The Nuclear Green Revolution

Sherrell Greene on Liquid Chloride Reactors, "Business as Usual," and a second Manhattan Project

2011-11-19T04:02:00.004-06:00

The third part of my interview Q&A with Sherrell Green focused on questions concerning the future of nuclear technology. My father had been a pioneer in research on Liquid Chloride Reactor technology in the 1950's. Sherrell Greene mention LCR development during out preinterview, so I wanted to ask him some follow up questions. The LCR is a potential competitor to the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor, but it is not clear if itsadvantages would out wight its potential costs. Sherrell notes that,

The environment in today’s nuclear energy enterprise is hostile to innovation.

This is undoubtedly the case, and the consequence of our unwillingness to take risks on new concepts in nuclear power are ominous. for our country are ominous. Continuing a business as usual pattern is likely to bring national economic and environmental failure, but it is not clear what it is we should be doing.

30. You view the development of a Liquid Chloride Reactor (LCR) as an important path to Generation V nuclear technology. What do you view as the most important contribution of LCR development to improving nuclear technology?
No I don’t. I’m actually very much on the fence with regard to LCRs. They are potentially attractive fast-spectrum systems and could offer some innovative options for burn/breed fuel cycles. But they also face much more daunting chemical compatibility challenges than fluoride salt-cooled concepts. I don’t consider LCRs to be in the same category of feasibility as liquid fluoride reactors.

31. Would a LCR have significant advantages over Liquid Metal Fast Breeders (LMFBR).
I don’t think we know enough about LCRs to answer the question.

32. Would a LCR have safety advantages in comparison to LMFBRs?
Theoretically, they should have because the coolant wouldn’t interact as energetically with air and water. But again, we know more about LMFBRs than LCRs.

33. Would a LCR have any notable safety problems, in comparison to LMFBRs?
I don’t think we know enough to answer the question. They two reactors have very different shutdown mechanisms. Again, until one has a specific mechanical design in front of them, it’s mostly speculation.

34. Do any Liquid Chloride Salt formulas hold potential advantages in comparison to Flibe (The lithium fluoride (LiF) and beryllium fluoride (BeF2) mixture, often referred to as the preferred carrier/coolant salt formula for MSRs?
Most of the chloride-based salts don’t perform well in the thermal spectrum. Corrosion management is more demanding than the fluoride salts. LiF-BeF2 (FLiBe) mixtures are very attractive from the nuclear, thermal, chemical, and thermo-mechanical standpoint. But with you have a tritium production issue, a lithium enrichment cost issue, and a beryllium occupational exposure issue to deal with. All of that drives up the cost. George Flanagan and David Holcomb at ORNL have recently evaluated some of these issues. They conducted an initial screening of LCR salt options, and developed a pre-pre- conceptual concept for a LCR. MIT and a few others have also done work in this area.

35. Do any Liquid Chloride Salt formulas have the potential of being technically competitive with Flibe, but at a lower cost?
Again, I think you will want to consider chloride salts for harder-spectrum systems. So it’s a different application. That’s said, I don’t think we know enough to answer the question. I am pessimistic there is a chloride salt that can match FLiBe from an integrated performance perspective.

36. What changes would you view as desirable in the current business-as-usual pattern of the nuclear technology industry?
This is probably the most important question we’ve discussed! I don’t pretend to have many answers. But I’m thinking a lot about this issue.

I’ve been privileged to work in one of the world’s premier energy research laboratories for over three decades. I’ve seen the ins and outs of the Department of Energy, and its national laboratories. I’ve been involved in major long-term international collaborations. I’ve supported the NRC. I worked with the nuclear industry. All of these venues are populated with extraordinarily bright, committed people with noble motives. Yet “business-as-usual” doesn’t seem to be working very well in the US.

The environment in today’s nuclear energy enterprise is hostile to innovation. Not by intent, but in reality nevertheless. The industry is highly regulated. It is very costly to do research, development, and demonstration. It’s a very capital-intensive business. The barriers to entry are incredibly high. The down-side risks of innovation are more easily rendered in practical terms than the upside gains. Often it seems everyone in the enterprise (federal and private sectors) are so risk-averse that innovation is the last thing on anyone’s mind. In this environment, “good-enough” is the enemy of “better”. Humans learn by failing. It’s the way we learn to walk, talk, and ride a bicycle. Our environment today has little tolerance for failures at any level. There’s no room for Thomas Edison’s approach to innovation in today’s world. On top of all of this, or perhaps because of it, the nuclear industry invests less on R&D, as a percentage of gross revenues, than practically every other major industry you might name.

We can and must change this paradigm if the 3-4 billion people on this earth who are in dire need of electricity are to ever have it. I view this as both a moral imperative and a practical necessity if global peace and stability are to be sustained throughout this century.

I’m an advocate of “Design Thinking”, which is a multi-disciplinary, human-centered approach to innovation pioneered by Tim Brown and others. One of the things I hope to do in the post-ORNL phase of my career is to integrate the Design Thinking paradigm with my experience in the nuclear energy enterprise to find ways to accelerate the rate of innovation and deployment of improved nuclear energy technologies and systems. This basically begins with questioning (notice I did not say attacking) everything about the status quo - assumptions, approaches, frameworks, paradigms, systems, etc. at all levels. It means re-visiting all constraints and asking a lot of “What if” and “How might” questions. All of this while maintaining a zealous adherence to scientific and technical integrity and engineering discipline. It means looking to both natural and man-made analogs for inspiration. (As an example, I believe the nuclear industry can learn a lot by emulating the petroleum industry’s approach technology deployment.) A fresh look at government – private sector partneships for research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) is in order. Realistic and practical methods for risk / reward sharing must be developed.
I’m a dedicated free-market guy. But it is clear to me the free market is not currently serving the long-range interests of our nation and our globe in terms of strategic energy resource development. There are policy, regulatory, business system, and other issues, but it’s clear to our current processes for policy and regulatory framework synthesis, and energy technology development and deployment do not capture all of the essential feedback loops required to drive us to good long-term decisions.

37. Would the Anthropogenic Global Warming problem justify a new Manhattan Project?
Well, this may surprise you, but I’m not sure I know what a “new” Manhattan Project looks like. If your definition is simply a focus of enormous federal resources on the problem, my answer is that’s a necessary, but not sufficient action.

In my mind, the achievement of the atomic bomb, the moon landing, and the Interstate Highway system are three of the greatest achievements of the US federal government. But the context and circumstances surrounding each of these accomplishments were unique to each. R&D investment in the Manhattan Project spawned a second generation of scientists and engineers who achieved the moon landing. Investment in the space program inspired and enabled a third generation of scientists and engineers whose talents and creations have benefited society in a plethora of ways during the past few decades. The interstate highway system is a trophy of perseverance. The Manhattan Project was done in response to an imminent threat to our existence. The lunar landing was motivated out of national pride and our desire to outshine the Russians during the cold war era. The interstate highway system was created out of recognition of the need for America to be “one nation” in culture and commerce.

The problem with global climate change is that it’s everybody’s problem. Which too often in this world means it’s no one’s responsibility to address. I’m reminded of both anecdotal and experimental studies showing that a large group of witnesses are less inclined to intercede to aid someone being attacked on the street, than is a individual who witnesses the event. When everyone owns a problem, no one owns the solution. It’s also a perfect “frog in the kettle” problem - big change in small steps over a long (in human lifespan terms) timeframe. Another issue is that the challenge is made so complex and so enormous by many who discuss it, that the average person surrenders in confusion or hopelessness. Climate change in many ways is the ultimate test of the “think globally, act locally” mentality. Finally, the “dirty little secret” of climate change is that if it occurs as many predict, there will be winners and losers in terms of countries, cultures, and populations. Massive population shifts would occur, but the story is not all bad. Large regions of land that are currently un-inhabitable could become prime real estate.

I feel we need to approach the global climate change problem with a hefty dose of humility. This beautiful blue planet we inhabit is a wonder of complexity and balance. We need a revolution in understanding of natural systems, their interactions, and their feedback loops. Understanding the natural system leads to predictive capability. Predictive capability enables us to examine the value of various interventions. This, in turn, allows us to gauge the value of various technologies. When we understand the value of various intervention technologies, we can prioritize our technology RD&D options. One thing is pretty clear: more carbon in the atmosphere is not a good thing. So reducing our carbon emissions and exploring ways to terraform or remove carbon from the atmosphere would be a critical element of a major attack on the problem. But we are talking about massive amounts of carbon. Nuclear energy could play an important enabling role in both of these endeavors.

Lastly, I believe our great scientific and technical institutions would have to be refocused in many ways to be successful in a “new Manhattan Project.” One challenge we face is that for too long the federal sector has tended to focus on “basic science” to the detriment of use-focused R&D. We’ve avoided the what Donald Stokes called “Pasteur’s Quadrant” of RD&D. After all, how many people can point to a single innovation from our national laboratory system in the past twenty years that has had a major impact on the lives of ordinary people? What grand problem have we actually solved? I’m not disrespecting the national labs. I love them. But in fact, there’s been an aversion in many quarters of the federal government to pursing research that has near-term payback or impact. I think it is time for us to rethink the value propositions for federally-funded R&D. Often, many of the challenges are in technology development and systems integration phases of development – not in the very fundamental basic research. This (technology development and systems integration) is the so-called “valley of death” between discovery and impact. It is precisely this type of RD&D that has been out of favor for too long in the federal sector, and where the interface between the federal and private sectors is broken.

38. Should the AHTR and/or the SmAHTR be targeted for development by a second Manhattan Project?
I feel that FHRs (SmATHR, AHTR, PB-AHTR) and MSRs warrant consideration for future development and deployment. I do feel the nation would be well served by a balanced program of FHR and MSR system concept development and enabling technology development. Such work is necessary to enable us to sufficiently mature system concepts and technologies to the point required to inform downselect decisons. We’re not there yet.

39. What other nuclear technologies would you see as candidates for rapid development by a Second Manhattan project? (If you view that a second Manhattan Project is desirable.)
Let me broaden your question.... I feel there are cluster of key technologies, working in harmony, that could revolutionize our planet: high temperature nuclear energy systems; carbon capture and sequestration to enable use of fossil fuels; ultra-high density electrical energy storage for individuals, vehicles, homes, and the grid; and “retrofitable” residential and commercial “super insulation” to reduce building energy consumption in existing buildings. These four technologies, along with a fortified and modernized electrical transmission and distribution grid, could revolutionize our future.

TEDxNewEngland | 11/01/11 | The Future of Nuclear Power: Getting Rid of Nuclear Waste

2011-11-15T08:42:00.005-06:00

A couple of MIT graduate students think they have invented a new way of solving the nuclear wast problem. Their presentation is full of good ideas, but you have already read about all of them on Energy from Thorium or Nuclear Green.

Sherrell Greene on AHTRs, SmAHTRs, and MSRs

2011-11-15T06:12:00.001-06:00

Sherrell Greene's research at ORNL included exploration of Fluoride Salt Cooled High Temperature Reactors (FHRs). Molten Salts can be used as both reactor coolants and as reactor coolants/fuel carriers. Advanced High Temperature Reactors (AHTR) are hybrid reactors which combine features of Molten Salt Reactors with features of Gas Cooled Graphite Structured or of Pebble Bed Reactors. The nuclear fuel for AHTRs is solid and embedded in graphite structures rather than a liquid salt dissolved in liquid salt coolant/carriers. SmAHTRs are Small Advanced High Temperature Reactors. (Sherrell Greene's web site can be found at, www.SherrellGreene.com.)
(Questions 12 and 13 have been omitted.)

14. What do you view as the advantages of Molten Salt cooled Advanced High Temperature Reactors (AHTR)?
First, to avoid confusion, at ORNL we developed some terminology I would like to see adopted more widely. We liked to call liquid salt-cooled reactors, “FHRs” – Fluoride salt cooled High temperature Reactors. These are salt-cooled, but not salt fueled. Then, of course, there’s the molten salt reactors or “MSRs”, with are both cooled and fueled with fluoride (or possibly chloride) salts.

The first FHR concept ORNL developed in conjunction with SNL and others, was the Advanced High Temperature Reactor (AHTR) in the early 2000’s. The AHTR in a large GW+ class central-station electricity generator. The second concept we developed during the past year or so was the Small modular Advanced High Temperature Reactor (SmAHTR). SmAHTR is a 125 MWt / 50+ MWe modular FHR for both process heat and electricity production.

In my view, FHRs integrate the best attributes of liquid metal-cooled reactors (LMRs), gas-cooled reactors (GCRs), and molten salt-cooled reactors (MSRs). They are high-to- very-high temperature, low pressure systems. They employ fluoride salt coolants, TRISO particle graphite fuels, and Brayton power conversion systems. Due to their low pressure, salt coolants, and graphite fuels, they inherit the best safety attributes of LMRs, GCRs, and MSRs. They inherit the economic advantages of low pressure systems – which means thinner-walled vessels and piping.

However, FHRs have their own issues. The favored fluoride salt (FLiBe) is very expensive. The high-temperature salt-tolerant structural materials are expensive. There are tritium control issues. And since you have to make the jump from a low pressure reactor to a high-pressure power conversion system in the electricity production application, there are a number of component design and reliability challenges – particularly with regard to heat exchangers.

Having said all of that, I’m big on the promise of FHRs.

15. How might the development of the AHTR contribute to the development of the MSR?
In many ways. In order to successfully develop and deploy an FHR, one must solve many of the fundamental technology challenges required for MSRs: the fluoride salt supply chain, the structural materials supply chain, fluoride salt pumps and heat exchangers, tritium control, instrumentation and control technologies... just to name the more important technologies. The development of an FHR would leave the country with a robust development infrastructure for MSRs. And the successful deployment of an FHR would be a path-finder for the licensing and regulatory framework environment required for successful MSR deployment. However, the fact that MSRs have a liquid, mobile fuel will be a large, unaddressed hurdle in the regulatory arena.

16. What do you view as the potential uses of the AHTR?
High-to-very high temperature process heat and high-efficiency electricity production for central station and remote applications.

17. Does the AHTR have a potential cost advantage compared to the LWR?
Yes. Their low pressure character translates to less metal in their construction. The coolant doesn’t interact energetically with air/water. This means one is not driven to massive containments. Less concrete. SmATHR could benefit enormously from factory fabrication. However, there are off-setting issues. I’ve already mentioned that fluoride salt coolant is really expensive. The nickel alloy structural materials aren’t cheap either.

ORNL and UC-Berkeley have both published analyses that indicate the FHRs should be competitive or superior in cost performance to modern LWR technologies. However, I would caution that due to the relative immaturity of the AHTR and SmAHTR concepts, it isn’t feasible to do the detailed bottoms-up cost estimates that support a truly compelling case at this point. We need to bring the concepts along to a higher degree of fidelity before that is really possible.

18. What are the AHTR potential safety advantages?
TRISO graphite fuel is a very robust high-temperature fuel form and operates with large thermal margins in FHRs.

Fluoride salt doesn’t react energetically with air or water.

Fluoride salt is an extremely attractive heat transport medium. This means less coolant to be pumped during operation, and the core can be cooled effectively with passive decay heat removal loops after shutdown.

Low pressure systems remove a major mechanical driving force for expulsion of radioactivity from the reactor system in the event of an accident.

19. Does the AHTR have potential safety advantages in comparison with advanced LWRs?
I believe FHRs do have advantages due to the attributes I mentioned above.

20. What are the useful characteristics of the Small Modular Advanced High Temperature Reactor (SmAHTR)?

SmAHTR can be factory fabricated, transported by a large semi-tractor trailer rig, and “installed” on site. It is a dual function high-temperature process heat and electricity producer. When coupled with the “salt vault” energy storage system, they can be clustered to meet a variety of power and energy demands.

21. What contributions would you foresee the SmAHTR making to Post-carbon energy technology?

An entry-level or prototype SmATHR would probably operate at ~600oC to 700 oC. Later systems would probably move up to 800 oC to 850 oC as materials performance limits are resolved. In theory, there’s no reason a SmAHTR or an AHTR couldn’t operate as high as 1000 oC – but that’s a long-term goal. In its early manifestations, SmAHTR and AHTR could provide high quality process heat required for production of a variety of fossil-based synthetic liquid fuels, hydrogen, and ammonia. Charles Forsberg, formerly at ORNL and now at MIT, is exploring such “hybrid energy system” concepts.

(There is no question 22.)

23. What would the SmAHTR do better than any other post-carbon energy technology currently being considered?
Well, it has the potential to be a game-changing high-temperature process heat system – particularly when coupled with the “salt vault” energy storage system I described in the SmATHR pre-conceptual design report (ORNL/TM-2010/199). I’m tempted to say, “Anything a gas-cooled reactor (GCR) can do, an FHR can do better”. But the fact is we know more about GCRs than we do FHRs at this point. So it’s a bit premature to make that claim.

24. What would be the safety advantages of the SmAHTR?
It has most of the advantages of an MSR and it’s small. The differences are almost entirely a function of utilizing solid TRISO fuel in the FHR rather than the liquid fuel of the MSR: Discrete fuel that can’t leak, high thermal margins, low pressure, relatively inert coolant in terms of interaction with air and water, the ability to remove decay heat passively, etc. It’s also an integral primary system concept, with no reactor vessel penetrations so traditional pipe-break loss of coolant accidents are precluded by design.

25. Would there be any serious safety problems for the SmAHTR?
None that I am aware of. However, I would want to really understand air-ingress accidents in FHRs due to their use of graphite fuel and other graphite structures in the reactor vessel. Refueling operations are also due serious scrutiny.

26. Do you believe that SmAHTRs can serve as the basis of a new energy related enterprise?
On paper, SmAHTR is excellent choice for distributed hybrid energy systems such as those Charles Forsberg likes to discuss. In our SmAHTR pre-conceptual design report (ORNL/TM-2010/199), I described an integrated “salt vault” energy storage system that could be a key enabler of multi-functional FHRs.

27. How much would it cost to develop an SMAHTR prototype?
A lot. That’s the case for any new reactor. If by prototype, you mean an NRC-certified design and functioning prototype, simply look at the investment today’s commercial rector vendors are making to secure a design certification for a new evolutionary LWR. It’s in the neighborhood of $0.5–1B dollars. But we are not in a position to estimate SmAHTR’s development cost until the concept is more mature. Reactor development is a “deep pockets” endeavor.

28. What could an SmAHTR do better than a Molten Salt Reactor (MSR)?
I haven’t looked specifically at the question. So my answers are fairly speculative. Given my view that FHRs would probably be easier to commercialize than MSRs, I would turn your question around and ask, “What can an MSR do better than an FHR?” My instincts are that in terms of the basic functions of high-temperature process heat production and high-efficiency electricity production, FHRs such as SmAHTR and the MSRs are equals. Due to the differences in fuel, they will have different waste streams. I don’t think we understand that issue well. SmAHTR is a uranium-based, thermal spectrum system. Right now, the reference SmAHTR concept employs a cartridge core comprised of hexagonal fuel assemblies employing graphite fuel plates. There’s more trade study work to be done to optimize the core configuration. Both pebble-bed cores and cores comprised of discrete fuel assemblies are possibilities. Per Peterson’s team at UC-B have looked at pebble bed FHRs and seed-blanket thermal breeding strategies. We’ve not looked at a SmATHR breeder. But I think the MSR has the potential to be a better thermal breeder than the FHR. The MSR probably would also have an advantage in terms of assured shutdown mechanisms due to the ability to use freeze plugs in the fuel loop. The flip side is that MSRs have the potential for fuel leaks and FHRs don’t. Finally, since there is, at least on paper, the potential for a fast-spectrum MSR, the MSRs almost certainly have an advantage for actinide burning.

One thing I would add... SmAHTR is an integral primary system design. Previously MSRs concepts have been loop designs. In my view, they’ve been plumber’s nightmares. That’s one of the reasons ORNL abandoned the two-fluid Molten Salt Breeder Reactor (MSBR) concept. If you look in detail at the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) at ORNL, they had many, many side streams of hot liquid salt. That was appropriate for an experiment and necessary at the time for a variety of reasons. But, today one would never design a commercial reactor that way. My friend Jess Gehin at ORNL and I have been discussing the idea of an integral-design MSR for some time. We believe integral concepts could potentially improve the reliability and operability of the MSR concept.

29. Might the SmAHTR be viewed as a stepping-stone to MSR development?
Absolutely. I believe a small FHR would be easier to design and license from the overall plant perspective. One doesn’t face all the salt processing and and flowing-fuel challenges posed by MSRs. However, one must again proceed with a hefty dose of humility here. FHRs are paper reactors. And there is no modern MSR design. So we do not have FHR or MSR design criteria. We do not have the FHR and MSR design details required for development of a PIRT (phenomena identification and ranking table) – much less the detail needed to conduct PRAs. There’s no licensing roadmap for either concept. That said, the MSR employs a flowing fuel that must be kept contained under all circumstances. This creates a plethora of design challenges that have never been faced in a modern regulatory environment. From the plant design perspective the flowing mobile fuel impacts system complexity and redundancy, plant reliability, plant cost, and licensing difficulty. The FHR does not have to face those challenges.

Finally (though many in the FHR and MSR community would not agree with me) I am concerned about the overall cost (supply chain, operations, and disposal) of FLiBe. I believe it could be an impediment to deployment of FHRs and MSRs. In my view, FLiBe is the worst possible FHR/MSR salt – other than all the other salts (laugh). It’s wonderful in terms of its integrated nuclear, thermal, and thermalhydraulic performance. However, the cost of removing the Lithium-6 will be high. An you still have to worry about tritium production after you do it. Beryllium is also a human occupational risk and environmental disposal issue. So I wish we could develop an affordable alternate coolant salt that performs as well as FLiBe. There’s been little serious coolant salt design work since ORNL’s original efforts in the 1950’s and 1960’s. I think we have a shot at developing a good alternative if we really applied ourselves. In the mean time, FLiBe’s overall performance is compelling.

Sherrell Greene on his Accomplishments and on Nuclear Safety

2011-11-13T07:28:00.004-06:00

Sherrell Greene recently retired from ORNL after 33 years employment. Sherrell was ORNL's Director for Nuclear Technology Programs from 2004 through 2010, and Director of ORNL's Research Reactor Development Programs from 2010 through his retirement in 2011. A "relatively-complete" list of Dr Greene's professional publications can be found in his blog. A few weeks after Sherrell Greene's retirement from ORNL in September I meet with him for a preinterview. Subsequently I sent him a number of interview questions for his written responses. This is the first section of Sherrell Greene's responses to my questions. Greene has made conspicuous contributions to nuclear safety, and my first series of questions dealt with nuclear safety.

1. What do you view as your greatest accomplishment at ORNL?

I don’t think in terms of “greatest accomplishments”. Frankly, I’ve not given any consideration to my “greatest accomplishments” (smile)

Overall, I’m most gratified to have played a leadership role in maintaining and growing ORNL’s nuclear energy R&D programs during the past decade. When I left the Lab, ORNL’s nuclear energy R&D portfolio had grown to roughly $100M / yr for four federal agencies and the commercial nuclear industry.

Technically, several things come to mind: (1) the pioneering work we did in the early 1980’s in BWR severe accident analysis, (2) our work in the 90s on reactor-based weapons plutonium disposition that laid the technical foundation in Russia and in the US for disposition of excess weapons-grade plutonium, (3) the successful execution of the Coupled End-to-End Demonstration at the Radiochemical Engineering Development Center a few years ago in which we demonstrated the first reprocessing of LWR fuel and fabrication of mixed oxide fuel without separating pure plutonium, (4) the development of the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy R&D Roadmap in 2008, (5) development of the OR-SAGE national electrical generation siting model, and (6) development of the Small advanced High Temperature Reactor (SmAHTR) fluoride salt cooled reactor concept. I found each of these challenging and rewarding, and feel blessed to have had an opportunity to engage in such a wide variety of endeavors. National laboratories are special places in terms of the breadth of opportunities afforded one with an entrepreneurial spirit.

Ultimately though, my greatest satisfaction came from the fantastic people I worked with, and building multi-disciplinary teams to tackle really tough challenges.
I don’t think in terms of “greatest accomplishments”. Frankly, I’ve not given any consideration to my “greatest accomplishments” (smile)

Ultimately though, my greatest satisfaction came from the fantastic people I worked with, and building multi-disciplinary teams to tackle really tough challenges.

2. What was your biggest disappointment at ORNL?

Probably my inability in recent years to convince Lab management to aggressively re- embrace its high temperature advanced reactor development legacy and aggressively pursue fluoride-salt cooled (FHR) and molten salt reactor (MSR) system concept development.

3. What do you believe is your most important contribution to Nuclear Safety?

Probably the work I did in BWR severe accident simulation and analysis in the 1980’s through the early 1990s. I was part of the team that conducted the first detailed analysis of unmitigated BWR station blackout and loss of decay heat removal sequences. The former work has been widely reference during the past few months since the Fukushima Dai-ichi events.

4. Would your ORNL peers agree with you, or would they point to other accomplishments?
I don’t know.

5. What other contributions have you made to nuclear safety?

I authored a report in 1984 (NUREG/CR-2940) that had some impact on the direction of LWR severe accident code development (particularly MELCOR). To my knowledge, I was the first one to identify and characterize the potential role of BWR reactor buildings in severe accident mitigation. I also conducted the first port of reactor safety code (CONTAIN) to a supercomputer (ORNL’s CRAY-I at that time). This opened our eyes to the potential for advances in computing technology to revolutionize our understanding of reactor safety.

6. How do you view the performance of the Fukushima reactors from a nuclear safety perspective?

Well, I think the primary containments of Units 1-3 have held together remarkably well given the challenges presented to them. It’s a testament to their fundamental design.

7. What safety lessons can be learned from the Fukushima reactor events?

We will be learning lessons from the Fukushima event for years to come. As you know, the NRC has taken a first cut at identifying lessons learned and creating an action plan. However, there are a few observations that standout to me. I’ve discussed the on my blog, www.SustainableEnergyToday.blogspot.com. First, from a risk based design/analysis perspective – get your top event frequencies/probabilities right. In hindsight, it appears the probabilities of the grand earthquake and coupled tsunami were underestimated. Second, understand the potential for events at one unit (such as explosions) to damage another unit. Third, understand the implications of events that not only damage one or more units on a multi-unit site, but also render the surrounding area incapable of providing assistance to the site. Few, if any, probabilistic risk assessments to date have fully explored the last two issues. Fourth, there’s no substitute for defense- in-depth in plant design. BWRs have a remarkably diverse set of options for injecting water into the reactor and containment. Despite all of the system failures at Fukushima, it was this diversity that has allowed the plant operators to manage as well as they have. Lastly, train and think as if these accidents can happen. They do. I could go on and on, but the point is, there’s much to be learned – and much will be learned from Fukushima.

8. How can the Fukushima lessons be best applied to existing reactors?

We need to take a second look at how we develop and validate the basic event data for our PRA models. We need to take a second look at our fundamental assumptions regarding the independence of events in multi-unit sites. We need to re-evaluate the implicit assumption in almost all PRA’s, that the outside world can gain rapid access to the site to provide assistance. Potential plant backfits, operational procedures changes, and emergency response procedures changes need to be examined and high-value modification should be made. We need to re-evaluate, from the systems perspective, our requirements with regard to station battery lifetime, backup diesel-generator availability, and off-site power feed to the plants. I feel the value of dedicated BWR containment flooding systems that our team identified in the 1980s should be revisited.

9. How can the Fukushima lessons be applied in future reactor designs?

All of the observations I made earlier also apply to the design of future reactors. All reactor technologies (water cooled, or otherwise), have inherent vulnerabilities that must be addressed by a combination of system design features, operational protocols, and emergency planning.

10. Do you believe that current LWR designs, for example the Westinghouse AP- 1000 solve safety problems revealed by the Fukushima accidents?

There’s no doubt in my mind that more recent designs are more robust than older designs. This is the case both for BWRs and PWRs. That’s not a condemnation of older designs. It’s just evolutionary progress. The fact remains, of course, that water and over-heated zirconium-clad fuel do not peacefully coexist. The newer plants do incorporate a variety of design features that reduce the probability this situation will arise.

11. What other safety features would you like to see in future Light Water Reactor designs that are not included in current designs?

As you know, the key issue for reactor safety is extraction and rejection of the core’s decay heat so that the fuel and its containment boundaries are not damaged. A more robust fuel design would be wonderful. But it’s a long path (probably 10-20 years) for introduction of a new fuel in the LWR business. Most of the new LWR designs already provide passive mechanisms for flooding the reactor and containment in the event of a station blackout event. Though we’re learning that many of the fears we originally had about massive damage in the spent fuel pools at Fukushima were not realized, I think it’s a good idea to remove spent fuel from close proximity to the reactor as soon as practical after the fuel is discharged from the reactor.

I’m an advocate of a design philosophy called, “Irreducible Complexity”. It is a line of reasoning that states there is an optimal design point – in terms of system complexity – at which removal of a design feature or artifact will result in an unacceptable reduction in system functionality; while addition of a design artifact will not significantly improve system functionality. Old-fashioned mousetraps and clothespins are good examples of irreducibly complex systems. We’ve been trying without success to improve upon their design from the moment they were created. While Irreducible Complexity may not be achievable in the real world, I’ve found the thought process to be an invaluable Gedanken Experiment countless time during my career. So my hope is that future plants can pursue simplified design architectures. Alvin Weinberg told me one time he felt one of the two major contributors to the demise of the MSR was that it looked too much like a chemical plant to the traditional reactor community. They just couldn’t get comfortable with it. That’s a lesson worth remembering...

