
Nuclear Reactor Development History - simonebrunozzi
https://whatisnuclear.com/reactor_history.html
======
stmw
On two related notes:

1\. for the first time since the 1970's, support for nuclear power is non-
partisan in the US - both parties have endorsed it.

2\. a good addition to the list would be mentioning a YC company, Oklo
([https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200615005643/en/Okl...](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200615005643/en/Oklo-
Announces-Historic-Acceptance-Combined-License-Application))

~~~
jabl
The second sentence on that page: "This page is a grand tour of reactor
development programs from 1945 to about 1970, also known as the nuclear
heyday." So yeah, no wonder Oklo is not included.

As for bipartisan nuclear support in the US, IIRC Clinton shut down the IFR
(one of the most promising advanced reactor + reprocessing concepts) in the
early 90'ies, largely due to anti-nuclear sentiments.

~~~
roenxi
The 90s were a long time ago. Possibly in the intervening years support has
grown for evidence-based policy.

~~~
SiempreViernes
I'm sure it has, but a look at the current white house suggests it still has
significant ways to go before reaching influential levels

------
acidburnNSA
Author here. Just got an alert from server. I enjoyed writing this in January
and am happy to see it here. Happy to discuss more or make corrections.

~~~
godelski
For anyone reading this I also suggest acidburn's article on waste[0] and
economics[1]. (I always recommend searching for his comments in HN nuclear
discussions)

Also, always good to see you and congrats on a post of yours getting to the
front page.

[0]
[https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html](https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html)

[1]
[https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html](https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html)

~~~
andromeduck
Also worth checking out: [https://anchor.fm/chris15401/episodes/Existing-
Nuclear-and-I...](https://anchor.fm/chris15401/episodes/Existing-Nuclear-and-
Imaginary-Nuclear-feat--Mark-Nelson-eibgl9)

~~~
acidburnNSA
I loved this episode. It resonated with all I learned in writing the history
page. There's almost no type of reactor that hasn't been tried, and so hoping
that some new kind of reactor is the answer to all problems in nuclear is a
bit misguided.

~~~
mncharity
> There's almost no type of reactor that hasn't been tried, and so hoping that
> some new kind of reactor is the answer to all problems in nuclear is a bit
> misguided.

Reading the history and economics pages, and searching for hopeful paths
forward, I thought of the NASA-SpaceX partnership. Where it wasn't that the
component technologies had never been tried, or weren't known, but that
company and systems optimized for atypical objectives might find an order of
magnitude to pick up, and maybe soon two.

------
sandGorgon
So what is the best reactor design today ? Globally. Which takes care of
Fukushima and Chernobyl style incidents and is much much safer?

Wikipedia says "However, as at August 2020, no Gen IV projects have advanced
significantly beyond the design stage, and several have been abandoned."

~~~
KneeDeepInThe__
Practically, it's the PWR- Pressurised Water Reactor. I say practically as
there are always new developments, like Thorium-Salt reactors that made the
headlines a while back, but these are the reactors that are producing the
majority of nuclear electricity and haven't had a single major accident. They
contain less fissile material in the reactor core, they are purely Boron
moderated (so Chernobyl 2 couldn't happen) and there is no risk of
contamination as the pressurised water in the reactor core cannot mix with the
water turned into steam for the turbine.

