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GE To Turn World's Biggest Civilian Plutonium Stockpile Into Electricity
First time accepted submitter ambermichelle writes "GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy has proposed to the U.K. government to build an advanced nuclear reactor that would consume the country's stockpile of radioactive plutonium. The technology called PRISM, or Power Reactor Innovative Small Module, would use the plutonium to generate low-carbon electricity. The U.K. has the world's largest civilian stockpile of plutonium. The size of the stockpile is 87 tons and growing. Nuclear reactors unlock energy by splitting atoms of the material stored in fuel rods. This process is called fission. For fission to be effective, neutrons – the nuclear particles that do the splitting and keep the reaction going – must maintain the right speed. Conventional reactors use water to cool and slow down neutrons, keeping fission effective. But water-cooled reactors leave some 95 percent of the fuel's potential energy untapped."
I am amazed that conventional water-cooled reactors are only 5% efficient. It sure casts the seemingly low efficiency factors of other alternative fuels(such as the cheapest solar panels) into a different light.
But water-cooled reactors leave some 95 percent of the fuel's potential energy untapped."
I gather the problem is that decay products poison the fuel after it's been run for a while. One would still need to reprocess fuel rods on a regular basis. But once that's done, you can get more than 5% of the energy from a fuel rod.
This 'fission' technology sounds interesting, but is it safe?
Yes perfectly safe as long as nothing goes wrong.
Living entails a 100% chance of dying - is living safe?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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But water-cooled reactors leave some 95 percent of the fuel's potential energy untapped.
Light water reactors, sure. But heavy water reactors are a whole different kettle of fish. CANDU can already burn anything from natural uranium through plutonium. Hot stuff you just dilute down.
No need to invent some new crazy reactor, just burn it at Bruce or Pickering.
I'm getting tired of all these posts saying "some entity to do something" when the summary says "proposed".
Assuming that "to" means "going to" to everybody else as it does me, I'd appreciate it if the editors could stop doing or allowing that.
You should really read up on the "Integral Fast Reactor" - the S-PRISM this article is about is evolved from the technology developed in the IFR project.
The main potential safety weakness of an IFR is the possibility of sodium leaks leading to a sodium fire (I'm not sure how they manage this risk; it certainly seems like a potentially nasty problem, but I'm sure they've taken some sort of measures to try to prevent that from happening; I hope they are effective).
But, Sodium fires aside, the type of problems you had an Chernobyl, TMI, and Fukushima-Daiichi simply cannot happen in an IFR-style reactor. You can't get supercriticality/runaway fiisson like happened at Chernobyl; you can't get a meltdown; you don't have to worry about steam pressure overwhelming the containment (because water is not used as the coolant, so hence no steam), and you can't get a hydrogen explosion (again, no water in the reactor).
You might get a hydrogen explosion if, somehow, water started mixing with the sodium, as sodium and water will combine to form sodium hydroxide and hydrogen gas, but if they can keep water out of the reactor, then no hydrogen explosions.
So far as I know, there have only been a few sodium fires amongst all the world's sodium cooled reactors over the last 60 years - the most famous one was in Japan back in the late 90's or early 00's, and while that scared the public, it wasn't actually a disaster - just a relatively minor industrial accident in the end. I've never heard of a sodium fire at a nuclear plant becoming a major problem, so I don't think the risk of sodium fires is actually a big, unmanageable 'ticking time bomb', but again, I'm no expert.
Still, I think the technology looks *very* interesting. Let's face it, we have a nuclear waste problem, and either IFR or another type of fast reactor (such as a molten salt fast reactor) are basically the only way to solve that problem. Let's stop fighting the solution to the nuclear waste problem. It truly is the only realistic solution - burn off that 100,000 year "plutonium problem".
no. but the usual Pu-239 isn't very radioactive, just emits alphas slowly with a very long half life of 24,200 years. That radiation can't even penetrate your skin or go through a piece of paper. Pu-240 is artificial, usually decays by alpha but sometimes spontaneously fissions, it too has long half-life of more than 6500 years. Then there is Pu-238, emits huge amounts of alphas with its short half-life of 88 years, it's used in RTG batteries and also radioisotope heater units. A kilogram of the stuff gives off 500 watts.
Just 'cuz I was curious, and it has some peripheral bearing on the question - assuming 19.816 gm/cm^3 for the density of Pu (more than lead) and also assuming (since it's the UK) we're talking "tons" = metric tonnes = 1000kg = 10^6 gm -
/TSG/
87 x 10^6 gm / 19.816 gm/cm^3 = 4.39 x 10^6 cm^3 = 4.39 m^3.
4.39 cubic meters is a single cube 1.637 meters on a side (or a little more than 5 feet/side, for us backward Yanks). More or less the size of a smallish SUV, yes?
Of course their Pu isn't, one hopes, stored all in one solid cube, which would probably exceed critical mass by some large factor. But still, it's not a massive physical quantity of material you're talking about here.
All power sources are problematic. Energy has a way of making environments uninhabitable to humans... When you start storing large amounts of energy in small spaces things get more dangerous.
But don't let that fool you. Coal seam fires for instance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania can make an area uninhabitable for decades, centuries...
Hydro destroys ecosystems down stream; to some humans, this can destroy their livelihood. And when one damn fails it'll kill hundreds to thousands in a few minutes...
