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Watch Idaho Nuclear Project to Gauge Obama's Energy Plan
It's an indicator for both nuclear and hydrogen as future American energy solutions
Doug Smock, Contributing Editor -- Design News, November 6, 2008
One bellwether project to watch as a gauge of President-Elect Barack Obama's energy policy will be funding for a commercial demonstration project at the Idaho National Laboratory to produce hydrogen and heat with high-temperature, helium-cooled nuclear power.
The project faces technical and finding hurdles and is already running behind schedule. "The Department of Energy asked us to complete the plant by 2016, but we are revising the date to 2021," said Sten A. Caspersson Jr. of Westinghouse in an interview with Design News following a presentation at the annual Congress of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in Boston, MA. Caspersson is project manager of next-generation, high-temperature reactors at Westinghouse, a Pennsylvania company owned primarily by Toshiba.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 authorized the Department of Energy to develop a research and development program that could deliver a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor prototype to increase domestic energy supplies, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and move more quickly towards a national hydrogen economy. Westinghouse and its partners plan to build a pebble bed modular reactor that uses fuel balls surrounded by a hollow sphere of graphite moderator. These are stacked in a close-packed lattice and are cooled by helium, not water. The term "pebble bed" derives from the use of spheres. Rods are used to control fission in conventional nuclear reactors.
Output of the reactor will be hydrogen that could serve as a fuel for vehicles and heat that could be used to more effectively produce fuels from oil sands or coal. Caspersson damped excessive enthusiasm for hydrogen as a quick-fix to high gas prices. "In his 2005 State of the Union address, President Bush said our grandchildren will be driving hydrogen-fueled cars. We're not even close to that." President Bush referenced hydrogen-fueled cars in his 2005 and 2006 State of the Union addresses.
Several challenges are delaying development of the Idaho demonstration project:
Licensing. Will federal authorities look favorably on the technology? President-Elect Barack Obama says he will support nuclear power if safety issues are adequately addressed. Caspersson told Design News: "Light water reactors are very safe. These (next generation nuclear plants) are even safer." For example, he said it would be almost impossible to extract fissionable materials from spent fuel balls. In addition, the spent balls could be safely stored in a remote location, such as the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada proposed for nuclear waste.
Economics: The cost to build a plant is currently estimated at $2.4 billion. Congress authorized the DOE to spend $1.25 billion on the project through 2013. However, funding has been steady around $30 million each year. The National Academy of Sciences has already reported that the project is under funded. A Westinghouse projection based on revenues from sale of hydrogen and heat, and coupled with a credit for improved carbon footprint, show the economics to be "marginally acceptable", in Caspersson's words. One big test will be the willingness of a company such as Dow or Chevron to step forward and embrace the concept as a commercial project.
Technology. There are many issues. One is the need for development of a material to be used in a lynchpin of the concept: an intermediate heat exchanger. Existing materials don't meet the requirements for intense heat and pressure. "We're starting with a material we know something about, 800H," said Cappersson. 800H is a controlled carbon Inconel alloy that receives a high temperature annealing treatment to produces an average grain size of ASTM 5 or coarser. Materials that possess even greater creep and rupture strength are being developed by national labs, Caspersson told Design News. "We will replace 800H with an improved metal or ceramic when they become available," he said. One potential replacement is an alloy called 617, which contains nickel, chromium, cobalt, and molybdenum. Materials development "is one of the primary barriers to success of the project," Caaspersson said. Another technical challenge is the requirement to improve the purity of hydrogen that will be produced
Even one of the environmental underpinnings of the project was challenged at the ASME Congress by Lawrence L. Kazmerski, director of the National Center for Photovoltaics in Golden, CO. In a question-and-answer period following Caspersson's presentation, Kasmerski questioned why one of the project's goals is production of heat that could be used to more economically produce hydrocarbons from oil sands in Canada. Another potential use for the heat is to produce gas from coal. The fossil fuels, when burned, release carbon dioxide. Caspersson responded that the nation's energy mix will still require use of fossil fuels. In a discussion following the presentation, Caspersson conceded that a South African project to convert gas to fuel is a huge producer of carbon dioxide emissions. Kazmerski was also a speaker at the National Science Foundation-sponsored forum at the ASME Congress.
