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Nuclear power
- Thread starter eledille
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DMSR reactors are quoted for costing US$ 1 / Watt and produce 6x more energy per ton of mined uranium (or recycled transuranics) vs current nuclear. So about 1/10th the cost of current nuclear per Watt and 1/5th the O&M costs also per Watt.
So while your math is almost certainly correct for regulatory overloaded water cooled nukes, molten salt reactors which can't melt down, which are walk away safe, go for very different economics.
Water cooled nuclear is a kludge.
Don't throw the baby out with the bath water, there are 100 ways to do nuclear. 98% of current reactors are the result and minor evolution of the needs of the US Navy circa 1950. Better ideas were shutdown for political and defense interests.
So while your math is almost certainly correct for regulatory overloaded water cooled nukes, molten salt reactors which can't melt down, which are walk away safe, go for very different economics.
Water cooled nuclear is a kludge.
Don't throw the baby out with the bath water, there are 100 ways to do nuclear. 98% of current reactors are the result and minor evolution of the needs of the US Navy circa 1950. Better ideas were shutdown for political and defense interests.
mspohr
Well-Known Member
nwdiver
Well-Known Member
I look forward to $1/w nuclear plants... I will be especially interested to see how they convert the heat into electricity... since that costs ~$1/w... and where they get cooling for the condensers... since that also costs ~$1/w...
Yes... I will be very interested to see how you take equipment that costs ~$2/w and cut the cost in half by ADDING a nuclear reactor :wink:
Yes... I will be very interested to see how you take equipment that costs ~$2/w and cut the cost in half by ADDING a nuclear reactor :wink:
People are reaching pretty far in this thread's last couple pages. In some ways, all you have to concentrate on is whether we can do better than the EPA's 27% coal, and 33% natural gas targets, at 2030. That's a U.S. -centric consideration.
I'm thinking we can, as the TMC debate yet again gets steered to horse racing nuclear and renewables. Molten salt reactors and solar "blue squares" are the stuff of theory, if your head is anywhere near policy. You have to move that mountain, first.
Right now, we exist in a federal policy reality that says replacing nuclear with natural gas is an answer to the requirements of the Clean Power Plan. Utilities won't reach for solar, when natural gas plants actually do cost <$1/watt. Plus, they can charge for the gas, where they can't for the sun. I still can't figure out why the EPA did this. Between natural gas and nuclear, they effectively created a positive value per ton of CO2. Seriously. Natural gas reduces EPA's rate-based CO2/MWh intensity (in states with coal and NG), where nuclear coming on, or going down, does nothing.
I'm thinking we can, as the TMC debate yet again gets steered to horse racing nuclear and renewables. Molten salt reactors and solar "blue squares" are the stuff of theory, if your head is anywhere near policy. You have to move that mountain, first.
Right now, we exist in a federal policy reality that says replacing nuclear with natural gas is an answer to the requirements of the Clean Power Plan. Utilities won't reach for solar, when natural gas plants actually do cost <$1/watt. Plus, they can charge for the gas, where they can't for the sun. I still can't figure out why the EPA did this. Between natural gas and nuclear, they effectively created a positive value per ton of CO2. Seriously. Natural gas reduces EPA's rate-based CO2/MWh intensity (in states with coal and NG), where nuclear coming on, or going down, does nothing.
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nwdiver
Well-Known Member
.... that's the message I've been trying to drill home for >5 years; Goes double for nuclear. I personally know a lot of people.... AAA LOOOOT of people that resist installing solar on their homes and criticize wind... 'cause.... any day now the nuclear renaissance is going to save us from needing to denigrate our lovely roof line with 'ugly' blue rectangles and 'destroy' our horizon with 'ugly' spinning wind turbines.
Sorry... that future will NEVER come. Nuclear has always been a hedge. Utilities have zero desire to undercut cheap gas and coal with nuclear. This is going to have to be a bottom up approach. No one is going to do if for you. Stop with the excuses and ACT. Consume >1 MWh/mo.... ok... then you better be generating >1MWh/mo. The time for deliberation is over; Now is the time for action. Can't get solar on your roof? Ok... invest in community solar or wind..... or nuclear if you can find it.... It's time we stop passing the buck as individuals cheering society to act. It's time to take PERSONAL responsibility for where your energy comes from. The nuclear renaissance isn't going to save you from the need to act.
