Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Hyperion, err, reborn?

Update: Hyperion PR explains their reasoning. (h/t Soylent)

Idaho Samizdat reports on nuclear startup Hyperion's recent conference presentation:

[Idaho Samizdat] Hyperion reveals design details of its 25 MW reactor

Dan Yurman calls this the "first release of reactor design information". Except the reactor design "released" appears to have very little to do with Hyperion as it was advertised. Googling into the past:

Hydride fuel

The key to the success of Hyperion will be its fuel – uranium hydride powder, which allows the hydrogen moderator to easily move in and out of the core. The physical characteristics of uranium hydride, a combined fuel and neutron energy moderator, are ideal for the generation of safe nuclear power. The reactor operates at an optimum temperature of 550°C, selected as the goal for the so-called Generation IV reactors by the US Department of Energy (DoE). At 550°C, the dissociation pressure for the hydrogen above the hydride is approximately eight atmospheres, which permits easy transportation of the gas without presenting significant high-pressure risk. The temperature-driven mobility of the hydrogen contained in the hydride can change the moderation, and therefore the reactor criticality, making the reactor self-regulating.

[NEI] High hopes for hydride (January 1 2009) (and many other articles )

Yet what the slides on Samizdat blog describe are not this, but rather a fast reactor, using solid ceramic fuel elements (uranium nitride) with lead-bismuth coolant. This is completely different, and I think it very bizarre that this goes under the same 'Hyperion' name. It is no longer a thermal-spectrum reactor (there is no moderator). The 'unique' idea of the self-regulating uranium hydride fuel is discarded. Sure there are reasons for major redesigns (and this is still purely conceptual), but this isn't even the same idea.

Adding to the strangeness, the Hyperion website quitely erased its original advertisements of hydride fuel. Just look at Google's cache of the main product description. The current version is the same minus one paragraph:

The core of the HPM produces energy via a safe, natural heat-producing process that occurs with the oscillation of hydrogen in uranium hydride. HPMs cannot go “supercritical,” melt down, or get “too hot.” It maintains its safe, operating temperature without the introduction and removal of “cooling rods” – an operation that has the potential for mechanical failure.

Analogous excisions were made on the FAQ page. And as far as the public-facing website goes, there does not seem to be any explanation for (or indication of) this complete reversal.

Incidentally, the new Hyperion seems conceptually similar to the Lawrence Livermore's SSTAR design - like Hyperion, it is a sealed, ~20 MWe, lead-cooled nitride-fuel fast reactor.

http://www.gen-4.org/Technology/systems/lfr.htm

https://www.llnl.gov/str/JulAug04/Smith.html

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Newsbox

Corrupt thieves are after Italy's wind subsidies:

Oreste Vigorito, head of the IVPC energy company and president of Italy's National Association of Wind Energy, was arrested on Tuesday in Naples. Vito Nicastri, a Sicilian business associate, was arrested in Alcamo, Sicily.

Two other men were arrested in Sicily and the Naples area, while 11 others were charged but not arrested. Police said the charges related to fraud involved in obtaining public subsidies to construct wind farms.

[Financial Times] Top executives arrested in Italy wind farm probe

Several national plans for nuclear expansion are going forwards:

In Britain, Miliband proposes plan to build 15 GW of new reactors by 2030. Which to be fair, doesn't do much other than replace existing nuclear plants. Which is important, but hardly addresses CO2 emissions. The figure in the article is a projected 30% nuclear electricity in 20 years, or barely ~15% of primary energy.

(Simultaneously, the UK is moving on carbon-sequestration plans, funding giant demonstration plants. Earlier this year Miliband established requirements not to approve any new coal plants without CCS.)

There is a circulating Guardian blogpost with ridiculous FUD about UK's nuclear plan. Curiously, the article does not mention the author's conflict of interest.

In the US Senate, Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and James Webb (D-VA) offer a bill aiming to double nuclear capacity by 2030. The main action is a direct subsidy (loan guarantees), which I think is dubious economic policy. A speech by Sen. Alexander introducing this bill is transcribed here.

In the UAE, WSJ reports the South Korean bid for four new reactors is taking a lead, underbidding the other competitors. The contractor will be announced in just a few weeks.

China's aggressive trade policy includes blocking exports of strategic lanthanide metals (which among other things are crucial to wind turbines and electric cars). Der Spiegel reports this may cause supply shortages around the world. Separately, Chinese solar firms admit to dumping solar panels in the US.

