Posted on 04/22/2007 9:37:28 AM PDT by grundle
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/04/06/60minutes/main2655782.shtml
60 MINUTES
France: Vive Les Nukes
Steve Kroft On How France Is Becoming The Model For Nuclear Energy Generation
April 8, 2007
(CBS) With power demands rising and concerns over global warming increasing, what the world needs now is an efficient means of producing large amounts of carbon free energy. One of the few available options is nuclear, a technology whose time seemed to come and go and may now be coming again.
For the first time in decades, new nuclear plants are being built, and not just in Iran and North Korea. With zero green house gas emissions, the U.S. government, public utilities and even some environmental groups are taking a second look at nuclear power.
And as correspondent Steve Kroft reports, one of the first the places they are looking is to France, where it has been a resounding success and the attitude is "Vive Les Nukes."
When much of the world spurned nuclear power, 30 years ago, the French, being French, decided to go their own way and embrace it. Paris, the "City of Light," is lit by nuclear energy, which powers just about everything else in France: its homes, its factories, even its high speed railroads.
Nearly 80 percent of the country's electricity comes from 58 nuclear power plants, crammed into a country the size of Texas. Pierre Gadonniex, the head "Electricite de France," the country’s national utility says it all began with a French obsession for energy independence.
"In France, we have nearly no coal. We have no oil. So clearly, nuclear appeared to be the best way," Gadonniex explains. "And 30 years later, it appears to be a very smart decision."
Because nuclear plants emit no greenhouse gases, France has the cleanest air in the industrialized world, and because the price of oil is now around $60 a barrel, it has the lowest electric bills in Europe. In fact, France has so much cheap electricity, it exports it to its European neighbors. French nuclear plants supply power to parts of Germany, Italy and help light the city of London.
"It is a very competitive way of producing electricity when oil prices are beyond, I would say, around $40 a barrel," Gadonniex tells Kroft.
And the rest of the world has taken notice. Nearly a dozen countries, including the United States, are either building or planning to build new nuclear plants, and some of that business will go to AREVA, the French government monopoly that controls every step of its nuclear industry from uranium mining to plant design construction to radioactive waste disposal.
Deep in the wine country of Burgundy, in a massive factory, AREVA is building the first European reactors since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
Bertrande Durrande, the Executive Vice President for Manufacturing, tells Kroft the business is "definitely growing."
Besides the new reactors it is building for France and Finland, Durrande says, AREVA is bidding on a project to build four new nuclear reactors in China.
Asked how many plants he thinks might be built in the next 20 years, Durrande says, "A minimum of 20. Which is quite a change when you compare it to the past."
And some of them will almost certainly be in the United States, which hasn't built a new nuclear plant since the 1970's. With energy prices and global temperatures near their reported highs, and the possibility that greenhouse gases will be regulated, the Bush administration is pushing a nuclear revival.
In many respects, the nuclear industry in the United States has disappeared. Over 100 plants were cancelled in the 1970's.
Kroft talked to Clay Sell, the Deputy Secretary of Energy and the administration's point man on nuclear power. With world energy demand expected to rise 50 percent over the next 25 years, he says it is the only practical option for producing huge amounts of electricity with no carbon emissions.
"No serious person can look at the challenge of greenhouse gases and climate change and not come to the conclusion that nuclear power has to play a significant and growing role in meeting that challenge worldwide," Sell says.
Asked how much interest there is right now in building new plants, Sell says, "There is a tremendous amount of interest. Two years ago there was exactly zero plants on the drawing boards here in the United States. Today, there are about 15 companies talking about building over 30 commercial nuclear power reactors. Now, all of those won't get built. But we think there's a significant chance that many of them will be built."
But so far, no one has signed up to actually build one, an undertaking that requires a huge investment of capital and a certain amount of faith. In the 1980's and 90's political opposition, regulatory delays, cost overruns, and a drop in electricity demand forced utilities to pull the plug on dozens of projects, and the industry has a long memory.
"I recall one story, a man who is a CEO today of one of our leading companies," Sell says, "And he described the pain associated with beginning what he thought would be a billion-dollar plant in the 1970's, and bringing it online as a $9 billion plant 20 years later. And he made the point to me that that is not a lesson that'll quickly be forgotten in the industry."
To try and assuage those concerns the government is offering utilities financial incentives, risk insurance and a streamlined regulatory system, which has borrowed a page from the French by pre-approving four basic reactor designs from which the utilities can choose, knocking years off the process. And some of those new plants could be built on existing sites where reactors are already licensed and operating.
But apart from economics, there is the issue of public acceptance. The Chernobyl disaster, and one barely averted at Three Mile Island nearly 30 years ago when a reactor core suffered a partial meltdown, severely damaged the industry's reputation.
"Forget technology for the moment," Kroft says. "Forget energy. Forget greenhouse gases. A lot of the problems of this industry have been political. I mean, people are afraid of them. Fair statement?"
