Is the nuclear renaissance dead yet?

[Axil]

These numbers should be grist for your calculator to give you what you are after.

Yes, thank you. As near as I can tell, most of the figures I've seen about how long we can power the country on our 'waste' is probably not including the depleted uranium left-over from enrichment. I've seen some people give figures of 100's of years of power, while others give 1000's. Partly that might be due to more conservative vs less conservative estimates of demand growth, but I think it probably is that the people saying 1000's of years are including all the DU.

By the way, the TWR is a one time through (not a breeder) sodium cooled fast reactor that uses depleted uranium as fertile and enriched U235 as fissile for startup.

According to what I've been reading on the Intellectual Ventures site about TerraPower, it is a breeder - the 'travelling wave' is constantly, slowly (takes 60 or 80 years for the wave to travel top to bottom through the fuel), breeding the fertile uranium in plutonium in-situ by hitting it with neutrons, then fissioning the newly transmuted plutonium, until almost all the original U-235 is gone? How is that not breeding?

Usually, a breeder reactor is a nuclear reactor that generates new fissile material at a greater rate than it consumes such material. But you are right. The TRW could be a break even breeder.

[jsbiff]

A ton of uranium if fully utilized will produce about a gigawatt year of power.

Are you sure about that? That sounds WAY too low to me. Here's why - there are 1GW *once-through* reactors in operation right now, and they run for what, 6 or 10 years between refueling? At 90% Capacity Factor, that means they are producing somewhere between 4 and 9 Gigawatt Years of power each. They *might* have more than a ton of fuel in them at anyone time, BUT all the figures I've seen have said we can get between 20X and 100X as much power out of our fuel as we currently extract.

If we are getting say 5GW-y of power out of reactors between refuelings, and we're only extracting at MOST 5% of the power (giving the most conservative estimate on this next number), and a ton of Uranium if we extracted ALL energy would only yield 1GW-y, that would indicate that a 1GW reactor yielding 5GW-y of power in 6 or 7 years, would need 20 * 5 = 100 tons of fuel in a reactor? Might be, but that doesn't quite sound right to me. According to the NEI the industry only uses about 2300 tons of fuel total per year (although, I suppose 100 tons in a reactor for 10 years is only 10 tons/year).

If you go with the figure that we only use about 1% of the energy, not 5, the numbers go to about 500 tons per reactor per year?

I dunno - that figure of 1GW-y of power still seems way too low to me.

EDIT: Could you provide a source link for your figure?

After my previous post, and the reason I'm interested in that figure in particular, is I've decided I want to figure something out:

I want to figure the total number of kWh potential energy sitting in our total stockpiles of 'waste' (about 63000 tons, currently), and multiply that first by 2 cents per kWh, then seperately by 5 cents per kWh, to establish what the probable range of the dollar value of all that potential electricity is.

I think it is a number that would shock most people. I expect it to dwarf our national debt. I think it would be a great number to put out to the public. Even better than telling them how many thousand years you could power the country. Instead, you start out something like this:

"What would you say, if I told you, that right now, Congress has under government ownership, a collection of assets worth more than all the gold in all the forts and banks and other repositories in the U.S. a collection of assets worth more than our national debt, assets worth $(HUGE NUMBER), and that the government is doing nothing with those assets, and is in fact planning to permanently destroy them?"

Sounds great, doesn't it? I just gotta figure out a way to realistically value the 'waste'.

[Axil]

Here is a source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

Work it out.

[jsbiff]

Here is a source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

Work it out.

Well, assuming Wikipedia is correct (which is never a sure thing), and assuming the values in WP are thermal, and assuming a .4 conversion from thermal to electric (that is, 40% efficient), then you're right - although the figure I arrived at was closer to 1.1GWy, but a slightly lower conversion efficiency (which might not be unreasonable) could take it down to 1GWy, so that does seem a reasonably conservative conversion, again, assuming WP is right. The citation that WP gave went to a page which didn't really give the specific energy for Uranium, though, so I'm not sure how they came up with that value.

