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Atomic Insights

Atomic energy technology, politics, and perceptions from a nuclear energy insider who served as a US nuclear submarine engineer officer

Gas Cooled Reactors

What exploded in Russia on Aug 8? My estimate is a (chemical) booster rocket for a nuclear powered cruise missile.

August 23, 2019 By Rod Adams 37 Comments

A cruise missile with a nuclear reactor heated turbofan engine and a liquid fueled booster rocket is the most likely description of the Russian developmental weapons system that exploded while being tested on August 8. It’s likely that the explosion occurred during maintenance or fueling operations on a barge floating off shore and not during an actual flight test.

Like other operational cruise missiles, the developmental weapons system probably flies at a low altitude at a velocity of roughly 500 kts, well below the speed of sound. The payload is likely to be less than 1000 kilograms. The missile probably has a small radar cross-section and includes a sophisticated navigational, communications and maneuvering system that allows it to be redirected while in flight.

Its small (approximately 10-20 MWth) nuclear fission reactor heat source provides it with almost unlimited range and a flight duration that is likely to be measured in days or weeks instead of hours. While operating, the reactor heat source will create a moderate to high level of direct radiation. It is a “point source” of radiation with a dose rate that falls off rapidly in inverse proportion to the square of the distance from the reactor.

Since there are generally no living organisms close to a cruise missile in flight, that radiation field is not an operational impediment to using a nuclear fission-heated turbofan engine. Even after the missile hits its eventual target and explodes, the reactor is likely to remain just a local source of radiation without much spreading of radioactive material.

Aside: Basis for that surprising conclusion rests on what bomb damage assessment photos show of the remains of a conventional cruise missile. It’s common to be able to detect recognizable turbofan engine parts. If they can survive warhead detonation, so will a propulsion reactor. End Aside.

The above is my own pieced-together interpretation. It is not the official story released by any government agency or investigative news outlet.

What have other sources said?

On August 8, 2019, there was a powerful, deadly explosion on a barge floating near the Nenoksa military base on the White Sea’s southern shore. That base is well known to intelligence sources as a place where Russia tests military weapons systems.

Four Russian monitoring stations that are capable of detecting radiation and that routinely provide data into an international network set up to help monitor for nuclear weapons testing reported a brief-duration increase in background radiation levels.

Based on publicly available sources on the Internet, it’s not clear exactly how long the increased levels lasted. Even the most pessimistic articles indicate that the levels reported from Severodvinsk – about 40 km from the test site – were no more than 16 times normal background. No monitoring station outside of Russia measured any increased radiation levels.

On August 21, Vladimir Putin stated that the explosion happened during testing of a promising weapons system. He also described the people killed during the explosion as doing “extremely important work to ensure the security of our state.”

Official Russian news sources have described the explosion as one that involved “isotope power sources.” Several of the five killed or three injured people were described as experts in the nuclear energy or radiological fields and as employees of the Russian Federal Nuclear Center. In some reports, the word “fissile” has also been used along with isotope power sources.

President Trump has described the missile that exploded as a nuclear powered cruise missile. Quoted experts for major media outlets like the New York Times and CBS News have disputed that description.

CBS’s quoted expert, Pavel Luzin, stated the explosion could not have involved a nuclear powered cruise missile because “Its (characteristics are) simply against the laws of physics.”

Mr. Luzin expanded on his dismissal of the existence of a nuclear fission heated cruise missile in an article for the Moscow Times titled I Don’t Believe a Missile Is to Blame for Russia’s Deadly ‘Nuclear’ Explosion. That article concluded with a bold, but ill-informed and incorrect statement.

However, the bottom line is that the mysterious cruise missile doesn’t exist because it contradicts the laws of physics. 

“I Don’t Believe a Missile Is to Blame for Russia’s Deadly ‘Nuclear’ Explosion” Moscow Times, August 14, 2019

The New York Times quoted Ankit Panda, described as a nuclear expert at the Federation of American Scientists as follows.

“I’ve generally been of the belief that this attempt at developing an unlimited-range nuclear-powered cruise missile is folly. It’s unclear if someone in the Russian defense industrial bureaucracy may have managed to convince a less technically informed leadership that this is a good idea, but the United States tried this, quickly discovered the limitations and risks, and abandoned it with good reason.”

