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1048 THE SECOND NUCLEAR ERA* WEINBERG, ALVIN M. Ph.D. Institute for Energy Analysis Oak Ridge Associated Universities Oak Ridge, Tennessee ALMOST 500 large nuclear reactors in the world today are either under construction or operating or well along in planning. By the year 1990, it is estimated that fully 8% of the world's primary energy will be generated through nuclear fission. This is an incredible achievement. I do not think that there is any comparable case in human history where a technology has jumped out full blown, like Athena from Jove's head, and in what on the human scale is really a short time-50 or so years-has become so important an element of our human experience. And yet, in the face of this enormous achieve- ment, this fantastic success, as some of my colleagues in other fields point out to me, we nuclear people are very disappointed that we are not loved. Despite this fantastic success, the nuclear enterprise has fallen upon bad days indeed. In the United States no new reactor has been ordered since 1978. Sweden decided that by the year 2005 or 2010 they would decom- mission all of their dozen reactors, although the reactors are working very well. The Austrian Zwentendorf reactor was completed but never started. In several other Western European countries nuclear energy has fallen upon very bad days. There are some exceptions. France is one exception. The Soviet Union is an exception, as is Japan. Some of the developing countries, such as Korea and Taiwan, are exceptions. Will we have a second nuclear era? Will nuclear energy somehow survive this period of malaise, and will it, in 20 or 25 years, be reborn? But first, I ask whether it makes much difference whether we have nuclear energy in the long run or not. What is the motivation for continuing this hassle? Assuming that the answer to the question, Is it important to continue nuclear energy? is yes, we do need nuclear energy, I would then like to talk about what is necessary for a rebirth of nuclear energy. Many arguments point toward an affirmative answer to the question, Is *Presented at a dinner as part of the Symposium on the Health Aspects ofNuclear Power Plant Incidents heldbythe CommitteeonPublicHealthoftheNew York AcademyofMedicine April 7and 8, 1983. Bull. N.Y. Acad. Med. SECOND NUCLEAR ERA 1049 SECOND NUCLEAR nuclear energy necessary? Yet, with one exception, none of these are completely compelling. One must remember that the discovery of fission was a fluke. It could have been that in each fission only one neutron was given off, instead of two and a half, and then one couldn't make a chain reaction. It was sort of a miracle-for that matter, it was a miracle that man evolved at this time in history, because if he had evolved 3 billion years later, assuming that the earth was still around, then there would be no U235 left, and it would be very much harder to make a chain reaction. So there is nothing absolutely foreordained that fission had to be discovered exactly at this time. Having said that, I would give the fundamental arguments for why it would be nice to be able to have fission, or even, possibly, why it is absolutely essential that we have fission. The intellectual basis for the opposition to nuclear energy is encom- passed in a syllogism that starts out with "electricity is bad," mostly because in converting fossil energy to electricity, about 67% of the energy is discarded as waste heat. So the syllogism goes: Electricity is bad. Centralized electricity is worse. And nuclear centralized electricity is an abomination that must be extirpated. This syllogism rests upon a misunderstanding of thermodynamics. Peo- ple forget that though electricity is inefficient, we accept that inefficiency because of the convenience of electricity. And, broadly speaking, though one throws away some energy to make electricity, one at the same time is really buying time: one can do things more quickly with electricity; and electricity is therefore an element of economic productivity. The marketplace seems to bear this out. Though the total energy demand in the United States has declined during the last couple of years, the fraction of the total energy of the United States that went through electricity in 1968 was 18%; today it is 32%. Despite the rhetoric of such antielectric doctrinaire revolutionaries as Barry Commoner, Amory Lovins, and Ralph Nader, the marketplace tells us something else. We are going electric; therefore it is very dangerous to turn away from such a source of electricity as nuclear energy. Second, despite the weakening of OPEC, the underlying political ener- gy issue revolves around oil. Our basic energy strategy ought to aim at displacement of oil. Oil can be displaced by coal or nuclear energy, both under the boiler that produces electricity and at the point of end use. Of the two, the latter is the more important. Unfortunately, much wrong- Vol. 59, No. 10, December 1983 11005500 AA..MM.. WWEEIINNBBEERRGG headed prejudice stands in the way of displacing oil with electricity for heating. Thus, space heating using resistive heaters is regarded as a terrible thing, because resistive heaters use only 30% or so of the original energy, the remainder being rejected as waste heat at the utility boiler. To be sure, at the point