So, if I didn't screw up some math, I get that 1GWy = 8.76581277 * 10^18 kWh.

So, 63,000 tons (I'm assuming that figure is metric tons - I hope I'm not running into a U.S. Customary to S.I. Conversion error here, should give us 63,000GWy = 5.52246205 * 10^23 kWh.

If you assume a nominal value of that power at 2 cents per kwH, that gives you a lower bound of $1.10449241 * 10^22.

Which is 11.0449241 Sextillion dollars. Jesus, Joseph, and Mary!

The value of the energy, is of course dependant on how much it actually costs to buy on the market. The higher to price, the lower the value, and vice versa - that is, as a consumer, 1 cent/kWh electricity is much more valuable than 10 cent/kWh.

It's probalby reasonable, then to assume that 11.045 SEXTILLION dollars is the LOWER BOUND of what that's worth. It's probably worth 2 or 3 times that much again.

That's also not including depleted uranium stocks. If there's 3X as much DU as waste, that gives a lower-bound value for waste + DU of around 44 Sextillion dollars, and maybe an upper bound of 120 Sextillion dollars.

I'm making a lot of assumptions here, though, which I admit might be wrong - I really can't quantify how much the 'effective' value of a kWh of electricity is (that is, the price from which you subtract the cost to decide the 'value' of the electricity). For one thing, the 'effective value' of electricity no doubt varies from person to person and company to company. Some companies can take energy, and per kWh spent, create products or services which generate much more profit than other companies, BUT, I have a hard time believing that people would buy energy from any energy source where they didn't get at least 2cent/kWh of perceived benefit, at least, from that expense. They'd just buy power from a different energy source.

So, I feel it's reasonable to make the assumption that, so long as Nuclear is cost competitive, which it should be able to be, long-term, it will have a value of AT LEAST 2 cent/kWh.

I also admit I have no idea how much DU there is in the world - I'm solelyl basing my multipliers upon the figure I've found that Uranium is enriched from 1 percent (or less), up to 3% (or more)., so it would seem like you'd have DU 3X to 5X greater than Enriched U.

[olivier]

the 'travelling wave' is constantly, slowly (takes 60 or 80 years for the wave to travel top to bottom through the fuel)

Forget about the travelling wave. I once was excited by this concept due to Teller.
According to their latest publications, TerraPower have practically abandoned most of it. What they are actually designing is a quite classical sodium-cooled fast-neutron reactor as have been designed, built and operated in many countries (US, UK, USSR, France, Japan, India,...) as early as in the 60s. They are using several fuel assemblies which have to be moved from one place to another within the core. They still call it the TWR because there is some hype associated to it, but it does not have much to do with Teller's design. Maybe they plan to come back to the original design later, but I doubt.

[jsbiff]

the 'travelling wave' is constantly, slowly (takes 60 or 80 years for the wave to travel top to bottom through the fuel)

Forget about the travelling wave. I once was excited by this concept due to Teller.
According to their latest publications, TerraPower have practically abandoned most of it. What they are actually designing is a quite classical sodium-cooled fast-neutron reactor as have been designed, built and operated in many countries (US, UK, USSR, France, Japan, India,...) as early as in the 60s. They are using several fuel assemblies which have to be moved from one place to another within the core. They still call it the TWR because there is some hype associated to it, but it does not have much to do with Teller's design. Maybe they plan to come back to the original design later, but I doubt.

Well, then, Bill Gates (in his TED address earlier this year), AND there website (checked yesterday) are both lieing through their teeth. If you check the TerraPower website, the only design they talk about is the Travelling Wave. I mean, you might be right, but I have a hard time believing that Bill Gates would allow himself to be caught so boldly lieing.

[KitemanSA]

So, if I didn't screw up some math, I get that 1GWy = 8.76581277 * 10^18 kWh.

One of us is WAY off!

I get 24*365.25 = 8.7E3 hours per year
and @ E6 k/G
this gives ~9E9, not ~9E18 kWhr per ton.

Oh, and that results in 11 billion dollars.

???

