People used to mispronounce the word "nuclear", all the time. It's an easy word to pronounce correctly because it is pronounced exactly the way its spelling indicates that it should be. But a lot of people used to muck it up. For reasons that I never understood the "cle" part would throw them. They acted as if it was actually spelled "cel". Many of those people where public figures who should have known better. And many of them continued to mispronounce the word for years. Where were their aides and assistants?
If you are in favor of nuclear power, as I am, things have definitely improved. At a minimum, the rate at which the word "nuclear" is mispronounced has diminished considerably. But pronouncing the word incorrectly is of minor importance in the grand scheme of things. The good news is that there have been improvements in far more important areas too. But the press has continued to focus what coverage they provide on the less important areas while almost completely ignoring the more important areas.
I dug into this subject in 2020. I put up two good posts, "Sigma 5: A Brief History of Nuclear Power", and "Sigma 5: Nuclear Waste", in that year. I recommend both of them. This post will build on the foundation they lay. As I noted in those posts, there are two kinds of nuclear processes that can be used to produce power, fusion and fission. Power generation using nuclear fission has been a commercial reality since the '50s. It continues in use to this day. Fusion has been "the future of nuclear power" for almost as long.
In practice, each depends on a single fuel. With fission it's Uranium. With fusion it's Hydrogen. Fission based power is an outgrowth of research done to create the Atomic Bomb. One main path to fusion-based power generation is based on research done to create the Hydrogen bomb. The other main path uses a more esoteric approach that is less closely tied to bomb research.
Let's start with the latter. It takes extreme conditions to make two Hydrogen atoms to fuse together to form a single Helium atom. Those extreme conditions exist in the center of all stars including our Sun. Most stars are like our Sun in that the fuel that powers them is Hydrogen. Stars eventually exhaust their supplies of Hydrogen. Our Sun will do so in about 5 billion years. If the star is large enough, and our Sun is, when that happens the star just moves on to using other elements to power the fusion process.
The Sun is gigantic both in terms of its size and in terms of its mass. All that mass is crushed toward the center by gravity. As a result, the center of the Sun becomes a location subjected to extreme heat and pressure. The conditions are extreme enough to cause Hydrogen to fuse into Helium at a substantial rate. That process releases tremendous amounts of energy which, among other things, pushes back against gravity keeping things in balance.
The trick has always been to reproduce those extreme conditions on earth at a much smaller scale and without the need for a star. For a long time, scientists thought there were three "states" of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. Early in the twentieth century a fourth state was discovered, plasma. At first plasma just appears to be gas. But it doesn't behave like a normal gas. That's because the particles of a plasma are electrically charged.
Half of them have a positive charge. Half of them have a negative charge. All the positively charged particles repel each other. All the negatively charged particles repel each other. That should cause the plasma to immediately fly apart. It would if it were a normal gas.
But all the positively charged particles are also simultaneously attracted to all the negatively charged particles and vice versa. That should cause the plasma to smash together, perhaps forming a solid. But under the right conditions the two effects exactly offset each other and achieve a balance. When that happens, a plasma is created.
Creating a plasma takes extremely high temperatures. And various other things must be just right. But if the right conditions can be created and maintained, then a stable plasma become possible. Needless to say, a stable plasma is fraught with extremes. And in this extreme environment high energy collisions are a distinct possibility. And high energy collisions are just what we need to cause fusion.
It didn't take long for scientists to see plasmas as a possible path to a controlled fusion reaction that could be used to create power. One thing that helped is the fact that electricity and magnetism are inextricably intertwined. A moving electric charge creates a magnetic field. A magnetic field can be used to steer the path of an electrically charged particle.
So, the game became finding just the right set of magnetic and electrical fields to get a plasma to do what we wanted it to do, create conditions that caused Hydrogen to fuse into Helium at a fast enough rate to be useful, but at a slow enough rate so that it didn't just blow everything up.
A lot of designs were tried. They all failed. The one that came the closest was a Russian design called a Tokamak. To the untutored eye the part that contains the plasma looks like a donut. All kinds of powerful magnets are wrapped around the outside. The idea is for the plasma to occupy the central area. This is surrounded by a vacuum. Particles can then zoom around in a rough circle while never touching the walls.
