This is Not Going to End Well

The Trump administration has decided to roll back environmental regulations on new nuclear power plant designs.

Considering that some of these plants use an explosive material (molten sodium) as a coolant, this decision concerns me.

The Department of Energy says advanced nuclear reactor designs - many of which have so far existed mainly at the experimental, testing, or demonstration stage - generally pose limited environmental risk and can qualify for a streamlined environmental review for future projects.

The DoE announced the "categorical exclusion" for advanced nuclear reactors (ANRs) in a Federal Register filing on Monday, establishing a pathway that can allow ANR projects to proceed without a full environmental assessment or environmental impact statement under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), provided specific conditions are met. The move follows Trump's executive orders directing agencies to streamline environmental reviews for nuclear reactors in order to accelerate their deployment.

A categorical exclusion means that a covered category of actions "normally does not significantly affect the quality of the human environment and therefore does not require preparation of an environmental assessment or environmental impact statement," the filing says. In this case, that's referring to ANRs, which include Generation III+ reactors, small modular reactors, microreactors, and stationary and mobile reactors.

Authorization, siting, construction, operation, reauthorization, and decommissioning of ANRs are all included in the categorical exclusion.

BTW, did I mention that the sodium cooled reactor is founded by Bill "Blue Screen of Death" Gates? 

Absolute nightmare fuel this is. 

Nuclear Power, Meet Blue Screen of Death

I've written about Bill Gates plans to create a sodium cooled fast breeder reactor before. 

Well, they (Warren Buffet is involved as well) have now selected a location for the prototype reactor.

I have a number of problems with the reactor in addition to Bill Gates' involvement:

• Molten sodium will leak, and it is highly flammable, and is potentially explosive. (The history of sodium cooled reactors is universally horrible)
  
• The reactor uses 20% Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU), which enriched is enough to make a bomb.  (You can at levels in excess of 10% enrichment)
• By design, it produces large amounts of Plutonium. (Traveling Wave Reactor)
  

Needless to say, I am not sanguine:

Power companies run by billionaire friends Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have chosen Wyoming to launch the first Natrium nuclear reactor project on the site of a retiring coal plant.

TerraPower, founded by Gates about 15 years ago, and power company PacifiCorp, owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, said on Wednesday that the exact site of the Natrium reactor demonstration plant was expected to be announced by the end of the year.

Small advanced reactors, which run on different fuels to traditional reactors, are regarded by some as a critical carbon-free technology than can supplement intermittent power sources like wind and solar as states strive to cut emissions that cause climate change.

"Regarded by some," Huh?  

Maybe if your last name is, "Strangelove."

………

“This is our fastest and clearest course to becoming carbon negative,” Wyoming’s governor, Mark Gordon, said. “Nuclear power is clearly a part of my all-of-the-above strategy for energy” in Wyoming, the country’s top coal-producing state.

This statement is absolutely false.  The construction of time for reactors is measured in decades, while wind turbines go up in a few months. 

If we need to move now, pretty much any other power source is online faster.

The project features a 345 megawatt sodium-cooled fast reactor with molten salt-based energy storage that could boost the system’s power output to 500MW during peak power demand. TerraPower said last year that the plants would cost about $1bn.

The molten salt energy storage, but using mechanical storage like pumped water is simpler, cheaper, and more efficient.

About the only thing more terrifying than Bill Gates starting up a bunch of nuclear reactors, he's alreay half way to a bond villain, would be if Comcast were to be running those plants.

Broadening the Definition Of, "Blue Screen of Death"

I just discovered that Bill Gates is funding a nuclear power startup.

The "Secret Sauce" is that it uses a molten salt for thermal storage, so that it can respond quickly to shifts in demand.

This from the guy Microsoft^®, so if your alarm bells are going off over the thought of the inevitable system crash, it gets even better.

The reactor in question is a fast fission breeder reactor using using liquid sodium as a coolant, so it produces large quantities of Pu₂₃₉ and uses a coolant that ignites upon contact with air, and cannot be extinguished with water.

All this from the mind that gave us "Blue Screen of Death".

Delightful:

Nuclear power is the Immovable Object of generation sources. It can take days just to bring a nuclear plant completely online, rendering it useless as a tool to manage the fluctuations in the supply and demand on a modern energy grid.

Now a firm launched by Bill Gates in 2006, TerraPower, in partnership with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, believes it has found a way to make the infamously unwieldy energy source a great deal nimbler — and for an affordable price.

The new design, announced by TerraPower on August 27th, is a combination of a "sodium-cooled fast reactor" — a type of small reactor in which liquid sodium is used as a coolant — and an energy storage system. While the reactor could pump out 345 megawatts of electrical power indefinitely, the attached storage system would retain heat in the form of molten salt and could discharge the heat when needed, increasing the plant’s overall power output to 500 megawatts for more than 5.5 hours.

………

The use of molten salt, which retains heat at extremely high temperatures, as a storage technology is not new. Concentrated solar power plants also collect energy in the form of molten salt, although such plants have largely been abandoned in the U.S. The technology could enjoy new life alongside nuclear plants: TerraPower and GE Hitachi Nuclear are only two of several private firms working to develop reactor designs that incorporate molten salt storage units, including U.K.- and Canada-based developer Moltex Energy.

………

Edwin Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, suggested on Twitter that the nuclear designs used by TerraPower and GE Hitachi had fallen short of a major innovation. “Oh brother. The last thing the world needs is a fleet of sodium-cooled fast reactors,” he wrote.

Yeah, this makes me feel safe an secure.

When You Start to Believe Your Own Bullsh%$

Rich people seem to think that simply because they have lots of money, they are knowledgeable about things completely out of their purview.

Case in point, Bill Gates, who appears to believe that he is an expert on nuclear power and global warming, so he is wringing his hands over the lack of new nuclear nuclear power plants in the US:

Bill Gates is urging the United States to invest in nuclear power research.

In his annual year-in-review Gates Notes blog post, Gates noted that, despite the consequences of climate change that people face around the globe, “global emissions of greenhouse gases went up in 2018.”

Because burning fossil fuels (oil, coal, and natural gas) releases carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, Gates wrote that we need breakthroughs in clean energy in order to curb the rise of global temperatures. Generating energy from sunlight and wind does not emit CO2; the same goes for nuclear energy.

“The world needs to be working on lots of solutions to stop climate change,” Gates wrote. “Advanced nuclear is one, and I hope to persuade US leaders to get into the game.”

First, the construction time for a nuclear power plant is on the order of a decade.

Second, one of the largest contributors to anthropogenic climate change is cement, and nuclear power uses a very large amount of that.

Third, the total life cycle costs, which are a good measure of total emissions are off the f%$#ing charts, so while fission emits no carbon, construction, enrichment, transportation of fuel, and disposal of waste, are major emitters.

So the savings are illusory, the costs are unsustainable, and the time frame is too long.