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 | THE FUROR OVER FISSION The Pros and Cons of Nuclear Power and Trying to Cope with Nuclear Fear November 20, 1996 |
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Scott Peterson of the NEI on the future of nuclear power:
A question from Anne Bullinger of Boston, MA
I live in the New England, which is heavily dependent on nuclear power for it's electricity. I've read about opening the electricity market up for competition. Since nuclear power plants are expensive to operate, most of them will go out of business, won't they? How do nuclear plants operating costs compare with coal and wind and solar?
Scott Peterson of the NEI responds:
Nuclear power's ability to generate clean, inexpensive electricity will be a valuable asset in the restructured electricity marketplace. As our country's second cheapest form of electricity, 110 nuclear plants currently meet the energy needs of 65 million homes at an average production cost of 1.92 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to 1.88 cents for coal-fired electricity. Nuclear power is significantly cheaper than natural gas (2.68 cents), oil (3.77 cents), and renewable energy sources (3.01 cents).
Record electricity production, combined with lower plant operating and maintenance costs, have lowered nuclear production costs by 34 percent since 1987. During this time, the industry achieved unprecedented levels of safety and efficiency.
These gains are the result of industrywide initiatives that encourage plant operators to share their best economic practices, and to benchmark their performance against the world's best nuclear plants. Nuclear utilities continue to lower costs and increase efficiency by reducing the length of plant refueling outages and by simplifying procedures and eliminating paperwork, with the review and approval of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The industry's challenge in the restructured electricity marketplace is to help every nuclear plant excel in all areas of operations. The facts are clear: nuclear plants can be both safe and competitive producers of electricity as the utility industry moves into a new era.
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A question from Allen Mabry of Wilmington, NC
It has been over 10 years since a new commercial nuclear power plant has been built in the U.S. I would like to know the panel members' opinions on the prospects for U.S. commercial nuclear power in the 21st century.
Scott Peterson of the NEI responds:
No new large plants of any kind—coal, gas, oil or nuclear—have been built in the past 10 years. There is not a need for new baseload electricity in the United States. However, the development of advanced nuclear plants today will allow utilities to consider standardized, pre-approved nuclear energy plants when demand for electricity rises. For example, one analysis shows that the United States will need an additional 225,000 megawatts of new capacity by the year 2010—a 28-percent increase over the 790,000 megawatts already on line.
From an environmental standpoint, nuclear power contributes significantly to reducing carbon dioxide emissions—the leading greenhouse gas. Today, using nuclear power keeps as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as taking 94 million cars off the road.
Our international competitors recognize the importance of nuclear power to their growing economies and are building advanced plants—some based on U.S. designs now under development.
National surveys, including a poll by Bruskin/Goldring Research in December 1995, consistently demonstrate that Americans strongly support nuclear power. In the Bruskin/Goldring survey, nearly three-quarters of those surveyed said advanced nuclear plants should be considered for their areas of the country when new generating capacity is needed.
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A question from Harry Burch of Savannah, GA
Why would we not have standardized nuclear plants rather than, as in the past, different plant designs for each plant?
Scott Peterson of the NEI responds:
America's 110 nuclear power plants all are light-water reactors, but beyond this common characteristic they are, for the most part, customized units. This reflects the early, rapid development of nuclear power in the 1950s and 1960s, when the technology—as well as licensing standards and regulatory requirements—were evolving rapidly. France, on the other hand, has built most of its nuclear power plants based on one U.S. design, and has demonstrated the benefits of the "standardized" approach to building and operating nuclear power plants.
Standardization is a foundation of the U.S. industry effort's to develop next-generation nuclear plants. Three designs for standardized nuclear power plants are now being reviewed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. These designs incorporate the lessons learned from 40 years of experience with today's plants to achieve even higher levels of safety and performance. When new sources of electricity are needed in the next century, power companies will be able to consider these standardized designs for clean, competitive nuclear power plants.
Standardization greatly improves the economics of nuclear power. The cost of developing one design can be spread across a number of units. Building multiple units based on one design also makes construction schedules and cost estimates more predictable. Once built, standardized nuclear power plants can share services, such as engineering, licensing, operator training, procurement and maintenance for added cost savings.
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A question from John R. Peterson of Pleasant Grove, Utah
As a former researcher with a PhD in Physical Chemistry, I have over the years learned a lot about the Nuclear Power Industry. The key word here is Industry, meaning a for-profit organization which has at no time thought beyond its own bottom line. Even with airtight safeguards against accidents (which, as a matter of fact are not possible to achieve) the question of waste storage still has not been adequately answered. The best analogy I know of is to compare it to the building of a new commercial jet airliner, and taking off on it's maiden voyage, complete with passengers, without having first built the landing gears. "Oh, by the time we're ready to land, we will have figured that out." Is that not what the Nuclear Industry expects us to believe? True, the one-hundred thousand year period spoken of by some may be an exageration, but even if the need for safe storage is no more than TEN thousand years, is that going to be possible? Will languages last long enough for people to be able to know that a storage site is dangerous? Will other nonreading creatures know not to burrow in? Will geologic conditions remain perfect for containment?
