France to build new 1600 MWe EPR nuclear reactor at Flamanville.

[NNadir]

This will be the first EPR (European Pressurized Reactor) built in France. Many more are expected.

http://www.edf.fr/html/epr/projet.html (In French.)

Sur son site de Flamanville (Manche), EDF souhaite construire dès maintenant une nouvelle unité nucléaire de production d'électricité d'une puissance de 1600 MW. Cette unité de production appelée " Flamanville 3 " serait construite avec la technologie des réacteurs nucléaires à eau sous pression européenne EPR (European Pressurised Reactor). Ce projet s'inscrit pleinement dans ses missions : produire, transporter et commercialiser l'électricité pour tous ses clients et garantir une électricité propre, sûre et compétitive.

The following link in English gives more details.

http://www.ecolo.org/archives/archives-nuc-en/2004-10-21-EPR-Flamanville.htm

The reactor should be in operation by 2012.

The 58 existing French nuclear reactors, are to be replaced starting in 2020 This lead-unit EPR reactor is meant to validate the new EPR concept and design, before building a series of EPR's to replace the 58 existing reactors. The EPR is not a revolutionary reactor, but an optimized version of the pressurized water reactors in operation today, who already work very well and are quite clean and very safe.

The French National Safety Authority (Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire - ASN) had authorized the EPR project to proceed on October 5th, indicating that this reactor includes significant improvements compared to existing reactors. The EPR has better safety systems, is more competitive, reduces the amount of waste produced and lowers the exposition of nuclear workers to radioactivity.

Constructing the EPR will take 5 years. But beforehand, there are 2 years of administrative procedures, and to test it properly before constructing a series, the EPR needs to operate at least until the first refuelling period, which requires another 18 months to 2 years.

[hunter]

1. Nice to see that somebody's watching out for the future.

Here in the United States we'll probably have to lose a few more cities before we acknowledge anything is wrong.

I have this grim feeling that in fifty years the phrase "Houston, we've got a problem" is not going to be associated with Appollo 13.

Rational people in many places have decided nuclear power is an answer.

Other rational people will come up with alternative answers.

But here in the United States we are not behaving in a rational manner. The first thing we need to do in the United States is to elect a rational government. If and when we accomplish that, it seems other nations will have already answered the most pressing energy problems.

[NNadir]

2. The French never abandoned the idea that nuclear energy was the answer.

In some sense, their case was driven by exigency: No gas, no oil, no coal, no choice.

In this sense, they provided the model for what the rest of the world is now experiencing.

In the 1980's, when the French committed heavily, the question of going nuclear was by no means as clear as it is now.

The long term reliability of the technology was not understood. The oldest reactors were small plants that for all intensive purposes were really pilot units. The larger industrial units were new and in the hands of necessarily inexperienced operators, balky. The inexperience played out graphically at the economic disaster at Three Mile Island, which while it killed no one, demonstrated that a huge asset could become a large liability in a matter of hours. The tens of thousands of reactor-years of experience we now have did not exist.

The upper limits of a nuclear accident were not known. Personally, when I heard what was happening at Chernobyl, I assumed that it would be much worse than it proved to be ultimately. Chernobyl was a catastrophe, but the silver lining is that the world was acquainted with the worst case. This gave data to the means of comparative analysis based on real data, not desperate imaginings.

Fossil fuels were still cheap and new major discoveries, such as the North Sea fields and the Alaskan fields were still being found. People were lulled into believing that such discoveries were just a matter of looking harder and trying harder.

The Oklo natural nuclear reactors, which operated 2 billion years ago, and have served to elucidate the long term behavior of actinides and fission products, were new discoveries, and the research on their implications were poorly known and understood. The long term behavior of spent fuel was an unknown. At the same time, no one could look back at the question of whether spent fuel from commercial reactors could be stored for long periods.

Most importantly, the issue of global climate change was a bit of thermodynamic esoterica - a possibility, a concern, not the reality it now is.

Viewed in this light, the French decision to adopt nuclear energy as their main source of electricity was courageous. It was bold. They could have made the decision we made, to outsource the pollution of fossil fuels, to become importers. (As it is now, electricity is the 4th largest export of France.)

People like to malign the French, mock their supposed lack of aggressiveness, their alleged vacillation. But in fact, they led the world. They took the bull by the horns. They were decisive. They chose. The world owes France some gratitude here. They showed it could be done, and they took a big risk to do it.

Vive la France! I think I'll hum the Marseillaise.

