Nuclear industrial process heat and district heating are old ideas. One from the 1960s was a "dust" reactor fueled by tiny fuel particles blowing around in a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere to make nitrogen oxides on purpose for fertilizers. Inherently safe.
The most energy-efficient way to separate hydrogen from water is the copper-chlorine thermochemical process, which needs heat at exactly the core temperature of most reactors.
CO2 can be separated from seawater (where its concentration is 140 times greater than in the atmosphere) using the BPMED process from PARC. Hydrogen and CO2 can be combined to make hydrocarbon fuels using the hundred-year-old Fischer-Tropsch process. The US Navy is working on this to make jet fuel at sea on aircraft carriers so their deployment duration will be limited by food and toilet paper instead of jet fuel, or hoping that tankers can keep up with them and survive in combat zones.
The GE/Hitachi consortium estimates they could make PRISM reactors in 150, 300, and 350 MWe sizes in a factory for under $4/watt if they had enough firm orders to justify building a factory. The first PRISM has been licensed and construction will soon commence at Kemmerer- WY, in partnership with Bill Gates's Terrapower. It will be coupled to a 500 MWh molten-salt thermal store to allow rapid load following, so the project is called "Natrium," the Latin word for salt. The obvious place to build reactors is a modern shipyard, but they won't touch the projects with a ten-foot Pole (or two five-foot Ethiopians) because the regulators' noses would muck up every step every five minutes.
"Nuclear Waste" is an intentionally misleading term. It's actually valuable 5%-used fuel. The right thing to do is to separate fission products from unused fuel and convert the unused fuel into electricity and fission products. Unused fuel contains plutonium, a perfect fuel with a 30,000-year half life (and therefore 300,000-year storage problem) of which we are desperately eager to be rid. 9.26% of fission products, caesium and strontium, have 30-year half lives, and are therefore a 300-year storage problem. Half the rest are innocuous before thirty years, and the remainder aren't even radioactive (and some such as rhodium and palladium are extremely valuable). The best processing method is the pyroelectric method developed at Argonne and Idaho national laboratories. An all-electric all-nuclear American energy economy with 1,700 GWe appetite would produce nine cement-mixer-truck loads of caesium and strontium per year. We can handle that. USA has 100,000 tonnes of 5%-used fuel and 900,000 tonnes of depleted uranium. That could power the all-nuclear all-electric 1,700 GWe economy for 500 years without mining, milling, refining, enriching, or importing one gram of new uranium.
EBR-II, the 20 MWe Experimental Breeder Reactor II was proven to an invited international audience in 1986. They turned off coolant circulation (as operators did at Three Mile Island) and sat back and watched. Due to inherent physical properties, the reactor was below operating temperature in seven minutes, with no action by operators, automatic control systems, or fancy computer algorithms. They restarted the reactor and turned off the water feed to the steam generator. Same response. Then operators at Chernobyl did the latter experiment six weeks later. PRISM is EBR-II writ large.
Read http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Nuclear.html . Read "Plentiful Energy: The IFR Story" by Charles E. Till and Yoon Il Chang. If you don't want to buy it on paper, use the PDF link on my page, for which Dr. Chang has generously given permission. Read my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" A comprehensive end-to-end life-cycle system-engineering analysis of the entire energy landscape. Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations so you can verify I didn't just make up stuff.
I agree with Mr. Hargraves and "the radical individualist" that this is an excellent summary. But I do question the discussion on death rates and safety. Does anyone know if Our World in Data factors in the deaths due to intermittency of renewables? To say there are only 0.02 death per terawatt-hour is disingenuous if you account for the 75 percent of fossil needed to meet demand when the primary source, solar, is NOT available.
There is no question that nuclear is the safest method of generating electricity (in mass, scalable quantities), and the argument of "what about the waste" is so trivial that it should be laughed at.
I've also seen data that seemingly contradict the OWID numbers; WHO suggests much higher values for wind and solar (0.15 and 0.44 per TWH, respectively, compared to 0.04 for nuclear).
