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This discussion relates to Technology Review's article Obama Goes Nuclear.

Discussions: Energy: Obama Goes Nuclear

kenbarnettpt

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02/03/2010 01:22 AM
Thorium, already?

Given all of the entrenched parties, is there any chance that some of these dollars will go to thorium reactors, free of the proliferation/terrorism risks or the waste disposal issues of uranium?
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- GaryB
  
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  02/03/2010 01:42 AM
  Re: Thorium, already?
  
  I was thinking that $36B would go a long way to establishing a self sustaining Thorium breeder reactor industry. These are loan guarantees and so will go to established technologies that they can build today.
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- paul randall
  
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  02/03/2010 02:55 AM
  Re: Thorium, already?
  
  Do you think that maybe you are overstating the safety of Thorium reactors by just a tad?
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- AndyN
  
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  02/03/2010 06:38 AM
  Re: Thorium
  
  according to www.itheo.org the money is for commercial power plants and the Blue Ribon Commission is for the "back end" of the fuelcycle.
  We need thorium energy now!
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- dnapolitano
  
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  02/05/2010 01:59 PM
  Re: Thorium, already?
  
  The Thorium fuel cycle,i.e. Th-232 to U-233 is an interesting alternative to the current U-235/Pu-239 once through fuel cycle. However, there is no economic advantage so long as the price of uranium is low. The differences in the Pu buildup and waste performance also do not provide a significant advantage. However, it should still be investigated as an alternative.
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- MakeSense
  
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  02/08/2010 11:00 AM
  Re: Thorium, already?
  
  There is about three times as much Thorium as Uranium available. However, Thorium is not fissile. It requires extra steps to convert it to U-233, which is toxic and a proliferation threat, before using the U-233 as nuclear fuel. India invests significantly in means to use Thorium because they have large reserves. To date, no one has come up with a viable commercial reactor. The extra steps are too costly and produce too many hot byproducts.
  
  A company called Thorium Power has developed a way to supplement uranium fuel in conventional nukes with Thorium to extend fuel. That seems like a viable way to use Thorium, provided that utilities could be convinced to use it.
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  - spad12
    
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    02/08/2010 05:53 PM
    Re: Thorium, already?
    
    The process of converting Thorium-232 to Uranium-233 occurs in the presence of a neutron flux. The most viable and already tested design is a molten salt reactor where you start with a U235 core that is cooled by molten thorium salt. As the thorium salt cools the reactor it is converted to U233 which slowly replaces the U235 as fuel. The U233 never has to be processed outside the reactor.
    
    This reactor design has already been tested and the fueling process worked. As someone stated above the biggest hindrance to a thorium reactor is the low cost of uranium.
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paul randall

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02/03/2010 02:53 AM
Nothing like the free market operating in all its glory

Is nuclear as cost competitive with individual solar electric, solar hot water and geothermal heat and cooling, when you add to the costs of power generation the associated costs of

*power lost due to line loss v/s power generated on site where it is consumed,
*private liability insurance covering the entirety of a catastrophic accident or an accident during transport of waste,
*costs for securing plants, shipment and storage of waste from terrorist attacks,
*the cost of transporting waste,
*local state and federal taxes paid by consumers for the power they buy,
*the cost to decommission and transport old plant debris to safe storage sites,
*the cost to maintain and secure safe waste storage sites,
*the added national security costs due to proliferation,
*additional costs needed to beef up and secure the national power grid to facilitate a highly centralized power generation model
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- spad12
  
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  02/03/2010 10:43 AM
  Re: Nothing like the free market operating in all its glory
  
  To answer your question yes it is. The reasons being:
  1) Low fuel cost
  2) Very long lifetime
  3) Very high power density
  
  The things you mentioned work well on a small scale, but you have to remember that individual homes do not account for the majority of the energy consumption. Solar water heating, and geothermal home climate control are probably the best ways to reduce electrical consumption for homes, but they can in no way meet the energy demands of larger establishments.
  
  Nuclear power provides stable, reliable, clean, and cheap electricity because of the power density of uranium and the economies of scale. 1 small nuclear power plant can provide electricity for more than 1000 homes. The only other generation source that can provide baseload power at the same cost is coal.
  
  The main issue with nuclear is high level waste, which is a political, not a technical issue.
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  - erbium
    
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    02/03/2010 07:01 PM
    Re: Nothing like the free market operating in all its glory
    
    ok then how about VERY LONG lead times to actually get the plant both approved to build and then built.
    
    not quite so reliable when you factor in reactor closings for maintenance and refueling.
    
    1000 highly skilled workers per plant, most of existing workers are getting older.
    
    NO RETURN ON INVESTMENT till plant is actually running.
    
