by CKR
In the midst of negotiating the nuclear deal with India, President Bush announced the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. I wondered about that timing. Ivan Oelrich is wondering about the continuing rush toward “implementing” this program.
The National Academy of Sciences just released a report that is highly critical of GNEP on technical grounds. They go into more detail than Oelrich and I did, but they repeat some of our points. The bottom line is that the United States has been out of the reactor business for a long time, particularly reprocessing, and it’s foolish to come back with a single bright idea and think that you’re going to tell the world how to develop nuclear power. Particularly on a rush schedule.
I’ve been trying to develop several posts lately, all of them on the theme of the utter lack of planning, strategy, on the part of the Bush administration. It’s becoming clear: there is at least an incapability in this area, and perhaps an antipathy to the very concept of strategy (strategery?). You want democracy in the Middle East? Presto: we invade Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein. End of planning. You want North Korea or Iran to end their nuclear programs? Presto: don’t speak to them. End of planning.
So there’s a problem with states having a full nuclear fuel cycle capability: that also gives them potential weapons capability. Russia is eager to use its overbuilt reprocessing and fuel fabrication capability. The nuclear industry in the United States wants some of the largesse that’s been going to the coal and defense industries. The national laboratories are casting about for something to do. Presto: stack together proposals that some of the national laboratories have been pushing aggressively with large numbers of contracts to the nuclear industry, top with what can be called visionary goals, tie with a tattered bow recycled from the Baruch Plan, and you have GNEP. President Bush needed an announcement for that talk, and, besides, Mohammed ElBarade and the Russians were making proposals for international control of reprocessing and fuel fabrication. Yeah, it upset the Indians some, but nobody’s perfect. End of planning.
So, as in the invasion of Iraq, the first steps are perfectly clear: award contracts to industry. Recently, $16.3 million. Some of this is for the preparation of “technical road maps.” These are plans for future work on which future contracts will be based. Would it surprise anyone if those technical road maps pointed in the directions of the contractors who prepare them?
As I did, the NAS committee finds the goals of GNEP diffuse and unclear:
The goals of the DOE’s GNEP program appear to consist of what DOE terms “objectives” and “criteria.”The committee points out that GNEP will require storage of fission products outside repositories for “several decades to hundreds of years.” It finds the technologies proposed to be in very early stages of development and questions whether it is wise to move immediately to full-scale plants much larger than any that have been built anywhere in the world without engineering scale-up. It estimates that GNEP will require many decades and many billions of dollars.
A reasonable person might suggest going back to the drawing board, which is more or less the NAS recommendation. However, if you are the executive of one of the companies that can benefit from the many contracts that will be let for those many billions of dollars, this looks like lifetime security. Build a plant that doesn’t work? Ten years to build and ten years to retrofit. Cost-plus contracts all the way. And, of course, there has to be all that R&D to continue to support making the plant work.
Visions of the Manhattan Project will be invoked by supporters. We can make nuclear power work if we really put our minds to it.
I would like to agree with this. If we could foster a Manhattan-Project-like atmosphere in which developing nuclear power becomes a matter of national and personal survival, in which the participants are willing to give their all to make it work, a goal different from supporting their company, making sure their technology wins the competition, having a chance to prove their ideas and ego, then I believe we could do it.
And I really don’t think that is likely to happen in today’s world.