ANS WINTER MEETING Nuclear and energy independence

W H I L E O R G A N I Z A T I O N S H A V E

canceled or altered conferences inthe wake of the events of Sep-

tember 11, the American Nuclear Society at-tracted more than 1100 attendants to its Win-ter Meeting in November in Reno, Nev. “Inlight of recent events, that is a remarkable ac-complishment,” ANS President Gail Marcuscommented during the opening plenary.

The large gathering was due perhaps to theupbeat mood of the industry in general, thanksin part to the Bush administration’s support ofthe continued use and further deployment ofnuclear power, and because any hope for re-ducing greenhouse gas emissions likely wouldinclude nuclear power in a national energypolicy.

During the plenary Marcus paraphrasedCharles Dickens by saying, “It is the best oftimes, it is the worst of times,” in referenceto the terrorist attacks on the United Statesand the opportunity for nuclear power tostake a substantial claim in the nation’s ener-gy future. “The recent events only point morestrongly to the need for energy security,” shesaid, “and in my mind, energy security has toinclude a very strong component of nuclearpower.”

Leon Walters, the meeting’s general chairand director of the Engineering Division atArgonne National Laboratory–West, notedduring the plenary that before September 11the world was coming to the realization thatnuclear power could be the solution to globalwarming. But now, he said, after that dark dayin September, “the contribution of nuclear en-ergy to reducing the dependence on foreignfossil fuels has taken on added importance.”

A foothold for the nation’s energy inde-pendence was made 50 years ago, Walterscontinued, when on December 20, 1951, theExperimental Breeder Reactor-I became thefirst nuclear unit to produce electricity. On alarge viewing screen set up in the plenary au-ditorium, an image was shown of an officialproclamation, signed recently by senators,congressmen, and the governor of Idaho, hon-

oring the EBR-I and the nuclear pioneers whodeveloped it. The proclamation recognized theenvironmental benefits of nuclear power andfeted those who worked to provide the worldwith “clean, sustainable energy for the bene-fit of humankind for centuries by making useof nature’s gifts of uranium and thorium.” Aceremony was held later during the WinterMeeting to celebrate the nuclear pioneers whoparticipated in the EBR-I project and helpedlay the foundation for energy independence.(For a history of the EBR-I project, see NN,Nov. 2001, pp. 28 and 30.)

The Winter Meeting, titled Nuclear Re-search and Development, also hosted twoembedded topicals and the ANS Student Con-ference. The topicals were Practical Imple-mentation of Nuclear Criticality Safety andAccelerator Applications/Accelerator DrivenTransmutation Technology and Applications.

History and hydrogenThe opening plenary, titled Global Energy

Perspectives, was divided into two sessionsover two days and provided a retrospective onwhere the nuclear power industry has beenand a perspective on where it might go.

During the first session, Len Koch, one ofthe nuclear pioneers honored for his work onthe EBR-I, reminisced about the early days ofthe industry. During his work career, Koch

was associate project director of the EBR-Iand project manager for another reactor, theEBR-II. He later became director of the Re-actor Engineering Division at Argonne Na-tional Laboratory before moving on to IllinoisPower Company.

“It is amazing the industry we gave birthto,” the 81-year-old Koch proclaimed proud-ly. “Today, there are 438 nuclear power plantsoperating around the world, producing abouta sixth of the electricity that is generated.”

Koch explained that while the EBR-I wascooled by NaK (a liq-uid-metal alloy ofsodium and potassi-um), the bulk of its re-flector was air-cooledbecause of the uncer-tainty that the controlrods could be operat-ed in a high-tempera-ture liquid-metal envi-ronment. The EBR-Iitself had an 8-in. di-ameter core that was

composed of 0.5-in. diameter pins of enrichedU-235 in a single assembly. The vessel andpiping all were doubly contained, a top inletbeing provided to the vessel, going downthrough the blanket and up through the core.Fast control was provided by bottom–operat-

40 N U C L E A R N E W S January 2002

Meetings

A N S W I N T E R M E E T I N G

Nuclear and energy independence

Major themes of the plenary:

◆ H2 power can be an application of nuclear

◆ 50 years since first electricity with EBR-I

◆ A proposal for a continental supergrid

Koch

ed rods and reflectors; slow control by move-ment of the 5-ton bottom blanket.

Koch likened the now historical poweringof four light bulbs at the EBR-I facility in Ida-ho, which represented the first nuclear–gen-erated electricity on December 20, 1951, tothe first flight of the Wright brothers’ airplane.“This was our first generation of electricity,”he said, “and on the next day we ran the reac-tor closer to full power . . . and all the elec-tricity in the building was supplied from thereactor.”

Those times developing the EBR-I were“the good old days,” Koch said, when nuclearpioneers considered nuclear reactors “very in-teresting, fabulous new tools.” With a nod to-ward energy security, Koch recalled that yearsbefore the EBR-I went into operation, scien-tist Enrico Fermi calculated that nuclear pow-er plants could generate all the electricityneeded in the United States for hundreds ofyears based on what were then the nation’sknown uranium resources. “Now, however,with the known amounts of uranium, nuclearcould provide power for the United States forseveral thousands of years,” he said.

Koch recalled a letter written in 1962 byPresident John Kennedy to Glenn Seaborg,then chairman of the Atomic Energy Com-mission. Kennedy’s letter urged the AEC tolook at the role of nuclear power in the na-tion’s economy. Seaborg conducted a studyand then responded to Kennedy. “For thelong-term benefit of the country and indeedthe whole world,” Seaborg wrote, more em-phasis needed to be placed on breeder reac-tors that could make use of nearly all urani-um and thorium reserves, instead of the lessthan 1 percent of uranium and little of thori-um that was used in present reactors. “Onlyby the use of breeders would we really solvethe problems of having adequate energy sup-ply for future generations,” Seaborg’s letterimplored.

“Things have changed,” Koch commentedsardonically.

Koch called President Jimmy Carter’s di-rective in the 1970s to eliminate reprocessingof spent fuel a “devastating decision,” andcredited Carter with founding a new fieldcalled “burial science.”

If the future belongs to nuclear, Koch chal-lenged, then new reactor designs should takeadvantage of the benefits of spent fuel. “TheGeneration IV program lacks the specifics weneed,” he said. In that regard, Koch called fora Generation V program that has a primaryobjective of using spent fuel and depleted ura-nium to power nuclear reactors.

Providing a per-spective on how anenergy system couldbe shaped through useof nuclear-derived hy-drogen was DavidSanborn Scott, vicepresident of the Inter-national Associationfor Hydrogen Energy.Scott opened his talkby declaring that nu-clear is “probably the

safest and cleanest of all energy sources,”while hydrogen is “probably the safest anddefinitely the cleanest of chemical fuels.” To-gether, he said, “they can deliver a brighter,cleaner 21st century.”

The 21st century, though, is at peril, Scottclaimed, because of a climate threat that is an“environmental juggernaut.” Current levels ofcarbon dioxide in the atmosphere equal 360to 370 parts-per-million, the highest amountsof CO2 concentration in the past 400 000years. “So when people say we are not puttingour planet at risk, it reminds me of the tobac-co industry saying smoking isn’t dangerous toyour health,” he said.

If unabated, climate destabilization “could”lead to catastrophic events, Scott continued,such as the shutting down of the Gulf Streamand the freezing of the United Kingdom.These possible catastrophes could be avoidedby using a two-pronged strategy, he said.

First, emphasis must be placed on oil inde-pendence, because a terrorist strike on SaudiArabia’s oil-production facilities wouldthreaten our economy. Imported crude oil is“the commodity all democracies depend on,”Scott said. Consider a few strategic factors:The average production rate of an oil well inthe United States is about 12 barrels a day. InPersian Gulf countries, it is about 5000 bar-rels a day.

Second, the age of hydrogen-electricity, or“hydricity,” must be ushered in to allow forthe production of hydrogen fuel cells for cars,planes, and other transportation vehicles thatcurrently are powered by fossil fuels. Sincehydrogen and electricity are carbon free, hy-drogen fuel cells manufactured by a nonfos-sil source such as nuclear power would releasezero CO2 into the environment, Scott said.

How does hydricity work? Both hydrogenand electricity are energy “currencies,” not en-ergy sources, Scott explained. Both can beharvested from any fuel source, fossil or non-fossil. The two currencies are mutually inter-changeable: “Fuel cells convert hydrogen toelectricity, and electrolysis converts electric-ity to hydrogen,” he said.

Scott predicted that because hydrogen isstorable, it will become the staple fuel of cars,buses, trains, and ships that employ fuel-cellengines. It also will power liquid-hydrogenaircraft that will fly farther (because hydrogenweighs about a third of what conventional fu-els weigh) and fly cleaner (because the ex-haust is water vapor).

The synergies inherent in hydricity systemswill permit “extraordinary” technical, indus-trial, and regulatory flexibility, thereby im-proving efficiencies, reducing costs, addingsecurity, and bringing environmental benefits,he said.

(A detailed review of hydrogen systemswas given during the President’s Special Ses-sion, covered later in this meeting report.)

Supergrid and infrastructuresChauncey Starr, president emeritus of

EPRI and past president of ANS, suggestedon the second day of the plenary that the na-tion needs a continental supergrid based onhydrogen-cooled superconductivity and nu-

clear power. “It would provide a real-timeelectricity connection between the east andwest coasts, and supply electricity and hy-drogen fuel,” he said.

Current-day national energy strategies areflawed, Starr noted, in that they are plannedon projections that provide little guidance be-yond a few decades. In contrast, the supergridwould be an example of century-long plan-ning, and would be an alternative approachbased on new research and development ini-tiated at the applied science level.

A long-term national strategy is needed,Starr stated. In that regard, he called for a na-tional “Energy System Advanced ResearchProject Agency” to stimulate new R&D.

“Let me be clear. We cannot expect lead-ership on century-longplanning from ourgovernment process.If there is to be an ef-fectively sophisticateddirection of technicalpolicy, it will have tocome from the scien-tific and engineeringcommunity. Neithergovernment nor theeconomy’s market-based processes will

do it for us. It’s our job,” he said.The “unplanned, radical” innovations of the

19th and 20th centuries came from science-stimulated R&D, he said—electricity, tele-phone, petroleum engines, automobiles, air-planes, nuclear power, semiconductors,biotech, etc.

Following in that line would be the conti-nental supergrid (“an old vision,” Starr not-ed, but one that with new applied sciencewould now be “marginally feasible”). Itwould supplement the existing grid, which isnot feasible to send electricity supplies backand forth between “the coal-based east andhydro-based west” because the power lossesare too great over such large distances, hesaid.

The supergrid, a “highly efficient energycorridor,” would be an assembly of bipolarloops using a magnesium diboride super-conducting transmission line (see figure,next page). Its core coolant at 25 K would beliquid hydrogen, with the hydrogen exitingas a fuel. The electricity and hydrogen bothwould be generated by nuclear power plantsspaced along the corridor. Water vaporwould be the only gaseous effluent. It wouldbe a direct-current system, controlled by sol-id-state electronics. “The end result is a sys-tem free of fossil fuel and greenhouse gasemissions,” said Starr, “with a relativelysmall ecological footprint and mostly buriedunder ground.”

The supergrid would cost perhaps $1 tril-lion, at an average rate of $10 billion per yearincluding R&D, superconductor cables, andpower plants. It would be built mostly on pub-lic land. “To provide competition and savetime, we would start at both coasts and at se-lected inland sites,” Starr said.

It would take decades to complete, andmany White House administrations would

January 2002 N U C L E A R N E W S 41

Scott

Starr

share in its progress. “I can picture the rhetoricand the symbolic switch-closings as we com-plete each milestone uniting the energy sup-plies of eastern and western U.S., and even-tually the continent,” he said.

The supergrid would be near invulnerableto terrorism because all major parts would beunderground. It also would further the na-tion’s energy independence. “If a hydrogen-fueled motor would gradually replace the in-ternal engine, the reduction of U.S.dependence on oil imports might radicallychange our foreign policies and commit-ments,” said Starr.

Another speaker, Hans-Holger Rogner,head of the planning and economic studiessection within the Department of Nuclear En-ergy, International Atomic Energy Agency,wondered what effect energy infrastructuredecisions made today would have on the com-ing decades.

“When we talk about global energy per-spectives, what it really is about is the energyservices needs of future societies,” Rognersaid. “Let us remind ourselves that there arestill about 2 billion people out there [to-day] . . . who have no access to modern [elec-tricity] services.”

Thus, Rogner noted, choosing an energy in-frastructure would have long-term, socio–en-

vironmental impactson the world. Factorsinfluencing the deci-sions on which energygenerators to pursuewould be the costs tobuild and maintainthem, their quality, re-liability, security, andconvenience, their ef-fect on the environ-ment, and their socialimpact.

Rogner presented scenarios of various en-ergy infrastructures and concluded that the fu-ture would hold “enormous technical oppor-tunities for nuclear power.”

Hydrogen futureThe potential importance of nuclear-de-

rived hydrogen to the future of the nuclear in-dustry was the driving force behind the well-attended “President’s Special Session onHydrogen Systems: An Overview.” “I knowin my agency, the Department of Energy,there’s some interest in hydrogen generation,in general, from any source, including nuclearpower,” said ANS President Gail Marcus. “Ithink this is the next big sector that we can ap-ply nuclear power to.”

Speakers at the session covered a range ofhydrogen applications and experience. Amongthe presentation highlights were discussions ofthe opportunities for nuclear power in the pro-duction of hydrogen for fuel cell applicationsand the role of nuclear-derived hydrogen inbuilding a sustainable energy system. Also, thefinal speaker convincingly dispelled false loresurrounding the topic that inevitably comes upduring any discussion of hydrogen as an ener-gy source: the Hindenburg disaster.

“With hydrogen applications moving outinto the general public arena, attention to safe-ty is clearly paramount,” said retired NASAengineer Addison Bain during his presenta-tion on the Hindenburg. “It’s not that it’s anymore hazardous than any other chemicals infuel, but that its unique and emerging uses willbe smaller in scale, less centralized, and moreaccessible to the public.”

Fuel cellsGed McLean, director of the University of

Victoria’s Institute for Integrated Energy Sys-tems, pointed out that fuel cell technology isin its infancy. In fact, what is purported to bethe world’s first portable fuel cell generator—manufactured by Coleman, the campingequipment company—was scheduled to cometo market before the end of 2001.

“This is a completely integrated, 2-kilowattremote standby power system,” McLean said.“It’s quiet. It makes no noise and it generatesvery little heat. It’s a premium product goingafter an early market—the early market being

competing with those ugly, horrible gasolinegenerators that make a lot of noise and, by theway, have emissions. You could run this inyour living room. You could run this rightnext to your frying pan while you’re cooking.In fact, you could generate all the power foryour electric stove from this.”

McLean cited a study that said although themarket for hydrogen fuel cells is minusculetoday, it will balloon up to $32 billion by2010. “Here’s my question to you: Do youthink that this is going to create some demandfor hydrogen?” McLean asked. “The fuel cellis at the fulcrum of change. It’s going tochange the energy system.”

By way of example, McLean said the Cal-ifornia Air Resources Board said that therewould be 2 gigawatts of installed generatingcapacity in automobiles by 2008. “Now, it’sdistributed. It’s like sand. But what happensif you hook up with some other technologythat I know about—embedded systems, theInternet, the chip—so that you can managethat? You can put electricity back into thegrid. You can take electricity out of the grid.You can store that electricity in hydrogen.You can take hydrogen from fossil fuels andmake electricity.

“So, you end up with a scenario like this:You generate hydrogen; that hydrogen is nowin your hybrid or fuel-cell car, which can nowprovide transportation services and energyservices.”

