Finding an energy common ground between “Warmers” and “Skeptics”

There aren’t many engineers in the string today. It is so easy to employ a priori reasoning (the kind of reasoning that a smart argumentative teenager uses on you because with no experience, he has no other kind to employ) in prescriptive policy advice. The neo-malthusians (Malthus was the quintessential a priori reasoner) have foist the engineer’s nightmare of wind mills and solar power on us and even though we knew they weren’t going to work as replacements for what we have, we allowed this expensive idiocy to go forward. We’ve also lost 50yrs of experience in nuclear energy development because of our forbearance – and they then produce studies that show it isn’t economic – I would say 50s technology for anything isn’t economic. In any case, it is certainly a heck of a lot more practical and economic than 5% efficiency windmills that work only when the wind blows.
The neo-malthusians’ a priori theorem that we are running out of resources has.a venerable history starting with Malty himself (a preacher by trade). The nineteenth century British economist Jevons had us running out of coal by the beginning of th 20th C (sorry on Bberry no links) with all the familiar disasters that that portended. The club of rome made a list of resources we would run out of. I recall one of them was zinc a commodity hat is used mostly for rust proofing sheet metal for culverts and barn rooves and the like. It illustrated that their was no understanding of the economics of resources. We don’t plan to “phase out” “scarce” resources. We let economics do this for us (by the way reserves of zinc are higher now than they were in the 50s!). By way of further illustration an engineer friend remarked that you could make a radio using only abundant materials if you had to – he quipped that heck you could make the case out of concrete. Ya see, the demand isn’t for zinc its for roofing and drainage. Please drop the phasing out of scarce commodities and move the discourse along.

I would be delighted to know if GM stands for General Motors.

@redneck says:
August 10, 2010 at 11:40 am
Redneck, I couldn’t agree with you more or have said it better. GM is a learned fool, who throws ad homs like hand grenades, and never has a citation to offer other than his gratuitous (second, pejorative definition) opinions.
I’ll give him one (first definition) off the cuff; the actual quote may be a little different: “A poor woman in the highlands of Scotland may bear 15 children in her life; a well to do woman in London these days can scarce bear two”. [Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776)].
And today, that’s where we stand – in Western Europe, Russia, Japan, China, and just about everywhere that isn’t Muslim (except, interestingly, the USA). The earth’s population growth looks like a graph Anthony recently posted about sea level rise – asymptotic. However, the demographic trends spell real danger for a world of progress, accomplishment and perhaps, happiness, another term invented or popularized by Mr. Smith.

The discussion of Malthusian scenarios is interesting.
It is always interesting that nobody discusses the real reason the third world has explosive reproduction rates when for centuries upon centuries populations were stable or growing very slowly. The reason is science in the form of medical advancements, and missionaries.
Populations were slowly growing/stable all over the world until the microscope was developed and cause and effect of diseases was discovered.
When doctors learned to wash their hands infant mortality and puerperal fever dropped dramatically. If you walk in old cemeteries in England, many graves have the man’s name and two or three wives, not because of harems 🙂 but because widowers needed a new wife to bring up children. One in three women died in childbirth.
Population growth depends on the number of living females. A man of 40 years was considered an “elder”.
Western society developed in parallel to medicine, resources that defied the Malthusian fears i.e. industrialization and energy use.
And then missionaries exported medicinal knowledge and medicine to the third world, in an unsustainable manner. Not only industrialization and energy use was hidden from the third world, but also their energy and other resources were exploited to keep and develop the western life style .
We cannot turn the clock back. There are too many people in the third world because of bad decisions of the first. It behooves us to search for unlimited energy and give it to the hoi polloi as soon as possible , because the sooner the populations stabilize the sooner they will start declining. In parallel make a massive effort to educate women. Educated women limit their reproduction when means are available to them, from contraception to abortions. In Greece for example, we are not reproducing ourselves and I think it is the same in all of Europe.
It may be that people who think like GM are really afraid of genetically disappearing, because, having started on the diminution road we will be much much less than the still growing third world.
The problem of the old generation when there is unlimited cheap energy is solved because with unlimited energy food and shelter will be available and a different value standard than the money standard will have to be found.

James Sexton says:
August 9, 2010 at 11:32 pm
“There are other viable alternate energy sources, such as LFTR, but I really don’t believe we are going to be able allowed to pursue any. Hydrogen was my favorite. For some reason, it has all but fallen from the discussion of alternate fuel. Why? ”
Show me the Hydrogen Mine, and I’m sure there will be a big rush for hydrogen cars.
Show me the Battery-stuff Mine, and I’m sure there will be a big rush for electric cars.

