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Corradini. >> Thank you for being here for Global Hot Spots today. Our speaker is Michael
And professor Corradini is chair of the UW Madison Department of Engineering Physics and
professor of nuclear engineering
and engineering physics. He's an expert on nuclear power,
as chair of the Governance nuclear safety and also serves
Associate Dean for the College Committee of the UW Madison Energy Institute. He served from 1995 to 2001 as
Engineering. of Engineering. And in 1998 he was elected to the National Academy of
Since 2002 Professor Corradini has served in a variety of
international review and capacities on national and
advisory boards related to nuclear power and safety, including Nuclear Waste
Technical Review Board, the French Civilian Atomic Energy Agency, and the US Nuclear
Before joining the UW Madison faculty, Professor Corradini Regulatory Commission.
spent three years on the technical staff of Sandia
National Laboratories where he
conducted research on severe accidents.
degree in mechanical engineering He received his bachelor's
Massachusetts Institute of from Marquette University and his master's and PhD in nuclear engineering from the
Technology. He's a Wisconsin Distinguished Professor and a Fellow of the
American Nuclear Society. Please join me in welcoming Professor Michael Corradini.
Michael Corradini: Thank you. So I'm all wired up. [APPLAUSE]
point. I'm supposed to not move. I'm supposed to use this to
So this ought to be interesting. Thank you very much.
in one. I have a bit of a talk about I have, essentially, three talks
energy, I have a bit of a talk about the status of nuclear
power, and then I have a talk about advances in nuclear power.
Somewhere in there I was actually in Oshkosh on March
14th. I think it was the evening of March 14th, three days after the
And so I've put in a few slides to talk about the Japanese events in Japan.
event, but I didn't want to make that, shall I say, the complete
version of this talk. Rather, come at 3 o'clock to
Mechanical Engineering 1106, and you'll get a good hour and a
half of talking about the accident if you want. So I want to talk about some
Now, I know some of you look background information.
familiar to me a lot and some of you look kind of familiar to me,
faculty, I know there's a few in so alums I'm sure, former
I thought there were more. the audience. Raise your hands. All right.
Alums of UW for sure. Affiliated with the university
still or in a past life?
Okay, all right. Social sciences, raise your hands.
All right.
Physical sciences raise your hands.
And so the rest of you are Humanities types.
biological? [LAUGHTER] Okay, so what I'd like to do is
talk about energy first.
And to do that, and I'll use all this fancy gear that I've got here, is that energy really
depends on population primarily.
As you look around the world, you'll notice now I'm supposed to point and this will be good
and it won't move on me.
I pointed as I was being introduced and my talk started
See, I knew it would do that. So as we increase in population in the world, so does energy off here.
The US and Europe is growing at about a percent per year. There are some nations like the Italians that are a negative
growth. I can use my own heritage.
And as you do that, energy usage Asia is growing greater than 2% per year.
grows rapidly with it. In fact, if you look at US and
away the recession, the recession is an interesting example of how things change Europe is growing, we could take
take away the recession, US and Europe has been growing about a percent a year in energy use, almost tracking the population.
Asia is growing at 8% a year. Primarily because they want to
have a standard of living very much like us, and to do that
they become more energy intensive compared to where we
are. And electrical energy use
actually increases more in
we're about 2% per year and Asia developed countries and less in developing countries. If you look at US and Europe
that as population continues to increase, energy uses continue So the first and foremost thing I guess I want to get across is
to increase. So it really is a vital physical
force behind our system.
Now, I know folks in California, I'm sure you do, there's a great
conservation as a way to reverse deal of effort in thinking about
this trend. In fact, California probably leads in that regard of trying
to use conservation, whether it be demand management or efficiency, to try to reverse or
But all we can see historically is that regardless of all these trends it really does tend to at lfollow population.his.
So the next thing is
So there was a friend of mine who is now at Stanford. SoHe used to be at Lawrencety hasLivermore Laboratory, Tomon.
Isaacs. And about 12 years ago Tom gave a talk, I think it was in San Francisco at an international
meeting, and he identified a
few, what I'll call, attributes of sustainability. Since it's a new word that's
being used but it's very hard to
Adequate supply of the energy resource. Acceptable land usage for the energy or the fuel cycle.
Economically feasible.
you may not want to. It has to be economically feasible, I feel, otherwise you start spending money in places
Minimal byproducts, many times when people think about environmental issues or
sustainability they think only
important is that neither the power source north the And one that I tell my students about that I think is very
And most of the conflict we've technology can be controlled by a few, otherwise we have war.
had historically, there's an excellent book by Daniel Yergin called, essentially, The Prize,
which is the history of the oil industry, and conflict rages
for oil. around the world for at least 150 years because of the search
So business as usually can't continue and energy without suffering the consequence.
So let's talk about some of these and then we can go into specifics about nuclear.
steal liberally, I'm giving a talk at 3 o'clock, as I said, and prior to this there was a Emeeting down at the Universityo
of Texas Austin, it was plasma
physicists trying to do fusion. And Ray Orbach, the former science adviser to President
Bush, gave a talk there and they
sent it to me and they said this is a really great talk. And I said yeah, but all those
slides are from Areva, which is a French nuclear engineering
company. And they said yeah I guess they
are.
So I stole this slide just as others want to steal the slide but it's from Jane Davidson.
Jane was on campus most recently
I think the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences had a meeting down at
I kind of had a conversation the Overture Center and she and
about issues. And Jane has come on campus now, counting the times in the fall,
four times over the last decade because I think she's absolutely
excellent. She's a professor in mechanical
engineering at University of
Wisconsin and Minnesota, and all Minnesota, our other research one campus, hopefully if we still keep reciprocity between
her research is in solar energy. So I tend to borrow a lot of
agree with how she views the Jane's slides because I tend to
world, and it's not some crazy nuclear engineer, it's some crazy solar engineer that's
giving you all these facts. So what this is is area per unit, energy per megawatt of
And all I want to point out is electricity.
that if land is the issue, if land is the issue, then you have to think carefully about what
you choose to use to produce
your electricity, at least in this case. Coal is the little box on the
upper left, I guess I can point at this and it won't move.
left. This is the plant. Good. Coal is the upper box on the
The bigger box is the fuel cycle.