McLean described a situation in which con-sortia of consumers could sell back hydrogenreserves to utilities. “This is really interesting,because . . . it means you don’t have to sizeyour nuclear power above the peak. It meansyou can size your nuclear plant somewherebelow the peak and rely on the hydrogen thatyou’ve produced . . . [to] get that hydrogenback to generate your peak.”

McLean concluded that this integrated ap-proach “will really change the way the ener-gy utilities work.”

Sustainable developmentHydrogen can be produced by splitting wa-

ter into hydrogen and oxygen by way of elec-trolysis, or by stripping the carbon atom fromfossil or biomass sources, noted Hans-HolgerRogner, of the International Atomic EnergyAgency. With global climate change being themost critical environmental threat of the 21stcentury, and in the absence of environmental-ly sound carbon disposal routes, the only sus-tainable hydrogen production options are re-newable sources and nuclear power, Rognersaid.

Over the next three to five decades, Rognersaid it is almost certain that only nuclear tech-nologies could produce hydrogen in sufficientquantities, and at economically viable costs,to build up a substantial bulwark against car-bon dioxide–induced climate risk.

In contrast to renewables, nuclear power is ahighly concentrated source of energy, withminimal burden on land requirements, he ex-plained. With continually increasing urbaniza-tion, concentrated energy supplies will becomeeven more important, Rogner said. Service ofpeak energy demand densities of 1.5 kW per


Rogner

Superinsulation in two sections of 20 layers each

Electrical insulation

Liquid hydrogen25 K (inner tubeis 10 cmdiameter) Stabilizer

Superconductor matrix

Ground plane

Superconductor matrixStabilizer

Outer structural element of stainless steel with avacuum barrier (outer tube is ~17 cm diameter)

Structural support

Low emissivity surface

Fig. 1: Design of the MgB2 DC superconducting transmission line in an evacuated pipe (Source: EPRI)

square meter will be needed, and nuclear pow-er is well suited to densities several times that,at a high rate of reliability, Rogner said. Re-newables, though, can supplement nuclearpower by, for example, supplying energy needsin remote or low-demand density areas.

System considerations, especially of the ex-pected energy service demand densities ofmodern metropolitan areas, set nuclear pow-er as superior to renewable sources—espe-cially in its ability to produce the very largequantities of energy that will be required with-out unacceptable environmental damage,Rogner said.

Hydrogen exoneratedAddison Bain, who designed hydrogen

systems for the Apollo program in the 1960s,outlined the reasons for the crash of the Hin-denburg dirigible in Lakehurst, N.J, in May1937. At age 57, Bain embarked on a doctor-al thesis on the subject. In the course of hisextensive research, he spoke to an employeeassigned to the construction of the Hinden-burg, a surviving crew member, and approx-imately a dozen eyewitnesses of the crash,among others. He is currently at work on abook about the crash, which he said appearsto have been caused in large part by the ex-treme flammability of the zeppelin’s fabric,as opposed to the flammability of its hydrogenload.

“I started out reading books about airships.And the more I read and the more I studied, Iran across so many inconsistencies. One of theairship books I read said that they used a cel-lulose nitrate–powdered aluminum mixturefor doping [the skin of the craft]. That sound-ed like a rocket fuel to me. That got me goingand inspired.”

Two boards of inquiry, an American ver-sion and a German version, into the disasterdetermined that one of the ship’s 16 gas cellssprang a leak, causing the vessel’s hydrogento mix with air, which was then ignited by a St.Elmo’s fire–type of brush discharge.

After much research, Bain reached a dif-ferent conclusion.

He said one of the most enlightening mo-ments of his investigation came when he ob-tained a piece of the Hindenburg’s fabric. Hetook that piece of fabric, as well as othersamples that were donated to him or that hepurchased, to the NASA Materials ScienceLaboratory at Kennedy Space Center. There,after conducting tests, he learned that the fab-ric consisted of cotton, iron oxide, cellulosefuel acetate, and powdered aluminum, aswell as other materials. Bain said iron oxideand powdered aluminum can cause a ther-mite reaction, in which temperatures canreach 5000 °F.

Also, the configuration of the powderedaluminum was similar to that of the powderedaluminum configuration used in rocket pro-pellant, which is “significantly sensitive to theflow of static electricity across its surface,”Bain said. That, coupled with stormy atmos-pheric conditions, in which lightning couldbe seen around the time of the landing, aswell as the debut of an unorthodox high-mooring landing procedure, appear to have

doomed the vessel. “That’s the first time theHindenburg ever attempted a high mooring,”Bain said of the procedure, in which the shipwas moored at a high altitude and winched tothe ground with cables. “The static electricbuildup on an airship is a function of the al-titude. The voltage potential that was built upon that airship that day was 250 000 to300 000 volts.”

Bain learned that the outer cover of the Hin-denburg’s sister ship, the LZ130 Graf Zep-pelin II, was of made of a different material.“It was a peak on sulfur and a peak on calci-um [during testing of pieces of the outer cov-er] that would determine that the coating in-cluded a calcium sulfate. And that is a fireretardant used in the textile industry. So, theguys knew,” Bain said.

He said he found likeminded testimony inan archive in Germany, which gave cause ofthe Hindenburg disaster to the fabric and dop-ing process used in the manufacture of thevessel—and not hydrogen.

“The moral of the story is, Don’t paint yourairship with rocket fuel,” Bain concluded.

Generation IV roadmapTwo sessions were devoted to the “Gener-

ation IV Roadmap,” the Department of Ener-gy’s ongoing initiative to develop the nextfleet of nuclear reactors. The roadmap, the ba-sics of which were introduced during a morn-ing session, has a goal of identifying and de-veloping one or more systems that can becommercially deployed no later than 2030 andcan offer significant advances in the areas ofsustainability, safety and reliability, and eco-nomics. Also explained were the roadmap’stechnology goals and fuel cycles.

An afternoon session delved deeper into thespecifics of the individual groups that are work-ing in support of the roadmap’s development.

Program directionThe need for a technology roadmap to

guide the Generation IV initiative was pro-posed by the DOE in 1999, according to RobVersluis, a nuclear engineer for the EnergyDepartment. Initiated in October 2000, theroadmap has a completion goal of October2002.

Research and development on GenerationIV technologies “is expected to be advancedinternationally,” Versluis said. Accordingly,about half of the technical experts participat-ing in the project are from outside the UnitedStates. “Once the roadmap is complete, it canserve as the organizing basis of national, bi-lateral, and multilateral R&D activities aimedat developing Generation IV systems,” hesaid.

While the roadmap’s international partnersinvestigate the long-term aspects of develop-ing new reactors, within the United States theDOE’s Near-Term Development Group(NTDG) is studying the regulatory, technical,and institutional issues that need to be ad-dressed to support the domestic deploymentof a new reactor within 10 years.

About 100 experts are involved in theroadmap through the following groups, in ad-dition to the NTDG:

■ Generation IV International Forum: Theforum consists of senior policy officials fromthe countries of Argentina, Brazil, Canada,France, Japan, Korea, South Africa, the Unit-ed Kingdom, and the United States. The Or-ganization for Economic Cooperation and De-velopment’s Nuclear Energy Agency and theInternational Atomic Energy Agency are per-manent observers. Each country and observ-er is providing technical expertise to theroadmap.■ Nuclear Energy Research Advisory Com-mittee Generation IV Technology RoadmapSubcommittee: This subcommittee will pro-vide advice to the DOE on the preparation ofthe roadmap.■ Roadmap Integration Team: This team isresponsible for developing and integratingthe roadmap groups and activities, andpreparing the final roadmap using analysesand documentation prepared by the workinggroups.■ Evaluation Methodology Groups: Thesefour groups collect information on and evalu-ate the four broad classes of nuclear energy sys-tem concepts: water reactors, gas reactors, liq-uid metal reactors, and nonclassical systems.■ Fuel Cycle Crosscut Group: This group re-views energy demand forecasts for the 21stcentury and develops the characteristics offuel cycles for comparison.

The steps to developing the roadmap, Ver-sluis explained, include establishing goals, de-termining how to measure concepts againstgoals, identifying the concepts to undergo ini-tial evaluation, gathering detailed informationfor promising concepts, evaluating thepromising concepts against Generation IVgoals, and identifying and establishing R&Dgoals for the most promising concepts.

Technical goals for Generation IV energysystems were detailed by Ralph Bennett, di-rector of Advanced Nuclear Energy at the Ida-ho National Engineering and EnvironmentalLaboratory. In all, eight goals have been pro-posed, three in sustainability, three in safety

and reliability, andtwo in economics.

For sustainability,the three goals are: thatthe systems (includingfuel cycles) will pro-vide sustainable ener-gy generation thatmeets clean air objec-tives and promoteslong-term availabilityof systems and effec-tive fuel utilization for

worldwide energy production; that the systemswill minimize and manage their nuclear wasteand notably reduce the long-term stewardshipburden in the future, thereby improving pro-tection for the public health and the environ-ment; and that the systems will increase the as-surance that they are an unattractive and leastdesirable route for diversion or theft ofweapons-usable materials.

For safety and reliability, the three goals arethat the systems will excel in safety and reli-ability; that they will have a very low likeli-


M E E T I N G S

Bennett

Continued on page 46

hood and degree of reactor core damage; andthat they will eliminate the need for offsiteemergency response.

For economics, the two goals are that thesystems will have a clear life-cycle cost ad-vantage over other energy systems; and thatthey will have a level of financial risk com-parable to other energy systems.

The eight goals “will be a vital factor inbuilding public confidence in Generation IVsystems,” Bennett noted.

Providing information about Generation IVfuel cycles was Charles Forsberg, of OakRidge National Laboratory. “Four generic fuelcycles that cover the spectrum of feasible tech-nologies for conversion of ore resources to en-ergy have been defined,” he said.

The four fuel cycles are Once through, inwhich the fuel is fabricated from uranium andthorium, irradiated, and directly disposed ofas a waste; Partial recycle, in which somefraction of the spent fuel is processed, the fis-sile material is recycled, and new fuel is fab-ricated; Full recycle, in which all spent fuel is

reprocessed for recov-ery and recycle ofplutonium and U-235;and All-actinide recy-cle, in which all spentfuel is reprocessedand all actinides arerecycled.

Forsberg concludedthat the four types offuel cycles have com-mon facilities—thosefor mining (uranium

and/or thorium), milling (purification of ura-nium and/or thorium), and fuel fabrication—as well as power reactors and the repository.Some fuel cycles, he said, include isotopicseparation facilities, reprocessing facilities torecover selected elements from spent fuel, andspecial facilities to burn minor actinides.

Roadmap specificsLouis Long, vice president of Southern Nu-

clear Operating Company, offered a strongcomment about the next generation of nuclearreactors. While the goal of the nuclear indus-try is to have new reactors on line by 2010, said

Long, for that to hap-pen a new plant mustbe ordered “by 2003.”

Long appeared dur-ing the second half ofthe “Generation IVRoadmap” session toexplain the work ofthe DOE’s NTDG,which is made up ofrepresentatives fromnuclear utilities, in-dustry, reactor ven-

dors, national laboratories, and academia.While the Generation IV roadmap seeks to de-ploy new plants by 2030, the NTDG has beenformed to identify and develop one or moreof the next-generation nuclear energy systemsthat can be commercially built no later thanthe end of this decade.

“Selections of new projects must be marketdriven and primarily supported by private sec-tor investment,” said Long, “but governmentsupport is essential” in the form of leadershipand effective policy, efficient regulatory ap-provals, and cost sharing of generic and one-time costs.

The NTDG has identified nine generic is-sues that could influence the viability and tim-ing of any new nuclear plant project, accord-ing to Long. These are: nuclear plant economiccompetitiveness, business implications of thederegulated electricity marketplace, efficientimplementation of 10 CFR 52 (the standard-ized licensing process), adequacy of the nu-clear industry infrastructure, a national nuclearenergy strategy, nuclear safety, spent fuel man-agement, public acceptance of nuclear energy,and nonproliferation of nuclear material.

Right around the corner, however, is thedate when a new plant must be ordered. “Af-ter reviewing all this, [the NTDG members]came to a conclusion,” he said, “and that isthat we think we can deploy new plants by theend of this decade. But in order to make ithappen, the owners/operators have to commitby 2003.”

Long reasoned that if construction on a newplant were to begin in early 2007 (in order for

it to be operating by 2010), work toward se-curing the necessary permits and licenseswould have to begin four years before that, in2003.

Jordi Roglans-Ribas, a nuclear engineer forthe DOE, explained the work of severalgroups that are evaluating specific areas of theGeneration IV roadmap. Last February, theroadmap’s Evaluation Methods Groups initi-ated the process for systematically evaluatingthe comparative performances of theroadmap’s proposed goals. A component ofthat process is “Screening for Potential,” ac-cording to Roglans-Ribas.

The Screening for Potential componentidentifies those nuclear energy system con-cepts that meet the purpose and principles ofthe Generation IV initiative and have the po-tential for significant progress toward estab-lished goals. “The basic philosophy for theScreening for Potential is to avoid discard-ing concepts with potential, even if associat-ed with large uncertainty,” Roglans-Ribassaid.

Criteria used during the screening includesystem characteristics that provide an indica-tion of a definitive future metric (e.g., facilitysize and complexity, as indicators of the cap-ital cost). Evaluations are of a qualitative na-


Much worse Worse than Similar to Better than Much better

Scoring by Goal than reference reference reference reference than reference-- - = + ++

Goal Sustainability 1

SU-1-1 Fuel Utilization

SU1-2 Fuel cycle impact on environmentSU1-3 Utilization of other resources


SU2-1 Waste minimization

SU2-2 Environmental impactSU2-3 Stewardship burden


SU3-1 Material life-cycle vulnerabilitySU3-2 Application of extrinsic barriers

SU3-3 Unique characteristics

Goal Safety and Reliability 1

SR1-1 Public/worker - routine exposures

SR1-2 Worker safety - accidentsSR1-3 Reliability


SR2-1 Facility state transparency

SR2-2 System model uncertaintySR2-3 Unique characteristics


SR3-1 Highly robust mitigation features

SR3-2 Damage/transport/dose understood

SR3-3 No additional individual riskSR3-4 Comparable societal risk

Goal Economics 1

and

Goal Economics 2

EC-1 Low capital costsEC-2 Low financial costs

EC-3 Low production costs

EC-4 Low development costsEC-5 High profitability

Concept Name:_______________________________________

Summary Evaluation: ______ Retain _____ Reject

Long

Meetings, continued from page 43

Forsberg

Example of a Generation IV “Screening for Potential” score sheet

ture, and a score sheet has been developed tohelp evaluate concepts against all the criteria(see accompanying figure). As additional con-cept information becomes available, Roglans-Ribas said, evaluations will become morequantitative.

Mario Carelli, manager of energy systems forWestinghouse Electric Company, explained thework of the roadmap’s Water-Cooled ReactorConcepts group. A total of 37 advanced water-

cooled reactor con-cepts are being investi-gated, each segmentedinto one of the follow-ing nine categories:■ Integrated primarysystem reactors:These light-water re-actor concepts arecharacterized by a pri-mary system that isfully integrated in asingle vessel, which

makes the nuclear island more compact andeliminates the possibility of large releases ofprimary coolant.■ Advanced loop pressurized water reactors:These are modified loop-type PWRs withsmall water-filled containments.■ Simplified boiling water reactors: These arevarious-sized BWRs with natural circulationin the core region, no recirculation pumps,and, in most cases, more passive decay heatremoval systems.■ Pressure-tube reactors: These are Candutype reactors with light-water cooling and fuelthat is slightly enriched.■ Supercritical water-cooled reactors: Theseare a class of high-temperature, high-thermal-efficiency water-cooled reactors, each with aprimary coolant system that operates abovethe thermodynamic critical point of water(374.12 °C, 221.2 bar).■ High-conversion water-cooled reactors:These are various reduced-moderation reac-tor cores designed to use uranium more effi-ciently and minimize the reactivity swing.■ Pebble-fuel reactors: These use a fluidizedbed of ceramic or metallic fuel particles insizes ranging from a few mm up to about 10mm, which keeps the fuel at low temperatures,enabling higher core power densities.■ Thorium/uranium fuel cycles: These are ei-ther homogeneously mixed thoria fuels or var-ious seed and blanket arrangements using bothoxide and metal fuels.■ AIROX fuel cycle: This fuel cycle consistsof an oxidation/reduction process to recyclespent LWR fuel into Candu reactors, or, withadded enrichment, back into LWRs.

