Jan 7, 2025 05:36 PM
https://www.breakthroughjournal.org/p/ho...o-innovate
EXCERPTS: . . .Now, we face a different tragedy: for the first time in a generation, there is strong demand for new nuclear, and the industry has no proven, mature advanced reactor ready to go. There is a cliché today that businesses should learn to “fail fast,” but that makes sense only if you draw the correct lesson from the failure, which in this case was to try again with a better helium circulator, and not to fall back on tried-and-true technology that would eventually become obviously troublesome, like fossil fuels.
St. Vrain isn’t the only example of a technology that was deployed early and died too soon. Fermi 1, south of Detroit, followed a similar trajectory....
[...] Like St. Vrain, which came a few years later, Fermi-1 also had operating troubles. The flow of the sodium coolant was interrupted by a blockage, and some of the fuel melted. The reactor shut down and there was no release of radiation beyond the containment building. The damage was repaired and the reactor re-started, although that took four years.
Detroit Edison ran it for another two years, and then shut it down. Its younger siblings, Fermi-2 and -3 are conventional light water reactors.
At both the Fort St. Vrain and Fermi-1, the issues were not so much reactor physics as they were materials science. Today, water does not degrade components very much in reactors, but only because the operators have learned from painstaking experience that tight control of water chemistry is essential. Moving to a different coolant poses new problems. Helium molecules, for example, are very small, so seals are tricky. Sodium poses a different set of problems.
And new problems are likely to turn up in new designs for advance reactors, now moving towards deployment....
[...] We could face problems that we haven’t seen before because the industry and the government missed the opportunity to discover the issues last time. They did not extract the maximum value from either St. Vrain, the gas-graphite design, or from Fermi-1, the sodium design, And now TerraPower is building a sodium fast reactor, under the same program that X-energy is using for its gas-graphite reactor.
Natrium has advantages over the builders of Fermi-1, including decades of engineering advances, but again, a reactor for which there is a market now will not be deployed for at least the next several years. Meeting our energy and climate challenges would have been easier if Fermi-1, although uneconomic, had been nurtured for a while longer....
[...] The early problems will give people who never liked nuclear energy an “I-told-you-so” moment. But their verdict, right or wrong, will be premature if it comes when the reactors first start running.
Both companies might do well to follow the pattern of companies that build cars or airplanes; they may expect to lose money on the first few and make it up as the bugs get worked out and their commercial viability becomes clear. This maybe essential when the first project is a full-scale model. Another advanced reactor company, Kairos Power, is taking an entirely different approach, iterating with model after model, demonstrating component after component, before moving to a full-scale machine. But this is atypical for reactor development.
It may also be time for the government to learn a lesson: if you invest in something as complicated as a first-of-a-kind reactor, the endpoint isn’t when construction is finished, fuel is loaded, and operators achieve the first criticality. It’s when the model becomes a commercial success... (MORE - missing details
EXCERPTS: . . .Now, we face a different tragedy: for the first time in a generation, there is strong demand for new nuclear, and the industry has no proven, mature advanced reactor ready to go. There is a cliché today that businesses should learn to “fail fast,” but that makes sense only if you draw the correct lesson from the failure, which in this case was to try again with a better helium circulator, and not to fall back on tried-and-true technology that would eventually become obviously troublesome, like fossil fuels.
St. Vrain isn’t the only example of a technology that was deployed early and died too soon. Fermi 1, south of Detroit, followed a similar trajectory....
[...] Like St. Vrain, which came a few years later, Fermi-1 also had operating troubles. The flow of the sodium coolant was interrupted by a blockage, and some of the fuel melted. The reactor shut down and there was no release of radiation beyond the containment building. The damage was repaired and the reactor re-started, although that took four years.
Detroit Edison ran it for another two years, and then shut it down. Its younger siblings, Fermi-2 and -3 are conventional light water reactors.
At both the Fort St. Vrain and Fermi-1, the issues were not so much reactor physics as they were materials science. Today, water does not degrade components very much in reactors, but only because the operators have learned from painstaking experience that tight control of water chemistry is essential. Moving to a different coolant poses new problems. Helium molecules, for example, are very small, so seals are tricky. Sodium poses a different set of problems.
And new problems are likely to turn up in new designs for advance reactors, now moving towards deployment....
[...] We could face problems that we haven’t seen before because the industry and the government missed the opportunity to discover the issues last time. They did not extract the maximum value from either St. Vrain, the gas-graphite design, or from Fermi-1, the sodium design, And now TerraPower is building a sodium fast reactor, under the same program that X-energy is using for its gas-graphite reactor.
Natrium has advantages over the builders of Fermi-1, including decades of engineering advances, but again, a reactor for which there is a market now will not be deployed for at least the next several years. Meeting our energy and climate challenges would have been easier if Fermi-1, although uneconomic, had been nurtured for a while longer....
[...] The early problems will give people who never liked nuclear energy an “I-told-you-so” moment. But their verdict, right or wrong, will be premature if it comes when the reactors first start running.
Both companies might do well to follow the pattern of companies that build cars or airplanes; they may expect to lose money on the first few and make it up as the bugs get worked out and their commercial viability becomes clear. This maybe essential when the first project is a full-scale model. Another advanced reactor company, Kairos Power, is taking an entirely different approach, iterating with model after model, demonstrating component after component, before moving to a full-scale machine. But this is atypical for reactor development.
It may also be time for the government to learn a lesson: if you invest in something as complicated as a first-of-a-kind reactor, the endpoint isn’t when construction is finished, fuel is loaded, and operators achieve the first criticality. It’s when the model becomes a commercial success... (MORE - missing details