*EPF512 07/28/00
Text: Nuclear Power Use May Reduce Emissions, Global Warming
(Energy expert advises renewed focus on nuclear energy) (6250)

Unless new, more prudent energy-supply systems are employed worldwide, global carbon emissions will increase sharply, resulting in serious climate change implications, said John P. Holdren, a professor at Harvard University and director of the Kennedy School's Program on Science, at a July 25 Congressional hearing.

"If the United States and the world continue to careen down the path of energy 'business as usual'-content to assume that tomorrow's energy-supply system can be much like today's, except larger-we will pay for this complacency with higher energy costs and lower energy security, slower economic growth, excessive environmental impacts, and increased international tensions in the decades ahead," said Holdren who is also a member of the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).

The impact on climate has already been detected. Holdren said that over the last century, there has been an increase of about 1-degree Fahrenheit in mean global surface temperature, accompanied by ocean warming and higher sea levels. He reported that according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) an increase of 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit in mean global surface temperature will occur by 2100 if the world continues with "business as usual" energy consumption.

Energy requirements will only continue to increase, so alternatives to carbon-emitting energy sources must be found, this Harvard scientist said. "Every effort needs to be made to develop and improve all of the non-carbon-emitting options to the point where they would become usable for meeting a part of the [energy] requirement, because no subset of the options can be shown, today, to be affordable and acceptably expandable to the degree needed to do the job," Holdren said.

In order to consider nuclear energy as a significant non-carbon-emitting source, Holdren estimated that the world would need somewhere between 2800-3500 nuclear reactors, increasing the current 350 reactors in operation by almost ten-fold.

To achieve global manageability, Holdren said nuclear energy costs would have to become competitive with alternative non-carbon-emitting sources. In addition, it would be necessary to attain a high level of safety, to address radioactive-waste management, to minimize links between nuclear energy and nuclear arms, and to gain widespread public acceptance.

The following terms are used in the text:

--billion: a thousand million

--exajoules: One exajoule (1018 joules) equals 0.95 quadrillion Btus or 22 million metric tons of oil equivalent. A joule is the absolute meter-kilogram-second unit of work or energy equal to approximately 0.7375 foot-pounds. A foot-pound is a unit of work equal to the work done by a force of one pound acting through a distance of one foot in the direction of the force.

--FY: fiscal year

--Pu: plutonium

--trillion: a million million

Following is the text of Holdren's testimony:

(begin text)

IMPROVING U.S. ENERGY SECURITY AND REDUCING GREENHOUSE-GAS EMISSIONS: WHAT ROLE FOR NUCLEAR ENERGY?

TESTIMONY OF JOHN P. HOLDREN FOR THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE

U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

JULY 25, 2000

MR. CHAIRMAN, MEMBERS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: I am John P. Holdren, a professor at Harvard in both the Kennedy School of Government and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Since 1996 I have directed the Kennedy School's Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy, and for 23 years before that I co-directed the interdisciplinary graduate program in Energy and Resources at the University of California, Berkeley. Also germane to today's topic, I am a member of President Clinton's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and have served as chairman of PCAST studies addressing "The U.S. Fusion Energy R&D Program" (1995), "Federal Energy Research and Development for the Challenges of the 21st Century" (1997), and "The Federal Role in International Cooperation on Energy Research, Development, Demonstration, and Deployment" (1999). A more complete biographical sketch is appended to this statement. The opinions I will offer here are my own and not necessarily those of any of the organizations with which I am associated. I very much appreciate the opportunity to testify this afternoon on this timely and important subject.

Liabilities of Energy "Business As Usual"

If the United States and the world continue to careen down the path of energy "business as usual" - content to assume that tomorrow's energy-supply system can be much like today's, except larger - we will pay for this complacency with higher energy costs and lower energy security, slower economic growth, excessive environmental impacts, and increased international tensions in the decades ahead. Specifically:

-- The United States - and many other countries as well -will be increasingly dependent on oil from the Middle East...and correspondingly vulnerable to externally imposed price hikes and supply disruptions. The potential for armed conflict over access to oil supplies will grow.

-- The regional air-pollution impacts of fossil-fuel combustion, while perhaps kept within manageable limits in the United States by increasingly sophisticated and costly "end of pipe" pollution control, will grow alarmingly in many other parts of the world, spilling increasingly across national boundaries and even across oceans.

