Nuclear Plus
By William Tucker
I recently took a fact-finding tour through the upper Midwest and Rocky Mountain region—America’s rapidly emerging energy capital. My first stop was the Cooper Nuclear Station in Brownville, Nebraska. Nuclear plants aren’t easy to get into these days, but Cooper is more open and receptive to publicity than most such plants. Beth Boesch, Nebraska Public Power’s smart and energetic publicity director, is on the board of the Nuclear Energy Institute, and thinks utilities should be showcasing nuclear’s recent successes for the public.
Cooper sits on a two-square-mile plot of farmland next to the Missouri River about 60 miles south of Omaha. Brownville has only 150 inhabitants, so the plant draws workers from all over eastern Nebraska. “There probably isn’t a home anywhere within 30 miles of here that doesn’t have a relative or friend working at the plant,” says Glenn Troester, a Vietnam vet and former weekly newspaper owner who is my guide. “We have people driving down every day from Lincoln and Omaha.” Like most nuclear plants around the country, Cooper is very popular with the locals, for whom it is a quiet and non-polluting source of both jobs and tax revenues.
Cooper was one of the nation’s most problematic reactors for most of its history, and three years ago Nebraska Public Power was preparing to close it down. “Then they looked at what it was going to cost to replace it and had second thoughts,” says Troester. “They called in Entergy, and their experts said, ‘You’ve got a good plant here, you’re just not running it right.’” Entergy is one of the new “merchant” energy companies that specializes in operating power plants, selling the electricity to utilities to distribute. There are a handful of companies that focus on nuclear operations—Exelon, Entergy, Constellation Energy, Dominion Resources, and FPL Group—and all of them are having success. They share information and coordinate on safety. Over the past decade they have raised the amount of time typical nuclear plants are up and producing from 65 percent to 91 percent. As a result, the amount of electricity Americans get from nuclear has risen from 12 percent in 1980 to 20 percent today—even though not a single new plant has been licensed during that time, and total demand has risen. “We’re just using what we have more efficiently,” says Troester.
Every nuclear plant now has a simulated control room in which every operator spends one week out of every six undergoing training. The reproduction is so perfect it is disorienting. When we walk past the real control room, I notice a series of photos in the outside hallway showing the plant in various stages of construction in the 1970s. As we approach the simulated control room, I see the identical photos hanging outside. I have to blink to realize we are not in the same place.
In the control room I meet James Florence, an enthusiastic young training coordinator in his late 30s. Like almost 80 percent of nuclear plant operators, Florence came to it through the Navy, a legacy of Admiral Hyman Rickover’s submarine program.
I mention Three Mile Island and everybody is eager to talk. “We’re a completely different industry now,” says Florence. “Those early plants never took account of the human factor. The people who built them never had to run them. In an emergency, you had 500 lights blinking at you at once, but nothing telling you what to do. Now we’ve got everything broken down so you’ve got priorities.” He shows me the control panel, which is diagramed like a circuit board, with differently colored lines leading the operators through various “if-then” scenarios.
“We’re prepared for any eventuality: fires, tornados, earthquakes,” Florence says. “Here, you want an earthquake?” He sits down at his computer and rifles through a few files. As I sit in my chair, the room slowly begins to rumble. Suddenly everything is shaking, lights are flashing, horns sounding. “That’s an earthquake—about .1 g of acceleration,” he says. “See, the reactor has already shut down. The cooling system is operating. We’ve lost our main power but the back-up generators have kicked in. Everything is under control.”
“The kids love that one,” he winks.
Like most nuclear plants, Cooper refuels every 18 months. A fleet of ten trucks pulls up to the gate and unloads the new fuel rods. The alternative way to make the same amount of electricity is for a train hauling 110 cars full of coal to pull up to a non-nuclear plant about every five days. (Each trainload sends tons of carbon dioxide and other byproducts into the atmosphere.)
“The uranium rods are basically harmless,” says Troester. “You can handle them with gloves.” Refuelings are choreographed years in advance and most take place over the course of about 25 days. Plans for Cooper’s next refueling in the fall of 2006 are long since completed. Administrators are now working on the following one in 2008.
