Bill Gates’ “Natrium” nuclear reactor project is a bad idea for Wyoming

- A Wyoming Citizen

A nuclear power reactor is proposed for construction in Wyoming by Bill Gates' TerraPower and Warren Buffett's PacifiCorp, the parent company of Rocky Mountain Power, with the support of Governor Mark Gordon.

The project will receive $80 million of taxpayer money from the Department of Energy, a continuation of the long history of government subsidies for nuclear power that will be discussed below.

The Casper Star-Tribune recently published its latest gushing report, part of a media blitz underway since the rollout of the plan in June 2021, designed to build support for the project among citizens of Wyoming.The campaign is an interesting exercise, as it tries to be all things to all people.

It appeals to climate change activists by purporting to be a "clean" new technology that can replace fossil fuel power generation and lead the way to a new sustainable future – despite the fact that so many of their fellow travelers have been adamant opponents of nuclear energy for three generations.

The Natrium project is also an easy sell to some who have supported nuclear energy all along, in part simply because of the perceived irrationality of the opposition, and in part because they have been led to believe for 60 years that nuclear power in all forms is safe and economical. There are reasons, offered below, why thoughtful people should be less enthusiastic.

The project appeals to some of those concerned about the damage being willfully inflicted on Wyoming's oil, gas, and coal extractive industries, not by suggesting any relaxation in that campaign, but by offering jobs during construction and operation of the plant, and some tax revenue to the state (although already there is pressure to offer tax breaks to the plant, similar to those already offered to wind and solar power generation). Construction labor, of course is short term, and the "small, modular" design of the plant is unlikely to require a very large workforce to operate; a boon to the community it is sited near, no doubt, but against the jobs being eliminated statewide in the fossil fuel industry, perhaps not such a win.

What is the Natrium nuclear power project?

The plant would be a 345-Megawatt (mw) sodium-cooled fast reactor, with output approximately 1/3 that of the average older light water reactor nuclear plants. It is intended to be built on one of four recently retired coal power plant sites, not yet selected.

One of the few actually "innovative" features of this design is that it uses molten, liquid sodium ("Natrium" is simply German for sodium) as a coolant, and for storing excess thermal energy to meet peak demand. Excess superheated liquid sodium is stored on site, and can be tapped to drive turbines, increasing the plant's electrical output "to 500mw for more than five and a half hours, which will be enough to meet the electricity needs of approximately 400,000 households," according to promotional claims. Looked at another way, when the standard output of 345mw is increased to 500mw for 5.5 hours, the excess energy it produces is 155mw times 5.5 hours, which equals 852mwh (megawatt hours) or what one of Wyoming's mid-size coal plants produces in about one hour. Drop the attractive fiction of the "small modular reactor" and triple the size of the Natrium plant to what will actually sell in the domestic and international markets, and the short term "power boost" capability will provide three times that much power; in other words, three hours' worth of regular electricity output from a mid-size coal-fired power plant.After five and a half hours, the thermal storage facility will have to be recharged; the promotional materials don't tell us how long that will take. Should we be impressed?

The idea of modulating power output to meet demand is not exactly new, being a basic capability of both fossil fuel-burning and older nuclear power plants, which can increase or reduce power output in real time based on demand. It is no wonder that environmentalists are (a) not impressed by that capability in existing fossil-fuel power plants, which they hate on principle, and (b) thrilled by it when offered as an "innovative" feature of the Natrium design. They like it because it compensates for a critical weakness in large scale, "renewable" wind and solar power production: the inability to modulate output with fluctuations in demand. The Natrium promotional copy puts it this way: boosting output "will allow utilities to leverage peaking opportunities created by fluctuations in renewable energy such as wind and solar."

"Leverage peaking opportunities." That must be good, right? The Natrium plant is being billed as a revolutionary new nuclear technology that will "supplement" the (failing and uneconomical) wind and solar forms of alternate energy to lead us to a "carbon-free" future. There are, however, more troubling questions.

The Natrium fast reactor would be fueled by enriched uranium – no innovation there – but according to TerraPower's CEO it would use uranium enriched to 20%, not the 3-5% enrichment used in older commercial reactors.This level of enrichment creates a nuclear weapons proliferation risk.

