White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Nuclear Power under Threat

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On the face of it, the nuclear power industry should be enjoying a boom, reveling in its extraordinary safety record and the fact that it is a carbon-free way to make electricity.

But all is not well in atom land. In fact, things are dismal. Only five nuclear plants are under construction, and they are having birth pains as schedules slip and costs rise.

One plant, Vermont Yankee, has been taken out of service and others are on a watch list. This is happening not because of safety or end-of-life, but because cheap natural gas is undermining the economics of nuclear.

The market has spoken and it has determined that gas is cheaper in the short term, and wind and solar, though limited, enjoy social acceptability and declining costs.

The mighty Exelon Corporation is trying to save three, and maybe more, of its nuclear plants with a political fix; arguing that nuclear is a value proposition – its value to the community will continue long after the gas boom has fizzled. It is an argument that might have been made to save commuter railroads in the heyday of the automobile.

But that is not all that challenges nuclear. Despite its environmental advantages in a time of climate change, the public has been steadily turning against nuclear, persuaded by a relentless campaign that has been waged by opponents like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Natural Resources Defense Council and by Japan’s Fukushima accident following an earthquake and a tsunami. Wrongly, it is believed this resulted in lives lost: Many lives were lost to flooding, but not to radioactivity release.

But the public has absorbed a fear of nuclear, unless it is associated with the Navy. That was reflected this month, when a Gallup poll revealed that only 51 percent now support nuclear, as opposed to a traditional divide of 60 percent for and 40 percent against. It is hopeless to expect a big swing to nuclear with this kind of public reaction. The current slim majority favoring nuclear falls far short of a call for action.

More, the nuclear industry has fair share of bad news of its own which does not help the public love the atom.

The San Onofre plant in California was closed down because new steam generators were defective, and the owners decided it was not worth the hundreds of millions it would cost to fix things. Cost overruns and delays, once blamed on environmental opposition, now are almost always a result of problems in the construction.

Much hope has rested on two new reactors being built by the Southern Company in Georgia. Known as Plant Vogtle Units 3 and 4, there are delays and cost overruns and the utility is in court with the prime contractor, the eponymous Westinghouse Electric Company. Although the Southern Company is determined to complete the reactors and under its feisty chairman, Tom Fanning, possibly to build more, the costs are rising.

Just a few months ago, there was hope that new reactors — smaller, mass-produced power plants — were in the pipeline. But now the industry is convinced the next reactor design will have to be developed outside of the United States; probably in Asia, where both China and India are working on radical new reactors, far from today’s light water plants — 100 of them — operating in the United States.

The U.S. challenge is not science or engineering – we have designs aplenty and great nuclear science – but regulation. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) – which protects public health and safety — is not equipped to license a new reactor, and it is believed that a new reactor type would have to spawn a whole new regulatory bureaucracy. One aspirant with a new nuclear design says ruefully, “It’s as though the FAA had recertified every aspect of flying when the jet engine came along.”

The NRC, even its staff admits, is slow and ponderous. What they don’t admit is that the commission is not only protecting the public, by making sure that today’s reactors are safe, but it’s also preventing the public from having better nuclear power in the future.

For the industry the problem is not only the time it would take to bring a new reactor through licensing, but also the cost. The applicant, not the government, pays for the NRC to license a reactor. Some say that cost could run towards a billion dollars.

Considering this situation, U.S. leadership in reactor technology is doomed. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Nuclear Power’s Undeserved Bad Year

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The great event of the nuclear calendar for 2011 was the earthquake and tsunami that hammered three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan.

If you are a nuclear power believer, these sturdy old machines proved their mettle. They withstood all that nature could throw at them; although terrible damage resulted from the loss of external power and the swamping of the emergency diesel generators. The result was core melting and trouble in the used fuel storage pools.

If you are doubtful about nuclear power, or you are simply a political opportunist, this event was the final nail in the coffin, the proof that the end had arrived. For you, it provided more evidence that nuclear power is inherently unsafe and that its use, as American scientist Alvin Weinberg once said, is a Faustian bargain. (It was a remark that Weinberg wished he had not made and which his staff and supporters tried to justify by explaining that in the German legend, Faust finally gets his soul back, having foolishly pledged it to the devil.)

Such nonsense aside, the extraordinary thing about Fukushima is that although almost 25,000 Japanese died as the result of the earthquake and tsunami, no one died directly from the nuclear accident or from the release of radioactivity. The buildings and containment structures survived as they were designed to 40 years ago. This, despite a wall of water 45 feet high with incalculable force.

