It is time for Light Water Reactors to be phased out. America has enough experience with Fast Neutron Spectrum reactors to get seriously in the game of industrializing Gen IV technology. Consider the Experimental Breeder Reactor II, the IFR, and others. Pro fossil fuel lobbyists have strangled U.S. progress in Fast Reactors through political means; making insurance, licensing, and investment very difficult to obtain for new designs. They have managed to keep America saddled with a Gen III Light Water Reactor approach and technology that is now pushing 60 years old. Sticking with these legacy Gen III reactors means risking another Fukushima scale accident.
Sticking with Light Water Reactors for another 10 to 30 years will insure the burning of fossil fuels for another several decades when compared to adoption of Fast Gen IV reactors. More Gen III reactor use means more mining and enriching of uranium, more stockpiling of LWR spent fuel and depleted uranium, and more continuous defueling and fueling of spent fuel rods. Further, because Gen III is much capable of having a meltdown accident than Gen IV, Gen III is more expensive to license and insure. Additionally, Gen IV has a cheap and abundant fuel supply, that being 770,000 tons of SNF and DU left over from Gen III plants, which simultaneously decreases the costly burden of disposing of SNF and DU. Unfortunately, Gen III reactors produce tons of nuclear waste that has to be expensively processed and stored.
All of these issues increases the cost of Gen III nuclear, as they have for 60 years, creating an environment most beneficial to Big Fossil Fuels. Indeed, licensing hearings are being closed to the public on the question of weather or not the government should give Gen III nuclear plant operators another 60 year licensing of their 60 year old approach. This is a disaster.

Many American companies, and many countries like France, Germany, India, Russia, China, and others are all investing in, testing, and manufacturing Gen IV Fast reactors and associated technology. General Atomics is building and marketing High Temp Helium Cooled Fast reactors. Toshiba’s 4S modular fast reactor is scheduled to be installed in Galena Alaska. Siemen’s fast reactor technology is being sold to China. Already having run two test fast reactors, China is planning to build 10 – 30 new fast reactors. Russia has had experience with fast reactors since the dawn of the cold war. Their Alpha class attack subs used sodium cooled fast reactors. India’s three step nuclear energy employs the Thorium fuel cycle in India’s fast reactor nuclear energy program.

In the 1970′s America was about to replace its Gen III reactor plants with Gen IV designs. However, Three Mile Island led to the shutdown of our ongoing research fast reactor tests, and tabled the whole idea o moving to Gen IV. A failure of Gen III led to the abandoning of Gen IV, which ironically meant that America would continue using Gen III for another 30 years! Big Fossil Fuels benefit.

companies and countries

The time required for a breeder reactor to produce enough material to fuel a second reactor is called its doubling time, and present design plans target about ten years as a doubling time. A reactor could use the heat of the reaction to produce energy for 10 years, and at the end of that time have enough fuel to fuel another reactor for 10 years.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene/fasbre.html

And that is based on a waste to fuel breeding cycle of 1.2

Anyone got any confirmed, peer-reviewed higher values than that?

I asked the question partly out of simple curiousity, but also because I was interested in the claim others have made about the waste being a valuable material in itself. Certainly, there are some valuable materials there if they could be extracted. So I tried to find current commodity prices for the solid elements, to estimate the resource value of the waste.

Warning: This is a very dodgy calculation! There aren’t really markets for the most valuable constituents, I don’t know which of these are radioactive and hence unusable, or, alternatively, more valuable for that, and the separation would no doubt be difficult and expensive, would the price of the rarest elements collapse with new supply, values are for the elements whereas their compounds are probably cheaper, etc.

Anyway, for what its worth, the value of 1 ton of waste on the figures I could find is about US$3.5m.

Half of that value is just in the technetium, which has no stable isotopes so does not occur on earth, and which ORNL is currently selling at $60/g. Next come caesium ($10/g), rubidium ($25/g) ruthenium ($5.90/g), and palladium ($15/g). That accounts for about 20% of the waste, and the rest of little value.

