Click here to subscribe to
Planet-Profit Report, reporting on sustainable development in the Western United States.

A case for the comeback of nuclear power

An executive talks about the need to educate the public

With more than 25 years in the nuclear fuel industry, Jim Graham brings a wealth of experience to his advocacy of nuclear power as a safe, clean and cheap source of power.

Though he retired from life as a corporate executive in 2009, he continues to work as a consultant. His firm, Nuclear Fuel Cycle Consulting LLC,  provides services to the nuclear fuel industry, based on 40 years experience in the mining and energy industries, with the last 26 in the nuclear industry.

Consulting work has taken him around the United States, Sakatchewan, Australia, Korea and Japan.

Graham retired in 2009 after 16 years as president and CEO of ConverDyn, the Englewood, Colorado-based joint venture between Honeywell International, Inc. and General Atomics. Converyn provided oversight for the only U.S. facility, in Metropolis, Ill.,  that converts raw uranium into nuclear fuel. There are only four such facilities in the world.

While he ran ConverDyn, Graham also was a senior vice president for General Atomics, responsible for the company’s nuclear fuel cycle activities from 1992 until 2004.  During that time, he oversaw the permitting, design, construction and operation of the first in situ leach uranium mine in Australia, which has one of the largest resources of uranium in the world. Australia now has three mines to extract uranium but no nuclear power program.

For two years, Graham worked as CEO of Cotter Corporation when it was owned by Commonwealth Edison. He supervised the reclamation and surface cleanup of the Schwarzwalder mine in Jefferson County, where high-grade uranium was mined on and off from the 1950s through early 2002.

Graham’s stature in the industry is such that he’s a former member of the Nuclear Energy Institute board of directors and past chairman of its Nuclear Fuel Supply Forum. He also chaired the board of governors for the World Nuclear Fuel Market and co-chaired the World Nuclear Association’s 2007 Global Nuclear Fuel Market study in London.

He’s written more than 100 papers and presentations to the nuclear industry, high schools, universities and governments on the nuclear fuel cycle and nuclear power.

Before his involvement with uranium, Graham spent nine years with the French oil company, Total, as president and CEO of its North American mining entities.

In several conversations with Planet-Profit Report, Graham made his case for the comeback of nuclear fuel in the United States and globally.

Planet-Profit Report: How much of your work experience has been with uranium mining and how much with nuclear plants?

Jim Graham: I guess I'm now one of the 'elders' of the nuclear fuel industry. The bulk of my experience in the past 26 years has been in uranium mining and the milling, conversion and enrichment of it so it can be fabricated into pellets that are fed into nuclear reactors.

I've been involved in what is called "the nuclear fuel cycle," all the steps that go into making the fuel that goes into the reactor. While I'm most proficient in matters regarding the fuel cycle, I'm very knowledgeable about the entire industry. And there's a lot of crossover; I've worked with utilities all along the way, since they have the reactors.

PPR: Jim, I read pages and pages about how efficient nuclear power is, how cheap it is, how clean it is, how safe it is. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, it is safer to work at a nuclear plant than at a fast food restaurant or a grocery store or in real estate. Why are there still so many people scared to death of it?

Graham: Mostly, people are uninformed and uneducated on the matter. They do not take the time to delve into it. Uranium, in its natural state, is everywhere around us. Naturally-occurring uranium, by itself, is not that bad. It's everywhere -- in your fertilizer, the soil, the mountains. You are exposed to more radioactivity walking in the mountains than you are near a uranium mining site. You don't want to eat it, you don't want to swim in it, and no one is going to. It's a mineral you can detect. You know where it is, you know where it's concentrated.

After uranium is converted into nuclear fuel and burned in a reactor it becomes highly toxic and safety precautions need to be taken.

When someone makes a statement about nuclear power -- one way or the other -- listeners usually don't ask whether it's true or false. They take it as true. I'd say there is a small group of anti-nukers, people who are passionate from the heart but not the head. If they took the time to learn, they would find that many of their fears are unfounded and positions simply are not true.

If you have an open mind, the answers are there, but as usual, it's the squeaky wheel that gets the attention. But unfortunately, nuclear power still suffers from many old stigmas that either were never true or no longer are.

PPR: OK, let's say these anti-nukers "take the time to learn." What would they find out?

