What happened at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima? What role did water coolant play in each one? Why do we use water as a coolant, given it has a liquid range of only 100 degrees Celsius?

Today's reactors, which are cooled by pressurized water, were viewed as a stop-gap technology until "breeder reactors" could be commercially deployed. Breeder reactors convert fertile material (such as Thorium) into fissile material (such as Uranium-233). It is not practical to operate a breeder reactor with water coolant, so a new coolant must be chosen. We examine two coolant options (from a field of many): liquid salt, and liquid sodium. What advantages do each have over water? Is one safer than the other?

It’s so strange to see otherwise caring environmentalists ignore climate scientists when it comes to climate change. The world’s top climate scientists, including Dr. James Hansen, Dr. Tom Wigley, Dr. Ken Caldeira and Dr. Kerry Emanuel, have all urged world leaders and environmental campaigners to stop their unscientific and ideological attacks on nuclear energy and support its expansion.

Climate scientists have warned that the anti-nuclear position of environmental leaders is causing unnecessary and severe harm to the environment and to our planet’s future by prolonging carbon emissions. Even the Union of Concerned Scientists, admits we need nuclear to address global warming.

U.S. carbon emissions rose in 2018 by over 60 million tons of CO2. Closing six nuclear plants over the last few years, building new gas plants, increasing manufacturing and construction, and increasing gasoline/diesel/jet fuel demand are the reasons for this rise. //

Over the next 20 to 40 years, the Levelized Cost of Energy for an existing nuclear plant is only 3¢/kWh. For an existing gas plant the LCOE is 5¢/kWh, and for an existing coal plant it’s 4¢/kWh. The LCOE for a new gas plant is 7¢/kWh, for a new nuclear plant is 9¢/kWh, for a new coal plant is 10¢/kWh, and for new wind is 11¢/kWh. So prematurely closing any nuclear plant to be replaced by new anything makes no sense economically.

Operating an existing nuclear plant is much more cost-effective than even existing coal and gas plants, and much cheaper than installing any new power plant, even natural gas.

Natural gas stakeholders join renewable energy fans in striking preemptive blows against the Energy Department's much anticipated grid reliability study //

Energy Dept. Grid Study: Oil And Gas Vs. Coal And Nukes
API’s case of nerves over the forthcoming grid study has a simple explanation: API has the interests of its membership at heart, and drillers have a tremendous amount of interest in pushing coal and nuclear energy out of the power generation field in favor of natural gas.

The shale gas boom has put a world of hurt on some local communities but it has resulted in low prices. The industry consensus is that so far, natural gas is the driving force behind coal power plant closures.

Earlier this week API released a study of its own demonstrating that natural gas is a better match for today’s flexible power demands than either coal or nuclear energy. //

“Baseload is kind of a historical term. It’s not really relevant to how electricity is produced today…What you need is dispatchability… and [coal and nuclear] are far slower when you compare them to a lot of the technology natural gas plants have.” //

As for nuclear energy, so far atom power has not been a particular area of interest for President Trump

When, on January 17 1955, the captain of USS Nautilus reported “Underway on nuclear power” it ushered in a new era of submarine warfare. In fact it was such a game changer that it reset naval warfare generally. Nuclear powered submarines were faster, did not need to surface during a mission and could run until their crew’s stores run out. Yet despite the disruptive nature of nuclear-powered submarines, few navies could follow the U.S. Navy into this new era. Russia, Britain, France and China built them, and India joined the ranks in the late 1980s by leasing a Russian boat.

Today, those same 6 countries are still the only ones operating nuclear-powered submarines. The U.S. Navy has 70, Russia has 41 including the fateful deep-diving special submarine Losharik, on which 14 submariners lost their lives in July. China is next with 19, Britain has 10, France 9, and India 3. //

During the Cold War others did attempt to follow the U.S. Navy’s lead, but gave up. Few people are aware that Sweden and Italy each had indigenous nuclear-powered submarine programs in the 1960s. But these did not survive to fruition. But today there is a new wave of interest among navies.

Brazil and South Korea are the safest bets for who will come next. And several other navies have either voiced an intention, or are worthy of speculation.

