“The nuclear renaissance isn’t just coming, it’s here already here.”

Those were the keynote remarks form J.M. Bernhard, Jr., CEO of the Shaw Group, at PennWebb’s “PowerGen” conference in Orlando last week.

The industry’s premier event, attended by 18,000 people, PowerGen was abuzz with talk of a nuclear revival. If you listened carefully, though, there was always a distinction to the scuttlebutt. “We’re doing a great business right now,” said one industry exhibitor after another. “But it’s all abroad.”

And it’s true. Although there is much talk about the number of applications now before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission  17 proposals that include 28 new reactors  the real action in nuclear construction right now is still taking place overseas. While Americans remain enthralled with the idea that we can solve all our electrical problems by covering the landscape with thousands of windmills, nuclear technology is still viewed with a great deal of fear and skepticism. The result is that America is actually beginning to fall behind the rest of the world on the technology. If the nuclear renaissance does not pick up steam here soon, the world revival is likely to be led by countries abroad.

Here’s a rundown on the current state of the renaissance:

Europe’s France remains the world leader in construction with 80 percent of its electricity coming from nuclear power. As a result, France has the lowest greenhouse gas emissions of any European country except Sweden as well as the cheapest electricity. Areva, the French nuclear giant, 96 percent owned by the government, is emerging as the world flagship, constructing new reactors in Finland and China and investing in key facilities in the United States. France is so replete with nuclear energy that it is shipping kilowatts to Belgium, Germany and Italy, making electricity its fourth largest export.

Finland has hired Areva to build Europe’s first new reactor in 30 years at Olkiluoto. Although the project has now fallen behind schedule largely because of the slow rate of approval by Finnish government inspectors. it is still scheduled to open in 2012. Even more reliant on nuclear in Scandinavia is Sweden, which gets half its electricity from nuclear, 40 percent from hydro, and has the lowest carbon emissions in Europe. A national referendum taken right after Three Mile Island in 1980 voted to shut down all 12 of the nation’s reactors by 2010. Two older reactors have been closed but any further action is now regarded as highly unrealistic.

Germany also voted in 2001 to phase out its reactors by 2020 and the policy is being implemented by Social Democratic Party members in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet. Two small reactors have been closed and four more, providing 4,000 MW, are scheduled to shut down in 2009. But nuclear still provides 30 percent of Germany’s electricity, with the rest coming from coal. The only alternative is to import more electricity from France or become more dependent on Russia for natural gas. A huge effort in wind has given Germans the second-highest rates in Europe (behind Denmark) but windmills cannot provide base load electricity and no power plants have been replaced, leaving Germany more energy-dependent than ever. Chancellor Merkel is now suggesting the country reconsider the reactor shotdowns.

Italy provides the best example of a country that has encountered first-hand the risks of going anti-nuclear. Whereas Sweden and Germany set long timelines, Italy closed down all its reactors within a few years and found itself woefully short of electricity. The country now imports nearly 80 percent of its power and has experienced recurring blackouts. In January 2008 Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi dismayed Europe by announcing plans to build eight new coal plants. He quickly switched to nuclear and the country is now considering a revival of its reactor program.

Russia and Eastern Europe. Anyone who thinks the Chernobyl accident in 1986 has permanently soured the former Soviet bloc on nuclear power is wrong. All Eastern European reactors have now been retrofitted with full safety regalia  little things like containment structures that Soviet scientists figured they didn’t need. Since the Soviets tended to locate their reactors far from Moscow, the surprising outcome of the Soviet breakup is that many of its former satellites get the majority of their electricity from nuclear.

The rub here is that Green Party influence in France and Germany has prevailed upon the European Union bureaucracy to insist that former East Bloc countries close most of their reactors before joining the European Union. (These are the same people who have persuaded Kyoto Protocol authorities to rule that countries cannot get carbon-reduction credits by building reactors in other countries.) “It’s been very unfair to Eastern Europe,” says Ognyan Minchev, Bulgarian director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Bulgaria used to export electricity all over the Balkans. Now we can’t even provide for ourselves.” After being forced to close four smaller reactors, Bulgaria is building a larger new facility at Belene.

Lithuania’s dilemma has become an international sore spot as it faces a 2009 EU deadline to close Ignalina-2, which provides 70 percent of the country’s electricity. Safety upgrades at the reactor have won a stamp of approval from several international agencies but the EU hasn’t budged. The effort is actually increasing tensions in the region, since the closure will make Lithuania almost totally dependent on Russian natural gas. The country is working to bring a new European Pressurized water Reactor (EPR) online by 2015 and has asked the EU to postpone any shutdown until the new unit is completed.

Asia. If Eastern Europe is a hotbed of new construction, real action is taking place in Asia. While the West has dithered, Asia has been forging ahead with nuclear technology - much as the world’s tallest skyscrapers are now being built in the Middle and Far East.

Japan has 55 reactors providing 30 percent of its electricity and is now seeking to close the nuclear cycle. In addition to constructing two new reactors, the Japanese are in the final planning stages of the 1300-MW Ohma mixed-oxide (MOX) facility, which will drastically reduce its inventories of so-called “nuclear waste.” South Korea has 20 reactors providing 40 percent of its electricity and is now aiming at the level of France, with 11 new plants under construction. Taiwan has four reactors providing 20 percent of its electricity.

The big news, however, is in China, which has bought technology from Russia, France and Japan and is planning to open 21 reactors by 2014. China’s nuclear push will mitigate its embrace of coal, which is already causing so much alarm in relation to global warming. Likewise, the recent signing of a technology agreement with the United States has stimulated India’s nuclear effort and the country is now planning 18 to 20 new reactors over the next 15 years, some of them using thorium, of which India has the world’s largest supplies.

So where does all this leave the United States, the one-time monopoly owner of the technology, now straggling dangerously toward the rear of the parade?

The future remains very uncertain. In theory, it now takes a minimum of three years to get through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s construction-and-operating license process but no one thinks it will happen that fast. With intervener groups dragging decisions into court, the more likely timeframe is five years and beyond.