I also question the OWID coal data. I do not question the contamination, but I do question if it is valid to compile data for a coal plant located within or near a large community, versus a plant that is 10 or more miles away from a population center. Averages are nice, and show a trend, but data such as those shown here can be misconstrued or misinterpreted, and do more damage than good.
That's the real truth about ANY metric about Wind & Solar power. They are parasitic energy sources and are always dependent on batteries/pumped hydro/fossil buffering and also for the large embodied energy necessary. So they correct metric using wind or solar is the System wide cost whether it be in O&M, capital, pollutants or even human lives.
The information you provided is certainly robust, and covers a lot of important topics, but some of the information is still debatable, especially based on technological, economic, and regulatory perspectives.
I think the claim that a reactor using tiny fuel particles was inherently safe and designed to produce nitrogen oxides for fertilizers might be historically accurate in terms of concept. However, "inherently safe" is a strong claim and often debated in nuclear engineering. Safety depends heavily on design, operation, and external factors. These ideas didn't take off, which might suggest practical, safety, or efficiency concerns.
While the Copper-Chlorine Thermochemical Process for Hydrogen Separation is one of the processes for hydrogen production, it’s debated whether it's the most energy-efficient way to separate hydrogen from water. Other processes, like high-temperature electrolysis or proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolysis, are often considered more scalable or efficient depending on the application. The suitability of different methods is often context-dependent.
The use of the Bipolar Membrane Electrodialysis (BPMED) process from PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) for CO2 separation is scientifically plausible, and the concentration of CO2 in seawater being higher than in the atmosphere is correct. However, the scalability, cost, and efficiency of using this approach for large-scale CO2 capture, particularly in conjunction with fuel production for aircraft carriers, is an area of ongoing research and could be debated.
The claim that PRISM reactors could be built for under $4/watt assumes large-scale production and firm orders, but this is speculative. Nuclear reactor construction tends to face significant cost overruns and delays due to regulatory, engineering, and logistical challenges. While the Kemmerer, Wyoming project is real, the overall feasibility of widespread factory production of PRISM reactors and the estimated cost remains debated.
The idea that modern shipyards are reluctant to build reactors due to regulatory issues may reflect frustrations within the industry, but this doesn't capture the full picture. Shipyard suitability and reluctance are influenced by more than just regulation—it includes safety standards, public opinion, labor specialization, and industry demand.
The statement that "nuclear waste" is intentionally misleading and that most spent fuel can be reused is not as simple as it sounds. While it’s true that spent nuclear fuel contains valuable isotopes like plutonium and uranium that could be reused, the process of separating and reusing them (e.g., via reprocessing) is expensive, controversial, and poses proliferation risks. Not all countries agree on how to manage nuclear waste.
Pyroelectric methods for reprocessing nuclear fuel have been studied, but their widespread adoption is still debated. They have potential advantages over aqueous reprocessing, but there are technical, economic, and political challenges. Full-scale commercial deployment is still a subject of contention.
While the EBR-II demonstration of inherent safety features is an important historical milestone, it is debatable whether the broader class of sodium-cooled fast reactors (like PRISM) can achieve the same level of safety in commercial-scale operations under all conditions. The incident at Chernobyl, which involved a different reactor type, cannot be directly compared to the safety features of fast reactors.
I think the claims you've made are clearly rooted in credible technology or historical events, but the practical, economic, and regulatory challenges surrounding these ideas make some of them debatable. Additionally, terms like "inherently safe" or "most energy-efficient" can be contested depending on the criteria used for assessment. There's a ton of information out there on these topics, and while the book you reference may have 350 citations, there is obviously more research, testing, and evaluation to be done to bring things from theory to practice.
Hi Van -- your bias is well known - so just -- "get real".
The only reason that people are looking at nukes again -- is because the "powers-that-be" haven't learned that we actually never needed nukes in the first place.
But because Physicists built the A-Bomb, which blew up a couple of cities - probably saving hundreds of thousands of lives - everyone thought they walked on water
.
The bottom line is that a nuke is good for one thing - never being built.
