OK, probably worth going through this one in a bit of specific detail - I've mentioned it before, but it's a common source of confusion in nuke debates. George Monbiot sets out a version of the thesis:
Last week I argued about these issues with Caroline Lucas. She is one of my heroes, and the best thing to have happened to parliament since time immemorial. But this doesn't mean that she can't be wildly illogical when she chooses. When I raised the issue of the feed-in tariff, she pointed out that the difference between subsidising nuclear power and subsidising solar power is that nuclear is a mature technology and solar is not. In that case, I asked, would she support research into thorium reactors, which could provide a much safer and cheaper means of producing nuclear power? No, she told me, because thorium reactors are not a proven technology. Words fail me.
Me too, to an extent, but actually whether by accident or design, Caroline Lucas is fundamentally right here.
The point is this - more research isn't going to help you with thorium reactors. The lab research program is complete; we know how to make a thorium reactor. There are probably about a dozen thorium reactors currently reacting in the world, all of them in university labs. The problem is now one of industrialisation and commercial scale. Because while there are a dozen or more lab-size reactors, what we would need would be a proper commercial-scale one. There are two problems here:
1) is that we don't have a magic size-increasing ray that would allow you to simply increase the size of the lab models to make them big enough to run a power plant off. Making a big casting is a more expensive process than making a small casting, for a given percentage tolerance, and:
2), even if we had a magic size increasing ray, if we used it to scale up a lab model by 10 times, we would be scaling up all the little cracks and imperfections by a factor of 10 times too. And this would mean that our magically scaled-up reactor would be unusable, because the size of a gap that something nasty can get through is a fixed quantity, not a percentage of the size of the object (dollhouses don't have mice in the walls). A working commercial-scale reactor has to be manufactured to a much finer percentage tolerance than a lab model.
How these problems are usually solved with new reactor technologies is by taking a deep breath and deciding to build a power plant anyway, hoping that in the process of doing so, you will come up with enough clever engineering wheezes and process improvements to mitigate the extraordinary expense of making very big objects to very fine tolerances - and that the lessons learned in doing so will mean that your second nuclear reactor is a lot better-designed than your first and so on. It has kindasorta worked sometimes in the past.
But this makes it clear what the issue is - there's no separate research issue in solving the problem of building a commercial-scale thorium reactor. The remaining problem to be solved is just literally the problem of "building a commercial-scale thorium reactor", and the only research methodology for solving that problem is also called "building a commercial-scale thorium reactor[1]". If you think that thorium's a commercially viable technology, commission one. At present, most people with their own (or their government's) money at stake don't - most of the people who do are perennial Mittyish nukeman optimists of exactly the sort that taxpayers and investors have learned to fear.
"More research", in other words, is basically the "no fly zone" of nuclear power plant development. It's a way of trying to be a little bit pregnant.
[1] Actually probably more like "commissioning a number of commercial-scale thorium reactors" - there isn't really much point in just building one.
Update: Alex's comment about the Indian thorium project prompts me to make a slight qualification here, because there is an intermediate stage between lab and commercialisation - the "prototype". But a prototype isn't really a research project - they are commissioned as step one in the development of a series of plants. They do give you the option of walking away having spent only massive amounts of money if the technology turns out to be unworkable, and that's important, but my objection to Monbiot still stands because you don't simply decide to build a prototype plant independently of your decision to build a load of real plants - that's pretty much the meaning of the word "prototype".
Well, isn't the answer "the Government of India", at least as regards thorium?
ReplyDeleteYes, although as I understand it, their project is for a fast-breeder with a plutonium core, rather than the magic supercheap type that thorium enthusiasts are usually talking about
ReplyDelete(The Wikipedia page on thorium is still quoting a 2008 article which said that the prototype would be working by 2011, btw; the current estimate is that 2017 might be more realistic).
ReplyDeleteI'm reminded of the UK nuclear industry crashing a train into a spent fuel rod carrying vessel in order to demonstrate its safety. I think at this stage I'd like to see a "crash test" of any nuclear reactor technology claimed to be inherently or passively safe. Proponents will claim this is too expensive or dangerous, to which the response is "yes, that was our point".
