05 January 09

As we enter the new year it may be instructive to hearken back to 1972 and take a look at the greatest environmental bestseller of all time, The Limits to Growth, from the Club of Rome. While its predictions of what would happen to human society and the earth itself was sometimes harshly critiqued at the time, 37 years later it is startling to see how prescient it was. It is our duty as stewards of the earth to interrupt the Club of Rome’s impressive record of prognostication.

The Limits to Growth modeled the interaction of population, food production, industrial production, pollution, and consumption of non-renewable natural resources, and predicted what would happen to our planet if we proceeded with business as usual. In my recently published book Prescription for the Planet, the reader will find a blueprint for a peaceful yet transformative global revolution that upends the business as usual scenario in order to solve many of the crises predicted back in 1972. As we near the end of the first decade of the 21st century, we find ourselves facing problems that seem all but intractable but which, with the necessary resolve, can likely still be solved in such a way as to greatly improve our future and that of our progeny.

One of the three technologies that underpin the proposed global revolution is that of the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR), a type of nuclear energy system that nullifies most of the arguments against nuclear power that have been voiced for decades. Discussions about the advisability of using this so-called Generation IV nuclear power often end up as fruitless exchanges because those taking positions on either side of the issue end up speaking about two very different things. It’s as if we were observing a discussion of the hazards of flying, with one side discussing the latest avionics and the other side talking about biplanes from the early 20th century.

Since publishing my book I have had many such discussions with both individual citizens and representatives of various environmental groups, among them Greenpeace, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Rocky Mountain Institute, the Sierra Club, etc. What I have observed is that those most invested in a doctrinaire anti-nuclear position most adamantly persist in refusing to acknowledge the transformative advances represented by IFR technology. It is understandable that the specifics of this technology and the state of its development are unknown to most people, due in no small part to the fact that the U.S. Department of Energy has purposely squelched such information since 1994. But claims that the technology is untested, untried, needs decades of R&D, and other such claims is simply untrue, and ignorance of the real state of affairs is no excuse for dismissing this crucially important technology.

The article [ http://www.marklynas.org/2008/11/14/nuclear-power-greenpeace-responds] that Greenpeace submitted for Mark Lynas’ website is in large part inapplicable to discussion of the IFR and to its commercial incarnation as embodied by the PRISM [1] reactor system which, contrary to popular belief, is actually ready to build. With sufficient support from the Obama administration, the design could be certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and we could have the first commercial PRISM reactor up and running within five years. After that it would be possible to build hundreds of them every year if we so desired, for unlike all the Generation II and Gen III reactors, the PRISM doesn’t require a pressure vessel, since it operates at atmospheric pressure. Therefore the construction bottleneck resulting from the fact that there is only one foundry in the world capable of building reactor pressure vessels will not impact the deployment of the PRISM.

I will not attempt to match the Greenpeace article for sheer length, since so much of it doesn’t apply to the PRISM system. For those readers unfamiliar with IFR technology and how it solves the myriad problems discussed in the Greenpeace article, I would refer them to my book where it is all duly explained [2]. I will deal only generally with the issues that Greenpeace discusses at length, except where specifics require further explanation.

The first section of the Greenpeace article deals with the disposal of nuclear waste and its troublesome longevity. Not only does the IFR system NOT produce long-lived nuclear waste, but it actually consumes the spent fuel from the current generation of reactors, solving the problem productively instead of burying it. Whereas lightwater reactors (LWR) use less than 1% of the energy in mined uranium, the IFR system utilizes 100% of it. Once uranium and/or plutonium (from spent fuel or decommissioned nuclear weapons) enters the IFR power plant, it never emerges except in the form of electricity and a small amount of short-lived fission products.

Instead of being burdened with spent nuclear fuel with half-lives of tens of thousands of years, the fission products resulting from the fast reactor (as exemplified by the PRISM system) have half-lives measured in decades. Within a few hundred years, the radiation from this waste will be below normal background radiation levels. Yet it will exit the plant entombed in borosilicate glass which will resist leaching any of it into the environment for thousands of years, long after any radiation has dissipated.

