Let's be clear here - Barry Brook is not a nuclear physicist - he is an activist supporting what he sees as a solution to the world's electricity generation and climate change problem. However, you only need to visit Barry Brook's Brave New Climate website to find material that refutes the passionate optimism of IFR's supporters.I put some excerpts below from this URL:

http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/09/14/fast-reactor-future/

"A retired, “Pioneer”, Leonard Koch is probably the oldest continuing supporter and participant in the development of the original concept of nuclear power. He joined Argonne National Laboratory in early 1948 and....

Below are quotes from a speech in IFRs by Koch:

"Could nuclear fuel be recycled through such reactors in the manner required to extract the energy?...

"The third question [above] has not been answered adequately. Nuclear fuel has not been recycled to the extent necessary to demonstrate the capability to extract a significant fraction of the energy contained in uranium! This is the remaining challenge for science and technology....

"Each future recycle system will create unique requirements related specifically to the fuel, the fuel form and the design of the individual fuel elements. They will include removing the spent fuel from its container; (most probably a cylindrical tube), reprocessing the fuel and installing it in a new container.

"It is this part of the total fuel recycle process that requires much development and demonstration. There are a variety of potential fuels and fuel forms and a variety of potential purification and fabrication processes which will produce a variety of fuel recycle characteristics and requirements . The composition of the fuel will change during recycle and an equilibrium, or near equilibrium, composition will eventually result. This scenario has not been produced for any of the potential fuel systems, nor will it be, until the required operational experience has been obtained. Global attention is needed because this will be a very slow, long-term undertaking. There are no quick fixes! (continued)

(continued) "A fuel cycle will probably take about three years, and several cycles will be required to establish a reasonable demonstration of the total performance of a specific recycle process. There will be, almost certainly, more than one total fuel recycle system to pursue; possibly several. Each will be unique and produce its own results and create its own requirements."

Now does that sound like a technology that is ready to save the world to you? I don't think so! The world is already slipping into financial chaos as we slide down the net energy curve. There will never be the money or time for this sort of development.

And tell me anyhow - when a big reactive sodium fire does, eventually, begin at one of these theoretical IFR plants (because of an earthquake, a mechanical failure or even a terrorist attack), how are you going to put it out? It will burn and burn all the while spewing highly radioactive particles over anything downwind.

IFRs are just a fantasy for techno-optimists and, fortunately, that is all they will ever be.

Ben,

Given that nuclear power is the safest form of power generation, the anti nuke lobby are fighting a rearguard action against the last pillar of protest, i.e. what to do with the waste. Reprocessing has been successfully done in France and Japan, and the re enrichment of spent fuel and the IFR which will dispose of the majority of the waste will rob them of all but their scare campaigns.

The choice that AGW campaigners are faced with is that the alternative to nuclear power, in the absence of viable "renewable" alternatives, is to continue burning fossil fuels at an increasing rate.

michael-in-adelaide I hope you realise the batteries in your Tindo solar powered bus have liquid sodium surrounding the negative plates. A simple prang could bring your much feared sodium fire closer than you think.

As far as wind and solar are concerned Adelaide is giving us a peak into the future with the world's highest electricity prices on Sunday week. In reality that wind and solar is only possible because gas takes up the slack. What happens when gas runs out? I think we can assume that will effectively be the case within the lifetime of today's kids. Start thinking of a long run alternative to the IFR and see how much fantasy that will involve.

A sodium fire is one thing. A radioactive sodium fire is another thing altogether! How do you put it out? And the scale of the fire is orders of magnitude larger than a burning bus!

Taswegian - I have been thinking about what my kids will do as our fossil fuels run out for the past 8 years now. The prospect is terrifying and there are no answers that even come close to being easy. But as you can read above, IFRs are a technology that we no longer have the time or "money" (energy) to develop. So we should stop wasting our time fantasising about them and get one with looking at feasible "solutions" (if any can be described as such).

Besides - it seems to me that IFRs are just being used as a cover to promote the building of more conventional nuclear power plants. But we don't have the time and money for that either - as Finland's experience is showing.

I have no idea where this area of energy production should go in the future.
We do have a very large amount of energy down in those hot rocks.
So far they have run into significant difficulties in getting it to work.
The energy is there, shouldn't we be moving hell & high water to get at it ?

The clock is ticking, the politicians are either not aware of the
energy problem and those that are made aware do not want to know.
They are afraid we might ask them to do something about it.

What is worse than denial? Arguably, deliberately providing counterfeit information?
On one side are climate science denialists, the other, green activists, whose main if un-stated covert goal, is to depopulate and de-industrialise the planet?
What is never contemplated is the pain and suffering of billions, as we get to the place they want? A green planet supporting around a billion, living in complete harmony as hunter gathers/agrarian cultures living in small village communities, supporting a few artisans, who would like potters and or blacksmiths, produce all the articles needed to support such a simple basic lifestyle, replete with a dawn to dust gut bust, just to produce the staples of life?
A family of four would need 5 acres of arable land for their food supply, another eight for each and every cow or horse! Another forty for a renewable self sustaining wood lot! The potters and smiths would need between five or ten times as much?
They would also need very reliable water supplies, supplemented by survival supporting Mildura stills, made possible by traditional glass works. More very large wood-lots!
So, when we run out of the hydrocarbons destroying our world, all we need do is lay back and wait for around 8 or 9 billion people to die? Remember all that hydrocarbon, and or the way it combines in isotopic bonds with the remaining oxygen? Well that would work to foster myriad diseases, we have never heard of or have any developed immunity for? Long before we reach the climate change said to be irreversible, we will see famine and pestilent problems on an entirely unprecedented scale.
A green lifestyle no guarantee of immunity.
Particularly, when the green occupations are done mostly indoors, as relatively well paid professionals?
Who will do the gut bust dawn to dark gut bust needed to survive? The perpetually postulating professors perhaps?
When our forbears walked/crawled out of the primordial swamps, the atmosphere was around 50-51% oxygen? Today its just 21-20%?
Everything we do to simply survive presents with some risk? Not changing over to non polluting power the very highest?
Rhrosty.

I'm in agreement with michael_in_adelaide

Conventional explosion, proliferation and record of lack of commercial interest grounds suggest IFRs as power sources are highly problematic.

The article references to safety are unconvincing and do not account for one in 100 year events. The Fukushima reactors might have been safer than future IFR reactors. IFR reactors experiencing Tsunami, earthquake or terrorist explosion risk extreme fire/explosion hazards if their sodium and water mix.

An IFR may normally require a mix of high proliferation input fuels for economically optimal operation. That is 20+ per cent enriched uranium and separated plutonium. Basically IFR are most efficient in countries that can produce highly enriched uranium and can reprocess plutonium - usually nuclear weapon countries.

These safety-proliferation risks may explain the glacial development since 1984 of IFRs. Why does GE-Hitachi merely propose to build an IFR that is still only of test reactor size (311 MW)? The minimum efficient power reactor size is almost always 1,000+ MW.

Pete

Michael in adelaide, I can but sigh. Having just written about the specificity of IFR technology and the foolishness of treating it generically, that is exactly what you are doing.

Why on earth are you quoting Len Koch to support your assertion of problems with IFR? Koch joined Argonne in 1948. A respected figure to be sure and now he is a member of the Science Council for Global Initiatives, the main body of experts now working to establish IFR as a commercial technology. Barry Brook is also a member. Koch was in the generation of fast reactor development that preceded Till's and Chang's advances.

Having established that you don't even know this much, why should we listen to your fear-mongering on the rest? And while you are busy bagging Barry Brook, exactly who on earth are you to know better?

Pete,

The delay in IFR stems from the fact that the program was terminated in a blatant act of anti-nuclear politics in 1994. You can read about it in Till and Chang's book. The delays continue in part due to misinformation. Which brings me to your comment.

With the initial charge of fuel, which is (you are correct) more highly enriched than fuel for a currently commercial light water reactor, the integrated pyroprocessing facility along with the breeder function of the reactor itself permits the reactors to run with inputs of depleted uranium and other existing high level nuclear waste, which is converted from oxide to metal fuel. This is the whole point of the IFR. It is not contingent on weapons development capability whatsoever, and makes no contribution to any such capability arising.

