Breeder reactors Bush's Plan is unsafe

[IChing]

France has not built new plants and has no plans for new reactors. Bush lies, people die
From the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist.

Bad ideas seldom die: they simply go into hibernation, ready to burst forth when conditions ripen.

A decade ago, the transmutation of high-level nuclear waste was widely seen as a dead end. It was too complex, too congenial to proliferation, and too expensive. But today, transmutation research is again fashionable. At international energy conferences it is lauded as "bringing to the table new concepts that could be relevant for next-generation power producing systems" and as being "rather seductive to all of us" because it will require "new reprocessing techniques, new fuel developments, additional nuclear data, new reactors and irradiation facilities." In 1999, Europe's Nuclear Energy Agency said transmutation research in Japan would help bring "the nuclear option into the twenty-first century in a healthy state." And in January, Pete Domenici, New Mexico's Republican senator, secured $34 million to test the technology at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

What's going on? How did moribund, poorly coordinated research programs on transmutation spring back to life? In a word: politics.
snip>>>>>.

The case against it
Proponents claim that transmutation--once developed and refined--will help solve the nuclear waste problem. Transmutation has even been described by Los Alamos as the solution to the proliferation problem. Neither claim is likely to prove out.

Rather, a close look suggests that transmutation research in the field has been driven by political forces intent on propping up the nuclear power enterprise.

A great deal of work and money--perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars--would be needed to fully develop and build the types of reactors needed for transmutation. These "fast neutron" machines would include subcritical reactors driven by neutron-producing proton accelerators, as well as fast-neutron "plutonium burner" reactors--varieties of breeder reactors first conceived during the Manhattan Project.

Transmutation was intensively investigated in the 1980s and looked at again in the mid-1990s, and found wanting. It was an inefficient way to address problems in nuclear waste management; it was too expensive; and it presented serious proliferation concerns.
snip>>>>>.

http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=ma01makh...

[Maple]

1. Pebble bed reactors

What should have been built in the first place

[IChing]

2. Not really

The industry acknowledges that "fuel pebble manufacturing defects are the most significant source of fission product release." Recent history shows that some companies have falsified fuel quality. In fact, there have been instances of fuel sabotage and tampering over the last few decades. Germany and Japan have shut down plants or refused fuel shipments once the problems were discovered. The industry can't produce "defect-free" fuel and therefore it is a certainty that a pebble bed reactor will experience an accident. The industry acknowledges that there is approximately 1 defect per pebble associated with these layers.

There was a pebble bed reactor accident at Hamm-Uentrop West Germany nine days after the Chernobyl accident. On May 4 1986, a pebble became lodged in a feeder tube. Operators subsequently caused damage to the fuel during attempts to free the pebble. Radiation was released to the environs. The West German government closed down the research program because they found the reactor design unsafe.

http://www.tmia.com/industry/pebbles.html source.

[jpak]

5. More on PBMR safety issues...

http://www.ieer.org/comments/energy/chny-pbr.html

http://www.earthlife-ct.org.za/ct/article.php?story=20040521121121179

Any speculation on the inherent "safety" and economics of the PBMR should be deferred until an actual prototype is built and the design is licensed by the US NRC.

No prototype of the South African PBMR has been built and the US NRC has some serious questions regarding their safety.

There are serious concerns regarding the economics of the proposed PBMR as well.

http://www.earthlife-ct.org.za/ct/article.php?story=20040521121121179

The estimated construction cost of the prototype 110 MW SA PBMR is >1.8 billion Rand...

PBMR = Pig in Poke.

[Igel]

3. Bad link.

Or at least IE 6.0 won't get it to work.

I was wondering why France was cited. Is there a claim that France is building new reactors, viz. breeder reactors, or should I understand the implicature to be that what France does, we should do?

Finland is building one (non-breeder), last I heard. To comply with Kyoto.

[IChing]

4. sorry the link

worked on another thread


http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=ma01makhijani

[IChing]

6. the above link

works

[NNadir]

7. Accelerator driven transmutation systems are indeed expensive,

They're almost expensive as a plant of similar capacity that produced power by means of photovoltaic power, except of course the PV plant would be useless capacity at night, or when it was cloudy, or when it was raining.

Thus I am not a fan of accelerator driven transmutation systems. The chief reason for building these plants is to further ratchet up the already spectacular safety record of nuclear power plants. An ordinary pressurized water reactor can be built for about two billion dollars in countries not inhabited by illiterate morons. Accelerator transmutation reactors are expected to cost about 10 billion dollars. Now the big selling point is that the accelerator reactor is "safer." How much safer? Well, first off, no one has ever died from the operation of a pressurized water reactor. So we are being asked to spend an extra 7 billion dollars, not to save a life, but to save a theoretical life imagined in the dark, dark fantasies of poorly educated anti-nuclear paranoids.

But these people cannot be satisfied. No amount of evidence will ever satisfy them. They keep imagining all kinds of fantastic scenarios about nuclear power even as the atmosphere collapses around them. (I regard them as immoral idiots, but that's just my opinion.) Although thousands upon thousands of reactor-years of experience on the planet they still chant the "nuclear power is dangerous" rosary. Though no matter how many times you ask them, they cannot produce a single person in the United States who has actually died from exposure to so called "nuclear waste," they still insist on calling it "dangerous nuclear waste." (Maybe we can get them to look up the word "dangerous?")