Each year, thousands of people are killed in coal mine accidents around the world. In 2010, 2,433 people were killed in China’s mines, the world’s deadliest.

Yet it was nuclear that had the world holding its breath. As with all accidents or even incidents, nuclear is held to a standard of safety orders of magnitude stricter than is applied to any other industrial activity, including other big energy undertakings, like oil refining, chemical production and transportation, and aviation.

The suspicion that falls upon nuclear technology is not only unfair – it is uneven.

The peace has been kept for five decades by the U.S. nuclear navy. In home waters and ports, nuclear ships and submarines sail without criticism.

Even the two organizations which appear to make their livings from relentless attacks on nuclear, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, have not dared to attack the nuclear navy. They do not protest, say, the USS Enterprise, when the great aircraft carrier sails blithely into domestic ports with eight reactors at work.

No one raises issues of waste, terrorist attacks or the consequences of military action. Those who make a living out of opposing nuclear power do not have the temerity to go after nuclear propulsion in warships. The public would not tolerate the disarmament that that would entail.

So the opponents go after nuclear’s soft underbelly: civilian power. It is hard to imagine that it is more dangerous to operate a nuclear facility built to be safe on land than one built for war-fighting on the high seas and in ports and harbors.

There are times in history when triumph is recorded as failure. The British and the Prussians finished off Napoleon in the Belgian town of Waterloo. But in the English Language, “Waterloo” — a British victory – is a synonym for catastrophic defeat. Americans believe the Tet Offensive was the turning point in the Vietnam War, even though the combined forces of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army were roundly defeated by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces.

Fukushima, a once-in-history accident, was a victory of design and construction for its time. Even the radiation releases are now found to be lower than expected, even those in the exclusion zone are surprisingly low. Despite eager attempts to find a surge in new cancers around the plant, none has shown up.

The lessons are to incorporate more passive features, better power supply and to protect the emergency generators. Newer designs already incorporate some of these features — and all will going forward. The industry has reacted with unusual alacrity in the past to new lessons, something uncommon across the broad range of industrial endeavor from aircraft to automobiles. As with aviation, nuclear safety is always a work in progress, a striving.

To my mind, after 40 years of chronicling nuclear power, the industry makes a mistake in rushing to advertise the safety of  nuclear power plants. That way the seeds of doubt are sown.

Aircraft makers learned that lesson back in the 1930s. They learned that the trick was to shut up and do better.

If nuclear plants are unsafe, they should be closed down. Now. Today.

If not, their virtues should be trumpeted. Now. Today. Where are the trumpets? – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Government Pulls Better than It Pushes

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Anyone who knows anything about railroads knows pulling is better than pushing. If you want to change the world, pull, don't push. This is especially true in the introduction of new technology.

Sadly, we are politically better at pushing than pulling. Congress, in particular, feels it is well-equipped to push and poorly equipped to pull. Its favored tool for pushing is the tax incentive. This is a subsidy in disguise, designed to propel a technology into the market.

It is the driving dynamic behind today's world of ethanol, solar, wind and the much-anticipated, smart electric grid. Pushing is good, if you understand that it is also inefficient. It hears the market imperfectly and, as a result, begs for unending government indulgence.

If the government is to have a role in the market of inventions, and in today's world it is obliged to, make it the customer not the inventor, hatchery manager or midwife. Let it pull and reward the winner not the wannabes.

A random sampling of technology that the government pulled into the market place:

·         The supercomputer. In 1955 Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, railed in now declassified documents about the inadequacy of “computing machines.” To achieve this goal, the national weapons labs bought computers, the bigger the better, sight unseen.

·         The Internet. This was invented to safeguard communications, not because it was a good idea that might find a market. Classic pull over push.

·         The aeroderivative turbine. This machine has revolutionized the burning of natural gas by electric utilities; but its genesis–its pull–came from the need for higher temperatures in fighter jet engines.

The pattern, of course, is clear. When the military is the customer, the puller, all the parts of the chain of invention come into play: private industry, academia and suppliers of components.

A new opportunity is at hand for the government to pull a technology into the market and strengthen the national defense, in military and civilian dimensions. The product is the small modular reactor. There is wide agreement that it is a good idea, but it looks set to be taken over by the push people, with all the known waste and inefficiency. Already, the designs are circulating along with calculations of how much government push is needed. Heaven forbid.

On the shelf there already exist many small reactor designs, some military and some civilian. In 1959 the government built a nuclear-powered, civilian ship called the NS Savannah. It used a safe, small reactor that has been decommissioned long since, but which is a starting point.

