by Robert Bryce
Small modular reactors. Generally defined as any reactor with a capacity of 300 megawatts or less, the small modular reactor (SMR) concept is gaining traction for several reasons. First, they cost a fraction of larger reactors. Second, they can be deployed as single or multiple units. If a utility needs, say, 800 megawatts of generation capacity, it could buy as many SMRs as it needs to meet that demand, and the reactors could be added in stages. Third, SMRs are designed to be buried in the ground, which makes them more resistant to natural disasters, terrorism, and mishaps. Finally, and perhaps most important, the SMR could be manufactured in a central location. That final aspect should lead to lower costs, as it would allow the company producing the reactor to maintain a dedicated workforce at one location and ship the reactors—by barge, rail, or truck—to the final destination. Concentrating the workforce in one place should also accelerate the learning curve and allow the company (or companies) producing the reactor to streamline production and reduce costs.
Perhaps the most prominent developer of SMRs is Babcock & Wilcox, which has decades of experience in the nuclear sector. In 2009, the company announced plans to build a modular reactor capable of generating 180 megawatts of electricity. The company’s stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
Molten salt reactors. Rather than use fuel rods like conventional reactors, this design mixes the nuclear fuel into a salt mixture. That mix is then pumped in a loop with a reactor on one side and a heat exchanger on the other. When the mixture is in the reactor, it goes into a critical state. The heated salt-fuel mix is then used to produce steam, which, in turn, is used to produce electricity. The design has a fail-safe mechanism in the form of a drain plug at the bottom of the reactor that is made of solid salt. That plug is continually cooled. If the cooler for the plug gets turned off, or if the system’s pumps lose power, the plug melts and the molten salt-fuel mix flows into a storage tank where it cools on its own. This design removes the possibility of a meltdown. Molten salt reactors are proven. The Department of Energy tested the design in the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where one ran for six years.31
Among the highest-profile promoters of the molten-salt reactors is a start-up company called Transatomic Power, which is promoting what it calls the Waste-Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor.32 Transatomic is backed by venture capitalists, including Ray Rothrock of Venrock Capital.33 Transatomic says their reactor design (which exists only on paper) can also run on nuclear waste, a feature that could help deal with the growing volume of spent fuel rods and other nuclear materials being stacked up in locations around the world. (The world now has about 270,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste, and that volume is growing by about 9,000 tons per year.)34
Integral fast reactors. A favorite of many nuclear aficionados, the integral fast reactor (IFR) is more than a concept. The Department of Energy built a prototype IFR in Idaho (called the EBR-II) and operated it for three decades. In the 1980s, the agency began building another IFR, but funding for the project was killed by Congress in 1994.35 The IFR uses metal cooling instead of water, the coolant used in conventional reactors. The reactor is designed to be safe. Tests on the prototype IFR in Idaho showed that if the reactor’s cooling pumps were shut off, the reactor would not overheat. Instead, it simply shut down on its own. In addition, the IFR can burn radioactive waste from other reactors and produce its own fuel. In other words, it can be self-sustaining. The industrial giant General Electric was one of the lead developers of the IFR project with the Department of Energy. Based on its work on the IFR, GE has teamed with the Japanese firm Hitachi to propose what they are calling PRISM, short for Power Reactor Innovative Small Modular. If GE and Hitachi are able to build a PRISM reactor, it would produce about 600 megawatts of power.36
Thorium-fueled reactors. Rather than use uranium, some nuclear advocates believe thorium is a superior reactor fuel. Thorium is far more abundant in the Earth’s crust than uranium. Unlike uranium, thorium doesn’t need to be enriched before it is put into the reactor. Used as a reactor fuel, thorium doesn’t produce as many radioactive by-products during fission (such as plutonium) as does uranium. This, in theory, reduces the risk of nuclear proliferation because it cuts the amount of plutonium available for making weapons. In addition, the waste produced by thorium-fueled reactors is far less radioactive than what is produced by conventional reactors.37 Despite thorium’s advantages, however, no commercial operating reactors are using it today.38 A Virginia-based company, LightBridge, is promoting the use of thorium as a reactor fuel. But the company, whose stock is publicly traded on the NASDAQ, is small—its market capitalization is about $20 million—and is struggling to make money.39 On the federal side of the ledger, Brookhaven National Laboratory, located on Long Island, New York, has long been a leader in research on thorium as a reactor fuel.
