Advanced High Temperature Reactor

Barry Brook has a post + discussion on the Molten Salt - Advanced High Temperature Reactor, a joint UC Burkley-ORNL project. The Reactor is a Molten Salt-Pebble Bed Hybrid. Barry has some interesting comments, including telling observations. To a significant extent, Barry's views are shaped by the IFR crew including George Stanford, Jan Van Earp and Dan Meneley. These are all smart guys, but with a somewhat narrow perspective. Per Peterson appears to have a comfortable relationship with the IFR crowd, but they have different horses in the race. Barry explains pee's views:

Per argues that fluoride-salt reactor technology (AHTR/LFTR) has a clear path to achieve substantially lower energy production costs than ALWRs. His expectation is that this evolutionary path will remain focused mainly on thermal-spectrum reactors, with efforts to push to higher temperatures and efficiency, and the introduction of thorium. Sodium-cooled, metal-fueled reactors are intrinsically bulkier and lower temperature/efficiency than AHTRs and LFTRs, but are not intrinsically more expensive than ALWRs. IFR is more mature than AHTR and LFTR, so the big question is what will be the most practical route to commercial demonstration. IFR will be a tough sell, though, if the general perception remains that it is more expensive than ALWRs.

Barry intends to say more about this. In addition I should not that one factor that was missed, and that is the relative size of LFTR start up charges, which may be in a thermal LFTR only 1/10 that of a fast reactor. Cheaper and with more rapid deployment has been the Nuclear Green Rallying cry since December 2007. per is calling his reactor the Pebble Bed - Advanced High Temperature Reactor. It is at the very least a design exercise with an architecture that has a lot in common with graphite moderated MSRs. The major difference is that the fuel is in the graphite not the coolant salts. A hybrid is a compromise which borrows some features from each design, but throws out others. The PB-AHTR, makes some of its biggest cm promises in the area of nuclear safety. One of the PBRs safety features is based on its rather large core, a feature that the PB-AHTR eliminates. The MSR features a small core with the ability to limit reactivity be expelling part of the active core fuel content as core fluids expand with heat. Since fuel is dissolved in the core fluid, as the core fluid heats up it expands and starts flowing out of the core. With the decrease in fuel, core reactivity declines. Hence we loose significant safety features on both sides.

As Barry points out the AHTR is a converter not a breeder. Hence the AHTR does not offer LFTR level fuel burn-up. The AHTR does represent an amalgamation of two semi-mature technologies, and can probably move faster than say a MSBR could on its own. But there are costs for such expediencies. The LFTR is more where we want to go than the PB-AHTR. The LFTR will give us more flexible energy choices.

The Best Option

John Newlands,
You said:
“….the best option would be something with a small footprint and fast construction time.”

That sums it up pretty well.

LFTRs can be economic in small sizes. Small LFTRs do not need to be constructed “on-site”. They can be built in factories and shipped to site on a couple of trucks. This is how Henry Ford would have built NPPs. - gallopingcamel, BNC, 25 August 2010

I grinned when I read this.

Faustian Bargains: Weinberg or Lovins?

One of the hazards of coining a memorable expression is wearing it out and continuing to use it after it should have gone out of fashion. Even thinkers as gifted as Alvin Weinberg can develop a mental cramp as far as their own memorable expressions are concerned. Weinberg's phrase "Faustian bargain" is a singular example of the problem. By the early 1970's the Faustian bargain idea had been made obsolete by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory team of reactor scientists, but Weinberg, almost always in the forefront of understanding the implication of new ideas failed to see that the relevance of the Faustian bargain idea was passing as far as nuclear science was concerned. Indeed Weinberg's post-ORNL work was to demonstrate that new Faustian bargains were emerging, bargains which held far more serious consequences than that which people believed they were confronted with by nuclear power.

In the conclusion to his November 1972 Nuclear Safety speech, Weinberg stated,

We nuclear people have made a Faustian bargain with society. On the one hand, we offer - in the breeder reactor - an almost inexhaustible source of energy. Even in the short range, when we use ordinary reactors, we offer energy that is cheaper than energy from fossil fuel. Moreover, this source of energy, when properly handled, is almost nonpolluting. Whereas fossil fuel burners must emit oxides of carbon and nitrogen, and probably will always emit some sulfur dioxide, there is no intrinsic reason why nuclear systems must emit any pollutant - except heat and traces of radioactivity.

Yet Weinberg saw that the benefits of nuclear energy came at a cost,

the price that we demand of society for this magical energy source is both a vigilance and a longevity of our social institutions to which we are quite unaccustomed.

Yet this contention has turned out to be untrue. As I pointed out in my first post on this speech, by the time Weinberg delivered it, the very molten-salt reactor technology which he had led Oak Ridge scientists in developing had made the Faustian bargain concept of nuclear energy potentially obsolete. This is a unique feature of molten-salt reactor technology. Charles Till and Y.I. Chang of Argonne National Laboratory attempted to replicate the MSBR level of safety with the IFR, but there was still a Faustian bargain aspect to the IFR. Sodium burns while molten fluoride salts do not. It is impossible to remove noble gases from IFR fuel during operation, while it is both possible and highly desirable to do so with a LFTR. The LFTR without xenon removal will not reach a one-to-one conversion ratio, and thus will eventually run out of fuel and shut down. The IFR's neutron economy does not require xenon removal, so the Faustian bargain is still in force.

Both the potential safety of molten salt nuclear technology, and its ability to destroy the most dangerous and long lived constituents of nuclear waste, the actinides including the various isotopes of plutonium. offer ways out of the Faustian bargain. Thus in terms of the classic objections to nuclear energy, which Weinberg articulated, the molten-salt reactor offered solutions to the problem of safe reactor design, and nuclear waste disposal. The "Faustian bargain" proved to not be interminable, and the keys to ending it had been developed before Weinberg left ORNL. IFR technology still involves a Faustian bargain despite the claims of its advocates to the contrary.

The Molten Salt Reactor offered truly amazing features as Uri Gat was later to point out in papers he authored with L.H. Dodds. Given the fact that the MSR established that the nuclear communities bargain with society was not inevitably a Faustian bargain. And indeed, IFR advocates would also state that the same is in fact the case with the IFR.

In a review of "NON-NUCLEAR FUTURES: The case for an ethical energy strategy" by Amory B. Lovins and John H. Price, published in Energy policy in December, 1976, Alvin Weinberg pointed to a Faustian bargain Lovins was offering his readers and society,

Despite its title, the book is not concerned with non-nuclear futures. The reader of a book so named is entitled to get from the authors a reasoned description of a feasible non-nuclear future. The authors excuse this omission with the assertion (p159), 'To show that a policy is mistaken does not oblige the analyst to have an alternative policy.' But this is inadequate. This is not dealing with a hypothetical issue, but a real one. It is not enough to point out the deficiencies of nuclear energy; one must deal with the situation that would arise if Lovins and price were successful in their onslaught: should the society indeed turn away from nuclear energy, what then?

Here Alvin Weinberg exposes Amory Lovins' Faustian bargain with our society. Weinberg Ferrets out Lovins' fundamental assumption about energy and society,

(p xxi), 'Low-energy futures can (but need not) be normative and pluralistic, whereas high-energy futures are bound to be coercive and to offer less scope for social diversity and individual freedom.

Weinberg raised a problem with Lovins' low-energy, high freedom claim, by pointing to an inevitable tradeoff between energy and time. The more energy we have, Weinberg argued, the more freedom we have to control our time. Weinberg pointed to a truth problem in Lovins' argument

So much of the argument is at the border of Science, or even trans-scientific, that one cannot prove the authors to be wrong, any more than one can prove the nuclear advocates to be wrong.

Weinberg put his finger on the greatest single environmental flaw of Lovins' argument, his failure to identify CO2 emissions from energy as a major environmental issue, and his willingness to accept carbon emitting coal as a substitute for nuclear energy. Weinberg wrote,

the authors regard net energy analysis as a convenient device for casting nuclear power in an unfavorable light, a feat they attempt to accomplish by ignoring significant comparisons, - nuclear and non=nuclear of the same doubling time and relative effects of heat release and CO2 release.

In response to Lovins recommending a coal burning bridge between the period when nuclear power was considered acceptable and the time when all energy would come from renewable resources, Weinberg asked,

Can we really ignore CO2 during the coal burning fission free bridge?