Moreover, the courts have proved to be singularly obtuse in dealing with nuclear technology. Yucca Mountain is now delayed another five years because the District of Columbia Court of Appeals decided a 10,000-year environmental impact statement was not sufficient. The court ruled the EIS must project forward one million years. A million years ago, Homo erectus was pounding out stone tools on the African savannah. What will technology be like a million years hence? Who know? But the idea of holding up a facility until an accurate projection can be made is more than ludicrous.

As a result, America is now flirting with the possibility of becoming an economic colony where nuclear power is concerned. Only one American company,  General Electric,  still builds reactors and this is done in partnership with Hitachi. Westinghouse Electric, a 1970s pioneer in the field, was bought by Toshiba in 2006. Babcock and Wilcox, another first-generation participant, has dropped out entirely.

Last May Areva announced plans to build a uranium fuel fabrication plant in Idaho. In October, it partnered with Northrup Grumman Shipbuilding on a facility to manufacture reactor components in Newport News. And in December EDF (Electricity de France), the national utility, topped the bid of Warren Buffet’s MidAmerican Energy in the battle to for control Maryland’s Constellation Energy, which is planning a new reactor at Calvert Cliffs. Areva is making money hand-over-fist selling nuclear technology to the rest of the world. When asked how Areva planned to finance the Newport News facility in the midst of a credit meltdown, Jacques Besnainou, the director of American operations, replied: “Cash.”

“The last shall be first and the first shall be last” has been true since the days of the Bible. America once held the lead in nuclear technology but we have become so obsessed by fear and caution that we are rapidly falling into the second ranks. Besnainou summed it up well in his opening remarks at the PowerGen Conference: “If America had embraced nuclear power twenty years ago, it would be in much better economic shape than it is today.”

Here;s a story that is the opening vignette in my book.

Just after New Year’s in 2006 I was out in Golden, Colorado, visiting the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, doing research for the book. I was just listening to Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat on the car CD when I pull into the parking lot and there’s Thomas Friedman unloading his Discovery Channel camera crew to do some interviews. He was just getting off technology at that point and onto energy. We chatted for a few minutes, I told him I was also doing a book about energy, and then I said, I’m talking a lot about nuclear. Are you doing anything like that? He gave me a blank look as if I had just asked him to lend me $5 or something. That was it.

So I go in and do an interview with Larry, Kazmerski, who has been with the NREL since it was the Solar Energy Research Institute in 1977 and is now considered the government’s leading authority on photovoltaics. We talked for about 15 minutes. I never said a word about nuclear  and then I finally asked him, What do you think is the overall solution to our energy problems. (Friedman was about to show up any minute so we had to hurry.) He gave me a very wary look. You know you’re probably not going to believe this, but I think we need both solar AND nuclear. We’re big fans of nuclear energy around here. Nuclear can provide the base load power, solar can provide the peaking power, and we can begin to retire the fossil fuels.

I was a bit astonished myself. You know that’s what I’ve concluded in writing that book.

His eyes got real wide at that point. You mean you’re going to write THAT book! he said. I’ve been hoping for ten years that somebody would write that book. I can’t get anybody in the Department of Energy to talk to each other. The nuclear people all think the solars are a bunch of hippies and the solars think the nuclears are a bunch of Nazis. I’ve stood up at conference and said, `We need both these technologies working together to provide the country with electricity, but nobody will pay attention.

At this point Friedman arrived with his cameras and he had to go. I hung around just to see what would happen. Soon Friedman had Kazmerski stationed in a little garden of solar collectors that NREL is testing. After a few “strolling together shots he plants Kazmerski in front of one of the more photogenic collectors and says, So the reason Germany and Japan are forging ahead solar energy and we’re not is because the government is subsidizing it.

Let him say it, shouts the director from behind the camera.

And so they do it again a few times but finally he gets Kazmerski to say it. The reason Germany and Japan are developing solar energy and we’re not is because their governments are subsidizing it.

And that was it. He got what he wanted.

The whole country is now going on a Friedmanesque binge  we’re going to rebuild the economy around solar and wind energy. (Hot, Flat and Crowded, the current best seller, is the book that finally came out of this.) We’re going to put people to work, achieve sustainability, secure our energy independence, etc. etc. It’s only people like Friedman, who don’t understand the physics of energy, who can be so wildly enthusiastic about wind and other so-called €œrenewables. (In truth, no form of energy is renewable - that’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics.) Scientists who really understand the situation know that you need both solar and nuclear if you’re going to eliminate coal.

By the way, as far as wind is concerned, Kazmerski was less than enthusiastic. He had a little joke about wind. Solar and wind work really well together. We have a big problem with bird droppings on solar panels and wind kills a lot of birds.

I’ll bet to this day Thomas Friedman still does not realize that the country’s biggest expert in photovoltaics is also one of its most enthusiastic supporters of nuclear power.

Last week Time ran a feature story on backyard windmills, the latest green craze. The story described the adventures of Doug Morrell, a Coopersville, Michigan maverick who has installed a 55-foot device on his farm. Here’s the exact quote from the magazine:On days with decent wind - which occur frequently enough, since he can feel the breeze from Lake Michigan - the $16,000 Swift wind turbine can generate 1.5 kilowatts (kW) an hour, i.e., enough to power the average lightbulb for 15 hours.

Did you read that. $16,000 to power a single lightbulb!? And we’re supposed to get excited about this? Then the article goes on to complain that such backyard versions are not a part of the general subsidy being given to large wind farms of the Boone Pickens variety.

What’s really held back residential wing power has been the lack offederal subsidies, which have fed the growth of other renewables likesolar and large-scale wind.

I’m getting a really queasy feeling about all this wind stuff. The nation is about to launch into a whole orgy of “renewable energy” construction without the slightest awareness of what it’s buying into. People think we’re going to achieve energy independence by putting up wind farms. Boone Pickens thinks we’re going to cut our oil imports. President-elect Obama thinks we’re going to create jobs and pull the nation out of a recession. But all we’re going to end up doing is littering the countryside with a bunch of industrial monstrosities that produce very little useful energy. It already takes 125 square miles to equal the output of one 1000-megawatt power plant. But windmills are only generating electricity about one-quarter of the times. That means you need 500 square miles and even that has to be backed up by conventional sources in case the wind dies down across several states.

