Scientists: Nuclear Energy is a Waste of Time
Dan Robitzski in Earth & Energy
According to new research, investing in nuclear power doesn't tend to lead to a drop in greenhouse gas emissions like using renewables does.

Status Quo
It turns out that nuclear energy, which advocates say is a more feasible means of transitioning away from fossil fuels than solar or wind, might not actually be up to the task.

That’s according to research published Monday in the journal Nature Energy, which shows that countries that adopted nuclear energy didn’t actually reduce their carbon emissions a significant amount — but that countries with renewable energy investments did. It’s a compelling case that clean energy initiatives ought to focus on solar and wind, and perhaps skip nuclear as a stepping stone on the road to decarbonization. //

“This paper exposes the irrationality of arguing for nuclear investment based on a ‘do everything’ argument,” study coauthor Andy Stirling said in a press release.

A potential breakthrough: The United States Department of Energy (DOE) Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and the Nuclear Engineering & Science Center at Texas A&M have partnered with Clean Core Thorium Energy (CCTE) to fabricate a new type of nuclear fuel, called “Advanced Nuclear Energy for Enriched Life”, or ANEEL.

With a proprietary combination of thorium (Th) and uranium (U), particularly “High Assay Low Enriched Uranium” (HALEU), ANEEL fuel can address several issues that have plagued nuclear power – cost, proliferation and waste. Plus, this fuel, being made-in-America, positions it as a prime candidate for export to emerging nuclear markets. //

The CANDU (Canada Deuterium Uranium) reactor was developed in the 1950s in Canada, and more recently in India as the PHWR (Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor). These reactors are heavy water cooled and moderated pressurized water reactors. //

CANDU/PHWRs generally use natural uranium (0.7% U-235) oxide as fuel, so they need a more efficient moderator (the material that slows or moderates the speed of the neutron so it hits the next nucleus at the right speed to split, or fission, it). In this case, these reactors use heavy water (D2O). Deuterium is hydrogen with one neutron in its nucleus. //

So having a new fuel made in America that can be used in reactors in other countries brings the United States back into play in the nuclear supply chain, and allows us to reach more of the nations around the world. //

In an existing CANDU/PHWR using natural uranium, each fuel bundle weighs roughly 15 kg. After the first 150 days of operation, an average of eight such bundles would need to be replaced daily for the rest of the reactor’s operating life of 60 years.

With the ANEEL fuel, each fuel bundle weighs approximately 10.65 kg. After the first 1,400 days of operation, an average of only one such bundle would need be replaced daily for the remainder of the reactor’s operating life, leading to significantly less waste. ///

Another crony scheme to sell a product instead of a solution. (As opposed to molten salt reactor whick doesn't need special patented fuel and provides higher temps for more efficient output and process heat.)

Prejudice towards nuclear power among some policymakers is preventing a fact-based assessment of its benefits, including the ability to cut global greenhouse gas emissions, Bohdan Zronek, chief nuclear officer at Czech utility ČEZ, told participants in World Nuclear Association's Strategic eForum last week. ČEZ was one of seven utilities that wrote to the European Commission in March, arguing that the nuclear industry ought to benefit from future sustainable financing.

Speaking on the high-level panel Driving investment towards nuclear projects on 10 September, Zronek noted the emission reduction targets suggested by the European Commission and the European Parliament of, respectively, 55% and 65%, by 2030. The forecast for 2040 by the European Nuclear Safety Regulators Group, however, suggests "big trouble" ahead, he said.

"Most countries in Europe will be hardly sufficient in power production and it will be very difficult to know where to buy or import from. Power production is now more a matter of ideology and policy than a technical issue, which creates a tough environment for construction and financing of any power source as we operate usually as stock market utilities, and we all have to meet our laws, regulations and corporate rules," he said.

Mini nuclear plants are almost here. Is the U.S. ready?

A former Extinction Rebellion (XR) spokeswoman left the environmental group to campaign for nuclear power because she says it is the only way to deal with the climate crisis.

Zion Lights, writing in the Daily Mail, also said that she had become unable to defend some of the group's claims.

XR "peddle messages of doomsday gloom that alienate" and offer "little in the way of positive solutions", she added.

The group calls on governments to take immediate action on climate change. //

Ms Lights wrote articles for both the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph on Thursday explaining her decision to leave behind XR and support nuclear power.

