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Welcome back. Module 17 covers nuclear energy. In this lecture, we will look at the science,
engineering, and uses of nuclear. So let's get started.
The history of nuclear is relatively short. It's one of the newest forms of fuel that we've used. Nuclear
fission was first discovered in 1939. The first nuclear chain reaction took place in Chicago, as part of the
wartime Manhattan Project in 1942. And three years after that, the first nuclear weapons test was
demonstrated in New Mexico.
So in the span of six years, we went from a fundamental discovery to a weapon, which is a pretty rapid
pace of innovation-- a pace of innovation we really haven't seen since in the United States or the world.
Six years after that, a power plant was demonstrated using nuclear reactors to generate electricity in
Idaho. By the 1970s, nuclear power was growing rapidly, averaging a 30% annual growth from 1970-
1975, which is an incredible rate of growth for any fuel source. But in particular, it was a rapid rate of
growth for a large system like nuclear.
In 1987, nuclear power was generating 15% of global electricity. And by the late '80s, nuclear
expansion actually slowed down because of environmentalist opposition, high interest rates, energy
conservation prompted by the 1970s energy shocks, as well as accidents and near-accidents like Three
Mile Island and Chernobyl. So it's a brief history of nuclear with mixed results.
Nuclear power is surrounded by some ironies. Nuclear power helps mitigate climate change.
Republicans like nuclear power but don't really care about climate change. And Democrats care about
climate change but don't really like nuclear power. So that's sort of interesting.
Nuclear power is compatible with strong government. Democrats are OK with strong government
intervention and energy, but they don't like nuclear power. And Republicans are OK with Nuclear power
but don't like government intervention. So this is sort of a conundrum.
And the irony by professional discipline is that France, run by engineers, has a lot of nuclear power.
And the USA, which is run by lawyers, has relatively less. Engineers tend to look at nuclear power as
clean, safe, reliable, baseload power. Lawyers tend to look at nuclear power as a liability waiting to
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happen. So we have a very different outlook about what nuclear means.
The main points about nuclear power is that it has many advantages and disadvantages, it's already a
major part of our fuel mix, it has improved with time, the economics are kind of complicated, and the
future of nuclear is unclear. I'll go through each of these one by one. Nuclear has several advantages
and drawbacks. The main advantage of nuclear is that it has supreme energy density.
The energy output per unit mass of fuel is absolutely incredible. That means less money and less waste
to deal with. Nuclear just requires less and produces less in terms of mass flows of waste and inputs of
fuel, and gives us a lot of energy in the meantime.
It generates very little waste per kilowatt hour, and all that waste is captured. Most of the waist from
most of our power plants is emitted into the atmosphere or into the oceans. With nuclear, we capture all
the waste. That waste is nasty, but we capture all of it.
It also has excellent capacity factor, excellent maintenance and safety records. And mostly, we have
domestic or friendly sources of uranium, from the US perspective. The disadvantages are the waste is
highly radioactive and long-lived, there are public safety risks from accidents and attacks, and concerns
about weapons proliferation. So three major downside concerns with nuclear that are well identified but
difficult to solve.
If we look at where nuclear is today, it already provides about 9% of our total energy consumption.
Petroleum, followed by natural gas, followed by coal, followed all the renewables together, followed by
nuclear, it's about 8% or 9%. So it's a significant fraction, but it's not the biggest fraction of all the fuels.
But it provides about 20% of our electricity. If you'll recall, nuclear only gives us electrical power. It's not
given us heat for industry, it's not heating our homes. It's really just making electricity. So it's 9% of our
overall energy mix but 20% of our electrical mix.
Here, we see how nuclear energy is used, along with all the other fuels and sectors. And nuclear is
coupled directly towards electrical production. We use it only for electricity production.
The basis for our conventional nuclear reactor in the United States is using uranium 235, a particular
isotope of uranium. There are other nuclear materials that you can use. You could use thorium, for
example, but this lecture will focus on uranium 235.
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And it starts a chain reaction. You have a neutron split the atom, which creates two smaller atoms that
also put out neutrons and then split other atoms. So you have a chain reaction of successive split as
you undergo fission or splitting of the different atoms. And in the process of splitting the atoms, heat is
released. That heat can be used to generate steam, to generate power.
For nuclear power, the form of uranium matters. Naturally occurring uranium consists primarily of two
isotopes. There is the less abundant isotope, uranium 235. It's less than 1% of naturally occurring
uranium. And then uranium 238, which is most of the uranium we find.
But uranium 235 is a better reactor fuel than uranium 238, so we have to enrich it. We have to enrich
the fractions to separate out the uranium 235 so we have a better reactor fuel. There's kind of two
grades. There's LEU, low-enriched uranium, which is less than 20% of uranium 235. Commercial
reactors in the US need something like 3% to 5% blend of uranium 235.