If you knew anything about electric circuitry - radio circuitry - and "resonance" - which has been around for over 124 years - since Tesla invented in in 1900 -- instead of making a hugely expensive - and long time radioactive - tea pots -- you would not be saying what you are saying.
You are entitled to your own opinion - which is well known -- but not your own facts.
Sign, words. How about building some to power a data center? Or even better yet, a hospital? About a megawatt of steady power for 20 years would be convincing.
How about showing a 1% more power gain, energy output/energy input? And tell us what is the magical source of that energy. And then write a paper on it, send it to the Nobel committee and pick up your Nobel Prize next year. While the physics community is in turmoil trying to fit a brand new fundamental energy source into the Standard Model.
Nukes are necessary to destroy the 100,000 tonnes of 5%-used fuel that we already have. The only alternative is the daft proposal to pretend to hide it for 300,000 years. The only kind of nukes that can destroy it are fast-neutron breeder reactors, the prototype of which at Idaho National Laboratory the Cliton Administration destroyed in 1993. When told it would cost more to terminate the research program and destroy the reactor than to finish the research program and mothball the reactor, Frank von Hippel, Slick Willie's vile science "advisor" said "I know; it's a symbol. It has to go." Between spent fuel and depleted uranium, USA has enough fuel to power an all-electric all-nuclear economy with 1,700 GWe appetite for 500 years without mining, milling, refining, enriching, or importing one new gram of uranium. After 500 years, we can start worrying about other methods.
No way. The Rossi E-Cat blows the doors off of the POD MOD, not even close. The POD MOD will still be squealing its wheels at the starting line while the E-Cat crosses the finish line.
Nuclear industrial process heat and district heating are old ideas. One from the 1960s was a "dust" reactor fueled by tiny fuel particles blowing around in a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere to make nitrogen oxides on purpose for fertilizers. Inherently safe.
The most energy-efficient way to separate hydrogen from water is the copper-chlorine thermochemical process, which needs heat at exactly the core temperature of most reactors.
CO2 can be separated from seawater (where its concentration is 140 times greater than in the atmosphere) using the BPMED process from PARC. Hydrogen and CO2 can be combined to make hydrocarbon fuels using the hundred-year-old Fischer-Tropsch process. The US Navy is working on this to make jet fuel at sea on aircraft carriers so their deployment duration will be limited by food and toilet paper instead of jet fuel, or hoping that tankers can keep up with them and survive in combat zones.
The GE/Hitachi consortium estimates they could make PRISM reactors in 150, 300, and 350 MWe sizes in a factory for under $4/watt if they had enough firm orders to justify building a factory. The first PRISM has been licensed and construction will soon commence at Kemmerer- WY, in partnership with Bill Gates's Terrapower. It will be coupled to a 500 MWh molten-salt thermal store to allow rapid load following, so the project is called "Natrium," the Latin word for salt. The obvious place to build reactors is a modern shipyard, but they won't touch the projects with a ten-foot Pole (or two five-foot Ethiopians) because the regulators' noses would muck up every step every five minutes.
"Nuclear Waste" is an intentionally misleading term. It's actually valuable 5%-used fuel. The right thing to do is to separate fission products from unused fuel and convert the unused fuel into electricity and fission products. Unused fuel contains plutonium, a perfect fuel with a 30,000-year half life (and therefore 300,000-year storage problem) of which we are desperately eager to be rid. 9.26% of fission products, caesium and strontium, have 30-year half lives, and are therefore a 300-year storage problem. Half the rest are innocuous before thirty years, and the remainder aren't even radioactive (and some such as rhodium and palladium are extremely valuable). The best processing method is the pyroelectric method developed at Argonne and Idaho national laboratories. An all-electric all-nuclear American energy economy with 1,700 GWe appetite would produce nine cement-mixer-truck loads of caesium and strontium per year. We can handle that. USA has 100,000 tonnes of 5%-used fuel and 900,000 tonnes of depleted uranium. That could power the all-nuclear all-electric 1,700 GWe economy for 500 years without mining, milling, refining, enriching, or importing one gram of new uranium.
