Current reprocessing techniques produce plutonium and enriched uranium, which are potential bomb materials. There are political and technical workarounds, though.
• First, it should be said that nuclear energy has done more to eliminate existing nuclear weapons from the world than any other activity. Megatons to Megawatts (I guess they decided against Megadeaths to Megawatts) is the name of a joint U.S.-Russia program to convert warheads into fuel. It began in 1994, and currently 10 percent of the electricity Americans use comes from Russian missiles and bombs. The goal is to convert twenty thousand nuclear warheads into fuel by 2013; that’s enough energy to run the whole U.S. nuclear fleet for two years. Two processes are involved. One “downblends” weapons-grade highly enriched (95 percent) uranium to low-enriched (5 percent) uranium for reactor use. The other converts plutonium into a “mixed oxide” (MOX) that also works as a fuel. In the next few years, the United States will supplement Russian efforts by commencing to forge our own nuclear swords into plowshares in Tennessee and at a new facility in South Carolina. This whole astonishing program has occurred with scant media attention and zero public hoopla. (Freeman Dyson tells me that’s good: “Important moves toward disarmament always go better when they are not reported in the media. Historic examples are Nixon’s getting rid of U.S. biological weapons and George Bush Senior getting rid of most of the U.S. tactical nukes. Both these big disarmament moves were done quietly so that they did not become political issues.”)
No other weapons system creates so much civilian value when dismantled. The sundry calls from around the world and across the political spectrum to eventually eliminate everybody’s nuclear weapons inventory and apparatus can draw on this strong additional incentive.
There is logic for and against the argument that expanding nuclear energy expands the possibility of nuclear weapons proliferation. The observation that “more nuclear means more nuclear, period” has bracing clarity. A worldwide nuclear energy renaissance involves massive expansion of nuclear skills, nuclear equipment, and nuclear materials—a whole nuclear economy. Nuclear weapons programs should have no problem quietly expanding in the shadow of all that, right?
Among the critiques of this energy-to-weapons sequence, perhaps the strongest argument is that it hasn’t occurred that way in history. Israel, India, South Africa, and North Korea secretly developed their weapons capability from research reactors, not from an energy program. Of the thirty-one nations currently using nuclear power, only seven have nuclear weapons (the United States, Russia, England, France, China, India, and Pakistan), and in each case the weapons program came first. North Korea and Israel have weapons but no nuclear power (though both have energy projects under way).
What I hear from people in the intelligence world is that antiproliferation efforts are going surprisingly well, mainly because international cooperation is inclusive and intense. It doesn’t matter if a particular American administration is in bad odor; every nation has its own strong motivation to have no nuclear weapons capability in non-state-actor hands. The full argument against the nuclear terrorism threat is worth hearing from John Robb, who runs the blog Global Guerillas and wrote Brave New War (2007):Though most of the worry over WMDs [weapons of mass destruction] has focused on nuclear weapons, those aren’t the real long-term problem. Not only is the vast manufacturing capability of a nation-state required to produce the basic nuclear materials, but those materials are difficult to manipulate, transport, and turn into weapons. Nor is it easy to assemble a nuke from parts bought on the black market; if it were, nation-states like Iran, which have far more resources at their disposal than terrorist groups do, would be doing just that instead of resorting to internal production.
It’s also unlikely that a state would give terrorists a nuclear weapon. Sovereignty and national prestige are tightly connected to the production of nukes. Sharing them with terrorists would grant immense power to a group outside the state’s control—the equivalent of giving Osama bin Laden the keys to the presidential palace. If that isn’t deterrent enough, the likelihood of retaliation is, since states, unlike terrorist groups, have targets that can be destroyed. The result of a nuclear explosion in Moscow or New York would very probably be the annihilation of the country that manufactured the bomb, once its identity was determined—as it surely would be, since no plot of that size can remain secret for long.