Finis Southworth, manager of systems, sci-ences, and engineering at the Idaho NationalEngineering and Environmental Laboratory,explained the work of the roadmap’s Gas-cooled Reactor Concepts group. The grouphas divided each of 20 concepts into one ofthe following four categories:■ Pebble bed reactors: These are all basedon thermal neutron spectra, and generally of-fer the following features: They are “natural-ly safe,” designed to maintain fuel integrityunder all design-basis accidents with no ac-

tive safety system re-quirements. They alsoexhibit high efficien-cy, generally based ondirect-cycle gas tur-bine power conver-sion systems, with orwithout a bottomingcycle using the rela-tively high exit tem-perature (about 500°C) helium from theturbine. The reference

pebble bed reactor is 250 MW thermal and115 MW electrical.■ Prismatic modular reactors: These also arethermal reactors. The potential benefits aresimilar to the pebble bed reactors regardingnatural safety and high efficiency. The refer-ence prismatic modular reactor power level is600 MW thermal and 286 MW electric.■ Very high-temperature reactors: These re-actors have core exit cooling temperaturesabove 900 °C. Concepts for these reactorsprovide the potential for increased energyconversion efficiency and for high-tempera-ture process heat applications such as coalgasification or thermochemical hydrogenproduction.■ Fast gas reactors: These concepts offer“high fuel utilization, closed fuel cycles”through high conversion or breeding of fissilematerials.

Michael Lineberry detailed the work of theroadmap’s Liquid Metal Reactors Conceptsgroup. Lineberry is a senior technical advisorat Argonne National Laboratory–West. Thir-ty-three concepts were reviewed by the group,

and 27 of them wereslotted into one of thefollowing five cate-gories:1. Medium-to-largesodium-cooled mixed-oxide fueled reactorswith advanced aque-ous reprocessing andceramic pellet or vi-bratory compactionfabrication (five con-cepts).

2. Medium-to-large sodium-cooled, metal-fu-eled (U-TRU-Zr metal) reactors with electro-chemical fuel cycle technology (pyroprocess-ing) (six concepts).3. Medium-sized Pb or Pb-Bi–cooled; MOXor Th-U-TRU-Zr metal alloy-fueled reactors;pyroprocesss fuel cycle for the metal-fueledconcepts, advanced aqueous or unspecified“dry” process for the ceramic-fueled concepts(nine concepts).4. Small Pb or Pb-Bi–cooled; metal- or ni-tride-fueled reactors with long-life “cartridge”or cassette cores; fuel cycles vary (three con-cepts).5. Sodium-cooled concepts that eliminate thetraditional secondary sodium loops by devel-opment of novel new steam generators (3concepts).

In addition, five of the 33 concepts wereevaluated as stand-alones (three direct energyconversion schemes, a concept involving the

Candu burnup approach, and a concept thatwould develop Russian Pb-Bi submarine re-actor technology for commercialization). Asixth concept was more a statement of fuel cy-cle principles, said Lineberry.

Samim Anghaie, professor and director ofnuclear engineering at the University of Flori-da, explained the activities of the roadmap’sNonclassical Power Reactor Concepts group.

Each of the conceptsfalls into one of five re-actor categories: liquidcore, gas core, noncon-ventional coolant, non-convectively cooled,and direct energy con-version.

The liquid core re-actor concepts includetwo subsets: moltensalt fuel and eutecticmetallic fuel. The

molten salt reactors are fueled by uranium orthorium fluorides dissolved in a mixture ofmolten lithium and beryllium fluorides. Eu-tectic metallic fuel reactors use a mixture ofuranium or plutonium and a low neutron ab-sorbing metal.

The gas core reactor concepts comprise allreactors that are fueled by uranium tetrafluo-ride vapor.

Nonconventional coolant reactors usemolten salts or high boiling point organic liq-uids to remove core power at low pressure andprovide heat at high temperatures.

Nonconvectively cooled reactors includeall designs that do not use bulk convectivecooling to transport the core power.

Direct energy conversion reactors are builtfrom very thin uranium dioxide foils fuel. Fis-sion fragments carry most of their energy andelectric charge out of the microns-thick foilsto direct power conversion devices.

The Nonclassical Power Reactor Conceptsgroup also is evaluating concepts with spe-cific design features, including those withminimized waste fuel cycles, advanced fuelmaterials, and alternative power conversioncycles. In addition, the group is investigat-ing diverse energy product reactors (whichmay provide hydrogen, hot water for districtheating, seawater desalination, and otherproducts, in addition to electric power) andmodular deployable reactors, which are de-signed for long- period (5–10 years) single-cycle use and installation in locations that arenot conveniently accessible for constructionor refueling.

Early site permittingThree nuclear generating companies—En-

tergy, Dominion, and Exelon—have an-nounced plans to examine the early site per-mit, which allows utilities, before actuallydeciding to build a plant, to obtain permissionto build it on a chosen site. The advantage ofthe early site permit is that it resolves the li-censing issues of a site for a given plant pro-file, which reduces the investment risk and al-lows utilities to clear many adjudicatoryissues before constructing a nuclear powerplant. A standard, certified plant design can


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then be plugged into the site.The session “Early Site Permits: First Step

to the Next Generation,” featured three pan-elists variously involved in early site permitactivities. Dan Keuter, vice president of En-tergy Nuclear, provided an update of Enter-gy’s early site permit plans: Ed Rumble, of theElectric Power Research Institute; and sessionchair Kyle Turner, CEO of McCallum-Turn-er, gave in-depth descriptions of what the ear-ly site permit process entails.

On the frontierEntergy Corporation is the second largest

nuclear utility in the United States, and “def-initely the fastest growing,” Keuter said. Theutility has recently doubled its nuclear fleet,adding five plants in the northeastern UnitedStates. Furthermore, he said, the company’slong-term vision involves building nuclearpower plants. “We want to bank these sites, atthe right time, with the right design . . . [and]start building new nuclear power plants.”

Entergy is actively embarking on early sitepermits for “at least two of our sites; it could

be more,” Keuter said,not wanting to divulgesensitive information.He mentioned that En-tergy is looking to addreactors where thereare existing plants be-cause “it’s a lot cheap-er to put up [plants at]an existing site than togreenfield a site,” hesaid. Although all 10of Entergy’s sites are

under consideration, Keuter mentioned thatIndian Point and Waterford stations are un-likely candidates for hosting new units.

Keuter said Entergy is interested in pursu-ing three reactor designs, GE Nuclear Ener-gy’s Advanced Boiling Water Reactor, West-inghouse’s AP1000, and the Gas TurbineModular Helium Reactor (GT-MHR). “Ourearly site permitting would be capable of tak-ing those three designs,” Keuter said. “But wewant to keep those options open. At the righttime, when the right economics come through,we’ll have a site that can pick up the right de-sign and place it in any of those sites.”

Those “right economics” have much to dowith being able to compete with natural gas.“A lot of people ask me, ‘When are you go-ing to build the next nuclear power plant?’”Keuter said. “And I tell them, ‘You tell mewhat natural gas is going to be doing and whatthe cost of a nuclear plant is.’ And I’ll takethat intersection and say, ‘That’s when we’llbuild it.’”

Application elementsEarly site permits are a “real good deal,”

said Ed Rumble, of the Electric Power Re-search Institute, in that they are applicablefor 10 to 20 years and can be renewed. Also,Rumble said, the public’s ability to chal-lenge an obtained permit is reduced. He de-scribed the three elements to the early sitepermit: the site safety analysis report, the en-vironmental report, and emergency planning

information.The site safety analysis report requires in-

formation about the site such as a general sitedescription; the meteorological and hydro-logical characteristics of the site; nearby in-dustrial, military, and transportation facilities;the existing and projected population of thesurrounding area; and a plan for site redress(i.e., for putting the site back into the state itwas in when work started, if the work is notcomplete).

The environmental report is for informationon the environmental effects of site prepara-tion, station construction, and station opera-tion, as well as reports on effluent monitoring.It is also to take into consideration the envi-ronmental effects of accidents and the eco-nomic and social effects of station construc-tion and operation, and provide a summarycost-benefit analysis. Rumble said there is cur-rently a petition to reduce the amount of al-ternative analysis—in which the applicant re-ports on considerations of other sites and othertypes of facilities—required in the environ-mental report.

Applicants pursuing an existing site for anearly site permit will find significant advan-tages in the emergency planning informationportion of the application, Rumble said. “Ifpeople use existing sites, it’s probably agood idea. If they pick what they call agreenfield site, which is a brand new site,then they’re either going to have to do a full-out emergency plan or propose the major el-ements of it,” Rumble said. The emergencyplanning information must describe thephysical characteristics unique to the pro-posed site, such as egress limitations fromthe area surrounding the site. It must containcontact information and descriptions ofarrangements made with local, state, andfederal governmental agencies with emer-gency planning responsibilities.

Rumble explained that the early site permitapplication also allows applicants to addressthe plant design in general terms of an enve-lope, without having to name the specific de-sign. “You could envelope many differentkinds of plants, or you could envelope only afew, depending on what you want to do. Butyou have flexibility there,” he said.

“The plant parameter envelope is supposedto bound the plants that you would want tobuild for that site,” he said. “Basically, the siteis approved conditionally on the plant’s beinginside that envelope. If you have a site, the sitehas got to accommodate that envelope, and theenvelope has got to bound the plant. So thatwhen you actually go ahead and pick a plantand decide to build that plant, the plant param-eters have to be within this envelope, so thatthe whole system works.”

Rumble then described the three rules gov-erning the plant-versus-site parameters in theearly site permit application. The first is thatthe site capacity must be greater than the siteneeds. Using raw water as an example, Rum-ble said, “You have to have enough capabil-ities for water to exceed the needs of theplant and everything else that’s at the site.”Second, the site capacity to accommodateplant operations must be greater than the

plant impact on site resources. Third, theplant must have the capability to withstandhazards greater than the site presents. “Forexample, in California it’s going to be diffi-cult to site plants because many plants aren’tdesigned for the earthquake [challenges] thatCalifornia presents. That’s one case whereplant design has to have certain capabilitiesto exceed the hazards on the site,” Rumblesaid.

“I have to caution that this is pretty newstuff and hasn’t been demonstrated,” Rumbleconcluded. “It’s going to be interesting to seehow the plant parameter envelope situation re-ally works out.”

The steps involvedKyle Turner provided more detail on how

an applicant might proceed from thinkingabout pursuing an early site permit to actual-ly obtaining one, and what the project entails.

When undertaking an early site permit pro-gram, utilities should expect it to last from 18to 24 months, Turner said. At an existing site,the process may only require 12 to 15 months.

As far as the cost of the project, however,Turner invited the audience to speculate.“What I can tell you is the work that is equiv-alent to an early site permit application con-

ducted for . . . plantslike the existing fleetwas about $5 millionin the 1970s. You canapply your own esca-lation factor to that.And you can also takeinto account that thegeologic and seismicchallenges are some-what greater today . . .because the burden ofproof lies more direct-

ly at the hands of the applicant.” Also, for asite investigation of a nuclear power plant,public relations programs are likely to have tobe more active today than 25 years ago—apoint he made several times throughout thesession—so those costs will also have to beconsidered.

Turner said it is important for utilities un-dertaking an early site permit program to ad-dress it as a project, with definite schedulemilestones, technical products, and budgetconstraints. “It is not a scientific investigation.It is not something where we’re lookingaround for whatever answer may arrive. Wedo have an objective,” Turner cautioned. “Isay this only because it’s very easy in one ofthese programs—and I’ve seen this in thepast—to sort of run off. . . . Well, we can’tconduct it that way and meet the schedule andbudget objectives that may apply.”

Also, a strong public information programwill be needed. “You will, by virtue of thework you have to do to develop an early sitepermit application, come into contact with thepublic,” Turner said. “You can’t do it in se-cret and you shouldn’t do it in secret. You’regoing to be in the process, as an applicant, ofdoing the things necessary to apply for an ap-plication. And the public is going to be inter-ested, at a minimum. And the agencies, both


Turner

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regulatory and informational, are going to beaware.”

Also, potential applicants need to be awareof unforeseen pitfalls owing to the novelty ofthe application process. The NRC reviewphase has not been tested, and neither the ap-plicants nor the NRC itself knows how this isgoing to evolve. “Some of these uncertaintieswill be hammered out only in the forum of theactual regulatory review,” Turner said. “AndNRC is going to be fighting its way throughthat process just like the applicants would.”

Having considered these points beforeembarking on an early site permit applica-tion, a utility must then, of course, pick asite. It helps to pick an existing site, or a par-cel of land adjacent to an existing site, be-cause regulators have already found them tobe acceptable. The site should also satisfythe National Environmental Policy Act re-quirements for the consideration of alterna-tives. “You need to be able to demonstratethat you considered the environment—[that]you didn’t just pick a site based on econom-ics or engineering considerations withouttaking into account the impacts that the plantmight have on that parcel of land and its sur-rounding area,” Turner said.

Also, the site selection decision processshould be replicable, Turner said. There is reg-ulatory guidance from the NRC, as well asdocumented criteria, that can be used in theprocess. Any intelligent and informed personshould be able to walk through the processand understand how the decision was made,Turner said. “You start, in general, with largeareas, and you narrow those down untilyou’ve got individual parcels of land. Andwhen you’ve done that, then you can comparethose parcels of land to each other. And, basedon those comparisons, you select the preferredsite that you propose to NRC and on whichyou do the site characterization work.”

Once the site is selected, the early site ap-plication project begins. Turner said the proj-ect is not any different than other projects inthat data is collected, analyzed, and summa-rized in a report. In this case, the report is theapplication, whereby the utility explains to theNRC what they’ve done to satisfy the re-quirements of the license application.

In the instance of an early site permit ap-plication, field data collection is not an in-significant item, Turner noted. Some data forthe application, which can be collected fromsources in libraries, the Internet, and agencieslike the Census Bureau, is obtained easilyenough. The amount of onsite and near-sitedata that is needed for the application, how-ever, “requires a significant amount of pre-planning and approval,” Turner said. “Fieldassessments in themselves require site access.This may mean legal agreements with peoplewho own land on the site or, in the case of anexisting site, land offsite. You may need per-mission to put on drilling rigs, to build roads,to run biological sampling. . . . You may needaccess to do geophysical testing.” And forsome field data collection programs, longer-term access will be needed for maintainingand calibrating meteorological tower instru-mentation or accessing well water or surface

water quality stations. And, in ecological stud-ies, investigators may have to return to the siteon a seasonal basis to gain a full understand-ing of a how a site’s environment works overthe course of a year.

Also, a plan for restoring landowners’ prop-erty to its original state will be needed. “Nor-mally, landowners don’t like for you to godrill holes on their property, construct roads,install . . . mud pits, and just walk away fromthat. So, in addition to access for these fielddata collection programs, you’ll also need . . .a redress plan,” Turner said.

