A nuclear power plant design invented at Argonne National Lab 24 years ago has none of the drawbacks of conventional nuclear plants
To control climate change, we must get rid of coal. To do that, we need a way to generate power for less than 3 cents per kWh, 24x7 that can be constructed anywhere. at a cost less than coal. We have such a technology. It was a billion dollar government research project...over 10 years at our top government national laboratory for energy (Argonne National Laboratory)...the largest research project in our history. The government had finally done something truly visionary and great. But the project was quashed by President Clinton in 1994 because Clinton thought it was unneeded! The scientists who worked on it were ordered to remain silent.
Our country's leading experts on global warming, such as Jim Hansen, who have been briefed on the IFR believe it appears to be one of the most important technologies we have to combat climate change and should be restarted immediately. The DOE tried to restart it under GNEP, but Congress has zeroed the funding for GNEP (not for reasons relating to the IFR which nobody in Congress knows about). Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
California Lt. Governor John Garamendi flew in the top IFR scientists and convened a meeting of experts in the field including one Nobel prize winner. Garamendi came away impressed and convinced that this is something we must do and is working to take the next steps in California. He could use some funding from the federal government.
by Steve Kirsch
August 10, 2008
Until now, I have been pretty agnostic about nuclear power. In fact, in May 2006, I wrote an op-ed for the San Jose Mercury News on why we shouldn't pursue nuclear power as a solution for global warming which infuriated the pro-nuclear people.
All that has now changed pretty dramatically. And some really smart friends of mine have read the stuff below, done their research, and their minds have changed as well. In fact, I don't know anyone who has met with the scientists who worked on the project who hasn't come away impressed.
I first heard about the IFR on August 4, 2008, in an email I received from James Hansen who is one of our nation's top climate experts. The email summarized his recent trip overseas to meet with foreign leaders.
The two most important things that Hansen tells foreign heads of state are (from page 5):
In other words, if we don't get rid of coal plants all over the planet, we're completely hosed. The sooner we do that, the better. Getting rid of every single coal plant is the single most important thing we can do to slow down global warming. If we cannot do that, then nothing else matters. We are basically re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. We will go down with the ship.
Displacing coal plants is hard because they are really cheap (since the utilities are not assessed of their pollution), they can be built anywhere where water is available (all thermal power plants, fossil or nuclear, have to be able to get rid of excess heat), and because they provide power 24x7. That's why every week to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego.
Getting rid of them is hard. Even with all the awareness about the harm of coal plants to the environment in the US, we have been unsuccessful in displacing them. Today, we still get 49% of our electric power from coal plants. If we can't displace coal plants in the US, how can we expect other countries, like China, to displace their coal plants?
Fundamentally, to get rid of coal plants and have any hope at all on controlling climate change, you must to come up with a power plant capable of 24x7 operation that can be built anywhere that is just as cheap (or cheaper) to build and operate as a coal plant. If you had that, then you'd have an economic incentive for people to make the environmentally responsible choice. There would be no reason to build coal plants anymore.
So if the US developed a way to generate electric power that had no CO2 emissions, was as cheap as coal, and provided 24x7 power, and could be built anywhere, and didn't require a lot of land to build, and was very safe, and didn't increase the risk from terrorism then that would be a great thing. It would mean that China would have an economic incentive to build these plants rather than coal plants.
We don't have that now. Concentrated solar plants can only be economically built in certain locations. Same for wind power. And both are intermittent sources (although if you have enough wind power over enough area in the right corridor, it can be pretty reliable).
Such an invention would, quite literally, save the planet from destruction. It would be the "holy grail" in the fight against global warming. It would arguably be the most important invention in history.
So you'd think that if such an invention existed, everyone would know about it, wouldn't you?
Well, would you believe that our top energy scientists invented a technology that does all those things and more! These plants can also get rid of the waste from existing nuclear power plants! And unlike nuclear plants where there is only a finite amount of nuclear material available (I think about 100 years), these plants make their own fuel so they will last 100,000 years. Remember Einstein's famous E=mc2? The point is that if you do it right, a little bit of matter can make a lot of energy.
And would you believe the research was done more than 20 years ago in 1984 by a large group of US scientists at Argonne National Laboratory?
The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) is a fourth generation nuclear design that provides a clean, inexhaustible source of power, cheap, with virtually no waste, inherently safe (if you remove the cooling, it shuts down rather than melts down), and the added benefit that it consumes the nuclear waste from other nuclear plants that we can’t figure out how to get rid of.
