Chinese Government Approves 4 More New Nuclear Reactors.

China National Nuclear Corp (CNNC) has received governmental approval to begin preliminary work on four new nuclear power reactors: two at the existing Tianwan site in Jiangsu province and two at the new Xudabao plant in Liaoning province.

The approval came from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and should lead to the construction of Tianwan 3 and 4 (Phase II of the plant) and the first two units at Phase I of Xudabao.

At Tianwan, CNNC will construct two 1060 MWe Russian-supplied VVER-1000 pressurised water reactors, alongside the existing two such units at the site. A contract for the engineering design of Tianwan 3 and 4 was signed in September 2010 between CNNC subsidiary Jiangsu Nuclear Power Corporation and AtomStroyExport, and the general construction contract was signed in November 2010. First concrete for unit 3 is scheduled to be poured in December 2012, while concrete for unit 4 will start to be poured in August 2013, CNNC said.

The first reactor at Tianwan was put into commercial operation in June 2007, with the second following three months later. The plant is eventually expected to house eight reactors, although units 5 to 8 are likely to be larger VVER-1200 units.

... fluid fuels are not subjected to the structural stresses of solid fuels: liquid-fuel reactors can operate at atmospheric pressure, obviating the need for containment vessels able to withstand high-pressure steam explosions. Gaseous fission products like xenon bubble out while some fission products precipitate out and so do not absorb neutrons from the chain reaction. Like PWRs, liquid-fuel reactors can be configured to breed more fuel, but in ways that make them more proliferation resistant than the waste generated by conventional PWRs. Spent PWR fuel contains transuranic nuclides such as Pu-239, bred by neutron absorption in U-238, and it is such long-lived transuranics that are a core issue in waste storage concerns. In contrast, liquid-fuel reactors have the potential to reduce storage concerns to a few hundred years as they would produce far fewer transuranic nuclides than a PWR.

History of liquid fuel reactors

The world’s first liquid fuel reactor used uranium sulfate fuel dissolved in water. Eugene Wigner conceived this technology in 1945, Alvin Weinberg built it at Oak Ridge, and Enrico Fermi started it up. The water carries the fuel, moderates neutrons (slows them to take advantage of the high fission cross-section of uranium for thermal-energy neutrons), transfers heat, and expands as the temperature increases, thus lowering moderation and stabilizing the fission rate. Because the hydrogen in ordinary water absorbs neutrons, an aqueous reactor, like a PWR, cannot reach criticality unless fueled with uranium enriched beyond the natural 0.7% isotopic abundance of U-235. Deuterium absorbs few neutrons, so, with heavy water, aqueous reactors can use unenriched uranium. Weinberg’s aqueous reactor fed 140 kW of power into the electric grid for 1000 hours. The intrinsic reactivity control was so effective that shutdown was accomplished simply by turning off the steam turbine generator.

In 1943, Wigner and Weinberg also conceived a liquid fuel thorium-uranium breeder reactor, for which the aqueous reactor discussed above was but the first step. The fundamental premise in such a reactor is that a blanket of thorium Th-232 surrounding the fissile core will absorb neutrons, with some nuclei thus being converted (“transmuted”) to Th-233. Th-233, in turn, beta decays to protactinium-233 and then to U-233, which is itself fissile and can be used to refuel the reactor. Later, as Director of Oak Ridge, Weinberg led the development of the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), the subject of this article. Aware of the future effect of carbon dioxide emissions, Weinberg wrote “humankind’s whole future depended on this.” The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, powered first with U-235 and then U-233, operated successfully over 4 years, through 1969. To facilitate engineering tests, the thorium blanket was not installed; the U-233 used in the core came from other reactors breeding Th-232. The MSRE was a proof-of-principle success. Fission-product xenon gas was continually removed to prevent unwanted neutron absorptions, online refueling was demonstrated, minor corrosion of the reactor vessel was addressed, and chemistry protocols for separation of thorium, uranium, and fission products in the fluid fluorine salts were developed. Unfortunately, the Oak Ridge work was stopped when the Nixon administration decided instead to fund only the solid fuel Liquid sodium Metal cooled Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR), which could breed plutonium-239 faster than the LFTR could breed uranium-233.

