Advanced High Temperature Reactor: Lower Costs, Enable Deep Burn and Advanced Fuel Cycle Reactors

[TupperHappy]

Pebble Bed Advanced High Temperature Reactor Can Enable Lower Costs and Enable Deep Burn and Advanced Fuel Cycle Reactors

The Pebble Bed Advanced High Temperature Reactor was covered here last year.

Brave New climate looks at the work on the Pebble Bed Advanced High Temperature Reactor to achieve lower costs (70% of the cost of existing light water reactors) and deep burn of nuclear fuel (ten times more efficient use of uranium).

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/08/pebble-bed-advanced-high-temperature.html

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[DCKit]

2. S'mores and weenies for everyone!!!!! n/t

[Tesha]

3. Wow! It almost sounds "too cheap to meter!"

Deeper burn of the fuel is nice as it reduces the
volume of nuclear waste, but there's still plenty
produced to be dry-casked at the reactor sites
(since we can't seem to figure out what else to
do with the waste problem besides "kick the can
down the road to the next generation").

Tesha

[DrGregory]

7. in the USA at least

That's true in the USA only.

Other nations reprocess / recycle
spent nuclear fuel. If you do that,
you can recycle the long lived
radionuclides back to the reactor
as fuel.

The only thing you really have to
store is the fission products, but
they are short-lived. Cesium-137
is the longest lived fission product
and it decays to non-radioactive
Barium-137. The lifetime is only
30 years.

The multi-thousand year storage
problem is unique to the USA, because
Congress outlawed spent fuel recycle
back in 1978.

The technology was invented in the USA;
and our own Congress outlawed it at the
behest of the anti-nukes.

Dr. Greg

[Tesha]

11. You seem to be confused (confusing us?) about "half-life" versus "lifetime".

> Cesium-137 is the longest lived fission product
> and it decays to non-radioactive Barium-137. The
> lifetime is only 30 years.

Actually, the "half-life" of Cesium-137 is thirty years.
So after thirty years, you still have half of the highly-
radioactive cesium left. And after sixty years, a quarter
of the highly-radioactive cesium left.

In fact, after 300 years, you still have about 0.1% of the
stuff left.

The waste, reprocessed or not, isn't "safe" by any sane
definition of the term, for a long, long time.

Tesha

[madokie]

14. Me thinks someone is full of bull

and I'm not talking about you either

[DrGregory]

26. then you can educate yourself

Read the following interview with nuclear physicist
and then Associate Director of Argonne National Lab,
Dr. Charles Till for PBS's Frontline from 10 years
ago. Dr. Till describes the "closed fuel cycle"
of the IFR, which reprocesses / recycles its spent
fuel:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

Quoting:
Q: And you repeat the process.

A: Eventually, what happens is that you wind up with only fission products, that the waste is only fission products that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens of years. There are a few very long-lived ones that are not very radioactive.
Unquote.

As Dr. Till states, when you recycle, the true waste - the fission
products - have lives as short as hours, days and months. Some
a few 10s of years.

Note to Tesha: Dr. Till refers to "lives" and he means of course
"half-life". As I said, real scientists are not confused by the
use of the word "lives", or "lifetimes"; they all mean "half-lives".


Nuclear waste doesn't have to last for thousands of years. It does
in the USA, because the anti-nukes got Congress to pass a law in
1978 to outlaw the process of which Dr. Till speaks. So the USA
has a waste problem - which is what the anti-nukes WANTED!!!

Other nations that use nuclear power, like the French, the British
and Japanese; all recycle their waste as Dr. Till explains.

The French have their facility at La Hague, the British have their
facility at Sellafield, and the Japanese used to have the French
reprocess their fuel with Greenpeace protesting the transport
ship at sea; until the Japanese built their own reprocessing facility.

Dr. Greg

[DrGregory]

24. Not confused at all

I'm not confused at all.

Evidently you don't understand that in the
scientific vernacular the "lifetime" of a
radioisotope means "half-life".

Since the decay of a radioisotope is
exponential, a true scientist understands
that there is no such thing as a "lifetime"
EXCEPT as meaning the "half life".

Therefore, in scientific circles, there is
ZERO ambiguity about the terms "lifetime"
and "half-life" - they mean the SAME.

Dr. Greg

[bananas]

32. Uh-oh!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_lifetime

If the decaying quantity is the same as the number of discrete elements of a set, it is possible to compute the average length of time for which an element remains in the set. This is called the mean lifetime (or simply the lifetime) and it can be shown that it relates to the decay rate,

tau = 1 / lambda.

<snip>

Therefore, the mean lifetime tau is equal to the half-life divided by the natural log of 2, or:

tau = t / ln 2 = 1.442695040888963 t.

E.g. Polonium-210 has a half-life of 138 days, and a mean lifetime of 200 days.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=cesium+137

cesium 137

Decay properties:

half-life | 30.08 years
lifetime | 43.38 years
...

[DrGregory]

42. Yes

Yes - as with ANY distribution there
are an INFINITE number of means.

We could define the mean lifetime as you
have, or we could define the root mean
square lifetime....

However, in the scientific vernacular
and common usage; "lifetime", "life"
both mean "half-life".

When a scientist refers to the "lifetime"
of a radioisotope, they mean the "half-life"
and not the inverse of the decay constant.

This is about common usage; not about
what "could be done". There's no need
for talking about a "mean lifetime";
if we know the "half life" then we know
everything about the time history since
the half-life fully characterizes an
exponential decay. No need for superfluous
"mean lifetime".

As I showed in another post, Dr Till refers
to the "lives" of the fission products, and
the meaning is "half life":

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

"A: Eventually, what happens is that you wind up with only fission products,
that the waste is only fission products that have, most have lives of hours,
days, months, some a few tens of years."


Dr. Greg

[bananas]

70. You said "there is no such thing as a "lifetime" EXCEPT as meaning the "half life"

and that is clearly incorrect.
You even used ALL-CAPS for emphasis, I probably wouldn't have even noticed your mistake if you hadn't used ALL-CAPS TO EMPHASIZE IT.

Your example of Till's statement is irrelevant because it would be correct whether he meant mean lifetime or half-life.

One of the problems with assuming that everyone is using the same "vernacular" terminology as those in your circle is, oh, for example, "Metric mishap caused loss of NASA orbiter"

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/

Metric mishap caused loss of NASA orbiter
September 30, 1999

(CNN) -- NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because a Lockheed Martin engineering team used English units of measurement while the agency's team used the more conventional metric system for a key spacecraft operation, according to a review finding released Thursday.

<snip>

That was way back in 1999 - I'm sure EVERYONE uses the metric system by now!

[DrGregory]

72. there's no lifetime in conventional sense

There is no unambiguous lifetime in the sense that, for example,
humans have a lifetime - a date certain birth and a date certain
death. Such a "lifetime" would be unambiguous.

However, for radioactive decay, there is no unambiguous lifetime
with a start and and end. There is an exponential decay that is
characterized by a half-life.

What "mistake"? You haven't shown me to be in error.

ANY distribution has a mean, and a root mean square....

However, if you give someone a mean - you have not
completely characterized the distribution. Suppose I say
we have an ensemble of particles that have a mean energy
of 1 keV. Have we completely characterized the distribution?

NOT AT ALL!!! Suppose we are talking about electrons in a
plasma; that assume a Maxwellian distribution in energy with
a mean energy of 1 keV. The distribution is a Maxwellian
with a temperature such that 3/2kT = 1 keV

However, if the ensemble is one of photons, then the distribution
is a Planckian.

So the mean does not necessarily completely characterize the
distribution.

So what "mistake" did I make? NONE!!!

My original response was to Tesha who said I couldn't use
"lifetime"; I could only use "half-life". My example with
Dr. Till shows that he also used "life" or rather its plural
"lives" and did not say "half-life" or "half-lives".

I am pointing out that it is COMMON to drop the "half"
because everyone knows what the meaning is.

Dr. Greg

[bananas]

79. Here's some more examples

Wikipedia:
This wikipedia page incorrectly gives the half-life of 44Ti as 90 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_supernova
The wikipedia editor who wrote that mistakenly thought "mean lifetime" meant "half-life".
This wikipedia page gives the half-life of 44Ti as 60 or 63 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanium-44

Max Planck Institute:
This page gives the mean lifetime of 44Ti as 89 years: http://www.mpe.mpg.de/gamma/science/lines/
According to you, that's wrong, because 'there is no such thing as a "lifetime" EXCEPT as meaning the "half life".'
This page gives the half-life of 44Ti as 59 years: http://www.mpe.mpg.de/gamma/science/lines/44Ti/44Ti_science.html

Arxiv.org:
Here's a paper which says "Recent accurate measurements by several independent groups give a weighted-average 44Ti lifetime of 86.0 ± 0.5 years": (pdf) http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0606/0606736v1.pdf
According to you, that couldn't have been written by a true scientist, because 'a true scientist understands
that there is no such thing as a "lifetime" EXCEPT as meaning the "half life".'

[DrGregory]

84. Those must be for public consumption

I thought I was clear in my explanation that there was no
such thing as a lifetime such as humans have - a time certain
birth and a time certain death.

As I also showed; ANY distribution can have a mean defined for
it. In fact, as I stated there are an INFINITY of means - just
take moments of the distribution.

Sure one can quote a mean for a distribution; but I gave you
an example of how quoting just a mean does NOT completely characterize
the distribution. If you give the mean energy of an ensemble of
particles - you do NOT fully characterize the distribution.

If the particles are matter; then the distribution is Maxwellian.
If the particles are photons; then the distribution is Planckian.

Most good scientists would give the half-life since that
fully characterizes the temporal distribution of an exponential
decay.

Dr. Greg

[bananas]

133. You've gone to "Most good scientists"

from your previous absolutist statements.
That is quite an improvement.
But you still have a long way to go.

[kristopher]

4. Bedtime for pebbles?

Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (Pty)
Bedtime for pebbles?

23 February 2010 | Nature 463, 1008-1009 (2010) | doi:10.1038/4631008b

Pebble-bed nuclear reactor gets pulled

South Africa cuts funding for energy technology project.
Linda Nordling

Hopes for the development of pebble-bed nuclear reactor technology, long held up as a safer alternative to conventional nuclear power, have suffered a blow. Last week, the South African government confirmed that it will effectively stop funding a long-term project to develop the technology.

The development company, Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR), based near Pretoria, says that it is now considering axing three-quarters of its 800 staff, about half of whom are scientists or engineers. "The resources available to the company will not sustain the current cost structure," the company says. The cuts could trigger an exodus of nuclear expertise from South Africa, although some argue that government funding has kept the project going for too long in the face of growing problems.

South Africa started to develop its pebble-bed reactor design in the mid-1990s, hoping that it would deliver cheap electricity and open up a lucrative export industry. It licensed the technology from Germany's Jülich Research Centre, which abandoned a working prototype reactor in 1991 after citing poor business opportunities.

Eskom, South Africa's main electricity generator, based in Johannesburg, set up the PBMR in 1999 to develop the technology into a economically viable reactor. "It caught the mood in South Africa, and the feeling among South Africans was that their technology was as good as anybody's," says Steve Thomas, an energy-policy researcher at the University of Greenwich, London. "This was their chance to show the world what they could do."

The proposed reactor would have used...

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100223/full/4631008b.html

[txlibdem]

8. PBMR's failure was administrative and project creep, not a failure of the system

From the article you linked:

"One problem was that the design became too ambitious, says John Walmsley, past president of the South African branch of the Nuclear Institute, a professional society for nuclear engineers. The PBMR hoped to push the reactor's operating temperature as high as possible to enable not just electricity generation, but also 'process heat' applications such as turning coal into liquid fuels, he says. It also aimed to boost the power output to the very limits of the design to make the reactor more economical. "They tried to build a BMW when they maybe should have started with a Morris Minor," he says."

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100223/full/4631008b.html

This indicates either management incompetence or greed, not a failure of Pebble Bed technology. The South African project became too bloated, so excessively ambitious that they couldn't even finish a prototype. From the same link, "Tsinghua University in Beijing now hosts the only operational prototype pebble-bed reactor." With a working prototype the Chinese are in a position to gain the technological upper hand in modular nuclear plant technology. That's not the future I'd like to see.

The main criticism in the linked article comes from Steven Thomas of Greenwich University.

"Professor Thomas is a researcher in energy policy with more than 30 years of experience. His work is international in scope and the main areas of research are on economics and policy towards nuclear power; liberalisation and privatisation of the electricity and gas industries; and trade policy on network energy industries."

http://www.gre.ac.uk/schools/business/about-us/departments/ibe/staff/Professor-Steve-Thomas

His focus is on privatising the utilities and nuclear power is an expensive option. The forces of corporatism do not want any large public works projects, let along any that can be cost competitive with the dirty but profitable industries of today. This one-sided attack on a promising nuclear technology is typical of the reactionary right wing who want no change from the status quo. Focusing on a bloated project that died for lack of funding and greed on the part of the backers as a death knell to a promising technology is pure punditry, pure politics but it has no meaning in the real world. Many solar projects may be canceled in this economic climate. Is solar a dead technology? I think not.

We need solar and wind power, as much as we can get. But any rational assessment of our energy needs has to include at least doubling our nuclear capacity if we are to prevent global climate catastrophe. We need all of the carbon-free technologies we can possibly get.

[DrGregory]

19. I agee

>We need solar and wind power, as much as we can get. But any rational assessment of our energy needs has to include at least >doubling our nuclear capacity if we are to prevent global climate catastrophe. We need all of the carbon-free technologies >we can possibly get.

I agree we should build all the wind and solar that is practical. However,
the National Academy of Science and Engineering has calculated that renewables
such as wind and solar can provide at MOST about 15% to 20% of our electric
energy demand.

Our electric energy demand doesn't go to zero after sundown. In fact, lots of
industries that are heavy users of electricity, like steel smelting and aluminum
electro-refining go 24 hours a day. The night time demand is only marginally
smaller than daytime.

A solar power plant inherently works on a 25% daily duty cycle. There's no
power generated for the 12 hours at night, and only marginal power in the
3 hours past sunrise and before sundown because of the low angle of the sun.
A solar power plant garners the bulk of its energy in the 6 hours centered on
the local noon, and has to store energy to meet demand at other times - in
essence it needs to store 75% of its output for release during non-sunny times
of day.

A typical 1 Gigawatt power plant in a single day produces, by definition,
a Gigawatt-Day of energy. ( The product of a power and a time is a unit of
energy ). As such, it can be converted to any other unit of energy, just as
one can convert feet to inches. If you do the conversion, a Gigawatt-Day is
the energy equivalent of 20 Kilotons, or the energy of the bomb that vaporized
Nagasaki.

However, a solar plant needs to be able to store 75% of its daily output for
release at other times. That means a solar plant capable of replacing a 1 Gwe
conventional plant needs to be able to store 15 Kilotons of energy or the
energy of the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

Does anyone know how to store that much energy safely? ( If you say store
it as heat - then you need to store 3 Hiroshima bombs worth - since the
efficiency of converting heat back to electricity is only 33% or so ).

When you get your energy from Mother Nature, you don't have a throttle. You
can only get what Mother Nature is offering at the time. For the bulk of
our energy demands, we need power on demand.

Hence, we have the conclusion of the National Academies; that for carbon-free
generation of the bulk of our electric energy, the so-call "baseload" demand,
the preferred option is nuclear power.

Dr. Greg

[TheMadMonk]

41. Actually you'd use heat pumps with a turnaround efficiency of around 80%.

Fight the good fight mate, but do it with accurate information please.

Or an array of MW range flywheels with turnaround efficiencies exceeding 90%.

[DrGregory]

45. that's an option

Of course nobody has MW range flywheels.

Suppose we had a whole array of flywheels
storing the energy. Remember we have to
store about 15 Kilotons of energy - so we
have 15 kilotons of kinetic energy in the
flywheels. Now flywheels are notorious for
coming apart. One flywheel fails and damages
the neighboring flywheels and a chain reaction
of damaged flywheels ensues.

We had 15 kilotons of energy stored as rotational
kinetic energy in flywheels and when the flywheels
self-destruct that 15 kilotons of energy is going
to be unleashed. I would not want to be ANYWHERE
NEAR such a happenstance.

I've made this argument in various forums before,
and I usually get someone saying they would store
the energy by heating salt or granite, or rocks....

ANY thermodynamic cycle that is going to turn that
entropy laden heat back into zero entropy work is
going to have to exhaust waste heat to carry away
the entropy as per the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.


Therefore, you won't recover all the energy you
stored; and in fact will typically only recover
of third of your stored energy. Therefore, to
meet the given demand; one has to store three
times the energy of the demand; or 45 kilotons
or 3 Hiroshima bombs worth of energy; if heat
is going to be the storage medium.

Dr. Greg

[TheMadMonk]

48. Heatpumps don't fight the laws of thermodynamics. They work with them.

And one of the more promising applications is built around insulated tanks of gravel. Heating rocks in other words. Actually heating one tank and chilling another.

I believe they are talking megawatt hours per module. Utility scale installations have been built and are undergoing evaluation.

Flywheels are individually housed as a matter or course, to prevent catastrophic failure cascades.

Also recent flywheel designs utilise fibre reinforces wheels. If one fails it comes apart in a low density snarl that disipates the stored energy as easily managable heat, rather than supersonic shrapnel. Check the bearings, buff the carbon off the walls, replace the rotor and plug it back in. The lighter weight of the fibre reinforced resin rotor, is more than compensated for by the much higher speeds it can be spun up to before it comes apart. mv^2 means velocity|speed trumps mass.

The storage technologies we need exist right now. And we need them right now IN ADVANCE of the clean technologies that have to come, whatever they may be. Which one (or ones) make it in the real world will have to be decided in the rough and tumble of the marketplace.

With storage facilities online we can eke out maximum performance from existing coal, oil and gas fueled generating infrastructure WITHOUT expanding it further.

[kristopher]

49. You are on target about everything except the order of deployment

There really is little to no "need" for largescale deployment of storage technologies for the next decade or so since the first objective is to shut down the coal plants completely. That is best done by building more renewable generation and feeding it into the grid where the grid itself acts to perform the role of dedicated "storage" technologies. We have a very, very large reserve of natural gas capacity and it can be turned on/off as needed to shape as needed the flow of power going into the grid.
Also it is anticipated that the largest storage reservoir we can expect to see is to be found in the batteries of electric drive vehicles. That is why the "smart grid" and battery electric drive vehicles are receiving so much attention at this stage of the transition.

The key to understanding the entire issue of a transition to renewables is to fix firmly in your mind the fact that we are dealing with a grid and that the characteristics that make an individual, centralized power plant a profitable enterprise are far less important to the technological needs of the grid than they are to the people who want to make money selling us power.

Don't get me wrong, energy storage is already exploiting inefficiencies in the system and last year was a $26B market in the US. It is just that the best use of pump-priming dollars at this time is to set in place renewable generating sources to pump electrons into the grid.

[TheMadMonk]

55. The first objective is to see that no more get built.

Or at the very least an equivallent in CO2 output worth of the lowest efficiency plants is taken offline with every new installation.

