030320 – Future Nuclear – London > words
Disruptor is an on-trend word that we hear on a daily basis, it is used as if it has just been conceived. But a disruptor is intrinsic to our evolutionary, political and technological progress. Disruptors can be technological, the square-rigged sail, the invention of gunpowder, the production of electricity, or the understanding of flight. Disruptors can also be social political, famines, disease, wars, education, affluence. Disruptors are causal, they open some doors and close others, sometimes their consequences are predictable often they are not. They improve efficiencies in some industries while simultaneously destroying others. The current computer revolution is a present-day disruptor. Climate change may well be our next.
Disruption is by definition uncomfortable, it initiates displacement, displacement of norms and of ideals. There are several taboos that will soon need to be addressed as our present disruptors force their presence. Three of these will be nuclear power, population and CRISPR eugenics. The easiest of these to address, is that of nuclear power.
What Is Nuclear? Before the 1900’s the world was understood through the laws of classical mechanics, that of Newtonian physics. Laws relating to motion, gravity and energy of the everyday and practical. These laws were adequate for the building of engines, bridges, railways etc. These are the laws that most of us understand, the basics of physics that we were taught at school. Laws relating to velocity, time and distance, mass, momentum and conservation are extremely powerful in physics since they allow one to derive a predictable stable future from the present conditions. Likewise, complete knowledge of the future allows precise computation of the past.
At the turn of the century mathematicians noted that reality deviated from Newtonian physics at all scales and that this was most notable as speeds approached the speed of light and at the microscopic scale of atoms. The macroscopic world, the one we live in, deals with concepts such as temperature and pressure. The microscopic world of atomic theory understands macroscopic quantities through the kinetic motion of atoms. In atomic physics all matter consists of atoms held together by electromagnetic forces. How tight these bonds are, determines the state in which matter exists: solid, liquid, gas or plasma. Solids have strong bonds, liquids have weak bonds, gases have no bonds and plasma is a conducive ionized gas.
Note: Plasmas are only found naturally in the coronae and cores of stars but can be artificially generated and are an essential for the creation of nuclear power. A nuclear generator creates plasma by heating and/or subjecting a neutral gas to a strong electromagnetic field. This removes from within the gas an atom’s orbital electrons, leaving the plasma either positively or negatively charged. This ionized gaseous substance becomes increasingly electrically conductive.
Einstein’s famous 1905 equation E=mc2 sets up a relationship between energy and mass, anything that has mass has the equivalent amount of energy. Energy and mass are the same thing and are interchangeable. Energy cannot be created or destroyed it can only be transferred from place to place.
Uranium is a high-density heavy metal. It was fused, along with all heavy elements, in a supernova 6.6 billion years ago. A supernova is the collapse of a star triggered into runaway nuclear fusion. Uranium contains its own fused energy, occurs in most rocks at 3 to 4 parts per million and it is in the earth’s seas. It is one of the heaviest of all the naturally-occurring elements (hydrogen is the lightest), and like all radio-active isotopes, is in a natural state of slow radioactive decay (cooling). This decay is very slow, millions of years, so it is barely radioactive, however it generates 0.1 watt / tonne as decay heat and this is enough to warm the earth’s core, causing convection and continental drift in the earth’s oceans.
Energy and mass are the same thing. The energy contained within heavy metals was transferred there from the collapse of a star, a supernova. Energy is obtained from uranium by splitting its atoms, reversing the process of a collapsing star. The nucleus of the Uranium-235 atom comprises 92 protons and 143 neutrons (92+143=235). When the nucleus of a Uranium-235 atom is hit by a moving neutron it splits in two and releases some energy in the form of heat but it also releases two or three additional neutrons. If the additional neutrons released cause other uranium-235 atoms to split these in turn produce more heat and more neutrons. This creates the chain reaction caused fission. When this process happens multiple millions of times, a very large amount of heat is produced from a relatively small amount of uranium. Radioactive isotopes release heat naturally through the process of radioactive decay over millions of years. When forced to release this energy all at once, this creates an explosion. Controlling the speed of the release of this energy creates a useable resource in the form of heat.
