NEI Nuclear Notes

In talking about the budget for the Department of Energy and particularly its Office of Nuclear Energy, we often zero in, logically enough, on the Appropriations Committees in the House and Senate. These are the committees that will ultimately determine what the budget will be. While appropriations committees determine what money is given to various programs, authorizing committees decide the general policies and programs that Appropriators can fund. In talking about the budget for the Department of Energy and particularly the Office of Nuclear Energy, the general policies and programs are decided in the House by the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee . And what this committee decides show how things might go over the next year and beyond. The Science Committee members have consistently expressed a lot of interest in next-generation nuclear technology – and on a bipartisan basis. That brings us to this amendment from Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.): Developing an advanc...

The uptick in public interest in the weather would seem to focus attention on the potential impacts of climate change – if you think outlandishly big storms are a symptom of it, that is – but what remains of primary importance is that people keep the heat and lights on. Obviously, the big Nor’easter now bearing down on New York, Boston and all the way to Philadelphia is the news of the day, so we thought we’d check in on the 24 reactors that cover the region. The news is good – 23 are operating at 100 percent capacity and the 24th is at 88 percent. Let’s let the coal and natural gas folks tout their own capacity factor, but I’ll wager this tops them by a margin. Bragging rights doesn’t trump the need for people to keep safe, of course, but a reliable system of power generators enhances that effort considerably. We’ll check in tomorrow and see how things are going as (and if) the storm really wallops the region. --- Tropical storms and hurricanes are named by the World Mete...

It’s a short story in Scientific American that might make you say, Uh-oh, here we go: Lockheed Martin Corp said on Wednesday it had made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready in a decade. Now, Lockheed Martin is certainly a legitimate outfit – my father worked there for years - and likely wouldn’t make a statement of this sort unless it were serious. Still, there are some red flags: Tom McGuire, who heads the project, said he and a small team had been working on fusion energy at Lockheed's secretive Skunk Works for about four years, but were now going public to find potential partners in industry and government for their work. Words such as secretive don’t inspire confidence, especially for what would be a gigantic breakthrough. Four years also seems odd, given the much longer amounts of time that other fusion projects, such as ITER and ...

A project on Indiegogo: Scientists at LPP Fusion, led by Chief Scientist Eric Lerner, are just one step away from this groundbreaking technology and we need your help for the final push. One step away! That’s pretty exciting, belying the fusion joke that a breakthrough is always five years away – unless of course that’s how long the step takes. Rising energy costs and resource scarcity are concerns shared by the developed and developing world alike.  We need the ultimate renewable energy technology in the form of fusion energy, the source of energy for the Sun and stars.  If we can succeed, Focus Fusion's low cost and easily distributed electricity will eliminate both global energy poverty and global air pollution once and for all.  Bold in original – and bold in concept. One thing you should not do when selling fusion is rank on fission. Bad form. Today, nuclear energy means nuclear fission, which raises issues like long-lived radioactive waste a...

News from Wisconsin: Phoenix Nuclear Labs (PNL), the Monona startup that has developed a particle accelerator-based neutron generator , announced a two-year, $1 million grant from the U.S. Energy Department to design and build a “high current negative hydrogen ion source.” That description at the end sounds a lot like fusion. The project has applications for physics research, medical cyclotrons, semiconductor manufacturing, and—over the long term—trying to achieve “abundant, clean, nuclear fusion energy,” PNL said. So fusion is a misty dream of the future while more achievable goals come first. I have no particular brief on Phoenix or its prospects, but sometimes we forget that what we call nuclear energy has applications that have nothing whatever to do with making electricity. Of course, there are medical applications (a field Phoenix also wants to be in), but I’d say an understanding of its potential and actual use beyond electricity and medicine is, for many peo...

Westinghouse previews a forum taking place today in Toronto called The Future of Nuclear. Westinghouse has no reactors in Canada and isn’t trying to sell any in its press release, which does include some interesting tidbits : "With 55 per cent of Ontario's energy being generated by nuclear, and given the province's commitment to clean-air sources of energy, nuclear cannot be ignored as a vital part of Ontario's energy mix," says Ron Lewis, vice president, Nuclear Power Plant Business and Project Development, Westinghouse Electric Company. That 55 percent figure is new  - it’s a little higher than I’ve seen before - and I’m not enough up on Canadian energy markets to know how much of that is exported to Ontario’s neighbors. That said, Ontario is the only province to aggressively pursue nuclear energy, with five facilities housing 20 reactors. Quebec and New Brunswick have 2 and 1 reactors respectively, with Quebec’s retired. When we looked at Canadian nuclear...

When the sun makes energy through nuclear fusion, it has the benefit of not having to pay real cash for the energy expended to make more energy. Here on Earth, the effort to make fusion energy affordable and practical has been a lot tougher, though the payout is potentially so great – and the benefits manifest - that much effort has gone into it. Every now and then we get a peek into the fusion world, which is almost always almost ready to almost produce a plausible reactor. And this will happen – I’m sure of it – someday . To create fusion reactions , the NIF [National Ignition Facility] scientists fire lasers into a hohlraum, or a hollow cylinder made of gold. The laser pulses, lasting billionths of a second, hit a tiny sphere that is full of deuterium (hydrogen with an extra neutron) and tritium (hydrogen with two extra neutrons). As the laser beams hit the hohlraum, the gold emits X-rays that are so powerful they vaporize the metal surface of the sphere. That vapor...

