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Nuclear Renaissance
Technologies and Policies for the Future of Nuclear Power
William J. Nuttall
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eBook - ePub
Nuclear Renaissance
Technologies and Policies for the Future of Nuclear Power
William J. Nuttall
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About This Book
Nuclear power is low carbon and reliable, but in recent years it has struggled to play a strong role in global plans for electricity generation in the 21st century. Many of those involved with nuclear power and environmental agencies see controlled expansion of nuclear plants as the most environmentally friendly way of meeting growing energy demands. In the UK policy makers must recognise concerns around severe accidents and radioactive wastes and balance these against the risks arising from other energy technologies. In addition, energy policy-makers must ensure that energy supplies remain affordable for all in society. How might new nuclear power stations help meet emerging policy needs?
This second edition of Nuclear Renaissance: Technologies and Policies for the Future of Nuclear Power continues to examine the future of nuclear power in the contexts of economics, environmental sustainability, and security of electricity supplies. Fully updated with the latest technologies and concerns, this comprehensive guide illustrates the technical challenges and opportunities facing nuclear power.
This semi-technical overview of modern technologies meets the growing interest from scientists, environmentalists, and governments in the potential expansion of nuclear power. Various countries are starting to announce plans for new nuclear plants, either to replace those being decommissioned, to provide additional power or to contribute to the decarbonisation of especially challenging industrial activities. In the 2020s many commentators, once again, point to a renaissance just beginning.
Nuclear Renaissance: Technologies and Policies for the Future of Nuclear Power is essential reading for physicists, engineers, policy-makers, researchers, energy analysts and graduate students in energy sciences, engineering and public policy.
Key features
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- Fully updated throughout, with new content on topics including the latest developments in fission and fusion energy, the global financial crisis of 2008/2009, and the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear accident.
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- Accessible to readers without a formal education in the area
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- Authored by an authority in the field
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Part I Introduction
1 Beginnings
DOI: 10.1201/9781003038733-2
The first edition of this book was published in January 2005. I first held a copy in my hands just before Christmas 2004. That is now more than 16 years ago as I write these words in January 2021. So much has happened in those passing years including the banking crisis of 2009 and the subsequent global recession, the rise of nationalism and the erosion of globalisation, and the global trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. Energy policy has been turbulent, as will be discussed in Chapter 2, and the concerns around global climate change have only grown. The need for action has become ever clearer. The strong credentials of nuclear power in this regard continue to motivate a Nuclear Renaissance, but the accident in March 2011 at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake badly dented confidence around the world. The United Kingdom, in contrast to many other nations, has consistently maintained an enthusiasm for Nuclear Renaissance and that story will be told in the next chapter.
In preparing this new edition, I continue to believe that a Nuclear Renaissance is underway, but it has been slow and difficult. There is growing evidence that it is now accelerating not just in electricity generation, but also in the service of other aspects of the economy (such as process heat applications in industry, domestic heating, and mobility) that have proved slow to decarbonise. This new edition will once again look forward to the prospect of a Nuclear Renaissance.
Where does this notion of Nuclear Renaissance come from?
It is in the United States that the concept of Nuclear Renaissance first emerged, and it was there that the term was first coined. In 1990, US News and World Report ran a short story by Charles Venyvesi under the headline âNuclear Renaissanceâ [1].
However, the idea of Nuclear Renaissance failed to catch the public imagination in the early 1990s. Then on 13 September 1999, the idea of Nuclear Renaissance was repeated in an article by Mark Yost in the Wall Street Journal [2]:
Not long ago, nuclear energy looked headed for extinction. Those days are over. With production costs dropping and regulations for fossil-fuel-burning plants rising, thereâs a renaissance taking place in nuclear power that would have been unthinkable five years ago.
This time the idea took hold.
The United States pioneered nuclear power in all its forms. With international assistance, it developed the atomic bomb in the 1940s. It pioneered the use of nuclear reactors in naval propulsion, and it developed a large-scale commercial civilian nuclear power industry in the 1960s and 1970s. In those early years, nuclear power felt good. Americaâs pre-eminence in all things nuclear was a source of national pride and self-confidence. In nuclear technology, at least, the United States led, and the rest of the world followed. However, as we shall see, these early years of hubris and optimism were followed by a period of national self-doubt, growing fears for safety and the environment, and a strong desire to question authority in all its forms. All these factors would combine to undermine civilian nuclear power.
