The United States must increase its capacity to generate energy,
in order to prevent the shortages in California from cascading across
the nation. Nuclear power should be a significant part of the solution.
The energy crisis witnessed in California has exposed a national
energy problem that has been more than 20 years in the making. Energy
consumption in the United States is now stressing the limits of
energy production. Witness the increasing numbers of rolling brown-outs
and black-outs on both the East and West coasts during the hot summer
months of the past several years.
This nation’s political and business leaders have acceded
to the will of the very vocal environmental minority. The Three
Es—Environment, Economy and Energy—are out of balance.
Even though the U.S. electricity consumption growth rate has slowed
to 2-3 percent a year as compared to the pre-1970s growth rate of
7 percent, energy generation stations still need to be added. Electrical
generation plant construction originally slowed because of so-called
NIMBY (not in my back yard) activism.
In their efforts to protect the environment, many groups, for many
valid reasons, have opposed the basic, reliable, base-load generators:
nuclear, coal, oil and hydroelectric dams. They support only “renewable”
energy sources—defined as wind, solar [photovoltaic], low-head
[run-of-the-river] hydro, geo-thermal and biomass. These generators
can, and should, contribute to the energy mix. But the renewables
are too small to constitute adequate, reliable and economical energy
sources to sustain U.S. industry.
By successfully lobbying for federal and state-level regulations
and restrictions, activists have imposed overly stringent air-emission
constraints on fossil-fuel generation facilities, as well as severely
slowed exploration for new oil and natural gas reserves and limited
coal mining. Thus, expansion of both power generators and fuel reserves
for their operation have slowed. This is counter to the steady increase
in the demand for electricity. These activists have created a regulatory
atmosphere in which their versions of the renewables are the only
politically correct new power sources. But those renewables alone
cannot meet U.S. power demands.
Base load power—constant source, reliable power—is
essential for the nation’s electrical grid. Base load electricity
currently is supplied by generators using coal (50 percent), nuclear
power (20 percent), hydro (9 percent) and oil (3 percent). Of the
remaining electricity on the grid, 18 percent is provided by natural
gas (16 percent) and the renewables (2 percent).
The potential power supplies from the renewables are either unreliable
(insufficient wind, cloudy day, sunless night), or have an insufficient
capacity, or occupy an unacceptably extensive beautiful land area
(large-scale hydro). Further, hydroelectric power is under siege
by environmentalists, who want to remove existing dams and prevent
the construction of new dams, in order to save specific fish species.
The less environmentally damaging and easy to turn on-off natural
gas-fired power plants were originally designed and installed to
supplement the grid to meet peak power requirements. Now, any economic
benefit of natural gas electrical generation that provides 16 percent
of U.S. electrical power has been erased in the last nine months
by the escalating fuel costs.
For example, in 1999, electricity generated by natural gas fired
plants cost 3.52 cents per kilowatt-hour. Today, it is up to 17
cents.
These power plants also are competing with other utilities that
provide natural gas for household and business uses and for production
of anhydrous ammonia fertilizers in the agricultural industry. Even
as new natural gas fired generating plants are planned, their construction
again is resisted by the small, but vocal groups for environmental,
esthetic and zoning and land-use reasons.
Fuel cells must be mentioned here. The fuel cell is an excellent
compact electricity generator, and it emits no greenhouse gases.
Fuel cells are not a source of energy. Fuel cells require hydrogen,
and hydrogen is not a readily available gas. Hydrogen can be split
from water or natural gas, but technologies currently available
to do that consume large amounts of energy from other sources.
The environment itself is compounding the electrical supply problem.
Drought conditions in the West for the past couple of years have
reduced the water volume behind hydroelectric dams, so their capacity
for electricity generation is reduced. The agricultural industry
is competing with the energy industry for that limited water.
Not all energy producers or energy production technologies are
anti-environmental. The need to control pollution and to protect
the land is well recognized. But by injecting some common sense
and balance into environmental regulation, the United States could
eliminate many of the burdensome and costly requirements that are
slowly strangling the power generation and distribution industry.
Energy Costs
It is worth looking at statistics for the generation costs of the
four conventional electrical production technologies in 1999:
The cost for hydro (produced 9 percent of electricity generated
in 1999) is not available. The cost for the remaining 2 percent
produced by the renewables is estimated to be higher than the other
generators.
In the 1970s, the activists convinced both federal and state governments
to divert taxpayer energy research and development dollars to renewables.
That investment, to date, is about $13 billion. California, the
prime example, is now stuck with low-efficiency, costly solar and
wind facilities that generate inadequate amounts of power for base
load and occupy large land space. Their cost, repayment for past
development plus current operation, may contribute to the high utility
bills.
It was economics that stopped new nuclear power-plant construction
in the 1980s, not safety. The economic roadblock began with the
high interest rates of the 1970s. Then came the lack of energy market
growth after the 1973 oil embargo. Then came the environmentally
imposed regulatory and legal morass. A total of 131 commercial nuclear
plants have been built and licensed in the United States. Twenty-eight
of those have been shut down. The remaining 103 now produce one-fifth
of the nation’s electricity.
The nation currently lacks a comprehensive energy policy. The following
points should be considered in developing such a policy:
There is a clear need to construct new electric power plants. They
must be environmentally friendly, economical in construction and
operation and provide reliable base load electricity. And for national
security reasons, they must use a sustainable fuel of U.S. origin.
