DA Ryan and the Miraculous MSR Graphite Fire

And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. - Exodus 3:2

When I began my investigation of the graphite fire risks this spring, I had formed no fixed opinion about the supposed danger. I had, of course, run across numerous references to graphite fire risks, including a statement from the redoubtable Ed Lyman of the ever vigilant anti-nuclear Union of Concerned Scientists. Lyman tells us,

A second unresolved safety issue concerns the reactor’s graphite coolant and fuel pebbles. When exposed to air, graphite burns at a temperature of 400°C, and the reaction can become self-sustaining at 550°C—well below the typical operating temperature of the PBMR. Graphite also burns in the presence of water. Thus extraordinary measures would be needed to prevent air and water from entering the core. Yet according to one expert, “air ingress cannot be eliminated by design.”

Yet a statement from General Atomics, a business which has designed and built graphite core reactors claims,

Numerous tests and calculations have shown that it is virtually impossible to burn high-purity, nuclear-grade graphites. Graphite has been heated to white-hot temperatures (~1650°C) without incurring ignition or self-sustained combustion. After removing the heat source, the graphite cooled to room temperature. Unlike nuclear-grade graphite, charcoal and coal burn at rapid rates because:

* They contain high levels of impurities that catalyze the reaction.
* They are very porous, which provides a large internal surface area, resulting in more homogeneous oxidation.
* They generate volatile gases (e.g. methane), which react exothermically to increase temperatures.
* They form a porous ash, which allows oxygen to pass through, but reduces heat losses by conduction and radiation.
* They have lower thermal conductivity and specific heat than graphite.

In fact, because graphite is so resistant to oxidation, it has been identified as a fire extinguishing material for highly reactive metals.

Thus the issue of graphite fires is open to question, and should be most properly settled by scientific investigation. The New Scientist published a discussion of the General Atomic claim in its November 4. 1989 edition. The New Scientist came to a graphite does burn reluctantly, and is not very dangerous view, pointing to research by Peter Kroeger's of Brookhaven National Laboratory for support. I concluded my initial investigation of the graphite fire danger by noting

Needless to say, Ed Lyman forgot to mention any of Peter Kroeger's research, the General Atomic's argument, or other arguments that makes his simple "Graphite burns" statement less than a serious inditement of pebble bed reactor safety.

Even less so, does the "graphite burns" statement a serious safety objection to the use of graphite in the core of Molten Salt Reactors. It should be noted that the presence of liquid fluoride salts would be a serious inhibitor of any graphite fire, and in the event of salt drainage from a MSR core, a graphite fire would not be a safety issue, because both fission products and nuclear fuel would drain out of the core along with the coolant salt. Thus even if we reject the General Atomic's contention that Nuclear Graphite does not burn, the graphite burns objection does not appear to raise a serious concern about Molten Salt Reactor safety.

My conclusions were based on facts - Peter Kroeger's graphite research, and the application of logic to those facts. Anyone wishing to disagree with my conclusions should either argue that I misrepresented Kroeger's research, or Kroeger's research was seriously flawed, or that I committed logical errors in reaching my conclusions. So far no one has used any of these rational approaches to dispute my claims.

My discovery of Kroeger's research was not the end of the line as fare as my investigation of the graphite fire risk. I had two supposed reactor graphite fire risks to explain. The Windscape fire, and the Chernobyl fire.

DA Ryan asserts

CB (Charles Barton) seem unable to absorb any information that contradicts their position.

What information? Ryan presents no facts, no analysis of logic which contradicts my views. Ryan's evidence is not based on research. In facts Ryan ignores all nuclear graphite fire risk research.

When I pointed out to Ryan a recent statement on the Windscale fire by the UK Nuclear Safety Advisory Committee that,

Inspections have shown that there was NOT a graphite fire: damage to graphite, caused by severely overheated fuel assemblies, was localised.

Ryan remarked,

the paper you point to with regard to Winscape is the minutes of a committiee meeting not an official statement or scientific anaylsis that has been subject to peer review. One could be unkind and describe it as “gossip”.

Yet the UK Nuclear Safety Advisory Committee reports the results of acrtual observations. None of the statements about the Windscape fire which Ryan refers to is based on evidence drawn from actual observation inside the core of the Windscape reactor. I went to the trouble of documenting several accounts of the Windscaple accident in0rder to show that the evidence in support of the UK Nuclear Safety Advisory Committee report has long been known, and that evidence includes photographs taken from inside the windscape reactor, and a link to a presentation by M.T. Cross, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory Graphite Research Reactor Workshop, May 9-10 2007. The presentation included numerous slides of photographs taken in the interior of the Windscape reactor that shows fuel capsules that were damaged or destroyed by fire, while the graphite structures that contain them are still intact. I wonder if Mr. Ryan would also categorize those photographs as "gossip."

If Mr. Ryan still can maintain his "Windscape was a graphite fire" position with a straight face, he must explain the miracle of the Windscape graphite, the graphite burned but was not consumed, just like Moses burning bush.

Mr. Ryan accuses me of ignoring the precaitionary principle, but he has managed to stumble very badly in his attempt to establish that there is a MSR core graphite fire risk. Ryan has posted a long response to my critique of his treatment of MSR technology, and to Bill Hannehan's critique. The first of Ryan's comments has to do with graphite fire. Ryan states:

Another critique of my critique of the LFTR can be found here:
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2011/08/d-ryan-msrlftr-critique-not-ready-for.html
As with the previous ones they either deliberately missread my critique in an effort to build up stray man arguments or reading just isn’t one of Mr Bill Hannahan, or “Rank Amateur” (his words http://daryanenergyblog.wordpress.com/ca/#comment-126) Charles Barton’s stronger points. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which.

Firstly, they misrepresent my views on graphite, which I point out is a “perceived fire risk” I was never suggesting it will catch fire if you put a match to it. I make this point repeatedly in the comments above, I even added a little section to chapter 6 to describe the two sides of the fire risk argument and clarify my position. But the fact opaque minds of BH and CB seem unable to absorb any information that contradicts their position. They also seem to have no idea about the concept of scientific uncertainty or the precautionary principle or the most basic concepts of how passive safety is guaranteed. These would require “some” action be taken on this issue. Indeed they compound there mistake by then misunderstanding why graphite is used in Class D fire extinguishers (for liquid metals!). Oh, and BH suggests you can use jet fuel to put out fires later on (yes really!). I’ll let the reader assess the practicalities of that!

Ryan starts off with a straw man argument, that is the suggestion that we were attributing to him the view that graphite

will catch fire if you put a match to it.

I never attributed that with to Ryan, and he, of course, can produce no quotes that say otherwise.

I do view Ryan's claims about about the fire risks posed by graphite cores in MSRs are at best exaggerations. Research on Graphite safety conducted in the United States after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, found that graphite was a safe material for nuclear cores, and that it posed little or no fire danger. I argued this because my own review of literature on graphite fire danger demonstrated that graphite posed no fire risks for Molten Salt Reactors. Mr. Ryan has not presented research evidence contradicting my conclusions.

Ryan attempts to discredit me by claiming that the word "perceived" in the phrase "perceived fire risk" some how invalidates our arguments against his position. In fact the word perceived has more than one meaning. It can be understood to mean, "detected by instinct or inference rather than by recognized perceptual cues," or it can mean, "detected by means of the senses." These two meanings are somewhat contradictory which makes the word "perceived"an excellent weasel word. Before we look further at what Mr. Ruan means when he uses the word "perceived," we ought first to look at what Ryan actually says about graphite and graphite fire risks. In his original essay, Ryan writes,

Another issue is that graphite core. As I detailed previously with regard to the HTGR (part 6.4.3) it’s a potential fire hazard. Thus we would need to put the MSR within a containment dome of sorts. Again, as with the HTGR, this dome need not be built to the same exacting standards of a LWR dome as we are merely trying to contain a graphite fire, not an out of control reactor.

The word perceived certainly does not decrease Mr. Ryan's certainty about the necessity of taking steps to control graphite fire risk. In addition to structural recommendations,

We would need an effective on plant fire control team and some form of fire detection and suppression system, within the containment dome and all the necessary gear that this entails. Again, I refer you the relevant section of the HTGR analysis, but needless to say such an arrangement would involve certain costs.

So Mr Ryan seems to mean by perceived fire risk, a plausible risk of graphite fire. But is there plausible risk of graphite fire in MSRs? Graphite fire research seems to show that there is none Ryan ignored that research when he made the graphite fire claims.

I argued that the evidence on graphite fire risks suggests that there are no circumstances in which the laws of nature would allow us to believe that a graphite core of a Molten Salt Reactor could catch on fire. If an idea contradicts the laws of nature, it is a misperception, a mistake, or a miracle. Mr. Ryan should have explained how the graphite core of a molten salt reactor could catch on fire despite the fact that a graphite fire in A MSR core would seemingly violate the laws of nature. Apparently Mr. Ryan's precautionary principle includes protecting the public from miracles.

Mr. Ryan fails to not the difference between assertion as rhetorical strategies, and actually demonstrating his case. Ryan acknowledges,

I could go thro this line by line but there’s no point, all they succeed in doing is demonstrating their own ignorance of the facts and inability to absorb any information that contradicts the LFTR gospel.

Ryan however, fails time after time to demonstrate that Bill and I are as ignorant as he says we are. He tells us that Bill is mistaken in asserting at low vapor pressure of MSRs is an advantage because,

The pressurization issue is a bit of red herring, the major materials stumbling block is the issue of the combination of corrosive attack under temperature, with a bit of radiation thrown in for good measure.

In this argument Ryan simply ignores ORNL finding from the MSRE. ORNL-TM-4171 (Postirradiation Examination of Materials from the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment ) reported that

The MoltenSalt Reactor Experiment operated very successfully. The fuel loop was above 500°C for 30,807 hr and contained fuel salt for 21,040 hr. A surveillance program was active during operation to follow the property changes of the graphite moderator and the INOR-8 structural material. After operation was discontinued in December 1969, several components were removed for examination. These included a graphite moderator element from the core, a control rod thimble, freeze valve 105, the sample cage and mist shield from the fuel salt pump bowl, a copper sampler capsule, tubes and a portion of the shell of the primary heat exchanger, and tubes and two thermocouple wells from the air-cooled radiator.

The overall findings were that

Examination of these materials showed excellent mutual chemical compatibility between the salts, graphite, and INOR-8. The INOR-8 exposed to fuel salt formed shallow intergranular cracks believed to be due to the ingress of the fission product tellurium. The INOR-8 was also embrittled by exposure to thermal neutrons, and this was attributed to the formation of helium by the (10)B(n,a)(7)Li transmutation.

The ORNL report found that

The primary corrosion mechanism in the fuel salt system was selective removal of chromium by 2UF4 + Cr(in alloy) Z+ 2UF3 + CrF& salt), and the concentration of chomium in salt samples was the primary indicator of corrosion. . . . The total increase in chromium in the 4700-kg charge of fuel salt is equivalent to leaching all of the chromium from the 852 ft2 of INOR-8 exposed to fuel salt to a depth of about 0.4 mil.

