Comment Re:This is good. (Score 5, Interesting) 490
It's quite simple, actually. The United States has not built a nuclear power plant since the seventies. Almost all of the plants we built then, and all of the plants that are still online, are pressurized light water (PLW) designs. This means that that coolant in the reactor, which also moderates the nuclear reaction, is ordinary water under great pressure (typically at least twice the industrial norm of 600 lb/in^2 steam). A PLW reactor produces as much plutonium 239 as it consumes uranium 235. We erroneously call Pu-239 nuclear waste, and the governments since the Clinton Administration have been looking to find a place to bury it for a quarter of a million years.
However, until the Clinton administration, your government was busy designing a better reactor. The program was called integral fast reactor, or IFR. IFR was a metal-moderated reactor. The coolant was liquid metal, sodium or lead. These elements don't moderate the neutrons, they fly unhindered through the pile. That means they can fission Pu-239. In fact, they can fission anything higher than uranium on the periodic table. That's not all a fast reactor can do, though. It can also turn anything on the other (left) half of the bottom row of the periodic table into fissionable material. That's what "fast" means in the name. The reactor produces its own fuel from thorium or uranium in its natural state! Just the uranium that has been mined to date, which we use for cannon shells once we've taken the U-235 out of it, is sufficient for 300-400 years of the US energy needs. The known reserves are good for 50,000 years or so. Uranium is more plentiful in the earth's crust than gold or tin, and there is three times as much thorium as uranium. Energy forever.
What does "integral" mean? It means that the fuel is recycled on-site. The fuel in the IFR is in metallic, rather than ceramic form. It is simply re-smelted periodically (not the whole load, just a few rods' worth), and the slag is the only waste. The balance of the fuel plus a tiny bit of uranium or thorium in its natural state, is recast into pellets and returned to the reactor. The volume of the nuclear waste is reduced by several orders of magnitude. The nature of the waste is only the light elements that are the products of the fission reaction. They have either extremely short half lives, measured in seconds to months, or such long half lives that they are essentially stable. They are also mainly low-energy beta emitters, instead of neutron and gamma emitters. While this waste is hellishly radioactive at first, it will be less radioactive than uranium ore in less than 300 years, and reactors might produce a couple hundredweight in a fifty year lifespan, instead of thousands of tons of spent fuel rods as a PLW reactor would.
Additional benefits of the IFR design? The fuel is in metallic form, suspended in liquid metal. It gets no hotter than the coolant, and thus cannot have a catastrophic loss of coolant, or "blow down", which is what happens if there is a leak in the primary circuit of a LWR. The fuel in a LWR is in ceramic form, and gets much hotter than the coolant (which is in turn much hotter than liquid sodium). If it were not continuously cooled, it would destroy its container and melt, hence the term "melt down." If that happens to enough fuel elements in a reactor, the fuel gathers at the bottom of the vessel and continues to react, until it melts through the bottom of vessel, or the "china syndrome." None of these is possible with the IFR design. As it gets warmer, the fuel assemblies expand and move away from each other, slowing or stopping the reaction. The IFR, in fact, was tested for this. They turned off the control system. The reactor heated slightly, and stopped working. The cut off the heat exchanger (simulating what happens if the heat exchanger or a turbine goes bad at a LWR plant)--same thing. The reactor heated slightly and shut itself down, without human intervention.
So what you have is a reactor that produces its own fuel, cannot blow down or melt down, and consumes nuclear waste, including the tons and tons of old Russian warhead plutonium we've bought and the million of tons of spent fuel we intend to bury. The fuel is useless for weapons, because it contains a mixture of elements and isotopes that is much more expensive, dangerous and difficult to separate than starting from scratch. You could give such a plant to Libya, Iran or N. Korea with no problem. When the reactor or turbine plant is too old to go on, the fuel is still perfectly good--just put it in the new plant.
So what does this cost? A tiny bit more than building "clean coal." Coal plants currently cost about $1200 per KW of capacity, including scrubbers for fly ash and sulfur. The French, Japanese, and Chinese are building nuclear plants for less than $1400 per KW of capacity. A 1 GW coal plant eats 100 train car loads of coal per day, and requires labor to move and store that fuel, and remove and cart away the cinders, fly ash, and sulphur that are collected, that latter two must be treated as hazardous waste, all three are actually pretty radioactive. In fifty years, a 1 GW IFR type reactor would produce about a cubic yard of waste.
The US has a generating capacity of about 1000 GW, demand grows at about 4% per year, and about 2% of capacity is retired as obsolete every year. That means that the power industry builds the equivalent of 60 1 GW power plants every year, using their own money. If all of those were nuclear, it would cost 90 billion instead of 72 billion, counting the cost of nuclear at $1500/KW. 18 billion dollars of tax incentives could get that done.
If in addition, you built another 2% of capacity (20 GW or 30 billion dollars) of surplus generation each year (doubling to 60 billion in 36 years), you would double US generating capacity in 36 years. That surplus electricity could cover transportation, whether by battery, hydrogen, fuel cell or catenary, and much of the home and industrial heating. Carbon emission would be cut by over 3/4. No more coal mining. No reliance of foreign oil. No dams on the rivers. It would cost a pittance. Nuclear is the greenest energy there is. Clinton's energy secretary, Hazel O'Leary (a lawyer, not an engineer), canceled the program in 1994 at the behest of Senator Kerry of Massachusetts and VP Gore. It cost more and took longer to shut down the reactor than it would have cost to finish the program. The prototype is shuttered up in Idaho. If we had begun building such plants then, we'd be nearly half done, and they'd be improving the prototype. There would be cheap, carbon-free electricity for hydrogen and electric cars. Actually, if you use lead for the moderator in such a reactor, it is hot enough to dissociate water directly to yield hydrogen, which could be done at night when electrical demand is low. And the Russians even built such a plant that uses the post-turbine steam to desalinate water. The French have built two. The Japanese have built two such reactors. All of them work fine, but the groundless fear of plutonium is strong, all have been shut down by environmental and anti-proliferation activism.
That's my energy plan. Oh, and it would obviously not be necessary to turn food into automotive fuel when a billion people in the world go to bed hungry every night.
