Molten Salt Reactor Claims Melt Down Under Scrutiny
powermag.com
powermag.com
The theory and simulations all lined up. But we still were cautious about claiming any sort of breakthrough, because we needed empirical experiments to prove the theory. And the government doesn't just hand out SNF (as my Navy Nuke classmate learned when he asked the Pentagon).
The most exciting thing at the ANS student conference at the time was a presentation by a German Graduate student and her work on ceramic cladding of fuel rods. So, its an industry that doesn't naturally lend itself to hype.
SNF : Spent Nuclear Fuel
In addition, it now specifies that the design “does not reduce existing stockpiles of spent nuclear fuel” or use them as its fuel source.
To me that was the most inspiring aspect of this idea. I'd still one day hope to have a nuclear reactor in my back yard, but to realise that dream we've got to keep the science as well as the engineering on point.
If nuclear scientists goof like this, it does not inspire confidence to the public and all we will end up is projects like Shoreham.
To be fair, the claims were made by grad students. Good on them for experimenting, hoping, testing, and failing. The true calamity would have never been to test.
Their failure is not a reflection of their character, ambition, or talent. Well perhaps a little bit their talent. But they could've done like many (most, arguably) grad students and worked on some fundamentally useless but "safe" path to ongoing work in the Ivory tower.
So let's hope they keep trying to identify and test the hard problems whose resolution would improve life for humans, and do better next time.
Grad students should know the basic physics of their respective subfields.
Long Island is literally an island. Power generation costs are currently insane, and have always been insane, because it's expensive to move fuel onto the island. Nuclear really made sense, economically. (It's much cheaper to move fuel rods across the sound than to do the same with liquified gas.)
Because Long Island is also 100% completely impossible to evacuate in the event of a Fukushima-grade accident, NIMBYs killed the project. Unfortunately the project was killed after it was constructed. The entire construction cost is still being paid by electrical consumers today, decades later. It never served a single hour in revenue service.
Shoreham was closed because the oil industry spread propaganda to activate and empower a NIMBY crowd. It had very little to do with real risks.
A friend of mine (also an alum) refers to it as "the magazine of things that will never happen".
inally, who cares about reprocessing fuel? At this time naturally abundant U235 prices are so low and projected to continue to be low for this century that all this effort to recycle fuel and burn longer seems completely unwarranted on market principles, despite how cool and hip it sounds to "close the fuel cycle" or produce "100 times" less waste. Last I checked, fuel and disposal was a tiny fraction of the real costs of nuclear electricity, and certainly far smaller of an engineering problem than the public likes to believe.
I wasn't aware that anyone had solved the problem of spent fuel. last I knew there were thousands of tons of the stuff sitting around in swimming pools next to reactors all over the country/world. I don't recall the status of the project to bury the stuff under mountain in Nevada either, but I don't think that plan is approved.
WTF is wrong with breeder reactors that consume the otherwise spent fuel? Yeah, yeah, proliferation risk. If the stuff is that hard to contain then why all the waste sitting around?
It's harder to contain than to process from waste.
You need advanced expensive tech to turn the waste into weapons-grade material. If we don't create it, the nasty material doesn't exist and has lower security risk.
They turned out to be uneconomic, is all. Perhaps that will change at some point.
Yeah, yeah, proliferation risk. If the stuff is that hard to
contain then why all the waste sitting around?
But maybe that's just a misperception on my part.
Before Beowulf clusters, building supercomputers required tremendous expertise. The U.S. thought it could keep China from building supercomputers by controlling the export of supercomputers and supercomputing-enabling technology. But once supercomputing moved to clusters of commodity hardware, most of those export controls became useless almost overnight. China didn't spontaneously develop an expertise in chip design and fabrication; rather, because of the technological shift in the West, supercomputing know-how and equipment simply became impossible to contain.
Because of our lack of intelligence assets, China and North Korean have done spectacularly well. Pakistan got away with selling nuclear plans for years without our knowledge. There's probably all manner of less complex projects underway that U.S. intelligence is oblivious to.