She told the Mail she initially joined XR because its message was "listen to the scientists" and the role of spokesperson gave her a platform "to talk about what I truly felt mattered". //

Ms Lights, who began campaigning about the environment as a student in the early 2000s, said she also had doubts about XR's approach of telling people "what not to do" and "peddling the notion that the solution to the climate crisis was to turn back the clock to a simpler time".

Writing in the Telegraph, she said the campaigners who argued that we needed to all live with less - as she once did - had to accept this was not going to happen "and look to solutions instead". //

Much of the green movement was "steeped in an anti-nuclear mindset", she said, "when any rational, evidence-based approach shows that a strategy including nuclear energy is the only realistic solution to driving down emissions at the scale and speed required".

She denied she was making a U-turn, instead saying it was a "logical next step" in looking for solutions rather than "shouting ever more loudly about the problem".

Ms Lights said she has since taken a role at campaign group Environmental Progress UK, whose campaigns include supporting the building of the Sizewell C nuclear power station in Suffolk.

Nuclear power is planned to be a key part of the UK's future energy strategy.

Nuclear energy is crisis. The world could lose twice as much nuclear as it gains, between now and 2030. Can radical innovation save nuclear? Yes, but it must be more radical than anyone imagines, argues EP's Michael Shellenberger in a major keynote address to the American Nuclear Society. //

What is atomic humanism? I would like to offer three first principles that are meant as the beginning, not the end of the discussion of what atomic humanism should be.

First, nuclear is special. Only nuclear can lift all humans out of poverty while saving the natural environment. Nothing else — not coal, not solar, not geo-engineering — can do that.

How does the special child, who is bullied for her specialness, survive? By pretending she’s ordinary. As good as — but no better than! — coal, natural gas or renewables.

Like other atomic humanists of his time, Weinberg knew nuclear was special. But he could not fully appreciate how special nuclear was given the low levels of deployment of solar and wind.

Now that these two technologies have been scaled up, we can see that nuclear’s specialness is due due an easy-to-understand physical reason: the energy density of the fuel. //

Second, nuclear is human. Nuclear is people using tools to make electrons through fission. And yet the picture in our minds when we think of nuclear has no people. Where are the people? What about when we think of a nuclear plant’s control room? Now picture in your mind the cockpit of an airplane. You walk on board and you see two men. If we didn’t trust these men, we wouldn’t get on the plane. The airlines ask us to trust them, the air traffic system, and the pilots, and we do. Why then are we asking the public to trust our machines?

In the movie “Sully,” the pilot loses both his engines to bird strikes shortly after taking off. The entire drama of the film is whether Sully made the right decision. Should he have returned to La Guardia airport, or was he right to make a water landing in the Hudson? At no point did anyone suggest we should ban jet planes because they could crash. Nor did anyone demand meltdown-proof jet turbines.

GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) and Bill Gates’ nuclear innovation startup TerraPower are ready to demonstrate a “cost-competitive” advanced nuclear //

Key to the system’s cost-effectiveness is its tight energy system architecture, which simplifies previous reactor types. A typical Natrium site, for example, will span about 44 acres, with a nuclear island of about 16 acres. “When normalized to power rating, the Natrium system has a smaller footprint compared to other Generation IV reactors. Similarly, Natrium has a smaller footprint than most multi-unit plants with light water reactors operating today,” TerraPower said. One benefit of a plant with the Natrium technology the companies highlighted is its significantly reduced emergency planning zone, “which allows it to be sited in many locations without affecting local population centers.”

The system design also involves fewer equipment interfaces, which could dramatically slash the amount of nuclear-grade concrete by 80% compared to larger reactors. “Non-nuclear mechanical, electrical and other equipment will be housed in separate structures, reducing complexity and cost,” TerraPower said. “The design is intended to permit significant cost savings by allowing major portions of the plant to be built to industrial standards.”

Its most significant attribute, perhaps, is that the system can generate power with the heat produced by the SFR or store it using nitrate salt molten salt energy storage technology, which has the potential to “boost the system’s output to 500 MWe of power for more than five and a half hours when needed.”

A left-leaning group seems to be promoting a conservative group opposing nuclear power... what gives? //

Small reactors are seen as a key to reviving a nuclear power industry that's far from thriving now.

Nuclear power is the Immovable Object of generation sources. It can take days just to bring a nuclear plant completely online, rendering it useless as a tool to manage the fluctuations in the supply and demand on a modern energy grid.

Now a firm launched by Bill Gates in 2006, TerraPower, in partnership with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, believes it has found a way to make the infamously unwieldy energy source a great deal nimbler — and for an affordable price.

