The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

by Daniel Yergin

  To date, the NRC has given extensions to about half of the 104 commercial reactors in the United States. Without those extensions, nuclear power plants in the United States would be in the process of shutting down today. Even with extensions, there is still, in view of the growth ahead, the question of maintaining the 20 percent nuclear share of electricity. Part of that is being achieved by upgrading the permitted capacity of existing plants. But new plants will be needed as well.10

  “WE ARE GOING TO RESTART”

  In February 2010 the Obama administration announced loan guarantees—to the Southern Company and its partners—to build the first two new nuclear plants in the United States in many decades. It did so under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which provides not only federal loan guarantees but also tax incentives for the first six gigawatts of nuclear capacity to come online by 2020. The units are going to be built at the existing Vogtle plant in Georgia. “We are going to restart the nuclear industry in this country,” pledged the White House energy “czar.” The first six projects are also eligible for several hundred millions of dollars of federal funds to compensate them for any “breakdown in the regulatory process” or litigation. This innovative provision was introduced to offset the way in which the regulatory processes and litigation drag on for decades, dramatically driving up costs. In effect, the federal government is insuring the developers against actions by other parts of the government that cause inordinate, expensive delays.11

  This set of policies recharged the prospects for nuclear power in the United States. Some 30 new reactors were proposed, 20 of them with specific sites and reactor types. All of the 20 would be built on existing nuclear sites, alongside currently operating plants. Subsequently, many of these proposals faded away in view of the still-challenging regulatory and cost environment.

  One critical objective in the new designs is to incorporate more passive safety features. Another is to standardize the reactor designs. “One of the greatest missed opportunities with our current fleet of reactors was the failure to standardize around a limited number of designs,” said Gregory Jackzo, the current chairman of the NRC. “That is not an efficient approach from a regulatory standpoint or an operational standpoint.”12

  One potential solution is a new variety of small and medium reactors—or SMRs, as they are known. Because of their size they should in principle be easier to site, and their simplified designs—and use of modular units—should bring down costs and shorten construction times. Indeed, the idea is to achieve economies of scale not by size, as was traditionally the case with reactors, but by manufacturing SMRs modularly and in greater volume. At the same time, SMRs would reduce the financial risk and complexity that come with the development and construction of large reactors.13 Yet it will likely take years for SMRs to be realized technically and for their economic viability to be established.

  “DEEP GEOLOGIC STORAGE”

  A perennial uncertainty is how to handle nuclear waste at the end of the fuel cycle. In the United States, despite the expenditure of many billions of dollars and two decades of study, the development of a deep underground repository in Yucca Mountain in Nevada—first proposed in 1987—remained stalemated. In 2010 the Obama administration officially pulled the plug on Yucca Mountain. In France, used nuclear fuel is reprocessed; that is, the waste is treated to recover uranium and plutonium, which can be reused. The used fuel that is left over is highly radioactive waste that is vitrified—essentially turned into glass—and stored for later disposal.

  Nuclear waste has, for many years, seemed an almost insoluble problem, at least politically in the United States. But when seen in relative terms, the problem of nuclear waste starts to look different. The physical amount of nuclear waste that would have to be stored is only a tiny fraction of the amount of carbon waste that would have to be managed and injected underground with a major carbon-storage program. All the nuclear waste generated by the entire civilian nuclear program would fill no more than a single football field to the height of ten yards. By comparison, the output of CO2 from a single coal plant, put into compressed form, would require about 600 football fields—and that would be just one year’s output.

  Moreover, thinking has changed about the criterion that was established for “deep geologic storage”—10,000 years risk-free underground. Specifically, that requirement means that the people living near such storage would receive no more than 15 millirem of radiation a year for the next 10,000 years—equivalent to the amount of radiation that one receives in three round-trip transcontinental flights. But 10,000 years is a very long time. Going backward, it predates the rise of human civilization by several thousand years.

  Is there not a different way to handle the problem? As it is, the nuclear waste, when first generated, is stored for several years in onsite pools while it cools off. A consensus is developing that the better course is to store it in specified, controlled sites, in concrete casks, with a timeframe of 100 years that would provide time to find longer-term solutions—and perhaps find safe ways to use the fuel again.

  But waste ties into another, more intractable issue.

  PROLIFERATION

  In October 2003 a German freighter named the BBC China picked up its cargo in Dubai, in the Persian Gulf, and then made its way through the Strait of Hormuz into the Suez Canal on the way into the Mediterranean and its destination, the Libyan capital of Tripoli. The voyage appeared uneventful. But the ship was being carefully monitored. Partway through the canal, the captain was abruptly ordered to change direction and head toward a port in southern Italy. A search there revealed that the ship was clandestinely carrying equipment for making a nuclear bomb.

