Richard K. Lester spends a good deal of his energy thinking about energy. One focus is how to control carbon emissions and limit the adverse consequences of climate change. For that to happen, low-carbon energy alternatives need to be developed, one of them being nuclear power. Lester realizes that the national conversation about energy has drifted away from the climate issue in recent years, and that nuclear energy has become a more divisive topic since the Fukushima disaster in 2011. He understands these challenges, but as head of the Nuclear Science and Engineering Department, he remains committed. “The world can’t afford to take nuclear energy off the table. We don’t have the luxury,” he says.
Richard Lester, Department Head, Nuclear Science and Engineering
Change comes in waves
Lester is also faculty co-chair of the Industrial Performance Center, which he founded with several faculty colleagues in 1992 as a focus for interdisciplinary research at MIT on industrial innovation, productivity, and competitiveness. The Center has carried out major studies of national and regional competitiveness and innovation performance commissioned by governments and industrial groups around the world. Its latest research project has resulted in Unlocking Energy Innovation: How America Can Build a Low-Cost, Low-Carbon Energy System, by Lester and co-author David Hart. Published at the end of 2011 by MIT Press, the book points out that innovation doesn’t just happen spontaneously, but rather occurs within a framework of policies and market and non-market institutions. “We must be as creative in designing these institutions of innovation as we need to be about the development of the technologies themselves,” Lester says.
America’s energy system won’t be transformed all at once, nor by a single “magic bullet” solution, he says. Instead, the coming energy transition will unfold in three successive waves of innovation. Each wave will gather momentum at a different rate, and each will sweep over the energy sector at a different time. But all must be pursued in parallel, and all must be accelerated.
The first wave, ramping up in this decade and continuing beyond, must focus mainly on energy efficiency improvements in all sectors, including transportation, but especially in buildings. The primary innovations here will be new business and financing models. The second wave will have its largest impact between 2020 and 2050, and will focus on the large-scale deployment of known low-carbon technologies for electricity generation, transmission, distribution, and end-use, as well as grid-scale storage, driving down costs through continual innovation. A possible third wave, achieving scale only after 2050, may result from radical advances enabled by fundamental research, he says.
Lester breaks the innovation process into four stages: creation, demonstration, early adoption, and improvement-in-use. The bookends work tolerably well; the two middle stages don’t, and need new thinking, he says. These intermediate stages are expensive – especially for large-scale technologies – and the risks to private investors are high. Public risk- and cost-sharing is needed, but previous government interventions have been controversial and often unsuccessful. One of Lester’s recommendations is a new scheme for financing and managing these activities, which would create new investing groups at the regional level. It would decentralize funding decisions, reduce the role of the federal government, and increase the level of competition in these “downstream” stages of the innovation process.
Making such a radical change “will be a hard sell,” Lester says, but the current top-down federally-driven innovation system is broken, and now is the time to develop new options for fixing it.
Building a better reactor
As head of the Nuclear Science and Engineering Department (NSE), Lester is helping to advance a number of projects designed to develop nuclear’s capabilities, particularly through better technologies for reactors and the nuclear fuel cycle. One project is developing an improved fuel for light water reactors, using a new kind of ceramic cladding. The ceramic layer wouldn’t react chemically with water or steam at high temperatures, avoiding the production of the hydrogen that caused the explosions at Fukushima, Lester says.
Other research is exploring the viability of a new kind of reactor cooled by molten fluoride salt and using coated particle fuel dispersed in tennis ball-sized graphite “pebbles”. Such a reactor would operate at atmospheric pressure, eliminating the need for massive pressure vessels and high-pressure systems. It would also operate at higher temperatures than today’s reactors, making it more efficient and enabling dry cooling. Because there would be no need for cooling water, the reactor wouldn’t need to be located near a river or ocean, increasing the siting possibilities. The heat generated also could be used in industrial processing, adding another use for the energy, Lester says.
As well as power reactor innovations, NSE is also developing alternative ways to dispose of high-level nuclear waste. One approach involves disposal in deep boreholes drilled into bedrock 4-5 kilometers below the earth’s surface – ten times deeper than the mined waste repositories that are the principal technology today. Containment of the radionuclides at these great depths is likely to be considerably more effective, thanks in part to the much lower permeability of the surrounding rock. This is also a more flexible approach, Lester says. A single borehole would be capable of storing 10-15 years worth of spent fuel from a large power reactor and could potentially be drilled, filled, and sealed in a year or less.
One more natural obstacle
All of Lester’s work holds the hope of reducing carbon emissions and making nuclear energy safer and more viable economically. “I’m excited about the work that we’re doing,” he says. “The field of nuclear science and engineering is probably still in its early stages – similar to where electrical engineering was a hundred years ago. Certainly, the need for nuclear innovation has never been greater.”
But along with funding issues, an unclear federal policy, and divided opinions, another obstacle remains: the low price of natural gas. “It’s hard not to choose it today,” Lester says. But natural gas, though it produces fewer carbon emissions than coal, isn’t a climate game changer. “The time when we’ll need large amounts of genuinely low-carbon energy will come relatively soon, and this isn’t the moment to stop exploring alternatives. We’ll likely need some of them at some point,” Lester says. He adds that participating in nuclear innovation is also the key to achieving his department’s most important mission: developing the next generation of leaders of the global nuclear enterprise. And here he’s optimistic. “The number of outstanding students who want to contribute to the development of safe, economically competitive nuclear technology has never been greater,” he says. “That bodes well for the future.”
This article originally appeared in the MIT ILP Institute Insider.
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