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purplecthulhu at 08:21am on 10/01/2008
purplecthulhu at 08:21am on 10/01/2008It seems that the UK is going to be building new nuclear power stations. I'm cautiously positive about this since nuclear is one of the few power generation technologies that can supply the baseline of power consumption while reducing CO2 emissions (though I know there are people who doubt this).
However, this decision comes from the same government that has just brought in swinging cuts to the funding of physics research, including nuclear physics and related areas such as particle and astrophysics. After decades of low investment in nuclear power research we will need more people to work in the field if we're to build power stations and move towards safer, cleaner fission technologies such as the Rubbia accelerator driven thorium reactor. But instead the government decides to cut directly relevant research as well as those fields that, reportedly, inspire 90% of undergraduates to study physics.
Call that joined up government because I don't.
The No. 10 petition on physics funding is here. You know what to do.
However, this decision comes from the same government that has just brought in swinging cuts to the funding of physics research, including nuclear physics and related areas such as particle and astrophysics. After decades of low investment in nuclear power research we will need more people to work in the field if we're to build power stations and move towards safer, cleaner fission technologies such as the Rubbia accelerator driven thorium reactor. But instead the government decides to cut directly relevant research as well as those fields that, reportedly, inspire 90% of undergraduates to study physics.
Call that joined up government because I don't.
The No. 10 petition on physics funding is here. You know what to do.
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(this is me being facetious of course - how will we get the money to buy this stuff in if we have no natural resources, manufacturing, or knowledge technology to sell to the world)
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The most likely outcome is that we will find ourselves in the humiliating position of the soviet and Chinese client states who required foreign technicians to run their reactors. Naturally we will find a better way of saying that: 'Turnkey Contracts' or 'Operate and Build' arrangements with Westinghouse (but not Framatome!).
As for the Rubbia Energy Accelerator, I am astonished that India hasn't done more research: they are one of the few sovereign nations to have no miltarily-useful deposits of Uranium, and their nuclear weapons program was heavily-based on using Thorium to create Uranium-233.
The result is compact and simple warheads that are almost impossible to handle six months after fabrication: the equilibrium concentrations of Pa-208 in the U233 decay chain make a critical mass a lethal gamma source - and you can't put six feet of lead around a warhead that's supposed to fly on a rocket.
Off-the-Shelf
General Electric will take your money today and build you a PWRII-reactor-based power station which will be delivering at least 1GW baseload into the grid in ten years time (assuming regulatory processing and consultation goes smoothly). The blue-sky-bullshit designs might be ready for start of construction of the first full-scale (500MW+ per reactor unit) prototype power station in that timescale. Might.
The next generation of installed baseload nuke will be PWR. The experimental technologies could be the generation after that, twenty years from now. Of course by that time ITER might have produced a workable fusion reactor design, making the assorted second-generation fission designs moot.
Some else commented on lack of uranium fuel; right now there are enough known economically-viable deposits of uranium to supply current worldwide demand for about fifty years. There is a lot more uranium out there, but nobody is bothering to look for it because prospecting is expensive and we have fifty years of supply already on tap.
Re: Off-the-Shelf
right now there are enough known economically-viable deposits of uranium to supply current worldwide demand for about fifty years
If a lot more of the world's power generation is going to be fission, then current demand is going to increase rapidly. As to ITER, I think putting all our eggs into that basket would be unwise, so alternate fission fuel cycles should be explored, as well as more conventional cycles but with better designs, such as pebble bed. Of course one very safe design that's been running for ages is the CANDUs, but corporate and national politics seems to have screwed them over.
Re: Off-the-Shelf
As it turned out the building of reactors worldwide plateaued, fuel prices stagnated and the greater construction costs for AGRs killed their viability. We started building PWRs, licenced from GE-Westinghouse, instead.
If demand for fuel increases, it will take ten years or more for uranium production to ramp up too -- there is a lot of nuclear capacity that is going to be decommissioned in the next ten years. The new-build nuke program is mostly to replace those older reactors as well as some obsolete coal-fired plant. That replacement doesn't lead to a much greater demand for uranium in the short-term. In the longer term we'll start looking for more exploitable yellowcake ore bodies and rework the older ones as the price of uranium goes up, but that's decades away.