EBR-II, the 20 MWe Experimental Breeder Reactor II was proven to an invited international audience in 1986. They turned off coolant circulation (as operators did at Three Mile Island) and sat back and watched. Due to inherent physical properties, the reactor was below operating temperature in seven minutes, with no action by operators, automatic control systems, or fancy computer algorithms. They restarted the reactor and turned off the water feed to the steam generator. Same response. Then operators at Chernobyl did the latter experiment six weeks later. PRISM is EBR-II writ large.
Read http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Nuclear.html . Read "Plentiful Energy: The IFR Story" by Charles E. Till and Yoon Il Chang. If you don't want to buy it on paper, use the PDF link on my page, for which Dr. Chang has generously given permission. Read my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" A comprehensive end-to-end life-cycle system-engineering analysis of the entire energy landscape. Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations so you can verify I didn't just make up stuff.
This article gives trustworthy insights into the history, politics, and possible future of nuclear power. His link about spent fuel is equally good. https://www.ans.org/news/article-5800/de-facto-disposal-the-dumbest-waste-solution/
This is excellent review of the current situation with nuclear energy.
In the entire civilized world, the 1960's design of nuclear power reactors are safer than Teddy Kennedy's Oldsmobile.
đŸ¤ªđŸ˜…đŸ˜‚đŸ¤£
I agree with Mr. Hargraves and "the radical individualist" that this is an excellent summary. But I do question the discussion on death rates and safety. Does anyone know if Our World in Data factors in the deaths due to intermittency of renewables? To say there are only 0.02 death per terawatt-hour is disingenuous if you account for the 75 percent of fossil needed to meet demand when the primary source, solar, is NOT available.
There is no question that nuclear is the safest method of generating electricity (in mass, scalable quantities), and the argument of "what about the waste" is so trivial that it should be laughed at.
I've also seen data that seemingly contradict the OWID numbers; WHO suggests much higher values for wind and solar (0.15 and 0.44 per TWH, respectively, compared to 0.04 for nuclear).
I also question the OWID coal data. I do not question the contamination, but I do question if it is valid to compile data for a coal plant located within or near a large community, versus a plant that is 10 or more miles away from a population center. Averages are nice, and show a trend, but data such as those shown here can be misconstrued or misinterpreted, and do more damage than good.
My two cents, adjusted for inflation.
That's the real truth about ANY metric about Wind & Solar power. They are parasitic energy sources and are always dependent on batteries/pumped hydro/fossil buffering and also for the large embodied energy necessary. So they correct metric using wind or solar is the System wide cost whether it be in O&M, capital, pollutants or even human lives.
The information you provided is certainly robust, and covers a lot of important topics, but some of the information is still debatable, especially based on technological, economic, and regulatory perspectives.
I think the claim that a reactor using tiny fuel particles was inherently safe and designed to produce nitrogen oxides for fertilizers might be historically accurate in terms of concept. However, "inherently safe" is a strong claim and often debated in nuclear engineering. Safety depends heavily on design, operation, and external factors. These ideas didn't take off, which might suggest practical, safety, or efficiency concerns.
While the Copper-Chlorine Thermochemical Process for Hydrogen Separation is one of the processes for hydrogen production, it’s debated whether it's the most energy-efficient way to separate hydrogen from water. Other processes, like high-temperature electrolysis or proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolysis, are often considered more scalable or efficient depending on the application. The suitability of different methods is often context-dependent.
The use of the Bipolar Membrane Electrodialysis (BPMED) process from PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) for CO2 separation is scientifically plausible, and the concentration of CO2 in seawater being higher than in the atmosphere is correct. However, the scalability, cost, and efficiency of using this approach for large-scale CO2 capture, particularly in conjunction with fuel production for aircraft carriers, is an area of ongoing research and could be debated.
The claim that PRISM reactors could be built for under $4/watt assumes large-scale production and firm orders, but this is speculative. Nuclear reactor construction tends to face significant cost overruns and delays due to regulatory, engineering, and logistical challenges. While the Kemmerer, Wyoming project is real, the overall feasibility of widespread factory production of PRISM reactors and the estimated cost remains debated.
