This is my report on the talk by Alan Waltar to the Distinctive Voices series. The title was:
“The Future of Nuclear Technology … After Fukushima”
given on Nov. 13, 2013. This is one of the series of Distinctive Voices at the Beckman Center.
The talk will appear on YouTube at
www.youtube.com/distinctivevoicesbc
Alan Waltar, Ph. D., is past President of the American Nuclear Society. He is a consultant to the IAEA and the Department of Energy.
Among other positions, he was Director of Nuclear Energy at the Pacific Northwest National Lab, and the Department Head of Nuclear Engineering at Texas A&M. He is the author of “America the Powerless: Facing Our Nuclear Energy Dilemma” in 1995, and “Radiation and Modern Life” in 2004.
He is participating in the Keck Futures Initiative on Advanced Nuclear Technologies at the Beckman Center of the National Academies of Science and Engineering in Irvine, California.
Dr. Waltar was a fast and enthusiastic speaker who covered many areas of nuclear power and applications of nuclear radiation. His talk was well illustrated and detailed, and I can mostly only outline it here. My advice is to view it on the Distinctive Voices YouTube when it becomes available in a few weeks from this date. (Parenthetical remarks are mine.)
On Fukushima, he cited someone who said “This Was Nuclear’s Finest Hour”.
The plant was designed for an 8.2 magnitude earthquake, and it survived the 9.0 earthquake. The containment stayed intact and the reactors shut down. (What failed was that the external power failed and the diesel generators could not be started to provide emergency cooling. I didn’t get time to copy the slide here.)
A few workers got over 100 mSv (milli Sievert). (This value is the lifetime limit in the US for nuclear workers. Background radiation is 3 mSv a year for average locales. Some medical tests hit 15 mSv.) Sickness occurs at 1 Sv. There were zero fatalities. Radiation sickness was zero. Latent cancers were zero.
The advantage of nuclear power is that the energy density is a million times that of fossil fuels. There is a supply of several millennia.
An advantage is energy security since most of the world’s oil is abroad. Nuclear energy also does not have much carbon emissions. The development of reactors plateaued around 1985 due to Chernobyl.
Russia plans to double its reactors by 2020. Germany is phasing out nuclear power, and their power cost is at 33 cents per kWh (compared with our starting rate of 13 cents per kWh including distribution charges). China has 29 reactors under construction.
The US has gained the equivalent of about 24 new plants by increasing their capacity (yearly time in service) and their power. (The US has 104 reactors, although some are retiring.) The US was planning a revival, but only currently building 5 reactors at Vogtle and VC Summer plants. Each reactor costs a large amount, $5 billion, but they are cash cows and last a long time. The new designs are Generation III+.
In the future will be small modular reactors. They are cheaper. They are safer and can be build on a much faster schedule. The size being considered is around 225 mWe (mega Watt equivalent). Designs are sodium cooled and lead bismuth cooled (there may be others also). 32 are now proposed.
The other half of the talk covers an enormous number of applications of radiation, which also generates a lot more money than just nuclear power, and employs more people. (I can only provide a partial outline here.)
Agriculture
Crops
Animals
Insect control by sterilizing them
Food safety by radiation preservation
Optimizing fertilizer and water use by tracing
Modern industry
Gauges for thickness, for example
Materials development and testing
Quality control
Semiconductors implantation by decays
Oil exploration
Personal care
Transportation
Nuclear powered ships
Cars
Trucks
…
Medical
Sterilization of tools
Imaging
12 million in US receive radiation tests a year
Radioactive tracers
CT scan
SPECT
PET
PET/CT
Therapies:
proton radiation therapy
Antiprotons
Monoclonal antibodies target cancers
Need neutrons from reactors to produce radioactive isotopes
Space
Heat generating reactors using Pu 238, such as in the Mars rover Curiosity
Public safety
Smoke detectors
Crime fighting
Terrorism detection
Cargo inspection
Arts and Sciences
Carbon 14 dating
Gemstone production by neutron radiation
Environmental protection
Pollution tracing
Water tracing
Nuclear plant heat for desalination
Oceans: trace pollution
Soil erosion trace
The economic impact of radiation applications is 4.4 million jobs in the US in 1995, and the business is valued at $441 billion in the US.
We need a better public reception of nuclear power.
Audience questions followed. Here are his answers.
Waste from nuclear power is very small, and this is a major attribute for nuclear power.
Nobody has been killed in western world from nuclear power.
France extracts Plutonium for use in a breeder reactor. There is a lot of Uranium and Thorium available.
In Fukushima, they could dump the stored water as its radiation level has decreased in storage.
Thorium reactors will work, we just don’t have much of a development history with them.
We (the US) are not leaders any more, as in the development of small reactors.
(His talk reflected a lot of the areas and goals of the Keck Futures Initiative conference.)
