Another Sodium Cooled Fast Nuclear Reactor Licensed in Russia.

[NNadir]

The article I'll excerpt is here: Beloyarsk issued with licence for BN-1200 reactor

Anyone who knows me will know that I am a supporter of Ukraine, and thus am not particularly fond of Russia, a country that has engineered the fall of the United States in my opinion, by promoting a stupid and venal man to accede to the office of President of the United States, a rather unique way of bringing down a world power.

This said, I have read and heard that Russia has the most rigorous requirements for its nuclear engineers, they need to be the best of the best. Recent history suggests it shows.

Russia only lags behind China in the ability to build nuclear reactors fast and on budget. Russia is, in fact, a major exporter of nuclear reactors, thermal reactors in the VVER class. They also have the world's longest experience at operating reactors in the fast neutron spectrum, both sodium cooled and lead cooled reactors. (I greatly prefer the latter, although nobody cares what I think; most fast reactor designs still rely on sodium cooling which in my view is a bad idea. However the worst bad idea in nuclear energy is still superior to the best ideas in dangerous fossil fuels promoted by hydrogen water boys and so called "renewable energy." )

The United States, once the world leader in reactor development and construction, now lags behind China and Russia by at least 20 years, if not more.

It is, in my view, absolutely essential that we build fast reactors in order to extend uranium supplies essentially to infinity. I have argued many times that with sufficient access to fast reactors, we might meet all of the world's energy demands for centuries using the uranium already mined, along with the thorium mined and then discarded from lanthanide ores.

Again, I don't like sodium cooling - there are better options I think - but Russia knows how to operate these, and should that country return to civilization, the plutonium they breed will be a resource for generations to come.

Excerpts from the article in the link above:

Russia's nuclear regulator Rostechnadzor has given the go-ahead for the Beloyarsk nuclear power plant's planned fifth unit - a fast neutron BN-1200 reactor. Preparatory construction works are expected to start this year...

...The sodium-cooled BN-series fast reactor plans are part of Rosatom's project to develop fast reactors with a closed fuel cycle whose mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel will be reprocessed and recycled. In addition to the BN-600 reactor at Beloyarsk unit 3, which began operation in 1980, the 789 MWe BN-800 fast at Beloyarsk unit 4 entered commercial operation in October 2016. This is essentially a demonstration unit for fuel and design features for the larger BN-1200, which will be unit 5 at Beloyarsk.

Rosatom says the service life of the BN-1200 power unit will be at least 60 years. Its design uses technical solutions that have proven themselves in the operation of the BN-600 and BN-800 reactors, but also features innovations. For example, the BN-1200 will have four instead of three loops for the circulation of liquid sodium, like its predecessors; the volume of the in-reactor storage facility will be increased to allow the unloading of fuel assemblies from the reactor directly into the used fuel pool, eliminating the intermediate drum for used assemblies; and the turbine condensers will be cooled using a chimney-type evaporative cooling tower...

...Ivan Sidorov, Director of Beloyarsk NPP, said: "Installation of the prototype serial power unit with BN-1200M reactor at Beloyarsk NPP will make it possible to take another important step towards two-component nuclear power engineering and fully use the ecological and economic advantages of the closed nuclear fuel cycle. The personnel of Beloyarsk NPP has accumulated vast experience in operating the unique BN-600 and BN-800 sodium fast reactors, so it is logical that the prototype BN-1200M will be created here."

The proposed date for completion of the reactor is 2034, nine years from now.

[FadedMullet]

1. NN - I do truly love and admire your views on Nuclear energy production, but does your comment on "worst.....

.....bad idea in nuclear energy" somehow dip one's toe into the pool of hyperbole? I'm thinking that you in particular could come up with some things truly bad, exceeding even my thoughts about building a dozen new Chernobyls along the San Andreas Faultline.

[FadedMullet]

2. NN - One more question. Lead cooling in a reactor? Didn't know about this. Pumps circulating molten....

.....lead like in a flow soldering machine?? This is a thing? How is the lead affected by the radiation? Thanks, as usual, for your patience.

[NNadir]

4. The Russians have built a series of reactors, particularly on submarines, that utilize LBE, lead bismuth eutectic.

The advantage of lead is that as a heavy metal it is self shielding. The concept has had some setbacks, materials science issues.

It is interesting that pure lead, a toxic metal, is transmuted into far less toxic bismuth in a neutron flux. In theory - although not to my knowledge in a practical sense - pure lead can generate it's own bismuth during operation. It's a way to get rid of lead, in theory, although the very high energy to mass ratio that makes nuclear energy environmentally superior to all other options, would make this effect small.

