11 ms·

How the first fourth-generation nuclear power plant works

85 points by chris222 3y ago

hunglee2 3y ago
Exciting to see this - so many advantages to pebble bed nuclear reactors including inherent safety (no risk of meltdown), use of helium coolant, ease of waste recycling disposal and continuous refuelling by simply adding more pebbles to the hopper. Illinois Energy Prof has an excellent YT channel on energy, and has a great talk on IV gen reactor design. Saw it 4 years ago, so pumped to see some of the ideas he was talking about get plugged into the grid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mJ3S-VQuHY&t=490s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mJ3S-VQuHY&t=490s for those who want to know more
- pstuart 3y ago
  If this helps China ween itself from coal faster then it's a huge win for the entire planet. I know there's a lot of hate for nuclear (much of it understandable), but if we hadn't fucked it up in the 70's then climate change would not be a thing right now. Yes, renewables and energy storage are good things too but the modern world is built on cheap energy and the more the merrier. Side note: I became enamored with LFTR when it started getting promoted back in the day and I still think that too would be worth tackling.
  - Krasnol 3y ago
    > Yes, renewables and energy storage are good things too but the modern world is built on cheap energy and the more the merrier. Yes, this is also why China invests more into renewables than in nuclear: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-trend-upward-while-nuclear-trends-flat/ https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-tre...
  - melling 3y ago
    China installed more renewable energy in 2023 than the United States has installed in its entire history.
    - pstuart 3y ago
      Yes, and that's great. But coal is still king and the enemy of coal is our friend: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-country?stackMode=absolute&country=~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou... It shouldn't be an either or equation. It should be yes, and.
      - melling 3y ago
        Yes, globally we are using more coal now than ever. And fossil fuel usage is still increasing. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/world-oil-gas-coal-demand-peak-by-2030-iea-says-2023-10-24/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/world-oil-gas-coal-d...
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - jansan 3y ago
      You know, if parts of your country are as south as the Sahara desert, it just makes a lot of sense to install solar. Just like solar makes a lot more sense in the US than in Germany, which is more to the north than all parts of the US except Alaska and the most northern parts of WA/MT/ND/MN.
      - pstuart 3y ago
        I am as pro-solar as can be, and am thrilled by the decreased costs and increased installation. I think every building where possible should have solar on it. Carports, agrivoltaics, etc. It's a no-brainer in addressing climate change, reducing energy costs, and more self-sufficiency. But not all the world has such solar profiles and there are also (addressable) issues with solar (storage, grid integration). This isn't a "pick one" problem. It's about feeding an energy hungry planet without cooking it, and every non carbon source should be embraced.
        jiggawatts 3y ago
        The problem with this logic is that solar + storage is still cheaper than nuclear.
  - gtvwill 3y ago
    Human health cost of global warming isn't exactly cheap. Delayed costs are still costs. It's just my generation and my kids who have to pay while my parents generation reaped the rewards and profits up front. I, like many of my peers feel like we are being grifted by the boomer generation.
    - The_Colonel 3y ago
      You're also reaping the advantages produced by the boomer generation in technology, medicine etc. to which they themselves did not have access (or had, but much later in life). In any case, it's disappointing to see how people are so quick to jump at any opportunity to stereotype and hate a group of people, this time not identified by their skin, but their date of birth...
      - gtvwill 3y ago
        [flagged]
      - screye 3y ago
        That bit is obvious. The next generation benefits from the innovations of the previous generation. But boomers knew about global warming, and refused to do even the bare minimum to help curb it. (More highways, gas guzzlers galore, effectively ban nuclear, anti sustainable urban development) Even the one positive assertion comes with asterisks. The boomers oversaw a lengthy defunding of federal programs while wealth kept accumulating at the very top of this nation. So the resulting economic benefits haven't been all that useful to the rest of America. Ofc, no individual bears the sin of an entire era. But we need to recognize the inherent selfishness of that era nevertheless.
  - fastball 3y ago
    Honestly the hate for nuclear isn't understandable at all. It has killed very few people, expense isn't a reason for hate, and everything else has pretty much been a win (land usage minimal, minimal byproducts, etc).
    - jiggawatts 3y ago
      Fusion power research in the EU is going to cost something like 100B euro for ITER + DEMO. No useful amount of power production is planned for decades. Meanwhile, that money could have purchased solar + wind that would provide something like a third or even half of Europe’s electricity needs! That’s not even factoring in ongoing cost reductions over those same decades. Fission has the same problem: it’s expensive power in the distant future versus cheap power available now.
      - jliptzin 3y ago
        Are we foregoing solar+wind in Europe because that money was diverted to fusion research or is it due to other reasons?
        einpoklum 3y ago
        Indeed, that's a false dilemma. I could just as well have argued that the money has gone to bailing out banks, or to funding the war in Ukraine, or whatever. Not to mention that money itself is a social construct; it is created by banks and/or the state. If a (sovereign) state wants to, it can print money. Of course this has risks, and sometimes results in currency devaluation (not as frequently as some believe), but it's another way in which one can't claim that "country C invested this much money in A instead of investing in B".
      - jupp0r 3y ago
        Fusion power research is research. It's not meant to produce electricity but knowledge.
        jiggawatts 3y ago
  - ViewTrick1002 3y ago
