When I started studying the question of how nuclear power’s expansion was likely to transpire, I, like many, took it as  a given that there would be a substantial global expansion of nuclear power plant construction. I expected the “renaissance” would include both growth in countries that have long had a near de facto moratorium on plant construction (e.g. the United States) as well as some of the more promising aspirant countries that have not previously had commercial nuclear power such as Indonesia and Turkey. While I never believed that most of the states clamoring for nuclear energy would achieve it in my lifetime, I did expect a significant swing. After all, with a price on carbon and renewables not ready to take a chunk out of king coal at an affordable cost, nuclear power seemed to stand to be a big winner from climate change.

Today I am far less sanguine about an expansion that could be reasonably be termed a “global renaissance of nuclear power”. Perhaps it can be said that Asia is experiencing a nuclear boom. 57%  of the plants currently under construction are being built in just five Asian countries (China [over 25% of the total alone], India, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan), and if you add Russia you have accounted for almost 3/4ths of the current construction. However, beyond rhetoric and political attempts to signal support for nuclear energy, there is little evidence of a full-fledged renaissance yet. The graph below shows the number of power plants being brought on-line each year, and the number of countries in which plants were brought on-line.

Just recently, the US government has signalled support for nuclear. The EPA predicted 180 new plants constructed by 2050 as a result of climate change legislation in its recent analysis (see: http://www.examiner.com/x-19285-Chicago-Economic-Policy-Examiner~y2009m10d26-EPA-sees-180-new-nuclear-power-plants-over-the-horizon ). Furthermore, there is evidence that the Obama Administration is backing nuclear expansion as part of a bid to get the required legislative support for passing carbon-constraining legislation. (see: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/27/AR2009102704081.html )

Should we expand nuclear power? I believe that, if we want to slow the pace of and eventually reduce carbon output, nuclear will have to be part of the solution. When you consider the scale on which we use electricity, wind, solar,  geothermal, and conservation in their current state of development don’t do the job . Hopefully, one day we will be able to cost-effectively tap the power of the sun for most of our electricity needs and will be vastly more efficient in our use of power, but that day isn’t today and by the time it arrives we may have suffered a dire price. 

It is essential to  understand the differences between nuclear power and renewables in terms of scale. Nuclear plants are typically both rated higher in terms of the amount of electricity they generate, and have much higher capacity factors than renewable plants. The capacity factor is a percentage of the rated power that a unit actually produces over the course of a year. For nuclear, capacity factors tend to be above 90% on average, and can be 100% in years in which fuel is not changed out and there are no other disruptions. For wind, a reasonable capacity factor is about 33%. This means that a typically sized nuclear plant (1000 MW(e)) produces more than 4000  wind turbines of 600 KW (e) or almost the same as 500 massive 5 MW(e) wind turbines. (These are at conservative capacity factors of 85% for nuclear and 35% for wind.)

So what is the tough nut to crack if the legislative environment is suitable for nuclear power’s growth? If one asks what policies need to be put into effect to spur US nuclear renaissance, one might quickly note that said policies are largely already in place, and still the evidence of a resurgence is primarily on paper.

First, you would need to provide loan guarantees. Why? Because private utilities don’t typically have enough assets to get people to loan them billions of dollars over a relatively short timeframe. It is not that these firms are small or not profitable, but rather that the magnitude of costs and risks for nuclear is so high. This is exacerbated by the many examples of planned plants that have not panned out. Famously, the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant in Long Island, New York was completed but never made a return on investment. The operator eventually went out of business / was subsumed by a government entity. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 provides for a program that would reimburse lenders up to a cap in case of default. Current discussions are considering increasing the $18.5 billion pot for this program as that, sadly, is a scant amount on the scale of spurring a massive increase in nuclear power.

Second, while the nuclear power industry has had a quite respectable safety record, the scale of possible consequences and liabilities makes it impossible for utilities to afford the kind of insurance they would need to ensure they could stay in business in the aftermath of an accident. The government has the utilities covered on that front as well with the Price-Anderson Act that caps the liability of private firms so that they only have to insure up to a certain level.

Third, a major problem in nuclear power plant construction, much as in Defense Department acquisitions, is a proclivity towards cost-overruns and delays. One can imagine that stretching out the interest payments on an $8 billion dollar loan could be quite costly proposition.