"It is a fair statement," Sell acknowledges. "There is some level of concern. But what we found out and what we have seen is the more educated the public is, the more they understand the technology, the more comfortable and the more accepting they are."
Americans, he says, tend to forget that there are 103 nuclear plants operating in the United States, that have produced 20 percent of the nation's electricity without major incident in the 28 years since Three Mile Island.
"And in fact, they have an outstanding record. There has never been a radiation-related death in the commercial nuclear sector in the United States, ever," Sell points out.
David Jhirad, the head of science and research for The World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank in Washington, acknowledges that the industry’s safety record has been pretty good.
Why are so many people afraid of it?
"When there's a small probability of a catastrophe people think about the catastrophe and not the small probability," Jhirad says.
"Then why have the French accepted it? And what is there about the two cultures that may influence that?" Kroft asks.
"The French love high technology. Whether it be nuclear power. Or supersonic airplanes. Or high-speed trains. They love that," Jhirad explains. "And they love, they accord huge respect and credibility to scientists and engineers. And scientists and engineers actually run these programs."
One of them is Anne Lauvergeon. She is an engineer, a onetime political aide to former French President Mitterrand and chairman of the nuclear giant AREVA, which dominates an industry that employs 150,000 people, and is a key exporter in the French economy. She may be the most powerful businesswoman in France, where everyone knows her as "Atomic Anne."
Asked what the safety record in France is, Lauvergeon tells Kroft, "The safety record in France is excellent. We have not known very important accidents. We are very, very careful."
"But one accident could change everything, right?" Kroft asks.
"Of course," Lauvergeon agrees. "One accident, one very serious accident could affect the nuclear industry as a whole."
"You must either be very good or very lucky," remarks.
"Maybe mix of both," she says. "You cannot bet on the luck. No luck in nuclear. Only work."
And right now she is working hard to convince the world that nuclear power can help solve some of the world’s environmental problems.
"One of the things the French tell us is that they consider nuclear power to be a green energy source. Accurate?" Kroft asks David Jhirad from The World Resources Institute.
"Accurate, except for one thing. Which is perhaps the Achilles' heel of nuclear power. It's certainly accurate that the plants emit no carbon dioxide," Jhirad says. "The one thing that needs to be solved is the issue of long term radioactive waste storage and management."
For decades, Americans have stored their radioactive waste on-site at power plants, awaiting a permanent solution, the Yucca Mountain Repository in Nevada. It's years behind schedule, will cost $30 billion to open, and is already too small to hold all the waste. The French have taken another approach to the problem.
While the United States decided to store its nuclear waste, the French embraced the idea of reprocessing it. Instead of burying the spent fuel rods underground or underwater, they decided to build a massive plant on the coast of Normandy and recycle the used fuel and reuse it.
The high security facility stretches for two miles along the coast. All of France's spent nuclear fuel eventually ends up at the plant in pools of water.
After the fuel rods have cooled five years, the French recycle them to make new fuel. The process drastically reduces the amount of nuclear waste, but one of the by-products of this is high-grade plutonium that can be used for nuclear weapons.
"In our judgment, we have to recycle waste eventually. And recycling makes a lotta sense," Sell says.
"The big argument against reprocessing has been the fact that some high-grade plutonium that could be used in making a bomb could be stolen from the plant," Kroft remarks.
"And we're quite concerned about that as well. And that's why the president has pursued a policy that says we shall develop advanced recycling technologies that do not result in separated plutonium," Sell replies.
The United States is leading an international effort to develop the process, but large-scale, plutonium-free reprocessing is still decades off, and just one of a number of research projects the industry hopes will improve a still young technology.
"Five years ago, nuclear was dead. Now people are really buzzing about it," says MIT Professor Andrew Kadak, who is working on a new generation of nuclear technology, called the Pebble Bed reactor. Instead of conventional fuel rods, the uranium is contained in hundreds of thousands of graphite balls, which would make it safer than than conventional reactors.
"This type of reactor is very unique in the sense that there's no way to melt this down," Kadak explains. "The power inside each little pebble is so low that the temperatures here don't get high enough to reach the melting temperature of uranium, these reactors are exactly what people really wanna see, and that is no meltdowns."
For now the French are pushing an interim generation of nuclear reactors that are safer, simpler and more efficient than the ones that were built in the United States in the 1960's and 70's and they have partnered up with the American nuclear plant operator Constellation.
"It's difficult to fight against climate change. And at the same time to be against nuclear power because you have not a lot of ways to produce energy without CO2 emissions," says AREVA chief Anne Lauvergeon. "You have hydro, you have nuclear, you have wind and you have solar. But wind and solar are you know, temporary sources of energy. It works when you have wind, it works when you have sun. No sun, no wind, no energy. You don't want watch TV only when you have wind."
Could you be any dumber? Of course it requires energy to build one, but that is a one time expenditure of energy, once it is built it is producing cheap non-carbon energy, and if enough of them were built they could replace even the coal used to make steel. Use your head for more than a hat rack, it helps to actually engage the brain before talking.