I criticize nuclear in the same spirit that FCVs are criticized... sure, an H2 powered FCV is 'technically' sustainable transport... but it's needlessly and absurdly expensive... and BEVs work just fine.
Bangor Bob
Member
Except, utilities ARE reaching for solar (and wind). In a big way - 11GW of new capacity reported to EIA over the next year. Installations of utility-side wind+solar have been roughly 10% greater than Natural Gas over the past 12 months, and the next 12 months. Even with the gas additions, so much coal has been retired in the past year that fossil fueled capacity has had a net reduction almost as large as the renewables capacity increase. Over the next year there is currently forecast to be a small net growth in fossil generation, but it's still lots of gas replacing coal.
EIA - Electricity Data
We're moving in the right direction. Let's hope utility-scale solar can keep up the annual doubling it's been doing for the past 3 years for a while longer - it's on the cusp of making some meaningful numbers.
Oh, and offshore wind FINALLY has steel in US waters. With luck Block Island is just the beginning. We need floaters for the Pacific coast.
The problem with nuclear isn't that it's not safe. IT IS. The problem is the cost of making it as safe as it is today, and the unwillingness to revisit all of the useless provisions mandated on nuclear power that didn't add to safety and that cost billions on the whole industry over a 10 year period.
Remember, an Elephant is a mouse built to government specifications, and the US NRC is a big fan of that concept.
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Not a big production one, but a small research one was built in the 60s, for less than 2% of the plutonium breeder fast reactor research budget. That includes operating the reactor for 6000 hours.
If you study water cooled nukes, and all the major funcionality required and compare it to the requirements of a DMSR, you will see that it has to be almost an order of magnitude simpler.
The only big issue is since the nuclear fuel is dissolved in the coolant, circulating with the core coolant, there will be some plating of fission product metals in the heat exchanger.
But here's the quicker, typical reactors must be shown to be safe and reliable for 40 years, with the expectation that with proper maintenance they could be operated for 80 years.
MSRs are so much more compact, lighter, that they are being designed to operate for no more than 8 years, reactor buildings will have slots for 2x as many reactors as required, install the first one, after its normal service life, shift the fuel+coolant to a second one, let it cool (and loose radioactivity) and ship it back to the factory, NO on site maintenance required. Once the second one is an year from shutdown, another reactor module is installed on the first slot, and life goes on, alternating.
When your design life is 4-8 years (depending on the design and power levels), it opens up a lot of improved engineering concepts which are unthinkable for water cooler reators (except for tiny ones, which won't be economical because they require most of water cooled nuke complexity).
No, I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I did study this stuff as deep as one can study without actually going to college to get a nuclear degree. It makes sense.
The real problem as far as cost is the mindset on how to build them.
It is NO secret that the NRC mandates an overall mentality that is INSANELY inefficient.
If the entire reactor vessel can be manufactured at a central facility, and shipped as a single module to the destination, then the nuclear regulatory body can just have a permanent presence at the factory and sign off whenever required, and if anything isn't up to their standards, the same people will learn from it and make it acceptable then.
Current nuclear projects don't have that series production mentality, most work is on site, so mistakes are repeated on all separate projects, with NRC inspectors coming and going (and charging millions of dollars just in NRC fees). Plus all paperwork that must be prepared.
I once was a consultant, willing to travel all over the country to fix problems on site, it was not a popular position, even though it paid well. People don't like to travel.
All DMSR as being proposed with ZERO nuclear specific local construction requirements. Local labour is the same as a coal / natural gas plant.
There are two simplified MSR projects underway (excluding the half a dozen more complex one):
Canada's Terrestrial Energy IMSR (http://www.terrestrialenergy.com)
USA's Martingale ThorCon (Thorcon Power | The Do-able Molten Salt Reactor)
Or you might want to take a look at (Energy from Thorium)
MSRs and generally associated with Thorium as a fuel, but there are huge benefits for MSRs with just Uranium / Plutonium as fuels.
