Dr. Charles Till
Interviewed re. the Integral Fast Reactor.
Nuclear Energy Options
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html
Nuclear physicist and associate lab director at Argonne
National Laboratory West in Idaho. He is co-developer of
the Integral Fast Reactor, an inherently safe nuclear
reactor with a closed fuel cycle.
Argonne
National Laboratory (ANL) is a Department of
Energy, Office of Science facility on 1,700 acres
located 28 miles southwest of Chicago. ANL was
the countrys first National Laboratory and
focuses on research areas including nuclear
reactor development, energy and environmental
technology, biomedical and environmental
research, and basic sciences research. Some of
ANLs significant accomplishments include:
(1) the development of many of the nuclear power
reactor types in use today; (2) development and
construction of large superconducting magnets;
(3) pioneering work in cancer diagnosis and
therapy; and (4) development of lithium-metal
sulfide batteries for vehicle propulsion and
peak-load leveling for utilities. ANL is home to
the Advanced Photon Source, a 1,104 meter
circumference synchrotron-radiation light source
producing high-brilliance x-ray beams used to
carry out basic and applied research in the
fields of biology, physics, chemistry,
environmental, geophysical, and planetary
sciences along with innovative x-ray
instrumentation.
ANLs
other site (ANL-W) is about 35 miles west of
Idaho Falls, Idaho. Research at ANL-W is
typically focused on areas of national concern
including those relating to energy, nuclear
safety, dealing with spent nuclear fuel,
nonproliferation, decommissioning and
decontamination technologies, and similar work.
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Q: Talk about when you decided to go into nuclear power,
and about the vision as it looked back then.
A: Oh, it was the field of the time. It was a field where
you could be assured of doing something important,
something for your time, is how I thought of it, that
energy is the basis of our society, and nuclear energy
was to be the way of the future.
Q: You saw this as an enormous benefit for mankind?
A: As a tremendous benefit for mankind, and that work,
only the first work had been done on it.
Q: What was this benefit? Was it the amount of energy?
Was it environmental aspects of the energy?
A: No. Remember, this was the late 1950s. The word
"environment" was not even used much then, nor
in fact really was the word "energy" much in
the all encompassing sense that we use it now. It was,
though, the unlimited amounts of energy. It wasn't the
fact that nuclear, as I later came to believe, was also
the best form of energy environmentally. But it was
simply that the humankind is going to need vast amounts
of energy in the future. Here was the way.
Q: Was recycling part of this dream?
A: Yes, of course it was ... If nuclear energy was to
provide the amount of energy that the dream said it
would, the vision said it would, then you'd have to
recycle it in order to use the resource in effect over
and over again.
Q: What do you mean when you say "close the fuel
cycle"?
A: Simply that once the fuel has been used, and used to
the maximum extent it can, which generally takes about
three years, that you take it out and process it in a
manner that allows you to take all of the useful elements
out of it and recycle them back into the reactor bed.
Simple as that.
Q: What is the concept of the Integral Fast Reactor
(IFR), and how [does] it address the issue of waste and
of using energy and so forth?
A: Well, the IFR was a concept that we worked on for some
ten years. And it was an outgrowth really of the studies
that were caused by the Carter administration in the late
'70s, where we looked at all the various kinds of
reactors, types of fuel, processes for dealing with the
waste, and so on. And it became obvious to us that one
could put a total reactor concept together that would at
the same time give you safety of a kind that reactors
today don't have, that would allow complete recycling of
the fuel, and thus extension of the ability to produce
energy (very roughly, by a factor of 100), and also a
waste product that did not contain the most dangerous
elements. So with one concept you attack all of the
principal real issues that there are for the use of
nuclear energy.
Q: Take us through the fuel cycle, as it refers to the
IFR.
A: The way the fuel cycle is done now is: you mine
uranium; you purify the metal; you convert it to oxide;
you put it in a reactor in the form of pellets; it stays
in there for about three years; you take it out, and you
try to find someplace to put it. The way the IFR fuel
cycle would work would be: you could start with mined
uranium, or you could start with fuel for present day
reactors. Either one would do perfectly well. It's left
in the metal form because metal is a particularly easy
thing to fabricate. And so you cast it into uranium.