And then there's HEU, or high-enriched uranium, which is more than 20% uranium 235. Weapons
grade is, for example, more than 80%. So we take this original ore, which is less than 1% 235 uranium,
we enrich it to raise the blend fraction of the uranium 235 to get what we need for reactors or weapons,
depending on the outcome.
Enrichment is achieved by taking advantage of the very slight mass differences between uranium 235
and 238. First, you create a uranium hexafluoride gas. UF6 is actually in pellet form-- solid until you
heat it up, make a gas. You put that gas in these centrifuges, which are these well-balanced aluminum
rods that you spin.
And as you spin the UF6, the heavier U238 moves to the outside. And the U235 tends to concentrate
near the center. And then you do that over and over and over again, as you constantly separate out the
different masses. You put it through a whole series of cascading centrifuges to get the blend you need.
What this means, in total, is that most of the uranium we mine never sees the inside of a reactor. We
get the uranium, we're constantly separating out the stuff we want from what we do want. We have a lot
of leftover uranium we don't use as well as the uranium we do want to use as a fuel.
If you put this in series, you have many hundreds of thousands of centrifuges. It becomes a pretty big
effort. And you can form this cascade. It ends up being very electricity intensive and therefore is a
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power hog that is easy to spot.
During World War II, at its peak, fuel enrichment in the United States consumed 15% of all electrical
power we generated. This was a huge effort in World War II for the United States. We built dams in
Tennessee and then used those dams to do fuel enrichment at Oak Ridge National Lab. We built dams
in the Columbia River, the Pacific Northwest, and then use those dams to generate power for fuel
enrichment at Pacific Northwest National Labs-- two historic nuclear labs set up because of their
proximity to the dams, because the dams gave the electrical power the need for the enrichment.
All this power consumption leaves a detectable signature. This is what we do when we go look at other
countries and we accuse them of enriching fuels to make weapons. We're watching how much
electricity they use.
And we say, well, we know how much you need to blend and enrich for a reactor versus a weapon. We
think you're blending too much. You're doing too much enrichment.
Nuclear fuel cycles are either open or closed. The open fuel cycle is what the US uses. The closed fuel
cycle is what France uses. In the United States, the open fuel cycle means we mine the ore, we refine
and enrich the fuel, we react the fuel, then we dispose of the waste. So it kind of comes through the
system, and we put it into the ground or store the waste when we're done.
With the closed fuel cycle, the loop is closed. You start with getting the ore, you make the uranium fuel
rods, then you turn the uranium-- after you've used it, put uranium back into fuel rods. So you close the
loop. Instead of just disposing the waste, you reprocess the waste to get more fuel you can use again.
And this has several advantages. One is it actually reduces the volume of the waste that you have to
dispose of significantly. And that waste is not as radioactive as the fissile materials you would use for
the reactors.
So reduce is how long the waste lives and how much you have to deal with, which is good news. The
risk is that in the process you make plutonium. And that raises concerns about weapons proliferation.
While France generates the greatest percentage of its electricity from nuclear-- there it is. Over 75% of
electricity in France is from nuclear. Belgium also does a lot. Ukraine does a lot. A lot of European and
former Soviet Union countries use a lot of electricity from nuclear.
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France generates the highest percentage of any country. The United States actually generates the
most power from nuclear. So nuclear power is only 20% of our mix.
But we are a bigger country with many more people, and we consume more electricity per person. So
the 20% of the US mix is actually is 800 billion kilowatt hours, compared to France, which is 400 billion
kilowatt hours, with its 75% mixed from nuclear. So we are actually the world's leading nuclear power in
the United States. We have about 104 reactors generating 800 billion kilowatt hours per year.
Nuclear power was ramped up in the 1970s and 1980s-- sort of a post-war event. We develop the
technology for weapons in the '40s, then turn it into electrical power. Built a bunch of plants-- we built
132 plants, 28 of which have been shut down.
We still have 104 operational today. And it's been that way since about 1996, when the last plant was
turned on. Then the following year, when one was turned off. So we've had a stable fleet of nuclear
power plants for the last decade and a half or so.
Despite not building more nuclear power plants in the last 15 years or so, the nuclear power actually
continued increasing. Even as power plants are no longer being built, each power plant would get
slightly upgraded with time and improve its performance and efficiencies, so each power plant was
giving us more. In fact, United States, just last month, we hit a new record for nuclear power output in
the United States ever, because we had more plants on than normal, and they were all operating at full
capacity.
So this is one of the stories about nuclear is that the output gets better with time. Even if we're not
building new nuclear power plants, the technologies, the controls, the software, the efficiencies all
improved on site. So we're getting more power out of each plant than we did a few years before.