As much as I am in favor of nuclear power, if "60 Minutes" is talking about it, there MUST be some catch. After all, "60 Minutes" is THE purveyor of invented news.
So, riddle me this. WHY is that Carter "Executive Order" still in force?? Why didn't Reagan or Bush simply issue a new one??
That argument is a lefty red herring. Making steel and concrete for windmills also releases the same amount of carbon. The important measure in energy generation is the ratio of energy out to carbon created during that process.
Well, the Democrats deserve about 95% of the blame for killing nuclear power. President Bush deserves the other 5%, because although he has pushed various energy plans ever since he came into office, he has not pushed them hard enough, he has not really twisted any arms over it, and he has not pushed nuclear more than marginally. He spoke the word once or twice, and then just let it sit there.
As for ethanol, which he pumped in his last SOTUS, that is a terrible and destructive copout that prevents us from getting serious about real energy solutions.
Now the problem is that the time for building a nuclear plant from approval to going on line is around ten years. And we’ve just wasted the past twenty or thirty years.
Lots of new Nplants in the USofA any time soon? Nope. Why? Three Mile Island is too embedded in the US consciousness..
Reprocessing fuel? Unlikely. Why? Two words - Kerr-McGee (+ related mine, mill and tailing/waste)
Back story -
Creating further negative publicity for the embattled company, Kerr-McGee’s nuclear-fuel processing plant in Gore, Oklahoma, was cited by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for 15 health and safety infractions between 1978 and 1986. In 1986 an overfilled cylinder of uranium hexafluoride exploded, releasing a toxic cloud of radioactive hydrofluoric acid. One employee died, and 110 people were hospitalized.
This fueled public outcry and set in motion a number of legal proceedings. The controversy surrounding the incident was further exacerbated when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission accused Kerr-McGee of giving a false statement during the commission’s investigation.
Also as important, Kerr-McGee lost its Corporate a$$ on the nuke energy business - a lesson not lost on other players in the industry. The FedGov is still paying to clean up mine waste and worker claims related to Uranium mining.
Will we see a large number of Nplants in the US? Not while coal is still a player - Nplants are very expensive, require *massive* FedGov subsidies - and for myself, I do not want ‘low bid’ mentality types running a plant that could devastate an area for centuries.
And I am not even ‘green’.
your mileage may vary.
Of course the mediocre leftists in our country are still stuck in the sixties after a real world demonstration of NP’s viability.
Actually, neither has hot. But it looks like BOTH "cold fusion" and non-Tokamak "hot fusion" are both "heating up".
Recent work released by a Navy Lab provides VERY strong evidence that the process involved in CF is indeed nuclear (their use of track-etch detectors to measure high-energy alpha particles given off seems pretty airtight).
And in another small Navy program, Dr. Robert Bussard (yes, he of the "Bussard ramjet" concept) claims to have made the necessary breakthrough to make electrostatic confinement fusion possible.
I am not sure, but I watched this segment on sixty minutes and I think they were saying that the recycled fuel, if it is continued to be used, can be used for weapons. I may have been mistaken but there was definately something about that. Maybe someone who knows more about nuclear power than I do can tell us the answer.
They used their tried and proved propaganda tactics of using lengthy interviews and then taking responses totally out of context to achieve the effect that they desire.
Illinois Power agreed to allow CBS to interview any of their employees that they desired as long as Illinois Power was allowed to tape the interview in its entirety. Illinois Power then took the responses to the questions that appeared on the program. They then showed the employees response in its entirety on their own prepared response. The hatchet job that CBS did was clearly transparent and also vividly shocking.
Illinois Power tried to buy air time on CBS, NBC and ABC to air their response. None would sell them the time. All networks were allied in their efforts against nuclear energy. Jane Fonda played her role as well with the “China syndrome” bit.
How do I know this. I saw Illinois Power’s version. Because they couldn't’t get an television audience, they made their response available to other electric utilities and anyone else that wanted it. I retired from one to those electric utilities.
CBS was wrong about the safety and reliability of nuclear energy as well as the environmental benefits. Their efforts to demean nuclear power has proved to be a gross error.
They will never admit it though.
Hmmmm. I think you’re right. Good call.
So it was the left that forced out dependency on foreign oil due to its NO NUKE policies.
My Democrat friend works for this company, Nuke Power is one thing we agree on.
According to the Left wing lunatics nuclear power plants are good for France, Europe, North Korea and Iran (who wants nuclear weapons not power plants) but it is terrible for the United States.
Thanks. I wasn’t sure what the reason was, but I thought that might be why they had restricted the usage. I guess they thought it was riskier to have a small amount of fuel that can be used for weapons, than a large amount of waste that can’t.
I suspect that even now we will still provide the fuel for the nuclear plant in Iran if it ever gets going...but on the condition that we can get the spent fuel back.
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