Reposted from Legal Insurrection
The last time we checked on the nation’s energy industry, the Biden-Harris administration banned drilling for gas and oil on 28 million acres of Alaska (rescinding the order signed by President Donald Trump).
However, there is better news on the nuclear energy front. This is good news given that nuclear energy is the only rival to fossil fuels in efficiency and cost-effectiveness and is worthy of supplying power on a civilization-level.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved construction of the first fourth-generation nuclear reactor in the country.
According to Interesting Engineering, the new Hermes reactor will be the first one built in the United States in 50 years that won’t be cooled by light water. Instead, it will use a system of molten fluoride salt, and a TRISO (tri-structural isotropic particle) fuel pebble bed design will power the generator.
Molten fluoride salts have “excellent chemical stability and tremendous capacity for transferring heat,” per the report, meaning it stays cooler and dissipates heat much faster than the light water that has been used for so long in American reactors.
The fuel bed consists of hundreds of millimeter-sized particles of uranium encased in multiple layers of special ceramic, which allows each individual piece of fuel to have its own containment and pressure vessel, per Ultra Safe Nuclear. The ceramic casing is stronger and more resilient than the typical zirconium alloy, meaning it can withstand higher temperatures and neutron bombardment past the failure point of other types of fuel.
On top of that, because each individual piece of fuel is so small, in the event that one fails, the ensuing burst of radiation would be significantly lessened — and less likely to cause further damage, thanks to the coolant system.
Generation IV nuclear power utilizes a system of fuel fabrication plants and reprocessing facilities that together overcome some of the shortcomings of the previous generations of nuclear power plants.
To be classified as Generation IV, a system must meet, or at least have the ability to meet, the following criteria:
(1) it is much more fuel-efficient than current plants;
(2) it is designed in such a way that severe accidents are not possible, that is, plant failure or an external event (such as an earthquake) should not result in radioactive material release to the outside world;
[3] the fuel cycle is designed in such a way that uranium and plutonium are never separated (“diverged”) but only present in a mix and with other elements. This makes it more difficult to create nuclear weapons.
Construction is underway on the new nuclear power plant in Tennessee, in the iconic city of Oak Ridge (famous for its importance in World War Two’s Manhattan Project).
Kairos Power has begun building the Hermes Low-Power Demonstration Reactor in Oak Ridge, the first Gen IV reactor approved for construction by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Hermes reactor utilizes a fluoride salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor design, differing from conventional light-water reactors.
“Generation IV nuclear power plant designs are revolutionary, in that they are planned to use a very different set of technologies than the reactors we use today,” Ross Peel, a professor with King’s College London’s Centre for Science and Security Studies told Newsweek.
Unfortunately, we are behind China when it comes to the construction. It launched its construction of a Generation IV reactor late last year.
The Shidaowan nuclear power plant, which features the world’s first fourth-generation reactor, started commercial operations on December 6, China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), one of the project’s developers, said.
“China’s independently developed high-temperature gas-cooled reactor demonstrator commenced commercial operation,” CNNC said in a statement.
“It signifies that China has completed the world’s first commercially operational modular nuclear power plant with fourth-generation nuclear technology, marking the transition of fourth-generation nuclear technology from experiments to the commercial market.”
Interestingly, more and more countries are rethinking their ban on nuclear energy, likely in light of the realities of “green energy” as well as the improvements being made in the Generation IV systems. Switzerland, for example, has reversed its outright ban of nuclear.
The Swiss government said on Wednesday it plans to overturn a ban on building new power plants to strengthen local energy supply at a time of increased geopolitical tension.
Energy Minister Albert Roesti said the government would submit a proposal to amend nuclear legislation by the end of 2024 so it can be debated in parliament next year.
“Over the long term, new nuclear power plants are one possible way of making our supply more secure in a geopolitically uncertain time,” Roesti told a press conference.
Failure to retain the option could be seen as a betrayal by future generations, Roesti argued.
All of these are positive developments for those of us who enjoy the perks of civilization, such a light at night and heat during the winter.
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“the Biden-Harris administration banned…”
“The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved…”
That is how the spin goes here.
Speaking of spin old mate, how about this one –
“wind is free”?
Yes, and it makes turbines spin.
Very expensive turbines and intermittently. We require reliable power. The sun does not shine at night and the wind does not blow consistently. That is why the nameplate capacity of a turbine is so much greater than its actual performance.
