RE: So what now do we do?

--- Mccarrick Alan D CRPH
<MccarrickAD@nswccd.navy.mil> wrote:
> Thanks to Al Koop for the additional info on
> breeders. Let me follow with another question.
> There was a time when smaller reactors were
> considered feasible options. Perhaps they offered
> better cooling designs and simply less materials to
> worry about. Has designs for smaller fission
> reactors been killed by economies of scale ?

No. It is alive and kicking.

The pebble bed designs are small, modular reactors,
that can be aggregated and controlled by a single
control room.

Japan is pursuing a "nuclear battery" of a sodium
cooled variety that is "plug and play" if you will...
they will theoretically deliver it, it generates power
for 30 years and you ship it back.

I think the gas cooled new design is modular as well.

A single small reactor is more expensive per installed
kilowatt, but for example the cost of the "nuclear
battery" is not so high in comparison say to the costs
of transporting large amounts of diesel fuel into very
remote areas, e.g., Northwest territories, parts of
Alaska, etc.

The magic economic number has been something like
$1,000 per installed kilowatt. Even big designs
aren't there right now, much less the smaller designs.
 The other type of modular reactors -- pebble bed and
gas cooled are designed to give the generator more
flexibility in how much energy they generate (and
minimize capital cost for "one" plant) and in large
numbers will theoretically come close to the price
effectiveness of building a large, single reactor. Of
course, this is all theoretical. Real world costs
vary.
 
> Al McCarrick
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Al Koop [mailto:koopa@gvsu.edu]
> Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 9:56 AM
> To: asa@calvin.edu
> Subject: Re: So what now do we do?
>
>
> From Alan Mccarrick
>
> 1. What is France's current stand regarding
> re-processing fuel and
> using breeder reactors? I thought the old Phoenix
> reactor was quite
> successful, but don't know what became of
> Super-Phoenix. It seems that
> one direction toward addressing the amount of highly
> radioactive wastes
> is to create more fuel rather than bury the whole
> mass.

This article misrepresents things in at least a couple
respects, depending on when it was written. There is
a licensing proceeding going on right now before the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a MOX
fabrication plant in the U.S.

I would imagine if it weren't economical, the
consortium that wants to build it would not want to
build it. If such plants were the environmental
disaster he claims, the NRC would NOT license it (of
course, it has not licensed the plant to be
constructed, yet).

As to the history of breeder reactors, I cannot say.
The reason why no one is likely to build or be
interested in breeder reactors at the moment is the
worldwide glut of Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) that
is being down blended to low enriched uranium LEU for
nuclear fuel fabrication. Thanks to the arms
reduction in the US and former USSR, there is a supra
abundance of material to fabricate into fuel... world
market prices for nuclear fuel are really low. Of
course it behooves everyone on the planet from a
proliferation standpoint to make sure the former USSR
(and less so the US, only because the US has better
safeguards procedures) keeps downblending its HEU
(which can be used for bombs) to LEU to be made into
fuel for nuclear power plants.

I imagine once the current glut of HEU dissipates,
such technologies will be of potential interest again.

> In The Party's Over, Richard Heinberg write the
> following:
>
>
> The fuel supply for nuclear power is virtually
> limitless if we use fast
> breeder reactors to produce plutonium--which is one
> of the most
> poisonous materials known and is used to make
> nuclear weapons. But only
> a few fast-breeder reactors have been constructed,
> and they have proved
> to be prohibitively expensive, largely as a result
> of the need for
> special safety systems. These reactors generate an
> extraordinary
> amount of heat in a very small space and use molten
> metals or liquid
> sodium to remove the heat. Designing reactors to
> take these properties
> into account has made them costly to build and
> maintain. It also makes
> them susceptible to serious fires and long
> shutdowns: the French
> Superphoenix reactor operated for less than a year
> during the first 10
> years after it had been commissioned.
>
> France and the UK, despite have pursued breeder
> programs for several
> decades, have no plans for constructing more such
> plants. Japan has not
> restarted its Monju reactor, which was shut down
> after a sodium fire in
> December 1995. Among countries that have
> constructed breeder reactors,
> Russia alone supports further development.
>
> It is also possible to reprocess spent fuel into a
> form known as MOX
> (mixed oxide) which consists of a mixture of
> plutonium and uranium
> oxides. Reprocessed MOX fuel can then be used to
> replace conventional
> uranium fuel in power plants. However, only two MOX
> plants have been
> built (one in the UK; the other in France), and both
> have turned out to
> be environmental and financial nightmares. End of
> quote.
>
> Does anyone know if there are any clear
> misprepresentations here?
> Heinberg is a strong proponent of the energy
> depletion scenario but I
> have not yet found a case where he has made bad
> misrepresentation of the
> situation.
>
> Al Koop

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now
http://companion.yahoo.com/
Received on Thu Dec 4 11:24:08 2003