    LOSS TO TAXPAYERS from money tied up in loans and possible defaults.
    
    and as previous poster mentioned, subsidies of liability insurance. If a solar power plant is destroyed by flood / terrorist / earthquake / maintenance goof (cause of soviet nuclear disaster) a solar plant won't kill lots of people, make large areas uninhabitable, plus raised cancer levels in large area outside danger zone, and raise global radiation levels.
    
    as mentioned, costs now 1/3 more than fossil fuels and won't be online soon enuf to make a dent in global warming. We'd need 100 plants.
    
    Wind costs are plummeting as is solar as proved by First Solar, whose non-silicon solar panels are dropping in price by double digits each year.
    
    Plus we could cut our energy use 30% by simply insulating all existing buildings better. those billions would be better spend doing this kind of thing, avoiding the need for as much new generation capacity.
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    - spad12
      
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      02/03/2010 07:30 PM
      Re: Nothing like the free market operating in all its glory
      
      Licensing and construction times can be brought down a lot with practice. In japan and france they can turn out a fully operational plant in 5 years.
      
      Nuclear power has the highest capacity factor of any power production method, around 95%. This means that in a given year the plant is producing its nameplate capacity 95% of the year. This accounts for maintenance. Wind has a capacity factor of about 33%, solar is about 20% at best.
      
      A small nuclear power plant will produce about 1GWe, a large one will produce 2-3 GWe. This is a base-load power source with a 95% capacity factor. In order to compensate for variability for wind you have to construct roughly 3x the nameplate capacity in windmills to get a base-load power source. (This is even if they manage to work out the storage problem.) The upper bound on the time it would take to license and build a 2GW nuclear power plant is about 10 years. (it can be done much faster) To build the same nameplate capacity in wind it would also take about 10 years. But, when you bring in the fact that in reality it takes about 3x the nameplate capacity to make wind a base-load source, you end up getting about 30 years to build the equivalent of a nuclear power plant in windmills. At this rate you will be replacing the first windmills built before you finish the last ones.
      
      As for safety, in the US nuclear power has resulted in fewer deaths than any other power generation method. You honestly have no idea how incredibly resilient these systems are. Reactors have survived earthquakes, floods, and category 5 hurricanes. If you do have a natural disaster that manages to completely destroy your reactor and the containment you likely have much much bigger problems on your hands.
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      - acowan
        
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        02/05/2010 10:57 PM
        Re: Nothing like the free market operating in all its glory
        
        Actually, nuclear power plants achieve nowhere near 95% capacity in practice. (More like 80% or 85%) Furthermore, even if they could achieve 95% capacity, that wouldn't be as great as it sounds, because demand is variable. In particular, there is not as much demand at night as during the day in many places. However, you can't dial back the reactor for lower generation at night. It takes longer than that to cool down. Reactors have to run at full bore all the time. So that excess power generated at night has to be stored. The most common means of storage is to build hydro dams and use the electricity to pump water uphill at night. So, in addition to building a hugely expensive nuclear plant, you now have to build a hugely expensive dam which creates it's own environmental problems. If you're going to build the storage anyway for nuclear, then you can use the same storage system to mitigate the availability of wind, pumping water when the wind is abundant, and using the reserve when it's not. In any event, if you have enough wind generators spread out over a large area, statistically, the wind is always blowing some time.
        
        Also, there are plenty of ways to increase generation capacity for wind and solar. Of course, geothermal has pretty constant capacity, as would tidal, salinity gradient generators, etc. Flying electric generators have shown much higher availability. Solar chimneys and even heliostats (power towers) can often operate far after the sun goes down.
        
        Then there is PV. Photovoltaic is a semi-conductor technology, and, as some have argued, it is therefore potentially subject to similar effects to Moore's law. As semiconductor technology advances, we are finding cheaper and cheaper ways to manufacture solar panels and even integrate cheap storage right into the panels. Eventually, just like million dollar CPUs end up costing only a few hundred, PV can be expected to drop in price. At present, it would have to drop a couple orders of magnitude to be competitive with the cheapest generation sources out there, but that is conceivable in the world of electronics. It's true that the sun isn't always shining, but if PV panels were cheap enough, you would just get 4 to 5 times more than you need and store the excess for use when the sun is not out. (BTW, PV often doesn't need concentrated solar, so it can operate a bit longer than solar thermal).
        
        One last point is that it seems that many of the current fossil and fissile generation systems do not really generate as cheaply as they claim. If you had to account for all the exacerbation of respiratory disease created by coal or gasoline combustion, for example, these sources would not be as economical as they sound. These costs are being externalized. Imagine if a solar panel aggravated people's asthma. There would probably be a crusade to outlaw their use on the spot. Yet, we tolerate this from the current fossil and fissile sources without challenge. As has already been pointed out, nuclear creates a lot of external costs as well that we would consider pretty unacceptable if it were coming from the wind industry, for example. People are up in arms if their view is spoiled by wind turbines, yet they happily accept living by a nuclear power plant that could be attacked 911-style and could spew radioactive materials over a wide area.
        