“U.S. Officials Suspect New Nuclear Missile in Explosion That Killed 7 Russians”, NY Times, Aug 12, 2019

Truth about nuclear propulsion for aircraft

During the period from 1951-1961, the US invested more than $1 billion then-year dollars developing and testing a wide range of systems for aircraft nuclear propulsion. Though a number of “experts” have stated that the program was halted due to technical failures or insurmountable physical obstacles, the truth is that the program ended as a result of fairly typical budgeting and prioritization decisions.

Some decision makers, like Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson, weren’t impressed by the speed or altitude limitations in systems achievable with 1950s vintage materials and control system technologies. He called the proposed nuclear powered bomber a “shitepoke” a bird that flies low and slow when comparing it to supersonic, high-flying penetration bombers.

A major effort during the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program involved radiation shields for the crews of manned bombers with mission that lasted days or weeks. It is a big technical challenge to provide sufficient protection for long duration exposures.

The problem is made tougher by its circular nature. Big, heavy planes require high powered reactors. High powered reactors produced more intense radiation fields and require more shielding. More shielding requires larger, heavier airframes. And so on.

Those design challenges shrink rapidly when the airframe is a few thousand kilograms and the “pilot” is a lightweight, easily shielded piece of electronic equipment. Nuclear fission turbofans work just like those heated by chemical combustion, but their exhaust gas is heated air instead of a mixture of combustion products.

In contrast to the simple safety of a nuclear fission-heated turbofan motor, a liquid fueled rocket motor is a volatile, explosive component that has been known to suffer seriously damaging explosions.

Unlike the frequently directional explosions produced by cruise missile warheads, an exploding booster rocket can cause unidirectional harm and might even break enough barriers in the reactor to produce a moderate radioactive material release.

One final observation – creating mystery and refusing to openly answer simple questions is a terrific way to generate fear, uncertainty and doubt in a public that has been taught to distrust. Nations that depend on revenues from selling oil and gas to provide roughly 50% of their government budgets have numerous reasons to stoke fear of radiation and small nuclear powered systems.

Filed Under: Gas Cooled Reactors, International nuclear, Nuclear Aircraft, Small Nuclear Power Plants, Smaller reactors

Project Pele – Part II. Enabling technologies

April 20, 2019 By Rod Adams 26 Comments

Building mobile nuclear power plants will be a challenge, but successfully meeting the challenges could alter the future trajectory of the energy and fuels supply industry.

ML-1 shown being off-loaded from a 1960s vintage transport plane

That is one of the largest and most consequential sectors of our modern, mobile, industrialized economy. There are no guarantees, but compared to many research and development projects, Project Pele has both a reasonable prospect of success and an almost unimaginable potential payoff.

Unsurprisingly, there are skeptics and naysayers who aren’t excited about the prospect of mobile nuclear power plants. The Union of Concerned Scientists’s Dr. Ed Lyman, acting director of UCS’s Nuclear Safety Project , is pessimistic enough about the prospects for success that he has declared that the project “won’t work.” (See Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Feb 22, 2019. “The Pentagon wants to boldly go where no nuclear reactor has gone before. It won’t work.” )

The National Interest chose This Might Be the Military’s Worst Idea Ever as the headline an article by Michael Peck that didn’t match the superlative at all. Instead, it laid out some good reasons why mobile nuclear power plants might be a pretty good idea as long as certain questions can be effectively addressed.

Several other publications produced articles with headlines claiming that “experts” were horrified, critical, or skeptical, but a fair number of those pointed to Ed Lyman as the “expert” and his article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists as the place where he documented his concerns.

From my perspective, Dr. Lyman errs by dismissing some of the technical advances that have improved the chances for successful accomplishment of the project’s stated objectives. He has an exaggerated opinion on the risks. He underestimates the potential value of successfully developing the capability to build systems that can meet the stated objectives.

The Army is only a lead customer with the skills and resources required; there are countless potential customers whose interest will be apparent once there is an actual product available for purchase.

A product that comes close to meeting all of the Army’s requirements for Project Dilithium might be especially appealing for settlements in Alaska or The North of Canada. Senator Lisa Murkowski has often expressed the interests her constituents have in small nuclear power systems. They want machines that can operate cleanly for years on small quantities of fuel that eliminate the complex and expensive transportation of diesel fuel.

That problem is essentially the same one that is such a recognized headache for Army planners. Except it’s one that never stops under current available product constraints.

Some proposed options don’t have much of a chance.

I must admit that I think Dr. Lyman is correct in his evaluation of one particular contender in the field. In fact, his opinion of the Los Alamos Special Purpose Reactor (aka Megapower) is a bit less critical than mine. He describes INL’s evaluation of the design as pointing out “several major safety concerns, including vulnerabilities to seismic and flooding events.”

