In July, micro-nuclear reactor company Oklo and bitcoin mining company Compass Mining announced a 20-year commercial partnership in which Oklo will eventually power a portion of Compass' mining activities with carbon-free nuclear energy.

Earlier in July, Akron, Ohio-based energy company Energy Harbor Corp. announced it will provide nuclear power to Standard Power's new Bitcoin blockchain mining center in Coshocton, Ohio beginning in December 2021.

Those in favor of mobile nuclear power for the battlefield claim it will provide "unlimited, low-carbon energy" //

The PM-2A was built in 18 months. It arrived at Thule Air Force Base in Greenland in July 1960 and was dragged 138 miles across the ice sheet in pieces and then assembled at Camp Century. //

The Army called the reactor portable, even at 330 tons, because it was built from pieces that each fit in a C-130 cargo plane. It was powering Camp Century, one of the military's most unusual bases.

Camp Century was a series of tunnels built into the Greenland ice sheet and used for both military research and scientific projects. The military boasted that the nuclear reactor there, known as the PM-2A, needed just 44 pounds of uranium to replace a million or more gallons of diesel fuel. Heat from the reactor ran lights and equipment and allowed the 200 or so men at the camp as many hot showers as they wanted in that brutally cold environment. //

The PM-2A ran for two years, making fossil fuel-free power and heat and far more neutrons than was safe.

Those stray neutrons caused trouble. Steel pipes and the reactor vessel grew increasingly radioactive over time, as did traces of sodium in the snow. Cooling water leaking from the reactor contained dozens of radioactive isotopes potentially exposing personnel to radiation and leaving a legacy in the ice. //

When the reactor was dismantled for shipping, its metal pipes shed radioactive dust. Bulldozed snow that was once bathed in neutrons from the reactor released radioactive flakes of ice. //

The U.S. military's first attempts at land-based portable nuclear reactors didn't work out well in terms of environmental contamination, cost, human health and international relations. That history is worth remembering as the military considers new mobile reactors.

Nuclear power has always been controversial, but the debate perhaps has never been so polarized. One camp argues that the planet needs it more than ever and champions the rapid expansion of capacity in countries such as China and India. The other side says now’s the time to get rid of nuclear energy and celebrates the shuttering of reactors in the U.S. and Europe. It’s a collision between concerns over global warming — which give nuclear power appeal as carbon-free energy — and anxieties about safety, which were heightened by three reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima plant in northern Japan after an earthquake and tsunami in 2011.

Surprisingly a real-life scenario and not a plotline from The Simpsons

A reactor at Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in Taiwan malfunctioned on Tuesday morning, triggering an auto shutdown that resulted in the loss of 985 megawatts of power – all due to the misplacement of a chair.

The plant owner, state-run Taipower, said the incident did not cause any grid power outages, although the power supply light turned yellow from green, indicating the system was running at 6-10 per cent of operating reserve ratio.

Both the power company and the Atomic Energy Commission, a government agency for atomic safety, confirmed there was no concern about radiation release.

An investigation by the Association for Natural Energy pinpointed the cause: misplaced furniture. Staff working in the control room moved the chair to clean and, in the process, knocked the acrylic protective cover of a main steam isolation valve switch causing it to tilt, shift, and close, setting off a chain reaction that tripped the main steam turbine and stopped the reactor.

Taipower filed a report on the 6:30am oopsie and by 11:40pm the reactor was approved to restart.

As the climate crisis worsens, the discussion intensifies over what role nuclear power should play in fighting it.

BYLOIS PARSHLEY
PUBLISHED MAY 4, 2021

Yesterday, the guys over at Powerline blog had this interesting little story on the practical realities as to why “renewable” energy sources like wind and solar power will NEVER generate the power needed to supply the vast electrical demands of the United States, notwithstanding all the proclamations and pledges made by moronic politicians chasing after “green votes”.

The bottom-line issue comes down to a simple calculation of the area of landmass needed to produce a specific measure of generated electricity when you employ different methods of generating that electricity.