The positive plasma particles consist of the nuclei of various isotopes of Hydrogen. The negative plasma particles consist of the electrons that have been stripped from the Hydrogen nuclei. All of these particles are moving at extremely high speed. It is hoped that a few of the Hydrogen nuclei will smash into each other and fuse to create Helium nuclei. The problem of how to collect all of the energy generated by this process and turn it into electric power is being left for a future generation of scientists and engineers to solve.
Over the past few decades, a bunch of Tokamaks have been built. None of them have worked. The plasma can only be maintained in a stable configuration at low density for short periods of time. The amount of fusion, and thus the amount of energy produced, is tiny.
But scientists have seen progress in moving to higher densities and in maintaining the plasma for longer periods of time. Both kinds of progress contribute to more fusion activity and, therefore, more energy production. That has led them to believe that they are making steady progress toward a design that works. One thing that seems to help is size. They hope that a big enough Tokamak can be made to work. The end result of this is ITER, the largest Tokamak built so far.
The ITER project being run by the Europeans. (The U.S. has, so far, made only modest contributions.) The project has consumed billions of dollars and many years so far. It will consume billions more before it is completed several years from now.
If, that is, it is ever completed. (Another delay of two or more years was recently announced.) And, if it works as well as its backers hope it will, it will not be a practical device. It will only be a "proof of concept", a device that paves the way for one that actually works.
If going from the ITER to an actual working device sounds like a long shot, it's because it is. A lot of things have to go well. And, if they do, it will be at least 20 years, and likely considerably longer, before a Tokamak will be used to fuse Hydrogen into Helium in a generating facility that is feeding commercial quantities of electric power to the grid. Let's move on to the next longshot.
I am older than the laser. I remember when the first working one was built. Back then, it's possible uses seemed limitless. A few years later when I was in college (roughly 1970) I remember bumping into a guy who was talking about using lasers to zap Hydrogen hard enough to cause it to fuse.
Back then such a trick seemed like it would be relatively easy to pull off. A laser would be focused onto a tiny spot. If the laser was powerful enough, and if the spot was small enough, both of which sounded possible, then it should be able to feed enough energy into the Hydrogen to initiate fusion. And fusing a tiny amount of Hydrogen into Helium would be all that was needed to produce a tremendous amount of energy.
As with creating and maintaining a suitable plasma, the problem turned out to be way harder than anyone expected. The early experiments were a bust. But technology kept getting better. More powerful lasers. Advances in focusing. For a while it looked like the goal was within reach. But it gradually became apparent that it was not. At least not without access to a giant test facility costing billions of dollars. And the funding for such a facility was just not there.
Until it was. To its credit, the ITER was built from the ground up for the expressed purpose of using a plasma to make Hydrogen fuse into Helium. The giant laser test facility that eventually got built was built to address an entirely different need, a military one. Whereas it is almost impossible to get billion dollar sized chunks of money approved for civilian projects, the military has long since figured out how to pull that off. And they have done it multiple times. They've even done it for projects that are complete boondoggles.
The project, called Nuclear Stockpile Stewardship, was not the first expensive boondoggle the military has sold the White House and Congress on. Nor will it be the last. Let me outline the specifics. The U.S. signed a treaty outlawing the testing of nuclear weapons. That was a good thing. But billions of dollars had been flowing annually into the design, construction, and testing of nuclear weapons. Not surprisingly, defense contractors (and others) wanted all that money to keep flowing.
So, they started talking up the idea that our stockpile of nuclear weapons would fall apart and stop working if nothing was done. They do need maintenance. But their actual needs are modest. But that's not the story the military, defense contractors, and their buddies in congress pushed. All kinds of extraordinary (and expensive) measures were desperately needed or terrible, just terrible, things would happen to our nuclear stockpile.
So, a project called Nuclear Stockpile Stewardship was added to the Defense budget and billions of dollars started flowing its way every year. One of the projects funded by this largess was the National Ignition Facility (NIF). Ginormous lasers would be built and used in clever ways to simulate nuclear explosions. The facility was situated at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, often facetiously referred to as Los Alamos West.
