336 comments on France and Italy: is nuclear power the way for energy independence?
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336 comments on France and Italy: is nuclear power the way for energy independence?
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They've been prototyped at ORNL in the molten salt breeder reactor experiment. They haven't been pursued basically for reasons of political inertia. Liquid metal fast neutron breeders were first to be developed and swallowed the lions share of the funding. In the halcyon days of the cold war, the dual use nature of LMFBRs for rapid plutonium production may have been attractive as well.
As for why no ones building them today, basically no one needs breeder reactors now. If these reactors are to succeed they need to be more than simply better at fuel utilization and waste production. But capturing the several billion in capital for developing a new reactor along with navigating the minefield of licensing an entirely new design isn't something I see private capital pursuing, at least not in the united states.
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/
I don't think we need a new-fangled molten metal breeder reactor to begin with.
Jimmy Carter commissioned the Shippingport light water breeder reactor in 1977(250 MW), which breeds U-233 out of thorium and a thorium/plutonium MOX starter fuel and it ran until zombie Reagan shut it down in 1982.
Countries like Norway, the US, India and Australia have lots of thorium and you get 50 times the energy per pound in a breeder reactor.
http://www.thoriumpower.com/files/Thorium_Fuel_for_Nuclear_Energy_by_Kaz...
Carter, probably our first Peak Oil president started half a dozen
technologically sucessful mitigation efforts in his few years in office( such as Great Plains Gasification).
Is it technologically possible to maintain our lifestyle with breeder reactors?
It may be(for a couple hundred years).
3% of ALL US energy comes from nukes(3 quads), so we would have to increase the amount of generation 12 times(~36 quads), assuming that 2/3 of the base energy of fossil fuels is lost and we'd covert every thing(electric cars, trains, heaters, etc.) to electricity.
Is it desirable?
Breeder reactors are extremely radioactive as is their waste. Accidents
could contaminate large areas.
They would make excellent terrorist targets and paranoid governments would make our lives (more)miserable.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/cooking_in_the_danger_zone/6638351...
If we chose nukes over renewables we continue on our current wasteful track, but with renewables we will move into a lower energy future, better in balance with nature.
You're severely mistaken in your points. The U.S. gets 8% of its overall energy from nuclear, 20% for electricity. Plants are not vulnerable to terrorist attacks due to their robust containment dome. The fuel supply is 'virtually limitless' using low-grade ores from granite or ocean water in fast neutron reactors. It is more desirable to have hot waste, since it decays quickly. The half-life of strontium-90 is only 28.8 years. The whole point is that you're destroying transuranic actinides, which are the long-lived wastes of LWRs.
If you would like to learn more about nuclear power, I highly recommend the new Cravens book, which was written using expertise from Rip Anderson, one of the most highly regarded nuclear experts in the world.
http://cravenspowertosavetheworld.com/
Severely?
You're correct that it provides 8% of US energy--I didn't count all the energy wasted by nuke-steam generation. The point I was making is that society would save energy by changing to electricity;
40 exajoules of petroleum replaced by 8 XJ of electricity plus 23 XJ of natural gas replaced by 18.4 XJ of electricity(less with heat pumps) plus 22 XJ of coal replaced by 7.3 XJ of electricity plus 2.6 XJ of electricity from nuclear, totaling 36.3XJ of electricity. So we would increase from 2.6 XJ electricity to 36.3 XJ or 14 times. So increasing nukes by 14 times is not that much.
You seem to think that there is plenty of uranium to supply all society's needs using ground up granite or seawater, a few parts per billion or less but that's idiotic based on simple EROEI. If you have to mine 100 times more rock to get the same amount of uranium out of it you end up with an EROEI of well under 1, in other words all the energy would be used up in giant mining and processing operations.
The Energy Watch Group says the world has about 70 years of uranium based on current use rates.
http://www.energywatchgroup.org/fileadmin/global/pdf/EWG_Press_Uranium_2...
Then you say this...
This a very good reason to go with thorium reactors, which is why I posted what I did.
There is (almost) no transuranic actinides with thorium breeder reactors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel_cycle#Actinides_in_a_thorium_m...
Craven is a green-to-nuke convert like James Lovelock which means that they are likely to overlook the dangers of nuclear power just as you do.
I hope this helps educate you(deuterium) on the advantages of thorium breeder reactors over uranium type reactors.
I think it is cleaner than the current U-235 units and as I mentioned Europe has large reserves of thorium.
