Nuclear power challenges and alternatives

Abstract

The comment by Walter Scheider that Three Mile Island “remains an icon of a profit-driven industry cutting corners” echoes one by Anatoly Alexandrov, president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and a strong supporter of the “RBMK” reactor, a particular type built only in Russia and used in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Alexandrov said that “such an accident [as TMI] can only happen in America where they put profits ahead of safety.” Lecturing in Dubna, Moscow, and Gatchina just after TMI, I told listeners that if they believed Alexandrov, they were condemned to have a serious accident in the country within a decade. Alas, I was right. The centrally planned economy of the Soviet Union did far worse in ensuring safety than the US, and the Chernobyl accident occurred.The profit motive, if suitably guided by good analysis tools, can enhance safety. Fortunately, we now have “risk-informed regulation.”Much of the improvement in safety since TMI has been profit driven. It was the industry that set up the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations and the World Association of Nuclear Operators. Those organizations set safety targets and guidelines and put pressure on members to follow them. Analysis by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and university groups strongly suggests that if the safety targets and procedures, guided by a rigorous analysis, are met, the reactor will be safer. Other than closing it, the safest way to operate a power plant is to have it running smoothly and continuously. That is also the most profitable, so the requirements of safety and profitability tend to coincide; the analysis spotlights those areas where they do not. Industry efforts have increased plant availability from 60% in the 1970s to 92% today.The cost of nuclear power to the consumer depends very much on public acceptance, and it is the antinuclear movement that has set up the expensive, often unscientific roadblocks to that acceptance. There are signs that improved plant performance in the past 20 years has increased public acceptance and therefore profitability. 1 1. R. Wilson, Int. J. Global Energy Issues (in press). However, few utility company presidents would order a new nuclear power plant today without some assurance that past roadblocks will not be reinstituted.Although disposal of the waste from nuclear fission is a problem, it is a much smaller one than the disposal of carbon dioxide from burning coal. That waste can produce the climate change that is Alan Robock’s professional concern. But his stated opinion that “the waste disposal problem is not solvable in the near future” can only apply to the political problem rather than to the scientific one. Independent committees agree that a technical solution is possible. Political maneuvers in late 2005 delayed or prevented the temporary storage of nuclear waste on the Goshute Indian Reservation in Utah. It is but one example of the political impasses that delay the storage of nuclear waste material. The funding cut in December 2006 for the US Department of Energy’s presentation of the case for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository is another.Scheider and the authors of the references he quoted incorrectly blame the power company for the confusion at TMI. However, neither the Associated Press nor any major newspaper accurately quoted the press releases from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. From noon on the day of the accident, I was involved in explaining events to the public, and I could say with assurance that the expressed fears were vastly overstated. I recommended that the press quote NRC press releases verbatim and then comment as they wished, but that recommendation was ignored.A study by the European Commission (http://externe.jrc.es/index.html) states unequivocally that if coal plants were forced to pay their full external costs, they would not be built. But Scheider is right in one important respect. The lay public is not stupid, and the details of nuclear power can be explained to them. For such an explanation I recommend David Bodansky’s excellent book. 2 2. D. Bodansky, Nuclear Energy: Principles, Practices, and Prospects, 2nd ed., Springer, New York (2004). REFERENCESSection:ChooseTop of pageREFERENCES <<1. R. Wilson, Int. J. Global Energy Issues (in press). Google Scholar2. D. Bodansky, Nuclear Energy: Principles, Practices, and Prospects, 2nd ed., Springer, New York (2004). Google Scholar© 2007 American Institute of Physics.