Since the coolant salt did not contain uranium, the corrosion rate was extremely low. During operation, the chromium content of the coolant salt remained at 32 ppm, within the accuracy of the analysis.

ORNL scientists went on to identify two solutions to the intergranular cracking problem, and proposed to solve the minor chromium corrosion problem by removing chromium from metal alloys. Mr. Ryan failed to examine the results of the ORNL experiment that was designed to determine the effects of

the combination of corrosive attack under temperature, with a bit of radiation thrown in for good measure.

Those findings were that there were some developmental problems, but none that were show stoppers.

One way to avoid mistakes due to ignorance in scientific matters is to pay careful attention to what scientists say in research related documents, and to quote them exactly and in context. This would be the approach that both Bill and I take, but Mr. Ryan does not seem to regard it as necessary to examine the actual research before he makes sweeping and all encompassing judgements on all sorts of matters. Thus his pronouncements on MSR related problems are invariably made without reference to ORNL research work product, which would be the primary source of information on MSR research.

Most of Mr. Ryan's response is an personal attack on Bill and I have left it to Bill has answer those criticisms.

DA Ryan's attack on Bill Hannahan and Bill's Response

DA Ryan has recently posted a number of responses to Bill Hannahan's latest Nuclear Green post. Ryan wrote:

Another critique of my critique of the LFTR can be found here:
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2011/08/d-ryan-msrlftr-critique-not-ready-for.html
As with the previous ones they either deliberately miss-read my critique in an effort to build up straw man arguments or reading just isn’t one of Mr Bill Hannahan, or “Rank Amateur” (his words http://daryanenergyblog.wordpress.com/ca/#comment-126) Charles Barton’s stronger points. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which.

Firstly, they misrepresent my views on graphite, which I point out is a “perceived fire risk” I was never suggesting it will catch fire if you put a match to it. I make this point repeatedly in the comments above, I even added a little section to chapter 6 to describe the two sides of the fire risk argument and clarify my position.
http://daryanenergyblog.wordpress.com/ca/part-6_htgr/6-4-3-fire-risk-and-mitigation/
But the fact opaque minds of BH and CB seem unable to absorb any information that contradicts their position. They also seem to have no idea about the concept of scientific uncertainty or the precautionary principle or the most basic concepts of how passive safety is guaranteed. These would require “some” action be taken on this issue.
http://daryanenergyblog.wordpress.com/2011/07/31/the-precautionary-principle/
Indeed they compound there mistake by then misunderstanding why graphite is used in Class D fire extinguishers (for liquid metals!). Oh, and later on BH suggests you can use jet fuel to put out fires (yes really!). I’ll let the reader assess the practicalities of that!

I could go thro this line by line but there’s no point, all they succeed in doing is demonstrating their own ignorance of the facts and inability to absorb any information that contradicts the LFTR gospel.

“the author counters his own point” no I don’t! I was just trying to give a fair and balanced assessment, but don’t let facts get in the way of a good hatchet job.

“low vapour pressure” The pressurization issue is a bit of red herring, the major materials stumbling block is the issue of the combination of corrosive attack under temperature, with a bit of radiation thrown in for good measure. The low vapour pressure solves some problems but creates others due to the difficult it creates in getting decent thermal efficiency and that it increases the risk of intrusion of outside air (unless you surround the reactor in a inert gas Caladaria, but that would be pricy and “complicate things”).

“MS in solar energy” – BH doesn’t seem to understand that solar thermal plants are a different kettle of fish, different salt mixtures, temperatures and pressures and most importantly no radioactive thorium suspended within.

BH then goes into a detour unrelated to the article, but which came up in discussion, regarding his fantasy’s of removing uranium from sea water. This has been refuted by several peer reviewed papers (Barti 2007 and Barti etal 2011, Dittmar 2011) claiming that such a process would likely yield less energy back than it returned. Such proposals also ignore certain practicalities. Barti suggests http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4558 that we would have to cover the whole of North Sea with Uranium adsorption structures in order to get enough uranium for just 16% of the present world’s electric power production. Dittmar suggests http://greatchange.org/ov-dittmar,nuclear_option_ASPO.pdf that you would need to capture and filter the flow of 5 times that of the Rhine river to run just one nuclear power station, so clearly impractical! Of course building a dam and using such a flow for hydroelectricity would yield substantially more energy as would covering a small patch of the North Sea in wave energy machines. BH seems unable to absorb these facts. It was repeatedly pointed out to him in this discussion above and Barti and others in the blog he links to as well. BH seems to declare “victory” of sorts here on the fact that Barti gave up trying to get the message across (I don’t blame him!). Indeed if you view that blog string you’ll see even several pro-nuke bloggers running out of patience with BH one describing him as a “propagandist” http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4558#comment-415499. He seems to think that just because everyone else left him mumbling to himself that counts as victory.

BH also brings up Radon (or does he mean Roswell? ;0) that’s not in my article, but in the discussion here and I rebutted his point but typically he ignored it. Oh well, I did try!
http://daryanenergyblog.wordpress.com/ca/#comment-135

“Publishing a quip that you know is misleading and prejudicial is unethical”…no it’s a quip, an amusing comment, you know? A joke! I know Americans lack our British sense of humour, but how old are you? grow up!

He then goes into a discussion about the CPP, making various stabs at it, that basically just confirms my worst fears (yet again) the LFTR fans have no idea how efficient this system will be, how to design it or what its implications to reactor operations are. Later he very wisely jettisons the idea, at least temporarily until the reactor is proven.

Indeed as part of this effort he also throws out Thorium, Air based cooling, the CPP, open cycle operation, small exclusion zones, baby, bath water and pram go flying over the side in a desperate fit of back peddling. Of course this puts his post in direct contradiction to the infamous wired mag article (which specifically highlighted the lack of large exclusion zones and Thorium as key positives of the MSR). Shall they be calling Wired asking for a retraction of these points? or indeed alter they’re own websites and all of those LFTR videos doing the rounds (and at this rate if BH keeps it up those 2 hr vids will be down to “hello” and “goodbye”) to reflect this new position? Well of course not! Who said we should let facts getting the way of a good techno fantasy!

Finally BH arrives at a point with a reactor design, not far removed from the Micro-fuji proposal, one that I acknowledged (8.12) had an air of plausibility surrounding it (of course he ignores this fact also). However BH neglects to point out the crucial arguments I made regarding cost. It’s clear that the MF will be rather expensive, far more so than any other reactor prototype of recent years and its difficult to avoid the argument that a follow on commercial unit will still be more expensive than existing LWR or HTGR technology. Given that we jettisoned all of the bits of the MSR that gave it its unique selling point, why would anyone invest in such an endeavor? You want cheap nuclear (relatively speaking!)? Use LWR’s. Want to burn Thorium? Use HTGR’s. Want cheap(ish) energy with no nuclear waste? We have renewables. We could add back in those bits of the MSR BH threw away, but that would greatly increase our R&D costs as well as the development time scale and increase the risk of the whole project failing.

He tries to counter my point about load cycling by quoting figures from the, as of yet untested, AP1000. He ignores the fact that the grid can see sudden changes in the order of GW’s per second, I believe it hits about a 2-4 GW swing (in a few seconds) here in the UK when a popular soap ends. While I acknowledge that newer reactors like the AP1000 should offer much greater flexibility than past reactors (but that’s unproven as no AP1000 reactor has yet been commissioned), they certainly don’t close the circle and a LFTR would be a very different beast (if he’d bothered to read my article), so it’s not a relevant comparison.

Also BH tries to disprove the well known toxicity of fluorine. He presents figures showing that fluorine (it doesn’t specify in which form) has a lethal dose (to a rat) of 300 mg (sounds pretty deadly to me!) and Chlorine at 4 times higher, with him then claiming that in fact it’s the other way around (i.e. the numbers suggest that Flourine is more deadly as it has a smaller lethal dose)…?…Also I would note that there’s a very big difference between both substances in various chemical forms or in the form of an easily inhaled gas, hence why people don’t keel over when brushing ones teeth!

I could go on, but its pointless. As I’ve shown, many LFTR fans see the world thro rose tinted glasses. They only absorb facts that support their technofantasy, can’t see the contradictions in they’re own arguments and assume any criticism is the work of Satan and it must be exorcised at once least the flock here of such heresy. Anyone who criticizes there views is either misinformed (even if he’s a respected nuclear scientist) or “one of them”…which brings us onto…
…Ad Homein comments? Pot calling the kettle black me thinks. Its strange that this is the opener from CB last time around (i.e. claim that I’m baised) and that the primary tool of LFTR fans is to attack the person and not the facts (as I think we’ve learnt most of them are “Rank amateurs”). Look at this rebuttal of the ecologist magazine article here: http://energyfromthorium.com/rees-article-rebuttal/. Almost all the various “rebuttals” of my critique online soon lurch into the form of personal attacks that question my credentials.

I intend to post my own response to Ryan's comments, but Bill has beaten me to the punch.

From Bill Hannahan: My response to Ryan’s comment. http://daryanenergyblog.wordpress.com/ca/#comment-220

“Firstly, they misrepresent my views on graphite, which I point out is a “perceived fire risk” I was never suggesting it will catch fire if you put a match to it.”

A small sliver of coal can be ignited with a match.

“we cannot conclusively conclude that there is no fire risk (as some mistakenly do), particularly given the evidence from Chernobyl.”

The Chernobyl reactor is as different from an MSR as the F-104 Starfighter is different from a Boeing 747. If someone used the F-104 accident rate as a reason to prevent the R&D of new improved airliners would you consider that a good argument?

“any ideas we have about building HTGR’s without containment domes”

First, no nuclear power plants are going to be built without containment. Second, chapter 8 is about MSR's, which have liquid fuel, making the fire analysis much different than for a solid fueled HTGR.

“BH suggests you can use jet fuel to put out fires (yes really!). I’ll let the reader assess the practicalities of that!”

Actually I showed that the temperature of burning jet fuel is lower than the normal operating temperature of an MSR, so jet fuel could be used to cool a MSR. Furthermore if you somehow induced a pile of nuclear grade graphite to burn, spraying it with jet fuel would lower its temperature well below the ignition temperature, putting out the graphite fire, and once all the residual jet fuel burns up the fire would stay out if there is no other source of heat to re-raise the temperature of the graphite.

I never claimed that real MSR plants will keep large storage tanks of jet fuel for use in response to a fire. The point of the example is to illustrate the fact that machines designed for very high temperature operation are easier to cool than machines made of low temperature materials. R avoids addressing this key technical point by deflecting with ridicule and misdirection.

“I could go thro this line by line but there’s no point”

Please do, your vague generalities and irrelevant references leave your case unsupported.

“the major materials stumbling block is the issue of the combination of corrosive attack under temperature, with a bit of radiation thrown in for good measure.”

Which is why I support building several small experimental plants of promising designs using the best materials available to get the needed performance data.

“The low vapour pressure solves some problems but creates others due to the difficult it creates in getting decent thermal efficiency and that it increases the risk of intrusion of outside air”

Here R is just making stuff up. If the salt had a lower boiling point it would have to be pressurized and that would somehow raise thermal efficiency? Nonsense.