A nuclear power station is similar to a coal, gas or oil fuelled power station, it uses a fuel to generate heat. The heat is used to create steam that turns a turbine, that is then converted into mechanical or electrical energy. The great environmental advantage of nuclear is in its energy density. A golf ball sized piece of uranium weighing 780 grams is enough to provide all the energy one would require for a whole lifetime, including electricity, flights, car transport, the manufacture of one’s food and goods, a total of 6.4 million kWh. In contrast, 3,200 tonnes of coal producing 11,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide would be required to produce the equivalent amount of energy. Other, more abundant heavy metals such as Thorium can be used to generate nuclear power. India has Thorium powered nuclear power stations. The UK has had on running nuclear power stations since 1956.
There are three principle ways of generating nuclear power, each is at a different phase of technical development and they all have differing levels of efficiency. Two are types of fission reactor, a fission once-through reactor and a fission fast breeder (fast neutron) reactor. Both of these split the atoms of heavy metals to release the energy trapped within from a collapsed star. The third type is a fusion reactor. Unlike nuclear fission that splits heavy atomic nuclei, fusion bonds (fuses together) lighter ones such as Hydrogen to give off energy. The sun and the stars are powered by nuclear fusion. These three methods of generating nuclear power are described in more detail in the text below.
Nuclear power is not a new technology and its development needs an historical context. In the 1920’s, using F.W. Astons measurements of the masses of low mass elements and Einstein’s 1905 theory of relativity E=mc2, Arthur Eddington proposed that large amounts of energy could be released by fusing small nuclei together and that this was the energy that powered the stars. The following years through the 1930’s, scientists made astonishing scientific achievements in the field of atomic physics. In 1932 Ernest Rutherford discovered that when Lithium atoms were split by bombarding them with protons, they released immense amounts of energy in accordance with Einstein’s mass energy equivalence theory. In the same year, 1932, James Chadwick discovered the neutron. The neutron has no electronic charge and was immediately seen as a tool for nuclear experimentation. In 1934 Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie discovered induced radioactivity by bombarding materials with neutrons. During the 1930’s Enrico Femi improved the effectiveness of induced radioactivity by bombarding uranium with neutrons. In 1938 German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, discovered that when a tiny neutron split a relatively massive uranium atom an immense amount of energy was given off along with additional neutrons, this process they called fission. Numerous scientists at that time realised that if fission reactions released additional neutrons a self-sustaining chain reaction could result. This was a eureka decade and a move nearer to unlocking the ideal of perpetual motion for energy. Once self-sustaining fission reactions were confirmed in the lab, scientists petitioned their governments for funding for nuclear research.
Nearly all of the nuclear research throughout the 1940’s and 1950’s was related to weaponry, but in 1955 commercial applications for nuclear fusion began in Japan, France and Sweden. By the mid 1960’s fusion development had stalled in the West but Russia made claims of progress with continued development of the Tokamak reactor, of this the west was sceptical. In 1969, by Russian invitation, a UK team of scientists confirmed the achievements of the Russians and this led to a wave of Tokamak toroid reactor construction throughout the 1970’s financed by multi-million-dollar research funds. R&D continues through the 1980’s to 2010’s with incremental improvements and breakthroughs in sustaining a fusion reaction. In 2014 US scientists at the National Ignitions Facility – NIF, for the first time, generate more energy from fusion reactions than from the energy put in to achieve controlled fusion.
Three Variants of Nuclear Reactor
Fission – Once-Through
In a Fission Once-Through nuclear reactor the energy is harnessed by a controlled chain reaction. When a uranium-235 nucleus in a reactor splits, it produces two or more neutrons that can then be absorbed by other nuclei, this in turn causes them to undergo fission as well. More neutrons are then released and continuous fission is achieved. The reaction is controlled by controlling the quantity of free neutrons that are able to induce further fission. Control rods made of neutron poisons absorb free neutrons. When the control rods are pushed deeper into the reactor, its greater exposure absorbs more neutrons and this slows the fission reaction. Neutrons produced by fission have high energies and move extremely quickly. These so-called fast neutrons do not cause fission as efficiently as slower-moving ones so they are slowed down in most reactors by the process of moderation. A liquid or gas moderator, commonly water or helium, cools the neutrons to optimum energies for causing fission.