ReplyDelete(A phrase I saw used with regard to cooling fukushima was "permanently provisional". Brilliantly chilling. The need of spent fuel to be cooled for years, even if it's stuck in the core of a scrammed reactor, is a disastrous problem I'd not understood until now)
This may be giving Caroline Lucas more credit than she deserves, but I think the confusion may be on Monbiot's side. Solar isn't 'mature' (and therefore should be subsidised) inasmuch as nobody's made it pay yet - well, not in these latitudes, anyway. Thorium isn't 'proven' (and therefore shouldn't be subsidised) inasmuch as nobody's made it work yet.
ReplyDeleteI'm reminded of the UK nuclear industry crashing a train into a spent fuel rod carrying vessel in order to demonstrate its safety
ReplyDeleteWhich worked admirably, and would have done with any imaginable nuclear thing that wasn't from the USSR. The only serious nuclear incident we've ever had in the UK was when our bomb factory caught fire, because we were trying to do terrifying things with it.
At the time, on the grounds of 'people who live in places that are remote and poor are remote and like having jobs, we decided to put our "terrifying experimental bombs research" and "not terrifying power reasarch" on the same site. This was tactically sensible, but strategically unwise, because it makes people who don't know much about the situation - ie most of them - think that nuclear power in the UK has ever caused an environmental problem. Which it hasn't.
One of the things that I did, as a nuclear power fan, when it became that Fukushima wasn't doing especially well, was to check the earthquake specs of UK nuclear power stations. The conclusion was that the worst - the remaining Magnoxen, Wylfa, etc - are built to the same earthquake resistance as Fukushima - and the newer ones are twice as resilient. And Fukishima survived the earthquake just fine (no, they're not tsunami-resilient - but there's a very good reason why there's no English word for 'tsunami').
In short: argue all you like about the cost-effectiveness of nuclear power, but if if the nuclear power plant in question is in a place which isn't on a major zone of tectonic activity, then raising safety (rather than cost) is lying ignorant bullshit.
The need of spent fuel to be cooled for years, even if it's stuck in the core of a scrammed reactor, is a disastrous problem I'd not understood until now
ReplyDeleteWe can make things be cold; that isn't difficult. See: freezers.
FFS. The level of comprehension of nuclear stuff is fucking childish. Whenever the whole Japanic is over, let's tally up the consequences of the gigantic exploding oil refinery (just, solely, the one that was on the bloody news - never mind all the other non-nuclear installations that catastrophically failed when they were faced with a gigantic earthquake and a fucking tsunami) versus the non-exploding power station. Perhaps we could model a dam's performance in the same scenario, while we're at it.
Twats.
I don't think that's true - Sellafield's THORP plant had a leak in 2005 which cost £300m to clean up, and this was simply the result of poor maintenance.
ReplyDeleteIt's also important to note that 'scaling up' is not just a matter of tolerances-- multiplying energy fluxes by a factor of ten or a hundred makes a qualitative difference in the consequences of getting it wrong-- from 'bad' to 'catastrophic'... and beyond.
ReplyDeleteTHORP was also a defence thing, although run on a ridiculous pseudo-commercial model. Reprocessing *doesn't make sense* unless you're trying to make plutonium.
ReplyDeleteThe stuff that comes out of nuclear power stations is inert and harmless (or "no more harmful than Cornwall") once vitrified and buried somewhere that isn't seismically amusing.
If you can't stick it somewhere sensible, and instead stick it on top of your reactor, or send it to Cumberland for people to turn it into MAXTREME bombs, the implications are negligible.
What we need is for places that create nuclear waste to vitrify it, and then send it some enormous, seismically safe country, which currently fucks the world by sending it colossal amounts of coal, to take the glassy cubes that occur and bury them a long way underground.
I can't think of such a country. Perhaps your readers could do better?
BAH. "the implications are negligible" should be "the implication are serious".
ReplyDeleteYes, I realise this is a correction of Greenspanic proportions, but at least I made it, and it doesn't affect my argument.