A tantalizing target for U.S. enemies. //

There are a lot of risks to public safety from this plan. //

On January 18, the Pentagon published a Request for Information on the feasibility of developing a portable nuclear reactor in support of a program known as “Project Dilithium.” The reactor is in response to a 2016 Defense Science Board report that found that fuel and water accounted for as much as 90 percent of supplies sent to outposts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which in turn exposed U.S. truck convoys to ambush (air-dropped fuel cost as much as $400 per gallon). //

The goal is to provide reliable electrical power to remote forward operating bases and during quick-response humanitarian missions. But the project also raises questions of nuclear security and keeping atomic materials from falling into the wrong hands. //

Noel Wauchope
a day ago
The article doesn't explain why it is "a horrible idea". Where's the rest of this story? //

Jim Laner
a day ago
There are Gen 4 fission (not fusion) nuclear generating technologies emerging that are low pressure, low waste, non-water-cooled, walk-away-safe, factory-built, and non-proliferative that are appropriate for the intended purpose stated by the Pentagon. The world ise about a decade away from their wide scale deployment. Their development is based on actual working prototypes developed at OaK Ridge National Labs. See: Molten Salt Reactor Experiment and do some research. NOT the same solid uranium fueled water cooled units as in today's commercial fleet technology.

By: Petr Beckmann

New figures show we’re using more energy and still pumping out more emissions—so why aren’t we moving the dial? //

renewables mainly picked up market share forfeited by another source of carbon-free power, rather than seizing it from fossil fuels. Once you add that to the increasing use of natural gas and coal use to fuel economic growth, it’s no surprise that the world still isn’t making a real dent in energy emissions, decades after the threat of climate change became clear. //

Many nuclear power stations around the world, however, are due for retirement or are already being decommissioned. Meanwhile, little new capacity is coming online thanks to tougher regulations and safety concerns intensified by Japan’s Fukushima disaster in 2011, as well as steep operating and development costs //

As things stand, the world’s retiring plants will remove around 200 gigawatts by 2040. That will make it nearly impossible to reach those targets unless companies and policymakers decide to extend the life of those facilities, or get busy building many more.

Some tout nuclear energy as ‘clean,’ but it’s hardly that, even with technological advancements. //

Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have come up with an unsettling discovery. Using the most complete and up-to-date list of nuclear accidents to predict the likelihood of another nuclear cataclysm, they concluded that there is a 50% chance of a Chernobyl-like event (or larger) occurring in the next 27 years, and that we have only 10 years until an event similar to Three Mile Island, also with the same probability. (The Three Mile Island Unit 2 reactor, near Middletown, Pa., partially melted down on March 28, 1979. This was the most serious commercial nuclear-plant accident in the U.S.) //

Then there’s the problem of nuclear waste. Just in the U.S., commercial nuclear-power plants have generated 80,000 metric tons of useless but highly dangerous and radioactive spent nuclear fuel — enough to fill a football field about 20 meters (65 feet) deep. //

The nuclear-energy industry wants to participate in the clean-energy movement by positioning itself as an environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuels. However, fossil-fuel pollution can be reversed. Nuclear waste is here to stay for hundreds of thousands of years.

As long term Atomic Insights readers know, I am a retired US Navy Nuke who likes atomic fission. I’m deeply skeptical about nuclear fusion devices that are not stellar masses and not explosive thermonuclear devices. (I fully accept the evidence that stars and bombs work.)

But I have to admit that a patent for a Plasma Compression Fusion Device was issued and that the US Navy, my former employer, apparently funded the research and inventions that supported the patent application.

I know there are Atomic Insights readers who are far more capable than I am of evaluating the patent claims and determining if the device described can be built and operated to provide reliable power.

Engineer-Poet says
October 13, 2019 at 9:56 AM

Toroid coils confine their magnetic fields inside the minor radius. They have next to no magnetic field outside the minor radius. I could see a solenoid coil but toroids would simply be useless for influencing a plasma outside the toroid coil itself, and that includes the space between these so-called “fusors”. This looks like fusion word salad.Word salad. The mass of plasma is negligible compared to the mass of tungsten-based electrodes. The one thing I could see as a possibility is the use of mechanical twisting of a magnetic field around a diamagnetic plasma to induce currents and consequent heating, but that would require solenoid coils rather than toroidal coils. //

One coulomb is an enormous amount of electric charge. Supercapacitors store multiple coulombs by way of equally enormous amounts of surface area of their virtual “plates”, which are made of things like activated carbon. In a small device with discrete plates and capacitance measured in picofarads, storing a coulomb would require voltages in the billions of volts. That’s in excess of the breakdown voltage of any available material and would immediately arc over. There are equally enormous energies involved. One coulomb in a gigavolt capacitor stores 5e8 joules, about 139 kWh. Forget fusion, if you can handle that you’ve got a killer battery. IOW, ain’t gonna happen. //

My impression is that this is going to be revealed shortly as Sokal Hoax III, an epic troll of both tne Green energy believers and the USPTO. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to learn that this “inventor” doesn’t even exist.

