[Hell_Is_Like_Newark]

The Donald Trump thread has been going off a bit on the subject of nuclear power (pros and cons). I found an old nuclear thread, but it was dedicated to thorium, which no working commercial reactors exist yet.

We actually have new nuclear plants being built in the USA.

From World-nuclear.org:

The four AP1000 reactors under construction at Vogtle and Summer will be eligible for subsidies similar but significantly less than those applied to wind power generation. Under the Energy Policy Act 2005, up to 6,000 MWe is eligible for production tax credits, divided pro-rata among those applicants which filed combined construction and operating licence (COL) applications by the end of 2008 and commenced construction of advanced plants by 2014, as these did, and which enter service by 2021. The level is $18 per MWh, for eight years.

More here:

It will be interesting to see what comes out of the Trump administration in regard to nuclear. One of the next generation of reactors (small modular) have been stuck in perpetual development. Westinghouse has pretty much shelved its own design, leaving Nu-Scale power as the only company partnering with the Dept. of Energy. So far, we don't have a working prototype yet. Progress has been less than stellar.

It appears though (see Wattsupwiththat.com) that Trump & Co. maybe planning to clean of the DOE as well as the EPA. Three months in office, these two department may have all new staff and be focused on very different projects.

[Foolsgo1d]

Even if Trump were to start building right now they take years to build. The new one over here being built by Chinese money & French contractors (hilarious in itself) will take 10+ years.

Trump doesn't have that time and the next POTUS will take credit for it.

[scotian]

I don't know much about the nuclear industry but I do know that when one is built there is a ton of work involved, the building codes are a lot more stringent than say an oil refinery which is why they take so long to build. I've been considering working in the Canadian nuclear industry which is having a mini-boom now but most of that work is in Toronto, lame! I'd like to learn more about the nuclear industry, don't we have a senior poster here who is a heavy duty nuke engineer, Beijing Bob or something?

[Hell_Is_Like_Newark]

(12-16-2016 05:03 PM)Foolsgo1d Wrote:  

Even if Trump were to start building right now they take years to build.

That is part of the motivation to design modular nuclear reactors (Gen IV). The idea is to build them on an assembly line and truck or train them to site, where the components are assembled.

This is the Nuscale version.

This is the Westinghouse version.

Any major power plant takes a long time to build. The newest generating station by me was under construction for over five years before it went operational (not including the planning stage), and it burns natural gas.

However, the service life is 40 to 50 years.

[TheFinalEpic]

They've got to start pushing Thorium reactors, the story about how they were politically cut in the 50s and 60s in favour of light water reactors is pretty fascinating.

[XPQ22]

I admit I'm a centrist enviro-weenie, and I think nuclear power is one of the better options out there for slowing the injection of CO2 into the atmosphere. Pebble-bed "walk away safe" reactors are feasible - there's no reason a situation like Fukushima or Three Mile Island should happen in the 21st century.

It wasn't just NIMBY environmentalists that stymied nuclear investment for many years in the US, though. Private investors were also really turned off by the realization after Three Mile Island that a multi-billion dollar asset could be pretty much instantly turned into a multi-billion-dollar liability. While nowhere near as catastrophic as Chernobyl, this wasn't some FUBARed RMBK Soviet bullshit "walk away deadly" design built in a garden shed, this was a modern US plant supposedly run by the best techs available. It wasn't supposed to happen here.

Compared to throwing up a couple new natural gas plants, nuclear just didn't seem like easy money to private capital firms. I don't know that it does now.

[AlphaRN]

(12-16-2016 05:32 PM)TheFinalEpic Wrote:  

They've got to start pushing Thorium reactors, the story about how they were politically cut in the 50s and 60s in favour of light water reactors is pretty fascinating.

You have a link? Sounds like an interesting read. I don't pretend to understand nuclear physics, but I am sure they dumb it down for us.

[MidJack]

Disruptive modular reactor efforts have been crushed by the regulatory regime which is controlled by the legacy reactor companies. Thorium, molten salt, etc could be commercially viable. If Trump can crack that, it will be a great thing.

I'll admit that getting the NIMBY lunatics under control is a somewhat different problem that also needs solving.

[Hell_Is_Like_Newark]

There are two approaches that I am aware of in regards to Thorium:

Lightbridge (formerly Thorium Power) is working on a system similar to what power plants use today (fuel rods). The main fuel is thorium instead of uranium 235.

