Is there a conspiracy against nuclear energy?
I have been accused of being a conspiracy theorist for pointing out the blindlingly obvious fact that nuclear energy competes for markets against fossil fuels.
There is abundant evidence showing how hydrocarbon interests have worked to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about nuclear power. Since the stories are spread over the 80 year period since atomic fission was discovered to be an incredibly dense source of heat, they can be overlooked or forgotten. For obvious reasons, there has been some effort to obscure the truth so researchers have to dig and keep working to get attention for their findings.
It’s completely logical to believe that at least some of the people whose jobs, wealth and power stem from one of the world’s largest enterprises recognize and respond to the competitive threat from nuclear energy.
It doesn’t take much of an exercise in deductive thinking to recognize that some of the people who have financial reasons to discourage nuclear energy will build support for their cause by making financial contributions to respected charities. Buying friends among groups that campaign for wildlife or for environmental protection is an investment that can provide major returns when it protects hydrocarbon markets from nuclear energy competition.
It’s not difficult to obscure sources of cash, especially when recipients have policies of confidentiality designed to protect donors from constant appeals from others.
Some ask why hydrocarbon interests haven’t just extended their businesses to include nuclear energy rather than engaging in the kind of discouragement I have discovered.
The answer is that commodity businesses usually suffer when there is too much supply of their primary products.
Even though industrial civilization depends on energy and fuel supply enterprises are enormous, PROFITS from the business are elusive. It is well known to be a “boom and bust” business. Busts nearly always occur as a result of an overabundance (glut). When supplies exceed demand by just a few percentage points, it doesn’t take long for storage systems to fill up.
When that happens, prices fall precipitously. (See, for example: Oil price crashes into negative territory for the first time in history amid pandemic)
Anticipation of a glut from new sources of supply can be enough to cause a substantial market price reduction. Conversely, anticipation of future shortages can produce almost unbelievable cash flows as prices rise when customers build inventories in fear of insufficient supplies.
Nuclear energy continues to pose the threat of making enormous capital investments worth less. When a entire countries like France or Sweden can shift almost all electricity production from coal and oil to nuclear over a 15 year period, it makes bankers, fossil fuel CEOs, sheiks, oligarchs, prime ministers, and others take action to prevent the possibility that others will “get it.”
I’m not sure how to overcome this obstacle to developing clean, abundant, reliable and affordable power, but I am hoping that increased recognition will help.
Note: I composed this as a comment in response to Zion Light’s excellent, heartfelt Medium post titled “Nuclear and nature: the love story no one wants to tell“. I published it as a comment there, but decided to share it here as well.
Update: Post updated on Mar 26, 2022 to add a link to an oil price story and to add links to related post below.
(this is an abbreviated and updated version of the comment I just posted at Real Climate.)
The NuScale has just been up-rated (again!) to 77 MW(e) gross. I suspect that means about 74 MW net. Ergo, it would take about 9500 NuScales to generate the ~700 GW(e) that the USA would need to electrify our grid and transport.
At 31% thermal efficiency, 9500 units would generate about 1600 GW of waste heat. That’s 48.7 quads of heat per year, 4+ quads per month. Peak US natural gas consumption for the residential and commercial sectors (space heat) occurs in January and peaks at only about 1.75 quads/month. In other words, NuScales plus district heating could get EVERYTHING that the networks could reach and eliminate all air emissions from it.
Or you can build more reasonably sized LWRs with lower core damage frequency (ESBWR), significantly better fuel utilization, which require fewer licensed operators per megawatt, etc..
With regards to the conspiracy against nuclear power…. it’s actually not a conspiracy, but investors instincts leading them to better return on investment. Nuclear power does just fine in planned economies or in states where the government is in business (China, Korea, RF, France, etc.). Return-on-Investment can be taken in quality of life of the citizenry in these places. Certain things break capitalism… Can things like spaceflight and nuclear power compete in a market without government backing? I tend to think not.
You’re ignoring the externalized costs from both LWRs and fossil fuels. The only way fossil fuels remain “cheap” is by transferring the true costs to everyone else.
And while new LWR designs are far more dependable now than early designs they still run at much lower temperatures than molten salt reactors and require frequent fuel swap outs producing large amounts of long term waste. Not to mention the massive up front capital costs of building them.
Far better to go with something like a molten salt fast reactor that doesn’t remove ANY actinides which create the long term waste hazard with LWRs and because they are fast spectrum reactors can run with much higher loads of fission products. So instead of needing to replace and/or clean your fuel load every four years or so as with a solid fuel reactor, you’re looking at a 40-80 year period before needing to do that with a molten salt fast reactor.
As for RIO, something like an Elysium MCSFR is designed to use only certified and cost effective components and would have capital costs similar to a gas or coal fired plant. And as it would burn what is now being stored as long term nuclear waste, operators would actually be paid to take their fuel. Any initial investment would be returned many times over during the lifespan of the reactor. And the core itself is essentially permanent and would be moved to a new reactor vessel when the old one aged out.
