Posted on 08/17/2006 12:09:33 PM PDT by cogitator
A couple of weeks ago, my colleague David Biello made a blog entry highly critical of nuclear power. Now, in the September issue of the magazine we have an article with a more positive outlook. John M. Deutch and Ernest J. Moniz of MIT present an analysis of how nuclear power generation might triple, in the U.S. and globally, by 2050. The discussion draws heavily on a 2003 MIT report that they co-chaired, The Future of Nuclear Power.
Such a tripling would result in approximately a terawatt (a million megawatts) of generation capacity and would avoid 0.8 to 1.8 billion tons of carbon emissions annually, depending on whether the nuclear plants were displacing natural gas-burning plants (0.8) or coal-burning plants (1.8). To put that in perspective, at present 7 billion tons of carbon are poured into the atmosphere every year, a figure that will double in 50 years if emissions continue to grow at the pace of the past 30 years (see the article in the same issue by Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala).
[More:]
To what extent the nuclear option should be exercised is not a simple question. The answer depends on what target we aim for regarding carbon emissions, how much electric power must be produced in 2050, how big a contribution to electric power generation can be made by renewable sources of energy such as wind and photovoltaics, and how successful carbon dioxide sequestration turns out to be. The economics of the different options must be weighed against one another, and then there are the harder-to-quantify factors of safety, waste disposal and nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.
The MIT report suggests that a terawatt of nuclear power is likely to be needed in addition to aggressive expansion of renewables, development of sequestration and so on. Others argue that improvements in efficiency and expansion of renewables alone can suffice.
Regarding nuclear waste, Deutch and Moniz state that the scientific case for geologic disposal, in which waste is stored in chambers hundreds of meters underground, is well-established:
Decades of studies support the geologic disposal option. Scientists have a good understanding of the processes and events that could transport radionuclides from the repository to the biosphere.
(As with much of the article, this point is elaborated on in greater detail in the MIT report, which is available in full on the web.) Of course, the scientific acceptability of the waste disposal scheme is quite a different matter from actually implementing it successfully, which entails overcoming daunting political and regulatory challenges. A highly sobering fact: The tripling scenario would entail building one waste repository of the size proposed for Yucca mountain about every three years.
I don't want to steal any more thunder from the print article itself, but there is one notable point that was abbreviated by cuts made for space reasons. Deutch and Moniz advocate a so-called once-through fuel cycle for the next few decades at least. That means that spent fuel is not reprocessed to extract material for re-use as fuel in a nuclear power plant. Adhering to a once-through cycle in the near term has specific policy implications:
Congress has pushed for reprocessing of spent fuel in the near term, but that is a mistake. Reprocessing is a costly, dangerous procedure that has risks to the environment and creates stocks of plutonium that can be readily diverted for use in weapons. The benefits for waste disposal using current technology are marginal.
Finally, the administration has proposed to reestablish a robust program to explore other approaches to waste management, in particular a type of advanced recycling in which all the transuranic elements in the waste are fissioned into shorter-lived elements. New types of reactors, separation technologies and fuel forms are all likely to be needed for such a system to work technically and economically, and much basic research is needed. It will take decades before such approaches can be evaluated, let alone deployed commercially.
Translation of the latter paragraph: The U.S. shouldn't rush to try to implement these advanced recycling schemes prematurely in large demonstration plants and the like.
Some kind of big shift in the national conciousness is underway.
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