Bio-Diesel/Biodiesel Energy Resources, Alternative Energy

William D. Magwood IV, Director, Office of Nuclear Energy,
Science and Technology, Department of Energy

CARD: Next we will hear from Bill Magwood. Bill heads the Office of Nuclear Energy in the Department of Energy and he is the person principally responsible for all of the Department’s nuclear energy and related programs. So, Bill, we look forward to hearing your remarks.

MAGWOOD: Thank you Bob. In many really nice hotels, the podium rises for tall people. (Laughter) Now, I also would like to join others who have come before me to thank the organizers of this event, not simply for putting this event on but for providing these really nifty “I Like Ike” buttons. I have always wanted one of these and I appreciate getting one when I came in today.

It’s a great pleasure to be here today and to meet with all of you and to share this panel with my distinguished colleagues, many of whom I have worked with for many years and people who also understand the very important message that President Eisenhower imparted on the world 50 years ago.

We at the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear energy are the most direct inheritors of the salient charge that President Eisenhower made on that historic day in the winter of 1953. In December of 1953, in the early days of the fear and dread of possibilities of nuclear war, President Eisenhower offered the UN General Assembly a new vision of a peaceful nuclear future. Rather than recoil in fear and ignorance, the President proposed to pull back the curtain of secrecy veiling nuclear technology in order to share its discovery with scientists and engineers whom he felt could best realize the great potential for peaceful application.

President Eisenhower told the delegates that, “We must hasten the day when the fear of the atom will disappear from the minds of the people and the governments of the East and the West. This greatest of destructive forces and be developed to a great boon for the benefit of all mankind.”

As we the case in the winter of 1953, we find ourselves today at the confluence of complex and unexplored waters that hold both great threat and great promise. It has been America’s great fortune that when such times arise we have had men of vision on the scene who understood the true opportunities presented by sweeping and historic changes in society and technology and in international relations. When history records success, it records the vision and action taken by forward leaning leaders who seize the moment. When history records failure, it records the error of entrenchment, fear and missed opportunity.

In Eisenhower’s case, the record is very clear. At a time when fear about radiation and nuclear weapons permeated nearly every aspect of life from the duck and cover drills endured by school children to the very, very bad science fiction movies endured by movie goers of the time, the United States push for a wide dissemination and application of nuclear know how to countries all over the world, these efforts encouraged and supported the construction of research reactors all over the planet, many of which are still in operation today.

A mere four years after the speech, President Eisenhower attended the opening ceremonies for the Shipping Port Nuclear Power Plant just outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. By 1962, six nuclear power plants had been constructed in the United States. Today, despite Three Mile Island and the significant overcapacity that can cause control problems faced by nuclear utilities in the 1980’s, nuclear power plants today provide a fifth of U.S. electricity and do so more reliably, less expensively and with less pollution than any other base(?) load(?) power technology other than hydroelectric dams, which we can’t expand.

Last year, despite the closure of a few less efficient units from the 1990s, U.S. nuclear power plants, as a group, produced more power last year than any other time in history in a record setting 780 billion kilowatt-hours. All that said, it’s clear that nuclear energy is at a crossroads in history. One path can lead to stagnation and eventual abandoning of nuclear as a source of energy for the future. We in the United States have not seen a new nuclear power plant, a new successful nuclear power plant project since 1973 and our research, industrial, and educational bases, have eroded dramatically in the last decade.

Fear about the spread of nuclear technology, another subject of discussion this afternoon, leads some to call for the United States to pull back from its engagement with the world and hide what it knows from they eyes of all instead of sharing with and learning from others in fruitful cooperation. Looking to the opportunities of the future, instead of only at the trepidations of the present, has been an important theme of President Bush’s administration. I believe in this spirit we have chosen an alternative path.