I'm sure this is a silly question being asked by someone who did no research, but is there a good reason that you couldn't mass-produce lab scale reactors and replace a 100x bigger thorium reactor with 100 small ones? This is certainly what happened in computing technology -- all of today's best computers are massive clusters of (essentially) PC's rather than the "big iron" style of the 80's. People (including academics and the US Air Force) have done serious work on big clusters of Playstation 3's, for example.
ReplyDeleteShort answer: yes, there is a good reason.
ReplyDeleteLong answer: no lab reactor, unless you count things that are the size of Windscale as lab reactors, actually manages to achieve the kind of thing one's looking for.
This is why Hard Physics is the only branch of philosophy that gets more funding than railway infrastructure - because, if you're a very clever person with a brilliant theory about How The Universe Might Have Happened, then the only way to test that theory is by building an Amazing Thing.
Nuclear power is, incidentally, scaleable to the desktop. If our laptops had batteries based on uranium rather than lithium, they'd last for longer than human civilisation. Disappointingly, health and safety types have ruled against such convenient measures.
(it's also the only way of concentrating power to the degree that's required for aviation to exist - there is no other way of storing such power than fossil fuels. It'll be interesting to see whether "it's necessary" or "OMG ANOTHER CHERNOBYLZ THE FEAR I AM AN IDIOT" will win out in our lifetimes once carbon-fuelled aviation is no longer an option).
"We can make things be cold; that isn't difficult. See: freezers."
ReplyDeletehttp://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/03/15/japan-nuclear-iaea-idUKLDE72E04G20110315
http://www.engineerlive.com/Power-Engineer/Nuclear_Power/Fukushima_disaster%3A_filling_spent_fuel_ponds/23355/
Clearly you should take your freezer over there and show them how it's done.
"no other way of storing such power than fossil fuels"
Synthfuel? Flying nuclear reactors aren't going to win in our lifetimes.
(Seriously, shouldn't you wait until Fukushima has stopped releasing radiation and been declared safe before trying to tell us it's safe?)
ReplyDeleteAnd nobody's commented on my destruction-test reactor idea yet.
If our laptops had batteries based on uranium rather than lithium, they'd last for longer than human civilisation. Disappointingly, health and safety types have ruled against such convenient measures.
ReplyDeleteYou've said several things on this thread. That one was epic, though.
If our laptops had batteries based on uranium rather than lithium, they'd last for longer than human civilisation. Disappointingly, health and safety types have ruled against such convenient measures.
ReplyDeleteYou've said several stupid things on this thread. That one was epic, though.
We can make things be cold; that isn't difficult. See: freezers.
ReplyDeleteSeriously. This is your argument. This is the kind of crap argument I expect from PR men for seriously nasty industries. Yes, we can cool food in our kitchens. This is not the same as doing so in an environment with lots of hazardous (to electronics) radiation.
God knows, anti-nuclear paranoia can annoy me, but this is worse.
Is that Finish reactor which was apparently the future doing any better. Last I checked it was seriously over budget, and there seemed to be a lot of pressure to compromise safety due to overruns. The engineering challenge of building it is extraordinary, particularly as much of it seems to be stuff that can't really be transferred to a new build.
ReplyDeleteJohn B: "What we need is for places that create nuclear waste to vitrify it, and then send it some enormous, seismically safe country, which currently fucks the world by sending it colossal amounts of coal, to take the glassy cubes that occur and bury them a long way underground.
ReplyDeleteI can't think of such a country. Perhaps your readers could do better?"
This would be instead of send such country all of the UK's convicts?
Its at this point that I'm reminded of the vast and thriving black market in "nuclear reprocessing".
ReplyDelete"But a prototype isn't really a research project - they are commissioned as step one in the development of a series of plants"
ReplyDeleteI think you're limiting the definition of "research" unnecessarily here.
I mean, your definition of "prototype" here fits ITER, and yet I don't see how it can be argued that ITER money isn't for fusion research.
