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A Nuclear Startup Will Fold After Failing To Deliver Reactors That Run on Spent Fuel (technologyreview.com)
Transatomic Power, an MIT spinout that drew wide attention and millions in funding, is shutting down almost two years after the firm backtracked on bold claims for its design of a molten-salt reactor. From a report: The company, founded in 2011, plans to announce later today that it's winding down. Transatomic had claimed its technology could generate electricity 75 times more efficiently than conventional light-water reactors, and run on their spent nuclear fuel. But in a white paper published in late 2016, it backed off the latter claim entirely and revised the 75 times figure to "more than twice," a development first reported by MIT Technology Review. Those downgrades forced the company to redesign its system. That delayed plans to develop a demonstration reactor, pushing the company behind rival upstarts like TerraPower and Terrestrial Energy, says Leslie Dewan, the company's cofounder and chief executive. The longer timeline and reduced performance advantage made it harder to raise the necessary additional funding, which was around $15 million. "We weren't able to scale up the company rapidly enough to build a reactor in a reasonable time frame," Dewan says.
There are around 50 nuclear startups designing 4th generation reactors. Some were always going to fail. In fact most will probably fail. Some will succeed though.
NuScale is the closest to market. Their design has already passed NRC phase 1 review, and it has been certified as meltdown proof. They will be constructing their first 12 reactors in Idaho for Utah municipalities. Hopefully in a decade they will be mass producing them like airplanes.
Being able to reprocess spent nuclear fuel means that there's less of a storage issue for nuclear waste.
Why are nuclear fanboys still pushing debunked Thorium breeder technology that has been relegated to a scientific curiosity? The new messiah is SMR's.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-power-reactors/small-nuclear-power-reactors.aspx
I think this is less that science is hard, and more that claims two orders of magnitude improvements in anything are probably bullshit unless there's a working demonstration. I'm also not sure that millennials are any worse at falling for that kind of bullshit than previous generations were either and sites like Kickstarter just mean that the public can get in on funding the kinds of scams that venture capitalists have been shown for decades.
Why is anyone wasting their time on this when there's thorium?
Their design does use thorium. The base salt is thorium fluoride. You heat up the salt till it melts, and then just mix in the nuclear waste, hook it up to a turbine, and presto, energy too cheap to meter.
Thorium salt reactors work GREAT in theory, and nerds tend to love them. In reality, there are ... problems.
I'd rather that money be spent/wasted on failed attempts at getting us off of fossil fuels when the math indicates that the idea might work, than to continue to burn hydrocarbon fuel for stationary power plants.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Right. The basic design principles were perfectly well-understood 60 years ago. No one is going to come along and improve the efficiency by a factor of 75. It's a claim that anyone with any sort of technical knowledge, not even specific knowledge of nuclear energy, would reject out of hand. It was bullshit for dimwitted financial types and loony environmentalists, some of whom apparently took the bait.
claims two orders of magnitude improvements in anything are probably bullshit
Normally I'd agree, but in this case the 10^2 improvement is largely based on the horrific inefficiency of our current fleet of solid-fuel, water moderated nukes, which is something like 0.7%. The vast majority of this efficiency gain is due to the liquid-fuel design (in this case, molten salt), which allows fuel to be reprocessed on the fly, whereas "traditional" nukes use solid fuel rods which degrade over time, and become unusable long before their energy content is anywhere near used up.
Other molten salt designs are under development, such as LFTR, which have similar claims on improved efficiency. The main difference is that this one (WAMSR) was supposed to be able to burn up existing stockpiles of spent nuclear fuel. Apparently that particular trick turned out to be more difficult than they anticipated.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
There are around 50 nuclear startups designing 4th generation reactors. Some were always going to fail. In fact most will probably fail.
No there are lots of them CLAIMING to be developing new reactor designs. Some of them might actually be working on the problem even. Curiously we've seen zero of these actually make it to market.
Some will succeed though.
There is no guarantee of that.
NuScale is the closest to market.
