Forging ahead
March 18, 2010
Finally Sheffield’s Forgemasters has got the government assistance that it has been looking for to build a 15,000 tonne press needed to manufacture the largest nuclear reactor components. I say finally because the project finance team has been working for 2 years to finalise the deal, before that the forge was conceived and designed, so my guess is that at least 5 years of work has gone into this and without it UK plc would seriously loose out in any new nuclear build.
The help is in the form of an £80m loan so we tax payers aren’t going to get stung for the full £80m unless Forgemasters goes bust immediately. We are effectively paying just over half the interest on the total loan by standing 57% of the total £140m required to build the kit. So, rough guess on a 5 year loan at 10% pa, the tax payer is taking £40m off the total bill that Forgemasters will have to pay. Its an opportunity cost to us, rather than an expenditure. Westinghouse, Lloyds and the European Bank are actually putting up most of the money. If you want a comparison the new windturbine blade test facility in Blythe is receiving over £25m worth of grants and supporting infrastructure, but then that’s a brand new capacity for the country and it deserves help too. I don’t know about you but I’d rather my money went into manufacturing than banking, maybe that’s just me 
I have to say I don’t think that’s a bad deal with the nuclear industry going the way that it is and it is a big piece of the supply chain for the UK’s own new nuclear generating capacity. So whether you regard £40m as a speculation against later export revenue, an investment in reducing import expenditure, a way to retain some real, world-leading manufacturing expertise, or simply a way to create several hundred skilled jobs for the next couple of decades it can’t be bad news.
Right now 15kt presses are not exactly common with only Japan, China and Russia reported as having capacity on this scale, with South Korea and India both wanting to enter the field.
Other people’s comments;
The Dark Lord lays out the argument in this article from last year.
This article from the Institute of Engineers has a similar flavour.
The WNA’s view of developments.
Even the Guardian seems to accept the logic of the loan
There is a second interesting point within the funding announcement (its near the bottom) was that Forgemasters would be ‘overseeing’ development of Indian forging capacity in a £30m deal. That is a technology transfer deal, effectively to show the Indians how to forge the smaller components of nuclear power systems. So we gain access to their market at the expense of some of our older technology. Swings and roundabouts. The big money is in the big kit, but a £3m per year revenue stream from tech transfer is enough to pay quite a chunk of the loan interest without tying up too many resources.
Of course you could take the other view, that nuclear power is bad/unnecessary/expensive/foolish/dangerous whatever form it comes in and we shouldn’t help its development through taxpayer assistance, whatever form it comes in. Personally I can’t justify that opinion ethically or economically as long at we in the UK use medical isotopes and invest in other less proven energy sources, such as coal with CCS or solar PV. I can see the arguments, but I think that they are emotionally driven rather than empirically based. The argument against spreading nuclear power technology to countries that currently don’t use it is much stronger, but even there its not black and white.
So I think the Forgemasters deal is great for Sheff and good for the UK. Let’s stop fannying about and start building big kit. Don’t care if its 300m tall 10MW offshore wind turbines, giant steel sea snakes or nuclear pressure vessels, the sooner we start the better, then we can stop hand-wringing and get back to helping the last billion out of crushing poverty.
A word to the wise – never be in London when there is a tube strike about to start, things get a bit crazy.
Anyway Day Two of the discussion meeting covered: Hydrogen storage, cerium oxide (for synfuels and hydrogen production), nuclear fission & fusion, more fuel cells, some super-capacitors and a bit of policy.
Interesting stuff that I noted down:
Zuttel
Each kWh provides €25c of full-cycle economic advantage while the current average cost to European consumers is about €5c/kWh.
The oil price spike in 2008 took those prices towards parity meaning, that no net economic advantage was effected by the energy expended, contributing in a large part to the economic crash.
I’d not heard it put in those terms before, and if there is a real and verifiable corelation between delta energy cost/benefit and the occurrence of economic crises, then we have a really powerful preventative tool. My guess is that this relationship is much less clear cut and that the materials scientist who proposed it isn’t fully up to speed on behavioural economics, but that’s only a guess.