The new design, announced by TerraPower on August 27th, is a combination of a “sodium-cooled fast reactor” — a type of small reactor in which liquid sodium is used as a coolant — and an energy storage system. While the reactor could pump out 345 megawatts of electrical power indefinitely, the attached storage system would retain heat in the form of molten salt and could discharge the heat when needed, increasing the plant’s overall power output to 500 megawatts for more than 5.5 hours.

Researchers are developing a new battery powered by lab-grown gems made from reformed nuclear waste. If it works, it will last thousands of years.

NuScale announced the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission completed final review of the Design Certification Application for its small modular reactor. //

PORTLAND, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--NuScale Power announced today that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) completed Phase 6 review—the last and final phase—of the Design Certification Application (DCA) for the company’s groundbreaking small modular reactor (SMR) with the issuance of the Final Safety Evaluation Report (FSER). The FSER represents completion of the technical review and approval of the NuScale SMR design. With this final phase of NuScale’s DCA now complete, customers can proceed with plans to develop NuScale power plants with the understanding that the NRC has approved the safety aspects of the NuScale design.

“Additionally, the cost-shared funding provided by Congress over the past several years has accelerated NuScale’s advancement through the NRC Design Certification process. This is what DOE’s SMR Program was created to do, and our success is credited to strong bipartisan support from Congress.”

Nuclear reactors generated a total 2657 TWh of electricity in 2019, up from 2563 TWh in 2018, and second only to the 2661 TWh generated in 2006, according to a new World Nuclear Association report. This is the seventh successive year that nuclear generation has risen, it noted.

In 2015, Oak Ridge National Laboratory produced the first plutonium fuel in the US in nearly 30 years. Now it’s headed to another planet. //

At the heart of Perseverance is a small “nuclear battery” the size of a beer keg called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or RTG. Unlike the nuclear reactors that create electricity on Earth, RTGs don’t have to initiate or sustain a fission reaction to generate power. They don’t even have any moving parts. Instead, they passively harvest the natural heat produced by the decay of plutonium-238 and convert it into electricity. They can reliably provide energy and heat to a spacecraft for decades—the two plutonium-powered Voyager probes launched in the late 1970s are still transmitting from interstellar space—and have been NASA’s go-to power source for more than two dozen deep-space missions.

“Plutonium-238 is a unique isotope of plutonium that principally decays by alpha radiation, and because of that, it generates a lot of heat,” says Robert Wham, the plutonium supply program manager at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is now responsible for making the stuff for NASA. “For a small spacecraft like Perseverance, you don’t want fission power. You just want thermal decay.” //

When the US got out of the plutonium business, it left NASA with a cache of a few dozen kilograms of plutonium-238 to ration for all future missions. It wasn’t much; the Perseverance rover alone uses nearly 5 kilograms of plutonium. At some point, this stockpile was bound to run out; a 2009 report by the National Academy of Sciences predicted that the US had only enough plutonium for a few more deep-space missions. That left the US with a few unpalatable options: Abandon exploration of the outer solar system, purchase plutonium from abroad, or start making it again domestically. //

With concerns about a plutonium shortage mounting—Russia was also running low—NASA policymakers decided the agency would foot the bill on its own. And since 2011, NASA has borne almost the entire cost of producing plutonium at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The investment soon paid off. By 2015, chemists at Oak Ridge produced the first sample of plutonium-238 in the US in nearly 30 years. At the same time, the lab invested heavily in automated production systems that would allow it to produce enough plutonium to meet NASA’s future needs. //

The process starts when researchers at Idaho National Lab send neptunium-237, itself a radioactive metallic oxide, to Tennessee, where automated machines press it into pellets the size of pencil erasers. Next, 52 of these pellets are stacked into metal rods called targets and placed in a nuclear reactor at either Oak Ridge or Idaho National Lab, where they are bombarded with neutrons to produce plutonium. After it’s left to cool for a few months, the plutonium is shipped to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where another machine presses the small plutonium pellets to form larger ones the size of marshmallows. Then they’re ensconced in a casing made out of iridium, a virtually indestructible metal that would prevent radioactive contamination in case of an accident when the rover is launched. Finally, the armored plutonium is shipped to Idaho National Lab, where 32 pellets are loaded into the rover’s nuclear battery before it’s installed on the vehicle.

Today, Oak Ridge is only producing about half of its target of 3.5 pounds of plutonium a year, a milestone Wham and his colleagues plan to hit by the mid-2020s.