Maybe. Best info I can find says they hope to have an operational reactor in 2024 and that was their projection in 2013. That means optimistically they might have something to show 6+ years from now. Not exactly cause for excitement.
Their design has already passed NRC phase 1 review, and it has been certified as meltdown proof.
NRC phase 1 review is a "Preliminary Safety Evaluation Report (SER) and Requests for Additional Information". It does not mean it has been certified as anything.
They will be constructing their first 12 reactors in Idaho for Utah municipalities.
If that were true you would think they would post it somewhere on their website. Perhaps you are talking about this project?
Hopefully in a decade they will be mass producing them like airplanes.
While I wish them well I think this is a good approximation of impossible.
Four issues : Cost, oversight, nuclear weapons capabilities, and transportation logistics. Cost ought to get two slots, to signify how much of an issue it actually is. The others could be solved at great cost. The rub, renewables are cheaper.
Nuclear isn't going to disappear but the idea of expanding it "on a budget" to meet the world's local power needs while wasting abundant clean, cheap renewable energy just doesn't make actual real-world business sense.
You haven't proven that any will succeed any more than you've defined success.
You could say that about any innovation. Internal combustion--you're going to deliberately set off thousands of explosions inside a sealed, iron box? Steam power? Microprocessors? Fire itself?
Imagine the first person who proposed "we're going to build a boat out of steel and it's not going to sink!" It's ludicrous! Steel is expensive. And everyone knows metal sinks and wood floats. Why on God's green Earth would you make a boat out of steel instead of good old fashioned wood?!? I'm not going to listen until you prove you have a working business model.
We won't know if any of these companies will succeed until one does. I can't predict which one it will be so I'm not willing to invest. Others have greater risk tolerance than I do, yay for them. In the mean time, I wish them all the best because the promise is amazing.
Processing spent fuel as you suggest is extremely dirty and generates about 10x the amount of original waste, most of it highly radioactive.
People forget the US tried to reprocess fuel for a while, the location is a radioactive superfund site.
Much of the problems I attribute here to politics and impatience - the funding dries up when folks just get impatient that progress isn't occurring. It's understandable, but sometimes there are HARD problems that need a lot of time and money to solve, yet the payback will be worth it in the long run. Nuclear frequently ticks that mark IMO. I don't think our (US) investment climate is compatible with this much.
A old letter posted by Will Davis @atomicnews today - http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/Rickover.pdf - Easily as relevant today, and basically agrees with your statement. It's a hard problem but we've done hard problems before.
In some sense, I wonder if our economic trend towards consolidation of resources into a few rich individuals is a subtle "invisible hand" reaction to our incessantly short-term thinking, because it's those few with overabundance who are in the best position right now to fund long-term, hard projects with open-ended amounts of capital.
the real at&t mix
molten salt reactors are a interesting idea but are untested
Molten salt reactors are proven technology. They ran one at Oak Ridge for thousands of hours back in the 1960s. There's a ton of info about this online, such as this lecture from a few years ago about LFTR. The Chinese currently have the most active (and best funded) program in this area. With any luck we might see a commercial product from them in the next few years, which could be a real game changer.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
it's technically possible (and a done deal) to use spent fuel or even depleted uranium or natural uranium in certain types of reactors, and to get many times the energy out of said fuel than a PWR could do.
Yes, but it requires special equipment and special handling, and it still can't be done cost-effectively.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'd rather that money be spent/wasted on failed attempts at getting us off of fossil fuels when the math indicates that the idea might work, than to continue to burn hydrocarbon fuel for stationary power plants.
I'd rather not nurture your false dichotomy, and suggest instead using the money to improve and implement already-proven technologies like wind and solar.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Have you met the average consumer? If you tell them that this "clean energy" will only cost them twice as much most won't approve.
Eventually the USA will join the 1st world and stop ignoring externalised costs, the "average consumer" will actually pay for the real cost of electricity and not only opt for the green choice, but maybe start doing something to actively bring the horrid energy consumption per household of the USA down to more reasonable levels.
But I thought there were already "breeder reactors" that did this. How was this design different from them?
