Nuclear Fuel Is The Swiss Watch of Energy and The Most Sophisticated Industrial Product You've Never Heard About.

Buckle up for a mega-🧵

There is a peculiarity at the heart of nuclear energy that rarely gets the attention it deserves. Every other thermal power plant in history destroys its fuel.

Coal goes in as a black rock and comes out as CO2, water vapor, and ash. Natural gas barely leaves a trace at all, just heat and gaseous combustion products dispersed into the atmosphere.

The fuel is gone, irreversibly transformed, its chemical identity obliterated in the furnace.

Nuclear fuel does almost none of that. The fuel elements that go into a reactor and the fuel elements that come out are, to a first approximation, the same material in the same geometry, sitting in the same place.

A spent fuel assembly pulled from a reactor after six years of operation looks nearly identical to the fresh one that went in.

The mass has changed by a tiny fraction of a percent, nuclear alchemy has occurred in which half the periodic table has been generated in the form of fission products within the ceramic pellets but the volume and geometry is essentially identical.

This one fact, that nuclear fuel must be preserved rather than destroyed, that the job of every layer of every system surrounding the core is to maintain the integrity of a material through years of radiation bombardment and extreme temperature gradients, shapes much of nuclear engineering.

It explains the cladding materials, the obsessive quality control in fabrication facilities, and the decades of slow, painstaking improvement that have transformed a fleet that routinely operated with failed fuel elements into one where a single leaker triggers a formal investigation.

I spent a long conversation with Michael Seely, the @AtomicBlenderYT, a nuclear enginner with a focus on fuel, going through what nuclear fuel actually is, how it is made, why it fails, and how the industry learned to prevent those failures.

What follows is my attempt to synthesize that conversation into something useful for anyone who wants to understand nuclear from the inside out. What the Fuel Actually Is

The commercial nuclear fuel cycle, in its conventional form, converges on a single material: uranium dioxide, or UO2.

Regardless of reactor type, whether you are talking about a pressurized water reactor in France, a boiling water reactor in Japan, or a CANDU in Ontario, the fuel pellet sitting at the centre of the fuel rod is almost certainly a dense ceramic cylinder of uranium dioxide roughly the size of a fingertip.

1/ Energy, industry, and sovereignty are inseparable. If Europe wants to be a truly independent pole in an emerging multipolar world, it must reindustrialize—not deindustrialize. That starts with reversing nuclear phaseouts. 🧵 2/ Germany, the industrial powerhouse of the EU, built its economic might on two things:
⚡ Cheap nuclear power
🔥 Cheap Russian gas
Now that Russian gas is gone, nuclear must return.

Why is China electrifying its economy at such dizzying speeds?

3 words

Straits of Malacca.

While the US leans into its hydrocarbon advantage, China is decoupling from severe oil dependence & geographical vulnerability. a 🧵based on @DecoupleMedia w @pretentiouswhat When Western climate analysts look toward China, in some sense they see the future, where fantasies of large-scale renewables deployment and EV adoption are playing out.

But far more than climate considerations, the geopolitics of oil dependence are shaping China's energy future. With 80% of its oil imports flowing through the narrow Strait of Malacca, China faces an existential vulnerability.

WE’VE GOT TO TALK ABOUT FUKUSHIMA TRITIUM RELEASES.

TL:DR the fear is misplaced.

Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen It binds H and O to make HTO, tritiated water.

It is created naturally by cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere as well as in nuclear power plants.

https://twitter.com/hanakomontgome1/status/1627986555444039680

Tritiated water behaves just like H2O and is excreted from the body quickly with a biological half life of 3.5 days. For this reason it doesn’t bioaccumulate up the food chain and diffuses and dilutes rapidly in lakes and oceans.

Its all doom and gloom for Nuclear in @BentFlyvbjerg's new book "How Big Things Get Done"

But did he miss some nuance when conflating the Korean/UAE collaboration which will have delivered four 1400MW reactors in 12 yrs with the unfolding fiasco of Vogtle 1/ In the book @BentFlyvbjerg and @dgardner contrast the Guggenheim museum and the Sydney Opera house to draw important lessons from two very cutting edge buildings. 2/

NUCLEAR WASTE IS INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS!

Unshielded & fresh out of the reactor exposure for seconds would result in certain death.

But somehow there has not been a single documented death from storing civilian nuclear waste. Ever.

Here's what you need to know: a 🧵 We make dangerous things, like nuclear waste, safe.

Consider civil aviation.

In 2019, 4.5 billion passengers took 42 million flights worldwide flying 900km/hr at 30,000 feet in thin skinned, pressurized aircraft often over vast oceans.

There were only 289 fatalities.