  The interdiction actually speeded up a process that had begun earlier in the year and that would, by the end of 2003, lead Libya to begin to normalize relations with the United States and Britain, and reengage, with the global economy (until civil war erupted in Libya in 2011). In the course of so doing, Libya renounced its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, specifically nuclear weapons, and turned over the equipment it had already received, along with detailed plans it had acquired about how to make an atomic bomb. It also paid compensation to the families on the Pan Am passenger jet that was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland.14

  The handwritten notations on the plans made abundantly clear where the nuclear know-how had come from. A network run by A. Q. Khan had promised a full nuclear weapons system to the Libyans for $100 million. Known as the father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb and celebrated as a national hero in Pakistan, Khan had stolen the designs for centrifuges while working for a company in the Netherlands. After returning to Pakistan, he had supervised the acquisition from a global gray market of the equipment and additional know-how that culminated in 1998 in Pakistan’s first atomic weapons test and turned it into a nuclear-weapons state. But as the years had gone on, Khan had also turned himself into the world’s preeminent serial proliferator, with a network that could sell weapons capability to whoever would buy it. Khan’s international network played a primary role in helping both Iran and North Korea in their quest for nuclear weapons. And Khan and his network were very open about advertising their capabilities at symposia in Islamabad and even taking promotional booths at international military trade shows.

  After the interception of the BBC China, an embarrassed Pakistani government sought to distance itself from Khan. He was arrested and compelled to go on television to apologize—after a fashion. “It pains me to realize in retrospect that my entire life achievements of providing foolproof national security to my nation could have been placed in serious jeopardy on account of my activities which were based on good faith but on errors of judgment,” he said. He was put under house arrest, but then after a few years was pardoned.15

  Khan’s grim specter haunts the global nuclear economy. For he graphically demonstrated not only the existence of a covert global marketplace for nuclear weapons capability but also how the development of nuclear power can also be a mechanism, a
s well as a convenient cloak, for developing nuclear weapons.

  When it comes to proliferation, civilian nuclear power can bridge into nuclear weapons at two key points. The first is during the enrichment process, where the centrifuges can take the uranium up to the 90 percent concentration of the U-235 isotope necessary for an atomic bomb. That appears to be the route Iran is taking. The other point of risk occurs with the reprocessing of spent fuel. Reprocessing substantially reduces the amount of high-level waste that has to be stored. It involves extracting plutonium from the spent fuel, which can then be reused as a fuel in reactors. However, plutonium is also a weapons-grade material, and it can be diverted to build a nuclear device, as India did in the 1970s, or it can be stolen by those who want to make their own atomic bomb.

  The great argument in favor of reprocessing is that it gets more usage out of a given amount of uranium and thus extends the fuel supply. The counterargument is that it expands the dangers of proliferation and terrorism. The risks provide the rationale for avoiding reprocessing and instead keeping spent fuel in interim storage in order to leave time for better technological answers over the next century. Moreover, there is no shortage of natural uranium.

  Overall, it is clear that a global expansion of nuclear power will require a stronger antiproliferation regime. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, implemented by the International Atomic Energy Agency, is built on safeguards and inspections, but the advance of Iran’s nuclear weapons program demonstrates the need for improving the system. But it is also clear that negotiating a new regime will be extremely difficult.

  Safety would always be a fundamental concern. It was recognized that a nuclear accident somewhere in the world or a successful terrorist breach of a nuclear power plant could once again arouse public opposition and stall nuclear power development. The latest generation of nuclear reactors aims to enhance safety with simpler designs and even passive safety features. They are also intended to reduce risks of nuclear proliferation and to downsize the amount of spent fuel that needs to be stored. The next generation of reactors are intended to carry these objectives further.

  NUCLEAR RENAISSANCE

  Today nuclear power represents 15 percent of total world electricity. A good deal of new capacity has come on line since the beginning of the century—just not in the United States and Europe. Between 2000 and 2010, 39 nuclear power plants went into operation. Most of those were in Asia. Indeed, about four fifths of the 60 units currently under construction are in just four countries—China, India, South Korea, and Russia. China embarked on a rapid buildup to more than quadruple its nuclear power capacity by 2020 and aims to have almost as many nuclear plants by then as does the United States. Both India and South Korea are also targeting substantial growth.16

  Nuclear power is also on the agenda for other countries. In December 2009 the United Arab Emirates, facing rapidly rising demand for electricity and concerned about shortages of natural gas for electric generation, awarded to a South Korean consortium a $20 billion contract to build four nuclear reactors. Cost was not the only reason. It was also because South Korean companies had built more nuclear reactors in the last several years than any other country. The UAE expects the reactors to start becoming operational in 2017.17

  This expansion became known as the “nuclear renaissance.” Even in Europe, the opposition that had blocked nuclear power since the rise of the Green political parties and the days of Chernobyl seemed to be ebbing away. Finland is building a new reactor, its fifth, on an island in the Baltic Sea, although its cost overruns have become a subject of great controversy. Nevertheless, Finland has said it will go ahead with two new reactors. In Britain, climate change and dwindling supplies of North Sea natural gas opened a public discussion about building up to ten new nuclear power plants. The coalition government, led by Conservative David Cameron, reaffirmed the previous government’s commitment to nuclear power, despite the opposition of its Liberal Democrats junior coalition partner, which has a traditional European-Green orientation. In Sweden, public opinion now ranks CO2 as a bigger threat than radioactive waste. Sweden has shut down two nuclear plants, but ten are still operating, and, in fact, are being upgraded in terms of capacity. While “decommissioning” is still formally on the books, in reality, nothing of the sort is likely to happen. As a senior Swedish official put it, “decommissioning is still an official policy.” “But,” he added, “any further decommissionings are as likely in 30 years—or 300 years—as in three years.”18