Even in the very unlikely case that a nuclear weapon did end up in terrorist hands, it would be a single horrible incident, rather than an ongoing threat. The same is true of dirty bombs, which disperse radioactive material through conventional explosives. No, the real long-term danger from small groups is the use of biotechnology to build weapons of mass destruction. In contrast with nuclear technology, biotech’s knowledge and tools are already widely dispersed—and their power is increasing exponentially.
(I’ll get to Robb’s final point on biotech in a later chapter. I should add that his view of Iran is that, whatever its ambitions for nuclear weapons, it does actually need nuclear energy, and that gives the world bargaining leverage on exactly how Iran proceeds with nuclear technology.)
• The many minds over many decades that have focused on preventing further nuclear proliferation have converged in the last few years on a single, all-encompassing strategy—an international fuel bank. Rid the world of the creation of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium and of hidden pockets of those materials by closely managing the world market in nuclear fuels and spent fuels so that unsupervised enrichment and reprocessing cannot occur. There is no explosive capability in nuclear fuel or spent fuel by themselves: They’re far too dilute. Many nations would welcome the outsourcing of their fuel reprocessing, because it is so expensive and tricky, and it would be a great relief for them to have their nuclear waste go away to be treated as someone else’s resource or service instead of lingering as a politically fraught local storage problem. The nation would basically rent nuclear fuel from a trusted international facility that comes around like the milkman to drop off milk and pick up empty bottles.
That is the idea behind GNEP—the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership—which could wind up being the one lasting accomplishment of the George W. Bush administration. Put forward in 2006, GNEP was blasted by antinuclear organizations and criticized by the National Academy of Sciences; but the partnership was quickly joined by eighteen nations, including France, Japan, Canada, and Britain, and it got support from the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, crucial for program oversight. Part of the GNEP scheme is to develop new proliferation-resistant reprocessing techniques and new reactor designs such as the sodium-cooled fast reactor, which breeds its own fuel, reducing traffic in nuclear fuel as well as reducing spent-fuel mass and longevity. Whether or not the GNEP prevails, it is just the most ambitious of several multinational fuel-cycle initiatives being proposed and funded. One or a combination of them is likely to be operative by the 2010s. President Obama announced his support of a nuclear fuel bank program before a global audience in Prague in early 2009.
• One reason the French were able to build a fleet of fifty-six reactors providing nearly all of the nation’s electricity in just twenty years was an efficient licensing process that took four years instead of the twelve years that became standard in the United States. As a result, France has the cleanest air in Europe, the lowest electrical bills, and a $4 billion export business selling energy to all its neighbors, including Green Germany and nuclear Britain (2 gigawatts flows west under the English Channel). France shut down its last coal-fired plant in 2004. It emits 70 percent less carbon dioxide per capita than the United States.
Lessons learned. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has adopted the French approach, with design standardization and a licensing process based on the model that emerged in Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. Reactor manufacturers can get their designs preapproved. One next-generation reactor, from Westinghouse, has already been approved, and two others, from AREVA and GE, are in process.
Many reactor-site approvals already exist, left over from the 1970s boom. Once a utility decides to build, it applies for a single combined construction and operating license, and the NRC has three years to grant or deny the license. Get the data, hear the critiques (including those from environmentalists), make adjustments, decide, and move on. With standardized designs and standardized parts, construction of large new plants should be completed in four years.
This is the kind of mobilization that is needed to deal with climate change. It should be applied to every activity affecting greenhouse gases, including renewable-energy technologies, transportation, agricultural practices, and city design.
Seeking that kind of acceleration, in 2005 Congress passed the Energy Policy Act with incentives for wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels, wave and tidal power, clean coal, efficiency and conservation . . . and nuclear. As the Economist summarized it, the actoffers four different types of subsidies for new reactors. First, it grants up to $2 billion in insurance against regulatory delays and lawsuits to the first six reactors to receive licences and start construction. Second, it extends an older law limiting a utility’s liability to $10 billion in the event of a nuclear accident. Third, it provides a tax credit of 1.8 cents per kilowatt hour for the first 6,000 megawatts generated by new plants. Fourth, and most importantly, it offers guarantees for an indeterminate amount of loans to fund new nuclear reactors and other types of power plant using “innovative” technology.
