Behind the Scenes
“You can get so much done behind the scenes, as long as you
don’t care who takes the credit.”
Evgeny Velikhov
My dear friend and mentor Evgeny Velikhov departed this life just a year ago, but I will always take to heart that bit of sage advice. Shortly after he read Prescription for the Planet in 2009, he called me from Moscow and proceeded to pave the way for me to interact with an international group of energy experts. He encouraged the formation of SCGI as a vehicle to advocate for the deployment of nuclear power.
When I wrote that book, I hoped that it would help stimulate members of the public to look at nuclear power afresh, after years of stagnation in most of the world. There weren’t many of us at the time who were nuclear advocates, a story recounted in the recently published book, Atomic Dreams: The New Nuclear Evangelists and the Fight for the Future of Energy. Shortly after Prescription was published, I realized that decisions as consequential, controversial, and economically serious as the deployment of nuclear power plants would be made by very few people. If the economics were favorable, that alone would probably be sufficient to overcome even the most vociferous anti-nuclear crusaders.
With the help of Velikhov and a couple of other internationally well-connected people, a lot of doors began to open for SCGI to play a part in high-level energy discussions in a number of different countries. The writer in me was eager to share exciting developments, but from the beginning, it was obvious that many of the negotiations and consultations in which I was now a participant could only be effective if conducted outside the glare of publicity. This was not because of any skullduggery. Much of it was due to the implacable and zealous anti-nuclear sentiment of people with institutional bullhorns who would be eager to undermine any progress.
Alas, this is still the case today, despite the recent developments heralding a nuclear renaissance that’s been in the news for much of the last year. It seems that the main reason for this nuclear enthusiasm has been the intense interest and development of AI, and the need for large amounts of reliable electricity to run the massive servers now being built in many countries. The “reliable” in that sentence is what’s led tech giants to turn to nuclear power after years of virtue signaling about wind and solar. They know that intermittency is simply not viable for their needs.
The changes in the Department of Energy this past year have changed the playing field. The secretary of energy, Chris Wright, was on the board of Oklo, the company that wants to build small (and eventually not-so-small) fast neutron reactors, the kind that SCGI has been recommending for years. It’s also the kind that Bill Gates’ Terrapower is starting to build in Wyoming.
The responsibility for oversight in building these and other new reactor types has been shifted from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to the Department of Energy itself. For many years, the NRC has piled stultifying regulations and onerous requirements on reactor developers that all but killed nuclear innovation. The new system should allow new reactor design prototypes to be evaluated, built, and tested more like they were in the years prior to the creation of the NRC.
SCGI continues to be involved with politicians, DOE administrators, and others involved in various aspects of nuclear developments. Though some of this activity must still proceed behind the scenes, there are a few projects we’re working on that can be discussed publicly.
Nuclear Fuel Enrichment
If a lot of nuclear reactors are going to be built, they’ll need a lot of fuel. Currently, the state of the art for fuel enrichment is to use giant centrifuges, but for decades, it’s been thought that using lasers to separate and concentrate the necessary isotopes of uranium would be much more efficient. Many companies and countries have tried unsuccessfully to figure out how to do it. In 2007, General Electric took up the challenge, but eventually backed out.
In 2010, I happened to meet a nuclear engineer, Jeff Eerkens, who had worked on the same project that GE had been hoping to commercialize, and his subsequent experiments showed great promise. I arranged for discussions with AREVA, then the nuclear power company owned by the French government. We traveled to France for discussions with AREVA’s people, and we thought they would back the project, but it foundered when their lawyers got scared off by the difficulties of technology transfer with the US. Other attempts to find funding support for the project came to naught, but last year it finally came together. At this point, the new company that’s been formed has a new laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (near Oak Ridge National Laboratory), and I expect that within the next year, they’ll be able to demonstrate the ability to enrich uranium at commercial scale using lasers, at a cost and speed of deployment that would make centrifuge enrichment obsolete.
The ORCA Water Project
You may have read about SCGI’s proposal to water the west. One of the hangups to that project is the fact that the lower reaches of the McCloud River would be inundated if Shasta Dam is raised. The McCloud is a small (75-mile-long) river running from Mount Shasta to Shasta Lake, and it’s been designated a Wild & Scenic River. That designation—which has never been rescinded once a river is so designated—would make it illegal to inundate any of it. I strongly suspect that the unremarkable little river was so categorized to prevent the raising of Shasta Dam, which has been considered off and on for decades.
Last time I was in Washington, a good friend of mine in Congress told me that a bill was going to be introduced to raise Shasta Dam. Though it’s unclear just how high they hope to raise it (my project proposes 200 feet, but I’ve seen other proposals for as little as 20 feet), any such project would require rescinding the McCloud River’s Wild & Scenic status. Whatever you may feel about the current government in Washington, the fact is that with Trump in the White House and a Republican-dominated Congress willing to do his bidding, there’s a high likelihood that such a bill would pass. If that river designation does end up being rescinded, then the ORCA project could be considered on its merits without having that legalistic hurdle in the way.
Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage
The way spent nuclear fuel is stored in the United States is needlessly risky. When fuel is removed from the reactor, the fuel bundles are placed in pools of water for about five years. After that, it has cooled sufficiently to be transferred to dry cask storage, where it can sit indefinitely with no danger to anyone. You can hug a dry cask without any effect.
But the way that the fuel is stored in the pools is the issue. In France, which uses nuclear power for about 70% or more of its electricity generation, the fuel bundles are stored in an open-rack configuration, with enough distance between the bundles so that if the water were ever accidentally drained from the pools there would be no danger of a fire, which otherwise could result in the release of harmful radioactive elements into the environment.
For reasons too complicated to explain here, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the United States decided that it would be acceptable for utilities to pack their fuel bundles close together in the spent fuel pools, which is fine if the pools never lost their water. Though that’s a pretty safe bet, it’s far from sensible to fail to consider the possibility of a terrorist attack or some such remote possibility when open-racking would eliminate the danger of any such eventuality. This was one of the main concerns at Fukushima, because the dense-packed spent fuel pools were located high up on the outside of the reactor containment building, and came all too close to losing the crucial water. One would think that such a close call would have the NRC in alert mode and requiring the utility companies to switch to open racking.
So far, that has not been the case. So on my last visit to Washington, I put together an explanatory document with suggestions on how the danger could be easily eliminated. I’ve been assured by my Congressman friend that he will make sure to address that with urgency. He’s also going to suggest to the new director of the National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA) to set up a meeting with me to discuss that and another nuclear matter that is one of those behind-the-scenes things I can’t write about here.
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Recipients of this newsletter may remember I posted the first chapter of my next book several months ago. Yet some of what I intend to write about in it is problematic because of its sensitive nature. So for the moment, I’m in a holding pattern until enough transpires to allow me to publicize some very encouraging developments. The writer in me is bursting with impatience to share more promising news. But such is the constraint of being involved with controversial subjects.
I hope that next year will be fulfilling and exciting for all of you. Many thanks to all of you who continue to support SCGI, not only monetarily but also just by passing along the news that the future holds immense promise to solve energy and global poverty challenges. Happy New Year!
Tom Blees
President of SCGI
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