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Humanity already has the technology to implement a global energy revolution. We can now usher in a post-scarcity era while solving the most intractable problems that threaten life on Earth.
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The Science Council for Global Initiatives, Inc. (SCGI) is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to informing the public and policymakers about technologies and strategies that can lead to an energy-rich world. SCGI provides a forum for many of the world's prominent scientists, authors and activists to collaborate and share their knowledge regarding solutions to the world's energy, resource and environmental problems.
Contrary to claims by opponents of nuclear energy that it is “unsafe,” “unclean,” and thus “unacceptable,” nuclear energy is the safest, cleanest, and among the most practical forms of power generation today. Unfortunately, opponents of this wonderful source of power are succeeding in their efforts to deceive people about it; and the deceived, in turn, are fueling legislation and regulations that shackle the nuclear industry. It is time to set the record straight and to defend this life-serving industry.
If I were Alexander
Since I am running out of things to say about nuclear power, it is time to play king-of-the-world. Suppose I were given the omnipotent capabilities to change the rules currently reserved for the NRC, what would I do to resurrect nuclear power in the United States and show humanity a solution to the Gordian knot of energy poverty and global warming?
The Progressive Case for Nuclear Energy
(A presentation prepared by Nucleation Capital in 2020, updated in 2021. Click the image to view the deck.)
I expected to hate this film; but that's not where I ended up. With a few glaring exceptions, the problem is not what is in the film. The problem is what is not. The crucial importance of cost is barely mentioned in passing. The fact that nuclear power was and could and should be the cheapest source of electricity is not even hinted at. And the elephant in the room, the NRC regulatory apparat, is totally ignored.
I came away thinking so close, and so far.
Never let a crisis go to waste. This may be one of the least original thoughts ever. It's been attributed to Niccolo Machiavelli, Saul Alinsky, and Rahm Emanuel among others. As Emanuel explained, a crisis ``is an opportunity to do things you could not do before". Trite but true.
The Federal bureaucracy, specifically the NRC and the EPA, present an insurmountable hurdle to the promise of cheap, reliable, pollution-free, nearly CO2 free nuclear power. They are incapable of change. Congressional prodding with pieties such as the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act is slow walked by the NRC and then turned into even more onerous regulation. The ADVANCE Act if passed will have the same fate. Congress suborned by well endowed, wind/solar lobbies is not about to do anything that would make a real difference.
But this will change. Under the present deranged policy of promoting intermittent sources and discouraging dispatchable sources, it is only a matter of time before the nation suffers a string of debilitating brown outs and black outs. Congress will suddenly wake up to the fact that those lobbyists may have oodles of money, but they represent maybe 5% of Americans. The other 95% will be pissed.
The political beasts will be desperate to do something to keep feeding at the public trough. We must be in position to tell them what.
The Lessons that should have been learned
The Two Lies are Lies
This should have been the big take away. Three Mile Island brazenly and unmistakably exposed the nuclear establishment's two big lies.
- The Negligible Probability Lie. The probability of a significant release is not negligible. The probability of the next release is 1.00. It is inevitable. It is only a matter of when.
The usual way that the nuclear establishment tells the Negligible Probability Lie is they throw out a bogusly small frequency number, say 1 in 17000 reactor years, expecting the public to interpret this as a ``no need to worry about it" number. But in a fully decarbonized, all nuclear world we will need at least 25,000 large reactors. So even if the 1 in 17000 number were correct, we could expect a TMI-or-larger release about once a year. The actual performance to date is about 1 TMI+ release every 4000 reactor years, in which case we are talking about roughly 6 TMI+ releases a year.
- The Intolerable Harm Lie. The radiation harm associated with a release is not intolerable. In this case, if there was any harm, it was far too small to be detected. If the TMI release had been more than 1000 times larger as it was at Windscale, there would have been no detectable harm. If the TMI release had been 300,000 times larger as it was at Fukushima, there would still have been no detectable public harm due to radiation.
At one point, the Rogovin Report appears to realize this:
Just as the regulators must change their attitudes to appreciate that this [the public's] perception of risk cannot be dealt with by trying to convince the public that it ``can't happen", so renewed efforts must be made to educate that the risks and benefits of nuclear power must be weighed against the very real health and environmental risks associated with other forms of power generation.\cite{rogovin-1980}[p 91]
But there is no follow up. Nor does this insight show up in any of their recommendations. The problem is, if the two lies are false, then there is no need for an NRC. And neither the Rogovin nor the Kemeny report is going to go there. //
The utility filed a four billion dollar suit against the NRC alleging the NRC's failure to tell MetEd about what happened at Davis Besse caused the loss. The way this works is MetEd first had to file a complaint with the NRC. The NRC Commission rejected the complaint on the grounds that it is not responsible for what happens at a nuclear power plant.
The commission does not, thereby, certify to the industry that the industry's designs and procedures are adequate to protect its equipment or operations,\cite{upi-1981}
This rejection allowed MetEd to go to the Courts. The court came up with a different out. It turns out the Davis Besse loss of feedwater was listed in a routine monthly Licensee Event Report that the NRC sends out to all the plants. According to the court, that's all it had to do.
When an agency determines the amount of information necessary to fulfill its regulatory mission, it is exercising the essence of its discretionary function.\cite{yorkdailyrecord-1984}
Let me get this straight. The NRC admits it is not responsible for nuclear plant safety. And the courts say the NRC has the discretionary power not to tell the plants that the training that the NRC has approved and required is both wrong and dangerously misleading. What does it have to do?
