Case For Nuclear

The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is now available regarding LFTR. A professionally done video featuring Kirk Sorensen et-al details the history and current status of the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR). This video crams an amazing amount of nuclear knowledge in to about 45 minutes. I would strongly advise everyone reading this page to also view this very fine video. It debunks much of what is holding this country back. The video can be viewed here. I am keeping an archive copy of the video should it disappear from the server it's on presently. The standard of living and the well being of U.S. citizens depends heavily on this country having access to an energy source that can scale to the very large quantities needed, is environmentally clean and provides energy that is reasonably priced and available on a reliable 24/7 basis. This page fully supports and endorses what is contained in this video. The video also clearly demonstrates the dangers associated with both boiling water reactors as well as pressurized water reactors. This includes, to a degree, the recently approved Westinghouse AP 1000 reactor design.

It's now amazing to see the progress being made, world wide, in using thorium as a safe nuclear fuel. There are notable and apparent exceptions, of course, such as in the U.K. Links are to the right. The one article I've found most informative is this article. It's especially distressing to me to see the U.S. locked into a fascination with renewables and all the problems they bring while totally ignoring essentially proven and quite safe nuclear technology.

The follwing is a list of companies that should never again be allowed to design power reactors (my opinion)

Babcock & Wilcox - Three Mile Island.
Gulf General Atomic - Ft. St. Vrain.
General Electric - Japanese Fukushima Reactors. Cave In To Tokyo Electric!

These companies have, in my opinion, done irreparable damage to the U.S. economy in addiiton to putting the health and safety of it's citizens needlessly in jeopardy. .

I don't think it matters at all what you believe. To the nay sayers, I would say, you can choose to continue to stand in the middle of the railroad track and be run over or move to adopt a more moderate position. Anyone who tries to oppose the global warming movement at this point will simply be steam-rollered. Dumping limitless volumes of carbon (and other poisons) into the environment will no longer be tolerated. Based on past methods of control, I predict one or more schemes will be used to tax/penalize carbon usage. The worst offenders (ie. coal users) will be targeted first followed by liquid (heavy) petroleum.

A news story just released details the country of Holland's decision to dump wind in favor of nuclear for new energy projects. Lets hope the U.S. is as smart. Renewables are certainly better than old technology coal, for example, but they also have significant problems. Perhaps the biggest problem with renewables is what you get back relative to what is required to build systems The following is from P.F. Peterson a Berkeley professor

It should come as no surprise that while the naive & gullible Americans are floundering in the world financial mess they made, countries like China are buying to control world commodity resources. If you think this is good news for the U.S. in the longer term, I know a good shrink you should see. In terms of construction, it should go without saying that as commodity prices rise, coal and especially wind & solar become very, very expensive relative to nuclear.

This paragraph is appropriate reading for and regarding utility scale solar projects. The cost of utility scale solar projects can be found in testimony before Congress by Mark Mehos of the NREL. Most nuclear plants are in the 1100 Mw area or larger. It is left to the reader to scale both the land usage and cost stated in the Mark Mehos testimony to match equivilant typical nuclear capacities. You should also note in the paragraph below, the very low capacity factor for solar relative to nuclear (.20 vs .97+). An additional consideration is the relatively short (20 yr.) life of PV panels compared to the operating life of a nuclear plant (60+ years). I, for one, absolutely DO NOT want to pay for utility scale solar when a clean, high capacity, nuclear power alternative is available.

You knew this was coming - right? To be viable, renewables require local energy storage for when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow. The output of the Springerville solar plant is typical and should strike fear into anyone familiar with how power systems need to operate. These storage systems, of course, also require a communications system that allows system dispatchers to control the storage devices. Purchase, installation and maintenance costs thus need to be added to the renewable side of the cost equation.

Capacity or production factors (what percent of the time does it run) certainly don't favor renewables (wind & solar) either. Wind tops out at around 28% with solar in the low 20% range. Add to this the high cost of high voltage transmission lines, used only a small portion of time at anywhere near their capability, to transport both to market and you get a very expensive picture. Links are to the right.

I don't know if safety even warrants a comment at this point. Gone are the designs that require massive containment vessels, multiple high reliability backup diesels and so on. The Gen III Westinghouse AP1000 is typical of current designs. The "P" in AP1000 stands for Passive (as in Protection). What this means is that your basic Exxon Valdez falling down drunk ship captain style reactor operator can not endanger the public safety. This site details specific fuel cycles that require no operator or electronic intervention to safely shut down. I'm not sure how much more safe you can get and still produce energy. Many pundits would like to see Gen III designs bypassed and go directly to the Gen IV designs which are even more flexible, efficient and safe.One additional factor that needs to be known in this area is the "negative temperature coefficient of reactivity" of any fuel cycle. LFTR, which is the featured cycle on this page, is often billed as the safetest of the safe with a very strong negative coefficient.

