Now that we have achieved a place in Government, citizens of the country will be looking to us to provide solutions to the vast problems that have resulted from the odious American leadership over the last six years. There has been much discussion about
how and
why we have come to power, and discussions have focused particularly on the Iraq war, Republican corruption, and general incompetence.
It seems to me though that these issues, while decidedly serious, are not the most serious issues we face. The most serious issue that humanity faces is clearly in my mind the environment, especially (but not limited to) global climate change.
I have avoided discussing energy during the excitement of the run up to the election, but now our task has changed. It is no longer about winning. It is about governing.
If we wish to distinguish ourselves from the Republicans, ethically, practically, and politically, we will be required to find policies that
work. In the area of global climate change, our options are limited. This necessarily involves the ability to think anew and to act on sober, realistic,
fact based analysis.
One may cavil about nuclear energy, but it is well understood that all of the usual - and largely ideological - objections aside, nuclear energy has the lowest external cost of all forms of scalable, continuous energy. By "external cost," we mean costs to the environment and human health - precisely the costs that are not paid "at the pump" or "at the outlet." Believe it or not, the external cost of nuclear energy is not only lower than all fossil fuels (by a large margin) but it is also lower than many more popular - if economically and energetically insignificant - renewable energy strategies. In fact, nuclear energy is safer than both solar energy and biomass energy, albeit in the former case, by a trivial margin. Depending on the nature of back-up and availability (and to some extent geography), nuclear energy is slightly less safe than hydroelectricity and wind power. However wind power is not continuous and hydropower is pretty much tapped out.
(In connection with safety though I feel compelled to state that the greatest energy disaster in human history was the much ignored Banquio serial dam failures in China in 1976, which killed many hundreds of thousands of people in a single night.)
Whenever I mention the fact that nuclear energy is the safest and cleanest form of energy available to us now, I get a lecture about solar energy, so let me address it. I often dismiss solar energy but that is not the same as hating solar energy. I wish it worked better. I have no objection to the use of solar energy, nor to I really object to money spent subsidizing it or researching it. That said, solar power, in spite of all the cheering about it remains prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthiest people on the planet. When you look at the numbers and match them to the promises over many decades, you recognize that solar PV has been spectacularly less than impressive in the 50 years since the discovery of the PV cell in actually producing. As of this year, the worldwide production of solar electricity has represented less than 0.01% of demand. One may quibble in sorts of ways about why these facts are true, but they are nonetheless, facts, "inconvenient truths" if you will. No amount of subsidy, no amount of research dollars, no amount of wishful thinking will make solar energy capable of timely address of the serious crisis of global climate change.
I am a nuclear energy expert, not professionally - though if I had my life to do over I would study nuclear engineering - but because of long years of private almost obsessive study, study that resulted from curiosity about the events at Chernobyl. Because I am a political liberal and a lifelong Democrat, and because of my strong support for nuclear energy, I've been viewed at various times with a mixture, at different times, of hostility, contempt, appreciation, curiosity, and confusion. That's neither here nor there. I am convinced now more than ever that I am right on this issue. We must use nuclear energy.
Often people who have knee jerk or simply unthinking negative reactions to my support for nuclear energy come to me and say that "nobody knows what to do with nuclear waste," or "it's too bad that we don't know how to get rid of the waste," or some such thing. Often I find these remarks extremely exasperating. I note that nobody knows what to do with fossil fuel waste either. We may not call it "waste" but air pollution - including but not limited to carbon dioxide - is exactly that, energy waste. So is coal ash. So are acid leachates from coal mines. So are oil spills.
In fact, so called "nuclear waste" is remarkable only in the sense that no one has ever died from it.
Even with that said, it must be said that we do know what to do with so called "nuclear waste." The understanding of how to reduce waste issue risks of nuclear energy are the best understood for any form of energy. The misunderstanding of this reality is completely characterized by the common public consideration that in order to be better than all other options, nuclear energy must be risk free. However there is no such thing as risk free energy. To be preferable to all other options, nuclear energy must only better than everything else, and it is.
Even so, because of the peculiar public perception to the contrary, nuclear engineers have been working continuously to reduce the risk of spent nuclear fuel even further beyond the absurdly low requirements already realized.
I would like to discuss some of these approaches, all of which involve the recycling for of spent fuel.
