Natrium's advanced nuclear reactor design, which will be up and running as a full scale trial plant in the late 2020s, also stores several times more energy than most grid scale batteries for rapid load response. //

Natrium's demonstration plant will be fully operational and connected to the power grid in its as-yet-unknown location by the mid to late 2020s. Its fast-neutron reactor will use high-temperature liquid sodium as its reactor coolant instead of water.

One of sodium's key advantages is the huge 785-degree temperature range between its solid and gaseous states; water offers only a 100-Kelvin range, so it needs to be pressurized in order to handle higher amounts of heat energy. High levels of pressure can have explosive consequences, and they also greatly increase the cost of the plant, as nuclear-grade high pressure components are not cheap. //

Liquid sodium will transfer an impressive amount of heat away from the reactor at normal atmospheric pressures, with the added bonus that it won't dissociate into hydrogen and oxygen, so Fukushima-style hydrogen explosions are out of the question. It's also non-corrosive, sidestepping an issue that puts a question mark over molten salt reactors.

Like many of the next-generation nuclear reactors under development, the Natrium design will use High-Assay, Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU) as its nuclear fuel. Where natural uranium comes out of the ground containing around 0.7 percent of the U-235 isotope that's split to generate nuclear energy, and traditional Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) nuclear reactor fuel is enriched by centrifugal processes or gas diffusion to contain 3-5 percent U-235, HALEU is further enriched, between 5 and 20 percent. For comparison, nuclear weapons need uranium enriched to more than 90 percent.

HALEU fuel can be produced by reprocessing the spent fuel from traditional nuclear power plants, and its higher grade improves reactor performance and efficiency to the point where it allows advanced reactors to be much smaller than LEU plants. Natrium says it should be four times more fuel efficient than light water reactors. //

The molten salt thermal energy storage attached to the Natrium generator holds ten times as much on-demand energy as the biggest grid-scale battery projects on the planet.

Where “doing everything” involves making investments that are slower or less cost effective, which divert resources away from preferable options, or which in some other way impede them, the result would be potentially disastrous for carbon emissions mitigation.

Amidst many uncertainties, the real questions we should be addressing are about which investments offer the most cost-effective and beneficial ways forward.

Our new paper, Differences in carbon emissions reduction between countries pursuing renewable electricity versus nuclear power, seeks to contribute towards this debate.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-00696-3 //

Our research explores this dilemma retrospectively, examining past patterns in the attachments (i.e. investments) of different countries to nuclear or renewable strategies. Our paper addresses three hypotheses:

A “nuclear climate mitigation” hypothesis: that countries with a greater attachment to nuclear power will tend to have lower overall carbon emissions.
A “renewables climate mitigation” hypothesis: that countries with a greater attachment to renewables will tend to have lower overall carbon emissions.
A “crowding out” hypothesis: that countries with a greater attachment to nuclear will tend to have a lesser attachment to renewables, and vice versa.
Across the study countries as a whole we found that the “nuclear climate mitigation” hypothesis is not sustained by the evidence at an appropriate level of statistical significance. The renewable climate mitigation hypothesis is confirmed with substantial significance. And the crowding out hypothesis is also significantly sustained.

Put plainly – if countries want to lower emissions as substantially, rapidly and cost-effectively as possible, they should prioritise support for renewables rather than nuclear power. Pursuit of nuclear strategies risks taking up resources that could be used more effectively and suppressing the uptake of renewable energy.

We develop Generation IV high-temp gas cooled nuclear reactors & the TRISO-X fuel to power them.

We are designing the safest, most efficient and most advanced small modular reactors for a wide range of global markets & applications.

We use TRISO particle fuel. We manufacture our own proprietary version (TRISO-X) to ensure supply & quality control.

Xe-100 is a 80 MWe reactor that can be scaled into a ‘four-pack’ 320 MWe power plant—with our modular design, the scale can grow even larger as needed.

