Canada, Westinghouse and A Fusion Follow-Up

Westinghouse previews a forum taking place today in Toronto called The Future of Nuclear. Westinghouse has no reactors in Canada and isn’t trying to sell any in its press release, which does include some interesting tidbits:

"With 55 per cent of Ontario's energy being generated by nuclear, and given the province's commitment to clean-air sources of energy, nuclear cannot be ignored as a vital part of Ontario's energy mix," says Ron Lewis, vice president, Nuclear Power Plant Business and Project Development, Westinghouse Electric Company.

That 55 percent figure is new  - it’s a little higher than I’ve seen before - and I’m not enough up on Canadian energy markets to know how much of that is exported to Ontario’s neighbors. That said, Ontario is the only province to aggressively pursue nuclear energy, with five facilities housing 20 reactors. Quebec and New Brunswick have 2 and 1 reactors respectively, with Quebec’s retired. When we looked at Canadian nuclear energy previously, it seemed the other provinces were pretty dim on nuclear energy and not particularly well informed as to its benefits.

All Canadian reactors are home grown CANDUs.The DU stands for Deuterium Uranium and hints at the use of deuterium (heavy water, actually, or deuterium oxide) to moderate the nuclear reaction, a unique feature of this design. I poked around the Candu web site and found the company is moving right along:

One of the unique features of CANDU reactor design is its ability to use alternative fuels such as recovered uranium (RU) from the reprocessing of used light water reactor fuel, low-enriched uranium (LEU) and plutonium (Pu) mixed oxide, thorium and actinides, in addition to the conventional natural uranium. Candu is currently working with China to further develop thorium as an alternative fuel source.

So, for this forum, Westinghouse is more focused on touting the benefits of nuclear energy, priming the pump for the siting of new reactors and perhaps – just maybe – one or more of those will be AP1000s. We’ll see. In the meantime:

"Canada has spent more than a generation developing nuclear energy, dating back to the 1950s right here in Ontario. The Province has an industrial base that depends on further build-out. On balance, nuclear is the best choice for jobs and the environment. The alternative is a move to high-cost electricity generation and an increase in greenhouse gas emissions, which are unavoidable if nuclear is not a part of Ontario's future energy mix," Lewis says.

Indeed.
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Since we had a little fun with fusion and the National ignition Facility’s project related to it last week, it’s only fair to pass along this news from the BBC:

The BBC understands that during an experiment in late September, the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel - the first time this had been achieved at any fusion facility in the world.

The story goes on to make the point that the goal is to make a lot more energy than is used, but out of negative numbers? Very good news for the fusion profusion crowd.

EDITOR'S NOTE: For a deeper dive on what's happening in Canada, we suggest Canadian Energy Issues, written by the tireless Stephen Aplin.

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Nuclear Fusion and Imploding Porcupines

When the sun makes energy through nuclear fusion, it has the benefit of not having to pay real cash for the energy expended to make more energy. Here on Earth, the effort to make fusion energy affordable and practical has been a lot tougher, though the payout is potentially so great – and the benefits manifest - that much effort has gone into it.

Every now and then we get a peek into the fusion world, which is almost always almost ready to almost produce a plausible reactor. And this will happen – I’m sure of it – someday.

To create fusion reactions, the NIF [National Ignition Facility] scientists fire lasers into a hohlraum, or a hollow cylinder made of gold. The laser pulses, lasting billionths of a second, hit a tiny sphere that is full of deuterium (hydrogen with an extra neutron) and tritium (hydrogen with two extra neutrons).

As the laser beams hit the hohlraum, the gold emits X-rays that are so powerful they vaporize the metal surface of the sphere. That vaporization puts immense pressure on the deuterium and tritium, and induces fusion, smashing the hydrogen atoms into helium, plus one neutron.

This is very basically what the sun does, minus the hohlraum and gold, but featuring hydrogen and helium. But this part isn’t where the economics begin to work. This is:

The problem is that even tiny imperfections in the surface of the sphere will mean the pressure on the deuterium and tritium isn't perfectly even all the way around. Result? "It implodes like a porcupine," Edwards told LiveScience. This uneven "reverse explosion" results in energy waste so that more energy is put into the system than comes out of it.

Well, that’s an unfortunate metaphor. Do porcupines implode? We hope the National Ignition Facility’s John Edwards didn’t find a way to do that in a previous job.

This is the kind of sentence we’re used to in fusion stories:

Right now, the amount of energy coming out of the NIF setup is about 80 percent of what is put in.

