Exciting to see this - so many advantages to pebble bed nuclear reactors including inherent safety (no risk of meltdown), use of helium coolant, ease of waste recycling disposal and continuous refuelling by simply adding more pebbles to the hopper.
Illinois Energy Prof has an excellent YT channel on energy, and has a great talk on IV gen reactor design. Saw it 4 years ago, so pumped to see some of the ideas he was talking about get plugged into the grid
If this helps China ween itself from coal faster then it's a huge win for the entire planet.
I know there's a lot of hate for nuclear (much of it understandable), but if we hadn't fucked it up in the 70's then climate change would not be a thing right now.
Yes, renewables and energy storage are good things too but the modern world is built on cheap energy and the more the merrier.
Side note: I became enamored with LFTR when it started getting promoted back in the day and I still think that too would be worth tackling.
China is also building enough renewable power than their grid expansion rate leading to a structural decline in CO2 emissions [1]. At the same time the utilization factors of the coal plants reduce each year.
This is driven purely by economic factors, for the first time since the discovery of fossil fuels, except the blip where we dammed up pretty much every single river globally to provide hydropower, we have in renewables have found a new cheaper energy source.
Honestly the hate for nuclear isn't understandable at all.
It has killed very few people, expense isn't a reason for hate, and everything else has pretty much been a win (land usage minimal, minimal byproducts, etc).
Human health cost of global warming isn't exactly cheap. Delayed costs are still costs. It's just my generation and my kids who have to pay while my parents generation reaped the rewards and profits up front.
I, like many of my peers feel like we are being grifted by the boomer generation.
How does it's cost to install and operate compare to gen 3/other nuclear tech? Safety is great, but nuclear is already safe enough (in the sense that, installing current and even last gen nuclear saves more lives through fossil fuel displacement than it can plausibly kill even in worst case disaster scenarios). Continuing to make nuclear safer, if it results in higher costs (and therefore reduced installs) is a bad tradeoff and has been for close to 50 years.
Nuclear reactors must meet stringent safety standards, not with hand-wavy "but people die from fossil fuel pollution" rhetoric; and at the same time, fossil-fuel-fired plants must be made to emit a lot less, through filtering and other technological means.
Nice to see one in operation. Anyone know if they move the LCOE needle?
For reference, traditional nuclear is 4-6x as expensive as wind/solar, and wind/solar are still dropping. For baseload the gas turbine still beats the pants off of nuclear.
I think nuclear needs to get to 2-3x unsubsidized to be relevant long-term, but that's a long road.
> For baseload the gas turbine still beats the pants off of nuclear.
Not if you price carbon.
> For reference, traditional nuclear is 4-6x as expensive as wind/solar, and wind/solar are still dropping.
That's cost per MWh generated not accounting for when you need it. Renewables need both short-term storage and long-term storage.
If you generate with solar, what do you do at night? You'd need 12 hours of storage. Maybe that's economical in some contexts but it definitely raises the cost.
Now what do you do if it's cloudy or still for a week, or a month? 720 hours of storage would be crazy expensive. You could use natural gas plants or similar, but then you have to pay the cost of maintaining natural gas plants and the associated infrastructure that you only use 2% of the time.
1GW nuclear plant vs 1GW (average) of solar + 12GWh of storage + 1GW natural gas plant + rarely used gas pipelines or 720GWh of on-site reserves, which costs more?
A couple of points I can think of, 1) the Helium nucleus is exceedingly stable so the coolant won’t get radioactive from neutron activation, 2) the coolant being chemically inactive means you can use run the reactor at higher temperatures, thus achieving higher efficiency if you use the heat to run a heat engine (steam turbine).
It escapes into space and that's the main problem with it. But it doesn't create steam explosions and hydrogen buildup under ionizing radiation (also explosive). My main gripes with pebble bed reactors is not helium, but pebbles cracking, graphite fires and complications with fuel reprocessing. Helium just ads another layer of complications because it's quite scarce and easily lost. Also the installed capacity of this reactor is quite underwhelming. But it's nice that the Chinese have built it and are testing and advancing the technology developed in Germany during the '80s.
