rc1111 wrote:
For what its worth, not quite a month ago this was published:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon ... 562d07411aThank you, rc1111.
“I don’t think you can come up with a viable, clean electricity scenario without nuclear playing a role in that,” said Tanju Sofu, manager of the Engineering Analysis Department at Argonne National Laboratory’s Nuclear Engineering Division. . . . Asked if thorium reactors were included in the MSR category, Sofu said, “They could be.”
Well! Thank you Jeff McMahon for representing the Thorium Energy Alliance at this extemely sensitive juncture in nuclear energy policy. Oorah! Essayons!
"They could be."
They could be? By the way, it was Argonne's solid-phase fast breeder program that got the go-ahead under President Nixon and led to the shutdown of ORNL's fluid-phase thermal breeder project by 1976. (Fast breeding is the natural default for the uranium fuel cycle and thermal for the thorium cycle and are mutually exclusive by nature.) Cold War and financial exigencies ended the development of dissolved-fuel molten salt cooled reactors and the subsequent absence of these engineering criteria in the nuclear laws in the first place!
People ought to cry, "Foul!" Not "could be," rather,
were, WELL before the 2001 GIF, historically the precedent for what the politicians today necessarily have to term an "advanced nuclear reactor" for the consequences of shutting down Dr. Weinberg's ORNL fluid-fueled program. Inadvertent Orwellian Newspeak (ION).
Those of the present-day global nuclear industrial establishment with captured regulation are running on what was first established with Adm. Rickover's (Dr. Seaborg's) solid fuels that don't slosh around at sea. Fluid-fuels are for the Army. Not the Air Force. ("Ahem. Excuse. The budget is how much?") They cannot, must not speak the "f" words: fluid-fueled. Nor can they dare speak the forbidden "th" word; we have "fuel cycle" ONLY! Really?
Since December 1945, Rickover had been Inspector General of the 19th Fleet on the west coast. He had been assigned to work with General Electric at Schenectady, New York, to develop a nuclear propulsion plant for destroyers. Rickover was sent to Oak Ridge as the deputy manager of the entire project in May 1946 through the efforts of his wartime boss, Rear Admiral Earle Mills (who became the head of the Navy's Bureau of Ships that same year), granting him access to all facilities, projects, and reports. Following efforts by physicists Ross Gunn, Philip Abelson, and others in the Manhattan Project, he became an early convert to the idea of nuclear marine propulsion.
Rickover's vision was not initially shared by his immediate superiors. He was recalled from Oak Ridge and assigned "advisory duties" with an office in an abandoned ladies room in the Navy Building. He subsequently went around several layers of superior officers, and in 1947 went directly to the Chief of Naval Operations, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, by chance also a former submariner. Nimitz immediately understood the potential of nuclear propulsion and recommended the project to the Secretary of the Navy, John L. Sullivan. Sullivan's endorsement to build the world's first nuclear-powered vessel, USS Nautilus, later caused Rickover to state that Sullivan was "the true father of the Nuclear Navy."
The DOE report is here:
Vision and Strategy for the Development and Deployment of Advanced Reactors 2016, Version 21, 27 May 2016.
The report never mentions specific fuel (no occurrences of "uranium" or "thorium") only "fuel cycle" and its only mention of "liquid" phase, outside of light water, is with respect to liquid metal coolant, but on p. 15, it mentions DOE's research in salt-cooled reactors:
Quote:
DOE also performs targeted research at its national laboratories (generic and design-specific, as informed by industry needs) to solve technical issues that reduce technical risk, enhance safety and security, accelerate development, and improve the economic competiveness [sic] of advanced reactors. This research to address technical risk reduces technical uncertainty concerning innovative aspects of new designs and assists multiple companies. [Really? Like Flibe Energy, Inc. of Huntsville, AL?] Current research is focused on high-temperature reactors (HTRs), liquid metal cooled fast reactors (LMFRs), and salt cooled reactors. HTR research is focused on developing innovative fuel forms [my emphasis] and advanced high-temperature materials. Gas Fast Reactor (GFR) research is centered on silicon carbide materials research. LMFR research is focused on concept development and establishing component-testing capability. Research on salt cooled reactor concepts includes university-led work on fluoride high temperature (FHR) reactors and laboratory-based plans to examine molten salt reactor (MSR) technology. DOE also conducts crosscutting R&D on advanced reactor modeling and simulation, code development and validation, and development of advanced manufacturing capabilities based on identified needs.
