The Nuclear Power Thread

[bhobba]

we need to find a couple of engineers who could yell some sense into energy politics, maybe then we could balance our carbon emissions with carbon free sources so much so that we can buy ourselves time and have a rather decent living too.

Just a couple? This is getting more into politics than I, as a mentor, am comfortable with, but will try and stay clear of politics. We need an informed public conversation on the whole issue. We can help here by giving the facts. There are some experts in this area that regularly post here. On other forums, if it doesn't degenerate into the use of the Ad Hominem fallacy, I point those who want the facts to this forum. I know the cost of electricity here in Australia is rising enormously. There are multiple reasons, but regardless of the cause, there will likely be some public backlash - we will see. I have seen discussion shows, the premier one here in Australia, called Q&A, where they occasionally have an engineer and other participants' claims get challenged on engineering grounds. We need more of that, IMHO. Also, the public must understand you can't have it all. Public polling has now been done that confirms people want something done on climate change but are only willing to pay a pittance (I could give the link, but contains stuff that I would judge as political - suffice to say it is from a well-respected news outlet the Australian ABC):

'More than 54,000 Australians took part in the nationally representative Australia Talks National Survey, and climate change was one thing they said was keeping them up at night. When we asked how much more they’d be personally willing to spend to help prevent climate change, the numbers varied. Some people wouldn’t spend anything more (21 per cent), and some were happy to spend thousands (9 per cent) — but most of us sit somewhere in the middle. On average, we’re willing to chip in at least $200 each year*.'

The plans of the current government will cost MUCH more than that. Interesting times ahead are all I can say.

Thanks
Bill

 

[Astronuc]

Bloomberg - How to Tear Down a Nuclear Power Plant in Vermont and Bury It in Texas
https://news.yahoo.com/tear-down-nuclear-power-plant-110007719.html

The Vermont Yankee power plant sits on the bank of a scenic river in Vernon, Vermont, and for more than 40 years, the atoms split in its reactor generated as much as 70% of the state’s electricity. But then natural gas prices undercut the plant’s electricity and local anti-nuclear protesters worried about safety marched with signs that read “Hell no, we won’t glow.” Entergy Corp., the big Louisiana-based power company that owned Vermont Yankee, shut the plant down in 2014. It then sold the site to NorthStar Group Services Inc., which is now responsible for the decommissioning.

Decommissioning the plant, which NorthStar estimates will cost about $600 million, is being paid for by a massive trust fund that the plant’s customers contributed to when the plant was generating electricity.

Nuclear plants are required to set aside a 'decommissioning fund' as well as a fund to store the spent nuclear fuel, since they cannot ship it to a federal repository.

The article brings up the irradiated fuel rods, which are known as "spent fuel" not "fissile material", and they are part of the high level waste (HLW). It's actually the fission products and the transuranic elements (isotopes) from transmuted uranium that are highly radioactive. The reactor vessel (and its internal structure) is either high or medium level was since it has become radiocative from the neutrons that leak out of the reactor core and into the stainless steel and pressure vessel. There are also corrosion products that circulate in the cooling water, which are collected by filters (a separate disposal issue) during operation, but also at the end of operation where the cooling system is flushed to remove remaining corrosion products.

 

[russ_watters]

For example, a simple analysis of the current Australian government policies showed what they want to do would cost trillions - way beyond what we can afford, plus multiple wind farms the size of Tasmania in the Simpson desert. This is just early stages in the debate, but I don't think governments should be saying what they will be doing (e.g. relying mostly on wind and solar but dismissing nuclear) at this point. All that will happen is when the rubber hits the road, they will have eggs on their faces. We don't discuss politics here, but one would think such would not be good for their re-election prospects.

I was with you until the end. Solar and wind are sexy and nuclear is not, so supporting solar and wind is how you get votes. And who cares how much it costs when you're buying votes with other peoples' money? Sure, it will fail eventually, but when? Before the next election?

 

[bhobba]

Solar and wind are sexy and nuclear is not, so supporting solar and wind is how you get votes. And who cares how much it costs when you're buying votes with other peoples' money? Sure, it will fail eventually, but when? Before the next election?