It is useful to understand that nuclear plants are cost-intensive in front-loaded construction costs, but are relatively cheap in terms of fuel and operations and maintainance. This means that, once plants are built, they are relatively profitable when the utilities no longer have to funnel a big chunk of the money back into paying off the capital costs. I’ve heard an employee from Georgia Power say that nuclear was by far their least expensive power source, but this was, of course, based on the fact that the plant costs had depreciated off their books. The Federal government has provided delay insurance to cover delays that are due to the regulatory requirements (i.e. if the NRC puts a hold on you, the government picks up the tab) for a limited number of early plants. Furthermore, some jurisdictions (i.e. Georgia and Florida) have approved the extremely controversial practice of allowing their utilities to charge customers for plants before they are even running (for that matter, before construction has even begun.)

Despite all these policies, I remain skeptical that we will see a major nuclear power plant construction boom given the magnitude of costs and risks involved. This puts me at a loss. While I believe in the benefits of nuclear power, I am also quite concerned about our massive deficit, so I’m not too sure about the one policy prescription that remains available to jump start a renaissance. That is, if the government buys or substantially increases subsidization of nuclear power that may make a difference. Any such policy would have to ensure that taxpayers got their investment back in terms of a cut of the earlier mentioned profitability.

In the Fall of 2002  I drafted an essay that became a Cato Institute Policy Analysis paper on why invading Iraq was a bad idea. In essence, the paper used rational actor theory to propose that there were better ways to address the threat to US security interests posed by Iraq, to the extent such threats existed, than by going to war. Now, seven years later, it is interesting to revisit the subject.

What made me think about this the recent discussion about a surge for Afghanistan. General McChrystal’s suggestion that 40,000 additional troops need to be introduced into the theatre raised quite a stir in the news. However, there seems to be a widespread opinion among military leaders that the 40,000 could not begin to be introduced until the new year, and could not fully be in place until late next year (presuming that they would all come from the US.) Perhaps President Obama’s delayed response is due to an attempt to figure out where they could get these troops in a reasonable timeframe. It is telling that despite a budget of over half a trillion dollars (not counting supplementals) and a military of over three million people when all branches and reserves are included, we cannot come up with 40,000 troops. Of course, few of the three million are relevant to the task at hand (i.e. sending F-16 mechanics or submariner firemen to Afghanistan is not that useful), but this raises a question for another day about why our military seems to be so ill-tailored to the wars it fights. However, the point to note here is that we can’t come up with 40,000 troops because many of the relevant troops are either in Iraq, already in Afghanistan, or are momentarily  rotated out of one of our two war zones long enough to keep their private lives in order and their sanity intact.

Let me acknowledge first that I, at least, was as fooled as anyone about the likelihood that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and /or programs for WMD. Readers of past posts will note that I place little stock in the ability to know or predict behavior absent first-hand knowledge. Despite the sound advice of Sun Tzu that we cannot know an enemy’s capabilities (much less their intentions) without first-hand information (e.g. through spies) and that such knowledge cannot be derived from oracles, humanity still thinks it can – except our oracles are probabilistic risk models. That said, in the absence of certain knowledge one is forced to make a best guess based on a reasonable reading of past actions and the available  indicators. I maintain that, given the uncertainty, it was not unreasonable to think that Iraq had WMD, and, at any rate, the advice given was optimal whether Iraq had WMD or not. The fact that Hussein did not have WMD by no means invalidates but rather bolsters the core message of the paper that (even believing that there were chemical weapons or worse) the threat to US security interests was overblown, and, to the extent these threats existed, they could be handled more effectively without force.

The question at hand here is whether we are better off having attacked Iraq, and I would maintain that we are certainly not at the moment. If, unlikely as it may be, we are threatened tomorrow by an actual threat to our existence or fundamental strategic interests we would be slow and hard-pressed to respond because we are stretched thin by the war in Iraq. True, there is one less dictator in the world. Nice as that may sound, as long as that dictator is not ruling the US, it is not a good measure of whether US interests are improved.

