Efficiency Improvements and Cost Reduction Efforts Related To Uranium Enrichment Cause Concern For Some "Nuclear Policy Experts"
Being a pro-nuclear activist can cause occasional frustrations, especially considering how easy it is to get stuck in circular arguments with groups holding conflicting views about the same aspect of nuclear technology.
One topic associated with nuclear energy production that can lead to frustrating arguments is the question of cost. People like Amory Lovins and Joe Romm oppose nuclear energy because they claim that it costs too much and displaces investments that should – in their opinion – be directed towards using less energy altogether and towards developing wind, solar, and geothermal sources for those energy needs that remain after all possible efficiencies have been wrung out. Lovins preaches a seductive gospel, especially for Americans who actually believe that there is a free lunch and that their neighbors are terribly wasteful.
In fact, there are some aspects of Lovins’s preachings that are useful and reasonable – it is a valid part of any good engineering practice to work to eliminate waste, to refine production methods, to get rid of production path processes that add cost without adding value, and to choose production methods that reduce the energy expenditure required to produce a high quality, finished product. In fact, there are a number of engineers at General Electric (GE) who have achieved great success in their careers by working on efficiency, reducing waste, and improving production. A long time focus area has been improvements in the process of creating commercially useful fuel for nuclear reactors.
One of the major cost components of that rather complex process is “enrichment”, the process that converts natural uranium, which has a fissile material concentration of just 0.7%, into low enriched uranium for light water reactors, which requires a fissile material concentration of between 3 and 5 percent.
Aside: I put enrichment into quotes because more accurate terms for the process would be “refinement”, “purification” or “separation” because there is no part of the process in a traditional operation where fissile material is added to enrich a stream of material, instead, the non fertile portion of natural uranium is selectively taken out of the stream, leaving behind a material with a higher portion of fertile material. This is not unlike the refinement process used in separating crude oil into its various components. However, “enrichment” is the chosen term of art for the process of converting natural uranium to something more useful in a light water reactor. End aside.
In the early days of nuclear energy development, the United States had a global monopoly on uranium enrichment because only the United States had invested the national wealth required to build a plant using gaseous diffusion, an energy intensive process that took thousands of stages using expensive materials that had to be carefully fabricated to produce the separation membranes. Powering our early enrichment plants required the electricity output of a couple of large coal fired power plants and was the source of the early anti-nuclear argument that producing fuel for nuclear plants actually consumed more electricity than the plants produced.
There have been countless improvements to both the fuel consumption and the enrichment process since those early days, and nuclear plants currently achieve extremely low fuel costs that reflect the small amount of energy required for each unit of fuel. The current average nuclear fuel cost in the US is roughly 0.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, with enrichment costs still being a significant portion of that total cost.
GE, always looking for ways to improve processes and to find a competitive advantage, recognized that the isotope separation process developed in Australia and known as SILEX (separation of isotopes by laser excitation) offered a path that had a good probability of resulting in lower enrichment costs. They calculated that the initial plant costs might be smaller for each unit of production than the cost of the current world standard production method using very high speed centrifuges and they also determined that there was a potential operating cost savings through the use of less input power. In 2006, GE signed a development agreement with the technology researchers.
Aside: Laser isotope separation was not invented in Australia, but the US gave up on the process in the 1990s after spending upwards of $2 billion on it. End Aside.
After several years of refinement in their Wilmington, NC laboratories the SILEX team (GE, Hitachi, and Cameco), operating under both the classification system of the United States and Australian governments and the well-respected GE commercial security methods that ensure protection of trade secrets offering competitive advantage, have apparently achieved some success in their efforts to apply the techniques in commercially useful production equipment.
An article in the November 16, 2009 issue of Forbes Magazine titled GE Enriches Its Nukes Business provides some details about GE’s enrichment business opportunties, but I also enjoyed reading an article titled Mom &: Pop: it’s time for energy policy with nuclear as base from WickedLocal.com out of Weymouth MA. That article helped me to understand that nuclear fuel enrichment business currently earns $7 billion each year. That is a blip in the world’s several trillion dollar per year energy business, but it is certainly a segment worth pursuing, especially as interest in new nuclear power plants develops significant momentum.
