Book Review: Robert Zubrin -The Case for Nukes
Energy is the industry that powers all other industries.
Energy has been a reason for and a weapon in war.
Energy is at center of all debates around climate change.
Let’s just say that energy is a topic important enough to care about and to think clearly about. You just do not want to have to bear the costs of failing to do so.
There is probably no other power source with as much mystery , confusion, lies, conspiricy and raw emotions around it as nuclear power.
Robert Zubrin’s new book “The Case for Nukes: How We Can Beat Global Warming and Create a Free, Open, and Magnificent Future” tries to demystify nuclear by entertainingly telling the story of its development from scientific curiosity to the most powerful weapons ever conveived, the roles women (Marie Curie, Lise Meitner) and people fleeing from oppressive regimes (Szilard, Einstein, Teller, Gamow, Fermi, Bethe) played in it and how it was converted to civilian use. We will focus on this latter part of nuclear history and its consequences here.
The marvelous simplicity of the PWR
After nuclear power had been developed for bombs, Admiral Rickover used the knowledge gained during the development to design an unparalled source of propulsion for US Navy submarines, allowing them the travel submerged for months at a time around the world, if necessary.
Rickover chose to develop a reactor cooled by pressurized water for this task, for which liquid metals like sodium or lead, molten salts and various gases have all been used over the years as competing proposals.
To make a nuclear reactor work, you need use to neutrons to split large atoms into smaller atoms and neutrons. Suprisingly, the products of this process weigh less than the orignal, large atom an the neutron. The difference is converted into energy by Einstein’s famous formula E = mc².
If you can make sure that each neutron creates at least one more neutron that creates yet another neutron and so on, you have a chain reaction.
If you create more than one neutron in every generation, you have an exponentially growing chain reaction and ever escalating levels of power.
Great, if you want to build a nuclear weapon, but not desirable, if you want to have a power generator. For that you want to make sure to have exactly one new neutron for every neutron you put in, to get a sustained, controlled and stable chain reaction.
Pressurized water naturally controls the chain reaction.
When a neutron is created from a splitting large atom, it is incredibly energetic. Per event, the splitting of an atom produces millions of times more energy than buring a molcule in a chemical processes. If such a fast neutron collides with molecules, it loses some of its speed (=heat = energy) in the collision, heating the other molecule.
A slowed-down neutron has a far greater chance than a fast neutron to split an atom. The hydrogen in water is great at slowing down neutrons.
The pressure of water determines the temperature at which it boils. At over 150bar ( = 15MPa = 2250 psi), water remains liquid even at over 315°C ( = 600 F). When water boils and turns into steam, its density drops radically. In steam, there are orders of magnitude fewer molecules in the same volume, compared to liquid water. That means fewer molecules can slow down neutrons and therefore fewer neutrons will split atoms. This reduces the power output of a reactor. If the coolant flow is not reduced, the fuel will cool down. Once its temperature is low enough to turn the steam back into liquid water, it can slow down neutrons once again.
Water’s characteristic when turning into steam thus allows to set the operating temperature of a reactor by setting its pressure and nature will make sure that the chain reaction will be kept stable by the laws of nature at the desired temperature. If you want to draw more power from the reactor, just pump more (cool) water through it.
These characteristics, in addtion to water’s cheapness, non-toxicity, availability etc. made it really attractive.
Rickover made sure that his system was rugged enough by installing parts of it in a submarine and depth charging it. Failing parts had to be reengineered.
Out of this military application, the civilian Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) was developed. On Sept. 6, 1954, President Eisenhower used a radioactive wand to activate the bulldozer that broke ground for the construction of the first PWR power plant at Shippingport, Pennsylvania. It was designed to use relatively cheap low-enriched uranium. Rickover insisted on this design choice, because:
“From your point of view as a bombmaker, the stuff is junk. You can no more make it explode like a nuclear bomb than you can a bag of apples.”
Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.128). Polaris Books. Kindle-Vesion
This means that PWRs have no direct military applications The design was “open-sourced” (=declassified) by the Atomic Energy Comission
Hundreds of engineers from around the world attended seminars on the Shippingport power plant given by the Naval Reactors Branch, Westinghouse, and Duquesne during 1954-55, and Westinghouse made available thousands of technical reports on every aspect of the project. Following its opening, it continued to serve as a school in reactor technology for hundreds of engineers.
Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.101). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.
This PWR design became the model for more than three fourths of all civilian nuclear reactors produced worldwide ever since.
Safety
Zubrin challenges the public perception of nuclear power with regards to safety.
While high doses of radiation delivered over short periods of time can cause radiation poisoning or cancer, there is, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “no data to establish unequivocally the occurrence of cancer following exposure to low doses and dose rates—below 10,000 mrem.”1 Despite this scientific fact, the NRC and other international regulatory authorities insist on using what is known as the “Linear No Threshold” (LNT) method for assessing risk.
Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.114-115). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.
The LNT is a simplistic measure. It works on the assumption that the harm done be a hazard is independent of the dose. So if 1 person gets drunk by consuming a liter of vodka, LNT asserts that there will also be one drunken person, if 1000 people drink 1/1000th liter of vodka each. Yes, it is as absurd as it sounds (here is a recent paper on the effects of low-level radiation), but this is the theory under which nuclear power’s “risk” is regulated and screaming headlines about “nuclear deaths” are produced.
Interestingly, this theory is not applied to other sources of radioactivity, for example coal power:
Coal contains radioactive constituents. Worldwide, coal-fired electricity stations release some 30,000 tons of radioactive radon, uranium and thorium into the atmosphere every year. They also emit millions of tons of highly toxic chemical ash containing mercury, arsenic, selenium, not to mention over ten billion tons of CO2 per year. In fact, along with 10 million tons of CO2, a single 1000 MWe coal-fired power plant annually produces 200,000 tons of ash, and in addition to several hundreds of tons of mercury and other chemical poisons, sends some 27 tons of radiative material — half radon, the other half uranium and thorium — right up the stack. In fact, the amount of uranium and thorium emitted to the environment as pollution by coal-fired power plants would be more than enough to fuel every nuclear power plant in the country, which could produce equivalent power without any of the CO2, toxic gas, or radiological emissions.
Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.117). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.
Coal emits far more radioactivity than natural gas, but still
A 1000 MWe natural gas power plant sends about 8 Curies of radon into the environment every month.
Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.117). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version
Interestingly this is about the same dose of radiation that was emitted by the “worst” nuclear accident in US civil nuclear history, Three Mile Island.
But while TMI emitted this dose ONCE in a historical and infamous accident that fueled the fantasy of writer and film makers (“The China Syndrome”), it gets absolutely no attention, when far more radiation is released from non-nuclear sources. Zubrin presents this table to communicate the point that the dose of radiation from nuclear power is miniscule.
But what about Chernobly?! First of all, it was not PWR, but a different animal all together.
That reactor (an RBMK-1000) did not have a containment building, did not only not have the balancing characteristic of the PWR, but had infact a destabilizing positive feedback loop, did not have proper shutdown systems and was deliberately run without security systems for a test on that fateful day in 1986.
Yet even using the LNT hypothesis:
According to a study by the International Atomic Energy Agency and World Health Organization using LNT methodology, over time this fallout could theoretically cause up to four thousand deaths among the surrounding population. Chernobyl was really about as bad as a nuclear accident can be. Yet, even if we accept the grossly exaggerated casualties predicted by LNT theory as being correct, in comparison to all the deaths caused every year as a result of the pollution emitted from coal-fired power plants, its impact was minor. Chernobyl-like catastrophes would have to occur every day to approach the toll on humanity currently inflicted by coal.
Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.124). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.
Waste Disposal
Zubrin tackles another concern often brought against nuclear power:
”What about the waste”? He argues that:
The hazards of nuclear waste disposal have been exaggerated by environmentalists, with the openly stated purpose of seeking to create a showstopper for the nuclear industry.
Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.118-119). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.
There are several ways to dispose of nuclear waste. For example the dirt cheap an simple seabed waste disposal:
The way to dispose of nuclear waste at sea works as follows: First, you glassify the waste into a water-insoluble form. Then you put it in stainless steel cans, take it out in a ship, and drop it into the mid-ocean, directly above sub-seabed sediments that have been, and will be, geologically stable for tens of millions of years. Falling down through several thousand meters of water, your canisters will reach velocities that will allow them to bury themselves deep under the mud. After that, your waste is not going anywhere, and no one will ever be able to get their hands on it. Furthermore, no nomads roving the Earth after the next ice age eliminates all records of our civilization will ever be harmed as a result of accidentally stumbling upon it. (I mention this latter point because protection of the public for the next 10,000 years, under all contingencies, has been made a Department of Energy nuclear waste repository requirement.)
Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.119-120). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.
The other solution is to build a land-based “deep geological repository”, which are more expensive to build and which are stifled by litigation.
Several states have provisions against new nuclear power, as long as there is no repository. While the US has an operating waste disposal site in possibly the best geology you could wish for (WIPP), it is forbidden to put civil nuclear waste there. Instead, Congress has decided to build (and subsequently start/stop) a repository in one of the worst geologies (Yucca Moutain), which is not operational. The non-exsitence of a repository is cited as reason to block new nuclear power plants or even of getting rid of nuclear outright. Because the US government fails to provide a repository, operators have to store used nuclear fuel on-site.
[Anti-nuclear environmentalists] claim to be interested in public safety and ecological preservation. Neither claim is supportable. By protecting fossil power from nuclear power, the anti-nukes are perpetuating environmental devastation and harming public health. Regarding public safety they are even worse. Indeed, it must perplex the rational mind that anyone can agitate, litigate, and argue with a straight face that it is better that nuclear waste be stored in hundreds of cooling ponds adjacent to reactors located near metropolitan areas all across the country than that they be gathered up and laid to rest in a government-supervised depository in a location far removed from civilization. Yet that is what they do.
Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.118-119). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.
Recycling used nuclear fuel would make the waste issue less of a problem, because the longer lasting actinides (for example Pu) would be removed and reused as fuel, while only the short-lived fission products would have to be disposed.
These have less volume and only need to be stored for about 300 years.
Of course, this is blocked by activists in need of a problem to raise money on as well. And activism like this is lucrative.
Zubrin makes the case that several proportedly environmentally concerned activist organizations are in fact in the business of mercenary environmentalism, where they lend their vocal opposition to what ever cause pays off.
The balance sheet of some of these groups definitely some support for this hypothesis:
Potential
Zubrin argues that nuclear power hat the potential to empower all of humanity without wrecking the environment and suspects that it is for this very fact that nuclear power is so controversial: it voids so many claims to power and control over other people.
In arguing for limits to growth, Malthusians always inevitably end up pointing to energy. There is only so much to go around, they say, so human aspirations must be crushed. Lest we run out of energy, they claim, people in advanced countries must accept lower living standards and the poor nations must stay poor forever. But nuclear power completely upends any such rationale for putting chains on humanity.
Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.63). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.
He tries to show the potential of nuclear power relative to fossil fuels by comparing how much electricity you could derive from both.
Humanity currently consumes about 20 TW-years of electricity equivalents per year. At our current rate of consumption, there are about 225 years worth of “conventional” fossil fuels. If humanity were to flourish and people were to use globally as much energy as Europe, we would be using approximately 5 times as much energy, which comes to 45 years of resources. To demonstrate the value of the different resources, Zubrin converts the amount of potential electricity at a price of 7 cents per kilowatt-hour, and divides it among the globe’s current population of around 8 billion people equally. (German electricity consumers would rejoice at these prices)
In this frame, there is just not enough energy to go around and we need to constrain humanity now. And we haven’t even talked about the CO2 emitted from the usage of fossil fuels yet.
