Fission news(I know blasphemy )

Point out news stories, on the net or in mainstream media, related to polywell fusion.

Moderators: tonybarry, MSimon

KitemanSA
Posts: 6179
Joined: Sun Sep 28, 2008 3:05 pm
Location: OlyPen WA

Re: Fission news(I know blasphemy )

Post by KitemanSA »

I'm still not sure where you foresee all the difficulty. Solid salt is brittle. That which hasn't made it to the dump tanks can be easily broken into small pieces and swept up. Then the remainder can be washed up. Clean-up... easy.

RERT
Posts: 271
Joined: Mon Jun 02, 2014 9:10 pm

Re: Fission news(I know blasphemy )

Post by RERT »

The Thorcon FDT is below the 'can', which contains the reaction vessel and primary cooling circuit. The facility includes a 400 ton hoist to remove and replace the can as a unit. Once the can is removed, there is no obvious reason why the exposed FDT could not also be lifted out and reprocessed at a specialised facility after a drain event.

That is speculation though: their website is silent on the process after a drain event. I've asked them for more info, we'll see if they care to respond to Joe Public.

D Tibbets
Posts: 2775
Joined: Thu Jun 26, 2008 6:52 am

Re: Fission news(I know blasphemy )

Post by D Tibbets »

Having a removable tank would help cleanup on site( probably by a large amount .But if it weighs 400 tons, it could not be transported intact, except perhaps by barge. Also, clean up of the actual radioactive slug is not just fragmentation of the sludge and sweeping. It is doing so by robotics. Everything will become dangerously radioactive and have to be stored for many years in a safe manner. Any washing fluid would also need to be stored, it could not be released into the environment. Washing may actually increase the radioactive waste volume and weight that has to be handled.

Actual damage to the reactor itself with it's associated steam generating and primary cooling plumbing may not be much with a liquid salt reactor coolent failure. Restoring the reactor function may not be to difficult once the failure points(s) have been corrected. So the plant may be recovered, but the clean up/ removal/ storage of the drain tank and associated plumbing is no trivial endeavor, though I can appreciate designing things so that an intact drain tank can be removed would help the local situation. The tank might be drained if the salt/ sludge is still hot enough to be liquid, or if it is reheated. This would allow transfer to more transportable tanks like railroad tankers similar to those designed for conventional transfer of liquid radioactive wastes to long term storage sites like Yuma Mountain, or processing sites where the products might be processed for subsequent use. Both of these considerations are very expensive though and have suffered considerable public resistance. To establish / reestablish a processing site like what was done for plutonium production would cost tens of billions $ if not hundreds.

This has to be considered in any system that uses fission fuel on industrial scales. My guess is that this is why storage is used for fission waste, it is cheaper than reprocessing and consolidating or reuse of the fission products. The exception is the weapons programs where the cost is acceptable to the parties involved. It has to compete with coal and natural gas. With political green considerations (which are very volatile at this time) nuclear fission gains and perhaps fission reprocessing gains. It also has to compete with wind and solar and other renewables, which is becoming cheaper.

Very large fusion reactors like large tokamaks suffer similar challenges except that the radioactive concerns are several orders of magnitude less problematic (provided there is not an uncontrolled quenching of the superconducting magnets). Concerns are not absent, especially with D-T dependent fusion, but it is better. Fusion advantages increase with D-D or D-D half catalyzed fusion reactors, and of course reach the apex of desirability with aneutronic P- 11B fusion. If liquid salt reactors can be scaled down economically, a failure would result in smaller drain tank size considerations and other advantages that would perhaps reduce the relative costs of recovering or retiring the reactor. The steam generation costs is very significant when considering the cost of operating, maintaining, repairing, or retiring a plant. Using CO2 super critical dynamos changes the picture some irregardless of the heat source. Having a direct conversion scheme changes the picture profoundly. No steam plant is required, cooling considerations are much easier without needing to generate a relatively hot and challenging and expensive gas (steam or CO2) handling system. This is somewhat tangential but is very important in consideration of system costs.