Plus the thermal efficiency of running at over 600 Celsius in the early models up to about 1,300 in later planned advanced designs. Giving operators large amounts of process heat for industrial applications, domestic heating and salt water de-salination.
Any pressurized water design is going to have a tough time competing in a market with molten salt and especially molten salt fast reactors. Any source of energy production will including “green” renewables like solar and wind power.
Doug,
considering the boiling point of salts is barely 1400 °C, isn’t a too narrow margin temperature to go up to 1300 °C ?
@doug coombes
yawn.
@michael scarangella
That is getting close to the disrespectful kind of comment I’d prefer for people to avoid.
If that’s all you have to say, wouldn’t silence be better?
I believe there was and continues to be from the natural gas and petroleum industry. Check out these comments from a recent paper from Japan that discusses the history of nuclear energy:
“The oil industry might well have felt threatened by the discovery of atomic energy.”
Low-dose radiation from A-bombs elongated lifespan and reduced cancer mortality relative to un-irradiated individuals
https://genesenvironment.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41021-018-0114-3
Sure, there is a financial conspiracy against nuclear. And your inexplicable musing once that Sen. Cory Booker is somehow pro-nuclear is relevant, at least in terms of the political interplay in my home state. Although NJ wants to be a showcase for the decommissioning of nuclear, at Oyster Creek (which decommissioning is going nowhere, amid popular accusations of corporate fraud and corruption against the contractor to do this) and for overpriced and overextended PV which is deployed most inconveniently on telephone poles by that socialized, politically brokered entity, PSE&G, I hear no advocacy whatsoever for more and newer nuclear here or within the region.
But why does all this specifically pertain to financial conspiracies against nuclear, or any other progress? Connect the dots. The most popular left preoccupation with The Donald over the next several months would be over the so-called “tax evasion” in New York State, in which he claimed one “set of books” for the IRS, and another for his lenders over the valuations of his real estate. This is actually more on the order of lending fraud, which is covered under federal statute, and for which all of one person was actually convicted (check an article in the New York Times).
There are actually lots of liar loans that infect the woke-encouraged housing market, and billionaire class that support the Biden set.
Naturally if Sanders and Warren ever raise the matters I suggest, their cabinet bids will be sunk, smothered in a back room by Biden with not so much as a gasp from the GOP Senate. That is precisely the point. Banks cannot live without governmentalized capital. They cannot earn their arbitrage fees without half percent money, bureaucratic regulation and just going along to get along. A business type to head the NRC? Like Phil Murphy said of the idea of allowing religious services to continue in the wake of the China Virus — it’s above their pay grade.
I hope I have educated you and your readers about Woke finance Rod, the better to fight for smoother seas for nuclear.
I thought I was the only one in New Jersey upset with the 150 watt name plate solar panels on the telephone poles all over Cherry Hill, and the outcome of the mail-in election. The former happened under the RINO’s governorship and was an incredible waste of money.
“Woke” finance is one of the greatest dangers to the US.
I note that Zion Lights mentioned being accused of being a ‘shill’.
I regard the shill accusation as a red flag that the person making it is massively dishonest. It is a variant of the ‘ad hominem’ & ‘poisoning the well’ fallacies. If the person accused has a long record of basing his/her arguments on lies & logical fallacies, then the red flag can be taken down.
“Shill,” “racist,” “white supremacist,” etc.
There needs to be a “Godwin’s Law” for these cliche terms as well. The “reductio ad Hitlerum” fallacy needs to be expanded to encompass all of the ridiculous terms used — primarily on the Left — to try to shut down conversation and “cancel” certain people.
You can’t have intelligent dialogue, when some people have their hands over their ears and are screaming insults at anyone they do not like.
Nuclear is the real threat to fossil fuels. So what if they play nasty? That can be overcome. It would take literally thousands of new SMR’s to actually replace all fossil fuels. But the value of those fuels would be dropping drastically as the public clearly sees the replacements coming.
Standard Oil gained the habit, born of need, of cut-throat competition. Nuclear needs to be cut-throat and a bit nasty. The major frustration I have over the past 12 years of advocating Nuclear is the “nice guy” attitude of most companies who are producing science projects rather than products. Everyone of them is going after the same market. Alaska! Northern Canada! Sigh. Shale oil?? Are you kidding me?
I have not heard of a single one of these super safe designs going after a data center. (100 MW) How about going after a Marijuana growing center! 2,000 to 3,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy per pound of product. (I actually hate Marijuana). Finally the U of C is looking at an actual power producing reactor.
Where are the lobbyists filling the halls of congress with money and donations to help them see that the NRC regulations are horrible and not needed.