To finish, one big concern often quoted is a peak uranium concept (which is a big fabricated garbage argument, but I'll play).
Regular reactors are able to fission just 50% of U235 in the fuel and the same amount of Plutonium from U238.
DMSRs are far more efficient with the neutrons, so they're able to fission 90+% of U235 and another 4 parts of Plutonium from U238.
And all MSRs are high temperature reactors, which increase turbine to electricity efficiency by about 50%.
So when it's all said and done, each unit of mined Uranium will produce 6x more electricity on a DMSR vs a regular reactor.
With reprocessing this could reach 10x more electricity.
That means that current raw Uranium reserves would be enough to 600-1000 years vs current 100 years.
And the world mining companies have no interest in search for more Uranium when the current recoverable reserves are enough for 100 years.
If we had to look for it, we could increase that three fold easily. Without resorting to Uranium from the sea. Uranium dissolved in the Oceans is enough for 10,000 years consumption using DMSRs, and then there's the Thorium, another 10,000 years using DMSRs.
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mspohr
Well-Known Member
Radiation is inherently unsafe. As you point out, it might be possible to make safer nuclear reactors but the cost is very high (too high to make nuclear a viable power source).
Pro-nuclear people constantly complain about "government regulation" and blame it for the high cost of nuclear power. Clearly there are differences of opinion here. If we take Fukushima as an example, it was engineered to withstand a 100 year earthquake and tsunami. Some might have thought this was "too much regulation", others not enough regulation. The problem was that they experienced an earthquake and tsunami which was an 800 year event and it overwhelmed the design. Pre-disaster, if you had tried to force Fukushima to be built to the 800 year standard I am sure that there would have been loud cries of "too much regulation".
That is the essential problem. Radiation is inherently unsafe and you can try to engineer something to contain the radiation but you will never be able to make radiation "safe", only contain it and only contain it to the limits of your design. It is impossible to predict all of the potential future stresses on a design and it becomes outrageously expensive to actually design and build for all of the future potential problems.
nwdiver
Well-Known Member
Ok... let's say there's a significant release near your home and background radiation levels go up ~1000x as they have in the area surrounding Fukushima. Is that lethal? No. Is it going to give you cancer? 'Probably' not. Is there an increase in your risk of cancer and birth defects for your children? Yes. Even if people are rational about this and the area isn't rendered uninhabitable it's still going to significantly depress property values and damage the nuclear industry. You simply cannot regulate nuclear power like you do coal or gas.... just like there are different regulations for aircraft vs cars... when the risks are greater the regulations need to be greater.
Would you be ok with radiation levels going up >1000 fold without compensation?
Would you be ok with radiation levels going up >1000 fold without compensation?
Every aircraft in operation, even the safest ones are inherently unsafe. If the pilots decide to crash the plane while in flight, and everyone is DEAD.
Still, flying the airlines is the safest mode of transportation.
So, what about in the very next airline accident we ground ALL airliners FOREVER ?
Nuclear power is arguably a little safer than solar.
What matters are actual safety record. Deaths per TWh.
Everything else is perception. Perception isn't science. Its a hall mark of human irrationality.
I'm not interest in that. I'm a scientific person. Aren't you ?
nwdiver
Well-Known Member
LOL... apples and oranges... they don't have to evacuate my town if I die falling off the roof.
I would 100% agree to treating nuclear like coal if a meltdown stayed inside the fence and only effected plant workers.
What ? Coal ash piles have been washed away by floods, polluting rivers downstream, causing untold cancers.
Coal emissions cause deaths too.
Last time I checked, 10 people died from Fukushima (2 drowned, 8 industrial accidents). The EVAC zone is being reduced significantly. In 10 years it should be down to less than 2 mile radius.
And we know Fukushima can't happen on 90% of the reactors. And with post Fukushima precautions it will never happen again.
Its funny you claim to be a nuclear professional, yet you assume the nuclear industry is incompetent.
If nuclear were unsafe, we'd have meltdowns every couple of years. And we wouldn't have a plan to avoid them.