Barry described it as a variant of the IFR that has been discussed here, but its a very different reactor concept. While its a liquid sodium cooled metal fueled fast reactor using the same uranium-plutonium fuel cycle, the organization of the nuclear reaction in the form of a wavefront propagating through a slug of fuel is very different to a homogeneously burning core.

There’s a presentation from Terrapower here that gives a bit more of an explanation. They envisage a core composed of many rods in a toroidal configuration, rather than a single slug.

Some things I don’t get about this design:

* How stable is the propagating wavefront? There are a variety of instabilities this sort of mechanism is prone to that could cause the wave to propagate unevenly (say, any density variations in the fuel rods, or phase separation of the fission products).
* How do you control the reaction? Can you shut it down? Can you start it up again?
* How do you sense the state of the burn in a rod, to control it?

The Terrapower design has about a 20% burnup, according to their presentation. I think thats about the burnup achieved in the S-PRISM IFR design before the rods get removed for fuel recycling by pyroprocessing, about once a year. I guess in the Terrapower design you have to wait 60 years to do this.

This looks like a tricky design, and they haven’t gone further than simulations so far. There’s a long road ahead.

To that end I must congratulate Barry on his sustained education campaign on Gen 1V reactors, again keeping an open mind until such time as they may be worked up as a viable, working prospect.

Today I came across a seemingly new technology – entitled Terrapower by the corporate team that is promoting it. See: http://www.intellectualventures.com/docs/terrappower/IV_Introducing%20TerraPower_February%202010.pdf

Has anyone got any background on this and how different would this technology be to the IFR technology that has been expounded through this blog site?

Nitpick: The Chinese variants of the AP1000 are the CAP1400 and CAP1700.

The CPR-1000s, are “French-derived three-loop units … without major modification, now called CPR-1000, or ‘improved Chinese PWR’, and designated Generation II+…”
The Chinese are building, or planning to build, about 40 of them.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf63.html

Then your fate is going to be to join the other failed movements that were convinced that Revelation was just around the corner. History is littered with such, the most glaring example being those that are waiting for the Rapture to make the world right.

Nuclear energy will not take its place in a world run by fossil-fuel interests, because someone in power notices some group of nerds circle-jerking over some advanced reactor design, particularly when it is blatantly obvious that few of them have any real background in science or engineering, and are engaged in flights-of-fancy debates on subjects they really know very little about.

Real political change is hard, messy, and tiresome work, that needs commitment and a tough ego to carry out. If you want to see how it is done, just look at our opposition. How many pronuclear supporters are there pamphleteering on the street, or on school campuses? How many letter writing campaigns have you seen to support nuclear energy. Vermont Yankee is going to be shut down because a HANDFUL OF LOUDMOUTHS, and little else, while the pronuclear movement is wringing its hands, and the one lone blogger on the issue has a Canadian as her most regular commenter.

The worse thing is that without much effort on our part, nuclear energy is now looking better to the population than it has in the last thirty years, but the people are fickle, and it is not a given that things will stay this way, never mind improve. The antinuclear movement has been caught with its pants down, and were shocked that they could not simply drag the old shibboleths out for an airing, to make it go away. But don’t think they are not regrouping and aren’t capable of making thing hot again, because the do know the value of working the hustings, and the importance of managing public opinion.

Look at thorium, here is a golden opportunity to pitch it as “Green Nuclear”, the press picked up on it almost by itself, but there is nobody following up, nobody recruiting those that are willing to force change. Instead the place that should serve as thorium’s central organ, is almost devoid of discussion or planning the steps needed to bring this design to the fore. Do the people that post there harbor a fantasy, that when the day comes, engineers are going to be searching through the archives looking for ideas from those that are writing there now, especially from the ones that seem to have no grasp of nuclear chemistry, or nucleonics?

At least here on BNC there seems to be an understanding that the politics are the important thing right now , a perspective that is sadly lacking elsewhere in the pronuclear web.