When efficiency is measured as a function of landmass use, the form of electrical generation that is far and away the best method is nuclear power. The chart found in the Powerline story shows that when “power density” is measured as watts per square meter of land used, nuclear power produces 2000 watts, while solar power produces 10 watts of electricity per square meter of land used, and wind power produces 1 watt of electricity per square meter.

Part of the variable here is that nuclear power runs at a constant generating capacity 24/7/365, and besides nuclear fuel, the only natural resource needed is a supply of water. //

Once the math is done with regard to the relationship of the various forms of power which can be used to generate electricity, the next relatively simple mathematical calculation is to determine how much landmass will be required to generate enough electricity from wind and/or solar power to meet the electricity needs of the United States over a given period of time. That is where the problems begin.

Setting aside for the moment the question of capital costs and what that might mean for electricity rates to be paid by consumers, if the calculation is limited solely to a determination of how many square miles of wind farms would be needed to power the electrical needs of the United States such that the burning of fossil fuels to turn water into steam that drives steam turbine generators, the answer is a landmass the size of California — times 2. You take something akin to California, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, and Arizona, cover it from top-to-bottom and side-to-side with giant wind turbines, and the rest of the country can run their air conditioners, microwave ovens, and electric power-washers without introducing another molecule of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from putting a match to fossil fuel. //

To accomplish the goals staked out in these policy prescriptions means devoting massive amounts of a scarce natural resource — land — to the re-invention of electrical generation capacity in the United States. I consider land as a “scare natural resource,” because the last time I checked, there isn’t any more of it being created. We “consume” the land when we cover it with solar panels and can’t make any other use of it.

Right now, the major metropolitan communities on the coasts are not served by electrical transmission lines from Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, and Oklahoma. All of that infrastructure would need to be built, as well.

Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy sources is a geographic impossibility based on current technology. Replacing fossil fuels with nuclear power could likely be accomplished with currently available technology.

France has done it. France reduced its fossil fuel consumption for energy from 96% in 1966 to under 45% in 2018. In the same time period, it increased nuclear-generated energy to 49%, a program which began in the early 1970s as a result of the “1973 Oil Crisis” and the recognition by France that it produces no oil and has no oil reserves among its natural resources. //

bluestardad
3 months ago
Massive solar farms will wipe out large areas of vegetation, which converts CO2 into Oxygen and water vapor. Strike one, enviro-NAZIs. Solar panels primarily come from China because they are about the only country willing to strip mine for the raw materials to make them. Strip mining is a wasteful method and creates all kinds of ecological damage. Strike two. Solar panels only produce electricity during sunny days. Battery storage requires climate controlled facilities to house them and keep them at peak performance, and even then they have relatively short operating lifetimes. Plus battery manufacturing also requires mining for rare earth minerals (think more strip mining.) Strike three //

NickSJ
3 months ago
Notice that greens fanatically oppose the only two reliable non-CO2 producing sources of electricity - nuclear and hydro. //

coyotewise NickSJ
3 months ago
China would not get huge revenues for the rare earth material with either hydro or nuclear. Biden loves him some China, and the better they do the better he and Hunter do.

Forward:

A book of this type must often get into discussions of scientific details. Every effort has been made to keep them as readable as possible for the layperson. The more technical details have been put into Appendixes at the end of the book. These can be ignored by readers with less interest in details. For readers with more interest in these, references are given which can be used as starting points for further reading. Personal inquiries about further information or references are always welcome.

Each chapter is broken up into sections. If a reader is not interested in the subject of a particular section or finds it to be too technical, it can usually be skipped over without loss of continuity.