A vast quantity of money was spent, and the facility was built. It brought together 192 gigantic lasers, individually among the most powerful lasers ever built. They could all be focused on a tiny target. Most "shots" would be used to test various aspects of nuclear weapon development and maintenance. But it is a unique facility, one that has by far the most powerful (and expensive) set of lasers available anywhere. They could be used to do laser fusion research, so they occasionally were.
The possibility of using the occasional NIF "shot" to do laser fusion research was lost on no one. So, pretty much from the start it has periodically been used to run various laser fusion experiments. One of those tests recently made a big splash in the press. "Scientific breakeven" had been achieved. It was big news only because the field has had little positive news to report for many years now.
Mostly, what we have heard about has been yet another instance of a project getting delayed (ITER) or going further over budget (pretty much everything in the field including ITER). Scientific breakeven was a positive achievement for a change, but a modest one.
The fact that they had to add "scientific" in front of the word "breakeven" kind of gives the game away. Breakeven is easy to understand in this context. You put a certain amount of energy in, and you get at least as much, and hopefully a lot more, out. In this case 2.05 something (it doesn't matter what) units was put in and 3.15 of the same units came out. They achieved a gain of a little more than 50%.
That's not very impressive, but it beats the alternative. A similar experiment run a year earlier had put 1.8 units of the same something units in and gotten only 1.3 units out. The process went backwards to the tune of about 30%. To roughly double the output (going from a gain of about 70% to a gain of about 150%) required several tweaks to the setup and about a year of work to pull off.
To get from "scientific" breakeven to actual breakeven will take a lot, because truly impressive accounting tricks had to be employed in order to allow the word "breakeven" to be used at all. The facility as a whole is less than 1% efficient. For every one unit of laser energy that hits the target, more than a hundred units of energy is used just to fire the lasers.
But wait. It's worse. No energy conversion system is 100% efficient. Less than a third of the energy in the gas a car burns ends up being used to move the car down the road. So only a fraction of the fusion energy will eventually end up as electrical energy. All told, the laser fusion process needs to be made about a thousand times better in order to put the process into the ranger of practicality. The current result needs to be doubled, then doubled again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again to get us to where we need to be.
Here's another problem. If a NIF shot had been able to produce the desired amount of output energy it would have destroyed the chamber containing the Hohlraum. So, NIF can't even be used to get to true breakeven. Most likely a whole new facility using different and better technology will need to be built. Such a facility is likely to cost many billions of dollars. That's bad but let me give you a tiny bit of good news.
The NIF is not designed and optimized for laser fusion purposes, so it is not very good at it. In laser fusion mode it is a multi-stage process. The lasers don't actually hit the ultimate target, a tiny bead of frozen Hydrogen. The bead is contained within a small complex package called a Hohlraum. It has a hollow, cylindrical shape. The ends are partially but not completely closed. But wait. There's more.
The 192 laser beams enter the Hohlraum through holes in the ends and strike its inner wall. The inner wall material is chosen to produce copious amounts of X-Rays when struck by the NIF's laser beams. These strike the bead, which actually consists of several different layers. The Hydrogen at the center of the bead is compressed and flooded with X-Rays. Only X-Rays have the energy necessary to initiate the fusion process. And the NIF lasers are not X-Ray lasers.
It is possible that a facility that was designed from the get-go to do laser fusion would not need so many layers and so much indirection. That's the good news. The bad news is that the NIF is a "one shot at a time" facility. And the turn-around time between shots is measured in days. To be practical as a wholesale source of electric power, many shots per second will be necessary. Finally, like the current ITER, NIF includes no means for gathering the energy produced and turning it into electricity. As a result, multiple generations of new facilities will likely be needed.
The reason all this harkens back to Hydrogen bombs is that's how they work too. An Atomic bomb is exploded. Its design has been optimized to cause it to produce copious amounts of X-Rays. The X-Rays are directed at a reservoir of Hydrogen. Flood a Hydrogen reservoir with enough X-Rays and fusion ensues.