Yes. Laboratory. For example, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where the extensive MSR program was born in the early 1950s. Yes. Like the "laboratory-based plans" at ORNL of the 1950s to "examine " the Aircraft Reactor Experiment (ARE) of 1954 (the year when Congress passed and the President signed the
Atomic Energy Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 2011-2021, 2022-2286i, 2296a-2297h-13) that was
the world's first molten salt fueled and cooled reactor, which set a record high temperature of operation of 1,600 °F (870 °C), that led to more "laboratory-based plans" used to build, successfully run, and "examine" the MSRE in the last half of the 1960s over 40 years ago that by the 1970s proved to the co-inventor of the LWR (Dr. Alvin M. Weinberg, then Director of ORNL), the LWR that is the solid-fueled reactor design at the heart of our present DOE "vision" for near-term (2050!) nuclear energy technology, that his thermal-spectrum thorium MSBR was THE
superior design for domestic nuclear energy, bar none!After World War II and with the availability of enriched uranium, new concepts of reactor became feasible. In 1946, Eugene Wigner and Alvin Weinberg proposed and developed the concept of a reactor using enriched uranium as a fuel, and light water as a moderator and coolant. This concept was proposed for a reactor whose purpose was to test the behavior of materials under neutron flux. This reactor, the Material Testing Reactor (MTR), was built in Idaho at INL and reached criticality on March 31, 1952. For the design of this reactor, experiments were necessary, so a mock-up of the MTR was built at ORNL, to assess the hydraulic performances of the primary circuit and then to test its neutronic characteristics. This MTR mock-up, later called the Low Intensity Test Reactor (LITR), reached criticality on February 4, 1950 and was the world's first light-water reactor (LWR).
A few years after Dr. Weinberg's ORNL program was shut down, Three Mile Island Unit 2 had an accidental partial core meltdown. Molten salt reactors
require a meltdown to safely run at atmospheric pressure for just one of its many superior performance features compared to the Weinberg LWR.
Wow. How rude of the DOE in their vision report! Again, bad manners are everywhere. Who are these DOE people who disrespect the original scientists, the esteemed Dr. Alvin M. Weinberg, who established this superior fluid-fueled energy option for domestic prosperity? Shame. Since this is a draft report, let's go ahead and edit that in:
". . . a resumption of the original MSBR program at ORNL that was led by then esteemed director, Dr. Alvin M. Weinberg, co-inventor of the light-water reactor, to continue and finish the examinations for accelerated priority development and deployment of the most excellent and superior senior nuclear fission reactor design by virtue of the fluid phase over the solid--the present LWR fleet that have been the foundation of the global nuclear power industries--the premium liquid fluoride molten salt thorium thermal breeder reactor."
"Innovative fuel forms" is missing the word "solid" and therefore evinces the
Herbert Mentality Effect (HME) that reveals hidden Orwellian Newspeak.
The most innovative fuel form, bar none, is fluoride salts dissolved in molten 2:1 7LiF-BeF2 ("flibe"). This "fuel form" by 1976 achieved the highest technology readiness level (TRL) of 9 out of 9 supported by the 2006 ORNL confirmation studies (
ORNL/TM-2006/12)
ten years ago!In 1953, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his Atoms for Peace speech to the United Nations. Commercial nuclear power generation was [the] cornerstone of his plan. A proposal by Duquesne Light Company was accepted by Admiral Rickover and the plans for the Shippingport Atomic Power Station started.
Ground was broken on Labor Day, September 9, 1954. President Eisenhower remotely initiated the first scoop of dirt at the ceremony. The reactor achieved first criticality at 4:30 AM on December 2, 1957. [I was almost two months old.] Sixteen days later, on December 18, the first electrical power was generated and full power was achieved on December 23, 1957, although the station remained in test mode. Eisenhower opened the Shippingport APS on May 26, 1958. The plant was built in 32 months at a cost of $72.5 million.
Four years from groundbreaking to grid power.
Four years! On October 1, 1982, the reactor ceased operations after 25 years of commercial service. It's third and final core was . . .
