Book: Nuclear is Hot; From Glowing Steel to Public Support

New nuclear reactors exploit heat in fluids such as molten salts, liquid sodium, or helium gas. Their red-hot temperatures in the range of 650-800C puts nearly 50% more of the reactor’s fission energy into electric energy than conventional PWRs at 300C put in steam systems of conventional turbines. High heat from these reactors is the new benefit of nuclear power.

A new book New Nuclear is Hot by Robert Hargraves, Ph.D., explores the uses of these reactors and their heat transfer fluids. “New nuclear technology is HOT, from its glowing steel to public support.” is the first line of his new book. Book: Nuclear is Hot; From Glowing Steel to Public Support. Excerpts from its are included here.

Reliable Nuclear Fission Technology Has a New Focus – High Heat

Today only 10% of world electricity comes from nuclear power plants. Reliable, CO2-free nuclear fission technology is returning to fashion, and more nuclear power plants are being built. The IAEA’s new annual nuclear power outlook high case projection predicts installed nuclear capacity will more than double to 890 gigawatts by 2050, compared to 369 gigawatts today. This represents an almost 25% increase from the Agency’s prediction in 2020, with its projections revised up for a third consecutive year.

Classic nuclear reactor power plants use water to transfer fission’s heat energy to a turbine-generator. Emerging small modular reactors continue the water technology but forgo new, high heat opportunities and efficiencies of new nuclear power.

New nuclear reactors exploit hotter heat in fluids such as molten salts, liquid sodium, or helium gas. Their red hot temperature heat puts nearly 50% more of the reactor’s fission energy into electric energy, not into the cooling water that condenses turbine-generator steam. Waterside new nuclear power plants use about half the cooling water of current ones.

Hot heat also brings new uses. Hot heat can break hydrogen out of seawater cheaply, heat buildings, power electrochemical separators to capture CO2, and energize new refineries to produce net zero fuels from the CO2 and hydrogen.

Nuclear Process Heat for Industry:
Chart – International Atomic Energy Agency,
Opportunities for Cogeneration with Nuclear Energy (May 2017)

We can halve CO2 emissions by repowering electricity generation and building heating while saving money. We can rid ourselves of transportation emissions with Seafuel made from captured CO2, hydrogen from high temperature electrolysis, and gas-to-liquid refineries.

The book New Nuclear describes the hotter heat in heat transfer fluids such as molten salts, liquid sodium, or helium gas. Their red-hot temperature heat puts nearly 50% more of the reactor’s fission energy into electric energy, not into the cooling water that condenses turbine-generator steam. Waterside new nuclear power plants will use about half the cooling water of current ones.

New Uses for High Heat

Cheap, hot heat also brings new uses. Hot heat can break hydrogen out of seawater, heat buildings, power electrochemical separators to capture CO2, and energize new refineries to produce net zero fuels from the CO2 and hydrogen. We can halve CO2 emissions by repowering electricity generation and building heating while saving money.

ThorCon’s nuclear 1100 MW module, using molten salt, (left)
is manufactured separately from the bigger power conversion module (right). 
Image: Thorcon file.

Only if we succeed in making reliable energy cheaper than fuel burning will we reduce CO2 emissions. Cheaper-than-coal energy can be generated by mass producing standardized, new nuclear power plants in efficient shipyards and factories. Plants will cost $1/watt of 24×7 generating capacity and deliver electric energy at $0.03/kWh, heat energy at $0.01/kWh.

Hot heat power can be much cheaper than electric power because there is no power conversion loss and no capital investment in an expensive turbine-generator. Rarely recognized is that 1 joule at 700°C is more valuable than 1 joule at 350°C.

Making Fuels from Seawater

We can cut transportation emissions with Seafuel made from captured CO2, hydrogen from high temperature electrolysis, and gas-to-liquid refineries. Gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel are valuable for vehicles because they are energy dense in volume and weight. It is difficult for vehicles such as airplanes or heavy trucks to be powered by batteries because they are an order of magnitude heavier per unit of energy delivered.

Carbon circulates from sea to Seafuel to vehicles to air to sea.  Image: Thorcon

When you buy $3 gasoline, you are paying for the heat that gasoline combustion can deliver within your vehicle’s engine, or $0.09/kWh. The engineering challenge is to repackage $0.01/kWh heat and $0.03/kWh electricity from a new nuclear power plant into gasoline, or diesel, or jet fuel worth about $0.09/kWh. One strategy is to use the cooling seawater flow as a source for hydrogen from water splitting and for CO2 dissolved in seawater.