The previously attractive attributes of the technology (engineering-led design pushing forward the limits of the possible, a culture of decision-making by experts, and the idea that humanity should harness nature) increasingly came to be regarded by mainstream society as being part of the problem of modern living rather than part of the solution to our collective needs.
If civil nuclear power is undergoing or is about to undergo, a renaissance, what will history judge to have been the low point in its fortunes? Will it be the accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, USA in March 1979, the disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine in April 1986, or perhaps Fukushima-Daiichi in March 2011? In this authorâs opinion, while these various events were indeed terrible and indicative of some of the worst problems of the industry, the greatest example of industrial failure was in 1989 and the early 1990s. It is a much less well-known story than the famous nuclear accidents above.
I.1.1 Nuclear Powerâs Darkest Hour?
If any single story demonstrates the descent towards the nadir of nuclear power from the 1960s to the 1990s, and the Dark Ages before the renaissance, then it is the tale of the Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island, New York. The downward journey took many years and had many twists and turns, but in this authorâs opinion it still, in 2022, has a strong claim to have been the true nadir of civil nuclear power.
On 26 February 1992, the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission authorised the decommissioning of the Shoreham boiling water reactor on the north shore of Long Island in New York State [3]. A brand new civil nuclear power plant, in fact then the worldâs most expensive commercial nuclear power plant, was to be decommissioned without ever having sold a single unit of electricity. The decision was made when the region desperately needed electrical power, the plant was complete and fully functional and the nuclear fuel had been inserted, activating the reactor core.
The story of the Shoreham nuclear power plant is so definitive in the history of nuclear power that at least two books have been dedicated to recording the sorry tale for posterity. The first of these to appear was David P McCaffreyâs 1991 history The Politics of Nuclear Power [4] followed in 1995 by Kenneth F McCallionâs Shoreham and the Rise and Fall of the Nuclear Power Industry [5].
The history of nuclear power is peppered by stories of cost overruns, construction delays, safety fears, and occasional accidents. While there have been many examples of successful nuclear power plant developments (such as Beznau I and II in Switzerland operating reliably since 1969 and 1971, respectively), there have been numerous other reactor projects that have been massively over budget and behind schedule. Of all these, the saga of the plans to build a nuclear power plant at Shoreham, New York, is probably the worst of all. Importantly no side emerges from the tale with its reputation unscathed. Whether oneâs perspective is that nuclear power was indeed the best solution for Long Islandâs power needs or conversely if one believes that nuclear power should never have been considered for a densely populated island, one cannot fail to be horrified by the extent of the folly that occurred.
It is not possible here to recount the whole sorry tale of the Shoreham plant, but some key aspects of the story are worth emphasising.
The story starts in 1965 in the heady days of nuclear optimism, when the Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO) of New York, conscious of the growing population of Long Island and the concomitant demands for electricity by domestic users and industry, decided to get into the nuclear game and founded a nuclear engineering division [6]. The following year LILCO formally proposed the construction of a nuclear power plant at an estimated cost of $65â75 million with the aim of supplying power to the island by the early 1970s.
Rather than cheap power ready for the 1970s, the final reality was that 23 years later, on 28 June 1989, the LILCO stockholders would vote to accept a deal with the state under which the completed Shoreham plant would be abandoned in return for a package of financial compensation from the state [4]. The cost to electricity consumers of the misadventure would finally total an astonishing $6 billion [7]. The cost of the Shorehamâs nugatory contribution to electricity generation totalled approximately 100 times the original budget for a machine that the early backers promised would produce useful electricity for the people of Long Island for several decades. Instead, the sorry saga of the Shoreham plant left Long Island saddled with some of the highest electricity bills in the United States.
How did the Shoreham plan go so badly wrong? Citizen activism, corporate mismanagement of the project, and a regulator that cared little for the true impacts of its decisions, had all conspired to halt the operation of a complete and fully licensed modern power plant.
