06

NUCLEAR
TECHNOLOGIES

KEY TAKEAWAYS Nuclear technologies include those for nuclear

energy production, nuclear medicine, and nuclear
weapons. This chapter focuses on nuclear energy,
° Nuclear fission offers a promising carbon-free
power source that is already in use but faces which exploits the energy present in the nuclei of
safety and proliferation concerns, economic atoms. Fission and fusion are the two ways to tap
obstacles, and significant policy challenges to that energy. Both fission and fusion reactions pro-
address long-term radioactive waste disposal. duce large amounts of heat, which can then be used
to generate steam. Steam in large amounts can be
used to drive turbines that produce electricity.
° Nuclear fusion recently achieved an important
milestone by demonstrating energy gain in the
laboratory for the first time. However, further
research breakthroughs must be achieved in the
coming decades before fusion can be technically
viable as an energy alternative.
Overview:
Nuclear Fission Technology
° Many believe that small modular reactors (SMRs)
are the most promising way to proceed with Nuclear fission is the process of striking the nucleus
nuclear power, but some nuclear experts have of a fissile isotope such as Uranium-235 with a
noted that SMRs do not solve the radioactive neutron, causing it to split into smaller nuclei of
waste disposal problem. lighter elements—and release energy. The split
also releases neutrons that can go on to split other

75
 fissionable nuclei, resulting in a chain reaction. If converted from nuclear reactors are released as heat
the chain reaction is uncontrolled, what happens is to the environment. This energy could be harnessed
a nuclear explosion. But a tightly controlled nuclear to use for heat demands in other industrial pro-
chain reaction can produce a continuous release of cesses, notably in desalination plants, metal refin-
energy at low levels that can generate electricity. ing, and hydrogen generation. These use cases are
still in the process of development, with the Depart-
Fission-driven power generation was first demon- ment of Energy (DOE) supporting US nuclear energy
strated in 1951.1 Nuclear (fission) reactors can pro- companies.
duce electric power in vast amounts without carbon
emissions, but the reaction also produces radioac- Commercial nuclear energy is used exclusively for
tive by-products that must be safely managed for electricity generation. In 2020, nuclear energy pro-
tens of thousands of years. vided 10 percent of global electricity generation,
making it the second-largest source of low-carbon
The spread of fission reactors can also raise con- electricity, behind hydroelectricity.2 In the United
cerns about the spread of nuclear weapons, since States, nuclear power contributes 18.2 percent of
knowledge and infrastructure to design, build, and electricity generation, the largest source of carbon-
operate a nuclear power plant overlap substantially free electricity.3
with what is needed to build nuclear weapons. In
this view, research on new nuclear reactors white- Research and development in nuclear energy
washes the nuclear power–nuclear weapons connec- focuses on new reactor designs that may reduce
tion. Others believe that the proliferation risks can nuclear fuel requirements, provide improved safety,
be minimized to the extent that fission reactors are a and be less expensive to build and operate. R&D is
viable option for emissions-free energy. also exploring approaches to disposal and long-term
management of radioactive waste resulting from
Overall, in the last couple of years, the global capac- reactor operation.
ity for nuclear reactors to generate electric power
has declined slightly. The new nuclear reactors
coming online, mostly in Asia, are unable to replace
the capacity loss due to aging nuclear reactors being
decommissioned in the West.
Key Developments: Fission
In addition, the United States does not offer compet-
New Reactor Designs
itive exports of nuclear power plants. Although there
are some exports from the United Arab Emirates and Advanced reactors could potentially offer a variety
South Korea, Russia dominates the global market of benefits for:4
for nuclear reactor exports. South Korea has a single
design and more expertise in industrial manufac- ° Safety Advanced reactors could offer passive
turing, allowing it to maintain low costs. Russia’s safety features that do not require direct human
state-owned Rosatom nuclear energy corporation intervention to be activated or reactor opera-
has better financing and offers a more complete fuel tion at lower pressure that can reduce the risk of
provision and waste disposal. explosion.