A Canada-Germany Hydrogen Scandal?

Beyond a potential political scandal lies a very real energy scandal. Listen Now!

James Fleay, an Australian engineer & project manager, joins @decouplemedia to discuss. 1/

@JavierBlas @DoombergT @BurggrabenH

anchor.fm/chris15401/epi… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… This Hydrogen Alliance is coming under increasing scrutiny due to allegations of a conflict of interest arising out of the Premier of Newfoundland, Andrew Furey's luxury trip to a lodge owned by Canadian billionaire John Risley this summer. 2/

⁦@JonathanWNV⁩ is out of line with the world’s top Climate activist ⁦@GretaThunberg⁩

Greta called on Germany not to close its nuclear as it pivots back to coal.

Wilkinson claims that gas is not used for electricity generation in Ger. This is factually incorrect. 1/ Here is Germany’s electricity generation by source in 2021. Gas was a significant part of their electricity. EU Natural Gas reached an all time high of 345 euro/MWh on the TTF in March of 2022 which has driven even more coal burning as a way to ration gas use on the grid. 2/

Is Nuclear Energy Just Too Risky? A 🧵.

As doctors we explain the risks & benefits of treatment plans on a daily basis. The risk/benefit profile of nuclear energy is clear. Nuclear is extremely safe, our lowest CO2 energy source & is essential to reaching our climate goals. 1/ After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, many Americans felt that flying was too risky and started driving instead. 2/

Thread: Dan Campbell was one of the workers who operated Nanticoke, North America's largest coal facility. He wasn't sure what to think about climate change & whether his workplace was contributing to childhood asthma or shortening the lives of Ontarians from air pollution 1/ He had worked hard to become very good at his job, enjoyed the challenge of his work and took pride in keeping the lights on across the province. 2/

“CHRIS KEEFER, a physician and part-time pro-nuclear energy advocate will be meeting with MPs and holding a press conference in Ottawa today, in a bid to put pressure on the government to change its energy policy.” 1/ “Nuclear energy was arguably given short shrift in the government’s recently-released greenhouse gas emissions reduction plan for 2030.” 2/

Is a “Just Transition” away from fossil fuels towards a decarbonized energy system technology specific? The basket of available & scalable technologies: Wind, Solar & Nuclear each come with characteristics that determine wages, levels of unionization & security of employment.🧵1/ When #GreenNewDealers imagine the jobs of a clean energy transition, they often nostalgically harken back to the post war era when generations of blue collar workers could support families on a single income in a unionized workplace & afford to send their kids to college. 2/

I was recently featured in a @simonahac “gotcha tweet” regarding the lifespan of renewable energy projects. There are some major problems with @simonahac's reasoning which I will go into below. I’ll avoid the mudslinging and name calling and stick to the facts. Thread 2.) TL:DR The renewables industry themselves and independent organizations claim an average lifespan of wind of 20 years and of solar panels of 25-30 years. I will argue below that the solar numbers are likely exaggerated. twi-global.com/technical-know…
greenbiz.com/article/what-w…

@AdamBlazowski is a founder of the Polish pragmatic environmentalist group FOTA4Climate. FOTA came together in 2018 out of a frustration with the limits of the mainstream environmental movement. Check out the interview on the @DecouplePodcast anchor.fm/chris15401/epi… 2.) @fota4climate includes a broad spectrum of experts and activists ranging from energy analysts to herpetologists and characterizes itself as a “tech agnostic group.”

I am joined by @Heather_mom4nuk on the @DecouplePodcast. Heather is the co-founder of Mothers for Nuclear. She is a materials scientist, nuclear reactor operator at Diablo Canyon and a lifelong environmentalist. anchor.fm/chris15401/epi… In the words of their website @moms4nuclear is an organization of environmentalists, humanitarians, and caring human beings.

I am joined by @E_R_Sepulveda, a telecoms regulatory economist with an interest in the electricity sector focussing on restructuring and privatization for a deep dive of electricity regulation and deregulation and its impacts on deep decarbonisation. anchor.fm/chris15401/epi… 2.) We begin with the first private companies at the dawn of electrification in the 1880’s and the populist push to exert some form of public control to curb abusive pricing, including setting up regulatory commissions to protect the public interest.

Is China on the verge of a historic moment like the Messmer plan which saw France accidentally decarbonize by nuclearizing its grid in 15 years while electrifying much of its heating & rail? Francois Morin of the @WorldNuclear answers this and more.. anchor.fm/chris15401/epi… 2.) China is currently third in the world in Nuclear Energy capacity with ambitious plans to have the most reactors in the world by 2030. The Tsinghua climate plan calls for a 7 fold increase by 2050.