Remember Jimmy Carter?

One of his key E/Os, which amusingly isn't prominently on display at his library (I went looking for it 10+ years ago) was his order halting all civilian nuclear fuel reprocessing.

Fission reactors inherently create a large quantity of nuclear waste.  But not all waste is equal when it comes to nuclear energy; some isotopes are short-lived and while very dangerous when created become non-dangerous almost-immediately.  As just one of many examples the cooling water gets "activated" in a BWR (Boiling Water Reactor) and thus you cannot enter the turbine room of a running unit because it is emitting fairly high-level radiation.  However, within a very short time after the reactor is shut down that has all decayed and there is no problem with going in there to work.  Since you would generally not want to actually try to work on a running steam turbine this isn't much of a problem operationally (although it does make for some interesting design requirements around the entry space to said turbine room so someone doesn't get accidentally irradiated!)

But some isotopes, especially those in the actinide series, are very long-lived, with half-lives in the thousands of years (or worse.)  The general rule is that after 10 half-lives of any radioactive substance there isn't any left to care about (do the math on it; it is in fact sound) but obviously 10,000 years (or worse) is wildly beyond the current lifetime of civilization as we know it -- and thus trying to claim you can "guarantee" something will remain contained and safe during that amount of time is a fantasy.

This leads to one inescapable conclusion: The only safe place for such material is inside an operating reactor since it is less-dangerous than everything else that is going on in there at that moment.  That is, since you must contain the fuel in a reactor while its running there's no "extra cost" in safety or price to simply put it in there, and there is in fact a benefit in that while the amount of energy it releases is small it is not zero and by being bombarded with neutrons in the reactor it will, over time, be broken down into lighter elements which are dangerous for a shorter period of time.

But today there is no reprocessing because when Carter destroyed the investments in that industry which had been made, even though Reagan reversed that order immediately upon taking office no commercial firm has been willing to take that risk of its investment being destroyed a second time.

Now the Supremes have been asked to rule on whether a private company can be licensed to store said waste away from the inherently dangerous reactor it is associated with.

I don't know how that decision will play out but its a question that arises due to a general problem with long-amortization investments generally that are subject to either Congressional or Presidential revocation since Congress turns over every two years and the Presidency every four or eight.

We must fix this and not only in the context of nuclear power.  Indeed, I would argue we may need a Constitutional Amendment that allows, for some subset of licensed activity, that an operating license over a given period of time is inherently attached to licensing authorization initially and cannot be modified or revoked without it being considered a 5th Amendment taking subject to immediate and summary compensation for the value that has been destroyed including the prospective profit that would otherwise be earned.

That does not mean that a license cannot be conditioned on, for example, proper operating practices or some other objective criteria delineated at the time of issuance related to, for example, environmental impact.  But it does mean that the firm in question must be protected against a different Congress or Administration changing the rules on what is permissible in terms of alleged or real environmental impact after the licensing occurs, and private actions that are aimed at the same goal must be subject to the same protections -- that is, the rules must be established at the time of the original permit and only a violation of those rules at that time can stand as a valid reason to revoke it.

Why can't we do this through legislation?  Simply put the EPA's actions, among other regulatory agency actions, make clear that the whims of political change are simply too mercurial to trust over an amortization period that extends beyond two Presidential terms -- and in some cases anything beyond one Congressional term, or two years, is too great an ask.

America, for example, proved that thorium-fueled reactors with a molten-salt coolant were functional in the 1960s.  I put forward a prospective path for energy self-sufficiency that required no outside-the-US inputs and would last for hundreds of years, providing not only electricity but also liquid hydrocarbon transportation fuel.

Why would not some large private company go after this hard?  After all having a several hundred year predictable-cost supply of gasoline, diesel fuel and electrical power looks pretty darn attractive, does it not?  In a world of geopolitical risk (which isn't going away ever, if history is a guide) an autarkic solution to America's energy needs that is sustainable for hundreds of years and resolves 99+% of the nuclear waste problem through online reprocessing, thus keeping all the high-level stuff in the plant where you can't evade having it anyway, this is a win on so many different levels assuming you had the tens or hundreds of billions accessible to invest you'd be nuts not to.

The reason it hasn't happen thus has to be an externality and the obvious externality is that any Administration can destroy it on a whim and for those who say "oh they'd never do that" well Carter did so nobody with two firing neurons in their head is going to take that risk a second time.