Old fashioned breeder reactors turn U-238 into plutonium. Although plutonium can be used as reactor fuel, it can also be used to make bombs. Furthermore, these reactors use fuel rods, and pressurized containers, and have the same complexity and safety problems as LWRs.
What makes this reactor different is that it doesn't make plutonium, it burns the fuel that in breeds in situ so no extra expensive reprocessing is needed, and it is an inherently safe design: It can't have a "meltdown" since it is already liquid, and it is not pressurized.
That is the theory. In practice, molten salt reactors don't have a very good track record.
Molten salt reactor
Nice USA bash. "America is the suck." HOWEVER the 1st world includes the European Union and Japan, both of whom are shutting-down nuclear plants (after the 2011 earthquake released a bunch of radioactivity).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
If by proven you means experimented with but no actual safety, reliability, cost or power generating capability analysis done.
Running a little experimental reactor for a couple years tells you nothing about the commercial viability let alone safety. One of the biggest problems with "molten salt" or liquid sodium reactors is that if the reaction vessel holding this mix of highly radioactive sodium and uranium mixture is every directly exposed to water or oxygen it will explode, burn and fill the atmosphere with a highly radioactive cloud of burning sodium which will then rain down on the surrounding countryside.
Reactor designs like molten salt reactors always fall apart as viable designs when they start talking about surviving things like earthquakes or other natural disasters. This is because to engineer around those disasters you have to do stuff like the current Georgia reactor under construction and spend $20 Billion building a pressure vessel that can survey tidal waves and earthquakes that wipe out the rest of the plant. And when that eventual power is priced at $0.25 kw/hr it's completely uneconomical.
The government doesn't research these "innovative" reactors because every time in the past they've tried the site ended up a superfund site. Every Single Time.
Running a little experimental reactor for a couple years tells you nothing about the commercial viability let alone safety.
Pardon my French: horseshit. Obviously we build smaller ones on the way toward building bigger ones -- whether it be nukes or jets or whatever -- it's called engineering.
One of the biggest problems with "molten salt" or liquid sodium reactors is that if the reaction vessel holding this mix of highly radioactive sodium and uranium mixture is every directly exposed to water or oxygen it will explode, burn and fill the atmosphere with a highly radioactive cloud of burning sodium which will then rain down on the surrounding countryside
You seem to be conflating molten salt with molten sodium. They are completely different. Sodium by itself is highly reactive, whereas sodium chloride (though somewhat corrosive) is quite stable. If you hit a LFTR with a bunker-buster bomb, it would indeed spray radioactive molten salt around the countryside. But it would rapidly solidify and fall to the ground, where it would be easy to find with a geiger counter. (Unlike radioactive steam which just floats away...)
you have to do stuff like the current Georgia reactor under construction and spend $20 Billion building a pressure vessel that can survey tidal waves and earthquakes
The reason for that pressure vessel is because water boils at 100C, and nuclear reactors are just getting warmed up around 400C. So a water-cooled reactor needs plumbing that can handle 150 atmospheres of pressure, just so they can run the reactor at the barely efficient temperature of 300C. But since FLiBe doesn't even melt until 360C (and doesn't boil until well over 1400C) you have a very heat-dense material that can both transport your fuel (enabling on-the-fly reprocessing) and cool your reactor over a broad range of heat regimes... and it does all this at ambient pressure. So you don't need that $20B pressure vessel in the first place.
Watch the video I linked above, it will explain all this in greater detail, and save me the trouble of writing it.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
eh, it's technically possible (and a done deal) to use spent fuel or even depleted uranium
I didn't refer to that aspect at all, just to the evident lies like "75 times more efficient" (than a quite mature technology on which lots of work has been done?!). In fact, I cannot think of a single scenario in any technological field with over 20 years where a 75-times improvement is possible right away. And in case of being possible at all (and logically by assuming that it doesn't provoke other problems), it would imply a beyond-justifiable incompetence in that specific field.
