US Nuclear Power—Has Its Time Passed?

In this examination of the U.S. commercial nuclear power industry, Resources senior editor Kent A. Price interviews John F. Ahearne, former member and chairman of the principal federal agency that oversees the industry, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Dr. Ahearne is a Ph.D. physicist who has held top-level positions in the U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense and in the White House during the Carter administration. President Carter appointed him to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a five-year term ending in June 1983; he served as NRC chairman during a period following the Kemeny Commission's review of the accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. In February 1984 he became vice president of Resources for the Future.

PRICE: As you are aware, the commercial nuclear power industry in this country is in serious trouble. New plants have been canceled in mid-course, new orders have not been forthcoming, and the press is full of stories about the possible demise of the industry. According to some, part of the problem is that the critics of nuclear power—the environmental movement, if you will—raise questions, cause delays and litigation. The pro-nuclear power people—the industry spokespersons—charge that these so-called intervenors on the environmentalist side are the principal causes of the delays in construction and licensing of plants, the principal causes of cost overruns. Do these intervenors really cause big delays in licensing plants?

AHEARNE: I don't think so. Actually, I think that the intervenor effect has been exaggerated both by the industry and by the intervenors themselves. Let me explain.

The industry side is that intervenors have been a principal reason why plants have been delayed. Back when I worked in the White House, I tried to see whether that could be supported from any data, and I looked at a lot of nuclear power plants that had been raised as cases by the industry. And in every instance, it really was not the intervenors who had caused the delay, but problems with the industry's construction or the design or the process they went through in locating the plant. When I moved to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, I kept looking to see whether intervenors could be identified as a principal cause of delay, and I never did. It certainly is true that utility executives' ulcers, nerves, and temperament were adversely affected by the intervenors, but as far as their actually causing delay, I could not find a case.

On the other side, the intervenors and the public interest groups like to describe themselves as the main reasons that plants are built safely or that unsafe plants are kept from operating. I think that also is an exaggeration. I believe that they have some positive effect, but just as I couldn't find good examples to show that the intervenors had delayed plants, I couldn't find good examples to show that the intervenors had added significantly to safety.

PRICE: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has come in for a goodly amount of criticism, from both sides. Some people charge that the NRC is simply a front for the nuclear power industry, and some of those on the industry side probably think that the environmentalist influence is too strong in the commission. Can you give me an estimate—an insider's look—on how important a factor the NRC has been in slowing down the growth of nuclear power?

AHEARNE: I don't think it has been a very major factor, although the rules that the NRC enforces certainly have increased the cost of nuclear power plants and in some cases have slowed it down. For example, the National Environmental Protection Act has had a major impact on slowing down some plants.

The NRC's legal process is cumbersome, it's lengthy, it leads to what some people have described as a sham in the sense that there's a lot of action, a lot of noise, and a lot of argument, but there doesn't seem to be much effect on the overall process. That's typical of adjudication, in my belief. Also, the NRC is an inefficient organization with a lot of internal bickering and squabbling, and it is, I think, overly legalistic—a characteristic that it probably shares with much of current U.S. society.

PRICE: If it hasn't slowed down the industry more than it would have been slowed anyway because of general legal and economic factors, say, has it been a factor in keeping plants safe? You indicated that the intervenors can't claim a lot of credit for keeping plants safe—can the NRC claim that credit?

AHEARNE: To answer your implied question first, the nuclear industry does have a very enviable safety record for a large, highly complex technology. It stands up very well in comparison to other technologies, such as the aircraft industry. I do believe that the NRC and its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, deserve a lot of credit for that. Their people work very hard in reviewing applications, in developing rules and regulations, and in inspecting the plants, and I believe they have improved the quality of construction. They have elevated the seriousness with which utility management looks at these projects much above what it would have been in their absence. So, yes, I think that those people do deserve a lot of the credit for the safe record of the U.S. nuclear industry.

The costs of delay

PRICE: We've just discussed safety and the application of various federal laws in the process of constructing and licensing a nuclear plant. Both of these things tend to increase the length of time it takes between the first spadeful of earth and the first electric power that's generated. Does all of this result in the cost of nuclear plants being driven up, and, if that's true, can that extra cost be laid at the feet of the NRC? Or is it simply a matter inherent in the complexity of the technology itself?

