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The Rise of Small Nuclear Plants
ColdWetDog writes "The Oil Drum (one of the best sites to discuss the technical details of the Macondo Blowout) is typically focused on ramifications of petroleum use, and in particular the Peak Oil theory. They run short guest articles from time to time on various aspects of energy use and policies. Today they have an interesting article on small nuclear reactors with a refreshing amount of technical detail concerning their construction, use, and fueling. The author's major thesis: 'Pick up almost any book about nuclear energy and you will find that the prevailing wisdom is that nuclear plants must be very large in order to be competitive. This assumption is widely accepted, but, if its roots are understood, it can be effectively challenged. Recently, however, a growing body of plant designers, utility companies, government agencies, and financial players are recognizing that smaller plants can take advantage of greater opportunities to apply lessons learned, take advantage of the engineering and tooling savings possible with higher numbers of units, and better meet customer needs in terms of capacity additions and financing. The resulting systems are a welcome addition to the nuclear power plant menu, which has previously been limited to one size — extra large.'"
Great for pumping stations and desalination plants... probably the cheapest way.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Nuclear energy is probably the best chance we have are breaking our addiction to oil. Nuclear energy is also relatively clean. I don't know why the government doesn't just fund the development of a bunch of nuclear power plants and put them on the coast or on the ocean somewhere. We could generate enough power to power the entire country, not to mention we could probably put hundreds of thousands of nuclear power plants in the desert.
I would assume the nuclear plants found on submarines and large warships both provide a lot of energy and are not in the category of 'extra large.'
put them all over as the power grid is not setup for having a lot of power in one place.
Brilliant. Instead of needing to get one "back yard", you now need half a dozen.
Actually, this could work out... smaller plant means smaller yard, right? We could put them in rougher terrain away from people.
as a small nuclear plant still needs almost as much safety, inspection infrastructure not forgetting the larger number of armed guards (the nuke police had guns way before they where that common in the rest of the uk) as a big one.
The amount of objections that citizens raise doesn't appear to be related to the size of a nuclear plant. They just seem to object to its very existence. Therefore it makes sense, that once you've got through the planning process, reviews, delays, hostility and protests you may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb and make the plant as large as practically possible.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Yes. That's why in my bathroom you have to climb up a ladder to get to the toilet seat, then hang on for dear life for fear of falling into the swimming-pool sized bowl.
It also has a bidet function, which isn't wimpy and French; it's got a firehose pump powered by a small nuclear plant.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Let's call it what it is. The BP disaster.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
As much as nuclear energy would help reduce CO2 emissons, the the anti-nuclear crowd has to be seen as a "force of nature" making new power plants less likely. The idealist would fight against irrationality, but as a realist I would redirect that energy elsewhere, e.g. against the NIMBYs who think wind turbines ruin the coastlines and kill birds or bats.
Also, if oil is non-renewable because it takes millions of years to re-form, then nuclear fuels are the ultimate non-renewable with a "when is the next supernova due?" regeneration period. And the energy density and relative ease of use is just too good to waste it powering our washing machines and slashdot browsing. Maybe in a few hundred years outer solar system exploration will be in a serious crunch because the lack of a good power source after all the uranium, thorium, plutonium etc. has been used up.
There is no way to recycle it...
Here, let me give you a couple citations to look at.
The only thing preventing us from recycling nuclear waste is government regulations inspired by hippy FUD. If we could get past those artificial roadblocks we'd find ourselves with a much longer timeline to deal with peak uranium (it's still a finite resource, after all) and we wouldn't have to squabble over Yucca Mountain and other potential repositories.
I can't imagine investing in a national nuclear infrastructure without also overhauling the distribution grid.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
You can buy heavy water, unlike that story claims. United Nuclear sells it.
Because there is hydrogen and carbon in space.
Peak oil is not about running out of oil, it is about running out of oil that is cheap and easy to get. Those hydrocarbons in space are too expensive to bother with, especially when we have all this uranium and thorium laying around.
It also has a bidet function, which isn't wimpy and French; it's got a firehose pump powered by a small nuclear plant.
Ya almost had me up to that point, ya cheese-eating pansy!