The fact is Fukushima couldn't have happened with an AP1000/ESBWR/CANDU6/S-PRISM or any MSR.
Fukushima reactor is a GE BWR Gen II, designed in the 60s, built in the 70s, operated for 40 years.
Its base design had none of the lessons from TMI and Chernobyl.
nwdiver
Well-Known Member
Please cite where I claimed the nuclear industry is unsafe or incompetent....
I've repeatedly said nuclear IS safe... in no small part to the strict regulations they are required to meet. Relaxing these regulations is not the way to make nuclear more cost effective.
You're right that Fukushima could not happen with an AP1000... why? Because the regulations you want to reduce to save $$$ motivated Westinghouse to design a passive cooling system that required no power. Kinda weird logic to say we don't need X because we have Y.... but Y exist BECAUSE we have X... :wink:
Had Japan REQUIRED passive cooling Fukushima would have been impossible in Fukushima... but they deemed that an 'unnecessary' expense.
I agree we need more regulations on coal... or eliminate it entirely :wink:
Look up the radiation produced by Coal Plants. Coal fly ash is radioactive, and more damaging than a normally operating nuclear plant. The slag or whats left behind is not so radioactive.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
nwdiver
Well-Known Member
I actually grabbed a pocket of coal ash on a coal plant tour and brought it to work with me to measure with a radiac ('geiger counter'...no one calls them that...) I got nothing. Not sure if that coal dust just had lower levels or what....
The thing about contamination is that it's really all about concentration, concentration and concentration. There was actually a plan at one point to mix spent nuclear fuel with fertilizer... you would actually only increase the radioactivity of the farm soil <0.000001% but obviously people 'freaked out'...
We have a joke at work... if you have >2x the contamination limit on your left hand what do you do? You rub your hands together. Now each hand is at the limit... next rub your hands on your pants.... ok... now you're good :wink:
So to claim that 800M tons of coal contains more radioactive material than 1k tons of nuclear fuel is 'true'... and a bit disingenuous....
Yes, there is probably less radioactive material in a spent fuel rod than 1M tons of coal ash... but it's EXTREMELY concentrated.
I'm sorry but you need to understand how the regulatory process works, what are the many requirements involved, and the cost of each one.
There are hundreds of NRC safety requirements that if rolled back would not give Westinghouse or GE ANY incentive to go back to early Gen III designs.
GE just got ESBWR approval from the NRC. Just as Westinghouse got AP1000 approval a few years back.
You need to look into the nightmare of regulatory requirements that must be met in order to obtain approval to deploy one such reactor anywhere in the country.
A lot of the requirements repeat processes already achieved in the certification.
Now say a nuclear operator got an AP1000 installed and operational, and they need another AP1000 right next to the first one, they need to repeat EVERY SINGLE RITE, EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF PAPER, they get zero chance to say, its all the same, nope, they must spend tens of millions of USD because the NRC will ignore the already operating site and repeat every little step in their analysis.
One of the strongest critics is exactly that after design approval is obtained, every new install of that reactor type in essence will go through many steps of certification again. You can't just skip the work that has been done for the certification.
The other issue is NRC regulatory process is prescriptive. You must follow their recipe for most aspects. Which in essence rules out brand new types of reactors like MSRs (and make even Sodium cooled fast reactors very difficult too).
This would only work if the NRC had the brighest PhD nuclear expert in the world, able to learn any new nuclear design. Maybe the DOE can, but the NRC doesn't seem to be in that league.
In order to certify an MSR with the NRC, the first MSR maker will have to pay the NRC close to a hundred million dollars cause the NRC charges US$ 225/hr and they will likely spend 100 thousand hours to learn MSR technology, so they can write their prescription for MSRs, without any assurances they wont invent a reason to reject MSRs. And to add insult to injury, there's no practical process to obtain approval to build an R&D reactor (without uptime pressure, run by the people that designed it), so the first mover cost will go to he first nuclear vendor that hopes to build a proof of concept MSR reactor in the USA, nope, they will rather go to Canada or some other country that actually offers a much easier process to certify a reactor as long as its lower power. I'm basing 100,000 hours on the fact that certifying a new AP1000 site costs in the vicinity of 10,000 hours of regulatory work, and that's if everything goes great. In reality it could be much, much, much higher numbers.