Also in Der Spiegel is an ominous feature, "Westward Expansion: Gazprom's American Ambitions".

WSJ reports China's advancing plans on Gen 4 reactors, specifically SFRs. I think the article may be confused: it refers to an Experimental Fast Reactor generating 800 MWe power, whereas it is apparently a research reactor of only 65 MWt [2]. There are 800 MWe commercial fast reactors in the plans for China, but these are Russian BN-800's.

In Jordan, a $1 billion aquifer project is being stymied by substantial radium contamination. Purely natural contamination from thorium minerals. Puts the "oh no the power plant leaked 2 Bq" stories in perspective.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

A.Q. Khan: Deng Xiaoping gifted Pakistan with 50kg HEU

History is being brought to light.

[Times of India] How China gifted 50kg uranium for two bombs to Pakistan

In a letter that Khan sent to British journalist Simon Henderson, parts of which have already been made public with the latest dribble coming out ahead of Obama’s visit to China next week, the Pakistani metallurgist reveals the following sequence of an episode the broad contours of which are well known despite Chinese-Pakistani subterfuge for nearly 30 years: In 1976, some four years after India tested its first nuclear device, Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto approached China’s supreme leader Chairman Mao in his quest for the nuclear bomb. By this time, Bhutto had already invited expat Pakistani scientists, including A.Q.Khan, to return home to help Islamabad make the bomb to ensure that the country was never again humiliated by India the way it happened in 1971.

...

After winning Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's approval, Khan, the general and two others flew aboard a US made Pakistani C-130 to Urumqi. Khan says they enjoyed barbecued lamb while waiting for the Chinese military to pack the small uranium bricks into lead-lined boxes, 10 single-kilogram ingots to a box for a total of 50 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU), for the flight back to Islamabad. "The Chinese gave us drawings of the nuclear weapon, gave us kg50 enriched uranium," Khan wrote in letter to his wife Henny which was meant to be an expose to get even with the military, which locked him up on proliferation charges even though Khan says they were part of the transactions approved by all governments that came to power in Islamabad, civilian or military.

By Khan’s account, Pakistan did not initially use the Chinese fissile material and kept it in storage till 1985 because they had made a “few bombs” with their own material. The Pakistanis then asked Beijing if it wanted its nuclear material back. After a few days, Khan says the Chinese wrote back "that the HEU loaned earlier was now to be considered as a gift... in gratitude" for Pakistani help. The Pakistanis promptly used the Chinese material to fabricate hemispheres for two weapons and added them to Pakistan's arsenal.

Other articles:

Washington Post

Xinhua (Chinese state news)

The Nation (Pakistan)

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Newsbox

France should be about to turn on a new uranium enrichment plant, Areva/Eurodif's Georges Besse II. How big is this? Tricastin is a site with an existing gaseous diffusion plant - a facility so immense, it is powered by four dedicated nuclear reactors. Now they are replacing the existing plant with centrifuges that are fifty times more energy-efficient. (No, seriously). This will free up almost all of the 3,800 MWe of the Tricastin power plant - not a trivial energy savings.

[NEI] GBII on schedule for start-up in 2009

Areva said 29 September that full testing of Georges Besse II has entered its final phase and will be completed in early November 2009

Incidentally, Georges Besse is named after Eurodif's founder who was murdered by communists.

Elsewhere, Japan is beginning its first trial of plutonium fuel in a PWR:

[Asahi Shimbun] 'Pluthermal' trial finally starts (with associated editorial)

To clarify to some readers: although this is recycling plutonium from spent fuel, it is not a true closed fuel cycle. In LWRs, much less fissile plutonium is created than fissile U-235 + Pu-239 is consumed: it is very far from breakeven, and so is only capable of using a fraction of accesible energy. LWRs use only ~1% of the energy from natural uranium; recovering and using plutonium, in the form of MOX fuel, increases this by only 10-20% (from the article).

Credit MIT study

But the point of plutonium recycling is not fuel efficiency, but the destruction of plutonium. There's various motivations for doing this: for one, becuase Pu-239 is a problem for conventional (geologic) waste disposal. Its half life (24,000a) is extremely long by human timescales, yet still short enough to be quite radiotoxic, which creates an unusual challenge. When the design parameters for waste repositories require 100,000-year timeframes, it is mainly because they are throwing away Pu-239. As the graph shows, almost all of the radioactivity on the 10^4-10^5 year timescale is Pu-239 (red). So here is a motivation for destroying it: waste storage is greatly simplified, from 10^5 year storage to the ~500 years of short-lived fission products (blue).

