Reflection: An ITRS roadmap for Nuclear?

How to get advanced reactors going.

My weekend job as a student was working at Chamberlains Silver Lakes- a hardware store in Pretoria. The director of the then more than 100 year old family business chain always reminded his staff that the most important lesson in sales is “to proceed with caution”.

When one of the seasoned floor managers realized that I had deeper theoretical knowledge about certain subjects, he told me that he wouldn’t be able to teach me anything deep about the tools that I am selling, but he could help me understand how customers behave and that the most important lesson in sales is still “being honest”. If you don’t know anything, rather tell the customer or your manager the truth than bluff your way through it - even if it makes him angry and not buy your product. Building trust and a cooperative spirit remains the key ingredient in any successful organization.

As a Nuclear Energy Advocate, I am the first to admit that nuclear enthusiasts are often unrealistic or as Dr. Rob Jeffery recently told me “over-nucleared” and therefore blind about the time and money needed to get advanced reactors going.

They often downplay the R&D challenges and the construction risks that are involved when pitching new ideas to investors and insist that Linear No Threshold is the only reason why Nuclear Power is “too expensive”. Although the theory’s adaption, on fraudulent terms, did set back the industry, it’s not the only excuse for non performance.

I have been approached by many people, who claim that they have money, on where to invest in Nuclear Technology and my response is always that I do believe there is great opportunity for the private sector, but they need to understand the risks involved as I don’t want them to come and cry to me if they go bankrupt. My advice is always hire a good quantitative analyst and an old engineer with years of experience - especially grab the ones that are full of nonsense when it comes to the details involved so they can red team your investment.

As a Civil Nuclear Engineer my job is to hit the brakes in the system as almost all Nuclear New Builds in the US and France failed to construct on time, in contrast to Russia, India, China and South Korea where they do seem to have construction costs under control.

Vogtle Power Station, which is an AP1000 prices at about $12000 per kilowatt of electricity (kWe) and Hinkley Point C is coming in at more than $10000/kWe. They are almost 5-6 times as high as the Chinese Reactors that are coming at $2000/kWe and about 3-4 times as expensive as South Korea’s reactor in the UAE. It’s not that the western engineers are bad at construction or that we “lost the skills to China”, it’s rather that the Chinese and Russians plan things properly and have 100 year plans for their infrastructure, and in addition they aren’t crippled by a well funded $2.3billion dollar per year environmental lobbying network that campaigns on ridiculous grounds.

At Vogtle the contractor ran to build the plant without a detailed design ready, only to discover that the NRC added a change in the design requirement (a ridiculous aircraft crash requirement) midway through the project. Vogtle in addition was staffed with inexperienced engineers that resulted in remarkable failure rate. The DOE report states that “Known test failure rates of components have ranged from 40–80% over different time periods.”. Yet Vogtle is arguably the best story in the last few years in the United States of America, because South Carolina for example paid $9 billion to dig a hole in the ground - only to fill it back up again a few years later. The balls-up saw an executive of Westinghouse charged with conspiracy and fraud and he is now facing a 20 years jail sentence.

France had similar failures with notably bad welding at Flamanville and poor geotechnical engineering at Hinkley Point C in the UK, resulting in major overruns and a taxpayer bailout for Electricité de France. There are many fingers to point at this issue, such as bad skills retention, political interference, and trying to reinvent the wheel by adding unnecessary safety features, as opposed to challenging the regulators that keep on imposing requirements, as the design goes on.

But ultimately the failure is not them, it is in construction risks being poorly managed. These are classical examples of “what not to do” and fortunately the industry now has a lot of lessons to learn from the last 2 decades as we look forward to the the completion of Vogtle, Olkiluoto-3, Flamanville, HPC and the construction of the much simpler EPR2.

The Strategy Forward

The best technology for nuclear remains, in my view, the good old Pressure-Water Reactor (PWR) as South Korea, Russia, China, and recently India & Iran are all building new power plants at scale.

The countries that are interested in Nuclear Power should seek to cooperate with them and learn from them. We should construct more PWR reactors, because they work, because they are Turnkey, before we go directly into what is new. These countries are all building properly and we need to get over the colonial notion that non western countries are not good at engineering, or lacking in quality. It’s complete nonsense. They get the projects done, simply because they plan it properly by making sure that the vendor shares a big part of the risk.

Fortunately a few more reactors are being built at a decent cost in Africa, China, Russia, India, Eastern Europe and South Korea, under proper conditions, and even Sweden and Taiwan are now making positive pledges towards Nuclear Power, and so is Italy (a country that trains an enormous amount of nuclear engineers). But the lesson going forward should be that had the proponents just taken another 2-3 years to iron out the details, had the risks being properly managed, and had the regulator not imposed ridiculous rules, then perhaps the plant would be a lot less money?

South Africa for example, should in my opinion build 1 or 2 new reactors around our coast and use these projects as an opportunity to bring the 150 engineers back home that helped build the UAE’s Nuclear Plant.

We ran out of water in 2008 for industrial purposes and they should be dedicated for desalination. But the mistake that SA shouldn’t make is to think that we should “manufacture locally”, that’s a recipe to explode the cost and create a disaster.

