The government called on Friday for utilities to swiftly decide whether to scrap aging reactors that would be particularly vulnerable in the event of a natural disaster. mainichi.jp

The Dutch government will provide a loan so that necessary upgrades can be made to enable the aging Petten research reactor to operate for a further ten years, by which time its replacement should have started up.  world-nuclear-news.org

Iran has still not implemented all the nuclear transparency measures it had agreed to carry out by late August, the head of the UN atomic energy agency said on Monday, suggesting little headway in an inquiry into suspected bomb research. businessinsider.com.au

EDF Energy said two twin reactors in Britain, Heysham 1 and Hartlepool will operate at 75 percent to 80 percent of their previous capacity for as long as two years due to fears that excessive heat in the boilers could cause cracks to develop. nuclearstreet.com

TEPCO said there has been a sharp spike in the radioactivity of water samples taken from an observation well built by the sea at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. japantimes.com

101,000 Bq/Kg of Cs-134/137 was measured from the soil of a park in Chiba, Japan. fukushima-diary.com

The Sindh High Court in Pakistan ordered a halt to construction of two ACP -1000 nuclear power plants slated for Karachi, siding with petitioners who said the necessary environmental reviews had not been done properly. nuclearstreet.com

Lockheed Martin said Wednesday that it was ready to find partners for a fusion energy process so small that a reactor could fit on the back of a tractor trailer. nuclearstreet.com

Fukushima nuclear waste detected off U.S. West Coast, from California to Canada. enenews.com

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has accepted the Department of Energy’s design for an underground geologic nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.  world-nuclear-news.org

Russia’s national operator for radioactive waste management (NO RAO) aims to build by 2024 an underground research laboratory tasked with studying the possibility of final waste disposal of high-level radioactive waste in the Nizhnekansky Granite Massif in Krasnoyarsk. world-nuclear-news.org

Over half the 52,060 used nuclear fuel elements at the former Magnox nuclear power plant at Oldbury in the UK have now been removed from site, two and a half years after the plant generated its last power.  world-nuclear-news.org

 

 

 

 

         I have been blogging this week about experimental fusion reactors. I got excited reading about the Bussard Polywell reactor. It has three excellent features. Based on hydrogen and boron-11 fuel, it does not consume radioactive fuel, it does not produce neutrons during operation and it does not produce radioactive waste. The developers of the Bussard Polywell say that they are confident that they can build a prototype 100 megawatt nuclear fusion reactor for about three hundred and fifty million dollars. This is a very small amount of money compared to the billions that are subsidizing the nuclear fission industry. But then I had to ask why one was not being built if it was such a good design.

       The original idea for this type of reactor design was from a paper by a Russian physicist named Lavrent’ev published in 1974. Robert Bussard started a company to pursue the Polywell concept in 1985. In 1992 and 1994, he received funding from the U.S. Navy as well as two small grants from NASA and LANL. IN 1995, a paper was published by Todd Rider that offered a detailed criticism of the Polywell design. Because no operational device existed, Rider had to use theoretical estimates from other fusion research. After making a set of assumptions about the operation of the reactor including such factors as loss of ions due to upscattering, ion thermalization rate, energy loss due to x-ray emissions and the fusion rate, Rider concluded that the design had “fundamental flaws.”

       Bussard responded that the Polywell plasma had a different structure, temperature distribution and well profile than the operational parameters that had been assumed by Rider. He questioned other assumptions made by Rider and concluded that his design would produce net useful energy. Other researchers also questioned Rider’s assumptions, calculation and conclusions. They pointed out that there were aspects of the Polywell design and operation that Rider did not address that undermined his conclusions.

       I do not have the mathematical and physics background that would enable me to review Rider’s critique and Bussard’s answers. I would assume but cannot document that twenty years of work on experimental devices by the Polywell team should have experimentally answered some of the criticisms posed by Rider. However, the existence of a detail critique, even if flawed has had a corrosive effect on support for the project over the years.

