Japan's Supreme Court Ruling on Monju breeder reactor

[hunter]

http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200506010150.html

"Ten years have passed since the prototype Monju fast-breeder reactor stopped operations because of a sodium coolant leak. Monju is sometimes called 'a dream reactor' because it generates more plutonium than it consumes.

The Supreme Court abrogated a ruling by the Kanazawa branch of the Nagoya High Court, which had invalidated the government's approval to build the reactor. The branch said the safety screening of a government agency before the reactor's construction was inadequate.
The high court's decision, handed down in 2003, was the first time residents had won a lawsuit concerning a nuclear reactor. If the government had lost the case at the Supreme Court, it would have been forced to scrap Monju.

As it turned out, the nation's top court completely reversed the decision of the lower court.

I always find it difficult to read Japanese, even in English, because it is so... I don't know ...polite.

The editorial comes across as a big fat "maybe."

The biggest problem at Monju, as is common in many cases like this, is that the plant's managers tried to cover up the severity of the accident. They had a "horrifying" spray fire of sodium from a failure in the secondary cooling loop, but they claimed at first it was a simple sort of spill, when in fact the fire and subsequent corrosion seriously damaged equipment and ate away three centimeters of the containment building's floor.

Nasty stuff, that sodium...

[formercia]

1. Sodium metal is very dangerous.

I had an accident while working with it. some of it came in contact with water and the resulting hydrogen gas explosion blew some of the windows out. I looked really funny with no eyebrows. Combine that with a subcritical mass of plutonium that just lost it's coolant.........

Right now, Japan has several hundred TONS of excess plutonium recovered from the fast breeder program.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.....

[struggle4progress]

2. "...The accident in 1995 at Monju occurred only months after ..

.. the reactor had come on line. The coolant leak sparked a fire and the operators caused a scandal by trying to cover up the extent of the leak ..."
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2005-05-30T095610Z_01_MOL035755_RTRUKOC_0_JAPAN-NUCLEAR.xml

"...The United States and many European countries have given up on developing fast breeder nuclear reactors due to their high cost and fears that increased use of plutonium could lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons ... The Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation, the predecessor of Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute, concealed video footage of a sodium leak in 1997 and falsely reported information about the accident, which caused a fire at facilities near the nuclear reprocessing plant. This and other scandals led to the disbandment of the organization and the creation of the institute ... Another sodium coolant leak in 1995 was followed by an accident at a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in Tokaimura, Ibaraki Prefecture, and another incident at Kansai Electric Power Co.'s Mihama Nuclear Power Plant. The incidents have prompted public concern over nuclear development ..."
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20050601wo34.htm

"... The Fukui regional government in February approved repairs at the mothballed plant, and construction there could allow the facility to restart within three years ... Monju went into service in August 1995 but was shut down just four months later on December 8, when more than a ton of volatile liquid sodium leaked from a secondary cooling system at the reactor ... Japan has reportedly already spent a cumulative Y800 billion ($A9.75 billion) on the one Monju reactor ... Fukui was also the scene of Japan's deadliest-ever nuclear-plant accident, when a corroded cooling pipe - carrying boiling water and superheated steam - burst at a plant in Mihama last August, killing five workers ..."
http://seven.com.au/news/topstories/84151

"... The top court ruled that authorization to build the Monju reactor was not given illegally because no serious errors were committed when safety inspections were performed. I wish to point out, however, that the court's endorsement of the government's contention that it acted legally in approving the Monju's construction is not the same thing as whether the reactor can be operated without problems ..."
http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200506010147.html

[jpak]

3. Add the Monju accident to a long list of sodium fires

at prototype LMFB's.

Rocketdyne PBR (US)

Fermi 1 (US)

SuperPhenix (FR)

BN-350 and BN-600 (RU)

In addition to sodium fires, three US prototype breeders (Rocketdyne, EBR-1 and Fermi 1) suffered partial meltdowns as well.

These type of reactors also have another "peculiarity" - unlike low-enriched uranium thermal reactors, they can undergo power excursions that could potentially cause them to explode (thermal not a nuclear).

For some reason, placing hundreds of tonnes of plutonium and uranium and millions of curies of radioisotopes in the middle of hundreds of tonnes highly reactive (and radioactive) liquid sodium metal just doesn't seem to be a good idea to me.

but that's just me

:)

[hunter]

4. The details of the Rocketdyne accident have been buried in bullshit...

...by both sides. The Rocketdyne accident is a fine example of why I dislike dissembling anti-nuclear activists as much as I dislike dissembling pro-nuclear industrialists.

Here's an article by Michael Collins at larryflynt.com about the Rocketdyne accident.

THE ROCKETDYNE MELTDOWN

By Michael Collins


The world's first nuclear meltdown occurred in Simi Valley, California, not more than 20 minutes from Los Angeles, on July 26, 1959. Thanks to a lack of media coverage on the meltdown, the amount of radiation that escaped and where it went is completely unknown. Despite the magnitude of the event and its suspected impact on the environment, even the residents of Simi Valley and the adjacent San Fernando Valley are largely unaware of what happened there and what has continued to take place in the years following.


http://www.larryflynt.com/notebook.php?id=10

Much of this article is hyperbole. Whatever the Rocketdyne accident really was, it was not "our Chernobyl" as Jonathan Parfrey, executive director of the Los Angeles public-health organization Physicians for Social Responsibility, proclaims. Nor was it some flash-in-the-pan sodium fire as Rocketdyne long claimed.