Whither nuclear power? That question has become more important as energy policies evolve to emphasize emissions-free “green” energy and an increased electrification of the U.S. economy. Some environmentalists consider nuclear power to be crucial to reducing carbon emissions; others continue to vehemently oppose nuclear power and believe that our energy must come solely from renewable sources. Asked whether they favor or oppose nuclear power, the public is split.*

Meanwhile, the nuclear power industry itself is in a parlous state for a variety of reasons. These include: (i) decades of construction cost overruns and plant delays because of poor designs, lack of manufacturing expertise, and changing regulations; (ii) political squabbling over spent nuclear fuel disposal; (iii) energy policies, including renewable energy subsidies and mandates, that have distorted electric power markets and made it harder for nuclear plants to compete; and (iv) lower natural gas prices and more efficient gas-fired generators. In the past few years, threatened plant closures have led state policymakers to award subsidies to a number of existing plants, and more such subsidies are likely forthcoming.

Nevertheless, nuclear power provides valuable benefits. It is highly reliable and emissions-free. It provides generation diversity, which can reduce the adverse impacts of fuel price shocks. It does not require backup and storage, unlike wind and solar power generation. New designs for nuclear plants promise lower costs and improved safety. This paper thus concludes that saving nuclear power is crucial to this country’s energy future, especially if that future is based on increased electrification. //

Several policies are necessary to preserve this power source. They include:

• Eliminating subsidies for renewable energy at the state and federal level, including federal production tax credits, state renewable portfolio standards, and feed-in tariffs for renewable resources that are increasingly distorting wholesale electric markets.
• Linking subsidies for existing nuclear plants to wholesale market prices of electricity and combining them with performance incentives that require improved operating efficiency over time. However, before subsidies are granted to prevent a nuclear plant’s closure, a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis should be performed to ensure that the grant is not a futile exercise or is so costly that building replacement generating capacity is a lower-cost alternative.
  .....

https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/R-0719-JL.pdf

DC Reade
traveling
April 7, 2019
Times Pick
I'm noticing the usual array of objections to nuclear power: 1) that high level waste storage is impractical; 2) that reactors are easy terrorist targets; 3) that radiation is such a horrific form of pollution that only zero tolerance will suffice; 4) that the track record of Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Miles Island demonstrates that the technology is inherently unsafe.

If people were to investigate these objections instead of regarding them as truisms, they'd find that 1) high-level nuclear waste can be reprocessed using fast-neutron reactor technology and reused to consume nearly all of it; 2) nuclear reactors are not exactly soft targets for terrorist groups, particularly in terms of making bomb-grade fissile material available to them; 3) some level of radiation is inescapable simply in the course of residing on the planet, and people incur much more of an additional radiation load as airline passengers than people do by living in proximity to a nuclear power plant; and 4) Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island are more examples of failure to heed ordinary good sense precautions than they are indications of an inherently dangerous technology.

Furthermore, the best and cleanest nuclear reactor designs- Gen III and Gen IV- are only now coming online. There are designs that don't use water for cooling. There are designs that don't even require uranium.

It's imperative to not fall into the trap of obsessing over every problem while objecting to every solution.

318 RecommendShareFlag
10 REPLIES
Lynn commented April 6, 2019
L
Lynn
New York
April 6, 2019
@DC Reade
"high-level nuclear waste can be reprocessed using fast-neutron reactor technology and reused to consume nearly all of it"
So is anyone doing that first with all the waste that's already lying around with no plan to go?

18 RecommendShareFlag
Ian Rasmussen commented April 6, 2019
I
Ian Rasmussen
Chicago
April 6, 2019
@Lynn As my understanding goes, the way to reprocess as @CD Reade mentions is called a Breeder Reactor, and yes, they are used around the world. That's what the authors are talking about when they say "we can either burn the waste as fuel in new types of reactors or bury it underground." For whatever reason we don't use them in America, I'm not sure why, probably politics. Europe and I believe Japan have used them for a while, and China just opened one in the last decade as they push forward on nuclear power. Could be some nuclear arms treaty fine print or something that prevents us in the US, or just the general fear of the word nuclear.