Another area I would like to see explored in future plants is the concept I call “Centurion Reactors”. A few years before Alvin Weinberg died, I had the privilege of spending the better part of an afternoon with him at his home in Oak Ridge. We discussed his career, his dreams, and his failures. During the later years of his life, he was passionate about the concept of “Immortal Reactors”. His idea was that commercial power plants are capitally-intensive investments that actually yield inter-generational benefits. Once their capital cost is amortized, today’s LWRs produce electricity at less than 5 cents / kilowatt- hr. That’s a huge benefit that lasts as long as the plant operates and accrues to its customers – the children and grandchildren of its builders. Before Dr. Weinberg died, he sent me his file on Immortal Reactors. After some thought, I concluded a realistic near- term goal would be to design nuclear power systems for an operating lifetime of 100 years. Thus the term “Centurion Reactors”. The entire plant would be designed by integrating design-for-life, design-for-maintenance, design-for-monitoring, and design- for-replacement technologies and architectures, with the goal of enabling the plants to be licensed for and operator for 100 years.

(Sherrell's web site can be found at, www.SherrellGreene.com.)

The Vermont Yankee Debate from Robert Hargraves

2011-11-06T07:30:00.000-06:00

Can Anthropogenic Global Warming be non-Catastrophic?

2011-11-03T08:44:00.004-05:00

The denial of something Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is the latest right-wing front in its attack on climate science. Right winger science deniers have set up a fall back strategy:

Position 1: There is no evidence that Global Warming is happening
Position 2: Global Warming is happening but has natural rather than human causes
Position 3: Global Warming is happening and has human causes, but will not have catastrophic consequences

it should be noted that positions 1 is inconsistent with positions 2 and 3, and position 2 is also inconsistewnt with position 3. But AGW skeptics often argue more than one of these positions at the same time, thus argue what amounts to incoherent arguments.

The skeptical camp has engaged in an all out attack on Michael Mann, those findings lead to the so called Hockey Stick Graf. The hockey stick shows that something dramatic is happening in global climate, something that cannot be explained without recourse to the AGW hypothesis. One reason why AGW skeptics are so upset by Richard Muller's Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project findings is that the data verified the Michael Mann hockey stick. Of course independently verifying Michael Mann's hockey stick has been something of an industry in Climate Science for some time.

In fact there appears to be a divergence between global temperature and the the denial of something Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is the latest right-wing front in its attack on climate science. Right winger science deniers have set up a fall back strategy:

Position 1: There is no evidence that Global Warming is happening
Position 2: Global Warming is happening but has natural rather than human causes
Position 3: Global Warming is happening and has human causes, but will not have catastrophic consequences

The skeptical camp has engaged in an all out attack on Michael Mann, those findings lead to the so called Hockey Stick Graf. The hockey stick shows that something dramatic is happening in global climate, something that cannot be explained without recourse to the AGW hypothesis. One reason why AGW skeptics are so upset by Richard Muller's the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project findings is that the data verified the Michael Mann hockey stick. Of course independently verifying Michael Mann's hockey stick has been something of an industry in Climate Science for some time.

Thus not only does the BEST data show that global temperature is increasing, but it establishes that the rate of increase has recently increased. The increase is global temperature thus becomes a problem to explain. The non-Anthropogenic Global Warming model must explain why the global temperature is rising, in light of powerful processes forcing global temperature in the direction of cooling. The first force for cooling is the earth orbital cycles (Milankovitch cycles), which have been trending towards colling for some time, and are expected to continue the cooling trend for the next 23,000 years.The Milankovitch cycles are widely believed by the scientific community to account for the global glaciation cycles. William Ruddiman attributes the divergence to the early anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions forcing of climate. This process, according to Ruddiman, dates back 8000 years. Ruddimamn points to forrest clearing and early agriculture as important components in global patterns of GHG emissions and atmospheric GHG concentration over the last 8000 years.

Global (solar) dimming is the mechanism that tends to force climate toward cooling. Meinrat O. Andreae, Chris D. Jones and Peter M. Cox argue,

Atmospheric aerosols counteract the warming effects of anthropogenic greenhouse gases by an uncertain, but potentially large, amount.

this in turn suggests unintended consequences for global garbon controls.

Strong aerosol cooling in the past and present would then imply that future global warming may proceed at or even above the upper extreme of the range projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Needless to say, AGW skeptics do not include known cold forcing mechanisms in their account of climate change.

Thus we can and should discount the argument against global warming as unscientific, but arguments against global warming are zombie arguments. A zombie argument is an argument that continues to be used after it has failed factual and logical tests. That is the argument is rationally dead, but continues to be employed by people who are not motivated by a high regard for rationality.

Once the reality of global warming has been established, the argument for AGW comes next. These arguments point to past examples of climate variation, the so called Medieval warm period, that was followed by the so called Little Ice Age. These episodes are not adiquately explained by AGW skeptics, and Ruddimamn explains them nicely from an AGW perspective. Of even greater difficulty to the anti-AGW cause is why the cold forcing mechanisms, the Milankovitch cycles

and global dimming are not having a climate effect. Finally the Mann Hockey Stick points strongly to increased atmospheric CO2 as the major climate forcing mechanism. Thus the anti-AGW argument has failed to explain why climate is not cooling rather than warming, while the AGW theory explains both cooling and warming trends over the last thousand years. Thus the anti-AGW argument fails to survive rational tests. This will not stop anti-AGW advocates from employing zombi arguments against the AGW theory.

Thus we find the last refuge of the AFW opponents, the anti-catistrophic argument. The Blog masterresources.org faithfully parrots the right wing Koch family line of global warming and energy issues. We know that the current Koch party line has embraced the attack on so called Catistropic Anthropogenic Global warming, when we see the recent play that the concept has received in masterresources. In late October E. Calvin Beisner wrote,

The recent announcement of the results of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) Project by project chairman Richard Muller has caused quite a stir. True believers in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) have greeted it as the final nail in the coffin of dissent. Why? Because it concludes—take a deep breath, now—that “Global warming is real.”

As I have noted the reality of the Michael Mann's hockey stick is also supported by the BEST data, and establishing global warming, places the onus on the Anti-AGW party to come up with a plausible explanation for why global climate is getting warmer, that excludes AGW. Needless to say, Beisner fails to do that. Instead he goes on the attack,

The only thing more stunning and frightening than the idiocy of equating “global warming” with “CAGW” is the failure of so much not only of the public, and not only of the media, but especially of the scientific community—well, okay, the already committed, true-believer “scientific community”—to recognize (admit? expose?) the rhetorical sleight of hand.

Now wait a minute partner, we just witnessed a

rhetorical sleight of hand.

One which came from Beisner, not the “scientific community.” Beisner dies not tell us what he means by CAGW and how he distinguishes it from ordinary AGW and GW. Nor has he indicated what tests should be applied in order to distinguish between AGW and CAGW.

Worst of all Beisner simply ignores evidence that the catistrophic effects of Global warming are already upon us. A recently published paper, Increase of extreme events in a warming world by Stefan Rahmstorf and Dim Coumou, who state,

We find that the number of record-breaking events increases approximately in proportion to the ratio of warming trend to short-term standard deviation. Short-term variability thus decreases the number of heat extremes, whereas a climatic warming increases it. For extremes exceeding a predefined threshold, the dependence on the warming trend is highly nonlinear. We further find that the sum of warm plus cold extremes increases with any climate change, whether warming or cooling. We estimate that climatic warming has increased the number of new global-mean temperature records expected in the last decade from 0.1 to 2.8. For July temperature in Moscow, we estimate that the local warming trend has increased the number of records expected in the past decade fivefold, which implies an approximate 80% probability that the 2010 July heat record would not have occurred without climate warming.

If Rahmstorf and Coumou are correct, catastrophic warming is upon us already.

Last year a catistrophic heatwave and drought struck Russia during the Summer. The record heat was so extreme that words like unprecedented and disastrous are appropriate.

Last week, Rahmstorf and Coumou described their article on Real Climate. They reported finding that between 1979 and 2009 the average Moscow temperature increased by 1.4 C. Winter Warming has increased by as much as 4.1 C since 1880. Thus local warming appears to be following a long term trend.

The 2010 Russian heatwave was far from the only extreme heat and drought event during the last decade. In 2003 an extreme heat wave struck Western Europe, killing some where between 35,000 and 50,000 people. Extreme heat waves returned to Western and Central Europe in 2006 and South Eastern Europe in 2007. The North Central United States and nearby areas of Canada were effect by a prolonged extreme heat event in 2006. Australia was affixed by extreme heat in 2008 and again in 2009. In 2010 not only was much of Russia afflicted by extreme heat, but the heat spread to Eastern China, Japan, the UK and the United States. in 2011 an unprecedented extreme heat and drought event struck Texas and surrounding states. The high Houston average heat for august amounted to a thousand year weather event, while during much of the same period Southwestern Asia was experiencing an extreme heat event with temperatures as high as 126 F (52 C) being recorded during August.

In addition, these heat events have taken tens of thousands of lives. In Russia alone, during the 2010 extreme heat waves, an estimated 56,000 deaths could be blamed on heat related causes. The Russian death tole was twice the number of people who died during the 2011 Japanese earthquake-tsunami event. Huge heat and drought crop losses were reported for Russia in 2010 and in Texas and adjacent area in 2011.

Catistropic Anthropogenic Global Warming? Its here. When a hero of the anti-CAGW crowd, Roger Pielke Jr attempted to argue with Rahmstorf and Coumou on Real Climate recently, he was repeatedly clobbered. It is really time for the skeptics to call it a day, unless they are simply in the game for Koch family money.

Kirk Sorensen is a social media god

2011-10-28T11:03:00.002-05:00

Kirk Sorensen is becoming well enough know to be beginning to acquire enemies. Not because he goes around hurting people, or because he is mean to puppies or is doing other wicked things. Kirk has things to say about energy and LFTR technology, and he is drawing more and more attention. The latest expression of anti-Kirk excess comes from JO ABBESS of Energy Change for Climate Control.

Kirk Sorensen is apparently a one-man propaganda machine. His personal energy must be immense. He keeps turning up everywhere.
Never since the days of Tesla versus Edison has there been such an energy-related public communications coup.

He is a social media god. He has to be . . . .

GW and AGW skepticism is crumbling by Republicans do not care

2011-10-27T06:55:00.004-05:00

During much of the last decade, LLNL researcher and University of California Physics professor Richard Muller has been something of a darling too the right-wing GW deniers. In December 2003 Muller published a column in the MIT's Technology Review, announcing support for the contentions of notorious climate change skeptics Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. In a follow up column, dated October 2004, Muller stated,

Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.

But it wasnt so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.

Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!

This statement made Muller a hero to the critics of GW. This brought Muller to the attention to the infamous right wing anti-AGW oil billionaires, the Koch Brothers. Muller had supported the argument of Weather forecaster Anthony Watts, that surface temperature data for the United States was an artifact of the location of temperature measuring platforms. Most official weather measuring were located in inappropriate locations where man made structures - buildings, parking lots, etc. - interfered with temperature readings. Watts had under taken a project document the problem by having his fellow GW skeptics document the weather station location problem by photographing the weather stations. These photographs showed that not only some, but most of the weather stations poorly placed, thus seemingly confirming Watts theory. However. in a paper published by the Journal of Geophysical Research, Matthew J. Menne, Claude N. Williams Jr., and Michael A. Palecki amassed evidence that the Watt hypothesis required further testing. They wrote,

Given the now extensive documentation by surfacestations.org [Watts, 2009] that the exposure charac- teristics of many USHCN stations are far from ideal, it is reasonable to question the role that poor exposure may have played in biasing CONUS temperature trends. However, our analysis and the earlier study by Peterson [2006] illustrate the need for data analysis in establishing the role of station exposure characteristics on temperature trends no matter how compelling the circumstantial evidence of bias may be. In other words, photos and site surveys do not preclude the need for data analysis, and concerns over exposure must be eval- uated in light of other changes in observation practice such as new instrumentation.

Thus definitive confirmation would have to come by comparing the data from well chosen location weather stations with data from poorly chosen location data. This project was large and complex, and Muller helped organize it with the help of Koch brother money. The Muller "Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project" was to be a major test of GW theory. If it could demonstrate that the the temperature trends observed in weather station date was an artifact of weather station locations, then a serious blow would be struct against the the GW hypothesis.

Muller's findings did not turn out to be the triumph for the anti-GW crowd that they had expected. Muller told Congress last winter:

We have done an initial study of the station selection issue. Rather than pick stations with long records (as done by the prior groups) we picked stations randomly from the complete set. This approach eliminates station selection bias. Our results are shown in the Figure; we see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups

We have also studied station quality. Many US stations have low quality rankings according to a study led by Anthony Watts. However, we find that the warming seen in the "poor" stations is virtually indistinguishable from that seen in the "good" stations.

We are developing statistical methods to address the other potential biases.

By the end of this summer the statistical study was completed, and the findings were such that GWs skeptics were wishing that Richard Muller had never joined theur cause. The problem was, as Muller explained to Congress,

poor station quality

although

poor station quality might affect absolute temperature, it does not appear to affect trends, and for global warming estimates, the trend is what is important

Our key caveat is that our results are preliminary and have not yet been published in a peer reviewed journal. We have begun that process of submitting a paper to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and we are preparing several additional papers for publication elsewhere.

In his congressional testimony, Muller paid tribute to many of the leaders of the anti-AGW movement, even though he rejected their contention:

Without the efforts of Anthony Watts and his team, we would have only a series of anecdotal images of poor temperature stations, and we would not be able to evaluate the integrity of the data

This is a case in which scientists receiving no government funding did work crucial to understanding climate change. Similarly for the work done by Steve McIntyre. Their "amateur" science is not amateur in quality; it is true science, conducted with integrity and high standards.

What ever hopes the anti-GW crowd took from Muller's remarks, they were dashed when he recently published the study's conclusions in the Wall Street Journal.

Over the last two years, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project has looked deeply at all the issues raised above. I chaired our group, which just submitted four detailed papers on our results to peer-reviewed journals. We have now posted these papers online at www.BerkeleyEarth.org to solicit even more scrutiny.

Our work covers only land temperature—not the oceans—but that's where warming appears to be the greatest. Robert Rohde, our chief scientist, obtained more than 1.6 billion measurements from more than 39,000 temperature stations around the world. Many of the records were short in duration, and to use them Mr. Rohde and a team of esteemed scientists and statisticians developed a new analytical approach that let us incorporate fragments of records. By using data from virtually all the available stations, we avoided data-selection bias. Rather than try to correct for the discontinuities in the records, we simply sliced the records where the data cut off, thereby creating two records from one.

We discovered that about one-third of the world's temperature stations have recorded cooling temperatures, and about two-thirds have recorded warming. The two-to-one ratio reflects global warming. The changes at the locations that showed warming were typically between 1-2ºC, much greater than the IPCC's average of 0.64ºC.

To study urban-heating bias in temperature records, we used satellite determinations that subdivided the world into urban and rural areas. We then conducted a temperature analysis based solely on "very rural" locations, distant from urban ones. The result showed a temperature increase similar to that found by other groups. Only 0.5% of the globe is urbanized, so it makes sense that even a 2ºC rise in urban regions would contribute negligibly to the global average.

What about poor station quality? Again, our statistical methods allowed us to analyze the U.S. temperature record separately for stations with good or acceptable rankings, and those with poor rankings (the U.S. is the only place in the world that ranks its temperature stations). Remarkably, the poorly ranked stations showed no greater temperature increases than the better ones. The mostly likely explanation is that while low-quality stations may give incorrect absolute temperatures, they still accurately track temperature changes.

When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.

Over the last two years, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project has looked deeply at all the issues raised above. I chaired our group, which just submitted four detailed papers on our results to peer-reviewed journals. We have now posted these papers online at www.BerkeleyEarth.org to solicit even more scrutiny.

Our work covers only land temperature—not the oceans—but that's where warming appears to be the greatest. Robert Rohde, our chief scientist, obtained more than 1.6 billion measurements from more than 39,000 temperature stations around the world. Many of the records were short in duration, and to use them Mr. Rohde and a team of esteemed scientists and statisticians developed a new analytical approach that let us incorporate fragments of records. By using data from virtually all the available stations, we avoided data-selection bias. Rather than try to correct for the discontinuities in the records, we simply sliced the records where the data cut off, thereby creating two records from one.

We discovered that about one-third of the world's temperature stations have recorded cooling temperatures, and about two-thirds have recorded warming. The two-to-one ratio reflects global warming. The changes at the locations that showed warming were typically between 1-2ºC, much greater than the IPCC's average of 0.64ºC.

To study urban-heating bias in temperature records, we used satellite determinations that subdivided the world into urban and rural areas. We then conducted a temperature analysis based solely on "very rural" locations, distant from urban ones. The result showed a temperature increase similar to that found by other groups. Only 0.5% of the globe is urbanized, so it makes sense that even a 2ºC rise in urban regions would contribute negligibly to the global average.

What about poor station quality? Again, our statistical methods allowed us to analyze the U.S. temperature record separately for stations with good or acceptable rankings, and those with poor rankings (the U.S. is the only place in the world that ranks its temperature stations). Remarkably, the poorly ranked stations showed no greater temperature increases than the better ones. The mostly likely explanation is that while low-quality stations may give incorrect absolute temperatures, they still accurately track temperature changes.

When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.

Global warming is real.

So much for GW evidence being a scientific hoax. So much GW science being careless.

The war over global warming is over, although the war over AGW is not over. Many of the more sophisticated AGW skeptics have acknowledged that global warming is real, but continue to argue that human CO2 emissions are not its cause. The case for such views is crumbling, however. The sophisticated critics point to the work of two climate scientists, Roy Spencer and Richard Lindzen to support their beliefs. But these two researchers are not without their own critics, and indeed their conclusions have received troubling questions. Recently as I pointed out:

The work of Climate Change denier Roy Spencer has recently been demonstrated to contain large scientific errors. (see here, here, here, here, and here, here, and here), while a recent paper by Texas A&'M professor Andrew Dessler offers a devastating critique to the skeptical claims of both Spencer and MIT Professor Richard Lindzen. Needless to say the Climate change skeptics are not folding their tents yet, but their days are numbers.

The argument that AGW is a Liberal hoax is in shambles, while the case is growing that AGW skepticism is growing steadily weaker. What has not yet surfaced, although it is obvious, is the argument that GW and AGW skepticism has been a Libertarian/Conservative hoax all along. Almost without exception AGW and GW skeptics identify themselves with Conservative and Libertarian political causes. Right wing Talk Radio figures have fanatically backed the Global Warming hoax line, while Fox News, notorious for its lies about about all sorts of issues, has repeatedly parroted the anti-GW, anti-AGW lines. AGW skeptics have been virtually lionized by Fox News. While right-wing Republican Presidential candidates Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Rick Santorium, all reject GW or AGW out of hand.

Michele Bachmann demonstrated her profound understanding of science,

Carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas; it is a harmless gas ... And yet we're being told that we have to reduce this natural substance and reduce the American standard of living to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occurring in the Earth.

Herman Cain believes that he is qualified to determin what real science is and what its conclusions are,

I don't believe ... global warming is real. Do we have climate change? Yes. Is it a crisis? No. ... Because the science, the real science, doesn't say that we have any major crisis or threat when it comes to climate change.

While Rick perry believes that scientists are manipulating data,

I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling in to their projects. I think we're seeing it almost weekly or even daily, scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.

If you want' to believe Perry's statement about scientists, don't ask him about his undergraduate science grades. Clearly many Republicans Presidential candidates support the right-wing anti-science hoax.

Is the nuclear renaissance over?

2011-10-22T05:49:00.002-05:00

Critics of nuclear power often back their arguments with rhetorical flourishes, but frequently seem to misunderstand or misrepresent the facts they assert. A well known energy expert put in a guest appearance on Rod Adams' Atomic Insights blog this week. The expert, a long time critic of nuclear energy, offered a blog post long analysis of the market problems of the reactor industry. The basis argument is not new, and indeed it is full of ambiguities.

Nuclear power continues to die of an incurable attack of market forces. A huge and capable propaganda campaign by the industry and its political allies is spinning an illusion of a renaissance that deceives credulous journalists but not hard-nosed investors.

The World Nuclear Association has kept track of new reactor construction, planning and development since January 2007. This information is backed by country by country WNA reports on the development of local nuclear industries. If our nuclear critic is correct, we should find evidence of market declines over the last 5 years in WNA reports.

In fact, globally in the post Fukushima era, planning for and construction of power reactors continues. According to the World Nuclear Association there are currently 432 operational power generating reactors in the world. This number reflects a decline of 11 in the number of currently operational reactors world wide since the Fukushima accident in March 2011. However the number of reactors under construction or on order or planned has not declined since the Fukushima accidents in March of this year. In addition the number of reactors under consideration has actually risen from 324 in March, 2011 to 357 in the October 20, 2011 report.

Most of the global decline in reactor numbers occurred in a few countries. Germany had 17 operational reactors in March of 2011 while Japan reportedly had something like 55 operational reactors. This month Germany is credited by the WNA with 9 operational reactors while Japan is credited with 51. In neither country was the reactor shutdown due to market forces. In Germany the cause of the reactor shutdown was political, while in Japan the cause of the shutdown was a natural disaster. The rise in the number of new reactors in the early phases of consideration since March, suggests that the market is still very interested in nuclear power.

Thus the stort term picture of the nuclear market does not support our expert's picture of a dying nuclear industry, but what of the longer term?

In addition there are 63 reactors under construction, and another 153 reactors in the planning stage. Construction of another 357 reactors is under consideration. These are facts. The number of reactors under currentlconstruction equals a little under 15% of the existing global reactor fleet , while the number of reactors in the planning stage is 35% of the global reactor fleet. These facts would point to exactly the opposite of what the nuclear power critic claims.

A five year perspective offers even stronger evidence that the nuclear market is flourishing. In its January 2007 report the WNA stated that 28 reactors were under construction and 64 reactors were being planned. Thus the number of reactors being built world wide increased by 225% over the last 5 years, while the number of reactors being planned increased from 64 to 153 an increase of 239%. The number of new reactors under consideration increased from the January 2007 figure of 158 with a capacity of 124 GWe to the October 2011 figure of 357 plants with a total capacity of 408 GWe. This represents an increase of capacity under consideration of 329%.

Are these figures spinn by the nuclear industry, intended to fool credulous journalists as our expert suggests? First I should note that I did not find these figures in a press release designed to prop up sagging investor confidence in a nuclear renaissance, they are intended to reflect the future markets of the Uranium mining industry, by offering a basis for estimating future uranium demand. Uranium mining companies make money by selling uranium, in order to make more money, they need to build more uranium mines. In order to make decisions about building new uranium mines, uranium mining companies need accurat information about future uranium demand. The WNA calls its reactor building estimates the World Nuclear Power Reactors & Uranium Requirements. The introductory paragraph to the nuclear power estimates states:

This table includes only those future reactors envisaged in specific plans and proposals and expected to be operating by 2030. Longer-range estimates based on national strategies, capabilities and needs may be found in the WNA Nuclear Century Outlook. The WNA country papers linked to this table cover both areas: near-term developments and the prospective long-term role for nuclear power in national energy policies.

Thus we have the WNA building country by country pictures of anticipated world wide nuclear industry developments over the next 20 years. These research papers appear to be written by and for nuclear industry professionals. They are almost never read by journalists and certainly not read by anti-nuclear experts who are notorious for picking out only papers that are favorable to their cause to read.

The WNA is far more than being a propaganda organization as our critic of nuclear power claims. I would not deny that the WNA engages in propaganda exercises for the nuclear industry, but its propaganda is mainly intended to counter disinformation and misinformation from the foes of nuclear power. The WNA's primary propaganda method appears to be the accurate reporting of facts. In addition to its propaganda function, the WNA collects information that is primarily of interest to its members.

Confirmation of the validity of the WNA reports comes from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The latest IAEA report, published on October 15, 2011 states

Current status of the nuclear industry:

* 433 nuclear power reactors in operation with a total net installed capacity of 366.555 GW(e)
* 5 nuclear power reactors in long term shutdown
* 65 nuclear power reactors under construction

The claim that

Nuclear power continues to die of an incurable attack of market forces

appears to be at best very inaccurate, and at worst downright dishonest. The evidence points to the opposite. The number of nuclear power plants under construction has more than doubled during the last 5 years. The number of nuclear power plants on order or being planned has more than doubled, while the generation capacity of new nuclear plants under consideration has more than tripled. These numbers suggest that far from dying, the global nuclear industry is flourishing, and those who suggest otherwise are either poorly informed, deluded, or deliberately lying.

Anti-science disinformation and politics

2011-10-18T04:25:00.006-05:00

The conclusions of good scientists who properly use the scientific method are often challenged for religious or ideological reasons. Although religion is often depicted as the major enemy of science, the Soviet Union proved that politically motivated wars against science are both possible and can lead to ideologically motivated wars on truth. The same of Trofim Lysenko is infamous in science for the purges of scientists his weird ideas lead to. Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet agronomist who believed that characteristics which organisms acquire can be inherited, contrary to all 20th century genetic research. Lysenko argued that if crops were

Stalin bought into Lysenko wacky ideas, and made Lysenkoism a part of the Soviet ideology. During the Stalinist purges of the 193o's, mainstream Soviet geneticist were purged for not adhering to Lysenko ideology. Geneticist were fired from academic positions, arrested and even killed for their refusal to bow to the official Soviet scientific ideology. Later the purged geneticist were posthumously rehabilitated, but this did not undo the damage that was done to Soviet science and to Soviet agriculture.

Unfortunately Lysenkoism was not the last anti-scientific idea that was to become popular. Last week the Houston Chronicle revealed that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality had censored a scientific paper on environmental issues in Galveston Bay written by John Anderson of Rice University. Portions of a chapter in The State of the Bay a periodical report published by the the Galveston Bay Estuary Program of the state of Texas. References to sea level rise, man caused environmental changes and global warming were censored out of the report by the The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality a body appointed by the fanatic anti-science Governor of Texas, Rick Perry. Anderson has withdrawn his chapter from the report, and several other scientists who were involved in the project have asked that their name be withdrawn from mention by the report out of fear that any association with such an anti-science travesty would harm their reputations as scientists.

Rick Perry is not the only American Governor to take anti-scientific stances. The current governors of New York believe that they are far better informed than research scientists about the safety of reactors. Not long ago, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, asked for a meeting with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to discuss earthquake dangers at New York's Indian Point Nuclear Plant. Earth Quake Dangers at a New York nuclear power plant?

You have got to be kidding. John Wheeler of This Week in Nuclear tells the story. Cuomo found the story in an article by Bill Dedman of MSNBC. Dedman claimed that

The reactor with the highest risk rating is 24 miles north of New York City, in the village of Buchanan, N.Y., at the Indian Point Energy Center. There, on the east bank of the Hudson, Indian Point nuclear reactor No. 3 has the highest risk of earthquake damage in the country, according to new NRC risk estimates provided to msnbc.com.

Dedman's report was allegedly based on an NRC document, IMPLICATIONS OF UPDATED PROBABILISTIC SEISMIC HAZARD ESTIMATES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN UNITED STATES ON EXISTING PLANTS. DaileyTECH noted numerous flaws in the Dedman story.
Dedman claimed,

It turns out that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has calculated the odds of an earthquake causing catastrophic failure to a nuclear plant here. Each year, at the typical nuclear reactor in the U.S., there's a 1 in 74,176 chance that the core could be damaged by an earthquake, exposing the public to radiation. No tsunami required. That's 10 times more likely than you winning $10,000 by buying a ticket in the Powerball multistate lottery, where the chance is 1 in 723,145.

DailyTECH commented,

the report says that the risk is of "the core being damaged by an earthquake, exposing the public to radiation". But as we mentioned earlier, that's not what the report says. The report references the risk of core damage, which does not estimate the actual probability of a "large early release" of radiation at all. As the report says, in the case of core damage, such a release would be a "possibility", but given additional containment measures, would likely be a far lower probability than the cored damage frequency (CDF) estimate.

In other words, the report does not predict the risk of the public being exposed to radiation directly at all.

DailyTECH adds,

the most "at risk" plant -- New York's Indian Point 3 plant -- has a 1 in 10,000 annual risk of core damage if an ultra-powerful 10 hz earthquake were to strike (thus this is dubbed the "maximum risk" or "weakest link" model). The actual risk is far lower. The report gives what is likely the most accurate estimate in the form of a weighted average. For example for Indian Point 3, the risk is 1 in 670,000 per year.

Clearly then Dedman has misrepresented the NRC report. Why would he do that? As DailyTECH states,

The net result is that the U.S. public is becoming mistrusting and fearful of nuclear power. . . .

This could have a tremendous deleterious effect on the energy future and security of the U.S. Nuclear power in the U.S. is arguably the cheapest and most tested form of alternative energy. The U.S. contains many rich deposits of uranium and other fissile isotopes -- enough to drastically reduce the reliance of the U.S. on fossil fuels from volatile foreign sources.

So Dedman is engaged in anti-nuclear propaganda, with the apparent intention of increasing public mistrust of nuclear power.

Daily Tech contacted Dedman in order to request an correction of his errors. For example, the communication to Dedman noted,

the report does not talk about the risk of public exposure to radiation,

Dedman responded,

the article is about core damage, which the NRC says would release radiation. You've decided that I must have been talking about something else, which I wasn't, and now you're saying, why aren't about that something else...

DailyTECH commented,

That is a clear mistake -- intentional, or unintentional.

The DailyTECH editorial when after Dedman with the Journalistic equivalent of an Iron club,

Engaging in the due diligence that Mr. Dedman neglected to we discussed Mr. Dedman's comments and our analysis with government authorities at the U.S. regulatory commission. They told me they never told him that. . . .