I clearly remember how mysterious it all was when they finally started trucking away the various scrapped nuclear experiments, mostly in reaction to growing anti-nuclear activism and the concerns of multi-millionaire property developers, but I think you have to remember that the Cold War was still very fresh in everyones's minds and the vast majority of people thought that keeping quiet about the details of these nuclear experiments for reasons of "National Security" was the right and proper thing to do. We couldn't let the Soviets know what we knew. (There were a lot of spooky people lurking about then too, we all knew some. Hell, people probably thought I was spooky since I hardly ever talked and seemed to come and go at random.)

The truth is we had little to fear from the Soviets obtaining our precious "nuclear secrets." Their guys were as just as smart as our guys, and the Soviet Union itself was hell bent on nuclear research. They were doing many sorts of experiments that were utterly reckless, and perhaps more informative, than we thought we could ever get away with. In fact, one of the most reckless experiments done at Hanford, the infamous "Green Run" of December 1949, was an attempt to duplicate a dangerous plutonium production method we thought the Soviets might be using.

If there is any point to this little rant, it is that I believe our Cold War mentality poisoned nuclear power development. I believe the pathological secrecy of the nuclear industry, as demonstrated by Rocketdyne after the 1959 accidents (or by the managers of the breeder reactor in Japan) has made nuclear power more dangerous than it might otherwise be.

It would be a positive development if anti-nuclear activism increased intelligent discussions about the issue, and led to an intellectually open and honest environment in the industry, but that's not what has happened. The dishonesty and lack of transparency on both sides of this issue will continue to have deadly consequences for a long time.

[NNadir]

6. An excellent analytical post. I agree with all of it. Thanx. n/t

[NNadir]

5. I am not a big fan of sodium liquid metal fast breeder reactors.

They are certainly problematic reactors and none have really been economic successes.

They are certainly not as dangerous as say, Greenpeace, or as dangerous as Greenpeace stupidity; they are not as dangerous as a typical coal plant, because coal plants actually kill people every day in normal operations and no one has ever been killed by the operation of a commercial breeder reactor.

The fact that liquid metal fast breeder reactors like the Monju reactor are not as dangerous as Greenpeace stupidity however, is not the same thing as saying that they are risk minimized. Certain physical and chemical properties make them less than ideal in comparison to other types of nuclear reactors. One risk is obvious, the use of liquid sodium or sodium potassium eutectic alloys as coolants. These alloys are in fact quite flammable, and the anti-nuclear anti-environmentalists are quite right in worrying about this, in much the way that a stopped clock manages to be right two times a day. Also these reactors tend to have a positive void coefficient, meaning that in a loss of coolant accident, they would tend not to shut down automatically.

(There is always someone to tell a cute story about throwing sodium in water. Here is what really happens if you do it: Sodium is lighter than water; it floats. Generally a piece of sodium thrown into a pond or pool will float and fizz from the released hydrogen gas, energetically skating across the surface of the water. The heat causes the metal to melt and bead up. Sometimes the hydrogen being produced catches fire, igniting the metal itself which then produces a brilliant yellow flame and sodium peroxide smoke. Generally the metal gets so hot "pops" into smaller pieces that also race around on the surface of the water, propelled by gaseous hydrogen. I have never seen an appreciable explosion, and I have thrown several hundred grams of sodium into an acidified (via acid rain) drainage recharge basin.)

Historically it was believed that breeding capacity would be necessary rather quickly because uranium was once believed to be a rare element, mostly because no one was looking for it. However, we now know that uranium and thorium - another nuclear fuel - are very common, inexhaustible in fact for the next several millenia. Moreover the world is awash in plutonium, over two hundred metric tons exist in nuclear weapons alone. This weapons grade plutonium needs to be destroyed to minimize the risks to peace. An additional 800 metric tons exists in spent commercial fuel, most of which is easily recoverable if needed. Moreover, light water reactors do in fact "breed" fuel. The difference between a so called "breeder" reactor and a normal reactor is simply that the breeding ratio in the former is greater than one: More thermally fissionable fuel is created than is consumed in fast breeder reactors; in thermal reactors, plutonium is still created, but there are fewer plutonium atoms created than are plutonium or uranium atoms destroyed. A typical thermal reactor might have a breeding ratio that is more like 0.9. This means that for every ten atoms that are fissioned only nine new fissionable atoms are created.

The current inventory of plutonium is enough to fuel the world's existing nuclear reactors for about two years. Given the immense importance of nuclear power generation to the world today, this represents an enormous amount of energy. If all of the world's nuclear reactors were to switch over to plutonium fuel and run for two years, the new inventory of spent fuel would be enough to fuel the world's reactors for 1.8 years. After 1.8 years, there would be enough fuel to run reactors for 1.62 years, and so on. Therefore we will not need plutonium for quite some time, and there is no reason to build or use sub-optimal reactors like the Monju.

Actually though, were breeding necessary, and it will be some day if humanity survives the global climate change being poo-pooed by Greenpeace morons, there are better options than reactors of the Monju type. One such option is thorium fueled CANDU reactors, which, using U-233 obtained by transmutation of thorium can produce burn-ups of well over 100,000 MW-days/ton as compared to about 1/3 that value for traditional thermal reactors. Another reactor of this type that has operated on a pilot scale is the molten salt breeder reactor. This type of reactor has spectacular breeding and anti-proliferation characteristics as well as incredible safety features. The reason that the United States elected to develop the liquid metal fast breeder reactor instead of molten salt reactors had every thing to do with cold war politics, weapons requirements, and so on, and nothing to do with physics and safety considerations.

I predict that many of hundreds of molten salt reactors will be built in the future, mostly because they are just too good to pass up.

