I broadly agree with the need to have breeder reactors (eventually), but they are also not a panacea.
-Even if the core can be factory built, there will still need to be a seismically rated containment structure for them. If anything, it will need to be more robust to external events, as low pressure nuclear does not (typically) have ceramic fuels and fuel sheaths (the first two layers of protection from large scale releases for water cooled reactors)
-Economies of scale are also real, and large numbers of parallel units are not used in the chemical industry (the closest analog for low pressure nuclear) for the same reasons. The large number of units adds a lot of costs for instrumentation and control, and the multiplexing of flows adds many potential leak points and much higher O&M costs.
-Most of the cost of traditional nuclear equipment is for AQ/QC, not the actual materials or direct fabrication. This will apply just as much to low pressure nuclear as water cooled. Fix it for one, and we fix it for the other as well. There is a better balance here, but it is not trivial requirements still.
-Fuel costs are a small fraction of the overall costs of nuclear now (that could change for a HALEU/TRISO design though). While breeding cycles nearly eliminate the raw material input costs, the chemical processing of hot materials is also expensive. Don't expect to save much if any over say a CANDU natural uranium fuel cycle cost. Note that a Pa extraction step in a Th cycle has huge proliferation concerns, which adds costs.
Hi Jesse, and thanks for your excellent and well-informed comments!
RE: Containment
I fully agree this is a major challenge area, but I also think we need to put more effort into re-thinking how to achieve containment objectives more economically without sacrificing safety. Getting away from pressurized cores is a big step--as you know, one of the reasons current containment buildings have to be so large and therefore expensive is to have room to contain all the radioactive steam in a LOCA event.
I'm not a nuclear engineer so I'm not qualified to comment with any authority on the viability of Copenhagen's proposed solution of building containment "cocoons" that encapsulate the reactor and achieve containment objectives whilst allowing the rest of the building not to need to be made from nuclear concrete or built to nuclear standards because the cocoon achieves the same result. But I what I will say emphatically is that I think we need more of this "thinking outside the box" approach to revisiting how we achieve containment and finding better ways to achieve the same degree of safety without creating a mountain of nuclear concrete that will have to be decommissioned as LLW someday.
RE: Economies of Scale
My passion is for finding ways to make nuclear cost less than coal & gas. I'm not necessarily married to Copenhagen's approach of multiple parallel small units. Another way to achieve the same manufacturability, scalability, and economy of scale benefits would be to design a much larger reactor that is factory pre-manufactured in a dozen container-sized modules that get assembled on site to make a large reactor. The part I think is important is that we get the on-site effort down to assembly rather than 'construction', and measure the time it takes to put the pre-manufactured reactor together on site in days and weeks rather than years.
RE: AQ/QC
I'm convinced the solution is to work really, REALLY hard to design fully robotic assembly and QC/inspection lines that use machine vision and advanced industrial robotics to do a better job on QC than we've ever done before, in a small fraction of the time and expense. The only way to make that work is VOLUME. We need to select a workhorse reactor design that can be MASS produced by the thousands in a gigafactory, then design the world's best AQ/QC automation factor to build them to higher quality standards than humans are capable of achieving in custom-build construction.
RE: FUEL COST
I think the "Fuel cost is a tiny % of the cost of nuclear energy so it doesn't matter to focus on it" is a really dangerous slippery slope. That's absolutely true HISTORICALLY. But my goal is to create enough nuclear energy to equal what we get today from fossil fuels. That will push the price of uranium up A LOT, and TRISO and HALEU are already cost risks as you allude.
I agree that the proliferation controls around Pa (or Pu-239 for that matter if we were talking Traveling Wave style breeders) have to be considered carefully as part of the cost, as does reprocessing. But we can't afford NOT to focus on the COST of everything. CAPEX is the really big nut to crack, but we can't ignore OPEX just because it USED to be a small part of the overall pie. We need to make the whole pie (cost) much smaller, and that means both OPEX and CAPEX need to be optimized lower.
RE: Technology advancement
Adding this, not in reply to your comments: I think the biggest thing we need to face up to is that we stopped advancing nuclear technology around 1970, and need to get back to work on it! Let's face it: All this "ADVANCED Nuclear" we hear about today is just a euphemism for "Late 1960s nuclear tech instead of early 1950s nuclear tech". Materials science has come a LONG way since 1970. Why are we still building reactor core vessels out of metal when the neutronics of Silicon Carbide are so much more enticing? Why haven't we made ANY substantive progress on nuclear technology itself in half a century? Things like Gen III+ automation and passive safety systems are nice modernizations for what is still early 1950s LWR technology. We haven't truly ADVANCED this industry (in the sense of new coolants, entirely new reactor designs, etc.) since 1970. All the "advanced" stuff in the works today is just 1960s nuclear tech with a few modern automation bells and whistles tacked on. WE CAN AND SHOULD DO BETTER!