Where is the aggressive marketing to take away actual market share? Safety does NOT sell! If safety sold, we would be flooding the market now with SMR’s. If safety sold we would not have spent 14 Billion on two new oversized science project engineering toy reactors in Georgia.
The new Nuclear companies do not need to be selling safety. They need to be selling 1. inexpensive power. 2. inexpensive power. 3. inexpensive power. 4. solutions to power needs. 5. Climate. 6. Convenience and flexibility.
Look, I literally know a thousand islands in the Philippines that could use 50 to 100 MW of power tomorrow. I know that Thorcon is absolutely on the right track. Want to compete with China? Head for Africa with Nuclear power. Want to compete with Natural Gas? Shame them! Take Meredith Angwin’s Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid and shove it down their throats with 30 second commercials all over Facebook and Youtube.
Please please please stop trying to put nuclear fuel in the desert. All that does is reinforce that it is dangerous.
Shame works. Fighting works. Advertising works. Go baby! Fight for the markets!
Paraphrasing: “The Vogtle AP000 expansion project is building ‘toys’ and we should build micro-reactors (fuel load costs as much as a LearJet) to power grow houses….”
^beyond absurd
@Michael – Where in David’s comment did you find an criticism of the AP1000 or of other large reactors in developed countries with large power demands.
He’s a guy who has logically noticed, while living and working in less developed nations, that one size of power plant – especially when it is “extra large” – does not fit everywhere.
He recognizes that the primary competitor – fossil fueled machines – do come in a wide variety of sizes.
Why can’t you see that?
Besides – why do so many nuclear engineers think advanced nuclear fuels are inevitably expensive? Are you unaware of how mass production works and how its principles are far more applicable to fuel than to large pieces of equipment?
First, I apologize for posting more than once on this. I had a strange reaction from my browser the first time.
Thanks for replying! I am saying that aiming ALL our engineering at SAFETY leads us to the AP 1000. This is a totally loosing proposition. We cannot build enough AP 1000 units to bring the costs of construction because we cannot get enough volume production to make it worth while finding production efficiencies.
The Vogtle AP 1000 has cost 14 Billion so far. The AP 1000 is using several first of a kind technologies that have been very difficult to manufacture and can only be made by a very small number of manufactures in the whole world. It will output 1,110 megawatt electric (MWe) roughly 10 milion MWH / year at $40 / MW gives a rough gross income of $400 million. I expect that operating costs will be about 1/2 of that. This leaves about $200 million that can go to pay off the capital costs. 14 Billion at about 1% interest / year needs 772,622,435.64 a year to pay off the capital cost in 20 years. So, the cost of the capital for the AP 1000 is 500 million higher than the available income. Each year.
Using nuclear power to produce renewable methanol synthesized from hydrogen extracted from water and CO2 extracted from the atmosphere is probably the biggest threat to natural gas. Natural gas electric power plants can be easily and cheaply retrofitted to use methanol.
So I look at all natural gas power plants as potential methanol electric power plants that could use methanol produced from nuclear power.
Marcel
“CO2 extracted from the atmosphere”
Or better yet CO2 extracted from seawater.
It looks to be cheaper than from the atmosphere.
https://bravenewclimate.com/2013/01/16/zero-emission-synfuel-from-seawater/
Thank you for this. I have been studying energy issues lately and I am continually surprised by how much I do not know.
And CO2 captured from the flu gases of methanol electric power plants and used to make even more methanol could make methanol production even cheaper. Plus recycling CO2 extracted from the atmosphere or from sea water would make the process more than carbon neutral; it would make every new power plant– converted to use methanol— carbon negative.
Marcel, you’d be better off using the Allam cycle. Also catalytically cracking the MeOH to CO and H2 in the regenerator.
So what if fossil fuels play nasty? That can be overcome. Nuclear needs to be cut-throat and a bit nasty. The major frustration I have over the past 12 years of advocating Nuclear is the “nice guy” attitude of most companies who are producing science projects rather than products. Every one of them is going after the same market. Alaska! Northern Canada! Sigh. Shale oil?? Are you kidding me?
Why not one of these super safe designs going after a data center? (100 MW for 20 years). How about going after a Marijuana growing center! They use 2,000 to 3,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy per pound of product. I actually hate Marijuana. Where are the lobbyists filling the halls of congress with money and donations to help them see that the NRC regulations are horrible and not needed.
Where is the aggressive marketing to take away actual market share? Safety does NOT sell! If safety sold, we would already be flooding the market now with SMR’s. If safety sold we would not have spent 14 Billion on two new oversized science project engineering toy reactors in Georgia.
The new Nuclear companies do not need to be selling safety. They need to be selling 1. inexpensive power. 2. inexpensive power. 3. inexpensive power. 4. solutions to power needs. 5. Climate. 6. Convenience and flexibility.
