Session E06: Climate Mitigation, Nuclear Energy and Proliferation

The role of nuclear energy in a decarbonized world: Examining and addressing equity, environmental justice, and governance constraints in the reactor design process

Nuclear energy is increasingly regarded as an important contributor to our future low carbon energy systems but remains mired in equity, environmental justice, and governance challenges. Principally, designers of nuclear energy technologies have failed to incorporate community input into their technological design and development processes. While such an approach may have been viable for large gigawatt reactors sited far from population centers, it is unlikely to be effective for small modular, micro, and nano reactors that are intended by their designers as community scale sources of heat and electricity.

This paper uses Design Justice as an organizing framework to examine opportunities for the inclusion of equity and environmental justice considerations, as well as community-scale governance in the process of engineering design. This work is done through a study of 32 contemporary nuclear reactor design projects -- 27 American and 5 French. Retrospective histories of design for each of these projects were constructed using interviews with designers, conference and journal articles, patent and regulatory filings, company websites, and articles from the trade press.  Specifically, in this analysis, I inquire who gets to be a designer and do design, and thus whose perspectives are privileged during the imagining and creation of engineered systems; what users, communities and environments designers imagine as being impacted by their work; what values are encoded and reproduced in the designed systems; what mechanisms of accountability are embedded in the designed artifact or its systems of governance; and how the designed systems are ultimately rationalized and stabilized through rhetorical closure mechanisms.

The broader aspiration of this work, which is part of a longer-term research agenda, is to enable the design of energy technologies and systems in just, equitable, and creative ways through the development of new design tools and methodologies. 

 

"Advanced" Isn't Always Better: Assessing the Safety, Security, and Environmental Impacts of Non-Light-Water Nuclear Reactors

If nuclear power is to play an expanded role in helping to mitigate climate change, newly built reactors must be demonstrably safer, more secure, and more economical than current-generation reactors. One approach to improving nuclear power has been to pursue the development of non-light-water nuclear reactors (NLWRs), which differ fundamentally from today’s light-water reactors (LWRs). But is different actually better? The answer is “no” for most designs considered in this assessment comparing NLWRs to LWRs with regard to safety and security, sustainability, and the risks of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. Based on the available evidence, the NLWR designs currently under development do not offer obvious improvements over LWRs significant enough to justify their many risks. 

Nonetheless, billions of dollars in both public and private investment have been committed over the last several years for development and demonstration of a number of NLWR designs by the end of this decade, including the TerraPower "Natrium" sodium-cooled fast reactor, to be built in Wyoming by a company founded by Bill Gates, and the X-Energy pebble-bed gas-cooled reactor, likely to be built in the state of Washington. These reactor designs have significant unresolved safety issues, and they both require uranium fuel enriched to higher levels than LWRs, raising proliferation concerns.These projects are also likely to experience high levels of technical and programmatic risk. Future appropriations for NLWR technology research, development, and deployment should be guided by more realistic assessments of the likely societal benefits and prospects for success than those that policymakers and investors have conducted to date.