The act includes funds for research on what are called generation IV reactors. (The reactors currently operating in the United States are generation II, and the ones now being constructed are referred to as generation III-plus—with better built-in safety and efficiency.) Generation IV designs, which are not expected to be commercial before the 2030s, aim for maximum all-around sustainability through lower construction and operating costs, superhigh fuel efficiency, greatly reduced waste with shorter-term radioactivity, and high temperatures capable of generating hydrogen or desalinating water. The goal is to solve permanently every one of the four major problems with current reactors—safety, cost, waste, and proliferation. A consortium of ten nations and the European Union is carrying out the research.
James Hansen suggests that the development of generation IV reactors could be sped up by applying some of the $28 billion already collected from the nuclear industry for waste storage: “This fund should be used to develop fast reactors that consume nuclear waste, and thorium reactors to prevent the creation of new long-lived nuclear waste.” The reactors he’s referring to are the integral fast reactor, which, he says, “can burn existing nuclear waste and surplus weapons-grade uranium and plutonium, making electrical power in the process,” and the liquid-fluoride thorium reactor. Full-scale working reactors, Hansen proposes, could be developed first in China, India, or South Korea, where the need is greatest, with American or European technical support. Deployed in the United States, the waste-burning reactors would make Yucca Mountain irrelevant.
Freeman Dyson comments: “Next-generation reactors could make a big difference. I like especially Lowell Wood’s scheme for building a thorium breeder that runs for fifty years without refueling. It is buried deep underground, and after the thorium is burned, it stays in the ground and is never touched.” Details on the design may be found in a 2008 paper in Progress in Nuclear Energy. The five authors conclude with the reactor’s advantages: “No more mining, no more enrichment operations, zero spent-fuel handling, no reprocessing or waste storage facilities, and the reactor vessel is the (robust) burial cask.”
• The new nukes with the greatest potential appeal for environmentalists are microreactors. They speak directly to Amory Lovins’s call for distributed micropower (“The cheapest, most reliable power is typically produced at or near customers”). They have the advantage of capital costs and construction times a fraction of what is required for the standard gigawatt-plus big nuclear plants, and the development time for new designs also is drastically shorter.
Right now Russia is building 35-megawatt reactors that float on barges, for use starting in 2010 along the nation’s newly navigable Arctic coast, and Russia’s developing-world clientele is expected to buy some for remote coastal villages. In Japan, Toshiba has invented a 10-to-50-megawatt “nuclear battery” the company calls 4S—for “super safe, small, and simple”—expected to be ready around 2015. Not to be outdone in the acronym department, the Lawrence Livermore Lab in California has a 20-megawatt reactor design it calls SSTAR—“small, sealed, transportable autonomous reactor.” The idea with these small units is that they can be trucked in and planted in the ground, and no fuel goes in, no waste comes out—they’re simply replaced decades later.
A company in New Mexico called Hyperion is building 25-megawatt reactors using a uranium hydride-based design from the Los Alamos National Laboratory; the company claims it has a hundred firm orders at $25 million per reactor. A company in Oregon, NuScale, has a 40-megawatt light-water reactor design it says can be in operation by 2015. Then there’s the pebble-bed modular reactor being developed in South Africa. Meltdown-proof, it also can operate underground, at a scale of 100 megawatts.