Your contention that a late '60s design BWR with known and exposed safety limitations is safer than this unpressurised, passive shut down, passive cooled reactor is just bizarre to be frank. Just like a new build LWR today, IFR could be constructed fully quake and airline strike proof.

I think we can trust GE-Hitachi on the economics of their own proposal, as they are asking for nothing up front to build it, and proposing to charge for the electricity sold, and the amount of separated plutonium they process to safer levels.

Good piece guys, well reasoned.

Wauchope and Adelaide are far apart but close in heart - no reason.

An afterthought or footnote.
The Chileans were able to build a very large solar thermal plant, that produced power for less than the current cost of coal-fired power.
The secret of their success, tax free public ownership not required to support shareholding parasites, never ever repaid debt, returning commercial rates of interest to offshore parent companies, and all paid for by the captive energy market.
Instead of mindlessly returning the surpluses as tax breaks for people who really don't need them, the Federal Government ought to invest surplus public money in endlessly sustainable power provision; and, at a cost, cost structure paradigm, that would physically encourage the mass migration of high tech manufacture to our shores? And in so doing, guaranteeing a future well beyond the current mineral/mining boom?
Moreover, each and every one of the privileged elite, would very likely prefer a sustainable future for their children or the children's children, than unneeded tax breaks.
Half of the current coal-fired pollution is generated in the transmission wires and or centralised power provision.
Should we change over to less polluting NG, we would reduce current pollution by around 40%; given, there is around 40% less carbon held in covalent bonds in NG, when compared to coal.
We could reduce that by half again, by the simple expediency of piping the gas directly to the household or consumer, and then producing all the power required and free hot water, by passing the gas through a ceramic fuel cell, when and as we need power.
We can also provide the same power utilising endlessly sustainable biogas! And for around a third of the current price of privately owned centralised power provision!
We must also consider nuclear power. Very safe new generation reactors could power our shipping and self defence bases.
Currently, knocking out a very few coal-fired power stations, would also knock out most of our communications and the transfer of critical self defence intell. As other posters will say, the status quo or simply doing nothing is not an option!
Rhrosty.

This talk of using plutonium is hair raising. The reality that the nuclear industry has produced so much of the dreadful, intractable stuff.

The point that the plutonium has to be dealt with is well made and a 'motherhood statement' - it's too dangerous to be left or even buried anywhere.

I'm willing to accept that a demonstration IFR be built - in a country that produces the plutonium and all of it should be dealt with there. No other country should ever be conned into taking this waste. If it works safely then that type should be built near the existing reactors that produce plutonium and no more conventional reactors should be built.

Cease any technology that produces more Pu, even if that means closing conventional reactors.

Nuclear may well be as 'low carbon' as solar thermal but it's far more polluting. Solar thermal costs will soon come down to below nuclear and there's no decommissioning or waste issues with it. I know which one I and for that matter the general populace would prefer.

"IFRs are just a fantasy for techno-optimists and, fortunately, that is all they will ever be."

How stupid is that. You've got a technical article which calmly and logically goes through all the defects in the previous post on IFRs, and how IFRs can be built and safely operated and all we get in response is the usual green and pro-AGW claptrap.

Hey Ben

Having written your second OLO article its rather obnoxious of you to bag people like michael_in_adelaide and myself who write sincere criticisms.

Your responses (in these your 12th and 13th comments on OLO) include:

"sigh...foolishness...you don't even know this much, why should we listen to your fear-mongering...[and]..is just bizarre."

are unbecoming of an author (in my view).

I suggest you try harder to be civil.

Pete

Peter, If I thought the criticisms were sincere, or if, for example, the comments were framed as queries, I would respond altogether differently.

But I don't find them sincere. It is almost as if yourself and Michael in adelaide have done almost everything you can to avoid engaging with the content of the article, which is factual, well-structured and referenced, and instead just jumped onto the comments as quickly as you can with scary sounding stuff that makes no sense for the benefit of other people's potential confusion. In the case of michael this includes attacks on a well regarded academic. Given the stakes of this issue, this type of thing frustrates me hugely.

So call me old fashioned, but I think civility in comments goes both ways, and includes readers not going out of their way to engage in, yes, fear-mongering in response to the effort of the authors.

I'll gladly meet you at the halfway point.

@Roses1, you had better prepare yourself... the IFR makes plutonium from uranium as it goes along. That's a key feature of how it works, but not the full story.

What is different is that word "separated". The UK have stockpiles of separated plutonium. While it is civil reactor grade, not weapons grade, having separated plutonium hanging around it still of concern. So an IFR or PRISM would help dispose of this.

But, using an IFR to get rid of the rest of the high level nuclear waste includes a process that turns some of the uranium in that waste (that cannot burn as fuel) into a type of plutonium (which can then burn as fuel). But as described in the article it never becomes separated and never leaves the site. So in case someone tries to scare you with the idea that "IFRs make plutonium", there is truth in that. Just not the whole truth.

Plutonium is a metal, not a monster. Provided we are not trying to do the wrong thing, and the IFR has been designed to make the "wrong thing" all but impossible, plutonium does not need to be feared.

That the IFR reactor has not been commercially built yet is not surprised considering the minute fraction of the total cost of generation is concerned with the price of fuel, and the cost of power generation is going to be higher than conventional nuclear power plants. If one compares these with non nuclear waste fuelled power plants, the cost of running these plants is several times more expensive than coal powered stations. These make a profit from disposing of waste that would otherwise cost a fortune in landfill. The reprocessing the spent rods and re enriching them for conventional reactors whilst burning the plutonium and other nasties in a small IFR reactor is a permanent solution to the waste issue. As far as highly enriched uranium (ie 20%,) the equipment used is exactly the same as enriching to 5%, and so claiming that this aids proliferation is a furfy.

With regards the liquid sodium coolant, the pipes would be sheathed in pressurized inert gas, and a leak would result in inert gas leaking into the sodium. Which would be rapidly detected. This is a common solution used for high voltage cables and hydrogen cooled generators, and is well proven.

Rhosty, no one has built solar generation that is cheaper than coal. If you look hard at the accounts this is rubbish. The best estimate yet is about 5-10x the cost of coal generation.

Roses1 - "Solar thermal costs will soon come down to below nuclear" Really? You know this how? Or is this just another motherhood "wish" from the greens.

Sodium-carrying pipes sheathed in inert gas? Would you like to make it more complicated (and vulnerable)? The point remains - when you do develop a large scale radioactive sodium fire (and don't tell me it will never happen) how on Earth will you put it out before it spreads radioactivity far and wide? Answer that question.

By the way - my point in quoting Koch is that I don't know much about IFRs but he, more than almost anyone else, does. It is not me you have to refute but Koch. Explain how Koch is wrong on the timescales and problems he describes for IFR development.

But hey - why not just ignore reality when the IFR fantasy is such a pleasant place to live.

Unlike many pronuclear advocates, I do not believe that the people who virulently oppose the use of nuclear energy are actually motivated by a desire to depopulate the earth and live a more simple, low energy lifestyle.

Instead, I see the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) campaign against capable technology like the IFR as being a deception tool of the fossil fuel industry. In the case of the IFR, the fossil fuel industry is joined in motivation by the uranium mining industry. After all, what impact would it have on their business prospects if word got around that we had already mined all of the uranium that we needed for hundreds of years worth of prosperity and power?

The fact is that uranium, plutonium and thorium all contain about 2 million times as much energy per unit mass as oil and about 3-4 million times as much as the best coal.

Neither uranium nor thorium are particularly rare - there are vast resources that are already known and are legally kept out of the market by silly regulations or absurd rules like the three mines policy that was in place in Australia for decades. Plutonium is exceedingly rare in nature, but it is easy to make by irradiating the abundant isotope of uranium (U-238) in a fast reactor.

