Make mine a mini-reactor, maybe
April 20, 2010
They’re a proliferation risk.
They’re a cost-effective, low-carbon, utility-scale alternative to coal.
They’re unproven and dangerous.
They are old technology and a known risk.
They produce radioactive waste that is just as bad as any big nuclear plant.
They have the potential to bring fresh water to arid parts of the world.
As far as I can tell these are the main rhetorical positions for and against the development of the nuclear mini-reactor. If I’m missing anything let me know.
Lets take a look at each in turn.
They are a proliferation risk – the argument is that by multiplying the number of nuclear installations, the number of nuclear-savvy engineers and scientists, and the amount of nuclear material transported around the world you are multiplying the risks associated with that material or its derivatives becoming accessible to ‘the bad guys’.
That makes absolute sense from a numerical, risk-based approach. No system is 100% reliable (that includes security and accounting systems), so doubling the volume should increase the risk by a commensurate amount.
But there is the counter argument that by making these reactors one-shot, non-refuellable sealed units the degree of risk drops when compared to the current macro-reactors. We should also consider whether building 50-year life-span installations is inherently more or less secure than building multiple 10-20 year installations that employ a restricted set of technologies.
There appear to be two main, credible proliferation risk points; fuel enrichment and waste handling/reprocessing. By centralising both to the mini-nuke manufacturers surely you are bringing together those risk vectors and making them more manageable.
There are some benefits to building strong communities around our critical infrastructure rather than commoditizing it. After all its got to be better to have thousand families worth of eyes looking out for security risks rather than a thousand pairs of eyes, who frankly should be concentrating on the work itself. Whether that is best done by centralisation of reactor manufacture or centralisation of power production I couldn’t say, but what I do know is that community support is necessary for either and it carries benefits past simply providing the workforce.
I’m afraid that the argument that some bad guys will come along and rip a mini-reactor out of the ground and whisk it away to play with is simply not credible for the majority of designs that are around right now. Most of the installations are still 50 tonnes plus for the body of the reactor and they tend to be surrounded by thick concrete walls.
They’re a cost-effective, low-carbon, utility-scale alternative to coal.
Well that’s just wishful thinking right now. Until someone gets their design through the nuclear regulators and actually builds one we simply can’t know that for sure. Certainly the 10-50MW size is a really convenient bracket to sell within, but local conditions and regulations will have a massive say in whether they are cost-effective or not.
For example a 30MW reactor in the Australian outback might be just what the mining industry needs in order to get away from using diesel to extract nickel, so reducing the full-cycle emissions profile of electric vehicle using nickel-hydride batteries, but Australia doesn’t currently permit civil nuclear power generation so to be the first company to take that challenge on will probably not result in black ink on the bottom line.
Alternately if we look at somewhere like Japan, where the civil nuclear industry is very advanced, why would they bother with tiny reactors ? Their electricity grid is advanced and ubiquitous. They have decades of experience in all steps in the civil nuclear cycle. They might want to develop mini-nukes as an export route but I doubt that they will be using many themselves.
So we need to be careful about blanket statements regarding costs, but that’s the same for all power generation.
Low carbon ? Well, that depends on who’s life cycle assessment you believe, but I think that it is credible that our current 50-year lifespan reactors are low carbon when compared to most power generation technologies, including renewables.
An alternative to coal ? It depends on your application. If you are a blast furnace that can site next to a remote iron ore mine, yes that’s almost certainly true. Reduced transport emissions alone will make a big dent in the total emissions pattern. But for an urban centre where demand is cyclical a nuclear reactor is not a good fit on its own, irrespective of the size. Nuclear reactors work best to provide a steady base-load because they can’t be switched on and off and back on again in the same way as coal or gas. They’re not alone here. Renewables have a similar issue with intermittency and both would need some form of back-up or storage to provide electricity with a domestic demand profile.
They’re unproven and dangerous.