Still, the failure of traditional liquid metal fast breeder reactors, does not mean that fast spectrum reactors should not exist. The fast neutron spectrum has certain advantages that will probably require the development of such reactors at a future date. First of all, as I recently explained to one of the worst idiots of my acquaintance - and we can be sure it went right over his tiny head - in a fast neutron spectrum certain nuclei that are not normally thought of as being fissionable are appreciably fissioned. For instance, about 30% of the neutron captures in U-238 result in fission in a fast reactor. This has the property of increasing fuel burn-up and minimizing the volume of spent fuel. Moreover in such a spectrum, transuranium actinides tend not to accumulate. Pu-240 can be made to go critical, and Np-237 can nearly be made to be so. Many people who have a weak understanding of nuclear technology, would describe these nuclei as "non-fissionable." (Two even numbered isotopes of curium, Cm-242 and Cm-244 can also achieve criticality in fast neutron spectra.) A type of liquid metal reactor known as the IFR - which although it does use sodium - was specifically designed to do this - burn transplutonium actinides. The program, which was abandoned in the 1990s on the grounds that the world does not currently need breeding capacity, can be revived at almost any time it is necessary. Probably this type of reactor will become common somewhere, though probably not in the United States, because the United States is increasingly dominated by ignorance and superstition, as we see with both the Greenpeace types and the ayotollahs of the Repuke party.

There are many other types of fast breeder reactors, including those that use non flammable elements like lead and mercury as coolants. I am exploring the physics of a type of fast reactor myself, and my preliminary work believe it has many very attractive properties, so many that I can't believe it hasn't been obvious, but my patent searches suggest that for some reason, no one has explored the idea. C'est la vie.

I would love discuss it further, but, in discussions with my business partner, I must keep it proprietary. We plan to become wealthy in a project that is is only peripherally related to nuclear technology (it may involve some nuclear medicine). Once we have finished with that project, and emigrated to some country with less pronounced insanity, we have agreed that our next project will be the development of this type of reactor. We hope that it will be our most important legacy.

[jpak]

7. Greenpeace Greenpeace Greenpeace

Fiddle-dee-dee...

CANDU reactors are NOT "fast" reactors and 238U can NOT be fissioned in them.

Nice try though (and not impressed by all the Big Words)...

Gee - how much Evil Mercury and Evil Lead would be used in these marvelous "safe" fast breeder reactors - hundreds of thousands of tons???

How much of these materials will make their way into the environment from these plants????

Also, please, tell us all about the environmental impact of all that lead and mercury mining that will be required to build these plants.

And what would be the impact of an accident at a mercury-cooled fast reactor????

There's a reason why there are no patents on patent nonsense...

:)

[NNadir]

8. As usual...

...the greenpeace idiots have no idea what I am talking about.

Greenpeace idiots are quite indifferent to lead and mercury when it comes from coal plants, or when it is proposed for use in the batterires for the big solar industry that they promise over and over and over and over without actually delivering.

I thought it would be fun to mention mercury, lead and "nuclear" in the same sentence and see if we could suddenly care about these elements. Voila. Mission accomplished.

This is pretty amusing and illustrative.

As for the capability to judge a patent, one would need to know some basic science, never mind nuclear science, to discuss the issue. Obviously someone repeating mindless ignorance over and over and over and over and over is hardly in a position to be a patent examiner.

A search for the term "nuclear reactor" on the US patent site, www.uspto.gov produces 8441 hits between 1976 and the present date.

Here is a list of the first 50 such patents (#50 having been been filed in March of 2005 and number 1 having been filed last week), not that a Greenpeace twit would have even the remotest idea of what the fuck any of the titles, never mind the content, mean:

