Wisconsin Public Television University Place Global Hot Spots  Michael Corradini Japan's Nuclear Disaster: An Update  May 6, 2011 UP586    cc >> Thank you for being here for Global Hot Spots today. Our speaker is Michael Corradini. 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, nuclear safety and also serves as chair of the Governance Committee of the UW Madison Energy Institute. He served from 1995 to 2001 as Associate Dean for the College of Engineering. And in 1998 he was elected to  the National Academy of Engineering. Since 2002 Professor Corradini has served in a variety of capacities on national and international review 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 Regulatory Commission. Before joining the UW Madison faculty, Professor Corradini spent three years on the technical staff of Sandia National Laboratories where he conducted research on severe accidents. He received his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Marquette University and his master's and PhD in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He's a Wisconsin Distinguished Professor and a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society. 

Please join me in welcoming Professor Michael Corradini. [APPLAUSE] >> Michael Corradini: Thank you. So I'm all wired up. I'm supposed to not move. I'm supposed to use this to point. So this ought to be interesting. Thank you very much. I have, essentially, three talks in one. I have a bit of a talk about 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 events in Japan. And so I've put in a few slides to talk about the Japanese 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 background information. Now, I know some of you look familiar to me a lot and some of you look kind of familiar to me, so alums I'm sure, former faculty, I know there's a few in the audience. Raise your hands. All right. I thought there were more. 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. Humanities types. And so the rest of you are 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 off here. See, I knew it would do that. 

So as we increase in population in the world, so does energy use. 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. Asia is growing greater than 2% per year. And as you do that, energy usage grows rapidly with it. In fact, if you look at US and Europe is growing, we could take away the recession, the recession is an interesting example of how things change because of economics, but if we 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 developed countries and less in developing countries. 

If you look at US and Europe we're about 2% per year and Asia is about 5% per year. So the first and foremost thing I guess I want to get across is that as population continues to increase, energy uses continue 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 deal of effort in thinking about conservation as a way to reverse 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 at least to mitigate this. But all we can see historically is that regardless of all these trends it really does tend to follow population. So the next thing is sustainability. So in my mind, sustainability has a very specific definition. So there was a friend of mine who is now at Stanford. He used to be at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Tom 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 define. And I think these are the attributes. Adequate supply of the energy resource. Acceptable land usage for the energy or the fuel cycle. Economically feasible. It has to be economically feasible, I feel, otherwise you start spending money in places you may not want to. Minimal byproducts, many times when people think about environmental issues or sustainability they think only about byproducts. And one that I tell my students about that I think is very important is that neither the power source north the technology can be controlled by a few, otherwise we have war. And most of the conflict we've 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 around the world for at least 150 years because of the search for oil. 

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. Environmental impacts, I tend to steal liberally, I'm giving a talk at 3 o'clock, as I said, and prior to this there was a meeting down at the University 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 the Overture Center and she and I kind of had a conversation 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 Minnesota, our other research one campus, hopefully if we still keep reciprocity between Wisconsin and Minnesota, and all her research is in solar energy. 

So I tend to borrow a lot of Jane's slides because I tend to agree with how she views the 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 electricity. And all I want to point out is 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. Good. Coal is the upper box on the left. This is the plant. The bigger box is the fuel cycle. Nuclear is over here. Very energy intense. 

Even with low concentrations in the earth. The little box is the plant. 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 you have to think about it because what you do with it in one case can essentially preclude you in other cases. So one thing is land. Cost is another one. 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 other than to say that if we're talking about baseload electricity, which what nuclear tends to contribute to, there's enough coal, there's enough uranium, and these days people are saying there's enough natural gas, we can argue about that later, such that that's not an issue in terms of resource. But let's talk about cost. 

