Why James Hansen Is Wrong About Nuclear Power (thinkprogress.org)

mdsolar writes: Climatologist James Hansen argued last month, "Nuclear power paves the only viable path forward on climate change." He is wrong. As the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) and International Energy Agency (IEA) explained in a major report last year, in the best-case scenario, nuclear power can play a modest, but important, role in avoiding catastrophic global warming if it can solve its various nagging problems — particularly high construction cost — without sacrificing safety. Hansen and a handful of other climate scientists I also greatly respect — Ken Caldeira, Tom Wigley, and Kerry Emanuel — present a mostly handwaving argument in which new nuclear power achieves and sustains an unprecedented growth rate for decades. The one quantitative "illustrative scenario" they propose — "a total requirement of 115 reactors per year to 2050 to entirely decarbonise the global electricity system" — is far beyond what the world ever sustained during the nuclear heyday of the 1970s, and far beyond what the overwhelming majority of energy experts, including those sympathetic to the industry, think is plausible.

Comments

LFTR

[kheldan]

Nuclear powers' 'various nagging problems' won't be an issue if we started using thorium-based reactors.

Re:LFTR

[Rei]

Right. Because the civilian nuclear industry has in sixty years hardly seen fit to invest anything in it, but that's clearly because they're ignorant nitwits who can't see how much clearly better it is, right?

Sorry, but thorium is not the be-all end-all. There are lots of lists touting its advantages that people like you and the gp love to share that conveniently omit the downsides. And the disadvantages aren't just "it's immature mothballed technology". You have to produce their (large) initial fuel load from other reactors, adding a lot of cost and robbing them of output for quite a while. Either that or use expensive, proliferation-risky highly enriched uranium or plutonium to start them, which itself has all sorts of problems related to limited solubility - and none of the workarounds are appealing. LTFRs have salt-freezing difficulties (so muchso that the leading "solution" is to run the entire reactor building blazingly hot rather than trying to heat every line) and use beryllium, a highly expensive, limited resource that's extremely toxic when aerosolized. They also are less controllable due to a lot of the delayed neutrons coming from outside the core. Moving the fuel (and thus waste) around also means that you can plate out waste onto your pipes and valves, potentially causing reduced flows or blockages. The tellurium formed tends to corrode the nickel-based alloys used. The alloys are also very damaged by long-term neutron exposure, and the alloying "fix" reduces the temperature limit, to a low level that may not be acceptable. The graphite has short lifespans and tends to accumulate radioactive daughter products and become a bulky, dangerous waste stream. It also has a potentially risky positive feedback loop, increasing U-233 fission as it heats up (remember Chernobyl? Same thing). The fuel (and thus waste) is fluorides, which are highly water soluble and thus a storage hazard, requiring a conversion step before storage (every such step adds costs and increases risk of spills). Fluoride wastes also over time tend to outgas hydrofluoric acid, uranium hexafluoride, and other extremely dangerous gases. Nobody has any clue what decommissioning costs would be, which is a massive unknown - the tiny Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment had huge decommissioning costs compared to its size. LFTRs are a serious proliferation risk via the protactinium extraction pathway, a necessary step if you want a half-decent power output, and the diversion would be very easy to hide because it's hard to quantify exactly how much protactinium the reactor should be producing at any given time. Protactinium can be used to produce very pure U233, which is a suitable material for making bombs. Another easy proliferation pathway is via extraction of Np-237 - working with a constantly reprocessed, fluoride-based stream makes proliferation almost too easy (the supposed "anti-proliferation" nature of LFTRs is that you can't (without difficulty) just extract the uranium due to U232 contamination... but that's irrelevant because it makes Pa-233 and Np-237-based proliferation so easy). LFTRs have to use expensive highly enriched lithium (7Li) to avoid becoming a major source of tritium outgasing and losing a lot of their neutronicity (which is already for many reasons a huge challenge in thorium reactors - they're much harder to simply "make work")

But no no, let's go on about how it's the solution to everybody's problems and that the industry is a bunch of morons for not throwing all of their money into it...

Really, a LFTR is pretty much backwards from where reactors should be going in every regard. You want your fuel and waste to be contained in small, stable elements, not flowing all over the place and touching (and degrading) everything. You don't want random, potentially rogue states having their hands on reprocessing equipment and liquid fluorides. You don't want to have to use more rare, expensive, and toxic materials in your construction and operation. You want delayed neutrons and negative v

Nope, James Hansen has at least this right

[Anonymous Coward]

James Hansen is right about this. Nuclear reactor technology has advanced to the point that safe-by-design reactors can be built, with technology that prevents meltdown in the event of total power and coolant failure. No other technology offers the energy density necessary to replace fossil fuel power plants.

Re:It's the least worst option

[kheldan]

It's not the 'least worst option', it's the best option. Thorium is plentiful compared to uranium, and more to the point it's plentiful here in North America (no need to buy it from someone else), thorium reactors don't need the complicated high-pressure reactors that uranium-fueled reactors need, thus lower construction costs, easier and cheaper management, they can't 'melt down', and the list of problems solved goes on and on. People need to get over their paranoia about anything with the word 'nuclear' in it and allow themselves to be saved by LFT reactor technology.

Re:Worthless post

[phantomfive]

mdsolar, this is absolute trash. No citations, only "it can't work".

There's a link in the summary. I suggest clicking on it. It contains supporting evidence for what is stated in the summary, which is what most people would consider a 'citation.'

Re:That's exactly right

[thegarbz]

Yes imagination can get you when you don't see how simple the construction itself is. That building, it's simple. Yes it requires the use of special materials but the structure itself is far simpler than any skyscraper would ever be. Those reactors? Simple by any standard used in the process industry. Which only leaves the question of scale.

I was right there with you in my thoughts. I thought scale was an incredible problem right up until I visited the largest oil refinery in Europe after visiting a tiny one in Australia. Everything was the same, the equipment was the same, the way they worked was the same, the effort put into maintaining it was the same. Things were only slightly larger though. A refinery that had 6 times the throughput had far less than double the foot print and the reactor vessels etc were less than double the size. Likewise on the co-generation facilities. Turbines with 10 times the power generation capacity were also less than double the size.

I also had the opportunity to visit a large industry motor / generator repair house to go check on the progress on one of our 2.5MW motors while they were overhauling a 300MW generator for the local power station. The diameter of the rotor was maybe 5 times the size of our little baby but the duty was over 100 times the power. My mind was absolutely blown. Powerlevels and throughput of industrial machinery scale what seems like exponentially with the size of equipment.

Re:That's exactly right

[FlyHelicopters]

https://www.ovoenergy.com/guid...

That says German average price is 35 cents per kWh.

Do you dispute that number being the average across Germany?

The US number given is 12 cents, and that is accurate for the average, but I pay much less, just over 7 cents in Texas. That doesn't make the 12 cent number wrong, just that it isn't MY number.

Maybe your number is lower, but I suspect that 35 cents is correct as a national average in Germany.