Lovins countered that he

worried about the climate effect of the release of CO2

but that nuclear power would not prevent CO2 emissions from high coal use. Clearly then Lovins offered a Faustian bargain with his anti-nuclear energy scheme. In 2010, long after a process which Lovins forecasted would have begun to shift human society from fossil fuels to renewables, coal use for energy continues to rise. If Lovins worried in 1976 about the climate effects of CO2 emissions, he did not worry sufficiently. Lovins Faustian bargain put society clearly on track for a climate disaster, and in 2010 Lovins still has not figured out how to avoid the disaster without nuclear energy. The Lovins Faustian bargain is still in force, and until we are willing to listen to Alvin Weinberg, we will continue to follow Lovins to perdition.

Nuclear Co-generation: Good Idea Coming Back in the Czech Republic.

Maya Wind

Tiffany Chantel, Contemporary American

From the gallery of the artist.

By NNadir.

Unfortunately the vast majority of the world's nuclear reactors have a thermodynamic efficiency well less than 40%. Thermodynamic, or Carnot, efficiency, of course, is a measure of work divided by thermal energy input in a heat engine, where work is typically thought of as the mechanical energy recovered via the expansion of a heated fluid.

The work - expressed as mechanical energy or electrical energy - can never even equal] the heat energy input: This is the crux of the second law of thermodynamics.

Although 100% efficiency in a heat engine would violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics - Einstein said that the laws of thermodynamics were the only physical laws he never expected to be overturned - one can raise the efficiency to values much higher than the traditional 30-40% found in most industrial and small heat engines around the world.

Although I favor the immediate phase out of all dangerous fossil fuels, many fossil fuel plants have achieved fairly high efficiency making their horrible properties slightly less worse, although they can never be as safe as nuclear energy. The most successful approach has been the combined cycle gas engine, which uses two different types of heat engine cycles, the Brayton cycle and a Rankine cycle. Brayton cycles involve a heated gas driving a turbine - a jet engine is an example - and a Rankine cycle is a familiar steam engine.

In the Brayton cycle a gas is compressed, then heated to a high temperature and allowed to expand against a turbine. Since the gas is at a high temperature - although expansion causes it to cool slightly - it can still remain hot enough to boil water. If the boiling water is connected to a steam engine, further energy can be collected by turning a turbine with the steam so generated. The limitation of these types of machines historically has involved materials science, but materials science advanced enough in the twentieth century that by the 1980's, many combined cycle dangerous fossil fuel plants had actually been built, many in Great Britain.

In theory, this type of option is available to nuclear energy, particularly with a type of reactor that is not particularly popular - although many actual examples are were known - the high temperature gas cooled reactor, which can be operated on Brayton cycles. (Another option is what I believe is Charles's favorite reactor - and in fact mine - the molten salt reactor which can also run Brayton cycles.)

My friend Rod Adams designed a type of reactor - the Adams Atomic Engine - that is designed as a Brayton nuclear driven engine, but these reactors have not been built.

However the laws of thermodynamics while placing limits on the amount of work that can be obtained from a heat engine, place far less restrictions on how much energy can be useful, particularly if one needs heat for some purpose. Of course, we do need heat to heat spaces, living and office spaces.

The original Calder Hall reactor, which connected to the grid in 1956 and ran until 2003, with an overall capacity utilization of 83.10%. The reactor generated 270 MWs of thermal power and only 50 MWs of electricity - it was a very small reactor in modern terms - and thus had a thermal efficiency of 50/270 = 18.5%. Most modern PWR type reactors have thermal efficiencies of around 33%; the EPR is said - if my memory serves me well - at close to 40%. So it would seem that the small Calder Hall reactor wasted better than 80% of the energy that nuclear energy provided.

Well, yes and no, quite and not quite. The Calder Hall reactor, the first truly commercial reactor in the world, and regrettably of a type that was dual use, weapons and commercial, used its waste heat to heat buildings.

This idea - which is not all that new - New York City has been using waste heat as district heat for over a century, is called cogeneration.

Even though nuclear reactors produce a lot of waste heat - as do coal and gas plants - very little of the heat has been used for district heating. It was so used in the former Soviet Union - including at Pripyat, where Chernobyl was located - and is still used today and the wonderful 3 operating heavy water reactors (CANDUS) operating at Cernavoda in Romania. (Talks are underway to complete two more CANDUS in Romania.)

This is an idea that should have been more widely exploited and, happily, there is a proposal to do just that in the Czech Republic.

To wit:

Plans are under consideration for a district heating network for the city of Brno, 40 kilometres from the Dukovany nuclear power plant.



Dukovany features four VVER reactors with a total thermal power of 5500 MW. Plant systems convert 1760 MW of this into electricity for transmission over the grid, but some of the leftover heat could in future be piped to homes and businesses.

An environmental impact assessment for plans by plant owner CEZ was put to regional officials at the end of July, which is expected to take up to two years to evaluate. Should it get the go-ahead CEZ would need another two years or more to install the feeder pipeline, which would be more than 40 kilometres long.



Benefits for the residents of Brno would come in the shape of reduced emissions and stabilized heating prices. The supply should also be very reliable: There have been no unplanned shutdowns at Dukovany's four reactors in the last ten years.

The Dukovany reactors all have capacity utilization factors in the mid 80% range, meaning that they are very reliable machines.

Czech Reactors Could Supply Heat.

Note that there are other ways to increase the efficiency of nuclear reactors by using them to produce process heat to drive chemical reactions, including those that produce fluid fuels. This is the real strength of fluid phase reactors, including LFTR's which are frequently discussed here and elsewhere on the internet.

It is very possible for these type of reactors to produce thermal efficiencies nearing - or even exceeding 60% - and if the heat losses are used - possibly in connection with heat pumps - one conceivably could utilize a very large fraction of the heat energy generated.

Weinberg on Nuclear Safety

By the middle of 1972 the handwriting was on the wall. Alvin Weinberg had some very powerful enemies, including Congressman Chet Holifield, and AEC administrator Milton Shaw. At the heart of their enmity was a distaste for Weinberg's view on nuclear safety. The official line of the Atomic Energy Establishment was that Light Water Reactor technology was mature and safe. Nuclear scientists who were worried about reactor safety were not sure. 7 years later the Three Mile Island-2 accident was to demonstrate that reactors, although not highly dangerous, were not as safe as they could be. Weinberg championed the cause of nuclear scientists who knew that more nuclear safety research was needed. The establishment, including Holifield and Shaw, found that Weinberg's stance was an unforgivable affront to their power and determined to fire him.

Weinberg's firing followed another incident, the forced censorship of a K.Z. Morgan paper, with a threat that if Morgan presented a notion that certain parties in Washington, Chicago and Arco, Idaho did not like, namely that the the Molten Salt Breeder Reactor (MSBR) was a safer and more acceptable than the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR), Laboratory funding, effecting the livelihood of hundreds of Laboratory employees would be cut. Alvin Weinberg came close to confirming Morgan's story that ORNL had been threatened with a funding loss had Morgan's uncensored paper been presented. This threat could have only been a serious threat if it came from Holifield and Shaw. As it was the staff of ORNL diminished from 5300 to 3600 during the late 1960's and early 1970's as the result of funding decreases including the termination of the Molten Salt Reactor development program.

As it turned out, censoring Morgan did not protect Weinberg, because Chet Holifield disliked Weinberg's stance on nuclear safety. Weinberg was later to be proven right on nuclear safety problems at a place called Three Mile Island.

From the late in the 1960's until the end of December 1972, Weinberg had worked to shift the direction of the laboratory focus away from reactor development and toward environmental issues. He succeeded in creating a major center for the study of carbon in the environment, at a time when so-called environmentalists favored burning CO2 to nuclear energy. Indeed because of Weinberg's intuitive, ORNL moved a generation ahead of Snowmass and almost everywhere else in its thinking about carbon and the environment. In November, 1972 the recently-fired Alvin Weinberg, six weeks away from a year long terminal leave from ORNL, journeyed to Boulder, Colorado to speak to Council for the Advancement of Science Writing about nuclear safety. Weinberg, whose integrity on nuclear safety was unquestionable, took environmentalists to task for their preference for fossil fuels over nuclear power. Weinberg stated,

Nuclear power plants and their subsystems have caused less damage to human health and to the environment, per kilowatt-hour, than have fossil-fueled central power stations. Thus Professor Lester B. Lave of Carnegie-Mellon University points out that from mining alone the damage imposed by coal is twelve-fold greater, per kilowatt-hour, than is that imposed by nuclear energy. (Professor Lave's argument is based on the fact that some 120,000 coal miners today receive about $300 per month compensation as the result of black lung disease.) C. Starr, M. A. Greenfield, and D. F. Hausknecht writing in Nuclear News, Oct. 1972, have compared the radioactivity hazard from nuclear plants with that from oil- or coal-fired plants. Their results show that to reach air quality standards for oxides of sulfur and nitrogen and radioactivity in Los Angeles County one could tolerate 160,000 nuclear plants of 1,000,000-kilowatt capacity, but only 10 oil-fired or 23 natural-gas plants of this size.

