Centrifuge May Be Superseded by Laser Enrichment

An anonymous reader writes "Australian scientists have discovered, after a decade of tests, a new way to enrich uranium for use in power plants." From the article: "There are at present only two methods for sifting uranium atoms, or isotopes, to create the right mix. One, called diffusion, involves forcing uranium through filters. Being lighter, U-235 passes through more easily and is thus separated from its heavier counterpart. The second method, widely adopted in the 1970s, uses centrifuges to spin the heavier and lighter atoms apart. Both, said Dr Goldsworthy, are 'very crude. You have to repeat the process over and over,' consuming enormous amounts of electricity. The spinning method requires 'thousands and thousands of centrifuges'."

Comments

True cost of nuclear...?

[itsdapead]

So does anybody have a figure for how much energy is used, how much CO2 is produced and how much other waste is produced in order to generate a kW/h of nuclear power?

Objective answers - rather than pro-nukular or anti-nuclear spin - preferred (some hope!)

Re:True cost of nuclear...?

[DemoLiter3]

No problem : here you have an emissions comparison for all widespread methods and various pollutants

http://www.nei.org/index.asp?catnum=2&catid=260

Laser enrichment isn't new

[charlie]

It's been around for over 20 years. What's new is that the Aussies appear to be commercialising it.

A question?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know where I can find detailed information about that new method?

Kisses,
Ahmadinejad

Short on details?

[saforrest]

If this is really so novel and useful, surely an analysis of it exists that is not written by the guy trying to sell it!

The article goes on to explain that six other countries have tried laser-enrichment schemes and failed, but this effort has succeeded, and the only possible hint at why is that this new approach is that it is more "elegant and sophisticated".

Even a link to the press release would have provided a bit more information (though more legalistic than technical).

Centrifuges

[BenBenBen]

The spinning method requires 'thousands and thousands of centrifuges'.

Unless you're Iran, in which case only 50 centrifuges is enough to put you "a few months away" from a nuclear weapon, according to Olmert. Or, y'know, 10 years at best, according to the latest National Intelligence Estimate. Of course, powers within Iran that are more relevant than Ahmedinejad have declared that atomic weaponry is unislamic and issued a fatwa against gaining them, and Ahmedinejad isn't the head of the military anyway. But look! Over there! They're making Jews wear yellow ribbons! Quick, bomb them!

Sigh.

Re:Centrifuges

[BenBenBen]

The manner in which Mossad tricked the US into attacking Libya was described in detail by former Mossad case worker Victor Ostrovsky in "The Other Side of Deception," the second of two revealing books he wrote after he left Israel's foreign intelligence service. The story began in February 1986, when Israel sent a team of navy commandos in miniature submarines into Tripoli to land and install a "Trojan," a six-foot-long communications device, in the top floor of a five-story apartment building. The device, only seven inches in diameter, was capable of receiving messages broadcast by Mossad's LAP (LohAma Psicologit-psychological warfare or disinformation section) on one frequency and automatically relaying the broadcasts on a different frequency used by the Libyan government.

The commandos activated the Trojan and left it in the care of a lone Mossad agent in Tripoli who had leased the apartment and who had met them at the beach in a rented van. "By the end of March, the Americans were already intercepting messages broadcast by the Trojan," Ostrovsky writes.

"Using the Trojan, the Mossad tried to make it appear that a long series of terrorist orders were being transmitted to various Libyan embassies around the world," Ostrovsky continues. As the Mossad had hoped, the transmissions were deciphered by the Americans and construed as ample proof that the Libyans were active sponsors of terrorism. What's more, the Americans pointed out, Mossad reports confirmed it. "The French and the Spanish, though, were not buying into the new stream of information. To them it seemed suspicious that suddenly, out of the blue, the Libyans, who had been extremely careful in the past, would start advertising their future actions. The French and the Spanish were right. The information was bogus."

Ostrovsky wrote: "Operation Trojan was one of the Mossad's greatest successes. It brought about the airstrike on Libya that President Reagan had promised -- a strike that had three important consequences. First, it derailed a deal for the release of the American hostages in Lebanon, thus preserving the Hezbollah as the No. 1 enemy in the eyes of the West. Second, it sent a message to the entire Arab world, telling them exactly where the United States stood regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Third, it boosted the Mossad's image, since it was they who, by ingenious sleight of hand, had prodded the United States to [bomb Libya]"

To blame the US intelligence services for the Iraq war is to believe that Rumsfeld and Cheney didn't want to go to war, that they felt they had to because of the intelligence. The truth is that they made sure that Bush and others only got intelligence that suppprted their pre-determined outcome of 'regime change', no matter how poorly sourced it was.