        Perhaps some of the newer designs for reactors, such as PBMR can address some of these concerns. However, in general, we are still talking about massive expenses, and still plenty of safety concerns, not to mention concerns about fuel supply. It is interesting that nuclear, for all the money that has been pumped into it and all the special privileges that it has been extended by government still can't compete in the "free market".
        
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        spad12
        
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        02/06/2010 12:53 AM
        Re: Nothing like the free market operating in all its glory
        
        Nuclear power has a capacity factor of 92% (http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/operation/statoperation.html)
        
        No, there is no way to increase the capacity factor of wind and solar. The capacity factor is
        (Energy Produced per unit time)/(Sticker Generation Capacity)
        
        For wind and solar this is fixed by local conditions. The wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. Wind capacity factor is 30%-40% solar varies (about 12%-15% in Ma). Increasing your efficiency etc of generation isn't going to change this, you still can only produce power a certain amount of the time.
        
        Nuclear plants can be cycled down, or excess production can go to producing hydrogen for transportation fuel. In fact if you are truly worried about excess power production the situation with wind is far worse than nuclear.
        (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V2S-4F490FK-2&_user=501045&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1122234871&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000022659&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=501045&md5=354e2ce7dd5d3555d9932e9302c7a2d6)
        
        If you are going to start factoring in additional things into the 'cost' of generating power from nuclear or fossil fuels you have to account for the land cost of wind and solar as well as the other things.
        
        Also if you are concerned about a nuclear reactor being attacked 9-11 style I recommend watching this video of a test of the strength of the containment dome. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWdcVo6zIYI)
        
        Once again I rest my case that all of nuclear's problems are political not technical. Wind, solar, geothermal however have many many technical challenges to overcome before they become viable large scale base power sources.
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        acowan
        
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        02/06/2010 02:45 PM
        Re: Nothing like the free market operating in all its glory
        
        It is false that capacity factor cannot be increased for wind or solar. The most obvious example of how you could increase capacity factor for solar would be to put your solar panels in orbit, where the sun would be available around 99% of the time. Of course, until space launch becomes cheaper, this is not a viable option. However, there are plenty of other ways of increasing the real generating capacity of solar and wind terrestrially. I find that most people who are knowledgeable about nuclear are not particularly informed about the host of other new technologies that are coming along.
        
        Flying electric generators (FEGs), for example, as the link below shows, do in fact have much higher capacity because the wind at high altitudes (30,000 feet) is almost constant as well as much faster than at lower levels. Capacities as high as 90% are cited.
        http://energy.probeinternational.org/alternative-energy/renewables/flying-windmills
        
        For that matter, offshore wind turbines have higher capacity because the wind blows a lot more frequently and more strongly offshore than it often will on land.
        
        Solar capacity can be increased by things like solar chimneys because they operate based upon convection. Air is sucked up a tall chimney, with a turbine at the bottom. It's a solar and wind hybrid system that relies upon the earth's surface being heated by the sun to power wind flow, but creates its own wind, so to speak, via the chimney.
        
        See:
        http://seekingalpha.com/article/14935-enviromission-s-solar-tower-of-power
        
        I also mentioned heliostats, which heat a central receiver that usually contains something like molten salt. At the risk of hearing the standards objections, I will list a wiki reference that quotes its capacity factor, as well as those of a number of other technologies. BTW, it quotes capacity factors for nuclear as low as 60% but does confirm your average figure of around 92%.
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
        
        I am not making these points merely to quibble. Nuclear proponents often attempt to dismiss all other technologies by claiming that they can generate enough baseload for long enough time frames. However, all the technologies I've cited, including geothermal, tidal, as well as FEGs, solar chimneys, heliostats, do have improved generation capabilities.
        
        The point I was making about the high capacity of nuclear was that, since demand is variable, its excess capacity ends up being for naught anyway, and you end up having to build storage. If you're willing to build massive storage for nuclear, then you're admitting that its high capacity factor is an illusory benefit. If you built the same storage system to support renewable systems, the final output would not look that different than what you get from nuclear, because the load would be leveled.
        
        It's true that we have to draw a line somewhere in what costs we assign to the generation of power. My point was that fossil fuels traditionally benefit from having their fairly pronounced external costs excluded from the price calculations for production, whereas many renewables are costed far more broadly. You mentioned that we could charge for the land use. But wind turbines take up a tiny footprint. You can often grow crops around them, or graze cattle with almost no disruption. Solar power plants are in the middle of the desert where the land wasn't being used for anything and is now being made productive. So we can play lots of games, but we need to play them fairly when comparing different options.
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        spad12
        
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        02/08/2010 06:09 PM
        Re: Nothing like the free market operating in all its glory
        
        First the technologies you are describing for improving the capacity factor for wind and solar are far from being deployable. Orbital solar stations are incredibly far in the future if they ever will be developed as the losses associated with beaming power to earth from space are huge.
        