6,901,128 Foreign matter filter for fuel assembly in pressurized water reactor
2 6,898,935 System and method of cooling steam turbines
3 6,898,469 Surveillance system and method having parameter estimation and operating mode partitioning
4 6,898,259 Process for reducing the corrosion of a component of a nuclear facility, and component of a nuclear facility
5 6,897,577 Methods and system for power generation
6 6,896,716 Process for producing ultra-pure plutonium-238
7 6,895,067 Smooth collet for pulling fuel rods
8 6,895,064 Spallation device for producing neutrons
9 6,894,251 Method for welding on stress-sensitive materials
10 6,892,163 Surveillance system and method having an adaptive sequential probability fault detection test
11 6,892,145 Method and system for conditionally triggered system data capture
12 6,892,115 Method and apparatus for optimized centralized critical control architecture for switchgear and power equipment
13 6,891,912 Fuel assemblies in a reactor core and method of designing and arranging same
14 6,891,476 Electronic exposure dose meter and radiation handling operation management system employing the same
15 6,891,310 Neutrino light to photon light converting matrix
16 6,889,957 Joint construction of cobalt-based alloy
17 6,889,889 Fusion-welding of defective components to preclude expulsion of contaminants through the weld
18 6,889,783 Remote controlled inspection vehicle utilizing magnetic adhesion to traverse nonhorizontal, nonflat, ferromagnetic surfaces
19 6,888,912 Device for positioning and axially aligning a fuel assembly and process and apparatus for restoring a positioning element
20 6,888,911 Method for preventing fretting damage to fuel rods, nuclear reactor fuel element, device for preventing fretting damage, and spacer in a fuel assembly of a nuclear reactor
21 6,888,910 Methods and apparatuses for removing thermal energy from a nuclear reactor
22 6,888,908 Reactor head with integral nozzles
23 6,888,713 Device and method to mitigate hydrogen explosions in vacuum furnaces
24 6,888,434 Nuclear fusion reactor incorporating spherical electromagnetic fields to contain and extract energy
25 6,888,179 GaAs substrate with Sb buffering for high in devices
26 6,887,458 Vascular embolic materials having multifunctions
27 6,886,502 Method for controlling steam generators
28 6,885,975 Method and apparatus for managing process transitions
29 6,885,945 Method for estimating origin time, hypocentral distance, and scale based on electric field observation, and apparatus for prediction
30 6,885,720 Modular reactor containment system
31 6,885,719 Method and compositions for grouting decommissioned nuclear reactor components
32 6,885,718 Method and apparatus for transferring an article between fluid-filled vessels
33 6,884,405 Method and device for producing higher fullerenes and nanotubes
34 6,884,304 Zirconium alloy highly resistant to corrosion and to sun burst by water and water vapor and method for thermomechanical transformation of the alloy
35 6,881,925 Laser emission head, laser beam transmission device, laser beam transmission device adjustment method and preventive maintenance/repair device of structure in nuclear reactor
36 6,881,131 Method and apparatus for diamond wire cutting of metal structures
37 6,879,653 Method and device for measuring the diameter of a peripheral rod in a fuel assembly of a nuclear reactor
38 6,877,389 Device for remote inspection of steam generator tubes
39 6,877,376 Apparatus, systems, and methods for ultrasound synthetic aperature focusing
40 6,877,309 Nuclear-fueled power generating system
41 6,876,715 Measurement system of torsion vibration for reactor internal pump
42 6,876,714 Device for heating gas from a thin layer of nuclear fuel, and space engine incorporating such device
43 6,876,713 Filter and fuel assembly for a light-water nuclear reactor
44 6,876,712 Flexible source wire for localized internal irradiation of tissue
45 6,876,195 Method and device for measuring the thickness of an oxide layer on the pencil cladding in a fuel assembly
46 6,875,323 Method of chemically decontaminating components of radioactive material handling facility and system for carrying out the same
47 6,873,671 Reactor manual control system
48 6,868,735 Method for nondestructively evaluating aged deterioration of ferromagnetic construction materials
49 6,867,390 Automated positioning of mobile laser peening head
50 6,867,148 Removal of organic material in integrated circuit fabrication using ozonated organic acid solutions

So much for the "dying" industry, 50 highly technical patents filed in a period of two months. Obviously many people on the planet know a fuck load more than Greenpeace twits. That's not surprising. You can't get into Greenpeace if you passed high school physics apparently.

Pathetic. Weak. Illuminating.

Here is something interesting about nuclear energy and lead and mercury. Nuclear power would actually prevent the increase of the lead content of the planet by destroying uranium and thorium that will decay (ultimately) into lead. Moreover, placement of lead into a nuclear reactor flux would actually destroy lead by transmuting Pb-206 into Bi-207, bismuth being a less toxic element. (Lead 206 constitutes 24% of most lead, depending on its source.)

Mercury has one isotope, 196, that would actually be transmuted into gold, satisfying the old alchemist's dream. However this is a minor natural isotope, having an abundance of only 0.15% of the mercury that rains on our head every day, largely unremarked by greenpeace twits.

I actually don't necessarily like these reactors, but mentioned them just for fun and to illuminate of the nature of stupidity and selective attention.

The reason for building nuclear reactors of course is not to transmute lead and mercury. The reason is to prevent the collapse of the earth's atmosphere. This basic fact escapes the preternaturally stupid no matter how many times you repeat it. This is apparently a result of the fact that inability to think is related to the inability to read.

[jpak]

9. LOL!!!!!

Please tell us more about this "prototype" molten salt breeder reactor.

At one time, Oak Ridge had a Molten Salt Experiment facility (a low-power test bed reactor) - but it wasn't a "prototype" breeder...

http://lpsc.in2p3.fr/gpr/english/MSR/MSR.html

...and the Molten Salt Breeder Project was nothing more than a computer simulation excercise...(see above).

Here's an interesting first-hand account of the MSE...

http://home.earthlink.net/~bhoglund/mSR_Adventure.html

The MSE did have a little "legacy" problem though...

http://www.deprep.org/1995-2/tr95f14a.htm

Given the toxicity of BeF and LiF, and the flammability of graphite (Chernobyl!!!) I think I would rather have an Hg-cooled breeder in my backyard...






(or not)

:)

[NNadir]

10. The MSBR Experiment is explained at length in Alvin Weinberg's

book. One would need to be literate to read the book, which cannot be found with links. Books are things that people read when they don't live by pasting links to subjects they clearly don't understand. People actually get educated by books. On the other hand, those who live by googling, sometimes end up in engaging in rhetoric that displays their tremendous ignorance and intellectual weakness graphically.

Now for the MSR: The reactor operated on thermal breeding conditions (which apparently don't exist according to the preternaturally stupid) and has an isolation loop for Protactinium-234. A breeding cycle was easily established.

You would need to know some physics to understand the subject.

It would be a waste of time to say more, rather like explaining mutation rates to a fundementalist christian. Useless.

Anti-nuclear anti-environmentalists don't understand safety, so it is a complete waste of time to discuss this issue with them as well. They are continually going on about the danger of so called "nuclear waste" but are completely unable to identify a person who has been injured by it. Meanwhile the coal for which they continually apologize for and tacitly support kills people every day. Why would one discuss "safety" with such people of such withered moral stature? When they say "safety," it is rather like describing the "war for oil" as the "war for terrorism." A reasonalbe person merely need point out it is doublespeak.

