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Jason Ford
News editor
The legacy of past and current nuclear fission technologies, funding for new reactors, and the continuing development of nuclear fusion are all under scrutiny this week.
Past, present and future: tough questions for nuclear
Its been an interesting week for the nuclear industry.
On one hand, Cumbria County Council effectively halted progress on assessing the feasibility of West Cumbria as the site for a nuclear waste repository.
The council’s cabinet agreed instead that the government should be encouraged to invest in existing surface storage facilities at Sellafield, which itself has been the subject of much media attention today with the Public Accounts Committee reporting on costs at the site reaching £67.5bn and rising.
The PAC report says deadlines to clean the site have been missed, leaving decommissioning projects over budget.
Eventually a repository will have to be built to house medium-and high-level nuclear material generated mainly by the country’s nuclear power stations, government plans for which can be found here.
Nuclear reactors have so far created thermal energy through a fission reaction but engineers and scientists are working hard to develop fusion reactors that that will provide a secure, low carbon form of baseload energy that won’t create the kind of legacy waste issues the country is currently struggling with.
This Wednesday Napier University hosts Dr Kieran Gibson, deputy director of the York Plasma Institute at York University, who is delivering a talk entitled Nuclear Fusion - within our grasp?
Dr Gibson’s talk, which is free to attend, will take a holistic view of fusion’s progress to date, covering the immediate challenges faced in harnessing fusion energy via magnetically confined plasmas, through to developing fusion in the context of other alternative energy sources.
In November 2012 The Engineer Q&A - a features strand that let’s our readership question engineers working on globally significant projects - focused on the fusion research taking place at ITER in Cadarache, France and the Joint European Torus (JET) at Culham in Oxfordshire.
At the time of publication a member of the ITER team said it was ‘taking time to develop high performance conductors for the central solenoid (the big central magnet (transformer) of the ITER tokamak)’ but added work was ‘progressing well’.
The latest news from the ITER suggests that a ‘technically reliable and economically viable solution’ has been found to the problem, and that designing the conductor with a so-called short twist pitch was key to the breakthrough.
Fusion power is proven but challenges remain in developing a system that can produce continuous electricity at competitive prices.
In our November 2012 feature a member of ITER said, ‘To make fusion energy commercially viable, future fusion reactors will need to produce a positive balance of energy, to harness plasmas for several hours, avoid too expensive materials and, last but not least, find materials that are capable to withstand the enormous heat loads and neutron fluxes that are expected in a fusion power plant (some factors higher than in ITER).’
Electricity from fusion is not likely to enter the grid until at least 2040, so in the interim fission will be instrumental in keeping the lights on, that’s assuming the UK’s proposed fleet of nuclear new build has the confidence of commercial entities willing to back them.
Only this morning Centrica announced that it won’t participate in new build, citing uncertainty about overall project costs and construction schedules.
As part of a deal struck with EDF Energy in 2009 Centrica took an option for a 20 per cent interest in new stations at Hinkley Point and Sizewell.
In a statement issued this morning Centrica’s chief executive Sam Laidlaw said, ‘Since our initial investment, the anticipated project costs in new nuclear have increased and the construction timetable has extended by a number of years.
‘These factors, in particular the lengthening time frame for a return on the capital invested in a project of this scale, have led us to conclude that participation is not right for Centrica and our shareholders.’
The next Engineer Q&A, focusing on the Severn Barrage and tidal energy, will be published in The Engineer’s February digital edition.
Other notable events due to take place include Southern Manufacturing, Cleantech Innovate and BAE Systems Maritime Science and Technology Conference. Details of these and more can be found here.
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Readers' comments (13)
JohnL | 4 Feb 2013 1:36 pm
I can understand Cumbria's concerns about deep storage and the geological risks, tiny though they may be. They are thinking in a political time-frame while the industry needs much longer for investment decisions to be taken, let alone designed and implemented.
