"And much of that fuel (about 14%) is coming from Russia, the world’s biggest enricher of uranium."
Maybe this is a major reason why the american terrorists want to destroy Russia and remove Putin from power using the Ukrainian morons as proxy... so they can grab the Russian nuclear resources... and gas and oil!
We should also be developing the capacity to reprocess so-called "spent" fuel. I believe something like 95% of the energy available in the fuel we 're using remains after our once through usage. I know, it would like take decades to get this online with today's regulatory regime, but it's colossally wasteful of a precious commodity to operate as we do.
GREAT and very timely article. The Brain dead dumbos in the Biden administration are quite happy, Tragically delusional, it seems, to do what he promised believing in the HOAX of the Green New Deal,
that Unicorns and windmills will power the world. Or alternatively let us freeze to death in the dark.
Robert, please let me comment instead on your PHP with Irina Slav. She spoke of her daughter reminding her of the need for CO2. Please recall Alex Epstein's phrase that CO2 is "plant food."
Your comment about stupidity: A WSJ letter to the editor a year or two ago had one of the greatest comments I've ever seen: "Some are born stupid; some achieve stupidity; some have stupidity thrust upon them." We are indeed having stupidity thrust upon us.
Regarding her hope lying in selfishness: See Ayn Rand's 1964 book The Virtue of Selfishness.
You didn't mention Thorium in your article. There's enough Thorium in the US, in the form of slag piles left over from rare earth mining, to also fuel a fission reactor renaissance. Yes we still need some small amount of enriched Uranium to start off the transmutation of fertile Thorium into fissionable U233, but we probably have enough. Heck we could look to our stored nuclear "waste" for that.
Thorium isn't fissionable; it's fertile. You need to put it in an operating reactor to breed uranium-233, which is fissionable. But we already have a million tonnes of uranium, above ground, mined, milled, and refined, in the form of 100,000 tonnes of spent fuel (only 5% used) and 900,000 tonnes of depleted uranium, every bit as much future fuel as thorium. Since thorium can be transmuted to fuel only in breeder reactors, one must wonder why we should rush to mine thorium when we already have enough uranium to power an all-electric all-nuclear American energy economy for more than 500 years. http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Nuclear.htnl has details.
Except that without operating breeders, that massive amount of spent fuel and depleted uranium is pure waste, with even less economic value than the thorium in mine tailings, because managing those have a cost, while thorium just sits in piles. The problem is fissile, and fast reactors only make it worse, because they need an order of magnitude more than thermal spectrum reactors. The economics just never made sense, even starting from spent fuel. Commercial fast reactors exist, but they aren't taking over the market; each needs a subsidy, and represents a lost opportunity cost to start 10+ thermal spectrum reactors.
Fortunately, we have accumulated such a massive stockpile of "spent" fuel, that we no longer need (or want) fast breeders. Waiting for exponential growth of fissile in fast reactors is now the expensive and slow path. We have a sufficient supply of spent fuel for an unconstrained buildout of enough reactors to power the entire world at a high standard of living, IF it is used in fissile efficient thermal spectrum breeders. (ie. the https://flibe.com LFTR) It is sitting in parking lots in casks convenient for shipping and stockpiling, waiting for wiser people.
It's not obvious whether the subsidies they "need" are intrinsic, or a consequence of the regulatory environment. The economics are discussed in "Plentiful Energy" by Charles E. Till and Yoon Il Chang, available on paper from Amazon, or at http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Nuclear.html, where Dr. Chang has generously given permission to post a PDF.
Thermal spectrum reactors do not fission transuranics beyond plutonium efficiently, so they accumulate and represent radiotoxic waste. Am-243, for example, has a 300 year half life.
PUREX doesn't separate anything other than uranium and plutonium, leaving all the other transuranics in the fission product raffinate, which would otherwise be dominated by 30-year caesium and strontium. See http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Radiotoxicity.html.
Russia has BN-600 (600 MWe) and BN-800 (800 MWe) sodium-cooled breeder reactors in operation at Zarechny in Sverdlovsk, and a 1200 MWe one (BN-1200) under development. BN-800 cost about $2.7 billion. A 350 MWe one operated from 1973 to 1993. China has contracted to build a BN-800. The prototype for fast neutron reactors was EBR-II, which operated flawlessly from 1963 to 1994, until the Cliton administration terminated the research program, destroyed the reactor, and filled the building with concrete. BN-600 and BN-800 are of the same "pool" type as EBR-II.