[yourout]

5. In my humble opinion the single biggest thing to be avoided in nuclear...

Energy is high pressure primary coolant that can be aerosolized in the event of a disaster and spread thousands of miles.

Low pressure sodium is fine.
Low pressure molten lead is fine.
Either of these will simply disperse a few hundred yards and harden.
While that would still not be good that would be far better than rendering 20 square miles uninhabitable for 1000 years.

[NNadir]

6. This figure of "1000 years" comes from where?

Last edited Tue May 6, 2025, 07:58 AM - Edit history (1)

We have had major reactor failures, the worst being Chernobyl which burned for weeks in a graphite fire. The relatively small death toll from Chernobyl helped change me from a rote mindless antinuke into a pronuclear person.

The area has become something of a tourist attraction, mostly because of the wildlife living in the exclusion zone.

The number of people who died from radiation exposure at the big bogey man at Fukushima is either zero or close to zero. The number of people killed by living in a coastal city inundated by seawater is 20,000, although nobody gives a rat's ass about the danger of coastal cities.

It turns out that fear of radiation killed more people than radiation itself did. In fact, if one looks at air pollution's annual death toll of around 7 million people per year, air pollution that could have been prevented were it not for irrational fear of nuclear energy, that condition exists on a scale of tens of millions of people every decade.

The cited paper in the text below open sourced. I keep the excerpt handy for claims like this.

Comparison of mortality patterns after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant radiation disaster and during the COVID-19 pandemic ( Motohiro Tsuboi et al 2022 J. Radiol. Prot. 42 031502)

...However, in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant(FDNPP) accident, no direct health hazards due to radiation, such as acute radiation injury, were observed, while various indirect health effects were reported even in the acute phase [2, 3]. Major health effects are attributed to the initial emergency evacuation and displacement, deterioration of the shelter environment, evacuation from nursing homes, and psychological and social health effects. In addition, there were also the effects of medical collapse, where lives that could normally be saved by medical care could not be saved due to a lack of medical resources [4, 5]. It is known that these effects are particularly susceptible to the socially vulnerable [6].

.

I added the bold.

Now the rest of the cited text - some of these authors live and work in Fukushima and have always done so; their institution is Fukushima Medical University, Fukushima City, Japan - indicates that the fear of radiation killed people, but radiation itself didn't. By the way, this group has published hundreds of papers on the topic.

I note that fossil fuel waste is making the entire planet increasingly risky. With the extreme global heating there will be tens of thousands of square miles that will be uninhabitable, perhaps more. We can expect famines, floods, fires, and inundated cities.

I have zero use for selective attention.

[yourout]

8. No argument for me on the need to get away from fossil fuels I just want the least potential damage from nuclear whateve

Will be very interested to follow the Chinese development in MSRs with thorium.

[NNadir]

3. Perhaps those words are far too strong, particularly because the Russians have long successful experience with sodium.

I just really, really, really prefer other metals. I have been discussing with my son a liquid metal coolant that to my knowledge, no one has ever suggested, but should. (I very seldom think of something the first time without finding out that someone has thought extensively about the same idea well before I did.) Japan and France both had huge difficulties with sodium cooled reactors; their efforts were failures.

I did say that the worst nuclear reactor is better than the best fossil fuel plant, which is true. I would include in this description the RBMK reactor that Chernobyl represented, and which was very similar to reactors at the US Hanford weapons plant. Despite the fetish about Chernobyl, it certainly didn't kill as many people as will die in the next five or six hours from fossil fuel waste, aka air pollution. It is an intellectual and moral problem that people obsess about Chernobyl but don't give a shit about the 19,000 people who die every day from air pollution.

There are many approaches to fast reactors, including some actually explored in the early days of reactor development. As my son is working on his Ph.D. in nuclear materials, I am collecting lots of phase diagrams, which hopefully he'll come across after I kick off and he becomes curious about his old man's thinking by going through my files.

As for San Andreas, I can think of no place on Earth that could profit quite so well from nuclear power as California. Among other things they have a huge inventory of valuable used nuclear fuel.

It is neither true nor ethical to suppose that fossil fuels are allowed kill people continuously in California during normal use because people fear that a nuclear accident might kill someone some day.

The Exxon/Mobile refinery on Crenshaw Blvd in Torrance had (and may still have) an inventory of liquid hydrogen fluoride, a cracking catalyst, that could easily make Bhopal, and for that matter, Chernobyl, look like a cub scout picnic. The 2015 explosion at that plant was a very serious near miss.

[FadedMullet]

7. Thanks, NN, you never fail to educate the masses, me in particular.