nuclear-news

A New Kind of Nuclear War; The Pentagon pushes for fission for fighting, POGO,BY MARK THOMPSON 19 Apr19 “…… the Pentagon wants to build flyable and truckable nuclear-power plants to generate the power U.S. troops need to wage war deep in hostile territory.The concept of micro-nuclear power plants on the battlefield is both inspired and insane.  The idea of landing portable nuclear reactors inside a war zone is as outlandish—economically and environmentally—as it sounds.

Yet the Pentagon’s nuclear push didn’t “go critical”—achieve a self-sustaining atomic reaction—on its own. “It is the culmination of a patient, decade-long effort by nuclear lobbyists to interest Defense and its congressional overseers in a costly product—small nuclear reactors—that few in the private sector seem to want,” Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in February. “The Pentagon is precisely the savior small nuclear reactor vendors need: deep-pocketed and unbeholden to return-seeking investors.”

Beyond that, the Pentagon’s nuclear advocates argue that battlefield nuclear reactors would improve the environment and help jump-start the nuclear-reactor business, creating thousands of well-paying jobs in the process. That meshes with the U.S. nuclear industry’s push to peddle more civilian reactors abroad, including a meeting with President Trump in February. “He really wanted to hear from us on what our views are on how we win the global nuclear energy technology race,” said J. Clay Sell, head of Maryland-based X-energy, an advanced nuclear-reactor company seeking business in Jordan. ….

it should come as no surprise that the nuclear industry is pulling out all the stops as it sees climate-change concerns giving it a second lease on life, even as renewable energy (wind, solar, hydroelectric) is now producing more power in the United States. The NEI spends about $2 million annually seeking favors from the federal government. Conveniently, the Trump Administration is seeking to bail out the nuclear industry.

The nuclear industry’s push isn’t only in Washington, DC. It’s gaining traction with state legislatures as well, most notably in Pennsylvania, home to Three Mile Island, the site of the most serious nuclear-power plant accident in U.S. history. In the last three years, Exelon, which operates Three Mile Island, has ramped up its lobbying efforts in Pennsylvania, in hopes of boosting taxpayer subsidies.

The Pentagon has had a long-standing romance with nuclear power, dating back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki…….

the Pentagon is trying to build support for the plan by noting that mini-nukes have heart-warming peaceful uses, too. “A small mobile nuclear reactor would enable a more rapid response during Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) operations,” it said earlier this year in a “request for information” seeking outside help to develop portable atomic reactors for war zones…….

The Pentagon wants a reactor capable of generating between 1 and 10 megawatts (enough for a base housing at least 1,000 troops for three years without refueling. Weighing no more than 40 tons, it must be “sized for transportability by truck, ship, and C-17 aircraft.” And to avoid the problems posed by water-cooled reactors, it needs to be cooled by “ambient air,” just like the original VW Beetle and its distinctive putt-putt engine……..

The unit will be “semiautonomous—Not requiring manned control by operators to ensure safe operation,” the Pentagon says. Starting it up should take less than three days, and shutting it down should take no more than a week. Their basic design is as simple as nuclear power gets: as the reactor fuel decays, it generates heat that is then turned into electricity. The Pentagon plans on funding up to three designs before tapping a winner from among them. Other nations—Canada, China, and the United Kingdom—are also exploring such small reactors…….

Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists says the “lobbying push” to build micro-nukes for the U.S. military comes from the U.S. Nuclear Industry Council. The Washington-based trade group says it is “composed of over 80 companies” and “represents the ‘Who’s Who’ of the nuclear energy supply chain community, including key utility movers, technology developers, fuel cycle companies, construction engineers, manufacturers and service providers.”

But nuclear insiders also are playing a critical role.   Among the authors of that key Defense Science Board report were some atomic heavyweights, including co-chairman Michael Anastasio, the only person to ever run two of the nation’s nuclear labs (he is the former head of Los Alamos in New Mexico, and Lawrence Livermore in California), and William Madia, who served as director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state. ……

There are proliferation risks associated with deploying nuclear reactors amid wars. The 2016 Defense Science Board report suggested that portable nuclear reactors be fueled only with low-enriched uranium that couldn’t be turned into nuclear weapons, although it conceded they would represent “a lucrative target to become a dirty bomb if breached.” The Pentagon’s January 2019 solicitation said that “technology, engineering, and operations must demonstrate minimization of added proliferation risk.” Of course, the U.S. government has been through this before, dating back to President Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” initiative. That led to the first nuclear reactors in Iran and Pakistan.

Harnessing nuclear power on the battlefield would require changes in U.S. military training, nuclear regulation and licensing, as well as convincing foreign governments to let them on their soil. ……..

Training soldiers to deploy and operate portable nuclear power plants would be challenging, although the Army said in the report, “this requirement is not anticipated to be as demanding as that of a nuclear weapon.” Any Army port-a-nuke “must prevent the reactor from going critical when it should not, such as during movement/transport.” While such a reactor “is not expected to survive a direct kinetic attack,” the Army said it would be designed “for the protection of personnel who may be adversely affected by the system or threats to the system.”

Outsiders are dubious. “Even a reactor as small as 1 megawatt-electric would contain a large quantity of highly radioactive, long-lived isotopes such as cesium-137—a potential dirty bomb far bigger than the medical radiation sources that have caused much concern among security experts,” the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Lyman warned in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “At best a release of radioactivity would be a costly disruption, and at worst it would cause immediate harm to personnel, render the base unusable for years, and alienate the host country.”

Any radiation leakage would be far more vexing than the cleanup after dumping about 20 million gallons of Agent Orange and other herbicides on Vietnam from 1961 to 1971. “While design simplification and damage-resistant fuel choices help, detailed planning for cleanup and removal of battle-damaged reactors or reactor components will be expensive and pose some technical challenges to resolve,” the Army report said, likely requiring changes to “existing treaties, international agreements, and policies.”

At the end of the day, of course, the big bugaboo is what to do with all that spent, but still dangerous, nuclear fuel. But not to worry: the Army has figured that out, too. “Nuclear fuel is a DOE [Department of Energy] responsibility,” the Army notes. “Issues such as recycling of nuclear fuel or long-term disposal are not DOD’s business.”

Perfect.

Of course, the Energy Department hasn’t figured out what to do with the 80,000 metric tonsof spent nuclear-reactor fuel created by U.S. commercial reactors over the past half-century. Bottom line: thinking about sending portable nuclear reactors off to war is kind of like invading a country with no plan for how to get out. https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2019/04/a-new-kind-of-nuclear-war/