An advantage of applying for an early sitepermit on an existing site is that much of theinformation required for approval is alreadyavailable. Because of changing regulations,however, one area in which this advantage isless certain is in seismology. Turner said thereason is simply the bases on which an appli-cant proves the adequacy of a site from a seis-mic perspective have been changed. “The ap-plicant does have much more latitude, but theapplicant does have much more in the way ofa burden of proof. And it is not certain at thispoint exactly how much of a leg up existingdata on seismicity at an existing site is goingto help with the licensing of a new site. Clear-ly, it’s an advantage. But how much of an ad-vantage we simply do not know yet,” Turnersaid.

“I would say that in the discussions withinthe industry and in the interactions withNRC . . . probably the area of most intense dis-cussion and most detailed discussion has beenin and will continue to be the degree to whichexisting site information provides you a legup—or not—in applying for and obtaining anESP application at a parcel of land that’s ad-jacent to an operating unit.”

Turner then once again emphasized the im-portance of public information programs. “Iwant to harp on this subject again, because it’sone that I think applicants find very difficult,”he said. “If you’re planning on doing some-thing as controversial as siting a nuclear pow-er plant, at the same time you’d like to keepyour stock prices as high as you could andyou’d like to keep your existing plants oper-ating efficiently and without interference. So,what you have here is the classic question ofwho do you tell and how much can you telland how do you tell it.

“. . . Whenever you start with this process,this program of developing an ESP—this datacollection, analysis, and reporting project—has to be integrated into that [a public infor-mation program], so that every interface that’sconducted as a part of the ESP application isconsistent with the existing institutional rela-tionship program.

“This becomes acutely a problem when youhave contractors working on your ESP appli-cation,” he continued. “They have to betrained. They have to know what the appli-cant’s position is. And they have to know towhom to refer any questions that they may getabout things like, ‘What kind of plant are yougoing to put here?’ ‘When are you going tostart building?’ ‘I’ve heard that you guys havealready started laying the foundation.’

“So, it becomes not only an institutional

planning issue, but also a communication is-sue, so that everybody working on this pro-gram—[who are] not always an employee ofthe applicant—knows how to handle thesekinds of questions.”

HTGR designsAmong the most exciting prospects for

the nuclear power industry is the high-tem-perature gas-cooled reactor, and the audi-ence for the panel session “HTGR: Innova-tive Designs” heard from some passionateadvocates for this technology from Germanyand the United States. Panel chair MarkReinhart, of the Nuclear Regulatory Com-mission, unfortunately had to tell the audi-ence that two presentations were with-drawn—one on China’s 10-MW reactor,which began operating in December 2000,and the other on Eskom’s Pebble Bed Mod-ular Reactor project.

This gave the three other speakers addi-tional time to present their thoughts about atechnology that they have been committed tofor most of their careers. The first speaker wasHubertus Nickel, from the Jülich research cen-ter in Germany, where the pebble bed conceptwas first developed.

Nickel, who had also been a member ofGermany’s Reactor Safety Committee(equivalent to the NRC’s Advisory Commit-tee on Reactor Safeguards) for 26 years, ranthrough some of the history, as well as themain features, of the HTGR. The HTGR uti-

lizes an all-ceramiccore with a graphitecore structure, ceram-ic-coated particle fu-els and complete ce-ramic fuel elements.Combined with thehelium coolant, thesystem provides ahigh level of inherentsafety while allowingvery high operationaltemperatures. Reach-

ing outlet temperatures of around 950 °Cprovides a number of advantages, includinghigh thermal efficiency and usable processheat for industrial applications.

Current designsThe latest designs of relatively small,

modularized reactors with steel pressurevessels provide what Nickel called “cata-strophe-free” operation through passive de-cay–heat removal during any loss-of-coolantaccident. The fuel temperatures during a fullloss-of-coolant accident would remain be-low 1600 °C, ensuring no catastrophic re-leases of radioactivity.

Nickel described the two types of HTGRs:the pebble bed concept and the prismaticcore–type reactor developed by, among oth-ers, General Atomics in the United States. Forthe pebble bed reactor, the fuel elements con-sist of tennis ball–sized spheres containingtiny coated particles in a graphite matrix. Inthe prismatic core, the fuel elements consistof hexagonal graphite blocks in which are in-serted fuel rods containing coated particles


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bonded in graphite matrix. The basic coatedparticle is essentially the same in both con-cepts, and present designs can achieve veryhigh burnup.

In the 1960s, several high-temperature re-search reactors were built to study this reac-tor concept: In Germany, the AVR (Ar-beitsgemeinschaft Versuchsreaktor), with apebble bed core; in the United States, thePeach Bottom-1 reactor, with a prismaticcore; and in Britain, the Dragon reactor, witha prismatic core (an international projectsponsored by the OECD Nuclear EnergyAgency).

These led to the construction of two com-mercial reactors operating on a conventionalsteam cycle:■ The 300-MWe Thorium High-TemperatureReactor (THTR) at Schmehausen, built by aGerman consortium. ■ The 330-MWe Fort St. Vrain reactor, builtby General Atomics for the Public ServiceCompany of Colorado.

Neither of these was commercially suc-cessful.

Nickel described some of the achieve-ments of the AVR reactor, which operatedfor more than 20 years, including 10 years atover 900 °C. Two particular concerns of theHTGR are the ingress of water or air into thecore. The scientists at AVR were able tostudy the effect of a water ingress first handwhen a steam generator tube failed during re-actor operation, allowing more than a ton ofwater into the core in about 20 hours. Ac-cording to Nickel, nothing much happened. Ittook some months to complete a dry-out ofthe core, but the fuel performed well at fullpower afterward. As to air ingress, whenAVR operations finally ended, an air ingressaccident was created in the reactor. The ef-fect on the fuel was relatively minor. It tookabout 36 hours for the helium to be purgedand oxidation affected only 1–3 percent ofthe fuel.

He also explained why a thorium-basedfuel cycle was chosen. Basically, the decisionwas taken at a time when there were still con-cerns about uranium supplies and before the

passage of nonproliferation legislation in theUnited States (during President JimmyCarter’s administration), which led to the end-ing of the use of high-enriched uranium—which drove the THTR fuel cycle—in manycountries, including Germany.

A vendor perspectiveThe next speaker, Walter Simon, senior

vice president at General Atomics, told theaudience that there was a time when GA hadan order book of 10 large HTGRs. Unfortu-nately, this was before the first oil crisis. Oneof them was canceled the day it received theconstruction permit; all others were also sooncanceled.

Simon explained some of the reasons forthe new interest in the HTGR, which have todo with both new technology and changing at-titudes, and described some of the more in-teresting features of the its new design, the285-MWe gas turbine modular helium-cooledreactor (GT-MHR).

One fortuitous development was the com-ing together of two technological develop-ments: gas turbines were becoming larger and

reactors smaller. There is now a good matchbetween the two. The move to smaller reac-tors, previously ruled out because of their per-ceived poorer economics, came from growingdemands for safer reactors. In 1984, GA re-ceived a letter from Congress asking it to lookat reactors that were safer. This resulted in adesign that looks very different from the pre-vious “short and fat” HTGR design. The newones are long and skinny.

The new design is largely determined bytwo constraints imposed by safety require-ments. First, there were to be no control rodsin the core, only in the periphery; second, toavoid a catastrophic failure, fuel temperaturescould not exceed 1600 °C in a loss-of-coolantaccident. These constraints basically definethe limits of the core diameter and power den-sity to levels that ensure adequate decay heatremoval to prevent fuel failures. It does, how-ever, allow some increases in core length, andby going to an annular configuration with puregraphite in the central region, some increase inpower was possible.

Simon described how decay heat is re-moved following a full depressurization.While there is a passive reactor cavity heat re-moval system, if this fails, heat from the re-actor, which is built underground, will flowthrough the containment and dissipate throughthe earth to ensure that fuel temperatures willnot go above 1600 °C.

A major development came in 1993, whenGA and Russia’s Minatom signed a Memo-randum of Understanding on the joint devel-opment of a GT-MHR. At the time, they alsoapproached the U.S. government for assis-tance, but it still had a no-nuke policy fully inforce and, “as usual in those days,” said Simon,they got no answer. GA then told Minatom thatit would put in $1 million to start the project ifthe Russians would also. Minatom, which hadalready proposed building a unit at Seversk toburn Russian weapons plutonium from dis-mantled nuclear weapons, agreed. Despite nothaving U.S. government support, there wasenough interest in this concept that in 1996,two commercial companies, Framatome andFuji Electric Corp., joined the project.


GT-MHR fuel temperatures during a loss-of-coolant accident (Source: GA)

The GT-MHR core (Source: GA)

In 1998, the position of the U.S. governmentchanged. As part of its plutonium dispositionagreement with Russia, it decided to fund theGT-MHR program (in parallel with the MOXdisposition program) with the condition thatthe Russians match it. The Russians have donethat ever since. In fact, this is quite a uniquesituation, said Simon, because it is the onlynonproliferation effort in which the Russiansactually share the costs. The project is nowsponsored jointly by the DOE and Minatom,and receives support from the Japanese gov-ernment and the European Commission.

The program calls for a prototype GT-MHR module to be in operation by 2009 inRussia and the operation of a power stationcontaining four modules, each of 285-MWecapacity, by 2015; each module will burn 250kg of plutonium per year. The fuel for thesereactors will contain only plutonium—therewill be no fertile component. This can bedone, said Simon, by including an erbium poi-son. Another advantage, said Simon, it that itis extremely difficult to extract any remainingplutonium from the spent fuel.

The development costs in Russia are a quar-ter to a third of what they would be in theUnited States, said Simon. Of course, a fewdesign changes would be required to convertthe design for strictly commercial use. For ex-ample, under the present agreement with theU.S. government, the first unit will have aconventional type of containment system. Si-mon explained, however, that such a high-pressure containment is not needed by this re-actor to meet safety requirements, and for thecommercial product, it would be converted toa low-pressure vented structure.

The project now has an advisory board con-sisting of representatives from a number oflarge U.S. utilities interested in the technolo-gy. In December 2001, a first meeting with theNRC was scheduled to set the licensingprocess into motion. Simon said that the pro-jected “nth-of-a-kind” plant costs are nowabout $1120/kWe, with generation costs of 3to 3.5 cents. The first plant would be about 25percent higher.

A view of the futureThe third speaker was James Kendall, who

recently retired from the IAEA, where he ledthe gas-cooled reactor technology develop-ment unit. Before moving to the agency,Kendall had gained extensive HTGR experi-ence in the U.S. No longer an IAEA official,Kendall felt free to speak his mind, and he hada lot of messages for those wanting to devel-op HTGRs.

Generally, he said he was quite encouraged.His experience at the agency, working onprojects involving safety issues, includingheat transfer and fuel performance, gave himconfidence that this is a relatively robust tech-nology and that the safety case will be made.Another positive development was that Chi-na and Japan, which both have operating high-temperature reactors, have successfully repli-cated German experience. He is alsoencouraged by the technological develop-ments in other fields important to HTGR de-velopment, notably in gas turbines, advanced

protection and control systems, and materials.One strong point for Kendall is that the re-

newed interest in this technology has been dri-ven by the marketplace, where credibility isso vital. He carried on this line to discuss someof the risks. For example, today’s operatingpower reactors—which he called nuclear’sgolden goose—provide the financial basis fordeveloping new technology. He warned thismust be taken advantage of now, as this situ-ation will not last forever.

Another concern he expressed was the ca-pability of vendors to deploy a new technolo-gy like HTGRs. There are a lot of skills thatwill be needed, he observed, in activities suchas designing, contracting, fabrication, andconstruction, as well as licensing, etc. He alsosaid that it would be necessary to find suppli-ers willing to take on some of the risk in de-veloping many components, which theywould do only if they were to find the productcredible.

Pebble bed reactorsImmediately following the second panel

session on HTGR Innovative Designs, a tech-nical session on the Pebble Bed Modular Re-actor (PBMR) was held.

Andy Kadak, Professor of the Practice, Nu-clear Engineering, at Massachusetts Instituteof Technology, opened the proceedings withan overview of an MIT version of a PBMR,which, he believes, provides some improve-ments to the South African PBMR version(NN, Sept. 2001, p. 35). “We have gotten goodpress. People are captivated by this idea.”

“We wanted to develop a demonstrable‘product’ that could compete with natural gasand coal. . . . It had to be demonstrably safe

and the waste could beeasily disposed of anddoes not create anyadditional prolifera-tion concerns,” Kadakexplained.

The project was ini-tially started in early1998 under the Amer-ican Nuclear Society’sEconomic and Envi-ronmental Imperativeinitiative to see if stu-

dents can develop a nuclear energy technolo-gy that can compete with natural gas. Re-search is aimed at developing a conceptualdesign of the complete plant. Ultimately, it ishoped that a full-scale, dual-purpose researchand demonstration plant is built based on thisdesign. The work is now largely supported bythe Idaho National Engineering and Environ-mental Laboratory (INEEL) and DOE Nu-clear Energy Research Initiative (NERI)grants. The project has proceeded to the pointthat serious consideration is being given tobuilding a full-scale dual-purpose researchand demonstration plant at INEEL under auniversity-led consortium that will include na-tional labs, other universities, utilities, andsuppliers.

Kadak acknowledged that they are not plantdesigners, but do want to get involved inbuilding the demonstration reactor. “We will

license it as a DOE facility on a DOE site. Wehope to have NRC work with us to develop arisk-informed licensing basis in the design andwe want the design to be certified.” The planis that the facility will provide the test-bed forlicensing purposes and then continue to beused to develop the concept.

The MIT reactor, rated at 250 MWt (l10MWe), is similar to the Eskom PBMR in itscore design but radically different in the bal-ance of plant.

Concept overviewThe pebble bed reactor core, he said, con-

tains approximately 360 000 uranium-fueledpebbles about the size of tennis balls. Eachpebble contains 9 grams of low-enricheduranium in tiny grains of coated particleswithin a hard silicon carbide shell. Thesemicrospheres are embedded in a graphitematrix material in the shape of a sphericalpebble. The unique feature of pebble bed re-actors is the on-line refueling capability, inwhich the pebbles are recirculated withchecks on integrity and burnup. It is pro-jected that each pebble will pass through thereactor 10 times on average in a three-yearperiod before discharge. Because of the on-line refueling capability, plant maintenanceoutages are projected to be carried out everysix years.

MIT chose an indirect cycle to allow formore flexibility in process heat applicationsand easier layout configurations. Kadak saidthey want to focus on the total modularity con-cept. True modularity, he said, will facilitatefactory fabrication, simplify site assembly,and, most important, on the maintenance side,allow replacement rather than repair.

For a new type of reactor, licensing will bea major item. Issues to be considered includecontainment and the possible impact of acci-dental air and water ingress into the system.

The latest estimate of capital cost is about$2000 per kW. While this is high, said Kadak,the cost per unit sent out is estimated at only3.3 ¢/kWh (net), and that includes decom-missioning and waste disposal. The total proj-ect cost will be roughly half a billion dollarsto bring the first demonstration unit on linewith certification.

Modularity conceptMarc Berte, an MIT graduate student, next

described the total modularity concept usedfor the reactor. In the MIT approach, thewhole plant—reactor, intermediate heat ex-changer, and the balance of plant—is pack-aged to be transportable via low-cost means(truck as opposed to barge) and easily assem-bled. This reduces capital, construction, andmaintenance costs, and makes them attractivefor use in developing countries, which do nothave an extensive rail network and are not ca-pable of large onsite construction. Another ad-vantage of modularity is that it can reducemaintenance costs and downtime since themodules can be replaced rather than requiringonline repair.

The fabrication of the modules, includingall complex assembly and welding, will bedone in the factory. All pipes are included in


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Kadak

the modules with their own support struc-ture—no additional support structures areneeded on site. No single module exceeds60 000 kg, well below the 100 000 kg whichshould be transportable. Shielding of modulesfor transporting active modules will also bepossible.

