It was one year ago that a 9.0 earthquake hit Japan and its
eastern Fukushima province and buried whatever hopes there might
have been for a worldwide Nuclear Renaissance.
The Achilles’ heel of nuclear, of course, is that despite its
stellar safety record and statistical standing as the least
dangerous way of generating electricity, there is always the
specter of that one huge accident that will take a devastating toll
and leave some large portion of the earth uninhabitable. Six coal
miners a day die in accidents in China. Thirteen people die every
year trying to service windmills by landing on the 45-story
structures in helicopters. So far there have been no casualties at
Fukushima. But the 12-mile zone still remains evacuated and mobs in
Japan, India, Germany, and sometimes the United States are calling
for nuclear power to be abandoned altogether.
So how does the scorecard stand a year later and what are the
possibilities of continuing the slow but steady revival of
nuclear?
Japan
The epicenter of the accident still remains fairly traumatized.
Japan got 33 percent of its electric power from nuclear and was one
of the most advanced countries in developing the technology. But it
may be a long time before it embraces nuclear again. All but one of
Tokyo Electric Power’s reactors are now shut down and half are
unlikely to reopen. The resulting shortage of electricity has hurt
manufacturing and led to the nation’s first trade deficit in 31
years.
So far there have been no deaths or illnesses from radiation,
although two older workers did die of heat stroke during the
accident. Of the 31,000 people who have been evacuated, many have
suffered from depression and a few have committed suicide.
Radiation levels in the region are now about twice normal
background. People in various parts of the world live with
background 1,000 times as high, but extremely strict standards
prevent Fukushima evacuees from returning to their homes.
Strong anti-nuclear movements have become politically powerful
and several leading newspapers are keeping up a constant drumbeat
of alarm. It is unlikely that Japan will be building any more
reactors in the near future. Government officials have indicated,
however, that Japanese industries will continue to sell their
excellent nuclear products abroad. Westinghouse, Hitachi, and
Mitsubishi are all world-leading manufacturers.
Germany
Premier Angela Merkel, herself a physicist, was stricken with
remorse during the Fukushima accident and vowed to close all of
Germany’s reactors in the next decade. In the year previous, she
had revived Germany’s program by renegotiating a 2000 agreement to
phase out all reactors by 2020. Now Germany has embarked on an
ambitious, government-subsidized effort to switch to renewable
energy. The results so far have been unpromising. This winter the
output of Germany’s 2.5 GW of solar collectors has been operating
at less than 5 percent cent capacity and the country has survived
only by importing nuclear electricity from France and the Czech
Republic. At one point it had to ask Austria to fire up an old
oil-burning plant. Siemens, the country’s largest manufacturer, has
complained the transition will cost $2 trillion and RWE and E.ON,
the two largest energy companies, are laying off 14,000 workers
because of slumping profits. What Germany’s effort is likely to
prove is that powering an industrial country with wind and sunshine
is a mirage.
China
China has shrugged off Fukushima and is proceeding with plans to
expand nuclear at all due speed. The Chinese are constructing the
world’s first four Westinghouse AP1000 reactors, the first
scheduled to go online in 2013. The AP1000’s “passive” design
employs natural convection currents instead of electric pumps to
circulate cooling water and will be able to avoid a Fukushima-type
emergency.
Altogether China has 27 reactors under construction, with dozens
more in the planning stage. All are being built on time and on
budget. Last year Anne Lauvergeon, former CEO of France’s Areva,
complained that the Chinese were building Areva’s EPR faster and
cheaper than the French can do it themselves. Seventeen of the new
reactors are the CPR-1000, China’s own design, pirated from
Westinghouse’s AP1000. China has not yet tried to sell the design
abroad, but when it does it could quickly dominate world
markets.
The Chinese are also exploring futuristic technologies in a way
that was once attempted in this country but has been abandoned. In
2011 the Chinese National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) announced the
commercialization of its first Integral Fast Breeder Reactor, a
design that burns any kind of nuclear fuel and can eliminate the
problem of “nuclear waste.” Project director Wang Junfeng told
reporters that recycling could provide China 3,000 years’ worth of
cheap electricity. America built an Integral Fast Breeder at the
Idaho National Laboratory in the 1980s, but the Clinton
administration excised it as part of a nuclear phase-out in
1994.
It was not surprising, then, that when Bill Gates’ new company,
Intellectual Ventures, headed by Mi-crosoft’s former head of
research, Nathan Myhrvold, decided to attempt an experimental model
of its futuristic Travelling Wave Reactor, Gates ended up in Peking
signing an agreement with the CNNC. The Travelling Wave promises to
reprocess its own wastes and run for 100 years without refueling.
Gates saw no possibility of moving ahead with the project in the
United States.