As with ITER, don't expect anything practical to emerge from laser fusion research in less than twenty years. As the old saying goes, "fusion is the energy source of the future, and always will be". I hope fusion power production eventually makes the transition from Science Fiction to reality, but I'm not holding my breath. Fortunately, there is an atomic energy source of the present. All we have to do is find the will to take better advantage of it.
Let me start my tour of the current state of nuclear fission as a source of electric power with a recap of the big-three accidents. The Three Mile Accident happened in 1979. No one was killed. The public was never put into danger because the radioactivity that was released was confined to the containment building.
As I noted previously, other than the accident itself, everything worked exactly as it was supposed to. And over the subsequent years the containment building has been cleaned up and all the highly radioactive components hauled off to "disposal" sites like the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. A little more about the accident itself.
The design used for the reactor generates Hydrogen gas. Normally, this is easily and safely vented off. But the valve that malfunctioned and failed to open was the one that was supposed to vent the gas. This failure trapped the Hydrogen gas in the reactor vessel. Hydrogen is light so a bubble formed at the top. The bubble eventually grew big enough to push the cooling water down to below the top of the Uranium/Zirconium rods. They overheated and things went south from there.
Three Mile Island sparked a change in instrumentation. The '50s-style "diagram on the wall" system was supplemented by computer assist. That should eliminate the possibility of a repeat. Similar reactors have all been upgraded to include computer assist. They have operated safely in the decades since. So, as I noted previously, this was only a financial disaster.
The second of the big-three is Chernobyl. It happened in 1986. The atomic "pile" in a squash court at the University of Chicago that played an important role in the development of the original Atomic Bomb was the basis for the design. The reactor vessel was a large cylinder. It had a strong floor and was covered by a lid that weighted thousands of tons. Blocks of a couple of different types of material were stacked inside in a carefully designed pattern.
One type of block used was made of graphite, a kind of carbon, so essentially coal. When the idiot operators performed their experiment things heated up and some of the graphite blocks caught fire. Soon there was a giant bonfire going on in the reactor vessel. At various points the Uranium blocks got rearranged in patterns that caused the chain reaction to speed up.
It is unclear how much was caused by the burning graphite versus the chain-reacting Uranium. But early on the lid was blown clean off. This gave the graphite access to lots of oxygen, and it burned furiously. Eventually, things cooled down, likely after the graphite had all burned off.
But while the fire was going the Venturi effect had thrown large amounts of highly radioactive material into the air. Large amounts of radioactive material settled on the ground close to the reactor. Tiny amounts of radioactive material eventually spread as far as Sweeden. This is not surprising because radioactive material is detectable at extremely low concentrations. Sweeden and its population were put in no danger by this tiny amount of radioactivity.
A containment structure was hastily built. It proved to be no match for the weather. Several years later a larger, more elaborate, and more expensive structure was put in place. It secured the reactor building and all the radioactive material it still contained. That was most of it. But far too much radioactive material had drifted away. The material that had settled in the immediate vicinity had done so in a high enough concentration to be actively dangerous. The new containment building did nothing to mitigate that danger.
At the time of the accident a large "exclusion zone" was put into place to deal with the areas of high radiation. Everybody was evacuated. It is still there. Its boundaries have changed little since 1986. There are still no people living there. But this has let plant and animal life thrive in every part of the exclusion zone. It turns out that people are more of a threat to plants and animals than even high levels of radioactivity.
I am going to skip over the modern history of Chernobyl other than to note that it is now in Ukraine, an active war zone, and move on to the third big disaster, Fukushima. It took place in 2011. There the reactor design was similar to Three Mile Island, but for various reasons it did not include a super-strong Three Mile Island style containment vessel. And in some ways Fukushima was a repeat of Three Mile Island.
In both cases Hydrogen built up. In the case of Fukushima things went on long enough for far more Hydrogen to build up. Eventually, this caused explosions. Without the super-strong containment vessel, the explosions were strong enough to blow the roof off of reactor buildings. There was no Hydrogen explosion that large at Three Mile Island. There the roof remained intact.
