Where the U.S. government researches a nuclear future
In 1955, the tiny town of Arco, Idaho, became the first community in the 'free world' to be powered by nuclear-based electricity. With the power coming from the nearby Experimental Breeder Reactor I, operated by the Nuclear Reactor Testing Station. Over time, the idea of using nuclear power for municipal electricity fell out of favor. But today, at the Idaho National Lab, the leading U.S. Department of Energy nuclear energy research institution, the idea is very much at the forefront, as scientists and policymakers alike search for ways to provide more power while creating less of a carbon footprint.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)ARCO, Idaho--On July 17, 1955, this tiny town, which might otherwise have forever escaped notoriety of any kind, was put on the map for a very historic reason: It became the first place in the "free world" to be powered by "electrical energy developed from the atom."
The power was generated by an experimental reactor run by the nearby National Reactor Testing Station, and the flipping of the switch seemed to usher in a new era for the United States and the world: the nuclear era.
Over time, the U.S. and other countries grew more and more attracted to the idea of nuclear power as a major alternative to fossil fuel-based power. But by the 1980s and early 1990s, the country had lost its appetite for the fuel source. It was seen as dangerous, too closely related to nuclear weapons, and too productive of nuclear waste, and gradually, the number of working nuclear power plants got smaller and smaller. In many places, in fact, the mere mention of nuclear power will draw a dirty stare.
But in Arco, there is still a civic pride associated with the events of 1955, and today, there is a growing national enthusiasm for the idea that back then, in the heart of the Cold War, seemed so novel: turning to nuclear power as a major source of energy.
Nowhere, perhaps, is that enthusiasm more palpable than at the Idaho National Lab (INL), the U.S. Department of Energy's lead nuclear research institution. Located in and around Idaho Falls, Idaho, INL is at the forefront of developing the technology that could bring nuclear back to the grownups' table, and the researchers there--and clearly, some policymakers in Washington, D.C., as well--feel that nuclear is our best bet for providing a good deal of the power needs of both the general population and industry, while at the same time keeping the carbon footprint small.
I visited INL this week as part of Road Trip 2009, and was given the lowdown on why nuclear is thought to be a better energy alternative than ever before, and why the public shouldn't worry about the kinds of safety concerns that were so prevalent after high-profile reactor accidents at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 and in Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in 1986.
My first stop was for a visit with Phillip Finck, INL's associate director for nuclear science and technology (see video below).
Finck explained that the genesis of his lab, which was formed about four years ago, was a feeling that a nuclear renaissance is coming, driven both by a need for new dependable sources of energy and by major climate concerns.
The vision behind the lab, he continued, is to figure out how to address America's carbon dioxide problems with nuclear. Today, roughly one-third of our domestic power output goes into electricity production, a third into transportation and a third into industrial, home heating, and other applications. Of that total output, nearly 85 percent comes from fossil fuels, while only 6 percent to 7 percent comes from hydropower and an equal amount from nuclear. A very small amount comes from other sources, such as biomass, he added.
As a result, the thinking is that nuclear can be a significant part of the solution, and in several ways.
The first, he explained, would be the building of new nuclear power plants; the second, the extension of the lifetimes of the 104 existing nuclear plants in the country; and the third would be using existing--and new--plants to produce new processed heats and liquid fuels that could replace existing carbon-based fuels.
Of course, there would still be the question of how to deal with the nuclear waste from the plants, but Finck said that is also something INL is working hard on. To begin with, INL is looking into ways to make existing reactors produce less waste, and at the same time, the lab, and other research facilities, are working on technologies designed to take spent fuels and through the process of transmutation, reduce their toxicity. The latter would mean, he added, that it could be possible to reuse much of the radioactive waste and reduce the toxicity of the eventual waste by a factor of up to 100.
What this all means is that the time has come, Finck continued, to pursue the development of what he called fourth-generation nuclear power plants. This is a growing research field that is being worked on in as many as 12 countries around the world, including the U.S., Japan, France, and China, all of which are working together to make these next-generation reactors possible.
The criteria of these new reactors are simple, Finck said: they would need to be cheaper, be more sustainable--meaning that they would produce less waste; have constantly improving safety standards; and would have improved proliferation resistance--meaning they would have less and less applicability for nuclear weapons.
Today, this is all in the research stage, but according to Finck, it's possible that the first fourth-generation plant could come online sometime around 2020.
In the meantime, however, there are factors that make even today's nuclear reactors more of a solution for our national energy problems than ever before, he said. To begin with, the operating and safety performance of the nation's plants have never been higher. There haven't been any notable safety problems in the U.S. since Three Mile Island, Finck said, and today, plants are operating at 92 percent efficiency, meaning that they are online 92 percent of the time.
