A Bright Future by Joshua S. Goldstein

Author:Joshua S. Goldstein [GOLDSTEIN, JOSHUA S. / QVIST, STAFFAN A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2019-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

The Third Generation

Third-generation designs followed on the 1986 Chernobyl accident and claim greater safety in unusual circumstances, such as earthquakes or failures by human operators. They are “walk-away safe” in that the reactor will shut down safely, without danger of a meltdown, with no operator action needed for at least seventy-two hours. Principles such as gravity replace human intervention. By contrast, a Fukushima-type design relies on electric power to pump cooling water after an incident, and this approach failed when all the backup generators were swamped by an epic tsunami.

Several third-generation designs have entered operation successfully, but those under construction in Europe and the United States are in trouble. Designed to be simpler and cheaper to build, several of them have instead proven extremely expensive, with long delays and regulatory snafus.

In the United States, in particular, a nuclear power industry that had not built any new reactors in decades had a terrible time trying to get back into the game with designs that had never been built before. So far, exactly one new reactor (Watts Bar in Tennessee) has reached completion and entered service. But it was a second-generation design that had been suspended in the 1980s and—needing design changes to meet new regulations during its forty-two-year construction—ended up costing $12 billion.

The leading third-generation design in the United States was the Westinghouse AP1000, which not only was inherently safer but also required less material in construction and was simplified in order to be more economical. The design was approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2005, and four reactors were to be built, but a decade of delays and cost overruns ensued. Regulations and designs kept changing, and antinuclear groups kept up a stream of objections and legal actions against the plants. Westinghouse lost so much money, almost $10 billion, that it filed for bankruptcy in 2017, threatening its parent company, Toshiba, as well. The two reactors in South Carolina were abandoned, leaving the remaining two, in Georgia, hanging by a thread. (China is moving forward with four AP1000s, although they are delayed by several years, and the first connected to the grid in 2018.)

The other big American nuclear power company is General Electric. With its Japanese partner, Hitachi, it has decades of reactor experience and a third-generation design, the Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor. In 2017 the NRC granted approval for construction of an ESBWR in Virginia. It took nine years for the NRC to certify the ESBWR design and several more years before approval of the Virginia plant. All of that is before a shovel ever hits the ground. A second ESBWR, planned for Mississippi, was abandoned after ten years, before construction.

The French nuclear power company AREVA has created a third-generation reactor called the EPR (originally the “European Pressurized Reactor”). One is being built in France and one in Finland, both taking about a decade in construction, years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. China is building two EPRs, which, although a couple of years behind schedule, are being built faster and cheaper than those in Europe.

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