The United States has an abundance of coal yet to be mined. In
order to use that resource in a more environmentally friendly way,
the Department of Energy is promoting Vision 21. The goal is to
achieve clean coal-burning technology so that no emissions will
go beyond the power plant’s fence line—a feat that nuclear
power plants already achieve.
What is interesting, and should be of national concern, is the
government’s long silence about nuclear power as part of the
solution for both environmental problems and economic power generation
woes. The Energy Department’s national laboratories have been
working toward the definition and design of the next generation
of nuclear power plants, Generation IV. To date, little has been
said publicly about their work.
The federal government sent a delegation to the Sixth U.N. Conference
of the Parties (COP 6) at The Hague in November 2000. COP 6 was
supposed to formalize agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emission
to levels that had been set at COP 3 in Kyoto, Japan, issued as
the Kyoto Protocol. The U.S. representatives at COP 6 were unable
to get agreement that nuclear power is an environmentally friendly,
safe, life-saving, economical electrical power-production technology
and should be accepted as at least part of the solution. Vice President
Richard B. Cheney did announce in late April 2001 that his energy
group will recommend nuclear power as an option for balancing The
Three Es, but re-emergence of this power source will face an uphill
battle. Nuclear power deserves a serious re-look at this time.
When considering the total life cycle, nuclear power plants create
a small fraction of the greenhouse gases that all fossil-fuel plants
produce.
The nuclear reactor-waste problem is a bogeyman. Few people know
that for the past 40 years, the nuclear reactor waste that has been
generated by all U.S. nuclear power plants remains stored on site.
How many other industries could do that: store all their industrial
waste on site and remain in business? If all the high-level nuclear
waste, which is actually spent fuel, from all the U.S. nuclear power
plants were collected and stacked in one place, it would cover a
single football field with a pile about 15 feet high.
Yucca Mountain, located on the west edge of the Energy Department’s
Nevada Test Site, is the place where more than 500 nuclear weapons
have been detonated above and below ground. The federal government
has selected that site as the spent-fuel repository. Yucca Mountain
is a well-researched and correct site to place the material safely
underground.
The nuclear material (uranium) came out of the ground originally
as an oxide (U3O8). About 97 percent of this uranium—with
3 percent waste products—would be returned to Yucca Mountain.
It would be a more concentrated form than the uranium ore from whence
it came, but placed into corrosion resistant canisters that will
isolate the spent fuel from the surrounding tunnel walls until it
has the same radioactivity as the original uranium ore.
The danger of transporting reactor waste to Yucca Mountain is another
bogeyman. The actual spent fuel is a ceramic uranium oxide pellet,
similar in look and feel to a coffee mug. The uranium pellets are
encased in zirconium tubes, which are then held in a thick steel-and-lead
transport cylinder. It has absorbers built in so that any impacts
will not violate integrity of the cylinder, let alone the individual
zirconium tubes with their solid uranium oxide pellets. The lead
component provides radiation shielding.
These transport cylinders have been tested extensively under severe
conditions—smashed into concrete walls at high speeds, hit
by trains, placed in pools of burning fuel, and dropped on spikes—without
being breached. Gasoline tankers transiting U.S. highways do not
necessarily provide this level of protection for the public.
The 131 nuclear plants that have operated in this country have
produced no radiation-related injuries or deaths. The infamous 1978
Three Mile Island accident outside Harrisburg, Penn., was precipitated
by human error, then compounded by a relief valve not re-setting.
The plant shut itself down. The minor amount of gaseous radionuclides
that was vented was not detectable outside the plant boundaries.
Current nuclear power plant technology in the United States can
be categorized as three distinct design generations: prototypes,
current operating plants and advanced reactors. While the Generation
III plants have been successful where they have been built, further
evolution will make new nuclear-energy systems an even more attractive
option. Many countries recognize that nuclear energy must remain
or become an integral part of their energy mix to meet present and
future energy supply needs. To help achieve this recognized need,
the Energy Department’s Office of Nuclear Energy, Science
and Technology is encouraging a wide-ranging study of the next-generation
nuclear energy system—Generation IV—for development.
The Generation IV initiative is a process, not a plant design.
Its intent is to gain international cooperation to identify, assess
and develop sustainable nuclear energy technologies. Technologies
that can be licensed, constructed and operated in a manner that
will provide a competitively priced supply of energy while satisfactorily
addressing nuclear safety, waste, proliferation resistance and public
perception concerns of the countries in which they are deployed.
Generation IV designs need to involve the public so that their
expectations are included in the design. They might include siting
a coal plant to sequester carbon dioxide, or generating hydrogen
for fuel cells during off-peak hours, or shortening the half-life
of current nuclear waste, or siting it on a coastline and using
the “waste” heat to distill fresh water. This time,
the deployment of nuclear power plants can better serve the public
needs.
Nuclear power plant construction—the brick and mortar and
pipe and dome cost—is economical. Included in the concepts
for Generation IV reactors are factory-built components that are
assembled on site to speed completion times. What makes nuclear
plants an expensive option are the legal and permit requirements,
which can stretch a nuclear plant start-up schedule from three to
10 years, tying capital up with no return. nd
Eric P. Loewen, Ph.D., is a consulting engineer at the Idaho National
Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, Idaho Falls, Idaho. The
opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of
the Department of Energy.