Integral Fast Reactors

[idlisambar]

When I first heard about the IFR last year I realized that that there were no real technological barriers to solving the energy problem or the global warming problem. That the issues are purely political fills me with equal doses of hope and frustration. I take the attitude of letting a thousand flowers bloom, and am all for continued study of wind, solar thermal, and geothermal (as well as fusion) but of these the IFR is the only one that scales and is ready to go today. I believe it deserves more political support.

Anyway, there is a good summary of the technology here: http://skirsch.com/politics/globalwarming/ifr.htm

An excerpt:


....
....
The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) is a fourth generation nuclear design that provides a clean, inexhaustible source of power, cheap, with virtually no waste, inherently safe (if you remove the cooling, it shuts down rather than melts down), and the added benefit that it consumes the nuclear waste from other nuclear plants that we can’t figure out how to get rid of.

Advantages include:

1. It can be fueled entirely with material recovered from today's used nuclear fuel.
2. It consumes virtually all the long-lived radioactive isotopes that worry people who are concerned about the "nuclear waste problem," reducing the needed isolation time to less than 500 years.
3. It could provide all the energy needed for centuries (perhaps as many as 50,000 years), feeding only on the uranium that has already been mined
4. It uses uranium resources with 100 to 300 times the efficiency of today's reactors.
5. It does not require enrichment of uranium.
6. It has less proliferation potential than the reprocessing method now used in several countries.
7. It's 24x7 baseline power
8. It can be built anywhere there is water
9. The power is very inexpensive (some estimates are as low as 2 cents/kWh to produce)
10. Safe from melt down because if something goes wrong, the reactor naturally shuts down rather than blows up
11. And, of course, it emits no greenhouse gases.
...
...



Interview with the lab director of the project:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

[Dogmudgeon]

1. Uh ...

:popcorn:

--d!

[Dogmudgeon]

2. Let me rephrase that

You are about to learn the meaning of "hysteria".

--d!

[phantom power]

6. ...

[leveymg]

3. Cancel those wind turbines and photo cells. I want my own home nuke!

And, a flying nuke car, and a nuke robot dog, and a nuke-powered electronic brain.

I am nuke man!

[Cobalt-60]

4. Too good to be true.

Fission processes don't just shut down.
Fission fragments continue to emit decay heat for hours after a reactor shurdown.
We don't have fusion yet, so I've got to ask how this is supposed to work.

[idlisambar]

8. Very good and true

The IFR also utilized a passively safe fuel configuration. The fuel and cladding were designed such that when they expanded due to increased temperatures, more neutrons would be able to escape the core thus reducing the rate of the fission chain reaction. At sufficiently high temperatures this effect would completely stop the reactor even without external action from operators or safety systems. This was demonstrated in a series of safety tests on the prototype.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor

Not clear on your fusion remark, this has nothing to do with fusion.

[bananas]

5. IFR's would cost more to build than LWR's

and have a bunch of technical problems.
The IFR is not "the only one that scales",
and it isn't close to being "ready to go today".

Either wind or solar by itself could scale to provide all our energy,
efficiency and wind are cheapest now,
solar PV costs are decreasing,
solar PV will be cheaper than IFR by the time IFR is "ready to go".

[idlisambar]

9. response

By "ready to go" I mean that the technology has already been demonstrated and there is a commercial design (S-PRISM) that could be built at any time.

You mention "technical problems" -- I am not sure what you mean. A prototype reactor has already been built and demonstrated.

Efficiency -- sure, no-one is arguing with making efficiency improvements. There is a lot of good work to be done there clearly.

I am not an enemy of wind and solar, it is just that from an engineering standpoint there is not a good story yet for them scaling to meet civilization size energy needs (neither is energy dense and each would need to occupy massive plots of land and allocation of material), and there is not a good story for how they can provide baseload power, which is why I mentioned geothermal as an alternative.

From what I have read, there is no reason why the IFR would be particularly expensive compared to LWR or other alternatives -- there are upfront capital costs but the fuel is basically free. Uniform design and use of modular components would make it cheaper still.

[bananas]

14. You contradict yourself in post #20

where you say that IFR's won't be ready for deployment until 2015-2020 at the very earliest,
and not for at least 20 years under business as usual.
That means they aren't ready to go. QED.

