What explains the diametrically opposed positions on nuclear power witnessed between France and Germany? France is arguably the most pro-nuclear energy country in the world, and Germany, while it may be having second thoughts, has been retiring its aging nuclear plants so as to gradually phase out of the nuclear energy business.

These two countries have quite a bit in common in addition to being neighbors. They have similar sized populations and economies. While Germany is a little bigger in terms of both population and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the two countries’ per capita GDP figures are quite close. On a broad continuum of political governance, they are quite close together as republics with parliaments and constitutions. There is a paper that suggests that Frances nuclear power optimism is a product of a system of governance that makes it hard for dissenting interest groups to make headway into impacting policy. (Delmas & Heiman, J of Policy Analysis and Management, 20 (3), pp. 433 – 456) They both built considerable nuclear capacity initially.

First, it may be interesting to consider those commonly hypothesized explanations that don’t do so well at clarifying this divide. One might find it reasonable to expect that public opinion about nuclear energy in the two countries would be radically different, and that this is the root of the divide. However, there is a survey conducted by GlobeScan on behalf of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that shows that, while Germans do have a slightly higher proportion of their population with negative opinions on nuclear, the differences were not, in fact, massive.

In France there is not a majority of the population clamoring for more plants, and, on the other hand, the percentage of Germans that want to see more nuclear power is only a couple percentage points below what is seen in France. These results could be deceptive. “Use existing facilities, do not build more”, which is the largest response category for both countries, could mean different things to citizens of the two countries. France might be considered to be at its saturation point with respect to nuclear power. Even though it is a major electricity exporter (including to Germany), France has so much nuclear capacity that it uses it not just for base-load production but also in a load-following role that is less optimal for nuclear plants. This is reflected in the lower capacity factors seen in France than most other advanced nuclear countries. (A capacity factor is a proportion representing what a plant actually produces over what it could theoretically deliver if it operated at its rated capacity constantly over a time period.) At any rate, when a Frenchman says don’t build more, he or she may just be saying that there is enough to meet the need and it would not be cost-effective to build more, whereas a German, not being near that saturation point, may be more likely to be expressing a negative view toward nuclear energy. However, if one examines the polling data for whether nuclear energy should be expanded to mitigate climate change, French and Germans are quite similar in the proportions that want expansion (about 40% each), but Germans have a somewhat higher proportion that are opposed to building more nuclear plants for this purpose (56% to France’s 43%).

Germany has been advancing renewable energy plants. However, as I have mentioned in past posts, these sources are not yet up to replacing coal and nuclear. While it has been posited that Germans are more environmentally conscientious, as observed in their build up of renewables, it should be noted that German emissions of greenhouse gases from energy production is significantly higher than France’s, even when one normalizes per capita or per GDP dollar (i.e. carbon intensity) the French come out ahead. It is also worth noting that it has only been quite recently that Germany has outdone France with respect to either the proportion of electricity coming from renewables or the absolute value of renewable electricity generated.

Besides differing policies toward nuclear energy, what else separates France and Germany? One prominent difference is that France is a nuclear weapons state, but Germany is not. This is not to imply that there is a connection between the difference on nuclear weapons and on nuclear energy – particularly given the fact that these two countries were building nuclear energy capacity side-by-side  in earlier times. However, it does act as a reminder that this policy gulf may, in fact, be idiosyncratic to the two countries in question. It may be tied to the history of each going back to the early days of the Cold War.

There are some differences that may have some generalizability. One factor is that French nuclear infrastructure is owned by firms that are super-majority owned by the French government, while German nuclear infrastructures are primarily owned by private sector firms. This may make a difference in that governments presumably have different attitudes towards risk and uncertainty than private-sector firms. Governments are used to being able to redistribute risk across the entire population, and, being expected to assume certain high consequence operations, are more used to such activities. Firms have to think about risk and uncertainty differently because they can only distribute their risk through costly insurance programs. If one considers the 53 nuclear power plants currently under construction, only two are being built in a country, Japan, where the private-sector dominates power plant ownership. Even the one plant currently under construction in the US is being built by the Tennessee Valley Authority, which is one of the few Federally owned corporations in the United States. It is very common to have mixed public-private ownership of nuclear power plants, but strictly privately owned plants are a rarity, even with the many policies put in place to facilitate them.