    China is also building enough renewable power than their grid expansion rate leading to a structural decline in CO2 emissions [1]. At the same time the utilization factors of the coal plants reduce each year. This is driven purely by economic factors, for the first time since the discovery of fossil fuels, except the blip where we dammed up pretty much every single river globally to provide hydropower, we have in renewables have found a new cheaper energy source. Renewables are cheap energy. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carbon-emissions-set-for-structural-decline-from-next-year https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carb...
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  How does it's cost to install and operate compare to gen 3/other nuclear tech? Safety is great, but nuclear is already safe enough (in the sense that, installing current and even last gen nuclear saves more lives through fossil fuel displacement than it can plausibly kill even in worst case disaster scenarios). Continuing to make nuclear safer, if it results in higher costs (and therefore reduced installs) is a bad tradeoff and has been for close to 50 years.
  - chasil 3y ago
    It is said that most reactors in the U.S. only use 2% of the available power within the fuel, and the best designs top out at 30%. How is the fuel efficiency for this design? Walk-away safe is a major benefit, and is worth some sacrifice of efficiency.
    - fbdab103 3y ago
      Is the uncaptured power completely gone during processing or does it remain embedded in the "nuclear waste"? It is not hard to imagine a future in which that waste gets mined to be put in a new reactor when the political/economic winds change.
  - einpoklum 3y ago
    With due respect - that's a BS safety argument. Nuclear reactors must meet stringent safety standards, not with hand-wavy "but people die from fossil fuel pollution" rhetoric; and at the same time, fossil-fuel-fired plants must be made to emit a lot less, through filtering and other technological means.
    - MostlyStable 3y ago
      Safety is not a binary, safe/dangerous. How much risk we are willing to accept and what the trade-offs are isn't something that has a correct answer. it's a values question. My comment was assuming that society's apparent risk calculation was evident in how we treat everything other than nuclear. If your argument is that our safety regime on nuclear is correct and everything else is too dangerous and needs to be made safer, well I personally disagree but at least it's consistent and I have no problem with your opinion. It's a difference in values. The real problem I have is people who think that nuclear is a special flower and needs to be held to different standards than everything else. Which is how society is currently acting. And it's killing millions of people every year.
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  Nice to see one in operation. Anyone know if they move the LCOE needle? For reference, traditional nuclear is 4-6x as expensive as wind/solar, and wind/solar are still dropping. For baseload the gas turbine still beats the pants off of nuclear. I think nuclear needs to get to 2-3x unsubsidized to be relevant long-term, but that's a long road.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > For baseload the gas turbine still beats the pants off of nuclear. Not if you price carbon. > For reference, traditional nuclear is 4-6x as expensive as wind/solar, and wind/solar are still dropping. That's cost per MWh generated not accounting for when you need it. Renewables need both short-term storage and long-term storage. If you generate with solar, what do you do at night? You'd need 12 hours of storage. Maybe that's economical in some contexts but it definitely raises the cost. Now what do you do if it's cloudy or still for a week, or a month? 720 hours of storage would be crazy expensive. You could use natural gas plants or similar, but then you have to pay the cost of maintaining natural gas plants and the associated infrastructure that you only use 2% of the time. 1GW nuclear plant vs 1GW (average) of solar + 12GWh of storage + 1GW natural gas plant + rarely used gas pipelines or 720GWh of on-site reserves, which costs more?
    - stubish 3y ago
      > Not if you price carbon. That is just adding an arbitrary cost, so you can get any result you like. You can also put an arbitrary cost on land usage to make nuclear cheaper that wind or solar. Just a government doing its job, putting its thumbs on the scale to get the result we want.
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        The result we want is "stop burning carbon" so yeah.
- huytersd 3y ago
  Why is helium coolant good? Because it will just evaporate instead of poisoning waterbodies?
  - petre 3y ago
    It escapes into space and that's the main problem with it. But it doesn't create steam explosions and hydrogen buildup under ionizing radiation (also explosive). My main gripes with pebble bed reactors is not helium, but pebbles cracking, graphite fires and complications with fuel reprocessing. Helium just ads another layer of complications because it's quite scarce and easily lost. Also the installed capacity of this reactor is quite underwhelming. But it's nice that the Chinese have built it and are testing and advancing the technology developed in Germany during the '80s.
  - bogeholm 3y ago
    A couple of points I can think of, 1) the Helium nucleus is exceedingly stable so the coolant won’t get radioactive from neutron activation, 2) the coolant being chemically inactive means you can use run the reactor at higher temperatures, thus achieving higher efficiency if you use the heat to run a heat engine (steam turbine).
  - vipa123 3y ago
    I am not an expert at this, but if I had to guess I would agree with your answer. Helium, even neutron enriched radioactive helium -if there is such a thing-, will evaporate into the air instantly, it will also rise to highest location being lighter than essentially every other atmospheric gas. This make it easy collect, contain, or cleanse, if performed. It will also rise above the atmosphere and get blown away by the solar winds should it escape the building. Additionally, helium is inert so it will not form other chemical compounds that will stay around, or enter the human body. Also because it is inert your body will not generally absorb it, certainly not like it would tritium water. Also comparing to water, helium will not dissolve other chemicals, radioactive or not, into it like water does. One last thing is the cooling potential of liquid helium is immense, being able to absorb massive amounts of heat during evaporation. Assuming they want to use a helium refrigeration cycle. Fingers crossed I got some of this right...
