Environment and Nuclear Energy

The 1997 conference took up the most timely topic, “Environment and Nuclear Energy,” and was again held in Washington, D.C. It emphasized the impact on environment of the use of energy. Could nuclear energy be a major contributor to an energy source mix that can help to alleviate greenhouse gas emissions and global warming problems? To what extent is it true that the use of nuclear energy in all regions of the world could help to solve pollution problems such as acid rain arising from heavy use of fossil fuels, particularly coal. Do the issues of nuclear waste and a possible nuclear weapons proliferation present scientific, technological, and political challenges? If all these problems inhibit the global use of nuclear energy then, the world is facing an important global issue requiring global solution.

There are complex global connections between economics, energy, and the environment. Meeting the rising expectations of a growing world population depends on economic growth, but if that growth is fuelled by fossil fuels, there are dire implications in terms of the increase in carbon emissions, the changes in the acidity of the rain, and the living conditions in our planet.

There are two obvious reasons why nuclear energy sources must be emphasized. One is that in the not-too-distant future, let us say, the year 2100, the world’s energy demand is apt to be at least ten times the present energy production, and presently known methods will not suffice with the only exception of nuclear energy. The second reason is that present worries about harmful environmental consequences are almost certainly justified if present methods are used and the amounts are increased by a factor ten.

The topic of this talk, “Energy Alternatives and Global Warming in the 21st Century” was chosen to set a global energy stage for the coming discussions of the potential role of nuclear power in reducing global warming. Much of the professional literature and media commentaries on global warming reduction focus on constraining energy use by political mandates (as in the coming Kyoto conference) and by economic tools such as taxing and subsidizing. An alternative view is that in a free market society, technology options should be the primary tools for addressing the physical issues of global energy and environment. I will try to shed some light on these energy technology options from my viewpoint as shaped by many decades of EPRI experience in fashioning energy technologies for national, regional, and individual purposes. I will not address the important technologies for accommodating to climate change or potentially for climate modification, such as recently suggested by Edward Teller.

Nuclear power is not doing well in the USA. No new plant has been ordered since 1973. Many orders placed before 1973 have been cancelled.

Today there is a strong movement in the direction of developing nuclear power that is more acceptable to the general public. I have had a front seat in the development of the water-cooled reactors that are producing nearly 20% of the electrical energy being developed in the United States. I believe that these reactors are relatively safe compared to other methods of producing electricity today — in fact, they probably represent the safest method of producing electricity. However, that is not the topic of my essay, which is devoted to new developments in the production of nuclear electric power.

The major energy sources of today are expected to last for only a small fraction of the millennium starting in the year 2000. In the plans of most people, nuclear energy has been ruled out for four separate reasons:

“Atomic energy is capable of applications for peaceful as well as military purposes.” With this pronouncement, the Congress, in the preamble to the 1954 Atomic Energy Act, released atomic energy (nuclear energy) from its military origins. The Congress also set out a new purpose for this new energy source... to serve and improve the “general welfare” of the country. The intent of the act was clearly broad and substantial, “to provide for... a program to encourage widespread participation in the development and utilization of atomic energy for peaceful purposes.”

A behavioral, top-down, forced-equilibrium market model of long-term (~2100) global energy-economics interactions has been modified with a “bottom-up” nuclear energy model and used to construct consistent scenarios describing future impacts of civil nuclear materials flows in an expanding, multi-regional (13) world economy. The relative measures and tradeoffs between economic (GNP, tax impacts, productivity, etc.), environmental (greenhouse gas accumulations, waste accumulation, proliferation risk), and energy (resources, energy mixes, supply-side versus demand-side attributes) interactions that emerge from these analyses are focused herein on advancing understanding of the role that nuclear energy (and other non-carbon energy sources) might play in mitigating greenhouse warming. Two ostensibly opposing scenario drivers are investigated: a) demand-side improvements in (non-price-induced) autonomous energy efficiency improvements; and b) supply-side carbon-tax inducements to shift energy mixes towards reduced- or non-carbon forms. In terms of stemming greenhouse wanning for minimal cost of greenhouse-gas abatement, and within the limitations of the simplified taxing schedule used, a symbiotic combination of these two approaches may offer advantages not found if each is applied separately.

The world’s population, energy demand, and rate of carbon emissions are increasing. Even modest growth rates present significant challenges to existing and developing technologies for reducing carbon and greenhouse gas emissions while meeting growing energy demands. Nuclear power is currently the most developed alternative to fossil fuel combustion and is one of the options for meeting these challenges. However, there are significant technical, economic and institutional barriers inhibiting growth of nuclear capacity in the U.S. and slowing the rate of implementation worldwide. In the near-term, the major barriers to nuclear power, especially in the U.S., appear to be economic and institutional. Risks such as safety, waste management and proliferation are within reasonably acceptable limits at the current installed capacity. Future growth of nuclear power, however, may well hinge on continuous evolutionary and perhaps revolutionary improvements in safety and fuel cycle management so that the overall risk of nuclear power, aggregated over the entire installed capacity, remains at or below today’s risks. This is a challenge that both U.S. industry and the government must step up to with a well-focused R&D program.

