Distributed "Nuclear Batteries" the New Infrastructure Answer? 611
thepacketmaster writes "The Star reports about a new power generation model using smaller distributed power generators located closer to the consumer. This saves money on power generation lines and creates an infrastructure that can be more easily expanded with smaller incremental steps, compared to bigger centralized power generation projects. The generators in line for this are green sources, but Hyperion Power Generation, NuScale, Adams Atomic Engines (and some other companies) are offering small nuclear reactors to plug into this type of infrastructure. The generator from Hyperion is about the size of a garden shed, and uses older technology that is not capable of creating nuclear warheads, and supposedly self-regulating so it won't go critical. They envision burying reactors near the consumers for 5-10 years, digging them back up and recycling them. Since they are so low maintenance and self-contained, they are calling them nuclear batteries."
Peace through mini nukes! (Score:5, Informative)
The liquid metal reactor takes advantage of the physical properties of a fissile metal hydride, such as uranium hydride, which serves as a combination fuel and moderator. The invention is self-stabilizing and requires no moving mechanical components to control nuclear criticality. In contrast with customary designs, the control of the nuclear activity is achieved through the temperature driven mobility of the hydrogen isotope contained in the hydride. If the core temperature increases above a set point, the hydrogen isotope dissociates from the hydride and escapes out of the core, the moderation drops and the power production decreases. If the temperature drops, the hydrogen isotope is again associated by the fissile metal hydride and the process is reversed. The chemical isotope splits chemically when it gets too hot. Just like water boils and turns into steam, you can design the water system to not exceed the boiling point of water. You would have to keep the water under pressure to force higher temperatures.
The safety systems will be similar but the reactor cores are different between the Triga (fuel rods in a pool type reactor) and the Hyperion Power Generation Uranium Hydride (liquid metal) reactor.
If you were going to blow it up, it would take a lot of explosives -like blowing up a 15-20 ton buried bank vault. A lot of explosives to penetrate the concrete cask and then more to blow through however many feet of dirt it is buried under.
It would not add much to the cost to have sensors and digital video camera security to these things. So extreme tunneling, attempts to move it or blow it up should be easily detectable and action taken.
For the amount of effort and explosives it would take then just take those explosives and add radioactive material (available in mines and in less secure facilities and sources) and then put your dirty bomb anywhere. Thus there is no incremental risk.
The nuclear material is tougher to turn into nuclear bombs than using raw uranium, which a terrorist could get from natural sources (mines etc...). Again no incremental risk (we are adding no new risk as there is an easier existing path).
For getting oil from oil shale this system can supply heat instead of natural gas. Hyperion also offers a 70% reduction in operating costs (based on costs for field-generation of steam in oil-shale recovery operations), from $11 per million BTU for natural gas to $3 per million BTU for Hyperion. Over five years, a single Hyperion reactor can save $2 billion in operating costs in a heavy oil field. A lot of the initial one hundred orders are from oil and gas companies.
A single truck can deliver the HPM heat source to a site. The device is supposed to be able to produce 70 MW of thermal energy for 5 years. That means that the truck will be delivering about 10.5 trillion BTU's to the site. Natural gas costs about $7 per million BTU which would would cost $73 million.
It would be better to compare the HPM to diesel fuel, which currently costs about 2 times as much per unit of useful heat as natural gas and still requires some form of delivery for remote locations. In some places, fuel transportation costs are two or three times as much as the cost of the fuel from the central supply points.
In certain very difficult terrains, or in places where there are people who like to shoot at tankers, delivery costs can be 100 times as much as the basic cost of the fuel.
Initially these units will be in remote areas near oil sand projects and they will not be directly under people's houses. Do people live directly over power transformers or oil refineries ? The first few thousand can be placed on the site of existing nuclear and coal plants which have a few square miles of space. Even if there eventually there was one for every twenty thousand or ten thousand homes, they would be situated in some industrial zoned area. For eastern europe and island developments, the units will be sited several hundred meters from where people
Re:why not just do this with solar. (Score:5, Informative)
Solar takes a lot of space and puts out a lot less power. It's also costlier. And the process of manufacturing solar panels is horrible for the environment.
