2023 December

Notes • Quotation Sources • Supporting Calculation

The first samples of this number were distributed to the public at LosCon, at the end of November 2023. Based on comments from recipients of preliminary versions, revisions were made until a final version was reached in April of 2024.

The format of this number, in which most of the space is occupied by the one long piece, The Atom in the World Energy Picture, is not intended to be typical. Hopefully future numbers will include more contributions from different hands, most of which can be expected to be brief.

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Notes

Page 3 — At least one person…

For Frédéric Joliot–Curie’s actions immediately following the first measurement of neutron multiplication, see The Atomic Complex by Bertrand Goldschmidt, published (in English translation) by the American Nuclear Society in 1980. Goldschmidt, much like Glenn Seaborg, was a scientist first — he was in the room with Halban and Kowarski that day in 1939 — who participated in the Manhattan Project on behalf of Free France, and later came to serve as a senior administrator.

Page 7 — The nuclear fuel that could be scavenged from ash heaps…

Oak Ridge National Laboratory was set on to the task of evaluating whether the leaching of uranium and thorium from coal waste was a plausible source of material for clandestine nuclear weapons production. This work was summarized in ORNL Review magazine in 1993. Pilot projects have been reported, but as yet, uranium is not being produced from coal ash on a commercial basis.

One conclusion was that a coal–fired kilowatt–hour, as a rule, involves the release of a great deal more radioactive material into the environment than the nuclear kWh. (See also JP McBride et al, Radiological Impact of Airborne Effluents of Coal and Nuclear Plants, Science, 8 December 1978.) This exposes the absurdity of objecting to nuclear power as a source of radioactive pollution, while continuing to burn coal, as Germany has.

Page 9 — So long as an evil seems necessary…

We will have more to say concerning the triumph of the masters of steam engines over the masters of slaves in the American Civil War in a future number. For the present, we may refer to the famous “Am I Not A Man And A Brother?” tokens, which circulated in Britain at the end of the 18th century, among the great mass of copper Conder tokens which made up for the lack of official small change. Such tokens were produced primarily in Birmingham, and the most notable producer was the firm of Boulton and Watt — yes, that Watt. Arguably the first steam–powered manufacturing establishment in the world, Boulton and Watt achieved such technical perfection with tokens that they were ultimately chosen to supply the regal copper coinage of 1797, which rapidly drove the Conders out of circulation.

Page 12 — Meanwhile in Germany…

On the effectiveness of the Energiewende, see for example Is Germany cleaner than France today?, which uses publicly–available information and internationally–accepted values for the carbon intensity of different electricity sources to compare the electricity supplies of the two countries. The difference is rarely less than ten–to–one in favor of France.

For the telling absurdity of demolishing a wind installation to expand the lignite pits which feed the Garzweiler power station, see this news story. The town of Lützerath is one among many. The forest of Hambach is a particularly ignoble instance of ecological vandalism in the name of the environmentalism which rejects fission and accepts coal.

Page 13 — The whole history of central–station power…

Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street Station, which entered service in September of 1882, initially served only lighting loads, but this was not typical. There was already a desire for transmission of power from central stations to operate machinery, if only to avoid the cost and complications of maintaining boilers. Beginning in 1871, power from steam central stations was distributed hydraulically in London, and operations ended only in 1977. (The pipes are now used for communications cables.) Early on at Niagara, it was proposed to distribute power by compressed air, as was being done on a modest scale in Paris.

For Martin Couney, the opposition he faced in a period when the death of premature babies was often called a wholesome weeding–out of the unfit, and the Coney Island sideshow, see this book review.

Page 16 — Having asked the question for the world as a whole…

To properly consider the problem of a transition to nuclear energy would require comprehensive information on topics such as the effect of energy costs on overall economic conditions, and of overall economic conditions on energy demand ; extent of uranium resources, and the variation of cost of production from those resources with annual output ; cost of power from converters and breeders, at different uranium prices ; cost of capital equipment for electrifying various industries ; and the possible competition for capital and manpower between power–system construction and electrification of end uses. In fact, only scant information is available on most of these topics, and its reliability is questionable, despite the best efforts of statisticians, economists, and engineers among others. Some of it may not even be possible to obtain. Therefore, if we are to answer a question, we must ask a simpler one.

