This web site contains materials for the Dartmouth Ilead Spring 2008 course, Energy Policy and Environmental Choices: Rethinking Nuclear Power.
Links to the presentation materials are Rethinking Nuclear Power Slides and Audio.
Syllabus
Global warming continues. The world consumes oil and gas faster than finding it. We import oil from unstable countries. Producing ethanol from corn consumes almost as much energy as the ethanol delivers. Sites for wind and hydro power are limited. Can more nuclear power help? Are the health risks acceptable? One theme will be how many? How many acres of corn? How many power plants? How many windmills? How many tons of uranium? How many tons of CO2? The eight week course will cover:
1. Introduction March 24, 2008
Energy units, uses, sources
Social benefits, demand growth, conservation, developing world
Periodic table, nuclear fission, nuclear power plants
2. Fear
Chernobyl, Three Mile Island
Radiation, health, safety, waste
Nuclear weapons proliferation
Guest speaker, Neal Boucher, Radiation Safety Officer, DHMC
3. Environmental choices
Oil and gas depletion
Global warming, mining, coal, oil shale, tar sands
Wind, hydro, solar
Corn, sugarcane, cellulosic ethanol, biodiesel
Uranium and thorium availability
4. Current technology
Submarines and ships
Guest speaker, Howard Shaffer, former nuclear submarine officer
Operating nuclear power plants, industry structure, NRC
Guest speaker, Graham Wallis, Dartmouth Thayer School and NRC
Guest speaker, Dick Bower, former NY PUC commissioner
Current products: GE, Westinghouse, Toshiba, Areva
5. New technologies
High temperature gas reactors, liquid metal reactors
Hydrogen production, hydrocarbon synthesis, coal-to-liquid, electric cars
Integral fast reactor, waste reprocessing
Fuel supply for non-nuclear nations
Current public awareness, funding, activities
6. Energy policy
Congressional and presidential candidates' views
Nuclear power plant visit May 12, 2008
FPL Seabrook Station at 1 pm, leaving Hanover at 11 am
Workshop leader
Robert Hargraves, AB Mathematics Dartmouth College, PhD physics Brown University, taught math and computer science at Dartmouth, founded a software company, worked as an IT consultant for energy and other companies worldwide, led information technology at Boston Scientific, retired to Hanover, authored http://pebblebedreactor.blogspot.com.
Readings
Rather than assigning one textbook for the class, I recommend each participant choose and obtain one book and read it thoroughly, so that many points of view are represented in our discussions. Click here for the list of books.
Nuclear Power Physics in 4 Pages
Blogs
If you wish to keep up with ongoing blogs (web logs, or online newsletters) a few interesting places to learn more about nuclear power are here.
Welcome letter to class
Energy Policy and Environmental Choices: Rethinking Nuclear Power
Welcome to this Ilead workshop about energy. One objective is to learn to quantitatively assess various energy policy options. You will learn to understand and critique ideas presented in the news media, without fear of dealing with long strings of zeros or concepts such as a quadrillion British Thermal Units. You will yourself be able to weigh the risks and benefits of energy from nuclear power and other sources.
Course information will be maintained at http://rethinkingnuclearpower.googlepages.com.
Internet
If you wish to do your own investigations, information from the Internet will be very helpful. Sources such as the Energy Information Agency of the US Department of Energy are at http://eia.doe.gov, for example.
Upper Valley Senior Center
The Upper Valley Senior Center at 10 Campbell St in Lebanon NH has a computer laboratory with a dozen PCs and Internet access. Weekday mornings the lab is staffed with volunteer tutors who can assist you use the Internet from both PCs and Apple computers. The phone is 603 448 4213, but you do not need an appointment.
Nuclear Power Plant Tour
Be prepared to provide your full name, residence address, social security number, and date of birth. I will forward this information to FPL Seabrook Station which will cooperate with US Homeland Security to pre-approve your visit on April 21, 2008.
Readings
Please select and read one or more of the books on the reading list. If you go to the course web site you will find links from each to Amazon.com, where you can read reviews of the books and possibly order one.
Presentation Materials
Much of the course materials will be presented using a PC projector with PowerPoint slides. I will endeavor to post the presentations on the course web site after each class, here.
Reading List
Rather than assigning one textbook for the class, I recommend each participant choose and obtain one book and read it thoroughly, so that many points of view are represented in our discussions.
Power to Save the World
The Truth about Nuclear Energy
Gwyneth Cravens
This 2007 book is written by a novelist in a narrative style that makes it easy to read. There are few illustrations. The work is supported by extensive references in the appendix.