Nuclear power is, believe it or not, the cleanest technology we have available, even if you consider the highly radioactive waste and the (typically minute) risk of meltdown.
Re:Didn't the Russians do this? (Score:4, Informative)
I did on-site service work recently for a 'union man' who did some work at a nearby nuclear power plant. He told me that after they were suited up they walked in and decided they were bill gates, mr burns, and homer simpson. They were told to move a radioactive part and 'burns' asked 'gates' if he was going to go get that. He said, "Hell no, I'm not moving that fucking thing. I'm Bill Gates, I'll buy homer a six-pack and that dumb bastard'll do it". Apparently the staff at the plant didn't find it as funny as they did.
He also had screen by screen pictures of the computer-based nuclear safety exams they all used to cheat their way in and could have walked right off the set of the sopranos but that is another story.
Re:Smells like bologna (Score:1, Informative)
Nuclear warheads require a certain ratio of Pu-239. Plutonium nuclides cannot be separated or enriched in an isotopic manner. (ie: if the spent fuel has 4% Pu-239, 90% Pu-240 and 6% Pu-241, it will always have that composition, you can't enrich it to 50% Pu-239) Therefore, unless the original Uranium fuel has the correct ratio of U-238 to the other nuclides, weapons grade plutonium cannot be crafted from the fuel, at any time.
Triga reactors (Score:3, Informative)
TFA says they will be using TRIGA reactors, which are open pool reactors. From WikiP [wikipedia.org]
"Pool reactors are used as a source of neutrons and for training, and in rare instances for process heat but not for electrical generation."
So how exactly are these "nuclear battery" TRIGA supposed to actually create useful power? The flow of hydrogen atoms to the "hydrogen trays?" It doesn't say protons.
Of course, I am treating wikipedia as infallible here. Maybe that is the flaw.
Re:Didn't the Russians do this? (Score:4, Informative)
Probably RTGs [wikipedia.org], which the USSR put in a lot of lighthouses and other remote places that needed power (with poor documentation, so nobody knows where all these things are anymore). They take a radioactive source (preferably a pure-alpha emitter, since they're easy to sheild, but theoretically any radiation will work) then use the Seeback effect to generate electricity.
What it sounds like they're doing in this article is having an actual nuclear reactor with fissionable material, rather than just generating power off of radiation. They seal it up, bury it, and don't expect to have to do any maintenance for 10 years or so. The fuel source is unsuitable for weapons (it could, of course, make a dirty bomb, but those are more about fear mongering than an actual threat), and has the same self-regulating properties as a pebble bed, where fission simply stops if it gets too hot. At $30 million each, I could easily see these getting bought by medium-sized municipalities to cover their energy needs, though it's a bit much for the totally decentralized grid that the article talks about.
Re:First idiot with a backhoe (Score:2, Informative)
Re:nuclear warheads? (Score:5, Informative)
There are two kinds of nuclear bomb-- Uranium and Plutonium. In order to get a Uranium bomb, you have to have highly enriched Uranium (a high U-235 to U-238 ratio). These reactors don't have anywhere near the U-235 ratio for that. The second option is Plutonium which is not a naturally-occurring substance. It is the by-product of some kinds of fission, and can be made in a specially designed nuclear reactor. These aren't those kinds of reactors, so you're not going to get enough Plutonium to be useful in weapons development.
Thus, one of these things wouldn't be much of a head-start over just mining some Uranium ore.
Re:why not just do this with solar. (Score:5, Informative)
to be fair there would be virtually no waste to worry about if reprocessing were allowed.
Our current problem is that spent fuel still contains much fissle material, and reprocessing fuel rods to get the material out is disallowed by the DOE.
