Posted on 07/07/2008 6:13:51 AM PDT by Red Badger
There is some excitement in the nuclear focused blog world about “The World’s First Commercial High Temperature Nuclear Reactor” based partly on a recent article in Power Engineering by Jana Miller titled “Powering Up A Growing Nation”. This project in Shandong Province will be a unique plant whose reactor heat source is two containers full of spherical fuel elements, each one of which is about the size of a billiard ball.
I am a bit reluctant to call this plant a “first”, but I can get just as excited about the third, 10th or 100th plant in a progressive series of improved plants that should number 1000 reactors or more.
The plant, designated as HTR-PM, will be a 200 MWe pebble bed reactor heated steam plant with two reactors, each with a single steam generator (boiler) feeding a single turbine. The plant will be built in Rongchen City on a site large enough to host series of perhaps 10-12 similar plants. In that area of China, there are hundreds of older coal fired power plants generating 50-300 MWe each.
The HTR-PM is a carefully watched project that uses technology old enough to be new again. The concept was introduced in the late 1940s by Farrington Daniels who suggested the idea of combining uranium with graphite, which is a high temperature substance that also moderates neutrons, into small, discrete units that could be piled into a simple, shielded container.
This concept, known as the Daniels’ Pile, was a bit before its time. The material science available in the late 1940s could not provide the tight, vapor-proof coatings needed to ensure that all fission by-products remained sealed in the pebbles in all core conditions. That problem was addressed and overcome by the German project known as the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Versuchsreaktor (AVR) run in Julich from 1959-1988.
General Atomics provided Pebble circa 1994The AVR started operating in 1961, provided power to the grid in 1967 and was shut down after many years of testing and fuel developmental improvements in 1988. The first commercial high temperature reactors
The AVR did not operate in isolation; during the same time there was a high temperature gas cooled reactor, built by Gulf General Atomics (now just General Atomics) and operated in the US at Fort St. Vrain. That HTGR was based on fuel in a different form, but it used fuel particles surrounded by layers of graphite and silicon carbide to provide the capability of operating at a significantly higher temperature and thermal efficiency than the conventional light water reactors.
I had the opportunity to visit General Atomics in 1994, before they decommissioned the fuel manufacturing facility that produced the Ft. St. Vrain fuel, and they gave me the pebble that you see here as a keep sake. It has been on my desk ever since.
The German group operating the AVR also built a commercial unit - Thorium High Temperature Reactor (THTR) - using fuel pebbles where some pebbles contained uranium-235 and others contained thorium-232. This fuel combination intrigued the designers because thorium is about 3-4 times as abundant as uranium, but it needs to be exposed to neutrons in a reactor before it can be used as fuel.
Unfortunately, though they were both commercial reactors, neither the Ft. St. Vrain HTGR nor the THTR operated for very long and neither led to any immediate successors. Good ideas, however, often incubate in the minds of problem solvers that see all of the potential and determine ways to solve the problems for another try. China’s New High Temperature Reactors (HTR)
In 2000, the AVR rose up like a Phoenix in a new location at Tsinghua University with a new name - HTR-10. The Chinese had recognized the potential of the design and purchased essentially all of the makings including technical drawings, machinery, and consulting engineering services from the German owners. In January 2003, the HTR-10 began critical operations and testing. I have a number of friends and colleagues who have visited the facility and have been impressed. You can have a similar experience by watching a video produced by the Australian Broadcasting System titled Nuclear China.
There are many things about pebble bed reactors that fascinate me, but one of them is the fact that they can be configured to be able to withstand a complete loss of cooling without causing any core damage. As long as each reactor unit produces less than 400 MW of thermal energy, operators can turn off the cooling circulators and walk away knowing that the plant will heat up a bit, shut itself down, and never exceed a temperature at which any fuel damage will occur. Now that is a hot idea whose time has come!
The HTR-PM is capable of providing very high quality steam, identical to the steam produced in the most efficient coal fired power plants. In fact, Jim Holm has suggested that we could short cut the lengthy nuclear plant construction process by replacing boilers in existing steam plants with high temperature pebble beds.
It is one hell of a way to help solve the world’s most pressing energy challenge - how do we replace the low cost heat that coal provides to enable our modern economy without creating emissions that may overheat our planet?
Photo credits HTR-10 Schematic and simulated pebble fuel element from Rod Adams archives under creative commons.
jane fonda’s movie agiprop
and three mile island
destroyed our nuclear industry.
