GE Hitachi PRISM - The Future of Nuclear Energy.

Nuclear Decommissioning Authority deems GE Hitachi’s PRISM Reactor a Credible Option for Managing Plutonium Stockpile

PRISM: Technology to Power and Secure our Energy Future.

LONDON – January 20, 2014 - GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) has welcomed today’s announcement by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) that its PRISM reactor technology is a “credible option” for managing the UK’s plutonium stockpile.

After an investigation into the potential of the various alternative options for plutonium reuse, the NDA has affirmed GEH’s view that PRISM could reuse plutonium faster than competing technologies; providing significant value for money to the UK taxpayer.

NDA’s announcement follows a two-year review process which now gives the green light for PRISM - a high energy, sodium-cooled reactor that uses proven, safe, and advanced technologies - to be considered  as a credible option to manage the Sellafield plutonium stockpile. 

“For more than 50 years GE has been at the forefront of energy innovation and nuclear technology and GE Hitachi’s PRISM reactor offers an attractive solution to tackling the UK’s plutonium management challenges while generating clean electricity,” said Mark Elborne, President and CEO of GE UK & Ireland.

“The UK has the largest storage of civil plutonium anywhere in the world and its Government is committed to re-using that material as an asset rather than a liability, maximizing taxpayer benefits. We believe PRISM offers the most effective solution for accomplishing this goal and look forward to the next stage of this process.”

The Government previously stated a preferred option to build a new MOX plant at Sellafield but, in an effort to gather data on technologies that offer better value or less risk to the taxpayer, responded to GEH’s interest in providing a credible alternative option for the management of plutonium, the PRISM advanced reactor.

Elborne went on: “PRISM can not only re-use the UK plutonium stockpile safely and responsibly whilst generating a step-change in industrial opportunity, but can also provide significant revenue for UK taxpayers. This is a socially and financially responsible solution”.

"...This [PRISM] can be part of how your nation becomes a nuclear leader again..."

This is the by far the most comprehensive report on PRISM technology and PRISM's UK prospects: Prism project: A proposal for the UK's problem plutonium




After decades of debate, a new reactor could help solve the UK’s plutonium problem

Of all the issues facing the UK’s nuclear sector, the problem of plutonium is perhaps the trickiest. But a solution that could feed into a perceived need for the country to resume a position of developing and building new reactor technologies in the future is currently before the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.

UKIP gets my vote, for Energy Policy alone! What does Nigel Farage think?

I don't know - he hasn't replied yet! 

This is what I emailed him nearly a week ago - Nigel, where are you?

-------------------------------------------------//-------------------------------------------------

No single issue is more important to the well being and life style of my grandchildren than energy security.

Your energy policy is good enough for you to get my vote, in respect of your emphasis on nuclear power and your mention of thorium as a fuel. 

However, you are probably not aware that we have an imminent, unique opportunity to start along the road towards 500 years of energy security from the UK's most precious energy resource.



Any day now, the NDA could choose, or not, to use a GE Hitachi PRISM reactor to burn our plutonium stockpile. It will eradicate this proliferation problem, now costing us £80 million a year, by rendering the plutonium useless as a bomb making material in 5 years. And, it's payment by results - no satisfactory outcome - no cost to the UK taxpayer. Is this a no-brainer decision: Yes! Is supporting this a vote-winner: Yes! Is this something you would be prepared to pursue?

A further little taster about this first PRISM reactor - from the fuel produced by the plutonium burn-up, it will continue generating enough electricity to supply the needs of 750,000 people for a further 50 or 60 years.

PRISM is a Gen IV Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor (SFR) and compared to the proposed 'New Nuclear' Gen III Light Water Reactors (LWRs), it is as advanced as an MP3 player over an old spool-to-spool tape recorder.

SFRs can be configured as a breeder reactor and this is where the 500 years of energy security comes into play. A fleet of breeder reactors can burn what the ill-informed and duplicitous call 'nuclear waste'. The UK has enough of this in existence to supply all of our energy needs for 500 years. The minuscule waste-stream produced, decays to background radiation levels in only 300 years - cheaply and safely stored.

PRISM reactors are inherently safe - they shut down according to the laws of physics, without human intervention, in the worst of accident conditions, such as the absence of  all electrical power and loss of safety devices.