Nuclear is over here. Very energy intense.
The little box is the plant. Even with low concentrations in the earth.
The little bigger, I knew this would happen, the little bigger red box is the fuel cycle.
And you can see the rest of them. So I'm not saying what's good or bad.
All I'm saying that in terms of what is used to produce the electricity, if land is an issue
because what you do with it in one case can essentially preclude you in other cases. you have to think about it
Cost is another one. So one thing is land.
I'm not going to talk about resources because I'm sure you've seen these slides and
I've put them at the back and I'm not going to talk about them
electricity, which what nuclear tends to contribute to, there's otenough coal, there's enoughre uranium, and these days people
are saying there's enough natural gas, we can argue about that later, such that that's not
But let's talk about cost. an issue in terms of resource.
Again from Jane, she came in 2006 to give a talk down at, not
down at the Monona Terrace at another conference we had here down at the Overture Center but
from her too because they haven't changed much and the about energy. And I basically borrowed these
numbers aren't as important as the trend.
So the thing on the left that you'll notice is nuclear is terms of the cost of electricity
guys all know what you pay, right? in cents per kilowatt hour, you
At least I do. What do we pay in Madison?
Anybody know? >> 15.
>> 15? A little less maybe.
12. And of that, about a third of it
is distribution, about a third of it is transmission, and about
a third of it is actually making
the electricity. It's relatively costly these
electricity in a metropolitan area even such as Madison. days to transmit and distribute
This is not the taking it from So this is only the making of the electricity part.
the plant and getting it to the metropolitan area or distributing it within the city
region. This is just to make the
electricity. So two to three cents is
nuclear, two to four is coal, and you can read the rest of
My point is from the standpoint of production of the energy, them. What's my point?
nuclear and coal are the cheapest.
That means every day, pretty
Point Beach, the Columbia mStation Power Plant, Oak Creek most of our electricity and baseload is coming from Kewaunee
of electricity, all right? in the south of Milwaukee because it's the cheapest form
And then as you move up the chain, natural gas will be taken up as a peeking.
We have 150 megawatts, by the way, you know the university
owns a power plant, right? We all know that, right?
The 150-megawatt plant which is the combined cycle gas turbine
plant by the lake over here is essentially halfway owned by the
UW Madison. We bought half of it to kick it off.
the way up the line. So natural gas, hydro, wind, all
My point is here, again, not what's good or bad, but my point
money on. Everything's a matter of choice. is what you choose to spend your
And at this case, at least for baseload as we produce
electricity and use it, nuclear and coal tend to be the first choices coming out of the box.
This focuses on the three that I have another thought here.
are the cheapest again. The numbers are a little bit different.
It doesn't matter.
The ranking pretty much is the same. And if you tended to read about
this whole idea of gas fracking.
that, particularly on WHA Do ythere's been a number of by gas fracking or hydro fracking? There's been a lot of talk about
impacts, etc, etc. educational programs on what it is, what are the environmental
This does not take this into account, as far as I can tell,
in this part of the world, this part of the country, it's not a highly large source of fuel because at resource.t, at least
And nuclear, gas, coal. The other part of this plot is
depends on non-fuel production. In nuclear's case, it's mainly to show you that depending upon the type of technology, it
people because most of these plants have been built 20-30
years ago and have been amortized out so it's not the capital cost of the plant.
way. And in this case, coal the same
And the yellow is essentially the fuel source. And for gas, even though we're
going to have new sources of
natural gas by hydro fracking, the cost of the fuel will essentially dominate.
I'm sure one of you will be wanting to ask, well, wait a
plant, what's the cost? The answer is, we don't know minute, what if I build a new coal plant or a new nuclear
because we haven't built one recently.
The closest new plant to us is
Oak Creek. The two 500-megawatt plants which were built.
They were started, interestingly
enough, back in 1998 and Sam Johnson from Johnson Wax, I should know the name of the
corporation but I forgot, I just
say Johnson Wax, fought tooth and nail to stop the building of Oak Creek for about eight years,
and finally it went through,
essentially, the public service commission and it started 2005 for construction, came online in
2009 and the cost of that plant,
and I'm not going to point at the screen, the cost of that plant is somewhere around four
or five cents per kilowatt hour.
Any new coal plant would be around six to seven. Any new nuclear plant would be
somewhere between 70 and 80 in
these units here. So new generation is going to be about as costly as gas or more
depending on where you build it.
And finally, my last plot about cost is that this is kind of the new world we're looking in. Everything's going to cost more.
one up is history. historical trend. And my reason for bringing this
I do not have cost beyond 2006 for natural gas, that's the blue
If you look at that, you're probably going to see the cost line.
of natural gas now is not six or seven, it's more like four or
five. In some regions of the country
like Pennsylvania, out east, where they're doing the hydro
fracking. So I'm going to leave that to a question later if you're
I want to keep on going. interested.
If we talk about emissions, now we're talking apples and oranges.
On the left are the apples. 90% of all our electricity, maybe 89%, something of that
nuclear. order, is either coal, gas, or
Nuclear's about 20%. Gas is about 12%, 15%, it's always rising.
Coal is about 50% to 60% where
you are in the country. And what's remaining it hydro. About 1% of our electricity is
renewables, what people think is
So most of everything between ren90% to 100% is hydro.ar, So this is the emissions and why voltaic or solar thermal.
On the left are the apples, coal I say apples and oranges.
and gas, except for ash, solid ash, which you have to bury or
it, we just kind of let it sit at least in the US we don't bury
out. Everything else is a free release into the atmosphere.