The other is molten salt. There was a demonstration reactor created in the 1960s. It sustained a nuclear reaction, but did not generate electricity. Thorium was not pursued because it did not have an application in the development of nuclear weapons. I also believe it wasn't considered practical for ship nuclear reactors (which use fuel rods that have a higher percentage of uranium 235 than commercial reactors).

[Hell_Is_Like_Newark]

(12-16-2016 05:43 PM)MidJack Wrote:  

Disruptive modular reactor efforts have been crushed by the regulatory regime which is controlled by the legacy reactor companies. Thorium, molten salt, etc could be commercially viable. If Trump can crack that, it will be a great thing.

I'll admit that getting the NIMBY lunatics under control is a somewhat different problem that also needs solving.

Toshiba (which bought Westinghouse's designs) planned to offer one of their 4S reactors (aka Nuclear Battery) to the town of Galena Alaska for no money down. They would then sell the town heat and power at a cheaper rate than they are paying now (via diesel generators).

Toshiba withdrew the offer because it going to cost them hundreds of millions of $$$ to get a small 10 MW reactor approved... costing way more than the actual construction costs.

[TheFinalEpic]

It all came down to wartime politics

^^ There's a link on the political nature. Also, the size of the building needed for Uranium reactors created more jobs, which in of itself was a political move.

[Dr. Howard]

Calling Deepdiver, Calling Deepdiver (aka bejing bob per scotian)

He is going to post an essay on this thread.

[SirTimothy]

Apparently South Korea just managed to set some kind of record for maintaining a fusion reaction:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/a...ecord.html

Quote:

According to World Nuclear News, South Korea's National Fusion Research Institute (NFRI) achieved a world record for plasma operation.

Using the Korean Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) reactor, the team maintained superheated hydrogen gas in a magnetic field for 70 seconds - a fundamental step of the fusion process.

In a statement, the NFRI said: ‘The world record for high-performance plasma for more than a minute demonstrated that the KSTAR is the forefront in steady-state plasma operation technology in a superconducting device.’

‘This is a huge step forward for realisation of the fusion reactor.’

While other groups, such as the Tore Supra tokamak in France, have maintained fusion reactions for more than five minutes, the Korean team managed to sustain 'high performance' plasma, reducing the flux associated with the superheated state.

[Paracelsus]

^^^

If so they were progressing the real holy grail of nuclear reactions.

Fusion, fusion, fusion. Yes, I know it's twenty years away and seems like it always will be, but the country that produces this first can more or less end both the disadvantages of fossil fuel and fission processes in a second.

[scotian]

(12-16-2016 08:56 PM)Dr. Howard Wrote:  

Calling Deepdiver, Calling Deepdiver (aka bejing bob per scotian)

He is going to post an essay on this thread.

Not Deepdiver, although I'd love to hear his input on this.

[dicknixon72]

My father is a retired steamfitter by trade and supervised work on several generating stations (Limerick, Palo Verde, Diablo Canyon, Turkey Point, Crystal River) and has lamented for years how behind this nation is in atomic power.

[Tokyo Joe]

Gentlemen: Commercial nuclear power in the United States is going nowhere, fast.

To see why, you need look no further than Southern Nuclear's Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in eastern Georgia, near the border with South Carolina (and down the road from the beautiful Augusta National Golf Club). Construction began in 2009 on the plant's Units 3 and 4 -- two Westinghouse AP1000 pressurized water reactors (PWRs), alongside the plant's existing Units 1 and 2, which came online in 1987 and 1989.

Units 3 and 4, with a total generating capacity of 2,234 MWe, were originally certified to cost $13.4 billion and to be completed in 2016 and 2017. According to lead utility Georgia Power's latest construction monitoring report [link], costs have already run over to $17.2 billion and the completion schedule has slipped to 2019 and 2020 -- a full goddamn decade after construction start.

Assuming that there will be no further cost overruns -- which I don't believe for a second -- the levelized cost of electricity (the LCOE, that is the actual "all-in" cost of generating electricity that includes construction, financing, fuel, operation & maintenance, and all other costs) from this "real doozy" of a project will be a whopping 14.0 cents per kWh. For comparison, assuming a natural gas price of $3.00 per mmBTU, the LCOE for a new combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power plant is 3.5 cents per kWh -- one-quarter the cost of electricity from the new reactors. lolzlzolzzolzll

Now, if you are wondering how the hell it came to be that the good rate-paying people of Georgia are going to get royally fucked in the ass on this deal: the Georgia Public Service Commission approved this project in early 2009 based on a construction cost estimate of $14.1 billion and a 2008 projection of future natural gas prices of $14 per mmBTU. By then the coming shale revolution was already apparent to the long eye of the right observer, but the participating utilities and the PSC totally missed it. (Based on their erroneous inputs, the expected LCOE for the new Vogtle units would be 11.9 cents per kWh, versus 11.8 cents per kWh for a new CCGT plant burning natural gas at $14/mmBTU.)

