Michele Kearney's Nuclear Wire

Major Energy and Environmental News and Commentary affecting the Nuclear Industry.

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

USA GIVES AWAY NUCLEAR FUTURE TO CHINA

https://www.linkedin.com/groups/3360244/3360244-6171417908317609987USA GIVES AWAY NUCLEAR FUTURE TO CHINA

Cheaper and cleaner nuclear plants could finally become reality—but not in the United States, where the technology was invented more than 50 years ago. Given unprecedented access to the inner workings of China’s advanced nuclear R&D program, I was witnessing a new nuclear technology being born.  At least in theory, this type of reactor can’t suffer the kind of catastrophic failure that happened at Chernobyl and Fukushima. What’s more, the new plants should produce little waste and might even eat up existing nuclear waste. They could run on uranium, which powers 99 percent of the nuclear power plants in the world, or they could eventually run on thorium, which is cleaner and more abundant.  Over the next two decades China hopes to build the world’s largest nuclear power industry.  Plans include as many as 30 new conventional nuclear plants (in addition to the 34 reactors operating today) as well as a variety of next-generation reactors, including thorium molten-salt reactors, high-temperature gas-cooled reactors (which, like molten-salt reactors, are both highly efficient and inherently safe), and sodium-cooled fast reactors (which can consume spent fuel from conventional reactors to make electricity).   Chinese planners want not only to dramatically expand the country’s domestic nuclear capacity but also to become the world’s leading supplier of nuclear reactors and components, a prospect that many Western observers find alarming. The first experiments with molten-salt reactors were carried out at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, under its director Alvin Weinberg in the late 1950s.  Alvin Weinberg believed that the link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons would have to be severed. And the way to break that link was the thorium molten-salt reactor. By the end of the century, the U.S. had built 104 nuclear reactors, but construction of new ones had all but come to a halt, and the technology remained stuck in the 1970s. Today government officials and scientists seek a nuclear technology without the expensive problems that have stalled the conventional version. Because they don’t require huge containment structures and need less fuel to produce the same amount of electricity, these reactors are more compact than today’s nuclear plants. They could be mass-produced, in factories, and combined in arrays to form larger power plants. All of that should make them cheaper to build.  But even though molten-salt designs have energized inventive young technologists, getting a novel nuclear power technology licensed and built in the U.S. remains a daunting prospect. From the Chinese point of view, thorium has a particular advantage: while mainland China has a small percentage of the world’s uranium, it has plenty of thorium. “Our team got most of the technical documents from the Web—they were posted by the Oak Ridge team,” recalls Xu Hongjie, the director of the molten-salt program, shaking his head in either admiration or amazement at the openness of the Americans. “They posted everything there for free.” While some scientists and nuclear-power advocates vehemently oppose the idea of helping China build a world--leading nuclear industry, many Oak Ridge engineers are just eager to see molten-salt reactors built somewhere.  The dream of American scientists at Oak Ridge, a half-century ago, is taking shape here, thousands of miles away.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602051/fail-safe-nuclear-power/?goal=0_997ed6f472-244b0f573b-153947645&set=602058

Fail-Safe Nuclear Power

Cheaper and cleaner nuclear plants could finally become reality—but not in the United States, where the technology was invented more than 50 years ago.

Fail-Safe Nuclear Power

Cheaper and cleaner nuclear plants could finally become reality—but not in the United States, where the technology was invented more than 50 years ago.

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