Granted that properly operating nuclear power plants and their sub-systems - including mining, transport and chemical reprocessing of used reactor fuel elements, and disposal of radioactive wastes - are benign and have been so demonstrated, are there concerns regarding the possibility that these systems may malfunction and cause hazard to people and to the environment? This is a perfectly legitimate question that deserves serious and thoughtful consideration; and it is this aspect of the matter that I shall address.

A properly operating nuclear power plant and its subsystems is and can remain as innocuous a thermal power plant as man has ever devised. The whole safety issue then centers around the possibility that a nuclear plant or its subsystems may malfunction so grossly as to cause damage to the environment or to people.

Weinberg has laid out the issues. The issue in November 1972 is the same which confronts us, 38 years later. The so-called "Greens" have made a secret alliance with fossil fuel interest that is to the detriment of all life forms on the planet Earth, including its human inhabitants. And no matter how much environmentalists profess to be concerned about the carbon problem, until they give up their anti-nuclear alliance with coal and natural gas interests, the safety of the planet is in jeopardy.

Environmentalists, who seemingly regard lies as a primary tool to further their anti-nuclear arguments, have long insisted that the scientific-technical community had ignored the issue of nuclear safety. Weinberg answered this slur,

At the outset, we must remember that the technical community has always recognized that a nuclear system is potentially a dangerous device.

This statement can be verified by anyone who would care to review the history of nuclear safety discussions and research, by pioneering nuclear scientists, as Weinberg pointed out,

I can assert that nuclear systems per kilowatt-hour have caused much less damage to the biosphere than have other sources of thermal energy, is a tribute to the ingenuity and foresight of the reactor engineer. From the earliest days of nuclear energy we nuclear people have been constantly reminded of this potential danger. (In 1942 one of the first jobs I did for the Manhattan Project was to estimate the hazard caused by minute amounts of radioactive carbon that would be emitted from the early air-cooled graphite reactors; and General Leslie R. Groves insisted that Enrico Fermi move his West Stands critical reactor from the center of Southside Chicago because of the potential hazard.) Being so sensitively attuned to this potential, we have developed techniques and methods for handling these materials safely. The question is, successful as we have been in the past, what can we say about the likelihood of our continuing success in the future when large nuclear energy reactors will dot the landscape everywhere?

Weinberg in 1972 addressed what continue to be nuclear safety concerns of the public:

The whole nuclear power system involves four subsystems:
(1) mining and refining uranium to fuel the reactor;
(2) the reactor itself;
(3) transport and chemical processing of radioactive materials from the reactor; and
(4) waste disposal.

After discussing research on cancer rates of uranium miners, Weinberg concluded,

the number of deaths caused by mining of uranium, per kilowatt-hour, is much less than those from mining of coal, simply because there are so many fewer miners involved per kilowatt-hour.

It should be noted that changes in mining technology during the last 40 years have improved the health and safety of all miners, but this is particularly true of American uranium miners, because uranium mining technology now does not require miners to go underground. Coal miners still die in deep underground mines, and workers at oil and gas extraction facilities still die from natural gas explosions. So if anything there is an even greater safety advantage in uranium mining today than when Weinberg spoke 38 years ago.

Weinberg noted two safety concerns in connection with reactors,

There are two quite different potential hazards from a nuclear reactor.

* First there are the routine effluents - including tritium which is a radioactive form of hydrogen, radioactive fission gases from possible leaking fuel elements, radioactive cobalt from corrosion products, etc.

* Second there is the question of a major, catastrophic accident to a nuclear reactor that might result in an appreciable fraction of the radioactive inventory being released to the environment.

Weinberg noted that the first hazard was itself controversial, but noted that even disregarding the controversy,

the current standards are now so low - 5% of the amount we receive from natural sources - at the reactor site boundary as to make the whole issue a non-issue. [By comparison, the added radiation one gets by sleeping adjacent to one's wife whose body (as does everyone's) contains radioactive potassium, is around 7% of the standard for the reactor site boundary. This is a classic case of balancing benefits versus risks!] And indeed, nuclear power plants are now designed to meet these very stringent requirements, and in fact are doing so; here a technological
fix has completely resolved a controversy.

Weinberg thus points out a reductio ad absurdum of the safety concerns of nuclear critics. It is, Weinberg argues, more dangerous from a radiation safety viewpoint to sleep next to your spouse than to sleep just outside the fence at a reactor site.

We now have reached a point where we should look for Alvin Weinberg's covert comments about his firing, which was a closely-guarded secret at the time. First it should be noted that ORNL had been between 1955 and 1965 a major international center for reactor safety research. A team of reactor chemists under the direction of George W. Parker had examined the circumstances of a potential reactor accident. My father from 1960 to 1965 had been a member of the team, and played a major role in writing a 1967 paper which described the team's work. I have noted elsewhere Milton Shaw's role in shutting down ORNL safety research. However, in their swan song, the ORNL safety researchers noted,

In conclusion, we wish to emphasize that there are many factors affecting the fission product source term and the amount of fission products which actually can escape the containment system of power reactors in reactor accidents. While the amount of fission products evolved from overheated fuel is highly useful information, it is now recognized that the hazard of reactor accidents can be fully evaluated only through sophisticated accident simulation experiments in facilities such as the Containment Research Installation (ORNL), the Containment Systems Experiment (Battelle Northwest), and the Loss-of-Fluid Test (Phillips-Idaho).

This recommendation was important in Weinberg's thinking. And it was a thorn in Milton Shaw's side. The loss of coolant test was the critical issue for Weinberg, because speculation had held that once core meltdown had occurred, nothing could stop the molten mass of core materials from eating its way through the massive steel pressure vessel, the cement floor of the underneath the reactor, and into the earth, all of the way to China. This was the infamous "China Syndrome." The loss of coolant test proposed to sacrifice a built-to-purpose reactor under construction at INL. A loss-of-coolant accident was to be simulated, and the reactor was then allowed to experience core meltdown. The goal of the experiment was to discover if the "China Syndrome" could in fact happen. Weinberg argued that the loss of coolant experiment was rational.

As long as reactors were relatively small we could prove by calculation that even if the coolant system and its back-up failed, the molten fuel could not generate enough heat to melt itself through the containment However, when reactors exceeded a certain size, then it was no longer possible to prove by calculation that an uncooled reactor fuel charge would not melt through its containment vessel. This hypothetical melt-through is referred to as the China Syndrome for obvious reasons. Since we could not prove that a molten fuel puddle wouldn't reach the basement of a power reactor, we also couldn't prove whether it would continue to bore itself deeper into the ground.

Weinberg pointed to the consequences,

Whether or not the China Syndrome is a real possibility is moot. The point is, however, that it is not possible to disprove its existence. Thus, for these very large reactors, it is no longer possible to claim that the containment shell, which for smaller reactors could be relied upon to prevent radioactivity from reaching the public, was sufficient by itself. In consequence, the secondary back-up cooling systems, which originally were designed simply to prevent property loss and awkward clean-up, must now be viewed as the ultimate emergency protection against the China Syndrome and as an integral part of the reactor safety system.

I have already pointed out that it was not Weinberg alone, but the community of Nuclear Scientists which did not accept Milton Shaw's judgment on nuclear safety. As Weinberg pointed out,

Very arduous and sometimes acrimonious [Congressional] hearings related to these criteria were held last year [1971]. During this time every aspect of the operation of the emergency core cooling systems both in pressurized-water reactors and in boiling-water reactors has been thoroughly re-examined. Although they are obviously cumbersome, the hearings have obliged all parties, intervenors, manufacturers, the AEC, safety engineers, to examine in excruciating detail the possible course of events following a loss-of-coolant accident. The criteria that have emerged represent additional conservatism in the design both of light-water reactors and of their emergency core cooling systems.

There is little reason to doubt that Weinberg saw the "China Syndrome" controversy as the backdrop to his firing.

