Nuclear Power - Redeeming Energy’s Prodigal Son

Matthew L. Wald
Nuclear Energy Institute
NEI Legal Advisory Committee
Washington, D.C.
June 24, 2015

Good morning. I’m here to talk about nuclear power, and how it went from being the energy prodigy to being the prodigal son, and how it might come back again.

I come at this from a different perspective. In December I wrapped up 38 years at The New York Times, and for most of that period I wrote about energy, including coal, oil, gas, hydro, fuel cells, solar, wind, wave energy, biofuels, and nuclear.

People in the corporate world, the laboratory and the academic world look at newsrooms like a black box. You can see what they produce but you can’t figure out the inner workings. Well, news flash, journalists look at industry and science the same way. Especially the utility industry. Having recently made the transition from one world to the other, I have been asked to play translator for a few minutes.

Most reporters and editors can’t tell the difference between a kilowatt and a kilowatt-hour and many of them don’t know why they’d want to tell the difference. That makes it unlikely they’re going to give a clear picture to their readers or viewers. Add onto that some fuzzy thinking among the general public, that includes ideas like, “electricity is a human right and therefore ought to be free,” and you’ve got a recipe for mis-communications.

Nuclear comes out badly not because it’s nuclear, but because of several overarching attitudes in newsrooms. One is that editors like disagreements, he said/she said. It’s an easy way to structure a news story. But the editors and reporters have rather limited ability to independently evaluate the arguments. Why do we have this persistent societal meme that vaccines cause autism?

Because news media got it started and to some extent, keep it alive. The idea that proximity to power lines causes cancer. If it can’t be disproved, it’s a good story. Journalists dislike expertise. They discount it. Maybe it’s the evolving nature of human knowledge. This year, we’ve changed our minds and high cholesterol doesn’t come from your diet. Some fats are good for you. DDT was a modern marvel of the mid-20th century because it nearly wiped out malaria. It also nearly wiped out bald eagles.

We were running out of landfill space. We were running out of oil. We aren’t any more.

Journalists also dislike the government, and pillars of the establishment. That started in Vietnam and it’s still true. Journalists sometimes think of themselves as speaking truth to power, or maybe to the power company. The operating theory is sometimes that if somebody sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, he must be wrong.

And, of course, some people don’t like power companies. We have a bias against big business, and reactors are always big business.

There’s another problem.  Editors and reporters are biased against risk, without being able to compare risks. The risks of measles epidemics. The risks of generating the same electricity with other technologies. The risks that banning genetically modified crops adds to world hunger. These risks aren’t probabilities; they’re certainties.

Applied to the nuclear context, this worldview keeps alive the idea that the spent fuel pools of boiling water reactors are kept in tree houses, in tin shacks.

These ideas aren’t confined to newsrooms. They are common among TV viewers, newspaper readers, internet browsers, guests waiting in the green rooms, and people who obsess over situations we haven’t yet resolved, like nuclear waste. There’s an aversion, a vague sense of dis-ease. For some people, Nuclear is the N word. Not understanding has its downside. Familiarity may breed contempt, or so the cliché goes, but black boxes breed fear.

Nuclear power probably suffers in the public eye for having been supported by government. Of course, solar and wind were too, and still are, but in general those aren’t seen as artifacts of a mistrusted officialdom.

Government policy can yield somewhat random results. For example, years of government sponsorship of basic science research laid the foundations for the fracking revolution that is now in progress. Fracking is good for a lot of industries. It’s an energy trend that Congress inadvertently set in motion in the 80s and 90s, in the course of throwing money at far-out research.

One area was supercomputing, which was an outgrowth of the nuclear weapons program. That’s what allows 3D seismic. Another is directional drilling, which the Energy Department backed for years and years. All of it in research programs that Congress authorized and appropriated for.

The department did mostly early work on fracking in tight formations, until the mid-90s, when the private sector picked it up and ran with it.

This strongly suggests something else: that Congress has set other research in motion that is still gestating, but that’s going to make a big difference in the 2030s. In fact, Congress has set a lot of wheels in motion. Something in batteries, in the efficiency of photosynthesis, in new photovoltaic cell chemistries, I don’t know which will pan out. If I knew, I’d be on the phone with my broker.

