The Green Nuclear Option

By William Donald Needham

The Green Nuclear Option offers a logical argument for considering nuclear power as one of the best options to deal with the climate crisis of the 21st century. Nuclear technology is decades old and has stood the test of time, becoming even more reliable and safe, incorporating the lessons learned from accident assessments. Carbon-free nuclear power is the only mature technology available to power the world away from greenhouse gas emissions.

This book is about the conflation of nuclear engineering and climate change, beginning with a history lesson that separates the origins of the atom bomb from the subsequent engineering of nuclear reactors. The destructive power of atomic bombs has ever cast a shadow over the potential bounty of taming the energy stored in the atomic nucleus for human good, but The Green Nuclear Option lays out the facts about its magnitude, global disposition, and why fuel recycling would greatly reduce the burden.  

The human race is running an uncontrolled physics experiment with the only home we have. There is little time to waste, and renewables can’t do it all. Nuclear power plants need to play a key, bridging role to a survivable future. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Release date: Mar 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781977263384

William Donald Needham

William Donald Needham retired as a captain in the U.S. Navy after a 30-year career operating and repairing nuclear submarines from Holy Loch, Scotland, to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. He spent the last 20 years as an environmental advocate in the Washington, D.C., area, becoming a Sierra Club life member and a Master Naturalist in his home state of Maryland. This culminated in the 2020 publication of his award-winning account of hiking and nature, The Compleat Ambler. William holds degrees in science from MIT, engineering from Duke, education from Troy and business from Central Michigan. Ten years as a docent at the Smithsonian American History Museum in Washington, D.C., affords his credentials as an historian.  

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The Green Nuclear Option

All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2023 William Donald Needham

v2.0

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE: ATOMS FOR WAR

CHAPTER TWO: FISSION PHYSICS

CHAPTER THREE: THE CURIE METER REM RULE

CHAPTER FOUR: SAFETY CONTROL REACTOR AX MAN

CHAPTER FIVE: ATOMS FOR PEACE

CHAPTER SIX: CHINA SYNDROME

CHAPTER SEVEN: SOVIET SYNDROME

CHAPTER EIGHT: WASTE NOT WANT NOT

CHAPTER NINE: WORLD POWER

CHAPTER TEN: ECONOMICS AND ELECTRICITY

CHAPTER ELEVEN: CHANGED CLIMATE

CHAPTER TWELVE: THE NUCLEAR OPTION

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

After graduating from college in 1972 at the height of the Cold War in the Naval ROTC program as a mechanical engineer, I found myself across the desk from Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy, which was then in a period of rapid growth. After being thrown out of his office and spending two hours in a hall closet, I was led back for a final tongue lashing before being sent on my way, evidently rejected outright. As I picked up my orders to go back to my unit, the clerk asked me, Mare Island or Bainbridge? On learning that these were the two locations for the navy’s Nuclear Power Schools, I found out that I was to become a nuclear engineer.

After a year at Mare Island, California, and then Idaho to learn and respect nuclear reactors, I was sent to my first submarine, eventually rising to become chief engineer of a second submarine. There followed tour assignments as nuclear repair officer at Norfolk Naval Shipyard, MIT for a degree in submarine design, submarine repair officer at the forward deployed base at Holy Loch, Scotland, and submarine force maintenance officer in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. I came to know that nuclear reactors are reliable, powerful, and safe if they are operated and maintained by well-trained personnel using well-established procedures. My life depended on them for months on end deeply submerged in the unforgiving ocean.

Twenty years later, I reported for duty in Washington, DC as the engineering director of the Seawolf Submarine Program, a new vessel meant to set a standard that adversaries could not easily best. This was the capstone of my aspirational career. Three months later, the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the program was cancelled. My days as a rising star naval nuclear engineer were over. My thoughts turned to other interests on hold while underwater and repairing submarines on navy bases.