Nuclear power is in a different league.
By contrast, our presently known reserves of uranium and thorium ore comprise at least 500,000 TW-years of energy, over a hundred times as much as fossil fuels, sufficient to power the globe at ten times current rates for over 2,500 years.
Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.64-65). Polaris Books. Kindle-Vers
The picture gets even more lopsided, if you allow for technological advances, like the ability to extract fissile material from the sea (like James Conca described here)
But it becomes absolutely ridiculous, if you begin to ponder the potential of “the other” form of nuclear power, fusion power. While the “regular” nuclear power plants derive power from splitting heavy atoms, fusion releases energy by combining two light atoms into a heavier one. This is the process that powers the sun and the mechanism in the largest and most devastating weapons known to us: thermo-nuclear bombs.
The most important thing there is to know about nuclear power is that it is far and away the greatest energy resource available to humanity today, exceeding all others combined thousands of times over.
Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.62). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.
According to Zubrin, the scarcity mindset pits humans against one another: if you fear that there isn’t enough for all of us, people will start to hog what ever is deemed valuable. And other people will try to take it by force. But given the numbers above, there is actually no need for this.
There is plenty of highly-concentrated energy to go around. Zubrin even argues that there is enough to upgrade the planet:
Put simply, the Earth lacks sufficient fresh water. Using nuclear power we can remedy this defect. The Earth has no shortage of salt water, and all it takes to turn it into fresh is energy. Nuclear power can readily meet this need. In fact, the waste heat from nuclear power plants can be used to desalinate massive amounts of sea water, with almost no cost to the stations’ grid power at all. […] Using mass produced nuclear power plants for desalination, not only Australia but even vaster tracts of desert stretching across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the sub-Arctic, and the Americas could be turned into fertile land, filled with grand forests, delightful meadows, towns, and farms, producing food, inventions, and thoughts, and hosting abundant and diverse wildlife.
Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.269-270). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.
But the oceans are also home to vast ecological deserts, where there are too few nutrients to allow fish from thriving. Enough energy could help here as well:
Then there are the oceans, which are largely desert as well, not because of a shortage of CO2 or water, to be sure, but of trace nutrients, like iron, phosphorus, and nitrates that come from the land. In fact however, these are only lacking in the surface waters of the oceans. Below a few hundred meters in depth they are present in abundance, because the deeper waters, lacking sunlight, have not been scavenged for their nutrients by photosynthetic organisms. If these nutrient rich deep waters could be pumped to the surface, they could turn every part of the vast desert ocean into nurseries for life as productive as natural upwelling areas such as the Grand Banks. By employing floating or island based nuclear power plants for this purpose, the abundance of life in the world’s oceans could be multiplied tenfold or more.
Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.269-270). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.
Nuclear power is also the only plausible form of energy that could enable humanity to journey to other planets or even stars.
Costs
Given its practically unlimited potential, the vast amounts of experience with the technlogy and the natural self-regulation properties of PWRs, nuclear power should be really cheap, actually beating the competition easily:
Your 1000 MWe nuke [should cost] something like $500 million, which is about what it takes to build a few suburban shopping malls. Yet the rest of the industry is shelling out $5 billion or more — ten times as much to build a plant of the same size? What gives? Why do commercial nukes now cost so much? According to antinuclear analysts, that’s just the way it has to be. So, regrettably, unfortunately, the dream of cheap unlimited non-polluting power is just a fantasy, and the little people will simply have to learn how to get by with less. Bunk. New nuclear power plants do indeed cost a lot, but they shouldn’t, and they didn’t use to. The Nautilus only took four years to develop and build, and the Shippingport plant three. In the 1960s, power stations got much larger, but it still only took an average of five years to build a new nuclear power in the United States. In South Korea today it still takes an average of four years to build a nuclear power plant. Now, as a result of environmentalist efforts to introduce regulatory roadblocks at every stage of the construction process, it can take 16 years to build one in the West. This has enormously increased the cost of all such projects.”
Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.132). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.
