A Safer Nuclear Future?

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

On December 8, 1953, President Eisenhower made an address to the 470th Plenary Meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, a speech now called the Atoms for Peace speech. In it, he noted that the US and the USSR, both with atomic weapons, had the power to do unspeakable damage to the planet if those weapons were ever actually used, and which resulted in a stalemate now called the Cold War, where the two nuclear superpowers reserved the right to destroy each other if one flinched:

To pause there would be to confirm the hopeless finality of a belief that two atomic colossi are doomed malevolently to eye each other indefinitely across a trembling world. To stop there would be to accept helplessly the probability of civilization destroyed, the annihilation of the irreplaceable heritage of mankind handed down to us from generation to generation, and the condemnation of mankind to begin all over again the age-old struggle upward from savagery towards decency, and right, and justice. Surely no sane member of the human race could discover victory in such desolation.

Pres. Eisenhower then continued, suggesting an alternative direction to a hopeless standoff. He proposed formation of a UN-led "international atomic energy agency" to "be made responsible for the impounding,storage and protection of the contributed fissionable and other materials" and, more importantly, "to devise methods whereby this fissionable material would be allocated to serve the peaceful pursuits of mankind."

Experts would be mobilized to apply atomic energy to the needs of agriculture, medicine and other peaceful activities. A special purpose would be to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world.

Thus the contributing Powers would be dedicating some of their strength to serve the needs rather than the fears of mankind.

Here's some interesting alternate history fodder: What if the US had done more than create the military-industrial complex (the one Ike later described in his farewell address) dedicated to a synergistic vision that fed both corporate energy behemoths and supplied the US military with all the bomb and ship propulsion material it could want?

Let me explain what I mean.

---

I just caught another Chris Martenson podcast from last July. In it, he speaks with Kirk Sorensen (transcript at the bottom of the link) about his hopes to build a prototype liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR, or "LiFTeR"). The quick synopsis of a LFTR:

. . . uranium has two isotopes, one of which is fissile and the other of which is fertile – means it can become fuel, but isn’t fuel initially. Thorium only has only one really naturally occurring isotope and it's fertile. So you need some fissile material with which to start the reaction. . . . [T]he neutrons bombard thorium, and the thorium nucleus absorbs the neutron and turns into Uranium 233, which is fissile. . . . And that is really where the magic happens. When Uranium 233 fissions, it gives off enough neutrons to continue the conversion of new thorium into fuel and existing U233 into energy through fission.

This is, it turns out, absolutely nothing like the solid fuel reactors we have today. Sorensen explains:

From the original uranium ore that you mined out of the ground, you are only consuming about half of 1% of the energy there. And that’s not happening because we are stupid; it's happening because there is a basic limitation. . . . [In] the enrichment process where uranium is rich in the first place, five parts out of six of uranium become waste. . . . That is the uranium where you decrease the amount of Uranium 235 – so right off the bat, there is an 85% cut, so only like 15% of the uranium even makes it into the fuel rods and of that, only a few percent [of the rods are consumed for energy].

I've known about this limitation for quite some time in the end rod, but didn't know about all the waste at the pre-processing stage. (In fact, it was the waste storage tanks that initially exploded at Fukushima; the "waste" rods are amazingly hot, but after they're pulled from the reactor core they're kinda like Swiss cheese, with refined uranium shot through with the fission after-product, and thus lower in energy density. Too cold to boil water for a good reactor, but too hot to ignore for a few hundred years. Yikes.)

By comparison, consider a Lifter reactor:

If we use LFTR technology, if we use the liquid-fueled approach that we’re talking about, we anticipate that we can probably get above 90% [fuel efficiency]. The theoretical limit is about 98.5% that you could actually consume. . . . I mean there is almost nothing else in the world that is talking about this level of radical improvement technology.

(Emboldenation mine.)

From 1% to over 90% of mined fuel consumed and available for energy. Oh, it gets better. Let's consider fuel supply: on the planet, "thorium is about three times more common than uranium." It is, in fact, a waste product of other mining operations:

[When] rare-earth companies are looking for rare earths to mine, they will advertise that they have a low thorium content vein, because the thorium is considered worse than worthless. It's is radioactive – very low level radioactivity, but nevertheless radioactive, and they have to take regulatory steps to dispose of it. So to say it's cheaper than free – there are rare-earth companies that would pay you to take the thorium off their hands.