We need to fix this folks and nowhere is it more-important than in the energy sector.

Its really rather simple: They have not gone along with "green energy" and as a result they have inexpensive and abundant energy.

The average Russian pays less than 10 cents/kWh (US converted cost) for electricity.  They have and do use some hydro and nuclear (about 20% each) but essentially all of the rest is carbon-based fueled.

Estonia of note recently told Russia to bite it and disconnected from their supply.  The result was a 50% increase in cost immediately.  While many are blaming this on cable disruptions the fact is that disconnecting from inexpensive and abundant sources has a price, and Estonians are paying it.

I will note that few places in the US have power costs anywhere near what Russia does and those that do are blessed with an abundance of hydro resource which is, of course, renewable (in that it rains) so once built your costs are confined to maintenance of the dam and generating turbines -- the "fuel" is provided by nature.  But most of the United States and Europe, as they have increasingly eschewed carbon-based fuels for energy, have seen meteoric increases in cost.  Were the citizens who allowed this and in many cases advocated for it given an honest assessment of said cost and did they thus accept it explicitly or were they lied to that "renewable energy" would be cheaper and better?

The truth is that renewables are neither cheaper or better in that they're unreliable and thus have to be backed up with something else because the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine -- in fact, at one of the times you want energy most, which is in the winter at 2:00 AM when its -20F outside the sun is never shining and wind is uncertain.  As a result you must have a reliable and dispatchable alternative available and pay for that infrastructure all of the time or your electrical supply becomes unreliable.

It may be that this trade-off is one that the people of a nation will voluntarily make, when fully-apprised of the impact on their personal life.  But one must also include in that the economic impacts and thus job impacts of such policy because behind every unit of economic output, which of course is the aggregate of all jobs and all labor, is a unit of energy.

All such choices have costs and while cleaning up energy production to a significant degree is inexpensive and quite easy completely doing so is in fact impossible no matter the form of energy unless you deliberately ignore some of the adverse effects and claim they don't exist.  Damming rivers, for example, does indeed have a disruptive impact, making solar panels requires highly-toxic chemicals and the contents of the panels are quite toxic as well (other than the glass on the front, which is fairly benign.)  Windmills require a huge amount of concrete to construct and the blades are non-recyclable, they're a petroleum product as they're made out of fiberglass and have a service life after which they must be replaced -- what do you do with the ones that are used up?

One serious problem in America is that inconsistency from administration to administration makes long-amortization projects uneconomic at the outset.  Nobody in their right mind is going to invest in something with a 20 or 40 year period during which it is expected to produce revenue when an administration can turn over in four year or Congress in two and suddenly outlaw it.  That leaves the investing firm with a smoking hole in their balance sheet and no recourse, thus firms will simply not spend the money beyond their own bare minimum requirements.

I put forward a potential long term energy policy 14 years ago ago that resolves many of these issues but without hard evidence that it would not be destroyed the next time someone else takes office nobody is going to do the engineering work to complete that and then build it out.  Such a policy and implementation would provide both stable electrical supply and petroleum fuels on a forward basis for hundreds of years but in order to actually do so you have to convince industry that their investment will not be destroyed by a Presidential pen two or four years hence, exactly as Keystone was by Biden and nuclear reprocessing was by Carter.

Are we ready to resolve that problem?  There's no evidence we are at this point but again, if you want economic progress you must solve this because the laws of economics are not suggestions and behind every unit of economic output is a unit of energy.

Some people have what is called "dual fuel" for heat -- both a combustion fuel and a heat pump.  Note that while technically the "backup" strips are a "dual" fuel they're really not since both are electricity -- and resistance heating is the worst choice.

The question thus arises "at what temperature outside should I set the unit to change over?"

This is a math problem; the general formula is found on this page.

You need to know (1) your kilowatt-hour charge for electricity, (2) the cost for therms if you have natural gas (or the cost-per gallon for propane; each gallon is 0.916 therm), (3) the efficiency of your gas furnace (0.80 is typical for old-style non-condensing, 0.90 to 0.95 for the newer condensing furnaces) and you need to find the chart in your heat pump's installation manual (if you don't have it, get the model number and look online) that gives you the COP, which is Coefficient of Performance curve for various outdoor temperatures, indoor coil input temperatures and airflow.