Sorbom has his doctorate from MIT and is co-founder and chief scientific officer of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a rapidly growing company spun out of Sorbom and his co-founders' research. CFS aims to commercialize fusion, a safe and virtually limitless source of "clean energy," to combat climate change. The company is funded by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates by way of energy innovation investment fund Breakthrough Energy. //

Creating and capturing the energy of the sun is delicate. A special form of hydrogen has to be heated until it gets to the fourth state of matter, plasma.

"If you heat a solid up, it turns into a liquid. If you heat that liquid up, it turns into a gas. If you heat that gas up, it turns into a plasma," he says, and "you get a charge soup of particles."

Plasma is an extremely fragile state of matter. If interrupted, the fusion reaction stops. So scientists developed a machine known by the Russian acronym tokamak, which uses magnetic fields to hold a doughnut of plasma safely in a container.

ИТЭР РФ | ITER RUSSIA
@iterrf
#DidYouKnow that the word "#tokamak" stands for "ТОроидальная КАмера с МАгнитными Катушками" (TOroidal'naya KAmera s MAgnitnymi Katushkami) - "toroidal camera with manetic coil" in english? #DYK #FusionEnergy @iterorg //

Research by Sorbom and his colleagues focuses on improving the tokamak, specifically by "making better and better magnets," Sorbom says.

Better and stronger magnets mean better insulation for the plasma, and the more efficiently the plasma can be heated up, the more energy that can be generated, eventually producing net energy. In the machines CFS is working on, temperatures will be around 100 million degrees Celsius, which is roughly 180 million degrees Fahrenheit.

In the modern world, countries need a reliable electricity grid to prosper. Globally, demand for electricity is growing as a result of population growth, new ways to use electricity, and the effort to spread access to electrical power to a greater portion of the world’s population.

For the past four years, Robert Bryce has been intensively studying the electricity business, which he describes as the world’s second largest industry by revenue, trailing only the fossil fuel industry. He calculates that global annual electricity sales total approximately $2 trillion. He traveled to a number of different locations to learn how countries, states, cities and even individual businesses are creating, transmitting and using electricity.

His resulting book, A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations, was released on March 10, 2020. By the time it had been released, the world was in the throes of responding to the coronavirus and his well-planned book tour had been essentially cancelled.

One of the first acts of the new Biden Administration is cancelling the permits for the Keystone XL Pipeline, a project of Canadian energy giant TC Energy that would have moved 800,000 barrels per day of heavy crude from Alberta to Cushing, OK, providing easier access to Gulf Coast refineries. The project was originally killed in the Obama Administration due to State Department objections, later to be revived and fast-tracked by President Trump. Cancelling the project, well into its construction, will cost 11,000 union construction jobs, the ongoing pipeline jobs and revenues, and $2 billion of future investment. //

HISTORICAL NOTE: Joe Biden is a long-standing opponent of domestic energy infrastructure. In 1973, a deadlocked Senate nearly blocked the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, sorely needed in reaction to the first OPEC embargo. Biden, then a back-bencher, joined the opposition. Vice-President Spiro Agnew broke the Senate’s tie vote, and the pipeline went in service in 1977. Sixteen billion barrels later, America remains free of OPEC domination, thanks in part to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. The boon to the economy, foreign policy, and the State of Alaska has been immeasurable.

Smaller, cheaper reactor aims to revive nuclear industry, but design problems raise safety concerns //

Engineers at NuScale Power believe they can revive the moribund U.S. nuclear industry by thinking small. Spun out of Oregon State University in 2007, the company is striving to win approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for the design of a new factory-built, modular fission reactor meant to be smaller, safer, and cheaper than the gigawatt behemoths operating today. But even as that 4-year process culminates, reviewers have unearthed design problems, including one that critics say undermines NuScale’s claim that in an emergency, its small modular reactor (SMR) would shut itself down without operator intervention. //

Normally, convection circulates water—laced with boron to tune the nuclear reaction—through the core of NuScale’s reactor (left). If the reactor overheats, it shuts down and valves release steam into the containment vessel, where it conducts heat to a surrounding pool and condenses (center). The water flows back into the core, keeping it safely submerged (right). But the condensed water can be low in boron, and reviewers worried it could cause the reactor to spring back to life.

