Daily Archives: May 23, 2008

We Need More Growth of Nuclear Power

With this post, I’m beginning a new series or category of bog posts that I’m loosely terming “A Better Future.”


I’ve been thinking a lot about the grail of infinite power, coupled with the enormous rise in gas prices this week.

While I am all in favor of reducing wasteful consumption, increasing efficiency, and generally being smarter about everything, I do not believe we will ever reduce our energy requirements in the long-term. We are always inventing, always creating, and most things we create require power in some form. It’s a fool’s errand to try to reduce the actual energy we’ll use overall. This doesn’t even take into account all of the peoples of the world who are just now beginning to participate in the global economy. There will always be something to eat up the energy we produce. Fighting against this trend seems to me, in a way, trying to run evolution and progress backwards. Our race as a whole won’t do that. Given this, it makes much more sense to develop clean, efficient, abundant, cheap sources of energy.

Increasingly, I am convinced that the way to build out a vast network of nuclear reactors powering our grid. We have an enormous network of power distribution–we should be taking more advantage of it.

According to the US Department of DOE, our 103 active nuclear plants provide 20% of the nation’s electricity. You can even get the operational status of each one.

Worldwide, the IAEA predicts that the electric power generation capacity of the world in 2015 will be roughly 20,000 billion kilowatt hours. In that year, nuclear generation will provide roughly 2,972 billion kilowatt hours, or less than 15%. That report has a lot of other information and I highly encourage you to read it.

We need to increase that percentage drastically–to the point where it supplies power not just to homes, but to plug-in hybrid cars, and everything else.

Nuclear power has gotten a bad rap in the US and other parts of the world for a long time. I think the attitudes are changing, but not quickly enough. At what point will the benefits outweigh the risks in most minds? I think that point is almost upon us.

With the increasing development of pebble-bed reactors, nuclear technology is advancing. We need to increase this development to promote further advances in the safety and efficiency of these promising power sources. None of the operational reactors in the US are pebble-bed reactors (aka HTGR–high temperature gas-cooled reactors), nor are any planned. There is a research reactor at Idaho National Laboratory. All of the commercial HTGR development is taking place for other countries. These reactors, while not universally acclaimed, seem to be safer, cheaper, and the spent fuel less able to be repurposed as weapons-grade material.

We can’t wait for others to do these things–we need to do them. Our country needs to get in on the act at a higher level of commitment than ever. We can’t wait for these technologies to become perfected, either–that will happen over time. As we use a technology more, we will learn new techniques, ways to improve efficiency, and how to lower costs further.

There is no excuse for the US not  to be a leader in this area–we have one of the largest energy demands, the most capital, the most to gain by investing in it, and the most  to lose by not doing it.

The next generation of nuclear technology may not be the ultimate energy savior we’re looking for, but it’s a huge step in the right direction–a step we’ve delayed taking for too long.

Nuclear certainly has some down sides, but I’ll discuss those in a future entry.

Relevant Links:

  1. Pebble-bed reactors at wikipedia
  2. Energy Information Administration / Department of Energy
  3. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
  4. Inconvenient  Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What It Means to Be Green (Wired Magazine)
  5. Idaho National Laboratory
  6. Module Pebble Bed Reactor (MIT)