Llewellyn King: The case for ‘hotter’ nuclear power in dealing with the electricity crunch

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

The drumbeat for more nuclear power grows louder all the time. 

As the demand for more electricity rises inexorably (now agreed at about 2 percent a year nationally and more in specific areas), the case for a surge in nuclear-power-plant development becomes stronger. Solar and wind with their intermittency can’t accommodate the growth alone.

Polls put public support for nuclear power in the United States at around 60 percent. Environmentalists who once opposed nuclear now endorse it.

Every day in newspapers and places where opinions are heard, experts are asserting that the world can’t reach its climate goals without nuclear energy. For the U.S., that seems clear. The prognosticators in and out of government say it is so.

There is political support in both parties, and nuclear has been on a technological march: better safety, better fuel, less steel and concrete. A platoon of small modular reactors (SMRs) — which generate 400 megawatts or less of electricity compared to the plants now operating, which are mostly over 1,000 MW — is in the wings.

The argument for these SMRs has been that because they are smaller, they will be cheaper to build, with much of the fabrication done in a factory, and easier to site.

The first of the breed is from NuScale, which has been under development for more than a decade, but recently lost its first U.S. customer, Utah Associated Municipal Power System, because of the rising projected cost of electricity from the plant.

A lot of interest is focused on the Natrium reactor, planned for a former coal-fired plant site in Wyoming and backed in part by Bill Gates and with participation from GE Hitachi.

Several utilities are looking at other designs. Of these only NuScale uses a modified light-water system, which is the technology on which the world’s 400-plus power generating reactors have been based.

The case for new technologies is eloquently made in a new and extraordinarily complete but very accessible book, New Nuclear Is Hot, by longtime nuclear advocate Robert Hargraves, a Ph.D. physicist.

Hargraves’s argument is that the alternative technologies now under development are hotter: They operate at far higher temperatures than the old reactors and are better for industrial uses; more of the heat is converted to electricity, less is wasted on disposing of so called low-grade heat, and the plants are smaller, easier to build and are inherently safer.

It is a convincing list of virtues.

Hargraves says, “New nuclear reactors exploit hotter heat in fluids such as molten salts, liquid sodium or helium gas. The red-hot temperature heat puts 50 percent more of the reactor’s fission energy into electrical energy, not into the cooling water that condenses turbine-generator steam. Waterside new nuclear-power plants use about half of the cooling water of current ones.”

Additionally, Hargraves says, “Hot heat also brings new uses. Hot heat can break hydrogen out of seawater cheaply, heat buildings, power electrochemical separators to capture CO2, and energize new refineries to produce net zero fuels from the CO2 and hydrogen.”

Hargraves is a promoter of thorium reactors and is one of the founders of ThorCon, a company that hopes to build a thorium reactor in Indonesia.

But the underlying challenge to nuclear energy and to providing the nation with enough electricity, as it converts to an electric economy, isn’t technology but money. First-of-its-kind reactors are expensive.

Even tried-and-true light water reactors are tricky to build. The two new units of the Vogtle plant in Georgia came in $17 billion over budget and 7 years late. The story for the latest reactor built in Finland has been similar: cost overruns and delays.

New reactors are expensive and that expense is hard to estimate. That means if the nation wants electricity, it needs to think up ways of financing the new future of nuclear power outside of the traditional avenues of finance. A nuclear plant can last for 100 years or more, but the big hurdle is the billions of dollars required up front.

It becomes a national survival issue: Will the nation have enough electricity for the future or will it accept electricity shortages as a limiting factor in the economy?

The nuclear establishment doesn’t need more endorsements. It needs to lay out a plan for not what should be built, but how it will be paid for — and it needs that plan now. 

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island.

Llewellyn King: We need much more nuclear power in the drive toward massive expansion of electrification

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

A new day is breaking for the nuclear industry in the United States. There are four drivers of the new enthusiasm for nuclear power, which is being felt throughout the utility world.

First, nuclear is “dispatchable.” That is the term for the power you can rely on; power that will be there when you need it, and you can dispatch it.

At present, utilities are struggling with an overload of non-dispatchable power coming from wind and solar generation. That is available only when the wind blows or the sun shines. Fossil fuel and nuclear power are dispatchable — and highly regarded in the industry.

The Texas grid, known as Electric Reliability Council of Texas,  was near catastrophe during the recent extreme heat wave when wind generation, which is a major part of the Texas power portfolio, simply wasn’t there to be dispatched. The ERCOT system has 35,391 megawatts of installed wind power; less than 1,000 megawatts of that were available.