There Is Not Enough Time for Nuclear Innovation to Save the Planet

By Allison Macfarlane //

Nuclear reactors worldwide are aging and, for the most part, are not being replaced as they are shut down. In 2019, for instance, six reactors started operations and 13 units were shut down. The average age of the world’s 408 operating reactors in 2020 was 31 years, with 81 of them over the age of 41 years. //

For all these reasons, nuclear energy cannot be a near- or perhaps even medium-term silver bullet for climate change. Given how many economic, technical, and logistical hurdles stand in the way of building safer, more efficient, and cost-competitive reactors, nuclear energy will not be able to replace other forms of power generation quickly enough to achieve the levels of emission reduction necessary to prevent the worst effects of climate change.

Innovations in reactor designs and nuclear fuels are still worthy of significant research and government support. Despite its limitations, nuclear power still has some potential to reduce carbon emissions—and that is a good thing. But rather than placing unfounded faith in the ability of nuclear power to save the planet, we need to focus on the real threat: the changing climate. And we need strong government support of noncarbon-emitting energy technologies that are ready to be deployed today, not ten or 20 years from now, because we have run out of time. We cannot wait a minute longer.

Just as the national Democrat Party is chasing the imaginary pot of gold at the end of the green energy rainbow, so too are Oregon’s Democrats, and they are all-in on wind, solar, and hydroelectric power as the ONLY sources powering Oregon’s electric grid. //

The bill requires PGE and Pacific Power to submit plans to reduce emissions by 80% from a baseline amount by 2030, 90% by 2035, and completely eliminate emissions by 2040.

We may be on the brink of a new paradigm for nuclear power, a group of nuclear specialists suggested recently in The Bridge, the journal of the National Academy of Engineering. Much as large, expensive, and centralized computers gave way to the widely distributed PCs of today, a new generation of relatively tiny and inexpensive factory-built reactors, designed for autonomous plug-and-play operation similar to plugging in an oversized battery, is on the horizon, they say.

These proposed systems could provide heat for industrial processes or electricity for a military base or a neighborhood, run unattended for five to 10 years, and then be trucked back to the factory for refurbishment. The authors—Jacopo Buongiorno, MIT's TEPCO Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering; Robert Frida, a founder of GenH; Steven Aumeier of the Idaho National Laboratory; and Kevin Chilton, retired commander of the U.S. Strategic Command—have dubbed these small power plants "nuclear batteries."

That’s right, you should NOT charge your electric vehicles during a heat wave in California. Why? Because, like the power supply system in many developing countries, California’s electric power generators can’t deliver enough electricity to CAISO to meet demand. //

Meanwhile, in Sacramento the governor, legislators, and regulators still think electric vehicles are vital to California’s plan to reduce emissions over the next two decades. In 2020, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, by executive fiat, set 2035 as a target date for ending the sale of gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles as a way to fight “climate change” in the state. //

California suffers from an electric grid problem, because the state has eschewed reliable fossil fuels in favor of unreliable green energy, such as wind and solar power. This presents a problem, because such sources don’t work when the wind stagnates during heat waves or at night. when there’s no sunlight. Simultaneously, the state is exacerbating this problem, creating ever more demand for electricity by promoting electric vehicles and shutting down access to natural gas appliances. //

In 2020, California’s electric grid came within minutes of collapse due to heavy loads at the same time solar power slumped at sunset. On August 17, during the CAISO Board of Governors Meeting, CAISO President Steve Berber let loose with this bit of reality.

According to the transcript, Berber said, “You are trading the loss of 3,000 megawatts for the collapse of the entire system of California and perhaps the entire West. … When you’re at the very edge and you have a contingency and you have no operating reserves, you risk entire system collapse.”

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA)’s official projections assert that “large amounts of annual waste are anticipated by the early 2030s” and could total 78 million tonnes by the year 2050. That’s a staggering amount, undoubtedly. But with so many years to prepare, it describes a billion-dollar opportunity for recapture of valuable materials rather than a dire threat. The threat is hidden by the fact that IRENA’s predictions are premised upon customers keeping their panels in place for the entirety of their 30-year lifecycle. They do not account for the possibility of widespread early replacement.