On site, the modules will be aligned andflanges and piping bolted together. The onlylarge machinery needed is a crane to emplacethe top-level modules. The amount of sitepreparation for the balance of plant, on-sitetooling, and machinery requirements is mini-mal. Overall, this layout requires the use of 21modules (not including command and controlor power processing units), each of which istruck transportable.

The goal is minimum time and labor andzero welding between modules. Whether thecodes allow it has yet to be determined. “Weare taking all the code compliance issues fromthe beginning so we do not run down a deadend,” explained Berte. As an aside, he also saidthat the possibility of air transport was beingconsidered, particularly because there are largeRussian air transporters available now.

Multi-pass fuel cycleIn addition to its inherently safe design, a

unique feature of the pebble bed reactor is itsmulti-pass fuel cycle, in which the graphitefuel spheres are randomly loaded and contin-uously cycled through the core until theyreach a typical end-of-life burnup of about80 000 MWd/t. Not all the spheres, however,have fuel. In the South African PBMR design,approximately a quarter of the core will con-sist of pure graphite “moderator” spheres, therest being fuel spheres of varying burnup. Toget the distribution right, the pure graphitespheres are dropped into the central region ofthe core at a single position, while the fuelspheres are dropped into an annular region atthe edge of the core at nine positions. Allspheres are removed from one central locationat the bottom.

It normally takes about three months for asphere to traverse the core. The reactor has afuel handling and storage system that regu-lates the input and extraction of the spheres.When a sphere leaves the core, the first re-quirement is to distinguish if it is damagedor not. The good ones are transferred to anidentification block to distinguish betweenfuel spheres and the pure graphite spheres. Ifit is a pure graphite sphere, it is sent to a sec-ond block where the identification is verifiedand then it is transferred back to the core. Ifit is a fuel sphere, it goes to another measur-ing block where its burnup is measured. If ithas reached the planned burnup level, it issent to storage; if not, it goes back into thecore.

David Chichester, of Thermo Gamma-Met-rics, described the on-line activity measure-ment system (AMS) his company has devel-oped for Eskom’s PBMR to differentiatebetween irradiated pure graphite and fuelspheres. The system measures the gross pho-ton activity of a sphere and compares this val-ue with a predetermined threshold value.These measurements are done using an ion-

ization chamber. The instrumentation was go-ing through acceptance testing at the time ofthe Reno meeting and should be on its way tothe Pelindaba Nuclear Institute near Pretoria,South Africa, in 2002.

The unique circulating fuel of the pebblebed reactor makes in-core fuel managementmuch trickier than for conventional light-wa-ter reactors for which computational methodsallow highly precise in-core fuel management.For the pebble bed, an on-line measurementapproach becomes the only accurate methodto assess whether a given pebble has reachedits burnup limit and is sent to storage or is re-turned to the core. Prof. Ayrnan Hawari, ofthe University of Cincinnati, described possi-ble on-line burnup monitoring using passivegamma-ray and neutron detection methods toestablish a power-history and cooling-time in-dependent burnup measurement. These meth-ods rely on radiation from selected fissionproducts and heavy actinides that have builtup.

Hawari’s group determined that Cs-137 andEu-154 provided the best correlations betweenactivity and burnup, and they believed thatboth methods could be developed for accurateon-line burnup measurements. Hawari ex-plained, however, that a usable system musttake into account other considerations, partic-ularly its ability to meet the requirements ofthroughput. The preliminary analysis indi-cates that using either method for the expect-ed measurement time is sufficient to meet acirculation rate of one pebble every 30 sec-onds. Several detectors and detection systemsare currently under evaluation.

Optimizing the designAccording to C. Y. Wang, an MIT gradu-

ate student, the development path of the MITreactor concept began with a design that al-though not necessarily optimized from an ef-ficiency or plant cost point of view, could intheory actually be built using current technol-ogy. “Once the initial, buildable design is es-tablished,” he said, “we will then determinekey limitations to this design, and develop apath to removal of these limitations.” Then, afinal design of a more efficient and cheaperplant will be developed that has a reasonablechance of being buildable.

The most significant constraints on the de-signers are having to comply with all exist-ing codes and standards and avoiding any sig-nificant additional R&D effort that wouldextend construction times and costs. For ex-ample, the use of an indirect heat exchangerhas the advantage of preventing radioactivecontamination of the secondary plant and re-duces “to incredible” the probability of a wa-ter or air ingress accident; this restriction,however, which is due to ASME code re-quirements, severely limits the allowable in-termediate heat exchanger temperatures, and,therefore, the plant efficiency. Avoiding anysignificant extension of existing technologylimits the allowable size of the turbines andcompressors, and by using the pressure ves-sel design of South Africa, coupled with theindirect cycle design of the MIT concept, aseparate cooling system will be required for

the pressure vessel.The current goal for the “next-generation”

plant is to achieve an overall plant efficien-cy of above 45 percent, compared to the cur-rent 40 percent. This will require extendingcurrent technology, which may involve ad-vances in materials performance to allowhigher intermediate heat exchanger temper-atures, increases in turbo machinery effi-ciency, and many other options. At the mo-ment, the optimum “mix” of technologydevelopment that minimizes overall cost and/or risk is not clear. A model is now being de-veloped to do this.

J. M. Martinez-Val, of the Spanish compa-ny UPM, discussed the possibilities of usingpebble bed reactors to transmute transuranicsand long-lived fission products from light-wa-ter reactor fuel. The key is the strength of theTriso fuel particles, which can achieve burnuplevels of more than 700 000 MWd/t. He de-scribed several variants, including the use ofan accelerator-driven subcritical pebble bedreactor in tandem with a critical reactor.

Various fueling strategies that meet differ-ent final goals were discussed, including:1. Once through strategy—LWR fuel is re-processed once and all the actinides are en-capsulated in Triso fuel, which is circulatedin the reactor until high burnup levels areachieved.2. Nonproliferation strategy—Irradiation andreprocessing of Triso fuel are repeated untiltargets of 99.9 percent transmutation of fissilematerial are achieved.3. Minimization of long-term radiotoxicitystrategy—Low-level fission products, such asTc-99 and I-129, are added to the actinides.

He warned, however, that to reduce thelong-lived isotopes to a level that will allowthe activity to decay to the natural uraniumlevel in about 400 years, it will be necessaryto virtually eliminate all transuranics. But toget close to 100 percent, the pebbles will haveto be reprocessed, which would be very ex-pensive to do.

Security measuresWith homeland security issues making

news, a special session chaired by ANS Pres-ident Gail Marcus was organized to examine“Nuclear Plant Safety.” Since the September11 terrorist attacks, the public has had a moreactive interest in nuclear issues, said BrianGrimes, an industry consultant from Mukil-teo, Washington. For the first time, for exam-ple, the general public seems concerned aboutperceived hazards from the transportation ofspent fuel, he said.

Also new is the interest of “mainstream me-dia” in talking with people about nuclear issues,Grimes continued. “Of course, there is the usu-al reporter technique of seeking judgmentsfrom local sources,” he said. “Unfortunately,some of the antinuclear people have more pun-gent quotes than the nuclear people.”

Overall, the general public has a greaterconcern for nuclear safety because an attackon a nuclear target could lead to perceivedworst-case consequences, such as radiationexposures and land contamination. This con-cern exists “because there is a general radia-


tion phobia [that is] enhanced by antinuclearfolks trying to advance their agendas,” Grimessaid.

It is up to the industry, then, to put nuclearthreats in perspective. For the short term,Grimes explained, emphasis must be placedon communicating the capabilities of nuclearplants, such as their hardened structures andthe separation of equipment on site. The in-

dustry must trumpetthat each site has anarmed and active re-sponse force and anenergy plan for evac-uation of an area.Also, the public mustbe made aware that ifan attack occurred ona nuclear plant, thelikelihood of radiationrelease would be low.Even in a worst-case

scenario, Grimes said, the result from a largeaccident would likely be “a bad day at theplant and [maybe] some local land cleanup.”

For the longer term, the industry must in-form the public that as the world battles ter-rorism, nuclear plants always will have theirprotective measures, Grimes said.

Hardened structuresMarvin Fertel, senior vice president of the

Nuclear Energy Institute, reviewed the secu-rity capacities of nuclear power plants. “Nu-clear plants in our country and basically any-where in the world are generally hardenedstructures,” Fertel noted. “Also, all the com-mercial plants have security plans and pro-grams in place in our country. So, security washere before September 11, it will be here af-ter September 11, and it’s changing [for thebetter through improvements].”

All nuclear plants in the United States havestayed at their highest levels of alert since theSeptember attacks, and the Nuclear Regula-tory Commission continues with around-the-

clock staffing at its Emergency OperationsCenter and regional Incident Operations Cen-ters. “So the entire [nuclear] infrastructurehas been at its highest security level,” Fertelsaid.

Regarding securityspecifics, Fertel re-marked that perime-ters have been extend-ed outward aroundnuclear plants, so thatvisitors are fartheraway before they gainaccess. Some stateshave National Guardtroops supplementingthe security forces atthe plants. Existing

safety measures include thorough backgroundchecks of employees, vehicle barrier systemsin place at sites, and security exercises con-ducted by plant personnel.

The NRC and the industry have indepen-dently undertaken “top-to-bottom” reviews ofthe security infrastructure. “We’re looking atevery aspect,” Fertel said. “Comments havebeen made, particularly in the media, about[plant security] weaknesses, and we’re look-ing at those to see how real they are.”

Fertel stressed that a nuclear plant’s con-tainment has about 12 feet of concrete and afoot of steel, in various segments, between thereactor core and the outside of the building.“So we have a relatively robust structure,” hesaid.

As to the question about aircraft attacks onnuclear plants, Fertel said that “only three ofour facilities have looked at airplane crash-es” during design consideration, but that isbecause those plants are located near airports.Those plants—Seabrook, Limerick, andThree Mile Island—were designed to protectagainst what could be perceived as possiblethreats or risks (aircraft crashes), the sameway a plant in Kansas would design to pro-tect against a tornado but probably not a hur-

ricane, he commented.Are nuclear plants in the United States ro-

bust enough to survive an aircraft hit? “Wethink generally the answer for containmentswould be absolutely yes,” Fertel said. Butthe real danger would be a plane engine’s ro-tor, not the body of the aircraft itself. “Theplane doesn’t do much damage except to it-self,” he said. “But the rotor becomes a mis-sile and could penetrate to some depth intoconcrete.”

While containments seem secure, there issome concern for other structures on site, in-cluding the auxiliary buildings and spent fuelpools, Fertel said. Spent fuel pools of pres-surized water reactors are below ground lev-el and so there is less worry about threats of airstrikes. But the spent fuel pools of boiling wa-ter reactors are elevated. “The question thereis, would a plane be able to crash into it,breech it, and drain it?” Fertel offered. “If it’snot drained, there is no problem. There wouldbe no radiological releases and the situationwould be controlled.”

For security of auxiliary buildings, “thereare concerns there,” Fertel said. A plane couldpenetrate them and make safety systems in-operable. In that regard, the industry is look-ing at probabilistic safety assessments andworking with EPRI to see that protections arein place in the event of aircraft accidents.

Much of the security issue comes down tothe likelihood of an aircraft making a directhit on a nuclear plant, Fertel said. The WorldTrade Center towers were very tall verticaltargets, and the Pentagon, while large hori-zontally, was not easy to hit and in fact wasstruck indirectly on September 11. “So a nu-clear plant’s profile”—a fraction of the size ofthe buildings attacked on September 11—“makes it difficult to hit from the air,” he said(see illustration above). “A plane hitting theplant is something that should be looked atand is being looked at, but it is not, at leastupon the first assessment, the threat that it ismade out to be by some of the antinucleargroups.”

Fighting anthraxAlso discussed during the session was a nu-

clear safety issue as related to the use of radi-ation to kill anthrax spores.

Gail Marcus made the presentation for RayDurante, who had planned to attend the sessionbut was unavailable at the last minute. Duranteis head of the Food Irradiation Council. “As farback as the 1960s, radiation was successfullyused to destroy anthrax spores in imported goathair used [in] making carpets,” Marcus readfrom Durante’s statement: “While only a lim-ited amount of research has been done specifi-cally on the anthrax bacillus spore, there isenough data on work related to similarpathogens to be confident that radiation wouldbe very effective for this application.”

Further research needs to be done, Du-rante’s statement continued, to determinewhat level of radiation would be most effec-tive since an organism’s sensitivity to irradi-ation depends on the size of its DNA and therate at which it can repair DNA damaged byirradiation.


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Grimes

Fertel

Relative sizes of a World Trade Center tower, the Pentagon, and a nuclear power plant’s containmentbuilding (Source: NEI)

“When it was first learned that anthraxspores were being sent through the mail andaffecting postal workers and others, therewas an understandable rush to find an im-mediately available method to counteractthe health threat,” Durante’s statement not-ed. Press releases and articles stated thatfood irradiation equipment could be usedto sterilize mail. Unfortunately, Durantelamented in his statement, a mature and vi-able food irradiation industry does not ex-ist today, although experience on sanitiz-ing medical supplies shows that themachines do work.

Durante noted that it would “seem logical”to use electron beams to irradiate large batch-es of mail.

Barbara Seiders, manager of chemical andbiological defense programs at Pacific North-west National Laboratory (PNNL), explainedtechnologies being studied for obtaining mailsafety. In examining the anthrax threat, re-searchers at PNNL have found that the size

of an anthrax particleis important because“not all particles areproblematic,” Seidersrevealed. “The onlyparticles you have toworry about are theones that find theirway into the lungsand cannot find theirway back out.” So if aparticle is too large, itmay deposit on the

tongue before it gets to the lungs. If it’s toosmall, it will be breathed in and breathed out.

Anthrax particle sizes range from 1 to 10microns in diameter, with one to two anthraxspores per particle. The bottom line, though,is that there are more than 1 million infectious

doses in a few milligrams of anthrax spores.“That’s kind of grim,” she commented. (Seephoto above for visual depiction of relativeamounts of anthrax, to scale.)

Seiders noted that while irradiation hasbeen used for medicine and food safety,“those usually have been done in liquidmediums or in meat tissue, and it is a verydifferent problem trying to sterilize a driedpowder as compared to a liquid-based or-ganism.” Limited information is availableabout irradiating dried foods such as spices,she said.

Based on a number of studies dealing withthe anthrax spore and from information pro-vided by experts, the radiation dose wouldhave to be greater than 10 kGy to kill anthrax,she said.

PNNL researchers have looked at a numberof methods for killing anthrax contained insealed envelopes and parcels. These methodsinclude irradiation using electron beams,gamma-ray irradiation using cobalt-60 or ce-sium-137, beta irradiation using strontium,and irradiation using X rays.

All methods are affected by the volume ofmail to be handled, the amount of time themail would need to be irradiated, operationalfeasibility concerns and constraints, humanhealth concerns, and availability of equipmentto do the irradiating. For example, using elec-tron beams at an existing facility, a conveyorbelt could carry boxes of mail through an ir-radiation machine, and PNNL researchershave estimated it would take less than 10 min-utes to kill the anthrax, depending on the sizeof the box of mail. On the other hand, for gam-ma-ray irradiation using Cs-137, pallets ofmail (4 ft � 4 ft � 4 ft) could be irradiated inup to five hours using low doses of about 3million curies or 15 minutes at a dose of 50million Ci. No facility for this gamma-ray

method yet exists, Seiders said.Work is also being done at PNNL on the

use of holographic imaging to aid in detectionof anthrax in mail parcels.

Seiders would not comment on the workthat PNNL is doing to kill the smallpox virus.