“BH doesn’t seem to understand that solar thermal plants are a different kettle of fish”

I understand that solar thermal plants will be very large, expensive, use large quantities of land, concrete, steel and salt, and have only a few hours of storage, with a limited capacity factor, especially during periods of bad weather. But my recommendation, R’s, is to push R&D in all potential sources of energy, including solar, as hard as possible.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7275#comment-755200

“BH then goes into a detour unrelated to the article, but which came up in discussion, regarding his fantasy’s of removing uranium from sea water.”

No doubt in 1902 some people were chiding the Wright Brothers for pursuing their fantasy of flight.

“Dittmar suggests http://greatchange.org/ov-dittmar,nuclear_option_ASPO.pdf that you would need to capture and filter the flow of 5 times that of the Rhine river to run just one nuclear power station, so clearly impractical!”

Dittmar could prove that the tuna industry is uneconomical by calculating how much sea water you would have to pump through a tuna extraction plant to fill a 5 ounce can. Obviously a real uranium extraction process would take advantage of ocean currents. Dittmar’s predictions have proven largely wrong so far.

http://nextbigfuture.com/?cx=partner-pub-2647001505857353%3A7695799466&cof=FORID%3A10&ie=UTF-8&q=dittmar&sa=Search&siteurl=nextbigfuture.com%2F#1402

“Barti suggests http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4558 that we would have to cover the whole of North Sea with Uranium adsorption structures in order to get enough uranium for just 16% of the present world’s electric power production.”

As I said before, seawater uranium does not have to supply all our uranium to guarantee a price under $200 per pound, it only has to replace the conventional portion that is over that price, which is zero in the foreseeable future.

More importantly, our pre Model T reactors only split about 1% of the uranium atoms mined to fuel them. A fast Breeder reactor would only need about six pounds of uranium per day. It could get that from the sea water used to cool its condenser.

“we’re not “destroying” radioactive material in a reactor, we’re merely transmuting it from one form to another and were still left with a large pile of “nasty stuff” sitting in a storage container which we now have to either re-bury or baby sit for a few millennia.
So all in all I’d argue uranium mining causes as many (if not more) problems than it solves.”

Show us your references and calculations, deaths, brain damage, respiratory illness for uranium vs. fossil fuel, or you could study this report.

http://theenergycollective.com/karenstreet/63318/earthquake-tsunami-and-nuclear-power-japan

““publishing a quip that you know is misleading and prejudicial is unethical”…no it’s a quip, an amusing comment, you know?

What other forms of disinformation do you believe are ethical?

“It’s clear that the MF will be rather expensive, far more so than any other reactor prototype of recent years and its difficult to avoid the argument that a follow on commercial unit will still be more expensive than existing LWR or HTGR technology.”

The first handful of Chevy Volt’s cost GM several millions of dollars, and the first MSR's will cost more than conventional plants. What will #100 cost? What will #1000 cost?

Given their compact size and reduced material requirements factory mass production of major components and modules becomes possible leading to big cost and time savings.

“He tries to counter my point about load cycling by quoting figures from the, as of yet untested, AP1000. He ignores the fact that the grid can see sudden changes in the order of GW’s per second, I believe it hits about a 2-4 GW swing (in a few seconds) here in the UK when a popular soap ends.”

And what is that as a percentage of total power? Split that 2-4 GW between hundreds of power plants and it is not a problem. How do you think they handle it now?

“While I acknowledge that newer reactors like the AP1000 should offer much greater flexibility than past reactors (but that’s unproven as no AP1000 reactor has yet been commissioned), they certainly don’t close the circle and a LFTR would be a very different beast (if he’d bothered to read my article), so it’s not a relevant comparison.”

Actually, I cited the AP 1000 performance in response to the authors claim that “existing nuclear stations are capable of some level of power cycling anyway just not much!”

When Boeing and Airbus design a new aircraft, they usually perform within a few percent of the design point by the end of the development process. Does R suggest that the AP 1000 design is so slipshod that it could be off by a large margin?

It is interesting that R can draw damming conclusions about future MSR's based on the totally different 60 year old Windscale reactor design, but the AP 1000 is off limits.

The most important thing is that for the first few decades MSR's will be run continuously at 100% because their fuel cost will be lower than any fossil plant and lower than the fuel cost for most other nuclear plant designs. MSR's will not have to load follow until the grid is almost all nuclear powered.

“BH tries to disprove the well known toxicity of fluorine. He presents figures showing that fluorine (it doesn’t specify in which form) has a lethal dose (to a rat) of 290 mg”

Here is a cut and paste of the section R is referring to;

{ “Fluorine gas is extremely toxic (several times more deadly than chlorine”

Toxicity Data, Fluorine
LC50 inhal (rat)
185 ppm (300 mg/m3; 1 h)

Toxicity Data, Chlorine
LC50 inhal (rat)
293 ppm (879 mg/m3; 1 h)

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=4911&page=320

By volume fluorine is less than twice as toxic as chlorine. The U.S. consumes ten billion kg of chlorine each year; enough to kill every man woman and child in the U.S. every 45 minutes. Essentially all of that is manufactured and consumed under conditions less secure than those inside a reactor containment building.}

R claims it does not specify the form, but anyone familiar with toxicity data would know it is for elemental gas. R claims I said the lethal dose is 290 mg, but as you see, the units are mg/m3, and the number is 300.

R goes on to say;

“(sounds pretty deadly to me!) and Chlorine at 4 times higher, with him then claiming that in fact it’s the other way around”

So lets do the math for R; 293/185 = 1.58 which is less than 2 by VOLUME as I specified.

R tries to prove me wrong by doing a MASS calculation, but he gets that wrong too. 879/300 = 2.9 which is less than 4 and less than “several times”.

R’s focus on insults and silliness, his failure to engage on the important points and his amazingly high error rate shows the weakness of his position. Here are key questions and issues from my review comment that he has not addressed.

1. Our cheapest fossil fuel is coal. To generate an 80 year lifetime supply of electricity for one person in the U.S. with coal we burn 1,140,000 pounds of coal, producing 2,440,000 pounds of CO2 and thousands of pounds of toxic waste, much of it released into the atmosphere. Lifetime fuel cost with coal is $34,000, $424/year.

The simplest uranium burning MSR will need about 12 pounds of uranium to make a lifetime supply of electricity. What would the price of uranium have to be to make MSR fuel more expensive than coal per kWh?

LFTR will need six ounces of thorium to make a lifetime supply of electricity. What would the price of thorium have to be to make LFTR fuel more expensive than coal per kWh?

2. MSR's can be designed to operate without graphite. Do you support R&D of those designs?

3. The Windscale reactor had large fans blowing air through the core. How could a large flow of air pass through a MSR reactor vessel?

3a. What is the driving source of pressure gradient?

3b. How are the required holes created in the reactor vessel and containment walls?

3c. At Windscale and Chernobyl the solid fuel, moving air and graphite were in direct contact. In a MSR, the graphite is normally submerged in salt. Can graphite burn while submerged in salt?

3d. When solid fuel melts it can release a large burst of volatile fission products acumulated over a period of months or years. MSR's do not accumulate volatile fission products.

Do you acknowledge that MSR's will not contain a large mass of volatile fission products that can be released in an accident? If you disagree, what is the concentration, chemical composition, melting point, boiling point of the fission products that would be problematic in a MSR accident? Compare those numbers with the numbers for solid fuel reactors. Why don’t these highly volatile compounds come out of solution during Normal operation?

3e. If the graphite is exposed to air, most fission products are below the liquid line in a chemical form that is stable at very high temperature. How would the graphite burning in air volatilize a large quantity of low volatility fission product compounds in the salt below the fire or in a remote tank?

4. The only nuclear accidents to release large quantities of fission products are those where a direct path to the atmosphere is provided by design or by explosion. MSR's have continuous online refueling. There is only enough reactivity for normal operation. I do not know of any way to make an MSR explode. Do you, explain the mechanism in detail?

5. It is interesting that out of hundreds of fission products, only a few of the most volatile constitute most of the risk in solid fuel reactors.

Cesium is by far the most problematic long term fission product in an accident. It melts at 28C, the boiling point is 671 C. When a cesium atom is produced in a MSR it immediately hooks up with a fluorine atom to make cesium fluoride, melting point 682C, boiling point 1251 C, so it has much lower volatility resulting in greatly reduced emissions under accident conditions. Very little cesium will be released in a MSR accident. Provide detailed mechanism if you disagree?

By the way R. I am sure you can post your comments on Charles Barton’s blog, he does not engage in censorship as you do.

The D A Ryan MSR/LFTR critique: Not ready for Prime Time, Part II

Several weeks ago, I posted a a critical review of DA Ryan's discussion of Molten Salt Reactor technology. Ryan is a British engineer, but his assessment did not appear to be at all well informed. Ryan began with questionable assumptions, failed to note well regarded information sources that simply disagreed with his controversial views, then proceeded to reason from unsupported assumptions to dogmatic conclusions about nuclear energy.

I generally judge how well a writer is doing by picking out an issue I am familiar with and looking at how well he treats that issue. In my review of Ryan, I looked at his assertion that there was graphite fires risk in Molten Salt Reactors. Ryan saw the fire risk ans a major hazard and claimed, “graphite is basically just high grade coal.” This is nonsense. Not only is graphite not vert flamible, but graphite powder based fire extinguishers are used to fight fires in metals like lithium. In addition, Post-Chernobyl studies attempting to assess graphite fire dangers as nuclear safety issues, have concluded that fires in graphite moderated reactors were much less likely than previously believed. Ryan insists that the fire in the Windscape unit 1 reactor, was a graphite fire. However recent remote visual inspections of the Windscale reactor demonstrate that very little fire related damage to its graphite structures occurred. This is wholly inconsistent with Ryan's contention, but in the face of this strong evidence, he refuses to acknowledge the weakness of the Windscale graphite fire contention, or the unlikelihood of a graphite fire in a Molten Salt Reactor. This behavior might be referred to as dogmatically clinging to a mistaken assumption after the assumption has been demonstrated to be false.

Bill Hannahan also posted several critical comments on Ryan's MSR critique. Bill has graciously offered to pass on his comments on Nuclear Green, and although delayed by my recent surgery, here they are.

The D A Ryan MSR/LFTR critique: Not ready for Prime Time, Part II
By Bill Hannahan

Charles Barton published an essay about a nuclear energy review that contained a chapter highly critical of Molten Salt Reactor technology. I began submitting review comments on each section of that chapter. After several comments were posted my comments were blocked. Charles has graciously offered to publish all the comments.

REVIEW COMMENTS ON 8.2 The MSRE experiment

“Notably, it never generated a single watt of electricity. As I’ve mentioned previously the turbo generator systems for high temperature reactors is technically challenging, especially for the LFTR as the molten salt presents a number of design challenges….

That said, the goal of the MSR experiment was to prove the reactor concept, not develop turbo machinery kit, which would have been a serious (and costly) distraction.”

