High time somebody in Europe besides France (which has faltered after its EDF was bullied into privatization) saw that nuclear is the only clean fuel big enough to put fossil carbon out of existence. How many people know that it isn't a fossil fuel, unless you count gold as a fossil reserve too? The uranium and thorium are most of what's kept the Earth's core molten for 4,500 million years.
If wind had any prospects, we'd be building sail-powered merchant ships. The US Navy's capital ships save millions of gallons of oil, probably billions, by using highly enriched uranium. And that's a primitive use. The liquid fueled thorium reactor uses a non-fissile main fuels, and a starter arrangement for the first charge of fissile material (surplus plutonium from retired nuclear bombs could be used), and from thene on converts the thorium to fissile uranium and consumes it. There is no long-lived waste, and the fission product waste works out at about a ton for the amount of energy that requires about two million tons of coal. The input consumed is, of course, about a ton of thorium.
Good on paper. The Halden test reactor (above) provides steam to Norske Skog's neighboring paper mill.
Nuclear reactors generate electricity. Everyone knows that. The general idea is simple: Start a chain reaction that creates a lot of heat and capture the heat to drive a turbine and make electricity, just as with coal- and gas-fired power plants,
But aren’t there other uses for heat? Don’t industries like steel, cement, petrochemicals, oil and many others require high temperature processes that manufacturers feed with C02-spewing fossil fuels? Wouldn’t it make sense to use small reactors instead, and thereby shrivel the leviathan carbon footprint left by those mighty mills that are stamping out goods and materials without which modern society cannot live?
Yes it would. And one country - Norway - is showing the way.
Its small test reactor in the town of Halden is furnishing steam to a nearby paper mill, according to the “Material Testing Reactors” website published by France’s Energy and Alternative Energies Commission (CEA). Wikipedia identifies the user as the Saugbrugs paper mill, operated by Norske Skog Corp.
Halden by night. That's not a nuclear glow. Just the lit up fortress.
The Halden test reactor is jointly operated by the 34-nation Paris-based Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Countries like France and others use it to investigate new nuclear possibilities (it is the site of thorium trials set to start next month in which privately held Thor Energy will run thorium as a potentially superior replacement for uranium fuel).
Those countries will be keeping an eye on the steamy business at the paper mill, which is potentially just a warm-up act, so to speak, to much higher temperature processes that alternative nuclear designs could provide.
The Halden reactor is essentially a small, conventional reactor that runs at about 240 degrees C - hot enough for steam, but not toasty enough for searing industrial processes, the World Nuclear Association explains.
But alternative designs like liquid molten salt reactors and pebble bed reactors operate at significantly higher temperatures, in some cases, around 700 degrees C. One design that uses lead bismuth as a coolant (coolants such as water in conventional reactors absorb heat from reactions and transfer that heat to the turbine) can exceed well over 1,000 degrees C.
Build these in compact versions that can easily fit into factories, and you’re looking at a carbon light industrial future. Halden is taking one small step in that direction.
Photos: Reactor from Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) via Wikimedia. Halden at night from Bård Halvorsen First, via Wikimedia.
More hot and alternative nuclear, on SmartPlanet:
- The shortest route: Russia ships gas to Japan, via Artic. Oh what a nuclear powered icebreaker can can do!
- Son of China’s ex-president: Thorium will help shape country’s energy future
- Norway ringing in thorium nuclear New Year with Westinghouse at the party
- Steel mill mulls thorium nuclear reactor for process heat
- How nuclear will make oil greener