If you reprocessed the fuel to make new fuel, and were left with only the low level waste then the radiation hazard would be fairly comparable with coal ash.
-nB
Re:Need more guarantees than that (Score:5, Informative)
The irony is that a Coal Plant is actually MORE radioactive than a Nuclear Plant!!
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste [sciam.com]
Hint: It in the ashes and it affect 1 mile around it. Don't eat stuff from your garden!
Re:Critical (Score:5, Informative)
Re:why not just do this with solar. (Score:1, Informative)
mod parent up!
Re:Edison wins, in the end (Score:4, Informative)
The concept of "local power" was first advocated by... Thomas Edison. He was advocating small power stations all around a municipality for local distribution via his DC-based systems.
Westinghouse's AC system, however, allowed for transmission of power great distances. Despite using his name, and some patents, most of what we use today owes more to Westinghouse than Edison.
Just for clarity (and to shake my fist at Schoolhouse Rock), if you're going to refer to Edison's DC, then you should refer to Tesla's AC (not Westinghouse's). And the only reason Edison "advocated small power stations all around a municipality" was because that's the only way his baby, DC, would work. DC just doesn't travel well.
Re:I always get a kick out of this... (Score:5, Informative)
One reactor design is made to prevent critical events from forming. Toshiba's 4S reactor. The reactor uses a neutron reflector to bounce neutrons back at the reactor core, heating it up as the reflector moves up and down. The faster the reflector moves, the more energy is produced. Something breaks, meeting SCRAM conditions, the reflector simply stops moving, the reactions stop, moving back down to relative background conditions. The design is modular, the core is sealed at the factory and moved to the site in a single piece containment vessel. Being sodium cooled poses risks, but is manageable.
This design will provide 10 MW @ 75% capacity for 20-30 years.
Re:Critical (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Need more guarantees than that (Score:3, Informative)
give them nothing but automated monitoring, and leave them going for awhile, something is eventually going to go wrong
Read up on pebble-bed reactors [wikipedia.org]. They cannot, under any circumstances, run away.
Re:Critical (Score:5, Informative)
Also Chernobyl was due to bad design and poor saftey and maintainence procedures.
Nuke is not 100% safe, but you could also get crushed under a solar panel or more-likely have the chemicals and other pollutants used in making the panel poison you.
Nuke can be safe and clean as well as relatively cheep with proper care and maintenance. It isn't a gift from Maya the Earth Goddess but then again it isn't a scheme by some villain from Captain Planet either.
Re:Critical (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer: That's not to say that we haven't learned anything in the 40 years since TMI was designed. I find it absurd that we stopped making nuke plants. We should be building shiny new safe ones so that we can decommission all the old time bombs.
Re:Edison wins, in the end (Score:3, Informative)
Just for clarity (and to shake my fist at Schoolhouse Rock), if you're going to refer to Edison's DC, then you should refer to Tesla's AC (not Westinghouse's). And the only reason Edison "advocated small power stations all around a municipality" was because that's the only way his baby, DC, would work. DC just doesn't travel well.
To be more precise - it's the low voltage does not travel well (both AC or DC), and in that moment no-one knew how to change DC voltage.
Once they've figured out how to make AC electric motor, Edison's DC system was doomed.
Nowadays, somewhat paradoxically, high voltage DC is even preferred for long distance transmission.
Re:Critical (Score:5, Informative)
The "saving the day" was way after the meltdown. The big concern was the hydrogen bubble formed in the reactor vessel by the reaction between steam and the much hotter than normal Zircaloy fuel cladding. The problem was the risk of the hydrogen causing an explosion that would rupture the vessel.
The meltdown was a concern from the regard of waste handling (as you can't simply pull the fuel cells out of the core like for a normal refueling) and due to the risk of destroying the first layer of containment (the reactor vessel). Even if the melting core material had ruptured the vessel however, that's why reactors in Western nations have a containment vessel to hold the contaminated material (and keep radiation levels outside the containment vessel at background levels).
