Oh man, I just watched the Q&A part of the SlowTV debate where Barry and Mark went head to head, and THEN this nutter from the crowd starts ranting about the USA as the largest terrorist organisation on earth and Barry just said “That’s a bit crazy for me, I won’t go there”.

The risks of live debate in front of a crowd encouraged to ask questions. Well done Barry. I have some sympathy for some of Mark’s previous work, but ultimately just want the problem solved. Whatever does the job in a given context hey?

“Today you’re always refuelling the reactor, so you have lots of people and lots of controls that could go wrong. That thing where you are opening it up and moving things in and out, that’s, that’s NOT GOOD! (Audience laughs). So if you have very cheap fuel, then you can put 60 years in, just think of it as a log, put it down and not have those same complexities, and it just sits there and burns for 60 years and then you’re done.”

So unlike IFR’s TWR’s have not been tested? OK, interesting. Gates was trying to sell the idea that leaving a rod there 60 years was better than the current fuel cycles we run each year, saying that “moving fuel in and waste out of reactors is a bad thing” which got a laugh from the TED audience. As a Simpson’s view (with my son of course) I even appreciated the point. Less moving parts for the Homer’s to bugger up.

But if you’re talking about this TWR not being built or tested (and that’s a 60 year test!??), AND having significant waste to be dealt with all in one hit at the end, then maybe it is safer to process it in smaller, self-contained safer units as we go. Lock it away in Synrock and let it sit in a basement under a Police Academy or Military Base, or at least the local police station, to save on security monitoring costs over the 500 year period.

Then at the end of that 500 year period, I’d recommend the nuclear PR people put up a big sign: “Another 1000 tons of waste safe!” (Or how much of the original Gen1 & 2 waste they processed).

Waste, safety, proliferation and most of all the economics were the main concerns I had with nuclear. This blog has removed the first 3 concerns for me… but I remain agnostic about the 4th… but hey? In a world with multiple advances in multiple energy scenarios, time will tell.

So far there is very little in the way of hard numbers for this reactor, and it is easy to find plenty of breathless hype, and difficult to find any rational discussions of the downsides.

I wrote elsewhere that at the moment the only thing they have is computer models, and I’m not so sure they can be relied on to predict the behavior of this assembly for its full 60+ design life.

As well it will produce several tens of tonnes of spent fuel, which will not be in easy form to handle, and will remain very hot for at least a couple of hundred years after the fuel is exhausted, and the unit retired. Thus it will most likely need to be buried on the spot, a factor that will limit where one can be placed.

And God help us if Gates insists that the controls run on Windows.

Watch the 20 minute talk and then stick around for the Q&A because he makes a claim I’m not sure about… that the Travelling Wave Reactor takes today’s nuclear waste and burns it for 60 years… so far so good.

Then he says they can take the reprocessed waste from the TWR and put it in the next one! Is that true? This may be sold to greenies on a NO WASTE platform! Forget storing the 10% waste for 500 years, this technology has NO waste? Is this just a case of a software guy not quite understanding what the TWR experts were explaining to him?

http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html

I would need a whole ‘nuther session to get stuck into the ‘all renewables’ argument, but figured if I tried to go down that line, I’d only do it in a half-arsed way and end up sounding even weaker than if I left it alone (as I basically did). It was a nuclear energy debate first and foremost, after all.

However, in question time, I thought the affirmatives absolutely wiped the floor with the negatives, exemplified by the exchange over Germany.

http://www.themonthly.com.au/debate-should-nuclear-power-be-response-climate-change-2270

Diesendorf’s mic was not working properly and question time was not fully captured. Both a conspiracy to hide the truth, no doubt.

If I remember, when the Gates TED talk comes out I’ll link to it somewhere on your blog.

BTW — good work on the Brisbane Institute Debate, and just because I’m still hoping Renewables can one day come in cheaper, baseload, and less politically charged than Nuclear, it doesn’t mean I’m a climate sceptic! ;-)

This blog has removed much of my instinctive antagonism towards nuclear. However I’ve seen so many papers about the hidden costs and externalities about so many different forms of energy… I’m having an epistemological breakdown about anyone in energy ever honestly being able to remember all the costs and include all the externalities.

So many renewable systems are incrementally improving and scaling and costs are coming down, that I guess the MAIN message I’m getting, as a former peak oil Malthusian, is that there are SO MANY fossil fuel alternatives that we’ll get by somehow. (As long as we don’t trigger some of the scarier “Carbon bombs” or global warming feedbacks along the way).

What’s the major edge the TWR has? It’s got the $$ support of Bill Gates…

Hang on… are you talking about coal-waste? Don’t they turn fly ash into concrete and various other uses?

Barry has explained a number of times that we could run the WHOLE WORLD on today’s nuclear waste for 700 years. Now I don’t know if they’re going to discover cheap inexhaustible Polywell fusion, or some super-battery that makes solar & wind more competitive, or what exactly is going to happen in energy over 700 years…

But it seems to me that until we have a better idea for the waste, we should at least build a few dozen Gen3 reactors in the USA to start the long process of munching through the existing waste!

And again, I’d love to see commentary by people grounded in the nuclear physics and history of nuclear as to whether or not the Travelling Wave Reactor is a pipe dream or a viable nuclear reality we have just yet to build.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor