I just Found Fire2Fission—Some Smart People

 

Yeah, I always come late to the party, but this is a great party.  The theme is that some people, especially people in the oil and gas industry, think that nuclear fission would be a great thing.  They do not see it as a danger.  Rather, they see a world where two billion people still only have the energy of their muscles, any draft animals, and wood or dung they burn for cooking.  Thus, they do not fear nuclear fission competition and even see it is as another needed energy source while oil and gas could shift to producing higher value products.

Mark Hinaman of the Fire2Fission nuclear advocacy group made those points and more in a Chris Keefer Decouple Podcast on April 17 of this year.

The podcast started with the question of whether we shall soon see peak oil and gas from shale fracking.  Hinaman is Director of Engineering and Innovation at Franklin Mountain Energy so he was highly qualified to comment on the possible timing of peak shale after which production would decrease as affordable deposits become scarcer.  His answer:  there are a lot of deposits—especially the Permian Basin—and other lesser provinces in the U.S. and Canada.  Furthermore, he said that the same people, equipment, and know-how could make fracking revolutions in other parts of the world.  This has not happened yet, so there are major deposits not yet tapped.  (There was a tantalizingly brief comment that the legal arrangement of local property owners benefiting from mining operations has been key to the success of the fracking revolution, but that is another story.)

Along the way, there was a comment that warming from emissions is probably not as severe as often said.  However, every year the atmospheric experiment gets stacked more strongly toward the warming side.  [Roger Revelle, one of the first researchers calling attention to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, was probably the first to call this change a great uncontrolled experiment that humanity was embarking on.]

That discussion led to the quietly accepted view that oil and gas fuel will eventually be replaced by some energy source that does not produce massive carbon dioxide emissions.  That led to discussion of the potential revolution of small modular reactors (SMRs) that seems to be on the way.

His guess, as a highly skilled expert in a somewhat related technical field, was that the first commercialized SMRs will be simply smaller more-advanced versions of the light water reactors that are most commonly operating today.  They might be called generation 3+, and their procedures, structural alloys, and fuels have been developed over decades.  Meanwhile, although smaller size of the SMRs leads to less efficiency of power produced, it has advantages of more factory production vs. on-site and easier cool-down

In contrast, the molten salt reactors (MSRs) and high-temperature gas reactors (HTGRs) of generation 4 have much less operating experience.  There have only been a few commercial HTGRs, and there have only been experimental MSRs. 

For the related boogeyman story, Hinaman noted that in MSRs, one of the fission products from the fuel is tellurium that can cause embrittlement and cracking in some nickel alloys used for nuclear reactors.  There are probably other more resistant alloys that could be developed, but such alloys have not been developed and then tested and certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a process that could require several years. 

Finally, Hinaman mentioned that he and others have formed the Fire2Fission Group to advocate for nuclear fission completely as a voluntary effort.  He knew it was important when a measure supporting fission failed in the Colorado state senate.  When he asked one of the senators why, she said that she had several concerns about fission, but no one had come to speak with her about those concerns. 

People with technical knowledge need to talk to other people.  Great, let’s do it. 

 

Bibliography

·         Xin Du, Shaoqiang Gao, and Sheng Wang, “Mechanism of Tellurium Induced Nickel Alloy Corrosion in Molten LiCl-KCl Salt,” Corrosion Science, vol. 209, 110734, Dec. 2022.  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010938X22006527 (Accessed Dec. 21, 2023)

·         https://fire2fission.com/

·         https://www.decouplemedia.org/

·         Li Jiang, Kai Wang, Bin Leng, et al, “Tellurium Segregation-Induced Intergranular Corrosion of GH3535 Alloys in Molten Salt,” Corrosion Science, vol. 194, 10994, Jan. 2022.  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010938X21007125 (Accessed Dec. 21, 2023)   

·         “Peak Shale: Not so fast!,” Decouple Media (podcast), April 17, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c0XcYzaOEE  (Accessed Dec. 21, 2023) 

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