Traveling wave reactors. This design is being pursued by TerraPower, a private company bankrolled, in part, by its chairman, Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, who has put some $35 million into the company. TerraPower’s vice chairman is Nathan Myhrvold.40 The former chief technology officer at Microsoft, Myhrvold is an author and polymath who has a doctorate in theoretical and mathematical physics from Princeton University.41 The traveling wave reactor has passive safety features that prevent it from melting down. In addition, it uses sodium as a coolant and depleted uranium (U-238) for fuel. That matters because U-238 is produced as a by-product during the enrichment process for U-235, which is the primary fuel used by conventional reactors. In addition to U-238, TerraPower says their reactor could also be fueled by spent fuel rods from existing conventional reactors, or even thorium.42 (For the major players in nuclear energy, see Appendix G.)
While private investors and publicly traded companies are seeking opportunities in nuclear, some mainstream environmentalists are finally embracing the technology. Their reason for supporting nuclear is simple: climate change. Their concern about carbon dioxide emissions, along with their understanding that renewable sources like solar and wind cannot begin to provide the scale of energy we demand at prices we can afford, has led them to see nuclear as an essential lower-carbon element of our energy mix.
In 2013, filmmaker Robert Stone released Pandora’s Promise, a documentary that “explores how and why mankind’s most feared and controversial technological discovery is now being embraced by some of the activists who had once led the charge against it.”43 Stone’s film is masterly in its use of a simple technique. Stone goes around the world to do interviews, and in many of his stops, including Chernobyl and Fukushima, he carries a handheld Geiger counter that’s measuring the background radiation levels. Stone shows that on a beach in Brazil, the background radiation is higher than in some locations near Chernobyl. By doing so, Stone helps demystify radiation and shows that, in fact, there are safe doses of radiation. In fact, we are being hit by radiation nearly all the time. On that beach in Brazil, a family is partially burying an older man in the dark sand because, as the old fellow explains, the radiation in the sand is good for his aches and pains.
Stone’s film features environmentalists who had been antinuclear and have since changed their minds, and it devotes significant time to profiling Stewart Brand, the iconoclastic environmentalist who gained fame as the publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, a book that helped define the 1960s and ’70s in America. In a trailer for the film, Brand provides a snappy quote: “The question is often asked, ‘Can you be an environmentalist and be pro-nuclear?’ I would turn that around and say, ‘In light of climate change, can you be an environmentalist and not be pro-nuclear?’”
Stone’s film also features Michael Shellenberger, the cofounder of the Oakland-based Breakthrough Institute, who is ardently pro-nuclear. The think tank has been a major supporter and proponent of Pandora’s Promise, and Shellenberger gets the last word in the film, saying that the pro-nuclear forces are gaining strength, and that it feels like “the beginning of a movement.”
The Breakthrough Institute has played a key role in catalyzing the pro-nuclear Left. In a 2012 article in Foreign Policy, “Out of the Nuclear Closet: Why It’s Time for Environmentalists to Stop Worrying and Love the Atom,” Shellenberger, along with his Breakthrough Institute cofounder, Ted Nordhaus, and their colleague, Jessica Lovering, summed up the position of the pro-nuclear Greens by declaring that “climate change—and, for that matter, the enormous present-day health risks associated with burning coal, oil, and gas—simply dwarf any legitimate risk associated with the operation of nuclear power plants.”44
In mid-2013, the think tank published a report that should be required reading for anyone interested in nuclear technology. “How to Make Nuclear Cheap” concludes that making reactors Cheaper will require sustained investment in nuclear technology. That investment should focus on making reactors safer and more modular, meaning that their various components can be standardized and therefore, manufactured at lower cost.45
Although the report doesn’t single out one reactor design as the “best,” it makes a critical point about the need for more governmental involvement. More government commitment is needed to streamline the licensing process for new reactor technologies. It’s also needed to enable innovation in materials science. “The history of the commercial nuclear power industry is one in which commercialization in virtually all contexts has depended upon heavy state involvement,” states the report. Such governmental involvement is a result of the complexity of nuclear technologies, as well as the need for proper licensing and oversight. Government is also needed to provide insurance in case of a catastrophic accident. “The prospects for accelerating nuclear technology [will] likely depend heavily on the evolving policy and regulatory landscape, both in the United States and abroad.”46
And therein lies a significant rub. Electricity production from fuels like natural gas and coal doesn’t require major interventions from government, because the capital requirements are far lower and the technologies involved are not as complex or potentially dangerous. Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute has frequently condemned governmental involvement in nuclear, calling nuclear “solar power for conservatives.” It’s a funny line. But Taylor is ignoring the benefits that nuclear energy can—and should—bring to society.