The enemies of Democracy are
WRONG. The technology to reprocess nuclear fuel has existed for more than half a century and is currently employed the world over. Just not in the U.S. In fact breeder reactors incorporate reprocessing into the design to use a fraction of the fuel and produce a fraction of the waste of those reactor types permitted in the U.S.
The problem with nuclear waste is one of politics, not of technology. Following on the heels of Gerald Ford's ban of commercial plutonium reprocessing, Jimmy Carter signed an order to ban the reprocessing of spent commercial nuclear fuel. Regan overturned the ban in 1981 but there was no funding provided to start up reprocessing facilities nor has the DOE provided license for anyone to do it. While they've waffled a bit during the Bush-Obama presidencies the DOE presently doesn't want domestic reprocessing. This has accordingly put a rather big crimp in the success of the GNEP which had closed loop nuclear power as a primary goal.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Dirty bombs are not that big a deal. Oh noes we need to clean up some contamination what ever will we do! Leakage would be a far bigger deal.
What black market is there for fuel grade uranium?
If you have to go to the black market to get it, you probably don't have the money to do anything with it anyway.
Read my comment again.
You should now have seen your mistake and should be calculating when peak thorium will occur.
I can't imagine investing in a national nuclear infrastructure without also overhauling the distribution grid.
did no one RTFA?
Oh yeah this is slashdot.
The idea is as Coal Plants get decommissioned you can use most of the same equipment, Which I assume means the same generators. Which make the nuke plants cheaper then overhauling the coal plant.
Really? and how would keep anyone from taking the whole thing breaking it apart somewhere else and selling the valuable fuel grade uranium on the black market?
Or worse yet, using the uranium and all the radioactive parts of the reactor for a dirty bomb?
Or even worse yet, trying to do one of the above, but fucking up and letting all kinds of radioactive liquids drain in the drinking water underground?
In most of these small reactor designs the fissionable material has nearly no value as a weapon. For example, a Pebble Bed Reactor uses balls of graphite and fissionable material which can be difficult to re-process into something other than fuel. A dirty bomb is of little concern because, again, it's much easier to just mine new material rather than use the fuel for these reactors.
Lastly, the modern designs for reactors are extremely safe. They have less chance of contaminating groundwater supply than building solar panels (a process that requires tons of heavy metals, organic wastes, and wastewater) or operating a coal-fired power plant. Not to mention that once you are done using the fuel and reprocessing it into new fuel you are left with a small amount of concentrated waste with either extremely short (degrades quickly to harmless elements) or extremely long (emits nearly no radiation) lifetimes.
The modern nuclear reactor designs are vastly better than the units built 40+ years ago, it's a shame that we haven't been building them. Instead we are maintaining older units because the red tape is too much to bother building new units to replace the aging ones. THAT'S your recipe for disaster!
Sapere aude!
The main problem in implementing small output conventional power plants comes from the difficulty of altering power output swiftly enough to follow rapid changes in load. The traditional steam generator method, regardless of the source of heat, has a large amount of inertia which makes its response sluggish. Making them small to get a more nimble response sacrifices efficiency. The conventional method of dealing with this difficulty is to have a huge grid with a quantity of large baseline generators, supplemented with peaking generators which are started up or shut down as needed. The size of the grid smooths out the fluctuations enough so this method works, usually. As long as nineteenth century methodology, boil the water, use the steam to turn a turbine, dominates the generation of electricity, the use of small generation facilities will be confined to applications such as factories where the load is fairly constant.
Think so? I think you are not considering a few facts.
But it's a good start. If we go nuclear we'd be well on our way. There is no better option to produce the same results for the price.
Oil provides about 2% of the electricity we use in the US. We get five times more electricity from hydro than from oil and coal provides about half the electricity used. Most oil is used for transportation and for various products. I like the thought of electric cars but those aren't going to do away with the need for oil anytime soon.
When electricity is cheap enough, we'll be able to plug our cars into our walls, along with our robot maid.
Building nuclear plants takes time. Lots of time. Even if we started today we couldn't bring enough nuclear plants online fast enough to service the anticipated need for electricity solely with nuclear during the next 15 years.
