Lead-Cooled Fast Reactor Proliferation Resistance White Paper 2021
gen-4.org
gen-4.org
Solar and wind continues to get cheaper and battery technologies continue to get better e.g. solid state in the medium term. And that makes once crazy ideas like shipping power from Australia to Singapore or from Africa to Europe economically feasible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JipQNWuYnA&t=10217s
In summary, he thinks hot fusion is obviously possible but the system is too complex to ever scale. He has an interesting idea about doping atoms with muons to increase the overall density of the material. I don't know that there's any substance to it, but I like his perspective that the ultimate solution will likely come out of nowhere by an individual or small team that's allowed to pursue wild ideas.
Fusion would be very important in the far future for the potential of interstellar probes or even interstellar migration. AFAIK it's the only power source that could enable flight at a meaningful (e.g. double digit) fraction of the speed of light.
So all we need for a Mr Fusion on our Delorean is a portable muon gun. :P
Edit: Video from MinutePhysics - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDfB3gnxRhc
Again per your observation, if it had any value we would do it so i'm missing one to many major things. I just enjoy thinking about it.
The biggest point which stood the test of time, and is the easiest to validate is that if you build a TOKAMAK big enough, it will work.
Plasma instability decreases with the device size, and efficiency rises.
Every experiment so far validated this.
Build bigger, more powerful reactors, with faster, or online refuelling.
Cost of fuel is completely nothing, even with the most inefficient reactors out there.
The cost of doing refuelling is actually more than the cost of the fuel being refuelled.
This all sounds promising, and it's certainly worth investigating further, however for actual reactors that have been built and operated, cost reduction through increasing the size has been one of the very few approaches that has been empirically demonstrated to work.
IIRC Nuscale is designing for up to 12 of their 60 MW reactors in the same plant.
One of the main issues of the design was that we simply do not produce enough bismuth for the lead-bismuth coolant, and lead-only variant was iirc more problematic due to higher operating temperature. The lead-bismuth design was tested for mnay years as submarine reactor.
Most current research on lead-cooled reactors use pure lead. The downside, as you say, is higher melting temperature.
Namely, the short half-life and the fact that it undergoes alpha decay into lead meant that a) it was very easy to detect leaks b) cleanup was also easier. Also, the rate of polonium production turned out to be pretty low.
The bigger issue is that Bismuth production would be utterly, completely drained by mass production of SVBR-style reactors.
It's the same issue as trucks vs trains: trucks are cheaper because they don't pay for the roads at all.
It’s actually cheaper and safer to pair Nuclear with batteries than it is to have that many idle nuclear power plants which makes it directly comparable to wind and solar. Unfortunately, in a head to head competition to fill batteries, Nuclear simply loses. It would even loses when directly compared to solar + batteries in most areas for a grid with steady 24/7/365 power demand.
That's simply not true.
[1]: https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2011/load-following-npp...
> To get close to 100% you need to have vastly more power plants constructed which then mostly sit idle
There's a difference between being forced to build enough capacity to provide 100% of your power, and have some idle when usage is at the cycle's low point, and not being able to load-follow i.e. not being able to adjust within that cycle...
> to have that many idle nuclear power plants [which] makes it directly comparable to wind and solar.
...And that's where that difference is important: a renewables production system has to install way more capacity than what's used on average, because they can't control the load factor, not just because they have to adapt to consumption cycles.
That’s why nuclear isn’t load following in practice. Sure you can build reactors that occasionally dip few a few hours each night without breaking the bank, but something else needs to be covering your daily peak demand let alone extreme demand.
PS: The more expensive bit relates to both design changes to deal with reactor poisoning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_poison) etc and thus construction cost increased alongside increased maintenance costs due to increased thermal cycling etc.
Varying the power output of a nuclear plant (regular 2G plant) between 40 and 100% is straightforward and needs no specific design changes, and you can even go as low as 10% if need be. Xenon poisoning is a real thing, but it is relatively easy to deal with (simply by tweaking the Boron concentration the position of the control rods) even though it requires a bit of practice to master the skill. It is done routinely every day in all French nuclear plants!
You are simply living in a parallel universe which seams to share very few similarities with the real world…
Also, it doesn’t use 70% nuclear power, it currently exports ~20% of the nuclear power it generates and imports almost exclusively non nuclear energy. Net result it’s customers actually use about 55-60% nuclear power meanwhile average nationwide nuclear capacity factors actually fell below 60% and only recently reached 70% when they started to phase it out.
> France has low retail electricity rates because the government massively subsidized nuclear power. That doesn’t mean cheap electricity, that means hiding the costs for electricity.
No. The impact of nuclear electricity on public finances is a clear net positive over the lifetime of the park. And for the past 10 years, nuclear has actually been anti-subsidized by the political will to boost RE and competition in the french electricity sector (see ARENH if you're interested).