It depends which design you are talking about here. Certainly some of the new modular mini-nukes are unproven. Bill Gate’s travelling wave reactor certainly is, but you can’t simply equate unproven with dangerous. You can equate degree of proof with degree of risk and I’d back you on that, but a rhetorical position that lack of proof of safety is proof of lack of safety is just nonsense.
They are old technology and a known risk.
Again it depends on which technology we are talking about. But simply saying its old stuff isn’t actually that reassuring. For example the Russians are proposing a simple re-use of nuclear submarine reactor technologies with a lead-bismuth cooling system. Apart from the number of boats they lost, that’s a really toxic mix to be using as coolant and it doesn’t inspire confidence. Its old and known, but unacceptably high risk to many people. Of course just using the word nuclear implies an unacceptably high risk to some.
They produce radioactive waste that is just as bad as any big nuclear plant.
No denying that.
Well, unless the newer technologies are used. The problem is that the fuel cycles used in most current commercial reactors are variants of the cold war fuel cycles designed to produce plutonium for bombs. Not all nuclear reactions that can be used to produce excess heat in a controllable manner from readily available fuels produce plutonium as an end-product and even those that do can be tweaked to produce more or less.
This is essential a question of perception. If you believe that all radioactive waste is equal then it doesn’t matter about the efficiency of the fuel cycle, or what fuel it uses, or what the waste products are and there is no argument that the size of the reactor is about as relevant as its colour. If however you apply a risk-based approach, then not all waste is equal (the current situation under most legal jurisdictions) and there is a valid argument that fuel cycles designed for purely civilian uses can be less harmful than in the past.
But you can’t have both. You can’t argue that some power-generating techniques are less risky than others (on the basis of emissions or pollutants, or economics or whatever) except nuclear which is just plain bad.
They have the potential to bring fresh water to arid parts of the world.
The water argument is an interesting one and one that makes a lot of people very nervous. Nuclear reactors use vast amount of cooling water in their current form and what is being proposed is that they are used for desalination in order to take advantage of this Hey presto ! You have a double-edged sword against poverty and hunger. Power and fresh water provided in areas currently without either. The big problem being that areas without power & water generally don’t have effective government either.
There is no doubt in my mind that the world needs more of both, but whether dropping a mini-reactor onto the coast of Somalia is the best way of achieving that compared with more conventional development mechanisms. I dunno. Historically its been big hydro that carried out this function, but the number of rivers large enough to make a difference is going down compared with the amount of disputes between upriver and down-river water users which seems to be going up.
So what have we learnt ? Not that much because until someone actually gets through licensing with one of these things we’re just not going to get a good look at the economics. Apparently the licensing will cost over $100m in the US. Separate for the EU and anywhere else that might want to buy one. If they are $25m a unit with a 10 year life whoever builds them is going to need a hell of an order book to build a self-sustaining business.
For what its worth I don’t think that mini-reactors will be cost effective in ‘normal’ urban or industrial environments, areas that have grid power already. What they could be really good at is driving down costs of things like mining or oil refineries so that we don’t have to transport dead weight three times around the world before we use it. We make the product or a semi near the primary resource and ship those instead.
Plastic Fantastic
February 5, 2010
I briefly mentioned the interplay between the plastic industry and the demand for oil, well the Financial Times recently did a piece on petrochemical prices that has shed a lot of light on the subject for me. Unfortunately the piece is behind a paywall, but you may be able to get to it with a free trial subscription.
The main thrust of the matter is that the major petrochemicals that plastics are made from (naptha, benzene, ethylene and propylene) are under massive and rising demand pressure from Asia. So much so that the FT reports that an index of their prices has risen by 150% in the last year, now don’t get too excited. Just before that year started the same index as reporting an all-time low as demand stagnated during the recession. The story of surging demand is also told by this Indian site in a bit more detail.