One of the things that used to characterize an insane asylum was the completely incoherent and inappropriate laughter, by the way. That bears repeating here.

The world is facing a tragedy. It is NOT funny.

[jpak]

11. Dissembling nonsense - and wrong

The MSRE was not a prototype breeder reactor - it was designed to test the characteristics of various molten-salt fuels under various operating conditions.

It produced 239Pu from the fission for 235U (like all thermal uranium reactors) but it was not designed as a "breeder" per se.

From Fusion magazine:

The Molten Salt Hybrid

A "Leisurely Walk" to a Fusion Economy
by C.P. Hager, Jr. (c) 1981, 1998

(This article appeared in the July 1981 issue of Fusion magazine)

<snip>

A test-bed nonbreeding molten salt reactor, called the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, was constructed and operated from 1965 to 1969, providing valuable information relating to systems engineering, reactor kinetics, and overall reliability.

<snip>

note: this is from a cached article...no direct link. Any one that is not afraid of Google can google it up using the key words "The Molten Salt Hybrid" and click on the cache option...

Also

http://www.iket.fzk.de/index.php?group=7&pid=19

http://oakridger.com/stories/040803/new_16.html

The MSBR prototype was never built.

Anyone that can read understands this - the French certainly do...

also...

:rofl:

[NNadir]

12. Yeah right. Let's hear from Alvin Weinberg himself...

Before we do, I'd like to touch again on the religious proclamation that U-238 is not fissionable. The probability of fission per neutron is given graphically in Fig 6.14 on page 235 of Stacey's "Nuclear Reactor Physics."

It is non-zero. Zero is an integer...oh never mind...

One doesn't have to be able to read to interpret this graph. One can look at the pictures. One would hope that this would be helpful, but probably it won't be, any more than a picture of a DNA molecule can help Pat Robert's understand that God didn't create plants and animals in a single afternoon.

Now let's discuss the MSRE (Molten Salt Reactor Experiment).

Weinberg's description of the MSRE is found on pages 125-127 of The First Nuclear Era: Life and Times of a Technological Fixer," which I happen to have in my personal library. (Weinberg was the inventor of the molten salt reactor, and was at the time of the experiment, the head of Oak Ridge National Laboratory - meaning that he had passed high school physics and was ineligible for membership in Greenpeace.)

(A library by the way, is a collection of books, which I apparently need to explain for those whose sole experience with scientific literature consists of googling and misinterpreting what one is reading.)

Weinberg's book is largely non-technical, and can be understood by anyone who does not attempt to superimpose religious opinions over basic science like a Bushie or a Greenpeacer.

Since this book cannot be found by googling, and thus is not free to be misinterpreted and misunderstood by people with a Greenpeace level understanding of nuclear physics (that would be zero), I will reproduce a few choice excerpts for those who can think:

"Molten salts had three great advantages over the aqueous homogeneous system: First, as Ray Briant had realized, their compatibility with stainless steel depended not on a somewhat fragile, thin oxide coating, but rather on the fundamental thermodynamic stability of the fluoride salts of uranium and thorium...

...Finally, thorium as well as uranium dissolved in molten fluorides. The thorium of blanket of a two region breeder was therefore at hand, whereas we never did have proper thorium blanket in the aqueous system...

...its molten fuel (1% U-235, 1% ThF4, 5%ZrF4, 70% Li-7F, 23% BeF2) flowed through channels in a cylindrical array of closely packed graphite columns...

...The molten salt entered the core at 1,175F and left it at 1,225F. It transferred its energy to a...coolant...

...The molten salt reactor began operation in early 1966 and achieved its maximum power (limited by the size of the ultimate heat exchanger) of 7,500 kilowatts in March of that year. It continued to operate remarkably smoothly with interruptions for maintenance until December of 1969 when its operations were terminated so that funds could be diverted to the development of more advanced molten salt systems...

...Before shutting down MSRE we operated it with U-233 as a fuel. Glenn Seaborg and Ray Stoughton, co-discoverers of U-233 were in the control room when we began a year long run with U-233...I think Glenn must have been please to witness 'his' U-233 being put to practical use!...



...To operate with U-233 we first had to extract the original U-235 from the salt. The chemical technologists built a small chemical plant in a cell next to the MRSE...

...It was a remarkable feat! In only 4 days all of the 218 kilograms of uranium was separated from the intensely radioactive fission products and its radioactivity reduced 5-billion fold. I shall never forget my wonderment as I stood next to the unshielded steel cans containing the U-235 that a few days earlier had been mixed with millions of curies of radioactivity. We were particularly proud of this because that tiny chemical plant was large enough to decontaminate the core of 1000 megawatt molten salt breeder...

After such success, our confidence soared and we expected that the AEC would support a much larger molten-salt U-233-Th-232 breeder. Ed Bettis and his crew had been designing various large molten-salt breeders, and we assumed that the AEC would undertake construction...

...but this was not to be for reasons I shall try to explain..."

Well there you have it. The italics are, of course, mine and not Weinberg's.

(Weinberg's 1994 book, from which I've excerpted, can be purchased at Barnes and Nobel and other places:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=3B6pMHCAab&isbn=1563963582&itm=1)

We have the Greenpeace anti-nuclear anti-environmentalist interpretation of the molten salt breeder reactor experiment, an interpretation, IMO, derived from googling and from an inability to understand even on a very low level, the basics of nuclear physics.

Opposed to this we have the words of the man who actually built and ran the experiment when he headed Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It is worth noting that the experiment's start-up was attended the winner of a Nobel Prize in chemistry, one of the greatest chemists in human history, Glenn Seaborg, who not only discovered more elements than any single human being, but also changed the shape of the periodic table forever.

