This is probably the last of a series of diaries I have written on the subject of the Indian Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR).
In Part 1, I noted that LMFBR are, unlike most commercial nuclear reactors, potentially dual use - they can be used to make weapons as well as energy. In Part 2, I showed that the purposes to which such a reactor is used is a choice by the user, and that the same reactor can be made an instrument of nuclear disarmament and further than one can make nuclear weapons without any kind of reactor. In Part 3, I indulged in making fun of the bourgeois dangerous fossil fuel greenwasher Amory Lovins. Then I pointed out the size of the scaling factor, the ratio of the required energy to the existing energy infrastructure all climate change gas free forms of energy would need to phase out dangerous fossil fuels, a ratio which is smallest for nuclear even though Lovins, dangerous fossil fuels apologist, keeps chanting that "nuclear is dead!" In Part 4 - this will be relevant to this last installment - I discussed how my friend Rod Adams showed me that the first US commercial nuclear reactor ran as a breeder reactor during its last fuel cycle, and I talked about our (small) national reserves of uranium-233...
...I discussed also something called "doubling time" which is the amount of time it takes for a breeder reactor to double the fuel with which it was originally charged. In Part 5, I discussed that India's small scale pilot LMFBR produced enough fuel to provide the annual energy needs (for all purposes) of 3/4 of a million Indians in one ton of fuel, and touched on the issues of poverty and wealth involved stripped of western bourgeois perception about how Indians don't deserve what we have. In part 6, I discussed some reasons why the Indian LMFBR may avoid some technical problems that plagued other LMFBR around the world and then took some shots at anti-nukes and the insanity of their rote dogma, closed minds, poor educations, and capacity for self-delusion and wishful thinking. (Predictably, it went over their tiny, bigoted, little heads - something that showed up on another website where I sometimes write.)
I want to touch in this probable last member of this series, on the issue of dual use (weapons vs. energy), breeding and most importantly, time as connected with the Indian LMFBR program.
As before, the primary guiding paper of this diary will be a paper by Jagannathan et al, Energy Conversion and Management 49 (2008) 2032–2046, for which the abstract is here.
The discussion will also focus on some other papers of Jagannathan's that will be referenced below, describing India's plans to repeat the successful breeder reactor experiment carried out at the first US commercial reactor, Shippingport, as described to me, as I indicated above, by Rod Adams.
Nuclear energy has shown itself in the last 50 years to be the fastest approach to replacing dangerous fossil fuels by far. It is the only new form of energy invented in the last century that has been scaled to a ten exajoule scale. (It's now pushing 30 exajoules out of the 500 exajoules consumed by humanity). Despite all kinds of hype and misinformation, this is 10 times as much energy as is produced by wind, solar, and geothermal combined.
If you can compare numbers - this excludes many anti-nukes - this is irrefutable, but trust me, wiggly anti-nukes will try to do so nonetheless. They have, apparently, no self respect.
I am, I also want to note, inspired to write this diary, because of a diary written by Kossack David Walters entitled, Toward a Thorium Economy: the Future of Nuclear Energy Part II: the technology. I commented in that diary, remarking that I do not necessarily favor a pure Thorium economy, although I think it wise and important that we incorporate thorium into future fuel cycles.
The only fuel cycles now operating on earth right now are the "once through" cycle which is linked to the concept of "waste," and in some countries, the single recycle (PUREX) based fuel cycle which recovers "first pass" plutonium and fissions part of it to obtain energy. Several years ago though, I gave an overview of advanced fuel cycles here, The Status of Advanced Nuclear Fuel Cycles referring to a report put forth by the OECD, "Advanced Nuclear Fuel Cycles and Radioactive Waste Management" (NEA No. 5990, OECD 2006).
If you refer to my diary note that none of the schemes actually refer to thorium, but that schemes 3a and 3b both call for fast reactors.
(Actually all of the schemes have something to recommend them, but my choice would be move first on DUPIC - by building CANDU reactors with our Canadian neighbors and, as a first pass, a traditional MOX capability or better yet, a MOX/Thorium capability, the latter not listed in the OECD document.)