Regarding cost, page 5 of chapter 1 of MIT's 2003 report "The Future of Nuclear Energy" says their MOST IMPORTANT RECOMMENDATION is:

Thus our most important recommendation is:

For the next decades, government and industry in the U.S. and elsewhere
should give priority to the deployment of the once-through fuel cycle,
rather than the development of more expensive closed fuel cycle
technology involving reprocessing and new advanced thermal or fast
reactor technologies.

Pay attention!
Obama's science advisor John Holdren participated in that report.
This is their most important recommendation!
I'm glad Obama is keeping his promise to base his policies on sound science!

Here's a longer excerpt, starting on page 4:

The result of our detailed analysis of the relative merits of these representative
fuel cycles with respect to key evaluation criteria can be summarized as follows:
The once through cycle has advantages in cost, proliferation, and fuel cycle
safety, and is disadvantageous only in respect to long-term waste disposal; the
two closed cycles have clear advantages
only in long-term aspects of
waste disposal, and disadvantages in
cost, short-term waste issues, proliferation
risk, and fuel cycle safety. (See
Table.) Cost and waste criteria are
likely to be the most crucial for determining
nuclear power’s future.

We have not found, and based on
current knowledge do not believe it is
realistic to expect, that there are new
reactor and fuel cycle technologies
that simultaneously overcome the
problems of cost, safety, waste, and
proliferation.

Our analysis leads to a significant conclusion: The once-through fuel cycle best
meets the criteria of low costs and proliferation resistance. Closed fuel cycles
may have an advantage from the point of view of long-term waste disposal
and, if it ever becomes relevant, resource extension. But closed fuel cycles will
be more expensive than once-through cycles, until ore resources become very
scarce. This is unlikely to happen, even with significant growth in nuclear
power, until at least the second half of this century, and probably considerably
later still. Thus our most important recommendation is:

----
For the next decades, government and industry in the U.S. and elsewhere
should give priority to the deployment of the once-through fuel cycle,
rather than the development of more expensive closed fuel cycle
technology involving reprocessing and new advanced thermal or fast
reactor technologies.
----

This recommendation implies a major re-ordering of priorities of the U.S.
Department of Energy nuclear R&D programs.

You can download the full report at http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower for more details.
Have fun!

[idlisambar]

15. I'm aware of that report

Like I said in the original post, the obstacles are political not technological, and certainly not "sound science". Most industrialized nations aren't bothering to heed this advice -- that should say enough.


Regarding my supposed contradiction myself when I said that IFR's are "ready to go", I meant compared to the alternatives -- wind, solar, and geothermal, each of which require further technological innovation to be deployable at civilization scale. Unfortunately, 2015 is not that far off as far as these things go.

Like I said in the original post, let a thousand flowers bloom -- solar PV, solar thermal, wind, fusion, Gen IV fission, etc -- give them all a go and we'll see what happens. It is interesting that you seem to be closed off on IFR when it clearly shows promise. Perhaps marketing it as a nuclear waste disposal facility that happens to give off energy might appeal more.

[kristopher]

17. You keep making assertions that are proved false

The Jacobson article I cited is an analysis of the options available to meet climate change goals. It is an organized look at what you are approaching only with intuition. Unless you can refute Jacobson's work, and while you're at demonstrate that technologies growing consistently at arate of over 30%/year (wind solar) are less ready to go than one still in the test stage, then your entire argument fails.


Here is a question, what came first in the idea of baseload, the demand or the supply?

[idlisambar]

19. You keep misunderstanding

Again, the Jacobson article didn't consider IFR's or other 4th generation nuclear options.

Let me try clarifying "ready to go" again. Wind and solar are less "ready to go" in the sense that it is not clear that they can scale to provide for all of our energy demand given the current level of technology. Solar thermal, for example, would require massive amounts of land and material, we need a way to store it that will scale, etc. With IFR's, these basic technological barriers don't exist -- it is "ready to go".

[bananas]

23. You keep talking gibberish.

What you mean by "ready to go" is that after at least ten or twenty years of extensive and expensive technological innovation IFR might be ready for deployment, at which point in time it will be more expensive than LWR, wind, or solar.
It's very clear that wind and solar will be able to scale to provide all our energy demand.

[kristopher]

24. Yes he did.

They aren't listed in the paper as viable options not because he didn't consider them, but because they aren't ready for immediate deployment.

