China has completed a 600 Megawatt fast neutron reactor. They had Russian help and it is part of the plan to have Uranium, plutonium and nuclear energy independence. They will close the nuclear fuel cycle in the 2040s and use the nuclear waste which is 95% Uranium 238 by mass.
China first commercial scale large-capacity fast neutron reactors, the CFR-600 power unit (Xiapu NPP) in Fujian Province is the only nuclear power plant outside of Russia with a large-capacity fast neutron reactor. It is either started already and grid connected or will be within a couple of months.
CIAE projections show fast reactors increasing to at least 200 GWe by 2050 and 1400 GWe by 2100. China will more than double the US nuclear fission power industry (just under 100 Gigawatts) by 2050 and 14 times by 2100.
Closing the fuel cycle means there would be virtually no nuclear waste or unburned fuel. The plan would involve regular reactors, fast reactors and offsite reprocessing (recycling of fuel) facilities. Fast reactors means the designs generates neutrons that are a hundred to a thousand times faster to split the even numbered isotopes of uranium. Unburned nuclear fuel is mainly Uranium 238 by mass. If you hit Uranium 238 with a fast neutron it briefly becomes Plutonium 239 before splitting.
The impact is there if China follows through makes hundreds of reactors based on this technology. They could leverage this to phase out coal power significantly starting around 2040. This would save hundreds of thousands of lives each year from lower air pollution.
For those who are scientifically and technically aware, you will notice that the breeders also make a lot of plutonium. The CFR-600 can make 200 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium each year, enough for about 50 nuclear warheads. If there were over 300 hundred such reactors then yes China would help the environment by stopping coal air pollution but they could also make 15,000 plutonium bombs per year. China already likely has over 1000 nuclear weapons. The US will have the SpaceX Starship, which can be the best hypersonic bomber in the world. It will have a reusable payload of over 200 tons. Ball bearings released at a speed of 20 times the speed of the sound would have more kinetic energy than the equivalent chemical high explosive. There would be no missile, plane or drone that could fly under a ball bearing loaded SpaceX Starship without permission.
The CFR-600 will be 1500 MWt, 600 MWe, with 41% thermal efficiency, using MOX fuel with 100 GWd/t burn-up, and with two sodium coolant loops producing steam at 480°C. Later fuel will be metal with burn-up 100-120 GWd/t. Most pressure water reactors have fuel burn-up (an efficiency measure) at 50-70 GWd/t while older versions were at 45 GWd/t.
GWd/t means gigawatt days per ton. A one gigawatt fast reactor would need 3.65 tons of uranium per year at 100 GWd/t while an older regular gigawatt reactor needing 7.3 tons of uranium per year with 50 GWd/t efficiency.
Breeding ratio is about 1.1, design operational lifetime 40 years. It is to have active and passive shutdown systems and passive decay heat removal.
China plans a commercial CFR1000 1000-1200 MWe fast reactor that might be completed in mid-2030. It would use metal U-Pu-Zr fuel and have 120-150 GWd/t burn-up.
China has plans and designs for 350 GWd/t burnup reactors. Those would need about 1 ton of uranium per year per gigawatt.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
Fast reactors do not eliminate nuclear waste; the chemical reprocessing creates about as much waste as simply sending used fuel to some form of repository.
If China is attempting to avoid buying foreign uranium, a better approach is to use more efficient reactors while avoiding reprocessing. Gas reactors can easily meet that objective and their cores are walk. The fuel can not melt.
Fast reactors have had dismal financial and operational results. This is directly the result of the technology being too complicated. Safety remains problematic because the reactors operate too close the edge of disaster.
Not to be too too much of a pessimist, but I smell a big fat nuclear core melt down before this SFR (sodium fast reactor) comes to be mass-produced.
Why? Because fast-neutron reactors — by design! — bring the core much closer to super-criticality than do the relatively safe BWR (boiling water reactor) and LWR (light water reactor) designs. That, and they’re breeding much more plutonium per day of operation — again by design! — than their mostly-uranium counterparts.
It might be technically challenging, but simply, having more plutonium in the core makes it both harder to rapidly shut down, and harder to “contain” if it accidentally goes pear shaped, and starts to melt down. Of course, the “solution” to the problem is keeping the rods in reactor for shorter periods of time, not letting the plutonium build up as much (ironically, substantially increasing the nuclear-bomb preferred type!), and sending them off to chemical reprocessing after “cooling” (in quotes because it is really allowing the most energetic radionuclides run thru their unstoppable decay-chains) for some years.
As others have already written, also do not underestimate the amount of total nuclear waste that these breeder reactors produce. LOTS. Oh, with markedly diminished fuel-left-behind of course, but with LOTS of massively radioactive other species in abundance. The radionuclide using industry only has so much need for the stuff. I continue to dream of encapsulating — world wide — all nuclear waste in thick lead-and-teflon shells, shaped in long pointed cylinders with tailfins; shipped by special carrier to the center of the Pacific, and “let go”, to dive, and dive, and dive, and bury themselves in the endless thick mud draped there. To slowly decay over hundreds of thousands of years. VERY safely. And basically irretrievably for wannabe terrorist organizations.
Sorry, off topic.