They're put in steel jackets and loaded into the reactor.
They stay in there about three to four years, and when
they come out, they're put through a very simple process.
One step separates out the useful materials. And then
cast the metal again back into fuel that go right back
into the reactor. The material that's left behind is the
true, the natural waste.
Q: The fission products.
A: Fission products. But none of the long-lived toxic
elements like plutonium and americium or curium, the
so-called manmade elements. They're the long-lived toxic
ones. And they're recycled back into the reactor ... and
work every bit as well as plutonium.
Q: So they go in, and then those are broken into fission
products, or some of it is. Right?
A: Yes.
Q: And you repeat the process.
A: Eventually, what happens is that you wind up with only
fission products, that the waste is only fission products
that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a
few tens of years. There are a few very long-lived ones
that are not very radioactive. And those are put in
either metallic [matrix], a metallic container, or in a
ceramic, very much like the ceramic in a sink so that the
form of the waste, then, is something very impermeable to
any kind of dissolution or anything like that, that will
certainly last long enough to take care of the
radioactive lives of materials that it's asked to
contain.
Q: But the advantages of this concept are, one, that you
don't waste energy, and two, that you get round this very
long life toxicity problem?
A: Yes. The advantages, then, of our concept ... at one
stroke you have given yourself almost unlimited energy
and you have then done it by using the waste product that
otherwise would be a nuisance. So that you have a very
long-term energy source, and you've got a waste product
that won't last nearly as long.
Q: So when you say the source is the waste, you're saying
you don't have to mine any more uranium for a while. What
could you use? Can you use weapons material? Can you use
waste from reactors?
A: You could use any and all of those things. [If] the
weapons stocks are being reduced, as they are today, an
ideal way to use that plutonium would be in an IFR. If
the policy of the nation were to allow recycling of spent
fuel that is a problem now for present day plants, it
would be a wonderful [fuel for IFRs]. If in fact IFRs use
uranium so effectively, my guess is, you could probably
make a
few parts per million in sea water. It really does allow
an energy source that is unlimited.
Q: Now, what about the issue of proliferation, the issue
of making plutonium available to terrorists?
A: The object in the IFR demonstration was to invent, if
you like, a process that did not allow separations of
pure plutonium that would be necessary for weapons. In
order to recycle, you need some kind of a chemical
process. And the chemical process that was invented here
at Argonne used quite different principles than present
processes do. It allows the separation of that group of
things that are useful, but not one from the other, so
that you cannot separate plutonium purely from uranium
and the other things. You can separate uranium,
plutonium, and the other useful things from the fission
products. So it does exactly what you want it to do. It
gives you the new fuel, and it separates off the waste
product, but it doesn't allow careful distinguishing
between the materials that are useful, such that you
could use one or another of those materials for weapons.
Q: So it would be very difficult to handle for weapons,
would it?
A: It's impossible to handle for weapons, as it stands.
It's highly radioactive. It's highly heat producing. It
has all of the characteristics that make it extremely,
well, make it impossible for someone to make a weapon.
Q: The other aspect of the integral fast reactor is that
it's one of a type of what's called passive reactors.
What does this mean?
A: Well, the IFR has characteristics that are really
quite different and superior to any other reactor that
has yet been tried, because in the very nature of the
materials that are used, it does not allow the reactor to
be harmed in any way by the kinds of accidents that
typically can happen to reactors, or indeed any other
large plant. The electricity-producing plant reactor has
a lot of valves, a lot of pumps, a lot of mechanical
things that can go wrong. And the thing that you don't
want to happen is to have the coolant, at once cooling
the reactor and also then acting as the source of heat
for steam to produce electricity. You don't want that
flow to stop. That's what happened at TMI. That's what
happened at Chernobyl. And if it does stop, then what
happens? And in the IFR what happens is, the reactor just
shuts itself down. There's no mechanical devices needed
to do that. There's no operator interaction. There isn't
anything. It's just in the nature of materials. When the
coolant flow
stops, the reaction stops. That's remarkable.