They do have a few downsides, like frequent fuel rod swaps and boric acid
buildup, but in the real world this is the safest working reactor we have
today.

~~~
jabl
> Practically, it's the PWR- Pressurised Water Reactor. I say practically as
> there are always new developments, like Thorium-Salt reactors that made the
> headlines a while back, but these are the reactors that are producing the
> majority of nuclear electricity and haven't had a single major accident.

Three Mile Island was a PWR. Of course, it wasn't a major accident in the
sense that no significant radioactivity escaped the plant, but it was a major
economic hit for the operator, and gave an unfortunate boost to various anti-
nuclear groups.

I think in practice, BWR's are considered about equally safe as PWR's. Yes,
Fukushima was BWR's, but it's uncertain if same vintage PWR's with equivalent
safety equipment would have fared any better.

> They contain less fissile material in the reactor core

Compared to what? A fast reactor of equivalent size, sure, but this isn't
really the thing holding fast reactors back..

> they are purely Boron moderated

No, they are water moderated. Boron, which is an efficient neutron adsorber,
is used to control the reactivity during the burnup. That is, with fresh fuel
rods the boron concentration in the water is higher to compensate for the
higher reactivity of the fuel.

There is ongoing research to design LWR's without boron, in order to avoid the
corrosion issues and the equipment needed for controlling boron concentration.
One way is to have rods filled with DU, which are slowly pulled out (and the
volume replaced by water) as burnup proceeds. This approach has its own
downsides, but, we'll see.

------
fuoqi
The article should be called "US Nuclear Reactor Development History". Good
read nevertheless.

------
java-man
ORNL flew in and built a small reactor at the Geneva conference in 1955.

wow.

------
ggm
Please add information from the European and Asian experiences.

~~~
samatman
FTA: "Note: This is written largely from the US perspective. Developments in
other countries are not well covered here. Also, the chains of events are
difficult to classify so the time linearity of the following is not perfect."

Perhaps you could write a similar page about European and Chinese development
of nuclear power. Who knows, you might end up on the front page of HN as well!

~~~
ggm
I don't play a nuclear scientist on TV. I wish I could write this, because i
think it would be interesting. But I wish I could read it more.

~~~
acidburnNSA
I would love to add more about this story in other countries as well. I just
ran out of time and steam when writing the US perspective. Give me more time
to recharge.

One thing that's nice about the US side for me is that we have vast libraries
of technical reports available for me to peruse. It would be impossible for me
personally to do such a deep dive in Russia or France or China or any other
non-English-publishing place simply because I don't speak the language.

~~~
ggm
The development of electricity generation from nuclear has deep roots in
europe: USSR in 1954, Uk in 1957.

AGR design got deployed at Torness. (I protested FWIW, a position I might vary
on now with hindsight)

The chinese work on pebble-bed interests me hugely. small modular reactor
stuff is fascinating.

The UK and France (aside from Russia) operate their own submarine reactors. I
think its odd they didn't move this up the foodchain to surface ships the way
the Americans did.

Both the UK and USSR had significant accidents, which informed choices around
future reactor design.

The role of Klaus Fuchs in the emergence of the east german nuclear power
industry would be worth a write up all of its own.

The extent of French dependency on nuclear power is amazing. And the German
retreat from nuclear power, likewise the scandi experience. China and India, I
think will be making a huge move off coal but its less clear this will be to
nuclear. Japan is obviously in a complicated situation, perhaps not unlike
France's dependencies.

------
imtringued
According to this chart [0] the installed capacity of fossil fuel plants is
4TW. Lets cut it down to 2TW because we don't know how much of that
infrastructure is actually utilized. Let's say I'm sold on nuclear and want
2TW of installed nuclear plant capacity. Each power plant should be able to
generate 700MW. This means we have to build 2857 new power plants. Half of
them need to be done by 2050. The other half should be in construction by 2050
but are allowed to take 10-15 years to be built. Surely economies of scale
should be able to reduce nuclear plant costs to around 2 billion USD per plant
[1] but that would still cost 5714 billion USD.

Open questions:

Which nuclear technology is available today that can be deployed 1400 times
today as soon as today without any massive safety flaws? Theoretical reactor
designs may sound cool but nobody is going to wait for them.

Who is going to pay for the prototypes and first dozen plants? How are you
going to convince the rest of the planet to install your nuclear plants?

Is this ambitious timeline even possible? Can you train enough people and
build an extensively optimized nuclear supply chain that can scale thousands
of reactors?

What happens once the "building" rush is over? Will the supply chain die again
and be hard to start back up?

Can every country be trusted to operate their own nuclear plants? Will they
openly report flaws and safety problems in the power plant and take those
reports seriously by turning off defective or unsafe plants until they
restored the safety of the plant? Fukushima was easily preventable but there
was no accountability and no incentive to prevent an accident. Nobody in
charge felt responsible to actually add adequate safety measures.

Can we mine enough fuel to power these plants? Will mining activity have to
increase to meet the new demand? Can that mining be powered by nuclear energy?
Is mining for nuclear fuel worse than coal?

Is waste disposal feasible today in every country? Can this cost be reduced
through economies of scale or is it fixed per unit of waste?

None of these things are impossible but they require time, money and trust.

People who don't care about climate change are not going to give you money for
nuclear or renewables.

Time isn't exactly on our side. We are at a point where we have figured out
lots of alternatives to fossil fuels, it is just a matter of sticking with one
choice and actually doing it. Hesitation will cost a lot of time so it's now
or never.

We are also short on trust. The UK doesn't like the EU. Other continents are
not unified at all and it is common for countries to be at war in the middle
east and Africa. Why would they want a power plant that is a juicy target for
terrorism?

Because of these concerns I'm not going to hope for a nuclear future but I'll
let myself be surprised if things turn out better than I predict.

[0] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/267358/world-
installed-p...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/267358/world-installed-
power-capacity/) [1] [https://schlissel-
technical.com/docs/reports_35.pdf](https://schlissel-
technical.com/docs/reports_35.pdf) (summary: coal plant went over budget and
cost 2 billion usd)