-- Disruption of global climate from the atmospheric buildup of heat-trapping gases -above all carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel combustion - will become the dominant environmental problem of the 21st century, imperiling the productivity of farms, forests, and fisheries, rendering many of the world's cities increasingly unlivable in summer, putting coastal property and wetlands at risk from rising sea level, and imposing a panoply of other adverse impacts on human health, property, and ecosystems.

-- Economic growth will be curtailed and economic aspirations frustrated -especially in the developing countries but also to some extent in the industrialized ones -by constraints on the growth of energy supply imposed by rising monetary and environmental costs and by disputes over energy choices and facility siting.

Compared to what could be achieved by prudent policies to develop and deploy a more economically affordable, environmentally tolerable, and publicly acceptable energy-supply system, the economically poorer and environmentally more afflicted world resulting from energy business as usual would be characterized by fewer and smaller markets for U.S. goods and services, a higher level of international tension and conflict affecting U.S. interests, and more spillovers of environmental and social miseries across U.S. borders (in addition to the adverse impacts generated strictly within our country).

Appreciation of the magnitude of the challenge of changing our energy future begins with understanding of the character of the energy-supply system today:

-- In 1998, the world's 5.9 billion people used about 440 exajoules of primary energy, 35 percent of it from oil, 23 percent from coal, 20 percent from natural gas, 6 percent from nuclear energy, 2 percent from hydropower, and 13 percent from biomass fuels. The most striking feature of this picture is the overwhelming continuing dependence of world energy supply on the fossil fuels -78 percent of the primary energy coming from oil, coal, and natural gas combined.

-- About 30 percent of primary energy in 1998 was used to generate electricity, yielding 13.6 trillion kilowatt-hours. Fossil fuels accounted for 63 percent of this electricity production, nuclear energy for just a sixth of it.

-- The United States, with 4.5 percent of the world's population but 21 percent of world economic product, accounted for 23 percent of global energy use and 27 percent of electricity generation. U.S. fossil-fuel dependence was even higher than that of the world as a whole - 87 percent of primary energy and 70 percent of electricity generation. Nuclear energy generated 19 percent of U.S. electricity.

The "business as usual" projection for the future evolution of this picture is based on the assumption that the key variables change on about the same trajectories as in the recent past, adjusted for expected patterns of economic development. Thus: population growth rates continue to fall, reaching zero population growth by the end of the 21st century; economic growth rates are high in the first third of the century and decline slowly thereafter; the energy intensity of economic activity (primary energy use divided by GNP) declines worldwide at about 1 percent per year throughout the century; and the carbon-emissions intensity of the energy system (emissions of carbon divided by primary energy) falls at about 0.2 percent per year. In addition, the fraction of primary energy used for electricity generation continues to grow slowly. Under these business-as-usual assumptions:

-- World population reaches 8.5 billion in 2030 and 10.3 billion in 2060 before leveling off at just over 11 billion by 2100. Nearly all of this growth occurs in the developing countries.

-- World energy use reaches 2 times the 1998 level in 2030, 3 times in 2060, and more than 4 times in 2100. Electricity generation is 4 times the 1998 level in 2060 and 5 times in 2100.

-- Emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel combustion, which amounted to 6.1 billion metric tons of contained carbon per year in 1998, reach 11 billion tons per year in 2030, 16 billion tons per year in 2060, and over 20 billion tons per year in 2100.

Growth of energy use in the industrialized countries is expected to be considerably slower than in the developing ones. Energy use in the United States under business as usual would be perhaps 40 percent greater in 2030 than in 1998, and 80 percent greater in 2060. The fossil-fuel share of the U.S. total could actually increase under business as usual, however, because the nuclear contribution declines from nuclear-plant retirements that are not replaced by new nuclear capacity. And U.S. oil imports are expected to grow under business as usual: the "reference" scenario of the U.S. Energy Information's Annual Energy Outlook 2000 shows imports rising to 17 million barrels per day by 2020, up from 10 million barrels per day in 1998.

As I noted in hearings on U.S. oil-import dependence held by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in March, it should be a matter of particular concern that

[T]he fraction of U.S. oil imports (and everybody else's) coming from the OPEC cartel and, within it, from the politically volatile Persian Gulf is more likely to increase with time than to decrease. Currently, the United States gets half of its oil imports from OPEC and half of that amount - a quarter overall - from the Persian Gulf. Worldwide, OPEC accounts for 43% of world crude oil production and 62% of the oil traded internationally, but holds 78% of the world's proved oil reserves. The Persian Gulf alone has almost 30% of world production, 43% of exports, and 65% of proved reserves. That OPEC and the Persian Gulf hold larger shares of reserves than of current production and exports means that their shares of production and exports are likely to increase over time. The prospect of increasing dependence on these unpredictable partners for oil imports - and not just by the United States but also by our friends and some of our potential adversaries - is not reassuring in either economic or national-security terms.