I'll add that after more than a decade of following this stuff, my impression of the ranking of approaches to reliable electrical production based on desirability from cost concerns- money and environmental, is first P-11B fusion in small machines, then large, followed by D-D fusion, solar/ wind, D-T in smaller machines, thorium and liquid salt fission, D-T fusion in large machines similar to ITAR, and finally classical fission. Aneutronic fusion is so attractive. I think Helium3 is an extremely unlikely candidate due to the lack of the fuel. The same can be said for tritium primary fusion. though expensive and unproven methods may circumvent this. I terms of the holy grail , P-11B fusion in small machines is the best by far. A huge effort should be directed towards it. Solar is another fusion reactor that may surpass fission and ITER schemes as improvements in cost and efficiency, and of course storability are pursued.

What worries me most is D-D fusion in small machines. The proliferation risk from such might be orders of magnitude worse than the large and very expensive fission reactors. This is especially true if D-D fusion becomes easy to implement primarily, instead of depending on the use of pirated large fission plants that have been foolishly made available to nuclear weapon wannabes.

Dan Tibbets
To error is human... and I'm very human.

RERT
Posts: 271
Joined: Mon Jun 02, 2014 9:10 pm

Re: Fission news(I know blasphemy )

Post by RERT »

...first P-11B fusion in small machines, then large, followed by D-D fusion, solar/ wind, D-T in smaller machines, thorium and liquid salt fission, D-T fusion in large machines similar to ITAR, and finally classical fission....
Interesting list, and seems sensible. Solar/Wind without batteries is more of a net-demand reduction technology, and is only a competing generation technology with good enough batteries. Hard to place the latter on the list until the batteries are understood, but probably high up there.

RERT
Posts: 271
Joined: Mon Jun 02, 2014 9:10 pm

Re: Fission news(I know blasphemy )

Post by RERT »

This response from Thorcon on the 'drain event'.
After a drain , the normal procedure is to use one of the drain tank's three fluidic pumps to transfer the fuelsalt to either

a) back into this Can's primary loop, or
b) to the other Can in this PMOD's, or
c) to the PMOD's fuelsalt transfer cask.

A drain is not a meltdown in any normal sense of the word. While a drain is used in some casualties to put the fuelsalt in location where there is no chance of criticality and the decay heat can be removed passively, it is also the first step in transferring used fuelsalt to either the other Can in the PMOD or to the transfer cask. A drain is a standard operating procedure, albeit one that normally takes place only once every 4 years per PMOD.

Fluidic pumps are quite reliable. They have no moving parts. And the compressor that drives them is in the silo hall where it is easily accessible for maintenance and replacement. And we have triple redundancy.

But if we cant pump the fuelsalt out of the drain tank, the crane is speced to lift both the Can/FDT and the salt. The problem here is that the additional radioactivity in the Can/FDT will require special procedures during the transfer for the silo to the Canship and at the Can Recycling facility end.

Hope this helps,
(reformatted by RERT)

Maui
Posts: 586
Joined: Wed Apr 09, 2008 12:10 am
Location: Madison, WI

Re: Fission news(I know blasphemy )

Post by Maui »

Maui wrote:Is Yucca really the primary hurdle for nuclear?
It seems reality has come back with a different verdict than the answer I got to this question earlier this year. (edit: last year!) The only two ongoing US nuclear projects (approved in 2009 and 2012) bankrupted builder Westinghouse due to billions in cost overruns.. Recently Georgia PUC elected to push forward on their project despite 5 years and $9B in overruns. South Carolina, OTOH, is abandoning their project and refunding customers an average of $1K in extra fees intended to have helped finance the project. This, despite being 5 years into construction.

I don’t see any mention of regulation tying up these projects which I would assume cleared most of those hurdles when they began. Perhaps Westinghouse just f’d this up, or there are better designs that should have been used, but it’s hard to argue this calls the economics of fission into question.

RERT
Posts: 271
Joined: Mon Jun 02, 2014 9:10 pm

Re: Fission news(I know blasphemy )

Post by RERT »

I think the assumption that regulation was cleared up-front is questionable. The assertion from Thorcon was that 1970s nuclear costs were lower than coal. That must mean currently many billions of costs per plant are due to regulation, which can hardly be from a careful review of plans. More likely every last component being over specified, tested, certified, and tracked - though that's just my speculation. Someone involved might shed more light.