It is controlled by the Clean Air Act.
The most recent version of the Clean Air Act is 1990, but it's
all free released in the
environment. The orange is nuclear.
byproduct is nuclear and highly radioactive and it's all solid Everything in terms of a
worry about it if I choose to, in a very compact form. I can find it, identify it,
but it's relatively compact. So how compact? I guess we're in the building so
I can use this building as an example.
I can take all the electricity made in the US by nuclear power,
take all the spent fuel, and I
can fit it into about half of Grainger Hall. So you got 60 years of
productional electricity from all the plants. If we tended to make the
facility Grainger Hall, we'd centralized interim storage
fill about half of it in volume. So it's not much in volume, it's
Yes, sir? [INAUDIBLE] >> It could. relatively radioactive.
That's for later. So, where is Don? Don and I were talking about, Don's somewhere over there,
there's Don, Don and I were talking about this as he was
get to the end, we're really running in. So I will say it now but I'll
changing between technically and a policy question.
answer. Policy, another discussion. Much longer. So technically, that's the
Okay? But apples and oranges. Every form of energy, every form Much more fun it turns out.
I'm a mechanical engineer in of energy has a byproduct.
all of work into heat but I can't turn heat into work and aneverything is a byproduct.l does exist, which is I can turn
of energy production. So I'm going to have some sort I have a byproduct with any sort
Enough. The one that people tend to worry about is CO2. TSo I thought I'd give you.
this one. This comes out of a PhD thesis, actually three PhD theses here
Institute of Environmental at Wisconsin from the Nelson
Studies. Scott White, who I just actually
retirement of a minister at Bethel Lutheran. saw back in town because of the
His father used to be the head of Bethel Lutheran.
Scott White's PhD thesis, Paul
Meier's PhD thesis, and Paul Denholm's PhD thesis, which looked at, essentially, energy
payback and byproducts from all forms of energy.
I picked this one out of one of their theses, I think it was
Paul Meier's, which basically looks at the emissions of CO2 per unit energy.
matter, okay? Per unit of energy, and you can look at the list and you can see The unit of energy doesn't
CO2 worries you, then fission nuclear, solar with no storage, and wind with no storage that, interestingly enough, if
impact on the environment. essentially have the least
In fact if you go further, you find that the two biggest sources of emission free energy
generation are hydro, which is
shrinking in the United States, and nuclear. Okay, so now let's move on.
Let's talk about, so I finished my first 20 minutes of my nuclear talk, or as my energy talk, the next one is my nuclear
talk. Interestingly enough, nuclear is
science. probably an old technology in the world of engineering and
In the physics world it's old. All the fun stuff occurred when they were trying to patent
fission.
In fact, in you go back historically, I love history, if you go back historically, Albert
Einstein, his sole passion in life to make enough money so he was actually patenting some engineering processes.
He was actually the first one to
come up with a refrigeration cycle but he wanted to use
which could be somewhat deleterious to your health if it ammonia as the working fluid
got out. But as he was in the Swiss
patent office, that's how he was
trying to make money. On the side he was doing special relativity and general
relativity. So he was a talented fellow.
If you go further in the '30s, all of the really fun physics
fission were essentially
to fun stuff and they left it to invented from the 1890s through the '30s. So the physicists then moved on
of what we see in nuclear uengineering goes from atoms to all work. But it was interesting that most
devices. That is, the things we see at
the nuclear power plants is what
we visibly see but all the fun stuff occurs at the microscopic level, at the nuclear level.
And if you look at it, and again
now I'm biased, I think this is a kind of interesting
a contribution to power, technology, it's really
human health, and security. My other fun historical fact was when the letter that Einstein
wrote, he actually didn't write it, Leo Szilard wrote the letter, he was the one that was trying to patent fission, but
when Leo wrote the letter and then drove to Princeton, I think
it was actually Long Island, drove to Long Island and had
Dr. Einstein sign the letter, there was actually three
letters. One was pushing the idea of
security, one of pushing the
idea of human health, and one was pushing the idea of power. And they decided between the
three letters which one should
he sign and which would get President Roosevelt's attention. And they decided the times they
were in, 1939, security was the push. It was a one letter proposal
That's a professor talking. I'm sorry. worth about a billion dollars.
That's really inappropriate. So as I said, three really
long-term aspects.
Major source of electricity, which is what I'll talk about,
science. enabling technology for medical
Wisconsin ought to be very proud.
relatively good nuclear engineering program, we have Not only do I think we have a
Started by John Cameron and carried on by a guy who happens to be our provost right now, physics program in world.
Zagzebski as chair. So an absolutely excellent Paul DeLuca, and now with Jim
treatment of diseases in the program in medical physics, which is essentially imaging and
medical sciences and underlying technology for security. So what I want to talk about in
part two is basically these sorts of topics.
get, when I get to it. And I'll talk about safety in terms of the accident if I can
I will get to it. And then depending upon your will and stamina, I'll get into
part three with advanced
on the left is generation one early prototype reactors. Those were all kind of test Soreactors or trial reactors.at
And interestingly enough, if
you're not careful, you go back to the future. Almost all of the great ideas,
not all but damn close to all,
occurred back in the '50s. All the reactors we'll be talking about looking forward
decades from now, right, have their roots in a lot of the ideas that people had back in the '50s.
Those are the generation one, early prototype reactors. The one I have pictured there is
Shippingport was essentially Shippingport.
a reactor to go in a sub. And they said decided instead of taking it in the sub they just
dragged it on land and stuck it in Pennsylvania.
It's about the size you have, even today, in our nuclear subs. It's about 50 megawatts electric.
ever been to Kewaunee that's The next one is Kewaunee. I pick slides that, so if you've
what it always looks like with the rainbow coming out of the containment.
[LAUGHTER]
If you notice it was in the news recently. Dominion has decided to sell it.