Q: So it's inherently safe.
A: So it's inherently safe. It's a remarkable feature.
Q: And you in fact ran an experiment that was comparable
to what happened at Chernobyl?
A: Yes, yes. Let me go on a little bit about that,
because it is a rather dramatic characteristic. The
Chernobyl accident happened in April 26 of 1986. Earlier
that month, the first week in April, with our test
reactor in Idaho, in fact the same reactor control room
where we're now sitting, we performed a demonstration of
that characteristic, where if you cut off the coolant
from the reactor, what would happen? And there are two
ways to cut off the coolant. One is that simply the pumps
that are pumping the reactor stop. The reactor just shut
itself down. And in the afternoon, we brought the reactor
back up to full power again and did an accident situation
where the reactor's unable to get rid of the heat it
produces, because the heat normally is taken away by the
electrical system, and so we isolated the electrical
system from the plant, and the reactor then has to deal
with the heat it produces itself. Again, another real
accident situation. Again, the reactor just quietly shut
itself down.
Now, later that month, the Chernobyl accident happened.
And the first of those scenarios that I described, where
the cooling pumps were shut off, is exactly what happened
at Chernobyl. The public was privileged to witness what
happened there, over a period of weeks. What happened
here was, the reactor just quietly shut itself down. That
was the basis of the story in The Wall Street Journal,
when some very alert science reporter realized the
similarity of the two events, and the nonaccident in one
case and the terrible accident in the other.
Q: So this concept of the IFR sounds almost too good to
be true, because it gets energy from waste, it
substantially solves your waste problem. Now, you'd
think, if anything was easy to sell, this would be. How
much luck have you had?
A: Well, we had ten years of development where we were
able to prove these characteristics. And I must say in
fairness that to be able to start with a new concept, as
we did, in the mid-1980s, and develop it as far as we
were able to go, was in itself quite remarkable. And I
think it's testimony to the quality of the concept and
quality of (people) on it. But in the end, of course, the
arguments for it proved to be insufficient to keep the
development going.
Q: The argument most put on the Senate floor was that the
IFR increases the risks of proliferation.
A: Yes. Well, it doesn't. As simply as that. There's no
technical reason why one would make that argument. In
order to produce weapons, you have to produce pure
plutonium. The IFR process will not do that. The only
possible argument that would hold any water whatsoever
was that when showing people that plutonium is not the
demon substance that it's been advertised as being, that,
in fact, it's quite a workaday material, that in some way
or other, the familiarity of it could be used to say that
it doesn't hold the terrors that it's supposed to hold,
and so, perhaps, more tempting in some way for someone to
try to misuse it. But I mean, that's a far-out kind of
argument, it seems to me, compared to the unquestioned
benefits from simply using this stuff to produce energy.
Q: But they were arguing that this made the world less
safe. Would you say the opposite, or what?
A: No, I would say completely the opposite. Modern
society runs on energy. This gives a wonderful, clean
form of energy. Its possibility for misuse for weapons
goes against the history of the development of nuclear
energy over the last 50 years. If weapons are going to be
produced, they're going to be produced by making
plutonium in facilities that specifically make
weapons-grade plutonium, because that's the kind that the
weapon designer needs. The IFR doesn't do that.
Q: Curiously, a number of the people in utilities haven't
been especially supportive. They say the thing is just
too expensive. Why aren't they ordering IFRs?
A: Well, I think that there's really two different cases
to be made. It's very easy, I think, for those who simply
oppose nuclear energy outright, to if you like, soften
their statements to the [innocent ear] by saying,
"Well, really it's too expensive," without
having any sound basis for making any assessment [to]
whether it's too expensive or not. The price of nuclear
energy today, if the plants were properly built and
properly run, would be perfectly competitive with coal
and gas. If the plants cost far too much in the building,
even through regulatory or inefficient management or
whatever, then the price of that would [increase]. But
there's no intrinsic reason why nuclear in general, even
today, should not be very competitive.
