OPG prepares for arrival of Harriet Brooks at Darlington

[NNadir]

OPG prepares for arrival of Harriet Brooks at Darlington

Subtitle:

As work progresses at the site for Ontario Power Generation's Darlington New Nuclear Project (DNNP), a massive tunnel boring machine that will be used in site preparations has been named Harriet Brooks in honour of Canada's first female nuclear physicist.

Excerpts:

The highly specialised excavating machine, also known as a 'mole', is being manufactured in Europe and will be used to drill the condenser cooling water tunnel path. Although it is not expected to be on site until next summer, DNNP's team has already completed a retaining wall for the machine's launch shaft.

Ontario Power Generation (OPG) announced in March that early phase works for the Darlington New Nuclear Project to construct the first of up to four BWRX-300 SMRs had been completed on time and on budget, clearing the way for the main site preparation work to begin. This summer has seen drilling begin for the reactor building shaft retaining wall. Work has begun on the on-site fabrication and pre-assembly buildings where components for the plant will be fabricated. OPG has shared a video update of progress at the site...

...After more than 100 name submissions and a vote for the best, the team settled on Harriet Brooks as the name of the new tunnelling machine. (A previous tunnel boring machine used to create a 10.2-kilometre-long tunnel to increase generating capacity at the Sir Adam Beck hydro complex in Niagara Falls was known as Big Becky in honour of Sir Adam Beck, the first chairman of OPG predecessor company the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario.)

Harriet Brooks was the first woman to receive a master’s degree from Montreal's McGill University in 1901. Brooks discovered that one element could change into another element through radioactive decay and - while she was still a student - was one of the first people to discover the radioactive gas radon. She worked under Ernest Rutherford and Marie Curie, and held a variety of university positions, including at McGill and Barnard College in the USA, as well as working with JJ Thomson at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England.

Rutherford and Brooks were the first to recognize that the "uranium emanations" were radioactive, but credited the discovery of the element Radon to the Curies.

[hunter]

1. The BWRX-300 SMR is an extremely conservative nuclear reactor design...

... that could become the IBM PC of the 21st century nuclear power industry.

[NNadir]

2. I don't have a problem with the BWRX-300, but for Canada, I'd rather they just build more CANDU type reactors.

The BWRX-300 is essentially reliant on an old technology - it's just a small BWR - and while there have been some improvements in the materials science connected with the cladding, it's still just another light water reactor.

Unlike the BWRX-300, the CANDU can function as a breeder with a ternary plutonium/depleted uranium/thorium fuel, helping to extend our fissionable resources. This is not a current industrial practice, but the Indians are moving in that direction as they have a fleet of heavy water reactors of the CANDU type.

I don't oppose any nuclear reactors, but I do think we should build innovative types that go beyond the 60s and 70s, my fondness for the CANDU notwithstanding.

If we are to scale up at any rate that might address the extreme global heating we are now observing, fissionable fuels might present as a bottle neck leading to a large scale up in uranium enrichment which I generally oppose as wasteful and, although it's over hyped, a possible weapons proliferation risk.

To the extent that boiling reactors produce reactor grade plutonium, their used fuel represents a resource, but it is an inefficiently utilized resource. The breeding ratio is less than one.

I'd like to see more innovative "breed and burn" type reactors become a standard SMR; they will offer something that light water reactors really can't, process heat. I have some reservations about the Terrapower reactor, but I'd rather see them, or the Kairos, and/or (my favorite) the Oklo designs become standards. Oklo, I think, has the right idea; the resource for fueling their reactors is used nuclear fuel. It is, in a sense, still overly focused on a backwards look, this at the EBR-II, but I expect they will find a path to deeper innovation.

[hunter]

3. The IBM PC was a mediocre computer built mostly from off-the-shelf components.

It ran a rough clone of a disk operating system that was already obsolete. Yet that was the beginning of the personal computing revolution -- a computer on every desktop.

Most computers and operating systems these days do not have that IBM PC heritage. Rather they use ARM microprocessors which were first developed for Acorn Computer's BBC Micro, and they run Unix-like operating systems, especially Linux which was Linus Torvalds' rough clone of Unix.

A boring old conventional reactor design like the BWRX-300 could be just what it takes to kickstart a modern 21st century nuclear power industry. I don't think one detracts from the other.

Big money people tend to be conservative.

"Nobody got fired for buying BWRX-300" could be this century's "Nobody got fired for buying IBM."

[NNadir]

4. Well, again, if people build these rapidly in an "off the shelf" manner using conservative money...

...I have no objection. However the environmental problems with extreme global heating we face go beyond machines that merely produce electricity.

To whatever extent the analogy with the IBM computer holds, I'm OK with it. We need to build reactors fast.

However, the BWRX-300 will require enriched U-235 fuel. This is a problem. We can and must do better than that, in particular because we need to put depleted uranium to use.

For the more broader requirements, my boy is working on printable cores for very high temperature reactors that do more than produce steam for electricity. I'm encouraging him to think about reactors that will run for a decade or more without refueling, and will produce high temperatures for flexible use.