That was only the first of several falsehoods and factual errors in Mr. Dedman's correspondence and work that we were able to definitively verify.

States a separate NRC team member, "There were numerous inaccuracies in that story."

Mr. Dedman writes us stating:

You're cherry picking. You've decided that the weighted average is the right column to use. Based on what? The NRC staff prefers the column that we've used, the "weakest link." That's the number it sent us, when it sent us one number for each plant. And as the report explains, the NRC has no basis on which to weight the averages, so it says a weighted average wouldn't be meaningful.

There are three separate falsehoods in this statement. As you will see, the NRC told Mr. Dedman nothing of the sort and he's clear mislead me, as he's done to his readers.

We write him:

Do you have a contact at the NRC who can substantiate your claims? How can you weight data without having a factor to do so? If you get me this information I can [edit my article].

Virtually always weighted data is what you would use in a case like this, as the data is typically weighted by the frequency of occurrence of the event (e.g. a probability of the probability). It's possible your correct, that would just be a bit unusual.

Mr. Dedman refused to provide us the identity of his phantom "contact" at the NRC, so we contacted them ourselves.

We asked them if they told Mr. Dedman to use this figure or told him that the weighted average was non-meaningful.

We inquire:

Did an NRC spokesperson tell MSNBC's Bill Dedman that the weighted risk was invalid and to use the weakest link model?

They respond:

No.

And they add:

The weighted average is not invalid (see Answer 5 below). All of the values in Appendix D were developed by NRC staff. Table D-1 in Appendix D uses the (2008) US Geological Survey (USGS) seismic source model, but the Seismic Core Damage Frequency results were developed by US NRC staff. The USGS seismic source model is the same one used to develop the USGS National Seismic Hazard Maps.

Tables D-1 through D-3 in Appendix D of the US NRC study show the “simple” average of the four spectral frequencies (1, Hz, 5 Hz, 10 Hz, peak ground acceleration (PGA)), the “IPEEE weighted” average and the “weakest link” model. These different averaging approaches are explained in Appendix A.3 (simple average and IPEEE weighted average) and Appendix A.4 (weakest link model). The weighted average uses a combination of the three spectral frequencies (1, 5, and 10 Hz) at which most important structures, systems, and components of nuclear power plants will resonate. The weakest link is the largest SCDF value from among the four spectral frequencies noted above.

Most nuclear power plant structures, systems, and components resonate at frequencies between 1 and 10 Hz, so there are different approaches to averaging the Seismic Core Damage Frequency (SCDF) values. By using multiple approaches, the NRC staff gains a better understanding of the uncertainties involved in the assessments.

In other words, each model is important to gaining a full understanding of various possible scenarios and Mr. Dedman erroneously selected the most sensational model and then falsely claimed the NRC told him to.

The NRC adds:

The weakest link model is a method for evaluating the importance of different frequencies of ground vibration to the overall plant performance. The model and its details are not integral to understanding the fundamental conclusions of the study.

That conclusion? The nation is quite safe (as we write in our piece).

[MSNBC and its employee Mr. Dedman have not corrected this error in their story, despite knowing about it, at the time of this article's publication]

It is quite clear then that as far as his reputation is concerned Mr. Dedman, a Pulitzer Prize winning Journalist has gotten himself into deep shit. How is that possible?

Googling Mr. Dedman's name produces this astonishing hit:

Investigative reporter Bill Dedman of msnbc.com is always looking for good story ideas and documents. He has written for msnbc.com about uninspected bridges, problems with firefighter safety equipment, a reclusive heiress and her money men, the Obama administration's visitor logs, treatment of detainees at Guantanamo, strategies for discouraging school shootings, and journalists making campaign contributions.

Write my story for me, Mr. Dedman seems to be saying. We have to ask then, who might have supplied Bill Dedman with he idea for this story? Who would place a story which DailyTECH describes as containing numerous inaccuracies, with Bill Dedman? Who is interested in creating what DailyTECH describes as contributing to public mistrust of nuclear power? Who is capable of such deception? Well I suspect my readers have some ideas. If the question shifts to who benefits, quite obviously almost anyone in the fossil fuel industry does, but not anyone in the fossil fuel industry is capable of such deception. But we know what people and what organizations in the fossil fuel industry have a track record for financing lies and disinformation about climate change, and the same people and organizations quite obviously would have an interest in spreading lies and disinformation about nuclear power.

Last week I spent two hours with a distinguished reactor scientist, Dr. Sherrell Green who recently retired after a 33 year career at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Dr. Greene has spent much time during his career researching reactor safety. In addition he was an inheritor of the ORNL nuclear safety tradition that goes back to the Manhattan Project days. As my readers are aware ORNL's commitment to nuclear safety was such that Alvin Weinberg refused to back down over it, when pressured by a Democratic Congressman. Weinberg was fired for bucking the Democratic party line over nuclear safety during the early 1970's., When it comes to knowledge of nuclear safety issues, I would trust Sherrell Greene. Sherrell was till recently ORNL's Director for Nuclear Technology Programs. I would trust what Dr. Greene says about Nuclear safety. I would not trust Dedman any further than I can throw him, because he is not a scientists, and because nothing in his experience suggests that he knows anything about nuclear safety. If Dedman knew anything about science writing, he would find sources like Dr. Greene, and report their opinions vervatum.

One of the greatest dangers of science journalists is misrepresenting what scientists say. My own investigation of scientific controversies suggests that even scientists cannot always be trusted to accurately describe what other scientists say, It is even more likely that a Journalist who knows nothing about the scientific issues he writes about, will make mistakes when he paraphrases scientists. Credibility depends on the use of credible sources. Mr Dedman does not seem to be aware of the fundamental realities of credible science writing.

So we have a Journalist who writes a poorly documented report which the NRC and science writers says say is inaccurate, and a state governor who reads the report and uses it to serve as a basis for policy. After reading Mr. Dedman's MSNBC article, Governor Cuomo lept into action. Claiming the authority of an NRC report, Cuomo cvalled on the NRC to shutdown of the Indian Point #3 reactor. In fact Cuomo was relying on Dedman's report which the NRC had already branded as inaccurate. Did Cuomo care about the NRC's actual views? Certainly not. He was only looking for excuses that supported his campaign against nuclear science. Cuomo like Rick Perry and Joseph Stalin knows that one way to gain political support is to attack or ignore the findings of science.

More on Underground Reactor Advantages

2011-10-17T05:34:00.005-05:00

My recent post on underground reactor housing (also posted by the Energy Collective) has brought me communications from Carl W. Myers of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Myers called my attention to a paper that he and James M. Mahar of James M. Mahar of Idaho State University presented last month to a Small Modular Reactors Symposium (SMR2011) in Washington D.C. The Title of the Myers-Mahar paper is UNDERGROUND SITING OF SMALL MODULAR REACTORS IN BEDROCK: RATIONALE, CONCEPTS, AND APPLICATIONS. This paper will be published as part the Conference Proceedings, but unfortunately that will not be on the Internet.

The Myers-Mahar paper offers important insights into the future of nuclear power station siting, nuclear cost reduction and nuclear safety. The "Underground Siting" abstract reads,

Small modular reactors (SMRs) sited 100 to 300 meters deep in underground chambers constructed in bedrock having favorable geotechnical properties could be both cost effective and provide superior levels of safety and physical security. The bedrock adjacent to and enclosing the reactor chamber would become the functional equivalent of a conventional containment structure, but one with increased margins of safety for design- basis accidents, reduced risks for beyond-design-basis accidents, and a high level of inherent physical protection against external threats. In addition, seismic safety could be enhanced at lower cost because seismic waves are generally attenuated with depth in bedrock. Nominal steel and concrete around the reactor would be required as would sealing of tunnels and other penetrations into the reactor chamber. Nonetheless, the net result in capital cost savings could potentially more than offset the cost of underground excavation. For a hypothetical granitic bedrock site with SMRs at a nominal depth of 100 meters, preliminary excavation cost estimates for single- and four-unit installations constructed by drill-and-blast range from around $90 million to $45 million per reactor, respectively, and for a twelve-unit installation constructed by tunnel boring machine from $25 to $15 million per reactor. Specialized applications for bedrock-sited SMRs include collocation at underground hydropower stations, test and demonstration facility for prototype SMR designs, and deployments in regions at risk of terrorist or military attack.

One of the long term objections to underground reactor siting has been that it would increases reactor siting and housing costs, but advances in excavation technology and Alvin Weinberg's idea of building large numbers of multi reactor parks could potentially lower nuclear costs, while dramatically increasing nuclear safety. The Myers-Mahar paper makes clear exactly how dramatic the cost savings of underground reactor housing might turn out to be. They argue,

1) Reduce per-reactor capital cost of underground construction by siting multiple reactors in a single location, thereby allowing the cost of the common access shafts and tunnels to be shared among more than one reactor.

2) Reduce capital cost by restricting siting to those locations in bedrock of such high quality that excavated openings would be largely self-supporting and the rock overlying and enclosing the reactor chamber would act as a low-cost, passive, natural containment structure---and in addition would attenuate seismic motion and protect against aircraft impact, bombs and related threats.

3) Reduce capital cost and shorten the schedule for underground construction by taking advantage of advances in equipment, technology, and techniques for underground construction that have occurred since the 1970s such as underground excavation using hard-rock tunnel boring machines.

4) Reduce life-cycle cost by using in-place decommissioning.

In addition,

5) Collocate waste management and other fuel cycle facilities underground in proximity to the reactors as a means to both reduce waste management cost and provide a new concept for nuclear waste management.

Myers and Mahar reference a paper. "Cost Advantages of Large Underground Nuclear Parks," by K.M. Giraud, J.F. Junze, and J.M. Mahar, to argue that a 10% reduction of electrical generation costs from large single unit reactors is possible through underground siting with an even larger savings possible through multi-unit nuclear parks.

Public concerns about nuclear safety may have their irrational components, but nuclear power will not be acceptable until the public is sure that nuclear power plants do not pose a threat to their safety and well being. Once the public feels confident about nuclear safety, the case against nuclear power will weaken significantly. It is not enough to build safer reactors, an accomplishment which reactor manufactures have already accomplished, the public must be assured by the designed in safety improvements. Underground reactor siting hold the potential of boosting public confidence in reactor safety, to the point where opposition to nuclear power is no longer acceptable. If underground housing of power reactors increases confidence in nuclear safety, while lowering nuclear housing costs, then we will improve the likelihood of a nuclear powered future.

Petitions to the White House

2011-10-10T05:59:00.004-05:00

I noted a few days ago Brian Wang's petition to the White House in support of nuclear education. That petition still needs 4505 signatures. In addition to Brian's petition I want to call your attention to the White House petition calling for "Provide Funding for Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) Research and Development for Energy Independence." This Petition requires 25,000 signatures and states,

Thorium is nearly a Perfect Fuel. Fund it's development.

It has been presented to Google and TED.com. Videos below.

Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) has been proven by previous US research and operated for nearly 5 years (1965-1969).

LFTR is PASSIVELY safe. During a loss of power or overheating, nuclear fuel is separated (passively) into non-critical holding tanks. It runs at low pressure compared to existing reactors.

LFTR is CHEAP, proliferation adverse, and domestic.

Thorium has proven reserves of well over 1000 years of current world usage.

Thorium could produce power for the entire world at levels far beyond current production.

Imagine a world with nearly infinite power.

www.energyfromthorium.com/

http://flibe-energy.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk

"Help us take this Message Forward": Kirk Sorensen Invades the United Kingdom

2011-10-07T05:06:00.004-05:00

About five and a half years ago, a young NASA engineer, Kirk Sorensen began a new blog, Energy from Thorium. It was not obvious at the time, but Kirk was not just an aero-space engineer, but a revolutionary who advocated am almost unknown approach to the way society could produce energy in the future. A Wired Magazine story told how kirk made his discovery.

(I)n 2000, Sorensen was just 25, engaged to be married and thrilled to be employed at his first serious job as a real aerospace engineer . . .

His job was with NASA and he had been assigned the task of researching the application of nuclear power to space based applications. A

thick hardbound volume was sitting on a shelf in a colleague’s office when Kirk Sorensen spotted it. . . . the book’s title — Fluid Fuel Reactors, (Addison-Wesley, 1958.) — jumped out at him. He picked it up and thumbed through it. Hours later, he was still reading, enchanted by the ideas but struggling with the arcane writing. “

The book was an account of a nuclear reactor research projects that were underway at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) during the 1950's. Kirk was fascinated by the book, and wanted to learn more. He discovered that ORNL maintained an archive of hundreds of documents that had been produced from the 1950's to the 1970's to document ORNL research on the Molten Salt Reactor. These ORNL documents are unusual in their thoroughness, lucidity and approachability.

Scientists tell me that what is most unusual about these working papers in that they document the ORNL MSR research and its background in detail and with an accurateness that many researchers fail of achieve. The Addison-Wesley book was produced by the same ORNL scientists who were documenting their research with such unusual thoroughness. Anyone who is scientifically Literate can read the ORNL MSR documents and appreciate what the ORNL scientists accomplished, and why they came to the conclusions they did. This is unfortunately not the case with the work of Argonne National Laboratory scientists, who Australian Environmental Scientist Barry Brook acknowledged left the grounds for many of their informal conclusions out of their reports. Brook stated.

Well-meaning folks like Charles Barton and co., with whom I agree on most issues, will and does like to try and dispute these figures and complain about lack of public open-source documentation on these details, and of course he’s quite within his right to object on this or any other matter regarding fast reactors, if he chooses. But it doesn’t change what is known by those engineers and scientists who worked on this technology for many decades, and understand the systems — their strengths, benefits, problems and outstanding issues — nor what data has been accumulated, tested and archived that is not public. As I have said before, it is these experts, not bloggers, who will ultimately need to convince decision makers and financiers as to the viability of a given system like the IFR.

Unlike the Argonne scientists I was trained to a reporting standard which can be stated as,

if it is not documented it did not happen.

Thus the failure of ANL scientist and engineers to accurately document their research and how they reached their findings is a significant weakness for their case.

If a literature search is the foundation for high quality science, Kirk Sorensen's approach was first rate. During the next few years Kirk, with the aid of the ORNL Library collected and digitized hundreds of ORNL documents related too ORNL's MSR research.

Kirk is not alone in recognizing the value of ORNL's well documented Molten Salt Reactor research. Scientist in other countries including Russia, Japan and France continue to do Molten Salt nuclear technology research, drawing on ORNL produced data. One recent Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory documentt noted,

Oak Ridge National Laboratory took the lead in researching the MSR through the 1960s, and much of their work culminated with the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE). The MSRE
was a 7.4 MWth test reactor simulating the neutronics “kernel” of an inherently safe epithermal thorium-breeder reactor. . . .

Kirk not only created a web site in which these ORNL documents can be located and linked too, he also created a web page in which those documents can be discussed. The Energy from Thorium Discussion Forum. This page is open to all comers and its only requirement is that participants be willing to participate in give and take written discussions. The give and take requirement would seem simple, but every now and then participants appear unwilling to take. A participant will make a point, but refuse to acknowledge that a second participant has made factually accurate and well reasoned response to his or her point. This is especially distressing to other discussion participants when the response by the original participant is not factually accurate or is supported by recourse to logically fallacious arguments.

Thus Kirk's discussion form adheres to Open Science standards. In addition Kirk created a standard blog in which he states his own opinions.

In addition to the standard blogging, documentation tools, Kirk has created a Facebook Energy from Thorium site, and has used Twitter and YouTube To increase his communications outreach.

During the summer of 2009 Kirk traveled to the United Kingdom in order to offer a presentation on the Thorium Breeding Molten Salt Reactor (the LFTR), to an event that was staged as part of the 2009 Manchester Festival. The event, sponsored by a British Newspaper with a long time association with Manchester, "The Guardian." The Guardian sponsored event offered a chance for new technologies intended to mittigate Global Warming to get a hearing, not just from attendees at a pannel of judges and other atendes at the Festival but from the readers of the Guardian, and from participants in the UN Conference on Climate Change, that was to take place in December of 2009. Presenters who were to offer accounts to the Manchester Report Pannel were ask to describe innovative technologies for mitigating Anthropogenic Global Warming. Kirk had submitted a paper to the pannel, and had been accepted to offer a presentation.

Kirk's presentation was considered one of the top 10 presentatrons by the Manchester Report pannel, and the LFTR was included in the Manchester Report as well as as mentioned on a story on the report by The Guardian. The Guardian coverage opended the door to subsequent British coverage of the LFTR by the main stream media of the United Kingdom.

Among the Pannelists who wrote the Manchester Report was a recently appointed member of the House of Lords, Baroness Bryony Worthington, who is an Independently environmental activist. Not only did Baroness Worthington, support the LFTR in the Manchester Report, she discussed it on the pages of the Guardian, and in the House of Lords. She also helped to organize a lobbying and advocacy endeavor called the Weinberg Foundation. The Launch of the Weinberg Foundation gave Kirk a chance to go back to the United Kingdom. Kirk gave a speech in the Palace of Westminister:

Kirk also briefed Charles Hendry, The UK Minister of State for the Department of Energy and Climate Change. On September 9, Kirk gave a presentation to top DECC top officials and staff.

Clearly then Kirk has come a long way quickly, and no where has the advance been greayer than In the UK, where

Brian Wang's Nuclear Education Petition to the White House

2011-10-05T08:39:00.008-05:00

Brian Wang of the blog Next Big Future has started a petition to the White House calling for THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO: Educate the Public Regarding Nuclear Power.

This petition is a response to the "End taxpayer subsidies for new nuclear reactors" petition.

Due to the manufactured controversy that is the nuclear reactor meltdown in Fukushima, Japan, perpetuated by a scientifically illiterate news media, the public is unnecessarily hostile to nuclear power as an energy source.

To date nobody has died from the accident and Fukushima, and nuclear power has the lowest per Terra-watt hour death toll of any energy source known to man:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

The Obama administration should take better strides to educate the public regarding this important energy source.

I encourage my readers to sign this petition. In addition Mr. Obama needs to better educate himself on the nuclear option, and the serious flaws in renewable energy.

Graphite Free Core?

2011-10-04T06:23:00.003-05:00

The Generation IV international forum describes itself as

a cooperative international endeavor organized to carry out the research and development (R&D) needed to establish the feasibility and performance capabilities of the next generation nuclear energy systems.

The Generation IV International Forum has thirteen Members which are signatories of its founding document, the GIF Charter. Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Republic of South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States signed the GIF Charter in July 2001. Subsequently, it was signed by Switzerland in 2002, Euratom in 2003, and the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation, both in 2006.

The goals adopted by GIF provided the basis for identifying and selecting six nuclear energy systems for further development. The six selected systems employ a variety of reactor, energy conversion and fuel cycle technologies. Their designs feature thermal and fast neutron spectra, closed and open fuel cycles and a wide range of reactor sizes from very small to very large. Depending on their respective degrees of technical maturity, the Generation IV systems are expected to become available for commercial introduction in the period between 2015 and 2030 or beyond.

Molten Salt Nuclear technology is included in the Generation IV project and recently quite litterally the picture of the MSR in the web site has changed. What is going on here?

A recent brief EfT duscussion focuses on what is behind the crossing out of the graphite free core, but not why this is not a good idea. Lars notes

the French approach definitely avoids graphite and its waste flow. Leaves you with the challenge for startup though. Apparently the concerns about proliferation are much lower in France.

Concerns about the proliferation risks posed by LFTRs another thorium cycle MSRs are absurd, as another recent EfT discussion has demonstrated. In this discussion Lars notes,

LFTR is one of a very few technologies that have a serious chance to provide power to 9 billion people without serious damage to the environment. Along the way it can also chew up the existing transuranic waste. There are some big engineering challenges to solve. But so far as I can tell they are all solvable. The really big unknowns are: 1) can we get the cost below coal and 2) can we survive the politics.

The LFTR is not going to supply energy to nine billion people without a graphite core. Indeed a Graphite free core will require ten times as much fissionable material in its start up charge, and will leak neutrons like a sive. Leaking neutrons mean no thorium breeding. As Cyril R points out in the graphite free core discussion,

Graphite free core, what nonsense. Lots of graphite reflector in the French designs, and lots of graphite in the core and pebbles of the AHTR. Even Jaro's HW-MSR uses graphite tubes. Only no-graphite design we've seen is David's tube in tube, and that's fringe culture for the Gen IV VIPs.

It would appear that the conversation about MSR technology on EfT goes on at a much higher level of information than the conversation at the Generation IV forum. Thorium is not going to provide energy for 9 billion people without graphite cores.

Harry's Place and the Origin of Nuclear Green

2011-10-03T05:43:00.004-05:00

We live in an age in which people are allowed to voice opinion on a subject they know nothing about. Not only may they voice views concerning matters concerning which they are extremely ignorant, but they expect to have their views respected. In 2007, I posted a guest post on a fairly popular English blog Harry's Place. My Harry's Place post has been unfortunately lost, but here is what I argued in it:

Global warming skeptics argue that fixing global warming will cost us so much that it would be ruinous to society to even attempt a solution. This is nonsense. We can take a few steps over the next 40 years to bring at least half of global greenhouse gas (CO2) emissions under control. 50% to 60% of CO2 emissions can be eliminated by bring two sources of CO2 emissions under control. There are great secondary benefits for controlling theses sources. Indeed the secondary benefits may save so much money, that they will pay for the changes on their own.

The two sources that produce over 60% of the CO2 emissions in the United States are electrical generation, and the use of internal combustion engines in ground transportation. Existing technology can eliminate all of the CO2 emissions from electrical generation within the next 40 years. Using existing technology we can eliminate at least half of the CO2 emissions from the ground transportation sector. Expected technological breakthroughs can eliminate the other half.

The changes are simple but radical. By 2050 all base load electrical generation should come from hydroelectric sources and nuclear power plants. All coal fired electrical generating plants should be phased out. Since most world wide hydro electrical resources are already utilized, the replacement of fossil fuel power plants will be primarily through conversion to nuclear reactors. Reactors can be mass-produced and either constructed modularly with local assembly, or by constructed on barges at reactor factories, and then towed to permeate locations at costal or riverine settings. Smaller pre-assembled reactors can be shipped by rail.

Many old and inefficient American and European fossil fueled fired plants, having come to the end of their useful life, will scrapped during the next 40 years. Since they will be replaced anyway, there will be replacement costs. Increasing demand for electrical energy will lead to massive new power plant construction as a matter of course. Already in the United States electrical utilities are focusing on building new nuclear power plants to replace old coal fired plants, and to bring new generating capacity on line.

While it might seem impossible to accomplish the goal of replacing fossil fuel generation with nuclear power, the commitment of societies including national governments, and international cooperation can accomplish it. For example, if the United States makes a national commitment to convert all fossil fuel generation electricity to nuclear, this can be accomplished using existing technology and resources.

The problems of transportation can be solved through the replacement of fossil fuel energy with electrical energy. Existing technology already makes plug in hybrids practical. Even with no new technology, it is feasible to build plug in hybrids with 40 to 50 miles (60 to 75 kilometers) range with no fossil fuel input. This range would cover almost all urban use. Thus it would be possible to perform everyday activities like drive to work, shop and do errands and go out for the evening, without starting the backup fossil fuel engine. Urban trucks and buses could also run on portable stored electricity. Finally American rail roads can be electrified thus eliminating the use of diesel power to haul rail freight.

I promised secondary benefits, they are these. First we will see a significant decline in national health care expenses. A few years ago a group of Canadian doctors began to look at the health related costs of producing electricity from coal. They found that atmospheric pollutants from coal fired electrical generating plants were a significant source of health problems in the province of Ontario. There research found that air pollution from all sources kills more than 5,900 people each year in Ontario. An Ontario government follow up study found that coal-fired power plants in Ontario were responsible for up to 668 deaths. In addition, atmospheric pollutants from coal-fired generators were responsible for 928 hospital admissions and 1,100 emergency room visits every year. The health related cost to the people in Ontario associated with generating electricity by burning coal was found to be $4.4 billion.

A more recent Canadian study found that Ontario hospitals received in one year 12,518 asthma related visits (7,825 children and 4,693 adults). There is little doubt that emissions from fossil fuel engine are a major cause of a worldwide asthma epidemic. In the United States alone, the number of people with asthma grew from 6.7 million people in 1980 to 17.3 million in 1998, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Elimination of coal fired power plants and most autos and truck exhaust would save many billions of dollars in health care costs, and would prevent an enormous amount of human suffering. Thus a secondary benefit from switching electrical generation and ground transportation, from CO2 emitting sources to CO2 free sources, would be decreased a hospital admissions due to repertory illness, and a significant health care savings which in time would by itself more than pay for the conversion.

A further secondary benefit for switching from the use of oil-based fuels in transportation to stored electricity has to do with the oil-based economy. It would be present far cheaper in the United States to power autos with locally produced electricity from nuclear reactors than to power them using energy derived from imported oil. Even without global warming, two factors are driving the price of crude oil ever higher. They are, the growing demand for oil in India and China, and the peaking of world oil production. So just as the oil supply has reached its maximum, tens and even hundreds of millions of new oil consumers are entering the market. Switching from fossil fuel based transportation to a transportation based on stored electricity would save consumers in North America and Europe hundreds of billions of dollars and euros.

The costs of fixing global warming will not be exorbitant, and indeed the secondary benefits of fixing it will by themselves, more that pay the cost of the fix.

I explained my approach:

"I must say that I consider my views revolutionary. I recently came to these conclusions after reading about the medical costs of coal fired plants in Ontario. I decided to extend the analysis to other secondary benefits that might occur if we switched from fossil fuel to nuclear power generation and battery powered cars. The result is not simply savings in health care costs, but potentially huge savings in transportation costs, as battery stored electricity replaces increasingly expensive oil transportation fuels. The economic benefits seem obvious. The discussion has included people I know to be global warming skeptics agreeing with my analysis. In this regard, my argument has accomplished what I wanted it to, which is to move the debate away from the global warming issue toward changes that most people will like. Changes that will incidentally help make the CO2 problem go away. "

I noted:

"Many old and inefficient American and European fossil fueled fired power plants, having come to the end of their useful life, will be scrapped in the next 40 years. Since they will be replaced anyway, the replacement costs will have to be paid. Increasing demand for electrical energy will lead to massive new power plant construction as well. Already in the United States electrical utilities are focusing on building new nuclear power plants to replace old coal fired plants, and to bring new generating capacity on line."

I argued:

"While it might seem impossible to accomplish the goal of replacing fossil fuel generation with nuclear power, the commitment of societies including national governments, and international cooperation can accomplish it. For example, if the United States makes a national commitment to convert all fossil fuel generation electricity to nuclear, this can be accomplished using existing technology and resources."

There were, I went on, considerable economic and health care benefits to doing this. (Brian Wong has also repeatedly made the same point.):

"A more recent Canadian study found that Ontario hospitals received in one year 12,518 asthma related visits (7,825 children and 4,693 adults). There is little doubt that emissions from fossil fuel engine emissions are a major cause of a worldwide asthma epidemic. In the United States alone, the number of people with asthma grew from 6.7 million people in 1980 to 17.3 million in 1998, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Elimination of coal fired power plants and most autos and truck exhaust would save many billions of dollars in health care costs, and would prevent an enormous amount of human suffering. Thus a secondary benefit from switching electrical generation and ground transportation, from CO2 emitting sources to CO2 free sources, would be decreased hospital admissions due to repertory illness, and a significant health care savings which in time would by itself pay for the conversion."

Shortly after this post hit the Internet, critics of nuclear power emerged from the wood work.

"Field" was especially adamant in opposition to nuclear power:

I'm not prepared to look at nuclear sympathetically. We have an abundance of energy from the sun and we have tidal. We should be concentrating all our efforts on solar energy, wind energy, Thin photovoltaic film is just coming on to the market and will revolutionise the solar power scene. Wind turbines are fantastic sources of energy and can be sited offshore to minimise damage to countryside views. We can now tap into tidal energy without ruining the ecology of estuaries.

At one point I responded to comments by "shlemazl:"

1. "Shlemaz":

At present only a tiny fraction of electricity generation is nuclear.

My response:

In Ontario 50% of electrical generation comes from nuks. Two more old nuks are being refurbished.

2. shlemaz:

Your "2050" forecast is utopian as it ignores practicalities.

My response:

With mass production it is practical. You accomplish what you really want too.

3. shlemaz:

There is not enough uranium to replace oil.

My response:

With breeder reactors, especially breading thorium they is enough nuclear fuel to last for several thousand years. It is, by the way possible to modify the CANDU design to do breeding.

4. shlemaz:

Fuel reprocessing ("recycling" to you) is an economic disaster. It's not so hot environmentally either. Only makes sense with fast reactors, which are also an economic disaster.

My Response:

A fluoride reprocessing system was developed by ORNL in the 1960's, in connection with the molten salt reactor. The chemists all liked and believed in the system, but could not sell it to the bureaucrats. The molten salt reactor appears to be the best long range option for safe, and reliable nuclear power. It is a excellent breeder, and thorium is an ideal breeding material.

Having proposed the use of thorium, I got this response from "MFB,"

Nice try, Mr. Barton, but not convincing.

I come from a country with loads of uranium (although producing less and less as our gold mines are closed down) and a fairly active nuclear industry developing, for reasons which escape me, the Pebble-Bed Modular Reactor which is supposedly inherently safe. (Unlikely to be so in practice, and appallingly expensive, but never mind.)

The first Big Issue with nuclear power other than the questions of safety and waste disposal, is the shortage of uranium. We really don't have enough unless we can find some way of properly breeding plutonium from U-238. So far, all fast-breeder designs have failed. The problem with slow breeding is that uranium apparently gets turned into other isotopes, such as U-234 and U-236, which have rather bizarre properties such as neutron absorbtion which make the fuel less efficient.