Weinberg then took up the issue of the transportation and chemical reprocessing of nuclear fuel. Weinberg argued that these problems should be addressed together because,

if reactors and chemical plants needed for reprocessing their fuel were built very close to each other (in nuclear parks) the transport problem as a separate safety hazard would largely disappear.

Weinberg knew of one such system, the Molten Salt Breeder Reactor that was being developed at Oak Ridge. Weinberg noted,

As for the chemical fuel reprocessing plants themselves, we at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are studying measures that might be taken to reduce radioactive emissions from such plants as low as those from light-water reactors - around 5% of radiation levels from natural sources at the plant boundaries. We believe that plants with practically zero release are actually quite feasible and would probably add around 0.5 mill per kwh to the cost of nuclear power.

Weinberg also reported that he had testified

before the Senate Interior and Insular Affairs Committee in October 1971, . . .

And his views had, no doubt given pain to Milton Shaw and Chet Holifield,

our present technology and philosophy of siting separates the chemical plants from the reactors, and so we are confronted with the necessity of transporting heavily radioactive materials. To estimate the hazard, let us suppose that by the year 2000, we have 1,000,000 megawatts of nuclear power, of which two-thirds are liquid-metal fast breeders. There will then be 7000 to 12,000 annual shipments of spent fuel from reactors to chemical plants, with an average of 60 to 100 loaded casks in transit at all times. Projected shipments might contain 1.5 tons of core fuel which has decayed for as little as 30 days (in which case each shipment while in transit would generate 300 kilowatts of heat) and 75 million curies of radioactivity. Present casks from light-water reactors might contain material that produces 30 kilowatts of heat and contains seven million curies of radioactivity.

It should be noted that sometime later, reactor researchers at Argonne National Laboratory redesigned the fuel reprocessing system for the LMFBR in order to keep it in the same location as the reactor. Not only did they tastily acknowledge that Weinberg was right, but they also managed to spend a huge amount of money to reinvent the wheel, that is to develop a technology that could do for LMFBR fuel what ORNL was developing technology for with the MSBR, using analogous molten-salt technology.

Finally, Weinberg offered some observations on nuclear waste. Ironically, Weinberg did not realize that ORNL had developed a solution to the nuclear waste problem. My father had in the 1950's investigated the use of plutonium as a Molten Salt Reactor fuel. And the use of Plutonium as a molten salt reactor fuel had been demonstrated during the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. Weinberg acknowledged the problem created by plutonium in used nuclear fuel,

Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,400 years, and wastes containing this nuclide will remain potentially dangerous for 200,000 years.

Ironically, if plutonium and the so-called minor actinides could be burned in a reactor, they would cease to be a part of the nuclear waste problem, the highly-radioactive fission products in nuclear waste would stop being dangerous after 300 years. Thus another solution to the nuclear waste problem was potentially available from Oak Ridge technology, but that had not been worked out yet. That solution could potentially produce a very large amount of new energy. Two decades later, Uri Gat and J.R. Engel of ORNL and H.L. Dodds of the University of Tennessee, were to write,

The MSRs, with their continuous processing and the immediate separation of the residual fuel from the waste, simplify the handling of the waste and contribute to the solution and acceptability of the waste issue.

The on-line processing can significantly reduce the transportation of radioactive shipments. There is no shipping between the reactor and the processing facility. Storage requirements are also reduced as there is no interim storage for either cooldown or preparation for shipment. The waste, having been separated from the fuel, requires no compromise to accommodate the fuel for either criticality or diversion concerns. The waste shipments can be optimized for waste concerns alone. The actinides can be recycled into the fuel for burning and thus eliminated from the waste. While further work is required to fully analyze this possibility, several proposals to burn actinides have been made. The MSRs with on-line processing lend themselves readily to recycling the actinides into the fuel. Eliminating the actinides from shipments and from the waste reduces the very long controlled storage time of the waste to more acceptable and reasonable periods of time

I must first state than nothing Weinberg had to say about alternative solutions to the nuclear waste problem was wrong. It is simply that using plutonium and other actinides from nuclear waste, as nuclear fuel, kills two birds with one stone. Not only does it turn what was considered dangerous waste into energy, but it will allow for hundreds and perhaps even thousands of thorium breeding molten salt reactors (LFTRs) to be started very quickly, since their initial fuel charge could be recovered from used nuclear fuel. Thus the supposedly terrible problem of nuclear waste, actually is part of a workable solution to the problem of post carbon energy.

Alvin Weinberg made important contributions to our understanding of the role of energy in our society, and those contributions have, as of yet not been fully appreciated. He understood both the problems and the potential of nuclear energy. In many respects Alvin Weinberg correctly saw path that society was taking, and gauged its consequences. Although not the first nuclear scientist to recognize the CO2 problem, that honor goes to Edward Teller, once Weinberg understood the carbon problem, he emerged as a leading voice in articulating it during the 1970's.

What Weinberg failed to realize was the extent to which ORNL scientists, under his leadership, had found a way out of "the Faustian bargain" which he frequently referred to as a description of the relationship between the nuclear science community and society. Undoing Weinberg's "Faustian bargain" will thus be a topic for a further post.

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Atmospheric CO2

An ENERGY Comparison Between Nuclear Plants Now Under Construction, and World Solar PV Production.

Marc Marc Chagall (1887-1985).

Golgatha (1912)

At the Museum of Modern Art, New York

(Cross Posted at Daily Kos: I apologize for editor "cut and paste" errors made here and there.)

One of the pleasures of the new Department of Energy under Steven Chu and the DOE of past years is clarity.

Until recently, if one wanted to find out from the Department of Energy website what portion of so called "renewable" energy actually came from solar PV, wind, biofuels, blah, blah, blah, one couldn't do it. With the exception of dangerous and deadly hydropower, the figures of so called "renewables" were all lumped together.

Not much it turns out.

Note that the units I will use here are units of energy and not in peak power. Energy is obtained integration power with respect to time, including time that the power output is, um, zero. On the other hand, average continuous power can be obtained by recording the total energy output over a period of time and the number of seconds in that period.

For instance, I once showed using on line data that anyone with a computer can call up and use, that the "51 kw" solar PV system had an actual average continuous power output of a 5 kw dangerous natural gas plant operated at 100% capacity, the difference between a putative gas plant and the solar PV plant being that the gas plant, at least, would be reliable and predictable, and also the difference between sales talk and reality.

Now for the numbers.

In 2007, the last year for which full summed solar PV energy data is available, the entire planet produced 0.050 quads of energy. A "quad" is a quadrillion BTU's, and multiplied by 1.055 to give exajoules. Thus PV solar power produced, in 2007, 0.052 exajoules of the approximately 500 exajoules of energy now used by humanity. The average continuous power of solar PV energy on the entire planet was thus the equivalent of 1658 MWe of a continously operated power plant of any type.

For comparison, the awful AES dangerous natural gas power plant, which routinely dumps all of its wastes in Earth's atmosphere - and past which one can bicycle in 5 minutes (I've done this) - produces 1300 MWe.

However, since the solar plants did not operate continuously, they were inherently dependent on spinning reserve, which on this planet consists almost entirely of dangerous natural gas and dangerous hydroelectric power.

(Although people in general couldn't care less, the greatest energy disaster of all time, which killed hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of days, was a serial hydroelectric dam failure at Banqiao, something that was very nearly repeated in the United States and which I covered in a diary called: A Tale of Two Centimeters: The Near Collapse of the Colorado River Dam System in 1983.
Predictably lots of people wrote in to say that detectable uranium has been in Lake Mead for several decades and thus everyone in Los Angeles will die. There is also detectable uranium in the ocean having resulted from the nuclear disaster that occurred roughly 5.0 billion years ago, causing a star to explode.)

But we were talking about the "solar miracle."

The provisional figures for 2008 show that solar PV energy (again combined with tidal) produced 0.088 exajoules of energy.
This is the equivalent of any kind of plant capacity, running at 100% of about 2800 MWe.

Spain produced, in 2008, 2.37 billion kilowatt-hours of solar PV electricity in 2008, which translates in terms of average continuous power to a reliable plant capable of running at 100% of capacity utilization - and not requiring spinning reserve and the effective costs of redundant infrastructure - of 270 MWe. Spain is phasing out its "screw the poor and subsidize the rich at the expense of the poor" solar subsidy, which has burned more than 5 billion euros (over 6 billion dollars as of today's exchange rate). That is not the cost, just the government subsidy. In addition Spanish banks loaned the solar industry 40 billion Euros, or more than 50 billion dollars. The link shows that as of today the cost of solar electricity in Spain, which may well be subject to desertification owning to climate change, is more than ten times higher than grid electricity - this after years of endless soothsaying about solar PV "grid parity" which has remained for 5 decades complete and total nonsense.

