Rod Adams
Rod Adams has not followed a typical career path: Formerly the chief engineer on a U.S. Navy submarine, he’s now a prominent blogger on nuclear power.
Rod is well qualified to preside over Atomic Insights, the blog where he writes about energy supplies, technology and politics from an atomic point of view.
For one thing, he knows nukes–not only was he an engineer on a nuclear-powered sub, he has taught “the principles of naval weapons systems” at the U.S. Naval Academy.
For another, he’s trained to do without sleep. “You get four hours of sleep, maximum,” he says, about submarine life. Now, he is able to hold down a day job as a Navy commander (assigned as a ship and submarine maintenance analyst) and still write, prolifically, averaging four to 10 posts a week. That’s because he often posts to his blog between 3 a.m. and 5:30 a.m.
Recently, Rod and I met at 7 a.m. (early for me, mid-morning for him) for coffee at a Starbucks in Crystal City, Va., near his office, to talk about nuclear power. I wanted to get the perspective of an expert who has, literally, lived with nukes. He handed me this:
“You know what that is?” he asked me. “It’s the equivalent of a ton of coal.” It would be, that is, if the tiny metal cylinder was made of uranium.
Rod, who is 50, is an unabashed “pro-nuclear activist.” He grew up in the industry–his father worked as an electrical engineer for Florida Power and Light–and Rod graduated from the Naval Academy in 1981. He spent about five and a half years on a nuclear sub. “Submarines are the killer app for nuclear power,” he says, because the fuel is lightweight, a single fuel load can last as long as 33 years and, unlike a combustion engine, it doesn’t require a smokestack to get rid of its waste.
When Rod returned to the Naval Academy to teach in the early 1991, he got interested in energy. “Oil was a big topic of conversation in 1991,” he told me. “Friends of mine were going to war to protect oil.” He did a lot of studying and found, among other things, that the U.S. civilian nuclear power industry hadn’t ordered any new plants since the 1970s.
“I couldn’t understand why,” he says.
Since then, he has come to believe that the nuclear industry is being held back by a collection of unlikely allies–the fossil fuel industry, wind and solar power companies, and environmentalists who believe that we can solve the global warming problem with a mix of energy efficiency and renewable energy. See, for example, his reaction to a Business Week article with the (silly) headline Endless Oil as well his comments about Scientific American’s Plan to Power the Planet with 100% Renewables, in which he writes:
…my analysis tells me that anyone who pushes the idea that there is a hope for human society to shift from fossil fuels to a narrowly defined set of “renewable” energy sources that pointedly excludes atomic fission is either hopelessly innumerate or simply lying through their teeth. Because I am pretty sure that statement is true, I understand why fossil fuel interests (broadly defined to include anyone who wants to keep making money by finding, extracting, transporting, financing, marketing, refining, or selling coal, oil, natural gas or any of their byproducts) talk a lot about their plans for development of wind, solar, geothermal and biomass energy and either ignore or discourage the use of nuclear energy.
Like Rod, I’ve been struck by the fact that the nuclear option is often off the table when people talk about global warming. Last month in Copenhagen, for example, a slew of events were held to promote renewable power but the nuclear industry was all but invisible. This is despite the fact that China, India, South Korea and others are building nuclear plants because they see nuclear power as an affordable, low-carbon source of baseline power.
B&W small reactor
I asked Rod what he thinks the U.S.’s nuclear policy should be. Interestingly, he’s not all that excited about the plans for large-scale nuclear power plants that are making their way through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at an excruciatingly slow pace. These are plants in the 1,15o to 1,700 MW range being pushed by utilities like the Southern Co. and NRG Energy. “There’s a market for big plants, but they can’t do everything,” he says.
He’s more excited by the smaller-scale plants being proposed by companies like NuScale Power and Babcock & Wilcox. NuScale, a venture capital-funded startup based in Corvallis, Oregon, is trying to commercialize, a modular, scalable 45 MW light water reactor. Babcock & Wilcox wants to deploy a reactor it calls mPowerTM which it says is scalable, modular and passively safe (we’ll try to explain that another day) with the capacity to provide 125 MWe to 750 MWe or more for a five-year operating cycle without refueling. B&W is a longtime nuclear supplier to the Navy and has built commercial power plants.
Rod writes:
There are numerous advantages to building smaller power plants in a factory setting, including the lowering of the risk for the initial units. Smaller power plants also allow vendors a more rapid path along cost lowering learning curves. Research has demonstrated that a typical learning curve for constructing the same design will provide a cost savings of 10-20% for every doubling of unit volume.
Of course, he can’t speak for the companies but he told me: “Small plants can been built without depending on the government for a loan guarantee or other financial support.”
Rod, by the way, knows business as well as nukes. He took a leave from the Navy, owned a successful manufacturing company and tried to launch a nuclear startup of his own, called Adams Atomic Engines. He hasn’t been able to raise the capital to get it off the ground, but he hasn’t given up either.