The thing that the world's hydrocarbon establishment fears more than anything else is the discovery and implementation of an energy source that overcomes the scarcity that has produced most of the petroleum profits. Unfortunately for the fossil fuel industry, the discovery was made in 1942 and refined throughout an intensive period of development. As a bonus, the new energy source happens to be clean enough to run inside sealed submarines.

Fossil fuel interests have fallen back on efforts to limit the IMPLEMENTATION of that energy source through spreading irrational fear.

People like michael, even if he does it unknowingly, are carrying the water of the global fossil fuel industry and its bankers, transporters, advertising media, politicians and material suppliers by helping their FUD campaign.

@michael

Koch was describing challenges and technical obstacles that can be solved, not barriers to development. Sure, it will take a long time to get to the point where we have recycled several generations of fuel through IFRs and solved all of the material challenges that Len identified.

The thing is that we do not need to solve them all before we start building machines that can be producing massive quantities of reliable, emission free electricity while they are creating the raw material needed to solve the problems. The reason that they are not solved already is that no one has been allowed to run any IFRs long enough to produce the unique blend of materials that will be produced with extended radiation exposure in a power producing reactor.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the only logical (immoral, but logical) reason to be adamantly opposed to development and improvement of nuclear energy is because you prefer to depend on profitable fossil fuels.

Even without the IFR, nuclear fission is superior to fossil fuel combustion. The IFR is simply one of many improvement vectors available that answer some of the more frequently repeated challenges - like "what do you do with the waste?"

My answer is, and has been for a couple of decades, you recycle it and make power out of it.

Michael,

I can see that you are technically challenged. This technology is not new, in fact it has been used successfully in high voltage cables for decades, and there are hundreds of kilometres below each city of cables sheathed in SF6 gas for insulation. Large power generators are cooled by pressurised hydrogen which is far far more flammable than sodium. Just because you don't know of it doesn't make it exotic or fragile. The reactor core can be immersed in the gas, and the only sheathed pipes would be relatively short. The sheathing can be made tough and flexible and extremely difficult to penetrate, and immune to earthquakes.

I can see that you are easily frightened by things you don't understand, and that the reality of the IFR reactors which eliminate your main remaining reason to oppose nuclear power is a problem for you. I also see that you have abandoned your other pseudo technical arguments.

The quotes from Len Koch cherry-picked by Michael are taken from a speech by Len that's up on the SCGI website. Among the many omissions that would undercut Michael's arguments is Len's statement that "The science is firmly established," his observation that 35,000 fuel pins were already recycled, etc. Michael also omits the fact that Len was talking about recycling not only uranium and other actinides but about thorium fuel cycles as well, hence his comments about a variety of fuel cycle options. Michael doesn't seem to know that sodium burns with a very cool but very smoky flame in air so it's easy to detect and deal with, that the water wouldn't be in the same structure as the radioactive sodium, etc. Or, worse yet, perhaps he does know it (since he's obviously spent a lot of time on Barry Brook's site and elsewhere where IFRs are discussed at length) but chooses to spread FUD anyway.

I am impressed by the passion of the defenders of theoretical IFRs.

While this is a guess I imagine that,unlike the defenders, I am alone in actually having a licence to handle radioactive substances and I imagine that few of them have actually seen a sodium fire. The question still remains - how will you put out a large scale radioactive sodium fire? The answers so far are all based on the idea that it will never happen. But of course, it would happen one day (if IFRs were ever to be built, which they will not be) and if the fire did happen there would be no safe way of smothering it. Best to ignore that problem completely and pretend that it could never happen (just like Fukushima could never happen).

I am so excited to learn that, despite having openly opposed the propaganda of the fossil fuel industry for many years, I am actually in league with them and doing their bidding! I guess that means I can expect a big, big, fat pay-cheque from them any day now. Exciting! I could really use it.

In case you are wondering - my reason for responding to such an article on IFRs is not because I am afraid that we would ever successfully build one. (We have more chance of a manned return mission to the Moon than that every occurring.) Simply I think that the illusion of IFRs diverts us from focussing our attention (and remaining energy/money) on what can really make a difference to the future of our civilisation - the end of growthist economic ideology, greater efficiency, stable population size and "appropriate" technology.

[Deleted for abuse.]

"the end of growthist economic ideology, greater efficiency, stable population size and "appropriate" technology."

There you have it; the solution is also in Michael's bleat; a return trip to the moon for such advocates as himself of this green, misanthropic vision.

To paraphrase the old saying, Go Up, young Michael, and take your Ludditism with you.

@Futurist, thanks. @michael_in_adelaide, disappointing. Explains the lack of sourcing I guess. And your latest comment, just charming. But I’ll play a straight bat and provide some more information.

Koch was instrumental at Argonne, pre the “IFR years” of 1984-94. He had much to do with the forerunner technology, the Experimental Breeder Reactor II. This established much of the knowledge for IFR, but challenges remained. The main developments in the IFR years were
1/ The demonstrated success of the metal fuel, an alloy of uranium, plutonium and zirconium.
2/ The highly successful fuel recycling (made easier with the much better new alloy fuel)
3/ Processes for managing the eventual waste stream.

It came together beautifully, especially combining the safety properties of the metal fuel with the safety properties of the sodium coolant. To quote Till “The IFR technology was one in which all the pieces fitted together, dovetailing to make each part of the system complement the rest and to make possible an entire system that could have had a truly revolutionary impact on nuclear power for the future”.

As to a raging radioactive sodium fire, it certainly is a comfy position to say “I need not suggest how it could happen, you must tell me what we would do”. For it to happen, significant amounts of non-corrosive sodium operating at very low pressure would need to escape from the two steel layers of the seismically isolated reactor vessel into an environment in which all of the heavy argon gas blanket had been somehow vacated, said environment being a containment vault that can withstand direct aircraft impact, and conversely contain anything that happens within. Don’t pretend likelihood doesn’t matter. Of course it does. If it happened, it would need to be controlled, and that would be hard. Were it not controlled, it would be contained.

To get up to speed quickly, read this interview with Charles Till http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html Though it would appear your actual issue is concern at the consequences of IFR being real. If so, perhaps comment as such, rather than making faux technical critique.

Michael,

Don't be so arrogant. I also have a license to import and handle nuclear devices, and am presently importing 10 sources for instrumentation. On top of that, while doing chemistry at University, we ran controlled fires with various elements including sodium, potassium, magnesium and aluminium. A large scale fire would require a complete rupture of the reactor vessel, the containment vessel and all the piping to spill sufficient sodium and vent the gas.

Finally the coolant has relatively low level of radioactivity, and even if it all burnt it would in no way compare to Fukushima.

P.S. There was a manned mission to the moon in '69. And there are other types of reactor that can burn waste fuel including the CANDU reactors of which 6 have been running for more than a decade, and 22 are under construction.

Thank you Ben, for your comments, and to you and Tom for your article.

The Greens are incorrigible when it comes to energy and unfortunately this current government has sold its 'soul' to this point of view.

Hopefully however, someone in Canberra may be reading and put your information into the future policy mix.

Interesting that my relatively mild bit of "abuse" can be deleted by OLO but when I pointed out to OLO that Malcolm King's fairly recent article on population issues contained outright lies nothing was done!

A contribution, if I may, from the possible home of a prototype PRISM...

Someone upthread made a comment to the effect of "why is the proposed PRISM unit only 300MWe?"

The clue is in the "M" in PRISM, which stands for "Modular" or "Module". It's part of a family of designs that are collectively called "Small Modular Reactors" or SMRs.

The concept of an SMR is basically that the more construction/assembly work can be undertaken in a factory environment, as opposed on in situ, the better. The overall concept of an SMR would have the major components factory built and tested, assembled into a small number (maybe 10-20) portable assemblies then shipped to site.

So, PRISM is designed that the main components - the reactor "vessel" (yes, I know it's a pool type, but I'm not sure waht else you'd call the main component holding the reactor internals)..., steam generators/heat exchangers and so on are rail or barge-portable.

On the downside, it obviously imposes size limits on the components, and hence indirectly on total reactor power. Hence the relatively small size of the PRISM unit (pretty much all the SMRs on the drawing boards are <300MW).

