Energy, history on line at Duke plant
Charlotte Observer | 05/22/2005 | Energy, history on line at Duke plant: " Posted on Sun, May. 22, 2005, OBSERVER IN DEPTH
Posted on Sun, May. 22, 2005
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R E L A T E D L I N K S
• Making sense of MOX: Experts' opinions differ
OBSERVER IN DEPTH
Energy, history on line at Duke plant
Nuclear reactor at Catawba station prepares to test fuel with plutonium
BRUCE HENDERSON
Staff Writer
ROCK HILL - Duke Power's nuclear plant on Lake Wylie is about to become the first commercial reactor to make electricity from plutonium meant for nuclear weapons.
Without fanfare, tests that begin next month will cross a line that for decades separated military and commercial nuclear uses. The current policy, dating to the Clinton administration, is to make surplus bomb material unusable by burning it in power plants.
Plutonium-239, blended in small amounts into a fuel that Duke will test at its Catawba plant, is chilling stuff. A single speck inhaled into the lungs can cause cancer. A softball-size lump flattened Nagasaki. It remains radioactive for at least 24,100 years.
Duke's test fuel, called mixed-oxide or MOX for short, won't blow up because of its diluted content. A blend of 4 percent plutonium and 96 percent uranium, the usual nuclear fuel, MOX is designed to mimic the more familiar fuels.
Nuclear nonproliferation groups say it's still a bad idea. Terrorists could steal the fuel and fashion a crude nuclear device, they say, although government experts say that wouldn't be easy. Duke won exemptions to some federal security rules for handling plutonium.
More than 20 years of MOX use in European nuclear plants, most experts agree, established its safe track record. The fuel Duke will test, however, contains more of the purer type of plutonium desirable for weapons.
After a few years of tests, Duke -- alone among U.S. utilities -- plans to use the mixed-oxide fuel alongside full-uranium fuel in all four of its nuclear reactors within 20 miles of uptown Charlotte for 15 to 20 years.
The end of the Cold War, in the early 1990s, left the United States and Russia with larger arsenals than either needed. By producing MOX, the United States plans to get rid of 34 metric tons of weapons plutonium. Russia agreed to do the same.
Duke agreed to join the swords-to-plowshares program because it believes the fuel is safe and because it can buy a reliable supply at a discount, saving millions of dollars -- Duke won't say how much -- over the life of the program. The Department of Energy, which owns the plutonium, will cover Duke's MOX-related operating, maintenance and capital expenses.
Most critics of the program prefer an alternate disposal method, canceled by the Bush administration, that would mix unneeded plutonium with highly radioactive waste and shape it into ceramic pucks.
Opponents also question MOX's safety in commercial reactors. They argue that the type of MOX Duke will use could make bad accidents worse by unleashing more radiation than uranium fuel would.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved Duke's tests in March. The modest scale of the Catawba tests -- four MOX fuel assemblies among 189 conventional assemblies -- will make differences between the fuels barely register, the NRC said.
But subtle differences remain. Those differences could grow more prominent if Duke expands its use of MOX, which it expects to do in about 2011. They could also influence the way Duke operates its reactors, and the outcome of severe accidents.
"The differences are not `good' or `bad,' " said Steve Nesbit, Duke's MOX project manager. "It depends on what (circumstances) you're looking at."
Compared with uranium fuel, plutonium atoms more easily split and release a little more energy. MOX could make the systems that control a nuclear chain reaction slightly less effective, government analysts say. And a catastrophic but extraordinarily unlikely accident that exposes the public to radioactivity could cause more, or fewer, fatalities depending on the scenario.
For all the analyses and European experience, the true nature of Duke's MOX won't be confirmed until the Catawba reactor starts humming.
"The field is pretty well known," said Frank Akstulewicz, an NRC reactor-regulation official. "If there's something that we're missing, that would be surprising. But that's why we collect the (test) data."
Member of consortium
Plutonium is produced in all nuclear reactors as they burn uranium. The man-made, refined plutonium-239 used in weapons readily fissions in an atom-splitting chain reaction that releases tremendous heat.A business consortium that includes a Duke Energy subsidiary is under a $130 million contract with the Department of Energy to build a fuel-making plant, beginning next year, at the Savannah River Site. The federal installation near Aiken, S.C., produced the nation's military plutonium for decades after World War II.