Wind and solar are insufficient and utterly unreliable for anything industrial, including AI & data centers
Only sometimes.. sort of at random.. how NON-useful.
And the cost of implementing that random erratic wind into the grid is HORRENDOUS.
… whereas Nick “spins” all the time.
How much energy (positive) does NS produce?
None.
Spin on wind is all it does nowadays.
When it feels like it.
Coal, oil, and uranium are also free — in raw unusable form. It’s converting them to a usable form that costs money — like your wind turbine.
It’s getting that power to its users that costs money — and wind turbines have to be where the wind is, unlike power plants which can be built near their customers.
It’s making that power reliable that costs money — and wind turbines need storage and two-way conversion to be reliable, three steps which cost money and add inefficiency.
40% of the time and only if wind is in the goldilocks zone
Less than 9mph and Net Zero Wind Generation
Stronger than 50-55mph and Net Zero Wind Generation
Sometimes and randomly, also needs expensive frequency control systems, even more expensive storage systems.
If this is really about reducing CO2, and saving the environment, then why the hostility to the ONLY proven grid scale technology to provide power that morons in the green blob take completely for granted.
And maybe reading is hard, the two selectively chosen bits you highlighted refer to completely different topics.
Not in the UK, not today anyway, 4.1GW from our 30GW fleet.
And, if its strong enough, it even destroys them:
Respun when its called withdraw
“Farther north, the Interior Department finalized a rule that withdraws 13 million acres of Arctic tundra from future oil and gas drilling. It ensures “maximum protections” in more than half of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, a swath of pristine wilderness on the state’s North Slope, bounded by the Chukchi Sea to the west and the Beaufort Sea to the north.
That decision would not affect the Willow project, the biggest new oil field in decades in Alaska, which is expected to produce up to 180,000 barrels per day for the next 30 years.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/climate/biden-alaska-drilling-mining-nrpa.html
The Willow project is inside the NPR
https://alaska.conocophillips.com/what-we-do/projects/willow/
A ban has an almost immediate effect, but the approval won’t start making a significant difference for a couple of decades. Figure a decade before the demo plant is up and running and another decade (at the very least) before a significant number can be brought online.
So as a diehard warmunist, why do you diss nuclear power plants? C’mon, tell us.
Well, the Biden/Harris administration has approved one.
But what will they do with the waste?
Undoing the wind and solar projects, and diverting the funding to nuclear, would be the right program, and should have enough inertia to remain in place long enough to overcome any political risk.
Where is a working prototype?
This was it
“Kairos Power has begun building the Hermes Low-Power Demonstration Reactor in Oak Ridge
But the smaller scale testing plant was in Albuquerque
outube.com/watch?v=GAh8imiX0K8
It seems they are a long way from from an actual working reactor and this design is only one of 3 or 10 to receive funding
Here is the punchline, totally missing mention anywhere in the above spin article:
“Hermes is a non-power version of Kairos Power’s fluoride salt-cooled high temperature reactor, the KP-HFR and is the first and only Gen IV reactor to date to be approved for construction by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Targeted to be operational by 2027, the reactor will be the company’s first nuclear build . . . Its primary objective will be to demonstrate the ability to produce affordable nuclear heat, but it will not produce electricity.”
— https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Work-begins-on-first-US-Gen-IV-reactor
(my bold emphasis added)
Thus, it is very much a misnomer to call this reactor a “power plant”, as is done repeatedly in the above article . . . it’s kinda more like a sub-scale lab experiment of one part of a theoretical future power plant.
Yes, pebble bed reactors are currently in use.
December 20, 2021 5:41 PM GMT+11 Updated 3 years ago
special ceramic, which allows each individual piece of fuel to have its own containment and pressure vessel
This reads like an IPCC statement. Climate talk enters nuclear energy.
Read up on “pebble-bed reactors” .
Actually a real, and functioning design..
Pretty nifty design actually..
… allows continuous refuelling… no “time-out” for refuelling like a normal reactor
… allows for total fuel dumping if required.
But seems likely to make further use of the large amount of energy still remaining in the “spent” fuel probably impossible once that technology is adequately developed.
Exactly . . . “special ceramic, which allows each individual piece of fuel to have its own containment and pressure vessel” seems to be totally incompatible with “pretty nifty design actually” when it comes to reprocessing spent nuclear fuels from pebble bed nuclear reactors.