And that has come as a result of better-than-ever training and discipline and means that existing plants are producing power at the equivalent of several entirely new plants, just from that increased efficiency, he argued.
Hydrogen Production
My next stop was to visit with Stephen Herring, the technical director for High Temperature Electrolysis in the Energy Department's office of nuclear energy nuclear hydrogen initiative.
Herring and his team are working on a number of experiments, but their major purpose is to develop methods, using nuclear reactors, of producing hydrogen as a way of improving the quality of existing liquid fuels and to produce more liquid fuels with zero, or at least much less usage of carbon dioxide.
As well, Herring's lab is all about looking for technical answers to problems raised by industry and then finding out, from industry, if they're on the right track.
At the next facility, the Fuel Conditioning Facility, I was shown a series of what are called "hot cells," which are highly radioactive areas behind five feet and nine layers of lead glass.
One of the first things I saw in the hot cells was a series of spent fuel rods from INL's Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR II), which was a formerly working reactor closed down by congressional decree in 1994.
If someone were to go inside the room, my host for the day, Don Miley, said, they "wouldn't see the sun go down. So we're not going in there."
In a similar facility, the Hot Fuel Examination Facility, we saw a different set of hot cells, this time behind four feet of glass, but no less dangerous on the other side (see video below). There, David Petti, the director of the Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR) technology development office, explained that his program is to work on a gas reactor, a "passively safe reactor" that is cooled with helium, and which has a reactor core made of graphite, and which is "tall and skinny" at 28 meters high and 8 meters wide.
Because it's graphite, which absorbs heat, he explained, it's resilient to accidents. That would mean that even in the case of an accident, it would take hundreds of hours to overheat.
"The joke," Petti said, is that in the case of an accident, "the operators could go to lunch, dinner and breakfast before having to figure out what to do."
Developed after Three Mile Island, the VHTR uses a unique kind of fuel: half-inch diameter and inch-long pellets made from huge numbers of compacted microscopic uranium particles covered in three layers of carbon and silicon carbine and then coated in graphite. The pellets, Petti explained, can take heats up to 1600 degrees Celsius without failing.
Inside the reactor, there are millions of these pellets, as well as tennis-ball sized spheres called "pebbles," and when bombarded with neutrons, they fission and create heat.
But the carbon covering the particles protects the uranium up to temperatures of 3,000 degrees Celsius, and the reactor is designed, he said, not to get above 1,600 degrees. "Everything is designed from that worst-case accident," he said, "so heat is always moved, and so it never gets that hot."
Looking into the cooling pond at the Idaho National Labs Advanced Test Reactor, it is possible to see a blue glow coming off of nuclear fuel stored below, which is based on the Cherenkov Effect.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)Another goal, he said, is to increase what is called "burnup," or how much of the fission is used for getting power on the grid. Today's water-cooled plants have a burnup rate of around 5 percent, he said, but at the INL's Advanced Test Reactor, they're working on getting that number up to 19 percent.
The idea, then, is to use the VHTR to prove the model and then begin building out similar reactors for use in industry. Ideally, then, companies like Chevron and Dow would license such plants in order to produce heat at constant cost and low carbon footprint, Petti said. And such a buildout of new reactors would make a big difference, he added, because a company like Dow has the same level of hydrocarbon usage as a country like Kuwait.
National Scientific User Facility
The last stop of the day was at the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR), a fully functional reactor that is used in large part by the Navy for a series of experiments, as well as by universities and government and industry researchers.
A big part of the ATR's mission is as the National Scientific User Facility, under which university researchers submit proposals for time in the reactor to conduct experiments. At any given time, there might be about 45 different experiments underway.
And one of the biggest utilities of the ATR is that because its core is geared towards giving every experiment exposure to as many neutrons as they need, it serves as somewhat of a "time machine," explained Frances Marshall, the ATR experiment program manager. That means, she said, that because neutrons erode metals, researchers can see a 20x aging effect on the metals in their experiments due to the bombardment of neutrons inside ATR.
Ultimately, it's too early to know whether the nation and the world will get behind a re-emergence of nuclear power plants as a major energy source. But at INL, the researchers and scientists there are making the argument that such facilities are both safe and energy and cost effective.
If true, a lot more towns like Arco, Idaho could someday see their power provided by nuclear reactors. In the short term, though, the world is hungry for new clean power, and a lot of people think the best answer is nuclear.
