US Energy Independence by 2020

When I hear about new design concepts for nuclear reactors I am reminded about the death blow given to the Clinch River, sodium cooled fast breeder reactor by President Jimmy Carter. It may have been deserved because a very unworkable organization was formed between the utilities, the federal government (ERDA and NRC), the prime contractor, Westinghouse, and two major subcontractors, General Electric, and Atomics International, Division of Rockwell (Boeing). GE and Rockwell were competitors in the bid for the FBR. As a result the Clinch River Breeder Reactor was never build and the US has no commercial breeder reactor. Moreover the actual construction fell years behind the schedule that was originally proposed with a huge cost overrun. Of particular difficulty was the fact that the AEC was both promoting and regulating the development of the breeder. Now, this all happened in the mid 1970’s. Since then the major national laboratories devoted to nuclear energy have spend millions on the development of other potential sources of energy which have not come to fruition. In the mean time it has now been more than 30 years since any company in the US has built a commercial nuclear reactor in the US which means that most of the reactors operating today are more that 30 years old. Most were designed originally to last 30 years and the adequacies of the designs have had to be reevaluated by the NRC. Some have been decommissioned. When will they all be shut down and decommissioned?
This little review of history points out a basic problem for the nuclear industry. If designs developed by Westinghouse and General Electric are proven to be safe, excluding the operators errors associated with 3 Mile Island and some other minor accidents, why have no new reactors been built? The answer is that the electric power utility industry cannot afford to build new reactors that comply with the NRC regulations on design and operation of a new plant because the designers had to change their designs to comply with NRC demands. Why does anyone think that the many proposed nuclear plants such the High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor, the Traveling Wave Reactor, Thorium Breeder Reactor, or Fluidized Bed Reactor will ever be build? Who will pay the development costs? Will NRC regulations be any less for these concepts? Can the federal government promote any of these designs while seeking to regulate the industry?
As much as these concepts would seem to favor the environment or eliminates some the undesirable aspects of nuclear power based on enriched uranium, it doesn’t seem that there is a public will to add more nuclear plants. The public seem content with the way things are now despite the hype about global warming. What will it take for the public to change their minds about nuclear energy?

DA, thanks for a great article! I am a big fan of both Thorium and CTL.
I think the two keys to developing nuclear power in this country are:
1. Small/micro power plants.
2. Evidence-based (aka, the best scientificly supported) regulations on multiple low-dose radiation exposures.
The first is important because, as I understand it, we can only get the forgings for large, nuclear certified containment vessels from one place in the entire world: Japan. And they have, I believe, a multi-year back in orders from other countries. Also, the capital costs for huge nuclear power plants is, from what I hear, becoming astronomical – to the point that the much anticipated nuclear renaissance may never materialize. With smaller power plants, the upfront cost is cheaper because they can be ordered one at a time. More importantly, they can be up and running, generating electricity, and therefore generating profits, sooner than a big monolithic, site-built, multi-gigawatt plant that takes many years to construct.
The second is important because regulations requiring unnaturally low radiation exposure levels (below background levels in some parts of the world!) complicate reactor design and emergency planning requirements. This increases the cost of reactors to the point where, in the current environment, nuclear has a tough time competing with low-cost natural gas.
I offer the following suggestions to an already excellent proposal:
As much as I like the many advantages of thorium, I suggest that the emphasis be on approving any and all small/micro nuclear reactor designs that improve safety and reduce the cost of building nuclear power plants as quickly as possible.
There are many competing designs for small nuclear reactors: http://www.economist.com/node/17647651
If we don’t go with Thorium at first, then until we do switch to that technology, we should develop a better reprocessing process that PUREX or use fast reactor designs to burn up the used fuel currently being stored on site at all the light water reactors we currently use. BTW: I heard Candu reactors can burn our used fuel for a few more years. If so, let’s build some of those or send the fuel to Canada.
Instead of converting vehicles to run on natural gas, I would add inexpensive natural gas as another feedstock to the process of converting hydrocarbons to a liquid fuel such as gasoline or diesel.
I think we can deploy small High Temp reactors to the CTL plants to make the process more efficient.
Also, we need to get rid of the restrictions on drill for our own oil – offshore, federal lands, whatever. I am not optimistic that we will get this done anytime soon, so we’ll need to free up as much oil as possible to drive our economy in the meantime.
Finally, if a multi-fuel motor ever becomes viable (like this one: http://www.ecomotors.com) we can move to producing more diesel: it is a more dense fuel than gasoline.
fyi: I like this site for Liquid Floride Thorium reactor info: http://energyfromthorium.com
Jack Simmons
January 1, 2011 at 8:11 pm
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/01/us-energy-independence-by-2020/#comment-563986
Jack, the article on the new CTL process developed at U of Texas, Arlington looks very promising, thanks for the link! CTL has been a “no-show” technology for years, but it looks like it may finally be getting off the ground.
There’s going to be a presentation on the CTL process developed at U of Texas at Arlington at the 6th annual CTL and coal gasification conference next month: http://www.informa.com.au/conferences/mining/oil-gas/ctl-coal-gasification – maybe we’ll find out how it’s coming along then.
Poptech
January 2, 2011 at 9:19 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/01/us-energy-independence-by-2020/#comment-564260
Poptech, you make good points. The WaPo article, “5 Myths About Breaking Our Foreign Oil Habit”, is excellent.
I would argue that the real object is not energy independence, but rather:
1. Develop less expensive, reliable sources of electricity and hydro-fuels for our economy (producing jobs in this country and cheap electricity to support our manufacturing industries – of which, we are still the world leader, btw).
2. Secure sufficient quantities of hydrocarbons to fuel our military.

