Nuclear Power

NUCLEAR POWER

NUCLEAR POWER refers to the energy produced by fission, when atoms are split, or by fusion, when two nuclei of a light atomare fused to forma single nucleus. The energy produced can be used for weapons or for peaceful purposes. The phrase is also used to designate those nations that have nuclear weapons. The first five nations to declare that they had nuclear weapons were the United States (1945), the former Soviet Union (1949), Great Britain (1952), France (1960), and China (1964), known as the "Big Five." The breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s resulted in the addition of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine as nuclear-weapon states because the nuclear missiles and storage sites placed on their territory by the Soviet Union became the property of these newly independent states; all three, however, transferred their weapons to Russia. India conducted its first nuclear test in 1974, followed by Pakistan in 1998. North Korea is believed to have the capacity to develop nuclear weapons within a short time. Others, such as Israel, have likely developed one or more such weapons secretly. Some analysts believe that another group of countries, including Iraq, were trying to develop nuclear weapons at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Nuclear power also refers to plants and industry that generate electric power from nuclear sources. The possibility of using the energy in the atomic nucleus as a power source was widely recognized soon after the discovery of nuclear fission late in 1938, but only the United States was able to devote any significant effort to atomic energy development during World War II. On 2 December 1942 Enrico Fermi and others achieved the first self-sustained chain reaction at Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. This experiment made possible the construction of three large plutonium-producing reactors; each generated about 250,000 kilowatts of energy, but they were not used for electric power production.

Despite the initial popular belief that the use of nuclear power was imminent, technical progress was slow after the war. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), facing extreme shortages of uranium ore, supported only three small reactor projects before 1950. One of these, the Experimental Breeder Reactor No. 1, succeeded in generating a few kilowatts of electric power late in 1951, an accomplishment more symbolic than practical.

Growing industrial interest in nuclear power by 1952, basic revision in atomic energy legislation in 1954, and increasing ore supplies made a more ambitious program possible in the 1950s. The AEC adopted a five-year plan designed to test the feasibility of five different reactor systems. One of these, the pressurized water reactor (PWR)—designed and and built by a joint AEC-Navy tea munder Rear Adm. H. G. Rickover, at Shippingport, Pennsylvania—produced 60,000 kilowatts of electricity for commercial use before the end of 1957. The AEC's Argonne National Laboratory, at Lemont, Illinois, under Walter H. Zinn, successfully developed the experimental boiling water reactor (EBWR). The PWR and EBWR committed the United States almost exclusively to water-cooled reactors for the next two decades. By the end of 1957, the AEC had seven experimental reactors in operation, and American industry had started nine independent or cooperative projects expected to produce 800,000 kilowatts of electricity by the mid-1960s.

Nuclear power plants differ from hydroelectric plants—which generate electricity from the force of flowing water—and from coal-, oil-, or gas-fired electric plants, which generate electricity from the heat drawn from burning fossil fuels. Nuclear power plants generate steam to drive electric turbines by circulating liquid through a nuclear reactor. The reactor produces heat through the controlled fission of atomic fuel. Normally the fuel for power reactors is slightly enriched uranium. These differences give nuclear reactors several advantages over power generation using other fuels. Unlike fossil fuels, nuclear fuel does not foul the air and is not dependent on oil imports from unstable parts of the world. Before the environmental effects of radioactive wastes and the safety hazards of nuclear plants became apparent in the 1960s and 1970s, some environmentalists were strong advocates of nuclear power as a "clean" energy source. Others, aware of the rising costs of the world's diminishing coal, oil, and natural gas resources and the limitation on the number of hydroelectric power plants that could be built, believed that nuclear plants could be the key to an independent American energy supply.

The attraction of electricity generated by nuclear power was not limited to the United States. In contrast to the American emphasis on water-cooled reactors, both the United Kingdom and France chose to rely on gas-cooled systems. By 1957 the United Kingdom was building or planning twelve reactors with a capacity of more than 1 million kilowatts; the French were building five reactors totaling more than 350,000 kilowatts. The Soviet Union was planning a 200,000-kilowatt PWR and two smaller boiling-water reactors. By 1966 nuclear power generators were being built or operating in five countries. By 1980 there were a hundred nuclear power plants in the United States.