[Dead_Parrot]

3. I might be wrong...

...but isn't the Finnish Onkalo 3 an "identical" plant (Framatome / Siemens EPR)? And if so, couldn't they use that as a test for the design? It would save a chunk of time before they get rolled out on on production basis...

Or is that insufficiently French? :evilgrin:

[NNadir]

4. The Finnish plant is an EPR.

However, I think it is important (seriously) to follow the laws and regulations. This makes the technology safer.

French law requires design certification. It's not like the French are facing a critical shortage of electricity, or that electricity generation in France is contributing to global climate change. They have what the rest of the world doesn't: Time.

The EPR is a great reactor; I'm sure of it. But I am in favor of regulation of all energy technology, including the safest technologies, which of course include nuclear energy.

[Dead_Parrot]

5. Begs the question...

...what do the French do, that the Finns don't? I would hope that Finnish authorities are just as strict about testing and certification and the French.

You're right, there's plenty of room to do things by the books. But I can't help wondering if the EU should be cooking up a set of common criteria, drawing on the best practices of the member states, which all countries could then adopt. It should be things simpler - and safer...

Something for the future, I guess.

[NNadir]

6. The Finns don't need a lot of reactors.

Finland already has 4 reactors that provide more than 30% of Finnish electricity. The largest existing Finnish reactor is roughly 1/2 the power of an EPR. The Finns could supply 100% of their electricity by nuclear means with 10 EPR's. Their experience with the first one will certainly represent certification of the design for future decisions to build. Probably Finland will build more. They are serious about global climate change. They specifically noted the point when announcing their intention to build.

Personally, I would not like to base my experience on Finnish experience. Finnish is not a widely spoken language. It quite literally wouldn't translate well.

Every new type of reactor will have FOAKE (First of a Kind Engineering Costs) in their host countries. This is inevitable. The real issue in nuclear energy is not technical, but perceptual. In this light the French decision is wise.

The EPR is a member of the class of "Gen III" reactors. Some countries have already have complete experience of building these types of reactors. Japan's Gen III type is the Advanced Boiling Water Reactor, the ABWR. They completed two of them in the 1990's. Another one went commercial a few months ago.

[dcfirefighter]

7. How far must a modern plant be situated from urban areas?

I know the current rule is to have a plan for evacuating a 10 mile radius, though there is also apparently a movement to reduce that to 2 miles.

I also know that Navy towns often have nuclear plants with highly enriched fuel parked in the Navy Yard.

It would be possible to move heat from the nuclear power plant more than 10 miles, it would be much easier to move it 5-6 miles. I understand that it's cold in Finland. Using waste heat as District Heating in towns would be another energy boon.

[NNadir]

8. Personally, I think it would be a good idea to have reactors in urban

areas, for the very reason you mention, to collect the waste heat.

It is unfortunate that people would object to this, but frankly it would be safer than burning heating oil, or even natural gas.

Reactors are just extraordinarily safe. If Three Mile Island had been in Brooklyn, it would not have mattered much at the end of the day.

I go to the New Jersey shore in Summer. I swim with my children within site of the reactor at Oyster Creek. It worries me not a whit.

I would be happy to have a reactor in my home town. It would, in fact make me safer than I would be if the power was provided by a coal station 50 miles away. I'd also love to have the tax revenue for a system that would be relatively unobtrusive.

[dcfirefighter]

9. Tax revenue....

Interesting how the communities with nuclear plants compete with each other to attract the next nuclear plant.

I searched for the maximum run of steam, and I haven't found anything more than about 6.5 miles. I don't think theres a physical limit here, it seems to be a matter of diameter, flow, and insulation. I especially think that relatively low quality heat energy for space heating could be piped rather far, as many steam runs are to energy consumers that need relatively high quality steam energy to convert to mechanical energy.

I know the soviets built towns near reactors to use waste heat for space heating, though I'm not sure of the morality of any of their processes.

One of my hobbies, similar to model railroading, is virtual city planning. I'll thank you to keep your geek comments to yourself. I believe that with well designed building codes and utility billing, a city can achieve electricity use rates of less than 500W (avg) per capita vs. US per capita of 1400We (avg). This leaves me with a need for only 25MWe of generation. The smallest late-model npp design i've found is the IRIS Reactor, at 100 to 300MWe, however, it seems to me that all of these must be operated in tandem, for one to work while the other is being maintained/refueled. In any case, the economics seem to support the idea that once you have permission to build a npp, you build the biggest one you can, economizing on the approval.