(Actually this would also need the destruction some other 'minor' actinides - e.g. Am-241. This is possible, but isn't yet being done. The conventional chemical seperation, PUREX, does not separate minor actinides from fission products - only plutonium and uranium (hence the acronym)).

Of course, in light of closed fuel cycles and a plutonium-breeding economy, this MOX episode may soon look rather absurd.

Steve Kirsch now writes a blog.

About Scientific American. Brave New Climate is a good place to start reading about it; Stanford's Mark Jacobson defends himself in the comments section.

NASA is designing an experiment on the effects of low-dose radiation, as for long-duration human space travel. The subjects are spider monkeys. Looking it up, the background radiation in deep space is 0.3-1 Sieverts/year, compared to 0.003 Sv/year on earth.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Spanish wind power exposed

I saw this stupid propaganda on Slashdot:

[Slashdot] Tech Allows Stable Integration of Wind In the Power Grid

One of the most frequently raised arguments against renewable power sources is that they can only supply a low percentage of the total power because their unpredictability can destabilize the grid. Spain seems to have disproved this assertion. In the last three days, the wind power generation records with respect to the total demand were beaten twice (in special conditions: a very windy weekend, at night): 45% on November 5 and almost 54% last night (Google translation; Spanish original). There was no instability. These milestones were accomplished with the help of a control center that processes meteorologic data from the whole country and predicts, with high certainty, the wind and solar power that will be generated, allowing a stable integration of all the renewable power. You can see a graphic of the record here.

First off, by most definitions Spainish wind is only a small percentage of total electricity: 9%.

[IEA] Monthly Electricity Statistics

In 2008, just 27 GWh out of a total of 287 GWh generated were wind/solar/geothermal combined. The only numbers appearing the Slashdot are peak power figures - where for a few hours is wind power five times above annual average. This is what they are pointing to - November 8 2008:

Image credit Red Eléctrica de España

[Red Eléctrica de España] Seguimiento de la demanda de energía eléctrica [requires Flash/SWF player]

(I cut off the axes because I shrunk the image and the text is too small. See the original: the y-axis range is 35 GWe, and the x-axis is a 26-hour time period).

For perspective, compare this to last week - take October 31:

Image credit Red Eléctrica de España

(30-hour time range). Here wind power is down to 1/10th of last night's peak - the figure that actually makes it into the news. And the difference, as you'd naturally expect, is entirely made up of natural gas.

Friday, October 30, 2009

The Atlantic's greenwashing of the Carter energy policy

It feels like 1977 all over again: economy in the doldrums, crisis in the Middle East, and a charismatic new Democrat in the White House preaching the gospel of clean energy. Can Obama succeed where Carter did not? Yes—but only if we’ve learned the lessons of three decades of failure.

[The Atlantic] The Elusive Green Economy

July's Atlantic article paints Carter as a visionary of "clean energy". It highlights his subsidizes for wind and solar power. It narrows in on the symbolic White House solar panels as a metaphor for the entire era.

It completely whitewashes any mention of the bulk of Carter's energy policy which was the promotion of coal.

The modern Carter eulogy is a fable. His energy policies had nothing to do with environmentalism or climate change: on the contrary they were primarily motivated by energy shortage, a concept incomprehensible to the armchair eco-warriors.

Why not excerpt directly from Carter's 'malaise' speech:

In little more than two decades we've gone from a position of energy independence to one in which almost half the oil we use comes from foreign countries, at prices that are going through the roof. Our excessive dependence on OPEC has already taken a tremendous toll on our economy and our people. This is the direct cause of the long lines which have made millions of you spend aggravating hours waiting for gasoline. It's a cause of the increased inflation and unemployment that we now face. This intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic independence and the very security of our nation. The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our nation. These are facts and we simply must face them.

...

Point three: To give us energy security, I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation's history to develop America's own alternative sources of fuel -- from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the sun.

I propose the creation of an energy security corporation to lead this effort to replace 2-1/2 million barrels of imported oil per day by 1990. The corporation I will issue up to $5 billion in energy bonds, and I especially want them to be in small denominations so that average Americans can invest directly in America's energy security.

...

Point four: I'm asking Congress to mandate, to require as a matter of law, that our nation's utility companies cut their massive use of oil by 50 percent within the next decade and switch to other fuels, especially coal, our most abundant energy source.

