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The complete lack of any details may fly on Chinese Central Television and Reuters.com, but I want more when I come to hacker news. What's next? "North Korea

The complete lack of any details may fly on Chinese Central Television and Reuters.com, but I want more when I come to hacker news. What's next? "North Korea boasts development of time machine!"

uvdiv 16y ago
They recently built an R&D-scale PUREX plant on the site of a weapons complex. The most likely "story" is that it started operating. >The Jiuquan Atomic Energy Complex (Plant 404) is centered on a 400-500MW light water graphite reactor [LWGR] fueled with natural Uranium. The facility includes a pilot plutonium reprocessing plant and a arge-scale reprocessing plant with a capacity of 300-400kg Pu/yr (both use PUREX method). It also includes a Nuclear Fuel Processing Plant for refining plutonium into weapons-usable metals. http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/china/jiuquan.htm http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/china/jiuquan.htm >The small reprocessing plant in Gansu was completed about six years ago, but Chinese oversight agencies have not yet permitted it to separate any plutonium—as of last month, just two fuel assemblies have been dissolved in the nitric acid tank at the plant. Full-scale operation is not expected before 2012. http://carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=41969 http://carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&... More about PUREX, reprocessing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing http://www.inl.gov/technicalpublications/KeyResults.aspx?key=20659 http://www.inl.gov/technicalpublications/KeyResults.aspx?key... China has a long-term vision (not really making progress) of closed fuel cycles based on fast breeder reactors. This is the state media reference to "60-fold increase in uranium usage", "3,000 year uranium supply". Since a fast reactor can't burn through fuel entirely in one go (it will fall apart), one of the requirements of a closed fuel cycle is reprocessing: fuel has to be removed from a reactor and re-fabricated. Certain waste products need to be removed, and pure plutonium* isolated for new fuel (this is a chemical separation). *(Not in every reprocessing method. COEX (mentioned in the Carnege Endowment article, where the French are trying to persuade China to adopt it) co-extracts plutonium with uranium. The pyroprocessing method developed at Argonne (US national lab) co-extracts plutonium with every trans-uranic, so that the resulting fuel is essentially unusable as weapons. China is pursuing PUREX.)
electromagnetic 16y ago
Who knows what the North Koreans are planning. They could be intending to use their nuclear program to fuel a train capable of travelling at extreme velocities so as to cause time dilation effects so that their leader can rule for an unnaturally long time.
cdavid 16y ago
This kind of claims has been heard in France as far as I can remember it. I don't know how technologies differ between French technology (super-phenix) and chinese ones, but I would be warry about the claims before seeing concrete results: fast breeder super phenix was supposed to solve most issues with civil nuclear usage, and it cost a fortune without producing electricity anywhere near reasonable cost. Thorium-based designs seem more realistic and useful, I wonder why this is not investigated more: it is more common than uranium and produces less nuclear waste than uranium-based designs. The US has a lot of it, Europe has a lot of it so it makes sense for countries like France to look at it, etc...
- uvdiv 16y ago
  I'd be wary of calling sodium fast reactors inferior on the basis of their past performance. All SFRs ever built were essentially prototypes; all their operating experience combined is less than what LWRs had in the 1960's. If thorium reactors had fewer spectacular commercial failures (e.g. [1]), it's largely because they had fewer commercial attempts. (That's not to concede that SFR failures were entirely commercial -- political obstruction was a large factor too. Both anti-nuclear opposition in general (post-Three Mile Island and post-Chernobyl) as well as specific, extremely misguided opposition to plutonium breeding. Argonne's IFR project was killed for this second reason [2]). >Thorium-based designs seem more realistic and useful, I wonder why this is not investigated more: it is more common than uranium and produces less nuclear waste than uranium-based designs. There's no meaningful distinction between FBRs and thorium reactors in fuel supply -- both have theoretically thousands of years of potential, so that it's silly to call this a factor. Nor is there a significant difference in waste production. (Though if I remember right, some minor actinides can only be efficiently destroyed by fast neutrons. This isn't an important difference; MAs are a small component, so you can augment a thermal-reactor fuel cycle with dedicated "waste burners" (e.g. [3] [4]) and still have a mostly-thorium fuel cycle). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300 [2] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/oleary.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/inter... [3] http://energyfromthorium.com/2009/11/11/lftr-and-msrs-achieve-the-doe-nes-goals/ http://energyfromthorium.com/2009/11/11/lftr-and-msrs-achiev... [4] http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2002/nea3109.html http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2002/nea3109.html