SnorkelTan 3y ago
Article text covered by obnoxious banner in firefox. Anyone got a link to the text?
- Krasnol 3y ago
  Just clear and update your ublock cache. No banners here on FF.
p1mrx 3y ago
China's HTR-PM (the topic of this article) is similar to the Xe-100 that X-energy is planning to build in Texas: https://x-energy.com/seadrift https://x-energy.com/seadrift But they've yet to apply for NRC approval, so who knows if that'll actually happen.
- credit_guy 3y ago
  They are at the stage of pre-application. https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/advanced/who-were-working-with/licensing-activities/pre-application-activities/xe-100.html https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/advanced/who-were-... X-Energy submitted 14 documents in December '23, and already 5 documents this month https://adams.nrc.gov/wba/?data=(mode:sections,sections:(filters:(public-library:!t),options:(within-folder:(enable:!f,insubfolder:!f,path:%27%27)),properties_search_all:!(!(DocketNumber,starts,%2799902071%27,%27%27))))&qn=New&tab=advanced-search-pars&z=0 https://adams.nrc.gov/wba/?data=(mode:sections,sections:(fil...
vlovich123 3y ago
China has also started experimenting building commercial molten salt reactors so it'll be interesting what the fourth generation power plant shootout will look like.
acidburnNSA 3y ago
Glad they got a high temperature gas cooled reactor up and running! I do dislike the terminology/categorization around 'fourth generation'. The first ever proposed commercial reactor (the Daniels Pile) was a pebble bed gas cooled reactor concept, worked on at Oak Ridge in the 1940s. We've built lots of gas-cooled reactors in the past, including helium cooled ones. Such as: * Peach Bottom * Fort St. Vrain * HTTR * Dragon * HTR-10 * AVR pebble bed * THTR-300 * Ultra-High Temperature Reactor Experiment (UHTREX) Nitrogen-cooled ones, such as ML-1 and GCRE CO2-cooled ones, like EL4, Lucens, AGR, Magnox Air-cooled ones like HTRE Liquid-hydrogen cooled ones like NERVA It's kinda dumb to call this the first 4-th gen reactor.
- jansan 3y ago
  > I do dislike the 'fourth generation' category in nuclear. Do you mean the term or the actual reactor technology?
  - acidburnNSA 3y ago
    I mean the term/categorization. I'll clarify in an edit, thanks.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Nitrogen cooled reactors produce copious amounts of 14C, unless you use isotopically purified 15N, which is quite expensive. Ditto for air cooled reactors.
jansan 3y ago
Reading this as a German feels really bitter. Our government has cancelled ALL research into nuclear reactors. We are completely out of the race, and there is probably no way back.
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  You guys had some really nice reactors too. Not just the ones recently shut down, but gas-cooled ones as well (THTR-300), and the infamous sodium-cooled one SNR-300, which got cancelled by protests after it was 100% completed and fueled but before it ever turned on. It's now an amusement park :( :(
  - ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
    Would be really interesting to see where the anti-nuclear sentiment in germany formented from
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - nukeman 3y ago
      1. Being on the front lines of the Cold War, in the event of a hot war, most nuclear weapons would be used in West Germany. (Yes, weapons aren’t power plants, but they can be hard to separate in popular discourse.) 2. Plans to build a nuclear power plant at Wyhl were opposed by locals, who occupied the site, and were forcefully removed by police. This was broadcast on television and helped galvanize the anti-nuclear movement. 3. The Chernobyl accident led to fallout being deposited on German soil, which furthered opposition, and in my view, was the killing blow.
      - jansan 3y ago
        > The Chernobyl accident led to fallout being deposited on German soil, A That was long after the anti nuclear movement had gained full steam, not a reason for it. People in Poland or Bulgaria are not nearly that extreme in their thinking, even though they got a much bigger dose of the Charnobyl fallout.
pfdietz 3y ago
A significant advantage of a higher temperature reactor would be if it could use the same steam turbines used in combined cycle plants. These are "dry" turbines that operate with high temperature (550 C) steam. In contrast, LWRs use "wet" turbines with saturated steam at temperature a couple of hundred degrees lower. They're about the only ones still doing so, I think, so the turbines are bespoke and do not benefit from the economies of scale of the CC steam turbines. (550 C is the upper temperature limit for cheap steel against creep, so I think that choice of temperature is not a coincidence. It also makes me dubious of reactor concepts operating at higher temperature.)
brazzy 3y ago
Unfortunately the "how it works" is very shallow, the Wikipedia article has a lot more meat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor
- Firerouge 3y ago
  It's still not entirely clear to me how reactor power is moderated. If there are control rods or if another method is used to control the reaction.
  - brazzy 3y ago
    As far as I understand, at least with some designs, the fuel elements have the property that it overall becomes less reactive above a certain temperature (that the elements can withstand without damage). So it's basically self- moderating, and the cooling system only has the job to extract the energy to generate electricity. At least that's the theory.
Almondsetat 3y ago
Doesn't China building so many civilian reactors mean they are getting more experience and more specialized workforce in nuclear energy than anyone else? How can the west compete if most nations reject the atom and the ones who don't either have minuscule numbers or focus more on military reactors?
- Retric 3y ago
  That’s only a big deal if nuclear was going to play a major role in the future, but the world seems to have decided on PV in a big way. The world is adding the equivalent of more than 100 nuclear reactors worth of PV solar per year even adjusting for differences in capacity factors. (~30% vs ~70-90%) China gets roughly 5% of it’s annual electricity from nuclear, 5% from solar and increasing rapidly, 10% from wind, and 15% from hydro. It’s a token investment in nuclear that only seems huge because they produce ~30% of the worlds electricity. PS: Also, don’t forget about the defense industry. We’re maintaining nuclear expertise even if the civilian industry fails.
  - ezst 3y ago
