Part 8
By Peter Cary, Contributing Writer
Two issues scared people away from nuclear energy in the 1970s: safety and waste. As nuclear energy gets front-burnered again, where do those two issues stand? And is the recent much-publicized breakthrough in fusion energy going to bring safer, cleaner power soon?
Nuclear’s Accident Track Record
The United States has posted 56 nuclear accidents over 70 years, with accidents defined as incidents that either caused death or more than $50,000 in damage.
The most infamous was the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Middletown, Pennsylvania. The failure of a relief valve resulted in a huge regional evacuation in 1979 but no injuries or deaths. Though catastrophe was thwarted, the incident stalled the nuclear power movement in the country for decades.
In Virginia, in 1979 at the Surry Nuclear Station, failed parts brought a $12 million shutdown and repair. In 1986, a feedwater pipe break there killed four workers. And two years later, a seal failure closed a Surry unit for a year.
In 2002 the Davis-Besse plant near Oak Harbor, Ohio, was shut down for two years when corrosion wore a football-sized hole in the reactor vessel head, nearly causing a loss-of-coolant accident.
The most spectacular nuclear accidents have occurred abroad. The Chernobyl disaster near Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1986, killed 30 area residents and spread radiation across Western Europe. A steam explosion at the Mihama nuclear plant in Japan killed four workers and injured seven in 2004. In 2011 an earthquake’s tsunami disabled Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant, resulting in an evacuation of 100,000 residents and an estimated death toll of 1,000.
While these and other accidents have brought more stringent safety regulations, earthquakes, tornadoes and human error still pose threats. Just last year, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission cited Dominion Energy for human errors that resulted in foreign matter clogging a relay that took one of North Anna’s two emergency generators out of service for three months. (If the plant loses off-site power, generators kick in.)
Ed Lyman, director of nuclear power safety for the Union of Concerned Scientists, expects to see more accidents with small modular reactors or SMRs because there will be many more of them, and they will be more vulnerable to earthquakes, forest fires and floods than the more remotely-placed old units. If they are used to power individual data centers, more will be located in densely populated areas.
He noted that the NRC is relaxing its rules regarding nuclear reactor radiation containment vessels, population exclusion zones, evacuation plans and armed security protection – all of which would increase the danger from SMRs.
“The NRC remains focused on efficiently enabling the safe use of nuclear power, including detailed licensing reviews of advanced and small modular reactor designs,” said NRC spokesman Scott Burnell. He added that SMRs will have to meet the NRC’s requirements for withstanding severe events, isolating waste from the environment, and staying safe from cyber and other human threats.
Even the disposal of nuclear waste presents challenges. If high-level nuclear waste is transported or stored, it must not be vulnerable to interception by criminals or terrorists who could use it to make a “dirty” bomb – that is, a bomb that would spread the radioactive material over a large area. Re-processing spent fuel for re-use is also a concern, as the process separates out the plutonium from the uranium.
“That’s the part of the fuel cycle that is of the most proliferation concern, because it can lead to plutonium,” said Cindy Vestergaard, former director of the Nuclear Safeguards program at the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C. “And plutonium has two uses: one is energy, and the other is direct use for nuclear weapons.”
“At the end of the day, no matter how this current administration relaxes the NRC’s approach, there are still going to be environmental regulations at the state level, at the community level, and a town hall process,” said Vestergaard. “If you don't have buy-in, it's not going to happen.”
In a method developed in 1986, cooled used fuel has been stored in casks on site on concrete pads. Under a new system, the casks are stored in steel-reinforced concrete bunkers. The sides and tops are 3- to 4-feet-thick to withstand disasters. Photos courtesy of Dominion Energy.
The Waste Quandary – Still Not Solved
When it comes to nuclear reactors, the United.States faces a serious problem: It has no proper place to store the waste they create.
The exhausted nuclear fuel stays highly radioactive for tens of thousands of years and must be securely isolated. The best place to dispose of it, experts agree, is very deep underground.
“The nation has over 90,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants,” the U.S Government Accountability Office wrote in a recent report. In Virginia, 3,124 metric tons are stored at Dominion Energy’s North Anna and Surry reactor sites–the weight equivalent of 1,038 Tesla Cybertrucks.
The U.S. Department of Energy “is responsible for disposing of this high-level waste in a permanent geologic repository but has yet to build such a facility….,” the GAO reported. “As a result, the amount of spent nuclear fuel stored at nuclear power plants across the country continues to grow by about 2,000 metric tons a year.”
As the United States nuclearizes its energy production, that amount will only increase.
In a typical big nuclear reactor, like the two at Dominion Energy’s North Anna plant, finger-size uranium pellets (the fuel) are contained in hundreds of 12- to 16-foot-long metal tubes stacked close enough to promote fission. Over time, the pellets produce less heat but become more radioactive. After roughly 18 months, the tubes and their pellets are replaced.
The spent fuel rods are placed in racks in a deep “swimming pool” in a building onsite. After a year, the rods will have lost most of their heat and radioactivity and are transferred to dry, 20-foot-tall storage casks. Photos of North Anna show more than two dozen white casks standing on a long concrete pad.
Dry casks are stored at 70 reactor sites in 34 states, according to a U.S. Department of Energy video.
Ideally they next would be deposited in a deep underground storage site. But the only site proposed by the DOE, at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, was halted by the Obama administration in 2010 due to unsolved geological issues. Since the U.S. government does not have a waste disposal site as is required by the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, it has paid billions of dollars to commercial nuclear reactor companies to store the waste.