Again from Jane, she came in 2006 to give a talk down at, not down at the Overture Center but down at the Monona Terrace at another conference we had here about energy. And I basically borrowed these from her too because they haven't changed much and the 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 in cents per kilowatt hour, you guys all know what you pay, right? 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 days to transmit and distribute electricity in a metropolitan area even such as Madison. So this is only the making of the electricity part. This is not the taking it from 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 them. What's my point? My point is from the standpoint of production of the energy, nuclear and coal are the cheapest. That means every day, pretty much, at least even in Madison, most of our electricity and baseload is coming from Kewaunee Point Beach, the Columbia Station Power Plant, Oak Creek in the south of Milwaukee because it's the cheapest form of electricity, all right? 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. So natural gas, hydro, wind, all the way up the line. My point is here, again, not what's good or bad, but my point is what you choose to spend your money on. Everything's a matter of choice. 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. 

I have another thought here. This focuses on the three that 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. Do you guys know what I mean by gas fracking or hydro fracking? There's been a lot of talk about that, particularly on WHA there's been a number of educational programs on what it is, what are the environmental impacts, etc, etc. This does not take this into account, as far as I can tell, because at this point, at least in this part of the world, this part of the country, it's not a highly large source of fuel resource. And nuclear, gas, coal. The other part of this plot is to show you that depending upon the type of technology, it depends on non-fuel production. 

In nuclear's case, it's mainly 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. And in this case, coal the same way. 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 minute, what if I build a new coal plant or a new nuclear plant, what's the cost? The answer is, we don't know 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. So nothing is for free in the new world we're looking in. Everything's going to cost more. And finally, my last plot about cost is that this is kind of the historical trend. And my reason for bringing this one up is history. I do not have cost beyond 2006 for natural gas, that's the blue line. If you look at that, you're probably going to see the cost 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 interested. I want to keep on going. 

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 order, is either coal, gas, or nuclear. 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 renewables, which is solar, wind, whether it be solar voltaic or solar thermal. So most of everything between 90% to 100% is hydro. So this is the emissions and why I say apples and oranges. 

On the left are the apples, coal and gas, except for ash, solid ash, which you have to bury or at least in the US we don't bury it, we just kind of let it sit 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. Everything in terms of a byproduct is nuclear and highly radioactive and it's all solid in a very compact form. I can find it, identify it, worry about it if I choose to, 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 centralized interim storage facility Grainger Hall, we'd fill about half of it in volume. So it's not much in volume, it's relatively radioactive. Yes, sir? [INAUDIBLE] >> It could. It could. 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 running in. So I will say it now but I'll get to the end, we're really changing between technically and a policy question. So technically, that's the answer. Policy, another discussion. Much longer. 

Much more fun it turns out. Okay? But apples and oranges. Every form of energy, every form of energy has a byproduct. I'm a mechanical engineer in nuclear engineering clothing, and the second law of thermal does exist, which is I can turn all of work into heat but I can't turn heat into work and everything is a byproduct. I have a byproduct with any sort of energy production. So I'm going to have some sort of byproduct. The choices are doing them. Enough. The one that people tend to worry about is CO2. So I thought I'd give you this one. 

This comes out of a PhD thesis, actually three PhD theses here at Wisconsin from the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies. Scott White, who I just actually saw back in town because of the retirement of a minister at Bethel Lutheran. 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. The unit of energy doesn't matter, okay? Per unit of energy, and you can look at the list and you can see that, interestingly enough, if CO2 worries you, then fission nuclear, solar with no storage, and wind with no storage essentially have the least impact on the environment. 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 probably an old technology in the world of engineering and science. 

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 ammonia as the working fluid which could be somewhat deleterious to your health if it 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 invented from the 1890s through the '30s. So the physicists then moved on to fun stuff and they left it to us engineers to kind of make it all work. But it was interesting that most of what we see in nuclear engineering goes from atoms to 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 technology, it's really a contribution to power, 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 worth about a billion dollars. That's a professor talking. I'm sorry. That's really inappropriate. 

So as I said, three really long-term aspects. Major source of electricity, which is what I'll talk about, enabling technology for medical science. Wisconsin ought to be very proud. Not only do I think we have a relatively good nuclear engineering program, we have probably the best medical physics program in world. Started by John Cameron and carried on by a guy who happens to be our provost right now, Paul DeLuca, and now with Jim Zagzebski as chair. So an absolutely excellent program in medical physics, which is essentially imaging and treatment of diseases in the medical sciences and underlying technology for security. So what I want to talk about in part two is basically these sorts of topics. And I'll talk about safety in terms of the accident if I can get, when I get to it. I will get to it. And then depending upon your will and stamina, I'll get into part three with advanced technologies. 