Good point. The debate is in the early stages, and it is only recently that nuclear was even in the discussion. Whenever I discussed it elsewhere, I often got ill-informed vitriol. At least that has now stopped.

Thanks
Bill

 

[russ_watters]

Nuclear plants are required to set aside a 'decommissioning fund' as well as a fund to store the spent nuclear fuel, since they cannot ship it to a federal repository...

...which they also paid for but didn't get.

 

[anorlunda]

I was with you until the end. Solar and wind are sexy and nuclear is not, so supporting solar and wind is how you get votes. And who cares how much it costs when you're buying votes with other peoples' money? Sure, it will fail eventually, but when? Before the next election?

I second that. And at the risk of sounding like a broken record, allowing politics to have decision making power over electric supply is a recipe for failure. Such decisions need to be in the hands of engineers.

 

[artis]

I second that. And at the risk of sounding like a broken record, allowing politics to have decision making power over electric supply is a recipe for failure. Such decisions need to be in the hands of engineers.

Exactly. Somehow everybody understands this when it comes to medicine, whether a politician or a climate activist, once your lungs get inflammation or your heart begins to fail you seek the best doctor to buy you the most time and get the highest chance of survival and getting back to normal.

When it comes to energy policy and solving the climate problems , all of a sudden it's like watching a hockey match, everybody suddenly becomes and expert.

Just today I watched a Greta interview, I don't want to talk her down but I really don't get the idea, why is she famous? Has she said anything new or given us a better plan ?
All I see is a arrogant teenager who skipped school and got some rich sponsors.
Basically the corporate world is trying to stay in power by simply switching rhetoric and buying up famous people to lobby on their behalf. Much like the tobacco industry did back in the day to keep smoking popular.

Meanwhile real engineers and real companies have already given us practically all the products actual science can come up with to use for energy production, all we need to do is get smart and sane people to cut out a plan on how much to use of each type of energy source.Basically we have two options, either we shut down and all sit in a silent and dark circle eating nothing but carrots to be carbon neutral or we go back to using nuclear and then balance it with everything else we can get like solar and wind and natural gas etc.
I think eventually people will settle back to nuclear once they realize that trying to power the modern world with just renewables skyrockets the energy prices.

Actually we are seeing this in Europe now, once we cut Russian oil and gas which was cheap, we now have left only our own baseload + renewables, but guess what, their not enough so we buy and buy and our electricity price has climbed and continues to do so and nobody knows when it will stop.

 

[Rive]

Just today I watched a Greta interview ... All I see is a arrogant teenager who skipped school and got some rich sponsors.

An opinion, then: I too can't really sense the sincerity and will from politics to address the climate change according to its importance and weight. And I can tell that most here might agree. And teenagers around the world might miss the matching education and experience yet, but they do sense that their future got openly exploited and abandoned.
So while the whole Greta phenomenon is very controversial, it has deep roots. And in case it won't get proper and sincere response, it may just open up the next generation for radicalization.
We are just at the point where the old green dogmas finally got questioned, and I really don't think we need a new wave of radical ideas.

The issue might not belong here but dismissal is just not a good idea at this point.

 

[artis]

An opinion, then: I too can't really sense the sincerity and will from politics to address the climate change according to its importance and weight. And I can tell that most here might agree. And teenagers around the world might miss the matching education and experience yet, but they do sense that their future got openly exploited and abandoned.
So while the whole Greta phenomenon is very controversial, it has deep roots. And in case it won't get proper and sincere response, it may just open up the next generation for radicalization.
We are just at the point where the old green dogmas finally got questioned, and I really don't think we need a new wave of radical ideas.

The issue might not belong here but dismissal is just not a good idea at this point.

Fair point , but keep in mind I never said I dismiss Greta and that whole agenda outright, I perfectly realize the data and what it shows. But I myself prefer a scientific/engineering approach to this not a political/slogan/hype approach.

