Gates-backed nuclear plant breaks ground without guarantee it'll have fuel Unwilling to let a little thing like reality stand in its way, Bill Gates' TerraPower has broken ground on its Wyoming nuclear power plant without any guarantee it'll have the fuel needed to run the thing once it's finished. The Microsoft tycoon made no mention of that supply issue in a memo he published on Monday announcing …
SFRs massively reduce nuclear waste, allow a wider range of core temperatures and don't require high operating pressures. It may seem scary but it solves for a lot of far greater hazards caused by using water as the primary coolant.
The really big one being that a well engineered SFR can handle decay heat without active cooling during an emergency shutdown. This limitation of water cooled reactors is what doomed Fukushima.
The boundary of the North American and Pacific plates is in California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, mostly on the coast, not out in the middle of Wyoming. The only geologically active region in the area would be the Yellowstone area in the northwest corner of Wyoming, which is mostly geysers, hot springs, and a general geothermal hot spot.
"The only geologically active region in the area would be the Yellowstone area in the northwest corner of Wyoming, which is mostly geysers, hot springs, and a general geothermal hot spot."
And not forgetting that all of the above are symptoms of the Yellowstone "super volcano", due to go off "soon", geologically speaking :-)
And not forgetting that all of the above are symptoms of the Yellowstone "super volcano", due to go off "soon", geologically speaking :-)
Looking on the bright side, nearby windmills would set generating records, albeit briefly.. And we'd have a whole different set of climate change stuff to argue about.
Emm, I htought the recent thinking was that the hotspot was moving under the thick, mountainous bit outside of the park and that Yellowstone would never erupt again?
Also that it never really was a "super"-vocano?
While the BBC drama "Supervolcano" had it as its main point that the caldera was 40,000 years overdue and could boil the planet at any moment. It's a fun story but not entirely up to date.
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Rather conveniently, a British HALEU enrichment facility is currently being developed. Russia and China aren't the only game in town for uranium ore either.
This seems to be one of the biggest political problems wrt nuclear. For it to work, there needs to be a fuel cycle to support reactors. UK tried this with BNFL to do this, but for a variety of reasons gave up. We're also currently sort of bidding on 3(?) SMR designs for regulatory approvals so we get supplier diversity. Also means suppliers get some supply certainty but runs the usual risk of government picking winners. As I understand it, HALEU can supply the SMRs we're considering so companies can crack on with developing support infrastructure for them.
In my opinion, the big problem BNFL suffered is that their infrastructure was based upon ideas that were very sensible at the time but rapidly undermined by shifts in the market and technological changes. Magnox and the infrastructure to support it was aimed at plutonium production, then Britain found she had enough nuclear weapons; AGR was a cunning way to efficiently make the best use of the limited metallurgy of the day, then practical superalloys and advanced (conventional) metal manufacture came along and robbed them of their advantage (as well as the limitations of prior understandings becoming apparent at scale, hobbling AGR).
My biggest fear now is that the expertise which was so painfully gained has been lost to time. Ideally, the later-constructed AGRs would have instead been shiny new Gen III (or, perhaps, what might be described as Gen IIb) designs but the Winter of Discontent and preceding events meant the Heath and Wilson governments were eager to get something connected to the grid that wasn't reliant on miners or foreign oil, even if it wasn't the best long-term solution.
The AGR, CANDU and RBMK designs all avoided the huge forgings you needed for a more conventional PWR type reactor. This was something we couldn't make at the time, and still can't. The AGR did have one advantage over the other designs and that was it produced proper superheated steam so worked perfectly with the standard coal type turbines. This was something we knew how to do in the UK so it made sense. Don't dismiss the metallurgy needed to work in high neutron flux and very hot CO2 :)
What I always find astonishing is that they managed to make the RBMK reactors water tight. There are some good videos on youtoob of the building of an RBMK and the number of welds is staggering!
A side note that not all magnox stations were plutonium producers. Calder Hall and Chapel Cross were specifically designed as plutonium producers. As the cores got bigger and temperatures got higher on the later designs they were not really practical.
The miners strikes are partly responsible for the spent fuel legacy... the reactors were burning up the fuel faster than it could be dealt with so it was left for the future...
I was puzzled why the out-of-government Australian LNP (our tory party) were pushing nuclear power when AU has only ever had one (research) reactor and a general community antipathy to atomic energy centred around waste storage, proliferation and safety history.
Fairly clear that serious money and powerful forces at play.
If AU can get to zero emissions without nuclear by relying on renewables, storage and emission reduction then it would provide an embarrassing counterexample to the claim that nuclear is unavoidable.
I am guessing by the time any of these reactors come on line their electricity is going to be woefully too expensive even at peak rates. If the massive accrued costs of these reactors were pushed into the consumer you might well have a retreat to off-grid or micro-grids so I am certain Uncle Sam (ie the US tax payer) predictably will be picking up the tab.
The problems with trying to just get renewables to phase out fossil fuels are capacity, storage and infrastructure.
Wind turbines need to be built where it is windy. Often these are not where people live and in Australia can be a long way from where people live. Landowners then object to the poles & wires that are required to connect the turbines to the grid.
The other infrastructure problem is that the grid simply isn't currently built to cope with the bursty nature of renewables. Here in the NT we have 2 large scale solar plants that have been sat idle since they were built 4 years ago. If they were connected to the grid, it would collapse in a heap. Until there is large scale storage to cope with the peaks & troughs, they are likely to continue to sit unused even as the government talks about building more.
