MIT competition update – 3 days left, votes needed!

Posted on 28 August 2013 by Barry Brook

Below is an update on the MIT competition that I highlighted in the last BNC post, including a plea for final action. There are only 3 days left to register your support, and in my opinion, this really counts. The winner will get in front of potential implementers at the Crowds & Climate Conference in November at MIT Boston, and will be heavily publicized through mainstream media.

Read Ron Gester’s summary of the current situation (below), and if you’re convinced, then help by doing some final networking. Voting ends this Saturday, August 31, at midnight EDT!

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Guest Post by Ron Gester M.D. The Treasurer and a co-founder of SCGI, Ron is a retired emergency physician and geologist, who is a passionate about solving the climate change problem.

For several weeks I (Ron Gester) have been encouraging everyone I can find to vote for Tom Blees’ Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) proposal at the MIT Climate CoLab competition. It has been a thought provoking exercise on many levels. As revealed in the below graph, our closest competitor is titled “EE based formalization.” It is a proposal to improve the energy efficiency of illegal substandard buildings in Montenegro and it is being promoted by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

MIT_comp28Aug

We probably all agree that improving energy efficiency is a good idea. Indeed, their program might even prove to be a role model in some other parts of the world. However, as a plan for combating the global challenge of climate change, it is difficult to imagine that it would have any significant impact. So this provokes the question: “Why is it doing so well in this competition?“

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Filed under: Hot News, Nuclear, Policy | 4 Comments »

Vote to get the Integral Fast Reactor presented at MIT!

Posted on 15 August 2013 by Barry Brook

Mass-producible integral fast reactor modules can power every country on earth for nearly a millennium with waste products already at hand. That’s the pitch that Tom Blees has made to the Climate CoLab at MIT. If Tom’s pitch garners the most votes, the push to get the first PRISM built will get a lot more traction in the US, and with the public.

The PRISM is an unusual case. Since the EBR-II was shut down in 1994, GE had it sitting on a shelf with a small group of engineers combing over the design and tweaking and optimizing it, piece by piece. It was a low priority at GE and these guys laboured in obscurity, with a succession of people moving in and out of the project over the nearly two decades. But with all that optimization of every part of the system, the PRISM is now so ready to build that GE could make an offer to build them for the UK, right NOW. Such an offer, especially from a company as conservative as GE, displayed an enormous amount of confidence in its readiness to build the PRISM. This design process that’s lasted since the early 90s is why we call PRISM the best reactor never built.

Anyway, here are some more details. Please BNC readers, do register and vote. This really is worth 5 minutes of your time!

Vote for Tom Blees to give a talk at MIT on how
“Integral Fast Reactors Can Power the Planet”

In a proposal for MIT’s Climate CoLab, Tom Blees, president of SCGI, explains that “Mass-producible integral fast reactor modules can power every country on earth for nearly a millennium with waste products already at hand. “

The goal of the Climate CoLab is to harness the collective intelligence of thousands of people from all around the world to address global climate change.

Tom’s proposal has made it into the final round of judging and is now being voted on by the public. If it either garners sufficient votes or is supported by the judges, Tom will be invited to present the proposal at an MIT conference in November 2013. Previous winners have sometimes been given the opportunity to present their proposals to the UN and the US Congress.

If you’d like to read the proposal and support it with your vote, you can find it here. On the right side of that site you will see a link to vote, which requires a brief registration procedure:

  1. Make sure to put at least 8 characters in your password.
  2. No spaces in your screen name.
  3. The bio and photo are entirely optional, you can disregard those fields.

When talking with people about Integral Fast Reactor technology, people often ask where they might find a brief written explanation. Tom’s proposal on the MIT site is a great place to direct friends and acquaintances who might be interested in learning about it. The proposal provides a succinct overview of both the technology itself and the grand vision of what its use can mean for humanity. Besides introducing them to the IFR concepts, directing them to the proposal on the MIT site (via personal email, Facebook, etc.) will also give them the opportunity to support the proposal and increase the likelihood that the message will reach a much wider audience.

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Filed under: Hot News, IFR FaD, Nuclear | 5 Comments »

Nuclear Waste Part 4: The choice … waste into fuel OR renewable wastelands

Posted on 1 August 2013 by Barry Brook

This is the final in a four part series on nuclear waste which has run on BraveNewClimate.com over a four-day period, authored by Geoff Russell. Go here for Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

I conclude the series by discussing why nuclear waste is such a valuable resource and also cleans up a few related issues surrounding waste and concerns about waste.

Recycling is so sensible…

It’s only waste if you don’t use it

While there are no shortage of excellent ways of disposing of nuclear waste, there are even better reasons to not dispose of it at all. Which is perhaps why the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) requires that all waste be recoverable for the first 50 years after it is disposed of. Other countries have similar requirements.

Think about this requirement … very carefully … what’s it for?

It’s rather like requiring nuclear waste be stuffed in the back of your bottom drawer instead of really being thrown out because you never know when it might come in handy.

This is because most nuclear waste will only be waste until such time as what are called fast neutron reactors are rolled out. At which time nuclear fuel waste will no longer be waste, but a highly valued fuel and the NRC is clearly betting on this eventuality. More than a few countries have built these reactors. They work. The Russians used them in nuclear submarines for decades and are hoping to have a scaled up demonstration unit by 2017. Other fast reactors are due to be completed in China before 2020 following the completion of a small Chinese prototype in 2011. Commercialisation at scale is a question of “when” rather than “if”.

Current reactors only extract about one percent of the energy available in uranium. Fast neutron reactors can exploit the other 99 percent. What’s left after this second pass is an even smaller amount of waste material that is even easier to deal with.

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Filed under: Impacts, Nuclear | 3 Comments »

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