Another notable difference is that Germany has massive stocks of coal.While Germany’s reliance on coal has been dropping, it is still true that both its production and consumption of coal are several times that of France.  Coal, like nuclear, is ideal for base-load power production, and, for that reason, coal may be considered the primary competitor of nuclear power in its domain. It is true that natural gas, which is ideal for peak-load production, is also used widely for base-load capacity – particularly when natural gas prices are low.

The case of France and Germany is an interesting one for considering why one state might be bullish on nuclear power while another, facing many similar circumstances, is bearish. Of course, as mentioned it may or may not be possible to generalize from this case to others. It is certainly possible that there are idiosyncratic explanations for this difference in policy. Even some of the more generalizable explanations just beg further questions. For example, if the public-sector versus private-sector ownership is an important factor, this raises the question of why the two countries took different approaches to plant ownership. Applying the hypothesis that having an abundance of fossil fuel deposits reduces the incentive to build nuclear plants to a broader set of countries can yield ambiguous results.

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.

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.

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.

Natural Gas Power Plant in Budapest, Hungary

I use the term the Russian gas weapon hesitantly, realizing that it sounds like something that comes from eating too much cabbage. The conflict between Gazprom and the Ukraine over whether the Russian energy giant is being adequately compensated for all of the natural gas used by Ukrainian customers continues to make parts of Europe a collateral damage zone. Quite a number of European countries obtain much of, if not most of, their natural gas from Russia, and the pipeline through the Ukraine serves many countries in southern Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).  With mid-winter heating needs and natural gas serving as an important source of peak-load electricity, countries such as Serbia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, and Moldova have been feeling the pinch. Countries that had no other natural gas source began having factories shut down and heating cut-off, and many of those that did initially began to horde.  Hungary was holding its stocks in country, but, noting the dire situation in Serbia, both the Hungarians and Germans began to release natural gas to the Serbians recently.

Gazprom’s withholding of gas is a prime example of the type of threat to energy security that countries around the world have dire concerns about. Furthermore, it is particularly disheartening because it shows that states can be cut off for reasons that apparently have nothing to do with their own behavior. No doubt  the Russians figured that hitting Europe would lead to pressure on the Ukraine, but, besides that side-effect, it does not seem that closing the spigots is directed at Europe. (While one might think that they also had it in their head to show the new NATO members how Russia can put a hurt on them, the fact that their long-time friend and ally Serbia is about the worst hit would seem to serve as evidence against that speculation.) 

It is interesting how fragile supply lines are for such commodities. Within a day after supplies were shut off, these countries started feeling the effects and were taking actions to get them through the gas draught. As someone who lives in an area serviced by the Gulf of Mexico region refineries, I can attest that short refinery shut downs due to storms quickly affect gasoline availability at the pumps.

As the conflict continues, it is already having wide ranging effects. Both Slovakia and Bulgaria have considered restarting Soviet era VVER-440 reactors to prevent disruptions in their power grid. When Slovakia initially suggested this it was rebuked by other European countries as a violation of their EU accession agreement. No doubt the old Soviet era nuclear reactors are considered a safety concern, and probably are.

It will be interesting to see what effects this event will have on long-term policy, if any. While it is certainly demoralizing, it seems as though it may be difficult to do anything about it in the short term. Some European countries have taken considerable actions to reduce dependency, but it seems to be a drop in the bucket. When I was flying back from Hungary in December I could see massive wind farms over what I believe would have been Germany. While laudable, that isn’t going cut it, particularly if the Germans maintain a stance of eliminating their nuclear plants.  Though they can always continue to import electricity from France.