HTGR

High-temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTGR) and their pebble-bed modular reactor (PBMR) sub-type have a long and troubled history. But the zombie HTGR concept refuses to die: each failure is followed by another attempt and another failure.

Here is Nuclear Monitor's 2010 report on the failure of South Africa's PBMR project:¹

The Pebble Bed Modular Reactor. Remember? It was globally heralded as the perfect nuclear reactor: small, safe and cheap. Dozens would be built in South Africa alone and in 1999 the company expected to sell 30 reactors annually from 2004 on.

Now, the South African government announced it is expected to close operations at PBMR (Pty) Ltd. finally 'within a few weeks' (that is August). The company once planned to build up to 24 165-MW high-temperature gas-cooled reactor modules for state-owned utility Eskom and export the modular HTR worldwide, but hasn't built even the demonstration model.

The government has invested an estimated South Africa Rand 9 billion (US$1.23 billion at current rates) in PBMR Ltd. over the 11 years since it was founded as an Eskom subsidiary. PBMR Ltd. is formally owned by Eskom, the Industrial Development Corp. and Westinghouse, but they have put no equity in the company for several years.

In a July statement, the Department of Public Enterprises, which has responsibility for the PBMR company, said PBMR "has not been able to acquire additional investment in the project since government's last funding allocation in 2007, nor has it been able to acquire an anchor customer despite revising its business model in 2008/09."

The company is operating on funds that were left over from the 2007 allocation and has downsized from about 800 staff to about 25. Although the PBMR website doesn't show anything about the current situation, it says there are "no career opportunities at the moment."

The company was set up in 1999 as Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (Pty) Ltd. to develop and deploy German technology it had acquired for small HTRs with coated pebble-shaped fuel elements. Besides British Nuclear Fuels plc (BNFL), Exelon, the largest nuclear fleet operator in the US, also made an early equity investment, and the company was broadly touted as the herald of a new nuclear age for the developing world based on small reactors that could be set up quickly under various site conditions. BNFL's stake was transferred to Westinghouse when the latter was sold to Toshiba.

But the PBMR partners never agreed on a new equity structure and the company remained the property of the South African government. The Department of Public Enterprises believes the R9-billion spent on the PBMR project has not been lost, as the skills developed "will contribute significantly in any future nuclear programs and save the country huge amounts of money in the process".

One of the critics, Stephen Thomas, professor of energy policy at the University of Greenwich in the UK, told the Cape Times that it was clear at least six years ago that the PBMR project was "going badly wrong. Yet the government continued to pour public money into it, indeed about 80 percent of all the money spent on the pebble bed was spent in the past six years."

Tristen Taylor, of Earthlife Africa, said "We hope that this will also mark the end of the South African government's love affair with nuclear energy and that taxpayer funds can now be spent on clean, proven and reliable forms of renewable energy".

The demise of PBMRs ... and China's attempted revival

Steve Thomas, Professor of Energy Policy at the University of Greenwich, wrote about the demise of PBMRs in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 2009.² Thomas covers the failure of PBMR projects in Germany and South Africa. He notes that the cost of the proposed PBMR demonstration plant in South Africa was initially US$223 million but the estimate had escalated eight-fold to at least US$1.8 billion by the time the project was abandoned.

Thomas concluded:²

"All the major countries involved in designing reactors, including the United States, Germany, France, Japan, and Britain, have put major time and effort into developing high-temperature, gas-cooled reactors such as the PBMR. Despite more than 50 years of trying, however, no commercial-scale design has yet been produced. Yet China and South Africa have found the allure of pebble bed technology irresistible, as if it were an "unpolished gem" waiting to be developed, regardless of the consistent engineering problems it has had since the beginning.

"South Africa took a particularly aggressive approach, believing that it could develop a commercial-size PBMR design without even operating a prototype. If the PBMR is proved to be fundamentally flawed, as indicated in the Jülich report³, South Africa's $980 million investment in the project will be seen in hindsight as wasteful, one that the country, plagued with many more pressing and basic problems, could ill afford."

