[HN Gopher] How the first fourth-generation nuclear power plant ...
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How the first fourth-generation nuclear power plant works
Author : chris222
Score : 68 points
Date : 2024-01-07 17:50 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.cgtn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.cgtn.com)
| hunglee2 wrote:
| Exciting to see this - so many advantages to pebble bed nuclear
| reactors including inherent safety (no risk of meltdown), use of
| helium coolant, ease of waste recycling disposal and continuous
| refuelling by simply adding more pebbles to the hopper.
|
| Illinois Energy Prof has an excellent YT channel on energy, and
| has a great talk on IV gen reactor design. Saw it 4 years ago, so
| pumped to see some of the ideas he was talking about get plugged
| into the grid
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mJ3S-VQuHY&t=490s for those who
| want to know more
| pstuart wrote:
| If this helps China ween itself from coal faster then it's a
| huge win for the entire planet.
|
| I know there's a lot of hate for nuclear (much of it
| understandable), but if we hadn't fucked it up in the 70's then
| climate change would not be a thing right now.
|
| Yes, renewables and energy storage are good things too but the
| modern world is built on cheap energy and the more the merrier.
|
| Side note: I became enamored with LFTR when it started getting
| promoted back in the day and I still think that too would be
| worth tackling.
| Krasnol wrote:
| > Yes, renewables and energy storage are good things too but
| the modern world is built on cheap energy and the more the
| merrier.
|
| Yes, this is also why China invests more into renewables than
| in nuclear: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-
| in-china-tre...
| melling wrote:
| China installed more renewable energy in 2023 than the United
| States has installed in its entire history.
| pstuart wrote:
| Yes, and that's great. But coal is still king and the enemy
| of coal is our friend:
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-
| sou...
|
| It shouldn't be an either or equation. It should be yes,
| and.
| melling wrote:
| Yes, globally we are using more coal now than ever.
|
| And fossil fuel usage is still increasing.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/world-oil-gas-
| coal-d...
| jansan wrote:
| You know, if parts of your country are as south as the
| Sahara desert, it just makes a lot of sense to install
| solar. Just like solar makes a lot more sense in the US
| than in Germany, which is more to the north than all parts
| of the US except Alaska and the most northern parts of
| WA/MT/ND/MN.
| pstuart wrote:
| I am as pro-solar as can be, and am thrilled by the
| decreased costs and increased installation.
|
| I think every building where possible should have solar
| on it. Carports, agrivoltaics, etc. It's a no-brainer in
| addressing climate change, reducing energy costs, and
| more self-sufficiency.
|
| But not all the world has such solar profiles and there
| are also (addressable) issues with solar (storage, grid
| integration). This isn't a "pick one" problem. It's about
| feeding an energy hungry planet without cooking it, and
| _every_ non carbon source should be embraced.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| The problem with this logic is that solar + storage is
| still cheaper than nuclear.
| jupp0r wrote:
| I don't think that's generally true, especially if you
| build nuclear as cost effectively as China does.
| osigurdson wrote:
| It is also building more coal plants than anyone else.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-
| building-...
| gtvwill wrote:
| Human health cost of global warming isn't exactly cheap.
| Delayed costs are still costs. It's just my generation and my
| kids who have to pay while my parents generation reaped the
| rewards and profits up front.
|
| I, like many of my peers feel like we are being grifted by
| the boomer generation.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| You're also reaping the advantages produced by the boomer
| generation in technology, medicine etc. to which they
| themselves did not have access (or had, but much later in
| life).
|
| In any case, it's disappointing to see how people are so
| quick to jump at any opportunity to stereotype and hate a
| group of people, this time not identified by their skin,
| but their date of birth...
| gtvwill wrote:
| Um lol? We're trajectory towards looking at hundreds of
| millions, potentially billions being displaced from their
| homes and starving and dieing. But oi they should be
| happy because they can post a selfie of it on insta and
| pop a panadol for their pains?
|
| This is an absurd excuse to try and write off their
| wrongs. Not even a remotely close tradeoff.
| fastball wrote:
| Honestly the hate for nuclear isn't understandable at all.
|
| It has killed very few people, expense isn't a reason for
| hate, and everything else has pretty much been a win (land
| usage minimal, minimal byproducts, etc).
