The Upchurch American Energy Act

Since the Republicans have proposed the American Energy Act, I thought this is a good time to put forward my own proposal. I think I can safely say that my plan has just as much chance passing in the current Congress as the Republican plan. I'm cribbing most of this from the French, since 78% of their electricity is from nuclear power. If you add in the hydroelectric power, then nearly 90% of their electricity is generated without producing carbon dioxide.

1. Create a Federal Power Authority.

The Federal Power Authority would be have the power to build and operate nuclear power plants anywhere in the United States. They wouldn't be involved in selling electricity to end-users and would sell electricity to the electric power utilities at wholesale, with one possible exception I will note below. If the wholesale pricing is good, then I anticipate little resistance from local power companies, since their focus is on selling power, not on producing it. Power companies focused on sales to other utilities will be less thrilled, since the FPA is going to be an 800 pound gorilla.

I was concerned about how to go about creating such a large federal agency from scratch, when it occurred to me that the nucleus of the FPA already exists in the Tennessee Valley Authority. They have been in the business of generating electricity since the thirties and they already operate 6 nuclear reactors at 3 different locations in two states. We would expand their authority to build nuclear power plants anywhere in the United States and keep the power of eminent domain and to issue bonds they already have. Their authority would be expanded to include the ability to issue tax exempt bonds to build nuclear power. The FPA would retain the other missions of the TVA besides power generation, but only in the Tennessee Valley.

The FPA would stay at their current headquarters in Knoxville, Tennessee. Since the whole purpose of expanding the TVA, is so the FPA can hit the ground running relocating the authority would be counter productive. There is also big advantage in being just down the road from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. ORNL is part of the Department of Energy. I haven't figured out exactly what will be the relationship will be between the FPA and the DOE.

2. Spent Fuel Storage and Reprocessing

The FPA would be responsible for accepting spent fuel from their own reactors and from other operators and storing it in their own storage site. They would also have a fuel reprocessing plant at same location and a reactor that would use reprocessed fuel. Colocating the spent fuel storage and fuel reprocessing is just common sense and also putting a power reactor on the same site will create employment for the county that hosts the facility. An ideal candidate would be large and sparsely populated county, with less than 10,000 households.

A lot of the resistance to nuclear storage facilities is that the local residents see it as an all pain/no gain situation. This approach will mean that a large percentage of the local residents will be FPA employees, their families and people providing goods and services to them. Also the FPA will sell electricity to local homes at a rate determined by incremental cost of production for the first 2000KWH and at the wholesale rates over that. Since they are using reprocessed fuel, the incremental cost may be less than 1 cent per KWH. I hope this spurs some competition about which county gets the facility.

Notice I said waste storage not disposal. 95% of spent fuel rods are Uranium or Plutonium which we can reprocess. Most of the remainder can be used in an Integral Fast Reactor which we will also build at the facility. It may be 50 years before we find out what is actually waste and not more fuel and by then we will have the technology to convert that into something harmless.

3. Licensing

The FPA will only use reactor designs approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The FPA will be self-licensing as far as site and operating licenses are concerned. They are already a licensed operator and we can beef up their Inspector General's department to make sure that they observe best practices. The current TVA Inspector General is a presidential appointee and that would be continued in the FPA.

Frankly, with their current workload, there is no way the NRC could process the extra 10 to 12 site licenses that the FPA would generate. It takes the NRC years to turn around the current applications. Adding to their workload wouldn't actually get more plants approved. It will just increase the approval time and cost.

We might also want to try some different ways to encourage good safety practices. For example we might require all managers at a reactor to live within 10 miles of the facility and try to have some of the managers working in inspection during construction.

4. Reactor Selection

One thing the French experience proved is that if you want to keep costs down, pick a single design and build a lot of them. With economies of scale and learning, the last plant is going to cost a fraction of the first plant. With quantity purchases we can get better prices from our vendors and have specialized construction crews moving from site to site during the construction.

I'm inclined to go with the Westinghouse AP1000 for a few reasons.

1. It's already approved by the NRC.
2. It's a generation III+ design which is much simpler and safer than older designs
3. It has a modular design which make it faster and cheaper to build.
4. The Chinese as already building one, so we can take advantage of what they learn while building them.
5. The Chinese plan to build 100 AP1000 reactors. If we build 100 also, then cost of the components should really come down. They should literally be coming off an assembly line.
   

5. Federal Lands

Whenever possible, the FPA should try to build their reactors on land the federal government already owns. This will save billions in purchase costs and cause less PR problems than exercising eminent domain would.

6. Future Plans

There are a lot of things the FPA and the DOE need to work on.

1. Design a nuclear reactor that can be used to retrofit existing coal plants to use nuclear energy.
2. Build an Integral Fast Reactor as mentioned above.
3. Design a reactor that produce electricity as cheaply as coal and is proliferation resistant and transportable for the export market. This will probably use a Thorium fuel cycle.
4. Design a reactor optimized to produce hydrogen for automobiles. #3 should also be able to produce hydrogen.
   
5. Work on all the spent fuel reprocessing I mentioned in #2.

References:

American Energy Act:
http://www.gop.gov/energy

Why the French Like Nuclear Energy
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/french.html

Tennessee Valley Authority
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority

Nuclear Fuel Cycle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel_cycle

NRC License Review Budget Constraints
http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2009/06/living-renaissance-nrc-license-review.html