The idea that modern shipyards are reluctant to build reactors due to regulatory issues may reflect frustrations within the industry, but this doesn't capture the full picture. Shipyard suitability and reluctance are influenced by more than just regulation—it includes safety standards, public opinion, labor specialization, and industry demand.
The statement that "nuclear waste" is intentionally misleading and that most spent fuel can be reused is not as simple as it sounds. While it’s true that spent nuclear fuel contains valuable isotopes like plutonium and uranium that could be reused, the process of separating and reusing them (e.g., via reprocessing) is expensive, controversial, and poses proliferation risks. Not all countries agree on how to manage nuclear waste.
Pyroelectric methods for reprocessing nuclear fuel have been studied, but their widespread adoption is still debated. They have potential advantages over aqueous reprocessing, but there are technical, economic, and political challenges. Full-scale commercial deployment is still a subject of contention.
While the EBR-II demonstration of inherent safety features is an important historical milestone, it is debatable whether the broader class of sodium-cooled fast reactors (like PRISM) can achieve the same level of safety in commercial-scale operations under all conditions. The incident at Chernobyl, which involved a different reactor type, cannot be directly compared to the safety features of fast reactors.
I think the claims you've made are clearly rooted in credible technology or historical events, but the practical, economic, and regulatory challenges surrounding these ideas make some of them debatable. Additionally, terms like "inherently safe" or "most energy-efficient" can be contested depending on the criteria used for assessment. There's a ton of information out there on these topics, and while the book you reference may have 350 citations, there is obviously more research, testing, and evaluation to be done to bring things from theory to practice.
Hi Van -- your bias is well known - so just -- "get real".
The only reason that people are looking at nukes again -- is because the "powers-that-be" haven't learned that we actually never needed nukes in the first place.
But because Physicists built the A-Bomb, which blew up a couple of cities - probably saving hundreds of thousands of lives - everyone thought they walked on water
.
The bottom line is that a nuke is good for one thing - never being built.
If you knew anything about electric circuitry - radio circuitry - and "resonance" - which has been around for over 124 years - since Tesla invented in in 1900 -- instead of making a hugely expensive - and long time radioactive - tea pots -- you would not be saying what you are saying.
You are entitled to your own opinion - which is well known -- but not your own facts.
Sign, words. How about building some to power a data center? Or even better yet, a hospital? About a megawatt of steady power for 20 years would be convincing.
How about showing a 1% more power gain, energy output/energy input? And tell us what is the magical source of that energy. And then write a paper on it, send it to the Nobel committee and pick up your Nobel Prize next year. While the physics community is in turmoil trying to fit a brand new fundamental energy source into the Standard Model.
You know so little about what you are saying.
Can you install a Rossi E-Ca in a single vehicle?
Can you install a Rossi E-Cat to power a single home?
Come on up - SF Smith -- show just how much you don't know.
Good information to know - but nukes are not necessary to develop electricity -- the POD MOD can do it.
Nukes are necessary to destroy the 100,000 tonnes of 5%-used fuel that we already have. The only alternative is the daft proposal to pretend to hide it for 300,000 years. The only kind of nukes that can destroy it are fast-neutron breeder reactors, the prototype of which at Idaho National Laboratory the Cliton Administration destroyed in 1993. When told it would cost more to terminate the research program and destroy the reactor than to finish the research program and mothball the reactor, Frank von Hippel, Slick Willie's vile science "advisor" said "I know; it's a symbol. It has to go." Between spent fuel and depleted uranium, USA has enough fuel to power an all-electric all-nuclear economy with 1,700 GWe appetite for 500 years without mining, milling, refining, enriching, or importing one new gram of uranium. After 500 years, we can start worrying about other methods.
Some of the thermal spectrum molten salt reactors are eager to use the SNF as well. i.e. Copenhagen Atomics:
Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor: Copenhagen Atomics Onion Core - Thomas Jam Pedersen @ TEAC12, gordonmcdowell:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqxvBAJn_vc
No way. The Rossi E-Cat blows the doors off of the POD MOD, not even close. The POD MOD will still be squealing its wheels at the starting line while the E-Cat crosses the finish line.