Nuclear-Reactor Renaissance

Nuclear power is back in vogue as a source of energy, thanks to revived interest in safe and less expensive reactor technologies.

There is an old joke sometimes told in the nuclear-power industry: Trying to sell nuclear power is like trying to sell anthrax. That’s because it has taken close to 30 years for the nuclear industry to get past the black eye it sustained from reactor emergencies at Three Mile Island in the U. S. and Chernobyl in the Ukraine.

But nuclear experts say the conditions that led to problems at TMI and the catastrophe at Chernobyl will never happen again. Chernobyl, for example, was built without a containment structure, considered a basic safety measure since the birth of the nuclear age. The problems at TMI arose both because its operators lacked training, and from the fact that its control room was configured as a more-complicated version of what you might find in a coal-fired generation plant.

The safety record of the nuclear industry has been exemplary since the dark days of the 1970s and 80s. Just two nuclear workers (in Japan) lost their lives in the 1990s because of accidents, and there have been no injuries recorded in the last 10 years. Nuclear-industry promoters like to contrast this record with that of the wind industry, where between 30 and 40 workers have lost their lives annually for the past several years.

All in all, nuclear proponents feel they have nothing for which to apologize when it comes to safety. And with a growing cry for carbon-free methods of generating electrical power, promoters say nuclear reactors deserve a larger role. Furthering this view is the advent of smaller reactors that promise to get past the other often-cited drawback of nuclear power: mind-numbingly high costs. Some of the new designs currently on the drawing boards are small enough to fit on a flat-bed truck and be mass produced to easily verified specifications. And one design addresses the growing problem of nuclear-waste disposal by using waste material from other reactors as its fuel.

The ability to make use of such nuclear-waste material (basically depleted uranium from conventional light-water reactors) is particularly important in the U. S., where there is no reprocessing of this material back into fuel. Consequently, an estimated 56,000 metric tons of depleted uranium sit in the U. S. The long-term storage of this material has become political.

In 2006, the research firm Intellectual Ventures, Bellevue, Wash., launched a subsidiary called TerraPower LLC to perfect the concept of a nuclear-waste-fueled reactor. TerraPower figures the stockpiles of waste represent enough fuel to generate $100 trillion worth of electricity with its reactor design. Conversely, the firm points out there is no need to enrich uranium for fueling its reactor design, thus eliminating an expensive step in the power-generation process.