My Letter to the President Concerning Climate Change and the Integral Fast Reactor

May 11, 2012

The Honorable Barack H. Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC  20500

Climate Change and the Integral Fast Reactor

Dear President Obama:

I write as a private citizen on behalf of myself and my grandson, Cavanagh, age 4, and his sister or brother whose arrival is anticipated this fall.

I believe that today civilization is facing its greatest threat ever in the form of climate change.  The principal cause is industrialization’s reliance for energy on fossil fuels, which emit climate-changing greenhouse gases.  The principal cure is a revolutionary new climate-stabilizing source of energy called the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR).  The advantages of this technology are summarized in my one-page attachment to this letter.

Forty-seven years ago President Johnson was warned by his science advisors that fossil fuel emissions could cause “uncontrollable” changes in climate—and he so warned Congress.  Climate change is a global problem, of course, but the United States was then, as now, the leader of the free world community.  It also happens to be the leader in climate change; its emissions of the most persistent greenhouse gas over the last century and a half are three times those of any other country.  The United States should, therefore, be leading the world in a global response to climate change.  Instead, it is doing, and has done, nothing.

Churchill said you can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.  For my grandchildren’s sake, I hope that’s true, but my reading of history leads me to believe that doing the right thing always requires strong political leadership.  It took all of FDR’s skill and commitment to prepare an isolationist-minded country for World War II; still, extension of the peacetime draft just four months before Pearl Harbor passed the House by only one vote.  Preparing a conservative-minded country for a change to climate-stabilizing energy sources requires equal skill and commitment.

Climatologist James Hansen wrote you (as President-elect) with three recommendations: phase out coal-fired power plants that don’t capture and store carbon emissions; enact a rising tax on fossil fuels with proceeds refunded to consumers; and fast-track the R&D of 4th-generation nuclear power such as the IFR.  Last fall serial entrepreneur Steve Kirsch suggested (in a letter to your assistant Heather Zichal) that you meet with Charles Till, former director of IFR development at Argonne National Laboratory.  I write to add my grandchildren’s voices and my own to theirs: IFR is the key to stabilizing the climate.

Sincerely,

Attachment: Integral Fast Reactor

Nuclear power systems create heat through nuclear fission for steam turbines to generate electricity.  The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) is a nuclear power system developed at the US Argonne National Laboratory that replenishes, recycles, refines and fabricates its unique metallic fuel and meets all five criteria for 4th-generation nuclear power listed below.

1.   Reduce the volume and toxicity of nuclear waste.

Existing nuclear light water reactors (LWRs) use only one percent of their uranium fuel and leave vast amounts of radioactive spent fuel including plutonium as toxic waste to be sequestered for multiple thousands of years.  IFR pyroprocessing recycles its spent fuel until all the longest-lasting radioactive elements have been used up.  Its much smaller amount of much less toxic waste needs to be sequestered for only 300 years.  Pyroprocessing can also recycle LWR spent fuel for IFR use.

2.   Keep nuclear materials unsuitable for direct use in weapons.

Nuclear fission weapons use uranium (as at Hiroshima) or plutonium (Nagasaki).  While weapons-grade uranium has to be enriched to increase its fissile isotope, U-235, from under one percent of natural uranium to more than 80 percent, weapons-grade plutonium can be chemically separated from the uranium that breeds it.  But in electro-refining during IFR pyroprocessing, plutonium is mixed with other elements that make it unsuitable for weapons.

3.   Be passively safe based on characteristics inherent in the reactor design and materials.

Because its fuel is a solid metallic alloy, IFR responds automatically to overheating caused by loss of coolant flow (as at Chernobyl) or output heat sink (Three Mile Island, Fukushima) by slowing or shutting down its reactor power.  Overheating causes metal fuel in core assemblies to expand, thereby increasing reactor size by a miniscule amount but enough to increase neutron leakage that reduces reactivity and overheating.  Other features—liquid sodium metal coolant with high boiling temperature; large sodium-filled reactor pool resisting the temperature increase; and the weak effect in metal fuel of a natural (stored Doppler) tendency to increase reactivity—provide the time and safety margins for the thermal expansion to take effect.  The metal fuel also has a low melting temperature; when all else fails, it will start melting and then disperse, reducing reactivity.

4.   Provide a long-term energy source not limited by resources.

By recycling its used uranium fuel and the plutonium fuel that it breeds from uranium, IFR increases the productivity of mineable uranium a hundred-fold.  (Plutonium, a natural element like uranium, has to be bred from uranium since it has no mineable sources.)  If IFR or a similar breeder supplied all of the world’s needs for electricity, uranium supplies could last as long as the planet.  Thus IFR is as “renewable” an energy source as solar, wind, water and geothermal.