Graham: They would learn nuclear power is very safe. The United States alone has logged more than 12,500 reactor- years without a fatality. It's very clean. From cradle to grave, we stack up with wind, solar and hydroelectric power on the amount of waste generated.

For instance, Gwyneth Cravens is a former editor at The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine. Somewhere along the line, she became a nuclear power advocate, and in 2007,   released a great book “Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy.”

She points out that a nuclear plant producing 1,000 megawatts takes up a third of a square mile. A wind farm would have to cover over 200 square miles to obtain the same result, and a solar array over 50 square miles. She also demonstrates how nuclear waste is pretty miniscule in size.

If an American got all his or her lifetime electricity solely from nuclear power, that person's total share of the waste would fit into one soda can. Of that, only a trace is long-lived. In France, where nuclear fuel is recycled, waste is drastically reduced, so that the lifetime total for a family of four would fit in a single coffee cup.

PPR: How does that compare to coal?

Graham: Half of U.S. electricity comes from burning coal. If an American got all his or her electricity from coal over a lifespan of 77 years, that person's mountain of solid waste would weigh 68.5 tons and would fit into six 12-ton railroad cars.  That person's share of carbon dioxide from coal emissions would come to 77 tons.

The annual solid residues of coal combustion in the U.S. come to 890 pounds per American: enough to fill one million railroad coal cars.

Nuclear power plants actually save thousands of lives every year in the United States. This is because nuclear plants replace many coal plants, which emit tiny particulates into the atmosphere. These particulates are believed to kill thousands of Americans each year. Nuclear plants emit no particulates.

PPR: What about storage, and radioactive waste?

Graham: Nuclear waste goes into cooling ponds or dry cask storage at the reactor sites, where it is kept in a small area and monitored.

By contrast, a 1-gigawatt coal plant burns 3 million tons of fuel a year and produces 7 million tons of CO2, all of which immediately goes into everyone's atmosphere, where no one can control it. That's not counting the fly ash and flue gas from coal full of heavy metals including lead, arsenic, and mercury.

Fortunately, very little radioactive waste is made per reactor per year. A 1-gigawatt coal plant produces about 15 tons of carbon dioxide, 200 pounds of sulfur dioxide, and about 1,000 tons of solid ash per minute. The radioactive waste from one year of nuclear power plant operation produces about 1.5 tons and would occupy a volume of about half a cubic yard, which could easily fit under your coffee table.

PPR: Is the waste useable?

Graham: When you run fuel through a reactor for an 18-month cycle, you burn about 5 percent of the available energy. If you reprocess uranium, you reduce its waste to about 5 percent of what you put into the reactor.

But the U.S. doesn't reprocess uranium, so we have a fair amount of used fuel that can be recovered later.

President Jimmy Carter decided in 1976 that the U.S. should not reprocess uranium. Plutonium is a byproduct of the used fuel reprocessing. With used or spent fuel, with the right equipment you can separate plutonium from uranium, and use the plutonium to make MOX (mixed oxide) fuel for the reactors or to make bombs. Carter decided -- remember the Cold War was still in full swing -- that the U.S. was going to lead by example and stop reprocessing the spent fuel so that no one would have the opportunity to generate plutonium from it and make bombs.

He wanted to stop or at least inhibit the proliferation of bombs. But it didn't work out well; the genie already was out of the bottle. The French reprocess their uranium, as does Russia, China, the British, Japan and India -- so it can be seen that governments take the lead in reprocessing.

It's been a difficult decision to reverse. Since the nuclear power industry is operated by private enterprise here, what company is going to spend $5 billion or more on a reprocessing plant that might break even?

PPR: What happens to the waste now?

Graham: Radioactive waste is stored at dozens of locations around the country at existing reactor sites, for lack of a permanent repository. The reactor sites store the waste in pools of water and in dry storage, inside massive concrete-and-steel containers.

In 2002, President Bush signed into law the Yucca Mountain Development Act, which was supposed to turn an area 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas into the nation's permanent storage site. But Harry Reid, the senior senator from Nevada and Senate Majority Leader, hates the idea and has been battling its implementation all these years.
Yucca is a temporary burial site, a high-tech retrievable storage site. You can put waste down there, and at some point in time -- when we decide we need that energy -- it can be taken back out and reprocessed.

But before any of that happens, Harry Reid has to leave office. I'd say that, by 2025 we may be reprocessing uranium here in the U.S.