It's your typical Republican MO - break an agency, then point at it and say "look, it's broken! Abolish it all!". See also; FEMA.

Re:Centrifuges

[BenBenBen]

The clothing thing is a hoax, a lie, disinformation to be endlessly repeated, half-remembered and alluded to even long after it's been proven bogus.

Re:Centrifuges

[BenBenBen]

how much people believe that Iran has 'only' 50 centrifuges(we've been wrong before!)

Umm, you mean about Iraq? You do realise that we were "wrong" on purpose, and totally the other way - mobile biological labs turned out to be weather balloon inflating equipment, fertilizer factories were labelled as anthrax factories and the weapons located "around baghdad and tikrit, north, east, west and south somewhat" (to quote Von Rumsfeld).. didn't exist.

Plus, it would have been a lot easier to keep track of what equipment Iran was buying if Dick Cheney hadn't knowingly outed a covert CIA agent tasked with Iranian counterproliferation as political retribution against her husband.

Re:Centrifuges

[Adult film producer]

"Oh, and it's not just the Jews that are to wear 'ribbons', it's chritians as well. Patch sewn onto clothing. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?"

Ya, it does sound familiar...

Re:hot potato. literally.

[Firethorn]

Fuel cells will do nothing about the demand for power stations. Anyways, this makes fuel for nuclear plants even cheaper, and it's already a 'negligable' cost for the operation of a plant.

I say we build so many nuke plants in 'trustworthy'(IE already nuclear) countries that we're buying all the fuel just to feed all the darn things. ;)

Realistically, it's going to be impossible to prevent any country that wants nuclear weapons from getting them. I'm kinda suprised that we've done as well as we have, as all it takes is a country going 'screw you' and building the stuff themselves. We know it can be done with cutting edge 1940's level technology, and it's been over 60 years. Even countries like Iran have reached the point where they can do it with domestic industry if they truly wanted to.

MOX Anyone?

[turgid]

The first generation of nuclear reactors in the UK (Magnox) used natural (i.e. unenriched) uranium metal as fuel.

This meant that the fuel was very cheap to make but the fuel cans had to have a low neutron capture cross-section, hence the Magnox. This limited the temperatures at which the reactors could operate.

Moving to enriched uranium allowed the use of stainless steel cladding which keeps its integrity to much higher temperatures and is mechanically stronger.

There have been many developments in nuclear fuel technology since the 1950s, as one might expect. MOX was a good idea, but derailed by BNFL corporate incompetence and "environmentalist" hysteria.

The idea with MOX is that, instead of enriching uranium to increase the proportion of fissile U-235, you mix in fissile plutonium recovered from used nuclear fuel which is then "burnt up" in the new fuel to provide power. Plutonium isotopes are natural byproducts of the nuclear reactions in fission reactors.

Perhaps it would be more economical and environmentally-friendly to use more MOX than enriching fresh uranium?

Re:MOX Anyone?

[turgid]

As far as I'm aware, fissile plutonium doesn't always come out of the process - it needs to be a specific type of reactor, with enriched fuel, to "breed" plutonium...

That's not true. In conventional nuclear reactors, the plutonium naturally produced is fissile, or at least a substantial proportion of it is. This gives rise to the "moderator coefficient of reactivity" in thermal reactors where an increase in moderator temperature brings about a proportional increase in the number of neutrons with the correct energy spectrum to cause fission in the plutonium. This is a form of neutron resonance.

This is why Magnox and AGR reactors are "positive feedback" systems.

When a Magnox reactor is new, there is no plutonium, so there is no plutonium fission, so for the first few months of operation, the reactor is negative feedback.

In AGRs, the moderator temperature is kept constant by running the cold coolant gas through the moderator prior to cooling the fuel, so AGRs are negative feedback (and hence stable) as long as the moderator temperature is kept constant, which is achieved by active safety systems.

PWRs, on the other hand, are light-water moderated. They are effectively under-moderated and are epi-thermal reactors. They are negative-feedback since any increase in the moderator temperature (water) causes it to expand, reducing its density and hence the amount of moderation. As long as you can keep pressurised water flowing around a PWR it is stable.