Today’s choices are no less profound. Despite the fact that war and terror dominate current world discussion, the true issue for the future is one of how we will manage and develop our limited resources to advance all humankind. The issue today is how will we power the lives and advancement of future generations without destroying the environment in which we live. This is a time for vision on a scale of Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace.” This is a time to look toward nuclear technology not as simply a tool for peace but also for broad, sustainable and enduring prosperity for all the world’s people.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney have personally engaged in this issue and our initiatives speak to their vision and understanding of the work that must be done. Secretary Abraham, who will address this group tonight, has proven his ability to see the long-term opportunities before us and has fostered a revival in nuclear research agenda the surpasses anything we’ve seen in decades. Since assuming office, this administration has re-energized the national and international discussion about nuclear technology. The national energy policy, the President unveiled in May 2001, stated a clear policy of the United States should look toward the expanded use of nuclear power for its future energy needs.

The administration has dislodged a process to move forward with a safe and necessary high-level waste repository and to provide one of the missing elements required for the future expansion of nuclear power. We have worked hard and closely with leaders in Congress, particularly Chairman Pete Dominici in the Senate and Chairman Billy Tauzer in the House to see new comprehensive energy legislation to complete the implementation of the policies that were advanced in the national energy policy.

We have also unveiled several very forward-looking initiatives that have radically altered the dialogue and the language of the debate over the future of nuclear energy. Two years ago, Secretary Abraham unveiled Nuclear Power 2010, which we’ve already heard a little bit about today. This has brought nuclear utility vendors, electric companies and government together in renewed cooperative dialogue on how to go about building new nuclear power plants in this country.

Next generation nuclear technology holds the promise of new levels of safety and economic performance while providing a wider range of energy products for a more flexible future. Finally, and we’ve heard about this from several speakers already this morning, and perhaps most importantly, the President this year challenged us with a national hydrogen initiative. This broad initiative calls upon the technical and industrial communities to resolve the issues associated with making clean burning hydrogen a fuel of tomorrow’s planes, trains, and automobiles in place of growing levels of imported petroleum.

Our new nuclear energy efforts are tailor made to answer the President’s call. Concepts for a new generation of ultra-safe proliferation-resistant nuclear power plants that can supply the extreme heat needed to produce hydrogen in an economic manner on a commercial scale may be brought to physical reality sooner than many believe would have been possible. This Gen Four technologies may become commercially available in time to realize the President’s vision that a child born today will be driving his or her first car, which will be powered by hydrogen and pollution free.

CARD: Thank you. Unless my watch is horribly off, we have a generous amount of time for questions, challenges, comments, whatever from the audience. I would just ask the commenter to please state their name and affiliation with the question. I think we have people with microphones so here we have a question and then back there, next, and then over here next and over there. Well, we’re all over. We will go here and there and then we’ll start over again.

COZARELLI(?): I’m Nick Cozarelli from UC Berkeley and my question is that we’ve heard several people talk about the hydrogen fuel cell but, obviously, the amount of energy you are going to get out of the hydrogen fuel cell is going to be less than the amount of energy you put in to making that hydrogen and, given the fact of what we’ve been hearing about this morning, about how far off any kind of really substantial nuclear power is, the hydrogen fuel cell is more polluting than any other form, than just gasoline for running a car.

MAGWOOD: Sure, I’ll-- I think first I’ll say that I don’t entirely agree with your postulate. First, I think that hydrogen fuel cells, especially the advanced fuel cells that DOE is doing research on now, has a great potential for very high efficiencies and I think that if we’re successful in having very efficient means of producing hydrogen, that the overall efficiency will be very good. I think we will be very competitive. What we’re trying to accomplish is not necessarily to achieve an alternative to petroleum that is going to be cheaper than petroleum.

I mean the reason that we use petroleum is because is cheap. What we like to do is have a viable alternative to petroleum that is not vastly more expensive but yet has huge environmental and economic security benefits for the country. And discussing this in the context of a lot of the overseas meetings, I’ve been to, there are many countries that agree with that point of view. So I actually am an optimist on both the fuel cell development and also and possibly for having nuclear technology appear in the foreseeable future, in the next decade or two that will fuel those fuel cells especially.