Injecting granular carbonates could create cake-like structures in damaged reactors //

Looking for a better method to cool and contain corium, Louie and colleagues turned to granular carbonate minerals like calcite and dolomite, which they say could be injected into the heart of reactors in the event of a meltdown. //

Beginning with a small-scale test, the team heated a few grams of lead oxide powder to 1000 °C to create a molten material similar to corium. They then combined this with both a sample of granular calcite and, for comparison, grains of silicon dioxide (sand).

“We saw that the injectable carbonate minerals work,” Louie said. “It reacted chemically to produce a lot of carbon dioxide, which ‘leavened’ the lead oxide into a nice cake-like structure. The reaction itself had a cooling effect, and all the pores in the ‘cake’ allow for further cooling.” In contrast, the sand used as the control sample had no effect on the simulated corium.

The two plants deactivated in 2018 and 2019 generated more than 1,400 megawatts, enough power for more than 1 million homes. //

More nuclear power plant retirements may be on the horizon: PJM, the Pennsylvania-based coordinator of wholesale electricity in 13 states plus the District of Columbia, has already begun planning for the planned retirements of the dual-reactor, 1,813-megawatt Beaver Valley Power Station in Pennsylvania and the Davis–Besse and Perry nuclear power plants that together generate 2,143 megawatts in Ohio.

PJM’s grid, which covers Pennsylvania and New Jersey, had 183,454 megawatts of installed generating capacity available as of May 2019. The company puts the total capacity of the recently retired nuclear plants and the three planned for retirement at 5,387 megawatts, or about 3% of overall capacity. (PJM says its all-time highest power use was 165,563 megawatts in the summer of 2006.) //

The grid counts 11,415 megawatts of new natural gas-fired electricity generation coming online in 2018 and 2019 and an additional 10,514 megawatts from gas expected to go in-service in 2020 through 2023. Operators of those future plants have signed what are called interconnection service agreements with PJM.

"That's sort of a stage at which the projects are likely to get built," Shields said of the agreements.

All told, new gas, wind and solar plants are projected to add 29,097 megawatts to the grid, as 19,037 megawatts of capacity are lost from retired coal, gas and nuclear plants, PJM says. That's a net increase of more than 10,000 megawatts. //

PJM projections show that if all three nuclear plants planned for retirement in Pennsylvania and Ohio go offline, carbon dioxide emissions would rise by about 3.7% above 2019 levels. Other emissions, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, would drop, thanks to older fossil fuel plants shutting down. If those nuclear plants remain online and all or even half of the new gas plants open, all three pollutants would drop across PJM’s territory.

Mark Bailey
a month ago
As an engineer with over 40 years in electrical generation and distribution, including 7+ years actually working in a nuclear power station in the United States, I believe nuclear generation is absolutely essential for renewable energy to be viable. Of the technologies currently available, only nuclear and hydro power are dispatchable, i.e. predictable well in advance of need and not subject to unavoidable interruption. Until renewables solve the storage problem, any source that is not dispatchable requires back up or the willingness to tolerate outages over significant areas of the country. There is also the transport issue. Power lines are harder to get approved and cause more political heartburn than power plants. The move to non polluting sources will also require much more electrical energy to displace fossil fuel home and building heating, industrial thermal processes, and motor driven transportation. Nuclear plants produce more power per unit area occupied and do not cause large numbers of deaths to common and protected bird species.

Our president is a global warming denier, is anti-vaccine, and is a conspiracy theorist. Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, being anti-science is never a good thing. When those in positions of power are ignorant of science and hostile to the institutions of science and the methods that those institutions espouse, that is a recipe for disaster. But even a stopped clock is correct twice a day. And even though there appears to be a significant asymmetry in the degree to which our two major political parties take anti-scientific positions, on some issues the political left has it wrong for their own ideological reasons. The two big anti-science issues popular on the left are anti-GMO stances and anti-nuclear energy. The latter was recently brought into sharp relief when Trump signed a, "Memorandum on the Effect of Uranium Imports on the National Security and Establishment of the United States Nuclear Fuel Working Group." //

Nuclear power is the safest form of energy we have, if you consider deaths per megawatt of energy produced.

Nuclear waste can be dealt with, and the newer reactors produce less waste, and can even theoretically burn reprocessed waste from older plants…

This is also the option most likely to succeed. We do have examples from other countries. Germany tried to go completely renewable and closed their nuclear plants, and now have to build coal-fired plants to meet their energy needs. Meanwhile, the countries that are doing the best with low carbon energy are France and Sweden, who invested heavily in nuclear. This is why Bernie’s plan would be a disaster, it would exactly follow the failed strategy of Germany, but on a larger scale.