Not because it isn't performing well. Actually Dominion did an
essentially improve its performance but it's too far excellent job of getting it to
plants, which are in Virginia and Connecticut. away, I think, from all their other places that they own
And it's a hassle. Only those that graduate from
Wisconsin want to work in Kewaunee. All those who live in Virginia
But I'm guessing that the sale want to go back to Virginia.
of that plant will be to potentially people and companies
other plants that are owned around the Midwest. Alliant's plants, I think Duane Arnold is owned by Florida Power
and Light as is Point Beach, for
example. So pay attention to that but
wasn't operating, it was just because of the fact it was so far away from the other plants. My point of showing you the
cartoon is this is essentially a
all 104, soon to the 105 plants, generation of plants in the US. All 104 plants. We're now rebuilding a plant,
I'll tell you what that is, either boiling water reactors or plants. They're light water reactors,
are the Canadian design and the Russian design. Around the world this is kind of The other two, CANDU and VVER,
104 in the US, and you have it the lineup.
in front of you, there's no need to look, it's about 436 units.
than this now, this is an old slide, now about 52 plants are There are about 40, there's more
The thing that's most interesting is who has them and underwho's building them. the world.
India and Korea are the builders, and they have a few but not as many as they're In this case, China, Russia,
China is building six units simultaneously. They probably have the corner on building.
the world in large projects. the market of civil engineers in
And so it's a very interesting Because the same engineers, civil engineers, that build these build refineries.
world if you tend to go to China or to India or the Pacific Rim
Oh, I wanted to say also, we are area at this point in time.
building one, and I'll come back to that.
I'm not sure what was next, but that's what came up next. So in the US, it's interesting, we haven't built a plant,
haven't started building a
plant, haven't ordered a plant since 1972. In fact, another little fun
fact, I love fun facts, is where
is the youngest oil refinery in the United States? Anybody know?
I'm talking a large construction
projects, so that's my pitch. Anybody know where the largest oil refinery is?
The youngest and largest? It's in Joliet, Illinois. If you ever drive to St.
left. It was built in 1972. We have not built a refinery in Lthe United States since 1972.e
British Petroleum tried to, or
Amoco tried to, in Indiana but that stopped, but that's another
So if you look at it, large construction projects in the story totally.
The work that we see happening United States haven't happened. Any large construction projects.
on the new plant they're building at the Vogtle site,
show you eventually, is probably which is an AP1000, which I'll
the largest new construction project in the United States. It's very interesting, we tend
to fix a lot of things, upgrade them, but not build them new. So my point of this slide is you
produced, this is in billions of kilowatt hours, so it's kind of a hard number to noticget your hands around.icity
So forget about the unit, it
not building anything? just is increasing. You might ask yourself, well, how can it be increasing if I'm
And so this kind of goes to running the plant more efficiently, running the plant
more reliably.
And what you see here is even though we haven't built anything from 1990 through 2004, where my
statistics are, we've essentially run the plants more reliably and we're getting more electricity out of those plants.
That essentially goes with the
definition of capacity factor. Capacity factor is the ratio of what I produce in the year of
electricity to what I could produce if I was running 100%.
it's now above 90%. And that's the way you see it. And so you can see the increase in capacity factor going up and
The other interesting fun fact is the way we've done this is
essentially by better engineering, tighter controls on
the reliability, the QA of the plants.
And that's actually improved the
fossil plants. I know that some of you may want
I'm not thrilled about them but they're there and they'll be to hate a fossil plant.
there for a whole long time so running them more efficiently is
a good thing from an emission standpoint. And a lot of the techniques used
going over to fossil plants. in nuclear plants have now been
And their capacity factors, if you were to plot them as a
follow, lag, but follow this function of time here, tend to
electricity cost, primarily because if you build one of these behemoths, these large Well, it lowers your
electricity, it's good that you run them because you still have to pay for the all debt that you plants that produce a lot of
So the cost of electricity has borrowed to build them.
gone down to what it is here in the range of one to two to three cents per kilowatt hour.
So where are these plants?
That's where they are. Now, interestingly enough, why
Anybody want to take, I guess I was told I wasn't disallowed are they there?
from asking questions. Why are they there?
Why in the east and not in the
beautiful west? >> Geologic stability? >> Huh?
Geologic stability? >> No.
But given what happened the last six weeks you might think that.
[INAUDIBLE] >> I'm sorry? >> Population density.
But what's the competitor? >> Population density, possibly.
But the big competitor is coal. Where is the coal? >> Well, all the power coming itself.
There. So on a pure economic basis, on
a purely economic basis, there's
not a hell of a lot clean coal, right? All coal, there's various
definitions of clean, but if you
dig coal out of the ground around here like northern Wisconsin, you go to Minnesota
you go fishing up in Canada,
it's relatively dirty, meaning a lot of it is inert substances that if you burn it, it all just
kind of goes out unburnt and
it's relatively low BTU content. The high BTU content coal that's
Potter River basin of Montana or relatively clean is out in the
in North Dakota. So there's no competition for coal out there.
There'd be no point to it.
It's not water, it's not seismic.
Partly is population. But there's an awful lot of coal But it's partly coal.
We have 104 nuclear plants, they're all smaller, but we have plants in the east. A lot of them.
of various shapes and sizes. something on the order of 500 coal plants in the United States
Now, another interesting fun fact is that these plants,
beasts, they tend to like to engineers are kind of strange
improve things, always tinkering.
electricity generated from those So this is a plot of additional
change a condenser, they change 10a pump, they change how theyy new plants. They change out a turbine, they
building a plant. And so the blue is how much buadditional electricity we'vee more electricity without
without building any more plants. It's about 5,500 megawatts of gelectricity, all baseload.s
So it's like building five
plants to produce more, and the plared is the expectation.em. TSo we're looking at somethingw naround six to eight gigawatts,
6,000 to 8,000 megawatts of electricity without building any
The term I use is power up-rates. We can get back to it. It's due to a range of things.
