Climate Changes Everything: Episode 17, The Future Ain't What It Used To Be (Part Two)

In this episode, the history of nuclear power production is discussed. The race to develop nuclear power began in the 1950s, with the Soviet Union and the United States leading the way. Other countries like Britain, France, and Canada also joined in. The size and power of nuclear reactors grew over time. By the late 1970s, nuclear power accounted for a significant portion of the power grids in several countries. However, the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 brought concerns and setbacks to the industry. Regulatory requirements became stricter, opposition increased, and costs soared. The Fukushima disaster in 2011 further emphasized the challenges with nuclear power. Despite France's success in relying heavily on nuclear power, the future of nuclear energy in the rich world seems uncertain. Hello, and welcome back to Climate Changes Everything. This is Episode 17, The Future Ain't What It Used To Be, Part 2. The future ain't what it used to be. That line comes from timeless philosopher and also Hall of Fame New York Yankee, Yogi Berra. Yogi wasn't talking about nuclear energy, but he could have been. Three quarters of a century ago, the future was absolutely, positively, undoubtedly going to be nuclear, until it wasn't, and then really wasn't, and then really, really, really wasn't, but now, might, just might be again. Back in the sharp-suited and Cold War-addled days of the 1950s, the future of both peace and warfare was clearly nuclear, a very industrial peace and a very industrial warfare. The nuclear future was so bright, we had to wear shades, well, at least those steampunk nuclear bomb test goggles, in any case, totally want a pair of those. So innovations and applications continued at a breakneck, Cold War paranoia-driven pace. Let's pick that up where we left off, focusing on nuclear power production and not the nuclear destruction side of things. The essence of the challenge was scale and control. Scale, a reaction big enough and making steam hot enough to turn a massive turbine generator to make electricity. But, and it's a big but, control, keeping the nuclear reaction and the resulting radiation and heat contained. Come to think of it, it's basically the same thing on the nuclear bomb side, making a reaction big enough for the desired human and property annihilation, but, and this may be the mother of all buts, containing the doomsday, full-planet atmospheric destruction so vividly imagined in the film Oppenheimer. Really big buts aside, the global nuclear race was on. Swords into plowshares, into bigger swords, into better plowshares, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. As with any new technology, development started with a bewildering variety of designs, driven by different design philosophies and the surprising diversity of the specific types of nuclear fuel that happened to be available in each country. I'm not going to confuse you with too many technical details as I outline the history, hopefully just enough to illustrate the sort of wacky races involved in first crossing any big technological frontier. Let's start with the Soviets. They modified their existing plutonium production reactor, Reed Military, for heat and electricity generation, Reed Industry, and in 1954, June of 1954, the world's first nuclear-powered electricity generator began operation near Moscow. I'm not sure how to say, take that, capitalists, in Russian, but I'm confident that there was much rejoicing. They say first as the 1951 reactor at Argonne National Labs, about three years earlier, was really just an itsy-bitsy test case sort of thing in terms of power generation, far too small and experimental to really qualify as first. This new Soviet plant was no giant, but at five megawatts, enough power for a few thousand homes, it was utility scale by the standards of the time. At the same time, the U.S. took their military reactor efforts, now focused on naval propulsion applications as well as bombs, into the power production realm. The direct result was the 60-megawatt shipping port nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, which began operating in May of 1958. Many times the size of the Soviet plant, take that, communists, and on it went, of course. I mention and re-mention the dates because I find the timelines clearly illustrate the swords-plowshares dynamic. Recall that the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, had launched back in January of 54, almost four and a half Cold War racing years before shipping port. And both the U.S. and the USSR had launched their first nuclear-powered surface vessels in 1959, just two years later. But it wasn't just the U.S. and the Soviets. The British, French, and even the Canadians were racing towards nuclear power production, too. Again, the old television cartoon, Wacky Races, comes to mind, a wild variation of science, engineering, and design hurtling along the twists and turns of the Cold War. At the same time, the U.S. had a virtual monopoly on uranium enrichment in the West, and apparently they were not sharing that fuel even with their closest allies. The British, lacking enrichment, built their reactors to run on natural uranium metal rather than the more potent enriched uranium that the U.S. had. As you might guess, this involved a different set of control and containment technologies for the reactor. The Brits built 26 of these before switching over to a much more advanced U.S. technology and, I have to assume, finally getting U.S. fuel in 1963. The Canadians took a somewhat different tack, although also based on natural uranium fuel, and their first unit went online in 1962. France, of course, did its own thing in its own way. Their initial design was similar to the British, but their first commercial reactor starting in 1959. In the following decades, and to the present day, though, the French went on to build what is arguably the world's most successful nuclear power program. France focused on continuously replicating and optimizing standard designs, and in so doing made nuclear power the very backbone of their power system, unlike the rest of us. But back to the Cold War. As you can imagine, those smaller plants and the technologies they used quickly gave way to much more effective and far larger designs. By the end of the 1960s, we were seeing 1,000 megawatt units, often in multiple unit configurations, orders of magnitude larger and more powerful than their ancestors. By the late 1970s, nuclear power comprised about 12.5% of the U.S. power grid, 20% of the U.S.S.R. power grid, and about 10% and 25% of the British and French, respectively. And watch out for the French, that 25% is set to triple very rapidly. Nuclear power seemed like it was here to stay, or was it? Now we set the Wayback Machine for 3.59 a.m. Eastern Time on March 28, 1979. The location, the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in the eastern U.S., Unit 2 to be exact. About 37 seconds after 4 a.m., an otherwise ordinary day turned into the worst day in the history of U.S. nuclear power, and arguably the first day of the world's turn against nuclear power. It began, as most accidents do, with seemingly remote, minor