Physicist dismisses molten salt nuclear reactors as a "waste of time"

there's a great deal of interest right now in canada and small modular reactors and there are a couple of different designs one of them is molten salt technology now professor ramada from the this who is the simon's chair in disarmament global and human security at the lou institute for global issues university of british columbia recently wrote a very interesting article in the conversation and it was titled nuclear power why molten salt reactors are problematic and canada investing in them is a waste so that's a very provocative title i'm going to talk to him about that uh professor ramana welcome to the interview thank you so much for inviting me look uh what's the big problem with molten salt i i've interviewed moltex which is cat one of you know canada's sort of leading molten salt reactor company and they have they give a pretty good uh sales pitch especially the fact that the uh their design they say can burn uh spent can do fuel which seems pretty cool but you say there are problems with it right so what you heard from them was likely a sales pitch as you rightly put it um there are multiple problems with it so there are the to think about the claim that they can burn spent fuel you have to understand that for there are two that that automatically means there are at least two separate components there is one component that is going to deal with the spin fuel and try to convert it into a form where it can be a fuel for a reactor spin fuel by itself just cannot be thrown into a reactor and the reactor operates the second component is the reactor itself and so let's first talk about the reactor itself that's why it's called a molten salt reactor so in most nuclear reactors what happens is that the fuel is in the form of some kind of a solid material a ceramic usually and is cooled by water the water is what takes the heat that is produced by the nuclear fission reactions and transfers it to something which we call a steam turbine that is basically something that converts water into steam which then goes and pushes a turbine that generates electricity in a molten salt reactor uh the heat conduction is done by molten salts and it could also be the case that the fuel itself is also dissolved into these molten salts now moltex is a slightly different design but we don't need to go into that i will talk a little bit more generally about the experience we've had with molten salt reactors so so far there have been two reactors that were constructed of this design both in the united states one in the 1950s and one in the 1960s the one in the 1950s was meant to produce a nuclear-fueled airplane that ran for a very short period of time and they basically dismantled it uh soon after that and then a few years later basically the u.s abandoned the whole idea of a nuclear-fueled airplane uh the following reactor in the 1960s between 1965 and 1969 was operated in the oak ridge national laboratory in tennessee and that particular reactor design is the basis for a lot of molten salt reactor designs so i did some historical research trying to see how that reactor actually uh operated and we found that it actually not operated so well at all it had shut down about 225 times over those four years and about three quarters of those shutdowns were not planned for there were unplanned shutdowns in other words it was not to shut down the reactor to make some change in the configuration change the fuel etc it was just something went wrong and the reactor shut down right and so this is not a basis for building a commercial reactor because you don't want your any power plant to be shutting down this offer okay the second part of the mortec's idea is that you can take the spin fuel and produce fuel with it but to do that what you have to do is to actually pull out of the spent fuel the the materials that can actually be used in the fission reaction in particular plutonium now plutonium as most of your listeners would know uh is the material that can be used to make nuclear weapons and the same technology that pulls out plutonium in any form from spin fuel makes it that much easier to be used in nuclear weapons right uh moltex's claim is that it is not going to be pure plutonium but that doesn't matter because it is like you've done 90 of the work the rest 10 percent of the work can be done by anybody anywhere right and the second thing to note about this particular process it's called pyro processing that they want to use it's been tried in the united states again the track record has been abysmal uh so there it is not managed to uh deal with all the spent fuel from the ebr reactor and um that process has been extremely expensive so all told uh we are thinking about a design which is based on two technologies which have both been unproven and is very unlikely to work now professor romano uh the i guess the the argument from maltex's side as i recall it in the interview is that there's been a lot of work done in the last you know i don't know 10 20 30 years since these other projects were undertaken some of those technical issues have been uh resolved they say others are in the process of being resolved they think they're going to have a working reactor in the late 2020s uh at the earliest maybe early 2030s uh opg ontario power and generation uh thinks the same but you think that it's unlikely that their their scientists and engineers will be able to overcome these challenges yes for a couple of reasons so again you should think historically uh so in canada is a little bit of a late entrance to this smr uh race as it were uh or at least this smr hype uh that we are hearing uh the united states has been at this for a much longer period so in the early 2000s under the bush administration there was a plan where the department of energy looked at a bunch of designs and they said there are several designs which can be commercialized by the end of the decade which means by 2010 now most of those designs that they were talking about is still not commercialized one particular design which has been moving forward called new scale is essentially a scaled down version of a light water reactor which is the most common design so it's a very well-known design just making it smaller and this particular design when the company was set up they were expecting to have it work by 2015 to 2016. now they are talking about 20 29 to 20 30 right so that's one thing to remember that you know all reactors uh designers start by making these tall promises they're invariably not able to materialize this is not going to happen the second thing to remember is that in the case of new scale again i remind people that this is based on a very well known white water reactor design unlike more text which is a completely experimental design the uh company the there's been totally so far about a billion dollars invested in it uh around 330 million from the us department of energy the rest of it coming from private capital and new scale expects to spend another 500 to 700 million us dollars on this so roughly about 1.5 to 2 billion dollars uh us dollars that's not we don't see that kind of investment coming here uh for moltex from any of the governments the government has given them about 50 million dollars which is really a drop in the ocean as it were because to try and convert something which is at the very experimental stage you know theoretical work has been done into a design that can actually be constructed takes a lot of money because any good regulator will ask a lot of hard questions how will this reactor behave under under earthquake how will it behave under a fire to answer all of that you have to do a lot of experiments you have to show employ a lot of engineers and scientists to show that directory will work and that's an expensive process well final question uh professor ramana the there's a an economist named jason dion who did a study on pathways to decarbonize canadian canadian economy and he talked about uh safe bets which are you know renewables electric vehicles those are already commercial and just need to scale up and then he talked about uh uh wild cards and those are technologies that still show promise but you know aren't are nowhere near a safe bet they need a lot of uh work and investment yet to develop them maybe they'll be commercial in the 2030s or 2040s he lists smrs amongst the the wild cards and the argument there is that that these show promise and we should continue to invest in them uh to see if they'll work maybe they will maybe they won't but we should continue investing would you agree agree that smrs are a legitimate wild card and that we should continue development no um and the simple reason is that we know a lot about these uh if you take away the hype that the smr vendors are sort of offering and you look hard at the facts and the technical challenges at the economic challenges which are immense i talked about the investment part of it but also remember that when you go small you are losing out on what are called economies of scale uh all reactors started off small in in most countries and they became larger and larger because they were trying to gain on economies of scale when you build a small reactor you're going ahead against it and nuclear power already even with large reactors is not economical right so that challenges people are not talking about and lastly the historical experience has shown us that many of these designs look great on paper uh but when they actually are trying to construct they just don't perform so well so i am not i don't think of this as a as even a wild card bite i think we have done the experiment we should learn from that experiment and move on well that's a very interesting perspective you're going against the grain and it's good to hear a contrarian point of view on this so thank you very much for your insights thank you very much really appreciate that

Channel: Energi Media

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Length: 10min 57sec (657 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 11 2021