Unfortunately I can’t find the link right now, but I had previously read somewhere that most of the FBRs to date (including the Russian BN600) were usually run on U235 (I believe slightly less refined than required for a PWR), with other fuels used only on an occasional experimental basis.

So still, as far as I’m aware, FBRs are very much an expensive experiment with a very limited degree of success and viability. The existence of new research projects in the field doesn’t appear to show otherwise, yet.

I’m sure it is possible to get their design right so that they don’t pose a huge threat to the surrounding area. However, whether I trust anybody (company, government or even an autonomous group of entirely un-profit-motivated altruists) to actually do this is another question entirely!

So perhaps with the exception of the Superphenix (which I’m going to look into more, and will do so with an open mind forgiving it’s teething troubles), I still get the impression from what you’ve posted that FBRs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

Also, when you said:

There were problems with FBRs as they were a relatively new technology. These were not safety issues.

So you don’t consider a major coolant fire (Monju) or coolant corrosion and leaks (Superphenix) to be safety issues? Not even when that coolant violently reacts with both air and water?

It seems to me that surrounding a high density reactor core with a volatile liquid sodium coolant isn’t a particularly good idea! Back to the drawing board on that one, I reckon…

I believe that the largest FBR was the French Superphenix, which closed in 1997. It was rated at 1.1Gw, which is slightly less than Sizewell B. In fairness, Superphenix met a lot of opposition and, as a ‘first in class’, had teething problems. Information from the IAEA on Superphenix is here. In answer to your questions about being proven safe on a large scale, this does a reasonable job.

Russia currently operates the BN600, producing 500MW. Monju, in Japan, is being started again and was rated at 280MW.

There were problems with FBRs as they were a relatively new technology. These were not safety issues. There weren’t the same pressures on oil in the seventies and eighties to drive nuclear research; now that those are there, things are moving forward.

The US, France and Japan are collaborating on a new generation of reactors – http://www.energy.gov/news/3218.htm

India is researching a reactor called AHWR which will use thorium as its main fuel; India has lots of thorium!

(whenever I mention a power rating, I mean watts electric, not watts thermal)

xD.

Uranium occurs naturally as 99.284% 238U is not fissile, it is fertile and can be transmuted to 239Pu or can be mixed with high-grade waste to form a fuel that can be used in reactors.

Interesting. Do any such reactors exist? What type of reactors are they? Are they proven enough that they could be safely used on a larger scale?

As far as I’m currently aware, any of the reactors that can use U238 as a fertile fuel (eg. fast breeders and so on) have suffered major safety issues and other technical problems which have made them basically unusable.

I really am interested to know more, so if you have links I could look at, that would be great. Thanks!

Whilst I’d be the first to agree with you that we ought to do something, anything, even, to free ourselves from carbon dioxide emmitters, you have slightly less faith in renewables than I do.

One single project, the Severn Tidal Power Proposal has the potential to generate 5% of the UKs’ energy needs on it’s own. Which is, at least, a start.

I’d like to see that fast tracked.

See here:

http://tinyurl.com/4gh82q

Of course its even more frightening when you consider that the American public is completely unserious about global warming (although surprisingly both mccain and obama have dealt quite a lot with this issue)and the biggest developing economies don’t even have any targets.

may as well ask China to pay for the nuclear power plants now.

(or just take over the world, while they’re at it. seeing as so much of everyone’s debts are pretty much to them.)

On the energy front what frustrates me most about this particular policy is that this is no policy at all as it does not really address the issue

Nuclear power has its supporters and detractors – and each side has its compelling arguments. Choosing one over the other would leave many bitterly disappointed and rightly so.

But whats the point of having this debate in the UK? This debate is only appropriate when the Government is seriously attempting to address this issue.

The attempts to claim this has been a bold and strategic decision falls flat when it is clear that nuclear power would be contributing less than 20% of our energy needs. And that is sometime after 2017. The Government has admitted so itself.

We are going to be nowhere near meeting the EU pledge of having 15% of our energy needs through renewable sources. We will fail, again by the Government’s own admission, quite miserably.

So, in effect, Government policy would ensure that in 2020 less than 35% of our energy needs would be met through renewable and nuclear energy.

That does not reflect much vision or strategy in addressing the energy issue. It reeks of political rhetoric and very little substance — something the Prime Minister always chides David Cameron for.

We will continue to use fossil fuel as, by far, the most dominant part of our energy mix well into the 2020s. If we are serious about changing the nature of our energy mix then we need to do far better than that.

We could be for nuclear and renewable energy — but less than 35% in 20 years time. An inspiring strategic policy direction to change our energy future. Yeah right.

Interesting pieces. I must confess I don’t know that much about this whole debate. Thanks for the links.

Dave S:

Well done.

wow. how can the least worst consumer option and the most poisonous technological option which places a foreing organisation in a powerful energy position be ‘excellent news’.

do you have any values at all?

dont worry, your progeny (if you are able to in your nuclear reality) will be cave dwelling hippies.

I don’t think I’ve argued much in my posts – except to say nuke waste leaking is damaging people and produced children with deformity in a remote pacific island which the world has pretty much forgotten . Seems it’s perferctly reasonable to point this out in a post that actually talked about the Pacific Island tests in the 50s.