Thats not necessarily true. The time it takes to build is relative to the cost it takes to build it and the expertise. It could be built in 5 years if we saw it as an emergency. You see how fast all that surveillance technology got built but they can't built nuclear power plants? Please!
If these smaller plants were to work (no idea if they would) that might help but then you have a distribution, cleanup and security problem with nuclear fuels.
If you think people are opposed to a coal plant in their backyard, try putting a nuclear plant there. People are quite fearful of nuclear. Sometimes with good reason and sometimes not but they are fearful nonetheless.
Not all nuclear plants are bad designs. Some have the cleanup as part of the design. Some are designed to require mininmal cleanup. And they are all more clean than coal.
Let's see. First, what coast did you have in mind that is unoccupied yet close to major metropolitan areas? How do you propose to convince the taxpayers that might be fearful of nuclear that it is a good idea? How do you propose to transport the electricity economically to places far from the coast?
New York, Boston, California, Florida, All the coasts. Build a large floating island on the coast, put the nuclear power plant on these islands just like we put our trash on floating islands. Float the islands far enough out so people don't see it and don't think about it.
First the coast and now the desert. Have you really given this any thought at all? No one lives in the desert and it's expensive to get the power out of the desert. Not to mention that cooling becomes a bigger problem there. While there are nuclear plants that don't require water, most use it because it is cheap and abundant. The entire advantage of a small nuclear plant is that you can place it where it is needed but no one wants to live near a nuclear reactor if they can help it.
Dig holes deep underground like a sandworm into the desert. Build the nuclear power plants under the desert sand so deep that nobody even notices they are there. This makes it easier to secure from terrorists because it's in the desert and this also puts it out of sight, out of mind.
Really? and how would keep anyone from taking the whole thing breaking it apart somewhere else and selling the valuable fuel grade uranium on the black market?
How are you going to dig up a thousand ton block of concrete buried twenty feet down and load it onto a flatbed without a spy satellite picking up your equipment and an assault team being dispatched? Just because they are not guarded, doesn't mean they won't be monitored.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Seriously, the majority of America's power does not come from large plants, but from small plants (50-200 mgwatt) that were built about 70-40 years ago. Many of the coal plants are Ancient and either need to be shut down or re-built. Interestingly, many of these are on a lot of land. Where life gets better is that the water required to run a coal plant is more than many nuke plants. Also, all the power lines have come into these areas. It is possible to put in nuke plants that are 50% or even 100% bigger in the same space, using either the same, or slightly more water, and be a plug-in.
Of course, nimby will still be an issue, but most ppl will prefer a nuke over a coal.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It is correctly called nuclear waste because the potential benefit of having it is a lot less than all the work required to separating it out. Machining very strong, hard, highly radioactive materials is incredibly expensive as the French have shown despite about thirty years of trying to make their reprocessing methods viable.
You can reuse the steam turbines and electric generators with solar thermal power plants as well.
Why not call it the Deepwater Horizon blowout? That's the phrase everyone else seems to be using.
It's more specific than 'BP Blowout' (for obvious reasons)
It's also more specific than 'Macondo Blowout' (The Macondo Prospect, as wikipedia tells me, is the name of the field, which presumably might still have another blowout at some point in the future. Deepwater Horizon, having sunk to the bottom of the ocean, is unlikely to have any future blowouts.)
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
I suggest watching the current Russian efforts at getting a large liquid sodium reactor going before putting all your faith in such a thing. There are major problems to solve that the French and the US were unable to sort out in the 1990s that made such a technology unworkable at a large scale, that's the real story behind the cancelled program. If the Russians can get it to work or some local R&D can solve the problems you'll have something to talk about, but for now what you are selling as a done deal is nothing but hopeful dreaming.
Lovins isn't just against nuclear for the (IMHO rather simplistic) economic arguments he gives here.
Back in the 80s he was asked what he would think of a truly cheap, clean and plentiful source of energy. He said it would a great disaster. Why? Because he felt that given any concentrated source of energy, humans would use it to wreak havoc on nature. Thus, it would be better to only have diffuse and limited sources.
So I'm a bit skeptical of his real motives in putting this out.
I will give him this, he's at least fairly consistent. I went to see one of his talks in the 80s, and he was basicly on a similar message with respect to the economy of nuclear power.