My point is this; running oil refineries is an expensive, energy intensive, dirty (in terms of emissions) and sometimes economically uncertain business. The price volatility of the raw natural resources (including water) is multiplied by the energy intensive nature of its processing and carbon emissions pricing. Also the demand for the products is dependent on macro-economics that, to a large part, are tied to crude oil prices as well. It seems to me that the price risks that ‘oil as fuel’ users face are minor when compared to those that ‘oil as feedstock’ users face.
The demand imbalances that cause supply price shocks, like the one we are seeing now, are temporary and transient as we can see from this paper from the Middle Eastern Economic Survey, so long as they are not coupled with oil price rises. However, since most mid to long term forecasts show oil price rising steadily we can reasonably expect the price of petrochemicals to rise as a function of the raw material price rises, possibly a multiple of oil price rises.
Lets have a little context;
China currently imports around 21m tonnes of oil per month or 200m tonnes for 2009 (and rising fast). Some estimates see global peak consumption of around 100m barrels per day, thats roughly 5,000m tonnes per year, against today’s 85m barrels per day (4,250m tonnes per year).
Lets compare that to our main petrochemicals;
naptha – 215m tonnes per year
benzene – 10m tonnes per year
ethylene – 25m tonnes per year
propylene – 15m tonnes per year
That’s a total of 265m tonnes of the products per year or, in broad terms, a similar amount of oil to that which China will be using in 2010-2011. I pose the question – what happens to global oil prices if you take China out of the equation ?
So here’s where bio-plastics and biomass derived chemical feedstocks come in. China and India are the two main marginal consumers, they swing oil prices by their increases in consumption. Take ‘a’ China out of that equation and my strong guess is that your oil price volatility drops by a significant amount.
So by replacing petrochemicals with bio-mass derived petrochemicals you can actually have a disproportionate effect on energy price security, because you have taken the price and volatility multiplier that is refining out of the equation.
Of course you still need the energy and the water, but your raw material would be forestry products or agricultural byproducts. These are generally grown in climates where water isn’t a major issue, but you would need to be a little careful over both water supplies and food production.
Anyone fancy setting up a bio-petro-chemical production facility in the Canadian forests (to supply North America) or the Russian Tiga (to supply Chindia) ?
Got even more wood ?
February 3, 2010
So DECC has launched a consultation document package for its Renewable Heat Initiative (RHI)
Lots of good stuff in there, but the bit that I’d like to comment on is the incentivisation of wood chip/wood pellets for domestic heating.
Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong but to me this provision looks like a commitment to an effective long term taxation of the rural poor. Its a bit counter-intuitive at first sight, after all how could an incentive to use local renewable biomass result in higher bills ? Well, its all to do with having a limited land package available to provide that biomass.
There is a distinction in the consultation between biomass that originates from wood, that which comes from grown for energy crops and that which is the result of existing agricultural processes (such as straw), but what concerns me is the interaction between existing managed woodland and possible new energy crops such as mycanthus and willow. The problem is that the RHI incentives only relate to pellet or chip burning boilers effectively replacing fossil-fuel burning boilers and central heating. Standing hardwood doesn’t make economic sense for pelletisation or chipping, its wears the machinery and takes more time and energy to produce and harvest.
What the consultation leaves out (and I can’t find mentioned anywhere in the document package) is the economic impact on existing wood users and those who cannot replace boilers. In other words me !
My situation is as follows: I live in a little village in Cornwall that is a good 10km from the nearest gas main. Most houses in the village use coal or wood to supplement Economy-7 electric heating. In many ways its a typical granite-built miners village. No cellars, very little outside space, houses are well over 100 years old (so low ceilings) and built of thick solid stone walls. Speaking for myself only; I don’t have a boiler, just an immersion heater that I turn on if and when I need hot water. I don’t have central heating, just a single electric storage heater that is powered by Economy-7 over-night. I rent the cottage and have only a small amount of space outside. I am not unusual in this county.