Uranium-235 has an operating cycle of 4 to 6 years. During the fission process some of the uranium is turned into plutonium-239. Plutonium-239 does not give off as much heat so with time the fuel degrades and efficiency declines. A nuclear fission reactor is very inefficient and it uses only 1% of the fuel available. Economics determines the length of time a fuel is used before it is considered spent. Spent fuel however, still contains large amounts of energy but short-term financial concerns determine that fuel rods are replaced so that they can run at 100% efficiency. The spent fuel is highly radioactive and contains weapon grade plutonium. This waste requires long-term protective storage to cool and decay. However, it should be noted that a kilogram of uranium-235 releases three million times more nuclear energy than the energy produced by burning a kilogram of coal and unfortunately this encourages inefficiency.
Fission reactors are categorised by generation. Generation 1 reactors are the experimental reactors of the 1950’s. Generation 2 reactors, are the most common of the current reactors, developed between 1965-1996. Generation 3 reactors have evolutionary improvements from 1996 to present. Very few Generation 3 reactors have been built and development has been very slow as political opposition to and related funding for nuclear has been withdrawn and projects terminated. Generation 4 reactors include technologies still under development. Nuclear fission is already a very old technology, it is incredibly inefficient and wasteful of its fuel source with its waste still containing huge quantities of unspent fuel. Fission reactors have been able to run this inefficiently due the relative cheapness and availability of the uranium fuel.
FBR’s
The plutonium-239 within the waste of the nuclear fissions once-through process has been the biggest setback to its development. If stolen, plutonium-239 can be used to fabricate nuclear weapons, it still requires dedicated safe secure storage where it is allowed to cool and decay to be used in non-weaponry. The technology already exists to safely burn plutonium-239 in Fast Breeder Reactors – FBR’s. This technology could dispose of the existing waste problem, reducing the threat of radiation and nuclear proliferation, and at the same time generate vast amounts of low-carbon energy.
The majority of fission reactors use a once-through method taking the energy from uranium-235 which makes up 0.7% of the uranium and discards the remaining uranium-238. Our present commonly used technology burns under 1% of the fuel’s potential. FBR’s – Fast Breeder (fission) Reactors, also called fast neutron reactors, allow the continued chain reaction to completely use the uranium fuel but control of these is both difficult and dangerous. FBR’s are very efficient, they convert uranium-238 to fissionable plutonium-239 and obtain sixty times more energy from the uranium. They are expensive to build and difficult to control but they can also produce, when required, more plutonium than they consume and therefore can produce more fuel than they burn. However, development programmes have faltered with material and technical problems that still need to be resolved.
The high costs of FBR’s and the relatively low cost of uranium fuel has helped the less efficient once-through fission burners to dominate. Although about 20 FBRs have already been operating, some since the 1950’s, they have covered some ground work for further design development. Russia and Kazakhstan have run reliable FBR’s since the 1980’s. FBR’s have the additional advantage that they can further burn the spent fuel from the once-through reactors and ex-military weapon plutonium because all plutonium isotopes in an FBR can fission. This would turn these waste and problematic resources into a useful energy supply. Fusion reactors should be the long-term goal but fast breeder fission reactors should be the focus of the short to medium term.
FBR’s use a coolant, such as liquid sodium, that is not normally used in the once-through fission reactors. This coolant is not an efficient moderator so its neutrons remain fast moving high energy. Although these fast neutrons are less efficient at causing fission they are easily captured by uranium-238 which then becomes plutonium-239. Plutonium-239 can be reprocessed and used as more reactor fuel. FBR’s can be designed to maximise plutonium-239 production and in some cases can generate up to 30% more fuel than they consume. This is why they are called Breeder reactors.
The process of producing more fuel than consumed is achieved because natural uranium consists primarily of uranium-238, which does not fission easily, and only 0.72% of uranium-235, which does. Natural uranium is therefore unsuitable for commercial reactors and its uranium-235 content has to be enhanced to 3 to 8% for it to be able to sustain a chain reaction. The uranium-235 is encouraged to fission but more than 90 percent of the atoms in the fuel are uranium-238. The fission process releases neutrons from the uranium-235 which are then absorbed by the uranium-238. When uranium-238 captures a free neutron, it becomes uranium-239, this rapidly changes by beta radiation (decay) into neptunium-239. Neptunium-239 continues to decay for a further 3 days to become plutonium-239. Plutonium-239 is more fissile than uranium-235 so additional nuclear fuel is produced.
