The ARM business model applied to nuclear and the LS reactor.

This topic was created by John Smith 19 .

[John Smith 19]

The ARM business model applied to nuclear and the LS reactor.

ARM dominates a large section of the embedded market for higher power processors, especially phones, routers and cable boxes, yet it makes no actual chips. It could be argued because it makes no chips.

Instead it delivers a well thought core instruction set (and its supporting documentation) with various option packages that customers can implement efficiently and find meets most of their needs. All well supported by an effective toolchain.

This set me thinking if this strategy might work if applied to the nuclear industry.

Could a reactor design be developed that could be licensed on a global scale to multiple countries with as much as possible being built locally (to standardised designs, allowing major parts to be stockpiled on a global basis)?

You might think this sounds impossible but there are precidents. The US Liberty Ships supplied 2710 ships each carrying 10200mt from 1941-45. This was done at 18 US shipyards. The engines were built y 18 mfgs. They were all interchanageable. So big things are also possible.

It's fairly obvious that there is a huge gap in the energy market IF it can meet certain criteria.

It needs to be cheap(ish) and quick(ish) to construct (like a liberty ship in fact) but it needs to go further.

It needs to be a complete solution. That means fuel and fuel assembly design, reactor and both reprocessing and refabrication. Burying used nuclear fuel in a hole in the ground for 2x longer than the entire history of civilisation sounds retarded and the result of the something-must-be-done school of policy idiocy. Because it is.

The goal is energy security. What you do when the sun don't shine, the wind don't blow (which in central Europe can last months) and the dams are empty (those are the ONLY renewable energy sources that actually deliver energy on a scale big enough to measure on a global energy map. the rest are basically a slightly thicker line between 2 wedges on the pie chart).

My instinct is no existing design (and none of the Gen IV) have the solution, but several of them have parts that could be adapted into a complete package. The problem is most of them are so bloody heavy :-(. The fuel in a PWR weighs 27 tonnes, but the vessel to hold it for Hinckly Point C weighs about 850 tonnes, mostly because it's 200mm thick and there are maybe 6-8 forges that can build one worldwide.

Not exactly the "build anywhere" kind of spec.

OTOH it does have zircaloy tubes that have a melting point of 1850c and uranium dioxide pellets that melt at 2500c. In fact if you dumped the water you could crank up the operating temperature quite a bit.

A huge slab of the existing cost BTW is the "finance" IE the interest charges on the £22Bn of borrowed cash to build this thing, and it doesn't start generating revenue till the whole things finished. I think we all know how well "Big bang" projects work at being on time and on budget.

Imagine if the 3260MW of HPC was split into 250MW chunks (large number of steam turbine mfgs at this size for coal and oild fired stations IF you can generate steam at matching conditions, as the AGR's did). If that first chunk took 4 years to build (as fossile fuel stations do) it would already be generating revenue. If the rest of the capacity rolled out at (for example) 6 month intervals (which is how long it's taken to lay the whole foundations, including the worlds longest continuos concrete pour of 5 days, longer than the Shard. I am soooo impressed. The whole conrete budget is 3 000 000 tonnes) most of the capcity would be online in the same timeframe EXCEPT a it would already be paying back those monster interest charges by the time the real Hinckly Point C starts its (no doubt) prolonged startup testing.

The human race faces (to coin a phrase) a "Climate emergency" (the planet does not. It could not give a f**k if the human race collectively disappeared tomorrow).

I beleive that better is possible. A lot better. The question is how?

[John Smith 19]

A substantial sub project

Would be ways to re-cycle existing fuel assemblie.

The ideal would be to develop and deliver (to plants world wide) an on-site reprocessing package that can turn the common designs of used reactor fuel back into new units. That would primarily by PWR/BWR/CANDU, all of which use Zirconium alloys and UO2 pellets.