You show your dishonesty by ignoring well established evidence that contradicts your statements. Jacobson is operating at the very highest levels of academia. He has access to all relevant data and researchers in each field being looked at. Your assertions about the state of renewable technology is directly contradicted Jacobson (and many others) and your assertions regarding IFRs are implicitly refuted by the omission from the list of technologies that are ready to deploy.

As I said, his (and those posted by bananas) is a peer reviewed paper. If you are going to contradict the content by saying his primary conclusion regarding wind is wrong, you are going to have to support that statement with something more than you've shown so far. He looks at constraints like space and materials, so your off-the-cuff, poorly thought out dismissals show that not only do you not really understand the topic very well, you also don't read when a remedy for your blatant ignorance is placed right in front of you.

[idlisambar]

26. This has touched a nerve

I appreciate the critical feedback. I wasn't interested in the discussion getting personal.

What you "placed right in front of me" was this powerpoint presentation -- http://www.awma.org/2008criticalreview/jacobson.pdf. Perhaps you sent me the wrong link because the presentation is hardly clear without additional context. For future reference one of the other links here http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/revsolglobwarmairpol.htm might have served as a better introduction than the raw presentation slides.

On the Jacobson work, I have no dispute. A wind based solution indeed looks plausible and should by all means be pursued. Conceptually, interconnecting windfarms could help emulate baseload power up to a certain point, so that partially mitigates my concern there (at least conceptually). That being said, there is a world of difference between a concept presented in a paper (even a peer reviewed one) and an engineered system. As Jacobson himself says speaking of harnessing wind at large scale -- "many practical barriers need to be overcome to realize this potential." -- http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/global_winds.html. Also, I didn't see any explicit discussion of materials or space in his work other than the part about wind power having a small land area footprint in referring to the surface area of the poles themselves. It seems clear from the maps and figures presented that broad swaths of the Earth's surface would need to be covered with windmills. Regarding materials, they are more of an issue for Solar PV rather than wind. It is also interesting to see how unevenly wind potential is distributed http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/global_winds.html, it is no wonder that the population centers of Asia are considering other options. There is also still the question of the effects of truly large scale wind capture on local climate systems.

I do dispute the notion that the fact that IFR's and other 4th gen nuclear reactors are left out of consideration by one researcher's program is somehow significant. I can assure that a lot of very knowledgeable and credentialed individuals take them very seriously. You might want to take a look at the links in the original post to find out more.

This discussion is generating more heat than light. I am checking out.

[bananas]

22. "more expensive" isn't a "political" obstacle, it's a "techological" obstacle

In 2007, the National Academy of Sciences came to the same conclusion as MIT.
Wind and solar could be deployed at civilization scale with current technology,
the continuing advancements in technology keep making them better and cheaper.
Advanced fuel cycles are going to be more expensive than once-through,
the continuing advancements in nuclear energy keep making it more expensive.
IFR requires extensive technical innovation before it could be deployed at any scale,
requiring at least another ten or twenty years of R&D of technological innovation.
You're trying to "market" something which is expensive and unnecessary.

[phantom power]

7. I'm for it.

:thumbsup:

[kristopher]

10. Perhaps you should be a little more critical

Your assessment of the state of the technology is wildly optimistic. Best guesses I've seen are 30 years to deployment. Your statements regarding the drawbacks of solar and wind and the significance of "baseload" energy are similarly off the mark.

There is no silver bullet solution, but there is a sustainable energy infrastructure that can replace our current generating and distribution grid while maintaining the essential lifestyle we currently have.

http://www.awma.org/2008criticalreview/jacobson.pdf

You also need to consider the costs and time to bring online of what you're proposing. Read the above paper carefully for an idea of where mainstream analysis recommends our best use of resources.

[Kolesar]

11. Global warming increases ozone where it is already high

– in polluted cities. California has the most polluted U.S. cities.

[idlisambar]

12. I welcome any critical arguments, but so far no-one has given any that stand up

"Best guesses I've seen are 30 years to deployment" -- Really 20 years for Gen IV nuclear reactors, but this assumes business as usual, which is clearly not an option regardless of what we do. With a push the timeline could be greatly accelerated...