The Jülich report mentioned by Thomas is the Jülich Center's 2008 review of its previous PBMR work.³ It was Jülich's design ‒ specifically the prototype PBMR ‒ which South Africa had taken as the basis for its PBMR. It seems that one after another nuclear nation is destined to find out for themselves that HTGR/PBMR designs are technically challenging and are best avoided.

China is building one demonstration HTGR/PBMR: twin reactors driving a single 210 MWe turbine.⁴ Further HTGR feasibility studies are underway in China⁵, but plans for 18 additional HTGR/PBMRs (with total capacity of 3,800 MW) at the same site as the demonstration plant have been "dropped" according to the World Nuclear Association.⁴ In 2016, completion of the demonstration reactor was anticipated the following year, and China's HTGRs would be on the world market within five years.^6,7 But the demonstration reactor has not been completed as of February 2019, construction of larger HTGRs in China has not yet begun, and the world will simply have to wait for Chinese HTGRs … or find alternative power sources. Construction cost estimates of the demonstration HTGR have approximately doubled.⁸

The checkered history of HTGRs

University of British Columbia academic M.V. Ramana has written a summary of the troubled history of HTGR / PBMR projects.⁹ An excerpt from Ramana's article is reproduced here:

"Proponents of HTGRs often claim that their designs have a long pedigree. ... But if one examines that very same experience more closely – looking in particular at the HTGRs that were constructed in Western Europe and the United States to feed power into the electric grid – then one comes to other conclusions. This history suggests that while HTGRs may look attractive on paper, their performance leaves much to be desired. The technology may be something that looks better on paper than in the real world ...

"Although Germany abandoned this technology, it did migrate to other countries, including China and South Africa. Of these, the latter case is instructive: South Africa pursued the construction of a pebble-bed reactor for a decade, and spent over a billion dollars, only to abandon it in 2009 because it just did not make sense economically. Although sold by its proponents as innovative and economically competitive until its cancellation, the South African pebble-bed reactor project is now being cited as a case study in failure. How good the Chinese experience with the HTGR will be remains to be seen. ...

"From these experiences in operating HTGRs, we can take away several lessons – the most important being that HTGRs are prone to a wide variety of small failures, including graphite dust accumulation, ingress of water or oil, and fuel failures. Some of these could be the trigger for larger failures or accidents, with more severe consequences. ... Other problems could make the consequences of a severe accident worse: For example, pebble compaction and breakage could lead to accelerated diffusion of fission products such as radioactive cesium and strontium outside the pebbles, and a potentially larger radioactive release in the event of a severe accident. ...

"Discussions of the commercial viability of HTGRs almost invariably focus on the expected higher capital costs per unit of generation capacity (dollars per kilowatts) in comparison with light water reactors, and potential ways for lowering those. In other words, the main challenge they foresee is that of building these reactors cheaply enough. But what they implicitly or explicitly assume is that HTGRs would operate as well as current light water reactors – which is simply not the case, if history is any guide. ...

"Although there has been much positive promotional hype associated with high-temperature reactors, the decades of experience that researchers have acquired in operating HTGRs has seldom been considered. Press releases from the many companies developing or selling HTGRs or project plans in countries seeking to purchase or construct HTGRs neither tell you that not a single HTGR-termed "commercial" has proven financially viable nor do they mention that all the HTGRs were shut down well before the operating periods envisioned for them. This is typical of the nuclear industry, which practices selective remembrance, choosing to forget or underplay earlier failures."

References:

1. Nuclear Monitor #714, 20 Aug 2010, 'The end is near for the PBMR', https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/714/end-near-pbmr

2. Steve Thomas, 22 June 2009, 'The demise of the pebble bed modular reactor', http://thebulletin.org/demise-pebble-bed-modular-reactor

3. R. Moormann, "A Safety Re-evaluation of the AVR Pebble Bed Reactor Operation and Its Consequences for Future HTR Concepts," Forschungszentrum Jülich, 2008, https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/39/099/39099...