The exceptions to this are the fission products of Iodine-129 and technetium-99. These do have long half-lives, with I-129 being mentioned specifically in the Greenpeace article. These are so-called soft beta emitters that can be incorporated into the vitrified waste stream and would pose no public health hazards in that form, being bound up for thousands of years. But if that isn’t safe enough, the most logical—albeit politically incorrect—method of disposal of the vitrified waste from IFRs would eliminate even that distant problem. That would be the practice of dropping the shielded canisters of vitrified waste into deep ocean areas with deep muddy bottoms. The canisters would bury themselves in the mud, and during the thousands of years that they would sit there without any chance of leaching anything into the environment even more mud would build up above, incorporating the vitrified substance and the casks containing it into the earth itself. Any I-129 that ever managed to escape into the ocean water thousands of years hence would be so diluted as to be completely innocuous. Indeed, more I-129 already exists on the surface of the earth from atmospheric nuclear testing in the past than would ever conceivably be an issue using this deep-sea disposal method.

That being said, both Tc-99 and I-129 can be transmuted into elements with considerably shorter half-lives, as has been demonstrated at Hanford’s Fast Flux Test Facility. But the extra expense of isolating and transmuting these substances would really be overkill. I realize that international agreement would be necessary to make such deep-sea disposal of the vitrified waste from IFRs acceptable to all, but since there is so little waste produced by IFRs it’s entirely feasible (and logical) to simply retain all the waste on-site (underground, for security reasons) during the lifetime of the power plant (about 60 years or so). That leaves us about ¾ of a century to come to some agreement on this politically volatile but scientifically rational method of disposal. Call me an optimist, but I think that 75 years hence logic and reason will prevail over the current state of political correctness.

The next section of the Greenpeace article discusses cancer incidence and other effects of radiation, primarily in regard to Chernobyl. Presumably this is as a warning that nuclear power is unsafe in general, that such an accident will ultimately happen again as long as we’re using fission to generate electricity. What isn’t mentioned is the fact that even when Chernobyl was built it was a recognizably inferior design that would never have been built in the USA, much less without a containment dome.

We can argue about how many people will ultimately contract cancer as a result of Chernobyl, but ultimately the issue raised by this is whether it’s possible to avoid such an accident in the future while still utilizing nuclear power. One might also raise the issue of how the tens of thousands (arguably hundreds of thousands) of deaths per year from coal use should be weighed against the risks of nuclear power.

It’s clear that nuclear power is not going to go away. Many countries are not only building new nuclear plants but are working toward the IFR concept, among them Japan, South Korea, India (currently building a 600MW fast reactor), China, France, and Russia (the only country with a long-running commercial fast reactor, with plans to build more). Pretending that convincing the USA or other individual countries to eschew the use of nuclear power—either fast reactors or lightwater reactors—will lead to the abandonment of these technologies worldwide is simply a convenient delusion to those who hope to eliminate nuclear power. Far more responsible would be involving the USA and other developed countries in the deployment of the safest possible reactor design in all those countries that are inexorably and determinedly pursuing nuclear power.

Every reactor design hoping to be certified by the NRC must meet what seems to be a quite stringent probabilistic risk assessment standard. The PRISM design is superlative in this regard, orders of magnitude safer than any other design of reactor either already in use or on the drawing board. Imagine, if you will, that all of humanity’s energy needs were to be supplied solely by PRISM reactors, thousands of them all over the planet:

As we’ve seen earlier, the IFR concept as exemplified by the S-PRISM was developed specifically to be about as fail-safe as humanly possible. And the adjusted risk assessment numbers for even such a huge number of reactors reflect the success of the IFR concept. They reveal that we could expect a core melt accident on the order of Three Mile Island, with these thousands of reactors online, about once every 435,000 years! [3]

Let’s put that into perspective a little: The last ice age had glaciers gripping much of the earth’s land mass about 18,000 years ago. Neanderthals died out about 30,000 years ago. Homo heidelbergensis, a forerunner of homo sapiens, was living in Great Britain about 400,000 years ago, and possibly hunting elephants with spears, or at least scavenging their carcasses for meat. According to most archeologists, the protohumans that would eventually evolve into homo sapiens began using controlled fire between 200,000 and 400,000 years ago [4].