By putting storage facilities online now, we can manage much higher peak loads with much less excess generation capacity and/or delay the need for increasing base load generation capacity. This means every green source

Using the grid as for "storage" can only go so far, and that distance gets shorter with ever intermittent source brought online. Particularly if we are to achieve our aim of actually turning off the fossil fuel fired installations. The grid does not store the energy from wind turbines or solar farm, it cuts back on supplying energy from other sources, but the amount by which peak capacity can be reduced is very much curtailed. Without storage facilities all that the large scale introduction of intermittent green technologies, such as wind and solar, means to existing utility operators, is that they are required to maintain the necessary peak generating capacity, but operate it at an ever reducing level of efficiency and do it in a hostile environment where they will pay penalties in the form of carbon taxes every time the green technology being forced upon them fails to deliver the goods. Acurate or not, that's how they see things.

Storage is every bit as important as clean sources and done right I think it can have a far more immediate impact than those sources in the short term. For one thing, by putting a high capacity stores close to the areas of highest fluctuating demand, the effective capacity of transmission lines can be increased enormously since what was once assigned to carrying peak demand can instead be devoted to keeping the "batteries" charged. Or their efficiency can be increased by running them at a lower current. Less fluctuation on the long distance lines also means reduced issues with load management over the wider grid.

But I think one of the most important things is that it gives existing operators a reason to get onside, rather than simply see what to them is the writing on the wall and drag their heels while they grab every last dollar they can. Hell if they're smart they'll see the fine print that would let them maintain their overall controll of the industry if they get in early enough. They will still own the distribution system no matter what, and if they build the GW/day class starage farms that a modern city needs, they get to set both the price they buy energy at and also the price at which they resell it.


EV batteries as a storage medium is problematical. If I get in my car I want to know it's got a full charge, or at least the charge I left in it. Furthermore, vehicles account for about 25% of greenhouse emissions. At best, when all is said and done, perhaps 10% of the battery capacity could be borrowed, so I doubt it would provide enough storage to 100% cover much more than existing intermittent renewable capacity, even if every vehicle on the road was electric.

A dual battery system, where the batteries are externally charged would work. Evening demand is satisfied from partially depleted batteries, a fresh battery goes in the car, and the depeted battery goes on charge the next morning when the sun comes up. But the downside of course is the significant cost of a second battery pack plus the inconvenience of swapping batteries every night.

A better choice might be a domestic class (100 KW/hr) flywheel in every basement. Batteries have a limited lifespan and can't be incrementally serviced. A flywheel that breaks down or wears out can be put back in service by replacing defective/worn parts as necessary. Toxicity is also a big headache with many battery technologies, and where toxicity is not an issue, scarcity of materials (lithium) may well be.

[kristopher]

57. I see your point but disagree as a point of policy

There are lots of opportunities to improve efficiency of existing systems with the use of storage. As we progress with renewables those opportunities will increase, and IMO the tide from that tide won't start cresting for at least 10 years. As a matter of public policy, the best way to stimulate the demand for storage (and thus the motivation to deploy and innovate) comes from the increased demand created by the increased penetration of renewables. This gives you far more bang for your buck than policy programs oriented heavily towards storage.

It would probably be wise to revisit the question of storage by EVs and the overall impact on storage that will have; the evidence is pretty convincing that you a missing a lot of the pieces of the puzzle. Recommend keyword "V2G" on google scholar.

[DrGregory]

76. but it's 15 kilotons

>Also recent flywheel designs utilise fibre reinforces wheels. If one fails it comes apart in a low density snarl that >disipates the stored energy as easily managable heat,

Look back at my previous post. If a solar plant is going
to replace a conventional plant - it has to store 15 KILOTONS
of energy.

Now if your fiber flywheels come apart and release their
energy as heat - then it will release 15 kilotons of heat.

That in essence is what a nuclear bomb does - it just dumps
15 kilotons of "easily manageable" heat into the atmosphere.
In an example, of "the dose makes the poison" - when the
amount of energy is 15 kilotons - then all that heat is
NOT manageable - and will DESTROY everything for a large
distance around.

Sure in the lab - the modest amount of energy in a single
flywheel is manageable. However, what happens when you
have 15 kilotons of energy in your flywheels, and that
15 kilotons of energy gets released as heat.

You in essence will have another Hiroshima.

Dr. Greg

[Nihil]

78. Just before someone with a short attention-span jumps on you for the "kilotons of energy" stuff ...

... I'll re-post your comment upthread:

> If you do the conversion, a Gigawatt-Day is the energy equivalent of
> 20 Kilotons, or the energy of the bomb that vaporized Nagasaki.
>
> That means a solar plant capable of replacing a 1 Gwe conventional plant
> needs to be able to store 15 Kilotons of energy or the energy of the
> nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

i.e., the repeated use of "15 KILOTONS of energy" is shorthand for
"the energy equivalent of a 15 KILOTON atomic bomb".

:hi:

(Sorry but it was bugging me that even though I knew exactly what you meant,
I just *know* that certain other people would be waiting to use the phrase
in order to distract/spam/otherwise derail your message.)

[DrGregory]

86. kiloton is a well defined unit of energy

i.e., the repeated use of "15 KILOTONS of energy" is shorthand for
"the energy equivalent of a 15 KILOTON atomic bomb".

It's more than that. The kiloton is a standardized
unit of energy - just like the calorie or the Joule.

In fact, a kiloton is defined to be a TRILLION calories.

So 15 kilotons stands by itself and is equivalent
to saying 15 trillion calories.

Here's a conversion table:

http://online.unitconverterpro.com/conversion-tables/convert-alpha/factors.php?cat=energy&unit=25&val=

Dr. Greg

[Dead_Parrot]

90. At which point point, I jump on you for "15 kiloton atomic bomb"

Trust me, they're not that heavy.

:P

[kristopher]

80. Completely false...

You really don't know what you are talking about. You wrote, "If a solar plant is going to replace a conventional plant - it has to store 15 KILOTONS of energy."

Your thinking is bound by the fallacy that we need to duplicate the operational characteristics of centralized thermal plants (like coal and nuclear) in order for us to provide electricity on demand to the end user. That is false. The operational profiles of all energy sources when they are linked together in a grid are what matters. The fact that this works to ensure the reliability of getting electricity to the end user is undeniable and renders your entire point meaningless.

You should really take your research to the places where renewable energy is actually discussed with an eye towards what it can do, instead of relying on the Nuclear Energy Institute for all of your information. We will have plenty of storage in a renewable grid, but your test of capacity is meaningless and another example of nuclear industry propaganda that you shouldn't fall for.

[DrGregory]

85. Forget the operational profiles blather...

>Your thinking is bound by the fallacy that we need to duplicate the operational characteristics of centralized thermal >plants (like coal and nuclear) in order for us to provide electricity on demand to the end user. That is false.

I don't know what your "operational profiles" blather means.

I do know that the MAJORITY of the USA's energy demand is baseload - that
is the power is demanded 24 hours a day. We have industries that operate
24 hours a day - you probably don't care about them, or would like to see
them shut down - but anyone who is serious about providing electricity for
the nation has to take them into account.

We have plants that smelt steel with electric furnaces, or that electro-refine
aluminum, or build cars, or airliners, or parts for same that operate around the
clock. How do we provide for their electric demand??

If we were totally solar, in the middle of the night there is no solar power;
the whole country is submerged in night. Therefore, if these plants, which you
don't care about, or don't want to consider; are to continue operating in the
USA, we have to find a way to provide them power at night.

If all our power is solar; then the only way we can provide for the power demand
at night is to STORE the energy. If the solar plant is truly going to take over
for an on-demand plant of 1 Gwe capacity; then the solar plant absolutely needs
to store the equivalent of 15 Kilotons.

BOOM - if something goes wrong.

Dr. Greg

[kristopher]

87. "If we were totally solar..."

Since your persist in your fallacious depiction of how our power system functions, it is not possible to "(f)orget the operational profiles blather". You claim you don't understand what the operational profile of a power generator is; if that is true, then you are totally unprepared to evaluate what works and what doesn't.


You display this poor ability to understand when you cite "baseload" power as being an essential feature of power generation. It isn't. It is a by-product of the way we designed the grid around the best technologies of the bygone day, which were all large scale, centralized thermal generators with power distributed by a highly regulated monopoly. It is a product of marketing, cost-plus regulation of utilities and the drive for increased economic efficiency. There is no technological reason that such a centralized system cannot be replaced by a grid that operates on distributed generation from renewables sources - electricity is electricity.


That poor understanding of yours is also on display when you make silly arguments like "If we were totally solar, in the middle of the night there is no solar power". Since we are not TRYING to build a grid that totally solar, such speculative claptrap is easily recognized as the diversion that it is.

[DrGregory]

89. WRONG - I understand better than you.

You display this poor ability to understand when you cite "baseload" power as being an essential feature of power generation. It isn't. It is a by-product of the way we designed the grid around the best technologies of the bygone day, which were all large scale,
================

No - the reason we have baseload is that there are some uses of power
that we demand 24 hours a day. How about heating - the control systems
of even your gas furnace run on electricity as well as the circulation
fans. Then there are alarm systems and other 24 hour / day demands.

How about computers. Google for example runs its servers 24 hours/day.
Where I work - a lot of batch computing gets done at night - our computers
don't shut down at night.

Evidently you are ignorant of the fact that in order to avoid damage
to large smelting furnaces, when they do shut down it is done over
the course of several days.

We use large scale technologies to achieve the economies of scale -
which are real. Some physics doesn't scale well to small scale.

Those that wave their hands and magically claim that all our large
scale uses of energy can all be done on a small scale have NEVER
proven or demonstrated that - it's just blather and hand-waving
by people who don't know what they are talking about.

There are truly demands on the electric grid at night because there
have to be those demands. If you add up all the 24 hour demands,
it comes to a MAJORITY of our energy use - which is why the baseload
is more than 50% our demand.

If renewables such as solar can't meet the demand 24 hours a day,
on demand; then their proponents should shut up about being able
to shoulder the load - they can't.

If all you have to offer is power for 6 hours / day - then
"NO THANK YOU."

Honestly, are you going to make everyone store their own power
for night time consumption? Have you ever investigated what
that would mean for your own home?

Go to one of the many outfits that helps people go "off grid",
and price out what it takes in the way of energy storage to
be able to make it through the night without utility power.

Again, if renewables can't meet the demand; and the demand is
for energy 24 hours a day for both home and industry; then
the renewable energy community should stop pretending that they
have something to offer.

Dr. Greg

[kristopher]

92. No it isn't.

The reason we have baseload power is that in the search for economy of scale, turbines grew larger and larger. Eventually they became so large that they had to be kept turning constantly; and because the shaft sags when rotation ceases they require nearly 24 hours of slow rotation to straighten them before they can produce power.

Since they had to be kept running constantly in order to help meet peak demand it was natural to try to utilize the wasted generating capacity. This centralized generation model has a very loose relationship with the demands of individual end users be they industrial, commercial or residential. However, there is no particular reason that energy users are bound to get their power via that particular strategy. The distributed generation model begins with demand and proceeds from there to the question of supply, which can be meet any any number of ways with renewable sources that are optimized for each application.

There is no question that renewables can more than provide for all of our energy needs. Nuclear and fossil supporters (the two groups are largely one and the same) are the only people who deny this and thy can NEVER support that denial.


Lovins on Baseload Myth

Public discussions of nuclear power, and a surprising number of articles in peer-reviewed journals, are increasingly based on four notions unfounded in fact or logic: that

1. variable renewable sources of electricity (windpower and photovoltaics) can provide little or no reliable electricity because they are not “baseload”—able to run all the time;
2. those renewable sources require such enormous amounts of land, hundreds of times more than nuclear power does, that they’re environmentally unacceptable;
3. all options, including nuclear power, are needed to combat climate change; and
4. nuclear power’s economics matter little because governments must use it anyway to protect the climate.

For specificity, this review of these four notions focuses on the nuclear chapter of Stewart Brand’s 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline, which encapsulates similar views widely expressed and cross-cited by organizations and individuals advocating expansion of nuclear power. It’s therefore timely to subject them to closer scrutiny than they have received in most public media.

This review relies chiefly on five papers, which I gave Brand over the past few years but on which he has been unwilling to engage in substantive discussion. They document6 why expanding nuclear power is uneconomic, is unnecessary, is not undergoing the claimed renaissance in the global marketplace (because it fails the basic test of cost-effectiveness ever more robustly), and, most importantly, will reduce and retard climate protection. That’s because—the empirical cost and installation data show—new nuclear power is so costly and slow that, based on empirical U.S. market data, it will save about 2–20 times less carbon per dollar, and about 20–40 times less carbon per year, than investing instead in the market winners—efficient use of electricity and what The Economist calls “micropower,”...


The “baseload” myth

Brand rejects the most important and successful renewable sources of electricity for one key reason stated on p. 80 and p. 101. On p. 80, he quotes novelist and author Gwyneth Cravens’s definition of “baseload” power as “the minimum amount of proven, consistent, around-the-clock, rain-or-shine power that utilities must supply to meet the demands of their millions of customers.”21 (Thus it describes a pattern of aggregated customer demand.) Two sentences later, he asserts: “So far comes from only three sources: fossil fuels, hydro, and nuclear.” Two paragraphs later, he explains this dramatic leap from a description of demand to a restriction of supply: “Wind and solar, desirable as they are, aren’t part of baseload because they are intermittent—productive only when the wind blows or the sun shines. If some sort of massive energy storage is devised, then they can participate in baseload; without it, they remain supplemental, usually to gas-fired plants.”

That widely heard claim is fallacious. The manifest need for some amount of steady, reliable power is met by generating plants collectively, not individually. That is, reliability is a statistical attribute of all the plants on the grid combined. If steady 24/7 operation or operation at any desired moment were instead a required capability of each individual power plant, then the grid couldn’t meet modern needs, because no kind of power plant is perfectly reliable. For example, in the U.S. during 2003–07, coal capacity was shut down an average of 12.3% of the time (4.2% without warning); nuclear, 10.6% (2.5%); gas-fired, 11.8% (2.8%). Worldwide through 2008, nuclear units were unexpectedly unable to produce 6.4% of their energy output.26 This inherent intermittency of nuclear and fossil-fueled power plants requires many different plants to back each other up through the grid. This has been utility operators’ strategy for reliable supply throughout the industry’s history. Every utility operator knows that power plants provide energy to the grid, which serves load. The simplistic mental model of one plant serving one load is valid only on a very small desert island. The standard remedy for failed plants is other interconnected plants that are working—not “some sort of massive energy storage devised.”

Modern solar and wind power are more technically reliable than coal and nuclear plants; their technical failure rates are typically around 1–2%. However, they are also variable resources because their output depends on local weather, forecastable days in advance with fair accuracy and an hour ahead with impressive precision. But their inherent variability can be managed by proper resource choice, siting, and operation. Weather affects different renewable resources differently; for example, storms are good for small hydro and often for windpower, while flat calm weather is bad for them but good for solar power. Weather is also different in different places: across a few hundred miles, windpower is scarcely correlated, so weather risks can be diversified. A Stanford study found that properly interconnecting at least ten windfarms can enable an average of one-third of their output to provide firm baseload power. Similarly, within each of the three power pools from Texas to the Canadian border, combining uncorrelated windfarm sites can reduce required wind capacity by more than half for the same firm output, thereby yielding fewer needed turbines, far fewer zero-output hours, and easier integration.

A broader assessment of reliability tends not to favor nuclear power. Of all 132 U.S. nuclear plants built—just over half of the 253 originally ordered—21% were permanently and prematurely closed due to reliability or cost problems. Another 27% have completely failed for a year or more at least once. The surviving U.S. nuclear plants have lately averaged ~90% of their full-load full-time potential—a major improvement31 for which the industry deserves much credit—but they are still not fully dependable. Even reliably-running nuclear plants must shut down, on average, for ~39 days every ~17 months for refueling and maintenance. Unexpected failures occur too, shutting down upwards of a billion watts in milliseconds, often for weeks to months. Solar cells and windpower don’t fail so ungracefully.

Power plants can fail for reasons other than mechanical breakdown, and those reasons can affect many plants at once. As France and Japan have learned to their cost, heavily nuclear-dependent regions are particularly at risk because drought, earthquake, a serious safety problem, or a terrorist incident could close many plants simultaneously. And nuclear power plants have a unique further disadvantage: for neutron-physics reasons, they can’t quickly restart after an emergency shutdown, such as occurs automatically in a grid power failure...

From Amory Lovins
Four Nuclear Myths: A Commentary on Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline and on Similar Writings

Journal or Magazine Article, 2009

Available for download: http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-09_FourNuclearMyths

Some nuclear-power advocates claim that wind and solar power can’t provide much if any reliable power because they’re not “baseload,” that they use too much land, that all energy options including new nuclear build are needed to combat climate change, and that nuclear power’s economics don’t matter because climate change will force governments to dictate energy choices and pay for whatever is necessary. None of these claims can withstand analytic scrutiny.

[DrGregory]

94. BALONEY

>The reason we have baseload power is that in the search for economy of scale, turbines grew larger and larger. Eventually >they became so large that they had to be kept turning constantly; and because the shaft sags when rotation ceases they >require nearly 24 hours of slow rotation to straighten them before they can produce power.

That is a crock. You claim that demand morphed to fit the
generating capacity - and that is exactly backwards.

The customer base of utilities determined the demand - they
used power when then needed it and how much. So there is
a fluctuation in demand during the day; but you can draw
a line under the fluctuation that determines an amount that
is demanded 24/7. As an analogy - think of the stock market.
In a given day, the market may vary from 10,000 points to
11,000 to 10,500 to 10,750 - but it is always over 10k. That
is the baseload.

Power companies built baseload plants to handle the baseload.
They built smaller plants that could be throttled easier to
handle the variation. For short duration peaks, they build
"peaker units" usually based on gas turbines that can be fired
up and down easily. There's absolutely NO NEED for the demand
to conform to the generating capacity - the generating capacity
conforms to the demand.

Honestly, I've heard some vacuous arguments; but this takes
the cake. You do realize that we as a society do things after
sundown that require energy; and that we do NOT do them because
we are attempting to maximize operational ease of the utility.

Do we not light our homes and streets. Do we not heat our homes
and offices at night? Do we not run our electric mass transit
trains after sundown.... The list goes on and on and on of
activities that require energy at night and can not be done
without energy via some magic "new technology".

As a scientist, I find so often that those that know the least
about science and technology are the ones that make these
vacuous claims for new technology or better efficiency.

Dr. Greg

[kristopher]

100. You prove two things with every post

1) You are not "a scientist"

2) You are blowing smoke and you have NO IDEA of the topic you are trying to pass yourself off as an authority on.


For most of the history of electricity in this country, the utilities, which are "natural monopolies", have been tightly regulated with a profit based on cost-plus operation. That means that they had/have every incentive to spend money building large projects. 6% of $10 billion dollars is a hell of a lot more than 6% of $10 million dollars. That is a perverse incentive to build more and larger - which dovetails precisely with what I wrote previously about large scale generation.

You continue to pretend that a renewable grid is going to operate the same as the present grid - that's like saying that a digitized information system is going to operate like Ma Bell did in 1955. I mean, how could you possibly have mobile phones? You can't carry around miles of wire.

The limitations you perceive for renewables are simply not valid.

April 22, 2009 NYTimes
Energy Regulatory Chief Says New Coal, Nuclear Plants May Be Unnecessary
By NOELLE STRAUB AND PETER BEHR, Greenwire

No new nuclear or coal plants may ever be needed in the United States, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission said today.
"We may not need any, ever," Jon Wellinghoff told reporters at a U.S. Energy Association forum...

You do know what FERC does right?