It is true that the climate problems have been talked over at least since the 90's and yet little has been done. But here is the crucial part that I actually believe Greta might not understand or at least many of her followers don't.
The reason why so little has been done on climate is not because all politicians and societies are inherently evil and selfish. It is simply because quite honestly we don't have that many options to use in order to continue to supply our modern way of life.
Let's not forget that most of what we have is because thanks to oil and gas.
When we found out CFC's harmed ozone we moved rather quickly and now the problem is largely solved, but that worked so nicely only because CFC could be easily swapped out for other less damaging agents, oil and gas is a different story.

Changing away from that as every engineer will know is really not that easy.

So this is the part that I dislike and find controversial, Greta and company is asking for the right thing but at the same time they refuse to understand the complexity and deep rooted dependence that we have on fossil fuels. Shouting and waving flags won't help here.

And the fact that so many climate activists are also against nuclear really leaves us with not many options.

I'd say both sides need to get real and drop the act and pretending. The people in charge need to sense the urgency and once in a while rely on professionals not public opinion while the activists need to stop the childish wishful thinking and come to the table and accept some harsh realities, probably the most important of them all is that the west and US will have to get back in nuclear otherwise this is not sustainable.
Closing off nuke plants and building what in their place?
Hydro is already used almost as much as it can, building a 1GW wind farm takes up a lot of land and when it comes to it not that many people actually want to live right next to a wind turbine.
So there is some hypocrisy also in the green climate side.

 

[anorlunda]

I think it is important to stress that allowing rules to be designed by engineers does not change public vs private, brown vs green, large vs small, central vs distributed sectors of interest. The system operator I worked for is governed by stakeholders (listed below). The voting power of stakeholders was negotiated. The rules which govern markets and operation of the grid were designed by committees representing all stakeholders. However, the stakeholders sent their engineers and economists to the committee meetings, not managers or politicians or lawyers. Many stakeholders engage specialized consulting engineers to represent their interests. So you can still have public versus private interest sectors, but the actual design work is done by engineers.

In contrast, places like Texas, California, and apparently Tasmania. Legislators are writing the rules, not engineers. Those have been mostly disasters. It is like @artis' analogy to medicine, where legislators pass a law saying which pill must be prescribed for which symptom.

Categories of stakeholders include: End-Use Consumer, Investor-Owner Transmission Owners, Public Power Party, Energy Service Co., Large Consumer, Residential Consumer, Environmental Party, Large Energy Using Governmental Agency, Small Consumer, Generator, Load, State Public Power Authority, Generator Owner, Load Serving Entity, Supplier, Industrial Consumer, Other Supplier, Transmission Owner, Commercial Consumer, Parties to the ISO Agreement, Demand Response Provider, Distributed Generator. State regulating agencies, and public interest groups may represent certain stakeholders.

 

[bhobba]

Legislators are writing the rules, not engineers. Those have been mostly disasters.

Having worked for the government for 30 years, when people complain about politicians and retreat to the side of politics they identify with, what is often happening is not politics; it is mandarin public servants protecting their rears. It's the process-oriented culture that the PS mostly adopts rather than a result-oriented one. It's their risk avoidance bias. Eventually, it is difficult to tell exactly when; it all falls like a house of cards. Surprisingly, the senior people in the PS know this (and I, too, was surprised when I found this out) and have attempted to do something about it, but to no avail. I spoke to one lady working on one such attempt (called management in the 90s), and she said they should not have even bothered. A recent example is during the pandemic, rules were established for interstate travel. Of course, there were exceptions. Some cases were obvious exceptions but were rejected. They were reported in the media. Our Premier (like a US state governor) was hammered. Anyway, she finally actually looked closely at the unit approving these exceptions. In a moment of actual honesty (rare for politicians - they often spin everything and anything) admitted the issue was a tick-and-flick culture in the unit, not looking at each case as a whole.

I get the feeling our energy system is heading down the same path. Like the Covid exceptions, the government will be forced to correct the bureaucratic ineptitude, but when and how bad it eventually gets, who knows.

Thanks
Bill

 

[anorlunda]

what is often happening is not politics; it is mandarin public servants protecting their rears.

I disagree. The question is "who decides" public servants or engineers, public servants or doctors?

