Remember Three Mile Island? Forget It
The "worst nuclear accident in American history" needs to be put into perspective.
But that was then, this is now. More people have come to realize that Three Mile Island was not Chernobyl (or the melting-down plant in the movie), and that three decades later plants can be designed to be even safer than those safe plants of the seventies. And now the fear, rational or otherwise, is not Chicago under a mile of ice, but New York under water, beachfront property in Orlando, and the end of California winemaking. Last year, 19 permits for new plants were applied for by the industry to meet the growing demand for alternate energy. So carbon is out and atoms are back in.
Or are they? Well, it’s clear that the Democrats in the White House and Congress have declared war on carbon, which may result in a war on trade (just what we need in a global recession). But their preferred solutions seem to be alternatives other than nuclear — wind, solar, geothermal — despite the fact that such technologies cannot be deployed fast enough or economically enough to address realistic future energy demands.
Both during the campaign and since inauguration, the Obama team has paid lip service to nuclear power, declaring it a “central part of the energy mix.” But actions speak louder than words. Critics note that the administration, amidst the hundreds of billions included in the recent “stimulus” bill, fought against the inclusion of needed billions for insurance of the industry and that it resists including nuclear under the umbrella of “renewable” energy (a debatable proposition, considering the possibility of breeder reactors). Most importantly, it has shut the door on the Yucca Mountain waste repository in Nevada, re-elevating the issue of what is to be done with the byproducts of nuclear power. This remains one of the most powerful, albeit emotional, objections against it (I still favor lunar storage, myself).
The administration has its defenders as well:
Yucca Mountain, they note, had been so controversial that it was unlikely ever to get built. A comprehensive energy bill could include the industry’s coveted loans. And a renewable standard, they say, is supposed to be for renewables; nuclear can get help elsewhere.
Administration defenders are correct that increasing the costs of putting carbon in the atmosphere will inevitably favor the nuclear industry. Assuming this is true, one would hope that it won’t be hindered and overburdened by other costs of over-regulation. One would also hope that the nuclear industry is allowed the freedom to innovate beyond the often-stifling strictures of central planners at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to find intrinsically safer and more cost-effective plant designs. (TMI and other reactors from the seventies were basically scaled-up early submarine power plants.)
Either way, and thankfully, thirty years later, the Three Mile Island “disaster” is far enough in the past that it is no longer – given that it never really should have been – part of the debate.
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Rand Simberg is a recovering aerospace engineer and a consultant in space commercialization, space tourism and Internet security. He offers occasionally biting commentary about infinity and beyond at his weblog, Transterrestrial Musings.
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35 Comments
1. Paul F. Dietz:The “lunar storage” link is broken. Did Fox move that page?
Apr 1, 2009 - 6:15 am 2. datarat:Sadly, it still IS part of the debate. To this day Three Mile Island is still used as a central point in any discussion I’ve had about future energy sources, followed quickly by the myth that solar and wind energy will solve all our problem.
Although I’d still like to see a solar sattellite.
Apr 1, 2009 - 6:23 am 3. John B:Paul-
The “Lunar Storage” link got a space added into it somehow when the story was typed up. Until the link is fixed, just remove the “%20″ from the destination, so that the end reads “46786,00.html”
As to the current administration’s commitments, I believe that it is more likely to go against coal and nuclear, and for wind and solar, even though nobody is buying wind turbines the way they used to. Even if they were, there’s still a 2-3 year backlog in production, but the energy policies and the economy are so unknown that there is no guarantee the wind turbine market will still exist by the time new plants could be built to equalize production with demand.
Apr 1, 2009 - 7:05 am 4. Bill Hensley:Without dramatic breakthroughs in energy storage technology wind and solar can never supply the base load, and so they can never displace coal and natural gas. Nuclear can. That’s the difference. I’m surprised you don’t mention that. It doesn’t get mentioned enough in my opinion.
Apr 1, 2009 - 7:15 am 5. Jack Okie:Rand –
What do you think of thorium’s potential in future reactors? India has made a large commitment to a somewhat conventional thorium reactor design, and the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (promoted by Kirk Sorensen at http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com) seems to offer more in the way of low maintenance and safety.
Apr 1, 2009 - 7:31 am 6. David Testerman:If Obama really wants to create domestic jobs then what better way than to start building power plants. The civilian industry has been operating plants for over 50 years with one accident. I think thats a pretty good safety record. Thousand’s of jobs could be created to build plant’s, for years to come. Until we get the Main Stream Media and the Obamacrats on board we are at stand still. The general public still continues be misinformed by MSM thru no fault of their own. Our power infrastructure is reaching desperate times.Its time for Obama to step up to plate and bring this country back as the leader in nuclear power generation.
Apr 1, 2009 - 8:30 am 7. Nate:I’ve heard that the problem is only plutonium. If you reprocess the plutotonium and run a reactor on it again you get something less radioactive than the original uranium you dug out of the ground.
This is one reason why France has less trouble with nuclear waste than we do even though they have more nuclear reactors per square kilometer. They treat plutonium as the valuable resource it is and extract more energy from it instead of burying it.
Apr 1, 2009 - 8:34 am 8. Self-hating Boomer:Interestingly, Chernobyl – which was about the worst case nuclear meltdown scenario physically possible, is long forgotten.
Wonder why that is?
Apr 1, 2009 - 8:57 am 9. Teleprompter Jesus:You don’t need more energy. My smart grid will multiply the electrons just like I, in a past life, multiplied the loaves and fishes.
Oh, ye of little faith…
Apr 1, 2009 - 8:59 am 10. Pee Wee Herman, Community Organizer:The basic difference, aside from the general shabbiness of the design and operation at Chernobyl, between TMI and Chernobyl is that while they were both light-water reactors, TMI used enriched fuel (a rather expensive process), while the Soviets tried to use unenriched fuel and tried to compensate by using graphite rods in the core. When Chernobyl overheated, the graphite rods seized, and they lost control.
In other words, the capitalists, ever obsessed with making a profit, spent the extra money, while the communists, focused on the welfare of the people above making a profit, cut corners, and built a fundamentally unsafe reactor.
“It’s a profit deal!!!” – Navin R. Johnson
Apr 1, 2009 - 9:08 am 11. Iman Infadel:New PBMR (pebble bed modular reactor)technology makes nuclear disasters a thing of the past.
http://www.eskom.co.za/nuclear_energy/pebble_bed/pebble_bed.html
Apr 1, 2009 - 9:17 am 12. Pat J:The most important thing about Three Mile Island was what did it teach us? I would argue it raised some alarms, as well as caused some undue panic, about the dangers of working with some very hazardous materials. The most important lesson learned being the importance of the pressurized water reactors in keeping the radioactive core partially in check.
As far as part of nucleur energy as part of the overall energy grid, one problem with building new nuclear plants is their cost. Power companies would need to raise their rates to help cover the cost of construucting the darn things. It also takes many years for them to become operational. Then there’s the issue of dealing with waste material that can be radioactive for up to 500,000 years. The costs outweigh the benefit.
And Nate, plutonium has all sorts of problems with it’s long half-life and it being the fuel for nucleur weapons. There are several other substances involved such as radioactive iodine, radon, and other non-biodegradeble substances that have the potential to be released as biproducts of nuclear power plants.
Sorry about any jargon. I wrote a paper about the pros and cons of nuclear energy in undergrad years ago and tend to keep up with the subject.
Apr 1, 2009 - 9:25 am 13. Mike Puckett:“Then there’s the issue of dealing with waste material that can be radioactive for up to 500,000 years. The costs outweigh the benefit.”
Balderdash,
The really nasty stuff burns out in a few hundred years. Low level waste that approximates the rad level of tailings remains for tens of thousands of years but it is still no worse than said ore residue.
Reprocessing and vitrification of the rest can solve the problem neatly and we already know how to do bith.
Apr 1, 2009 - 9:49 am 14. Paul from Hamburg:Pat J:
Nuclear plants are expensive, but at least part of that is because they are basically custom built, one at a time. If we had some federal commitment to get several built in the next few years, many of the fixed costs could be spread around better and overall cost per plant would go down.
