The Rise of Small Nuclear Plants 490
ColdWetDog writes "The Oil Drum (one of the best sites to discuss the technical details of the Macondo Blowout) is typically focused on ramifications of petroleum use, and in particular the Peak Oil theory. They run short guest articles from time to time on various aspects of energy use and policies. Today they have an interesting article on small nuclear reactors with a refreshing amount of technical detail concerning their construction, use, and fueling. The author's major thesis: 'Pick up almost any book about nuclear energy and you will find that the prevailing wisdom is that nuclear plants must be very large in order to be competitive. This assumption is widely accepted, but, if its roots are understood, it can be effectively challenged. Recently, however, a growing body of plant designers, utility companies, government agencies, and financial players are recognizing that smaller plants can take advantage of greater opportunities to apply lessons learned, take advantage of the engineering and tooling savings possible with higher numbers of units, and better meet customer needs in terms of capacity additions and financing. The resulting systems are a welcome addition to the nuclear power plant menu, which has previously been limited to one size — extra large.'"
Re:The Navy? (Score:2, Informative)
Cost still factors in to the equation, but it would seem that gas turbines aren't cheap enough to offset the other benefits nuclear provides.
Re:The Navy? (Score:3, Informative)
Naval reactors are completely contained, they don't dump anything.
Re:The Navy? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Nuclear waste (Score:1, Informative)
Nope! Modern reactor tech takes that waste, and re-uses it. Then, THEIR waste is still processable by OTHER reactors, all down the line...and pretty soon, you wind up with stuff that's only about as dangerous as your average mining slag. (You don't want it in your groundwater, but it's not utter devestation).
Re:The Navy? (Score:3, Informative)
No, the primary loop on a Naval reactor does not use seawater.
Naval reactors are so small because the uranium they use is more highly enriched than the uranium in civilian plants.
Re:Waste of Uranium (Score:3, Informative)
the anti-nuclear crowd should be renamed the anti-braincell crowd
Re:The Navy? (Score:5, Informative)
To minimize sound possibly?
Not even a little. Nuke plants are noisy. This actually poses a problem aboard nuclear subs. Of course a carrier isn't stealthy to begin with, especially not if deployed in a battle group, so the reactor noise isn't relevant.
The GP asked why the navy would use a nuke if a gas turbine would do the job. Fuel is the biggest answer, as a nuclear reactor needs refueling infrequently, and removing the need for large fuel tanks leaves more room for other stuff - in the case of a carrier, the "other stuff" would include aviation fuel and munitions, two things needed in quantity. In the case of a sub, the reactor is desirable in that it lets you stay submerged more or less indefinitely, since you can electrolyze water for oxygen.
Other than those two situations (carriers and subs), naval nuclear reactors are uncommon for exactly the reason given at the beginning of the thread: cost.
Re:Macondo blowout? (Score:2, Informative)
The Macondo blowout is more specific. If you just say the BP Disaster, people aren't sure whether you're talking about the Alaskan Pipeline Incident, the explosion at the Texas City refinery, or the Macondo Blowout.
Re:Nuclear waste (Score:2, Informative)
There is no way to recycle it...
Here, let me give you a couple [wikipedia.org] citations [wikipedia.org] to look at.
The only thing preventing us from recycling nuclear waste is government regulations inspired by hippy FUD. If we could get past those artificial roadblocks we'd find ourselves with a much longer timeline to deal with peak uranium (it's still a finite resource, after all) and we wouldn't have to squabble over Yucca Mountain and other potential repositories.
Re:DIY Nuclear Reactor (Score:3, Informative)
You can buy heavy water, unlike that story claims. United Nuclear sells it.
Re:This is good. (Score:4, Informative)
Clean coal cannot exist. What are you going to do with all the waste? What will you do with the CO2?
It is a freaking PR job by the dirtiest industry in the USA. They top off mountains and dump the remains into peoples drinking water. Then they store hazardous waste in open ponds and let that run onto people's property. These folks make the nuclear industry look like saints.
Re:Nuclear waste (Score:5, Informative)
WRONG. The technology to reprocess nuclear fuel has existed for more than half a century and is currently employed the world over. Just not in the U.S. In fact breeder reactors [wikipedia.org] incorporate reprocessing into the design to use a fraction of the fuel and produce a fraction of the waste of those reactor types permitted in the U.S.