[DrGregory]

122. You still can't answer a simple question

1) You are not "a scientist"

2) You are blowing smoke and you have NO IDEA of the topic you are trying to pass yourself off as an authority on.
================================

Our society uses electricity 24 hours / day; one of the major uses
is refrigeration. You don't unplug your refrigerator every night;
and you watch TV, and light / heat your home.

WHERE do you get that energy if your energy source is 100% solar
and you haven't stored the energy due to the inherent risks.

You can't answer that question - can you?

You are the one that is blowing smoke. It's a very simple basic
question - where do you get energy if your source is solar and
doesn't work and night and there is no energy stored?

You can't possibly believe that you are fooling people by saying
that there's something "new" and "magical" about the electric grid.

ANY grid needs an energy source - and if your solar plant is down
at night and there's no energy stored because of the risks; then
where does one get the energy to run refrigerators and lighting
and heating....

Point to an ENERGY source - not studies.

Evidently you don't know the types of question a scientist
like myself asks - because a scientist will ask precisely
this question - where do you get the energy?

Dr. Greg

[kristopher]

123. Where do you get electricity for the 29% of the time nuclear power plants are down?

Help me out, the historic global average capacity factor for nuclear - is it 71% or is it 76%?


In any case, and even if you want to use the last couple of years and claim only 10% down time (even though there is no evidence this is sustainable over time - especially in the rapidly aging reactor fleet that is developing) where do you get the energy to replace that plant for the hours, days, weeks, months and even years that characterize nuclear plant shutdowns?

[DrGregory]

126. Fabrications don't interest me.

Where do you get electricity for the 29% of the time nuclear power plants are down?
===========================================================

Your fabricated numbers don't interest me.

The fact is that there EXIST power systems the bulk of which
are nuclear based - such as France, and the Commonwealth Edison
of Chicago system.

If you were correct that nuclear plants spend a great deal of their
time down - then Chicago wouldn't be running. However, Chicago
and northern Illinois experience electrical availability that is
comparable to any other power system. The same with France; and
France additionally supplies energy to Germany and its other
neighbors. How could France do that if it had a power source
that is as unreliable as you contend nuclear is.

The answer is that you are just plain WRONG!! Nuclear power is
every bit as reliable as it takes to build a reliable power system.

Additionally, the reactor really doesn't "age". The core of the
reactor is essentially replaced every 3 years. There are no moving
parts to wear out. The only age related issue is the build-up of
metal crystal dislocations in the pressure vessel - but those can
be cured via annealing.

Many of the reactors we have are over 3 decades old; and many have
just had their licenses renewed to operate another 3 decades.

In fact, like a fine wine; reactors tend to get more reliable with
age as the power company learns and acquires experience. It's like
a musician too - the more you play and practice the better you get.
You don't "wear out" because you play and practice more.

Dr. Greg

[kristopher]

127. US nuclear reactors are not operating 29% of the time they are supposed to.

The capacity factor for the US fleet is 71% ((Herbst and Hopley 2007), and UK load factors are about the same.

Where does the electricity come from when they are shut down for what is often days, weeks, months or years at a time? It comes from a grid with a great deal of redundancy from fossil fuels. In a renewable grid, the same idea is at work except that all the elements contributing to the grid are renewable. You claim this isn't feasible, yet study after study by the experts in the field of how our energy system works tell us that it is.

Chicago is not on the isolated grid that you assert and the fact that you make that claim is not only absolutely absurd, it shows how dishonest or uninformed you are. The US grid has only 3 distinct sections - east, west and texas. Chicago is within the "Eastern Interconnection" and ConEd specifically is a huge owner of transmission capacity.

You MUST support your claim that renewables cannot do the job with hard evidence or you must (if you have the scientific background you assert) reject that claim as false - there is no middle ground.

[DrGregory]

128. More trumpeting of ignorance

The capacity factor for the US fleet is 71% ((Herbst and Hopley 2007), and UK load factors are about the same.
========================

WRONG again. US nuclear power reactors are NOT offline 29% of the
time. You don't know the difference between capacity factor
and availability factor.

Capacity factor is the fraction of the energy generated vs
what the plant could do if it ran at 100% power for 100% of
the time.

However, the only time a plant can approach a 100% CF is
if it is baseloaded. In order to get 100%, the plant has
to be at full power all the time.

However, a utility sizes its fleet of plants to meet the
MAXIMUM demand. This occurs during the summer with heavy
air conditioning loads. What happens when you don't have
the heavy loads - the plants are throttled back. That
affects capacity factor - because to get 100% CF you have
to be at full power. But it's not the plant's fault that
the customers are not demanding full load.

So there is another metric called the "availability factor"

The availability factor doesn't require 100% output of the
plant - if the plant is up and running and meeting the
demand - then it gets 100% an availability factor.

The lower than 100% CF does NOT mean the plant is offline;
it means it is throttled back because the customers are
not demanding power.

Yes I know that Commonwealth Edison is not an island - but
CommEd is one of the utilities that is a DONOR to grid -
that is they produce ALL the energy needed by their
service area; and produce additional energy to meet
shortfalls in the service areas of other utilities.

The claim about renewables is from the National Academy
of Sciences study circa 1992 or 1994. They don't have
an online copy of the report - so I posted a link a
to a report that CITES the '90s report. You can then
order a paper copy from the Academy.

Dr. Greg

[DrGregory]

129. Redundancy doesn't apply to solar

In a renewable grid, the same idea is at work except that all the elements contributing to the grid are renewable.
==================

I understand how other plants on the grid can make up the
shortfall when another plant is down for maintenance.

However, my comment was in regard to the boneheads that
want 100% solar. As I previously stated, when your solar
power plant is down because it is night time, another
solar plant can't cover for it because it will also
be down because it is night time.

You have redundancy when you don't have "common mode"
failures. But with solar, there is a built-in, INHERENT
"common mode" failure mechanism - they don't work at night.

Since one can't use solar plants to make a redundant grid
because they all share the same common failure mode - the
fact that they don't work at night - means you have to have
something else. A grid across the entire USA doesn't help
in this regard - it's night time for the entire country.

So that leaves us with "wind" and energy storage. Wind
can not be counted on either - what if it is dark and the
wind isn't blowing?

So the only thing that can be counted on is energy storage.

However, I've already exposed the dangers / risks of
storing large amounts of energy.

These were all considered by the National Academy study
which is why the scientists reached the conclusions
they did.

Dr. Greg

[DrGregory]

96. Baseload is natural

>The reason we have baseload power is that in the search for economy of scale, turbines grew larger and larger. Eventually they became so large that they had to be kept turning constantly;

The reason for baseload has nothing to do with power plants or size of turbines; but
is due to our demand for power. It is a useful commodity and we all have uses for it
24/7.

Take your own house. What is one of the biggest electric energy users in the
average person's house? Answer - the refrigerator. This heat pump takes a lot
of energy to run. Do we turn our refrigerators off at night? No - that would
be pointless. We run these appliances 24/7. < or at least we hope/want to >.

Now it's true the refrigerator cycles on/off. However, suppose the refrigerator
is running 15 min out of every hour. That means that for every 1000 homes; on
average, 250 refrigerators are on and running. That demand is 24/7 because
we run them 24/7. There's baseload right there.

Practically every house in the country has a baseload demand represented by
the refrigerator. Refrigeration has been such a boon to elimination of
food-borne disease and pathogens - I don't think the citizenry of the USA
is going to get rid of refrigeration because the solar power industry can't
handle it.

Likewise, there are many businesses that need power 24/7. This weekend I took
a tour of a local winery. A friend of a friend is the vintner, and gave a
group of us a tour. At one point in the process, in order to make the wine
stable at all serving temperatures; they cool it down for several days and allow
the undesirable precipitates to fall out of solution. They refrigerate the wine
24/7.

Put your mind to it; and I'm sure that anybody can come up with uses for electricity
by both business and residential that are 24/7. Electricity is useful - and we have
plenty of round the clock uses.

The baseload characteristic is quite natural - the result of electricity being
useful. I don't buy for a nanosecond that our 24/7 demand for electricity is due
to our collective concern for the health of the turbine shafts of our local power
plants.

GEESH- next time you want to fabricate an excuse for your favorite SUB-PAR
technology - at least make it something PLAUSIBLE!!!

Dr. Greg

[kristopher]

101. You don't know what you are talking about

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=256825&mesg_id=257725

[DrGregory]

97. Shows a MISUNDERSTANDING

>Every utility operator knows that power plants provide energy to the grid, which serves load. The simplistic mental model of one plant serving one load is valid only on a very small desert >island. The standard remedy for failed plants is other interconnected plants that are working—not “some sort of massive energy storage devised.”

The baseload is NOT a property of power plants and has NOTHING to do with an
assumption that a single power plant is serving the load.

Baseload is a property of the time-dependence of the demand on the utility.

If you graph the minute by minute power demand on a utility over the day;
< demand is demand - what the customers want > it varies. It looks a little
like the graph of a stock price or the Dow Jones average over a day - a
jagged line.

However, you can draw a nice horizontal line underneath the jagged one. In the
case of the stock price; the value at that horizontal line is a value the
stock held 24 hours a day. If the lowest point on the jagged daily graph is
$5 /share - then the stock was worth at least $5 / share for 24 hours.

Sure it went up and down during the day but never fell below $5/share.
That $5 / share would be analogous to the baseload.

GADS it is so tiring having to explain elementary school level mathematics.

As far as nuclear power plants not being dependable; what a load of manure.

Chicago and northern Illinois, the service area of Commonwealth Edison; are
as dependent on nuclear generated electricity as much as France is. The
fleet of reactors owned by Exelon powers Chicago and a big portion of the
industrial Midwest - and are as dependable as any other power plants.

As far as solar and wind being reliable - yes when solar / wind provide
such a MINUSCULE amount of energy to the grid - it's hard for them to
"fail" - there's such a small difference from when they are working and
when they are not.

Dr. Greg

[kristopher]

102. You still don't know what you are talking about

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=256825&mesg_id=257725

[DrGregory]

99. More MISUNDERSTANDING!!!

>It is interesting to note that The US Department of Energy also has an article refuting the myth of baseload power. Below is a short extract.

>Photovoltaic (PV) technology can meet electricity demand on any scale. The solar energy resource in a 100-mile-square area of Nevada could supply the United States with all its electricity >(about 800 gigawatts) using modestly efficient (10%) commercial PV modules. ...

It doesn't matter how large that solar energy resource is - whether it
is 100 square miles or 1000 square miles.

At night, the entire state of Nevada is DARK. At night, photovoltaics
can NOT provide power - they can't see the Sun.

Since they can't provide power for 24 hours; they are BY DEFINITION;
NOT baseload. They can't provide the baseload amount that the
utility has to provide 24 hours a day. ( One can define baseload based
on less than 24 hours - but a minimum over 24 hours will INCLUDE a
minimum over 6 hours or 3 hours or whatever)

http://www.energyvortex.com/energydictionary/baseload__base_load__baseload_demand.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load_power_plant

[kristopher]

103. Your writings reek with an obvious lack of understanding and knowledge

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=256825&mesg_id=257725

[DrGregory]

106. BALONEY

Your writings reek with an obvious lack of understanding and knowledge
=============================

I read the ERROR-FILLED piece of TRIPE to which you reference.

Base load is such a SIMPLE concept. The fact is that there is a
MINIMUM demand on the utility because we use electricity for certain
applications 24 hours / day. As I posted - refrigeration in your
own home is an example of base load.

Can you not understand that???? A CHILD can understand that.

Since your home and that of others as well as businesses use
a certain fraction of their electrical energy 24 hours per day -
then that becomes the base load.

It has NOTHING to do with any assumption of using a single power
plant to supply a grid.

I've been monumentally UNIMPRESSED with the various screeds by
Amory Lovins. This appears to be one of the most brain-dead of
all.

Dr. Greg

[kristopher]

107. You still don't know what you are talking about

http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E09-01_NuclearPowerClimateFixOrFolly

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/2008/nuclear_power_report.html

http://www.olino.org/us/articles/2009/11/26/the-economics-of-nuclear-reactors-renaissance-or-relapse

Landmark report explodes renewable energy myths

Comprehensive study concludes 100 per cent renewable energy supplies are technically feasible and economically attractive
Europe can switch to low carbon sources of energy without jeopardising reliability or forcing up energy bills to punitive levels, according to a major new study that claims to be the most comprehensive assessment to date of the viability of zero carbon power supplies.

Roadmap 2050: a practical guide to a prosperous, low-carbon Europe will be released later today and will demonstrate how transitioning to a low or zero carbon power supply based on high levels of renewable energy would have no impact on reliability, and would have little impact on the cost of producing electricity in the period up to 2050.

The report was developed by think tank the European Climate Foundation (ECF) in collaboration with a number of leading economists and energy industry experts, and includes contributions from McKinsey, KEMA, Imperial College London and Oxford Economics.

Its analysis argues that cost effective zero carbon power is not reliant on technology breakthroughs, although it warns that they would help to further reduce the cost of decarbonisation.

Matt Phillips, a senior associate with the ECF, said many of assumptions made at the outset of the research project had been proved wrong....

http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2261182/landmark-report-explodes

[DrGregory]

112. Then answer this...

Do we use electrical power at night?? YES!!!

Can a solar power plant ( without storage )
produce power at night? NO!!!

Therefore, a solar power plant without storage
can NOT meet the entire load - because some of
it is at night.

Why is this so difficult to understand???

Therefore, if a solar plant aspires to meet the
total demand - it has to be able to supply demand
at night. That means energy STORAGE!!!!

There is NO WAY that you can meet the total demand
with a SOLAR plant WITHOUT storage because some of
that demand is at night when the solar power plant
is worthless.

Again - why is this TRIVIAL concept so difficult
to understand.

Repeat after me 1000 X; "Solar plants can't produce
energy at night."

"Solar plants can't produce energy at night...."

If they are going to meet demand, at night; then
they need energy storage.

However, storing very large amounts of energy in
energy storage systems can be problematical...
because of the AMOUNT of energy that needs to
be stored.

That's all I'm saying!!! Again a child could
understand this - why can't the solar proponents???

Dr. Greg

[kristopher]

113. Still the same bullshit...

Solar power is not a grid.

Lovins on Baseload Myth

Public discussions of nuclear power, and a surprising number of articles in peer-reviewed journals, are increasingly based on four notions unfounded in fact or logic: that

1. variable renewable sources of electricity (windpower and photovoltaics) can provide little or no reliable electricity because they are not “baseload”—able to run all the time;
2. those renewable sources require such enormous amounts of land, hundreds of times more than nuclear power does, that they’re environmentally unacceptable;
3. all options, including nuclear power, are needed to combat climate change; and
4. nuclear power’s economics matter little because governments must use it anyway to protect the climate.

For specificity, this review of these four notions focuses on the nuclear chapter of Stewart Brand’s 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline, which encapsulates similar views widely expressed and cross-cited by organizations and individuals advocating expansion of nuclear power. It’s therefore timely to subject them to closer scrutiny than they have received in most public media.

This review relies chiefly on five papers, which I gave Brand over the past few years but on which he has been unwilling to engage in substantive discussion. They document6 why expanding nuclear power is uneconomic, is unnecessary, is not undergoing the claimed renaissance in the global marketplace (because it fails the basic test of cost-effectiveness ever more robustly), and, most importantly, will reduce and retard climate protection. That’s because—the empirical cost and installation data show—new nuclear power is so costly and slow that, based on empirical U.S. market data, it will save about 2–20 times less carbon per dollar, and about 20–40 times less carbon per year, than investing instead in the market winners—efficient use of electricity and what The Economist calls “micropower,”...


The “baseload” myth

Brand rejects the most important and successful renewable sources of electricity for one key reason stated on p. 80 and p. 101. On p. 80, he quotes novelist and author Gwyneth Cravens’s definition of “baseload” power as “the minimum amount of proven, consistent, around-the-clock, rain-or-shine power that utilities must supply to meet the demands of their millions of customers.”21 (Thus it describes a pattern of aggregated customer demand.) Two sentences later, he asserts: “So far comes from only three sources: fossil fuels, hydro, and nuclear.” Two paragraphs later, he explains this dramatic leap from a description of demand to a restriction of supply: “Wind and solar, desirable as they are, aren’t part of baseload because they are intermittent—productive only when the wind blows or the sun shines. If some sort of massive energy storage is devised, then they can participate in baseload; without it, they remain supplemental, usually to gas-fired plants.”

That widely heard claim is fallacious. The manifest need for some amount of steady, reliable power is met by generating plants collectively, not individually. That is, reliability is a statistical attribute of all the plants on the grid combined. If steady 24/7 operation or operation at any desired moment were instead a required capability of each individual power plant, then the grid couldn’t meet modern needs, because no kind of power plant is perfectly reliable. For example, in the U.S. during 2003–07, coal capacity was shut down an average of 12.3% of the time (4.2% without warning); nuclear, 10.6% (2.5%); gas-fired, 11.8% (2.8%). Worldwide through 2008, nuclear units were unexpectedly unable to produce 6.4% of their energy output.26 This inherent intermittency of nuclear and fossil-fueled power plants requires many different plants to back each other up through the grid. This has been utility operators’ strategy for reliable supply throughout the industry’s history. Every utility operator knows that power plants provide energy to the grid, which serves load. The simplistic mental model of one plant serving one load is valid only on a very small desert island. The standard remedy for failed plants is other interconnected plants that are working—not “some sort of massive energy storage devised.”

Modern solar and wind power are more technically reliable than coal and nuclear plants; their technical failure rates are typically around 1–2%. However, they are also variable resources because their output depends on local weather, forecastable days in advance with fair accuracy and an hour ahead with impressive precision. But their inherent variability can be managed by proper resource choice, siting, and operation. Weather affects different renewable resources differently; for example, storms are good for small hydro and often for windpower, while flat calm weather is bad for them but good for solar power. Weather is also different in different places: across a few hundred miles, windpower is scarcely correlated, so weather risks can be diversified. A Stanford study found that properly interconnecting at least ten windfarms can enable an average of one-third of their output to provide firm baseload power. Similarly, within each of the three power pools from Texas to the Canadian border, combining uncorrelated windfarm sites can reduce required wind capacity by more than half for the same firm output, thereby yielding fewer needed turbines, far fewer zero-output hours, and easier integration.

A broader assessment of reliability tends not to favor nuclear power. Of all 132 U.S. nuclear plants built—just over half of the 253 originally ordered—21% were permanently and prematurely closed due to reliability or cost problems. Another 27% have completely failed for a year or more at least once. The surviving U.S. nuclear plants have lately averaged ~90% of their full-load full-time potential—a major improvement31 for which the industry deserves much credit—but they are still not fully dependable. Even reliably-running nuclear plants must shut down, on average, for ~39 days every ~17 months for refueling and maintenance. Unexpected failures occur too, shutting down upwards of a billion watts in milliseconds, often for weeks to months. Solar cells and windpower don’t fail so ungracefully.

Power plants can fail for reasons other than mechanical breakdown, and those reasons can affect many plants at once. As France and Japan have learned to their cost, heavily nuclear-dependent regions are particularly at risk because drought, earthquake, a serious safety problem, or a terrorist incident could close many plants simultaneously. And nuclear power plants have a unique further disadvantage: for neutron-physics reasons, they can’t quickly restart after an emergency shutdown, such as occurs automatically in a grid power failure...