Quote:
. . . a light water breeder, which began operating in August 1977 and after testing was brought to full power by the end of that year. It used pellets made of thorium dioxide and uranium-233 oxide; initially the U233 content of the pellets was 5-6% in the seed region, 1.5-3% in the blanket region and none in the reflector region. It operated at 236 MWt, generating 60 MWe and ultimately produced over 2.1 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. After five years the core was removed and found to contain nearly 1.4% more fissile material than when it was installed, demonstrating that breeding [of U233 from thorium] had occurred.
That cost of $72.5 million was in 1954 when gold was $35 per troy ounce; today's Shippingport project cost is
~$637 million ($0.6 billion) give or take a few million but who's counting?
The DOE, when it was yet the AEC, already had a major R&D program for fluid-fueled molten salt reactors, the ORNL MSBR program. Compared to the other Gen IV designs for advanced reactors, MSRs have seniority, and the FE LFTR is already mostly at TRL 6 of 9 just because of the ORNL MSBR program.
Missing from DOE "vision" plan's field of view is the senior (1970) ORNL MSBR Program suspended right in their blind spot!
"The DOE, with proper recognition of President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace and honor to Dr. Alvin M. Weinberg, a founding father of the nuclear power industries that today supply 60% of non-emitting electricity, vigorously aims to resume Dr. Weinberg's original work on a reactor design safer and more able to deliver energy than his solid-fueled uranium LWR, and thereby more capable of achieving national security goals. Energy is the single largest component of global GDP and nearly all other goods and services require or spring from energy directly or indirectly. Non-emitting nuclear energy is immensely more energy dense than carbon burning and is the only energy technology capable of dramatically improving global GDP, reversing the accumulation of atmospheric carbon, drastically reducing rates of consumption of non-renewable energy resources, that combine to raise prosperity and achieve peace. Dr. Weinberg's fluid-fueled reactor was ideally suited for full utilization of the more abundant fertile thorium compared to uranium; a design more capable of realizing Atoms for Peace than his LWR. Dr. Weinberg's visionary invention had been suspended then and must for national and international security be completed now. A fluid design that was accomplished at Oak Ridge National Laboratory by the early 1970s, DOE now intends to build and institute Dr. Weinberg's safer Molten Salt Breeder Reactor based on the thorium fuel cycle in the fluid phase. DOE recognizes that this ambitious but necessary goal rests in the public domain. Only public efforts are able to overcome a singular, severe financial inertia of the very large initial one-time technology costs that the nuclear energy markets have not in the nuclear age ever moved to bear; costs that—by their particular nature in this singular and unique national security case—are highly unlikely to ever acquire incentives for the extraordinarily high entry into the nuclear energy businesses on a technology with very large regulatory uncertainty, particularly and uniquely faced with the only other natural and competing nuclear fuel cycle technology—fluid-fueled thorium—and especially in parallel to the aging solid-fueled uranium fuel cycle LWR fleet simultaneously competing with new, abundant natural gas production, and soon several competing solid-fueled designs. DOE respectfully grants top priority to the contemporary private LFTR MSBR qualified senior proposals with the priority goal of TRL 8 by 2022 at which time the first prime breeder for the U.S. thorium fluid-fueled program will begin operating with the first initial inventory of NG U-233 for the breeding phase. The first battery of public-private prime breeders by 2030 define the LFTR-MSBR program TRL 9 that will mark the phase-down to isobreeding at the start of the final expansion phase of the private isobreeding fleet for the thorium fuel cycle component of the total U.S. electrical and thermal energy resources until national security goals of optimized prosperity are met through the vastly improved energy resources maximally facilitated by the increasing LFTR fleet combined output; and prior to fusion power anticipated to be at TRL 7 by 2050; new nuclear energy supply levels that the natural diffuse, intermittent renewable energy technologies are unable to match beyond niche markets in competition with the extreme energy density of nuclear power.""Many of the issues which arise in the course of the interaction between science or technology and society—e.g ., the deleterious side effects of technology, or the attempts to deal with social problems through the procedures of science—hang on the answers to questions which can be asked of science and yet which cannot be answered by science. I propose the term trans-scientific for these questions since, though they are, epistemologically speaking, questions of fact and can be stated in the language of science, they are unanswerable by science; they transcend science. In so far as public policy involves trans-scientific rather than scientific issues, the role of the scientist in contributing to the promulgation of such policy must be different from his role when the issues can be unambiguously answered by science."