[NNadir]

10. There was a lot of talk about building small reactors in the lean years.

The thinking was that they could be simpler and that they could be easily located in urban areas.

There still is some thinking like that. The 25 nuclear reactors planned in South Africa will all be small pebble bed units. These reactors are considered modular. You simply add nuclear capacity as you need it. I personally don't like pebble beds, because they are inherently a "once through" technology. However, I do think that a very convenient modular reactor would be the molten salt types of reactors. I think that there isn't enough attention paid to this design, even though in my mind the advantages of this class of reactors are enormous. They will be extremely cheap to operate, I think, in the long run, since they don't require fuel fabrication. (That is the problem in economic terms - most of the money made in nuclear power is made in fuel fabrication.)

I think that molten salt reactors could very easily be modified to produce electricity/liquid motor fuels and or chemicals/and home heating all in one place. If we built a few in my town, we could provide electricity and fuel to Philadelphia and New York, and heat for my home or the homes of my neighbors. All of the prospective scenario based energy charts, as well as the current energy flow charts, show exajoule scale quantities of natural gas being used in residential settings. The 2002 figure was 8.7 exajoules. Meanwhile we are rejecting more than 20 exajoules of heat to the environment just for electricity generation. I realize that some losses are inevitable, but I think we could in fact recover some of that energy in some places. I like your thinking.

However we should not overlook another way that nuclear energy could produce home heating: Electric heating. From an environmental standpoint, I think that in the future, should we survive global climate change, the best home from an environmental standpoint will be one that is all electric.

I don't think there is much risk in siting nuclear plants in urban areas, but I'm not sure that the public perception is quite ready for that idea. People are coming around to reality, but there is still some very conservative thinking out there.

[dcfirefighter]

11. Home Heating

If I had the money, I'd build a well-insulated sun-tempered home heated by a ground source heat pump, and pay a little extra for wind-derived electricity from my utility. I don't, so I just buy CFLs and cut back on the thermostat. I'd like to play with an induction cooktop to see if it would satisfy my preference for gas cooking.

I strongly believe that urban living is much more resource efficient than rural living: reduced transport, reduced heating, reduced water use, shared public resources, etc.

You can maximise the efficiency of a single house at the expense of the efficiency for the entire community - for example, a community of entirely passive solar houses would take up much more land than an equal s.f. community of 3 storey rowhomes, and you'd suffer efficiency losses in transport, infrastructure, public safety, etc.

I'd be interested in determining the cost to pipe heat 6 miles and then distribute it over 100 acres or so, vs. supplying gshps to a similar population.

There are interesting designs for district heating and cooling, which become feasible at high housing densities. A water chiller is even more efficient than a GSHP, by a factor of about 3. Unfortunately all of the current district heating designs are generally based on using waste heat from a small gas turbine or oil boiler. Local District heating utilities could pull heat from the ground, sun, sewer, and hotwater returns for use in the hotwater supply. Waste heat from a distant thermal electric plant could even be used, with a water-to-water heat pump increasing the temperature of the local hotwater supply using lower temperature waste heat.

That being said, it's relatively easy to zone electric resistance heating, and if electricity is cheap enough, or alternative heating is expensive enough, electric resistance heating will predominate.

[hunter]

12. Nuclear district heating probably won't sell.

As a practical matter heat pumps can have better efficiencies in most circumstances.

The biggest advantage of heat pumps and resistance heating is that the use of these is not tied to any particular power plant. If a local power plant is down, customers still have heat. In most district heating schemes backup heat is supplied by conventional fossil fueled boilers, and this is very inefficient.

Overall, district heating systems have been notoriously inefficient except in places that have a tradition of extremely fastidious public service. If you are looking for examples you might want to compare Switzerland's experience with district heating to the old Soviet experience.

[NNadir]

13. Maybe not. We do have some small cities that are heated by nuclear.

Without commenting on their raison d'etre, we should recognize that aircraft carriers are small cities, with thousands of people living very close, in most cases within a few hundred meters, to two nuclear reactors.

In theory one could heat and power high rises in the same way.

There are several types of nuclear reactors which are continuously fueled, but I fully acknowledge that the necessity for back-up systems causes inefficiency, cost, and environmental impact. This same factor is one of the main drawbacks of wind power by the way.

[hunter]

14. I would hope the navy is fastidious about maintainence...

As for living next to nuclear reactors, submarines are the highest form of the art.