But there are yet more technology rabbits to be pulled out of the government hat. These will be good for some industries and bad for others. Take the low price of gas, caused by fracking.  It’s suppressing development of new nuclear, wind and solar although those are also among our national goals. The reason is that when gas is at $3 per million BTU, displacing one kilowatt-hour from a gas-fired plant with a kilowatt-hour from a wind turbine or a solar panel saves about two and a half cents worth of natural gas. When gas was $9 per million BTU, the same kilowatt-hour from wind or solar saved seven and a half cents worth of natural gas. In places where the price of electricity is set by auction, the clearing price, the price that wind generators and everybody else receives, would be a whole lot higher if gas were still higher. That would have brought more wind production and probably more solar too.

From that perspective, what the government has done is set up a collision. That’s the flip side of “all of the above.” We’re promoting competitors and thus they can’t all be successful. The situation of the whole electricity business brings to mind the observation from my favorite industry analyst, Janis Joplin. She said, “I don't understand why half the world is crying, and the other half is crying too.”

Sometimes we put policy in place that just doesn’t add up. In the Energy Security Act of 2007, Congress had in mind a certain proportion of ethanol, but what it specified was gallon volumes. Then the amount of gasoline sold begins to decline, because the price was high and because of something else Congress ordered, higher-mileage cars. So suddenly there’s no place to put the ethanol, because hardly anybody is equipped to sell it in blends of more than 10 percent.

And Congress specifies that more and more of the ethanol or other renewable fuel has to come from cellulosic sources – crops not food. Lots of companies started work to make the stuff. Some of them are big multi-nationals with extensive experience in process engineering, and lots of money. They build pilot plants. They break ground on commercial-scale plants. What happens? Nothing. They can’t get the recipe right.

Then there was President Obama’s goal to have a million electric cars on the road by this year. Lots of money in the stimulus program went to that. We probably have about 300,000, including plug-in hybrids. We don’t have widespread trash-to-energy plants, which was a goal in the 80s.

Anybody remember when fuel cells were going to revolutionize the business?

None of this breeds respect for the government’s ability to predict the energy future, or even the effects of its own actions.

As my other favorite industry analyst, Mick Jagger, pointed out, you can’t always get what you want. Especially if you have trouble distinguishing among the improbable, the possible and the likely.

We thought the nuclear renaissance was likely. We didn’t get what we wanted.

And the renaissance ran off the rails because of unforeseen changes: low-cost shale gas, slack demand for electricity, and perhaps Fukushima.

More nuclear would have been popular in some quarters.

Fracking is popular in some places, not in others. But when it comes to popularity contests, electricity also occupies an ambiguous spot.

In fact, electricity is noticed only when it’s absent. When the National Academy of Sciences looked at the 2003 blackout, the one that covered an area from Detroit to New York City, it took the amount of lost economic activity and the number of kilowatt-hours not used, and calculated that the value of a kilowatt-hour that you don’t have is about five dollars. That’s a stunning number for a commodity that sells for about 11 cents at retail. Do we treat electricity as if it were worth $5 a kilowatt-hour?

Nope. Electricity generating stations of any stripe are not loved.

The attacks of September 11 haven’t helped. Take Indian Point. The two operating reactors sit down near the level of the Hudson River, but the parking lot is on a bluff up above. On your way down to the plant, you pass a terrace, an observation point, that looks like a scenic overlook at some historic site, in Rome or Jerusalem; it’s got a bronze plaque that shows what you're looking at, in outline, all nicely labeled: the containment dome, the turbine building, the primary auxiliary building, etc.

No tourist has been within 100 yards of the spot since the mid 1990s, when the truck bomb rule took effect. The terrace is now well inside the security perimeter.  Security considerations have forced us to turn nuclear plant sites into armed camps and deny the public the access and familiarity they need in order to gain greater appreciation for the technology.

To quote a 19th century political theorist, average people have been alienated from the means of production.

There’s a lot of confusion about nuclear power. According to Roper, 23 percent of American believe that nuclear power contributes a lot to global warming, and 21 percent believe it contributes some. Maybe this shouldn’t surprise us; most members of the public are confounded by distinctions like the difference between a kilowatt and a kilowatt-hour. A lot of people who think of themselves as environmentalists can’t do that either. Perhaps even worse, they can't think in relative terms. What’s the risk of someone being hurt or killed by a nuclear reactor? How many people will we lose to gas leaks, coal mine explosions? What’s the risk of being blown up by a gas leak, dying in a coal mine, or on an offshore oil and gas platform, watching millions of gallons of oil flow into the Gulf of Mexico? Personally, I had a moment of revelation in October 2007, when five men were killed and two more injured by a fire in a power plant in Colorado. Alas, it’s not surprising that workers die in power plant accidents. The surprise was that it was hydroelectric plant.