    > but the world seems to have decided on PV in a big way. No, the world has decided to procure lots of cheap PV from China
    - Retric 3y ago
      It’s a little more complex, ~60% of panels used outside of China come from China. Thus current prices are just what it costs to manufacture not the result of some subsidy. Roughly 37% of the worlds supply is by China for China, 38% by China for the rest of the world, and 25% is by the rest of the world for the rest of the world.
- huytersd 3y ago
  It’s silly. Next we’re going to severely hamstring AI research because of some insipid NYT lawsuit and let them run away with it too though we did all the research for it.
photochemsyn 3y ago
Better article here: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinese-HTR-PM-Demo-begins-commercial-operation https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinese-HTR-PM-D... > "The HTR-PM features two small reactors (each of 250 MWt) that drive a single 210 MWe steam turbine. It uses helium as coolant and graphite as the moderator. Each reactor is loaded with more than 400,000 spherical fuel elements (‘pebbles’), each 60 mm in diameter and containing 7 g of fuel enriched to 8.5%. Each pebble has an outer layer of graphite and contains some 12,000 four-layer ceramic-coated fuel particles dispersed in a graphite matrix." Note that Chernobyl was graphite-moderated and water-cooled, but hot graphite and steam is a bad combination, tending towards the generation of (explosive) hydrogen and carbon monooxide gases during loss-of-coolant type accidents. The helium coolant avoids this process, and can sustain higher operating temperatures so has industrial uses, somewhat ironically in the petrochemical sector: > "The major purpose of HTR-PM is to co-generate high temperature steam up to 500℃ and electricity. It is cost effective currently in the Chinese market to supply steam and electricity for the petrochemical industry to substitute the burning of natural gas and coal." It seems like a pretty safe design with some unique capabilities, although it'd be interesting to see the total cost-per-pellet inputs (each 6 cm pellet generates as much power as 1.5 tons of coal prior to its retirement, but manufacturing each pellet is probably not that cheap).
ziofill 3y ago
> The operating reactors are cooled by the inert gas helium instead of water. Is this going to hit a wall when scaling up? Helium is notoriously scarcer lately https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/helium-shortage-4-0-what-caused-it-and-when-will-it-end/29255/ https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/helium-shortage-4-0-wh...
einpoklum 3y ago
Shell script wrapper invoking a third-generation nuclear power plant? Ah, no, it's a physicists' project, so maybe a fortran90 program invoking a fortran77 program? Am I close?
euroderf 3y ago
As I've understood it, the main risk of running a PBMR is that putting out a graphite fire is somewhere between very difficult and impossible. Does this particular design somehow address this ?
- Firerouge 3y ago
  While I'm not certain about this system, it sounds like the fuel pellets they've designed for it have no graphite in them. It sounds like they've gone for an intrinsically safe design where the maximum safe temperature of the fuel composites is higher than the maximum temperate an uncontrolled reaction could reach.
  - MaKey 3y ago
    They do have graphite in them (see comment from photochemsyn).
huytersd 3y ago
So it sounds like all new things (that aren’t an idea or software) will come from China moving forward. I hate this but it’s interesting in a way to see how far they will get. The US supercharged the world for generations but now seems to have directed all its attention to feminizing its men. I wonder how far the Chinese can take it. Settlement on the moon? Mars? Generational ships headed out of the solar system? Anything seems possible with the mostly benevolent dictatorship they have going on over there.
knlje 3y ago
According to this summary, Germany has lots of remaining problems with its prototype pebble bed reactors: https://web.archive.org/web/20170329044120/http://nuris.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Moormann_Decommissioning-problems-of-German-pebble-bed-reactors.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170329044120/http://nuris.org/...
mvac 3y ago
Thiel was right (9y ago) with the west being leader in innovation in the world of bits, but not in the world of atoms.
DarkNova6 3y ago
This reads more as a puff piece than an informative article. Hardly surprised coming from the "China Global Television Network". It just reads like "Everything going great, look no further". And for somebody who has been following the development of 4th generation reactors, this one is rather non-exciting. Yes it uses a pebble-bed and higher temperature (hence VHTR), it's overall improvements are rather diminishing compared to Gen 3 designs. The meager output of 150m isn't exactly thrilling and the possibility for hydrogen production remains unused as well. I don't want to be purely cynical. Every incremental advance is a form progression and can advance the status-quo as we know. But the most promising space is clearly happening in the Fast Reactor space, just maybe not the SFR, this is a nuclear disaster waiting to happen.
lven 3y ago
My own partisan comments on the pebble bed class of reactors (https://lvenneri.com/blog/pebble-bed-nukegumball https://lvenneri.com/blog/pebble-bed-nukegumball) for those interested in a deeper yet still qualitative comparison of pebble beds and prismatic cores - the main types high temperature reactor. Long story short : pebbles offer significant disadvantages compared to prismatic geometries, summarized by this donald duck clip: https://youtu.be/shvwSBGDmE0 https://youtu.be/shvwSBGDmE0.
- credit_guy 3y ago
  I'm not sure who the intended audience is. Your arguments are technical enough that whoever is able to follow them will be extremely unimpressed by the linked Donald Duck cartoon. The fact that you do include it and think it improves your case demonstrates that you attempt to target the emotional side of your reader. I'll be honest and admit this is an uncharitable view. The charitable view is simply that you found this video and couldn't resist linking to it. But it's not good.
hmm37 3y ago
What's interesting is whether this tech will allow China to replace their coal plant boilers with this one as a drop-in. e.g. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/12/chinas-plans-to-begin-converting-coal.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/12/chinas-plans-to-begin-...
nuclearsugar 3y ago
Is the helium cooling aspect part of a closed system?

85 points by chris222 3y ago

Exciting to see this - so many advantages to pebble bed nuclear reactors including inherent safety (no risk of meltdown), use of helium coolant, ease of waste recycling disposal and continuous refuelling by simply adding more pebbles to the hopper. Illinois Energy Prof has an excellent YT channel on energy, and has a great talk on IV gen reactor design. Saw it 4 years ago, so pumped to see some of the ideas he was talking about get plugged into the grid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mJ3S-VQuHY&t=490s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mJ3S-VQuHY&t=490s for those who want to know more

pstuart 3y ago
If this helps China ween itself from coal faster then it's a huge win for the entire planet. I know there's a lot of hate for nuclear (much of it understandable), but if we hadn't fucked it up in the 70's then climate change would not be a thing right now. Yes, renewables and energy storage are good things too but the modern world is built on cheap energy and the more the merrier. Side note: I became enamored with LFTR when it started getting promoted back in the day and I still think that too would be worth tackling.
- Krasnol 3y ago
  > Yes, renewables and energy storage are good things too but the modern world is built on cheap energy and the more the merrier. Yes, this is also why China invests more into renewables than in nuclear: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-trend-upward-while-nuclear-trends-flat/ https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-tre...
- melling 3y ago
  China installed more renewable energy in 2023 than the United States has installed in its entire history.
  - pstuart 3y ago
    Yes, and that's great. But coal is still king and the enemy of coal is our friend: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-country?stackMode=absolute&country=~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou... It shouldn't be an either or equation. It should be yes, and.
    - melling 3y ago
      Yes, globally we are using more coal now than ever. And fossil fuel usage is still increasing. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/world-oil-gas-coal-demand-peak-by-2030-iea-says-2023-10-24/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/world-oil-gas-coal-d...
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - jansan 3y ago
    You know, if parts of your country are as south as the Sahara desert, it just makes a lot of sense to install solar. Just like solar makes a lot more sense in the US than in Germany, which is more to the north than all parts of the US except Alaska and the most northern parts of WA/MT/ND/MN.
    - pstuart 3y ago
      I am as pro-solar as can be, and am thrilled by the decreased costs and increased installation. I think every building where possible should have solar on it. Carports, agrivoltaics, etc. It's a no-brainer in addressing climate change, reducing energy costs, and more self-sufficiency. But not all the world has such solar profiles and there are also (addressable) issues with solar (storage, grid integration). This isn't a "pick one" problem. It's about feeding an energy hungry planet without cooking it, and every non carbon source should be embraced.
      - jiggawatts 3y ago
        The problem with this logic is that solar + storage is still cheaper than nuclear.
- gtvwill 3y ago
  Human health cost of global warming isn't exactly cheap. Delayed costs are still costs. It's just my generation and my kids who have to pay while my parents generation reaped the rewards and profits up front. I, like many of my peers feel like we are being grifted by the boomer generation.
  - The_Colonel 3y ago
    You're also reaping the advantages produced by the boomer generation in technology, medicine etc. to which they themselves did not have access (or had, but much later in life). In any case, it's disappointing to see how people are so quick to jump at any opportunity to stereotype and hate a group of people, this time not identified by their skin, but their date of birth...
    - gtvwill 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - screye 3y ago
      That bit is obvious. The next generation benefits from the innovations of the previous generation. But boomers knew about global warming, and refused to do even the bare minimum to help curb it. (More highways, gas guzzlers galore, effectively ban nuclear, anti sustainable urban development) Even the one positive assertion comes with asterisks. The boomers oversaw a lengthy defunding of federal programs while wealth kept accumulating at the very top of this nation. So the resulting economic benefits haven't been all that useful to the rest of America. Ofc, no individual bears the sin of an entire era. But we need to recognize the inherent selfishness of that era nevertheless.
- fastball 3y ago
  Honestly the hate for nuclear isn't understandable at all. It has killed very few people, expense isn't a reason for hate, and everything else has pretty much been a win (land usage minimal, minimal byproducts, etc).
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    Fusion power research in the EU is going to cost something like 100B euro for ITER + DEMO. No useful amount of power production is planned for decades. Meanwhile, that money could have purchased solar + wind that would provide something like a third or even half of Europe’s electricity needs! That’s not even factoring in ongoing cost reductions over those same decades. Fission has the same problem: it’s expensive power in the distant future versus cheap power available now.
    - jliptzin 3y ago
      Are we foregoing solar+wind in Europe because that money was diverted to fusion research or is it due to other reasons?
      - einpoklum 3y ago
        Indeed, that's a false dilemma. I could just as well have argued that the money has gone to bailing out banks, or to funding the war in Ukraine, or whatever. Not to mention that money itself is a social construct; it is created by banks and/or the state. If a (sovereign) state wants to, it can print money. Of course this has risks, and sometimes results in currency devaluation (not as frequently as some believe), but it's another way in which one can't claim that "country C invested this much money in A instead of investing in B".
    - jupp0r 3y ago
      Fusion power research is research. It's not meant to produce electricity but knowledge.
      - jiggawatts 3y ago
- ViewTrick1002 3y ago