Technical difficulties prevented any of these national plans from being realized by the early 1960s. In the United States the AEC countered the resulting pessimism

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by predicting the imminence of economically competitive nuclear power and concentrating resources on the most promising reactor designs—water-cooled reactors for the immediate future and sodium-cooled breeder reactors for later decades in the century. This confidence was fulfilled by early 1964, when an American power company first announced its decision, on the basis of economics alone, to construct a nuclear power plant. Despite a temporary dampening effect of licensing delays and challenges from environmentalists protesting the dumping of radioactive wastes, the trend toward nuclear power accelerated again in the early 1970s. By the fall of 1972, the total nuclear gross generating capacity of all nations outside the Communist bloc had reached 32 million kilowatts. Of this total, the United States provided 13 million electrical kilowatts generated in twenty-eight operating plants. More than a hundred additional plants with a total capacity of more than 116 million kilowatts had been ordered or were under construction in the United States.

A serious accident at Three Mile Island in 1979 proved to be a major turning point for nuclear power in the United States, and no new nuclear generators have been ordered since. All of the increases in nuclear-generated electricity since 1979 have come from existing plants, which have boosted their national capacity factor from under 65 percent in 1970 to 76 percent in 1996.

One of the byproducts of nuclear-power generation is plutonium, a material that can be chemically processed for use in nuclear weapons. The danger of such use by nonnuclear nations led to international safeguards under the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In Article III signatory nations agreed to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), "with a view to

preventing diversion of nuclear energy from peaceful uses to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices." Most of the world's nuclear and nonnuclear nations signed this treaty. Iraq in 1992 and North Korea in 1994 were subjected to IAEA inspections that proved treaty violations in the former and raised serious suspicions about the latter. Both nations were signatories of the treaty, although North Korea announced its withdrawal some months prior to inspection. Iraq's nuclear-weapon production facilities were discovered as a result of a series of highly intrusive IAEA inspections and were subsequently destroyed by the United Nations.

When Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, it approved President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace program, which included commercial development of nuclear reactors for the purpose of generating electric power. During the 1960s electricity generated by nuclear power contributed 1 to 2 percent of the nation's energy total. Since then that percentage has grown steadily, surpassing the proportion from hydroelectric sources in 1984.By 1990 nuclear power amounted to one-fifth of the nation's total generation of electricity. By 1992 nuclear generation reached 619 billion net kilowatt hours, more than double the amount generated in 1979, the year of the Three Mile Island accident.

In reaction to the 1973 oil embargo, U.S. consumers temporarily used less energy, which diminished the rate of growth in electricity generation. As a result of this and other factors, such as higher construction costs, delays brought on by antinuclear protests, increased operating costs resulting from new federal regulations, and uncertainties about disposal of high-level radioactive waste, no requests for construction of new nuclear power plants have been received by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since 1978.The level of generation was still rising, however, because plants started in the 1970s had gone on-line, and modernization after 1979 made power plants more efficient. The rising production trend continued until the end of the twentieth century; in the year 2000, for example, 104 commercial nuclear plants in the United States produced 20.5 percent of all electricity consumed in the United States. Nuclear power's future is far from clear, however. The Energy Information Administration projected in 2001 that 27 percent of the nation's nuclear generating capacity then in existence would be retired by 2020, with no construction of new plants anticipated.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration. Annual Energy Outlook 2002 with Projections to 2020. Washington, D.C.: Department of Energy, 2001.

Deudney, Daniel, and Christopher Flavin. Renewable Energy: The Power to Choose. New York: W.W. Norton, 1983.

Duffy, Robert J. Nuclear Politics in America: A History and Theory of Government Regulation. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997.

Henderson, Harry. Nuclear Power: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2000.

Robert M. Guth

Richard G. Hewlett / c. w.

See also Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1978) ; Nuclear Test Ban Treaty .