Abstract
International treaties (Kyoto and Paris), EU and national legislation have created a growing demand for a larger share, and overall larger amount of concentrated de-carbonized electricity. With such high stakes, to rely on wind and solar as the only feasible solutions is a strategic error. To address the existential need for more and more energy of our growing and wealthier societies across the world, we argue for keeping the nuclear option open, supported by future revolutionary safe and clean nuclear technologies, which would be acceptable to an otherwise presently mostly nuclear-averse society. This proposal is further supported when one acknowledges the real problem of stewardship of already existing high-grade nuclear waste over time scales eclipsing that of stable societies. To realize this vision, substantial ongoing national and international R&D programs exist, although funding is at historically low levels, and the sufficiency of current policies and activities to meet expected energy demand at an acceptable level of emissions has been questioned. Moreover, in the nuclear industry, there is the risk of stagnation of essential human-capital and know-how. The promising concepts and designs presented in Chap. 6 provide the impulse to get us over the existing hurdles, but the scope is ambitious, and time delay from R&D to commercial deployment in general is too long, stemming in part from regulatory inertia. Therefore, we call for an urgent increase in government and international R&D funding by two orders of magnitude—i.e., of the order of hundreds of billions of USD per year, for an international civilian “super-Apollo” program. We emphasize that such a large-scale public program is not unprecedented in size, and experience indicates that such investments in fundamental technology are not only of immense public benefit but also enable revolutionary innovations to be spun out that would not otherwise ever have been attained.
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Notes
- 1.
The amount of existing wastes is known (about 20,000 cubic meters) and the current rate of production is also known (http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/radioactive-waste-management.aspx). As it stands, is there enough waste in all countries to economically justify the (currently) necessary long term deep geological disposal? It could be argued that producing more waste would actually result in a more proper handling of the existing wastes by requiring the continuity of the required technological expertise. Also, this gives force to the goal of developing new technology to burn these wastes (see Chap. 6).
- 2.
The management of heavy metal wastes also involves very long time scales, see e.g. Raymond A. Wuana and Felix E. Okieimen, Heavy Metals in Contaminated Soils: A Review of Sources, Chemistry, Risks and Best Available Strategies for Remediation, International Scholarly Research Network, ISRN Ecology, Volume 2011, Article ID 402647, 20 pages, https://doi.org/10.5402/2011/402647 (2011).
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- 10.
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One should point out that priorities are not always well thought of. Consider that one car driving 15,000 km a year emit approximately 101 grammes of Sulphur oxide gases (or SOx) in that time. The world’s largest ships’ diesel engines that typically operate for about 280 days a year generate roughly 5200 tonnes of SOx, the equivalent of 52 million cars. Thus, based on engine size and the quality of fuel typically used by ships and cars shows that just 15 of the world’s biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world’s 760 million cars. Low-grade ship bunker fuel (or fuel oil) has up to 2000 times the sulphur content of diesel fuel used in US and European automobiles. And there are about 90,000 cargo ships in operation. Europe, which has some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, has dramatically cleaned up sulphur and nitrogen emissions from land-based transport in the past 20 years but has resisted imposing tight laws on the shipping industry, even though the technology exists to remove emissions. The corresponding added cost to shipping that would follow if higher grade fuel oil was imposed are feared to stymie global commerce and economic growth. Pollution from the world’s 90,000 cargo ships is estimated to lead to 60,000 deaths a year and costs up to $330 billion per year in health costs from lung and heart diseases. (Ellycia Harrould-Kolieb, Shipping impacts on climate: a source with solutions, Oceana (July 2008)) (http://usa.oceana.org/sites/default/files/reports/Oceana_Shipping_Report1.pdf) and John Vidal, Health risks of shipping pollution have been ‘underestimated’, The Guardian, Thursday 9 April 2009.
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- 21.
In its 2011 report (Toxic Air, The Case for Cleaning Up Coal-fired Power Plants, March 2011), The American Lung Association estimated that smoke from coal-fired plants kills about 13,000 people every year in the US alone. Similarly, the “Europe’s dark cloud report” prepared by the WWF European Policy Office, Sandbag, CAN Europe and HEAL in Brussels, Belgium, found that EU’s currently operational coal-fired power plants were responsible for about 22,900 premature deaths in 2013. In the study (P. R. Epstein et al., Full cost accounting for the life cycle of coal, Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1219, 73–98 (2011)), coal costs USD500 billion per year in large part due to health-induced problems. Disaggregating this global US cost figure, the health costs of cancer, lung disease, and respiratory illnesses connected to pollutant emissions total over USD185 billion per year.
- 22.
There are technological and economic logics to put these concentrated sources close to consumers. On the other hand, safety considerations suggest to put these concentrated power sources far from consumers (see however Chap. 6).
- 23.
One of the greatest ironies of the modern era is that OECD energy policies based around wind and solar are in fact locking us into a long-term dependency on gas and coal to provide back-up and load following capability.