[olivier]

Bill Gates (in his TED address earlier this year), AND there website (checked yesterday) are both lieing through their teeth.

I would not call those people liars but communicators. The scenario which I imagine is the following. The visionary (Teller) convinced the billionnaire (Gates) to fund his revolutionary design. After the death of the visionary, the billionaire hired competent people to build the thing. The competent people studied the design and quickly understood it would be difficult to build , if not impossible (maybe they knew before being hired but did not tell). So they decided to build something easier and more realistic. But they kept the name in memory of the visionary and for the consistency of the communication.
Teller's design was based on a matrix of metallic uranium crossed by helium pipes as a coolant, where a fission/breeding wave propagated very slowly "like a candle". What was presented in the Global'09 conference is a small sodium-cooled core filed with the usual fuel elements (rod assemblies with cladding). The originality of the design comes from the way the fuel elements are shuffled within the core to avoid opening it for refuel. This is far from stupid, just very different from and much less innovative than the original design, but still interesting.
I prefer to see billionaires' money turned into power reactors than mega yachts, so I wish'em the best.

[jsbiff]

So, if I didn't screw up some math, I get that 1GWy = 8.76581277 * 10^18 kWh.

One of us is WAY off!

I get 24*365.25 = 8.7E3 hours per year
and @ E6 k/G
this gives ~9E9, not ~9E18 kWhr per ton.

Oh, and that results in 11 billion dollars.

???

Ok, I'm not sure what I did wrong. I need to learn not to try to do math late at night. Also, for long-chain calculations (that is, calculations with a lot of intermediate steps), I really need to learn to setup a spreadsheet so I can go back and see what I did to arrive at a number lol. I have no idea how I got to that 10^18

That said, something is STILL wrong - there's no possible way that extracting 100X as much energy as current reactors (or, put another way, powering our country for 300 years, as people have said) could *possibly* be worth only 11 Billion, even at a nominal value of only 2c per kWh. Something's not making sense here.

I'ma have to go try to find another source for the potential energy of uranium. I still contend, for my earlier reasons (e.g. that we have something like what 100 or 200 reactors around the world generating multiple GWy of power *each*, and *have* been for like 40 years, and I'm sure that collectively each reactor has [or is expected] to generate revenues that exceed 11 Billion dollars).

*sigh* between my math mistake, whatever it was (which I cannot now reconstruct, because I could swear I'm doing the same math, but definitely coming up with the same lower number you did - 11 Billion dollars @ 2c/kWh) and that WikiPedia value of 1GWy per ton, we're getting answers, neither of which makes any sense.

I kind of thought the Sextillion order of magnitude seemed way higher than even my highest guesstimate which would have been something on the order of trillions of dollars. That is, since I know the electric utilities in the U.S. currently generate Billions in revenue annually, several centuries should give us something on the order of Trillions, no?

In any case, my first clue should have been that, I originally *thought* 1GWy of electricity sounded like a lowball figure, so it doesn't seem right to get such an absurdly high figure from such a lowball base value, multiplied by 63,000. Actually, the thought fleetingly skittered around the corners of my mind, but I was up way too late past my normal bedtime, I guess, hehe.

I dunno, in any case, neither number sounds right. I'm gonna keep looking. (And next time, I'll do the math in a spreadsheet lol).

UPDATE: I had emailed Steve Kirsch (you've probably heard of him - he is a venture capitalist who has become a major cheerleader for the Integral Fast Reactor), asking if he had any estimates from any of the nuclear experts he is in contact with, on what the 'dollar' value of all our spent fuel and depleted uranium tailings was, if burned in an IFR.

He replied back with a word document, which appears to include several different conversations with different people (I think), which come up with a few different figures. The figures vary a bit between about $10 Trillion and $70 Trillion, which is in the order of magnitude I was expecting, based on my limited knowledge.

If someone can provide a place for me to upload the document where it could be accessed by a public URL, I'd be happy to share it with you guys so you can see the numbers and methodologies used to arrive at those numbers.