From Amory Lovins
Four Nuclear Myths: A Commentary on Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline and on Similar Writings

Journal or Magazine Article, 2009

Available for download: http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-09_FourNuclearMyths

Some nuclear-power advocates claim that wind and solar power can’t provide much if any reliable power because they’re not “baseload,” that they use too much land, that all energy options including new nuclear build are needed to combat climate change, and that nuclear power’s economics don’t matter because climate change will force governments to dictate energy choices and pay for whatever is necessary. None of these claims can withstand analytic scrutiny.


*************************

Amory Lovins, a MacArthur Fellow and consultant physicist, is among the world’s leading innovators in energy and its links with resources, security, development and the environment. He has advised energy and many other industries for more than three decades, as well as the U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense. A former Oxford don, Amory Lovins advises major firms and governments worldwide and has briefed 19 heads of state.

Lovins’ work focuses on transforming hydrocarbon, automobile, real estate, electricity, water, semiconductor, and several other sectors toward advanced resource productivity. Amory Lovins co-founded and is Chairman and Chief Scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute, an independent, market-oriented, entrepreneurial, nonprofit, nonpartisan think-and-do tank, that creates abundance by design. RMI has served or been invited by more than 80 Fortune 500 firms, redesigning more than $30 billion worth of facilities in 29 sectors, with much of its path-finding work involving advanced resource productivity (typically with expanding returns to investment) and innovative business strategies.

Amory has held several visiting academic chairs, most recently as MAP/Ming Professor in Stanford’s School of Engineering, offering the university’s first course on advanced energy efficiency. He has also authored or co-authored hundreds of papers and twenty-nine books including: Small Is Profitable: The Hidden Economic Benefits of Making Electrical Resources the Right Size - an Economist “book of the year” blending financial economics with electrical engineering, and the Pentagon co-sponsored Winning the Oil Endgame, a roadmap for eliminating U.S. oil use by the 2040s, led by business for profit.

His work in over 50 countries has been recognized by the “Alternative Nobel,” Blue Planet, Volvo, Onassis, Nissan, Shingo, Goff Smith, and Mitchell Prizes, the Benjamin Franklin and Happold Medals, ten honorary doctorates, honorary membership of the American Institute of Architects, Foreign Membership of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, honorary Senior Fellowship of the Design Futures Council, and the Heinz, Lindbergh, Jean Meyer, Time Hero for the Planet, Time International Hero of the Environment, Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Leadership, and World Technology Awards.

The Wall Street Journal named Amory Lovins one of thirty-nine people worldwide "most likely to change the course of business.” Newsweek has praised him as "one of the Western world's most influential energy thinkers" and Car magazine ranked him the “twenty-second most powerful person in the global automotive industry.”

[DrGregory]

114. Non-Sequitur

Solar power is not a grid.
=========================

Who cares if it is on a grid or not!!!

Answer this - can solar power plants ( without storage )
produce power at night???

I don't care if it is on a grid or not on a grid.
I don't care if it is a 1 Megawatt unit or a 1 Gigawatt unit,
or a 1 watt unit for all that matter.

Can you answer a SIMPLE, TRIVIAL question -

"Can a solar power plant ( without storage )
produce energy at night?"


A CHILD could answer this!!!!

The answer is of course NO!!

There's a LIMITATION on solar power.
However, the "true believer" solar power
advocate; can't acknowledge that limitation.

That's why they should be minimized and their
opinions IGNORED - they can't face cold hard truths.

Dr. Greg

[DrGregory]

115. Definition of Base Load

http://cipco.apogee.net/foe/fgdlbl.asp

Base Load

The utility must generally supply some minimum power level or
base load 24 hours per day every day of the year. Industrial
plants, hospitals, and even residential customers with their
refrigerators all contribute to this base load.


The base load is the minimum that must be supplied over
24 hours and a lot of what determines that is the usage
by refrigerators...

All of this is EXACTLY as I have been saying.

Again, why can't the "true believer" solar proponents
acknowledge a fundamental LIMITATION on their favorite
SUB-PAR technology...

Dr. Greg

[DrGregory]

108. Xenon-transient

>And nuclear power plants have a unique further disadvantage: for neutron-physics reasons, they can’t quickly restart after an emergency shutdown, such as occurs automatically in a grid power failure..

Lovins is referring here to a Xenon transient.

Again Lovins is up to his usual dishonest characterizations of
the operation of nuclear reactors.

A reactor suffers a build-up of a neutron absorbing isotope
Xenon-135 immediately after shutdown.

What Lovins doesn't say; is that if you restart the reactor
immediately, it CAN be restarted. If you wait several hours,
then you can't restart the reactor. However, if you wait a
few hours more - total time < 12 hours - then you can restart
the reactor just fine.

Additionally, reactors can be built that have the ability to
"over-ride a Xenon transient". The reactors used by the
US Navy are so designed. The Navy would NEVER accept a
power plant that couldn't be restarted at the skipper's
command. When the skipper says the ship has to move - it
has to move - and naval reactors are designed to comply.

This is what I despise about Lovins - his intellectual DISHONESTY.
However, because there are so many gullible people who don't
understand the physics; they fall for his screeds "hook, line,
and sinker".

Dr. Greg

[kristopher]

109. You are the one being dishonest...

Safety procedures for a war vessel and a nuclear power plant on the grid are not the same. Lovins' statement is accurate. YOU are the one being dishonest repeatedly. This is one example; another is your claim that renewables can't do the job.

Yet another is the one you made elsewhere about the radioactivity of enriched fuel being the same as raw ore. You were attempting again to employ the "shoot the messenger" fallacy when you cooked up that crock. Your claim depends solely on exploiting the fact that radioactivity can be discussed as either the physical property of an atom OR as a measurement of potential dosing. The article was clearly discussing the potential for dosing, and you tried to pretend that such discussion was contradicted by the property of a single uranium atom; that enrichment was meaningless.

Tell us again who is dishonest?


The Self Limiting Future of Nuclear Power
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/2008/nuclear_power_report.html

[DrGregory]

111. Lovins' statement is CRAP

>Safety procedures for a war vessel and a nuclear power plant on the grid are not the same. Lovins' statement is accurate.

Lovins' statement is CRAP - it is misleading.

Over-riding a Xenon transient has NOTHING to do with safety!!

When a reactor shuts down there is a build up of Xenon-135 which
absorbs neutrons. The build up of Xe-135 is NOT a safety issue -
it just means the reactor can not start.

However, a reactor can be designed to "over-ride" or overcome
the "poisoning" of the core by Xe-135.

I'm saying that if we couldn't design reactors to be immune to
this - then the Navy would never accept it as a power plant for
a warship. The warship has to be able to move when ever the
skipper says. If the chief engineer has to say, "Sorry skipper,
I just shut down the reactor - you have to wait 12 hours" that
would be UNACCEPTABLE to the Navy. They would NOT use reactors.

However, they DO use reactors. The reason is that you can design
a reactor that can overcome that limitation. It has NOTHING to do
with safety.

Another reactor that can over ride the Xenon transient is the
research reactor at MIT. When I was a doctoral student at MIT,
I spent a Friday night measuring the Xenon-transient of that
reactor. We shutdown the reactor as per normal Friday afternoon.
However, I and an operator stayed in the control room and every
quarter hour we removed the control blades to a point such that
the reactor restarted. We knew how much reactivity we added
with the control blades. Therefore, when the reactor restarted,
the amount we added EXACTLY counteracted the poisoning by
Xenon. Since the control blades were calibrated - we could
tell how much "negative reactivity" the Xenon added.

Didn't affect safety AT ALL. After all, MIT in Cambridge is
in the middle of the Boston Metro area.

So much for the excrement that exudes from the mouth of Lovins.
He is the one that is misleading. Utilities could also have
reactors that over ride Xenon like the Navy - but this is such
a NON-PROBLEM for utilities that they don't bother.

Dr. Greg

[DrGregory]

116. Someone else that doesn't know high school physics.

>Yet another is the one you made elsewhere about the radioactivity of enriched fuel being the same as raw ore

Enrichment does NOT make new radioactive atoms!!!

EVERY atom in enriched fuel was already radioactive when
it came out of the ground!!!

Why do anti-nukes fall for this propaganda?
I know the answer - the WANT to believe the UNTRUE!!!

The ONLY thing either enrichment or reprocessing does
is SORT atoms. Enrichment sorts on the basis of weight,
while reprocessing sorts on the basis of chemical element

They DO NOT make new radioactivity.

Again this shows why we should IGNORE the anti-nukes.
They are NOT truth seekers - they are SHILLS.

Good public policy has to be based on TRUTH and
GOOD SCIENCE!! You don't get that from the anti-nukes.

To anyone that doubts - go ask your local high school
physic teacher if "enrichment" creates new radioactive atoms.

If you do - you will see I'm CORRECT!!!

Better yet - go read the book:

"Physics for Future Presidents"
by Prof. Richard Muller

Prof Muller is a Professor of Physics at
University of California Berkeley.

Even the most left-wing nut case should be
able to trust a professor from Berkeley.
Prof. Muller discusses enrichment in his
book.

Educate yourself with TRUTH from a real
professor - and not the propagandist CRAP
posted on anti-nuke websites for the gullible.

Dr. Greg

[Terry in Austin]

110. Customary units of energy

I think it's customary in such discussions to cite energy yields in terms of BTUs, joules or perhaps kilowatt-hours.

"Kilotons" doesn't accomplish much more than gee-whiz-that-sounds-like-atomic-bomb-stuff.

Please recalibrate. Thank you.

[DrGregory]

117. it gives you an intuitive feel

>"Kilotons" doesn't accomplish much more than gee-whiz-that-sounds-like-atomic-bomb-stuff.

It helps you appreciate the magnitude.

You have a better feeling for the size of a kiloton
as opposed to if I said a trillion calories.

I could have said that the energy you need to
store is about 60 trillion Joules or 15 trillion
calories; and you might not have an intuitive
sense of how large that is.

However, if I say that the energy you need to
store is 15 kilotons; then you know immediately
that if the energy storage system fails, and the
energy is released - we are talking about an
amount of energy that can destroy an entire city.

Dr. Greg

[Terry in Austin]

118. Gee whiz, Doctor Greg

That sounds like atomic bomb stuff!

:dunce:

[DrGregory]

119. just in magnitude.

>That sounds like atomic bomb stuff!

Only in regard to the amount of energy.

A typical 1 Gwe electric power plant, of
ANY type; in a single day produces the
energy equivalent of a 20 kiloton atomic
bomb - like the Nagasaki bomb.

If that power plant is a solar plant that
aspires to completely replace a conventional
power plant by providing energy 24/7; then
by sundown it needs to store about 15 kilotons,
the energy equivalent of the Hiroshima bomb;
in some type of energy storage system to take
it through the night until it can see the sun
again.

You don't get an intuitive feel for how much
energy these power plants are producing in a
day if one puts it in terms of calories or Joules.

However, if you put it in terms of kilotons; you
know that we are dealing with energies of a
magnitude that can destroy a city.

Dr. Greg

[bananas]

21. No, the technology sucked, it was a lemon. nt

[bananas]

22. "INHERENTLY SAFE" GERMAN PBMR COVERS UP RADIATION ACCIDENT AND SHUTS DOWN

Trust is something that has to be earned.
The reason people don't trust the nuclear industry is because they constantly show they can't be trusted.
A German PBMR leaked radiation in 1986, they tried to blame it on Chernobyl:

http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/pbmrfactsheet.htm

<snip>

"INHERENTLY SAFE" GERMAN PBMR COVERS UP RADIATION ACCIDENT AND SHUTS DOWN

As Dr. Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb said, "Sooner or later a fool will prove greater than the proof even in a foolproof system." Accidents can and do happen in the inherently dangerous business of splitting the atom. Human error occurs at every level of development, construction and operation of the process. Material and component failures along with aging can break down or defeat operational and safety systems.

In 1985, the experimental THTR-300 PBMR on the Ruhr in Hamm-Uentrop, Germany was also offered as accident proof--with the same promise of an indestructible carbon fuel cladding capable of retaining all generated radioactivity. Following the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident and graphite fire in Ukraine, the West German government revealed that on May 4, the 300-megawatt PBMR at Hamm released radiation after one of its spherical fuel pebbles became lodged in the pipe feeding the fuel to the reactor. Operator actions during the event caused damage to the fuel cladding.

Radioactivity was released with the escaping helium and radioactive fallout was deposited as far as two kilometers from the reactor. The fallout in the region was high enough to initially be blamed on Chernobyl. Government officials were then alerted by scientists in Freiburg who reported that as much as 70 % of the region’s contamination was not of the type of radiation leaking hundreds of miles away in Ukraine. Dismayed by an attempt to conceal the reactor malfunction and confronted with mounting public pressure in light of the Chernobyl accident only days prior, the state ordered the reactor to close pending a design review.

Continuing technical problems including a lack of quality control resulting in damage to unused fuel pebbles and radiation-induced bolt head failures in the reactor’s gas channels resulted in the unit’s closure in late 1988. Citing doubts about reliability, the government refused to further subsidize utility funding and instead approved plans for decommissioning the reactor.

<snip>

[DrGregory]

27. I wouldn't believe anything NIRS states

I wouldn't believe anything that NIRS states.
Their story doesn't make sense.

They claim that a damaged pebble led to the
release of much radioactivity, and that it was
damaged in the tube feeding pebbles into the
reactor.

Well, if the pebble is being fed INTO the
reactor; then it is FRESH un-irradiated fuel
going into the reactor.

Fresh fuel going INTO the reactor is no more
radioactive than when it was dug out of the
ground.

Since this pebble hasn't been in the reactor
yet; then how did it get more radioactive than
it is naturally?

This is where the skill of "critical thinking"
is useful. From the Wikipedia entry on the
German reactor:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300

Also increased public scrutiny following both the Chernobyl accident and the THTR-300 fuel pebble event of May 4, 1986, in which a fuel pebble became lodged in a fuel feed pipe to the core and some radioactive dust was released to the environment


So the accident had "some radioactive dust" released.

Dust doesn't sound like much; and any radioactivity
of the fresh fuel going into the reactor is the
low level natural radioactivity of uranium.

This sounds like the typical NIRS ploy of
"making a mountain out of a mole hill".

When will people stop falling for such deceptions?

Dr. Greg

[bananas]

29. "Fresh fuel going INTO the reactor is no more radioactive than when it was dug out of the ground."

BWAHAHAHA!!!!

Fresh fuel going INTO the reactor is no more
radioactive than when it was dug out of the
ground.
...
When will people stop falling for such deceptions?

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

You really crack me up, "Greg"!

http://www.pbmr.co.za/index.asp?Content=224

<snip>

The uranium-235 isotope occurs in natural uranium at a concentration of approximately 0.7 percent. In order to have a self-sustaining or "chain" reaction, the uranium in the PBMR fuel is enriched to about 9.6 percent in uranium-235, which is the isotope of uranium which mainly undergoes fission in the core.

The reactor is continuously replenished with fresh or re-usable fuel from the top, while used fuel is removed from the bottom. After each pass through the reactor core, the fuel pebbles are measured to determine the amount of fissionable material left. If a pebble still contains a usable amount of the fissile material, it is returned to the reactor at the top for a further cycle. Each cycle takes just over three months.

Each pebble passes through the reactor about ten times and lasts about 1000 days before it is spent, which means that a reactor will used 13 total fuel loads in its design lifetime of 40 years.

<snip>

[DrGregory]

44. It's funny what amuses some people.

Fresh fuel going INTO the reactor is no more
radioactive than when it was dug out of the
ground.
...
When will people stop falling for such deceptions?
=================================================

Evidently you are ignorant of what the term
"fresh fuel" means when applied to reactor
reloads.

If one is reloading a reactor, one can use what
is called "fresh" fuel - this is "virgin" fuel
that has not been in a reactor. One can also
use "recycle" fuel, which is fuel that has been
through a reactor burn cycle and is being returned
to the core.

Evidently, you think the enrichment of the fuel
is somehow pertinent? You haven't explained
what you "think" < term used loosely > is in
error or funny.

"Fresh fuel" is mined as ore, the uranium is
extracted, and converted to uranium hexaflouride,
UF6 for enrichment. Enrichment is commonly done
by either gaseous diffusion or centrifuge. The
uranium is then converted to uranium dioxide and
fabricated into the "fresh fuel".

NONE of those operations increases the amount
of radioactivity! They are physical or chemical
processes, not nuclear processes. They do NOT
affect the nuclei of the atoms, hence my statement
about the radioactivity is totally CORRECT.

Since you haven't stated what you "think" is
incorrect, I assume you must be confused by
the enrichment process.

Enrichment does NOT create more radioactivity
than you started with. If you started with N
radioactive nuclei before enrichment, you will
have N radioactive nuclei after.

Simply put; enrichment just "sorts" atoms; the
sorting done on the basis of weight.

Let me explain. How many here have heard that
Iran is using centrifuges to enrich uranium?
Have you heard of another circumstance in which
centrifuges are used? How about the laboratory
at your local hospital? These labs centrifuge
blood all the time.

Your blood consists of a fluid called "plasma"
which resembles seawater. Suspended in this
fluid are red cells, white cells, and platelets.
Sometimes it is desired to separate the cells
from the fluid and concentrate them. Blood
is placed in a centrifuge, and the process works
on the same basic principle as the Iranian
centrifuges.

The red cells, for instance, will be driven to
the bottom of the tube. The plasma can be
siphoned off the top.

Now has this process INCREASED the number of
red cells? Suppose we have a blood sample
of 10 ml. that has exactly 50 billion red
cells. We centrifuge the sample and siphon
off the plasma.

Now we count the number of red cells in the
plasma ( the separation is not 100% efficient )
and the number left concentrated in the tube.
We add those figures together.

What will we get? We will get 50 billion.
Centrifuging, aka "sorting"; doesn't make
any new red blood cells. It doesn't turn
white cells to red cells or red cells to
white cells.

Likewise, when you centrifuge or otherwise
enrich natural uranium which is 0.7% U-235
and 99.3% U-238; you do NOT alter the nuclei
of the atoms. You have just as many U-235
atoms before as after. Same with U-238.

Since we haven't altered the nuclei, and it
is the nuclei that determines the amount of
radioactivity - the total amount of radioactivity
remains constant.

In that sample of fresh fuel, every radioactive
atom in the sample was radioactive when we took
it out of the ground. We don't create ANY
additional radioactivity by enrichment.

I don't know what erroneous thought processes
were used to conclude that my previous statement
was some type of "deception".

Dr. Greg

[PavePusher]

47. It has always amazed me...

how little science is understood by those most opposed to various science-driven processes.

Ignorance truely is bliss, it seems.

Thanks for the clear explaination, Doc!

[caraher]

51. I think there's always a question of appropriate baselines for comparison

On one hand yes, the nuclear fuel production process does literally nothing to increase the amount of net radioactivity on Planet Earth above the amount originally present.

On the other hand, it does change where the nuclides are, and it does result in a greater concentration of radioactivity in certain places and in certain forms.

The question is not and never has been whether nuclear power results in more radioactivity, either as a whole or through fuel production. What matters is whether the hazards of nuclear power can be (and are!) managed responsibly. It's seems certain that the truth lies somewhere between the seemingly reflexive aversion to any human use of radioactive materials many seem to have and bland assurances that worries are unjustified. Those of us "in the middle" on this issue have plenty of reason to be skeptical of both extremes.