Second, a new range of nuclear-power designs is making its way to market, and they have many advantages over the old, large plants of the kind that still produce 20 percent of the nation’s power, all of it dispatchable.

The new reactors, small modular reactors (SMRs), come in various sizes and use differing technologies from today’s jumbo workhorses — and they promise great things.

A panel of nuclear-power experts at a recent U.S. Energy Association virtual press briefing, which I organized and hosted, agreed that whether the technology is light water, molten salt or some other choice, SMRs will use less steel and concrete per unit of power produced, and they will require less land.

They have superior, failure-resistant fuel and will be passive, inherently safer, and won’t require their big brothers’ pumps and backup generators. Also, Bud Albright, president of the U.S. Nuclear Industry Council, told the media that these reactors will operate for 60 or more years and require fueling less frequently.

The SMRs come in various technologies and sizes, from NuScale’s 80-MW light water modules being built in Idaho to GE Hitachi Nuclear’s 300-MW reactor, the BWRX-300, being considered by the Tennessee Valley Authority. The modules will offer utilities flexibility in the size of the installation as well as enable individual modules to be repaired while the plant continues to produce power.

Cost remains an open issue. The USEA’s panel was quick to point out that factory manufacturing, standardization of design, and the simplicity of the new offerings would reduce their costs. But they weren’t so sure how these could go.

Jon Ball, executive vice president of GE Hitachi Nuclear, estimated that the BWRX-300 will deliver power at $60 a megawatt hour. That is still well above the cost of wind or solar power. So dispatchability and lifespan are important.

The third driver for a nuclear surge is the Inflation Reduction Act, which has put a new spring into the power generators’ steps. Doug True, vice president and chief nuclear officer of the Nuclear Energy Institute, said the act will level the playing field for nuclear compared to wind and solar.

Louis Finkel, vice president of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, told me he thinks there will be a surge in interest among rural co-ops to build reactors and that some that now are only in the distribution business will be interested in adding generation.

The Inflation Reduction Act makes this possible in several ways, but most important, it extends to not-for-profit utilities, like the co-ops and municipals, the benefits of construction and operating tax credits. These they will receive in the form of a check from the Treasury, which can be as much as 30 percent of the project.

Overall, driving the need for nuclear is that the nation needs more power if it continues its headlong rush to electrification of surface transportation and manufacturing.

The National Academy of Sciences predicts that electricity production will have to grow 170 percent between now and 2050. NRECA’s Finkel points out that the academy’s study doesn’t include coal and gas taken out of production to achieve net-zero emissions in the same timeframe

There would, indeed, seem to be a new day for nuclear.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Llewellyn King: To be serious about global warming be serious about the need for nuclear energy

The Seabrook Nuclear Power Station, behind the Blackwater River, as seen from Route 1A in Seabrook, N.H. The two remaining nuclear plants in New England — the 2,073-megawatt Millstone plant, in Waterford, Conn., (see below) and the 1,251.4-megawatt Seabrook plant, together provide about 26 percent of the region’s electricity.

— Photo by ThePessimus

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

If you have gasped in Dallas, sweltered in London, or baked in Tokyo this summer, you are likely to believe that global warming is real.

You are also likely to believe that governments -- at least the caring ones -- are desperate to cut the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere from power plants and vehicles.

More electricity is needed to cut the greenhouse-gas emissions from cars, trucks, buses, trains, and, eventually, aircraft. The government figures that U.S. electricity demand will double by 2050, even as the fuels producing it change.

There are three technologies for producing new large quantities of electricity without producing greenhouse gases: wind, solar and nuclear.

Leading global energy institutions, including the International Energy Agency, are adamant that nuclear must be part of the future energy mix.

Nuclear is desirable in many ways:

·       It isn’t dependent on foreign supply except for some heavy components, like the castings for large pressure vessels. These, if needed in newer reactors, can be acquired from reliable allies, including South Korea and Japan. Alternatively, we could reinvigorate our large component industry.

·       When it comes to supply chains, nuclear component manufacture can be brought to America. It doesn’t have a Chinese component. Wind power is dependent on rare earths -- they are a multiplier in wind turbines, increasing output up to five times. Over 90 percent of rare earths are processed in China, even if they are mined elsewhere. It will take precious decades to replicate the Chinese rare earths infrastructure. Also, China dominates the manufacture of cheap solar cells.

·       Nuclear offers long-term planning: The design life of a plant can be as long as 100 years. These plants are clean, safe -- and getting safer. They have a high energy density and low land use, both of which contrast with solar and wind.