~~~
08-15
> Is this ambitious timeline even possible?

Of course it is. Pick a design that can be built right now, which means the
Chinese or Russians have to do it, because everyone else (Siemens, Areva,
Westinghouse, ...) seem to have forgotten how to build theirs. One reactor
produces 600-1400MW, so we're talking roughly 1500-3000 reactors. You set a
timeline of about 40 years, or 15000 days. This means, construction of a
reactor has to start every 5-10 days. Construction of a nuclear plant takes
about 4 years or 1500 days, unless treehuggers are allowed to interfere with
frivolous lawsuits. This means, 150-300 reactors will be under construction
concurrently. Worldwide, that doesn't sound too bad.

Let's build one reactor per week.

> What happens once the "building" rush is over?

More building to replace aging plants. At the end of your 40 year timeline,
the plants built at its beginning are (nominally) at the end of their life.
(Not really, but then again, 40 years into the future, 2TW won't be enough.)

Let's build one reactor per week, forever.

> that would still cost 5714 billion USD

So what? Those 2TW of generating capacity are still going to be built, if only
to replace broken down old plants. Capital cost for power plants varies a bit
by technology, but 2000G$ are going to be spent on power plants no matter
what; if the future is solar, it's going to be a lot more than 6000G$.

> Can we mine enough fuel to power these plants? Will mining activity have to
> increase to meet the new demand? Can that mining be powered by nuclear
> energy? Is mining for nuclear fuel worse than coal?

Yes, yes, mostly, no. If we actually embark on a massive nuclear program like
this, we will run out of fuel fairly quickly (about 100 years). One generation
of once-through burner reactors can be fueled easily, maybe two. After that,
the Uranium may need to come from low grade sources, which is annoying, or
breeders have to be used.

> Is waste disposal feasible today in every country? Can this cost be reduced?

Yes, and why bother? Waste disposal is more a political problem than a
technical one. It isn't actually expensive. Arguably, the "waste" isn't waste
and should be recycled instead of being disposed of.

> Why would they want a power plant that is a juicy target for terrorism?

Bullshit.

This is called "drive by slander". Why do you do this when you (otherwise)
appear to like nuclear power as a solution to climate change?

------
maxdo
why KRUSTY wasn't launch to the space if test were successful?

