RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The plant began to be built 37 years ago. Now the work is to be resumed and may finally be ready. If this happens, Brazil will double its capacity for generating nuclear energy. Is it worth it?
Brazil’s nuclear program began on a beach. More specifically, the Areia Preta beach, in the center of Guarapari, 60 kilometers from Vitória, the capital of Espírito Santo.
It is made of monazite sand, from which it is possible to extract thorium – a metal that can be converted into uranium-233, used to power nuclear reactors and build atomic bombs. Thorium from the beach is harmless to bathers, but valuable for military purposes. In 1940, Russian Boris Davidovich realized this and started his fortune extracting and selling the sand to the USA.
In 1944, exports began to be managed by the Vargas government – which at first did not seem to understand the value of the material it was supplying. In 1951, it came to its senses and put the brakes on thorium exports.
The Americans turned to other sources of nuclear fuel, but the Areia Preta beach continued to be excavated until 1986 (its sand is also used to make batteries, automotive catalytic converters, and oil refining equipment). At that point, Brazil was also in another league: the priority of its nuclear program was the Angra 1 power plant, which had started operating the year before.
Brazil was even building a second plant, Angra 2, on which work had begun in 1976. Besides mastering nuclear energy production, the country had another goal: to develop the capacity to produce an atomic bomb. This project was kept secret by the military dictatorship, but the intention was clear – in 1968, the country had refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Pressure from the USA, which wanted to prevent Brazil from having nuclear weapons, together with the political and economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s, completely hindered the construction of Angra 2, which only began operating in 2001. And its little sister, Angra 3, whose construction work began in 1984, has not been completed to this day.
Now it may finally be. In February this year, the Senate passed Provisional Measure 998, preparing for the resumption of work at the plant – which, strictly speaking, is not fully stopped: in March, it received its last two accumulators, 22-ton tanks that hold the water used to cool the reactor, from state-owned nuclear company Nuclebrás.
Two buildings have yet to be built, one for the reactor (which will come from Germany) and the other for the control systems. The government plans to hold a bidding process, worth R$15 (US$3) billion, to hire contractors and finish the work by 2026. When (and if) this happens, Brazil will almost double its nuclear energy generating capacity: 3,395 megawatts in all, enough to supply a city of 6 million inhabitants such as Rio de Janeiro, and the equivalent of its current solar energy production.
It is a lot. But at the same time it is not much: It will not even represent 2% of the electricity generated in Brazil. The Belo Monte hydroelectric plant alone produces more than triple the amount of all the Angras plants combined. The conclusion is obvious. Unless Brazil plans to build dozens of nuclear power plants, which would be economically unfeasible, they will not become a relevant source of energy for the country (as they are in France, for example, whose 56 reactors produce 70% of the country’s power, or in the U.S. and Russia, which get 20% of their electricity from nuclear plants).
The promise of Angra 3 is another, no less important promise: technological sovereignty. The new plant can generate scientific, economic, and industrial development, and prepare Brazil for a future less dependent on fossil fuels (which today account for 16% of the country’s energy matrix). Not least because the country is one of the few to dominate the entire uranium cycle – and has one of the world’s largest reserves of this metal.
The rebirth of the atom
It is hard to imagine today, but nuclear energy was once a new technology.
In 1942, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi built Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1), the first nuclear reactor. It was a pile of uranium blocks, 45 tons in all, that Fermi stacked in a laboratory at the University of Chicago. Uranium releases neutrons, a type of subatomic particle. When these neutrons collide with other uranium atoms, fission occurs, that is, the atoms break apart – releasing energy (in the form of heat) and more neutrons, which propagate and break up other atoms.
This is the so-called chain reaction. This is what Fermi managed to do for the first time in history. The contraption he assembled used 330 tons of graphite blocks to moderate (slow down) the neutrons – which is essential to keep the chain reaction going. The Chicago reactor sustained a chain reaction for 4 and a half minutes, and produced 0.5 watt. It would not turn on a light bulb.
In the following years, the U.S. built several nuclear reactors, but their purpose was not to generate electricity, rather to make plutonium (which is produced by irradiating uranium with neutrons) for use in atomic bombs. The Hiroshima bomb, detonated in 1945, was made of uranium; the Nagasaki bomb, dropped three days later, used plutonium.
In 1947, a Navy officer named Álvaro Alberto da Mota e Silva wrote Brazil’s first nuclear policy plan. It began to be implemented in 1951, when the National Research Council (CNPq), headed by Alberto himself, was created. The idea was to stop exporting monazite sand and master nuclear technology. At that time, it was still exclusively military.