California energy crisisThe quick answer to the question posed in

the session’s title, “California Electricity Cri-sis: How Can Nuclear Help?” is, of course,that it can’t, because it is currently illegal tobuild nuclear power plants in California. Fur-thermore, session chair and former ANSpresident Bertram Wolfe, a California resi-dent, said he suspects that the state’s gover-nor, Gray Davis, is antinuclear. Wolfe saidhe sent a letter—twice—about nuclear pow-er to Gov. Davis, signed by 15 leading ex-perts, that went unanswered. “So, we don’thave . . . a governor in California today thatis looking generally . . . at the energy situa-tion and what nuclear power can do,” Wolfesaid.

Nonetheless, speculating on the impact nu-clear power could have had during the Cali-fornia energy crisis—which led to high ener-gy prices and recurring rolling blackoutsthroughout the state over the past two-and-a-half years—or could have in the comingdecades, was the subject at hand.

Although the state’s energy problem hasabated somewhat, several speakers during thesession emphasized that it has not beensolved. “In the future and in the present in Cal-ifornia, 95 percent of all our generation beingbuilt is natural gas,” commented 1998–99ANS President and California resident TedQuinn. “Governor Davis has been very proudto announce the opening of natural gas gener-ating stations. And it’s really a benefit to helpus. But, certainly in the long term, it’s not theanswer.”

California legislators, however, appear tothink that it is. Nuclear Energy Institutemember outreach director Dave Modeen il-lustrated that point when he recalled a trip hemade to the state a year ago. “I happened tobe in California last January. And the weekI was there there were two decisions,” Mod-een said. “Two large plants, 600 megawattseach, were voted down by the authorizingagencies because of concerns by the not-in-my-backyard participants. . . . So, even whilethis issue of the doubling, the tripling, thefactor-of-10 increase in energy costs was go-ing on, there was still really a reluctance totry to address, at least from my perception,some of the imbalance, on the part of the pol-icy-makers.”

Part of the problem, Modeen said, is thattwo-thirds of California’s current energy mixcomes from less than reliable sources. Natu-ral gas, which accounts for 46 percent of themix, according to Modeen, can suffer fromdrastic price swings. And hydroelectricsources, accounting for 22 percent of the en-ergy supply in California, Modeen said, arenot always available. In other words, Califor-nia appears to be setting itself up for moreproblems in the future.

“We realize that the electricity business will


1 mg 25 mg

100 mg 1 gram

(Source: PNNL)

Relative amounts of anthrax, to scale

Seiders

continue to experience significant price andsupply volatility,” Modeen said. “It’s just nat-ural. I know in the last five or six months, asthe economy has eased, the weather has easedalso, and things look a little better in Califor-nia. That could be a short-term situation.There’s really nothing to say that we can’tswing back to much of the same situation,even with the restructuring of some of theselaws and market rules.”

Fast reactorsCarl Walter, a longtime staffer at the Uni-

versity of California’s Lawrence LivermoreNational Laboratory—who now calls himself“a retiree working at Lawrence Livermore”—said the crisis could have been avoided if firmsteps had been taken in the 1970s to constructan appropriate sustainable electric power in-frastructure. He also added his voice to thechorus, warning that “we must not be ledastray by only short-term approaches to theso-called electricity crisis in California. Theproblem is of vastly greater scope and dura-tion, and no less urgent.”

Walter outlined what he believes can be along-range solution, once the spent fuel dis-posal problem is solved and California againpermits nuclear power plants to be built with-in its borders. He said the advanced fast reac-tor with fuel recycling—or FR/FR—is “thesolution to our problem in California.”

Work on the reactor has been done by GENuclear Energy, Argonne National Labora-tory, and Burns and Roe Company. GE’s de-sign for the Super-PRISM, a liquid sodium-cooled fast reactor, comes closest tofulfilling the vision for the reactor, Waltersaid.

The FR/FR is passively safe, with a lowprobability of severe core damage. All the ac-tinides are fissioned, and the long-lived fissionproducts can be transmuted, which means itsdisposal would not require safeguards, Walternoted. The reactor utilizes uranium two ordersof magnitude more efficiently than light-wa-ter reactors. And, at anticipated costs of $28per megawatt-hour, the cost of power is com-petitive, Walter said, “particularly when youcompare it with Governor Davis’s secretlyawarded contracts of $69 a megawatt hour.”

Crisis noninterventionDuring his presentation, which drew a

hearty round of applause at its conclusion, at-torney Dan Fessler, who was president of theCalifornia Public Utilities Commission from1991 to 1996, provided an analysis and time-line of the California energy crisis.

When he took over as president of theCPUC in 1991, energy prices in Californiawere about one-and-a-half times higher thanthe national average. There was a question,Fessler said, of how long California could sus-tain its economy—with its higher taxes andhigh cost of living—especially as its neighborstates enjoyed energy prices below the na-tional average.

At one point, following the end of the ColdWar and subsequent “screeching halt on alldefense procurement,” after which California“began to hemorrhage jobs,” it was decided

that California could not sustain its economy,Fessler said.

The job of the CPUC has always been todeliver safe, reliable, reasonably priced andenvironmentally responsible provision of en-ergy. The issue that then faced the state legis-lature was “the question of reasonable pric-ing,” Fessler said.

“It was decided that . . . it would be in theinterest of all consumers, particularly to con-sumers in California—which was and remainsa state that imports the great bulk of its ener-gy during peak periods, either in the form offuels that are brought in . . . or in the form ofelectrons over the high-voltage transmissiongrid from the other western states—to try topromote a transparent competition in genera-tion, wherein a marketplace would be createdthat would give evidence of what would be theleast costly set of generators that could run atany hour and satisfy the demand in Californiaand, more broadly, in the West,” Fessler ex-plained.

A spot market for electricity, the first of itskind in the western U.S., was created, calledthe Power Exchange. “The idea was a fairlysimple one,” Fessler said. “We would take thetransmission assets of California, place themin the hands of a central grid operator, whoseresponsibility would be to operate the trans-mission assets so as to facilitate the physicaldelivery of electricity from the least costly setof generators that could be identified in . . . thePower Exchange.”

It was a day-ahead and hour-ahead marketfor electricity, in which electricity generatorswould see a day ahead the projections of thestate’s demand for electricity spelled out overa 24-hour clock, and then they could bid, inone-hour increments, the price that they wouldcharge to supply electricity during that hour,Fessler said.

One of the features of the California PowerExchange, Fessler explained, was that all bid-ders would be paid the price that was to beawarded to the last increment of supply need-ed to meet demand. “That was thought to be thereal marginal cost of electricity. And with thatprice signal being sent seven days a week, 24hours a day, it was thought that over time thoseprice signals would alert individuals as towhere opportunities were to build new gener-ation, where transmission constraints were be-ing discovered. And it would focus, therefore,the science plus the economics of our profes-sion . . . upon the true problems in building outan infrastructure that would match a supplyneeded to meet demand in an efficient manner.”

Rather than expose the state to the truemovements of supply and demand, however,the state legislature—comprising “very ner-vous” elected officials—decided that it wouldorder a 10 percent price reduction to be givento all household users of electricity, as well assmall industrial, small commercial, and smallagriculture users. In other words, voters,”Fessler said. “[The] voters would have an im-mediate 10 percent reduction, sort of as a de-cree of Caesar Augustus, even as the govern-ment was speaking about giving up commandand control of price regulation and moving toforces of supply and demand.”

According to Fessler, the legislation alsocapped the amount of money that the utilitiescould charge for electricity prices during thisperiod, and fixed them at the electricity ratesprevailing on January 1, 1996. “They couldnot charge a higher rate no matter what hap-pened,” he added.

In March 1997, the Power Exchange be-came operational. And during 1997 and1998, prices on the wholesale market forelectricity fell dramatically, not only in Cal-ifornia but across the West. “It appeared thatour fondest hopes for deregulation and thecommitment to market forces was payingsubstantial dividends,” Fessler said, “becauseone of the provisions that we had put throughwas that the utilities would have to passthrough the wholesale costs of electricity, asfound in the Power Exchange, to all Califor-nia citizens, which meant that the benefits ofcompetition would reach every citizen, froman individual living on a pension alone in asmall apartment to the largest user of elec-tricity. That was, to me, one of the prides ofwhat had been accomplished, because it de-vised a delivery scheme to deliver the bene-fits as well as the risks of competition to all,on an equal basis.

“Well, obviously, the story, if it had endedthere, would be a happy story. But it didn’tend there.”

In June 1999, on one day, in one hour, avery strange thing happened, Fessler said. Theprice on the Power Exchange shot up to an as-tronomical level for the hour-ahead market,and the market cleared at that very high price.But the market receded within the two hours,and thereafter, for about 7 months, there wasno problem.

But by spring 2000, price spikes were be-coming a persistent problem. Prices in Cali-fornia on the Power Exchange were going up,and they were not just going up during thepeak hours of electricity usage. “Peak priceswere going up and they were not comingdown during periods of the day in which itwas thought that electricity prices would nor-mally recede dramatically,” Fessler said.

By May, the high prices began to be an en-demic problem in California. “Indeed, it canbe argued, that by May of the year 2000, whatwas wrong with the system was fully evidentto anyone with public and private sector re-sponsibilities, not only in California, but inWashington, D.C.,” Fessler said.

The market had become dysfunctional.Somehow, Fessler explained, significant seg-ments of supply were not bidding into thePower Exchange. “It wasn’t that the physicalgeneration was physically disabled. It wasn’tthat it had picked up and left the Western partof the United States. But it was not being bidin the Power Exchange. Instead it was beingbid into the secondary market, which was op-erated in real time by the independent systemoperator. The mission of the independent sys-tem operator was to keep a constant physicalequilibrium between supply and demand, costbeing no object.”

Its normal function would have been to fillin if there had been a loss of a generatorthrough a physical calamity. But now it was


M E E T I N G S

taking up an increasingly large sector of themarket—5, 10, 15 percent. “By the time theprices reached their full maturity, nearly 40percent of the market had moved from thePower Exchange into the last-minute desper-ate scramble for electricity. Sometimes thescramble wasn’t fast enough, and for the firsttime in 15 years, Californians began to expe-rience blackouts.

“That was May.“And June,” he continued.“And July.”“And the government did nothing,” Fessler

whispered.Consumers were not seeing the price con-

sequences of the high prices being paid in thewholesale market because the legislation hadcapped the retail rates for electricity. “Cali-fornia therefore moved into this crisis with theconsumption of electricity virtually unabat-ed,” Fessler said.

Also, Fessler noted, 2000 was, of course,an election year, in which California was amajor prize in the election. “And it seemed tome, as a civilian, to be the primary goal ofelected officials to make certain that no priceswere communicated to the public until afterthe sixth of November in the year 2000.

“It was on the eighth of November thatGovernor Davis discovered that Californiahad a problem with electricity.”

The difference between what the electricutilities had paid for electricity in the first 11months of the year, and what they had beenallowed to recoup from ratepayers throughfrozen rates had gone from a $1-billion prob-lem in May to an estimated $14–$16-billionproblem, Fessler said.

In response to an audience question, Fesslermade the session’s most striking point: “Wewill debate for years what actually wentwrong in the last 26, 28 months in Califor-nia. . . . But here is a solid fact, and it hauntsme. At no point in California during the peri-od of time in which the [energy] market wasreacting with these grotesque price signals, orin which we were shutting people off from theconsumption of electricity, was the imbalancebetween supply and demand ever in excess of600 megawatts.

“Now, if SONGS-1 [San Onofre nucleargenerating station] had been operating, wewould not have had a problem. If RanchoSeco had been on line, we would not havehad a problem. If Trojan had been func-tional—and if you assume that there wasadequate transmission capacity, which canbe a problem—we would not have had aproblem.”

Someone in the audience immediatelyasked, “Have the folks in California been toldthis?” to which Fessler responded, “No.”

50 years of fast reactor knowledgeThe session “Passing on Fifty Years of Fast

Reactor Knowledge to a New Generation onNuclear R&D” provided an opportunity todiscuss what needs to be done to preserveknowledge in this technology and motivate itto happen. Opening the session, Leon Wal-ters, of Argonne National Laboratory, re-minded participants that the decline in fast re-

actor research and development began withthe Carter administration in the mid-1970s.“If we want to recover the information gen-erated over several decades, it would be verydifficult,” he said. And to compound matters,experienced people have been leaving theworkforce, taking a lot of knowledge with

them. The only way toreverse the situationwould be with a vig-orous program andthis is not possible, heremarked, at least forsome considerabletime.

One impetus forthis session was thediscovery, during re-search undertaken onthe technical history

of EBR-II, that much of the information wason the verge of being lost. Several billions ofdollars was spent getting this information, not-ed Walters, and for a few million more, “wecan put it in a state that can be passed on.”

Walters had recently made two importantcontacts, the International Atomic EnergyAgency and the DOE’s weapons program.With the help of IAEA’s Alexander Stan-culescu, an Agency “consultancy” (a prelim-inary meeting to define the scope of a problemand how to approach it) is planned for nextspring in Idaho Falls, Idaho, to develop aworldwide plan for preserving fast reactorknowledge. In the meantime, the Reno meet-ing provided an opportunity to get some of

the people together tostart exchanging ideasand set the stage forthe consultancy.

Another importantdiscovery was that aknowledge preserva-tion program forweapons technologyis already in place.One of the conse-quences of the endingof both U.S. nuclear

weapons testing and weapons development in1992, was that this community has been ex-periencing a continuing loss of expertise. Butit was able to convince the administration andCongress that this should be viewed as a na-tional security issue, and funding has beenmade available to undertake a preservationprogram.

IAEA workWalters then asked Stanculescu to describe

the potential role of the IAEA. He explainedthat the agency appreciates the need to pre-serve information and knowledge when, as itexpects, the world comes asking for more nu-clear power plants. It already has useful re-sources available, including the Internation-al Nuclear Information Systems (INIS) andseveral nuclear databases. And providedmember countries are in favor, said Stan-culescu, the agency can provide a number ofother services. “We can look around andidentify what is being done and act as a cata-

lyst and facilitator,” he added. “And we cantry to integrate these activities and initiatespecific projects with strong member stateparticipation.”

The IAEA is already involved in preserv-ing fast reactor data. In 1999, it invited expertsto meet to discuss what should be done to startan initiative. The agency is also now workingwith the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency(NEA), which has a similar activity under wayfor preservation of experimental neutronphysics benchmark data. Generally, NEA willconcentrate on thermal reactors and IAEA onfast reactors.

The session then heard presentations on theapproaches being taken and the activities un-der way in several other countries.

Roland Soule, of France’s Commissariat àl’Energie Atomique (CEA) described a majorproject to preserve fast reactor knowledge thatbegan after the government decided to closethe 1200-MWe Superphenix reactor. He nowhas several people working on what appearsto be a very user-friendly information system.It was constructed to cover the entire scientif-ic and engineering information requirementsof the fast reactor. He mentioned several data-bases operated by CEA, including SNEDAX,which covers integral fast reactor experimentsin zero power facilities. SNEDAX was origi-nally developed at Forschungszentrum Karls-ruhe (FzK), in Germany, and includes exper-imental data from facilities in France,Germany, Japan, Russia, the United King-dom, and the United States.

A German contribution by Roland Boehme,of FzK (presented by the session co-chair, asthe author could not attend), described the his-tory of fast reactor development in Germany,beginning in the 1960s with the zero-powerSNEAK facility at FzK. SNEAK was shutdown in 1985 when a decision was taken byFrance, Germany, and the United Kingdom(which operated the ZEBRA facility) to keeponly France’s Masurca facility going as an in-ternational project.