It's certainly a viable concept - I've got experience of on-site QA in plants with utterly different construction concepts, the UK's AGRs. That wasn't fun.

Will the economics work? The Jury's obviously out. Designs like the ESBWR are still very largely factory/modular built but are very much larger, and weill benefit from ecnomies of scale.

Ok, I'm convinced.

So we're gonna need about 20 or so in the next 20 years, where can we buy them?

Ok, so we're going to need some people to set them up and run them as well, where are we getting them? Do we need to train some or are we drawing on an international pool of trained nuclear techs?

How much is this going to cost us?

@AndyD thanks, great pick up.

@Bugsy Great questions. If you build out a scenario of rapid decarbonisation, with no new fossil baseload on the basis of urgency, you do still include more new build of Generation III+ reactors because, unfortunately, IFR has been largely on ice since it was sh!tcanned by the Clinton Adminstration. So the question is how quickly can we bring forward IFR to commercial dominance.

As noted above, the UK looks to be a probable front runner for the introduction of the technology via GH-Hitachi, though the PRISM does not, to my knowledge, plan on the complete use of the plutonium, just enough to downgrade it to levels that meet waste guidelines. Nonetheless, a lot of eyes are on that situation.

For the bigger picture though, the Science Council for Global Initiatives are working to build the structures that would enable this rapid roll out like manufacturing, international cooperation and sharing of expertise, one standard design and yes (well picked), mobile teams of experts. The book to read for this is "Prescription for the Planet" by Tom Blees. Cracking read, the true lay-person text for IFR.

Cost, well, if built as designed, and if the design is a global standard (as SCGI are working towards) there are clear reasons why IFR should be cheaper in capital terms than current LWR or at the very least, no more expensive: no pressurisation, far simpler design, fewer parts, less materials. Some of the IFR materials would be higher grade though, which may put upward pressure on price. But the bottom line is, we don't yet know; we will need a commitment to construction before that evidence is in. Chicken, meet egg.

Thanks Ben, but that does sound a little like a bait-and-switch.

You mean we can't actually buy any IFR units or find anyone with expertise in building them?

But if can we buy into nuclear through the promise of IFR, we should be build some GenIII+ reactors in the meantime?

How many countries are building these reactors and how many people are we going to need versus how many being trained?

Are we going to inflate the market on nuclear techs? Will we be able to get enough of them?

Ben, no problem.

Indeed, it's hard (as yet) to say what the ultimate cost profile will be. TBH, I expect the mode of manufacture SHOULD have more impact on the economics of the plant than the technical aspects of the design per se (i.e. I'd expect an SMR-LWR not to look too radically different in cost to a modular IFR).

Let me also make my own position clear - it'll be hard to overcome the economy of scale aspect compared to something like a 1500MW ESBWR (which lacks steam generators, etc, and is delivered to site with a near-fully assembled vessel with complete internals, doesn't need recirc pumps etc.)

I'm also unsure where IFR/PRISM would sit in terms of another niche relatively poorly served by current design, and that's load-following. If unit capital cost can be brought down, that should make this far more viable - and I'd have assumed with quite such a good heat-transfer mechanism, and no xenon-poisoning issue, IFR/PRISM ought to play well in this space.

One aspect that IS worthy of thought, however, and I've yet to see any solid work on this, is the impact on disposal costs of burning actinides and leaving only fission product waste to be considered. A repository and encapsualtion aimed at isolating waste for (say) 500 years can be a radically different beast than one with a 200,000 year isolation capability.

@AndyD again, great remarks, very relevant. We can’t know how effective IFR manufacturing will be until established. All I can really commit to now is an opinion that capital costs would be in the range of current nuclear and IMO to the lower end.

“Thanks Ben, but that does sound a little like a bait-and-switch.”

@Bugsy, yes I hear you but let me be clear. My long-established position (fully outlined at Decarbonise SA) from the POV of a climate change professional is that we need continued growth in nuclear power. I would like to see that transition through to IFR (or IFR plus LFTR) as quickly as possible, but the process is not quick. Never is.

It just happens that your questions are sufficiently switched on that they don’t come with ready answers. My inquisitors who argued against the technology being proven and real are wrong. You are talking about commercialisation and deployment: entirely relevant areas of discussion. It’s not a bait and switch. You’ve just found the area or uncertainty.

“You mean we can't actually buy any IFR units or find anyone with expertise in building them?”

Essentially, yes. We can’t place an order.

TBC

@Bugsy from previous

“But if can we buy into nuclear through the promise of IFR, we should be build some GenIII+ reactors in the meantime?”

IMO certainly, in the interest of cutting emissions ASAP. Bear in mind from the Australian perspective, we have considerable work to do from a legal and regulatory perspective, and certainty on IFR may be a lot greater once we declare our market ready for nuclear in general.

“How many countries are building these reactors and how many people are we going to need versus how many being trained?”

Currently, no one is building them. I have some insight into the efforts of SCGI on this front but they do not send me the minutes if you catch my drift. Lots of people will be needed if we want the fastest possible rollout. A more realistic scenario though is scale down of currently commercial reactor new build, and scale up IFR.

This from the SCGI: “we'd like to organize an international IFR conference that we hope will grow out of our work with Russia, the UK, and the World Energy Forum'sOctober energy conference in Dubai. The IFR will have the nuclear program's focus there in front of many heads of state and other policymakers. It's being sponsored by the Emir of Dubai and the UN/World Bank-affiliated World Energy Forum.”

"Are we going to inflate the market on nuclear techs? Will we be able to get enough of them?"

I expect they will be in great demand. The UAE for example purchased both hard ware and construction/operation expertise from South Korea in order to establish it’s own domestic nuclear industry. Australia, having divested itself of nuclear in our Universities, would need to do similar for a time.

So,

We can't buy them yet.
We can't build them yet.
In fact, noone is actually building them yet.
Even if we built the earlier versions, we don't have anyone trained to build or run them and everything and everyone will have to be imported to start up.
We don't know how much it will cost.
It also seems all the resident climate 'skeptics' love the idea.

Sounds like you're on a winner.

@Bugsy Heh heh... that’s given me my first laugh for the thread.

The resident climate deniers can go to hell. My agreement with them in this area is coincidental. A heck of a lot of reputable people support both nuclear and IFR. I keep a list.

http://decarbonisesa.com/who-gets-it/.

People on the other side of the fence should stop leaning on the fact that some deniers support nuclear as a reason to stand against nuclear. It’s just immature.

What you have outlined is exactly what the ground looks like when something is new. When it is moving from proving and demonstration to commercialisation and deployment.

If you want replacement of fossil fuels with zero carbon generation based on some rather brilliant and incredibly safe technology you can place an order for now, you have any Gen III+ reactor to choose from.

You can look at IFR and say “too hard” or you can look at IFR and say “worth fighting for. I might suggest to my Government that they send representatives to the World Energy Forum and have Australia put its hand up to join the international effort to get these things rolling out”. Your call. Am I on a winner? Technologically, yes. Nuclear generally, IFR especially, distinguishes itself among zero carbon generation technology by actually packing the punch to break the back of the climate and energy challenges. The other challenges depend on other people, you being one of them. I never said we don’t need to fight. It just happens that this fight brings with it the possibility of victory against the threat of an unstable climate. I like that type of fight.

Ben, I couldn't agree more.

"People on the other side of the fence should stop leaning on the fact that some deniers support nuclear as a reason to stand against nuclear. It’s just immature."

I hope you don't think this is the reason I pointed out their support.

But don't you think it's a little bit bizarre?

They appear to spend spend every online minute telling us that climate change is scam, we aren't running out of fossil fuels and they don't affect climate anyway. In other words, there is no good reason to spend money on renewables or anything else and we can't even afford a carbon tax.

But yet when a technology comes along, which by the way seems to be rather expensive and requires a lot of safety precautions to make it environmentally acceptable and investment over time, and the only really good justification for it is to reduce our emissions and their effects on AGW, they are all over it like the proverbial fat kid on a smartie...