I think Monbiot comes out the best in this debate:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/30/prescription_for_survival_a_debate_on
You've said several stupid things on this thread. That one was epic, though
ReplyDeleteYes. It was definitely meant entirely seriously. Eejit.
Pete: "The last reported temperature level in the spent fuel pond at Unit 4 was 84 degrees Celsius, although increases in temperature up to 1,000 degrees Celsius could cause the fuel rods' zirconium cladding to catch fire" is filed in the same section as "if my auntie had balls she'd be my uncle". Cooling things *is* quite easy for a developed society to do, which is how Japan has managed to keep Fukushima under control and will continue to do so, and why the only people worried about its implications for anything other than 'costing the Japanese government a lot of money and allowing people to lie that nuclear power is dangerous' are clowns.
ReplyDeleteCooling things *is* quite easy for a developed society to do, which is how Japan has managed to keep Fukushima under control and will continue to do so ...
ReplyDeleteThat would be why there's a crack in the containment leaking radioactivity into the sea then ...
"how Japan has managed to keep Fukushima under control"
ReplyDeleteAh, so in your definition, giant building-wrecking hydrogen explosions and now effectively running an open-loop cooling system through reactor cores and straight into the environment constitutes being "under control".
http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-npp/daiichi-photos.htm
Generally I don't regard situations where the things you need to fix are buried under hundreds of tons of smoldering radioactive rubble and twisted steel as being under control, but I guess I'm just conservative that way.
As fuel is only a small portion of the cost of current nuclear power I don't see why it would be worth the expense of developing thorium reactors, especially as there is unlikely to be a shortage of uranium anytime soon.
ReplyDeleteIf too many countries switch to nuclear power then there will be a shortage of uranium.
ReplyDeleteGuano
Is John a physicist, or a nuclear engineer, incidentally? He's speaking with a lot of authority here. Interesting to know what that authority rests upon.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous, the the number of nuclear reactors has been fairly stagnant for the past 30 years and a considerably number are approaching the end of their operational lifespans, so the question appears to be will enough new reactors be built to maintain current capacity rather than will enough be built to create a uranium shortage. While it is possible that many new reactors will be built, it doesn't seem likely at the moment.
ReplyDeleteI can't remember if it was DD who said this, or it was a comment to a previous post of his, but isn't the problem with nuclear power not the technology per se, which is pretty straightforward, but the fact that it's a massive civil engineering project.
ReplyDeleteThe technology requires a build precision and "accident" rate that is impossible in massive civil engineering projects by definition (as any decent civil engineer would attest).
Which is what we are finding at Fukushima. It's not the technology that has gone wrong, but the failure of the civil engineering to sustain it.
Once the engineering fails, then the consequences and clean-up costs are enormous.
It is indeed true that the number of nuclear power plants has remained quite constant for the last 30 years and is likely to do so for some time to come. But that means that nuclear power is not the answer to climate change. For nuclear power to be the answer to climate change would require a big increase in the number of plants, which would make uranium a scarce resource (and engineering skills, regulatory capacity, waste disposal facilities etc would also become scarce resources)
ReplyDeleteGuano
"In short: argue all you like about the cost-effectiveness of nuclear power, but if if the nuclear power plant in question is in a place which isn't on a major zone of tectonic activity, then raising safety (rather than cost) is lying ignorant bullshit."
ReplyDeleteSurely though you can't separate the two? Nuclear power stations' safety levels are directly linked to their cost? I imagine you would want the (legal) safety standards made laxer, which would make them cheaper, others would take the opposite view which would make them more expensive.
Yes, I think that safety and cost are the big tradeoffs here, albeit that unsafe nuclear power plants are still not exactly cheap. And although there's no such thing as "a major zone of shoddy maintenance activity", I would guess that if there was, Britain would be quite likely to lie within one.
ReplyDeleteQuite. The problem with nukes is not the technology, which may be fine (outside my field of competence), but the social infrastructure required to keep them safe. If somebody can provide a convincing argument that a nuclear power station which was built using shortcuts/shoddy workmanship is safe, then maybe. If that safety is still there where the maintenance is slipshod/farmed out to the cheapest contractor, there's a bullying management style, all under cover of total secrecy. Well maybe we can talk. Until then, not fan of building them here (that goes double for the US, incidentally).