  China is also building enough renewable power than their grid expansion rate leading to a structural decline in CO2 emissions [1]. At the same time the utilization factors of the coal plants reduce each year. This is driven purely by economic factors, for the first time since the discovery of fossil fuels, except the blip where we dammed up pretty much every single river globally to provide hydropower, we have in renewables have found a new cheaper energy source. Renewables are cheap energy. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carbon-emissions-set-for-structural-decline-from-next-year https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carb...
MostlyStable 3y ago
How does it's cost to install and operate compare to gen 3/other nuclear tech? Safety is great, but nuclear is already safe enough (in the sense that, installing current and even last gen nuclear saves more lives through fossil fuel displacement than it can plausibly kill even in worst case disaster scenarios). Continuing to make nuclear safer, if it results in higher costs (and therefore reduced installs) is a bad tradeoff and has been for close to 50 years.
- chasil 3y ago
  It is said that most reactors in the U.S. only use 2% of the available power within the fuel, and the best designs top out at 30%. How is the fuel efficiency for this design? Walk-away safe is a major benefit, and is worth some sacrifice of efficiency.
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    Is the uncaptured power completely gone during processing or does it remain embedded in the "nuclear waste"? It is not hard to imagine a future in which that waste gets mined to be put in a new reactor when the political/economic winds change.
- einpoklum 3y ago
  With due respect - that's a BS safety argument. Nuclear reactors must meet stringent safety standards, not with hand-wavy "but people die from fossil fuel pollution" rhetoric; and at the same time, fossil-fuel-fired plants must be made to emit a lot less, through filtering and other technological means.
  - MostlyStable 3y ago
    Safety is not a binary, safe/dangerous. How much risk we are willing to accept and what the trade-offs are isn't something that has a correct answer. it's a values question. My comment was assuming that society's apparent risk calculation was evident in how we treat everything other than nuclear. If your argument is that our safety regime on nuclear is correct and everything else is too dangerous and needs to be made safer, well I personally disagree but at least it's consistent and I have no problem with your opinion. It's a difference in values. The real problem I have is people who think that nuclear is a special flower and needs to be held to different standards than everything else. Which is how society is currently acting. And it's killing millions of people every year.
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
Nice to see one in operation. Anyone know if they move the LCOE needle? For reference, traditional nuclear is 4-6x as expensive as wind/solar, and wind/solar are still dropping. For baseload the gas turbine still beats the pants off of nuclear. I think nuclear needs to get to 2-3x unsubsidized to be relevant long-term, but that's a long road.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > For baseload the gas turbine still beats the pants off of nuclear. Not if you price carbon. > For reference, traditional nuclear is 4-6x as expensive as wind/solar, and wind/solar are still dropping. That's cost per MWh generated not accounting for when you need it. Renewables need both short-term storage and long-term storage. If you generate with solar, what do you do at night? You'd need 12 hours of storage. Maybe that's economical in some contexts but it definitely raises the cost. Now what do you do if it's cloudy or still for a week, or a month? 720 hours of storage would be crazy expensive. You could use natural gas plants or similar, but then you have to pay the cost of maintaining natural gas plants and the associated infrastructure that you only use 2% of the time. 1GW nuclear plant vs 1GW (average) of solar + 12GWh of storage + 1GW natural gas plant + rarely used gas pipelines or 720GWh of on-site reserves, which costs more?
  - stubish 3y ago
    > Not if you price carbon. That is just adding an arbitrary cost, so you can get any result you like. You can also put an arbitrary cost on land usage to make nuclear cheaper that wind or solar. Just a government doing its job, putting its thumbs on the scale to get the result we want.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      The result we want is "stop burning carbon" so yeah.
huytersd 3y ago
Why is helium coolant good? Because it will just evaporate instead of poisoning waterbodies?
- petre 3y ago
  It escapes into space and that's the main problem with it. But it doesn't create steam explosions and hydrogen buildup under ionizing radiation (also explosive). My main gripes with pebble bed reactors is not helium, but pebbles cracking, graphite fires and complications with fuel reprocessing. Helium just ads another layer of complications because it's quite scarce and easily lost. Also the installed capacity of this reactor is quite underwhelming. But it's nice that the Chinese have built it and are testing and advancing the technology developed in Germany during the '80s.
- bogeholm 3y ago
  A couple of points I can think of, 1) the Helium nucleus is exceedingly stable so the coolant won’t get radioactive from neutron activation, 2) the coolant being chemically inactive means you can use run the reactor at higher temperatures, thus achieving higher efficiency if you use the heat to run a heat engine (steam turbine).
- vipa123 3y ago
  I am not an expert at this, but if I had to guess I would agree with your answer. Helium, even neutron enriched radioactive helium -if there is such a thing-, will evaporate into the air instantly, it will also rise to highest location being lighter than essentially every other atmospheric gas. This make it easy collect, contain, or cleanse, if performed. It will also rise above the atmosphere and get blown away by the solar winds should it escape the building. Additionally, helium is inert so it will not form other chemical compounds that will stay around, or enter the human body. Also because it is inert your body will not generally absorb it, certainly not like it would tritium water. Also comparing to water, helium will not dissolve other chemicals, radioactive or not, into it like water does. One last thing is the cooling potential of liquid helium is immense, being able to absorb massive amounts of heat during evaporation. Assuming they want to use a helium refrigeration cycle. Fingers crossed I got some of this right...