With the contract, Duke agreed to burn MOX at Catawba and a second Charlotte-area plant, McGuire on Lake Norman. A Virginia Power plant was also part of the 1999 agreement, but the utility soon dropped out, citing business reasons.
Advocacy groups have fought the plan on safety and security grounds.
"It's bomb-making material. The fact that Duke has applied and gotten exemptions from security requirements is very troublesome," said Janet Zeller, executive director of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, based north of Charlotte in the mountains of Ashe County.
In its challenge to Duke's federal application to test the fuel, Blue Ridge protested Duke's request for several exemptions from classified security rules that the public, including Zeller, isn't allowed to read. Duke said the exemptions, such as maintaining a tactical-response team and erecting additional barriers, are measures it had already satisfied.
After months of debate over access to those rules, an NRC licensing board granted the exemptions -- with stipulations that were also classified.
Rallying broad public opposition to MOX has been another challenge for Blue Ridge. Few local people have publicly opposed Duke's plan or written the NRC in protest.
The complexity of the issue "really makes your head spin," said Rock Hill resident Chad Simpson. A former newspaper reporter who's written about MOX, Simpson says he's still not convinced the program is wise.
"There's a lot of information out there that I've come across, and I don't fully understand why (Duke and the government) are doing this," he said. "I don't fully understand it, and most of the people I've talked to don't understand it."
Usage could expand
But MOX isn't likely to fall out of the public eye.
Duke plans to seek federal approval, in 2007, to make MOX up to 40 percent of the fuel for Catawba and McGuire. Opposition groups are likely to again protest.
Small differences in how MOX behaves could grow if Duke increases its use, said Paul Turinsky, who heads the nuclear engineering department at N.C. State University.
"The reality is that probably some accidents would use up some of their (safety) margin and others will gain margin" by using MOX, Turinsky said. Turinsky, who has worked as a consultant to Duke on MOX research, believes the fuel is safe to use.
The Department of Energy has estimated that the risk of an accident in which the water that cools Catawba's reactor fuel is lost -- one of the worst the plant is designed to withstand -- would grow by 3.3 percent with the higher proportion of MOX fuel.
Because the likelihood of such an accident is extremely small, the increased risk is equal to one extra fatality for every 2.3 million years of plant operation.
If a more severe accident occurred, releasing radiation into the open air, MOX could cause 8 percent more fatalities within 50 miles of the plant. About 17,700 would die immediately or later by cancer, the Department of Energy estimated, compared with about 16,400 with the uranium fuel already in use. No U.S. nuclear plant has ever experienced such an accident.
Edwin Lyman, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, believes the study underestimated MOX's dangers. Lyman, whose group opposes policies that could spread nuclear weapons, believes 11 percent to 30 percent more deaths could result from such an accident.
"It's clear that some of these (fuel) differences aren't so minor," Lyman said. "I've been looking at them for many years, and I don't believe there's enough experience with MOX to resolve them."
Catawba and McGuire are particularly ill-suited to use MOX, Lyman contends.
A 2000 study for the NRC concluded that nuclear plants designed like Catawba and McGuire are substantially more likely to fail in certain types of accidents. Both plants would use ice to condense escaping radioactive steam, relieving internal pressure. But their outer shells of concrete and steel aren't designed to withstand the same pressures as most other U.S. plants, which rely solely on stronger shells.
"Those ice condensers are still as dangerous as they were in 2000," Lyman said.
Nesbit, Duke's project manager, said the company never accepted the report's finding because it was based on overly pessimistic assumptions. The NRC has said the plants' risks remain within safe boundaries.
If Duke expands its MOX use, fuel shipments to Catawba and McGuire would contain enough weapons material for thousands of nuclear bombs.
Critics say trucking plutonium to and from the fuel-making facility at the Savannah River Site, about 135 miles south of Charlotte, invites terrorism. The test fuel was made in France. A secretive federal agency that says it has logged 1.6 million miles successfully hauling nuclear material around the country will truck the fuel to Duke's plants.
MOX's low plutonium concentration, packaged inside 1,500-pound fuel assemblies, doesn't make it an inviting terrorist target, the NRC says.
MOX makes environmental sense because it recycles plutonium that had already been created when conventional fuel was burned, said Rosa Yang of the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry research center.
"You would hope that Duke would quickly use up this material so it doesn't fall into the wrong hands," she said. "I find it strange for people to be against it."