I think he overlooked the part where the evaluators gently told the designers that their beautifully-optimized, computer-designed model cannot be manufactured.

It relies on unobtainable tolerances in drilling ~ 2,000 channels, each 1.5 m long, in a stainless steel monolithic cylinder with 1 mm thick webbing between the channels. Additionally, it envisions the ability to seal about half of those channels at each end to retain fission product gases.

I might be a bit of an outlier, but I believe system designers should make sure their ideas are functionally possible within manufacturing capabilities before they spend too much time determining if they can survive extreme seismic or flooding events.

It turns out that the beautifully optimized but impossible to manufacture design shares one of the perennial problems that have plagued nuclear technology development since the 1940s. It is a substantially scaled up version of a system that has been proven at a smaller scale using highly enriched fissile material. LANL developed Kilopower for a NASA mission to Mars. It worked fine in tests, why not immediately make it 10 times bigger and more powerful?

The prototype power system uses a solid, cast uranium-235 reactor core, about the size of a paper towel roll. Passive sodium heat pipes transfer reactor heat to high-efficiency Stirling engines, which convert the heat to electricity. 

Demonstration proves nuclear fission system can provide space exploration power

Therefore, this article will continue on the assumption that the only real contenders for near term success in meeting Project Dilithium’s specifications will use a variant of a high temperature gas reactor and a Brayton Cycle heat engine.

Army tested a mobile nuclear power plant in early 1960s. It was a direct Brayton Cycle machine

Here is a quote from an October 2018 study conducted for the Army’s G-4.

ML-1 was a true mobile power plant. Its main advantage was the ability to substitute a single nuclear fuel load to displace and eliminate the need to transport the equivalent of 400,000 gallons of liquid fuel. Unlike the other Army reactors, ML-1 did not use water for coolant, substituting a sealed reactor design with pressurized gas (nitrogen) to drive a closed cycle gas turbine. This design made possible a significant reduction in both size and weight, enabling it to be truck-mobile. The reactor could fit in a standard International Organization for Standardization (ISO) container for ease of shipment by standard military transportation systems.

Study on the Use of Mobile Nuclear Power Plants for Ground Operations, Army Deputy Chief of Staff (DCS) G-4 p. 2.2

Though ML-1 worked, it didn’t work well. There were a number of design flaws and unreliable components that led to project schedule delays. By 1966, the Army had lost almost all of its R&D funding as the Johnson Administration attempted to support both an expanding conflict in Vietnam and growing social programs. Programs that weren’t at the top of the performance list were cut.

The Atomic Energy Commission wasn’t interested in pursuing suitable reactor design improvements without a strong demand signal from the military service.

Though it has been almost five decades since the DOD funded a program of for designing and deploying mobile nuclear systems, the supporting technology base has made substantial advances.

Initial concept of using gas to move heat from fission reactors to heat engines

Even if ML-1 had achieved its full design potential without technical issues or delays, it still would have been an inefficient machine. The reactor used in the system was capable of minimally adequate temperatures for a Brayton Cycle; 3 MW of heat would only produce about 300 kW of electrical power.

Brayton Cycle turbo machines were also in their infancy in the early 1960s. The theory was well-established, but functional machines had only been available for a couple of decades. Many of the most common applications for the machines were still in high performance aircraft where the engines were only expected to run for a few hundred hours before being replaced. Brayton Cycle machines had barely begun to penetrate land based power generation, or maritime propulsion.

The fundamental idea of matching a high temperature gas cooled reactor with a simple Brayton Cycle heat engine originated during the final years of the Manhattan Project. Farrington Daniels, Director of the Metalurgical Laboratory in Chicago, had pre-war high temperature industrial experience in developing processes to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere. Once the Met Lab had essentially completed its assignment for the Project, Daniels and his scientific colleagues began meeting informally to discuss ways to put fission energy to productive use.

Daniels suggested a “power pile” composed of uranium spheres mixed with beryllium oxide moderator spheres and cooled by helium gas. The Manhattan District assigned Monsanto to lead the project and provided initial funding in December 1945.

In April, 1946, GE, Westinghouse, Allis-Chamers, the US Navy, the US Army Air Corps and the Clinton Laboratories joined the Manhattan District and Monsanto in the project. They supplied engineers and scientists on an in-kind basis. Everyone on the project knew that it was a pilot system that should be constructed quickly so that it could help develop knowledge of material performance at high temperatures.