In a previous life I worked in Reactor Physics at a nuclear power station.

Re:Is it just me?

[MichaelSmith]

It seems absolutey crazy to encourage the use of nuclear fission in an atmosphere. There are to many things that can go wrong not to mention that there is no proven safe way as of yet to deal with the waste permanently.

There is a lot of radioactive material in brown coal. A power station is one of the best ways to distribute it in the atnosphere.

Re:FP

[Anonymous Coward]

But in a laser, the Uranians can't go "Wheeeeeeeeee!".

No, I'm just joking, I really do love the Uranian people.

This is hardly a new technology

[Trestop]

According to Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear whistle blower - as quoted by the Sunday Times - Israel had laser enrichment technology, in actual production use, at the early 1980s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordechai_Vanunu

So - nothing new here, move along, move along.

Women And Warheads

[cybrpnk2]

I'm one of the "500 scientists" who worked on the ""failed" US efforts in the early 1980s, and I'd take this whole report with a grain of salt. First of all, just how far the US got with our effort is classified and having the media calling it a "failure" doesn't mean that we never accomplished in our labs 20 years ago what these Austrians did in theirs last month. The US lab effort was HUGE and not just aimed at uranium enrichment. There was a seperate program for seperating plutonium isotopes via laser enrichment to fine-tune and further miniturize nuclear weapons to an amazingly small package. These were the Reagan Star Wars years, after all.

However, it's a LONG way from lab benchtop enrichment experiments to a functioning enrichment plant. And once you get to that functioning enrichment plant, there's the question of whether or not it was economically justifiable to build in the first place. This is where the American effort "failed" - even on paper, it never made sense to pursue this technology because it was just too expensive. Sure, you need thousands of high-precision centrifuges to run an enrichment cascade. This was still cheaper than building a laser enrichment plant.

The designs for a uranium laser enrichment plant ON AN INDUSTRIAL SCALE are not for the fainthearted. YOu've got to have the uranium in a gaseous state. That means heating it so hot that not only do you have a pool of molten uranium, but it's BOILING. The laser is going through the HOT uranium "steam". The only material that can stand up to these temperatures is pure graphite. The design becomes like a series of rain gutters on a house that carries "more enriched" and "less enriched" streams of molten uranium back for reboiling. Somehow you've got to figure out a way of putting optical ports into this hellhole to fire the laser beams in. The laser beams themselves are a weird wavelength (green) and takes some really expensive gear to generate at all, much less with intense enough power to penetrate deeply into a fog of molten uranium. Doing all of this cheaply? Good luck.

And in the background overshadowing enrichment plant economics was and is the fact that nuclear power plants are still just too expensive a way to generate electricity (primarily due to regulatory costs) compared to coal and natural gas turbine plants. The expected boom in nuclear power plant construction forcast in the 1970s and early 1980s never materialized, mainly due to Thre Mile Island and Chernobyl, and so the need for new-fangled enrichment technology as a support industry never materialized with it either.

Right now the cheapest way to come up with fuel for a nuclear power plant is not laser enrichment or even centrifuge enrichment. It's diluting old Russian warheads, all 30,000 of them, down from 93% enriched uranium back to 3% uranium. This, along with all those Russian brides American men now have access to, are the REAL spoils of winning the Cold War.

Re:Women And Warheads

[Asphixiat]

...what these Austrians...

There were Austrians in Australia working on enrichment? This is a very big deal politically here atm (in Australia that is you 'merican speed reader :)

Australia is a nuclear free country (except for the Lucas heights reactor in Sydney, we make isotopes for medical research only). We flirted with it in the 50's, but we have, until recently been a country who feels we can sell uranium (we have a lot btw - like a whole lot) overseas, pretty much raw, and use almost none of it for our own purposes.

Our Prime Minister has decided to ignite a nuclear debate. It will distract us from the real debate we should be having (about the new IR laws), and will to be fair, is probably better in the short term then carbon sequestration.

A report was also delivered to the cabinet today, explaining that we (the tax payer) would pay a lot of money on insurance if we build the world's 5th Westinghouse AP1000 reactor in 10 years, or wait 10 years, and build the worlds 10th Westinghouse AP1000, and save a lot of cash. Howards other idea is to enrich the unranium, give it to countries on condition that they use it peacefully, and return it to us for storage and for us to store it safely, at their expense of course.

