Molten salt reactors have been explored in the past. They were originally seen as a possible power source for airplanes because they could be small enough for that application. In one type of molten salt reactor, fuel in the form of uranium tetraflouride is mixed with other chemicals and the heat generated by nuclear reactions turns the mixture molten. A graphite core serves the moderator. The molten salt circulates through a heat exchanger to create steam to power turbines. While the reactor operates at high temperature, it also operates at low pressure which reduces the complexity of the reactor and the wear on the components. Unfortunately, the power density of the molten salt reactors is much lower than the light water reactors that currently supply commercial nuclear power. Although the U.S. and other countries including Russia and China have explored molten salt reactors they have never caught on for any major commercial application. The old designs for molten salt reactors are simply not cost competitive for power generation.

          Leslie Dawan has invented a new type of molten salt reactor and has started a company called Transatomic Power to develop the new design. In her design, with new materials and a new shape, she has managed to increase the power density thirty times to the point where her smaller molten salt reactors can compete in the market place with existing reactor designs. In her design, there is a plug made of the salt mixture that is cooled to keep it solid. If the power to the reactor fails, the plug melts and the molten salt fuel pours out into a big chamber under the reactor. The mixture spreads out and the nuclear fuel is no longer compact enough to react so the mixture cools and solidifies posing no threat of a meltdown. An additional benefit of her molten salt reactor is that it can burn nuclear waste. One ton of nuclear waste can be consumed in a year to generate power and only about eight pounds of waste will remain at the end of the year. This could help with the disposal of nuclear waste.

         At this point in time, the design only exists as a document, a series of computer simulations and some patent filings. Dawan needs about four million dollars to runs a series of experiments to validate her design. After that, if she wants to sell reactors in the U.S., it will take a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to go through the certification and licensing process of the Nuclear Regulator Commission. Dawan has decided that her design is a better choice for carbon dioxide reduction than sustainable sources such as wind and solar. Unfortunately, climate change is accelerating and waiting ten years to even start selling her reactors may be too late to have a meaningful impact. She has decided that she might have better luck taking her design to China where they could move faster with implementation. While I admire her enthusiasm and engineering skills, she might be a bit naïve when it comes to the Chinese nuclear industry. As I outlined in my article yesterday, there are some serious problems in China that could interfere with her good intentions.   

There is increasing international concern about the removal of the spent fuel from the pool atop the Unit 4 reactor building at Fukushima.  Enenews.com

South Korea bans all fishery products from 8 Japan prefectures. Enenews.com

South California Edison Publishes 3,200 Pages of Documentation on Faulty SONGS Steam Generators purchased from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries for San Onofre. nuclearstreet.com

Uranium Energy Corporation will reduce output at its Palangana mine in Texas while it focuses efforts on developing its nearby Goliad and Burke Hollow projects. The move is in response to low uranium prices. world-nuclear-news.org

Ambient office = .079 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .102 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = .100 microsieverts per hour

Packaged ham slice from Costco =  .103 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .075 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .058 microsieverts per hour

          Yesterday, I posted an article about the nuclear reactor building boom going on in China. They currently have twenty seven reactors operating, twenty eight under construction, fifty more reactor projects scheduled and a hundred more being planned. This is a very ambitious program and I mentioned some concerns that I had about their reactor buildingplans.

          Many different factors played into the inflating of the Chinese real estate bubble in the last decade. Banks loans became easier to get, people wanted to own homes, newly wealthy Chinese were looking for lucrative investments, and the government wanted to stimulate economic growth and pumped money into development projects. The end result was the creation of entire empty cities full of expensive condos that were mainly seen as investments by the owners. One of the big problems is that people either don’t want to move to the new cities or they cannot afford the price of the housing. The bubble has been deflating for the past year and some of the big projects were simply abandoned uncompleted.  What will happen if reactors get half built and then resources dry up? Worse yet, what will happen if reactors get built and fueled but operations become too expensive? Decommissioning is very expensive and they may just have to put up fences if the money isn’t there.

        China is currently ranked eightieth in Transparency international’s Corruption Perceptions Index. This index includes “graft, bribery, embezzlement, backdoor deals, nepotism, patronage, and statistical falsification.”  Consider for a moment how every one of these could lead to problems with the nuclear reactor program. With the enormous amount of capital that will be expended in reactor construction, does anyone serious believe that there will not be bribes to government officials to look the other way as substandard materials are used on poorly constructed reactors. And, as the reactors are operated, does anyone believe that proper safety regulations will be followed when a bribe can get the regulators to ignore infractions? The Chinese public believes that there are more corrupt government officials than honest ones. Unprecedented levels of corruptions that came with the shift to a market economy are considered to a major threat to China’s future economic and political stability. Reactors construction sites might become a target for enraged citizens fed up the corruption.

