The Future of Nuclear Power

[TheGlyphstone]

Because we need something controversial to talk about here other than American politics for a change. :D


I watched a very interesting PBS special last week about how the development of nuclear energy and the attitudes towards it have ebbed and flowed over the years, anchored on the consequences of the Fukushima meltdown in 2011. Aside from being a fascinating hour of education in general, the last third was used to talk about new and upcoming designs for nuclear reactors, with their positive and negative aspects - two in particular.


Liquid sodium-cooled designs incorporate, obviously, liquid sodium as the primary coolant instead of water. The primary advantage here being that sodium's boiling point is far higher than water, giving a large safety cushion in the event of something going wrong and the coolant supply being interrupted (the cause of meltdowns). On the other had, sodium is much more volatile, burning in air and exploding when it meets water, so keeping it contained is harder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-sodium-save-nuclear-power/

Molten-salt designs use liquid fuel by design. Their biggest draw is that they're essentially meltdown-proof, and some can process existing nuclear waste as fuel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
http://www.zmescience.com/ecology/what-is-molten-salt-reactor-424343/


Interest in green energy in general is growing, but I'm curious what the thoughts of the forum specifically on nuclear-sourced energy production are, including the Gen-IV designs mentioned. I might even turn out to be surprised.

[Vekseid]

I think we'll see fusion power before we see more exotic fission reactor designs take mass hold, personally.

Ultimately, I would like to see a handful of fission reactors to help support our space program (producing radiothermal isotopes), and a lot of fusion, aided by solar/hydro/wind.

Fusion is particularly nice as it can act both as baseline power generation and respond to changes in demand on demand - thus eliminating the need for methane as a power source or relying on hydro for this.

[ReijiTabibito]

How close are we to actual fusion nucleation, though?  In a mass-produced sense of the word.  And I'm not so certain that the environmental lobby will like nuclear power any more than they like the current main modus of supplying energy to the industrial world.  Though to be fair, a number of 'NO NUKES NO MATTER WHAT' that I've had the poor fortune of meeting have seemed more...neo-primitive, I guess you'd say?  Talking about stuff like 'return to nature' and such things.

Usually my (internal) response to them is 'you watch that movie The Village?  That's the world you're talking about.'

[TheGlyphstone]

I'm also curious about that. Fusion power would obviously be the ideal - all the benefits of fission without the drawbacks - but it's been a pipe dream of energy power for very long time. The running joke about fusion's viability being proven fifty years from the date when the question is asked has persisted for decades. AFAIK, no one has successfully built a fusion reactor with a positive power balance - have there been concrete advances in the field I haven't heard about?

[Teo Torriatte]

Unfortunately American politics rears its ugly head, here, as well. Because the Dept of Energy is about to be run by someone with no scientific background, and who once vowed to abolish the dept altogether if he were ever to be elected president. (When he could even remember that it existed)

[TheGlyphstone]

Unfortunately American politics rears its ugly head, here, as well. Because the Dept of Energy is about to be run by someone with no scientific background, and who once vowed to abolish the dept altogether if he were ever to be elected president. (When he could even remember that it even existed)

Here yes. But as much as the new president wishes it were true, the world doesn't start and end at American borders. There's fission plants outside America, with all the same issues and problems as ours, so if America is turning away from them that just makes the thoughts and opinions of our non-American E-members on the topic all that more valuable.

[midnightblack]

I think we'll see fusion power before we see more exotic fission reactor designs take mass hold, personally.

Ultimately, I would like to see a handful of fission reactors to help support our space program (producing radiothermal isotopes), and a lot of fusion, aided by solar/hydro/wind.

Fusion is particularly nice as it can act both as baseline power generation and respond to changes in demand on demand - thus eliminating the need for methane as a power source or relying on hydro for this.

Reading through the nuclear physics books of the '60s you can find claims like "we'll have sustainable fusion in about a decade". Unfortunately it did not happen, and to my knowledge not that much headway has been made since then. To my understanding, the main problem is that fusion plasma is extremely unstable. Essentially, the energy required to keep it from blowing up is larger than the output produced through the controlled process. I'm guessing nuclear fission will remain the most handy source of energy for a good long while yet. Unless some kind of tantalizing breakthrough either makes fusion viable or turns solar panels dirt cheap, green during the manufacturing process (at least back when I last inquired, which was a good deal of years ago, the designs of that time were pretty messy to produce), easy to maintain and highly efficient. Wind energy has its issues as well, I understand it tends to throw some massive spikes in the power grid when you have sudden changes of weather, and it's pretty hard for the engineers to keep them under control.