The other problem is that you need a plutonium reprocessing plant. This is a huge chemical plant for dissolving fuel elements in nitric acid or some equivalent and then precipitating out the plutonium. Note that some of the plutonium is Pu-240, which is not fissionable; the more Pu-239 becoming Pu-240, the less efficient the process. Meanwhile you are left with a caustic solution of horribly radioactive stuff which is dangerous to store and expensive to get rid of. No doubt you could precipitate out some of the radionuclides and make use of them, but that, too, would be expensive. It's nasty and dangerous (most of the world's worst nuclear accidents have been at reprocessing plants).

Thorium is not fissionable by itself, although it can be bred into fissionable material. Then it needs to be reprocessed in much the same way, and with much the same problems, as with plutonium. However, this is blue-sky stuff; nobody yet has a workable commercial thorium breeder reactor and nobody knows whether one will work. The record of new nuclear reactors is not brilliant (virtually all the working designs were developed in the 1940s) and not likely to attract much investment.

So, to sum up, you want to spend vast amounts of money developing a technology which may not work, and developing another technology which almost certainly does not work and wastes vast amounts of energy (uranium enrichment is very problematic). It seems to me that this is an unwise policy.

A much more sensible policy, cheaper and known to work, is to enlarge the current solar and tidal systems (including, of course, hydro power). A vast array of improvements can be made with very little investment and virtually no risk, and with the advantage that solar/tidal power is not going to run out in the next few decades (or centuries in your rather over-optimistic perspective).

In the longer term solar power stations in space will be able to beam down energy to earth.

I pointed to the many unsolved problems associated with renewable energy and argued that it would not offer an economically viable replacement for fossil fuel energy sources. I argued that the nuclear option was the only viable option, if we are to replace fossil fuels. Few of my Harry's Place readers bought into my suggestion.

What is interesting to me about my Harry's place post is that I first developed the Message I continue to elaborate on Nuclear Green,

1. Nuclear reactors provide the only reliable CO2 free source of electrical energy, among currently proposed energy options.
2. Reactors can be mass produced, just like cars and computers.
3. The mass production of reactors will bring the cost of individual reactors down very significantly. Mass produced reactors will be cheaper to build than the coal fired power plants they will replace.
4. There is enough nuclear raw material in the world, to last a nuclear power industry for a long time.
5. Electrical energy, supplied by nuclear power plants can be substituted for fossil fuels in many present uses.
6. These include both personal and commercial transportation.
7. Plug in hybrid automobiles with a 40 to 50 mile trip range are possible using current technology.
8. The substitution of reactor generators for coal, and the use of plug in hybrids in place of fossil fuel technology will bring us very important secondary economic benefits that will save society and individuals more money that the conversions will costs.
9. The secondary benefits include billions of dollars in health care savings. The use of fossil fuels - coal and crud oil - is responsible for the respiratory illness and other health problems effecting millions of people in the United States. The treatment of these illnesses and other economic costs associated with them cost the United States economy hundreds of billions of dollars every year. Switching away from fossil fuels would save most of this money.
10. The international supply of crud oil has peaked, while millions of new consumers in China and India have entered the market for crude oil products. This has lead to a condition of rapidly expanding crud oil prices. The price of crud oil was $12 a barrel in 1998. Today (early October, 2007) it is over $80. Next year it is expected to reach as high as $140. (It reached $138 on 6/6/08). The substitution of electrical energy for crud oil products like gasoline, will save American and European consumers hundreds of billion dollars on imported oil and oil products.
11. Most autos now in use, and most coal fired power plants will come to the end of their useful life and will need to be replaced during the next 40 years. It will cost little or nothing to replace coal fired power plants with reactors, and to replace conventional cars and trucks, with long range plug in hybrids. Thus the total economic consequences of the conversions I suggest will be an enormous savings, not an added cost. Thus conversion to CO2 free energy far from entailing an enormous cost, will cost society nothing.
12. The nuclear waste problem is much less serious than is often believed. Most of what is called waste is potential reactor fuel. Each reactor produces only a few hundred pounds pounds of true waste a year. Some of the byproducts of nuclear fission, are useful material. The by products of nuclear fission grow less and less dangerous in time. As they grow inert many of he byproducts of nuclear fission can be diverted to industrial use.
13. Materials that are radioactive over long periods of time are not very dangerous, and can be stored in places like abandoned uranium mines, where elevated levels of radiation occur naturally.

In the Harry's Place post the nuclear option is the only viable option, if we are going to successfully respond to the threat posed by Anthropogenic Global Warming we much shift to the use of advanced nuclear technology. My disappointment with the reception it received lead me to my decision to create Nuclear Green, as an educational tool.

Many Texans Take Reffuage in Hell as the Summer of 2011 Proves to be too hot

2011-10-02T09:55:00.004-05:00

On Friday Dallas experienced its 71dt 100 day of 2011 breaking the 69 100 degree day record set in 1980. But the Dallas record is nothing compaired to Wichita Falls which experienced 100 too degree days this year, shattering its old record of 79 fays set during the imfamous 1980 heat wave.

Number of 100-degree days for select Texas cities (as of Sept. 29, 2011)
--Wichita Falls: 100 days
--San Angelo: 97 days (San Angelo's previous 100 degree days record was 60 days in 1969)
--Waco: 85 days (Waco's previous record was 63 100 degree days in 1980)
--Del Rio: 82 days
--Austin (Mabry): 83 days (Austin Mabry was 69 days in 1925)
--Abilene: 79 days (Abilene shattered its previous record of 46 days in 1934)
--Dallas: 71 days (Dallas had 69 100 degree day in 1980)

People in Texas who say that Anthropogenic Global Warming is all a big hoax have been shown to be suffering from Anthropogenic heat stroke. You hear that Governor Rick Perry.

- Hat tip to Accu-weather.

Transporting Small Factory Built Reactors and Modular Components

2011-09-29T07:45:00.006-05:00

Factory produced small reactors must be designed with transportation in mind. The design of the Babcock & Wilcox mPower reactor core is highly suggestive of the transportation considerations which the designers of factory manufactured reactors have in mind. In the case of the Babcock and Wilcox mPower core (illustrated to left) the core and the primary coolant loop appear designed to be shipped as a single unit. The mPower core unit appears to be intinded for shipment by rail. Width is the most significant limitation of rail transportation. A typical rail load cannot be a lot more than 9 feet wide under most circumstances. The mPower measures 75' by 15' (23m by 4.5m). That may not seem very wide but it is clear that moving the mPower core by rail is going to offer some challenges. In fact the 4.5 meeter wide package may not be the shipping unit at all. The Westinghouse SMR, a competing design measures 11.5' in diameter, and 81 feet long. The mPower steam generator is reoirtedly 3.6 metres in diameter and 22 m high. Thus the mPower steam generator unit diameter is only a few inches greater than the SMR unit diameter. Pictures of the mPower suggest that is is wider at the bottom, and the extra width can probably be accounted for by a pressure vessel slipped over the core. Thus it would appear that the mPower pressure vessel may not be shipped as a part of the core unit.

How can Westinghouse slip a reactor that is almost twice as powerful as the mPower into a core package that is similar in size. The answer is that Westinghouse uses a few tricks. For example the steam generators could be placed outside the core package, and the Westinghouse core package may not include the steam generators. The SMR containment vessel has s outer diameter: 32 ft. We are thus well beyond the rail transport point with a 32' diameter pressure vessel. The Westinghouse SMR appears to be an evolutionarily development from the earlier Westinghouse IRES SMR.

The question thus arrises how much labor will the factory manufactured Light Water SMR actually save in comparison to full size LWRs? The Westinghouse AP-1000 is constructed from factory built modules, and the B&W mPower may require more manufacturing labor input per MW of rated output than the AP-1000. Ditto for the Westinghouse SMR. Thus it would appear that Light Water SMR may not have a cost advantage over standard size LWRs, and although they may have a decreased construction time, they will still require a couple of years to construct. But since the AP-1000 is designed for manufacture within three years, this does not seem like a lot.

We have seen in the paper, A Small Mobile Molten Salt Reactor (SM-MSR) For Underdeveloped Countries and Remote Locations, that 100 MWe MSRs can be made to be easily transported by breaking down the loads into core structure and graphite components. Core assembly could be easily acomplished in a day, during the time while the underground core chamer is being dug and lined with a prefavricated concrete liner. At that point the core can be lowered into its underground chamber. Other trucked in modules for example a reactor salt cleaning moduuel, which could be housed underground, and turbine and generator moduels.

If we abandon the requirement that factory manufactured reactors be delivered by truck or rail we can focus on the economic benefits of delivery of factory manufactured reactors by barge or ship. Factory manufactured reactors Factory production can shift from moduels to major components, and indeed whole reactors. Research by Professors Larry Townsend and Larry Miller of the University of Tennessee and Professor Andy Kadak of MIT has focused on barge transportation of factory manufactured nuclear units. Professor Townsend's ANS interview is probably more approachable to the average reader than the DoE report, DESIGN AND LAYOUT CONCEPTS FOR COMPACT, FACTORY-PRODUCED, TRANSPORTABLE, GENERATION IV REACTOR SYSTEMS. The most detailed account in this study focuses on the Westinghouse IRIS SMR. The choice of the IRIS lead to a discovery, as Professor Townsend acknowledged,

Initially, we considered transport by barge, truck, or rail. But for the IRIS reactor, because of the large size of the reactor vessel itself, it quickly became clear that we were limited to barge transport. So, we de- cided to focus strictly on barge transport. The other two groups—the liquid-metal and gas reactors—focused on truck and rail transport.

The IRIS as designed by Westinghouse turned out to not be barge transportable on the entire Mississippi/Ohio River system although adjustments can be made:

Note that the 100m (328 ft) length of the plant is less than the 400 ft capacity (length) of the locks on the Mississippi/Ohio River system for barge transport. However, the 40m (144 ft) width of the plant exceeds the 110 ft width limitation for barge traffic through the Mississippi/Ohio River locks. The excess width in the plant layout arises from the width of the Westinghouse reactor building specifications. The actual width of the reactor containment and balance of plant is less than this 110ft width limitation. Therefore, barge transport is still possible if the "buildings" are redesigned or are constructed after barge arrival at the plant site.

Thus barge transport is possible for 300 MWe LWRs. Since MSRs and their potential generating systems are both lighter and more compact the barge transportation of MSRs of up to 500 MWe and even greater generating capacity is a reasonable possibility. It may not be desirable to transport complete MSR generating units by barge if the reactor core is to be located underground. The underground core component would be lowered into place and then connected to above ground components. Still if the reactor arrived onsite with in only two barge carried component loads, the actual final assembly could be performed in a few weeks at most. Considering the potential barge accesible reactor locations on the Mississippi River system, the Great Lakes, and the North American Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and Pacific coats, a factory intended to produce barge transportable reactors should not suffer from transportation problems for its products.

We have seen that both highway and rail transport of reactor units and reactor modulare components will create problems for reactor mobilitry. At the same time it appears possible to truck transport core units for MSRs of up to 100 MWe. The SM MSR modules could be locally delivered by barge or ship, and then moved to their final locations by truck or by rail. Thus the cost savings potential of factory manufacture of reactors is an open possibility

Underground Reactor Advantages

2011-09-26T06:40:00.000-05:00

Underground sited. This scale was chosen so that the physical size allowed it to be factory manufactured and transported to the site,which is a significant potential cost reducer. . . .

- John Rawls, Chief Scientist at General Atomics

From the dawn of the Nuclear era, Edward Teller was deeply concerned about reactor safety. Teller favored underground placement of civilian nuclear power plants primarily for safety reasons. Indeed in his last paper Teller advocated underground placement of Molten Salt Reactors, although arguably MSRs could be designed to be safe enough to make further safety measures unnecessary. A further justification of underground placement of MSRs, would be that it would be consistent with low manufacturing costs and rapid reactor deployment.

Underground deployment of nuclear tractors offers a number of advantages including,

Higher Resistance to...

– Terrorist attack

– Aircraft impacts

– Proliferation

– Sabotage and vandalism

– Conventional warfare effects

Underground sites offer superior protection against the effects of severe weather events and some potentially protection even from the effects of earthquakes. Underground sites also offer superior protection against fission product release in the event of a serious reactor accidents. Studies of underground siting conducted during the 1970's reported that underground siting would cost more than traditional reactor siting, but these studies assumed the use of conventional nuclear technology and that the entire nuclear facility would be located underground. From the viewpoint of safety and security it is only necessary to house reactors underground. Turbines and generators, as well as other Nuclear Power Plant related facilities can be located above ground without any disadvantages if the cost of underground facilities placement become a matter of concern. In addition Generation IV reactors are generally more compact than conventional reactors. There are other ways to limit underground housing costs. For example salt formations offer unique advantages for nuclear reactor housing, with low cost excavation. Existing underground salt mines offer unique placement advantages. In addition to existing salt mines, many old mines and natural caverns offer potential underground siting for reactors. Studies of underground placement of nuclear facilities made during the 1970's assumed that reactors would be placed 300 feet or more beneath the surface, but reactor manufacturer Babcock and Willcox intend to place their small mPower Reactor just below the surface.

Underground placement of small, compact Generation IV nuclear power plants would be inexpensive, and underground placement is often featured in many small Modular nuclear designs including the B&W mPower Reactor. A recent report to the American Nuclear Society by Mark S. Campagn and Walter Sawruk and titled, "PHYSICAL SECURITY FOR SMALL MODULAR REACTORS" states,

Rely on government response for SMR facilities with vital assets underground or otherwise well protected. Shallow burial or a hardened structural design provides excellent protection against large explosive weapons and aircraft impact as well as an excellent means of enhancing security system effectiveness against sabotage. Application of the traditional multilayered defensive approach of detection, deterrence, delay, and defeat can be used effectively for physical protection of SMRs. Detection, deterrence, and delay concepts must be integrated into the early design phase of the facility in order to provide sufficient lead time for government response.

A few years ago three University of Tennessee Nuclear Engineering Graduate students, William A Casino, Kirk Sorensen, and Christopher A Whitener wrote a paper titled "A Small Mobile Molten Salt Reactor (SM-MSR) For Underdeveloped Countries and Remote Locations." The paper won first prize in an American Nuclear Society reactor design contest. This design exercise focused on a reactor small enough to be transportable by truck, yet large enough to be transportable by truck. The design is highly suggestive although it turns out to be a little big to be truck transported. The reactor was designed to produce 100 MWe, with an active core region that weighed 216 tons (about 200 metric tons). This is too heavy to be easily transported by truck, but it might be possible to shave that weight down significantly. More than half of the core weight is contributed by core graphite (about 147 of 215 tons). Thus a method of inserting core graphite into the core at the destination site, would offer considerable advantage if this could be accomplished quickly and at low cost. The use of graphite pebbles would be consistent with these goals. This would lower of the weight of the core moduel to 68 US tons, which would certainly be manageable by either truck or train. Further the primary heat exchange and connecting pipes are included in the core module, and this might be considered a flaw in the design.

There were a number of flaws in the SM-MSR design, which was after all a student design exercise. Although a core dump tank was included in the SM-MSR design, no colling system was included. However, a passive cooling system for the disposal of fission product decay heat is possible with an underground MSR. Air can be drawn into the underground chamber and heated by the dump tank exterior, and then the heated air could rise through a chimney. The rising heated air, would, of course, draw more air into the underground chamber by lowering its air pressure, thus creating a passive decay heat cooling system.

Casino, Sorensen, and Whitener noted that,

One site specific limitation is that the primary containment module as proposed is to be placed into a silo to be trenched into the earth. This silo needs to be approximately 28 meters in depth and be approximately 25 square meters in area. The water table in most locations will likely occur above this level, and the SMMSR containment module shall be constructed to withstand moisture impingement on the outer surface. Other corrosive elements in the water need to be checked for.

The reactor silo would not requite a significant amount of excavating, and thus could be dug quickly. As has already pointed our, building a silo from scratch might not always be required. Silos built for cold war guided missles, and well as a variety of underground mines might be useful, although preexisting underground structures would not be the only solution to small reactor siting the problem. Rapid drilling of a silo could advance at rates of as much as 10 meters a day. With prefacricated silo liners, site preperation might require no more than a week. Thus the re-use of coal fired power plants sits to house clusters of small baseload reactors could easily include underground housing of a number of reactors.

Underground housing of small reactors appears to be practical and it is credible to argue that Underground reactor housing can lower nuclear costs, and dramatically shorten reactor construction times. In addition underground housing can increase nuclear safety and offer significant protection of reactors from aircraft and other forms of terrorist attacks.

The Sovereign Debt Crisis and the Nuclear Green MSR Plan

2011-09-21T02:01:00.000-05:00

Believe it or not when in 2007, I worked out the plan that lies behind all of my work on nuclear Green, I included the possibility that the United States would not be able to pay off its sovereign debt during a period of time when national goals included replacement of fossil fuel energy sources with post carbon energy sources. I assumed that new energy sources would have to be low cost tp build, and low cost to operate. In 2007 when I first attempted to think and talk through the future of American energy, I realized that the international financial situation of the United States was a precarious, and that any energy solution that was likely to work, would, at the very least, not raise energy costs. Yet in order to adopt a renewable energy approach, to fossil fuel replacement we would either be forced to build a large number of redundant renewable energy facilities, in order to provide 24 hour a day energy sources, and greatly expand the electrical transmission grid. Redundancy and expanded transmission facilities were, however not the only added expense required to make a renewable dominated grid reliable. A very large back up energy storage system would also be required. This made a future American renewablees dominated energy system very expensive, and probably not affordable, given the economic situation of the United States.

Renewables advocates suggested that energy efficiency and the continued use of fossil fuel energy backup systems backups could bridge the gap between energy supply and energy demand. But the united states government has carried on programs to encourage greater energy efficiency since the 1970's. And while these programs have meet with some success, they have not succeeded in dramatically lowering American energy demands. Much of the decline in energy United States demands during the last 30 years can be attributed to the shift of energy intense industries off shore. Energy that was once required to produce American consumed goods, is now produced off shore. Moving America manufacture to other countries may make the United States economy look more energy efficient on paper, but it does not reduce global energy demand, nor does it solve the long term problems of the American economy.

Planning for continued use of fossil fuels as an alternative to nuclear power is stupid and self defeating. Climate scientists tell us that we need to reduce global fossil fuel consumption by 80% by 2050 to avoid a drastic climate shift. Yet German Greens prefer building new coal and gas fired power plamys, to continued use of German nuclear plants. Given the problems that an 80% carbon reduction involves, continued use of fossil fuels in electrical generation may not be an option. In addition the emerging economies of India and China require very large amount's of energy, and the prospect of seeing nations such Brazil, Mexico Nigeria, Indonesia and other nations, whose economic development is expected to expand during the next 40 years. We should not expect that any energy required to power newly emerging economic activities will come from from fossil fuels. Nor can we expect renewable energy and efficiency to bridge the energy gap.

Thus leaves us with no option other than nuclear energy if we are to avoid unacceptable emission levels of carbon-dioxide. But what of the complaints that are often made against nuclear energy. I was told when I proposed the nuclear solution in 2007, that the use of nuclear power

* Was not safe and that accidents at nuclear power plants could kill thousands of people
* Produced deadly toxin waste that would be deadly for millions of years
* Lead to nuclear proliferation, and the the use of nuclear weapons by terrorists
* And at any rate was too expensive
* Plus we are running out of nuclear fuel.

I have explored akk of these problems extensively on Nuclear Green. Others including bloggers Kirk Sorensen, Barry Brook, NNadir, and Rod Adams have also offered extensive explorations of these issues. None of these problems seemed unsolvable to me, although I quickly noted that many nuclear power critics seemed singularly uninterested discussing solutions. It also struck me that the critics of nuclear power seemed to exaggerate their complaints. For example, the deadly for million years complaints, might refer to a relatively small amount of actinites from uranium fuel cycle reactors, but it is quite possible to eliminate the production of transuranium elements from Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors almost completrely, and to burn the remining TRUs completely over time. The remaining fission products produced by liftors would be no more radioactive than natural uranium ore after 300 years. There are billions of tons of uranium ore burried in the earth, and it does not seem to be killing people. Thus the dangerous for millions of years claim seems to be a huge exageration.

Much of my knowledge of the nuclear option stems from the fact that my father had worked for nearly 30 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He had made a major contribution to the development of what is today the main stream reactor technology, the Light Water Reactor. He received exactly one dollar from the United States Government for the patent of his discovery, which is used in practically every civilian and military reactor in the world today.

Oak Ridge scientists, including my father, had believed that it would be possible to design and build a far better reactor than the Light Water Reactor which they developed during the 1940's.

After reviewing what scientists had written about nuclear power technology, I came to the conclusion that reactors were not unsafe by any reasonable standard, that nuclear waste did not constitute anything like the hazard that nuclear critics claimed, that civilian nuclear power plants are not useful tools for the development of nuclear weapons, that historically civilian nuclear power had not lead to nations acquiring nuclear weapons, and infacts most nations that had acquired nuclear weapons, had first done so without first developing civilian power reactors, and that almost all nations that built civilian nuclear power plants before acquiring nuclear weapons, had not gone on to acquire nuclear weapons. Thus the evidence from history is that there is at worst only a association between the prior acquisition of civilian nuclear plants, and the aquisition of nuclear weapons proceeds the acqusition of nuclear powered generating plants.

It has proven quite possible for even underdeveloped nations that lack civilian nuclear power facilities, to develop advanced nuclear weapons programs and even develop and test nuclear weapons, and that countries that acquire nuclear weapons in disregard to international treaties, almost always acquire nuclear weapons before rather after they acquire civilian nuclear power. Further nations that acquire civilian nuclear power technology first almost never go on to acquire nuclear weapons.

The traditional arguments against the use of nuclear power offer a very weak case against nuclear power, and the urgency of our need for fossil fuel replacement. Objective evaluations have repeatedly concluded that renewables and efficiency are ineffective substitutes for fossil fuels and will cost far more than nuclear power.

Marcel Coderch Collell, a distinguished Spanish technocrat, has reviewed the possibility of replacing much of the worlds fossil fuel generated electricity by 2030.

Based on United States Energy Information Agency estimates, Collell argues that the business as ususl approach to new electrical generation facilities would not work with the French nuclear generation model. But then of course, the French did not follow a business as usual model when they developed their nuclear electrical generation facilities.

In fact, the French model is to not rely very much on renewable energy, but we will allow Senior Collell latitude in making his point. He describes the French Model

One of the first options to consider would be to follow the French model and gradually increase the number of reactors to produce a good deal of the world’s electricity by 2030 or perhaps a little later. This would take the pressure off fossil fuels and, in principle, would not require technical innovations of any kind. Electricity would be produced emission-free, based either on nuclear or renewable sources. This would save enormous amounts of natural gas and coal, as well as considerable oil, thus reducing emissions and perhaps putting downward pressure on fossil fuel prices (or at least keeping them steady), while making non-renewable fuel available for a longer period.

But is the French model to gradually increase the number of reactors, Or did the French embark on a crash reactor building program during the 1970's and 80's? Historians say that the French embarked on a deliberate, reactor crash building program.

Senior Collell then suggests that in order to follow the nuclear French model by 2030,

4,740 new 1GWe reactors would have to be built and [one] put in operation every two days for the next 25 years.

Senior Collell then offers a reflection on the difficulty of this task in a business as usual world.

An optimistic estimate of construction times (five years) would mean having 950 teams of technical specialists, workers and machinery simultaneously working full time. This is hard to imagine, despite talk of standardising designs. In the previous period of nuclear construction (1963-88) only 423 reactors were built, at a rate of 17 per year.

He also argues that fuel shortages would constrict the depolyment of such a large reactor fleet.

A simple calculation suffices to show how an extension of the French model would collide with a scarcity of uranium. This is old news, given the serious doubts that already exist regarding the availability of uranium even to feed a few more reactors than now exist. In 2004, 365 GWe of nuclear capacity consumed about 67 kt of uranium (approximately 180 tons of uranium per GWe per year), of which 36 kt came from currently operating mines, while the rest came from recycled nuclear weapons and other secondary sources (that is, from prior production). Supply forecasts for the reactors currently in operation (plus foreseeable growth) put uranium mining production at 50 kt per year in 2015, with a significant shortfall developing in 2010, by which time Russia's nuclear weapons will have been dismantled and their uranium will have been consumed, . . .

If we assume linear growth from the current 365 GWe to 4,959 GWe in 2030, uranium demand would be around 400 kt in 2015 and 700 kt in 2030. This means multiplying by eight today’s estimates of production capacity in 2015, and multiplying by fifteen for 2030.

In fact, scientists have been forcasting a uranium shortage for a long time, and so far it has not happened. Nuclear Green has reviewed the evidence that vast amounts of recoverable uranium and thorium are avaliable in the earth's crust. Infact enough recoverable nuclear fuel is avaliable to make nuclear power for all practical purposes a sustainable resource. This has been known for a long time.

Alvin Weinberg recored,

“At the April 28, 1944, meeting of the New Piles Committee, Phil Morrison had reported the known reserves of uranium at workable concentration to amount to only about 20 000 tons. With so little fuel, nuclear energy based only on the 0.7 per- cent of uranium-235 in natural uranium could hardly amount to much. Morrison also pointed out at this meeting that the vastly larger amount of residual uranium in the granites could be burned with a positive energy balance—but only if used in a breeder.”

According to Weinberg, Morrison added that

more work should be done on the nuclear development of thorium because of its greater availabil- ity and also suggested experiments, . . .

Weinberg records Morrison's excitement when,

Morrison showed me his calculations . . .

What Morrison demonstrated to Weinberg was that,

if uranium (was) burned in a breeder (reactor), the energy released through fission exceeded the energy required to extract the residual 4 ppm of uranium from granitic rocks.

Despite the long standing evidence of science Senior Collell insists we will quickly run out of nuclear fuel.

Senior Collell sees these facts as casting the nuclear build out on the horns of a dilemma.

Let us suppose, however, for argument’s sake, that it were possible to achieve a production capacity of 700 kt/year by 2030. In the context of this analysis, two questions are raised: first, the CO2 emissions that would be generated in this phase of the nuclear cycle. Given the amount of uranium necessary, it would almost certainly be necessary to make use of hard rock deposits and low concentrations.

There are fortunately multiple flaws in this argument. First the rock does not have to be moved in order to be mined. Low energy mineral recovery technologies are avaliable to miners. Uranium miners are increasingly adopting a mining technique called in situ leaching. When in situ leaching is practiced on uranium ore, the primarily the uranium is extracted, and the rock is left in place. Thus contrary to Senior Collell, a low energy technology is avaliable that would permit the recovery of a huge amount of uranium with a favorable energy return for energy invested.

The problem that Senior Collell is pointing to is the limitation of the Light Water Reactor. Light Water Reactors were first developed as a means of powering American Nuclear submarines. In American Nuclear Submarines LWRs are small, they provide reliable power for 15 years, after which their cores can be replaced. Submarine reactors are expensive, but nothing can serve as a substitute . Large power reactors can be even more expensive and they are very fuel inefficient. Part of the problem has to do with the flaws in the Uranium cycle. In LWRs as little as 0.3% of the potential fuel gets burned, and the rest falls into a category called "nuclear waste." The problem is that uranium is relatively cheap, so it cost less to seperate out the good stuff, the U-235 and use it for nuclear fuel. A tiny fraction of the 95% to 97% of the fuel gets converted to fissionable Pu239, and a fraction of that gets burned as nuclear fuel. Unfortunately Pu-239 is not very good fuel in LWRs.

French Scientists from the University of Grenoble are aware of the problem. In "Scenarios with an Intensive Contribution of Nuclear Energy to the World Energy Supply," H.Nifenecker, D.Heuer, S.David, J.M.Loiseaux1, J.M.Martin, O.Meplan, and A.Nuttin, maintain that

If carried out with PWR or BWR reactors, the important nuclear power deployment will make heavy demands on natural Uranium resources. Resources are, presently, estimated to be around 20 Million tons. Assuming PWR or BWR reactors, the cumulative needs in 2050 could reach 16 million tons. This shows that breeding reactors are necessary to meet the needs or, alternately, that Uranium would have to be extracted from sea water, at a significant cost.

These considerations may, however, probably exaggerate the Uranium shortage. Certainly when the huge global thorium stock is added to recoverable uranium there will be no shortage of nuclear for a long time to come. Alvin Weinberg relates how the possibility of a future global uranium shortage was understood by the founding fathers of the Nuclear age, including Enrico Fermi, and Eugene Wigner.

At any rate I am not going to contend with the not enough uranium argument. Even if there is enough uranium, the French analysis is fairly sound for other reasons, which I have pointed out on Nuclear Green. In "Intensive Contribution," the French team reviewed two possible breeding cycles:

* The U-Pu cycle using fast reactors
* The Th-U cycle using thermal reactors

This analysis was expanded with typical French thoroughness in "worldwide deployment," if anyone is interested. Both "Intensive Contribution," and "Worldwide Deployment" came to the same conclusion, that a deployment of Light Water Reactors can only be sustained until 2030. Lets call this the conservative case. Conservative, in that it is based on very conservative estimates of global uranium resources. While far more generous Uranium resources are justifiable, they are by no means certain. A really plausible plan should make conservative assumptions. If generous assumptions do not pan out, then the plan can be altered in to reflect a better than expected resource picture.