of origin of the electricity the efficiency is low, but at the point of application the efficiency is essentially 100%. By contrast, direct space heating with fossil fuel is actually quite inefficient. The relative efficiency of heating electrically is surprisingly close to the efficiency of heating with hydrocarbon fuels. Thus, if electricity generated by coal or nuclear energy were used widely for space heating, a sizable amount of fluid hydrocarbon fuel would be saved. What about the very long range energy picture, when we no longer have much fossil fuel, and we must resort to an energy source that is somehow renewable, that is inexhaustible? What are the inexhaustible energy alternatives? Solar energy, of course, is the darling of the energy revolutionaries. But we must remember that cost is important. To be sure, I can get a $1,500 tax rebate on a solar heater for my swimming pool. But iow many people have swimming pools and can get that $1,500 rebate? And when one talks about subsidies (the nuclear people are accused of enjoying a great big subsidy-well, renewable people also enjoy very big subsidies), the Congressional Budget Office estimates that tax rebates on renewables cost the government about $700 million in 1982. Solar energy is great; let's use as much as we can. Yet it was irresponsible for the previous administration to claim that 20% of our primary energy could be solar energy by the year 2000. This simply was not in the cards. The previous administration knew this at the time; yet, because energy policy was in some measure captured by the energy doctrinaires, this became accepted policy. The main objection to solar energy is that it is intermittent, and therefore the control of time that is inherent in the use of fossil or nuclear electricity is no longer available if electricity can be generated only when the sun shines. Intermittency can be handled if the solar device is backed up by Consolidated Edison and Commonwealth Edison, who will provide electricity when the sun is not shining. But if the solar electric load is 20%, 30%, or 40% of the total energy, backup with nonsolar sources is very expensive. Thus, although solar energy is great, we cannot depend upon it as our ultimate source. What about thermonuclear energy? Great! Wonderful! Let's push it as hard as we can. I have been on the periphery of the thermonuclear Bull. N.Y. Acad. Med. SECOND NUCLEAR ERA 1051 SECOND 1051 business for many years. I still insist that it is not possible to base energy policy, even long-range energy policy, on the success, let alone the economic success, of thermonuclear energy at any time in the future. My own bet is that I certainly will not be alive when competitive thermonu- clear energy is available, and it may never be available. Which leaves us, then, with nuclear energy as the only really large- scale inexhaustible energy source that is both technically feasible and economically acceptable. Fission is very much more inexhaustible than people usually say, since with breeders, because one can burn uranium- 238 as well as the rare uranium-235, one uses raw ore very much more ef- ficiently. One can therefore go down to very much lower levels of ore than are now being mined; and we have estimated that by extracting the residual uranium in the granites, one can have millions of years of fission energy. This is long enough to keep us going until the next Alvarez meteor strikes. Returning to the more immediate situation, though, I argued that electricity was good, not bad; and that oil displacement by coal or nuclear electricity was a legitimate short-term aim. I, however, avoided the question, Why not use coal to achieve both of these ends, electricity and oil displacement? Is there any real argument to pursue nuclear energy rather than coal? I must concede that the arguments that favor nuclear energy over coal are second order. We could do well, especially in this country, for a long time just with coal. It then becomes, in the first place, a question of economics: Which is the cheaper? At the moment, though the cost structures of coal and nuclear power plants differ (the latter being more capital intensive), on the average in most places coal and nuclear are probably close to a toss-up. In many places coal is now cheaper. In some cases nuclear energy continues to be cheaper. So one comes to second order questions: Are there some fundamental advantages in nuclear energy that are not enjoyed by coal? I argue that the ordinary environmental impacts of properly operating nuclear plants, like noxious fumes or acid rain, are far less than the environmental impacts of coal. But beyond that, of course, is the ultimate environmental impact- the carbon dioxide issue. