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A Double First in China for Advanced Nuclear Reactors
- m3kw9 8y agoAdvanced + nuclear sounds scary to me.
- ouid 8y agoIs this comment supposed to sound like it comes from the anti-vax that lives in my head?
- lainga 8y agoI would think 'primitive + nuclear' the scarier prospect.
- ben_w 8y agoMay I intrigue/terrify you with naturally occurring fission reactors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
- Dylan16807 8y agoOf the kind that can't stay hot without water moderating, which is a different category in my book.
- ggm 8y agoWish we had news on the Pebble Bed stuff.
- Animats 8y agoWell, Mammoet, the heavy-lift company, was able to move the jammed German pebble bed reactor to a new location where it can cool down for 60 years or so until somebody figures out how to dismantle it.[1] [1] https://www.mammoet.com/cases/avrjulich/ https://www.mammoet.com/cases/avrjulich/
- ggm 8y agoThat's quite some clusterfuck.
- Animats 8y agoEvery reactor design which had something mechanically or chemically complex going on inside the radioactive zone has had major problems. Pebble bed reactors jam. Sodium cooled reactors have fires. Helium cooled reactors have leaks. The interior environment is hostile, unmaintainable, and has to work for decades. That's why we're stuck with water-based reactors.
- jabl 8y agoWell, yes and no. Basically LWRs are good enough for the time being. When/if there's a major expansion of nuclear power, we'll need breeders and reprocessing, but right now there's no pressing need. Right now what nuclear power needs (from the technical POV) is to reduce the time and cost of construction. Which, most likely, won't happen by introducing new and unproven reactors and fuels.
- Ygg2 8y agoThe link indicates Mammonet moved a reactor built in 1950. Are you sure it is related to pebble bed design at all?
- ggm 8y agoYes. its the original design model which subsequently moved to China. I don't doubt the design flaws which were in the 1950s model have been overcome, but man. The Strontium90 burden.. thats one sick sad story.
- kalleboo 8y agoI don't know why that article says it was built in the 50's, it was built in the 60's https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_(Jülich) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_(Jülich)
- Animats 8y agoWhat's left of Westinghouse is now owned by some private equity firm.
- theoh 8y agoIt's sad that, as evidenced by the AP1000 Youtube videos, the nuclear industry (at least in Westinghouse's case) appears to have become sclerotic and unable to even hire a dynamic visual communication team. You can't disrupt a reactor, which leads to understandable caution, but surely they could have understood that, given nuclear power's ominous reputation, you need to have the best PR and visualizations money can buy.
- Angostura 8y agoIt's owned by Toshiba, I believe.
- topspin 8y agoHere are three videos that describe the passive cooling mechanisms in the AP1000 during a blackout (total loss of onsite and offsite power); passive core cooling[1], passive containment cooling[2] and passively cooling spend fuel[3]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCorzfw5liQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCorzfw5liQ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghy9aba3kHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghy9aba3kHU [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzBe_kwIs28 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzBe_kwIs28 Basically the reactor will cool itself without operator intervention and without power for 72 hours. After 72 hours the operator must use various on site equipment and coolant supply to maintain cooling and/or provide coolant from some off site source.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoI wonder what prevents them from capturing the steam from the spent fuel storage and running it through a condenser that is connected to a ground heat exchanger (basically tubes run into the earth)
- JKCalhoun 8y agoGuess: tremendous amounts of heat needing to dissipate would overwhelm all but an enormous ground heat exchanger?
- ChuckMcM 8y agoTrue, but space is generally not a problem at nuclear plants because there is a huge area around them to protect against the accidental release of radiation. Fourier's law for heat conduction would suggest that if you had enough surface area in just steel pipes you could dump a megawatt or more of excess heat into the surrounding atmosphere. In an unconstrained atmosphere (like your heat exchanger structure is outside) that would induce an air current that would further enhance the ability to dump heat into the air passively. If you had a larger water reserve you could also build the equivalent of a Watt steam pump that could use the heat in the steam to pump water from the reserve into the cask pond. Time to run some simulations to see whether that is doable at all.
- melling 8y ago“The White House cited this nuclear nexus in a May memo instructing Rick Perry, the Secretary of Energy, to force utilities to buy power from unprofitable nuclear and coal plants.” I hope people noticed the part about subsidizing coal. Natural gas is so cheap that coal is no longer competitive, which is a good thing. The administration is extending the life of coal plants that aren’t profitable.