Now comes the frustration part. According to a recent article in Defense News titled Laser Enrichment Plan Draws Critics a couple of dozen “nuclear policy experts” have written a letter to the US Senate demanding that they hold hearings about the process. Their intention is to produce legislation that requires the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to “consider the dangers of proliferation before issuing a license for GLE to build a laser enrichment plant.”
Apparently, these “nuclear policy experts” are worried that the GE Laser Enrichment (GLE) process is too small, cheap and energy efficient. Why, if this closely guarded commercially useful secret were to get out, there is a (exceedingly remote) possibility that a nefarious group would be able to afford to build a factory and hide its use while they enrich enough uranium to a high enough percentage to use it to build a BOMB!
A laser enrichment plant might be one-quarter the size of an enrichment plant that uses today’s state-of-the-art centrifuges. The plant would also use much less electricity than a standard enrichment plant.
“You could hide an enrichment facility in a warehouse,” said Charles Ferguson, a nuclear energy and weapons expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.
And that’s the danger.
“This specific method of uranium enrichment makes it easy to conceal and, consequently, extremely difficult for international nuclear inspectors to detect,” said Leonor Tomero, director of nuclear nonproliferation at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.
As a pro-nuclear activist, I often engage in debate with people who are terribly concerned that nuclear energy is simply way too expensive, and should not be pursued because the cost would choke off the development of other useful technologies. When skilled engineers who have made a career out of solving cost challenges for competitive advantage
actually take on the challenge and make improvements that could significantly reduce costs and improve energy productivity, another group steps up. Their goal is to erect cost increasing road blocks under the guise of being worried that lower cost production methods might somehow escape and end up in the wrong hands. Senate hearings and NRC regulations can add years of delay and drive costs far higher than they would be in the absence of such activity.
It should be obvious to anyone who has ever dealt with commercial enterprises that have trade secrets offering competitive advantage that the potential of “leaks” from those enterprises is far lower than the potential of leaks from government agencies who are otherwise trusted with not only access to techniques that might be useful in weapons production, but actually finished weapons themselves. There is not a darn thing that slowing down the GLE commercialization path will do to reduce the danger of the use of nuclear weapons, but adding cost to the development process through bureaucratic actions could be of great use to the competitive suppliers in the business.
Potentially interested parties who could benefit from increasing the cost of GLE include other companies that are already established in the $7 billion per year enrichment business, foreign governments that supply enrichment services, and foreign governments that have already enriched materials that are being sold for blending down. Of course, there are also interested parties involved in the fossil fuel industry that tacitly and financially encourage ANY activity that will increase the cost of producing commercial energy using atomic fission. They only way they can continue to compete is to keep working to keep the cost of nuclear energy as high as possible.
Bottom line – I am excited by GLE’s laser excitement separation process. I wish I knew more about the details, but if I did, I would not be able to share them. The idea that this process will add to the risk that of another nuclear weapon being used to kill people is exceedingly remote – to the point where I suspect the motives of anyone who is working to use that argument against the development of the process.
You do know that the people entering this challenge are well aware of how flimsy their argument is? The real purpose of these types of demands is just to increase the overhead and delay the start of a nuclear project. Proliferation is just a useful flag to wave in this case.
Part of the problem is that the whole proliferation issue is out of control, and it has spawned a policy monster globally that exists only to exist. Unless it is brought to heel, it may well cripple nuclear development in a way the Greens could only dream of.
DV82XL – I agree. I do not believe that the hamstringing effects of the “non-proliferation” argument are accidental. Any deep research into the roots of the movement can find many threads that relate worries about weapons proliferation to the same kinds of establishment commercial interests that I continue to talk about.
I imagine that there were at least some in the “influential” crowd who saw the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a manner illustrated by this imaginary board room discussion that I think just might have occurred in August 1945.
“What do you mean, a single plane carrying a single bomb could cause that much damage? How in the world are we going to keep selling all of those bombers and bombs that our factories produce plus all of the fuel that they burn if the rest of the world figures this stuff out?”