Advantages include:
What's wrong with that? Absolutely nothing...that is if you look at the facts and the science rather than the words.
Sadly, most people when they hear "nuclear reactor" or "breeder reactor" react negatively. "Not in my backyard," they say. But that's because of second generation nuclear technology. When people say "no nuclear," they really are referring to "second generation nuclear." Everything about the IFR and fourth generation technology is completely different. The words with negative connotations are no longer negative. Yet we have this bad habit of remembering the bad associations. We have to overcome that. For example, one scientist told me, "Breeding, however, is a dirty word these days, so the GNEP emphasis is on burning the transuranics, instead of using them to assure an expanding source of clean energy into the indefinite future." So, in other words, we are doing stupid things because "breeding" is a dirty word. "Breeding" for the IFR is the nuclear equivalent of "recycling and re-using." That's a good thing, not a bad thing. And the safe word, "burning," is actually a bad thing. So the connotations are actually reversed.
We actually gave a group of our smartest scientists funding for 10 years and left them alone to come up with something brilliant so that it could be completed before we actually needed to deploy it. Talk about visionary, long-term thinking! Of course today things are different. Today, Congress is completely shortsighted. After gas is at $4/gallon, they say we need to drill for more oil. Well if that is the solution, how come we didn't do that 10 years ago so we wouldn't have a crisis?
So here, in a rare instance of long term strategic investment and vision, our government did something really amazing in funding this project. And the scientists returned that trust by delivering on their promises. And then our government thanks them by pulling the plug on the project just before it was completed.
When Bill Clinton cancelled the funding in 1994, he said in his State of the Union speech that he did it because the project was unnecessary, not because it didn't meet any of its objectives. In his speech, he said, "We will terminate unnecessary programs in advanced reactor development."
He never asked the National Academy of Sciences to look into whether this project was unnecessary. Why not? Shouldn't you do a little objective research before you pull the plug on the biggest energy research project in history?
The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) technology is arguably the single most important thing we can do to stop global warming. If it isn't the single most important thing, it's awfully close to the top.So if this is so great, how come everyone isn't all over this technology?
Because nobody knew about it!
How can that be?
Because the DOE ordered the scientists working on the project not to talk about it.
Why would the government do that?
Why do you think the government would pour billions of dollars into the biggest energy research project in history and then not just cancel it, but do their best to bury it? The researchers at Argonne developed a safe and economical source of unlimited clean energy. Between that and the other renewable power technologies we wouldn't need oil, coal, gas or uranium mining/drilling anymore. We're talking about putting the most powerful corporations on the planet out of business. Not out of malice or spite, but simply because they won't be needed anymore and because what they're doing to the planet is killing us.
Some people think that the fossil fuel lobbyists could tell you why our government ordered the scientists not to talk about it. It's similar to the gag order (and edits to manuscripts and reports including IPCC reports) that the administration likes to put on scientists who try to talk about global warming. Jim Hansen can tell you a few stories about that since he's experienced it first hand.
In fact, Hansen himself just found out about the IFR recently. Hansen is very informed. So if he didn't know about it, it's probably not well known. And that's what I found when I asked around.
According to this article that just appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Bill Gates is investing in a project at Intellectual Ventures to "create a new type of nuclear reactor that would use fuels other than enriched uranium -- including spent fuel from existing reactors." The article quoted Myhrvold as saying " The idea is to create a nuclear reactor that is simpler and cheaper than current reactors, and generates clean power without waste or proliferation problems."
Well that's exactly what the IFR did. They knew about the IFR. It would be great if he could help it succeed or has ideas on how to make it even better.
GE has created a commercial plant design called the S-PRISM. GE is ready and willing to build a plant (a) to demonstrate the technical feasibility of a commercial-scale operation, and (b) to narrow the existing uncertainty in the final cost. They are not proposing, yet, to plunge into mass production of S-PRISMs. We can start building a reactor vessel for around $50 million.
Apparently, Al Gore doesn't know about the IFR either. Check out this video where Senator Craig (a strong advocate of the IFR in 1994 but not really known for his advocacy of good science) chastises Gore for his role in cancelling advanced nuclear research in 1994. Gore doesn't know what Craig was talking about. More recently, people associated with the IFR tried to brief Gore, but they couldn't get past Gore's defensive linemen.