The environment as human habitat has always been a core tenet deeply embedded in my way of thinking. This in all probability a result of starting out life on Midway Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean surrounded by gooney birds at eye-to-eye level. After running the recycling program in college for the Ecological Society of America, the move to California prompted a continuation there and my first introduction to the Sierra Club on John Muir’s home turf. It was to the Sierra Club that I turned for an initiation to the mountains of western Virginia. A decade of discovering new trails through forests and fields and learning the fauna, fauna, and fungi that lived there followed—the interconnected harmony of nature through the cycle of seasons punctuated by the occasional storm. Green in summer, red and gold in fall, brown and gray in winter, pink and blue in spring. I became a Sierra Club Life Member.

The first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report was a global-warming yellow alert. It was based on the unassailable principles of thermodynamics. The science of heat and energy is a core curriculum course in mechanical engineering and the basis for all power plants, including nuclear. Carbon dioxide traps heat, and the earth must warm up to balance the sun’s light energy input; global warming is thermodynamics. In the two decades that have passed since then, the prescience of early climate scientists has become manifest. Soaring temperatures, massive floods, and superstorms have been heralded by subsequent IPCC reports. The predicted slow but inexorable effect on nature is now a matter of observable fact with changing migration patterns of both animals and plants. There are already some migrations of Homo sapiens to greener pastures. The need for action to reverse this trend is now a flashing red alert.

The conflation of nuclear engineering and climate change is what this book is about. It is at first a history story that separates the origins of the atom bomb from the subsequent engineering of nuclear reactors. Atoms for war versus atoms for peace. The destructive power of atomic bombs has ever cast a shadow over the potential bounty of taming the energy stored in the atomic nucleus for human good. Fear of the unknown is at the heart of the nuclear energy debate. There follows a nuclear engineering educational primer that provides the basics of reactions and radiation based on the basic curriculum of the navy program that turned ignorant raw recruits into competent nuclear engineers. The three nuclear accidents that stand out from an otherwise excellent nuclear safety record have been branded as the inevitable rather than the rare exception. A technical summary of what actually happened at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima Daiichi provides some context from which important lessons were learned.

The second half of the book is a world’s eye view of the present and future of nuclear energy. From this global perspective, many countries such as France and Finland have embraced nuclear power and others such as Germany have opted out, choosing to rely on Russia’s gas instead. Nuclear waste is one of the key obstacles in the mind of many environmentalists. The facts about its magnitude, global disposition, and why fuel recycling would greatly reduce the burden are discussed in sufficient detail to understand the issue. It is not what it has been made out to be. That reactors are expensive and complicated, and therefore take too long to build is one of the key issues raised by critics. A business case analysis for the construction of new nuclear power plants affordably and on schedule is a template for success.

The point is that green is not the same color anymore. The human race is running an uncontrolled physics experiment with the only home we have. There is little time to waste, and renewables can’t do it all. Nuclear power plants need to play a key, bridging role to a survivable future. The United States Navy has been building nuclear reactors and putting them into ships and submarines for over seventy years. There has never been a nuclear accident on any navy reactor even though they are routinely cycled through their full range of power in all manner of ship operations. The model is proven: Build the same reactor design over and over with the same seasoned workforce and operate it with a knowledgeable, well-trained crew. This is the green nuclear option.

CHAPTER ONE

Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true.

~ Ulysses S. Grant

ATOMS FOR WAR

The nuclear age began with a bang at 5:29:45 a.m. on 16 July 1945 at a godforsaken site in the western desert of North America code-named Trinity. Los Alamos Director Robert Oppenheimer chose the name from John Donne’s sonnet Batter my heart, three-person’d God, eliciting the contradiction of the power of the atom for all time. Human habitation of the empyreal Garden of Eden abruptly came to an end because the knowledge of good and evil had been gained by eating the forbidden fruit. When the cynosure Aioi Bridge in central Hiroshima was sighted, the bomb bay doors of the Enola Gay were opened, and bomb away announced its dispatch. Adam and Eve were banished to a life of painful toil to eke out a meager subsistence amid thorns and thistles. In the blasted Eden of Hiroshima, one resident recalled a blinding … flash cut sharply across the sky… [followed by] dead silence … probably a few seconds … and then a … huge boom … like the rumbling of distant thunder.¹ The white light at Trinity announced the mushroom of debris and energy that grew ever upward and outward to become the signature of its frightful destructive power. It was the culmination of the three-year sprint of the Manhattan Project that started with scientific theory and ended with engineered demonstration. The knowledge gained changed the equation of life on Earth forever, the Garden of Eden now twice removed.