I am not an expert at this, but if I had to guess I would agree with your answer. Helium, even neutron enriched radioactive helium -if there is such a thing-, will evaporate into the air instantly, it will also rise to highest location being lighter than essentially every other atmospheric gas. This make it easy collect, contain, or cleanse, if performed. It will also rise above the atmosphere and get blown away by the solar winds should it escape the building. Additionally, helium is inert so it will not form other chemical compounds that will stay around, or enter the human body. Also because it is inert your body will not generally absorb it, certainly not like it would tritium water. Also comparing to water, helium will not dissolve other chemicals, radioactive or not, into it like water does. One last thing is the cooling potential of liquid helium is immense, being able to absorb massive amounts of heat during evaporation. Assuming they want to use a helium refrigeration cycle.
One of the reasons for the HGT-reactors is the extremely high temperature. Helium is a lot better than water for things like that. The extra high heat means you can have a higher efficiency while having more heat left for industrial processes.
Glad they got a high temperature gas cooled reactor up and running!
I do dislike the terminology/categorization around 'fourth generation'. The first ever proposed commercial reactor (the Daniels Pile) was a pebble bed gas cooled reactor concept, worked on at Oak Ridge in the 1940s. We've built lots of gas-cooled reactors in the past, including helium cooled ones. Such as:
* Peach Bottom
* Fort St. Vrain
* HTTR
* Dragon
* HTR-10
* AVR pebble bed
* THTR-300
* Ultra-High Temperature Reactor Experiment (UHTREX)
Nitrogen-cooled ones, such as ML-1 and GCRE
CO2-cooled ones, like EL4, Lucens, AGR, Magnox
Air-cooled ones like HTRE
Liquid-hydrogen cooled ones like NERVA
It's kinda dumb to call this the first 4-th gen reactor.
Nitrogen cooled reactors produce copious amounts of 14C, unless you use isotopically purified 15N, which is quite expensive. Ditto for air cooled reactors.
> "The HTR-PM features two small reactors (each of 250 MWt) that drive a single 210 MWe steam turbine. It uses helium as coolant and graphite as the moderator. Each reactor is loaded with more than 400,000 spherical fuel elements (‘pebbles’), each 60 mm in diameter and containing 7 g of fuel enriched to 8.5%. Each pebble has an outer layer of graphite and contains some 12,000 four-layer ceramic-coated fuel particles dispersed in a graphite matrix."
Note that Chernobyl was graphite-moderated and water-cooled, but hot graphite and steam is a bad combination, tending towards the generation of (explosive) hydrogen and carbon monooxide gases during loss-of-coolant type accidents. The helium coolant avoids this process, and can sustain higher operating temperatures so has industrial uses, somewhat ironically in the petrochemical sector:
> "The major purpose of HTR-PM is to co-generate high temperature steam up to 500℃ and electricity. It is cost effective currently in the Chinese market to supply steam and electricity for the petrochemical industry to substitute the burning of natural gas and coal."
It seems like a pretty safe design with some unique capabilities, although it'd be interesting to see the total cost-per-pellet inputs (each 6 cm pellet generates as much power as 1.5 tons of coal prior to its retirement, but manufacturing each pellet is probably not that cheap).
A significant advantage of a higher temperature reactor would be if it could use the same steam turbines used in combined cycle plants. These are "dry" turbines that operate with high temperature (550 C) steam. In contrast, LWRs use "wet" turbines with saturated steam at temperature a couple of hundred degrees lower. They're about the only ones still doing so, I think, so the turbines are bespoke and do not benefit from the economies of scale of the CC steam turbines.
(550 C is the upper temperature limit for cheap steel against creep, so I think that choice of temperature is not a coincidence. It also makes me dubious of reactor concepts operating at higher temperature.)
Doesn't China building so many civilian reactors mean they are getting more experience and more specialized workforce in nuclear energy than anyone else? How can the west compete if most nations reject the atom and the ones who don't either have minuscule numbers or focus more on military reactors?