Like China and North Korea, Iran is something of an outlier. Israel has long had strong intelligence assets in Iran, and in addition to benefiting from those, the U.S. seems to have been able to beef up SIGINT fairly quickly with arguably better than usually results.
It's highly dependent on the technology and the country in question. Sure, at the end of the day it's impossible to keep the genie in the bottle. But the goal is never forever. A country's strategic interests always have an implicit time component. If you can suppress tech long enough for a "rogue" state to become a respectable player in the international system, then you've won. Long enough might be only a few years.
Conversely, if you can develop tech faster than the U.S. can learn about _and_ act upon it, you've won. North Korea won that race, and might have been able to win it even without China protecting it. And how did North Korea win that race? Largely with exogenous skill, importing Soviet talent after the fall of the USSR.
Also, need I remind anyone the intelligence disaster that was both 9/11 and the Iraq War? It's not so much that the intelligence community was wrong, but that there's rarely any certainty in their assessments. If you don't know for certain that something is true, how do you justify your policy decisions? It gets muddy very quickly.
I don't think that's fair. Maybe China and North Korea have done well because there are knowledgeable and determined who live and work in those countries.
> Pakistan got away with selling nuclear plans for years without our knowledge.
How do you know that?
I don't think that's fair. Maybe China and North Korea have
done well because there are knowledgeable and determined who
live and work in those countries.
How do you know that?
However, for whatever reason the Illuminati saw fit to disclose that Pakistan sold nuclear secrets to North Korea; which apparently went on for over decade before the initial disclosure; that many high-level U.S. officials (politicians, appointees, and civil servants alike) went [apparently] apoplectic upon disclosure; and that the fall-out seemed to be widespread and persistent.
We also "know" that South Africa had the bomb and Israel has the bomb. And despite official denials it seems clear that Israel, minimally, had the tacit approval of the U.S. if not outright assistance, and that South Africa's program was also under surveillance at the time. In other words, once details of these programs became publicly known it also became publicly known shortly afterward the extent to which the U.S. knew about those developments. In the case of the Pakistan sale of nuclear secrets, and in multiple situations wrt North Korea and China, by all public accounts the U.S. was and still is often readily taken by surprise. There are plenty other historical examples (including recent examples) of the U.S. being taken by surprise, although obviously not all were so strategically consequential.
(An interesting insight into late cold-war politics is that it was the Soviet Union that tipped off the United States that South Africa was preparing to test a weapon).
What's not known is how much he was engaging in nuclear proliferation with the permission of the government, or which parts of the government were helping him. Pakistan's warring security agencies make the current US dispute between the CIA and FBI over Trump and the Russians look like amateurs.
Now did the CIA believe that Sadam would have re-built them the first chance he got? Very probably.
(and ok i guess technically they could still be buried out in the desert somewhere, has this been ruled out?)
The case for the Iraq War was made on the back of a single informant, an informant that most Western intelligence agencies (including Israel) believed not particularly credible. The CIA also, initially, didn't believe that informant very credible. However, Cheney & Co went hunting for evidence, dredged it up, packaged it, and sold it as a "slam dunk" to the previously incredulous Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet. It's only by dint of Tenet being Director can we say that the CIA believed the justification behind the Iraq War.
TL,DR; Iran vs SaudiArabia turns with nukes into, Iran <-> Iran and SaudiArabia vs SaudiArabia.
Short term gain is long term pain.
Rare, but it does happen.
I found the experimental Oak Ridge one that's talked about in the article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment
..but I thought there was one fully operational and connected to the grid for years before it was shut down. I can't seem to find that one though.
India and China need thorium power. It is non-proliferation fuel and is abundant in these two countries.
It could be the biggest factor bringing down pollution in the world's two fastest growing economies with massive demand for power.
The debunked claim is just that they could get uranium fuel utilization comparable to a fast reactor, using a reactor operating mainly in the thermal spectrum. None of the other projects make that claim; either they actually are fast reactors (Moltex, Terrapower), they claim much lower fuel utilization (Terrestrial Energy), or they plan to run on thorium.
