This paper does not contain new computational and experimental scientific results. It attempts to analyze, based on a simplified phenomenological approach, the methodology of the evolution histories of nuclear science and technology, as well as the contradictions and issues which, if not resolved, make senseless any discussions of scenarios for the full-scale evolution of nuclear power.

The paper analyzes in brief the evolution history of nuclear technologies in the USA and in the USSR. It also considers the present-day state of nuclear power. Two international projects, INPRO and GIF IV, were initiated in 2000. The INPRO objective is to define the evolution strategy for and the requirements to the nuclear power of tomorrow. The GIF IV project aiming to develop Generation IV reactors for future NPPs focuses on building innovative reactors capable to cope with the challenges involved in further evolution of nuclear power.

The following issues were considered as the result of the system analysis

– further evolution of nuclear power worldwide;

– nuclear non-proliferation;

– NPP safety;

– nuclear waste;

– climate and oxygen burning in the NPP operation;

– education and training of younger generations of nuclear workers.

A critical analysis into the history, status and future evolution of nuclear technologies at the present-day stage shows that the nuclear energy market has monopolized the design, development and construction of practically only one type of nuclear reactors for NPPs (95% of the NPPs under construction have water-cooled water-moderated reactors) which explains the fact that single-skilled personnel are largely trained for the construction and operation of this plant type.

Achieving the full-scale evolution level of nuclear power capable to cope with the socio-economic and ecological issues faced by humankind requires a basically new evolution concept for all fields of nuclear industry.

Nuclear power, nuclear technologies, system analysis of nuclear power

To analyze the evolution stages of nuclear science and technology that determined the creation and development of nuclear weapons and, later, nuclear power, one needs to go back to the early 20^th century, that is, to more than 100 years ago. Neutrons had not yet been discovered then and no acceptable theory of nuclear structure existed while the possibility of a nuclear fission chain reaction was not even an issue of discussion, but it was as soon as in 1910 that Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, a prominent Russian scientist, made a report on new nuclear forces, based on radium radioactivity investigation results, to the Russian Academy of Sciences. At the time, there were experiments known conducted by the Nobel Prize winners, Marie Skłodowska Curie and Pierre Curie. Vernadsky realized that the discovered nuclear forces were million times as efficient as the known chemical forces. So, accordingly, he suggested that humankind was entering a new era when there would be no limits on access to energy and all of the nourishment, health, and industrial and social development problems would be resolved (Vernadsky 2013).

This was one of the first predictions about the coming Golden Age of humankind based on a scientific and technological revolution. Later, however, when the Radium Institute was opened in 1922, he was first to understand the full extent of the tragic drama brought about by this opening of the ‘door’ not only to a brighter future but also to the potential self-destruction of humankind as the whole. When addressing an audience of scientists and public figures (Vernadsky 1922), he said:

“We are approaching a great change in the life of humankind, the one incomparable with all those experienced by it before. The time is near when man will acquire atomic energy, the source of such a force that will make it possible for him to build his life as he desires. This may occur in several years to come or in a century. But it is clear that it is bound to happen.

Will man be able to take advantage of this force and to use it for benefit and not for self-destruction?

Is he mature enough to use the force that science is inevitably bound to give him?

Scientists shall not turn a blind eye to the potential consequences of their scientific work and the scientific progress. They must feel responsible for all of the consequences their discoveries bring. They must connect their work to the best organization of the entire mankind”.

In December 1942, a team led by Enrico Fermi, an Italian scientist and Nobel Prize winner, started the world’s first uranium-graphite nuclear reactor based on natural uranium (СР-1, Chicago Pile 1). Later, the reactor was dismantled and moved, under the name of CP-2, to the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) established in the USA. It was two years later, in 1944, that the world’s first heavy-water natural-uranium reactor (CP-3) was started at the АNL. These two types of natural-uranium reactors formed the basis for the evolution of plutonium production industry. In parallel, the uranium enrichment technology was evolving successfully. These two technologies made it possible to begin to build nuclear weapons (Andrianov et al. 2012).

The first, plutonium, nuclear bomb was detonated by the USA in July 1945. This Trinity explosion is considered the beginning of the nuclear era. The two next (uranium and plutonium) nuclear bombs were detonated over Japan.

The successful nuclear weapon testing focused the efforts of scientists, engineers and technologists from the allied countries on the creation of nuclear weapon arsenals and delivery vehicles, the key priority national task of their survival.

This moved the evolution of nuclear power and the advent of the Golden Age of energy prosperity to the sidelines of national scientific and technical progress for a decade.

At 7.00 AM local time on 29 August 1949, the Soviet Union’s first nuclear charge, RDS-1, was detonated at the Semipalatinsk test range.

Nuclear problem required the involvement of experts in a great variety of fields of science and technology, including metallurgists, mechanics, chemists, biologists, textile technologists, and glass experts. This was a systemic problem and it could be resolved only through the joint work of as many persons with the greatest scientific and technological expertise as possible. The USSR hurled all of the country’s efforts into resolving this complicated and important problem and the required basis was fully formed. The nuclear industry infrastructure was simultaneously established as the groundwork for the further nuclear evolution of the nation.

This solved conceptually the problem of nuclear weapon building in the USSR and eliminated the US nuclear monopoly. Further, as the result of the nuclear arms race, over 1550 nuclear tests were conducted and more than 8500 nuclear charges were built in total in the USA and in the USSR during the cold war period.

Simultaneously, the problem of nuclear weapon delivery was being resolved in the USA and in the USSR. Enormous resources (material, technical and financial) were spent to build over 500 nuclear submarines equipped with about 1000 nuclear reactors and missiles carrying nuclear warheads. The number of states possessing nuclear weapons (nuclear powers) started to grow as Great Britain, France, and China joined the USA and the USSR. The threat of nuclear weapon proliferation emerged.