Nuclear is just scary because its a black box that "normal people" don't understand. When a dam fails, those thousand people die quickly in an easy to comprehend way. When a criticality event happens and people drop to a gamma burst, well, lets just say a wall of water is a lot less scary than nothing at all... And, in the end, all energy storage mediums have risks: to the environment, to people, and to economies...
" low frequency risk is still beyond catastrophic.
Not with modern generators.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor
Liquid metal thorium reactor are incredibly safe.
No event in any nuclear reactor that has ever happened can happen in one. Plus you can burn waste in them.
Oh and the waster from these return to background radiation levels in 200-500 year. Very workable, and possible to store on site. No shipping the waste.
The US government should be building 20 of these right now. And the US government should operate them;remove the desire to make bonuses , and all other problems go away with it.
These are the solution until we can get cheaper solar, or maintainable fusion.
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Area under water behind a dam is uninhabitable and unarable, same goes with solar. Wind is just uninhabitable. If you count the amount of land required by them and compare to land made "uninhabitable" by nuclear, average over power generated, nuclear is a clear winner.
The radiation levels in Chernobyl Zone are lower than natural background radiation in some areas around the globe. Year of living in Ramsar in Iran exceeds nuclear industry limits during emergencies! Calling them "uninhabitable" for 1000 years is a bit of an overstatement... Unarable for food production, maybe, but then you can use those areas for production of automotive fuel.
Oh, and don't forget the amount of land made unarable and uninhabitable by heavy metal poisoning from regular industry, just look at mercury pollution in USA.
You can't get supercriticality/runaway fiisson like happened at Chernobyl
Fast reactors are somewhat notorious for being trickier to control than (well-designed) thermal ones. It's very difficult to avoid a positive void coefficient, and fairly small changes in the fuel geometry can lead to large changes in reactivity. There was a meltdown in an early FBR caused by thermal expansion causing the fuel to bow inwards, increasing the reactivity. Phenix in France also had unexplained loss of reactivity incidents.
I was wondering why GE was trying to get a new reactor design built in the UK instead of its home country, the US. Then I realised why: our government is the only one that will pay for it. The Conservatives view the government as a way to fund commercial enterprises, to build stuff that no bank would back but which with most of the cost paid for out of taxation are a potential gold mine for the owner. That is the way we build nuclear plants here, the tax payer funds it and takes on most of the risk and clean-up cost while the commercial owner creams off a nice profit during the operational lifetime.
Unfortunately the government always gets ripped off when building anything and the companies running our nuclear facilities seem to be incompetent and unwilling to invest in safety. The plant TFA mentions, Sellafield, is notoriously accident prone, so I'm not sure it is a good idea to give them any more ways to screw up.
Thanks but no thanks GE, get back to us when you have built a working one paid for out of your own pocket.
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Here's a clue - liquid sodium is used for technical and not safety reasons.
Whoever is selling you on some snake-oil "sodium is safe" marketing line is not being honest to you and you are making yourself look naive and poorly informed by repeating it.
Two things, first it only consumes a small portion of nuclear waste and produces a larger volume of a different type of waste - which I'm sure you already know. Second, the established civilian nuclear energy producers have been the ones fighting the solutions to the nuclear waste problem on the basis of cost. I atteneded a seminar on Synrock over twenty years ago and it's only recently that it has been adopted anywhere due to governments pressuring reactor operators to do something with their waste.
I would hate to see a scaled up Solar Thermal power plant. The largest one that I know of is the SEGS plant in California. As I remember it has a peak power output of ~350MW. But if your talking about 24/7 operation that drops to a small 75MW of output.
To get that 75MW of base load capacity, they have to use 6.5KM^2(I had to look that up ^^) of land. If this technology was scaled up to the size of a nuclear plant that has a base load capacity of 1GW you would be talking about using(some people would say destroying) 90KM^2 land.
Actually, looking at the Invanpah plant which is currently under construction, it's a 392MW(Peak Power) plant that is going to be using ~16KM^2 of land. So the newer plant is even worse on land usage... While it's technically possible to build large solar thermal plants, I don't think your going to find the land to do it. Invanpah was scaled down from initial plans because of land use issues...
I am not so sure about the cost difference either. Invanpah is a 2.2 billion dollar project. When you compute $ per KW of capacity, your looking at about $5,600 per KW. It's hard to find accurate Nuclear plant numbers since so none have been built in the US in 30 years. Looking online I found two numbers on $per/KW a pro nuclear site quoted ~$2000-2500/KW and a anti-nuclear site said ~5000-6000/KW. I am not sure which to believe but even if it's the high number, it lines up with Invanpah cost almost exactly. But the problem is that this is comparing the Peak Power $/KW price of Invanpah vs Nuclear. I looked all over the place and I couldn't the planned capacity factor... but if Invanpah can only generate a base load of ~100-130MW then the cost of Invanpah would be 3-4 times that of the "High" figure vs Nuclear.
Honestly after looking at these numbers I am shocked at just how bad Solar Thermal power really is for baseload generation costs. I didn't think it was good but I never would have thought it was this bad.
No event in any nuclear reactor that has ever happened can happen in one.
WTF. Where did you get this from? Twenty seconds of research shows the Monju Nuclear Power incident which was a fire caused by a liquid sodium leak. That can obviously repeat in any sodium cooled reactor.
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