Thus a solar plant, again not even counting the dangerous fossil fuel back up, and the external costs of the dangerous fossil fuel waste dumping, dangerous fossil fuel accidents, dangerous fossil fuel mining and dangerous fossil fuel war, nor the cost of solar PV waste - more or less equivalent to ordinary electronic waste - that was the equivalent of the 1000 MWe Trillo Nuclear Power plant - just one of the eight operating Spanish nuclear plants - which first provided power to the Spanish Grid in 1988, would cost roughly (combining the loan figures and subsidies) 240 billion dollars. The Spanish GDP is about $1.6 trillion dollars, meaning that just one solar plant to match - again not counting the cost of back up - would consume about 15% of the total value of the Spanish economy.

Of course replacing all of Spain's nuclear electricity with waste generating solar PV garbage would require the entire annual output of the Spanish economy, all the money they spend on food, water, clothing, education, medical care and all of the other stuff about which trust fund kids couldn't care less.

(Typically anti-nukes express NO interest in phasing out dangerous fossil fuels for electrical generation, as France has done, more or less. That would consist, of course, of biting the hand that feeds you.)
(Spain is damned lucky that there are transmission lines over the Pyrenees.)

No wonder they shit canned the subsidy. They couldn't afford it. No one can, save maybe highly paid asshole dangerous fossil fuel sales people living in Aspen far above the seething impoverished masses on this planet.

(Germany is also phasing out its solar subsidy, which has been even more of a waste than the Spanish solar subsidies, given that Germany is not yet well on its way to desertification.)

It can be shown on the planet as a whole, that the capacity utilization of nuclear power is 77%, which makes it the most reliable form of energy capacity on the entire planet, more reliable than any of the dangerous fossil fuels, all of which are more reliable than any form of so called "renewable" energy. In the United States, which is still, despite the growth of ignorance here, the world's largest producer of nuclear energy, the capacity utilization is more like 89%.

No wonder they shit canned the subsidy. They couldn't afford it. No one can, save maybe highly paid asshole dangerous fossil fuel sales people living in Aspen far above the seething impoverished masses on this planet.

(Germany is also phasing out its solar subsidy, which has been even more of a waste than the Spanish solar subsidies, given that Germany is not yet well on its way to desertification.)

In fact, there are now, on this very planet, 57 nuclear reactors under construction and all the faith based dangerous fossil fuel funded "solar will save us" complacency generating trash talk will do nothing to prevent this happy fact. The power rating of these nuclear reactors now under construction is 53,781 MWe. This is electric power, not thermal power.

Assholes in Aspen have been writing for many years now that nuclear power is dead, but this is pure trash talk. (Ironically trash burning is still the world's largest, save hydroelectricity, form of so called "renewable energy" even though you couldn't possibly build a trash incinerator in Aspen - these things are only built in poor neighborhoods.)
In fact, there are now, on this very planet, 57 nuclear reactors under construction and all the faith based dangerous fossil fuel funded "solar will save us" complacency generating trash talk will not stop them from being built. The power rating of these nuclear reactors Note that the units I will use here are units of energy and not in peak power. Energy is obtained integration power with respect to time, including time that the power output is, um, zero. On the other hand, average continuous power can be obtained by recording the total energy output over a period of time and the number of seconds in that period.

The amount of electrical energy that this capacity will generate at 77% of capacity utilization - and I suspect that the actual capacity utilization for these new plants will be higher than that - is 1.38 exajoules of pure electricity.

This is more electricity than Spain produces from all sources, including the dangerous fossil fuel crap that dominates the Spanish electricity supply, more electricity than all of the power plants in the United Kingdom produce from all sources, including nuclear, dangerous fossil fuels and the so called "renewable" toys.

It can be shown by appeal to a very unpopular subject called "science" that one can in fact, recover some of the waste thermal power of nuclear reactors to produce things like fluid fuels, but it is not my intention to be boring, although probably not using the type of capacity that is now under construction. I have been studying this subject for a number of years and am currently more convinced of it than ever. (I probably shouldn't be wasting valuabe time here and should focus on my work.)

Now I don't know why you are a Democrat, assuming you are one, but I know why I am a Democrat. I am a Democrat because I actually spite, in spite of all the trash talk ignoring this point by assholes who live in Aspen, that the section one of 25th article of the International Declaration of Human Rights should be more honored in practice than in breach.

It reads:

•(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

This is the work of the person who I personally consider to be one of, if not the, greatest American of the 20th century, Eleanor Roosevelt.

Note that this article does not speak of the right to be an asshole in Aspen, but it does require a minimum standard of wealth for all humanity. Irrespective of distribution issues - about which I am personally not happy - wealth is about productivity, not faith based wishful thinking.

I recognize that the Daily Kos web site is an anti-nuclear site, and that nuclear scientists are not welcome here.

Even so, the contention that the Democratic Party is an anti-nuclear party is purely absurd. With the exception of Teller and Wheeler, almost all of the great nuclear scientists of the 20th century were Democrats and irrespective of this website's official stance, no Democrat need apologize for an interest in and knowledge of nuclear science.

Glenn Seaborg, Hans Bethe, Eugene Wigner, Alvin Weinberg, Robert Oppenheimer, Frank Oppenheimer, to name a few, were all famously politically liberal, and all were invested with a profound consideration for the state of humanity that was largely consistent with Mrs, Roosevelt’s views. (The three Nobel Laureates on this list were ALL active in, promoters of, and defenders of commercial nuclear power througout their careers.)

In fact, the only Democratic President or Democratic Presidential candidate to refuse to meet with Nobel Laureate Glenn Seaborg was, um, Michael Dukakis, and anyone who remembers that guy will recall what happened to him.

(Source: A Chemist In the White House.. Glenn Seaborg personally met every single elected President of the United States, from Truman to Clinton, and effectively held cabinet level rank in the Kennedy administration.)

The respect for nuclear science in the Democratic Party is still visible at the very highest levels of the Democratic Party.
Neither the President of the United States, who I continue to admire greatly even if I certainly disagree with him on some points about energy nor his Secretary of Energy, a Nobel Laureate in, um, nuclear physics, are anti-nukes.

Quoth the President of the United States speaking to the AFL-CIO executive committee just a few weeks ago:

Because of you, we’ve been able to get a lot done over the last 20 months. Together, we’re jumpstarting a new American clean energy industry -- an industry with the potential to generate perhaps millions of jobs building wind turbines and solar panels, and manufacturing the batteries for the cars of the future, building nuclear plants, developing clean coal technology. There are other countries that are fighting for those jobs, in China and India and in Germany and other parts of Europe. But the United States doesn’t play for second place. As long as I’m President, I’m going to keep fighting night and day to make sure that we win those jobs, that those are jobs that are created right here in the United States of America and that your members are put to work.

I obviously disagree with the concept of "clean coal" and I regard any money spent on solar and wind energy as a complete waste of precious resources, and so the President and I disagree on these points, but the point is also clear that the President is decidedly not an anti-nuke. No Mike Dukakis, he.

In announcing a blue ribbon commission on the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, the Secretary of Energy said:

"Nuclear energy provides clean, safe, reliable power and has an important role to play as we build a low-carbon future. The Administration is committed to promoting nuclear power in the United States and developing a safe, long-term solution for the management of used nuclear fuel and nuclear waste. The work of the Blue Ribbon Commission will be invaluable to this process. I want to thank Congressman Hamilton and General Scowcroft for leading the Commission and I look forward to receiving their recommendations,"

DOE Announcement, January 29, 2010.

Note that the Secretary specifically used the words "used nuclear fuel," - Rod Adams' coinage - and not the malignant and grotesquely misinformed term "nuclear waste." If you have a faith based belief in the artificial concept of so called "nuclear waste," you are decidedly not as smart as the Secretary of Energy.

I am personally relieved that nuclear science has a place in the White House, just as it did in Glenn Seaborg's time. This gives our country something that I think it lacked: Hope.