Naturally occurring uranium contains only about 0.7% U-235, the fissile isotope that is needed to sustain a chain reaction, and is useful in nuclear reactor fuel – or nuclear weapons. Enrichment is a complex chemical and mechanical process that increases the proportion of U-235. Nuclear weapons generally require "highly enriched" uranium, that is, enriched to levels of 90% U-235 or more; but the early stages of enrichment are the most difficult. It is a truism that 90% of the effort is expended getting to 20%; from the 20% to the 90% enrichment level is relatively quick and easy. Access to 20% enriched uranium is of great value to anyone seeking to produce nuclear weapons.That is, for instance, why the on-again, off-again U.S.-led efforts to inhibit Iranian development of nuclear weapons focus on preventing them from enriching uranium to 20% or beyond. Natrium fast reactors will be fueled by 20% enriched uranium, creating a demand for production – and safe storage and transport – of this potentially dangerous substance that has never before been used in commercial power plants.

If that is not enough of a concern, fast reactors like the Natrium design can be used as "breeders." They can bombard non-fissile Uranium-238 (the isotope which accounts for over 99% of naturally occurring uranium) with neutrons, transforming it to Plutonium 239. Wrap the reactor core in a "blanket" of U-238, leave it there long enough, and voilà: plutonium, ready for fabrication into more reactor fuel – or nuclear explosives. The "breeder" function is highly attractive, because it allows most of the otherwise useless 99% of naturally occurring uranium to be transformed into usable fuel. Despite this powerful economic incentive, the U.S. has forbidden the building and operation of "fast breeder" reactors from 1977 to the present, because of their potential for nuclear weapons proliferation. TerraPower is excited about their chances of selling Natrium reactor technology not just to U.S. utilities but internationally. Would they or their international customers resist the temptation of this potentially very profitable but decidedly dangerous capability? They won't say, and we can't know.

Because it is fueled by uranium, the Natrium reactor will produce chemically toxic, thermally hot, highly radioactive waste in the form of spent fuel assemblies, which TerraPower confirms will be stored indefinitely on site, as is the case with every operating reactor in America. The hazards of this are dealt with in detail below.

The only really new technology in the Natrium proposal is the use of liquid sodium, not water, as a coolant. There are potential safety advantages over water-cooled designs, but even these are debated within the industry.

The Natrium plant proposed for construction in Wyoming is "small" but it's not "modular". It's a one-of-a-kind pilot plant. Production of its components would never be "modular" unless there were a large market for similar small plants. TerraPower is not convinced of the market for "small, modular" reactors and its CEO openly discusses the desirability of scaling up the design to gigawatt output (equivalent to traditional reactors) for US and overseas customers.

The truth behind the safety and economy of commercial nuclear power

Because the Natrium plant is not truly innovative in its reactor design and operation, it suffers from the traditional drawbacks of nuclear power, that supporters in industry and government have consistently played down or ignored: massive federal subsidies without which commercial nuclear power would be uncompetitive in the energy market. Fiscal conservatives should take note, and puzzle out why government subsidies are unfair and undesirable when applied to solar and wind power, but perfectly acceptable with nuclear.

Driving without Insurance

The Price-Anderson Act of 1957 – incorporated and updated as Section 170 of the Atomic Energy Act – addressed the early unwillingness of private insurers and underwriters to provide full liability coverage for commercial nuclear power operators at a cost the industry could afford to pay. The law establishes an industry-wide insurance pool that is notionally large enough to offer coverage for all covered operations at acceptable rates for individual operators. As with all insurance coverage, that is true only so long as the number of claims and payouts across the industry remain low. However, total liability for an individual incident is capped by the U.S. government at $10 billion, and the insurance pool is not required to cover costs of any nuclear accident that exceed that amount. Responsibility for costs that might exceed that amount rest with the United States government – essentially a promise guaranteed by the credibility and solvency of the U.S. government, as no funding instruments or reserves have been created to meet this commitment.

For perspective, consider that the estimated cost of the permanently evacuated lands and communities in the highly radioactive exclusion zone surrounding the earthquake and tsunami-devastated Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan is $250-500 billion. This does not include human costs incurred by the more than 150,000 people permanently relocated from the zone, many of them with levels of radiation exposure which will continue to impact their health for decades to come - and human costs are very much a factor in liability settlements. Nor do those cost estimates (already 20 to 50 times higher than the U.S. cap on nuclear power plant operators' liability) account for the very real possibility of additional, future catastrophic damages arising from the crippled plant, with its three melted reactor cores and massive spent fuel storage generating an increasing amount of radioactive waste and relying on continuous infusions of cooling water to prevent further fires, explosions, and releases of radiation into the environment.