The complete lack of any details may fly on Chinese Central Television and Reuters.com, but I want more when I come to hacker news. What's next? "North Korea boasts development of time machine!"

uvdiv 16y ago

They recently built an R&D-scale PUREX plant on the site of a weapons complex. The most likely "story" is that it started operating. >The Jiuquan Atomic Energy Complex (Plant 404) is centered on a 400-500MW light water graphite reactor [LWGR] fueled with natural Uranium. The facility includes a pilot plutonium reprocessing plant and a arge-scale reprocessing plant with a capacity of 300-400kg Pu/yr (both use PUREX method). It also includes a Nuclear Fuel Processing Plant for refining plutonium into weapons-usable metals. http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/china/jiuquan.htm http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/china/jiuquan.htm >The small reprocessing plant in Gansu was completed about six years ago, but Chinese oversight agencies have not yet permitted it to separate any plutonium—as of last month, just two fuel assemblies have been dissolved in the nitric acid tank at the plant. Full-scale operation is not expected before 2012. http://carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=41969 http://carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&... More about PUREX, reprocessing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing http://www.inl.gov/technicalpublications/KeyResults.aspx?key=20659 http://www.inl.gov/technicalpublications/KeyResults.aspx?key... China has a long-term vision (not really making progress) of closed fuel cycles based on fast breeder reactors. This is the state media reference to "60-fold increase in uranium usage", "3,000 year uranium supply". Since a fast reactor can't burn through fuel entirely in one go (it will fall apart), one of the requirements of a closed fuel cycle is reprocessing: fuel has to be removed from a reactor and re-fabricated. Certain waste products need to be removed, and pure plutonium* isolated for new fuel (this is a chemical separation). *(Not in every reprocessing method. COEX (mentioned in the Carnege Endowment article, where the French are trying to persuade China to adopt it) co-extracts plutonium with uranium. The pyroprocessing method developed at Argonne (US national lab) co-extracts plutonium with every trans-uranic, so that the resulting fuel is essentially unusable as weapons. China is pursuing PUREX.)

electromagnetic 16y ago

Who knows what the North Koreans are planning. They could be intending to use their nuclear program to fuel a train capable of travelling at extreme velocities so as to cause time dilation effects so that their leader can rule for an unnaturally long time.

cdavid 16y ago

This kind of claims has been heard in France as far as I can remember it. I don't know how technologies differ between French technology (super-phenix) and chinese ones, but I would be warry about the claims before seeing concrete results: fast breeder super phenix was supposed to solve most issues with civil nuclear usage, and it cost a fortune without producing electricity anywhere near reasonable cost. Thorium-based designs seem more realistic and useful, I wonder why this is not investigated more: it is more common than uranium and produces less nuclear waste than uranium-based designs. The US has a lot of it, Europe has a lot of it so it makes sense for countries like France to look at it, etc...

uvdiv 16y ago
I'd be wary of calling sodium fast reactors inferior on the basis of their past performance. All SFRs ever built were essentially prototypes; all their operating experience combined is less than what LWRs had in the 1960's. If thorium reactors had fewer spectacular commercial failures (e.g. [1]), it's largely because they had fewer commercial attempts. (That's not to concede that SFR failures were entirely commercial -- political obstruction was a large factor too. Both anti-nuclear opposition in general (post-Three Mile Island and post-Chernobyl) as well as specific, extremely misguided opposition to plutonium breeding. Argonne's IFR project was killed for this second reason [2]). >Thorium-based designs seem more realistic and useful, I wonder why this is not investigated more: it is more common than uranium and produces less nuclear waste than uranium-based designs. There's no meaningful distinction between FBRs and thorium reactors in fuel supply -- both have theoretically thousands of years of potential, so that it's silly to call this a factor. Nor is there a significant difference in waste production. (Though if I remember right, some minor actinides can only be efficiently destroyed by fast neutrons. This isn't an important difference; MAs are a small component, so you can augment a thermal-reactor fuel cycle with dedicated "waste burners" (e.g. [3] [4]) and still have a mostly-thorium fuel cycle). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300 [2] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/oleary.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/inter... [3] http://energyfromthorium.com/2009/11/11/lftr-and-msrs-achieve-the-doe-nes-goals/ http://energyfromthorium.com/2009/11/11/lftr-and-msrs-achiev... [4] http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2002/nea3109.html http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2002/nea3109.html