This may sound overly fatalistic, but if you stop GE, then someone else will eventually figure out laser enrichment. The way to stop proliferation is to address the reasons these countries want the weapons in the first place. I am NOT in favor of selling centrifuges in WalMart, but trying to stop proliferation by banning commercial nuclear technology is akin to banning florists to stop the opium trade…
Proliferation shouldn’t be used as an excuse to attack nuclear power. There are relatively easy ways to detect the sorts of massive cascade type operations necessary for highly-enriched product, and with SILEX, this will presumably hold true.
But proliferation, in the grand scale of things, is a concern. The problem with proliferation is that if such types of things get into the wrong hands, they can cause a lot of damage very quickly. What once took years of military effort and there was a chance of countering are replaced with weapons that have the same effect in the period of seconds.
The flaw in the assumption that proliferation has no harm is that, of course, no nation would use weapons because of MAD. I would agree that no RATIONAL nation would use weapons. But human beings – and human nations – can sometimes be IRRATIONAL. Perfect rationality is a perfectly irrational assumption, and one that led to this financial crisis that we’ve found ourselves in.
Of the many answers to proliferation, there are many that don’t affect technology, such as placing the fuel cycle under international regulation, treaties providing for multilateral coercive action to ensure disarmament of suspected proliferators, or the idea of forbidding sovereign states (with a temporary grandfather clause for the NWS) from touching the fuel cycle and only allowing IAEA licensed multinational corporations not substantially dominated by one nation to touch the fuel cycle.
Proliferation concerns can be managed and accommodated without destroying or slowing nuclear power. That is because proliferation is a government failure (a “failure of socialism”) rather than a market failure or a technical failure. The answer to proliferation is to better manage governments, to better manage the evils that men do to one another, rather than gimping nuclear technology.
We have got to get rid of this simplistic idea that if this technology isn’t controlled nations will be ‘tempted’ to make nuclear weapons. A nuclear weapons program is a unbelievably expensive undertaking (“we were eating grass” as they said in Pakistan) and no nation decides to engage in such a project lightly.
This attitude assumes that just the availability of HEU would be an overwhelming temptation for some random Third-World nation to start fabricating N-weapons. This is just too simplistic a view of the whole issue of what motivates a country to obtain an N-weapon capability. It presumes that the nation in question is going to treat the acquisition of this capability as lightly as they would any other item of military hardware and trivializes the other technical challenges of making a reliable, deliverable, device. Much of this thinking is a product of Cold War thinking that itself was based on assumptions that events have proven to be false.
In short, no country has shown any signs of working towards making a nuclear arsenal unless they feel that their very existence is threatened, but once that determination has been made, nothing that the international community can do, short of military action can stop them from getting one.
Hand wringing inside and outside of the pronuclear power community on the issue of weapons proliferation seems to be locked in theories first put forward in the 1960’s which events since that time has proven wrong. If you recall, it was assumed by those theories there would be more than a dozen new nuclear weapons States by the turn of the century – is is obviously just not so. Even if the question of suppling weapon-grade fissile material is removed, it still requires a sizable technological infrastructure and the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars to make a weapon. The costs of a more ambitious program aimed at producing a militarily significant number of weapons can easily run into the billions of dollars.
The fact remains that despite this popular view of what will happen, and a strong belief that it would in the anti-proliferation community, the truth, born out by by examining events of the last fifty years, is that it hasn’t turned out that way. Proliferation myths, like most of the nuclear mythos that grew as a consequence of a mix of ignorance, inexperience and Cold War propaganda, has been shown to be false. Continuing to expect policy to follow those falsehoods is ineffectual at best and counterproductive at worst.
The US (and Australia) do not have a monopoly on bright engineers and scientists. Blocking the commercial deployment of the SILEX uranium technology will not make it disappear and be forgotten.
If the technology proves to be economically advantageous in comparison to the centrifuge process, I would particularly look to the Chinese to start pursuing it. They certainly are not above espionage to obtain the details, but they are fully capable of developing it independently.
One point of concern with a laser based process is that it may not need the large number of stages to obtain HEU that both the diffusion and centrifuge processes require. If this is so, it does make a small laser based system more suitable for a clandestine weapons program.
Bill
Bill – I would imagine that the best target for anyone who wants a clandestine weapons program is a finished weapon. I would bet that it is far easier to get ones hands on that kind of device than to put together a program to develop a tricky and complex technology like SILEX and then still have to do all of the rest of the development needed to build a weapon. All enrichment gets you is refined material – you still have a ton of work to do to turn that into a weapon.
