More Nukes, Please

In fact the news is even better than that. Recent improvements in safety techniques and operating procedures have raised the nuclear industry’s “capacity factor” (the percentage of time the plants are on line) to an almost unbelievable 90 percent. Coal plants run at only 69 percent of capacity, while oil and natural gas generators run at about 30 percent — mainly because their fuel is so expensive that it’s profitable to shut them down whenever possible. Hydroelectric dams, at the mercy of rainfall and snowmelt, ran at only 40 percent last year. While fossil fuel plants must be shut down every week or two for routine maintenance, Three Mile Island Unit I (the one that didn’t melt down) set a record in 1999, having operated for nearly two years without interruption.

These accomplishments have occurred with minimal fanfare. Indeed, nuclear power was barely mentioned last week when President Bush and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham warned of a looming energy crisis. “If you ask Joe Public how many nuclear reactors are operating in the country, they’ll probably tell you 10 or 12,” says Tom Shiel, spokesman for nuclear operations at Duke Power. “They have no idea we have 103 reactors and that we’re producing 20 percent of the nation’s electricity. The truth is we’ve been happy to stay out of the public eye for awhile. As far as this industry is concerned, no news is good news.”

Even so, public attitudes are changing. Twenty years ago, nuclear power was personified by Jack Lemmon being chased through the control room by a gun-toting utility executive in The China Syndrome. Today most young people know about nuclear power because Homer Simpson works at a nuclear plant. More than 60 percent of Americans now approve of nuclear power, and 51 percent think we should build more reactors. Ironically the same majority believes that other Americans don’t agree with them. It may be time for a breakthrough.

On March 7, Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico introduced the Nuclear Energy Electricity Assurance Act, designed to reignite the nation’s nuclear effort. “We must abandon our old fears of nuclear energy and embrace a technology that holds the potential of easing us out of our energy woes,” he said. In February, Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, told the National Press Club that his home state had better start thinking about nuclear power: “I have not yet heard anybody utter the phrase ‘nuclear power’ in California, . . . but in terms of environmental costs and competitiveness, I just don’t see any other solution.” A month before that, Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel, said essentially the same thing: “Nuclear power is the only answer, even though it’s politically incorrect.”

In fact, nuclear power probably can’t do much to help California escape its electricity shortage in the short run (only eliminating price controls will do that). But as a long-range alternative it is looking more and more attractive. Although only two new plants have opened nationwide since 1990, remarkable advances in operating procedures at existing plants have added generating capacity equivalent to 23 large new reactors over the past decade. Nuclear operating costs are now at an all-time low — half of what they were in 1990. In 1999, electricity from nuclear plants averaged 1.83 cents per kilowatt-hour, as opposed to 2.07 cents for coal, 3.24 cents for oil, and 3.52 cents for natural gas.

“These figures can only improve as natural gas becomes more expensive,” says Marv Fertel, senior vice president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry trade group. “We still have higher construction costs, but we’re basically immune to increases in fuel prices. Uranium is as common as tin and relatively easy to process.” Over the past 10 years the uranium costs of nuclear power have actually decreased from .92 cents per kilowatt-hour in 1990 to half a cent in 1999.

How did this revival occur? Basically, nuclear power escaped the claustrophobic environment of regulated utilities and federal bureaucracy and entered the private sector. More than one quarter of the nation’s 103 reactors are now “merchant” plants — owned by the new independent energy companies rather than the regulated utilities of yore. Exelon, formed last year from the merger of PECO Energy and Chicago’s Commonwealth Edison, owns the nation’s largest “fleet” — 17 reactors at 10 sites in Illinois, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

“We’ve built up a wealth of operating experience,” says David Knox, a nuclear expert at Exelon’s Chicago headquarters. “In the early 1990s, it would take the industry anywhere from a month to six weeks to do a refueling [i.e., changing the fuel rods, which must be done every 18 months]. In 1998, we did one in 30 days. Last fall we set a record by completing a refueling in 15 days. All this means you’ve got more time when your reactors are generating electricity.”