[bananas]

65. "Fresh fuel going INTO the reactor" is enriched uranium

You even put the word "INTO" in ALL-CAPS for emphasis.
What's "dug out of the ground" is uranium ore.
Enriched uranium is more radioactive than uranium ore.
Enriched uranium is more radioactive than natural uranium.
Enrichment seperates natural uranium into enriched uranium and depleted uranium,
the depleted uranium does not go INTO the reactor, only the enriched uranium goes INTO the reactor.

[DrGregory]

74. Oh BROTHER!!!

The process of enrichment does NOT create
radioactivity - it just concentrates it
in one place - but there is NOT "more"

Suppose I have a dozen 30 lb bars of gold.

I have them scattered over the floor of the
room. I can pick each one up.

Now suppose I put all dozen bars in a pile
which will now weigh 360 lbs and I no longer
can lift.

See how much "richer" I am now that I have
so much gold that I can't pick it up!!

WRONG!!!

You demonstrate conclusively that you have
not studied science since you keep confusing
"intensive" and "extensive" quantities. That
is one of the first things taught in high-school
physics,

You are wrong that the "radioactivity" of
enriched uranium is more than natural. The
proper term is "specific radioactivity".

You can't say the "radioactivity" of enriched
uranium is greater than natural uranium. You
can say the "specific radioactivity" is more.

You can't say the mass of lead is greater than
the mass of water. You can say the DENSITY
of lead is greater than the DENSITY of water.

However, if I have 100 kilograms of water and
1 kilogram of lead; the mass of the water is
greater than the mass of the lead. The density
of the lead is greater - but the mass of the
water is greater.

You are ignorantly doing the same thing by
saying the "radioactivity" of enriched uranium
is greater than natural uranium. You can't say
that. You can say the "specific radioactivity"
is greater.

Just as with the gold that has been clumped
together into a pile - the specific radioactivity
of the enriched uranium is increased. Specific
radioactivity, like density, in an "INTENSIVE"
quantity.

However, the "radioactivity" an "EXTENSIVE" quantity
is UNCHANGED as I have stated. Just like the total
amount of gold is unchanged even when you pile it into
a single pile.

You keep trumpeting your scientific incompetence for
all to see. YOU are the one that is making ERRORS!!!

Print this thread out and take it to your local
high school physics teacher and he / she can
further explain what you have said is WRONG!!!

Dr. Greg

[bananas]

23. The demise of the pebble bed modular reactor

A link to the Julich report is at the end of this article.

http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/the-demise-of-the-pebble-bed-modular-reactor

The demise of the pebble bed modular reactor
By Steve Thomas | 22 June 2009

Article Highlights
* After years of investment, South Africa has abandoned its plan to develop a fleet of electricity-generating pebble bed modular reactors (PBMR), once hyped as the future of nuclear power.
* Problems with the PBMR aren't new; a 2008 German report chronicles Germany's own problems developing the reactor since 1967.
* China, still developing PBMR-based power reactor designs, has taken a slow approach and it is unclear if they have run into problems as well.

In February, Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) Ltd., an eponymously named South African company announced a major change of strategy. After 10 years of development it said it was abandoning plans to build a full-size 165-megawatt-electric demonstration plant. Furthermore, PBMR Ltd. said it will try to redirect its future plans for the reactor from electricity generation toward thermal applications, such as coal gasification and water desalination. With government funding set to run out next year, the company will have to close if new funding is not found.

<snip>

The technological root of both the South African and the Chinese PBMRs is the German high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) developed at the government's Jülich research center outside Cologne. A German company promoted the pebble bed design for a couple of years with high expectations that Russia would buy the technology. These hopes never materialized, however, and in 1991, it abandoned the reactor design citing a lack of realistic business prospects. It did, however, continue selling technology licenses, most notably to companies in South Africa and China.

In 1993, the South African utility Eskom took up a PBMR design that, unlike its predecessors, was expected to generate electricity using a gas turbine driven directly by its helium coolant. In 1999, Eskom set up PBMR Ltd. to develop and market the PBMR and to complete a feasibility study. The subsidiary raised money, but several investors eventually pulled out of the project. The end of the feasibility phase of the project was never announced publicly, although it appears to have been completed in March 2004.

<snip>

The Jülich report further recommends that gas-tight containment structures be built for any commercial pebble bed plant deployed and that further research and development is necessary to evaluate the safety of the design and to understand why such high temperatures were experienced at the AVR. The need for such containments for PBMR-based plants has been the subject of disagreement for some time. PBMR Ltd. has claimed the pebble bed is "intrinsically safe" and "melt-down proof" and has argued that no pressure containment is needed and that the emergency evacuation zone needs to be no larger than the plant site itself. If a containment structure is required, the additional cost would make the reactor prohibitively expensive to build commercially. Although the Jülich report is bitterly contested by PBMR advocates, the high credibility of Jülich, which submitted the report to an extensive peer-review process, means it cannot simply be dismissed.

<snip>

[bananas]

25. Watchdog says redesign will not save the PBMR

They redesigned it for process heat in a desperate attempt to get more funding for this boondoggle.
From Feb 2009:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x188383

Pebble bed reactor too expensive for electricity
so they're going to redesign it for melting oil from tar sands.

South Africa's Pebble bed project turns to process heat applications, hydrogen, focus after funding for electricity generation runs out

7:29 AM Feb 23rd from TwitterGadget
djysrv
Dan Yurman

Watchdog says redesign will not save the PBMR
Published: Wed 18 February 2009

South Africa's Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) has been called "waste of vital public funds" at time when the project is seeking a redesign in order to be more commercially viable.

Watchdog group Earthlife Africa has called for the shelving of the project and the diversion of funds into more economically viable technology such as the 100 MW concentrated solar plant in the Northern Cape, for which Eskom is seeking finance of R5 billion to build.

The group argues that it made better economic sense than the estimated R14 billion for 165MW for the PBMR, which didn't even include the cost of the security apparatus necessary for the PMBR.

In 1999, the PMBR construction costs were estimated at R2 billion, but by 2005 they had risen to R14 billion, excluding the costs of decommissioning.

<snip>

SA nuclear demo project will run out of cash
Published: Mon 23 February 2009

The South African government's allocation of funds for the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) project will run out by early 2010 unless it can adapt itself to be commercially viable.

Business Report says the project had spent R7.5 billion since its inception in 1999 and had R980 million left, according to PBMR spokesperson Tom Ferreira.

PBMR chief executive Jaco Kriek said talks were under way with suppliers to put certain contracts on hold to prevent unnecessary spending.

Public enterprises deputy director-general Chris Forlee told members of parliament in the standing committee on public enterprises that a new approach was being developed that would lead to standard nuclear processes being used, "reducing technology and licensing risk associated with a first-of-a-kind project".

PBMR is not viable with Eskom
February 18, 2009
By Michael Hamlyn

Parliamentarians were told on Wednesday that the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor project is not viable in the short to medium term with Eskom as the anchor customer for its demonstration power plant.

Chris Forlee, the deputy director general: energy and broadband at the Department of Public Enterprises, told the portfolio committee of Parliament that Eskom's massive conventional build programme has ruled it out of the game, because of the funding needs of the conventional programme which is putting its balance sheet under severe pressure.

<snip>

However the second leg of the project, which involves the production of process heat, could still be viable. Process heat has uses in steam generation for heavy oil recovery in oil sands, for methane reforming to produce hydrogen, ammonia and methanol, water splitting, coal to liquids and coal to methane, and desalination.

"The process heat market seems to have many more opportunities for PBMR than power generation," Forlee said.

<snip>

[bananas]

28. We don't need nuclear energy to solve global warming.

None of the major environmental organizations support nuclear energy to solve global warming.
Most of them are against it. As are most of the scientists trying to solve global warming.

Stephen Pacala of Princeton's Carbon Mitigation Initiative:
"I personally think nuclear is a non-starter."

http://www.theclimategroup.org/our-news/interviews/2004/10/15/stephen-pacala/

In the August 2004 issue of Science, Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow of Princeton's Carbon Mitigation Initiative published a paper identifying 15 existing technologies that could each prevent 1 billion tons a year worth of carbon emissions by 2054. Pacala and Socolow have created a graph that divides the problem into the seven 1 billion-ton-per-year "wedges" which are required to halt the rise in greenhouse gas emissions, and stabilize the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at 500 parts per million (ppm) (see figures below).

Their findings provide a strong counter to the argument that major new technologies need to be developed before significant mitigation of emissions can begin.

<snip>

Q. What wedges are the least worth pursuing, and would it be the ones with the shortest lifetimes, ie. the forestry and agriculture projects?

A. I actually think those are among the ones that are the most worth pursuing. Right now I see one titanic obstacle to climate change mitigation, and that is the United States (US) government. If the US government were leading the charge, then everyone else would be in its slipstream and we would have this problem solved. In the US, the agricultural sector is incredibly powerful. On the issue of climate change, farm state senators need to see something that will be of value to their constituents, and that is where agricultural soils really come to the fore. If we can convince a few representatives from a few states that this is in the interest of their constituents, it could help tip the debate in the US.

I personally think nuclear is a non-starter. In the article we were not trying to choose sides, only to point out the mitigation technologies that are already in place. However, I cannot imagine that in this era of concerns about terrorism that we are going to start the production of fissionable material all over the world. It is disingenuous when the Bush administration says that the way to solve this problem is through coal and nuclear. Clean coal through carbon capture is fine if it can be made to work. But if you actually injected all of the CO2 produced in the United States (1.5 billion tonnes) the entire country would jack up in the air by 1mm/year. You don't have to be a scientist to know that is not sustainable. If you try to solve even one wedge of this problem with nuclear, it would require a doubling in the amount of nuclear power deployed. Solving the problem entirely with nuclear means increasing deployment by a factor of 10, and if you calculate how many of these plants would have to be in countries like Sudan and Afghanistan, you are just not going to do it.

<snip>

The Union of Concerned Scientists:

http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_and_global_warming/nuclear-power-resurgence.html

Nuclear Power: A Resurgence We Can't Afford

<snip>

The economics of nuclear power alone could be the most difficult hurdle to surmount. A new UCS analysis, Climate 2030: A National Blueprint for a Clean Energy Economy, finds that the United States does not need to significantly expand its reliance on nuclear power to make dramatic cuts in power plant carbon emissions through 2030—and indeed that new nuclear reactors would largely be uneconomical.

That analysis shows that by significantly expanding the use of energy efficiency and low-cost and declining-cost renewable energy sources, consumers and businesses could reduce carbon emissions from power plants as much as 84 percent by 2030 while saving $1.6 trillion on their energy bills. And, under the Blueprint scenario, because of their high cost, the nation would not build more than four new nuclear reactors already spurred by existing loan guarantees from the Department of Energy (DOE) and other incentives.

A forced nuclear resurgence, in contrast, could make efforts to cut the nation’s global warming emissions much more costly, given the rising projected costs of new nuclear reactors. A nuclear power resurgence that relies on new federal loan guarantees would also risk repeating costly bailouts of the industry financed by taxpayers and ratepayers twice before.

Joe Romm's full solution to global warming:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x191961

<snip>

Note to all: Do I want to build all those nuclear plants. No. Do I think we could do it without all those nuclear plants. Definitely. Therefore, should I be quoted as saying we “must” build all those nuclear plants, as the Drudge Report has, or even that I propose building all those plants? No. Do I think we will have to swallow a bunch of nuclear plants as part of the grand bargain to make this all possible and that other countries will build most of these? I have no doubt. So it stays in “the solution” for now.

<snip>

[Kringle]

30. codespeak for... poor people don't deserve electricity .nt

[bananas]

31. Nope. nt

[txlibdem]

33. Link spamming from untrusted sources is just... bananas

Thinking that this furthers your point is just... bananas.

We get that you are quite rabid in your anti-nuclear power stance. But what alternative are you offering? None. This means a continuing of coal power plants for far longer than if we begin a robust expansion of nuclear power plants. Aside from releasing huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, coal plants release lead, arsenic, mercury (all toxic stuff!) and each coal plant emits tons of thorium and even uranium (including hundreds of pounds of U-235 - the same stuff in atomic bombs!!!) into the environment each and every year. Year after year.

Burning coal is not an option. Burning oil is positively out of the question. Burning natural gas is better but that has its problems as well, and we will run out of that as well anyway.

It will take decades till solar and wind can supply 100% of our needs. I believe it is possible but solar generates most of its energy during the 6 hours right around noon so you need first to store energy for the other 18 hours of the day, and second to build out so many solar power plants (4x what you need at peak). So what do we do in the meantime? We can hope for fusion to come along, just as we've been waiting for the last 50 years and scientists keep saying "it's 20 years away" and they just said it again recently. What's the answer? Is there a "perfect" power source? No. But being anti-nuclear power is only saying you are FOR coal power plants.

[kristopher]

34. You need better understanding...

One of the (many) strikes against nuclear is the length of time required to bring a plant online. Renewable energy sources are much more quickly and cheaply deployed than nuclear. That means that for every dollar you divert to nuclear from renewables, you are going to get significantly less carbon reduction than you would have if the money went to wind and solar.

You also have a flawed understanding of how these energy sources integrate into a grid. Storage is NOT the obstacle you envision.

Nuclear is the fallback position for the same folks that brought you coal.

[txlibdem]

36. I'm glad to hear you are against coal

All of the anti-nuclear activists of the 1970s and 1980s are each responsible for hundreds of coal power plants that had to be built (to replace the energy that would have been created by nuclear power). If I was a serious environmentalist I would hang my head in shame if I had to tell my grandkids that I stopped a nuke plant but caused hundreds of coal power plants that spew out many times the radioactive material, the stuff that made me afraid of the nuclear power plant in the first place. I'd feel like a fool.

I actually agree with you that energy storage needed for renewable energy on a large scale is not a show stopper. We absolutely need to be moving full force toward solar thermal power plants of gigawatt size and larger, like the Blythe Solar Power Project in cali (http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x257003), which needs only 10% of the water of a regular solar power plant.

As to the length of time it takes to build a nuclear power plant, I am again in total agreement with you. It takes far too long to construct. The main reason for this is that each one is built like a custom construction project, similar to a Lamborghini sports car, piece by piece custom made and custom fitted. But the whole idea behind a Pebble Bed Modular Reactor is right there in its name: modularity. The pieces are mass produced to identical specifications. This will cut costs and shorten construction time. PBMR (the company in South Africa) wasn't building a modular reactor that can be mass produced as the actual term PBMR means. That was a part of the management failure I have posted on here previously.

[kristopher]

39. All you are doing is regurgitating nuclear industry talking points...

that have been repeatedly proved false.

Each technical "solution" for a specific problem in the area of nuclear energy is a framework for a different set of problems that can only be solved by a yet different design. It creates a wonderful circle-jerk of talking points for the ignorant, but those (your) logical fallacies and misinformation do nothing to solve the problem of climate change.

For example, in this case you think modular design is the answer, however there are a host of reasons that modular designs do not achieve the savings in time and money you attribute to them. Areas like the effects of economic competition, security, nuclear weapons proliferation and complexity of the required redundancy in safety and operational systems are all disqualifiers for the idea that modular systems are "the answer".

You should definitely hang your head in shame if you are supporting nuclear energy in spite of the abundance of evidence demonstrating that it is not needed since we do have a viable and immediately available alternative with NONE of the shortcomings associated with nuclear power.

[txlibdem]

43. You're wrong on all points but I gotta give you credit for being consistent

What in my post has "repeatedly been proven false" exactly? Proven by whom and when?

Which solution for a specific problem creates a different set of problems? You are talking gibberish. My post was about Pebble Bed Modular Reactors made from modular, mass produced components. You claim that mass production of exact components does not achieve savings in time and money. You obviously haven't heard of a man called Henry Ford, nor the assembly line. Nor have you heard of the VCR, DVD, computer components, or any of the thousands of other products that we enjoy today because they have been made using mass production on an assembly line. But I won't try to shoe-horn any logic into your carefully constructed reality, I guess.

You claim that nuclear power is not needed and that an unnamed alternative is immediately available. If this is true then why don't you name it and list its costs and construction timelines, its energy output on a per hour basis over a 24 hour period, and compare each of these to nuclear power, point for point.

[kristopher]

53. What did you write that was false?

Your words are in italics.
All of the anti-nuclear activists of the 1970s and 1980s are each responsible for hundreds of coal power plants that had to be built (to replace the energy that would have been created by nuclear power).
False - the failure of nuclear power was a result of the bad economics of nuclear power, not the environmentalists. The nuclear industry pulled the same shennigans then that they are pulling now, they lowballed the estimates on what it would cost to build safe plants and their lies eventually caught up to them. Cooper calls this "The Great Bandwagon Market" and shows the similarity to today's circumstances:

From the first fixed price turnkey reactors in the 1960s to the May 2009 cost projection of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the claim that nuclear power is or could be cost competitive with alternative technologies for generating electricity has been based on hope and hype. In the 1960s and 1970s, the hope and hype analyses prepared by reactor vendors and parroted by government officials helped to create what came to be known as the “great bandwagon market.” In about a decade utilities ordered over 200 nuclear reactors of increasing size.

Unfortunately, reality did not deliver on the hope and the hype. Half of the reactors ordered in the 1960s and 1970s were cancelled, with abandoned costs in the tens of billions of dollars. Those reactors that were completed suffered dramatic cost overruns (see Figure ES-1). On average, the final cohort of great bandwagon market reactors cost seven times as much as the cost projection for the first reactor of the great bandwagon market. The great bandwagon market ended in fierce debates in the press and regulatory proceedings throughout the 1980s and 1990s over how such a huge mistake could have been made and who should pay for it.

In an eerie parallel to the great bandwagon market, a series of startlingly low-cost estimates prepared between 2001 and 2004 by vendors and academics and supported by government officials helped to create what has come to be known as the “nuclear renaissance.” However, reflecting the poor track record of the nuclear industry in the U.S., the debate over the economics of the nuclear renaissance is being carried out before substantial sums of money are spent. Unlike the 1960s and 1970s, when the utility industry, reactor vendors and government officials monopolized the preparation of cost analyses, today Wall Street and independent energy analysts have come forward with much higher estimates of the cost of nuclear reactors.

The most recent cost projections are, on average, over four times as high as the initial nuclear renaissance projections.

Even though the early estimates have been subsequently revised upward in the past year and utilities offered some estimates in regulatory proceedings that were twice as high as the initial projections, these estimates remain well below the projections from Wall Street and independent analysts. Moreover, in an ominous repeat of history, utilities are insisting on cost-plus treatment of their reactor projects and have steadfastly refused to shoulder the responsibility for cost overruns.

One thing that utilities and Wall Street analysts agree on is that nuclear reactors will not be built without massive direct subsidies either from the federal government or ratepayers, or from both.

In this sense, nuclear reactors remain as uneconomic today as they were in the 1980s when so many were cancelled or abandoned.

http://www.olino.org/us/articles/2009/11/26/the-economics-of-nuclear-reactors-renaissance-or-relapse

Looking at who participated in the furthering of those lowball estimates is a great guide to the parties that are under the thumb of the nuclear industry.



I actually agree with you that energy storage needed for renewable energy on a large scale is not a show stopper. We absolutely need to be moving full force toward solar thermal power plants of gigawatt size and larger, like the Blythe Solar Power Project in cali (http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph... ), which needs only 10% of the water of a regular solar power plant.
The key to renewable energy is switching the grid from a machine that is built around the generating characteristics of large scale, centralized, thermal generation of electricity to a machine designed around the concept of smaller scale, distributed generation and the operational characteristics of renewable power. While these large scale projects such as you point to are important, but ultimately it will be small scale home and commercial systems that are the backbone of the system; with the large scale projects in the resource rich geographic ares areas being a means of filling in localized gaps with probably an 80/20 split between locally generated power in the supplemental power from large scale renewable projects like offshore wind or desert solar plants (either PV or thermal).


