Is Small Nuclear Reactor R&D Fleecing the Public?

Two weeks ago I received an email announcing that Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS), a D.C.-based watchdog organization, had awarded this year's Golden Fleece for wasting tax dollars to the federal government's efforts to promote the development of small, modular nuclear reactors (SMRs).  My quick perusal of the award's justification left me with distinctly mixed reactions, before I filed it away with the other announcements I received that day.  Since then, every time I ran across a reference to SMRs I was drawn back to the group's assertions about the technology, while questioning whether my opinion of the award would have been different had they singled out the renewable energy loan guarantee program, renewable energy cash grants, or some other example of recent federal generosity toward emerging energy technologies. 

The Golden Fleece awards were started in the mid-1970s by Senator William Proxmire (D-WI).  He had a knack for highlighting egregious examples of government waste and bureaucratic excess, though he also periodically skewered legitimate scientific research.  My view at the time was that he possessed a genuine passion against waste but a poor understanding of how science benefits society. TCS apparently revived the award in 2000.  Its targets since then have included projects such as Alaska's infamous Bridge to Nowhere.  Fair enough.  Yet as I reread the group's claims about the government's support for this technology, it came across less as a balanced critique and more like a one-sided attack that misinterprets the concepts involved, thus falling into the same trap that the late Senator occasionally did. 

Let's set aside the question of cost for a moment.  The US is exiting an era in which government could unquestioningly pay for any idea that anyone in the administration or Congress could think up.  Programs and projects like this should indeed have to vie with each other for scarce funding, guided by a clearly articulated list of our national priorities, a consensus on which is long overdue.  However, that's not the argument TCS is making.  It rests instead on four points specific to SMRs:

First, they treat SMRs as an entirely unproven technology with no cost-performance track record, despite having reminded us a few paragraphs earlier that at least some SMR designs are an outgrowth of extremely successful naval reactor programs.  Their contention that "no one is clamoring to buy an SMR because there is no assurance that the electricity will be remotely competitive with power from other sources" could have been made about any early-stage energy technology.  That raises basic questions about the legitimate role of all federal energy R&D spending, but in the context of a single technology that happens to be at the starting blocks today.  Moreover, disqualifying SMRs on the basis of today's low natural gas prices conflates a genuinely challenging commercial environment with a standard that, if applied consistently, would soon leave us 100% reliant on natural gas for electricity generation.  Not even the most ardent supporters of shale gas would advocate that.  The better question to ask is how nuclear--small or large--fits into a diverse future energy mix.

Next TCS states that the case for SMRs contradicts the logic behind large-scale nuclear power--implying that both can't be valid--rather than viewing them as distinct and different models for nuclear generation.  If anything, the real contradiction lies in saddling SMRs with the history of cost overruns in large-scale nuclear, much of which has resulted from protracted permitting delays and lawsuits, or on-site construction problems that SMRs are specifically intended to circumvent. 

I agree with TCS when they say, "There is no assurance that SMRs would pass regulatory muster."  Yet when has any new energy technology arrived with such a guarantee?  Their concerns about the organizational challenges that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) would face if SMRs progressed strike me as a better argument for reviewing the funding, structure and processes of the NRC, than one against SMRs.

Finally, the award text evokes unmanaged nuclear waste and terrorist attacks on SMRs emplaced in suburban locations.  There's little I can add to the decades-long debate on nuclear waste other than to observe that the challenges involved fall more into the realm of politics than science and engineering.  As for SMRs in suburbs, although that might be the vision of some nuclear entrepreneurs it seems realistic now only if we define "suburb"--a word that TCS went out of its way to repeat-- as any part of the country not within some urban zone.  The likeliest locations for at least the first generation of SMRs are within the site boundaries of operating or retired large-scale nuclear power plants: locations already well-protected against terrorism and other threats.  SMRs are not coming to a neighborhood near you any time soon, with or without federal funding.

Returning to my discomfort with my initial, somewhat reflexive reaction to the award, Taxpayers for Common Sense raised some concerns about federal support for small modular reactors that could fairly be aimed at a wide array of programs within the roughly $10 billion per year portion of the Department of Energy's budget that isn't related to nuclear weapons, along with the recent federal stimulus.  Despite that, SMRs have significant potential as a future source of low-emission electricity on a scale that could prove more compatible with the current capital budgets of the power industry, and with an emerging, renewables-intensive, smart-grid-enabled energy mix.  Without singling out this technology, I agree that in a post-sequestration world of limited budgets we should be asking more of the kind of hard questions that TCS raises about "market-distorting subsidies."   However, if their intention was to stimulate that kind of debate across the whole energy space, their cause might have been better served by taking it on directly, rather than targeting a concept that enjoys wide support as a legitimate focus of federal R&D spending.  