The first use of the power of the atom was both good and evil in the grayness of moral suasion. The quest began in 1939 with a letter to President Roosevelt written by Albert Einstein encouraged by the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard warning of advances already apace in Nazi Germany to unleash the power of the atom. A British committee named Military Application of Uranium Detonation (MAUD) had concluded that a bomb was feasible in 1941, about six months before the entry of the United States into World War II coincident with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on the 7 December date that would oratorically live in infamy. With the laconic brevity necessitated by war, the United States special committee S-1 concluded in 1942 that a no-holds-barred effort could build a bomb by July 1944 for $100 million. The race against time was existential from the start. Ultimately, it would cost more than twenty times that much and take an additional year.

The neutron was first discovered by James Chadwick in 1932. Two years later, Enrico Fermi used it to bombard and fracture an atom of natural uranium at the University of Rome. Later in the prewar decade, physicists at the University of Minnesota determined that U-235, a rare variant or isotope of natural uranium (U-238), would be able to sustain the chain reaction necessary for a bomb.² In 1941, a second candidate was artificially created at the University of California, Berkeley, with even greater potential. It was named plutonium for Pluto, which was at that time still considered a planet named for the Roman god of the underworld. The high stakes of the gamble and the unlimited resources at hand made pursuing both options in parallel the only rational choice. In 1942, the concentration of fissionable but rare U-235 from the more abundant U-238 at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the manufacture of plutonium-239 from uranium-238 at Hanford, Washington, commenced under the direction of General Leslie Groves at the Los Alamos Laboratory directed by Robert Oppenheimer just south of Trinity. The uranium enrichment proved to be the most difficult and resulted in a single bomb nicknamed little boy. Scientists were fairly confident of its success. Three larger fat man plutonium bombs were more experimental necessitating the test at Trinity. The world’s first nuclear arsenal would consist of just four bombs.

By January 1945, there appeared some light at the end of the long tunnel of concurrent development just as the war in Europe was grinding to a close and the war in the Pacific moving ever westward. The war that had started on land and at sea moved to the air as the wrath of destruction came without warning from above. Incendiary bombs dropped on March 9 killed over 80,000 Japanese and leveled sixteen square miles of Tokyo, their capital city. Another 45,000 were killed in Hamburg, Germany, with conventional bombs that same month. President Franklin Roosevelt, who had authorized the atomic bomb project, died in office on 12 April, and was succeeded by Harry Truman, who had no idea of its existence just at Germany surrendered unconditionally on 7 May. Absent the threat of Nazi bomb-making, the raison d’être for whole enterprise, the justification for its continuation was no longer moot. In the words of the Secretary of War Henry Stimson in a memorandum to Truman: Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city.³

The decision to proceed was not made without serious debate and discussion of war and peace at that time and the implications for war and peace in the future. Truman formed the Interim Committee chaired by Stimson that considered options including demonstrating the power of the bomb on an uninhabited island and providing prior warning to a target city to allow for evacuation. A second major issue was whether or not to inform the other allied powers, notably the Soviet Union, of the secret project. On 31 May, after an all-day session, it was decided that the bomb would need to be dropped on a city in Japan as soon as possible without warning. The options were considered too risky primarily due to the uncertainty of a successful detonation; the bomb had yet to be tested, and a dud would do more harm than good. There were dissenters of course―seven scientists including Leo Szilard signed a petition raising the concern that the opprobrium against the United States would ultimately result in an international atomic arms race.

A second review by the Interim Committee on 16 June to address the dissenting petition concluded, firmly and finally: We can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.⁴ On 24 July, President Truman approached Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference to tell him that the United States had a powerful new secret weapon. Stalin responded, I am glad to hear it and I hope you make good use of it against the Japanese.⁵ On 26 July, the United States issued an ultimatum since known as the Potsdam Declaration that called on Japan to surrender or suffer annihilation. It was rejected by the Japanese emperor two days later.