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Fusion power research in the EU is going to cost something
| like 100B euro for ITER + DEMO. No useful amount of power
| production is planned for decades.
|
| Meanwhile, that money could have purchased solar + wind
| that would provide something like a third or even half of
| Europe's electricity needs! That's not even factoring in
| ongoing cost reductions over those same decades.
|
| Fission has the same problem: it's expensive power in the
| distant future versus cheap power available now.
| jupp0r wrote:
| Fusion power research is research. It's not meant to
| produce electricity but knowledge.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| It is meant to procure electricity. That's the entire
| point. The _stated purpose_ of ITER+DEMO is to develop
| new power generation technologies!
| jliptzin wrote:
| Are we foregoing solar+wind in Europe because that money
| was diverted to fusion research or is it due to other
| reasons?
| holoduke wrote:
| Luckily we have people looking into the future and invest
| in things that bring us new tech.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Yes, we're all very lucky China is investing in solar
| power instead of blowing taxpayer money on science
| fiction.
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| "Land use minimal" seems often to exclude the exclusion
| zones in Chernobyl and Fukushima. Which isn't nothing.
|
| Chernobyl 4000 km2/1600 sq mile, Fukushima 800 km2/300 sq
| mile.
|
| https://www.britannica.com/story/nuclear-exclusion-zones
| locopati wrote:
| for me it's distrust of private companies to take public
| safety seriously even with regulatory oversight. the costs
| of failure are bigger with nuclear.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| China is also building enough renewable power than their grid
| expansion rate leading to a structural decline in CO2
| emissions [1]. At the same time the utilization factors of
| the coal plants reduce each year.
|
| This is driven purely by economic factors, for the first time
| since the discovery of fossil fuels, except the blip where we
| dammed up pretty much every single river globally to provide
| hydropower, we have in renewables have found a new cheaper
| energy source.
|
| Renewables _are_ cheap energy.
|
| [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-
| carb...
| MostlyStable wrote:
| How does it's cost to install and operate compare to gen
| 3/other nuclear tech? Safety is great, but nuclear is already
| safe enough (in the sense that, installing current and even
| last gen nuclear saves more lives through fossil fuel
| displacement than it can plausibly kill even in worst case
| disaster scenarios). Continuing to make nuclear safer, if it
| results in higher costs (and therefore reduced installs) is a
| bad tradeoff and has been for close to 50 years.
| chasil wrote:
| It is said that most reactors in the U.S. only use 2% of the
| available power within the fuel, and the best designs top out
| at 30%.
|
| How is the fuel efficiency for this design?
|
| Walk-away safe is a major benefit, and is worth some
| sacrifice of efficiency.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| Is the uncaptured power completely gone during processing
| or does it remain embedded in the "nuclear waste"? It is
| not hard to imagine a future in which that waste gets mined
| to be put in a new reactor when the political/economic
| winds change.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Nice to see one in operation. Anyone know if they move the LCOE
| needle?
|
| For reference, traditional nuclear is 4-6x as expensive as
| wind/solar, and wind/solar are still dropping. For baseload the
| gas turbine still beats the pants off of nuclear.
|
| I think nuclear needs to get to 2-3x unsubsidized to be
| relevant long-term, but that's a long road.
| huytersd wrote:
| Why is helium coolant good? Because it will just evaporate
| instead of poisoning waterbodies?
| petre wrote:
| It escapes into space and that's the main problem with it.
| But it doesn't create steam explosions and hydrogen buildup
| under ionizing radiation (also explosive). My main gripes
| with pebble bed reactors is not helium, but pebbles cracking,
| graphite fires and complications with fuel reprocessing.
| Helium just ads another layer of complications because it's
| quite scarce and easily lost. Also the installed capacity of
| this reactor is quite underwhelming. But it's nice that the
| Chinese have built it and are testing and advancing the
| technology developed in Germany during the '80s.
| bogeholm wrote:
| A couple of points I can think of, 1) the Helium nucleus is
| exceedingly stable so the coolant won't get radioactive from
| neutron activation, 2) the coolant being chemically inactive
| means you can use run the reactor at higher temperatures,
| thus achieving higher efficiency if you use the heat to run a
| heat engine (steam turbine).
| vipa123 wrote:
| I am not an expert at this, but if I had to guess I would
| agree with your answer. Helium, even neutron enriched
| radioactive helium -if there is such a thing-, will evaporate
| into the air instantly, it will also rise to highest location
| being lighter than essentially every other atmospheric gas.
| This make it easy collect, contain, or cleanse, if performed.
| It will also rise above the atmosphere and get blown away by
| the solar winds should it escape the building. Additionally,
| helium is inert so it will not form other chemical compounds
| that will stay around, or enter the human body. Also because
| it is inert your body will not generally absorb it, certainly
| not like it would tritium water. Also comparing to water,
| helium will not dissolve other chemicals, radioactive or not,
| into it like water does. One last thing is the cooling
| potential of liquid helium is immense, being able to absorb
| massive amounts of heat during evaporation. Assuming they
| want to use a helium refrigeration cycle.