125,000 nuclear weapons have known to have been built since 1945, the majority were constructed by the US and the Russians during The Cold War. As of 2019 17,000 of these weapons are known to still exist. In 1992 when The Cold War officially came to an end, nuclear weapons stockpiles were decommissioned and these flooded the market with cheap plutonium and uranium. This proved to be a setback to FBR development and the less efficient but easier to achieve fission once-through reactors benefitted from this surplus. Further, market lead capitalism unfortunately will always opt for the short-term gain over a wiser long-term objective. This is due to the fact that if one company decides to take the sensible long-term view they will be undercut by their competitors and this perpetuates short-termism. A further setback for FBR’s and nuclear in general, has been that companies sitting on fossil fuel assets, coal, petrol and now shale, will understandably encourage their consumption whilst promoting negative news on alternative competitor fuels. Governments are equally aware that disruption to the fossil fuel industries will displace a considerable workforce that would need to be re-employed elsewhere. Although a market lead economy is good for competition it is not necessarily good for setting sensible and sustainable long-term objectives. These need to be set as agreed global government policies with market competition encouraged and controlled to develop efficiencies within these directives.
Fusion
Considering the potential benefits of nuclear fusion relatively little research and development work has been done since the oil crisis in the 1970’s. The Anti-nuclear movements, often naively linked to environmental campaigns, have forced nuclear R&D to stall and the considerable budgets required for fusion research have been withdrawn.
Nuclear fusion would be the alchemist’s elixir. It is the energy source that would power the future, on earth and in space. Its energy density is way beyond any comparative and as an energy source it is highly efficient, both in terms of minimum waste and energy production. Unlike nuclear fission, that splits heavy atomic nuclei, fusion bonds lighter ones such as Hydrogen to give off energy. The sun and the stars are powered by nuclear fusion. The concept of putting the power of the sun inside a box is enticing, the issue is that we don’t as yet know how to make the box.
Fusion has more potential power than fission. With fission large unstable nucleons such as uranium and plutonium are split to produce energy. With fusion lighter elements are fused together to form heavier elements, such as deuterium and tritium yielding helium + neutron + energy. Fusion can yield eight times more energy than fission but fusion uses considerably more energy to initiate than fission.
The Tokomak reactor has been one of the most successful fusion reactors to date. It uses extreme magnetic fields to confine a hot plasma into the shape of a torus. This forces the atoms together as they travel at high speed, 4 million meters per second, around the torus, whilst heated to 150 million degrees Celsius (ten times the heat of the centre of the sun). When deuterium and tritium fuse, they become an unstable isotope of helium that quickly becomes stable by releasing one neutron and 17.6 million electron volts of energy. This process has kept the sun and stars burning and releasing energy for billions of years. Every second the sun transforms 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium at a temperature of 15 million degrees centigrade. The problems with fusion, is not the principles of fusion but with the amount of energy required to jump start and sustain a fusion reaction. The basic science is solved and the problems that remain are technical ones to do with materials. The Tokomak reactor has to withstand extremes of force, speed and heat and this pushes the limits of our current technologies.
Nuclear fusion is still considered to be speculative and experimental as the energy required to cause fusion has, to date, been more than the energy commercially produced. The International Thermal Experimental Reactor – ITER is an international R&D project that is looking at the long-term reliable potential of nuclear fusion and as mentioned above the US NIF lab claimed energy positive fusion in 2014. When a fusion reactor is achieved that is energy positive it would also be easier to miniaturize. Recent billionaire backed funding (Bloomberg, Gates, Bezos) programmes have been looking to create fusion reactors small enough to be built in factories and shipped for assembly on site. With the new HTS magnet technology (High Temperature Semi-Conductors), a net-energy fusion device can be considerably smaller at about 2% of the volume and mass of ITER. A smaller size means lower costs, opening fusion design to the smaller, more agile organisation. Several start-ups that are pursuing nuclear fusion believe that this will be achieved by 2025 to 2030. Hydrogen fuels are widely available, when fusion reactors fail, they tend to burn out as opposed to meltdown, making them safer. Fusion reactors give off fast neutrons but these can be shielded by lightweight high-tech poly plastics such as Borated HDPE and this could be moulded making a seamless enclosure for smaller units.
Miniature SMR’s
Small Modular Reactor’s SMR’s. The image of a nuclear power station is that of an enormous factory, ring fenced from the rest of the world, a preternatural industrial island. Why aren’t nuclear reactors small and if so, how small is small?