Apr 1, 2009 - 9:58 am 15. Self-hating Boomer:And the reason why they’re not competitive with coal is that they have to budget for a lot of project uncertainty, due to legal and political hurdles. The green left has created a self-fulfilling prophesy; the say nuke is uncompetitive, when they are the reason.
Oddly, the green left in Europe (particularly France) isn’t so paranoid, and they seem to be doing fine generating most of their power, even before the climate change thing became fashionable, from nukes.
Here, where nuclear energy was invented, the panic pimps have managed to create yet another self-fulfilling prophesy: by preventing any new plants from being built in the past 30 years, they’ve assured that our plants are old technology, and old equipment.
If the government were serious about creating a reasonable regulatory and legal regime regarding this technology, it would be competitive in a lot of markets, and much, much more competitive than CO2 sequestration.
But they’re gonna do it the stupid way.
Apr 1, 2009 - 10:37 am 16. bear:what was the stimuls package for?
Apr 1, 2009 - 10:41 am 17. Self-hating Boomer:And btw, there’s no such thing as an “energy grid”, and the power grid is just the transmission and distribution system, and does not include the generation plants. “The grid” doesn’t make power, it just moves it around.
A lot of the flawed thinking that goes on regarding this issue comes from wrong nomenclature. And don’t EVEN get me started about the stupid “smart grid”…
Apr 1, 2009 - 10:43 am 18. James Bennett:Too bad China Syndrome wasn’t up to the technical accuracy standards of Jane’s more realistic movies, like, say, Barbarella.
Apr 1, 2009 - 10:52 am 19. Bill N:Jack Okie (#5)
Apr 1, 2009 - 12:22 pm 20. cackcon:Thorium (Th) is a distinct possibility as a nuclear fuel, but its proponents are touting its safety as a publicity gimmick. Think; in 60 years normal U-235 reactors have not even injured a member of the public. Why try to improve a perfect record? Th is important, not as an unnecessarily safer fuel but rather as a more abundant one. Worldwide reserves of Th are about three times that of Uranium.
The down side is that there are no usable amounts of natural fissile isotopes of Th. Th “fuel” must be bred, like U-238. That is, Th-232 (the main natural isotope) must absorb a neutron in a reactor and then decay to U-233, which is fissile (able to generate energy). The U-233 then fissions to produce energy and more neutrons to breed more Th. The advantage here is that, again for publicity purposes, Th is bred to uranium whereas U-238 breeds to the “evil” plutonium. Also, as you can imagine, a Th reactor must be quite more complex than a uranium fission reactor, on a par with a uranium breeder reactor because, well, it has to be a breeder to work.
I seem to recall the promise of offshore oil drilling at some point in the campaign, as well. Gee, how’s that turning out?
Well, at least we’ll know that the administration’s energy policies won’t adversely affect women and girls, thanks to the president’s new task force.
Is it not possible to tap the plentiful, renewable natural resource that is Joe Biden’s hot air?
Apr 1, 2009 - 1:19 pm 21. Bill N:Pat J (#12), You are soooooo off-base. Plutonium is NOT the problem, except insofar as the nonuknicks have prevented us from repressing the used fuel. Far from a problem, plutonium is a valuable fuel. Forcing us to bury it along with the real waste is like refining crude oil to gasoline and discarding the diesel. Also, plutonium from a nuclear reactor operating as a power reactor cannot be made into a bomb. This is because it is a mixture of three plutonium isotopes; Pu-239, Pu-240, and Pu-241. This is the nuclear equivalent of a mixture of fuel oil, diesel and gasoline. You can make a piston engine run on either diesel or gasoline, but not a mixture of both because you need the fuel to detonate like a bomb and the two ignite at different temperatures and burn at different rates, thus no detonation. No bomb.
Of what significance is the half life of the waste if we bury it in the Nevada desert forever? As opposed to the waste from coal, oil, and gas which is blasted into the air for us to breathe. How biodegradable is fly-ash?