Bruce Henderson: (704) 358-5051; bhenderson@charlotteobserver.com.
Posted on Sun, May. 22, 2005
Click here to find out more!
R E L A T E D L I N K S
• Making sense of MOX: Experts' opinions differ
OBSERVER IN DEPTH
Energy, history on line at Duke plant
Nuclear reactor at Catawba station prepares to test fuel with plutonium
BRUCE HENDERSON
Staff Writer
ROCK HILL - Duke Power's nuclear plant on Lake Wylie is about to become the first commercial reactor to make electricity from plutonium meant for nuclear weapons.
Without fanfare, tests that begin next month will cross a line that for decades separated military and commercial nuclear uses. The current policy, dating to the Clinton administration, is to make surplus bomb material unusable by burning it in power plants.
Plutonium-239, blended in small amounts into a fuel that Duke will test at its Catawba plant, is chilling stuff. A single speck inhaled into the lungs can cause cancer. A softball-size lump flattened Nagasaki. It remains radioactive for at least 24,100 years.
Duke's test fuel, called mixed-oxide or MOX for short, won't blow up because of its diluted content. A blend of 4 percent plutonium and 96 percent uranium, the usual nuclear fuel, MOX is designed to mimic the more familiar fuels.
Nuclear nonproliferation groups say it's still a bad idea. Terrorists could steal the fuel and fashion a crude nuclear device, they say, although government experts say that wouldn't be easy. Duke won exemptions to some federal security rules for handling plutonium.
More than 20 years of MOX use in European nuclear plants, most experts agree, established its safe track record. The fuel Duke will test, however, contains more of the purer type of plutonium desirable for weapons.
After a few years of tests, Duke -- alone among U.S. utilities -- plans to use the mixed-oxide fuel alongside full-uranium fuel in all four of its nuclear reactors within 20 miles of uptown Charlotte for 15 to 20 years.
The end of the Cold War, in the early 1990s, left the United States and Russia with larger arsenals than either needed. By producing MOX, the United States plans to get rid of 34 metric tons of weapons plutonium. Russia agreed to do the same.
Duke agreed to join the swords-to-plowshares program because it believes the fuel is safe and because it can buy a reliable supply at a discount, saving millions of dollars -- Duke won't say how much -- over the life of the program. The Department of Energy, which owns the plutonium, will cover Duke's MOX-related operating, maintenance and capital expenses.
Most critics of the program prefer an alternate disposal method, canceled by the Bush administration, that would mix unneeded plutonium with highly radioactive waste and shape it into ceramic pucks.
Opponents also question MOX's safety in commercial reactors. They argue that the type of MOX Duke will use could make bad accidents worse by unleashing more radiation than uranium fuel would.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved Duke's tests in March. The modest scale of the Catawba tests -- four MOX fuel assemblies among 189 conventional assemblies -- will make differences between the fuels barely register, the NRC said.
But subtle differences remain. Those differences could grow more prominent if Duke expands its use of MOX, which it expects to do in about 2011. They could also influence the way Duke operates its reactors, and the outcome of severe accidents.
"The differences are not `good' or `bad,' " said Steve Nesbit, Duke's MOX project manager. "It depends on what (circumstances) you're looking at."
Compared with uranium fuel, plutonium atoms more easily split and release a little more energy. MOX could make the systems that control a nuclear chain reaction slightly less effective, government analysts say. And a catastrophic but extraordinarily unlikely accident that exposes the public to radioactivity could cause more, or fewer, fatalities depending on the scenario.
For all the analyses and European experience, the true nature of Duke's MOX won't be confirmed until the Catawba reactor starts humming.
"The field is pretty well known," said Frank Akstulewicz, an NRC reactor-regulation official. "If there's something that we're missing, that would be surprising. But that's why we collect the (test) data."
Member of consortium
Plutonium is produced in all nuclear reactors as they burn uranium. The man-made, refined plutonium-239 used in weapons readily fissions in an atom-splitting chain reaction that releases tremendous heat.A business consortium that includes a Duke Energy subsidiary is under a $130 million contract with the Department of Energy to build a fuel-making plant, beginning next year, at the Savannah River Site. The federal installation near Aiken, S.C., produced the nation's military plutonium for decades after World War II.
With the contract, Duke agreed to burn MOX at Catawba and a second Charlotte-area plant, McGuire on Lake Norman. A Virginia Power plant was also part of the 1999 agreement, but the utility soon dropped out, citing business reasons.