One issue to consider is the threat posed by the perception of the US as a “high capability – low will” state. I don’t suspect we have any enemies that think the capability of the US military is anything but extremely high. Our military is technologically without peer, and is, at best, matched by few in terms of the level of training and morale of forces (I would contend that an all-voluntary military is a force-multiplier unto itself, particularly after spending so much time studying the Russian system and its influence on combat-effectiveness when I was a graduate student .) However, there is also a perception that the US has a limited stomach for warfare, and will not see its engagements through to the end. This problem is created when a country is a little too fast-and-loose in going to war. Its danger is that it decreases the perception of other states of the cost of conflict with America and makes them more likely to engage in activities that may be viewed as threatening.

Frankly, I am astounded at the relatively slow erosion of support for conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan that is, I presume, a mix of the influence of the 9-11 events on the national psyche and a detachment of the average American to these distant wars. The erosion is present none-the-less. It is not unreasonable that American support for the war in Iraq has diminished. The outcome of the conflict fundamentally affects the way people in Iraq live but not substantially how Americans live, and so it is a given that people over there will be willing to fight long after our will wanes. You may remember hearing a line during the political debates to the effect that ”Timelines to withdraw would be a boon to insurgents and radical elements”. I hate to break it to those critics, but whether we leave now, next year, or in 20 years, some radical element will be around to claim victory. 

The US needs to look at war more like it looks at nuclear war. In other words, it is an extreme action against dire attacks against the national existence or critical national interests and should not be engaged in lightly, and that, having made the decision, we will fully accept the consequences of war and see the conflict through to a definitive end. War as a means to reach limited objectives such as tweaking the world into a more palatable form – as I would suggest was the case in Iraq – is a dangerous game. 

Unfortunately, we are really only mid-course in the conflict in Iraq, so knowing the degree to which we will be better or worse off after than before the war remains unclear. If our government (both the Bush and Obama administrations) is correct in its prevailing presumption that we can leave an Iraq that is democratic, stable, and friendly to the US we may end up better off. However, we live in a world where uncertainty is inexorable, and there are other scenarios, that we cannot accurately judge the likelihood of, that may make us worse off. The most prominent of these alternative scenarios is that the Shia majority takes control and reciprocates against a minority that oppressed them for decades. Under this scenario, we will have essentially built an Iraq – Iran alliance that will make any involvement we have in the Persian Gulf region more challenging and may shake up regional stability.

Iran’s President Ahmedinejad has a lot to keep straight. When he’s inside Iran, the Holocaust didn’t happen, but when abroad it did happen (no, may have happened?) – but is irrelevant to today’s world. Is it any wonder that it would have slipped his mind to mention to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Iran was building another uranium enrichment facility until, once again, Tehran was caught with its hand in the cookie jar.

This does answer a question that I’ve asked many times, which is how Iran intended to get from its current position to having a nuclear weapon without the intervening event of having its offending nuclear infrastructure bombed to smithereens. There were essentially two paths available to an Iran bent on having the bomb. The first was to build yet another covert facility (which is apparently what Tehran chose to do.) The second, and this is the one I’ve never heard a convincing explanation of the process by which it could succeed, would be a “strategic breakout” of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) regime. The idea of strategic breakout is to get all your ducks in a row, and then withdraw from the NPT and kick inspectors out of the country / remove surveillance equipment. The problem with this is that it is essentially saying “we’d like to build our atomic bomb now, please leave us in peace.” While it is true that they could get a lot of their affairs in order, there would seem to be plenty of time between their announcement and the production and machining of the requisite material to allow a country to bomb the facilities into oblivion, perhaps even with a Security Council resolution in hand.  The second covert facility was the only path I’ve ever suspected was workable, though there have been proponents of a strategic breakout scenario.

This building of covert facilities only to have them discovered has got to get prohibitively expensive at some point. I’m not saying Allah is trying to send you a message, Mr. Ahmedinejad, but maybe you should consider it a hint. Allah might just find an Iran with a nuclear weapon to be as disturbing a prospect as the rest of us do.

Data Source: Energy Information Administration: Short-Term Energy Outlook, August 2009

 The answer to the question posed by the title, of course, varies depending upon the nature of one’s yardstick. As one can see, renewables are minor players in US electricity generation when compared with coal, natural gas, and nuclear. Geothermal displays less than 0.8% of the output of coal, and the figures for solar and wind are 0.07% and - a whopping  – 2.4% respectively.