As I said - lots of news down here, however, even the experts think right now it is probably too expensive, and the problem of which state will have the reactor, do the enrichment, or store the waste will make every body in our wide brown land bicker and argue for quite a while. This press release is probably part of the spin to deflect debate on our new IR (industrial relations) laws.

Mass spectrometry

[nickovs]

There are at present only two methods for sifting uranium atoms, or isotopes, to create the right mix.

There is a third method that has been used on an industrial scale, which is to essentially build a huge mass spectrometer. Mass spectrometers are usually used to separate atoms into their isotopes for analysis but Ernest O. Lawrence proposed this for the Manhattan Project and the Y-12 separator at Oak Ridge, TN, built in 1941, yielded some useful results before being superseded by gaseous diffusion at the K-25 facility and later the S-50 thermal diffusion plant. Indeed the first 200 grams of fissile material delivered to Los Alamos came from the electromagnetic separator, more than a year before the diffusion separator started operation (the uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima used about 64Kg)

Re:Mass spectrometry

[DerekLyons]

There are at present only two methods for sifting uranium atoms, or isotopes, to create the right mix.

[TFA refers to the two most common methods; gaseous diffusion and centrifuges.]

There is a third method that has been used on an industrial scale, which is to essentially build a huge mass spectrometer.

There's also a fourth method - thermal diffusion. In this method you have two concentric pipes, you run coolant through the inner pipe, and heat the outside of the outer pipe, and pipe uranium hexaflouride gas between them. This method was used by the Manhattan Engineering District[1] and was studied by the Japanese (during WWII) as part of their (miniscule) weapons program. The only good thing about thermal diffusion is that it's only slightly less murderously inefficient than electromagnetic seperation. (the 'giant mass spectrometers' of the OP, properly called 'Calutrons'.)

Thermal diffusion was only pursued because the Navy had a boiler test and development facility that could provide the massive volume of steam needed as a heat source. It's small capacity limited it's role to providing enriched 'hex' to the Calutrons. (Using a more enriched feedstock moved them from hideously murderously inefficient to merely murderously inefficient.) Like the calutrons, the thermal diffusion plant was dismantled as soon as enough capacity from the gaseous diffusion (K-25) plant was available.

Richard Rhode's The making of the Atomic Bomb discusses the various enrichment methods available in WWII in great detail.

Sand + glass + electricity

[JumpingBull]

And you have the potential for electrolysis.
Process heat comes from the Sun, still the best fusion reactor going.
Electrolytic by-products are:

• oxygen
• silicon
• a glassy slag concentrating mineral impurities to higher grade ore

Now if the reaction can be combined with some hydrogen injection to make water and ease the total (electrical) energy required you get a nice sustainable technology. Water, also.

Solar cells are made from the silicon, formed into parabolic mirrors that focus the IR band to the smelting pot. Interference coating the cells is easy with the free nothing called a vacuum

Electricity from the power cells drives the electrolysis and runs the station power.

With all that silicon, I'm betting that some composition can make silicon into something more ductile.
Cheap building material would be nice...

This is Not "nuclear power," this is AUS Nuclear

[Vexar]

Okay, TFA is talking about Uranium 235, which is a weapons-grade isotope of Uranium, because it is fissile. Furthermore, this is necessary only because Australia uses Light Water Reactors. Fast Neutron Reactors and several other of the dozens of reactor designs do not need enrichment and work just fine off the naturally occurring U238.

If you read up on the Gen-4 reactor designs, you'll find that greenhouse gasses, non-proliferation, safety, and more efficient designs (a LWR reactor is rather wasteful on the scale of designs) have been taken into consideration. Rest assured that the new reactors being built in Florida, and all across the USA are being built with the best, safest technologies available.

Oh, and the thousands of centrifuges? That's just bad journalism. I don't know how lasers are cheaper at all (someone needs to actually write a decent article here), but for what it is worth, Nuclear Energy in the United States is cheaper than coal, but just barely.

Check out www.nukeworker.com and ask your questions there. Those guys know their Uranium from their belly buttons!