Maybe I wasn't explicit enough; breeding fissile with fast reactors, no matter how you do it, is no longer the optimal path, especially when the decades of delay are measured in lifetimes or generations of populations in poverty. The subsidy I'm referring to isn't necessarily explicit, but one of lost opportunity. It is not a matter of the regulatory environment, but of physics: fission cross sections are small in the fast spectrum, so a whole lot of fissile is needed for each reactor, which takes more time and effort to recover from spent fuel. I'm only suggesting that we use our existing fissile currency wisely, because creating more will always involve unnecessary mining and other bottlenecks. (One might argue that the fast option is still better than once-through, but the high up-front cost is still a problem.)
The recovered TRUs are most valuable in thermal-spectrum thorium converters/breeders allowing more and faster builds. This is especially true with the inherent simplicity and minimal resource use of MSRs, and the very much simplified chemical processing that may be realized with the thorium fuel cycle. It isn't important that the actinides beyond Pu burn efficiently; the salts are impervious to radiation damage, and so they can remain in the reactor until they do fission, or until the salt is saturated with those isotopes. The fissile is only ~1% of the salt, so that will take quite a long time, if it ever does happen. The waste volume has already been reduced to nearly nothing; at worst, clean the salt, store or bury the rest, and move on.
What does PUREX have to do with this? The IFR used pyroprocessing, which is a molten salt process. Either way, PUREX is obsolete; there is no longer any good reason to separate plutonium, and it is an immensely complex, expensive, and messy process producing much aqueous waste and other activated materials. Chemically separating the TRUs and uranium is trivial, and produces readily usable fuel for MSRs and an essentially natural uranium byproduct.
China builds at least one of everything, to learn, which is not unwise.
The Uranium we have is enough to fuel America for the next 1000 years. All we have to do is not stockpile it as nuclear waste. We can even take the worst of the nuclear waste and burn it for fuel and instead of tens or hundreds of thousands of years of nuclear waste, it would be brought down into the hundreds of years.
Centrus is just a bunch of former government stooges feeding at the public trough. Congress could throw 50 billion at them and they might make you a couple of lbs of HALEU. They cannot be given a monopoly position.
I think a reasonably priced government tender for HALEU may also be combined with an advanced order of highly enriched Navy reactor fuel and that might unstick this and allow competition, but you are right- it will take a few years to get that running.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter. People have more important things like beer and drag queens to argue about.
Highly recommended: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-centrus-fiasco at the Gordian Knot, which does an excellent job of concisely detailing the appalling insanity crippling US nuclear, while also offering a number of sensible solutions. Demonstrated failures should receive less funding, not more. HALEU is neither necessary nor optimal, and should never have been made the keystone of US advanced reactor development; it incentivizes inefficient reactors that produce waste in a myriad of forms, many of which are intractable to recycle.
We need a strong military to protect our access to these resources. My dad always told me, "If I have the guns and you have the gold then I have the guns and the gold."
I'd like to hear your take on how GLE (Global Laser Enrichment) fits into this picture. It's a US-based joint venture between Silex (Australia) and Cameco (Canada). Laser enrichment is many times more efficient than centrifuge tech, and is more versatile. The same equipment can be used to make LEU or HALEU, and fine-tune it to whatever level you want. In comparison, a cascade of centrifuges will be set to make one product and one product only. The major US nuclear utilities, including Constellation and Duke, have signed letters of intent to work with GLE going forward. It seems to me laser enrichment is the future... we need to make it as near in the future as possible.
While Megatons to Megawatts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program) was a wild success I often wonder if it was not an intentional maneuver by anti-nuclear or Malthusian activists to cripple the USA's domestic ability to produce nuclear fuel. Constructively disposing of Russian bomb material was a great idea. But did it cost us our ability to domestically produce fuel? If so, was that cost intentional?
The program was the brain child of Thomas Neff, a physicist at MIT. MIT has some deep historical links to anti-nuclearism. I don't know anything about Neff. Anyone else know? Connections to the usual suspects like UCS, GP, NRDC? Or an honest pro-nuclear physicist who just didn't consider second order economic effects?
Here's a graph of US Uranium production and imports with time.
Good points.
"And much of that fuel (about 14%) is coming from Russia, the world’s biggest enricher of uranium."
Maybe this is a major reason why the american terrorists want to destroy Russia and remove Putin from power using the Ukrainian morons as proxy... so they can grab the Russian nuclear resources... and gas and oil!