The first civilian reactor, designed to generate electricity, was only inaugurated in 1954 in the Soviet Union: the AM-1, which was built 110 km south of Moscow and had 5 megawatts of power. It used the heat generated by nuclear fission to boil water, whose steam propelled a turbine, thereby generating electricity. This principle is used, with some variations, in all reactors to this day.
In Brazil, CNPq began its nuclear research by trying to buy a cyclotron (a type of particle accelerator) from the United States. But the American government banned General Electric from doing business. So Alberto began to approach West Germany, which in 1956 agreed to sell Brazil three ultracentrifuges: equipment used to separate uranium-235 (which is lighter, and makes up 0.7% of natural uranium) from uranium-238 (which is 99.3% of ore).
Uranium-235 is ideal for use in nuclear reactors, because its atoms are easier to break down. After centrifugation, the two uraniums are mixed together again, in another ratio (most nuclear reactors operate with 3% to 4% U-235). This process of separating and recombining the two types is called uranium enrichment.
Brazil again exported ores to the U.S. nuclear industry. In exchange, in 1957, it was finally authorized by the U.S. government to buy the first nuclear reactor for research purposes. It was installed inside the Atomic Energy Institute (IEA), at the University of São Paulo (USP), where it still operates today. It was the first in the Southern Hemisphere.
In 1965, the Nuclear Engineering Institute (IEN), in Rio de Janeiro (RJ), inaugurated Argonauta, the first nuclear reactor developed in Brazil. They are modest: the São Paulo IEA-R1 operates at up to 5 megawatts, and the Argonauta is a thousand times smaller than this (commercial nuclear plants work at another level, at over 1,000 megawatts of power).
The 1964 military dictatorship decided to fast-track Brazil’s nuclear program. To this end, in addition to continuing to invest in its own research and development, the country once again sought partnerships with companies in developed countries. At the turn of the 1970s, Brazil was on the international market, looking for suppliers to build its first nuclear power plant. It received five proposals and chose a Westinghouse model, which used the PWR (pressurized water reactor) system. It was the right choice.
“This type of reactor is the most widely used in the world and its operation is relatively simple, when compared to other models,” explains physicist Italo Curcio, professor at Mackenzie Presbyterian University. In a PWR reactor, the water does not boil. Because it is under pressure, it remains liquid, flows through a pipe and exchanges heat with a second, separate water circuit, which converts into steam and drives a turbine.
Brazil closed the deal with the United States, which in addition to the reactor would supply the fuel (enriched uranium), and Angra 1 began to be built in 1972. It was easy to name it: Almirante Álvaro Alberto Nuclear Center. But why did the military choose Angra dos Reis? For two reasons. Actually, three.
The sea and Bahia
According to the Houaiss Dictionary, “Angra” means “small bay or inlet, usually with a wide opening and close to high coasts.” Angra dos Reis is exactly like that. It is located by the sea, where there is plenty of water to boil and move the plant’s turbines (this water, it is worth repeating, goes through the secondary circuit – and does not come into contact with the reactor).
It is also surrounded by mountain ranges and rock formations, which act as a wall – if one day there were some kind of leak, the winds would blow the radioactive particles into the sea, keeping them away from inhabited areas. And Angra is close to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the two largest energy consumers in the country. That is why it was chosen.
Angra 1 was completed in 1982, and started commercial operations in 1985. But in the beginning it experienced a string of shortcomings: power production was frequently interrupted for preventive repairs. From the 1990s on, the plant went into continuous production mode. Today it generates 640 megawatts, enough to supply a city of 1 million inhabitants.
In 1974, the military government founded Nuclebrás (Empresas Nucleares Brasileiras S/A) with the mission of dominating all stages of nuclear energy production. It so happened that at the same time India made its first test with an atomic bomb (ironically called the “Smiling Buddha”). Then things went sour. The Americans stepped on the brakes and refused to transfer nuclear technology to Brazil – which, by the way, was not foreseen in the contract, but hung in the air as a promise.
The military then came up with plan B again: West Germany. In 1975, the country signed a historic agreement with the Germans, who committed themselves to selling the country four to eight reactors over a 15-year period, while at the same time transferring knowledge about the entire cycle: prospecting, mining, and enriching uranium, producing nuclear fuel, and reprocessing radioactive material.
The Americans did not like that, and neither did the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Under pressure, Germany – which, unlike Brazil, was a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty – never delivered all the technology as promised. But it did authorize the sale of a second reactor: a PWR, manufactured by Siemens, for Angra 2.
Construction began in 1976, but the plant would only start operating commercially in 2001, after a series of interruptions in the works. A far cry from the original plan: the military had planned to build 12 nuclear power plants by 1990.