In any case and without wanting to start a discussion here about those specific approaches, when your conclusions have an eminently-theoretical basis, even if formed by extrapolating results from empirical tests under restricted conditions, you should make an extra effort to ensure that your estimates are realistic (no single theory can account for all what really happens at the practical level). Otherwise, it wouldn't really matter to me whether you were extremely incompetent or intentionally dishonest: your conclusions wouldn't make any sense. Pretty much like seriously expecting a function to deliver reliable results under clearly overfitted conditions. Something like "I have two data points, 1-2 and 2-4, and my conclusion is that y=2x will perfectly explain a behaviour potentially applicable to thousands of cases". Ridiculous! The sensible interpretation is that you don't have enough information to know what is going on.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Apparently, you are seem to be wrongly assuming that CANDU reactors ("...allowing it to use some alternative fuels; for example, "recovered uranium"...") are necessarily related to reusing uranium. Also according to Wikipedia, "Reuse of reprocessed uranium has not been common because of low prices in the uranium market of recent decades, and because it contains undesirable isotopes of uranium.". Apparently, the whole point of this project was precisely to improve on this front and the fact that they weren't able to deliver (in general but mainly on the reusing-uranium front) seems to confirm the aforementioned problems of this approach.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
France has been recovering uranium for decades.
After some online research, I haven't been able to find any reference undoubtedly confirming your statement in the sense of your intention (i.e., defending that regularly reusing uranium is perfectly feasible for more or less typical nuclear plant operations). There are certainly quite a few references to uranium (or plutonium) recycling (and France does look like being very active on this front), but not indicating the absolute superiority (being the future, lots of work being done on this front or similar) of this approach and/or its suitability for normal or big-scale nuclear power generation. This process seems to have quite a few problems like generation of additional dangerous products, requiring certain kind of inputs (e.g., enriched-more-than-usual uranium) and special conditions (e.g., having to deal with too hot fuel). You can find what looks like a quite good overall summary here. Long-term storage of nuclear waste is likely to be a big concern for France and their high recycling activity might be mostly meant to somehow minimise the impact of this. I couldn't find any reference to waste-recycling having a relevant impact on France's (or any other country's) nuclear power generation though.
In summary and as per my current understanding of this specific aspect of nuclear power, it seems that most of the recycling efforts are either R&D-ish or performed under very specific conditions to somehow improve certain issues (not being a serious fuel alternative for normal operation). There seems to also be another set of sources/interests defending these ideas on more or less abstract lines (like your "France has been recovering uranium for decades"), whose actual knowledge or real interest in the proper, long-term understanding of what all this implies seems very low. Nuclear, financial, misguided-eco lobbies? The kind of people who says things like "all our energy problems will be solved once we get nuclear fusion working". I am more than happy to update my impressions and my (a bit rusty) knowledge on this matter, but this doesn't seem possible via absolute statements with no validation. Please, feel free to share actually-relevant information and to prove me wrong.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
challenges of repository siting (a problem that applies equally to direct disposal of spent fuel), the environmental risks of the aqueous and organic waste streams, and because of its high cost compared to the once-through fuel cycle
but all are agreed that under current (2005) economic conditions the reprocessing-recycle option is the more costly
If reprocessing is undertaken only to reduce the radioactivity level of spent fuel it should be taken into account that spent nuclear fuel becomes less radioactive over time. After 40 years its radioactivity drops by 99.9%,[46] though it still takes over a thousand years for the level of radioactivity to approach that of natural uranium.
On 25 October 2011 a commission of the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission revealed during a meeting calculations about the costs of recycling nuclear fuel for power generation. These costs could be twice the costs of direct geological disposal of spent fuel
And now let's see the distribution of these plants: China (1), France (3), UK (2), India (4), Pakistan (2) and Russia (1). By taking a quick look at these numbers (+ the ones of already decommissioned plants whose total is higher), the situation seems pretty descriptive even before analysing the generated power. They have been running since quite long time ago (starting in 1944!!), are available in only a few countries (most of them "cost concerned") and represent a very tiny fraction of the total number of nuclear plants. Even though the really relevant figures would be the ones comparing the actual power generated from reused vs. natural fuel, which are likely to be even much more negative for your interests.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.