5.   Be economically competitive with other electricity sources.

Since IFR’s systems are small, simple and designed for remote manufacturing, its capital costs should be competitive.  If the cost of waste storage are accounted for in the operating costs of LWRs and the negative externalities of greenhouse gases, toxic emissions and non-conventional mining in fossil fuel plants, IFR should be a runaway winner.  Its 24/7 availability wherever steam turbines can operate should make it competitive with solar, wind, water and geothermal power.

In 1994 Congress upheld the President’s termination of IFR development as “unnecessary.”

References: Yoon I. Chang, “Advanced Nuclear System for the 21st Century” (2002), http://www.ipd.anl.gov/anlpubs/2002/04/42922.pdf; Charles E. Till, “Plentiful Energy and the IFR Story” (2005), http://www.sustainablenuclear.org/PADs/pad0509till.html; and Till and Chang, Plentiful Energy: The Story of the Integral Fast Reactor (2011), ISBN 978-1466384606.  (Revised 6/17/12)

Peak Denial

When I was 11 or 12, I started worrying about what would happen if the world ran out of natural resources.  I can’t remember which I had in mind, but this was during World War II when availability of resources was talked about.  My father’s response was reassuring: we would invent some substitute, as we invented synthetic rubber during the war when natural rubber supplies were cut off.  Necessity is the mother of invention, as the phrase went.

I can imagine that I might have given my son the same answer -- but not my grandson.

One difference between now and when I was 11 or 12 is world population.  It was 2.4 billion then and 2.5 billion in 1950 when I entered college.  Today it’s seven billion, almost three times larger.

But in the same time period the world economy has grown almost ten times larger.  The Earth Policy Institute tells us that “consumption has begun to outstrip natural assets on a global scale."  Leaving aside non-regenerative assets like oil and fossil aquifers,

“demand has surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity.  We are overharvesting forests, overplowing fields, overgrazing grasslands, overdrawing aquifers, overfishing oceans, and pumping far more carbon into the atmosphere than nature can absorb.”

Again leaving out oil, the demand for and growing scarcity of all important commodities in the last decade has led to a surge in prices that erased the benefits of a century of declining prices.  Investment guru Jeremy Grantham believes that rising prices are very probably here to stay, representing a “Paradigm Shift” that is “perhaps the most important economic event since the industrial Revolution.”

 

“We all need to develop resource plans,” he concludes, “particularly energy policies.  There is little time to waste.”

Tell  that to the US Congress, and what do you get?  Policies that encourage overplowing, overdrawing and the pumping of more carbon into the atmosphere than nature can absorb without warming the globe and acidifying its oceans.

By way of explanation (or excuse), Grantham suggests that humans are genetically ill-disposed to dealing with “long horizon issues and deferring gratification,” possibly because “we could not store food for over 99% of our species’ career and were totally concerned with staying alive this year and this week.”  He also thinks humans are “optimistic and overconfident,” traits which may have been important to our survival.  Especially Americans.

In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking Penguin 2005), Jared Diamond’s examination of human societies that succumbed to environmental problems and others that survived them, the author said that in planning the book he assumed it would just be about environmental damage.  But later he realized he had to add other factors including the only one that proved significant in every society’s failure or success -- “the society’s responses to its environmental problems.” 

The environmental issues for these societies, chiefly deforestation and soil and water problems, were similar to those we face today.  Global warming, however, is a modern issue, derived from industrialization and the growth in human population that it made possible.  President Johnson was officially advised of it in 1965, but neither he nor any of his eight successors nor any Congress in the almost half-century since has taken action.

Global warming is a long horizon issue, of course, though not so distant that it won’t affect our grandchildren.  It also requires a global response involving other nations.  But we acted with other nations to control toxic chemicals (another modern environmental issue) creating a hole in the ozone layer.  The fault is not in our stars but in our politics.

Since fossil fuel emissions account for most of the increase in greenhouse gases that cause global warming, an obvious first response to reduce and eventually reverse this increase is to raise the price of fossil fuels by taxing them or capping their use, thereby making non-fossil energy more competitive.  But enough members of Congress are indebted to corporate interests that profit from fossil fuels or depend on them to block any such response.

Most of these members claim to doubt global warming.  But considering “the consensus scientific view” that global warming is occurring and that greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary cause, their claim seems more like self-induced self-delusion -- a fig leaf we could call Peak Denial hiding their representation of the corporate interests held by the 1% rather than the interests of the 99% among their voters and the public good.

Global warming, left unchecked, will eventually create an environment that’s different from the one to which both we as a species and the food that we grow are genetically adapted.  How the world society responds to it may determine whether the society succeeds or fails.

Congress is consistently choosing to fail.  To make sure that society succeeds, we must choose a Congress that is not dependent on the 1%.