I think the country needs a basic lesson in physics. You can’t power an electrical grid with intermittent sources. The requirements for storage are immense - you essentially have to double capacity and even then no real technology has emerged. All this started off with “Small is Beautiful.” Now we’re talking about covering whole states with windmill farms and building an entirely new electrical grid to move all this elusive energy around.

On the other hand, Hyperion, a California company, just introduced a 70-MW nuclear reactor the size of a gazebo that can power a city of 15,000. And it wouldn’t require any new transmission lines. Is it possible that nuclear is really “small and beautiful?”

I’ve just gotten back from a weeklong tour of France’s major nuclear facilities. It was like wandering around Narnia. Here’s a country that gets 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear, that doesn’t burn a single ounce of coal or oil, that isn’t uglifying its landscape with giant windmills, that imports only half as much natural gas as Germany and Great Britain, and that is reprocessing all its nuclear fuel both for itself and other countries. One of their biggest projects is taking enriched uranium out of former Soviet weapons and “de-enriching” it down to the level where it is being used for fuel in American reactors. As everyone says, one out of every ten light bulbs in America is now being powered by a former Soviet weapon.

I’ve made the trip the last chapter of my book, which is now at the publisher’s. Just to give a complete accounting and a foretaste of the book, here it is:

Is there a land in which this vision of a world run on terrestrial energy has been fulfilled? Indeed there is. That country is France.

In May 2008 I took a weeklong tour of French nuclear facilities, from the reprocessing plant at La Hague to the MEDOX recycled fuel fabrication plant near Avignon. It was like a trip through Narnia. What only exists in theory on this side of the Atlantic is practical over there.

Moreover, the people I met didn’t express any particular smugness. we’re just putting into practice what you invented, they say, modestly enough. They freely acknowledge the technological advances of mid-20th century America and  anything - wish we would do more now. In fact, Areva, the French nuclear company, is returning the favor by building a reprocessing plant at the old Barnwell site in South Carolina and proposing two new reactors at Calvert Cliffs, Maryland, in conjunction with Constellation Energy. The very day we sat talking with executives in Paris, Areva revealed plans to build a new $3 billion uranium enrichment plant in Idaho Falls another important link in the nuclear revival. The announcement caused a stir in France but didn’t even make the Associated Press in this country. Stories in the Idaho papers were inevitably accompanied by the declaration from the Snake River Coalition that such a temple of idolatry would never be built in their Garden of Eden.

Briefly, here’s what nuclear power has done for France. It provides 80 percent of the country’s electricity at the lowest rates in Europe. It gives France the second-lowest level of carbon emissions in Europe, behind only Sweden, a smaller country that is half hydro, half nuclear. It provides France’s third largest import, behind only wine and agricultural products. It allows Germany, Belgium and Denmark to posture that they are anti-nuclear while in fact they are importing nuclear electricity from France and have quietly abandoned the vow to shut down their own reactors. Italy, much less skilled at hypocrisy, actually closed down its three reactors, leaving it with frequent blackouts. The country now imports 70 percent of its electricity and recently horrified Europe with plans to build several new coal plants.

In short, by marching to Charles de Gaul’s own drum, France has solved its energy and environmental problems and is about to show the rest of the world how to do it as well.

*

I have always found the first few hours of a trip to be the most vulnerable and as usual, this one starts with a near-disaster. When I went to Iraq a year ago, I arrived in Kuwait Airport to find a sign saying my baggage would not be arriving. I called British Airways and five minutes later realized my laptop was gone as well. In less than twenty minutes, I had lost 80 percent of my possessions. Fortunately I went back and found I had left the laptop on top of the telephone booth, but the baggage never arrived, which is why thanks to small claims court,  I am now flying for free.

My tour guide for the trip is Jarrett Adams, a young American who has just joined the public relations staff at Areva’s American headquarters in Baltimore. I am supposed to make it to Station St.-Lazare on the West side of Paris and meet at the Blue Train. From there we will catch the afternoon train to Avignon for a Monday morning tour. I assume the Blue Train is a train, however, and – through some misunderstanding of my bad French, my cabdriver ends up taking me to the Gare du Nord on the other side of the city. By the time I realize I am in the wrong place it is getting perilously close to departure. Our cell phones don’t work yet but after frantic emails on hotel wireless cards, we finally get straightened out and rendezvous at the Blue Train - which is a restaurant - at Gare St. Lazare. It is amazing how quickly lack of a language can turn you into a lost child.

By late afternoon we are whizzing south on a “bullet train, that will make the 400-mile journey in a remarkable three hours. It is already getting toward the solstice and at this latitude there is not a trace of twilight as we rocket through the countryside. The most common crop is fields of a yellow flower that makes the whole landscape look like a well-tended garden. Our seatmate says it is a variety of hay fed to cattle. Further south, vineyards begin to prevail.

Adams fills me in on the French nuclear effort. “It started with Charles de Gaulle,  he says. You may recall, the French decided to build their own bomb in the 1950s and that meant they had to start enriching uranium. They were very smart, however, and saw the energy potential. France never had much coal and no oil either. They had some foothold in the Middle East and North Africa but saw that was slipping away. Long before America had its oil awakening, they had been anticipating energy problems.

After the Arab Boycott, the French government made an all-out commitment to nuclear. There was growing opposition worldwide but the government felt it didn’t have any choice. They had a slogan. `We don’t have any oil, but we have ideas. That’s the reason they’re so far ahead of us now. As we approach Avignon, the landscape becomes mountainous. On one of the last ridges, we see our first windmill silhouetted against the sunset. French Premier Jean Sarkozy recently commented he thought France had done well to spare itself the sight of wind farms cluttering its landscapes. At the same time, I have found some of the most pleasing vistas of cooling towers are taken against the background of French countryside.