That’s only a big deal if nuclear was going to play a major role in the future, but the world seems to have decided on PV in a big way. The world is adding the equivalent of more than 100 nuclear reactors worth of PV solar per year even adjusting for differences in capacity factors. (~30% vs ~70-90%)
China gets roughly 5% of it’s annual electricity from nuclear, 5% from solar and increasing rapidly, 10% from wind, and 15% from hydro. It’s a token investment in nuclear that only seems huge because they produce ~30% of the worlds electricity.
PS: Also, don’t forget about the defense industry. We’re maintaining nuclear expertise even if the civilian industry fails.
It’s silly. Next we’re going to severely hamstring AI research because of some insipid NYT lawsuit and let them run away with it too though we did all the research for it.
My own partisan comments on the pebble bed class of reactors (https://lvenneri.com/blog/pebble-bed-nukegumball) for those interested in a deeper yet still qualitative comparison of pebble beds and prismatic cores - the main types high temperature reactor. Long story short : pebbles offer significant disadvantages compared to prismatic geometries, summarized by this donald duck clip: https://youtu.be/shvwSBGDmE0.
I'm not sure who the intended audience is. Your arguments are technical enough that whoever is able to follow them will be extremely unimpressed by the linked Donald Duck cartoon. The fact that you do include it and think it improves your case demonstrates that you attempt to target the emotional side of your reader. I'll be honest and admit this is an uncharitable view. The charitable view is simply that you found this video and couldn't resist linking to it. But it's not good.
This reads more as a puff piece than an informative article. Hardly surprised coming from the "China Global Television Network". It just reads like "Everything going great, look no further".
And for somebody who has been following the development of 4th generation reactors, this one is rather non-exciting. Yes it uses a pebble-bed and higher temperature (hence VHTR), it's overall improvements are rather diminishing compared to Gen 3 designs. The meager output of 150m isn't exactly thrilling and the possibility for hydrogen production remains unused as well.
I don't want to be purely cynical. Every incremental advance is a form progression and can advance the status-quo as we know. But the most promising space is clearly happening in the Fast Reactor space, just maybe not the SFR, this is a nuclear disaster waiting to happen.
Readit News
Illinois Energy Prof has an excellent YT channel on energy, and has a great talk on IV gen reactor design. Saw it 4 years ago, so pumped to see some of the ideas he was talking about get plugged into the grid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mJ3S-VQuHY&t=490s for those who want to know more
I know there's a lot of hate for nuclear (much of it understandable), but if we hadn't fucked it up in the 70's then climate change would not be a thing right now.
Yes, renewables and energy storage are good things too but the modern world is built on cheap energy and the more the merrier.
Side note: I became enamored with LFTR when it started getting promoted back in the day and I still think that too would be worth tackling.
Yes, this is also why China invests more into renewables than in nuclear: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-tre...
This is driven purely by economic factors, for the first time since the discovery of fossil fuels, except the blip where we dammed up pretty much every single river globally to provide hydropower, we have in renewables have found a new cheaper energy source.
Renewables are cheap energy.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carb...
It has killed very few people, expense isn't a reason for hate, and everything else has pretty much been a win (land usage minimal, minimal byproducts, etc).
I, like many of my peers feel like we are being grifted by the boomer generation.
How is the fuel efficiency for this design?
Walk-away safe is a major benefit, and is worth some sacrifice of efficiency.
Nuclear reactors must meet stringent safety standards, not with hand-wavy "but people die from fossil fuel pollution" rhetoric; and at the same time, fossil-fuel-fired plants must be made to emit a lot less, through filtering and other technological means.
For reference, traditional nuclear is 4-6x as expensive as wind/solar, and wind/solar are still dropping. For baseload the gas turbine still beats the pants off of nuclear.
I think nuclear needs to get to 2-3x unsubsidized to be relevant long-term, but that's a long road.
Not if you price carbon.
> For reference, traditional nuclear is 4-6x as expensive as wind/solar, and wind/solar are still dropping.
That's cost per MWh generated not accounting for when you need it. Renewables need both short-term storage and long-term storage.
