Page 6 - AsiaElec Week 33 2021

AsiaElec COMMENTARY AsiaElec
with China National Nuclear Corp. (CNNC) in 2015, but this fell victim to the Trump admin- istration’s limitations on technology transfer to China. Travelling Wave fission uses breeder neu- trons to transform U238 straight into plutonium, which then fissions to generate heat for power. Rods containing raw U238 are shuffled around inside the reactor using robotics to keep the fis- sion reaction inside the cooling sweet spot, but the reactor vessel is closed for decades.
Terrapower is also working on the design of an MSR using chloride salts in place of fluoride salts, but that looks like being many years away from a test build.
Another US player is Thorcon. Thorcon’s strategy is to deploy MSRs burning uranium 235 in modular assemblies mounted on power barges (like a nuclear version of Karpower’s highly successful power ships). About 20% of Thorcon’s energy will come from added thorium. Thorcon’s reactors will have some of the benefits of China’s MSRs (lower operating pressures, lower production costs, lower risks) but will generate plutonium as a fission product, making reprocessing a strategic risk and cost. Thorcon is working on its first deployment with Indonesia. In 2020 a key memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed for the build, and work is progressing towards a financial round to fund a 500-MW construction starting in 2022 at a yard in Surabaya.
Canadian Terrestrial Energy (founded in
2012) has taken advantage of Canada’s more innovative regulatory environment to develop a 200-MWe Uranium-fuelled MSR, and is cur- rently in the final stages of design approval.
India a non-starter
India, with very large thorium reserves and almost no uranium reserves, has been paying attention to a thorium fuel cycle for decades but in spite of much talk about its potential it has got no further than a project to include thorium in solid fuel elements for its PWR programme.
Finally a small US innovator, FLIBE Energy, has been promoting the use of molten thorium salts as reactor fuel since 2011, but with mini- mal financial investment has made no moves towards actual test engineering work.
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China to be a dominant world player
At present, therefore, it looks as if China, with its portfolio of MSR patents and (shortly) real- world test data and a working design, may well become the dominant provider of MSR reactors based on the thorium fuel cycle to developing economies worldwide. If the system proves its assumptions it will not only create and take a very large new market – dozens of installation per year at $1-1.5bn per installation – but it will also sound a loud death-knell for the PWR con- struction industry, currently dominated by Rus- sia and South Korea.™
HYDROGEN
Hydrogen boom for Inner Mongolia
CHINA
CHINA aims to use solar and wind to pro- duce 66,900 tonnes per year in of green hydro- gen in the cities of Ordos and Baotou in Inner Mongolia.
The plants could be up and running by 2023 and would be able to avoid about 21 million gallons of petrol for fossil fuel vehicles per year, China’s Hydrogen Energy Industry Promotion Association said.
About 20% of the power generated from the plants will be sent to the local grid, while the rest will be used to produce green hydrogen via elec- trolysis, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Green hydrogen is a natural gas obtained from waste carbon dioxide through electrolysis, which splits up hydrogen and oxygen in water using an electrical current.
The scale of the plans can be judged by the fact that it will require at least 465MW of
electrolysers to produce these amounts of green hydrogen, which is more than entire global ship- ments in 2021.
The new project would be a major turna- round for the Inner Mongolian region, which is a leading coal producer. Becoming a renewable energy hub would be a major policy change.
The area has 3,100 hours of sunlight per year, as well as cold winds from Siberia.
Hydrogen is widely viewed as vital to China’s drive to decarbonize its economy by 2060. Chi- na’s aims of being carbon neutral by 2060, and for CO2 emissions to peak by 2030 at the latest.
The output value of the country’s hydrogen industry is forecast at 1 trillion yuan ($154 bil- lion) in five years time, China Hydrogen Alliance said, and it could reach 12 times that by 2050, Bloomberg said.™
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w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 33 18•August•2021