According to Ian Morris in his book, Why The West Rules – For Now, the measure of man is per capita energy consumption. Mr. Morris, standing on the shoulders of the seminal 1971 Scientific American article by Earl Cook, The Flow of Energy in an Industrial Society, points out that modern Americans are estimated to consume 230,000 calories of energy per day in all forms. This compares to 2,000 calories per day for the human animal before the invention of fire. His diagram is reformatted below to modern standards.
Mr. Morris goes on to postulate that by 2050 Americans will be consuming 4x as much energy or 1,000,000 calories per day. This energy consumption forecast appears fantastic to the average American consumer who has been browbeaten by ‘Peak Oil’, ‘Global Warming’ and ‘Small is Beautiful’. My supposition is that Americans will be consuming the equivalent of 1,000,000 2011 calories per day in 2049 — the year of Mr. Kurzweil’s Singularity – based on rapid advances in energy efficiency in lighting, communications, computing, propulsion, production, heating/cooling, medicine and war.
NASA’s award of $1.35 million to Team Pipistrel –USA for the Taurus G4 points the way. This electric aircraft covered 200 miles in less than 2 hours using the electricity equivalent of ½ gallon of fuel per passenger — 200 miles per gallon to fly 100 miles per hour…sweet.
Obviously, the planning for and nurturing of all this energy growth is the responsibility of the Department of Energy. The White House explains its funding request and priorities for DOE in 2012 on this web page. http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/factsheet_department_energy/
Basically, it states that the President’s highest priority for DOE is “clean energy and research and development …To that end, his 2012 budget provides $29.5 billion to support this mission, a 12 percent increase over the 2010 level.”
Given a $30 billion budget, it is incredible to me that the US Government has only allocated a nominal amount of funding to SSTAR and isn’t more actively pursuing the concept. SSTAR stands for Small, Sealed, Transportable, Autonomous nuclear Reactor – I guess they dropped the N because no one wants to get involved in another ‘Stan’.
The idea is to pack a small ‘fast’ reactor core in a vessel containing molten lead which both shields and cools the rector. The vessel is essentially a self-contained cylinder that produces heat that is then converted into electricity. One of the key benefits of the concept is that the reactor does not produce extra fissile material, so it creates virtually no nuclear waste that has to be reprocessed and stored for thousands of years like with a conventional nuclear reactor.
SSTAR could be sized to produce between 10 MW and 100 MW. A 10 MW unit could power 5,000 typical American households. A 100 MW unit capable of powering 50,000 homes would be 15 meters high by 3 meters wide, weigh 500 tons and could be transported on a barge or truck to its location. After 15 to 30 years, the unit would be picked up and sent back to the factory for decommissioning and replaced with a new unit.
An idea that good should be actively promoted by the DOE, shouldn’t it? But it is not.
Last week, I had the good fortune to interview Dr. Craig Smith, formerly of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (“LLNL”) and currently a Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, one of the nation’s foremost experts on SSTAR to get an update on the subject. He explained that SSTAR was “on hold” and LLNL was focused on ‘keeping abreast of international efforts relative to SSTAR”. Apparently, the Russians, the English, and the EU are funding similar technology. To his knowledge, there was no funding in the 2012 DOE Budget for the design or prototyping of SSTAR.
Dr. Smith’s 2004 article on SSTAR, Nuclear Energy to Go; A Portable Self-Contained Reactor [https://www.llnl.gov/str/JulAug04/Smith.html] explains the technical concept in some detail. In the article, he outlines the advantages of SSTAR, i.e., it could be cheaper, generate far less nuclear waste, use less
water because it is lead cooled and be less prone to terrorism than convention nuclear plants. Because SSTARs are small – from 10MW to 100 MW – it could decentralize the power grid and make the grid more
reliable – kind of like the Internet, one SSTAR could go down, but the rest of the grid would still function. From a ‘global warming’ standpoint, any power source that reduces greenhouse gases in a safe, affordable and de-centralized fashion should be a strong candidate for active Government funding. But it is not.
According to Dr. Smith, a prototype of SSTAR could be produced in a relatively short time frame – perhaps as short as five years – at a cost of less that $500 million – the approximate size of the loan to Solyndra or about $100 million per year – or 0.3% of DOE’s research and development budget. Seems like a small bet for a technology that might have such advantages and potential.
And in my view, it is the government’s role to fund bleeding-edge energy technologies that are too risky for private investors but could result in technical and cost breakthroughs and foster new industries. SSTAR appears to fit those criteria.
From a construction cost perspective, SSTAR could be as cheap as $1,000 per KW for a 100MW unit if the lower end of Dr. Smith’s cost estimate stands the test of time. Obviously, construction costs would depend on
mass production volumes. Accordingly to the DOE, the only technology that looks cheaper if the $1,000 per KW estimate holds up is natural gas. Even if Mr. Smith’s worst case cost estimate of $5,000 per KW for a 10 KW unit turns out to be true, the technology would be comparable to solar, offshore wind, carbon-capture coal and conventional nuclear.
Legend: PC and IGCC are coal. CCS means carbon capture. NGCC and CT are natural gas, the rest are self-evident.
Looking at the full cost of generating electricity in the chart below, SSTAR is likely to come in at the lower end of the cost spectrum based on its projected advantages. It might offer the low capital cost of NGCC / CT and the low variable and fixed operation and maintenance cost of nuclear. If Dr. Smith is right, SSTAR could represents the best of all worlds with no carbon emissions.
SSTAR has other advantages that include (1) relatively low variable operation and maintenance costs similar to solar and wind –[natural gas’ variable O&M costs can be as high as $10.00 KW — (2) no nuclear refueling
for 15 to 30 years – only time will tell how long a single unit will last – (3) much less nuclear waste, in comparison with current reactor systems, (4) minimal threat of terrorist sabotage due to the small reactor size and very thick molten-lead-filled casting around the reactor needed to ‘cool’ the reactor, (5) air cooling of the reactor, and (6) efficiency, i.e., 44% of the energy is converted into electricity versus 30-35% for conventional water-cooled nuclear.
It is true that before SSTAR can be commercialized some nagging engineering concerns will have to be satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt, such as what kind of casting material can contain molten lead safely for 15 to 30 years without failure. Obviously, a puddle of molten lead leaking from a SSTAR would put a damper on the whole concept.
From the perspective of a resident of Dobbs Ferry, New York, 23.9 south of the Indian Point Energy Center in Buchanan, New York, SSTAR might be a good solution to our local energy needs. We can barge a 30 MW unit up the Hudson River up to Waterfront Park, off load it at the boat ramp, plug it in the Metro North power grid and have enough energy for the entire Village plus some extra to sell to the grid.
Sounds like carbon-free, energy independence to me.