...
"The common presumption that 4th generation nuclear power will not be ready until 2030 is based on assumption of ‘business-as-usual”. Given high priority, this technology could be ready for deployment in the 2015-2020 time frame, thus contributing to the phase-out of coal plants. Even if the United States finds that it can satisfy its electrical energy needs via efficiency and renewable energies, 4th generation nuclear power is probably essential for China and India to achieve clear skies with carbon-free power"
...


http://buildeco.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/hansen-to-obama-pt-iii-fast-nuclear-reactors-are-integral/

You imply that base-load power is not significant -- please explain. Our society and infrastructure currently operate on the assumption of reliable 24x7 power.

The Jacobson link you provided has nothing to do with IFR's.

"There is no silver bullet solution" -- very sober sonding and there are certainly enough problems for which this statement actually applies, but I would like to see evidence that this is the case (certainly it is what I once thought). IFR's seem to have all the properties of a silver bullet -- please tell me why they aren't silver bullets.

[Massacure]

13. The IFR was an interesting research project, but I wouldn't advocate it for prime time.

I support nuclear power, but I would disagree with points 9 and 10. Molten sodium is not an easy coolant to work with. It spontaneously ignites in the presence of air and and violently reacts with water.

[idlisambar]

16. Relative Risk

Are you really saying that sodium is what is stopping you from supporting IFR? That's like saying you wouldn't support wind because it kills birds or wouldn't date halle berry because her ankles are too fat :-). In my considered opinion, the energy and global warming problems are several orders of magnitude too large to let relatively minor problems get in the way of a promising solution.

http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA378.html


.....
O.K. What else?

ALMRs use liquid sodium for cooling and heat transfer, which makes the system intrinsically safer than one that uses water. That is because the molten sodium runs at atmospheric pressure, which means that there is no internal pressure to cause the type of accident that has to be carefully designed against in an LWR: a massive pipe rupture followed by "blowdown" of the coolant.

Also, sodium is not corrosive like water is.


But doesn't sodium burn in air and react violently with water?

Yes it does, and this of course requires prudent design, involving inert atmospheres and multiple barriers.


Not so fast! Seems to me there was a serious sodium leak and fire at a Japanese fast reactor.

You're right. In December, 1995, at the Monju reactor, a temperature sensor broke and sodium leaked from a secondary sodium loop and caught fire. The plant was shut down, and has not yet been restarted.


How many people were hurt?

None.

Was radioactivity released?

No.


Was the reactor damaged?

No.


Was there any damage at all?

Yes. Some minor damage was caused by the burning sodium, and combustion products were spread through a portion of the building; cleaning them up took almost a year. The accident was classified as Category 1 on the international scale of 0 to 7 (with 0 being the least serious) by a committee of independent specialists.


So the sodium isn't so safe after all.

When you think about it, it is pretty safe. There have been sodium fires, and undoubtedly there will be more. The Monju fire was a public-relations disaster, but did not even come close to being a public health threat. There is a great deal of industrial experience with liquid sodium, and there have been very few problems.

[NNadir]

18. I think the IFR had many advantages and stimulated many very innovative ideas but...

...I have to disagree with one of your statements here to wit:

sodium is not corrosive like water is

One problem with all liquid metal alkali metal reactors - and for that matter liquid bismuth/lead types built in the former USSR - has been corrosion, some of it having to do with the solubilities of metals in metals. Further it is nearly impossible to completely eliminate oxides of alkali metals from forming over time on the planet of earth. These are inherently corrosive over a service life of decades.

I think the IFR could never have been as dangerous as a typical dangerous natural gas plant - as you correctly point out. But I personally would like to see other fast spectrum options developed, my personal IP issues notwithstanding.

I think it was a big mistake to choose liquid sodium or sodium/potassium reactors as a default for fast spectrum reactors, although I somewhat grudgingly support the Indian Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor on which I am now writing a long series of diaries.

The IFR concept lead to the development of many very good processing approaches however, and I would like to see the concept explored a little further as a back up.

The program produced more value to the future than the entire renewables energy program of DOE has produced in 30 years of kvetching pissing and moaning, since one could build five IFR's and easily outstrip all of the solar PV energy output on earth.

Of course, nothing as yet been quite as useless as the fusion energy program, although it did produce a lot of decent work in recent years on the physics and nuclear physics of high temperature fluids, including liquid metals.