Headquarters of the French Popes,  Avignon is a walled Medieval city now besieged by tour buses parked at its doorstep. Our hotel claimed to be part of the French Pope;s original complex, but it certainly had undergone a few renovations since the 14th century.

Next morning we head for the Melox plant in suburban Marcoule. A very horizontal industrial establishment, it sits atop a small plateau overlooking the Rhone about 35 miles to the northwest. The building’s glass-and-steel fade is striped with individual red and yellow lines that the brochure says are designed to make it blend with the surrounding landscape. Security is tight, however, and the all-encompassing barbed-wire fences give it the feel of a low-grade state prison. Belying this atmosphere, the walkways glisten with Mediterranean sunshine and knots of workers stroll casually in Areva’s spanking white jumpsuit uniforms.

After threading our way through numerous identification procedures and radiation checks, we are ushered into an upstairs conference room where we meet Pierre Guelfe, chief engineer of the facility. Predictably, Guelfe has a company Power Point ready to roll but – even more typically can’t get the projector to work. I recall the story of Lou Gerstner’s first tour through IBM, where he finally turned off the slide projector of one vice president and said, “Look, just tell me about your business. Taking my cue, I tell Guelfe to forget the Power Points and start peppering him with questions.

What’s the main operation you do here, I ask.

Our biggest task is recycling spent fuel from La Hague, he begins. When the depleted fuel rods are removed the reactors they are shipped to La Hague for reprocessing. They let it cool down for a few years and then remove the uranium and plutonium. They ship the plutonium here. We take it and mix it with another stream of material, which is the scrap that is left over from uranium enrichment. The U-235 content of this is very low, as you know, U-235 is the fissionable isotope -

Yes, I know.

But the plutonium is much more fissionable than the depleted uranium. So when we mix them together, you get a fuel that is very close to enriched uranium. It’s called Mixed Oxide Fuel MOX. We have 20 reactors here in France running on MOX and there are ten more in Germany and two in Switzerland. So we’re plutonium and scrap uranium together. We use everything. We don’t leave any waste.

There’s one thing I want to ask, I said. I’ve read this several times but I want to make absolutely sure. The plutonium that comes out of a commercial reactor, that you separate from the fuel rod, that cannot be used to make a bomb, right?

That’s right, he nodded. “You have four plutonium isotopes  Pu-239, Pu-240, Pu-241 and Pu-242. Of the four, only Pu-239 can sustain a chain reaction. The others are contaminants. The PU-241 is too highly radioactive. It fissiles too fast so you can’t control it to make a bomb. But you can use all of them to sustain fission in a MOX reactor.

I lean back for a second. I don’t know whether you know all this  I’m sure you do – but we completely ended reprocessing in the United States in the 1970s on the premise that if we extracted plutonium someone might use it to make a bomb. We were saving the world from nuclear proliferation. But in fact, as you’re saying, this is all wrong. You can’t use plutonium from a commercial reactor to build a bomb?

You have to have a special kind of fast reactor that breeds only Pu-239, he said. That’s what the North Koreans did.

So we’ve created this whole problem of nuclear waste on a false premise. And we’re building this huge complex at Yucca Mountain on a completely mistaken idea.

He gave a little Gallic shrug and smiled under his mustache. That’s right, he said.

The other thing we’re doing here is recycling former Soviet bomb material, he continued, returning to his Power Point. When the Soviets were making weapons they decided to stockpile all kinds of enriched uranium. Then the Soviet Union collapsed and all this bomb material was left sitting around. No one knew where half of it was and there and there were a lot people who didn’t have any money and would be happy to sell it. So two American Senators.

Peter Domenici and Sam Nunn.

Right. They negotiated a deal where we would de-enrich all this uranium down to reactor grade. And that is what we are doing now. They ship it to us here, we mix it with more scraps from uranium enrichment, and then we ship it to you. What is it they say? `One out of every ten light bulbs in the United States is being lit by a former Soviet weapon.

“You think people would be dancing in the streets.

“Swords into plowshares, he said with another little Gallic grin, just like in the Bible.

We don our Areva jumpsuits and make tour of the plant. As soon as we enter the first room we encounter a seven-foot cylinder painted yellow. This is plutonium, says Marty Delphin, our guide. “It just arrived from La Hague.

I put my hand up against it and sure enough, the container is warm. “So this is the dreaded plutonium? Delphin nods. Plutonium is not a gamma emitter, right?

“Just alpha, he says.

Feels like energy! I say.

And it can’t blow up! adds Guelfe. Everyone gets a laugh out of that.

The working part of the plant is narrow and cramped, so that it feels like we are in the bowels of a submarine. At every turn there are glass compartments behind which some mechanical task in the pelletization of the fuel is taking place. They are somehow reminiscent of aquariums. Each unit has a glove box where workers can reach in and manipulate the process if something goes awry.

“We have different a different fuel for each country, explains Delphin. “Every reactor has a slightly different design so we have to mix the fuel to very tight specifications. These ones are headed for Japan, indicating a sealed container.

Like the original uranium fuel rods that arrive at a reactor, they are only mildly radioactive. Don’t get too close, says Delphin as I do a close inspection. Just a precaution, he says apologetically. I want to see the Russian material but we must rush back to catch the afternoon train. We’re due in Paris for another round of appointments in tomorrow morning.

The next day we meet at Areva’s headquarters with Arthur De Montalembert, vice president for international and marketing and Jacques Besnainou, vice president for the back-end sector. Anne Lauvergeon, the president of Areva and rated one of the ten most powerful women in the world by Time, has a busy schedule and was unavailable for an interview.

De Montalembert is the kind of suave, debonair Frenchman you would expect to meet in the upper reaches of the national bureaucracy. He talks in measured tones, the gray at his temples adding gravity to his words. Besnainou, on the other hand, is a pudgy, ebullient Sancho Panza with a hawk nose and a bubbling enthusiasm that counters de Montalembert’s reserve.

Naturally, they want to give us the same Power Point but we quickly tell them we’ve seen it. Well, you’ve come at a very opportune moment, De Montalembert begins. We’re just announcing our new uranium enrichment plant in the United States. We’ve been considering five sites and we’re now picking the winner.