Hatred of physical sciences based on a faith based lack of knowledge of these same sciences has always has had economic consequences. In the late 15th century and early sixteenth century, the intellectual and economic center of Europe was in Italy. The chilling effect on the persecution of Galileo - and part of this involved Galileo's habit of ridiculing those who were obviously not his equals - was critically involved in Italy's devolution into a cultural and intellectual backwater and the movement of the same centers to Northern and Western Europe.
The World Nuclear Association which is run by, um, nuclear scientists and engineers, maintains an outlook page which is informed by official government policies and announcements. Energy predictions are notably fuzzy and wrong. The Oracle at Snowmass's prediction in 1976 that the United States would be producing 18 quads of solar energy and be consuming just 54 quads of energy by 2000 was the equivalent of Pat Robertson's predictions of the imminent return of Jesus. He was off by four orders of magnitude on the solar soothsaying, not that this would disturb or embarrass anyone who knows as little science as he does.

Nevertheless, the World Nuclear Association predicts - again based on announced government policies - that the world nuclear fleet will have, as a low estimate, 602 nuclear reactors, and as a high estimate, 1350 reactors by 2030.

The estimate for the turn of the next century, should that actually arise, is between 2000 and 11,000 reactors.
World Nuclear Organization Outlook Pages.

Of course, predictably, someone will pipe in to say that these are the predictions of nuclear people, nuclear scientists and nuclear engineers and are therefore invalid. The same people of course, will predictably claim that the people least qualified to discuss medical prospects are doctors and that the least qualified people to discuss the future of aviation are pilots.
China's government recently announced plans to have 200 reactors by 2030, twice as many as the United States now has. Currently they have 24 reactors under construction, and poured first concrete on a new nuclear park in the last several months.

On August 1 - a few weeks ago - the Qinshan Phase II nuclear power plant was connected to the Chinese grid. Its capacity is 650 MWe, which is ironically roughly the average continuous power out put of all the wind turbines in the "Drill, Baby, Drill!" nation of Denmark, constructed over the last 28 years.

First concrete on the recently connected reactor was about six years ago.
I note, despite much mythology to the contrary, none of which is even remotely connected to something called "reality," that nuclear power remains exactly what it has been for more than five decades, the fastest growing scalable form of climate change gas free energy in the world.

Have a nice day.

I Speak for the Dead

One of my favorite television shows has been Di Vinci's Inquest, a Canadian series from a few years ago. Di Vinci, a coroner has a line, "I speak for the Dead." In "Nuclear Green, I, of course, speak for myself, but beyond that, I speak for the dead as well. To explain what I mean, I would like to briefly refer to two bloggers who are very much living, Barry Brook and Kirk Sorenson. In a recent post, Barry spoke of what might be called his Damascus Road revelation about nuclear power. Barry in the not very distant past was a Australian climate scientist who had started to blog, and who had as of yet not thought through the energy issues. Barry wrote that in an early post he had extoold Australia;s renewable resources. Barry recently wrote,

my focus at this point was pointedly directed at carbon emissions reduction (clean energy was just a means to an end), and it was obvious to me that the logical path to achieve this was renewable sources such as solar and wind power. I was coming at this issue from a genuine concern for eliminating carbon-based energy, and was overwhelmed by a sense of frustration, because I couldn’t understand why the ‘clean energy revolution’ wasn’t happening. . . Indeed, I hadn’t given much thought to nuclear power at this point, not because I was ever ideologically ’anti-nuclear’ — I had simply accepted the ‘peak uranium’ argument and not thought much more about it, as this comment I made back in Dec 2008 indicates.

Then, reality bit me, and it hurt. I remember I was sent an early version ofTrainer’s thesis, and against all reason (’what nonsense is this?‘ I recall first thinking), I read the damned thing. Somewhat crestfallen, yet also morbidly fascinated, I followed up, reading ‘The Solar Fraud‘ (the only other book on this topic of renewable limits, according to Trainer’s piece) and then a bookshelf worth of other tomes on this general topic, including ‘Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air‘ and ‘Prescription for the Planet‘ (kicking off my nuclear education in earnest), followed by various technical analyses, IPCC WG III, blogs, etc. My first post on this blog on nuclear power was on 28 Nov 2008, 3 months after it has been launched. My transformation of thought had begun in earnest, and was reinforced by the work of people such as Peter Lang.

Kirk Sorensen responded to Barry's post:

I had a similar conversion story…I was once a hard-core wind and solar guy, spending lots of time thinking about how to cover deserts in solar concentrators and build windmills. I couldn’t figure out why everyone didn’t want this, but a couple of summers living in the Mojave and seeing the remnants of past solar projects and the half-broken windmills of the Tehachapi Pass began to dampen my enthusiasm.nNuclear didn’t seem particularly compelling to me. I had a lot of mistaken ideas, but there was still a lot of stuff about LWRs that I had right and left me underwhelmed. My conversion began when I started reading a book called “Fluid Fueled Reactors” and around the same time read an article written by Rod Adams on the subject of thorium…

Barry and Kirk can only testify to the living. They bare witness to themselves, they tell us what they experienced, how they came to certain views. I can speak for the dead, because I was a witness to their lives.

The dead include the Nobel Prize winning scientist/engineer Eugene Wigner who I, along with other ORNL supernumeraries, meet one summer afternoon in 1971. I did not fully appreciate who Wigner was then, but a long time later, as I began to understand the history of nuclear technology, I began to appreciate Wigner's towering genius.

The dead include Alvin Weinberg whose death triggered my recognition that Weinberg's generation of nuclear scientists had a lot to say to the living. Weinberg was far more than a reactor designer and science administrator, he was also a deep thinker who had a great deal to say about the role of energy and science in society. Weinberg offered a clear vision of the future, that has proven far more accurate than Amory Lovins has.

I speak for my father whose numerous contributions to nuclear science were almost unknown before I began to discover them in his papers. My father's vision of the future was clear, and pointed unmistakably to a future in which nuclear energy was to be a safe, clean and reliable source of energy for our future society.

I speak for many ORNL scientist of my father's generation, Ed Bettis, George W. Parker, Bob Moore, Raymond C. Briant, Warren Grimes, and numerous others, who worked to make safe, clean and reliable nuclear energy available the people of earth.

I first realized that the dead needed a voice when Alvin Weinberg died in October 2006. Alvin had been the father of a childhood friend, David Weinberg, and I had had a distant acquaintance with Alvin from my childhood onward. In reviewing past stories about Weinberg in the ORNL Review, I discovered the astonishing fact that Weinberg had been fired as ORNL director in a spat with AEC leadership over Weinberg's insistence that continued nuclear safety research was important. It was clear that Ralph Nader had known both about Weinberg's firing and the circumstances around it, but Nader, who professed to be concerned about nuclear safety chose to say nothing on Weinberg's behalf. Weinberg's vision of the future has proven far more accurate than that of Amory Lovins, who he befriended and sparred with over their contrasting visions of the energy future. Important parts of the Weinberg legacy is accessible on the Internet, much through The Information Bridge.

In 2007, for the first time I thought seriously about carbon mitigation. It did not take me long to find a solution. Part of my solution, scalability energy through reliance on mass produced small reactors, was very much a part of the spirit of our time. But the memory of voices from the past influancec my designation of the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor, the LFTR as the technology of the future, as the energy Black Swan. Fortunately my father was still alive then, and I had the unique opportunity to talk with him as I read his papers. I want to briefly mention Richard "Dick" Smyser, the long time editor and publisher of the Oak Ridger. I mention Smyser because he was the faithful scribe who reported the visions, wishes and aspereations as of Oak Ridge scientists as they emerged.at ORNL. It was through Smyser's reporting that I learned much about the visions of a high energy nuclear future pioneered by Alvin Weinberg and the ORNL staff. during my childhood and early adult years.

In a way, what I say now about nuclear power and particularly Molten Salt Reactor/LFTR technology is said for those who no longer speak for themselves. I speak for the dead. I bear witness to their voices. I learned of Anthropogenic Global Warming at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the spring of 1971. I had no doubt from the first moment that nuclear power would offer a superior solution to the problem. I watched for decades after 1971, as so called renewables advocates such as Amory Lovins openly advocated the use of carbon emitting coal, oil and natural gas technology in preference to nuclear generated electricity.