If the point of comparison is how much other countries generate by renewables in absolute terms, the US is certainly prominent, coming in behind only a few other large countries. Of course, this may lead one to note that the US is a collosal juggernaut in terms of both electricity consumption and generation, and the fact that countries like China, Canada, and, recently and presumbly based on its bio-fuel pursuits, Brazil are bigger lead one to wonder where the US falls in electricity generated by renewables as a percentage of total electricity generated. At about 9% of net electricity generation coming from renewables, the US is not near the top of countries using renewables, and for 2005 (the most recent year for which their is widespread data) the US came in about 117th out of 212 countries.

The US has been ramping up wind power as of late, and did recently surpass Germany as the world’s number one country for wind generation of electricity. However, it should be noted that the total net electricity generation by wind in the US in 2007 (when Germany still reigned supreme) was about equal to the output of four typical nuclear power plants (i.e. assuming 1,000MW(e) plants running at a modest 90% of capacity.)

Babcock and Wilcox (B&W) have announced plans to sell a scalable modular reactor called mPower(TM) that would come in sizes as small as 125 MegaWatt (electrical) [MW(e)]. (See:  www.babcock.com/products/modular_nuclear/) This is not the first we have heard of small nuclear power plants with long (5 year) fueling cycles. For well over a decade it has been argued that economies of scale for nuclear power plants are a myth, and that there are benefits to be had by building smaller plants. To clarify, the argument is that, while multiple units per site may be beneficial, the monstrous 1000+MW(e) plants do not result in lower average costs of construction than do smaller plants. While many studies seem to bear this out, it seems clear that utilities globally have not bought into the argument. One need only look at the plants being constructed to see that, except for Pakistan, these units tend to be on the order of 1000MW(e). B&W seem to be banking that they can gain purchase with an idea that has not proved immensely popular in the past, but their approach of combining the strengths of existing approaches to nuclear power with the small modular design may, in deed, give them an edge over some past plant ideas.

The arguments in favor of such small reactors are several. Smaller reactors mean that a utility will be taking a smaller amount of its base-load power off-line each time refueling takes place.  The modular design is anticipated to allow one to cut delays and the capital costs incurred in building power plants, though the fact of this will remain to be seen. Furthermore, such reactors could be used on smaller grids. There are safety gains resulting from having the containment area underground, and from passive safety systems that are also seen on other commercial designs of this generation. (Passive safety uses things like gravity-fed and convection-operated systems to achieve emergency cooling- rather than pumps and other mechanical devices. This reduces the amount that can go wrong and the amount of complexity in the system.) If these advantages prove to be true to a sufficient degree, they might change the fate of nuclear power.

The term “nuclear renaissance” has been bandied about a lot in recent years. The presumption is that we are on the leading edge of a massive world-wide expansion of nuclear power. As the argument goes, as costs and /or regulatory constraints are put on carbon emissions (e.g. the cap and trade system being worked on in the US), nuclear power, whose operation does not result in greenhouse gas production, will be a big winner. However, it remains unclear to what degree an expansion of nuclear power will include either nascent nuclear power generating countries, or, for that matter, the US. 

A review of the list of states currently constructing nuclear power shows that, except for Iran, all of the countries with plants under construction have a history with nuclear power plants. The bulk of construction is being carried out in large emerging market economies. 26 of the 45 plants being built are in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries, and other large emerging markets including Taiwan, Argentina, and the Republic of Korea account for eight more of the new plants. Of those building plants, many (e.g. Finland and Iran, though for very different reasons)  are experiencing major problems with delays and cost-overruns.  

Delays and cost-overruns are at the heart of the apparent death and only slow recovery (if it proves to be the case) of nuclear power. The appeal of nuclear power goes like this: While the cost of building nuclear power plants is enormous, the cost of running it afterwords (fuel and operations costs) compared to fossil fuel plants are quite low. Therefore, you can put some of that high revenue relative to cost into paying back your loans, and eventually, once the debt has been paid off, nuclear becomes the utility’s cheapest (and, therefore, most profitable) energy source.