What were the five sites?

“Columbus, Ohio, where there is already an enrichment plant, the Argonne Laboratory, near Chicago, Los Alamos, Hanford, Washington, and Idaho Falls, near the national laboratory, he says. I feel good I’ve already visited three of the five.

So who’s the winner?

I can’t say until the announcement is made, De Montalembert smiles.

“I promise I won’t phone my rewrite desk. He smiles again but no answer. (It was Idaho Falls.)

We are building a reprocessing plant in South Carolina as part of the GNEP effort, he continues solemnly. And we have plans to build two new reactors at the Calvert Cliffs site in Maryland.

Do you think you’ll run into opposition on any of this? I ask.

De Montalembert demurs. We know we will have the academy against us, he says, choosing a nice French word to describe the universities. I am just going down to debate Mr. Frank Von Hippel of Princeton this afternoon. He says he is in favor of nuclear power but is against reprocessing. <!–[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]–> <!–[endif]–> Basically, you’ve dropped the ball, chimes in Besnainou enthusiastically. The U.S. was the leader in this technology for a long time but then you stopped. Glenn Seaborg invented the process for extracting plutonium in 1944. It was very difficult. He tried hundreds of solvents but finally found one that worked.

Sounds like Thomas Edison.

Right. So the process hasn’t changed at all since then, he says cheerfully. You provided the theory. We’ve just done the engineering. We’re keeping the torch alive.

The younger generation will probably be different, says de Montalembert. Anne Lauvergeon spoke at Harvard last winter and invited a group of nuclear opponents to come over to France and see what we are doing. We’ll be showing them around next month.

It’s difficult to see why this is so hard to sell to America, says Besnainou with only a touch of regret. You recycle household garbage. You’re very good at that. Why not recycle spent fuel as well. We’ve cut our need for uranium 30 percent by reprocessing. There’s so much energy left there. We’re calling spent fuel the new uranium mines.

The next day we make our final visit to the reprocessing plant at La Havre. This time it’s only 120 miles through the beautiful French countryside but still two hours since the train doesn’t travel as fast. As we approach the coast of the English Channel, the landscape begins to undulate and I try to imagine American soldiers fighting along the hedgerows in the Normandy Invasion. I am still reading the publicity brochure from the Paris headquarters:

Source of Life. Since that gigantic nuclear explosion, origin of the universe, called the Big Bang, matter and energy have remained a united and faithful duo. Man himself is stardust. . . Today the stars, the sun, and the burning core of the earth are ceaseless beds of nuclear reactions . . . . From distant stars to the earth’s core, it continues its constructive work. Man has learnt to master one nuclear reaction, fission, taming it into a clean and inexpensive energy.

They understand these things over here.

The La Hague Reprocessing Center sits on top of a cliff just outside Cherbourg overlooking the English Channel. It’s the same flat, industrial design, trying to look unobtrusive, with its prison-fence surrounding. Security here is even tighter, with an endless round of ID cards and personal codes that change every time we enter a new section. Our guide is Christopher Naugnot, a mid-30s, brush-cut communications director whose English,  like everyone else’s, is very good.

Naugnot leads us into a conference room and once again there is the same old Power Point ready to roll. We’ve got it memorized by now, I tell him. So he provides us with some bare details  the facility employs 5,000, 20 percent of the jobs in Cherbourg, it’s been operating for twenty years, the locals love it. (We were to meet with the Mayor of Cherbourg but he had to cancel because of one of the ubiquitous French holidays.) The U.S. has produced 50,000 tons of spent fuel and has designed Yucca Mountain to hold 70,000 tons, says Naugnot. We’ve already recycled 24,000 tons at this facility.

Why don’t you just take all our fuel off our hands? I ask.

You’re producing about 2,000 new tons a year. We can only reprocess 1,700 tons a year at this facility so we’d be hard pressed. We’d much rather recycle in the United States.

So are you going to do it?

That’s what we’re trying to do in South Carolina.

We don jumpsuits once again and start through the facility. Naugnot tells us how the spent fuel casks are generally shipped by rail, then offloaded into trucks, which bring them to the plant. They enter through the basement and then are brought into a sealed room where they are cooled for awhile before they’re put into the storage pools. We’ll see that next.

We climb a stairs and find ourselves standing outside a glass window looking through a thick yellowish glass into a room perhaps about 2,500 feet square, brilliantly lit and filled with about as much equipment as the average weight room.

Why is the glass yellow, I ask with one of those innocuous questions that usually lead someplace.

It’s treated with lead, for shielding the radiation.

And suddenly, there it is before us. Like some benthic organism being hauled out of the deep, a complete fuel assembly is slowing rising out of the floor, lifted by an overhead crane, until it reaches the full height of the room. With its steel frame and vertical black lines  the fuel rods  it looks eerily like a miniaturized version of the World Trade Center. Yet its blank and featureless face has the soulless menace of a shark’s eye.

What’s the radiation coming out of that thing?

Naugnot consults quickly with a nuclear engineer who speaks only French.

“Un million millirads, says the engineer. A million millirem. Quick calculation that’s 1000 rems. The highest exposure people got standing near ground zero at Hiroshima was only 500 rems. This is truly the most powerful and dangerous material on earth. Yet here we are, perfectly shielded by a foot of lead-laced glass. If we suffer the slightest exposure, the full-body radiation detectors will catch it when we leave.

What happens if something goes wrong in there? I ask.

Right here, says Naugnot. On either side of the window there are handles that attach to two long arms extending inside the room that can reach almost 20 feet in any direction. You should see what those guys can do with these things. We should have brought someone down to show you.

How long has it been since someone was in that room?

Not since it was built. And they won’t be in there again until years after it’s decommissioned. If you walked in there now, you’d be killed instantly. But we have that wall and glass between us.