I picked on the coal people, let Well, why did I bring that up?
me pick on the renewables. With all the growth in wind,
large, enormous growth in wind, the average amount of electricity, on average, that we which has been historically
largest renewable source in the United States, is something like produce from wind, which is the
3,000 megawatts of electricity per year power.
3,000 megawatts electric. So we have essentially done about the same amount in just up-rates of power plants, of
nuclear power plants. So it's a very interesting
comparison point in scale. Now there's new plants.
Forget the little red dot in
Now, if I ask a question of why the new plants are where they are, a lot of your reasoning We'll come back to that plant.
One, the population is moving to matters.
the south, so that's where the growth and the need for electricity is.
We're actually shrinking, or at least flat as a pancake in
So it's population. It's partly economics, again electricity growth in Wisconsin or in the northern Midwest.
But there's another one that because I don't have coal in the southeast.
for the growth in the south or the southeast/southwest? atPotential sites?. What would be another one
Because I'm waiting for you so say, why not build renewables Any thoughts?
And my answer there is the wind doesn't blow very well down there. Which you could.
Dakota, up there where there's in the south. If I went to North Dakota, South
a hell of a lot of wind, let's forget about how I transmit it
them out there, I'd have a very big wind resource. anywhere, but if I could build
It's a very big wind resource. Very reliable.
But down here, not a lot of wind
resource. The reason that I also think there's a growth, and it's not
just I think, I talk to other people and they tell me so I believe them, is non-attainment areas.
Most of these areas are pretty
much up to their limit on what they can produce by fossil. And if they build anymore fossil
plants, they essentially go above the EPA limits for the
Clean Air Act. Which means they'd have so
replace the fossil plant. They couldn't build a new one,
they'd have to shut one down and build another one.
So to grow in power they're going to have to have other ways. And that's another reason why
you see it there. The one plant I'm going to point
to, if this damn thing doesn't want to move on me, that's good
I don't have to touch it, I just
This is the first new plant hathey've actually starteds right here. This is the Vogtle plant.
South Carolina side which is a construction. The second plant is over on the
Summer plant. Both of them I'll show you are AP1000 designs, which is the
advanced design.
So a little bit of physics. We all need physics. So nuclear power is, as I said,
invented back 80 years ago. Actually, I'm running out of
they were cousins, Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch, and they were time, but this is a good one. So there were two individuals,
on their cousin's farm in Sweden when Lise actually figured it
out.
And it was essentially from experiments done by Enrico Fermi and Madame Curie and her husband
back in France and Italy that led them to this. So the experimentalists were in France and Italy and the
theoreticians, Lise was a chemist, I think, and Otto was a
physicist. And as they were essentially
taking a vacation, that's where you get your most work done, and
walking about. She came up with this idea of
essentially what was happening
from the data. It turns out, another great trivia thing is that Enrico
Fermi just won the Nobel Prize, and when they discovered this they interpreted some of his
and Fermi won the Nobel Prize, I data that showed it was fission
think, for transmutation to make -- elements.
and he says, oh, my, And he looked at his own data
some of that is wrong. It's showing fission. So he went and tried to change
his paper that's being published
at the Royal Academy, and it was too late. So the human element of this is
just a kick when you start
A neutron is absorbed by a reading back on this. So anyway, this was found out back in the '30s.
nanoseconds. uranium atom. That's an unstable state. These guys stay there for
That's a word you know these days, nanoseconds.
two red pieces which are fission And then they break apart into
products, which is the high level waste, when you think of high level waste are the fission
products. Two more neutrons are born. They go off somewhere and by, if
are slowed down and go into more I build this right, they go and
little orangey colored stuff and essentially are reabsorbed and
The thing that people forget the chain reaction begins.
about with the current technology is that water is used
also used to moderate it. It turns out the little blue to cool this reaction but it's
guys on the right when they're born are very energetic and they
have to slow down to much slower
velocities to essentially make this continue.
them down or moderate them. There's another story about Enrico Fermi and goldfish that's And you need the water to slow
But essentially you've got to slow them down, and water is one a great one about this.
of the things to slow them down. As they essentially impact the
hydrogen molecule and slow them down to keep the reaction going.
It kind of fits in this thing like this. So water is used to cool and to moderate.
The water is going around in The fuel is now red in my cartoon.
I put water in, which is kind of this, and essentially it goes into a large pot of a steam generator.
reactor. the turquoise green, and it comes out as steam. And this is a pressurized water
It's in a containment. Of course, the rainbow is always
[LAUGHTER] shining.
Now, I'm almost to my third Mypart, and I think I have a. But this is a pressurized water reactor.
deviation here to talk about safety, but I want to get across
a few things. First, there's a fuel cycle.
And so I give you a ton of numbers, please ignore them for
the moment. The only reason I'm showing you this is that everything that we use to produce energy has a fuel
or some source and there's
byproducts. And I've told you that before. In the nuclear case, follow the
red line because that's the United States.
we pay the Canadians and the We dig it up somewhere. It turns out we don't dig it up,
Australians to dig it up, and they ship it over. We do a little but not much.
It's cheaper to get it from the Canadians and the Australians.
We enrich it, more physics, we'll skip that. We dig it up. We mill it, grind it down.
We fabricate it. We stick it in the reactor.
We burn it. It splits into the red guys, the
fleshy colored orange guys go to red guys.
And then we store it. It goes to spent fuel over here.
I'll come back to the other arrows later. AI can have once through cycles treated as waste.
Ignore all the numbers. I tend to use my slides liberally in various settings, of various types.
quiz on gigawatt days per ton or so you're not going to have a
per cents or whatever. But the process stays the same. It's a once through fuel cycle,
and the historic policy in the
US has been to essentially dig it up, essentially fabricate it,
That's been the policy since the burn it, and bury it.
Carter Administration. What does the spent fuel look like?
