PRISM: lighting a new era for reactor safety, energy security and used nuclear fuel management.

A Presentation by David Powell, Vice President Europe Region for GE Hitachi, at the ENC 2012 Conference 

EUROPEAN NUCLEAR CONFERENCE - MANCHESTER 

9 - 12 December 2012 

Slide 2 of 24.
This link takes you through GE Hitachi's efforts to make the case for the use of PRISM Reactors to 'burn' our plutonium, depleted uranium and spent nuclear fuel stockpiles. We have enough of this Energy Resource  to power the UK for 500 years:  The Nuclear 'Waste' Dilemma.

Spinning for Yesterday's Nuclear!

11 months apart, two of the UK's top technologists are worlds apart

Lord Hutton, 30 December 2012.
"Nuclear power has always been a controversial issue. But whatever view you take about the future role of nuclear energy, successive governments have rightly tried to establish a permanent solution for the radioactive waste generated by our military and existing civil nuclear programmes.

These plans are now at a critical stage of development.

My belief is that we must not continue to pass the buck. We have a choice.

We can either continue to store this old waste above ground indefinitely and leave the final solution for future generations to resolve, or we can tackle this once and for all with a permanent geological disposal facility.

The latter course is the only responsible way to proceed".

Voice of Business: Time to solve this toughest nuclear problem

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Professor David MacKay, 02 February 2012

According to figures calculated for the Guardian by the American writer and fast reactor advocate Tom Blees, this alternative approach could – given a large enough number of [PRISM] reactors – produce enough low-carbon electricity from Britain's waste stockpile to supply the UK at current rates of demand for more than 500 years.

MacKay confirmed this figure. "As an upper bound on what you could get from those resources in fast reactors I think it's a very reasonable estimate. In reality you'd get all kinds of issues so you wouldn't achieve the upper bound but I still think it's a reasonable starting point."
New generation of nuclear reactors could consume radioactive waste as fuel

Have you heard the one about the Entrepreneur, the Climate Scientist and the Nuclear Engineer?

Some of what the Letter had to say:

Energy Security: "...Unlike today's nuclear reactor, the IFR can generate unlimited amounts of inexpensive clean power for hundreds of thousands of years..."

Proliferation Resistant: "...It provides an excellent solution for what to do with our nuclear waste because it can use our existing nuclear waste for fuel and it is significantly more proliferation-resistant than other methods of dealing with nuclear waste..."

Much Much Safer: "...The IFR is also inherently safe. In an emergency, unlike today's reactors, it shuts down without human intervention and without requiring electric power …"

Affordable: "... Hundreds of nuclear scientists believe this technology has the ability to generate carbon-free power at a cost per kW less than coal..."

Wind Farms - Old Bangers at 10 years! Clapped out after 15 years!

The Performance of Wind Farms

 in the United Kingdom and 

Denmark

Figure 1 shows the simplest variant [irrespective of the generating capacity of the wind farm] of the normalised age-performance curve for onshore UK wind installations together with the equivalent curves for onshore and offshore Danish installations.

Figure 2 illustrates similar curves but in this case the estimates are constructed by weighting each wind farm by its generating capacity, referred to as capacity-weighted. This gives a better representation of performance degradation per MW of generating capacity

 The Performance of Wind Farms in the United Kingdom and Denmark

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/

GE Hitachi Website - The information is Short and Sweet

http://www.ge-energy.com/products_and_services/products/nuclear_energy/prism_sodium_cooled_reactor.jsp