The problem with nuclear waste is one of politics, not of technology. Following on the heels of Gerald Ford's ban of commercial plutonium reprocessing, Jimmy Carter signed an order to ban the reprocessing of spent commercial nuclear fuel. Regan overturned the ban in 1981 but there was no funding provided to start up reprocessing facilities nor has the DOE provided license for anyone to do it. While they've waffled a bit during the Bush-Obama presidencies the DOE presently doesn't want domestic reprocessing. This has accordingly put a rather big crimp in the success of the GNEP [wikipedia.org] which had closed loop nuclear power as a primary goal.
Re:This is good. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The Navy? (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, if you had some way of searching the ocean for faint traces of hydrogen bubbles, and if said bubbles co-operated by not reacting with anything in the meantime. So far as I know we've never developed anything like that. Now, to put on my paranoid hat for a second, "so far as I know" could just mean that attempts to do this were classified, though I think the easier explanation is that nobody has bothered.
I don't want to say it isn't possible, because that's the sort of sentiment that invites the universe to prove me wrong, but lets just say it's a needle in a haystack sort of problem. You'd be looking for faint chemical trace over a vast area, with the trace in question being chemically reactive enough to virtually guarantee it won't linger. At a minimum, your solution would need to be used over a narrow search region.
Now, look at the problem from the opposite direction. Stealth under water is relative. A submarine, however well designed, however well commanded, can be found using existing methods, provided you know roughly where to look for it. Think of how many shipwrecks have been found by searching the general area they sunk, often decades or more after the fact. Now, factor in that those wrecks are on the ocean floor, meaning it's harder to spot them on active sonar than a sub, that the wrecks are utterly silent instead of just mostly silent, and that many of those wrecks were found using non-military hardware (meaning a few boats with active sonar pinging the ocean floor, instead of a fleet of warships and air-dropped sonar buoys).
The key concept here is knowing where to look. If all you know is that a sub is somewhere in the Atlantic, then you aren't going to have much luck finding it. If you know where to look, you don't need anything like a hypothetical hydrogen searching method when more straightforward options exist.
Re:put them all over as the power grid is not setu (Score:4, Informative)
I can't imagine investing in a national nuclear infrastructure without also overhauling the distribution grid.
did no one RTFA?
Oh yeah this is slashdot.
The idea is as Coal Plants get decommissioned you can use most of the same equipment, Which I assume means the same generators. Which make the nuke plants cheaper then overhauling the coal plant.
Re:Not true (Score:5, Informative)
Really? and how would keep anyone from taking the whole thing breaking it apart somewhere else and selling the valuable fuel grade uranium on the black market?
Or worse yet, using the uranium and all the radioactive parts of the reactor for a dirty bomb?
Or even worse yet, trying to do one of the above, but fucking up and letting all kinds of radioactive liquids drain in the drinking water underground?
In most of these small reactor designs the fissionable material has nearly no value as a weapon. For example, a Pebble Bed Reactor [wikipedia.org] uses balls of graphite and fissionable material which can be difficult to re-process into something other than fuel. A dirty bomb is of little concern because, again, it's much easier to just mine new material rather than use the fuel for these reactors.
Lastly, the modern designs for reactors are extremely safe. They have less chance of contaminating groundwater supply than building solar panels (a process that requires tons of heavy metals, organic wastes, and wastewater) or operating a coal-fired power plant. Not to mention that once you are done using the fuel and reprocessing it into new fuel you are left with a small amount of concentrated waste with either extremely short (degrades quickly to harmless elements) or extremely long (emits nearly no radiation) lifetimes.
The modern nuclear reactor designs are vastly better than the units built 40+ years ago, it's a shame that we haven't been building them. Instead we are maintaining older units because the red tape is too much to bother building new units to replace the aging ones. THAT'S your recipe for disaster!
Re:The Navy? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:theres still problems (Score:4, Informative)
Not so much. Depending on the design, a nuclear reactor can be self regulating.
As far as producing small nuclear power plant, check out the ones soon to be marketed by Hyperion [hyperionpo...ration.com]
.
The load variation problem (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This is good. (Score:5, Informative)
Nuclear power is cheap and clean. It is cheap enough that France exports large amounts of electricity to Italy, Germany, and the UK. The importing countries closed or scaled down their nuclear power investments to placate local enviro-weenies but are OK importing it, even if the reactors are right next to the border. France has some of the cheapest electricity costs [www.cbs.nl] in Europe. So I do not get where you are coming from.