> Also, it doesn’t use 70% nuclear power, it currently exports ~20% of the nuclear power it generates and imports almost exclusively non nuclear energy. Net result it’s customers actually use about 55-60% nuclear power
This makes no sense. You can't just discount export from nuclear and count import as non-nuclear…
First of all, most of our biggest neighbours also have nuclear electricity (UK, Belgium, Germany) so we are definitely also importing nuclear (well, when it makes sense to actually export nuclear, see the next point).
Second, most of the time when we export we're actually producing electricity from other means than nuclear (gas, wind, hydro) why would you count only nuclear as being exported? If you want to draw an accurate line, you'd need to count the electricity at the marginal price as the one being exported and most of the time it's not nuclear.
Third, what about the past few days? We've artificially reduced nuclear production to import wind, because the weather leads to a massive overproduction of wind power in Europe. It's not that nuclear couldn't have produced this energy right, just that we had to turn it down to protect the grid from a collapse. Yet in your calculations you are somehow counting it as a liability for nuclear.
I am not sure how you think it’s a refutation of my point?
> You can’t just discount export from nuclear and count import as non-nuclear
I didn’t. They do export some non nuclear generation, but the majority is nuclear which you can verify by looking at the generation during times of export. ~20% nuclear is just what the actual number is. Similarly, they import almost zero nuclear power simply based on when generation occurs and when new power is brought online by the countries involved.
> No
Feel free to dig into hard numbers such construction costs, liability for accidents, and funds set aside to pay for decommissioning and where they came from etc. You obviously feel strongly about this so I can only assume you have exact numbers and a nice economic breakdown.
It takes some doing including digging into Areva‘s finances before and after it’s restructuring (bailout) etc.
Why the hell would you dig in Areva's finance on that topic? Look at EDF's finance instead for the past 40 years instead, because that's where the money is. Area's situation is a project management and strategic failure, but they aren't relevant to the discussion because they aren't electricity producers.
> I am not sure how you think it’s a refutation of my point?
Well, you argued that:
> They do export some non nuclear generation, but the majority is nuclear which you can verify by looking at the generation during times of export.
RTE's[1] disagrees with you … I don't know where you get your ideas from but they simply don't align with facts.
> That’s why nuclear isn’t load following in practice.
and
> The more expensive bit relates to both design changes to deal with reactor poisoning
Which I refuted: nuclear is indeed load following, and you don't need to make design changes to make it so.
[1]: https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit...
Trying to hand wave away something as not X even if X is completely dependent on it is political hogwash.
> Yet in your calculations you are somehow counting it as a liability for nuclear.
It’s a liability to people operating nuclear power plants as they generally get paid by the market for generating power. When a grid adds solar or wind the wholesale price of electricity drops while those power plants costs stay the same. If it hypothetically costs you 10c/kWh of capacity averaged over the lifetime of the power plant your paying that money independently of how much you’re operating it. Workers showed up, equipment aged, and interest on your loan was due etc. Now actually generating electricity adds some small extra cost for the fuel etc so shutting down may actually save you money when the wholesale price falls low enough, but your losing money either way. The specifics do get complicated as a grid operator may have signed various contracts, but as the marginal costs for wind and solar are much lower than nuclear oversupply fucks nuclear in a pure market.
Of course in France the government subsidizes the industry, so it’s not at the mercy of pure market forces. However, someone is still stuck with the bill even if it’s future taxpayers as seen with recent bailouts. The obvious question then shows up of what exactly the mix of Nuclear vs Wind and Solar should on a carbon free grid. As a pure economic question the cheapest option is to have some large scale energy storage. Unfortunately, once that’s on the table the capacity for steady state operation suddenly becomes vastly less useful. Which is the long way around to what I have been saying where nuclear can’t follow the grid and be economically viable close to 100%.
This is true, but here we're going back to square one [1]: wind and solar are only cheap because we don't count the externalities. Each time you build a wind farm, you hurt the viability of other electricity sources but at the same time, so you raise the price of all electricity on the market because you need these other sources to deal with intermittency anyway. But it is not counted as part of the cost of wind, even though it is directly linked to the amount of wind poer you have in your mix.
> Of course in France the government subsidizes the industry, so it’s not at the mercy of pure market forces.
No, no no and again no. You really need to stop believing in this bullshit and face the facts: France doesn't subsidize nuclear at all, it's completely the opposite: it has been a milking cow for decades. And for the past 10 years, because the EU wants to promote competition, EDF actually has to give away some of its nuclear electricity to its competitors because having a monopoly on such a money-making energy was considered unfair. (you definitely didn't look for ARENH as I advised you to do so yesterday, right?)