I applaud anybody pushing for legitimate solutions for us to avoid/lessen the climate collapse which is under way already. Recent climate research paints a dire picture, and solar and wind are resource intensive products that require fossil fuels to make and have limited lifetimes to boot.
Smart folks like Arthur Berman largely dismiss wind and solar, and essentially say that it's naive to believe that technology will bail us out of the crisis we've created (e.g. there is no way for us to scale carbon sequestration to the extent needed).
Degrowth seems to be the only realistic way to stop the bleeding, but I understand that capitalism and the belief that we can have infinite growth in a finite world, is the religion of the Western world. Pushing to colonize Mars is more politically feasible than degrowth.
All that aside, I believe electricity only accounts for ~20% of energy usage, while the rest is for shipping, fertilizer, and various other production processes. You mentioned using nuclear to power freighters in the last article, but I've read that the density of fossil fuels is what allows for these commercial uses and differentiates them from sources like nuclear. I am sincerely curious... could the technology you propose be viable to power industries like steel and shipping?
A lot of folks would tell me that we're already cooked, while many more deny climate change and say drill baby drill, putting their foot on the gas while we drive off the cliff. One thing we know for sure, is that we're definitely cooked if we just give up and stop searching for solutions. Thanks for pushing for solutions.
Thanks for this very comprehensive series. There is much here that makes reading accessible to a beginner like me. One point I hear sometimes, but not often enough (considering the hysteria around spent fuel) is how little actual space the so-called waste takes today. As I understand it, our accumulated 250,000mt is only about 20 Olympic-sized pools in space. We need more reiteration of such small figures to disabuse the lay person of their notions of mountains of spent fuel (appreciate how you emphasized it's not actually waste).
I broadly agree with the need to have breeder reactors (eventually), but they are also not a panacea.
-Even if the core can be factory built, there will still need to be a seismically rated containment structure for them. If anything, it will need to be more robust to external events, as low pressure nuclear does not (typically) have ceramic fuels and fuel sheaths (the first two layers of protection from large scale releases for water cooled reactors)
-Economies of scale are also real, and large numbers of parallel units are not used in the chemical industry (the closest analog for low pressure nuclear) for the same reasons. The large number of units adds a lot of costs for instrumentation and control, and the multiplexing of flows adds many potential leak points and much higher O&M costs.
-Most of the cost of traditional nuclear equipment is for AQ/QC, not the actual materials or direct fabrication. This will apply just as much to low pressure nuclear as water cooled. Fix it for one, and we fix it for the other as well. There is a better balance here, but it is not trivial requirements still.
-Fuel costs are a small fraction of the overall costs of nuclear now (that could change for a HALEU/TRISO design though). While breeding cycles nearly eliminate the raw material input costs, the chemical processing of hot materials is also expensive. Don't expect to save much if any over say a CANDU natural uranium fuel cycle cost. Note that a Pa extraction step in a Th cycle has huge proliferation concerns, which adds costs.
Hi Jesse, and thanks for your excellent and well-informed comments!
RE: Containment
I fully agree this is a major challenge area, but I also think we need to put more effort into re-thinking how to achieve containment objectives more economically without sacrificing safety. Getting away from pressurized cores is a big step--as you know, one of the reasons current containment buildings have to be so large and therefore expensive is to have room to contain all the radioactive steam in a LOCA event.
I'm not a nuclear engineer so I'm not qualified to comment with any authority on the viability of Copenhagen's proposed solution of building containment "cocoons" that encapsulate the reactor and achieve containment objectives whilst allowing the rest of the building not to need to be made from nuclear concrete or built to nuclear standards because the cocoon achieves the same result. But I what I will say emphatically is that I think we need more of this "thinking outside the box" approach to revisiting how we achieve containment and finding better ways to achieve the same degree of safety without creating a mountain of nuclear concrete that will have to be decommissioned as LLW someday.
