Someone Else’s Top Ten

We know it’s getting to be top ten time of the year (and decade), but we’ve never really enjoyed these summary wrap-ups. After all, time like the tide is rather fluid and what seemed most important in the short term of a year fades before much more time has passed. Even the top ten movies or albums seem vagrant, the results of a passing fancy.

So, speaking for ourselves, we’ll probably bypass the mania for top ten and move right on to passing you along to someone else’s top ten list. It both confirms and spoils our potted formulation.

It is Greentechmedia’s Top Ten High Concepts of 2009. We actually like it because it focuses on items that may not come to fruition at all, but simply demonstrate the good work that goes on in industry and university labs all the time. The great thing about such projects is that they can be quite valuable even when not workable – the lessons learned can be quite instructive.

Take, for example, number 3:

Osmotic Pressure Gradients: In OPGs, fresh water passes through a membrane, drawn through by an inherent attraction to a vat of salty water on the other side. As the volume of water increases in the salty tank, pressure builds, which can be used to crank a turbine.

We’d have to read more about this to see how it decreases the pressure or what you do with the salinated fresh water – can’t put it back where you got it, presumably – but pretty neat.

But despite the interest in this and other entries like Instant Oil and a Solar Air Conditioner, we were interested in the first and second entries. Number 1:

Nuclear Goes Mod(ular): NuScale Power, Sandia National Labs, TerraPower and Babcock & Wilcox discussed plans to build and/or license small reactors that could produce 45 to 125 megawatts of power.

We’ve written about these a fair amount and they’ve picked up tremendous interest – both here, where a couple of bills encouraging their development are moving through Congress, and overseas, too, where their potential could be enormous.

If anything holds them back, it’s that no design has been approved by the NRC – none submitted, mind you, but still, such design licensing can take years and be a real business inhibitor. Hopefully, Congress can move on that, too, and provide resources so the NRC can review these units quickly.

And number 2:

Fusion: Livermore National Labs showed off a system in which 192 high powered lasers focused on tiny capsule of hydrogen could generate fusion power.

When we’ve written about fusion, it’s usually to make fun of it – not that it shouldn’t be taken seriously, even by us. But it’s been around long enough that it has inspired a fan base that has followed its travails for years and years (and inspires hobbyists to make their own fusion reactors). Maybe it’s that there’s a faint whiff of alchemy around fusion, as it takes the electricity generation of a small country to light a bulb. We joke, but getting the resource-to-result ratio right is a big stumbling block.

Here’s the next sentence in the entry on fusion: “Scientists hope to show it can work in 2010 or 2011.” As we always do (and have for years and years), we wish them luck.

Read the whole thing – lots of fun technology.

An osmotic pressure plant. Osmotic pressure works the other way, too, desalinating water.

[Oasys] is using what it calls engineered osmosis. Unlike conventional desalination systems, the Oasys system establishes an osmotic pressure gradient instead of using pressure or heat to force water through a purifying membrane. The approach exploits the fact that water naturally flows from a dilute region to one that's more concentrated when the two solutions are separated by a semipermeable material, thereby saving the energy normally needed to drive the process.

So, to answer our question above, we presume you can do a two way osmotic pressure exchange that both salinates and desalinates water. See here for more.

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

Below is from our rapid response team . Yesterday, regional anti-nuclear organizations asked federal nuclear energy regulators to launch an investigation into what it claims are “newly identified flaws” in Westinghouse’s advanced reactor design, the AP1000. During a teleconference releasing a report on the subject, participants urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend license reviews of proposed AP1000 reactors. In its news release, even the groups making these allegations provide conflicting information on its findings. In one instance, the groups cite “dozens of corrosion holes” at reactor vessels and in another says that eight holes have been documented. In all cases, there is another containment mechanism that would provide a barrier to radiation release. Below, we examine why these claims are unwarranted and why the AP1000 design certification process should continue as designated by the NRC. Myth: In the AP1000 reactor design, the gap between the shield bu...

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

Several weeks ago Joshua Pearce at Clarion University in Pennsylvania released a study titled “ Thermodynamic limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology .” In the study he stated... nuclear energy production would have to increase by 10.5% per year from 2010 to 2050 to both replace fossil-fuel-energy use and meet the future energy demands. This line, of course, made the headlines and has been picked up by several outlets and blogs . When looking into his calculations for this statement, he made one assumption error that overstated the above sentence by nearly a factor of three. Page 121, Section 4.1 of the study states: Richard Smalley pointed out that in 2004, the global economy consumed the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil per day, which converted into electricity terms is the equivalent of 14.5 TeraWatts (TW), or 14,500,000 MegaWatts (MW) (2005). … With a nuclear plant having about 1000 MW (1 GW) of capacity, we would need 14,500...

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

You may have noticed over the past few weeks that a number of nuclear plants are shut down for refueling outages or are resuming operations after just returning from one. This type of routine outage usually occurs in the spring or fall when electricity demand is low so that nuclear reactors can replace about one-third of the spent fuel rods with new fuel and conduct other routine maintenance and repairs at the plant. To get a better sense of how refueling works at a nuclear energy facility, I spoke with Marcus Nichol, NEI’s senior project manager for used fuel storage and transportation, and asked him to explain the basics. Why does a nuclear plant need to replace one-third of its fuel? Nichol: The main purpose of a refueling outage is to replace older fuel that is depleted—meaning it can no longer efficiently produce energy from nuclear fission reactions—with new fuel. This “used fuel” has typically been used in the reactor for four-and-a-half to six years before it is pe...

NEI Nuclear Notes

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