Cancelling the IFR was a huge mistake...One US Senator even commented how Congress will regret that decision. He said,
I couldn't have said that better. And Senator Kempthorne, who also isn't exactly known for his advocacy of science, is still waiting for his colleagues in Congress to regret and reverse their decision."I assure my colleagues someday our Nation will regret and reverse this shortsighted decision. But complete or not, the concept and the work done to prove it remain genius and a great contribution to the world."
"Through his work on the Integral Fast Reactor program, Dr. Till demonstrated that his technical solutions out paced the ability of the political process to appreciate them."
The good news is that DOE is trying to restart IFR with the GNEP (Global Nuclear Energy Partnership) initiative. The GNEP, if it is allowed to proceed, will involve a commercial demonstration that will establish the degree of economic competitiveness of the recycling process. General Electric thinks they can build an economically viable system and they already have a complete commercial design completed (S-PRISM).
But it looks as though Congress, in a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bath water, might decide to zero the funding of GNEP due to other aspects of the GNEP program.
Once again Congress shows how easily they seem to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The same Congress that brought you the Iraq war is now making sure that the best solution to the global warming never sees the light of day.
Hansen was blunt in his most recent trip report when he wrote “we should not have bailed out of research on fast reactors.” Yet here we are doing it again. When are our politicians going to start listening to our scientists who are trying to solve the global warming problem?
Are there any other promising technologies that have no emissions and the potential to displace coal plants and can be sited anywhere? I don't know of any other than this.
But we should be looking at the ideas that are on the table now and funding the most promising 5 ideas with stable long-term funding (e.g., 10 years or more) that isn't subject to the capriciousness of Congress. That way, we'll have solutions available when we desperately need them instead of the normal short sighted approach we take which is to react to a crisis rather than take preventative steps. An energy crisis should never have occurred in the US. We should have been making huge investments in renewable research 10 to 20 years ago.
In this case we got lucky and did make the investment in electric power generation and the technology is available today when we need it. What a miracle.
Now we need another miracle: we need our government to restart the research at Argonne, we need the NRC to accelerate the approval of the plant designs, and we need to allow utilities to start building these plants. GE is ready and willing to build a demonstration plant.
California has a ban on new nuclear plants until the waste problem is solved. But building the IFR solves the waste problem. So I hope California will be a leader in incentivizing our utilities to start building these plants here. If California needs to change the law to do that, it should.
For around $50M, we can build a reactor vessel to expedite certification and licensing by the NRC. That's a small price to pay to prove we have a silver bullet to solve the global warming problem. This is too good an opportunity to pass up.
I am not suggesting that the IFR is the be-all, end-all solution to the global warming problem. Some people believe other technologies (e.g., high-altitude wind, such as MakaniPower.com, solar thermal such as Ausra, the work MIT is doing on solar electrolysis and fuel cells, or enhanced geothermal (EGS)) might be a silver bullet. Maybe. Maybe not. Most experts think you need a mix of good solutions just like we have a mix of ways to generate power today.
From a risk management point of view, you certainly want to cultivate and develop at least a small portfolio of silver bullets, i.e., "silver buckshot." After spending a lot of time talking to the people who built this technology, it's clear to me that the IFR deserves a place in that portfolio. The research at Argonne should be restarted now and someone should ask GE to build one; either a big utility or Congress should give DOE the money so they can have GE build a pilot S-PRISM test plant.
We are running out of time. If we do not start using breeder reactors, such as the IFR, this century, then it appears we will reach "peak nuclear" this century. If we use 4th generation breeder reactors such as the IFR (whose only disadvantage seems to be perception), we can extend the usable life of our nuclear resources to 1,000 years or more (see GamePlan, p. 126) with the IFR folks estimating over 50,000 years.
Also, it's not something we can decide to do later. If our objective is to get to 20% nuclear in our energy mix, that means we must build one 3GW plant per week for the next 25 years (see GamePlan, p. 149)!
So unless we are absolutely 100% sure we don't need nuclear, we should start very soon, or that option will be lost forever.
Mary Nichols, the highly respected chair of California's Air Resources Board has been convinced for years, and has said publicly, that nuclear would be needed and would make a comeback but only with breeder technology. While she has not yet been briefed in the IFR, she wants to learn more about it and a meeting has been set up.
A number of people who have read the above had additional insightful questions, such as "how do you respond to the disadvantages listed on the wikipedia page on the IFR?" or "if this is so good, why doesn't GE have a customer for the S-PRISM?" or "how do you address the proliferation problem?" Those questions, and more, are answered here: The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) project: Q&A.