As if that weren't enough, it turns out there is already a supply ready for the taking:

Under about twelve feet of dirt in the Nevada test site in the United States, we recently buried about – I think it was 3,500 tons of thorium that had been in a strategic stockpile for fifty years. Back in the 50s when people like Alvin Weinberg were saying, “We’re going to run the world on thorium in the future,” the United States made a farsighted move to stockpile thorium. And then the people that were making thorium into reality got reassigned and fired and so forth, and in the early 2000s, they said, “Well what are we going to do with all this thorium?” “It's worthless, throw it away.” So that is essentially what they did.

So the best thorium mine in the world is sitting under twelve feet of dirt in Nevada right now in nice barrels that would be easily recoverable, isolated, and purified. . . .

It's that Alvin Weinberg fellow that makes this story interesting.

---

From the Wiki page linked above, we learn that Mr. Weinberg did some amazing research into "alternative" nuclear reactor designs, only to have a successful liquid thorium reactor expansion project shut down during the Nixon administration in 1972. He pressed to restart the program, but instead "was fired by the Nixon Administration from ORNL in 1973 after 18 years as the lab's director because he continued to advocate increased nuclear safety and Molten Salt Reactors, instead of the Administration's chosen Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR) that the AEC's Director of Reactor Division, Milton Shaw, was appointed to develop."

That seems to be the problem with the liquid thorium design. Yes, it does produce a fissile waste product, Uranium 233; but according to Sorensen, this waste sucks as nuclear bomb fuel. From the Martensen interview once again:

Uranium 233 has never been used in an operational nuclear weapon. It has always been highly enriched plutonium and uranium. And there are some real disadvantages to using Uranium 233 for nuclear weapons, and I think that is why it's never been done and never will be done.

Many of the more traditional nuclear reactors, by contrast, can be used to breed bomb fuel as a part of their cycle. . . which is exactly the opposite of what Ike said needed to happen in his 1953 speech. The Atoms for Peace in practice became the Atoms for War (with a side-benefit of centralized electrical energy sources just to keep up appearances).

---

So, what if Ike's words were followed a bit more closely and the US had pursued what Sorensen describes as a far more efficient and safe reactor design? Even better, what if we finally follow Sorensen and the company he helped found and give this better reactor at least a try? It won't of course solve all our problems, but nothing in and of itself will. Pursuing a dissensus, a complete divergence from the former operating manual, one built of Cold War priorities and double-speak of the highest order, might be a good first step.

NB: I'm pulling double shifts at work all week, so this is a quickie, full of the flaws most quickies have. If I do further research on this and find it to be full of crap, I'll note such a thing later.

Comments

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

Could you unlock the post please?

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

That was weird. Fixed.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

I don't no about the whole one-world-government/atomic authority angle, it's a little too Bradburian for my taste and to be frank I suspect that the Cold War as it actually happened was pretty close to being the optimal scenario.

That said, as an engineering geek it has always annoyed me how little love liquid core reactors get. There have been several promising projects over the years that have been shut down for reasons that have more to do with politics than principal.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

A more optimal scenario would have been Hitler getting stopped cold in 1940, preventing a Cold War as we know it and the rise of the superpowers. That is about as optimal as scenarios get, and regrettably Gamelin and Weygand ensured it didn't happen.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

I said "close to" not "the".

That said there is also the very real possibility that a war that leaves most of Europe still standing just encourages them to go for round 3. As you said below "the odds of some idiot triggering a crisis in Berlin turning that crisis into WWIII go up, not down."