These reactor systems are capable of providing all the energy humanity needs without greenhouse gas emissions or radioactive releases except the inert vitrified waste described earlier. Arguments against the certification of this design and the building of a single PRISM reactor in order to establish hard data about costs and time to build are difficult to countenance in the face of the grave problems we face. And this modest goal is all that is being proposed for now. Once this data is in hand and a PRISM reactor is operating, then the discussion about whether to deploy them in numbers can be conducted based on facts rather than speculation.

Dr. James Hansen, arguably the world’s foremost climatologist, is advocating just such a limited course of action. While stressing energy efficiency programs and the development and deployment of renewable energy systems and a smart grid as our primary goals, Dr. Hansen sees IFRs as a responsible backup plan. If we find, after the five years necessary for such a plan have passed, that we’re on track to provide all the energy that humanity needs from renewable sources alone, then we’ll have spent a paltry sum for the insurance of having the IFR option at our disposal. If, on the other hand, we find that renewables simply cannot be expected to meet all our energy needs, we’ll be ready with a proven technology (remember, the forerunner of the PRISM ran for 30 years at Argonne National Laboratory with barely a hiccup) to take up the slack, to provide whatever portion of our energy needs can’t be met by renewables.

The GP article also pans nuclear based on the cost of building nuclear plants, but here too the numbers aren’t based on the factory-built modular PRISM design that promises to be very competitive. We can argue all day about how much GE claims they would cost with how much Greenpeace and others claim, but the one way to really know is to just build one. GE could build a non-certified full-sized reactor vessel within the next year for about $50-60 million. This would be exactly the same as a certified version and could be filled with water and mockup fuel assemblies as a prototype to both simulate a lifetime of operation and to expedite the certification process by the NRC.

Complaining about the amount of subsidization the nuclear power industry has received in the past and speculating baselessly about how uneconomical this type of nuclear power will be is useless. The fact is that we can know for certain at very little cost, and in very few years.

The argument that renewables can supply all our energy needs and that even such a modest plan as this is unnecessary is belied by Greenpeace’s own Energy Revolution studies. The China study [5] states right in the beginning ”...it is economically feasible to cut global CO2 emissions by almost 50% within the next 43 years.” Yet a prominent Greenpeace representative (who shall remain nameless to spare him embarrassment) offers these studies in support of his claim that, “Fortunately, for both the US and the planet, expanded use of nuclear power is unnecessary. Not only can the US address climate change without resorting to new reactors, so can India and China.” Where, pray tell, is the other 50+% of China’s energy supposed to come from?

By Greenpeace’s own assessment, China alone will have an energy shortfall of over 50% after renewable energy sources are taken into account. That leaves us with two choices: fossil fuels or nuclear power. IFRs can produce all that energy and then some without contributing any GHG emissions. Which leads us to yet another claim thrown about blithely by anti-nuclear activists: that the life cycle carbon costs of nuclear power are barely better (or even NO better) than fossil fuel power plants.

This is patently false even when considering the older, larger, and more complex Gen II lightwater reactors in use today around the world. The IPCC has stated that they are about on a par with solar or wind power systems in terms of life cycle carbon costs. But much of the emission load attributed to nuclear power systems are those arising from mining, milling, and enrichment of uranium. With IFRs we wouldn’t need to do any of that for nearly a thousand years even if we produced all the energy humanity needs solely from IFR systems. As for the construction of the power plants themselves, IFRs use significantly less concrete and steel than Gen II systems. So look at this [ http://www.marklynas.org/assets/2009/1/5/table.jpg] comparison of Gen II reactors, coal, and wind power from a study [6] done by the University of California at Berkeley.