Keep in mind that TMI-2 was scrammed the entire time the core was melting down -- this was not a runaway nuclear reaction, this was a loss of core cooling (a nuclear core will generate "decay heat" for some time after it is shutdown). So a meltdown is not a concern for radiation generation per se but rather for nuclear plant integrity.
Are nuclear meltdowns an issue? Of course they are -- they wreck a tremendously expensive nuclear core and the cleanup is it itself even more expensive than normal. But it is nowhere near the same league as Chernobyl (which violently blew up due to managing to achieve "prompt criticality [wikipedia.org]", which is the criticality you want to avoid).
Re:Critical (Score:3, Informative)
Three mile island was fairly trivial. You can't go into the site for a few hundred years, that's about it.
Chernobyl was not trivial in the general sense of the world, but considering that it was essentially a practical worst case for design, administration, and maintainence and was built by a country that couldn't even make simple machinery work more than one time in three as a worst case benchmark it's remarkably benign.
No one is saying that nuclear power is 100% without risks. What we're saying is that of the available options for power it's our best bet.
Coal, even without the whole carbon problem is about the dirtiest thing you can burn. We have better uses for oil and natural gas than power generation(and they're not all that clean either). Wind and solar are just not able to produce the kind of power levels we need in any practical way at the moment. Hydroelectric is fairly environmentally damaging and is only really practical with the right terrain. Geothermal appears to be pretty good, but again it requires you to have the right geological features available.
Nuclear is not ideal, you generally have to choose between large amounts of radioactive waste and reactors which can produce material for nuclear weapons. Neither of those scenarios are all that great.
However, if you want cleaner air and less carbon output, and you want it in the next 20 years, nuclear power is pretty much the only way to go.
Re:Critical (Score:5, Informative)
Very true but perhaps understated. Even the poor procedures at Chernobyl were ignored. From what I have seen, the operators in the space of an hour managed to do practically every DON'T in their procedural manual, including overriding the safety systems to withdraw more control rods than was permitted under any circumstance.
That coupled with an inherently unsafe design and wildly fluctuating power output (due also to operator error) perfectly set the reactor up for a thermal runaway.
With appropriate fuel reprocessing, nuclear has the potential for the LEAST environmental impact of any power source including wind (kills birds, spoils view), solar (takes up large land areas), and hydro (kills fish, prevents return to spawning grounds).
Re:Need more guarantees than that (Score:2, Informative)
Control rods do not "cool the reactor down". The control the nuclear chain reaction.
For instance in the standard pressurized water reactor commonly used the reaction is completely "self-regulating". If temperature gets too high then power goes down, if temperature drops too low then power goes up to compensate. What control rods do in this type of reactor is to control the temperature that is maintained by the reactor.
Thanks to the magic of decay heat [wikipedia.org] it is possible for a pressurized water reactor to meltdown due to loss of cooling even if the nuclear reactor were to be terminated immediately (by scramming control rods) once flow was lost. I'm not familar with the reactor type they're proposing but there are nuclear reactor designs which cannot meltdown so I don't doubt that it could be done.
Re:This again! (Score:3, Informative)
The problem was a flood overflowed the mine tailings dam into the town water supply. Several people were reported ill before the problem was identified. Due to the high rainfall and topography of the area the tailings dam has overflowed on several occasions but this was the first time it was reported to have contaminated drinking water.
I brought this example up since so many nuclear advocates think the stuff runs off magic beans and not a mining and industrial process. The "zero emissions" idiots are the worst at pretending this - we should be happy with very low emissions instead of pretending the fuel arrives by magic.
Re:why not just do this with solar. (Score:3, Informative)
This is a common misconception and comes from letting non-scientists frame the waste disposal argument.