The Fukushima facility included several nuclear reactors. The operators of that facility were well aware of the possibility of Hydrogen explosions and what the likely result would be. The plan covering such a possibility was to vent the Hydrogen off well before it reached dangerous levels.
It's just that the damage caused by the earthquake and Tsunami was so extensive that they couldn't do that. Had Hydrogen venting been possible, then little or no radioactivity would have spread to the civilian areas that surrounded the facility.
At Three Mile Island the reactor was never successfully SCRAMmed. If it had been, then nothing bad would have happened. All the reactors at Fukushima were successfully SCRAMmed. (This happened after the earthquake hit but before the Tsunami struck the facility.) But there was no power to circulate cooling water in the days that followed.
Eventually the Hydrogen built up (there was no power to run the valve that controlled venting) and things heated up. Explosions ensued. They were insignificant by nuclear standards. But they were powerful enough to further damage the plant and to throw a considerable amount of radioactive material into the air.
The Japanese immediately implemented a large exclusion zone. As the people on the receiving end of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Atomic bombs, the Japanese were hypersensitive to any possible exposure of the general population to heightened levels of radioactivity. As a result, there were no civilian casualties associated with Fukushima.
It is possible that one or more plant employees were exposed to enough radiation to kill them or damage their health. But I know of none. It is safe to say that radiation fatalities associated with Fukushima were likely confined to single digits. And it is possible that the single digit was zero.
Japan is a capable nation. But they were hampered by the widespread death and destruction that was caused by the earthquake and tsunami and which had nothing to do with Fukushima. 20,000 people were killed by these twin disasters. Many billions of dollars' worth of damage was inflicted. The damage included critical infrastructure like power lines.
All things considered it is remarkable that they were able to get the site under control within only a few months. But by that time, it was in terrible shape. For instance, they were forced to resort to flooding some areas of the plant with water. That was the only way to cool the reactors and keep things under control.
As a result, they ended up with a tremendous amount of contaminated water. Their short-term solution was to store this water in tanks on site. But as time has passed, they have literally run out of space. They are solving this latest problem by resorting to "solution by dilution".
They plan to slowly pour the contaminated water into the ocean. Various people have objected to this. But they tend to be the types that believe in the fantasy that there is a zero risk/cost option out there. But there isn't. The nay sayers also have no idea just how big the ocean is.
There are 1.3 million tons of contaminated water currently being stored on site. That sounds like a lot. But if it is poured into the ocean at the rate of only one cubic meter per second it will take less than three years to dispose of all of it. And ocean water is never completely still. It is always moving.
Let's say it is poured into a part of the ocean with a current traveling at a walking pace. That's three kilometers per hour, not very fast. But even at that slow rate the radioactive water will travel about 500 KM per week. After only a week it should have been diluted to a ratio of a billion to one. The ocean is large. Much of it is miles deep. 500 KM is only a short distance when it comes to traversing the ocean.
The farther the radioactive water travels, the more dilute it will become. And that's why I am confident that no harm will come from depositing that amount of radioactive material in the ocean. Experience with the current methods used to store nuclear waste tell us that something needs to be done, and sooner rather than later.
Back to Chernobyl for a moment. It is impossible to say how many casualties there were there. Then as now the Russians are not a reliable source of this kind of information. Plant personnel were killed. A small team of experts purposely risked their lives to explore and monitor what was going on inside the building. That was critical information that could be gotten in no other way. Some of them died. Others suffered serious health effects.
Soldiers were brought in during the first few days and deliberately put into extreme danger as part of the effort to get things under control. It is likely that some of them died, and others suffered serious health effects. And the evacuation was slow. So, it is possible that some civilians suffered serious health effects.
The highest estimate I have seen that comes from a credible source puts likely Chernobyl related deaths at a few thousand. Other estimates are lower. These estimates include both short term and long-term fatalities. Of course, many times the number who die will suffer mild to severe health effects. But even for people who lived in the immediate vicinity of Chernobyl at the time of the disaster, a list of the top 100 health hazards they should be concerned with would not include the disaster.
