China's Nuclear Program Moving Fast Enough to Increase Interest in Advanced Fuel Cycles
For most of the past thirty years, there has been little incentive to develop nuclear energy systems that release more than a tiny portion of the potential energy found in uranium. The same lack of market incentive has nearly completely kept thorium out of the energy supply market. The perception was that we were doing just fine with the available fossil fuels and were using nuclear energy so sparingly that it was considered okay to use only the 0.7% of natural uranium that was most easily fissioned.
There was a vast quantity of uranium discovered during a brief period of exploration during the Cold War, and the rate of new plant construction and operation was much lower than envisioned by some early planners. For decades, there was enough uranium available on the world market to keep the price at levels that encouraged the wasteful behavior of setting aside used fuel bundles after only a few percent of the potential energy had been extracted. Many businessmen and political leaders just could not be bothered to invest the money required to improve the systems when it seemed like the low fuel prices would last forever.
That situation is changing slowly, partially driven by a Chinese nuclear construction program that will soon exceed the build rate that was achieved in the US during the first Atomic Age. Just a few years ago, the goal in China was to increase nuclear plant capacity from about 9 GWe to 40 GWe by 2020. The current plan will achieve that goal within the next five years and could hit a number closer to 80-120 GWe by 2020. The reactor construction and manufacturing enterprise will not suddenly stop at that level. As the construction continues, China could be operating 300-400 GWe of nuclear plant capacity by 2030. If history is any guide, that capacity should be operating at a capacity factor of 75-90%, displacing a tremendous quantity of fossil fuel consumption.
The rate of uranium consumption at that level of installed capacity would cause some significant tightness in the market. The prospect of significantly increased fuel consumption and the associated supply-demand imbalance is already encouraging people to reconsider their expectations about the continued availability of low cost natural uranium. Here is a quote from Steve Kidd, director of strategy for the World Nuclear Association:
“If you go to 300 or 400 GW of total capacity, you’re going to have to start looking at something else because you are getting into very high-cost uranium,” Kidd said.
“By then they should develop the next generation of reactors, but you only get to the next generation when you are successful with the current generation. If China is suddenly doing 10 (third generation) pressurised water reactors a year, there will be an incentive to come out with something better,” he said.
Fortunately, there are known technologies that do a much better job of extracting energy from the 99.3% of natural uranium that is a bit more reluctant to fission than the fissile part. As uranium usage increases, it becomes increasingly valuable to employ technology that uses higher energy neutrons to split U-238 “logs” instead of just using the U-235 “kindling” that fissions easily with low energy neutrons.
According to a May 19, 2010 post on NextBigFuture.com titled China Adding Twelve More AP1000 Nuclear Reactors to Existing Build Plans and China, Russia, Japan and France in Forth Generation Nuclear Reactor Talks the Chinese may start construction on two 800 MWe fast neutron reactors by 2013 and have them operating by 2020.
There are some devoted technologists in the US who are fanning the flames of interest in reactor systems that offer better fuel efficiency, but most of the established industrial and political leaders cannot be bothered to consider fast neutron systems like the IFR or in-core thermal conversion systems like the LFTR. The technologists often lament – at least on the email lists that I read regularly – that other countries are passing the United States by using technology that we developed and tested during our heyday of reactor development. It is not too late for the US to get back in the game. We still have a tremendous range of assets that can be applied to the task, but we cannot continue to wait if we want to capture any of the available market share.
I am encouraged by the fact that the American Nuclear Society has recently elected Eric Loewen as its President Elect. Eric works for GE-Hitachi as its chief consulting engineer for advanced plants technology. He was recently featured in Esquire Magazine for his work on the PRISM, a sodium cooled fast reactor design that uses some of the technology developed in the Integral Fast Reactor program.
Keeping eyes on the current energy needs
The Chinese fast reactor effort is in addition to, not instead of the rapid development of light water reactors that are currently limited to producing heat with the easily fissioned part of natural uranium. They know that they need power now to reduce their coal consumption and it attendant air pollution issues and they know that fuel that gets used once in light water reactors can be recycled into fast reactors when they become available.