To the line-item cost of oil, we must add the cost of our mid-east wars needed to ensure our supply of same. Which is worse, spending billions in the USA building valuable assets or spending even more overseas to destroy valuable assets?
The Democrats have just spent TRILLIONS on such things as a train from LA to Las Vegas. How disingenuous of you to complain that the cost of building nuclear reactors “outweighs the benefits”. BS!
Apr 1, 2009 - 1:53 pm 22. Robert:I call BS on Pat J’s comment. Lets begin:
Pat J said:
You want your nuclear fission fuel to have a long half-life, or else it won’t work. Also the longer the half-life the less intense the radiation per curie of radioactive material. Your statement that mentions the long half life (in the order of tens of thousands of years) of Pu239 as a problem doesn’t make any sense.
Bill N has already refuted your blurb on nuclear weapons fuel.
Most plastics and many of the corrosion resistant alloys aren’t biodegradable either. I’m pretty sure the materials of wind turbines and solar collectors aren’t biodegradable as well.
You only get radioiodine and radon released from nuclear plants if there is core damage in conjunction with a reactor coolant leak. Besides, the half lives of radon and iodine are short (radioactive iodine’s half life is measured in hours). In spent Uranium fuel, Plutonium is the major long lived product of U-238 and is better spent as fuel instead of being buried.
Apr 1, 2009 - 3:05 pm 23. Self-hating Boomer:Bill, in the short-to-medium term, you’re correct that the U cycle will be more practical than Th, but further out, Th may have another advantage in that U-233 lends itself better to a liquid salt reactor (which is safer, cleaner, and more economical than a rod core reactor). If things were allowed to evolve naturally, we’d migrate from carbon to U (through several generations of U technology, such as pebble bed), and in the long haul to fusion, possibly taking a detour through Th on the way there.
But no, we’re going to do what the in crowd thinks is cool. Until their lights start to brown out, anyway…
Apr 1, 2009 - 3:33 pm 24. Patterson:#9
I love Teleprompter Jesus!
Apr 1, 2009 - 3:36 pm 25. Eric:The Lefties won’t be convinced that we have to build more nuclear power plants until we exhaust ourselves, drive energy prices so high our economy collapses, and we suffer blackouts. I’ve done the math, as anyone can do, and wind and solar will NEVER be more than feel good sources of energy. NEVER.
Apr 1, 2009 - 4:44 pm 26. Rick M.:Bill N. (#21)
“You can make a piston engine run on either diesel or gasoline, but not a mixture of both ….”
That bare statement isn’t strictly true: witness the old army
deuce-and-a-half truck with its multi-fuel engine and Automatic
Density Compensator. One time our rookie put gasoline in a crane
that took diesel. We dragged it back to the shop and dumped the
contaminated mix into our 2.5 ton truck. It ran okay, but noisy.
Mixing fuels in an army truck is a survival trick: possible but
Apr 1, 2009 - 7:08 pm 27. myth buster:not a good idea for the reason you said. I take your argument that mixing fuels in a nuke bomb wouldn’t work well. Anyway, I thought that was a fun fact.
The real problem with plutonium is that it’s hot. With a half life on the order of 10^4 years, the radiation doesn’t diminish much over reasonable periods of time, but it is active enough to produce a lot of heat. U-233, by contrast, has a half-life on the order of millions of years, making it much cooler.
It was touched on earlier that RBMK reactors, like Chernobyl, are inherently unsafe, in contrast to American built reactors, but I should add that unsafe designs like RBMK, which are prone to cascading nuclear reactions when they overheat, are illegal in the United States.
Apr 1, 2009 - 7:38 pm 28. gatorfan:What isn’t being mentioned here is that consumers have been paying a 1 mill/kilowatt hour surcharge for electricity generated from a nuclear power plant into a fund known as the “Nuclear Waste Fund”. These payments have been paid to fund Yucca Mountain for 20 years and Congress keeps spending it on other stuff!
Then you have Sen. Harry Reid throwing roadblocks at Yucca Mountain at every possible turn.