         China is faced with a mounting water crisis. Frequent and severe shortages along with disasterous flooding threaten China. Forty four percent of China’s population and fifty eight percent of its cultivated land are in the north and northeastern provinces but this area has only fourteen percent of the country’s water resources. Reactors will be built in the most populated areas and they require enormous amounts of water to cool. Operations of some reactors may be suspended because there is not enough water to cool them. In addition, global warming is increasing the temperature of rivers, lakes and the oceans. Reactors in the U.S. have had to be shut down because the water they used for cooling became too hot to use. In addition, reactors can be vulnerable to floods as has been shown at Fukushima. Water could definitely become a major problem for Chinese reactors.

            China has announced that it wants to have a closed fuel cycle which means that it will be mining its own uranium. China’s record on mining toxic metals is horrible. For every one of the hundreds of thousands of tons rare earths extracted from the Bayan Obu mine near Beijing, about four hundred thousand cubic feet of waste gas (including dust, hydrofluoric acid, sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid), twenty five hundred cubic feet of acidic waste water and a ton of radioactive waste residue are also produced.  Some rivers in China are so polluted with toxic chemicals from mining and industrial operations that all the fish in them have died.  Is it likely that China will be any more careful with the toxic waste from uranium mining that it has been with the waste from other mining operations? I will leave aside the question of disposing of spent nuclear fuel because I think I have made my point. If all the planned reactors get built and go into operation, big areas of China will become a radioactive wasteland from uranium mining, reactor accidents and the disposal of spent nuclear fuel.

Bayan Obu open pit rare earths mine near Beijing:

Errors Cast Doubt on Japan’s Cleanup of Nuclear Accident Site. nytimes.com

Conflicting reports have left many baffled, and now nuclear experts have highlighted that no one really knows the true severity of the radioactive water leaks at Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. huffingtonpost.co.uk

A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman warned any military intervention in Syria would create a nuclear disaster.  Washington.cbslocal.com

Iran transfers nuclear talks to foreign ministry from security council. washingtonpost.com

Ambient office = .085 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .114 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = .072 microsieverts per hour

Vine ripened tomato from Costco =  .107 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .095 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .077 microsieverts per hour

             I have always been fascinated by China. Their culture stretches back thousands of years. They have an amazing record of invention that was largely unknown in the West until the Twentieth Century. They also have a record of making sudden and profound changes in their society. I recently read 1421 by Gavin Menzies in which he describes two of these shifts. Around 1420, the Chinese built and dispatched thousands of ships to explore and map the entire world. When the fleet returned a few years later, the government had changed and the new Emperor order that all ships and records of the voyages be burned and forgotten. In the Twentieth Century, we had such abrupt changes as Mao’s Cultural Revolution which tore down the old government system and sent scholars to work on pig farms. Then, after Mao, the Chinese shifted again to allow more capitalist elements. Currently, they are a have a booming but overheating economy based on manufacture and international trade. They are planning another huge shift in the near future. The idea is that they need to have more consumers in China to relieve their dependence on international trade. The government has decided that they want to move two hundred million peasants from the countryside into new cities that are being built to accommodate them. This is supposed to be accomplished by 2025. All I can say to that is “good luck”.

           Their economic boom and great plans require huge amounts of energy. They are building something like one new coal power plant a week over there. The air pollution in Beijing is so bad that most of the time it is like living in an airport smoking lounge. They are also working hard to pioneer solar energy and are beating us to market with new systems. And, to bring the subject back to this blog focus, they are building a lot of new nuclear power plants. They have purchased a couple of reactors from the Japanese but they are in the process of ramping up domestic production of their own nuclear industry.

            Currently, Mainland China has seventeen nuclear reactors in operation and twenty eight under construction. Construction of fifty more reactors is scheduled in the near future with a hundred more being planned. They want to have four times the current nuclear power capacity by 2020 which would be about fifty eight gigawatts. Another fourfold increase to two hundred gigawatts is planned for 2030 with future doubling to four hundred gigawatts by 2040. They are purchasing nuclear technology from other countries and using it to develop their own reactors designs including some of the most advanced reactor designs in the world.