CARD: Thank you Bill. I will attempt to weigh in just a bit on that. Right now, today I think well-to-wheels efficiency probably would favor a diesel or a diesel hybrid. But we really see an addition to the strategic diversity issues that Bill mentioned, which are vitally important, we’re really shooting for breakthrough technologies. When you couple that with the possibility of fuel price increases and other inputs, we think the hydrogen system is an extremely important alternative.

NEFF: I don’t know if I’m the right person. I think I am. I’m Tom Neff from MIT. I just had a question and a comment about renewables. Everybody there on the panel I think said something very kind about renewable resources and energy and nuclear but there is a link and not much has made of it. It is actually an old point. I wrote a book about it about 25 years ago. Most new energy technologies have payback times. They take two, three, five years even to generate as much energy as it took to make them.

So if you and to get from a low installed base for renewables to a large installed base, you need to expand a lot of traditional forms of energy in order to get that base installed. It takes aluminum. It takes-- Whether it’s wind, wave, solar panels or whatever or hydrogen fuel cells. For example, if you want a gigawatt of solar next year, you’ve got to use about three gigawatts this year. I’m not sure why the point has not been made that, in order to have, say, expansion of renewable resources over the next 50 years or 100 years, we actually need to build a lot more conventional capacity.

We have two choices, basically. Gas is saturated. We have nuclear and we have coal. And I think it’s a great argument for nuclear. Nuclear power plants can generate the electricity that is largely used to make the facilities necessary for renewable for energy generation. And I think that might help disarm a certain amount. There is a certain dichotomy here between those who sort of favor the soft energy path, the renewable resource path as a simple, totally separate kind of path to go forward. But there is no such simple, separate path. They are linked.

Second, fossil fuels get a huge subsidy in our system because they’re not required to pay for the disposal of waste product, carbon dioxide. Because of that subsidy, fossil fuels and new power plants in fossil fuels are cheaper, generate cheaper electricity than nuclear, at least according to all the studies I’ve seen. Now, Mr. Hintz talked about building new nukes in the United States. The question is, is industry really going to do that without some incentives? What does the government have to do to strike the appropriate economic balance to make up for the subsidy that fossil fuel is getting?

HINTZ: Well, I don’t know if I agree with you that we’re making tons of money on the existing plants (laughter) but they are very profitable and that’s primarily because the production cost is very low compared to other ways of generating power. But getting back to what it would take for say, Entergy to build a new nuclear plant, I guess it’s been about two years ago, I made a presentation. And the title of the presentation was, “The Stars are Aligning” and the theme was that it does seem like everything is starting to come together that would allow us to go ahead and build new nuclear plants.

And the stars I was talking about was, I think the public opinion is continuing to get better. We’re seeing plant operational performance not only being better but I think we have a lot of confidence that we can operate them consistently at high performance levels. And I’d say ten years ago we weren’t sure of that because it always seemed like you could operate them well but then you would end up with a long-term shut down for some reason or another. The safety record has been extremely good.

We still see that operating costs are decreasing or at least stable and we’re seeing most other fuels, the fuel costs are continuing to escalate. And so I mean it looks like everything is coming together that, why aren’t utilities jumping at the chance to build a new nuclear plant? Probably the biggest reason I think is that the capital costs are still quite high. And I know the vendors have done a lot of work in trying to reduce the costs and trying to make the plants a little simpler and having more passive systems and things like that.

But the issue is, with the special things associated with nuclear, a lot of capital dollars, it takes a long time to build them and things like that, that the capital costs are still such that the other forms of generating electricity are more attractive. But it is getting close and I get a lot of questions now, when people see what happens to the price of gas. Well, surely, now, that’s going to be the final thing that’s going to tip it. And I think everybody’s got a different view on natural gas and I’ll give you Entergy’s, which I’m sure is wrong. We’ve never been right on it in the past, but (laughter) we see natural gas is going to be very volatile. I mean you are going to see $10 dollar gas and, we used to say, $2 dollar gas. I don’t think you are going to see that again, probably.