Think of all the technical questions you answer here on PF. Suppose we assigned not you, but public servants to answer those questions? That's the wrong choice regardless of the attributes of public servants.

 

[bhobba]

The question is "who decides" public servants or engineers, public servants or doctors?

I see your point. The right people, who are fearless, should be advising the government. The issue is that the culture of covering your rear and pleasing your employer often does not lead to fearlessness, so, as you correctly say, they are the wrong people.

Not always, of course. I remember a Q&A episode where an engineering advisor of a previous prime minister, who also was on the panel, pointed out several 'porkies' the previous PM was espousing. The previous PM response was - that does not sound right. The problem was, being the previous advisor, he got his facts from the same source. This was a case where the previous Public Servant did the right thing.

Thanks
Bill

 

[PeterDonis]

The question is "who decides" public servants or engineers, public servants or doctors?

Before you can answer this, you need to figure out what kind of thing it is that is to be decided.

If the thing to be decided is a technical question, like "what possible failure modes are there for nuclear reactor design X, and how can they be mitigated?", then that is a technical question that should be decided by technical means.

But if the thing to be decided is "how should country A generate energy?", that is not a technical question (although answers to a bunch of technical questions can certainly be relevant to it). It's a social question. Technical experts are not any better qualified to decide social questions just because they're technical experts.

The underlying issue with trying to decide social questions is whether or not there are any people who are "qualified" to decide them. But even without answering that question, it seems evident that bureaucratic institutions are generally not well structured to address such questions. That is what @bhobba is observing.

 

[PeterDonis]

The right people, who are fearless, should be advising the government.

This assumes that (a) such "right" people exist at all, and (b) the government will act appropriately on their advice. But the experience you describe suggests that (a) is rare, and (b) virtually impossible.

 

[bhobba]

This assumes that (a) such "right" people exist at all, and (b) the government will act appropriately on their advice. But the experience you describe suggests that (a) is rare, and (b) virtually impossible.

Unfortunately true. The example I gave of an engineer on a Q&A panel was after he was the advisor to the previous PM.

Thanks
Bill

 

[anorlunda]

But if the thing to be decided is "how should country A generate energy?", that is not a technical question (although answers to a bunch of technical questions can certainly be relevant to it). It's a social question. Technical experts are not any better qualified to decide social questions just because they're technical experts.

Technical experts can take guidance from nontechnical masters, yet still retain the decision making power.

For example, the infamous Enron gaming of the California energy market in 2000-2001. Rules were created with social goals in mind. The CA legislature enacted them into statute law, and never listened to engineering advice to "leave that to the experts." The rules were riddled with loopholes that Enron exploited. Just because the motivation is social, that's no reason to allow those with no expertise make the rules.

Diversity of supply strongly influence reliability. The legislature can mandate type of generation, and mandate cost ceilings, and mandate reliability performance, and wind up with a tangled mess of contradictions. We need engineers to sort out the trade-offs, and usually the result does not include 0% or 100% weight of any factor.

Another consideration is that technical rules may need frequent or rapid tweaks. The severe cold weather shortages in Texas illustrate that. The Texas legislature enacted power grid rules written into laws and expected them to remain fixed for a decade or more. If they instead delegated the authority to groups of experts, small tweaks in the rules might have occurred dozens of times per year in the earliest years.

On the Federal level, Congress delegated drug decision power to technical experts at FDA. Every time a bureaucrat, or a President, overrides decisions of the experts, a major brouhaha results.

Legislatures sometimes retain technical experts to draft laws for them. That is a better than lawyers doing technical work, but worse than authorizing technical experts to have the authority to make rules.

p.s. I can't resist this true anecdote. The reason the California Legislature ignored engineering advice was that the day they scheduled a hearing to hear from the experts, it was the same day that O.J. Simpson in a white Bronco evaded police. The experts testified to an empty room, and no follow-up hearing was ever scheduled. The consequences were widespread brownouts in 2000-2001. Would we accept that excuse from engineers?

 

[PeterDonis]

Technical experts can take guidance from nontechnical masters, yet still retain the decision making power.