|
| Fingers crossed I got some of this right...
| bjoli wrote:
| One of the reasons for the HGT-reactors is the extremely high
| temperature. Helium is a lot better than water for things
| like that. The extra high heat means you can have a higher
| efficiency while having more heat left for industrial
| processes.
| SnorkelTan wrote:
| Article text covered by obnoxious banner in firefox. Anyone got a
| link to the text?
| Krasnol wrote:
| Just clear and update your ublock cache.
|
| No banners here on FF.
| p1mrx wrote:
| China's HTR-PM (the topic of this article) is similar to the
| Xe-100 that X-energy is planning to build in Texas:
|
| https://x-energy.com/seadrift
|
| But they've yet to apply for NRC approval, so who knows if
| that'll actually happen.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| China has also started experimenting building commercial molten
| salt reactors so it'll be interesting what the fourth generation
| power plant shootout will look like.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Glad they got a high temperature gas cooled reactor up and
| running!
|
| I do dislike the terminology/categorization around 'fourth
| generation'. The first ever proposed commercial reactor (the
| Daniels Pile) was a pebble bed gas cooled reactor concept, worked
| on at Oak Ridge in the 1940s. We've built lots of gas-cooled
| reactors in the past, including helium cooled ones. Such as:
|
| * Peach Bottom
|
| * Fort St. Vrain
|
| * HTTR
|
| * Dragon
|
| * HTR-10
|
| * AVR pebble bed
|
| * THTR-300
|
| * Ultra-High Temperature Reactor Experiment (UHTREX)
|
| Nitrogen-cooled ones, such as ML-1 and GCRE
|
| CO2-cooled ones, like EL4, Lucens, AGR, Magnox
|
| Air-cooled ones like HTRE
|
| Liquid-hydrogen cooled ones like NERVA
|
| It's kinda dumb to call this the first 4-th gen reactor.
| jansan wrote:
| > I do dislike the 'fourth generation' category in nuclear.
|
| Do you mean the term or the actual reactor technology?
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| I mean the term/categorization. I'll clarify in an edit,
| thanks.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Nitrogen cooled reactors produce copious amounts of 14C, unless
| you use isotopically purified 15N, which is quite expensive.
| Ditto for air cooled reactors.
| jansan wrote:
| Reading this as a German feels really bitter. Our government has
| cancelled ALL research into nuclear reactors. We are completely
| out of the race, and there is probably no way back.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| You guys had some really nice reactors too. Not just the ones
| recently shut down, but gas-cooled ones as well (THTR-300), and
| the infamous sodium-cooled one SNR-300, which got cancelled by
| protests after it was 100% completed and fueled but before it
| ever turned on. It's now an amusement park :( :(
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| Would be really interesting to see where the anti-nuclear
| sentiment in germany formented from
| nukeman wrote:
| 1. Being on the front lines of the Cold War, in the event
| of a hot war, most nuclear weapons would be used in West
| Germany. (Yes, weapons aren't power plants, but they can be
| hard to separate in popular discourse.)
|
| 2. Plans to build a nuclear power plant at Wyhl were
| opposed by locals, who occupied the site, and were
| forcefully removed by police. This was broadcast on
| television and helped galvanize the anti-nuclear movement.
|
| 3. The Chernobyl accident led to fallout being deposited on
| German soil, which furthered opposition, and in my view,
| was the killing blow.
| jansan wrote:
| > The Chernobyl accident led to fallout being deposited
| on German soil, A
|
| That was long after the anti nuclear movement had gained
| full steam, not a reason for it. People in Poland or
| Bulgaria are not nearly that extreme in their thinking,
| even though they got a much bigger dose of the Charnobyl
| fallout.
| nukeman wrote:
| But the severity of Chernobyl definitely fomented anti-
| nuclear sentiment much further than it had been. It
| "showed" that a major radiological release could happen
| in a civilian power plant (nonwithstanding that such
| designs weren't used in Germany). Ultimately the
| formation of the sentiment was a process, of which
| Chernobyl is a core part.
| al_hag wrote:
| Disasters lead to a rethink
|
| [...] the meltdown in Harrisburg in 1979, the Super-Gau in
| Chernobyl in 1986. The answer of the then Union-led federal
| government: Helmut Kohl creates a Ministry for the
| Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety. Also a
| demonstrative sign to the Greens, who first entered the
| Bundestag in 1983, with the clear demand for an immediate
| construction and operation stop to all nuclear power
| plants.
|
| https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/atomausstieg-
| d...