Another reactor was designed and built for a West German, nuclear-powered, trade and research ship called the Otto Hahn. The contractor was the American nuclear company Babcock & Wilcox.

Babcock has emerged and is a contender for the small reactor. Problem is that civilian nuclear culture is now mired in push, i.e. money from the government. Money for investigating, not delivering.

Yet there is a military need here and now that becomes more urgent all the time. The military needs a reactor that can provide power on forward bases: Diesel is expensive and depends on long, vulnerable supply lines.

We know how to make small nuclear reactors already, both civilian and military. Why don't we do it?

The USS Enterprise–one of the greatest examples of naval engineering ever–has eight small reactors on board. Other ships and submarines of the nuclear Navy have two reactors each.

We should shelve the idea of loan guarantees and build a small reactor, initially for new military use on bases, forward and otherwise.

For 40 years I've been asking why haven't we learned more from the Navy about small reactors? They work so well.

When James R. Schlesinger was chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, he said it was an excellent question. So I took it to the legendary Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, whose attitude was that the Navy had disclosed enough in handing over the light water technology in the Shippingport reactor in Pennsylvania.

The truth is the Navy is reluctant to get embroiled in what it sees as the civilian nuclear swamp, where their derivative reactors would be examined in licensing proceedings and subjected to scrutiny by anti-nuclear groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

Earth Day: Why It Was a Quiet Party

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Forty years ago on the first Earth Day, there was the smell of revolution in the air. Metaphorically millions said aloud and to themselves, “We have fouled our nest; now we must clean it.”

The issues seemed simpler back then. They are so complex today that the world is suffering from environmental shock.

It is not that the state of the environment is not precarious, but rather that the solutions are more elusive.

There are those who believe it can all be done with a hydrogen economy; and others who believe the wind and sun alone can do the job. There are those who can see a plastic-free future, if we would just tax the plastic. Yet others believe Nirvana is just a vegetarian meal away.

Forty years ago, we were still in the throes of the upheavals of the1960s; and the 1960s were the time of The Great Accusation. This accusation was leveled by an angry populace at all institutions, both public and private, that had betrayed the citizenry. The anger of the Tea Party movement today is nothing compared to the anger on the streets in those days; the days of the Vietnam War, civil rights, gender equality and the environment.

The premise under the demonstrations on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, was that the only reason the Earth was going to hell in a hand basket was that big companies polluted for profit and that government covered up for them.

It was a simple, powerful premise. The road ahead was clear: Make the polluters pay and all would be well.

It also was a time when the idea of climate change was hardly known, and those who talked about it did so as an arcane curiosity.

Clean air was an issue, but not to forestall global warming. Smog and later acid rain were the air issues.

Water was a huge preoccupation, which is why the Clean Water Act —initially vetoed by President Richard Nixon but then signed after huge protests — preceded the Clean Air Act.

The critical piece of legislation was The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 which has become the bedrock of environmental law.

As time took its course, the simple premise of good guys vs. bad guys evolved into our guys vs. your guys, a wholly different equation. Virtue was less easy to establish back then as it is today.

The environmental movement found its strength not in the streets but in the law courts, testing, and expanding by precedent the scope of the new laws.
It also developed attachments to some technologies over others. It favored a European transport model with high gasoline taxes and a portfolio of electric- generating technologies that it called alternative.

But significantly, the environmental organizations en masse became technology partisans, signifying approval of the obscure (solar, wind, waves and hydrogen) over the practical (hydroelectric and nuclear).

Of the half-dozen or so really effective environmental groups, the National Resources Defense Council became the most successful litigator, dwarfing other groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists, the National Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club and Greenpeace. Yet to their opponents they were a unified threat, skillful and intractable. For philosophy they had Amory Lovins (“The Path Not Taken”) and E.F. Schumacher (“Small Is Beautiful”).

Forty years on, the environmental debate is more complicated and there is less room for certainty. At some point, China and India are set to surpass the United States as the world’s largest polluter; governments promise to change the ways of their people, but not if it hurts.

Earth Day’s big birthday Thursday also was overshadowed by a natural disaster: Iceland’s volcano eruption. The economic impact was global in unexpected ways which showed, among other things, how hard it is to lay down absolutes about the environment. You can’t sue a volcano.

Who would have thought a volcano in Iceland would devastate the cut-flower industry in Kenya, and with severe consequences for that country’s economy? Who ever knew that a third of Europe’s cut flowers came from faraway Kenya on polluting aircraft?

Who needs flowers? Kenyans do. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate