11 ms·

Lead-Cooled Fast Reactor Proliferation Resistance White Paper 2021

31 points by DrNuke 5y ago

threeseed 5y ago
I am far more interested in white papers on how nuclear fission can be made significantly cheaper. Otherwise advancements in design are great but ultimately pointless. 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.
- jcims 5y ago
  Lex Fridman had an interview with his dad on his podcast a while back. His dad is a plasma physicist and had some interesting thoughts on your point here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JipQNWuYnA&t=10217s 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.
  - api 5y ago
    Interesting. If solar/wind and batteries continue their downward price trajectory we may never see commercial hot fusion on Earth, not because it's impossible but because it could never be economically competitive with the giant free gravitational confinement reactor at the center of the solar system. Fission and fossil fuels would eventually be eaten too, though I think you might still see some use of them in regions that are isolated and have very poor solar and wind options. 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.
  - RBerenguel 5y ago
    Note: haven't watched the video (I might). Using muons as catalyst is "old news" [0], it didn't seem to work well enough in experiments. It was used by Arthur C. Clarke as the energy source for the ships in 2061: Odyssey III [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion
    - jcims 5y ago
      Oh wow! Thank you for this! I clearly didn't understand the mechanism that Alexander was discussing, definitely not that the change the atom was sufficient for it to effectively self-fuse and release the muon afterwards. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDfB3gnxRhc
      - RBerenguel 5y ago
        IIRC creating muons is not that hard, but the fusion ratio was too small anyway. I still think combining it with some weak containment might work… I guess it doesn't and this is why it's not worked on anymore
        jcims 5y ago
        Yeah I don't know anything at all but it does make me wonder if you could use the energy created by the muon-catalyzed fusion to push a lower-temp hot plasma into fusing over the edge. Almost like hierarchical catalysis of fusion. 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.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    There is no "ultimate solution" 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.
    - jcims 5y ago
      Sure. Definitely wouldn't advocate we stop following that path.
- DrNuke 5y ago
  Gen-IV forum is a worldwide consortium with a long-standing effort in making nuclear fission viable for the second half of this century. It is less glamorous than fusion but much steadier, and at least three of the six Gen IV reactor designs under development are now approaching the technical readiness level for demonstrators. China and Russia are a bit ahead, to be fair, but the European Union is also doing well with their sodium and lead fast reactor concepts. This white paper just shows they care about more issues than blunt commercial viability. Also consider that they cannot rely upon Russian gas for much longer, and that the C02 zero emission target for 2050 is going to be tough, without nuclear (if they put it into the incoming tassonomy). United States are more pragmatic, and with a dual path: big national laboratories + commercial startups.
- baybal2 5y ago
  > how nuclear fission can be made significantly cheaper 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.
  - bell-cot 5y ago
    My impression is that dis-economies of scale in fission reactors (safety systems, low-volume manufacturing & construction, local grid management, etc.) are severe enough that neigh-all more-recent proposed designs are for far smaller reactors than the older generation (~1GW per reactor).
    - jabl 5y ago