The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor

A significant advantage of using thorium to breed U-233 is that relatively little plutonium is produced from the Th-232 because six more neutron absorptions are required than is the case with U-238. The U-233 that is bred is also proliferation-resistant in that the neutrons that produce it also produce 0.13% contaminating U-232 which decays eventually to thallium, which itself emits a 2.6 MeV penetrating gamma radiation that would be obvious to detection monitors and hazardous to weapons builders. For example, a year after U-233 separation, a weapons worker one meter from a subcritical 5 kg sphere of it would receive a radiation dose of 4,200 mrem/hr; death becomes probable after 72 hours exposure. Normally the reactor shielding protects workers, but modifying the reactor to separate U-233 would require somehow adding hot cells and remote handling equipment to the reactor and also to facilities for weapons fabrication, transport, and delivery. Attempting to build U-233-based nuclear weapons by modifying a LFTR would be more hazardous, technically challenging and expensive than creating a purpose-built weapons program using uranium enrichment (Pakistan) or plutonium breeding (India, North Korea).

http://energyfromthorium.com/

Work on thorium-based reactors is currently being actively pursued in many countries including Germany, India, China, and Canada; India plans to produce 30% of its electricity from thorium by 2050. But all these investigations involve solid fuel forms. Our interest here is with the liquid-fueled form of a thorium-based U-233 breeder reactor.

The configuration of a LFTR is shown schematically in Figure 2. In a “two-fluid” LFTR a molten eutectic mixture of salts such as LiF and BeF2 containing dissolved UF4 forms the central fissile core. (“Eutectic” refers to a compound that solidifies at a lower temperature than any other compound of the same chemicals.) A separate annular region containing molten Li and Be fluoride salts with dissolved ThF4 forms the fertile blanket. Fission of U-233 (or some other “starter” fissile fuel) dissolved in the fluid core heats it. This heated fissile fluid attains a noncritical geometry as it is pumped through small passages inside a heat exchanger. Excess neutrons are absorbed by Th-232 in the molten salt blanket, breeding U-233 which is continuously removed with fluorine gas and used to refuel the core. Fission products are chemically removed in the waste separator, leaving uranium and transuranics in the molten salt fuel. From the heat exchanger a separate circuit of molten salt heats gases in the closed cycle helium gas turbine which generates power. All three molten salt circuits are at atmospheric pressure.

http://energyfromthorium.com/

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009, 12:26 PM ET
First Solar To Build 2-Gigawatt Solar Power Plant in China
By Keith Johnson, Cassandra Sweet contributed to this post.

Solar-panel maker First Solar is cracking open the Chinese market, which could become one of the world’s most promising for solar power.

Arizona-based First Solar said today it signed a deal with Chinese officials to build a 2,000 megawatt solar-power plant in Inner Mongolia over the next decade at an estimated cost of $5 billion to $6 billion.

UPDATE: That figure is apparently what it would cost to build a similar plant in the U.S. today; building a large plant in China in the future would likely cost less, due to labor costs especially, say First Solar spokesmen.

For First Solar, which already has contracts to build smaller, though still utility-size, solar-power plants in the U.S., the Chinese deal could be a game-changer. “If you have two gigawatts, it could change the image of solar power from niche to nuclear-plant-size installations,” said First Solar chief executive Mike Ahearn in an interview.

http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/09/08/first-solar-to-build-2-gigawatt-solar-power-plant-in-china/

Currently, the world’s largest operational solar power plant is the 80MW Sarnia Solar Project completed last month in Canada. No sooner had it commenced operation than a 1GW plant known as the Blythe Solar Power Project received approval to be built in California. The U.S. plant is expected to take six years to complete and won't generate as much power as the proposed 2GW plant planned for China, but the South African government hopes its Solar Park will be generating 1GW as early as 2012 and a total of 5GW by 2020.

Last week more than 400 potential investors and solar energy experts gathered at the two-day Solar Park Investors Conference held in the small town of Upington where the park is to be built to learn more about the project. The site is seen as ideal for a solar park as it hardly ever rains, rarely has clouds, and doesn’t have sandstorms. The park carries an estimated price tag of 150 billion Rand (approx. US$22 billion), most of which would be provided by private investors.

http://www.gizmag.com/south-african-5gw-solar-plant/16839/

Space Based Solar Power Satellite Program from PG&E and Solaren in California

Now PG&E in California, is planning to take their ability to tap renewable energy to a whole new level: solar power in space.“Solaren says it plans to generate the power using solar panels in earth orbit, then convert it to radio frequency energy for transmission to a receiving station in Fresno County. From there, the energy will be converted to electricity and fed into PG&E’s power grid.” ~ Next100.com

Solaren hopes to begin launching before 2016. The satellites will deploy the solar panels so they dock automatically together in orbit, resulting in an orbital power plant weighing roughly 25 tons if back here on Earth.

The advantages of space solar power include:

• energy that can be harnessed at all times, even at night or when it’s cloudy.
  
• baseload power delivery that makes efficient electricity possible for meeting customer demand.
  
• an underlying technology that is mature since it is based on communications satellite technology.

http://cleantechnica.com/2009/04/18/space-based-solar-power-satellite-program-from-pge-and-solaren/
... ... ... ... ... ... ...
for more info also see:

PG&E makes deal for space solar power

Utility to buy orbit-generated electricity from Solaren in 2016, at no risk
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30198977/ns/technology_and_science-space/

California gives green light for space-based solar

California regulators on Thursday approved an ambitious project to beam solar energy from space starting in 2016.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10408897-54.html#ixzz1AghArBsb

April 13 (Bloomberg) -- Seth Grae, chief executive officer of Lightbridge Corp., talks with Bloomberg's Margaret Brennan about the use of thorium as an alternative to uranium for powering nuclear reactors.