Commercial reactors offer other potential appli- ° Industrial decarbonization Some advanced
cations as well, since two-thirds of the energy nuclear reactors can generate enough heat for

76 STANFORD EMERGING TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

 industrial processes that would otherwise be gen- low-enriched uranium (HALEU).7 However, HALEU is
erated by fossil fuels. unavailable at a commercial scale, and projections
suggest that more than 40 metric tons of HALEU
° Radioactive waste reduction Some designs will be needed before the end of the decade in
seek to reduce the amount of long-term radio- these advanced reactors should they actually be
active waste produced in the power generation deployed.8 US government–supported research is
process; however, no reactor produces no radio- underway to develop processes to produce com-
active waste at all. mercially viable HALEU. These processes use spent
nuclear fuel from government-owned research reac-
One new reactor design gaining traction is the small tors to produce small amounts of HALEU—the first
modular reactor (SMR). These reactors generate steps in the creation of a domestic HALEU supply for
less than 300 megawatts of electricity, about 25 to advanced nuclear reactors.
30 percent the capacity of a conventional reactor.
Smaller than conventional reactors, SMRs have the More than 90 percent of the uranium used in US
benefit that they can be mass produced in facto- nuclear reactors is imported; Kazakhstan and Russia
ries and transported to installation sites. Timelines account for nearly half of all US uranium consump-
for approval could be significantly reduced because tion, while Canada and Australia account for about
the design of any given SMR would have to be 30 percent.9 One approach to eliminate the need
reviewed only once. Multiple SMRs could support for uranium imports is to extract uranium from sea-
large power plants, while single SMRs could power water. In total, seawater contains hundreds of times
smaller ones.5 more uranium than is on land, but extracting it for
use in nuclear power generation is challenging due
On the other hand, SMRs are currently at the to its low concentration and the high-salinity back-
demonstration and licensing phase and hence ground.10 As noted by Stanford professor Steven
remain an unproven technology. Moreover, while Chu, former US secretary of energy under President
SMRs are designed to reduce capital costs, a large Barack Obama: “Seawater extraction gives countries
fraction of an SMR’s cost goes toward preparing that don’t have land-based uranium the security that
the site, which means that the use of an SMR saves comes from knowing they’ll have the raw material to
30 to 40 percent in cost—but produces 70 percent meet their energy needs.”11
less power. SMRs also generate a greater volume of
waste per unit of energy produced as compared to
Nuclear Waste Disposal
larger reactors.6
Radioactive nuclear waste can be differentiated
between high-level and low-level waste based on
Fuel for New Reactors
how long it takes before the waste decays and is
Uranium ore consists of about 99.3 percent no longer hazardous. High-level waste includes
Uranium-238 and 0.7 percent Uranium-235. For use “spent,” or used, nuclear fuel and waste generated
in today’s commercial light-water reactors, uranium from the reprocessing of spent fuel. Low-level waste
must be “enriched” to increase the concentration includes items that have come in contact with radio-
of U-235 from 0.7 percent to about 3 to 5 per- active materials; such items include paper, rags,
cent, making it “low-enriched” uranium. Most new plastic bags, or clothing. In terms of overall volume,
reactor designs, however, call for the use of ura- less than 1 percent of existing radioactive waste is
nium fuel enriched with U-235 at a level between high level; about 4 percent is intermediate level; and
5 percent and 20 percent, fuel known as high-assay around 95 percent is low level. This low-level waste