...

You know we can do it. We have the natural resources. We have more oil in our shale alone than several Saudi Arabias. We have more coal than any nation on Earth. We have the world's highest level of technology. We have the most skilled work force, with innovative genius, and I firmly believe that we have the national will to win this war.

[PBS] Primary Sources: The "Crisis of Confidence" Speech

I'm not sure how much more needs to be said.

Obviously there is zero mention of CO2 or climate change, which is what you'd except in a eulogy of coal and shale oil. (Open question: what was the state of anthropogenic climate change science as of 1979, and did Carter make any political mention of it during his term?)

I want to highlight the third paragraph - "I propose the creation of...", because Carter followed up on it. The "energy security corporation" he refers to became the Synthetic Fuel Corporation, which was designed to create synthetic oil out of coal.

Carter's grand design would have produced the equivalent of 2 million bbl. of oil per day, an amount equal to almost 40% of current petroleum imports, from abundant American supplies of shale and coal.

[Time] Some Setbacks for Synfuels

This is the crux of Carter's energy policy: to end importation of Middle Eastern oil (which incidentally would do nothing to relieve price volatility - but then Carter is a textbook case of "no clue about economics"...), create a subsidized domestic fuel program. And because conventional oil is short in the US, use unconventional (expensive) sources like shale oil and coal. And these are vastly more CO2-emitting than conventional petroleum - Carter's policy is absolutely the opposite of "clean energy", "save the climate".

Incidentally, what is the CO2 intensity of coal-to-liquids? I've tracked down the numbers. The conversion process (excluding refining to gasoline) emits 1.8-3.0 tons CO2 per ton oil (this excludes the carbon content of the fuel itself). Petroleum crude has a carbon fraction of ~0.85; I assume synthetic crude is the same. Then the CO2 content of crude oil is 3.1 tons CO2/ton, and synfuels add 1.8-3.0 tons CO2 to this, for a relative increase of 60-100%.

[BERR] [PDF file] Technology Status Report: Coal Liquefaction

[ORNL] Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center - Conversion Tables

This agrees with reported media figures - e.g. this NYT article says coal-to-liquids "doubles" the CO2 intensity:

[NYT] $100 Oil = Liquid Coal = ?

I should point out a few other pathologies in the Atlantic article. Once again, journalists demonstrate complete ignorance of the capacity factor (you may have guessed this is a pet peeve of mine).

Peter Le Lièvre, the co-founder of Ausra, a solar-thermal company in Mountain View planning a 177-megawatt facility in central California, told me. BrightSource, an Oakland competitor, is licensed to build 2,600 megawatts of capacity across 14 plants. Upon their completion, these solar-thermal plants will produce more energy in California than either of the state’s nuclear facilities.

On the contrary. 2,600 MW of solar thermal capacity is far less - at 21% capacity factor (e.g. the capacity factor SEGS plants - solar thermal in California's Mojave desert) is 4,800 GWh(e)/year. Each of Diablo Canyons' reactors individually generate 7,000-10,000 GWh(e)/year:

[IAEA] Power Reactor Information System

The author is clueless to the difference between 20% capacity factor solar and 90% capacity factor nuclear, resulting in yet another factually false factoid.

The author probably did not study physics, as he is scandalized by the second law of thermodynamics:

This gave rise to a modern power industry that not only emits enormous amounts of greenhouse gases but does so with remarkable inefficiency. (A typical coal-fired plant burns three lumps of coal to produce one lump’s worth of electricity; the rest goes up the chimney as waste heat.)

(And solar thermal plants do what, he thinks?)

And on Amory Lovins' essay, he disgracefully misrepresents the infamous "hard/soft" dichotomy:

At a time before Al Gore was even in Congress, Lovins noted: “The commitment to a long-term coal economy many times the scale of today’s makes the doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration early in the next century virtually unavoidable, with the prospect then or soon thereafter of substantial and perhaps irreversible changes in global climate.” He dubbed this “the hard path.”

The alternative, which Lovins called “the soft path,” favored “benign” sources of renewable power like wind and the sun, along with a heightened commitment to meeting energy demands through conservation and efficiency.

This is quite false. The "hard/soft" distinction is not "polluting/clean" but "centralized/decentralized". Nuclear reactors, hydroelectric dams are "hard". "Community-sized" coal plants are "soft". The Lovins essay is not an attack on pollution, but on attack on corporate industry. I'll quote directly from the NYT's article on his 1977 paper: (the actual paper is attached in the PDF)

[RMI] [PDF file] Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?