Now, no doubt we'll have some dunderhead response to the presentation of these two interpretations of events. The response will filled with all kinds of religious dogma of the nature of "that's not true..." etc with lots of stupid links, with silly misinterpretations that are supposed to be taken, one would suppose, on the absurd faith that the person providing them has even the remotest clue about the subject.

To a thinking person, it ought to be obvious whose account can should be accepted: Weinberg's.

Pathetic people will clearly take an opposite approach about what to believe. This is to be expected. It's why they're pathetic.

[struggle4progress]

13. MSRE was still causing headaches twenty years after it was shut down:

<snip> The reactor facility, called “Ole Salty” by some, was converted to lab and office space as the reactor lay in stand-by status. Then, in March 1994, samples of the off-gases in the process lines unexpectedly revealed uranium hexafluoride (UF6) and fluorine, a highly reactive gas. Where surveyors expected to find part-per-million concentrations, they found concentrations of UF6 of up to 8 percent and fluorine of 50 percent.

That, and the discovery of uranium deposits on a charcoal filter, prompted a precautionary evacuation of the MSRE buildings. Because the uranium had migrated outside the storage tanks, MSRE became a remediation project under federal and state auspices. But it was a brief disruption, and any risk of a criticality accident or release of radioactive gas was quickly minimized. <snip>

“We discovered a highly hazardous situation in 1994,” Rushton says. “The uranium in the charcoal beds was in an unfavorable geometry that could have led to a chain reaction. If the system had burped, the contamination would have been dispersed over a wide area.

“The more studies we did, the more they showed that it could happen. There was a significant potential for disaster.” <snip>

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ridgelines/nov12/msre.htm

These snippets courtesy of the clique of nuclear enthusiasts at ORNL ...

[jpak]

14. More dissembling and still wrong

CANDU reactors are thermal (not fast) reactors fueled with natural uranium (~0.7% 235U).

They fission 235U - not 238U - as religious twits have laughably suggested - and no amount of hocus pocus will change them facts.

:rofl:

Weinberg was an advocate of MSR's but did not oversee the development of the MSRE.

Again, from the first hand account by H.G. McPherson who actually was involved with the program...

<snip>

http://home.earthlink.net/~bhoglund/mSR_Adventure.html.

The conceptual design of the MSRE was arrived at as follows. To keep the reactor simple we intended to simulate only the fuel stream of a two-fluid breeder reactor, so that no thorium fluoride was included. We wanted the neutron spectrum to be near thermal, as it would be in a commercial reactor, and since graphite was the moderator, this dictated the minimum physical size. The moderator was in the form of a 1.37-m-diam x 1.62-m-high right circular cylinder. Had it been smaller, the neutron leakage would have caused the neutron spectrum to be more energetic than we wished. We would have liked to have a higher power density, but cost considerations limited us to ~10 MW of heat. There was also another reason for limiting the power of the reactor. The AEC accounting rules at the time allowed us to build a 10-MW reactor as an experiment, using operating funds. A higher power reactor would have required us to obtain a capital appropriation and would have limited our freedom to make changes. Actually we miscalculated the heat transfer characteristics and the reactor operated at only 8 MW.

<snip>

Design of the MSRE started in the summer of 1960 and construction started 18 months later, at the beginning of 1962. The reactor went critical in June 1965, and was briefly at full power a year later. After a shakedown period, reliable operation was achieved in December 1966, when a 30-day continuous run was made at full power. While carrying out numerous experiments, the reactor was operated at full power most of the time during the next 15 months, after which the 235U was removed from the fuel salt and later replaced with 233U. The reactor was operated with 233U as the fuel from January through May 1969. This was the first time 233U had been used as a reactor fuel, and AEC Chairman Glen Seaborg and Ray Stoughton, codiscoverers of 233U, were present when the reactor first went critical with 233U fuel.


During the remainder of 1969, the reactor was devoted to a number of experiments, including xenon stripping, fission product deposition, tritium behavior, and plutonium additions. Operation was finally terminated in December 1969 so that the available funds could be applied to other development areas.

<end snips>

The MSRE facility had no thorium blanket and no thorium was ever used in the experiment - it was not a thorium breeder.

www.wmsym.org/Abstracts/2002/Proceedings/28C/330.pdf

(Google up "PDF Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs)" for a schematic of the MSRE facility - no direct link)

Taking Weinberg's writings out of context and attempting to apply them to the MSRE is pathetic.

I call bullshit.

PS: I'm a molten salt guy, and soon ** very soon ** I will become fabulously rich with my advanced MSR design...

:rofl:

[hunter]

15. Huh?

"CANDU reactors are thermal (not fast) reactors fueled with natural uranium (~0.7% 235U)."

"They fission 235U - not 238U - as religious twits have laughably suggested - and no amount of hocus pocus will change them facts"

That is clearly wrong. Yes, uranium 235 gets the reaction rolling, but a significant amount of energy comes from the fission or uranium 238, or of thorium.

A CANDU reactor is not a "breeder" because it does not make more easily fissionable fuel out of thorium or uranium 238 than it consumes. This does not mean it doesn't "burn" uranium 238 or thorium, it most certainly does. But easily fissionable isotopes such as uranium 235 are the primary fuel, and thus without breeder reactors, the ultimate production of energy in CANDU reactors is limited by the supply of these isotopes.

Breeder reactors change the equation -- the limits on our energy production become the amount of thorium and uranium 238 available to us. All that "depleted uranium" we use to shoot people in Iraq becomes potential fuel in a breeder reactor energy economy...