06 Nuclear Technologies 77
 can take a few years or decades to decay, while
high-level waste can take upward of tens of thou-
sands of years. Over the Horizon: Fission
Managing nuclear waste requires answering two Impact of New Reactor Designs
primary questions: how to store it and where to
Generation IV nuclear reactors are proposed reac-
store it. Low-level nuclear waste is most often
tors that are more advanced than the Generation III
stored in metal drums; high-level waste is by law
and III+ reactors in use today. Generation IV reactors
turned into glass, or vitrified, to immobilize it and
seek to improve sustainability, economics, safety and
then stored in containers. But by far the most con-
reliability, proliferation resistance, and physical pro-
troversial issue in waste management is where to
tection. Some of the technical goals of such reactors
store it.
include increased efficiency of electricity generation;
generation and capture of process heat to be used
After cooling for years in water, low-level waste is
in other thermal applications, such as the production
moved to dry storage aboveground. High-level
of hydrogen; increased safety; and reduced produc-
waste requires deep underground repositories to
tion of waste materials.
isolate it for thousands of years. However, identi-
fying suitable sites is highly contested, despite a
broad consensus that such waste should be stored Generation IV reactors are characterized by their
underground (as opposed to burying it at sea, for coolants, which can be water, helium, liquid metal, or
example). Because it must be stored for so long, molten salt, and by whether they operate with mod-
a geologically stable environment is needed to erated (slower) or unmoderated (faster) neutrons.
ensure that earth movements do not disturb the Reactors using moderated (or thermal) neutrons can
waste repositories, and a dry environment is needed operate with low-enriched uranium fuel, which pres-
to ensure that running water does not leach away ents a lower risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.
waste and transport it from the disposal site. This is Reactors using unmoderated (or fast) neutrons must
a possibility because long-lived fission products and use HALEU but are able to generate more power per
some activation products have geochemical prop- unit of fuel.
erties that prevent them from binding onto the sur-
faces of minerals that would otherwise immobilize According to the US National Academies of Sciences,
them in place. Engineering, and Medicine, “advanced nuclear tech­
nologies likely will not be able to markedly contrib-
Finally, the idea of transmuting the radioactive ele- ute to electricity generation until the 2030s at the
ments in nuclear waste into less dangerous elements earliest.”12 Nevertheless, they may compete with
is occasionally floated. Natural transmutation for other energy technologies in the long term.
nuclear waste materials occurs over time but takes
hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Speeding
Challenges of Innovation
up this process entails subjecting the nuclear waste
and Implementation
elements to some other nuclear process to effect a
transformation and has been demonstrated on the Bridging the gap between innovation and implemen-
atomic scale in the laboratory—but never on a scale tation remains a challenge for advanced Generation IV
necessary to deal with the 86,000 tons of high-level reactors. The design for such reactors has been on
radioactive waste now being stored temporarily in the books for many years, and the scientific theory
aboveground sites. of nuclear power generation and the engineering

78 STANFORD EMERGING TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

know-how to build nuclear plants have also been Economics Nuclear energy and economics are
available for many years. Nevertheless, concerns over intrinsically linked, with both capital costs and the
matters such as cost and safety have largely prevented operating costs of energy production directly influ-
any action being taken toward deployment. China encing the economy’s health and competitiveness.
connected the first Generation IV reactor—a demon- At the construction phase, conventional nuclear
stration project—to its power grid on December 20, power plants have experienced significant construc-
2021,13 but no other Generation IV plants are known tion cost overruns. The construction of new fission
to be under construction anywhere else in the world. power plants faces delays due to Nuclear Regulatory
Commission intervention during construction, state
Policy, Legal, and Regulatory issues rules that delay permitting, and a lack of advocates
for new nuclear plants. At the operational phase,
Waste management There is no enduring US plan
nuclear-generated electricity is not cost-competitive
for a long-term “permanent” solution to disposing
due to high operating costs. In the United States,
of nuclear waste, with essentially all civilian nuclear
the cost of upgrades for older nuclear reactors and
waste being “temporarily” stored on-site at nuclear
the relative marginal cost of nuclear compared to
power plants. The one site that was seriously pro-
wind and solar (nuclear has higher marginal cost)
posed for permanent storage at Yucca Mountain was
have made nuclear power plants less economically
shut down in 2010. The Obama administration cited
feasible than other sources of renewable energy.
opposition from the State of Nevada in suspending
the Yucca Mountain Project. There are no new fuel
disposal or storage facilities for long-term US use Timescale Recognizing the urgency of reducing
currently in development by the DOE, although at greenhouse gas emissions and the time it takes to
this writing, Finland is expected to open its Onkalo approve and build new reactor designs safely, it is
site for permanent storage of spent fuel in 2024.14 unclear whether a sufficient number of nuclear reac-
Two private-sector facilities for interim storage tors can become operational in time. According to
(Consolidated Interim Storage Facilities) have been the International Energy Agency, 439 nuclear power
proposed in Texas and New Mexico, but host states reactors were in operation in 2021, with a combined
have opposed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s capacity of 413 gigawatts, which avoids 1.5 giga-
licensing of these facilities.15 Both states have tons of global emissions per year.17 Considering that
received NRC licensing, but the approval of the Texas global emissions in 2022 reached 36.8 gigatons,18
site was vacated by the US Court of Appeals for the doubling the number of reactors would only reduce
Fifth Circuit.16 The amount of US high-level nuclear global emissions by 4 percent (assuming efficiency
waste to be managed is today around 86,000 tons remains the same). The median construction time of
and grows at the rate of an additional 2,000 tons per nuclear reactors connected to the grid in 2021 was
year—which makes management of such waste an eighty-eight months.19 In the United States, the var-
important public policy concern. ious approval processes take about sixty months.20

There is no enduring US plan for a long-term

“permanent” solution to disposing of nuclear waste.

