Forging Ahead. Not you Sheffield !
June 21, 2010
In the past it was usually considered an advantage to have someone at the top of government fighting for their constituency and its interests. The member for Sheffield Hallam appear to wish to buck this trend and make his constituency suffer for voting for him.
Back in March I commented on the government loan guarantee of £80m to the Sheffield Forgemasters in order to build a world-leading 15kt forge press that would enable Britain to become a significant player in nuclear manufacturing for decades to come. The cost to the tax payer about £20m over 5 years in opportunity cost (things that we could have done with the cash).
Well the recent announcement that this loan guarantee is to be cut shows exactly what our new government thinks of UK manufacturing – it couldn’t care a toss. What Nick Clegg thinks of Sheffield – he’d rather kick them in the nuts than stand up to his public school buddy. How far our new chancellor looks when he tries to balance the books – no further than two years out. How much influence that DECC has on energy system planning – zero. And how bloody stupid partisan government can be when faced with a choice that involves long term thinking.
The argument is that this loan constitutes a subsidy to the nuclear industry and the new govt has said no public money to that industry. They are still quite happy to pile cash into windmills, solar panels for the top of your house and subsidise coal and CCS, but building an export capacity that would bring in millions every year from outside our shores. Apparently thats bad news. Not to mention how long it will take to wait for any new nuclear build within the UK with the only other forge press in Japan booked up years in advance.
Even Chris Goodall at Carbon Commentry thinks its a bad idea.
I’m not prone to swearing, but this is a bloody stupid idea and if I were in Sheffield (or staying at my Gran’s old house 10 miles away) I would be demonstrating outside Clegg’s front door irrespective of whether he’s now in his grace and favour mansion or not.
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.
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.
Carbon Capture & Snorage UK
November 15, 2009
With the big nuclear announcement now out of the way for the UK the nascent UK CCS sector is hoping to get some kind of caffine jolt to wake it up.
The competition to get 4 pilot plants up and running has gone off the boil. Big players have dropped out and the anticipated cross-Europe rush to start burying CO2 has lost some momentum. Lets look at why.
Demand
The recession has hit demand. No doubt about it. UK manufacturing (what was left of it) has gone into hibernation and is not expected to get back to 2007 levels for another 2 or even 3 years. That means the forward demand curves have all been shifted by up to 5 years backwards from where they were in 2008. This really works against the shorter lead times in building new coal, compared with nuclear. The big wind projects that have already been approved, but are waiting for finance or grid connections, have been given £1.3bn in loan guarentees and a new planning regime to work under, further eroding the argument for new coal with CCS as a stop gap until the baseload new nuclear is online. DECC has ruled out any new coal without CCS.
Simply put, why try and prove up the new CCS systems to plug a supply gap that is no longer really there when the proven wind and nuclear options will provide much, if not most, of the mid-term replacement capacity ?
This is very much a UK specific situation and the case for CCS in the UK, to my mind, hinges on quick deployment. Any delays will reduce the potential for a self-sustaining CCS industry in the UK.
From this perspective it looks like new gas-powered peaking plants (or possibly biomass) will be needed to bridge the gap between baseload nuclear and intermittent wind, unless the UK can raise its efficiency substantially over the next 5 years or so.
Enhanced Oil/Gas Recovery
One of the big supporting economic arguments for developing CCS in the UK is its potential to replace the oil and gas industries as a major technology and skills exporter. I think that this is a justified argument as far as it goes. Having worked offshore myself I can see most of the skills being transferable between the two industries and there are a lot of workers looking to CCS as a way to sustain their livelihoods until oil and gas are no longer a mass market source of energy.
One of the ways that oil companies in the US and Canada have been coupling the two industries is by Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). Pump CO2 down into the oil reservoir and the additional pressure and viscosity drop (increased runniness of the oil) increase total recovery. The amount of the increase is very dependent on the age of the reservoir and its extraction history. For example a brand new oil field that has CO2 pumped into it from its very first production could give up as much as 50% more oil than without the addition of CO2. Older fields that have had a prior history of water injection may only give up an additional 10% or so.
This is a problem for the UK. Most of the North Sea fields are old meaning that the application of CO2 for EOR is limited. That means that returns are limited in both time and amount, which in turn means that the majors don’t see the 20-30 year profit lines they need in order to support their administrative and development burdens. The mid-tier and junior oil companies were excluded from the UK’s competition by the requirement to prove that finance was available for full development of the pilot plants and allied storage sites.
So the big guys are too flabby to be able to operate CCS at a profit in UK waters and the smaller guys can’t finance it. Bit of a hitch there.
There is a slightly bigger issue with CO2-EOR. Well spacing. Where Canada and the US (and Saudi, and others) have onshore oil fields where well spacing can be very close and access is not a major issue, the North Sea is not a location that allows close well spacing. This will push EOR to the limits technically and it will not be as effective as in onshore oil fields. Developing the new technologies in this challenging environment would be worth it for a permanent industry, the way we saw North Sea oil in the 70s as providing a new frontier, but not for an industry that has only ever been seen as a stop-gap we have to question what that new frontier is for when considering CO2-EOR and CCS together. Investing in an industry that will migrate away from the UK within a generation, or possibly two at the outside, doesn’t seem like a sound long-term strategy to me.
Intellectual Property and Licensing
If CCS is to be implemented in the North Sea, with or without EOR, the current oil and gas fields are the logical place to start. That means using IP from the oil and gas companies to fast-track development. Unfortunately the mechanisms for doing this are not yet in place. Likewise licensing is only just getting beaten into shape after the recent EU directives to allow CO2 storage under the seabed. Previously it would have been considered as the dumping of waste at sea.
So while those things are eminently do-able, they take time. They will be challenged and discussed, and re-drafted. Go around that loop a couple of times and you’ve lost a year to bureaucracy. That essential quick deployment doesn’t look so achievable and the investment risk escalates. The investors get more and more nervous and we see a situation where even the syndicates left in the UK’s competition start to ask whether its worth carrying on.
So, while I’m sure we will see a demo plant or two on the east coast of the UK in 5-10 years time, I’m starting to doubt whether the North Sea will be centre of a new industry. If I were an investor looking at CCS, I’d be looking at countries that are wedded to coal and that had large onshore sedimentary basins (for example USA, Canada, China, Germany, Poland & Australia, possibly South Africa). I would not be looking at countries that have mulitple energy sources, those with a big commitment to nuclear or those without large onshore sedimentary basins (for example the UK, Norway, Japan, France, Benelux, South Korea).
Update
The new UK Energy Bill 2009 (read on the 19th Nov 2009) includes enabling legislation for CCS in the UK. It allows financial aid for CCS development, without specifying limits, and it provides for DECC to provide regulation for the industry. So either Ed Milliband reads this blog and his officials at DECC are really quick off the mark or I wasn’t the only one to notice that things had gone a bit quiet. I’m not taking bets on the former.
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