I've also emailed the Economics department at the local state Uni - the University of Cincinnati (Ohio), asking them if they might be able to help me find an answer to the economic question of "How much is a kWh of energy worth to the U.S. economy writ-large, at different purchase prices?"

Not sure if I'll get an answer back, but I hope so. Unfortunately, since I'm not an elected official or policymaker of any kind, and I don't have any money to underwrite research on this question, I'm not holding my breath.

[jsbiff]

Bill Gates (in his TED address earlier this year), AND there website (checked yesterday) are both lieing through their teeth.

I would not call those people liars but communicators. The scenario which I imagine is the following. . . But they kept the name in memory of the visionary and for the consistency of the communication.

Have you even looked at their website:

http://www.intellectualventures.com/Our ... Power.aspx

They can keep the 'brand' name "TerraPower" if they like, but keeping the *technical* name as Travelling Wave Reactor, if it is NOT a Travelling Wave Reactor is highly deceptive, at best, possibly false advertising or investment fraud at worst (potentially - right now Gates and a few close friends are the only investors, so presumably they know what's going on, so I guess there's really no one to be defauded if their website is mis-representing things).

There's no indication ANYWHERE on the site that the actual reactor they are working on is NOT a Travelling Wave design.

I'm not saying you're wrong - I'm just confused on what you've seen, to make the assertion they are NOT *actually* using the TWR design anymore, but just a 'standard' fast reactor? Everything on the website seems to indicate they are working on TWRs?

[jsbiff]

Here is a source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

Work it out.

I've found a different source. The MIT "Future of Nuclear Power" paper, has this to say: "Typical LWR spent fuel today reaches a burnup of 50,000 MWD/MT" (Appendix 1, page 105).

Based upon that source, I created a spreadsheet to calculate out resulting values. (Unfortunately, when OpenOffice.org saves to HTML, it doesn't save the formulae along side of the calculated values, but you can also download Excel or ODF versions of the file if you want to double check it).

Bottom line, is I got a number of about $25 Trillion (using more coservative assumptions this time, just to be safe - 1 cent/kWh value of electricity, only 30 percent thermal efficiency), which is in-line with some of the estimates in the Kirsch document.

[olivier]

There's no indication ANYWHERE on the site that the actual reactor they are working on is NOT a Travelling Wave design.

Not on their website. Let us say that "traveling-wave" is their trademark rather than a reference to a particular design. Unfortunately it does not appear in the abstract available on the web, but in their full paper at ICAPP'10 in San Diego they describe a classic sodium fast reactor with an inner core (called ACZ for Active Control Zone) and blankets (called FCZ for Fixed Control Zone).
A short quote:

After a predetermined amount of time the TWR is shut down in order to move high-burnup assemblies to the Fixed Control Zone near the core periphery replacing them with depleted uranium assemblies. The "fuel shuffling" operation is expected to take one to two weeks depending on the number of fuel assemblies requiring shuffling.

The interesting thing in their design is that the fuel assemblies are moved from the blankets to the inner core without opening the core unlike the refueling operation usually required with in a burner. At the end of the day, you still have to physically handle the rods, so tell me where is the wave.

[Axil]

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnup

Converting between percent and energy/mass requires knowledge of κ, the energy released per fission event. A typical value is 200 MeV/fission. With this value, the maximum burnup of 100%, which includes fissioning not just fissile content but also the other fissionable nuclides, is equivalent to about 938 GWd/MT. Nuclear engineers often use this to roughly approximate 10% burnup as just less than 100 GWd/MT.

A breeder should convert 99.9% of the fuel energy content to thermal power. (938 GWd/MT)

[Skipjack]

Olivier, this is indeed very different from what Bill Gates described in the TED talk that was on Youtube a few months ago. There he is clearly referring to a reactor that does not require maintenance and that basically burns like a candle once lit. You can see that in the graphics they were showing there as well.
So what you are saying is really discouraging and very disappointing, unless they are doing some sort of intermediate design or something until they can fix the kinks in the TWR.

[Axil]

Here is a post that touches on some of the subjects discussed in this thread.

http://theenergycollective.com/barrybro ... ot-use-ifr