Nuclear companies might be on a sticky wicket with the public and the regulator if they cited (well known) regulations as the cause of overruns.

Tom Ligon
Posts: 1871
Joined: Wed Aug 22, 2007 1:23 am
Location: Northern Virginia
Contact:

Re: Fission news(I know blasphemy )

Post by Tom Ligon »

In our neck of the woods, we have an abundance of gas from fracking. The most recent powerplant to be built in our area is natural gas fired. This has, if I understand it, a mix of steam and gas turbines. The gas turbines are like turboprop engines ... can throttle up our down quickly.

Compare this to nukes, with reactor periods of half a day or more. These typically just run steady to supply base load. But we're getting more and more wind turbines on line here. In South Carolina, I've recently noticed a proliferation of old agricultural fields covered with PV panels. Nuclear is not a good balance for these. Natural gas is. I suspect the economics of fission plants, already not great, are not being helped by the load-management hurdles the renewable part of generation are creating.

RERT
Posts: 271
Joined: Mon Jun 02, 2014 9:10 pm

Re: Fission news(I know blasphemy )

Post by RERT »

Can't argue with that. Subtract volatile renewables from volatile demand, and you get smaller demand which is more volatile. Must be bad for any base load supply which is not easy to adjust.

Ironic that renewables are working against carbon-free nuclear power. You can probably work up an argument that base load can shrink more than the average contribution of renewables. In places where all of base load is nuclear, that might make the addition of renewables increase carbon intensity...

williatw
Posts: 1912
Joined: Mon Oct 12, 2009 7:15 pm
Location: Ohio

Re: Fission news(I know blasphemy )

Post by williatw »

Uranium Seawater Extraction Makes Nuclear Power Completely Renewable

Uranium is dissolved in seawater at very low concentrations, only about 3 parts per billion (3 micrograms/liter or 0.00000045 ounces per gallon). But there is a lot of ocean water – 300 million cubic miles or about 350 million trillion gallons (350 quintillion gallons, 1,324 quintillion liters). So there’s about 4 billion tons of uranium in the ocean at any one time.

However, seawater concentrations of uranium are controlled by steady-state, or pseudo-equilibrium, chemical reactions between waters and rocks on the Earth, both in the ocean and on land. And those rocks contain 100 trillion tons of uranium. So whenever uranium is extracted from seawater, more is leached from rocks to replace it, to the same concentration. It is impossible for humans to extract enough uranium over the next billion years to lower the overall seawater concentrations of uranium, even if nuclear provided 100% of our energy and our species lasted a billion years.
America, Japan and China are racing to be the first nation to make nuclear energy completely renewable. The hurdle is making it economic to extract uranium from seawater, because the amount of uranium in seawater is truly inexhaustible.

And it seems America is in the lead. New technological breakthroughs from DOE’s Pacific Northwest (PNNL) and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national laboratories have made removing uranium from seawater within economic reach and the only question is - when will the source of uranium for our nuclear power plants change from mined ore to seawater extraction?

Nuclear fuel made with uranium extracted from seawater makes nuclear power completely renewable. It’s not just that the 4 billion tons of uranium in seawater now would fuel a thousand 1,000-MW nuclear power plants for a 100,000 years. It’s that uranium extracted from seawater is replenished continuously, so nuclear becomes as endless as solar, hydro and wind.

Image
Researchers around the world have been working frantically to develop an array of materials and fibers able to economically extract uranium from seawater. They have succeeded, as discussed at a conference devoted to the topic. Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory exposed this special uranium-sorbing fiber developed at ORNL to Pseudomonas fluorescens and used the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory to create a 3-D X-ray microtomograph to determine microstructure and the effects of interactions with organisms and seawater. Courtesy of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory


Specifically, this latest technology builds on work by researchers in Japan and uses polyethylene fibers coated with amidoxime to pull in and bind uranium dioxide from seawater (see figure above). In seawater, amidoxime attracts and binds uranium dioxide to the surface of the fiber braids, which can be on the order of 15 centimeters in diameter and run multiple meters in length depending on where they are deployed (see figure below).

