TechnologyReview.com
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Nuclear Powers Up |
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The Case: Improved nuclear-power
technologies are at hand--but the public is still wary. Entergy Nuclear
decided that before proposing a new plant, it should band together with other
utilities, lobby for subsidies, and make the link between nuclear power and
the "hydrogen economy." The U.S. nuclear-power
industry has been stagnant for three decades; the last successfully completed
reactor order was made back in the early 1970s. The 1979 Three Mile Island
accident, and the far worse 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, helped stop the
industry in its tracks. Public confidence plunged; regulatory pressures,
political opposition, and costs surged. And by the 1990s, fossil fuels were
cheap enough that nuclear power--even with more-efficient designs--wasn't worth
pursuing. Instead, U.S. utilities dotted the landscape with advanced
natural-gas-fired power plants. But today, natural-gas
prices are three times what they were 10 years ago, making all alternatives,
from wind turbines to nuclear reactors, more attractive. Abroad, 24 nuclear
plants--including eight in India, four in Russia, and three in Japan--are now
under construction. And in the United States, several utilities are
reconsidering the nuclear option. Why not simply build
new plants, which would benefit from three decades' worth of technology
advances in materials, sensors, and control software? Today's 104 operating
U.S. nuclear power plants, after all, reflect the designs of the 1960s and
the technologies of the 1970s. But the job of actually building plants
requires much more than better technology; it requires partnerships, public
relations, and lobbying to overcome the ghosts of the recent past. Entergy Nuclear of
Jackson, MS, already operates 10 nuclear power plants over eight locations,
and it would like to build more at some of those sites. But as a practical
matter, the company realized it needed to band together with others in the
industry to reduce its exposure to market risk, promote enough competition
between major reactor suppliers to yield an affordable design, sell the
communities near the sites on the plants' economic benefits, and extract
federal subsidies. Entergy also believed
it needed to try to replace the "No Nukes" slogan of yesterday with
a "No CO2" slogan for today. In essence it's pushing the idea that
the slight risk of meltdown and the proliferation of bomb ingredients are
lesser evils than global warming triggered by the buildup of carbon dioxide
from fossil fuels (see "Environmental Heresies," May 2005). Entergy knew it needed
to tread carefully, especially at the outset. "If one utility was to
step out [and propose a nuclear plant], they could become the lightning rod
for the antinuclear community, and for people's concerns on Wall
Street," says Dan R. Keuter, Entergy Nuclear's vice president for
nuclear-business development. As the last U.S. nuclear plants were being
built in the 1970s and '80s, delays caused by new regulatory pressures,
political opposition, construction problems, and the slow issuance of
operating permits caused enormous cost overruns. So in 2003, Entergy,
along with the Chicago-based utility Exelon, took the lead in forging a
coalition. The companies called five other utilities and suppliers to a
meeting near the Atlanta airport. "We called it the 'Atlanta seven'
meeting, and our goal was to see if we could respond together to come up with
a new reactor design and share those costs and those risks," Keuter recalls.
Out of that meeting came a consortium called NuStart, which now includes nine
power companies and two major reactor builders, Westinghouse and GE. Each
member contributes $1 million annually to the consortium's joint operations. The consortium has revived
the approach to nuclear power that prevailed in the 1950s, says Andrew Kadak,
a nuclear engineer at MIT. One of the first nuclear power plants, Yankee Rowe
in Rowe, MA--completed in 1960--was built by 10 utilities who shared costs
and the resulting power. NuStart "is an important new initiative for the
industry," says Kadak. "The new initiative may end up being the
same model [as the one of the 1950s]." But before construction of a
plant can begin, the utilities will need two permits from the U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission. The first would approve the site selection, the other
the construction and operation of the reactor. The design question is
fairly simple. While some farther-out technologies, such as the helium-cooled
pebble bed modular reactor--an updated version of the gas-cooled reactors
prototyped over the past 30 years in Germany and the United States--are being
pursued in China and South Africa, NuStart is betting on so-called
evolutionary advances in the tried-and-true water-cooled designs that
predominate today. In this basic design, water flows through a superhot
reactor core, creating steam to drive turbines. The goal of the
evolved design is to keep things as simple and affordable as possible without
compromising safety. Today's U.S. nuclear plants include at least two
redundant sets of safety equipment, including auxiliary pumps to supply
cooling water to the reactors and auxiliary diesel generators to keep the
equipment humming. One way of reducing the need for such systems is to make
safety systems "passive." For instance, huge tanks of water placed
uphill can, in an emergency, flood reactors without the use of power or
pumps. "You can make
[nuclear power plants] cheaper with less equipment, and that was the reason
for the focus on passive safety," says Keuter. Improvements in a range
of supporting technologies, he argues, have enabled the construction of very
safe plants. "Instrumentation and control systems have become much
smaller and faster and solid state and more reliable, all of which allow you
to monitor the operation more precisely." In its drive to
execute a new power plant design, the NuStart coalition is benefiting from
generous federal subsidies. NuStart and the U.S. government are splitting the
$400 million to $500 million cost of coming up with the detailed designs for
two versions of evolutionary water-cooled reactors, one from General Electric
and the other from Westinghouse. The NRC has already approved a Westinghouse
design for a 1,000-megawatt reactor; General Electric is readying the design
of a 1,500-megawatt reactor for NRC approval later this year. Both of these
reactors incorporate passive safety features. After settling on a
pair of possible designs, the consortium approached the delicate question of
where to actually build a new plant. It was helped by a 1992 change in
federal law that streamlined the permitting process. Previously, the NRC
would authorize the construction of a reactor and then, when it was finished,
issue a separate operating permit. The 1992 change created a combined
construction and operating license. In May, the NuStart
coalition announced it had settled on six potential sites: Entergy's Grand
Gulf Nuclear Station in Port Gibson, MS, and River Bend Nuclear Station in
St. Francisville, LA; Constellation Energy's Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power
Plant in Lusby, MD, and Nine Mile Point Nuclear Station in Scriba, NY; and
two federally owned sites, the Bellefonte Nuclear Plant in northeast Alabama,
owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Savannah River Site, a U.S.
