of-scale nuclear energy plan come to fruition. Congress, on the other hand, will not let the shining hope of clean energy die, and so throws out an occasional rescue lifering such as subsidized insurance and waste disposal programs to keep nuclear power from dying altogether. No one, it seems, has the courage to support a clean-and-safe nuclear energy policy on a political platform, even though it could mean a huge benefit to national security. Inexpensive nuclear power, coupled with electric and hybrid vehicles, can protect the U.S. from OPEC oil boycotts and would defend the Alaskan wilderness and other environments from irreversable damaged caused by oil drilling, spills, and pipelines.
Even hard on the heels of the Enron debacle, too many parties have personal and political interest in seeing the fricassee of this energy battle continue. But as all technologists, engineers, and sci-fi enthusiasts know and hope, someday the business and political biases of human avarice, superstition, and irrational fears will have to give way to common sense. Belief in the need to protect mankind's home from pollution and preserve it for our family and descendents will eventually triumph. In the long term, it can serve no useful purpose to tinker with high-cost energy alternatives that are unimplementable on any scale of meaningful size and do not measurably impact pollution or reduce energy-dependence. And in the short term, to fail to achieve energy indepencence may yet risk the apocalypse of a new world war (or, ironically, an atomic war) that would break out if terrorism or the Middle East situation balloons to the point where OPEC once again cuts off the world's oil. Now that the debate over Yucca Mountain has run its course, it's time to replace old, dangerous atomic plants with the newer, safe Pebble Bed technology. And if it's truly safe — why not save the planet from life-shortening pollution, energy shortages, 'killer' storms and floods spawned by global warming, and potential OPEC-driven wars as well?