That's what it really looks like
when you stick it inside the reactor.
thin as this thing, about a centimeter. We're all in metric units these It's essedays, right? about as
Centimeter, half an inch. And about 12 feet long. You put about 225 of these guys together, you bundle them
together and you put about
200-some of them in and, voila, you have a reactor core. If you now take them out when
they're spent fuel, still about 96% of it is still uranium, which could be recycled, we'll
talk. Of the pie slice that's black, get to that, that's in my third
about two-thirds of it is stable fission products, that means
they're not radioactive.
Whether it be short-lived Anfission products, long-liveds inside those little other slivers.
And all of the after heat, the K fissions products, plutonium, etc.
heat, the stuff that caused the problems at Fukushima, come from essentially the continuing decay
of that one, two, two and a half
percent of the material. Okay? So it's not much.
So the first point is it's not
much but it's buried in about 96% to 97% of stuff that one could recycle if one wanted to.
Now before we go into safety, we
got to talk about radiation. So I'll list this for you.
radiation. There's three types of
Alphas, betas, gammas, or to put it another way: your smoke
americium, is an alpha emitter. Electrons are your TVs, if you detector in your house,
not the fancy schmancy ones, have the old TVs like I have, which are cathode ray tubes
the flat ones. And gamma rays which essentially
radiation. is high energy electromagnetic
This is not gamma rays, this is is too low energy. But an x-ray like a physician
would have. Radiation at sufficient levels
can affect the health. About 2,000 times natural
background is deadly. And I'm not going to tell you what natural background is. It varies but it's on the order
of about 300 millirem per year. You don't know what that is.
20 times that is allowed for Don't care. 2,000 times that is deadly.
radiation workers. Why?
hundred years or work 24/7. Or at least not yet. Because none of us live a
So 20 times natural background is allowed for radiation
workers.
Two to three times natural background is allowed for the general public.
From release, that's about four to five x-rays is natural background, and nuclear plants
natural background. And most other man-made sources release about 10% of natural normally release about 1% of
This is strictly for the US but we should be proud of ourselves, background.
from our medical procedures, on average, as natural background. So we've doubled our exposure from about 300 rem to about 600
rem just because of our medical procedures. X-rays, this, that. Now, let's talk safety and
Fukushima for three slides, and then we'll go to part three of
loss of life in the US due to commercial nuclear power plants. the talk. So there's not really been a
or minus a month, and it TMI is the one you ought to remember from 32 years ago, plus
released a small amount of radiation.
large has to be considered Now, what's small and what's
relative to health effects. That's probably the only way that one wants to think about
this. So the TMI accident really was
due to a equipment failure compounded with human actions or
human factors.
And we could go into that, that's another lecture. The Chernobyl accident is
different.
25 years ago, the Chernobyl accident is different. It was a bad design compounded
by human actions. Now, I'm going to use the word
bad here seldom but it was a bad design.
As an engineer, it was a bad
design. And the reason it was bad is because the operators themselves
didn't understand the way the machine worked. And when they got into the
This is not good. Just not good. event, they were surprised.
[LAUGHTER] All these plants are now closed
or redesigned for operation.
And there's not many operating. There's a handful in Russia. All of those outside of Russia
have been shut down.
designed by the Russians. The Fukushima accident was outside of Russia now are pressurized water reactors
The compounding is only coming initiated by a natural disaster compounded by human factors.
out now, and I'd rather not talk about it because I think if you look at it we have an
unfortunate cultural affinity to
criticize others before we know what the hell is going on. And I use that word carefully,
but I think hell fits.
So I think culturally the Japanese behaved as they would normally for any one of their
emergencies, and we tend to second guess them.
But I do think it was compounded That's, I think, very inappropriate.
by human factors and it's still under investigation. The new plants and the plants
that we have running in the United States now have improved their safety management primarily due to TMI and
primarily due to 9/11,
essentially, the terrorist attack, because almost all the
United States has been modified based on what occurred at 9/11. So now let's do an accident comparison and you can come back
at 3 o'clock if you want to get in detail.
over a few days compared to Fukushima. Chernobyl released about 10 times more radioactive material
So I'm doing everything on a relative basis.
That's what the Japanese report.
How do they know that? A lot of estimates. It could be 20 times.
It could be 30 times. But 10 times is a way to think
more radioactive material is about it. So about an order of magnitude
released in Chernobyl over a few days. Actually, it was released in
about one minute or actually
TMI released about 10 times less about four seconds because it was an explosion. But we'll pass that.
radio activity. Now, is it 10? Is it 20?
It's an order of magnitude. The earthquake and the tsunami
was extensive. I gave testimony in front of the
Congress about this, and there
was a lot of consternation in the Congress and the House Science and Commerce Committee
about the accident. And I started off my discussion to point out that we still have 27,000 dead or missing from this
tsunami and earthquake. And I was there in 1995 during
thing at the time to see the the Kobe earthquake with my kids, and it was an interesting
it was. And the cost estimates just from here the devastation is there's no comparison on how much more
trillion dollars. $250 to $500 billion. The accident has not caused a loss of life, that's a fact.
There were some workers that
were killed by the actual earthquake, I think two or three.
There were some workers that
were overexposed. And actually the mitigation of the accident, that was about two
dozen, but they all fall within the boundaries of that dose that
And the estimates are about 5% to 10% of the total damage I shestimates are due to thefor radiation.
90%-95% is the off-site, and the accident on site, and the other
The Union of Concerned estimate is latent cancers will be tens out of tens of million. Now that's not my number.
using the Union of Concerned Scientists came up two days later in another testimony in front of the Congress, and I'm
Chernobyl accident had early Scientists numbers. So I'd say they're relatively conservative.
fatalities, about 50 between the radiation and the fire. With about 5,000 cases of
thyroid cancers in children, all
treated. The interesting thing about Chernobyl, since I'm dwelling on
this, is 25 years later still the World Health Organization,
the other talk, the World Health and I don't know if I have that slide here, I may have it for
Organization still is not understanding why the latent cancers were so small.