All three of these disasters, but particularly Fukushima, had a large impact on society as a whole. At the time of the Fukushima disaster, Japan had about 80 nuclear power plants. Japan is resource constrained. Those nuclear plants allowed Japan to reduce by a large amount the quantity of fossil the fuels they needed to import and consume. But Japan decided to shutter all its nuclear plants after Fukushima anyhow.
And it wasn't just Japan. France and Germany, two other countries that had decided for reasons similar to Japan's to depend heavily on nuclear for power generation, announced plans to also drastically reduce or shutter their nuclear power plants.
Soon, the only place where new nuclear power plants were being built was China. By this time China had terrible air pollution problems. A major contributor were the many coal-fired electric power plants they had built. China is still building nuclear power plants. Unfortunately, they are still building coal plants too.
I was pretty depressed by the general situation when I wrote the posts I linked to above. Fortunately, things have since changed for the better. Why? War and pestilence. But before moving on, a final observation. As noted above the Chernobyl design was abandoned as a result of the disaster. Fukushima highlighted the fact that SCRAMming a reactor of that type was not enough. It was important that the reactor cooled down completely come hell or high water.
The need for a "passive cooldown" capability was well known. It's just that before Fukushima the need didn't seem that great and the expected cost, once legal wrangling was factored in, seemed too high. Fukushima might have driven the industry in the direction of producing new nuclear power plants that included passive cooldown. Instead, things went in another direction. They built no new plants and started shutting down the old ones.
Incorporating passive cooldown into the design of a nuclear power plant is simply an engineering problem. It doesn't matter whether the design is an old one or a new one. Either way, there are no great technical challenges. It is simply a matter of deciding to do so.
On the other hand, retrofitting the feature into an already built facility would be fantastically expensive, if it was even possible to do at all. But for a new plant the design and increase in construction costs are relatively modest. In spite of this no commercial reactor that incorporated this feature was built. Why? The anti-nuclear movement.
A new design, or a significant modification to a current design, automatically triggers a review. And a review opens the process up to litigation. The anti-nuclear people are past masters at engineering long, drawn out, and expensive cycles of litigation whenever they get a chance. The certainty of being tied up in a decade of expensive litigation had to be balanced against the perceived benefit by the industry.
The industry perceived that the benefit was small. Neither Three Mile Island nor Chernobyl had had any cooldown problems. In both cases the infrastructure surrounding these plants had remained intact and in good operating condition. The power necessary to complete the cooldown process had been readily available. At Fukushima it was a different story. But remember, Fukushima would not have happened absent a record-breaking earthquake coupled with a record-breaking Tsunami.
Back when I wrote the two posts I referenced above, the situation was tightly locked in. The anti-nuclear forces were strong and well organized. The opposition was weak and disorganized. Under their relentless barrage of attacks nuclear power plant designs were frozen. Construction ground slowly to a halt everywhere but in China, a country where the government was powerful enough to suppress the anti-nuclear movement.
But things were changing, even if it wasn't apparent at first. Global Warming started out as a concern limited to certain circles of the scientific community. Word slowly spread from there. Then Al Gore hit the lecture circuit with an excellent presentation on the subject. He turned his presentation into a compelling movie in 2006. The movie garnered enough buzz to attract the interest of the general public. They went to see it in droves.
The public interest the movie created soon led to a backlash. The backlash was initially led by various groups of science deniers. Then the fossil fuel industry, most notably Exxon Mobile, started secretly funding various disinformation initiatives. Conservatives started thinking "if liberals like Gore are for it, then we are against it".
But the evidence kept piling up. The impacts caused by Global Warming kept getting larger and more noticeable. More and more people were impacted. Severe weather events got not only more severe but more frequent. Glaciers, some of which were near built-up areas in Europe and elsewhere, shrank noticeably or even disappeared completely. There was push back from doubters and deniers. But it soon became nearly impossible to find a glacier that was growing.
Large population areas began routinely suffering from severe floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, extreme snowfalls, fires, etc. Bad weather caused power blackouts, massive disruptions to transportation systems, and other activities that added up to far more than just the occasional inconvenience. "Hundred year" extreme weather events became an annual occurrence. All the stuff that Gore had warned about started happening.