Look, I literally know a thousand islands in the Philippines that could use 50 to 100 MW of power tomorrow. I know that Thorcon is absolutely on the right track. Want to compete with China? Head for Africa with Nuclear power. Want to compete with Natural Gas? Shame them! Take Meredith Angwin’s Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid and shove it down their throats with 30 second commercials all over Facebook and Youtube.
Shame works. Fighting works. Advertising works. Go baby! Fight for the markets!
Nuclear needs to fight nasty.
There’s room for many different approaches.
Yes, Rod, there is room. I having followed your thoughts on this for years. The nice guy approach is not working. Now that an actual Nuclear industry is forming it needs to fight. It needs to compete on COST not on safety. When every new design says they are safer than the guy before, but the science project / engineering study kind of approaches will never get installed. Why not work on cost? Why not shame your competition?
If Nuclear were cost competitive the companies could go to these massive data centers that spend out the nose for battery backup and sell them 20 years of power at a fixed LOWER cost.
Rod you have convinced me that Nuclear power (and radiation) are well within the normal range of hazards we face in daily life. Companies need to quit saying they are SAFE now. Talk about the advantages to large factories.
@David:
I agree with competing – hard – with ALL other energy competitors. If I was running communications for a nuclear company, I’d spend a lot of time and ink on touting the numerous benefits it brings.
I’d spend a little less ink & time on messages that ensure audiences were well aware of the limitations of other sources of heat and power.
I might even spend a marginal amount of ink & time ensuring audiences knew that our specific nuclear fission power or heat system had some refinements that other fission systems did not have.
Every once in a while, especially if there were questions being asked, I’d invest in messaging that described fission’s amazing safety record. Within that set of communications, I would also point out how my specific system meets the industry standards with less effort, less special training, less material, fewer additional systems. IOW, it would be a cost-focused message that alleviates nagging doubts that WILL continue to be planted by opponents.
I agree with that strategy. I hope you are able to implement it!
Why does it take a conspiracy? Why would fossil fuel companies need to do anything but allow the nuclear industry to make serious strategic mistakes while superstitious technical illiterates organize political opposition?
I think what we’re seeing is the path of least resistance among the important people in the situation. Nothing more. It doesn’t have to be anything more than that. Bureaucrats in both the industry and the NRC crave the certainty provided by extensive specific rules, and the anti-nuclear activists play the two off each other. Existing nuclear industry players like barriers to entry because they keep competition out, the anti-nuclear activists like barriers to entry because they know they’re bad for the long-term health of the industry as a whole, and the NRC as an institution is fine with being used by both groups to create these barriers to entry in the form of complex regulations, because it allows their low- and mid-level managers to build empires. Who is important in the process and pushing back on any of this? No one. So it just builds and builds, on itself. It’s how bureaucracy expands everywhere.
The nuclear industry is simply what happens when bureaucrat culture takes over everything to the point where it chokes itself to death. Nobody needs to conspire to do this.
@Stewart Peterson
If you start your evaluation of nuclear fission history as if it started in the 1980s, I can see SOME basis for your conclusions. By that time, the trajectories were well established. Fear had been ingrained and the bureaucrats were firmly entrenched.
But nuclear fission began long before that and should have found a different path. It took serious, thoughtful and creative efforts to detail a technology with such incredible potential and almost immediate areas of superiority over all other energy alternatives.
BTW, I never alleged that the actions taken actually fell under the definition of conspiracy. They were logical actions taken by people who often didn’t have any knowledge of efforts being taken by others for the same ultimate goal of slowing the entry of nuclear fission power into the market. It was an alignment of interests, not a criminal conspiracy.
Though there are some in the nuclear industry and in its regulatory bodies that are doing a good job of slowing development and forcing a gradual reduction of nuclear fission into the margins of the energy supply endeavor, there are still some actors who keep pressure on to make nuclear as costly and as challenging as possible.
Fortunately for the good of humanity, there are also others that are fighting their way to a position that offers amazing opportunities to successfully change the future.
One of the energizing things about my current endeavors with entrepreneurs and investors (as Managing Partner in Nucleation Capital) is that I get to converse regularly with some of those innovative leaders. I can’t always share the specifics of what I learn, but I can share the general sense of optimism and excitement.
PS – It’s good to hear from you again. It’s been a while.
Yet this bureaucratic culture came from somewhere; it didn’t sprout from nowhere in the 80s. It’s the same culture that developed in every pre-deregulation industry, from railroads to commercial aviation. That culture was absolutely present in the 40s and the 50s. Other industries have gotten rid of it, admittedly painfully – largely via the old operators going out of business.
New reactor designs aren’t going to solve the problem by themselves. We’ll need them, too – but only after radical deregulation. The current model in aviation seems to work: keep the FAA as both regulator and promoter, get rid of the CAB, and give accident investigation to an independent agency (the NTSB) so there are no coverups. They seem to regulate a high-tech industry, with high hazard potential but a great safety record, without bankrupting it or stifling innovation.