What I do have is a nice big fireplace that I can settle down in front of in the evening. I burn wood in that grate and buy my wood from local suppliers or one of the many local shops who sell 5kg bags of split logs over the counter.
My concern is that if pelletised or chipped wood becomes a lucrative product, managed woodland in the area will shift towards those products and away from larger trunked species suitable for splitting and domestic use. It’ll take time, I don’t expect to see the price that I pay for wood to rocket overnight, but the house that I live in will be around for at least another 100 years so the issue is not gong to go away. Over the 20-50 year timescale, by shifting the forestry from bulk wood to processed chip you will see a price differential mount that penalises those living in houses that cannot be physically altered to accommodate pellet burning boilers. These houses are generally smaller, cheaper and occupied by those less able to cope with price rises. Effectively this is an incentive that will put the rural poor at a greater disadvantage than ever.
I like the idea of increasing biomass use as I previously stated in Got Wood ?, but this particular policy seems poorly devised.
Got wood ?
November 23, 2009
Now that I’m a rural type with an open fire and only electricity to back it up (I’ve always had gas or oil as a third fuel before), I’m starting to look at wood with a bit more interest.
Though not strictly energy-related I was struck by the potential of liquid wood, which is not some elixir sold under the counter in Soho, but a bio-plastic that apparently can be injection-moulded into a variety of remarkably unattractive items. I think that the German engineers need to hand this one over to the Italian or British designers now or it will be relegated to butt-ugly functional grommits.
Of course the hunt is on by several industries that use crude oil as a chemical feedstock rather than a fuel to find a raw material that has less price volatility and more security in its supply chain. Plastics is probably the largest volume with approx 100m tonnes being used every year. Not all of that comes directly from crude oil, there are other chemicals added to give it colour or specific performance qualities and inert fillers to add bulk, but its still a lot of oil and I wonder what the economic dynamic would be if even just 25% of the plastics industry headed for the woods ?
Its not one of the best known of the UK’s energy intiatives, but apparently 15% of renewable energy is supposed to come from biomass by 2020 and dedicated biomass production and generation is currently one of the most heavily inentivised energy production mechanisms in the UK. It gets between 1.5 and 2 ROCs (Renewables Obligation Certificates) per MWh generated. I think that’s fair enough. Its not as if you can incentivise it through capital investment in fuel/production capacity, as you would be able to do with nuclear or wind or coal, after all how much do a few saplings cost ? Even fast-growing mycanthus, willow and poplar take a few years to get to maturity and all are subject to the whims of weather and disease.
As this map shows, biomass generation is still pretty small scale with only just 2GW planned (compared to 25+GW of offshore wind), and the ‘large’ dedicated power plants, such as Prenergy’s planned 350MWe Port Talbot plant, are looking for security of supply using imported wood chips. I know that Drax’s co-fired capacity is set to go up to half a GW, but it uses ‘residues’ rather than grown for energy biomass, so to me it feels more like a giant incinerator, sorry, waste co-generation project.
I know that the Welsh National Forest AKA Woodlands for Wales is a really central part of the Red Dragon’s strategic economic plans, but its a long-play. A new Wylfa may even have been constructed by the time the sustainable forest economy has been built. However, looking at this report from the Land Use Policy Group would suggest that sustainable managed forestry as a part of an integrated energy/economy/environment strategy might work better (and cheaper) than what Wales has right now. Until then, expect the first shipment of wood chips from the Baltic or Canada to be unloading in Port Talbot some time in 2011.
I don’t know about you but wood feels good for Wales. It seems like an appropriate scale. I wish that it wasn’t but the steel industry is on its last legs, so the really big point consumers just don’t seem to be around any more. My grandad and dad were born in Cardiff and Barry respectively after my great-grandad settled in Cardiff just after the Great War, so I have an affection for what is truly the Land of my Fathers and its good to see the Assembly taking a long view on how best to live in Wales.
