White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

In Nuclear, U.S. Is Still the Gold Standard

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In nuclear industry parlance the “gold standard” has special significance and there is real concern the world may slip below that standard as the U.S. industry falters.

Gold standard is the term applied globally to the U.S. regulation and licensing of nuclear power plants. It is a term of respect for American standards of excellence. It was widely used at a meeting of the Nuclear Infrastructure Council in Washington Tuesday and Wednesday; and surprisingly, coming from French and Chinese lips, was an affirmation of the whole licensing and regulatory apparatus that exists in the United States.

The fear is that as the United States lags in the construction of reactors and while it continues to eschew fuel reprocessing, the gold standard will lose its luster to a world that is building new nuclear at breakneck speed and is, or plans, to reprocess the used fuel.

Most of today’s concern is about China, now committed to the fastest growth in nuclear. But India is also building and others like the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Brazil and Argentina are thinking about it.

Will a deterioration in the quality of construction, regulation and operation occur? Not if the gold standard continues to be respected and reflects the latest innovations, according to industry sources in Europe and America. Otherwise, a slew of new reactors could be less safe than they might be.

At present, according to the companies involved in China including Westinghouse Electric, the Shaw Group, a U.S. construction firm and the French giant Areva, they are maintaining the gold standard. The term embraces total quality assurance from licensing integrity to concrete and steel specifications, to analysis of components and certification of welds.

What is surprising about the idea of the gold standard is how long it has endured. It goes back to the Eisenhower administration and the Atoms for Peace program. This was an ambitious idea that the civilian benefits of atomic power would be spread across the world. Implicit in the program was the assumption that the U.S. nuclear industry would control world nuclear commerce and, as a result, safety standards would be the highest. Proliferation and accidents would be guarded against by the gold standard, exercised through the dominance of the U.S. industry.

The world’s fledgling nuclear industry accepted this U.S. technological hegemony happily. No one wanted a nuclear accident; and those who wanted to build a weapon would do so clandestinely, as Saddam Hussein tried to do in Iraq.

The gold standard regime was first challenged when President Jimmy Carter — a nuclear engineer who was ambivalent about nuclear — yielded to the left wing of the Democratic Party and decided that the United States would unilaterally not process used nuclear fuel. Carter’s point man in this folly was Joseph Nye of Harvard. The industry and those interested in maintaining the gold standard were appalled.

I crossed swords with Nye, highly regarded as an academic and intellectual, at the Uranium Institute (now the World Nuclear Association) annual meeting in London in September 1977. So heated was our discussion that Nye followed me out of the hall into the street, urging me to accept his point of view.

 

Although that was decades ago, it was the first blow to the gold standard. Other countries proceeded with reprocessing: Areva and British Nuclear Fuels claim it is a very profitable business, as well as greatly reducing waste volumes.

Despite this insult to nuclear, the gold standard held — possibly at 18 carats rather than 24 carats.

But the Obama administration is doing what Carter did all over again.

Carter tepidly endorsed nuclear, while opposing reprocessing and a demonstration fast breeder reactor authorized by Congress. Obama has been less severe, but he has nixed the Yucca Mountain waste repository in Nevada — and $15 billion spent there — and set back a waste-storage solution by as much as 50 years.

Now the world will store and reprocess waste without a gold standard to guide it.

It matters because slipping standards — anywhere from China to Jordan — endanger all nuclear power and a lot of people. A meltdown in Japan has battered nuclear acceptance and that was because of a once-in-history natural event. The next one could be because of lower licensing standards, bad concrete, fake parts or a bribed inspector. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

 

U.S. Is Losing Its Grip on World

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The patient is the United States and the diagnosis is “Asia shock.”

It is a psychological disease with physical symptoms and no known cure. However there are therapies, therapies of trade, diplomacy and fiscal restraint at home.

As President Barack Obama jets around Asia, he may be pondering not so much the economic power that lies East of Suez, but why it took so long to emerge. And why the patient is in denial.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Asia was for the taking by the European colonialists — and take they did.

Foremost was Britain with India, Ceylon, Burma, Malaya and coastal enclaves in China. France lumped together the countries of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos as Indochina. Holland, of shrinking consequence in Europe, dominated Indonesia. Portugal had its toehold in Goa and Macao. Spain dallied in the Philippines till booted out by the emerging power of the time, the United States.

Only Japan was sufficiently organized to be a local maker of mischief in Korea and China.

Anyone looking at brawling, muscular, talented Asia today has to wonder why the giants slept for so long, and how the colonial masters were so ignorant of the abilities of their subservient people.

Blame Britain.

During the 15th century, the Age of Discovery, exploration was driven by a lust for wealth in the form of spices, gold and silver. Once the Industrial Revolution got under way in late 18th-century Britain, the lust was for those things, plus raw materials to feed the factories back home.

The newly wealthy in London and the south, with their lavish country homes, wanted tea and coffee, herbs and spices, tropical goodies and strange flavors from the East.

The colonial compact, more implied than written, was simple: They — the Asians — grow and harvest. We manufacture.

Britain, followed by its rivals, set the policy, and in so doing kept the Industrial Revolution at home; it was not for export.

While the British like to export their values, their justice systems and, in a tepid way, Anglicism (Catholic countries were more aggressive in the export of religion), they kept their industrial revolution at home, and all of the secondary industry it spawned. It was a black day in London when it was learned that industrial espionage had allowed cloth spinning technology to escape to America.

To this day, the remnants of the system which ruled that “value-added will take place in Britain” can be seen in British specialty products. The great tea-packing houses are still in Britain and Ireland, and some cottons are still woven in Britain.

No factories sprang up in the Asian empires of the European colonists. No technology transfer was encouraged, and the enormous latent talent of Asia went unrecognized.

Japan, without colonial influence, industrialized in the first part of the 20th century, but mostly to mechanize its military.

It was not until after World War II that Asia stirred and threw off the European constraints. Ironically, along with Japan, the British colonies of Hong Kong and Singapore showed the way.

If China was slow to industrialize, it has charged ahead, changing the balance in the world and embracing the central truth of the Industrial Revolution: You need energy to make and move goods.

China has signed up developing countries’ oil and gas suppliers at a dizzying rate. In contrast, the United States looks at energy — the indispensable element in industrial output — through a post-industrial, environmental lens.

According to the World Nuclear Association, China has 39 nuclear reactors planned or on order and 23 under construction. There are 120 on its wish list. The United States has nine on its wish list and is building two.

The United States can no longer forge the large components for nuclear reactors. This can be done only in Japan; but China and South Korea are building new facilities to do the work. We dominate the world in two disparate arenas: defense technology and entertainment. In nearly all else, we are slipping.

It will be a shocking day for Americans when people from another country walk on the moon, where astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin trod in 1969. But it will happen.