[NNadir]

17. Naval reactors seem to have a pretty low accident rate.

It is believed that the Thresher, a nuclear submarine that sank in 1963, went down because of a reactor malfunction. It is believed that a weld in a pipe broke, causing flooding that automatically shut down the power reactor, leaving the submarine unable to resurface.

Other than that accident, I know of no other US naval reactor accidents that lead to loss of life.

Of course, small reactors in peaceful settings would not generally involve powering resurfacing a ship. A shutdown would probably mean supply from elsewhere in the grid.

You're right of course. The people who live the closest to nuclear reactors would be submariners. I would guess that there are tens of thousands of naval veterans who have had that experience.

My understanding is that the vast majority of nuclear power plant operators were trained in the US Navy.

[Dead_Parrot]

15. Could we use something like these?

The Encapsulated Nuclear Heat Source (ENHS) concept is a liquid metal-cooled reactor concept of 50 MWe being developed by the University of California. The core is in a metal-filled module sitting in a large pool of secondary molten metal coolant which also accommodates the separate and unconnected steam generators. Fuel is a uranium-zirconium alloy with 13% U enrichment (or U-Pu-Zr with 11% Pu) with a 15-year life. After this the module is removed, stored on site until the primary lead (or Pb-Bi) coolant solidifies, and it would then be shipped as a self-contained and shielded item. A new fuelled module would be supplied complete with primary coolant. The ENHS is designed for developing countries but is not yet close to commercialisation.

A related project is the Secure Transportable Autonomous Reactor - STAR being developed by Argonne under the leadership of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (DOE). It a lead-cooled fast neutron modular reactor with passive safety features. Its 400 MWt. size means it can be shipped by rail and cooled by natural circulation. It uses U-transuranic nitride fuel in a cassette which is replaced every 15-20 years. The STAR-LM was conceived for power generation, running at 578°C and producing 180 MWe.
...
A smaller STAR variant is the Small Sealed Transportable Autonomous Reactor - SSTAR, being developed in collaboration with Toshiba and others in Japan (see 4S below). It has lead or Pb-Bi cooling, runs at 566°C and has integral steam generator inside the sealed unit, which would be installed below ground level. Conceived in sizes 10-100 MWe, main development is now focused on a 45 MWt/ 20 MWe version as part of the US Generation IV effort. After a 20-year life without refuelling, the whole reactor unit is then returned for recycling the fuel. The core is one metre diameter and 0.8m high. SSTAR will eventually be coupled to a Brayton cycle turbine using supercritical carbon dioxide. Prototype envisaged 2015.
...
A small-scale design developed by Toshiba Corporation in cooperation with Japan's Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry (CRIEPI) and funded by the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI) is the 5 MWt, 200 kWe Rapid-L, using lithium-6 (a liquid neutron poison) as control medium. It would have 2700 fuel pins of 40-50% enriched uranium nitride with 2600°C melting point integrated into a disposable cartridge. The reactivity control system is passive, using lithium expansion modules (LEM) which give burnup compensation, partial load operation as well as negative reactivity feedback. As the reactor temperature rises, the lithium expands into the core, displacing an inert gas. Other kinds of lithium modules, also integrated into the fuel cartridge, shut down and start up the reactor. Cooling is by molten sodium, and with the LEM control system, reactor power is proportional to primary coolant flow rate. Refuelling would be every 10 years in an inert gas environment. Operation would require no skill, due to the inherent safety design features. The whole plant would be about 6.5 metres high and 2 metres diameter.

From here, bold mine. More "nuclear batteries" at the link.

It strikes me these would give the advantage of keeping the core production facilities (fuel & waste processing, technical expertise) at a few key sites while letting anyone have access to power: With a bit of tinkering to the design, they could be used to heat a town and supply electricity, while saving transmission losses & emissions...

There would be a issues with security, or course, but it strikes me the main problem one of opinion.

[NNadir]

16. I am not familiar with these concepts beyond Pb/Bi eutectics.

The Pb/Bi concept is part of the Gen IV program.

I like the Pb/Bi idea. One of the more interesting things about that reactor is that it transmutes a portion of the lead to give the less toxic metal bismuth (of Pepto-Bismol fame.)

This would have the effect of slightly reducing the chemical toxicity of the planet, although I doubt that the effect would ever be huge.

I have always imagined these reactors as being large scale fast reactors though, not small modular reactors.

