coal2nuclear.com 
coal2nuclear.com
Part 5 Small high-temperature liquid
reactors.
(Right) Here is where your electricity is coming from.
As you can see, quite a lot of your electricity is coming from expensive natural gas rather than much cheaper coal, hydro, or nuclear. Wonder why your power bills have been creeping up? Look no further. You know who's doing it to you. (Wikipedia)
(Right) A quick reminder of all the basic parts that make up a coal burning power plant.
OUR PRICELESS AND IRREPLACEABLE OLD COAL
BURNING POWER PLANT SITES.
AS NIMBY - FREE AS A POWER PLANT CAN BE.
The Global Warming emergency has
caused a lot of politicians who do not have backgrounds in, nor in-depth
understanding of, electricity generation and distribution to become decision
makers about electricity's future. They are advocating elimination of many
existing smaller coal power plants and their sites. They do not appear to
understand that the most effective weapons in the fight against Global Warming
are the physical locations upon which thousands of old coal burning power plants
are built. These old power plant sites - some nearly 100 years old - are the
most fertile ground in America for electricity's future growth.
Power plants are located where transportation, electrical grid, and cooling water access intersect and, in the modern "Not In My Backyard" world of endless costly court battles, new power plant sites and their operating permits are virtually impossible to obtain. Why? Any or all of those critical accesses could depend upon hundreds or even thousands of property owners along proposed right-of-ways - any one of which could bring a project to establish an new power plant site to a screeching halt for decades.
This means these old existing sites are, and will always continue to be, nearly irreplaceable essential components in our energy supply chain. Repowered with new, small, far more powerful nuclear reactors, these old coal power plant sites will continue to provide the energy necessary to power our children's future long after the current renewable energy bubble has burst.
We simply can't allow these power
plant sites to be shut down, broken up like Humpty-Dumpty, and sold off for
non-power plant use. Repowering or replacing an old coal burner means much more
than today's victory over Global Warming. It means we have renewed and
reaffirmed our electricity production system for at least several yet-unborn
generations.
(Above, the kind of power plant I'm talking about.) Consumers Energy's J.R. Whiting power plant (1952). Has three ~100 MWe coal burning boilers, burns 1.4 million tons of coal per year, has 125 employees. One 311 MWe GE-Hitachi reactor could replace all three boilers, keep the plant open another 40 years.
Part 1:
1. Babcock &
Wilcox's 125 MWe "mPower" Small Modular slow Reactor (SMR).
Reactor type:
Integral PWR
Power: ~125MWe, ~400MWt (air cooled) (136 MWe liquid cooled)
Reactor coolant: <14MPa (2000psia), ~600K (620F)core outlet
(Primary coolant loop) 620F = 1,786 psia saturated
Steam conditions: <7MPa (1000psia), superheated
(Secondary coolant loop) 544F =
1,000 psia + 76F superheat.
Reactor vessel diameter: ~3.6m (12ft)
In real life, losses in the steam generator will make it more like 10F superheat.
Height: ~22m (70ft)
Fuel assemblies Sixty-nine 17x17, uranium dioxide
Height: ~half of standard fuel assembly
Fuel assembly pitch: 21.5cm
Active core height: ~200cm
Core diameter (flat to flat): ~200cm
Fuel inventory: <20t
Average specific power: ~20kW/kgU (20 kW per kg
of Uranium)
Core average fuel burnup: <40GWd/tU (40 GigaWatt-days per ton of Uranium)
Target fuel cycle length: ~5 years
Maximum enrichment: <5%
Reactivity control: Control rods
Other features: No soluble boron, air cooled condenser, spent fuel stored
in containment for 60 year design life
This is an impressive, very modern, slow-neutron reactor. Unlikely we'll see slow-neutron reactors evolve much further. What this small additional bit of superheat gives us is a world of freedom from those huge and costly steam dryers that plague your slightly cooler 900 psia, 530F, neighborhood mega-reactor. Unfortunately, it is a 620F slow neutron so in all likelihood the high pressure stage of the existing 3 stage turbogenerator will have to be changed to a second intermediate pressure stage.
2. General Electric-Hitachi's 311 MWe nuclear
waste burning, coal boiler emulating,
GE-Hitachi Prism Congress .pdf GE-Hitachi Advanced Recycling Center .pdf
GE-Hitachi ARC - Advanced Reactor Designs .pdf
The author finds a lot to like about the nuclear waste
burning GE-Hitachi
PRISM reactor.
It's large enough to make a real dent in "Small Coal" CO2 pollution. It runs on the nuclear waste produced by your neighborhood big "slow" reactor - we're sure to have plenty of that around for a long time - being a "fast" reactor, what little waste it does make won't stay radioactive very long.
Notice above that its output temperature is 930F which means it can emulate a coal fire and run in the same thermal league as the Russian BN-800.
A trick the Russian BN-800 CAN'T do is cool itself down passively. As a matter of fact, this is the ONLY fast reactor the author knows of that can go passively cool to safety. Clever, these Japanese. The argon reactor jacket indicates it must have taken a ton of thermodynamic studies to come up with a passive design they felt they could take to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Also note the earthquake shock absorbers - important in Japan. Notice also the entire system is below grade. Good for radiation blocking and Kamikaze Camel Jockeys.