Climate Change as the Most Demanding Challenge

If the oil-import picture for the United States and the world in the decades ahead is unsettling, the climate-change implications of the steep continued rise of global carbon emissions under business as usual are positively alarming. The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide in the year 2000 is nearly 33 percent above its pre-industrial value - 370 parts per million by volume (ppmv) compared to 280 parts per million in 1750 - and there is no doubt that this increase has been mainly due to human activities (initially deforestation, but increasingly and overwhelmingly, over the past 100 years, fossil-fuel burning). The changes in the Earth's climate now being experienced, moreover - an increase in mean global surface temperature of about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past century (with substantially larger increases in mid-continents and at high latitudes), accompanied by a corresponding increase in the vigor of the hydrological cycle, a warming of the oceans to depths of thousands of feet, and an increase in mean sea level of 4-10 inches since 1900 - correspond closely with what climate science predicts should be expected from the observed carbon-dioxide increases, taking into account the effects of other human influences on the atmosphere and what is known about the natural variations in the sun's output.

Continuing along the business-as-usual trajectory of fossil-fuel burning and carbon emissions would lead to an atmospheric concentration of 550 ppmv - twice the pre-industrial concentration - by between 2050 and 2060, and more than 700 ppmv by 2100. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the work of which has engaged the efforts of a substantial fraction of the world's most respected scientists in fields related to climate change and its impacts, this business-as-usual continuation of the carbon dioxide buildup would be likely to entail:

-- a further increase of about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit in mean global surface temperature by 2100, with mid-continent temperatures in the United States averaging 4.5 to 7 degrees F warmer than today's by mid-century;

-- a further increase of perhaps 20 inches in mean sea-level (which would continue to rise for centuries thereafter), with devastating impacts on low-lying lands and coastal property;

-- changes in precipitation patterns (including frequency of floods and droughts), storm tracks, and extremes of temperature and humidity, accompanied by

-- "wide ranging and mostly adverse impacts on human health, with significant loss of life"; and

-- "negative impacts on energy, industry, and transportation infrastructure, human settlements; the property insurance industry; tourism; and cultural systems and values."

In the unlikely event that civilization continued on the business-as-usual trajectory through the year 2100, moreover, it would be difficult if not impossible to turn things around rapidly enough at that point to stabilize the atmospheric carbon dioxide content at less than a quadrupling of its pre-industrial value. This would be likely to entail twice the temperature changes of a doubling, drastic disruption of oceanic circulation and eventual multi-meter increases in sea-level, severe impacts on soils and agriculture, and so on. It is impossible to contemplate such a prospect with equanimity.

The 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was signed and ratified by the United States and more than 170 other nations, commits the parties to pursue "stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." While there is as yet no formal or informal agreement on the carbon dioxide concentration that would meet this criterion, I believe the evidence of disruption even at today's concentrations and the size of the changes projected to accompany a doubling mean that no target above a doubling can possibly be justified and that an even lower one is ultimately likely to be agreed.

As an illustration of the size of the challenge posed for the world energy system by the climate problem, then, let me dwell for a moment on the size of the deflection from the business-as-usual trajectory that would be required to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide at twice its preindustrial level, or about 550 ppmv. The IPCC's analyses indicate that, in order to reach this stabilization target, emissions would need to start falling below the business-as-usual trajectory by no later than about 2015 and would need to be declining in absolute terms by about 2035, after reaching a peak no higher than 10 or 11 billion tons of carbon per year. By 2100, the emissions would need to have fallen back to about the 2000 level - about 6 billion tons per year - and they would need to continue to decline thereafter, falling eventually to about a quarter of that level.

Under any imaginable scenario of future energy requirements, achieving such an emissions trajectory will entail a huge expansion in the amount of energy that must be derived from non-carbon-emitting energy sources, consisting of renewables, nuclear fission and fusion, and advanced fossil-fuel technologies that can capture and sequester the carbon from these fuels rather than emitting it to the atmosphere. For the 550-ppmv stabilization trajectory to be achieved in parallel with business-as- usual growth in world energy supply, for example, about 15 times as much energy would have to come from the non-carbon-emitting energy sources in 2100 as is being obtained from this class of sources today.