The nuclear intensive plan would assume a nuclear build out to 3387 GWe of electrical generating capacity by 2030. This is, in itself an enormous and extremely daunting build out, and indeed suggests that a major revolution in nuclear manufacturing technology will be required. Fortunately many of the components of that revolution are already understood, and none of them represents a serious impediment to technological change. Factory production of reactor construction kits, together with on site labor saving machines, and new materials savings reactor designs can be expected to improve reactor manufacturing, labor, time and materials efficiencies during the next decade, and to be reinforced by a learning curve. Such a large build out will probably require a shift of many reactor manufacturing activities from the final manufacturing site to factories. The recycling of old steam plant locations as nuclear power stations sites, will also save money and time for the buildout.

Thus while ambitious, the 3387 GWe buildout by 2030 is still not impossible, but the goal must be set soon. Both "Intensive Contribution," and "Worldwide Distribution" then looked at the U-Pu fast reactor cycle. By 2030 an enormous amount of reactor grade plutonium will become available. This RGP can be put to use both in the production of nuclear power and in the breeding of more reactor fuel. Doing so would serve as at least a partial solution to what is commonly seen as a major problem for nuclear power, the so called nuclear waste problem. Indeed the reuse of nuclear fuel turns "nuclear waste," into an asset. "Intensive Contribution," argues that given the supply of plutonium for LWRs and fast breeders, a buildout to 9000 GWe by 2050 is possible.

"Worldwide Deployment" looks at a number of added options including burning recycled RGP in LWRs. This delays, perhaps for a hundred years, but does not prevent the eventual draw down of fissionable materials that are tied to a non-breeding nuclear economy. A better use of the RGP is

Thus the transition to some form of nuclear breeding will be inevitable, if a long term commitment to nuclear power becomes a matter of policy.

Fast sodium cooled reactors are often viewed as the preferred method of nuclear breeding, although various Molten Salt Reactor breeding options exit, and include many attractive features that are more than competitive with what liquid sodium cooled breeder reactors such as the Integral Fast Reactor. IFR backers claim higher breeding ratios, but the compatibility of those high breeding ratios with optimal safety has, as of yet to be confirmed.

"Worldwide Deployment" also reviews a gas cooled fast reactor option, but did not like it as well as the sodium cooled concept.

"Worldwide Deployment" foresaw global energy demands for the equivalent of 18 Billion tons of oil by 2050. Even with stockpiling massive amounts of RGP, and using it to start Sodium Cooled Fast Breeder Reactors, "Worldwide Deployment" concludes that there will not be enough fast breeders to meet world energy demand after 2080. Hence, we must turn to Thorium fuel cycle Molten Salt Reactors.

The argument that nuclear power was too expensive, does not seem rational because when the cost of redundancies, new transmission systems, and energy storage systems required by a renewable generated electrical system is factored into the costs of renewable generated electricity, the cost of renewables turns out to be far more expensive than the cost of nuclear generated electricity. If we are confronted with a Sovereign debt crisis, the cost of renewables would be prohibitively expensive, while the cost of advanced nuclear power systems will be low enough to pay for out of current electrical rates. In addition by adopting more advanced nuclear technology, and adopting the thorium fuel cycle, all the objections brought against nuclear power by renewable advocates can be demonstrated to be fallacious. If we want to avoid a climate disaster, we have no choice other than to commit to a massive deployment of nuclear power. Even in the face of a sovereign debt crisis, a massive deployment of LFTRs is possible.

On Futute Nuclear Grrrn Posts

2011-09-17T08:01:00.003-05:00

My recent eye surgery has left me at least temporarily unable to continue work on my blog.

2011-09-13T04:25:00.002-05:00

Climate change Skeptics need to look again. We have known about the CO2- climate change link for over 100 years.

The work of Climate Change denier Roy Spencer has recently been demonstrated to contain large scientific errors. (see here, here, here, here, and here, here, and here), while a recent paper by Texas A&'M professor Andrew Dessler offers a devastating critique to the skeptical claims of both Spencer and MIT Professor Richard Lindzen. Needless to say the Climate change skeptics are not folding, but their days are numbers.

Before the end of June, NOAA had announced that the United States had set an all time record for extreme climate events.

Climate scientists have been noting the emergence of patterns of extreme weather for some time and predicted more same.

The extreme weather events of 2011 are continuing. Houston witnessed a once every 10,000 year weather event in August, and Dallas may tie or even break an all time record for 100 degree days this week. The Northeast is just starting to recover from yet another rain/flood event,this one brought on by remnants of tropical storm Lee. Lee dumped an enormous amout of Water on the Gulf Coast and the Southeast as it headed north, we had something like 6.5" of rain from Lee in Knoxville, and parts of East Tennessee received much more.

Before the end of June, NOAA had announced that the United States had set an all time record for extreme climate events.

I have thought for some time that a run of very hot years, global temperature breakers, will be required to silence the global warming skeptics. The evidence for global climate change must be both very powerful and quite evident, before global warming skeptics, will fold their tents and slip quietly into the night, but that day is coming and is coming soon. In the debate over climate change the skeptics have nor established that the over all theory that climate change is upon us is wrong. Indeed I do not believe that they have shown that a preponderance of evidence contradicts the climate change theory. They have certainly have failed to shown that climate change is not happening with appodectic certaintyIt is clear that some conservative critics of climate change theory are not climate change skeptics. Doug Craig has recently pointed out the rather more subtle thrust of the right wing "American Enterprise Institute" ideological line on climate change. In 2002 an AEI essay stated,

That the environment should be a source of extreme ideological fractiousness and bitter partisan division is a mystery from a common-sense point of view. When the environment rose to the top of the public policy agenda in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was widely regarded as a consensus issue around which long-term bipartisan action would ensue. No public constituency favors polluted air, fouled rivers, and wasted habitat. The conservative governor of California, Ronald Reagan, joined the environmental bandwagon on the first Earth Day in 1970 and declared "the absolute necessity of waging all-out war against the debauching of the environment." Barry Goldwater was a member of the Sierra Club.

There is of course the rather simplistic identification of climate change with Environmentalism. In fact the Environmentalists are Johnny come lately to the climate change game. As I have several times pointed out, supposed environmental stalwarts, such as Ralph Nader, and Amory Lovins supported the use of fossil fuels as a remedy against the use of carbon mitigating nuclear power. Environmental organizations such as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund continue to favor the use of natural gas over the superior carbon mitigating qualities of nuclear power.

Many nuclear power advocates, are as concerned as the environmental community about climate change, but unlike the environmental community, they entertain strong doubts that renewable energy strategies will mitigate carbon driven climate change without high costs for the future quality of life, and a diminished possibility for the development of under industrialized countries.

The 2002 AEI essay rightly distinguished between romantic and practical environmentalism. Advocates of nuclear power would for the most part fall on the practical rather than the romantic side of that divide. The Essay states,

Romantic environmentalism is a strong and uncompromising environmentalism that holds that environmental values should always or almost always trump other values, especially those associated with economic development and growth. The movement has strong roots in American intellectual and political history and many accomplishments to its credit (without John Muir the Yosemite Valley might today be known as the San Francisco Reservoir). And romantic environmentalism has many adherents today. Some are philosophically authentic--people who are strongly attached to the natural world and believe that civilization grows distant from nature at its mortal peril. Others adopt the uncompromising posture for strategic reasons because they see that the forces of development and growth are powerful and require a strong counterattack just to be held to a draw.

The essay wrongly attributes concerns about the catastrophic consequences of climate change, with Romantic Environmentalism. In fact many practical environmentalists are concerned about potential catastrophic consequences of climate change, And thus the case assignment between categories between practical and romantic which leads the AEI essayist into his ideological trap. The essay categorizes the existential dilemma which Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) posses with Romantic Environmentalism. Yet practical Environmentalism also acknowledges the dilemma as well. The difference between the practical and the romantic views, is that the practical view offers nuclear power as the course away from disaster, and toward greater human prosperity. While romantic environmentalists tend to either engage in Pollyannaish rhapsodies on the future of renewable energy, coupled with bumper sticker like attacks on nuclear power, or to lapse into pessimistic neo-Malthusian discourse, proclaiming that the human race is headed toward a mass dienoff, if not extinction. The rejection of nuclear power is coupled with a romantic attachment to a petit-bourgeois model of society, with at the very least the means of local electrical production owned by lower middle class investors in small local distributive power projects. The AEI fails to note the extent to which its calls for local control of environmental issues is mirrored by some romantic environmentalists. The very environmentalism localism, which the AEI advocates, is increasingly being used by the romantic environmentalists as a tool to fight nuclear power.

Other Conservatives are less sophisticated than the AEI, and fall deep into an epistemological trap, in which they claim appodictic certainty for their skeptical views. These right-wingers, in effect painted themselves into an ideological corner. If their rejection of the climate change theory proves wrong, they stand in danger of being irretrievably tarnished with a monumental intellectual error. Conservatives should know better, but they are so trapped in a partisan world view, that seemingly demands a highly risky opposition to practical society and world wide carbon mitigation efforts. Libertarian John Jacobs, offers an example of the conservative problem,

I’m a libertarian and don’t believe in any of the climate change, earth is warming due to man nonsense. BUT…even if it was true, the absolute best way to attack it is through the free markets.

Well maybe but if you deny that a problem exists, you are hardly going to work through the relationship between free markets and world wide carbon mitigation needs. Ryan Avent,has pointed out the problem for Libertarians,

a serious problem for libertarians. Climate science has followed a path very similar to many other sciences over the past few decades. An interesting hypothesis touched off a great deal of research which led to a growing consensus on the validity of the hypothesis — that in fact, it was consistent with the available data. But scientific progress in other fields didn’t, by and large, generate some rather significant policy implications (the minimalist one of which, for climate change, is that something should be done, even if that something is simply preparing for the effects of warming). And so libertarian think tanks haven’t devoted themselves to trying to undermine the science in those fields, while libertarians have gone to war against the field of climate science. They made this choice not because they dislike the process of scientific inquiry, but because they dislike the policy implications of a specific scientific conclusion.

That is to say, confronted by a problem demanding solutions inimical to libertarian beliefs, libertarians were faced with the choice of reneging on their beliefs or turning their back on science. Tellingly, they chose the latter. One might think that’s a rather drastic decision, given the role scientific endeavors have played in delivering the material prosperity so dear to the hearts of the libertarian world, and one would be right.

A belief system that cannot grapple with the fundamental reality of a situation is, quite simply, not a belief system worth having.

The problem faced by the Libertarians involves more than the simple choice to accept or reject climate change. If the Libertarians acknowledge that society faces a climate related crisis, is it an emergency. Free market solutions are often seen as inappropriate to society wide emergency situations. We do not seek to fight World War II with free market solutions. Nor do we attempt to deal with much smaller nature driven crises, for example floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis by turning the response over to the free markets. Crisis responses may require a mobilization of social resources that extends well beyond the business as usual model of libertarians. In fact major social emergencies such as fighting wars, is often seen as an exception to Libertarian principles. Indeed some rigid Libertarians are pacifists or at least limited pacifists. However, the objection that war involves both the corrosive use of violence and the dist ruction of property, would not seem appropriate in the case of a global climate change emergency.

Global Climate change is likely to impose on society a prolonged emergency, that may require that the free market "business as usual model" may fail and should be abandoned for at least the short run. A quick review of the Irish potato famine should be enough to illustrate the magnitude of the folly of attempting to solve a major social crisis through recourse to libertarian principles. The British government, led by Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel attempted to solve the crisis created by the failure of the Irish potato crop without "stifling private enterprise." While the British government did make some small food purchases in the United States, the Peel government placed primary responsibility for response to the crisis in the hands of the local authorities in Ireland. Those authorities could only draw on the resources of a shattered land, and their efforts were doomed to failure. Before the crisis was over one million people died, and another million had fled to the United States. Libertarianism offered limited and often inadequate solutions for major social crises.

Lest the conservative forget, the Irish potato famine was a man made crisis, created by the political economy of Ireland, the dependence on mono culture potato farming, and the importation of the potato disease on board one or more merchant ships sailing from South America. The potato famine proves that human beings, aided by free market economies are perfectly capable of afflicting society damaging ecological disasters on themselves., disasters that free markets cannot be relied on for mitigation.

Conservatives including libertarians have not shown with appodectic certainty that we do not face a major crisis due to AGW. Furthermore, there is good reason to believe that Libertarian principles are not helpful when societies face major crises, and the reliance on them for mitigation may cause further harm.

The dilemma for Conservatives as well as libertarians is simple, the survival of a society in which meaningful Conservatism and Libertarianism are possible, may only be possible through the temporary abandonment of Conservative and Libertarian principles. The extreme weather events of this year strongly suggest that the climate change crisis is now upon us. If Conservatives are not willing to get on board the climate change ship now, they may witness their ship go down. Tragically we may all go down with it.

ORNL Offers a Brief Look at MSR/LFTR Economies

2011-09-11T06:02:00.002-05:00

A recent ORNL report, Fast Spectrum Molten Salt Reactor Options, offers some insight into the cost lowering potential of MSR nuclear technology. Since Nuclear Green has always had an interest in the cost lowering potential of MSR technology, I intend to review the cost related information included in this report, while in some cases offering a context for that information.

The "Fast Spectrum" report does not offer and cost evaluation in terms of dollar costs, indeed this would not be possible. The report offers an overview of technical options, and no dollar cost evaluation is possible outside the context of a specific design project. The report acknowledges,

A confident assessment of the economic performance of an FS-MSR is not yet possible. Technology, regulatory requirements, and market conditions have changed significantly over the 40 years since the economic assessments accompanying the MSBR; therefore, the cost inferences drawn from the earlier work have such large error bands that they provide little guidance. Additionally, the neutron spectrum of the present evaluation alters the fuel cycle both in and outside the power plant site sufficiently that direct analogies to other reactor concepts are challenging. The most challenging aspect of reporting a cost for an FS-MSR, however, arises from the concept flexibility. A no-heavy-metal reprocessing design variant has a plant layout much different from that of a full-recycle plant intending to directly accept used LWR fuel as its fuel source. Similarly, a plant intending to produce gasoline as its primary product has an entirely different power cycle compared with an electricity generator.

Overall economic tendencies, however, can be estimated by comparing FS-MSR attributes with those of other nuclear power systems. A summary of FS-MSR attributes and their cost implications is provided in Table 2. A primary cost metric for any power plant is its thermal efficiency. FS-MSRs, as high- temperature power plants, are anticipated to have 45–48% thermal efficiencies, a 12–15% efficiency advantage over LWRs. As refueling for an FS-MSR would be performed on-line, the plant availability would be expected to eventually, once maintenance techniques were developed and matured, surpass that for an LWR.

Thus costs are evaluated in relationship to the cost of Light Water Reactor costs. For example, the absence of a fuel fabrication requirement would lower FMSR costs and indeed all MSR costs relative to LWRs

Other FMSR characteristics that would tend to lower capital costs noted by the Fast Spectrum report would include,

* No fuel handling equipment or pool storage facilities
* No irradiated cladding or matrix material in ultimate waste stream
* Large temperature reactivity coefficient
* No cladding- or matrix-based temperature limits in accident scenarios
* Safe shutdown possible through geometry control in accident scenarios
* Higher primary coolant volumetric heat capacity
* Visually transparent, low-pressure, chemically stable coolant

In addition to these cost lowering characteristics, the capacity of all MSRs to operate at a one atmosphere pressure offers a further and important cost lowering potential.

The ORNL Fast Spectrum report also noted characteristics of FMSRs that would lower electrical costs to customers, or increase utility revenue per unit of electricity generated. These include,

* No cladding-based burn up limits
* Higher operating temperature
* Flexible input fuel chemical form
* Flexible input fuel isotopic content

A number of FMSR characteristics that would raise capital costs include,

* No cladding as fission product barrier with a substitute fission product barrier
* Higher operating temperature
* Highly radioactive, fissile-bearing primary coolant
* Potential for safeguards concerns with separated material
* Material corrosion problems

In the case of materials corrosion, it should be noted that there is a low cost work around, if the designer is willing to accept a somewhat lower but still high by LWR operating temperature.

One MSR characteristics offer a mixed cost picture. This was:

* Continuous separation of fission products (and reduction of source term in accident scenarios)

Not only did continuous separation have potential to lower safety related manufacturing and construction costs, but it offered a potential for dramatically lowering regulatory costs. If gaseous and volatile fission products are removed from a reactor as they are produced by nuclear fission, then the motive for most aspects of nuclear regulation is disappears. Thus the cost of nuclear regulation can be lowered. In addition, if separated from the coolant salts, many fission products become salable, either immediately or after a laps of some time. Thus fission product separation can lead to a new revenue stream. Finally although fission product removal devices add to capital costs, their cost can be lowered if Molten Salt Reactors are mass-produced.

It should be noted that the capital cost raising and lowering picture is similar other forms of MSR, with factors such as coolant salt choice, core design including graphite use, and relative neutron speed (thermal, epithermal, and fast), effecting capital costs.

The Fast MSR offers a tool for managing the actinide content of nuclear waste. . In 1991, Uri Gat, and J. R. Engel of ORNL, and C. H. Dodds, of the University of Tennessee, proposed burning fissile fuel from dismantled nuclear weapons in LFTRs, as a means of nuclear deproliferation. That is the process of destroying the raw materials of nuclear weapons.

V. V. Ignatiev, S. A. Konakov, S. A. Subbotine, and R. Y. Zakirov of the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, and K. Grebenkine proposed the use of Molten Salt Reactors as a means of disposing of nuclear waste. They noted that LFTRs had advantages over Liquid Metal reactors for nuclear waste disposal. The Russian research has lead to the development of the MOSART reactor design. The MOSART is a liquid salt fuel reactor concept intended to burn nuclear waste.
A similar proposal has come from Charles W. Forsberg of ORNL.

The integral Fast Reactor can perform a similar function. and while I have come to appreciate the IFR design, it still has safety problems that would not trouble a fast MSR design. In addition, fast reactors require very large start up charges, in comparison to MSR thermal thorium breeders. The large size of fast start up charges limits their scalability. Thus ten times as many LFTR can be started with the plutonium from nuclear waste, as IFRs or FMSRs. Fast reactors thus are an option for disposing of plutonium from nuclear waste. LFTRs can be started with Reactor grade plutonium (RGP), U-235 or U-233 if it is available. They can be started with a mixture of reactor fuels, or they can be started with all three. The current American stockpile of RGP is gig enough to start enough LFTRs to supply the entire American electrical demand and then some.

Some IFR advocates argue that high breeding ratio IFRs are rapidly scalable because they can produce a very large amount of nuclear fuel. But IFR design research and development has to date largely focused on IFRs capable of burning RGP with breeding ratios similar to those of thermal LFTR breeders. Higher IFR breeding ratios are undoubtedly possible, but they would require much R&D and would never be as safe as FMSRs. Thus RGP can be disposed of by fast reactors, but Lars Jorgensen has established that a fleet of thermal LFTRs can dispose of our entire stock of RGP in under 300 years. Thus if it is viewed as desirable to use the RGP found in "nuclear waste" to start thermal breeder LFTRs, it can be used to start hundreds of LFTRs. Since actinide disposal is the largest single problem associated with the so called nuclear waste issue, the thermal LFTR-RGP start option may well represent the best option for nuclear waste management.

At any rate ORNL FMSR report, offers further support for the contention that MSRs have the potential for lowering nuclear costs. The cost lowering features of the FMSR are all available in high scalable thermal spectrum LFTRs, as well as uranium fueled MSR designs. In addition small MSRs can be built in large numbers in factories. Factory produced small MSR/LFTR modules can be shipped by truck or by train to final assembly sites, or completely assembled in factories and shipped by barge. Not only can they be used to provide electrical power, but they can produce industrial heat, serve as the basis of combined heat and power systems, and even include bottom cycle desalinization. Thus the small MSR may prove to have not only a lower cost than conventional nuclear power plants, but superior versatility.

It is clear then that if breeder scalability and rapid manufacture is desirable, the thermal MSR/LFTR path holds significant advantages over the FMSR or IFR fast breeder approach.

Faustian Bargains and the 80 Year Slow Motion Train Wreck

2011-09-07T10:33:00.003-05:00

There are moments when abstract concepts become real, and about our survival. We can call these existential moments. I had my existential moment about global warming in 1971 when I heard Jerry Olson talk about the topic at a very informal gathering of people who worked for the ORNL-NSF Environmental Studies Project. Alvin Weinberg had his existential moment about the same subject at about the same time, and with Jerry Olsen initiating him as well. The same year Alvin Weinberg coined the phrase Faustian Bargain to describe the relationship between society and nuclear energy.

Weinberg first used the phrase "faustian bargain in a 1971 speech. In an 1972 Science article "Social Institutions and Nuclear Energy", Weinberg repeated the content of the 1971 speech. In the article Weinberg wrote,

We nuclear people have made a Faustian bargain with society. On the one hand, we offer -- in the catalytic nuclear burner (breeder reactor) -- an inexhaustable 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. . . .

But the price that we demand of society for this magical energy source is both a vigilance and a longevity of our social institutions that we are quite unaccustomed to. In a way, all of this was anticipated during the old debates over nuclear weapons. . . . . In a sense, we have established a military priesthood which guards against inadvertent use of nuclear weapons, which maintains what a priori seems to be a precarious balance between readiness to go to war and vigilance against human errors that would precipitate war . . .

It seems to me (and in this I repeat some views expressed very well by Atomic Energy Commissioner Wilfred Johnson) that peaceful nuclear energy probably will make demands of the same sort on our society, and possibly of even longer duration.

Weinberg repeated the same message a year later. 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 a post on this speech, by the time Weinberg delivered it, the molten-salt reactor technology which he had led Oak Ridge scientists in developing was off the table. but that promise has not been forgotten. Yet Weinberg still knew of the unique promise of molten-salt reactor technology.

What exactly was Weinberg getting at with his Faustian Bargain? There are in fact two Faustian Bargains known to literature. The first, found in Marlow's play the Tragic History of Doctor Faistus and Gounod's Opera Faust. In both Faust signs an agreement to obtain the services of Méphistophélès' master Lucifer, during his life, in exchange for the surrender of his soul after death. At the end of the story, Méphistophélès collects on Faust's bargain, dragging him down to hell.

In Marlow's Doctor Faustus, Faustus says,

Si peccasse negamus, fallimur, et nulla est in nobis veritas;

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and there
is no truth in us. Why, then, belike we must sin, and so
consequently die:
Ay, we must die an everlasting death.
What doctrine call you this, Che sera, sera,
What will be, shall be? Divinity, adieu!
These metaphysics of magicians,
And necromantic books are heavenly;
Lines, circles, scenes, letters, and characters;
Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires.
O, what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of honour, and omnipotence,
Is promis'd to the studious artizan!
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command: emperors and kings
Are but obeyed in their several provinces;
But his dominion that exceeds in this,
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man;
A sound magician is a demigod:
Here tire, my brains, to gain a deity.

This surely does not express the ambition which Weinberg had in mind in his 1971 speech. The end of that Faust is depicted in Gounod's Opera Faust:

There is another Faust tradition, this one linked to the great German poet, thinker and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In a paper written shortly before his death in 2006, Weinberg made explicit his intent to refer to Goethe's Faust.

In Goethe’s play, Faust is assisted and put up to mischief in his endeavors by the devil. This assistance is arranged over the course of the discussion of a number of contract- like arrangements: In the Prologue, Mephistopheles (the devil) suggests to God an experiment with a virtuous human being named Faust. Mephistopheles claims that it will be easy for him to make Faust forget his striving in return for an easy life on Earth. God, reluctantly, agrees to the experiment, knowing that Mephistopheles will fail in his attempts.

Interestingly, Mephistopheles does not explicitly suggest to God a deal that goes beyond Faust’s death. This would be too irreverent towards his master, even for Mephistopheles. God, on his part, does not enter into a contract with anyone else, this would mean to step down to the level of the contract partner. So this preliminary discussion is not a bet or bargain, but in a sense it is part of the ‘‘Faustian Bargain’’.

In Part I of Goethe’s play, Mephistopheles offers Faust a bargain similar to the one that the bridge builders and other innovators were thought to have accepted. His offer, however, is not the experiment he has discussed with God. Mephistopheles suggests to Faust a bargain, his services here on Earth in return for Faust’s soul . . . .

Faust accepts Mephistopheles’s services, leaving open, however, his fate after his death. Instead he offers to make a bet:

Weinberg points our that Mephistopheles encourages Faust to work for greater Energy and speed. The Goal of Goethe's Faust is clearly that of the 18th century Enlightenment,

The restless striving for more power and success derived from knowledge, energy, and other resources; along with the striving for unattainable perfection in love and virtue; are the main themes of Faust II. This Faustian drive is described as an essential element of human existence. It creates wars and suffering, but it is essentially human in the Faustian sense to live for continuous progress.

In Goethe's play, Faust says,

If e’er upon my couch, stretched at my ease, I’m found, Then may my life that instant cease!
Me canst thou cheat with glozing wile
Till self-reproach away I cast, –
Me with joy’s lure canst thou beguile Let that day be for me the last!
Be this our wager!

Weinberg agrees with the economist, Hans-Christoph Binswanger, that Faust's bargain

is that Mephistopheles helps Faust to overcome time, to become immortal by being part of eternal progress, while Faust promises never to rest and never to pause striving for further progress . . . .

In the end Faust’s soul is not left to the devil. The angels, carrying Faust’s remains up into heaven, sing:
"For he whose strivings never cease, Is ours for his redeeming."

Boito depicts the death of Goethe's Faust.

If Weinberg undersood the Faustian Bargain interns of Goethe's Faust, then what was Weinberg striving for? As I have often pointed out in 1971 Weinberg was striving for three things,

* Nuclear safety
* Control over CO2 emissions, which Weinberg understood threatened the future of humanity
* The Development of Thorium Breeding Molten Salt Reactor technology, which Weinberg believed would fulfill his first two goals

In all three goals, Weinberg faced protagonists, Congressman "Chet" Holifield and AEC Reactor Research Director Milton Shaw. Not long after he made the "Faustian Bargain Speech, Weinberg was told by Congressman Hollifeld, that it was time for him to go.

I have attempted to explored the background of Weinberg's Firing on Nuclear Green. Alvin Weinberg was involved in a conflict between National Laboratory Scientists, and the leadership of the Washington DC nuclear elite, including Congressman Chet Hollifeld and AEC Reactor Research Director Milton Shaw. In addition to disagreements over the safety of conventional reactors, the conflict for Weinberg involved a radical approach to reactor safety, which would solve many conventional reactor safety concerns. That approach was embodied in the development of the Molten Salt Reactor. Undoubtedly, what Weinberg had learned from Jerry Olsen in 1971, added to his motivation in the struggle for Nuclear Safety and the development of Molten Salt Reactor Breeding technology. Weinberg's Faustian bargain had as its goal the rescue of humanity, from the consequences of a quest for energy.

During the struggle Washington DC elite were telling the scientists, further striving toward nuclear safety is unnecessary. Weinberg was responding, we have made a deal with society and our side of the deal is not yet complete, and indeed it may take a long time and a lot of hard work to complete. The benefit of the deal to society is a low cost abundant supply of energy. The benefit to scientist are twofold, first they get to explore and to know the secrets of nature. Secondly they get the respect of their fellows for benefiting society by striving to fulfill the bargain.

In 2006 Alvin Weinberg explained,

The image has been used and the phrase quoted over and over again, both because the term was well chosen and because, very often, it has been misunderstood.

The two elements of the Faustian Bargain were both present in the early nuclear enterprise: the temptation of the easy, carefree life it offered (electricity too cheap to be metered), and the bargain it struck (continuous striving was promised). The service electricity provides could be used to pursue progress in all kinds of ways, as long as the obligation was kept to look after the nuclear waste (and, for that matter, other fissionable material as well). If the obligation were shirked, it could, in an extreme scenario, mean the end of humankind.

Weinberg added,

The phrase Faustian Bargain was also misunderstood. The same year that Weinberg’s paper appeared in Science (1972), John W. Gofman wrote an article in which he painted a sketch of what was needed, institutionally, to keep nuclear waste safe (Gofman, 1972). Not only was there a need, in Gofman’s view of the Faustian Bargain, for a perpetual institution (like a priesthood) to look after these wastes, but also everyone had to bow to the whims and wishes of this institution. In other popular publications, the Faustian Bargain was presented not as a human condition, but as a devilish complot by one group of humans to enslave the rest.
The term Faustian Bargain has been used during the subsequent years to characterize many ‘technological fixes’ of immediate problems with potential negative long-term consequences.

Fulfilling the Weinberg's Faustian bargain meant solving all of the problems associated with nuclear power, so that nuclear energy could be made available to the masses without any reason for fear. It also meant solving the CO2 emissions problem.

Weinberg's critics, including Ralph Nader and Amory Lovins were afflicted with a paranoid fear of nuclear power. Even though Weinberg held out the possibility of safe, clean, cheap and peaceful nuclear power as the goal of the Faustian bargain, Nader and Lovins weren't ready to buy the vision. Even if Weinberg's vision could be fulfilled, they weren't buying.

Instead Lovins and Nader held out Fustian bargains of their own. Nether seemed to have experienced the deep existential encounter with Global Climate change that Weinberg had, and both had confused visions of its remedy. Lovins envisioned coal as a non-nuclear bridge to soft energy and thus preferable substitute for nuclear power, that would gradually be replaced by soft energy around 2020. Lovins thus was no opponent of coal to generate electrical power in practice. Thus if anyone ever made a Faustian bargain, Amory Lovins did. Armory Lovins, who was warned about what he was doing by Alvin Weinberg, sold his soul for lumps of coal, and now has lost his soul completely and forever. Lovins soft path failed to offer a path to a carbon free existence, and seemingly never will.

Ralph Nader was always more concerned about the fate of coal miners than about what coal was doing to the environment. Nader's Faustian bargain involved the sale of his soul for government regulation of business and industry. Nader triumphed when General Motors and Chrysler nearly went bankrupt, but his Faustian bargain brought him presidential campaigns that lead to failure in his life's ambition. And for his country, Ralph Nader's crusades have not brought a low carbon non-nuclear coal substitute, and I wonder if he really cares.

