Cool Tool: The Nuclear Fuel Cycle Cost Calculator

Lasrick writes: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has launched a very cool new tool that will excite anyone interested in understanding the per kilowatt cost of nuclear energy. Developed over the last two years in a partnership between the Bulletin and the University of Chicago, the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Cost Calculator estimates the cost of electricity produced by three configurations of the nuclear fuel cycle:

1. The once-through fuel cycle used in most US nuclear power plants, in which uranium fuel is used once and then stored for later disposal.
2. A limited-recycle mode in which a mix of uranium and plutonium (that is, mixed oxide, or MOX) is used to fuel a light water reactor.
3. A full-recycle system, which uses a fast neutron spectrum reactor that can be configured to 'breed' plutonium that can subsequently be used as either nuclear fuel or weapons material.

This online tool lets users test how sensitive the price of electricity is to a full range of components—more than 60 parameters that can be adjusted for the three configurations of the nuclear fuel cycle considered. The results provide nuanced cost assessments for the reprocessing of nuclear fuel and can serve as the basis for discussions among government officials, industry leaders, and public interest groups.

Comments

Re:Let me put my skepticism hat on...

[AmiMoJo]

The tool also fails to include the cost of insurance, both to the operator and the government. The government's costs are practically impossible to calculate, as it has almost unlimited liability.

The cost of equipment failure is ignored as well. Around 1.3% of all civilian reactors have failed catastrophically, but vastly more equipment has failed safely and either been abandoned or needed expensive repairs. Storage and reprocessing systems are included. Maintenance costs tend to be rather high because the equipment gets contaminated and can't safely be worked on by human beings.

Thorium

[JudeanPeople'sFront]

FRIST!! Apparently nobody mentioned it yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... The Thorium Reactor operates at almost 100% fuel consumption. And some of the waste materials are used for cancer treatment, space batteries, etc. Current technologies use about 1% of the nuclear fuel. Not only that, but LFTR can use the already accumulated spent nuclear fuel, mixed with the Thorium, to produce energy and reduce the accumulated nuclear waste.

Re:What about the cost for enrichment waste?

[Rei]

The waste issue (as well as inherent safety) is part of the reason that there's so much research on ADSRs right now (note: the article says that an ADSR "would use thorium as a fuel", but it's not actually limited to thorium, it can use any subcritical fissile core). Spallation can rip apart the long-lived actinides that don't have a sufficient (n, gamma) cross section to prevent their accumulation in nuclear waste. And of course, since the core is inherently subcritical by design, simply not enough neutronicity under any condition to sustain a chain reaction on its own, when you shut the beam off, fission ceases instantly (though you still have decay heat like with any other nuclear power plant). Spallation source provides no more than about 10% or so of the neutronicity, but it's the amount needed to push the core over the edge.

I have my own very radical variant on the concept of an accelerator driven fission that I'm working on simulating now in Geant4 (although that was probably a poor choice of software, apparently their thermal scattering codes are really immature... as far as CERN is concerned, once particles get down below the MeV range they're usually not particularly interesting). But anyway the concept is to have a core with literally zero neutronicty - a lithium-burning reactor. The basic concept is as such:

1. A planar proton beam is delivered by one or more high power linac beamlines. Commercial-scale linac costs - without any improvements in technology - are expected to cost $5-20 per watt. The particular design would call for very high voltage (~16MV) klystrons to drive it - and not simply to reduce size (more in this shortly)

2. The proton beam bombards a fragment emitting target inside an axial magnetic field in a vacuum. The estimation of deceleration efficiency is estimated at over 90% in fragment reactors due to the lack of Carnot losses (according to the published research on the subject). The resultant HVDC will be direct converted to the klystron voltage in producing the electron beam that drives the linac. About 60% of the energy of spallation goes into fragment production. Fragments will be drawn away from the fragment target en route to the collector via a slightly expanding axial magnetic field. Fragment collection allows for automatic isotope separation.

3. The maximum power output of a fragment reactor is limited by its surface area and its ability to radiate heat. Fragment-emitting targets can be either electrostatically suspended dust or rapidly rotating with thin fibers or planes of target material, in order to radiatively cool without melting. Spallation targets, for efficiency, need to be high-Z materials, such as lead, tungsten, mercury, etc. Tungsten is particularly attractive due to its high melting point of 3695K. High-Z metal-rich ceramics are also possible targets, with very high melting points. The temperature of the chamber's beryllium walls being radiated to will be around 1050K. This means heat exchange between a ~3000K emitter (4.6e7W/m) and a 1050K receiver (6.8e4W/m), or about 4.5MW per square meter. In short, this allows for a surprisingly compact core, limited more by the length necessary to ensure a sufficient proton spallation cross section.

4. Neutrons emitted by spallation (at a cost of 30-40 MeV per neutron) are heavily biased by

Waste?

[MrL0G1C]

How France is [not yet] disposing of its nuclear waste - BBC News

Despite advanced schemes in Finland, not a single country worldwide has an operational underground repository.

50+ years of nuclear and still no waste storage.