Mike McMillan said on January 2, 2011 at 10:57 pm:

janama says: January 1, 2011 at 9:20 pm
OT – could someone explain why this site is unformatted in Firefox yet is formatted in IExplorer? It only started in the past day.
You have css turned off. To cure in Firefox:
click View,
click Page Style,
select Basic Page Style.

There is also an “intermittent” wordpress.com error that could be affecting you. I just got a slightly-late Christmas gift with the ending of around two months of unformatted wordpress pages.
Details are here: http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/none-of-my-blogs-displaying-properly
It’s blamed on a routing error. Specifically, the style sheets aren’t loading, which actually come from wp.com. This is one of them:
http://s0.wp.com/wp-content/themes/h4/global.css
From the above forum link, try testing with this link:
http://s0.wp.com/helloworld.html
Note it says: “The css link probably wasn’t the best test as different browsers and operating systems display it differently.”
The issue apparently crops up somewhere between wordpress and the local-level ISP servers. I’m certain it would have made some noise if all wordpress users or all customers of my ISP were affected. Yes, the “Is it just me?” feeling is quite irritating.
If that’s your issue, hopefully you won’t be waiting as long as I did for the “intermittent problem” to clear up. It’s hit me before, but those times it cleared up after a day to a week, making the last outage extremely annoying. In the meanwhile, you may find it amusing to discover that certain sites are hosted on wordpress.com, that you’d never have guessed they were, because they too are now unformatted.

Thorium might be an interesting technology some day, but it is far from being ready for mass production. The MSRE that everyone points to as proof of concept is still sitting in a building in Oak Ridge, waiting for someone to figure out a way to defuel it. Anyone who has ever had anything to do with really operating or maintaining a nuclear power plant will take one look at this design and say “fuhgedaboutit”. It is a maintenance nightmare, because it circulates the fission products throughout the coolant system, and contaminates an enormous amount of piping. It is combining a nuclear power plant and a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in one facility, and bringing all of the difficult aspects of each together in one place. Some people say that it produces less fission products, but that is only because there definition of fission products is transuranics, which are NOT fission products. FPs have an atomic number and mass less than the original fissile material. They include strontium and cesium and iodine and rubidium, and a whole bunch of other elements. FPs do NOT include plutonium or americium or uranium or any of the elements that are produced when the fissile material captures a neutron and beta-decays up the chain to something with a higher atomic number. All fission reactors, whether they use thorium or uranium or plutonium produce the same amount of FPs, but the distribution is slightly different for each element and isotope. The number of FP atoms is the same (2) for each atom that fissions. The number of neutrons produced varies according to the element, isotope, and the type of fission (from thermal to fast).
Yes, there is a lot of thorium out there. There is a lot in the US, and a LOT in India. However, there is no real shortage of uranium. We just don’t let people mine for it in the US any more, for environmental reasons. If necessary, we could extract it from seawater, and although it would cost probably two times more than the highest price for mined uranium, it would not affect the cost of nuclear energy significantly because the price of the uranium itself is only a few percent of the overall cost. And there will be uranium in seawater as long as rain continues to wash down mountains into the sea, which I think can be considered a pretty sustainable source. The Indians are very excited about thorium because they have a lot of it, but very little uranium. They want the rich western countries to develop the technology so that they can take and use it with their thorium resources. We would be crazy to do this work for them. It would require building test reactors and new fuel designs and an enormous range of activities at very high cost. Maybe someday, we might want to look at this – maybe as a long-term research program. But not on a crash basis – it would be silly.
Instead, we have at least a dozen existing reactor designs that use proven uranium fuel designs and could be built with reasonable assurance that they would produce reliable amounts of power. We also have the technology to recycle the fuel from these plants, in separate nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities, and with recycling we don’t really need to look for new technologies like thorium for a long time, if ever. The big limits here are: (1) the number of qualified people to finish the detailed designs, construct the plants, and operate them, (2) the availability of qualified industrial sources of supply for the equipment, some of which has not been produced in the US for 30 years, (3) the availability of a qualified, quality workforce that can pour nuclear-grade concrete and make good welds, (4) the availability of money to finance this, and (5) a stable regulatory environment that ensures that once the decision is made to build something, it can be completed and operated without intervention by politians, luddite environmentalists, and NIMBYs. The last item is probably the hardest to deal with.