In addition to the large third generation light water reactors originally designed in France, the US, and Russia, China is refining its own designs for somewhat smaller plants using some of the knowledge they have gained from working with Westinghouse, Areva, and Rosatom. According to Reuters, the detailed design work for the ACP600 should be completed by 2013. That 600 MWe power plant is aimed at more remote sections of China, like the island of Hainan, off the southern coast and lying across the South China Sea east of Vietnam.
Chinese leaders have apparently decided that they no longer want to “dabble” in nuclear technology development. They have learned enough in their early programs to decide that the technology has enough immediate value and growth potential to go all in.
Here is food for thought for energy policy makers in the US and Europe. So far, all of China’s nuclear activities have been aimed at building plants for domestic use. In contrast, Chinese manufacturing companies are exporting a very large portion of the wind turbines and solar panels that their factories are producing, preferring to collect cash instead of whatever energy those systems could have produced if installed locally.
My in-laws were once stationed in Taiwan and learned to play Mah-jong while they were there. They shared that game with all of their children and it has become a popular pastime during holiday gatherings. That popular Chinese game requires multiple rounds of decision making. Each round you draw a new tile, but you also must discard a tile that can be picked up by other players. You keep the ones that you draw secret – most of the time – and you openly display the ones that you are discarding. Skilled players keep tiles that improve their long-term chances of winning and discard the ones that lead to dead ends.
I think there is a metaphor there somewhere.
Additional Reading
TimesOnline (Jan 31, 2010) – The great uranium stampede
Boy, ah sure do wish that ah knew about the whole energy predicament thingy back in `94 when ah cancelled the IFR. Sure makes meh look pretty foolish after watching stuff like this:
http://www.researchchannel.org/asx/ric_prof_energy_250k.asx
Here tell the congress is still increasing those corn ethanol mandates to 50% of the corn crop by 2015, and we’ll be buying E15 gasoline out west soon. Maybe this whole newfangled ‘civilization’ stuff is just too complicated for us `mericans, and like in Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” it is time to pass on the torch…
China has been so economically successful, they have 1-2 trillion dollars in the bank and can spend them on infrastructure projects they think will provide the best improvement. They picked nuclear energy, and are building plants faster and cheaper than has been done in any other country before.
Meanwhile, all European countries are deeply in debt after decades of anti-industry policies, with some of them near bankruptcy and having to be bailed out. They plan a new solar project called Desertec, costing $500 billion, and have yet to come up with the money.
Which of the two regions do we believe is making the right decisions?
Who would bet on a diffuse and intermittent source of energy, when there exists that is on a volume basis uranium/throrium fuel which is 50 million times more energy dense than coal. It defies common sense to count on solar to be an economically viable replacement for fossil fuel. On the other hand given the great energy density superiority of fuel for nukes, one can anticipate future reactors capable of producing energy cheaper than coal. The best hope for avoiding the down side of coal in the future is replacement of coal power plants with Generation VI nuclear energy production.
Russia recently sold two BN 800 Breeder reactors to China. The BN 800 is an updataded BN 600. Russia reports that the BN 600 has produced electricity reliably for 30 years. Russia will soon modified it to use plutonium from the former USSR weapons. Climate change and swords into plow shares issues are addressed by China, while Europe continue to suffer from radio-phobia.
It is difficult in any country to compete with Chinese business people. They raise their children to think like business people and save to start their children in their first business. The children are expected to succeed and start more businesses. They are incredibly thrifty and save like no body’s business. They are applying those same characteristics to their national economy. Katy bar the door!
Energy is the base of an economy. It should not be the place where large profits are made, but the place that encourages large profits in other areas by it’s availability.
Glad to see you devote a little time to China. You’re correct that if both China and the US stay on their current paths, China will be the nuclear technology leader in a decade or two.
I do think it is great that ‘breeder’ technologies are coming back to the fore and development sooner is better than later. However, I think talk of ‘high-price’ uranium is much too early. If you search on a nuclear engineer named James Hopf I think you will find some interesting well-though-out articles on uranium reserves. Think about the history of any other mineral resource (including coal and oil) and you will see that reserves kept expanding for a very long time. Think about how much oil we have used and it seems that only now are we probably approaching the end of that ride. Reserves aren’t reserves until you find them, but there is no reason to think uranium will be different from copper, etc. — there will be a LOT to find.
