The public discussion of energy options tends to be intensely
emotional, polarized, mistrustful, and destructive. Every option is
strongly opposed: the public seem to be anti-wind, anti-coal,
anti-waste-to-energy, anti-tidal-barrage, anti-fuel-duty, and
anti-nuclear.

We can't be anti-everything! We need an energy plan that adds up.
But there's a lack of numeracy in the public discussion of energy.
Where people do use numbers, they select them to sound big, to make an
impression, and to score points in arguments, rather than to aid
thoughtful discussion.

My motivation in writing "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air"
(available both on paper, and for free in electronic form
[withouthotair.com]) is to promote constructive conversations about
energy, instead of the perpetual Punch and Judy show. I've tried to
write an honest, educational and fun book.[2] I hope the book will help
build a cross-party consensus in favour of urgently making an energy
plan that adds up.

"Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" presents
the numbers that are needed to answer these questions:

• How huge are Britain's renewable resources, compared with our current
  energy consumption?

• How big do renewable energy facilities have to be, to make a
  significant contribution?

• How big would our energy consumption be if we adopted strong
  efficiency measures?

• Which efficiency measures offer big savings, and which offer only 5
  or 10%?

• Do new much-hyped technologies such as hydrogen or electric cars
  reduce energy consumption, or do they actually make our energy
  problem worse?

By Robert Hargraves

Democratic president Franklin D Roosevelt proclaimed at his 1933 inauguration, “…the only thing we have to fear is…fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

In years past Republican presidents were conservative stewards of the environment. Theodore Roosevelt started National Parks. Nixon created the EPA. George H.W. Bush moved to stem acid rain.

Who now dares to conserve our planet, while advancing all its people’s prosperity, with ample new nuclear power?

During the CNN climate town hall the leading Democratic presidential candidates opposed nuclear energy. The two fearless supporters trail in polled public support.

The candidates’ Green New Deal illustrates the political maxim “never let a crisis go to waste”. Reducing CO2 emissions is buried under trillion dollar promises to guarantee jobs, health care, housing, healthy food, improved infrastructure, and reduced industrial pollution.

Our climate-energy crisis is not national; it’s global, so the Green New Deal can’t solve it. Even the UN IPCC Paris agreement can’t reduce emissions enough; it falls short by a factor of ten.

Rich nations won’t stop their emissions while letting developing countries advance by burning ever more coal. Coal burning is the most rapidly expanding power source on the planet, because it’s reliable and cheap. But fearless developing nations would use nuclear energy sources if we make them cheap enough and accessible enough.

Greens had hoped to power us with wind and solar, but these intermittent energy sources require supplemental power. That assistance normally comes from burning natural gas that emits about half the CO2 of coal. Batteries that might store intermittent electricity are too expensive by a factor of ten, particularly for week-long energy supplies.

The Fearless Green Deal relies on cheap new nuclear power. The million-to-one energy density advantage of fissioning uranium makes it intrinsically cheaper than burning coal.

New North American ventures are now combining proven technologies like liquid fuels, metal alloy fuels or coated particle fuels to allow higher temperatures and passive safety. They’re taking advantage of advanced manufacturing technology to drive nuclear energy costs below those of fossil fuels.

Cal Abel’s scheme is much better. Nuclear heat is really cheap, so just run the reactor at 100% feeding heat into a solar-salt tank at something like 500°C. Pull hot salt from the tank as required to make steam for a steam turbine; the steam generators have a considerably higher thermal power maximum than the reactor. This lets you (a) decouple the reactor from the instantaneous electric output so it can likely be controlled by the system operator without violating NRC regs, and (b) follow the entire daily load curve without burning fossil fuel. That’s something that Hybrid Power manifestly cannot do.

If you need more than the ST’s rated power or run out of hot salt, you fire up some open-cycle gas turbines and use heat-recovery systems on the GT exhausts to help top up the salt tank.

The essence of why thorium energy offers such a remarkable perspective, has often been illustrated by a hand that presents you a metal ball. The claim of thorium proponents is that this ball of metal contains all the energy that you’ll need for a lifetime of western style living.

While this facility ultimately failed, float-friendly reactors are now the future.

Finland's Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (Stuk) has published a report discussing the safety assessment and licensing of small modular reactors (SMRs). The regulator says it is preparing for the licensing of such reactors "due to the national and international interest in them."