After a month or so in seawater, the lengths are remotely released to the surface and collected. An acid treatment recovers the uranium in the form of a uranyl complex, regenerating the fibers that can be reused many times. The concentrated uranyl complex then can be enriched to become nuclear fuel.

This procedure, along with the global effort, was described in a special report in Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research. The scientists from PNNL and ORNL led more than half of the 30 papers in the special issue, involving synthesizing and characterizing uranium adsorbents and marine testing of these adsorbents at facilities like PNNL's Marine Sciences Laboratory in Sequim, Washington.


ImageScientists envision anchoring hundreds of lengths of U-extracting fibers in the sea for a month or so until they fill with uranium. Then a wireless signal would release them to float to the surface where the uranium could be recovered and the fibers reused. It doesn’t matter where in the world the fibers are floating. Source: Andy Sproles at ORNL



Gary Gill, deputy director of PNNL's Coastal Sciences Division who coordinated the marine testing, noted, "Understanding how the adsorbents perform under natural seawater conditions is critical to reliably assessing how well the uranium adsorbent materials work." In addition to marine testing, PNNL assessed how well the adsorbent attracted uranium versus other elements, how durable the adsorbent was, how buildup of marine organisms might impact performance, and which adsorbent materials are not toxic.

This marine testing shows that these new fibers had the capacity to hold 6 grams of uranium per kilogram of adsorbent in only about 50 days in natural seawater. A nice video of U extraction from seawater can be seen on the University of Tennessee Knoxville website.

And later this month, July 19 to 22, global experts in uranium extraction from seawater will convene at the University of Maryland-College Park for the First International Conference on Seawater Uranium Recovery.

Stephen Kung, in DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy, says that “Finding alternatives to uranium ore mining is a necessary step in planning for the future of nuclear energy.” And these advances by PNNL and ORNL have reduced the cost by a factor of four in just five years. But it’s still over $200/lb of U3O8, twice as much as it needs to be to replace mining uranium ore.

Fortunately, the cost of uranium is a small percentage of the cost of nuclear fuel, which is itself a small percentage of the cost of nuclear power. Over the last twenty years, uranium spot prices have varied between $10 and $120/lb of U3O8, mainly from changes in the availability of weapons-grade uranium to blend down to make reactor fuel.

So as the cost of extracting U from seawater falls to below $100/lb, it will become a commercially viable alternative to mining new uranium ore. But even at $200/lb of U3O8, it doesn’t add more than a small fraction of a cent per kWh to the cost of nuclear power.

However, the big deal about extracting uranium from seawater is that it makes nuclear power completely renewable.

Uranium is dissolved in seawater at very low concentrations, only about 3 parts per billion (3 micrograms/liter or 0.00000045 ounces per gallon). But there is a lot of ocean water – 300 million cubic miles or about 350 million trillion gallons (350 quintillion gallons, 1,324 quintillion liters). So there’s about 4 billion tons of uranium in the ocean at any one time.

However, seawater concentrations of uranium are controlled by steady-state, or pseudo-equilibrium, chemical reactions between waters and rocks on the Earth, both in the ocean and on land. And those rocks contain 100 trillion tons of uranium. So whenever uranium is extracted from seawater, more is leached from rocks to replace it, to the same concentration. It is impossible for humans to extract enough uranium over the next billion years to lower the overall seawater concentrations of uranium, even if nuclear provided 100% of our energy and our species lasted a billion years.

In other words, uranium in seawater is actually completely renewable. As renewable as solar energy. Yes, uranium in the crust is, strictly speaking, finite. But so is the Sun, which will eventually burn out. But that won’t begin to happen for another 5 billion years. Even the wind on Earth will stop at about that time as our atmosphere boils off during the Sun’s initial death throes as a Red Giant.

According to Professor Jason Donev from the University of Calgary, “Renewable literally means 'to make new again'. Any resource that naturally replenishes with time, like the creation of wind or the growth of biological organisms for biomass or biofuels, is certainly renewable. Renewable energy means that the energy humans extract from nature will generally replace itself. And now uranium as fuel meets this definition.”