For the next several weeks, Geek Gestalt will be on Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be writing about and photographing the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota and Colorado. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.
Daniel Terdiman is a staff writer at CNET News covering games, Net culture, and everything in between. E-mail Daniel. 
I support new plant development using new designs, but we should build one or two first, to prove them out.
The fact is that these things should not have been made in densely populated areas, unless absolutely necessary. Even back then, it wasn't.
And, let's face facts: when have we EVER had a nuclear waste spill from a nuclear reactor? Answer: Never. And the meltdown at Three Mile Island was due to poor maintenance, not from an unsafe reactor, even back then. They have improved the reactor designs since then and have even figured out ways to keep reusing nuclear waste in different reactors after it is too 'depleted' for one reactor, so we could stretch out the thinking about the nuclear waste 'problem' (of which there really is none, just put it in Yucca Mountain, where it would be totally safe to do that) for 50 years or more.
Not exactly. Safety has increased over time since the inception of nuclear power. While the USA stopped cold in the 80's. France kept making progress. Now they are a leader in safety (and the actual ability to build a plant).
It does make sence to build them where you need them.
After being discharged, I moved right into comercial nuclear power plants, where I have been an operator for 10 years. This month I just recieved my reactor operator license, issued to me by the NRC.
I have been in nuclear power since 1992, and I can say without a doubt that people in the nuclear industry are some of the smartest, highly motivated people out there. We run our plants with the highest degree of safety possible, and public health is ALWAYS put before generation. The rules are very strict, but we follow them to the letter. If there is any doubt about our safety, we will shut down, and fix whatever problem MAY exist.
We in the nuclear industry are extremely hopeful about a renewed nuclear future. The newest generation of plants, already in use in France, are a breackthrough in simplicity and tecnology. With inherent safety system built in, There is a much smaller chance of component failure, and reduced building and operating costs. We urge the public to speak to us, and learn how the nuclear industry operates today!
I have no doubt we can build nuclear power plants that operate safely. The question is what do we do with the waste. The US government has been unable to agree to a resolution of that issue for the last 30 years. On site storage will work for a period of time, but it creates distributed sources of dirty bomb material. To properly protect that from the bad guys costs money and multiple locations costs more. Yucca mountain sounds good at first glance, but the location is too close to water tables and could pose a danger to drinking water for the Southwest.
So, we are stuck with what to do with the waste. We know how to build and operate the reactors safely, it's the last bit we still don't have all figured out yet.
With the right storage cells you could power the entire world using solar cells that take up only roughly the size of Arizona and Utah, which sounds large but if you were to disperse it throughout the world it would be negligible. That is why politiicians trump up solar power.
I don't have anything against nuclear, but the real solution will be orbital solar collectors that beam power down to the surface by microwave, not nuclear power plants.
@Seaspray0
I don't have anything against nuclear, but the real solution will be orbital solar collectors that beam power down to the surface by microwave, not nuclear power plants.
_______________________________________
Sorry, but no. One, what if a plane accidentally went into the microwave transmission? Two, what if a child somehow got into the range of the transmission? Three, what if something out in space hit and damaged the solar collector?
No, NUCLEAR is the only real option for relatively clean, cheap power production.
BUT nuclear power is just too expensive to build and maintian (there has to be intense security to gaurd the fuel) than once the reactor is done its even more expensive to get rid of the plant
we need to get tidal power and underwater turbines, and geothermal (which is the best in my opinion)
The qualitative political difference between Europe/Japan and the US is that in those countries, the elected representatives regulate corporations (look at the fines against Microsoft in the EU; nothing like that could happen in the US). In the US, corporations regulate the elected representatives (for example, the entire 8 years of the Bush administration).
Though theoretically we could build safe nuclear plants, the great probability is that here in the good 'ol US of A we would build instead the most *profitable* nuclear plants in an industry highly promoted by, say, Fox news, Murdock media, and a few billions in lobbying dollars.
Suppose that, despite all our efforts, at some point in the future we have completely failed to contain global warming? Which is quite likely - though we have to keep on trying. At that point, do you want a landscape populated by nuclear plants controlled by a massive paranoid military/corporate bureaucracy which wont' let you know anything about the construction of the plants out of fear that terrorists will use the information? Nuclear plants that we are dependent on and can't shut down, just as the Soviet Union kept operating Chernobyl's identical sister plant for years after the disaster? Or would you rather see a thousand smaller enterprises building community-sized projects connected to a smart power grid that we can all learn about and have a hand in?
Secondly, we would NOT make the most profitable nuclear reactors at all. It would be the safest AND the most profitable reactors, with the first thing taken into consideration a lot more than the second.