> As a pure economic question the cheapest option is to have some large scale energy storage. Unfortunately, once that’s on the table the capacity for steady state operation suddenly becomes vastly less useful. Which is the long way around to what I have been saying where nuclear can’t follow the grid and be economically viable close to 100%.
You don't really know what you're talking about. First of all, I don't think why you're obsessed by the idea of getting 100% nuclear, France shows that 70% is a good mix and I think everybody agrees that going higher would make little sense. But you can't run on 100% solar or wind either (you'd need at least to 2 weeks of storage if you wanted to to do, which is far out of reach) and in fact there isn't a single demonstrated example of a working grid with even “just” 70% solar/wind, and just going above 50% is going to be quadratically more expensive for each percent (the load factor decreases, and the need for storage quickly ramps up).
This rolls back to here: “Each time you build a wind farm you hurt the viability of other electricity sources.”
If you say nuclear is a fine 70% solution, what’s the other 30%? If it’s wind then 70% nuclear is no longer viable because that was already the limit and it just became less viable. Thus the core problem, wind and solar cost less per kWh, but as you add them they push out nuclear. Essentially what mix actually works? If say 70% wind and solar 25% nuclear 5% hydro is economically cheapest nuclear needs a very special power purchase agreement designed to support it.
Which gets to the hart of the matter, much of the problem with the current grid is power purchase agreements. No utility wants to sign a power purchase agreement for the lifetime of a power plant which pays nuclear even when it’s off. Even 35 years after construction means the power plant needs to compete on the open market in ~40 years. Which means subsides.
PS: “France doesn’t subsidize” among other things it’s agreed to limit liability in the event of a major disaster. That’s incredibly valuable, suppose you wanted insurance for a 1 in X per year per 1GW reactor risk of a 500 billion dollar failure what does that cost? Well X becomes really important, we have had what 2 major disasters in what 441 current reactors * ~70 years of operation = 1 in 16,000ish. Now I think a reasonable argument can be made that French reactors are safer than that, but napkin math says even if it’s 1 in 50,000 per year you’re still looking at ~10 million per year per reactor * 56 reactors or 1/2 billion per year for insurance. Even if their 100x as safe as historic examples it’s still significant money.
The biggest recipient for energy subsidize in France is fossil fuel, and the lowest is nuclear. This is despite the fact that fossil fuels account for the least amount of energy, and nuclear the highest. Renewables sits in between. Fossil fuel subsidizes is on the rise, especially for oil and gas.
What France (and other countries in EU) should do is to cut those subsidizes for everything, and an additional carbon tax on top that directly targets the energy sector. That money can then go into a tax reduction/social support for individuals most effected by the increase energy prices, while at the same time letting fossil fuel industry die a horrible death.
That said, EU mas a yearly report of the state which include graphs: https://ec.europa.eu/energy/sites/default/files/annex_to_the...
Page 6, figure 2, Subsidies for different energy sources, as percent of GDP and in billion euros in 2019
The yellow slice is nuclear, green renewables and grey fossil fuels. The image text describe the additional colors that refers to "other" and "shared by all".
In term of actually money collected by tax agencies in EU countries, fossil fuels and renewables is the primary recipient of citizens money. Year in, year out.
France is a rather large anomaly even though their nuclear reactors have been built and paid for. This is exactly the time period they should be most profitable, yet still a significant subsidy. More, that’s in comparison to all energy consumption not simply the electric grid. And further, their subsidies for wind and solar are actually paying for new generation to just continued production.
When we are talking about electricity grid subsidies in France and they bring up EU wide gasoline subsidies that’s a rather clear misunderstanding. I could have gone further and talked about subsidies on a per kWh over the lifetime of a power plant rather than the relatively tivial amounts mentioned to keep already built nuclear reactors operating but that’s likely to go above their head.
As I have told you I don’t actually care about correcting the ignorant. At best I get some dark joy at making some people look foolish.
In page 6, figure 2, bottom line, there are country codes. FR is the country code for France. From left is the 11th, which only represent the numbers from France. France and only France.
You mean France doesn't exist?
So how come large consumers' usage is not shifted to smooth out the peak? (Or it's simply not enough or too unpractical?)
> France meets its peak electricity demands with fossil fuel generation, hydropower, and imports.
Hydropower is used for peaks a lot, because France has a lot of reversible hydro, but fossil plants and imports aren't routinely used for peak use.
Exact numbers get tricky as they would export and import at the same time due to grid balancing still they needed to export ~1/5 of all nuclear power generated at a loss and import ~30+tWh just to meet demand. Even then utilization tells the story it was in the 60% range in 1988 while the US saw utilization in the 90% range, and again that’s with exporting below costs. Low utilization increased prices by about 30-50% depending on year and that’s with heavy dependence on fossil fuels and a relatively low percentage of nuclear consumption in the country. Nuclear simply doesn’t scale across an electric grid unless you want to more than double the price of electricity or provide subsidizes on that scale.