Log scales are for quitters who can't find enough paper to make their point properly.

Fuel energy density, in MegaJoules/kg

• Sugar 19
• Coal 24
• Fat 39
• Gasoline 46
• Uranium 76,000,000

The company expected to be the first in the United States to operate a small nuclear reactor is facing setbacks that have caused supporters to question whether the novel technology will ever realize its potential as a tool to combat climate change. //

Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, a group of small community-owned utilities in six Western states, cited a rise in expected costs for the NuScale reactors. The group is counting on the nuclear power to provide around-the-clock, zero-carbon electricity to replace a coal plant it plans to close, but its members say they won’t need the new cleaner electricity source until later than expected.

“The setbacks are not fatal,” said Erik Olson, a climate and energy analyst at the Breakthrough Institute. “But if this project falls through, that would be an enormous blow to the promised next wave of nuclear power.”

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 notion is widely accepted, but, if its roots are understood, it can be effectively challenged. //

There have now been 110 nuclear power plants completed in the United States over a period of almost forty years. Though accurate cost data is difficult to obtain, it is safe to say that there has been no predictable relationship between the size of a nuclear power plant and its cost. Despite the graphs drawn in early nuclear engineering texts-which were based on scanty data from less than ten completed plants-there is not a steadily decreasing cost per kilowatt for larger plants.

It is possible for engineers to make incredibly complex calculations without a single math error that still come up with a wrong answer if they use a model based on incorrect assumptions. That appears to be the case with the bigger is better model used by nuclear plant planners.

For example, one assumption explicitly stated in the economy of scale model is that the cost of auxiliary systems does not increase as rapidly as plant capacity. In at least one key area, that assumption is not true for nuclear plants.

Since the reactor core continues to produce heat after the plant is shutdown, and since a larger, more powerful core releases less of its heat to its immediate surroundings because of a smaller surface to volume ratio, it is more difficult to provide decay heat removal for higher capacity cores. It is also manifestly more difficult, time consuming and expensive to prove that the requirements for heat removal will be met under all postulated conditions without damaging the core. For emergency core cooling systems, overall costs, including regulatory burdens, seem to have increased more rapidly than plant capacity. //

nuclear power is no different conceptually than hundreds of other new technologies.

The principle that Ford discovered is now known as the experience curve. . . It ordains that in any business, in any era, in any capitalist competition, unit costs tend to decline in predictable proportion to accumulated experience: the total number of units sold. Whatever the product (cars or computers, pounds of limestone, thousands of transistors, millions of pounds of nylon, or billions of phone calls) and whatever the performance of companies jumping on and off the curve, unit costs in the industry as a whole, adjusted for inflation, will tend to drop between 20 and 30 percent with every doubling in accumulated output.

George Guilder Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise Updated for the 1990s, ICS Press, San Francisco, CA. p. 195 //

The Adams Engine philosophy of small unit sizes is based on aggressively climbing onto the experience curve. If a market demand exists for 300 MW of electricity, distributed over a wide geographic area, traditional nuclear plant designers would say that the market is not yet ready for nuclear power, thus they would decide to learn nothing while waiting for the market to expand.

In contrast, atomic engine makers may see an opportunity to manufacture and sell 15 units, each with 20 MW of capacity.

LOGAN – Members of the Logan City Council voted Tuesday to end the city’s partnership in an increasingly expensive nuclear power project.

As a member of the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), Logan City owned a partial interest in a first-of-its-kind nuclear plant proposed to be constructed at the Idaho National Laboratory.

Faced with Sept. 15 deadline to ante up more funding for the risky project, both Mark Montgomery, the city’s light and power director, and Logan Finance Director Richard Anderson recommended that Logan withdraw from the Carbon Free Power Project.

Council members Jess W. Bradfield and Mark A. Anderson were reluctant to make that decision, saying that the innovative project had the potential to produce clean, economical power in the future.

Montgomery told city council members that Logan had invested about $400,000 in the Small Modular Reactor (SMR) project since 2017. If the city had opted to continue its participation in the project into its initial licensing phase through 2023, the price tag would have been another $654,000.

In early August, the Utah Taxpayers Association urged all Utah cities to reconsider their participation in the SMR project due to its potential for out–of-control costs.

Unit 1 of the Barakah nuclear power plant in the Al Dhafrah region of Abu Dhabi has been connected to the grid and has begun supplying electricity to the UAE. The South Korean-supplied APR1400 is expected to enter full commercial operation later this year.