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Nuclear Renaissance

9 May 05

There are 103 nuclear power plants in the United States, supplying about 20 percent of US power.   The newest one is the Tennesee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar 1, which is almost 10 years old.  The industry has been steadily declining in the US for 30 years, as concerns about safety and environmental impacts have raised the costs of nuclear fission technology.

A Nuke at Sunset

As the world demands more energy, the attractiveness of non-oil sources increases.  Samuel Huntington, the Weatherhead University Professor at Harvard, and author of The Clash of Civilizations, sees nuclear power as an attractive way for countries like the US to gain a larger measure of energy independence.  He advocates increased investment in new nuclear power plants.

Now it appears that some of the past opponents of nuclear energy are becoming advocates as well.  A few prominent environmentalists see nukes as the lesser of two evils – nuclear power has no greenhouse gas emissions, so it is operationally cleaner than fossil fuels.  Stewart Brand, the founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, noted in MIT’s Technology Review in May:

“The only technology ready to fill the gap and stop the carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere is nuclear power”

As opposition to nuclear power begins to decline and demand for energy continues to grow, the business of nuclear plant construction would seem to be poised for a renaissance. 

But the skills required to build nuclear reactors are highly specialized and have not been used for more than ten years.  Many of the large firms who built our current set of nukes are no longer in the business, and their engineers have retired or moved on to other specialties.   So if a nuclear renaissance occurs, who will lead it?

“Everything depends on getting new and better nuclear technology designed and built.”

Stewart Brand, in Technology Review, May 2005

There’s been quite a bit of academic research done over the past 50 years examining the fate of established firms facing disruptive new technologies.  In most cases examined, the established firms lose most of their business to new companies who specialize in the new technologies, a process that Joseph Schumpeter labeled “creative destruction” when he wrote about it in 1942. 

The nuclear power situation is slightly different.  Established companies need to reinvigorate the development of reactor technologies that have lain fallow for many years.

While the situation is different, the result may be the same – new nukes will use new technologies to generate their power.  We’ll continue to see established firms losing out to new entrants in the process of “creative destruction.”

            For example, Stewart Brand cites the pebble-bed reactor as one potential new reactor design.  There are a number of companies working on this new technology, with names like Eskom in South Africa, Romawa B.V. in the Netherlands, and Adams Atomic Engines in the US.  As the innovation researchers would predict, none of these companies come from the previous generation of nuclear plant designers. 

Meanwhile, Cold Fusion Advances

Cold Fusion, the Musical

Over the last three years, cold fusion research has regained some of the credibility it lost with the notorious 1989 announcements by Drs. Pons and Fleishmann from the University of Utah.  Since 2003, the Department of Energy has been funding basic research in cold fusion and sonofusion. 

Advances are being made.  On April 28th, The New York Times reported that scientists had produced fusion in a footlong cylinder just five inches in diameter. 

"We can diddle temperature a mere 30 degrees and generate fields that make fusion."

Dr. Seth J. Putterman, of UCLA, in The New York Times

As with most basic research, commercialization is in the very distant future.

 But demand for nuclear power is now coming from a variety of new constituencies, and we can expect that the supply of new nukes will come from new technologies as well.

More Information:

1. Stewart Brand’s article in MIT’s Technology Review is here: http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/05/issue/feature_earth.asp

2. Facts about nuclear plants in the US: http://www.nei.org/index.asp?catnum=3&catid=13

3. I wrote an update on Cold Fusion in April 2004.  Here’s a link: http://www.biz-architect.com/cold_fusion.htm

4. The Wikipedia entry on Pebble-Bed Reactors:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor

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