4. World Nuclear Association, 21 March 2016, 'First vessel installed in China's HTR-PM unit', http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-First-vessel-installed-in-Chinas-HT...

5. World Nuclear Association, 19 Sept 2017, 'China plans further high temperature reactor innovation', http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-China-plans-further-high-temperatur...

6. Dan Yurman, 13 Feb 2016, 'Nuclear News Roundup for 2/14/16', http://neutronbytes.com/2016/02/13/nuclear-news-roundup-for-21416/

7. Richard Martin, 11 Feb 2016, 'Two high-temperature, gas-cooled reactors under construction in Shandong will make up the first commercial-scale plant of its type in the world', https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600757/china-could-have-a-meltdown-pr...

8. 1 Dec 2016, 'China's plans to begin converting coal plants to walk away safe pebble bed nuclear starting in the 2020s', http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/12/chinas-plans-to-begin-converting-co...

9. M. V. Ramana, April 2016, 'The checkered operational history of high-temperature gas-cooled reactors', Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2016.1170395

China is pushing ahead with ambitious plans to expand nuclear power, but the risks are daunting.

China's State Council published the 'Energy Development Strategy Action Plan, 2014-2020' in November. The plan envisages an expansion of nuclear power from 19.1 gigawatts (GW) of currently installed capacity to 58 GW by 2020, with another 30 GW under construction by then. It says that efforts should be focused on promoting the use of large pressurised water reactors (including the AP1000 and CAP1400 designs), high temperature gas-cooled reactors, and fast reactors.¹

Ambitious targets for renewables have also been set: 350 GW of hydro capacity by 2020, 200 GW of wind power capacity, and 100 GW of solar capacity. ¹ Thus the renewable target of 650 GW greatly exceeds the 58 GW nuclear target. In 2013, for the first time, China added more new renewable capacity than new fossil and nuclear capacity.²

Chinese authorities have a history of failing to meet nuclear power forecasts:

• In 1985, authorities forecast 20 GW in 2000 but the true figure was 2.2 GW (11% of the forecast).³
• In 1996, authorities forecast 20 GW in 2010 but the true figure was 8.4 GW (42% of the forecast). ³
• In late 2012, China revised its plan to have 50 GW of nuclear capacity installed by 2015 down to 40 GW − and the true figure will be around half that.⁴

The Economist noted in a December 6 article that plans for a massive nuclear expansion should be taken with "a big pinch of salt" and added: "It is true that China is the brightest spot in the global nuclear industry, but that is mostly because prospects in other places are bleak."⁵

Claims by industry bodies − such as the World Nuclear Association's forecast of 150 GW of nuclear capacity in China by 2030⁶ − should also be taken with a pinch of salt.

In 2010, Chinese officials forecast 130 GW of installed nuclear capacity by 2020 − more than double the current forecast. And the State Council Research Office's 2011 forecast of 70 GW by 2020 has been reduced to 58 GW.²

It is unlikely that the 58 GW target can be reached by 2020. It assumes no closures of the 22 operating reactors, completion of all 27 reactors (29 GW) under construction, and completion of 10 GW that has yet to begin construction − all in the space of six years.

Constraints

The South China Morning Post noted in a September 2014 article that "China will have to overcome some big hurdles, including conflicts of interest among large state-owned companies, technological uncertainties in new-generation power plants and public concerns about nuclear safety." The newspaper quotes a China Institute of Atomic Energy expert who argues that a shortage of scientists and engineers poses a "major challenge".⁷

Plans for inland nuclear plants have been delayed by public opposition (especially in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster), water shortages and other problems. Even the latest plan calls for nothing more than feasibility studies regarding inland plants.

A 2011 report from the State Council Research Office stated that nuclear development would require new investment of around US$150 billion (€121b) by 2020, on top of the costs of plants already under construction. The Office noted that new nuclear projects rely mainly on debt, funds are tight, and "investment risks cannot be discounted". Supply chain problems and bottlenecks could result in delays and further cost increases, the report noted.⁸

Safety first?