Page 18 — The important thing is…

The breeder reactor has proven a conundrum for economists. Partly this is because of the strong influence of technical details such as the cost of fuel refabrication, or the loss of fissile material in reprocessing. It is also difficult to evaluate the capital cost of breeders, when few have been built. Even with two recent nuclear power projects so similar as Hinkley Point C and Barakah, both using pressurized–water reactors (the most common type) of about 1500 MW electrical output each, the spread in cost per installed kilowatt of capacity is more than a factor of five. A survey of the literature, however, reveals a total lack of consensus on methods. The price of plutonium, for instance, has variously been set based on an equivalent quantity of enriched uranium, which depends on the design of the reactor it is to be used in, as well as on the costs of uranium and enrichment ; at the full cost of recovering it from discharged fuel ; or even at zero, where reprocessing is considered a vital part of waste–management, and its cost is paid by the operator of the reactor discharging the fuel. Consequently, it is possible to find a study supporting pretty much any position.

It does not help that breeders of different designs produce different average numbers of new fissile atoms per fissile atom consumed (up to a maximum of about 2·1, which would be very difficult to obtain in practice), different quantities of net fissile material per unit of energy output, and different annual quantities of net fissile material per tonne of fissile investment in the core. The concept of the support ratio can help greatly in disentangling the confusion. Converters of different designs, operated in a closed fuel cycle, require different amounts of make–up fissile material per unit of output. If we require a certain amount of energy from the overall nuclear installation, and the deficit on the converter side is to be balanced by the surplus on the breeder side, then we see two main possibilities. With breeders which produce only a modest fissile surplus per unit of energy (as is typical of designs using ceramic fuel, such as the French Superphénix), and converters with a large make–up requirement, such as the PWR, it would take more than 1 W of breeder capacity to feed each watt of converter capacity. In this case, few converters will probably be built after the breeders begin to be built on a large scale, and the surplus fissile from the breeders will mostly be dedicated to starting up further breeders. For breeders which produce more fissile, typical of metal–fuel designs such as EBR–II and its derivatives, and converters which require less, such as CANDU, each watt of breeder capacity can support considerably more than 1 W of converter capacity. This leads to a mixed system of breeders and converters.

Page 22 — The Pickering accident of 1983…

On 1 August 1983, while operating under full load, Reactor 2 at Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, near Toronto, Ontario, suffered the rupture of a pressure tube. A sudden failure of the primary pressure boundary is considered perhaps the most severe kind of accident that could occur to a power reactor — in a pressure–vessel water reactor such as PWR, it would be absolutely catastrophic, and must be prevented at all costs. Operators brought the stricken reactor to a safe, depressurized condition without needing to invoke the emergency systems, and without any radiation exposures to personnel or radioactive releases to the environment beyond the very small ones of ordinary operation. The reactor was subsequently repaired and returned to service, although this required more than two years, because a detailed examination found that further failures were likely. To prevent this, all the pressure tubes of Pickering reactors 1 and 2 were replaced with an improved design, fabricated from a different zirconium alloy, already adopted for Pickering 3 and subsequent CANDU reactors.

Page 22 — Not only winter heat, but also summer cooling…

Extracting low–temperature heat from the bottom of the thermodynamic cycle at a power station, where the conversion efficiency is least, is a well–established way of economizing on fuel. A particular advantage is that it makes available to domestic users heat from fuels such as lignite or heavy oil, which are cheap but require complex and expensive equipment. Nuclear power represents an extreme case of this, and the use of fission for combined–heat–and–power operation goes back at least to the R3 Ågesta experimental station near Stockholm, Sweden, which operated 1964—74. (The very first instance of nuclear space heating appears to have occurred in the autumn of 1951, at Harwell in England. See Walker and Grout, Utilization of Waste Heat from the British Experimental Pile, Nucleonics, 1952 March.) At Beznau in Switzerland, as a typical case, approximately eight kilowatt–hours of heat are supplied for each kWh of electric production lost. By pumping hot water, at above atmospheric pressure, transmission distances of tens of kilometers become practicable. For the advantages of this system over steam, see Fred L Moesel, Piping Problems Simplified with High Temperature Hot Water Distribution, Architectural Record, 1953 February.

US Patent 1,781,541, granted 11 November 1930 to Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, and titled simply Refrigeration, describes the absorption chiller, marketed by the Servel Corporation as The Miracle of Ice from Heat. It is really an invention worthy of those two great lateral thinkers : a purely thermodynamic machine, composed of a sealed loop of tubing, actuated by heat, and with circulating fluids as its only moving parts. Absorption chillers today are typically either very large units, or very small ones, such as for travel trailer refrigerators. In the former case, they are typically fired by pipeline gas, sometimes by oil or even coal — whatever fuel is used by the building boiler. In the latter, they are often fitted for operation by bottle gas when the vehicle is parked, and electric heat when in motion.