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases by about one third of one percent per year. About 715 billion tons of carbon as carbon dioxide are now in the atmosphere. This 715 billion tons is to be compared with the 10 trillion tons of coal that many people believe are still to be taken out of the earth. If even half of that were taken out and Vol. 59, No. 10, December 1983 1052 A. M. WEINBERG 1052 A. M. WEINBERG burned, then the ultimate increase in carbon dioxide amounts to a possible quadrupling of the carbon dioxide, even if only half the injected carbon dioxide remained airborne. This constitutes a risky geophysical experiment of unprecedented scale. Most climatologists think that the result of such injection will be a general warming, with unknown human consequences. Thus, the ultimate reason to maintain nuclear is this nagging worry about the carbon dioxide issue. The first nuclear era in the United States, in the sense that I have described it, is over. What can we do to launch the second nuclear era? First, when will a second nuclear era begin? I do not think any American utility executive will order another nuclear plant for 10 to 15 years. So we do have a fair amount of time to think about what it is that we really want to do. The question, then, is: Are there technological improvements that we can be thinking of during this hiatus? Are there institutional fixes that might make sense to be put in place around the year 2000? Finally, are there social and perceptual fixes that will be necessary for us to get on with the second nuclear era? I shall be very brief in each of these. At our Institute in the last year and one half, with some support from the Mellon Foundation, we have been examining technological fixes for the second nuclear era. What deficiencies in the current nuclear system do we try to remedy with technological fixes? Aside from the question of waste disposal (which most of us in the business do not really believe is primarily a technical issue), the main thing wrong with nuclear energy is that an awful lot of people are afraid of nuclear energy, particularly since the accident at Three Mile Island. Is it possible to fix the technology so there are no such accidents, so that it contravenes a law of nature to have a big accident? Can existing re- actors be improved by incremental fixes, so that even if one cannot quite prove that the probability of a bad accident is zero, one can nevertheless say that the probability is very, very small? We discovered that not all existing light water reactors are equally safe as judged by probabilistic risk assessment. And some reactors yield an a priori accident probability of the order of 1/1,000 per reactor-year; but others which are in the same genus have probabilities as low as 10-6, a factor of a thousand. If we could backfit the poorest reactors so that they were as good as the best ones, then we would have something 100 to 1,000 times better than what we have now. And if one looks at the comparison with other sources of energy, one certainly ought to be Bull. N.Y. Acad. Med. SECONDNUCLEAR ERA 1053 SECOND NUCLEAR ERA convinced that this really ought to be good enough. The conclusion that we are reaching in our study is that incremental fixes are probably sufficient. I might mention that in England right now there is a big dispute about building England's first pressurized water reactor, the so-called Sizewell B reactor. The Sizewell B reactor is provided with a great deal more redundancy than some of the American reactors. Therefore, when one subjects it to the kind of analysis that Lewis and Rasmussen subjected reactors to, one comes out with the a priori probability for a serious accident of the order of 10-6 per reactor per year, where Rasmussen's median probability for the reactors he analyzed was 10-4, or five times 10-5 per reactor per year. Are there other possibilities that go beyond incremental fixes? There is the gas cooled reactor, which overcomes the fundamental problem of the light water reactor, which is its low thermal inertia. If something starts happening in a light water reactor, it happens very quickly. The gas cooled reactor is very much larger, so that it has much higher thermal inertia, and, in fact, at Fort St. Vrain, which is a big graphite cooled reactor, they have had several instances in which all the cooling failed for about half an hour, and nothing happened. It just sat there, because it had very big thermal inertia. Unfortunately, these big graphite reactors appear to be more expensive than light water reactors; thus incrementally-fixed light water reactors may be cheaper than graphite gas reactors as well as safe enough. One of the very extreme ideas that has received a fair amount of attention has come out of Sweden, and is called the Process Inherent Ultimately Safe Reactor, invented by K. Hannerz of the ASEA-ATOM company. Hannerz puts a light water reactor with small thermal inertia into an enormous, concrete pressure vessel. The vessel is filled with borated water; if there is any loss of cooling in the reactor, borated water automatically rushes in, quenches the chain reaction, and adds to the reactor's thermal inertia the enormous inertia represented by all the borated water in the concrete vessel. This is practically foolproof and accident-proof. My own view is that we ought to be devoting some of our time during this hiatus to thinking about new ideas such as the Process Inherent Ultimately Safe Reactor. Reactor design used to be a very lively business, and people were always coming up with new ideas. This activity has now died off, and perhaps this hiatus ought to be used to generate new ideas Vol. 59, No. 10, December 1983 1054 A. M. WEINBERG 1054 A. M. WEINBERG that will deal with what some people regard as the central problem, namely, the possibility of a reactor accident. Some people regard examination of "supersafe" reactors as very