You have more faith in Chinese invention than I. They are terrific reverse engineers, but how many innovations have they developed recently?
My point is that hampering the development of this particular project will do NOTHING to make the world a safer place, but it will do a LOT to keep profits flowing in the same direction that they are flowing today. In other words, it is simply a ploy to hamstring the competition. Nothing more.
That’s another thing that is pure myth – the ‘loose nuke.’
Given the size of the investment these things represent, the idea that they would be so poorly controlled in and country that owns them, that somebody could walk off with one is ludicrous. The risk of some internal enemy getting hold of one is more than enough motivation for any goverment to keep security high.
That someone could sell or give a complete device to a ‘terrorist’ group is also highly unlikely, because any government doing that would in essence be handing over their foreign policy decisions to the leadership of said group.
When you stop to think about,these scenarios are the stuff of bad made for TV movies, not real geopolitics.
DV82XL – Just to make myself clear, I am not terribly worried about a loose nuke scenario either. I am just saying that neither one (loss of control of key enrichment technology or loss of control of a complete weapon) is likely enough to cause me to lose sleep.
In the long run, the only thing that will ever make the world a safer place is to end the motivation for wars. That means to end scarcity, because scarcity is at the root of all conflicts, whether scarcity of energy or scarcity of materials. Without ending scarcity, conflict is inevitable.
Nuclear power will get us there in terms of ending scarcity of energy, and with enough energy, all things become possible.
(As for scarcity of materials, there’s a great NASA publication entitled “Advanced Automation for Space Missions” from back in 1979 that introduces the concept of self-replicating space factories, which are about 1000x as feasible today as they were 30 years ago when the study was published, just because of the advance in computing technology.
All you have to do is launch 100 tons of payload (various types of robotic mining, processing, and fabrication equipment – probably initially teleoperated equipment) to the Moon and, well, you’ve just made raw materials shortages history, as well as built the only thing that can outproduce the Chinese – because the robotic factory you just launched to the Moon works for free, it can be used to reproduce itself, say 100,000 times, and it can be used to gather the raw materials for, fabricate, assemble, and launch other 100 ton factories to the asteroid belt, Mars, Alpha Centauri, etc. Seriously – it’s feasible and it’s worth looking in to. The nation that builds it and launches it wins everything, forever.)
Dave – You made a great case for how nuclear energy can lead to a wonderful world where scarcity has been eliminated and there is plenty to go around. Such a situation can indeed lead to reduced pressure for war, which is really a way to fight about the distribution of scarce resources. However, you also illustrated the difficulty of actually achieving that peaceful utopia in a society full of human beings with your very last sentence:
The nation that builds it and launches it wins everything, forever.
For some people, competition is always about having winners that need a whole bunch of losers in order to make themselves feel powerful and superior. Until we get to a point where people see that their gains do not have to come at the expense of losses for others, we will continue to be warlike creatures.
My hope for the future, however, is that we will move that competition more and more to playing fields where we can cheer and battle without actually shoot each other or blowing things up. I really do believe that eliminating scarcity is a wonderful goal for human ingenuity, we just have to get there without those who are now dominant and powerful tripping us up because they LIKE living in a world of haves and have nots simply because they are a “have” and it makes them feel better to think that there are others who are not.
The end of scarcity will eventually bring about the end of nations, at least as militarized bodies. All together, there becomes no point to have haves and have nots in a world without scarcity.
What I meant by the nation that builds it “wins everything forever”, is that it wins the only scarce thing in a world without scarcity: the credit and the honor for making a world without scarcity possible.
Perhaps I’m also using a bit of reverse psychology. It’s also because to some extent I’m a realist, and I realize that the only way something like the Advanced Automation for Space Missions concept would get built is if somebody sees it as a either a weapons system or an enabler of building weapons systems, just like the Internet grew out of concepts originally designed for distributed, resilient communications in the event of a nuclear attack, or GPS was a positioning system for fast-moving land, air, and space platforms.
In essence, it’s the ultimate weapon, the very last weapons system ever necessary, because it destroys the very purpose of weapons.