The next stop is the swimming pool, a larger version of the storage pools that hold spent fuel at almost every nuclear plant. This one is near-Olympic size. The blue Cerenkov glow is fainter, giving it the color of one of those horrible kids kool-aid flavors. As we scan the perimeter I suddenly see something wildly incongruous and yet perfectly appropriate - life preservers hanging about every twenty yards along the guardrail – a perfect conjunction of high- and low-tech.

Anybody ever fall in? I ask.

Not yet, says Naugnot. “But if they did, it wouldn’t hurt them. The water protects you. I tell him the story I have heard of American workers occasionally taking a splash in the storage pools, much to the consternation of the NRC.

How long do the rods stay in here? I ask.

Up to fifteen years.

Fifteen years?! I would have thought a few months. “So all this happens on a completely different time scale than any other industrial operation, I say.

It takes a long time to get one of these operations started, he says. “But once you get going, it runs pretty smoothly. We don’t have many lulls.

Next we see more behind-the-glass machinery slicing operations of the fuel assemblies being sliced into small sections and submerged in nitric acid, which dissolves the material. Then another solvent  Glenn Seaborg extracts the uranium and plutonium, which is shipped off to Avignon. Other actinides are drawn off by similar procedures.

What remains are the fission products  cesium, strontium and others  all highly radioactive and highly compact. These are vitrified dissolved into a molten glass that hardens with the radioactive material in solution. The glass will stay the same for thousands of years, says Naugnot. It isn’t protective  you need a steel container for that  but the radioactive products won’t dissolve or move anywhere. It is this vitrified material that is put in final storage.

And so at last we find ourselves standing in that one room in La Hague, the place where the French keep all the nuclear waste from 25 years of producing 80 percent of their electricity beneath the floor. I have thought about this room for months. Now I am standing in it.

It is a bit larger than I imagined. Somehow I had seen it as about the size of a small visitors center. Instead it is more like a large basketball gymnasium. Still, it’s one large room. In the floor there are about 40 manhole covers stenciled with Areva’s triangular logo. All are so tightly sealed with no visible handles it seems impossible they could ever be removed.

They’re magnetized, Naugnot explains. He points to the ceiling. “See this large  how do you say it in English.

Gantry?

Yes, gantry. There’s a magnetized crane that removes them. Inside the plug there’s another cap with handles. The crane can grasp them as well. The canisters are very small. There’s room for six in each ring. They’re stacked six-deep beneath the floor. The total material stored here for each French citizen is ten grams  about the weight of a two-Euro coin.

And that’s it,  the sum total of what the French call les dechets their nuclear waste. Even this storage is only temporary. The material can be retrieved any time the French Parliament decides that recycling of more radioactive isotopes is economical. The entire environmental footprint of 25 years of producing the France’s electricity, the equivalent of all those sulfur sludge piles and billions of tons of carbon dioxide hurled into the atmosphere is right here beneath my feet. The French have proved in practice what we can only say in theory - there is no such thing as nuclear waste.

 

I apologize for not posting here for awhile. I guess this is starting to look like one of those “abandoned blogs” before it even gets started. My excuse is I have been editing the final draft of the book, which is now on schedule to come out in late August / early September. Bartleby Press is doing a great job of rushing it into production. They just chose a cover last week that is a beautiful picture of a pair of cooling towers standing next to a wheat field. In fact there are a lot of pictures like that. We also have one of a pair of towers almost in the middle of a vineyard in France. You can do that with nuclear because it doesn’t have to be surrounded by the mountains of coal you get at a coal plant. You do get “emissions” with a cooling tower, however. My 18-year-old son (who’s a big Obama fan) looked at the picture and said, “But Dad, you’ve still got pollution coming out of those towers.” I had to explain. “Dylan, that’s steam. It’s not carbon dioxide. The thin little wisps of smoke you see coming out of a cooling tower is just water vapor. There’s nothing bad about it.” It’s a distinction that a lot of people find hard to make - including me sometimes. I noticed this at the Zimmer coal plant in Ohio, near Cincinnati. It’s sort of a landmark in America’s energy saga because in 1985 it was 95 percent completed as a nuclear reactor. Cincinnati Gas & Electric had already sunk several billion dollars into it when they decided they would never be able to get an operating license. In those days the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would make you tear apart a reactor and insert some new safety development every time something was invented. And of course there were public protests since everybody was still traumatized by Three Mile Island. Anyway, they switched it to coal and now it puts out its obligatory CO2 and other by-products. It’s a very “clean” coal plant in that most of the sulfur and ash are precipitated or scrubbed out. The smoke is also white but it’s a very dense white, not the cirrus-cloud transparency of steam. I also found the people at the plant who have experience with nuclear all hate Zimmer and with they were working at a reactor - but that’s a different story. It’s in the book.

And while we’re on the subject of the book, I would suggest since this book won’t be out until August you go right now to Gwyneth Cravens’ website and check out her book, Power to Save the World (what a beautiful title), which came out in October. (www.powertosavetheworld.com). Gwyneth is a skilled writer with seven novels under her belt who actually protested the Shoreham Nuclear Reactor on Long Island in the 1980s - generally considered the very nadir of nuclear’s long history. She’s from New Mexico, however, and while visiting her family one time had a chance encounter with a leading nuclear scientist from Los Alamos. He surprised her by defending nuclear and ended up taking her on a long, eight-year Dante-like trip through the country’s nuclear infrastructure. Little by little she realized the truth about nuclear (that’s the subtitle of the book) and has written a beautiful account of her gradual conversion. She’s now touring the country giving speeches and making some headway. None of this is going to happen fast. People will be won over one by one.

So what does any of this have to do with Paris? Well, I’m headed out tomorrow to do a tour of the French nuclear facilities. I realized it would be the capstone to my book. I’ll have to write fast because Bartleby is raring to go to press. I’m going to talk to executives at the offices of Areva, the French nationally owned nuclear company, and then tour the reprocessing facilities near Avignon and the “nuclear waste dump” in Le Hague. The facility (I forget the name of it) is France’s Yucca Mountain. The only difference is that, because the French reprocess - i.e., recycle - their nuclear fuel, they don’t really have any “waste.” The high-level material that can’t be immediately used for something - more fuel, medical isotopes - is all stored in ONE ROOM at Le Hague. That’s all the “waste” from 25 years of producing 75 percent of their electricity with nuclear. People find that hard to grasp. It is hard to grasp. We haven’t really understood how different - how much more highly concentrated - the energy stored at the nucleus of the atom really is. It really has nothing in common with fossil fuels. That’s something I spend a lot of time explaining in my book. You have to - it takes a lot of explaining. I’ll be blogging from Paris - a good way of taking notes.