With the indoor coil you have you can determine the airflow setting in use, or if you don't know use the middle one -- it'll be pretty close.

So here's an example:

Electricity costs 0.15/kWh
Natural Gas costs $1.35/therm
Your furnace is new (95% efficient)

Therefore the COP changeover point is: (0.15 * 0.95 * 29.3) / 1.35 = 3.09

Now look on your chart or table for your heat pump and find where the COP for your typical conditions indoors (usually 70F at the coil) and airflow (if you know, or use the middle if you have to guess) crosses 3.09 for outdoor temperature.

Above that outdoor temperature the heat pump is cheaper to run, below it the fuel is cheaper.

That is where you set the changeover.

Note that as the power or fuel cost changes so does the proper change point and most of the time that's reasonably stable during a winter season but changes from year to year, possibly by quite a bit, especially for either gas or propane.  Also note that with propane being wildly more expensive than natural gas most of the time the difference between those two alternative fuels is huge if the power cost is identical.

This is all a numbers question and if you can use either at your discretion why would you spend more money than you need to keeping your house warm in the winter?

Calculate the correct place each fall, set that, and whenever the power or fuel cost change get out the calculator and see if you need to move it.

You might think that dual fuel makes no sense up north but you'd be wrong; it in fact makes more sense up north than it does anywhere else because up north there are very significant parts of the year where a heat pump wins big on operating cost but at the same time it gets cold enough that it can be a huge lose, especially if you size it sufficiently to be able to keep the house warm at all in cold temperatures.  Most modern systems will produce quite a bit of usable heat even at zero Fahrenheit outdoors but they usually lose massively to natural gas at that temperature as their COP is down to 1.5 or so.  At 40F, however, modern units can produce a COP of 3.0 which can be a huge win, especially against propane.  In fact if your secondary fuel is propane the heat pump is often cheaper to run, depending on electrical cost, even down into the single digits outdoors!

This is a math problem so run it for your unit and see where the correct place to set it is.  If you're looking to replace an HVAC and have a secondary fuel available run some typical scenarios -- you might be surprised at how fast the dual-fuel setup pays for its additional up-front expense and the further north you are and thus the larger your "shoulder" season the more-likely that is to be true.

If you have read Leverage one of the key points made fairly early on, and one I've made repeatedly in this column, is this:

Behind every unit of GDP there is a unit of energy.

It has always been thus and always will be thus.  It is akin to the laws of thermodynamics, which you cannot do anything about and it does not matter if you like them or not.  Attempting to go "beyond them" will not only always fail it will hurt in some regard since it will at best be a less-than-optimal experience and at worst will be a death-causing one.

Fracking was considered a "miracle."  It was no such thing.  I noted many years ago during its "heyday" that it was nothing more than a parlor trick: Yes, you get hydrocarbons out of the ground in places where they were formerly uneconomic to attack, but the problem with doing so is that you haven't changed the amount in the ground -- only the speed of extraction.  Therefore if you double the speed of extraction you also double the rate of depletion!

One of the common chestnuts is that we're "running out of oil."  We are not.  There is a crap-ton of oil.  The problem is the cost of extracting it.  We've run out of cheap to get to oil.

Indeed, we have more than 500 years of reasonably-recoverable and consumable fuel that can be used as liquid hydrocarbons and, if you do not care about cost, we actually have an infinite amount!

What, you say?  That's impossible!

My riposte is that you failed high school chemistry class.

Hydrocarbons are simply chains of hydrogen and carbon, when you get down to it.  Natural gas is a simple one; CH4, or one carbon and four hydrogen atoms.  It has much more energy than coal (which is basically just Carbon) because hydrogen has much more electronegative potential, and thus when burned you get much more energy released for each unit of fuel you use.  This has been the primary reason the United States has in fact dropped its per-BTU CO2 emissions dramatically over the last 30 or so years; natural gas has been cheaper than coal.

We don't use hydrocarbons for energy because we're pigs that hate the Earth, in short.  We do so because they are the only reasonable means to get the energy required for modern life in a package form that works.  All the screaming about EVs and similar is nothing more than a bunch of ignorant jackasses who think they can violate the laws of thermodynamics..

You can't.