11 RecommendShareFlag
DC Reade commented April 6, 2019
D
DC Reade
traveling
April 6, 2019
@Ian Rasmussen

In the US, the obstacles are based in politics and litigation. I've gotten to view most of that resistance as based in irrational fear- with the (dys)functional result being that high-level nuclear waste products continue to be stored on-site in cooling ponds long after they've cooled enough to be moved, which is a much more potentially hazardous than transporting the material for reprocessing in a breeder reactor, or moving it to a remote storage site that's nowhere near any bodies of water and relatively secure from being mobilized by the wind and weather.

11 RecommendShareFlag
617to416 commented April 7, 2019
617to416
617to416
Ontario Via Massachusetts
April 7, 2019
@DC Reade

"Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island are more examples of failure to heed ordinary good sense precautions than they are indications of an inherently dangerous technology. "

And are we confident that "failures to heed ordinary good sense" are a thing of the past and that we've now entered an era where humans will be free from error, always rational, and never motivated by passion, greed, or anger?

The failure to heed ordinary good sense is a significant risk that any truly rational person can't ignore!

8 RecommendShareFlag
K D commented April 7, 2019
K
K D
Pa
April 7, 2019
@DC Reade
The incident at Three Mile was handled exactly the way it was suppose to be handled. They followed procedures and no radiation escaped.

11 RecommendShareFlag
Cactus commented April 7, 2019
C
Cactus
RI
April 7, 2019
@DC Reade
You've said everything better than I could. I understand many anti-nuclearists think they are protecting life on our planet. If only they would educate themselves----we are so mis-informed. The author's book is a good start as is Gretchen Craven's Power to Save the World.

8 RecommendShareFlag
Anne commented April 7, 2019
A
Anne
Chicago
April 7, 2019
In a few years homes can fully power themselves (https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/green-tech/fuel-cells/solar-panel-prototype-splits-water-to-produce-hydrogen).
That leaves a much smaller production need for industry and vehicles which can be largely covered with other renewables. The US has the open space and latitude for it.

3 RecommendShareFlag
Peter Melzer commented April 7, 2019
P
Peter Melzer
C'ville, VA
April 7, 2019
@Ian Rasmussen,
Russia is the only country that claims to have developed functional commercial-scale fast breeder reactors. France's Superphenix produced power for a few weeks before the project was abandoned because of technical difficulties. Japan's Monju project never went on grid. Construction of the Clinch River reactor in the US was abandoned in its early infancy.

5 RecommendShareFlag
Varsityvic commented April 7, 2019
V
Varsityvic
NJ
April 7, 2019
@Ian Rasmussen I worked as a nuclear engineer on the breeder reactor. Government funded, cancelled a few years after TMI accident for both political and economic reasons. They are much more complex than normal reactors. I’m surprised no mention of geothermal in article or comments by others.

5 RecommendShareFlag
Dirk commented April 7, 2019
D
Dirk
Camden, Maine
April 7, 2019
@K D It may have been handled exactly the way "it should be" but it never should have happened in the first place. What it proves is that nuclear accidents (and blunders) WILL happen. Full Stop.
Therefore we need to expect more of them if we build more of them. You didn't mention the costs of 3-Mile Island. From what I can gather it cost $973M (or almost a billion dollars) to clean up -- which doesn't include the cost of building the reactor. It was new at the time it failed so all the imbedded costs in its construction and startup were lost. These babies are not cheap and some will fail. 3-Mile Island came very close to a complete meltdown. Fukishima is not done melting yet -- it's still a major disaster in progres. But that said, it's predicted to cost Japan over $200Billion (American dollars) over time. Five of those and you have a Trillion. This is playing with fire. Solar is not.

3 RecommendShareFlag
paul commented April 7, 2019
P
paul
White Plains, NY
April 7, 2019
Times Pick
Finally, a voice of reason in an age of anti-nuclear rhetoric. Nuclear power is efficient, economical and safe, despite the fear mongering of people who simply ignore the science and the facts. Look at New York state, where the witless Governor Andrew Cuomo has frightened the residents of the Hudson Valley into the imminent shut down of the Indian Point nuclear power plant. Where will the replacement power come from? How much will it cost? No amount of wind or solar power can generate what Indian Point does, but Cuomo simply ignores the economic realities. Sheer stupidity, or more likely the outright political manipulation of the people.