I talked earlier about how the use of a LMFBR, whether to use it for peace or for weapons, is a choice. India couldn't care less about how much we trust them to make this moral choice. Even if we describe ourselves as a moral force in the world, they are under no obligation to be less than impressed with our description of ourselves. They are building the LMFBR reactor whether we like it or not. As noted in earlier members of this series they have successfully fabricated major components. It is smug and self serving of us, however - as the owners of the world's largest nuclear weapons stockpile - to assume that they will make the wrong choice, just because they did so in the past, exactly as we did for part of our exploitation of nuclear technology.
The Jagannathan paper referenced above gives a very clear description of the technical aspects of making the right choice with this technology. Here is an excerpt of the description of using Thorium - of which India has a great deal and could, in theory, make itself completely independent of energy imports and dangerous fossil fuel use:
Fast reactors adopt a variety of fuel and coolant materials [1–3]. In India we consider oxide fuel and sodium coolant for the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor which is under construction [4].We have chosen the same materials for the conceptual design proposed here.
At present, there are no internal fertile blankets or exclusive fissile breeding zones in power reactors operating in the world. Loading of seedless thoria rods as inner blanket region was proposed by us in the thorium breeder reactor concept ATBR [5,6]. In this concept, it was shown that the breeding of 233U in internal blanket zones could be utilized for achieving a fuel cycle duration of nearly two years (720 days) for a reactor power level of 600 MWe or 1875 MWt with no refueling and no major external control maneuvers. Applying the design principles of ATBR in evolving the conceptual fast thorium breeder reactor (FTBR) design was suggested earlier [7].
Table 1 gives description of the design of the FTBR core and the fuel types thereof. The reactor power is 2500 MWth. With 40% efficiency the electric power would be 1000 MWe. A fuel cycle length of 720 days with a three batch fueling scheme is considered. The gross energy in one fuel cycle is 1,800,000 MWD. The mean design discharge burnup is 100,000 MWD/T...
I will return to the ATBR design below. It's a scheme based on the successful Shippingport Experiment of which Rod Adams made me aware.
What's relevant here is that the quantity of fuel used here is about 18 tons and that the energy produced is about 1.8 million Megawatt days. This translates to about 0.155 exajoules of energy from this one reactor. This is the equivalent of 83% all of the energy produced by all of Denmark's windmills over an 8.5 year period, as I showed in a diary I called More Fun With Danish Energy Agency Data: A Diary About Me. Note that the reactor does this in just about 2 years, whereas the Danish windmills to 4 times as long to produce that much energy, and a hell of a lot more material than 1.8 tons plus the mass of the reactor.
(None of this will prevent members of the anti-nuke religion from claiming that wind is faster to scale than nuclear; even when I produce actual numbers covering the last decade.)
About half of the fuel is thorium and half is MOX, a mixture of depleted uranium and plutonium. (There are also some rods with completely depleted uranium.) When discharged the thorium rods contain about 40 of U-233 grams per kg of original thorium. This works out to about 36 kg of U-233. (Some plutonium is consumed in this process and other plutonium is created, but the plutonium charge is now - partially at least - less suitable - if suitable at all - for weapons use than any plutonium that went in, weapons grade or otherwise.)
The operative thing is that they are choosing to plan to load thorium into the reactor. This would not be the idea were the reactor only planned as a weapons reactor. As long as thorium is in the core, the reactor is a net plutonium consumer.
Thirty six kilos of U-233 is not all that much by the way. As I pointed out in the earlier part of this diary, the Shippingport reactor was loaded with about 500 kg to become a light water breeder. But this reactor has a very small fuel loading and a very high burn-up. It produces huge amounts of energy for very small mass, even when compared to other nuclear reactors.
In another paper in the literature, also out of India, some idea of the quantity of U-233 required to fuel a single reactor is given using an alternative breeding approach, the CANDU type reactor which is also known (especially in India) as the PHWR, for Pressurized Heavy Water reactor. This type of reactor can operate as a pure breeder reactor. The paper in question is "Utilization of Thorium in Reactors" and the abstract is here. (The ref is Journal of Nuclear Materials 383 (2008) 119–121.) In this paper they propose to load a 300 MW Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (Now under construction) with about 0.5 MT of U-233, and 1 MT of mixed Plutonium/Thorium fuels. Fuel fabrication is now underway is expected to be complete within the next two years.
