Nuclear Reactor Renaissance
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
> Some analysts have expressed doubts that the EPR is the world's safest reactor. Their main concern is the spent fuel: The reactor's higher burn-up rate makes the waste more radioactive, raising concerns about proliferation.
They got this exactly backwards. Higher burn-up rate makes the spent fuel even harder to use for nuclear weapons, by screwing up the isotopic mix. The way you make weapons-grade plutonium is to construct special reactors designed for very low burn-up. And then I come to this gem:
> Despite its higher temperature, the reactor operates at one-fifth the power of a PWR. That reduced power density enhances overall safety. What's more, additional heat naturally increases the carbon's ability to absorb neutrons, so the carbon acts as a passive safety mechanism capable of shutting down the core.
First, the power of a reactor depends on its size and power density. Phrases like "one-fifth the power of a PWR" are meaningless. It's confusing power with power density.
Second, they say "additional heat" when they mean "additional temperature". Heat and temperature are completely different things, and you'd think the IEEE would know that.
Third, high temperatures make the non-fissile U-238 in the fuel more likely to absorb neutrons, not the carbon. The carbon is there as a structural component of the fuel, and to act as a moderator to slow down the neutrons.
Finally, it's not so much that it shuts down the core, as that it keeps the core at a roughly constant temperature. If you stop coolant circulation, then sure, the core is going to reduce its power output drastically; in some pebble bed research reactors they do this to turn it off at night. But the true beauty of this negative feedback loop is how it regulates the temperature, not some hypothetical "What if there's a stupendous accident?" application.
>"Because it's a fast reactor, the HPM doesn't consume vast amounts of water, making it attractive for areas where water is scarce or unavailable."
There's no reason a fast reactor should be different from an ordinary LWR in water use. A thermal power plant uses river or ocean water as a heat sink; nothing about a fast reactor changes the thermodynamic need for a heat engine to have a cold reservoir. Of course there's no longer water in the closed loop that cools the reactor core (which is what confuses them?).
There are probably a few entities doing research, but I could not find any that actually had a schedule for submittion for approval.
It seems that there's considerable distance between getting an approval and building one. Areva's EPR-proto has proved that western nuclear industry contractors had forgot (comparable to UK's Trident missile -case) how to actually build nuclear power plants. This has resulted in several years of delays at Olkiluoto, Fi and Flamanville, Fr.
As noted in recent discussion, jet fighter designers will also lose some of their skills when there isn't enough new design work to be done.
"The first license application for the European Pressurized Reactor was made in December 2000. Construction of the power plant commenced in August 2005. The original commissioning date of the reactor was set to May 2009. However, in May 2009 the plant was "at least three and a half years behind schedule and more than 50 percent over-budget". The commissioning deadline has been postponed several times and as of June 2010 operation is set to start in 2013."
- 10-15 years from license application to commissioning!
I really wonder about this: surely the cited concrete problems can't be due to requirements that are entirely unique to building nuclear power plants? (In some case, though, I can well believe it, e.g. the foundation for the reactor, although it ought to be at least a bit like building serious bomb-proof fortifications.)
Have people forgotten how to forge metal? Very possibly, depending on the type and scale needed (I know there are general US issues with our defense industrial base here, then again we just aren't building military artifacts in the old ways anymore (e.g. modular Chobham tank armor vs. cast armor, construction of the B2 ws very different than the B1)), but we need more info than is provided in the source article: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-Olkiluoto_pipe_welding_...
Which you'll notice the main topic of was a gross failure to properly direct and supervise pipe welding. When you all these three things up, it smells to me like serious supervisory incompetence on the part of the general contractor rather than anything likely to be unique to nuclear engineering.
Of course that could be due to the general contractor getting out of practice, but the concrete and pipe welding it relatively basic stuff (e.g. high quality pipe welding is critical to refinery and chemical plant construction). This sounds more like "out of practice at being serious about their job", which is a sort of institutional rot that can set in when an organization has no real work to do for too long. See e.g. Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail40...
Not entirely related, but there are only three (foundries? forges? - not sure of the noun) capable of creating a one-piece reactor pressure vessel in the entire world, one in Germany, one in Japan, and one in France (I think - there might be two in France and none in Germany).
Given that, it wouldn't take too much effort to cobble together what you would need to do it (stuff to hold the work in progress, like the two submarine shipyards we keep alive for the obvious reasons), but it's specialized and low volume enough I'm not be surprised there are only a handful operational in the world right now, and of course post-TMI the US wouldn't have one of them.
There are lots of problems. For example the control systems are now all digital. Now find THREE INDEPENDTLY designed and programmed control systems, so that these are available redundant and don't fail at the same errors. How many companies are there that can get their stuff certified at the required levels?
Given my very limited understanding of the requirements, isn't nuclear reactor control a lot easier than fly-by-wire avionics? And somewhat safer, in that good designs (e.g. not the RMBK) are designed to safely passively fail as Three Mile Island Babcock & Wilcox design quite nicely did in a near worst case accident (about half the core melted with 20 tons of uranium flowing to the bottom).
Airbus sells many airplanes. Boeing, too. It took a long time to go to fully digital control systems on airplanes.
I don't think any one wants a reactor to passively fail. That's a worst case scenario. If your reactor control system has to fall back to that, then it has no chance. The control system has a) to keep a reactor at all times in safe operation conditions and b) it has to work under failure conditions. If the core melts, then this is an economic loss of billions. The reactor in Finland will cost upwards of 6 billion Euros (last estimates I read were at 5.7 billion Euro). No one would want to have a core melting at such an expensive machine.
Read more here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8138869.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/27/nuclear-po...
This sounds even worse:
Hmmm, reading those links and the most relevant of the items linked by the last, it sounds like:
The French may have done an inadequate job in the control system design; at the very least multiple other country's regulatory bodies are concerned about the same and very basic thing (module independence) and that sounds bad to me.
The other conclusion is that it was insane to start building 3? of these EPRs without getting all the way through the design process (!!!) let alone getting the first up and running. That's just appalling bad project management, which I think the U.K. regulator implied in its complaint (the "experts" knew of the control system architecture problems but management wasn't listening to them).
France has been technically quite successful in their nuclear power program (ignoring the experimental Superphénix) and was finishing construction of their last operating plant as late as the last month of 1999. I wonder what happened (well, we can guess well enough).
However - I am also missing LFTR - which BTW is also "unmeltable" and cannot go supercritical.
The truth can be read in the German version of the article, it simply did not work problem free. It is also mentioned further down in the English article. The German article about this specific reactor, the THTR-300, goes into detail.
The pebbles were breaking. The concrete got too hot. The reactor got too hot in its center. Taking out pebbles could only be done when he reactor was running with reduced power. It also had an accident where the reactor was leaking radioactivity.
All in all the handling of the pebbles had many ugly surprises for pebble bed reactor designers. They were breaking at a rate of 1000 higher than expected.
The German THTR-300 was the first attempt to build a full-scale pebble bed reactor, after they'd run just one smaller research reactor. Problems with the design are to be expected. That's not an indictment of pebble bed reactor designs; that's just how nuclear engineering works. I'm glad that the pebble bed guys are finally picking themselves off the floor and continuing on with the Chinese HTR-PM reactors, which were designed to avoid the problems which plagued the THTR-300.
http://juwel.fz-juelich.de:8080/dspace/bitstream/2128/3136/1...
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/02/current-status-and-technica...