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Six Asean countries are either considering or
building nuclear power plants.
Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam
will have operational nuclear power stations in 2016, 2021 and 2015,
respectively.
Myanmar had asked Russia to help
it put up a nuclear research reactor to train technicians to manage
nuclear power plants.
Malaysia and the Philippines have
still to make up their minds on when and how many nuclear power
plants to build.
None of these countries seem to
have been deterred by the earthquake that shut down the world’s
biggest nuclear complex in Kashiwasaki in Japan last month.
The reasons are strategic. As
Hans Holger Rogner, the head of the economics section of the UN’s
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told The New York Times,
“Fuel prices, energy security concerns, environmental
concerns—not just climate change but pollution as we—if you add
that up it’s really put the nuclear option back into the planning
equation.”
The Philippines is skittish about
nuclear power plants, having been burned by the Bataan Nuclear Power
Plant (BNPP) that President Marcos contracted Westinghouse to build
but which President Aquino refused to use for reasons of safety.
Public sentiment against nuclear
power is still strong. The recent meeting between the officials of
the Department of Energy (DOE) and the executives of Tokyo Electric
Power Co. (TEPCO) did not go beyond an offer by the Japanese to
train Filipino technicians in how to evaluate nuclear technology.
It would be difficult to pass up
the nuclear option. The country needs a reliable source of large
scale, non-polluting power. Energy planners have no choice but to
include nuclear power in the energy mix, if we are to make our
growth targets.
When the BNPP was constructed
there was not much choice; it was either heavy water or light water
reactors.
Today, despite the hiatus due to
the Three-Mile and Chernobyl accidents engineering research has
produced safer nuclear reactors.
Let me cite 3 examples.
In the sixties, General Atomic,
then a division of the General Dynamics Corp. in the US, put on the
market a reactor called HTGR or High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor.
It was more efficient than water-cooled rectors; much safer and less
vulnerable to mishandling than light-water reactors. Independent
tests in the US and in Germany established that a full-scale model
of 1,000 megawatts was “a thousand times as safe as light water
reactor” to quote the physicist Freeman Dyson who helped develop
it. However, because of poor sales it’s no longer in the market.
The other example is more recent.
In fact it’s still undergoing development in Norway. Its fuel is
thorium, not uranium. Unlike a conventional fission reactor that
needs enough fissile material to bring about a nuclear chain
reactions the energy amplifier, as it is called, doesn’t need to
sustain a chain reaction. Heat is produced by an accelerator that
fires high-energy particles into the fuel, producing fission
reactions. It can be designed so that it does not overheat, the
cause of meltdown. Energy amplifiers however are not cheap and they
still have to be proved commercially.
My third example, unlike the two
above, is available and proven. It’s the advanced liquid-metal
reactor or ALMR.
This is a fast-neutron reactor
that can squeeze more energy from nuclear fuel. In fact, it uses the
spent fuel of light-water reactors. Therefore, it saves on uranium
and it reduces the amount of radioactive wastes that need to be put
away. A 1,000 megawatt-electric-thermal reactor produces more than
100 tons of spent fuel a year. A fast reactor with the same
electrical capacity generates less than a ton of radioactive waste.
To ensure safety, the ALMR has
the following features:
(a) if the pumps that circulate
the sodium coolant fail, the coolant would still circulate by
gravity;
(b) if the coolant pumps
malfunctioned, it has special devices that would lower the
temperature;
(c) in an emergency, 6 control
rods would drop into the core to shut it down immediately; and
finally
(d) if the chain reactions
continue, neutron-absorbing boron carbide balls would be released
into the core shutting it down completely.
Fast reactors are in service in
France, Japan, Russia and the US. Argonne Laboratory in the US is
still trying to make them even safer and more efficient.
Readers who want more detailed
information could read George Stanford’s Integrated Fast Reactors:
Source of Safe, Abundant, Non-Polluting Power, National Policy
Analysis Paper #378, December 2001 at www.nationalcenter.org/NPA.378.html.
Should the DOE decide to build a
nuclear power plant, the ALMR should be its first choice.
The HTGR and the energy amplifier
should be considered for use later in the century, once they become
available and affordable.
The spent fuel of the HTGR can be
used by the ALMR. In the meantime we should begin prospecting for
thorium, a metal that’s more widely distributed than uranium.
My point: We should choose the
technology and not let the vendor foist its technology on us. This
is the expertise that DOE must acquire.
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