His thesis, in brief, is that the "hard" energy technologies - giant centralized electric power stations, for example - now turning the wheels of the economy must give way to "soft" technologies based on renewable sources of energy, such as solar power.

...

To Mr. Lovins any centralized power plant is "hard." Nuclear power plants top the list. Right behind are big coal power plants, oil and gas pipelines from the Arctic, coal gasification complexes, shale oil recovery systems. And he sees them all as massive, menacing, brittle and by nature transient. Home solar heating systems are soft, as are backyard windmills, local facilities for squeezing energy from garbage and plants that convert agricultural wastes into automotive fuel. These he views as small, localized, benign, resilient and inherently renewable.

The following paragraph is particularly revealing with regards to the Atlantic's thesis:

The nation is on a hard path, he says, warning of a society enslaved by its own demand for hard energy: huge coal conversion plants producing synthetic oil and gas instead of clean-burning "fluidized-bed" combustors consuming coal right in the factories where the heat is needed. Remote and mammoth power stations making electricity to heat houses that could have used roof-top solar collectors.

Those "huge coal conversion plants producing synthetic oil" are precisely Carter's legacy. That is the "hard" path (of course the Atlantic left the whole episode out of their convenient little "history"). And then there's Lovins advocacy of "clean" fluidized bed coal! This is so interesting, I'll quote again from Lovins' paper itself:

Perhaps the most exciting current development is the so-called fluidized-bed system for burning coal (or virtually any other combustible material). [...] Fluidized-bed boilers and turbines can power giant industrial complexes, especially for cogeneration, and are relatively easy to backfit into old municipal power stations. Scaled down, a fluidized bed can be a tiny household device—clean, strikingly simple and flexible—that can replace an ordinary furnace or grate and can recover combustion heat with an efficiency over 80 percent. At medium scale, such technologies offer versatile boiler backfits and improve heat recovery in flues. With only minor modifications they can burn practically any fuel. It is essential to commercialize all these systems now—not to waste a decade on highly instrumented but noncommercial pilot plants constrained to a narrow, even obsolete design philosophy.

It cannot be clearer: "hard/soft" is NOT about clean energy, and the Atlantic is exceedingly mendacious to claim it is. "Soft" energy is precisely the opposite of clean: it advocates coal - "municipal", "household" coal - while vilifying nuclear power. On top of all the usual pollutants contained in coal - mercury, SOx, etc., this is the the most intensely CO2-emitting fuel there is, and it makes the Atlantic's painting of Lovins' "soft" path as "climate friendly" extremely ridiculous.

(To be fair, Lovins avoids directly labeling micro-coal as "soft" power, rather merely associating it as a necessary "transitional" technology in his "soft path". At the exclusion of clean energy, of course.)

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

With a straight face, too

A recurring theme in President Obama's speech today was affordable energy:

That's because this grid, which is made up of everything from power lines to generators to the meters in your home, still runs on century-old technology. It wastes too much energy, it costs us too much money, and it's too susceptible to outages and blackouts.

...

Now it's time to make the same kind of investment in the way our energy travels, to build a clean energy superhighway that can take the renewable power generated in places like De Soto and deliver it directly to the American people in the most affordable and efficient way possible.

...

It's expected to save consumers more than $20 billion over the next decade on their utility bills. And I know nobody minds seeing their utilities bill cut. I'm sorry, Lew, but they really don't mind that.

...

It will make our grid more secure and more reliable, saving us some of the $150 billion we lose each year during power outages.

...

And to speed that process along, nine federal agencies have signed an agreement that will help break down the bureaucratic barriers that currently make it slow and costly to build new transmission lines on federal lands.

...

And I'm pleased to report that a consensus is growing to achieve exactly that: a consensus between Democrats and Republicans, environmentalists and evangelicals, labor leaders and especially so many business leaders like Lew, that are ready to jump on board because they understand that the growth of clean energy can lead to the growth of our economy.

...

There are those who are also going to suggest that moving toward a clean energy future is going to somehow harm the economy or lead to fewer jobs.

Which is rather amusing, because he was delivering this speech in a solar plant.

The cost was $152 million for 25 MWe nameplate, est. 4.8 MWe average. ($32/W average)

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/state/epaper/2009/10/27/1027obamafpl.html

http://www.fpl.com/environment/solar/desoto.shtml