The reuse of recycled fuel in the IFR is where the
potential great benefits lie, in the solution of the
waste problem, in the sense that the waste is much easier
to get rid of. And then the plants don't have to, as they
do today, simply build up the spent fuel in pools and
wonder what on earth are they going to do with it.
There's nobody today who can tell you how much it's going
to cost to get rid of that spent fuel. The utility today,
because of agreements, can give it to the Department of
Energy, and at a very low price, if they can convince the
Department of Energy to take it. And it seems to me they
will succeed and are succeeding in doing that. But now
the Department of Energy has got a problem. And how much
that will cost the nation there's no way of predicting.
The IFR
gets at those problems.
But really the powerful argument for nuclear is not
whether it's necessary today. It produces 20% of our
nation's electricity. That's a lot of electricity. That's
a lot of benefit. But the real benefit of it is in the
decades and the centuries to come, where you [could] have
an energy source that you can count on, and not to
wonder, you know, whether we have ten more years of
reserves or 50 more years of reserves or whatever. It
takes away that problem entirely.
Now, in having done that, to do that in a way that the
reactors are safe, that they don't contribute to
proliferation, and that they have a fairly easily
disposable waste product, in my view, that's a wonderful
thing. And that was the promise and is the promise.
Q: What do you think of the policy of digging a hole in
Yucca Mountain and sticking it in there? Why are so many
people pushing for that to happen?
A: The burial of the spent fuel intact was one of the
principal effects of the decisions in '77 to discontinue
reprocessing efforts. It's had a very deleterious effect.
Digging a hole and putting the spent fuel in it, as far
as I'm concerned, is a perfectly fine thing to do, if you
want to do that. You've
done a number of things you shouldn't do, in my view.
You've thrown away 99% of the waste of the energy
content. You've put toxic materials in the ground that
are perfectly useful for energy. You've done a number of
things that don't make a whole lot of sense to me. But
having said that, I'm perfectly convinced that the
repository in Yucca Mountain, expensive or inordinately
expensive though it may be, and it may never come about,
but if it does, it will handle nuclear waste perfectly
safely. But at a tremendous cost.
Q: So it will be a waste.
A: It's a waste. Yeah. It's a waste. It's a waste of
resources. It's a waste of energy potential. It's a waste
of human effort. It's a waste of all kinds of things. But
having said that, it is the one avenue now that the
utilities have to solve a problem that has been handed to
them--keeping spent fuel on site. The utilities must
argue for Yucca Mountain. They have no choice,
particularly where the Administrations are canceling any
other alternative. If you block every other alternative
then the one certain path that the utility has is that
hole in the ground.
Q: And they don't want things like the IFR distracting
people ...
A: Oh no, because it's too uncertain. The IFR could be
allowed to go for another year, and then a change of mind
in an administration, and it's canceled, it's gone. The
hole in the ground in Nevada is a permanent hole in the
ground. And so if you or I were sitting in the shoes of
the CEO or utility, the local utility, and we see the
spent fuel going up, and we have restrictions on the
amount of additional storage space we can put in, what is
what is our reaction going to be? Our reaction is going
to be: "We've got to get that repository in Yucca
Mountain open. We've got to get the Department of Energy
to accept the fuel as it now is. And any other path, even
though it ultimately may be a better path, we cannot
allow that to interfere with our problems that we face
today." And I understand that. It's perfectly
[reasonable].
Q: Is the IFR still operating?
A: No. The IFR was canceled in the end of September of
1994, two years ago.
Q: Who made that decision?
A: The decision was made in the early weeks of the
Clinton administration. It was tempered somewhat in the
Department of Energy in that first year. Congress then
acted to keep the program alive in that first year. And
then in the second year of the Clinton administration,
the decision to really reinforce the earlier decisions
was made final, and the Administration put a very
considerable effort into assuring successfully that the
IFR would be canceled.
Q: And what was the basis for the decision to cancel the
IFR? What grounds, what argument was presented?
A: The arguments fundamentally were that there was no
longer any need for advanced nuclear power or research on
nuclear power. In President Clinton's State of the Union
address that first year, one of the statements was that
unneeded programs would be canceled, and for example,
programs on advanced nuclear power would be canceled. So
that the fundamental argument was that there was no
longer any need for any further research.