ReplyDeleteIn Southern Italy they dump the waste in landfill.
For some values of "waste", of course. One thing that you can rely on is that adding some basically harmless material (like used rubber gloves from your local hospital radiography department) to a news story about illegal refuse disposal will activate the rest of it and render it significantly more exciting and sensational.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Italy doesn't actually have nuclear power stations.
GG/Jacob: cooling things is quite tricky when you're in the aftermath of a tsunami that's levelled everything for miles around. Now that there are power lines running to all six reactors, the "cooling things that are there" question is solved - the problem is "dealing with the shit that went down before the power lines reached the reactors". My response about freezers was a little too glib and belligerent, though - apologies.
ReplyDeletePace Alex, I'd suggest that the Zones of Shoddy Maintenance Activity question is self-solving for the developed world, with Italy as an excellent example. The fact that a country with China's culture of transparency and honest construction activity is in the midst of a large nuclear power programme is a little more concerning.
I'd seriously question the suggestion that civilian nuclear generation plants in the UK are likely to be ZoSMA - the only severe nuclear incidents that have occurred in the UK have been in the bits of Windscale/Sellafield that were run for military value (reprocessing is almost completely useless for commercial civilian plants). The suggestion that the UK defence industry manages to take cost and safety and turn them into ravingly mad disasters is one I'm quite happy to agree with.
I'm also happy to entertain the case that the restrictions we put on nuclear plants in the UK to make them safe make them economically unviable, although I've not seen convincing evidence so far.
The fact that our nearest geographical neighbour gets more than half its electricity from nukes, whilst not having either an obviously greater safety culture in heavy engineering or obvious examples of terrifying nuclear dangerousness, strikes me as the start of a counterexample.
And if you're going to suggest that EDF's French plants are actually terrifyingly dangerous, then they present as much of a threat to the UK's main population centres as power plants in Cumbria and Anglesey in any case...
I've briefly read up on the subject of Thorium reactors on Wiki and it seems to confirm the impression I had already, which is that they sound a bit too good to be true.
ReplyDeleteWhich is not to say that the claimed benefits aren't real but I have to wonder why there aren't many more of them being built. I mean I take on board the practical issues mentioned by dd in the original post but are these any different from the challenges posed by building conventional nuclear reactors? And obviously they would share the same economic drawback, ie huge upfront costs, which may make them an unattractive proposition for the private sector but if the benefits really are as huge as are claimed then they would hugely outweigh such concerns.
Basically, the problem is that thorium reactors have to run very hot in order to keep the chain reaction going - they don't have enough spare neutrons hanging around. This is what makes thorium reactors so expensive to build and maintain, and it's a problem that gets bigger with size.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteAlso, Italy doesn't actually have nuclear power stations.
Its not Italian waste. Though I'm sure they have similar scams with hospital waste. They dump other stuff too. Waste disposal is a big black market for fairly obvious reasons.
I'd suggest that the Zones of Shoddy Maintenance Activity question is self-solving for the developed world, with Italy as an excellent example.
ReplyDeleteEh?
The suggestion that the UK defence industry manages to take cost and safety and turn them into ravingly mad disasters is one I'm quite happy to agree with.
Also trains. Plus the fact that our current political culture is one in which its basically going to privatised in some god awful way (see also the US).
The evidence that nukes in the UK are economically unviable is that nobody wants to invest in them. Now there might be excellent reasons to invest in them anyway, but financial returns is clearly not one of those. This is also true in the US incidentally, where the evidence is that the safety culture is quite lax.
Incidentally there are things that the UK Nuke industry government could do to convince me that it will be managed safely (focus on a strong independent inspectorate and total transparency would be a big start).
ReplyDeleteFocusing all their energy on safety propoganda, makes me fairly certain they're not ready for prime-time.
dd, OK - thanks for that
ReplyDeleteThe evidence that nukes in the UK are economically unviable is that nobody wants to invest in them.