He also said that we really didn't need any new sources of power, that conservation and limiting of our growth/what we did meant that we already had enough. At the time, I remarked that he was allowing no chance for less developed populations (India and China) to increase their standard of living, but that wasn't addressed.
He's got a fairly appealing line of talk but when you start really looking, it doesn't measure up.
With some eco-aware folks ...
As soon as someone uses the term "eco-aware" or a variant of it, that's generally a sign that the associated opinion needs to be taken with a heavy grain of salt. Right from the start, things are framed not as a disagreement between different sides analyzing the facts, but as those who are "aware" and those who are not. Would you talk about a dispute between, say, C programmers and PHP programmers, and describe the former as "compiler-aware"?
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
I thought it was interesting the reason given when the cancellation of the IFR was mentioned in Clinton's first state of the union speech. It was that we would never need it, and thus it was a waste of money.
To say the least, I disagreed.
With respect, peak oil is about the wet stuff we can get to easily. Once there's less of it coming out of the ground things get more expensive because the alternatives are more expensive.
You've been misled by manipulative bastards pushing some agenda into misunderstanding a very simple term describing a simple problem.
Geothermal power plants are the best substitute for nuke plants. They're highly efficient, create practically no emissions (especially once they're built), are fast to build and put online, present practically no security or pollution risks, and generate continuous baseloads. They don't depend on finite supplies of dirty fuel mostly produced in dirty ways mostly in foreign countries. All at scales only nuke plants have delivered. With a smart electric grid routing power around the country, even the few places where they can't be built at all (because of faultlines) can still get their power.
--
make install -not war
There are a few useful sizes at which to build such things as nuclear reactors. One useful size is what can be transported on a railroad car or a heavy-equipment transporter truck. That's as big as you can get and still build the thing in a factory, which has substantial cost advantages over on-site construction. The upper limit for this seems to be around 135 MWe.
Wind turbines have a size problem, too. Somewhere around 3MW, they become too big to transport assembled by road or rail, even with the blades shipped separately. Better generator design seems to help with this. Enercon has been able to get up to 10MW or so with a no-gearbox generator design and still ship the parts by road. The very large machines require more on-site assembly.
First: if you're not reading The Oil Drum, you should be.
But on to my point. The controlling factor for building nuclear power plants is not money or power, but fear. Fear of contamination controls the decade-long permitting process. Fear of terrorist attack or accident controls the number of guards, monitoring personnel, and operators who work at the plant on a daily basis. The majority of the expense of actually building the plant goes into safety and security systems.
Now, some of these fears are reasonable. But that's not the point: the point is that a small power plant is just as scary as a large one.
The best power plant is not the most energy efficient one, or even the one that's strictly speaking the safest. It's the one that produces the least amount of fear per gigawatt. And that means building gigantic plants.
You mean like the liquid sodium Russian BN600 (600 MW electric fast breeder power plant) that's been running since 1980?
It's had some problems, but nothing that couldn't be repaired and put back online.
Or maybe like the Japanese Monju plant? It had a sodium fire, but that was due to a bad design on a temperature sensor rather than anything to do with sodium itself as a coolant. It's back online now. Much of the reason it took so long was due to a scandal with the management covering up and the resulting court cases. It wasn't the technical problems that stopped it for all that time but the legal/political ones.
Sodium reactors have been around since the 50s at least. Yes, there are problems with embrittlement and the reactivity of the coolant, but it's hardly a show stopper. They're known and manageable problems.
What led to the shutdown of the program was the opposition of John Kerry and others, not technical problems with the sodium coolant.
Yes, sodium gets activated by the neutrons. Yes, it's highly radioactive then. But, it's quite short lived (15 hours for Na-24, 2.6 years for Na-22) so it's not as big a problem as you imply. Na-22 is a beta decay, so that's not problematic. Na-24 is the one that has dangerous radiation as it emits gammas. But with a 15 hour half life, it decays very quickly.
The daughter products aren't a problem either (Ne-22 and Mg-24), they're both stable.
The future of energy is in thorium. It a) cant be weaponized, b) is cleaner, c) does not need to be throttled up like uranium. They are developing these plants in other parts of the world such as india.