This year the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released a technical report on recent progress in this sphere. The report is entitled "Advanced Nuclear Fuel Cycles and Radioactive Waste Management" and regrettably it doesn't have an internet link beyond bibliographical data. One must go to a University Library to access it. The library of congress call letters are: TK9360 .A38 2006eb The document is available electronically in many libraries.
I have the report however and would like to offer some relevant quotations from it from the discussion of our nuclear fuel options and why they are continuously being re-evaluated and improved - just as all energy technology should be continuously reevaluated and improved.
First a general statement of what the issues are. Note that the issues are not "one size fits all" approach.
A central goal of sustainable development is to maintain or increase the overall assets (natural, man-made and human or social assets) available to future generations. The aim of advanced fuel cycles is to improve the sustainability of nuclear energy by enhancing the effectiveness of natural resource utilization and by reducing the volume and long-term radiotoxicity of high- level waste while the costs of energy products, for example electricity, stay economically viable. Advanced fuel cycles address among others the problem of long-term radiotoxicity of HLW by burning the majority of the long-lived MA. Reducing the amount of actinides to be disposed of does not facilitate the short and medium term waste management issues, because the problem of the heat produced by the fission products remains as an important issue. However, the advanced separation technologies offer more degrees of freedom in waste management policies.
For instance, after being separated from the main waste stream, some of the fission products that are key contributors to dose and heat output could be immobilised in specially designed matrices for disposal, or some of them could be stored separately and disposed after they have been cooled down, or some of them could be transmuted in reactors. This potential reduction of short-term heat load may have a direct impact on present repository concepts.
Previous studies have shown that advanced fuel cycles reduce substantially the uranium consumption per unit of energy produced, and thereby all associated waste streams. More specifically, transmutation of actinides reduces the source term that dominates the released dose in the long and very long terms. The reduction of short-term heat load and long-term dose per TWhe can increase drastically the mass and volume of waste that can be disposed of in a given repository concept at a specific site. The present study aims at providing quantitative estimates of these effects.
1.3 Main results of earlier studies
Earlier studies have concluded that partitioning facilities for actinides (such as plutonium, americium, curium and neptunium) and some long-lived fission products could be designed and constructed as extensions to existing reprocessing plants. But much work is still to be performed in order to make these extensions compatible with industrial reprocessing practices. Studies have constantly re-demonstrated that the fast neutron-spectrum devices [dedicated fast reactor (FR) or ADS facilities] are more efficient than current LWRs for recycling and transmuting long-lived radionuclides.
FR and ADS have been found to have similar performances with respect to criteria concerning environmental friendliness. However, they differ considerably regarding their level of technology readiness and from the safety viewpoint. Being a sub-critical system, the advantage of the ADS reactor concept is that it has fewer limitations on the fuel composition as compared with reactors operated in critical mode. On the other hand, the coupling between a reactor and an accelerator presents a particular technological challenge [1].
A bit more:
Given the wide range and flexibility of advanced fuel cycles under development - represented in this study by a limited number of representative schemes - it should be feasible to design and implement safe and economic nuclear energy systems addressing efficiently natural resource and waste management issues. Strategic choices will be based on the priorities of policy makers which reflect country specific criteria such as characteristics of available waste repositories, access to uranium resources, size of the nuclear power programme, and social and economic considerations.
The results of the study complement the analysis of effects of advanced fuel cycles on uranium use and transuranic losses by a description of their impact on waste management policies. The issues addressed include the activity of HLW after 1 000 years, their decay heat after 50 and 200 years of cooling, their volume and the maximum dose originating from underground repository concepts in four different host rocks, namely clay, granite, salt and tuff.
The set of fuel cycle schemes considered covers a broader spectrum than it was the case in previous studies, including present industrial practices, partially-closed cycles and fully-closed cycles with fast-reactor systems. Fuel cycle schemes are analysed with emphasis on primary and secondary waste generated at each step. The compositions, activities and heat loads of all waste flows are tracked and their impact on the waste repository concepts mentioned above is assessed. The study also
(Let me state though, even as I acknowledge that "one size does not fit all" that I am very much in favor of the internationalization of the nuclear fuel cycle under the auspices of the IAEA.)
All of the options are already safe, but we can arbitrarily depending on how much we are willing to pay, make them even safer. (None of them are even close to being as dangerous, however, as continuing to use coal, or natural gas and oil for that matter.)
Differences in heat load and waste volume may have a major impact on the detailed concept of the repositories. This in turn has technical and economic impacts. For example, a given repository could receive the waste issued by the production of 5 to 20 times more electricity if the electricity were produced by advanced reactors associated with advanced fuel cycle processes than if it were produced by light water reactors operated once through.