Historically speaking, peace in Europe is an aberration.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

True, though I don't think the Soviets would start it. The only times they did, with Poland and Afghanistan, they got beat. They understood that whenever their leadership was solid, and the Anglo-French alliance would be too gutted from urban warfare to do anything of the sort. As I said this is about optimal for Europe. Unfortunately it won't spare Asia the protracted horrors of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

I wasn't going for the one-world-gov angle, but for the dominance of solid fuel support in the political decision making field. It's probably partly due to the fact that the operational differences between solid and liquid fueled nukes is large enough to create downright confusion, if not terror. Once all those solid fuel technicians get trained, "meltdown" is a word reserved for the nightmare scenario; with a Lifter, "meltdown" equates with "startup." It's enough to blow a too-well-trained mind.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Hehe, true that.

and if you want to get really weird you should read some of the NASA studies on Gaseous "Lightbulb" core reactors from the 80s. :O

[mutive.livejournal.com]

I'd love it if we put more money into thorium. Honestly, I'd love it if every single baseline power plant in the world was converted to nuclear, even the boring old uranium type.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

I'd be happy to start retiring the coal plants at the very least. Start with the oldest.

One of the benefits of the Lifter design is that it can be scaled down ecomomically to replace existing small coal plants without becoming uneconomical. Also, since they don't have to be sited near fresh water, they can be located inland.

[mutive.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I suspect that saying, "out with them all now!" is pretty unrealistic. (Even if I think that it's a MUCH better idea than waiting until all the ice caps are melted to go, "hmmm...now that we have several trillion dollars in damage, maybe we should do something.") But at the very least, taking the *really* awful old plants and replacing them seems like a no-brainer.

I agree that being able to scale down is a huge benefit. (Although, really, no nuclear needs to be near fresh water as long as they use cooling towers. It is a bit more expensive, but not prohibitively so, from what I can recall.)

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Not sure about the cooling tower thing. They are necessary, true; but I believe regulations mandate siting near lakes, rivers and the like. You know, just in case. I can't think of a single nuke not more than a half mile from a significant fresh flow.

[mutive.livejournal.com]

Hmmm...possibly. I'm not sure of the laws regarding fresh water. (Or possibly even the desire to have it around as a back up in case something happens with the cooling towers, which would make a fair amount of sense, too.)

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Here's some interesting alternate history fodder: What if the US had done more than create the military-industrial complex (the one Ike later described in his farewell address) dedicated to a synergistic vision that fed both corporate energy behemoths and supplied the US military with all the bomb and ship propulsion material it could want?

Then we would be the leading energy exporter in the world to Canada and Mexico instead of consuming energy from Canada, the BP oil spill would've never happened because politicians would not be in Big Non-Nuclear Energy's pockets and safety standards would not be ignored, all subsidies would end for non-nuclear ventures, we could turn our coil into oil, the massive profits would pay down our debt, science awareness in this country would increase, etc.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

Or the BP oil spill would have been a nuclear radiation disaster that left the area uninhabitable for the forseeable future.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Well of course, but then you'd be delving into pure fiction instead of just alternative history.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

Why? Obviously safety measures don't prevent environmental disasters.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Obviously, because strawman.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

I don't think that's a straw man.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

You invented an argument and then defeated it. That's the definition of a strawman. You specifically said "a nuclear radiation disaster that left the area uninhabitable for the forseeable future," but what you defeated was "environmental disasters." I don't feel like engaging in such a dishonest conversation.

And to people against nuclear power, there is NO safety standard good enough for them. None. Even with a 0.0001% chance, they say no, and instead we have more coal plants built.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

I would agree with that. "Safety" itself cannot exist, since the term is simply a negation of "danger" and therefore too unspecific a word to apply in all but the most generic occasions.

However, the flip side can be argued; a flagrant disregard for common-sense precautions (as was evident at the Deepwater Horizon drill) is almost guaranteed to cause disasters.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

With the smaller amount of nuclear power usage, we've had disasters. When they happen, they're fairly monumental. With gas, something we use very commonly, we have had some very large flagrant disregard for common sense disasters. Anybody who says if we went to an all nuclear power system we would not have an increased rate of disasters is putting on ideological blinders.