But, since they did make the electric car viable (I for one didn't see it coming and was preparing for Mad Max in real life), I'm hoping for the best.

[Vekseid]

Progress towards break-even has been slow but consistent with projections with respect to investment. Above and beyond e.g. ITER, renewed interest in alternative reactor designs have also born fruit (e.g. the W7-X).

A lot of it is simply a combination of verifying our current understanding and just building it - these devices get more efficient the bigger you build them. That costs resources, however, so having a thorough understanding of how to do it efficiently, what gotchas may be found, etc. is important.

[Lucetta]

What a lot of scientists are tossing around is the concept that salts make a very good medium for maintaining a stable nuclear reaction.

Then, Uranium burns very very hot and that is what most nuclear reactors use as a fuel source in modern day. But a more common and less dangerous material that could have been funded instead in energy research was Thorium. Naturally, the Manhattan Project literally wanted to make a big bang and that's a major contributing factor to our using the harder to acquire and maintain Uranium instead.

If you get past the difficulty of breaking even, Thorium is a more efficient fuel, creates less nuclear waste and is far less likely to cause a disaster such as Chernobyl. That will be the future of Nuclear Energy. After start-ups, the energy a Thorium-fusion-into-Uranium reactor provides will become more stable and affordable for more years than with today's Uranium reactors.

So you got your Thorium and you got your salts, but what kind of reactor would be suit this new fuel source? What else?! We were really on to something when we worried that Uranium reserves in the world were low. Why not bring that kind of forward thinking back? Because of the money that will be spent getting there and the reduced amount of money this miracle technology will make. Energy would be too affordable in a future in with the breeder reactor to motivate capitalists to invest in the research, development and manufacturing of this technology.

Plutonium enriched from uranium still serves a purpose. Plutonium is an exceptional element in that it spends the entirety of its considerably lenghty halflife maintaining a nuclear chain reaction. The heat alone powers our best probes while we continue to explore the cosmos. So if we beef up on exploring the cosmos, the Uranium market doesn't crash suddenly.

[NotoriusBEN]

My thing about Green energy and all the hubub about solar and wind power. The sun isn't out 24/7 and the wind isn't always blowing. You need giant fuck-off accumulators and batteries to store what energy you collect during low use hours and it must last through the high peak usage night time and winter.

Nevada and Utah can certainly use solar power, they have sunny days, 400 days out of the year. But places like the west coast or Alaska for those north of the 55* parallel are dark or cloudy most of the time. I can also point to entire swaths of eastern washington that are shut down wind farms because there is no wind that day. The wind power generation also plays havok with the river dam turbines as well, in that the dams are required to step up and step down power usage due to fickle wind. It's murder on the turbines and they're losing years of active lifespan from doing this.

So here is my position. You get reliable accumulators up and running, I'll join in on the solar and wind thing.
Right now, there are two reliable forms of non-carbon emitting power. Hydro, and Nuclear. The only carbon footprints they leave are in the steel reinforced concrete foundations.


The other bit is, what are you willing to pay for?

I don't even want to go into the actual cost of this stuff, but here's an article from Newsweek last year.
http://www.newsweek.com/whats-true-cost-wind-power-321480

There's a reason we use cheap stuff... its cheap. I also think we should be letting business (even the power business) thrive on its own. How many politicians are actual company owners? Used their own money to start a business? Very few, if any at all. They use and waste other peoples' money for things because its always there (taxes)

So why don't we go back to pre-industrial power consumption?

So, you'll give up your computer, the internet, your iphone, your TV, you washer and dryer, your dishwasher, heating during the cold winters, A/C during the hot summers, your night life at the restaurant/theatre/sports event, not to mention not using your car to get everywhere, the list goes on, not to mention the water pumps to bring water everywhere for irrigation and drinking. That's just your own personal power usage. That's not even considering the power usage from business and industry. You'll have to go back to using paper and actually doing physical work. We don't even have the animal flesh around that did a lot of that work in the past.  California and most of the south-west would be unlivable with the population densities they have. We would re-inherent all the problems we had in the pre-industrial era.