Eventually, a turning point was reached. It became nearly impossible to deny that Global Warming was real and that it was having a large negative impact on people. People still didn't want to do anything because they rightly believed that "the fix" would be uncomfortable, inconvenient, and expensive.
People imagined that "the fix" would a larger and more intrusive version of what happened the two times in the past century when OPEC cut the U.S. off from their oil wells. People had to suffer through blocks long gas lines. They were expected to dump their big, cheap, gas guzzler car that was fun to drive for a small, more expensive model that was supposedly more practical, but was also not nearly as fun to drive. And when things returned to normal, somehow gas was a lot more expensive.
But the Global Warming problem could no longer be ignored. That led to a search for mitigations that were cheap and pleasant. Elon Musk came out with an electric car that was cool and fun to drive. It was too expensive for most people, but it introduced the idea of electric cars as a positive experience rather than a negative one.
Solar Panels and Wind Turbines kept getting cheaper. They have been the cheapest way to generate electricity for several years now. They have made it possible to shut down dirty coal fired power plants while saving money. Switching from getting our electricity from burning fossil fuels to green solutions might actually save money rather than costing it.
That started giving people hope. Hope that it was possible to fix the problem. Hope that the problem could be fixed at reasonable cost. Hope is not the same thing as reality. But having a reason for hope that is based in reality and not fantasy took away a lot of the negative pressure.
And the cost of doing nothing keeps getting higher and higher. Floods, Hurricanes, and other weather extremes were literally wiping out people's homes, livelihoods, their whole way of life. There were real, large, and highly visible costs associated with doing nothing. That has led to an increase in positive pressure, pressure to do something about the problem.
COVID put everything on hold for a couple of years. To put it mildly, it was a major disruptor. After COVID the amount of change people were comfortable with increased tremendously. COVID was not caused by Global Warming. COVID didn't even made Global Warming worse or more likely. But it was a sharp reminder of how interconnected everything is and how change is sometimes forced on us whether we like it or not.
And then Russia invaded Ukraine. More accurately, they resumed the invasion they had begun in 2014. It's been a long time since the world has seen a major War. Ukraine is not a World War, at least not yet. But it was also not an Iraq or Afghanistan sized war. In those wars the primary weapons were the AK-47 and the IEDs.
Ukraine is a war involving real armies using state-of-the-art weapons with tremendously greater range and destructive power. One of them can take out a whole building, not just a few people or a single vehicle. The amount of havoc being wrought, and the swiftness with which it is being dealt out, have been shocking to many.
And the Ukraine war is not being fought in some less developed corner of the world. It is being fought in a modern country on the edge of Europe. And it is a "good guys (Ukraine) versus bad guys (Russia)" type of war. People often lose track of how often in the postwar period Americans and Europeans have supported some corrupt autocracy against a group of "freedom fighters".
Whether they actually were or weren't freedom fighters was often unclear. But they were almost always the indigenous population of the area in dispute. In the case of the war in Ukraine it is the Ukrainian people who are the indigenous population in the area under dispute. And they are opposing the Russians, who are indisputably the foreign invaders.
In 2014 the Russians tried to make a case that there was significant support for Russia's actions among the local population in the areas they took control of. But there was no local faction that had risen up and invited them in. On the other hand, a lot of people living in the areas Russia occupied in 2014 had strong cultural ties to Russia and saw the Ukranian government of the time as corrupt and suspect. So, the case the Russians were trying to make at that time was dubious but not completely lacking in merit.
The extent to which the people living in the areas Russia occupied in 2014 still feel positively toward Russia is now an open question. The Russian occupation makes it impossible to learn the true feelings of those people. But there is no dispute that when Russia resumed military operations in 2022, they were trying to gain control of areas where they had little or no local support. It was a land grab, pure and simple.
Wars take place in a geopolitical context. Europe saw Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a serious threat. There wasn't much they could do in 2014 due to the precarious nature of the Ukrainian government at the time. But by 2022 Ukraine had a different government, one that was willing and able to effectively oppose Russia. This gave the Europeans actual options. Not everything became possible, but a lot did. For instance, the Europeans did not want to go to war with Russia. But they were happy to supply Ukraine with all kinds of assistance, including military assistance.