JimF
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/09/finding-an-energy-common-ground-between-%e2%80%9cwarmers%e2%80%9d-and-%e2%80%9cskeptics%e2%80%9d/#comment-453946
“But your question really is about nuclear waste. President Carter in 1977 outlawed reprocessing spent reactor rods, for “noble” reasons (I’ll leave it to you to find out why). But get this: U235, the easily fissionable isotope of uranium, comprises 0.5% of natural uranium (U238 makes up 99.x% of the rest, with U234 – a product of uranium radioactive decay – a minuscule, short-lived component of natural uranium).
When used in a reactor, U235 has to be concentrated to something above 5% (and about 20%+ for an atomic bomb). The rest of the reactor rod is U238 and binding materials.”
Thanks for all the above info and without hopefully being too pedantic I assume by ‘reactor rod’ you mean ‘fuel assembly’?
Also you do a good job of informing readers of this thread that the most of the uranium that forma part of the fuel pellets within the fuel pins within the fuel assembly is indeed watsed if the ‘spent uranium’ is not reprocessed and so recovered but you fail to mention that this will only be the case i.e. that the ‘spent uranium’ become suseful if we re-fabricate the ‘spent uranium’ (largely non-fissile U238) into fuel assemblies that are irradiated in a ‘breeder’ reactor e.g the fast breeder reactor (FBR).
FBR’s and other ‘breeders’ only ‘breed’ more fissile material than they consume (in the case of U238 it breeds Pu239) if they are designed and operated in such a way as to have a ‘positive breeding coefficient’. In the case of almost all the experimental and small scale power producing FBR reactors built so far (including teh IFR) their positive breeding coefficient has been NEGATIVE i.e they have consumed (more often than not considerably) more fissile material than they have ‘breed’. Indeed Sir Walter Marshall a former Chairman of the UK’s Central Electricity Gnerating Board (CEGB) often referred to the FBR as the ‘Slow Breeder Reactor’ for that reason i.e. he thought ‘fast breeder’ was a complete misnomer as the ‘fast’ actually refers to the energy of the neutrons used in the fission process and not that rate at which fissile material is ‘breed’ in these reactors.
Do we currently need FBR or ‘breeder’ reactors based on the Thorium fuel cycle yet? I don’t think so. At least not until we allow the developing world to exploit nuclear power of a means of generating relatively cheap electricity as we do at present. If we did this then clearly the price of uranium ore would go up and we would need to find further economic reserves of uranium to cope with the demand. This would be some decades if not at least a century off though I suspect. Should we start spending money on researching and further developing these ‘breeder’ technologies and in particular showing that we can have reactor designs with positive breeding coefficients? Most definitely. Should we reprocessing the ‘spent uranium’ now inorder to retrieve the U238 to fuel these commercial demonstration reactors? No! As we have more than enough reprocessed spent uranium fuel sitting in storage facilities (used to be in a car park in Harwell for many years) to ‘fuel’ these reactors in the UK at least.
In the UK what we need is to get on and build our next generation of Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) base don tried and tested light-water reactor technologies like the EPR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Pressurized_Reactor) or the AP1000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000). In the UK we must avoid our tendency to build each different reactor we operate to yet another different design as we did in the past for our Magnox and AGR NPPs. Instead we must as the French have largely done choice only one design and build and operate at least 10 NPPs to that same design. If we don’t and we don’t do that NOW! then for sure ‘our lights will be going out’ within the next 10 years. IMO we should not reprocess the spent fuel from these new reactors until such time as it makes economic sense to i..e not until we have committed ourselves to a fully developed design of ‘breeder reactors’. In the intervening time the spent fuel assemblies should be stored in cooling ponds either ‘on site’ or whereever we would most likely build the next generation reprocessing and fuel fabrication planets for this future generation of ‘breeder reactors’.

kwik says:
August 11, 2010 at 4:48 am
LFTRs looks very promising. I wonder why China isnt going for it then?
Instead of the coal plants? Is it 4 they build every week now?
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China needs a quick-fix solution in matching electrical generation to the industrial investments. Hence, even conventional nuclear is too slow to built for their own good, while coal fired boilers/turbines come cheap and by the dozen amd most probably with a buy-2-and-get-one-free sort of purchase.
Hence, investing in an unknown such as Thorium Nuclear is risky for the Chinese. However, some countries, including India are researching Thorium reactors.
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There is one thing which has been bugging for some time now. US and Russian (was going to say Soviet..oops) ships run on nuclear. These must have some kind of compact, extremely safe and reliable nuclear reactors that fit in one ‘small’ corner of the ship or sub. Wouldn’t these be also compact, extremely safe and reliable for any type of seafaring vessel such as a bulk carrier? Or would the cost be prohibitive? Or is it just fear of public fear? Who said that there is nothing to fear but fear itself?

