My guess (not too informed, by the way) is there is still more materials science to be done on pebble beds, maybe 3-4 years, maybe 5-7 years.
Why ?
1) Material science takes almost as long as biotech. The world has become much better at material science and creating new engineered materials, but outside of alloys of well known metals and many plastics, this is still both and experimental and theoretical science - you have to experiment to gets lots of data, actually formulate and test some variations or tweaks to theory, and then experiment again. Then, once you know what you want, you need to find a way to produce it consistently and relatively cheaply.
2) Nuclear research and pebble bed specifically has been WAY underfunded everywhere in the world up until maybe 2003-4, roughly. Funding started going up about two years after there was talk about 'peak oil".
3) The Ft. St. Vrain stuff is very old, and probably did not collect the detail of data needed today.
4) I expect the German data is considerably better but that ended in 1988.
5) This effectively means China is building the first one. Sounds fun, but it isn't - you get all these chicken and egg problems, like where do the Wright Brothers take flying lessons when there weren't any airplanes ? You also get to make all the standard 'mistakes'.
Hmm, you can tell from the above that I am an engineer, not a scientist. I like to build things that work, not find out all the ways something won't work, and publish a paper on those ways.
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I expect what China will do is to build about 2-4 first generation designs, run them a few years, then build about a dozen second generation reactors based on maybe 2 or 3 designs, and then have a third generation which can go everywhere and then build 100s of these. Many of first generation will likely be decommissioned and/or rebuilt in around 10 years, having produced power and been useful experiments.
In 15 to 20 years, pebble bed designs will be a major export for China.
Meantime, China will also build plenty of conventional reactors, based on standard designs.
>>>It's a damn shame more research was not funded in the 1990s for this, the tools, like scanning atomic microscopes, computers, etc, were all available, and there were scientists available from cuts in defense spending worldwide. But no one funded this except the Germans, and I expect they had to stop funding to pay for re-unification.
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I think your coal investments are very safe in the meantime...;-) |