Fewer Choices Post-Fukushima?

Even before the resolution of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex--a crisis that has diverted media attention from the much larger humanitarian crisis caused by last Friday's tsunami--its consequences for nuclear energy policy are rippling across the globe. It is extraordinarily premature to form conclusions about these events, although that didn't stop many from arriving at similarly hasty and under-informed conclusions in the case of last spring's Deepwater Horizon accident. Pervasive instant analysis promotes knee-jerk responses. If the nuclear renaissance that had already been slowed by the recession and financial crisis was struck a fatal blow last week, what could that mean for our energy choices in the years ahead?

Although I want to focus mainly on the potential consequences in the US, what has already transpired in Germany provides a cautionary tale. As reported Tuesday, seven nuclear power plants of similar vintage and/or design to the damaged quartet at Fukushima are being shut down, at least temporarily, as the German government reassesses its decision to extend the operating life of the country's 17 power reactors. Germany hasn't been comfortable with its nukes for some time, though I find it remarkable that 70% of the population is apparently concerned that an accident that required an epic earthquake and a tsunami to trigger could happen there, too. (The next time someone lectures you about German practicality, this would be a fine counter-example to trot out.) However odd that reaction might seem to me and others with an engineering/hard science bent, it's a reminder that nuclear risks are viewed differently than many others, perhaps because radiation is invisible and insidious in its effects. Even if the reactors are finally cooled down with no further incidents and no injuries beyond the plant personnel, who have taken great risks for the public good, we will tend to focus on how much worse the outcome could have been.

Yet shutting down those nuclear plants in Germany is not without consequences, either, as noted by the Breakthrough Institute. Germany's greenhouse gas emissions will inevitably increase, because the country is already adding renewable generation as fast as it can and must make up any shortfall from fossil fuels. After committing an estimated €120 billion ($167 billion) for solar power through 2011, based on the 20 years of feed-in tariff support existing installations will receive, Germany still gets just 2% of its annual generation from solar, compared to around 24% from nuclear. That's mainly because Germany is such an unsuitable location for solar.

What about the US? Nuclear power supplied almost 20% of the electricity generated here in 2010, compared to 45% for coal, nearly 24% for natural gas, 10% for all renewables, and less than 1% from oil. Any notion of replacing the contribution of nuclear power in the longer term would require careful consideration of the energy sources that might fill the gap--based on scale and growth potential--and what it would mean for efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions by reducing the generation of electricity from coal, which accounted for 81% of the emissions from the electricity sector and 26% of all US emissions in 2009. As for replacing nuclear power in the short run, that's simply out of the question, unless we want to bring on a recession that would make 2009 look like a boom year.

It's not that it's impossible to imagine a US energy mix without nuclear. After all, that's what we had on a much smaller scale prior to the 1960s. We certainly have enough coal and natural gas to take up any slack, although I don't think that would be quite the desired solution of those who would be most eager for an end to nuclear power. For that matter, a combination of geothermal power and concentrated solar power (CSP), the former baseload and the latter at least dispatchable, could also fill the gap, although a geothermal build-out on that scale would provoke concerns about "induced seismicity", while CSP would be largely a regional solution or require lots of very long-distance, high voltage power lines that present massive NIMBY issues of their own. Wind power, which until last year was growing at around 40% annually, could provide 20% or more of the generating mix by 2030, but it can't substitute for nuclear's central role without far more cheap power storage than we can reasonably expect to have available by then. And while solar has great potential, especially as its cost falls, it's no better suited to delivering reliable 24/7 power than is wind, and it is starting from an even smaller level than wind's 2.3% of generation last year.

The likeliest replacement for nuclear power in the US would thus be a combination of sources similar to our current non-nuclear mix, comprised of about 55% coal, 30% gas and 15% renewables, with some help from efficiency. On the basis of the average emissions from these sources, making up for the loss of the 807 billion kilowatt-hours generated by nuclear last year would increase US greenhouse gas emissions by around 580 million tons of CO2-equivalent per year, or 10% of net US emissions in 2009. That would hardly be conducive to meeting our Copenhagen pledge to reduce emissions by 17% by 2020, but then in a non-nuclear world most such pledges would have to be considered null and void.