           While I applaud their ambition and have no doubt that they have the engineers who can build this huge new fleet of reactors, I do have some concerns about their plans. For one thing, they are in a huge real estate bubble economically that could collapse any day and interfere with the availability of the resources including investment capital they need for their new reactor fleet. Another problem I have is that there is rampant corruption in the Chinese government and a serious lack of transparency and oversight. I remember Chinese schools that collapsed during an earthquake because they were built with substandard concrete and one fourth of the steel reinforcement that they should have had. If some of these new reactors are constructed with substandard materials and lax standards, they will be accidents just waiting to happen.  A third issue is the availability of cooling water for the reactors. Major rivers in China no longer reach the sea because all the water has been drawn off for drinking water, industrial use and irrigation. China intends to have a closed fuel cycle.  That means that they will be mining uranium inside China. Considering their poor environmental record to date, there could be serious environmental degradation from such mining.  And finally, they will have to dispose of the waste generated from all those reactors which has many complications of its own. China may come to regret the brave new nuclear future that it has planned.

Fukushima’s Unit Four reactor building is sinking and there is a threat of fission in the fuel rods in the spent fuel pool if the building collapses. Enenews.com

Japan needs to ask for international assistance in dealing with the Fukushima situation. akiomatsumura.com

Although Southern Co. recently announced reactors under construction at Plant Vogtle will exceed their original budgets, Georgia power regulators voted Tuesday to wait until the first unit is complete before addressing any cost overruns. nuclearstreet.com

Slovakia’s government agreed to limit the amount that the largest industrial electricity consumers have to pay into the state nuclear fund to help businesses in the face of an economic slowdown. bloomberg.com

Ambient office = .088 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .089 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = .091 microsieverts per hour

Romaine lettuce from Costco =  .106  microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .081 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .063 microsieverts per hour

           There has been a lot of news lately about the mess at Fukushima. They are still not sure exactly where the cores are. Water is being pumped underground to cool the cores that melted into the earth. We are told that hundreds of tons of contaminated groundwater from Fukushima have been flowing into the Pacific daily since the accident. Estimates are that the plume of contaminated water will reach the West Coast of the U.S. within the next year. There are also models that show that there will be a measurable rise in radioactivity in the entire Pacific Ocean by 2020.

TEPCO has been storing hundreds of thousands of tons of contaminated cooling water in tanks that they bolted together. Those tanks are almost full and in danger of corroding. The groundwater is rising up around the site, turning the ground into a swamp and threatening the stability of the buildings. And, at this point, it looks like the cooling water will be flowing directly into the Pacific soon. The latest plan is to pump liquid nitrogen down holes drilled into the ground in order to freeze the groundwater in place. I am still confused about this new groundwater threat and the groundwater that has been flowing into the Pacific for two years.

         At first TEPCO had only assigned two men to inspect over one thousand tanks for leaks. They were not even wearing dosimeters to monitor their radiation exposure. They did find some leaks and measured some increased radiation levels. Then it was found that the radiation meters that they were using were not able to measure above a certain level of radiation. TEPCO put more men on the monitoring with better Geiger counters and found a serious increase in radiation in the past few days on the order of eighteen times the previous averages for past months. This level can kill in hours. Some nuclear chemists day that it is not possible that the spike in radioactivity is from leaking tanks. They speculate that there may be active fission processes going on with the melted cores underground.

        In the past few days, some nuclear experts have been saying that the spent fuel pool in the weaken Unit Four reactor building at Fukushima may very well be the most dangerous situation that the human race has ever faced. Another earthquake could bring down the building and expose the fuel rods to open air which would cause them to burst into flames and burn. This would release massive amounts of radiation into the atmosphere that would make its way around the whole world. TEPCO has decided that they are going to try to remove the rods manually because the automatic machinery has been destroyed. However, the radiation levels are high and very dangerous. If they disturb the rods as they try to remove them, they may trigger the lost of cooling water and the burning of the rods. Sort of a damned if you do and damned if you don’t situation.

        The Japanese government, after dithering around for two years has, finally decided that TEPCO is not competent to clean up the Fukushima mess. They promise to get more involved and have asked for external help from other countries that have nuclear technology. They do, however, claim that it is perfectly safe to hold the Olympics in Tokyo in spite of numerous reports of black dust and mold in Tokyo that tests positive for radioactivity. They are also shutting down one of the two reactors that they had restarted and are talking about shutting down the other one. But Prime Minister Abe is still running around the world trying to sell less developed nations Japanese nuclear reactors.

        There has been a viral picture circulating for several days on the Internet that purports to be a photograph of the Fukushima plant and the nearby ocean boiling. There is something in the air over the ocean but it could be anything from smoke to steam to mist. It is hard to tell and there has been no corroboration in the international media. But the International media and the Internet are certainly boiling over Fukushima. It is a truly international disaster and it is certainly not helping the floundering global nuclear industry.

Ocean boiling at Fukushima??