Questioning how nuclear reactors are built
As the world moves towards replacing ‘fossil fuels’, ignoring a solution that might be ten times cheaper is a luxury poor people and poor countries cannot afford.
The current defacto consensus that wind, solar, conventional nuclear, and a whole lot of batteries is the path forward does not look inexpensive, will be monumental to implement, and will likely shackle future generations with dystopian maintenance demands.
However, there is a case to be made that if nuclear reactors are built the way they should have been built from the beginning of the nuclear age, they would produce electricity for ten times less than current costs with absolutely, positively, incontrovertibly zero risk to people or the environment.
The truth is a perfect reactor is so simple, even a kindergartner could understand it and yet, our entire society has never and cannot be bothered to understand it. A perfect reactor is nearly as simple as the Sun.
It can produce electricity for at least ten times less than any of the currently promoted methods with no risk whatsoever of releasing catastrophic quantities of radioactive material into the environment. If we as a society wake up twenty years from now unable to afford to heat our homes, it will be because there were no adults in the room when the decisions were made as to how the world would power itself in the future.
We face two possible futures. One is a world blanketed in lower power passive collection systems and massive power storage systems delivering electricity as a luxury commodity many will only be able to afford in sparsity.
The other is perfectly safe electricity ten times cheaper than today with no ‘carbon emissions’.
It is clear that the powers that be seek to deliver a world of expensive electricity where trillions of dollars will be directed to their pockets to deliver it. They don’t care that such a course will deny developing countries the energy they need to develop.
It is incumbent on anyone who honestly seeks the best outcome for humanity, to be willing to listen to anyone claiming a tens of times better solution.
Current reactors have been limited to the very worst reactor designs ever conceived. They pack the nuclear fuel in rods that are then placed in a kettle to boil water. No self-respecting engineer would have ever signed off on such a horrible design.
This fuel-rod design drastically limits the power-generation rate, results in a massive accumulation of seriously bad material, necessitates the need to maintain cooling, escalates costs tens-fold, and makes the reactor vulnerable as a weapon of mass-collateral damage.
Imagine a terrorist lobbing an artillery shell into an operating reactor. The resulting steam explosion would blow 40 billion-trillion disintegration per minute of hell straight up.
It has been known since the dawn of the nuclear age that the only logical way to build a reactor is to mix the nuclear fuel into a high-melting temperature coolant and circulate it between heat exchangers and a vessel designed to allow a sustainable nuclear chain reaction.
In this design, any hazardous material is entrained in the coolant and under no circumstances will significant quantities of radioactive material ever be released to the environment, even if such a plant were bombed due to terrorism or war. Furthermore, the cost of such a reactor is little more than the cost of materials as such a design eliminates billions in fuel fabrication, emergency response, and reactor complexity costs.
The total amount of savings in cost and elimination of risks is really too fantastic to believe unless one is willing to take an honest look. The current state of the nuclear industry is like when your grandmother takes her car to the shop and is told it will cost ten thousand dollars to fix and when you look into it, you find it is a loose wire. This honestly is the truth about nuclear energy.
For myself, it is irrelevant whether anyone is ever willing to take an honest look at nuclear energy. I won’t be the one paying the electric bill. But as a nuclear engineer, I know that the nuclear industry was sabotaged from the very beginning and I have a responsibility to say something.
Somehow, the higher-ups ignored the engineer and selected the stupid reactor design. They claimed that the potential for a catastrophic release of radioactive material is an inherent risk of nuclear energy but this is simply not true.
They chose to build reactors with this inherent risk even though they knew that a perfectly safe reactor could be built for ten times less. It deserves to be asked “Who and why would anyone build a dangerous reactor when a safe reactor could be built for so much less?”
Even a child can understand that hot sand in a molten metal looks like a smarter and safer way to boil water than tens of thousands of fuel rods that can never be denied cooling. It is obvious this sand could heat the Lead tens of times faster and cost tens of times less.