AHEARNE: I think to a large extent it's inherent in the technology. To some extent it's the fault of the NRC in that many of the regulations pile upon themselves rather than starting over again and trying to devise a less complex set of regulations. This has led, in some cases, to tearing out something that was put in under NRC order, and to making two or three modifications instead of one. But the basic problem is that it's a complex technology.

PRICE: We have had trouble in this country recently building plants. Part of this has to do with the fact that the demand for electric power has gone down, a function mostly of higher energy prices. But still, in other countries nuclear power has not been in this kind of trouble. Why is it that in France, for instance, in Japan, in Germany, they can build plants quicker, cheaper, and—apparently—safer than we can in the United States?

AHEARNE: It's often said that Japan and France and Germany do much better in building their plants, but I think usually by people who aren't quite familiar with the details of those countries' operations. France, for example, does build its plants quicker than we do and, since time is money when you're borrowing large amounts of capital to build a plant, therefore cheaper. But in France there is one company that builds them, one company that operates them, and one company that designs them. And all of those companies have a very substantial government involvement. The influence of the government keeps the design standardized and also accelerates much of the review process that in this country is set up in the Administrative Procedures Act—a lot of procedural rights of citizens. In France, the government handles all of that.

Germany and Japan, on the other hand, have had a lot of problems with their nuclear plants. The German nuclear industry essentially stalled for five to seven years as battles were fought out in the courts because of the extremely complex legal system they have for moving plants forward. In Japan a few years ago they launched a major review to find out why plant construction was taking so long—twelve to fourteen years. That's not the type of number we hear about. We hear about the much shorter time it takes once all the lengthy process of negotiation has been completed in Japan. The process of negotiation that we do in the courts they do among the utility and the government, the local unions, and the local municipalities, and they finally reach accommodation on which plants are allowed to go ahead. So I think it's fair to say that the length of time in Japan and Germany is not really shorter than in the United States. The length of time in France is much shorter.

PRICE: And that is because the government puts its full weight behind the program?

AHEARNE: It's a combination of the government putting its full weight behind the program and, because of the government's having such strong control, they have a standardized design. Standardized design would have led to shorter construction time and cheaper plants in the United States, but because of our system we have a very large number of designs. We would be a lot farther along if the companies didn't have to keep making a sales pitch that they will make a slightly modified version for company X and another for company Y and still another for company Z. In France, if you want to buy one, you buy the one model.

Assessing the risk

PRICE: The Three Mile Island affair in March of 1979 was a very big accident, but, as the nuclear industry likes to point out, no one was killed there. It was a contained accident: it was serious, but certainly not a disaster. But it was a disaster, in a way, for the prospects of the nuclear industry, because so much weight is given to public opinion in this country, to political acceptability. It can be argued that Three Mile Island possibly dealt a fatal blow to the industry. When will the next accident happen? And is it likely to be on the order of Three Mile Island?

AHEARNE: Three Mile Island clearly was a financial catastrophe: it put a major utility on the verge of bankruptcy and it's not yet clear how it's going to get out of that financially. And it was a catastrophe psychologically to a large number of people living around the plant. The mental stress that those people went through and still are going through has been traumatic. As you correctly say, it also put the industry as a whole on the ropes.

You can go through a probability estimate based on U.S. experience, and you end up with a probability of another accident like Three Mile Island occurring before the year 2000 of between 20 percent and 80 percent if there have been no major changes since the Three Mile Island accident to improve safety.

PRICE: But the Three Mile Island accident was the result of a whole series of unique progressions of malfunctions going wrong at the same time. Is that likely to happen again?

AHEARNE: All big accidents are the result of a lot of unique progressions going wrong at the same time. What I'm saying is that probability analysis leads to the 20 to 80 percent estimate, if no major changes have occurred. The NRC and the industry argue that safety has been improved by a factor of 10, which then knocks it down to a less than 10 percent probability. My own guess is that there will be another accident of that magnitude before the year 2000. The only questions are whether enough safety features will have been put in to make sure that nobody will be hurt off-site, and whether the insurance system the utilities will have developed will be enough to prevent the kind of bankruptcy threat that Metropolitan Edison and its holding company have gone through.