Allied plans for the invasion of the Japanese home islands were drawn up in early 1945 as the course of the war in the Pacific progressed. Lessons learned from the invasion of Iwo Jima and then Okinawa in the spring provided some indication of the carnage that would result. With the code name Downfall, phase I was to start on 1 November with Olympic, an amphibious assault on the smaller southern island Kyushu followed four months later by Coronet, a second attack on the main island Honshu. Facing an estimated force of five million Japanese soldiers and some five thousand kamikaze planes, the allied invasion force of five million was expected to suffer half a million dead before victory in late 1946. Among the many logistical considerations were the procurements of enough Purple Heart medals needed for the number expected to be killed in action or wounded in the assault. President Harry Truman, who made the decision to use the bomb, said nothing about it until 1965, when he stated I made the only decision I ever knew how to make. I did what I thought was right.⁶

The first and next to last atomic bomb used as a wartime weapon exploded at 0915 on 6 August 1945 just above the city of Hiroshima, Japan, killing 78,000 people and razing 60 percent of all structure. The successful explosion of little boy, the only uranium bomb, on its first and only trial was a technological success just as it was a moral conundrum. The final wartime atomic bomb, one of the three plutonium fat man bombs, was dropped on the city of Nagasaki three days later killing an additional 74,000 Japanese. The first plutonium bomb was the test at Trinity, when it was known euphemistically as the device. The last bomb was held in reserve should a third demonstration be necessary; it wasn’t since Japan surrendered two days later and World War II was over. The stockpiled cache of 495,000 Purple Hearts not issued to the American servicemen expected to be killed or wounded in prosecuting the invasion of Japan were still being slowly depleted fifty years later. ⁷ The debate over whether the use of the atomic bomb to end World War II was justified will never be resolved. To some, it will always be an act of evil. To others, it will always be a justified act of war that ultimately saved lives. It is history.

The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States started decades before the second hot war of the twentieth century was over. It originated in the confused loyalties incident to the Russian Revolution in the final years of the First World War. The overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II in February 1917 culminated in the October Revolution of 7 November⁸ that ultimately brought the Bolsheviks to power and an end to the fighting on the eastern front with the December treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Forty divisions of German troops that had faced the Russians were transported to the western front, and in the spring of 1918, the allies were faced with a potential juggernaut. Had it not been for the recent arrival of the Americans, the war would almost certainly have ended there and then with a German victory. The final year of the war that was supposed to be the end of all wars became a fight to the finish at the eleventh hour of the eleventh month with the unconditional surrender of Germany. The Versailles Conference that established the terms of the shaky peace and crushing war reparation payments absent the agreement of participation of the Germans or the Russians sowed the seeds of discontent, which culminated in a second world war that started with a nonaggression pact between Russia’s Stalin and Germany’s Hitler.⁹

War is a complicated affair with victory achieved by the ready, resilient, and resourceful faced with unknowns and multiple options at every turn. The facts on which actions must be based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty requiring a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.¹⁰ This fog of war was especially true in Eurasia in 1918. Ironically, the seeds of Soviet mistrust were sown due to an attempt to provide supplies to Russia as an ally through the only available open ports of Archangel in the north and Vladivostok in Siberia a continent away. Tens of thousands of tons of invaluable metals and other military stores had been stocked at these two locations when Russia surrendered to Germany. Due to concern that this war materiel would fall into the hands of the enemy, the British sent military units to guard the two supply depots, later convincing the Americans to follow suit.

