IT’S not a great time to be a nuclear reactor engineer. Plants are closing all over the world, even before the end of their usable lives. Most recently, a  project in Cumbria, UK, was mothballed.
In the US, the are . Should the four Westinghouse models under construction in South Carolina and Georgia ever be finished, it’s hard to say who will service them. Westinghouse Electric, their manufacturer and one of the last private companies building nuclear reactors, .
What happened? Just four years ago, we were supposed to be entering a nuclear renaissance. The US had started building its first reactors in 30 years to much fanfare. The Bush and Obama administrations increased spending on nuclear energy R&D by billions of dollars. Radical new designs for the next generation of reactors were supposed to spread safer, cleaner, sustainable energy around the globe.
Advertisement
Instead, we seem to be stuck with a dwindling supply of mid-20th century models. “Even if they finish those [Westinghouse] reactors, they will not be monuments to the nuclear renaissance,” says economic analyst at Vermont Law School. “They will be mausoleums to the end of nuclear power.” Can the next generation of reactors still save the day?
“New reactors will not be monuments to the nuclear renaissance – they will be mausoleums”
Between 1996 and 2016, the share of global electricity generated by nuclear power . The downturn is perhaps surprising given nuclear’s green credentials. The typical nuclear power plant splits uranium atoms in a process called fission, and uses the heat from that reaction to produce steam, drive a turbine and generate electricity. This offers cheap, clean energy – nuclear power plants produce no greenhouse gases or air pollution, they run day and night, and are relatively inexpensive to operate.
Thus, much of their appeal is as a bulwark against climate change. “The last thing you would want to do is lose your largest contributor of non-emitting power,” says John Keeley of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a lobbying group in Washington DC.
That may sound like lobbying enthusiasm, but it is borne out by research published in April by at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in the Tennessee Valley in the 1980s to increased air pollution and lower infant birthweights, a measure of overall health.
Natural experiment
The Tennessee nuclear plant was one of many shut after a partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania in 1979 raised safety concerns. Almost all nearby energy production shifted to coal-fired power plants. That made it an excellent natural experiment to compare the health effects of coal and nuclear. The results were clear: nuclear is a better way to generate energy, not just for the climate but for short-term health. Letting the world’s reach the end of their lifespans without replacing them would have significant consequences.
But for most of the world, building new plants hasn’t been on the cards (see diagram). A few serious nuclear incidents – including at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011 – have put deep dents in public trust of nuclear energy.
The industry’s bigger problem is money. Large reactors like those being constructed in the US typically cost to build. “One of the reasons for the high cost is to make it safe,” says of the University of British Columbia in Canada. “If you think about the cost of cleaning up after a major accident, you will be very happy to have spent that money up front.”
Still, with climate change becoming a more immediate threat, many had already begun to investigate radical new nuclear designs capable of emissions-free energy without safety trade-offs.
The designers of these “” reactors tried to take innovative approaches to safety, moving away from standard ways of making power from uranium – which accounts for most of the safety measures – to like depleted uranium and other materials that don’t require enrichment or reprocessing, reducing proliferation risks. Other safety measures included burying the reactor or simply making them small and modular.
These reactors were moving steadily through the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s approval process, but there has been no sign of them.
Some think the stall is permanent. “The story the nuclear industry tries to offer, is that while old reactors may have been afflicted with problems, the new generation is going to be immune. But while they will get around some, they will also have a new set of problems,” says . “If it were up to me, I would say it’s not worth spending more money on these things, throwing good money after bad.”
“The nuclear industry is sort of riding into the sunset,” he says. “The question is how fast is it going to ride into it.”
Others think reports of nuclear’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The next generation of nuclear reactors is still under development – largely by small companies that are backed by venture capitalists and billionaires like Bill Gates and Peter Thiel. More than 50 “advanced nuclear” companies exist in the US today, according to a report by US think tank .
“This has become a start-up industry,” says Samuel Brinton, an energy analyst formerly at the US Bipartisan Policy Center. “There’s a lot of private work on it, but they’re not building yet.” Most of the companies are aiming to have a working reactor by 2025, and Brinton expects the first wave to hit the market by 2030.
The reason Generation IV reactors won’t be here sooner is the same as for the big reactors: safety regulations and cost. We don’t yet know if that will be a deal-breaker for advanced nuclear.
“This isn’t an app, you can’t just tinker around and see if it works,” Brinton says. “You have a massive amount of regulatory oversight, which means it’s going to be a couple of years.”
Some places will keep building the old models. Adoption is up in Russia and Asia, particularly . Other places will keep their ageing fleet on life support as long as they can. Three plants in New York, each more than 40 years old, will remain operating for another 12 years.
Even if new models do come online, it leaves a long time between the decline of the ageing fleet of nuclear reactors and the emergence of the first credible alternatives.
In the meantime, something will be needed to provide electricity. If municipalities build capacity with ever improving wind and solar devices, which have much lower set-up costs, it could render new nuclear plants unnecessary.
“A next generation nuclear reactor isn’t an app – you can’t just tinker around and see if it works”
There’s even a potential challenge from the nascent small-fusion industry (see “Super nuclear“).
For those who see a nuclear sunset on the horizon, the clearest solution to the problem of both energy production and climate change is renewables. Nuclear energy might be sustainable, in the sense that it will last a long time, but ultimately Earth’s uranium supplies will run out. Not so wind and sun, says Cooper.
“Anyone who wants to buy that small modular reactor can look up in the sky and feel the breeze blowing and know they don’t have to go that route,” Cooper says. “Nuclear is never going to catch up.”
Super nuclear
Last month, former Google executive Mike Cassidy launched a company called , which is “working on a revolutionary fusion hybrid power plant to serve safe, clean, and affordable electricity to everyone”.
Where nuclear fission splits atoms, fusion reactors would fuse deuterium and tritium atoms to make helium nuclei and a stray neutron. Oh, and a massive amount of energy. It doesn’t rely on uranium fuel, which is expensive and dangerous to mine and refine.
For more than 50 years, people have been trying to achieve break-even fusion, after which point you get out more electricity than you put in, and there are other companies working on small-scale fusion.
Apollo Fusion started in a garage. Co-founder Ben Longmier, a nuclear engineer who once worked on spacecraft propulsion at NASA, had an idea for a new kind of fusion reactor while building an ion thruster in a garage laboratory.
“I can’t go into detail about what exactly that is now, but it worked well,” Longmier says. “We ended up generating a little bit of fusion power in the garage.”
Longmier says the company is planning for the first power plant to generate 5 megawatts, which in the US should power a small city.
He isn’t anywhere close to the break-even point. But the payoff for success will be huge. “Whoever cracks this will solve energy for the next thousand years,” Longmier says.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Nuclear holiday”
Article amended on 25 May 2017
Clarification: Since this article was published, we have clarified the details of the Cumbrian project.