dan- gerous, because if the light water reactor is safe enough, why bother thinking about an even safer reactor? I presume that the reason we bother is that, granted that the light water is safe enough, if we can get something even safer and no more expensive, then, as a commercial proposition, that is the direction to take. We do not really know whether that is the situation. I do not want to leave the impression that we know enough about the Process Inherent Ultimately Safe Reactor to be able to verify any of the assertions that I have made. ASEA-ATOM has spent perhaps one ten-thousandth as much on its design as has been spent on pressurized water reactors. Let me turn to the next point: What kind of institutional fixes are needed for the second nuclear era? The fundamental point is that if the nuclear business is to survive, we must move as rapidly as possible on the learning curve. For example, precursors of Three Mile Island occurred in at least three other reactors, but the information somehow did not get to the people at Three Mile Island. After Three Mile Island, the utility industry recognized that it had to move much more rapidly along the learning curve. Some ofus at one time said: Well, the only way to do this is to put all the utilities together in the same company, and have one great big utility, in which the word would go back and forth very freely. In France, in effect, that is what they do. Electricite de France is about twice as large as the largest utility in the United States, and will operate 60 reactors. But that does not conform to the fragmented structure of the utilities in this country, so the utilities invented a mechanism, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, with its Nuclear Safety Analysis Center, whose job is fundamentally to enhance the rate of learning. If something happens at one reactor that is of interest-for example, the Salem inci- dent, where the circuit breakers did not go off-they have a scheme to make sure that everybody knows what has happened; they have a follow- up system, and they also have an inspection system. Will this be good enough? Is the learning going to be good enough? I do not know. But many ofus who have followed what has happened since Three Mile Island are impressed, and we think that there is pretty good evidence that the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations will achieve a great deal. We hope that it will achieve everything that is required. The nuclear utilities all are hostages to the worst operator, and the Institute Bull. N.Y. Acad. Med. SECONDNUCLEARERA 1055 SECOND NUCLEAR ERA tries to make sure that the worst operator becomes a better operator. Finally, I turn to the public's perception of the issue. Suppose we had a perfect nuclear power plant. Suppose that the learning really improved tremendously. Would that still be enough to allow the nuclear enterprises to start up again in, say, 10, 15 years in this country? For that to happen, I think two further things have to happen. First, it is of the essence that we do not have a repetition of an incident, say, as bad even as Three Mile Island-not so much that people get hurt (no one was hurt at Three Mile Island) as it is that utility presidents simply will not buy another reactor if they conceive that there is that much risk ofbankrupting the utility. One of the two most important things, therefore, is no repetitions of Three Mile Island. Now, Lewis said there will be accidents, and I think that is true, but I think it not unlikely that we can go through the next 10 or 15 years without an accident as serious in terms of the actual damages done to the reactor as at Three Mile Island, the cost of which is still not fully assessed. The total cost may be as much as $2 to $3 billion. In addition, there must be a drastic and profound change in the public's attitude towards low levels of environmental risk, environmental insult of every kind, particularly radiation. I am not exaggerating when I say that our Western society, for reasons that are unclear to me, suffers from massive hysteria. It is not entirely unlike the witchcraft hysteria that swept through Western Europe for 200 years beginning in 1494. The analogies are really quite similar, as was first pointed out by the ecologist William Clark. Children got sick, cattle died, crops failed, and people were puzzled: Why did that happen? Obviously, because witches hexed them. Fully a half-million people, mostly women, were executed during that period because they were bona fide witches. And then, in the year 1610, the Inquisitor in the south of Spain put together an advisory committee, and said to the advisory committee: What is the epidemiological evidence for a connection between these witches who are casting their spells and all these bad things happening? And his committee got together, and they considered the matter, and they made a report, and they concluded that they could find no connection between how many witches were killed, or whether the witches were there or not, and all these bad things happening. The Inquisitor did not forbid executing witches. All he did, after due consideration and consultation with many members of the hierarchy, was to forbid the use of torture in extract- Vol. 59, No. 10, December 1983 1056 A. M. WEINBERG 106A .WIBR ing confessions from