Okay? So what I'd like to say is that on the left is generation one early prototype reactors. Those were all kind of test reactors or trial reactors. 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. Shippingport was essentially 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 50 megawatts electric. 

It's about the size you have, even today, in our nuclear subs. The next one is Kewaunee. I pick slides that, so if you've ever been to Kewaunee that's 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 excellent job of getting it to essentially improve its performance but it's too far away, I think, from all their other places that they own plants, which are in Virginia and Connecticut. And it's a hassle. Only those that graduate from Wisconsin want to work in Kewaunee. All those who live in Virginia want to go back to Virginia. 

But I'm guessing that the sale of that plant will be to potentially people and companies that are, like, in Illinois or 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 it's not because the plant 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 generation of plants in the US. All 104 plants. We're now rebuilding a plant, all 104, soon to the 105 plants, are soon to be generation two plants. They're light water reactors, I'll tell you what that is, either boiling water reactors or pressurized water reactors. The other two, CANDU and VVER, are the Canadian design and the Russian design. Around the world this is kind of the lineup. 104 in the US, and you have it in front of you, there's no need to look, it's about 436 units. 

There are about 40, there's more than this now, this is an old slide, now about 52 plants are under construction around the world. The thing that's most interesting is who has them and who's building them. In this case, China, Russia, India and Korea are the builders, and they have a few but not as many as they're building. China is building six units simultaneously. They probably have the corner on the market of civil engineers in the world in large projects. Because the same engineers, civil engineers, that build these build refineries. And so it's a very interesting world if you tend to go to China or to India or the Pacific Rim area at this point in time. Oh, I wanted to say also, we are building one, and I'll come back to that. Ah, good. 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. Louis, down 55, it's off to the left. It was built in 1972. We have not built a refinery in the United States since 1972. British Petroleum tried to, or Amoco tried to, in Indiana but that stopped, but that's another story totally. So if you look at it, large construction projects in the United States haven't happened. Any large construction projects. 

The work that we see happening on the new plant they're building at the Vogtle site, which is an AP1000, which I'll show you eventually, is probably 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 notice the amount of electricity produced, this is in billions of kilowatt hours, so it's kind of a hard number to get your hands around. So forget about the unit, it just is increasing. You might ask yourself, well, how can it be increasing if I'm not building anything? 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%. And so you can see the increase in capacity factor going up and it's now above 90%. And that's the way you see it. 

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 to hate a fossil plant. I'm not thrilled about them but they're there and they'll be 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 in nuclear plants have now been going over to fossil plants. And their capacity factors, if you were to plot them as a function of time here, tend to follow, lag, but follow this based on good practice. What has that done? Well, it lowers your electricity cost, primarily because if you build one of these behemoths, these large plants that produce a lot of electricity, it's good that you run them because you still have to pay for the all debt that you borrowed to build them. So the cost of electricity has 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 are they there? Anybody want to take, I guess I was told I wasn't disallowed 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. >> Population density, possibly. But what's the competitor? [INAUDIBLE] >> Well, all the power coming itself. But the big competitor is coal. Where is the coal? 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 relatively clean is out in the Potter River basin of Montana or 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. But it's partly coal. Partly is population. But there's an awful lot of coal plants in the east. A lot of them. We have 104 nuclear plants, they're all smaller, but we have something on the order of 500 coal plants in the United States of various shapes and sizes. Now, another interesting fun fact is that these plants, engineers are kind of strange beasts, they tend to like to improve things, always tinkering. So this is a plot of additional electricity generated from those 104 plants without building any new plants. They change out a turbine, they change a condenser, they change a pump, they change how they burn the fuel, and they produce more electricity without building a plant. 

