The realization, by the experts, that climate change is upon us, and that it is coming much faster than said experts had been predicting, has increased interest in nuclear power as a solution to our need for clean energy. Clearly, nuclear reactor technology is a mature field and the energy it produces is not accompanied by carbon dioxide emissions, but it does produce dangerous, long-lived radioactive products—lots of them. After the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, the public support for the industry evaporated and most plans for new plants were canceled. Economics also played a major role: nuclear power plants were subjected to rigorous environmental reviews, they were expensive, and always seemed to cost more and take longer to build than anticipated. And electricity demand could be met more cheaply and quickly by fossil fuel plants. Can the demand to respond to climate change cause a reconciliation between the public and nuclear power? How useful might a reinvigoration of this technology be in countering global warming?
Bill Gates recently produced an optimistic take on possible responses to the changing climate: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need. He makes the case that nuclear power must be a growing component of any clean energy plan.
“…it’s hard to foresee a future where we decarbonize our power grid affordably without using more nuclear power. In 2018, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyzed nearly 1,000 scenarios for getting to zero in the United States; all the cheapest paths involved using a power source that’s clean and always available—that is, one like nuclear power. Without a source like that, getting to zero-carbon electricity would cost a lot more.”
Resurrecting nuclear power as an option will require a revolution in the technology in order to make it seem safer, cheaper, and more quickly delivered. Gates believes improved plant designs exist that can deliver what is needed.
“I’m very optimistic about the approach created by TerraPower, a company I founded in 2008, bringing together some of the best minds in nuclear physics and computer modeling to design a next generation nuclear reactor.”
“TerraPower’s reactor could run on many different types of fuel, including the waste from other nuclear facilities. The reactor would produce far less waste than today’s plants, would be fully automated—eliminating the possibility of human error—and could be built underground, protecting it from attack. Finally, the design would be inherently safe, using some ingenious features to control the nuclear reaction; for example, the radioactive fuel is contained in pins that expand if they get too hot, which slows the nuclear reaction down and prevents overheating. Accidents would literally be prevented by the laws of physics.”
It is difficult to be as sanguine as Gates about “fully automated” systems eliminating human error. After all, the automated systems are created by humans and have been known to incorporate human error as a feature in their performance. The measure of safety is not just eliminating any possibility of a runaway nuclear reaction, it is ensuring that there is no possibility that significant radioactive material can be introduced into the environment. It is encouraging that he recognizes that a cheap, easily reproduced plant, implemented in large numbers, would be an obvious target for terrorists of any stripe. Perhaps more troubling is the use of old technology in his new design, technology that has been found too difficult to commercialize for nearly seventy years.
Gates came to an agreement with the state of Wyoming to build a demonstration plant, presumably at a retired coal plant. This source provided a description of the proposed facility referred to as a Natrium Reactor.
“The demo project will feature a 345MW sodium-cooled fast reactor with a molten salt-based energy storage system. The technology incorporated in the storage system is designed to increase the capacity to 500MW for more than five and half hours which will be enough to meet the electricity needs of approximately 400,000 households.”
Molten salt is used as coolant rather than water as in existing commercial designs. This has the advantage of less moderation of the energy of the neutrons bouncing around, thus the term “fast reactor.” This produces a more desirable type of waste than water-cooled reactors which produce a lower energy neutron distribution.
Andrew Cockburn provided an article in Harper’s Magazine intended to counter any notion of optimism about nuclear power. It was titled Spent Fuel: The risky resurgence of nuclear power. He details the history of molten salt technology and focuses on the tendency for companies and governments involved in nuclear power to lie about the risk of accidents, and when accidents do occur, to lie about the damage done.
The very first reactor to produce commercial electric power was placed in the then small remote town of Moorpark near Los Angeles.
