New approach, old debates
So far, there is no sign that the government's nuclear gatekeeper, NRC, is wowed by the small-reactor designs.
NRC's Office of New Reactors warned Babcock & Wilcox in June that the agency "will need to limit interactions with the designers of small power reactors to occasional meetings or other nonresource-intensive activities" over the next two years because of a crowded schedule of work on other proposals.
Meanwhile, opponents of nuclear technologies are not convinced that small reactors are an improvement over traditional designs.
Arjun Makhijani, who heads the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a think tank that advocates against nuclear power, sees disseminating the technology as incompatible with controlling it.
"A lot of the proliferation issue is not linked to having or not having plutonium or highly enriched uranium, but who has the expertise to have or make bombs," Makhijani said. "In order to spread nuclear technologies, you have to have the people who have the expertise in nuclear engineering, who know about nuclear materials and chain reactions and things like that -- the same expertise for nuclear bombs. That doesn't suffice for you to make a bomb, but then if you clandestinely acquire the materials, then you can make a bomb."
Peter Wilk, acting program director for safe energy with Physicians for Social Responsibility, an anti-nuclear group, argues that expanding nuclear power use runs counter to the goal of nonproliferation. "The whole proposition presupposes an ... international economy in which more and more fuel is produced and more and more waste must be dealt with, which only makes those problems that are still unsolved larger," he said.
"It may or may not do a better job of preventing the host country from literally getting their hands on it, but it doesn't reduce the amount of fuel in the world or the amount of waste in the world," Wilk added.
And then there is the issue of public opinion.
"Imagine that Americans would agree to take the waste that is generated in other countries and deal with it here," Makhijani said. "At the present moment, it should be confined to the level of the fantastic, or even the surreal. If [the technology's backers] could come up with a plan for the waste, then we could talk about export."
Makhijani pointed to a widely touted French process for recycling nuclear waste as a red herring (ClimateWire, May 18). "It's a mythology that it ameliorates the waste problem," he said.
According to Makhijani's calculations, the French recycling process generates far more radioactive waste than it cleans up. One category of highly radioactive material, which ends up stored in glass "logs" for burial, is reduced, he said. But in processing the waste, about six times the original volume of waste is produced, he said. Much of that must be buried deep underground, and the discharge of contaminated wastewater used in recycling has angered neighboring countries, he said.
Operational risk, of course, is another major concern.
"One has reduced the amount of unnecessary risk," Wilke said, "but it's still unnecessary risk."
He added, "I get the theory that smaller, newer, ought to be safer. The question is: Why pursue this when there are so many better alternatives?"
To Sandia's Sanders, Wilke is asking the wrong question.
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21 Comments
Add CommentMr. Sandia's Sanders is 1100% right, I think. Unites States already lost competative role in supplying thw world with safe Nuclear reators, big or small and smart. Why? Because we have been sleeping on this technology. Ironically, we have mad e tremedous progress in "killing" machine - armamnets and weapons etc!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWith aggressive Government help we can do some seroius research into to dispoing the spent fuel safely. Why not blast the spent fuel into outer space to the sun, for example!
Ram
Why not use decommissioned nuclear submarine reactors for small city power?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMakhijani's thoroughly discredited propaganda refers to Frances current fuel recycling efforts which attempt to separate out the 98% unused fuel from the depleted materials to be reused in Generation 3.5 reactor fuel rods.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFast neutron reactors like Sandia's and the extremely successful Shippingport reactor shutdown by corrupt politicians in the early 80's use the discarded fuel rods as fuel itself and the waste product from these is small in volume, much more benign and of no use to 3rd world bomb makers. They also can use thorium for fuel.
Costs of these 95% load factor small reactors with under mass manufacturing techniques will be much less than solar/wind tech and are ideal to replace the boiler part of fossil fuel generators on site.
A nuclear submarine reactor plant is not suitable for such use, and a decommissioned one is worn out.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEco's have stopped all nuclear construction in this country for over 20 years.
As to blasting nuclear waste into the sun, that is a dangerous and wasteful thing to do. At present space shots fail 1 out of 120 and cost over $10,000 per pound to launch. Deep sea trench subduction is the safest long term disposal that I know of, but the Eco's would foam at the mouth over that.