That’s like the sun, too, though the sun doesn’t need to worry about break-even. Jesse Emspak’s story goes further to express the perpetual doubt about fusion, but, like so many others, including myself, he hopes for the best:

Still, Edwards is optimistic. "Our goal is to demonstrate that ignition is feasible," he said. "We've made a huge amount of progress, and we're close to achieving what our calculations say should be happening in a regime slightly less demanding than full-up ignition implosions."

“Close to achieving.” Let’s look forward to the day when that phrase and fusion are not logically linked. The whole story’s worth a read.

Here’s the Web site for NIF – it’s part of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. On its homepage, it points out that Star Trek: Into Darkness was filmed there, so there’s that. Here’s its page on fusion if you’d like to learn more.

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Protesting Nuclear Fusion On the Basis of Nothing

We sometimes bring up nuclear fusion as an object of fun, because activists say that fusion will scale successfully and become commercially viable in 10 years or so – and have been saying so for at least  20 years. That’s one joke. Another one is that it takes a city to power a town with fusion energy because it requires a lot of electricity to produce a little energy.

None of this is (completely) fair, of course, and there are several projects exploring the use of fusion. The most significant of these is the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER).

ITER is a large-scale scientific experiment that aims to demonstrate that it is possible to produce commercial energy from fusion.

This undertaking requires a full-scale reactor – in fact, a full-scale facility. ITER is located in France and financed by the European Union, China, Russia, South Korea, Japan, India and the United States – the big boys and girls of the nuclear world. (The EU is shouldering about 50 percent of the 13 billion euro project.)

Naturally enough, there are protests:

[M]any feel that the money and research would be better spent on renewable sources and addressing immediate problems instead.

The protester class in France is unusually full of know-nothings.

[M]any in France oppose the EU’s enormous financial investment in the project, in addition to the unknown environmental risks that it could pose. For instance, Sortir du Nucléaire [roughly, Get Out of Nuclear] opposes the project because the expensive, experimental reactor may never actually be able to produce energy commercially, there are unknown risks associated with fusion reactors, which still produce radioactive waste.

I’m surprised if anyone in this crowd really cares about the commercial prospects of the facility. These folks do make you wonder how France got to a Fifth Republic. It all feels knee-jerk – you say nuclear, we say “unknown risk.”

“While entertaining the myth of an ever-abundant energy source in a few decades, ITER is diverting attention from real solutions to energy problems like renewable resources and energy conservation,” said Charlotte Mijeon, of Sortir du Nucléaire.

No, ITER isn’t diverting anything – it has nothing whatever to do with renewable resources. Mijeon may mean that ITER is diverting money better spent on other things, but anyone can say that about anything that costs money. Europe seems pretty enthusiastic about renewable energy sources and ITER doesn’t seem to be impeding their uptake.

What struck me about these protests and how they differ from their American counterparts is that the French are standing against the potential for real scientific progress. Everything that leads to ITER’s goal is potentially productive in itself – a benefit of a large experiment – and if ITER does fulfill its goals, forget about it. The implications are immense. There’s a reason all these countries are partners.

And besides, even some of the fusion people can be seen as allies to the misbegotten.

The real effects, however, will be long-term solutions to energy shortages, he [Aris Apollonatos of Fusion for Energy]said. ITER participants are hoping that the research will be invaluable for the future when carbon and petroleum become scarce. Renewable energy sources like wind and water may not be enough, but nuclear energy as it is currently creates too much pollution and risk. With fusion, that could change. “Fusion, and by consequence ITER, is part of the long-term sustainable energy mix given the fact that it does not emit any carbon dioxide,” Apollonatos said.

Very much a “Can’t we all be friends?” moment that might seem a little cagey.

To be honest, I’m not sure how diligently to argue for fusion energy, the perpetual fifth wheel on the energy cart. But fair is fair – many bright minds have turned their luminosity onto fusion and some of the brightest are at ITER. I can see how this is how money should be spent and resources should be deployed – on projects that have the most potential to do the most good for the most people.

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Fusion-Fission Fandango in Texas

It’s like the doublemint twins at the University of Texas at Austin.

The researchers — Mike Kotschenreuther, Prashant Valanju and Swadesh Mahajan of the College of Natural Sciences — have patented the concept for a novel fusion-fission hybrid nuclear reactor that would use nuclear fusion and fission together to incinerate nuclear waste. Fusion produces energy by fusing atomic nuclei, and fission produces energy by splitting atomic nuclei.