To my mind, the Green path forward begins with environmentalists realizing that nuclear power will grow no matter what we do. Our customary opposition would make it grow badly—slowly, expensively, unsystemically, and with dangerously poor overall coordination. But if we encourage it in the right way, nuclear energy growing well would mean that it minimizes humanity’s carbon-loading of the atmosphere; that it collaborates well with other carbon-free or superefficient energy forms; that it helps generate other Green services such as desalination or hydrogen; that its uranium and thorium make minimum lasting mess on their way from the ground and back to it; that it helps eliminate nuclear weapons; that it securely energizes cities and thereby helps reduce world poverty; and, if something better comes along, that it gracefully gives way to its replacement.
Glow-in-the-dark Greens might push especially hard for first-rate microreactors and help them to find customers. We might insist that the next version of the Kyoto Protocol does not repeat the disgrace of denying carbon credits for nuclear power. We might lobby for open-sourcing the various reactor designs, for public debugging and trust. We might encourage investigating nuclear propulsion on commercial ships, the current source of 4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions—double the amount generated by airplane traffic. And as we promote plug-in cars, we might note that they reduce carbon emissions only if their electricity comes from Green sources such as nuclear, wind, hydro, and solar.
If hydrogen becomes a practical fuel, we might support high-temperature generation IV reactors that specialize for hydrogen. The same machines could drive desalination, the most energy-intensive source of water and also the least naturally disruptive way to provide water for our increasingly coastal populations. Because coal is now understood to be the long-term systemic horror we once thought nuclear was, we should closely monitor the real-world effectiveness of coal disincentives and make sure they work. To encourage public confidence and familiarity with nuclear, we can follow Sweden’s and France’s example by opening all reactors to public tours. (A third of all Swedes have toured a nuclear plant, which helps to explain why 80 percent of the population supports their continued use.)
For our fellow environmentalists still queasy about nuclear, we might quote Al Gore’s mentor Roger Revelle, who sponsored the atmospheric carbon dioxide studies that first exposed the inconvenient truth about climate change. Revelle regarded nuclear as “much more benign” than other energy sources. He said, “What we ought to do is imitate the French and Japanese. They haven’t got any phobias about it.” We can even invoke the Sierra Club, which pushed for nuclear power in the late 1960s and early 1970s as preferable to hydroelectric dams. They were right.
• The atmosphere responds to the aggregate of all human activities. What the United States does about nuclear is not the main event.
The squ
atters’ rights organization in South Africa, Abahlali baseMjondolo, has declared: “Electricity is not a luxury. It is a basic right. It is essential for children to do their homework; for safe cooking and heating; for people to charge phones, to be able to participate in the national debate through electronic communication (TV discussion programmes, email, etc); for lighting to keep women safe and, most of all, to stop the fires that terrorise us.”
About half of India has no grid electricity. What power there is comes from diesel fuel trucked around to local generators. A New York Times article told of the fate of one village:Chakai Haat once had power at least a few hours each day, and it changed the rhythm of life. Petty thefts dropped because the village was lighted up. The government installed wells to irrigate the fields. Rice mills opened, offering jobs.
The boon did not last long. Strong rains knocked down the power lines. The rice mills closed. Darkness swathed the village once more.
Five out of six people live in the developing world—about 5.7 billion in 2010. One way or another, the world’s poor will get grid electricity. Where that electricity comes from will determine what happens with the climate.
Live-linked footnotes for this chapter, along with updates, additions, and illustrations, may be found online at www.sbnotes.com.
• 5 •
Green Genes
A truly extraordinary variety of alternatives to the chemical control of insects is available. Some are already in use and have achieved brilliant success. Others are in the stage of laboratory testing. Still others are little more than ideas in the minds of imaginative scientists, waiting for the opportunity to put them to the test. All have this in common: they are biological solutions, based on understanding of the living organisms they seek to control, and of the whole fabric of life to which these organisms belong. Specialists representing various areas of the vast field of biology are contributing—entomologists, pathologists, geneticists, physiologists, biochemists, ecologists—all pouring their knowledge and their creative inspirations into the formation of a new science of biotic controls.
Whole Earth Discipline_An Ecopragmatist Manifesto Page 14