Just look at what happens to the EU grid if Germany and every every other country outside off France was 1/3 nuclear.
Ok. You're not just some dude arguing in bad faith. You must be genuinely psychotic.
Did you notice people saying French nuclear power had zero subsidies? Notice how I didn’t mention the links from other people in this thread showing French nuclear subsidies.
Perhaps I am sadistic, then again I am not the one defaulting to personal attacks rather than cold hard facts.
Permanent goalpost moving, pulling imaginary figures from sources you never refer to (and pretending you did) isn't “cold hard fact”: it's bullshit.
But! Uniquely from that group nuclear power can be very easily industrialized. Basically if there would be a group that orders 100-200 (and of course more) plants ... the unit costs would go down dramatically.
As long as each one is a unique little bespoke snowflake, each site needs special plans, every pipe and valve and weld and button needs loving care and precious human attention ... it's going to be expensive.
There are hundred of weaponizable reactors in not really good places of the world. In case of the next big war, nobody will ask IAEA for permission to build the nuke.
As some the saying goes, the genie is long out of the bottle.
This is one of the few ways we can shortcut the developing world's reliance on fossil fuels while still supplying plentiful base load power that can grow with them.
If somebody will bomb your cities with nukes, killing millions in the process, you will not need Mariano Grossi, he will be useless to USA. You will need capable military allies.
So far, the US does everything to turn away any potential ally, including by denying them access to powerful weapons, with thermonuclear weapons being the biggest one.
Right. This isn't about them. This is about all the other developing countries that don't. This is about making them allies by giving them nuclear technology, something that the developed world is terrified of doing because of nuclear proliferation. That's why proliferation resistance is relevant.
Nuclear bombs are forties technology. Industrial output of forties USA is met by dozens of countries today.
People continuing to advocate for non-proliferation cannot believe the that the most basic point of theirs is false: from technical viewpoint, from logical, political, and military one.
And have some advanced nation genocide all the relevant brains on your country? I would try to lead them in some other enterprise, even better if it doesn't have to be clandestine.
The article we're commenting on is part of the EU and US response - they want to sell their reactor technology to a bunch of countries to prevent China from getting that business and gaining influence, but they want to do it in a way that reduces proliferation because the constituents that vote for them care about nuclear proliferation. It's entry level geopolitics.
In fact, international inspection mechanisms worked pretty well so far.
NPT with annexes is already plenty enough to prevent hidden repurposing of waste into weapons, it just doesn't fit American immediate econopolitical wants.
Because it's not just state actors you need to be worried about. A gun-type fission bomb is simple enough for a well-funded terrorist group to construct from scratch - if they can obtain enough enriched Uranium.
Fast spectrum reactors require a larger core inventory of fuel and higher concentrations of fissile material within the fuel. That makes fuel diversion more dangerous with fast reactors. Presumably that's why people interested in fast reactors are trying to improve their proliferation resistance, to bring it in line with what's considered acceptable today.
As a side note, purely technical measures cannot render reactor designs proliferation-proof against rogue governments that might repurpose reactors to make weapons. At best you get some warning from breach of anti-proliferation measures so other countries know when legal/diplomatic countermeasures become warranted.
Usually, a reactor is considered a proliferation problem if it allows you to produce plutonium easily. Getting radioactive material isn't good enough to be a significant security risk, because dirty bombs are much more complicated than conventional explosives, for an impact that isn't significantly bigger.
So a reactor can be a risk if it lets you get plutonium easily (and, specifically, the Pu239 isotope). The other plutonium isotopes are not good weapon material, and so you want to be able to use a reactor that lets you produce material with as much pu239 as possible.
Depending on design, if you can get easy access to the nuclear fuel, you can filter it frequently to retrieve the pu239, before it has a chance to react with another neutron and become one of the bad Pu isotopes.
BWR and PWR reactors are bad for enrichment, because in order to access the fuel, you need to stop the reactor and depressurize the primary cooling circuit, which takes time. On the other hand, if you let the fuel spend a long time in the reactor, you end up with spent fuel that has lots of Pu240 and Pu241, which sucks.
Other types of reactor, like CANDU, RMBK or UNGG reactors let you access the fuel more easily, without shutting down the reactor. Therefore, it is easier and quieter to retrieve the fuel frequently and get the Pu239 before it has time to react again.
That is why some types of reactors are nicer to have if you want to build a bomb: they take less time and would raise less suspicion from other countries to collect the same amount of Pu239. Currently, most commercial reactors in the world use BWR/PWR technology.
I think that sums up the gist of what it means to make a reactor less proliferation-friendly, and why it's important in order to make that technology more friendly to export.