We shall discuss a few issues broached in earlier chapters. With regard to the so-called nuclear renais-sance that is taking place in the world, the question arising is, Will the United States be part of this? A few years ago, almost anyone who worked in energy policy would have said, “Absolutely,” if for no other reason than that we have to deal with the problem of greenhouse gasses. But over the last 3 years, we have tripled our reserves of natural gas. It now appears that we have abundant natural gas resources and that these are obtainable at very low prices. It doesn’t cost much to build efficient natural gas combined cycle power plants. So we have a choice as to what to do about our heavy dependence on coal for electric power. When
we use natural gas instead of coal to make power, the greenhouse gas emissions are 50 percent lower.
Thanks to the commercial development of natural gas from shale formations, the projected prices of natural gas are such that it looks like it will be competitive with coal for power generation.
So where does that leave nuclear energy in the United States? Nuclear energy doesn’t produce any greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, the best estimates we have for nuclear power plants are that they’re fairly expensive, especially if the alternative is a highly efficient combined-cycle natural gas plant.
The recent MIT study estimated a range of $2,000 to
$4,000 per kilowatt of capacity for a brand new nu-clear plant. The U.S. Government has been trying to promote nuclear power and has offered loan guar-antees and other incentives. Yet the costs that we’re seeing are in the $6,000.00 per kilowatt range. If that’s right, these estimates place nuclear power costs well above the competition. So it’s questionable whether the United States is going to be able to participate in this renaissance. That’s unfortunate because we have a lot to offer especially when we consider the potential for proliferation of nuclear weapons. It would be de-sirable for the United States to have a firmer standing in this renaissance.
Along with a few others at RAND, I recently com-pleted a study on the nuclear fuel cycle. We looked at the back end, which means looking at how you man-age spent waste from commercial reactors. There’s a security issue here because some countries are talk-ing about reprocesstalk-ing this waste. We found that the kind of reprocessing technology that’s available today really doesn’t offer much benefit, if any, and it looks very expensive. They may have security reasons for
reprocessing, but we don’t see reprocessing as making economic sense.
Reprocessing doesn’t reduce appreciably the amount of waste that’s generated. It forces the coun-try to develop a very large site that needs to be pro-tected, that could be very polluted, and that could be expensive to restore. There are safe methods that we can use to manage spent nuclear fuel. Right now it’s being stored at nuclear power plants. Our analysis says that dry-cask on-site storage is safe. We wouldn’t want to store it there forever, but for the next 50 or a 100 years this is certainly feasible, and it doesn’t cost much. While it’s on the site, it’s cooling down, which makes it a lot easier to ultimately dispose of it. Anoth-er option is to have centralized above-ground storage.
For example, it could be cooled down at the front door of Yucca Mountain. There’s certainly nothing wrong technically with going forward with the geological repository although, politically, we’ve made some big mistakes, and the government has not treated its citizens very well in the way it went about licensing Yucca Mountain.
Finally I’d like to turn to the use of nuclear power at military bases. A few years ago a Defense Science Board headed by James Schlesinger looked at energy, and one of its conclusions was that U.S. military in-stallations were vulnerable to a loss of electric power.
One reason they’re vulnerable is that our grid over-all is more vulnerable. Because of deregulation and other concerns, less investment is being directed at the reliability of electric power. The recommended solution was to look at renewable options, solar op-tions for military bases. Since then, there’s been a lot of movement in the U.S. military toward solar energy.
A major motivation has been that this is a more secure
source of power, but it’s very expensive. I don’t see much current effort in the military on nonrenewable options. If there is a security concern with power sup-ply, what is the full range of options? How does the military work with the local utility to make sure that it has reliable power when it needs it and more secure power especially with regard to terrorist threats or natural disasters?
The nuclear development community in the United States has come up with the concept of a small nuclear reactor. In their view, it could be similar in size to, or smaller than, those that are in our nuclear submarines.
The idea centers on developing a modular reactor that could be built in a factory, delivered, and assembled on site, all on an economical scale. This would be a constructive way to secure our military installations.
When we deploy, we could even take a few of the small devices with us so we would have a power sup-ply.
My own view of this concept is that we simply do not know whether it is at all reasonable. When we can’t even price a conventional nuclear reactor within a factor of 2, I am skeptical whether we can price one of these brand new designs within a factor of 4 or 5.
To me, it’s an interesting option, the idea of putting a miniature power plant on a base, but at this stage, while it is probably worth further study, it is prema-ture to reach any strong conclusions regarding its op-erational viability.
ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT, AND SECURITY