06 Nuclear Technologies 79
 All in all, a twelve-year period from initiation of the The confinement problem refers to the challenge of
approval process to grid connection does not seem keeping a fusion fuel—typically a mix of hydrogen
excessive. isotopes like deuterium and tritium—at the neces-
sary high temperatures and pressures long enough
Fuel supply For fission in new nuclear reactors, for a significant number of nuclear fusion reactions
the only commercial source of HALEU today is to occur. Because fusion involves “fusing” two nuclei
Russia, and the security and reliability of Russia as together, the fusion reaction must overcome the
a source is not assured. Although the US govern- repulsive forces between two charged nuclei—and
ment is undertaking research that might result in the only known way to do that is to have the nuclei
the availability of a domestic supply, environmental moving at very high speeds, corresponding to being
and other land-use issues might inhibit the devel- at a very high temperature.
opment and deployment of facilities to produce
HALEU. One way to confine the fuel is to use powerful mag-
nets to trap a high-temperature plasma of deuterium
and tritium, a process known as magnetic confine-
ment fusion (MCF). These magnets keep the hot
plasma away from the containment vessel walls,
Overview: Nuclear Fusion aiming to maintain the necessary high temperatures
and densities for the fusion reactions to occur in suf-
Technology ficient frequency. The engineering challenge is to
ensure stability of the plasma and maintain confine-
Fusion is another physical process that produces ment conditions sufficiently long enough (several
massive amounts of energy from atoms. Instead of seconds) for a net positive energy output, as plasma
splitting atoms like fission, fusion occurs when two instabilities can disrupt this process.
atomic nuclei collide together to form a heavier
nucleus. Substantial amounts of energy, several A second way—inertial confinement fusion (ICF)—
times greater than fission, are released without any calls for the very rapid compression of a fuel pellet
long-lived radioactive waste. Fusion is the source of using lasers or ion beams, causing the fuel pellet to
energy in a thermonuclear bomb—and the sun. As implode. The beams hit the pellet’s surface simulta-
with nuclear fission, the hope is that fusion can be neously, causing the pellet’s outer layer to explode,
controlled to drive electrical generators. thus driving the rest of the pellet toward its center.
The beams are very powerful but illuminate the pellet
Fusion energy comes from the fusion of deute- for a short time, around 20 nanoseconds, during
rium (D) and tritium (T), both isotopes of hydro- which the pellet is compressed. When an adequate
gen. Deuterium is common in seawater, but tritium degree of compression has been achieved, ignition
is radioactive and, because of its short half-life of of the fuel begins, and for an even shorter time of
twelve years, is not found in nature and thus must about 100 picoseconds, the compressed fuel—now
be manufactured. The D-T reaction produces a a very hot plasma—does not have a chance to move
helium-4 nucleus and a fast neutron. very much because of its own inertia—hence the
name inertial confinement. Here, the engineering
Fusion energy is still in the R&D stage. There are two challenge is ensuring that the beams hit the pellet
approaches in serious fusion research today, and simultaneously in a symmetrical manner, and the
both attempt to solve what is known as the confine- rate at which pellets can be dropped and imploded
ment problem.21 determines the rate at which energy is released.