1 Reply107 RecommendShareFlag
rosa commented April 7, 2019
R
rosa
ca
April 7, 2019
Times Pick
I'm 70.
I was born about the time that nuke-poer and nuke-weapons came on the scene.
Nuke power, they said, was going to be cheap!Evry one would use it for pennies a day!

And they never said anything about nuke waste.
They didn't have to.
There was a terrific site in Washington. All they had to do was scrape a deep trench in the soil, throw in the waste, scrape a cover over it, and, VIOLA! No more problem!

When I left Washington, they had 'discovered' that, ooops, the trenches were leaking. Into the Columbia. Heading downstream. So, don't eat the fish.

You'll forgive me, young men, if I don't believe anyone when they say they have a solution to.... pretty much anything, but especially, nuclear waste.

We still have no solution to Chernobyl.
We have no solution to Fukushima Diachi.
Yucca Mountain? It's one of the most earthquake states, Nevada, that there is.
And what about that nuclear power plant that was built on the California coast?

Sorry.
Never.
There is no industry in the world that is run by a more incompetent bunch, ever.
I am 70.
So are nukes.

Seriously, NYTimes?
Is this the next subject that shall be "normalized"?

Solar.
Wind.
Hydro.
Tidal.
They are all cheaper - and safer.
No nukes - for any reason - until the problem with "WASTE" is solved.

Start with the state of Washington.

88 RecommendShareFlag
3 REPLIES
spike commented April 7, 2019
spike
spike
NYC
April 7, 2019
@rosa Nukes always seem like a great idea on paper, but in the end they always end up much more expensive then alternatives. Any mistake is very expensive to fix, the waste problem is endless. The need to place them next to water and near cities means any problem becomes catastrophic. The huge capital cost means engineers will always be pushed to cut corners so that Diablo Canyon and San Onofre are sited over faults. Hindsight always shows ways that disasters could have been avoided- Fukushima would have survived if the fuel tanks for the back up pumps have been underground so that they were not swept away by the tsunami. But all systems fail at some point. After the Tohoku earthquakes probably the safest place to put a nuke plant is Fukushima- it wouldn't see another earthquake a large for a very long time. Instead Japan maintains nuke plants at other more vulnerable locations. Probably the safest place to dump nuclear waste would be in the deep oceans, where it would be slowly diluted by the vast ocean. Instead it will be placed on land where it will be vulnerable to terrorists, earthquakes, leak into water supplies and always be a danger.

3eeeeeeeddddededeeeee

Blue Moon
Old Pueblo
April 7, 2019
Times Pick
Three Mile Island had a seriously adverse effect on the American psyche. After that, no new nuclear plants were licensed for startup until 2012 (33 years later). And many plants that were being planned at the time wound up delayed or canceled.

China is on track for 100 nuclear generating stations in the near future (as well as robust investment in wind and solar). If they can do it, why can't we? And if we still decide not to do it, that decision isn't going to stop the Chinese.

There is no rational reason for America not to pursue nuclear power in earnest again. We fell off the wagon. It's high time to get back on.

Rod Adams
Rod Adams
Trinity, FL
April 7, 2019
@b fagan Your link points to a graph of installed and projected CAPACITY, not generation.

Because nuclear plants run at 100% of their capacity for major portions of each year, they produce more electricity per unit of capacity than variable sources like wind.

Though nuclear CAPACITY was just 2% in 2016, nuclear electricity generation in 2018 was 294.4 billion kWh. That's 4.2% of the total generation and an 18% increase over 2017.

In 2018, China put 8 new nuclear plants into operation; most of them only generated power for a small portion of the year. Expect another large incremental growth in nuclear electricity production for 2019.

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-01/24/c_137771695.htm

One more thing - China is also building one of the world's largest nuclear powered icebreakers. I'm pretty sure that wind powered icebreaking isn't even a thing.

