Hello! I have written an essay on the possible role nuclear energy has in the transition to clean energy. The paper covers the necessity of converting our energy system to clean sources, the drawbacks of renewables and nuclear and a short summary of why nuclear is struggling in the US. I am looking for critique on my Essay, my assignment for peer review asks for 3 areas of improvement. I felt that my weakest points were when and how to use sources, overall flow of the paper, and formatting. Do you agree? Thanks!
EDIT: The formatting did not carry over from Word in some areas, apologies.
John Sullivan
Research paper: Rough Draft
ENG102
07/27/23
Nuclear Power: A Key Part of the Clean Energy Transition
"The world remained firmly in warming's grip last year, with extreme summer temperatures in Europe, China and elsewhere contributing to 2022 being the fifth-hottest year on record, European climate researchers said this week.
The eight warmest years on record have now occurred since 2014, the scientists, from the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service, reported, and 2016 remains the hottest year ever." (Fountain and Rojanasakul). Without a doubt the world is getting warmer. The consensus amongst the scientific community is that warming is caused by carbon emissions into the atmosphere. The most common emissions are in the form of CO2, a colorless, odorless gas typically a byproduct of burning fossil fuels. The other is methane, also colorless and odorless, which comes from a wide variety of sources, the most common being the extraction of natural gas and a byproduct of biological decay. These compounds are very similar and come from similar sources, in fact methane is just carbon with an additional 2 hydrogen atoms. "One kg of CO2 equivalents is equivalent to the effect of one kg of CO2 emission. The emission of 1 kg of nitrous oxide (N2O) equals 298 kg of CO2 equivalents, and the emission of 1 kg of methane (CH4) is equal to 25 kg CO2 equivalents." (Statistics Netherlands) Methane breaks down in the atmosphere after 10 years but during that time is much more potent. The Earth has been hotter many times in the past, during the Jurassic period for example the Earth was estimated to be 5-10 degrees Celsius warmer than it is today. Today our governments and scientists worry about just 1.5-2 degrees of warming, but it is not the total heat change that has them worried, it is the rate of the change. "Life finds a way" is a popular quote from Jurassic Park and given enough time life typically does find a way to adapt and thrive in its environment, but without enough time we may find biosphere suffering. Wildfires can displace thousands and are happening more often and larger than ever (Hoy). The dinosaurs may have been ok with large storms and rapidly changing weather patterns, but wheat, rice and corn may not be so forgiving. Famine would be a terrible humanitarian crisis but could also result in a destabilization of the world's governments, which would make fixing emissions an even more difficult task than it already is. So, what can the world do about it?
Reducing emissions is a very difficult and complex task, but like any complex task the best way forward is to break it down into small ones. The largest contributors to carbon from the US are burning fossil fuels for electricity, heating, and transportation (Sources of Greenhouse Gas Emissions). Transportation is difficult as the fossil fuel sources are disbursed across millions of vehicles, to fix that issue, we need to centralize the carbon source by incentivizing the purchasing of electric vehicles, this brings the carbon emissions from the vehicle to the grid. Electricity and heating are closely related, if we can incentivize new homes to switch to heat pumps and older homes to switch from gas furnaces, we can also centralize the heating issue as it will make the heating units run on electricity instead of natural gas. Lastly, as the carbon sources have been centralized to the electricity grid, we need to convert the grid to using renewable sources.
Clean energy and renewable energy are slightly different. Renewable energy comes from sources that are effectively unlimited, such as wind and solar. Clean energy produces energy without burning fossil fuels but is not an unlimited source, like nuclear, as it uses Uranium ore as fuel. Renewable energy in its current form comes with significant drawbacks. Solar does not generate any energy while the sun is not shining, or when cloud cover prevents a significant portion of sunlight. Both drawbacks are exacerbated by local weather patterns and the positions of these systems on the planet, longer days, and longer nights (Gonzalez). Likewise, wind does not produce energy when the wind is not blowing. Both suffer from the large amount of land usage required for such systems, they both disturb the local ecology in their areas and wind can be a significant hazard to birds, especially in paths of bird migration patterns. However overall, the drawbacks are outweighed by the benefits. Renewable energy has reached and is surpassing cost parity with fossil fuel sources, solar cells have fallen in price by 90% (Scheltens). Upfront costs on renewable sources tend to be higher, but without any fuel costs and only maintenance costs to consider their overall price is very attractive in the long term. It also reduces stress on supply chains as there is no need to ship coal or natural gas to a generating station.