This matters because there are 23 reactors of the same design currently operating in the United States, and their combined onsite spent fuel storage is far greater than that at Fukushima; and because all U.S. commercial reactors, including the Natrium if built, store their spent fuel on site.

In the history of U.S. commercial nuclear power production, all outlays for damages have totaled a tiny fraction of these costs, and have never exceeded the limits of the primary and secondary insurance pools established by the Price Anderson Act. But a similar statement could have been made in Japan, right up until the catastrophic destruction of the Fukushima plant in March, 2011. Wyoming's Natrium plant, if it is built, may have design features that mitigate some of that catastrophic potential; but that deserves serious critical study that is not impeded by normalcy bias resulting from the industry's safety record so far. Responsible risk management looks at both the probability of an event occurring, and the consequences if it does.

The bottom line here is that nuclear power does not pay its own way. There would never have been a commercial nuclear power industry in America, had the industry been obliged to purchase insurance coverage for the unlikely but catastrophic events that are still inherent to its operation. A government subsidy, in the form of legal limits on the owner/operators' liability and a "soft" (i.e., unfunded) commitment of federal funding for any catastrophic costs over those limits, was one of the primary enablers of the entire industry; but not the only one.

The fuel cycle subsidy

The other massive shift of responsibility and financial burden from nuclear power plant operators to the taxpayer was, from the very beginning, a federal commitment to handle the "back end" of the fuel cycle: the thermally hot, chemically toxic, and highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies removed from every reactor core during its regular refueling.

The potential has always existed – and is in use in some foreign countries – to chemically reprocess that spent fuel, reducing its volume enormously and producing a substantial amount of fuel that can be used in new fuel assemblies. Unfortunately, the primary output of that process is Plutonium 239, the premier weapon-grade fissile material. It can fuel a reactor to produce electricity, in lieu of mined and low-enriched uranium; but it can also be easily utilized in the production of nuclear weapons. As noted previously the United States has historically refused to reprocess spent nuclear fuel, in order to avoid producing massive quantities of plutonium.

As a courtesy and encouragement to the industry that was deprived of the efficiencies and profit that reprocessing would have offered, the government promised to take full responsibility for the disposal of high-level radioactive waste, which in terms of quantity and risk, consists overwhelmingly of commercial reactor spent fuel assemblies. The government promised to construct a safe repository for this waste, and to take responsibility for safe transport of the spent fuel from reactor sites to the repository, at no cost to the utilities operating the plants.

However, despite all the political and regulatory power, funds, and scientific expertise of the federal government, that promise has never been fulfilled. No repository for highly radioactive waste has ever been opened, and there is no facility in North America that can receive or safely handle these wastes; nor is there any near-term solution to the problem, 60+ years after the promise was made. Therefore, spent fuel accumulates at each nuclear power plant where it is produced, in "wet storage" – pools of water that is constantly circulated by pumps and cooling plants to prevent spontaneous ignition and explosion as occurred, and threatens to occur again, at Fukushima. There are currently (according to the GAO) approximately 85,000 metric tons of spent fuel stored on site, at every commercial reactor in the United States, increasing by a total of 2,000 metric tons per year. Since the U.S. has not yet had an incident similar to Fukushima, we are lulled into complacency – since it's never happened before, we cannot imagine that it ever will.

Natural disasters like the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in 2011 are not the only events that threaten the tenuous safety of on-site spent nuclear fuel storage. Every storage facility in the United States is an attractive target to terrorists, hackers, and on-site "insider" saboteurs. Reactors inside their steel and reinforced concrete containment vessels and buildings are themselves very secure against anything less than a sustained aerial attack with deep-penetrating munitions, like the Israeli attack on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor under construction in 1981. After years of storage in pools of circulating cooling water, spent fuel cools down enough that it can be transferred into dry casks that provide greater protection; but spent fuel wet storage usually contains a greater amount of highly radioactive material than the reactor core itself, has very little physical protection against impact, explosives, or penetration, and is vulnerable to many modes of attack, direct and indirect, that could disable the cooling systems, without which spent fuel assemblies can melt through their containment pools to contaminate ground water, and spontaneously ignite into unextinguishable fires, spreading intensely radioactive materials and toxic chemicals far downwind of the site in smoke plumes. These consequences are not theoretical; they are what Japan and every other nation on the Pacific littoral have been dealing with since 2011.

In conclusion