The spent fuel rods are far more dangerous—although not as intractable as most people think. Like most other utilities, Cooper is storing its spent fuel in a cubic pool of water about 40 feet deep. Troester takes me to the top floor, where we peer over a metal railing into its depths. The water glows a faint blue as it absorbs the radioactive decay. “You could swim in there,” says Troester. “The water shields you. We send divers down every once in a while if something gets stuck.”
Ironically, Cooper is now one of the grand old ladies of Nebraska Public Power’s fleet. All but two coal plants are more recent. The company added one gas boiler in the last five years, but gas is so expensive it now runs only at summer peaks. Meanwhile, Cooper is operating so successfully that NPP is selling spare power to other states. “They’re making a lot of money,” says Troester. “It’s one of the best plants we’ve got.”
Nuclear at the cutting edge
Idaho Falls: a former logging town resting at the foot of the Grand Tetons to the east, and a 900-square-mile test range to the west, where the Department of Homeland Security tests unmanned aerial and ground vehicles and other anti-terrorist devices. It’s also home to the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), where the U.S. Department of Energy’s most advanced nuclear research takes place.
My first interview is with Kathryn McCarthy, director of advanced nuclear energy integration. “I was a senior in high school when Three Mile Island happened,” she says. “I got turned on to nuclear energy by my high school physics teacher. There’ve been some down years in between, but it feels like nuclear is finally coming back.”
The INL’s big idea now is to use nuclear reactors to manufacture hydrogen. “People talk about the ‘Future Hydrogen Economy,’ but we’re already living in a hydrogen economy,” says McCarthy. “The energy we get from gas and oil is in the hydrogen bonds. The problem is that the new oil we’re finding now is very thick and sour. The Alberta tar sands, for example, contain as much oil as there is in Saudi Arabia. But it needs more hydrogen to turn it into gasoline. Right now the Canadians are using natural gas as a hydrogen source, but that’s a waste, and it’s getting too expensive. With a 300-megawatt nuclear reactor, on the other hand, we can use both the heat and electricity to generate hydrogen from water at an efficiency of more than 50 percent.”
I ask McCarthy whether the U.S. has fallen behind the rest of the world in nuclear research. “Surprisingly not,” she says. “We’re behind in engineering and manufacture. If a company were to build a nuclear reactor here today, we’d have to import the turbines from France. We just don’t make ’em anymore. But in basic research, other countries still look to us. A China delegation is here today, trying to figure out which technology they’re going to buy. People still seem to want us to take the lead in nuclear energy, even though we haven’t been doing much in the field.”
The possibility of talking with the China delegation is too much to resist. I have to talk my way past several communications honchos—security! protocol!—but I finally crash the dinner party and spend a good deal of time with them. Chen Hua, director-general of China’s Department of Nuclear Power, is a friendly fellow who shakes hands like a car salesman and speaks excellent English. “China is moving ahead very fast with nuclear power,” he says. “We’ve now got nine reactors and are planning 30 more. All our reactors so far have been built by France and Russia, but the two new ones we announced in December are our own.”
I ask if there is any public opposition to nuclear power in China. “No, we have educated our people very well. They understand. People are very upset about coal. The cities are too smoky. We’re taking a lot of industries and moving them far out into the countryside.”
I tell him we have the same policy in this country. “When an industry gets too smoky and uses too much energy, we move it to China.” He likes that.
A balanced generating diet
My afternoon interview is with Harold McFarlane, a veteran of nuclear energy’s early days who is about to become president of the American Nuclear Society. Like many old-timers, he has a sense of regret about nuclear’s promise. “We made a lot of mistakes before Three Mile Island. We’ve more than corrected them.” Surprisingly, he says, a lot of young engineers are coming back into nuclear.
“They go where the money is,” he says. “They sense a big revival.”
When I ask about the possibility of running out of fuel supplies he scoffs. “One out of every ten lightbulbs in America is now lit by a former Russian nuclear weapon,” he says. The math is simple: 20 percent of our electricity now comes from nuclear. And half the fuel used in U.S. reactors is now plutonium recycled from Russian warheads. “If we go back to reprocessing fuel, we’ll have enough cheap electricity to last for centuries,” says McFarlane.