As we think about nuclear, the economics is a little tricky to evaluate. The financing is complicated, for
example. So one of the challenges of nuclear is that the costs of capital are very high. It's very
expensive to build nuclear, but then it's cheaper to operate-- expensive to build, relatively cheap to
operate. The low-- in particular, nuclear has low fuel costs, which is one of its main advantages.
Well, if you're trying to finance building a nuclear power plant, banks and insurers worry about liability.
They don't understand the technology, so they either charge a higher interest rate or won't offer
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financing at all. The government intervenes to help overcome these financing problems through a
couple policy mechanisms. One is the Price-Anderson Act from 1950's, which offers $10 billion of no-
fault indemnity insurance to help secure financing.
So the US government says, dear banks, if they have a mistake, we'll cover the costs. So please give
them a loan. That law was extended for 20 years in 2005. There's also loan guarantees, where the US
government actually guarantees the loan and says to the bank, if the nuclear power plant company fails
to pay off its loan, we, the government, will pay for it.
So these are interventions by US government to help overcome the financing hurdles, because it's so
expensive to build nuclear power plants. While it's expensive to build the nuclear power plant, it's really
cheap to get the fuel and to operate it. If we look at how the electric generation costs are on a marginal
basis for nuclear, it compares pretty favorably with gas and coal. But the fuel costs are a small part of it.
For coal, about 80% of the costs on a marginal basis are the fuel. And 20% is the operations and
maintenance. For natural gas, a bigger slice is the fuel. Smaller slice is operations and maintenance.
A small slice of the cost for marginal nuclear operation is the fuel. And that includes the conversion of
the fuels, the fabrication of the fuel rods, the waste fund. Every kilowatt hour of nuclear electricity that's
generated has a fee associated with it to deal with the waste later on. That's 0.1 cent per kilowatt hour.
31% is for the enrichment, and 42% for the uranium in the first place.
So the fuel costs are relatively cheap. And it goes for a couple different things. And we built into the fuel
costs waste disposal. So we collected tens of billions of dollars for waste disposal that we're waiting to
use, because we don't know where we're going to dispose of the waste yet.
If we look over our history in the United States, the levelized nuclear costs vary from very affordable to
very expensive, depending on what number you want to use. This is a chart showing 99 nuclear power
plants over the last several decades that have been built in the United States. The cheapest ones are
about $0.03 per kilowatt hour, on average. The most expensive ones are about $0.14 or more per
kilowatt hour.
So if you wish to say nuclear is expensive, you can demonstrate that point, because many of them are.
If you wish to say nuclear is cheap, you can demonstrate that point, because many of them are cheap.
So whether you're an opponent or proponent of nuclear will affect how you interpret this.
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Now basically, no two nuclear power plants are the same. Everyone had a different cost structure. And
in particular, the newer ones, the relatively more recently built nuclear power plants were more
expensive.
Looking forward, the future of nuclear is unclear. A nuclear renaissance is imminent and has been for
years. For example, 2001, there was a new dawn for nuclear power. In 2007, nuclear power was new
age, for example.
And then we had, in March 29, 2009, the coming nuclear renaissance. And then just two months later,
the question was, is the nuclear renaissance fizzling? So this is the question. We've been on the edge
of a nuclear renaissance for a decade at least.
But then there's also this question, has it already fizzled? Is it over? Here's another example. February
2010, the US Department of Energy delivered its first long-awaited nuclear loan guarantee.
The United States government is saying, let's build more nuclear. One week later, Vermont senate
voted to close the nuclear power plant they have in their state. So at the same time, we're building
some nuclear, we're shutting them down. So it feels less like a renaissance and more like we're just
kind of keeping even.
The Energy Policy Act 2005, the United States actually encourages nuclear. It has specific provisions to
encourage the development of nuclear in the United States. Some specific examples include liability
limits, cost overrun support, tax credits, R&D support, as well as it stepping up the DoE work to address
high-level waste. This remains one of the vexing problems for us.
And then this, Fukushima, which some people have declared is the end of nuclear power. Japan is still
struggling to figure out what nuclear power's role will be in the country. Germany's asking the same
question. So is the UK.
So it's sort of this question of, what's going to happen with nuclear in the post-Fukushima world? Well,
many have declared nuclear renaissance under way. In fact, there are dozens of nuclear plants being
built, but not in America, not in the West-- mostly in Southeast Asia, in China, in the Middle East.
Dozens are planned, hundreds are proposed.
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The big question is what industrialized nations will be. Are countries like the US and Japan going to
allow the nuclear power plant permits to expire? Or are we going to build more power plants as a way
to mitigate CO2 emissions? So this remains one of the big open questions from nuclear planning.
I encourage you to do the online exercises to reinforce what we learned in this module. I look forward to
seeing you at the next lecture.
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