The Author effectively counters his own point. When GE builds a new jet engine they do not build a new plane to test it on. They test it on a stand. Then they test it on an OLD plane with other well proven engines. After the new design has met its performance requirements it is mated with the new airframe for which it was designed. We know how to convert high temperature heat into electric power.

Checking the author’s link to part 3 to review the technical challenges for LFTR we find this;

“Several of these proposed reactors have operating temperatures in excess of +800 °C. Some, such as the LFTR would need critical parts to go even higher as much as +1,600 °C…

So before we even begin our evaluation, we have to conclude that a big stumbling block to several of the proposed reactor designs is this issue of materials choice.”

One of the great advantages of the MSR is the ability to go to high temperature without pressurization, thereby allowing higher thermal efficiency and reducing component size. The author is trying to make a silk purse look like a sow’s ear.

The most important quality in an engineer is the ability to compromise wisely. Engineers are trying to create the optimum balance over many issues, construction cost, life expectancy, efficiency, safety, maintainability, operating and maintenance cost etc. The engineer who focuses on one parameter at the expense of all others will design a failure.

The author makes it sound as if these issues only apply to the MSR, but all engineering is like that, the Chevy volt, Apple I pad, Boeing 787 etc. are all compromises.

Imagine doing the engineering for a solar thermal plant with molten salt storage. Some collectors may be a mile away from the storage facility. They go from blazing hot temperatures at high noon to freezing temperatures on some nights. The salt temperature is constantly changing throughout the cycle, flow rates are constantly being adjusted as temperatures change, to maintain the desired output. Heat exchangers, piping and storage vessels have to be extra large to envelope worst case conditions.

The constant steady flow of clean high temperature intermediate loop salt into the steam generator of an MSR makes the design of those components a breeze by comparison.

It is likely that the parametric studies will show that the first generation MSR’s should be simple uranium burning reactors made of familiar materials, operating at the low end of the MSR potential temperature range.

We must pay for the R&D to do the studies and build a few plants to get the engineering data. That is how we make progress. That is how we develop systems that can make energy cheaper than fossil fuel and end the age of fossil fuel.

“Stories of said pipe work glowing red (see below) are worrying, as it indicates they were operating well within the thermal creep zone... Consequently, its unlikely one could utilise the same design spec today for a commercial plant.”

Yes, the design engineers will have to do some engineering to ensure that all materials are operating well within their nominal performance envelope. Nothing unusual about that.

“Also, the MSRE never included the more tricky Chemical Processing Plant. One was designed by ORNL but never installed.”

Right. This is why I think the first generation MSR will be the simple uranium burner that does not need on line processing. We do not need breeders immediately.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F0tUDJ35So

http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com/downloads/TEAC3%20presentations/TEAC3_LeBlanc_David.pdf

The general tone seems to be that the MSR is not mature fully developed technology; therefore we should not pursue it. If humans had taken that view throughout history we would still be living in caves.

Review of 8.3 Thorium Cycle questions and problems

“we’ll still need supplies of Uranium to get Thorium reactors going again whenever we have to turn it off (which will happen at least once a year or so during its annual maintenance shutdown)…

Obviously, once we exhaust the world’s U-235 stockpiles, LFTR’s and any other Thorium fuelled reactors will cease to function.”

For the LFTR you would only need uranium 235 to startup and breed the uranium 233 sufficient to continue operation. No additional uranium is needed for each shutsown/startup cycle.

There are 3.5 billion tons of uranium in seawater. Perhaps half of that is available at less than 5 times today’s price. That’s still cheap for conventional reactors that require 58 pounds of uranium to generate an 80 year lifetime supply of electricity for one American. It is very cheap for uranium MSR's that requires only 12 pounds of uranium to generate a lifetime supply of electricity for one American, and it is an insignificant cost in a breeder reactor that uses 6 ounces of uranium and/or thorium per lifetime supply of electricity.

“Thorium-232 is a problem with its half life of 14 Billion years (and while the T-232 isn’t a major worry its only mildly radioactive, all the time during this 14 Billion years it will be decaying and producing stuff that is!).”

Thorium-232 (natural thorium) is now scattered throughout the earths crust, including under your house and mine. So removing it, and converting it to fission products that loose the vast majority of their activity in a few hundred years, while extracting enormous quantities of emission free energy, and placing those fission products in a carefully selected location deep under ground or under the seabed, is a good idea.

Nuclear power means earth will be LESS radioactive for most of its remaining years than it would have been without humans.


Comments on 8.4 The Chemical Seperation Plant and waste output

“One other misconception on the internet is the view that a LFTR reactor will produce almost no nuclear waste”

It depends on your definition of almost. To generate an 80 year lifetime supply of electricity for one person in the U.S. with coal we burn 1,140,000 pounds of coal, producing 2,440,000 pounds of CO2 and thousands of pounds of toxic waste, much of it released into the atmosphere.

To generate a lifetime supply of electricity with today’s reactors we mine about 58 pounds of uranium of which about 10 pounds gets into the reactor and produces 6 ounces of fission products. With breeder reactors we mine 6 ounces of uranium or thorium to do the same thing.

The complete natural decay of one uranium atom to one stable atom of lead produces about 7 times more radiation than the complete decay of the fission products from one uranium atom. Uranium and thorium are nature’s radioactive waste, distributed throughout the earths crust without special containment vessels. Nature’s radioactive waste is not buried in carefully selected sites deep underground, it can often be found in soil on the surface.

The extraction of uranium from sea water has been demonstrated at an estimated cost of $160/kg.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/11/two-proposals-for-mining-ocean-for-720.html

Coal, our cheapest fossil fuel, costs 3.2 cents / kWh.

http://www.eia.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html

We generate about 1,500 watts per person in the U.S., so an 80 year lifetime supply of electricity is about 1,000,000 kWh's. Lifetime fuel cost with coal is $34,000, $424/year.

A LFTR will consume 6 ounces of fuel to make this much electricity. To be conservative lets assume that the uranium required to start the reactor is 10% of the lifetime reactor fuel consumption (it’s probably more like 1%, even less considering that at end of life the uranium 233 can be transferred into a new reactor).

Some fission products have positive value.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv-mFSoZOkE

By destroying 6 ounces of uranium we make earth LESS radioactive for most of its remaining years than it would have been without humans, we prevent the formation of six ounces of lead that would be toxic forever, we produce some valuable material, we produce a lifetime supply of electricity, and we prevent the harmful effects of generating that energy by some other means.

In my opinion any technology that destroys more waste than it produces meets this requirement; “will produce almost no nuclear waste”

“I’ve seen various dusty line drawings of the 1970’s ORNL proposal, you can see them yourself here and here, but that’s it. I would firstly note that materials science and chemical processing technology has moved on hugely in the last 40 years, so I doubt it would be sensible to build an CPP as shown in these plans. A new one would have to be redesigned from scratch.”

I agree with everything except “from scratch.” It makes no sense to ignore the knowledge and experience gained in the past. We should build on that.

“Either way building our entire energy strategy on a as of yet unproven concept would be dangerous. The same equally goes for Thorium.”

I agree, it is foolish to spend billions building huge numbers of windmills and solar farms that cannot produce reliable dispatchable kWh's. That is why I recommend an all out R&D program to develop all possible replacements for fossil fuel.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7275#comment-755200

Comments on 8.5 Graphite core and Fire Risk

“Graphite is basically ultra high grade coal!” …

The Windscale reactor is basically a stovepipe charcoal starter with forced air ventilation, scaled up to the size of a power plant. If the designers had actually used coal as a moderator it would have fired up like a blast furnace. It would have destroyed the vent filters, vaporized much of the fuel and likely collapsed the building.

“Inspections have shown that there was NOT a graphite fire: damage to graphite, caused by severely overheated fuel assemblies, was localised.”

http://www.hse.gov.uk/aboutus/meetings/iacs/nusac/131005/p18.pdf

Graphite clearly does not burn like coal. The claim that, “Graphite is basically ultra high grade coal!”, is either based on lack of knowledge or it is deliberate disinformation.

The author acknowledges that in a MSR the graphite will normally be submerged in molten salt, not air. The dump tank will be filled with an inert gas. When the core is dumped, a vent line from the top of the dump tank to the top of the reactor vessel will transfer the inert gas into the reactor vessel. The reactor room will likely be inerted as well.

For air to get to the graphite the salt must be dumped and at least two barriers must be breached, and there will be no fans to generate a high flow rate.

If the graphite did somehow burn, recall that the vast majority of fission products would be safely tucked away down below in the dump tanks, or previously removed to safe storage. Only a thin patina of fission products on the graphite would be subject to fire, not enough to support a big release.

The claim that a graphite fire in a MSR could result in a large release of fission products is a groundless fabrication with no supporting evidence and no potential mechanism.

A 50 year follow up of Windscale workers showed;

“Despite the higher doses received by the fire cohort workers the SMRs by decade for all malignant cancer are consistently lower than those of the non-fire cohort workers.”

http://iopscience.iop.org/0952-4746/30/3/001/pdf/0952-4746_30_3_001.pdf

Comments on 8.6 Why air cooling a LFTR would be a very bad idea

“Another misconception is that LFTR’s can be air-cooled (here and here) rather than being dependant on the water cooling process we utilise in most other power stations.”

Actually the high temperature of MSR’s makes them ideally suited for dry cooling in arid climates.

“Firstly, fire safety, air is an oxidising substance. Fires start all the time at power stations (fossil fuel fired and nuclear ones), especially in the turbine halls and the last thing we want in an emergency is a load of big cooling fans blasting in air and literally fanning the flames!”

I think the author has since acknowledged that the fans would be cooling the condensers located outside the turbine hall, not in the turbine hall or containment building. The turbine hall is separate from the reactor containment and its safety related equipment.

“In this scenario we’d face the dilemma between stopping the fans and cutting of the source of cooling”

The steam plant and its condenser are not safety related systems, the reactor does not rely on the steam plant for safe cooling. Decay heat will be removed by natural convection of air or water. There are no flammable materials in or around the dump tanks.

“The Uranium we’re mining was safe underground and seperate from the biosphere.”

According to the EPA, thousands die from radon exposure every year in the U.S. alone. Nuclear power is far safer than natural uranium left in the ground.

““basically high grade coal” was a quip”

Publishing a quip that you know is misleading and prejudicial is unethical.

The danger of a positive void coefficient of reactivity was well known before the Chernobyl reactors were built. The design could never have been approved for construction in the west, nor could any power reactor design without a containment building, as Chernobyl was. Operators bypassed the protection systems and violated the operating limits to perform a dangerous experiment and spiked the power to 100 times design limits resulting in a steam explosion that blew the reactor apart.

The risk of hydrogen production from the zirconium water reaction was well known, as are the mitigating mechanisms; ventilation to keep concentration below the flammability limit or ignition to burn the hydrogen as it is produced to avoid an explosion. Unfortunately the Japanese failed to deal adequately with the hydrogen production.

The only nuclear accidents to release large quantities of fission products are those where a direct path to the atmosphere is provided by design or by explosion. Even then it is interesting that out of hundreds of fission products, only a few of the most volatile constitute most of the risk.