SnorkelTan 3y ago

Article text covered by obnoxious banner in firefox. Anyone got a link to the text?

Krasnol 3y ago
Just clear and update your ublock cache. No banners here on FF.

p1mrx 3y ago

China's HTR-PM (the topic of this article) is similar to the Xe-100 that X-energy is planning to build in Texas: https://x-energy.com/seadrift https://x-energy.com/seadrift But they've yet to apply for NRC approval, so who knows if that'll actually happen.

credit_guy 3y ago
They are at the stage of pre-application. https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/advanced/who-were-working-with/licensing-activities/pre-application-activities/xe-100.html https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/advanced/who-were-... X-Energy submitted 14 documents in December '23, and already 5 documents this month https://adams.nrc.gov/wba/?data=(mode:sections,sections:(filters:(public-library:!t),options:(within-folder:(enable:!f,insubfolder:!f,path:%27%27)),properties_search_all:!(!(DocketNumber,starts,%2799902071%27,%27%27))))&qn=New&tab=advanced-search-pars&z=0 https://adams.nrc.gov/wba/?data=(mode:sections,sections:(fil...

vlovich123 3y ago

China has also started experimenting building commercial molten salt reactors so it'll be interesting what the fourth generation power plant shootout will look like.

acidburnNSA 3y ago

Glad they got a high temperature gas cooled reactor up and running! I do dislike the terminology/categorization around 'fourth generation'. The first ever proposed commercial reactor (the Daniels Pile) was a pebble bed gas cooled reactor concept, worked on at Oak Ridge in the 1940s. We've built lots of gas-cooled reactors in the past, including helium cooled ones. Such as: * Peach Bottom * Fort St. Vrain * HTTR * Dragon * HTR-10 * AVR pebble bed * THTR-300 * Ultra-High Temperature Reactor Experiment (UHTREX) Nitrogen-cooled ones, such as ML-1 and GCRE CO2-cooled ones, like EL4, Lucens, AGR, Magnox Air-cooled ones like HTRE Liquid-hydrogen cooled ones like NERVA It's kinda dumb to call this the first 4-th gen reactor.

jansan 3y ago
> I do dislike the 'fourth generation' category in nuclear. Do you mean the term or the actual reactor technology?
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  I mean the term/categorization. I'll clarify in an edit, thanks.
pfdietz 3y ago
Nitrogen cooled reactors produce copious amounts of 14C, unless you use isotopically purified 15N, which is quite expensive. Ditto for air cooled reactors.

jansan 3y ago

Reading this as a German feels really bitter. Our government has cancelled ALL research into nuclear reactors. We are completely out of the race, and there is probably no way back.

acidburnNSA 3y ago
You guys had some really nice reactors too. Not just the ones recently shut down, but gas-cooled ones as well (THTR-300), and the infamous sodium-cooled one SNR-300, which got cancelled by protests after it was 100% completed and fueled but before it ever turned on. It's now an amusement park :( :(
- ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
  Would be really interesting to see where the anti-nuclear sentiment in germany formented from
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - nukeman 3y ago
    1. Being on the front lines of the Cold War, in the event of a hot war, most nuclear weapons would be used in West Germany. (Yes, weapons aren’t power plants, but they can be hard to separate in popular discourse.) 2. Plans to build a nuclear power plant at Wyhl were opposed by locals, who occupied the site, and were forcefully removed by police. This was broadcast on television and helped galvanize the anti-nuclear movement. 3. The Chernobyl accident led to fallout being deposited on German soil, which furthered opposition, and in my view, was the killing blow.
    - jansan 3y ago
      > The Chernobyl accident led to fallout being deposited on German soil, A That was long after the anti nuclear movement had gained full steam, not a reason for it. People in Poland or Bulgaria are not nearly that extreme in their thinking, even though they got a much bigger dose of the Charnobyl fallout.

pfdietz 3y ago

A significant advantage of a higher temperature reactor would be if it could use the same steam turbines used in combined cycle plants. These are "dry" turbines that operate with high temperature (550 C) steam. In contrast, LWRs use "wet" turbines with saturated steam at temperature a couple of hundred degrees lower. They're about the only ones still doing so, I think, so the turbines are bespoke and do not benefit from the economies of scale of the CC steam turbines. (550 C is the upper temperature limit for cheap steel against creep, so I think that choice of temperature is not a coincidence. It also makes me dubious of reactor concepts operating at higher temperature.)

brazzy 3y ago

Unfortunately the "how it works" is very shallow, the Wikipedia article has a lot more meat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor

Firerouge 3y ago
It's still not entirely clear to me how reactor power is moderated. If there are control rods or if another method is used to control the reaction.
- brazzy 3y ago
  As far as I understand, at least with some designs, the fuel elements have the property that it overall becomes less reactive above a certain temperature (that the elements can withstand without damage). So it's basically self- moderating, and the cooling system only has the job to extract the energy to generate electricity. At least that's the theory.

Almondsetat 3y ago

Doesn't China building so many civilian reactors mean they are getting more experience and more specialized workforce in nuclear energy than anyone else? How can the west compete if most nations reject the atom and the ones who don't either have minuscule numbers or focus more on military reactors?