Doc, you are way off-line here. The reason why America is in trouble is because it became dependent on Fossil Fuel, mostly imported. Now, I am a HUGE fan of geo-thermal, BUT, the last thing that I want is to be fully dependent on it, or any singular form of energy. Instead, we need a matrix of energy. Ideally, each energy stream will provide no more than 1/3 of our total energy.
Right now, Nukes provide about 18% of our electricity. As such, it provides less than 10% of total energy. Ideally, we would bring it up to at least 20% of our total energy. At the same time, we should bring geo-thermal up to 20% as quickly as possible. Sadly, it will not happen. However, it is the smartest thing that we can do.
Finally, doc, I would also argue that we should build more energy storage as well as solar thermal addition to current fossil fuel plants. The storage would enable nighttime collection of electricity esp. from geo-thermal, wind, nukes, etc and then add to the matrix during the daytime.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You can reuse the steam turbines and electric generators with solar thermal power plants as well.
Haven't you ever played sim city? You can't replace a Coal Plant with Just one solar plant.
A solar plant with the same foot print as the coal plant might get 50 Mwatts, Where the coal plant it's replacing is usually around 500 Mwatts.
Whereas most nuke plants are like 1000-2500 Mwatts.
Yeah, that's the problem. No matter what the size of the reactor, NIMBY.
And since NIMBY is so hard to overcome, if you do manage to overcome it, you might as well build a honking big one instead of a small or medium sized plant.
And in the US, tack on a few more acres for storing the waste indefinitely, as the Federal Government is unlikely to get it's act into gear and actually create a storage facility for it anytime soon.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
The reactor parts are "low grade waste" and is generally safe after a few decades to a 100 years (depends of course-but thats about right for 99% of low grade reactor parts). Fast neutrons do get rid of the heavy elements in modern PWR waste. Thats where the "unsafe for 10 000 years" comes from. So already you have massively reduced the lifetime of the waste (other nasties have very long life times- so don't contribute to the radioactivity that much). There are few fission products that are problematic, they too can be dealt with via fast neutrons (Cs being the hardest to deal with). Even without that we are down to centuries of "high activity time" rather than 1000s. Now we add reprocessing. This brings the volume of the waste down by about 60 fold (more or less), and gives use 60 times more plain U + some Pu. We then dilute the waste to make thermal management easier, but its already much smaller and with a shorter lifetime.
We should be doing research into this now. Sure its not a done deal, and a clear waste management plan is needed. But once though fuel cycle is completely retarded. Its that kind of wastefulness that gets us into these problems in the fist place.
People seem to think 100 years is a long time. The hotel i stayed in Italy last year was build in 720AD. The wine cellar in Czech has been producing wine since at least ~800AD.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
In the US in situ leaching is used.
Basicly you pump a mix of water and baking soda into the ground and the uranium disolves in it.
Then you pump it back up and extract the uranium.
Baking soda isn't high on my list of things I'm afraid of getting in my water.
Pretty clean and safe.
waste storage wouldn't be too hard if it was treated as a technical problem, unfortunatly politicians who consider the words "nuclear" and "satanic" interchangable screwed that one up.
You couldn't have a better sig for that post!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Smaller plants can of course get by this problem by running low reaction, low temperature reactors. For example if you were to pulse the reaction rather than have a sustained reaction you can substantially reduce the temperature of the reactor whilst increasing the life of fuel and use a hydrocarbon lubricating reactant (liquid to vapour) in a closed cycle turbine, where the nuclear reaction is enclosed within the main active turbine blades and the reaction then drives an array of passive turbine blades. So a shipping container sized reactor ie many smaller, simpler, safer, reactors in a power plant (they are safer because of course the substantially reduced operating temperatures and the fuel rods last the life of the reactor, no refuelling).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Uranium *dissolved* in ground water is not the same as "just baking soda".
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
If I lived next to a coal-burning power plant, I would jump at the chance to have it converted to nuclear.
Redundancy is good And also good.
Far easier to steal a medical source. There are more of them, they're widely distributed under varying security conditions, the containers they're in aren't as robust and the radioactive materials are more effective when dispersed.
Stealing even a small nuclear power plant doesn't strike me as particularly easy.