Q: Where does the IFR stand today?
A: Well, the IFR today is not an active program. The
development of the IFR was carried on from 1984, then, to
1994. The work on the new fuel form and on the processes
and on safety and so on, is all documented thoroughly in
the literature, in the technical literature, so that the
knowledge that was gained in those years is certainly
there for others to study if they wish to do so. There is
related work on the process, on the chemical processes,
now being done at Argonne to help with some of the DOE
nuclear waste. But it's not aimed at the IFR.
Q: But the lights are still on in this room, which is the
control room. What's still running here?
A: Well, the reactor itself is being decommissioned. And
when you do that, we have to take the fuel out, and
that's done deliberately and safely. And so what you see
going on around you here are the decommissioning
activities of what had been a very successful reactor.
Q: Then its future is in the documentation at this point?
A: The future, I think, can be said quite honestly that
the future of the IFR in this country is nonexistent.
Q: But in some other country?
A: I think the chances are very good that the IFR
concepts will be adopted by others. They are, after all,
very sound.
Q: Do you think the particular administration we've had
over the last two decades has been particularly
anti-nuclear?
A: Let me answer the question this way. Nuclear power for
very many years was not a party proposition. There was
bipartisan support for the development of nuclear power.
That changed in and around the 1976. It was certainly
changed dramatically during the Carter Administration,
from '76 to '80. The Reagan administration was supportive
of nuclear power development, but not madly so. They
supported a continued effort, probably at a level of
something like 10 or 20% of the effort that had been
carried out in the country a decade or so before. That
was also true of the Bush administration. The Clinton
administration, I think, firmed up quite an anti-nuclear
power position. The position of the administration is
that present day reactors are supported, but that there
is no need for any further nuclear reactor development or
improvement. And the implications of that are that
nuclear power then will be a passing thing. But without
recycling, there is no real future.
Q: What will be our energy source, then?
A: I think that many engineers would agree that there is
limited, additional gain to be had from conservation.
After all, what does one mean by
"conservation?" One simply means using less and
using less more efficiently. And there have been
considerable gains wrung out of the energy supply and
energy usage over the past couple of decades. We can
probably go somewhat further. But you're talking, you
know, 10% or 20%. Whereas over the next 50 years, it can
be confidently predicted that with the energy growth in
this country alone, and much more so around the world, it
would be 100%, 200%, or some very large number.
And so what energy source steps in? There is only one.
It's fossil fuel. It's coal. It's oil. It's natural gas.
Some limited additional use of the more exotic forms of
things, like solar and wind. But they are, after all,
very limited in what they can do. So it will be fossil.
Now the question, of course, immediately becomes, well,
how long can that last? And everyone has a different
opinion on that. One thing that is certain, and that is
that the increase in the use of fossil fuels will sharply
increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Another thing is certain. You will put a lot more
pollutants into the atmosphere as well, in addition to
carbon dioxide, which one could argue the greenhouse
effect exists or doesn't exist. One can point to natural
gas. Well, natural gas has fewer pollutants, and it gives
you some considerable factor of perhaps two--more energy
for the amount of carbon dioxide put into the air than
does coal. But if you're increasing the amount of fossil
fuels by a large number, like five then the use of
natural gas is not any long-term answer. It simply
somewhat reduces what may be a very serious problem.
Q: What about Solar?
A: Solar? No.
Q: Wind?
A: No. Small amounts. Small amounts only. The simplest
form of pencil calculation will tell you that. But you
know, energy has to be produced for modern society on a
huge scale. The only way you can do that is with energy
sources that have concentrated energy in them: coal, oil,
natural gas. And the quintessential example of it is
nuclear, where the energy is so concentrated, you have
something to work [with]. With solar, your main problem
is gathering it. In nuclear, it's there. It's been
gathered.
Q: What about the rest of the world? What will it do for
energy?
