Britain should lead 21st Century nuclear revolution

It is hard to imagine now, but Britain once led the nuclear revolution. Ernest Rutherford first broke the nuclei of atoms at Manchester University in 1917. Our Queen opened the world’s first nuclear power plant in 1956 at Calder Hall.

Such were the halcyon days of British atomic confidence, before defeatism took hold and free market ideology was pushed to pedantic extremes.

Most of Britain’s ageing reactors will be phased out over the next decade, leaving a gaping hole in electricity supply. By historic irony the country has drifted into a position where it now depends on anailing state-owned French company to build its two reactors at Hinkley Point, with help from the Chinese Communist Party.

The horrors Hinkley are by now well-known. The European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) is not yet working anywhere. The Olkiluoto plant in Finland is nine years late and three times over budget. EDF’s Flamanville project is not faring much better.

What is clear is that the costs of ‘old nuclear’ have spun out of control everywhere in the developed world. It is too expensive to keep trying to refine an inherently dangerous technology dating back 60 years in a Sisyphean attempt to make it less threatening after Chernobyl and Fukushima.

The capital cost of new nuclear plants in Europe and the US has risen from $1,000 per kilowatt in the 1970s to around $5,500 today in real terms. Hinkley will be nearer $8,000. Hence the lapidary term ‘negative learning’ coined by Yale scientist Arnulf Grubler.

The standard light water reactors were solid workhorses in their day – and averted huge releases of CO2 from fossil fuels – but they operate at 100 times atmospheric pressure. They need costly containment structures  to prevent an explosive release of deadly radioactive gases across hundreds of miles.

Ernest Rutherford 
Ernest Rutherford first ‘split the atom’ at Manchester University in 1917

This nuclear cost spiral has been happening just as solar and wind costs plummet, and the verdict is in. The nuclear share of global power has dropped to 10.7pc from 17.6pc in 1996. Ten new reactors were built last year, but eight were in China. In Europe they are shutting down.

There is an alternative. Research into a radical new wave of safer, cleaner, and cheaper reactors is suddenly reaching critical mass, some are entirely compatible with the intermittency of wind and solar.

This is what Theresa May should be looking at as she launches her industrialisation drive and fashions an energy policy fit for the 21st Century.

The Washington think tank Third Way has identified fifty advanced reactor projects in North America, including eight based on molten salt fuel, ten on liquid-metal, and some based on fusion designs.

The US Energy Department has thrown its huge research power behind this push for a “meltdown-free” reactor cheap enough for mass production. It even explored micro modular variants for large jet aircraft at a forum in March, and Boeing has filed a patent to do exactly that with a laser-powered fusion-fission engine.

One of the US-backed projects is a “waste annihilating molten salt reactor”, which uses up spent nuclear fuel and lethal plutonium residue. As it happens, Britain’s start-up company Moltex Energy is working on similar lines, and this country needs the technology even more urgently than the US.

“We have the largest plutonium stockpile in the world and we don’t know what to do with it,” said Stephen Tindale from the Alvin Weinberg Foundation.

Moltex founder Ian Scott estimates that his molten salt design can cut costs to almost a quarter of the Hinkley tariff. “We think we can come in at a levelized £29 per megawatt hour,” he said.

“That is radically cheaper than gas or coal in Europe. It could have a massive impact on the UK economy and it would be a terrible shame if we lose it,” he said.

Molten salt reactors were built by the US physicist Alvin Weinberg at the Oak Ridge Laboratories in the 1960s, but were never pursued because the Pentagon wanted the plutonium residue from light water reactors to build nuclear warheads.

They dissolve the nuclear fuel in molten salts rather than using dry pellets of uranium. Advocates say a melt-down is impossible, and there can be no chain-reaction along the lines of Fukushima. If the reactor gets too hot, a freeze plug melts and the salts drain off. They cool down and turn solid. The fission process stops automatically.

“It is inherently stable. You could break every containment barrier and still not get a leak of cesium or iodine outside the reactor,” said Dr Scott. The plants operate at atmospheric pressure so they are much smaller and safer.

Fukushima
Bags of radioactive contaminated soil piled up along the coast near the Fukushima nuclear plant

The Moltex reactor can run off existing spent nuclear fuel, cleaning up the legacy headaches of old nuclear plants. “We can process nuclear waste very cheaply instead of burying it at enormous cost in steel tanks for 200,000 years underground,” he said. The plan is switch to thorium as a “greener” source of fuel once Britain’s stockpile of nuclear waste has been consumed.

The Moltex design slashes costs by using a convection process that avoids pumping molten salt around the system. This reduces corrosion, the metallurgy barrier has bedevilled molten salt projects.

Dr Scott is the former chief scientist of Unilever and his technical advisory board includes Derek Fray at Cambridge, Paul Madden at Oxford, and Tim Abram at Manchester. The design is one of several projects being examined by the UK government in its competition for the best small modular reactor.

“We have done everything entirely without government so far, and frankly we have had much more interest in Canada where we were welcomed with open arms by the regulators,” said Dr Scott.

Read full story at www.telegraph.co.uk

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