In 1954, following a prolonged debate, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution on establishing international control of the development and use of nuclear technologies and setting up the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to supervise its enforcement.

As the initial practical step, it was decided to hold the First Geneva Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy under the UN auspices, where ways for peaceful uses of atomic energy could be discussed. Quite a sensation was created at the conference by a report on the world’s first nuclear power plant started in 1954 in the city of Obninsk in the USSR (5 MWel) with a water-cooled uranium-graphite reactor based on enriched uranium (AM-1).

Later, in 1956, the world’s first commercial NPP, Calder Hill, (50 MWel) with a carbon dioxide cooled uranium-graphite reactor based on natural uranium was started in England. It had a MAGNOX-type nuclear reactor developed for weapon-grade plutonium production.

In 1957, the world’s first NPP (Sheppingport of 70 MWel) was started with a water-cooled water-moderated reactor of the PWR type (the VVER type in Russia). This reactor type was developed for the nuclear submarine nuclear propulsion system and forms currently the basis of present-day nuclear power.

A conceptually important step was the startup by E. Fermi’s successors in 1946 in the USA of the world’s first fast-neutron reactor (without moderator), Clementine (CP-4), in which plutonium was used as fuel. This was the first time that liquid metal (mercury) was used as coolant (Andrianov et al. 2012).

This caused a rapid growth in the number of NPPs worldwide (see Fig. 1) based on the platform formed by nuclear weapon projects, including the fuel base and the whole of the industry infrastructure in a range from uranium mining to fabrication and in-pile use of nuclear fuel, personnel training, and expertise.

Figure 1. 

Growth of NPP capacity in the world (by regions), and the number of new NPPs constructed annually (Andrianov et al. 2012).

More than that, the world’s first launched NPPs of different types were actually the result of the conversion to the development of designs for military applications (Andrianov et al. 2012).

By the mid-1980s, there were not less than 40 nuclear units under construction worldwide, and the total power of nuclear facilities reached more than 350 GWel. Everything was going perfectly well until 1979 when an accident, the largest one in the history of commercial nuclear power in the USA, occurred at Three Mile Island, a nuclear generating station, leading to substantial economic losses (over 200 orders for the construction of new NPPs with the most widespread reactor type, PWR, were cancelled). This was followed by the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl NPP which grew into a nuclear disaster with both economic and global socio-political consequences. It was the Soviet Union that was largely affected as the world’s only maker of this reactor type. However, there was a sharp rise in negative public attitudes towards nuclear across Europe. Seven small countries decided to ban nuclear development.

The evolution of nuclear power started to decay by the end of the 20^th century. The concept of NPP safety and further development of “nuclear safety culture” as one of the bases for nuclear power began to be revised. The aphorism by H. Blix, the IAEA Director General, that “a nuclear accident anywhere is an accident everywhere”, became a manifest truth (Andrianov et al. 2012).

Two international projects (Fig. 2) were organized in 2000 to find the way out of the crisis in the development of nuclear power. The Russian-initiated INPRO innovative nuclear power project has been evolving under the IAEA auspices and unites the efforts of experts from nuclear developed and developing countries (over 40 countries).

Figure 2. 

Base documents of INPRO and GIF IV, two key international projects (Andrianov et al. 2012).

The INPRO objective is to define the evolution strategy for and requirements to future nuclear power.

The project to develop generation IV reactors for future NPPs (GIF IV) aims to build innovative reactors (Fig. 3) expected to resolve (after 2030) the problems of further nuclear power evolution, including in terms of safety, economic efficiency, unlimited development resources, waste handling and spent fuel non-proliferation (Fig. 4). The stakeholders in the US-initiated project are only 11 most nuclear developed countries (Russia and China joined GIF IV in 2006).

Figure 3. 

The list of fourth-generation reactors in accordance with GIF-4 (Andrianov et al. 2012).

Figure 4. 

Requirements and objectives of the 4^th generation NPP (Andrianov et al. 2012).

Unfortunately, the situation worsened sharply as the result of the 21^st century’s gravest nuclear accident. It occurred in 2011 at the Fukushima Daiichi NPP in Japan, one of the most industrially and nuclear developed countries in the world.

Nuclear community must find the way out of the existing contradiction: nuclear technology has not yet led humankind into the golden age with energy problems resolved but has made it possible to build a nuclear weapon potential capable to destroy humankind.

In recent years, despite the construction of 54 new units in the world with 5 to 10 NPP units started up annually, the contribution of nuclear power to electricity generation (currently 11%) and to the total energy balance (currently 5%) is decreasing. The reason is not so the decommissioning of outage nuclear units as the rapid growth in the number of conventional and alternative energy sources (Fig. 5).

Figure 5. 

Scale of and reduction in the share of nuclear electricity generation worldwide (Murogov 2019).

Academician P.L. Kapitsa wrote back in 1955 that new competitive NPP units cannot be built without changing the scientific and technical principle of atomic energy conversion to electrical energy (Fig. 12) (Kapitsa 1955).

Figure 12. 

A fragment of P.L. Kapitsa’s 1955 paper (Kapitsa 1955).

Achieving a full-scale evolution level of nuclear power capable to cope with socio-economic and environmental issues, the challenges faced by humankind, requires a basically new evolution concept of nuclear power (Kapitsa 1981) and its nuclear fuel cycle (Bashkirov 2018). No less challenging objective of our society is to cultivate a new mentality in the humankind that has entered the nuclear era.