Reducing the growth of energy use below the business-as-usual trajectory can alleviate but cannot eliminate the expansion requirement for the non-carbon-emitting sources. The least controversial way to achieve this is to increase the rate of reduction of the energy-intensity of economic activity (energy/GNP ratio) from its business-as-usual level, by means of more rapid development and implementation of energy-efficiency improvements. If energy intensity could be reduced at an average of 1.5% per year over the 21st century, as opposed to the 1% per year assumed in the business-as-usual scenario, then energy requirements in 2100 would be only 60 percent as large as under business as usual, for the same size economy. This would cut in half the expansion needed from the non-carbon-emitting energy sources between 2000 and 2100, from about 15-fold to about 7.5-fold. If energy intensity could be reduced by 2% per year over the whole century, the energy requirement in 2100 would be only 36 percent as large as the business-as-usual figure, and the non-carbon-emitting sources would need to be expanded only about 3-fold.

Reducing population growth rates below the business as usual assumptions would also be helpful in meeting carbon-reduction targets (and for many other reasons). If the world population in 2100 were 8 billion rather than 11 billion plus, this would considerably reduce energy requirements in general and the needed expansion of non-carbon-emitting sources in particular (although not quite proportionally, inasmuch as most of the reduction in population growth would be in countries where per-capita energy use is below the world average).

I believe that seeking to reduce the energy intensity of economic activity by 2% per year on a world-wide and century-long basis is a desirable target, as is seeking to hold the year-2100 world population to 8 billion. But success is not assured in either of these endeavors, and a middle-of-the-road performance might be considered to be 1.5% per year average reduction in energy intensity and a year-2100 population of 9.5-10 billion. The expansion that would be needed in non-carbon-emitting energy sources over the course of the 21st century would then be something in the range of a factor of 7 (from about 100 to about 700 exajoules per year). I propose in any case to use this figure as a rough benchmark for what may be required. I emphasize that the increment required from these non-carbon-emitting sources in this case - an extra 600 exajoules per year by 2100 - is about a third larger than world energy supply from all sources in the year 2000.

The Contribution of Nuclear Energy

The size of this "benchmark" requirement for the expansion of non-carbon-emitting energy sources in the 21st century is so large as to make plain, even without further analysis, that no stone should be left unturned in the search for economically affordable, environmentally tolerable, politically acceptable ways to meet the challenge. Every effort needs to be made to develop and improve all of the non-carbon-emitting options to the point where they would become usable for meeting a part of the requirement, because no subset of the options can be shown, today, to be affordably and acceptably expandable to the degree needed to do the job. This was an important part of the rationale of the 1997 and 1999 PCAST energy panels in recommending a portfolio approach to U.S. Federal energy R&D and international cooperation on energy-technology innovation, in which all of the major sets of technological possibilities - end-use efficiency improvements, renewables, advanced fossil-fuel technologies, fission, and fusion - are included. (This is not the same as saying that all of the options will succeed equally in the contribution they ultimately make, or even that all will succeed at all, but only that prudence requires making investments in trying to maximize the capabilities and minimize the liabilities of all of them, so that society can choose the actual mix of options to be deployed from a menu that has been made as complete and as attractive as it can be.)

What are the prospects for nuclear energy to play a significant role in meeting this largest of 21st-century energy challenges - as well as in meeting the more immediate challenge of limiting the oil-import dependence of the United States - and what could be done to improve those prospects?

To address first the shorter-term issue of limiting U.S. oil-import dependence, the prospects for nuclear energy in this role are not very good, for two reasons:

-- First, the potential for additional electricity generation of any kind to displace oil directly is quite limited. In 1998, oil generated only 3.6% of U.S. electricity, and doing so accounted for only about 3% of U.S. oil consumption (about 600,000 barrels per day). Electricity can also displace oil through the electrification of some of the end-uses that oil serves, such as replacing residential oil-fired heaters with electric heat pumps and shifting commuters out of their cars and into electricity-powered public transit systems. The latter has so far proven very difficult to achieve on a large scale, however, and the former represents only a modest market nationally: home heating with oil uses only about 1.1 quadrillion Btu per year, corresponding to an average of some 500,000 barrels per day if pro-rated over the year. The other leverage of the electricity sector against oil consumption is indirect, through the potential of alternative electricity options to displace natural gas from electricity generation, enabling the gas freed up by this to displace oil in the industrial, residential, and transport sectors.