Our research does. Using real U.S. data, we modeled the incentives affecting consumers’ decisions whether to replace under various scenarios. We surmised that three variables were particularly salient in determining replacement decisions: installation price, compensation rate (i.e., the going rate for solar energy sold to the grid), and module efficiency. If the cost of trading up is low enough, and the efficiency and compensation rate are high enough, we posit that rational consumers will make the switch, regardless of whether their existing panels have lived out a full 30 years. //

If early replacements occur as predicted by our statistical model, they can produce 50 times more waste in just four years than IRENA anticipates. That figure translates to around 315,000 metric tonnes of waste, based on an estimate of 90 tonnes per MW weight-to-power ratio.

Alarming as they are, these stats may not do full justice to the crisis, as our analysis is restricted to residential installations. With commercial and industrial panels added to the picture, the scale of replacements could be much, much larger. //

The industry’s current circular capacity is woefully unprepared for the deluge of waste that is likely to come. The financial incentive to invest in recycling has never been very strong in solar. While panels contain small amounts of valuable materials such as silver, they are mostly made of glass, an extremely low-value material. The long lifespan of solar panels also serves to disincentivize innovation in this area.

As a result, solar’s production boom has left its recycling infrastructure in the dust. To give you some indication, First Solar is the sole U.S. panel manufacturer we know of with an up-and-running recycling initiative, which only applies to the company’s own products at a global capacity of two million panels per year. With the current capacity, it costs an estimated $20-30 to recycle one panel. Sending that same panel to a landfill would cost a mere $1-2. //

The same problem is looming for other renewable-energy technologies. For example, barring a major increase in processing capability, experts expect that more than 720,000 tons worth of gargantuan wind turbine blades will end up in U.S. landfills over the next 20 years. //

Compared with all we stand to gain or lose, the four decades or so it will likely take for the economics of solar to stabilize to the point that consumers won’t feel compelled to cut short the lifecycle of their panels seems decidedly small. But that lofty purpose doesn’t make the shift to renewable energy any easier in reality. Of all sectors, sustainable technology can least afford to be short-sighted about the waste it creates. A strategy for entering the circular economy is absolutely essential — and the sooner, the better.

Liberty, a North American oilfield company, released a video on Thursday slamming North Face for its hypocrisy.

The outdoor clothing company often boasts that it is an environmentally friendly company that recycles and reuses textile materials to create its gear. North Face even went so far as to deny a different oil and gas company its order in the name of committing to be more “green,” but Liberty CEO Chris Wright says the popular company is mostly talk.

“I went through North Face’s website of wide-ranging products, and I failed to find a single product that wasn’t made out of oil and gas,” he said.

The project features a 345 megawatt sodium-cooled fast reactor with molten salt-based energy storage that could boost the system’s power output to 500MW during peak power demand. TerraPower said last year that the plants would cost about $1bn.

Late last year the US energy department awarded TerraPower $80m in initial funding to demonstrate Natrium technology, and the department has committed additional funding in coming years subject to congressional appropriations.

Cities are considering measures to phase out gas hookups amid climate concerns, spurring some states to outlaw such prohibitions //

A growing fight is unfolding across the U.S. as cities consider phasing out natural gas for home cooking and heating, citing concerns about climate change, and states push back against these bans.

Major cities including San Francisco, Seattle, Denver and New York have either enacted or proposed measures to ban or discourage the use of the fossil fuel in new homes and buildings, two years after Berkeley, Calif., passed the first such prohibition in the U.S. in 2019.

NuScale Power and Washington State’s Grant County Public Utility District on May 26 announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to evaluate the deployment of NuScale’s small modular reactor (SMR) technology in Central Washington State.

Under the MOU, the two parties will work together to support Grant PUD’s due diligence process in evaluating reliable, carbon-free energy solutions. “The deployment of NuScale’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)-approved design will support meeting the demands of Grant PUD’s customers and the desired commercial operation timeline with acceptable and affordable cost certainty,” NuScale and Grant PUD said in a news release.