Barry Brook Charts the Path to the Future

Yesterday I presented what I consider to be Barry' Brook's most significant contribution to the current energy discussion, a very powerful critique of what could be called the Renewable Energy Paradigm. Barry has written a number of posts, but other posts by Peter Lang, Ted Trainer and others have fleshed out the picture. There critiques have received what can be called the open science treatment. That is anyone can comment, and commenter can and do present evidence both in support of and in opposition too the substance of the critique. Not every critical discussion is lead off by a formal paper. The first discussion of the Zero Carbon Australia 2020, a discussion that drew 560 comments. Comments included extensive quotations from the report as well as links to hundreds of sources. Many of the best comments focused on sources from which ZCA2020 drew its assumptions. The original ZCA2020 discussion was followed up a month later by a paper by ‘Zero Carbon Australia – Stationary Energy Plan’ – Critique, by Martin Nicholson and Peter Lang, This paper built on the earlier discussion, and has drawn another 200 comments.

Barry can be thought of as following Karl Popper's model of science in his blog. Barry's hypothesis is, that nuclear power offers the only satisfactory long term energy solution to the post fossil-fuel era. One null hypothesis, offered by renewable advocates is renewables advocates is that renewable energy (and efficiency) offer a long term energy solution to the post fossil fuel era. Brave New Climate has, I would contend, offered convincing evidence that the Null Hypothesis is not true. This in its self demonstrates that the implementation of the nuclear solution is required if our form of energy intense civilization is to survive, and expand to the rest of the people on earth. Nuclear Green has followed the same path to the same conclusions.

Critics of nuclear power have offered a second null hypothesis which Barry addresses. The limitations of nuclear power are so serious that nuclear power forms an unacceptable form of energy. Those alleged limitations include:

* Unacceptable safety risks due to the inhalant design flaws of nuclear reactors
* Unacceptably dangerous risks to the human and environmental future posed by nuclear waste
* Unacceptable limitation on available nuclear fuel
* Unacceptable risk to the human future posed by the increased risk of nuclear proliferation and subsequent nuclear war, posed by a link between civilian nuclear power and nuclear weapons manufacture.
* Unacceptable costs of power reactors
* Unacceptable scalability limitations of the nuclear solution.

Brave New Climate has certainly not ignored this null hypothesis. Like Nuclear Green, Brave New Climate relies heavily on the potential development of Generation IV nuclear power plants as a to correct defects in current NPP designs. Generation IV technology offers solutions enhanced nuclear safety, solve the problem of nuclear waste, assure the availability of nuclear fuel for millions of years to come, potentially lower nuclear costs, and offer solutions to the scalability limitations of current nuclear technology. Beyond the potential technological improvements, nuclear advocates including Barry Brooks and other Brave New Climate posters have point out evidence that suggest that the problems of the current generation of nuclear power plants are not nearly as bad as critics claim.

Barry's approach to nuclear technology is more as an educator, than as an explorer of possible nuclear futures. A review of Barry's 100+ posts related to nuclear energy will demonstrate how Barry organizes knowledge in a textbook type fashion, and lays it out in easy to understand language. It is not without reason that Barry has won an award for his contributions to science education.

I do have one major disagreement with Barry. Barry bought into Tom Blees view that the Integral Fast Reactor offered the best rout to the nuclear future. I support another Generation IV technology involving the use of Molten Salt Reactor technology, especially by realizing its potential to breed new nuclear fuel from thorium. Barry's liquid sodium cooled fast breeding, IFR, while offering many attractive features, would have some disadvantages when compared with the Liquid Fluoride (Salt) Thorium Reactor (LFTR). Kirk Sorensen has created a grass roots movement around his pro-LFTR blog, Energy from Thorium that has not been matched by IFR supporters. EfT along with BNC practice open science, but the open science of EfT focuses on problems that likely would be encountered during any implementation of the LFTR designed. BNS does not look at similar IFR technical issues.

EfT offers links to hundreds of research based documents, that chart the development of MSR technology in Oak Ridge. Some of those documents are reviewed on EfT while discussions often center around research findings reported in ORNL documents. Nothing like this level of technical specificity exists in IFR related discussions on BNC. I would not describe this as a BNC weakness, but it is a weakness of the IFR advocacy that nothing like EfT has come out of their advocacy efforts. EfT has very successfully controlled discussion of Molten Salt Reactor technology, by offering superior information resources, coupled to a very high level of technically oriented discussions. EfT has become a major resource to MSR/LFTR advocates in their very successful outreach campaign which has made their basic concepts known to a much wider audience. It would be very helpful to IFR advocates if they could reference a similar site.

This should not be taken as a criticism of Barry. He has created in Brave New Climate an outstanding and important web site, that deals with both climate and post-carbon energy issues. In addition to his important contribution to increasing understanding of the limitations of renewables, Barry has made an important contribution to increasing public understanding of nuclear energy. The importance of this contribution cannot be overestimated. Barry has done a first rate job of organizing educational materials that can aid the public in better understanding the nuclear option. This is a remarkable accomplishment in two years, and Barry dissevers public recognition and accolades for his accomplishments.

Barry Brook has Reason to Celebrate

Barry Brook, a Professor of Climate Science at the University of Adelaide. has a double reason to celebrate. First Barry has been named South Australian Science Educator of the year. Secondly, Barry's blog, Brave New Climate has just had its second birthday. In those two years Barry has created a major voice on energy issues. has an interesting history From August 2008 until November 2008 Barry, who is a climate scientist, wrote about climate. , but in late November 2008 Barry began writing a series of posts discussion Dr. James Hanson's Letter to Barack Obama, regarding the urgency of fighting climate change. In his third Hanson post, Barry mentioned reading a draft of Tom Blees' “Prescription for the Planet,” na book in which Blees argues the case in support of the Integral Fast Reactor. Barry was by no means a nuclear supporter at that point. He observed,

I can’t seem to agree fully with either the anti-nukes or Blees. Some of the anti-nukes are friends, concerned about climate change, and clearly good people. Yet I suspect that their ‘success’ (in blocking nuclear R&D) is actually making things more dangerous for all of us and for the planet. It seems that, instead of knee-jerk reaction against anything nuclear, we need hard-headed evaluation of how to get rid of long-lived nuclear waste and minimize dangers of proliferation and nuclear accidents. Fourth generation nuclear power seems to have the potential to solve the waste problem and minimize the others. In any case, we should not have bailed out of research on fast reactors. (BTW, Blees points out that coal-fired power plants are exposing the population to more than 100 times more radioactive material than nuclear power plants – some of it spewed out the smokestacks, but much of it in slag heaps of coal ash. See http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3614/dirty_smoke_signals/ re the effect of this waste on Native Americans in the Southwest, as well as ‘Burning the Future’, above, re the Appalachians.)

I don’t agree with Blees’ dismissal of the conclusion of most energy experts that there is no ‘silver bullet’; they argue that we need a mix of technologies. Blees sees a ‘depleted uranium bullet’ that could easily provide all of our needs for electrical energy for hundreds of years. His argument is fine for pointing out that existing nuclear material contains an enormous amount of energy (if we extract it all, rather than leaving >99% in a very long-lived waste heap), but I still think that we need a range of energy sources. Renewable energies and nuclear power are compatible: they both need, or benefit from, a low-loss grid, as it is more acceptable to site nuclear plants away from population centers, and nuclear energy provides base-load power, complementing intermittent renewables.

BTW, nuclear plants being proposed for construction now in the U.S. are 3rd generation (the ones in operation are mostly 2nd generation). The 3rd generation reactors are simplified (fewer valves, pumps and tanks), but they are still thermal pressurized reactors that require (multiple) emergency cooling systems. France is about to replace its aging 2nd generation reactors with the European Pressurized Reactor (EPR); a prototype is now being built in Finland. According to Blees, OECD ranks EPR as the cheapest electric energy source, cheaper than pulverized coal – that evaluation doubtless presumes use of a standard design, a la the French procedure for its 2nd generation reactors. The prototype in Finland, according to reports, is running behind schedule and over budget – that was also true in the prior generation, yet the eventual standard French reactors have been economical. Current efforts to start construction of 3rd generation nuclear plants in the U.S., so far, do not seem to have achieved a standard design or to have avoided project delays (partly due to public opposition) that drive up costs.

Blees argues that the 4th generation technology basically exists, that the design will be simplified, especially due to the absence of a need for emergency cooling systems. He foresees a standard modular construction of the reactor per se, smaller than earlier generations, which can be built at the factory, shipped to the site, and dropped in the prepared excavation. His cost estimates have this nuclear power yielding cheaper electricity than any of the competition. The system is designed to eliminate long-lived nuclear ‘waste’ and minimize proliferation dangers. There is enough fuel available without further uranium mining to handle electricity needs for several centuries, for whatever fraction of electricity needs cannot be covered by renewable energies. If these claims are anywhere close to being correct, we could phase out use of fossil fuels for electricity generation over the next few decades.