Again, my scientific spidey-sense is tingling with the heightened probabilities of nuclear core melt-down. Another angle is the “sodium loop” coolant. Lest we forget, that stuff is pretty reactive if ever it escapes those gleeming stainless steel tubes. The French SFR had to be decommissioned following its research reactor leak. Hmmm… Maybe all reactors have to be decommissioned following unexpected tiny leaks, but still … fiery sodium? I don’t think so. Not a good thing to have next to water (in the secondary, “power generation” loops).
Tingling.
I wish the Chinese well. And without any irony, kind of hoping that if they’re doomed to have a nuclear core accident from this SFR tech, that it happens EARLY in their roll-out cycle. To put a damper on the whole thing. Out of prudence.
⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅
EBR II couldn’t melt down when they tried to get it to do so. So I don’t think meltdowns are a concern with SFRs. Isn’t the real problem that they always leak sodium in the heat exchangers at higher power outputs due to metal dusting?
Are there any pro-social uses for that much plutonium?
Fissioning it to produce electricity & industrial process heat.
I will note that even with fast neutron reactors there is a tradeoff between producing weapons grade material & producing economical energy for peaceful uses. Pu 239 when hit by a neutron usually fissions but sometimes absorbs the neutron to make Pu240. Pu240 in plutonium makes it harder to make a nuclear explosion. Fast neutron reactors make less Pu240 that thermal neutron reactors, but still some.
Settling the outer solar system. Fission reactors are great for powerful compact simple long lasting power plants. Also Orion based propulsion is a fast transport system we can build near term to take people to outer system in a year.
I want also to point out that “no waste fuel cycle” is a very different from no radioactive waste cycle. Even if you reprocess all the fuel waste into new fuel you always end up with tons of highly neutron-irradiated materials that become radioactive themselves. All the reactor vessels and the core of the fuel reprocessing plants are always going to become significantly radioactive and upon decommisdionig you will gave to figure iut what to do with them. You can consume 10 tons of fuel/year fir 40 years and not priduce a gram of wasted fuel. Still you end up with 1500-2000 tons of irradiated material from the reactor.
And is it even going to be true that there’s significantly less radioactive waste?
Sure, in volumetric terms, the amount of waste might be around 1/30th – but it’ll still be nearly as radioactive. “Closing the fuel cycle” by extracting the generated plutonium and re-enriching the ~1% remaining U235 doesn’t change that very much, as they aren’t all that radioactive due to their long half-lives.
I guess maybe you could make some kind of converter to generate power from the radioactive strontium and cesium so that you could claim it isn’t ‘merely radioactive waste’ any more?
Additionally SFR fuel rods need to be vented or have a very large plenum (larger than the fueled length) space (head room) for fission gas. A light water reactor fuel rod is pressurized to 220 psi with helium at manufacture, and can exceed 2000 psi at end of life in a 2250 psi coolant system. Steel cladding will creep/balloon in low pressure 600C NaK if the rod is pressurized….
That 1 simple fact makes SFR worse than LWR for worker dose. Dealing with that fission gas….
The mentioning of a SpaceX “ball bearings bomber” is odd and fails to make any coherent connection with the rest of the article. What was the point of that??
Spacex Starship + ball bearing payload >> nuclear missiles, planes and bombs.
I am just making clear that the world will change soon, so people do not have to worry about the possibility of few tens of thousand plutonium bombs.
It is the same as when people talk about a wonderful science fiction world with spaceships flying people around at over 4% of the speed of light and then talking about nuclear weapons as the weapon for those ships. Kinetic energy from the space ship would be more powerful than any nuclear weapon.
If we are flying around with mach 20-40 rockets that only cost $20 million each and carry 200-400 tons of payload then it is light shifting from 80m mph biplanes to supersonic.
I was gonna say the ball bearing thing was a non sequitur. Not only would they burnup on re-entry, the amount of kinetic energy doesn’t really compare to a 100kT baseline plutonium weapon.
SFRs, even moreso than LWRs, are just one core melt away from not being worth the trouble.
The math with 50 or 100 GWD/T is not as straightforward as you imply. 4.5% LEU achieving 50GWD/T (effectively 5 atom % burn) isn’t worse fuel utilization than 10-20% HALEU achieving 100GWD/T, especially in oxide form. With metallic fuel being twice as dense as ceramic, 200 GWD/T on metal is the same cladding fluence as 100 GWD/T on oxide, and no cladding will support the burnups needed to make concepts like TerraPower traveling wave work. That concept required doubling the 200 displacements per clad atom experience base of HT9 (in other words, nonsensically high burn up).
Good luck, China. There’s people out there that have wanted breeders for generations. India is also building another version of the russian BN800.
200 tons payload of ball bearings is not going to be as manoeuvrable as 200kg warhead mirv. The rods from God project had the issues that if you want to do launch-to-kill-launches these are easily monitored as normal icbms (and you want solid fuel rockets for that) and if you instead launch first and keep stuff in orbit to drop it at later moments you will still need to make orbit corrections and you will need multiple orbits to reposition, and moving 200 tons of stuff is still going to be noticed. You can use it against low tech enemies in Afghanistan, you cannot do it against advanced nations (the ones that can produce thousands of nukes per year might get really annoyed)