Some details of this reactors design are discussed in Nuclear Engineering and Design 236 (2006) 758–769.
Some work needs to be done on the fuel recycling technology, the so called "Thorex" process which, in Indian hands, looks to be more solvent extraction systems similar to PUREX. (I think better approaches are available.) Some alternatives are discussed in Separation and Purification Technology 35 (2004) 85–103 "Amides and diamides as promising extractants in the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle: an overview."
I may discuss Thorex chemistry in a future diary or I may not. We'll see.
The ATBR system is designed to completely eliminate plutonium from the cycle ultimately but it is interesting that the Indians will be isolating relatively pure U-233. One interesting feature of this fuel is that the Indians give an idea of the relative quantities of U-236 they expect through the first several cycles. This isotope has certain non-proliferation value. Through each cycle inventories of this isotope, which does not actually occur naturally on earth (it is an extinct member of the thorium series) is increased from trace amounts
I'm running short on time, but I would like to add some remarks about the ATBR, the Advanced Thorium Breeder Reactor, to which I referred above. This reactor is a plutonium burner, designed to consume plutonium and make U-233 in its place.
This speaks to India's ability to back out of nuclear weapons if they make the wrong choice of how to utilize their LMFBR as discussed above.
Details of this reactor are described in Energy Conversion and Management 47 (2006) 2781–2793.
Table 3 gives the seed input and output contents for the equilibrium core. It is seen that the only 40% of the Pu feed is consumed (0.88 T out of 2.2 T). Since thoria rods achieve about 50 GWD/T burnup, nearly 640 kg of the 12.78 T of thorium loading (at the rate of 5 kg/T) in the unseeded thoria rods is used for energy production in its four fuel cycle operation. About 502 kg of uranium is available from the discharged thorium with 87% fissile. This shows that 886 kg of reactor grade Pu is utilized for converting 1142 kg of thorium to uranium of which 640 kg is used to produce 50% share of power in the same reactor. Thus the ATBR can be used for Pu incineration and it produces the intrinsically proliferation resistant 233U for sustenance of future reactor programme. Since 50% of the core loading is always unseeded thorium, the load on reprocessing and refabrication of back end fuel will be proportionately less.
The author here is again Jagganathan. Here's the abstract: Towards an intrinsically safe and economic thorium breeder reactor.
What is interesting is that the residual U-233 (of which the US has only a few tons) can be used, as Rod Adams helped me to show in the earlier member of this series, to turn almost all of the world's existing nuclear infrastructure into breeders, more or less, albeit marginal breeders.
It is very clear that India is well on its way to building a considerable inventory of U-233.
I ain't got a problem with that. As I pointed out earlier in this series, the only constraint on scaling nuclear energy by a factor of 10 to wipe out dangerous fossil fuels is having readily available fissile nuclei and the more U-233 that is available anywhere on earth, the easier it will be to accomplish this at something like the time scale required.
Let me qualify that. It's too late now to talk about what's "required." The best we can hope for is "as fast as possible to minimize the inevitable damage.
Beyond that, I oppose all nuclear weapons, and I do have a problem with the Indian (and American) nuclear weapons programs, but it is clear to me that India has made a huge technological advance on finding a way to make weapons disarmament technically feasible. That's more than I can say for some other countries in the world.
The Light of Day: India's Fast Breeder Nuclear Reactor: Some Technical Comments. (Pt 1)
The Light of Day: India's Fast Breeder Nuclear Reactor: Some Technical Comments. (Pt 2)
The Light of Day: India's Fast Breeder Nuclear Reactor: Some Technical Comments. (Pt 3)
The Light of Day: India's Fast Breeder Nuclear Reactor: Some Technical Comments. (Pt 4)
The Light of Day: India's Fast Breeder Nuclear Reactor: Some Technical Comments. (Pt 5)
The Light of Day: India's Fast Breeder Nuclear Reactor: Some Technical Comments. (Pt. 6)