This might work ok if the issue is technical, but those kinds of issues are the easy ones. The hard issues are social issues, not technical issues, and, as I said, technical experts don't have any special expertise on such issues. Indeed, I'm not sure anyone has special expertise on such issues, certainly not when it comes to imposing rules on society as a whole. Your Enron gaming example illustrate what happens when that is tried. I don't think "leaving it to the experts" would have helped because there aren't any experts in the social issue that was in play.

The only way we know of to bypass such things is to not have rules imposed from above at all, but instead let the free market work; in a free market, people with technical expertise exercise it directly, by, for example, building power plants that generate energy more cheaply and thereby capturing more market share legitimately, because they are better serving customers. The free market is not perfect, but its failure modes are much less severe than the failure modes of top-down dictated "public policy".

 

[PeterDonis]

On the Federal level, Congress delegated drug decision power to technical experts at FDA. Every time a bureaucrat, or a President, overrides decisions of the experts, a major brouhaha results.

But the major brouhaha is not because those are the only times the FDA makes bad decisions; it's just because that particular kind of bad decision is much more newsworthy given the incentives of the media. When the FDA delays authorization of beta blockers for ten years in the US as compared to Europe, thereby causing, according to their own numbers on beta blocker effectiveness, well over 100,000 fatal heart attacks that could have been prevented, nobody hears about it; but bad decisions like that are arguably even more costly overall than the ones that get the media hype.

 

[artis]

But if the thing to be decided is "how should country A generate energy?", that is not a technical question (although answers to a bunch of technical questions can certainly be relevant to it). It's a social question. Technical experts are not any better qualified to decide social questions just because they're technical experts.

I could argue that it actually is a technical question. If we take the constitutions of most stable democracies at face value then politicians should merely be the "managers" of the will of their electorate, so the electorate decides that say 50% of it wants to "stay as is" and 50% wants only renewables.
If the politician wants to be fair to his people then he basically needs to make a meeting of experts and say to them straight, this is what the people want, how do we make it real?The problem of course why this doesn't work like that is because people often don't know or don't care about issues like these and others want energy production means that are not sustainable in the long term etc, so the politician becomes a kind of mediator and equalizer between all the involved parties. The politician basically needs to manage both the engineers involved and the society voting for him. A job I believe that can only be done correctly by a brave, wise and honest individual. Now it just happens to be that most who make it to politics lack either one of those traits or all of them.

The typical outcome is that the politician/s does neither of what society wants nor what the experts say.
Piles of examples of this happened during last two years of the pandemic.
But on a lesser degree they happen all the time in other fields.

The usual result is wasted budget funds.

 

[PeterDonis]

If we take the constitutions of most stable democracies at face value then politicians should merely be the "managers" of the will of their electorate

But if we take those constitutions at face value, the electorate does not vote on individual issues (except in the rare case of a direct referendum). The electorate only votes for representatives. There might be opinion polls taken by private entities on various issues, but those aren't part of the constitution and elected representatives have no constitutional duty to pay any attention to them.

The typical outcome is that the politician/s does neither of what society wants nor what the experts say.

While I don't disagree with this as a description of the typical outcome, I don't think the reason is quite what you say. I think the reason is simpler: since people only vote for representatives, not on individual issues, and since any individual's vote has only a very, very small chance of being the actual deciding vote in any given election, and since obtaining accurate information on what candidates will do in office on every issue is very costly, voters rationally choose not to bother, and base their votes on very simple and easily findable characteristics like political party affiliation or declared positions on a single "hot button" issue. Since those things correlate only very weakly, if at all, with actual effectiveness, we get governments that are very ineffective and wasteful.

 

[artis]

And we have a title on CNN , but I wonder what the actual data will look like.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/12/politics/nuclear-fusion-energy-us-scientists-climate/index.html

US scientists reach long-awaited nuclear fusion breakthrough, source says​

 

[Imager]

I read the actual announcement is tomorrow. (Tuesday, 12/13)

 

[artis]

I read the actual announcement is tomorrow. (Tuesday, 12/13)

Well CNN couldn't wait

 

[Astronuc]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A high-tech nuclear energy project in Wyoming, backed by the U.S. Department of Energy and Bill Gates, is delayed by at least two years and a U.S. senator said it showed that the United States needs to reduce reliance on Russia for a special fuel for such reactors.