[idlisambar]

20. appreciate the considered feedback

By the way, the statement on corrosion was not mine, it was in the link I provided. I will say that I recall reading that the Argonne reactor had no corrosion problems after 3 decades.

To be clear I don't have a dog in this fight, I am not an IFR program fan-boy :), just someone serious about solutions. If there are better ideas with even fewer drawbacks then wonderful. It is my understanding that the IFR is at a further state of development than other 4th generation options such as LFTR that also have a lot of potential and I have a bias toward proven concepts. If you could provide some links to your preferred option(s) I would appreciate it.

All that aside, the original point stands. The IFR is an existence proof -- it shows that the barriers to solving the energy problem and global warming problem are political and not technological. IFR, minor drawbacks aside, can sustainably meet energy demand in an industrial civilization without causing serious disruption to the planet; that and it solves the long-term nuclear waste problem. The disconnect between the value of the technology with these next generation reactors and the political support for them is huge.

[NNadir]

21. Well you'll get not much of an argument here - not from me at least.

The problem with nuclear energy has been the same for almost twenty years - people who are too ignorant to understand it have been allowed to stand in its way because ignorance has become a value in itself.

[phantom power]

25. What happens if you take the derivative of an Integral Fast Reactor?

Are you left with just a Fast Reactor?

[struggle4progress]

27. We're going to do all that reprocessing without producing much waste?

:rofl:

[Massacure]

28. Do humans process anything without waste?

Fast spectrum reactors have the advantage of being able to transmute the various radioactive elements contained in a reactors fuel into more fissile or shorter-lived elements, but whether it is cost effective on a commercial scale is to be seen. Then again it is difficult to tell what is or what is not cost effective in the energy industry with all the subsidies thrown around. The price of oil doesn't reflect the cost of the U.S. military presence in the middle east, and coal has been given a lot of money and land over the years.

[struggle4progress]

29. NUCLEAR SPENT FUEL RECYCLING

June 20, 2008
By Robert Alvarez
Senior Scholar, Institute for Policy Studies

... Radiation doses to people living near the Sellefield reprocessing facility in England were found to be 10 times higher than for the general population. Denmark, Norway, and Ireland have sought to close the French and
English plants because of their radiological impacts. For instance, discharges of Iodine 129, a very long-lived carcinogen, have contaminated the shores of Denmark and Norway at levels 1000 times higher than nuclear weapons fallout. Health studies indicate that significant excess childhood cancers have occurred near French and English reprocessing plants ...

... Between the 1940’s and the late 1980’s, the Department of Energy (DOE) and its predecessors reprocessed tens of thousands of tons of spent fuel in order to reuse uranium and make plutonium for nuclear weapons. By the end the Cold War about 100 million gallons of high-level radioactive wastes were left in aging tanks that are larger than most state capitol domes. More than a third of some 200 tanks have leaked and threaten water
supplies such as the Columbia River. The nation’s experience with this mess should be serve as a cautionary warning. According to DOE, treatment and disposal will cost more than $100 billion; and after 26 years of trying, Energy has processed less than one percent of the radioactivity in these wastes for disposal. By comparison, the amount of wastes from spent power reactor fuel recycling in the U.S. would dwarf that of the nuclear weapons program -- generating about 25 times more radioactivity ...

Since the 1950’s, the experience with plutonium-fueled “fast” reactors is marked with failure. At least 15 “fast” reactors have been closed due to costs and accidents in the U.S., France, Germany, England, and
Japan. There have been two fast reactor fuel meltdowns in the United States including a mishap near Detroit in the 1960’s. Russia operates the remaining fast reactor, but it has experienced 15 serious fires in 23 years.

The failure of fast reactors has created a plutonium legacy of major proportions. Of the 370 metric tons of plutonium extracted at reprocessing plants over the past 30 years, about one third has been used. There is about 200 tons of plutonium sitting at reprocessing plants around the world – equivalent to the amount in some 30,000 nuclear weapons in global arsenals ...

<pdf:> http://www.cornnet.nl/~akmalten/Alvarez_nuclear_recycling_June-21-2008-rev-2.pdf
<google html from pdf:> http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:dsuiXUsVPhEJ:www.cornnet.nl/~akmalten/Alvarez_nuclear_recycling_June-21-2008-rev-2.pdf+nuclear+reprocessing+wastes+france&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=73&gl=us&client=opera