Logically they should be saying 'what? no way!', and yet they don't. Why is that?

@Bugsey

Like many people, I suspect many climate deniers have adopted their stance partly out of a desire to keep doing what they have always been doing. In some cases that means living a high energy consumption lifestyle with as low a tax on the fossil fuel that enables that lifestyle as possible. In other cases, it means selling as much fossil fuel as possible while sharing as little of the bounty as possible with everyone else in the form of tax payments to the general coffers.

In the case of the former, they like nuclear energy because it is just one more source of energy. Though I do not deny climate change and believe we should have taken effective action a long time ago, I kind of agree with that line of thinking. I LIKE doing things that happen to use a lot of power.

In the case of the second group, I often find them damning nuclear energy with faint praise, saying that it is pretty good as long as "they" can solve their waste issue or as long as "they" can figure out how to pay all of the incredibly high upfront costs without asking for any tax breaks or regulatory easing. The climate change denying purveyors of fossil fuels often support long term solutions like the IFR until it gets close to commercialization and begins to look like an immediate threat to their market dominance.

Interestingly enough, some of the fossil fuel pushers like to cast doubt on the science of climate change, but when confronted with facts they offer natural gas as a lower carbon bridge to a distant utopia where all power is somehow supplied by unreliable sources like the wind and the sun. They know that the "bridge" to that future will be very long and that the end will never be reached.

If I did not believe in climate change, there would be no point in going nuclear, as coal is cheap and plentiful.

Unfortunately the renewable energy sources have failed to live up to hopes, and we are faced with going nuclear or paying lip service.

SM

The changes required can't happen overnight (especially here in Oz) - but we must make a start.

It will require a mix of energy solutions (you know this).

However, as you have typically shown on OLO ... you yourself just pay lip service.

@bonmot thanks! Straight praise is so rare it makes me feel weird.

@Bugsy no, the remark was certainly not intended your way, but directed at many folk I have encountered on my journey. I used to be one of them, rejecting nuclear because, among other reasons, John Howard supported it. Good one, Ben! Way to think like a grown-up!

But no, I don't find it bizarre, I find it consistent with what I think exists in Australia: a very strong culturally entrenched pattern of contrarianism, where certain people simply disagree with environmentalists on all fronts. Ergo, denying climate science, ridiculing any attempt to abate emissions, rejecting marine parks and... embracing nuclear and calling Greenies fools for not doing so. The env./Green movement has been so entrenched in nuclear rejection for so long, that those who identify themselves by NOT being Green have an equally ideologically entrenched embrace of nuclear. It's not because they are more scientific; their climate denial puts paid to that. The do it to oppose the people they don't like. They just happen to be right on that point!

So what would happen if the environmental movement embraced nuclear? These climate denying nuclear proponents would have 5 minutes in the sun, laughing at the stupid hippies, and then quickly find themselves consigned to irrelevance as the rest of us just got on with the job of cutting emissions. A large section of Australia who is not that passionate either way would be much happier that we are not still being told to rely on wind and solar alone which, they strongly suspect, are not up to the task on their own (and they are, of course, correct on that one).

This is basically the reason I am so "loud and proud" as a pro-nuclear environmentalist. I (along with others) need to provide an alternative model for other environmentalists to follow so that we can finally get some sensible action on climate change.

Following this conversation is so extremely odd in a way. In South Australia where Ben and I live the government did everything possible to avoid establishment of a long term repository for medium to high level nuclear waste although I think - as world citizens - that we could make a motza (and do a morally very positive thing) by placing the rest of the world's nuclear waste into the world's most stable geological formations. However, considering the extreme pubic resistance to nuclear energy it is inconceivable that nuclear generation of electricity would be supported until economic conditions become very desperate due to the decline of fossil energy. It would certainly never be supported on climate change grounds. But when the economy is eventually in desperate shape due to energy decline where does Ben and the other IFR proponents think the money (i.e. energy) will come from to build any kind of nuclear plant? The SA government is already cutting back on spending and these are supposed to be relatively good times. With the world now sliding down the net energy curve I simply don't see how IFRs - or any other form of big-investment, high tech, long term strategy energy source - will ever be built. Just because something seems like a really neat idea does not mean it will happen. Only energy (not optimism) can turn dreams into reality. Ben's website bubbles over with evangelistic, born-again positivism and belief in IFRs but despite obviously looking into these issues for some time it seems he does not really understand the way that energy is expressed in economic activity and that energy limits simply cannot be overcome. He is in no way unique in this regard but it is a pity to see such enthusiasm (that could be directed into more useful advocacy such as making feasible preparations for a low-energy future) going into something like promoting IFRs.

Mike,

As far as waste handling is concerned, the first step is not high tech reactors, but reprocessing which can reduce the waste by about 90%. Reactors like the IFR are to get rid of 90% of the last fraction.

Considering that most of the high level waste consists of spent rods, which don't actually need much space, the storage issue is more political than practical. The use of reprocessing and reactors such as CANDU and IFR would come close to eliminating the problem all together.

@michael_in_adelaide Extreme public resistance is not my experience, which to date is presentations to over 1,000 South Aussies. I find a surprising degree of outright acceptance and support. Where I find opposition, it is typically only weakly held and moves far and fast with some discussion. Entrenched opposition seems to be very small. It's just loud, and nuclear makes a good political football. So I reject that premise, that barrier is extremely tractable.

Many fossil baseload plants are seriously ageing, as well as being forced out of the market by their carbon intensity. e.g. Playford now going to operate only 6 months of the year. Loy Yang will not survive many years into the gradual reduction in free permits. NO form of baseload, be it fossil, renewable or nuclear is cheap. A lot of money will need to be found and spent in the next 1-2 decades on electricity generation infrastructure. I want all options available so that we spend it the best way.

As to the back end of your comment. Michael, it seems your world view and your work is entirely predicated on energy limits. Technologically, IFR blows this out of the water. We can, if we choose, have unlimited energy with no greenhouse gas or other pollution and no more mining. This goes a long way to solving our greatest sustainability problem being climate change, while raising questions about the potential implications for other areas of sustainability. Now THAT would make an interesting discussion. But please don't ask me to buy into the idea that a "low-energy future" is inevitable, feasible, realistic or desirable.

@Shadow Minister what are you referring to? The reprocessing the French do for current reactors gives a pretty pathetic and very expensive improvement compared pyroprocessing and then running fuel in IFR.

michael_in_adelaide,

You say that a more useful form of advocacy is "making feasible preparations for a low-energy future". Yet this is a completely useless approach if we are to avoid dangerous climate change. World energy demand is on the rise (particularly in developing economies) and that will not change any time soon. There are still plenty of fossil fuels, and even more of them are now economically extractable thanks to the development of non-conventional extraction techniques (e.g. hydrofracking, coal-seam gas). http://theconversation.edu.au/how-to-sell-green-energy-in-an-era-of-abundant-gas-and-oil-7668 . If we simply prepare for the day that fossil fuels become scarce, we're toast. The trillion tonnes of cumulative emissions we need to limit ourselves to will be overshot by a mile.

You also say that "Just because something seems like a really neat idea does not mean it will happen." Well, yes, obviously. Ben and I will be the first people to acknowledge that, despite nuclear energy being a no-brainer for fixing the bulk of the energy and climate crises, it suffers from a lack of public support. Not everywhere, but certainly in Australia. There are no guarantees here. But precisely the point of writing an article like this is to counteract some of the misinformation out there, and try to turn that lack of support around. And I agree with Ben that public resistance in Australia is not "extreme".

I see no major technological reasons to prevent a large-scale roll out of IFRs in the future. Sodium-cooled fast-breeding has already been soundly demonstrated with the EBR-II. Pyroprocessing is a ubiquitous material processing technology used in a wide variety of industrial applications. I don't see a major expansion of this technology commercially in the shorter-term, but there are plenty of existing nuclear technologies (Generation III/III+) which can easily fill this gap. And ultimately, we won't have a choice but to close the nuclear fuel cycle through full fuel recycling in the longer-term.

