Nukes Now?
Kevin over at the Smallest Minority has posted a seemingly reluctant endorsement, (acquiescence?), to the need for a return to building nuclear power plants.
Some of the reasons he and commentors mention for, (and largely eliminate), halting nuke power plant implementation in the past include cost, inefficiency and danger.
Overly burdensome regulations, opposition willing to bankrupt itself to fight every plant built through regulatory hearings, the courts and by other means are all included therein.
Plus, as was pointed out, each nuke plant here is essentially a custom designed one-off. So each design has to be individually approved by regulators, rather than using a previously approved design. The costs are huge, running into the billions of dollars. No wonder power companies returned to building fossil fuel, (FF), burning power plants, like coal, oil and gas.
In addition, the design itself, requiring huge, redundant cooling systems guarantees they will be very expensive, even if regulations were streamlined, and designs were standardized
But what was not mentioned specifically is that expensive, high-pressure light water reactors are no longer needed, or may not be. There has been a move lately towards Pebble Bed Reactors, where the fissionable material is packed into billiard ball sized ‘pebbles’ and loaded into a reactor vessel. Helium is pumped through it, expands and drives turbines, at much lower pressure than steam, which also provides the cooling. Each modular reactor is fairly small, they can be spread out closer to the point of use, (lowering transmission loses and vulnerability to attack), and can be duplicated easily, since they are much cheaper to build than the current tech is.
Both mainland China and South Africa are leading in the drive to pilot and implement this technology.
The advantages are that if the reactor over heats, the Pebbles expand, increasing the distance between them, which slows down or stops the reaction, without the need to mechanically manipulate control rods, allowing cooling. If gas escapes, being helium, it rises through the atmosphere and eventually out of it, rather than cooling to water vapor and settling to the ground. Some designs do still use variations of a control rod, but the basic idea is the same.
Not a new design, a rather old one dating from the 1950’s. The high pressure light water reactors we use now were chosen for political reasons as much as for engineering reasons. Even then, they were given all sorts of subsidies and limits on liability in case of accident, all in a drive to make the US the leader in peaceful nuke tech.
Nuke tech has advantages, similar to those of FF, over renewable sources of energy, like ethanol and hydrogen as well as solar driven energy tech like photo-voltaic, wind and hydro, or geothermal.
Nukes can be placed anywhere, (within reason), just as FF plants can be.
Nukes are using a ready made store of energy that we only need to extract. The storing of the energy has already been done by geological processes over the course of millions of years. With ethanol and hydrogen energy stores, we need to do the storing of energy into them, (create them), that is not needed for FF.
With hydro, wind and geothermal, there are limited areas where they can be used efficiently, which is also true, to a lesser extent, for photo-voltaic. Not all places are suitable for hydro, lacking sufficient or suitable water sources. The same goes for wind, if it is intermittent or not sufficiently strong. Geothermal may be fine for Iceland, or those living near a place such as Yellowstone, but for Chicago, Boston, London and other cities not near geothermal vents it is a non-starter. Solar has the widest geological potential, but can be complicated with it’s need for battery storage to carry over through night or over cloudy days. While photo-voltaic panel costs are dropping, the cost of the infrastructure needed to support it has not moved much. Not to mention costs to recycle old batteries once they wear out. In some areas such as far northern or southern latitudes, it is not practical due to the weakness of the sunlight reaching the ground.
Nukes have been roundly criticized in the past, (and rightly so in many cases), but as the technology has matured, and new designs are being developed, it is time to reconsider it. Pebble Bed Reators are being critisized now as well. While some of the criticisms seem like complaining that modern cars do not have crank starters, we should listen to these concerns where they are rational.
What we should avoid though, is another drive to implement it as we had back in the 1960’s-70’s, with subsidies and liability limits. Streamline the process for approval, encourage the use of standard designs, perhaps by automatic approval of designs used elsewhere that were previously approved. But do not subsidize, and certainly do not limit liability in the case of an accident, as the Price-Anderson Act currently does.
Encourage the development of new technology, and permit use of designs developed elsewhere, such as China and South Africa. After all, in a global economy, there are US companies involved, (pdf link), in those efforts as well, so it will benefit us as much as them.
Lets stop being obstructionist, be watchful, but helpful, and let business and technology loose to solve our energy problems.