Friends and foes of nuclear power alike will be disappointed by Megawatts and Megatons. It's superficially impressive, being a thick and heavy book written by two well-decorated scientists, but it's short on honest talk about nuclear risks, alternative sources of energy rather than coal, and recent developments in nuclear technology that might make nuclear energy safer and cheaper but which would also make nuclear weapons available to terrorists and two-bit dictators.
Between the threat of global warming and limited world oil supplies which will make the industrial world increasingly dependent on the unstable Middle East, we badly need a treatment of our energy options that compares nuclear energy, coal technology and renewable energy and that considers the relationship between energy and the economy. Rushed into English print to capitalize on last year's California energy crisis, Megawatts and Megatons isn't that book.
Filled with numbers and graphs, introductory physics lessons and amusing anecdotes, one might imagine that he'd really learned something from reading this book. Yet, like most advocates of nuclear powers, the authors play a sort of shell game, using numbers to create an impression that they know more than they do and selecting information selectively so that we'll draw the conclusion that they want.
Thirty years ago the nuclear industry had pinned it's hopes on the liquid metal fast breeder reactor (LMFBR,) which burns the plentiful isotope U238 for fuel rather than the rare isotope U235 used by current nuclear plants. (Nuclear energy isn't an "unlimited resource" as many people think -- currently usable reserves of U235 contain about as much energy as oil and gas put together, and much less than coal.) The authors mention that one breeder, the French Superphenix, was considered a failure and decomissioned in 1997. They fail to mention why. Superphenix had been shut down for some time after it caught on fire, causing billions of dollars worth of damage. After the roof fell in on one of it's auxillary buildings, local authorities refused to renew it's license. The authors also fail to mention that similar accidents forced the shutdown of breeder programs in the US and Japan. They breifly mention that one type of breeder (the Integral Fast Reactor) has had a successful operating record in the US, but they don't mention that it's exotic metal fuel design limits it's power output to less than 2% of today's nuclear power plants or that it's low burnup results in plutonium of exceptional quality for nuclear weapons.
The authors make little distinction between a bird in the hand and a bird in the bush. For instance, they assert that a nearly unlimited supply of uranium is available from seawater at a price of around $100 /kg, and although uranium currently costs about $20/kg they comment little on what that will do for the cost of energy. They devote a lot of talk to Carlo Rubbia's "Energy Amplifier" scheme, an untested cross between a particle accelerator and a nuclear reactor, as a possible way to extract nuclear energy by converting naturally abundent Thorium into the gamma-emitting isotope U233. They remain completely silent about what seems to be the best-kept secret in the nuclear industry: that in 1977, a conventional light water reactor was successfully retrofitted to operate on a mixture of U233 and Thorium, a fuel cycle that would potentially increase the supply of nuclear fuel a hundredfold or more.
The authors take the same line that most nuclear advocates do: that the risks of nuclear power are comparable to or less than that of other energy sources, especially coal. Although not everyone agrees, this could be correct about the risks of radiation, accidents, and nuclear waste disposal. The real thing that keeps nuclear engineers up at night isn't a technical problem, but a human problem. In operation, nuclear reactors convert naturally occuring Uranium 238 into Plutonium 239, the ideal explosive for nuclear weapons. The ultimate problem with nuclear power is that every technical development that makes it cheaper, more abundant, or safer, brings us closer to the day that nuclear weapons fall into the wrong hands.
The author discuss the subject at length, but they somehow manage to avoid the main point: there isn't an easy solution. In 1977 Jimmy Carter banned the commercial reprocessing of nuclear fuel; a messy procedure that generates radioactive contamination and produces plutonium in a separated, useful form. The alternative, a "once-through" fuel cycle, isn't much better -- as nuclear waste accumulates, radioactive decay makes it easier to handle and removes the undesirable isotope Plutonium 241; fifteen to thirty years of sitting around converts reactor waste into weapons grade Plutonium.
A growing pile of nuclear waste is nothing but a "plutonium mine." The math is simple. A nuclear economy generates hundreds of tons of plutonium a year, yet it takes only 10 kilograms of plutonium for terrorists or rouge nations to make a bomb. India's, Pakistan's and Iraq's defiance of treaties and international inspection point out that proliferation would be impossible to control in a world where the current 400 nuclear reactors expand to 5000, as would be necessary to halt global warming and raise living standards in the third world with nuclear energy.
Finally, Megawatts and Megatons has little to say about recent developments.
Although no new nuclear plants have been ordered in the US since 1980, licensing procedures were loosened after the Harrisburg (Three Mile Island) accident. After the energy crunch of 2000-2001, several companies entered the rush to build the next one. GE is pushing the Advanced Boiling Water Reactor and the Simplified Boiling Water Reactor, refined versions of the light water reactors (LWR) that are already widespread.
An international coalition is planning to create a radical new type of reactor, the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) which may be immune to the kind of loss of cooling accident (LOCA) that destroyed a reactor at Three Mile Island. This would allow the use of a less sturdy confinement building which would reduce the cost of electricity, but many fear that this would make the reactor more vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Unlike the LWR, the PBMR never needs to be shut down for refuelling, since pool-ball sized fuel pebbles are continuously added at the top and removed from the bottom; waste pellets are packaged in steel drums and put into temporary storage in the basement. Although online refuelling increases efficiency and cuts costs, it also makes the PBMR an ideal producer of weapons grade plutonium. A small reactor, in the 100-200 MW range, the PBMR would be particularly attractive for third world countries, and so would be particularly dangerous for nuclear proliferation. Although the PBMR is certainly the most interesting thing going on in nuclear energy, Megawatts and Megatons dedicates only a few pages to it and says absolutely nothing about the menace it poses as a cheap source of weapons grade plutonium.
Other changes could make a short term "nuclear revivial" entirely irrelevant. In response to the 2000-2001 crunch, utilities went on a rampage building combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) plants based on natural gas. The CCGT running on natural gas is inexpensive, and the cleanest source of electricity based on fossil fuels. However, if the economy performs poorly over the next ten years, it's likely that we'll be facing an electricity glut rather than a shortage -- eliminating any demand for nuclear power plants. Although a moderate increase in gas prices could encourage gas drilling in the US, we can't forget that the supply is finite, and that drilling for gas at deeper depths significantly increases it's cost. Although the Department of Energy forecasts a linear increase in gas production between now and 2020, that would leave us with our reserves almost depleted. More realistic projections estimate that we could feel the effects of depletion as soon as 2010, leaving our newly built CCGT plants without fuel.
Megawatts and Megatons is profoundly disappointing book. Like most of the propaganda from the nuclear establishment, it lies constantly through omission. Now that the sins of the fossil fuel age (global warming, depletion, and political instability) are coming due, we particularly need an honest and penetrating discussion of our energy options -- Megawatts and Megatons only adds to the fog.
Title: Megawatts and Megatons, A turning point in the nuclear age?
Authors: Richard L. Garwin and George Charpak
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
ISBN: 0-375-40394-9
Year: 2001
Pages: 384
Libraries: TCPL