You can argue all you like about how unlikely a coal-to-nuclear transition is. But advocating a global-scale, voluntary reduction of energy demand to solve the climate problem is a guaranteed path to failure.

Tom

Shadow/Ben/Tom - you don't appear to appreciate (or you just ignore) that we are at energy limits NOW. Why do you think the world economy is in its current state? Even China's growth is now faltering. Much of the media hype about unconventional oil etc. is just that. Energy limits are non-negotiable. You cannot take them or leave them. Accepting reality and making the best of a bad deal is not failure and it is not pessimism for pessimism's sake.

@michael in adelaide there is a 400 year supply of brown coal in the La Trobe Valley if we choose to burn it. Coal in general remains essentially plentiful. Oil is clearly in trouble and, from what I know of you, we have one big point of agreement: our capacity to have ignored this incredible issue is breathtaking. Gas could well have more life than we thought a few years ago, but as the price follows oil basically and gas is far too greenhouse intensive, dependence here is another trouble spot.

We have energy pressures, for sure, but they are hardly the sole explanation of the global economic downturn.

Full scale rollout of IFR can put them to bed, forever. There may be a squeeze while it happens, but if we want energy we can have it; clean, GHG free, inexhaustible, free of mining. There is simply so much usable material sitting around right now doing nothing. All that while, technologies using solar, wind and other renewables sources will continue to improve in the contribution they can make.

If we ignore nuclear power, I think we are thoroughly effed, through climate change, through impending oil scarcity, and through idiotic determination to keep exploiting ever lower grades of hydrocarbons.

michael_in_adelaide,

We are only at "energy limits" if your definition of energy is the energy that comes from fossil fuel combustion. With implementation of the IFR (and other Generation IV nuclear technologies), nuclear fission fuel is practically inexhaustible. http://www.mcgill.ca/files/gec3/NuclearFissionFuelisInexhaustibleIEEE.pdf . Saying "Energy limits are non-negotiable" is simply wrong.

Of course, at the moment everything is built from oil. So as oil becomes scarcer and more expensive, it will make new energy infrastructure (as well as all other infrastructure) more expensive. This really only increases the urgency to replace fossil fuel energy systems and electrify the transport system/develop and use synfuels.

On the contrary, I think you are ignoring the fact that even if we are on the downward slope of oil production (and I think we are), if we continue to burn the stuff, as well as all the coal, tar sands, and gas we still have access to, we are toast.

Re "making feasible preparations for a low-energy future"

I spend about six weeks a year in a country with a "low energy present" – India. In reality, it's an unattractive option - low energy use tends to track with levels of poverty (e.g. low transport energy use implies people staying put where they grow up, limiting opportunities for education and employment, restricting access to technology and so on. Indians are understandably desperate to break out of their "low energy" paradigm - I wish that those who think it's a good move would spend some time in the reality of low energy economies.

And yes, there are constraints on energy use - carbon output (although just how severe those are depends on assumptions about climate sensitivity), and fuel availability.

it's true that oil production is at or close to peak, albeit the decline curve can be very much slower than expected (Brits have seen that demonstrated in spades, with the amazing longevity of large parts of the North Sea province - many fields that are still in production should have been exhausted as far back as the middle 1990s, Forties being a prime example).

Coal supplies are a long way from hitting viable extraction rates, but are obviously constrained by high carbon content. CCS may make that constraint more relaxed, but at the moment that's looking far from viable - our own flagship project in the UK has bitten the dust - that involved retrofitting CCS to 300MW of a 2000MW coal station - and when probable cost rose beyond £2Bn.

The wild card is gas. No-one yet really knows the potential of the various forms of tight gas production, although the IEA is estimating 100-150 years supply at current extraction rates - and they're not notably an organisation prone to optimism. I'm surprised to see anyone characterising gas as "high carbon" - with CCGT technology, it produces about half the CO2/MWh of coal, even burning coal in a supercritical station. Further, fitment of precombustion CCS to gas is relatively unchallenging, albeit it’ll probably double unit costs

<cont>

< cont> Also, don’t underestimate just how much gas is being produced nowadays – in total, current production is about half the energy value of oil production.

There are certain areas where (short of miraculous developments in energy storage/batteries etc.) hydrocarbons are likely to remain dominant because of their combination of easy portability and high energy density. For example, in aviation, liquid hydrocarbons will be with us for many years either as “natural” production, “gas-to-liquids” processes or potentially biofuels; in shipping it ought to be viable to substitute gas for oil (LNG tankers already fuel themselves by using the “boil-off” to power their engines). CNG/LPG works rather well in road transport, albeit is at least partially substitutable by foreseeable battery technology and electrification, especially with “range extender” hybrids pretty much demonstrably viable.

Outside of that space, pretty much all things are substitutable either through electrification or through “unconventional” process heat production.

So, the argument about a “low energy future” is ultimately about how much electricity can be produced from low-carbon sources, and if nuclear can viably take up that load.

You'll excuse me talking from a UK perspective, but I doubt the Australian or even US situation is conceptually different, other than in scale.

<cont>

< cont >

We currently average between 35 and 40GW average electrical load. Our generation is typically split 40:40:15:5 between gas, coal, nuclear and a mix, including about 2% hydro and 1.5% wind. Power generation contributes about 40% of total carbon output (188 million tonnes from 475). Other major contributors are transport (120), industry/business (73), residential cooking and heating (78), public and other (17). We've undertaken to deliver an 80% cut by 2050, so get to around 100 million tonnes. Using a rule of thumb approach, producing 1GW from fossil fuel seems to result in about (188/(.8*40)) million tonnes of CO2 per year. Close enough if we call it 6 million tonnes as equivalent to 1GW running for one year.

The thermal efficiency of power plant is slightly better than IC engines, so allowing from transmission losses, so we can probably assume the two sectors to be similarly carbon intensive. if we use EVs, plug in hybrids and eletrified rail for most personal transportation, we can probably get to 65% decarbonisation. That leaves us putting out about 40 Million tonnes, but adds (0.65*120 = 80Million tonnes) to our equivalent electrical CO2 ouput = equal to about 13GW of continually running capacity. Let's assume we can move all the other demands 80% onto electricity (In practice, we can get pretty much to 1:1 replacement by the use of heat-pumps and similar approaches - here are a raft of othe efficiency improvements available, too). At the moment, that's (73+78+ 17) = 158 million tonnes - so 80% of that is 126 million tonnes - or, 21 GW equivalent. That leaves us putting out about 32 million tonnes.

SO, I'm now up to needing to decarbonise my (considerably greater) electricity production. I need to make all of my current 40GW, plus 13GW for transport, plus 21GW for the other uses. That's 74GW. There will also be some growth in demand, no matter how careful we are. UK average is about 2 to 2 1/2%. Let's assume I can get that down to 1.5%, by being reasonably aggressive about energy efficiency. <cont>

<cont>

That puts my 2050 demand at about 125GW. And to get to my overall target of limiting output to 100 million tonnes, I have to make that 125GW with less than 32 million tonnes of CO2 output.

Let's start by assuming I can do something like France does at the moment - 80% of total electrical production is nuclear. 0.8*125 = 100GW.

Is it feasible to build and run 100GW of reactors?

Well, and EPR is 1600MW, and an ESBWR 1500, plus there's a probable stretch of the AP1000 to 1400MW in the pipeline - so, let's assume standard units of 1500MW. That means I need 66 of them. Allow for an 85% capacity factor, and that's 78. Could a nation like the UK build 78 reactors in 38 years? France built 58 in about 20 years, so it doesn't look infeasible.

OK, how much CO2 is the rest of my fleet going to put out? Well, it seems sensible that the rest of the fleet is used for load-following, if it's reasonably low capital cost. - and it has to be dispatchable, so that rules out intermittent renewables. I can probably build 10GW or so of pumped storage hydro (we've got about 5-6 at the moment, so that's certainly doable). Of course, I need an extra 4-6 nuclear plants to feed them, but that's a minor extension to what I've already got. Let's assume the other 15GW is gas-fired. 40% of current production is gas - and we know it's about half as CO2 intensive as coal. That gives me about 4 million tonnes of CO2 per year per GW of average ouput. So, I'm at 60 million tonnes of CO2 - not good enough. But, decarbonising gas is far less technically demanding that doing it with coal - and doing that for half the fleet doesn't seem infeasible. So, I can get there.