Our future prosperity depends on cheap abundant reliable supplies of electricity. We should be looking to, and investing in, nuclear because the physics are so favorable. Denser energy is almost always better energy. Nuclear’s power-density advantages simply cannot be denied.
Make Atoms for Peace a Reality
In 1946, the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, a document produced for the Truman administration, concluded that the world had entered a new era. “There will no longer be secrets about atomic energy,” it said. It declared that given the potential destructiveness of nuclear weapons, there must be “international control of atomic energy” coupled with “a system of inspection.”47 Today, nearly seven decades later, the need for international control of nuclear materials, along with a reliable system for inspecting nuclear-energy plants, remains essential. But the International Atomic Energy Agency remains weak and underfunded.
Created in 1957, the IAEA was designed to be a global “atoms for peace” agency under the aegis of the UN.48 But it remains a still-obscure entity with no real political muscle. Its 2011 budget was $433.1 million, of which just $171.4 million was spent on nuclear security and nuclear safeguards.49 Putting that figure into perspective, in 2014, the total US budget for defense-related spending will be approximately $830 billion. That works out to about $2.3 billion per day.50 Meanwhile, the IAEA, which has responsibility for global nuclear security, is spending just $171.4 million per year, or less than $500,000 per day. In other words, the US military spends 13 times as much every day as the IAEA spends on nuclear security in a year.
If the United States and the rest of the world are going to embrace nuclear energy as part of a global effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, then there must be a concurrent commitment to vigorous international regulation and policing of the nuclear sector. That requires closer monitoring of the fuel used by nuclear reactors as well as increased efforts at ports and other locations to detect radioactive materials that could be used for nefarious purposes.
In 2011, shortly after the meltdown of the reactors at Fukushima, Richard Lester, head of the Nuclear Science and Engineering Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, neatly summed up the issue, writing that “one of the most urgent and important tasks facing the international nuclear community is to affirm, articulate and enforce a set of universal principles of effective nuclear governance.”51
The only entity that can make that governance effective is a robust IAEA. The IAEA needs more money, political support, and technology. The United States should provide all three. Alas, President Obama has been nearly invisible on nuclear policy for the past few years. In his April 2009 speech in Prague, he said that he wanted to “build a new framework for civil nuclear cooperation, including an international fuel bank, so that countries can access peaceful power without increasing the risks of proliferation.”52 That’s an easy speech to make. But making that kind of program into a reality requires having a strong, credible, forceful IAEA. Obama has made little effort toward that end.
The need for a strong IAEA has never been more obvious. Iran wants to harness the atom for electricity production. (And sensibly so. Iran has a young and growing population. Half of the population is under thirty-five, and electricity use more than doubled between 2000 and 2012.)53 Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, India, Slovakia, and several other countries also want nuclear and are either building, or planning to build, new reactors. The United States must be a leader in giving the IAEA the authority it needs to make the objectives of the Acheson-Lilienthal report into a reality. No other country has as many nuclear reactors. The United States produces about twice as much electricity from nuclear as France does.54 The United States has some 7,700 nuclear warheads; only Russia has more, with some 8,500.55 Most, or better yet, all, of those warheads could be converted to peaceful means. Power generation has been one of the best ways of converting the highly enriched uranium used in weapons into something truly useful. (For more on this, see the “Megatons to Megawatts” program that converted Russian warheads into the low-enriched uranium needed for use in American reactors.)56
If we are going to try to slow the growth of carbon dioxide emissions, we must have more nuclear energy production, and that must happen on a global basis. The IAEA is the only entity that is credible and has the pedigree to be the global nuclear cop. Supporting the IAEA has been in America’s long-term interests since the end of World War II.