But whatever happened to pyroelectrolyis that was being investigated at MIT and in Russia? The idea is to melt the used fuel and recover the U238, apparently all the nasty stuff goes to the other electrode. This (a) massively reduces the amount of really nasty fission products, all of which have short half-lives and (b) would enable the U238 to be used in fast reactors.
It doesn't of course solve the problem of medium and low level waste which constitutes the vast majority by volume but that was a one-off generated by the physically large reactors that we built historically. New reactor designs are very much smaller with correspondingly smaller construction and decommissioning costs.
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Rob Hill | 4 Feb 2013 1:48 pm
If we accept that CO2 is the climate bogey man then I can't see how we can avoid going down the nuclear fission route. We will simply have to find a way round all the "return on investment" questions. The waste storage issue is not difficult technically - it is more of a political and PR problem. If we don't start building some large scale generating capacity soon we will be faced with the prospect of the lights going out. I fear that by delaying any decisions we will back ourselves into a corner where the only thing we can do in the time available is to build gas-fired generation. We need a much more informed way of making decisions than making no decision until there is only one possible solution. Of course, our politicians will try to convince us that this was the best option all along!
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stewart boyle | 4 Feb 2013 2:37 pm
It's good that we are having this grown up discussion. I'd really like to know from all the anti renewables correspondents who regularly fill the comments page here how they square their concerns over the costs of wind power say with the £67.5 billion (and rising) for cleaning up Sellafield. When someone says they need to find "a way around 'return on investment' questions" it rather smacks of double standards. So renewables have to be competitive very quickly in the market while nuclear, with 50 years of development and subsidy behind it, is essential and we have to shape the whole EMR to effectively price carbon high enough for nuclear to be competitive. I personally don't know if nuclear is still going to be needed in future, we certainly need a lot of low carbon options soon, but let's treat the 'solutions' in a fair and balanced way. Otherwise it's just gut feeling, technology bias and prejudice
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Anonymous | 4 Feb 2013 4:35 pm
The nuclear industry claims their power stations as low carbon, but the carbon footprint of building them is huge compared with renewables, and even barrage systems. We only need to look at the mess at sellafield to realise that nuclear is a bad idea, especially foreign built and owned on UK soil. I know the nuclear industry employs lots of engineers compared with renewable tech, but that is a rather selfish reason for all that pronuke propaganda in this august tome;-) lots of engineers because of lots of problems?
There is an old joke in the energy business that nuclear fusion is only twenty years away, and probably always will be. We need a solution now, and it needs to be British owned and built, and renewable, I'm afraid nuclear doesn't tick any of the boxes.
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Editor's comments | 4 Feb 2013 4:35 pm
Playing devil's advocate for a second, why does it need to be British owned? And given the prevalence of foreign companies among the owners of the UK's current renewable plants, does renewable energy really provide that kind of solution anyway?
Colin Megson | 4 Feb 2013 8:07 pm
Yesterday's nuclear - Pressurised and Boiling Water Reactors- these are the ones requiring active intervention to keep them safe and produce tonnes of, what the ill-informed and duplicitous call, nuclear waste. Today's technology is the Gen IV, Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor (SFR) and it's here and now.
The world's first commercial one, a PRISM reactor, is under consideration for burning the UK's plutonium stockpile. Within 5 years it will convert the plutonium into useful fuel, while rendering it useless as a bomb-making material. This will rid us of the world's worst proliferation risk and the reactor will continue generating enough electricity for 750,000 people, 24/7, for a further 50 or 60 years.
This type of reactor is hundreds of times safer than the ones we are about to build. They shut down according to the laws of physics, without human intervention. SFRs, configured as breeder reactors, are able to give every individual on the planet (even when there are 10 billion of us) an energy-rich future, for all of time (from inexhaustible uranium fuel sources).
'Nuclear waste' (the most tragically misleading oxymoron ever), is in fact the most precious energy resource the UK possesses. SFRs can burn this resource as fuel and could produce all of the UK's power for 500 years, from existing materials. The minuscule amount of waste they produce, decays to background radiation levels in only 300 years, so can quite easily and cheaply be stored.