The management mistakes included the selection of General Electricâs novel Mark II containment structure, later judged to be inadequate and requiring $100 million to be re-engineered [3]. Another engineering and management error was the initial choice of diesel back-up generators for the plant. In 1976, three back-up diesel generators were supplied by Transamerica Delavel, Inc., a company new to the nuclear business. Seven years later, in August 1983, when the plant was finally approaching completion, the crankshaft of one of the three generators broke during routine testing. Inspection of all three generators revealed that they had been manufactured with crankshafts inadequate to perform routine operations [8]. Despite the fact that the fault was repaired, LILCO eventually purchased new units from Colt Industriesâa regular supplier to nuclear power plants in the United States. LILCO had been seduced into purchasing the untried Transamerica Deleval equipment by the prospect of small cost savings when compared with the cost of tried and tested competitors. There is a certain irony in the fact that penny-pinching led to problems on one of the most over-budget nuclear power plants in history. In fact, such false economies were a direct cause of much of the cost overrun and it could be argued that the story was an example of the old adage: âspoiling the ship for a haâporth of tarâ. It took LILCO 7 years to realise that it had a problem with the diesel generators and this delay in awareness contributed to the slow progress. As the problem was noticed towards the planned end of the project, it is estimated that it added approximately 16 months to a project that was already in serious trouble [8].
The repeated delays raised two consequential difficulties for LILCO and its contractor Stone and Webster which might otherwise have been avoided. First, the delays allowed for the imposition of ever-tighter regulatory burdens. In most cases, these burdens became new, and previously unanticipated, requirements that the uncompleted Shoreham power must meet. If the plant had been completed, there would have been no requirement to comply with the new tighter regulations. The consequence of such policies is described by Kenneth McCallion as follows:
âŠin Georgia, two plants designed to be identical were scheduled for completion in 1975 and 1978. After the first was completed, however, regulatory changes required that the second must be built with thousands of pipe supports that were twice as large as those in the first unit. âNow these plants are one foot from each other and both are operatingâ, commented W A Widner, a Georgia Power Co. official. âIt says something about the systemâŠ. It just doesnât make any senseâ [9].
The Shoreham saga, however, takes perversity of nuclear policy beyond the idea that two plants might both be licensed to operate simultaneously to include the idea that (on the basis of different safety standards) a newer safer plant could be barred from operating by a regulator, while simultaneously an apparently less safe facility was allowed to operate.
While the modern Shoreham plant was being stifled by safety regulation, in the 1970s and 1980s the United States continued to operate an increasingly elderly nuclear plant that in some cases had been constructed before there had been a proper understanding of the effects of radiation on nuclear reactor components. A rational safety-first analysis would have closed the ageing plant and replaced the lost supply capacity with a new plant such as that constructed at Shoreham. The actual consequence of a policy process intended to promote safety was that the (very small) risk of a nuclear accident was probably increased rather than diminished.
Political pressure grew for ever-tighter regulation of nuclear new build in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. By this time the, Shoreham nuclear power plant should have been operating for several years. The reality, however, was that the Shoreham project received the full political and regulatory impact of both Three Mile Island and the later Chernobyl disasters.
A second major consequence of the project delays at Shoreham was that it allowed opponents from within the local community ample time to mobilise against the project and to plan ever more sophisticated legal attacks against it. The history of the legal arguments surrounding Shoreham is extensive. Dominant in these disputes was a lengthy tussle between Suffolk County, New York, and LILCO concerning emergency planning. (Suffolk County consists of the eastern two-thirds of Long Island. The neighbouring county immediately to the west and, therefore closer to New York City, is Nassau County.)
Legal issues surrounding Shoreham included [10]:
- In 1982, the local authority, Suffolk County, New York, removed itself from the contract to collaborate with
LILCO on emergency planning. - By February 1983, the county had concluded that acceptable emergency planning was not possible for Shoreham given the islandâs geography.
- In 1984, there was a dispute between Suffolk County and
LILCO concerning the level of property taxes to be paid by the utility. - In 1986, Suffolk County passed a local ordinance prohibiting the testing of Shoreham emergency plans without the prior approval of the county legislature.
- Later the same year the Suffolk County legislature sued
LILCO using anti-racketeering legislation arguing that the utility had obtained electricity price hikes on the basis of submitting knowingly false information. - Also in that year, the neighbouring Nassau County refused permission for key facilities required for Shorehamâs evacuation plans to be placed on its territory.
- In late 1986, the local radio station WALK resigned as a primary broadcaster of any emergency announcemen...