      Bussard continued to receive funding from the U.S. Navy from 1999 to 2006. He died in late 2007 while seeking funding to continue his work. In 2007, the Navy renewed funding and the project continued up to the present. The Polywell company is now seeking funds to build a full-scale model. Part of the problem  with getting more money from the Navy lies in the fact that most of the nuclear research funded by the U.S. government is handled by the U.S. Department of Energy which supports the tokomak approach to nuclear fusion.

       Considering how important this device could be if it works and the enormous amount of money the U.S. government spends on nuclear research, subsidies and loan guarantees, it would make sense to allocate the funds to build one. Assuming, of course, that the theoretical challenges from Rider and other have been successfully answered.

Diagram of a basic Polywell design:

First tests since Tuesday’s typhoon Vongfong show radioactive material continues rising near ocean at Fukushima nuclear plant.  enenews.com

Britain is holding public consultations in its choosing of a site to store nuclear waste from decommissioned submarines. upi.com

A prominent volcanologist disputed Japanese regulators’ conclusion that two nuclear reactors were safe from a volcanic eruption in the next few decades, saying Friday that such a prediction was impossible. foxnews.com

Ukraine dismissed 39 high-ranking officials yesterday as a new law on “power purification” came into effect. world-nuclear-news.org

 

        I have been posting lately about nuclear fusion reactors. I have not covered them before in my blog because I did not feel that there were any fusion projects that could possibly be turned into commercial energy sources for decades. There is an old joke that nuclear fusion is forty years away, always. Nuclear fusion just seemed to absorb billions of dollars but like the end of the rainbow it just kept receding as you approached it.

        I am happy to say that there now appears to be three different approaches to nuclear fusion power that might result in a commercial model in less than ten years. All three of these new fusion reactor projects are being done by private groups. For reference, I have also blogged about the huge ITER project that is being build in France  by a consortium of governments. This experimental fusion reactor will cost billions of dollars and will not even be completed until 2027 at the soonest. Then there will have to be years of testing before any possible commercial reactor could be built. The three private fusion reactors under development will be about ten times as small, ten times as simple, ten times as cheap and generate more power than the ITER design. And, more importantly, one or more may hit the market before ITER is ever finished.

       The fuel for these fusions reactors will be very light elements like hydrogen, deuterium, tritium and boron. Hydrogen is easily made by decomposing water into oxygen and hydrogen. Deuterium can be separated from normal water or from hydrogen produced by electrolysis. Tritium can be produced when deuterium captures a neutron from nuclear fission. Tritium can also be produced in nuclear fission reactors by neutron bombardment of lithium-6, a stable isotope.

        Lithium is a very useful common element in the crust of the Earth and there are many sources. World production is about one one hundredth of the economically extractable reserves. So there is easily a hundred years supply at current levels of production. Lithium-6 is about eight percent of naturally occurring lithium.

        Boron is a fairly rare element but is concentrated in water soluble minerals. About eighty percent of boron is in the form of the stable isotope borton-11. Proven boron reserves are about two hundred and fifty times current production levels so we have several centuries of boron available at current levels of use. However, it is time consuming and expensive to separate out the boron-11.

         Deuterium and tritium reactions produce fast neutrons which causes concrete and metal to become brittle and can make other materials radioactive. While boron-11 may be expensive to produce, the amount consumed in a nuclear fusion reactor is very small compared to the consumption of boron for other industrial application. The main benefit of a hydrogen-boron reactor is that it does not produce fast neutrons. If a commercial nuclear fusion reactor is created, I would prefer that it not produce neutrons.

        The basic waste product of these nuclear fusion reactors is alpha particles or helium nuclei. As a matter of fact, the U.S. has been selling off critical helium reserves lately and we need to produce more helium. I do not have the numbers to show that substantial quantities of helium would be produced by fusion reactors but it is nice to have a harmless waste product that could have commercial value instead of the horrible waste generated by a nuclear fission reactor that has to be buried for centuries.

         The development of a commercially competitive nuclear fusion power reactor would be a game changer for the global energy industry. It could solve the base-load problem of renewables such as wind and solar much better than nuclear fission reactors and fossil fuels.