There are several potential flies in the ointment with respect to the dream of nuclear power. First, delays translate into postponement of the date at which you are beginning earn a return on your investment with which to pay back loans. Readers from Georgia will be familiar with the controversial end run around this problem that utilities have made by successfully lobbying to get rate hikes in place that allow them to build a pool of funds with which to pay off debt before the plant begins to operate. Such schemes are hugely controversial for many reasons, including that they reduce the incentive to stay on schedule, current power customers subsidize future customers, and they raise a lot of questions about what happens if the plants don’t come on line. Second, cost-overruns also have the effect of increasing the capital costs. Finally, there is always risk that due to regulatory, legal, or political reasons, there will never be a return on investment. The ill-fated Long Island Lighting Company experienced this first-hand when they fully-constructed the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant, but it never earned revenues.  Not only were massive construction costs incurred in building Shoreham, but there were also not-inconsequential costs of decommissioning, all of which had to be paid for from sources other than earned plant revenue.

Suffice it to say, a lot of nuclear energy’s woes revolve around the shear scale both with respect to finance as well as plant size. There are several nuclear aspirant countries that could not go nuclear even if they could manage to secure a few billion dollars in loans because their electrical grid or grids are not large enough to support even the smallest of the commercially available reactor designs now sold. Typical nuclear power plants are in the area of 1000+ MW(e) per unit. If that one unit makes up more than ten percent of the installed capacity on a grid, it is not likely to be feasible.

The B&W claims indicate that it would mitigate both the cost / finance difficulties and the grid size limitation issues. How the problem of grid size limitations are affected is elementary, but the mechanism by which the financial challenges are reduced is less intuitive. The idea is that the modular design would mean that the reactors could be factory-constructed and rail-shipped to  the plant location. Of course, the reactors themselves are only a portion of the infrastructure that must be build, so I’m not certain of the degree of savings to be had. That is, the cooling system, turbine housing, and systems maintain the pressure in the system are all built on site. (Of course, many of these systems are very similar to fossil fuel plants.) If it is true that you can bring the units on-line more quickly, and that they can be operated while construction is being done on the others, this could be a significant benefit. It would speed the time to receipt of revenues and the capacity to pay back loans, and would reduce the value of interest to be paid. Of course, if more utilities are successful in achieving Georgia Power’s sweet-heart deal (and it is not certain that many US utilities will build nuclear power plants if they have to shoulder a bigger portion of the risk) then there may be little incentive to reduce delays or cost-overruns.

I was visiting Watts Bar Nuclear Power Plant earlier this week, and asked the Engineer guiding us how he viewed the apparent death throes of the Yucca Mountain repository project and how it might affect the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVAs) operations there. I was told that they have not yet needed to employ interim dry storage (all their spent fuel is still in wet storage), and that it was by no means an urgent problem for them. He went on to say that they now had a source of funds to develop a dry storage facility on site from their share of what will likely be a multi-billion dollar settlement from the Department of Energy to utilities for failure to take possession of spent fuel as required by law.  

While, as an economist, it seems reasonable not to give in to sunk costs, it is disappointing to see money continue to be hemoraged (or even trickled) on a project that is not going anywhere. I think it is essential to get an act together on nuclear waste management soon. If  Yucca Mountain is, in fact, dead; then we need to stop feeding money into it and move on to the next option. If Yucca is the best option, it needs to move forward. This is not because there is urgency (i.e. power plants are not overflowing with dry storage casks), but because it doesn’t make sense to keep paying good money both for the continued development (money has been cut but not eliminated) and in law suites, if there is no intention to use the facility.

Unfortunately, the fact that there is time to consider the problem thoroughly and to build a sound waste management strategy means that it is more likely than not that no decision will be made. Politicians seem only capable of making hard decisions under high pressure. If the outrage at inaction is not high, and any course will be controversial in some quarters, the politically astute thing to do is stall until the people become distracted.

The Obama Administration says it wants its ducks in a row on waste management before moving forward on nuclear energy, but it is hard to say whether this is a measured and laudable approach or a means to stonewall on nuclear energy. Hopefully, the former is the case. Stonewalling outright would not be a popular decision because there is a sufficiently widespread belief that nuclear needs to be part of the solution to the country’s energy and environmental challenges. In fact, it would be hard to take the President’s ambitions to cut carbon seriously without nuclear making up some part of the overall strategy.   

To be fair, the questions are by no means simple. For example, should we reprocess / recycle nuclear fuel? There has not been a great deal of economic impetus to do so, and there is a lot of reluctance that stems from nuclear nonproliferation concerns. On the other hand, reprocessing reduces the volume of high level radioactive material and its lifespan considerably, and it radically expands the amount of fuel that can be obtained out of our given reserves.

