Computer simulation and full scale testing of components are part of the plan
Defying conventional wisdom that the only destiny for spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear reactors is long-term storage, General Electric says there are big dollars at the tail end of the nuclear energy value chain. GE thinks they can bring profitable solutions to market.
Speaking to the Idaho Section of the American Nuclear Society this week (12/06/07), Eric Loewen, a senior nuclear engineer with GE's Wilmington, NC, operation, described several initiatives the company is taking in this area and its currents scope of business.
Loewen is something of a folk hero to the nuclear scientists and engineers at the Idaho National Laboratory, as he used to work there, and the hotel banquet room was packed for the dinner meeting.
From a business perspective Loewen said, GE has a 60/40 stake in the GE-Hitachi partnership in the U.S. to build and market GE's ABWR reactor design. Loewen pointed out six plants have been built so far, four in Japan and two in Taiwan. Loewen called the ABWR a "road tested" reactor. Further, Loewen said, two more have been specified in the COL license application NRG submitted for its South Texas Project to the NRC in September. This past week NRC formally accepted the application which starts the 42-month clock on the license review.
The situation with the new GE/Hitachi ESBWR is less mature. The design has been submitted to the NRC for review, but the agency is clearly unhappy with the document having reportedly submitted over 2,000 questions about it. GE will respond to NRC's questions, Loewen said, because the firm believes that demand for nuclear energy will increase significantly as demand for electricity grows globally.Advanced Recycling Center
GE is developing an advanced recycling center for spent nuclear fuel, and has also proposed one for its Morris, IL, spent fuel storage site. The purpose of the effort is to prove the business case that spent nuclear fuel can economically support a fast reactor. To do that Loewen said, the price of electricity must drive demand for nuclear fuel. GE believes that as fossil fuel electricity prices rise that this will create more market space for commercial nuclear energy.
The GE facility is among 13 sites in eleven states under DOE consideration for three different facilities. The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership GNEP program anticipates to be a year-long selection process with a decision in June 2008. At these facilities, the GNEP will recycle spent nuclear fuel and destroy its long-lived radioactive components, separating spent nuclear fuel into reusable and waste components. New nuclear fast-reactor fuel would be derived from the components.In terms of processes, GE will not use an aqueous system. Loewen says there are too many environmental legacy issues. Instead, GE plans to investigate electro-refining as a "prudent GNEP starting point." He said the nuclear fuel recycling business plan has three elements.
- Licensing & design issues
- Simulation of a full scale facility
- Component testing at full scale
GE needs a test facility, Loewen said, and thinks that the Idaho lab might be a good candidate for one. The reason is GE's other nuclear facility, located in California, is now surrounded by suburban development. The Idaho site includes a remote space, which is the size of Rhode Island, located 45 miles west of Idaho Falls, ID, and has secure access and a trained workforce. Also, unlike Idaho Falls, which strongly supports the GNEP program, people in Morris, IL, are irate about it and came out in force at hearings to oppose it last Spring.
GE is not the only GNEP applicant who wants to use the INL site for advanced nuclear fuel and reactor projects. There are two other proposals. One is by EnergySolutions for a site near Arco, ID. It would involve fuel reprocessing and fabrication. The other is consortium including Areva, Japan Nuclear Fuels, and BWXT that would cover the complete range of GNEP facilities at the Idaho site.
Near terms prospects for building these facilities are not good. The National Academy of Sciences recently submitted a report to Congress criticizing the program as lacking scientific peer review. A group of eight Democratic Senators sent a letter to the White House asking the President to stop the program. The pending 2008 Energy appropriation halves the budget request to less than $200 million. If anyone is going to prove the business case for re-using spent nuclear fuel, it will have to be done entirely by the private sector. The government has tied itself up in knots, as usual, and is unlikely to be a major funding sponsor of the work.
Laser enrichment of uranium
In other remarks Loewen mentioned that GE is working hard to bring its laser enrichment with isotope separation technology to market. The technology was acquired from Silex Systems in Australia in 2006. GE has the exclusive global rights to launch the uranium enrichment technology. The firm plans to build a full-scale U.S. facility. Construction is underway to build a test loop at the Wilmington, NC, location. The implementation process is;
(1) Test loop
(2) Lead cascade
(3) Initial production module
(4) Full commercial plant
Utility support for laser enrichment
Last October Exelon and Entergy signed non-binding letters of intent to contract for uranium enrichment services from GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH). The utilities may also provide GEH with facility licensing and public acceptance support if needed for development of a commercial-scale Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) plant according to a report by World Nuclear News.
Site selection and commercial licensing activities are currently underway to support a projected start-up date of 2012. The commercial laser enrichment facility would have a target capacity of between 3.5 and 6 million separative work units (SWU).
Exelon and Entergy, the two largest US nuclear utilities with some 28 nuclear power reactors between them, are the first utilities to sign letters of intent for the product and are longtime customers of GE and Hitachi.
Update 01/11/08
The Department of Energy took most of the GNEP sites off the table in December by opting to only consider sites that were within the boundaries of federal national laboratories at Argonne, Savannah River, and Idaho. The action to stop consideration of other sites, including Morris, IL, as GNEP sites, in the programmatic environmental impact statement for GNEP, is a reflection of a lack of congressional support, and severely diminished funding, for the program. GNEP is now mostly a long-term R&D effort and is unlikely to build the multi-billion dollar facilities it once envisioned.
The market opportunity to recover the vast amount of useful energy in spent nuclear fuel remains available if a firm, such as General Electric, can develop the technologies to safety recover it without the environmental issues associated with aqueous recycling methods.
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3 comments:
GE would have a head start for the GNEP cycle. They worked with ANL and INL in the the late 80s early 90s on the ALMR/PRISM concept to further the work performed on EBR-II:
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=4912&page=202
Not a surprise Democratic senators are opposing it. They already were the driving force behind the premature shutdown of EBR-II in 1994. That ultra-safe reactor was too dangerous for the established dogma, that nuclear power is "an issue".
In the view of anti-nukes, EBR-II had the very bad idea of being 1) a breeder with potentially very low fuel costs and virtually unlimited supply, 2) capable of burning all of its actinides, solving the so-called fuel disposal "issue" and 3) an inherently safe design that passively shut down even in an absolute worst case scenario of simultaneous loss of coolant + loss of control, a capacity that was actually proven by real tests, with the secondary loop 100% stopped and the control rods held at max reactivity and deliberately prevented from scramming. The reactor simply stopped on its own thanks to the very high temperature coefficient of its metal fuel and the huge thermal inertia of its sodium primary.
Too safe, too efficient, too well designed, unacceptable.
Concerning GNEP - but what about the failure of reprocessing in other countries? As I understand it, the UK doesn't use a gram of MOX fuel from its huge government-owned plutonium stockpile and neither do the Russians or Japanese. The French electricity utility, EdF, is forced to take plutonium fuel (MOX) from reprocessing by Areva, and places no value on the plutonium, preferring to use uranium. So, from a fiscal conservative perspective looks like the industry abroad is propped up by big government, that it depends on a socialist approach. Looks like the same failure would happen in the US as it will only be big government which supports this, not industry on its own dime. Would you support a fiscal conservation approach, a halt to government subsidies for GNEP?
The UK MOX plant is an abject failure so far having produced nothing since it was built. There are over two dozen reactors in Europe which use MOX fuel, so that market does in fact exist. The US is building a MOX fuel plants in Savannah River, SC, and two Duke Reactors have modified their NRC licenses to burn it. The MOX fuel market and GNEP are not the same thing.
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