Nuclear Policy and Maroon Football
As a third-generation graduate of the University of Chicago, nuclear power has a special place in my thinking about policy. The University of Chicago Maroons (the university’s football team) played at Alonzo Stagg Field and had many achievements, including being the only football team undefeated against Notre Dame. The most important achievement at Stagg Field, however, occurred off the pitch: in an experiment on December 2, 1942, a team of scientists affiliated with what we now refer to as the Manhattan Project created the first nuclear chain reaction in a storage room under the grandstand of the stadium. A pile of radioactive material stacked in a roughly spherical shape among graphite bricks drove a reaction for roughly half an hour before shutdown. It had no cooling system and no radiation protection for onlookers.
However, in a subsequent trial at Stagg Field, the reaction was not properly regulated and went supercritical, with a rapidly-increasing rate of fission, leading to substantial damage to the stadium and a release of radiation into the surrounding area. The remains of the football stadium were demolished and replaced with the Regenstein Library (the beginning of generations of jokes about the University of Chicago’s interest in academics versus athletics). Detectable levels of radiation still exist within the ground-level classrooms of the Regenstein.
The Chicago experience is a microcosm of nuclear history. In general, the world’s nuclear luck has been very good. Despite an incomplete understanding of nuclear power and sixty years of disagreement over nuclear reactor design, few accidents have occurred. However, when things have gone wrong, they have created great concern – arguably disproportionately great concern.
Let’s examine the central challenges of nuclear power policy.
The first issue is the enormous cost of the reactors themselves. This has several effects. First, because the reactors are so enormously expensive, they must have long life spans over which to amortize these initial costs. This means that, in a world where people sign three-year automobile leases and buy new iPods every six months, nuclear reactors are expected to run for decades with minimal downtime and zero failures. Because nuclear power tends to be in use in developed countries with strong legal structures and strong property rights, perceived litigation risks often deter private actors. Hence, unfortunately, government bureaucracies tend to be involved in nuclear power rather than private corporations. This involvement may take the form of subsidies, in the United States, or direct involvement, in the case of France. The complexity of these funding arrangements makes it very difficult to estimate the real cost of nuclear power production.
The second is disagreement over the design of reactors. While there are many layers of subtlety here, there are essentially two designs. The American, primitive, cheaper design is a boiling water design of the type we’ve seen in Japan this past week. The French, advanced, expensive design is what is termed a third-generation reactor and the type of design most likely to lead to super-fast sodium-cooled reactors (which will be fourth-generation reactors). In general, the French design is so expensive that it is nearly impossible to produce with private-sector capital, but most experts agree it is safer than the American design and requires less maintenance. Its development was a continuation of unprecedented investment in reactor design in France (during the 1950’s, when France planned to produce 100% of its power from nuclear reactors) where many breakthroughs in reactor design were achieved.
The third issue is non-proliferation concerns about weapons affecting the availability of nuclear power. Largely due to this issue and the difficulty of raising large amounts of project capital for reactors, many countries that probably should have nuclear power plants don’t. Those that do have nuclear plants are subject to scrutiny that focuses more on weaponization prevention than on safety encouragement. There are people born in 1941 who have great-grandchildren. Nuclear reactors are the only 1940’s technology that we invest billions in restricting. Continuing to restrict access to this technology harms everyone: it reduces incentives to improve the core technologies, it reduces the number of scientists and engineers available to the nuclear power industry, and, most importantly, it reduces the number of people and corporations who are able to enjoy cheap, clean, reliable power.
This leads to the last difficult policy issue: the environmental impact of nuclear power. In short, nuclear power has far less environmental impact than any other system we’ve devised for producing large, reliable quantities of electricity. Many economists, including Kevin M. Murphy at the University of Chicago, have argued that building dozens of additional nuclear plants in China and Brazil could slash the world’s CO2 emissions to target levels without other countries needing to adjust their emissions (the concept is that a set of climate-related trade policies would allow other countries to buy nuclear reactors for China and Brazil to meet global emissions goals). There are other benefits to more widespread use of nuclear power, including the ability to spread R&D costs for fourth-generation reactors across a wider market of consumers and the prospect of speeding the development of small reactors, which could be important in the developing world and in the agriculture-to-manufacturing transition that many economies in the global south are experiencing, a transition which involves activities that are hugely energy-intensive.
In sum, nuclear power presents difficult questions for policymakers due to huge costs over long timelines and high expectations from the public around reactor safely and reliability. In the seventy years since the early reactions at the University of Chicago, environmentalists (on the left) and those interested in stopping the spread of the technology (primarily on the right) have stunted the development of nuclear technology and limited its availability. As a result, today’s nuclear plants are antiquated, today’s nuclear industry often does not draw the world’s top scientists and engineers, and today’s policy goals around nuclear power are far less ambitious than those of the past.
Rather than restricting nuclear power in the wake of the situation in Japan, policymakers should seize this opportunity to push for more and better nuclear powerplants in the future. The nuclear power industry is much like the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field – containing evidence of breakthroughs and setbacks – and, like Stagg Field, this industry can and should be rebuilt even after the most high-profile and discouraging events.