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Yeah... somehow it's hard for humans to compare normal
| operating combustion sources like fossil and biofuel
| killing ~8 million people/yr from air pollution while
| also causing climate change against a few bad reactor
| accidents.
| maxnoe wrote:
| Chernobyl.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| This is probably mostly right. I consider it worth noting
| that each single coal plant operating normally kills more
| people than Chernobyl, even in the high-end estimates,
| roughly every 5 years. I think the psychology of
| radiation is somehow a lot scarier than the psychology of
| particulate air pollution, for some reason.
| jansan wrote:
| That's what I am often wondering about. A large part of
| Germans have developed a completly exaggerated fear of
| nuclear energy, acting almost like cult or if they are in a
| mass delusion.
|
| One example: When I say to some of my friends that I would
| be perfectly fine living near an underground long term
| storage facility for nuclear waste, they do not believe me
| or think I am a moron. They really think that facility
| could either blow up or the radiation will kill you in your
| sleep. And those are doctors, judges and other people with
| higher education. One influential German politician even
| claimed, that the Fukushima incident killed 16000 people,
| simply attributing most of the deaths from the tsunami to
| the Fukushima powerplant. And those people are now in power
| of this country.
|
| I have no idea if this development was controlled by
| interest groups or they spiralled into that mindset
| themselves, which would not even surprise me.
| camgunz wrote:
| Their environmental movement--and many others around the
| world--was against nuclear power. It's easy to forget now
| but fairly or unfairly nuclear came to be seen as a dirty
| energy source after stuff like Chernobyl, Three Mile
| Island, and Fukushima. Even now a lot of hardcore
| environmentalists are completely against any nuclear
| builds, favoring essentially only wind and solar
| (geothermal/hydro here and there but meh).
| hunglee2 wrote:
| there are many theories but I think being front-line for so
| long in any East-West confrontation is the most important
| factor - it was the reason Green / Anti-Nuclear / Pacific
| sentiment was much stronger in Germany than anywhere else
| in Europe. It's fashionable to dunk on Merkel these days
| but when she went against nuclear post-Fukushima it was
| with widespread support from the society.
| al_hag wrote:
| Not the case for fusion https://world-nuclear-
| news.org/Articles/Germany-plans-massiv...
| Krasnol wrote:
| Probably? There surely is no way back. Not only Germany has
| turned they back on nuclear.
|
| Germany has replaced what nuclear has generated years ago and
| is on track to decommission all its coal plants.
|
| No reason to waste money on nuclear anymore.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuclears-share-world...
| pfdietz wrote:
| A significant advantage of a higher temperature reactor would be
| if it could use the same steam turbines used in combined cycle
| plants. These are "dry" turbines that operate with high
| temperature (550 C) steam. In contrast, LWRs use "wet" turbines
| with saturated steam at temperature a couple of hundred degrees
| lower. They're about the only ones still doing so, I think, so
| the turbines are bespoke and do not benefit from the economies of
| scale of the CC steam turbines.
|
| (550 C is the upper temperature limit for cheap steel against
| creep, so I think that choice of temperature is not a
| coincidence. It also makes me dubious of reactor concepts
| operating at higher temperature.)
| brazzy wrote:
| Unfortunately the "how it works" is very shallow, the Wikipedia
| article has a lot more meat:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor
| Firerouge wrote:
| It's still not entirely clear to me how reactor power is
| moderated. If there are control rods or if another method is
| used to control the reaction.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Doesn't China building so many civilian reactors mean they are
| getting more experience and more specialized workforce in nuclear
| energy than anyone else? How can the west compete if most nations
| reject the atom and the ones who don't either have minuscule
| numbers or focus more on military reactors?
| Retric wrote:
| That's only a big deal if nuclear was going to play a major
| role in the future, but the world seems to have decided on PV
| in a big way. The world is adding the equivalent of more than
| 100 nuclear reactors worth of PV solar per year even adjusting
| for differences in capacity factors. (~30% vs ~70-90%)
|
| China gets roughly 5% of it's annual electricity from nuclear,
| 5% from solar and increasing rapidly, 10% from wind, and 15%
| from hydro. It's a token investment in nuclear that only seems
| huge because they produce ~30% of the worlds electricity.
|
| PS: Also, don't forget about the defense industry. We're
| maintaining nuclear expertise even if the civilian industry
| fails.