The French had a slogan when they decided to go nuclear in the 1970s. “We don’t have any oil but we have ideas.” That’s the French for you. Unfortunately, in the U.S. our slogan at the time was, “We don’t have any ideas, but we have lots of coal.” That’s where we are today.

A lot of people point out that France is a very highly centralized country and it’s only because the government owns and runs everything that they’ve been able to “go nuclear.” The same is being said of China - which has a big reactor program, although not big enough. (They’re building a new coal plant every week.) The argument is that this is America and we should decentralize, go with “distributed” power and avoid those big, hulking 2000-megawatt reactors that may require a “nuclear priesthood” to run. (That was Alvin Weinberg’s phrase.) There’s a certain amount of truth to this. One of the things that stalled nuclear in the U.S. is that it was being built and operated by individual utilities - often very isolated utilities that didn’t know what the heck they were doing - and certainly if you take Silicon Valley as the prototype for our economy, it would be better to take this “small is beautiful” approach. That’s Amory Lovins’ approach. He argues that “microturbines” are the answer to our electrical needs. Every household should have a small electrical generator that captures the steam from its turbine and creates all kinds of efficiencies. The grid should be “a thousand points of light,” so to speak, instead of just a few hulking reactors on the edge of the city somewhere.

There’s definitely an appeal to this vision - and Silicon Valley itself is now sinking hundreds of millions into “alternate energy,” which it sees as the “next big thing.” (Personally, I think it’s a bubble that’s eventually going to pop, but that’s investment advice I’m not licensed to give.) But the answer to that, I believe, is that, in an evolutionary situation (which is what we’re in), no solution works forever. There was a very nice article in New Scientist two weeks ago about “Myths of Evolution.” (Search it at http://www.newscientist.com/home.ns.) One of the myths was that “Natural selection leads to ever greater complexity.” On the surface it seems true - human beings are obviously much more complex than bacteria. (The measure is how long it takes to reproduce one.) But it’s not a one-way street or straight-ahead process. Some of the greatest advances in evolution have resulted from greater SIMPLICITY. Once a simple solution to a problem is found, a lot of other more complicated things can be discarded. That’s why we have so much material in our genes that doesn’t do anything - it’s not needed anymore. It’s the same in any engineering task - even writing. Sometimes you can take a whole paragraph to explain something and when you think about it long enough, you realize it can be said better in one sentence. That’s why, if you’re using “track changes,” your discarded material often exceeds your finished work.

Anyway, the point is, Lovins’ vision of every-house-a-microturbine has its own unnecessary complexity. “Small is beautiful” works different ways. The microturbines themselves may be small but the NETWORK they create is far more complex than generating all this electricity in a single power plant. Then of course you have to ask the question, “What’s going to run all these microturbines?” The answer usually is “natural gas” (although sometimes it’s hydrogen manufactured from windmills blanketing all over North and South Dakota.) So what we’re essentially doing is taking one 1000-megawatt (MW) natural gas fired generator and cutting it up into 100,000 pieces so you have 100,000 household generators putting out 10 kilowatts apiece. Now, is that going to do anything to reduce carbon emissions and global warming? How can it? Whatever efficiencies are gained from using the steam will be lost by the thermodynamics of tiny little generators expending waste heat. That’s why we built bigger and bigger boilers in the first place - because there’s less wasted energy. And what will 100,000 natural gas microturbines do for weaning us off fossil fuels?

That’s one fallacy that nuclear opponents all share - that, as Al Gore put it, “Nuclear reactors only come in one size - extra large.” You can build a micro-reactor that puts out 10 kW and it would probably fit in the palm of your hand. We may do that some day when we overcome our fear of nuclear power. But for now it makes sense to build the biggest reactors we can because we’re trying to REPLACE a coal infrastructure that reaches across the entire country (600 major plants putting out half our electricity).

And that brings up another subject that is going to be a very sore point here. That’s the coal industry itself. Anyone who thinks that the almost incalculable advantages of nuclear - its compactness, its ease of transport, its lack of pollution - is going to make the game easy doesn’t understand politics. Aside from farming, no industry is so firmly entrenched in America as the coal industry. There are “coal states” in which the governors and senators do nothing but dream up new ways to use coal. West Virginia is almost entirely run by coal interests - which is why they’ve been able to decapitate 10 percent of the mountains in the state now without much opposition. Ted Rockwell, one of the last of the Los Alamos generation (he was Admiral Hyman Rickover’s biographer) believes that the Nuclear Energy Institute itself is sabotaged from within by the coal industry. “NEI is made up completely of utilities and for every nuclear reactor those utilities own they have three or four coal plants. Do you think they really want to see coal pay its own way by paying a carbon tax?”

That’s why I desperately wish the environmental movement would wake up and join the nuclear industry in a “nuclear-solar alliance” that would try to push a carbon tax through Congress. Neither group is ever going to accomplish it by themselves and when push comes to shove they often end up opposing each other. I read somewhere the other day that John McCain was very good on global warming - he did co-sponsor the McCain-Lieberman Act proposing a carbon tax - but that he had “fatally polluted” his own effort by supporting nuclear power! What in heaven’s name do these people think is going to REPLACE coal in generating 50 percent of our electricity if not nuclear?

That’s why I’m going to France.