Scott Peterson of the NEI responds:
As a matter of national policy, the federal government—not the nuclear utility industry—has a legal obligation to begin managing used nuclear fuel from America's commercial nuclear power plants and from defense activities in 1998. Temporarily, used fuel is stored safely at nuclear power plants in deep pools or in dry concrete and stainless steel containers. Safe storage and permanent disposal of nuclear waste is not a technical issue, rather a political dilemma that must be resolved by the U.S. Congress. Congress is expected to consider comprehensive legislation early next year to develop an integrated system for transporting and managing used nuclear fuel—first at a single federal storage facility and, ultimately, in a permanent underground facility.
In its comprehensive assessment of environmental standards for the proposed underground repository site—Yucca Mountain in the remote Nevada desert—the National Academy of Sciences said the site's geologic stability is suitable for underground disposal for 1 million years. "One of the major reasons for selecting geologic disposal was to place the wastes in as stable an environment as many scientists consider possible," the 1995 NAS report ("Technical Bases for Yucca Mountain Standards") said. "...Even the longest times considered for repository performance models are not excessive. Furthermore, even changes in climate at the surface would probably have little effect on repository performance deep below the ground....The time scale for long-term geologic processes at Yucca Mountain is on the order of approximately one million years."
Scientists and engineers at Yucca Mountain will use deep underground disposal and the shielding technology of the stainless steel containers themselves to prohibit access to the materials in the distant future. Deep geologic disposal was selected as the preferred method to manage nuclear waste in part because it isolates the materials from the public. Language-based warnings are part of the multi-layered strategy to prevent future exposure to materials in the repository, but are not the primary method.
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A question from Noel Rainville of Westford, MA
What are the experts' current projections of the development of "clean fusion" as a viable energy source? My 1st intro. to this topic, well over 20 yrs. ago, projected a "clean burn within 20 yrs!" The last info. I heard was from "Science Friday" (?) and the estimate given was "within 20-50 yrs." Has "clean fusion" become a dead issue due to the current public attitude? Or has progress in this field slowed to a crawl?
Scott Peterson of the NEI responds:
The federal government committed in 1980 to send electricity produced by fusion to the power grid by the year 2000. The government projected the cost for the 20-year program to be about $20 billion, which would have required a tripling of the fusion budget that existed in 1980.
But instead of increasing the fusion research and development budget, Congress has consistently reduced funding in this area. In fact, the budget has been cut by a factor of three, and none of the facilities required to meet the 2000 schedule have been built. There are no plans now to complete those facilities or to jump-start the fusion research program at a level that would lead to electricity generation. A fusion test reactor at Princeton generated 10 megawatts of fusion power in late 1994, but there are no facilities capable of expanding research for power production.
However, there is detailed research to deepen the understanding of fusion and that work is ongoing as part of the Department of Energy's research and development program. That program was funded at $227 million in fiscal year 1997, a significant reduction from just two years ago when it received $356 million. An accelerated program to transfer these concepts to produce electricity does not exist. The United States is considering whether to participate in an international proposal to build 1,000 megawatt fusion test reactor that would come online in 2010, but that unit would be an engineering test reactor to produce heat, not electricity.
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A question from Lisa Mentz of Quebec
Do some nuclear power plants run on fusion and some on fission? What are some of the advantages of each method?
Scott Peterson of the NEI responds:
Although they differ in design, all the world's 437 nuclear power plants are fission reactors—that is, they generate electricity by splitting uranium atoms to release energy. Nuclear fusion, the source of power in the Sun and the stars, releases energy by joining different forms of hydrogen atoms. Fusion power on a scale adequate for a commercial power plant has not been demonstrated.
The advantages of nuclear fission were envisioned when the uranium atom was first split in a controlled nuclear chain reaction in 1942. Because a fission reaction does not burn anything, nuclear power plants conserve limited fossil-fuel resources and do not release greenhouse gases or other harmful emissions. Nuclear power generates large amounts of electricity efficiently and is a proven contributor to energy diversity and security. For example, if the United States did not have 110 nuclear plants, carbon dioxide emissions from power production would be 30 percent higher. Advocates of fusion energy point out that the technology uses readily available forms of hydrogen for fuel and produces few radioactive waste byproducts. However, commercial use of nuclear fusion is not seen as practical for at least several decades.
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The nuclear energy industry began as the peaceful, beneficial alter-ego to the menacing nuclear arms race. Currently there are 93 plants licensed in the United States. Since these plants began producing power in 1973, the percentage of electricity produced by nuclear energy has grown from four percent to 20.
Although the TMI accident had hurt public opinion, no one was killed and actual damage had been extremely limited. On April 26, 1986, an accident occurred which demonstrated what could happen if nuclear reactors are not designed and maintained carefully. An explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Northern Ukraine sent 50 tons of radioactive dust into an area of nearly 140,000 square miles - covering parts of the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. The radioactivity was 200 times the amount in the Atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
It is estimated that as many as 4.9 million people have been exposed to significant doses of
radiation. 
"By the 1930's most people vaguely associated radioactivity with the uncanny rays that brought hideous death or miraculous new life; with mad scientists and their ambiguous monsters; with cosmic secrets of death and life; with a future Golden Age, perhaps only reached through an apocalypse; and with weapons great enough to destroy the world, except for a few survivors." Dr. Weart argues that these images stayed with nuclear energy from then on and affected the way people think about all forms of fission, from power to bomb.
