Tag Archives: powerstations

Commoditisation of civil nuclear power

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Logo for BBC Inside ScienceA colleague and I published a paper last month that we hope will bring about a paradigm shift in the nuclear power industry. I was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Inside Science on the day following its publication – its the first time one of my scientific papers has made that big a splash in the media!  You can listen to the programme on BBC Sounds at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001zdwv.

In the paper we describe a blueprint for the factory-production of sealed micro-power units with a digitally-enabled, holistic assurance framework.  Currently, several designs of micro-reactors are progressing to the prototype stage with hazards contained on-site.  The integration of these approaches enables a transformation of the regulatory regime to type or series approval at the factory, similar to the aerospace industry, and supported by digital tools such as block chains to provide transparent quality assurance within the supply chain.  The transformation of the regulatory regime and the shift to ‘flow’ production in a factory would remove the financial risk from the power plant to the factory thereby enabling nuclear power to become a realistic competitor for intermittent green energy sources, such as wind and solar, both in terms of financial and ecological costs.  The output from three production lines could replace the current electricity generating capacity from fossil fuels in the UK over approximately 15 years thus making a significant contribution to achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions.  We propose a design philosophy for the micro-power units that will allow them to go unnoticed in an urban environment or even become an iconic product that signals a community’s commitment to responsible stewardship of the Earth’s resources.  Our blueprint represents a revolutionary change for the nuclear power industry that would likely lead to the commoditisation of nuclear power whereas the status quo probably leads to extinction.

The paper is published with open access (its free) at Patterson EA & Taylor RJ, 2024, The commoditisation of civil nuclear power, Royal Society Open Science, 11:240021.

Slow progress replacing 150 year old infrastructure

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Photograph of salvaged section of original gas mainThe Liverpool Gas Light Company was formed in 1816, just as the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere started to rise above the pre-industrial revolution level of 278 ppm. A rival Oil Gas Company was formed in 1823 and became the Liverpool New Gas and Coke Company in 1834. The two rival companies merged in 1848. Last year a piece of cast iron gas main from around this period was salvaged while replacing a gas main on the Dock Road in Liverpool. It was date-stamped 1853. For the last month, works have been underway to replace the original gas main in our street which appears to be of a similar age. The concept of gas-fired central heating using pressurised hot water was developed in the 1830s by Angier March Perkins [1838 US patent], amongst others; but did not become fashionable until the 1850s which coincides approximately with laying of the original gas main in the road outside our house. There is a cavernous coal hole under the pavement (sidewalk) in front of our house which would have been used to store coal that was burned in fireplaces in every room. So, we can deduce that the house, which was built in the early 1830s, did not initially have gas-fired central heating but that it could have been installed sometime in the second half of the 19th century, just as the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere started its exponential increase towards today’s level of 412 ppm [monthly average at Mauna Loa Global Monitoring Laboratory for August 2020].  Carbon dioxide represents about 80% of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the US EPA, and heating of commercial and residential properties accounts for 12% of these emissions in the US and for 32% in the UK.  Hence, before our house is two hundred years old, it is likely that we will have converted it to electrical heating in order to reduce its carbon footprint.  We have made a start on the process but it is pointless until our power supply is carbon neutral and progress towards carbon neutrality for electricity generation is painfully slow in the UK and elsewhere [see ‘Inconvenient facts‘ on December 18th, 2019].

You can check live carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation and consumption using the ElectricityMap.

Nuclear winter school

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I spent the first full-week of January 2019 at a Winter School for a pair of Centres for Doctoral Training focussed on Nuclear Energy (see NGN CDT & ICO CDT).  Together the two centres involve eight UK universities and most of the key players in the UK industry.  So, the Winter School offers an opportunity for researchers in nuclear science and engineering, from academia and industry, to gather together for a week and share their knowledge and experience with more than 80 PhD students.  Each student gives a report on the progress of their research to the whole gathering as either a short oral presentation or a poster.  It’s an exhausting but stimulating week for everyone due to both the packed programmme and the range of subjects covered from fundamental science through to large-scale engineering and socio-economic issues.

Here are a few things that caught my eye:

First, the images in the thumbnail above which Paul Cosgrove from the University of Cambridge used to introduce his talk on modelling thermal and neutron fluxes.  They could be from an art gallery but actually they are from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and show the geometry of an advanced test reactor [ATR] (top); the rate of collisions in the ATR (middle); and the neutron density distribution (bottom).