Third, we already have a 'massive paranoid military/corporate bureaucracy which won't let you know anything' about a lot of things right now, so your point there is absolutely moot.
As to Chernobyl..... it was not made in the right way in the freaking first place, so that's a moot point. Chernobyl and it's sister plant were INHERENTLY unsafe, and everyone knew that before it was built in Russia who had anything to do with the building.
As to the fines against Microsoft in the EU? Most of those fines are unjustified and I would really support Microsoft pulling out of there and REFUSING to sell their products there, because they are asking for way too freaking much in the EU from Microsoft.
fokkwp, please go read a book or take NUEN 101 before you make your comments. Chernobyl RBMK 1000 design can never been approved in US by NRC. and yes, nuclear power reactor in US is profitable, otherwise, what would be the point of building a new technology while its not profitable. BUT the nuclear industry spend so much money on saftey and emergency planning, it could be at least twice as profitable compares now which would make electricity twice as cheaper. oh, and if you don't like nuclear, then please turn off your AC 20% of the time in the summer since that's how much electricity the nuclear power plants contribute in US.
Can we trust big corporations to not cut corners when it comes to nuclear power plants? If you say yes, then why not trust the scientists who say that global warming is man-made?
Thats the theory at least. If the ice sheets on Greenland melt off into the ocean the sharp influx of fresh water offsets the gulf stream and prevents warm water and air from heading north causing catostrophic cooling. In theory anyway.
There will be accidents, there will be failures, the key is to mitigate risk and reduce exposure. I like what they're doing with Graphite to help with that. Very cool stuff.
These issues are not insurmountable by any means, but nuclear boosters usually minimize or distort these risks and hurdles when having the discussion. In reality, we could suck up all the money we could use finding other, cleaner forms of energy - as well as better battery and transmission technologies that conserve existing energy - just by building a handful of nuclear power plants.
Most uranium comes from deserts of australia these days so i don't know where the strip mining concerns are. Uranium is very plentiful (same as tin) and can be obtained from sea water.
Just say "I don't like nuclear power" and leave it at that. Your arguments are bogus.
In other words, all the costs and problems involved with nuclear power are man-made.
How are you going to fit the decomissioned steam generator into a 20 gallon bucket???
People don't realize that if our nation relied 100% on nuclear power then Uranium would turn into modern day oil. It would do nothing but costing us trillions to build a new infastructure to make us just as dependent as we were before, if not more so. And more so the uranium grade need to power the plants is of the .239 grade which is much rarer than the .238 grade.
And while b_baggins claims that nuclear waste has a low level of radioactivity it is highly radioactive just in a smaller amount from it being continuously reprocessed. And even if it weren't sealing our waste in concrete doesn't solve any problems.
waste is a problem, but is not after a careful engineer solution which we already have.....but thanks for our GREAT politicians in DC which made this impossible.
it is much more expensive to build a nuclear power plant than a coal power plant, but that's only b/c we have so much more regulation on nuclear than coal that we spend much more money. we also use state of the art equipments compare to a coal plant.
Secondly, most of the costs of nuclear power plants comes from the NUMEROUS lawsuits challenging them every single time one tries to open.
Third, a lot of nuclear power plants can last MUCH longer than 20 years, which as iptofar said, is the mean 'ToL' that they are using.
To the author- the facility you refer to as the RERTR was named HFEF at one time, and I think still is. Hot Fuel Examination Facility.
Disclosure: I'm neither pro nor anti nuclear power, but am allergic to the rhetoric on both sides...
I suggest, Daniel, since your tour isn't far away, that you take a side trip to Hanford WA. While you've gotten the rah rah from Arco, a trip to Hanford might give you another perspective on the issues. I'm old enough to remember that the same "clean safe bright future" rhetoric was applied to Hanford.
True story: I was at a meeting concerning Commonwealth Edison's nuclear plans in Chicago. The discussion turned to Plutonium output from ComEd's reactors. It's generally agreed that Plutonium 239 will remain hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years. Somebody asked the ComEd spokesman if Commonwealth Edison (now an Exelon Company) would still be around in 200,000 years to ensure the safety of the current nuclear waste. His (completely serious) answer? "Yes"
I worked on oil platforms 20 years ago. You aren't allowed to do now what you did then either.
Plutonium 238 is an alpha emitter. Which means unless you eat or inhale it, it's harmless. Alpha radiation can't penetrate the epidermis (it won't even give you a sunburn), and is stopped by about 6 inches of air.