Russia
Of all the countries with nuclear technology, Russia has been
the most dismissive of the Fukushima accident. Speaking at the
opening of the Kalininskaya reactor late last year, Premier
Vladimir Putin scorned wind and solar energy and said if no one
else is prepared to lead the world into a nuclear renaissance,
Russia will. The Russians now get 17 percent of their electricity
from nuclear and hope to raise it to 25 percent by 2030 with the
construction of 38 new reactors.
Russia has sold reactors to India, Vietnam, and Iran and hopes
to sell as many as 30 more abroad in the coming decade. Putin has
proposed supplying the world with uranium out of a single large
mine in Siberia. They are even touting their blunders at Chernobyl
as giving them “experience” in the field of nuclear accidents. As
one New York Times reporter marveled, “The Russians have a
peculiar lack of discomfort with all things nuclear.” They have
even offered to take any country’s spent fuel for reprocessing—a
technology that we abandoned in the 1970s.
France (and Italy)
France has led Europe’s nuclear effort since Charles de Gaulle
decided to free his country from foreign dependence in the late
1960s. France has 59 reactors, the highest per capita in the world,
and gets 75 percent of its electricity from splitting the atom. As
a result, it is only half as much dependent on Russian natural gas
as the rest of Europe. Areva, a world-leading manufacturer, has
nevertheless seen its position slip in recent years. Its Olkiluoto
project in Finland, begun in 2005, was originally supposed to be
completed by 2008 but is now not scheduled to open until 2014 at
more than 50 percent over budget. An identical reactor in
Flamanville on the Normandy coast, begun in 2006, is not scheduled
to open until 2016. Bureaucratic delays and disputes over
workmanship have slowed both projects. Still, Areva dominates
nuclear construction in Europe and America. It is building both a
weapons-plutonium recycling plant in South Carolina and a uranium
enrichment plant in Idaho.
A nascent anti-nuclear movement has finally taken hold in
France, but it is unlikely to close any reactors. If it did, Italy
would probably collapse. The Italians responded to Chernobyl by
shutting down all their reactors and now import 80 percent of their
electricity. An Italian proposal to build eight new coal plants was
shouted down in Europe and a subsequent plan to revive nuclear has
been postponed indefinitely by the financial crisis. The Italians
may be the first country to miss the nuclear boat completely.
South Korea
Although they only started building reactors in the 1990s, the
South Koreans have quickly become the world’s leading provider.
KEPCO, the national utility, astonished everyone by beating out
Wes-tinghouse and Areva for a $20 billion contract to build four
new reactors in the United Arab Emirates in 2009. South Korean
President Lee Myung-bak visited the UAE last December and the whole
country celebrated with a National Nuclear Day to introduce
schoolchildren to the technology.
The United States
And so we can now ask the question, “What are the prospects for
nuclear energy in the United States?” The news is not great but
perhaps not quite as bad as might be expected.
After almost eight years of deliberation, the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission finally gave approval to the design of the Westinghouse
AP1000 last December—the model that is already being built in
China. If, as expected, the NRC also issues a
construction-and-operating license to Southern Electric this year,
then the utility will be able to start work on twin reactors at its
Vogtle site in Georgia. It would be the first newly licensed
project since 1976. Southern already has 1,500 construction workers
on the job doing site preparation.
Flamanville-type delays can be expected. When bulldozers leveled
the first mounds of fresh earth last year, the NRC made them do it
all over again. Then it suspended operations for a month because
two employees had given oral assurance that they were not addicted
to drugs instead of filling out a written form. With this kind of
oversight, the project could take more than a decade to
complete.
Still, nuclear construction may not be impossible. Flying under
the radar, the Tennessee Valley Au-thority has completed two
reactors in the last six years using licenses originally issued in
the 1970s. Both were completed on time and on budget. But then, the
projects didn’t attract much attention from opposition groups.
The real problem is that the American nuclear industry has
become one giant corporation operating out of central headquarters
in the 11-story offices of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Nothing can be done without processing it through Beltsville, and
the pace is glacial. Over the past two years, Constellation Energy
of Baltimore and NRG Energy of New Jersey have abandoned major
projects out of despair of ever gaining NRC approval.
Such centralization makes innovation almost impossible. Over the
past decade, inventive engineers have adapted the small modular
reactors we have been putting on submarines since the 1950s into
commercial designs. There are almost a dozen proposals for such
reactors on the drawing boards but none has much of a chance of
making it through NRC licensing over the next decade. The Russians
are mounting a 150-megawatt reactor aboard a barge to be floated
into an isolated Siberian coastal village to provide power. South
Korea, Japan, and China are all moving ahead have similar designs.
It is no wonder that Bill Gates decided to develop his Travelling
Wave abroad.
So there is a distinct possibility that we could wake up in ten
years to find the giants of Asia have passed us by in nuclear
technology and we have no choice but to buy it from them—just as we
are now buying our nuclear infrastructure from France. As one
blogger commented to the CNN story announcing the opening of
China’s Integral Fast Breeder, “In case you missed the 19th
century, this is what the transfer of world domination looks
like.”