It doesn’t matter whether we use thorium or uranium in reactors; the thorium reactor actually breeds uranium, which is the fuel that fissions (uranium reactors breed plutonium, but more in a moment). The waste products are essentially identical in each case: unburned fertile material, residual fissile material, and fission products. Mind you, only the fission products are truly waste, and they are the reason that fuel assemblies are removed from reactors: they “poison” the neutron production by absorbing neutrons. There’s plenty of nuclear fuel left to “burn”; there’s too much “ash” impeding the reaction. This is why reprocessing is so important. By separating the (usually short-lived) fission products from the remaining fuel, that fuel can be used further. Normal uranium reactors breed enough plutonium that a considerable portion of their total power generation is provided by plutonium fisson.
Nor should we forget the CANDU reactor, which uses unenriched uranium as fuel (Hatlo Hat Tip to the clever Canadians, who invented the concept because they couldn’t afford Manhattan Project-style enrichment facilities). It goes to show that we need not be overly bothered by the need for enrichment. Once any reactor can be put into operation, breeding fissionable fuel is a logical next step. (Better than enrichment, because the bred fuel can be chemically separated from the fertile material.)
What about the real nuclear waste? Store it underground if you want…or dump it into the ocean. If you work out the concentration of the chemical constituents of seawater, you will discover that a given cubic kilometer of seawater already contains thousands of tons of dissolved radioactive elements. Concentrated ionizing radiation is potentially harmful, but we live in an environment of weakly diffuse ionizing radiation, which may be essential to our health. Our granite countertops are radioactive. Your wife or husband is radioactive (carbon-14 anyone?). Also, radioactivity is not a form of leprosy that can be passed on to other materials.
Finally, don’t get too worked up over fusion reactors. Most fusion reactions that are practicable result in the creation of 14 MeV neutrons, which have a nasty habit of transmuting materials into radioactive isotopes (not a contradiction to the above; neutron irradiation is not radioactivity). This creates what has been called the “first wall” problem: every so often the entire inner lining of a fusion reactor will have to be removed and disposed of because it will have been rendered radioactive by the neutron exposure and possibly also because the neutron flux will have degraded its material properties (disruption of the crystalline lattice of the metal). Yes, the reaction is clean, but there is collateral radioactive waste to be dealt with. This fact has been known by those in the business since the 1970s (when I was shocked to learn the truth from my grad school professors).
With enough nuclear power, we can synthesize any chemical fuels we need in an endless cycle: hydrogen, hydrocarbons, aluminum, boron…you name it.

Looks like I am late (as usual) for this discussion. I have been a fan of the LFTR for a long time.
Let’s put some back-of-the-envelope calculations here:
A LFTR requires about 1 ton of thorium per GW and year. It would produce about 1 ton of fission products (nuclear waste) per year. A pure thorium cycle LFTR does not produce any transuranics (very long lived radioactive elements) like an U235/U238 reactor.
About 83% of the fission products have half-lives of 1 year or less (many have half-lives of only minutes). After 10 half-lives 99.9% of those <1 year hl isotopes decay to a radioactivity level where they can be considered harmless (remaining activity equal to or less than common uranium containing ore). So for those 83% that means after 10 years.
The remaining ~17% of fission products have half-lives of ~30 years. Meaning 170 kg per year from a 1 GW LFTR have to be stored for 300 – 500 years (10-16 half-lives, decaying to 0.1% to 0.001% of original activity). Because of the decay rate, there's a limit of how much total radiactive fission products there will be at any time. The limit is reached when the total decay rate (in kg/year) of those stored fission products is the same as the production rate of 170 kg/year. Which means no more than a few tons for every 1 GW reactor at any time.
If we use the usual "green" energy measurement of "enough to supply x households", while assuming 1 kW consumption per household, then a 1 GW LFTR will supply 1 million households while consuming 1 ton of thorium per year. Or 1 g of thorium per household per year.
According to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium (yes, I know)
Common soil (or rocks) contains 12ppm Thorium. At a density of 1.6kg/m^3 it means about 83 kg of common rocks (a few shovels full) have enough energy in the form of thorium to supply a family for a year. The mount of dirt moved to just build the household’s house contains enough thorium to supply the electrical energy needs for that household for 2 or more generations.
The US government buried in the 1960s 3200 tons of thorium in the form of thorium nitrate in the Nevada Desert. That material sits there in 50 gal drums, covered with a shallow layer of dirt.
These 3200 tons of already mined thorium fuel alone, using LFTRs, could supply all the US electrical energy needs (2005 level) for over 7 years.
Re: the Malthusian argument that we run out of materials like phosphates and so on is easily refuted. The elements that make up these materials after all don’t go away. They stay right here on earth. When we “consume” them we really just combine them with other elements and change their distribution on earth. Given enough cheap energy though, we can recycle ANY material.
All it costs us is a relatively abundant element like thorium. And not much of that either.

Redneck says:
So consequently I can write like this otherwise the GM’s of this world couldn’t understand me. One advantage though, there is nothing more unnerving and frightening for a liberal/progressive than running into a educated redneck. It turns their whole world upside down.
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Sort of like Randy Newman’s song, Rednecks. Brilliant musical sarcasm.