I am a fan of renewables. i have rooftop solar. I just think that the primary objective should be to get rid of coal fired power as soon as possible and all fossil fuels as soon as we can after that. All technologies should be considered to reach this goal while keeping the lights on. The current ideological ban on nuclear power is stupid.
It might be because, without nuclear, they don't have a carbon emission reduction strategy.
That said, with nuclear, they don't have a carbon emission reduction strategy. Best estimates are that nuclear could not be generating before 2038, by which time even the piss-poor commitments they made in Paris '21 will not be worth the toilet paper they were written on.
Remembering that Spud supported Abbott over Turnbull, the bad old days of climate change denial are well and truly entrenched on the opposition benches.
Never mind, the Libs won't be getting Higgins, Kooyong, Goldstein, North Sydney or Wentworth back until they have a climate policy, and they won't get government without their (former) heartland. They will keep tearing themselves apart over this issue until either it destroys them, or the reality of climate change eats them.
Australia has a pretty low population, the vast majority are in relatively dense areas and they have the upside of vast areas of flat spare space coupled with generally nice weather. What works for them isn't going to work for say the UK, NZ or USA.
Aus has 2/3rds the population of California.
And yet California still has about a third of the population density of the UK (and under a quarter the population density of England since Scotland brings the average down so much).
Australia's population density is absurdly low, what with a lot of the country being a near-uninhabitable desert (for a modern city - the Aborigines did a damn fine job of dealing with it), but the US isn't exactly low on elbow room - the whole column of states from Montana to New Mexico aren't being used a whole lot. The US has a whole lot of desert that nobody has found a good use for outside of nuking for the shiggles.
Australia has a pretty low population, the vast majority are in relatively dense areas and they have the upside of vast areas of flat spare space coupled with generally nice weather. What works for them isn't going to work for say the UK, NZ or USA.
Plus most of the population is coastal, so easy access to cooling water. And Australia has uranium deposits, plus plenty of space and stable formations for waste depositories if it needs them. But also has the usual political problems with irrational objections to nuclear. There's also the slight problem of it's Environmental Protection Act that pretty much bans uranium mining, enriching, reprocessing and nuclear energy. But with sufficient political will, that section of their Act could be amended or repealed. Plus the AUKUS deal gives the potential for more technology transfer.
I guess Australia faces the same challenges other nations considering nuclear power. No idea if Australian universities offer nuclear engineering courses, but suspect there's a shortage of educated/qualified people given Australia's previous anti-nuclear stance. It'll take time to build that pipeline, and no doubt face intensive lobbying against it.
AUKUS also gives Australia a ready-made nuclear workforce. Not large, but as people with nuclear skills start retiring from the Aussie Navy in the 2030s - they'll be available for any projects that want them. It'll only be a tiny number at first, as the guys who're supposed to set up the training are already training in the US and Royal Navies. Plus in the US shipyards - because they're also building a nuclear sub repair facility, which will be used for the 1-3 US subs they've going to buy/lease at the end of this decade - and because the US currently have more subs needing refits than they have yard capacity - the Aussies might end up doing some of their refit work as well.
AUKUS also gives Australia a ready-made nuclear workforce. Not large, but as people with nuclear skills start retiring from the Aussie Navy in the 2030s - they'll be available for any projects that want them. It'll only be a tiny number at first, as the guys who're supposed to set up the training are already training in the US and Royal Navies.
Yep. It's pretty sad that in a lot of the West, the only new reactors to have gone critical in the last few decades have been in the military. Plus I guess recruiting must be quite challenging given armed forces around the world are struggling to recruit, and candidates have to be the 'right stuff' to work on submarines. So I guess it'd be a pretty small pipeline of retiring personnel, but at least they'd have more opportunities to use the skills they've learned*.
I think the civil side also needs to start ramping up, but whether universities would be keen to do that without bungs given engineering courses tend to cost more to run than arts or humanities. But it also needs the political will. When I was heading for university, I wanted to do nuclear engineering, but then the political environment became ever more anti-nuclear. So opted for a systems engineering/safety critical focused engineering course to keep my options open. Then ended up in telecomms.
*Hopefully not the 3-sock system, although that's maybe something they could amuse new students or employees with..
"When I was heading for university, I wanted to do nuclear engineering, but then the political environment became ever more anti-nuclear. "
I looked at going back to Uni for a nuclear physics/engineering degree and it's stupid money. At the time I was looking, my life expectancy wasn't enough (decades) to recoup the money it would take. I'm guessing that part of that is the US government will pay whatever is being asked for naval personnel in the nuclear power program to get their degrees and outside of that, it isn't a profession with lots of openings. If you are really passionate about nuclear physics, you could do fine but there's risk that it might take much longer to find a position that pays enough to live on more than pot noodles in a rented room. It's like my favorite quote from Sting "you can make a killing in the music business, but it's hard to earn a living".
"And Australia has uranium deposits, plus plenty of space and stable formations for waste depositories if it needs them."
If they want to stick with granddads nuclear. With no entrenched nuclear industry to cater to, Aus would do well to look into LFTR and other MSR designs that don't have as much need for storing as much waste. There's still a cooling water requirement, but if the plants are co-located with industries that use lots of process heat, cooling can be reduced as well.
If they want to stick with granddads nuclear. With no entrenched nuclear industry to cater to, Aus would do well to look into LFTR and other MSR designs that don't have as much need for storing as much waste. There's still a cooling water requirement, but if the plants are co-located with industries that use lots of process heat, cooling can be reduced as well.
Yep. In many ways, Australia's a lot like Russia on account of being huge and having a lot of natural resources. When they were looking to move away from being a mainly agricultural economy, there was a funny story from a farmer. On account of their farms being kind of massive, a farmer was flying over his land and spotted a large, red patch. Thus finding a massive iron deposit pretty much by accident. It's not listed as a titanium producer, but might have that tucked away.. somewhere.
