Can There Be Nuclear Reactors That Consume Their Own Radioactive Wastes?

With mankind’s energy demand slated to double in the next 30 years, will a nuclear reactor that burns its own radioactive wastes provide an answer? 

By: Ringo Bones 

With coal burning power plants that emit excessive carbon dioxide no longer viable in our increasingly climate change conscious global village, is there a power plant that provides reliable safe and competitively priced energy with the extremely low carbon dioxide output of traditional nuclear fission power plants? If Leslie Dewan gets her way, there will probably be – and lots of them. 

Leslie Dewan CEO of TransAtomic Power already has plans for a “carbon neutral” energy generating power plant sans the risk and waste disposal problems of current nuclear fission power plants. Dewan was also named Time magazine’s 30 people under 30 that changed the world in 2013. Leslie Dewan got the idea of a nuclear fission power plant that consumes its own long-lived nuclear wastes back in February 2010 together with TransAtomic Power co-founder Mark Massie while working on her white-paper finishing her PhD in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Dewan and Massie turned to a nuclear fission power plant technology developed but never commercialized in the 1950s due to its relatively high initial building cost in comparison to competing designs - i.e. the  light-water fission reactors that comprise 99-percent of commercial power plants that had been in operation for over 50 years. The TransAtonic Power's WAMSR or Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor - can burn spent nuclear fuel safely in a liquid salt reactor instead of a traditional light water reactor similar to the design used in the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant that went into a tragic meltdown after the March 2011 tsunami.

TransAtomic Power's WAMSR or Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor, it is way safer than current nuclear fission power plants – even from a defense analyst’s / counter-terror analyst’s point of view – because the uranium fuel assembly used to start WAMSR is “too diluted” to be used in a uranium-235 based nuclear device. On the long-lived radioactive waste issue, WAMSR produces only 20 to 30 kilograms of long-lived atomic wastes a year – like the “notorious” neptunium-237 which has a half-life of 2.2-million years (it still contains half of its radioactive strength after laying around for 2.2-million years) that can still be fashioned, with some skill, into a crude nuclear bomb. 

This is way less than a conventional commercial light-water nuclear reactor which generates 20 to 30 tons of long-lived highly radioactive wastes in a typical year of operation. Speaking of the long-lived radwaste issue, commercial light-water nuclear fission power plants currently in operation have a current stockpile of 270,000 metric tons worth of long-lived radwastes whose permanent disposal is still in Limbo. Would TransAtomic Power’s WAMSR plant provide a viable solution?

Unfortunately, TransAtomic Power currently only has 3.5-million US dollars in government funding, way less than the billions of dollars of “subsidies” rubber-stamped by “conservative politicians” at Capitol Hill to conventional commercial light-water reactors currently in operation in strategic areas in the United States. In economic viability terms, TransAtomic Power’s WAMSR nuclear fission power plant only has half the operating cost per megawatt generated when compared to conventional commercial light-water nuclear fission power plants. If Uncle Sam green-lights Dewan and Massie’s proposal, it would take 8 to 10 years to open a Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor and probably just a few years to solve the United States’ high-level long-lived radioactive waste disposal and future energy problems. 

Whatever Happened To The Schadewald Gravity Engine?

Its working principles were described a few years after the OPEC Crude Oil Embargo of 1973 as a solution to the global energy crisis, but does anyone know whatever happened to the Schadewald Gravity Engine? 

By: Ringo Bones 

The October 17, 1973 OPEC Crude Oil Embargo and its impact on the energy hungry West finally made everyone realize that we are not only addicted to crude oil – and still are until this very day – but are also very dependent on non-renewable energy sources. Given that the still ongoing global energy crisis and our desperate search for viable solutions had for sometime established some so-called “perpetual motion energy religious cult” for sometime now - as if devotees of the “Our Lady of Perpetual Motion” already has the free energy problem already worked out. Speaking of energy generating machines that relies on the principle of perpetual motion, does anyone still remember the Schadewald Gravity Engine of the late 1970s? 

The late, great physicist Paul A. M. Dirac conjectured that the universal force of gravity slowly decreasing. If this is true, consider a wheel with one heavy weight at the top. As the weight rotates to the bottom, the wheel picks up kinetic energy, which transfers back to potential energy as the weight swings up the other side. Since gravity is decreasing, the value of g is less on the second part of the full revolution, it follows that there should be a net gain in kinetic energy, causing the wheel to speed up indefinitely with every revolution. 

Science writer Robert Schadewald reported this breakthrough as his own in Science Digest back in April 1, 1978 – a time where the 1973 OPEC Crude Oil Embargo was still topically fresh in everyone’s minds. Schadewald even closed the article by quoting: “As of April 1, 1978, I yield my invention to the public domain, that it may solve the energy crisis and bring peace and prosperity to the world. I ask only my initials be inscribed on the wheel of every engine, so that my genius may get the sort of recognition it deserves. – Bob Schadewald.” Given that he surrendered his invention to the public domain, free energy devotees of the late 1970s became very euphoric after reading the article. 