A: Well, parts of the rest of the world are very much
powered by nuclear electricity today. France, of course,
is the principal example. But all of the Western European
countries. Japan will continue an orderly increase in the
amount of nuclear power. There's no question about that.
There will be a tremendous increase in China and in Asia
of both the use of coal and the use of nuclear energy. I
hope that most of it's nuclear.
Q: So the United States economically, by foreclosing the
nuclear future, will foreclose that part of its economic
policy too, its economic competition.
A: I think that this policy will have unintended
consequences that will be serious. But I recognize also
that any man's opinion is as good as anyone else's on
that. But one thing sure is that nuclear energy is going
to be needed, is needed today as an energy source. It
will be developed around the world. It will be developed
by highly intelligent people, every bit as intelligent as
we are. They will make the intelligent choices. They will
develop the forms of nuclear energy that are best. Our
nation will be best served by trying to lead, in my view,
or at least be a responsible part of it. I think that
best serves the interest.
Q: In terms of day-to-day operation, which puts more
radiation into the atmosphere: a coal plant or a nuclear
plant?
A: Coal plants, by a large margin.
Q: What's the form of the radiation?
A: The radiation is from the contaminants in the coal,
the radioactive contaminants in the coal, and they go
right up the stack.
Q: Which are?
A: Well, thorium.
Q: Uranium?
A: Uranium as well. Yeah, sure. And, well, I mean, it's
ridiculous. It's a large source of pollution.
Q: No nuclear plants are being commissioned since the
late '70s.
A: Right.
Q: Plants which are seeking to relicense are having
trouble because of the waste issue. Is the first chapter
of nuclear energy at least dead in this country? Can
anything save it now?
A: I don't know. You see, nuclear power in this country
has to be understood in the context that nuclear power
was never needed as a present day source. It wasn't
needed in the '50s, wasn't needed in the '60s, '70s,
'80s, isn't really needed today. The U.S. is still very
resource-rich with fossil fuels. And currently, we can
import as much oil as we want. And so as long as you can
do
that, and if nuclear power is troublesome to you in any
way, why, you just turn away from it. The present
generation of nuclear is a perfectly adequate electrical
generation source. There's no sound reason why it
shouldn't continue for decades. Is it going to? Yes, it
will. Will all of the nuclear plants now in operation
continue? No. But nuclear, for the plants that have been
well maintained and have largely had the capital costs
paid off, are going to be very cheap forms of electrical
energy that will be a real force. California, for
example, and other places to keep those plants going a
very long time. So it will go on. Will there be more
plants built? I don't know. Others' guesses are probably
better than mine.
Q: As somebody who's seen a technology which was
principally pioneered in this country, rise and fall, do
you feel frustrated that the next chapter may be made
somewhere else in the world?
A: Well, of course one does. I go back to my feelings
when I was a young man going into this field, that this
was the place to be to do something for mankind. And I
believe that we have succeeded in at least a modest way,
here at Argonne. And to have our nation not follow up on
it is disappointing. But many things in life are. The
exciting thing about nuclear power is its ability to
handle mankind's needs in the future. The vast amount of
energy that's possible from it. It's not if we can
produce it for two cents per hour or four cents a
kilowatt hour, where coal ... is three cents or whatever
... it requires an infrastructure and, if I may say so, a
care and intelligence perhaps not needed in a coal plant.
Q: So the need is based on a very long-term vision.
A: Yes, but not long-term by the lifetime of man. You
know, I sincerely hope that you live 80-90 years. On a
scale of 80 or 90 years, nuclear power is going to be a
very necessary thing, and in large amounts. Not only in
the rest of the world is my guess. It will be very
necessary here, as well.
Q: The current situation on the IFR, do you have any hope
that it can be saved?
A: I don't think that the administration will support
further work in nuclear energy. And without the
administration's support, there is little chance that a
successful development program could proceed. That must
be a policy of the nation, as enunciated by the
administration. And for good reason or not, that is not
the policy of this administration. So without
administration support, there is no real hope of
proceeding with the IFR.
--
Peter Myers, 381 Goodwood Rd, Childers 4660, Australia ph
+61 7 41262296
http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers
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