MSR's have continuous online refueling. There is only enough reactivity for normal operation. I do not know of any way to make an MSR explode. Do you?

Cesium is by far the most problematic fission product in an accident. It melts at 28C, the boiling point is 671 C. When a cesium atom is produced in a MSR it immediately hooks up with a fluorine atom to make cesium fluoride, melting point 682C, boiling point 1251 C, so it has much lower volatility resulting in greatly reduced emissions under accident conditions. Jet fuel boils at about 200 C, and the temperature of burning jet fuel is 260-315C in open air, 980 C in an ideal burner.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel

You could cool a MSR by spraying it with burning jet fuel.

““the fuel will be safely tucked away in dumb tanks” IF the fuel dump process goes okay! This is the danger here, you’re relying on the successful functioning of your fuel dump process”

If the fuel is not dumped the graphite is submerged in salt, no oxygen contact, no fire. You might say, ‘what if it is half submerged?’ In that case the fission products are mostly below the liquid line. If the graphite above the liquid line burns, very little fission product will be volatilized, and it will plate out as soon as it contacts a cooler surface.

This is a fundamental difference between solid and liquid fueled reactors. Volatile fission products will be removed continuously and non volatile products will largely stay on site during an accident. The author cannot have it both ways; he provides no evidence or mechanism to support the idea that a graphite fire in a MSR can happen, and even if it does burn, no mechanism that would result in a large release of radioactivity. The graphite fire hazard claim with MSR's is a groundless fabrication.

“Defence in depth would require that other measures be taken also, although this could be as simple as just putting it all in a reinforced concrete building designed to withstand a high temperature fire.”

I have no doubt that all future power reactors, including MSR's, will have a robust containment. But the MSR containment can be much smaller, using far less material, because hi temperature heat exchangers are very small and steam generators can be small and located outside containment. A pipe rupture inside containment will not release a huge volume of gas or steam, so no need for a large expensive high pressure containment vessel.

“you still need some water on site”

There will be water on site, but you do not need it to keep MSR fuel safe. Engines and motors are air cooled. Light bulbs with white hot filaments are air cooled. In fact, the hotter an object runs, the easier it is to air cool, another big advantage of MSR's.

“So all in all I’d argue uranium mining causes as many (if not more) problems than it solves.”

If we replaced all coal plants with nuclear plants, eliminating mountain top removal, huge releases of mercury, cadmium, soot, CO2 etc that would save perhaps 1,000,000 lives per year and prevent millions more non fatal adverse health effects. How will uranium mining match those effects, especially with advanced designs that reduce mining to 6 ounces per lifetime?

FOLLOWUP on sea water uranium comment by bluerock.

“Extracting uranium from the sea is not a practical possibility.”

If Bardi is right why can’t he answer questions? Why can’t he find the error in contrary analysis? What is your answer to these questions?

http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4558#comment-412498
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4558#comment-412127
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4558#comment-413193
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4558#comment-414051
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4558#comment-415226

“Maybe, like me, he can’t be bothered to read, research and respond to every challenge that appears on the interwebs.”

It is interesting that he found time to address the easy and favorable comments but not the hard questions based on facts and logic.

“Here’s one way to shut us all up: prove that it is technically and *economically* viable to extract uranium from seawater at quantities that could supply a global nuclear industry.”

Had you carefully reviewed your own reference you would know that I addressed that point.
“Why are there no sea water uranium extraction plants?
Historically the price has been under $60 / pound with a few big spikes.
Would you bet your life savings on uranium staying above $200 / lb? I don’t think so, and neither do professional investors, however if sea water technology keeps improving the cost may drop enough to make it happen sooner than most people think.
Sea water uranium is very important because it puts a cap of $200/pound on the maximum sustainable cost of uranium for thousands of years.
Sea water uranium does not have to supply all of our uranium in order to cap the uranium price at $200/pound. It only has to replace the percentage of land based uranium sources that cost more than $200/pound, and that percentage is zero for the foreseeable future.”

http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4558#comment-413193

Comments on 8.7 Why power cycling a LFTR would be an even worse idea!

“The truth is that the LFTR is as constrained in it power output capabilities as other reactors, possibly more constrained in fact.”

It is interesting that you know the performance specifications of power plants that have not even been designed yet.

“Power cycling a LFTR would necessitate such cycles, worsening our already narrow materials choice and requiring a much more heavily constructed reactor.”

So you have already designed the plant, chosen the materials, selected the salt formula, determined the operating temperature. Sounds like you designed a poor reactor.

“It is also worth noting that existing nuclear stations are capable of some level of power cycling anyway just not much!”

The most popular gen. III reactor is the AP-1000. Its design includes the lessons learned from decades of experience running gen. II reactors. Look at its capability.

“The AP1000 is designed to withstand the following operational occurrences without the generation of a reactor trip or actuation of the safety related passive engineered safety systems. The logic and setpoints for the AP1000 Nuclear Steam Supply System (NSSS) control systems are developed in order to meet the following operational transients without reaching any of the protection system setpoints.

· ± 5%/minute ramp load change within 15% and 100% power
· ± 10% step load change within 15% and 100% power
· 100% generator load rejection
· 100-50-100% power level daily load follow over 90% of the fuel cycle life
· Grid frequency changes equivalent to 10% peak-to-peak power changes at 2%/minute rate
· 20% power step increase or decrease within 10 minutes
· Loss of a single feedwater pump

Off-site power has no safety-related function due to the passive safety features incorporated in the AP1000 design. Therefore, redundant off-site power supplies are not required

Containing Core Damage. The AP1000 design provides the operators with the ability to drain the IRWST water into the reactor cavity in the event that the core has uncovered and is melting. This prevents reactor vessel failure and subsequent relocation of molten core debris into the containment. Retention of the debris in the vessel significantly reduces the uncertainty in the assessment of containment failure and radioactive release to the environment due to ex-vessel severe accident phenomena.”

http://www.ne.doe.gov/pdfFiles/AP1000_Plant_Description.pdf

“The turbine generator is intended not only for base load operation, but also for load follow capability. Mechanical design of the turbine root and rotor steeple attachments uses optimized contour to significantly reduce operational stresses.”

https://www.ukap1000application.com/PDFDocs/Safety/UKP-GW-GL-740%20Rev%200.pdf

As implied above, load following thermal/mechanical stress cycles are largely limited to the steam turbine. If MSR designers want to keep reactor temperature constant, they can coordinate feedwater flow to the steam generators with reactor power to maintain constant reactor average temperature over the full range of operation.

As power is reduced the reactor hot leg temperature will cool slightly and the cold leg temperature will warm slightly, keeping the average constant. If the engineers want to eliminate even that small temperature swing they can modulate salt flow rate with power to keep the inlet and outlet temperatures constant over the full range of operation.

Six ounces of thorium can produce an 80 year lifetime supply of electricity in a LFTR. It requires no enrichment or fabrication into fuel rods. Assuming the fuel is free will induce a negligible error in the overall economic analysis.

These plants can be run a few percent over demand with fine control managed by dumping excess power into a resistor bank. This would allow near instant slew rates without subjecting the plant to rapid power jockeying. The grid itself could be used as the resistor bank by modulating power factor. With fuel cost essentially zero, they could run the plants continuously at 100% and avoid any thermal cycling of the steam turbine/generator, using the excess power to make hydrogen or carbon based fuel from atmospheric CO2.

http://www.lanl.gov/news/newsbulletin/pdf/Green_Freedom_Overview.pdf

As electric vehicles become more numerous, nighttime charging and smart grid technology will level out the day/night swings.

The addition of intermittent, unreliable, undispatchable wind and solar farms has made load balancing much more difficult.

“- the combination of wind facilities +balancing facilities is significantly less economical than using the balancing facility at rated output in base-loaded mode.”

http://theenergycollective.com/willem-post/57905/wind-power-and-co2-emissions

High variability induced by wind and solar farms may cancel all claimed emissions reductions.

http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/stories/2010/04/19/daily11.html

Intermittent, unreliable, undispatchable energy sources must be backed up by reliable dispatchable plants. The true value of intermittent, unreliable, undispatchable kWh's is the cost of fuel saved, 0.5 cents/kWh nuclear, 3.2 cents/kWh coal and 5.2 cents/kWh gas. The simplest non breeder uranium MSR would have a fuel cost of 0.1 cents/kWh, essentially zero for breeders.

The real reason nuclear plants do not load follow is that they have the lowest fuel cost. Intermittent, unreliable, undispatchable wind and solar kWh's would have no value on a nuclear powered grid.

“Several meltdowns of liquid metal cooled reactors have resulted from such clogging incidents.”

A sodium cooled experimental reactor with solid metal fuel and a serious design defect has little relevance to future MSR's.

Comments on 8.8 Thermal windows and material choices

This entire section boils down to “Some R&D is required.” No one denies that. There is no reason to believe that any of the issues mentioned are show stoppers.

Comments on 8.9 The Brayton cycle and MSR reactors

The Wright Brothers did not build an SR-71. Henry Ford did not start with the GT-40. Like all technologies, the MSR will start simple and build on that experience.

“the fact that our turbine would have to be designed to withstand having a mixture of molten salt and fluorided fuel passed through it at very high temperatures.”

There would be an intermediate heat exchanger, no fission products outside containment.

“oh! but we almost forgot about that chemical processing plant and its net energy inputs, say we deduct 5-10% of reactor power output to account for running that,”

6 ounces of thorium can produce about 1,000,000 kWh's. So processing 6 ounces of fission products requires 100,000 kWh's? Not a chance.

Comments on 8.10 Piping, FMEA and leak prevention

“the major risk to any MSR reactor is ….either a fire effecting its graphite core (which for a LF reactors running at low vapour pressure is a greater risk than with any other graphite cored reactor) or more likely a burst pipe.”

The fire risk was covered in a previous section.

“the major danger with a LF plant is that somewhere in the lengthy network of pipes that it and its CPP consist of, something breaks.”

The author carefully avoids describing the exact sequence of events that results in a large scale release of fission products to the atmosphere that he alludes to.

There is a strong incentive to minimize fuel volume. Therefore the intermediate heat exchangers will be close to the reactor vessel to keep pipe length short.

Small leaks will solidify on the floor. Large leaks will flow to the drain tanks. There is no large inventory of volatile fission products. There is no mechanism for a powerful explosion. The reactor room will be inerted.

During normal operations volatile fission products will bubble out of the hot salt as they are formed and be converted to a form that is non volatile and easy to store away from the reactor. Fission produces that do not come out of the molten salt are in forms that are stable at very high temperature. So there will be no inventory of volatile fission products available for release in an accident, as can happen when solid fuel melts under accident conditions.

So what is the detailed scenario resulting in a large scale release of fission products to the countryside? What is the chemical composition of the fission products? What are the melting and boiling temperatures of those compounds? What mechanism drives them out of the plant into the atmosphere?

By what path do they escape?

“Take for example the pipe at the base of the reactor that allows us to dump the core to the emergency dump tanks… suppose for example that it bursts during a dump scenario? Obviously we need a containment vessel around the pipe to catch any leaks.”