Passive cooling wasn't required to avoid Fukushima, just put half of the generators at higher positions and increase tsunami wall height (either one would do, but I agree both should have been done).
Requiring passive cooling retroactively worldwide would result in a trillion dollars worth of losses to nuclear operators. It's a bad idea. Much like 40 year old Boeings and Airbus are still allowed to fly, and boy those have no workload automation, much more risky to result in an accident.
We can't compare coal with nuclear, and that's why I don't even try. Coal is a continous environmental disaster. The worst estimates say over a million people / year are dying due to coal worldwide. The more modest ones over 200 thousand. Even including every death from the A bombs dropped in Japan and every nuclear related death in all of mankind coal just needs 1-3 years to repeat tthe carnage again.
Estimates are 13 thousand / year deaths due to coal in the USA alone !
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nwdiver
Well-Known Member
I am FAR more familiar with the regulatory process than I wish I was. I've had NRC regulators watch me work... they're not bad people.
It's also typically not the regulator than mandates specific actions... it's the regulatee.
The NRC will say... this accident sequence has a 1:1000 probability of occurring... how are you going to mitigate that? It's then up to us to either show that the odds are far less than 1:1000 or come up with a plan that satisfies the regulator.
Had the NRA been as vigilant as the NRC they may have asked how Fukushima planed to mitigate the possibility that their below ground diesels would get flooded.
This also leads to the negative learning curve that plagues nuclear power... for every 'potential' problem we solve we discover 2 more. On the plus side nuclear power is safer than ever... but the costs keep rising. Elon has a quote that if the odds of a defect are 1:1000 then you're probably not going to see it until you build >1000 of something. We've not quite built 1000 reactors yet and everyone agrees its a bad idea to wait and see what breaks so we have teams that use their imagination to come up with different scenarios for what could happen... they invent some crazy stuff sometimes... we actually have 'missile shields' at my plant.... seriously.
If anybody reading this haven't read about Transtomic Power. Homepage - Transatomic
They are working on an ultra advanced MSR that will run on spent nuclear fuel, chop the SNF, remove the cladding, absorb the noble gas fission products, fluorinate to change from oxide to Fluoride, and insert fuel in the reactor. The reactor is slated to have online filters for noble gasses (standard on all MSRs) plus filters to remove other neutron poisons.
It uses LiF + UF carrier salt. With 27x more Uranium dissolved in the salt and a much more compact moderator, ZrH, which allows the reactor core to be just half moderator (the MSRE was very bulky since Graphite is a much less efficient moderator than ZrF).
And its slated to consume 80+% of the SNF, reaching fast reactor burnups (without intermediate reprocessing cycles, since the fuel is liquid, reprocessing and fueling doesn't stop the reactor). Typical LWR/BWR consume just 4% of nuclear fuel, hence it extracts 20x more fission energy, plus higher temperature turbine means about 30x more energy extraction vs LWR/BWR.
Could also be fueled with 1.8% enriched Uranium, also extracting 80+% of nuclear fuel energy.
Its so efficient that the available 272,000 tons of SNF worldwide would power the whole world's electricity demand for 72 years, including predicted energy growth, without mining an ounce of additional Uranium.
Since it goes from 0.5% of extract Uranium energy for LWR/BWR to 50%, current Uranium mining would be too much if all reactors in the world were replaced with transatomic ones.
Its a bleeding edge design, but unlike many MSR designs, they have raised a few million USD and are undergoing tests under agreements with MIT to validate their design. Paypal mafia Peter Thiel Founding Fathers Fund means serious funding would follow if they can retire all risks before building a demonstration reactor.
Perhaps the only MSR design in North America that's actually testing stuff in the real world, others seem to be only doing computer design and computer simulations.
