Nuclear experts head for China to test experimental reactors
CHINA is becoming the testing ground for a new breed of nuclear power stations designed to be safer and cheaper, as scientists from the US and other Western nations fi nd it difficult to raise enough money to build experimental plants at home.
China National Nuclear Power Co. this month announced a joint venture to build and operate a “travelling wave reactor” in Hebei province, designed by Bellevue, Washington-based TerraPower, whose chairman is Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The development follows Canada’s SNC-Lavalin, which has agreed to build a new recycled-fuel plant with China National Nuclear Corp. and Shanghai Electric Group, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is working with the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics on a salt- cooled system.
“China is where is the demand exists and where willing partners exist for this kind of plant,” said TerraPower President Chris Levesque, whose company has been working on the travellingwave technology for a decade. “It is really encouraging when your partners are announcing a site.”
While most advanced economies are slowly pivoting to energy sources like solar and wind, China’s soaring energy demand means it’s spending billions on new power plants across the energy spectrum, from coal and natural gas, to renewables and nuclear. China has the world’s most aggressive reactor construction plan, with the goal of boosting its nuclear power capacity by about 70 per cent to 58 gigawatts by 2020.
“The outlook for nuclear power is brighter there than anywhere else in the world,” said M. V. Ramana, a professor at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia. “It is not so difficult for a company developing a nuclear reactor design to find a partner.”
The systems proposed belong to the so- called fourth generation of reactors. The current generation under construction include enhanced safety features following the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011, but still typically use traditional fuel rods, cooled by water under pressure. Both Areva and Westinghouse Electric are slated to turn on their current-generation nuclear reactors in the next year in China – well ahead of any other nation, despite delays.
Some Generation IV designs aim to cut construction costs by using coolants that work at atmospheric pressure – reducing the need for massive containment structures. Many recycle their fuel, reducing the need for uranium, and in some cases are fail- safe without intervention if something goes wrong.
In a pebble-bed reactor, for example, thousands of tiny fuel seeds encased in tennis-ball sized graphite “pebbles” can withstand much higher heat.
In the event of an accident or loss of coolant, the rising temperature automatically shuts down the nuclear reaction.
Beijing’s Tsinghua University has been running a small experimental pebble-bed reactor on campus since 2003 and has worked on the technology in cooperation with researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US China Nuclear Engineering Construction Corp. is now building the world’s fi rst commercial plants using the technology, including one in Shandong province, south of Beijing, that is due to connect to China’s grid next year.
Some of the new designs, including TerraPower’s travelling wave unit, are breeder reactors that produce more atomic fuel than they consume, reducing the need to add costly processed nuclear elements. Some are designed to burn spent fuel from conventional reactors, or fi ssile material from decommissioned nuclear warheads.
Coolants include liquid sodium, gases and molten metal. Some use thorium instead of uranium to power the reaction.
Still, the theories behind many of the proposed systems aren’t new and often date back to the 1950s and ‘60s.
Some experimental plants have been built, such as the fast breeder reactors in the UK and US. Most suffered from crippling cost or design problems or were abandoned after nuclear accidents.
“Most if not all of these socalled advanced reactor designs have been around for decades,” said Ramana at the Liu Institute. “Different designs have different problems. I don’t think anyone can be or should be confident that these problems can be resolved merely by throwing money and hiring engineers and scientists.”
TerraPower’s travelling-wave design is based on research by Saveli Feinberg, a physicist who fi rst proposed it in the 1950s. Levesque says that advancements in computing in the last decade have revolutionised the ability to develop these technologies. “You couldn’t get it near the concept without the computer modelling,” he said. — WP-Bloomberg