You may be thinking about the Shippingport reactor which used solid Thorium fuel for a while. [1]
As for corrosion, molten salt reactor chemistry is complicated but we think we understand most of the key issues, at least with flibe salts. When an atom fissions, it becomes one of hundreds of different fission products, and that's why the chemistry gets tough. Only a few are really bad actors though, from a chemical standpoint.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shippingport_Atomic_Power_Stat...
"Nuclear Energy Startup Transatomic Backtracks on Key Promises" https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603731/nuclear-energy-sta...
2x the energy per ton of uranium is decent, but I wonder how they ever thought they could get 75x.
I remember some figure that coal fired plants cost about half as much to build as nuclear plants. I could be wrong. But if true there might not be that much fat to cut out of nuke designs in general.
How does de-construction cost and transport/storage cost for nuclear waste (including the remains of decommissioned plants) fare? I can't believe it's negligible.
what of the claimed safety benefits? and how completely can it use up new fuel (thus reducing its own waste)?
Do you wrap all the pipes & pumps in heat tape?
So they are unlikely to ever get cold enough to solidify, and if they do, can be melted with external energy.
And yes, they do insulate the pipes. So heat from the reactor would eventually flow and melt all the salt.
75x should have been the red flag from the first mention, it's such a huge figure. It's not like they are switching from fission to fusion.
But Transatomic isn't a fast reactor.
So, if you read it again, you can see that another way to parse the sentence is with "claims" as the noun and "melt down" as the verb. Now it's makes perfect sense because molten salt reactors are still in experimental form.
I dunno, seems like a fine title to me. Maybe you are not actually reading every word from the title?
Yes they do.
> Plus, why would a reactor be claiming that it's melting down?
Maybe they were lying before? It's definitely confusing, but the title parses correctly that way, so it's not obvious that a different word is the verb.
Are MSRs less likely to melt down? Why do people say they don't?
MSRs and other advanced reactors have passive decay heat removal by making use of different coolants (molten salt, liquid metal, etc.) and natural circulation air heat exchangers.
In reality, it's just an energy startup's exaggerated performance claims that "melted down" (were proven incorrect) when examined by the community.
A molten salt engine is going to be molten when everything's fine!
Please don't demand the dumbing-down of content for everyone else because you want to be spoon-fed.
I'm a native English speaker. In retrospect, I see how the title is supposed to read - but that is not how I initially read it - and it took me several times to actually realize that 'claims' was not the verb.
And yes, my tone might be a bit aggressive, but people making trivial complaints about titles has been on the rise at HN recently. I've been hanging around here for years, and it's never been a problem before. You then talk about (horror!) having to read the first two sentences of the article to realise that it's not in fact a nuclear meltdown, though really you should have realised there wasn't a nuclear meltdown when it mentioned students a dozen words in.
Besides, reading it the way you're suggesting would mean that the supposed nuclear meltdown was caused by the scrutiny, which is just nonsensical.
This is what frustrates me into making these comments; that people prefer to be spoon-fed content rather than use their brain a little.
http://www.ajc.com/news/local/dekalb-jail-says-the-biggest-m...
Anyway you're getting really picky now. I've demonstrated that inanimate locations can "say" things by the standards of headline-writers, so I'm done. It was flat-out wrong to imply such a thing is a non-fluent mistake.
Also you should stop conflating "has a pun" and "is a garden-path sentence" in your other line of conversation, thanks. You're mostly arguing for the former there, other people are arguing against the latter, and they are totally orthogonal.
Yeah, a niche journal targeting the power industry should be careful not to instill momentary panic in their specialist readership that way. They should definitely use the blandest terms possible.
It's just another reason why these complaints about titles are irritating - people demand titles for the general public from sources catering to specialists, implying that it's bad journalism to do otherwise.
> by the standards of headline-writers, so I'm done
If you were going by the standards of headline-writers, you wouldn't have started here. This kind of headline has been par for the course for almost as long as there's been headlines.