Existing systems use complex, radiation sensitive organic chemicals and lots of acid. A commercial system would use simple, cheap(ish) and robust (to radiation) chemicals to

1) Deliver the Zr as Zr Chloride for input to the Zirconium tube making process

2) Split the U (which will still have a higher level of U235 in it than natural U) to enrichment plants (lowering their costs) as U Hexafluoride (or "Hex")

3) All the TRU's together for heaviliy shielded (and highly automated) re-fabrication on-site. Or as the Koreans like to put it "Dirty Pu" :-) (yes that is ia technical term)

4) Caesium and Strotium. In 300 yrs (not several 1000) both will be about 1/1024 their starting levels. Most Cs will be Ba and most Sr will have become more Zr, having released a lot of low grade heat

5) The rest. Now in a much smaller, and much colder, package.

hol

Only stuff that's safe to move without a 10t casket and armed security is actually moved. A PWR core holds about 82 tonnes of fuel and about 1/3 of it replaced each fuel cycle (roughly 18-24 months) IOW the plant has to process <113Kg/day, assuming (48 week, 5 day long working year).

All of this fuel will have been in storage for at least 10yrs, It's activity will be roughly 1/13 of the level the EBR II reprocessing system was designed to deal with. Desiging the sytem to last the expected 60 years of a modern nuclear plant ( TCO bites hard when failed part may have to be treated as High Level Waste, which is expensive) will be challenging and generate (for the developers) significant IP in design methods and know how, which can also be licensed to other countries.

Note this is not an R&D. It's a turnkey package designed to do one job and would only be sold under international monitoring and surveillance safeguards.

[John Smith 19]

And somebody took the trouble to vote both of my posts down.

Oh Didddumms.

Did the nasty horrible man post something about you that you didn't like?

There there. Googoo, googoo, googoo.

[John Smith 19]

Some design rules

Key tools are Anticipation and Imagination

To design for a 60 yr life, Decontamination & Decommissioning, start from the end, and work from the inside out.

IOW 1) Start from the design of the fuel package and how you take apart the finished NPP with minimal waste in a way that allows for maximum recycling of materials.

60yrs is a) 2/3 Pi x 10^9 Secs, 526K hrs or (from the US NRC) 500k PWR operating hours.

A few jet engines have managed 40K hrs while being entirely maintained on the wing of their aircraft.

Tilting pad bearing designs in hydroelectric power plants have lasted 50+ years.

So expect to operate, maintain and repair major sections of the plant over it's life. IOW design in access paths, clear lines of sight, hoists and monorails to move vessels about from day one (The "Digital twin" of the plant will be a vital part of the this process).

Gamma and neutron radiation are very bad for organic lubricants and all forms of insulation including the oxide layer in MOS transistors.

IOW keep all electrics and electrical sensors out of the core, and AFAP out of containment. Acoustic (sound waves can be in the 100s of MHz), optical, microwave and even mechanical are viable sensor options, which shaft, metal belt and compressed gas are all possible drive systems (NASA built a 1000Hp compressed air drive for testing high speed propellers in the late 70s/early 80's), with microwave heating for sintering fuel pellets.

[John Smith 19]

Some further design rules

Engineers (especially in construction) have a fascination with heroic engineering.

They love the "ists." Biggest, longest, flattest etc. For example at one point in the design of the SR71 Kelly Johnson was looking at powdered coal as a high temperature stable fuel, before JP-7 became available.

IHMO any project that needs this suggests the designers have a)Gone down a blind alley b)Failed to have any useful dialogue with build team as to how it's going to be made.

Hinckly Point C for example has "Big Carl," which can lift something like 1200 tonnes and 58 other cranes on site. Incidently that might be huge by construction site crane sizes but is SOP for shipyard gantry cranes.. They can run 20 000 tonnes.

Meanwhile a 20 foot ISO container can carry somewhere between 24 and 28 tonnes. The heaviest load on a UK road was a 640tonne transformer, although it needed a lot of wheels on the trailer to spread the loaded. The biggest on UK roads was a hydrogen boiler for a petrochem plant, around 8m on a side.

Likewise the problem of a forged pressure vessel is not the forging, it's that it is so dammed big OTOH if the wall thickness is more like 2"/50mm then you're looking at < 200t, a size I suspect there are hundreds of world wide forges that could meet such a requirement, rather than the roughly 6 for the size of a full size PWR. At this scale it's not so much the biggness of the ingot, it's the smallest of the wall, given that 1""/25mm is quite adequate for the wall thickness of a FPP boiler shell.