The Daniels Pile project was defunded almost as soon as the civilian AEC took over responsibilities from the Manhattan District of the Army Corps of Engineers. Before that happened, Daniels and his team of Project scientists and industrial partners had done enough design work and testing to convince themselves that a gas cooled, beryllium-moderated reactor could operate at high enough temperatures to provide useful information for subsequent design efforts.

Daniels spent at least five more years trying to find funding for his idea, but the AEC monopolized all nuclear work. The appointed commissioners at the top of the organization had determined that America had no need for any new power sources. Instead, the commissioners and their political overseers had determined that the primary mission of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission was to develop weapons and other military applications.

Aside: The tight linkage in public perception between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons started in the earliest days. It’s quite possible that some of the participants in decisions like naming the AEC wanted to keep scary bombs linked to useful power applications. End Aside.

Coated particles invented as a way to retain fission products at high temperatures

After several years of unsuccessful efforts to convince various government agencies to pursue atomic power using high temperature gas cooled reactors, Daniels was recruited by the Rockefeller Foundation to create a solar energy research program.

However, his pebble bed reactor concept simmered and was eventually taken up by Rudolf Schulten in Germany. He devised a way to coat actinide fuel particles with fission product-retaining coatings. He also devised a method of assembling thousands of particles along with graphite moderator into 6 cm diameter spheres that could be “piled” into a cylinder to form a critical mass. The spherical shape of the pebbles results in at least 40% of the cylindrical volume being empty and available for a turbulent flow of cooling gas.

The idea of coating actinide fuel sources with refractory style graphite and silicon carbide coatings was nurtured by a minor, but passionate multinational group of technologists for the next 60 years. Another major fuel form, a prismatic graphite block with drilled coolant channels and drilled voids to contain compacts of particle fuel was developed. Several operating reactors including Dragon, Peach Bottom 1, AVR, Ft. St. Vrain, THTR, HTTR, and HTR-10 have provided an increasingly extensive database of fuel and component performance.

A variety of coatings and coating processes have been tested. Fuel kernels of various compositions including actinide (thorium, uranium and plutonium) oxides, carbides and a mixture of the two have been irradiated and examined. A comprehensive summary of the various testing development programs written by P. A. Demkowicz, B. Liu and J. D. Hunn was recently published as Coated particle fuel: Historical perspectives and current progress.

Since 2003, the US Department of Energy has been engaged in a carefully planned series of irradiations and post irradiation examinations for a high potential system that uses a series of four coatings on a kernel of uranium oxy carbide. That program is nearing its completion with final testing aimed at identifying potential issues that might result from exposure of the high temperature fuels to excessive moisture or chemical contaminants.

For certain postulated configurations, including those that can meet the Project Pele requirements, there is no need to wait for the results of those final tests. These systems do not have any pathways that allow water or other contaminants to get into the system. Even the ultimate heat sink is dry atmospheric air.

Contrary to the description Dr. Lyman offered in his dismissive article about the potential for mobile nuclear generators, results from DOE’s Triso fuel development and testing program have been anything but “inconsistent.”

The program has produced consistently impressive data on tens of thousands of irradiated particles. Even with fuel burn ups in the range of 19%, the coatings have provided excellent fission product retention even when heated to 1800 C for extended periods of time.

That temperature offers more than 500 C in margin compared to the highest envisioned fuel operating temperatures and 200 C in margin for the highest possible fuel temperature in the most limiting postulated accident.

None of the operated high temperature reactors using coated particle fuels have used a direct cycle gas turbine. Several aborted design efforts have made enough progress to determine that using helium as a coolant is not too hard, but using it as a working fluid in a Brayton Cycle gas turbine leads to some difficult material and mechanical challenges.

The authors of the G-4 study on the use of mobile nuclear power for ground operations noted the possibility of “carbon dioxide, argon, nitrogen” as options to helium. It also reminded readers that the ML-1, the only direct Brayton Cycle nuclear power system that has been operated in the U.S. used pressurized nitrogen as a working fluid and reactor coolant.

Companies that might be in the running and customers that might be following

There are a handful of relatively new start-up companies that have been focusing their design efforts on very small manufactured reactors that might be suitable for powering remote mines, villages, or forward operating bases.

Holos, Ultra Safe Nuclear, StarCore, and X-Energy all come to mind as companies that are working on designs that might be quickly adapted to meet the requirements specified for Project Dilithium. None of them have been working on designs that are directly applicable because none of them had previously identified an appropriate early adopter customer.