“Dwight Eisenhower’s ‘Atoms for Peace’ program, unveiled in 1953, set the optimistic tone for nuclear power: ‘The United States knows that peaceful power from atomic energy is no dream of the future. The capability, already proved, is here today,’ and would ‘rapidly be transformed into universal, efficient, and economic usage.’ Four years later, Moorpark, a small town, northwest of Los Angeles, became the first American community to draw its electricity from a nuclear reactor. Moorpark’s power came from the Sodium Reactor Experiment, operated by the Atomic Energy Commission at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory twenty miles away.”
“No such lyrical announcement marked the day in July 1959 when the plant’s coolant system failed and its uranium oxide fuel rods began melting down. With the reactor running out of control and set to explode, desperate operators deliberately released huge amounts of radioactive material into the air for nearly two weeks, making it almost certainly the most dangerous nuclear accident in U.S. history. The amount of iodine-131 alone spewed into the southern California atmosphere was two hundred and sixty times that released at Three Mile Island, which is generally regarded as the worst ever U.S. nuclear disaster. None of this was revealed to the public, who were told merely that a ‘technical’ fault had occurred, one that was ‘not an indication of unsafe reactor conditions’.”
“As greater Los Angeles boomed in the following years, the area around the reactor site—originally chosen for its distance from population centers—was flooded with new residents. No one informed them of the astronomical levels of radioactive contaminants seeded deep in the soil.”
Cockburn provides some background on the liquid sodium technology.
“…such liquid sodium technology is by no means innovative. Nor, in an extensive history of experiments, has it ever proved popular—not least because liquid sodium explodes when it comes into contact with water, and burns when exposed to air. In addition, it is highly corrosive to metal, which is one reason the technology was rapidly abandoned by the U.S. Navy after a tryout in the Seawolf submarine in 1957. That system ‘was leaking before it even left the dock on its first voyage,’ recalls Foster Blair, a longtime senior engineer with the Navy’s reactor program. The Navy eventually encased the reactor in steel and dropped it into the sea 130 miles off the coast of Maryland, with the assurance that the container would not corrode while the contents were still radioactive. The main novelty of the Natrium reactor is a tank that stores molten salt, which can drive steam generators to produce extra power when demand surges. ‘Interesting idea,’ Blair commented. ‘But from an engineering standpoint one that has some real potential problems, namely the corrosion of the high-temperature salt in just about any metal container over any period of time’.”
“In a March 2021 report for the Union of Concerned Scientists, the physicist Edwin Lyman likewise concluded that there was little evidence that reactor designs like Natrium’s would be safer than water-cooled models. ‘When I read about many of the current proposals,’ Blair said, ‘it is almost as if they are unaware of all the work that has gone before.’ Citing the Navy’s abandonment of sodium reactors, he suggested that companies such as TerraPower ‘are unaware, or intentionally choose to ignore history’.”
“He recalled that Admiral Hyman Rickover, who ran the Navy’s nuclear program for three decades, would personally command the sea trials of every new nuclear submarine. In that spirit, he suggested, ‘they should only license a small modular reactor on condition that the head of the corporation that built it takes up permanent residence within a quarter mile of the plant’.”
“As the sodium saga indicates, the true history of nuclear energy is largely unknown to all but specialists, which is ironic given that it keeps repeating itself. The story of Santa Susana follows the same path as more famous disasters, most strikingly in the studious indifference of those in charge to signs of impending catastrophe. The operators at Santa Susana shrugged off evidence of problems with the cooling system for weeks prior to the meltdown, and even restarted the reactor after initial trouble. Soviet nuclear authorities covered up at least one accident at Chernobyl before the disaster and ignored warnings that the reactor was dangerously unsafe. The Fukushima plant’s designers didn’t account for the known risk of massive tsunamis, a vulnerability augmented by inadequate safety precautions that were overlooked by regulators. Automatic safety features at Santa Susana did not work. This was also the case at Fukushima, where vital backup generators were destroyed by the tidal wave.
Attempts to conceal or mitigate effects of nuclear accidents make it difficult for the public to assess the types of scenarios that might play out should it choose to reembrace nuclear power. As an example, Cockburn uses the potential damage the Japanese thought they faced as the Fukushima disaster was unfolding.