Immediately after the shutdown ofSNEAK, work on preserving documentationstarted. This was completed in 1996 and thentransferred to the CEA. Information from thecountry’s fast reactors, including details fromthe experiments undertaken at the KNK-2 re-actor at Karlsruhe, and publications on theKalkar SNR-300 fast reactor (which was built,but never received an operating license) arestored in the archives of Siemens, now Fram-atome ANP. No manpower is available forscrutinizing these.

The Japanese situation was described byYoshio Yokota, of JNC (Japan Nuclear Cy-cle Development Institute), which still hasa very active fast reactor program, althoughits two power generating plants, Joyo andMonju, are not presently in operation. It alsohas a comprehensive knowledge preserva-tion program that includes collecting “hu-man” knowledge. This is done by recordedinterviews with key staff as they reach re-tirement and through the preparation of in-dividual “memoirs.” Based on this, a com-puterized “FBR plant design planningsystem” is being constructed that will in-


Stanculescu

Walters

clude an explanation of each design decisionand how the decisions affect each other.Since it is difficult to select what to retain,it preserves all information.

JNC is also proposing a major internation-al knowledge preservation program to becalled ISAN, which, besides being anacronym for International Super Archive Net-work, is, appropriately, Japanese for “legacy.”The company hopes that this will provide oth-er countries whose staff have been redeployedor retired with an incentive to put some re-sources into this activity. It will use the WorldWide Web as a means of sharing nonpropri-etary information.

The Russian programVisa problems meant that the Russian con-

tributors were unable to attend, and John Gra-ham, of ETCetera Assessments LLP and apast president of ANS, summarized the paperthey sent. Russia has an active fast reactor pro-gram, which includes plans to extend opera-tion of its BN-600 station to 2020 and to con-struct an 800-MWe version (BN-800), forwhich some funds have been raised.

As with other countries, however, its ex-perts are leaving. Some work preservingknowledge is being done—for example, post-irradiation experience has been gathered fromthe country’s three critical facilities and con-struction of a database is in progress. In addi-tion, some work is under way to gather expe-rience directly from experts. This includesinterviews with older specialists and havingthem produce their memoirs, focusing on spe-cific problems.

Unfortunately, this work has stopped dueto lack of funds. This is an activity that wouldappreciate support from the West. The Insti-tute of Physics and Power Engineering, in Ob-ninsk, has also begun to preserve the privatearchives of famous scientists (photos, letters,drafts of scientific papers, etc.).

In his own contribution, John Grahamimagined it being the year 2050 and the fusionprogram having just been terminated. “Whatdoes it take to recreate a fast reactor technol-ogy?” he asked. To get an idea of how big ajob this would be, he provided a long list ofthe types of work that would have to be un-dertaken. For example, the basic knowledgecategories he listed were: R&D, design, fab-rication and construction, operation, and de-commissioning. Under design, he includedgeneral design system criteria and standards;core physics information (through core life);dynamic analysis (normal and off-normal);system design descriptions; safety analysisand reports; beyond design-basis protection;project costs.

Graham then discussed a couple of specif-ic topics of vital importance to fast reactors—thin-walled piping for loop-type fast reactorsand sodium boiling—where information andknowledge has been lost. After the ClinchRiver Breeder Reactor Program was canceledin 1984, the files on the development workdone by Westinghouse along with ArgonneNational Laboratory were boxed and sent forstorage in caverns below Pittsburgh with anotation to destroy them in 10 or 15 years. As

by that time there was unlikely anyonearound to say that the files were worth keep-ing, he doubts that anything survived. Onsodium boiling, he asked the expert in thiscountry, who happened to be in the audience.Graham was told that “his own published pa-pers were stored in his garage, but the West-inghouse files of analysis and data had beendestroyed.”

Graham concluded that he knows “of notechnology which has been fully lost withoutbeing superseded by better technology. Fastreactor technology is in danger of being lostjust in that way—presently, the compendiumof knowledge exists only in Japan and Russia.If those programs are terminated without theknowledge being preserved, then the worldwill have lost a vital resource. . . . To recon-struct the technology again 50 years hencewill cost us 10 to 50 times what it cost 25years ago, even at modest escalation rates. Itis almost already too late to act.”

Weapons knowledge preservationAn actual nuclear knowledge preservation

program that is in progress was described byWilliam A. Bookless, of Lawrence LivermoreNational Laboratory. In this case it concernsthe DOE’s weapons technology program.Bookless remarked that when early-retirementincentives were first offered by the DOE, therewas one day that 700 people left the laborato-ry. This represented more than 10 000 person-years of nuclear weapons experience.

In about 1993, he and a few others got to-gether to consider how to keep the technolo-gies robust for future use, following the dra-matic changes that were occurring in theweapons program as production facilitiesclosed and consolidation was in full swing: in1989, the Rocky Flats plant was closed, andin 1992 all nuclear weapons testing and de-velopment stopped. In response, these fewpeople created the nuclear weapons informa-tion group, an ad hoc group of experts fromdifferent organizations, to discuss the work al-ready going on independently in each. Be-cause it is now seen as a national security is-sue, this work also gets financial help fromgovernment agencies.

In his presentation, Bookless discussedmany problems and issues that they hadcome across. Trying to understand how totransfer knowledge to later generations is abit more complicated, he warned, than datamanagement. “Data does not represent un-derstanding of anything,” he said. Abovedata, he listed “information,” which com-puters can capture fairly effectively. But thatdoes not capture “knowledge,” he said. Thisrequires an understanding of patterns. “Ourdatabase systems today cannot understandpatterns the way a human being can. Perhapssome day.”

In his view, the final goal is the ability is toapply the knowledge to a project—such asbuilding a reactor. The application of thatknowledge requires the kind of connectednessthat computer databases will not be able to dofor a long time. “The only method that hasbeen proven, as far as I am concerned, is thementoring of people, which involves the ac-

tual exercising of our people. We have im-plemented this at our lab. . . . I believe a con-stant program is needed that applies theknowledge to real projects, real things to door we will lose it,” he said. This is why send-ing people to take part in Russian and Japan-ese programs seemed a good idea to him.

Bookless also talked about the need to cre-ate an environment where people feel com-fortable to induce them to impart their knowl-edge. Some people love to talk and hate towrite, he said, and others would rather isolatethemselves until they have finished writing.“We have had people provide 500-pagetomes on one specific design approach wherethey attempted to write down what we nevercaptured in the past—why we did it,” he said.He gave an example of a particular alloy thatwas chosen for some purpose. While therewas good documentation about the alloy,there was no record of why it was chosen—was it because it was ductile, or strong, orcheap, or have minimum of a material thatshould not be included? “What was the reasonwe used it?” Only those involved in decidinghad those answers, he said. In another case,the key designers of a particular item werebrought together. With a model in front ofthem, they spent many hours discussing eachdesign feature allowing the thought process-es involved in coming up with the design tobe extracted.

He also provided a lot of other advice. Hementioned that a group at Sandia has cap-tured a structured way of extracting knowl-edge. They have explored a lot of techniques,such as the use of panels, methods of moti-vating people, how to ask questions, etc. Re-garding information storage, they use for-mats that are considered “migratable,” suchas pdf, ASCII and html, which should beavailable generation after generation. An-other thorny issue is sharing proprietary in-formation. “We have been working on thisfor many years and feel we are gettingclose,” Bookless said.

An FBR session postscriptAt the end of the session, the chair told the

participants that given the interest shown, hewas inviting everyone to join him and sever-al of the speakers on the final day of the meet-ing to continue the discussion. This extra ses-sion provided an opportunity to examinewhere to go now.

Bookless had more useful advice based onthe weapons technology knowledge preserva-tion program. To attract funding, he said, it isnecessary to get the message across that it isvital to preserve fast reactor knowledge, asone day it may be needed. He said it was vi-tal to talk to members of high-level commis-sions and panels—particularly congressional-ly mandated ones—not only to convince, butto familiarize them with the idea that it is a na-tional security issue and that without it, bil-lions of dollars of knowledge will be lost. Thiswill take many years and a lot of effort. Hisadvice led to a proposal to produce a “white”paper that puts the arguments together. A con-vincing story is needed with a strong justifi-cation, he said. That there are other countries


M E E T I N G S


A SIGNIFICANT ROADBLOCK TO de-velopment of additional nuclear pow-er capacity is the concern over man-

agement of the nuclear waste produced by theplants, which requires disposal. Authorized byCongress to begin in fiscal year 2001, the De-partment of Energy’s Advanced AcceleratorApplications program was created to addressthis and other pressing nuclear issues facing theUnited States, including declining U.S. nuclearinfrastructure and global nuclear leadership.

The Embedded Topical Meeting on Accel-erator Applications/Accelerator Driven Trans-mutation Technology and Applications washeld to discuss many of these concerns. Tech-nical program chair Warren Funk, of theThomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facil-ity, said the program committee received be-tween 170 and 180 papers, nearly double whatthey had in the largest previous meeting.

AAA historyThe AAA program is developing the tech-

nology base for waste transmutation—the nu-clear transformation of long-lived radioactivematerials into short-lived or nonradioactivematerials—and aims to demonstrate its prac-ticality and value for long-term waste man-agement. Both acting associate director for theprogram, John Herczeg, and director of theAAA program at Los Alamos National Labo-ratory, Bruce Matthews, provided historiesand overviews of the program.

Although there was work on transmutationin the early 1990s at LANL, the actual AAAprogram did not begin until 2000, Herczegnoted. The program was formed by Congres-sional directive as a combination of the Ac-celerator Production of Tritium and the Ac-celerator Transmutation of Waste programs.The organization over the last year has in-cluded several DOE laboratories and sites, in-

cluding Los Alamos, Argonne, and SavannahRiver.

“We were required to put a report to Con-gress in place,” Herczeg said. “That report de-fined that we were to build a facility within 10years that would cost around $2 billion. Con-gress looked at that report and decided thatthat was a little too expensive.”

The AAA program has decided to holdback on accelerator development for now,Herczeg said. “We’re going to focus on trans-mutation separations technology. We’re stillgoing to maintain the [accelerator] technolo-gy. That is, we’re going to still do some workin the design of the [accelerator] facility, evenif it’s preconceptual and at a very low level.”

Matthews noted that transmutation isneeded because Yucca Mountain wouldquickly be filled to its statutory limit. “Some-where—we’re guessing 2015—policy-mak-ers in this country are going to have to makea decision whether we go to an alternativestrategy or build a new repository if we aregoing to have nuclear energy as an option.That’s really, I think, what the key driver isfor this program is and where we fit into thefuture,” he said.

SNS updateThe associate laboratory director for the

Spallation Neutron Source, Thomas Mason,provided an overview and update of the Spal-lation Neutron Source, an accelerator-basedneutron source that uses spallation, which isunder construction in Oak Ridge, Tenn., andset to begin operation in 2006. At 1.4 MW, itwill be the world’s leading pulsed spallationsource and the world’s leading facility forneutron scattering, Mason said. “We believethat the capability of this machine will outstripanything that’s currently available, and it’sour intention that SNS will be the world’sleading facility for neutron scattering.”

One of the unusual features of the project,Mason pointed out, is that it is being devel-oped by a consortium of Department of Ener-gy labs. The front end, which includes the ionsource and some of the low-energy compo-nents of the accelerator, is being developed byLawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Thelinear accelerator, which accelerates H-minusions up to 1 GeV, is being developed by LosAlamos National Laboratory. The accumula-tor ring is being developed by BrookhavenNational Laboratory, and the mercury target

T O P I C A L M E E T I N G

Accelerating the transmutation programMajor points from the session:

◆ Accelerator transmutation can addressthe waste issue

◆ Spallation Neutron Source to operate in 2006

that want to share the burden was consideredhelpful, he added.

It was generally agreed that preserving theknowledge found in the heads of experts—who know what has been done, why it wasdone, and what the results are—should havepriority, since this sort of information is sel-dom included in reports and is perishable. It

was suggested that there are probably onlyabout 500 people in the world that have thetype of experience and knowledge that shouldbe preserved.

The IAEA’s Stanculescu also noted thatsome people want to get a clear vision of whatis to be done. “I am afraid we cannot have aclear vision,” he said. “If we wait to know

how to do it, then we will not get started.”The important thing is to get started, headded, and then what needs doing will comeout. He was confident that the consultancymeeting, which was tentatively scheduled forthe first week of April 2002, will be a step to-ward a real international effort to preservefast reactor knowledge.

by Argonne National Laboratory.The funding request for the project in FY

2002 was $291.4 million. The bill that hasbeen passed by the House and Senate in-cludes the full request of $291.4 million.“This is a reflection of the fact that the proj-ect has very full congressional support,” Ma-son said. “This is our peak funding year. In’03 we drop off to $225 million and flattenout. Our eventual operating budget will beabout $150 million a year. So, from a politi-cal funding point of view, we’re over thehump. . . .

“We still have an awful lot in front of us interms of getting it done. Nevertheless, the factthat we’ve now finished off a year where ourfunding was $278 million, going into a yearwith $291 million means there’s an awful lotgoing on now in terms of procurements forhardware, awards for construction of build-ings, real tangible stuff that gives us confi-dence that we’re going to get done.”

The project design is about 70 percent com-plete. Overall, the project is about one-thirdcomplete, and that includes all the R&D ac-tivities and the design work. In terms of theactual construction, though, the project wasabout 15 percent complete through the end ofSeptember, Mason said. The total project costis $1.4 billion.

Mason said that significant site construc-tion activities are under way, with good prog-ress on all of the technical components fromthe front end through the superconductinglinac, ring, target, and instruments.

Initial cost and design estimates have beenaccepted for the last two instruments (asmall-angle neutron scattering instrumentand a powder diffractometer) of five totalthat are being built as part of the construc-tion project. “Each one of those [five instru-ments] has outstanding performance that eas-ily outstrips anything, typically by factors of20 to 100 in terms of raw throughput,” Ma-son said.

On the site, the linac tunnel, which is thefirst accelerator structure, is now greater than75 percent complete, and the target buildingfoundation is under way. “The target buildingis the most complicated building on the site,”

Mason noted. “The target is a nuclear facility,so it’s complicated from that point of view.It’s also got to accommodate all the experi-mental apparatus. And it’s the most expensivestructure that we’re building, certainly.”

Mason said the facility staff have recentlyshifted their planning focus from design,which is now fairly stable, to planning for theinstallation and the hand-off from partner labsto Oak Ridge. He said he expects this nextphase to begin next spring.

The need for transmutationNobel laureate Burton Richter, chair of a

Nuclear Energy Research Advisory Commit-tee group on accelerator transmutation ofwaste, and director emeritus of the StanfordLinear Accelerator Center, said that transmu-tation is important and worth researching be-

cause of the energyproblems throughoutthe world. “Theworld’s energy prob-lems are not solvablein an environmentallytolerable way if wekeep the same patternof carbon-based ener-gy supplies as we’reusing now. That is to-tally unsustainable,”Richter cautioned. His

presentation focused on why transmutation isneeded.

Richter said carbon-based energy suppliescannot be scaled up to meet the growingworld population or the projected increase inper capita gross national product in the de-veloping world, nor can they prevent drasticglobal climate change. “Without a change inhow we get our primary power, we’re head-ing for an economic catastrophe, an envi-ronmental catastrophe, or both,” saidRichter, who won the Nobel Prize for physicsin 1976.

Much of the problem is due to develop-ments occurring in the underdeveloped world,he said. Only industrialized societies, howev-er, have both the technology and resources tocarry out the essential research and develop-

ment for carbon-free energy alternatives.Richter noted that the United Nations esti-

mates the current world population to be 6 bil-lion. The U.N. predicts that figure will in-crease to 9 million in 2050 and to 10.5 billionin 2100. In turn, the world’s primary energydemand grows by a factor of two by 2050, and3.5 by 2100. “The global environment can’tstand a 350 percent increase in emissions fromthe world’s existing primary energy sources,”he cautioned.