The real debate is not about that. The real debate is whether it is worth it. Nuclear energy takes quite a bit less nuclear material to provide energy, you're shipping less overall. Companies SO FAR have been willing to pay quite a lot more for safety because they know that the bad press of a radioactive disaster and the costs of cleanup would be the instant demise of their company (though CEOs might still get a giant golden parachute which would contribute to their flagrant disregard of safety for profit)


There's actually another big question- nuclear power is the consolidation of a whole lot of power in the hands of a few, by necessity. Oil doesn't have to be, but through financial manipulation and legal wrangling it has become that. But nuclear power on the other hand requires quite a large investment for startup that no small mom and pop shop is nearly going to have a chance at. By necessity it is either power from the government, or by a large corporation that suddenly has a very large amount of control over an area.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Anybody who says if we went to an all nuclear power system we would not have an increased rate of disasters is putting on ideological blinders.

That's cute, how many nuclear disasters have we had in this country that left areas "uninhabitable for the forseeable future"? Fucking zero. And that's with nuclear plants built WITH 1950s-1970s TECHNOLOGY! What ideological blinders?

I concede that the chances do go up... from 0.0001% to 0.0002%.

But nuclear power on the other hand requires quite a large investment for startup that no small mom and pop shop is nearly going to have a chance at. By necessity it is either power from the government, or by a large corporation that suddenly has a very large amount of control over an area.

This argument is ludicrous. Why the fuck would you want a mom n' pop establishment to have control over a nuclear fucking plant anyway?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lectricit%C3%A9_de_France

Oh look, a company that has both a history of national ownership and limited liability corporate ownership, and it's doing fucking fine with nuclear power!

"EDF is the world's largest producer of electricity.[2] In 2003, it produced 22% of the European Union's electricity, primarily from nuclear power:

nuclear: 74.5%;
hydro-electric: 16.2%;
thermal: 10.2%;
wind power and other renewable sources: 0.1%.

Its 58 active nuclear reactors (in France) are spread out over 20 sites (nuclear power plants)."

I hope you don't want to live in France, apparently it's a death trap!

Almost every single utility in history has a history of government start-up and then later privatization.

Why do I even bother?

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Just read this article please: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf06.html





If anything, Fukushima proves that even with an old reactor design, a once-in-a-millenium tsunami and earthquake, poor geographical placement (the US has zero plants that are in an area with seismic activity or tsunami risks), nobody died from radiation poisoning. Even the most hyperbolic estimates put the increased cancer rate at like 0.1%.

If nuclear power isn't worth the risk, then it's setting a double standard that's not being applied to any other sources in the world.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

I agree with everything you say. That's why listening to the interview was so enlightening.

With the smaller amount of nuclear power usage, we've had disasters. When they happen, they're fairly monumental.

All of our previous nuke disasters have involved interruption of the cooling medium, water. If you don't have water covering either the reaction chamber or the waste storage pools, the solid fuels overheat and melt. Thorium? To Mr. Sorensen (http://www.peakprosperity.com/podcast/79398/kirk-sorensen-detailed-exploration-thoriums-potential-energy-source):

No, they are going to be very, very different. Because the salt operates at such high temperature, and because we are using a gas turbine powered conversion systems rather than a steam turbine. We actually could employ air-cooling on these systems and reject heat directly to air. And that would get rid of the cooling towers and it would get rid of the need to be sited next to a body of water. . . . Water-cooled reactors are really restricted in how hot they can go, because they are restricted by the basic properties of water. They cannot get much above about 300c. These [LFTR] reactors naturally operate at about anywhere from 600-700c, so just from a straight thermodynamics perspective, they already have a lot more potential for high performance than a water-cooled reactor.

Which leads to safer operation and scalability:

I’m from the West originally, and I always wondered when I was younger, why didn’t we have nuclear reactors in the West? And it is because we don’t have big rivers in the West. . . . Water reactors run under real high pressure. And if you depressurize it and you don’t cool it, the fuel is going to melt down. That is the basic problem in a water-cooled reactor. This [LFTR] reactor doesn’t even have that feature to begin with. It runs at atmospheric pressure; if you lose all power, the fuel will passively shut down. It drains out of the bottom and into a drain tank and is passively cooled.

So the fission products, the ones that you are really worried about, are completely chemically occluded in the salt, particularly strontium and cesium. They are very, very stable fluorides. So it has a completely different approach to just about everything that we do today with a water-cooled reactor. I think that is one of the problems when conventional nuclear folks look at it. They go, “Wow, this is just completely different in every way from I am doing now. It's a brand new machine.”