      Small Modular Reactors (SMR) are currently the darlings of the nuclear world. They promise cost reduction through mass production in factories rather than on site, smaller size enabling simpler passive emergency cooling, hypothetically simpler licensing through something like type certificates used for, say, airliners rather than starting from scratch for each reactor, etc etc. 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.
      - pas 5y ago
        The reactors can be small, the plant has to be big to have economies of scale, right?
        jabl 5y ago
        Sure, even if all the previously mentioned SMR advantages would turn out to be true, it would still make sense to place multiple SMR's at the same site in order to take advantage of common grid connections, security, etc. IIRC Nuscale is designing for up to 12 of their 60 MW reactors in the same plant.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  You mean fusion? Because fast breeder, metal cooled, proliferation resistant are some extremely relevant concepts for making fission cheaper.
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  Solar and wind are only cheaper when you don't count the adaptation the network needs to make to accommodate them (storage or gas plants to deal with intermittency, but also regional interconnections, frequency stabilization mechanism, the “smart grid” thing, etc). And people usually bring that “nuclear doesn't account for the decommissioning cost”, as if renewable did… It's the same issue as trucks vs trains: trucks are cheaper because they don't pay for the roads at all.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Nuclear isn’t load following either. To get close to 100% you need to have vastly more power plants constructed which then mostly sit idle, but trying to do that is horrifically expensive. 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.
    - pyrale 5y ago
      > Nuclear isn’t load following either. That's simply not true. [1]: https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2011/load-following-npp.pdf 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.
      - Retric 5y ago
        You can build a more expensive a nuclear reactor to quickly adjust power output across a wide range just look at nuclear subs. You can’t however do that and meet close to 100% of annual demand by keeping average power output below 50% and sell electricity at under 25c/kWh without truly monumental subsides. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_poison) etc and thus construction cost increased alongside increased maintenance costs due to increased thermal cycling etc.
- pas 5y ago
  Nuclear Power has the same cost problem as public transit infrastructure (and healthcare & education for that matter too). It's not mass produced, there's no competition, capital productivity factor is very low. 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.
baybal2 5y ago
I would say proliferation resistance is nearly completely irrelevant. 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.
- akiselev 5y ago
  This is short sighted. This isn't about getting the genie back into the bottle but about sharing nuclear technology with developing countries that we otherwise can't help because they'd need a source of enriched uranium and it'd provide them with an industrial source of weapons grade radioisotopes. 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.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    "Developing countries" with an axe to grind on USA already have dozens of research, or power reactors. This is my point. 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.
    - akiselev 5y ago
      > "Developing countries" with an axe to grind on USA already have dozens of research, or power reactors reactors. 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.
      - baybal2 5y ago
kleton 5y ago
China has 150 new reactors planned to go online in the next 15 years. They have a variety of different experimental fission plants such as molten salt and high temperature gas (helium) in addition to reliable "traditional" third gen reactors. It's a question of political will more than engineering at this point.
- pyrale 5y ago
  China already has nuclear arms, proliferation isn't really a concern about their use of commercial nuke plants.

