Nuclear Energy Revolution in the Form of Pellets

THE END IS NEAR!

Of the month that is. Love it or hate it - we all respect it. Nuclear energy offers a memorizing display of force as seen in the video above. The most powerful and destructive force that man has ever been able to achieve so far. With countries and terrorist threatening to use this power for evil, where does this leave the nuclear future?

South Africa may offer insight and a staging point for the future revolution of nuclear energy. The continents only nuclear power plant is located on its southern tip in no man’s land of Cape Town. It is an obsolete, water cooled reactor that is run by the State. However Eskom is ready to change all that and become the world’s first pebble bed reactor.

Pebble bed reactor promises safer, cleaner, smaller and more affordable power than conventional nuclear power plants. They even say this style reactor is “meltdown-proof” and “walk-away safe.”

“It is physically impossible for it to suffer the kind of accident at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl,” Ferreira says.

To skeptics, however, the PBMR project sounds like a reckless return to an energy source that was long ago rejected as too dangerous and costly. Construction of new reactors ground to a halt in the anti-nuclear atmosphere that followed the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. A new reactor hasn’t been commissioned in the United States since the 1970s, and many environmentalists would like to keep it that way.

As the world’s demand for energy continues to rise and mounting concerns over global warming, attitudes toward nuclear power are changing. Countries all across the world are now planning and building new reactors, such as Finland and Japan. Anxious to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil, the Bush administration also has called for a nuclear energy revival.

South Africa’s government, meanwhile, is scrambling to provide a domestic supply of affordable energy to millions of citizens long deprived under apartheid. Coal, which currently supplies 90 percent of the country’s power, is cheap and plentiful, but also highly polluting. Renewable forms like solar and wind energy have their limits. Hydropower isn’t an option, either. For now, at least, that leaves nuclear power.

The PBMR’s small size and relative simplicity are major advantages, advocates say. A new plant can be constructed in two years, while building a traditional plant requires at least six years. Unlike the typical 1,100-megawatt facility, the PBMR design is adaptable to changing local power needs. Once the core 165-megawatt plant is built, additional power-generating modules can be added to it.

Like conventional reactors, the PBMR produces energy by harnessing the heat of a nuclear chain reaction to power an electricity-generating turbine. The main difference between the two systems lies in the storage of the enriched uranium fuel, and in the delivery of heat to the power plant. Instead of traditional fuel rods, the PBMR reactor is packed with tennis ball-size graphite “pebbles,” each containing thousands of tiny uranium dioxide particles. The PBMR system relies on superheated helium gas, instead of the usual steam, to drive the turbines.

The fuel-storage system makes the PBMR inherently safer, Ferreira says, by preventing the radioactive material from overheating to the point of a meltdown. “With a conventional reactor, you’ve got to do a whole host of things to prevent the chain reaction from running away,” he says. “In a PBMR, you’ve got to do a whole lot of things to keep the chain reaction going.”

When the system malfunctions, the reactor simply shuts down, he says. The heat dissipates, and the radioactivity is contained.

The PBMR already boasts a successful track record. A 15-megawatt demonstration model was built in Germany during the 1960s, and it ran without a glitch for 21 years. But the government axed the program in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster.

In 1993, a German scientist took the moribund project to Eskom, where work slowly began to commercialize the technology. Now, the group hopes that the $1 billion project will establish South Africa as the world’s leading supplier of PBMR technology.

The PBMR still needs government approval, however, and other potential roadblocks remain. Earthlife Africa, an environmental group, has filed an appeal that could kill the project before it reaches the final approval stages.

Environmentalists have been alarmed by, among other things, developers’ claims that the plant’s built-in safety features remove the need for elaborate emergency backup and containment systems that are required for conventional reactors. This greater simplicity is what, in theory, makes the PBMR less expensive to build than water-cooled reactors.

Nevertheless, if the first PBMR proves successful, the consortium hopes to begin tapping the $100 billion global market for new power stations by 2010. Eventually, the PBMR consortium hopes to offer added perks, such as the capacity to desalinize seawater and generate hydrogen using the heat generated from the nuclear reaction, Ferreira adds. The PBMR consortium intends to seek U.S. funding next year to work on producing hydrogen power.

Ferreira acknowledges that South Africa has a limited window of opportunity to realize its nuclear ambitions. While South Africa’s program is most advanced, PBMR technology is also being pursued in China and at MIT. Unforeseen glitches and delays could cause this developing nation to miss out on a rare chance to count itself among the world’s technological leaders, he says.

“Pebble-bed reactors will be built in the world, regardless of whether we do it or not,” Ferreira says. “It’s got so many things going for it that I can almost not see it not happening.”

For further information on nuclear energy and its history, head over to http://www.nuclearfiles.org/ for more information.