PRICE: That leads to a kind of bottom line question: are U.S. nuclear plants safe? Can people have confidence in these plants? If the country is going to be depending, for a current 13 or 14 percent of its electricity, on nuclear plants and a projected increase as new plants come online, can the public have confidence in these things? Even a 10 percent chance of major error seems pretty high to me.

AHEARNE: I think the public can have confidence that the plants will be safe, but pressure ought to be kept on the regulators and particularly on the utilities. The fundamental weakness, in my mind, in the American utility industry is management. I don't think that the people who own nuclear power plants and manage their construction and operation understood the difficulty of the technology. They tended to approach it as they did their old coal-fired plants. They didn't appreciate that this was a different type of technology, requiring much more competent people, and they have been reluctant to face up to the fact that they essentially are in a new generation, a new technology.

PRICE: Some have said that the people who operate nuclear power plants ought to be regarded as comparable to, say, airline pilots. That is, they're both groups running highly technical machines, but machines that, in their normal operation, do not require a great deal of skill—only in moments of emergency. But they ought to be highly paid, highly competent, highly professional people. And that isn't the case now in the nuclear power industry. Where do you stand on this?

AHEARNE: I'm one of those who say they ought to be like airline pilots. I think they ought to be college graduates, they ought to be competent technically, and they ought to be paid to keep that level of competence behind the controls in the operating rooms of the nuclear power industry. That's not the case in this country; it is the case in many other countries.

The waste dilemma

PRICE: Nuclear waste storage concerns many who might even be willing to concede the general safety of the process of generating electricity, but who worry a lot about what's called the "back end" of the nuclear fuel cycle. That is, what do you do with this literally hot stuff that is left over afterwards? There are fuel rods, there are things as seemingly innocuous as white laboratory coats, things that vary in the range of danger they offer to living organisms, from those that must be isolated for a few years to those that would have to be isolated indefinitely. One could even say infinitely, in terms of human lifespan, or, for that matter, the lifespan of most governments. Just how will the United States solve the problem of getting rid of nuclear waste?

AHEARNE: You mention the wide range of hazard associated with nuclear waste. At the low end of that range—the white lab coats and so forth—the present solution is to package the items and bury them in relatively shallow trenches, a few feet deep. The package simply is dumped in the trench and earth is packed over it in an area where water does not seep through. At the moment there are only three of those sites in the country—in South Carolina, in the state of Washington, and in Nevada. There's a big effort under way by the states to try to develop five or six regional sites around the country. Incidentally, those have to be created independent of what happens to the nuclear power industry, because there is a lot of medical and other waste material to be disposed of in low-level waste sites.

The high-level waste is the real problem. Those are the items whose hazardous lifetimes are in the tens of thousands of years or at least a thousand years. They primarily are the product of nuclear power plants—the used-up nuclear fuel rods. Or, if reprocessing were to occur, the waste that comes from that.

PRICE: When you say "primarily," do you mean as opposed to military wastes?

AHEARNE: As opposed to military wastes, yes. The difficulty with the high-level wastes has not been trying to devise a technical system for getting rid of them—many scientific organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences have done studies on how you can do it. All have reached the conclusion that storing waste deep underground, encasing it in something like a glass, perhaps with a metal container around that, will be adequate to provide the necessary protection if the geological studies are done carefully to locate the site. The real difficulty is finding any state that is willing to take on that kind of site: so far no state has volunteered. In fact, what usually happens is whenever the Energy Department identifies a potential state, that state mobilizes opposition to get it blocked. At the end of 1982 and the beginning of 1983 the Congress passed a waste act that set out a lengthy procedure for the Energy Department to find sites, characterize them—that is, go through the technical analysis—discuss it with the states, and present it to the Congress. If the state objects, Congress must override the state's objection. To many of us, that makes it still a very "iffy" proposition. The Energy Department hopes to be able to start construction on the first nuclear waste repository sometime early in the 1990s.

PRICE: You're suggesting, then, that it's mostly a political and public relations problem and not really a technical problem at all. Is that a fair characterization?

AHEARNE: Well, I wouldn't say "just"—I think it's fair to characterize it as primarily a problem of trying to develop public understanding and treat the public's concern adequately. Those, in a democracy, are fundamental issues. And so far, the government has done a very poor job of it.