- 24.
There are of course significant risks to health due to radioactivity but these tend to be over-estimated in the minds of the public and the politicians thus over-react to cater to the general perception. If we take one of the earliest accidents in 1957 at Windscale, UK, that caught fire and burned for 3 days, creating an INES 5 accident, there was no evacuation. There were no immediate deaths but between zero (K J Bunch, T J Vincent, R J Black, M S Pearce, R J Q McNally, P A McKinney, L Parker, A W Craft and M F G Murphy, Updated investigations of cancer excesses in individuals born or resident in the vicinity of Sellafield and Dounreay, British Journal of Cancer 111, 1814–1823, doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/bjc.2014.357 (2014)) and perhaps 500 early deaths from cancer (J.A. Garland and R. Wakeford, Atmospheric emissions from the Windscale accident of October 1957, Atmospheric Environment 41(18), 3904–3920 (2007)) did occur many years later. This needs to be contrasted with Fukushima in 2011 where the evacuation of ~300,000 people led to immense trauma and a conservative estimate of 573 deaths from suicide since the accident. One estimate places the number of deaths resulting from the evacuation as high as 1600, mainly from the elderly population. Had the evacuation not taken place, all these people would likely still be alive today. However, avoided latent delayed fatalities due to reduced exposure must also be credited. These examples are offered as matter for thought to neither fall in the extreme of over- nor under-reacting. We call for rational scientific approaches to such evacuation decisions, which may have large scale consequences for the public.
- 25.
Gen-II nuclear plants, based on technology from the 1970–1980s, generate significant radioactive wastes, and have been made safer through substantial retrofitting rather than by initial design. Anchoring on the technology and safety record of the early days, and ignoring both the measurable improvements, and that present and future technology can be a game-changer, would lead to excluding what can be considered as one of the most promising energy sources for the twenty-first century and beyond.
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- 30.
Compared to petrol/coal, the specific energy of fissionable material is 1.74–2.78 million times higher respectively, and 16.1 million times higher than (Li-Ion) battery.
- 31.
About 80 MW thermal per cubic meter for current light water reactors.
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Annex
Annex
Box 7.2 The Case of Public Spending (In This Case Military) and Its Role in Fostering Innovation in Silicon Valley
It is useful to reflect on the history and raison-d’être of Silicon Valley, arguably the most innovative place on Earth. Most people associate Silicon Valley with the electronic revolution and the rise of the personal computer. However, its true origin is very different, going back to WWII. The following summarises the synthesis of Blank.Footnote 73
The story starts with the efforts of the Allies to counteract the German Air defense system, the most sophisticated in the world at the time, aimed at destroying the Allies’ planes flying from England towards Germany, through a network of early detection radars. Using this system, the Germans managed to destroy about 4–20% of the Allies’ planes on each mission. In response, the Harvard Radio Research Lab (HRRL), with 800 workers, was secretly founded in 1942 to understand and shut down the German’s radar system. In this way, a drastic change was initiated in the relationship between militaries and universities. Militaries began to directly fund some universities to complement their R&D programs. Frederik Terman, director of the HRRL, set up his own lab in the Stanford School of Physical Sciences in 1945 to research microwaves with 11 key members of the HRRL, which closed after the war. In 1949, the US military approached Terman and doubled the size of the electronic lab in Stanford at the beginning of the Cold War. The goal was the same as during WWII, to understand the enemy’s electronic system and beat it.
The first satellite was launched in 1957 by the Russians. As the race for space played a key role in the Cold War, Silicon Valley was developing the systems for these satellites and acquired valuable expertise in this domain too. Silicon Valley begun to change in 1955 as Terman encouraged his students to leave the university and his lab to create their own companies. The valley became a “Microwave Valley” with the government, including CIA and NSA being the biggest clients of many private companies. The military was funding entrepreneurs to develop and produce technological systems and products for the Cold War. At that time, the main motivation was not profit but winning the technological battle against the USSR. William Shockley, known as the other founder of Silicon Valley, was the inventor of the transistor and had a military background in weapon R&D. He founded Intel and 65 other chip companies, all involved in semiconductors. He really helped to implement new technologies and an entrepreneurial spirit in the Valley. Today, the Valley is full of private capital and the companies financed directly by the military are few.
In 1955, the first companies went public, which attracted the first venture capitalists and some angel capitalists to Silicon Valley. Regulations were adapted such that private capital could take over the role of public funding. And by the end of the Cold War 1991, civilian technology had become the main activity of Silicon Valley. This brief history clearly shows the massive influence of the (American) government investment and legal apparatus on the formation of this highly innovative and productive region.
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Sornette, D., Kröger, W., Wheatley, S. (2019). Potentials and Vision for the Future of Nuclear Energy. In: New Ways and Needs for Exploiting Nuclear Energy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97652-5_7
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