Hell and High Water
Global Warming, the Solution and the Politics, and What We Should Do
Joseph Romm
Romm was acting assistant secretary at the Department of Energy in the Clinton administration. His 2007 book treats the failure of the Bush administration to address global warming as a right wing plot led by the established industrial complex. He devotes two pages to nuclear power.
A Brighter Tomorrow
Fulfilling the Promise of Nuclear Energy
Senator Pete V. Domenici
The New Mexico senator wrote this book in 2004; he analyzes our energy problems and strongly supports nuclear power. The appendices provide resource materials. The book is marred a bit by some (possibly well won) chest-thumping. It gives a view into the difficult and complex world of governmental laws, regulatory agencies, and international treaties. It also has a good overview of waste, spent fuel, and reprocessing technologies.
The Revenge of Gaia
Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity
James Lovelock
This is the latest in this environmentalist's series about Gaia -- earth viewed as an organism. He frets about global warming and concludes that nuclear power is essential for survival of humanity.
Nuclear Renaissance
Technologies and Policies for the Future of Nuclear Power
W. J. Nuttall
This 2005 book by a British author is a comprehensive survey of the various nuclear power technologies in history, the current time, and the future. There are many illustrations. It is not very technical, but you might be more comfortable reading it if you have science or engineering in your background.
Cool It
The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming
Bjorn Lomborg
This short 2007 book is an economist's analysis of prudent expenditures of resources to combat global warming. He presents costs and benefits of many approaches -- such as painting city streets white!
Nuclear Power is Not the Answer
Helen Caldicott
This is a 2006 book by a famous Nobel-peace-prize-nominated anti-nuclear activist pediatrician. Read it carefully: "...the nuclear industry received thirty times as much financial support -- $15.3 per kilowatt hour..."
Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy
George A. Olah, Alain Goeppert, G.K. Surya Prakash
If you studied chemistry in high school or college you can understand this 2006 book by Nobel-prize-winner George Olah. He shows how methanol and dimethyl ether can substitute for petrochemical gasoline and diesel fuel, using the existing US infrastructure of pipelines, delivery trucks, and gas stations. Methanol can be produced via hydrogen from new, high temperature gas nuclear reactors.
The Hype About Hydrogen
Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate
Joseph J. Romm
This 2005 book by a Clinton-era executive in the Department of Energy is a good overview of the envisioned hydrogen economy. It illustrates the difficulties of utilizing hydrogen as a vehicle fuel and makes alternative recommendations. Nuclear power to create hydrogen is treated in two pages, but he does not discuss hydrogen as a feedstock to create methanol and other petrochemicals.
The Environmental Case for Nuclear Power
Economic, Medical, and Political Consideration
Robert C. Morris
This 2000 book by a retired chemistry teacher is an easy-to-read book comparing the hazards of nuclear power to the hazards of air pollution. Though updated in 2000, its environmental evidence is based mainly on much older research. The book is a bit preachy, and there is not enough back up for many of the statements (that I do believe are correct).
Three Mile Island Accident
Kemeny Prologue to the Three Mile Island Report
Dartmouth College President John G. Kemeny headed the Three Mile Island Commission, which investigated the accident at that nuclear power plant. I include this prologue because of the tie to the local community, and because Kemeny wrote a clear explanation of how a nuclear power plant works.
Account of the Accident
Prologue
On Wednesday, March 28, 1979, 36 seconds after the hour of 4:00 a.m., several water pumps stopped working in the Unit 2 nuclear power plant on Three Mile Island, 10 miles southeast of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.1 Thus began the accident at Three Mile Island. In the minutes, hours, and days that followed, a series of events -- compounded by equipment failures, inappropriate procedures, and human errors and ignorance -- escalated into the worst crisis yet experienced by the nation's nuclear power industry. The accident focused national and international attention on the nuclear facility at Three Mile Island and raised it to a place of prominence in the minds of hundreds of millions. For the people living in such communities as Royalton, Goldsboro, Middletown, Hummelstown, Hershey, and Harrisburg, the rumors, conflicting official statements, a lack of knowledge about radiation releases, the continuing possibility of mass evacuation, and the fear that a hydrogen bubble trapped inside a nuclear reactor might explode were real and immediate. Later, Theodore Gross, provost of the Capitol Campus of Pennsylvania State University located in Middletown a few miles from TMI, would tell the Commission:
Never before have people been asked to live with such ambiguity. The TMI accident -- an accident we cannot see or taste or smell ... is an accident that is invisible. I think the fact that it is invisible creates a sense of uncertainty and fright on the part of people that may well go beyond the reality of the accident itself.
The reality of the accident, the realization that such an accident could actually occur, renewed and deepened the national debate over nuclear safety and the national policy of using nuclear reactors to generate electricity.