-- Second, and even more seriously, nuclear energy is not in a position to increase its contribution to U.S. electricity generation at all in the short to medium term. As the 1997 PCAST report noted

No new fission power plant has been ordered in the United States since 1978. Utilities have shut down operating plants before the end of their licenses, and more plants are likely to be closed as the electric utility system becomes deregulated. The outlook is that no new nuclear plants will be built in the United States in the next 10 - or perhaps even 20 - years.

This situation is above all a result of economics: Electricity from a new nuclear power plant in the United States would cost 5-6 cents per kilowatt-hour, even assuming the plant could be built and licensed on the kind of expeditious timetable that has characterized the French and Japanese nuclear programs in the past but not the U.S. one. By comparison, electricity from new combined-cycle natural-gas-fired power plants in the United States typically costs 3-3.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. No U.S. electric utility would buy a nuclear plant under these conditions, even in the absence of the controversies and uncertainties that have surrounded reactor safety, siting, and radioactive-waste management in this country.

Of course, the price of electricity from natural gas will probably go up in the future (because gas gets more expensive and/or because fossil-fueled plants are forced to control or pay for their carbon-dioxide emissions); and improvements in reactor design might bring the price of nuclear-generated electricity down. (These possibilities are discussed further below, in the context of nuclear energy's potential contributions in the longer term.) In the meantime, the only potential leverage on nuclear energy's contribution to U.S. electricity generation has to do with slowing the rate of decline of nuclear capacity by extending the operating licenses of some of the existing plants. If no licenses are extended and if, as the Department of Energy estimated for the 1997 PCAST study, 5 percent of the existing plants shut down before the end of their initial licenses, U.S. nuclear capacity will fall to half of its current value by 2020 and will be essentially zero by 2030. If, on the other hand, 75 percent of the plants received 20-year license renewals, half of the current capacity could still be operating in 2035, and it would be 2050 before the contribution from this generation of power plants became negligible. The difference between these two scenarios represents a substantial amount of fossil-fuel burning - or a substantial extra demand for renewable electricity generation - in the period between 2010 and 2050. This motivated the 1997 PCAST recommendation of Federal funding of $10 million year, to be matched by industry, for R&D addressing problems that might prevent continued operation of the existing plants.

With respect to the larger and longer-term dimensions of the problem of expanding the contribution of non-carbon-emitting energy sources not only in the United States but worldwide, the question is what factors will determine whether nuclear energy can be greatly expanded in the course of the next 50 to 100 years - a quite different question from asking what would be needed merely to maintain its contribution at something like current levels. In this context, a sense of the size of the expansion one is talking about can be gained by asking what it would take for nuclear to provide something like a third of the non-carbon-emitting energy that will be needed by the year 2100. If one uses the "benchmark" value derived above for this non-carbon-emitting requirement - 700 exajoules per year - then a third of it would be about 8 times larger than the 28 exajoules per year converted to electricity in nuclear reactors in 1998. A similar answer is obtained if one asks how much nuclear energy would need to expand in order to be providing one third (instead of today's one sixth) of total electricity supply, after this total has expanded to 4-5 times today's level: twice the share of a 4- to 5-fold bigger total means an 8- to 10-fold expansion.

Today's global nuclear electricity-generating system is equivalent to about 350 reactors of 1,000 electrical megawatts capacity each. Thus a future nuclear system big enough to be significant in terms of the projected need, by the above definitions, would need to be equivalent to 2800 to 3500 reactors of this size. To give a further sense of the scale of the operation:

-- If 10 times the 1998 nuclear electricity generation were to be obtained from light-water reactors typical of today's, operating on once-through fuel cycles, the uranium mining requirement would be 540,000 metric tons of uranium annually, the annual uranium-enrichment requirement would be 400 million separative work units, and the spent-fuel to be discharged and disposed of would be some 70,000 metric tons of heavy metal per year, containing roughly 700,000 kilograms of plutonium.

-- If the same amount of nuclear electricity were to be generated instead by fast-breeder reactors of contemporary design, recycling their plutonium, the uranium-mining requirement would be negligible and the enrichment requirement zero, but the 30,000 metric tons per year of spent fuel discharged would contain about 5.5 million kilograms of plutonium, which would flow through fuel-reprocessing and fuel-fabrication plants.