Also, its made by one of the world's largest producers of wind turbines. How "Green" can a nuclear reactor get?
3. Throwing pebbles at high energy costs and Global Warming:
A third example of this kind of thinking is this
drawing from China. It is using a "Pebble Bed" reactor (left, olive,
dark red) which heats the heat exchanger
The steam generator produces both high pressure superheated steam to drive: 1, the high pressure stage of the three stage turbine (brown), 2, reheats the high pressure stage's discharge steam, 3, then uses the reheated steam to drive the intermediate (orange) and low pressure (green) stages of the turbogenerator.
Steam lines are dark blue, condensate lines are light blue. Heat exchangers at the bottom are the economizer stages.
This is exactly a modern coal burning power plant set-up except the Chinese are using a high temperature nuclear reactor instead of a coal burning boiler.
Pebble beds under about 110 MWe are considered to be "Intrinsically, Passively, Safe" - meaning operators just can't do anything stupid enough to make them dangerous. Since the Chinese strongly favor 200+ MWe electricity generators in their power stations, they will have to use a pair of pebble beds in tandem to drive a common steam generator.
Clever, these Chinese.
(Left) Pebbles in a pebble bed reactor. Not unlike charcoal briquettes in your backyard grille. The control rods go up and down in the tubes, drop by gravity for shut-off if the reactor gets hot enough to melt the fusible links holding them up. Along with Doppler Broadening over-temperature limiting, automatic control rod drop is one of several ways the reactor automatically shuts itself down on over-temperature.
Believe it or not, the United States
is currently (as of summer 2010) hard at work at Idaho National Labs "re-inventing" the
pebble bed reactor as part of our "Next Generation" reactors project.
(Right) The Rongcheng pebble bed power plant
complex.
(From Chinese project proposal documents. There are going to be 36 pebble
bed reactors
in 7 buildings)
4. Author's pebble bed system. The author would like to take advantage of the 1,700F temperature the pebble bed reactor produces and use 1,200F supercritical water to heat a steam generator that makes both superheated and reheated steam. This is the most common set-up for both old and new coal burning power plants.
We could buy the already-developed 100 MWe Chinese HTR-PM reactors by the hundreds and convert all our smaller, older power plants from coal or natural gas to nuclear in a very short while for a very reasonable cost. Nuclear and coal are at near parity, but we could save a lot of money converting the natural gas power plants to nuclear. Perhaps they should be converted first. Conversion of our natural gas power plants to nuclear would free up a lot of natural gas. Makes the idea of converting natural gas into gasoline an even better idea.
There you have it. Four somewhat
different, but ready-to-go ways we can repower our
Part 2:
Boiler Swapping Examples: Two quick and simple examples of how both coal and natural gas boilers could be replaced by nuclear boilers are offered: Taichung, perhaps the world's largest coal-burning power plant, and the U.S. Capitol Building Complex, which is heated and cooled by industrial-sized natural gas boilers.
If you owned a supersized coal burning power plant here is the biggest reason why
you would want to convert to nuclear:
Permits. Permits. PERMITS. PERMITS. PERMITS!
Would you rather have an existing site that is already permitted or do you want a new site so badly you are willing to fight in court forever against anti-nuclear environmentalists in the pay of your competition?
An existing old coal burning power plant has enormous local support for the idea that adding a small modular nuke electricity generation unit is far better than shutting the plant down.
Always get the identities and photographs of protesters and make sure everyone at every discussion meeting knows where THEY live. Always photograph any protest demonstrations with a wide-angle lens - leaving plenty of space on either side - so everyone can see how few protesters there really are.
1. A
lready paid for - NO NEW COSTS FOR MOST OF THE EQUIPMENT2. Already wired to our cities - NO NEW TRANSMISSION LINE RIGHT-OF-WAYS NEEDED
3. A
lready have cooling water - NO NEW RIPARIAN OR PRIOR APPROPRIATION RIGHTS NEEDED4. A
lready have access roads - NO NEW ROAD RIGHT-OF-WAYS NEEDED5. A
lready have railroad tracks - NO NEW RAILROAD RIGHT-OF-WAYS NEEDED6. U
sually have ample land for several additional future units - NO NEW LAND NEEDED, COAL YARD LAND WILL BECOME LAWN SOON7. N
o construction delays - THEY ARE ALREADY RUNNING, CAN CONTINUE TO RUN DURING UPGRADE EQUIPMENT INSTALLATION8. A
lready have proven operators who know the equipment - FEWER OPERATORS LOOSE JOBS, EXISTING OPERATORS WOULD BE BETTER PAID9. C
leaner working environment - NUCLEAR PLANTS ARE CLEAN[A helpful power plant operator reader suggested I add the following. (Thank you)]
A few advantages you may want to list in terms of BOP. Feel free to use them or
not...
1. Construction is made *cheaper* because all necessary roads, water transport
and rail lines are already in place. A huge savings relative to a green field
plant and even a currently operating nuclear plant.