Numerous insiders have warned about inadequate nuclear safety and regulatory standards in China. He Zuoxiu, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said last year that "to reduce costs, Chinese designs often cut back on safety".⁹

Li Yulun, a former vice-president of China National Nuclear Corporation, said last year that Chinese "state leaders have put a high priority on [nuclear safety] but companies executing projects do not seem to have the same level of understanding."¹⁰

Cables released by WikiLeaks in 2011 highlighted the secrecy of the bidding process for nuclear power plant contracts in China, the influence of government lobbying, and potential weaknesses in management and regulatory oversight. Westinghouse representative Gavin Liu was quoted in a cable as saying: "The biggest potential bottleneck is human resources – coming up with enough trained personnel to build and operate all of these new plants, as well as regulate the industry."¹¹

In August 2009, the Chinese government dismissed and arrested China National Nuclear Corporation president Kang Rixin in a US$260 million (€209m) corruption case involving allegations of bid-rigging in nuclear power plant construction.¹²

Regulation

In 2011, Chinese physicist He Zuoxiu warned that "we're seriously underprepared, especially on the safety front" for a rapid expansion of nuclear power. Qiang Wang and his colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences noted in 2011 that China "still lacks a fully independent nuclear safety regulatory agency"¹³, and they noted that China's nuclear administrative systems are fragmented among multiple agencies; and China lags behind the US, France, and Japan when it comes to staff and budget to oversee operational reactors.¹⁴

The 2011 report by the State Council Research Office recommended that the National Nuclear Safety Administration "should be an entity directly under the State Council Bureau, making it an independent regulatory body with authority."⁸

China's nuclear safety agency is still not independent. And there are other problems: salaries for regulatory staff are lower than in industry, and workforce numbers remain relatively low. The State Council Research Office report said that most countries employ 30−40 regulatory staff per reactor, but China's nuclear regulator had only 1000 staff.⁸

In 2010, an International Atomic Energy Agency team carried out an Integrated Regulatory Review Service mission and said the review provided "confidence in the effectiveness of the Chinese safety regulatory system."⁸ Which just goes to prove that the IAEA sometimes says the silliest things − and in the process implicitly endorses and encourages sub-standard practices.

The Economist argued on December 6: "[T]he headlong rush to nuclear power is more dangerous and less necessary than China's government admits. One of the main lessons of Fukushima was that politicised, opaque regulation is dangerous. China's rule-setting apparatus is also unaccountable and murky, and ambitious targets for a risky technology should ring warning bells."¹⁵

Nuclear technology options

The Economist points to risks arising from China's approach to nuclear technology options:

"China's approach to building capacity has added to the risk of an accident. Rather than picking a single proven design for new reactors from an experienced vendor and replicating it widely, the government has decided to "indigenise" Western designs. The advantage of this approach is that China can then patent its innovations and make money out of selling them to the world; the downside is that there are now several competing designs promoted by rival state-owned enterprises, none of which is well tested.

"China should slow its nuclear ambitions to a pace its regulators can keep up with, and build its reactors using the best existing technology − which happens to be Western. That need not condemn it to more sooty, coal-fired years. The cost of renewable energy is dropping quickly and its efficiency is rising sharply. Last year, over half of all new power-generation capacity installed in China was hydro, wind or solar. If China wants to accelerate its move away from coal, ramping up those alternatives yet more would be a lot safer."¹⁵

Liu Baohua, the head of the nuclear office at the National Energy Administration, recently said that key technology and equipment being deployed in China's nuclear program is "still not completely up to standard". Liu said: "The third-generation reactors now under construction still have problems with the pumps and valves, and with the inflexibility of the design. ... We are working to resolve these problems and the overall situation is still under control." He said more needed to be done to improve the regulatory framework and to train nuclear personnel.¹⁶