RE: Economies of Scale
My passion is for finding ways to make nuclear cost less than coal & gas. I'm not necessarily married to Copenhagen's approach of multiple parallel small units. Another way to achieve the same manufacturability, scalability, and economy of scale benefits would be to design a much larger reactor that is factory pre-manufactured in a dozen container-sized modules that get assembled on site to make a large reactor. The part I think is important is that we get the on-site effort down to assembly rather than 'construction', and measure the time it takes to put the pre-manufactured reactor together on site in days and weeks rather than years.
RE: AQ/QC
I'm convinced the solution is to work really, REALLY hard to design fully robotic assembly and QC/inspection lines that use machine vision and advanced industrial robotics to do a better job on QC than we've ever done before, in a small fraction of the time and expense. The only way to make that work is VOLUME. We need to select a workhorse reactor design that can be MASS produced by the thousands in a gigafactory, then design the world's best AQ/QC automation factor to build them to higher quality standards than humans are capable of achieving in custom-build construction.
RE: FUEL COST
I think the "Fuel cost is a tiny % of the cost of nuclear energy so it doesn't matter to focus on it" is a really dangerous slippery slope. That's absolutely true HISTORICALLY. But my goal is to create enough nuclear energy to equal what we get today from fossil fuels. That will push the price of uranium up A LOT, and TRISO and HALEU are already cost risks as you allude.
I agree that the proliferation controls around Pa (or Pu-239 for that matter if we were talking Traveling Wave style breeders) have to be considered carefully as part of the cost, as does reprocessing. But we can't afford NOT to focus on the COST of everything. CAPEX is the really big nut to crack, but we can't ignore OPEX just because it USED to be a small part of the overall pie. We need to make the whole pie (cost) much smaller, and that means both OPEX and CAPEX need to be optimized lower.
RE: Technology advancement
Adding this, not in reply to your comments: I think the biggest thing we need to face up to is that we stopped advancing nuclear technology around 1970, and need to get back to work on it! Let's face it: All this "ADVANCED Nuclear" we hear about today is just a euphemism for "Late 1960s nuclear tech instead of early 1950s nuclear tech". Materials science has come a LONG way since 1970. Why are we still building reactor core vessels out of metal when the neutronics of Silicon Carbide are so much more enticing? Why haven't we made ANY substantive progress on nuclear technology itself in half a century? Things like Gen III+ automation and passive safety systems are nice modernizations for what is still early 1950s LWR technology. We haven't truly ADVANCED this industry (in the sense of new coolants, entirely new reactor designs, etc.) since 1970. All the "advanced" stuff in the works today is just 1960s nuclear tech with a few modern automation bells and whistles tacked on. WE CAN AND SHOULD DO BETTER!
I applaud anybody pushing for legitimate solutions for us to avoid/lessen the climate collapse which is under way already. Recent climate research paints a dire picture, and solar and wind are resource intensive products that require fossil fuels to make and have limited lifetimes to boot.
Smart folks like Arthur Berman largely dismiss wind and solar, and essentially say that it's naive to believe that technology will bail us out of the crisis we've created (e.g. there is no way for us to scale carbon sequestration to the extent needed).
Degrowth seems to be the only realistic way to stop the bleeding, but I understand that capitalism and the belief that we can have infinite growth in a finite world, is the religion of the Western world. Pushing to colonize Mars is more politically feasible than degrowth.
All that aside, I believe electricity only accounts for ~20% of energy usage, while the rest is for shipping, fertilizer, and various other production processes. You mentioned using nuclear to power freighters in the last article, but I've read that the density of fossil fuels is what allows for these commercial uses and differentiates them from sources like nuclear. I am sincerely curious... could the technology you propose be viable to power industries like steel and shipping?
A lot of folks would tell me that we're already cooked, while many more deny climate change and say drill baby drill, putting their foot on the gas while we drive off the cliff. One thing we know for sure, is that we're definitely cooked if we just give up and stop searching for solutions. Thanks for pushing for solutions.
Well, at least the other 1/5th of the world is sane.
Thanks for this very comprehensive series. There is much here that makes reading accessible to a beginner like me. One point I hear sometimes, but not often enough (considering the hysteria around spent fuel) is how little actual space the so-called waste takes today. As I understand it, our accumulated 250,000mt is only about 20 Olympic-sized pools in space. We need more reiteration of such small figures to disabuse the lay person of their notions of mountains of spent fuel (appreciate how you emphasized it's not actually waste).
China is to establish lead? Who is going to compete? USA's policy is Coal is Beautiful and DIg Dig Dig..