If you carry this out to the logical extreme, PBR could power every home in the USA with an outside unit that sits next to your home’s AC compressor..............or power your car for next to nothing...............
Shhhhhh. You’ll wake up congress.
I thought South Africa had one of these up and running 15-20 years ago.....
i don’t know much about it.
but if what you say is true,
that would be too easy!
the liberal-socialists want life to be more difficult than that for us.
Technology so old, it's new again!
I like that idea.
destroyed our nuclear industry.
...which is ironic, since Three Mile Island was largely a success story of nuclear power plant design. Even with multiple failures and errors, there were no injuries or deaths.
None.
I call that a success story when you're talking about a meltdown.
* Cease all ethanol production. It takes away from food production and the unintended consequence is higher food costs. As diesel prices go up, the cost of farming tips the balance of cost to make ethanol a bad idea. Just say "no" to ethanol! Even Jimmy Carter says that diverting farm production from food to fuel is dumb – even HE gets it. This will create only ONE "blend" of gasoline and will cease regional "boutique" blends (gasohols) which are stupid, costly, and meaningless. Trucking custom blends around the country is wasteful. Ethanol blends may actually lead to fewer miles to the gallon, and adds to the cost of production and transportation. Newer cars do not need oxygenated fuels.
* Lift the restrictions in order to drill for oil in Alaska, Gulf of Mexico, and other sites in the CONUS as a matter of national security.
* Encourage the petro industry to construct state-of-the-art refineries and/or retrofit current and dormant ones and crank up production for our newly-accessed oil in the CONUS.
* Make all “carbon credit” scams unlawful. Discrediting Algore should have been a slam-dunk a long time ago. Stop electing Reps who buy into the Global Warming / Global Cooling / Climate Change Hoax. CO2 is not our enemy!
* Construct SEVERAL, regional Pebble-Bed Modular Reactors (or other similar modern designs) that are rechargeable, and cleaner than any current nuclear generator design. Refine spent nuke fuel for recycling. DO SOMETHING NUCLEAR to resolve energy problems.
* Use the residual heat from the reactors above to process motor fuel from coal and/or shale. Even though Clinton "stole" some of the best coal reserves, we still have a lot to use.
* Become independent enough to make the cartels (i.e. OPEC) inconsequential.
* Lift or cap the tax on gasoline. When the tax is higher than the profit margin, the argument over what is “obscene” becomes moot.
* List (chapter and verse) all the regulations and laws that need to be repealed in order to drill, and drill now. Use this list as the new "Contract With America for Energy Independence". Have a mega-bill (Omnibus Package) introduced that in one fell swoop removes the self-imposed energy embargo.
If you squint real hard, and read between the lines, the ‘manifesto’ will require fewer RINOs and LibDems and the election of some clear-minded conservatives to even consider the above.
PBR’s are the cleanest, safest, most economical and easiest to produce of any nuclear reactor ever designed...........That’s why they won’t be made here.............
Prediction;
The more we see serious interest in nuclear in the US, the more times the movie “The China Syndrome” will be re-run on TV.
I’ll believe it when I see it. Helium, which is the coolant / heat transfer medium, is very difficult to work with. The engineering problems associated with making a helium-cooled reactor practical are formidable. The German project and the Ft St Vrain high-temperature gas-cooled reactor in Colorado are no longer running for a reason (and that reason is not those pesky Sierra Clubbers).
The biggest single cost of building a nuke plant is getting the site prepped and all the approvals signed off on. You can do all that with one module, start generating early in the process, and add modules over time. The modules are constructed in a central manufacturing facility and shipped to the nuke plant for installation, so if one plant hits a last minute regulatory snag, the module can just be shipped to another plant
Nitrogen or CARBON DIOXIDE (gasp!) can be used as the coolant gas, too.................
Didn't know thorium could be used in the graphite: this resolves several issues with the older Pu breeding liquid metal reactors.
Which can also breed more fuel than they use, another permanent electric power solution.
That the democrats killed, and the republicans are ignoring.
PEBBLE BED PING.
If you’re interested in lower cost — relative to conventional nukes — electric energy, GET ALL OVER YOUR UNINFORMED CONGRESS CRITTERS ABOUT THIS TECHNOLOGY and DEMAND that they get up to speed on this before the Chinese and others get farther ahead of us than France now is.
If, however, you’d prefer to swelter in the dark in the summer or freeze in the dark this winter, do nothing.
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