“No one knows exactly how much radiation was released by Santa Susana—it exceeded the scale of the monitors. Nor was there any precise accounting of the radioactivity released at Chernobyl. Fukushima emitted far less, yet the prime minister of Japan prepared plans to evacuate fifty million people, which would have meant, as he later recounted, the end of Japan as a functioning state.”
“Another common thread is the attempt by overseers, both corporate and governmental, to conceal information from the public for as long as possible. Santa Susana holds the prize in this regard: its coverup was sustained for twenty years, until students at UCLA found the truth in Atomic Energy Commission documents.”
Radiation released from a reactor accident kills few people quickly. Most die slowly. A radiation-induced cancer could take years to kill. If no one is interested in counting the dead and dying, it is easy to conclude that “reactor accidents aren’t so bad.”
“Most striking of all is the success of official campaigns asserting that even the most serious accidents have caused little or no harm. The spectacular scale of the Chernobyl disaster, with its mass evacuations and radioactive clouds wafting across borders, made it difficult to downplay health effects. Yet, as Kate Brown, a historian of science at MIT, details in Manual for Survival: An Environmental History of the Chernobyl Disaster, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization helped promote the notion that the disaster’s health effects had been minimal. In 2005, the UN settled on a figure of 4,000 deaths among those most exposed in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia—a number at the low end of a strikingly wide range, Brown observed. The IAEA had earlier reported ‘no health disorders that could be attributed directly to radiation exposure.’ It was only when Keith Baverstock, a scientist with the World Health Organization, defied a superior and publicly disclosed a sharp increase in extremely rare thyroid cancers among Belarusian children that there was some grudging acceptance of the disaster’s deadly consequences. Even so, Baverstock says, he was threatened with firing unless he withdrew his findings; others in receipt of WHO funding claimed the jump in cases was merely the result of intensified screening.”
Kate Brown would spend years trying to overcome the official obfuscation to obtain a more realistic assessment.
“Brown spent ten years in archives across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, disinterring records of what happened to the millions of people exposed not only to the invisible cloud, but to its residue in the landscape from which they drew their food. That residue had global reach—a truck carrying Ukrainian blueberries to the United States from Canada was so radioactive it was stopped at the border. Traveling around affected areas, some far from the plant itself, Brown encountered evidence of communities shredded by radiation, such as women who sorted wool from sheep slaughtered in the radiation zone. Toting bales of radioactive wool, Brown has said, ‘was like hugging an X-ray machine while it was turned on over and over again.’ Many got sick and died. Yet amid the tens of thousands of pages Brown perused, just one obscure official document furnished a hard figure for Chernobyl-related deaths: 36,525. That was the number of women in Ukraine who received pensions because their husbands had died as a result of the disaster—a toll far in excess of anything reported by Western officials. But that stark number must represent only a small fraction of the total. ‘That’s just Ukraine,’ she told me, ‘which received only 20 percent of the radiation. There’s no comparable figure for Belarus, which got far more’.”
This source tells us that after seventy years of research there are only two active sodium-cooled reactors. Both are in Russia. That country claims it will have a version safe and reliable enough for export in 2036. It is still in development.
Pharmaceutical companies can run an eight-week clinical trial for a drug and move on to commercialization having no inkling whether long-term effects might emerge years later. In general, waiting years before administering a drug is counterproductive. With a new design for a nuclear reactor, how long does one wait before deeming the plant safe for commercialization? Certainly not eight weeks. Is eight years sufficient? Is any amount of time sufficient?
There was no time estimate for when the Wyoming reactor would be operational. Given history, it could be many years, and many years afterward to demonstrate a degree of safety. And how many years might it take for even a successful demonstration product to be approved across the nation? We do not have time to wait. The worst that could happen is if the promise of clean nuclear power slowed the relentless push required for other forms of clean energy. Even if the technology worked, it might produce more harm than good.
One wonders if Bill Gates would be willing to take up
residence within a quarter mile of his Wyoming project.
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