A secondary, if remote, objective was the possibility of reestablishing the eastern front against Germany. The Russian communists, widely known as Reds, also wanted the accumulated stockpiles for use in their on-going fight against the royalists called Whites who strove to restore the tsar to power. On 3 June 1918, the allied war council resolved that each country should send four to five thousand soldiers to support the White Russians.¹¹ When the war ended, scattered military operations pitting the Whites with some cooperation by the British and American forces against the Reds continued for several years. The incursions ended by 1920 without anything that amounted to a pitched battle.¹²

There was no love for the Bolsheviks among the capitalist societies of the west. Their manifesto, written by the English Engels and the German Marx, was that communists …openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.¹³ The revolution that started in Russia was expected to spread throughout the world. The fact that the Reds killed Tsar Nicolas II who was the first cousin of King George V of Great Britain did little to mitigate geopolitical concerns. The allied advances from Vladivostok in Siberia and Archangel on the White Sea never seriously threatened the Soviet state. They did become the foundation for the Soviet myth that the forces of imperialism were and always would be hell-bent on their destruction. On 15 September 1957, Pravda, the official newspaper of the communist party, published a four-page diatribe that was to be used on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the revolution. Britain, France, and the United States were accused of attacking from all sides―from north and south, east and west with hordes of interventionists and White Guards. The sustained invasion went on for over three years while the Soviet Republic was obliged to fight off the mad armed attack … of the imperialist beasts of prey.¹⁴

Although the neologism Cold War was not coined until after the Second World War, the global struggle between the communists who promised power to the people and the capitalists who championed the freedoms of democracy was well established by then. The utopian promise of a dictatorship of the proletariat was appealing to many as counterpoint to the depredations of industrialism. In theory, the idea that we are all equal as comrades is compelling, the communes of hippiedom and the kubutzes of Israel adhere to that same basic premise. Many were drawn to the vision of peace and sharing in social harmony … among them was Klaus Fuchs. The son of an itinerant Lutheran pastor from near Frankfurt, Germany, he studied physics at the University of Leipzig in the early 30s just as the Nazis were becoming established as a political force. Drawn to liberal causes, he became active as a leader of the student political group with communist aspirations, an action that drew the wrath of the Brown Shirts, who beat him up and threw him into the Kiel Canal. He left school, traveled to Berlin to officially join the Communist Party, and then emigrated to England in 1934 to pursue his studies there, culminating in a doctorate in physics from the University of Edinburgh.

World War II began on 1 September 1939 when Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland. Fuchs, as a German national, was classified as an enemy alien by the British and banished to an internment camp in Canada. Becoming further radicalized, he joined a communist cell before being released to return to Britain in early 1941. Within the year, he had accepted a position at Birmingham University to work on the nascent nuclear bomb project and contacted the Soviet embassy in London to volunteer as a spy. He became a naturalized British citizen in 1942, and, as the British nuclear bomb project segued to the Manhattan Project, he was assigned to Los Alamos. On 2 June 1945, Klaus Fuchs drove to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he delivered the plans for the atomic bomb exploder assembly to Harry Gold, his Soviet courier he knew only as Raymond. The next day, Gold met with Corporal David Greenglass, a machinist at Los Alamos and the brother of Ethel Rosenberg, who provided the details of the explosive lens, a component crucial to bomb detonation. Ethel and her brother Julius had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and were recruited as spies early in the war. The information that they provided to the Soviet Union is estimated to have advanced their nuclear program by three years. It also sowed the seeds of the nuclear arms race that continues to the present and into the foreseeable future.¹⁵ It didn’t have to be that way.

The success of the Manhattan Project in creating the ultimate weapon to end the war in the Pacific resulted in the same dilemma that faced those who reluctantly chose to use the bomb as the only viable option in the first place. Having caught a tiger by the tail, how do you let go? After a series of high-level meetings between the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, the Agreed Declaration of 15 November 1945 established the key points that: the power of atomic weapons with the means of destruction hitherto unknown was a reality; the lack of any defense against nuclear weapons rendered the nations of the world helpless; and atomic bombs were weapons in the employment of which no single nation can in fact have a monopoly. Secretary of State James Byrnes set up a board including Robert Oppenheimer and chaired by the Under Secretary Dean Acheson on January 7, 1946, as a place to begin, a foundation on which to build to address this conundrum. The Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy was released by the board in March, recommending "… that all dangerous activities in the field of atomic energy be