But you are going to see, we believe, fairly low-priced gas. You’re going to have the volatility. So, when you are building a plant, like a nuclear plant, you’ve got to figure out, on average, what’s the price of natural gas going to be? And we’re not convinced on the average that it’s going to be greater then $5 dollars. And if you’re somewhere between $4 and $5 dollars, these capital costs are still too much. But I think if we got any credit or much credit for the environmental advantages of nuclear, I think that would be enough to tip the table and I’d be surprised if you wouldn’t see someone going ahead it.

Let me just say. I know I am taking much too much time. But let me just say one of the problems that you have with building a nuclear plant, besides large capital costs, we can’t get debt on them. And maybe we can’t today, but we built a gas-fired plant with 90% debt and we’re building this nuclear plant with 100% equity. And it could be the greatest technology in the world and vendors can do a great job of getting costs down, but when you’re building something with 100% equity, that does change the financial situation of that plant. I think we’re close but we’re not quite there yet.

CARD: Thank you Don. I think it was important to have that dialogue so that the audience understood that it is not a national policy issue -- why we are not seeing more nuclear plants. It’s the financial structure and the thing the Don didn’t delve into but I think is a big deal is that since we have liberalized the market and we’re in favor of that and Europe is doing the same thing, when you apply corporate rate of return to that capital, it makes it very hard to recognize the long-term investment potential of a nuclear power plant.

WAGNER: Henry Wagner, Johns Hopkins. I would like to ask the panel what role nuclear energy has in desalination. Fresh water availability is a major, major problem for the future. And sometimes I dream of seeing a nuclear submarine temporarily parked outside the island of Kauai(?) in Hawaii, making enough fresh water for next year and then moving on to another place and producing more fresh water. Could somebody comment on the role of nuclear energy in desalination?

BOWMAN: I see a golden opportunity to use nuclear power in desalinization. I see less opportunity for using a nuclear submarine to do that. First of all, just very quickly, we need all the nuclear submarines that we can get and then some to do what’s going on in the world today. It’s not that outlandish a proposition, by the way. I’ve been approached several times in the seven years I’ve been in this job to back a submarine into the piers in New Hampshire and perhaps feed the energy grid there.

The truth of the matter is, if you look at the size of our reactors and you look at the devotion of the majority of that energy to propulsion power and not to electrical generating power, you will see that it is a non-starter from the standpoint of contributing measurably to any of our deficits. But nuclear energy as a means of desalinization, you’re right, we do that onboard our nuclear powered aircraft carriers and submarines today and it certainly, with the advent of new systems, reverse osmosis systems for desalinization, I think it is another thing we should be thinking about.

BUGAT: Yes, I can add some more on the subject. We are studying 300- megawatt electric co-generation nuclear plant for electricity and desalination and it works. The Indian people are studying too. But roughly speaking, with the 300- megawatts you can use 250 for electricity and use 50 megawatts for desalination and with that 50 megawatts you can produce 200 thousand cubic meters by day. So that means that that kind of is able to furnish electricity and water for one million people, an area of one million people.

So it cannot be-- We are not plenty of that kind of population who need the water. That is tropical countries with networks and are able to transfer the electricity. And more of that, what is important, the cost of the kilowatt that is produced is two times the cost of one thousand megawatt plant, which means, how do you build the investment? How do you build the capital for the investment? It was a question on which every company is locked(?) now.

DOWNEY: Good morning. Lieutenant Colonel Jim Downey. I’m currently a fellow at Harvard University. And I want to ask just a little off question. We’ve spoken about nuclear power and land and also the sea. I’m interested in the medium of space. NASA has a new program to develop a nuclear reactor based propulsion system for deep space. And what surprises me is so far, it has not received a lot of attention in perhaps the environmental concern arena, although it may in a couple of years.

BOWMAN: I’m still developing some understandings. I believe it will forward the cause of nuclear energy. I suggest that your opening salvo may come true sooner than we want, that the environmentalists will notice and we will begin having to answer some questions about it. But the idea would be-- The first idea that NASA is working on is an orbiter unmanned for the icy moons of Jupiter and the JIMO project. It’s funded. It has received funding for the past two years in NASA and, indeed, the possibility that Naval Reactors will be delivered another national mandate similar to the two that I discussed earlier, that Admiral Rickover received is very real and we’re looking at that even as we speak.

