Soviets Go Atomaya Energiya
They look to nukes for more and more power
The future of nuclear power is an issue that bedevils America and excites the Soviet Union. While perfervid demonstrators, dallying bureaucrats and well-paid lawyers are holding back the development of U.S. atomic power, the U.S.S.R. is moving ahead rapidly with its own nuclear programs. TIME Correspondent Peter Staler recently spent two weeks visiting Soviet nuclear installations and filed this report:
MAY THE ATOM BE A WORKER, NOT A SOLDIER is spelled out in foot-high Cyrillic letters on a wall just inside the main gate of the huge nuclear power complex at Novovoronezh. The slogan seems at first to be no different from the exhortations that decorate buildings throughout the U.S.S.R. Unlike many of the others, however, the slogan at Novovoronezh, some 300 miles south of Moscow, reflects as much realism as rhetoric. The Soviet Union is by no means ready to beat all of its nuclear swords into plowshares. But it is moving vigorously to put the atom to work as a civilian.
Hampered by an inefficient industrial system and a ponderous bureaucracy, Soviet nuclear development is still years behind that of the U.S. and Western European countries. Still, the Soviets, caught between increasing demands for energy and declining supplies of fossil fuels, are catching up. They are not only expanding their use of established nuclear technologies and plants but, with a speed sure to cause concern on the western side of the Iron Curtain, they are moving into new--and not wholly proven--ways of harnessing the atom.
Their decision, Soviet energy experts told a group of U.S. journalists visiting their power plants and physics laboratories, has not been taken casually. As they see it, the U.S.S.R. has no choice. Though the country's coal reserves are the world's largest, they lie mostly in Siberia. Mining this coal is costly; transporting it thousands of miles to the main cities is difficult; burning it in large amounts will cause environmental problems. Oil is not the answer either; the U.S.S.R. is so desperate for hard currency that it sells much of its oil abroad. It is also running low and has resorted to costly tertiary recovery methods in some of its fields. Solar energy, which Americans hope eventually will ease their energy problems, is not taken seriously by Soviet scientists, who, for the most part, seem not only highly competent but almost aggressively realistic. Explains Academician Alexander Sheindlin, director of the Soviet Union's High Temperature Institute: "The U.S.S.R. is a northern country. We cannot rely on the sun for energy."
The Soviets are trying to improve the efficiency of their coal and natural gas power plants through magnetohydrodynamics, or the use of powerful magnets to help generate electricity. In the process, a current-conducting plasma, or superheated gas, is passed through a powerful magnetic field that heats it even further, and then is used to generate steam to drive a turbine.
The U.S.S.R. opened its first MHD plant, an experimental 200-kw installation only a few hundred yards from the Kremlin, back in 1963. It has since been joined by a larger plant at Sheindlin's institute on the outskirts of Moscow. Using a 40-ton magnet built by Argonne National Laboratory and lent by American scientists eager to test its properties, the impressive new plant generates 100,000 kw of electricity. Scientists at the institute say the plant has convinced them that MHD can make a significant contribution to Soviet energy.
Sheindlin and his colleagues predict that by the year 2000 the U.S.S.R. could have up to 20 MHD plants generating up to 2,000 Mw each of electricity, or enough to supply the needs of around 20 million people. But, with the pragmatism that seems to characterize Soviet energy policy, they acknowledge that even if their hopes are realized, MHD would provide but a fraction--no more than about 7%--of the Soviet Union's power. The major share, they conceded, will have to come from nukes.
Like the U.S., the U.S.S.R. is counting on thermonuclear fusion, which is cleaner and safer than fission, as the long-term answer to its power needs. But the scientific problems confronting both countries are enormous. Fusion--in which atoms are joined rather than split to produce energy--can take place only when a plasma made from hydrogen gas is confined, generally by a magnetic field, and then heated to tremendous temperatures. At present, concede physicists at Moscow's Kurchatov Institute, researchers at Princeton University are leading in the fusion race, having created temperatures of 60 million degrees Celsius. And, say the Soviets, the U.S. is likely to retain this edge for a while. Even when planned modifications are completed, the Kurchatov's T-10 fusion reactor is expected to do no more than equal the temperatures already attained at Princeton. "I think Princeton will achieve the first real fusion reaction," says Academician Boris Kadomtsev, director of the Kurcha-tov's Plasma Physics Division. "But I do not think this will happen tomorrow."
Until it does happen, the Soviets plan to increase their use of more conventional nuclear plants. At present, the U.S.S.R. gets only about 2% of its electricity from nukes, vs. about 13% for the U.S. But the Soviets hope to increase their figure quickly. The Kremlin's 1975 five-year plan committed the U.S.S.R. to build enough nukes to generate between 13,000 and 14,000 Mw, or about 8% of its electric power, and to derive much more of its electricity and home heat from the atom by the year 2000.