“This flexibility also allows for seamless integration with intermittent sources of power utilizing exceptional load following capabilities. These qualities align well with Grant PUD’s long-term objective of providing its customers with reliable, carbon-free energy and are a driving force in the initiation of the due diligence process in order to investigate the applicability of the NuScale technology in Central Washington,” NuScale and Grant PUD said.

In April, Grant PUD with Energy Northwest and X-energy signed a MOU for the development of an advanced nuclear reactor demonstration project.

The partners agreed to collaborate and share resources to evaluate the goal of siting, building, and operating an X-energy Xe-100 SMR plant at an existing Energy Northwest site north of Richland, Wash. The plant would have four 80-MW units and is scheduled to begin construction in 2024 and come online in 2027.
NuScale’s power plant design is scalable in 77 megawatts electric (MWe) increments up to 924 MWe. Modules can be added incrementally as regional load demands increase.

Turning waste plastic into fuel isn’t a new idea. Many researchers have achieved it through a process called pyrolysis, which involves heating plastic to between 300º C and 900º C in an oxygen-free environment. This breaks the substance down into fuel, along with some additional chemicals. Hongfei Lin, associate professor with The Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering at WSU, thinks that he and his team have discovered a way to make the process more efficient and environmentally friendly. //

Pyrolysis is an old technology, Rollinson told Ars. It was used to make things like creosote and methanol from wood, prior to the widespread use of petrochemicals, he said. Since the 1950s, attempts have been made to use the process on plastics. So far, it has not worked out, according to Rollinson.

Though the paper says the process is high-efficiency, it’s likely not, Rollinson says, as it requires a good deal of hydrogen pressure. Reaching the necessary pressure requires a lot of energy. Making and storing hydrogen also takes a lot of energy, reducing any green benefits. He said that the experiment was only in a laboratory setting. It would require a far greater amount of hydrogen and energy to pressurize it, if introduced at a commercial scale.

Further, Rollinson noted that the catalyst and solvents used would also need to be scaled up for larger amounts of plastics. Hexane, the solvent, is toxic, explosive, and environmentally harmful if released into the wild, he added. There’s also an energy input in the process of making these chemicals. In an email to Ars, Lin acknowledged that solvent recovery and reuse would add costs, but the technology itself would work to keep costs low. All the same, Rollinson has his doubts.

“No way it’s a go-er at all,” he said. “For science’s sake, it’s quite interesting. But as a practical answer to plastic … it’s not workable.” //

RindanArs Tribunus Militumet Subscriptorreply2 days agoignore user
SharpieFiend wrote:
If we want to reduce the amount of oil that gets pumped out of the ground then something needs to be done about jet fuel - it's a major demand driver. Even if the process is less efficient than refining crude it can still be worth while.

Sure, but why "recycle"? We know how to make jet fuel. We can make fossil fuels with no problem. The Germans were doing it during World War II when they couldn't important gas, and we have surely only gotten better at the process. There is a reason why we don't do this though; it isn't worth the cost. The amount of energy you have to dump in isn't worth it. It's like using electrolysis for to get hydrogen. Yeah, you can technically do that, you just have to accept a massive loss of energy and cost. The process that we end up using for carbon neutral jet fuel is going to end up being whatever is cheapest at scale, and we are only going to use that once the cost of jet fuel rises so that it

We don't need to recycle things into jet fuel; we need a process that is scalable and the least energy intensive possible. If starting from a plastic component gets us there, great, but recycling shouldn't be the goal, just a happy side effect if that's the path that ends up being the cheapest. I'm skeptical that this is the cheapest. We are far better off to bury our plastic in the ground and then make carbon neutral jet fuel, then to spend extra energy to recycle plastic into jet fuel. Plastic in a landfill isn't hurting anyone. Using a bunch of energy on the other hand, especially with our current electricity mix, is definitely hurting someone.