CARD: --Space nuclear. Bill, did you want to add anything to that?

MAGWOOD: Sure, I’ll just add that I think that whenever you are able to use nuclear technology to take on an activity such as exploring space that the public gets excited about, I think it’s something that has potential benefit all over for nuclear power. I often, in talking to school children about nuclear technology, point out the wonderful pictures we’ve gotten from the planets, from Jupiter, from Uranus and others-- And to be able to point to that and say, “We wouldn’t be able to do that without nuclear technology,” I think is a real advantage.

And the fact is that as we’ve worked with NASA over the years about what their future visions are for space exploration, it became extremely clear to them-- We had to sort of drag them into it but it became very clear to them that they couldn’t accomplish their mission without nuclear technology. And someone mentioned earlier there needs to be an education process and that is part of the education process because there are things you can do with nuclear you can’t do with other things, not just in space exploration power but also in medical treatment and other things and I getting that story out has to be very important.

BRODSKY: Alan Brodsky again, ...(inaudible)RC and Georgetown University. But I’m speaking for myself. Not even my wife approves very much of what I say. (Laughter) I congratulate the nuclear energy industry and the great safety record and I wonder why they don’t-- My question is, why don’t they spend more advertising funds to educate the public properly. I’ve made my own miniscule efforts through professional society and have had very little success.

The President, as opposed to the conditions under which President Eisenhower was able to promote nuclear energy, has to face the possibility that he won’t be re-elected because so much of the mis-information that some of the people I know have spread through the media to the public. I have some ideas about the proper kinds of information to be given by the public but have not been able to reach anybody in a leadership position who can present this information.

(Unidentified Speaker)__: Great. So, I’m a physics professor at Michigan and like Bart Richter, I work at high energy accelerators. We’re not producers of electricity; we’re customers. But I’m going to talk about nuclear engineering. President Eisenhower’s 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech, certainly helped to make nuclear engineering a very exciting field. Therefore it attracted some of the best and brightest young students. As I say, I sure am not a nuclear engineer but for a complex reason, I came to know and admire some of the ex-students about 20 years later in 1973, when there was some problem.

Is there any plan for DOE or the nuclear power industry to start rapidly providing some scholarships in nuclear engineering for freshman engineers, some fellowships for graduate students in nuclear engineering and some post-doctoral fellowships to keep these young guys occupied so that you can start attracting people? I started talking to some of the kids in my physics class into going into nuclear engineering and I work at it and I got a few. But it’s hard when there is not clearly any jobs downstream.

MAGWOOD: We’re currently funding about 150 scholarships and fellowships for nuclear engineering students every year. That’s not enough. I mean I would like to do twice as many but it’s a start and it’s a basis to build on. The point you make is absolutely correct. There is a real threat in the United States particularly, that the infrastructure that was built after Atoms for Peace-- It is not just the people. It is the research reactors. It’s the program. They’re all aging to the point where many schools are abandoning their programs.

We’re making a bigger investment. When I first took over the Office of Nuclear Energy, we were spending about $3 million dollars a year on nuclear engineering. We’re now spending about $20. So we’ve increased it. I would like to do more. I will do more. But the fact of the matter is there is a limit to how much the government can do unless Don here gets his industry, galvanizes it to build more plants because when we talk to students about the future prospects for nuclear, it’s very clear that the people we’re seeing are the people really excited by the science and technology.

And I give you an illustration of ...(inaudible) well they could advertise. But it isn’t necessarily a matter of advertising. It’s a matter of getting you message out and there are many ways that that can be done. I’ll give you an illustration. A couple of years ago The New York Times ran an article in which they said that thousands of people had died as a result of the Chernobyl accident. How many of people here, I wonder believe that thousands of people died at Chernobyl?

IRVINE: As a result? Well, so it happened that ten years after the accident, there was a conference in Vienna where all the people that had studied the impact of Chernobyl on health met and it may surprise you to know that they agreed at that conference in Vienna that the number of people who died as a result of that accident was less than 50. You may find that incredible but I invite you to go look at the record, the report of that conference, which you can find on the Internet.

