NEI Nuclear Notes

Sustainable Business Oregon presents a interview with Pete Lyons, DOE’s assistant secretary for nuclear energy. It’s fine and worth a read – he talks mostly about the NuScale deal – see posts below for more on this. Lyons does a good job explaining what NuScale offers specifically and what the interest in small reactors may mean generally: Small modular reactors offer an opportunity for a new paradigm in how we think about nuclear plant construction. In the past we’ve gone to bigger and bigger plants built at a job site. We have realized there are some economies going to these bigger and bigger plants (built) on site. We’re trying to explore a different type of economy by moving down in size to where they can be built in a factory under factory quality assurance standards and moved intact to a site. --- The European Union is investigating the deal between the British government and Electricite de France to build a new reactor at Hinkley Point C. That story will require mor...

Professor Peter Wadhams off ice This suggests an academic freak-out: Geo-engineering techniques such as whitening clouds by adding fine sprays of water vapor, or adding aerosols to the upper atmosphere have been ridiculed in some quarters but welcomed elsewhere. Wadhams proposes the use of thorium-fuelled reactors, being tested in India, which are said to be safer because they do not result in a proliferation of weapons-grade plutonium, experts say. Also, under certain circumstances, the waste from thorium reactors is less dangerous and remains radioactive for hundreds rather than thousands of years. Wadhams is Peter Wadhams, a professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University. What he’s talking about are the desperate measures he envisions as necessary to mitigate climate change. The thorium-powered nuclear future represents what he calls a nuclear energy “binge” – the resort to thorium seems to me a bit of a hedge, but he’s only proposing not disposing. He’d probably be co...