Light it up //

The consensus among virtually every expert in this field, including scientists who are concerned about carbon emissions and climate change, is that we need more nuclear power (actually, a lot more) not less. And yet there was Warren, vowing to shut down every reactor in the country as quickly as possible. (Washington Examiner) //

You won’t find much of a better example than the one Novella mentions when he compares Germany and France. Germany eliminated their nuke plants entirely, promising to power the nation on wind and solar. They are now rushing to build coal plants because they can’t keep the lights on. France, on the other hand, has significantly increased its investment in nuclear energy and is currently building even more plants. They’re meeting their carbon emission goals and have electrical power to spare. //

Liberals continue to cling to old beliefs based on watching The China Syndrome too many times and summoning up images of Chernobyl and Fukushima. The fact is that when Three Mile Island melted down, it created a God awful mess inside the protective dome that’s still being cleaned up today. But at no time did radiation leak out of that plant in greater amounts than you’d get by spending a day walking around Denver airport.

Chernobyl blew up because the Russians were using a horrible, unsafe reactor design. We don’t build them that way. Fukushima was working fine until it got hit by a tsunami. Yes, you have to be careful and you have to be smart when planning a new nuclear plant. Don’t build them on fault lines or on the coast where the ocean may swamp them. But there are plenty of geologically stable locations where we could start construction.

Concerns about the storage of spent fuel rods are mostly a thing of the past. They were a terrible and valid concern with our earlier reactor models, but the technology has come a long way. //

Why aren’t we building more nuclear plants in America today? Partly because of the politics, but also because we have so heavily regulated the industry that utility companies can no longer afford all of the hoops they have to jump through. New nuke plants under the current regulatory scheme will never be profitable so the energy companies don’t even bother trying. There is a regulatory overhaul on the table that could resurrect the nuclear energy industry (read all about it here), but the usual list of suspects are fighting it tooth and claw.

If we expect to create a prosperous future fueled by low-cost, clean energy, it’s time to recalibrate the way we think about renewables. That requires us to move beyond the once cutting-edge view that solar power is a key ingredient in lowering greenhouse gas emissions.

Ironically, a frequent target of environmentalists, Duke Energy, is showing us that’s not the case. In fact, Duke documents show the negative impact of deploying solar power on the electric grid.

Reporting by North State Journal revealed Duke is asking North Carolina regulators to ease air quality emission limits for some of Duke’s combustion turbine facilities. The utility is trying to reduce air pollution it says is due to the increased penetration of solar power. North Carolina ranks second in the nation, behind only California, in the amount of installed solar plants.

Duke’s problem shows what happens when basic science collides with operational reality. Solar energy is intermittent. Until a reasonable storage technology is available, natural gas plants must operate when solar is brought on and off the grid. Put simply, the gas plant is generating power when the sun isn’t shining. Duke’s applications reportedly show that, due to the see-saw effect of deploying solar, emissions of the pollutant nitrogen oxide have increased, even though the level is lower than emissions from purely coal-based energy.

North State Journal also reported on Duke’s concerns about the potential reversal of reductions in another pollutant, carbon dioxide, if North Carolina continues to impose its renewables mandate on utilities. Such a reversal is possible if regulations force Duke to reduce nuclear plant output because it must accept solar electricity instead. It turns out that when zero-emission nuclear plants are dialed back to make room for solar, greenhouse gas-emitting plants must be employed to give nuclear plants time to ramp back up when the sun goes down. That’s not exactly the results environmentalists were expecting from the push to adopt solar power.

let’s embrace clean nuclear energy now and in the future. North Carolina’s Duke Energy operates six nuclear plants, a small portion of a considerable fleet that has served the nation well. They have years of useful life remaining, but ensuring their long-term future requires a lengthy relicensing process by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

We must incentivize utilities to relicense their plants rather than retire them. Publicly owned, regulated utilities typically don’t receive a rate of return on assets that have fully depreciated. This is not to say utilities are retiring coal and nuclear plants after paying off mortgages simply because the plants no longer earn a return. Still, the lack of additional incentive is a reality.
A recent study from the Institute for Energy Research revealed that the cost of power produced by an old nuclear plant is more than 30 percent cheaper than new natural gas, the next cheapest option.