But like you say, it's also not stuck with any nuclear baggage, other than it's anti-nuclear policies. So like a lot of other countries rethinking their energy policy, it can skip old tech and jump straight to Gen3+ or GenIV designs like LFTRs or MSRs. A lot of it's population is coastal, along with industry, so nuclear makes a lot of sense. Energy could be used for population, desalination, mineral processing etc etc. It just needs the political will to do so, but currently seems in the grip of the 'renewables' lobby, despite past problems that's caused them.
"In many ways, Australia's a lot like Russia on account of being huge and having a lot of natural resources."
It's odd that Australia has a first-world educated population yet a lot of export is raw, unprocessed material. China's been moving up the food chain with what they export after starting with raw materials. They would export refined Silicon ingots and then they started limiting those sales as they ramped up production of solar cells and then started limiting the sales of component cells and selling complete panels. You can still buy Silicon ingots for some applications, but they might not sell you much or at all if your company is in the business of solar cells/panels. The value added is GDP and good paying jobs.
The reason China is busily value-adding to raw materials is cheap labour. Try hiring a tradie in Australia to find out why it's not feasible down under. Australia will continue to export coal and iron ore to China, and will continue to import washing machines and fridges from China.
"The reason China is busily value-adding to raw materials is cheap labour. "
Not so much anymore. Where they really get ahead now is automation. Unions can't tell companies that they can't automate away jobs. A brand new factory with the latest in automation is going to out compete and if the amount of human labor required is shaved down, it's become less of factor in pricing/costs. In the US automotive world, the United Auto Workers union (UAW) can tell Ford or GM that they can't shut down an under-performing plant or shift production of a model elsewhere. They'll also threaten a strike if proposed automation will reduce headcount. It only through great sufferance that workers are allowed to use power tools at all.
Australia has a couple of significant advantages in terms of climate which mean that the main grid (east coast) can be fully renewable with a fairly small amount of storage, and relatively little over capacity.
But yes, nuclear actually doesn't really play as well as people think it will - it's not easily dispatchable...
It's not an efficiency thing - it's just that a nuclear power plants neither ramp up nor down quickly*.
Now, you could easily say "but we can have energy storage setup to charge as we slowly spin down and discharge to cover the slow spin up", and that's fine. The issue isn't insurmountable, and nuclear has a role to play in the european energy supply system (and other regions, likely excluding australia) - I am absolutely pro nuclear.... but the thing it is often pitched as a solution for (intermittency) isn't what it's inherently good at - hence my enthusiasm is usually somewhat damper than it might otherwise be.
Specifically in this case the reactor is to be paired with a data centre, which has a peculiar energy usage profile (effectively flat) which is particularly well suited to a nuclear generation facility.
* They're actually significantly more nimble than I had remembered - but still slow in absolute terms - The EUR specify daily load cycling between 50% and 100%, though that is of course a minimum.
They're actually significantly more nimble than I had remembered - but still slow in absolute terms - The EUR specify daily load cycling between 50% and 100%, though that is of course a minimum.
That's also something that's completely impossible for 'renewables' to deliver, ie windmills are entirely at the mercy of the weather. It's also one of those areas where anything 'renewables' can do, nuclear can do better. So the hype for hydrogen proposes 'excess' wind capacity could be used to crack water to produce H2. Nuclear can do that to, so if grid demand drops, electricity can be diverted to produce H2 and the reactor can carry on running at peak efficiency. Plus potentially find more uses given NPPs also generated heat, so could due stuff like steam reforming to produce syngas or fuel.
This is one of the biggest con tricks around 'renewables'. They simply cannot load-follow. You're stuck with whatever the weather gives you. Then as with this garbage 'report', the costs of this failure are glossed over, ie the enormously high costs of batteries that can't generate, only demand shift. But then that's the purpose of that 'report'. With a renewed interest in nuclear and a growing realisation that 'renewables' simply can't deliver, the 'renewables' lobby is growing desperate.
Response time and load following has been something the grid has had to deal with since the invention of the darn thing. There has always been a mix of generation on the grid to cope with this.
We are going backwards with this plan to put huge reliance on something as fickle as weather dependant renewables.
Indeed - which is why both storage and demand shaping are key.
Both of which will help nuclear as well...
Renewables are already providing about 50% of our electricity demands - claiming that they don't work, can't work, and are useless is pissing into the very wind you're so scared of.
"Renewables are already providing about 50% of our electricity demands"
On average. The numbers touted are based over a very long time base, like a year.
Solar works on average half the time (if you never have clouds).
Right now it is <2% wind and <10% solar in the UK.
The UK has a relatively benign demand curve. OK, the odd surge at half time during a big match or at the end of some soap everyone wants to watch. Parts of the US have a major problem with renewables as the peak demand occurs as the sun goes down so the grid load is going up as the solar generation is dropping like a stone. Compounded by the south only aspect of large fixed solar farms for best peak output. In these cases renewables are making the ramp demands on other generation methods worse which is why gas is the usual backup.
Yes I quote an annual average. It's much, much more at times - but it's a very substantial portion of our usage, and could fairly easily be increased massively.
"Right now it is <2% wind and <10% solar in the UK."
When I check I see solar at 17% in the UK, and wind is 4%
Solar has been running at 4-5GW consistently all morning according to gridwatch, so I don't know where you were getting your figures from.
As you rightly point out - the ramp demands are if anything even higher with a deeply renewable grid - that's why nuclear isn't a "close fit" partner, it doesn't handle that ramping well.