Under such a policy we can use the PWR expertise as a springboard so that in less than 10 years, we can get a gas-cooled reactor back up going again. We can do it by signing a cooperative agreement with China or America, or perhaps we can just do it ourselves through local companies?

Advanced Reactors

Mastering SMRs will require a balance between policy options, of which I don’t have a strong opinion on, and they should all be considered seriously by the Department of Energy.

The real world takes a long time to change and advanced reactors by my estimate are still $0.8-1billion per 100MWe and 10 years away before the first one will start. These prices include promising projects such as X-Energy and Kairos in America, Stratek Global in South Africa, Nuward in France, Rolls-Royce in the UK, Moltex in Canada and, Seaborg and Copenhagen Atomics in Denmark, and the Thorium Network in Australia. Most ambitious is Nuclear Fusion at ITER, where I worked for almost 2 years.

Only after the R&D is complete, and the planning is proper, will it be possible to reduce the cost, to become modular and to expand at a mass production rate, as France did with up to 10 reactors per year in the 1980s. In the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, the highly successful Mesmer Plan achieved the fastest pace of decarbonizations and Nuclear expansion of any country to date. When I started my career in France, I worked with many of these engineers who were about to go into retirement. They were not special people when they started, but rather they had a government and engineering team that planned properly and executed without much deviation from the norm. They understood their role and got the job done.

My impression with SMRs is that we cannot just go balls against the walls and build a reactor, even if the design conceptually is ready. It takes time and planning to make the technology “Turn Key” and for the nuclear sector to earn the respect of the public. Many of the above mentioned companies are ready for investment and there are many others too. Investors should indeed approach them, but they should also “proceed with caution”.

They do have competent and motivated teams, but my advice is always that it remains to be seen how they will get to market. When I speak to engineers who work there, they are confident that 5-8 years is reasonable and that the entry cost is lower than I think.

Personally I am skeptical that it won’t be at least 10 years, because I include potential construction risks in my calculations. A first of a kind investment is always risky and unfortunately its not a computer code that scales easily with little startup cost. Costs can easily explode and the project goes back to where it started. SMRs are expensive, especially because they are new. Factories have to be prepared, supply chains have to be mobilized and the regulators have to be convinced before the project gets to fruition. Then afterwards a dedicated team will have to build and build again until the costs are under control.

My view is that the Nuclear industry, going ahead is better off cooperating with each other and step on the brakes every now and then to reassess. That’s if there is to be a future beyond the PWR.

Nuclear Cooperation and Non Proliferation

Cooperation in Nuclear Power can be used as a basis for mutual peace and it can also help bring an end to nuclear weapons proliferation. Perhaps the best story of the Industry is that for nearly 10 years in the United States, 10% of all electricity came from repurposed warheads that saw the world stockpile reduced significantly, from nearly 70 000 at its peak during the Cold War to around 12 000 today. These are excellent achievements by scientists that understood the dangers of atomic weapons and the benefit of atomic energy.

South Africa still leads the world by being the only country to voluntarily sign the NPT and give up our nuclear weapons. The Pelindaba facility that hosted our bombs close to Pretoria was transformed into a facility that manufactures medical isotopes for cancer treatment. By embracing the NPT South Africa has created opportunities to responsibly invest in the fuel cycle. Our engineers are still designing Triso fuel that is used in reactors all over the world and whose byproduct cannot be used for weapons proliferation.

The African Nuclear Free Weapons zone is also possible if the United States move their Nuclear Weapons from Diego Garcia, an island that rightfully belongs to Mauritius and whose Chagossians ethnic population still has no right of return. Engineers and scientists that work in the field have to start speaking out against these crimes and also call to question Israel’s violation of the NPT and Netanyahu’s links to the uranium smuggling mafia.

Although I share the concerns with Nuclear Weapons opponents like Steven Starr and Noam Chomsky (who I have both interviewed), I disagree with their rejection of Civilian Nuclear Power - which is my expertise. Their convictions have deep roots in the Babyboom generation, and the initial environmental movement. As Oliver Stone has shown in his recent documentary, the legacy is that the counter cultural movement, that arose during the Vietnam War, threw the baby out with the bathwater.

We should understand that radiophobia is deep, and that those like my friend Greg Schwartz (who thinks that I am Hugo Drax from James Bond), are scared, and write for websites like counterpunch are not evil people, but genuinely concerned.

I don’t agree with them on the rejection of Civilian Power, but I understand where they are coming from. In fact I believe that Civilian Nuclear Power and the Non Proliferation Treaty remain the best example of International Law and the best way to achieve a nuclear weapons free world.

A Roadmap

Achieving Nuclear Power’s full thermodynamic potential is scientifically possible, but to make it economically viable will take more time, cooperation, and a dedication to the goals of the NPT (a fatwa against WMDs such as was issued in Iran) .

My proposal is that the Nuclear Industry needs a roadmap, similar to the ITRS roadmap that the semiconductor industry had and that the project should start in assessing where we are as an Industry and using reality as our basis before we go forward.

We need to do what Silicon Valley did, and that can only be achieved by connecting to each other and cooperating on a global level to get to that point where 1 gram of uranium or thorium salt replaces 2 tons of oil.

Regards

Hügo KRÜGER