Newly optimistic about the technology, many owners are applying to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for 20-year extensions to the original 40-year operating licenses. Homer Simpson and his neighbors couldn’t be happier. When Constellation Energy went for renewal on its Calvert Cliffs plant in Lusby, Maryland (which produces 25 percent of Maryland’s electricity), almost the entire county turned out in support. “We had no local opposition,” says Mary Krug, a former county commissioner. “Three-quarters of the plant employees live in Calvert County. They donated over a quarter of a million dollars last year to the United Way. They’re a very good corporate citizen.” Calvert Cliffs also employs 1,200 people and pays $ 20 million a year in county property taxes.

But are these advances being bought at the price of safety? Quite the contrary. In 1994, former NRC chairman Ivan Selin warned that deregulating utilities and selling reactors to private companies might create “incentives to cut corners” on safety. Now the agency admits this was wrong. “The industry has made tremendous strides,” says Victor Dricks, spokesman for the NRC. “Both the number of safety system activations and scrams [automatic protective shutdowns] are about one-tenth of what they were in 1985. Safety and economic efficiency can go hand in hand.”

“With proper management you can serve both masters,” agrees David Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, which, although often critical of nuclear power, is not completely opposed. “When private companies started buying reactors, people said, ‘They’ll run them until they melt down, collect the decommission money, and move on to something else.’ That’s not happening. These companies know their future is riding on safety. If one nuclear reactor melts down, they’ll lose their whole fleet.”

In retrospect it appears that nuclear power’s notorious safety problems had more to do with government monopolies than the technology itself. In a remarkable analysis published right after Three Mile Island (“Who Caused Three Mile Island?” Reason, August 1980), industrial psychologist Adam Reed noted the real problem with nuclear plants was the cloistering of the technology in the NRC’s precursor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission. Shunning the private insurance companies — which had established the Underwriters Laboratory for the explicit purpose of promoting electrical safety — the government overseers missed an entire generation of research about human factors in operational safety. “Some of the manufacturers of nuclear power reactors had highly competent engineering psychologists working for their other divisions, but the AEC insisted on keeping nuclear reactor work secret and isolated,” wrote Reed.

By 1970, no new design for a toaster or blender at General Electric could get off the drawing board without being examined by an expert in human factors. Yet the same company was designing, manufacturing, and delivering nuclear reactors that had never even been seen, much less examined, by an engineering psychologist. . . . It was only after Three Mile Island that engineering psychologists asked what the hell was going on in nuclear power plant control rooms. What they saw made them shiver.

In those days plant operators faced a panel of hundreds of identical gauges and switches, many of which could be read only by climbing ladders. Gauges that recorded responses were often on the other side of the room from the switches that controlled them. At many plants the fuel rods were raised and lowered by pulling one of two identical levers that sat side by side. In one famous instance, operators tried to differentiate the levers by attaching Heineken and Michelob tap handles — only to have the utility order them removed for fear of being fined by the NRC. “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission imposed safety standards,” wrote Reed. “But in 1979, its regulations were still based on the most recent safety research of 1954.”

Predictably, the Three Mile Island accident occurred when an improvised cardboard maintenance tag obscured a signal light on the control panel. A resulting human error activated the automatic emergency core cooling system, which lit a red light saying that water had successfully entered the core. But operators mistook the red light as a danger signal that too much water had entered the core and emptied it, setting off a partial meltdown. Homer Simpson would have felt right at home.

Today these government-sponsored hijinks are a thing of the past. “Every nuclear reactor has its own site-specific simulated control room,” says Fertel of the Nuclear Energy Institute. “On average, our operators spend one week a month in a training environment. They do more simulation practice than airline pilots.”

“We share safety information quickly, openly, and thoroughly throughout this entire industry,” adds Karl Neddenien, spokesman for Constellation Energy. “We’re as knowledgeable about every other plant in the world as about our own. Our first concern is safety.”