One of the interesting things is that now, because nuclear fuel as evolved - nuclear power plants have been operating for decades - one can imagine all sorts of things that one could not imagine previously. For instance, in a few decades it will be possible to imagine "reactors" that are like RTG's used in space craft. Curium-244, which is accessible from Amercium has a decay heat of 3MW/MT. One could imagine such types of reactors providing energy in remote locations. Since the resulting plutonium-240 can be fissioned, this decay heat does not actually consume the fuel. Technically, it is a catalytic way of making 4 neutrons to make a helium atom.

The growth of computational power also makes a huge difference. The fuel depletion equations are a set of differential equations that must be solved analytically. One can now run these programs on a home PC, whereas formerly they would have cost millions in computer time.

Actually this goes to show that only a very small subset of possible types of nuclear reactors have been explored.

[hunter]

18. Small reactors like these would be nice to have in your hidey-hole...

It would be the perfect power plant for Dick Cheney's underground bunker.

The security aspects of nuclear reactors under 600 MWe tend to make me nervous. It's easier to keep an eye on a few big things than a lot of little things. Such concerns could be addressed by clustering smaller reactors together in a single location.

The lead-bismuth reactors are very intriguing.

[dcfirefighter]

19. That's what they thought on Dec 6, 1941

Per capita electricity consumption in the US is about 12,500 kWh/y.
This is an average of about 1500W/person.
a 100MWe npp could provide power for 70,000 people (a small city)
a 200MWe npp could provide power for 130,000 people (a medium city)

I agree that there is an economy of scale for security of nuclear power plants, however there is also a critical node factor to account for, as well as a loss of efficiency when long distance transmission lines are required. Cities 'out west' could certainly benefit from nuclear power, but may not have the demand to justify a 3,000 MWe nuclear power complex.

Furthermore, it is my contention that the largest 'terrorist' threat to a npp is some sort of denial attack, where the plant is rendered inoperational, but otherwise safe. Such an attack would be more effective against a 3,000 MWe complex than a 250 MWe npp. I also tend to think that the security economy of scale isn't that great - a smaller plant with fewer employees, less traffic, and more 'known' faces may well be easier to secure than a large complex.

I think other scale economies have a much greater effect of npp siting (the cost of land, the cost of overcoming NIMBYism, the cost of licensing) than the cost of security.

[hunter]

20. That's an interesting analysis.

It is incredibly easy to take down power distribution systems.

I wasn't thinking about security in those terms. Rather I was thinking about security in unstable regions where a long lived and easy to use nuclear reactor would be a very tempting asset to take. Grab those power plants along with the television and radio stations and you've got yourself a nation.

Regarding your other point, there would be plenty of demand for 3,000 MWe power complexes 'out west' if we decided to replace coal fired power plants with nuclear plants.

[dcfirefighter]

21. Rule of thumb for transmission losses?

Does anyone have one?

Wyoming (the extreme case of 'out west' absense of population) currently has a little over 6000 MW summer capacity, very nearly all from coal. They have one 2100 MW plant, one 1667 MW plant, two between 500 and 1000 MW, 2 between 350 and 500, the remainder are less than 100 MW.

It's hard to compete coal when you site the plant on top of the coal seam (and don't have to pay for pollution).

[NNadir]

22. A rule of thumb for transmission losses is about 9%.

See the notes section here: http://eed.llnl.gov/flow/pdf/ucrl-id-129990-99.pdf

It is hard to compete with a coal plant on top of a coal seam in the case where the external cost is ignored.

On top of a coal seam, coal usually beats out nuclear by a small amount on internal costs (plant + fuel).

However in the case of a realistic cost, where carbon dioxide is taxed according to what it costs in economic terms, never mind moral terms, where the cost of disposal at reasonable risk of waste - the disposal of coal waste being largely impossible to date where as so called nuclear waste is easily stored indefinitely - coal can never compete with nuclear anywhere.

The decision to ignore external costs is completely arbitrary and unwise.

The decision to use coal on the basis of its internal costs alone is in effect a decision to subsidize energy using flesh and the habitat of all living things as currency. In this sense it is a subsidy no one can afford, since it easily will lead to vast economic disruption.

[hunter]

23. The Secure Transportable Autonomous Reactor might be less expensive...

... than other reactor designs.

It would be mass produced in one location and shipped out to point of use.



http://www.llnl.gov/str/JulAug04/Smith.html

[NNadir]

24. That's a very interesting design.

I really like how they control reactivity by movement of a reflector. That's something that I certainly never thought of doing.

I wonder what the fuel burn-up for that system would be like. If the reactor is not refueled for 30 years, I would imagine the burn-up would be very high.

It's a cool design.