For actuation by low–temperature heat, such as from a district heating system or solar collectors, ordinary water under sub–atmospheric pressure is used as the working fluid, with an admixture of lithium bromide, an extremely hygroscopic salt. This system has long been used for air–conditioning ; see George L Dahl, Air Conditioning Works with Design, Architectural Record, 1950 January. As a refrigerant, water is not only as cheap as could be desired, but non–toxic, and utterly incapable of forming an explosive mixture with air. The prototypical refrigerant for compression–type chillers, anhydrous ammonia, is both poisonous and explosive. The chlorinated fluorocarbons were invented to solve these problems, but have been banned as injurious to the ozone layer of the atmosphere, which protects us from the harmful rays of the Sun. HFCs, brought in as substitutes for CFCs, themselves must now go, because of their exceptional global warming potential. And what is the new favored working fluid for small installations, typical of retail stores, homes, and vehicles? Propane.

Page 24 — The Hanford site in eastern Washington…

Gatlinburg II : An Acceptable Future Nuclear Energy System (MW Firebaugh and MJ Ohanian, editors) is the summary Proceedings of a 1979 conference held by the Institute for Energy Analysis and the Oak Ridge Associated Universities, and consists (unusually, but usefully) primarily of the discussions rather than the papers presented. Section II of this volume, Siting, emphasizes the power park and fuel cycle center concepts. Work relating to the Hanford site specifically is reported by Ronald K Robinson.

Quotations

• President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace speech, made before the General Assembly of the United Nations, 8 December 1953, can be heard on the Web site of the Eisenhower Presidential Library.
• Sir Fred Hoyle is best known as the astrophysicist who worked out the mechanism of the production of carbon from helium in stars, which is of crucial importance for the Big Bang model of cosmology (although he himself long advocated the rival Steady–State model). With his nephew Geoff, he wrote (in addition to science–fiction novels) Commonsense in Nuclear Energy (1979) and, Energy or Extinction? The Case for Nuclear Energy (1981). Not content to indicate ways that anti–nuclear campaigns in Western countries served the interests of the USSR, Sir Fred explicitly accused Friends of the Earth of taking Soviet money. This resulted in a lawsuit and the destruction of many copies of the first printing of the book, although (with the benefit of post–1990 disclosures) it appears to have been quite true.
• Uranium Supply and Demand is the Proceedings of the 1978 Conference of the Uranium Institute, an industry group composed principally of companies involved in mining and refining. (I have cited conference Proceedings by the date of the conference, not the date of publication, which is sometimes the next or even a subsequent year.) Because of the highly specialized nature of the uranium business, end–users have a strong tendency to become involved in joint ventures for the production of the primary mineral. The subject matter of these annual conferences, held for some years, ranged from purely technical developments such as improved recovery of uranium from South African gold–mine tailings, to high–level examinations of the world energy scene, making the volumes of Proceedings (which changed titles several times) more rewarding to the general reader than might have been anticipated.
• Nuclear Energy and Alternatives (Osman Kemal Kadiroğlu, Arnold Perlmutter, and Linda Scott, editors) is the Proceedings of the International Scientific Forum on an Acceptable Nuclear Energy Future of the World, held 7—11 November 1977 under the auspices of the Center for Theoretical Studies at the University of Miami, and the chairmanship of Behram Kurşonoğlu. The Forum was dedicated to physicist and fission energy pioneer Eugene Wigner, on the occasion of his 75th birthday, which fell on the 17th of November, 1977.
• Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy is the collective title of the sixteen volumes of Proceedings of the (First) International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, held at Geneva, 8–20 August 1955, under the auspices of the United Nations. The publication of these Proceedings was hardly complete when the Second Geneva Conference was held in 1958. Both the Shevchik and Cisler papers quoted from are in volume 1, The World’s Requirements for Energy : the Role of Nuclear Energy, P/799 at page 141, and P/863 at page 436 respectively.
• The Evolution of CANDU Fuel Cycles and their Potential Contribution to World Peace by Jeremy Whitlock was presented at the 2000 International Nuclear Youth Congress, and is available from the International Nuclear Information Service repository maintained by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
• Nuclear Technologies in a Sustainable Energy System is a summary of the Proceedings of a workshop entitled A Perspective on Adaptive Nuclear Energy Evolutions : Towards a World of Neutron Abundance, held 25—27 May 1981 in Heidelburg, Germany, by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Substantial coverage is given to the potential use of particle accelerators and fusion machines as neutron sources for the production of fission fuel.
• Mr Mellor’s remarks were printed in ATOM, the magazine of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, number 311, 1982 September, under the heading Renewables face the challenge. This is separate from the regular column reporting Parliamentary debates on atomic energy and allied topics.
• The quotation from the pompously–titled Ground for Concern : Australia’s Uranium and Human Survival (Mary Elliott, editor) is itself quoted from a review by Hugh Hunt of the Finance Branch of the UKAEA, appearing in ATOM №265, 1978 November.