If you want to live like an old timey mud farmer, go ahead. I'm not. I'm happy I don't have to put up with shit my great grandparents had to put up with.

Damn this is starting to be preachy, but if you haven't guessed it yet, I'm a conservative and a realist. or possibly a libertarian on this. I'd be more than happy for green tech to work, but right now it doesn't, and I don't want to pay the subsidies/taxes for it. I'm more than happy to pay for natural gas, frakking, nuclear and hydro because those work right now and they are far cheaper per kilowatt hour. I'd much rather see the money being dumped in solar and wind subsidies be reallocated to NASA, education, or the military.

[ReijiTabibito]

One of the interviewers I listen to is Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report - he had on as a guest some time ago Alex Epstein, who is a writer that works at the Center for Industrial Progress; he wrote a book called The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.  Now, I'm not here to talk about that bit, but Epstein noted in his conversation with Rubin that the people pushing wind and solar power - whom he refers to as the 'anti-human' movement - are busy trying to tank alternative forms of energy outside of their pre-approved ones.

Epstein notes three major forms of energy that can keep mankind at the level of where we are now - fossil fuels, like oil, coal, and natural gas; nuclear power; and hydroelectric.

Fossil fuels, we've heard about carbon emissions and climate change, about how it's polluting the environment and causing sea levels to rise and that.  (Surprisingly, Epstein doesn't debate that climate change exists, he debates the level of human impact in climate change.)  Epstein argues that fossil fuels are presented as this tremendous negative, that it has all these downsides that no other form of energy has and that other energy tech can produce comparable levels of power, but that's hardly the case.

Hydroelectric power has its own criticism built in, since you require enormous water sources to run hydroelectric power - your local stream isn't going to produce enough power for the town or even your own home; hydroelectric is a viable power option only in some places around the world.

Nuclear power - the subject of our discussion - has been used in other countries successfully, but what the wind & solar movement has done is use incidents like 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima to argue that nuclear is unsafe, and therefore can't be utilized as 'what would happen if we had a nuclear meltdown in NYC?'

Epstein's argument about energy in general is one that people can get behind - you need to sit down and look at every form of energy, evaluate its benefits and costs, and then decide if a particular form of energy is right to use.  Wind and solar have a benefit in that they are infinitely safe forms of energy - there's no power plant meltdown or carbon emissions going into the atmosphere with either form; Epstein argues that the movement has set their threshold there and that every other form of power gets compared to wind and solar in that specific area, that the only forms of acceptable power are those that are infinitely safe.

The problem is that, with the exception of hydroelectric, which isn't viable outside of certain geographic locations, no other form of energy is infinitely safe, so all other forms of energy are set up for failure.

[NotoriusBEN]

and that's it.

Chernobyl happened because it was built poorly, ran poorly, and actually set up for failure during a hurried late night stress test. The operators turned off the safety indicators and set up the reactor core contrary to the stress test that resulted in an uncontrolled reaction, flashing water into a steam explosion and starting a graphite fire that lasted more than a week sending fissil material into the atmosphere and over russia and parts of europe.

3 Mile island happened due to poor training and shitty human-computer interfaces, there was a hidden warning light that caused the operator on duty to think there was too much coolant water present in the reactor, causing a steam release when in actuality it was a Loss-of-coolant accident as the water was leaving from a stuck open pilot valve.

Fukushima was hit by the biggest tidal wave seen by humanity since basically Noah's flood and destroyed its emergency generators that would have pumped coolant water into the reactors to shut down their reaction.

There are currently 450 plants operating in the world with 60 more coming online as of November 2016. and its not like we didn't learn anything from these failures. That's why we are going into Gen IV reactor designs and I remember seeing some coolant designs that are purely gravity and physics based, ie. you put all the emergency coolant above the reactor and the valve that holds it is designed to melt before the reactor goes critical thus letting the coolant flood in and stop the reaction. and if it keeps going, there are another few melting points that send the entire reactor into a giant fuck off concrete tomb and cover it before it turns into chernobyl or fukushima.