Blue Moon
Old Pueblo
April 7, 2019
@seattle expat
Natural gas burns cleaner than coal but still pumps CO2 into the atmosphere. Fracking represents an extreme environmental hazard (e.g., water table contamination, earthquakes). Realistically, wind and solar will take many decades to implement effectively for a large portion of the U.S. population, requiring a "transcontinental railroad" infrastructure effort to transmit the power from solar and wind farms to where it is needed. Battery storage capacity will take many more decades to properly develop for commercial applications. We can get nuclear plants up and running within 20 years, in abundance. Natural gas to nuclear to renewables (wind, solar) is the best progression and the way we need to go. Threats from nuclear waste disposal and accidents pale in comparison to the existential threats of global warming and climate change. China certainly has its share of problems, but safely embracing nuclear power generation is not one of them. Nuclear power will provide the path to powering our electric cars of the near future. It is foolish to shun it.

Expanding the technology is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions and decarbonize the economy.

April 6, 2019

Beyond decarbonizing today’s electric grid, we must use clean electricity to replace fossil fuels in transportation, industry and heating. We must provide for the fast-growing energy needs of poorer countries and extend the grid to a billion people who now lack electricity. And still more electricity will be needed to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by midcentury.

Where will this gargantuan amount of carbon-free energy come from? The popular answer is renewables alone, but this is a fantasy. Wind and solar power are becoming cheaper, but they are not available around the clock, rain or shine, and batteries that could power entire cities for days or weeks show no sign of materializing any time soon. Today, renewables work only with fossil-fuel backup.

Germany, which went all-in for renewables, has seen little reduction in carbon emissions, and, according to our calculations, at Germany’s rate of adding clean energy relative to gross domestic product, it would take the world more than a century to decarbonize, even if the country wasn’t also retiring nuclear plants early. //

But we actually have proven models for rapid decarbonization with economic and energy growth: France and Sweden. They decarbonized their grids decades ago and now emit less than a tenth of the world average of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour. They remain among the world’s most pleasant places to live and enjoy much cheaper electricity than Germany to boot.

They did this with nuclear power. And they did it fast, taking advantage of nuclear power’s intense concentration of energy per pound of fuel. France replaced almost all of its fossil-fueled electricity with nuclear power nationwide in just 15 years; Sweden, in about 20 years. In fact, most of the fastest additions of clean electricity historically are countries rolling out nuclear power.

New nuclear power plants are hugely expensive to build in the United States today. This is why so few are being built. But they don’t need to be so costly. The key to recovering our lost ability to build affordable nuclear plants is standardization and repetition. The first product off any assembly line is expensive — it cost more than $150 million to develop the first iPhone — but costs plunge as they are built in quantity and production kinks are worked out.

Yet as a former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission put it, while France has two types of reactors and hundreds of types of cheese, in the United States it’s the other way around. In recent decades, the United States and some European countries have created ever more complicated reactors, with ever more safety features in response to public fears. New, one-of-a-kind designs, shifting regulations, supply-chain and construction snafus and a lost generation of experts (during the decades when new construction stopped) have driven costs to absurd heights. //

These economic problems are solvable. China and South Korea can build reactors at one-sixth the current cost in the United States. //

dozens of American start-ups are developing “fourth generation” reactors that can be mass-produced, potentially generating electricity at lower cost than fossil fuels. If American activists, politicians and regulators allow it, these reactors could be exported to the world in the 2030s and ’40s, slaking poorer countries’ growing thirst for energy while creating well-paying American jobs. //

Currently, as M.I.T.’s Richard Lester, a nuclear engineer, has written, a company proposing a new reactor design faces “the prospect of having to spend a billion dollars or more on an open-​ended, all‑or‑nothing licensing process without any certainty of outcomes.” We need government on the side of this clean-energy transformation, with supportive regulation, streamlined approval, investment in research and incentives that tilt producers and consumers away from carbon.

All this, however, depends on overcoming an irrational dread among the public and many activists. The reality is that nuclear power is the safest form of energy humanity has ever used. Mining accidents, hydroelectric dam failures, natural gas explosions and oil train crashes all kill people, sometimes in large numbers, and smoke from coal-burning kills them in enormous numbers, more than half a million per year.