        Second, geothermal, tidal, as well as FEGs, solar chimneys, heliostats do have improved generating capacities, but are not scalable. They are geographically limited and have a low power density compared to nuclear.
        
        You seem to miss the point of a high capacity factor, which is that the power output is controllable. Wind, Solar, Tidal, you can't control when they are producing power, you can predict, but with these sources your generation won't necessarily line up with your demand causing huge issues. Renewables are a pain when it comes to load balancing. You need huge amounts of storage for renewables because you have to be able to control the release of power to the grid. With nuclear you can cycle the output of the power station. You can drop the output of a nuclear power plant by about 50% without shutting it down.
        
        If you are isolating your wind and solar generation to specific geographical areas such as deserts of farmland you lose out on the padding that distributing them over say the entire nation gets you. While true you can use farm land for wind turbines this presents the problem of having your power source a long ways away from where it is needed. This leads to even more losses in transmission, increased cost because more transmission lines are needed, etc.
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        acowan
        
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        02/09/2010 02:09 PM
        Re: Nothing like the free market operating in all its glory
        
        Losses are not actually that high at all for beamed power, if you use appropriate technologies. The cost of cheap access to orbit may drop pretty quickly if nano-technology ramps up. I was only making a technical point that capacity factor on these devices can be improved.
        
        I'm not sure why you think that FEGs, and similar technology can't be scaled. In point of fact they are one of the most scalable, since they can be used almost anywhere, as opposed to just areas with high surface wind.
        
        The same applies with photovoltaic. It can be used almost anywhere. We just need cheap enough manufacture.
        
        Even with geothermal, technically, it can be used almost anywhere, if wells are deep enough. Of course those are more expensive right now. But air and ground heat pumps can be used in many places and can displace energy use that would otherwise require fossil fuels.
        
        Transmission losses are a fact of life, but we are clearly working on technology from HVDC to superconducting that will mitigate those losses. Nuclear often has similar issues because it must transmit such huge amounts of energy from a central source over a wide region.
        
        Nuclear can be part of the answer, but these other sources can be very economical compared to the cost of constructing a huge nuclear plant as the one-size-fits-all "answer" to all energy needs. Renewable is far more *appropriate* for local needs, in many cases.
        
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    - GaryB
      
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      02/04/2010 12:06 AM
      Re: Nothing like the free market operating in all its glory
      
      I've always liked solar and wind, but they just cannot scale in time or practicality. We are simply never going to cover immense chunks of remote desert with solar panels nor completely revamp our grid to handle it. Wind is nice, but pretty ugly, very loud, kills birds absorbs immense space.
      
      Nuclear is dense and it can scale. Particularly if we look into Thorium thermal breeders which don't have melt down or containment issues. But, even with nuclear, there are better technologies to bring down the toll of zero public deaths in the history of the industry.
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- StuRat
  
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  02/04/2010 01:53 PM
  Re: Nothing like the free market operating in all its glory
  
  Much of Europe and Japan gets a high percentage of their domestic electrical power from nuclear power. France itself uses nuclear for over 75% of their power generation.
  
  What are you afraid of that the French aren't?
  
  You don't think the contractors that built the French plants would be interested in government-subsidized US contracts?
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  - TooMany
    
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    02/13/2010 04:09 PM
    Funny isn't it
    
    how we can argue over the practicality of nuclear power when it has been working for decades just across the pond
    and how we can worry about the dangers when even the ridiculously unsafe Chernobyl plant will ultimately shorten the lives of fewer people over decades than die in coal mining every year?
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- FreddyG
  
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  02/05/2010 04:17 PM
  Re: Nothing like the free market operating in all its glory
  
  Insurance for these plants is subsidized by the government; always has been and always will be. No private utility or insurance company could possibly pay for the risk of a possible catastrophic $1Trillion+ accident. Indeed that probability is small but it is there; these are complicated, intricate systems with equipment and human factors interplaying. Industry track record: 4 decades, several hundred plants worldwide: 1 catastrophic failure leading to permanent evacuation of all urban areas and farms for miles around (Cherynobyl) and one near miss (3 mile island) I'm aware of, perhaps more. The reality is that if one of these things had another catastrophic problem, the utility/ insurance company couldn't pay the remediation costs, they'd file for bankruptcy, and you and I would pick up the tab to relocate those cities and for the chemotherapy. Perhaps it's a better risk than coal, but let's honest and call it what it is: subsidized.
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