The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) was supposed to facilitate reprocessing, but in a way that did not separate out Plutonium into weapons-usable fissile material. That program was another put upon the chopping block. The justification presented for killing it was its nonproliferation ramifications with respect to fuel reprocessing. Either those responsible for the GNEP reprocessing scheme were not astute in explaining how they could make good on such a claim, or they were not believed. (It seems apparent to me that even technically knowledgeable people don’t fully understand how the GNEP process could achieve this objective.)

On February 26th a conference took place at Georgia Tech in Atlanta entitled “The Six Party Talks and Korean Energy Security”. Conference speakers included Mr. Kurt Tong- Director of the Office of Korean Affairs at the State Department, Minister Kim Myong Gil of the North Korean Mission to the United Nations, former Ambassador to South Korea James Laney, and a number of prominent experts from academia and think-tanks. The conference covered a range of issues involving energy needs on the Korean Peninsula, and lent particular focus to questions of energy as both a vital resource for economic development and as a bargaining chip in negotiations with North Korea.

The central bargain of the 1994 Agreed Framework agreement between the US and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was the provision of energy to North Korea in exchange for movement away from nuclear arms development. The energy in question included fuel oil shipments as well a commitment to provide about 2000 MWe in electrical capacity in the form of light water nuclear reactors. The 1994 agreement, like all other agreements with North Korea to date, eventually unraveled in a raft of mutual accusations about failure to comply with the provisions of the bargain.

The use of energy as a bargaining chip makes a good deal of sense because the DPRK is desperately under-provided with electricity and heat, and the amount of electricity generated in recent years is even substantially below 1994 levels. Many readers have probably seen nighttime time-lapse satellite photographs in which South Korea looks like an island in the sea of Japan, with only a single dot recognizable between the Republic of Korea and the coast of China. One speaker at the Georgia Tech conference, Leon Sigal, had recently traveled to the DPRK, and spoke about how meetings were conducted in winter coats because the little space heaters in the Ministry conference rooms could not adequately heat the big rooms in a timely manner. As I once heard from a medical student who had traveled to North Korea, it is telling how deficient even the showplace facilities are in the DPRK (the student was talking about the atypical, yet still out of date and unhygienic, hospitals to which his delegation was taken.)

Dark Nights

 The North Koreans are apparently still angling for light water reactor technology to be part of a negotiated agreement. Selig Harrison, Director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy and occasional visitor to the DPRK, wrote in a February 17th Washington Post Column that he was told that completing the two reactors negotiated under the Agreed Framework would be part of the requirement for continuing dismantlement of the existing Yonbyong reactor. The US now apparently takes the stand that it is not the time to discuss light water reactors as part of an agreement.

What is interesting is that the North Korean grid,  as it exists, is incapable of handling the two 1000MW(e) plants. This point was made several times during the conference at Georgia Tech, and may be clear even to neophytes to capacity planning such as myself. North Korea’s electrical grid is not international in nature. In fact, North Korea’s electricity is supplied by a number of small grids that are not all interconnected even within the country. It has been said that any more than 10-15 % of electricity on a grid coming from a single plant is problematic. If North Korea’s grid were a single interconnected grid, one 1000MW(e) plant would produce about 20% of the electricity being generated on the grid in 1994. However, since it is not a single grid, this would be much larger proportion. Furthermore, the electrical grid, like much of the DPRK’s infrastructure, has been steadily deteriorating. The idea of installing such a massive source is a recipe for failure.

There have been a number of suggestions that might make nuclear power plants feasible in the DPRK such as bringing the North’s grid up to date and / or hooking part of it into Russia’s elecrical grid, but it is intriguing that such an essential component for nuclear power plants to be feasible was not a central part of the discussion. It would seem that North Korea is eager to gain access to the technology and, perhaps, to have the feather in its cap of having such advanced technology.  Meanwhile, the US, at least in 1994, has seen provision of reactos as a means to buy North Korea’s compliance at a low proliferation risk, and was not overly concerned with the reasonableness of the “solution”.

Technology Review’s  “Top Ten Emerging Technologies for 2009″ issue is now out. (see: http://www.technologyreview.com/specialreports/specialreport.aspx?id=37)  Among the ten technologies anticipated to “change the way we live” is the Traveling Wave Reactor design developed by Intellectual Ventures. Intellectual Ventures is a Bellevue, Washington company founded by a couple former Microsoft executives that combines venture capitalism with research and development. The reactor in question would internally convert some of the non-fissile isotopes in natural uranium into fissionable components, and, therefore, breed its own fuel.

