The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
The Forum - On Line Opinion's article discussion area



Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Main Articles General

Sign In      Register

The Forum > Article Comments > The importance of facts in research: the IFR > Comments

The importance of facts in research: the IFR : Comments

By Ben Heard and Tom Keen, published 18/6/2012

Nuclear technologies are a key to reducing carbon emissions, so let's understand how they really work.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. ...
  6. 10
  7. 11
  8. 12
  9. Page 13
  10. 14
  11. All
To Ben Heard
There you go again - pontificating about how ignorant I am, (and some reputable journalists are, too.) And I'm chastised for mistaking PRISM reactors for Integral Fast Reactors.
Now, where did I get that silly idea from?
Why, from this self same article by Ben Heard - where you say:

Too good to be true? Not according to GE-Hitachi, which is proposing to build a commercial-scale (311 MW) version of the IFR called the Power Reactor Innovative Small Module(PRISM) in the UK right now, to deal with unwanted stockpiles of separated plutonium.
Noel Wauchope
Posted by jimbonic, Thursday, 5 July 2012 3:56:51 PM
Find out more about this user Visit this user's webpage Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Noel,

Since time difference is on my side, I'll save Ben the effort of explaining things:

First, you linked a story about the supply of fuel to SMRs in Carolina. These aren't fast reactors of any sort - they're small sized thermal light water reactors, in this case water moderated.

Like all commercial LWRs these work at low levels of enrichment - typically 3-4%. At this level of enrichment, this fuel cannot be mode to explode, or be converted to bomb-grade without an enrichment plant (and if you've got one of those, you might as well staret with natural uranium - certainly not canned sintered ceramic oxide fuel, which would be a bugger to extract the uranium from).

So, little or nothing to do with the IFR/Prism debate.

Then you kept digging. The clue is in the "I" in IFR. It stands for "Integrated", and refers to the fact that the plant has an ons-site integrated fuel cycle - that is, extraction of unburned Pu and U (and other actinides), and separation of fission product waste, plus fuel fabrication.

As has also been explained, this material is fundamentally unsuitable for making nuclear explosives, due to the presence of unstable plutonium isotopes, and higher actinides.

The fuel in an IFR uses medium enriched metal fuel - different from that in the SMRs you commented on, but still too low in enerichment, as well as with an infeasible isotope mix, to be readily useful in bombs.

However, what's proposed for Sellafield lacks this fuel cycle facility. It'll take externally fabricated fuel - partly plutonium from old stocks - and burn it. It uses basically the same reactor module (slightly simplified in operation, since no-one will be worried about balancing burn-up of the fuel)

Hopefully, that gives a little clarity.
Posted by AndyD, Thursday, 5 July 2012 10:13:16 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
from Noel Wauchope. This article was a straight response to my previous article http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=13726. Ben Heard describes my article as a "dangerous litany of confusions and avoidable factual errors." It was " bad information ",he says, and how dare I criticise Barry Brook, who sits on the panel of the Global Energy Prize. Heard makes out that this prize is of the same reputable standing as the Nobel Prize.

Well, what sort of a panel is Global Energy Prize anyway? It is heavily weighted with connections to the nuclear industry. Its principal members are mainly Russian, and mainly technical physics experts. Prominent are: Englen Azizov(Russia)Head of the Tokamak Reactors Division, Robert Aymar(France) Senior Scientific Advisor to CEO, French Atomic Energy, Lars G. Larsson (Sweden)founder and owner of consulting company SiP Nuclear Consulting AB , William Martin(USA) Chairman, Nuclear Energy Advisory Committee, U. S. Department of Energy , Thomas Sander (USA)Associate Laboratory Director for Clean Energy Initiatives Savannah River National Laboratory.

Heard goes on to give a highly technical account of the Integral Fast Reactors, quite ignoring the non technical issues that I had raised.
Anyway, the comments keep to this technical focus. Meanwhile comments on my initial article include some quite offensive personal remarks, attacking me.
My response to these attacks can be found at http://www.independentaustralia.net/2012/environment/in-dispraise-of-integral-fast-nuclear-reactors/
Posted by jimbonic, Tuesday, 10 July 2012 1:18:27 PM
Find out more about this user Visit this user's webpage Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Noel,

Your in danger of starting to sound rather petulant - my nine year old daughter seems to handle being contradicted rather better than you are at the moment.

and it's inarguable that your original article contained a good few howlers, especially where you'd obviously confused IFRs, molten salt reactors, SMRs and others. Your still doing it now - I challenge you to find a Tokomak in use anywhere in a nuclear plant worldwide. They're used in fusion research, nothing to do with fission plant.

I've always been a great believer in the old maxim "when you're at the bottom of a hole, stop digging". Well, it seems you've reached bedrock......
Posted by AndyD, Tuesday, 10 July 2012 2:45:43 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Noel, what non-technical issues did you actually raise? I can find none in your article. You raised the following: -

Safety - you made much of the sodium coolant, which is a technical issue.

Proliferation - you talked about proliferation and discussed the fissile inventory. That is a technical issue.

Wastes - again, you talked about the various isotopes produced in a nuclear reactor, and how we deal with them. That is a technical issue.

Security - you claim nuclear reactors can be used to "make bomb material" given the various nuclear fission cycles. That is a technical issue.

Costs - this is an issue which requires economic analysis (and should include externalities in my opinion). That is inherently technical.

Investment - i.e. who invests in what. This is getting into finance. That is a complex issue which is affected by numerous factors. I.e. technical.

Time - the trade off between time and total cumulative CO2 emissions is a technical issue, with the latter being far more important.

So, where were the non-technical issues?
Posted by Tom Keen, Tuesday, 10 July 2012 7:29:43 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
one small apology....

re "your" and "you're" in my previous post. It's not that I'm illiterate. It's simply that I'm posting from my phone, and "predictive text" keeps getting the better of me....!
Posted by AndyD, Tuesday, 10 July 2012 7:34:19 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. ...
  6. 10
  7. 11
  8. 12
  9. Page 13
  10. 14
  11. All

About Us :: Search :: Discuss :: Feedback :: Legals :: Privacy