Despite such bold hints that the article was intended as an April Fools’ Joke, Schadewald was taken seriously, even by the scientific community at the time. Some people wrote him and asked for more information. Others sent drawings of their own machines that allegedly work on the same Dirac – based principle and one person even offered to buy the plans quite convinced in believing that the physics and mathematics behind the Schadewald Gravity Engine were valid. Given the hints of “credibility” of the physics and mathematics behind the device, whatever happened to the Schadewald Gravity Engine? 

Artificial Photosynthesis: Clean Energy’s Holy Grail?

Given that unsustainable fossil fuel burning has now endangered our planet’s fragile climate, will artificial photosynthesis based energy generation be the clean and sustainable energy production’s “Holy Grail”? 

By: Ringo Bones 

Given the recent dire UN IPCC irreversible climate change warning, it seems that if humanity can master an energy generating system based on photosynthesis used by plants for millions of years would not only serve as a very viable clean, sustainable and renewable energy production for industrial use but also serve as a viable way of cleaning up the excess carbon dioxide already in the earth’s atmosphere produced by decades of uncontrolled fossil fuel burning. But is there an inherent difficulty of artificial photosynthesis that it is now labeled as the “Holy Grail” of cleaning up the energy generation systems of our industrialized world. 

Joel Ager of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories is just one of the 5 energy research labs in the United States currently working to develop a viable way to replicate photosynthesis in generating energy for industrial use. Their latest prototype is an “artificial leaf” that uses sunlight to convert carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and water to convert it into methanol / methyl alcohol but in a chemical reaction that’s ten times faster than typical plant based reactions found in nature. Once perfected, artificial photosynthesis could provide a truly carbon neutral way to generate electricity to power the wheels of industry. Though this is the latest phase of the development of artificial photosynthesis, research into the concept has been around for a few decades now. 

Back in 1980, “splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen via ordinary sunlight” has been a goal of photochemists finding ways to wean industry from its heavy dependence on crude oil when it comes to energy generation. Michael Grätzel and his team at Lausanne, Switzerland had devised a system with special catalysts that carries out this process with high efficiency. The catalytic material consists of platinum and ruthenium dioxide deposited on titanium dioxide. A notable feature of the system is that it is effective over long periods, with hydrogen production undiminished after two days of ordinary sunlight exposure. 

Low Cost Solar Thermal Power Plants: Sunny Future?

With increasing concerns over the deleterious effect of excess industrial activity produced carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, are low cost solar thermal power plants the viable long-term answer?

By: Ringo Bones 

Here’s a solar energy generation concept that could surely make solar power advocate Ed Begley, Jr. blush, but could low cost solar thermal power plants be a practical and economically viable long term solution in curbing our conventional power generating activity from dumping excess carbon dioxide gas into the Earth’s atmosphere? Luckily, the idea seems to point a sunny future on the concept of affordable renewable energy power generation. 

A civil engineer named Andrea Pedretti says constructing low cost solar thermal power plants using simple aluminized plastic foil is up to 50 times cheaper than the glass based mirrors currently used as the parabolic mirror through in a solar thermal power plant. Aluminized plastic foils found in the market today are now about as corrosion resistant as the glass based mirrors currently used in solar thermal power plant construction. Given that aluminized plastic foils used as a mirror are much lighter than their glass based counterparts, most of the financial savings in constructing these types of solar thermal power plants could mostly come from using cheaper support structures bearing much lighter loads.   

Andrea Pedretti’s low cost solar thermal power plant concept had been tested in a Moroccan cement factory and shows results on par with their costlier rivals that use conventional glass based mirrors on their parabolic through arrays that heat the working substance – like oil or water – that generate power by being directed to drive a dynamo type electrical generator. If scaled up, aluminized plastic foil based low cost solar thermal power plants could finally make practical clean solar power available to the parts of the world who can’t afford conventional solar thermal power plants. If the concept becomes successful, who needs the groundwater pollution risks of fracking. 

Helium 3: Clean Energy Source Of The Future?

Even though we have yet to design a practical nuclear fusion power plant that can economically use helium 3 as a fuel, does it really represent a clean energy source of the future?

By: Ringo Bones

All of our experimental controlled nuclear fusion power plants use helium 3 as a starting material. Unfortunately, a lot of experimental fusion power plants working on the ignition principle seems to be only able to sustain nuclear fusion for a few fractions of a second while those more ingeniously designed ones based on the working principles of Ballotechnic Superfluid are woefully underfunded, does this make the promised potential of an atomic isotope of a gas currently used to make balloons float called helium 3 be forever be in the far-off future? But even if we managed to design a practical controlled nuclear fusion power plant to use it tomorrow, do we ever know where to find it? But first, here’s what we know so far about helium 3.