Coal, of course, dumps massive amounts of CO₂ into the environment in addition to some very nasty heavy metals such as mercury and uranium (radioactive). Atmospheric lifetimes for CO₂ are now estimated to be in the 1000's of years. Details of the coal issue can be found in the ORNL article. There is, of course, the side issue of transporting massive amounts of coal 100's of miles to power plants. This usually requires the burning of very large amounts of diesel fuel by train locomotives. On the nuclear side, gone are the days of inefficient fuel cycles (2-3% burn) that generate waste requiring tens of thousands of years of safe storage. Thorium, in contrast, typically burns with 97% efficiency and there are plans for thorium/uranium based reactors that can burn the current high level waste in storage. End products are of much smaller volumes and typically are reported to have a half-live of around 30 years making storage a short 300 years consideration not tens of thousands of years. New 2-21-10, GGA has just announced a proposed small reactor that will use curent nuclear waste as a fuel source. I only wish it were not GGA doing the engineering. They are the ones that screwed up the Ft. St. Vrain plant in Colorado. The current above ground fuel storage represents a huge potential energy source for the U.S. We only need to be smart enough to use the so-called spent fuel.

Water, especially in the west, continues to be a very hot topic. Another advantage of molten salt breeder reactors and probably some fuel rod designs is that they can use the Brayton Cycle for power output. Old style coal and nukes have used conventional Rankine Cycle steam turbines which, because of the low conversion efficiencies, require very large amounts of water to operate (ie. cooling towers, lakes or rivers). Brayton operation, while slightly more efficient, allows turbines much like gas turbines to be used and, of course, typically require little water or steam unless a steam bottoming function is added. This can be a major advantage in any region short of water.

The poster children here are the Ph.D's that recline in their overstuffed chairs and count the paychecks from Exxon Mobile (documented fact) while bad mouthing anything and everything they are paid to denigrate. A close 2nd may be the nation wide REA organizations and others that promote electric powered ground source heat pumps, powered in most cases by coal fired generation. The three-to-one energy gain of an electric powered heat pump is nearly totally offset by the coal plant's low 33% conversion efficiency. You then need to add in the average 7% transmission losses between the plant and the heat pump. These systems, when powered by coal, emit nearly twice the CO₂ produced by a high efficiency natural gas fueled boiler or furnace (CO₂ burn values are in table above) on a per unit of energy basis.

This area depends on the type of reactor built. As stated before and based on the Uri Gat article as well as others, there may be enough old style spent fuel in storage to last the U.S. for many years. Such fuel is blended with Thorium and burned to completion. Beyond this, Thorium is much more plentiful in nature than Uranium. It also doesn't require very expensive refining and fuel fabrication as do most current reactor fuels.

I saw an estimate in the local paper today quoting $11 billion to build a nuclear plant. I couldn't resist adding this paragraph as a result. Quoted costs depend a lot on your politics and ideology. It's true that as politicians continue to destroy the value of the dollar vs. world commodities, the price of nuclear power plants (along with everything else) will naturally increase. The two best sources for costs I've found include rough estimates from General Electric and from Wikipedia. My greatest fear is that the politicians will succeed in destroying the value of the dollar to a point such plants can not be built. This will surely result in a greatly reduced standard of living for everyone. The latest budget for the DOE can be found here

I'm really tired of all the half ass sales pitches for favorite energy sources. What the energy industry needs is a first class, unbiased, reality check. You can rationalize your favorite solution into the next millennia. Coal is dead on arrival due to numerous very real environmental issues. The coal industry has had more than two decades to clean up it's act. Show me a large scale coal power plant that even remotely comes close to the emissions levels of a modern nuclear power plant. Renewables are very expensive to build, have terrible capacity/production factors, don't scale well and have reported relative short life spans. If you don't agree, then show me the hard data with out all the built in B.S. bias. I sure don't see energy intensive industries flocking to California to take advantage of the cheap power there. What I do see is a sub-prime style melt down for the electric power industry. The power grid is at the edge in many areas. All it will take is a major event like a major volcano eruption, a large major earthquake near a large heavily populated city or something similar to start things off. It's very hard and uncomfortable to live without electric power. Unfortunately, it's probably going to take a major event to wake people up to reality.