Incredibly, the world, outside of China and Russia, seems to have lost the ability to build nuclear plants. It is as though talent and institutional knowledge have disappeared. Those under construction are running many times over their projected costs, and a decade or more behind schedule. They represent a systemic industrial failure, whether it is Plant Vogtle in Georgia, Flamanville-3 in France (a nation that gets 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear; we get 19 percent), or Olkiluoto 3, in Finland.

At the heart of these failures -- and they are complex and far-reaching -- is a failure of welds, and a shortage of welders.

As a first step, the United States, in conjunction with the nuclear manufacturing industry, needs to find out what it is that we have lost in expertise and how to recapture it. We built more than 100 reactors in the 1960s and 1970s. There were some delays back then, but they were nothing like the catastrophic ones of today.

Particularly, the examination of what has gone wrong with nuclear building needs to concentrate on welding. Is this an old trade that needs updating? Can we fix some of the human error that has plagued big industrial welding, from nuclear plants to new ships, through automation and AI?

Not since the 1960s, I am told by nuclear lobbyists, has the public policy apparatus been so aligned to favor nuclear. One of these lobbyists said, “Both houses of Congress are on board, the administration is on board, the regulatory agencies are on board, and public acceptance is greater than it has been in years. But the industry is on its back.”

The issue, to my mind, is not whether we can relearn how do what we used to do, but that there is no mechanism for the utilities to buy and build new nuclear plants, whether they are the new generation of small modular reactors now under development or updated, large (about 1,000 megawatts), more traditional light water reactors. No utility can take the risk in the deregulated world. It is too much to ask.

The nation needs a coherent plan whereby a new generation of nuclear power can be built quickly. It has been done in the past, and it can be done again.

I would suggest -- as I have suggested over many years -- that as nuclear needs government safety oversight, proliferation safeguards, and approval that a tranche of reactors be built on government sites, financed by the government, and sold to commercial consortia to operate. These needn’t necessarily be utility companies. Wind and solar are being developed by merchant companies in many cases.

There is a national climate crisis, and a national electricity crisis is building. Utilities are having to produce more electricity while giving up coal and gas to do it. Nuclear is the strong third leg of the future electricity stool.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

The Millstone Nuclear Power Station, in Waterford, Conn., on Long Island Sound.

Llewellyn King: The case for nuclear and against coal

This is Seabrook Unit 1, a nuclear-power plant in Seabrook, N.H., that’s the largest individual electricity-generating unit on the New England power grid. It is the second-largest nuclear plant in New England, after the two-unit Millstone Nuclear Power Plant, in  Waterford, Conn., on Long Island Sound.

Coal and nuclear power have been yoked together for decades. Nuclear power and nuclear science have both paid the price for this double harness. Now it looks as though nuclear will pay again.

The electric utilities in the 1950s and 1960s were faced with runaway demand for electricity as air conditioning was deployed and new home construction boomed. This was before acid rain became a problem and when global warming was just a minor scientific theory.

As the utilities struggled to deal with electricity demand that was doubling every 10 years, nuclear appeared as the brave new fuel of the future. They loved nuclear, the government loved nuclear and the public was happy with it.

So, utilities went hellbent into nuclear: In all, starting in the 1950s, utilities built over well over 100 reactors for electricity production.

Then opposition to nuclear began to appear, at first in the late 1960s and then with intensity through the 1970s.

Horror stories were easy to invent and hard to counter. Being anti-nuclear was good for the protest business. The environmental movement — to its shame — joined the anti-nuclear cavalcade. Indeed, in the 1970s and 1980s, environmentalists were still hard against nuclear. They advocated advanced coal combustion, particularly a form of coal boiler known as “circulating fluidized bed.”

For their part, the utilities defended nuclear, but never at a cost to coal. They were worried about their investments in coal. They would not, for example, sing the safety, reliability and, as it was then, the cost-effectiveness of nuclear over coal.

They said they were for both. “Both of the above” meant that the nuclear advocates in the industry could not run serious comparisons of nuclear with coal.

Now the Trump administration is seeking that history repeat itself. To fulfill the president’s campaign promises to the coal industry and to try to save coal-mining jobs, the administration is invoking national security and “resilience” to interfere in the electric markets and save coal and nuclear plants, which the utility industry is closing or will close.

The predicament of these plants is economic; for coal, it is economic and environmental.

Both forms of electric generation are undermined by cheap natural gas, cheap wind power and cheap solar power. In a market that favors the cheapest electricity at the time of dispatch, measured to the second, these plants do not cut it financially. The social value or otherwise is not calculated.