As to the length of time it takes to build a nuclear power plant, I am again in total agreement with you. It takes far too long to construct. The main reason for this is that each one is built like a custom construction project, similar to a Lamborghini sports car, piece by piece custom made and custom fitted. But the whole idea behind a Pebble Bed Modular Reactor is right there in its name: modularity. The pieces are mass produced to identical specifications. This will cut costs and shorten construction time. PBMR (the company in South Africa) wasn't building a modular reactor that can be mass produced as the actual term PBMR means. That was a part of the management failure I have posted on here previously.

When you are talking about nuclear power, the driving force is the people who stand to make a lot of money off of the technology. There is no way that a global focus on nuclear power will result in a cookie cutter nuclear plant. Let's say we try to meet ALL of our needs with nuclear and it required 10,000 new nuclear 1GW reactors. Do we use a French design, a South African design, a Canadian design, a US design, a Japanese design, a Russian design, a Korean design or a Chinese design?

Which country's nuclear industry gets dumped?

You want to use a PBMR design right? Since there is no working, economically viable design currently in place, what process do we use to design and select one, and how long will it take to test it under field conditions?

Remember, you are talking about building up to 10,000 of these units (or more if the size is smaller than a GW) so what do you do to ensure that there are no design flaws that shut them all down after 10 years of operation? That is no small task.


But let's say you do have a design and everyone on the planet agrees with it so the maximum savings is possible. What are the actual actual savings from economy of scale at that number of units? Well since you mentioned Lamborghini let's look at that.

We can posit that we will need 10K reactors over a 20 year period. That means 500 reactors per year. Lamborghini manufactures 2-3 THOUSAND vehicles (a much, much simpler design no?) each year and they DON'T capture any economy of scale worth mentioning.

There are other problems associated with your proposal, but I think I've substantiated the substance of my remarks. Your "solution" is nothing of the sort. We have the renewable resources and on the shelf technologies to meet ALL of our energy needs and they are safer, less expensive, and more quickly deployed than nuclear can possibly be.

Nuclear is the climate change solution brought to you by the same people who want you to keep using coal.

[txlibdem]

56. Not a very good argument

You refuted none of my points, gave no alternatives and provided nothing to back up your point but two separate links to the same anti-nuclear power activist (Cooper), backed up by Wall Street analysis. Nice.

Extrapolating excessive costs from past plant construction to claim that future construction budgets will be equally bloated is not sound science. We do agree that past nuclear power plants were too expensive but the reason for these overruns and construction delays were mainly caused by NIMBY lawsuits from well-meaning people against nuclear power coupled with a plethora of ever-changing environmental studies. Construction contractor greed and inexperienced project managers/contract negotiators caused cost overruns on some projects. There is no proof that any of these problems will occur again. The last nuclear power plant constructed in US was completed in 1984 IIRC so projecting costs from then to now is quite problematic.

The facts are that no new nuclear power plants were built after that time and America's electric power requirements continued to increase so hundreds of coal plants HAD to be built to supply the energy. That is the nature of electricity - supply has to match demand at all times or the whole grid goes down. The utilities had no choice but to build the type of plants they could at the time. Therefore, any person who helped to stop a nuclear power plant from being constructed is responsible at least in part for the construction of hundreds of coal plants. Fact. Every coal plant spews out tons of Uranium and Thorium each year. Fact. Ergo, the well-meaning people who wanted to reduce the chance of radiation getting into the environment (from nuclear power plants) have, instead, caused the release of thousands of tons of radioactive material into the environment.

Add to that the toxic heavy metals, lead and mercury that have leaked from coal ash dumps and has polluted our water supplies. Recently, an additional 39 locations have been identified as polluting ground water with the poisons that come from burning coal.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/08/39-more-toxic-coal-ash-sites-contaminate-u-s-water-supply.php

You also failed to explain the source of renewable energy that "makes nuclear power unnecessary." Which is it? Geothermal? Wind? Solar PV? Solar Thermal? Or ??? Name the solution you claim to have all figured out. You claim that decentralizing the source of renewable energy is going to solve all our power generation problems. How? With solar? Does the sun shine 24 hours a day in your world? Distributed energy generation is great for smaller nuclear power plants like the Traveling Wave Reactor.

The tough realities of the world require tough choices. And some of those choices may cause the oil companies to make less money and the coal monopolies to make less money. I'm sooo sorry about that. Nuclear power is not free but neither is solar, wind or geothermal. Our modern way of life costs money to maintain, that is another fact.

Pebble Bed Modular Reactors will reduce the costs of building a nuclear power plant by mass producing the components that go inside the plant. That does not mean a hundred plants, it means 100,000 straight pieces of pipe and 100,000 45 degree and 90 degree pipes, and 1.2 million bolts and nuts of each required size, as well as all the other needed components. Economies of scale will bring cost reductions. That is how it has worked for over a century. You cannot change facts just because it is related to nuclear power. Relating millions of mass produced parts to 3,000 cars is not an accurate or acceptable comparison. Lamborghini = hand made, Chevy Corvette = mass produced.

I agree that another 100 nuclear power plants that are made exactly as the ones in the 1970s were is a terribly bad idea. Fortunately, nobody is suggesting that. Contracts will be made by more experienced government officers, environmental rules have been ironed out already and there will be very few surprises in that respect, and the government has eased the approval process by leaps and bounds and standardized it as well. No other country's nuclear program need be terminated. I am not advocating changes for Israel or Belgium but the United States of America.

[kristopher]

58. Bullpuckey that is straight from the Nuclear Energy Instititute...

Thanks.

[DrGregory]

46. that's not what the scientists say...

>You should definitely hang your head in shame if you are supporting nuclear energy in spite of the abundance of evidence >demonstrating that it is not needed since we do have a viable and immediately available alternative with NONE of the >shortcomings associated with nuclear power.

Scientists say that nuclear power is ESSENTIAL.

For example, read the following white paper
published in August 2008, and signed by the
Directors of the Dept of Energy's National Labs:

"A Sustainable Energy Future - The Essential Role of Nuclear Energy"

http://www.ne.doe.gov/pdffiles/rpt_sustainableenergyfuture_aug2008.pdf

As mentioned above, this was signed by the Dept. of Energy's
10 Directors of the National Labs; including the gentleman who
was Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in August 2008.
His signature is the third down in the first column of the title page.

He is one Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winning Physicist. This
nuclear energy advocate and supporter is now President Obama's
Secretary of Energy.

Dr. Greg

[kristopher]

50. Actually that IS what the scientists say.

You quote bureaucratic administrators with a vested interest in encouraging the flow of federal dollars into nuclear research. Have you EVER found such an administrator that DIDN'T claim the area of their jurisdiction was "vital"?

The fact is that there is little to no analysis that concludes nuclear is essential to meeting climate change goals. Plenty of plans are floating around that make the unfounded assumption that nuclear will be part of the mix, but when that assumption is put to the test of rigorous analysis the assumption is proven wrong.

The last time you posted this I asked for the analysis that substantiates the claim that nuclear is needed; where is it?

[caraher]

52. I won't speak for the others, but Chu can be trusted

Chu's only vested interest is in what works. He does not have a long-term professional interest in nuclear power; he has a Nobel, which is a golden ticket in science, and he does what he wants to. If he didn't think climate change is THE problem that needs attention, he'd probably be carrying on with his second career in biophysics (which followed the atomic physics work that won him his Nobel).

He may be wrong, but if so he comes by his mistakes honestly.

[kristopher]

54. I think the basis of the letter is nothing more than common wisdom

That actually isn't so wise. There no detailed comparative analysis I've ever seen that reaches the conclusion of the letter, but there are a rather large number concluding the opposite.

The Jacobson analysis is an example of what I'm referring to:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/revsolglobwarmairpol.htm

It's the first item on the page. There is very little ambiguity on the results and it has been recognized as fact as early as the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. If those administrators are basing their opinions on fact, I'd love to see the evidence that supports their implicit claim that renewables and current technology cannot fulfill our needs.

[DrGregory]

75. National Academy of Science

The Lab Directors are basing their contention on a
well known conclusion of a study by the
National Academy of Science and Engineering
about the inadequacy of renewables to "go it alone"

I think you will find the conclusion at the
National Academy website in one of their stated
positions circa the mid '90s.

Dr. Greg

[kristopher]

82. IF such a conclusion were arrived at by the NAS (I doubt it)

then it has been shown to be false. There is NO QUESTION that renewables can not only provide all of our energy needs, they can also displace all fossil carbon fuels and do it more quickly, for less money and with far greater safety than nuclear can.

[DrGregory]

83. BALONEY

>then it has been shown to be false. There is NO QUESTION that renewables can not only provide all of our energy needs, >they can also displace all fossil carbon fuels and do it more quickly, for less money and with far greater safety than >nuclear can.

It may be "no question" in the minds < term used loosely > of some environmentalists;
but good scientists say that renewables can provide only a fraction of our demand

ONLY if the USA stopped being a major industrial power and went back
to being a society based on agriculture could renewables meet the total demand.

Some, perhaps yourself; welcome that change.

Most of us would not.

Dr. Greg

[kristopher]

88. That is false.

I challenge you to provide any analysis that explicitly supports your assertions. You stated there was a NAS study - cite it. You wrote "good scientists say that renewables can provide only a fraction of our demand ONLY if the USA stopped being a major industrial power and went back to being a society based on agriculture could renewables meet the total demand."

Since your claim is pure internet doomer bullpucky, you will not be able to provide any such assessment. The closest you will come would be to point to papers that answer the question of whether it is possible to replace fossil fuels with noncarbon energy sources. Those studies (such as the Sololow and Pacala's wedges) are designed to show the public that such a transition is possible, they make no effort at all to determine the best resources nor which of the resources are most effective or necessary.

Produce a citation.

[DrGregory]

91. Gladly

I challenge you to provide any analysis that explicitly supports your assertions. You stated there was a NAS study - cite it.

In conjunction with the National Academy of Sciences,
the US National Laboratories undertook a study as to
whether nuclear power was needed.

The results of this study was a white paper signed
by the Directors of the US Dept of Energy National Labs;
including Dr. Steven Chu, President Obama's Secretary
of Energy who signed on behalf of the lab he was then
directing; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory:

A Sustainable Energy Future:
The Essential Role of Nuclear Energy

http://www.ne.doe.gov/pdffiles/rpt_sustainableenergyfuture_aug2008.pdf

Additionally, see statements in support of nuclear energy
at the National Academy website, along with the websites
of the American Physical Society, and the American Institute
of Physics; as well as a nice review from the Academies at:

http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11998

On page 94 the Academy states that as much as 20%
can come from renewables, 25% if you count hydro
as renewable.

This is just the most recent cite of this determination,
which can be found in numerable National Academy publications.

It all goes back to a study the Academy did in the early
'90s. Although the Academy has kept abreast of recent
developments and technology; it has never changed the
original assessment that renewables can meet about 20%


Dr. Greg

[kristopher]

93. That isn't a "study" it is a statement of opinion by vested bureaucrats

Were is the data?

[DrGregory]

95. It is the summary

>That isn't a "study" it is a statement of opinion by vested bureaucrats.

No - it's the summary of a whole host of studies conducted by the
national labs. Feel free to explore the DOE and individual lab
websites for the detailed studies.

The national labs are not "vested" in the health of the nuclear industry.

That's about as vacuous as saying that the FAA or NASA has a vested
interest in the health of the airline industry. No - the labs are
funded by the Government - so Congress and the Administration have
their own experts in various scientific fields "on retainer" - so they
can get unbiased scientific opinions.

Scientific opinion has favored nuclear power and that drives the
various anti-nukes and "environmentalists" apoplectic because they
don't like the conclusions. Therefore, they claim bias.

Talk about lack of intellectual honesty; anyone that disagrees with
you is doing so for biased, parochial reasons.

Dr. Greg

[kristopher]

98. It isn't a study - it is an opinion by bureaucrats with a vested interest in funding

Ignoring the fact that those administrators are responsible for getting funding for their researchers is typical of your pronuclear blindness. If as you say "scientific opinion has favored nuclear power" then you should have no problem producing the research that proves your assertion that renewable energy cannot provide for our energy needs.

There are NO scenarios envisioned where nuclear power is the answer to our energy needs.

Put up or shut up.


Problems with nuclear:
* Prohibitively high, and escalating, capital costs
* Production bottlenecks in key components needed to build plants
* Very long construction times
* Concerns about uranium supplies and importation issues
* Unresolved problems with the availability and security of waste storage
* Large-scale water use amid shortages
* High electricity prices from new plants
From The Self Limiting Future of Nuclear Power, by Joe Romm
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/2008/nuclear_power_report.html

[DrGregory]

104. BALONEY

>Ignoring the fact that those administrators are responsible for getting funding for their researchers is typical of your pronuclear blindness.

The Lab Directors don't have to run to the nuclear industry for funding. They are
funded by CONGRESS and the Administration.

This is the typical anti-nuke clap-trap that when scientists that say nuclear is
the answer; then they have to be in bed with the nuclear industry.

As far as your litany of problems with nuclear; France doesn't
have those problems. The high costs, hold ups, long construction
times in the USA are the result of OBSTRUCTIONISM by the anti-nukes.

The anti-nukes CAUSE the problem - then they have the unmitigated GALL
to complain about they problem THEY CAUSED!!!

As far as uranium supplies - we have LOTS of uranium. It is one of the
most uniformly distributed elements in the Earth's crust. The concern
is about the cheapest uranium. At present, it costs about 2.1 cents per
kilowatt-hour to make electricity via nuclear ( the busbar cost ). Of
that, about 0.01 cents is for the fuel and 0.01 cent fuel is limited.
However, if you let the price double to 0.02 cents per kilowatt-hour;
then the supply swells dramatically. How will that doubling of fuel
cost affect the consumer - 0.01 cents per kilowatt-hour.

ANY Rankine steam cycle plant uses water.

How about we do what Commonwealth Edison did when they built their
fleet of power reactors ( now owned by Exelon ) in northern Illinois.

They build artificial lakes for each of those plants and let them fill
with rainwater. The plants RECYCLE that water over and over again.
Anything wrong with that?

The only ones with a water usage problem are the unimaginative anti-nukes
who can't see past a once through cooling system of a plant situated on
a river. They say - "Oh that is bad" and they UNIMAGINATIVELY assume that
that is the only thing that can be done. Because they want there to be
some bad aspect to the operation of the plant.

However, a little "out of the box" thinking - where the power company
makes its own lake and recycles the water - and the little amount of
evaporation is made up by natural rainwater NEVER occurs to the average
anti-nuke.

Dr. Greg

[kristopher]

105. Where are the data and the studies saying renewables can't do the job

Put up or shut up.

[DrGregory]

124. the cause of the problems are the ones who complain

Costs are not prohibitively high - in fact nuclear per kwh which is the
only way to measure - is second only to coal in being cheap. Coal is about
1.9 cents per kwh at the busbar and nuclear is 2.1 cents per kwh at the
busbar.

Construction times in the USA are a function of our dysfunctional court
and regulatory system. France and Japan can put up a nuclear power plant
in a few years. The problem isn't the technology - its our dysfunctional
regulatory environment which the antis exploit.

Uranium cost is a very minor portion of the cost of nuclear electricity.
One can let the cost of uranium double and the effect on overall price
is marginal. However, at double the fuel cost - there's plenty of uranium.
There is a shortage of super-cheap uranium; but uranium is on of the most
uniformly distributed elements in the Earth's crust.

Reprocess / Recycle / Reuse spent nuclear fuel is the answer. France
doesn't have a nuclear waste problem - they are not looking for a mountain
to bury waste in.

The water use is the same as any Rankine cycle steam plant. Do what
Commonwealth Edison did - build a lake for every plant. Natural rain
is more than enough to compensate for evaporation.

Dr. Greg

[bananas]

37. I've been offering the solution in every post

Right in my sigline, I've had a link to the "The full solution to global warming": http://journals.democraticunderground.com/bananas/826

Now, "links to untrusted sources" usually refers to computer security issues, concerns about getting viruses or other malware. I usually try to check my links before I post, if you find a problem with any of them, please let me know. I use no-script, so if a site has obnoxious flash ads or javascript junk, I never see it, so please let me know if that's the case. If by "links to untrusted sources" you mean you don't know how credible the source is, that's a different issue altogether.

There are two links in my sigline right now, both to democraticunderground.com, so if you are here in this forum, you can't consider them "links to untrusted sources" (in the computer security sense). One of those links is a quote from the "About Democratic Underground" page: 'We address the right in harsh terms, and we fully intend to make the word "conservative" absolutely radioactive' and it links to the "About Democratic Underground" page: http://democraticunderground.com/about.html

The other link is to "The full solution to global warming" and it links to an entry in my Democratic Underground journal: http://journals.democraticunderground.com/bananas/826
The reason I link to the journal entry instead of the forum discussion thread is because the url is shorter, and allows more room for other information in my sigline. I mostly use my journal as a way of bookmarking items so I can find them later.

At the end of the journal entry, it has a link to the forum discussion thread (as all journal entries do), that's also on Democratic Underground and cannot be considered a "link to an untrusted source" from a malware perspective. In the post, I have a link to a page on Climate Progress and a summary of the contents.

Perhaps you are wondering, "Is Climate Progress a trusted source?"

Well, the first reply in that thread is by NYC_SKP and he says:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=191961&mesg_id=191965

NYC_SKP DU Moderator Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Tue Mar-31-09 11:37 AM
Response to Original message
1. The Princeton Wedge Stabilization Game.

The Princeton Wedge Stabilization Game is pretty fun.
http://www.princeton.edu/wedges /
We played this at an IPCC conference in SF in 2007.

<snip>

I've bolded two items, one showing that NYC_SKP is a DU Moderator and one showing that he is familiar with the material and that it is in fact used at IPCC conferences. So, you shouldn't be too worried about my link to Climate Progress from either a malware or credibility concern.

A personal reference for the Climate Progress and Joe Romm comes from Paul Krugman, the well-known economist who writes for the New York Times.
On his blog on the New York Times website, Paul Krugman says "I trust Joe Romm on climate":

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/a-counterintuitive-train-wreck/

October 16, 2009, 10:10 am
A counterintuitive train wreck

Uh oh. I trust Joe Romm on climate — and his verdict on Superfreakonomics is pretty damning. I’ll get to work on the book myself, but it doesn’t look good.

<snip>

Yup, Paul Krugman links directly to the "Climate Progress" website and says "I trust Joe Romm on climate".
So you should definitely consider Climate Progress to be a trusted source!

If you don't know who Joe Romm is, wikipedia has a lot of information; among other things, he has a physics PhD from MIT and was DOE Acting Assistant Secretary under Clinton:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_J._Romm

Joseph J. Romm (born June 27, 1960) is an American author, blogger, physicist<1> and climate expert<2> who concentrates on methods of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and global warming and increasing energy security through energy efficiency, green energy technologies and green transportation technologies.<3><4> In December 2008, Romm was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In March 2009, Rolling Stone magazine named Romm to its list of "100 People Who Are Changing America".<5> In September 2009, Time magazine named him one of its "Heroes of the Environment (2009)", calling him "The Web's most influential climate-change blogger".<6>

Romm is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he writes and maintains their climate blog, ClimateProgress.org. In 2008, Time magazine named Romm's blog one of the "Top 15 Green Websites",<7> and in 2010, Time included Romm's blog in a list of the 25 "Best Blogs of 2010"<8> Romm is also the executive director and founder of the non-profit Center for Energy and Climate Solutions, which helps businesses and U.S. States adopt high-leverage strategies for saving energy and cutting pollution and greenhouse gas emissions<4> and is a principal of the Capital E Group, an energy technology consultant. Romm also writes regularly for several energy and news websites.