We sometimes bring up nuclear fusion as an object of fun, because activists say that fusion will scale successfully and become commercially viable in 10 years or so – and have been saying so for at least  20 years. That’s one joke. Another one is that it takes a city to power a town with fusion energy because it requires a lot of electricity to produce a little energy. None of this is (completely) fair, of course, and there are several projects exploring the use of fusion. The most significant of these is the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). ITER is a large-scale scientific experiment that aims to demonstrate that it is possible to produce commercial energy from fusion. This undertaking requires a full-scale reactor – in fact, a full-scale facility. ITER is located in France and financed by the European Union, China, Russia, South Korea, Japan, India and the United States – the big boys and girls of the nuclear world. (The EU is shouldering ab...

It’s like the doublemint twins at the University of Texas at Austin. The researchers — Mike Kotschenreuther, Prashant Valanju and Swadesh Mahajan of the College of Natural Sciences — have patented the concept for a novel fusion-fission hybrid nuclear reactor that would use nuclear fusion and fission together to incinerate nuclear waste. Fusion produces energy by fusing atomic nuclei, and fission produces energy by splitting atomic nuclei. How does it work? The researchers’ patent covers a tokamak device, which uses magnetic fields to produce fusion reactions. The patented tokamak is surrounded by an area that would house a nuclear waste fuel source and waste by-products of the nuclear fuel cycle. The device is driven by a transformational technology called the Super X Divertor. The Super X Divertor is a crucial technology that has the capacity to safely divert the enormous amounts of heat out of the reactor core to keep the reactor producing energy. I guess this me...

Our fusion fan friends will need to let us know how consequential this is: UT [University of Tennessee] researchers have successfully developed a key technology in developing an experimental reactor that can demonstrate the feasibility of fusion energy for the power grid. Nuclear fusion promises to supply more energy than the nuclear fission used today but with far fewer risks. It’s not (just) that I’m automatically dubious about fusion projects – if it’s fusion it’s just around the corner - but this one seems very early: UT researchers completed a critical step this week for the project by successfully testing their technology this week that will insulate and stabilize the central solenoid—the reactor's backbone. That feels like step two of a process with many, many steps. Read the rest of the story and decide – break out the champagne or let it get – a little more – aged? --- China Daily offers a little fusion doings: Russian academic Evgeny Velikhov w...

We always have time for some good news: A three-judge panel at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) denied a filing by Massachusetts to stop the relicensing of Entergy's 685-megawatt Pilgrim nuclear power plant in Massachusetts. This had never seemed a good bet for Massachusetts, which had based its contention on events at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi. Since the NRC is working to apply lessons learned from Fukushima to the American fleet, the state’s contention seemed irrelevant. But – there are further steps to be taken: The NRC said the state could appeal the ASLB ruling against its Fukushima contention to the five-member, presidentially appointed Commission that oversees the NRC. The ASLB is is the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board , which handles these issues. It was the ASLB that created a minor tempest when it ruled the Department of Energy could not withdraw its license application for Yucca Mountain from the NRC. This is smaller in scope, but an important step to...

A few posts down, we spotlighted continued support for nuclear energy from Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. The billionaire’s club may not be big, but it certainly is interested in energy issues. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has contributed to a $19.5 million round of funding for Canadian nuclear fusion startup General Fusion, marking the web billionaire’s first major investment in nuclear energy. General Fusion describes itself as a venture capital funded company, so this infusion will doubtless be very welcome. Here’s how the company describes what it is doing: General Fusion’s approach is based on “magnetized target fusion” concepts first developed about 30 years ago. This approach is a hybrid of traditional “magnetic fusion” and “inertial confinement fusion” methods, and involves first confining plasma in a magnetic field, and then compressing the confined plasma to thermonuclear conditions. General Fusion’s patent-pending fusion technology involves the equipment nee...

We’re pretty sure this is how we got The Incredible Hulk: The NIF [National Ignition Facility] team will fire nearly 200 individual laser beams generated by an accelerator the size of a football field. The beams converge on a single target chamber containing a capsule of hydrogen. The hope is to compress it, and creating a subatomic reaction called fusion, ultimately igniting a controlled version of the same thermo-nuclear combustion that takes place on the sun. Yes, this would indeed be fusion, under the auspices of the Lawrence Livermore Labs in California. We have demonstrated that we can break every barrier," said NIF project manager Bruno Van Wonterghem. "We have broken the energetics barrier for the largest laser in the world. This is not only the highest energy laser, it is also the most precision laser in the world." "And believe it or not, this is where we take the hydrogen in water and using Einstein's equation, turn mass into energy...

At least that's what scientists at the University of Gothenburg may have determined. Science Daily has the story : Ultra-dense deuterium is a million times more dense than frozen deuterium, making it relatively easy to create a nuclear fusion reaction using high-power pulses of laser light. “If we can produce large quantities of ultra-dense deuterium, the fusion process may become the energy source of the future. And it may become available much earlier than we have thought possible”, says Leif Holmlid. “Further, we believe that we can design the deuterium fusion such that it produces only helium and hydrogen as its products, both of which are completely non-hazardous. It will not be necessary to deal with the highly radioactive tritium that is planned for use in other types of future fusion reactors, and this means that laser-driven nuclear fusion as we envisage it will be both more sustainable and less damaging to the environment than other methods that are being developed.” And...

Sometimes, you just have to do for yourself, so if you want nuclear power, you build a reactor. The Wall Street Journal's Sam Schnecter reports on a group of science fiction fans and amateur scientists who are working on home-based fusion reactors: Getting into their elite "Neutron Club" requires building a tabletop reactor that successfully fuses hydrogen isotopes and glows like a miniature star. Only 42 have qualified; some have T-shirts that read "Fusion -- been there...done that." Like many such projects, it has its quixotic side, since fusion works well for, oh, the sun, but practical applications are harder to come by: But they won't be powering homes anytime soon - for now, fusors use far more energy than they produce. [Fusors are the tabletop reactors.] For now and likely, for the foreseeable future. But that's not the point. This is something that you do because it can be done, it fascinates you, and into the bargain, it acts a...