YAKIMA — The world needs nuclear power.
That’s what Alan Waltar, a nuclear engineer with decades of experience at Hanford and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, told the Yakima Rotary Club on Thursday.
Despite safety fears raised by 2011’s post-tsunami meltdown in Fukushima, Japan, and the ongoing debate about how and where to safely store waste, Waltar believes that nuclear power is the clean way to meet the planet’s growing energy needs.
“Fukushima was nuclear power’s finest hour,” Waltar said, echoing Winston Churchill’s famous speech about Britain not giving up during World War Two. “There was a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and the reactor survived. Everything worked as engineered.”
A 45-foot-high wall of water knocked out the diesel generator responsible for backup power to cool the reactors, causing three of the plant’s six reactors to melt down. But, most importantly, no one died, Waltar said.
People were evacuated, and the World Health Organization found that as a result, no one was exposed to radiation levels high enough to increase future cancer risks, he said.
The incident shows how safe nuclear power can be if a disaster of that scale can be managed without loss of life, Waltar said.
The earthquake and tsunami, on the other hand, killed almost 16,000 people.
Waltar, 72, is the past president of the American Nuclear Society. He taught nuclear engineering, and was the head of the nuclear engineering department, at Texas A&M University and served as director of nuclear energy at PNNL. He specializes in fast-breeder reactors, a nuclear process that creates more energy by reusing fuel, not typically used in American power plants. He’s written four books and currently serves as a consultant to a variety of government and industry nuclear organizations around the world.
In the Fukushima aftermath, fears about radiation and nuclear safety caused Japan to shutter its 55 plants. That decision was damaging to the country’s economy, Waltar said, because replacing that cheap electricity has been expensive. The government plans to restart the plants, with new safety regulations, this year or next, but public concern over safety remains high.
Germany is also trying to move away from nuclear power, but Waltar said the move is costing them, too.
“Germany pays 10 times more for their electricity than I do,” Waltar said. “They are heading for a cliff, pricing themselves out of business.”
Not that building a new nuclear power plant is cheap. Upfront, a 1,000- megawatt plant — enough to power about 800,000 homes — costs about $5 billion.
That’s a big investment for a utility company to make, especially in today’s cheap natural gas market. But five plants are being constructed in the Southeast, the first in decades. Most nuclear plant construction around the world is in China and India.
“I never thought I’d live to see the day that we are building new plants, but we are,” Waltar said.
Once built, nuclear power plants are cheap to run and the fuel supply is expansive, he said.
Waltar believes that new technologies for reprocessing and using the “waste” will reduce concerns about long-term storage liability.
But nuclear reactors of the future might not look like the plants built 40 years ago. There’s growing interest in small nuclear reactors that could be built in factories and assembled on site and bring costs down.
Engineers from around the world are developing different versions of these small reactors, which could be used individually or in a fleet, similar to a wind farm.
The smaller reactors are easier to cool because of their size, and safe because each unit is self-contained, Waltar said, but questions remain about costs and licensing.
He’s optimistic about the renewed research and believes that policies aimed at reducing emissions from fossil fuel use could give utilities more incentive to invest in nuclear again.
The problem with relying on renewable sources such as wind and solar is that they are intermittent, only producing when the sun shines and the wind blows. Utilities, meanwhile, need a consistent level of power production to keep everyone’s lights on. For many utilities, that power base comes from coal, natural gas or nuclear.
“Many of our coal plants need to be replaced. The small modular reactors are ideally suited to do that,” Waltar said.
Around the world, the demand for cheap, clean energy is only going to grow, he said, and he hopes the U.S. can regain the lead it once had in developing cutting-edge energy technology.
“The global nuclear renaissance is real,” Waltar said. “The question is do we have the courage to push ahead and be leaders again?”