They also operate at atmospheric pressure, so the UK has the nuclear expertise and manufacturing capacity to factory produce them in their entirety. It could mean manufacturing jobs, prosperity and growth we have not witnessed in 3 generations.

I am a retired manufacturing engineer and host the blog: PRISMs to Power the UK. You're not up against strong competition on the energy front: http://prismsuk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/parliamentarian-buffoon-or-jester-who.html

I hope you take the time to absorb this basic information and would be very interested in your opinion on the points I have raised. I sincerely believe it would do you and your party nothing but good to promote breeder reactors as a solution to the UK's energy security problems.

38DEGREES - How to get PRISM under the Public's Skin?

50,000 votes is what we need - Only 49,983 to go!

You 49, 682 people out there, worrying about nuclear waste - all you have to do, from this day forward, is regard it as the most valuable energy asset this country has got at its disposal.

Turn your concern into action.

Vote for a fleet of PRISM reactors.

Give the UK 500 years of energy security.

Cut our carbon emissions to practically 0%.

Give your children and grandchildren an energy-rich future in a world which is free of dependence on fossil fuels, peaceful and stable - even when there are 10 billion of us.

The link for voting for the PRISM Campaign is: Nuclear waste can be burned to provide all of the UK's energy for 500 years.

Meet the Man Who Could End Global Warming. Meet the Technology that can do it!

"....The man who is going to save the world is an ordinary-looking man. He's average in height, with an average face. He has blue eyes and sandy hair. He wears eyeglasses. He's forty-eight years old....a classic all-American Homo suburbanus, but in fact he is a former officer of the United States Navy with a Ph.D. in a fiendishly complicated type of engineering. 

He is low-key and unassuming, with a quiet midwestern sense of humor....The man who is going to save the world is also a damn good father, a tendency that is at the heart of this world-saving business...."

Read more: Nuclear Waste Disposal - Eric Loewen's Disposal of Nuclear Waste - Esquire 

Eric Loewen: Best and Brightest 2009 Honoree on Nuclear Waste.

The next thing you should know is that Loewen's miracle technology is not some airy concept. It cost billions of dollars to develop. Some of the biggest companies in America spent ten years refining it under the close supervision of the U. S. government — before the program was shuttered and abandoned in a hasty political decision that makes Who Killed the Electric Car? look like a promotional film for General Motors.

"...."So what is nuclear waste? It's still uranium! Right? It's 95 percent uranium. It's still usable. But we've got these evil things called transuranics, which is 1 percent of the total and 99 percent of the headache..."

"...."...And that is my fuel. The problem becomes the solution."...."

"....Transuranics are highly radioactive elements like plutonium, typically regarded not as sources of energy but for their capacity to vaporize cities.

"But if I build a different kind of reactor that uses liquid sodium instead of water to slow things down, I can have a higher neutron speed and that stuff becomes a fuel. You just mix it in the crucible, put in the transuranics, put in some uranium, put in some zirconium, and you cast it into thin rods. That technology's been developed, it's easy to do, and you do it in a room about this size [a conference room]...."

...."So [GE] sat down and said, You know what, we're pretty good at making washing machines and jet engines in a factory and replicating them. Why don't we make a sodium-cooled reactor that's factory-built, modular, with passive safety and replicate that, instead of trying to scale up?"

Passive safety meant that it would shut itself off automatically instead of melting down. 

Replicability meant the reactor vessel couldn't be more than twenty feet in diameter, because that's the biggest you can ship down a rail line. So they would gang reactor modules together to power a single turbine. They named it the Power Reactor, Innovative Small Module, or PRISM.....

....much of the environmental movement continues to hate nuclear power as an article of faith, and armchair scientists point to the difficulties of the fast nuclear plants in Russia and Japan, and the infinite armies of inertia simply avert their eyes....

The point is, PRISM isn't half as complicated.... "That's how I answer the naysayers who say we can't build this till 2040," he says...."

Let's cut to the Nitty-Gritty

A White Paper, joint authored by Tom Blees and Barry Brook, presented at WORLD ENERGY FORUM 2012

Cutting to the Nitty-Gritty means looking at 'The Way Forward' 

6. The Way Forward

There is a pressing need to: 

(a) displace our heavy dependence on fossil fuels with sustainable, low-carbon alternative energy sources over the coming decades to mitigate the environmental damage of energy production and underpin global energy security and 

(b) demonstrate a credible and acceptable way to safely deal with used nuclear fuel in order to clear a socially acceptable pathway for nuclear fission to be a major low-carbon energy source for this century. 