The single biggest obstacle to renewable energy is its inability to produce base load electricity. Base load is electricity needed constantly throughout the entire day. During any given day a cities power needs can vary wildly. We mitigate this issue by having base load and peak load facilities. A base load facility generates electricity and a constant rate while peak load facilities increase, decrease, or cease production based on need. Peak load facilities are often natural gas or coal and are easily replaced by renewables, after all people mostly consume their energy during the day when the sun is shining, but base load facilities are more difficult. People still want to run their dryers and televisions after the sun has gone down, this is where base load facilities find their need. There are solutions to having renewables fill this gap, but significant technological improvements are needed to meet that goal. Batteries are an obvious solution, but the storage capacity requirements are immense and would need battery production to increase by orders of magnitude to meet the need. On top of the increase in production, raw materials being mined from the earth do not even come close to meeting the demand for lithium and cobalt, key materials in lithium-ion batteries. "In 2020, some seventy per cent of the world's cobalt came from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. "Unless we have diversity, we're going to be in trouble," Srinivasan said. Any disruption to the supply chain can strongly affect prices and availability. Moreover, a lot of water and energy are required for mining the metals, which can cause environmental damage, and some cobalt-mining operations involve child labor. Experts doubt that Li-ion prices will drop more than thirty per cent below their current levels without significant technological advancements-a drop that is still too small, according to the Department of Energy. We need to expand our capacity; by one estimate, we'll require at least a hundred times more storage by 2040 if we want to shift largely to renewables and avoid climate catastrophe." (Hutson) Clearly the hurdles to generating the kind of storage we need with batteries are large and will need significant technologies developed to be feasible. Pumped hydro is also a solution that has been used, tested, and found to be effective, but requires specific topography and available bodies of water. To summarize, without a significant change in the technology, using entirely renewable sources for energy without an alternative for base load facilities will be very difficult.
There is a clean energy solution that comes with its own drawbacks but can fill the gap of baseload facilities until energy storage solutions are feasible at the grid scale needed. Nuclear energy has been around since the 50's, initially developed to be used as weapons the nuclear technology was adapted for peaceful purpose and the first commercial reactor went online in 1957. The only type of commercial reactor in the US is the LWR or light water reactor, that uses regular (purified) water to cool and modulate the reactor's power. The drawback of this type of reactor is that it is not good at reducing or increasing power on a large scale. "There are affects of changing power, namely Xenon. Xenon Is a natural fission fragment from fission, and it also has a large cross section of absorption for a thermal neutron, interfering with normal fission which will cause the reactor to down power somewhat." (Huck) Therefore nuclear is most fitting as a base load facility, it is very efficient at generating constant power, consistently at a low cost. As previously mentioned, there are drawbacks to nuclear energy. Nuclear generating stations are expensive, extremely expensive. "More than safety or waste issues, cost is nuclear's Achilles' heel. Modern-day reactors have become jarringly expensive to build, going for $5 billion to $10 billion a pop. Worse, the price tag seems to be rising in many places. Back in the 1960s, new reactors in the US were one of the cheaper energy sources around. Two decades later, after a series of missteps, those costs had increased sixfold - a big reason we stopped building plants." (Plumer). Another reason that costs have risen is that new reactors have not been built for many years, construction projects like these are complex projects that only highly specialized firms and people are capable of performing. "There are some pretty impressive concepts, when it comes to metallurgy, when it comes to the skill of the craft of our profession that, uhm, I've seen a lot of experience retire and people with the know-how, you know, they may not be around anymore" (Huck). We have largely lost generational talent that was building this reactors through the 20th century that will have to be rebuilt if we want to build more plants.
Waste is a popular detractor against nuclear. Waste, while significant is not the extreme problem it is made out to be. Spent nuclear fuel will remain radioactive for millions of years. Uranium 235, which is the "enriched" part of the reactor fuel and the most desirable element for an LWR has a half life (the amount of time for half of the radiation to be emitted) of about 700 million years. For this, the industry had to find a solution. Originally the plan was for the government to build a facility in Yucca Mountain, Nevada capable of storing the fuel in a secure site. Unfortunately, "politics got in the way and that facility is no longer going to be storing spent fuel, the industry was out of time and out of space and had to find a solution, dry cast storage was that solution" (Huck). The solution the nuclear industry came up with was dry cast storage, which is essentially an incredibly dense concrete storage "storing 1000 fuel assemblies per cast, with sarcophagus capable of withstanding a train derailment, and emitting essentially zero radiation from the interior" (Huck). To further illustrate the strength and safety placed on reactor fuels "The storage units are capable of a jet engine collision at speed with an armed professional security force on site 24/7, it would take an incredibly capable and complex scheme to damage or steal any spent reactor fuel." (Huck). Another solution beyond storing the spent fuel, is to change the law around reprocessing fuel. Since the 70s under Jimmy Carter, it was made illegal to reprocess spent nuclear fuel. The US is unique in this, for example "France has reactors based on reprocessed fuel, and reprocessing plants, instead of focusing on the spent fuel as waste, we should realize the huge potential of reclaiming some of the energy in those fuel assemblies. A natural byproduct of burning uranium-238 in the core is plutonium, that potential energy is wasted in the US." (Huck). The current method of wasting what is essentially a huge reserve of potential fuel is wasteful, though it does not seem to harm the bottom line of the energy companies as uranium fuel is relatively cheap, there is a hidden cost as those mining operations are terrible for the local environment and are often taken from poorer countries with poor worker safety and human rights records. (Occupational Safety in Uranium Mining)
