“A large-scale nuclear power station in China is the first in the world to be completely impervious to dangerous meltdowns, even during a full loss of external power,” reports the New Scientist. “The design can’t be adapted to existing nuclear reactors around the world, but could be a blueprint for future ones.”
The nuclear power station uses a “relatively new kind of reactor design, called a pebble-bed reactor (PBR),” which
has the advantage of being passively safe, which means that if power for cooling systems is lost, then the reactor can safely shut down by itself. Rather than use highly energy-dense fuel rods like many other reactor designs, PBRs use a large number of low-energy-density ‘pebbles’ as fuel, which contain a small amount of uranium surrounded by graphite. This can help slow the nuclear reaction and withstand high temperatures.
This lower energy density means any excess heat will be spread out over all of the pebbles, and so will be easier to transport away using natural cooling processes like conduction and convection, says Zhe Dong at Tsinghua University in China.
While small working prototype reactors have been built in Germany and China, no full-scale PBRs have been shown to work and be passively safe—until now. Dong and his colleagues have demonstrated that the system works with a full-scale nuclear plant, the High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor Pebble-Bed Module (HTR-PM) in Shandong.
Global nuclear power generation is set to reach an all-time high next year, according to the International Energy Agency. That will aid “efforts to cut carbon dioxide emissions,” notes the Financial Times.
Power generated by nuclear power plants is expected to rise by about 3 per cent in both 2024 and 2025, and by an additional 1.5 per cent in 2026, according to the IEA. By contrast nuclear power production fell in 2022 as nuclear power plants closed in Germany and some other places that have an irrational phobia of nuclear power.
A recent study found that nuclear power is best for the environment. Yet green activists in places like Germany have still forced the closure of nuclear power plants. And they have done so even though “every major study, including a recent one by the British medical journal Lancet, finds the same thing: nuclear is the safest way to make reliable electricity,” says a long-time environment activist. “Solar panels require 17 times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create over 200 times more waste,” such as “dust from toxic heavy metals including lead, cadmium, and chromium.” Unlike wind farms, nuclear power plants don’t kill birds. And “wind turbines, surprisingly, kill more people than nuclear plants.” “Nuclear power is the safest form of energy we have, if you consider deaths per megawatt of energy produced,” notes Yale University professor Steven Novella.
Nuclear plants generate most electric power in countries like France and Slovakia, but in the U.S., nuclear power plants provide only about 19% of all power. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission makes it very expensive to construct a nuclear plant — even the application process is incredibly expensive and usually takes years of unnecessary delay. Even when nuclear plants are already operating safely and providing badly needed power, anti-nuclear activists sometimes get government officials to shut them down. Recently, however, the NRC approved the construction of a nuclear plant with an innovative design and a non-water cooled reactor.