The fight between coal and nuclear, and more realistically between nuclear and natural gas, misses the true virtue of nuclear: It is a scientific cornucopia.

Nuclear science is reshaping medicine, enabling space travel and peering at the very nature of being. In 100 years, nuclear science will be flowering in ways undreamed of today. A healthy nuclear power industry grows the nuclear science world, brings in talent.

Even without the science argument, there is a case for saving the nuclear plants: They produce about 20 percent of the nation’s electricity without hint of carbon effluent, which gas cannot say.

A fair market allows for externalities beyond the cost of generation and dispatch at that second. Clean air is a social value, scientific progress is a social value, and predicting the life of a plant (maybe 80 years) is a social value.

Natural gas, the great market disrupter of today, does not meet these criteria.

As electricity is unique, the national lifeblood, it deserves to be treated as such. That cries out for nuclear to be considered for a lifeline in today’s brutal market.

If it embraces a long-term solution through carbon capture and use, then coal may hold a place in the future. But the industry is cool to this solution. Robert Murray, CEO of Murray Energy Corporation, denounced it to me.

The administration has put money into a new nuclear through incentives and subsidies for small modular reactors even while linking established nuclear to the sick man of energy, coal.

Electricity is a social value as well as a traded commodity. The administration is working against itself with its coal strategy.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Robert Whitcomb: Another trap in the energy cycles

A few years ago I co-wrote a book, with Wendy Williams, about a controversy centered on Nantucket Sound. The quasi-social comedy, called Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Energy, Class, Politics and the Battle for Our Energy Future, told of how, since 2001, a company led by entrepreneur James Gordon has struggled to put up a wind farm in the sound in the face of opposition from the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound — a long name for fossil-fuel billionaire Bill Koch, a member of the famous right-wing Republican family.  An amusing movie, Cape Spin,  directed by John Kirby and produced by Libby Handros, came out of this saga, too. Mr. Koch's houses include a summer mansion in Osterville, Mass., from which he doesn’t want to see wind turbines on his southern horizon on clear days.

Mr. Koch may now have won the battle, as very rich people usually do. Two big utilities, National Grid and Northeast Utilities, are trying to bail out of a politicized plan, which they never liked, forcing them to buy Cape Wind electricity. They cite the fact that the company missed the Dec. 31, 2014, deadline in contracts signed in 2012 to obtain financing and start construction. Cape Wind said it doesn’t “regard these terminations as valid” since, it asserts, the contracts let the utilities’ contracts be extended because of the alliance’s “unprecedented and relentless litigation.” Bill Koch has virtually unlimited funds to pay lawyers to litigate unto the Second Coming, aided by imaginative rhetoric supplied by his  very smart and well paid pit-bull  anti-Cape Wind spokeswoman, Audra Parker,  even though the project has won all regulatory approvals.

It's no secret that it has gotten harder and harder to do big projects in the United States because of endless litigation and ever more layers of regulation. Thus our physical infrastructure --- electrical grid, transportation and so on -- continues to fall behind our friendly competitors, say in the European Union and Japan, and our not-so-friendly competitors, especially in China. Read my friend Philip K. Howard's latest book, The Rule of Nobody, on this.

With the death of Cape Wind, New Englanders would lose what could have helped diversify the region’s energy mix — and smooth out price and supply swings — with home-grown, renewable electricity. Cape Wind is far from a panacea for the region’s dependence on natural gas, oil and nuclear, but it would add a tad more security.

Some of Cape Wind’s foes will say that the natural gas from fracking will take care of everything. But New England lacks adequate natural-gas pipeline capacity, to no small extent because affluent people along the routes hold up their construction. And NIMBYs (not in my backyard) have also blocked efforts to bring in more Canadian hydro-electric power. So our electricity rates are soaring, even as many of those who complain about the rates also fight any attempt to put new energy infrastructure near them. As for nuclear, it seems too politically incorrect for it to be expanded again in New England.

Meanwhile, the drawbacks to fracking, including water pollution and earthquakes in fracked countryside, are becoming more obvious. And the gas reserves may well be exaggerated. I support fracking anyway, since it means less use of oil and coal and because much of the gas is nearby, in Pennsylvania. (New York, however, recently banned fracking.)

Get ready for brownouts and higher electricity bills. As for oil prices, they are low now, but I have seen many, many energy price cycles over the last 45 years of watching the sector. And they often come with little warning. But meanwhile, many Americans, with ever-worsening amnesia, flock to buy SUV's again.

Robert Whitcomb oversees New England Diary.