I think Terrestrial Energy IMSR and Martinghale ThorCon has a higher chance to succeed, since they aren't nearly as audacious in their plans, but if Transtomic succeeds, it might be the only solution we'll need to get rid of coal and natural gas for energy worldwide. With current SNF stockpiles plus existing recoverable Uranium reserves that would be enough to power the world for at least 1000 years without Thorium or new Uranium reserves. Enough to quiet the Nuclear isn't renewable mantra.
Notice I'm not against solar or wind, specially with Tesla Energy offering a serious energy storage, but nuclear is a more universal solution, considering high Alaska, Siberia, Scandinavia and other places that just don't get enough sunlight in the winter.
They are working on an ultra advanced MSR that will run on spent nuclear fuel, chop the SNF, remove the cladding, absorb the noble gas fission products, fluorinate to change from oxide to Fluoride, and insert fuel in the reactor. The reactor is slated to have online filters for noble gasses (standard on all MSRs) plus filters to remove other neutron poisons.
It uses LiF + UF carrier salt. With 27x more Uranium dissolved in the salt and a much more compact moderator, ZrH, which allows the reactor core to be just half moderator (the MSRE was very bulky since Graphite is a much less efficient moderator than ZrF).
And its slated to consume 80+% of the SNF, reaching fast reactor burnups (without intermediate reprocessing cycles, since the fuel is liquid, reprocessing and fueling doesn't stop the reactor). Typical LWR/BWR consume just 4% of nuclear fuel, hence it extracts 20x more fission energy, plus higher temperature turbine means about 30x more energy extraction vs LWR/BWR.
Could also be fueled with 1.8% enriched Uranium, also extracting 80+% of nuclear fuel energy.
Its so efficient that the available 272,000 tons of SNF worldwide would power the whole world's electricity demand for 72 years, including predicted energy growth, without mining an ounce of additional Uranium.
Since it goes from 0.5% of extract Uranium energy for LWR/BWR to 50%, current Uranium mining would be too much if all reactors in the world were replaced with transatomic ones.
Its a bleeding edge design, but unlike many MSR designs, they have raised a few million USD and are undergoing tests under agreements with MIT to validate their design. Paypal mafia Peter Thiel Founding Fathers Fund means serious funding would follow if they can retire all risks before building a demonstration reactor.
Perhaps the only MSR design in North America that's actually testing stuff in the real world, others seem to be only doing computer design and computer simulations.
I think Terrestrial Energy IMSR and Martinghale ThorCon has a higher chance to succeed, since they aren't nearly as audacious in their plans, but if Transtomic succeeds, it might be the only solution we'll need to get rid of coal and natural gas for energy worldwide. With current SNF stockpiles plus existing recoverable Uranium reserves that would be enough to power the world for at least 1000 years without Thorium or new Uranium reserves. Enough to quiet the Nuclear isn't renewable mantra.
Notice I'm not against solar or wind, specially with Tesla Energy offering a serious energy storage, but nuclear is a more universal solution, considering high Alaska, Siberia, Scandinavia and other places that just don't get enough sunlight in the winter.
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nwdiver
Well-Known Member
Really interesting discussion about nuclear on The Energy Collective this week;
Some of the highlights;
- Nat Gas costs below nuclear O&M costs are killing plants in New England and the Mid-West. Another shut-down announced :crying:
- Nuclear Power isn't given enough credit for providing zero-emission power under the CPP.
- The Nuclear Industry and Renewables Industry need to make nice. This means you Exelon!
To that last point the priority is to salvaging our existing fleet. If the O&M costs are too high to be competitive I don't see how building new plants is even remotely feasible since capital costs are typically equal if not more than O&M costs.
Main theme... KEEP EXISTING NUCLEAR ON-LINE
Some of the highlights;
- Nat Gas costs below nuclear O&M costs are killing plants in New England and the Mid-West. Another shut-down announced :crying:
- Nuclear Power isn't given enough credit for providing zero-emission power under the CPP.
- The Nuclear Industry and Renewables Industry need to make nice. This means you Exelon!
To that last point the priority is to salvaging our existing fleet. If the O&M costs are too high to be competitive I don't see how building new plants is even remotely feasible since capital costs are typically equal if not more than O&M costs.
Main theme... KEEP EXISTING NUCLEAR ON-LINE
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