Photo: Jeramey JanneneAfter the Japanese military spent much of last week struggling to cool spent rods at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, resorting to spraying them with fire hoses in some cases, the situation seems to have calmed recently as power was restored to at least two of the plant’s reactors. Though just as Prime Minister Naoto Kan stated that he could see “a light at the end of the tunnel” of the disaster, workers were evacuated as plumes of smoke poured from two of the damaged reactors.
The folks over at IV Insights, the blog associated with Nathan Myhrvold‘s Intellectual Ventures, point out that it was the complete loss of power that disabled the cooling systems protecting the plant’s reactors. Which raises the question: Is there nuclear technology that could withstand such a catastrophe? Possibly. TerraPower, an Intellectual Ventures spin-off that also boasts Bill Gates as an investor, is working on a new reactor design called a traveling wave reactor that uses fast reactor technology, rather than the light water technology used at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
The two biggest advantages of the fast reactor design is that it requires no spent fuel pools and uses cooling systems that require no power to function, meaning the loss of power from the tsunami might not have crippled a fast reactor plant so severely. Read more here.
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YES! And it’s infuriating to those of of who are aware of it, but the IEC Fusor design championed by the late, great Dr. Robert Bussard would have just shut down. The polwell-based design designated the “WB” series is basically an improved version of the farnsworth-hirsch fusor that high school kids have been taking to science fairs for more than a decade now (and which has been around since the 50′s). Unlike those devies, the WB series can – no has – achieved stable plasma and sustained energy output on the order of milliseconds – something not yet achieved with takomak designs (IETR) or by even more exotic designs out of MIT or Sandia. (If you’re a plasma… a millisecond is as good as year.)
More importantly – these devices, while proven on deuterium-deuterium reactions that produce fast neutron radiation – would be capable of aneutronic fusion using proton-boron reactions. The alpha/beta radiation emitting particles that are left over from p-Br reactions have half-lives measure in hours. (Another plus, alpha and beta radiation can directly drive atomic batteries to produce electricity, eliminating the need to steam-driven turbines. This is how we’ve powered deep space probes for decades. Voyagers 1 and 2 are still ticking away out there in the void running off their atomic batteries.)
I need the good folks at Intellectual Ventures to get with the good folks at SpaceDev (yes, that spacedev, the guys helping to build Virgin Galactic’s fleet of sub-orbital joy rides). The entire body of product from Bussard’s research – including the WB-8 reactor model, which I believe produced 10 kev on it’s final run in November of 2010 – was transferred there when Energy Matter Conversion Corporation ran out of grant money. I think they’ll find that they’re $7mn away from WB-8 that can indefinately sustain a plasma, and $200m away from a commercial 100MW reactor plant.
Again, the advantages here are:
1. Proven reactor design – high school kids are building these
2. Proven lineage – research on IEC fusor technology has been going on since the 1930′s, so the theoretical framework is in place to support advancement
3. Direct conversion of nuclear energy to electrical energy
4. No cooling system required at all – heat is waste
5. Capable of running with no neutronic radiation, only short-lived alpha and beta radiation
6. Can use just about any fusable fuel all the way down to Boron, which is something we have plenty of.
7. Proliferation proof – cannot produce enriched weapons grade material
Thanks… I’ll get off my soapbox now.
“cool spent rods at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, resorting to spraying them with fire hoses in some cases, the situation seems to have calmed recently as power was restored to at least two of the plant’s four reactors”
Correction: Fukushima Daiichi has six reactors, not four. (Fukushima Dai-ni has four reactors.)
That picture is of the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant’s cooling tower. It was demolished in 2006.
There has been a “walk away safe” reactor design that has been around for decades. It is called CANDU. Of course it isn’t American and it doesn’t have Bill Gates and Microsoft as beneficiaries so it can’t be any good.
One of the most frightening aspects of this accident is the lack of passive stability as pointed out in the article. Stability is always a problem with high energy density fuels/sources. Natural gas explodes quite happily, oil burns or spills, coal mines explode, collapse, or burn for millenia, and hydroelectric dams has been known to fail spectacularly. Even laptops have a nasty habit of bursting into flames. But none of these render areas uninhabitable quite the way that a nuclear accident can. Fortunately, there are a number of designs with significantly improved passive stability, which other posters have pointed out. The problem with all these designs is that a cooling leak… say after a massive earthquake… would similarly lead to meltdown (although secondary and tertiary containment is vastly improved in more modern reactors). Although it may exist, I have seen no evidence that the TerraPower reactor would maintain core integrity with only passive solid thermal conductivity (not relying on a cooling fluid) And while there’s a lot to say in favor of their design (and I do mean a lot) I’m not comfortable concluding that it solves all the problems of nuclear power!
The TWR does however use liquid sodium as a coolant. If you think that leaking coolant is an issue in a light water reactor, try dealing with a substance that reacts violently on contact with air and water. The experimental fast breeder reactors built in Japan and Russia (which also use sodium coolant) have had major issues in this regard.
I also understand that it is possible to design a LWR that has sufficient passive cooling capacity to survive a failure of the active cooling system as long as it is shut down. This would seem to be a better option.
Maybe…?!
I worry about possible developments as outlined by Charlie Stross.
In short: The Fukushima death toll may be in the thousands, but not because of radiation. Eastern Japan is down 15 nuclear reactors, and is heading into summer — which in Japan is brutal. The elderly, of whom Japan has a very large number, are much more susceptible to hyperthermia. Without sufficient power to run in-home air conditioning, Japan is one heat wave away from a crisis that may well overshadow the death toll from the tsunami.
(of course, losing 15 coal power plants would have led to the same situation, so this is by no means a criticism of nuclear)