Hydrogen carries 39kWh/kg
Recent regulations against the use of asbestos have effectively killed the prospects of using electrolysis of water as a large scale hydrogen production method in Europe. Asbestos was used in industrial electrolysis as a membrane.
Hydrogen storage tanks are now made of a thin blown aluminum shell, wrapped with kevlar or carbon fibre.
Hydrogen storage in metal hydrides can be twice the amount that can be held in tanks as the hydrogen is adsorbed onto the metal hydride in a very densely packed fashion. However, you need one metal hydride per hydrogen, so the storage media gets really heavy, really quickly as the tank size increases. There is an option to combine both hydride and liquid storage to get the best of both worlds.
Even with hydrogen stored in metal hydrides, the energy density is still only half that of gasoline.
Haile talked about ceria (cerium oxide) – a wonderful material apparently (she got her mineral economics all out of whack of course, but was better than most on the resources side).
Full cycle ceria-mediated synfuel production is currently 13% efficient, 23% efficient if you recover 50% of the process heat. The inputs are sunlight, water and CO2 as far as I can tell.
She quoted ceria availability at 40Mt – enough for >50,000 100MWe power plants operating 6hrs a day. Cost $140/MW installed using $20/kg of ceria. She didn’t mention that in Feb 2008 cerium price was $9.50/kg, so I will.
Cerium (for the uninitiated) is the least rare of the Rare Earth Elements (REEs), but that doesn’t mean that is is geologically more readily available than, for instance, lead which has a similar crustal abundance. The geochemistry of REEs means that there are very few deposits rich enough to be mined at a profit. Deposits are generally rich in either ‘light’ REEs or ‘heavy’ REEs, but not both. This limits a mine’s ability to fully service a customer with a mixed REE product, so limits its profitability. There are three main REE deposit types as far as I know; carbonitites (igneous intrusions such as that previously mined at Mountain Pass, California), ionic clays (where the REEs have been adsorbed onto clay minerals from groundwater) and REE-enriched iron ores. These last two are the forms seen in China, which currently provides 95%+ of the world’s REEs. Anyway, yes they may be relatively abundant, but they are not very available.
Grimes showed some nice animations on defect modeling in radiative environments.
Duffy talked on fusion. Apparently the bigger, the better with fusion (less losses through reduced surface area of the plasma per unit volume). ITER should be a net power producer giving up 10x the energy put in (50MW in – 500MW out), but it won’t be set up to extract that energy from the system because that isn’t what its for. It is primarily a materials test lab since the plasma physics is pretty much sorted (they think). The demo plant, to follow in 30 years or so, is sketched out to be a 3,000MW monster producing 50x energy input. First electricity to grid sometime after 2050.
For Paul; the fusion boys are not in the least worried about lithium availability for the tritium breeder jacket because there is ‘loads of it around’. As you know I tend to agree, lithium availability is energy price sensitive and not geologically constrained.
However other elements in the reactor vessel may be resource constrained – beryllium & tungsten specifically and they are looking at these very closely.
Hirose (a bit of a legend apparently, now works for Toyota Fuel Cells division)
The Japanese always have a different angle on things and it was fun to hear the debate between the Japanese view and the Californian when it came to transport availability. Hirose stresses the Quality of Mobility (QoM) and the role of fuel cells in maintaining or extending QoM, whereas Haile warned against generalisations of social conformity in development of scientific solutions. The point was actually raised several times that social science needs to be engaged in progressing societal change and the roll-out of these new technologies. I agree, why else would I be here ?
Toyota’s well to wheel efficiency for fuel cell vehicles using hydrogen is about 40%
Simon on Supercapacitors – ‘supercaps’ in the biz
They are a complimentary technology, not a disruptive one to batteries. They have a short discharge time ~10sec at high power, so have applications in acceleration of mass, quick deployment mechanisms and the like, but the most interesting applications were in energy harvesting from mechanical systems to time-shift that energy back into later acceleration. Effectively its the regenerative braking that is talked about in Formula One.
But you will never run transport just on supercaps, they just make the system more efficient, ~30% more efficient at present. Good news, but not a stand-alone solution.
Foxon was the only speaker to come in under time, brought no new data and was dull. I’m just all-round glad he’s not coming down to speak at our conference