The smallest designed and prototyped, nuclear reactor known was built in 2012 for NASA deep space missions. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory LLNF-DUFF space reactor is just 24 watts. The energy was used to turn a Stirling engine electrical generator. A Stirling engine is a closed-cycle regenerative heat engine with a permanently gaseous working fluid. The first portable nuclear reactor “Alco PM-2A” was used to generate electrical power (2 MW) for Camp Century from 1960. Optimism towards nuclear in the 1950’s was such that Ford produced the Nucleon concept car. A car powered by its own nuclear reactor, with its toroidal reactor visually located behind the passengers.
More recently, in 2017, Kilopower a NASA initiative designed a nuclear reactor to provide one to ten kilowatts of electrical power continuously for twelve to fifteen years. The reactor is intended for space travel and exploration including future Mars missions. Designed, prototyped and tested in 2018, it measured approximately 2m high by 1.2m diameter and weighs 134kg, it produced 1kW of power. An Israeli research team designed a thermal heterogeneous reactor that weighed 4.95 kg and measured less than 19cm across, it would produce a few kilowatts of power. These are prototyped future projects but small nuclear reactors have been in use for many decades.
Nuclear powered ships were in use in the 1940’s. The first nuclear submarine was built in 1955. The majority of nuclear marine propulsion use nuclear power to heat water in a sealed primary system, that in turn heats water to turn a steam turbine. This can then provide direct propulsion or can generate electricity that provides both utility power and propulsion. Compared to earlier diesel fuelled submarines, nuclear fuel offers advantages of very long intervals before refuelling. All fuel is contained within the nuclear reactor saving the space that would usually be required for fuel and no air intakes or exhaust stacks are required. The relative fuel costs are low but are offset by high operating and infrastructure costs, so nuclear marine transport is mainly used by the military.
Most nuclear submarines have one but can have two reactors, whilst aircraft carriers have two but the USS Enterprise has eight reactors. Marine nuclear reactors are much smaller than conventional land power generators, in both dimension and output. To compensate for this, they use a uranium of higher energy density that is safer than the uranium used on land but it comes at a cost. Marine reactors also use more innovative cooling and shielding systems. Nuclear ships operate for years (10 to 25) without refuelling. In the US the latest Virginia Class SSN-774 submarines designed by General Dynamics Electric Boats will be in service until 2060. The SSN-774 use a S9G nuclear reactor that delivers 40,000 shaft horse power (c. 30kW) and has a nuclear core life estimated at 33 years. These submarines use a quiet pump-jet propulsion instead of conventional propeller. Much of SMR future development will borrow heavily from the transfer of existing military applications. A fleet of nuclear-powered cargo ships would be wise replacement for those that burn heavy fuel oil with its high sulphur and nitrogen content.
At present nuclear fission and fission FBR’s are multi-billion-dollar developments. This financial commitment means that its asset value encourages longevity of use, to refurbish instead or renewing. This means that many nuclear power stations have been on running since their inception in the 1950’s and 60’s, long past their initial design lifespans. The smaller SMR’s would have a much shorter life and be decommissioned and replaced more often encouraging design development in line with other products such as aircraft and cars.
The majority of the cost overruns in building large nuclear power stations are not due to construction cost overruns, but instead are due to legislative costs related to delays called upon during the development and construction process. With billions involved in the financing of these mega projects any delay begins to rack up fees and adds to the project’s procurement inefficiency. With Small Modular Reactors the oversized expensive one-off nuclear power station becomes instead a factory product with all the benefits of factory design and development. Using recognised standards and technologies creates certainty with regard to both quality control and licensing procedures. Factory controlled product design provides control not only of the build but also of the design development process. Design feedback from product use can be quickly assimilated to improve and further develop the generic designs.
SMR’s would provide a low cost, low carbon, safe and reliable energy source. In the developed world energy infrastructure has aged with many power stations, coal, nuclear or otherwise all running beyond their scheduled termination dates. With costs of one-off mega projects being multiple billions (£15b-£25b) there will always be the temptation to revamp and relicense existing power plants. This means the continued use of technologies developed in the 1970’s and this in turn hinders design development. Design development of SMR’s would increase efficiency, improve safety while simultaneously reducing product scale. Design development would continue to fit improved efficiency into a smaller package at a lower cost. A network of smaller SMR’s also mitigates risk of total loss of energy supply. A designed product is a globally exportable commodity and as such would develop with the benefit of global technological inputs. Several firms, established and start-ups are pursuing the development of SMR’s. Their designs range from 6 to 440MWe. A SMR creating 440MWe of electricity would be enough to power a city the size of Leeds. But SMR’s need to be smaller than this, around 100MWe, and spread into a grid that would also include solar inputs and battery storage.
