Electric Dirt Farmer

I have just finished reading a very interesting article about nuclear power in China from Wired Magazine. To meet the demands of the world’s fastest growing energy market, the Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology (INET) at Beijing’s Tsinghua University has developed a new reactor called the HTR-10. They’ve apparently solved the problems of traditional big nukes by using something called “pebble bed” technology.

The really neat thing about this reactor is that it’s small and modular (which makes it inexpensive to build) and has no super-heated heavy water (which makes it safer). Apparently, this new Chinese reactor is incredibly fault tolerant: things can go wrong without rapidly escalating to terribly wrong.

In the event of a catastrophic cooling-system failure … the core temperature climbs to only about 1,600 degrees Celsius – comfortably below the balls’ 2,000-plus-degree melting point – and then falls. This temperature ceiling makes HTR-10 what engineers privately call walk-away safe. As in, you can walk away from any situation and go have a pizza.

This unusual margin of safety isn’t merely theoretical. INET‘s engineers have already done what would be unthinkable in a conventional reactor: switched off HTR-10’s helium coolant and let the reactor cool down all by itself. Indeed, [project director Zhang Zuoyi] plans a show-stopping repeat performance at an international conference of reactor physicists in Beijing in September. “We think our kind of test may be required in the market someday,” he adds.

The article also has an enlightening recap of why it has taken this long for someone to serious develop this kind of reactor technology. It’s a shame that it’s taken until now, but this article made me very optimistic about the potential of nuclear energy.

I picked up this link from the Chaos Manor Mail.