- devy 8y agoMethane is a much more potent (up to 100x) greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide [1] and previously unknown methane leaks could greatly undermining our current understanding of the carbon footprint of methane. While I do think other renewable energy sources (solar/wind/geothermo) are the true safer source for mankind's long term continuity, I don't think we can achieve carbon neutral without Nuclear. If we discourage nuclear, it might not even matter in the carbon neutral in 50 years as climate change could potentially wipe a lot of us out on mother earth as it's currently enroute to a irreversible disastrous future. [1] https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/issues/natural-gas/ https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/issues/natural...
- gwbas1c 8y ago> All the while, nuclear is falling further behind renewable solar and wind power. As Schneider notes, the 3.3 GW of new nuclear capacity connected to the grid worldwide in 2017 (including three in China and a fourth in Pakistan built by Chinese firms) pales in comparison to the 53 GW of solar power installed in China alone. Somehow I don't think nuclear has any chance of coming back. The tone of the article is that no one can figure out how to build them. By the time we have lots of nuclear plants, we'll have even more cheap solar panels and cheap batteries.
- devy 8y ago> By the time we have lots of nuclear plants, we'll have even more cheap solar panels and cheap batteries. Probably true, for the better. But we shouldn't shut down all the existing nuclear plants prematurely simply we fear a meltdown. Newer design are MUCH safer and Fukushima type meltdown is much less possible. Don't forget, the weather dependent, and high peak output during daytime but zero output at night time nature of the solar is still unresolved until mass grid-scale battery or some sort of energy storage device is deployed ubiquitous into our power infrastructure. That's gonna take forever. We haven't found another truly safe and renewable yet mass-scale energy source yet - nuclear is one right now. Don't abandon it before we find a reliable replacement.
- FooBarWidget 8y agoWhy is the nuclear industry plagued with cost and schedule overruns? And shouldn’t they have thought by now, “hey our estimates are always off so let’s double them”?
- allannienhuis 8y agos/nuclear/software/g There, fixed that for ya. :P
- yazr 8y agoYour comment is more insightful that u realize ;) Software projects often suffer from exponential variations in specs, implementation, testing, environment, etc. Nuclear projects often suffer from inflexible and pre-defined specs and constraints.
- ummonk 8y agoThat happens in basically every industry. The problem is that if you double your own estimate, but no one else does, then your project doesn't get selected. Also, if you double your estimate and go ahead with the project, it will have a psychological impact which causes wasteful spending and slow work that will result in additional overruns...
- greglindahl 8y agoI haven't heard much about cost overruns for wind farms and solar panel farms. Solar thermal, yes, that's a startup industry.
- ummonk 8y agoTo clarify, it happens in basically any industry with megaprojects.
- greglindahl 8y agoSo, it applies to all of the recent large solar, wind, and battery projects... which appear to hit their budgets and dates? Or are those not megaprojects?
- lunchladydoris 8y agoMeanwhile, solar appears to be leaping forward in China. From the end of the article: "All the while, nuclear is falling further behind renewable solar and wind power. As Schneider notes, the 3.3 GW of new nuclear capacity connected to the grid worldwide in 2017 (including three in China and a fourth in Pakistan built by Chinese firms) pales in comparison to the 53 GW of solar power installed in China alone. "
- M_Bakhtiari 8y agoI'm all for safer reactors coupled with expansion of nuclear power, but how is China buying yet another a packaged product from the west a "double first"?
- _n_b_ 8y agoThe Chinese had lots of involvement in building these, and neither the AP1000 or the EPR is online anywhere but China yet...
- igravious 8y agoBecause they are the first exemplars of these packaged products (note: plural, one each from Framatome|Areva/EDF/Siemens in Europe† and Westinghouse in the US‡) to be built anywhere in the world ahead of other construction projects. Thus: "double first". † https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) ‡ http://www.westinghousenuclear.com/New-Plants/AP1000-PWR http://www.westinghousenuclear.com/New-Plants/AP1000-PWR ps: it's a little bit worrying I can't find any single commercial page detailing the EPR
- bawana 8y agowhy are they using this unsafe tech (Pu-U) when molten salt reactors are safer? https://whatisnuclear.com/msr.html https://whatisnuclear.com/msr.html