Also, just so we’re clear on our terms: the definition of “conspiracy” in criminal law excludes a lot of things that would be called “conspiracy theories” in ordinary terms. It would be, as you say, perfectly legal for some kind of shadowy cabal to orchestrate a publicity campaign or pressure campaign. Yet most people would call this a conspiracy theory if there weren’t good evidence for it. And the mere existence of powerful competitors doesn’t mean that they intervened in the process when all they needed to do was sit back and laugh. Blaming it on them just papers over our own mistakes – and sets us up to fail again if we don’t fix them before trying again.
My approach? Let’s assume it’s all our fault. Start over as though we were starting from scratch and had to invent a supply chain, a skilled labor supply, a regulator, and a technology. And do it right this time, basically copying aviation.
Most of these are political problems, of course, and beyond the reach of engineering to solve. We’re used to technology being the limiting factor, advancing as fast as it can, but historically the opposite has been true: what society is willing to let us do has been the limiting factor for the vast majority of human history. Fission faces the same limit – and historically, that has meant that technical progress typically freezes in place for several hundred years. That’s why I chose to go into fusion: we haven’t been stopped yet. And, I might add, the vast majority of us fusion people are pulling for you guys in the short- to medium-term.
Good to hear from you, too.
Have you read any of the ‘smoking gun’ posts?
I’ve read each one. I don’t find that they add up to the massive, coordinated campaign that would be required to destroy an entire industry. In particular, the collapse of the coal industry in recent years shows that they are incapable of protecting themselves, and the (much bigger) petrochemical industry lost most of its utility market share to nuclear power in the 70s and 80s.
In other words, we beat the oil companies, and later on, the oil companies beat the coal industry. That doesn’t add up to the coal industry beating us through some kind of scheme – a scheme you’d think they would use to survive when the natural gas boom came for them.
Why not just fix the stuff that’s our fault – the stuff we can control? Maybe we’ll come out on the other side and find out that the competition is bigger than us and we can’t make it happen. But let’s be in a position where it’s not going to be our fault this time.
No one destroyed an entire industry. Hydrocarbon interests are not monolithic. They often work at cross purposes and engage in internecine battles against other producers of exactly the same product. Battles in fuel supply industry are about market share and about keeping supplies limited enough to keep prices profitable (or very profitable.)
There is no “we” in the sense of having some kind of pure nuclear industry. Almost without exception, companies and individuals involved in the nuclear “industry” are also involved in hydrocarbons. They have, in some cases, adopted the business model of ensuring that supply is always somewhat less than demand. They have erected barriers to entry to limit the entry of smaller, potentially more nimble competitors.
My point in this discussion isn’t to avoid or overlook the importance of taking all available actions to improve nuclear’s competitive posture. It isn’t to blame outsiders for self imposed problems. It is more of an effort to illustrate that opposition to nuclear doesn’t spring from ideology and isn’t the moral high ground that many opponents have tried to claim it is.
It’s fundamentally a logical, but not particularly moral, effort to protect vested interests and to extract as much money as possible from energy customers.
It’s not just the energy market that will be profoundly changed by a systemic move to nuclear power as the base, the economic and social changes will be just as profound. We’re talking about an energy source that as the technology advances will have almost limitless fuel reserves and a tiny waste stream when you look at molten salt reactors.
The question then becomes not “where will we get our next source of fuel to provide energy” as it is now, but “how do we use this almost limitless energy in a sound and sustainable way.”
This turns on its head a fossil fuels based energy model that is based on anything but sound and sustainable. I think a big roadblock to acceptance of nuclear power as the base of a new energy model comes from this mindset. People in the fossil fuels sector, those who support them and those who finance them tend to see the world in a far different – and chaotic – way than someone who thinks in terms of a steady process of splitting atoms that provides virtually limitless power.
Think of an Elysium fast reactor for instance. When in operation this reactor will burn spent nuclear fuel, plutonium from decommissioned weapons and when reactor chemistry is mature it can burn depleted uranium. That is potentially thousands of years of energy production at current levels right there. And that is just one potential game changer out of many in the nuclear sector now.
Maybe what it comes down to and it’s definitely how I see it, nuclear power extends our horizons vastly beyond where fossil fuels can ever take us. And when presented with this amazing potential from nuclear power, people now both mentally and economically dependent on fossil fuels behave in the same way someone with agoraphobia would when presented with the great plains.
With fear and reluctance instead of excitement and wonder.
“Think of an Elysium fast reactor for instance. When in operation this reactor will burn spent nuclear fuel, plutonium from decommissioned weapons and when reactor chemistry is mature it can burn depleted uranium…. yada, yada.”
