A second nuclear era?

I grew up in Oak Ridge TN in the 1960s. It would have been hard to find any city in the world more pro-nuclear at that time*. Since then, nuclear power plant building went into decline in the US, partly because of concerns over safety. 

But any serious effort to decarbonize the world’s energy will require nuclear power**. To make that practical, the problem of safety must be solved. While thorium molten salt reactors are inherently safe, they have never been made on commercial scale since they were abandoned in the 1970s over corrosion issues. Last year, it appears that a pebble-bed module reactor met the safety concerns of an unscheduled shutdown:

“The world’s first demonstration plant of a high-temperature reactor with a pebble-bed module (HTR-PM) entered its commercial operation on December 6, 2023. Two safety tests were conducted on the two reactor modules of the HTR-PM plant, each at a power of 200 MWt. During the tests, the active power supply was totally switched off to see if the decay heat can be removed passively. The responses of nuclear power and temperatures within different reactor structures show that the reactors can be cooled down naturally without active intervention. The results of the tests manifest the existence of commercial-scale inherent safety for the first time.”

 

None of this is to say that solar, wind, geothermal and hydroelectric power should be abandoned. But unlike solar and wind, nuclear doesn’t suffer from the intermittency problem, and unlike geothermal and hydroelectric, nuclear power plants can be sited just about anywhere. Are we seeing the dawn of a second nuclear era?

*Ironically, the nearest power plant to Oak Ridge was the Bull Run coal-fired steam plant.
**Until fusion power becomes commercialized, which is always fifteen years away

 

https://www.cell.com/joule/abstract/S2542-4351(24)00290-3?fbclid=IwY2xjawIwKV5leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHZNbCq7gLyHPUvYaSBbO9aF3vK7fVE863AzODg2UoQqg_yp8WToxZUDVQw_aem_amBgjFY-hTrIA5cUTo9pKw