Russian scientists have proposed a concept of a thorium hybrid reactor in that obtains additional neutrons using high-temperature plasma held in a long magnetic trap. This project was applied in close collaboration between Tomsk Polytechnic University, All-Russian Scientific Research Institute Of Technical Physics (VNIITF), and Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics of SB RAS. The proposed thorium hybrid reactor is distinguished from today's nuclear reactors by moderate power, relatively compact size, high operational safety, and a low level of radioactive waste.

Aero-engine giant says small modular reactor technology will generate at $78/MWh and falling //

UK power technology group Rolls-Royce claimed it's on track to grid-connect mini nuclear reactors that can match renewables such as wind power on cost of electricity produced.

The group’s chief technology officer Paul Stein said its small modular reactor (SMR) technology, which uses prefabricated components that can be transported on a truck and assembled on site for scalable projects, can revive the prospects of nuclear as a source of zero-carbon energy by avoiding the pitfalls of massive, gigawatt-scale power station builds.

Stein told the BBC: “We think we can get the cost of a power station producing 440MW … to about £1.75bn ($2.23bn).

“If you go through the maths of the cost of capital, it means we’re selling electricity below £60/MWh ($78.5/MWh) which puts it into the territory of many of the renewables.”

The British blue chip company, known for providing power solutions for aircraft, ships and land projects, says its Small Modular Reactor concept would dramatically reduce the cost of building nuclear power sites.

Greater efficiency in Russian nuclear power plant maintenance outages saved nearly 180 days last year and enabled 2.9 terawatt hours more electricity to be produced than would otherwise have been possible, Rosenergoatom said yesterday. This amount of electricity is enough to meet the energy demand of, for example, the Smolensk or Tver regions for six months, the company said. //

The main contributors to the achievement were Kursk units 1 and 2 and Leningrad unit 4 thanks to improvements in “managing the characteristics” of RBMK reactors, Rosenergoatom said.

In total last year, there were 37 maintenance outages at 32 power units. This year, 41 maintenance outages are planned, with a total duration of 2484 days (at the target level).

When units three and four go on-line, Plant Vogtle will stand alone in the nuclear power industry.

“If these two units go into operation, it will be the only four-unit nuclear plant in the United States,” said U.S.NRC Spokesperson, Roger Hannah. “It will be the biggest nuclear power plant in the country.”

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has to approve the reactors before they’re operational. //

“This project is vital, and we continue to expect that we will bring these units on-line,” said Wilson. “November 2021 for unit three and November 2022 for unit four.”

Nuclear power provides 10% of global electricity, but to stem climate change the world is going to need far greater amounts of clean and reliable energy, the International Atomic Energy Agency says in a short film it published today. To tackle climate change, 80% of all electricity will need to be low carbon by 2050. //

Several countries are developing small modular reactors (SMRs) and one has already been built in Russia, it adds, referring to the floating nuclear power plant Akademik Lomonosov.

Rebecca Casper, mayor of Idaho Falls in the USA, said SMRs can "integrate beautifully and seamlessly with wind, with solar, with some of those other sources that are maybe intermittent but that are also carbon-free". Nuclear power is "the key," she adds, “that makes all of that other desirable alternative energy possible because alone it just can't sustain a growing population."

How green is nuclear power and what are the other options? //

Nuclear is good for the environment. Nuclear is bad for the environment. Both statements are true.

Why is it good? Nuclear power is planned to be a key part of the UK's energy mix.

The key benefit is that it helps keep the lights on while producing hardly any of the CO2 emissions that are heating the climate.

CO2 emissions come from traditional ways of creating electricity such as burning gas and coal.

From America's smallest nuke sub to Russia's floating power plant.

It's a huge step toward the energy holy grail. //

Plasma is volatile, and particles that escape the sun-hot plasma stream react with the materials that enclose the tokamak. This stops the plasma fusion reaction because the temperature falls out of the effective zone, but more importantly in Maslow’s hierarchy, it’s also wildly dangerous for the reactor itself and everything around it.

The PPPL team found that while boriding—literally, coating with boron—helps to keep plasma in the right reaction state, the existing method is too dangerous. Nuclear scientists use diborane gas, which is made of boron and explosively flammable hydrogen. To use it, these scientists must stop their tokamaks completely, introduce the gas, then leave again because of the flammability. At PPPL, they thought there must be a better way.