Advocacy groups have fought the plan on safety and security grounds.
"It's bomb-making material. The fact that Duke has applied and gotten exemptions from security requirements is very troublesome," said Janet Zeller, executive director of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, based north of Charlotte in the mountains of Ashe County.
In its challenge to Duke's federal application to test the fuel, Blue Ridge protested Duke's request for several exemptions from classified security rules that the public, including Zeller, isn't allowed to read. Duke said the exemptions, such as maintaining a tactical-response team and erecting additional barriers, are measures it had already satisfied.
After months of debate over access to those rules, an NRC licensing board granted the exemptions -- with stipulations that were also classified.
Rallying broad public opposition to MOX has been another challenge for Blue Ridge. Few local people have publicly opposed Duke's plan or written the NRC in protest.
The complexity of the issue "really makes your head spin," said Rock Hill resident Chad Simpson. A former newspaper reporter who's written about MOX, Simpson says he's still not convinced the program is wise.
"There's a lot of information out there that I've come across, and I don't fully understand why (Duke and the government) are doing this," he said. "I don't fully understand it, and most of the people I've talked to don't understand it."
Usage could expand
But MOX isn't likely to fall out of the public eye.
Duke plans to seek federal approval, in 2007, to make MOX up to 40 percent of the fuel for Catawba and McGuire. Opposition groups are likely to again protest.
Small differences in how MOX behaves could grow if Duke increases its use, said Paul Turinsky, who heads the nuclear engineering department at N.C. State University.
"The reality is that probably some accidents would use up some of their (safety) margin and others will gain margin" by using MOX, Turinsky said. Turinsky, who has worked as a consultant to Duke on MOX research, believes the fuel is safe to use.
The Department of Energy has estimated that the risk of an accident in which the water that cools Catawba's reactor fuel is lost -- one of the worst the plant is designed to withstand -- would grow by 3.3 percent with the higher proportion of MOX fuel.
Because the likelihood of such an accident is extremely small, the increased risk is equal to one extra fatality for every 2.3 million years of plant operation.
If a more severe accident occurred, releasing radiation into the open air, MOX could cause 8 percent more fatalities within 50 miles of the plant. About 17,700 would die immediately or later by cancer, the Department of Energy estimated, compared with about 16,400 with the uranium fuel already in use. No U.S. nuclear plant has ever experienced such an accident.
Edwin Lyman, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, believes the study underestimated MOX's dangers. Lyman, whose group opposes policies that could spread nuclear weapons, believes 11 percent to 30 percent more deaths could result from such an accident.
"It's clear that some of these (fuel) differences aren't so minor," Lyman said. "I've been looking at them for many years, and I don't believe there's enough experience with MOX to resolve them."
Catawba and McGuire are particularly ill-suited to use MOX, Lyman contends.
A 2000 study for the NRC concluded that nuclear plants designed like Catawba and McGuire are substantially more likely to fail in certain types of accidents. Both plants would use ice to condense escaping radioactive steam, relieving internal pressure. But their outer shells of concrete and steel aren't designed to withstand the same pressures as most other U.S. plants, which rely solely on stronger shells.
"Those ice condensers are still as dangerous as they were in 2000," Lyman said.
Nesbit, Duke's project manager, said the company never accepted the report's finding because it was based on overly pessimistic assumptions. The NRC has said the plants' risks remain within safe boundaries.
If Duke expands its MOX use, fuel shipments to Catawba and McGuire would contain enough weapons material for thousands of nuclear bombs.
Critics say trucking plutonium to and from the fuel-making facility at the Savannah River Site, about 135 miles south of Charlotte, invites terrorism. The test fuel was made in France. A secretive federal agency that says it has logged 1.6 million miles successfully hauling nuclear material around the country will truck the fuel to Duke's plants.
MOX's low plutonium concentration, packaged inside 1,500-pound fuel assemblies, doesn't make it an inviting terrorist target, the NRC says.
MOX makes environmental sense because it recycles plutonium that had already been created when conventional fuel was burned, said Rosa Yang of the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry research center.
"You would hope that Duke would quickly use up this material so it doesn't fall into the wrong hands," she said. "I find it strange for people to be against it."
Bruce Henderson: (704) 358-5051; bhenderson@charlotteobserver.com.
posted by Greta Jane at Sunday, May 22, 2005
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