But that's the point - it's not a solution to intermittency, it's a different part of the solution of energy supply.
And since this bit of thread was looking at australia in the first instance - nuclear not something that's needed there, because the geography and climate lend themselves really well to a completely renewable grid with relatively small amounts of storage needed.
Yes I quote an annual average. It's much, much more at times - but it's a very substantial portion of our usage, and could fairly easily be increased massively.
Sure, which is exactly what the 'renewables' lobby wants. They want >£80MWh to build new offshore wind and don't pay any of the costs of dealing with intermittency. That's all loaded onto our energy bills. Yet if we believed the hype from the lobby, their costs are the lowest, and have been falling. So we can scrap all the subsidies.. right?
But that's the point - it's not a solution to intermittency, it's a different part of the solution of energy supply.
Intermittency is a fundamental problem with 'renewables', which can only be solved by massively increasing costs to solve the problems 'renewables' generate. The problem is how to meet UK energy demands. 'Renewables' cannot provide dependable, reliable baseload capacity to meet those demands. Nuclear can generate say, 300MW per unit (or more for full-size NPPs) 24x7x365. For wind or solar, it's physically impossible for them to do the same. Then it's a matter of load following, so what generating capacity is chosen to deal with demand variations. Wind & solar can't do that either.
This "renewables lobby" - are you referring to climate scientists?
Because we know who is lobbying to keep burning crap, and it's not companies we have any business trusting.
Renewables provides well predictable generation, but we don't live in the 1970s any more - we don't need to blindly follow load, we have the capacity for much load to follow generation - baseload is not the requirement, energy delivery is the requirement, and that can be achieved in different ways.
This "renewables lobby" - are you referring to climate scientists?
Climate pseudo-scientists are certainly a huge part of the problem. Take for example the Met Office, which used to be independent, but now has to make money. It does this in part by flogging forecasting services to wind farmers. But for many of them, their jobs depend on pushing the global warming dogma, which results in minor technical details like setting temperature records using jet exhausts, or this-
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/05/30/met-office-should-put-2-5c-uncertainties-warning-on-all-future-temperature-claims/
His comments follow recent disclosures in the Daily Sceptic that nearly eight out of ten of the Met’s 380 measuring stations come with official ‘uncertainties’ of between 2-5°C. In addition, given the poor siting of the stations now and possibly in the past, the Met Office has no means of knowing whether it is comparing like with like when it publishes temperature trends going back to 1884.
UK 'global warming' and much of the world's 'global warming' is just fake data from fake scientsis. Or maybe they were once real scientists but became corrupted by the fame and fortune that piled into the global warming scam. The Met Office simply doesn't have accurate, reliable temperature data for the UK, with the majority of stations improperly sited or simply don't exist and the temperatures made up, or 'estimated'.
Because we know who is lobbying to keep burning crap, and it's not companies we have any business trusting.
And why do you blindly trust the 'renewables' lobby, when they obviously have their own interests at heart. Why would you trust the conclusions in 'IEEFA' when they're clearly promoting 'renewables', and they provide net zero information about their funding sources? If it were a peer-reviewed paper in a respectable journal, funding would have to be stated. Throwing a paper out to gullible journalists relies on those journalists to do some basic due diligence to judge if the claims are credible, or just another marketing piece.
...we have the capacity for much load to follow generation - baseload is not the requirement
You may have worded that poorly, or you've been drinking too much of the Green Kool-Aid. I assume you're talking about demand management, which again has been a collosal waste of money and something we shouldn't have to do, if we had a sane energy policy. Baseload will always be a requirement, as will load following again, 'renewables' can do neither of those things. You may also have noticed Greens took a hammering in the European elections, especially in Germany. Being the EU, it doesn't really mean much given the power lies with the Commission but it may be indicative that the public just isn't buying what the Greens are selling any more. They can see the problems with insane energy policies in their energy bills, or shopping baskets.
Full conspiracy mode engaged... I was wondering when you'd out yourself.
There is no conspiracy theory, just an actual conspiracy. Go look at the 'record' temperature release for May from the Met Office. It fabricated this 'record' by deciding to use night instead of daytime temperatures, cherrypicking a 'since.. ' date when it has data going back longer showing several hotter Mays from the last century, and for the cherry on top, claiming another temperature record. Again set at an airport from a weather station right next to an aircraft stand.
The station's fine for flight ops at the airport, but should not be used for climatology because it's siting standards are well below official WMO siting standards. And funnily enough, the 'record' May is being followed by a colder than average June. But two things you could try.
1) Go to the Met Office website and find their daily temperature measurements, along with the station information
2) Ask the Met Office why you can't find them given they're insistent that 'global warming' is the greatest threat facing mankind.
Then think about how much money is being wasted fighting this phantom menance, and is used to promote ancient technology like windmills that our ancestors obsoleted in the past. They knew the problems of depending on the weather instead of technology, why don't you?
"Because we know who is lobbying to keep burning crap, and it's not companies we have any business trusting."
It's more that those behemoth companies want to keep doing the same thing they've been doing for years. They have well refined business models, loads of historical trend data and lots of capital equipment both fully recovered and still being amortized. To do anything new is risky and execs could get fired or lose their bonuses if they guess wrong on which direction to go.
I think of giant business from a physics standpoint. They have so much mass that inertial keeps them going in the same direction unless there's a very serious external force. OTOH, startups aren't very massive at all so they can pivot based on new ideas. As soon as they hit on something promising, they get absorbed into the larger mass and the VC's and entrepreneurs all spend an expensive afternoon at the McLaren showroom.