Three Mile Island is home to two nuclear power plants, TMI-1 and TMI-2. Together they have a generating capacity of 1,700 megawatts, enough electricity to supply the needs of 300,000 homes. The two plants are owned jointly by Pennsylvania Electric Company, Jersey Central Power & Light Company, and Metropolitan Edison Company, and operated by Met Ed. These three companies are subsidiaries of General Public Utilities Corporation, an electric utility holding company headquartered in Parsippany, New Jersey.
Each TMI plant is powered by its nuclear reactor. A reactor's function in a commercial power plant is essentially simple -- to heat water. The hot water, in turn, produces steam, which drives a turbine that turns a generator to produce electricity. Nuclear reactors are a product of high technology. In recent years, nuclear facilities of generating capacity much larger than those of earlier years -- including TMI-1 and TMI-2 — have gone into service.
A nuclear reactor generates heat as a result of nuclear fission, the splitting apart of an atomic nucleus, most often that of the heavy atom uranium. Each atom has a central core called a nucleus. The nuclei of atoms typically contain two types of particles tightly bound together: protons, which carry a positive charge, and neutrons, which have no charge. When a free neutron strikes the nucleus of a uranium atom, the nucleus splits apart. This splitting -- or fission -- produces two smaller radioactive atoms, energy, and free neutrons. Most of the energy is immediately converted to heat. The neutrons can strike other uranium nuclei, producing a chain reaction and continuing the fission process. Not all free neutrons split atomic nuclei. Some, for example, are captured by atomic nuclei. This is important, because some elements, such as boron or cadmium, are strong absorbers of neutrons and are used to control the rate of fission, or to shut off a chain reaction almost instantaneously.
Uranium fuels all nuclear reactors used commercially to generate electricity in the United States. At TMI-2, the reactor core holds some 100 tons of uranium. The uranium, in the form of uranium oxide, is molded into cylindrical pellets, each about an inch tall and less than half-an-inch wide. The pellets are stacked one atop another inside fuel rods. These thin tubes, each about 12 feet long, are made of Zircaloy-4, a zirconium alloy. This alloy shell -- called the "cladding" -- transfers heat well and allows most neutrons to pass through.
TMI-2's reactor contained 36,816 fuel rods -- 208 in each of its 177 fuel assemblies. A fuel assembly contains not only fuel rods, but space for cooling water to flow between the rods and tubes that may contain control rods or instruments to measure such things as the temperature inside the core. TMI-2's reactor has 52 tubes with instruments and 69 with control rods.
Control rods contain materials that are called "poisons" by the nuclear industry because they are strong absorbers of neutrons and shut off chain reactions. The absorbing materials in TMI-2's control rods are 80 percent silver, 15 percent indium, and 5 percent cadmium. When the control rods are all inserted in the core, fission is effectively blocked, as atomic nuclei absorb neutrons so that they cannot split other nuclei. A chain reaction is initiated by withdrawing the control rods. By varying the number of and the length to which the control rods are withdrawn, operators can control how much power a plant produces. The control rods are held up by magnetic clamps. In an emergency, the magnetic field is broken and the control rods, responding to gravity, drop immediately into the core to halt fission. This is called a "scram."
The nuclear reactors used in commercial power plants possess several important safety features. They are designed so that it is impossible for them to explode like an atomic bomb. The primary danger from nuclear power stations is the potential for the release of radioactive materials produced in the reactor core as the result of fission. These materials are normally contained within the fuel rods.
Damage to the fuel rods can release radioactive material into the reactor's cooling water and this radioactive material might be released to the environment if the other barriers -- the reactor coolant system and containment building barriers -- are also breached.
A nuclear plant has three basic safety barriers, each designed to prevent the release of radiation. The first line of protection is the fuel rods themselves, which trap and hold radioactive materials produced in the uranium fuel pellets.
The second barrier consists of the reactor vessel and the closed reactor coolant system loop. The TMI-2 reactor vessel, which holds the reactor core and its control rods, is a 40-foot high steel tank with walls 8-½ inches thick. This tank, in turn, is surrounded by two, separated concrete- and-steel shields, with a total thickness of up to 9-½ feet, which absorb radiation and neutrons emitted from the reactor core. Finally, all this is set inside the containment building, a 193-foot high, reinforced-concrete structure with walls 4 feet thick.
To supply the steam that runs the turbine, both plants at TMI rely on a type of steam supply system called a pressurized water reactor. This simply means that the water heated by the reactor is kept under high pressure, normally 2,155 pounds per square inch in the TMI-2 plant.