The point is -- whether people who are paid to know this stuff got it right or wrong ("and boy did they get it wrong, am I right people?") -- the shale revolution (which started with natural gas and then spread to crude oil) has totally upended the United States energy market. Abundant and cheap natural gas isn't going away any time soon, either. It would not have even in a HAG Adminstration, and it certainly won't under Trump, whose Energy team is set to cut back on onerous regulations, open up federal lands and offshore fields to exploration and production (both tight and conventional), and very rightly shit all over the Year Zero farce of carbon-dioxide-as-pollutant.

Furthermore. The natural gas onslaught has been so ferocious that it is even forcing the early closures of existing US nuclear power plants -- which are fully paid off and produce stunningly cheap electricity. For a fifteen-year period from the late 1990s until c. 2012, the United States steadily maintained a fleet of 104 commercial nuclear reactors, but beginning in 2012 -- when cheap natural gas prices really started to bite -- US utilities have announced the premature closure of 15 nuclear units, with more too come. (To be fair, a handful of those units were shut down due to very serious technical problems -- e.g. San Onofre in CA and Crystal River in FL -- but the great majority simply could not compete with dirt-cheap natural gas fired generation.)

People in the US electric utility industry are very well aware of the above dull facts -- which is why no other new nuclear plants are under construction except for Units 2 and 3 at the VC Summer Plant in South Carolina: They made the same strategic error back in 2009 that was made at Vogtle.

A final comment. The vaunted Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) that nuclear die-hards and fetishists love to think will save the nuclear industry are a dead letter. You can't improve the shitty economics of a 1,000-MWe nuclear plant by breaking up and building ten 100-MWe plants -- "Assembly-line factory" or not. And you can take that to the bank.

[komatiite]

TJ you nuked the thread!

Anyone see how Saskatchewan Uranium giant Cameco closed its Rabbit Lake mine in April?
http://www.mining.com/500-jobs-lost-afte...bbit-lake/
Not a trivial closure -- the US buys 1/3 of its Uranium from Saskatchewan. Sask has bar none the most attractive uranium deposits in the world -- there are good ones in Central Asia but they are so politically unstable. So Sask U3O8 mining should be a good proxy for growth in the Nuke Power industry. Basically there was this Yuge Himalayan sized mountain range that extended from Northern Sask across Hudsons Bay in Northern Canada about 1.5 billion years ago called the Trans Hudson Orogeny. The range eroded over time (there were no trees back then, so erosion of mountain ranges was rapid, think of like a flood of water going across a parking lot, there were no soils and vegetation to control the topographic flow path of water into streams). On the south side of the mountains was a "foreland basin" where sediments accumulated called the Athabasca Basin. Sediments built up in the basin, and due to the high Uranium content naturally occurring in the granitic basement, groundwater picked up some of that uranium in the basement rock but would be forced to drop out that Uranium when it would migrate upwards through tiny cracks in the granite and hit those unconformably overlaying sands usually due to pressure differentials or pH changes. So you get really nice consistent high grade uranium deposits at a max depth of like 800m, which is actually rare. The US technically has the largest uranium deposits in the world in an Appalachian shale called the Chattanooga but it is super low grade, just basically atomic - scale buildups of uranium derived from seawater built up in a deep marine mud. Will never be economic.

when you see comments like "thorium is as common as lead in the Earths crust" which I see all the time on Reddit then be wary -- Th is just like U in the sense that it is indeed a common element but it is very rare to find it naturally occurring in high grade natural deposits. There are some decent Th deposits by Dillon Montana but generally your best bet for obtaining economic quantities of Th is as a byproduct of REE extraction in monazite. Just going through the gangue rock at old mines in China after all of the REEs were extracted is probably cheaper than opening a new Th mine.

Either way the point of this post is to just chime in to TJs point from an economic geology level -- extraction of uranium or Th is considerably more expensive than fracking for nat gas, and with so much pre existing nat gas infrastructure already out there, I don't know how economic opening a bunch of new Uranium plants would be.

On the contrary, would any nuclear power plants become as attractive as hydrocarbon based power if both were faced with equally small regulatory burdens? I am ignorant when it comes to nuclear regulatory restrictions but assume they are very bad.