Many so called environmentalists, including Ralph Nader, Amory Lovins, David Roberts, Mark Z. Jacobson, and Joe Romm simply ignore problems with "Green energy" solutions. In 2007 I had something of a one sided dialogue with David Roberts, via the comment section of the Grist blog. Roberts relentlessly championed the green technological fixs, and was convinced that renewables and efficiency offered all of the solutions, even when other people raised seemingly raeasonable objections. When those renewable fixes did not make sense, Roberts took big leaps of faith, telling us about miraculous solutions to all the renewable technology problems. I learned quite a lot from the discussion with Roberts, but unfortunately Roberts was not willing to learn anything from me.

Roberts pulled out all of the stops on Green objections to nuclear power. I responded to his objections by pointing out both flaws in Roberts statements of facts, and in his reasoning, as well as the advantages offered by molten salt reactors. Roberts responded by raising the question of scalability and I responded by pointing to the potential for mass production of small MSRs which could be built very rapidly and in large numbers in factors. Roberts appearantly had never heard of factories, and did not understand my point.

I knew about Molten Salt Reactors because my father had worked on the development of the technology over a 20 year period of time at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Because he was working under contract, neither he nor I stood to gain any money from MSR development. My father had also made a significant contribution to the development of conventional Light Water Reactors.

I did know enough from my father to know that he considered the MSR to be a remarkable reactor that offered many potential advantages over conventional nuclear power plants. He had found working with Molten Salt Reactors difficult and challenging, and he had made significant contributions to the development of MSR technology.

MSR were safe, could, at least in theory, completely eliminate the problem of nuclear waste, would not increase proliferation, and in factories could be built in very large numbers over a short period of time.

There were significant problems with with the Faustian bargain Roberts offered. The United States Government has had efficiency improvement programs for over 30 years, and while these programs have produced small but steady improvements in efficiency, they have not produced the sort of improvements Roberts envisioned. Roberts did not offer good reasons for expecting future rapid improvements in efficiency. Secondly, economist note that big increases in efficiency sometimes produce increased use of energy. In some instances the increase may be greater than the energy saved, while in other instances the increase only partially offsets the energy savings. Thus efficiency gains, although desirable, may not constitute the sort of energy panacea which the Green Faustian bargain claims efficiency to be.

By 2011 the goals of the Green Faustian Bargain are receiving more and more. It has been repeatedly pointed out to Amory Lovins, that the predictions which he made with respect to the soft energy path, have failed to come to pass. In 2011m human energy needs are still wedded to coal, and to other fossil fuels, contrary to Lovins' predictions. Amory Lovins 1976 claim for coal use in the soft path.
Coal use 2001 to 2010, the reality that Amory Lovins refuses to acknowledge.

The 80 year slow motion train wreck

I use the phrase Slow Motion Train Wreck, to describe the inexorable advance of time from the 1971 Spring day when I first heard Jerry Olsen talk about Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Anthropogenic Climate Change. 50% of the time we had to set things aright then has been lost. We seem unwilling to make the commitment to the "Faustian Bargain" our energy
desires requires of us, if we want to survive. We must strive for a post-carbon energy order. If we are unwilling to strive, we will not survive as a civilization.

In a recent Forbes interview with Michael Tobias (MT), University of California-Berkeley Environmental Scientist Dr. John Harte laid out the dangers:

the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), summarizes the results of these calculations and concludes that under “business as usual” trends in fossil fuel consumption, by 2050 the planet will on average have warmed between 3 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit. . . . hat warming is the result of both the direct heat-trapping effect of greenhouse gases and certain feedback processes. The latter will increasingly occur in response to the direct warming, causing further warming. As polar and glacial ice melts and snow cover decreases, temperatures will rise as less sunlight is reflected by our planet and more is absorbed by the remaining, darker surfaces. . . . There are many of us in the scientific community who believe that any number of important feedback processes are not being accounted for in the current IPCC projections. For example, from ice core data informing us about temperatures and atmospheric greenhouse gas levels over the past million years, we know that when the planet warms a little from any cause, it responds by releasing from the land and sea to the atmosphere huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane. These greenhouse gases contribute to further warming. Because this process is not reflected in current climate projections, we can expect that there will be further emissions from our soils and our oceans. These will create additional warming beyond what IPCC currently projects. . . . The evidence for these additional feedback effects is starting to pour in. Rising methane emissions from warming tundra soils and waters are being observed, and field research shows that warmed temperate ecosystems release additional carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Forest damage from wildfires and bark beetle infestation, both of which are triggered by warming, will also result in the carbon stored in trees flowing to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. By some estimates the additional warming could raise mid-century temperatures by as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit.

For most people on Earth, the threat is not get real, and climate change skeptics deny the very possibility that there is any danger to our well being. The Climate change skeptics are offering a Faustian Bargain along Christopher Marlow's lines, "Sell your soul to the temptation to take it easy. Don't pay attention to the voices of scientists that warn of the dangers of climate change". They are willing to sell their souls for any energy headless of what the bargain will cost them. They are assured by Talk radio that Anthropogenic Global Warming is not real, it is a Liberal hoax. Or they are assured by Amory Lovins and Greenpeace that nuclear energy is a deadly illusion that will not rescue us, we will be saved by efficiency and renewable energy.

We have warnings that post-carbon renewable energy plans are doomed to failure, There are enormous problems with solar and wind as a major human energy source. Even if these problems can eventually be overcome by science, it is unlikely that that will occur before 2050 when scientists like Dr. Harte say that we face big and in many respects very unpleasant environmental changes.

But what of the idea that we can save ourselves through efficiency. In 2008 Robert Bryce laid out the case against the efficiency rhetoric. In another article, Bryce was extremely critical of Energy Guru Amory Lovins for his prophecies about the contributions that efficiency can make to solving the carbon problem. Lovins promised a detailed response to Bryce's criticisms, but has never provided that response. Renewable advocates are notorious for not answering their critics.

In a response to a pro-reneables comment, I received on Nuclear Green, I noted,

Anonymous, I do not put great stock in NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory0 studies, because they tend to pass on Renewable Industry propaganda claims as if they were facts, and consistently downplay the bad news in their data. For example, the latest Eastern Interconnect study clearly demonstrated that rising wind penetration would lead to increased electrical costs, but this was not one of the conclusions that was featured in the press release, or in the executive summary. A preliminary finding of the Western interconnect study of wind and solar has been that renewables will primarily displace CCGTs, while leaving coal largely untouched. Thus the carbon mitigation of high penetration wind and solar was much less than would be assumed if we did not have that information, but the NREL study failed to draw the obvious conclusions about the relative carbon mitigation costs of of renewables verses nuclear. I am not impressed by the 30 GWs of German PV. The capacity factor of German PV is likely to be under 10%. That means that the 30 GWs of PV capacity will probably produce under 3 GW years of electricity every year. Displaced generators are likely to be CCGTs, and German cloud conditions will likely requite a large number of OCGTs to be kept spinning. With the looming shutdown of German nuclear plants, the carbon emissions from the operations of of the German electrical system are likely to rise rather than fall. Thus we must consider the opportunity costs of the German FIT. What Germany will have is a hugely expensive electrical system that will almost certainly produce more CO2 than it does now. If PV farms are as cheap to operate as you claim why do they need such huge subsidies?

Thus the Faustian bargain offered by anti-nuclear environmentalists, like Amory Lovins, does not really lead to heaven. Instead it seems to lead straight to an energy hell, with little energy to cope with increasingly challenging environmental conditions.

The situation we face, a disastrous change in climate caused by human-carbon based energy sources, best be described as a slow motion train wreck. From 1971 when I first learned of AGW till 2050, the date which climate scientists say is the cut off point for avoiding, serious, long term consequences, consequences which I call the train wreck, is 80 years. Hence the 80 year slow motion train wreck.

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.

I offer two serenades for those who do not wish to strive to avoid the train wreck:

The MSR and the Veil of Secrecy

2011-09-03T03:35:00.002-05:00

Sometime, not long after my father went to work as a chemist in Oak Ridge, I asked him what he did at work.

"That is a secret," he told me. His secret employment lead to the development of reactors for submarines. Later the same work lead to the development of civilian power reactors. Then his secret work turned to Molten Sale Reactors and the potential to build atomic powered bombers.

How secret his work was can be judged, by a document I found among his papers. That document recorded on data set numbers left out of a report because they were considered too sensitive to include in the report he had written for the AEC. All he would tell his family about what he was doing where the letters "ANP".

Gradually the veil of secrecy under which my father work was lifted, and the product of his research was opened to other scientists without regard to security considerations. During the 1960's ORNL scientists, working on Molten Salt Reactor technology, were quite open about their research, and their work product was distributed to anyone who was interested.

When Kirk Sorensen founded Energy from Thorium, he included an open science forum, which allowed anyone who was interested in MSR technology to openly talk about it. This began to change a couple of years ago, when Kirk left NASA for employment with a private business. It is probable that the words proprietary concerns were mentioned to Kirk. Other words may have been mentioned as well. Then a year ago, the Chinese appeared at an ORNL conference on MSRs. They did not have much to say, but they were listening intently.

The significance of Chinese interests were revealed earlier this year, when the Chinese announced that they were planning to develop Thorium Fuel cycle MSRs. They used words like intellectual property rights, and the whole game changed. Yesterday I pointed to a quote by Kim Johnson that illustrates how much things have changed in a short period of time:

Sadly however, I can no longer post important details Freely. Serious Foreign competition could very well, in a few years' time, leave the US so far behind in our own Fluoride-Energy tech we'd never recover economically.

People are starting to hold back information.

People who in the past held jobs that had nothing to do with MSRs, now are finding MSR related employment. As they do, they start withholding information. I am not scolding them, just pointing out what is happening. I could talk about who is doing this, and speculate about what they are not saying, but it is probably best to leave those questions alone.

This is, of course, a sign of progress. A sign that what I have worked for during the last 4 years is starting to come to pass. The unintended consequence of a success that can be laid at the feet of free information, is that the very same information begins to dry up.

Energy from Thorium's Recent LFTR Cost Thread

2011-09-02T05:54:00.005-05:00

A recent Energy fromThorium discussion has once again brought to the fore questions about MSR/LFTR costs. "Zeropoint" kicked off the discussion:

I’m a LFTR n00b so forgive me if this topic has been addressed many times. Also please point me to any threads that already talk about this. I did a search for the other threads but I didn’t see the information I wanted.

I am trying to understand the economics of LFTR.

I am taking my data from the OECD/IEA “Projected Costs of Generating Electricity” report 2010 edition.

Using that data I wanted to know estimate LFTR overnight costs (not taking into account the time value of money) and operating costs.

For the current costs of nuclear, coal and gas plants I went to tables 3.7a, 3.7b, 3.7c in the report. I dropped the two highest and lowest plants as well as any others that looked out of place. I then use the extremely scientific method of averaging them. My results are in the attachment below.

(I cannot reproduce Zeropoint's attachment. Readers will jave to look at the original comment.)

Overnight Costs of LFTR
I figure the theoretical lowest cost for LFTR is the overnight cost of a gas plant since LFTR could be interpreted as a nuclear heat powered gas turbine. Since coal and nuclear have a less efficient conversion efficiency and higher capital costs due to the steam cycle, I am going to make another scientific assumption and assume that the difference between the costs for Coal and Gas is due to the capital cost of the water condenser system, the more efficient conversion, and the efficiency of having the gas turbine factory made which you drop in place. That is a different of $1475. The cost going from the coal plant to the nuclear plant is then the cost of the containment, the nuclear reactor and the redundant systems. That is a difference of $1875. Assuming that the containment is only a third of the 1875, it means that LFTR could be built for
LFTR_Overnight_Cost = 1028 + 1875 * 2/3 = 2258 USD/kWe
I am surprised it is so close the cost of a coal plant. I thought it would be a little higher.

Fuel Cycle
I am going to assume 0.1

Operation & Maintenance
You may be able to have less operators at a LFTR plant than a traditional nuclear plant but the maintenance costs will be higher due to the replacement of the graphite core. I am going to assume that O&M is the same as traditional nuclear, 13.6 MWh.

Construction Time
If LFTR components are factory made and then plumbed up on site then you can probably get the same construction time as a coal plant. Not sure how long the regulatory piece takes. Assume 4-5 years with one of those years being regulatory.

Plant Lifetime
This I have no clue on this. Any guesses?

Decommissioning Costs
Will probably be the same as traditional nuclear at 15%.

Any thoughts?

At this point I would note that Nuclear Green makes a number of assumptions that differ from those offered by "zeropoint". Nuclear Green substitute assumptions are intended too lower MSRs/LFTRs costs, to decrease MSRs/LFTRs construction time, and to increase the speed and number of MSRs/LFTRs deployed before 2050. Thus from the viewpoint of Nuclear Green, Zeropoint makes very conservative assumptions.

"Lars" responded to "Zeropoint,"

It is tough to get a good cost on current nuclear power plants - just look at the variance in actual costs to build existing reactors. The estimates have generally been even to 30% cheaper than LWRs but the estimates are very old.

If LFTR takes off like I think it should then there will be a substantial learning curve advantage to factor in - especially in the all critical time to build.

Here are the reasons we think it should cost significantly less.

Compared to the old LWRs new ones have increased in price dramatically due in large part to redundant engineered safety systems and schedule delaying tactics by opposition intended to drive up the cost. LFTR has its safety due to physics so it is reasonable to hope that the cost will not go up.

There is no high pressure system in LFTR so we don't need the super thick, 600 ton pressure vessel that can only be made in Japan today. In fact, there is reason to think that most of LFTR could be factory assembled and shipped by barge, or truck to the site reducing construction time (similar things are being done for future LWRs too).

Dry or Wet/Dry cooling could allow placing the reactors away from rivers/lakes/oceans generating less opposition and less unique environmental impact reports.

Counter to these nice things is that the reactor is fundamentally different and regulators won't know what to do with it. These days they tend to over-regulate. Some things that were allowed and have been grandfathered in for LWRs likely won't be tolerated for LFTRs.

But - the majority of LFTRs won't be installed in the US or EU so our over-regulation will matter less.

For plant life-time, I'd guess this doesn't matter too much but the general target for modern power plants is 60 years.

Lindsey commented,

(My) gut feel says 2,000 - 3,000/kW for a 400 MW+ sized plant, but my capital cost estimates say for a simple graphite free tank type core $1,350/kWe all in, and that sounds too cheap to me.

Lindsey's too cheap comment is all too familiar to be. Three years ago, I attempted to estimate LFTR costs, using the small factory manufactured LFTR mode; and a number of different assumptions, and kept getting estimates that struck me as far too low.

Lindsey also offered construction time estimates that were far more conservative than those which I believe are both desirable and obtainable.

For standardized designs the equipment manufacture if made to order would be about 10 -18 months depending on hardware used, on-site construction time could be 12 - 18 months, followed by 6 - 12 months commissioning and testing, so all of that together get's you out to 4 years approx from financial investment decision (FID)

Lindsey is thinking in terms of traditional reactor construction methods, but I have reason to believe that research aimed that drastically shortening small reactor field set up times may be underway.

"Ida-Russkie" commented,

The NRC hearing process for the AREVA eagle rock plant is set to last two years by law. Is a reactor going to be easier to get approval? So, this is one area where there should be some relief after you prove one can be built. the hearing process is to stop the design changes which bankrupted some nuclear plant builds in the past. The environmental impact study took one year to submit.

"Ida-Russkie's" comment clearly assumes a businesses as usual operation for the NRC, however, the potential inherent safety of MSRs may lead to big changes in the regulatory process, and the recycling of coal fired steam plant locations, may drastically change the state permit situation, since permits have already been issued for coal fired power plant sites.

"Cyril R" pointed out one of the reasons for low MSR costs,

different reactor builders are using different numbers of loops. Westinghouse seems to prefer a few big loops for the AP1000. Areva likes to use one more loop. 4 for the EPR, this is 1600/4= 400 MWe per loop compared to 550 MWe for the AP1000. It seems plausible that the loops should be as big as possible for economics. But the LFTR has a remote maintenance requirement. Multiple smaller loops could allow easy modular replacement. The LFTR has less pumping power than a PWR. On the order of 7-8x less I believe, based on the AHTR pumping power requirement of 1.46 kW/MWth and 8 kW/MWth for the EPR, combined with better turbine efficiency, gives around 7-8x less pumping power per kWe. It could be even smaller than that, as the temp drop is larger for LFTR, and this likely more than compensates the heavier fuel salt pumping requirement.

Pumps are important and usually expensive components of reactor design. The EfT discussion makes clear that Westinghouse has chosen to lowe its pump costs by decreasing their number, with each of 2 pumps moving half of the AP-1000 reactor coolant.

"Zeropoint" calls attention to the cost of regulation,

Sorry to dwell on the subject of the NRC which I know all of you love. I wanted to understand the approval process a little better since I didn't have it in my cost estimates.

I just listened to Atomic Rod's podcast #154 "Atomic Round-up With Five Experts" where he mentions that for new nuclear plant designs you have to pay the NRC $200+ an hour for them to analyze and authorize new designs.

Wow! That is going to be a drain on any startup especially for a LFTR based design where the NRC has to be educated on the technology. Is this still the case (the podcast was done a year ago)?

At $250 an hour, one man year costs $500,000 ($250*40hrs*50weeks/yr). Does anyone know how large an NRC team would be to analyze new designs? If the team was 10 people for 10 years, then that is $50mm to get a design approved. That is a pretty good size chunk of change.

Lars estimates that the cost of NRC regulatory approval runs about $50,000,000. With the Cost of LFTR design runint to $500,000,000. Of course in Energy circles $500,000,000 does not amount to a lot. Solyndra, a Solar PV systems manufacturer, has just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Solyndra received over $500,000,000 in Federal loan guarantees in 2009 in addition to nearly One Billion Bucks from venture capital firms. Well, the chumps who just parted with one and a half billion bucks were warned. Warned by Nuclear Green, and Brave New Climate.

Cyril R, comments

The purpose of the NRC is to maintain the status quo on nuclear. Molten fuel reactors could potentially break the status quo, so the NRC won't license it in our lifetimes. However, they will gladly take all your money to research it to death, and laugh all the way to the bank.

Its like, asking the king to help start a revolution for democracy.

http://ergosphere.blogspot.com/2011/07/quote-without-comment.html

MSRs have the real potential to work, and work much better than LWRs, so the NRC won't help you.

Cyril's link points to a quote from Ugo Bardi

Bureaucracy is a tool to keep the world as it is, not to change it. So, in perfect Tainter-style, the system works hard to avoid innovation, not to promote it. It is almost impossible to be financed to study resource depletion; that would highlight problems that would require changes and that's a no-no. Instead, it is still possible to obtain research grants as long as there is no risk that the results will threaten the status quo. Hydrogen as a fuel is a good example. It is high-tech, fashionable, sophisticated, popular, environmentally friendly, and it doesn't work. This last characteristic makes sure that its development will bring no changes whatsoever.

Several issues touched on in the LFTR cost thread invite Nuclear Green posts, but one by Chemical Engineer Kim L Johnson is down right pregnant. Johnson writes,

I'm a chemical engineer who has been working to develop industrial Fluorides for many years and have assembled lots of online documentation for the benefit of Lftr and the like.

If you have any significant interest in Fluorides, structural materials for Fs and in which forms of whatever elements are best for the Lftr bath & containment, I would be happy to send you lots of link.

Sadly however, I can no longer post important details Freely. Serious Foreign competition could very well, in a few years' time, leave the US so far behind in our own Fluoride-Energy tech we'd never recover economically.
Fortunately, the very successful efforts of TEA & other "T Com" leaders -- fruit we shall soon see in the Senate & elsewhere -- should shortly enable guys like you, (hopefully) Lars, and many others to develop Thorium-enabled technologies full time (*just* getting off the phone with this effort's champion) !

MSR/LFTR endeavors are being launched. Some are so clouded in secrecy that their very existence may be unknown to me at this point. Lots of things are going on that I can only guess at. Part of this secrecy is due to the entry of the Chinese into the MSR/LFTR field, and part is due to proprietary concerns.

The EfT discussion suggested that the Nuclear Green view that MSR/LFTR technology can lower nuclear costs, is shared by engineers and scientists who are aware of that technology. It also suggests that other members of the EfT community may be more wed to business as usual assumption than Nuclear Green is. However, the discussion points to concerns about Federal regulation as an barrier to technological advancement that require further attention.

The EfT LFTR cost thread makes conservative assumptions, but still suggest that LFTR costs may be so low that at least one discussion used the words too low to make sure we knew he is sane. At the very least, it can be concluded from the EfT discussion that MSR and LFTR technologies may be a road to lowering the cost of nuclear power.

MSR/LFTR development and Chinese Economic Growth.

2011-08-30T04:51:00.008-05:00

Note: This is the third part of an three part essay on the the the future non proliferation policies of India and China with respect to the thorium related technologies. The second part of this essay discussed the role of Thorium in India's nuclear development program, and Indian past, present and possible future attitudes towards nonproliferation.

Despite the current extremely robust growth of the Chinese economy during the last decade, some economists, looking ahead see clouds on the horizon. Michael Pettis is a professor at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management, and author of the well received book, The Volatility Machine: Emerging Economics and the Threat of Financial Collapse. Pettis is a pessimist about the stability of the international finance order, and sees international boom and bust monitary cycles effecting the economies of developing countries even more than the econmies of developed countries. In a recent article in China Financial Markets, Professor Pettis argues that

we are at the end of one of the six or so major globalization cycles that have occurred in the past two centuries. If I am right, this means that there still is a pretty significant set of major adjustments globally that have to take place before we will have reversed the most important of the many global debt and payments imbalances that have been created during the last two decades. These will be driven overall by a contraction in global liquidity, a sharply rising risk premium, substantial deleveraging, and a sharp contraction in international trade and capital imbalances.

Professor Pettis predicts:

* BRICS and other developing countries have not decoupled in any meaningful sense, and once the current liquidity-driven investment boom subsides the developing world will be hit hard by the global crisis.
* Over the next two years Chinese household consumption will continue declining as a share of GDP.
* Chinese debt levels will continue to rise quickly over the rest of this year and next.
* Chinese growth will begin to slow sharply by 2013-14 and will hit an average of 3% well before the end of the decade.
* Any decline in GDP growth will disproportionately affect investment and so the demand for non-food commodities.
* If the PBoC resists interest rate cuts as inflation declines, China may even begin slowing in 2012.
* Much slower growth in China will not lead to social unrest if China meaningfully rebalances.
* Within three years Beijing will be seriously examining large-scale privatization as part of its adjustment policy.
* European politics will continue to deteriorate rapidly and the major political parties will either become increasingly radicalized or marginalized.
* Spain and several countries, perhaps even Italy (but probably not France) will be forced to leave the euro and restructure their debt with significant debt forgiveness.
* Germany will stubbornly (and foolishly) refuse to bear its share of the burden of the European adjustment, and the subsequent retaliation by the deficit countries will cause German growth to drop to zero or negative for many years.
* Trade protection sentiment in the US will rise inexorably and unemployment stays high for a few more years.

The rest of Professor Pettis's article fleshes out his predictions about the course likely followed by the Chinese economy for the rest of the decade, and the implications of that course for Chines society, and political system. (Hat tip to Brian Wang for his recent post on Professor Pettis's economic forecast.)

It is my view that even if this socio-economic and political crisis strikes China, Global awareness of the grave implications of continued reliance of carbon based energy sources will rise rise rapidly. Thus at the same time China may faces an economic crisis. Even if more conventional estimates of the developmental course of turn out to be correct, China will be faced with the problem of shifting its energy system to post-carbon energy technologies.

Thus what ever the course of the Chinese economy, the need to replace energy from fossil fuel sources, with energy from post carbon sources will start to become acute within the next ten years. Thus what ever its economic situation, China will require rapidly scalable energy technologies that can replace coal and other fossil fuels. At the moment, China appears committed to developing LFTR technology. On February 2, in the wake of the Chinese LFTR announcement I stated on Nuclear Green, I stated:

The potential promise of thorium and the LFTR technology can rapidly be brought into the effort to prevent further global climate change. China, perhaps more than any other country has realized the importance of energy in increasing the wealth of its citizens, and making life for its people better. At the same time, the Chinese have paid an enormous price for their reliance on fossil fuel technology. As many as 500,000 people die every year from fossil fuel related causes. Global Warming represents another large threat to the well-being of the Chinese people, and although China has made a large commitment to renewable energy sources, the Chinese leadership is aware that renewables cannot produce anything like the amount of energy that the Chinese people need to bring their standard of living to that enjoyed by people living in advanced Industrialized and post-industrial societies. At the same time, the Chinese leadership is far more technologically oriented than the leadership of the United States or Europe.

Thus, the leadership of China is far more open to promising new technology. In addition China has a large thorium supply that comes from its rare earth mines, and so far has not found any use for thorium. The LFTR allows China to kill two birds with a single thorium stone. First it offers a potential source of vast amounts of environmentally clean and safe energy at a low cost, and secondly it allows China to take advantage of an unused resource, which can easily replace coal. LFTR technology has the potential of providing China with abundant energy at a very low cost, and might solidify Chinese economic, cultural and political dominance of the world for a long time to come.

What will appeal to Chinese leadership about MSR/LFTR technology during the next decade is its potential for rapid production in large numbers and at a low cost. Uranium fueled MSRs offer a technology that is almost ready for mas production today.

The MSR core is very simple, requires few materials, and can be built with a tiny fraction of the labor required by conventional reactor cores, Other optional parts of the MSR may be more complex, but this is in no small measure because radioactive fission products can be continuously cleaned from the MSR core. The added cost of fuel salt cleaning can be balanced by a diminished cost of other safety features. Both fuel cleaning and reprocessing can be included in the MSR package. Thus the MSR can eliminate the necessity for building a separate large and complex fuel reprocessing facility. Molten Salt Reactor researchers world wide have repeatedly touted their safety. Low cost underground placement would further enhance their safety.

One the other hand the low cost of MSRs, their scalability and the sustainability of of LFTR technology would make LFTR technology an extremely valuable source of post-carbon energy, and quite possibly the dominate energy technology on earth asa soon as 2050. The paths to LFTR development were charted at Oak Ridge National Laboratory during the 1970's and are well understood. In terms of the potential cost savings that could be achieved through the adoption of LFTR technology the cost of its development would be extremely small, and indeed a number of large American companies could afford to finance LFTR development without government assistance, if they chose to do so.

Nor would MSR/LFTR development take long, if a business as usual approach were abandoned in favor if a more intensive approach. My estimate that if MSR/LFTR development were commenced in China this year, MSRs could be ready to start rolling off production lines by 2020. With factory based mass production, the replacement of carbon based electrical generation could be accomplished in a short time. In addition, to use in electrical generation, LFTRs and be used as an industrial process heat source. They can be used to produce hydrogen, and carbon based liquid fuels from atmospheric CO2 and water. They can also be used to power ships.

The principle obstacle to MSR/LFTR development is ignorance and human incredulity. Until recently Molten Salt Reactor technology was not even be mentioned is the training of reactor physicists and nuclear engineers. Past statements about Molten Salt Reactor technology form the Department of Energy are filled with misinformation While Secretary of Energy Chu recently made statements about the LFTR that suggest he had been given the same misinformation. Even when informed about the potential some people are incredulous, or insist that it would take to long to develop to be a practical solution, or that it is too technologically challenging. The Chinese have a significant advantage, because its technologically sophisticated national leadership is aware of the potential that the LFTR offers.

The LFTR approach to world energy issues amounts to a paradigm shift. What will be required for the success of a LFTR based approach is the spread of knowledge about the LFTR and of a vision of LFTR potential. Knowledge and vision cannot simply be spread by policy, and indeed in the United States policy has been an impediment to its spread, until the policy makers themselves are educated, and catch a little of the vision. Once that knowledge and the vision are discovered by enough people, as appears to be the case in China, a tsunami of change will follow that will rapidly sweep us forward into the post carbon age.

Thus by continuing its commitment to develop LFTR technology, Chinese leadership, either Communist or democratic, will almost certainly assure continued Chinese economic development, whatever short run national economic problems emerge in China.

No accurate estimate of China's Thorium reserve is available, but thorium is a common mineral in rare earth mining tilings, and China's rare earth mining industry is by far the largest in the world. My guess is that China holds enough thorium above ground now, to power the entire Chinese economy for hundreds if not thousands of years. The energy potential of this internal, low cost energy source is attractive to China, which like India is dependent on foreign uranium sources for a uranium powered economy, would prefer to have total control of its energy resources.

Historically China has been economically self contained, and although Chinese economic development has focused on international trade, Professor Pettis offers the view that future Chinese economic development will focuse on the growth of internal markets. In addition the Chinese government is under great though largely hidden pressures to clean up environmental problems. Shifting from coal to Thorium would solve serveral environmental problems at the same time. A shife from trade to internal economic grown and increasingf environmental concerns thus point to a rational for thorium energy use as a matter of national policy.

The historic foreign policy of China has usually been to exercise hegemony over its neighbors but to not incorporate them into its empire. In addition, the Chines state has usually defended its territory rather than sought expansion. The present Communist government has acted to insure that traditional Chinese imperial territory remain part of China. The 1949 invasion of Tibet, and the continued Chinese insistence that Taiwan is part of China are evidence of that poi icy, The Chinese Government is also concerned about border defenses, and the 1962 war between China and India was motivated by Chinese desires to obtain defensible southern borders.