The answer is in the drawing of the FUJI MSR in your report. The spill would flow down the floor drain into the emergency drain tank.

“Also simply relying on gravity would be inadequate in certain scenarios, a pump on a separate stem (or a tank of inert high pressure gas connected up to the pressure vessel to “encourage” the fuel to drain away), would be necessary.”

Gravity has not failed in 14 billion years. Describe in detail an accident sequence of events where the proposed additional equipment would prevent a large offsite release of fission products that could not be prevented without that extra equipment.

“But what if the trigger for the accident is a clogging of fuel channels (as discussed earlier) by solidified fuel?”

The solidified fuel would heat up and re-melt.

“If we dump in that scenario we might cause the dump pipe to clog also, likely leading to a criticality incident or its failure and a breach.”

Maintaining criticality under normal operation with the minimum concentration of fissile material is the challenge. The poor geometry and lack of moderation in a spill avoids criticality problems.

“So we would need a thermal regulation system around the pipe to ensure it can be heated or cooled as necessary. Also I don’t like the idea behind this “freeze plug”. I realise the passive safety benefits it brings, but it’s just going to be too slow to act in a real emergency and there’s too much that can go wrong with it. If I were an engineer at such a plant I’d want a big shiny red “dump core now!” panic button on my control panel.”

I agree. I have never felt good about the fan cooled freeze plug.

If I were responsible for this part of the plant I would ask a dozen bright engineers to independently come up with a plan for handling this safety function, then pass them around and generate lists of pros and cons for each.

My suggestion would be to use a thermal rupture disk, or a flapper valve held shut by a thermal fuse or electromagnet. In each case there would be the option for quick manual operation. There would be an orifice to allow a continuous metered flow of salt into the drain tank. That flow would maintain the temperature of the drain line and verify its functional availability. The salt stream would be continuously pumped back into the primary loop. It could also be the source of fuel for continuous chemical processing.

There would also be another dump path with a conventional control valve; it would be the primary valve, the thermal device would be the backup, along with the floor drain.

In the extremely unlikely situation where everything fails the stockholders are going to take a hit, but there will be no major release of fission products to the countryside.

“see how in the process of getting one short section of pipe back to within a reasonable safety margin the result has been for it to balloon into a massively complex system in the space of 5 minutes.”

Welcome to the real world of engineering. All large scale power plants are complicated. A Boeing 787 is more complicated then a Cessna 150. MSR's can be much smaller and less complicated than coal plants with emissions controls of the same output.

“the benefits of a Molten-Salt fuel system are outweighted by the lengthy inspection process of all that pipe work.”

The compact design of the MSR allowed by high temperature and lack of active safety systems and complicated emission control systems makes the piping far less complex and easier to inspect than a conventional coal or nuclear plant.

The failure of that piping would be less dangerous than the failure of fuel system piping at a natural gas plant.

“any MSR reactor would inevitably have to have large stockpiles of salt stored on site or nearby,”

Why? Small amounts of material are coming out of the system; why/how would we put in large amounts of additional material?

“Fluorine gas is extremely toxic (several times more deadly than chlorine”

Toxicity Data, Fluorine
LC50 inhal (rat)
185 ppm (300 mg/m3; 1 h)

Toxicity Data, Chlorine
LC50 inhal (rat)
293 ppm (879 mg/m3; 1 h)

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=4911&page=320

By volume fluorine is less than twice as toxic as chlorine. The U.S. consumes ten billion kg of chlorine each year; enough to kill every man woman and child in the U.S. every 45 minutes. Essentially all of that is manufactured and consumed under conditions less secure than those inside a reactor containment building.

Fluorine will not be stored or transported in elemental form in large quantities. The chemical processing equipment in LFTR's will be very small by industrial standards, and they will be among the most secure and well regulated in the world.

“ Another misconception of the LFTR fans is that LFTR’s will not require the same large exclusion zones as other reactors. A.”

Other reactors do not have large exclusion zones, nor will LFTR's. Check Google Earth.

“A LFTR is essentially just a glorified chemical plant”

A large LFTR will produce a few pounds of fission products per day. The image of a large industrial chemical plant is false. Many common industrial facilities use far larger quantities of hazardous materials under far less secure conditions.

I expect the chemical processing will be done in sealed tamper resistant modules with standardized size and simple connections so that as processing technology improves, the older plants can have access to the latest technology.


8.11 MSR’s, A proliferate problem?

There are two relatively easy, fast, cheap paths to nuclear explosives;

1... Extraction of U235 from natural or reactor grade uranium. (enrichment technology).
2... Plutonium production using a simple unpressurized water cooled graphite reactor with natural uranium fuel.

There is at least one difficult, time consuming, and expensive path to nuclear explosives; using a commercial nuclear power plant.

If a group or nation wants to build nuclear explosives, the optimum level of proliferation resistance is that which is just barely easy enough to convince them to take the most difficult, time consuming, and expensive path to nuclear explosives.

All proposed future reactor designs are far beyond this standard, so it makes no sense to add complexity and cost to a plant design in response to the proliferation issue. That just makes it harder to build new energy sources that are much cheaper than burning fossil fuel, and there in lies a real risk.

The solution to the proliferation issue is education.

8.13 LFTR, the Kool-Aid Fuelled Reactor?

A collection of ad hominem attacks and insults, nothing substantial.

Bill Hannahan's on his difficulties getting his Archer-Jacobson review published

As I indicated in the introduction of Bill Hannahan's critical review of the Jacobson & Archer claims about Wind baseload power, Bill went through quite a struggle to get his paper published, both by the The Journal of Applied Meteorology & Climatology (JAMC) and by the Internet site the Oil Drum. Bill's efforts were frustrated by both. This is especially disturbing in the case of the JAMC, because it was obliged by the standards of science and its own publication rules to publish Bill's second round paper. The failure of the JAMC publish Bill's second round paper should be itself reviewed as a potential ethical lapse. The Oil Drum simply passed up a good opportunity, and I suspect that was at least as much a matter of style as of substance. Bill's current account is long, but it concludes with an important point about the effect of the internet on the speed of human knowledge growth.

Can interconnected windfarms replace baseload power plants, Part II

By Bill Hannahan

The Journal of Applied Meteorology & Climatology (JAMC) published a peer reviewed paper by Stanford professor Mark Jacobson and Cristina Archer called

“Supplying Baseload Power and Reducing Transmission Requirements by Interconnecting Wind Farms”

A first round review comment on the electrical engineering portion of the analysis was submitted in accordance with the published procedure which calls for two rounds of comment/author response, with publication of the second round. The authors submitted a response to the first round comment. The final comment was submitted.

SUMMARY

The response to the review comment revealed the following facts.

1… Author Mark Jacobson did not identify any errors in the final review comment.

2… Interconnected windfarms cannot meet the reliability standards required to replace any fraction of baseload power plant capacity.

3… Stanford President John Hennessey has a B.E. in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in computer science. He did not identify any errors in the final comment, yet he refused to take any action to diminish the damage being done by the flawed Stanford paper which is still on the Stanford web site.

4… The Journal of Applied Meteorology & Climatology (JAMC) violated its published policy by refusing to publish the final review comment and by repeatedly trying to publish the first round comment without the author’s permission.

5… Peer review does not guarantee high quality or accuracy. Quality and accuracy depend entirely on the quality of the people involved.

6… Peer reviewed journals are an inefficient out of date mechanism for reviewing scientific papers. The internet makes possible faster more detailed and more accurate reviews that are transparent.

7… Nate Hagens, Kyle Saunders, Gail Tverberg and five more editors at The Oil Drum found no errors in the review comment yet they refused to publish the facts.

SEQUENCE OF EVENTS

The editor informed me that the authors refused to respond to my final comment and insisted on publishing the first round comment/response, in violation of published AMS policy.

I sent the following letter to members of the AMS in a position of leadership.

[WARNING, it is a long and disjointed letter, reflecting the process.]

I received the following note from the JAMC editor.

Dear Mr. Hannahan,

I have been informed by the authors of the original manuscript that, after receiving your revised version of the Comments, they have no time, nor are they interested in, revising their reply to match the new version. Although your revision has followed the instructions that the comments need to be standing alone, the number of comments have now doubled compared from the original version and, as a result, the comments and replies are now out of sequence, making it impossible to publish the pair. This leaves me no choice but to go with the initial pair of Comments/Reply. I have carefully compared the new and old version of your comments and I feel that publishing the original version won't lose all the major points that you are trying to make in your revised version…

I recognize and appreciate the work that you have put into the revision, but in the interest of moving the process forward and getting the comments published, I have to accept the original Comments/Reply pair (April 2008).

I responded to the editor with the following note:

“This is the second time you have tried to publish my first round comment without my permission. Why are you trying so hard to publish my weakest comment?

My first round review comment was written and submitted in compliance with the AMS procedure, which calls for two rounds, of which only the second round will be published. Only my final comment is approved for publication.

You wrote;

“I have been informed by the authors of the original manuscript that, after receiving your revised version of the Comments, they have no time, nor are they interested in, revising their reply …. This leaves me no choice but to go with the initial pair of Comments/Reply.”

It is interesting that the authors would rather go with the first round comment that they found objectionable than to address my final comment that lacks the offensive material.

The AMS procedure does not require an author response, it is optional. In fact the AMS procedure specifies the author’s right to respond at a later time. There is no reason to revert to my first round comment. Why do you want to publish the inferior comment when the final comment is so much better?

The AMS procedure gives the authors the last word which is normally a huge advantage. If the authors forgo that privilege in an effort to suppress the superior comment, why should they be rewarded for that strategy? Why should the readers be denied the best argument? Are the authors practicing science or playing chess.

You wrote;

“I have carefully compared the new and old version of your comments and I feel that publishing the original version won't lose all the major points that you are trying to make in your revised version.”

So it is OK to delete half or more of my points, especially the most important ones, because the authors do not want to address them? I don’t think so.

The final comment is much improved over the first round comment. It clearly documents the defects and omissions in the reports analysis and it lacks the controversial content of the first round comment that the authors and you found objectionable.

Clearly the authors do not want my final comment published because it contains devastating points that they cannot answer. The authors must not be allowed to hide the facts by simply refusing to respond to them.

You wrote;

“I recognize and appreciate the work that you have put into the revision, but in the interest of moving the process forward and getting the comments published, I have to accept the original Comments/Reply pair (April 2008).”

To recognize my work, and to allow others to appreciate it, and to complete your obligation in this matter, simply forward my final comment for publication.

Stanford received thousands of dollars to create this deeply flawed report. The authors received thousands of dollars to write this deeply flawed report. JMAC and the reviewers were well paid to publish this deeply flawed report.

I spent many precious hours of my time researching and composing my final comment. While that time was unpaid, my final comment more accurately reflects the unreliability of wind power than does the deeply flawed Stanford report, and it deserves to be published.

The nineteen points in my final comment should have been raised by the peer reviewers. Had they done so, the deeply flawed conclusions of this report would not be spread across the internet and other publications, and the many hours I dedicated to this effort could have been put to other use. Publishing my final comment will not un-ring the bell, it will not undo all the damage caused by this report, but it will be a start.