No need for the breeder

PRICE: Not long ago Congress drove what perhaps is the last nail in the coffin of the breeder reactor in this country. I know it's a technical subject, but can you give our readers a simple explanation of a breeder reactor? Does it have a future in this country or elsewhere?

AHEARNE: Uranium, when it comes out of the ground, basically is of two kinds. When you send a neutron into one kind, the atom splits, producing energy. If you do it very quickly, you get an atomic bomb. If you do it very slowly and carefully, under controlled conditions, with very little of it, you get a nuclear reactor. The nuclear reactors we have in this country work on that kind of uranium. That actually is a very small percentage of the uranium found in the ground—less than 1 percent. If you send in a neutron to most uranium, it doesn't split; you don't get energy out. But if you send in a high enough energy neutron, the uranium will change to something that can fission—for example, plutonium—which then can be used in a nuclear reactor to generate energy. What a breeder does is to use the uranium from the ground, suitably packaged and modified, and generate high-energy neutrons for other material, for example, plutonium. While generating those high-energy neutrons you do get heat out, you can produce electricity, but at the same time those neutrons then go into the rest of this unusable uranium, transforming it into a usable form. So you end up "breeding" fuel. You make more fuel than is used up, because you have taken some of that unusable material and made it usable. Therefore, the real advantage of a breeder is that you end up with more fuel.

PRICE: So if fuel is scarce, that's a big advantage.

AHEARNE: That is the sole argument: if fuel is very scarce, it's a big advantage. Back in the early 1970s when it was forecast that a thousand nuclear plants would be built in the United States by the year 2000, and it was thought that we were running out of uranium, it appeared that if we wanted a nuclear future we were going to have to go to the breeder just to be able to have fuel. What has happened since then is that we have found more uranium, and instead of a thousand plants, there probably will be only a few more than a hundred by the year 2000. So the fuel crisis is no longer there. The breeder is a more complicated machine, and even its most ardent proponents agree that it will cost more to build. Consequently, its reason for being adopted in the United States has disappeared.

There are breeder programs in a few other countries. The Soviet Union has a big breeder program. France is the most noticeable one—it has pushed its breeder program very hard. Whether that's going to become another Concorde for France is still an open question. But France does have a reason we don't have: we have a lot of uranium, as the United States is one of the largest holders of uranium resources in the world. France has none. French nuclear power plants have to run on imported fuel. Consequently, it's very much to their advantage if they can figure out some way to get a lot more out of their fuel—and a breeder would do it.

PRICE: When you say "Concorde," do you mean something that works well but costs too much?

AHEARNE: Something that is a technological leader at a time far before it's really needed.

Fear and the fatal flaw

PRICE: There is fear—I think we have to recognize this—about the nuclear process. One thing people are concerned about, particularly when something like Three Mile Island happens, is that a commercial nuclear power plant, an installation that produces electricity, essentially through a fancy way of boiling water and turning a turbine—they are afraid that that facility can "blow up" like an atomic bomb. Is this possible, or is it not?

AHEARNE: No, it's not possible. Basically, to get a sustained nuclear reaction to go very rapidly, which is what becomes a bomb, you need much more highly enriched uranium, much more concentrated uranium than is used in a nuclear reactor. A reactor typically contains uranium that is only 3 percent material that can fission and produce energy. In a bomb, typically it's 90 + percent. There is a threshold below which you no longer can get the fission reaction to occur for an explosion, and that point occurs long before you reach 3 percent. So, physically, you cannot get a bomblike explosion out of a nuclear power plant. You can, of course, generate a lot of energy and a tremendous amount of steam, which can force a rupture and can release a lot of radioactivity. That can happen. But an atomic explosion cannot.

PRICE: So we can talk about serious accidents, but people don't have to worry about an atomic explosion occurring at their local friendly electric-generating plant.

Dr. Ahearne, a summary question. I opened our interview with allusions to the troubled state of the U.S. nuclear power industry. Does the industry have a future in the United States?

AHEARNE: I've written several articles in the last couple of years on that question. In one I called the nuclear industry a Greek tragedy and identified, as in Greek tragedy, the fatal flaw. That fatal flaw, I think, is the lack of public acceptance that leads, perhaps indirectly, but eventually, to poor management of the nuclear industry. So I conclude that unless the management approach to the nuclear industry changes substantially, there will be no future in this country for nuclear. At the moment, I do not see those changes being made.