Today fuel burning releases CO2 into the atmosphere. About 9 gigatons, a third of annual emissions, are absorbed by the ocean’s surface area. The concentrations in sea and air stay in balance at equal partial pressures. Seawater CO2 concentration is 140 times atmospheric concentration, creating a less expensive opportunity to remove the CO2 as nuclear plant cooling water passes by.

Electrochemistry can temporarily swing seawater to a more acidic pH enabling CO2 to be bubbled out with pumping. The water pH is then swung back to its original acidity and discharged to the sea.

Making Hydrogen with High Heat

Hydrogen is the other ingredient for long-chain hydrocarbon fuels. H2 frees C from CO2 by making H2O from it. More H2 bonds with the C to make hydrocarbon fuels. Net zero hydrogen can be produced with electrolysis, but this is too expensive commercially. New nuclear enables 560°C processes such as the copper-chloride cycle utilizing both high temperature hydrolysis and electrolysis to produce hydrogen at costs near $1/kg.

The processes for combining gases such as CO2 and H2 to make long chain hydrocarbon fuels are well established and in commercial use by companies in the natural gas, coal, and petroleum refining industries.

District heating from rejected heat of steam condenser.  Image: Thorcon

Almost all building heating now comes from combustion of natural gas and fuel oil, emitting CO2. Concerns about global warming make these sources more expensive and less available.

The graphic above illustrates how a nuclear or other thermal power plant accomplishes co-generation of both 500 MW of electricity and 600 MW of heat for district heating.

Cheap High Heat is the New Benefit of Nuclear Power

The potential to use nuclear power for heating is virtually unknown to the public and politicians. Heat from a purpose-built nuclear heating plant can cost $0.01/kWh; heat from the steam condenser of a nuclear power plant is nearly free.

China built and operates four Westinghouse-designed AP1000 nuclear power plants, each generating 1150 GW of electric power. China added co-generation and district heating to two of the nuclear power plants at Haiyang City, so the rejected heat now heats 30 million square meters of buildings instead of being wasted.

China will build four units of its more powerful nuclear power plant, the CAP1400, to provide all 658,000 Haiyang residents with heat, and to generate electric power for a third of Shandong province, population 102 million.

Cheap heat may suddenly be recognized as a real, new benefit of new nuclear power. Public pressure for cheap, clean heat for all city residents could force politicians and regulators to abandon the strictures that have made new nuclear power impossibly expensive. Might cheap heat unleash a new nuclear power watershed and permit a nuclear power plant in every city’s backyard?

Benefits of New Nuclear Will Set Aside Historical Fears

People have been hesitant to embrace nuclear power. The lore of cancer from nuclear radiation has been uncritically accepted. Straightforward observations of radiation dose rates on human health replace the disproven, fearful conjectures that low dose effects are cumulative and harmful.

Problematically, achieving the economic, climate, and social benefits of new nuclear energy will require overthrowing or bypassing stultifying regulatory regimes that ignore observational evidence. Perhaps the developing nations will do so.

Three billion people live in energy poverty, served with less electricity than your old refrigerator uses. Nearly a billion have no electric power at all. They need more energy to power industry and commerce for even modest prosperity.

They are adding hundreds of new coal-fired and gas-fired power plants. They seek reliable energy to drive industry and commerce. They may become adopters of cheap, new nuclear power and compete successfully with regulator-constrained, high-energy-cost Western nations.

The costly, Green, wind and solar energy transition is not reducing the growth of global CO2 emissions. The demand for technical metals for electric vehicles, their batteries, fanciful grid-scale batteries, solar panels, and costly offshore wind turbines is increasing rapacious mining of scarce minerals..

People are learning of new nuclear’s environmental and economic benefits. Recent surveys report five supporters of new nuclear power for every opponent. Surveyed people report new nuclear power relieves energy security concerns. Vulnerability of energy supplied by long, undersea pipelines, or electric cables, or shipping through conflict zones, is now clear to all.

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Robert Hargraves is a Brown physics PhD with an honors AB in mathematics from Dartmouth where he served as assistant professor and taught mathematics and computer science courses. Hargraves is the author of THORIUM: Energy Cheaper than Coal and cofounder of fission energy company ThorCon

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