In December 2008, Barry discussed the work of Dr Ted Trainer, a Lecturer in Social Work at the University of New South Wales in Sidney. Trainer is a Neo-Malthusian, who believes in resource insufficiency. Amory Lovins' book Natural Capitalism is a starting point of Trainers argument, Trainer argues,

The dominant conventional assumption is that industrial-affluent-consumer societies can be made sustainable by technical advances which dramatically reduce resource use and environmental impacts per unit of output, and thereby avoid any need to abandon the present commitments to affluent living standards and economic growth. Two influential supporters of this general position are discussed, viz., Julian Simon and Amory Lovins. Most attention is given to the latter's assumptions regarding energy, which it is concluded are seriously mistaken. This critical discussion reaffirms the limits to growth perspective. It is concluded that sustainability can only be achieved by radical change to a fundamentally different society, identified as The Simpler Way*.

Since the publication of The Limits to Growth by Meadows et al. (1972) discussion of the global situation has been divided into two camps. The dominant and conventional position has been that industrial-affluent-consumer society can continue without major change in its fundamental goals and operating principles, such as its commitments to high material living standards, the market system, private enterprise, globalisation and economic growth. Within this position it is usually acknowledged that there are formidable problems, especially ecological deterioration, but it is assumed that these can be dealt with adequately by technical advance, tougher legislation and the normal adjustments of the market place.

Lovins is on the continued affluence side. Trainer found that the claims of Lovins and his associates did not stand up to careful scrutiny.

In a book titled "Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society," Trainer offered a long and carefully reasoned attack on the claims of renewable advocates. There is little doubt that Trainer's attack on renewables has had a significant impact on Barry's thinking on Renewables, and on the content of Brave New Climate since December 2008. Brave New Climate has included numerous attacks on renewables claims during the last two years. Many of those posts were written by Peter Lang. According to Barry,

Peter is a retired geologist and engineer with 40 years experience on a wide range of energy projects throughout the world, including managing energy R&D and providing policy advice for government and opposition. His experience includes: coal, oil, gas, hydro, geothermal, nuclear power plants, nuclear waste disposal, and a wide range of energy end use management projects.

Ted Trainer contributed post, and Tom Blees contributed two case studies of the problems of renewable implementation in Europe.

Barry has offered a number of posts critiquing the case for renewables. Quite appart from the number of posts critiquing renewables Barry has offered, two characteristics stand out. The first is the uniformly excellent technical quality of the posts on Renewables. The posts are well researched, and the analysis of the material is very good. Beyond the excellent quality of the research, both the number and quality of the comments are noteworthy. A recent post on the Zero Carbon Australia 2020, report has drawn to date 560 comments. Many of the comments are well researched, and/or well reasoned. The quality of Brave New Climate comments is far higher than the quality of comments on Energy Collective posts.

The ZCA 2020 post and discussion has been followed up by a Martin Nicholson-Peter Lang post which summarizes the ZCA2020 discussion and systematically lays out the case against both the assumptions and the conclusions of the report. The usual spirited discussion followed. During the discussion, Peter Lang took "Francis" to task,

Francis,

You say:

It remains clear that, contrary to its presentation, the ZCA Plan is aspirational

“Aspirational” is not the word I would choose to describe the ZCA plan. Words that come to my mind a re:

fraudulent
dishonest
greenwash
evangelistic
deep green religion
irrational
incompetent
gullible (like Uni of Melbourne and the academics for endorsing it).

I say fraudulent because of the many false and misleading statements throughout, eg

1. the plan is based only on commercially available, costed technologies

2. base load solar power exists now

3. Discount rate used in analyses of 1.4%

4. risk rate for a very safe investment (no one would invest in this scheme; it is extremely high risk)

5. All domestic ship and air transport would be converted to electric rail (in ten years!!!). Just think bout what that would mean in terms of electric rail lines being run all over the country to every town where there is an airport or airfield. The rail lines at $15 million per kilometer. None of that cost is included in the plan.

6. all bus travel would be moved to electric trains (in 10 years!!)

7. half the road transport and road freight would be moved to electric vehicles and electric trains ( in 10 years!!!!)

And to think that people swallow this sort of complete and utter nonsense. Francis, please find a more appropriate word than “aspirational” to describe the ZCA report..

Peter Lang also added this quote from Vaclav Smil in what he described as a reality check today,

Indeed, the entire history of Western modernization can be seen as a quest for higher efficiencies as generations of engineers have spent their professional lives wringing additional returns from their contraptions and as entire nations, guided by that famously invisible hand, have been relentlessly following the path of reduced waste and higher productivity. But the outcome is indisputable: global energy consumption is far higher than the rate of population growth and the need to satisfy not just basic existential needs but also a modicum of comfort and affluence.

If my reader wonders why I point to Lang's comments in a discussions of Barry Brook's blog, I would point out that it is Barry who has given the stage to Lang, and who, by all evidence, is pleased to allow Lang to say what he does. For this Barry should be commended.

The critique of renewables in Brave New Climate, to which Peter Land has contributed so much, has devastated the case for renewables. The posts and discussion have demonstrated that the arguments for the future of energy lying with renewables simply are not plausible. Barry has repeatedly offered advocates of renewable energy the opportunity to test Ted Trainer's thesis. Over and over again renewables supporters have been unable to demonstrate that renewable energy sources can sustain a consumer society. Following a Debate with Australian Renewables advocate Mark Mark Diesendorf, Barry, in a BNC comment condemned Diesendorf’s "intellectually bankrupt" reliance on appeals to authority, offered a quote from Karl Popper,

Today, the appeal to the authority of experts is sometimes excused by the immensity of our specialized knowledge. And it is sometimes defended by philosophical theories that speak of science and rationality in terms of specializations, experts, and authority. But in my view, the appeal to the authority of experts should be neither excused nor defended. It should, on the contrary, be recognized for what it is – an intellectual fashion – and it should be attacked by a frank acknowledgement of how little we know, and how much that little is due to people who have worked in many fields at the same time. And it should also be attacked by the recognition that the orthodoxy produced by intellectual fashions, specialization, and the appeal to authorities is the death of knowledge, and that the growth of knowledge depends entirely upon disagreement.

Barry's work has been to use facts and sound reasoning to critique the intellectual fashion on energy. This is the case whether or not Barry, Peter Lang or some other colleague is the author of a particular post. Given the high technical and intellectual quality of the debate on renewable energy on Brave New Climate, Barry should be praised for offering a significant contribution to our understanding of the major limitations of renewable energy.

Although I have had my disagreements with Barry, I view his contributions to the current discussion on energy as important. In many respects Barry's approach to those issues and his views resemble mine.

(I intend to follow up this post in the near future with a discussion of Barry's views on Nuclear Energy.)

The LFTR Advocacy Community's use of Social Media

Dan Yurman sent and email yesterday to participants on a "social media" list of nuclear power supporters. Dan's email called attention to a presentation by Robin Fray Carey, CEO of Social Media Today, on the use of social media to communicate business messages. After viewing Carey's presentation, I recognized that it nicely demonstrates the extent to which the LFTR advocacy community is already making effective use of Social Media. Not only do we have active blogs,
http://energyfromthorium.com/
We have a discussion forum,
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/
We have done outreach to The Oil Drum readers,
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/
We have done outreaches to the Energy Collective,
http://theenergycollective.com/TheEnergyCollective/48416
we have several Facebook pages,
http://www.facebook.com/EnergyFromThorium
We have a presence on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
we have a presence on twitter,
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=thorium
we have numerous YouTube videos.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk
We have reached out to scientists and engineering professionals through media articles in professionally oriented journals.
http://www.americanscientist.org/my_amsci/restricted.aspx?act=pdf&id=36745203226947
we have reached out to technically sophisticated young adults in a Wired article published in January.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/
We also are using social media sources that are not mentioned in the presentation, for example a page in the How Stuff works site.
http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2009/12/01/how-a-liquid-fluoride-thorium-reactor-lftr-works/
Have we been effective? You bet ya. No one had heard of the LFTR 4 years ago, because the term had not been yet coined. Today, lots of people have heard of it, and the LFTR has taken a life of its own on the Internet, quite apart from the core community of LFTR advocates. Even Bill Gates has mentioned the LFTR in a televised speech, and James Hanson mentioned it in a letter to President Obama.