Meanwhile, production of a peddle-bed nuclear reactor is already under way in South Africa, and China is aggressively developing the technology.
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Watch Idaho Nuclear Project to Gauge Obama Energy Plan
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finding hurdles ?
I think you mean funding hurdles.
M. Simon - 2008-19-11 14:37:27 EST -
It's perfect. Hydrogen is an easily centralized, easily manipulated gasoline-like market model. It adds many wasteful layers of complexity to, in the case of fuel-cell cars, the simpler electric/hybrid model.
Using nuclear to forward the hydrogen model is just icing on the cake! It would be hard to come up with a more expensive, monopolistic energy concept.
Great job!'>"move more quickly towards a national hydrogen economy"
Great, let's all get behind the latest "big oil" replacement. Instead of moving to a distributed renewable energy model, the current administration came up with "big oil II - the hydrogen boondoggle".
It's perfect. Hydrogen is an easily centralized, easily manipulated gasoline-like market model. It adds many wasteful layers of complexity to, in the case of fuel-cell cars, the simpler electric/hybrid model.
Using nuclear to forward the hydrogen model is just icing on the cake! It would be hard to come up with a more expensive, monopolistic energy concept.
Great job!
Markus Unread - 2008-18-11 08:06:50 EST -
Pebble bed reactors with closed cycle gas turbines do not necessarily need intermediate heat exchangers. They could be based on fuel designs that are already well proven instead of the stretch goal fuels under consideration for the NGNP project. They could even use N2 gas instead of helium to reduce the timelines required for producing a helium based compressor and turbine, since N2 is both inert and very similar to atmospheric air.
NGNP is a wonderful example of why the government should not be in the business of picking technologies. It forms partnerships with the establishment without recognizing the inherent conflicts of interest. Instead, the government should establish objective rules that apply to all players. They should be more like the guys in the striped shirts than the guys that actually carry or pass the football.
Rod Adams
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Producer and host, The Atomic Show Podcast'>The Sasol coal to liquids plant is indeed a major CO2 source, but at least 1/2 of the CO2 released is a result of burning coal to produce the heat required to make the Fischer-Tropsch reaction proceed. If that heat is supplied by nuclear fission, that part of the CO2 production disappears and what remains is the CO2 production from consuming the fuel. That should be about the same as what gets released by burning fuels made from crude oil. As the article states - there is no evidence that humans are going to be able to stop burning fossil fuels any time in the near or foreseeable future, but we can burn less and we can make that process cleaner.
One of the big reasons that the US government led high temperature reactor project has such a long time line is that Congress imposed a number of very challenging goals - partially at the request of the national laboratories and the industry partners. The lab scientists love to study things; for them a project designed to last into the 2020's is a perfect, career justifying assignment. The industry partners have other products in their pipeline - like large, conventional reactors - that they want to market now, without distractions from a newer, simpler design that would be more like the PBMR in South Africa or the HTR-10 and its 200 MWe successors that are now under construction in China.
Pebble bed reactors with closed cycle gas turbines do not necessarily need intermediate heat exchangers. They could be based on fuel designs that are already well proven instead of the stretch goal fuels under consideration for the NGNP project. They could even use N2 gas instead of helium to reduce the timelines required for producing a helium based compressor and turbine, since N2 is both inert and very similar to atmospheric air.
NGNP is a wonderful example of why the government should not be in the business of picking technologies. It forms partnerships with the establishment without recognizing the inherent conflicts of interest. Instead, the government should establish objective rules that apply to all players. They should be more like the guys in the striped shirts than the guys that actually carry or pass the football.
Rod Adams
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Producer and host, The Atomic Show Podcast
Rod Adams - 2008-6-11 20:29:16 EST
