The Atomic Show #045 – Nuclear CANDU for Alberta oil sands production
Alberta oil sands producers are taking a hard look at CANDU nuclear power plants.
Alberta Canada is one of the few areas in the world where oil production has increased rather dramatically during the past 5 years. The area has a vast resource of unconventional oil in the form of oil sands, where the concentration of oil in the sand to a significant depth is in excess of 10%. However, the oil tightly adheres to the sand and will not flow with normal drilling techniques. There are several ways to gather the oil in this region, but the one with the most potential requires the use of large quantities of steam in order to cause the oil to flow so that it can be pumped.
Even after the oil is gathered, it needs additional processing and upgrading steps, which also adds to the amount of energy investment needed to produce this oil. The current source of the energy is natural gas, but the supply growth is limited and the cost is increasing with the market price of natural gas.
The solution that appears ever more likely is to build some CANDU (Canadian Deuterium) nuclear reactors in the oil producing region to provide vast quantities of steam and electricity. See, for example: Oilsands tax incentives questioned.
Shane and I like the idea and provide some comments about why it might be good to pursue the possibilities.
Here are some links that might be useful if you want to do some additional research.
Argonne has a good introductory page with pictures of processes;
also good facts that are backed up by Wikipedia references:
This is the original paper that Shane found a few years ago concerning
the natural synergy between nuclear energy and oil sand extraction;
He especially likes the fact that the oil sand resources, after they are
cleaned of their bitumen, are often good zirconium ores:
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I just read a article about atomic batteries but it wasnt very good tecnicly
can you do a show about it
Enough Canadians have similar “safety” concerns as Americans do about nuclear power that I wonder when I hear talk like this, i.e. that nuclear could power the extraction of oil out of the sand there, if it will ever get off the ground. (I am Canadian, living in the US on a green card at present).
The resource is very large, but the reserves (i.e. what the official reserves as recognized by whatever international body recognizes these things are “only” roughly comparable to those of Saudi Arabia, 170 billion barrels, say. The rest, I think ten times as large, is buried too deep for current techniques, although the sky would be the limit if the price goes high enough. The problem with this resource is, of course, CO2 emissions when it is burned, which I hope will tax this extraction business out of existence, unless they can figure out how to keep the CO2 from entering the atmosphere, or how to economically remove it from the atmosphere. Chilchinisky at Columbia is developing a process for air capture of CO2 she has been touting that she says can turn any industrial plant, i.e. coal fired electricity generation station, etc, into a net carbon sink because her air capture process can use the waste heat to remove more than enough CO2 to compensate for all the CO2 the coal plant emits as it produces the electricity. She wrote the cap and trade section of the Kyoto agreement, so I took her seriously enough to ask her for details about all this but its under wraps until the pilot plant is unveiled in California first quarter 2010, she says.
I’d like to hear you discuss the MAPLE reactors that it looks like Canada will not put into service. They were built to replace the aging Chalk River reactor that was producing such a large percentage of the world’s medical isotopes that Canada is the biggest single supplier, only the regulator will not approve startup because “safety” cannot be guaranteed, according to the regulator. It is astonishing.
I first heard about this (as a former nuclear agnostic only recently following nuclear developments with some enthusiasm) on Canada’s national public radio science show Quirks and Quarks. The link to download the mp3 file of the segment of the show concerning the reactors is:
http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/media/2009-2010/mp3/qq-2009-11-28_04.mp3