"This is one of the biggest con tricks around 'renewables'. They simply cannot load-follow."
That's very true with wind so there has to be some way to take that into account and just dumping it on the grid isn't a good approach unless there's some way to signal end users of there being an offer for the next XXX minutes. Solar is better as it goes with how we humans operate in general. It might mean shifting work day start and stop times, but demanding that everything fit in an arbitrary schedule isn't efficient.
I'll keep saying it, EV's can be an excellent load sink if the network will adjust pricing based on supply and there are plenty of places to plug in (Level 2). Over time, there will be plenty of used EV battery packs that aren't useful for a vehicle, but still have a considerable amount of remaining capacity. Without looking into infinity, those unloved batteries can be used to boost EV charging locations, charge when there's loads of renewables flooding the market at schools and other institutions to be drawn upon when rates peak during the day, etc. My chest freezer runs on battery overnight and solar during the day with enough solar capacity to recharge the battery (good for a couple of days). If all else fails, it will back up with the grid. A fun project and a bit of savings. I plan on doing more of that.
"ie windmills are entirely at the mercy of the weather."
The only way they make sense is if they can be paired with something that isn't fussy about an intermittent power supply. I've thought for a long time that Ammonia production might be a good application. Lots of electricity is used to make Ammonia and it can be stored without too much fuss so taking at least some production off-grid can make sense. Maybe it also makes sense to use the energy from wind to crank a mass up the side of a hill. From a cursory thought design, it appears that it could be better than pumped storage. A gravity storage system could be a good nighttime component for solar farms.
Smartening up the grid will be useful all around. If EV's can listen to the current prices, when there's excess supply, EV's can take the load for a reduction in price. There could be other industrial uses that can be brought online when there is cheap power to add load. There will be times when there isn't spare generation, but no scheme is going to be perfect.
Hydrogen via electrolysis is too inefficient. Storing H2 is problematic and there isn't a widespread market for Hydrogen unless government goes around banning gas to create one.
You're confusing dispatchability and load following. Dispatchable means the grid manager can ask for another 500 MW starting at 5:00pm to meet predicated load and the generating plant can guarantee to deliver it regardless of external conditions.
Load following means how well a generating plant adjusts to actual load on a second by second basis.
Nuclear is about as dispatchable as it is possible to get. Wind and solar in contrast are not dispatchable at all as their output depends on highly variable factors outside of their control such as whether the wind and the weather. They deliver when and if they can, on an opportunistic basis as a supplement to coal and natural gas.
When used in a grid which has both nuclear and gas turbine generating plants, the nuclear plants are typically used to provide the base load because they have very low fuel costs. The gas turbine plants are used for peaking (turned on at periods of high demand) because they have high fuel costs but low capital costs.
Hydro electric has very good load following characteristics, so it's often used in that role as well as for providing base load. Many countries have built pumped storage systems specifically to provide better load following characteristics.
Very large battery systems will fill the same role as pumped storage without requiring favourable geography for reservoirs and the like. They are also ideally suited for use with nuclear generating plants for daily peaking. The nuclear plants can provide the constant base load, while the battery systems can provide the daily peaks, re-charging from the nuclear plants at periods of low demand.
Battery systems however can't somehow turn a non-dispatchable power source into a dispatchable one. Size and cost factors mean that practical battery systems can cover short term daily peaks, but can't cover for extended periods of unfavourable weather.
"You're confusing dispatchability and load following."
Indeed I am - though that's mostly a semantic error - since the point was around the load following ability.
My brain considers load following to be short term dispatch... which is sort of is, but they do have different terms for a reason.
In Australia they don't get long periods of unfavourable weather across enough of the grid to matter.
In Europe (and elsewhere) nuclear has a role, but it's not one that covers against renewables, which is so often the pitch.
Wind turbines are actually rather poor at load following as well. They suffer from two problems. One is that since they depend on wind speed you can't suddenly ask for more power out of them. They deliver whatever they can and that will vary unpredictably. The other is that because they are usually distributed over a large geographic area they are difficult to coordinate. Large distributed AC systems do not react instantaneously. There is an appreciable lag in response across a large grid which makes control more difficult as the geographic area increases.
If you have a grid which depends heavily on wind power, then you need a large amount of excess capacity operating at all times or you will have an unstable grid. Restarting a wind dominated grid after a black out is also still not a solved problem due to the difficulty of controlling its inherent instabilities.
Wind power on a large scale is probably best suited to places like Quebec which have very, very, large hydroelectric plants and reservoirs which can make up for wind's inherent technical deficiencies. Using gas turbines and coal for this purpose with wind as is done in most places is going to run into difficulties with gas and coal being phased out.
Solar power is a reasonable match up for peak air conditioning loads in hot sunny countries. However, it doesn't provide a base load capability as output varies by time of day, dropping to zero for much of the day. It would probably be best used as a supplement to nuclear in certain limited climactic regions. I don't know if they suffer from the same sort of distributed control instability problems that wind power does, as there seems to be much less literature published on it.
"Wind turbines are actually rather poor at load following as well."
They're not poor, that would be vastly overselling their capability.
"Wind power on a large scale is probably best suited to places like Quebec which have very, very, large hydroelectric plants and reservoirs which can make up for wind's inherent technical deficiencies. "
Or other storage - Pumped hydro isn't the only option available, indeed it also fails to deal with extended periods of reduced production.
Really long cycle storage will be something that isn't already on the grid - pumped hydro doesn't, in the vast majority of geographies, scale well enough.
There are various thermal storage options which are interesting, as well as the every present threat of various chemical storage options (it's one of the few places I can see hydrogen making any sense).