See the video at: http://www.bloomberg.com/video/58837544/

Also discussed in the video is using nuclear power plants to destroy nuclear weapons material by using it as fuel, etc.

From: "New" Nuclear Reactors, Same Old Story
By Amory B. Lovins

...IFRs' wastes may contain less transuranics, but at prohibitive cost and with worse occupational exposures, routine releases, accident and terrorism risks, proliferation, and disposal needs for intermediate- and low-level wastes. It's simply a dishonest fantasy to claim, as a Wall Street Journal op-ed just did,8 that such hypothetical and uneconomic ways to recover energy or other value from spent LWR fuel mean “There is no such thing as nuclear waste.” Of course, the nuclear industry wishes this were true.

No new kind of reactor is likely to be much, if at all, cheaper than today's LWRs, which remain grossly uncompetitive and are getting more so despite five decades of maturation.

“New reactors” are precisely the “paper reactors” Admiral Rickover described in 1953:

An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics:
(1) It is simple.
(2) It is small.
(3) It is cheap.
(4) It is light.
(5) It can be built very quickly.
(6) It is very flexible in purpose.
(7) Very little development will be required. It will use off the shelf components.
(8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

On the other hand a practical reactor can be distinguished by the following characteristics:
(1) It is being built now.
(2) It is behind schedule.
(3) It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items.
(4) It is very expensive.
(5) It takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems.
(6) It is large.
(7) It is heavy.
(8) It is complicated.

Every new type of reactor in history has been costlier, slower, and harder than projected. IFRs’ low pressure, different safety profile, high temperature, and potentially higher thermal efficiency (if its helium turbines didn’t misbehave as they have in all previous reactor projects) come with countervailing disadvantages and costs that advocates assume away, contrary to all experience.

Thorium reactors
Some enthusiasts prefer fueling reactors with thorium—an element 3× as abundant as uranium but even more uneconomic to use. India has for decades failed to commercialize breeder reactors to exploit its thorium deposits.

But thorium can’t fuel a reactor by itself: rather, a uranium- or plutonium-fueled reactor can convert thorium-232 into fissionable (and plutonium-like, highly bomb-usable) uranium-233. Thorium’s proliferation,9 waste, safety, and cost problems differ only in detail from uranium’s: e.g., thorium ore makes less mill waste, but highly radioactive U-232 makes fabricating or reprocessing U-233 fuel hard and costly. And with uranium-based nuclear power continuing its decades-long economic collapse, it’s awfully late to be thinking of developing a whole new fuel cycle whose problems differ only in detail from current versions.

Spent LWR fuel “burned” in IFRs, it’s claimed, could meet all humanity’s energy needs for centuries. But renewables and efficiency can do that forever at far lower cost, with no proliferation, nuclear wastes, or major risks.10 Moreover, any new type of reactor would probably cost even more than today’s models: even if the nuclear part of a new plant were free, the rest—two-thirds of its capital cost—would still be grossly uncompetitive with any efficiency and most renewables, sending out a kilowatt-hour for ~9–13¢/kWh instead of new LWRs’ ~12–18+¢. In contrast, the average U.S. windfarm completed in 2007 sold its power (net of a 1¢/kWh subsidy that’s a small fraction of nuclear subsidies) for 4.5¢/kWh. Add ~0.4¢ to make it dispatchable whether the wind is blowing or not and you’re still under a nickel delivered to the grid.
Most other renewables also beat new thermal power plants too, cogeneration is often comparable or cheaper, and efficiency is cheaper than just running any nuclear- or fossil-fueled plant. Obviously these options would also easily beat proposed fusion reactors that are sometimes claimed to be comparable to today’s fission reactors in size and cost. And unlike any kind of hypothetical fusion or new fission reactor—or LWRs, which have a market share below 2%—efficiency and micropower now provide at least half the world’s new electrical services, adding tens of times more capacity each year than nuclear power does. It’s a far bigger gamble to assume that the nuclear market loser will become a winner than that these winners will turn into losers.

BEIJING — Chinese scientists have mastered the technology for reprocessing fuel from nuclear power plants, potentially boosting the supplies of carbon-free electricity to keep the country's economy booming, state television reported Monday.

The breakthrough will extend by many times the amount of power that can be generated from China's nuclear plants as fissile and fertile materials are recovered to be new fuel, CCTV said.

Several European countries, Russia, India and Japan already reprocess nuclear fuel – the actual materials used to make nuclear energy – to separate and recover the unused uranium and plutonium, reduce waste and safely close the nuclear cycle.