A successful breeder reactor program would change everything. Many environmentalists recognize this (consciously or subconsciously) and there is a strong impulse to wish the problem away.

If you view an industrialized consumer society such as ours as a plague upon this earth (and I do), then such a society powered by breeder reactors is certainly one of the worst sorts of nightmares you can imagine. Picture a steroid pumped Arnold wanabee in an H₂ powered H₂ running over desert wildlife and you've pretty much got my nightmare. I would like to see a more stable and environmentally sensitive society develop before we go on to anything like breeder reactors or cheap fusion power. But you got to play the cards you are dealt.

Back to the specifics of this post, even though the MSRE discussed here did not formally operate as a "breeder reactor" it clearly demonstrated that such a reactor could be used for that purpose.

[jpak]

16. Ugh

238U can capture thermal neutrons and be converted to fissionable 239Pu - but it is NOT fissionable by thermal neutrons...

http://epswww.unm.edu/facstaff/zsharp/103/lecture%2021,%20nuclear%20power.htm

http://www.psigate.ac.uk/newsite/reference/plambeck/chem1/p05016.ht

Now, 238U can be fissioned with fast (>2 Me) neutrons but the these are minor processes in CANDU reactors...

(Google up: canteach.candu.org/library/20040717.pdf for the PDF)

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:4uQdPA0wwFoJ:canteach.candu.org/library/20040717.pdf+CANDU+238+U&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

I'm also not holding my breath that someone will invent a breeder cycle that is sustainable, safe and economical...it ain't gonna happen.

[hunter]

17. Egads! There is a forest behind those trees.

Did you read those links, or is this merely a quibble about my language?

When Uranium 238 captures a neutron:

₉₂U²³⁸ + ₀n¹ � ₉₂U²³⁹ + gamma rays

₉₂U²³⁹ � (23 minutes) ₉₃Np²³⁹ + _-1e⁰

₉₃Np²³⁹ � (2.3 days) ₉₄Pu²³⁹ + _-1e⁰ + gamma rays

The candu.org paper you cited above states "By far the most significant effect of U-238 in the core is resonance capture. This is important enough to require a new heading..."

That's what they are talking about here. A very significant fraction of the energy released in light water or CANDU reactors comes from the fission of plutonium, and this plutonium is derived from Uranium 238.

The overall result of the process is that Uranium 238 atoms in the fuel are "split." In everyday language this is "fission." The fact that a less significant number of Uranium 238 atoms undergo fission in a more direct manner is probably irrelevent to the discussion.

If Uranium 238 only absorbed "fast" neutrons, then plutonium would only be made in breeder reactors. Most plutonium is not made in breeder reactors.

In reactors making weapons grade plutonium the object is not to make energy, but to extract the maximum amount of plutonium 239 from the fuel before it is contaminated with stuff like plutonium 240, which makes it useless for nuclear bomb making.

The Canadians are very sensitive about this issue since plutonium for India's first nuclear bomb was made in a CANDU reactor. Subsequent CANDU designs and fuel cycles have been specifically designed to make the production of weapons grade plutonium very difficult. But it probably doesn't matter much, this cat is long out of the bag...

But certainly in non-breeder reactors the amount of energy you can ultimately extract is limited by Uranium 235. But the limitation isn't because Uranium 238 "...is NOT fissionable by thermal neutrons..."

In any case the concept of "fast" neutrons and "thermal neutrons" is just a shorthand for people who know the physics. It's probably not a useful concept in any layman's debate about nuclear power.

The concept to take home is that without breeder reactors, overall energy production is limited by Uranium 235 resources. This is not a one-to-one relationship, it is the amount of Uranium 235 you have multiplied by some number. Reactors like the CANDU allow you to stretch your supply of Uranium 235 quite significantly by using Uranium 238 or thorium.

In an energy economy using breeder reactors, overall energy production is limited only by the supply of Uranium 238 and Thorium, and this is a very large (and potentially very dangerous) resource.

[NNadir]

18. And now, a sentence from "Nuclear Reactor Physics"

I have less and less time on my hands, but I do need to take some time out for my cruel indulgence in testing the limits of modern stupidity in the age of George Bush.

Here, available for spectacular misrepresentation, just waiting for a stupid response are a few sentences from Nuclear Reactor Physics by William Stacy, page 36-37. Copyright 2001 2001, Wiley and Sons.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=3B6pMHCAab&isbn=0471391271&itm=1

"Fast Fission.

The product nf is the number of neutrons produced on average, from the fissile nuclides for each neutron absorbed in the assembly. There will also be neutrons by the fission of non-fissile nuclei mostly by fast neutrons. Defining the fast fission factor e = total fission neutron production rate/fission production rate in fissile nuclides, nfe, is the total number of fission neutrons produced, on average, for each neutron introduced into the assembly by a previous fission event..."

(Note: I have substituted the English letter n for the Greek letter "eta," and e for "epsilon" in the original text because of the limits of the editor; the italics are mine; the equal sign here substitutes for the definition symbol usually represented by three parallel lines in scientific texts.)

I was very amused by the last spectacular exercise in poor reading comprehension which represented a response to my last post about Alvin Weinberg. That response included the following gems:

1) (Technical) That I have represented that a CANDU reactor as being a fast reactor. (I did point out as discussed on page 43 of the same text referenced in this post that thermal reactors have a distribution -for the spectacularly illiterate this would mean "mixture" of thermalized and fast neutrons, as shown in figure 2.4 on this page (43) for a light water reactor, where the number of thermal and fast neutrons are approximately equal.)

