Josh Freed - Back to the Future: Advanced Nuclear Energy and the Battle Against Climate Change
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- Book:Back to the Future: Advanced Nuclear Energy and the Battle Against Climate Change
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The Golden Age of nuclear energy in the United States has passed, and the accidents, if not disasters, at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima have damaged nuclear powers rise in some parts of the world. And yet today, as Third Ways Josh Freed illuminates in the latest Brookings Essay, a flood of young engineers are exploring safer and cleaner nuclear energy technologies as the best option for powering the world and addressing the looming threat of climate change. Yet as Freed demonstrates, advanced nuclear energy is too big, complex, and expensive to take off without significant political backing and changes in how the government supports innovation. If the U.S. doesnt invest in advanced nuclear, he argues, its inevitable that another country will lead the way in this game-changing field. THE BROOKINGS ESSAY: In the spirit of its commitment to high-quality, independent research, the Brookings Institution has commissioned works on major topics of public policy by distinguished authors, including Brookings scholars. The Brookings Essay is a multi-platform product aimed to engage readers in open dialogue and debate. The views expressed, however, are solely those of the author. Available in ebook only.
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Matt Doeden
Scott L. Montgomery
Caldicott
Francis J. Gavin
Maxwell H Irvine
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THE BROOKINGS ESSAY
In the spirit of its commitment to high-quality, independent research, the Brookings Institution has commissioned works on major topics of public policy by distinguished authors, including Brookings scholars. The Brookings Essay is a multi-platform product aimed to engage readers in open dialogue and debate. The views expressed, however, are solely those of the author.
You can access the entire Brookings Essay series online at
www.brookings.edu/essay
www.brookings.edu/essay
Copyright 2014
THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20036.
www.brookings.edu
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the Brookings Institution Press.
ISBN 978-0-8157-2666-1 (ebook)
Cover illustration by Marcia Underwood
Leslie and Marks Old/New Idea
The Nuclear Science and Engineering Library at MIT is not a place where most people would go to unwind. Its filled with journals that have articles with titles like Longitudinal double-spin asymmetry of electrons from heavy flavor decays in polarized p + p collisions at s = 200 GeV. But nuclear engineering Ph.D. candidates relax in ways all their own. In the winter of 2009, two of those candidates, Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie, were studying for their qualifying examsa brutal rite of passageand had a serious need to decompress.
To clear their heads after long days and nights of reviewing neutron transport, the mathematics behind thermohydraulics, and other such subjects, they browsed through the crinkled pages of journals from the first days of their industrythe glory days. Reading articles by scientists working in the 1950s and 60s, they found themselves marveling at the sense of infinite possibility those pioneers had brought to their work, in awe of the huge outpouring of creative energy. They were also curious about the dozens of different reactor technologies that had once been explored, only to be abandoned when the funding dried up.
The early nuclear researchers were all housed in government laboratoriesat Oak Ridge in Tennessee, at the Idaho National Lab in the high desert of eastern Idaho, at Argonne in Chicago, and Los Alamos in New Mexico. Across the country, the nations top physicists, metallurgists, mathematicians, and engineers worked together in an atmosphere of feverish excitement, as government support gave them the freedom to explore the furthest boundaries of their burgeoning new field. Locked in what they thought of as a life-or-death race with the Soviet Union, they aimed to be first in every aspect of scientific inquiry, especially those that involved atom splitting.
Though nuclear engineers were mostly men in those days, Leslie imagined herself working alongside them, wearing a white lab coat, thinking big thoughts. It was all so fresh, so exciting, so limitless back then, she told me. They were designing all sorts of things: nuclear-powered cars and airplanes, reactors cooled by lead. Today, its much less interesting. Most of us are just working on ways to tweak basically the same light water reactor weve been building for 50 years.
But because of something that she and Mark stumbled across in the library during one of their forays into the old journals, Leslie herself is not doing that kind of tweakingshes trying to do something much more radical. One night, Mark showed Leslie a 50-year-old paper from Oak Ridge about a reactor powered not by rods of metal-clad uranium pellets in water, like the light water reactors of today, but by a liquid fuel of uranium mixed into molten salt to keep it at a constant temperature. The two were intrigued, because it was clear from the paper that the molten salt design could potentially be constructed at a lower cost and shut down more easily in an emergency than todays light water reactors. And the molten salt design wasnt just theoreticalOak Ridge had built a real reactor, which ran from 1965-1969, racking up 20,000 operating hours.
The 1960s-era salt reactor was interesting, but at first blush it didnt seem practical enough to revive. It was bulky, expensive, and not very efficient. Worse, it ran on uranium enriched to levels far above the modern legal limit for commercial nuclear power. Most modern light water reactors run on 5 percent enriched uranium, and it is illegal under international and domestic law for commercial power generators to use anything above 20 percent, because at levels that high uranium can be used for making weapons. The Oak Ridge molten salt reactor needed uranium enriched to at least 33 percent, possibly even higher.
But they were aware that smart young engineers were considering applying modern technology to several other decades-old reactor designs from the dawn of the nuclear age, and this one seemed to Leslie and Mark to warrant a second look. After finishing their exams, they started searching for new materials that could be used in a molten salt reactor to make it both legal and more efficient. If they could show that a modified version of the old design could compete withor exceedthe performance of todays light water reactors, they knew they might have a very interesting project on their hands.
First, they took a look at the fuel. By using different, more modern materials, they had a theory that they could get the reactor to work at very low enrichment levels. Maybe, they hoped, even significantly below 5 percent.
There was a good reason to hope. Todays reactors produce a significant amount of nuclear waste, many tons of which are currently sitting in cooling pools and storage canisters at plant sites all over the country. The reason that the waste has to be managed so carefully is that when they are discarded, the uranium fuel rods contain about 95 percent of the original amount of energy and remain both highly radioactive and hot enough to boil water. It dawned on Leslie and Mark that if they could chop up the rods and remove their metal cladding, they might have a killer appa sector-redefining technology like Uber or Airbnbfor their molten salt reactor design, enabling it to run on the waste itself.
By late 2010, the computer modeling they were doing suggested this might indeed work. When Leslie left for a trip to Egypt with her family in January 2011, Mark kept running simulations back at MIT. On January 11, he sent his partner an email that she read as she toured the sites of Alexandria. The note was highly technical, but said in essence that Marks latest work confirmed their hunchthey could indeed make their reactor run on nuclear waste. Leslie looked up from her phone and said to her brother: I need to go back to Boston.
Climate Change Spurs New Call for Nuclear Energy
In the days when Leslie and Mark were studying for their exams, it may have seemed that the Golden Age of nuclear energy in the United States had long since passed. Not a single new commercial reactor project had been built here in over 30 years. Not only were there no new reactors, but with the fracking boom having produced abundant supplies of cheap natural gas, some electric utilities were shutting down their aging reactors rather than doing the costly upgrades needed to keep them online.
As the domestic reactor market went into decline, the American supply chain for nuclear reactor parts withered. Although almost all commercial nuclear technology had been discovered in the United States, our competitors eventually purchased much of our nuclear industrial base, with Toshiba buying Westinghouse, for example. Not surprisingly, as the nuclear pioneers aged and young scientists stayed away from what seemed to be a dying industry, the number of nuclear engineers also dwindled over the decades. In addition, the American regulatory system, long considered the gold standard for western nuclear systems, began to lose influence as other countries pressed ahead with new reactor construction while the U.S. market remained dormant.
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