It’s sad to see the NIMBY crowd stifle a safe, reliable (20% of the nations electrical generation capacity) energy industry.
Hey, I’m all for solar and wind generation too. By the way has anyone driven past a solar or wind field lately and seen how much acreage is required for even a paltry amount of generation capability?
Apr 1, 2009 - 7:46 pm 29. Northern Light:Up here in Ontario we’ve had nuclear power for decades now.
For about 20 years our reactors churned out the power with no problems at all. Lately, however, the plants have turned into an expensive millstone around our necks. It will cost billins of dollars to fix them and almost as much if we decide not to fix (you can’t just flip a switch and close a nuclear plant. They are dammned expensive things to turn off and tear down).
The Ontario government’s reaction has been to call for new nuclear plants to be built.
I don’t have a lot of trouble with nuclear power itself. There have been serious problems at plants all over the world, but if people realized that nuclear power is something you can’t be sloppy about and the rules have to be followed to the letter (unlike Chernobyl) it’s certainly better for the environment than coal or it’s oxymoronic brother “Clean (?) Coal”.
I do object to the fact that the costs will probably be about 50% higher than the $15 billion our government says they’ll cost.
I get a lot of heat from my leftist friends for this, but I believe that although renewable is the way to go long-term, for the next couple of decades we need nuclear. I just worry about price.
Apr 2, 2009 - 7:58 am 30. Big dude:Where’s this beachfront property in Orlando you speak of?
Apr 2, 2009 - 10:53 am 31. JL:This is brilliant. We get some cheap electricity now and then we only have to protect the radioactive waste for 4 million generations. The waste has to be stored and protected by armed guards round the clock for 92 million years. Almost as long as there has been a human race. That’s like having a mortgage you have to pay for 92 million years. And during these 92 million years you have to make sure that no terrorist blows up the radioactive material. Because if they do, a big part of the planet will be inhabitable forever. This is clearly a genius strategy.
Lunar storage. Yes fantastic. Let’s have a gigantic pile of lethal toxic waste and combine it with highly explosive rocket fuel and send it up in the atmosphere where it really can be distributed over a large population in case the rocket explodes. Great! truly Nobel price worthy thinking here.
Apr 2, 2009 - 12:07 pm 32. Pee Wee Herman, Community Organizer:Armed guards for 92 million years. Somebody’s been smoking too much Captain Planet.
Apr 2, 2009 - 2:26 pm 33. jakevonMN:JL,
Please, you really think that that waste is just going to sit there idle until its safe??
With consistently high funding into nuclear energy research, and increased control over subatomic particles (which things like CERN will bring. We would probably figure out a way to use it as FUEL (or simply neutralize it) within a couple decades.
Apr 3, 2009 - 6:57 am 34. Bill N:Myth Buster (#27), You’ve got it just backwards. The longer the half live the slower the decay and the less heat produced per minute, making the temperature lower. If you start with a million radioactive atoms with a half life of 1 hour, then in the first hour 500,000 will decay, producing 500,000 decays worth of heat. If the half life is longer, say 2 hours, then in the first hour only 293,000 atoms will decay, producing only 293/500 = 58% as much. If there is enough plutonium OR uranium to produce measurable amounts of heat you have a TREMENDOUS amount of valuable fuel that should NEVER be treated as waste.
Apr 3, 2009 - 3:02 pm 35. Bill N:Pee Wee (#32), The armed guards ruse is one of the many successful ploys used by the nonukenicks to kill nuclear power. It runs like this:
Nonukenick: “Nuclear waste can’t be stored safely!”
Nuclear Engineer: “Yes it can.”
NN: “But if some terrorist gets his hands on it he can make a dirty bomb! It needs to be guarded!”
NE: “Sigh. OK, it’s a trivial cost compared to the time we’re wasting on this discussion. We’ll spring for two armed guards in perpetuity.”
NN: “OK, put it in writing.”
[The agreement is announced as policy]
NN: “Nuclear waste is so dangerous that even the experts admit that it needs armed guards for 92 million years! BAD, bad, bad!!!!!!”
Apr 3, 2009 - 4:02 pm