Indeed we should. Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is slated to build a fast nuclear test reactor called the Versatile Irradiation Test Reactor (VITR), a new type of nuclear reactor that is expected to generate ten times the energy of existing reactors and create nuclear waste that is easier to handle and isn’t hot for very long.
It will also be used to test materials for a variety of uses in other industries.
The House and the Senate have bills that fund the project and it is likely to pass in some form.
As John Kotek, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy, recently noted, "A new generation of nuclear is on its way. And it is going to change the way people think about how we light our homes, power our data centers and our factories, and charge our electric vehicles."
That’s true – the new nuclear designs are amazing, whether it’s NuScale Power in Oregon that will build the first small modular reactor in America, Terrestrial Energy in Canada with their new Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR), or even the new fusion reactor companies like Helion Energy in Redmond, CTFusion in Seattle, Canada’s General Fusion, or AGNI Energy in Olympia.
Some are further along than others, but all are great designs that will change the way this planet produces power and electricity, whether it’s for power in harsh climates like the Arctic or the Sahara, to power large server farms like Google and Amazon, to support industry and desalination, or just produce clean reliable power 24/7 for a thousand years.
The only question is – will they be ready in time to mitigate the worst of global warming? Or is our Goose Cooked?
These reactors can’t melt down, they’re modular and scalable, they can ramp up and down to load-follow renewables or the weather, they’re cheaper as they can be built in the factory, and they will last for 100 years. Since for all clean energy sources like nuclear and renewables, most of the cost is in the construction, so the longer they last the better.
But it’s the waste that most captures the public’s imagination and fear. And that is what these fast reactors are so good at – they can burn the old reactor waste and get ten times the energy from it without having to make new fuel. And that waste is only hot for a couple hundred years, not tens of thousands.
This aspect is what intrigued Bill Gates and got him to form his own nuclear company in Bellevue, Washington, called TerraPower, to build just this sort of reactor. It’s what the Chinese and Russians are already building.
So it is reasonable, and essential, that we move forward as well and build a fast test reactor to optimize and test various aspects, processes and materials used in these new reactors. Because INL is the nation's premier nuclear science and technology lab, building this test reactor there makes obvious sense.
This will be a test reactor to support a whole new part of the industry. It won’t be a working commercial reactor so the idea that it has to be cost-competitive with natural gas is nonsense, although it will allow the first fast reactors to be more than competitive. The first wind turbines and the first solar panels certainly weren’t, neither were the first thousand. And that’s OK. The whole point of government-backed science and technology is to get over the hump of testing and designing so that industry can take it from there.
Reactors come in many types, but only one has been used widely. All of our existing reactors are light water reactors, that use water to slow neutron speeds down to those optimal to split atoms like uranium-235 and plutonium-239. They also use water to cool the reactor.
But fast reactors don’t need water to moderate the speed since they use the high speeds of neutrons coming right out of the split atom’s nucleus to split more actinides than just U-235 or Pu-239. And fast neutrons inject themselves more readily than slow neutrons into the U-238 nucleus to form Pu-239 that then goes on to split, producing a lot more energy than light water reactors.
It’s difficult to exaggerate the long-term benefit of a new test reactor in the United States. As a government assessment of the program pointed out:
The new test reactor will be a tool available to all U.S. vendors and developers and will establish the basis for domestic and international transformational fuels and materials research…For perspective, compare potential U.S.-based test reactor availability to utilization of the only fast-spectrum test reactor operating in the world today, BOR-60 in Russia.
The BOR-60 has been a workhorse but one where access is a long and difficult process. Irradiations research and development within foreign reactors have been limited for a number of reasons, including the high cost and long timeline to gain access to these reactors and the difficulty in transporting irradiation samples to and from the reactors."
The United States has always had test facilities, it’s one reason why we led the 20th century in science and technology. There are few investments that compare to investing in science and technology, and the infrastructure needed to carry them out.
We also shouldn’t be beholden to Russia in light of their ongoing attacks against our energy infrastructure. Russian hackers targeted hundreds of U.S. electric utilities last year in a large and long-running campaign that put them inside the utilities' control rooms where they can cause blackouts and other mayhem, and their hacking campaign is continuing.
Fortunately, they could not get into our nuclear plant control rooms, and all new reactor designs make sure they won’t in the future either.
There are a lot of unique needs of advanced reactors, especially in material science. The materials used in them must handle much higher energies, temperatures and neutron fluxes than ordinary reactors. Existing reactors don’t have the ability to produce high enough neutron fluxes or energies to test key materials before the final design, like the fuel cladding that holds the fuel in place, or the fuel itself.
Most traditional materials don’t do well in such a fast neutron flux. Materials like silica carbide hold promise. And these materials will have lots of applications in space, aircraft, medical and other industries. Just like the Space Program in the 1960s, the spinoffs to society at large more than pay for these types of investments.
So it was confusing when Adrian Cho interviewed folks who called this project a boondoggle in his Science article. One problem, according to some critics, is that American utilities have no plans to deploy such reactors.
Duh – no utility has plans to deploy something that’s not tested yet. These reactors are years away, but it takes years to perfect them. That’s why we need this test reactor. When they are ready, utilities will deploy them, like they’ve done with every other technology we’ve ever developed, whether it was wind turbines, solar panels, computers or nuclear reactors.
Some policy analysts say these reactors pose a proliferation risk because they use plutonium, the stuff of atomic bombs, but that’s not quite true. They use enriched uranium to start them, then they produce, and burn, the plutonium that is made as it goes. If you wanted plutonium for a bomb, you still have to take it out of the reactor quickly, in less than 6 months, which defeats the whole purpose of a fast reactor.
This is why no one has ever built a bomb from plutonium from a commercial power reactor. After only 6 months or so, power reactors breed in so many other isotopes of Pu that poison the chain reaction and prevent a bomb from working. They cannot be separated from each other during reprocessing. And fast reactors make it even harder to make weapons. The recycling technology for making new fuel is similar to that for making bombs, but the materials are not.
Since fast reactors burn plutonium as well as uranium, and most other actinides, as soon as they form, it would take special, and obvious, steps to make and extract plutonium for weapons. It’s kind of a difficult and stupid way to do it. Just like ordinary commercial reactors.
If you want a bomb, you build a weapons reactor. Like we did. Like the Soviets did. As North Korea did. As Syria tried to do before Israel bombed it in 2007. It’s cheaper and faster. It just doesn’t make any sense, logistically or economically, to use anything else.
In the end, however, if the critics quoted in the Science article don’t care about global warming, fine – many people don’t. If they think renewables alone can do it, fine – some people do. I’m sure they’re well-intentioned. However, every leading climate scientist from Jim Hansen on down knows that we will not achieve any of our climate goals without a dramatic increase in both nuclear and renewables.
Since fast-reactors, like those that will be tested in the VITR, can get ten times the power out of the same fuel, can burn spent fuel and even depleted uranium like our old Iraqi tank armor, when we get to fast reactors as a significant portion of our energy we will have several thousand years of low-carbon power on hand.
That’s more energy than exists in all the coal, oil and natural gas in the ground right now.