There’s nothing these reactors that don’t exist cannot accomplish in better form than our current fleet.
At least you’re not using the present tense; that’s a common mistake that proponents make when describing their preferred academic reactor.
With a few exceptions, those who push MSR technology have little experience with nuclear power…
So, trying to learn here. When you say our current fleet are you talking about the Light Water Reactor fleet in the USA? How do those burn plutonium and other “waste” ??
Several countries use MOX in LWRs, but I argue that there is no spent fuel ‘crisis’
– casks are an indefinitely satisfactory solution.
Experience shows recovering actinides and remanufacturing nuclear fuel from SNF results in additional expense over the once through fuel cycle. It also results in a lot of contaminated equipment in the fab, necessitates remote handling, and creates diverse waste streams that prove more difficult to handle than sealed tubes containing a relatively inert oxide, which may be stored indefinitely in a cask. Any halide fuel would need to be converted to an oxide before it could be as safely and as easily stored as LWR fuel. Of course you would probably argue this is unnecessary, since the fuel would be ‘consumed completely in situ’ (notice future tense). That sounds awfully academic to me considering the material science issues (corrosion) – the fuel is going to outlast the system. Sounds reasonable /s.
I believe improvements could be made where enrichment is reduced and fuel stays in the core longer, so long as these developments provided some financial benefit, such as requiring less fuel over the lifetime of the plant *without reducing heat rate too much*. In some distant future, where uranium is scarce, the clear solution is Thorium MOX in reduced moderation LWRs or HWRs, as 233U yields more than two neutrons per thermal fission (allows thermal isobreeding), and since the bred uranium (~98% 233U) may be separated using HF and F2; 233UF6 literally wafts out of the pot and may be condensed. All this stuff was figured out before 1980 – the work done at shipping port was abandoned just like the MSRE. MSRE was abandoned because it made a mess (still not cleaned up)… Thorium MOX in LWR was abandoned because it works well and makes a lot of nearly pure fissile material that is easy to concentrate.
Basically everything about a molten salt reactor is better than a PWR or BWR. It’s why the guy who designed the first PWR for the US Navy, Alvin Weinberg soon abandoned the idea of using PWRS for domestic power production and began development of molten salt reactor. An idea from Eugene Wigner in the mid 1940s. This is not new technology, the MSRE ran for four years in the 1960s.
Advantages of molten MSRs over PWRs and BWRs:
No need for massive primary and secondary containment. The primary containment is chemical, it’s the bond of the fissile material to the salt.They aren’t pressurized and don’t use water that can flash to radioactive steams from primary and secondary coolant in PWRs and BWRs. The core itself is the coolant and heat exchange medium.
They are far more economical with fuel use and in the case of the Elysium reactor will produce almost no actinide waste with long half lives.
Much higher operating temperatures and much greater thermal efficiency.
Much simpler design, an Elysium reactor will basically be a stainless steel can(not pressure vessel) with geometry such that when filled with molten salt with a certain concentration of fissile material will be barely critical. The more fuel salt you pump through it the more power is output.
Because it is fast spectrum, because of the smaller capture cross sections they can run with much higher fission products loads.
The list goes on and you can only say so much in this format. I encourage you to do a little research if you actually are interested in the future of nuclear power technology.
Because it is clearly not with PWRs and BWRs.
@Doug Coombes
You have done a fine job of absorbing talking points.
Please ask yourself this question – if molten salt reactors are so advantageous and the knowledge has been available since the 1940s, why is the worldwide operating experience limited to two experimental reactors whose generated heat was simply discharged to the environment?
Whatever political issues Alvin Weinberg ran into in the United States should not have slowed others, especially in Russia or China, from pursuing such an obviously advantageous technology.
Maybe, just maybe, there are some technical obstacles that you are ignoring or are unaware of?
Several countries use MOX in LWRs, but I argue that there is no spent fuel ‘crisis’
– casks are an indefinitely satisfactory solution.
Experience shows recovering actinides and remanufacturing nuclear fuel from SNF results in additional expense over the once through fuel cycle. It also results in a lot of contaminated equipment in the fab, necessitates remote handling, and creates diverse waste streams that prove more difficult to handle than sealed tubes containing a relatively inert oxide, which may be stored indefinitely in a cask. Any halide fuel would need to be converted to an oxide before it could be as safely and as easily stored as LWR fuel. Of course you would probably argue this is unnecessary, since the fuel would be ‘consumed completely in situ’ (notice future tense). That sounds awful academic to me considering the material science issues (corrosion) – the fuel is going to outlast the system. Sounds reasonable /s.
