I wonder why people seem to want to push pebble bed reactors as being better for power generation than today’s technology. Therer’s some strange drive to develop them and I’m not sure people really understand what they’re going to get as a result.
One of the things I hear is that pebble bed reactors will be far cheaper at around $250 million as opposed to $4 billion. The french certainly aren’t running their country off an array of $4 billion reactors, nor are the Japanese. Claiming that these things will save us money makes about as much sense as sending all our nuclear employees to learn Japanese and hoping things will become cheaper. A large portion of the cost of building a nuclear reactor is development costs. When you do things the way France and Japan have, you don’t need to pay development costs for each reactor because it’s the same design as the last one. This is not true for North America.
Another thing I hear being touted about pebble bed reactors is the lack of a descrete fuel handling unit. Ok, so in an existing reactor, one of the pipes ruptures and we’re in big trouble. Of course, we know that already and so we monitor the conditions very closely. We know if one of those will be in danger of breaking and of course, we’re not stupid enough to let that happen. There’s no such thing to break in a pebble bed reactor. Till Chernoble came along, some nuclear reactors just mixed uranium and graphite together with no discrete fuel and well, that didn’t really prove to be a benifit. One of the big advantages to the current design and using it in power generation is the ability to refuel the reactor while it’s running. Sure, we can add fuel to a pebble bed reactor, we can take fuel out, but if there’s 18 different ages of fuel in there, how do we make sure it’s the oldest fuel that we’re removing? When you’re sorting a bunch of pebbles that can shift around, this becomes problematic. I’m not saying that this won’t be possible, but remember those development costs I mentioned earlier? Add a bit to that amount.
Another thing I’d like to promote about the current nuclear system is that we already have all the facilities needed to process the fuel for it. We can build a reactor and get ready to use fuel bundles shipped to it. If we want to build a pebble bed reactor, we’re going to need to build a facility to process the fuel.
Let’s not push things before they’re ready. If we had to build a nuclear reactor hear in the next five year, let’s build on our existing technology and expertise. It will be cheaper and safer for us. If we want to build a pebble bed reactor for fun and learn things, expect it to be much more expensive. Down the road, if people decide that they don’t want to live with our design decisions, we get back into our current situation of having a different reactor at every site and paying development costs all the time. We might even get ourselves into a worse spot and start a trend of developing new fuel pebbles and processing facilities for each reactor.
Developing pebble bed reactors is a good idea. Building a small one for research is a fairly reasonable idea. Getting some use out of the research reactor is also another reasonable idea. Letting research get bogged down with uptime requirements is not such a good idea. Building a big one is not a good idea yet.
All this being said, I’d like to advise people to do a few things
1) Trust industry experts to make a good decision. They at least have the information to make an informed decision. Down the road, someone might find new information that’ll favor an alternative, but a decision based on information is often better than a decision based off severe simplifications and misconceptions.
2) Wait for technology to mature. Every design that dies on paper and gets improved upon is one that we didn’t have to spend money to build in order to learn from. If we want the cost of nuclear power to be cheap, the thing to do is to develop a standard and simply build more than one from the same set of plans. When you have a design you’re happy with, it takes an army of people to decide where every screw, bolt and weld goes as well as all the other fine details that paper reactors don’t need to worry about. The fewer times we have to do this, the cheaper it is and the more people we have to devote to other things like developing the next generation of nuclear reactors.
3) When you hear that something is a potential problem, don’t panic about it. Chances are, someone who’s been studying it already knows about it and the only reason you know about it is because it sucks to spend your life doing something and never talk it about. It’s the people who are actually there studying this who find out about problems first, not the guy you meet at the bar who has a friend who knows someone that works at a reactor. They deal with problems without worrying the general public and it gets dealt with and people don’t go to work every day fearing that their work place will explode all around them. After that, there are a bunch of people being paid to keep an eye on something, they tell their buddies what they do. Then people, who regret asking, start telling stories of problems with various parts of a nuclear reactor without knowing how the thing works as a whole.