80 STANFORD EMERGING TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

In a typical conceptual design for a fusion reactor,
a pellet might be dropped ten to twenty times per
second, requiring the illuminating lasers to fire that Key Developments: Fusion
often. The laser energy incident on the pellet would
be a couple of megajoules, and the fusion reaction A milestone was reached in December 2022, when
would produce around 100 to 150 megajoules, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence
for an energy gain of fifty to one hundred times. Livermore National Lab reached better than
(Energy gain is the ratio of the energy produced “breakeven” in an ICF experiment—in other words,
to the energy used to initiate the fusion reaction. the point at which more energy was released by a
It is important because only if the gain is greater nuclear fusion reaction than the proximate energy
than one is the reaction producing net energy.) used to initiate the reaction;24 in this experiment,
Important engineering challenges include build- the energy released was 1.53 times the proximate
ing facilities for mass production of fusion pellets, energy (i.e., the energy gain was 1.53). A second
as a single reactor might use a million pellets per demonstration of “better-than-breakeven” was
day. Other challenges include reducing the cost of repeated in July 2023.25
pellets (a target goal might be 10 to 50 cents per
pellet), developing lasers that can fire ten to twenty In both cases, the proximate energy was the energy
times per second, and finding structural materials used by the lasers involved in initiation. However,
for building the reactor that can acceptably with- these experiments did not come anywhere near
stand the fast neutrons that are emitted in the fusion to breakeven if the energy inputs to the lasers
reaction. are considered. Nevertheless, these experiments
have spurred interest in the field of nuclear fusion,
For fusion to be a viable energy source, the con- especially among the large number of start-ups in
finement strategy must allow more energy to be this arena. While most of the investment in such
produced from the fusion reactions than the energy companies comes from venture capital firms, the
invested in initiating those reactions (i.e., the Department of Energy has outlined plans for public-
energy gain must be greater than one). Achieving a private partnerships to develop on-grid fusion energy
net positive energy output while managing the con- within the next few decades.
finement challenges is a central problem in fusion
research.

Research on nuclear fusion is performed in a number

of government, commercial, and academic institu- Over the Horizon: Fusion
tions. Government involvement occurs in a number
of national laboratories. A few dozen private-sector
Impact of New Technology
companies are active in fusion and a dozen or so
universities are also involved. Funding for fusion The fusion energy future faces many technical re-
research comes from private capital and US gov- search challenges, including:
ernment coffers: research for fusion for energy
production received $763 million from the US gov- ° Reactor configuration The feasibility of fusion
ernment for fiscal year 2023 and fusion research as a power source depends on solving the con-
related to nuclear weapons received an additional finement problem, and we don’t know if magnetic
$630 million.22 Private companies declared funding confinement or inertial confinement will prove to
of $4.7 billion in the 2022 calendar year.23 be feasible methods in the long run.

06 Nuclear Technologies 81
 ° Availability of tritium Because tritium is not that the experiment suggested that practical fusion
found in appreciable amounts in nature, it must energy was “just around the corner.” Even the most
be manufactured. Tritium can be produced in optimistic private investors in fusion do not believe it
fission nuclear reactors by subjecting lithium is any closer than ten to fifteen years away.
to neutron irradiation in the reactor’s core. The
United States has not needed to produce tritium
Policy, Legal, and Regulatory Issues
for several decades, but if fusion power becomes
commercially viable, it will have to obtain suffi- Nuclear proliferation Fusion power plants will gen-
cient supplies. erate fast neutrons in addition to producing useful
heat. These neutrons can be used in principle to
° Fabrication of fuel Fusion reactors require the transmute certain elements into material that can
preparation of the D-T mixture into geometric be used to make fission weapons. One study on this
forms that easily absorb the energy needed to topic acknowledges some proliferation risk but con-
push the nuclei together. cludes that “proliferation risk from fusion systems can
be much lower than the equivalent risk from fission
° Materials The physical structures housing systems, provided commercial fusion systems are
fusion reactions are subject to damaging bom- designed to accommodate appropriate safeguards.”26
bardment, since most proposed fusion reactions,
including deuterium-tritium, release high-energy Waste management The primary waste products
neutrons. New materials are needed that are from nuclear fusion are the materials irradiated by
more neutron resistant. the intense neutron radiation produced in the fusion
reaction. The neutrons serve to transmute the ele-
ments in the original materials into other elements,
Challenges of Innovation and
and often these “activation products” are radioac-
Implementation
tive. However, they generally do not remain danger-
Some press accounts of the genuine breakthrough in ous for nearly as long as the waste products from
achieving scientific breakeven gave the impression fission reactors.

82 STANFORD EMERGING TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

NOTES

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06 Nuclear Technologies 83