failures in a secondary, and in this case, non-radioactive system. Then a stuck valve on the radioactive side. Radioactive cooling water leaking, radioactive gases and iodine spewing into the atmosphere. Then very, very bad got much, much worse. The plant's operators were slow to recognize the rapidly unfolding disaster. Once they did, they realized that their training and procedures were inadequate for the task. So was the plant itself. Design flaws that were probably seen as annoyances during normal operations multiplied the problems. Partial meltdown, massive radioactivity release, widespread contamination. A suddenly and understandably terrified public, not just around Harrisburg, but around the world. A billion-dollar clean-up. So very suddenly, the future wasn't going to be what it used to be. From 1963 to 1979, the number of reactors under construction worldwide had increased in all but two years. The industry didn't die with Three Mile Island, but its growth was severely stunted, especially in the previously massive market of the United States. In total, 51 U.S. reactor orders – we're talking price tags in the hundreds of millions and billions of dollars each at this point – were canceled between 1980 and 1984. More broadly, of the 129 nuclear power plants with U.S. regulatory approval in 1979, only 53, less than half, were actually built. Seven years later, the even more severe Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine. Through this period, regulatory requirements became far tighter and local opposition far stronger, as you can imagine. And as a result, engineering and regulatory approval and construction times became much longer. Costs skyrocketed. Then the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011. Yogi Berra was right. The future ain't what it used to be at all. At least in the rich world, or most of it anyway. France, as I mentioned, is all in on nuclear power and adopted what I think of as the Southwestern Airlines model, building and optimizing the same technology over and over in the same way that Southwest only flies and keeps parts for and trains its pilots and crews and mechanics on Boeing 737s. Like Southwest, France has become very, very good, very, very efficient, and very, very cost-effective in doing so. The U.S., by contrast, has a nuclear fleet that resembles United Airlines, Boeings of every size, Airbuses of every size, CRJs and Embraers, and all the parts and pilots and crews and mechanics and tools, oh my. So every engineering exercise, every regulatory approval, every nuclear power plant construction, and every nuclear power plant operation ends up being different, with predictable consequences. France's power system is now over two-thirds nuclear, very much by design, powering both France and exporting a bunch of power to the rest of Europe. In the U.S., it's only about 20 percent, only slightly more than in 1978. Japan, too, was all in, or at least a whole lot in, on nuclear power, pre-Fukushima at least. There are very good reasons for this. Japan is both the world's third-largest economy and relies on imports for about four-fifths of its energy needs, depending on how you measure, most of it in the form of crude oil from the Middle East. It is remarkably energy-poor within its islands and thus remarkably vulnerable. Carbon-intensive, too, given all that crude oil. So despite Japan's history with destructive nuclear technology, productive nuclear technology, electricity generation actually makes a lot of sense. Japan had 54 reactors operating before the Fukushima disaster, providing about 27 percent of its electricity needs, but only a handful are operating now. The rest are undergoing much stricter relicensing post-Fukushima. The Japanese government would like to get that back up to 20 percent or so by 2030, but that's likely more aspirational than realistic. In the meantime, the nuclear equation is changing. Three big global factors. First, global electricity demand. Rapid economic growth in less-developed countries and rapid electrification everywhere mean that global electricity demand is increasing and set to increase even faster than it has. No surprise that big developing countries are now at the forefront of new nuclear power plant construction. But not as newcomers. India brought its first plant back online back in 1972 and China in 1984. In fact, China now has the world's third-largest installed capacity of nuclear power behind only the U.S. and France. And with its immense economy, that still accounts for only about 5 percent of its total electricity needs. China also has big nuclear power ambitions going forward. In addition to the 55 plants currently operating, China has 22 under construction and more than 70, 7-0, in the planning stages. India, for its part, has eight plants operating, generating only about 3 percent of the country's vast power needs. India's ambitions are substantial, however, especially with regard to thorium rather than uranium-fueled reactor technology. I'm also super excited about thorium, and we'll cover that when we talk about opportunities for innovation, entrepreneurship, and advocacy at the end of our nuclear series. But back to our list. Electricity demand growth was first. Next comes energy security. Economic growth and electrification depend on secure energy supplies. Japan is a particularly vivid example, simply as a function of its severe dependence on energy imports for its huge economy. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has brought the same risk home for Europe, long dependent on Russian natural gas for heating, power generation, and industry. And global memories are long when it comes to energy. The oil shocks of the 1970s, the way access to oil shaped every aspect of World War I and World War II, the Gulf Wars, all these things still inform policy for both energy producers and energy consumers to this day. So energy security, being able to produce your energy needs affordably within your own borders has risen to the top of the global policy agenda, not that it was ever far from the top at any time in modern history. Third, climate change. You knew this was coming. We'll discuss the pluses and minuses in the next episode, but nuclear power generation in itself does not produce greenhouse gases. So climate positive, at least on its face. So these three factors, demand growth, energy security, and climate change, happen to coincide with a new generation of reactors, large and small. It is a heck of an exciting time for nuclear power. We're seemingly well past the industry's initial wacky racist phase, edging out of its dark ages and seeing powerful new drivers for both further innovation and expansion. But what about the bigger questions? Is nuclear power safe or unsafe? Sustainable or unsustainable? Earth positive or Earth negative? Climate positive or climate negative? And ultimately, humanity positive or humanity negative? Or in each case, somewhere in between? Or it depends? Or how much time do you have, and is there a whiteboard we can use? And what are the opportunities for innovation, entrepreneurship, and advocacy in this brave new climate-changed world? I'll see you next time for another episode of Climate Changes Everything. Thanks for listening.