Once a product is accepted by a market its development becomes exponential. Consider flight, from the Wright Brother first 1903 flight, a 37m, 12 second hop at 6.82 mph, to the SR-71 Blackbird Mach 3 (3x the speed of sound) flights in 1976, or to the moon landing of 1969. This development period is only 60 to 70 years. Computers are equally an obvious comparative, consider the whole buildings required to house NASA’s computers in the 1960’s. The Apollo 11 / iPhone 11 comparison is one, not only of computing power, but one that takes mankind’s most astonishing achievement and compares it with a mass produced, everyday pocket utility. The Apollo 11 computer had 32768 bits of RAM and a processor that ran at 0.043 MHz compared to the Apple iPhone 11 (basic model) 64 GB RAM that is 549,755,813,888 bits (16.78 million times more than Apollo 11) and 2x 2.65GHz of processing speed. This increase in efficiency and reduction in scale has been achieved in 50 years. Nuclear power needs to enter this phase of design development and it needs to do so quickly and SMR’s are a way to achieve this.
Waste
Nuclear waste, like all waste products from industry, remains unresolved. Nuclear fission reactors use only 1% of the fuel available. When fission reactors split heavy uranium nuclei into medium sized nuclei creating energy it gives off waste. The nuclear energy available per atom is approximately one million times larger than the chemical energy per atom of fossil fuels. This means that the amount of fuel and waste used and produced, would be one million times smaller than that for the equivalent energy produced by fossil fuels. For example, the ash waste from ten typical coal fired power stations would be four million tons per year, the equivalent nuclear waste would be four tons. The materials flowing into and out of nuclear reactors are small relative to fossil-fuel streams. Most nuclear waste is low-level waste. 7% is intermediate-level waste and 3% is high-level waste. From the above example of ten typical coal fired power stations with 4m tons of ash per year a once-through nuclear power station would produce 109kg of high-level waste. Nuclear high-level waste is highly radioactive and it is generally stored with the reactor for forty years in cooling pools. After 40 years the radio activity has fallen 1000-fold but it will remain a high-level contaminant for at least 1000 years. Nuclear waste is a problem but it is a physically small problem and with the use of the right reactors a resolvable problem. It should be remembered that this high-level waste is a very potent future fuel that at present cannot be commercially accessed but at some future date will have value.
Radioactive isotopes eventually decay, or disintegrate into harmless materials. Some isotopes decay in hours or even minutes, but others decay very slowly. Strontium-90 and cesium-137 have half-lives of about 30 years (half the radioactivity will decay in 30 years). Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years. By reprocessing separates residual uranium and plutonium from the fission products both can be used again as fuel. Most of the high-level waste (other than spent fuel) generated over the last 35 years has come from reprocessing fuel from government-owned plutonium production reactors and from naval research and test reactors. Most of this waste has a use as a future fuel source.
Industry, has as yet, never provided a circular economy where all waste is reused. The last two hundred years has burnt through fuels and materials at criminal levels of inefficiency. Metals are sent to ground fill or down-graded when reused and plastics are the current curse of the Anthropocene. With the coming of the global adoption of the electric car and with the addition of grid storage, disposing of spent batteries will be our next mountain of a problem to which no feasible solution, pre-adoption, has been tabled. Every aspect of industry should ideally be circular but society is taking a long time to get there. Nuclear waste obviously adds to this problem but volumetrically is almost insignificant to the mountains of existing and coming industrial waste. All waste at some point will need to feed back into a circular system.
Bad Timing
If nuclear power offers such opportunity why has development stagnated over the last fifty years. The Cold War was the political disruptor that pushed man to the moon before he was technically ready to go there, with plentiful reserves of oil and coal, energy has not had such a disruptor. Nuclear energy was an amazing scientific breakthrough but unfortunately a discovery made with very bad timing. Bad timing can often have the same conclusion as a bad decision. Nuclear power was first discovered in the 1930’s. This great decade for science and technology unfortunately fell in the midst of mankind’s cultural and political regression. The 1930’s sits inconveniently between the two World Wars. Governments, each believing that its neighbours were in the process of constructing atomic weapons poured funds into their making. In the US the Manhattan Project, ironically lead by European scientists that had fled fascist Germany, created the first nuclear chain reaction in December 1942. The United States tested its first nuclear weapon in July 1945 and within a month Hiroshima and Nagasaki were annihilated. The Enola Gay and Bockscar B-29 bombers may have ended World War 2 but the Cold War that endured post-war built up arsenals of nuclear weapons. 125,000 nuclear warheads have been built since 1945, 97% of them were American or Russian. There are a known 17,000 nuclear weapons in the world today. The words nuclear and bomb can no longer be separated, they have become culturally infused, joined by a hyphen that cannot be eradicated.
