The Obama administration's planned loan guarantee to build the first nuclear power plant in the U.S in almost three decades is part of a broad shift in energy strategy to lessen dependence on foreign oil and reduce the use of other fossil fuels blamed for global warming.
President Barack Obama called for "a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants" in his Jan. 27 State of the Union speech and followed that by proposing to triple loan guarantees for new nuclear plants. He wants to use nuclear power and other alternative sources of energy in his effort to shift energy policy.
Obama in the coming week will announce the loan guarantee to build the nuclear power plant, an administration official said Friday. The two new Southern Co. reactors to be built in Burke, Ga., are part of a White House energy plan that administration officials hope will draw Republican support.
Loan guarantees for other sites are expected to be announced in the coming months, the official said, who would speak only on condition of anonymity ahead of Obama's announcement. The federal guarantees are seen as essential for construction of any new reactor because of the expense involved.
If the GOP really is something more than the nihilistic party of no that our friends Bruce Bartlett and Andrew Sullivan so vigorously accuse it of having become, this is something the GOP ought to back. Nuclear power has proven successful in many countries (see, e.g., France) and, of course, in our own Navy.
Speaking of our Navy, my one complaint is that Obama has opted to go the traditional route of loan subsidies. There's a better route. The federal government ought to be building pebble bed reactors on government land (such as military bases):
The pebble bed reactor (PBR) is a graphite-moderated, gas-cooled, nuclear reactor. It is a type of Very high temperature reactor (VHTR) [formally known as the high temperature gas reactor (HTGR)], one of the six classes of nuclear reactors in the Generation IV initiative. Like other VHTR designs, the PBR uses TRISO fuel particles, which allows for high outlet temperatures and passive safety.
The base of the PBR's unique design is the spherical fuel elements called "pebbles". These tennis ball-sized pebbles are made of pyrolytic graphite (which acts as the moderator), and they contain thousands of micro fuel particles called TRISO particles. These TRISO fuel particles consist of a fissile material (such as U235) surrounded by a coated ceramic layer of SiC for structural integrity and fission product containment. In the PBR, 360,000 pebbles are amassed to create a reactor core, and are cooled by an inert or semi-inert gas such as helium, nitrogen or carbon dioxide.
This type of reactor is also unique because its passive safety removes the need for redundant, active safety systems. Because the reactor is designed to handle high temperatures, it can cool by natural circulation and still remain intact in accident scenarios, which may raise the temperature of the reactor to 1600°C. Because of its design, its high temperatures allow higher thermal efficiencies than possible in traditional nuclear power plants (up to 50%) and has the additional advantage that the gases do not dissolve contaminants or absorb neutrons as water does, so the core has less in the way of radioactive fluids.
A number of prototypes have been built. Active development is ongoing in South Africa as the PBMR design, and in China whose HTR-10 is the only prototype currently operating.
And, as I have proposed before, we should create a Naval Corps of Nuclear Engineering to run them:
The Navy already operates dozens of small nuclear reactors in aircraft carriers and submarines, with an outstanding record of safety and reliability. They have an established training program that churns out nuclear-capable officers.Why not, indeed?
By analogy to the Army Corps of Engineering, we could create a Navy Corps of Nuclear Engineering. It would build and operate dozens of small nuclear power plants around the country. To address security concerns, the first plants would be built on military bases, where the garrison can provide security. Licensing costs would be cut because the government would own and operate the plants.
The proposal should not offend small government sensibilities. Nuclear power is rife with market failures (and government failures). Huge research and development costs associated with traditional large scale nuclear power plants may be beyond the ability of private firms to finance. In addition, we know that private firms tend to underproduce the sort of basic R&D necessary to develop new generations of power plants. But the Navy already spends money to develop new naval reactors, which presumably could be scaled up at reasonable costs. Since the Navy need not worry about earning market competitive rates of return on its investment in R&D, moreover, there's no economic disincentive to conducting that sort of R&D in the Navy.
Private utilities are subject to state utility regulators who notoriously meddle, typically to "protect" consumers from rate increases, but usually with the outcome of making plants nonprofitable. A federal Naval Corps of Nuclear Engineering presumably would be outside the scope of state regulation.
Private utilities used cost-plus contracting when building nuclear power plants--with all its notorious problems--because there were serious problems of incomplete information when dealing with large scale, non-standardized plants. Smaller, standardized plants should be amenable to fixed price contracts.
Private parties have a hard time adequately insuring against very low probability but very high magnitude events. Since the taxpayer likely would ultimately be on the hook anyway, why not have the government own the plant and self-insure? And profit from selling electricity?
Another advantage of my proposal is that lots of military bases are brown field sites that would require mega-investments in environmental cleanup before being converted to civilian use. So why not build a nuclear plant there?
So I'd say Obama's half right. Oddly, however, this time I think his problem is that he's leaning too much on the private sector. The Navy knows how to run small nuclear reactors. Small nuclear reactors are the future of the industry. Why not put them together?