The '12th 5-year Plan for Nuclear Safety and Radioactive Pollution Prevention and Vision for 2020', produced by the Ministry of Environment and endorsed by the State Council, said that China needed to spend US$13 billion (€10.4b) to improve nuclear safety at over the three years to 2015. The document states that "China has multiple types of nuclear reactors, multiple technologies and multiple standards of safety, which makes them hard to manage."⁸

China continues to build large numbers of 'Generation II' reactors which lack the safety features of more modern designs. The State Council Research Office report said that reactors built today should operate for 50 or 60 years, meaning a large fleet of Generation II reactors will still be in operation into the 2070s, when even Generation III reactors may have been superceded.⁸

Secrecy

The EPR reactors under construction at Taishan illustrate some of the problems and risks associated with China's nuclear program. "It's not always easy to know what is happening at the Taishan site," Stephane Pailler from France's Autorite de Surete Nucleaire (ASN) said in an interview this year. "We don't have a regular relationship with the Chinese on EPR control like we have with the Finnish," she said, referring to Finland's troubled EPR reactor project.

Philippe Jamet, one of ASN's five governing commissioners, testified before the French Parliament in February. "Unfortunately, collaboration isn't at a level we would wish it to be," he said. "One of the explanations for the difficulties in our relations is that the Chinese safety authorities lack means. They are overwhelmed."¹⁷

In March, EDF's internal safety inspector Jean Tandonnet noted problems evident during a mid-2013 visit to Taishan, including inadequacies with large components like pumps and steam generators which were "far" from the standards of the EPR plants in Finland and France.¹⁷

Tandonnet urged corrective measures and wrote that studies "are under way on tsunami and flooding risks."¹⁷ Oilprice.com has assessed nuclear plants most at risks from a tsunami. Globally, it found that 23 nuclear power plants with 74 reactors are in high-risk areas. The riskiest country is China − of the 27 reactors under construction, 17 are located in areas considered at risk of tsunamis.¹⁸

Little information has been published about the Taishan reactor project − and the same could be said about many others. Albert Lai, chairman of The Professional Commons, a Hong Kong think tank, said this year that the workings of China's nuclear safety authority are a ''total black box'' and ''China has no transparency whatsoever.''¹⁷

Insurance and liability arrangements

The Economist recently noted that Communist leaders are "keenly aware that a big nuclear accident would prompt an ugly − and, in the age of viral social media, nerve-wrackingly unpredictable − public backlash against the ruling party."⁵

The backlash would be all the more virulent because of grossly inadequate insurance and liability arrangements. Chinese authorities are slowly developing legislation which may improve the situation. Currently, liability caps are the lowest in the world. Nuclear plant operators must have insurance that covers financial losses and injuries up to 300 million yuan (US$48.5m; €39m). If a legitimate claim exceeds that amount, the central government may provide up to 800 million yuan (US$129m; €104m) extra.¹⁹

Closing the fuel cycle, increasing the risks

China's attempt to develop a closed fuel cycle will increase safety and security risks as discussed in an October 2014 paper by Hui Zhang, a physicist and a research associate at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.²⁰

In 2010, China conducted a 10-day hot test at its pilot reprocessing plant, where it is also building a pilot MOX fuel fabrication facility. The China National Nuclear Corporation plans to build a medium-scale demonstration reprocessing plant by 2020, followed by a larger commercial reprocessing plant.

Hui Zhang notes that the pilot reprocessing plant lacks an integrated security system. He notes that the 2010 hot test revealed problems: "Although reprocessing operations stopped after only ten days, many problems, including safety and security issues, were encountered or identified. These included both a very high amount of waste produced and a very high measure of material unaccounted for or MUF."

If the closed fuel cycle plans proceed, the long-distance shipment of MOX fuels and metal plutonium fuels will pose major security concerns.

Hui Zhang argues that "China has no convincing rationale for rushing to build commercial-scale reprocessing facilities or plutonium breeder reactors in the next couple of decades, and a move toward breeders and reprocessing would be a move away from more secure consolidation of nuclear materials."