ReplyDeleteAnd that they are uninsurable. So the taxpayer always has the ultimate tab, and the industry a subsidy, no matter what the PR and contracts might say.
Also trains.
ReplyDeleteAwesome. My "industry I know a hell of a lot about in which a dogmatic person who doesn't know much at all has made a false assertion" filter has been tipped... I knew being a train geek would be helpful at some point.
The UK's rail system, although expensive because of the lack of state subsidy (which, itself, is mostly because of the lack of province-level autonomy - Greater Manchester Council can't use local tax to raise the number of trains, because Mrs Thatcher abolished it), is as reliable and functional as those elsewhere in western Europe.
Intercity trains are slower than in France, but we haven't abolished the concept of a rail network in favour of pretend aeroplanes + capital city + embarrassing pre-Beeching stuff.
We're not as good as Switzerland, but being as good as Switzerland would involve being as good at Switzerland at stuff in general, which I don't think is a fair bar.
So the taxpayer always has the ultimate tab, and the industry a subsidy
ReplyDeleteUnlike, say, roads? I mean, the suggestion that if something can't generate market revenues, it isn't worth doing, is surely even rejected in 6th form economics? This is sub-Worstall tossery.
I'm talking about Potter's Bar, not the expense of the rail industry. It pointed to an endemic problem within British corporate life (also present in several other areas), and within the state. The Nuclear industry itself has never exactly impressed with its approach to safety, either. This has been improved (though hardly fixed) since it was taken over by the government, but it took a bad accident to make this happen.
ReplyDeleteWhat worries me about the nuclear industry is not so much the technology (its a dangerous technology which can be managed safely), but the extremely immature safety/management culture that surrounds it here and elsewhere. Perhaps things are different in France, I have no idea, but in the UK they're not. Risks can be managed, but pretending that either they don't exist (the approach of most nuclear apologists), or ignoring them (the government's approach) doesn't exactly achieve that.
the fact that the nuclear industry proponents also push out technical garbage (the industry needs a base load, for example and only nukes can manage it. Or the even more ludicrous that nukes are the perfect backup for renewables), doesn't really increase my confidence in the people running it.
Your final comment is attacking a strawman. Nobody is arguing that nuclear isn't worth doing because it can't make money. Merely that the current argument that nuclear power is basically competitive is rubbish. Its far more expensive than the alternatives, something which is priced in by the markets. If the argument is that we should do it anyway, then that argument needs to be made within the context of other things we could spend the money on. Such as demand reduction (insulation, energy efficiency, subsidised solar heating), or other forms of generation (tidal power being an obvious one).
This has been improved meaning railtrack, not the nuclear industry. Curses.
ReplyDeleteI'd be much more confident our Britain's trains if fares were actually something like the marginal price.
ReplyDeleteCian makes a very good point here about a fundamental asymmetry - it is true that both nuclear industry opponents and nuclear industry advocates talk an awful lot of mendacious crap. However, only one of these groups is asking to be put in charge of spending huge amounts of public money on a potentially very dangerous thing.
ReplyDeletepun?
ReplyDeleteThis post is indebted to this thread.
ReplyDelete"However, only one of these groups is asking to be put in charge of spending huge amounts of public money on a potentially very dangerous thing"
ReplyDeleteThat's bollocks, unless you think all those advocating nuclear power actually work in the nuclear industry.
Anyway, if you're worried about "potential danger", why even bother getting out of bed in the morning?
Anyway, if you're worried about "potential danger", why even bother getting out of bed in the morning?
ReplyDeleteSomeone has to pay the taxes to subsidise the nuclear industry.
Anyway, if you're worried about "potential danger", why even bother getting out of bed in the morning?
ReplyDeleteIndeed. Safety regulations are such pointless things. Don't bother addressing the problem, just ignore it.
Or is this not what you mean?
If you're not worried about "potential danger", I would very much recommend a career outside the nuclear power industry.
ReplyDeleteEpilogue: Fukushima is now a "level 7" incident, and still on fire and leaking.
ReplyDeleteHaven't they flown the freezers in yet?
ReplyDelete