Okay? That's a very interesting thing because right after the accident
epidemiologist from UCLA, I and distinctly kept all his slides in 1986 there was an
and his talk, where he was predicting thousands, tens of
thousands of deaths, and it hasn't come to pass.
So something is happening here that we don't understand from a
health impact standpoint. Total cost is there.
For TMI about $2 billion, with off-site damages about $150
million.
And my point about Fukushima is, if you think about money which I
health effects, most of it is on-site damage in terms of cost. tend not to, I think about
Now, this is TMI and we're going to skip that because I'm about
five minutes late, but all I
wanted to get across is as the engineer in me, what do I worry about?
The engineer in me worries about
how they're managing the water. Now, you may say that's pretty mundane, but it isn't because
they chose to do direct injection from sea water and not
they cool it, and they take the same water around and around and to have a close circuit where they pump it in, they take out,
then accumulate. around. They've chosen to inject and
In TMI, they accumulated about Well, they've accumulated one hell of a lot of water. How much?
two million gallons of water they had to process.
after they discussed it for 12 It took them two years to do it
years. That's the US.
The Japanese want to start their [LAUGHTER]
water processing and they have about 10 times more.
The estimates we have, the Actually more than that.
estimates we're getting are 20 to 30 million gallons that they have to deal with.
And it's going to cost more and it's going to take longer.
So from an engineering standpoint, to keep the
long-term health and safety of
the public in the region, that's the big issue is water
Okay, we're done. Let's move on to the third part of the talk is what's happening in the future.
And so I come back to these.
Those are what are being built I will mention generation three reactors. What are those?
around the world. So I've got a lot of cartoon pictures of what is being built
around the world and I'll tell
you where they're coming here and we'll see if there's a story to be had.
And then what could happen, oops, somehow I lost my, who
knows where it went. Okay, generation three reactors.
Why?
simple result is that back when TMI occurred, and that's when the designs of these started, we You can read all the words, the
And all engineers all kind of behaved the same, we're a strange lot, which is every new device has got to be safer than
the device before.
If you guys go on an airplane, I hope you look at the type of
one of these has a failure rate and they're not the same. The 737XYZ is not the same as athe 737ABC is not the same ash
the 707, it's not the same as the A319 or the A320. I don't want to scare you but all of these have, essentially,
a fatality rate engineered into them by some estimate.
and purposely designed to be And the newer plants, back to nuclear power, the newer plants
safer than the older plants. It just has to be that way. That's good engineering.
What do these look like?
Oh, I'm sorry. The final point I guess I make
the thing I always tend to is I was talking about devices,
remind many audiences is it's not just the device but it's actually the people involved.
It's the engineers that improve the designs, instrumentation
materials. It's the people that run the
plants. You have to do it right, safety is foremost.
power. And this is not just nuclear
It should be chemical plants. We could go and talk about the oil spill if we wanted to go
that route in terms of
operation. And credible regulation.
know how lucky, we do not know The United States, you don't
by regulation. how lucky we are with the regulation we have. You may say we're burdened
There are many places in the Yeah, but we have audible, open regulation. That's very important.
plants because they're all world where we don't. You can go to the NRC website and find all the bad actor
scored out in colors, of course. Red, no I'm sorry it goes green,
And how they score out on all of white, yellow, red.
of it. their various actions and activities. And credible regulation is part
Everything in some sense is a people business in terms of who you train and operate the It's reallyplants.le business.
So what do these things look
like? The ABWR, where are those? Four of those have been built in
Japan.
If you remember the earthquake, not the one we were thinking about now, but the earthquake in
2007 which was on the west coast
essentially the advanced boiling of Japan. There was a seven-reactor site. Three of those reactors were
water reactor which is a General Electric design.
Finland and in France. The EPR is being built in
This is a Westinghouse design that the French bought the license for, improved, they
brought in the Germans. The German improved it more as
can make more jokes. only Germans would. Some of us are German here so I
[LAUGHTER] Actually, if you, I have
My hidden joke is if you, and I tend to be flip about it, but if a hidden joke here.
you look at the Finnish plant, it's pretty much in the news the
Finnish is behind schedule. It's about three years behind schedule. It was supposed to start in
2009, it's going to start in
2012, and it's over budget by about 30%. And when you go to Europe and
you ask about it, the French
point to the Germans and the Germans point to the French.
other but it's an interesting discussion. And then they both point at the So I still thFinns.ey like each
But another time. But the EPR is an advanced
It has different features but it pressurized water reactor design.
be built is in other parts of ithe Middle East and Britain. Finland and France. The next place it will probably
The advanced pressurized water reactor from Westinghouse is the
AP1000. Now, this one is different, and the reason it's different, I
what is called, passive safety want to emphasize, it has some,
features. In the previous two plants these were designed very similar to
current plants but more redundancy of active systems. Now, you may say, well, what is he talking about.
Remember way back when I talked about the fleshy colored guy and
fission products and those the two red guys. And I said the red guys are the
fission products, about 1%-1. 5% of what is left in the high level waste is radioactive, when
things continue to decay they give off heat, you have to
And if you don't, what you get provide water or some sort of cooling to remove this heat.
is what occurred at Fukushima which is they delayed, they held off on cooling for almost a full
day, and you had these cores
degrade. In this case, most of the features are passive so there is
no active systems.
Just by gravity and how they cleverly placed the water tanks you get essentially cooling.
These plants are going built in China.
And finally the ESPWR which is a new advanced General Electric
design. Again, a passive plant. These are to the built in India.
None of them are being built in the United States. Now, what's my message?
they will be imported into the They're all being built somewhere else first and then
United States. So the whole paradigm of the
is a watcher and we'll growth of nuclear power, the US
But the rest of the world is essentially potentially maybe possibly take advantage of this going forward.
proceeding basically without us. If we choose to.
are those? Generation four systems, what
I'll give you some examples of why we have them. One is to improve efficiency,
hopefully reduce cost.