The largest hazard, understandably given the consequences, is meltdown. Any time a fuel has been irradiated it will continue to emit heat, it needs no oxygen, and the fuel is abundant. You can't put it out with water, you simply use the water to keep taking away the heat. This is the largest danger of these reactors as, if cooling were to stop, the reactor would melt down through the containment pad into the ground, hence the term "meltdown". Reactor operators can scram the process by dropping in control rods, which are rods made of a type of material that absorbs the neutrons flying around inside the reactor without creating fission. Remember the fission is what generates the heat, and if those materials do not undergo fission when struck with a neutron, they will not generate heat, but the fuel is still irradiated even after a scram and is still emitting heat. The heat tolerances of these reactors are impressive, but they still need cooling even if the fission process has stopped. "The fuel needs to be kept in water for 10 years until it is ready for dry storage where convective air flow will be enough to dissipate heat generated by the decaying fuel" (Huck). The risk of nuclear meltdown is still present and must always be considered by the professionals in the sector, "We have seen incidents, like Chernobyl and Fukushima, that nuclear is nothing to be trifled with, we still need to have nuclear professionals" (Huck).
Fukushima specifically is an incident which caused considerable anxiety in the nuclear energy sector and for the public. While nobody died of acute radiation sickness, the release of radiation into the environment was considerable, it is widely considered the 2nd worst disaster in history following, by a huge margin, Chernobyl (Acton and Hibbs). The severity of incidents is rated on a scale called the "International Nuclear Event Scale" going from the least severe of a 1 to the most severe at 7, Fukushima was a 7, along with Chernobyl. A 7 is classified as a major accident, with a major release of radioactive material, with widespread health and environmental effects. While it is too early to see the increased cancer rates following Fukushima, an effective government response and ability to disseminate information to the public lead to a truly spectacular evacuation. In fact, the only deaths so far attributed to the nuclear accident itself is the deaths associated with the evacuation and not the radiation itself. The accident occurred due to a massive flood caused by an earthquake and tsunami, the largest ever recorded in Japan, caused the backup diesel generators to flood, and go offline, leading to a loss of power and coolant flow into the reactor. The decay heat of the fuel eventually caused a meltdown in 3 of the 4 reactors at Fukushima, and hydrogen explosions caused by oxidation of zirconium by steam. Significant amounts of radioactive gasses were released into the air, and perhaps more importantly sea water was contaminated and flowed back out into the ocean. While this may seem like a dire accident, the results were mostly in expense as containment was constructed, deaths were low and while excess cancer rates may occur, stillbirths and birth abnormalities are not increased, and we may not see any increased cancer rates at all. The reality is, that when safety systems are implemented, these reactors are incredibly safe. Following Fukushima, the International Atomic Energy Agency found considerable fault with Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and with the Japanese Government. This accident was foreseeable and avoidable (Acton and Hibbs). And with this "The nuclear industry is evolving, we implemented safety procedures after Fukushima, and now have redundant diesel generators in case of grid power failure to keep coolant flowing" (Huck). And if the worst were to happen, evacuation and planning can reduce the mortal damage to the public to near zero, even for level 7 events.
Without a doubt, there is some serious baggage that comes along with nuclear energy, however without an alternative for base load electricity, there does not seem to be an alternative. We cannot generate the energy we need with renewables when the sun doesn't shine, and wind doesn't blow. We cannot continue to use natural gas or coal as a crutch. We cannot store energy efficiently or on such a scale without some radical change in the technology needed. We cannot force people and businesses to change their energy needs to accommodate peaks and troughs in renewable energy generation. The only solution in my mind is to utilize a well-practiced and proven technology that can fill these gaps right now, without modification or improvement. It is expensive, and it has risks, but so does continue to warm our planet to an unsustainable level.
In conclusion, the risks of nuclear energy are high, the incidents are infrequent, but when they happen, they can be disastrous. Fukushima sets the example that despite decades of improvement there is still always an omnipresent risk of meltdown and release of radiation. Events like Chernobyl show that human error can also be a cause beyond broken equipment and failed safety standards. If we do not acknowledge these risks, we are doomed to repeat them. But nuclear energy, despite the risks, represents a golden opportunity. Clean, plentiful power that, after the initial cost, is cheap and can power our cities decades and possibly centuries into the future. We can use that power to keep our homes cool despite this record heat wave, and the ones to come. With this power we can build a renewable energy grid that will keep our planet healthy and habitable for our children.
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