21st CENTURY

EDITORIAL
Go Nuclear!
If the United States is to survive as an industrial nation,
we must go nuclear—and we must do it aggressively and
fast. The only way to accomplish this is to mass produce
standardized, medium and small-size modular nuclear units,
using advanced reactor designs.
The reason for going nuclear is not the yet-to-be-proven
greenhouse effect—although many of the people who buried
nuclear power are now calling for its exhumation to
save them from the warming of the atmosphere. The fact is
that unless we begin now to mass produce nuclear power
plants, it will not be possible to sustain any real economic
recovery in the United States. Without nuclear energy, it
will not be possible to have anything remotely resembling
our current living standards here, nor will it be possible to
prevent much of the world's population from succumbing
to starvation and death.
Electricity use is increasing at 4 percent per year nationwide,
and more in some regions. The conservation and
austerity-motivated projections of the Carter years for 2
percent electricity use growth rates up through the year
2000 are far short of the mark. Unless we add to the power
grid in the early 1990s—that's in the next five years—Americans
will be thrown into the abysmal conditions of the East
bloc or of the developing sector, where there is little industry
and where domestic electricity is so irregular that one is
never sure if there will be enough power to boil water.
As this issue's special report spells out, the only reason
this nation has not been subject to more widespread
brownouts in 1988 is that depression conditions and the
shutdown of heavy industry have cut down the real demands
for power in an industrial nation.
Mass Production
Mass production of nuclear plants means designing and
equipping factories to turn out on an assembly line numbers
of standardized, modular, medium-sized nuclear reactors
that would be transported by rail, truck, or barge to
prepared plant sites. It also means licensing a standardized
design, so that each nuclear plant does not have to go
through a lengthy licensing process.
There is no problem in readying the science and engineering
to produce such modular nuclear reactors. The
problems are strictly political: We have to overthrow the
tyranny that killed this efficient source of energy in the
1970s and 1980s by turning routine seven-year plant constructions
into costly fifteen-year nightmares.
Once the world leader in developing civilian nuclear
technology—from reprocessing, to reactor design, to fuel
breeding—this nation has now taken a back seat. We are
the only nuclear nation, in fact, that does not reprocess
spent fuel, but stockpiles it instead (as a target for environmentalist
propaganda).
The United States has 35 years of experience with commercial
nuclear power here and abroad. Although we have
the largest number of nuclear plants in any one country
(106), this represents by no means the largest ratio of nuclear-generated
power to total power. Here nuclear in 1986
was about 16 percent of total power produced. Western
Europe, in contrast, is 30 percent nuclear, with France leading
the world at 65 percent.
A Nuclear Renaissance
Although the U.S. nuclear industry is now half-dead, the
situation can be reversed. What's required is an unequivocal
presidential policy statement on the necessity of going
nuclear and the setting up of a presidential panel to plan a
crash program for a nuclear renaissance. This includes a
public education program that stresses the facts about nuclear
power and an adequate research budget for all the
advanced nuclear technologies, for university research, and
for training nuclear industry workers.
Immediately, we can bring on line the more than 14 gigawatts
of nuclear power now stalled in construction or licensing.
Simultaneously, factories must be geared up to turn
out quantities of standardized plants. In order to reap the
benefits of shop fabrication, these nuclear plants have to
be smaller in capacity than the typical 1,000-megawatt plant
of today. The loss of the traditional economy of scale
achieved by constructing larger plants is compensated for
by the cost savings from assembly-line production, standardization,
sharing of facilities as two or more modular units
are grouped together, shorter lead times for completion,
and reduced financial risk. Further, experience from Navy
reactors and other small mobile reactors suggest that there
will be additional savings from the greater reliability of
smaller reactors.
In addition, there will be cost savings from the use of new
nuclear technologies under development, like General
Atomic's high temperature gas reactor or General Electric's
PRISM, a new modular breeder reactor, and, of course,
fusion energy.
If we start now, the factories can be ready in three years,
and the first nuclear plants can roll off the assembly line in
five years, ready to be installed at prepared construction
sites. The alternative—not going nuclear—constitutes an
immeasurable risk to the future of humanity.
2 November-December 1988 21st CENTURY EDITORIAL