Maybe I'm being too skeptical, but this seems like a gimmick to me. We don't need to recycle plastic into jet fuel, we need jet fuel, and maybe if someone can find something energetically worthwhile, a separate method of recycling plastic. It's okay if those are two independent and completely different steps, especially if it takes less energy. //

WickwickArs Legatus Legionisreply2 days agoReader Favignore user
I wish people would get off the idea that high-temperature processes must be low-efficiency. There's nothing that says one cannot have heat exchangers used to preheat products headed to the pyrolysis chamber. This isn't a combustion cycle. There's no requirement to reject heat to the environment to make it work.

The only thermodynamic limit is that the fuel probably has lower entropy than the plastic (though that's not a given). If it does, you have to invest in some amount of energy to execute that conversion.

Thermoelectric (TE) conversion offers carbon-free power generation from geothermal, waste, body or solar heat, and shows promise to be the next-generation energy conversion technology. At the core of such TE conversion, there lies an all solid-state thermoelectric device which enables energy conversion without the emission of noise, vibrations, or pollutants. To this, a POSTECH research team proposed a way to design the next-generation thermoelectric device that exhibits remarkably simple manufacturing process and structure compared to the conventional ones, while displaying improved energy conversion efficiency using the spin Seebeck effect (SSE).

It’s hard to write about battery research around these parts without hearing certain comments echo before they’re even posted: It’ll never see the market. Cold fusion is eternally 20 years away, and new battery technology is eternally five years away.

That skepticism is understandable when a new battery design promises a revolution, but it risks missing the fact that batteries have gotten better. Lithium-ion batteries have reigned for a while now—that’s true. But “lithium-ion” is a category of batteries that includes a wide variety of technologies, both in terms of batteries in service today and the ones we've used previously. A lot can be done—and a lot has been done—to make a better lithium-ion battery. In fact, gains in the amount of energy they can store have been on the order of five percent per year. That means that the capacity of your current batteries is over 1.5 times what they would have held a decade ago. //

Energy density has a prominent trend. The original commercial lithium-ion battery, produced by Sony in the early 1990s, had an energy density of under 100 watt-hours per kilogram. That number has climbed over time, with the familiar cylindrical 18650 cells on the market hitting 200 watt-hours per kilogram by 2010. According to BloombergNEF, batteries used in electric vehicles have gotten as high as 300 watt-hours per kilogram in the last couple of years. //

The cost of lithium-ion batteries has fallen dramatically—with huge effects on electric vehicles. A recent study noted that “the real price of lithium-ion cells, scaled by their energy capacity, has declined by about 97 percent since their commercial introduction in 1991.” The early lithium-ion cells in the 1990s were around $3,000 per kilowatt-hour. By the early 2000s, that was nearer to $500 per kilowatt-hour.

In terms of electric vehicles, BloombergNEF estimates that the average price of a complete battery pack was about $1,180 per kilowatt-hour in 2010. By 2020, it was down to around $130 per kilowatt-hour. Ultimately, this is what makes it possible to produce a car with 300-mile range that someone not named “Jeff Bezos” can plausibly afford.

The world is moving away from fossil fuels, towards large-scale adoption of clean energy technologies.

Building these technologies is a mineral-intensive process. From aluminum and chromium to rare earths and cobalt, the energy transition is creating massive demand for a range of minerals.

Copper is one such mineral, which stands out due to its critical role in building both the technologies as well as the infrastructure that allows us to harness their power. //

Relative to 2020 levels, annual copper demand from solar PV installations could more than double by 2030, and almost triple by 2050. The largest percentage increase in copper requirements comes from offshore wind farms. IRENA’s REmap scenario requires 45,000 MW of annual offshore wind installations in 2050, which translates into 432,000 tonnes of copper—a 648% increase from 2020 levels. //

According to Citigroup, the global copper market is expected to be in a 521,000 tonne deficit in 2021—and the transition to renewables is still in its early stages.

While the demand for copper comes from a range of industries, the majority of its supply comes from a few regions, making the supply chain susceptible to disruptions. Mine shutdowns in 2020 exemplified this, as copper production fell by around 500,000 tonnes.

Additionally, average ore grades in Chile, the largest producer of copper, have fallen by 30% over the last 15 years, making it more difficult to mine copper