Retric 3y ago
That’s only a big deal if nuclear was going to play a major role in the future, but the world seems to have decided on PV in a big way. The world is adding the equivalent of more than 100 nuclear reactors worth of PV solar per year even adjusting for differences in capacity factors. (~30% vs ~70-90%) China gets roughly 5% of it’s annual electricity from nuclear, 5% from solar and increasing rapidly, 10% from wind, and 15% from hydro. It’s a token investment in nuclear that only seems huge because they produce ~30% of the worlds electricity. PS: Also, don’t forget about the defense industry. We’re maintaining nuclear expertise even if the civilian industry fails.
- ezst 3y ago
  > but the world seems to have decided on PV in a big way. No, the world has decided to procure lots of cheap PV from China
  - Retric 3y ago
    It’s a little more complex, ~60% of panels used outside of China come from China. Thus current prices are just what it costs to manufacture not the result of some subsidy. Roughly 37% of the worlds supply is by China for China, 38% by China for the rest of the world, and 25% is by the rest of the world for the rest of the world.
huytersd 3y ago
It’s silly. Next we’re going to severely hamstring AI research because of some insipid NYT lawsuit and let them run away with it too though we did all the research for it.

photochemsyn 3y ago

Better article here: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinese-HTR-PM-Demo-begins-commercial-operation https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinese-HTR-PM-D... > "The HTR-PM features two small reactors (each of 250 MWt) that drive a single 210 MWe steam turbine. It uses helium as coolant and graphite as the moderator. Each reactor is loaded with more than 400,000 spherical fuel elements (‘pebbles’), each 60 mm in diameter and containing 7 g of fuel enriched to 8.5%. Each pebble has an outer layer of graphite and contains some 12,000 four-layer ceramic-coated fuel particles dispersed in a graphite matrix." Note that Chernobyl was graphite-moderated and water-cooled, but hot graphite and steam is a bad combination, tending towards the generation of (explosive) hydrogen and carbon monooxide gases during loss-of-coolant type accidents. The helium coolant avoids this process, and can sustain higher operating temperatures so has industrial uses, somewhat ironically in the petrochemical sector: > "The major purpose of HTR-PM is to co-generate high temperature steam up to 500℃ and electricity. It is cost effective currently in the Chinese market to supply steam and electricity for the petrochemical industry to substitute the burning of natural gas and coal." It seems like a pretty safe design with some unique capabilities, although it'd be interesting to see the total cost-per-pellet inputs (each 6 cm pellet generates as much power as 1.5 tons of coal prior to its retirement, but manufacturing each pellet is probably not that cheap).

ziofill 3y ago

> The operating reactors are cooled by the inert gas helium instead of water. Is this going to hit a wall when scaling up? Helium is notoriously scarcer lately https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/helium-shortage-4-0-what-caused-it-and-when-will-it-end/29255/ https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/helium-shortage-4-0-wh...

einpoklum 3y ago

Shell script wrapper invoking a third-generation nuclear power plant? Ah, no, it's a physicists' project, so maybe a fortran90 program invoking a fortran77 program? Am I close?

euroderf 3y ago

As I've understood it, the main risk of running a PBMR is that putting out a graphite fire is somewhere between very difficult and impossible. Does this particular design somehow address this ?

Firerouge 3y ago
While I'm not certain about this system, it sounds like the fuel pellets they've designed for it have no graphite in them. It sounds like they've gone for an intrinsically safe design where the maximum safe temperature of the fuel composites is higher than the maximum temperate an uncontrolled reaction could reach.
- MaKey 3y ago
  They do have graphite in them (see comment from photochemsyn).

huytersd 3y ago

So it sounds like all new things (that aren’t an idea or software) will come from China moving forward. I hate this but it’s interesting in a way to see how far they will get. The US supercharged the world for generations but now seems to have directed all its attention to feminizing its men. I wonder how far the Chinese can take it. Settlement on the moon? Mars? Generational ships headed out of the solar system? Anything seems possible with the mostly benevolent dictatorship they have going on over there.

knlje 3y ago

According to this summary, Germany has lots of remaining problems with its prototype pebble bed reactors: https://web.archive.org/web/20170329044120/http://nuris.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Moormann_Decommissioning-problems-of-German-pebble-bed-reactors.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170329044120/http://nuris.org/...

mvac 3y ago

Thiel was right (9y ago) with the west being leader in innovation in the world of bits, but not in the world of atoms.

DarkNova6 3y ago

This reads more as a puff piece than an informative article. Hardly surprised coming from the "China Global Television Network". It just reads like "Everything going great, look no further". And for somebody who has been following the development of 4th generation reactors, this one is rather non-exciting. Yes it uses a pebble-bed and higher temperature (hence VHTR), it's overall improvements are rather diminishing compared to Gen 3 designs. The meager output of 150m isn't exactly thrilling and the possibility for hydrogen production remains unused as well. I don't want to be purely cynical. Every incremental advance is a form progression and can advance the status-quo as we know. But the most promising space is clearly happening in the Fast Reactor space, just maybe not the SFR, this is a nuclear disaster waiting to happen.

lven 3y ago

My own partisan comments on the pebble bed class of reactors (https://lvenneri.com/blog/pebble-bed-nukegumball https://lvenneri.com/blog/pebble-bed-nukegumball) for those interested in a deeper yet still qualitative comparison of pebble beds and prismatic cores - the main types high temperature reactor. Long story short : pebbles offer significant disadvantages compared to prismatic geometries, summarized by this donald duck clip: https://youtu.be/shvwSBGDmE0 https://youtu.be/shvwSBGDmE0.

credit_guy 3y ago
I'm not sure who the intended audience is. Your arguments are technical enough that whoever is able to follow them will be extremely unimpressed by the linked Donald Duck cartoon. The fact that you do include it and think it improves your case demonstrates that you attempt to target the emotional side of your reader. I'll be honest and admit this is an uncharitable view. The charitable view is simply that you found this video and couldn't resist linking to it. But it's not good.

hmm37 3y ago

What's interesting is whether this tech will allow China to replace their coal plant boilers with this one as a drop-in. e.g. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/12/chinas-plans-to-begin-converting-coal.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/12/chinas-plans-to-begin-...

nuclearsugar 3y ago

Is the helium cooling aspect part of a closed system?