The maximum dose released to the biosphere at any time in normal conditions remains well below authorised limits for all the schemes and all the repositories considered. For all the repositories considered in the study, the maximum dose resulting from the disposal of the high-level waste does not differ significantly for any of the various fuel cycle schemes envisaged.
The doses resulting from the disposal of HLW from fuel cycle schemes with reprocessing are at most a factor eight lower than those from the reference PWR once-through scheme. However, the lower dose mainly results from the removal of iodine 129 from the liquid HLW during reprocessing; should it be captured and disposed of in the HLW repository, the doses resulting from all scenarios would be about equal. In the very long-term, i.e. after a few million years, the total dose is lower in the case of the fully closed fuel cycle schemes, because much smaller amounts of actinides have to be disposed of in the repository.
For those with a technical bent like mine, here is a description of what the options are:
Scheme 1a "Once-through fuel cycle"
Reference fuel cycle.
Scheme 1b "Conventional
reprocessing
fuel cycle" Plutonium is recycled once in the form of MOX.
Scheme 1c (Variant of Scheme 1b) Avoids the separation of pure plutonium by recycling the neptunium together with the plutonium.
Scheme 1d "DUPIC fuel cycle" PWR spent fuel is reused in
CANDU heavy water reactors while avoiding any chemical reprocessing.
Scheme 2a "Plutonium burning in
LWR" Uses LWRs only. Requires MOX fuel with enriched
uranium (MOX-UE).
Scheme 2b "Plutonium and americium burning in LWR" Requires two types of MOX-UE fuel as well as americium-curium separation. The curium decay products (mostly plutonium) are either disposed or recycled as MOX fuel.
Scheme 2c "Heterogeneous americium recycling"
Americium is recycled in targets which are disposed after irradiation.
Scheme 2cV (variant) Americium goes to storage facility, together with the curium. The decay products are either disposed or recycled as MOX fuel.
Scheme 3a "TRU burning in FR"
Based on Integral Fast Reactor concept. Avoids any separation of pure plutonium.
Scheme 3b "Double strata fuel cycle" Burns all plutonium in conventional LWRs and fast reactors.
Scheme 3bV (variant) Circumvents the FR stage by transferring the plutonium from the PWR-MOX stage directly to the ADS fuel cycle.
Scheme 3cV1 "All-FR strategy" Based on Gen-IV gas-cooled fast reactor.
Scheme 3cV2 (variant) Based on EFR using MOX fuel
reprocessed by UREX+. Uranium is not recycled.
It is important to recognize, again, that no one scheme is mutually exclusive of another, and that "no one size fits all." It is further important to consider that these only represent a subset of possible schemes. They are merely the schemes that have been examined in considerable detail.
I am sure that many people here at DKos remain skeptical about nuclear power. I do not mean to construe that I am endorsing a cornucopian view of energy, either, when I note that we must have nuclear power. With or without nuclear power, I still insist that conservation is important - with the important and vital constraint that we must at the end of the day approach this problem without insisting that some of humanity be impoverished. In fact the traditional liberal agenda includes addressing human poverty and human suffering. Poverty and suffering in turn cannot be addressed without access to energy.
But a reality of conservation is that there are some people living who already live who cannot conserve because they already do not have enough. I contend strongly that no environmental issue can be addressed without addressing the limitation of human population growth. It is well understood that poverty leads to ignorance and ignorance is very much a factor in unrestricted population growth. Technology may have delayed the Malthusian catastrophe, but it is here nonetheless. Population will be managed, but I think we'd all prefer it happen as ethically as is possible. This will necessarily include the liberal values such as respect for women, respect for justice, again, the elimination of poverty, decent access to health care, respect for the rights of our gay citizens, etc. These things are known to exist - along with managed population growth - in countries where there is wealth. Wealth, in turn, is really defined by access to energy.
I am happy to note that many second or third world nations are looking at nuclear energy carefully, nations like Nigeria, for instance, and Vietnam and Romania. This is important. They must do this much as we must do this. Other nations that are attempting to climb out of a history of extreme population based deprivation, notably China and India, have already committed in a huge way to nuclear energy.
As the world turns its eyes to nuclear energy, it is comforting to know that we do know what to do with the so called "waste." I will be happy to respond to any questions about what that answer is: Recycle.
I have edited this entry to fix some very bad grammar.