But heck, have nuclear on the grid, but let's also develop drilling technology to be able to sink geothermal boreholes at every existing thermal power plant's location, just a new way of getting steam to those turbines, let's also get decent storage options for medium and long term storage.
We need to diversify, but diversify *away* from burning stuff. And that's where I don't see nuclear *as a complement to* other renewables.
And we need to change the way we load the grid - with the current raft of "intelligent" tariffs being a part of that - some of those tariffs are set 24 hours ahead, some are absolutely dynamic, with the retailer controlling equipment which allows them to increase demand, to use energy when it's cheap/plentiful, and some which also allows export, to support the grid at times of expensive/scarce production.
"Specifically in this case the reactor is to be paired with a data centre, which has a peculiar energy usage profile (effectively flat) which is particularly well suited to a nuclear generation facility."
Aluminum/metals processing, ammonia production (that could work well with wind), any operation using heat. There's loads of businesses that would be good to co-locate with a nuclear power plant. In a residential setting, rooftop solar can offset a lot of baseload needs during the day. If EV's could be signaled when there lots of wind to take advantage of low rates, that could offset oil refining power needs. There's no silver bullet and it makes sense to look for as many complimentary pairings as possible At the very least, large greenhouses could be heated with low grade nuclear waste heat which can mean less of a need to import fruit and veg, especially off-season. A big savings on long distance cooled cargo.
That is an issue related to how France designed those particular installations. They decided not to build cooling towers to save time/space/money and rely entirely on river water. The ones that had cooling towers kept working. There is a plant in Arizona that cools using the local city's processed waste water.
The big coal plants in Aus need cooling too.
...Thorium? We know it works, we know it produces orders of magnitude less waste, we know it's not easy for it to lead to the proliferation of weapons, we know it's easier and safer to mine, we know it doesn't need to be enriched, we know we can build reactors that do not melt down, and we know the US has 12% of the world's supply right under our feet.
With all that, there hasn't been a working thorium reactor in the US since Oak Ridge National Laboratory shut down the MSRE reactor in 1969.
The US did have a couple of Thorium fuel cycle reactors going after 1969. One was the Fort St Vrain HTGR in Colorado and the other was the "Light Water Breeder Reactor" in Pennsylvania. What hasn't run since 1969 is the molten salt reactor at Oak Ridge. One option that is talked about less than MSR's is the EBR-II inspired Integral Fast Reactor, where the fuel is reprocessed on site and the fissile portion is never separated from the metallic fission products.
I suspect that the Natrium reactors will eventually be switched to running mixed oxide fuel as there is a lot of reactor grade Plutonium sitting around in spent fuel. That assumes that the Natrium reactors get licensed in a timely manner, which may be helped by Harry Reid's buddy being long gone from the NRC.
Canadian CANDU reactors can use thorium. However, uranium is so cheap and abundant that it's not worth while economically to use more expensive thorium fuel mixtures.
CANDU reactors currently run on natural uranium - no enrichment needed - so enrichment capacity shortages are irrelevant because it doesn't use any. They have been running on a large scale around the world for decades with an excellent safety and reliability record, so they are a very well proven technology.
Uranium fuel will self start. If you are using a natural uranium reactor such as CANDU then fabricating fuel elements from purified natural uranium oxide is relatively inexpensive.
Thorium however needs some sort of "seed" material such as plutonium to get the reaction started as it is fertile rather than fissile (you need to transmute it to U233 in the reactor before "burning" it). This means you need to set up fuel reprocessing infrastructure to extract the plutonium from uranium cycle fuel and mix it in with thorium fuel into a mixed oxide fuel. It's theoretically possible to breed more U233 than is burned and use that instead of plutonium, but that's a bit iffy and the breeding rate is slow at best.
An EC6 CANDU or ACR-1000 could be started with thorium fuel with 5% reactor grade plutonium (this is a different isotope than is used in bombs). The plutonium fuel bundles can then be gradually replaced (the reactors are refuelled while on-line) with recycled U233 from spent fuel.
Generally though, to operate thorium cycle reactors you need at least a few uranium fuelled ones to produce plutonium to start the reaction. Studies on using uranium enriched to about 20% as a fissile driver show the concept isn't economic.
Practical studies on thorium fuel require a mixed fleet of reactors. Spent fuel form Uranium cycle reactors is reprocessed and mixed with thorium and then "burned" in the thorium cycle reactors.
Indian reactors (CANDU derivatives and later developments) have long used some thorium fuel bundles in some fuel channels as it gives better operating characteristics. Using thorium on a large scale however will require breeding enough plutonium in uranium cycle reactors to make mixed oxide fuel.
Canada, South Korea, and China have all done extensive research and testing on using thorium in CANDU reactors (all three operate them). It is technically feasible and practical. However, uranium is currently so cheap that it isn't economically worth while compared to the more complex and expensive thorium-plutonium fuel mixtures.
> ...Thorium? We know it works, we know it produces orders of magnitude less waste, we know it's not easy for it to lead to the proliferation of weapons, we know it's easier and safer to mine, we know it doesn't need to be enriched, we know we can build reactors that do not melt down, and we know the US has 12% of the world's supply right under our feet.
Err no, not really....
There is no reason it will intrinsically produce any less radioactive waste. That's wishful thinking. Thorium, can have high burn up reactors, but so can uranium and plutonium, just as easily (or just as difficult-ly )
It is perfectly feasible to reprocess the uranium produced from thorium fission to make bombs. It is only true to say that you can't directly make bombs out of the fuel without special processing. A country that wanted to make bombs and had a thorium fission stack, would have no difficulty doing so.