Barring a worst-case outcome in Japan, I don't expect a groundswell in the US if favor of abandoning nuclear power--not even for the 35 reactors of generally similar design to the ones at Fukushima. Despite that, the emissions figures I calculated above remain relevant. Without a concerted effort to build new power reactors in the next two decades, the US will be on a sure path to de-nuclearization, as 41 of the existing plants would reach the end of their lives and operating licenses--many after a full 60 years of operations--by the mid-2030s. That process could accelerate significantly if the facilities that are awaiting license extensions now face much tougher scrutiny and are turned down in significant numbers. In that case we could lose up to 10,000 MW of nuclear capacity by the end of this decade, generating roughly the same annual output as our entire current wind power capacity. There are some who are already working to make that happen, either openly or more subtly. In that context the story on MSNBC yesterday listing US nuclear reactors in order of earthquake risk was either a public service or fear-mongering, depending on your perspective.

Whether we back away from nuclear power all at once, as Germany seems poised to consider doing, or one plant at a time, the result would be much the same: increased emissions, costlier and less reliable power, at least in the near-to-medium term, and more strain on infrastructure. I still think we'll choose to include nuclear in our evolving future energy mix, particularly given the significant improvements in the technology since the Fukushima reactors were built, along with the development of new, smaller-scale nuclear power options. Yet I have to admit my confidence in that result has been shaken by the reaction to the events in Japan.

Toward a Low-Emission Electricity Standard

McDermott International, Inc. announced yesterday that its Babcock & Wilcox subsidiary will begin marketing a 125 MW small-scale nuclear power plant design. Their press release also indicated that the company has a letter of intent from the Tennessee Valley Authority and a group of municipal utilities to use this technology. This development looks particularly interesting in the context of the debate over the proposed national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) in the Waxman-Markey Bill, along with another version of an RES in a new bill from the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee. However, if we really want to address climate change on a meaningful scale, then both bills should focus not on renewable electricity but on low-emission electricity.

When I looked at the proposed RES a month ago, I was frustrated by its narrow list of included technologies, and in particular by the way it excluded our largest current renewable electricity source, existing hydropower installations. Nuclear power wasn't even mentioned. Since that posting, the RES target in Waxman-Markey was revised downward, and nuclear power has apparently been included in an odd, backhand way. If I understand it correctly, an electricity supplier’s “base amount” on which the RES would apply would shrink as it brought on new nuclear capacity. While that might alleviate a small part of the financial burden of investing up to $10 billion in a new nuclear power plant by requiring the generating company to build somewhat less renewable capacity, in order to comply with its RES target, this seems a paltry incentive for our largest low-emission energy source by far—a status nuclear seems likely to enjoy for many more years.

So how would small reactors fit into this equation? Mainly by reducing the sheer scale of investment required to bring new nuclear capacity online, and presumably by making nuclear project timelines more manageable by replacing much of the time-consuming onsite construction activity with more efficient offsite manufacturing. So even under Waxman-Markey, a utility would benefit from small nuclear that arrived in increments every year or two, instead of having to wait a decade or more for a new large-scale plant to be approved, funded and built—all the while having to add a larger quantity of wind, solar or other “qualified” renewable power.

Of course, if the Congress saw fit to reconfigure the RES as a low-emission standard, or LES, including all low-greenhouse-gas technologies on an even playing field, a small nuclear reactor might look especially attractive. Assuming that the 125 MW version could be run as reliably as its 10X-larger cousins—and a half-century of nuclear naval propulsion argues that case pretty effectively—then a mini-nuke such as McDermott’s “mPower” reactor would provide as many annual kilowatt-hours of generation as a 400 MW onshore wind farm or a 500 MW solar installation in a sunny location, while doing so more predictably and dependably, and for a similar investment cost. Nor is McDermott the only company with a horse in this race. Veteran nuclear vendors such as GE-Hitachi and Toshiba-Westinghouse are pursuing small-scale reactors, and Hyperion, a start-up out of Los Alamos National Laboratory, has designed a 25 MW plant. There’s even a regular reader of this blog with his own small-nuclear start-up.

So when you see those full-page ads from the American Wind Energy Association promoting “Global Wind Day” next Monday and exhorting you to support a strong Renewable Electricity Standard, remember that wind is only one of a number of energy options we can deploy against global warming, and that the renewable energy distinction ought to matter much less than low emissions, regardless of the source.