Other issues that gave nuclear power a black eye have also changed dramatically. During the 1980s, not much was known about the long-term effects of exposure to low levels of radiation. Natural background radiation exposes people to 250-350 millirems per year, while sitting on the property line of a nuclear plant would add an additional 1 millirem. Extrapolating from the damage done by poisonous levels of exposure, and assuming that there is “no safe dose” of radiation at any level, antinuclear activists such as Drs. John Gofman and Ernest Sternglass were able to conjure up visions of thousands of children dying of cancer because of the construction of a nuclear plant.

In 1991, though, the National Cancer Institute published a report concluding that there is “no general increased risk of death from cancer for people living in 197 U.S. counties containing or closely adjacent to 62 nuclear facilities.” Moreover, demographic studies have since revealed that cancer rates vary inversely with exposure to background radiation. People living on the Rocky Mountain Plateau receive the highest doses of background radiation in the country (through radioactive minerals in the mountains and greater exposure to cosmic rays) yet have the lowest rates of cancer in the country. This has spawned a counter-theory which says that high levels of background radiation may be healthy. Just as a vaccine stimulates the immune system against microbial invaders, so small doses of radiation may stimulate the body’s known mechanisms for repairing genetic damage.

Neither is the disposal of high-level wastes the problem it once seemed. France (70 percent nuclear) and Japan (50 percent) are reprocessing spent fuel rods into more fuel, which reduces the volume of waste by a considerable amount. Reprocessing has been outlawed in this country since President Jimmy Carter issued an executive order in 1978, but that could be rescinded at any time. (Actually, uranium prices are so low that reprocessing is uneconomical right now.)

Since 1987, the Department of Energy has designated Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a permanent geological repository for the nation’s 40,000 metric tons of spent fuel (2,000 tons added each year). The site has a capacity of 70,000 tons and could probably be extended to 120,000. But political opposition in Nevada has blocked the effort. In 1998, the department reneged on a commitment to start handling high-level wastes. Instead, the wastes remain at reactor sites, stored in pools of boric acid or corrosion-proof casks. Although no one wants a build-up, they can probably remain there indefinitely. The real impediment is that the federal government is not offering Nevada sufficient reward for taking the repository. If a system of financial compensation can be devised, the problem will probably solve itself. “At least we know where the wastes are,” says Rod McCullum, senior project manager for used-fuel management at the Nuclear Energy Institute. “Other technologies just spew them into the atmosphere.”

If the country does elect to renew the nuclear effort, it will undoubtedly be because of energy shortages and their accompanying environmental costs. “If you’re at all worried about air pollution or global warming, you’ve got to take a serious look at nuclear power,” says Florida senator Bob Graham, a Democratic co-sponsor of the Domenici bill. California has pushed conservation and renewables to the limit yet still finds itself woefully short of electricity. The demand for clean air across the country has steered utilities into burning natural gas — yet this is backfiring as demand pushes prices up. Even if California succeeds in building its 10-15 new gas-fired generators — as governor Gray Davis insists it will — there is a serious question whether the state will have enough gas or pipeline capacity to run them.

Nuclear power has always been handicapped by the perception that the “Atoms for Peace” program that gave birth to the industry wasn’t really practical or cost-effective but was pursued only as a way of assuaging wartime guilt over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As history marches on, this argument is getting harder and harder to accept. If war guilt was the motive, how come Japan has the world’s third-largest nuclear program?

A better way of understanding the industry is to realize the significance of Albert Einstein’s equation E=mc<2>. Fossil fuels are built on energy stored in chemical bonds created by sunlight, which is itself a release of nuclear energy. The earth has vast reservoirs of these fossil fuels, but they represent relatively low levels of energy and will eventually become harder and harder to access. Einstein’s equation says that most of the energy in the universe is locked up in matter itself. When matter is transformed into energy — as it is in the sun or a nuclear power plant — the amount of energy produced is going to be the amount of fuel multiplied by the square of the speed of light, a factor of one quintillion. The amount of matter transformed into energy by the first atomic bomb was one gram.

This explains why small amounts of uranium can produce such fantastic quantities of energy. It is the nature of the universe. If we are to persist as a civilization — without burning up half the earth’s furniture in the process — it seems only sensible that we should avail ourselves of some of that energy.

William Tucker is the author of Progress and Privilege: America in the Age of Environmentalism.