Here's from wikipedia a cost of electricy per killowatt or megawatt hour for different types of generators
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

if you want to number crunch and compare graphs for most of it, it shows the cost over the entire lifetime of that generating facility. its installation, use, maintenance, and subsequent dismantling. It shows that solar is fuck off expensive and that nuclear, coal, hydro, and natural gas are at least half its price. I'll let it go that wind power has a cheap Levelized Cost Of Energy, but I maintain that it is still unreliable as fuck and requires other energy producers to be on standby to take over the load on a moments notice. To have reliable wind and solar, you need batteries to store energy gained from non peak hours for high peak hours. Add in the current battery technology costs and it jumps the LCOE of wind and solar up at least 400$/megawatt hour. Compared to nuclear and the others which top at ~100$/megawatt hour or less.

[Trigon]

My thing about Green energy and all the hubub about solar and wind power. The sun isn't out 24/7 and the wind isn't always blowing. You need giant fuck-off accumulators and batteries to store what energy you collect during low use hours and it must last through the high peak usage night time and winter.

Nevada and Utah can certainly use solar power, they have sunny days, 400 days out of the year. But places like the west coast or Alaska for those north of the 55* parallel are dark or cloudy most of the time. I can also point to entire swaths of eastern washington that are shut down wind farms because there is no wind that day. The wind power generation also plays havok with the river dam turbines as well, in that the dams are required to step up and step down power usage due to fickle wind. It's murder on the turbines and they're losing years of active lifespan from doing this.

So here is my position. You get reliable accumulators up and running, I'll join in on the solar and wind thing.
Right now, there are two reliable forms of non-carbon emitting power. Hydro, and Nuclear. The only carbon footprints they leave are in the steel reinforced concrete foundations.


The other bit is, what are you willing to pay for?

This is actually demonstrably false; the truth is is that the cost of renewables now compare favorably to coal: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-06/wind-and-solar-are-crushing-fossil-fuels

Additionally, they aren't quite as intermittent as once believed. Or rather, it is actually a non-problem, as there are ways of working around it: https://thinkprogress.org/why-the-renewables-revolution-is-now-unstoppable-698f8d08cf4c#.vpewz4b1w

That being said, I still believe nuclear energy to be part of the solution, at least if we are talking about Thorium reactors or Fusion. But the "problems" of renewables have been largely overblown. The reality is that they will likely lead the charge to the post carbon future...

[ReijiTabibito]

A few things I'd like to point out about the Bloomberg article you cite.

One: the article opens by talking about how wind and solar companies have won bids to produce electricity at the cheapest rate possible.  Did you take a look at the countries where wind and solar won?  Mexico and Morocco.  Those countries have climates that are conducive to the utilization of wind and solar energy; not every country will be so fortunate.

Two: the chart that compared the major energy forms - nuclear, hydro, fossil fuels, W&S.  The chart details the investment capital that has gone into those fields.  Investment is needed for primarily 2 things - infrastructure and R&D.  If I have a technology that's relatively brand new, like solar, then there are going to be a lot of advances that could be made in it compared to something that's been around for 100 years like oil or coal, and to get those advances, you need investment.

Three: the chart that shows the increase of solar power as the price of it falls.  First off, kind of obvious - the cheaper something becomes, the more people are going to adopt it.  That's why nobody uses Laserdisc and everyone uses DVD these days.  The second thing on that chart is, look at the time - the trend started in the 70s and continued to today.  Of course a technology is going to diminish in cost over the course of half a century.  In the 1970s, solar was seen as an innovation - see The Man with the Golden Gun.

Four: the chart with the doublings on it.  I'm not interested in how many doublings have occurred, I'm interested in the interval gap between doublings.  If solar experienced its first doubling over a span of 20 years, and then the second doubling took 35 years, that's a lot different than it the second doubling takes only 8 years.  Second, if you look at the charts, the charts show that wind and solar only combine to produce about 5% of the world's energy.