BTW, ceramic materials are notorious for having low CTEs and for being a brittle material when subjected to tensile loading . . . leading any competent mechanical engineer to question why they would be a good choice to contain an internal, refined uranium or plutonium material of any given particle size that cycles from cold to hot.
But then again, self-fracturing of ceramic pebbles as a function of time/thermal cycles could indeed be a pretty nifty design feature if it facilitates fuel reprocessing without comprising reactor functioning. Pretty nifty design actually. /sarc 😳
If freezing to death in the dark saves one life than I’m all for it.
We shouldn’t concern ourselves with what China is doing or has done. They are liars and cheats. We need to move forward, no short cuts and do the best job we can.
It may indeed be that the US is behind China in Gen IV construction, after all, didn’t Obama give China all of the US’s technology soon after starting in office? However, the statement appears to be attempting to soften the impact since all reports are that the reactor actually started commercial operation late last year. Can China develop and build and start using, all within one year?
The CCP of the PRC always claims to be doing amazing things. Caveat emptor.
What does “demonstration” mean?
“… a low-power demonstration reactor to support development of Kairos Power’s fluoride salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor (KP-FHR) technology
The current target schedule for Hermes is to start construction in 2023 and to have the reactor operational in 2026.”
Note that construction seems to have started a year late.
There must be a timeline someplace, but a short search brought only vague ideas.
Anything nuclear power related is always late and runs over cost because of willfully ignorant know-nothings who protest and file lawsuits to try and stop it.
Of course it’s always everyone elses fault. Even hina is behind their nuclear plans while completing their renewable goals early. Guess they also have protests and lawsuits?
Construction is complicated, especially so for any first in its class project. The Chinese may not worry about protests, they simply do what the regime decides to do … but they still will run into construction and likely also operational problems to overcome with any new technology power plant. Just like everyone else.
With any new technology (energy or otherwise), the process of development usually begins with models-based design, then on to small or laboratory scale testing to test out the models … then on to demonstrator or pilot plant development to test the feasibility and make design refinements … and then when all of the kinks have been worked out, move on to full scale production via construction and operations.
After the first full scale plant goes into operation, then subsequent plants will benefit from the experience of operating the first full scale plant, with continual design tweaks.
Something wind and solar seem to have bypassed.
A tiny experimental reactor. With 35 MWth. And for this joke they get 303 million from the government. By the time this is finished the chinese will build 35MW wind turbines.But we don’t need no future technologies in the US, aren’t we?
Too bad it doesn’t produce electricity for your light.
Plan to != Has done
Like in: Nuclear plans to do renewables already do – to become the dominant form of energy.
You’re complaining that the NRC invested up to $303 million in performance based incentives (not just grants) in a renewable energy technology that has promise to dramatically reduce CO2 emissions, at the same time that the US Federal government has invested more than $16 billion in other types of renewable energy sources that are mostly NOT tied to achieving specific performance objectives, but get subsidized because they simply exist?
I thought you guys were all for renewable energy development. Apparently not .. you are only interested in investing in Unobtainium, not actually functioning energy producing systems.
Gee, one might conclude only that the warmunists are interested mainly in suppressing the existing 21st century economy by imposing shortages and high prices for energy.
Maybe you’ll get lucky and somebody will build a 35MW wind turbine next to your home. I’m sure you’ll love it.
Followed by a 140MWh battery full of lithium right next to the turbine. “Safe, sustainable environmentally friendly power” – words have lost all meaning and people will lie without any reservations.
I don’t care that China is first. I think all the China hate and push against China is insane and we are all going to be hurt by it. I know one thing I sure would like to buy one of those incredible EVs China is making at very affordable prices. They have also solved the charging time problems. They have set up stations across the nation that you drive into and in less than 7 min an automated robot from underneath the car takes your battery pack out and puts a new one in and you are off. BYD has an incredible luxury SUV for around 50 thousand dollars that would cost 120 thousand in the US. Don’t start saying that that is because of government subsidies because the US gives just as many subsidies to GM and other car companies. Biden gave GM and others billions of dollars to roll out EVs in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act and our wonderful car companies gave their investors the money in the form of stock buybacks. We are living in very sad times in the US. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqhTRQ–x_Q
Chinese EVs are self immolation at a rate of greater than 21,000 A year. The “Cheap” Chinese EVs are truly nothing but glorified golf carts with motors capable of 17-24 mph and batteries capable of 25 miles. That’s why they’re so cheap.