Update
DECC has just put out this statement on primary biomass projects. The funding is tiny at £1.5m, but as I mentioned its tricky to find large capital projects in this space and it looks like this is aimed at providing things similar to the German model where wood collection and delivery is guarenteed at a state or district level to put security of supply on a par with other fuels.
Active roads – a new poetry of motion
October 9, 2009
A couple of media stories, a long road journey and my recent change of status to homeworker provoked this thought – what are active roads up to ?
Let’s define what I mean by active roads first.
These are energy transfer or recovery systems that are part of the vehicle/road combo that moves mass around the world. Technologies like piezo-electric road surfaces, hydraulic speed bumps, and wireless power transmission work together to increase the overall efficiency of transporting that mass around.
I’m guessing that most people know by now that conventional internal combustion engine-based independent transport systems (some people know them as cars running on roads) are pretty inefficient in energy terms. Most of the stored energy in petroleum is liberated as heat which goes to the nearest sink (usually the atmosphere, though I did see a patent on recovering some of that heat to power refrigeration in lorries). I’m also guessing that most people know that there are some economic, environmental and social implications of using petroleum distillates to power this transport system. And I’m also finally guessing that you are rapidly tiring of my use of silly words to describe it all, but that is deliberate so I make no apologies for it.
The reason why is because the car/road combo is a system. I want to make it seem as complicated as it is. It includes oil exploration, production, pipeline construction, rig (de)commissioning, environmental monitoring and remediation, demand planning, road route design and optimisation, integration with utilities such as electricity and water at local and district level, industrial planning to make sure that mass in all it’s living and non-living forms reaches its various destinations safely, regulation to make sure that safely really means safely, structured and orderly markets to buy and sell all the bits necessary to run the system, mines to supply the metals for the vehicles, quarries to provide the road making materials, people to maintain all the elements of the system, police to enforce speed limits, ambulances to scrape people of roads when they break those speed limits, etc, etc, etc. And that’s not even thinking about the pleasure & leisure aspect of vehicle ownership. Or the food distribution and consumption aspects. Or the philosophical aspects. I could go on, and on, and on. But I won’t.
It boils down to this – cars are life in our industrial societies. Which makes roads as much part of our world as food or football. They feed our mind, body and soul. I’m willing to bet that there are many, many people out there who wouldn’t even exist were it not for the influence of the car/road system.
They are so embedded in our psyche, in our culture, in our economy, even in our sense of self that any radical change to the car/road combo is a big deal.
However the road isn’t personally ours, so we forget about it for the most part unless it has a hole in it or is full of other masses being moved or is about to be built/not built somewhere we want/don’t want it to be built/not built. But it is the real enabler, the car is parasitic on the road. There is no such genre as ‘the car movie’, yet ‘the road movie’ continues to provide a backdrop to examine the journey of our lives. OK, that’s a bit florid, but you get the idea.
So now roads themselves are starting to have an active part in the conversation. They are becoming more than they once were, harvesting energy from mass in transit that would have otherwise dissipated and giving it back to the next lump of mass, so that each mass can continue to travel along the road further and faster.
I think that the road has the measure of us.
Our civilisations grew up with roads. Drovers roads to move bovine mass. Roman roads to move Italian mass. Freeways to move free mass.
As a technology the road is persistent and pervasive. Almost every other technology is parasitic on the road. Even numbers. Without trade no need for numbers, without roads trade would be limited to barter, so roads are also responsible for the existence of money.
And yet it has taken until now for roads to start to be taken seriously as a participant in the conversation. They have watched from the sidelines, maybe a little shy, maybe just soaking it all in before revealing their master plan with a flourish.
Maybe not.
It was a VERY long drive and I wasn’t under the influence of anything apart from tiredness. But there is a serious point that I wanted to raise. If you feel that energy systems should be optimised then the movement of mass is an essential part of that. If you have to move mass, move as little as possible as efficiently as possible then look at recovering waste energy around the edges. But first consider whether the movement of ideas is more efficient than the movement of mass.