I personally feel that with hundreds of billions already spent in Iraq to satisfy the stupid, we cannot afford billions upon billions more to satisfy other stupid people, even if their stupidity seems, on the surface at least, different. It's not like these people are capable of being educated. It's not like they're able to assess data.

Fuel recycling techniques that are far less elaborate than accelerator driven systems are already in operation worldwide. Moreover, breeding capacity is not really needed. There are over 1000 MT of plutonium available and ready for use. About 200 MT of this is surplus weapons plutonium. The rest is in spent fuel. If you do the calculation, one sees that the energy contained in this plutonium alone is sufficient to provide every single joule of energy used anywhere for any purpose on this planet for about one month. (In that theoretical month, there would be zero air pollution, and all our rivers would run free.)


It actually develops that we don't need much breeder capacity at all and may not want it for many many years. Such capacity was only proposed when it was thought that Uranium was rare. We now know it's nearly ubiquitous. Right now uranium is so cheap it is not economical to use plutonium. Some day it might be, but we can address that issue when it comes. A reactor being operated in Russia right now by the Thorium Power Company, a PWR with a different fuel loading scheme, is converting plutonium breeding capacity into safer and more broadly usable U-233 breeding capacity. U-233 when placed in a CANDU reactor under the right conditions is actually a breeding fuel, even in a thermal neutron spectrum. This is why India has been building so many CANDU type reactors and continues to build them. They have lots and lots of thorium, enough to last them for many centuries.

For the record, I have privately, using my newly developed (self-taught) nuclear engineering skills, have begun to work on a type of fast spectrum reactor that does not have a liquid metal cooled core. Actually it's a back burner project, but I will probably patent it in the next decade. In a few decades, after I am dead, people may want to have fast spectrum reactors, because they manage the accumulation of transplutonium actinides quite well and help to recover their energy. Some of these fast reactors may be liquid metal types, but I'm sure they'll be quite different than what was proposed in the 1980's, if only because of advances made in materials science. Maybe someone somewhere will use my reactor design, you never know. I would be very happy to give something that nice to the future.

For the record, as I have stated elsewhere, I am not a fan of pebble bed reactors. The fuel is too stable and too difficult to recycle. This is wasteful. This technology is purposed again, to satisfy the fantasies of the stupid, and the stupid are incapable of being satisfied on the grounds they cannot be educated.

[Kolesar]

8. Radioactive fuel recycling

This is the topic I thought I was asking about in my previous thread about "actinide recycling". DU Thread Thank you for your answers, btw.

I had a moment to ask a local nuclear engineer about recycling. He was not-so-enthused about the CANDU reactor because it needed heavy water. He mentioned an exciting idea about using lasers but would not elaborate on it because he was eager to move along and talk to the man who leads our state alternative energy advocacy group. That atomic scientist article was the most comprehensive thesis I have read on the subject of recycling. I hope I can find more material.

My impression on the huge cost of our local nuclear plants was that the builders were forced to reengineer the control system(s) in mid project. That added $ millions to the cost of each project (there were two sites), but it also delayed the moment when they could go online and begin billing the rate payers for the projects. A $700 million dollar project turned into a generating plant that cost "a few billion" dollars. The absolutely huge interest rates in the mid-1980s that they had to pay to finance the construction added $ billions to the total cost, so each plant ended up costing about $7 billion when is came online in 1987.

[NNadir]

9. Actually the cost of heavy water isn't really prohibitive.

Deuterium enrichment of water is a side product of electroysis. The main commercial application for electrolysis is to produce chlorine, which is of course used for many thousands of products, from household bleach, to paper, to vinyl chloride. (Soda lime is another product of electrolysis that has huge commercial applications.)

Another other side product of this process is, of course, hydrogen. It is really not economic from an energy perspective to set out to make hydrogen by electrolysis, since that process has low efficiency, but nonetheless, it is unavoidable that one must produce it. Because of a huge isotope effect in the hydrogen-deuterium mixture in ordinary water, the largest for any two isotopes of the same element, the gas released from the electrolysis units is depleted with respect to deuterium and the water remaining behind is enriched with respect to it. Using this process, one can obtain as much heavy water as one desires.

In a CANDU reactor, the heavy water is not consumed but remains in the reactor for it's lifetime. Thus the expense is a capital expense and not a long term expense.

People seem to expect that nuclear power needs to meet standards that no other form of energy is required to meet. For instance the standard at Yucca Mountain calls for a probability that no one be injured by it for many thousands of years. On the other hand, one can dump millions of tons of coal waste almost at will either into the atmosphere or on to the land.

Opponents of nuclear power, among whom I was once included, raise completely ridiculous and idiotic standards to try to stop the construction of nuclear power plants. Moreover, the power companies are compelled to address these absurd objections at high capital cost, whereupon the morons in question then crow "nuclear power is uneconomical." These same morons who have demanded probabilities of one chance in less than 10 million completely and immorally ignore the certainty one chance in one that global climate change and air pollution deaths will occur.

If this isn't immoral stupidity, I don't know what is.

[dcfirefighter]

10. Recommended Reading?

NNadir -- I always look forward to your posts. As a self-taught nuclear power advocate, do you have any book recommendations? I wouldn't mind a few with a range from layman and up. I hated calculus, but had quite a few years of it. Any differential equations presented will be accepted by me as an article of faith.

[Massacure]

11. Why do you not advocate breeder reactors?

Uranium may not be rare, but it does have to be mined. Mining very rarely does not cause ecological damage.