As of 2011, even though it is still a laboratory curiosity, helium 3 can already be purchased at a rather steep price of 3,000 US dollars a liter. Ordinary, low-cost helium used for making balloons float are sourced from natural gas wells – primarily from Texas and adjacent states in the United States - where it comprises 1.75 per cent of the gas with 0.5 per cent carbon dioxide mixed in while the rest is methane. Some natural gas wells in Tajikistan and Turkmenistan contain a higher percentage of helium 3 compared to ordinary helium in comparison to other natural gas wells elsewhere on Earth, but most helium 3 on Earth – given its scarcity – primarily came from Cold War era atmospheric Hydrogen Bomb tests a little over 50 years ago before being halted by test ban treaties.

As we just recently found out, the closest abundant – and might be economically viable – store of helium 3 is on our Moon. Almost all of the helium 3 found on the Moon is primarily produced by our Sun and it got there via the solar wind and the occasional coronal mass ejection or two. Sadly as well as fortunately, the Earth’s magnetosphere deflects most of these radioactive helium 3 particles that came from our Sun to land on the Moon instead of increasing everyone’s incidence of cancer here on Earth. Back in July 1969, Neil Armstrong and his Apollo 11 team set-up the “aluminum foil” experiment on the Moon’s surface. The purpose of which to use the aluminum foil to capture atomic particles thrown off by the solar wind which are otherwise deflected by the Earth’s magnetosphere. Upon bringing back the foil for an extensive lab analysis at NASA, it was found out that the aluminum foil used in the Lunar surface experiment managed to capture a high percentage of helium 3 atoms – as well as atoms of argon and neon caught in the stream of the solar wind.

Integral Fast Reactor: The Safe Nuclear Fission Reactor?

Shaken by the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and more recently, the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster, will the IFR fulfill the nuclear energy industry’s needs for a safe nuclear fission power plant? 

By: Ringo Bones 

For over 50 years, the world has been waiting for the dream of the practical nuclear fusion energy to be realized – but engineers at Argonne National Laboratory had already tested the supposedly safe next generation of that old and much-abused standby – the nuclear fission reactor. Since 1991, nuclear engineers at Argonne had not only tested but had built a kind of nuclear fission reactor that not only is inherently safe but also consumes its own dangerous radioactive wastes – including dangerous radioactive wastes from other older commercial fission nuclear power plants. 

The Argonne nuclear engineers’ design is dubbed the Integral Fast Reactor or IFR that uses high-energy or “fast” neutrons to trigger the nuclear fission chain reaction. In contrast, conventional light-water reactors which are currently used by over 99% of the global nuclear fission power plant industry typically slow their neutrons down with a “moderator” like graphite rods or heavy water. And given that fast neutrons can cause many more types of elements to undergo fission, the IFR is not limited to using uranium and plutonium that conventional commercial nuclear fission reactors use as fuel. 

The IFR can also use the highly radioactive elements with half-lives of tens of thousands or even a few million years that are by-products of uranium and plutonium fission that are deemed as “radioactive wastes” as its own fuel. By separating the long-lived radioactive isotopes out of the waste stream, nuclear power plant operators using the IFR type nuclear fission reactor will finally eliminate the problem of having a huge inventory of radioactive wastes that requires hundreds of thousands, and like neptunium-237, even a few million years of containment. And unlike the more familiar breeder-type nuclear fission reactors still operating in Europe and Japan, the IFR can “burn” plutonium rather than producing it. It thus precludes the possibility that a cache of nuclear weapons-grade fuel might fall into the hands of rogue states and terrorist bomb makers – lessening the headache of the International Atomic Energy Commission when it comes to “auditing” potential nuclear weapons-grade materials used by most typical commercial nuclear fission power plants. 

The other great advantage of the IFR, according to its designers at Argonne, is a safety system that makes it virtually resistant against those catastrophic loss-of-coolant accidents that crippled the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and more recently the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant during the Japanese tsunami of March 11, 2011. The IFR’s fuel assembly is designed in such a way that it would actually expand if it started to get too hot. This thermal expansion would allow more neutrons to escape from the reactor core and since it is the neutrons that trigger fission, the neutron leakage would slow the chain reaction and eventually bring it to a halt – before a disastrous core meltdown could occur. And given the lack of progress in the commercial applications of nuclear fusion, the IFR seems to be the only near-term technology currently available that can provide a huge energy source while addressing global warming and environmental concerns over excessive carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions in commercial power generation.