In fact, nuclear power was built in the late 60s for less than $700/kW, since then, construction methods improved considerably, which should make Zubrin’s estimate possible.
So why is nuclear power so expensive today?
Ask the opponents of nuclear power and they … create the impression that people who build nuclear plants are a bunch of bungling incompetents. The only thing they won’t explain is how these same ‘bungling incompetents’ managed to build nuclear power plants so efficiently, so rapidly, and so inexpensively in the early 1970s.”
Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.133). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.
Zubrin, pondering this conundrum, comes up with two different reasons:
He produces a table that models inflation adjusted prices per kW over time squared and finds the resulting index to be rather constant, indicating that an increase in the completion time of power plants is a main driver of cost increases.
There are many reasons why stretching out time increases costs.
Retaining works costs money, whether they are standing around waiting for orders to do the next task or are actually getting work done.
It adds to interest rate costs and inflation costs.
Increased construction time adds opportunities for extremely costly changes in regulatory orders or litigation.
The other reason for cost increases is the regulatory process, which he describes as follows:
The overall process used by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to strangle the nuclear industry goes by the charming term of “ratcheting.” As Cohen said, “Like a ratchet wrench which is moved back and forth but always tightens and never loosens a bolt, the regulatory requirements were constantly tightened, requiring additional equipment and construction labor and materials. …between the early and late 1970s, regulatory requirements increased the quantity of steel needed in a power plant of equivalent electrical output by 41%, the amount of concrete by 27%, the lineal footage of piping by 50%, and the length of electrical cable by 36%. The NRC did not withdraw requirements made in the early days on the basis of minimal experience when later experience demonstrated that they were unnecessarily stringent. Regulations were only tightened, never loosened. The ratcheting policy was consistently followed…
Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.136-137). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.
Nordhaus and Stein have recently presented the maddening new regulations that the NRC wants to subject advanced nuclear designs to in a Foreign Policy article, which are based on literally impossible assumptions.
Litigious anti-nuclear mercenary environmentalists and overzealous regulators of the power source with the best security record of all are to blame for escalating costs, accroding to Zubrin. Not the technology itself.
From this follows his recommendations to unleash nuclear’s potential:
There are four areas that need to be addressed. These include regulatory reform, waste disposal, support for research and development, and public understanding.
Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.272). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.
Summary
I’d like to come to a close of this review with Zubrin’s actual introduction to his book:
Global warming and anthropogenic atmospheric chemistry change are both real.
They are not currently a crisis.
But they are going to become a crisis, and then a disaster, unless something is done to effectively change the current trajectory of events.
The primary solution offered by those who recognize this problem — to wit, reducing carbon use by making fuel less affordable to people of limited means — is unethical and impractical, and consequently deserves to fail, has failed, and will inevitably continue to fail, spectacularly.
That the claim that modern civilization can be powered by updated forms of the renewable energy sources that needed to be replaced by fossil fuels to enable the birth of industrial society is nonsense.
That the more radical prescription of global population reduction offered by the minority of climate crisis believers who recognize the unfeasibility of the carbon tax and green energy solutions is the worst idea of all, one that would lead to catastrophes too horrific to even contemplate were its enforcement seriously attempted.
That far from contracting our energy use, human progress must and will inevitably entail continued exponential growth of human power generation.
That therefore the widespread adoption of nuclear energy is essential for a positive human future.
Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.8-9). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.
Zubrin’s “The Case for Nukes: How We Can Beat Global Warming and Create a Free, Open, and Magnificent Future” presents his case for nuclear power with a level of unapologetic enthusiasm that is refreshing.
While his arguments are probably well known to pro-nuclear minded people, I think he has done a great job with this book in packaging these arguements in a readable form to help further public education on nuclear.
In a world, where the formerly leading industrial country Germany decided to follow through with vandalizing its world-class nuclear reactors in the middle of an active war with its main energy supplier on the opposing side for logically and scientificly unsound, yet highly-emotional reasons, such education is dearly needed.