Check them out
https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=cheap+chinese+electric+vehicles+
I guess slave labour is not a problem for you.
From the quoted Interesting Engineering excerpt given in the above article:
“Molten fluoride salts have ‘excellent chemical stability and tremendous capacity for transferring heat,’ per the report, meaning it stays cooler and dissipates heat much faster than the light water that has been used for so long in American reactors.”
The mention of tremendous capacity for heat transfer is simply false in terms of practical engineering principles.
Lithium fluoride/beryllium fluoride (FLiBe) is the preferred primary coolant for fluoride salt-cooled high temperature reactors (FHRs). FLiBe has a 2:1 ratio of lithium fluoride to beryllium fluoride, with the mix having a melting point of about 460 °C.
The design operating temperature of molten salt in nuclear reactors is typically in the range between 600 to 800 degrees Celsius so there is no phase change in the molten salts occurring as they circulate in the primary cooling loop as part of a nuclear reactor’s overall thermodynamic cycle.
The specific heat capacity of molten lithium fluoride is about 1.56 J/g-K and the specific heat of molten beryllium fluoride is about 2.45 J/g·K, thus yielding an average specific heat for the targeted mix for nuclear reactors of about 1.86 J/g·K
In contrast, the specific heat of liquid water is 4.18 J/g-K (about 2.2 times greater than FLiBe), hence FLiBe hardly deserves mention of “tremendous capacity”.
N.B.: in the case of molten fluoride-cooled nuclear reactors, as well as for light water-cooled nuclear reactors, a primary loop-to-secondary loop heat exchanger is used so that high pressure, high temperature liquid water in either secondary loop can be converted to steam to drive the power plants generator turbine(s).
It is not the specific heat capacity of molten salts as compared to liquid water that makes them more efficient. It is the much higher operating temperatures at very low operating pressures which makes the secondary coolant system – a carnot cycle thermal plant – more efficient, and also safer than PWR plants. The low operating pressure makes the primary coolant loop and reactor far less susceptible to loss of coolant accidents … and the higher primary coolant operating temperature without a coolant phase change also makes the reactor far less susceptible to damage from LOCA. It is the phase change in PWR reactors that greatly increases the risk posed by LOCA, because the steam bubble that forms with a LOCA does not effectively cool the core like liquid water. Specific heat capacity is mass based.
TILT!
The secondary cooling system, which drives the turbines in the plant’s electricity generators, does not operate with good overall efficiency when its operating pressure is “very low”.
Most importantly, operating pressure directly determines the amount of superheat (temperature above NBP) the liquid water part of the cooling loop can support. For example, at a pressure of 500 psia the water will remain in liquid phase up to 459 deg-F, whereas at 100 psia pressure the water will remain in liquid phase only up to 327 deg-F. It is critical that the secondary coolant loop water not boil prior to being injected into the steam turbine section. Turbine efficiency is directly related to the amount of superheat the injected water has because it directly determines its volume expansion ratio as it converts to steam prior to aerodynamically driving the turbine.
Also, lower steam pressures mean larger turbines, which in turn means higher mass, larger external surface area with higher associated heat loss, and generally higher turbine cost for the same amount of output power.
Also, much higher operating temperatures in the secondary cooling loop means necessary increases in component material stresses (yield strength of metals decreases with increasing temperatures) unless their pressure containment wall thicknesses are increased, which in turn means higher mass, larger external surface area with higher associated heat loss, and generally higher cooling loop cost for the same amount of output power.
Last but certainly not least, a secondary cooling loop that drives a steam turbine operates on a Rankine thermodynamic cycle, NOT a Carnot thermodynamic cycle.
Does not matter which cycle, it’s basic thermal hydraulics that the higher the operating temperatures (leading to a greater delta T) the higher the efficiency.
Typical reactors are only 30% efficient. China’s molten salt reactors are at about 50%, even though they are the first run, and CCGTs, which are basically jet engines running at thousands of degrees can reach 65% efficient!!!
Gonna have to look that one up.
Hmmmm . . . that certainly doesn’t appear to be the case with magnetic plasma fusion machines (e.g., Tokamak devices) which contain plasma at a typical temperature of around 150 million °C yet can’t even produce net energy output.
About a mile and a half south of Hermes is a wind turbine graveyard where an entrepreneur is developing a way to recycle turbine blades. Talk about irony.
I suspect his business is “booming”, as they say.