At a time of almost certain need because of local and global challenges to the environment from overuse of fossil and other organic fuels, nuclear technology may not be available in the United States because it lacks credibility with many Americans. It lost credibility because leaders of the nuclear community failed to ensure that important principles of quality were used to manage, regulate, and develop policies for its use.

The term “sustainability” or “sustainable development” is not completely new. At the beginning of the 18^th century it emerged in forestry and was manifested by instinctive actions of forest management to cope with regional environmental problems (triggering substitution of wood by coal). In our times the “Brundtland-Report” (1987) provided a revival of this idea defining sustainable development as “a development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. It contains the concept of needs and the idea of limitations and necessitates a process of change taking environmental, economical, and social aspects into account. The Agenda 21, a program of action as one of the major outcomes of the Rio Earth Summit’ 92, formally introduces the concept of sustainability development indicators, which are mainly environmentally (climate change) driven.

In December 1997, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change will hold its third session in Kyoto, Japan (COP3). This conference is an important step in the international negotiations initiated at the Earth Summit (Rio de Janeiro), 1992, where the international community first recognised the need for urgent action to combat the Greenhouse Effect.

I am sure that it is clear to most participants at this conference that the world cannot do without new nuclear power deployment over the next fifty years given:

The generation of energy by fusing together the isotopes of hydrogen, namely deuterium and tritium, is an objective pursued for the past 50 years by virtually all nations. In principle, it is the same process occurring in the sun and the stars, which has naturally powered the universe for billions of years. The need for pursuing this objective on Earth is compelling. As Fig. 1 shows, if we assume that the world population stabilizes at 10 billion, consuming energy at 2/3 of the U.S. 1985 rate, the energy available from fossil, hydro, and non-breeder fission will suffice approximately until the year 2030. After that, the shortfall will be increasing, and must be made up by other sources. The only alternative is fusion energy.

Awareness of the total materials inventory and materials balance associated with differing methods for energy generation is part of present-day concerns associated with disparate areas that include atmospheric emissions, resource utilization, health effects, and both current and long-term hazards and risks. Nuclear energy, for a number of decades, has been the recipient of significant scrutiny concerning the materials and wastes it generates, particularly in the context of long-term solutions to such issues. This paper examines the nuclear materials and waste generation for nuclear energy scenarios spanning the coming century. The paper also briefly addresses wastes (in the form of emissions) from other energy sources and examines requirements associated with back-end energy system materials management. Possible future requirements pertaining to CO₂ management are found to place conditions upon waste management generally similar to those for nuclear waste. One example of material flows for the case of coal generation of electricity coupled with carbon sequestration is also given.

As the globalization of the economy progresses, opportunities arise for new concepts in different fields of economic activity, including energy. Oil companies are one of the prime examples of multinational energy enterprises that cover a very large spectrum of organizational modalities. There are no set rules since these corporations have their own identities, the point is that among them, practically every possible way of dealing with the oil business is covered.

The electric utility sector is of central importance for economic growth and social development. While numerous societal and economic benefits arise from electricity production, it can also have negative impacts. Today, an increasing number of electric utilities are working on integrating environmental, social and economic aspects into their decision-making processes in an effort to move the electricity sector towards sustainable development. Some utilities have demonstrated that sustainable energy development is not a costly add-on to their core business; instead given cost-effective implementation it can improve their competitive position in a fast-changing industry (Boone and Howes, 1996).

Perhaps it is because of my background in energy and nuclear economic analysis in Congress that I have been invited to speak about the legislative framework necessary for the successful reemergence of the nuclear industry. So I will act like the economist who is asked how he would suggest hanging a picture. As any good economist, he first states his assumptions: “First, assume the existence of a hammer and a nail... ”. In this case, I will assume the existence of a nuclear technology that is environmentally benign and economic. I will leave to you to ponder whether this would be a new or existing technology. I am not going to get into the “assumptions”. Rather, I am going to focus on how to hang the picture if one has a hammer and nail — what is the legislative framework which would allow this nuclear technology to succeed.

For the past twenty years nuclear energy plants under construction in the U.S. have encountered such regulatory and legal delays that they have taken a dozen to twenty years to complete, with resulting uneconomic costs. As a result not a single Electric Utility intends to build a new nuclear plant in the U.S. Indeed, a few years ago when the NRC requested aid just to demonstrate the feasibility of a new nuclear plant siting procedure, no Utility was willing to help - even though it was made clear that there was no commitment to actually build a new plant.

The famous Indian nuclear scientist, Dr. Homi Bhabha, coined the expression “no energy is more expensive than no energy”. He meant that nothing is grimmer than living without any other energy than that of your own body. For a good life we need energy for cooking, heating, transportation, industrial production, communication, home appliances...

As the world awaits the discussions and agreements at Kyoto, one fact stands out - that of all the alternate fuels nuclear power is alone in producing no appreciable particulate air pollution, not contributing global warming and, with a breeder reactor being able to produce power for 100,000 years at modest cost. The present problem is that the cost has risen considerably in the last 25 years and begins to approach the costs of some of the solar energy alternatives.