Check the DOE energy reports. In the US nuclear power generates more electricity than wind, solar, hydro and other renewables combined [wikipedia.org]. If CO2 is considered a pollutant there is no clean coal.
Re:This is good. (Score:5, Informative)
I'd recommend looking at this post [slashdot.org].
First, the nuclear power industry pretty much has the best safety record going. Per dollar of product produced, it kills the least amount of people. Let's see, in the past decade it's killed, what, 3 people (the 3 Japanese workers in a reprocessing plant that got stupid by using a steel bucket instead of the multi-million machine intended for the purpose). Just this year, in the USA, for oil and natural gas we have the Deepwater horizon, which killed 11. China regularly loses hundreds each year, we lost 25 in the explosion at Massey this year. 34 miners lost their lives the year before in various incidents.
Second - Let's look at Yankee Rowe [wikipedia.org] - third commerical nuclear reactor. Shut down early due to concerns that the reactor vessel might be becoming brittle.
Cost: $36M in 1960, $209M in 2k dollars
Decommission: $450M($567M), worst case. $320M($403M) is the 'basis average'.
During it's life, Yankee Rowe produced 34 Billion kwh, achieving a sub-performing 74% capacity factor - most of the newer reactors still in service are well over 90%.
So, going by an average 3 cents a kwh, that's $1.02B in electricity produced. That leaves $244M for operations and profit during it's time. So not very expensive, though not as good as would be hoped. If you go by the worst case decommission costs. Basis average would be a lot better, as would it have been if the reactor had lasted it's expected lifetime.
Third - You have got to be kidding me. 19.4% in 2007 [doe.gov]
Fourth - So nuclear power needs loan guarantees to proceed. Wind and Solar power need cash subsidies, often in excess of half their cost! Heck, your 'clean coal' got more subsidies [doe.gov] than nuclear - $29.81/MWh for 'clean coal', Solar $24.34 and wind around $23.37, nuclear got only $1.59/MWh
In total dollars:
Refined Coal: $2,156M
Solar: $14M
Wind: $724M
Nuclear: $1,267M
The biggest problem with coal is air pollution. There is technology available to reduce pollution to negligible levels, but nobody wants to use it because it's "too expensive". Instead of flushing a few Billion down the toilet with nuclear power, we could put that money into clean coal technology.
Still have the problems with fly ash and such, so it's still not 'clean', and at that point your 'clean coal' is more expensive to install than nuclear, as well as more expensive to operate.
I'll just pick on one obvious mistake (Score:3, Informative)
It is correctly called nuclear waste because the potential benefit of having it is a lot less than all the work required to separating it out. Machining very strong, hard, highly radioactive materials is incredibly expensive as the French have shown despite about thirty years of trying to make their reprocessing methods viable.
Re:I'll just pick on one obvious mistake (Score:5, Informative)
And that is why you toss it back into a feeder reactor as fuel to and let the neutron radiation break it down for you.
Standard Amory Lovins: (Score:3, Informative)
Lovins isn't just against nuclear for the (IMHO rather simplistic) economic arguments he gives here.
Back in the 80s he was asked what he would think of a truly cheap, clean and plentiful source of energy. He said it would a great disaster. Why? Because he felt that given any concentrated source of energy, humans would use it to wreak havoc on nature. Thus, it would be better to only have diffuse and limited sources.
So I'm a bit skeptical of his real motives in putting this out.
I will give him this, he's at least fairly consistent. I went to see one of his talks in the 80s, and he was basicly on a similar message with respect to the economy of nuclear power.
He also said that we really didn't need any new sources of power, that conservation and limiting of our growth/what we did meant that we already had enough. At the time, I remarked that he was allowing no chance for less developed populations (India and China) to increase their standard of living, but that wasn't addressed.
He's got a fairly appealing line of talk but when you start really looking, it doesn't measure up.
Geothermal Power (Score:3, Informative)
Geothermal power plants [wikipedia.org] are the best substitute for nuke plants. They're highly efficient, create practically no emissions (especially once they're built), are fast to build and put online, present practically no security or pollution risks, and generate continuous baseloads. They don't depend on finite supplies of dirty fuel mostly produced in dirty ways mostly in foreign countries. All at scales only nuke plants have delivered. With a smart electric grid routing power around the country, even the few places where they can't be built at all (because of faultlines) can still get their power.