Finally China has cooperated with American Nonproliferation policies only when it is in Chinese interests to do so. China has in the past been willing to transfer of nuclear weapons technology and even weapons grade nuclear materials, when the development of nuclear weapons by other states furthered what Chinese leaders viewed as China's national interest. China has viewed India as a potential enemy, and thus its allied itself with another enemy of India Pakistan. China reportedly provided both nuclear weapons design and U-235.

Thus China appears wholly unwilling to adopt nonproliferation goals, that run contrary to its national interests, or the national interests of Allies that it might wish to see possessing nuclear weapons. Furthermore China is unlikely to prefer nonproliferation over national economic or energy policies. To the extent that American policy toward the thorium cycle as a proliferation issue runs contrary to Chinese trade or energy goals, China will be unwilling to give preference to American goals over its own.

Thus if American thorium related nonproliferation policies are contrary to Chinese interest, China can be expected to oppose and even undermine them. China may well regard its own internally developed LFTR as a legitimate trade item, even without proliferation controls preferred by the United States. The United States will have no choice except to adapt its nonproliferation policy to the sort of nonproliferation order that China is willing to accept. China, like India will most likely be willing to support a nonproliferation agreement that embraces thorium, but that order may be quite contrary to current US nonproliferation policy.

Thus both India and China have in the past been notably independent from American nonproliferation policies and goals, and can be expected to maintain that independence. There growing economic power will make that opposition increasingly difficult for the United States to impose its nonproliferation goals on the international community. Both India and China have interests in developing a Thorium cycle nuclear power technology, and it is very likely that any future nonproliferation order will conform to Chinese and Indian policy goals with respect to thorium fuel cycle technology.

What are the problems with LFTR technology?

2011-08-29T03:18:00.004-05:00

What are the problems with MSR/LFTR technology? This turns out to be a hard question to answer. Since there are a large number of LFTR design options, however, it is difficult to identify a set of problems that shared all of the options. Rather we should talk about elective choices, and the problems that a MSR/LFTR designer would face if a certain option were chosen.

Protactinium would seemingly pose a problem for thorium breeding. The Protactinium nucleus is a very big target for neutrons in a LFTR core. Kirk Sorensen discussed the problems posed by Pa-233 and U-233 in MSR blanket salts:

From these cross-sections, you can see that thorium-232 has a moderate cross-section for absorption, but there’s so much of it in the blanket that it does almost all the neutron-absorbing (as we would want).

After absorbing a neutron, the Th-232 becomes Th-233, which has a monster absorption cross-section (almost 200x that of Th-232) but its half-life is so short (22 min) that it isn’t around very long to absorb a neutron.

Once it turns into Pa-233, the absorption cross-section is still over 5 times greater than the Th-232. That is one of the basic reasons why it’s so important to isolate the Pa-233 from the blanket–in order to prevent another neutron absorption. This is a key step that you just can’t do in a solid-core reactor that’s trying to “burn” thorium (and achieve a conversion ratio of > 1.0).

Finally, the Pa-233 decays to U-233 in 27 days. The U-233 has a huge cross-section, mostly for fission (531 barns) but with a lot of absorption (45 barns). Thus, uranium-233 left in the blanket will really want to gobble up blanket neutrons and cause fission. That leads to even more trouble, because that will deposit fission products in the blanket, complicating reprocessing and making the blanket “hot” with radiation from fission products.

All of these factors argue for getting protactinium of out the blanket and letting it decay to U-233 outside of the neutron flux. The U-233 can then be removed by fluorination to UF6 and adding it back to the core salt by reduction to UF4. Continuous refueling of the core means that excess reactivity in the core can be held to almost nothing, an extremely important consideration for safe operation that is very difficult to achieve in a solid-core reactor.

This problem would seem to be compounded in a single fluid LFTR, in which thorium breeding takes place in the same fluid that carries the fissionable nuclear fuel. protactinium is not easy to remove from molten salts. It turns out that it is a lot easier to wait until the Pa-233 is transformed by a gamma particle emission into U-233. There is, however, a proliferation related disadvantage to Protactinium separation in addition to the problem posed by the need to separate Protactinium out of its carrier salts. Dr Buzzo points out,

U-233 is perfectly suitable for use in a nuclear weapon, at least in theory. The thing which makes it difficult is that there would be some U-232 as well. This does not preclude the use in a weapon, but the short halflife of U-232 makes it much more radioactive and therefore difficult to handle. . . . .

it's really the U-232 which is going to make the uranium recovered less suited for weapons use.

However looking at the aspects of protactinium separation, I'm wondering if this could be a hole in the process which would allow for much lower U-232. U-232 is the daughter product of Pa-232 just as U-233 is the daugher of Pa-233. Pa-233 has a half-life of 26.9 days but Pa-232 is only 1.3 days.

This seems as if it could cause a problem. Basically if you separate the protactinium and let it decay for about eleven days, for example, you've gone through eight half-lives of Pa-232 but less one half of a halflife cycle of Pa-233. Thus you still retain about three quarters of the Pa-233 you started out with but the Pa-232 has been diminished to less than half a percent of what you started with. You could do it for even longer before you start to loose a lot of the Pa-233.

Thus, at this point you could do the process over again, removing the uranium and retaining the protactinium and you would have a very high concentration of Pa-233 and very little Pa-232, which is where the U-232 would come from. This is not very difficult and could easily be done with what is available. The result is basically an easy source of weapons grade U-233.

Therefore, according to Dr. Buzzo, it is undesirable to to separate Protactinium from its carrier salts, if you are worried about proliferation. In response to Dr. Buzzo's proliferation related concern, David LeBlanc commented,

Many of us on this site strongly favor the 2 Fluid design of having one salt with the U233 (and maybe a little thorium) and a separate salt for the thorium. The Single Fluid design however has been what most researchers have focused on since the late 1960s.

In a Single Fluid design it is much more difficult to try to skip Pa removal and still break even. The way to lower the neutron losses to Pa is to lower the average neutron flux it experiences (especially thermal neutrons). You can do this by simply having a much larger core or by having excess salt that you cycle in and out of the reactor loop. However, in a Single Fluid design, having more fuel salt means having much more fissile material to start. This is not a deal breaker but a serious impediment nonetheless.

In a 2 Fluid design we can lower losses to Pa down to almost nothing by simply increasing the volume of blanket salt. This means paying for more thorium and carrier salt but thorium is very inexpensive (the true potential cost of mass produced Flibe salt is unfortunately one of the big unknowns). For example, 1960s 2 Fluid designs had about 260 tonnes of thorium in the blanket salt versus about 70 tonnes in the later Single Fluid design.

In another thread, Dr. LeBlanc commented,

in a 2 fluid reactor you can have more blanket salt cycled in and out of your reactor to really lower the loses to Pa. Here are some numbers to give you an idea of losses (remember you can almost double the values since you often lose a second neutron to U234):

Single Fluid design with a 3 day Pa removal time, Pa losses are 0.0017 out of 2.23 neutrons

Single Fluid design WITHOUT Pa removal, Pa losses are 0.05 out of 2.23

2 Fluid design with lots of blanket salt, NO Pa removal (ORNL 1467) 0.0079 out of 2.22 (0.36%)

2 Fluid design with less blanket salt but Pa removal (ORNL 4528) 0.0002 out of 2.22.

The neutron losses for all designs noted by Dr. LeBlanc are acceptable for breeding purposes. Thus a LFTR designer has a number of potions to chose from, in creating a design that best meets breeding goals. As it turns out, according to Dr. LeBlanc, none of the options pose serious barriers to breeding goals, although one option - Single fluid design with no Pa removal - offers the most disadvantages.

There are a number of number of problems associated with core graphite in thermal MSRs. Graphite cores breeders offer huge scalability advantages, because they can be started with a small charge of fissionable material. It takes about 10 times more fissionable material to start a Fast Breeder reactor, than a graphite moderated thermal breeder requires. This makes an enormous difference in the number of reactors that can be started quickly. Well over a year ago I posted a comment on Brave New Climate,

By 2050 if not sooner, we will begin to need breeder technology in order to keep up with world energy demand. The question is which Generation IV technology will have the advantage. I have argued that LFTRs will, because they are far more scaleable, can be manufactured more rapidly, are more flexible, and will be perceived as safer, and less of a proliferation danger. (I am not arguing the last two are the case, I am now satisfied of IFR safety, and proliferation is an anti-nuclear canard,.) Claims of high IFR breeding ratios are not confirmed from IFR design plans. The only IFR designs I was able to locate on the Information Bridge, had a maximum breeding ration of 1 to 1.07, the same as 1970′s ORNL MSBR designs. Statements by IFR advocates indicate no higher breeding ration can be expected in the near term. Since as many as 12 LFTRs of equivalent power output can be started for every IFR, if the IFR has no breeding ratio improvement, it cannot be seen as the most likely LWR replacement. Never-the-less world wide we will see LMFBRs. I believe that the Indians are considering plans to build as many as 300 500 MW LMFBRs, and I fully expect Russia, China and Japan to enter the LMFBR race.

However, it turns out that the reactor grade plutonium from spent light water reactor fuel becomes a chocking point for Generation IV reactors. The world supply of unused reactor fuel now is sufficient to now start a very large number of LFTRs, but not of IFRs. Given that current IFRs designs have no breeding advantage over the LFTR, allotment of RGP to start LFTRs offers some enormous scale advantages. Given that LFTRs are likely to cost less to build, can be built more rapidly, and are likely to have less political and public opposition, it seems to me that IFR advocates are backing the wrong horse in the Generation IV breeder race.

Needless to say, IFR advocates were not pleased by this comment, but they have not been able to show that I was wrong. However, in order to wrap the thermal scalability LFTR advantage, we have to find ways to solve the graphite problems. The two major graphite problems, are

* graphite deterioration in a high neutron flux environment

* And a positive coefficient of reactivity associated with core graphite.

If we want to build a large number of LFTRs quickly then we have to find a workaround. On solution to the graphite deterioration problem is to replace the core graphite every few years. One way to accomplish this is by using graphite pebbles rather than a graphite core structure. The pebbles can be replaced as they reach a point where their deterioration become unacceptable. "Cyril R" points out,

Graphite pebbles have a lot of potential advantages. In one two fluid design, the pebbles are filled with blanket salt. This means every pebble is a barrier, and so barrier maintenance is potentially easier. However, circulating pebbles turns out to be a bit tricky, and with a lot of pebbles all containing liquid blanket salt, broken pebbles seem like a big risk in a true two fluid design. . . .

However, if solid graphite pebbles were to be used in a two fluid design like David's tube in shell, things would be easier. The pebbles wouldn't circulate, but act as fairly static moderator. The simple graphite pebbles would last longer and be easy to replace. Because pebbles have a high void fraction, the traditional MSR graphite density could not be achieved (probably at least half the graphite density).

Lars commented,

Graphite in the blanket would serve to slow the neutrons down. The slower spectrum will make all cross-sections larger so less blanket salt is required to absorb the neutrons. However, the cross-section of the fissile will grow dramatically faster than anything else - which is not good in the blanket. It means that we have to keep the u233/th232 ratio much lower to keep fission in the blanket rare. So one result is that we have to process the blanket faster to keep the u233 concentration down. I'm not sure how big an issue this is - the original 2-fluid ORNL designs were thermal and so they faced this issue and did not identify it as the reason to stop work on the 2-fluid design. But they also generally assumed they could process things at a pretty high rate.

Another effect of graphite in the blanket would be that any neutrons that hit the exterior wall would be slow so they are much easier to absorb and stop and are easier on that wall.

Another effect is that it becomes more cost effective to absorb a higher percentage of the neutrons in the blanket since the thorium in the salt is more effective at absorbing slower neutrons.

One BIG concern is that if there is a big break in the plumbing for the blanket salt you will drain the neutron absorber from the blanket. With the graphite present it will slow down and reflect many neutrons back toward the core. In normal operations the blanket salt will absorb most of them. With the blanket salt drained they will go back to the core. In other words, if you get a dramatic break in the blanket plumbing and drain the blanket salt the reactivity of the core will go up. This can not be allowed. The design would need to somehow guarantee that no matter what the reactivity of the core does not go up in any accident scenario.

David LeBlanc described his position.

your don't want graphite or other good neutron reflecting material in the blanket zone or you end up with reactivity problems if the blanket salt drains or even just gets hotter and less dense.

For the core, using graphite is always a serious option and pebbles certainly have some big advantages but they don`t really help with the core to blanket barrier issue. Even a core with graphite moderator you still need some sort of physical barrier to the separate the fuel and blanket salts (any Two Fluid or 1 and 1/2 Fluid needs barrier material). A graphite core of logs might make things a little easier because we could have a simple metal cladding wrapped around it that would need no structural strength of its own). My google tech talk also shows a method to use individual graphite logs bunched together as the barrier but too complicated to describe here.

So in general, pebbles versus logs is always going to be an interesting trade off of pros and cons. In terms of radiation damage, I still don`t know if anyone has a good idea of how long a pebble would be last. The expansion beyond original size is no longer of structural concern for the core (like it would be for logs) but it the pebble starts to crack due to expansion then we do have a big problem. ORNL seemed to be on the fence regarding this in their early studies with pebbles (which seemed always to be a Plan B that never got too deep a look).

In most cases, comments are or can be referenced back to ORNL MSR research. I could quote more of the graphite pebbles discussion which illuminates a number of problems, but this is enough to suggest that MSRs problems exist, but that solutions and work arounds are available. Each solution or work around may have its cost, so any MSR/LFTR design is going to offer a compromise. The question facing the LFTR designer is, which set of compromises works best given design goals. Because the graphite moderated LFTR is highly scalable even without a high breeding ratio, designing the LFTR to produce just one U-233 atom for every fissionable atom burned. Not only does this decrease proliferation risks, but it allows for more breeding ratio lowering compromises in the LFTR design.

There would be a set of problems for every MSR/LFTR design, but there appear to be an acceptable set of compromises for the problems we have looked at. At least some of the compromises I have reviewed, seem to have secondary benefits that are consistent with probable design goals. In the nearly 40,000 comments of the Energy from Thorium discussion section, no one single killer problem has yet popped up. This most likely means that development of various MSR designs including LFTRs will not involve serious development challenges, and we can be reasonably but not entirely certain that serious problems will not impede MSR/LFTR developmental progress.

Thus it can be asserted with reasonable certainty that the LFTR offers a potential long term solution to human energy needs, that is consistent with a high energy lifestyle, and which will not create the sort of safety, waste, proliferation and capitol cost problems associated with LWR power technology.

Honesty and the Green Case against Nuclear Power

2011-08-28T05:35:00.006-05:00

Greens accounts of nuclear power and nuclear power safety and proliferation related issues are riddled with quite obvious mistakes and misrepresentations of well documented facts. Many of those deliberate misrepresentations and errors are intended to creat doubts and fear in the minds of the readers and listeners.

In December 2006 by the Canadian Pembina Institute published a report (titled Nuclear Power in Canada: an Examination of Risks, Impacts and Sustainability), that was harshly critical of nuclear power. The Report Summary stated:

Any life-cycle analysis of an energy source is likely to identify previously unrecognized or un-quantified impacts. However, the range and scale of impacts and risks associated with nuclear power production make it unique among energy sources.

While the greenhouse gas emissions associated with nuclear power are less than those that would be associated with conventional fossil fuel energy use, no other energy source combines the generation of a range of conventional pollutants and waste streams – including heavy metals, smog and acid rain precursors, and water contaminants – with the generation of extremely large volumes of radioactive wastes that will require care and management over hundreds of thousands of years. The combination of these envi- ronmental challenges, along with security, accident and weapons proliferation risks that are simply not shared by any other energy source, place nuclear energy in a unique category relative to all other energy supply options. In essence, reliance on nuclear power as a response to climate change would involve trading one problem – greenhouse gas emissions – for which a wide range of other solutions exist, for a series of other complex and difficult problems for which solutions are generally more costly and difficult and for which the outcomes are much less certain.

This report is still available online today at the Pembina Institute web site. It has not been altered from its 2006 form, despite the numous errors in the report that have been pointed out by its critics. Pembina Institute has not undertaken a response to its critics, even though they= Institute and its board of directors must be aware of the criticisms.

The Canadian Energy Research Institute (CERI) prepared a response to Nuclear Power in Canada, titled Nuclear Power in Canada: A Review of a Critique. The Introduction to that Review states,

The Pembina Institute released a report in December 2006, entitled Nuclear Power in Canada: an Examination of Risks, Impacts and Sustainability (hereafter referred to as the Pembina report). The report addressed the suitability of nuclear power as an energy source in modern society. It focused on six major issues that surround nuclear power: safety, reliability, cleanliness, greenhouse gases, sustainability, and cost-effectiveness. The Institute found nuclear wanting on all of these counts.
The purpose of this study is to review and assess the Pembina report and its relevance to the application by the Sierra Legal Defence Fund (name subsequently changed to Ecojustice) for a complaint filed with the Competition Bureau. The current work reviews the Pembina report with the normal standards of scientific inquiry in mind. These standards are discussed in a limited fashion, although adequately for the purpose at hand, in Appendix 1. The Appendix essentially states that when providing commentary such as that in the Pembina report, a measure of objectivity must be adopted in order to avoid the kind of bias associated with extreme political views — views that may unfairly influence the obvious conclusions and lead to faulty advice with respect to policy. We do not address everything in the report, but we do identify numerous cases where the conclusions seemed unsupported by evidence or where other analytical deficiencies were identified. Our review concludes that the Pembina report exhibits a bias against the nuclear sector that a critical analysis would suggest is not warranted. The report, in our view, is of very limited use as a means to understanding the role and place of nuclear energy in the modern world and the appropriate policies that should condition that use.

The strength of the conclusion warrants some comment. We recognize the authors of this work may not represent the views of the Pembina Institute as a corporate entity. It is not our intent to criticize the Institute itself, rather the specific study under review. Pembina acknowledges some bias in favour of protecting the environment, and CERI accepts that there is a range of views on the broader subject of environmental policy that can be supported by legitimate scientific enquiry. Therefore, in the spirit of candid discourse, it is reasonable to provide diverse views on subjects of academic and policy interest. That was the spirit in which we undertook the study. However, when our work was completed, it was the unanimous conclusion of all our review team that there appears to be an unusually strong bias against nuclear energy in the Pembina report; in our judgment, that bias cannot be supported by the facts or the arguments presented.

We note that Sierra Legal, in an application to the Competition Bureau dated 18 December 2006, used the Pembina report to support a charge that the nuclear industry, through its high-level advertising, misrepresents the economic and environmental implications of using nuclear power. While those charges are not the subject of this review, we are obligated to note that, to the extent that they rely on the report at issue, the charges are likely unwarranted.

The Pembina report provides a significant amount of information on the nuclear industry, its operation and history. That information, much of which provides accurate descriptive background, is then interspersed with comments or conclusions that we found questionable; either because they are susceptible to further analysis which would lead to different conclusions, or because they are limited to Canada, when relevant information from other countries should have been incorporated. It was somewhat surprising to find that all of the authors’ interpretations tended to result in negative conclusions. That led our review to focus on those negative conclusions to see whether or not they are reliable.

The CERI response is extremeky well thought out, and engages in considered reflection on the employment of objective research method in research on energy issues. The CERI response points to the role of biase in the Pembina Selection of data:

The Pembina report contains extensive descriptions of the various phases of the nuclear cycle and underscores the negative aspects of nuclear power in Canada. However, as the emphasis on painting a negative picture is apparent, the report initiates inevitable questions as to the reasonableness of its own statements and conclusions.

The Pembina report is, according to its authors, “intended to inform public debate over the future role of nuclear energy in Canada and to facilitate comparisons of nuclear energy with other potential energy sources” (p. 3.) The study falls short of this objective for a number of reasons that will be addressed in detail in the remainder of this review. . . .

Major flaws are identified

Perhaps the most important limitation stems from the failure to compare the results to other alternatives. However, other concerns include the fact that although the report covers several time periods, it does not properly identify trends. Rather it presents a snapshot-like picture of nuclear power instead of acknowledging the dynamic aspect of past developments and likely future evolution. The snapshot neglects comparisons with alternatives, positive aspects of nuclear energy, the need for diversification of energy supplies, and the increasingly important uses for nuclear technology in medicine and other fields.

Moreover, the report does not feature appropriate comparisons because it does not identify emissions that can be legitimately tied to domestic electricity generation rather than exports or non-electric uses. The occasional exclusion of some emissions as being not relevant to domestic generation, as in Tables 3.3 and 4.18, tend to disguise this problem, raising suspicions about possible bias.

It is unfortunate that the report does not provide quantitative analysis that supports its conclusions. While the nuclear life cycle is discussed in great scientific detail (VOCs, Tritium Oxides, Iodine-131 etc.), there is little analysis. The report is essentially a literature review, relaying data and information regarding the risks and impacts of nuclear power through its entire life cycle, often relying on outdated stereotypes and perceptions of nuclear energy. It appears, on occasion, to be selective in the research it cites. In Chapter 6, for example, it provides little empirical evidence, simply noting cost overruns related to certain nuclear facilities and increasing prices of uranium. Notwithstanding the lack of evidence, the report’s conclusions that nuclear is neither cost-effective nor sustainable are emphatic.

The literature review the authors rely on is itself limited. While the report examines risks and impacts in Canada, it would be useful to compare and review the experience of other nations with regard to nuclear power operation and spent fuel management. This is especially true for the second phase, in which the Pembina report begins by stating that “available information on the impacts of uranium refining, conversion and fuel fabrication is limited” (p. 43). The authors do not cite the nuclear experiences of nations such as the United States, the United Kingdom and France, whose experiences could have enhanced the scope of the report, yet were ignored. Despite the lack of thorough review, the authors are willing to conclude that, “the environmental impacts of uranium mining and milling are severe” (p. 23). This is inconsistent with effective scientific inquiry.

The Pembina report offers a menu of policy conclusions that address the emotional rather than the logical consciousness of decision makers and the public. Advice for policy making should be based on concrete evidence that leads to confidence in findings and conclusions.

Because both evidence and credible presumption stemming from reasoned argument are lacking, the report is of limited usefulness.

As a scholarly assessment of the work of other scholars, this is utterly damming. Yet it is clear that Pembina does not care. It still posts the unaltered" Nuclear Power in Canada" on the PI web page. Nor does it appear that Penbina has not posted a defense of the shoddy practices which the CERI critique pointed out. Such practices dare to say the least, all too characteristic of the Green Industry.

The Problem is illustrated by Review of the Greenpeace report:“Tritium Hazard Report: Pollution and Radiation Risk from Canadian Nuclear Facilities” by R.V. Osborne. Osborne finds that,

The report has been written in two main parts. Part 1 discusses the basic properties of tritium and the levels of tritium in the Canadian environment. It is based largely on the data in a document prepared for the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission in 2002. In that document, the exposures to tritium of individual members of the public were estimated for three environments; one representative of the tritium levels distant (~ 40 km or more) from nuclear facilities, another representative of the area around a nuclear facility where tritium is produced or handled and the diet is of locally produced foods, and a third area, very close to a nuclear facility with a diet that includes some fruit and vegetables from a garden adjacent to the facility. Although it is clear from the text that some of the aspects of behavior of tritium in the environment and of the biokinetics of tritium are misunderstood by the author of the Greenpeace report, the analysis yields similar values for the exposures except for the environment with the highest levels. Here, the quite unrealistic assumption was made that the complete diet could be provided by the local garden; an assumption that more than doubled the estimated exposure. Nevertheless, the Greenpeace report notes that based on the current understanding of the dosimetric implications of these levels of tritium, even with the unrealistically high value calculated in this report, the doses to the general public “are miniscule”, and are not a health concern. However, the report claims that the current understanding of the dosimetry and biological effects of tritium is wrong, that the doses from tritium are much more significant than currently acknowledged (by a factor of ten at least, which is supposedly shown in Part 2 of the report and its appendices), and that there are real implications for health. The analysis in Part 2 and the appendices does not support this contention. There are misinterpretations and misunderstandings of the scientific literature and no new points are made. The text is largely based on a paper prepared by a European NGO for a review by a UK committee in 2003; a review that found the analysis unpersuasive. The additional material presented in this Greenpeace version is a review of Canadian epidemiological studies but it has misinterpretations of the various studies and provides no evidence for the observation of any effects on health from tritium.

Osborne noted unwarranted recommendations growing out of the Greenpeace misrepresentation of the environmental hazards posed by tritium from Canadian reactors,

Based on the claimed hazard from tritium near nuclear facilities in Canada, Greenpeace make six recommendations. Two in particular are completely unjustified; namely that pregnant women and young children should not live near nuclear facilities and that food from gardens near nuclear facilities should not be consumed. This is unwarranted fear-mongering. Even if the doses from tritium were to be ten times those that could conceivably be the maximum, such recommendations would be unnecessary.

Osborne reports a number of misrepresentations and/or mistakes in the Greenpeace report. For example,

There is a suggestion in the Greenpeace report that “few tritium emissions” from nuclear facilities in Canada are by way of a stack or chimney and that “tritiated water vapour literally oozes out of practically every surface, nook and cranny of the reactor building”. No reference is cited. The suggestion is plain nonsense. For a start, reactor buildings are operated at negative pressure with respect to the ambient atmospheric pressure and have to meet stringent leakage tests. Further, any tritiated water in the liquid phase that does escape from reactor systems within the reactor buildings is collected in tanks and is monitored and handled as liquid waste.

And

There is also the implication by Greenpeace that increasing concentrations of tritium (in the moderator and coolant of CANDU reactors) have caused radiation degeneration of seals, resins and filters, without any reference being cited. Again, this claim is wrong.

Osborne points to evidence that the Greenpeace report simply invents facts,

in commenting on the processing of heavy water moderator and coolant from the nuclear power plants at Pickering and Bruce, the author refers to the “problem of the estimated 4,000 truckloads per year” estimated to be needed to transport the heavy water to the Darlington facility. There are not 4000 truckloads per year. The estimate is high by at least an order of magnitude even if all the heavy water going to the Darlington facility had to be trucked there, but of course it does not since the Darlington reactors are on the same site.

In addition the Greenpeace text uses vague language to create impressions that may not be factually true,

Throughout the text the qualifiers “large”, “very large”, “extremely large” and “surprisingly large” are applied to tritium releases without any indication of the criterion on which this characterization is based. Indeed the whole chapter and the recommendation at the end to reduce tritium emissions are written without any indication of the dosimetric implications of the releases. As will be seen in subsequent chapters, these doses are low, even for the most highly exposed, relative to regulatory standards and to the magnitude of fluctuations experienced by the public from natural sources of radioactivity.

The Greenpeace report substitutes games with words, for fact based characterizations of real problems.

The Greenpeace author notes that the emissions from CANDU NPPs are way below the release limits that are derived from the Canadian regulatory limit of one mSv/a to a member of the public. The author then argues that the regulatory agency (the CNSC) therefore does not “restrict” the amounts of radioactive materials that are being released, as is claimed by that agency. This argument by Greenpeace is just playing with words and, in effect, completely ignores the application of the well-established ALARA1 principle, reflected in the conditions in site licences and the imposition of action levels.

The Greenpeace report is either confused or is deliberately attempting to introduce confusion.

The limits on tritium in drinking water are discussed. In the discussion there is confusion between the different approaches taken to setting drinking water guides for chemicals and for radionuclides. There is even the implication that detection limits would be appropriate for setting the guides. Given the sensitivity with which radionuclides can be detected, and in particular that for tritium in water (~one part per million million million), such a criterion would lead to an absurd standard that corresponded to a dose rate less than 2 nSv/a from continuous ingestion of water with this concentration; the dose rate is less than one millionth of the dose rate from the natural radiation background. Even the level of naturally-produced tritium in drinking water is greater than this.

Osborn points out that the Greenpeace report claims an increase in tritium concentration in the Great Lakes, when in fact just the opposite was the case. From the 1960's until the time of the Greenpeace report, the concentration of tritium in the Great Lakes had actually dropped.

Tritium concentrations measured during 1997/1998 in the Great Lakes are summarized. The values given are the same as those quoted in Osborne [2002]—the reference papers are the same—but the Greenpeace report does not include the values for earlier years. These show that the concentrations in the Great Lakes have been decreasing since the mid-sixties when fallout from nuclear weapons tests was at a maximum—even those in Lake Huron and Lake Ontario— despite the emissions from the nuclear facilities. For example, the value measured in Lake Ontario in 1965 was 43 Bq/L; by 1997 it was 7 Bq/L [King and Workman 1997].

Despite these clear data, the Greenpeace author contends that there is a “continued rise in tritium levels in most Great Lakes” and add that they are a “matter of concern”. Greenpeace also list incidents in which there have been transient tritium releases and contends that these too are matters of concern.

Osborne points out many other examples of mistakes or deliberate misrepresentations of facts If we assume mistakes we must assume that the Greenpeace authors are deliberately careless to the point of making up facts without checking. Thus the claim to represent truthful knowledge is in fact a misrepresentation.

In addition to the erroneous representations of fact, Osborn notes,

Tritium concentrations measured during 1997/1998 in the Great Lakes are summarized. The values given are the same as those quoted in Osborne [2002]—the reference papers are the same—but the Greenpeace report does not include the values for earlier years. These show that the concentrations in the Great Lakes have been decreasing since the mid-sixties when fallout from nuclear weapons tests was at a maximum—even those in Lake Huron and Lake Ontario— despite the emissions from the nuclear facilities. For example, the value measured in Lake Ontario in 1965 was 43 Bq/L; by 1997 it was 7 Bq/L [King and Workman 1997].
Despite these clear data, the Greenpeace author contends that there is a “continued rise in tritium levels in most Great Lakes” and add that they are a “matter of concern”. Greenpeace also list incidents in which there have been transient tritium releases and contends that these too are matters of concern.