As old technology(1977), it probably isn't sufficiently cool for a nuke lover such as yourself but thanks to JC, it has shown to be practical in a light water reactor. Everyone knows liquid metal reactors like Monju too dangerous.
Yet another advantage for thorium is that it burns hotter and so the nuke plant efficiency could be increased a bit.
Of course you forgot to that all thorium is stable Th-232 and therefore
can be converted into fissile U-233 in the reactor where as less than 1% of uranium is fissile U-235, so most of the fuel Th-232 can burnt.
Majorian,
37% of energy consumption in the U.S. is in the form of electricity. 20% of U.S. energy is electric. Do the math. Obviously nothing is 100% efficient, even for coal plants heat is lost. But for electric energy consumption, 20% is from nuclear.
As for your insistence that we will run out of uranium, you need to distinguish between U-235 and U-238. U-238 is 99.3% of uranium, which is important when using low-grade ores. The fissioning of a uranium atom unleashes 210 million electron volts-- 50 million times as much as a carbon atom. So yes, you can yield net energy.
http://www.ans.org/pi/ps/docs/ps74.pdf
My point is that we don't measure nukes in pounds of uranium but in electrical output. Yes, I ignored thermal outputs of nuke reactors for that reason.
As far as U238, I'm glad you understand that uranium from seawater or granite rocks could NEVER be supported by a once-thru, non-breeder program. In fact there is NO FUTURE for a nuke program based on a once-thru non-breeder process given the fact we have 70 years of virgin U-235 left. Once you buy into nukes, you have to buy into breeders and they are an order of magnitude more dangerous that the current nuke technology. Does that make you pause?
There's several misunderstandings here. The 70 years of LWR fuel we have left are based at $130/kg from current mines based on IAEA estimates, not probable resources that are exploitable at say $1000/kg. Uranium prices contribute to less than 1% of the total cost of nuclear power, and the industry can bear the cost of much higher uranium costs. The energy costs of mining as shown from the Rossing mine in Namibia are tiny compared to the output of the produced uranium from even very low grade ores. Future reactor regimes will have to compete on more than just fuel efficiency.
Second, the notion that breeder reactors are an order of magnitude more dangerous is just misinformed. Fast neutron reactors have inherent control problems that require more passive safety because of their high prompt neutron ratio, but there are techniques that in aggrigate can make fast neutron reactors safer than modern LWR regimes. But really, breeder reactors don't require fast neutron reactors at all except to run entirely on transuranics. Thorium breeder regimes can run entirely in the thermal spectrum.
Sodium cooled fast breeders are dangerous as well as expensive. In contrast the LFTR is very safe - safer than LWRs - and potentially less expensive than LWRs.
There appears to be some confusion here. I agree with you that thorium is a promising energy source, and India is pursuing the liquid fluoride salt technology to utilize thorium-232. However, in the case of uranium-238, the decision has been made to use sodium, lead, and helium gas. Liquid fluoride salt is ONLY for thorium, not U-238. See for yourself:
http://www.ne.doe.gov/genIV/neGenIV7.html
Sure, but liquid fluorides aren't the only fluid fuel regime. There's problems with FLiBe with plutonium solubility above various concentrations, but I believe it can handle some Pu load without serious problems.
However liquid chloride reactors offer much better chances of utilizing a hard spectrum than liquid metal reactors.
ORNL ran U233, U235 and Pu239 in the MSRE at the same time.
Thanks. But I am not so sure that molten sodium or lead reactors are all that horrible.
One real problem with liquid metal cooled reactors is their reliance on solid fuel in a reprocessing regime, which entails something that is a necissarily costly fabrication process compared to mined uranium in LWRs or no fabrication at all in the case of fluid fuel reactors.
Lead cooled reactors (or rather lead-bismuth eutectic reactors) are sort of awful because these eutectics are very heavy and hard to pump, corrosive, and the bismuth is highly prone to neutron activation into whats essentially the most radiotoxic substance known, Po-210.
Sodium cooled reactors of course have sodium fires and associated extra capital costs. Theres also the problem that the core is completely opaque to imaging so its hard to see what state the core is in.
Finally theres the inherant safety problems of any critical fast neutron reactor: Delayed neutron component. The delayed neutron component of fast reactors is vanishingly small compared to thermal reactors, such that the reactivity swings are on the order of miliseconds rather than minutes, so scramming the reactor becomes sort of a lost cause in the event of a criticality excursion. I think this can be managed, but fast reactors are allways inherently less safe than thermal reactors.
I was a proponent of the IFR at one point. I've since changed my mind.