In the 1990s, Romm served as Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy. Romm has published several books on global warming and energy technology. Technology Review wrote that his December 2006 book, Hell and High Water, "provides an accurate summary of what is known about global warming and climate change, a sensible agenda for technology and policy, and a primer on how political disinformation has undermined climate science."<9> Romm's 2010 book, Straight Up, released in April 2010, is "largely a selection of his best blog postings over the past few years related to climate change issues".<10>

<snip>

Romm graduated from Middletown High School in 1978. He then attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1982 and a Ph.D. in 1987, both in physics.<13> He pursued part of his graduate work at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.<14> In 1987, Romm was awarded an American Physical Society Congressional Science Fellowship for the U.S. House of Representatives, where he provided science and security policy advice on the staff of Representative Charles E. Bennett.<15>

<snip>

Al Gore also recommends Joe Romm.
On his twitter account, Al Gore said:

http://twitter.com/algore/statuses/12469954346

Joe Romm has an important new book out. I recommend it: http://amzn.to/awZ2qj #climate

11:42 AM Apr 19th via web
Retweeted by 43 people

Al Gore

Another personal recommendation comes from Al Gore, the famous climate activist and former Vice-President.
Al Gore said "His blog, Climate Progress, is a must read." on his blog and crossposted it to the Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-gore/the-latest-must-read-gree_b_543449.html

Al Gore
Fmr. Vice President; Chairman, Current TV
Posted: April 19, 2010 05:01 PM

The Latest Must-Read Green Book

Joe Romm is one of the most important and influential voices fighting for an end to the climate crisis. His blog, Climate Progress, is a must read.

Romm just published an important new book, titled Straight Up: America's Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions. In the book, Romm "cuts through the misinformation and presents the truth about humanity's most dire threat. His analysis is based on sophisticated knowledge of renewable technologies, climate impacts, and government policy, written in a style everyone can understand."

If you are interested in the fight to solve the climate crisis, I recommend you read this book.

Cross-posted from Al Gore's Blog

(I added the bold to highlight the part I'm talking about here).
So, again, there should be no concern about Climate Progress as an untrusted source, either from a malware or credibility perspective.

Hope this helps!

[Nederland]

59. Question

Your solution calls for:

1 wedge of wind for power — one million large (2 MW peak) wind turbines.
1 wedge of wind for vehicles –another 2000 GW wind. Most cars must be plug-in hybrids or pure electric vehicles.
3 wedge of concentrated solar thermal (aka solar baseload)– ~5000 GW peak.
1 wedge of solar photovoltaics — 2000 GW peak.

How exactly do you intend to deal with the problem of wind and solar being intermittent sources of energy? I didn't see anything in the blog post that even acknowledged it as a problem...

[kristopher]

61. No power source delivers 100% of the time.

All renewables have different operational profiles, just as all central thermal systems have different operational profiles. The system is large enough that it possesses all the redundancy needed to keep the power flowing 24/7.

Wind Power Myths Debunked

November/December 2009

Michael Milligan, Kevin Porter, Edgar DeMeo, Paul Denholm, Hannele Holttinen, Brendan Kirby, Nicholas Miller, Andrew Mills, Mark O’Malley, Matthew Schuerger, and Lennart Soder

IEEE Power and Energy Magazine

The natural variability of wind power makes it different from other generating technologies, which can give rise to questions about how wind power can be integrated into the grid successfully. This article aims to answer several important questions that can be raised with regard to wind power. Although wind is a variable resource, grid operators have experience with managing variability that comes from handling the variability of load. As a result, in many instances the power system is equipped to handle variability. Wind power is not expensive to integrate, nor does it require dedicated backup generation or storage. Developments in tools such as wind forecasting also aid in integrating wind power. Integrating wind can be aided by enlarging balancing areas and moving to subhourly sched- uling, which enable grid operators to access a deeper stack of generating resources and take advantage of the smooth- ing of wind output due to geographic diversity. Continued improvements in new conventional-generation technolo- gies and the emergence of demand response, smart grids, and new technologies such as plug-in hybrids will also help with wind integration.

Download full paper at http://poweracrosstexas.org/node/115


For a more precise example see: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/03/29/0909075107.abstract



And a for more detailed explanation of the overall manner of operation of a distributed grid see these Amory Lovins articles:
http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E08-01_NuclearIllusion

http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E09-01_NuclearPowerClimateFixOrFolly


But you already knew all of that; you are just trying to make negative noise about renewables.

[Nederland]

63. The IEEE Article is a good one

If you had actually read it, which I suspect you did not, you would realize that it only addresses situations where wind penetrations are below 25%. The value of wind at levels above that are at this point theoretical and probably uneconomical.

<snip>

Isn’t There a Limit to How Much Wind Can Be Accommodated by the Grid?

Although wind is a variable resource, operating experience and detailed wind-integration studies have yet to find a credible and firm technical limit to the amount of wind energy that can be accommodated by electrical grids. Some countries already receive a significant amount of electricity from wind power. Denmark receives about 20% of its electricity from wind power (43% of peak load), and Germany has reached the level of 7% wind-energy penetration (30% of peak load). Spain and Portugal have each reached wind-energy penetration levels of 11% (30% of peak load), with a limited interconnection to the rest of Europe. Ireland has an island system with 9% wind-energy penetration (11% of peak load). There is not a technical limit to increased penetration of wind energy, but there might be an economic limit—a point at which it is deemed too expensive to accommodate more energy from wind in comparison with the value that it adds to the system. Years of worldwide experience in operating power systems with significant amounts of wind energy and detailed integration studies have shown that the increase in costs to accommodate wind can be modest, and that the value of additional wind energy does not decline as precipitously as once expected. More directly, it has been shown that large interconnected power grids can accommodate variable generation (wind and solar) at levels of 25% of peak load. Studies examining even greater levels of wind penetration are under way for both the Eastern and Western interconnections in the United States.

<snip>

But you already knew all of that; you are just trying to make negative noise about nukes.

[kristopher]

64. That's why I included the Kempton National Academy of Science article.

It addresses penetrations above 25% and clearly demonstrates the reliability that is attainable with the most variable of the renewable alternatives. Given that those renewable solutions include solar thermal, solar PV (with rapidly declining costs), geothermal, wave/tidal/current, biofuels and rapidly evolving storage solutions, it is obvious that the wind turbines will be working in tandem with a wide variety of generating profiles.

Your criticisms have no merit - as usual.

[Nederland]

67. That is a lie

Nowhere in the Kempton National Academy of Science article does it say how the grid will behave when wind penetrations exceed 25%.

[Name removed]

69. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[kristopher]

81. The Kempton article is the basis of the answer. If you don't see that the failing...

... is you ability to comprehend, not the research.

[DrGregory]

125. the argument doesn't work for solar

All renewables have different operational profiles, just as all central thermal systems have different operational profiles. The system is large enough that it possesses all the redundancy needed to keep the power flowing 24/7.
=====================================

If one has a fleet of coal plants or nuclear power plants, the shutdown
of one is not a fatal problem since the power company has enough excess
capacity in the other plants so that the plants can "cover" for each other.

If one has a fleet of nuclear power plants, and one has to take one down
for a few days to refuel - the other plants can pick up the slack.

However, that doesn't work for solar. If one of your solar power plants
is down because it is night time - they are ALL down because it is night.

Dr. Greg

[rainier]

35. PBMR technology feasible?

I disagree with your opinion that the PBMR technology is technically feasible. My country, Germany, has spent about 10 bn $ in PBMRs and now it becomes more and evident that there was no success: The dismantling of the small AVR reactor in Juelich, which was quoted in the past as highly successfull, will cost at least 0.8 bn $, or 0.5 $ per kWh of produced electricity. This is, because the reactor was operated at high temperatures (Helium temperatures of 950°C) which is now known not to be possible. The reactor is extremely contaminated, its beta contamination (strontium) is the largest of all nuclear installations world wide (as announced by AVR on WM00 in Tuscon, 2000). Solving technical problems of PBMRs requires similar effort as in the fusion case, which means at least additional 10 to 15 bn $.

[bananas]

38. Welcome to DU!

[txlibdem]

10. Steven Thomas, privatising of electricity and gas industries is his focus

The fact that the PBMR reactor would be built by the government-owned electric company is the reason for this zealot's anti-PBMR stance.

In June 2004, it was announced that a new PBMR would be built at Koeberg, South Africa by Eskom, the government-owned electrical utility.<4> There is opposition to the PBMR from groups such as Koeberg Alert and Earthlife Africa, the latter of which has sued Eskom to stop development of the project.<5> In September 2009 the demonstration power plant was postponed indefinitely.<6> In February 2010 the South African government stopped funding of the PBMR because of a lack of customers and investors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor

[pscot]

5. That won't need water

to keep it cool, will it?

[txlibdem]

9. PBMR reactors are cooled by Helium not water

"In the PBR, 360,000 pebbles are amassed to create a reactor core, and are cooled by an inert or semi-inert gas such as helium, nitrogen or carbon dioxide."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor

[Tesha]

12. And, strangely enough, helium is an element many scientists are quite concerned...

...about us running out of (or at least seeing its
price rise by several orders of magnitude).

Tesha

[DrGregory]

20. once again...misunderstanding reigns

> PBMR reactors are cooled by Helium not water

When we talk about river water and cooling;
we are NOT talking about water that is used
to cool the reactor. We are talking about
water that is used to cool the CONDENSERS
of a normal Rankine steam cycle.

A PBMR uses helium as reactor coolant.
However, the Rankine steam cycle hooked
to the PBMR uses water to cool the condensers
just like any other steam cycle electric power
plant.

The reactor is cooled by helium. The helium
then goes to a heat exchanger to turn water
into steam on the other side of the heat
exchanger.

The steam turns the turbine, and the turbine
exhaust is condensed back to water to be
recirculated.

In order for the turbine exhaust to be
condensed, you have to remove heat, which
is done by another water loop which is what
the river water or cooling tower water is
for.

A PBMR, although cooled by helium; needs
river water, cooling tower, or cooling lake
water to cool the condensers.

Dr. Greg

[Tesha]

13. *ALL* "heat engines" require a heat sink.

Cooling towers, huge geothermal installations, or
a handy lake, river, or ocean; take your choice.

Nuclear-powerd heat engines are no different in
this regard.

Tesha

[DrGregory]

6. another advanced design

In the first part of my career, I worked at
Argonne National Laboratory on a concept
called the Integral Fast Reactor or IFR.

Here's an interview of then Associate Director
Dr. Charles Till with Richard Rhodes that aired
on a Frontline program about 10 years ago:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

The IFR is inherently safe, proliferation resistant, and
highly efficient due to its high temperature molten sodium
coolant.

Dr. Greg

[pscot]

15. Does the Sodium become radioactive?

I seem to recall that liquid sodium was used as coolant at Hanford. The radioactive sodium is still a major headache today. For the last 40 years they've talked about turning it into glass logs for storage, but it has yet to happen.

[Dead_Parrot]

16. Seems unlikely

The longest-lived isotope of sodium (excluding the stable ²³Na) is ²²Na with a half-life of 2.6 years: After 40 years, the problem will have pretty much solved itself.

I believe there were some releases of ²⁴Na at Hanford: That's probably what your thinking of, although if the Na has acquired other stuff in it it might require some treatment.

[pscot]

17. My research is a bit stale

I wrote that paper 40 years ago.:P

[DrGregory]

18. sodium is not a long term problem

As Dead Parrot pointed out, the longest lived
radioactive isotope of sodium is Na-22, with
a half-life of 2.6 years.

However, a reactor is not going to make Na-22.
You put stable Na-23 into the reactor, and when
the Na-23 absorbs a neutron it becomes Na-24.

Na-24 has a half-life of 15 hours. So Na-24
decays fairly quickly. As long as the reactor
is operating and continually making new Na-24,
then the sodium loop is radioactive. That's
why LMFBR reactors like the IFR have 2 sodium
loops. Radioactive sodium from the reactor
transfers heat to a non-radioactive sodium
loop which then transfers the heat to water.

This way the sodium that goes into the heat
exchanger with the water is non-radioactive.
That way, even if there is a leak, the sodium
that reacts with the water is non-radioactive.

Hanford had one test reactor, FFTF that used
sodium coolant - which dumped its heat to the
air via sodium / air heat exchangers.

With exception of the water cooled N-reactor,
most of the reactors at Hanford that made
plutonium for the US nuclear weapons, were
air-cooled.

Contrary to a previous poster, sodium is NOT
a long term problem.

Dr. Greg

[bananas]

66. Did you attack or protect the whistleblowers?

Whistleblowers need protection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor#History

IFR opponents also presented a report<12> by the DOE's Office of Nuclear Safety regarding a former Argonne employee's allegations that Argonne had retaliated against him for raising concerns about safety, as well as about the quality of research done on the IFR program. The report received international attention, with a notable difference in the coverage it received from major scientific publications. The British journal Nature entitled its article "Report backs whistleblower", and also noted conflicts of interest on the part of a DOE panel that assessed IFR research.<13>. In contrast, the article that appeared in Science was entitled "Was Argonne Whistleblower Really Blowing Smoke?".<14> Remarkably, that article did not disclose that the Director of Argonne National Laboratories, Alan Schriesheim, was a member of the Board of Directors of Science's parent organization, the American Association for the Advancement of Science.<15>

[bananas]

68. Usenet and Congressional Record debate on the IFR back in 1994

The IFR has been discussed a number of times here.

In one thread last year, I posted a link to an old usenet discussion which referenced the Congressional Record: "105. Usenet! From 1994 - when the IFR was debated in Congress!" http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=217701&mesg_id=217882

Dead_Parrot replied with a link to the Congressional Record: "106. Here you go:" http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=217701&mesg_id=217883

I replied with some excerpts by John Kerry: "112. Congressional Record: June 30, 1994" http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=217701&mesg_id=218115

[DrGregory]

73. Discredited!!1

> I replied with some excerpts by John Kerry: "112. Congressional Record: June 30, 1994"

Senator Kerry's remarks on the floor of the Senate were TOTALLY DISCREDITED!!!

Dr. Till makes reference to the fact that Kerry was 100% WRONG!!

http://www.sustainablenuclear.org/PADs/pad0509till.html

Senators Simon and Kempthorne wrote a letter to the Washington Post which stated
Kerry was wrong. The Senators quoted a study by Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory that said Kerry was WRONG!!

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/05/opinion/l-new-reactor-solves-plutonium-problem-586307.html?n=Top%2FReference%2FTimes%20Topics%2FPeople%2FK%2FKempthorne%2C%20Dirk

Clinton and Gore wanted to kill the IFR as Dr Till states in his
Frontline interview and Kerry was their "point man" in the Senate.

However, Kerry's diatribe was later shown to be a tissue of LIES.

The SCIENTISTS from Argonne and Lawrence Livermore proved Kerry WRONG!!

Dr. Greg

[bananas]

120. Wrong - Kerry was correct, and validated by the 2003 MIT report

The "most important recommendation" from MIT's 2003 report "The Future of Nuclear Power":

The result of our detailed analysis of the relative merits of these representative
fuel cycles with respect to key evaluation criteria can be summarized as follows:
The once through cycle has advantages in cost, proliferation, and fuel cycle
safety, and is disadvantageous only in respect to long-term waste disposal; the
two closed cycles have clear advantages
only in long-term aspects of
waste disposal, and disadvantages in
cost, short-term waste issues, proliferation
risk, and fuel cycle safety. (See
Table.) Cost and waste criteria are
likely to be the most crucial for determining
nuclear power’s future.

We have not found, and based on
current knowledge do not believe it is
realistic to expect, that there are new
reactor and fuel cycle technologies
that simultaneously overcome the
problems of cost, safety, waste, and
proliferation.

Our analysis leads to a significant conclusion: The once-through fuel cycle best
meets the criteria of low costs and proliferation resistance. Closed fuel cycles
may have an advantage from the point of view of long-term waste disposal
and, if it ever becomes relevant, resource extension. But closed fuel cycles will
be more expensive than once-through cycles, until ore resources become very
scarce. This is unlikely to happen, even with significant growth in nuclear
power, until at least the second half of this century, and probably considerably
later still. Thus our most important recommendation is:

For the next decades, government and industry in the U.S. and elsewhere
should give priority to the deployment of the once-through fuel cycle,
rather than the development of more expensive closed fuel cycle
technology involving reprocessing and new advanced thermal or fast
reactor technologies.

This recommendation implies a major re-ordering of priorities of the U.S.
Department of Energy nuclear R&D programs.

[kristopher]

121. That entire report is damning for the nuclear industry..

...when viewed in light of what has happened since it was published.

[DrGregory]

130. Kerry was WRONG

Wrong - Kerry was correct, and validated by the 2003 MIT report
============================

The MIT report speaks in generalities.

Kerry was speaking about a PARTICULAR reactor design;
the IFR. Argonne National Lab and Lawrence Livermore
National Lab have said Kerry was WRONG!!

Kerry has no technical expertise - the idiot is a politician.

However, we have the best reactor lab and the best weapons
lab saying Kerry was WRONG on an issue that these two
labs are the EXPERTS on.

BTW; MIT is NOT the expert in nuclear weapons technology -
it is a UNIVERSITY for Heaven's sake.

One of the Labs that I quote DESIGNS the US nuclear weapons,
and hence should be the experts on what can / can not be
used to make nuclear weapons.

Dr. Greg

[kristopher]

132. No, he wasn't. but it couldn't be more clear that you are - again.

Fast Breeder Reactor Programs: History and Status
Efforts in the United States to resuscitate fast reactors

Since the cancellation of the CRBR in 1983, ANL and the Nuclear Energy program
office in the DOE have continued to seek ways to revive fast-neutron reactor
development in the United States, first by promoting the Integral Fast Reactor
concept,72 then through the Generation IV International Forum, and most
recently the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP).



Integral Fast Reactor and pyroprocessing
In the wake of the demise of the Clinch River Reactor project, ANL scientists
developed and promoted the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) concept. Patterned after
the EBR-II with its Integral Fast Reactor fuel cycle facility (see EBR-II discussion),
the IFR would integrate the plutonium-breeder reactor with an on-site spent fuel
pyroprocessing and electro-refining process. In this process, plutonium and the
minor transuranic elements would be separated and recycled together into new
fuel.

The IFR was advanced as the key to making the breeder reactor economical,
proliferation-resistant and environmentally acceptable.73 There were ample
grounds for skepticism, however. Most importantly, pyroprocessing looked
still more expensive than conventional reprocessing. Moreover, were the IFR
technology to be adopted by a non-weapon state it would provide the country
with access to tons of plutonium in each co-located reactor and reprocessing
facility. A cadre of experts trained in transuranic chemistry and plutonium
metallurgy could separate out the plutonium from the other transuranic elements
using hot cells and other facilities on-site. A 1992 study commissioned jointly
by the U.S. Departments of Energy and State describes a variety of ways to use a
pyroprocessing plant to produce relatively pure plutonium.74


Fast Reactor Development in the United States
Despite these problems, ANL was able to attract federal support for the IFR
concept for a decade until the Clinton Administration cancelled the IFR program
and the Congress terminated its funding in 1994. As a political compromise with
Congress, it was agreed that while EBR-II would be shut down, funding of the
fuel reprocessing research would continue—renaming it the “actinide recycling
project.”75 A decade later this program would be re-characterized and promoted as
necessary for long-term management of nuclear waste—becoming the centerpiece
of the George W. Bush Administration’s GNEP.