I believe improvements could be made where enrichment is reduced and fuel stays in the core longer, so long as these developments provided some financial benefit, such as requiring less fuel over the lifetime of the plant *without reducing heat rate too much*. In some distant future, where uranium is scarce, the clear solution is Thorium MOX in reduced moderation LWRs or HWRs, as 233U yields more than two neutrons per thermal fission (allows thermal isobreeding), and since the bred uranium (~98% 233U) may be separated using HF and F2; 233UF6 literally wafts out of the pot and may be condensed. All this stuff was figured out before 1980 – the work done at shipping port was abandoned just like the MSRE. MSRE was abandoned because it made a mess (still not cleaned up)… Thorium MOX in LWR was abandoned because it works well and makes a lot of nearly pure fissile material that is easy to concentrate.
Armored casks are a temporary solution to a hazard that will last for thousands of years. While the health risks of Pu-239 are overblown it is an alpha emitter and if ingested can to a lot of damage. There needs to be a long term solution to SNF that contains transuranic actinides(TRUs).
If you go with a solid fueled PWR/BWR you are always going to be looking at either a long term solution to storing waste that contains TRUs…. or expensive and hazardous fuel reprocessing.
Here’s how you process the fuel for the Elysium MCSFR. You buy your table salt from a bulk wholesaler, I think it is in the hundreds of dollars for an entire reactor load of salt. You melt the salt then, chop your SNF rods into small pieces and drop then in the salt where they are then grabbed by the chloride salt and are effectively contained.
You never take the actnides out of the salt, they stay in until they are transmuted to something fissile and burn up. The only fission products coming out of your reactor for decades are noble gases that won’t stay in solution. They can be safely stored until they’re at ground state and often sold. Xenon is quite valuable for high tech application. The core is also permanent, the salt repairs itself about 100,000 times faster than the neutron flux damages it. When the steel reactor vessel is retired due to activation and aging the fuel salt core is simply moved to a new reactor vessel.
Because it is a fast spectrum reactor U-238 becomes weakly fissile and 10% of that isotope will burn up the rest being transmuted to something more fissile like Pu-239. Which means that depleted uranium also become a viable fuel source of which there is huge amounts available.
You basically eliminate almost all the bottlenecks in fuel sourcing and processing and waste stream output with a MCSFR. Most of the FPs coming out of the reactor have short half lives and will be at ground state in a decade. Of the rest the longest storage need is about 300 years, not thousands. All this in a reactor that isn’t pressurized, doesn’t use water or a moderator and because of its much higher temperatures has much higher thermal efficiency. You get far more energy output that can be used with a MCSFR than you ever can with a PWR/BWR.
Plutonium is almost harmless if ingested. 1 atom in ~10^5 is absorbed by the gut.
Plutonium is a dust/inhalation hazard and a hazard if injected (e.g. contaminated glass shrapnel or stabing yourself with something contaminated at some weapons lab somewhere). It’s also very immobile in the environment. We know this from the Oklo natural reactors. It can have ground water actively flowing through it and not much will happen.
@Rod Adams
It wasn’t technical issues that sidelined the MSBR in the mid 1970s, it was politics. Nixon wanted the LMFBR for political reasons and rejected the ORNL proposal to build a MSBR for $340 million over ten years. Maybe Weinberg’s team would have hit some technical hurdles, but they already had a working design and needed to mate that with a power generation loop and a fuel processing system.
These are the same guys who flew a functioning MSR in a B-36 in the 1950s, I think they were more than up to the challenge of producing a working domestic power MSBR prototype by the mid 1980s.
One major drawback at the time for them was the thorium based MSBRs would not have produced almost any Pu-239 which was a major consideration for most of the nuclear power nations at that time. The Cold War was still under way and weapons production was a major consideration.
And once the MSBR was rejected and Weinberg was fired from ORNL for being “too safety conscious” there was no one to drive MSR design forward. Most people didn’t even know the technology existed until Kirk Sorensen was doing research for NASA on space based reactor designs in the 2000s.
And now the advantages of MSRs are understood many nations are putting major resources into developing domestic power versions. Ed Pheil and team take an already elegant design from Weinberg and Wigner and simplify it even further. Adding the fast spectrum option to burn SNF and DU.
@Doug Coombes
So no one outside of US knew of chemical and physical properties of molten salts or thought they might be useful for nuclear fission reactors?
I suspect Weinberg’s interpretation of the reasons for his firing ignored factors like the fact that his “safety consciousness” was directly responsible for activating Ralph Nader’s campaign against nuclear energy development.
Kirk’s interpretation also requires one to believe that the US didn’t already have more plutonium than it could use being produced in materials production reactors at Hanford and Savannah River.
Take a hard, critical thinking look at the challenges ORNL has had in disposing of the leftover molten salt from the MSRE. Thorium and its actinide byproducts introduce some interesting obstacles that still need to be overcome.