As for safety, that's not a problem, really. All modern existing power reactor designs are very safe. Previous "disasters" in the West were learned from and what's built today takes that into account. The Chernobyl disaster happened because the RBMK-4 design was a positive-feedback piece of shit, never mind it didn't have a containment structure as all Western power reactors have had since year Dot.
The CANDU design is supposed to be safer than classical designs but there may be failure modes in its design we just don't know about, until they happen at which point people will stand around the slagged remains of the reactor saying "Why didn't we see this coming?"
Re: Off-the-Shelf
As to reactor designs, just about any allegedly safer system can have those 'Why didn't we see this coming?' moments, PWRs and AGRs included. While the RBMK was a poor design, implemented badly and run by idiots that's not an excuse to not pursue designs that are more 'failsafe' than current PWRs. After all it might not be bad operators you have to deal with but a lunatic with an RPG who's just knocked out one of the cooling loops.
Meanwhile, if the UK feels confident that fission is going to be in big demand in the future, why should we let all the construction work go to GE et al. in the US? Why shouldn't we (once again) establish a home grown industry so that we can sell reactors to, say, China, Australia and South Africa when they want them?
Re: Off-the-Shelf
I addressed that previously. There are *known* reserves enough for several decades. Nobody's bothering to look for more reserves today because exploration is expensive and the return on investment will only start paying back fifty years from now. The current demand for yellowcake is going to go down, not up as more and more existing reactors are shut down as they reach end-of-life. The plan to build more reactors in the UK is to replace these end-of-life units. If that happens the demand will stay level and we still have several decades of reserves. It's only if we build nukes to replace obsolete coal-fired and other carbon-fuel stations (and reduce our carbon emmissions) that our demand for uranium will go up. Until those new plants are ready to operate the fuel isn't needed. Even if we and all the other nuclear-power operators decided to double capacity tomorrow, it would be nearly 15 years (2020) before the first tranche of new reactors came on stream and at that point the extra demand would mean known reserves would drop to 20-25 years supply, i.e. going out to 2040. During that time, exploration for fresh yellowcake bodies would start again. There would also be fresh investigations into the older workings to develop new techniques to economically recover ores with lower, previously uneconomical yields. By the time today's known reserves were exhausted it would be at least 2050, maybe later.
Oil and gas are running out, even with the massive price hikes of recent years, and we don't know what to do with the desequestered carbon loading in the environment burning fossil fuels creates. We burn a lot of gas for house heating in the UK -- when the North Sea gas fields dries up, as they will in the next fifteen years or so we may have to switch to electrical heat at which point our demand for generating capacity will go through the roof. That means building baseload nukes, or pay the extortionate prices the Russians will demand for their abundant gas supplies, or buy electricity from the French.
"Meanwhile, if the UK feels confident that fission is going to be in big demand in the future, why should we let all the construction work go to GE et al. in the US? Why shouldn't we (once again) establish a home grown industry so that we can sell reactors to, say, China, Australia and South Africa when they want them?"
After the AGR let-down Britain basically got out of the reactor design business, except for shipboard reactors for our all-nuke SSN and SSBN fleet. To get back into the power reactor business we'd have to basically start from scratch, build new units in the UK as demonstrators, run them and showcase their efficiency, low cost of operation etc. Only then would we be able to compete, exporting our first new reactor design maybe 15 years from now if we were lucky. Compare that to the GE or French production reactors, already in place with decades of real-time numbers for cost, safety, TCO etc. for a buyer to look at today, and ready to go right now. Our only other alternative is to revamp the AGR design as the AGR Mk. II and try and sell that but any prospective buyers will ask "Well if it's that good why aren't you building and using them yourself?"
In reality any British purchase of GE PWR IIs will involve a lot of wrangling with some of the production of the reactor equipment being done in the UK under licence -- almost any big capital project tends to work like that these days.
Re: Off-the-Shelf
Of course a year or two back this wouldn't have been an issue, at least in principle, since Westinghouse was owned by BNFL rather than a group of Japanese, US and Khazakhstani companies.
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Also, do not the main CO2 objections arise from the emissions generated from the building phase (and component manufacture) of a new plant? Solar cells certainly suck in that regard ...
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Nuclear power: a nice technology if you have saints and angels to run it. (Well, why do you think god put the big reactor is 93 million miles away. :-)