There’s another factor that makes nuclear-generated electricity so attractive. It grows out of the fact that all electric utilities have to supply three different types of power: base load, intermediate load, and peak load.
Base load is about half the power supply. It must run un-interrupted. New York City, for example, requires about 5,000 megawatts of power night and day.
This base load is best carried by coal or nuclear plants. Coal is favored because it is cheap and plentiful. Today all over the Midwest, a 110-car coal train arrives at a power plant somewhere every half hour. Nuclear is ideal for base load because the plants run continuously. Last year the nation’s 103 nuclear reactors were up and running more than 90 percent of the time. (The average for coal plants is about 60 percent.)
Intermediate load is the normal increase that occurs during the daytime. New York City’s demand, for instance, usually rises to about 9,000 megawatts during the business day. Most of this load is now covered by firing up coal and gas generators. These generally run at between 30 and 60 percent efficiency. Some relatively new natural-gas-fired generators now sit idle because gas has become prohibitively expensive.
Peak loads are the most difficult. They occur during the summer on hot days when air conditioning strains the system. On the scorching afternoons, New York City consumes 12,000 megawatts. Having the ability to cover such spikes means building power plants that may only be used a few times a year. Most peaking plants are jet engines bolted to the ground and powered by natural gas. These are cheap to build but very expensive to run. They also pollute mightily.
A dream solution would be some electricity-generating technology that could kick in to complement those steady, efficient nuclear and coal plants when peak loads arrived. There may be such a solution. But there are obstacles.
Who’s open minded?
Bernard Cohen is the grand old man of nuclear power. Now more than 80 years old, he spent most of the 1970s and 1980s touring the country and appearing on television, speaking in calm, even tones that tried to balance hysterical opposition to nuclear energy from opponents like Ralph Nader (“a pound of plutonium can kill 4 billion people”), John Gofman (“every nuclear plant kills 300 children a year”), and Ernest Sternglass (“the closer you get to reactors, the more babies are dying”). Cohen once offered to eat as much plutonium as Nader would eat caffeine (they have about the same toxicity). Nader turned him down.
In 1992, Cohen wrote The Nuclear Energy Option: An Alternative for the ’90s, recommending a revival of nuclear power. He carefully laid out the comparative risks (coal, for example, kills 20,000 people a year through air pollution), and the wildly exaggerated fears of radiation. If there was any bitterness in his book, it was only against the press, whom he believes constantly inflates the dangers of nuclear power for sensationalist purposes.
But Cohen is not an ideologue when it comes to either nuclear energy or other energy alternatives. Perhaps most interestingly, Cohen was perfectly willing to recognize the potential of solar energy when it began to look less impractical.
After pointing out that nuclear-generated electricity is ideal for base loads, while solar panels work best for meeting peak loads, Cohen wrote that:
There will be no competition between nuclear and solar electricity in the foreseeable future. Each has its place in our nation’s energy mix, and these places are very different. Each serves to reduce the environmental problems from fossil fuels…. Each serves to alleviate the political and economic problems incurred in importing oil…. If I were to return to Earth thousands of years from now, long after fossil fuels are gone, I would not be surprised to see nuclear reactors generating base load power and photovoltaics providing the intermediate and peak loads.
Nuclear and solar could indeed complement each other nicely. The scorching days when power demands tend to spike are precisely the times when solar cells work most efficiently. (Indeed, those are the only times that photovoltaic cells are reasonably efficient.)
The problem, though, is politics. The environmentalists and utopians who are the most adamant backers of solar energy are generally apocalyptic haters of nuclear power. So the two technologies, though scientifically and economically well matched, have come to seem oxymoronic. The reason they don’t seem to mix is because their backers live in different universes.
Recently, however, technologists like Bernard Cohen and others have approached alternative energies like hydrogen, oil sands, and solar with an open mind and cooperative spirit. If only the proponents of solar power would recognize the limits of their own technology and share the same complementary vision. America will need that kind of calm reason to solve its future energy demands.
William Tucker is a TAE contributing writer. He last wrote about nuclear power in these pages for our January/February 2005 issue.