Asking that an adult in the room question nuclear design isn’t a demand that anyone accept what is being said, it is simply a request to look at current reactor designs that are too expensive by billions and can only burn one percent of the resource mined to fuel them. If one percent is not a number that deserves questioning, nothing is.
Deciding how to replace ‘fossil fuels’ is one of, if not the, most important decisions that will be made in the 21st-century. It matters a great deal that we make the best decision.
If there is the possibility that we may be burdening our progeny with unnecessary and excessive costs and labor demands, we have a responsibility to take seriously, any such suggestions.
As I was born a working-class minion, I imagine the millions of future working-class minions will mind greatly if they are shackled with billions of hours of unnecessary and stupid toil, cleaning, fixing, and replacing billions of solar panels and millions of wind turbines and batteries when there was always a far less laborious and costly alternative.
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Jay
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Anyone who thinks that nuclear energy is safe should read the March 4, 1996 issue for Time Magazine.
The problem is that while the reactors are designed for safety, the people who run the plant make decisions based upon $ instead of safety, and the plants then become unsafe.
ANYONE who advocates for nuclear after Fukushima disaster is an idiot.
And I was educated and worked as a Nuclear Engineer.
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JaKo
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Jay: “ANYONE who advocates for nuclear after Fukushima disaster is an idiot.”
While you make a good point that blind profit chasing isn’t particularly “a safe attitude” in operation of a nuclear power-station, your quote about Fukushima seems rather off.
Building nuclear plants of that type (active safety required) in earthquake / tsunami prone zone was a criminal act. OTOH, shutting down German NPS is the proof of rampant irrationalism sweeping our world.
So let’s put on our covidian masks, six-foot social distance and sweep the snow from our solar cells.
Cheers, JaKo
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Herb Rose
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Hi Jay,
Building the current nuclear reactors is idiocy, when a Thorium reactor (which is what the article is about) has so many advantages not building them is idiocy. The only drawback that prevents them from being used is that they don’t produce plutonium for making bombs.
Herb
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T. C. Clark
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Fukushima was easily avoidable by building the back-up power generator nearby on higher ground…all of the nuclear disasters were man made and avoidable despite the poor design of the reactors…..”Time Magazine” is not a source of wisdom on any subject….MSRs (Molten Salts Reactors) are definitely a better and safer design than the fuel rod designs…..and thorium is a better fuel. Einstein observed that maybe man’s ignorance is infinite.
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Shawn Marshall
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Do you not see how illogical your Fukushima comment is. The author advocates for a safe nuclear design, not for an illogically sited plant of poor design.
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T. C. Clark
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Fukushima had no cooling after the plant was flooded because back up generators were in the basement…the cooling loss meant a meltdown. The basic problem with the fuel rod designs …and there are lots of variations…is the high pressure cooling. The nuclear submarine reactors which are the forerunners of the large land reactors had steel containment vessels and of course an unlimited amount of cool water around the submarine. There are many variations of MSRs…here is one…https://thorconpower.com
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Jay, Commenters and PSI Readers,
Two points: The first one should be obvious; Fear is used to control many people. Admiral Rickover, the creator of the USA Nuclear Navy, to my knowledge, never had a nuclear accident. Why,? He hand picked the engineers who would be responsible for the care of the small reactors of his ships.
Jay, you wrote: “It has been known since the dawn of the nuclear age that the only logical way to build a reactor is to mix the nuclear fuel into a high-melting temperature coolant and circulate it between heat exchangers and a vessel designed to allow a sustainable nuclear chain reaction.” Easy to write but maybe challenging to design and construct. Has anyone designed a small working model of your proposed safe solution? I certainly do not know the answer to this question. So, if someone has, please inform me of its existence, if it exists.
For I believe that that the first fission reactor was designed, constructed, and tested by Fermi. And I believe, but don’t claim to know, that all fission reactors have been designed etc. as Fermi showed us could be done.