Re:I'll just pick on one obvious mistake (Score:3, Informative)
That is why it is seen as waste and not fuel.
Re:This is good. (Score:1, Informative)
Although gbutler69's remarks were tagged as flamebait, he is fundamentally correct.
Nuclear power plants do generate about 20% of the electricity in the US, which does bring into question rudy_wayne's facts and conclusions.
Second, the Obama administration's $8 Billion loan guarantee is just a guarantee for a specific project [wsj.com], not a loan. That is, the US government pays nothing unless the owner, Southern Co. defaults on the loan.
Russian and Japanese experience: (Score:4, Informative)
You mean like the liquid sodium Russian BN600 (600 MW electric fast breeder power plant) that's been running since 1980?
It's had some problems, but nothing that couldn't be repaired and put back online.
Or maybe like the Japanese Monju plant? It had a sodium fire, but that was due to a bad design on a temperature sensor rather than anything to do with sodium itself as a coolant. It's back online now. Much of the reason it took so long was due to a scandal with the management covering up and the resulting court cases. It wasn't the technical problems that stopped it for all that time but the legal/political ones.
Sodium reactors have been around since the 50s at least. Yes, there are problems with embrittlement and the reactivity of the coolant, but it's hardly a show stopper. They're known and manageable problems.
What led to the shutdown of the program was the opposition of John Kerry and others, not technical problems with the sodium coolant.
Sodium coolant neutron activation: non-issue: (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, sodium gets activated by the neutrons. Yes, it's highly radioactive then. But, it's quite short lived (15 hours for Na-24, 2.6 years for Na-22) so it's not as big a problem as you imply. Na-22 is a beta decay, so that's not problematic. Na-24 is the one that has dangerous radiation as it emits gammas. But with a 15 hour half life, it decays very quickly.
The daughter products aren't a problem either (Ne-22 and Mg-24), they're both stable.
Re:This is good. (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, it's even easier, add cobalt to several nukes on site, blow them up on site and let winds and currents take care of the rest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb [wikipedia.org]
Re:This is good. (Score:1, Informative)
What, who said smelting had to be done in giant vats? Control the size of the glob (pellet) being smelted, and no, there really is no chance of a criticality incident.
Fireworks manufacturers do this sort of calculation (albeit with chemical reactions, not nuclear) all the time, but the underlying principle is the same: if you want to ensure that the building remains intact even in a worst-case scenario, you work with no more than $XYZ grams of $MATERIAL in the building at a time.
To get back to the point, if you can get a 10-gram pellet of anything to go critical using nothing more than a crucible and a heat source, contact the DOE (before the DOE contacts you! :) It may not be cheap to smelt in 10 g increments, but if you're getting $1000 worth of electricity out of every such pellet, it may still be more profitable to set up the required production line than to buy the energy-equivalent amount of coal.
Re:Thorium Power (Score:3, Informative)
Re:put them all over as the power grid is not setu (Score:5, Informative)
In the US in situ leaching is used.
Basicly you pump a mix of water and baking soda into the ground and the uranium disolves in it.
Then you pump it back up and extract the uranium.
Baking soda isn't high on my list of things I'm afraid of getting in my water.
Pretty clean and safe.
waste storage wouldn't be too hard if it was treated as a technical problem, unfortunatly politicians who consider the words "nuclear" and "satanic" interchangable screwed that one up.
Re:This is good. (Score:3, Informative)
Except, given the *current stock* of nuclear fuels, we have enough to power the world for at least the next couple thousand years. That's not to say we currently have the reactors to burn that fuel; nonetheless the fuel supply is plentiful.
Its one thing to say "peak uranium", its quite another thing to say, "peak nuclear fuel". The first may or may not be true. Many suspect its not. The later is most definitely is not true.
Re:This is good. (Score:3, Informative)
The only people I have come across that support Nuclear are Nuclear scientists, and deluded Slashdot posters, indulging in wishfull thinking.
And the French. Don'f forget the French. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France [wikipedia.org]
Or the Japanese... - http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf79.html [world-nuclear.org]
Or the British even... - http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/apr/15/nuclearpower-edf [guardian.co.uk]
How about the rest of europe... - http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/ukfs_news/hi/newsid_4710000/newsid_4713300/4713398.stm [bbc.co.uk]