We should also be developing the capacity to reprocess so-called "spent" fuel. I believe something like 95% of the energy available in the fuel we 're using remains after our once through usage. I know, it would like take decades to get this online with today's regulatory regime, but it's colossally wasteful of a precious commodity to operate as we do.
Uman animals mindset is not very fan of reprocessing stuff!
Forgot to mention THE most important issue.
Get the government regulations to get the hell out of the way!!
GREAT and very timely article. The Brain dead dumbos in the Biden administration are quite happy, Tragically delusional, it seems, to do what he promised believing in the HOAX of the Green New Deal,
that Unicorns and windmills will power the world. Or alternatively let us freeze to death in the dark.
Here's an amazing talk on uranium and nuclear power. Very optimistic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnDy6SGoG00&t=1s
Robert, please let me comment instead on your PHP with Irina Slav. She spoke of her daughter reminding her of the need for CO2. Please recall Alex Epstein's phrase that CO2 is "plant food."
Your comment about stupidity: A WSJ letter to the editor a year or two ago had one of the greatest comments I've ever seen: "Some are born stupid; some achieve stupidity; some have stupidity thrust upon them." We are indeed having stupidity thrust upon us.
Regarding her hope lying in selfishness: See Ayn Rand's 1964 book The Virtue of Selfishness.
You didn't mention Thorium in your article. There's enough Thorium in the US, in the form of slag piles left over from rare earth mining, to also fuel a fission reactor renaissance. Yes we still need some small amount of enriched Uranium to start off the transmutation of fertile Thorium into fissionable U233, but we probably have enough. Heck we could look to our stored nuclear "waste" for that.
Thorium isn't fissionable; it's fertile. You need to put it in an operating reactor to breed uranium-233, which is fissionable. But we already have a million tonnes of uranium, above ground, mined, milled, and refined, in the form of 100,000 tonnes of spent fuel (only 5% used) and 900,000 tonnes of depleted uranium, every bit as much future fuel as thorium. Since thorium can be transmuted to fuel only in breeder reactors, one must wonder why we should rush to mine thorium when we already have enough uranium to power an all-electric all-nuclear American energy economy for more than 500 years. http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Nuclear.htnl has details.
Except that without operating breeders, that massive amount of spent fuel and depleted uranium is pure waste, with even less economic value than the thorium in mine tailings, because managing those have a cost, while thorium just sits in piles. The problem is fissile, and fast reactors only make it worse, because they need an order of magnitude more than thermal spectrum reactors. The economics just never made sense, even starting from spent fuel. Commercial fast reactors exist, but they aren't taking over the market; each needs a subsidy, and represents a lost opportunity cost to start 10+ thermal spectrum reactors.
Fortunately, we have accumulated such a massive stockpile of "spent" fuel, that we no longer need (or want) fast breeders. Waiting for exponential growth of fissile in fast reactors is now the expensive and slow path. We have a sufficient supply of spent fuel for an unconstrained buildout of enough reactors to power the entire world at a high standard of living, IF it is used in fissile efficient thermal spectrum breeders. (ie. the https://flibe.com LFTR) It is sitting in parking lots in casks convenient for shipping and stockpiling, waiting for wiser people.
It's not obvious whether the subsidies they "need" are intrinsic, or a consequence of the regulatory environment. The economics are discussed in "Plentiful Energy" by Charles E. Till and Yoon Il Chang, available on paper from Amazon, or at http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Nuclear.html, where Dr. Chang has generously given permission to post a PDF.
Thermal spectrum reactors do not fission transuranics beyond plutonium efficiently, so they accumulate and represent radiotoxic waste. Am-243, for example, has a 300 year half life.
PUREX doesn't separate anything other than uranium and plutonium, leaving all the other transuranics in the fission product raffinate, which would otherwise be dominated by 30-year caesium and strontium. See http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Radiotoxicity.html.
Russia has BN-600 (600 MWe) and BN-800 (800 MWe) sodium-cooled breeder reactors in operation at Zarechny in Sverdlovsk, and a 1200 MWe one (BN-1200) under development. BN-800 cost about $2.7 billion. A 350 MWe one operated from 1973 to 1993. China has contracted to build a BN-800. The prototype for fast neutron reactors was EBR-II, which operated flawlessly from 1963 to 1994, until the Cliton administration terminated the research program, destroyed the reactor, and filled the building with concrete. BN-600 and BN-800 are of the same "pool" type as EBR-II.