2) (Personal) It was represented that I plan to get rich from developing a type of fast reactor. An understanding of how I plan to get rich would only be available to scientists, not Greenpeace twits. The details are, of course, proprietary and I do not intend to share them with people for whom I have measurable intellectual respect, never mind with people for whom I have zero intellectual respect. However my plan does not involve very much nuclear science. It is an exercise, instead, in esoteric but powerful chemistry.

However, once I am rich, I do plan to spend my new found time to develop further my reactor ideas, unimpeded by responses from the preternaturally stupid. This is a matter of ethics and not a matter of money.

3) (General Drivel) The usual insipid laughter.

I am very much looking forward to the next completely dumb response from our new found nuclear experts, the anti-nuclear anti-environmental Greenpeace "we don't give a shit about Global Climate Change" crowd to this new excerpt from a standard, if rigorous, text on nuclear science. I'll bet it will outstrip the response to Weinberg's book in total misapprehension.

It promises to be really, really, really illuminating.

I do wish it were possible to post Stacey's chapters on neutron slowing down (Chapter 10, pages 379-410), multi-group (vs one group) neutron diffusion theory (pages 123-134 and elsewhere), etc, etc, so we could have some really, really, really, really stupid responses to subjects from people who don't have a fucking clue about even the basics, never mind the moderately advanced. Look though, these guys glaze over with simple addition and subtraction, can't do multiplication and division, and clearly have, at best, heard the word "calculus" from a friend of a a friend of a friend's mother. And even if they've heard the word, calculus, I'll bet they thought that it was a discussion of dental plaque.

Pathetic.

[jpak]

19. Yeah right

:crazy:

[NNadir]

20. A very original response.

I'd be flattered by the emulation, except I have so little respect of any kind for my antagonists, all of them apparently having failed high school physics.

Of course, the intellectual weakness of my opponents arguments is thinner than the ice melting on an ancient glacial lake while they chant mantras and obeisances to a few trivial kilowatts here and there of peak load solar power.

Still I commend my opponents for not embarrassing themselves further. I was hoping for more drivel to feed on.

I'll have to wait for the next thread I guess.

[hunter]

21. Ah, you make me want to edit my post, tighten up my language..

After my post #17 I got to looking at the neutron spectrums in various sorts of reactors...

There is some art to describing such equations in a non-mathematical way. The example NNadir cites is quite hideous.

"The product nf is the number of neutrons produced on average, from the fissile nuclides for each neutron absorbed in the assembly. There will also be neutrons by the fission of non-fissile nuclei mostly by fast neutrons. Defining the fast fission factor e = total fission neutron production rate/fission production rate in fissile nuclides, nfe, is the total number of fission neutrons produced, on average, for each neutron introduced into the assembly by a previous fission event..."

Converting equations into words is not the way to go. Anyone who could understand those words could more easily read the raw equations. Anyone who has trouble reading the raw equations will not be helped by the words.

Anyways, here's a very cool illustration I found:

IMPROVING AND EXPANDING VITAL NUCLEAR
DATA FOR NEUTRON PHYSICISTS



Figure 1. Plot of the total, elastic and fission
cross sections for uranium-238 versus energy.

http://www.cea.fr/gb/publications/Clefs45/clefs45gb/clefs45_fig_1a.html


The fission of Uranium 238 is not significant when neutron energies are less than 10⁶ eV. But that really doesn't mean anything to someone who doesn't have a feeling for "electron volts" or for the neutron spectrum within the various parts of a reactor core.

That "squiggly" part of the graph is the "Resonance Capture" of jpak's citation. This region is below some conventional ranges for "fast neutrons" (eV=10⁴) and above the ranges of "thermal neutrons" (eV=10⁰). I don't know where nuclear reactor engineers draw that line, but it doesn't matter once I see this chart.

The important point here is that non-breeder reactors can indeed "burn" very significant amounts of U-238 or thorium.

[jpak]

22. Not by the fission of 238U

(as was wrongly claimed by a "resident expert" )

In a CANDU reactor, the number of neutrons with energies > 2 MeV is insignificant - there is no significant fission of 238U.

Neutron capture and production of 239Pu from 238U does occur but not all 239Pu nuclei subsequently undergo fission (239Pu accumulates in CANDU fuel).

~29% of the thermal energy produced by CANDU reactors is derived from the fission of 239Pu - not 238U.

Which is the point I made several posts back...

[hunter]

23. Well, nice of you to point out the quibble...

The 238U captures a neutron, is transformed into 239PU, and only then does it undergo fission, which accounts for ~29% of the thermal energy in a CANDU reactor. I'm glad we have that clear.

But in the larger picture, the sorts of mistakes and criticisms a person makes are very revealing of their thought processes.

Before we became an idiot nation making our children insane with fill-in-the-bubble multiple-choice exams, students were always asked to "show their work." You could actually get a 9/10 on an incorrect answer if your work revealed you had approached the problem correctly.

But it is entirely possible to pass a multiple choice exam without having the slightest clue about any actual system the words and numbers are supposed to represent. In my own experience, I took statistics in college but really didn't have a good feel for it until I started working in medical labs and precision machine shops. (It's always a great feeling, far better than getting an "A" on an exam, when you are doing some actual work and you think "Wow, now I get it!")

I originally posted this thread because I think the interplay between politics and technology is fascinating. My own prejudiced opinion is that the scientific camp knows a lot more about the political camp than the political camp knows about the scientific camp.

A project like the Monju breeder reactor gets built because the politicians are looking for "technological fixes" and pork. The scientists and engineers deliver those fixes and pork. Sometimes it turns out badly.