The person who figures out how to do it, if it can be done, creates a world that is wildly beyond the dreams of Lucas and Roddenberry.  Even in the Star Wars and Star Trek fictional universes they follow the laws of thermodynamics -- in Star Trek they use dilithium as an energy medium, and in Star Wars it is Kyber crystals -- both of which have to be mined, in other words, both of which were created as a result of the formation of planets and stars and both of which are finite resources.

Let's take a simple example: An electric car.  It's "more efficient" than burning gasoline, right?

Uh, nope.

A modern gasoline engine is about 35% efficient in terms of taking the BTUs in the gasoline and turning it into movement.  That's horrible, you'd think -- electric motors can reach 90% efficiency with modern controls (and the motors in electric cars typically are near that range.)

Electric wins, right?

WRONG.

Every transfer or transformation of energy involves loss.

The best combined-cycle natural gas generating plant has roughly 60% energy efficiency.  These are the most-modern; everything else is worse.  Nuclear is a lot worse, typically, about half that (that is, for every watt that comes out of a nuclear plant as electricity about two more wind up dumped, typically into a body of water.)  So we'll use the best.

The natural gas plant is 60% efficient making the electricity.

The transmission of the power from the generating plant to your house is 95% efficient (5% is lost, roughly.)

The charging of the EV battery is about 75% efficient during normal (slow) charging but this drops wildly when "superchargers" or similar are used.  Such charging is unlikely to exceed 50% efficient due to the requirement to keep the batteries cool.  In short charging at more than "1C" for a lithium cell results in much lower charge efficiency because you are attempting to "overdrive" the chemical process that charges the cell, and doing so radically increases loss.  We'll use 75%.

Assuming you do not let the EV sit (all batteries self-discharge over time) and drive it the next day the loss from self-discharge is very small.  We'll ignore it, and give you the entire 90% "best of breed" efficiency between the battery and the wheels (the withdrawal of said energy, control electronics and motor turning the stored battery power into movement.)

So where are we thus far?

0.6 * 0.95 * 0.75 * 0.9 = 38.5% efficient for the EV assuming the best case, which of course is bull****, but even if you assume such it is still nearly identical to that of the gas-powered car that cost far less money to buy!  Never mind that there is no economically-viable means to recycle a lithium battery pack in an EV; it is toxic waste when it wears out and inevitably, as with all such things, it does.  Nearly every part of a traditional car is recyclable; the metal the vehicle, including its engine and transmission all is, much of the plastic is, and the starting battery is almost 100% recyclable into a new starting battery.

But while you can't violate the laws of thermodynamics you can deliberately cripple yourself.  We can, for example, make all the liquid hydrocarbon we want out of atmospheric (or sea-sequestered carbonate) sources of carbon.  Indeed the CO2 bottle that is refilled at your local brewery or fast-food store that dispenses fountain drinks was almost-certainly condensed out of the air; that is the most-common means by which industrial CO2 is produced.  The reason we don't do this to make fuel is that you must put the energy back in you wish to liberate, plus something for the inevitable losses which you cannot eliminate.  In short what we're doing is using that which the sun put in via energy rather than doing it ourselves and the reason we do it is that it is cheaper.  That's all.

It does not matter if you like these facts or not; they are nonetheless facts.  No amount of braying at the moon nor complaining by the "green wokesters" will change it.  What you can do, however, is foolishly jack up the price to the point that nobody can afford it, at which point modern society as we know it ceases to exist.

Consider that while you may think it would be great to not have all those vehicles running around spewing CO2 into the air where the CO2 goes into the air doesn't change that it does so, and the "more refined" form energy takes the more loss and less efficient it is.  Electricity is a very highly-refined form of energy particularly when compared to, for example, a gallon of diesel fuel.

The premise that we can shift all our energy needs to "renewables" is pure folly.  We cannot at a price that can be paid by the common person, and whether we like it or not renewables are largely unreliable as well so you must add massive storage costs which makes them even more uneconomic.  While the ultra-rich do not care if their power bill at their mansion goes from $2,000 a month to $5,000, since they make north of a million a month anyway, the common person cannot pay a $500 electric bill that used to be $200.  That's roughly $3,500 a year of additional expense they do not have.  To cut that $500 bill back to something they can afford they cannot have either heat or air conditioning, and might not be able to have hot water!