Despite that frustration, he’s convinced that nuclear power will eventually thrive again in the U.S., particularly if it’s given a chance to compete on a level playing field. Actually, he prefers a basketball metaphor.
“Nuclear is like Shaquille O’Neal on a playground,” Rod says.
Huh? I didn’t get it. “No one wants to let Shaq play basketball on the playground,” he says. “The only way the other guys can compete is to tie him down.”
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Very interesting article and perfect timing. I just went to a senate hearing today about renewable energy and Sec. of Energy Steven Chu was the witness. He believes that the solution to the energy/climate problem also includes nuclear. I actually wrote a summary of the hearing. If you’d like, I can email or link it to you.
Marc:
Thank you for the kind words. I enjoyed our conversation as well. One minor correction – I was the General Manager of J&M Industries, Inc., not the owner. I was recalled to active duty within a month of the time that a deal to purchase the company fell through. Sometimes you get lucky.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
‘He believes that the solution to the energy/climate problem also includes nuclear.’
I would only change includes to is. Asia is going to show the way. I would not be surprised if in 20 years China is building almost exclusively nuclear and will have given up on coal, wind, solar.
Useful article, Marc. I agree that nuclear is needed. However, the first problem is that the environmental movement is dead set against it. Has been since Three Mile Island. Convincing them that nuclear power is safe is a more formidable task than persuading people that re-newables alone can’t solve our energy deficit. The second problem is that we still haven’t reached an agreement on storage of nuclear waste. As in other policy areas, our governmental system is easily pushed toward paralysis, and the fossil fuel industries have been working the system for decades. The environmental community is relatively new to the process but it has quickly learned how to pour sand in the gears when faced with an initiative it opposes.
While so many kind words in one place might turn the head of lesser nuclear Bloggers I feel Rod Adams is perhaps one of the few that can take a few sincerely felt complements in stride and then just push on to the next challenge. Many, if not most, current nuclear advocates have read Rod’s work and have had their own views deepened by exposure to his views.
Thank you for your fine article on Rod Adams, a naval officer and engineer who possesses unusual skills in communication and has rare intelligence and strengths in variegated and subtle analysis that escape most others nominally in the same profession.
@Norman
“However, the first problem is that the environmental movement is dead set against it. Has been since Three Mile Island. Convincing them that nuclear power is safe is a more formidable task than persuading people that re-newables alone can’t solve our energy deficit.”
I may be an optimist, but I believe there is a simple solution. If people in the environmental movement simply spend a weekend or so on a retreat where the ONLY electrical power allowed is from a network of renewable sources, they will be faced with the REALITY of what that means. It is not impossible, but I have been around enough people associated with the movement to recognize that they would not necessarily enjoy the limitations they would have to accept.
For the more stubbornly committed ones, it might take a week or a month before they would tire of the challenges, but it would be very few who would put up with the experiment that long.
(Note: I am an active volunteer at a large local environmental group and have engaged with the members and professional staff at that organization for more than 8 years at many events and social functions.)
Nuclear plant operations safety doesn’t seeem to be as much of an issue as uranium mining or disposal. Then there’s the subsidies…
Thanks Marc for giving Rod Adams some much-deserved exposure. Rod invests huge amount of personal time in a pro bono effort to communicate to a lay audience. Rod is a nuclear advocate but quite different than “advocate” implies when we think of so-called environmental NGOs like Friends of the Earth. What distinguishes Rod is his critical thinking which makes him more of an “honest broker” than an “advocate”. I don’t recall encountering any critical thinking eminating from the FOE class of advocates. Rod reaches his conclusions on low-carbon energy policy by applying an engineering approach to valuation of the options.
One important concept to add to your thumbnail on smaller-scale nuclear plants, that is “volume manufacturing”. Consider what would be the cost and reliability of a complex, high end automobile like an Audi A8 if it were hand made one at a time in the buyer’s back yard. The world has never experienced mass-manufactured modular nuclear power. If your main concern is not cost but safety, consider the large gains in safety achieved by well-designed manufacturing process, where much of the NRC responsibility can be executed by certifying and monitoring the process (rather than inspecting the subassemblies on the construction site).
You can learn all about these concepts from Rod’s podcast The Atomic Show (subscribe at iTunes) as well as his blog Atomic Insights.
And thanks for recommending Stewart Brand’s important new book “An Ecopragmatist Manifesto”. I have added Marc Gunther to my RSS feeds!
Ben, uranium mining is not really more complicated than mining for other minerals and is on a smaller scale. Disposal is entirely a political problem, not a technical one. And the “subsidies” are mostly fictional and certainly not directed at day-to-day power production.
These points are just the rolling defences of the anti-nuclear-power camp who will be widely mocked if they continue their more blatantly false scaremongering (“a nuclear power plant is a bomb” etc.)