“That’s a bit like saying we should ban the mining of lead in car batteries because Iran might use it for batteries.”

I think you missed my sarcasm – you pointed out like a nursary school teacher:

“… Nuclear power stations are not nuclear weapons.”

I was joking when I said tell this to Iran.

That’s a bit like saying we should ban the mining of lead in car batteries because Iran might use it for batteries.

The links you give refer to Operation Crossroads. The waste stored there is a result of irradiation from those tests. The fact that the storage isn’t up to scratch is a different issue. I’d say that the US should do something about it, but that’s not to say we shouldn’t go for nuclear at all, particularly as the alternative is continuing to pump out carbon.

xD.

If only the world would listen to Iran..

I gave you a good example of a current example of nuclear waste in the world – sorta related to the section on the threat that refered to..er…

What to do with Nuclear Waste?

Lovelock also makes the same mistake link when he talks about .. among other things the Pacific Island in that conclusion section…though i disagree with this arguments.

“One of the striking things about places heavily contaminated by radioactive nuclides is the richness of their wildlife. This is true of the land around Chernobyl, the bomb test sites of the Pacific, and areas near the United States’ Savannah River nuclear weapons plant of the Second World War. Wild plants and animals do not perceive radiation as dangerous, and any slight reduction..”

I gave the most live example of empirical evidence on nulcear waste in the Pacific today. The people living in bikini islands are suffering from deformity as a result of eating vegetation and plant affected by radiation in the soil.

The papers you cite refer to detonating nuclear weapons. Nuclear power stations are not nuclear weapons.

Arif,

Unpolluting, yes. However, given that the technology is not yet mature, we have to choose between the options available. I don’t know enough about grid decentralisation, but it has its own problems; it would effectively prohibit large-scale wind farms, such as has been proposed for the channel, as, from the point of view of the grid, these function as individual power stations.

In any case, nuclear power generation is better characterised as a batch process rather than a flow process, quite apart from the smaller volumes needed.

xD.

- decentralised
- unpolluting
- based on resources which are relatively equally spread or mixed between a wide variety of resources so nothing is so valuable you’d fight each other for it

So from that perspective, nuclear is at least similar to oil and coal – a bit more centralised, polluting in different ways, based on resources which people are willing to fight over.

The only think in its particular favour may be that it is something to use in a small scale where very necessary, but as a massive global industry, it might just make uranium and other resources our next sources of violence, pollution and centralisation of power.

http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/workshop_IPPE_Tagicakibau.doc

The journalist on this link is one of the few journalists who has made it out to this remote, remote atoll since the US blasted them in the 1950s. The report states that the waste on the bikini islands is still nuclear active and leaking – raising the spectre that the islanders may be living on top of a huge radio active dustbin, and a disaster is waiting to happen.

http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2339403.htm

A few other points

Nuclear waste
This is a giant canard. We already have a lot of nuclear waste. Even if we shut down every existing reactor and never build another, the nuclear waste we already have will not go away. Figures from CoRWM suggest that a new generation of nuclear plants in Britain would increase the volume of nuclear waste by about 10%; granted, most of that increase would be high-level waste, but there’s HLW out there that we have to deal with anyway.

Availability of nuclear fuel
Dave S – I’m afraid you’re flat wrong. Uranium occurs naturally as 99.284% 238U is not fissile, it is fertile and can be transmuted to 239Pu or can be mixed with high-grade waste to form a fuel that can be used in reactors. Extraction of nuclear isotopes from seawater has been established as a viable concept. Estimates for the amount of nuclear fuel we have left from ten thousand to billions of years (http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen.html and http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/ENF_Exploration_drives_uranium_resources_up_17_0206082.html).

Your comment about the earth not being able to sustain our lifestyles is half accurate. It cannot sustain this many people with these lifestyles. If you know of a way to convince people to stop reproducing, commit mass suicide or drastically reduce their standard of living, I’d be interested to hear it. Until such time, we’re going to have to do what we can to keep ourselves going and nuclear, given that the emission of carbon gases is The Big Problem, looks like part of the answer.

Safety
Things have improved over the years. Comparing new nuclear power in the UK to Chernobyl is, I think, unfair. For one thing, most modern reactors are built so that you have to do things to keep them going and if you don’t do them, they stop running. Chernobyl, aside from being badly maintained, was quite the opposite, requiring constant operation to keep it from destroying itself.

Renewables
The big problem with most renewables is that their power production is not constant. Windmills don’t generate when it’s not windy, solar panels don’t generate when it’s not sunny. The issue is slightly different with tidal power, as tides are predictable but not constant. Part of the implementation of large-scale renewable power generation will involve better storage of energy. As we all know, you can’t store electricity but you can store power. A good example is Electric Mountain in Wales, which stores water in an upper reservoir, discharging it through turbines into a lower lake when it needs to produce electricity (at peak times) and pumping it back up (at around 80% efficiency) during the night when there is a surplus of electricity, dropping the price. Another option would be to use electricity from renewable sources to generate hydrogen, which could then be burnt for electricity, stored or even used in cars and the like.

Renewable energy generation is a mature technology, but the means to fully use it is, IMHO, not.

xD.