But Brazil’s nuclear program did not stagnate: it advanced on several fronts, starting with uranium itself. In the late 1970s, the Navy developed its own uranium enrichment technology, dispensing with German centrifuges (which proved inefficient for large-scale use). In 1982, the country began mining its own uranium, in Poços de Caldas (MG), in a deposit that lasted 13 years before being depleted. In 2000, it found a very viable alternative in Lagoa Real, in Caetité (BA). Mining lasted 15 years, until the uranium ran out.
But in 2020, production at the site was resumed, with the discovery of a new mine. In 2024, a new mine should start operating, in Santa Quitéria (CE). Brazil has plenty of uranium. Until today, only 30% of the national territory has been mapped, and the country holds the 6th largest uranium reserve on the planet. But exploiting it has an environmental cost: after it was decommissioned, the Poços de Caldas mine became a large lake of acid water, surrounded by 11,000 tons of uranium and thorium waste.
Once a year, on average, uranium from the reactors needs to be replaced (because it has suffered too much fission, and cannot sustain the chain reaction with the same efficiency). It becomes nuclear “waste” that must be stored carefully. The residues from Angra 1 and 2 are submerged in special pools (the water serves to cool the material, which continues to generate heat), but these are full. Therefore, as of this year, the waste will begin to be transferred to the Complementary Dry Storage Unit (UAS), a complex of warehouses that is being built between the Angra 2 and Angra 3 sites.
The material, which no longer emits as much heat, will be stored in carbon steel cylinders, each 2.4 meters high, shielded against radiation. According to Eletronuclear, the state-owned company that operates the Angra plants, the system is used in more than 70 plants in the U.S., with no safety issues.
The history of Angra, by the way, is excellent in this respect. In decades of operation, there have been zero accidents or events that endangered the environment. Brazil is also not subject to earthquakes or tsunamis – such as the one that resulted in the Fukushima plant accident. And PWR reactors are very safe. They have a “negative vacancy coefficient,” which means that if for some reason the reactor loses water, the nuclear reaction cools down. In RBMK reactors, such as the one that exploded in Chernobyl, the vacancy coefficient is positive – so the opposite occurs.
Nevertheless, and also to meet legal requirements, Angra 1 and 2 maintain a contingency plan, which involves evacuating the population within a five-kilometer radius, and is tested every two years. The plants also perform at least five emergency drills with their employees every year.
Angra 3 is a kind of twin sister of Angra 2, only a little more powerful, with 1,405 megawatts. Its reactor is also from Siemens, which is now called Areva ANP. There are some upgrades, such as the digital control system, but overall it is the same. The difference lies in the cost: each megawatt-hour generated in Angra 3 will cost R$480, according to the official estimate (in Angra 1 and 2, whose construction has already been paid for, electricity costs R$230 per megawatt-hour).
This is much more expensive than hydroelectric power – which costs an average of R$186 per MW/h, according to ANEEL (National Electric Energy Agency). If Brazil has so many rivers, room to expand its wind and solar generation, and no longer plans to build an atomic bomb – the country signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1998 -, why build another plant? Is it worth it?
“Nuclear energy is essential for the development of humankind. There is no other source, which is ecologically viable, capable of satisfying all future demand. Unless one advocates freezing the countries’ development,” argues physicist Dalton Girão, researcher and professor at the Military Engineering Institute (IME).
“Nuclear energy is safe, does not emit harmful gases, takes up little space, does not depend on weather conditions and, with the new generation of so-called ‘fast reactors’, which produce more fuel than they consume, it is virtually unlimited,” he says. (These reactors, also known as FBR, generate “spare” neutrons, which can be used to irradiate thorium-and thereby generate more uranium.) Also weighing in favor of finishing the project is the fact that it is 67.1% ready, according to Eletronuclear’s data, and that R$7.8 billion were spent to get there. Abandoning Angra 3 would mean throwing it away.
But the arguments against the project are equally convincing. “The fact that you take a bus and pay the fare doesn’t mean that you have to go all the way to the last stop,” says engineer Roberto Schaeffer, PhD in energy policy from the University of Pennsylvania and professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).
In other words, what has already been spent doesn’t justify the new expense. With the R$15 billion that will be spent to finish Angra 3, he highlights, it would be possible to produce more energy investing in solar and wind generation, which are safer sources and do not have the problem of radioactive waste. On the technological front, Schaeffer says it would be more fruitful to invest in the development of batteries (to store surplus wind and solar energy, which is currently lost) and a grid interconnecting Latin America’s electrical systems – which would help offset the fluctuations inherent to these energy sources.
Whatever the viewpoint, one thing is certain: the new plant will not only produce electricity. It will also generate jobs and controversy, clean energy and radioactive waste, solutions and problems. The proportions of these will only become fully clear once the plant starts operating. Which, considering the track record of Angra 1 and 2, could mean any time over the next few decades.