If its promise can be realized, such a reactor would offer a number of proliferation risk mitigating effects as well as some environmentally friendly benefits. First, it apparently reduces the amount of uranium enrichment that would be required. Apparently, the process uses only a small amount of uranium enriched in the Uranium-235 isotope, and, because it makes its own fuel, no fuel changes would be needed over the life of the plant. This means that the desire to build more enrichment plants globally to either meet expanding demand or to assuage supply disruption fears would be reduced. 

Second, it would presumably reduce the need to recycle / reprocess (proponents using the former term and opponents the later) spent nuclear fuel via external facilities, because this would be done internally within the reactor. Presently, good arguments have been offered for moving toward a closed fuel cycle ala France rather than the open one ala the US. An open cycle uses fuel once and then puts it into storage, a closed one (reprocessing/ recycling) extracts fissile material from the spent fuel and runs it through another reactor to get more electricity for the dollar. The arguments in favor of recycling fuel are based on both economics and environmental factors. For one thing, the closed cycle radically expands the amount of nuclear fuel that is available in the world. Another factor is that recycling the fuel reduces the amount of high-level radioactive waste that must be stored. 

So, given these upsides of recycling, why isn’t the US doing it? There are at least two reasons. One is that the process is expensive. Proponents of recycling will argue that not all the benefits are captured by those considering the expense of recycling. Such benefits include: a.)  a decreased amount that needs to be stored, and, thus, a need for fewer / smaller repositories; b.) a reduced longevity of the radioactivity of waste products; and c.) a vastly expanded stock of available fuel that will push out into the future the date at which short supplies lead to skyrocketing  prices. These may all be true, but the fact of the matter is that private companies don’t see it this way. This is because individual firms don’t calculate benefits accruing to society as a whole into their bottom lines, and the future is heavily discounted such that the difference between running out of nuclear fuel in hundreds of years versus tens of thousands of years is inconsequential (these timescales are  not based on calculations or even an educated guess, but are just a, possibly hyperbolic, literary device). This leaves government to take the task of capturing societal cost and benefits, but governments tend to be near-sighted themselves. 

The other downside of recycling or reprocessing is that the extracted fissile material from the spent fuel  translates into a potentially greater risk that such material will be diverted to military or criminal uses. Recycling involves transporting material, plutonium getting caught up in pipes, and whole new facilities to monitor. However, the traveling wave reactor would seem to achieves at least some of this within the reactor.  Since one can’t steal the fuel from inside a reactor (they tend to be both really hot and highly radioactive), some degree of recycling is achieved without the proliferation risk.

Before one gets too excited, it is important to realize that the reactor is at the moment a design, and idea. There are several hurdles that must be leapt before this technology can contribute to a change in the way we live. First, it has to be taken from a theoretically appealing concept to a physically preforming technology. The second, and no doubt harder chore, is that it must be made economically competitive with existing technologies. Finally, along the way there will be a number of powerful firms, in some cases closely tied to governments, that will stand to lose as such a technology takes over.

I tend to be inherently pessimistic; even when, as in this case, I am fundamentally ignorant of the technical issues involved. Things that are easily achieved are readily done, and most of what isn’t fails. That being said, I am hopeful that this and other technologies that can offer us the environmental benefits and energy security of nuclear power while simultaneously reducing the proliferation threats will succeed sooner rather than later.

Is Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, assassinating Iranian scientists involved with Tehran’s nuclear fuel program? A number of sources are reporting on this story whose origins seem to be in a Daily Telegrapharticle dated February 16th by Philip Sherwell. Most concretely, the Telegrapharticle reports on circulating rumors about Mossad’s involvement in the death of Ardeshire Hassanpour in 2007. Hassanpour was reportedly a high level scientist at Iran’s uranium conversion facility at Isfahan. However, the thrust of the article is a suggestion that Israeli covert efforts are likely to be stepped up because of fears that President Obama will be less likely to approve of Israeli military attacks and more likely to be obstructionist against such operations. Other than the reporting of rumors, there is not a great deal of solid accusations in the article. Therefore, it is difficult to draw conclusions about the factuality of the claim.