And so the blue is how much additional electricity we've gotten out of the 104 plants without building any more plants. It's about 5,500 megawatts of electricity, all baseload. So it's like building five plants without building them. The pink is what's under review now to ask to please modify the plants to produce more, and the red is the expectation. So we're looking at something around six to eight gigawatts, 6,000 to 8,000 megawatts of electricity without building any new plants. It's due to a range of things. The term I use is power up-rates. We can get back to it. Well, why did I bring that up? I picked on the coal people, let me pick on the renewables. With all the growth in wind, which has been historically large, enormous growth in wind, the average amount of electricity, on average, that we produce from wind, which is the largest renewable source in the United States, is something like 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 Idaho just ignore that. That's a special plant. We'll come back to that plant. Now, if I ask a question of why the new plants are where they are, a lot of your reasoning matters. One, the population is moving to 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 electricity growth in Wisconsin or in the northern Midwest. 

So it's population. It's partly economics, again because I don't have coal in the southeast. But there's another one that I didn't hear anyone yell at me about before. What would be another one for the growth in the south or the southeast/southwest? Potential sites? Any thoughts? Because I'm waiting for you so say, why not build renewables down there. Which you could. And my answer there is the wind doesn't blow very well in the south. If I went to North Dakota, South Dakota, up there where there's a hell of a lot of wind, let's forget about how I transmit it anywhere, but if I could build them out there, I'd have a very big wind resource. 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 have to get close to it, is right here. This is the Vogtle plant. This is the first new plant they've actually started construction. 

The second plant is over on the South Carolina side which is a 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 time, but this is a good one. So there were two individuals, they were cousins, Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch, and they were 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 data that showed it was fission and Fermi won the Nobel Prize, I think, for transmutation to make -- elements. And he looked at his own data and he says, oh, my, 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 reading back on this. So anyway, this was found out back in the '30s. A neutron is absorbed by a uranium atom. That's an unstable state. These guys stay there for nanoseconds. 

That's a word you know these days, nanoseconds. And then they break apart into two red pieces which are fission 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 I build this right, they go and are slowed down and go into more little orangey colored stuff and essentially are reabsorbed and the chain reaction begins. The thing that people forget about with the current technology is that water is used to cool this reaction but it's also used to moderate it. It turns out the little blue 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. And you need the water to slow them down or moderate them. There's another story about Enrico Fermi and goldfish that's a great one about this. But essentially you've got to slow them down, and water is one of the things to slow them down. As they essentially impact the hydrogen molecule and slow them down to keep the reaction going. 

So water is used to cool and to moderate. It kind of fits in this thing like this. The fuel is now red in my cartoon. The water is going around in this, and essentially it goes into a large pot of a steam generator. I put water in, which is kind of the turquoise green, and it comes out as steam. And this is a pressurized water reactor. It's in a containment. Of course, the rainbow is always shining. [LAUGHTER] My animation looks like this. But this is a pressurized water reactor. 

Now, I'm almost to my third part, and I think I have a 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 dig it up somewhere. It turns out we don't dig it up, we pay the Canadians and the 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 dig it up. We mill it, grind it down. We enrich it, more physics, we'll skip that. 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. And the spent fuel in the US is treated as waste. 

I'll come back to the other arrows later. I can have once through cycles of various types. Ignore all the numbers. I tend to use my slides liberally in various settings, so you're not going to have a quiz on gigawatt days per ton or 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, burn it, and bury it. That's been the policy since the Carter Administration. What does the spent fuel look like? That's what it really looks like when you stick it inside the reactor. It's essentially pins about as thin as this thing, about a centimeter. We're all in metric units these days, right? 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 get to that, that's in my third talk. Of the pie slice that's black, about two-thirds of it is stable fission products, that means they're not radioactive. And all the radio activity sits inside those little other slivers. Whether it be short-lived fission products, long-lived fissions products, plutonium, etc. And all of the after heat, the K 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. There's three types of radiation. Alphas, betas, gammas, or to put it another way: your smoke detector in your house, americium, is an alpha emitter. Electrons are your TVs, if you have the old TVs like I have, which are cathode ray tubes not the fancy schmancy ones, the flat ones. And gamma rays which essentially is high energy electromagnetic radiation. 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. Don't care. 2,000 times that is deadly. 20 times that is allowed for radiation workers. Why? Because none of us live a hundred years or work 24/7. Or at least not yet. 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 normally release about 1% of natural background. 

