[HN Gopher] Accident-tolerant fuels could boost the performance ...
___________________________________________________________________
Accident-tolerant fuels could boost the performance of today's
reactors
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 54 points
Date : 2022-07-27 14:55 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.energy.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.energy.gov)
| epistasis wrote:
| > The mid-2020s will be a critical time for the nation's fleet of
| reactors.
|
| > Many of them have 60-year operating licenses that will expire
| in the 2030s. Getting these new fuels to market before then would
| increase the performance of these reactors and ultimately improve
| their chances of applying for extended operation with the NRC.
|
| Going beyond 60 years is quite breath taking. There are so many
| components in these massively complex beasts that would need to
| be inspected and replaced, since this is far far beyond their
| design life times.
|
| For example, at Davis-Bessie there was an acidic leak dripping
| onto a reactor head for years, resulting in more than 6 inches of
| corrosion into the reactor head, leaving only 3/8 of an inch to
| hole back all that pressure. Despite warning signs of lots of
| rust in the air filters, they didn't find it until that late
| stage. This was 20 years ago:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis-Besse_Nuclear_Power_St...
|
| What sort of other unexpected issues can crop up? We need these
| nuclear reactors to run as long as possible. And those in the
| reactor construction industry tell me that there will never be
| replacements like them. If we do figure out how to build nuclear
| again, it's going to be small. And that won't scale until at a
| bare minimum of the late 2030s.
|
| So this seems like a good effort, but without some heroic
| efforts, there will be a period where we go from ~100GW of
| nuclear in the US to just a handful of GW.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Some countries are in the habit.
|
| The Russians are building VVERs (their name for the LWR) in
| many countries, they just signed a deal to build 4 in Egypt.
| For that matter the Russians have a fast breeder running too,
| they are not so scared of Sodium fires they just put them out.
| (Which is what The DoE in the US says they did when they ran
| SFRs.)
|
| China is also building LWRs at a high rate.
|
| Two AP1000s are in the final stages of commissioning now in
| Georgia, a similar project was abandoned in South Carolina.
| Those projects were delayed because they were waiting for the
| first AP1000 to be completed in Zhejiang, China which was
| waiting for a Chinese factory to make parts.
|
| There are no forges in the US large enough to make LWR parts
| but they do have them in China, Japan, Russia and France and
| these are planned in Czecha, India and the UK.
|
| Some reactor types like the HTGR are lower power density than
| the LWR but others, particularly fast reactors, are higher
| density and could be physically smaller for the same power
| output.
|
| Back when people thought fast reactors were inevitable they
| believed the capital cost of fast reactors would be inevitably
| higher than the LWR but now some people think a sodium cooled
| fast reactor could be cheaper if it was coupled to a gas
| turbine power set which is a fraction the size of a steam
| turbine never mind the size and cost of associated heat
| exchangers. Moltex particularly believes they can build a (salt
| cooled and salt fueled) reactor for much less than an LWR.
| cosmotic wrote:
| Oh my, quite the rabbit hole of corruption surrounding that
| plant.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| I hope we get off our asses and replace them with either more
| nuclear sources or renewables (if practical).
|
| I am really disheartened by the trend of politicians and
| environmental orgs shutting down nuclear plants with the public
| justification being to replace them with renewables and then
| just building natural gas turbines instead (looking at you
| California).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Any migration into (non-hydro) renewables will bring more
| water or gas turbines at the short term.
|
| At the long term those will be gone, probably replaced by
| batteries (or just fed with synfuel). But right now they are
| the other side of the renewables coin.
| StillBored wrote:
| "At the long term those will be gone, probably replaced by
| batteries (or just fed with synfuel)"
|
| AFAIK, that is a huge leap of faith, nevermind the
| overbuild requirements to supply it.
|
| Do you have any actual data/estimates to back up that
| theory?
|
| Bonus points for including the energy required to supply
| transportation needs, and energy growth estimates over say
| the next couple decades.
|
| Because, I've read a crapton of literature on this stuff
| (and I have a family connection to the TX energy system)
| and I simply can't see how any of this is going to actually
| work if 1: The costs don't balloon over carbon sources, 2:
| The grid maintains a reasonable level of reliability, 3: we
| can maintain the rare earth mines/production/etc needed to
| get us even to 100% over the next couple decades without
| accounting for demand growth.
|
| AFAIK: The only workable solution for providing a couple
| TW's of power realistically in the next decade is Nukes,
| everything else depends on some "breakthrough" that hasn't
| happened yet.
|
| Edit: If you take hydro out of the picture, the current
| status of wind/solar is really poor, and its only going to
| get worse when you have to build 6-8x as many wind turbines
| or 3-4x as many solar farms just to provide enough average
| energy to meet todays demands, and with that will come cost
| multiplication as well. Its easy to build 30% renewable,
| but every overbuild multiplier is just going to multiply
| the cost. Then you have to figure out how to store it.
|
| edit: edit: Here look at this:
| https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-
| ener...
|
| That is a projection of where the US will be in 30 years,
| and nothing really suggests to me that they are wrong. The
| only thing I think that will change that is a 1970's French
| like pivot which clears the red tape, and has an explicit
| goal of building the ~150 reactors in the US needs to
| remove most of that carbon. And then start handing it out
| like candy to other countries because we have standardized
| the design enough, and built enough of them to return it to
| 1960's levels of cost (aka cheaper than natural gas).
|
| My actual bet at this point is the Chinese do it, and
| replace the US as a worldwide leader in energy production.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-27 23:01 UTC)