In normal operations, it is important in a pressurized water reactor that the water that is heated in the core remain below "saturation" -- that is, the temperature and pressure combination at which water boils and turns to steam. In an accident, steam formation itself is not a danger, because it too can help cool the fuel rods, although not as effectively as the coolant water. But problems can occur if so much of the core's coolant water boils away that the core becomes uncovered.
Schematic of the TMI-2 facility
An uncovered core may lead to two problems. First, temperature may rise to a point, roughly 2,200°F, where a reaction of water and the cladding could begin to damage the fuel rods and also produce hydrogen. The other is that the temperature might rise above the melting point of the uranium fuel, which is about 5,200°F. Either poses a potential danger. Damage to the zirconium cladding releases some radioactive materials trapped inside the fuel rods into the core's cooling water. A melting of the fuel itself could release far more radioactive materials. If a significant portion of the fuel should melt, the molten fuel could melt through the reactor vessel itself and release large quantities of radioactive materials into the containment building. What might happen following such an event is very complicated and depends on a number of variables such as the specific characteristics of the materials on which a particular containment building is constructed.
The essential elements of the TMI-2 system during normal operations include:
• The reactor, with its fuel rods and control rods.
• Water, which is heated by the fission process going on inside the fuel rods to ultimately produce steam to run the turbine. This water, by removing heat, also keeps the fuel rods from becoming overheated.
• Two steam generators, through which the heated water passes and gives up its heat to convert cooler water in another closed system to steam.
• A steam turbine that drives a generator to produce electricity.
• Pumps to circulate water through the various systems.
• A pressurizer, a large tank that maintains the reactor water at a pressure high enough to prevent boiling. At TMI-2 the pressurizer tank usually holds 800 cubic feet of water and 700 cubic feet of steam above it. The steam pressure is controlled by heating or cooling the water in the pressurizer. The steam pressure, in turn, is used to control the pressure of the water cooling the reactor.
Normally, water to the TMI-2 reactor flows through a closed system of pipes called the "reactor coolant system" or "primary loop." The water is pushed through the reactor by four reactor coolant pumps, each powered by a 9,000 horsepower electric motor. In the reactor, the water picks up heat as it flows around each fuel rod. Then it travels through 36-inch diameter, stainless steel pipes shaped like and called "candy canes," and into the steam generators.
In the steam generators, a transfer of heat takes place. The very hot water from the reactor coolant system travels down through the steam generators in a series of corrosion-resistant tubes Meanwhile, water from another closed system -- the feedwater system or secondary loop" -- is forced into the steam generator.
The feedwater in the steam generators flows around the tubes that contain the hot water from the reactor coolant system. Some of this heat is transferred to the cooler feedwater, which boils and becomes steam. Just as it would be in a coal- or oil-fired generating plant, the steam is carried from the two steam generators to turn the steam turbine, which runs the electricity-producing generator.
The water from the reactor coolant system, which has now lost some of its heat, is pumped back to the reactor to pass around the fuel rods, pick up more heat, and begin its cycle again.
The water from the feedwater system, which has turned to steam to drive the turbine, passes through devices called condensers. Here, the steam is condensed back to water, and is forced back to the steam generators again.
The condenser water is cooled in the cooling towers. The water that cools the condensers is also in a closed system or loop. It cools the condensers, picks up heat, and is pumped to the cooling towers, where it cascades along a series of steps. As it does, it releases its heat to the outside air, creating the white vapor plumes that drift skyward from the towers. Then the water is pumped back to the condensers to begin its cooling process over again.
Neither the water that cools the condensers, nor the vapor plumes that rise from the cooling towers, nor any of the water that runs through the feedwater system is radioactive under normal conditions. The water that runs through the reactor coolant system is radioactive, of course, since it has been exposed to the radioactive materials in the core.
The turbine, the electric generator it powers, and most of the feedwater system piping are outside the containment building in other structures. The steam generators, however, which must be fed by water from both the reactor coolant and feedwater systems, are inside the containment building with the reactor and the pressurizer tank.
A nuclear power facility is designed with many ways to protect against system failure. Each of its major systems has an automatic backup system to replace it in the event of a failure. For example, in a loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) -- that is, an accident in which there is a loss of the reactor's cooling water -- the Emergency Core Cooling System (ECCS) automatically uses existing plant equipment to ensure that cooling water covers the core.
In a LOCA, such as occurred at TMI-2, a vital part of the ECCS is the High Pressure Injection (HPI) pumps, which can pour about 1,000 gallons a minute into the core to replace cooling water being lost through a stuck-open valve, broken pipe, or other type of leak. But the ECCS can be effective only if plant operators allow it to keep running and functioning as designed. At Three Mile Island, they did not.