If you generate with solar, what do you do at night? You'd need 12 hours of storage. Maybe that's economical in some contexts but it definitely raises the cost.
Now what do you do if it's cloudy or still for a week, or a month? 720 hours of storage would be crazy expensive. You could use natural gas plants or similar, but then you have to pay the cost of maintaining natural gas plants and the associated infrastructure that you only use 2% of the time.
1GW nuclear plant vs 1GW (average) of solar + 12GWh of storage + 1GW natural gas plant + rarely used gas pipelines or 720GWh of on-site reserves, which costs more?
Fingers crossed I got some of this right...
I do dislike the terminology/categorization around 'fourth generation'. The first ever proposed commercial reactor (the Daniels Pile) was a pebble bed gas cooled reactor concept, worked on at Oak Ridge in the 1940s. We've built lots of gas-cooled reactors in the past, including helium cooled ones. Such as:
* Peach Bottom
* Fort St. Vrain
* HTTR
* Dragon
* HTR-10
* AVR pebble bed
* THTR-300
* Ultra-High Temperature Reactor Experiment (UHTREX)
Nitrogen-cooled ones, such as ML-1 and GCRE
CO2-cooled ones, like EL4, Lucens, AGR, Magnox
Air-cooled ones like HTRE
Liquid-hydrogen cooled ones like NERVA
It's kinda dumb to call this the first 4-th gen reactor.
Do you mean the term or the actual reactor technology?
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinese-HTR-PM-D...
> "The HTR-PM features two small reactors (each of 250 MWt) that drive a single 210 MWe steam turbine. It uses helium as coolant and graphite as the moderator. Each reactor is loaded with more than 400,000 spherical fuel elements (‘pebbles’), each 60 mm in diameter and containing 7 g of fuel enriched to 8.5%. Each pebble has an outer layer of graphite and contains some 12,000 four-layer ceramic-coated fuel particles dispersed in a graphite matrix."
Note that Chernobyl was graphite-moderated and water-cooled, but hot graphite and steam is a bad combination, tending towards the generation of (explosive) hydrogen and carbon monooxide gases during loss-of-coolant type accidents. The helium coolant avoids this process, and can sustain higher operating temperatures so has industrial uses, somewhat ironically in the petrochemical sector:
> "The major purpose of HTR-PM is to co-generate high temperature steam up to 500℃ and electricity. It is cost effective currently in the Chinese market to supply steam and electricity for the petrochemical industry to substitute the burning of natural gas and coal."
It seems like a pretty safe design with some unique capabilities, although it'd be interesting to see the total cost-per-pellet inputs (each 6 cm pellet generates as much power as 1.5 tons of coal prior to its retirement, but manufacturing each pellet is probably not that cheap).
(550 C is the upper temperature limit for cheap steel against creep, so I think that choice of temperature is not a coincidence. It also makes me dubious of reactor concepts operating at higher temperature.)
China gets roughly 5% of it’s annual electricity from nuclear, 5% from solar and increasing rapidly, 10% from wind, and 15% from hydro. It’s a token investment in nuclear that only seems huge because they produce ~30% of the worlds electricity.
PS: Also, don’t forget about the defense industry. We’re maintaining nuclear expertise even if the civilian industry fails.
No, the world has decided to procure lots of cheap PV from China
And for somebody who has been following the development of 4th generation reactors, this one is rather non-exciting. Yes it uses a pebble-bed and higher temperature (hence VHTR), it's overall improvements are rather diminishing compared to Gen 3 designs. The meager output of 150m isn't exactly thrilling and the possibility for hydrogen production remains unused as well.
I don't want to be purely cynical. Every incremental advance is a form progression and can advance the status-quo as we know. But the most promising space is clearly happening in the Fast Reactor space, just maybe not the SFR, this is a nuclear disaster waiting to happen.
https://x-energy.com/seadrift
But they've yet to apply for NRC approval, so who knows if that'll actually happen.
https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/advanced/who-were-...
X-Energy submitted 14 documents in December '23, and already 5 documents this month
https://adams.nrc.gov/wba/?data=(mode:sections,sections:(fil...