Is a global nuclear-energy operation of this scale feasible? Manageable? Desirable? Answering in the affirmative requires, in my view, that nuclear energy be able to meet the following conditions:

-- nuclear electricity-generation costs being competitive with alternative non-carbon-emitting electricity sources;

-- attaining and maintaining a very high level of safety in all nuclear-energy operations;

-- addressing the problem of radioactive-waste management in a way that is both technically adequate and politically acceptable;

-- minimizing linkages between nuclear energy and nuclear-weapons capabilities; and

-- gaining widespread public acceptance for such a large expansion of nuclear energy's contribution.

Let me elaborate very briefly on these five items:

Cost compared to other electricity sources is, as noted above, a major obstacle in the short term in regions where fossil fuels or renewables are inexpensive. In the longer run, climate concerns will make fossil fuels costlier, and the least expensive renewable options will be limited by the availability of good sites. While it would be a benefit if advanced nuclear energy systems were cheaper than today's, this may not be a prerequisite for a major nuclear contribution over the course of the 21st century.

Reactor safety is adequate for modern Western reactors in a world with a few hundred of these, but it would need to be improved 10-fold or more in a world of a few thousand reactors. Such an improvement is likely to require increased reliance on "passive" as opposed to "active" safety systems. This is probably practical, and might even reduce costs overall while speeding licensing and improving public acceptance.

Radioactive wastes must be shown to be manageable without significant worker or public radiation exposure in the short to medium term, and with the expectation of a substantially problem-free permanent solution in the long term. I believe the long-term problem is technically soluble, but convincing not only the technical community but also the public that it has been solved for a particular geologic-disposal site - in somebody's "backyard" - may take some decades. Building engineered interim-storage facilities capable of storing all the wastes safely in the meantime is practical and desirable for a number of reasons, as long as doing this does not derail the needed work on geologic repositories for the long term.

Proliferation resistance of nuclear energy systems must be increased by a combination of technical and institutional means. In the short term, this will involve avoiding use of highly enriched uranium, minimizing inventories of separated plutonium (by minimizing reprocessing and maximizing disposition), and improving protection and safeguards for all stocks of these materials. In the longer term, it will require either (a) avoiding plutonium recycle indefinitely (using, e.g., uranium from sea water), or (b) developing recycle technologies that do not separate plutonium completely from fission products, and/or (c) placing all enrichment and reprocessing facilities in internationally operated and guarded complexes.

Public acceptance of expansion of nuclear power will require not only that all of the foregoing conditions be met but also that the public be confident they have been met. This in turn requires that the institutions operating and regulating nuclear power cultivate a culture of competence, responsibility, honesty, and transparency, and that the opportunities for public participation in nuclear decision-making be increased.

Of the first four conditions, the most difficult to address adequately and the one most likely to undermine public acceptance and the ultimate expandability of nuclear energy, in my view, is proliferation resistance. I believe, further, that in order to minimize the chance of proliferation disasters linked to fission energy in the short run it would be best if all nuclear-energy-generating countries agreed to postpone reprocessing of spent fuel and recycle of plutonium for at least the next few decades. (The Carter Administration decision to advocate this position, much reviled by many nuclear-energy proponents then and since, was right then and is even more right now.) There is no sound economic, resource-availability, waste-management, or nonproliferation argument for reprocessing now or soon - and very strong nonproliferation reasons not to do so. The time gained by postponement can and should be used both to strengthen nonproliferation institutions and to explore advanced technologies that would make reprocessing less proliferation-prone as well as less emissions- and waste-intensive (or that would postpone the need for it indefinitely, as would the demonstration of economic extraction of uranium from sea water).

Many arguments are heard in favor of reprocessing and recycle - particularly from the Europeans, Japanese, and Russians (all of whom are either doing it or hoping/planning to do it) - but I do not believe any of these arguments are persuasive. Here is my capsule analysis:

Economics: Recycling plutonium in light-water reactors is much costlier than once-through use of low-enriched uranium fuel, and it is likely to remain costlier for at least the next few decades. (Uranium would have to be about ten times more expensive than it is today for reprocessing/recycle to compete with the once-through fuel cycle using low-enriched uranium fuel.) Recycling in breeder reactors using current technologies would be even costlier.

Resource conservation: Uranium is abundant, which is reflected in the economics. If prices reflect true costs (including environmental costs), then saving uranium only makes sense if it saves money - which today and for a long time to come it most emphatically will not.