It should be noted that, if the Israelis are engaged in such activities, it is hard to imagine that they would be able to continue to succeed. Even if the Mossad is not running a covert war against Iran, the Iranian government, which has completely demonized Israel, is likely to believe the stories are true and to sequester the most crucial people. There are people in the Iranian government who would readily accept a claim that Israelis grind up their elderly for plant-food, let alone something as unexceptional as that they are involved in a covert campaign of assassination and sabotage to slow down Iran’s progress in the realm of the nuclear fuel cycle.

Given Iran’s enthusiasm for the destruction of Israel, it would be difficult to fault the Israelis if they did form such a plan in desperation. However, the challenge of succeeding in such a task is considerable, and the potential for impacts deleterious to Israel’s well-being would be high. This is a big program, and it is hard to imagine crippling it with such covert operations. Those that can readily be killed are not critical, and those who are critical may not be easily accessed. One the cost side of the ledger, Israel doesn’t need to advance an image of itself as an underhanded rogue state reticent to engage in diplomacy and swift to resort to prison-yard tactics.

On the other hand, the measure of success seems to be in delaying progress, and, given this vague metric, Israel might find it worthwhile. However, if they are stalling for President Obama to be out of the White House, they will probably need to keep the ball in play for eight years. Unless, the economy hasn’t bounced back into positive growth within the next three years or there is a major terrorism event that pushes the American people in a more hawkish direction, President Obama is likely to be around in 2016. Of course, they may be banking on the President’s mind being changed or on developing a means to a more permanent solution that doesn’t require US support and/or sanctioning. Certainly if Ahmedinejad remains around, it may only be time before the President, himself, finds that he can’t suffer the idiot or his country’s nuclear ambitions a moment more.

The Los Angeles Times is running a story that suggests that the official stance of the US on Iran’s intentions with respect to nuclear weapons has changed under the Obama Administration. see: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-fg-usiran12-2009feb12,0,3478184.story

Readers may remember the shocking National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was released toward the end of 2007 that proposed that there was good reason to believe that the Iranians had shelved their nuclear weapons program. To clarify, as the NIE does, this does not mean that they stopped work on uranium enrichment which is necessary for them to make a nuclear weapons but is also used to make fuel for light-water reactors, nor did it mean that they stopped work on delivery systems (i.e. missiles).

What did it mean? It meant that the intelligence community had some reason to believe that the Iranians had been, but were no longer, conducting research on the systems involved directly in producing a nuclear explosion. Such research might include development of specialized high explosives, metal machining, or the development of precision electronics. One would expect that they had inside sources to make such a bold determination. After all, these types of research are not like testing the nuclear device itself or missile testing that can be easily monitored by technical means such as seismic sensors or satellites. It is also unlike uranium enrichment which requires large electricity-intensive facilities.

The 2007 NIE left many scratching their heads. Even if one had such human intelligence or verifiable signal intelligence in place to give a high degree of confidence of the veracity of your statements, why would you publicize it? On one hand, this might seem to put at risk whatever sources or methods had been used to cultivate the intelligence, and, on the other, it put those negotiating with Iran into a weaker position. Ostensibly, someone had some sort of strategic thought process going on when they released the NEI. Perhaps it was sound and perhaps it was not, one cannot know without better understanding of the intentions of those involved. However, it was certainly controversial, and most significantly with the European nations negotiating with the Iranians.

The LA Time article states that there has been no indication of changing intelligence since the 2007 NIE, but that the current administration believes the Estimate gave a false impression.

What I find interesting is that Presidential Administrations have to take a firm stand about what they believe the opposition’s intentions to be, regardless of whether they can really know what those intentions are with any degree of certainty. While it strains credulity, it is possible that the Iranians are doing as they say. That is, that they are seeking to enrich uranium to use in the nuclear power plant that they have under construction with no intention of building a bomb. The Iranian government’s  behavior with respect to seeking to make fuel that will not be cost competitive with the fuel on the  global market, and in withholding information from the IAEA, makes their veracity seem a dim prospect indeed, but it is not impossible by any means. Of course, it is possible that intelligence agencies have a look “inside the mind” of the Iranians via human intelligence, but it may well be that their is no such insider’s view. In such case, the certitude of any politicians may be a point of concern.