By contrast, in 60 years of nuclear power, only three accidents have raised public alarm: Three Mile Island in 1979, which killed no one; Fukushima in 2011, which killed no one (many deaths resulted from the tsunami and some from a panicked evacuation near the plant); and Chernobyl in 1986, the result of extraordinary Soviet bungling, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day. (Even if we accepted recent claims that Soviet and international authorities covered up tens of thousands of Chernobyl deaths, the death toll from 60 years of nuclear power would still equal about one month of coal-related deaths.) //

Nuclear waste is compact — America’s total from 60 years would fit in a Walmart — and is safely stored in concrete casks and pools, becoming less radioactive over time. After we have solved the more pressing challenge of climate change, we can either burn the waste as fuel in new types of reactors or bury it deep underground. It’s a far easier environmental challenge than the world’s enormous coal waste, routinely dumped near poor communities and often laden with toxic arsenic, mercury and lead that can last forever.

Renewable energy, carbon-capture technologies, efficiency measures, reforestation and other steps are important—but they won’t get us there

By Daniel B. Poneman on May 24, 2019

Sixty-five years ago, President Eisenhower took the first concrete steps toward implementing his “Atoms for Peace” initiative, presenting Soviet leaders with a detailed outline of the safety and nonproliferation rules that should guide the peaceful development of civilian nuclear energy.

Three more years of determined U.S.-led diplomacy culminated in the establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which continues to be pivotal in maintaining, monitoring and enforcing global nonproliferation safeguards—so that, in Ike’s words, “this greatest of destructive forces can be developed into a great boon, for the benefit of all mankind.” //

The threat of nuclear proliferation abroad should not lead us to abandon nuclear energy at home. Indeed, American nuclear leadership has always been critical to guiding the safe, responsible use of civilian nuclear energy around the world.

For example, a number of American companies are developing advanced generation-reactor technologies that offer a host of safety and nonproliferation advantages. These advanced designs would have “walk away” safety, meaning they do not need any backup power or external cooling systems in the event of an accident. And since many of the new reactor designs would rarely if ever need to be refueled, the risk of diversion of fuel from uranium-enrichment or plutonium-reprocessing plants to a bomb program would be greatly diminished.

The U.S. should lead the way in the development of these reactors so they can be deployed at home and abroad over the next decade. As a growing number of countries around the world turn to nuclear power as a source of carbon-free electricity, it is strongly in our interest that they do so with safe, American-made technology. Countries that adopt the new U.S. reactor designs will also be subject to U.S. nonproliferation requirements, which are second to none. //

The 98 reactors in our nuclear fleet are the workhorse of the clean-energy sector. They provide one fifth of our electricity. Unfortunately, over the past few years six reactors have been prematurely shut down, and another 12 are set to close in the next seven years.

The problem is that the rules governing wholesale electricity markets do not allow the unique advantages of nuclear power to be reflected in the wholesale price, effectively putting new and existing nuclear plants at a disadvantage. These rules were written decades ago to deliver some things we want (low prices and excess capacity to meet spikes in demand) but not other things we want (clean air, lower carbon emissions and grid reliability). //

Nuclear plants are not only emissions-free and carbon-free, they are by far the most reliable assets in our power generation mix, operating 93 percent of the time—even during extreme weather events when some fossil fuel plants may be forced to shut down or curtail their operations. Under current rules, electricity markets are not allowed to value these attributes, even though they are clearly valuable. //

Preserving existing reactors may not sound exciting, but it is a critical first step if we take the climate challenge seriously. Consider that for every reactor that prematurely shuts down, our carbon dioxide emissions rise by about 5.8 million metric tons per year. According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Equivalencies Calculator, that equals the emissions from burning more than 648 million gallons of gasoline—the equivalent of filling up an NFL stadium with gasoline and setting it on fire. //

In the 1950s, Admiral Hyman Rickover’s redoubtable efforts to establish a nuclear navy led directly to a commercial nuclear power industry in the U.S., beginning with the Shippingport reactor in 1957. Today the Pentagon’s need for reliable power can help drive demand for nuclear energy and defray its costs.

