Old Fashioned Nuclear Power

I was talking with a nuclear engineer over the weekend. I asked him if the new growth and interest in nuclear power was due to advances in pebble-bed technology. I recalled the concept from reading Peter Schwartz’s article in Wired Magazine, Nuclear Now. Contrary to all the buzz, this really isn’t the design of choice for new plants. Engineers still like the old Three Mile Island style reactors. The main reason is due to new ideas on how to pump water that make the power plants safer. Some of the ideas aren’t so new, though, like using gravity instead of pumps to move the water (sounds like an old brewery design to me). We joked that finally by the year 2006 we finally figured out how to pump water. Why is this significant? Because pebble-bed reactors pump helium. The argument is that we finally figured out, after all this time, how to make a failsafe system that uses water, why would we want to start all over again with helium? Helium uses a whole new set of rules. For instance, it is very hard to keep inside the pipes. A lot of it leaks out. Innovation in the nuclear industry, therefore, is incremental in nature. The majority of the new plants that will be coming online, in China for instance, will just be refinements to an old design.