31 points by DrNuke 5y ago

I am far more interested in white papers on how nuclear fission can be made significantly cheaper. Otherwise advancements in design are great but ultimately pointless. 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.

jcims 5y ago
Lex Fridman had an interview with his dad on his podcast a while back. His dad is a plasma physicist and had some interesting thoughts on your point here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JipQNWuYnA&t=10217s 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.
- api 5y ago
  Interesting. If solar/wind and batteries continue their downward price trajectory we may never see commercial hot fusion on Earth, not because it's impossible but because it could never be economically competitive with the giant free gravitational confinement reactor at the center of the solar system. Fission and fossil fuels would eventually be eaten too, though I think you might still see some use of them in regions that are isolated and have very poor solar and wind options. 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.
- RBerenguel 5y ago
  Note: haven't watched the video (I might). Using muons as catalyst is "old news" [0], it didn't seem to work well enough in experiments. It was used by Arthur C. Clarke as the energy source for the ships in 2061: Odyssey III [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion
  - jcims 5y ago
    Oh wow! Thank you for this! I clearly didn't understand the mechanism that Alexander was discussing, definitely not that the change the atom was sufficient for it to effectively self-fuse and release the muon afterwards. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDfB3gnxRhc
    - RBerenguel 5y ago
      IIRC creating muons is not that hard, but the fusion ratio was too small anyway. I still think combining it with some weak containment might work… I guess it doesn't and this is why it's not worked on anymore
      - jcims 5y ago
        Yeah I don't know anything at all but it does make me wonder if you could use the energy created by the muon-catalyzed fusion to push a lower-temp hot plasma into fusing over the edge. Almost like hierarchical catalysis of fusion. 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.
- baybal2 5y ago
  There is no "ultimate solution" 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.
  - jcims 5y ago
    Sure. Definitely wouldn't advocate we stop following that path.
DrNuke 5y ago
Gen-IV forum is a worldwide consortium with a long-standing effort in making nuclear fission viable for the second half of this century. It is less glamorous than fusion but much steadier, and at least three of the six Gen IV reactor designs under development are now approaching the technical readiness level for demonstrators. China and Russia are a bit ahead, to be fair, but the European Union is also doing well with their sodium and lead fast reactor concepts. This white paper just shows they care about more issues than blunt commercial viability. Also consider that they cannot rely upon Russian gas for much longer, and that the C02 zero emission target for 2050 is going to be tough, without nuclear (if they put it into the incoming tassonomy). United States are more pragmatic, and with a dual path: big national laboratories + commercial startups.
baybal2 5y ago
> how nuclear fission can be made significantly cheaper 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.
- bell-cot 5y ago
  My impression is that dis-economies of scale in fission reactors (safety systems, low-volume manufacturing & construction, local grid management, etc.) are severe enough that neigh-all more-recent proposed designs are for far smaller reactors than the older generation (~1GW per reactor).
  - jabl 5y ago
    Small Modular Reactors (SMR) are currently the darlings of the nuclear world. They promise cost reduction through mass production in factories rather than on site, smaller size enabling simpler passive emergency cooling, hypothetically simpler licensing through something like type certificates used for, say, airliners rather than starting from scratch for each reactor, etc etc. 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.
    - pas 5y ago
      The reactors can be small, the plant has to be big to have economies of scale, right?
      - jabl 5y ago
        Sure, even if all the previously mentioned SMR advantages would turn out to be true, it would still make sense to place multiple SMR's at the same site in order to take advantage of common grid connections, security, etc. IIRC Nuscale is designing for up to 12 of their 60 MW reactors in the same plant.
marcosdumay 5y ago
You mean fusion? Because fast breeder, metal cooled, proliferation resistant are some extremely relevant concepts for making fission cheaper.
littlestymaar 5y ago
Solar and wind are only cheaper when you don't count the adaptation the network needs to make to accommodate them (storage or gas plants to deal with intermittency, but also regional interconnections, frequency stabilization mechanism, the “smart grid” thing, etc). And people usually bring that “nuclear doesn't account for the decommissioning cost”, as if renewable did… It's the same issue as trucks vs trains: trucks are cheaper because they don't pay for the roads at all.
- Retric 5y ago
  Nuclear isn’t load following either. To get close to 100% you need to have vastly more power plants constructed which then mostly sit idle, but trying to do that is horrifically expensive. 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.
  - pyrale 5y ago
    > Nuclear isn’t load following either. That's simply not true. [1]: https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2011/load-following-npp.pdf 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.
    - Retric 5y ago
      You can build a more expensive a nuclear reactor to quickly adjust power output across a wide range just look at nuclear subs. You can’t however do that and meet close to 100% of annual demand by keeping average power output below 50% and sell electricity at under 25c/kWh without truly monumental subsides. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_poison) etc and thus construction cost increased alongside increased maintenance costs due to increased thermal cycling etc.
pas 5y ago
Nuclear Power has the same cost problem as public transit infrastructure (and healthcare & education for that matter too). It's not mass produced, there's no competition, capital productivity factor is very low. 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.

baybal2 5y ago

I would say proliferation resistance is nearly completely irrelevant. 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.

akiselev 5y ago
This is short sighted. This isn't about getting the genie back into the bottle but about sharing nuclear technology with developing countries that we otherwise can't help because they'd need a source of enriched uranium and it'd provide them with an industrial source of weapons grade radioisotopes. 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.
- baybal2 5y ago
  "Developing countries" with an axe to grind on USA already have dozens of research, or power reactors. This is my point. 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.
  - akiselev 5y ago
    > "Developing countries" with an axe to grind on USA already have dozens of research, or power reactors reactors. 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.
    - baybal2 5y ago

kleton 5y ago

China has 150 new reactors planned to go online in the next 15 years. They have a variety of different experimental fission plants such as molten salt and high temperature gas (helium) in addition to reliable "traditional" third gen reactors. It's a question of political will more than engineering at this point.

pyrale 5y ago
China already has nuclear arms, proliferation isn't really a concern about their use of commercial nuke plants.