It’s time to make atoms for peace a reality.
23
SX SMALLER FASTER
WHY THE UNITED STATES WILL DOMINATE THE SMALLER FASTER FUTURE
It’s easy to parody the twenty-, thirty-, and forty-somethings who attend the Interactive portion of Austin’s South By Southwest Festival. Paying little heed to those behind, in front, or next to them, some attendees blithely walk along the sidewalk, eyes locked on their iPhones or Droids. Oblivious to their surroundings, the clad-in-black technophiles wander along the sidewalk, narrowly averting collisions with other hipsters, cyclists, and streetlight poles.
It might be even easier to parody a guy like Matt Tran, a twenty-something dressed in a hoodie and jeans who was wandering around the festival with a skateboard in his hand. But Tran, a graduate of Stanford, was no parody. He was in Austin in March 2013 pushing Faster Lighter skateboards.
Tran and two other Stanford grads founded Boosted Boards, a company that claims to be selling the world’s lightest electric vehicle. At 12 pounds or so, they might just be right. “This will take you 6 miles in San Francisco,” said Tran as he flipped the skateboard over to show me the lithium-ion battery pack and the electronic drive system which was controlled by a small device that Tran held in his hand. “We produce th
e cover for the battery with a 3-D printer.” As a few other people gathered around to take pictures of his board, Tran explained that Boosted Boards had raised money on Kickstarter—about $467,000, nearly five times their goal of $100,000. “It has regenerative braking,” said Tran, as he pointed to the board’s drive system.
How fast can it go? “We limit it to about 20 miles per hour.”
Boosted Boards promises to solve “the last mile.” As they explain, the last mile or so of transportation—from public transit to people’s homes or workplaces—is the most problematic and costly. If people can carry a device that allows them to get from the bus/train/metro stop to their destination in rapid fashion, they could help solve that last mile challenge. Of course, you can’t expect everyone to ride a skateboard, powered by batteries or not. Nevertheless, Tran and his partners at Boosted Boards, Sanjay Dastoor and Matt Ulmen, have done the electric bike one better: they removed the bike.1
Tran’s impromptu sales pitch in the hall outside the main trade show at South By Southwest was the kind of thing that happens every year at the festival. An event that began as a music confab for slackers and Springsteen-wannabes has expanded so much that the Interactive portion of the festival has become bigger than the music and film events that launched it back in the 1980s. In March 2013, I was among 30,621 people who’d paid to attend the Interactive shindig, and throughout the event, the Austin Convention Center provided a showcase for dozens of entrepreneurs who were on the make, hustling, trying to sell their ideas. And those ideas invariably were about Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper.
Sure, the conference’s trade show had booths occupied by high-profile, multinational companies—Amazon, 3M, and Chevrolet—but there were also scads of motivated entrepreneurs, including people like Jaime Emmanuelli and Jon Miller, the owners and founders of Hive Lighting, a start-up company. Standing in front of their brightly lit booth in the trade show, the two thirty-somethings were pitching their high-output lights, which offer a Smaller Lighter Cheaper alternative to the conventional lights that are used for stage and movie productions. Their key technology: plasma bulbs, which use a radio frequency to excite inert gases and take them into the plasma state. That offers advantages in both efficiency—measured in lumens per watt—and in the amount of heat produced by the lamp. Hive’s plasma lights use about half the power of metal-halide lights and about a sixth of what’s needed by incandescent lights. That efficiency gain can mean big savings for a movie or TV production that’s shooting a scene in a typical house. Using Hive’s lights, the production crew can simply plug their lights into the wall sockets in the house. If the production were using older, conventional lights, they would likely need to rent and manage a portable generator in order to have enough power to properly light the set. That generator would, in turn, require the use of lots of thick electric cables, connector boxes, and other equipment.