How does it work?

The researchers’ patent covers a tokamak device, which uses magnetic fields to produce fusion reactions. The patented tokamak is surrounded by an area that would house a nuclear waste fuel source and waste by-products of the nuclear fuel cycle. The device is driven by a transformational technology called the Super X Divertor.

The Super X Divertor is a crucial technology that has the capacity to safely divert the enormous amounts of heat out of the reactor core to keep the reactor producing energy.

I guess this means – well, I’m not sure what it means. It sounds as though the fuel rods would need to find their way to the tokamak via the Super X Divertor or perhaps the system would use something other than a fuel rod. Or I’m all wet. Let’s look for more detail.

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This illustration (also above – click for larger) suggests a two part process – a fission/fission-fusion fandango - with light water reactors operating as they normally do, and the used fuel then further processed in the fission-fusion reactor.

This second reactor can also produce energy and presumably can be rated much as fission reactors are now done, so the result will be more electricity and perhaps a good deal of process heat, which theoretically has impressive industrial applications. Perhaps the use of the Super X Divertor, which diverts the heat so as to avoid it melting the containment, gives that use added plausibility.

This article provides a few more details. I admit I’m still lost on some elements of it; for example, what would seed the fusion reaction? ITER is using deuterium (heavy water) and tritium – but I’m not sure about this project. (The reason to care is to understand better the cost implications). But there are a lot of good details here.

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Anyway, the professors have gotten some attention for their work:

Several groups are considering implementing the Super X Divertor on their machines, including the MAST tokamak in the United Kingdom, and the DIIID (General Atomics) and NSTX (Princeton University) in the U.S. Next steps will include performing extended simulations, transforming the concept into an engineering project, and seeking funding for building a prototype.

Which keeps it firmly in the university/lab sphere, for now. In describing fusion projects, I sometimes think of them as  “Today’s Technology Tomorrow,” because fusion always seems two years away from a major breakthrough. It always has, as long as I’ve followed the subject.

But one can’t help but be impressed by the amounts of ingenuity and enthusiasm being poured into fusion projects. Maybe that’s  motivated by a potentially enormous payoff for the team who can make a project practical – that is, scalable and affordable – but maybe also, even largely, for love of ingenuity and enthusiasm. Those qualities have carried the world a long ways. 

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Fun Fusion For Friday

Our fusion fan friends will need to let us know how consequential this is:

UT [University of Tennessee] researchers have successfully developed a key technology in developing an experimental reactor that can demonstrate the feasibility of fusion energy for the power grid. Nuclear fusion promises to supply more energy than the nuclear fission used today but with far fewer risks.

It’s not (just) that I’m automatically dubious about fusion projects – if it’s fusion it’s just around the corner - but this one seems very early:

UT researchers completed a critical step this week for the project by successfully testing their technology this week that will insulate and stabilize the central solenoid—the reactor's backbone.

That feels like step two of a process with many, many steps. Read the rest of the story and decide – break out the champagne or let it get – a little more – aged?

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China Daily offers a little fusion doings:

Russian academic Evgeny Velikhov was in Hefei, East China's Anhui province, to attend the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) Training Forum & Second Workshop on Magnetic Fusion Energy (MFE) Development Strategy, which was held on May 30- June 1 at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC).

But it appears the reporter didn’t have much to report from this meeting.

Velikhov's visit to USTC was significant in promoting the development of Chinese nuclear fusion and strengthening extensive cooperation and thorough exchanges between China and Russia.

I guess that’s something. Velikhov is a founder of ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which is based in France and also involved with the Tennessee work. The world of fusion is fairly tightly knit.

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Here’s the pitch:

Nuclear fusion is a seemingly ideal energy source: carbon-free, fuel derived largely from seawater, no risk of runaway reactors and minimal waste issues.

A lot of good, dedicated people all over the world want to make it work. The problem has always been the amount of energy necessary to achieve fusion – the sun, after all, doesn’t care much about economics – and the joke has always been that it takes a town to power a light bulb.

Even if you can make fusion work – that is, become a net generator of electricity - doing so is only the beginning. You have to scale it up to production level, you have to get reactor designs licensed and you have to generate a model to market it and fund facilities. Those are all time (and money) consuming activities. But – for now – let’s hope - the path to a working fusion reactor may be a little shorter.

From ITER: Work on the Seismic Isolation Pit is finished: the basemat, retaining walls, and seismic plinths and pads are in place. See here for more.

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