Renewables Vs. Nuclear

What are the Environmental and Financial Costs?

There are only two questions about future electricity that have to be answered. At what costs environmentally and financially? Hopefully, they would be prioritized in that order. As will be argued here, an uncorrupted nuclear plant design is the only logical decision.

As arguably benign as renewable energy is, the levels of installation required are beyond the pale. The world consumes 100 million barrels of oil a day. To replace that with renewables, entire regions and entire populations would be required not just to maintain it but to replace it at even optimistic attrition rates. Aside from this, there has never been a sci-fi story yet where the future of energy is dreamed to be such a pathetically limited and passive system. Instead, sci-fi writers have always envisioned some fantastical super, on-demand generator like a nuclear reactor only a hundred times better. A super reactor as it were. The true potential of nuclear power.

Conventional reactors have been stunted by a perverse belief that all fuel must be encapsulated or by a deliberate decision to simply not build a reactor the way the laws of physics says is the only way to build a reactor. As such, all reactors can only utilize 1% of the resource mined to fuel them, and then, only at great processing expense. Likewise, they cost a hundred times more to build and pose nearly incalculable risk to people and the environment. And as if that weren’t bad enough, their power production is limited by a factor of dozens.

Anytime half the cost of a plant is in ‘safety’ systems, it should be clear to most that you are dealing with an intrinsically dangerous design. Likewise, if someone says there is a design that is intrinsically safe and requires no safety systems, it is hoped that someone in the crowd would be willing to listen.

Since the dawn of the nuclear age, the physics has remained the same and we have always known how a nuclear plant should be built. By mixing fuel powder into molten bismuth, you create a self-heating fluid that will congeal and encapsulate all the dangerous materials should it ever escape the confines of the reactor. It is really just a more logical version of a molten salt reactor as it uses a coolant that won’t degrade as opposed to a salt molecule that disassociates into its elemental components when subjected to intense radiation fields.

To understand reactor basics, one need only consider the simple engineering goals of eliminating risk, maximizing performance, and minimizing costs.

To the first element of risk, there is a profound difference between controlling risk and eliminating risk. Current reactors spend a king’s ransom controlling risks with triple redundant safety systems. In a molten metal reactor, there is no risk. All hazardous material in entrained in a liquid that will quickly congeal into a solid encapsulant even if such a plant is destroyed in a war. For anyone willing, try performing a thought exercise on what the consequences would be if current nuclear plants were targeted in a war.

As for maximizing performance, current reactors inhibit heat transfer to the coolant and thus the ultimate heat generation rate. In that the ratio between surface area and mass is a function of particle size, making an artificial particle as big as a fuel rod as compared to that of a microscopic particle inhibits heat transfer by thousands fold. The ultimate heat generation rate of a fuel/coolant mixture is only limited by the physical limitations of pumps and heat exchangers. Theoretically speaking, a nuclear reactor can produce any quantity of heat up to that produced in nuclear weapons.

Aside from quantity, a fuel/coolant mixture reactor can not only produce dozens of times more energy for a single investment, it can produce far more useful energy. Current reactors can only heat steam to 700F while an optimized reactor could reasonably achieve 3000F when combined with Molybdenum piping. This advantage would make it possible to use nuclear energy for so many processes that require not only high heat but enormous quantities of heat, like fertilizer or hydrogen production.

Then there is the all-important issue of cost. What good is electricity if 2/3rds of the world’s population can’t afford it? If anyone were willing to listen, the ultimate cost of an optimized reactor would easily exceed ten times less that of any current or imagined electricity source. This is because such a reactor is nearly as simple as the Sun. In that it would only consist of a witch’s cauldron of self-heating metal and steam generating heat exchangers, it would easily avoid 90% of the cost of current reactors.

It is easy to discount a voice in the wilderness claiming that current reactors are the result of a fundamentally criminal financial interest and that the ultimate potential of nuclear reactors is almost too good to be true. But anyone who can honestly say that 1% fuel utilization is nothing at which to look askance is not anyone to whom you should be listening. Likewise, why would you listen to anyone who says we can control the risks and not listen to someone who says we can not only eliminate the risks but eliminate them at a ten-fold reduction in costs?