Random Comments on Nuclear Now

Finally got a chance to see Nuclear Now, Oliver Stone's documentary on nuclear power. You can stream it for free at Register Now. Despite its flaws, it is worth your time. Some great footage. Here are my notes.

Stone starts out with an autobiographical sketch, your basic lefty's view of nuclear, with lots of footage of atom bomb drills and anti-nuke protests. This is a good intro for his intended audience; but missing is the Viet Nam war protests (and fear of the draft), which in my memory were far more important than nuclear in creating the counter-culture.

The early history segment is great, the best part of the movie. Showing the last part of Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace speech was more effective on me than maybe even Stone intended. Nobody has done more to turn Eisenhower's soaring promise of sharing nuclear power into a sham than the US government.

Stone does an excellent job of capturing the optimism, and the vision of the Greatest Generation. But the movie fails to point out that this vision had an economic basis. In the late 1960's nascent US nuclear was fully competitive with coal, when coal was as cheap as it ever was, and it was reasonable to expect it would get cheaper.

The movie also fails to point out that nuclear had priced itself out of business by 1975, Figure 1.

Figure 1. USA Nuclear Power Plant Orders

At that point, public support for nuclear power remained high, and the anti-nuclear power protests were just getting organized. There were six attempts at the state level to impose a moratorium on new nuclear builds in 1976. All were soundly defeated. But by that time the economics had totally fallen apart. Why?

The movie's answer is predictable. It starts with a great cartoon of the Standard Oil octopus, and then the film goes off the rails. Big Oil is the reason it all went wrong. In the late 1940 and early 1950's, they colluded with the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) to falsely claim that low dose rate radiation was a genetic menace.

Yes, the RF did hatch such a plan and to carry it through they broke every principle of scientific inquiry in the book. It is a fascinating story. But the target was not nuclear power. It was nuclear weapons testing. The Rockefeller Foundation management, a group of elite globalists, felt personally responsible for the Bomb. And with good reason. RF funding was critical to the success of the American Bomb program. Stopping Bomb testing justified breaking all the rules. And if nuclear power was collateral damage, so be it.

Big Oil had nothing to do with this travesty. In fact, Big Oil saw nuclear power as an opportunity. Their experts were telling them oil production would peak in a decade or two. So they jumped on the nuclear power train. They would be nuclear power's fuel supplier. Big Oil made an enormous bet on nuclear power at the same time the RF was undermining it; and took a massive hit when nuclear power flopped. This is a strange form of collusion.

The only evidence that Stone can come with for Big Oil's concerted attack on nuclear is a single donation, which is totally mischaracterized. The Anderson donation was $80,000, not $200,000. The gift was to the John Muir Institute, a conservationist think tank, not Friends of the Earth. Friends of the Earth was not founded specifically to fight nuclear power, but to take a much more aggressive approach to environmentalism, than the conservationist Sierra Club was willing to. If Anderson bought Brower, he did not stay bought long. One of the the first things Friends of the Earth did was a file a suit against the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline, whose job was to bring Prudhoe Bay oil to the Lower 48. The owners of Prudhoe Bay? Anderson's ARCO. ARCO led the way in extracting valuable products from spent nuclear fuel including developing the smoke detector that most of us have in our homes.

Stone's claim that Big Oil was the reason the counter-culture turned against nuclear power is preposterous. As is his claim, that the counter-culture killed nuclear. Stone uses the Zimmer plant on the Ohio River as their key example. What killed Zimmer and 100 other plants is NRC regulatory costs.

Zimmers was awarded a Construction License in 1972. But that just means you get to start a race with the regulatory ratchet. In the next 10 years, as the number of regulatory guides went from less than 60 to more than 300, components had to be redesigned, removed, replaced, sometimes two or three times. Such changes throw a construction site into chaos, and induce delays which means more regulatory changes. The Zimmer site was a mess.

The final killer at Zimmer was their QA paperwork was not up to the latest NRC requirements.

The Zimmer facility has been constructed without an adequate quality assurance program to govern construction and to monitor its quality, resulting in the construction of a facility which currently is of indeterminate quality [1982 NRC Ruling]

The NRC decreed Zimmer had to redo all the pressure boundary welds. Bechtel estimated it would cost 1.5 billion dollars to satisfy the NRC. With no assurance that the rules would not change again, in 1982 the utility threw in the towel, and converted the 97% completed plant to coal.

The Three Mile Island segment was a disappointment. TMI harmed nobody, but it exposed the Negligible Probability Lie. The public, not the activists, now knew that the people running nuclear power were liars. That's the true legacy of TMI. The fact that it also exposed the Intolerable Harm Lie went unnoticed. But in the movie this goes undiscussed. Instead we get clips of Jane Fonda and footage of the ensuing rock concerts, the old anti-Viet Nam protesters keeping the party going. There is no mention of the NRC blunders, which resulted in the panicked evacuation.