Since concrete and steel comprise upwards of 95% of the construction inputs of both nuclear and other generating systems, it is glaringly obvious that if anyone wants to argue against IFRs based on life cycle carbon costs they will be only setting themselves up for extreme embarrassment. Remember, IFRs will be far better than even the figures above would indicate for New Nuclear, which is actually Old Nuclear.

The argument is also made that spending money on nuclear power plants will deplete the funds necessary for renewable energy supplies. Again, proceeding with the modest plan to certify and build a single PRISM reactor will provide the data we need to evaluate which types of technology can compete on a level playing field. There is no reason to bicker about it until we have the facts in hand, something we can easily do within a very short time and at negligible cost.

The Greenpeace article goes on to dispute Prescription for the Planet directly, claiming that these systems are nowhere near ready to be built, saying at one point, “In order for even prototype versions to be built, technological breakthroughs in material development will have to be made.” This and their other arguments to that effect are simply false. Either they don’t know the current state of the technology (very likely) or they do know, which would be worse yet. The PRISM is ready to be built. GE could start building one next week. The costly and time-consuming NRC certification process is the only reason it hasn’t already been done, that and the certain battle that awaits any attempt to deploy fast reactors because of their fuel breeding capabilities.

The contention that huge amounts of uranium would have to be mined in order to begin deploying these reactors is likewise baseless, but rather than deal with a lengthy explanation here I will simply refer readers to my book. We wouldn’t have to mine a speck of uranium for hundreds of years. Yes, we would have to reprocess current stockpiles of spent nuclear fuel from LWRs into fuel assemblies for IFRs, a one-time process that will be well worth the expense of building a small number of high-capacity plants for that purpose around the world. After that, all fuel production and recycling will take place in small batches within the confines of the IFR power plants, producing both the fuel they need for continued operation and that necessary to start up new plants of the same kind. This type of recycling from the spent oxide fuel form to the metallic IFR fuel should not be conflated with MOX reprocessing or with PUREX reprocessing such as that used elsewhere in the world.

The arguments that Greenpeace offers disputing my description of how plutonium and uranium can be used in IFRs don’t hold water either, but again I would direct the reader to my book rather than take the time to rewrite it here. I’m not trying to sell books here; just ask your library to order it and then you and all your friends can read it. It’s clear from the GP article that either they haven’t bothered to read it, or have ignored the facts. By the way, the MIT study cited in their article is duly critiqued in Prescription for the Planet.

The contention that France’s success with nuclear is a mirage is patently ridiculous. First of all the GP article argues that France has a higher per capita oil consumption than that of its neighbors. What does that have to do with France’s electricity use and production? Few generators use oil these days, in any country. Oil use reflects France’s driving habits. It says nothing about the considerable success of their nuclear power program, which contrary to GP’s claims provides about 80% of their electricity needs and at the same time provides so much excess as to make electricity France’s 4th largest export. GP states somewhat ambiguously, “the contribution of nuclear power to overall consumption was a mere 14%.” If they’re talking about electricity consumption, they’re off by a factor of about six.

I do hope that the writer(s) of the Greenpeace article will take the time to read Prescription in order to clear up the countless misconceptions obviously clouding their judgement about IFR systems. For those readers interested in more detail, as well as a fuller picture of how IFRs and the other two technologies discussed therein can lead to a much brighter future for our planet, I hope you’ll take a look for yourself. Don’t be misled by anti-nuclear arguments that don’t apply to this new power generation system that holds such transformative promise for solving the serious problems facing us today.

[1] When I speak of the PRISM throughout this article I am actually referring to the latest version of this design, actually called the S-PRISM (for Super Power Reactor Innovative Small Module). The “Super” designation resulted from a modification of the original design to increase both its physical size and its power output.

[2] You can read the Intro and first chapter at my website: www.prescriptionfortheplanet.com

[3] Based on GE-Hitachi risk assessment studies obtained by the author

[4] Prescription for the Planet, Chapter Eight

[5]  http://www.greenpeace.org/china/en/press/reports/energy-revolution

[6] Per Peterson, “Current and Future Activities for Nuclear Energy in the United States,” (Berkeley, CA: Department of Nuclear Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, Oct 11, 2006)