To make the process just as effective, but far safer, the PPPL team tested the use of both pure boron and boron nitride powders. The powders are inert, meaning they don’t react with anything or catch fire. The researchers applied the powders by injecting them into the tokamak while it was running, which is another method improvement over diborane gas. Once inside, the powder worked the same way the gas did: It kept the temperature in the high performance zone, which keeps the plasma more stable and prevents scraping the sides of the tokamak’s chamber.

The Netherlands' Nuclear Research and Consultancy Group (NRG) has completed a major milestone irradiation test of molten nuclear fuel salts in its High Flux Reactor at Petten 37 mi (60 km) north of Amsterdam. The first test of its kind since the ones carried out at Oak Ridge, Tennessee in the 1960s, its purpose is to learn more about the safe operation of a future Molten Salt Reactor (MSR).

States, high technology costs, slow demand growth, and competition from natural gas and renewables have dampened the prospects of building new, large nuclear reactors.

Georgia is currently building the only new conventional nuclear power plant in the country, which is five years behind schedule and nearly double its original cost estimate. All other plans to build large nuclear facilities in the U.S. have been abandoned for economic reasons.

Re-establishing an economically competitive domestic nuclear industry in America will require taking a different technology approach. Small and micro reactors offer such a solution, but the sector struggles with regulatory barriers and a lack of construction experience, according to a new paper from The Breakthrough Institute, the R Street Institute and Clearpath. //

Small and micro reactors, defined in the paper as reactors under 10 megawatts thermal, come with less risk than their larger counterparts. They rely on economies of multiples rather than economies of scale, which makes their design simpler and upfront costs more manageable. They also target niche applications — including off-grid and industrial — allowing for the technology to compete in the near term, without going up against mature generation technologies in wholesale markets.

These units are two to three thousandth the size of a typical commercial reactor, with the ability to supply electricity to around 2,000 households. This is significantly smaller than the next generation of research reactors being tested around the country. NuScale Power, for instance, builds 60-megawatt units designed to operate in six or 12 packs. Because of its size, micro reactor technology should be licensed in a process that recognizes “the very minimal risks such tiny reactors pose,” the paper argues.

The world’s first small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) have started delivering electricity to a coastal town in Russia, firming up their potential for use in small power grids in geographically

A new generation of reactors will start producing power in the next few years. They're comparatively tiny—and may be key to hitting our climate goals. //

NuScale uses a light water reactor—by far the most common type of reactor in commercial nuclear power plants—but that’s about where the similarities end. NuScale’s reactor is 65 feet tall and 9 feet in diameter, and is housed in a containment vessel only slightly larger. About the size of two school buses stacked end to end, you could fit around 100 of them in the containment chamber of a large conventional reactor. Yet this small reactor can crank out 60 megawatts of energy, which is about one-tenth the smallest operational reactor in the US today. //

They’re safer, in part because they are small enough to sit in underground pools of water. If a reactor leaks, the heat can slowly diffuse into the pool. That also means the reactors could be built closer to the places where their power is needed, without the 10-mile safety buffer a conventional plant must have.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been reviewing NuScale’s design since 2016; if the commission gives its blessing, the company can finally start building the first commercial reactor of its kind. The review process is brutal—NuScale submitted a 12,000 page technical application—and will likely stretch on for at least another year. But the company has already secured permission to build its first 12-reactor plant at the Idaho National Laboratory //

The Department of Energy is also interested in microreactors, a “plug and play” nuclear plant that usually generates less than 50 megawatts of power. Whereas small modular reactors are better suited to industrial processes and other large power loads, microreactors are ideal for smaller needs like powering a remote military base or keeping the lights on in an isolated Alaskan community //

In the US, the push for small reactors has prompted some changes to the regulatory environment to help companies get a first small reactor online at a federal facility by 2027. But small reactors will still need to prove they can be cost-competitive,

Federal go-ahead for Florida reactors could start a chain reaction. //

You probably haven’t heard about a recent regulatory decision that will reduce carbon emissions because it doesn’t follow the green template of controlling private industry and suppressing economic growth.

Last week the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for the first time extended a nuclear plant’s license so it can operate for 80 years. The decision for the Turkey Point reactors in south Florida could encourage other plant owners to apply for renewals and extend the viability of the leading carbon-free energy source.