<cont>

Ben Heard takes money from the uranium industry as a consultant for General Atomics / Heathgate, the company that operates the Beverley uranium mine in South Australia. He rarely if ever discloses that financial interest. Heard's claim to be an environmentalist sits extremely uncomfortably with his willingness to take on consulting work for GA/Heathgate, a company that i) supported police brutality against environmentalists at Beverley (and the capsicum-spraying of the 11-year-old grand-daughter of an Adnyamathanha Elder), ii) has been caught spying on environmentalists, iii) has a sub-standard environmental record and iv) is heavily involved the military-industrial complex. Part of Heard's back-story is that he used to be anti-nuclear before he saw the light, but there's not a shred of evidence that he was anti-nuclear - not a single letter to a newspaper, not a single comment on any online forum, etc. Recently Heard has resorted to blatant deceit with his dishonest claim that Friends of the Earth tried to shut down a pro-nuclear public meeting in Adelaide. A critique of Heard's propaganda is posted at http://www.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/oz/ben-heard-decarbonisesa

I am ploughing through all these comments, after having ploughed through Ben Heard's article, and I do admire Heard's optimism.
But - it's all been a bit much for this peasant to absorb.
I noted Bugsy's comment - I think he's talking about Small Modular Reactors, or IFR's - perhaps they're both the same - no matter.

Bugsy says:
We can't buy them yet.
We can't build them yet.
In fact, noone is actually building them yet.
Even if we built the earlier versions, we don't have anyone trained to build or run them and everything and everyone will have to be imported to start up.
We don't know how much it will cost.
It also seems all the resident climate 'skeptics' love the idea.
Sounds like you're on a winner.

I dunno who you are, Bugsy, but I like your style!
Noel Wauchope

@Jim Green

I work in the nuclear industry and make a good living doing so. However, I do not advocate for the increased use of nuclear energy BECAUSE I work in the industry; the reality is quite the opposite. I work in the industry BECAUSE I believe to the very core of my being that atomic fission is the best available source of heat. Our industrial society is nearly completely powered by heat; either directly or through machinery that converts heat into other useful forms of power - like electricity and motive force.

Fission is superior because it is concentrated - uranium has 2 million times as much energy per unit mass as oil, which happens to be the most concentrated source of heat from chemical combustion. That means we need a lot less material. Uranium mines do not often contain highly concentrated ore, but that is okay, we can do the milling close to the extraction point and just move the good stuff to the customers. In contrast, coal, oil and natural gas need to move massive quantities of material all the way to the burners.

Fission is also superior because the process does not consume oxygen and produces waste that is slightly less massive than the small quantity of input material. (Fission heat is produced by converting a tiny quantity of mass into energy via the well known formulation of E-mc^2, where c is the speed of light; a very large number.) Virtually none of the waste products have ever entered the environment; they are all well contained, inventoried and monitored. I cannot find any evidence, despite years of searching, of a documented case of someone being harmed by exposure to the waste products of a commercial nuclear power plant.

Nuclear fission is also superior because it eliminates the notion of fuel scarcity; there is enough uranium and thorium to power an abundant and prosperous human society for thousands of years without running out. That fact scares the established hydrocarbon industry.

Jimbo,

Just because the IFR reactor hasn't been built yet, doesn't mean it can't. Compared to standard reactors it is far more expensive per MW to build. The motivation for these reactors is not cheap power, but the burning of unwanted fissile material.

The skills needed for running this reactor would be almost identical to running any other reactor.

In this article Vaclav Smil explains why we will not see an IFR future:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/a-skeptic-looks-at-alternative-energy/0

The REALITY is that the IFR people are talking about rolling out a technology for which development is not even complete to cover an energy deficit that is already opening up NOW. People also need to understand that it not only takes time to convert an energy system - it takes energy itself to build energy infrastructure - that energy must come from somewhere.

Interesting to learn that Ben Heard receives money from the nuclear industry.

And just by the by I was fascinated to read about the bits of fuel rods washing up on the beach at Dounreay in the UK (and nearby):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dounreay

"The beach has been closed since 1983 due to this danger,[1] caused by old fuel rod fragments being pumped into the sea.[1] In 2008, a clean-up project using Geiger counter-fitted robot submarines will search out and retrieve each particle individually, a process that will take years.[1] The particles still wash ashore, including as at 2009 -137 less radioactive particles on the publicly accessible but privately owned close-by Sandside Bay beach and one at a popular tourist beach at Dunnet.[7]"

Lovely!

Ben Heard states that my article (criticising Barry Brook’s proposals for nuclear power for Australia ) is dangerous, because it might “kill momentum” for the development of Integral fast Nuclear Reactors. Well, I had no idea that I had that kind of power. I must do this more often.

We’re told that the Integral Fast Reactor will be the solution to the stockpiles of nuclear waste and of depleted uranium. Well – this raises a very worrying question, particularly if, as Barry Brook wants, Australia gets a whole heap of these IFRs.

How do these wastes get to Australia’s new IFRs? Or indeed, to everybody else’s IFRs all around the world? By transport of plutonium and depleted uranium – in road transport, ships, planes? This raises the questions of accident risk, terrorist risk, weapons fuel proliferation risks and the enormous and costly program of security for all this transport.

The PRISM fast reactor is only at the discussion phase in Britain, as a way to deal with their heaps of plutonium wastes. They know already that deep underground burial would be safer,and cheaper.

Ben Heard does admit that nuclear power is a “high capital option”. But he claims that nuclear is much less expensive than solar thermal. Perhaps so - for the setting up. But what about the disposal ? Solar thermal does not leave us with radioactive wastes, to be secured and guarded for 300 years, on top of the costs of bringing in the plutonium, and building the final repository for the wastes.
And – here’s the rub. Nuclear power has, for the past 70 years, always required tax-payers’ money. The real impetus for IFR’s comes from the crisis of nuclear waste – a forlorn effort to turn the waste disaster into some kind of commercial success. The UK tried this with Sellafield - it was an economic and environmental disaster. Same with Japan's effort - the Monju nuclear reprocessing reactor. I doubt that the public will buy this magician's trick to turn a huge liability - nuclear waste - into some sort of commercial win. Noel Wauchope

You turn your back for 5 mins...

Been a little busy, as I am in the United States, mainly to discuss IFR with others who actually know what they are talking about.

What Jim Green does is called "smear". He does it because he has run dry on arguments. That I hardly ever mention it is another way of saying I have mentioned it, repeatedly, in forms that stick around, including about three times on my own blog. This is why Green knows about it.

My "consulting" to Heathgate is assistance with their mandatory reporting of greenhouse and energy under the NGER act. It is probably the least strategic (i.e. least interesting) work I have done all year, and made up about 3% of my revenue. The bulk is from the local Government sector, a smattering of other private, and some teaching work. Just in case anyone missed it, IFR is what puts Heathgate out of business.

Green illustrates how sick environmentalism is; that some regard it as a club to which the likes of him determine membership, rather than a set of values. Will he be asking for my tax returns to see all my donations? Would he like witnesses to the times I argued against nuclear? Presumably chucking in a whole qualification and career to retrain in sustainability does not count.

Noel, we were referring to IFR not SMR. There is, again, a difference. But you seem to be making a personal selling point of your ignorance. Do you know for example that spent nuclear fuel has no value from a weapons perspective? It's full of all the wrong isotopes for the job? Would be like trying to make a cake rise using cement? So why are you waving it around as scary? Oh yes, because that is what you do, leaving it to others to correct you.

Ben Heard is correct - used nuclear fuel from commercial reactors is so wrong for nuclear weapons that no one has ever used it to make a weapon - even to demonstrate the possibility that it can be done. Sure, you can find stories on the Internet and even some vague papers by supposed nuclear weapons,experts that claim the task is possible. However, every one of them hides behind the claim that the details are too secret to release.