Fast spectrum molten salt reactors solve a problem that isn’t the one that is hampering nuclear energy development right now. There is such an abundance of easily mined uranium from fully characterized resources that several of the world’s most production mines have been taken out of operation. We have an affordable above ground storage option that can be licensed for 100+ years. There is no technical reason why those licenses cannot be extended if necessary and no reason why casks cannot be repaired or replaced if they show signs of deterioration.
Was there really any motivation for anyone in the nuclear power sector to look so far outside the box in the 1970s. keep in mind that Weinberg and his team at ORNL weren’t just doing nuclear reactor design research in the 1960s, they were also looking at economic, social and environmental issues including climate change. The molten salt reactor was designed to remove most of the failure mechanisms of PWRs and BWRs. No core to melt down, no water in the primary and secondary loops that could flash into radioactive steam in a catastrophic loss of reactor coolant. And no need to swap out the entire core every few years wasting most of the fuel. And creating a major long term waste issue.
Weinberg may have contributed to some of the growing anti-nuclear movement, but that can mostly be traced back to the 1950s I think with that guy who left the Sierra Club and was funded by California oil money. And also the creation of the LNT model of ionizing radiation risk which was clearly meant for political purposes to slow nuclear weapons proliferation not really quantify the real risk posed by IR.
And yes there are serious issues with flibe salt toxicity, and the complexity of a thermal spectrum reactor design that would need to swap out graphite cores every few years.
Ed Pheil, Carlos Perez and their team specifically went with sodium chloride and a fast spectrum reactor to address this. You could eat the salt being used in the Elysium reactor BEFORE it went in. Also no need for a graphite moderator in the core so no need to deal with the waste from that.
The major selling point of the Elysium reactor isn’t that it’s fuel cost will be cheap, it’s that they will be in the black. You can’t compete with the economics of someone paying you to take your fuel off their hands. Plus the boon of burning up all that SNF. In a reactor that is designed to be as economical to build as a gas or coal plant. You could swap out an Elysium core with heat transfer loops for the burners in existing gas and coal plants. There’s no need for massive containment because your reactor isn’t running under pressure. And won’t ever melt down.
@Doug Coombes
Unless there are significant improvements in materials, molten salt reactors cannot achieve high enough temperatures to be used as the heat source for modern gas and coal plants. Reactor outlet temperature for the primary salt loop is limited to about 600 ℃. Every step of heat transfer required before you produce steam lowers that temp a bit because heat only flows if there is a delta T.
David Brower, the founder of Friends of the Earth, split from the Sierra Club to found FoE in 1969, not in the 1950s.
I am aware that Ellysium is making some progress with testing salt loops and that TerraPower is also working on the fundamental testing required to enable chloride salt fast reactors to be produced and reliably operated. But you appear to be underestimating the amount of work that must be done before this product can be ready for the market.
Rod,
am I wrong or 600 °C as T_out is high enough to power ultra critical steam turbines with an efficiency in the range of 45-50 % ?
@ Rod,
In your mind what is hampering Nuclear development at this point? I think it is cost. I would love to see you write an article or podcast on Open100. https://www.open-100.com/
The first iteration of the Elysium won’t be hot enough to replace coal and gas burners as its reactor vessel is going with already certified stainless steel to avoid any roadblocks in development. With high temperature alloys the reactor operating temperatures will eventually be brought up to around 1,300 Celsius, almost hot enough to use for concrete production.
I was thinking 1959 for FoE for some reason. My point was that Alvin Weinberg wasn’t an opponent of nuclear power who motivated Nader, he was its father to a great degree. And he saw flaws in his early designs he wanted to correct, some of which became apparent with the TMI accident. In part so that people like Nader wouldn’t have ammunition to use against the nuclear power sector.
Elysium has simplified everything it can especially the fuel cycle. It’s doesn’t use solid fuel so it doesn’t have to be tested in reactor conditions for decades for certification. They are well on their way to certification with that. The main challenge is reactor vessel design and they’re working on a low power demonstrator now.
The whole point of the Elysium MCSFR is to get a viable, safe and low waste producing reactor to market as soon as possible.
As the author highlights, there is a lot of money involved in protecting the fossil fuel industry from nuclear energy competition. However, after years of research, environmentalists have found that air pollution and heavy metals are more likely to harm human health[1] than radiation. This directly contradicts the efforts by fossil fuel lobbies to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about nuclear power. An increased effort to spread information about the viability and relative safety of nuclear power could help to educate more people about the potential of using nuclear power as an option to combat climate change[2].
Some of the people who want to discourage nuclear energy may donate large funds to charities that campaign for wildlife protection, renewable energy, and environmental conservation. In order to implement nuclear power in the United States, it may be necessary for nuclear power lobbyists to put more money behind nuclear power in an effort to compete with the fossil fuel industry.
[1] https://www.intechopen.com/books/heavy-metals/environmental-contamination-by-heavy-metals
[2]https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/01/22/climate-change-solution-nuclear-energy-our-best-hope-column/2821183001/