Higher uranium prices, of course, make the extraction of uranium from seawater more economically viable.
China is also pursuing the idea of using plutonium from spent fuel in heavy water thorium reactors which could dramatically reduce the consumption of uranium resources.
And, of course, the commercial introduction of mass produced small reactors could dramatically decrease the capital cost of nuclear power plants, probably mitigating any increase in the cost of using higher priced uranium resources.
In March 2010 one of the Chinese nuclear fuel companies delivered the qualification fuel bundles for the DUPIC process for use with the Chinese CANDU reactors.
They chose to dilute the used LWR fuel with depleted uranium to get a natural uranium equivalence. Once they qualify their process I believe they plan to reduce the dilution and run with a low enriched equivalent. This will get them get them a higher burn up than a natural uranium equivalent and ultimately less used fuel to deal with.
This is something else the Chinese are doing right.
Bill
I like the DUPIC concept, cutting up and recapping old fuel rods and using them as CANDU fuel. It has the potential to be a useful “topping cycle” on used fuel as a preliminary to reprocessing, and perhaps a way to make a self-liquidating interim spent-fuel storage facility for LWRs until reprocessing is ready to go.
(E.g. the LWR ships the spent fuel to the storage facility, the storage facility uses their CANDU and sends the spent fuel through a DUPIC cycle, and uses the money generated to pay their investors and pay for for interim storage.) How does the used fuel’s performance compare with stock natural uranium?
It can take time to increase uranium producion capacity. New mines are hard to site and get going. Thus, if uranium demand grows rapidly, one could indeed see a large increase in the price of uranium, due to having to turn to (existing) low-grade mines, or possibly a literal supply shortage. The fact that the Megatons to Megawatts program is ending on 2013 will further exacerbate the situation. Perhaps that was Mr. Kidd’s point, when he refers to “really expensive uranium”. It was about demand RATE exceeding production RATE, over some period of time.
However, if he meant that there is a small, finite supply of high-grade ore in existence, that we will go through in a short period of time if there is a lot of nuclear growth, then he is just plain wrong. Since we’ve just started looking for uranium, the known reserves of uranium are a tiny fraction of what’s out there. We will discover high-grade deposits, equal to 100 times known reserves, or more. Nobody in the industry (utilities, etc..) is remotely worried about long-term uranium supply. Although there will be fluctuations, based on supply/demand balance, prices are not excpected to increase, over the long term. Even with substantial growth in nuclear, we have (will find) enough high-grade uranium ore deposits to supply us for centuries, even with the once-through cycle.
Based on the above, my opinion is that the price of uranium ore will – never – be high enough for closed cycles to create fuel that is as cheap as mined uranium. I’ve heard that the breakeven price is ~$1000/kg U3O8 (~450 $/lb – 10 times today’s price). We ain’t ever getting there. Not for centuries, anyway.
That does not mean we should not persue closed cycles, however. It’s just that the main benefits of closed cycles will not be a cheaper source of fuel. The benefits are in the areas of waste management and the environmental (and political) costs of uranium mining. With an advanced closed cycle, a repository will still be needed, but we will be able to get away with one repository. Given the political problems with siting repositories, this is a huge plus. It is also true that uranium mining is probably the one real, tangible environmental cost of nuclear. Increasing the number of mines will be difficult, and will be a source of general opposition to nuclear. If we close the fuel cycle, we would need no more new mines, and could even close a lot of the less environmentally sound (or less popular) ones. The political advantages of having less mines and repositories will be significant.
That said, there is no reason to hurry into reprocessing. We should spent the next couple decades researching better, advanced fuel cycle technologies, and reactors. We should rush forward with less desirable technologies like PUREX. We don’t need to start the closed fuel cycle for decades, perhaps after 2040. Research and demonstration projects, however, should of course go forward.
Thanks. Always better to hear it from the horse’s mouth. It was very refreshing when I happened on one of your articles a couple of years ago. It’s nice to find people that know what they are talking about.
I meant to say we “shouldn’t” rush forward with technologies like PUREX.