It is an essential weapon in the fight against climate change

As demand for energy rises in the developing world, nuclear power could provide one partial solution to the global climate crisis. Large countries such as Russia and China are both investing in nuclear power and positioning themselves to export technology and expertise. But whether developing countries should incorporate nuclear energy depends on a range of factors such as local energy demand and the availability of other energy sources. They should also consider how competitive nuclear energy would be. Most important, countries that go nuclear should have sufficient technological, industrial, and political stability. //

Nuclear expansion in Africa. Energy demand in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to grow by 80 per cent by 2040—that is, at 3.5 percent a year—faster than the global average of 1.3 percent. Ghana, Kenya, and Namibia have expressed interest in nuclear power. Russia is at various stages of negotiating nuclear cooperation agreements with at least 16 African countries. Currently, only South Africa has a functioning nuclear power plant. However, several African countries possess substantial uranium ore deposits. Namibia, for example, has seven percent of the world’s known uranium reserves and has made a political commitment to supplying its own energy from nuclear power in the future. Still, African access to electricity is the lowest in the world, according to the World Bank, and infrastructure in many parts of the continent is scarce. Consequently, large investments and development are needed before technologically demanding nuclear power production will be economically viable. //

decisions regarding nuclear power often result not from common-sense considerations, but rather from bargaining between countries that seek nuclear technologies and countries that can help them master such technologies. Developing countries rely on the IAEA and major powers such as the United States and Russia to provide access to the purposeful and peaceful application of the nuclear energy worldwide.

This situation of dependency creates challenges and opportunities for the IAEA and major powers engaged in providing access to the technology and expertise necessary for nuclear energy production. The challenge is linked to upholding the commitment to provide access to peaceful nuclear use while also detecting the potential diversion of nuclear technologies for non-peaceful purposes. Balancing these commitments should entail preventing the expansion of nuclear power in regions that are unstable and prone to proliferation. The Middle East is currently the most combustible region in this respect, with several ongoing conflicts involving rival states with nuclear ambitions. Limiting or strictly controlling access to nuclear technology may be one way of controlling developments. On the other hand, nuclear states and the IAEA have an opportunity to provide accessible power to regions that are more stable and whose population density make them suitable for nuclear power. If solutions to produce more cost-efficient nuclear power can be found, this will provide one opportunity to solve the dual problem of the growing global demand for energy and global climate change—an opportunity that should not be missed.

This year’s controversial documentary ‘Planet of the Humans,’ produced by Michael Moore, posed some uncomfortable questions to renewable energy enthusiasts. While the film has serious flaws, it gets one big thing right: renewables are not a magic fix-all for our energy problems.

It all comes down to what we mean by ‘renewable’. People tend to think that an energy type is renewable…

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.

Argonne scientists look to 3D printing to ease separation anxiety, which paves the way to recycle more nuclear material. //

We can recycle waste from nuclear reactors in several ways, including one method developed by Argonne scientists in the 1970s. With these approaches, nuclear engineers can recycle 95 percent of the spent nuclear fuel from a reactor, leaving only five percent to be stored as long-term waste. But now, for the first time, Argonne scientists have printed 3-D parts that pave the way to recycling even more nuclear waste, as detailed in a Sept. 6 article in Scientific Reports.

At first glance, recycling another two percent of nuclear waste may not sound like much. But it would dramatically reduce both the amount of waste stored and the time it remains hazardous.

“Rather than store five percent for hundreds of thousands of years, the remaining three percent needs to be stored at a maximum of about one thousand years,” said Andrew Breshears, an Argonne nuclear chemist and co-author. ​“In other words, this additional step may reduce the length of storage almost one thousandfold.” And breaking down that nuclear material in a fourth generation fast reactor would generate additional electricity.

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.