Category Archives: recycling

Q and A with Russell Wilcox of Transatomic Power

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I asked Russell Wilcox of Transatomic Power to fill us in a little more about the WAMSR (Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor.)

The history of missed opportunity regarding advances embraced by France has left the US behind in the area of reprocessing. It started back when it was made illegal to recycle used fuel in the US. Many people don’t realize that law was reversed but the stigma attributed to nuclear waste and what to do with it has left a vacuum of unrealized potential.

This proposed new reactor had it’s beginnings at MIT with two of the co-founders of Transatomic Power Mark Massie and Leslie Dewan, both MIT PhD students.

The Massachussets based company is getting attention and advice from a team of experienced Continue reading →

Does "small" have a better chance of making it to market?

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Interview with Hyperion Power Generation CEO John R. “Grizz” Deal

It is a small 70 MW reactor but works in a distributed system as Romania and the Czech Republic are planning for 2013. About the size of an outhouse.

Interesting quotes :

John R. “Grizz” Deal: Transportable, not portable. Once you put it in the ground, it’s there for its life because it’s hot. It’s about a meter-and-a-half across and about 2 meters tall, which is very small.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

“So how do you get dependable, base-load power? Wind is not base-load capable. Solar is certainly not base-load capable. They’re not always there. You can’t store electricity; you generate it and then you use it or lose it.”

Those people—and virtually every country in the world, to some extent—rely upon United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing as a basis for their own licensing. So we are seeking a design certification and a license from the U.S. NRC, even if we never install one in the U.S.

[Other countries] won’t rely on [NRC licensing] completely, but they will leverage that work.

So an NRC license will get you in the door?

John R. “Grizz” Deal: Right. It’s a lot like the FDA and how getting licensed in the [European Union] helps you in the U.S. and vice versa.”

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

“…The difference here is it is really easy to build one computer chip, but it’s really hard to build a million of them because there’s quality control issues, there’s supplier issues, there’s raw material issues, so we’re doing that part of this so we can build—well, of version one, we expect to build 4,000 reactors.
Small or not, that’s a lot of reactors.

John R. “Grizz” Deal: The market opportunity is for half a million units today and it’s growing, so selling 4,000 units of our first design is a pretty reasonable goal. But we’ve still got to be very, very careful about how we get that final design done.

That’s what we’re doing now. We’re finalizing the design so that it’s repeatable, it’s replicatable and it’s got a high degree of quality control behind it because, quite honestly, unlike a lot of products out there, we are extremely regulated. You wouldn’t believe. And I’m glad that we’re highly regulated—it’s nuclear energy, after all; it should be highly regulated.

How tightly regulated is this technology?
John R. “Grizz” Deal: Just as highly regulated as the drug industry is the way that we put it. People are familiar with 20-year development cycles for biotech products. Well, we pre-empted the first 10 years of our quote-unquote product cycle because of the work that we’re leveraging from Los Alamos. So, if you wanted to make an analogy between the regulatory environment for nuclear reactors and a medical device or drug, you could say we’re getting ready to start clinical trials.

Do you have a working prototype?
John R. “Grizz” Deal: We’re leveraging the design of a very common reactor, called a TRIGA reactor. There are 60-something of those reactors around the world. They are the only reactor that the NRC has licensed for unattended operation, meaning it’s so safe that you can literally walk away from it. It’s walk-away safe.
So we’re taking that basic concept and …”

Thorium Molten Salt Reactor covered in Wall Street Journal

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The Wall Street Journal wrote this on Thorium MARCH 19, 2011

…Does a Different Nuclear Power Lie Ahead? By MATT RIDLEY
Might the Fukushima accident eventually create a chance for the nuclear industry to “reboot”? In recent years some have begun to argue that solid-fuel uranium reactors like the ones in Japan are an outdated technology that deserves to peter out and be replaced by an entirely different kind of nuclear energy that will be both safer and cheaper…

The attention brought by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant break down has had unexpected attention brought to the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor which by the way has no need for water or containment and cannot melt down and will not radiate the worst nuclear isotopes.

There was a time when the Americans chose a path based on the perceived need to compete with the Russians for military supremacy. Nuclear weapons needed Plutonium. The method at the time was to breed Plutonium in a reactor. But Thorium Molten Salt Reactors could not produce Plutonium. This was viewed as a negative and became shelved.

Fifty years later, the worst nuclear breakdown since Chernobyl in 1986 has turned turned out to be relatively minor and the 50 remaining nuclear reactors in Japan remain safe. The different circumstances are so obvious. For instance human error was responsible for the Chernobyl accident. A natural disaster of such an unexpected strength that has not been experienced by Japan in modern history caused the disruption of 4 reactor units at the same plant in Fukushima Daiichi. The safety record for nuclear power plants has been unsurpassed by any other power facility or other industry.

The antinuclear movement has unwittingly helped the progress of nuclear energy. Articles such as these will now become more common over the next few months. The reality is that people are asking why has there been so little innovation over the last 30 years? Can reactors be made safer?

One of the main inventors of the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor, Alvin Weinberg, knew that they were superior to the solid fueled reactors and pushed for their acceptance. He eventually lost his job for making too much noise about it when the politics of the time were more about arms than climate change. Weinberg was ahead of his time. He also designed the Light Water Reactor, currently the most popular reactors, which he himself turned against.

Now considered a fourth generation technology the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor shows the most promise as a nuclear energy design precisely because they solve the problems that made the older nuclear power plant designs unpopular.

South African Scientists Like Thorium

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From South Africa
Nuclear matters
Thorium could be answer to South Africa’s energy woes
Published 3 March 2011 in HSNW

…South African scientists are increasingly touting thorium as a viable solution for the country’s energy woes; scientists believe that South Africa could use its plentiful reserves of thorium, a radioactive rare earth metal, to generate greenhouse gas-free electricity; South Africa’s aging energy infrastructure has led to rolling blackouts and energy rations; South Africa currently generates 78 percent of its energy from coal making it one of the largest contributors of greenhouse gases in the world; thorium is a better alternative to uranium in nuclear power production as it cannot be weaponized, does not need to be converted or enriched, its radioactive waste breaks down faster, and is less expensive and environmentally friendlier to extract…

…

According to Professor Mulder thorium was the preferred material for the nuclear industry for nearly twenty years, before it was eventually replaced by uranium because it could not be weaponized.

In pushing for the use of thorium, columnist Dave Gleason of NewsTime writes, the rare earth metal “is inherently incapable of causing a meltdown; it doesn’t need to be converted or enriched; it is very energy efficient; its waste lasts for tens of years unlike uranium which hangs around malevolently for thousands; it is much less expensive than uranium extracts and is reasonably environmentally friendly to mine.”

Eskom, the state owned utility company which generates 95 percent of the country’s power, says that it will not consider using thorium until it is licensed by the National Nuclear Regulator.

South Africa contains vast reserves of rare earth metals and in the 1950s was the world’s largest source of rare earth minerals.

South Africa’s thorium mine was closed in 1963, but last October a Canadian mining company was granted a license to extract thorium from the mine, located north of Cape Town.

The metal is not currently available for commercial use yet as a reprocessing plant must be built to “breed” uranium 223 from thorium before it can be used to generate power…