Supporting Calculation

To simplify calculation, a 100% annual load factor has been used. In other words, each gigawatt of reactor capacity is taken as generating 8760 gigawatt–hours of electricity a year. This is not possible in practice, and as a result, in any real system, the investment of fuel in reactor cores, per gigawatt–year of generation, will be greater. As a further simplification, only the annual fuel use of the converter reactors has been considered. Of course, a reactor cannot be started up without a full load of fuel, and if a fuel bundle stays in the reactor for three to five years, then a corresponding amount is required in the beginning. This can be offset to an extent, for instance, by part–loading with plain thorium or depleted uranium, and by fuel shuffling, but it is a complicating effect which must be accounted for in framing a realistic model. In this instance, it is partly represented by the uranium which is initially stockpiled.

The construction rates shown, peaking at about 150 GW/a, may appear astonishing, far beyond anything so far achieved. The vital point is, however, that for the kind of universal electrification now being advocated, something will have to be built at this kind of rate. The products of well–established heavy industries, which can be installed on a limited number of modestly–sized sites, and do not require the wholesale reconstruction of power networks, have a strong claim to consideration. Indeed, wind and solar would require installation of a much greater (perhaps 5×) nameplate capacity to generate the same number of annual units, only to require replacing at 12—20 year intervals. Electrochemical storage systems, often promoted in conjunction with wind and solar, are even worse. Not only would they have to be installed on a scale hitherto altogether unheard–of, but they can scarcely be expected to last more than 3—5 years in heavy service. It is difficult to see how anything can be achieved with such inadequate means.

Clearly, the weak point in this calculation is the support ratio of 2·5. If this cannot be justified, all else falls. A quick evaluation is not promising : with the CANDU performance assumed, an input of 608 kg ²³⁵U is offset by a production of 377 kg total plutonium. Even assuming this Pu to be 1:1 equivalent to ²³⁵U, a deficit of at least 231 kg must be made up, which is greater than the Pu surplus per GW_ea of S–PRISM in the high gain configuration. Adding in the residual ²³⁵U, about 46 kg, only brings us to a support ratio of unity. Even adding in the ²³⁶U, about 89 kg, which would correspond to ²⁴⁰Pu in a fully plutonium–fueled system, does not get us to anything like the 60 kg/GW_ea make–up fissile assumed.

The use of thorium as fertile material helps to economize on fissile material, because the ²³²Th nucleus has a capture cross–section for slow neutrons more than 2·5× that of ²³⁸U. (See figure, page 6.) This makes it a more effective competitor against neutron–absorbing fission products. As metal or oxide, thorium also changes its properties more slowly under neutron bombardment than uranium does, meaning that thorium fuel bundles can be left in the reactor longer, saving on reprocessing and refabrication costs. It has been suggested that a fast breeder could be built to accept fuel bundles fabricated from plain thorium in its outer blanket, which would be discharged at a certain fissile content, and then loaded directly into a converter. Set against this is a much smaller probability of fast–neutron fission compared to ²³⁸U. The fissile species produced, ²³³U, has a smaller fission cross–section than either ²³⁵U or ²³⁹Pu, so that more of it is required for criticality, but its tendency to absorb a slow neutron and not fission is particularly small, making for better overall economy.

A word about the treatment of ²⁴⁰Pu, produced by about a quarter of all slow–neutron absorptions in ²³⁹Pu : although this isotope is not fissile — that is, it does not fission with neutrons of all energies, and thus cannot sustain a chain reaction by itself — it has a much larger fast–neutron fission cross–section, and a lower neutron–energy threshold for fast fission, than nuclei such as ²³⁸U. For this reason, depending on reactor design, it is typically assigned an equivalent worth, gram for gram, in the fast reactor of about 0·3× ²³⁹Pu, taken as a reference fuel. In a plutonium–fueled converter, ²⁴⁰Pu absorbs a neutron, producing ²⁴¹Pu, which has an even higher fission cross–section and neutron yield than ²³⁹Pu. The resulting disappearance of an absorber and appearance of a fissile nucleus helps to maintain reactivity despite the consumption of ²³⁹Pu, and for this reason, plutonium with a high content of ²⁴⁰Pu has been termed phoenix fuel.