In the 1950’s countries still had optimism for nuclear power. The UK built its first nuclear powered reactor in 1956 at Calder Hall (Sellafield) but government policies, along with world policies, changed during the 1970’s and 80’s and development stagnated. At the beginning of the 21stcentury interest in nuclear power has again picked up but has so far focused on multi-billion mega projects. Globally there are many different approaches to SMR nuclear design, some using innovative fuels or cooling systems, some explore new materials. Conventional, proven and understood systems will be developed first, however as soon as markets are established, new technologies will find funding and speed up design development.
It is interesting that the majority of providers of SMR’s prioritise economic reasons for their development, as compared to the larger plants and mega projects that have struggled to be delivered on budget or at all. SMR’s would offer reduced overall capital cost that would enable conventional project financing. They would offer improved certainty of construction, manufacture, project delivery and a competitive cost for the production of electricity. These are all very pragmatic concerns, but the conversion of nuclear power station design, each as a one-off, to a product-based design approach of an SMR, will speed up design development. Design development will feed into new design fields, especially when the product inevitably tends towards miniaturisation and improved efficiency. At the same time knowledge from existing product runs, the car, aircraft, ship building industries, will feed into reactor procurement and production. Further, SMR’s should not be considered as single stand-alone power plants, they are designed to operate as a fleet in series. An SMR would require one tenth of the space needed by a conventional power station to produce the equivalent amount of electricity. Nuclear power, due to bad political timing, is a technology that has been left on the shelf for nearly fifty years.
The Way Forward
The energy hungry world has long been fossil fuel dependent. At the same time as the world begins to reduce the burning of fossil fuels, additional demands will soon put considerable pressure on electric energy generation and electric energy grid infrastructure. Renewables such as solar, wind and hydro, however efficient, will never deliver enough power, there simply isn’t the space for the required number of solar panels or lengths of coasts for suitable offshore wind. The energy hungry computer servers that support the cloud and the world of instantaneous communication. the coming global roll out of electric cars, electric transport, electric heating and the further development of solely electric factories, will put additional demands on an already creaking system.
Immediate short-term transitional fixes should be applied to existing energy systems. This would need to be a coordinated global initiative. Carbon Capture – CCS should be fitted to all existing coal fuelled power stations and no further coal fuelled power stations should be built. Where possible coal fuelled power stations should be converted to gas. Heavy fuels should be removed from all trans-oceanic shipping, converting existing stocks to run on either lighter fuels, gas or by fitting heavy fuel scrubbers.
Nuclear power is an essential ingredient to a future sustainable energy mix and is possibly the only realistic alternative power source at this present time that can support present population levels and maintain existing quality of life expectations. In the near-term R&D should focus on Small Modular Fast Breeder Reactors – SMFBR’s (100-150MWe) and set up production lines where these are factory built. When nuclear power becomes a product, the natural efficiencies of product design, continued product refinement, product logistics and international IP, will increase efficiencies, shrink size, standardise components and systems and lower costs.
The lessons learnt by developing SMFBR’s as products would feed directly into R&D for nuclear fusion. SMR – Nuclear Fusion would not only provide the energy that the planet requires to maintain its existing level of population but it will also provide the power that is required for man’s next great exploration, that of space.
“We may be the only source of high intelligence in the cosmos, but our act of avoiding nuclear power generation is one of auto-genocide. Nothing more clearly demonstrates the limits of our intelligence.” James Lovelock
“We made the mistake of lumping nuclear energy in with nuclear weapons, as if all things nuclear are evil.” Patrick Moore
“Nuclear energy, in terms of an overall safety record, is better than other energy.” Bill Gates
“The sensible thing to do for a country like the UK, I think, is to focus on CCS, which the world needs anyway, and nuclear.” David MacKay.
Images. Shelled Nuclear Fictive SMR’s