There is a long way to go before the Soviets can meet this goal. The U.S.S.R. switched on the world's first atomic power plant at the Institute of Physics at Obninsk, some 60 miles southwest of Moscow, in 1965--three years before the first American commercial reactor went on line at Shippingport, Pa. Since then, Soviet nuclear development has lagged, and while the U.S. and other countries built dozens of nuclear plants in the 1960s, the U.S.S.R. started up only six small reactors that generated 900 Mw, or enough to supply a city of some 400,000, during the same period.
Most of the reactors now in use and under construction are uranium and graphite devices of a type long since phased out in the West. Soviet industry cannot produce more modern pressurized water reactors fast enough. A huge nuclear components plant scheduled for completion at Volgadonsk is far behind schedule and is an obvious source of embarrassment to Soviet power planners.
The Soviets are going nuclear quickly. They now have four pressurized water reactors, with a rated total capacity of 1,440 Mw, on line at Novovoronezh. A fifth, designed to produce 1,000 Mw, is under construction, and several more 1,000-Mw plants are planned.
Also in the works is a major expansion of the breeder reactor program, which has been stalled in the U.S. because of questions about reactor safety and concern over the breeder's role in the production--and proliferation--of plutonium, a highly toxic substance that can be used in weapons. The Soviets have a breeder reactor, which is used both to generate electricity and to desalinate water, on line at the Caspian Sea port of Shevchenko. They have a 600,000-kw breeder under construction near Beloyarsk in the Urals. They plan to build even more of these reactors, which, to the joy of power planners and the dismay of many others, produce more plutonium than they consume. Indeed, Mikhail Troyanov, a well-respected and tough-minded physicist who serves as deputy director of the Obninsk laboratory, predicts that after 1990 breeders will be the backbone of the Soviet energy system. Says he: "I don't see any difficulties in going to plutonium."
In fact, Soviet scientists envision few of the problems that concern even pro-nuclear Americans. Most feel that their present system for handling low-level radioactive wastes provides ample protection. They are cooled off by storage in on-site "swimming pools" for three years, then shipped to a reprocessing plant where their radiation is reduced even further, and finally they are pumped into deep wells. The scientists also insist that their country's method of disposing of highly radioactive wastes, which are also stored underground, is adequate. They figure that Americans worry too much about waste.
Soviet scientists insist that nuclear reactors are safer than other types of power plants and claim that many of the safety devices accepted as essential in the West are unnecessary. Their attitude can be unsettling to those who assume that even the best reactors must be treated with respect. At the Kurchatov, for example, scientists seemed blissfully unconcerned as visiting journalists leaned against flimsy railings to gaze down into an open experimental pool reactor and marvel at the blue radiation glow that emanated from its fuel rods. While the radiation itself was under water and posed no hazard, a dropped camera or notebook, not to mention a reporter who might have fallen into the pool, could have contaminated the reactor and forced its shutdown.
The energy authorities say that the Soviet public shares their confidence in nuclear power. Vitaly K. Sedov, director of the Novovoronezh nuclear power station, even claims with a straight face that his country has never been bothered by anti-nuclear demonstrations like those that have besieged nukes in the U.S.
The Soviets, of course, are making some concessions to safety. In the past, their reactors have been built without the huge, thick concrete containment structures that enclose nuclear plants in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West because, says Yuri Svintsev, director of the Kurchatov Institute's nuclear safety laboratory, "the plants are so safe." But no longer. The No. 5 reactor now under construction at Novovoronezh is being built with a towering concrete container; other new Soviet nukes are expected to have the same feature.
What these plants will not have is the up-to-date instruments and equipment common to Western nukes. The control rooms of many Soviet nuclear power plants look like sets from the 1930s science-fiction film Things to Come, and bear only a passing resemblance to the all-electronic control rooms from which engineers run, say, American or German plants. One of the main switches for the reactor at Obninsk is a double-pole, single-throw knife switch, a device that now turns up in the U.S. only in the laboratory scenes of Frankenstein movies. The Soviets' computer technology is many generations behind that of the West. Their turbines have been plagued with problems and often break down, forcing nuclear plants to operate under capacity.
The combination of lagging technology and overdue interest in safety will probably prevent the U.S.S.R. from meeting its 1980 goals for nuclear power. But these problems have not yet--and do not seem likely to--hurt the Soviets' accelerating campaign to sell their nukes abroad. Offering long-term financing and a package plan under which they supply the fuel and take back the waste, the Soviets already have helped the Finns build a $250 million power plant around a 440-Mw Soviet-built reactor similar to one of those at Novovoronezh. The reactor, which the satisfied Finns have facetiously labeled "Eastinghouse," is the first the Soviets have sold outside the U.S.S.R. Libya has agreed to buy a similar nuclear power plant, and the Soviets hope to sell additional installations and fuel-processing services to other developing nations.
The Kremlin's nuclear push could help close the gap that now separates the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. The Soviet Union has a long way to go before it realizes its dream of self-sufficiency and becomes a net exporter of energy. But it need not go very far to dominate the international market in nuclear reactors and power plants. The U.S. nuclear industry is virtually barred from this market by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act and uncertainties about American attitudes toward the atom. Soviet atomic exports face no such obstacles. By the time the U.S. decides to go nuclear, the U.S.S.R. may already be almost there. -
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