There are other potential customers that are interested in reliable electrical power in places that are not readily reachable by wired transmission systems. They can be in remote areas separated by long distances from the existing grid, on islands separated by expanses of water, on offshore exploration platforms, or on ships whose movements prevent wires from being a possible solution.

Because they cannot be reached by wires, they must either rely on diesel or gas turbine generators or they must do without power. In virtually all cases, the unconnected customers survive with a combination of very expensive power from burning refined petroleum in relatively small machines and doing without many of the electrically powered support systems that many of us take for granted.

Those with the fewest resources lean more heavily on doing without power. That often makes their lives a struggle without hope of improvement through industry, education or increased productivity.

Many of these potential customers could benefit from the availability of power from machines with the same characteristics that a military forward operating base needs, so potential suppliers have always identified the military as a potential customer.

Because the DOD’s need to reduce logistics vulnerabilities can be more directly measured in lives lost and dollars spent, it could be an early adopter that provides an accelerating market pull.

Small, manufactured nuclear systems are going to be available fairly soon even without the DOD, but its more pressing needs might provide more resources that enable design completions and manufacturing cost reductions. These will help customers with fewer current resources to afford the power systems that they could already put to good use if they were on the shelf now.

My primary concern about Project Pele is tied to the US military’s notorious belief that the technologies it uses are somehow so unique that they must be surrounded by a dense thicket of secrecy, even if they are merely ruggedized versions of power generators or ship propulsion engines that could be used in a wide variety of applications.

Those secrecy rules not only bind up initial development, but they cause enormous cost increases by requiring unique support systems provided by contractors that fiercely protect their special relationships with military leaders, congressional appropriators, and even presidential candidates/office holders.

What about vulnerabilities that Lyman described?

In his BAS article on mobile nuclear plants, Dr. Lyman expressed concerns about the vulnerability of mobile nuclear plants in a hostile environment. One feature of nuclear power systems that many critics forget is the fact that they require robust shielding systems.

The same layers of dense metals and hydrogen containing materials like concrete, plastic and water that protect people from radiation would do a very good job of protecting reactors from penetrating projectiles.

Compared to the diesel and kerosene storage containers needed for current power generators, mobile nuclear should require fewer protective resources.

Even in the unlikely situation that an explosive can be delivered into a properly shielded reactor core, it’s probable that most radioactive material will be effectively retained. Coated particles might be dispersed a short distance, but they seem too dense to be carried very far. It’s probably worthwhile to perform testing to verify this theory.

One of the specific statements made by Dr. Lyman is a myth that continues to be propagated in even the most informed and supportive circles of people with nuclear expertise. He called graphite “the combustible material that brought the world an 11-day radioactive fire after the April 1986 Chernobyl explosion”.

Nuclear grade graphite might be pure carbon, but it isn’t combustible. It’s structure is far too ordered to offer any available sites for the kind of rapid oxidation required for combustion. At Chernobyl, graphite heated to temperatures high enough to produce a red glow was dispersed and landed on combustible materials in the building structure. Those are the materials that actually burned. (Source: Prerelease of a forthcoming IAEA publication on graphite in nuclear reactors.)

Bottom line is that Project Pele is a fascinating reach forward that is worth watching. I encourage all decision makers involved to be as transparent as possible, while paying attention to the need to protect certain kinds of details.

Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, Gas Cooled Reactors, Small Nuclear Power Plants, Smaller reactors

Turning nuclear into a fuel dominated business

October 28, 2018 By Rod Adams 66 Comments

Under our current energy paradigm, nuclear power has the reputation of needing enormous up-front capital investments. Once those investments have been made and the plants are complete, the payoff is that they have low recurring fuel costs. Just the opposite is said of simple cycle natural gas fired combustion turbines. They require a small capital […]

Filed Under: Adams Engines, Advanced Atomic Technologies, Business of atomic energy, Economics, Gas Cooled Reactors, Graphite Moderated Reactors, Pebble Bed Reactors, Smaller reactors

Fission heated gas turbines address MIT Future of Nuclear challenges. Easier, straighter, less costly path

September 20, 2018 By Rod Adams 57 Comments

Addressing Recommendations of MIT Future of Nuclear Energy In a Carbon Constrained World The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a world renowned institution that has produced thousands of highly educated engineers and scientists. It is generously supported by foundations, corporations and governments. In 2003, the MIT Energy Initiative, began publishing a series of reports […]

Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, Gas Cooled Reactors, Graphite Moderated Reactors, New Nuclear, Pebble Bed Reactors, Small Nuclear Power Plants, Smaller reactors

Urenco, Bruce Power Sign MOU To Develop U-Battery for Canada

January 8, 2018 By Rod Adams 5 Comments

Urenco, Bruce Power and AMEC NSS Limited recently announced that they had signed an MOU to cooperate in the design, licensing and development of Urenco’s U-Battery micro nuclear system for the Canadian electricity and heat market. The U-Battery contains a 10 MWth nuclear heat source that can be configured to produce either 4 MWe plus […]

Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, Gas Cooled Reactors, International nuclear, Reactors, Small Nuclear Power Plants, Smaller reactors

Can Gas Turbines Using Nuclear Fuel Change The Energy Game?

August 31, 2017 By Rod Adams 49 Comments

Disclosure: Rod Adams founded the now defunct Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. His company developed nuclear gas turbines from 1993-2010. It is a modern day truism that natural gas power plants are cheap while nuclear power plants are expensive. Natural gas plants can also be built in a variety of sizes by a larger number of suppliers […]

Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, Army Nuclear Program, Economics, Gas Cooled Reactors, New Nuclear, Small Nuclear Power Plants

History and promise of high temperature gas cooled reactors

January 16, 2017 By Guest Author

By: Diarmuid Foley A small modular nuclear reactor to replace coal plants could be on the market within 5 years. In 2014, the Generation IV international forum[1] confirmed the Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR) as one of 6 promising reactor technologies that should be pursued in order to develop advanced reactors suitable for deployment in […]

Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, Atomic history, Gas Cooled Reactors, Pebble Bed Reactors, Reactors, Small Nuclear Power Plants, Smaller reactors

Will China convert existing coal plants to nuclear using HTR-PM reactors?

November 21, 2016 By Rod Adams

It would be a huge benefit to the earth’s atmosphere if China, India, Brazil and the US could reduce direct coal burning while still making use of much of the capital that they have invested in building coal fired power plants. It would make an even larger difference in reducing air pollution in the areas […]

Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, ANS Winter 2016, Climate change, Gas Cooled Reactors, Graphite Moderated Reactors, New Nuclear, Pebble Bed Reactors

U-Battery – Micronuclear power with intriguing business model

February 14, 2016 By Rod Adams 19 Comments

U-Battery was one of the more intriguing presenters at the Advanced Reactor Technical Summit (ARTSIII) held at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory last week. Even though this was a technical summit, the segments of the presentation that captured my attention were the business model and the funding source. However, certain technical choices are vital to […]

Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, ARTSIII Feb 2016, Business of atomic energy, Gas Cooled Reactors, Graphite Moderated Reactors, New Nuclear, Nuclear Batteries, Reactors, Smaller reactors

Atomic Show #248 – Dr. Pete Pappano, VP Fuel Production X-Energy

November 20, 2015 By Rod Adams 2 Comments

On Thursday, November 19, 2015, I interviewed Dr. Pete Pappano, vice president of fuel development for X-Energy. As described in X-Energy introduced its company and first product to Virginia chapter of ANS, X-Energy is a start-up company based in Maryland that is developing a modular high temperature gas cooled reactor. Each module will produce 50 […]

Filed Under: Gas Cooled Reactors, Pebble Bed Reactors, Podcast

Treasure trove of documents about the ML-1, the US Army’s trailer-mounted, nitrogen-cooled, atomic fission-heated generator

November 3, 2015 By Rod Adams 11 Comments

I recently published an article featuring a video from the Army Nuclear Power Program that focused on the Army’s mobile, low power closed cycle nitrogen cooled nuclear reactor designated the ML-1. The article generated a good discussion that indicated a strong desire for more information about the program. My initial searches didn’t turn up a […]

Filed Under: Army Nuclear Program, Atomic history, Gas Cooled Reactors, Small Nuclear Power Plants, Smaller reactors

X-Energy introduced its company and first product to Virginia chapter of ANS

October 30, 2015 By Rod Adams 48 Comments

On Tuesday, October 27, three leaders from X-Energy spoke to the Virginia ANS chapter about their company and the Xe-100, the high temperature, pebble bed gas reactor power system that they are designing. During the presentation, meeting attendees learned that X-Energy is an early phase start-up with a total staff of a few dozen people, […]

Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, Atomic Entrepreneurs, Gas Cooled Reactors, Graphite Moderated Reactors, New Nuclear, Pebble Bed Reactors, Small Nuclear Power Plants, Smaller reactors

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