One of the geopolitical considerations was that in early 2022 when the war started Europe was heavily dependent on Russia for oil and gas. Theoretically, Russia could close the valve on either or both at any time. Russia, of course, depended heavily on the money these sales brought in. So, an important question became "how much damage was Russia willing to inflict on its own economy?" In any case, it now seemed to be in Europe's interest to move away from Russian oil and gas.
But the whole reason the Europe had gotten into bed with the Russians in the first place was because there were few alternatives to Russia given the amount of fossil fuels that Europe wanted to consume. As soon as the war started Europe started scrambling to find alternative sources. That effort has only been partially successful. That made it obvious that what they really needed to do was to substantially reduce their consumption of fossil fuels. They needed to go green.
Not that long ago there seemed to be little or no reason to stick with nuclear power plants. But nuclear plants produce no greenhouse gases. And they don't depend on what Russia is up to. As the Ukraine war ground on European countries started shelving their plans for shutting down nuclear power plants. In fact, it seemed like a good idea to get some of the mothballed plants back online.
A similar thing happened in Japan. The environmental cost of burning fossil fuels was becoming more apparent. And Japan was not spared from extreme weather events. So, the economic case for going green kept getting stronger and stronger. Plans to mothball Japanese nuclear power plants are now on hold. Whether they will restart any mothballed units, or build new ones, are still open questions. But both of options are no longer off the table.
And then there's the U.S. We are energy independent. But we don't want to see the Russians succeed in Ukraine. We have poured tens of billions of dollars into Ukraine's war effort. We, and the Europeans, have now gone through several cycles of "we can't provide Ukraine with 'X' because it will cross a red line", only to reverse ourselves as the war drags on and start providing 'X'.
At the same time extreme weather events in the U.S. have become routine. So, here too the anti-nuclear side of the argument is no longer seen as being the zero cost one. That has drastically changed the calculus that surrounds the construction of nuclear power plants. It hasn't changed completely yet, but it is moving the U.S. away from an anti-nuclear position.
For instance, for the first time in decades there are two new nuclear power plants under construction. They are Georgia Power Plant Vogtle unit #3 and unit #4. Both units are scheduled to come online this year (2023). One (#3) should be online by the spring. It only has a couple of hoops left to jump through so that is likely to happen. The other (#4) has more hoops left to jump through, so it is still several months (and several possible delays) away from coming online.
These plants are the large, multibillion dollar projects we are used to when it comes to nuclear power plant construction. There have been the usual delays and cost overruns. Assuming lessons have been learned, similar plants should be cheaper and quicker to build.
But the result will still be large and very expensive projects similar to what we have seen in the past. They are not game changers, except in the sense that they are actually getting built. They managed to defeat the anti-nuclear forces in the courts.
A more interesting project is NuScale. It is the furthest along of several projects that are taking similar approaches. It has managed to jump through some but not all of the regulatory hoops necessary to actually construct a nuclear power plant. It is currently scheduled to go online in 2029. I expect that schedule to slip, possibly substantially.
NuScale is not business as usual in the nuclear power business. It is one of several efforts to build small modular nuclear plants that differ substantially from the traditional design. The new designs all aim to have modest siting requirements. The idea is to eliminate the customization inherent in the current process. That should save money. A NuScale power plant would be modular. As would the others. A plant would consist of several small, standardized modules that could be produced assembly line fashion. That too is supposed to save money.
Each effort uses a different, more efficient, process to convert the energy released by nuclear fission into electric power. Several approaches are being put forward. All are quite different from the current approach. All are also supposed to produce less nuclear waste.
If successful, the NuScale approach would be a game changer. If it fails, then maybe one of the alternatives will succeed. It will be several years and several billion dollars before we know if NuScale will succeed in delivering on its many promises. It will be even longer before we know how the others will fare.
But the need for green electric power becomes more urgent every year. And, for a change, nuclear power is looking better and better every year rather than worse and worse.