Years ago I penned a column that was an expansion of part of what I wrote about on energy in Leverage called "Let's Talk About An ACTUAL Energy Policy" that, unlike the woke dreams and fairy tales does not violate the Laws of Thermodynamics nor does it require that we conquer something (e.g. fusion) we do not know how to do.  It does require engineering progress, but engineering is something that humans have always been good at, given the will.  Our landing on the moon is but one example; there were no actual breakthroughs required in terms of what we knew how to do, but engineering, the application and refinement of what we know, was required.  The same holds true here.

It is indeed easier to scream at people about them being pigs than to put your nose down and solve engineering problems, especially if you lack the intellectual firepower required to do the latter.  Those who fly all over the world yet scream about fossil fuel use are in that group -- to an individual.  So are those who live in mansions rather than 1,000 sq/ft hyper-insulated homes, have swimming pools and other personal accoutrements.  Fenestration (windows) are energy pigs; the person who claims to be a "green woke individual", if they're not lying, has no business living in a structure with floor-to-ceiling "natural light" that both gains energy in the summer and loses it in the winter, both of which must be reversed by artificial (and earth-damning, by their claims) means.

Perhaps as the self-imposed stupidity begins to bite we will force some of these people to live by their own standards.

I might also grow six heads, but somehow I suspect both are equally likely, and given the public's unwillingness to take the time to understand even the most-basic principles of both chemistry and physics I hold out little hope on a forward basis.

Meh.....

More than 50 U.S. companies are developing advanced reactor designs that will bring enhanced safety, efficiency and economics to the nuclear energy industry.

X-energy, located just outside the nation’s capital in Greenbelt, Maryland, is working on a pebble bed, high-temperature gas-cooled reactor that the company says can’t meltdown.

X-energy is developing its Xe-100 reactor and specialized uranium-based pebble fuel that could be available in the market as early as the late 2020s.

Who gives a ****?

Seriously, I mean it.

This design does have advantages -- don't get me wrong.  It's also not new.  The premise is that you construct fuel "pebbles" (about the size of a cueball, so more like "fuel rocks" rather than pebbles) that contain the fuel inside an allegedly "impervious" sphere.  The pebbles, being spherical, allow gas (Helium in this case) to pass between them, which takes the reaction heat away, and you use that to produce electricity through a traditional heat exchanger mechanism.  The moderator is graphite and in the reactor vessel; the fuel is cycled through from top to bottom, which means it is continually refueled in operation, with each fuel unit running for about three years.

Traditional water-cooled reactors use zirconium for the fuel rods.  Zirconium is "transparent" to neutrons; that is, it neither interrupts their passage nor does it get "activated" (absorbing them and becoming a radioactive isotope.)  This is good; you want what looks like a window to the sun for neutrons, because they have to get into the fuel in order to cause fission.

But zirconium has some problems.  Chief among them is thermal tolerance.  This is not a problem provided the reactor remains flooded with water, since water has a critical point of ~3200psi and ~705F.  Therefore you must keep the pressure below that and the temperature below it too, since water is also the moderator.  Above 705F it's steam no matter the pressure.  For this reason water-cooled reactors tend to run around ~1,000psi in normal operation for a BWR and ~2,200psi for a PWR.  BWRs are simpler in that as water boils it loses its moderation; this is a negative feedback on the power level and makes designing control systems, and their inherent safety, easier.

However in the event of loss of circulation (the ability to dump heat) or coolant (e.g. pipe break, etc) you have a severe problem because zirconium melts at ~3,300 F -- and once it does, you're screwed.  Silicon carbide, which is what the pellets in a pebble-bed reactor have their outer shell made of, doesn't melt until nearly 5,000F.  That's a huge safety factor.

But, there's a rub.  The "safety analysis" has run tests that postulate that in an accident the temperatures should not exceed 1,800C.  I note that this is below the melting point of zirconium, yet as we know in Fukushima and elsewhere, that temperature is indeed exceeded in bad situations.

There are also general issues with graphite moderators; they're manageable however, albeit at some cost.

So how safe is this thing?  Well, good question.  But in the end, it doesn't matter.