Department of Energy facility near Aiken, SC. Of these, the coalition plans
to pick two by October 1; it will then apply for construction and operation
permits for both. Now that NuStart has
broken the ice, some utilities--members of the consortium and nonmembers
alike--have gone ahead with their own permit applications or announcements.
Three companies have applied for site permits: Entergy at Grand Gulf; Exelon
Generation at a site in Clinton, IL; and Dominion Nuclear--which is not a
member of NuStart--at its North Anna plant in Virginia. Finally, though it
hasn't applied for a site permit, Duke Energy of Charlotte, NC, says it is
planning to seek an NRC combined construction-operation permit for an
undisclosed site. Each of these plants would use one or the other of the two
competing NuStart designs. The companies also say they need the U.S. Congress
to continue subsidizing the process; subsidies are part of the president's
proposed energy bill. Of course,
technologies such as wind turbines and hybrid cars also make a good case for
government subsidies. The nuclear industry is promoting itself as a pathway
to the hydrogen economy. The electricity produced by a nuclear power plant
can split water into hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis, without
creating air pollution. And hydrogen can also be produced directly: the
extremely high temperatures inside nuclear reactors can be used to split
water molecules. None of the utilities
applying for NRC permits has ordered a new reactor. But if one or more
actually goes ahead, it could open the door to investments in a new
generation of more efficient plants. "If they are successful in getting
new plant construction started in the United States during the next three to
five years, that will open the door for other nuclear technologies,"
says Regis Matzie, chief technology officer and senior vice president at
Westinghouse, who is also a director of the South African consortium seeking
to build a pebble bed plant in that country. "Further, restarting
nuclear build in the United States will have a profound impact on new nuclear
build around the world." In a pebble bed
reactor, the uranium fuel is encased in billiard ball-sized graphite spheres.
The reactor is cooled by helium gas, so it can operate at much higher
temperatures than water-cooled plants do, greatly increasing its efficiency.
In addition, the technology's advocates argue, pebble bed plants are ideal
for hydrogen production because their operating temperatures make it easier
to split water into oxygen and hydrogen without electrolysis. "The
success of NuStart should be of great value to [the South African consortium]
for the future," says Matzie. But there is an
inescapable problem with any nuclear-energy strategy: waste. In the past two
decades, the U.S. government has spent some $6 billion to develop an
underground storage repository at Yucca Mountain, about 140 kilometers from
Las Vegas. But there are serious questions about whether the mountain is dry
enough to prevent waste containers from eroding for many thousands of years (see
"A New Vision for Nuclear Waste," December 2004). "The industry
should be trying to solve the waste problem. If they want more nuclear power
plants, there's not going to be enough space at Yucca. They are going to have
to keep visiting this issue over and over again. If they don't, it will come
back to haunt them," says Allison Macfarlane, a geologist at MIT and
editor of a forthcoming book on Yucca Mountain (Uncertainty Underground:
Yucca Mountain and the Nation's High-Level Nuclear Waste). While the waste
problem remains unsolved, current trends favor a nuclear renaissance. Energy
needs are growing. Conventional energy sources will eventually dry up. The
atmosphere is getting dirtier. But resurrecting the industry will prove to be
a delicate task. Neither Entergy nor any other U.S. company has committed to
actually building a nuclear power plant. Entergy says that it will wait to
see whether Congress approves subsidies before making its next move. David
Talbot |
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