"....we are faced with the necessity of a nearly complete transformation of the world’s energy systems. Objective analyses of the inherent constraints on wind, solar, and other less-mature renewable energy technologies inevitably show that they will fall short of meeting future low-emissions demands. A ‘go slow, do little’ approach to energy policy is not defensible given the urgency of the problems society must address, and the time required for an orderly transition of energy systems at a global scale...."

What is needed now is a two-pronged approach, for completion by 2020 or earlier, that involves: 

(i) demonstration of the pyroprocessing of LWR spent oxide fuel, and 

(ii) construction of a PRISM fast reactor as a prototype demonstration plant, to establish the basis for licensing and the cost and schedule for subsequent fully commercial IFR plants. 

Once demonstrated, this commercial IFR will be expected to show very significant advances in nuclear safety, reliability, nuclear fuel sustainability, management of long-term waste, proliferation resistance, and economics. 

The time has come to capitalize on this exceptional energy technology, with the benefits of this development extending throughout the global energy economy in the 21^st century.

The Case for Near-term Commercial Demonstration of the Integral Fast Reactor/

What is David Cameron's vision? What will be his legacy?

Dear Prime Minister,

One decision, more than any other, can secure a wonderful future for our Nation.

That decision will revitalise our manufacturing industries, leading to growth and prosperity not witnessed for several generations. It will meet our carbon targets with alacrity, whilst securing our energy supply for hundreds of years to come, with the incidental outcome of making our nuclear waste ‘problem’ evaporate.

On your watch, events are conspiring for you to make this decision, leave your mark on history and earn the grateful thanks of the generations of your children and grandchildren, as the UK leads the world into a pollution-free and energy-rich era.

The era is that of the inevitable global deployment of breeder reactors, which can supply all of the energy requirements – that’s electricity and carbon-neutral fuels for all transport and industrial processes (including seawater desalination) – for many thousands of years to come, for every individual on the planet, from inexhaustible uranium and thorium fuel sources. Your children can inhabit a planet free of the threats of energy wars, water wars, pollution and climate change.

Ignore the negativity coming at you from your renewable and (PWR) nuclear advisers, because energy from both technologies fall orders of magnitude short of the capabilities of breeder reactors. Look at the performance of the GE Hitachi PRISM Power Block, one of which you will surely be sanctioning, in the not too distant future, to economically dispose of our plutonium stockpile. Then, you can do the arithmetic for yourself.

This benign, that is, passively-safe reactor generates 600 MW of electrical power, capable of supplying all of the electricity needed by a city with 600,000 inhabitants. You will be aware that there are no impediments to its UK licensing, which you can surely expedite. You will also be aware that we have a fuel source, in our existing legacy waste, to power our nation for the next 500 years. About 30 PRISM Power Blocks would supply all of the 16 GW of our ‘New Nuclear’, which would be a credible first-step towards ‘PRISMs to Power the UK’ (the title of my new Blog).

The vessels and pipework of a PRISM are made from stainless-steel and operate at atmospheric pressure and these factors are of tremendous significance, because we have the technological expertise, experience and the manufacturing capacity to produce these reactors in their entirety, right here in the UK.

Crucially, you are at a point in history giving you the strongest possible position to negotiate a licence with GE Hitachi, for us to start to manufacture PRISMs in the UK. They are sure to consider an offer which can turn all of their endeavours thus far, into saleable hardware.

Do you have a vision for our country stretching beyond your watch? You could lead your Cabinet, Parliament, the UK and the world, into the era of the breeder reactor. Within your own lifetime, you will see some of the fruits of your decision, but that decision will influence far more greatly, the character of the world your children and grandchildren will inherit.

Energy decision time is now. If today’s national leaders, you included, get this singular decision on energy wrong, the outcome for future generations could be nightmarish.

I urge you most strongly, to look into the matters I raise and would very much appreciate your thoughts on our energy future.

Yours sincerely,

Colin Megson,

----------------------------------------------------//---------------------------------------------

This will be winging its way shortly, to the PM.