Part of the excitement over so-called small modular reactors – reactors producing less than 300 megawatts that can be built in factories – is that they may produce less waste.
But two studies suggest that hype is overblown. One 51-page study of three commercial SMR designs, done by scientists at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory in 2022, found that SMRs will produce roughly the same amount of waste per kilowatt as big conventional reactors.
“All told, when it comes to nuclear waste, SMRs are roughly comparable with conventional pressurized water reactors, with potential benefits and weaknesses depending on which aspects you are trying to design for,” senior nuclear engineer Taek Kyum Kim said in a summary.
The same year another study of SMR waste was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Our results show that most small modular reactor designs will actually increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal, by factors of 2 to 30 for the reactors in our case study,” wrote lead author Lindsay Krall, then at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.
Like the Argonne researchers, Krall’s team studied three designs: water-cooled, sodium-cooled and helium-cooled. One problem they found is that the United States has not developed ways to manage radioactive liquid sodium, which can combust in contact with water or air. “Those exotic fuels and coolants may require costly chemical treatment prior to disposal,” wrote co-author Allison Macfarlane.
One development that may address the waste problem, however, is a new effort to recycle it for re-use in reactors. Oklo, which is also working on a model SMR at Idaho National Laboratory, announced in September that it would spend $1.7 billion to build a plant near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to turn nuclear waste back into fuel. A company called Curio Energy, headquartered in Washington, D.C., is looking to build a similar plant.
Critics say that similar efforts in Britain and Japan have proven unsuccessful and that the process can produce weapons-grade plutonium, a high security risk. Oklo says its SMRs could run on plutonium, and the DOE reportedly is interested in having Oklo turn plutonium nuclear weapons cores into commercial reactor fuel.
Seventeen nuclear experts sent a letter to Congress in July warning that such projects could “foster the spread of sensitive nuclear weapons-related technology.”
What Will the Big Fusion Breakthrough Bring?
People have been saying that nuclear fusion is just around the corner for decades. And now they are saying fusion is... just around the corner. Do we hold our breath or not?
The company racing to build a fusion plant near Richmond says they'll have it pumping out electricity in six or so years.
Another company in Everett, Washington, is aiming for 2028.
But a lot of experts say we won't see commercial fusion until the 2040s at the earliest.
"It’s going to take another 15 or 20 years or so after the first commercial plants come online to truly make a dent—and that’s a rapid, optimistic timeline," energy analyst Charles Boaky told Fortune in October.
Still, that doesn’t stop would-be providers of fusion energy from betting big. Among them is a company called Commonwealth Fusion Systems. It is trying to commercialize an advance in fusion science that occurred at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2022, when scientists were able to get atoms to fuse and produce more energy than it took to make the reaction happen.
Now the company is racing to develop a small working model of a fusion reactor called SPARC, in Devens. Massachusetts., 30 miles west of Boston, and hoping to use that technology to build a big commercial reactor called ARC to feed power to the grid in Virginia by the early 2030s.
Skeptics abound, as the science is mind-boggling. SPARC will use super magnets to create and constrain a cloud of hydrogen-based particles and heat them to 100 million degrees Celsius – hotter than the core of the sun – so the particles can fuse and release more energy than it took to contain them. Critics note that SPARC is not expected to even demonstrate that it can do this until 2027, and that the fusion experiments that have produced energy so far have lasted only seconds.
Current nuclear reactors and SMRs use fission, or the splitting of uranium atoms, to release energy. But fission plants create waste and risk leaking radioactive material. The fusion process produces minimal waste and the risk of a runaway fission reaction is nil.
Scientists had been trying for decades to get a fusion reaction to produce more energy than it takes to initiate it. Finally, in 2022, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory were able to bombard a pellet of deuterium and tritium with lasers and get the results they wanted.
Some nuclear experts, noting the newness of the technology and its serious challenges, think the world will not see widespread commercially-viable fusion until at least 2040. At this point, there are no fusion plants feeding into power grids anywhere on the globe.
Still, at least two dozen companies and labs around the world are working on fusion models. One under development in Oxfordshire, England, by Tokamak Energy hopes to connect to the UK grid by 2030. The biggest is being built by an eight-country consortium in France, which is now slated for initial operation in 2039.
Last December, Dominion Energy announced that it was partnering with Commonwealth Fusion Systems to build a 400-megawatt fusion plant to be called ARC on Dominion-owned property along the James River south of Richmond. Commonwealth hopes to have the Virginia plant running by the early 2030s.
Helping its schedule is the fact that the NRC has determined that it did not have to issue licenses for fusion plants. However, the project would need several state permits like any large industrial project, plus a radioactive materials license from the Virginia Department of Health. The Commonwealth said in July that it has begun filing permits and holding community meetings.
Power consumers are signing up. On June 30, Google signed a deal with Commonwealth to buy 200 megawatts from ARC. Earlier, in 2023, Microsoft signed a deal with another would-be fusion energy provider, Helion Energy of Everett, Washington, to buy 50 megawatts from a plant it hopes to have running there by 2028.
Still, as with Dominion Energy’s plan to generate 1.3 gigawatts of SMR power by 2039, adding 400 megawatts of fusion power by 2030 would do little to help the problem: The Mid-Atlantic needs to add 32 gigawatts of power – and probably more – in five years, and at least 62 more by 2035.
You can reach Peter Cary at pcary@fauquier.com.