IRVINE: Yes, except they pointed out that there were a lot of lives lost as a result of the abortions because the mothers feared that the babies would be malformed or something like that. So, what you should do, Mr. Blitz is when you see something like that in The New York Times, you might have done what Accuracy in Media did and that is write them a letter and tell them they were wrong and lean on them to persuade them that they are on the wrong track in terrifying people. I’m sure that the people who were resisting putting that $7 billion dollar plant at Shoreham(?) into operation, were not concerned about economics. They were not even concerned about their taxes or electrical bills. They were concerned about the danger that they perceived even though the industry has an outstanding record for safety.

I wanted to call your attention on page four of the program, the first bullet says, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl cast a very dark cloud over the nuclear industry. Now that we have greater historical perspective, how should we view these incidents? What have we learned from these events? It was just published two days ago that the other Three Mile Island Plant just hit a record of 680 days continuous operation before it shut down for its refueling outage. So, that’s some perspective on Three Mile Island.

BOWMAN: One other-- In the same vein as to the Accuracy in the Media report that we heard. Three Mile Island, of course, I said in my discussion, was a non-event from a radiation standpoint and I truly believe that. The number of the public that received the most radiation from that event was back calculated to have received 37 millirem, which we, in this audience know is not very much, about a little over a tenth of what she would have received in her home anyway, for that year.

Thirty-seven millirem is a little over a third of the allowable non-occupational exposure. The occupational worker who received the most did not exceed the occupational limits on Three Mile Island. So I couldn’t agree more with the perspective that more needs to be done in educating the public. I would suggest that along with advertising, we need to, as a group, go ahead and go for the throat and speak to the concerned scientists who are legitimately concerned but need some information, need some education about some of the things that we know that they don’t know. Indeed we do sing to much to the choir, preach too much to the choir.

We need to go, maybe to the concerned scientists and sit and walk through some of these facts and figures and we’ve been in operation long enough now that it might be time that we stop trying to prove the negative and put the onus of responsibility on the other side, bring forward the proof of the bad effects of this rather than challenging me to show that there is no bad effect, that we’ve been through two and a half generations of Navy nuclear power and there’s nothing there; there’s nothing to show.

(Unidentiefied Speaker)__: I think there is one other threat that we haven’t mentioned, a threat to the commercial nuclear industry. We talk about threats on public opinion and maybe not having the public educated and we talk about the economics of the new nuclear plant. But I think there is another big threat that industry is dealing with as we speak and that is the consequences of 9/11 and the impact on security on these nuclear plants. I mean we were the most secure major infrastructure in the United States prior to 9/11.

But as a result of 9/11, we are an industry that has been put in the spotlight and we spent a lot of money on security already and it’s not over yet. I mean we just have to keep dealing with the bigger bomb and we get that done and we start on something else. And, you know, the industry, we’re advocating that at some point in time, we would like to get thrown in with all the other critical infrastructure in this country. And if we were and you compared the threat associated with a nuclear plant compared to chemical plants or any other critical infrastructure, we look, actually, pretty good.

But 24 thousand people, we anticipate, have died, will die from Chernobyl. It is just a tiny fraction of the population. It does not influence the positive views on the expansion of the nuclear industry but we provide the quotes from Abo(?) Gonzales, from the IAEA who never did the multiplication but says the 600 thousand seabirds, 60 million person rem, would correspond to that number of deaths and that’s the cost of doing business. You kill many more people from air pollution from coal-fired plants.

CARD: Thank you. With regrets to the at least dozen people who are still waiting for a dialogue on this-- I’m thrilled with the interaction. We’re going to go to lunch now. There were some logistical instructions. Do any of the hosts want to-- If it’s about lunch we’ll do it. Otherwise it will have to wait. Anybody want to offer any directions about what we do for lunch other than just go out the door and look for lunch. That’s what we’re going to do. Yes, Bob. Bob, do you have a mike?

William D. Magwood IV, Director, Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology, Department of Energy

William D. Magwood IV, Director, Office of Nuclear Energy,
Science and Technology, Department of Energy