| ezst wrote:
| > but the world seems to have decided on PV in a big way.
|
| No, the world has decided to procure lots of cheap PV from
| China
| Retric wrote:
| It's a little more complex, ~60% of panels used outside of
| China come from China. Thus current prices are just what it
| costs to manufacture not the result of some subsidy.
|
| Roughly 37% of the worlds supply is by China for China, 38%
| by China for the rest of the world, and 25% is by the rest
| of the world for the rest of the world.
| huytersd wrote:
| It's silly. Next we're going to severely hamstring AI research
| because of some insipid NYT lawsuit and let them run away with
| it too though we did all the research for it.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Better article here:
|
| https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinese-HTR-PM-D...
|
| > "The HTR-PM features two small reactors (each of 250 MWt) that
| drive a single 210 MWe steam turbine. It uses helium as coolant
| and graphite as the moderator. Each reactor is loaded with more
| than 400,000 spherical fuel elements ('pebbles'), each 60 mm in
| diameter and containing 7 g of fuel enriched to 8.5%. Each pebble
| has an outer layer of graphite and contains some 12,000 four-
| layer ceramic-coated fuel particles dispersed in a graphite
| matrix."
|
| Note that Chernobyl was graphite-moderated and water-cooled, but
| hot graphite and steam is a bad combination, tending towards the
| generation of (explosive) hydrogen and carbon monooxide gases
| during loss-of-coolant type accidents. The helium coolant avoids
| this process, and can sustain higher operating temperatures so
| has industrial uses, somewhat ironically in the petrochemical
| sector:
|
| > "The major purpose of HTR-PM is to co-generate high temperature
| steam up to 500 and electricity. It is cost effective currently
| in the Chinese market to supply steam and electricity for the
| petrochemical industry to substitute the burning of natural gas
| and coal."
|
| It seems like a pretty safe design with some unique capabilities,
| although it'd be interesting to see the total cost-per-pellet
| inputs (each 6 cm pellet generates as much power as 1.5 tons of
| coal prior to its retirement, but manufacturing each pellet is
| probably not that cheap).
| ziofill wrote:
| > The operating reactors are cooled by the inert gas helium
| instead of water.
|
| Is this going to hit a wall when scaling up? Helium is
| notoriously scarcer lately
| https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/helium-shortage-4-0-wh...
| einpoklum wrote:
| Shell script wrapper invoking a third-generation nuclear power
| plant?
|
| Ah, no, it's a physicists' project, so maybe a fortran90 program
| invoking a fortran77 program? Am I close?
| euroderf wrote:
| As I've understood it, the main risk of running a PBMR is that
| putting out a graphite fire is somewhere between very difficult
| and impossible. Does this particular design somehow address this
| ?
| Firerouge wrote:
| While I'm not certain about this system, it sounds like the
| fuel pellets they've designed for it have no graphite in them.
| It sounds like they've gone for an intrinsically safe design
| where the maximum safe temperature of the fuel composites is
| higher than the maximum temperate an uncontrolled reaction
| could reach.
| huytersd wrote:
| So it sounds like all new things (that aren't an idea or
| software) will come from China moving forward. I hate this but
| it's interesting in a way to see how far they will get. The US
| supercharged the world for generations but now seems to have
| directed all its attention to feminizing its men. I wonder how
| far the Chinese can take it. Settlement on the moon? Mars?
| Generational ships headed out of the solar system? Anything seems
| possible with the mostly benevolent dictatorship they have going
| on over there.
| knlje wrote:
| According to this summary, Germany has lots of remaining problems
| with its prototype pebble bed reactors:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20170329044120/http://nuris.org/...
| mvac wrote:
| Thiel was right (9y ago) with the west being leader in innovation
| in the world of bits, but not in the world of atoms.
| DarkNova6 wrote:
| This reads more as a puff piece than an informative article.
| Hardly surprised coming from the "China Global Television
| Network". It just reads like "Everything going great, look no
| further".
|
| And for somebody who has been following the development of 4th
| generation reactors, this one is rather non-exciting. Yes it uses
| a pebble-bed and higher temperature (hence VHTR), it's overall
| improvements are rather diminishing compared to Gen 3 designs.
| The meager output of 150m isn't exactly thrilling and the
| possibility for hydrogen production remains unused as well.
|
| I don't want to be purely cynical. Every incremental advance is a
| form progression and can advance the status-quo as we know. But
| the most promising space is clearly happening in the Fast Reactor
| space, just maybe not the SFR, this is a nuclear disaster waiting
| to happen.
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