Maybe I wasn't explicit enough; breeding fissile with fast reactors, no matter how you do it, is no longer the optimal path, especially when the decades of delay are measured in lifetimes or generations of populations in poverty. The subsidy I'm referring to isn't necessarily explicit, but one of lost opportunity. It is not a matter of the regulatory environment, but of physics: fission cross sections are small in the fast spectrum, so a whole lot of fissile is needed for each reactor, which takes more time and effort to recover from spent fuel. I'm only suggesting that we use our existing fissile currency wisely, because creating more will always involve unnecessary mining and other bottlenecks. (One might argue that the fast option is still better than once-through, but the high up-front cost is still a problem.)
The recovered TRUs are most valuable in thermal-spectrum thorium converters/breeders allowing more and faster builds. This is especially true with the inherent simplicity and minimal resource use of MSRs, and the very much simplified chemical processing that may be realized with the thorium fuel cycle. It isn't important that the actinides beyond Pu burn efficiently; the salts are impervious to radiation damage, and so they can remain in the reactor until they do fission, or until the salt is saturated with those isotopes. The fissile is only ~1% of the salt, so that will take quite a long time, if it ever does happen. The waste volume has already been reduced to nearly nothing; at worst, clean the salt, store or bury the rest, and move on.
What does PUREX have to do with this? The IFR used pyroprocessing, which is a molten salt process. Either way, PUREX is obsolete; there is no longer any good reason to separate plutonium, and it is an immensely complex, expensive, and messy process producing much aqueous waste and other activated materials. Chemically separating the TRUs and uranium is trivial, and produces readily usable fuel for MSRs and an essentially natural uranium byproduct.
China builds at least one of everything, to learn, which is not unwise.
The Uranium we have is enough to fuel America for the next 1000 years. All we have to do is not stockpile it as nuclear waste. We can even take the worst of the nuclear waste and burn it for fuel and instead of tens or hundreds of thousands of years of nuclear waste, it would be brought down into the hundreds of years.
Centrus is just a bunch of former government stooges feeding at the public trough. Congress could throw 50 billion at them and they might make you a couple of lbs of HALEU. They cannot be given a monopoly position.
I think a reasonably priced government tender for HALEU may also be combined with an advanced order of highly enriched Navy reactor fuel and that might unstick this and allow competition, but you are right- it will take a few years to get that running.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter. People have more important things like beer and drag queens to argue about.
Highly recommended: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-centrus-fiasco at the Gordian Knot, which does an excellent job of concisely detailing the appalling insanity crippling US nuclear, while also offering a number of sensible solutions. Demonstrated failures should receive less funding, not more. HALEU is neither necessary nor optimal, and should never have been made the keystone of US advanced reactor development; it incentivizes inefficient reactors that produce waste in a myriad of forms, many of which are intractable to recycle.
Already subscribed 😉
We need a strong military to protect our access to these resources. My dad always told me, "If I have the guns and you have the gold then I have the guns and the gold."
I'd like to hear your take on how GLE (Global Laser Enrichment) fits into this picture. It's a US-based joint venture between Silex (Australia) and Cameco (Canada). Laser enrichment is many times more efficient than centrifuge tech, and is more versatile. The same equipment can be used to make LEU or HALEU, and fine-tune it to whatever level you want. In comparison, a cascade of centrifuges will be set to make one product and one product only. The major US nuclear utilities, including Constellation and Duke, have signed letters of intent to work with GLE going forward. It seems to me laser enrichment is the future... we need to make it as near in the future as possible.
Got U?
Ask Cameco
They CANDU
& maybe DNN too
Burma Shave
(for those of you old enough to remember...)
Nuclear... it is so obvious, it is tragic.
If it were only a philosophical difference/matter it would be tragic. It's almost criminal.
While Megatons to Megawatts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program) was a wild success I often wonder if it was not an intentional maneuver by anti-nuclear or Malthusian activists to cripple the USA's domestic ability to produce nuclear fuel. Constructively disposing of Russian bomb material was a great idea. But did it cost us our ability to domestically produce fuel? If so, was that cost intentional?
The program was the brain child of Thomas Neff, a physicist at MIT. MIT has some deep historical links to anti-nuclearism. I don't know anything about Neff. Anyone else know? Connections to the usual suspects like UCS, GP, NRDC? Or an honest pro-nuclear physicist who just didn't consider second order economic effects?
Here's a graph of US Uranium production and imports with time.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2020.07.17/chart2.svg
That huge jump in imports and then drop off 20 years later is Megatons to Megawatts.
Parent article at EIA of the graph, in case anyone wants more info: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=44416
Once again:
Solvable problem + politics/special interest = 0
Thanks for another informative article Robert.