Have a good day, Jerry
Have a good day,
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Jay, Commenters and PSI Readers,
Two points: The first one should be obvious; Fear is used to control many people. Admiral Rickover, the creator of the USA Nuclear Navy, to my knowledge, never had a nuclear accident. Why,? He hand picked the engineers who would be responsible for the care of the small reactors of his ships.
Jay, you wrote: “It has been known since the dawn of the nuclear age that the only logical way to build a reactor is to mix the nuclear fuel into a high-melting temperature coolant and circulate it between heat exchangers and a vessel designed to allow a sustainable nuclear chain reaction.” Easy to write but maybe challenging to design and construct. Has anyone designed a small working model of your proposed safe solution? I certainly do not know the answer to this question. So, if someone has, please inform me of its existence, if it exists.
For I believe that that the first fission reactor was designed, constructed, and tested by Fermi. And I believe, but don’t claim to know, that all fission reactors have been designed etc. as Fermi showed us could be done.
Have a good day, Jerry
Have a good day,
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JaKo
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Sorry Jerry,
You beat me to it — I should load the comment section in a separate tab and refresh it before I post…
You too have a great day.
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JaKo
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OK,
Fukushima and all future nuclear disasters can’t be prevented by these fantastic “new designs” anytime soon!
For those really interested to learn something, there is a decent article on World Nuclear Association web-site.
Just a snippet of that information to consider: “There are a number of different MSR design concepts, and a number of interesting challenges in the commercialization of many, especially with thorium.”
I would refrain from calling people idiots based on pretense of knowing anything.
Cheers, JaKo
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T. C. Clark
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I have lived for years about 30 miles from a nuclear reactor…there are siren tests and evacuation routes, etc. but I don’t pay any attention. I would not mind living 10 miles from a MSR with the automatic drain plug safety feature. Alvin Weinberg is sort of the Godfather of MSRs since he developed the first one over 50 years ago at Oak Ridge. They had more freedom back then to experiment but of course they lacked the computers and tech of today. It’s a long involved story but fuel rods are not too efficient…a small amount of the fuel is consumed before the rods have to be changed and re-manufactured. Of course the amount of information available is immense. https://thmsr.com
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Jerry Krause
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Hi PSI Commenters,
Thank you for the term MSR, which Jay did not write and I did not know what it represented. So I Googled it and found this history which I consider might be of interest to common PSI Readers. Who may or not read this.
“The R&D programme demonstrated the feasibility of this system, albeit excluding online reprocessing, and highlighted some unique corrosion and safety issues that would need to be addressed if constructing a larger pilot MSR with fuel salt. With a radioactive primary coolant loop, challenges would include processing facilities to remove the main fission products, though gaseous fission products come off readily in the gas purge system. It also showed that breeding required a different design, with a larger blanket loop and two fluids (heterogeneous). Tritium production was a problem (see below re lithium enrichment). The breeder project to produce U-233 from thorium was discontinued.
From 1975 to 2010 little happened in the USA with MSRs, though in 1980 ONRL published a study to “examine the conceptual feasibility” of a denatured MSR (DMSR) fuelled with low-enriched uranium-235 “and operated with a minimum of chemical processing,” solely as a burner reactor. The main priority was proliferation resistance, avoiding use of HEU.2
In the UK a large (2.5 GWe) lead-cooled fast spectrum MSR (MSFR) with the plutonium fuel dissolved in a molten chloride salt was designed, with experimental work undertaken over 1968-73. Funding ceased in 1974.
There is now renewed interest in the MSR concept in Japan, Russia, China, France and the USA, and one of the six Generation IV designs selected for further development is the MSR in two distinct variants, the molten salt fast reactor (MSFR) and the advanced high temperature reactor (AHTR) – also known as the fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor (FHR) with solid fuel, or PB-FHR specifically with pebble fuel.” (https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/molten-salt-reactors.aspx)
Have a good day, Jerry
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