I’ve been collecting little bon mots like that (see I’m speaking French already) and wanted to make a list of them. The ability of the mainstream press to ignore the EXISTENCE of nuclear power is reaching monumental proportions. For instance, in the April 28th issue, Time ran a special Earth Day cover story (bordered in green for the first time in its history), “How to Win The War On Global Warming.” A twelve-page special section talking about everything from carbon capture to tidal energy and not a single MENTION of nuclear power. The article even cited nuclear FUSION at one point - that way-down-the-line technology that no one has even been able to prove yet - but not a single word about nuclear fission, which provides 80 percent of France’s electricity and has been with us for more than 50 years. Another example is Jeff Goodell’s recent book, Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future. Goodell, an editor at Rolling Stone, spends 380 pages making a great case about all the horrible things coal do to our environment. Yet here is the one half-sentence that he writes about nuclear power: [A]t least coal plants are not going to melt down in some radioactive nightmare or increase the risk that some Middle Eastern terrorist will get his hands on a few ounces of uranium.” (You could probably get your hands on a few ounces of uranium in your back yard. I think he means plutonium.) A lot of global warming advocates seem to make a point of pride in not knowing anything about nuclear.

So that’s it for now. I probably shouldn’t have gone on for so long here. I just haven’t emptied my head in awhile. The next dispatch will be form Avignon, where we’ll visit the MELOX plant where the French reprocess spent fuel rods into a “mixed oxide” fuel of uranium and plutonium that can be burned in other reactors. (The Japanese just bought a big batch: http://www.areva.com/servlet/cp_kansai_28_04_2008-c-PressRelease-cid-1209133111773-en.html.) Parlez-vous nucleaire?

Hi, I’m Bill Tucker, author of the forthcoming book, Terrestrial Energy, and operator of this website. As you can see, it’s about nuclear energy, global warming and the threat to the environment. The theme of my book is that nuclear power is the only technology that’s ever going to make an impact in cutting carbon emissions and heading off global warming. Anyone who understands physics knows this is true. The quantities of energy we need to run our society just aren’t available from what we’re calling the “clean alternatives.” Solar energy in its various manifestations are incredibly dilute and takes an incredible amount of effort to gather and distribute. It’s “environmental footprint” is gargantuan - that’s the best word I can come up with. Think of Lake Powell backed up behind Hoover Dam in Nevada. It produces 2000 megawatts (MW), which is about one-third more than the largest nuclear plant. The nuke can sit on an industrial park about about two square miles. I just finished reading a fairly famous paper by Jesse Ausubel, of Rockefeller University, “Renewable and Nuclear Heresies.” http://phe.rockefeller.edu/docs/HeresiesFinal.pdf. He makes another analogy in there. If you were to burn trees to produce as much power as one nuclear plant, you would need a forest of one thousand square miles.

People have trouble grasping this. In fact it’s one of the themes of my book. The secret of understanding nuclear is in Einstein’s formula, E=mc2. (Sorry, no superscript in this format.) That says we derive energy by turning matter into energy. (You can also turn energy into matter, but that’s something only God has been able to do so far.) When we burn coal, we’re transforming very, very infinitesimal amounts of matter in the electron orbits into energy, or at least releasing it from where it’s been stored. The point is this. The structure of the atom is that 99.99 percent of the matter is in the nucleus. The protons and neutrons weight about 2 million times more than the electrons, which are virtually weightless. Therefore the energy release from transformations in the nucleus are about 2 million times greater than what we can get from “chemical” changes in burning coal or oil. (The energy that comes from turning a windmill or a tapping a waterfall is orders of magnitude less than that. They’re not even chemical energy but kinetic energy, the weakest kind.)

That’s why you have these juxtapositions: two square miles for nuclear reactor versus one thousands square miles for “biofuels.” Coal throws off 3 billions tons of carbon dioxide a year in America, nuclear zero. Of course, there’s the “nuclear waste,” which is highly radioactive, but that’s completely misunderstood. That radioactivity is only more energy. We could tap it - and nations such as France and Japan, which are now way ahead of us on nuclear, already do. The reason spent nuclear fuel is so radioactive is because there’s so much energy left in it. The ultimate “waste” product of the breakdown of uranium by-products is non-radioactive lead. It’s harmless and useful. Waste implies something that has been remitted into the environment so that, even though it may be potentially useful for something, it’s much too difficult and expensive to recover. The carbon dioxide exhausts from fossil fuel burning that are thrown into the atmosphere are “waste.” But nuclear by-products are all sitting in one place, waiting to be recycled or stored. There is no such thing as “nuclear waste.”

That’s a lot of information and I’d much prefer you explore these issues through the site, which we’ve tried to set up to make it accessible.

I’ve called nuclear energy “terrestrial energy” because that’s what it is. It’s energy stored in the earth. The interior of the earth is heated to a temperature of 7000 degrees Fahrenheit by the breakdown of uranium and thorium in the mantle. That’s hotter than the surface of the sun. We can tap this as “geothermal energy,” but the much easier strategy is to mine a little bit of the source of this energy - the uranium - and duplicate the process, accelerating it a little, in a “nuclear reactor.” Terrestrial energy is perfectly natural. it’s no different than digging up the stored solar energy in coal - and a lot, lot cleaner. It’s environmentally benign, not nearly as dangerous as people suppose, and has the potential to save the planet from all kinds of degradation caused by less concentrated and messier forms of stored energy. As Ausubel says, “Nuclear is green.”

Unfortunately, there’s a huge bifurcation in American society. We have a core of people who understand nuclear technology, who recognize its world-saving potential, but who simply can’t communicate this to the general public - and are getting kind of bitter about it as well. Then we have the general public that yearns for something exactly like nuclear - “clean energy” - but is totally misinformed about it and therefore fearful. If you take the time and patience to explain nuclear to people, they almost always understand. But it’s difficult and you have to get their attention.

Blogging is writing to its core. I’ve been writing for 25 years but I’ve never done anything like this - pure public declamation where you have to be brief, concise and comprehensible or people will roll their eyes, get bored, and wander off to some other subject. If you’ve read this far then I guess I’ve got your attention, so please feel free to post as much as you like. I’m desperate for suggestions. And I’ll be back soon to list some of those ridiculous instances where even the most sophisticated people (Al Gore, for instance) don’t seem to understand nuclear energy.