Since there has never been a demonstration, the people who worry about "proliferation" ask the rest of us, some of whom have a little expertise of our own on the topic, to trust their assertions and models.

Since there is a word limit here, I'll point to a more detailed article that I wrote on the topic that includes additional references.

http://atomicinsights.com/2010/07/proving-a-negative-why-modern-used-nuclear-fuel-cannot-be-used-to-make-a-weapon.html

Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights

Heard and Adams have a narrow view of weapons proliferation.
These days nuclear weapons are becoming old hat.
There are cyberweapons now. for national states to develop.
But, better still,for terrorists, there are "dirty bombs". All they need is some radioactive material, and then whatever they like as an explosive. I think they use fertilisers. Lovely for spreading radioactivity into air and water.
All nuclear reactors produce radioactive wastes. These new smart aleck ones - SMRs, IFRs whatever you like - are not that different from "conventional" nuclear reactors, except that they cost astronomically more to build and to run.
Noel Wauchope

Jim Green, Thursday, 28 June 2012 1:45:37 AM

Big deal, Jim Green. Ben Heard is a climate consultant, he is not paid to promote the nuclear industry or promote uranium. Your post is incredibly misleading. On the other hand, you are paid by Friends of the Earth to campaign specifically against the nuclear industry. That is your job, regardless of the facts.

I take it that, considering you only managed a personal attack on Ben, you could not find anything substantial to criticise in this article?

Tom Keen

Noel Wauchope, 2 July 2012 10:33:56 AM

You have failed to provide a shred of evidence for your any statements, again.

How do you propose these "terrorists" get their hands on radioative material? Approach a reactor core, dip a bucket in? This is nonsense talk.

What is your basis for stating that IFRs "cost astronomically more to build and to run"?

Certainly the capital cost for next generation reactors are higher than conventional reactors (for now at least), but the operational costs are lower because the fuel is free (i.e. the "waste" from older reactors). This paper in Energy Economics is a comprehensive projection of nuclear costs, including fast reactors: http://www.mit.edu/~jparsons/publications/FuelRecyclingReprint.pdf . It does not support your contention. And neither do the cost projections in Plentiful Energy.

Try again.

michael_in_adelaide, Sunday, 1 July 2012 1:05:08 PM

Try being a little less misleading. I already explicitly acknowledged in this comments thread that all energy infrastructure is currently built with oil. I also acknowledged that the longer we wait to roll out nuclear technologies at the scale required to decarbonise our energy systems, the more it will cost due to escalating energy costs.

The fact is, the more energy costs escalate, the greater the urgency will be to secure energy supplies that aren't based on fossil fuels. The cost of transitioning will be higher, but the cost of inaction will be higher again due to energy poverty and the effects of climate change - particularly if we burn every last remaining fossil fuel reserve we have access to.

We already have many nuclear technologies which are ready to roll out NOW, so it doesn't matter if the IFR takes a few decades to take off.

And what does Dounreay have to do with the article we wrote?

I'm not the only one who worries both about terrorists getting the plutonium fuel in transit to the new small reactors, and about the eventual radioactive wastes. From yesterdays' news in South Carolina: "The mini-reactors – also dubbed small modular reactors or SMRs – have been hailed as the nuclear technology of the future.
waste is the problem…… waste could be shipped into the state from other areas…. South Carolina once again could become the nuclear dumping ground for the nation. Before South Carolina embraces this untested technology, we need answers to questions about possible accidents and their consequences, the potential for a terrorist strike or theft of nuclear material – but mostly about the waste." http://www.heraldonline.com/2012/07/01/4085457/mini-nuclear-reactors.html#storylink=cpy Noel Wauchope

Noel Wauchope

Just because there are journalists and even some radiation protection professionals who spread irrational fear about radiation, radioactive materials and nuclear "waste" does not mean they are correct. There is a very large body of evidence and experience with radioactive materials that has been accumulating for more than 110 years that disputes the notion that it is something that should be the subject of fear instead of simply the subject of understanding.

For anyone who might be worried about the already remote possibility that a terroristmight somehow obtain a significant quantity of radioactive materials, I published some advice from and expert on how to deal with a dirty bomb. That article may be getting a little old, but the information remains accurate; the science has not changed.

http://atomicinsights.com/2007/07/dirty-bomb-advice-from-larry-grimm.html

Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights

Noel,

SMR is not IFR (in the same way that IFR is not LFTR; as in they are DIFFERENT THINGS). There will not be plutonium fuel "in transit" to SMRs, they will run on the same low enriched uranium as reactors do currently.

You seem to make an art form of blending unrelated nuclear information into scary sound-bytes. It's perhaps an effective sort of activism, but it has a more specific name: "misinformation".

This site is called On Line Opinion and yes, you are entitled to yours. But you are not entitled to you own facts, no matter how doggedly you choose to remain ignorant about these things.

CLARIFICATION to comment above; where I have stated "SMR is not IFR"

The proposed PRISM fast reactor for the UK could be fairly described as a Small Modular Reactor. However the PRISM alone is not an IFR as it lacks the facility to continually reprocess the waste.

The designs referred to by Noel Wauchope that are discussed in her linked editorial are not integral fast reactors. They would not operate with recycled spent nuclear fuel or separated plutonium, but standard LWR fuel.

Where the editorial Noel has quoted states "And if the technology is licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the mini-reactors use spent nuclear rods from power plants as a source for fuel, then waste could be shipped into the state from other areas" this is purely ignorance on the part of the journalist. Even in an IFR one does not simply reload a used fuel rod; it requires reprocessing to cleanse the fuel and produce new, usable fuel pins. Whether Noel deliberately cherry picked the key phrase from this sentence, or was just saving words, I'm not sure, but the error in the logic is clear when the full sentence is read. If you arrived at one of these proposed SMRs with a load of spent fuel rods, you would be turned away in confusion...

Noel, I'm understanding of people's worry, very much used to share it. But it's borne predominantly of ignorance, and it would be great if, instead of touting these matters as fact, you instead raised them for discussion or posed them as a question so that the ignorance might actually be alleviated, not perpetuated.

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

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.

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/

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......

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?

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....!

Additionally Noel, you've gone and repeated the same technically-flawed arguments in your "Independent Australia" article (which doesn't appear to allow non-administrators to comment) even after our critique.

e.g. "PRISM reactor is cooled by liquid sodium, which can very readily catch fire".

How deceptive can you be? Almost the entire article is a straw man too. "Nuclear priesthood"? "Nuclear lobby"? "Nuclear technocrats"? "Nuclear hierarchy"? I.e. you simply decided who we are, who we represent, and what we think. I guess it's easier to argue against false opponents.

I don't work for the nuclear industry. I'm not an engineer. I'm an ecology student with a low-income healthcare card. If I'm part of the "nuclear priesthood" then good luck to us.

Ben and others,

despite some pretty uncivil and ignorant sledging in bits,
plaudits to you for your patient, honest and reasonable presentation.

I reject the acusation that just because you work in an industry you are a shill. Those that argued that lost instantly. It is more a reflection on thier own lack of morality. Maybe they could work in an industry they could only cynicly defend with lies. Some of us take pride in our endevours.

I have been reading up on this topic for ages and have alway got bogged down chasing the unicorns thrown up by the anti nuke zeolots. I have tried to keep an open mind. I appreciate being told the facts. I really hate having to verify information from faux experts only to find I have wasted my time unpicking BS.

micheal_in_adelaide I cant figure out where you are coming from. Seeming to suggest there are no solutions and we are all stuffed? Better get used to a post industrialist future? Can you even imagine how horrible that would be? If I shared your view of the future I would go out and buy myself a kilo of smack to last the rest of my life.

I want a future for our species that includes space exploration and hightech health care. A middle class life of comfort for all. We have the technology so why not do it?

Once we have worked through all the low hanging fruit ore mineral / resource wise we are gonna need plenty of joules to keep providing the nessesities of life.

You sold me - Nuclear is the only way for now.