After Congress terminated funding for the IFR program, the DOE kept its
pyroprocessing program alive by selecting it to process 3.35 metric tons of
sodium-bonded EBR-II and FFTF spent fuel at INL. In 2006, the DOE estimated
that pyroprocessing could treat the remaining 2.65 tons of this fuel in eight
years at a cost of $234 million, including waste processing and disposal for a
reprocessing cost of approximately $88,000/kg.76


From:
Fast Breeder Reactor Programs:
History and Status
Research Report 8
International Panel on Fissile Materials
Thomas B. Cochran, Harold A. Feiveson, Walt Patterson, Gennadi Pshakin, M.V. Ramana, Mycle Schneider, Tatsujiro Suzuki, Frank von Hippel

www.fissilematerials.org

February 2010
© 2010 International Panel on Fissile Materials

[DrGregory]

136. Same old cast of characters

Thomas B. Cochran, Harold A. Feiveson, Walt Patterson, Gennadi Pshakin, M.V. Ramana, Mycle Schneider, Tatsujiro Suzuki, Frank von Hippel
=======================

Sure Cochran, Von Hippel et al say that you can make
bombs from IFR plutonium.

However, they are NOT experts in nuclear bomb
design. They are straying from their field of
expertise - which good scientists should not do.

However, we do have REAL experts in nuclear bomb
design; the scientists at Lawrence Livermore.
They are the scientists that have designed the
US nuclear weapons - so they know what can /
can not be done in the field of bomb design.

They say that you can't use IFR plutonium for
bombs.

I will go with the real experts any day of the week.

Dr. Greg

[bananas]

134. No, Kerry wasn't wrong, and Kerry isn't an idiot

DrGregory, you keep calling Kerry an idiot.
Kerry is not an idiot, the MIT report came to the same conclusions Kerry did.
You must think the people at MIT are idiots too, because they came to the same conclusions as Kerry did.
Kerry is one of our best Democratic leaders.
He has a long history of fighting for our Democratic values.

You also said, "MIT is NOT the expert in nuclear weapons technology - it is a UNIVERSITY for Heaven's sake."

Members of the MIT study include John Deutch and John Holdren.
John Deutch was CIA Director under President Clinton.
John Holdren is President Obama's Science Advisor.

John Deutch has much experience with evaluating what can / can not be used to make nuclear weapons, here are some of the positions he held:
- Director of Central Intelligence
- Deputy Secretary of Defense
- Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology
- Director of Energy Research
- Acting Assistant Secretary for Energy Technology
- Undersecretary in the United States Department of Energy
- President's Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee
- President's Commission on Strategic Forces
- White House Science Council
- President's Intelligence Advisory Board
- President's Commission on Aviation Safety and Security
- President's Commission on Reducing and Protecting Government Secrecy
- President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology
- Chairman of the President's Commission to Assess the Organization of the Federal Government to Combat the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction

You might not understand what Aviation Safety and Security has to do with nuclear weapons and nuclear energy; it's been pointed out a number of times in this forum that similar methodologies are used in analyzing catastrophic failure rates of aircraft, nuclear weapons systems, and nuclear power plants. John Deutch has experience with these methodologies across all three technologies.

http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/experts/5/john_m_deutch.html

John M. Deutch

International Council Member, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

Experience

John M. Deutch is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served as Director of Central Intelligence from May 1995–December 1996. From 1994–1995, he served as Deputy Secretary of Defense and served as Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology from 1993–1994. John Deutch has also served as Director of Energy Research (1977–1979), Acting Assistant Secretary for Energy Technology (1979), and Undersecretary (1979–1980) in the United States Department of Energy.

In addition, John Deutch has served on the President's Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee (1980–1981); the President's Commission on Strategic Forces (1983); the White House Science Council (1985–1989); the President's Intelligence Advisory Board (1990–1993); the President's Commission on Aviation Safety and Security (1996); and the President's Commission on Reducing and Protecting Government Secrecy (1996). He currently is a member of the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (1997) and the Chairman of the President's Commission to Assess the Organization of the Federal Government to Combat the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (1998). Dr. Deutch serves as director for the following publicly held companies: Ariad Pharmaceutical, Citicorp, CMS Energy, Cummins, Raytheon, and Schlumberger Ltd.

Dr. Deutch has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1970 and has served as Chairman of the Department of Chemistry, Dean of Science, and Provost. Dr. Deutch has published over 120 technical publications in physical chemistry, as well as numerous publications on technology, international security, and public policy issues.

[DrGregory]

139. Who are the experts in nuclear weapons?

DrGregory, you keep calling Kerry an idiot.
Kerry is not an idiot, the MIT report came to the same conclusions Kerry did.
=======================================

MIT is a private university and they are NOT the
experts in nuclear weapons.

There are only TWO places in the USA where there
are experts in the exact details as to what can
be done in nuclear weaponry. Those experts are
at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore.

MIT and everyone else has to rely on very
GENERALIZED statements that have been declassified.

The Senate requested that the EXPERTS in nuclear
weaponry in the USA - at Lawrence Livermore -
answer the question as to what could be done
with IFR fuel.

Lawrence Livermore gave them the answer.

John Kerry IGNORED that answer because he
was asked by Clinton / Gore to be the point
man for their position in the Senate.

When someone IGNORES EXPERT scientific opinion,
merely to push a political agenda - to the
detriment of the public ( we could really use
that research now ) then in my book, that makes
the man a complete IDIOT!!!

If a doctor diagnosed a man with cancer, but
Kerry said he didn't have cancer in order to
push a merely political agenda - would you not
call him an IDIOT??

When you ignore the EXPERTS ( and MIT is NOT
an expert in nuclear weapons ) then the man
is an IDIOT!!

Dr. Greg

[bananas]

71. John Kerry on the IFR, from the Congressional Record: June 30, 1994

Congressional Record: June 30, 1994

<snip>

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, a few moments before the quorum call was
put into place, the Senator from Idaho asked Senators to listen
carefully to this debate, because it is about the future, the future of
nuclear power, and about the interests of the United States with
respect to the control of plutonium.

<snip>

The reality of the ALMR, the advanced liquid metal reactor, is that
it is a waste and that it is a danger, that it is fiscally
irresponsible, scientifically irresponsible, and irresponsible with
respect to arms control and nuclear waste. And every single independent
study--independent study--confirms what I have just said: OTA, National
Academy of Sciences, GAO, and so forth.

Now let me frame this debate, if I may, by reading a letter from the
President of the United States sent to me yesterday. I will just read
the first paragraph which is relevant.

Thank you for your letter supporting our decision to
terminate the Department of Energy's advanced liquid metal
reactor program, including the integral fast reactor project.
I want to assure you that this administration does not
support the IFR and will oppose any efforts to continue the
funding for this reactor project. The IFR has no foreseeable
commercial value and its continuation would undercut our
international nuclear weapons nonproliferation efforts.

<snip>

The question is squarely before the U.S. Senate: Do we have the
courage and the foresight to be willing to cut a program that every
single analysis has deemed a waste, which the President does not want,
which the Secretary of Energy does not want, and which so clearly
threatens the proliferation concerns of this country?

<snip>

This kind of irresponsible effort for fundamental pork barrel
purposes undercuts every single effort of the United States in the
international community.

<snip>

My colleagues are going to come to the floor and say you can
eliminate all of that because this technology is going to chew it all
up. Wrong. Wrong. The National Academy of Sciences tells you: Wrong and
unnecessary. That is the most important thing I ask colleagues to focus
on. When we come to the floor of the Senate and we are asked to make a
judgment about a program--you may have the most incredibly highfalutin,
wonderful program of creative technology, but it could be absolutely
unnecessary because you have a far simpler, more readily available,
safer technology at your hands. And that is precisely what we have.

<snip>

This is not a vote for or against nuclear power and it should not be
confused as that. I support light water reactor technology. I support
the advanced light water technology that is proposed in this bill.

<snip>

[Name removed]

77. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Name removed]

131. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[DrGregory]

138. This is about SCIENCE - not left / right politics

"Kerry LIES!!"
"idiot politician the likes of Kerry"
DrGregory has outed himself as a right-wing troll.
=====================================================

I don't care about right-wing / left-wing ; but
I care about good science and what people are
saying that doesn't make sense scientifically.

Kerry is NOT a scientist - he's a politician.

When it comes to your health - do you believe
some politician or do you believe your doctor?

When it comes to science - do you believe a
politician or do you believe the scientists
IN THAT FIELD. See:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

"Q: The argument most put on the Senate floor was that the IFR increases the risks of proliferation.

A: Yes. Well, it doesn't. As simply as that. There's no technical reason why one would make that argument. In order to produce weapons, you have to produce pure plutonium. The IFR process will not do that. "

http://www.sustainablenuclear.org/PADs/pad0509till.html

"The anti-IFR forces were led by John Kerry. He was the principal speaker and the floor manager of the anti forces in the Senate debate. He spoke at length, with visual aids; he had been well prepared. His arguments against the merits of the IFR were not well informed�and many were clearly wrong. But what his presentation lacked in accuracy it made up in emotion. He attacked from many angles, but principally he argued proliferation dangers from civilian nuclear power."

From Kerry's Senate colleagues who received the same reports:

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/05/opinion/l-new-reactor-solves-plutonium-problem-586307.html

"You are mistaken in suggesting that the reactor produces bomb-grade plutonium: it never separates plutonium; the fuel goes into the reactor in a metal alloy form that contains highly radioactive actinides. A recent Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory study indicates that fuel from this reactor is more proliferation-resistant than spent commercial fuel, which also contains plutonium. "

Dr. Greg

[Terry in Austin]

40. Nice lab curiosity

Nuclear power struggles along with a huge energy subsidy for our fossil fuel base.

It's not going to replace that base. In fact, no combination of non-fossil energy sources is going to replace it. We're just going to be obliged to make do with a lot less as the 21st Century wears on.

Doesn't mean we should stop tinkering in the lab, but thinking it's going to preserve "our way of life" is pretty much wishful.

[Nederland]

60. France did it

France gets 80% of it's electricity from nuclear. If they converted all their gasoline vehicles to electric vehicles that got charged at night when the demand for electricity is 60% of daytime demand, they would practically eliminated all fossil fuel consumption.

[Terry in Austin]

62. France has done it so far, anyway

They were smart enough and small enough to get ahead of the curve on the necessary fossil-fuel subsidy and get a nuclear infrastructure in place. A lot of what makes it even possible to have nukes depends on the existing fossil energy base.

It remains to be seen, I think, whether the French nuclear infrastructure can support itself energy-wise as the fossil energy base dwindles. Sure, we can charge up the EV with nuke-juice, but there's still a lot of roads to build, cement to bake, steel to smelt, mines to sink, ore to haul -- all of which need to be plentiful in order to keep the reactors humming.

[Christopher Calder]

135. The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor is even better!

SEE: http://thorium.50webs.com/

The Pebble Bed and Prismatic Block reactor designs are a big improvement over current 3rd generation light water reactors, and they are both meltdown proof designs. But the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor uses thorium as the prime fuel, which we will never run out of, and its expected cost is 25% of the cost of light water nuclear reactors, not 70%. The LFTR has a much higher power to weight ratio, meaning it is much smaller and requires far less concrete and steel to construct.

Mining thorium is very safe as thorium is barely radioactive until you get it in the reactor core and expose it to neutron bombardment. Then you cook it until it is 100% turned into energy. That means hardly any long term radioactive waste. The LFTR is the cleanest new energy source possible, cleaner than wind or solar power because the mass of materials you need to construct them is so tiny. Renewable energy projects are all resource hogs that require gigantic amounts of materials to construct, and that construction itself causes pollution, not to mention the vast amounts of land area they destroy.

If we do not have dirt cheap electricity, we have no chance of survival on this planet in the kinds of large numbers of humans we have today. The renewable energy fad is leading us to the world of Soylent Green, not the world of Utopia.

See "The Renewable Energy Disaster" at: http://renewable.50webs.com/

[kristopher]

137. Thorium Fuel: No Panacea for Nuclear Power

Thorium Fuel: No Panacea for Nuclear Power
By Arjun Makhijani and Michele Boyd

A Fact Sheet Produced by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and
Physicians for Social Responsibility


Thorium “fuel” has been proposed as an alternative to uranium fuel in nuclear reactors. There are not “thorium reactors,” but rather proposals to use thorium as a “fuel” in different types of reactors, including existing light-water reactors and various fast breeder reactor designs.

Thorium, which refers to thorium-232, is a radioactive metal that is about three times more abundant than uranium in the natural environment. Large known deposits are in Australia, India, and Norway. Some of the largest reserves are found in Idaho in the U.S. The primary U.S. company advocating for thorium fuel is Thorium Power (www.thoriumpower.com). Contrary to the claims made or implied by thorium proponents, however, thorium doesn’t solve the proliferation, waste, safety, or cost problems of nuclear power, and it still faces major technical hurdles for commercialization.

Not a Proliferation Solution
Thorium is not actually a “fuel” because it is not fissile and therefore cannot be used to start or sustain a nuclear chain reaction. A fissile material, such as uranium-235 (U-235) or plutonium-239 (which is made in reactors from uranium-238), is required to kick-start the reaction. The enriched uranium fuel or plutonium fuel also maintains the chain reaction until enough of the thorium target material has been converted into fissile uranium-233 (U-233) to take over much or most of the job. An advantage of thorium is that it absorbs slow neutrons relatively efficiently (compared to uranium-238) to produce fissile uranium-233. The use of enriched uranium or plutonium in thorium fuel has proliferation implications. Although U-235 is found in nature, it is only 0.7 percent of natural uranium, so the proportion of U-235 must be industrially increased to make “enriched uranium” for use in reactors. Highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium are nuclear weapons materials.

In addition, U-233 is as effective as plutonium-239 for making nuclear bombs. In most proposed thorium fuel cycles, reprocessing is required to separate out the U-233 for use in fresh fuel. This means that, like uranium fuel with reprocessing, bomb-making material is separated out, making it vulnerable to theft or diversion. Some proposed thorium fuel cycles even require 20% enriched uranium in order to get the chain reaction started in existing reactors using thorium fuel. It takes 90% enrichment to make weapons‐usable
uranium, but very little additional work is needed to move from 20% enrichment to 90% enrichment. Most of the separative work is needed to go from natural uranium, which has 0.7% uranium-235 to 20% U-235.

It has been claimed that thorium fuel cycles with reprocessing would be much less of a proliferation risk because the thorium can be mixed with uranium-238. In this case, fissile uranium-233 is also mixed with non-fissile uranium-238. The claim is that if the uranium-238 content is high enough, the mixture cannot be used to make bombs without a complex uranium enrichment plant. This is misleading. More uranium-238 does dilute the uranium-233, but it also results in the production of more plutonium-239 as the reactor operates. So the proliferation problem remains – either bomb-usable uranium-233 or bomb-usable plutonium is created and can be separated out by reprocessing.

Further, while an enrichment plant is needed to separate U-233 from U-238, it would take less separative work to do so than enriching natural uranium. This is because U-233 is five atomic weight units lighter than U-238, compared to only three for U-235. It is true that such enrichment would not be a straightforward matter because the U-233 is contaminated with U-232, which is highly radioactive and has very radioactive radionuclides in its decay chain. The radiation-dose-related problems associated with separating U-233 from U-238 and then handling the U-233 would be considerable and more complex than enriching natural uranium for the purpose of bomb making. But in principle, the separation can be done, especially if worker safety is not a primary concern; the resulting U-233 can be used to make bombs. There is just no way to avoid proliferation problems associated with thorium fuel cycles that involve reprocessing. Thorium fuel cycles without reprocessing would offer the same temptation to reprocess as today’s once-through uranium fuel cycles.

Not a Waste Solution

Proponents claim that thorium fuel significantly reduces the volume, weight and long-term radiotoxicity of spent fuel. Using thorium in a nuclear reactor creates radioactive waste that proponents claim would only have to be isolated from the environment for 500 years, as opposed to the irradiated uranium-only fuel that remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. This claim is wrong. The fission of thorium creates long-lived fission products like technetium-99 (half-life over 200,000 years). While the mix of fission products is somewhat different than with uranium fuel, the same range of fission products is created. With or without reprocessing, these fission products have to be disposed of in a geologic repository.

If the spent fuel is not reprocessed, thorium-232 is very-long lived (half-life:14 billion years) and its decay products will build up over time in the spent fuel. This will make the spent fuel quite radiotoxic, in addition to all the fission products in it. It should also be noted that inhalation of a unit of radioactivity of thorium-232 or thorium-228 (which is also present as a decay product of thorium-232) produces a far higher dose, especially to certain organs, than the inhalation of uranium containing the same amount of radioactivity. For instance, the bone surface dose from breathing the an amount (mass) of insoluble thorium is about 200 times that of breathing the same mass of uranium.

Finally, the use of thorium also creates waste at the front end of the fuel cycle. The radioactivity associated with these is expected to be considerably less than that associated with a comparable amount of uranium milling. However, mine wastes will pose long-term hazards, as in the case of uranium mining. There are also often hazardous non-radioactive metals in both thorium and uranium mill tailings.

Ongoing Technical Problems
Research and development of thorium fuel has been undertaken in Germany, India, Japan, Russia, the UK and the U.S. for more than half a century. Besides remote fuel fabrication and issues at the front end of the fuel cycle, thorium-U-233 breeder reactors produce fuel (“breed”) much more slowly than uranium-plutonium-239 breeders. This leads to technical complications. India is sometimes cited as the country that has successfully developed thorium fuel. In fact, India has been trying to develop a thorium breeder fuel cycle for decades but has not yet done so commercially.

One reason reprocessing thorium fuel cycles haven’t been successful is that uranium-232 (U-232) is created along with uranium-233. U-232, which has a half-life of about 70 years, is extremely radioactive and is therefore very dangerous in small quantities: a single small particle in a lung would exceed legal radiation standards for the general public. U-232 also has highly radioactive decay products. Therefore, fabricating fuel with U-233 is very expensive and difficult.

Not an Economic Solution

Thorium may be abundant and possess certain technical advantages, but it does not mean that it is economical. Compared to uranium, thorium fuel cycle is likely to be even more costly. In a once-through mode, it will need both uranium enrichment (or plutonium separation) and thorium target rod production. In a breeder configuration, it will need reprocessing, which is costly. In addition, as noted, inhalation of thorium-232 produces a higher dose than the same amount of uranium-238 (either by radioactivity or by weight).

Reprocessed thorium creates even more risks due to the highly radioactive U-232 created in the reactor. This makes worker protection more difficult and expensive for a given level of annual dose. Finally, the use of thorium also creates waste at the front end of the fuel cycle. The radioactivity associated with these is expected to be considerably less than that associated with a comparable amount of uranium milling. However, mine wastes will pose long-term hazards, as in the case of uranium mining. There are also often hazardous non-radioactive metals in both thorium and uranium mill tailings.

Fact sheet completed in January 2009
Updated July 2009