Your comments SMART grid are correct. Consumers do not want big brother controlling their cold beer supply, boiling stew, and what is comfortable temperatures in the privacy of their homes.

In the early ’70’s Nixon wanted the uS to become energy independent by building about 500 LWR’s. Problem then and more of a problem today is that the global production of stainless steels (Inox) could not supply enough material for more than a minuscule fraction of the 500. Going forward with a scaled back version of the LWR project would have driven up the price and robbed SS (or at least the chromium and cobalt) from other critical projects.
Attempting to build a large number of breeder reactors today would cause the same headaches.
On paper it is a GREAT idea.
Thanks DA!

A paper on Zero Emission Coal Alliance’s (ZECA) technology – note this is approximately 10 years old (Feb 2001).
http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings/01/carbon_seq/2b2.pdf
Another paper on ZECA:
http://manhaz.cyf.gov.pl/manhaz/links/COAL_BASED_NEW_TECHNOLOGIES/conceptual_design_and_econ.pdf

Whoops, let’s try that again –
Lucia (at the Blackboard) had a far reaching discussion of various nuclear subjects at
http://rankexploits.com/habari/nuclear-power-in-deserts. Thorium, the French systems, etc. Somewhat less speculative than David’s post.
Bob

harrywr2 says:
January 2, 2011 at 1:48 pm
Actually, what happened is that the expected aluminum demand didn’t materialize.
Boeing had a slump, folks decided maybe aluminum siding wasn’t so stylish after all and someone else decided that aluminum cans should be recycled.
Even today, the US Aluminum industry still consumes 1.2% of all the electric power produced in the US.
Sorry Harry,
…but the local government bureaucratic control of the funding was out of control. In January 1982, the WPPSS board stopped construction on Plants 4 and 5 when total cost for all the plants was projected to exceed $24 billion. Because these plants generated no power and brought in no money, the system was forced to default on $2.25 billion in bonds. This meant that the member utilities, and ultimately the rate payers, were obligated to pay back the borrowed money. In some small towns where unemployment due to the recession was already high, this amounted to more than $12,000 per customer. The bond holders sued and the matter wound it way through courts for the next 13 years. Plants 1 and 3 were never finished either, but their costs were backed by the Bonneville Power Administration and the power it generated from the Columbia River Dams.
Plant 2 at Hanford was completed in 1984 and is now called the Columbia Generating Station. It produces 12 percent of the power supplied by the Bonneville Power Administration at a cost of 2.3 cents per kilowatt hour. Seattle customers pay an average of 3.89 cents per kilowatt hour. The unfinished plants were mothballed against the possibility that construction would be resumed. In 1995, WPPSS decided to demolish what remained of the structures.
The real losers were those you speak liken the aluminum industry who no longer would pay to play in the Northwest with the new higher power rates generated by and of the WPPSS fiasco. The demise of WPPSS rests squarely on the finance management of the project.
Consequently, the Northwest public does not trust the powers who control such purses in constructing a new facility such that David Archibald presents; regardless of specific type of fuel is used for nuclear energy.
🙂

Thanks David for summarizing some key points on thorium and coal to liquid.
These were a great topic in the late 70’s and equally timely now 😉
And the true history of where and why both thorium and coal to liquid have been shelved may be a great topic over at theoildrum.com.
The generation of “goolgers” get a dangerous glut of misinformation about both nuclear and solid to liquid fuels that have been both over promoted through the propaganda machines over the last decade as either the salvation or death to our energy future. Making comments a one way bickering fest that you have to be either “for coal and nuclear” or against it. Not realizing that we are simply asking both sides to choose a more sustainable way to utilize both until we bridge the gap between fossil fuels and sustainable fuels.
Further false beliefs in a “simple renewable energy fix” to oil and coal will only recreate a more direr situation than we are currently in. The Carter era proved we can spend trillions over decades to be “more energy independent” and then be even further away from that future than ever before.
Just proving something wrong is not supporting something right…
Energy, health and environmental programs are ultimately driven by politics and propaganda not good economics or intentions.
Even the most solid and beneficial programs to society and our planet will not flourish without political and media support.
The key is to continue to influence both with better options that they will embrace as inevitably the best choice for whatever cause or agenda they are pushing. Not a war against it.
They need to clearly understand that unless a new breed of reactors are used, the nuclear renaissance will implode. And unless coal is done right it will be continued to be used wrong.
If our current energy situation has any “hope for change” it is vital that we find a way to utilize military and spent fuel stockpiles to power our future. Or we don’t have one.
Maybe not by 2020… but implementation of new reactors, waste to fuels and utilizing home/industrial cogeneration with benefits of architecture2030.org we have “hope of change”.
As far as CTL… sorry David, I have more data against than for it.
Thanks commentators for all the links!
Here are a few more:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes
http://www.power-technology.com/features/feature78177
http://www.halifaxcourier.co.uk/features/Can-thorium-save-the-planet.5454977.jp
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4971?page=1
http://www.architecture2030.org
And can’t forget http://www.nextbigfuture.com