Uranium is not especially problematic to mine, but there is actually a lot of thorium rich slag and tailings already that could be used, and some places (India) have thorium but not uranium. Same is true of U/P where the nuclear nations have huge amounts they can use already, they don't because mining more has been cheaper and easier.
No melting down is a function of reactor architecture and design. You can make a thorium reactor to melt down or blow up if you want. You can make a (hypothetically) meltdown proof uranium or plutonium reactor too.
Thorium reactors require plenty of enriched U/P to begin - you cannot go straight to Thorium reactors
The US has more uranium than it needs already mined if it changes to fast fission.
Thorium is more complex, with a bunch of key processes that have never been tried, and are sure to be problematic engineering and cost wise. (which is why they didn't try them back in the day)
It might be part of a nuclear future, but it is not part of a near term one, and it has most of the issues of U/P in practice. If we could make radically different architecture reactors for thorium, we can also do it easier for U/P and get the same benefits (if they materialise in practice)
If you had the technological ability to turn spent fuel from thorium into U233 bombs, you would simply build a uranium reactor and extract plutonium from there instead as it's much simpler to do that. U233 has been tested in bombs by several countries, found to be unsatisfactory, and abandoned.
If you are producing U233 from thorium, it will inevitably be contaminated with highly radioactive U232. U232 is difficult to handle, whereas bomb grade plutonium is much easier. It is the U232 contamination in the fuel which supposedly makes thorium unattractive as a source of bomb material because it makes extracted uranium difficult to handle from a practical standpoint (e.g. high precision machining of the bomb segments). This is aside from U233 being a less desirable bomb isotope to begin with.
As mentioned above in another post, CANDU style reactors can use thorium, and they are a very safe and well proven technology operating on a large scale for decades. They keep the lights on where I am right now.
However, practical thorium fuel cycles require at least a few uranium cycle reactors to provide the plutonium to mix in with the thorium fuel. They need about 5% plutonium in the fuel mix. This would be reactor grade plutonium, which is a different isotope mixture than weapons grade plutonium. The presence of too much Pu-240 makes it unsuitable for use in bombs. Military reactors producing Pu-239 for bombs have to cycle their fuel through quickly in order to avoid build-up of Pu-240.
Plutonium which contains 19% or more Pu-240 is considered to be "civil plutonium" and not bomb material. It is not feasible to separate Pu-240 from Pu-239.
UK Magnox reactors were built to product Pu-239 with electricity as a byproduct. This meant that reactor fuel was cycled through quickly. This is not normally desirable from a commercial perspective, as it results in low fuel burn-up rates. It does however mean that if you want to monitor whether someone is making bombs, you keep track of their fuel usage.
Reactor grade plutonium is currently used today as a component in mixed-oxide reactor fuels in uranium reactors as a substitute for U235. CANDU reactors can and have run entirely on plutonium-uranium MOX fuel. US light water reactors can run on it, but I don't know if they have done so on a commercial scale. French reactors use MOX as about 30% of their fuel load.
Practical Thorium reactors would use thorium-plutonium MOX fuel, or possibly thorium-U233 MOX fuel.
It is not reactor technology which has been holding back thorium fuel cycles. It's simply the economics favour the cheaper and simpler conventional uranium fuels. Until such time as uranium becomes in short supply and the price becomes much higher, there is no economic incentive to use thorium.
The original Terrapower TWR was a neat idea. Pity it didn't pan out, but hey-ho, that's how it goes.
I have to feel that whatever the technical merits of a sodium cooled reactor might be, once again technocrats are going to say: "Trust us, a liquid sodium nuclear reactor is going to be safe"
while the whole rest of the world is going to say: "We did chemistry at school. We know that sodium explodes if it ever comes in contact with water (- you know, the stuff you use to make steam in your nuclear power plant) and catches fire if you ever expose it to air. How is this a good or safe idea?"
This is an idea that is doomed to be unpalatable to the public. They should have gone with some molten salt variant where you can make a credible case to Joe Q Public that this is actually likely to be safer for reasons he can understand.
No one is ever going to believe that about hundreds of tons of (now) radioactive molten sodium. Not ever.
There were Supercritical carbon dioxide and liquid sodium chemical reaction experiments to elimination of the need to accommodate potential sodium-water reactions.
(ref: "Title: Supercritical carbon dioxide and liquid sodium chemical reaction experiments Authors: Craig Gerardi, Nathan Bremer, James J. Sienicki, Darius Lisowski and Christopher Grandy")
The Brayton cycle using Supercritical carbon dioxide is actually more efficient than using Supercritical steam, the low end temperature can be lower and the high end temperature can be higher, the greater area within the cycle means that more energy can be extracted from the same source of heat than by using Supercritical steam inside your turbine.
Pretty much my feelings. Sodium reactors have a long history of designers saying "Trust me bro, this one totally won't catch fire" followed by them promptly catching on fire... Hell, the Russians basically designed the things to be easily replaceable when they catch fire...
It worked fine in France with Phenix and Super Phenix... Until the Greens managed to kill it. ( and most of the French nuclear industry along the way )
We had to resort to a more expensive way to recycle some of the *nuclear wastes*, creating the MOX to put back in the regular plants. ( instead of putting the *semi-recycled wastes* in Super Phenix and create new material that could be used in regular plants.
"... We did chemistry at school. We know that sodium explodes if it ever comes in contact with water ... "
So does molten iron, but there's a lot more of it around in blast furnaces (and you can't *ever* shut down a blast furnace) but I don't hear a whole lot of people screaming that making cutlery isn't safe.
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
why fund a dead end technology when renewables will give you a far better return?