And most other man-made sources release about 10% of natural background. This is strictly for the US but we should be proud of ourselves, we have so many medical procedures we have as much dose 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 the talk. So there's not really been a loss of life in the US due to commercial nuclear power plants. TMI is the one you ought to remember from 32 years ago, plus or minus a month, and it released a small amount of radiation. Now, what's small and what's large has to be considered 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 event, they were surprised. This is not good. Just not good. 

[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. The only plants operating outside of Russia now are pressurized water reactors designed by the Russians. The Fukushima accident was initiated by a natural disaster compounded by human factors. The compounding is only coming 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. That's, I think, very inappropriate. 

But I do think it was compounded 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 civilian infrastructure in 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. Chernobyl released about 10 times more radioactive material over a few days compared to Fukushima. 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 about it. 

So about an order of magnitude more radioactive material is released in Chernobyl over a few days. Actually, it was released in about one minute or actually about four seconds because it was an explosion. But we'll pass that. TMI released about 10 times less 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 the Kobe earthquake with my kids, and it was an interesting thing at the time to see the devastation, and on the cameras here the devastation is there's no comparison on how much more it was. And the cost estimates just from repairing everything that happened is about a half a 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 I showed you earlier, slide for radiation. And the estimates are about 5% to 10% of the total damage estimates are due to the accident on site, and the other 90%-95% is the off-site, and the estimate is latent cancers will be tens out of tens of million. Now that's not my number. The Union of Concerned Scientists came up two days later in another testimony in front of the Congress, and I'm using the Union of Concerned Scientists numbers. So I'd say they're relatively conservative. Chernobyl accident had early 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, and I don't know if I have that slide here, I may have it for the other talk, the World Health Organization still is not understanding why the latent cancers were so small. Okay? That's a very interesting thing because right after the accident in 1986 there was an epidemiologist from UCLA, I and distinctly kept all his slides 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 tend not to, I think about health effects, most of it is on-site damage in terms of cost. 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 to have a close circuit where they pump it in, they take out, they cool it, and they take the same water around and around and around. They've chosen to inject and then accumulate. 

Well, they've accumulated one hell of a lot of water. How much? In TMI, they accumulated about two million gallons of water they had to process. It took them two years to do it after they discussed it for 12 years. That's the US. [LAUGHTER] The Japanese want to start their water processing and they have about 10 times more. Actually more than that. The estimates we have, the 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 management. 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. I will mention generation three reactors. What are those? Those are what are being built 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? Why would have I generation three reactors? You can read all the words, the simple result is that back when TMI occurred, and that's when the designs of these started, we wanted to improve the safety. 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 airplane you go on because each one of these has a failure rate and they're not the same. 

The 737XYZ is not the same as the 737ABC is not the same as 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 the newer plants, back to nuclear power, the newer plants and purposely designed to be 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 is I was talking about devices, the thing I always tend to 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. 

And this is not just nuclear power. 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. The United States, you don't know how lucky, we do not know how lucky we are with the regulation we have. You may say we're burdened by regulation. Yeah, but we have audible, open regulation. That's very important. There are many places in the world where we don't. You can go to the NRC website and find all the bad actor plants because they're all scored out in colors, of course. 

Red, no I'm sorry it goes green, white, yellow, red. And how they score out on all of their various actions and activities. And credible regulation is part of it. So my point here is that people matter. It's really a people business. Everything in some sense is a people business in terms of who you train and operate the plants. 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 of Japan. There was a seven-reactor site. Three of those reactors were essentially the advanced boiling water reactor which is a General Electric design. 

The EPR is being built in Finland and in France. This is a Westinghouse design that the French bought the license for, improved, they brought in the Germans. The German improved it more as only Germans would. Some of us are German here so I can make more jokes. [LAUGHTER] Actually, if you, I have a hidden joke here. My hidden joke is if you, and I tend to be flip about it, but if 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. So I still think they like each other but it's an interesting discussion. 

And then they both point at the Finns. But another time. But the EPR is an advanced pressurized water reactor design. It has different features but it is essentially being built in Finland and France. The next place it will probably be built is in other parts of the Middle East and Britain. The advanced pressurized water reactor from Westinghouse is the AP1000. Now, this one is different, and the reason it's different, I want to emphasize, it has some, what is called, passive safety 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 the two red guys. 

