Nuclear Power--Posner's Response to Comments

There were a number of good comments, as usual. Let me first correct a mistake. I said that "reprocessing [spent nuclear fuel] produces as a byproduct plutonium, which is readily convertible to nuclear bomb material." The second part of the sentence is correct, but not the first. The spent fuel from the operation of the ordinary nuclear reactor contains plutonium; that is why on-site storage is so problematic from the standpoint of terrorist threats: plutonium is present wherever spent fuel is stored. The plutonium in spent fuel can be recycled into a fuel for nuclear reactors, and this might seem the solution to the disposal problem, but there are special safety concerns and the reprocessing itself produces considerable radioactive material as a byproduct. For a compact description, see pages 106-108 of the MIT nuclear-power study that I cited in my original posting. I should also have mentioned that while creating a nuclear waste dump in lieu of on-site storage would alleviate the problem of stealable plutonium stored on site, it would not solve it. And this for two reasons: plutonium would remain stored on site awaiting shipment to the dump; and trucks carrying the plutonium to the dump are potentially vulnerable to being attacked. Notice also that the more frequent the shipments, the smaller the amount of plutonium that will remain stored on site but the more potential interceptions of the traffic between site and dump there will be. A further point to add to my original discussion is that if greater use of nuclear power resulted in a fall in the demand for oil, this would have the incidental effect of reducing the price of oil. The cost of producing oil varies. As demand grows, higher-cost producers are drawn into the market, and their costs determine the market price. If demand falls, therefore, the highest-cost production will be withdrawn and price will fall. This is true even when the producers collude (the OPEC cartel); other things being equal, when cost falls the optimum monopoly or cartel price also falls, though it remains above the competitive level. But the effect of a gradual, incremental increase in nuclear power generation on the demand for oil would be modest. And a more important policy goal than reducing the price of oil is reducing our dependence on foreign, especially Middle Eastern, oil. This could be done by a heavy tax on oil, which would reduce the demand for oil much more than a modest increase in nuclear electrical generation would do. One comment points out that if current unlike older reactor designs are quite safe against the risk of an accidental (as distinct from terrorist-induced) meltdown, this provides an additional reason for building new reactors: replacement of older, dangerous ones. Most of the comments on my posting, oddly enough, debate global warming, which I had mentioned only in passing. I have discussed the issue at length in my book Catastrophe: Risk and Response (2004), and do not wish to repeat the discussion here. Suffice it to say that while there are skeptics, there is also a strong scientific consensus that global warming is an increasingly serious problem to which human activities, mainly the burning of fossil fuels and the clearing of forests by fire, both being activities that emit substantial quantities of carbon dioxide, a major "greenhouse gas" and one that indirectly increases another greenhouse gas--water vapor in the atmosphere--are contributing significantly. The point to emphasize in relation to the nuclear-power issue, however, is that the contribution of expanded use of nuclear power to generate electricity to alleviating the global-warming problem would be small because nuclear power at present generates only about 20 percent of the world's electricity and expansion of nuclear power would be gradual and of course would not affect the contribution to global warming of other activities besides the generation of electricity, such as automobile traffic. Moreover, because the effect of emissions of carbon dioxide on the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is cumulative except in the very long run, merely reducing somewhat the current rate of emissions would not reduce, but would merely slow the rate of growth of, atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.

Comments

[bill]

Only a few days ago, there was a couple of scientific papers that said we have cleared the air so much with cleaner technologies that more sunlight was now hitting the ground. SO we are going to fry regradless what we do.

on a serious note, what are the commensurate problems with waste and storage when the newer meltdown proof PBMR reactors are put in service? It appears that China is going ahead with deployment of these type reactors. One wonders why we don't emabark on a program to replace our older reactors with these PBMR and at the same time do what the Chinese are doing, make all new electical plants the newer meltdown proof nuclear models.

[Ryan Kasprzak]

1. Lack of a link between nuclear power and oil prices:

Supporting Professor Posner�s point, International Energy Agency data for 2002 indicates that oil accounts for only about 2% of US electricity production. Thus, we should assume that as the use of nuclear power for electricity production increases the decline in demand for oil will be minimal; the more likely impact would be a decline in the price of coal and a decline in coal-related greenhouse gas emissions. This would be true unless electricity prices (relative to oil prices) fall enough that people begin substituting electricity for fossil fuels in other applications, such as transportation. The most efficient way to do this might be to tax oil modestly and use the proceeds to subsidize electricity production.
Unless we shift the US transportation infrastructure away from oil and toward another energy source, the issue of foreign oil dependence cannot be addressed; simply taxing oil may be too regressive of a tax given that automobiles are much more of a necessity in the United States than in other developed countries. To look at the problem more precisely, my layman�s understanding of energy might suggest that storage issues prevent electricity (difficult to store) from replacing oil (easy to store) in many applications. Reducing our dependence on foreign oil might best be accomplished by subsidizing research into battery technologies.

2. Nuclear power cannot be adapted to a distributed generation regime:

One additional thought on nuclear power; nuclear power is the only type of transformation of raw material to energy that is inherently and unambiguously centralized. Oil, coal, natural gas, solar, and wind, all afford the opportunity to pursue centralized or distributed power generation, whereas nuclear energy does not. It would be interesting to consider what implications this has for the long run prospects of nuclear versus other sources of energy.

[ds]

uhhh, electric cars, trains and busses, wouldn't that reduce oil consumption and lower pressure on oil and gas supplies? Seems to me like it would. Taking coal fired plants out of electricity production would reduce greenhouse gasses as well.

For that matter, nuclear energy could be used to run various conversion plants that produce oil products. Hydrogen conversion is another very useful endeavor that nuclear plants are well suited for. IMHO, hydrogen is likely to be the fuel of choice for vehicles in the not too distant future.

The new PBMR are designed to be built close to points of consuption, not like the old nuclear behemoths of the 70s. Their smaller size and enhanced saftey makes this feasible.
Nuclear is all good, little bad when you look at it objectively.

[Robert J. Walker]

I keep wondering whether the debates over Social Security and what to do about our growing oil dependence will soon merge. Raising energy taxes and using the proceeds to reduce payroll taxes could create a triple dividend: less dependence on foreign oil, reduced pollution (including greenhouse gas emissions) and, just as importantly, more jobs. In the past few years, European nations have made movement in this direction, with more than a dozen countries lowering their payroll tax rates and some of them, like Germany, using higher energy taxes as a means of facilitating lower payroll tax rates. Tax shifts of this nature use price or market-based mechanisms to make businesses less energy intensive and more labor intensive (i.e. higher more workers. Given our current circumstances, what's wrong with that?

Bob Walker

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