The energy demand in the developed worldor the reforming world (such as the EasternBloc) will not be increasing as much as ener-gy demand in the underdeveloped world,Richter said. “We have to take steps in the in-dustrialized world to make carbon-free pow-er practical and available. Because if wedon’t, we’re going to see average world tem-peratures go up. The latest estimate is [an in-crease of] 6 °C. And while we don’t knowwhat the environmental consequences are go-ing to be, it’s been several hundred millionyears since the temperature was that high.And the environment is certainly going to bedifferent.”

So, what are the options? The first is nu-clear power, Richter said. The second is con-servation and efficiency, particularly in theUnited States, which is the least energy effi-cient of the industrialized societies. (Richtersaid the United States uses twice as much en-ergy per dollar as Japan, and one-and-a-halftimes as much as Europe.)

He noted that nuclear power is the onlysource of electricity that can immediately startreplacing large amounts of carbon-based pow-er. “We can have reliable baseload systemswith the current generation of light-water re-actors. You could, if you wanted, expand thetotal amount of energy by 2050 by a factor offive. That requires a coordinated effort to de-sign simple, modular, medium-sized, next-generation reactors, and that is going on now.The Generation IV program I hope is going tocome up with something that’s economic andefficient.”

Richter, however, pointed out the usualstumbling block of the public’s irrational fearof radiation. “Every time I show this, peopleare startled,” Richter said, showing a newview graph. “You get 240 millirem per yearfrom natural radiation, but 40 millirem ofthat comes form the radioactivity in yourown body. . . . There’s a significant amountof radiation that comes in the radioactivepotassium and carbon that’s used to produceyou. On the average, you get 60 milliremfrom medical [procedures]. You get practi-cally nothing from nuclear power plants.You get about the same amount from coal-fired power plants, but nobody ever express-es any concern about [radiation from] coal-fired plants.”

Richter cited a study from the journal RiskAnalysis that detailed the public health im-pacts of various forms of power generation.Nuclear power was ranked second to windpower in having the fewest public health im-pacts—and both were far better than coal andoil. “If you want to deploy renewable powerand have a minimum impact on human health,


M E E T I N G S

Site plan of the Spallation Neutron Source (DOE)

Richter

you either work on wind power or you workon nuclear power. And if you work on any-thing else, you’re working on things that havea bigger health hazard.”

Turning to transmutation, Richter said thereare four goals that the process has to fulfill inorder to be useful and acceptable.

Transmutation has to improve public safe-ty in terms of helping meet both the Environ-mental Protection Agency’s drinking waterstandard and the Nuclear Regulatory Com-mission’s dose standard. Transmutation canhelp meet these goals by reducing toxicity ofthe waste. “But I like to put it in a little morecolloquial way: You want to reduce the po-tential hazards from spent fuel to less than thatof uranium, from which it comes, in less thanthe lifetime of the pyramids,” Richter said.“The pyramids are manmade structures.They’ve been sitting there for 6000 years. Ithink you can convince the general public thatwe can build [facilities] at least as good as theancient Egyptians can.”

Transmutation must provide benefits for therepository program. It can do so by potential-ly simplifying the design of future storagesites, reducing the number of storage sitesneeded per unit energy, and reducing the vol-ume of waste that goes into the repositories.“I think that people should pay attention tothis because it’s part of the very important fi-nancial question that is going to continue toplague nuclear power,” he said.

Transmutation must reduce the risk of pro-liferation. “In any system that involves trans-mutation, there is in-process plutonium thathas been separated and is in transit, from fab-rication to being burned someplace. And youreally have to look at how much the increasein short-term risk is balanced by the reduc-tion in long-term risk. That’s a policy issue.And nuclear engineers and physicists are notgoing to make that call. There are other peo-ple who are going to make that call, and wehave to give them all the information theyneed.”

Last, transmutation must improve theprospects for nuclear power. The public’sfear of long-lasting radioactive waste is jus-tified, Richter said. “The general public hasgood reasons to be skeptical about [long-term radioactive waste]. Nothing has lastedhundreds of thousands of years that we knowof. The climate’s not the same as it was ahundred thousand years ago. Everything’sdifferent. And that’s one of the driving forcesfor transmutation.”

Indecision and the excess of methods avail-able for transmutation remains the biggestproblem for the technology. “This programcannot afford to pursue all of those options.There are far too many of them,” Richter cau-tioned. “And one of the challenges you face,whether you’re worrying about a European ora Japanese or an American R&D program, isto reduce that number of options to somethingthat can be pursued in more depth and doesn’tspread everybody too thin. That really has tobe an important focus of the next six monthsto a year.”

Entering into a broad-scale internationalcollaboration is the most beneficial step the

transmutation community can take rightnow, Richter said. “It’s of interest to every-body to solve this waste problem. Everybodyis facing the same funding limits and thesame shortage of test facilities. It’s to every-body’s benefit to share the workload untilcommercialization of the program. . . . Itdoesn’t make a lot of sense for Europe, Asia,and the United States to duplicate or tripli-cate the full spectrum of test facilities thatare required to go from where we are to ademonstration. I think we have to get to-gether and we have to get a sensible interna-tional program going.

“So, a final word. Nuclear power, and pos-sibly wind power, is the only carbon-free sys-

tem that can make a big impact on CO2 pro-duction in the next 20 years. If the waste dis-posal is not addressed in a way that’s accept-able to the public, nuclear power cannot andwill not expand.

“Any plans for handling waste have to gothrough a lot of R&D. They have to developan international context because nobody canafford this. . . . And they ought to be integrat-ed into the next-generation reactors.

“What that says is that transmutation R&Dis not a sandbox for the science and engineer-ing community,” he concluded. “There is aproblem that has to be solved, and transmuta-tion is a very important possibility to solvethat problem.”

A F T E R O P E N I N G T H E EmbeddedTopical Meeting on Practical Imple-mentation of Nuclear Criticality Safe-

ty, meeting general chair Stephen Bowman,of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL),turned the plenary session over to honorarychair Francis Alcorn, senior advisory engineerat BWX Technologies’ Nuclear Navy Fuel

Division. At 67 yearsof age, 36 of which hehas worked in critical-ity safety, Alcorn saidhe still enjoys what hedoes, although he prom-ised to retire some day.

The plenary lookedto the roots of the pro-fession, as well as atcurrent issues and fu-ture challenges. Al-corn used the opportu-

nity to name and thank 70 people for theircontributions to criticality safety. This verypersonal nod to the past led him naturally tothe first speaker, Norm Pruvost, of the Criti-cality Safety Information Resource Center(CSIRC), who described the making of a setof videos that recorded the discussions duringtwo special conferences devoted to the her-itage of criticality safety. The first, the Criti-cality Heritage Video 2000 Conference, washeld September 18–20, 2000, at Los AlamosNational Laboratory (LANL), and the secondat ORNL, May 21–23, 2001. He also showedtwo 10 minute excerpts from the many hoursof taped discussions.

Pruvost explained that they were not justinterested in preserving records and papers.“We decided it was also time to capture someof the people involved [and] . . . we wantedto have them in ‘three dimensions,’ particu-larly for some of the young people who will

not have a chance for a direct contact withthese people.” So he and several colleaguesorganized the heritage conferences at whichpioneers of criticality safety were video-taped, discussing subjects of interest in thefield.

To explain what was meant by heritage,Pruvost said: “I took the arbitrary starting dateas February 11, 1939, and ending at January19, 1975. The first . . . corresponds with thepublishing in Nature of the letter titled ‘Dis-integration of Uranium by Neutrons: A NewType of Nuclear Reaction,’ by Lise Meitnerand Otto Frisch, in which the word fission firstappeared in nuclear science context. The end-ing point . . . was the last day of the AtomicEnergy Commission.”

The past versus the presentOne of the particular aims of the confer-

ences was to contrast the criticality safety ac-complishments of the Heritage period with de-velopments since. For example, some seniorexperts believe that current criticality safetyfinds itself addressing insignificant concernswhile serious concerns go unattended. This ispartly due to an over-reliance on regulationsand regulators, as opposed to the more prac-tical efforts of experts whose experience andknow-how have provided high standards ofsafety for decades.

The pioneers selected were Hugh Paxtonand Dave Smith, of LANL, and Dixon Calli-han, of ORNL, who joined their respectivelabs in the 1940s, and Joe Thomas, who onlycame to ORNL in 1953. Some young special-ists were included at the conferences to askthe pioneers to elaborate on specific issues thatinterested them. The sessions covered a range of topics, including major events, like the 1958 criticality accidents at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, and areas where the pioneers felt

T O P I C A L M E E T I N G

Nuclear criticality safety:Past, present, and future


Alcorn

some confusion existed, such as the distinc-tion between reactor safety and criticalitysafety and the double-contingency principle.

Following some interest from medical peo-ple, sessions were added to the Los Alamosconference in which specialists with experi-ence or medical knowledge of criticality ac-cidents—including the JCO incident in Japanwhere two people died—discussed how toproceed in assessing the treatment for victimsof criticality accidents. Another session fo-cused on the development of the AmericanNuclear Society standards for criticality safe-ty. Other topics covered included the interac-tion between criticality experts and opera-tional personnel, changes in the regulatorystructure, and early calculational methodsused before big computers were available.

While the video project looked at heritage,the next presentation, by the Department ofEnergy’s Jerry McKamy, took the subject tothe next phase, explaining how over the pasttwo decades, criticality safety arrived at itscurrent position. In his talk, the “Evolution ofCriticality Safety Requirements,” he began bynoting that there is really only one require-ment: Avoid criticality.

To explain why the regulatory requirementshave expanded so much, despite there not be-ing a criticality incident in the United Statessince 1978, McKamy described how otherdrivers, including public attitudes, nationalnuclear policies, and external events, have af-fected the regulatory environment.

McKamy listed the main criticality eventsin the U.S.:■ In 1945, the first criticality incident (at LosAlamos).■ In 1958, the first fatality due to a criticali-ty accident.■ In 1964, the second and last fatality due toa criticality accident.■ In 1978, the last criticality incident.

In 1964, McKamy said, the development ofnational consensus standards began, and asthere have been no further fatalities in theUnited States and no criticality incidents since

1978, the application of the standards has beenquite successful.

Other events, however, have led to moreregulation, notably the TMI accident in 1979and Chernobyl in 1986, and the publicationof a 1986 report by the National ResearchCouncil that criticized the DOE’s handling ofreactor safety. According to McKamy, criti-cality safety, although not identified as a par-ticular concern, was swept up along withthose that were, and, unfortunately, featuredquite prominently in the development of newrules.

He described the shift from the time whenexperienced criticality experts drove safetythrough the national consensus standards, towhen the regulators led it. During what hecalled the expert period (which is close to theHeritage era), the specialists tended to havelong careers at sites that would all have theirown critical mass laboratories for testing.These experts, he said, applied their test re-sults and experience creatively to the process-es in hand. And they shared their experiences.

The shift was particularly noticeable withthe introduction of new regulations, as well asof legal, civil, and criminal penalties for vio-lation of requirements. He gave examples of“shoulds” used in guidance documents beingchanged into “shalls.” Regulations also be-came more complex and required more criti-cality controls. “This despite the fact that therewere no criticality incidents since 1978,” hereminded the audience. Another environmen-tal change was a growth in the number of peo-ple and agencies needing or wanting to be in-formed about criticality safety procedures.McKamy said he now has to coach his staffon how to present its work to various stake-holders. The level of paperwork needed hasgrown by a factor of about 100. There wasalso a growing compliance mentality.

“We are now trying to manage everythingreactor-like,” he said. “We were safety driven,now we want to minimize liability. Then wehad risk acceptance, now we are risk averse.”In the past, the goal had been to do something


M E E T I N G S

Major points from the session:

◆ A concern to preserve records andexpertise

◆ Insignificant concerns vs. seriousconcerns

◆ A shift from being expert-driven to moreregulation

◆ Challenges: Risk assessment,communication, technical competence

productive—e.g., operate a reactor, move andprocess fuel. Criticality safety was then de-fined, explained McKamy, as the art and sci-ence of operating fissile systems while main-taining subcriticality under all reasonablycredible conditions. The processes are notsafer in this new era, he said, but they are allmore expensive.

The next speaker, Christa Reed, also regis-tered her concern about the regulation culture.While some criticality safety controls are inplace to protect against a criticality, she said,“some, quite frankly, are in place because wewant to avoid regulatory violations, some arein place because of regulations or license re-quirements.” When these kinds of controls gowrong, nuclear criticality safety (NCS) man-agers can find themselves in the “awkward po-sition of trying to explain why a controlwasn’t really important to criticality safety.”

New challengesReed, manager of NCS at BWXT’s Naval

Fuel Division, described the new challengesfaced in criticality safety and how best to re-spond to them. The ones she featured were as-sessing risk, communication, and maintainingtechnically competent staff.

An increase in understanding of risk andhow it is assessed is essential, Reed said, asregulation shifts from being compliance-basedto risk-informed and performance- based. Sheparticularly pointed to the difficulty in recon-ciling an approach to safety based on a risk-in-formed assessment and the use of the double

contingency. “As we move more and more tothe risk-informed paradigm . . . we are chal-lenged to ensure that different approaches, es-pecially quantitative in nature, are meaning-ful, are capable of being consistent with doublecontingency, and do not distract our limitedNCS resources from other more valuable du-ties, such as walking the process floor.”

Commercial demands are also presentingchallenges for NCS. As an example, shepointed to the drive for improved economicperformance, which has led to a demand byprocess companies for more operational flex-ibility (such as the use of bigger tanks, in-creased throughput, etc.), and reduced mar-gins; these present challenges to criticalityexperts to support and justify such measureswith the current experimental data available.Another example is the push to introduce newand better reactor technologies, such as thepebble bed modular high-temperature reac-tors, which requires parallel efforts fordemonstrating criticality safety.

She also pointed to the challenge of im-proving communication, which is not therejust to frustrate the expert. Her favorite illus-tration of how times have changed is the re-port of an assessment that she came across insome old files. The assessment, which hadbeen carried out by a criticality expert, con-sisted of two sentences: “The evaluation iscomplete. Call me for the limits.” Jargon isalso an obvious issue. Explaining that theanalysis “applied the double contingency prin-ciple” is unlikely to improve understanding,

she remarked. Nor is the explanation, “I in-corporated sufficient factors of safety to re-quire at least two independent, unlikely, andconcurrent changes in process conditions be-fore a criticality would be possible.” One oftoday’s challenges is “to close the under-standing gap between an NCS expert and reg-ulator, or an NCS expert and plant manage-ment, or an NCS expert and operator, or evenan NCS expert and the public.”

On human resource issues, Reed said that“technically competent staff is the single mostimportant factor affecting success.” The sta-tistics are startling, she said: The supply of un-dergraduate nuclear engineers is at a 35-yearlow. This is coupled with an outflow of expe-rienced workers. Current projections indicatethat 76 percent of the nation’s professional nu-clear work force can retire within five years.She also noted that 30 percent of BWXT’sNCS engineers could retire today. “The bot-tom line is that we are losing expertise, andalong with it, valuable institutional knowl-edge. This is a reality.”

She also warned about the difficulty oftraining people in criticality safety: It cannotbe done by checklists. “Learning criticalitysafety takes time, with guidance from an ex-perienced engineer.”

But she was not totally disheartened. Reedtold the audience that like Alcorn, she also hasa list of 70 people. “They all have 10 or lessyears of experience and are willing, capable,and eager to face the challenges of today andthe future.”


M E E T I N G S

ANS WINTER MEETING Nuclear and energy independence

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