I like the pun. The pun is great. My dislike of the garden-path sentence has nothing to do with the pun. I do not want bland terms at all. Pun headlines are standard, garden-path ones are not.
If there had only been one claim then "Molten Salt Reactor Claim Melts Down Under Scrutiny" would be a great headline. Witty but not grammatically confusing.
Apologies if the title has been changed since initial comments. Otherwise, probably the case of "mentally read beginning and end of sentence" :). [and yes, journalists seem to have love of puns and 'puns' that others can only groan at... my favourite in IT is of course The Register, which can raise a stink in the room just by listing the headlines;-]
I'll skip over the 170 human fatalities and mention:
> Environmental damage (including bird deaths)
> 203 cases of environmental damage have been reported – the majority since 2007. This is perhaps due to a change in legislation or new reporting requirement. All involved damage to the site itself, or reported damage to or death of wildlife. 66 instances reported here include confirmed deaths of protected species of bird. Deaths, however, are known to be far higher. At the Altamont Pass windfarm alone, 2400 protected golden eagles have been killed in 20 years, and about 10,000 protected raptors (Dr Smallwood, 2004). In Germany, 32 protected white tailed eagles were found dead, killed by wind turbines (Brandenburg State records). In Australia, 22 critically endangered Tasmanian eagles were killed by a single windfarm (Woolnorth). Further detailed information can be found at: www.iberica2000.org/Es/Articulo.asp?Id=3071 and at: www.iberica2000.org/Es/Articulo.asp?Id=1875
> 600,000 bats were estimated to be killed by US wind turbines in 2012 alone. 1.4 million bird fatalities per annum are estimated if the US reaches it’s 20% target for wind generation.
Solar farms are known to cause similar damage to wildlife. For example: http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/12918/20150223/solar...
> Unfortunately, though, anything that happens to wander too close to a boiling tower is very rapidly cooked by the focused sunlight. Workers at the Ivanpah solar power plant call these birds “streamers,” as they ignite in midair and plummet to the ground trailing smoke. Federal wildlife investigators said there was, on average, one streamer every two minutes — or hundreds of thousands of incinerated birds per year. Another expert estimated that the number is nearer 28,000 per year. BrightSource’s own estimate is around 1,000 roasted birds per year. BrightSource is reportedly looking to build an even-larger power plant, which wildlife officials say could be “four times as dangerous” to birds. BrightSource has offered $1.8 million in compensation for the expected bird deaths.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188328-californias-new-s...
"69 were public fatalities, including workers not directly dependent on the wind industry (e.g. transport workers). 17 bus passengers were killed in one single incident in Brazil in March 2012 ; 4 members of the public were killed in an aircraft crash in May 2014 and a further three members of the public killed in a transport accident in September 2014 ."
That is, if people were workers travelling to a wind farm in the course of their employement, their RTA counts as a "wind farm accident".
(170 people is almost the exact number of fatalities caused by the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster, for scale)
The RSPB is not against wind farms provided they are sensibly sited: https://www.rspb.org.uk/our-work/our-positions-and-campaigns...
Some uranium mines now are little more than a pair of wells; one pumps water down to a uranium deposit, the other pulls back up water with uranium dissolved in it.
Because uranium is water soluble, it exists in vast quantities in the ocean. If we combined fast uranium reactors with seawater extraction, then nuclear would be a renewable resource with a very light footprint.
Also, remark on deaths caused in comparison if you don't feel that that's too hard to defend.
I'm not 100% sold on nuclear as being a panacea, but it is hardly a waste of time.
If you got 100% of your energy as an average American (transportation, electricity, heat, etc.) for your entire life, you'd consume 1.5 soda cans of nuclear fuel. The tiny footprint associated with this incredible resource is why nuclear matters.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densitie...
There are other companies (FLIBE, Lightbridge) researching LFTR MSR that have promise. Just because some grad students made ridiculous claims, it shouldn't throw shade on the whole industry.