To survive, the NRC must spread fear and then sell a bogus solution to that bogus fear. To survive, the NRC must promulgate the Two Lies, even if events like Three Mile Island prove both are false. That's what it has to do and continued to do.
People who screw up must pay
Accountability shows up almost no where in the Kemeny and Rogovin reports. There is one exception. The TMI Reactor Operators lost their licenses and had their careers ruined, for doing what they had been trained to do. [3] And when that failed, they did a pretty good job of coping with the resulting mess. They were not culprits; they were scapegoats. //
[3] This was based on an NRC Office of Inspection and Enforcement Report which pinned the blame squarely on the operators.\cite{nrc-oie} The problem was their mindset.
There is considerable evidence of a ``mindset", that overfilling the reactor cooling system (making the system solid) was to be avoided at almost any cost. Undue attention by the TMI operators to avoiding a solid system led them to ignore other procedural instructions and indications that the core was not being properly cooled.\cite{nrc-oie}[p 2]
Nowhere in this 800 page exercise in unapologetic deflection is there any admission that this strange mindset was a product of NRC approved and required training, nor that the NRC had ample, multiple warnings that the training was dangerously wrong.
Rickover is the man most responsible for both the success and the failure of nuclear power. Thanks to Rickover, nuclear power became a reality as much as a decade earlier than it otherwise would have. But Rickover (along with Teller) was an originator of the Two Lies. He thought and taught that any sizable release was intolerable. My guess is that this doctrine was more a product of his concern for his program than his concern for humanity. But either way such a release must be prevented. He insisted this could be done if you followed Rickover's system of quality assurance religiously enough, cost be damned. The Intolerable Harm Lie and the Negligible Probability Lie put a crushing burden on nuclear power, which has prevented nuclear from realizing its promethean promise, and will continue to do so until they are renounced.
An instructive exception to Rickover's control of American nuclear effort was the Army's successful small reactor program in the very late 1950's. This included Camp Century. Camp Century was located at 77N in one of the most inhospitable places on the planet, 6000 feet above sea level on the Greenland Ice Cap, 800 miles from the North Pole, Figure 1. //
from a nuclear power perspective, Camp Century showed what is possible when you combine
1) a non-standard nuclear manufacturer accustomed to building large components in a competitive market [American Locomotive Company],
2) a plant built entirely on an assembly line,
3) transported by ship in blocks to site,
4) an erection time measured in weeks,
5) disassembled by reversing the process,
with an attitude that nuclear power is just another way of making electricity with its own benefits and hazards. [2]
When Camp Century was abandoned, the reactor and its fuel were removed; but just about everything else, including 200 m3 of diesel fuel and reactor coolant water with an initial activity of 1.2 GBq of activity, was left buried in the ice. The ice flow at the site has been tracked by the Danes ever since, most recently by Colgan et al.\cite{colgan-2023}. The ice is moving southwest at about 3.7 meters per year. But this will speed up as the ice gets closer to the shore. Colgan et al estimate it will hit the shore at Melville Bay in about 7000 years, Figure 4.
This has been promoted as a looming radiological disaster. 1.2 GBq is about 1/800th of the activity of a nuclear powered pacemaker. The deal with the Danes required that the site surface be left with no higher than normal background radioactivity. This was checked and signed off on by Danish personnel.
The longest lived isotope in the coolant is our old friend tritium. Tritium emits a weak electron which for all practical purposes is harmless. Tritium has a half-life of 12.3 years. If we conservatively assume all the ``initial" activity was tritium, by the time the Camp Century ice gets to the sea, the tritium will be reduced by more than a factor of 1.0e170. That's 10 followed by 169 zeros. //
Camp Century left us with a precious gift, Figure 6, a 1390 meter long ice core, all the way down to the ice base.3 This was the product of a multi-year effort to do what never had been done before. It was our first real record of the climate of the last 100,000 years. The single most important data is the ratio of heavy oxygen, Oxygen-18 to normal oxygen, O-16.. The lower this ratio, the colder the planet, since more of the heavy oxygen in the atmosphere condenses and precipitates out as it moves north before it gets to northern Greenland. //
CO2 measurements showed that atmospheric concentration of CO2 dipped to around 200 ppm about 20,000 years ago, barely above the level needed to support photosynthesis.\cite{neftel-1982}
There's more. The Army actually drilled about 3 meters into the sediment below the ice. Astonishingly, this portion of the core was pretty much forgotten, until it turned up in a freezer in Copenhagen in 2017. The sedimentary record spans pretty much the whole Pleistocene (roughly the last 3 million years). It contains plant material including well preserved twigs which showed that during that period the Camp Century location was ice-free, at least twice.\cite{christ-2021} The core is still producing papers.
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To us, this deal, if it gets approval from the EU, signals that the EU fully acknowledges that choosing nuclear power is a political decision. And that expanding nuclear power requires government actions and explicit government financial support. That clears the air. Now let's see what the policymakers do.
But there are four reasons that most Americans prefer to buy cars with internal combustion engines: cost, convenience, climate, and China. //
the Biden administration’s push for EVs is to supposedly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But in order to produce supplies of batteries for EVs and other components, China is increasing its construction of coal-fired power plants. America has 225 coal-fired power plants (which the Biden administration is trying to put out of business), and China has 1,118 (half of all the coal-fired plants in the world). //
Biden says that EVs will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and that regulations on tailpipe and power plant emissions reduce global warming. But this is a fantasy. Emissions will not be reduced until the biggest producers of so-called greenhouse gases—China, India, and Russia—reduce their emissions, which they show no signs of doing.
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