Republicans

[Mark_MF-WN]

It's not just republicans, it's all bad-government conservatives. What happened to the days when conservatives had the balls to just say "centralism sucks, so we're cancelling these programs and lowering taxs"? Nowadays, they fuck up otherwise successfull programs, DON'T lower taxes, create deficits spending money on things that don't work, and lie constantly. Modern conservatives can't even come up with good lies. At least guys like Nixon made it hard to be sure exactly what was going on. You knew he was full of shit, but what kind of shit? Bush just relies on the fact that most Americans are as almost gutless as he is, and are too cowardly to doubt anything. Or my own "leader", Stephen Harper, who tells lies that are contradicted (often within hours) by undeniable evidence. At least Paul Martin's lies left you confused and uncertain about reality... Harper's just embarass us all.

Yet another answer to a non-problem

[Ancient_Hacker]

It's just swell to work in a lab, but you should occasionally read a newspaper or surf the internet.

Right now, nobody needs or wants any more U235, except for North Korea, Iran, and various splinter groups.

The US Govt has PILES of the stuff, as does the USSR. Plus many tons of Plutonium. All very expensive stuff, but worth less than zero.

There's more tons of U235 and Plutonium in all the unprocessed fuel elements that have outlived their usefulness in nuclear reactors. The stuff is so worthless it's being stored or buried, not put through a relatively cheap chemical reprocessing cycle to recover the U235 and Plutonium.

If we needed more U235, there are several multi-billion dollar separation plants in mothballs that one could restart with relatively little effort.

So this laser-enrichment, IF it can ever be gotten working on a large scale, is (a) a threat if rogue states and the Mafia get into it and (b) Will produce soemthing nobody needs, and (c) probably riskier and more expensive than just starting up the old plants.

Fun with lasers

[Deadstick]

That trick of selective absorption of laser light has some pretty neat applications...you can actually cool a gas by shining a laser into it.

If a photon of precisely the right frequency (and therefore energy) hits an atom, two things happen:

(1) It gets absorbed, and transfers its momentum to the atom -- i.e., gives it a little push.

(2) One electron in the atom absorbs the photon's energy, exciting it to a higher energy level.

Then, after a random time interval, two more things happen:

(3) The electron drops back down to its old energy level.

(4) The atom emits a photon, carrying the energy given up by the electron, and the photon's momentum delivers another push to the atom.

But while the first push was in the direction of the laser beam, the second one is in a random direction -- so the affected atoms, statistically speaking, wind up with a net gain of momentum in the direction of the laser beam.

So far, the laser is basically just stirring the gas. Now you tune the frequency of the laser a little bit lower. The "average" atom sees the photons at the wrong frequency, and the photons just truck on by. But atoms that happen to be moving toward the laser see the photons Doppler-shifted up to just the right frequency and they receive a push away from it -- so their average speed is reduced. Ba-bing, ba-boom, the gas is colder.

Laser cooling, along with a couple of other techniques, made it possible to get the super-low temperature needed to isolate the Bose-Einstein Condensate which got the 2001 Nobel.

rj

Re:Women And Warheads - extreme temperature

[cybrpnk2]

Use of UF6 is the MLIS process, championed by Los Alamos. Use of atomic vapor is the AVLIS process, championed by Livermore. You would not believe the endless arguments that ensued during the 1980s over which was better. AVLIS won.

Re:UK

[turgid]

Your bitterness is mighty. :)

Thanks. I've been cultivating it. :-) I intend to be the world's most curmudgeonly old git when the time comes, hopefully with an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for being an intolerant, cantankerous old fool with an "I told you so" attitude.

Location, location, location...

[The_REAL_DZA]

It really pisses me off that we, Australians, invent so much stuff and then just sell it off for a quick buck to some foreign company rather than commercialising is ourselves. The Australian government has got a lot to answer for.

It's not helping that you guys are way down there at the "bottom" of the world, either. I think you should give some serious consideration to relocating a little closer to the population centers of the world; the shipping costs alone have to be just about killing you (besides, why would someone buy stale nucular fuel shipped from almost the South Pole when they can make their own fresh fuel right here at home?!)
In short, until you can overcome the transportation issues inherent in being about a zillion miles away from your customer base your best bet is to just export your ideas and let someone else implement them.

(in all seriousness: the "because they're very far away" answer is so far the ONLY way the wife and I have been able to convince our two three-year-olds we can't just pick up and go visit The Wiggles some weekend...though one of them actually just wants to go because on our globe Australia is pink.)