Since the authors have given up their right to respond in a timely manner, I request that you publish my final comment now with a note that the authors choose not to respond. Or publish all three comments with a note that the authors choose not to respond to the final comment. They have the right to respond at a later time. Your readers are intelligent well educated adults. They will understand.

The length of my final comment will be similar to that of both first round comments combined. Given the length of the deeply flawed Stanford report, the length of my comment should not be an issue. Energy and climate change are the two biggest problems faced by mankind.

The Stanford paper plays a role in delaying the implementation of the best possible energy policy. As a result billions of people around the world will experience more pain and suffering needlessly, and many lives will be shortened over the next several decades. It is the people on the lowest rung of the economic ladder who will suffer the most for this.

This comment process is now in its 14th month. The ball has been in my court a small fraction of that time. The U.S. is about to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on energy policy. The truth needs to come out soon.

The JAMC editor ignored the points made in this response and violated the published AMS policy for correspondence, page 14 of the authors guide pdf, at least 7 times.

1… The editor withheld the author’s first round comment from me for six weeks, (June 12, 2008- July 20, 2008).

2… The editor tried to publish my first round comment without my permission, (June 25, 2008).

3… The editor allowed the authors to introduce diversionary issues not contained in my review comment or in the original paper (July 20, 2008).

4… The editor tried to publish my first round comment without my permission a second time, (March 5, 2009).

5… The editor claims that the final comment is too long, (March 12, 2009). The editor did not identify any points that were wrong, irrelevant, insignificant or otherwise appropriate for deletion. AMS procedure does not limit the length of comments.

6… The editor refused to have any of my comments reviewed by an electrical engineer with experience in the generation and distribution of electric power.

7… The editor refused to publish the final comment while agreeing that it is of high quality, (March 12, 2009).

MY REQUEST

There is a lot of material here. There are two key points to keep in mind while evaluating this material.

1… The first sentence of the introduction to the AMS author guide.

“The constitution of the American Meteorological Society lists as its objectives

“the development and dissemination of knowledge of the atmospheric and related oceanic and hydrologic sciences and the advancement of their professional applications.””

2… The fact that my final comment is the best comment. None of the authors, editors or reviewers have identified any fault with it.

Do you believe that it is in the best interests of science to have an unobstructed debate of the best ideas? Do you believe that theories and analyses should be subject to thorough independent examination? Do you believe that science should not be “Pay to Play”? Do you believe that scientists should not be able to hide the flaws of their work behind institutional and procedural barriers? Do you believe that the points in the final review comment have merit and deserve a full airing?

If these are your beliefs I ask that you explain them to JAMC chief editor Rob Rauber,

rauber@atmos.uiuc.edu and ask him to publish the final comment without the author’s response, as provided for by the AMS procedure, or publish all of the comments.

I also ask that you copy your remarks to AMS president Thomas R. Karl,

Thomas.R.Karl@noaa.gov

and to me at mc2essay@yahoo.com .

[THIS LETTER TO AMS LEADERSHIP CONTINUES WITH AN EXAMPLE]

Postscript: A Contrasting Example and a Recommendation

In his first round response and in his other energy papers, author, Dr. Jacobson references the work of Dr. Benjamin Sovacool. Sovacool claims that the lifecycle CO2 emissions from nuclear power are 66 gms/kWh.

http://www.nirs.org/climate/background/sovacool_nuclear_ghg.pdf

Unlike Dr. Jacobson, Dr. Sovacool engages in public discussion of his work. Consider the following exchange:

Hannahan… Is you goal to produce a paper on; (A) The world’s historical emissions of CO2 from nuclear power plants, or (B) CO2 emissions from future Gen III reactors built in the U.S.?

Your calculation of capacity factor is consistent with A. To make the cost estimate consistent with A, average the actual construction cost of all plants built so far. I would expect a number around $1.00/watt.

Your use of U.S. Gen III construction cost estimates, the highest in the world, makes me believe that your objective is a paper that will be useful to policy makers deciding the future of nuclear power in the U.S., therefore your goal should be B.

To be consistent you should estimate the capacity factor of future Gen III reactors in the U.S.. Gen II reactors in the U.S. have ramped up from 50% in the 70’s to about 90% in recent years

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/pdf/pages/sec9_5.pdf

in spite of the fact that Gen II plants are handicapped by an old decaying grid that experiences occasional outages requiring nuclear plants to throttle back or shutdown. Experts agree that we need to overhaul the grid to increase capacity and reliability, regardless of the energy source mix.

Gen III plants are Gen II plants that incorporate the lessons learned over the last 40 years. They have reduced complexity, inherently safe design features and vastly improved instrumentation and control systems, making them more reliable. With these improvements the most probable capacity factor for U.S. Gen III reactors is well over 90%, not 81 %.

Sovacool… Point well taken. Really the paper was not meant to be either A or B—I just wanted to see what the literature said about GHG emissions from nuclear plants—but in the end I suppose it ended mixing A and B up. This is because many of the studies analyzed mixed them up, with some looking at historical emissions in places like the US, and others looking at future emissions in places like Japan or Sweden. I think a more careful paper that does either A or B would be very useful, and if it did B, it would need to account for the high capacity factor of US nuclear plants that you point out.

Hannahan… U.S. Gen II plants were designed for 40 year lifetimes. Almost half have received license extensions to 60 years.

http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2008/12/shearon-harris-plant-receives-license.html

Gen III plants are designed for 60 years with possible extension to 80 or more years. The assumption of 30-40 year lifespan for future Gen III reactors is not appropriate.

You would not evaluate the future performance of wind and solar based on 1950-1980 windmill and solar cell designs. Nuclear power plant design has been frozen at an immature level for several decades, roughly equivalent to the DC-3 in aviation, but the DC-3 had the advantage of being factory mass produced. There is enormous room for evolution in nuclear power plant design and construction.

Sovacool… The 40-60 year lifetime for newer plants is also a good point, and this is the first I’ve heard of it (much of the literature I’ve read says 20-40 years). Naturally, the longer nuclear plants operate, the lower their emissions per kWh from construction and decommissioning will be. Scarcer supplies of uranium could offset this improvement if more GHG are emitted to mine and enrich the uranium, but your point is valid.

Hannahan… By far the biggest problem is the assumption that the energy mix does not change over the life of the plant. Most wind and solar emissions come before the first watt hour is produced, whereas half of the nuclear emissions are released after 20-40 years of operation. What are the odds that coal will be generating 50% of our electricity 20, 40, 60, 80 years from now? There is rapidly growing resistance to more coal in the U.S. and many existing plants are nearing end of life. Dr Hansen (NASA) believes we must get off coal soon. Of course in 80 years global cooling might be the big issue, but for now the up front CO2 loading of wind and solar is a disadvantage nobody is talking about.

The transportation mix is going to shift away from oil into natural gas, electric and biofuel, reducing fossil carbon/ton mile substantially. Do you distinguish between fossil carbon and recycled atmospheric carbon?

Accounting for these changes over the life of the plant will dramatically reduce average fossil CO2/kWh for nuclear plants, less so for other options with shorter life spans and higher up front emissions.

An easier method, yet still reasonable for comparison purposes, would be to assume that all electrical inputs are from the technology being evaluated.

Underground uranium mines are largely electric, open pit mines will shift toward natural gas, electric and biofuel, sea water uranium can eliminate mining.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4558#comment-413193

Milling and enrichment are electric, cold war diffusion enrichment plants are going away. The U.S. is building two centrifuge enrichment plants and two more are in planning.

Sovacool… I hope you’re right about coal, and as I’ve told many others on this website nuclear plants are far superior from coal plants for a variety of reasons. The amazing thing is that electric utilities in the US are still talking about adding huge amounts of coal and natural gas capacity in the coming years. Both the EIA and IEA, for example, project that by 2030 and 2040 fossil fuels will provide the SAME mix of energy services that they do today, if not more. So while I agree many of the shifts you talk about would indeed be welcome (and more efficient), I’m sceptical that they will occur.

Hannahan… Gen 4 reactors will reduce uranium requirements / kWh by a factor of 60-100. Gen 4 plants using sea water cooling could extract all their fuel directly from the condenser cooling water.

Sovacool… [no comment]

Hannahan… An alternative viewpoint is to see each study as the correct answer to a different question, depending on the boundary conditions and assumptions it is based on.

From this perspective, the first step is to decide which question we want to answer. The most important question is the one your paper is most often claimed to have answered.

“If we build new Generation III nuclear power plants in large numbers, how much CO2 / kWh will that release?”

Each of the calculations in your study should be evaluated to see if it answers this question. For example, do they account for;

A… The fact that the fossil carbon content of electricity will go down dramatically over the next 60-80 years. Over 70% of our electricity comes from fossil fuel now. If we replace the fossil plants with a large number of Gen III nuclear plants, the CO2 per kWh will drop by a huge factor, and that will feedback into a further reduction of nuclear CO2 per kWh. If we do not build large numbers of nuclear plants the CO2 content of nuclear kWh's is irrelevant because it will have a minor impact on our problems.

B… Capacity factors above 0.9

C… 60+ year lifetimes.

D… Continuing modest improvements in fuel design with gradually increasing energy yield per ton.

E… Continuing modest improvement in decommissioning techniques including the use of advanced robotic technology likely to be available in 60-80 years when Gen III plants begin reaching end of life.

F… The fact that cold war diffusion enrichment is going away soon and centrifuge technology will continue to improve at a modest rate over the next 60 years. Laser enrichment may reduce enrichment cost further but need not be considered at this stage.

G… A rational approach to spent fuel. Recycling into Generation IV reactors or a simple, safe, easy, low energy consumption solution like deep seabed disposal.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96oct/seabed/seabed.htm

After weeding out all the studies that do not meet these criteria you will be left with a small number of studies with results that are clustered within a narrow range of the correct number. Average those numbers and you will have a valuable result. I would expect it to be near the low end of the results you reviewed.

Sovacool… I don’t think the correct question to answer is “If we build Generation III nuclear plants …” Those plants may never be built, given the recent increases in the capital cost for nuclear power plant construction, public resistance towards siting and the transportation of nuclear waste, and the risk of proliferation and accident (and no matter how many times we go back and forth about these issues in Scitizen, people will still believe what they want to believe). The better question, for me, is “what are the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the current lifecycle,” the plants that will be operating for the next few years, the ones that are competing against existing generators. And here, I see a number of advantages in favor of wind, solar, etc.

Hannahan… True or False. If we stopped burning fossil fuel completely, the fossil CO2 per kWh of nuclear power would be near zero.

Sovacool… If we stopped burning fossil fuels completely, and even used nuclear power plants or renewable power plants to create the electricity needed to enrich uranium etc., I do agree the c02 per kWh for nuclear would decline. But I suspect it would still be much higher than the c02 per kWh from other sources such as energy efficiency or renewables.

