Wash. Times Article re Nuclear Power

["Estabrooks, Bates (IHK) " <IHK@Y12.doe.gov>]

September 4, 2002 

Nuclear energy 



Gordon Prather

The objective of the World Summit on Sustainable Development just held in

South Africa was to find ways "to meet the needs of the present without

compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

Alas, some conferees seemed more concerned about future generations than

ours.

Take energy, for example. The conferees assume the world's supply of fossil

fuels will soon be exhausted. So, they want us to shift to inexhaustible

sources of energy. The greens even demand that 15 percent of the world's

total energy production be produced by renewable energy sources by 2010. 

Now, "renewable" is not synonymous with "inexhaustible." Cow dung may be in

some sense "renewable," but hardly inexhaustible. In any case, cow dung,

when burned, produces carbon dioxide, which, according to the greens, causes

global warming. That would compromise future generations, so burning

anything with carbon in it is out.

What about nuclear power? Once we have got "breeder" reactors on line, our

supplies of uranium and thorium will be practically inexhaustible.

Furthermore, nuclear power plants don't emit any cow dung gases. 

So, why didn't the Sustainable Development conferees fall in love with one

of the world's most promising nuclear power developments - South Africa's

Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR)?

The PBMR technology was developed and successfully prototyped in Europe and

was licensed in 1996 to the South African utility Eskom. The PBMR consortium

was formed to construct - beginning this year - a commercial 120 MW

demonstration plant in South Africa. The consortium intends to manufacture

PBMRs for export. 

The South Africans estimate that manufacturing and exporting just 10 PBMRs a

year would create 57,000 jobs and add nearly $700 million to South Africa's

gross domestic product. South Africa alone will need about 200 of them just

to meet domestic electricity needs in 2025.

Until April of this year, Exelon - a U.S. utility that owns 17 nuclear power

plants - was a member of the PBMR consortium. Exelon had intended to submit

a license application to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission this year

for the sequential construction of ten PBMRs. Once approved by the NRC,

Exelon hoped to have the first module constructed in only 20 months. It

would take eight to 10 years to construct a conventional 1,200 MW nuclear

power plant.

The PBMR gets its name from the fuel. Uranium, plutonium or thorium-sintered

microspheres are coated with pyrolytic carbon and silicon carbide. Thousands

of these microspheres are then incorporated into billiard-ball-sized

pebbles, which are similarly coated. Gaseous or metallic fission products

are prevented from escaping, even at 1,650 Celsius, far above the

temperatures obtainable in the reactor core itself.

The PBMR reactor core is a cylinder filled with hundreds of thousands of

these billiard balls. A small fraction of the billiard balls in this bed are

continually withdrawn from the bottom of the cylinder and nondestructively

tested for burn-up. If there remains unburned fissionable material in a

pebble, it is then dumped back into the top. 

The PBMR can run its entire 40-50 year life on one load of pebbles, and does

not have to be periodically shut down for refueling.

The reactor uses helium gas - which cannot become radioactive - as a coolant

to keep the operating temperature at about 950 degrees centigrade. Then the

950-degree helium - which is also chemically inert - is fed directly into a

high-pressure gas turbine to generate electricity. The thermal efficiency

for the high-temperature gas-cooled PBMR is very high, about 45 percent. 

So why did Exelon pull out of such a promising venture? Well, earlier this

year Rep. Henry Waxman - ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform

Committee - found a favorable reference to the PBMR in the Bush-Cheney

energy plan. Mr. Waxman charged it was there because Exelon had made

contributions to the Bush-Cheney campaign. Within a matter of days, Exelon

notified the PBMR consortium that it was withdrawing.

So, what is Exelon going to do, now? Shift to renewable sources of energy?

No cow dung, of course, but lots of windmills?

And what will happen to the PBMR consortium? Well, the Russians, who have

got a lot of weapons-useable plutonium to get rid of, have shown interest in

the PBMR for that purpose. Furthermore, they already have a factory

producing barge-mounted nuclear power plants. The Russian KLT-40 reactors,

designed to power ice-breakers, use fairly highly enriched (60 percent

U-235) uranium. 

>From the standpoint of meeting this generation's energy needs - while

preventing nukes from getting loose - it would be a good thing if PBMRs

could be mounted on those barges.



* Gordon Prather has served as a nuclear physicist at Sandia National

Laboratory, as a national security adviser to Sen. Henry Bellmon, and as a

Reagan appointee in the Pentagon.





Bates Estabrooks

BWXT Y-12

ihk@y12.doe.gov <mailto:ihk@y12.doe.gov> 









"If J. Edgar Hoover was still alive, al-Qa'ida would be described as a

movement whose followers mysteriously disappeared in the early 1990s. 



Germany refused to turn over terrorism evidence against alleged 20th

hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui unless we promise not to give him the death

penalty. They don't believe in giving mass murderers the death penalty. They

believe in giving them Czechoslovakia and Poland."

-Argus Hamilton





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