There's actually another big question- nuclear power is the consolidation of a whole lot of power in the hands of a few, by necessity.

A legitimate concern. One won't find a mom-and-pop operation with these, but one can have much smaller companies operating them. Why?

But a [LFTR] reactor like this, you wouldn’t build them nearly as big. You build them modular so you can build them in a factory and take them where you need to go. The footprint would be much smaller, because you don’t have the worry about or need for an evacuation boundary – massive radiation leaks – basically there is nothing inside this reactor that wants to let go, like a water reactor.

Furthermore:

And the other thing about light water reactors, their economics get better the bigger you build them. There are certain things in that reactor that really favor a large scale. In our reactor design, there really aren’t parameters that favor really being big or small. I mean the scaling factor is just not nearly as intense. So if you want to say, “I want to build it at 200 megawatts,” you can do that. You can build a 200-megawatt light water reactor, but there are a lot of things that do not scale favorably by doing that.

Seriously, listen to the interview. It raises exciting possibilities.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

It's beyond possibilities, it's what France has been doing and China is doing. Oh the irony of the US buying technology from foreign counties in the future.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

France and China are still both stuck on the solid fuel model, though they're making it work far better than the US (well, France is, not sure about China, and given their secrecy we probably never will be). The US, in fact, tried a pilot project a few years ago, sending some spent fuel over to France for reprocessing. Not sure how it worked.

If we get the LFTR tech going, we could once again jump start a disruptive technology and be at the bleeding edge. We could witness what it was like to grow up in the 50s!

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

China's building dozens of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Sadly, from the link, "The proposed completion date for a test 2 MW pebble bed solid thorium and molten salt cooled reactor has been delayed from 2015 to 2017. A proposed "test thorium molten salt reactor" has also been delayed."

Delays are bad. Something is wrong either with their project or the political will.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The Soviet Union was never fully interested in peace historically. If nukes are removed, the odds of some idiot triggering a crisis in Berlin turning that crisis into WWIII go up, not down. There is no coincidence that conventional wars of long duration are only fought between non-nuclear states. Besides, the nuclear standoff did not end civilization historically. Removing the nukes, OTOH, would bring about a third general war in Europe in a century. The Soviets might not even be the ones to start it without them...

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

I wasn't suggesting that the nukes would disappear, only that the synergy and political homogeneity between the solid fuel reactor crowd and the bomb makers would be reduced to the point where liquid core reactors would have been built in the 50s or 60s, and therefore would have given us (should they have proven feasible) greater grid energy supply, perhaps enough to displace significant coal plants.

Of course, since I was work addled, I forgot to clarify that point.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

UMWA would never stand for that nor would the proto-environmentalist movement.

That said would have been nice to see some of the more creative nuclear projects come to pass.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

UMWA can bite me, as can those others. (Did you perhaps mean the faux-environmentalists?)

I do see an argument against centralized power of just about all types, but the scalability of the Lifter is an argument in its favor.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

true that

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Ah. Now I see what you're talking about. I think that might work in the United States, but my question is whether or not we can trust the Soviet Union to maintain these reactors. Chernobyl casts a certain dark shadow on what the Soviet government can or cannot do.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Dietrich Dörner's The Logic of Failure ran down the series of events at Chernobyl. It turns out everything that happened that day had happened many times before; just not all at the same time and in the right sequence. The meltdown was a failure not of government, but of systems management and a recognition of emergent events, ie. non-linear tightly-coupled interdependent phenomena, like a nuke.

The same damned thing could have easily happened here in the States, and got too damned close with Three Mile Island.

My point (which I've forgotten until review) was that unlike the Chernobyl- and Fukushima- styled reactors, the liquid thorium design default to stability. One need not rely upon water pumps failing, for example, since they're air cooled. Dump one element of the reaction and gravity dampens the fission; in Chernobyl, the rods got too hot, deformed, and would no longer fit in the damper system. Lots of problems with solid fuel nuke design.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

That is the greatest advantage of liquid core designs. Despite the higher operating temp they physically default towards quiesance rather than KABOOM.

That and by mixing liquid HO3 you can make a truly "high octane" rocket engine.

850 isp? Fuck yes!