These reactors don't 'play' at solving our problems. The UK gets an unparalleled degree of energy security and our carbon targets are met. almost as an incidental outcome.
This technology is here and now. The reactor currently under consideration could be licensed in 5 years and factory-made in modules, built and commissioned 5 years after that. If we get this first one up and running in the UK, we could lead the world into an era of widespread deployment of these reactors.
All we need, to make this no-brainer decision, is an enlightened Prime Minister or Secretary of State - does anybody happen to know of one?
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Martin | 4 Feb 2013 9:35 pm
I suggested sometime ago that if we were to put solar panels on all south facing roofs, domestic or industrial we could produce all the electricity required during the daytime for the whole country without any other power stations of any kind. You would only need them for dark periods of the day, and this would cost a lot less than the cost of cleaning up nuclear waste etc. The main thing is we can start now and every roof covered would contribute to the demands of the country. Not as a micro production either as some have commented, but as an addition to the national grid!
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CG | 5 Feb 2013 10:29 am
Martin,
How much PV generating capacity do you think we could get for 68 billion quid? I reckon about four nuclear power stations' worth.
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Rob Hill | 5 Feb 2013 2:19 pm
In my previous post I was not trying to be pro nuclear or anti renewables. The real point is that the planning for future generation needs must surely be based on proven numbers in engineering terms rather than fiscal "cityboy" measures of return on investment. If it was left to city investors we wouldn't do anything with a long time horizon unless there was a guarantee of a payout. Simple questions: Is CO2 the problem? Yes, seems to be the popular answer. What technologies do we have (actually have, right now, without exaggerated claims) that can generate in the volumes we need when we need it? None of the renewables come close to passing this test. They will get better of course but they are nowhere close right now. Fusion is too far away and, as yet, unproven on a commercial scale. Nuclear fission has to be a serious contender. I'm not ruling out the role of fast reactors here at some stage in the not too distant future. We need to stand back from the politics, the prejudices and the propaganda and do some hard, honest numbers. What ever mix of generation we chose, the numbers have to work or the lights are going out and no amount of political rhetoric or talk of return on investment will stop it.
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Paul Reeves | 5 Feb 2013 6:40 pm
Just one point - prompted by the issue around Centrica's shareholders and the fact that they don't appear to want to take a risk over the long term.
Technology isn't really the issue here - although investment in R&D for all kinds of energy generation wouln't go amiss. The real issue is how a market based economy can get investment in large capital projects (and even solar panels on all south facing roofs would require this) to 'stick' and not run away to more short term. CLAYTON M. CHRISTENSEN In this article http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/business/a-capitalists-dilemma-whoever-becomes-president.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
suggests that taxes on investment income should be regressive over time (ie less the longer you keep the investment in place). May be not the solution but we shoudl be thinking along these lines or governments should.
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Paul | 5 Feb 2013 6:47 pm
ITER is not, in reality, going to lead to an economically competitive source of energy anytime soon.
In the US, the ARIES project has, for decades, looked at engineering of tokamak-based fusion reactors. Detailed cost models have been developed, and despite numerous iterations they have failed to produce a design that would be sufficiently cheap.
A recent (2008) report painted a bleak picture.
http://aries.ucsd.edu/raffray/publications/UCSD_Reports/UCSD-CER-08-01.pdf
"Fusion fuel is cheap, but the capital costs are high. This may be the Achilles Heel of economic fusion power. The capital costs must be lowered by significant amounts — an order of magnitude of cost reduction would be highly desirable but probably not attainable. Traditional cost cutting efforts offer marginal improvements and will not be sufficiently effective. Innovative approaches that promise orders of magnitude cost reductions on major items must be aggressively pursued… [This will require] new fabrication and production technologies…. "
If competing energy technologies, including renewables, were also allowed to assume order of magnitude cost reductions from entirely new manufacturing technologies, then fusion could never catch up.
The lack of materials capable of withstanding the neutron load is also damning. In other technologies, a lack of a necessary material is sufficient to relegate it to slideware. For fusion, it's just a minor problem to be handwaved away.
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