Five: the whole thing about declining investment over fossil fuels.  Two things I want to note about that.  A: fossil fuels are a non-renewable energy source.  As the source runs out, demand for it is going to decline because who wants to pay crazy high prices to get something when there are alternatives for the same cost?  The company solution has been to try and cut prices to encourage people to buy, but that hasn't worked because of B: the rhetoric espoused by the W&S and climate change movement has been working, people are shifting off of fossil fuels to W&S because of the (possibly misguided) notion that if we do, we can avert climate change and save human civilization somewhere down the road.  Vox populi is a very effective factor in getting people to change their priorities.


Don't misunderstand, I'm on your side - the energy model of the future will work off a combination of 4 things: hydro, nuclear, and W&S.  But that's because of the nature of fossil fuels as a non-renewable energy source, something that will eventually run out, and I expect the majority of the world's power to be nuclear, because hydro, wind, and solar require certain geographic features to be viable.

[Trigon]

Four: the chart with the doublings on it.  I'm not interested in how many doublings have occurred, I'm interested in the interval gap between doublings.  If solar experienced its first doubling over a span of 20 years, and then the second doubling took 35 years, that's a lot different than it the second doubling takes only 8 years.  Second, if you look at the charts, the charts show that wind and solar only combine to produce about 5% of the world's energy.

Yes, that is indeed true. In fact, even under the most optimistic scenarios, by the mid 21st century fossil fuels will still be running the show (and this is even accounting for an increase of nuclear energy). But only if we let the so-called market dictate what can be viable.

But then, this only holds if, and only if, in the absence of an aggressive alternative energy policy. The overall point I had wanted to make was that renewables are in fact very versatile, and they are now a great deal more cost effective than was the case even a few years ago.

Five: the whole thing about declining investment over fossil fuels.  Two things I want to note about that.  A: fossil fuels are a non-renewable energy source.  As the source runs out, demand for it is going to decline because who wants to pay crazy high prices to get something when there are alternatives for the same cost?  The company solution has been to try and cut prices to encourage people to buy, but that hasn't worked because of B: the rhetoric espoused by the W&S and climate change movement has been working, people are shifting off of fossil fuels to W&S because of the (possibly misguided) notion that if we do, we can avert climate change and save human civilization somewhere down the road.  Vox populi is a very effective factor in getting people to change their priorities.

I actually suspect its a lot worse then that; all indications suggest that we are way above the sustainable limit as is. Electricity is not the only thing that matters; there is still arable land, water, food, etc. that we need to consider here.

The studies by the Club of Rome indicate that humanity as a whole would reach a crisis sometime in the mid-twenty first century, barring dramatic changes to economic and social policies.

We don't really know what the ultimate limit of fossil energy there is. On the one hand, conventional oil has peaked over a decade ago. On the other hand, we have so far been able to replace this short fall with shale oil and shale gas. And as far as I know, there is still plenty of coal left. But those sources release huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions (so the limits will be with the pollution sinks, rather than the non-renewable sources...).

Don't misunderstand, I'm on your side - the energy model of the future will work off a combination of 4 things: hydro, nuclear, and W&S.  But that's because of the nature of fossil fuels as a non-renewable energy source, something that will eventually run out, and I expect the majority of the world's power to be nuclear, because hydro, wind, and solar require certain geographic features to be viable.

Yes, but only to a certain extent. Recent technological developments on solar panels are encouraging, and allow the panels to generate energy even on overcast days. Really, it is an engineering problem, and something that isn't too difficult to solve.

My main worry is with the impact on our food supply that climate change will have, if we don't drastically curtail fossil fuels. We still need to find a way to feed potentially upwards of 11 billion people by the end of the 21st century. And if the climate destabilizes then we are in trouble...

[Trigon]

In regards to the future of nuclear energy more specifically, this article by the MIT press discusses briefly the progress the West is making towards the next generation nuclear reactors: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603573/next-generation-nuclear-power-not-just-yet/

On the one hand, since Trump and the GOP have no idea what they are doing, they may well cripple investment in such research in the near future in the USA. But China appears to be surging ahead with this...

[TheGlyphstone]

Well, Trump's man to run the DoE is Rick Perry, who despite wanting to shut it down entirely couldn't remember its name. So that could be good news or bad. Probably bad, since that also means he's in charge with taking care of our atomic arsenal (an entirely different kind of nuclear energy).