If we allow nuclear plants to be retired under current economics, some combination of natural gas combustion turbines and renewable sources such as solar or wind will replace them. This means a zero greenhouse gas-emitting source that doesn’t spew nitrogen oxides or other pollutants will be replaced with a source that does, and at a higher cost as well

Estonia looks at small modular reactors to keep its energy independence //

Back in 2005 the technology was ready but there wasn’t a customer that was ready,” said Rita Baranwal, the U.S. Department of Energy’s top nuclear power official. “That’s part of the reason these concepts had been shelved.” //

Fermi has raised funds from local investors who see potential for the startup to run the reactor without state backing or financial aid from utilities. The country will need the extra source of power to meet more unreliable flows of electricity when Estonia and the rest of Baltic region synchronizes its grids with Europe instead of Russia from 2025.

But with northern and western neighbors in Germany, Denmark and Sweden replacing thermal plants with wind and solar generation, Baltic electricity flows could become more dependent on the weather. Small modular reactors are being designed to ensure power supply at those times when the sun doesn’t shine or the air is still. //

New demand from countries like Estonia is accelerating the American licensing process for the technology, the DOE’s Baranwal said in an interview. Testing of the first licensed units won’t begin until early next decade in the U.S., with commercialization only years later.

Meanwhile Estonia will have to depend on its oil plants, making up 85% of the nations power supply and making Estonians the European Union’s largest per-capita emitter after Luxembourg. With the price of carbon having more than tripled last year the country’s state-owned utility Esti Energia AS has had to put employees on forced leave due to rising costs.

Kallemets insists that modular reactors are worth the wait as building natural gas plants would make the nation dependent on Russian fuel and that wind turbines will never be able to fully cover demand on windless winter days when imports from rest of Europe are limited.

Did you know that the Three Mile Island nuclear plant only shut down last Friday? Just like the coming closure of New York’s Indian Point plant, it’s bad news in the drive to reduce carbon emissions. //

What prompted the Pennsylvania plant’s early shutdown? Abundant, cheap natural gas — thanks to fracking, which has been a huge boon to the Keystone State’s economy. So cheap that the nuclear power wasn’t cost-competitive without a subsidy from the state.

It’s operators wanted a penny per kilowatt hour — less than half of what Pennsylvania offers wind and solar plants, which can’t deliver the reliable power to make them a viable large-scale alternative to oil, coal or gas facilities. //

Nuclear power should be the centerpiece of any sane, practical plan for combatting climate change. That the Green New Deal and Climate Strike crews are firmly anti-nuclear is proof that they don’t really see climate change as a truly overriding threat.

(1 GWye = roughly the electricity for one million people, living by western standards, for one year)

Let us suppose it is our mission to produce electricity for a run-of-the-mill city with about 1 million inhabitants living by Western standards. This city will need about thousand megawatts of electricity, year round, in short 1GWye.

Coal we have used since we started producing electricity. But how much coal will we need to accomplish our mission? That would be about 1,5 km of freight train, all wagons filled to the brim with coal. Oh yeah, that’s just for a single day. So for one year of electricity in our city, we will need 570 km of coal train: 3.3 million tons of coal in total. Of course, our coal powered plant does not only produce electricity, it also produces 9 million tons of CO2 and 330.000 tons of fly ash.

How much uranium or we going to need to accomplish our mission if we burn it in a conventional nuclear reactor? In a usual Light Water Reactor (LWR) we will first need to mine uranium ore, enough to make about 250 tons of natural uranium. Out of this we will produce about 35 tons of enriched uranium that we can use in our light water reactor. This will leave us with 215 tons of depleted uranium, with which we don’t really know what to do. An LWR can produce the required gigawattyear with 35 tons of enriched uranium.

The third option is to use the fuel in a molten salt reactor that is based on the use of conventional reactor fuel, but then in liquid form. This is the concept of for instance Terrestrial Energy and Thorcon Power. Details of the fuel cycle have not yet been published. [Approx 8 tons of mixed U235/238 per GWye]

The fourth option (on top in the graphic) is the thorium MSR. It basically consists of a vessel containing a mixture of molten salts at high temperature, about 600 degrees Celcius.

we only need a single ton of thorium to produce our GWeY. Most of the waste produced by this process is not really waste. After a year of storage, the waste is separated. 83% consists of precious stuff like rare earth metals and can be sold at a nice profit. The remaining 17% will need to be stored for about 300-500 years. Or sold to NASA: most of it is the very rare Plutonium 238, the stuff used to generate electricity in space when there’s not enough sun. The stuff is rare and priceless…

In the 22nd century, our descendants will struggle with the health and societal implications of global climate change.