Plutonium 238 has a half-life of 85 years and decays to Uranium 234. Uranium 234 has such a low level of radioactivity, we use it for bullets.
The idea that Plutonium 238 is deadly for 200,000 years is a lie. Period.
Learn to read...
The IFR actually generates new fuel during its operation and allows on-site reprocessing. In its simplest explanation, an IFR's worst radioactive waste is just pumped around for another go. Math fact two.
The IFR's waste that is not re-usable is composed of those isotopes with relatively short half-lives. That part can be stored on site for a period of a few hundred years, after which it presents no more of a radiation hazard than some ores. Math fact three.
I will freely admit that a full cost model of any project of this magnitude is always unproven and must remain so until a production unit is built and operated. True for solar power or wave power or sewer extensions. But the projections are sound enough that seems worthwhile to move to production.
One reason that existing plants are hard to predict is that they tend to be designed and built, one at a time. IFR proponents are seeking certification for a fixed design that can be replicated over and over. While "mass production" it's not, the opportunity is there for a much faster approval and building cycle at a lower initial cost at each site. Math fact four.
(and do these road trips more often...)
I am not sure what Daniel calls "clean", but nuclear is as far from clean as cyanide is to a healthy glass of water. People who think that a nuclear power station is clean, obviously because it just does not emit smelly black fumes, should seriously take an introductory course in nuclear physics and learn that the stuff that remains after burning the nuclear fuel remains extremely radioactive and poisonous for thousand of years.
Yes Daniel, if nuclear is safe, would you like to have your nice house close to a dump of this stuff?
Then let the stuff be run by a crew of bored Russian scientists, just because they are obviously better in handling melt-downs, or because if the cases of cancer in your region increase by huge amounts you do not really care.
And what about the odd ... (<- add your preferred unhappy group here) who sooner or later will have access to a few pounds of the stuff and take in downtown? Will that be a clean-kill?
I think this is a most important matter which should not be left in the hands of irresponsible and incompetent journalist, or worse of free market entrepreneurs looking at the next cheap source of energy (yes, it is all about money, at the end!) who will promise us that the sky will never fall.
Daniel, keep writing on games, and let this topic to be discussed by more serious people!
You persist on calling others ignorant while publicly proclaiming your own ignorance. Cute.
Nuclear power is a foul, dirty, nasty poisonous injurious menace that has been placed upon us by the central banking cartel. The only thing it is good for is to freshen up nuclear triggers so that they can get a sure shot off over our heads, incidentally, they have tried already but most folks cannot bring them selves to understand or believe that.
When the mopes (Living Dead) finally figure it out, "You're gonna wonder where the yellow went!"
I wonder if anyone as actually seen a large solar or wind facility? They render enormous land areas unusable for any other purpose! And that's before we consider the effect of sucking up all of that energy! The media has hystericized concern over a low-power greenhouse forcer (CO2 - a minor contributor to the greenhouse effect that let's us all live); consider the future hysteria about modifying tides, wind patterns and who knows what else with all of this so-called green technology?
Oh yeah. And the sun. The sun is more or less a supersized hydrogen bomb with a large amount of fuel to power it.
I believe that you can test the authentic concern about the environment in a person with the nuke test - if they favor the use of nukes, then they have genuine concern. If they oppose nukes, then their agenda is something else, but it's not the environment. There simply is no other realistic "green" technology.
If that is all it takes, then why is it so hard to find a nuclear physicist...or ANY physicist...who argues against using nuclear power generation?
Instead of all this fighting by the uneducated masses, how about we go to the source and ask physicists?
Answer: Practically every physicist, nuclear or not, thinks that using nuclear power is a no brainer. If nuclear is such a bad idea, explain that.
I like to think of it this way: one less nuke plant, a lot less slacker security guards better suited as mall cops falling asleep at their posts. The tech might be safer these days, but I question whether the PEOPLE really are.
The REAL thing that was shown was that nuclear power plants were not intrusion proof (big deal, neither are military installations!) and that they needed to up the security in some places.
- by powermeerkat July 10, 2009 9:57 AM PDT
- It's actually pathetic to hear PC crowd rant and rave about nuclerar power and at the same time demonstrate an ignorance level of high-chool drop-outs.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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- by pch4101 July 12, 2009 1:39 AM PDT
- "Rant and rave" - heh. So, are you attacking both the supporters for and against nuclear power? Or did you just meant the ranting crowd?
- Like this
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (78 Comments)If you can't tell the difference between Pu238 and Pu 239 and between a graphite reactor and an H-bomb you better educate yourselves before you start your tirades.