So by any definition, solar, wind, hydro and nuclear are all renewable. It’s about time society recognized this and added nuclear to the renewable portfolio.


https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca ... d79982159a

Interesting...not that Uranium supply was ever the limiting factor in our use of fission but noteworthy just the same. And of course there are people working on Thorium fission. Thorium I believe is several times more abundant than Uranium.

cc
Posts: 19
Joined: Thu Jul 22, 2010 4:26 am

Re: Fission news(I know blasphemy )

Post by cc »

Tom Ligon wrote:In our neck of the woods, we have an abundance of gas from fracking. The most recent powerplant to be built in our area is natural gas fired. This has, if I understand it, a mix of steam and gas turbines. The gas turbines are like turboprop engines ... can throttle up our down quickly.

Compare this to nukes, with reactor periods of half a day or more. These typically just run steady to supply base load. But we're getting more and more wind turbines on line here. In South Carolina, I've recently noticed a proliferation of old agricultural fields covered with PV panels. Nuclear is not a good balance for these. Natural gas is. I suspect the economics of fission plants, already not great, are not being helped by the load-management hurdles the renewable part of generation are creating.
This is only true of solid-fueled reactors which trap Xe-135. Molten salt reactors can be very responsive, and naturally follow load. (at least when coupled to a brayton cycle turbine, where sCO2 would be ideal.) Some designs call for a molten salt buffer to handle variations in demand, and this is more practical than battery storage. The artificially inflated cost of fission today can be addressed more easily than repealing the laws of physics, which is essentially what renewable advocates are demanding.

Combined cycle natural gas plants (those with a coupled steam cycle) can be ~60% efficient, but the open cycle peaking plants used to follow intermittent renewables are only half as efficient. With low capacity factors, gas complementing renewables may emit more than efficient gas plants alone. In addition to the overbuild required to compensate, full backup needs to be available and capable of ramping from 0-100% at a moments notice, favoring less efficient plants. The true cost will become apparent as exports equalize gas pricing and supplies dwindle. Also, expect the usual shortages and volatile pricing, because pipelines are expensive and storage is difficult.

The renewable and gas lobby are essentially the same thing, which is why efforts to greenwash gas and kill nuclear have been so well funded and effective. The one upside is that Allam cycle gas turbines may make carbon capture economical, but it also comes with the downside that the captured CO2 is likely to be used for enhanced oil recovery. Fossil still wins the day, intermittent renewables increase fossil profits, and people are left with increased bills for useless green ornaments.

RERT
Posts: 271
Joined: Mon Jun 02, 2014 9:10 pm

Re: Fission news(I know blasphemy )

Post by RERT »

Had to share this smile: looking for something to read this morning, I typed 'thorium salt reactors' into Bing. Second result was:

Thorium Reactors 70% Off
Lowest Price On Thorium Reactors. Free shipping, in stock. Buy now!

Wow. That certainly snuck up on me...

Giorgio
Posts: 3061
Joined: Wed Oct 07, 2009 6:15 pm
Location: China, Italy

Re: Fission news(I know blasphemy )

Post by Giorgio »

RERT wrote:
Fri Jul 10, 2020 9:25 am
Had to share this smile: looking for something to read this morning, I typed 'thorium salt reactors' into Bing. Second result was:
Yesterday I found and watched a new presentation in Bali for Thorcon, worth watching if you have free time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB1IrzDDI9g
Thorium Reactors 70% Off
Lowest Price On Thorium Reactors. Free shipping, in stock. Buy now!
Please do an "unboxing" video once you get it! :mrgreen:
A society of dogmas is a dead society.

RERT
Posts: 271
Joined: Mon Jun 02, 2014 9:10 pm

Re: Fission news(I know blasphemy )

Post by RERT »

I will fo an ‘unboxing’ video for every thorium salt reactor i get through the post...

paperburn1
Posts: 2484
Joined: Fri Jun 19, 2009 5:53 am
Location: Third rock from the sun.

Re: Fission news(I know blasphemy )

Post by paperburn1 »

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-govern ... 00939.html

Then there is this,
(I have been out of touch for a while so if it is old news , please be kind)
I am not a nuclear physicist, but play one on the internet.

Post Reply