China ranks poorly in the NTI Nuclear Materials Security Index − it is in the bottom fifth of the countries ranked. The NTI summarises: "China's nuclear materials security conditions could be improved by strengthening its laws and regulations for the physical security of materials in transport to reflect the latest IAEA nuclear security guidelines, and for mitigating the insider threat, particularly by requiring personnel to undergo more stringent and more frequent vetting and by requiring personnel to report suspicious behavior to an official authority. China's nuclear materials security conditions also remain adversely affected by its high quantities of weapons-usable nuclear materials, political instability, governance challenges, and very high levels of corruption among public officials."²¹

References:

1. WNN, 20 Nov 2014, 'China plans for nuclear growth', www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP-China-plans-for-nuclear-growth-2011144.html
2. World Nuclear Industry Status Report, 2014, www.worldnuclearreport.org/WNISR2014.html#_Toc268768720
3. ACF, 2012, 'Yellowcake Fever: Exposing the Uranium Industry's Economic Myths', www.acfonline.org.au/resources/yellowcake-fever-exposing-uranium-industr...
4. Keith Bradsher, 24 Oct 2012, 'China Slows Development of Nuclear Power Plants', www.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/business/global/china-reduces-target-for-cons...
5. 6 Dec 2014, 'Promethean perils', www.economist.com/news/business/21635498-after-hiatus-nuclear-power-set-...
6. World Nuclear Association, 9 December 2014, 'Nuclear Power in China', www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-A-F/China--Nuclear...
7. Stephen Chen, 14 Sept 2014, 'China plans to be world leader in nuclear power by 2020', South China Morning Post, www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1591984/china-plans-be-world-leader-nucl...
8. World Nuclear Association, 9 December 2014, 'Nuclear Power in China', www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-A-F/China--Nuclear...
9. He Zuoxiu, 19 March 2013, 'Chinese nuclear disaster "highly probable" by 2030', www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/5808-Chinese-nuclear-di
10. South China Morning Post, 7 Oct 2013, 'China nuclear plant delay raises safety concern', www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/1325973/china-nuclear-plant...
11. Jonathan Watts, 25 Aug 2011, 'WikiLeaks cables reveal fears over China's nuclear safety', www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/25/wikileaks-fears-china-nuclear...
12. Keith Bradsher, 15 Dec 2009, 'Nuclear Power Expansion in China Stirs Concerns', www.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/business/global/16chinanuke.html?_r=2&
13. David Biello, 16 Aug 2011, 'China's nuclear ambition powers on', www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2011/08/16/3293802.htm
14. 22 June 2011, 'China needs improved administrative system for nuclear power safety', www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-06/acs-cni062211.php
15. 6 Dec 2014, 'China's rush to build nuclear power plants is dangerous', www.economist.com/news/leaders/21635487-chinas-rush-build-nuclear-power-...
16. Reuters, 5 Dec 2014, 'China's new nuclear technology not yet fully up to standard, energy official says', www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1655799/new-nuclear-tech-not-yet-fully-s...
17. Tara Patel and Benjamin Haas, 20 June 2014, 'Nuclear Regulators 'Overwhelmed' as China Races to Launch World's Most Powerful Reactor', www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-18/french-nuclear-regulator-says-china-co...
18. Oil Price, 4 Nov 2014, http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/8-Countries-With-Nu...
19. 26 April 2014, 'What if China has a Fukushima?', www.globaltimes.cn/content/856971.shtml
See also WNN, 16 Sept 2014, 'Insurers can help improve the image of nuclear', www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-Insurers-can-help-improve-the-image-of-nuc...
20. Hui Zhang, 8 Oct 2014, 'The Security Risks of China's Nuclear Reprocessing Facilities', http://nuclearsecuritymatters.belfercenter.org/blog/security-risks-china...
21. NTI Nuclear Materials Security Index, 2014, http://ntiindex.org/countries/china/