ALVIN M. WEINBERG, Ph.D.

12 Pages·2006·1.21 MB·English

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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.
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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-
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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-
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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
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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
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