witches. And the result was that witchcraft fell precipitously. I am not prepared to say that our environmental concerns are all that akin to witchcraft, although some very disturbing pieces of evidence are beginning to emerge that raise doubts about the entire scientific basis for our allegations that cancer and environmental insult are somehow that closely related. But I do not have time to raise these issues. I am not prepared to say that all the environmental insults are simply witchcraft; some ofthem, of course, are not. I am prepared to say that we will have to educate ourselves, and then the universities, the media, the churches, that we are not suffering from a cancer epidemic; that we are living longer than we ever have before; that the infant mortality rate in the United States is the lowest it has ever been; that, fundamentally, richer is safer, and richer is healthier-if we are to overcome this terrible hysteria. Once we have overcome that hysteria, we can look forward to a second nuclear era in which we can fully enjoy the not inconsiderable advantages of nuclear energy. Questions and Answers QUESTION: In view of the current low growth rate for electric demand which is projected at 1.1% or 1.2% in the New York State Master Plan, I would like to hear your opinion on the issue of encouraging slower incremental growth concurrent with the building of smaller plants. DR. WEINBERG: If I understand what you are saying, you suggest that the present units are really too large to conform to the perceived lower growth rate. That is an arguable point. I repeat the statistic that I quoted, that the percentage growth of electricity has been phenomenal compared to other forms of energy. The percentage of electricity used has gone from 18% to 33% in about 15 years. You suggest that 1.1% is the perceived rate of growth over the next 15 years. You may be right. Our studies at the Institute suggest that you may be wrong. The reason you may be wrong is that many industrial processes that have traditionally used gas or oil for process heat are now finding that there are economic reasons to go to electricity. For example, glass making. Much glass making is now electrical. Why is it electrical? In an electric glass furnace, the heat is put exactly where it is wanted, whereas in a gas or oil-fired furnace much of the heat uselessly Bull. N.Y. Acad. Med. SECONDNUCLEAR ERA 1057 SECOND 1057 dissipates. But, more important than that, the product from electrical melting of glass is much cleaner. Therefore, our estimate of the situation is that, despite temporary relaxation in the rate at which electricity is growing, we think that if the recovery takes place, we will begin to see a much sharper increase in the rate of growth of the use of electricity. With respect to the suggestion that the present plants are too big, this is because the utilities are too fragmented for the large size plants. We probably ought to form larger utility consortia that will be more comfort- able with, say, 1,000 megawatt plants than the present utilities. DR. MERRIL EISENBUD (New York University): I do not think that we should limit our future development because electrical energy is not available. While it may be all right in the present climate of things to assume a 1/2% economic growth rate, it could be that it is going to be 2, 2½2, or even 3%. It is projected that the United States population could reach as much as 400 million by the latter part of the next century. It would be a great pity if our economic development were slowed because we did not have electrical energy. The big breakthrough in the need for nuclear energy would come if technical developments would allow the use of electrical energy for transportation. This would go a long way toward eliminating our dependence on imported petroleum. DR. WEINBERG: I think that most demographers would consider you, somehow, rather expansive when you say that there is any possibility of reaching 400 million by the end of the next century. Electrical transport would increase the total amount of kilowatt hours that would be used with nuclear power. It would not change the number of kilowatts all that much, because one would generally charge the battery at off-peak times so that electric transport would be a load leveler. Miss GOLDIE WATKINS (New York State Health Department): Quite a bit of concern in your presentation was for the efficiency in converting from thermal to electrical energy. The dominant concern may not be the conversion process per se but the political issues involved. We as individ- uals concerned with public health and safety need to have clear in our minds the basis of the public concern so that we can reduce that particular aspect in order to make an impact. DR. WEINBERG: I agree with you. I assume that you are referring to the second part of my syllogism, which started out: Electricity is bad. Central- ized electricity is worse. I think that is what you mean by the political im- plications. But that is a fundamental political difference of opinion. I Vol. 59, No. 10, December 1983

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have much fossil fuel, and we must resort to an energy source that is .. centralization is that I do not have to putter with an ornery prime mover. I.
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