Second, a great app for your phone called electricityMap that shows you a live map of global carbon emissions and when you click on a country it reveals the sources of electricity by type, i.e. nuclear, gas, wind etc, as well as imports and exports of electricity.  Dame Sue Ion told us about it during her key-note lecture.  I think all politicians and journalists need it installed on their phones to check their facts before they start talking about energy policy.

Third, the scale of the concrete infrastructure required in current designs of nuclear power stations compared to the reactor vessel where the energy is generated.  The pictures show the construction site for the Vogtle nuclear power station in Georgia, USA (left) and the reactor pressure vessel being lowered into position (right).  The scale of nuclear power stations was one of the reasons highlighted by Steve Smith from Algometrics for why investors are not showing much interest in them (see ‘Small is beautiful and affordable in nuclear power-stations‘ on January 14th, 2015).  Amongst the other reasons are: too expensive (about £25 billion), too long to build (often decades), too back-end loaded (i.e. no revenue until complete), too complicated (legally, economically & socially), too uncertain politically, too toxic due to poor track record of returns to investors, too opaque in terms of management of industry.  That’s quite a few challenges for the next generation of nuclear scientists and engineers to tackle.  We are making a start by creating design tools that will enable mass-production of nuclear power stations (see ‘Enabling or disruptive technology for nuclear engineering?‘ on January 28th, 2015) following the processes used to produce other massive engineering structures, such as the Airbus A380 (see Integrated Digital Nuclear Design Programme); but the nuclear industry has to move fast to catch up with other sectors of the energy business, such as gas-fired powerstations or wind turbines.  If it were to succeed then the energy market would be massively transformed.

 

Subtle balance of sustainable orderliness

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129-2910_IMGI wrote this short essay a couple of weeks for another purpose and then changed my mind about using it.  So I thought I would share it on this blog.

Whenever we do something, some of our useful resource gets converted into productive activity but some is always lost in useless waste.  In other words, 100% efficiency is impossible – we can’t convert all of our resource into productive activity.  Engineers call this the second law of thermodynamics.  Thermodynamics is about energy transitions, for instance converting chemical energy in fossil fuels into electrical energy in a power station, and in these circumstances, the useless waste is called entropy.  At the time of the industrial revolution, Rudolf Clausius recognised that entropy can be related to the heat losses which occur whenever we do something useful, such as generating electricity in a power station, cleaning the house with an electric vacuum cleaner or running to catch the bus.

Clausius’s definition of entropy was really useful for designers of 19th century steam engines but it is difficult to use in other walks of life.  Fortunately Ludwig Boltzmann gave us a more valuable description.  He equated entropy to the number of states in which something could be arranged, or its lack of orderliness.  In other words, the more ways you can arrange something, the less ordered it is likely to be and the higher its entropy.  So a box of children’s building blocks has a low entropy when the blocks are packed in their box because there is a relatively small number of ways of arranging them to fit in the box.  When the box is emptied onto your living room floor, there are very many more possible arrangements and so the blocks have a high entropy.  The chance of knowing the whereabouts of a particular block is small. Whoops!  Now we’ve wondered into information theory.

Let’s get back to the second law, which using Boltzmann’s description of entropy, we can express as the level of orderliness should always decrease.  Stephen Hawking describes this as the arrow of time.  Because, if someone shows you a video clip in which steam gathers itself together and returns into a cup of coffee, or that box of children’s blocks repacks itself, then we know the video is being run backwards because these processes involve decreasing entropy and this can only happen spontaneously if we reverse the direction of time.  If this is true then why do we exist as highly ordered structures?

Erwin Schrödinger in his book, ‘What is Life’ says that organisms suck orderliness out of the environment in order to exist, so that the orderliness of the universe, that’s the organism and its environment, decreases.  Humans digest highly-ordered food to sustain life and food, in the form of plants, is brought into existence by metabolising energy from the sun and releasing entropy in the form of heat.  When we die these processes cease and the orderliness is sucked out of us to sustain insects, maggots and bacteria.

We are organisms, known as Sapiens, that organise ourselves into cultures and societies.  Organisation implies an increase in the level of orderliness in apparent contradiction of the second law.  So, we would expect to find a corresponding increase in disorder somewhere to counterbalance the order in society.  The more regimented society becomes the greater the requirement for counterbalancing disorder to occur somewhere in order to satisfy the second law, which might happen unexpectedly and explosively if the level of constraint or regulation is too great.  This is not an argument for anarchy or total deregulation, the financial sector has already demonstrated the risks associated with this path, but for an optimum and sustainable level of orderliness.  This requires subtle judgment just like in elegant engineering design and living a healthy life, both physically and psychologically.