The Chernobyl and Fukushima segments are excellent. The filmmakers stuck to describing what happened, and they did a good job. Both casualties, in their own way, expose both lies.

I thought the reaction to Fukushima segment was helter-skelter, but there is a brief mention that Korean nukes were producing electricity, ``at a very low price"; one of the few references to cost in the whole movie.

The spent fuel segment starts out well. The all US spent fuel fits in a Walmart and its graphics are very effective. Much better than the usual football field comparison. But Stone completely blows it on the long lived radioactivity issue. There is no mention of the difference between penetrating and non-penetrating radiation. There is no mention that after a few hundred years you would need to grind up the fuel and eat it for it to harm you. Why pro-nukes don't scream this to the high heavens I will never know. No talk about the need to keep the U-238 around for breeders.

Instead we get the old Oklo formation story and the fact that nothing has moved in two million years. And we praise the Finns for Onkalo and deep geologic disposal. Stone perpetuates the phony zillion year problem. Big, big opportunity missed.

The wind/solar segment has some good shots; but they blew the intermittency issue pretty completely. Instead of talking about bridging dunkelflauten, we get the usual confusion between dispatchable capacity factor and intermittent capacity factor as it they are measuring the same thing. Another blown opportunity.

The segment on methane leakage was very well done. I also liked the scary vs dangerous bit. Could have been a good intro into the Two Lies, and who is telling them. But they really did not take it anywhere.

Around 1:10 we finally get to electricity poverty. Some good shots, and a great cartoon; but once again no discussion of the need to be cheap. I would have liked to see much more time on energy poverty; but this is a movie by rich people for rich people.

The segment on electrification claims we would need 2 to 4 times current to electrify everything. Combined with eliminating electricity poverty, that's way low. Some blather about scalable, but no talk about cheap.

I did not think the Chinese, Russian, French travelogue added much to the film. The film fails to point out the Chinese are determined to make nuclear cheaper than coal and they are probably getting pretty close. The fast breeder is not well explained; nor the need for the breeder down the road; nor the implications for spent fuel storage.

At 1:22 we are back in the US. Pious stuff about tenacity using the Wright brothers, as if our problem was lack of same. If you are going to bring in the Wright brothers, make the point it was a private development in a non-regulated environment which succeeded when the well funded public program failed. Might also point out that the key 1908 demo flight for the Army ended in tragedy with Lt. Selfridge killed and Orville badly injured. It was a worst case failure at the worst time. The Army's reaction: order some aircraft. What would the NRC's reaction be to a similar demo failure?

Long obligatory section on Small Modular Reactors. But no mention that all these efforts still have to work their way through the NRC regulatory maze, except possibly NuScale which currently holds the record for the most expensive nuclear plant ever.

Oklo takes the SMR nonsense one step further. We are going to solve the planet's energy poverty and global warming problem with ski resort A-frames? But there is one revealing comment from Cochran, where she actually says the naughty word regulation. Her point is, at this tiny scale, we might reduce the regulatory burden. But the NRC flat rejected Oklo's original application and told them to start over.

The non-power segment starts off with some misleading talk about ``free" heat. A well designed plant has a turbine exhaust temp of about 32C. You can't even take a decent bath with 32 degree heat. Anything warmer means you are reducing the plant power and efficiency. The movie would be better off without this segment.

The hydrogen section is also all handwaving. If you are to make synthetic hydrogen, you need extremely cheap electricity and you need an immense amount of it. The round-trip efficiency is a putrid 37%. We've been at new nuclear for well over 10 years. So far it has not produced a single kilowatt-hour of electricity. If NuScale meets its targets, it will start producing a tiny bit of the world's most expensive power in 2030. And we're talking about synthetic hydrogen?

Then comes a gratuitous excursion into fusion. Do not know why they did this? Just a distraction from their main story. Fusion is setting up to be the new wind/solar, an excuse for not doing fission.

Finally, we have a soaring, upbeat ending which would put to shame the best the-atom-is-your-friend commercial of the 1960's. Same vision. Not sure how this fits with a documentary; but I'd have nothing against this proselytizing, if it came with a realistic means of reaching this utopia. And that means correctly identifying why we are not already there.

I expected to hate this film; but that's not where I ended up. With a few glaring exceptions, the problem is not what is in the film. The problem is what is not. The crucial importance of cost is barely mentioned in passing. The fact that nuclear power was and could and should be the cheapest source of electricity is not even hinted at. And the elephant in the room, the NRC regulatory apparat, is totally ignored.

I came away thinking so close, and so far.