Energy security: The major suppliers of uranium in the world market are diverse geographically and politically, and unlikely to collude to raise prices or limit supplies. If supply disruption is nevertheless a concern, a "strategic" reserve of uranium fuel would be inexpensive to buy and easy to store. The most likely source of disruption of nuclear-energy supply comes not from fuel availability but from the possibility of a major accident or proliferation incident anywhere in the world, which could shut down nuclear power everywhere; such an event is made more likely, not less likely, by reprocessing and recycle.

Environment: Reprocessing/recycle increases worker and public radiation exposures and increases accident risks, while not significantly reducing the burdens of radioactive-waste management. Reprocessed high-level waste has less volume than direct-disposed spent fuel, but it has similar heat and radioactivity (which govern repository size and hazard); and reprocessing/recycle generates additional categories of wastes that add to the waste-management burden.

Nonproliferation: Reprocessing and plutonium-fuel-fabrication plants are difficult to safeguard, and separated Pu is at risk of theft by proliferant states and subnational groups as well as risk of diversion by its owners. Some say reprocessing is needed soon in order to limit accumulation of Pu in spent fuel, which might later be accessed to make weapons (even by "mining" this spent fuel out of geologic repositories). But mining spent fuel is a credible proliferation hazard only in the long term (if at all), after most "easier" sources of bomb material have been eliminated (if this in fact occurs) - and even then the only serious risk would be host-state diversion, not theft by others. Reprocessing soon to address this distant, speculative, and narrow danger would add to larger and more diverse proliferation risks in the short term - a bad trade.

Spent-fuel management: It is sometimes argued that countries need to reprocess because they have insufficient capacity for interim storage of the spent fuel being generated by existing reactors, and no permanent geologic repository yet in operation. Reprocessing is then the most expeditious way to get the spent fuel out of the way (it is said). But, given the high costs and risks of reprocessing using current technologies, it would be cheaper and wiser to construct additional interim storage capacity for spent fuel.

The PCAST Recommendations

Although the foregoing analysis is my own, it is fair to say that largely similar considerations motivated the recommendations relating to fission energy in the 1997 PCAST study of U.S. Federal Energy R&D. That study recommended, in particular, that in order to clarify and improve the prospects for nuclear energy to make a growing contribution to the energy challenges of the 21st century, the Department of Energy should fund a Nuclear Energy Research Initiative (starting at $50 million per year in FY 1999 and increasing to $100 million per year by FY 2002), which would competitively select among proposals by researchers from universities, national laboratories, and industry that address issues including proliferation-resistant reactors and fuel cycles; new reactor designs with higher efficiency, lower cost, and improved safety; low-power reactors; and new techniques for on-site and surface storage and for permanent disposal of nuclear waste.

The 1997 PCAST study also recommended an increase in the funding for R&D on fusion energy, which although it remains far from commercialization today could conceivably make a large contribution to nuclear electricity generation in the second half of the 21st century. (A 1995 PCAST review of the U.S. fusion program had recommended that fusion funding be stabilized at $320 million per year. It had fallen, nonetheless, to $225 million by FY 1998, and the 1997 PCAST recommendation was to ramp it up to $320 million by FY 2002.)

In the 1999 PCAST study of international cooperation on energy innovation, the nuclear component of the recommended program had three high-priority elements, quoted verbatim here:

(1) addition of an explicit international component to the DOE's new Nuclear Energy Research Initiative (NERI), promoting bilateral and multilateral research focused on advanced technologies for improving the cost, safety, waste management, and proliferation resistance of nuclear fission energy systems;

(2) expansion and strengthening of international cooperative efforts in studies and information exchange on geologic disposal of spent fuel and high-level wastes, to include expanded participation, inclusion of studies of international interim-storage facilities, and development of a consistent and rigorous international regulatory framework for both interim storage and geologic disposal of these materials;

(3) pursuit of a new international agreement on fusion R&D that commits the parties to a broad range of collaborations on all aspects of fusion energy development, while selectively enhancing U.S. participation in existing fusion experiments abroad and inviting increased foreign participation in new and continuing smaller fusion experiments in the United States.

The first two of these recommendations were motivated not least by the recognition that the viability and expandability of nuclear energy anywhere depends on the safety and proliferation resistance of nuclear facilities everywhere - a compelling rationale for cooperation indeed.

(end text)

(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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