See, the natural ore is radioactive before it is ever processed and put in the reactor. It was going to be radioactive for thousands of years, no matter what human beings did. Not our fault, it just is.
When we concentrate it and use it in our reactors, the used fuel is highly and dangerously radioactive. The primary radiation producing elements are Cesium and Strontium. One has a half life of around 10 years, the other has a half life of 20 years. 20 years after a fuel rod is removed from a reactor, 75% of the Cesium will be gone and half the the Strontium. After 200 years, the fuel rod will emit basically the same amount and kinds of radioactivity it did before it went into the reactor. That is higher than natural ore, but not so high that exposure to it will sicken or injure humans.
The Anti-Nuke crowd believes that we should prove that we can safely sequester nuclear waste until it emits zero radioactivity. This becomes a political fight because a scientist would look at the problem and ask if a few hundred years of sequestering will make it the equivalent of an old uranium mine, why isn't that good enough?
Rule of thumb, if someone tells you that something is highly radioactive, it has a short half-life and is easily disposed of. (If it is throwing off lots of radiation, it doesn't take long before nothing of the original source is left). If someone tells you that something will be radioactive for thousands of years, it means it emits very low levels of radiation over a very long period of time.
Overall, I have to give you a thumbs up though, If something does produce high levels of energy for long periods of time, it would seem to be a useful energy source. I wonder how practical a Radioactive Isotope Thermal Generators powered by waste Cesium and Strontium would be?
Re:Critical (Score:2, Informative)
Do some research and think for yourself!
Well, I am thinking for myself. As for research, I'm busy with another area. And it's important to keep in mind even if I did make my mind up about which is better currently, that has no bearing on which one is going to be used.
It's trivial to me, in other words, so I'm going to use my time for more important things.
Re:Say Aircraft carrier (Score:3, Informative)
> These have been working of submarines and aircraft carriers for decades.
Incorrect. The pressurized water reactors that were used in subs and ships were adapted to produce the big 1000 MW reactors that scare the antinuclear types that we all know. This design (TRIGA) preceded PWRs by decades, and was designed for college research departments to "play" with safely. It hasn't had the reactor-years of PWRs because it isn't as suitable for commercial use when joining the grid.
Re:Critical (Score:3, Informative)
What happened at Chernobyl (in a nutshell) was that the presence of steam in their water-regulated reactors increased the reaction rate. (This is called a "Void coefficient" greater than 1.) You can see where this leads: more steam --> more reactions --> more heat --> more steam (from boiling the water). That is what caused the meltdown, not the fact that the reactor (like every other power-operating reactor) "went critical".
Modern nuclear reactors, on the other hand, have a Void coefficient less than 1. This means that the presence of steam (or other bubbles) in the reactor actually decreases the reaction rate, breaking the cycle above that led to the catastrophic meltdown at Chernobyl.
Three Mile Island, on the other hand, involved craploads of human error. Thankfully, the standard safety procedures down the line still prevented anyone from being harmed by the incident. Yes, it sucked, and was a massive wake-up-call to increase safety measures due to the "close-call" factor, but even the safety measures already implemented were sufficient to prevent a catastrophe.
Nuclear power isn't perfect--after all, there's the whole issue of what to do with the radioactive wastes--but it is well ahead of burning coal/oil and can be scaled up to meet rising demands using today's technology where wind and solar cannot (yet).
And besides... someday, we'll have clean, cold fusion, and this will be a moot point, anyways... but I'm not holding my breath.
Re:why not just do this with solar. (Score:4, Informative)
Wow; combat garbage with more garbage, eh? (Score:4, Informative)
The subsidies are far far far less than what is plowed into Coal, oil, OR NUKES. In addition, with our the subsidies, wind produces less than
As to the bats, well, how much life do you think is dying from Mercury, lead, etc. emission in the air by coal and oil. How many died from that recent ash release?