A nice idea but where will we get the Uranium from ? http://www.resourceinvestor.com/News/2009/4/Pages/Uranium-shortage-looming--PDF-.aspx. Using Plutonium would be a security nightmare
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo instead of fewer piles of radioactive spent fuel we will have many more smaller piles of spent fuel sitting around for hundreds or thousands of years ?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is a terrorists dream.
Me liek nuclear. Me liek glow in dark. Pretty!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHulk
I don't think putting negative labels on folks who disagree with your opinion will help.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFission reactors still have the inherent problem of storing their waste a very, very long time. While we may be able to place the waste in containment now, how do we guarantee that it will stay in containment that long? We're not solving any environmental problems with fission, we're merely deferring it. We need to put some of our creative energy into creating a permanent solution.
Alcohol, solar, geothermal, hydro all seem to be very viable solutions. Even if we can't fix it all now, blunting the demand is a huge step in the right direction. Ultimately, fusion is probably the right answer (since all of the above are derivatives of a nearby fusion reactor).
There is no need to store nuclear waste a long, long, long time. In reality we only need to store it a couple hundred years until we have a better solution. Storeing something 200 years is an engineering piece of cake. It may not be feasible to ship the waste to the sun now but do you really belive it would be hard to do 200 years from now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh, what intellectual laziness. Blame the Eco's for all that went wrong in nuclear land. Do the terms 'spiraling costs' and 'project overrun' ring a bell?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh what intellectual laziness. Blame the Eco's. Without them, this world would be so fine. Disregard the fact that the US is a democracy and that, apparently, in the eyes of the democratically elected government(s), those Eco's were right.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf there is anyone to blame for the nuclear disappointment, it is the nuclear industry itself. Do the terms 'spiraling costs' and 'project overrun' ring a bell?
Oops, sorry for the double post.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDeep sea trench in subduction zones are a viable solution, so when someone talks about long term storage being a problem, I dismiss their opinion, since they are blocking facts. Ships sink pretty reliably, never to return. If you don't know what a subduction zone is, perhaps you need to study up before you opine on such a technical and important subject.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTest
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThese sealed fuel reactors are a great idea and worth serious consideration. Nuclear power is green, much more efficient than wind, solar, fossil and most importantly it's simply unavoidable. We need to spend a great deal of time, money and thought on Nuclear engineering ideas in the future.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow about NO fission reactors--large, medium, or small?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScientists are telling us that there is some chance we are as little as 10 years away from falling off a climate precipice with permafrost methane emissions and ocean acidification forming the leading edge of a very steep slope. We don't have time for wind. solar, geothermal, biomass partial solutions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe nuclear waste problem is solved with the consignment of waste to fuel for liquid metal fast reactors, like the one Sandia Labs has just designed and just needs political support to launch. To put the waste problem in perspective, we could just take all of it to the nearest coal plant and meter it slowly into the smoke stack. The nuclear waste would increase the coal plants already radioactive emissions by only a tiny percentage and wouldn't add any more lead, arsenic or mercury to the air. Or we could store the nuke waste under a half acre or so of the thousands of square miles of desert ,solar types were planning destroying forever by covering them with toxic solar cells.
DON"T EVEN TRY TO TELL ME ABOUT THE ECO"s!!!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am over 60 years old,and have paid attention. For nearly 50 years, every time someone ever tried to do any thing in this country there is a group of Eco's screaming bloody murder "no way, not ever". For every endevior there is an eco group with an army of lawyers against.
Fusion as is pursued at this time by the main stream is a very large dead end. has been for 50 years. Even GOD does not use plasma fusion to power the universe. 50 years ago practical plasma power generation was within 30 years. Now the number is within 50 years. The very last thing plasma wants to do is fuse. Even a hydrogen bomb is not a plasma fusion device.
Real atomic fusion uses an entirely different path.
No nuclear. You can make it the size of a pea and its radioactive waste would still be affecting life for millions of years. Its disgusting and way too long term.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWasn' this an idea that a San Diego company called General Atomics had years ago?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTchernobyl is supposed to have caused a mere 32 deaths. This is to forget the 900,000 workforce who shovelled highly radioactive material from the reactor and its immediate surroundings! Are a million Americans prepared to sacrifice their health if another 3-mile Island incident actually blows?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs reactors get older they get riskier as they get fragile. There are already too many to properly supervise. Scrap them before the already huge costs soar exponentially...