Hannahan… Vattenfall generates electricity in Sweden. It gets 37.5 % of its electricity from hydro and 61.7 % from nuclear. Only about 1/4 % comes from fossil fuel. The very low fossil carbon content of Vattenfall’s electricity makes the fossil content of its nuclear kWh's very low.

The lifecycle CO2 emissions of Vattenfall nuclear power is only 3.5 gms CO2 per kWh, 5% of your reports number. The lifecycle CO2 emissions of Vattenfall wind power is 10.5 gms CO2 per kWh, three times higher than nuclear.

http://www.vattenfall.com/www/vf_com/vf_com/Gemeinsame_Inhalte/DOCUMENT/360168vatt/386246envi/2005-LifeCycleAssessment.pdf

If the U.S., or any country, replaces its fossil power plants with Gen III nuclear plants, the fossil carbon content of its kWh's will also be very low. Combine that with the effects of longer life, higher capacity factor, improved construction techniques and more efficient enrichment capacity, and the CO2 per kWh of nuclear power will be lower than it is in Sweden now.

Sovacool… No Comment.

Hannahan… Consider these two questions.

A… What are the CO2 emissions associated with the current lifecycle of existing Gen II nuclear plants?

B… If we replace our fossil power plants with Gen III nuclear plants, what are the CO2 emissions / kWh associated with the lifecycle of those new plants.

Which of these questions is most important to the future of the human race? Our Gen II reactors were designed in the 60’s and built in the 70’s – 80’s. We are not going to build more of these reactors, or more Titanics or more Model T Fords. Do you compare the performance of 60’s reactor technology with the performance of 60’s model windmills, solar energy systems, geothermal and biomass technology? Almost none of them are still working, and the comparison would be meaningless for the future.

Sovacool… No Comment.

Hannahan… … Benjamin, you have candidly acknowledged that A is the, “better question, for me”. For those of us looking for the answer to B, will you acknowledge that your report does not answer question B?

Sovacool… No Comment.

Hannahan… Why is Vattenfall wind power CO2 per kWh three times higher than nuclear? Windmills use much more steel and concrete per kWh than nuclear, and those emissions are almost all up front, before the first kWh is generated.

Sovacool… No Comment.

Hannahan… Vattenfall has already gone a long way towards this goal. If we leave the fossil carbon atoms in the ground in the form of coal, oil and natural gas deposits, the fossil CO2 emissions of nuclear power, and any other surviving energy source, would be approximately zero. If necessary we can even make nuclear power carbon negative by using some of the energy to extract CO2 from the atmosphere.

http://www.lanl.gov/news/newsbulletin/pdf/Green_Freedom_Overview.pdf

Sovacool… No Comment.

Hannahan… Extracting uranium from seawater using ships anchored in the Gulf Stream and Black Current, powered by water turbines in the current, can provide fossil carbon free uranium for hundreds of years using Gen III reactors, and billions of years with Gen IV reactors.

http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4558#comment-413193

Sovacool… No Comment.

These and many more interesting exchanges are available here;

http://www.scitizen.com/screens/blogPage/viewBlog/sw_viewBlog.php?idTheme=14&idContribution=2136

CONCLUSION

In the span of a few weeks this discussion has teased out important points regarding CO2 emissions from future nuclear power plants that I have not seen in any papers on this subject. The debate was cordial, respectful and even humorous at times.

Contrast that with the 16 month ordeal at JAMC resulting in zero comments published and procedurally limited to two rounds with only the last round published, had the editor followed the AMS procedure. Think how much would have been lost if the Scitizen site limited debate to one or two rounds, or less if an author was intimidated by a comment.

Although I disagree with Dr. Sovacool on some points, my respect for him is infinitely higher than for Dr. Jacobson, because Sovacool VOLUNTARILY discusses his work in a public forum.

If Dr. Jacobson posted his wind reliability paper on Scitizen it would be ripped apart like a piece of meat in a tank of hungry piranhas. He would be forced to improve the quality of his work dramatically, and to stick to the subjects for which he has expertise. More importantly, his conclusions would not be posted all over the internet and other publications misleading people and political leaders, distorting energy policy, resulting in needless suffering in the decades to come.

Limiting comments to one round may have made sense before the electronic age when comments were hand written and type was handset but we can do much better now. I urge AMS to take the lead by setting up a site like Scitizen on AMS’s computer system where issues can be fully aired out.

For the record;

My degrees are in electrical and nuclear engineering. I support nuclear power, but my energy recommendation is neutral. Conduct R&D on every technology, build prototypes of everything, publish the results, level the playing field, pick the best technology.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4961#comment-459021

If this recommendation is implemented the best solution will emerge, whatever it is. I believe wind power will be stopped dead in its tracks.

My energy paper is here;

http://coal2nuclear.com/energy_facts.htm

The supporting calculations, assumptions and references are here.

http://coal2nuclear.com/ENERGY%20CALCS%20REV%207.xls

I thank you in advance for your help in getting my final review comment published.

Regards,

Bill Hannahan

[THIS IS THE END OF MY LETTER TO AMS LEADERSHIP]

They did not respond to any of the points raised and continue to refuse to publish the final comment.

A slightly revised version was sent to Stanford president John Hennessey. Here are the revised sections.

“President Hennessy, do you believe that it is in the best interests of science to have an unobstructed debate of the best ideas. Do you believe that theories and analyses should be subject to thorough independent examination? Do you believe that science should not be “Pay to Play”? Do you believe that scientists should not be able to hide their work behind institutional and procedural barriers? Do you believe that the points in the final review comment have merit and deserve a full and accurate response?

If these are your beliefs please explain them to author Dr. Mark Jacobson. He takes the opposite point of view. If he responds to the final review comment, the Journal will publish both documents.

If he still refuses to provide a response, I ask that you contact AMS president Thomas R. Karl, and ask him to publish the final comment without the author’s response, as provided for by the AMS procedure. I also ask that you remove the paper from your website or post my review comment with it.

Since this paper was published Dr. Jacobson has produced at least one more deeply flawed paper.

http://www.rsc.org/delivery/_ArticleLinking/DisplayHTMLArticleforfree.cfm?JournalCode=EE&Year=2009&ManuscriptID=b809990c&Iss=Advance_Article%20l/#tab1

It assigns the effects of nuclear war to commercial nuclear power plants. It assigns the emissions from fossil fueled power plants to imaginary nuclear plants that have not been built. The author claims that windmills can replace baseload power plants, citing his wind reliability paper, which he knows is deeply flawed, having read my comments…

The journals are becoming an anachronism due to their failure to use the best technology to accelerate the progress of science. I urge you to take the lead by setting up a site like Scitizen on Stanford’s computer system and requiring Stanford personal to defend their work in an open environment. That is not to say they would have to respond to every crackpot with a dumb remark, but they would ignore thoughtful substantive comments at their peril.”

I receive the following response 2 weeks later.

“Of course, I have no right to interfere with the processes of the JAMC. Furthermore, Professor Jacobson's decision on how he wants to respond is well within his prerogative as a faculty member.

I am sorry I cannot be of further help in resolving your issue.

Best wishes,

John L. Hennessy
President”

FINAL COMMENTS

1… When I wrote the first round comment I had not reviewed IEEE Std. 762-2006 or the data from the North American Electric Reliability Council. The first round comment did not contain items 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 16. These are fact based points that cannot be refuted.

2… I am not allowed to publish the author’s response to the first round comment. It is short, shallow, error filled and illogical on some points. It did not address all points in the first round comment. It also includes new issues not found in the paper or my comment including an attack on nuclear power claiming high CO2 emissions for nuclear power.

That attack triggered the idea of using the Sovacool discussion as an example of how a back and forth discussion can develop important points.

3… I am sure that Charles Barton will welcome and post a full uncensored response from the authors, president Hennessey or the editors. I hope they take advantage of that opportunity.

CONCLUSIONS

1… Stanford President Hennessey has a B.E. in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in computer science. He did not identify any errors in the final comment, yet he would not lift a finger to diminish the damage being done by the flawed Stanford paper.

There is a growing religious belief that renewable energy can replace fossil fuel with little or no reduction in quality of life or increase in human suffering. Science is not a religion.

Consider the history of the Big Bang Theory.

1916 … Einstein’s theory of relativity published.

1927 … Georges Lemaître proposes theory of an expanding universe. Einstein claims the universe is fixed.

1929 … Hubble studies red shift, finding that galaxies are moving away from our galaxy at a speed proportional to our distance from those galaxies.

1945 … George Gamow proposes neutron reactions that could explain the formation of light atoms in a big bang environment, and he proposes the existence of background radiation from that event.

1965 … Penzias and Wilson, Bell Lab engineers, detect the background radiation.

1970 … The Big Bang theory attains scientific consensus and enters school textbooks.

1970-present … Cracks appear in the theory. The distribution of matter in the universe is not uniform. Galaxies rotate too fast for the known mass in them. Expansion seems to be accelerating.

In the future the big bang theory will be modified or removed from the textbooks altogether if something else attains greater scientific consensus.

Contrast that with supporters of creation theory who want to put it in the school science books first and create a generation of supporting scientists later.

The worrisome thing about renewable energy true believers is that they include people with parchment claiming expertise in science and engineering, like president Hennessey, the authors and the leaders at AMS. They are willing and determined to use their standing in the world of science and engineering to promote renewables at all cost and to suppress opposing information.

Somehow they obtained degrees in science and technology without learning the fundamental principles by which scientific knowledge expands and improves in quality. The free exchange of ideas subject to continuous testing against the reality of nature is essential for the progress of science and technology.

2. In academia the rule is publish or perish. Some Journals have become engines that convert money into paper without respect to quality. In the worst case they suppress documents of high quality if they do not bring in revenue or if they conflict with high dollar customers.

3. My attempt to publish a single comment at JAMC lasted 16 months. The ball was in their court most of that time. The discussion with Dr. Sovacool lasted a few weeks and provided important insight on the issue in a friendly and respectful environment. In the words of a famous song, I have never received “so much resistance from behind.”

If the journals continue to operate as they did in the nineteenth century they will become irrelevant. Internet sites like Scitizen and Nuclear Green are accelerating the pace at which knowledge is critically reviewed and distributed.

3. Peer review does not guarantee accuracy. None of the authors or reviewers of this paper are electrical engineers in the power industry. Authors are asked to suggest reviewers for their work. Are the students at Stanford allowed to suggest fellow students to grade their term papers? This is a sign of laziness.

The editors should do the leg work to find independent reviewers. Any senior grid manager, of which there are hundreds, could have done an excellent job.

Two civil engineers published a deeply flawed electrical engineering paper in a journal for meteorology and climatology. The paper is being used to mislead the public and political leaders. It has been referenced repeatedly on numerous blogs and publications.

4. A comment does not have to be perfect to have value. Even flawed comments can improve the quality of science by revealing new insights. In the discussion with Sovocool there may be errors on both sides of the discussion, but the overall conclusions are still valuable.

5. The authors, editors and Stanford president did not identify any errors in the final comment. Even if they did find errors, that does not justify suppressing the comment unless all points were flawed. The leaders of the AMS have yet to explain why they violated their published policy and suppressed this comment.