  Even Germany seemed set for a turnaround. In 1999 in Germany, the Social Democratic–Green coalition decided to “phase out” the country’s 17 reactors. More than a decade later, Germany remained officially committed to the phaseout of nuclear power, which currently supplies over a quarter of its electricity. But Christian Democrat Chancellor Angela Merkel conveyed her strong support for nuclear generation and called the phaseout “absolutely wrong.” In 2010 a new law extended the life of Germany’s nuclear reactors by an average of twelve years, although opposition parties vowed to challenge the extension in court.19 But the chancellor strongly reaffirmed her conviction that nuclear power needed to be part of the power mix.

  France is building one massive new reactor. France accounts for about half of Europe’s total nuclear power–generating capacity. And, as it turns out, nuclear power is under some circumstances just too good a deal to pass up. Italy, like Germany, has a moratorium on new nuclear power. Despite their official opposition, both countries import a good deal of nuclear-generated electricity from the world’s largest exporter of electricity—France.20

  In addition to France, the other major industrial country with a strong commitment to nuclear power was Japan. It targeted 40 percent of its electricity to be nuclear by 2020 and then aimed to go even further and derive half of its electricity from nuclear in 2030. It was a determined national commitment.

  That too was part of the nuclear renaissance.

  FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI

  Then came the earthquake. The collision between two tectonic plates off the coast of Japan on March 11, 2011, set off the most powerful earthquake ever registered in Japan and a tsunami on a scale never imagined. The giant wave overwhelmed the sea defenses along Japan’s northeast coast, taking a terrible toll in human life.

  Certainly a wave so huge had never been imagined when the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear station had begun operating four decades earlier. The complex was little damaged by the earthquake itself. As soon as the earthquake struck, the reactors “scrammed”—shut down automatically—as they were supposed to. Along with much of the power in the region, the electricity that supplied the station was knocked out, putting the complex into a precarious situation called “station blackout.” The response to that point was according to plan. The backup power system was supposed to kick in, but the tsunami had been much higher than the sea wall, and it flooded the station, including the backup generator, so that it could not operate. That meant no lights in the control room. No readings on the controls. No ability to operate equipment. And, most crucially, no way to keep the pumps working that delivered water to the reactors.

  The backup power was the safety margin. When hurricanes Katrina and Rita knocked out the electric grid along the U.S. Gulf coast in 2005, the backup diesel-powered electricity kept the nuclear plants in proper operating condition until the external power could be restored. But after the tsunami, without the power to keep the pumps working, the reactors were deprived of the critical coolant they needed to moderate the heat generated by the chain reactions.

  That loss of coolant was what set off the nuclear accident, which unfolded over weeks: explosions of hydrogen, roofs blown off the containment structures, venting and spread of radiation, fires, and, most critically, the partial meltdown of the nuclear cores. Workers, suited up against the radiation, working only by flashlight and listening for hydrogen explosions, risked their lives struggling to bring water into the reactors, drain out radioactive water, get the emergency pow
er back on, and enable the control equipment to start working again. Thousands of people in the area were evacuated. As the weeks went on, the accident, originally rated as a 4, was raised to a 5 and then a 7, the highest level, the same assigned to the Chernobyl accident a quarter century earlier, although the actual effects in terms of radiation release at Fukushima Daiichi appeared to be much lower. Still, the extent of the accident was such that it was estimated that it would take six to nine months to reach what was called a “cold shutdown.” Some or all of the reactors would be damaged beyond repair and would be complete write-offs.

  What was also damaged was the global prospect for nuclear power. The structural integrity of the complex had held up well in the earthquake. The accident was the result of an immense act of nature—and what proved to be poor decisions in understanding the potential size of a tsunami, protecting the site, and in positioning the backup power system. If the plant had not been flooded, the accident would almost certainly not have occurred. In addition, the Japanese governmental system was overwhelmed trying to deal with the nuclear accident. As a government report on the accident put it, “Consistent preparation for severe accidents was insufficient.”

  But the fact that it did occur, and the difficulties—and time required—to get it under control, shook the structure of confidence of governments and publics around the world about nuclear power that had been built up in the quarter century since Chernobyl.

  Japan itself faced what was estimated as a $300 billion cost to recover from the earthquake and the tsunami, the most expensive price tag on any natural disaster ever. The credibility of the nuclear industry was gravely injured. But nuclear power would continue to be part of Japan’s energy mix, although siting new plants will likely be even more difficult for some years, and there will be much closer scrutiny of existing plants and operations. The goal of 50 percent nuclear almost certainly will be abandoned, with greater reliance placed instead on imported LNG, increased emphasis on efficiency and renewables, particularly solar and possibly geothermal, and a stepped-up research effort.