And I’m not counting the risks here of life without electricity. Toilets won’t flush, or if they do, the sewage won’t get treated. Water taps will run dry. Fresh food is out of the question. So is staying warm in winter and cool in summer.

But we can’t see the public inability to think through risks and benefits without also considering that our technology is advancing to the point that it’s letting other skills atrophy. We are losing technical competence and even understanding on all levels, macro and micro.

On the micro level, last weekend I watched a young cashier at the hardware store scan purchases and heard the customer complain that the total was wrong. I was terrified by the cashier's response. It wasn't, “No, the computer is right.” It wasn't, “let me double check.” It was, “How did you know?” When it comes to adding numbers in our heads, we've not only forgotten some skills, we've forgotten we ever had them.

The medievals lost the secret, known to the Romans, of making cement. The Cambodians lost all kinds of knowledge when Pol Pot took over. Without any such revolution, we’re losing intellectual ground. I’ll risk saying something un-democratic; maybe it’s because more people are thinking about energy and environment, and they’ve got less background for the task.

There’s no point lamenting this; we just have to deal with it.

But all is not gloom & doom. I believe that for nuclear, like the prodigal son, eventually things will work out. You will recall that the prodigal son comes home and is warmly welcomed. The other trend, one I haven’t talked about here, is globalization of the energy business. In the United States, nearly half of all primary energy – that is, coal, oil, gas, falling water, fissioned uranium – goes into the electric system. In most of the rest of the world, it’s far, far less.

Electrification will come to those places. As with the solar industry and the wind industry, nuclear will benefit from mass production, although the production may not be here in the United States. And the rest of the world is going to want all the things we have – essentials of life like machines that make ice cubes, heated toilet seats, even air fresheners that run on electricity, not to mention light when it’s dark, heat when it’s cold, cool when it’s hot, and clean water all the time. A lot of that, maybe most of it, is going to have to come from dispatchable sources, that is, sources you can turn on and off. It’s going to have to be clean, and compact. A significant fraction is going to be nuclear.

Not everything in the world of energy and environment is going badly. I’d like to introduce you to something that’s going well: that is, the grid. The grid is an agent for cleanup. The grid is what makes rooftop solar practical, and even more important, utlity-scale, central station solar. The grid is what makes it possible to build wind machines in the windy middle of the country, and enjoy the benefits in other places. The grid is what lets us locate huge industrial plants like nuclear reactors in distant places, and import the electricity that supplies us with water, takes away our sewage, keeps our food cold and our homes warm, or, if we want, heats our food and chills our homes. It also runs our microchips, which increasingly run our lives.

Of the odd environmental ideas floating around these days, the silliest is to go off the grid. If you go off the grid, then either you buy a lot of really expensive batteries, or you only have electricity when the sun is shining on your rooftop panels, and if you can’t use it then, it’s wasted.

Dislike of the grid is related to the idea that small is beautiful. Actually in generating energy, Big is beautiful. Often, the bigger, the better.

Lazard estimated last September that residential rooftop solar cost at least $180 per megawatt-hour; utility-scale, ground-mounted, you could get the same energy for $72. According to the municipal electric department of Hull, Massachusetts, which runs several enormous wind machines and then installed a small one for students at the town’s high school, a big wind machine is one-sixth the cost, per unit energy, as a small one. The biggest sources of carbon-free energy, nuclear and hydro, don't work at all on my rooftop. If we get to carbon capture, that will have to be at grid scale, too. If you’ve got a strong grid, then use it; take advantages of economies of scale.

Small can work, including small reactors. The rule of thumb on the grid is you need a reserve that is 50 percent larger than your biggest contingency. The contingency could be a power line or it could be a generator. You really don’t want a reactor that’s going to cause a national blackout every time it trips.

If we build small reactors here, they are likely to be ganged together. They may also fit well where they’re replacing 1950s-vintage coal generators, which today we would consider quite small. But if you’ve got a big grid and a big need, big may work better.

So, having told you that Congress isn’t very good at making predictions, I’ll make some myself.

First, Texas, which used to export oil and later exported Texan oil men, is going to export fracking.

Second, we don’t think clearly about weather and we will sometimes feel we’re at fault. Get a couple more Katrinas, or widespread drought in the East, like the summer that the Mississippi River got so low the barges couldn’t move, or the summer that the Atlantic Ocean got so warm that a nuclear reactor in Connecticut had to shut down, and we’ll get acutely concerned, at least for a time. We’ll return our attention to getting bulk supplies of low-carbon energy. Not predicting we’ll follow through, but we’ll embark on it.

And third, watch for more rabbits coming out of the laboratory hat.

Thank you for your kind attention.
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