Solar panels are fantastically bad environmentally. They require the production of green house gasses far worse than CO2, lifetimes are limited and exponentially decay. They require toxic batteries to work, and are unreliable due to weather. 14% efficiency. Also, bad for ground-level wildlife.
You are kidding, right? Green House gases far worse than CO2. Like water? Limited Lifetime? You mean 30-50 years? They require energy storage to work 24x7 (i.e. base power), not necessarily toxic batteries. 14% efficieny? The systems vary any where from 7% (thin film) to 35% on newer products (using mags). Bad for ground-level wildlife? You mean something on the roof is bad for the ground? Hmmmm.
Of course, the worse part about your statement is that it assumes SOlar PV. Solar Thermal is actually at the same cost as coal.
The only real alternatives are:
Solar algae (2-4% efficient)
Geo-thermal (limited places)
Wave/tidal (possible local environmental impacts, high maintenance costs)
Nuclear (low risk, high output, radioactive half-lives are down to 200 years)
Again wow. Just wow.
Solar Thermal was missed in all your stuff.
Algae 2-4% efficient?????
Geo-thermal. Have you even read the current study by MIT? Google for it. If you consider only shallow geo-thermal, then USA will only produce about 10GW of power via it. BUT deep geo-thermal can produce more than 1/2 of America's total power need (that assumes everything on electrical) before 2050.
Nukes half-lives down to 200 years? ONLY if you run it through IFR. Of course, that was killed and the program needs to be re-started (if nothing else, just to use our nuclear waste up).
Look, I am a big fan of nukes (more of the IFR), BUT, spreading garbage about AE does not help the cause. This is
Re:Critical (Score:5, Informative)
I remember reading that it takes more energy to build a Solar power system than that system will deliver in it's expected lifespan. Is this true?
No.
To elaborate: picture a 200W solar panel [solarhome.org], it weighs about 30lbs and has a lifetime of 20 years or more. In those 20 years, if you average 8 hours a day of full output, that's 1.6kWh per day, or over 11 Megawatt hours. A moderately sized factory might consume [wikipedia.org] 11 megawatts, but if it's that big, it had better be turning out more than 1 solar panel per hour.
Re:Critical (Score:3, Informative)
Well, that's not entirely accurate. They also take into account materials used to build them, extraction of those materials, etc.
However, the argument is silly when it comes down to it.
1. The only reason other fuel sources don't have this issue is because they have a constant consumable that is not going to last anywhere near as long as the sun.
2. It completely ignores the possibility of recycling solar panels.
3. It completely ignores the effect that a substantially increased demand for solar power will have on its manufacture. Does the stuff Nanosolar's putting together even HAVE the "takes more energy to make than you'll get from it" problem?!
Seriously, this is the only area where people will suddenly ignore the market. It's not about getting more energy than you put into it, engineers will fix that issue (which is far easier than mass-producing oil) eventually, it's about whether it will pay for itself in energy output compared to its purchase price compared to purchasing power the old fashioned way. If it does, then solar's a good idea. If not, then don't bother.
Re:Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! (Score:3, Informative)
PV on rooftops is a fine source of supplemental power and I'm all for it, but it will not be enough to shut the base load plants off. You're forgetting all that electricity used for factories and other industrial operations. There's simply not enough room on their roof for enough PV panels to run the plant. Especially considering the ones that run 24/7.
Part of why residential PV costs are coming down is that they typically use the grid for 'storage' and backup. If your objective is to be off the grid, it'll either cost more or require lifestyle changes. I have nothing against that either but it's not likely for everyone.
Of the various 'green' power sources, only hydro is useful as a base load plant.
As for TMI, the reason there's a crew there is that unit 1 was brought back online in 1985 and is operating at full power. TMI-1 is licensed through 2014 and likely to be granted an extension to operate until 2034.
As for TMI-2, the only crew is a security guard because people are too depressingly stupid to stay out of a building covered in radiation hazard signs and regular inspections to make sure the roof isn't leaking. The fuel and coolant is long gone.