2. Licensing:
a. Water usage for everything from cooling to potable water. In place.
b. Sewage and waste water discharge. In place.
c. Air pollution (not that it's needed) in place, frees up carbon licenses if
this occurs.
d. Hazardous waste storage/processing (all industrial facilities have to pay for
this, regardless). In place.
e. Lube oil and chemical usage/storage licenses. In place.
3. Control Room(s). Only a retrofit of the existing coal plant (to bring it up
to N-stamp standards) controls have to occur.
4. Grid access. The grid and switchyard is *in place* and ready to swap over. If
MW out put is close to the same, it's even possible the same main bank
transmission can be used, a huge savings, along with, BTW, all the associated
remote monitoring (relays for undervoltage, overvoltage, shorts, grounds, etc
etc), already in place. No major transmission upgrades needed if MWs are to stay
the same and even then, only minor ones at worse.
5. Human Resources. The coal plant will have trained operators and maintenance
personnel many/some/a lot of whom will be able to migrate over (literally by
walking) to the new plant after NRC qualifications.
FUN COMMENT: (From another reader:)
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Part 3:
in an
existing coal power plant.
Proximity: 5,000 sailors on an aircraft carrier live for years within 500 feet of two or more fairly large nuclear reactors.
Environment: Most coal burning power plants are located on bodies of water for cooling. Reactors installed in underground silos located on tropical coasts or flood-prone rivers could be inundated by floods, hurricane/cyclone storm surges or tsunamis.
The neighbors might object:
Fuel shipments and storage:
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Part 4:
Converting a
typical supersized coal power plant to nuclear.
Now
is another one of those Sputnik déjà vu moments in U.S. history.
make ending Global Warming financially attractive.
The economics of repowering a supersized coal burning power plant: Buy a nuclear boiler twice as large as you need.
So, in addition to ending Big Bend's 10 million tons of CO2 every year, we get an almost free full sized nuclear power plant's worth of electricity in addition to what Big Bend is already putting out.
There will never be much
Repowering
a supersized coal burner to nuclear. The new equipment: A
BN-800 reactor mounted on a buried barge
covered by a huge mound of dirt, and a new "hybrid" turbine (located between the
reactor and the original coal burning power plant).
The addition of the hybrid turbine almost doubles the electricity output
of the power plant for very little additional cost - $300 million installed
turbine-generator cost gives us 1.3 billion dollars of new electrical generating
capacity at
This approach ends the Global Warming CO2 this plant was producing while almost doubling its electrical output. What's not to like from a deal like that?
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The author is mulling over the possibilities of a liquid reactor that is automatic, unattended, and intended to replace the world's 1 million small fossil fuel boilers as if they were your basement hot water heater. This is the only way we will be able obsolete the fossil fuels that are causing most of Global Warming in such a way that Global Warming will never return.
One major advantage of liquid reactors is that, unlike solid fuel reactors, they
are capable of rapid
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.html Thorium page, pdf of Thorium page: Thorium Report .pdf
http://www.thoriumpower.com/
Thorium Power Ltd. is a nuclear energy pioneer and the leading developer of
thorium-based nuclear fuels.
Since 1994, Thorium Power Ltd has been involved in a Russian programme to
develop a thorium-uranium fuel, which more recently has moved to have a
particular emphasis on utilisation of weapons-grade plutonium in a
thorium-plutonium fuel. The program is based at Moscow's Kurchatov Institute and
receives US government funding to design fuel for Russian VVER-1000 reactors.
The design has a demountable centre portion and blanket arrangement, with the
plutonium in the centre and the thorium (with uranium) around itc. The blanket
material remains in the reactor for nine years but the centre portion is burned
for only three years (as in a normal VVER). Design of the seed fuel rods in the
centre portion draws on extensive experience of Russian navy reactors.
The thorium-plutonium fuel claims four advantages over the use of mixed
uranium-plutonium oxide (MOX) fuel: increased proliferation resistance;
compatibility with existing reactors - which will need minimal modification to
be able to burn it; the fuel can be made in existing plants in Russia; and a lot
more plutonium can be put into a single fuel assembly than with MOX fuel, so
that three times as much can be disposed of as when using MOX. The spent fuel
amounts to about half the volume of MOX and is even less likely to allow
recovery of weapons-useable material than spent MOX fuel, since less fissile
plutonium remains in it. With an estimated 150 tonnes of surplus weapons
plutonium in Russia, the thorium-plutonium project would not necessarily cut
across existing plans to make MOX fuel
Under 200 megawatt (thermal) Mininuke Reactors:
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/ http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/
http://www.facebook.com/EnergyFromThorium LFTR activity place.
Thorium and uranium are dissolved in molten salt, simplifying fueling and
waste removal compared to today's nuclear power plants. Prototype molten salt
reactors were developed and tested by the US at Oak Ridge National Laboratories
in the 1960s and 1970s. In 2006 the Oak Ridge research papers were scanned and
posted on the internet. A
collaboration of scientists, engineers, and professional volunteers has
begun developing an updated conceptual design for the LFTR.
From:
