 Advanced Nuclear Power Systems for Long-term Energy and Climate Security - ANU Lecture
High rez version of the slides here bravenewclimate.files.wordpress.com Fossil fuels currently supply about 80% of modern societys primary energy. Given the imperatives of climate change, pollution, energy security and dwindling supplies, and enormous technical, logistical and economic challenges of scaling up coal or gas power plants with carbon capture and storage to sequester all that carbon, we are faced with the necessity of a nearly complete transformation of the worlds energy systems. Nuclear power is capable of providing all the carbon-free energy that mankind requires, although the prospect of such a massive deployment raises questions of uranium shortages, increased energy, environmental and socio-political impacts from mining and fuel enrichment, and so on. These potential roadblocks can all be greatly alleviated or dispensed with, however, through the use of fast neutron reactors coupled to full fuel recycling. The Integral Fast Reactor IFR, a sodium-cooled, metal-fueled pool design, developed at US national laboratories in the latter years of the last century, can economically and cleanly supply all the energy the world needs without any further mining or enrichment of uranium. This talk will cover the history and technical basis of the IFR and similar Generation IV designs, consider current fast reactor developments in China, India, Russia and elsewhere, and consider realistic timetables for large-scale de...
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