There is plenty of reason for concern about the honesty and altruism of Greenpeace.

Greenpeace is a wealthy and powerful business. Greenpeace does not make anything, and despite its commitment to "green" values, does not cultivate any environmentally friendly plants, non genetically modified plants. Instead, when Greenpeace wishes to make money, it raises hell. This never ceases to impress the mainstream media, which can peddle the titillating story of Greanpeace's latest hell raising campaign to sensation hungry readers and viewers.

Some of Greenpeace's escapades seem to be motivated by a sort of legal blackmail. Greenpeace, is at the very least, guilty of fear mongeringg and pushing the limits of truth in many of its publicity campaigns. Among Greenpeace claims:

* that it is dangerous to drink Budweiser beer because of the use of a small amount of genetically modified rice in the brewing process.

* That food grown by American farmers should be boycotted, because it is legal to grow genetically modified crops in the United States.

* That Genetically modified crops are a disaster waiting to happen

* That animals fed genetically modified foods show serious side effects.

* Thar bromine detected in the Apple iPhone were environmentally harmful, even though none of the bromine compounds detected were seen as harmful by European Union environmental standards covering toxic substances in electronics. ,

Needless to say, Greenpeace lacks scientific evidence to back up these absurd claims. Greenpeace makes money by telling lies that misrepresent facts.

A Greenpeace media story began with the headline,

Cracks in nuclear power plant.

But were the cracks flaws in the power plant's structure? No! The Greenpeace story tells us,

Thirty Greenpeace activists entered the Borssele nuclear power plant in Zeeland, Netherlands. On top of the nuclear reactor, a crack has been painted to demonstrate the fact that the power plant is old and not safe and should be closed by 2013, as agreed previously. The Dutch government is reconsidering to keep the nuclear plant open after 2013.

Greenpeace always lies. There were no structural cracks in the Zeeland power plant, rather cracks painted by Greenpeace, and there were no serious indicators that the Zeeland plant was actually not safe due to its age.

The Greenpeace story pulls out all the stops as it tells us about the Nuclear Bogeyman, that oh so dangerous and oh so evil enemy of human well being.

The reality of nuclear power is no different now than it was in the 20th Century - it is inherently dangerous.

Time and time again the industry has demonstrated that safety and nuclear power is a contradiction in terms.

Safe reactors are a myth. An accident can occur in any nuclear reactor, causing the release of large quantities of deadly radiation into the environment. Even during normal operations radioactive materials are regularly discharged into the air and water. The policy of secrecy,which surrounded the development of the bomb, was transferred to civil nuclear power projects after World War II and lives on today. . . .

Aging of nuclear reactors, in particular the effect of prolonged operation on materials and large components, is endemic throughout the world's nuclear industry. At the same time nuclear operators are continually trying to reduce costs due to both greater competition in the electricity market and the need to meet shareholder expectations.

Are civilian power reactors as "inherently dangerous" as Greenpeace claims?

Cyril a regulat contributor to the Energy from Thorium Discussion commented:

I don't get the whole quest for inherently safe reactors. LWRs have negative reactivity due to the coolant also being the moderator that keeps the chain reaction going. If something drastic happens the coolant will be lost and the chain reaction will stop. In fact the chain reaction will stop even without breaking primary circuit, the negative feedback is very powerful.

This is an inherent safety mechanism. It means LWRs cannot go Chernobyl. They can still damage themselves from fission product afterheat. This damage is limited to the plant. It is the difference between having 7% heat load or 10000% (the latter caused Chernobyl). The negative feedback prevents Chernobyl completely. It is physics.

I don't like it when people talk about gen4 as inherently safe because it suggests there is no inherent safety with current designs. As we can see above this is not correct. If we define inherently safe as being completely safe to the general public, then LWRs already do this.

Cyril is quite correct that the LWR has some inherent safety features, and in particular a negative coefficient of reactivity in the event of coolant loss. The Three Mile Island accident established a LWR core meltdown would not trigger a China syndrome situation. That is the reactor pressure vessel would contain the molten core at least in most situations. in the TMI accident the core actually only partly melted, and the TMI accident was the worst loss of coolant accident that could reasonably be expected. The TMI accident left two significant containment barriers intact, demonstrating that even in the worst nuclear accident, the public would be safe. Nuclear power plants proven by TMI to not just be safe "by the skin of our teeth," but to be safe by a wide margin.

Radioactive gasses did escape from the TMI reactor during the incident, but they did not pose biological dangers, and were quickly dispersed. No one died as a consequence of escaping gasses at TMI, and no one got sick. And TMI was the worst accident that can reasonably be expected. Far from being inherently dangerous, the LIght Water Reactor was proven to be quite safe, not safe in the sense that LWRs will never have accidents or mishaps, but that accidents or mishaps involving the reactor core will not kill or injure people. Nuclear power plants turn out to be safer than gas fired power plants, far safer than coal fired power plants, far safer than wind turbines, and far safer than solar photovoltaic generating systems, when it comes to human safety. The one thing you will never find Greenpeace doing is publishing objective accounts of renewable energy related accidents or publishing objective data on deaths and injuries tied to renewable energy related accidents. On the other hand Greenpeace unceasingly exaggerates the death total from the Chernobyl nuclear accident. The Greenpeace account of Chernobyl casualties keeps rising. Ten years after the accident Greenpeace claimed that it had produced 2500 casualties. Radiations exposures from the Chernobyl accident as well as their effect have been wildly exagerated by the Greenpeace influenced media. A recent Greenpeace report, which Greenpeace conned the New York Academy of Sciences into publishing claimed that the Chernobyl death total was approaching one million people. What of Reports of respected agencies like the world Health Agency which pegged the Chernobyl death toll at 4000. According to Greenpeace the WHO is lying. Well someone is probably lying, but do you really believe that it is the WHO?

I have a long standing interest in the sociology and social psychology of public issues. Why do people put up with this crap? Modernity is marked by the use of political and social issues to define personal identity and the identity of social groups. Although disinterested individuals may come to see certain issues as being of great importance to society and chose to devote time and energy to those issues out of purely altruistic concerns, this is far from always the case. Some of the leading critics of nuclear power have tied their hostility to nuclear power to personal business interests. This would include figures like Ralph Nader, Amory Lovins, and organizations like Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace.

It is often assumed that non-profit status, implies a lack of financial motivation, but such beliefs would not be held by people who have worked in the non=profit economic sector. Often non-profits are set up in such a way that great economic benefits may flow to a single manager or to a small numbers of managers, while most of the agencies employees may be underpaid. I't is not unusual for agencies to violate their own rules, by denying fair compensation to some employees, while overcompensating others. Boards of directors may turn out to be the personal friends of the executive director, or alternatively the board may never meet, and decisions are reached by phone calls between the chairman of the board and the executive director. The income from the agency may come in the form of grants and contracts that are subtly at variance with the public purposes of the organization. Thus an environmental organization known for its anti-nuclear stance may be taking money from a foundation to promote the idea of clean coal. The foundation may in turn receive funding from coal mining interests. The organizations leadership may understand all of this, but the reality may not be appreciated by the organizations rank and file or a large numbers of people who identify with the cause and support it by making small or even large contributions to what they regard as a good cause.

Leaders in popular, issues related social movements may be more conceerned about managing followers social identities than in the accuracy of information they offer the public, Thus leaders and other individuals who have tied themselves to the anti-nuclear movement may spend a great deal of time motivating followers to oppose nuclear power without concern about the truthfulness of statements made to increase the motivation of followers.

Even those who are aware of the inconsistency between high minded purpose and cynical manipulative and dishonest means are loath to publicly point to the conflict. I would by no means confine the scope of these remarks to the anti-nuclear movement. The leadership of many allegedly high minded organizations conduct their business in dishonest fashion. And even with organizations whose overall commitment to high minded goals is unquestionable, lying and deception still may be an informal part of the organizations method of doing business.

I am not suggestion that all or even most cause oriented organizations are corrupt, only that the high minded should not ignore evidence of deception on the part of their leadership. Those who do so are enablers of wrong doing, either by playing the role of mark or chump, or by cynically becoming a party to the deception. We should not assume that Harvey Wasserman, Amory Lovins, Helen Caldicott, or Ralph Nader are unaware of the extent to which they engage in deception while promoting their anti-nuclear cause, or the compromises that figures like journalist Ellen Goodman make while facilitating the communication of these deception.

It is my contention then that anti-nuclear leaders and organizations knowingly repeat false or inaccurate information as part of their anti-nuclear campaigns, and that among their motivations for doing so, are financial rewards. I further maintain that there is an anti-nuclear business, and that among the services it provides, is the manipulation of adherents identities. The motivation of adherents has been explored by Eric Hoffer, who wrote in The Ordeal of Change

"Faith, enthusiasm, and passionate intensity in general are substitutes for the self-confidence born of experience and the possession of skill. ... The substitute for self-confidence is faith ... the substitute for self-esteem is pride; and the substitute for individual balance is fusion with others in a compact group. ... In the chemistry of the soul, a substitute is almost always explosive if for no other reason than that we can never have enough of it. We can never have enough of that which we really do not want. What we want is justified self-confidence and self-esteem. .... We can be satisfied with moderate confidence in ourselves and with a moderately good opinion of ourselves, but the faith we have in a holy cause has to be extravagant and uncompromising, and the pride we derive form an identification with a nation, race, leader, or party [religion] is extreme and overbearing."

Nuclear supporters may at present be protected from corruption, not by any moral superiority that might fall to us because of the rightness and justice of our cause, but by the lack of motive for corruption. Despite the charge by our critics that we are shills for the nuclear industry, in fact the nuclear industry for the most part a distant reality from which we receive no benefits, nor do we expect too. But were bribes available would we be incorruptable?

DA Ryan, spiraling down

2011-08-26T05:57:00.002-05:00

DA Ryan just sinks lower and lower. Here is one of his most recent posts. I do not believe that I need to repond.

daryan12 commented on A critical analysis of current and proposed future nuclear reactors designs.

in response to a comment by daryan12:

Once upon a time I used to be a fan of nuclear energy. As far as I saw it, nuclear energy was the silver bullet solution to all of our energy problems and more. However, the more I’ve learned about the industry the more critical I’ve become. Notably the fact that most of the economic [...]

Another rant / rave / character assassination can be found here: http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2011/08/da-ryan.html
Yet again “Rank Amateur” Charles Barton demonstrates all the standard methods employed by the LFTR cargo cult in dealing with opponents, i.e. quote mining, misrepresentation of their statements, deliberate straw man building and Gish Galloping galore. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop

Again my views are completely misrepresented and taken out of context by CB. As anyone who reads what I actually say in my link below and compares it to what he claims I say (by quote mining) you will see a distinct difference. For example I acknowledged the new evidence that has emerged from the investigations into Windscale (showing minimal core burning) and even post a link to it on my page, although I also give several other counter points, as anyone doing a balanced critique would do, of course a fanatic like CB doesn’t see it that way. http://daryanenergyblog.wordpress.com/ca/part-6_htgr/6-4-3-fire-risk-and-mitigation/

I would also note that CB asks where’s my evidence? I’ve pointed out to him much evidence in the link above, including several peer reviewed papers (both for and against) and the official NEA Chernobyl accident report, plus several more in comments exchanges. I have done these repeatedly, but he just doesn’t listen.
http://daryanenergyblog.wordpress.com/ca/#comment-161 http://daryanenergyblog.wordpress.com/ca/#comment-135 http://daryanenergyblog.wordpress.com/ca/#comment-120 http://daryanenergyblog.wordpress.com/ca/#comment-141 http://daryanenergyblog.wordpress.com/ca/#comment-160

Furthermore, as even BH has noted, some degree of containment of a MSR reactor would be necessary. Be careful there sir, CB maybe about to call you a heretic against his “precious” too! http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2011/08/d-ryan-msrlftr-critique-not-ready-for.html

Consider the following, BH and CB have now devoted as best I can tell 11,000 odd words to they’re 3 “Gish Gallops” plus a further 3-4,000 odd words here (out of a total comments page length of 22,000, 90% of it run up by LFTR fans or the rebuttals to their points). All together they have written comments double the length of the original MSR article, and most of that has been directed at two small pieces (the fire risk sections) of at most 1,000 words length! The irony is, some LFTR fans have complained about my article being too long! Naturally such insane antics does much damage to their cause.

I think they doth protest too much! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_lady_doth_protest_too_much,_methinks

Deproliferation, India and the Thorium Fuel Cycle

2011-08-25T02:35:00.001-05:00

In the first part of this essay, I reviewed the almost inevitable rise of China and India to great power status. I pointed out that by 2050, current expectations are that by 2050, China and India will be ranked along with the United States as great powers of the first order. I noted that both China and India are committed to the development of Thorium fuel cycle nuclear technology, and the possibility that those commitments could chalenge the current course of American nonproliferation policy.

It is possible to produce fissionable U-233 from thorium from the same sort of reactors used to produce weapons grade plutonium, yet during the cold war, no one thought to do so. Frank von Hippel is a self-styled non-proliferation expert who has greatly influenced American, and even global non-proliferation policy. Other self-styled non=proliferation experts tend to advocates arms control policies suggested by von Hippel. Together with Jungmin Kanga and von Hippel, actually attempted to explore this seemingly rational step was not taken during and after the cold war in a paper titled U-232 and the Proliferation- Resistance of U-233 in Spent Fuel.

They write,

Uranium-233 is, like plutonium-239, a long-lived fissile isotope produced in reactors by single-neutron capture in a naturally-occurring abundant fertile isotope (see Figure 1). The fast critical mass of U-233 is almost identical to that for Pu-239 and the spontaneous fission rate is much lower, reducing to negligible levels the problem of a spontaneous fission neutron prematurely initiating the chain reaction -- even in a "gun-type" design such as used for the U-235 Hiroshima bomb (see Table 1). Why then has plutonium been used as the standard fissile material in the "pits" of modern nuclear weapons while U- 233 has not? This question is not just of historical interest, since there is increasing interest in U-233-thorium fuel cycles.

Kanga and von Hippel note

One of the most important reasons why plutonium was chosen over U-233 as a weapons material is that first-generation plutonium-production reactors were fueled by natural uranium, which contains almost as large a fraction of neutron-absorbing fertile material (U-238) as is possible consistent with a reactor achieving criticality. In a natural-uranium fueled reactor, such as the Canadian heavy-water-moderated (HWR) reactor type, Pu-239 is produced by neutron absorption in U-238 at a rate of about one gram of plutonium per thermal megawatt-day (MWd) of fission energy release at low U-235 "burn ups," (see Figure 2).1 Approximately one MWd is released by the fission of one gram of fissile material. After taking into account the neutron requirements for maintaining a steady chain reaction, there is about one excess neutron available per fission and virtually all of these neutrons are absorbed by U-238. Production of U-233 requires the addition of the fertile material Th-232. If the fuel is natural uranium, only a relatively small percentage of thorium can be added before it becomes impossible to sustain a chain reaction. We"estimate that about 7 percent thorium oxide can be added to HWR fuel achievable burnup is reduced from 7000 to 1000 MWd/t (thermal megawatt- days per ton-heavy metal). Because the thermal-neutron absorption cross-section of Th-232 is almost 3 times larger than that of U-238, this concentration of thorium would yield about 0.2 grams of U-233 per MWd at burnups lower than 1000 MWd/t (see Figure 3). Thus most of the fissile material produced in the core would still be plutonium.

Kanga and von Hippel also state,

For a country with uranium-enrichment capabilities, the balance between plutonium and U-233 production could be shifted almost all the way toward U-233 by fueling production reactors with highly-enriched uranium. Indeed the U.S. produced much of its weapons plutonium in the Savannah River heavy-water-moderated production reactors, using highly-enriched uranium fuel and depleted uranium targets in mixed-lattice arrangements.

But Kanga and von Hippel also noted a second problem for weaponizing U-233,

But at this point it should be noted that countries with uranium enrichment capacities to the level of highly-enriched uranium already possess the capacity to produce nuclear weapons. And the process of producing U-233 using HEU-235 to in production reactors, destroys more weapons grade fissionable material than it produces. The use of U-235 at Savannah River to produce Pu-239 was motivated by the fact that Pu-239 had useful military qualities that U-235 lacked. The military qualities of U-233 are inferior too the military qualities of U-235. Thus the choice to produce Pu-239 but not U-233 at Savannah River was rational. Kanga and von Hippel acknowledge the problem,

A second problem with U-233 as a fissile material for either weapons or reactor fuel is that it contains an admixture of U-232, whose decay chain produces penetrating gamma rays. The decay chain of U-232 is shown in Figure 4. The most important gamma emitter, accounting for about 85 percent of the total dose from U-232 after 2 years, is Tl-208, which emits a 2.6-MeV gamma ray when it decays (see Appendix C). For plutonium containing a significant admixture of 14.4-year half-life Pu-241, the most important source of gamma-ray irradiation from is its 433-year half-life decay product, Am-241, which emits low-energy (< 0.1 MeV) gamma rays. These gamma rays do not represent a significant occupational hazard for weapon-grade plutonium (0.36% Pu-241) but their dose becomes more significant for "reactor-grade" plutonium, which contains on the order of 10 percent Pu-241. Thus both U- 233 contaminated with U-232 and reactor-grade plutonium are made less desirable as weapons materials by virtue of the fact that their gamma emissions bring with them the potential for significant radiation doses or shielding requirements for workers involved in nuclear weapons production and for military personnel handling nuclear weapons.

How much less desirable? Kanga and von Hippel report that at a 1% U-232 contamination level a worker would begin to accumulate a cancer risk after working with U-233 for less than three minuits. But 1% U-232 is unusual to say the least. The problem is simple, U-233 poses problems for workers and military personel by exposure to radiation from a U-232 daughter product, while the same radiation poses problems for weapons electronics in storage.

Kanga and von Hippel report that India is researching laser isotope separation of U-233 from U-232. But does this represent a proliferation challenge? First if Indian researchers can separate U-233 from U-232 using lasers, they can also separate U-235 from U-238, and U-235 from U-238 separation is one of the two classic route to nuclear weapons. U-235 based weapons are reliable enough that they do not require tests to identify their military effect. This is not the case for U-233 based weapons. The only known test of a U-233 based weapon failed to accomplish test objectives, although it did explode with a respectable if not as large as expected bang, Thus it would appear that given routs to U-233 and U-235 based weapons, given equivalent costs and technical obstacles, but without tests, military planners will prefer the U-235 based weapons.

Now it can be argued that India should not develop laser uranium enrichment technology because such technology poses proliferation risks, but Burma, a rogue state, is also developing Laser enrichment technology, although it is very unlikely that the Burmese will master it. Burma is also attempting to master centrifuge technology, and given the track records of Pakistan and Iran, that appears to more likely.

The Indian three stage nuclear Research and Development program is well known, and despite setbacks, it has made steady progress over the last 50 years. During much of that time, the global anti-proliferation community sought to punish India for its pursuit of nuclear weapons. India, which shares common borders with two nuclear armed hostile states that are allied against it, believed that a small nuclear arms program was prudent, given the likelihood that at least one of its enemies might use nuclear weapons against it. India maintained its nuclear weapons program despite a 34 year embargo on uranium and other nuclear related trade items. The embargo somewhat handicapped the development of the Indian nuclear industry, and limited the production of nuclear power in India.

It should be pointed out that in 1974, at the beginnings of the international nuclear trade sanctions against India, that nation lacked many of the characteristics of a great power. Never the less it refused to back down on its nuclear weapons program. Today, India is rapidly becoming a great power. It is conceivable that by 2050 India will have the largest economy of any nation. At worst India will have by most estimates the second or third largest economy. India, like China is developing aircraft carriers, a standard military technology for projecting power.

If in 1974, a relatively weak India refused to subordinate itself to the nuclear policies dictated by the United States, by 2050 a very powerful Indian State will certainly not place itself under American Nuclear hegemony. The 123 agreement between India and the United States offered India recognition of its great power status.

The Indian three stage Indian Nuclear development plan directly contradicts the non-proliferation policy advocated by Frank von Hippel who opposes nuclear waste reprocessing and the use of fast reactors. Von Hipple states,

Reprocessing is enormously dangerous. The amount of radioactivity in the liquid waste stored at France's plant is more than 100 times that released by the Chernobyl accident. That is why France's government set up antiaircraft missile batteries around its reprocessing plant after the 9/11 attacks.

Even more dangerous, however, is the fact that reprocessing provides access to plutonium, a nuclear weapon material. That is why the U.S. turned against it after 1974, the year India used the first plutonium separated with U.S.-provided reprocessing for a nuclear explosion. President Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger, his secretary of State, managed to intervene before France and Germany sold reprocessing plants to South Korea, Pakistan and Brazil, all of which had secret weapons programs at the time.

The heart of the Indian long range three stage nuclear program involves recycling spent fuel from conventional power reactors. Plutonium in that spent fuel becomes the the Fissile start charge for for fast breeder reactors, which produce plutonium and U-233 from thorium. That fuel is recycled and the the Plutonium is returned to the fast breeder while the thorium is used to power thorium fuel cycle thermal breeder reactors.

Von Hippel apparently has not produced a comprehensive case study of nuclear disarmament issues from the Indian perspective, but he thinks he knows what the Indians should be doing. In 2006 he co-authored a paper which offered prescriptions for demands which the United States should seek to include in any nuclear trade agreement with India. In particular von Hippel demanded that any nuclear trade agreement with India should require that before trade can begin

that India has stopped the production of fissile material (plutonium and highly enriched uranium) for weapons or else joined a multilateral fissile production cutoff agreement;

Von Hippel also called for

A determination and annual certification that U.S. civil nuclear trade does not in any way assist or encourage India's nuclear weapons program.

The Conditions which von Hippel sought to impose on India might be described as humiliating for a great power, even a great power which was content to hold a small number of nuclear weapons. India faces a possible military alliance between China and Pakistan which together hold far more nuclear weapons than India does. Thus India's nuclear arsenal may not offer India sufficient for conceivable national defense needs.

In addition von Hippel has taken a stance that nuclear fuel reprocessing is conducive to weapons use of fissile materials. Von Hippel also objects to fast reactors because a fast reactor fleet will inevitably be dependent on fuel reprocessing, and theoretically fast reactors could produce fissionable materials that could be used in nuclear weapons. Later in this essay, I will examine problems with von Hippel's belief that reprocessing and fast reactors increase the likelihood of nuclear proliferation. In Fast Breeder Reactor Programs: History and Status, a study coauthored by von Hippel, he remarks

India’s Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR), expected to be completed in 2010, will have the capacity to make 90 kg of weapon-grade plutonium per year, if only the radial blanket is reprocessed separately and 140 kg per year if both radial and axial blankets are reprocessed.15 The Nagasaki bomb contained 6 kg of weapon-grade plutonium and modern weapons designs contain less. At 5 kg per warhead, the PFBR would produce enough weapon-grade plutonium for 20–30 nuclear weapons a year, a huge increase in production capacity in the context of the South Asian nuclear arms race. were left mixed with the plutonium, however — a project that the U.S. Department of Energy abandoned when it learned that the technology was not in hand — the gamma radiation field surrounding the mix would still be less than one-hundredth the level the IAEA considers self-protecting against theft and thousands of times less than the radiation field surrounding plutonium when it is in spent fuel (figure 1.4).

It is doubtful that von Hippel favors Indian reprocessing of Thorium cycle nuclear fuel. Thus to the extent that American nonproliferation policy is influenced by von Hippel and his followers, American nonproliferation policy, it is likely to conflict with Indian nuclear policy. The Indian nuclear policy had from its inception of using nuclear power to turn India into a rich and powerful nation. Not just militarily and politically powerful, but economically powerful as well. It is unlikely that the Indian political leadership will abandone their goal of achieving great power political and economic status for India, and the prevailing view that nuclear power will play a key roal in accomplishing that goal. To understand Indian national goals is to begin to understand the realpolitik of Indian objections to American nonproliferation as interpreted by Frank von Hippel.

Much 20th century thinking about nuclear nonproliferation, sprang from ethical goals. Nuclear war, is a moral wrong, and the use of nuclear weapons is evil. These assumptions cannot be dispited. But nuclear weapons and their use exist in a morally imperfect world, where people believe that they are sometimes are forced to commit acts that are morally wrong, and even to do things which in absolute moral terms are evil. It is not necessicary to justify such behavior in order to acknowledge that it exists, and to regard the necessity of responding to the real acts of people, as imposing on us constraints on the moral aspects of our life and thought. It is desirable to bring together the real world of human thought and action, with the more lofty goals offered by moral thought. Such is the case if we wish to control the production and use of nuclear weapons.

Thus future American policy towards India nuclear developments ought to focuse on a conversion of the ethical with the realpolitik goals. American policy has no choice but to accept that India has chosen a path that will lead to a thorium based economy. as well as the Indian need for a limited stock of nuclear weapons, at least in the short run.. Once Indian goals accepted, India will willingly participate in the creation on an international order directed towards arms control.

Indian and Chinese Developmemt, Nonproliferation and Thorium

2011-08-23T02:29:00.006-05:00

This is the first of a series of posts which I plan to offer that will argue that current nuclear nonproliferation schemes are at best transitory, and are likely to undergo significant changes before the middle of the 21th century.

Numerous studies projecting future global economic growth have suggested that by and in most cases well before 2050, the Chinese economy will be the largest single national economy. Some studies, however, suggest that Indian economic growth will exceed China over the next 40 years, and by 2050 the Indian economy will be the largest in the world. Views that the Indian economy will rank second or third in the global economy are generally seen as more common.

A recent Citigroup Global Markets study finds

China should overtake the US to become the largest economy in the world by 2020, then be overtaken by India by 2050.

The Chinese political-social system as well as current demographic trends are expected begin to act as a drag on its economic growth, while Indian democracy and the greater openness of Indian society is expected to lead to higher levels of competitiveness.

By 2050 Citi researchers expect both the Chinese and the Indian economies to be twice the size of the American economy. These developments have significant implications for global affairs. Globally Citi anticipates that the 10 largest economies in 2050 will be India, China, The United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Nigeria, Russia, Mexico, Japan and Egypt. Key resources, including Water and electricity play a major tole in economic development, and in the long run will potentially be sources of economic problems. The Citi researchers suggest,

Many rapidly growing economies, including China and India continue to charge prices for key resources, including water, electricity and other sources of power that are far below long-run social marginal cost and even far below long-run marginal private cost (excluding environmental externalities) (see OECD (2009) and Easter and Liu (2005), World Bank (2010)). In the case of prices charged to households, there is a second-best argument that, if cash grants to address poverty are not administratively feasible, the subsidization of certain key goods and services consumed by the poor is (constrained) efficient. This argument also supports the use of subsidies on the staple foods consumed by the poor as a poverty relief measure. There is no equity or efficiency-based case, however, to subsidise (charge a price below long-run marginal social cost) the use of water, power and other resources by the industrial and agricultural sectors – by far the largest consumers of power and water.23 The over-use of both power and water this has encouraged is creating a major potential environmental problem in both India and China. Unless this issue is addressed as a matter of urgency, scarcity of clean, fresh water alone could become a binding constraint on growth in both India and China – and many other countries with large arid regions. Long-run social marginal cost prices of all key resources (or equivalent physical rationing schemes which would, however, be much less efficient in practice) is the only way to prevent further destruction of environmental capital.

Thus sources of low cost sustainable energy will play an important role in economic development, especially approaching 2050 or after. Both India and China are planning very ambitious programs of nuclear power development. Both countries are planning rapid deployment of significant numbers of traditional Light Water and Heavy Water power reactors. while projecting for further development both Fast Liquid Metal Reactors and Thorium cycle breeder reactors.

Indian nuclear plans include the construction of a large number of fast reactors that will be used to both produce electricity and breed thorium. In addition India plans currently include a large number of Thorium Fuel cycle heavy water reactors that operate at or close to one to one conversion ratios. The Chinese Academy of Science has initiated a program of Thorium cycle Molten Salt Reactor (LFTR) research and development.

Nuclear Green has argued on the basis of studies conducted at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, that LFTR type reactors will offer safe, sustainable and efficient nuclear power at a potentially low cost. (See for example, ORNL-TM-1851 (SUMMARY OF THE OBJECTIVES, THE DESIGN, AND A PROGRAM OF DEVELOPMENT OF MOLTEN-SALT BREEDER REACTORS) ). In contrast to the relatively simple and low cost chemical processes that would allow low cost Fluoride salt based nuclear fuel reprocessing being investigated by the Chinese, the Indian thorium cycle scheme would involve far more expensive chemical fuel reprocessing systems, and most likely more expensive reactors. All in all, the Indian thorium based energy scheme appears to be more complex and more expensive.

Several motives will undoubtedly drive India and China to develop nuclear power systems that are capable of producing sustainable energy, while at the same time facilitate rapid and mast deployment while providing low cost energy. These motives include concerns about the climate implications of burning fossil fuels, increasing scarcity of and rising prices for fossil fuels, the health and agricultural consequences of burning fossil fuels, and the ready availability of large, easily recovered thorium deposites.

Conclusions

By the middle of the 21st century the combined economic power of India and China will be so great that they can impose an international order that is consistent with their interests on the global political-economic system. Where future Indian and Chinese interest converge, the United States can expect to make little headway against them. Both India and China appear committed to developing a thorium nuclear fuel cycle, and it would appear to be rational that they both do so. It is possible that the combined interest of India and China might diverge from those of the United States, and it would appear unlikely that under such circumstances, the interest of the United States would prevail. These conclusions have significant implications for future American nonproliferation policy.

In the next post, I will review the implications of current American nonproliferation policies for the deployment of thorium based nuclear technologies.