And I said the red guys are the fission products and those 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 provide water or some sort of cooling to remove this heat. And if you don't, what you get 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. Now, what's my message? None of them are being built in the United States. 

They're all being built somewhere else first and then they will be imported into the United States. So the whole paradigm of the growth of nuclear power, the US is a watcher and we'll essentially potentially maybe possibly take advantage of this going forward. But the rest of the world is proceeding basically without us. If we choose to. Generation four systems, what are those? 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. So now this is a Wisconsin one. And I stole this one away because it's a good Wisconsin story. 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, right? 100 C water boils. So it's high temperature. And one of the things you could do is make sin fuels like used biomass. So my example on the far left is I stole Professor Dumesic's idea from chemical engineering which is called aqueous-phase carbohydrate reforming, and since nobody wants to say that too many times, the ACR process. And Professor Dumesic from chemical engineering has developed a technique where if you chop up biomass very finely, mix it with water, dilute it and 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 biomass, the CO2 released is essentially just replacing what we used to begin with the growth of biomass, and I can, with very, very clever chemical engineering, build up the hydrogen and CO and alkane chains and make liquid fuels. So with the right process, I can do that. I can do it at higher temperatures by carbon recycle and having essentially biomass or oil products or coal. The Germans developed this, essentially, to run World War II. Or I can do it at very high temperatures and use water as the feedstock. The point is, I can make sin fuels from process heat. So there is an advanced reactor called the gas-cooled reactor which is going to be built as a demonstration in Idaho to processed processed heat and prove out the possibilities using essentially now a different advanced design for a nuclear power plant. 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. 

I recycle the plutonium, I recycle the uranium, and I use up all that 90-plus percent of stuff by continually recycling it. To do that I need another sort 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 recycle it inside of current reactors. I go further and I keep on 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. What does the design look like? The design that is being pushed right now is from Argonne National Laboratory. 

It's a sodium-cooled fast burner reactor, and you don't have to read all the words. We're kind of at the end of our thing here. Now, eventually there will be waste. There always is waste. So I think this is relatively current. Because the politics change. The gentleman asked me this question, the politics change. All fuel cycle waste right now, except for high level waste, has been reliably disposed of. We have a law, in 1982, that the US has to define, that defines spent nuclear fuel as high level waste. So right now we have this once through cycle. 

Japan and Europe do not have that. The cycle I just showed you and the reactor I show you in terms of fast reactor are being developed by the Japanese and the French. Spent fuel is currently stored at all the sites. We produce about 2,000 metric tons per year of fuel. And I made a typo here. Our total amount now is about 60,000 metric tons, not 50. So that's a typo, I apologize. And originally it was planned to be stored or buried at Yucca Mountain. That's changed. Right now it's being thought about. 

All nuclear electricity is being 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 byproduct. We pay, you pay, I don't pay, we all pay, something like a little under a billion dollars a year into a fund. We've collected about $30 billion. We have saved, the treasury says, $20 billion but I'm not sure where it sits. And that is being sat there to essentially use for the burial of this high level waste in some form. And now I leave you with a policy question and we can have questions for a while. Not too long, but a while. What's safe enough? And this is not a technical question; this is a policy question. That means citizens can exercise 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 background which is the EPA requirement for the first 10,000 years of burial. And then you see a bunch ever wiggly lines. What are those? Those are all simulations. Nobody's buried waste for a million years yet. So these are all simulations on what would be the dose if I sat at the boundary of Yucca Mountain, drank my water, planted stuff, grew it, ate it, consumed it, drank the water, and lived at the border of Yucca Mountain. 

And now my question is, what is safe enough? 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 away. None of them dispute this technical fact. The question is, is it safe enough? So I gave you the blue line, the top blue line, the bottom blue line, and I leave you there, okay? Because in my mind this is not a technical problem. It's safe. Now, is it safe enough? I don't know. But it's pretty damn safe. In terms of getting it out of the general mainstream of the world for decades, hundreds of years, thousands of years. And interestingly enough, since I used to be the head of the 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]