No fission design is safe end to end, which is all that matters, until and unless you have a closed fuel cycle.  The problem is that the burn-up in a TRISO fuel reactor -- that is, a pebble bed, while much better than a BWR or PWR (20% .vs. ~10%, roughly) still sucks in that 80% of what you put in there comes out and has to be reprocessed somewhere or discarded as high-level waste.

There is no reprocessing in the United States today, and hasn't been since Jimmy Carter shut it down.  Therefore any plant design that does not inherently separate and reprocess its own fuel as an inherent part of its operation is manifestly unsafe and unsuitable for deployment until and unless there is a viable reprocessing cycle available in the United States.

There is only one way to safely deal with most transuranics, which remain dangerous for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years.  You have to put them back into a reactor and burn them up.

Short-lived isotopes that reach a stable, non-radioactive element with half-lives in the range of single-digit years or less we can deal with.  After 10 half-lives basic mathematical theory tells us that the substance is no longer dangerous no matter how high-level of radiation it emitted originally.  But that's not something you can fudge; anything with half-lives in the tens, hundreds or thousands of years has to be returned to a reactor and reduced in this fashion until it reaches either a stable isotope or one with a half-life of less than 10 years.

Period.

Now there will always be a small amount of waste that isn't amenable to this, but if it's small enough in volume it never has to leave the plant until the plant is decommissioned.  What we cannot accept is a no-reprocessing paradigm, which is what we have now, where fuel comes out of these units full of hundred or thousand-year or more half-life highly-radioactive elements for which we have no rational disposal mechanism.  Without reprocessing we cannot put those elements back into a reactor and burn them up and we have nowhere we can safety put them either.

Nuclear power safety is not solely about meltdown safety, although pebble bed designs look promising in that regard.  In addition these designs have other challenges, one of them being that they use Helium as a coolant -- and Helium is a non-renewable gas that is in short supply and in addition it's a very small molecule so it leaks like crazy.  Helium, incidentally, is used as a coolant in these units for a number of reasons -- among them is that it is not easily activated (that is, it doesn't capture more neutrons easily) and when it does it decays extraordinarily quickly, so it doesn't form dangerous reaction products.  This means that if it's released (e.g. due to a pipe break) it won't hurt anyone as any activated isotopes will decay before it can get out of the building.  It also has a pretty good specific heat ratio; that is, it carries heat well as gases go (much better than air, for example), so it's a good choice for that reason as well.  Being inert it has no reactive issues with the various materials inside the reactor either, which is a big bonus.  And it has a very low neutron cross-section, so it doesn't interfere with the fission reaction itself.

Finally, due to the use of gas as a coolant and the much higher temperature tolerance of the fuel these units run at materially higher temperatures than a common PWR or BWR, which means they're materially more thermally-efficient.  It also means they can, at least theoretically, be run in places where large-volume water cooling is not available (e.g. inland, and not near oceans, fault lines or huge lakes) with reasonable overall efficiency.  That's a plus.

But on the downside our supply of Helium is basically all from natural gas wells, where it's a trace component of what comes out of the hole.  It's completely non-renewable and non-capturable, in that it is so light it effectively disappears into the upper atmosphere when released.  For this reason consumption of it is a serious long-term problem since our ability to get more of it is inherently tied to natural gas production.

Nonetheless the big problem with all of these types of reactor designs remain -- there is no sane means of dealing with the waste products out of these units.  Of the fission designs currently known and on the board there is only one that is amenable to continual, on-site reprocessing that burns up basically all of the high-level reaction products as part of its normal operation.

That's the LFTR, which uses Thorium as its fuel, is started on Uranium (since Thorium is fertile and not directly fissile) and since the fuel is dissolved in the working fluid it can be reprocessed chemically online in the plant itself, thereby allowing on-site burn-up of most of the high-level reaction products.

Oh, and it is also passively safe since are no fuel pellets or rods that can overheat, crack and release the material inside, and we know that passive safety system works because it was run for several years at Oak Ridge in the 1960s and when the scientists went home for the night they literally just turned the power off to the systems and walked away.

I wrote an article on a viable hydrocarbon replacement strategy here, and also covered it extensively in my book Leverage in Chapter 10.  It's as valid today as it was then; go read it.

The LFTR was abandoned, incidentally, because being Thorium fuel-cycle based it is almost entirely unsuitable for the production of nuclear bombs -- and we wanted dual-use nuclear technology.

Go figure.