TerraPower, a venture founded by billionaire Gates said last year its $4 billion Natrium plant would be built in Kemmerer, a remote Wyoming town where a coal plant is set to shut in 2025. The 345-megawatt plant will likely be delayed for at least two years until 2030, the Casper Star Tribune said late on Tuesday, citing a TerraPower spokesperson.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-backed-high-tech-nuclear-150539075.htmlNot quite true - Fusion Is Nuclear Power Without the Meltdowns and Radioactive Waste
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/fusion-nuclear-power-without-meltdowns-184708908.html
There will be radioactive material for which safe disposal will be required.

Wherever there are neutrons, there will be transmutation via neutron capture, and the result is a radionuclide.

 

[Astronuc]

Some useful information on fuel dimensions, design characteristics and uncertainties.
Benchmarks for uncertainty analysis in modelling (UAM) for the design, operation and safety analysis of
LWRs
Volume I: Specification and Support Data for Neutronics Cases (Phase I
https://one.oecd.org/document/NEA/NSC/DOC(2013)7/en/pdf

 

[Astronuc]

FLUKA and its history
http://www.fluka.org/fluka.php?id=history&mm2=1

Of particular interest to me is Electron and photon transport (EMF) from the standpoint of effects on structural materials in nuclear energy systems and accelerator targets.

The original EGS4 implementation in FLUKA was progressively modified, substituded with new algorithms and increasingly integrated with the hadronic and the muon components of FLUKA, giving rise to a very different code, called EMF (Electro-Magnetic-Fluka). In 2005, the last remaining EGS routine has been eliminated, although some of the structures still remind of the original EGS4 implementation.

I am also interested in other radiations, e.g., protons, alpha particles, nuclei, subatomic particles, as well.

 

[dlgoff]

I am also interested in other radiations, e.g., protons, ...

Astronuc
One of the coolest things I did while at the University of Kansas was working with the 4 MEV proton van de graaff accelerator.

 

[Astronuc]

Astronuc
One of the coolest things I did while at the University of Kansas was working with the 4 MEV proton van de graaff accelerator.

What research was using protons?

It's interesting to read comments about low or high energy and what value is mentioned. For some, anything in the MeV range is high energy, while others, e.g., those using colliders are looking at GeV and TeV ranges. Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays have even greater energies.

I visited a tandem Van de Graaff at U of Texas back in the 1970s. I can't remember if I was in high school or early years of university.

These days I'm looking at radiation effects on structural materials, and one issue is taking results of experiments using protons and comparing to results one would expect from neutrons and other radiation. Turns out the even with the same dpa, the responses are different. However, in some neutron fields, one can find proton damage from (n,p) reactions, and presence of He from (n,α) reactions.

 

[dlgoff]

What research was using protons?

The professor I was working with was looking at X-ray fluorescence. I gave a little talk at a district Student Physics Society meeting on Trance Element Analysis by Heavy Ion Induced X-ray Fluorescence. The targets were biological samples. I had the data from the detectors stored on an old IIRC IBM machine. I wrote a Fortran program that would calculate the area under the emission curves which would be the Parts/Billion of the trace element in the sample. We would ash/concentrate the sample and would use Silver as our reference (energy). At first the targets were made by putting a thin film of carbon over a metal slid with a whole in it. But they would burn up really quick. At that time in my life, my father worked at DuPont and he got me some new film they were making (can't remember what it was called now) that could handle the proton beam.

edit: My professor was trying to get some grant money from the NIH. Years after I graduated, I ran into him at my barber shop and asked him what ever happen with the project. He said he and a graduate student made some good progress at the University of New Mexico. I could never find any papers about the research though.
edit-2: I remember what that film was called now. It was called Kapton.

Kapton was invented by the DuPont Corporation in the 1960s.