And I have some words here but I want to show you a bit of a picture and then have some time
for questions.
story. So now this is a Wisconsin one. And I stole this one away because it's a good Wisconsin
So it turns out, remember that crazy star up in Idaho I told you to ignore?
So there is a new project called
the Next Generation Nuclear Plant Project, NGNP, and the purpose of that plant is to not
produce electricity but produce process heat. And you may say, what's process heat?
Like what?
Well, it turns out the chemical industry uses process heat for everything.
For the chemical feedstocks to
make everything from plastics to anything you use. Most of the stuff in this room
is made from chemical feedstocks
mainly with oil as the main feedstock. But you need process heat.
Anywhere from 200 degrees C to
1,000 degrees C. You guys all know what C is,
100 C water boils. right?
biomass. So it's high temperature. And one of the things you could do is make sin fuels like used
So my example on the far left is I stole Professor Dumesic's idea
is called aqueous-phase carbohydrate reforming, and since nobody wants to say that from chemical engineering which
And Professor Dumesic from too many times, the ACR process.
chemical engineering has developed a technique where if
mix it with water, dilute it and you chop up biomass very finely,
mix it, dissolve it in water, the carbohydrates, the cellulosic carbohydrates, with
the right temperature and with
the right catalyst, can produce hydrogen, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide.
In this case, because it's
sustainable, I'm using essentially the waste from
essentially just replacing what we used to begin with the growth biomass, the CO2 released is
engineering, build up the hydrogen and CO and alkane of biomass, and I can, with very, very clever chemical
do that. chains and make liquid fuels. So with the right process, I can
I can do it at higher temperatures by carbon recycle and having essentially biomass
or oil products or coal.
Or I can do it at very high temperatures and use water as essentiathe feedstock.rld War II.
fuels from process heat. The point is, I can make sin
demonstration in Idaho to Soprocessed processed heat andr called the gas-cooled reactor which is going to be built as a
different advanced design for a nuclear power plant. prove out the possibilities using essentially now a
Now, my last example are the red.
Now, remember I showed you this last time, and I said look to the spent fuel. Now look at my red lines and now
I'm looking at recycling where I
come down, I come out of the reactor, I go to a reprocessing plant, I separate out the high
level wastes, the fission products, and everything else I recycle.
recycle the uranium, and I use I recycle the plutonium, I
up all that 90-plus percent of stuff by continually recycling
To do that I need another sort it.
of a reactor design. So here's my cartoon. I stole this from Professor
Wilson. He's a very good animator.
So if I hit the magic button, it doesn't first go to Yucca
Mountain or somewhere.
It actually goes to some facility where I reprocess and I
reactors. I go further and I keep on recycle it inside of current
recycling and I go into some sort of advanced reactor, a fast
reactor, to continue the
recycle. Secretary Chu, for example, Secretary of Energy, is very
interested in this design.
National Laboratory. What does the design look like? The design that is being pushed right now is from Argonne
It's a sodium-cooled fast burner reactor, and you don't have to
We're kind of at the end of our thing here. Now, eventually there will be read alwaste.words.
There always is waste.
So I think this is relatively current. Because the politics change.
The gentleman asked me this question, the politics change.
been reliably disposed of. All fuel cycle waste right now, except for high level waste, has
We have a law, in 1982, that the US has to define, that defines
waste. spent nuclear fuel as high level
So right now we have this once through cycle.
that. The cycle I just showed you and the reactor I show you in terms Jof fast reactor are beingve
developed by the Japanese and the French. Spent fuel is currently stored
We produce about 2,000 metric tons per year of fuel. at all the sites.
60,000 metric tons, not 50. So that's a typo, I apologize. And I made a typo here. Our total amount now is about
And originally it was planned to be stored or buried at Yucca
Mountain. That's changed. Right now it's being thought
All nuclear electricity is being about.
taxed. Interestingly enough, we're the only form of energy where
there's a tax on the byproduct, I'm sorry, a tax on the product to pay for the disposal of the
We pay, you pay, I don't pay, we byproduct.
all pay, something like a little under a billion dollars a year
We've collected about $30 billion. into a fund.
sure where it sits. And that is being sat there to We have saved, the treasury says, $20 billion but I'm not
essentially use for the burial of this high level waste in some
form. And now I leave you with a
Not too long, but a while. policy question and we can have questions for a while.
question. That means citizens can exercise And this is not a technical question; this is a policy
their rights in thinking about this.
And I'm not going to talk about the policy of Yucca Mountain
because that is another lecture. Let's talk about the technology
of it.
On the left is the annual dose. Natural background is over there with that top blue line.
15 millirem per year is the bottom blue line. That's 5% of the natural
requirement for the first 10,000 background which is the EPA
years of burial. And then you see a bunch ever wiggly lines.
What are those? Those are all simulations.
So these are all simulations on what would be the dose if I sat Noat the boundary of Yuccaa million years yet.
planted stuff, grew it, ate it, consumed it, drank the water, and lived at the border of Yucca Mountain, drank my water,
And now my question is, what is safe enough? Mountain.
Interestingly enough, although those folks in Las Vegas, which
I guess is Clark County, are
against Yucca Mountain and they tend to have more political sway than Nye County, where Yucca
Mountain is, a hundred miles
The question is, is it safe enough? So I gave you the blue line, the technical fact.
line, and I leave you there, top blue line, the bottom blue
okay? Because in my mind this is not a technical problem.
It's safe.
In terms of getting it out of the general mainstream of the world for decades, hundreds of But it's pretty damn safe.
And interestingly enough, since I used to be the head of the years, thousands of years.
Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, when I went it Las Vegas
and heard the general public
talk about it, they did not talk about the technology. Interestingly enough.
Not these sorts of things.
They talked about other things. So I leave you there, and we can answer questions.
[APPLAUSE]