Depends who you mean by 'you'. If 'you' is a supplier of 'renewables', then yes. The way the market is currently rigged with massive subsidies could make you very rich. Makes our energy also very expensive, but that isn't your problem.
A major problem though is lobbying and greenwashing. Like the 'report' mentioned in the article. The IEEFA is.. an interesting outfit. Sounds fancy, but is run out of a small office above a wine bar in Nowheresville, Ohio. Their website makes no mention of how they're funded, which should ring alarm bells wrt their neutrality.
But then their report makes that abundently clear-
https://ieefa.org/sites/default/files/2024-05/SMRs%20Still%20Too%20Expensive%20Too%20Slow%20Too%20Risky_May%202024.pdf
Regulators, utilities, investors and government officials should embrace the reality that renewables, not SMRs, are the near-term solution to the energy transition
So it's anti-nuclear hit piece probably funded by the usual suspects and the 'renewables' lobby. This is further made obvious-
Finally, it is vital that this debate consider the opportunity costs associated with the SMR push. The dollars invested in SMRs will not be available for use in building out a wind, solar and battery storage resource base. These carbon-free and lower-cost technologies are available today and can push the transition from fossil fuels forward significantly in the coming 10 years—years when SMRs will still be looking for licensing approval and construction funding
Licensing approvals can be expedited, if there's political will. But nuclear faces intensive anti-nuclear lobbying and campaigning, as this 'report' makes clear. Their sponsors do not want money taken away from their gravy train, even though their solution is useless. Combine the costs of wind & solar with batteries and 'renewables' are far more expensive than nuclear which doesn't need energy users to waste billions on batteries.
The 'report' is also rather dishonest. It completely overlooks the fact that 'renewables' also face cost increases and cost overruns. So off-shore wind projects in US and UK being cancelled because of higher costs. UK's last round of CfDs dangled £80/MWh and there were no bids from the wind farmers because they're demanding more subsidies. It also massages cost figures with a 'cost per kW', and doesn't really give comparators. So this-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
On 9 September 2019, it arrived at its permanent location in the Chukotka district, the far eastern end of the Far East region. It started operation on 19 December 2019. On 22 May 2020, the plant had been fully commissioned. By that date it had delivered 47.3 GWh of zero-emissions electric energy, covering 20% of demand in the region.
and cost-
Initially, estimated costs were 6 billion rubles ($232 million). Calculations in 2015 totalled 37 billion rubles ($700 million), including infrastructure reinforcements in Pevek
So crude math gives that a 'cost' of only $14/kWh, and obviously that falls as the reactor continues to generate. So figure it generates 7.5GWh a month and being operational for 4yrs, it's generated around 360GWh, so the cost per kWh is already under $1. The 'report' deceptively gives a cost per kW of over $20k for the NuScale however, which isn't really a relative metric. Especially given it doesn't include the costs of 'renewables' for comparison. It quotes from the CEO of NextEra, and mentions their proposals to add 'renewables', but makes zero mention of those costs. But I suspect NextEra may have sponsored this advertorial anyway. They've done some shady business in the past.
Basically the 'report' is a load of bollocks from a lobbying shop that seems to be masquerading as an 'institute'. So far, so normal for NGOs.
> How exactly do you use depleted uranium as a fuel
Basic nuclear science 101:
U-238 (depleted uranium) is fertile! You can use one, or more, fuel source(s) to make U-238 into additional fuel. The fissioning of an atom of uranium-235 inside a reactor produces two to three neutrons, and these neutrons can be absorbed by uranium-238 to produce plutonium-239 and other isotopes. Plutonium-239 can also absorb neutrons and fission along with the uranium-235 inside a reactor.
Basic nuclear science 101:
Be gone with your foul alchemy!
But also one of the 101 things we can't do (or do easily, cheaply) with a windmill. Produce isotopes we need for medicine and industry, including a whole load of safety critical stuff. Which I guess is also a factor in national choices wrt reactor designs, ie ability to produce needed isotopes. I guess that's also down to self-sufficiency and volume required or dependency on other nations to maintain research or other reactors that can supply demand. Plus it's always amused me that nuclear physicists are usually quite happy being referred to as nuclear alchemists, but then they are transmuting materials.
Nice to see billionaire Gates building this in Wyoming instead of his home state of Washington. Keeps it nicely out-of-sight in one of those evil red states instead of his tree-hugger friendly home state.
Long history of failed nuclear power in the Pacific Northwest, look up Washington Public Power Supply System and the 1970's. He is probably hoping no one will notice.
Rod Adams (of Atomic Insights) had a proposal to create a heavy nitrogen gas cooled direct cycle reactor. The key advantage being that the gas just flows straight into a natural gas plant style turbine, rather than heating water into steam at a heat ex-changer. It never got traction. Part of the problem was probably that it would have used pebble fuel, which is expensive, and contains HALEU to boot I think.
The problem with any non water moderated reactor is that nothing is as good a moderator as the hydrogen atoms in the water. The British AGRs (Advanced Gas cooled Reactors) used graphite as the moderator, and the Canadian CANDU reactors used heavy water. As carbon and deuterium and not as good a moderator as hydrogen these reactors had to be absolutely massive to contain enough moderator to produce a decent amount of heat and electricity (without resorting to expensive HALEU fuel). But being massive makes them difficult to build and expensive.
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory is currently testing Yttrium Hydride as a moderator as part of its Transformational Challenge Reactor program. If this works you could have a small but powerful gas, metal, or molten salt cooled reactor.
Personally I would like to see a nitrogen cooled, molten salt in fuel pins, yttrium hydride moderated direct cycle reactor.
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