(In preparation.  Please contact author.)

Initially, there should be a conference of all the world's high temperature, gas-cooled reactor experts followed by a conference of potentially impacted power producers.  Identification of potential project participants.

This plan picks up at the point where the decision has been made to upgrade existing coal burning power plants to Coal Yard Nukes and to build additional power plants using the "Hybrid" idea.

PROJECT SCOPE:

The world's installed generation capacity in 2005 was 3,900 gigaWatts, or 3,900,000 megaWatts.  To replace that much electricity using 1 megaWatt wind turbines and being mindful they only average 1/3 their rated power, we would need 11.7 million wind turbines.  To get the job done in 10 years, we would have to install about 3,200 wind turbines every day of those ten years.  This illustrates the blind alley the wind people are driving us into with their overblown promises.

Turnabout is fair play.  At best, a single PBMR pebble bed can produce 180 megaWatts of electricity.  An astute reader pointed out that it would take 21,700 PBMR reactors to replace that 3,900,000 megaWatts of electricity.  That comes out to 6 reactors a day for 10 years.  That's why it's so important to go after the 5,000 biggest ones first.  Say the 5,000 worst account for 1/3 or 1,300,000 megaWatts, which would consume the output of 7,300 PBMR reactors or a world-wide build of 2 a day for 10 years.  Right now, the Chinese alone are completing one coal plant every week.  And their sky is much the worse for it.

That brings up another issue.  How many power plant generation units has the world built per day since the end of WWII?  It's been 63 years or about 23,000 days since V-J day when WWII ended.  Let's say all power plants were built since then.  A 63 year old plant would be completely worn out.  We know there are 141,000 generating units in operation now.  So, 141,000 units / 23,000 days = 6.2 units / day for 63 years.  Does this give you any clue as to how big the CO2 problem really is? 

Worldwide, electrical generation and distribution systems represent the largest industrial capital investment.  These figures clearly illustrate why the world won't throw away that much money in electricity generation equipment just for clean air.  Not only must we move away from coal as quickly as possible, we must do it as frugally as possible.  Al Gore's dream doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell if he doesn't push real hard for COAL YARD NUKES.

The only POSSIBLE way to end this 11 billion tons a year of power plant CO2 is to repower coal plants with nuclear.  We simply can't build our way out in time.  Again, the Master Key is to repower those 5,000 biggest polluters first.

A possible materials constraint is graphite.  Graphite is used in large quantities in both in the reactor body and in the fuel itself.  Again, fortunately, graphite is a form of carbon and can be readily manufactured from common coal.  Depending upon its trace chemistry, graphite can modify free neutron behavior in a variety of ways.  Graphite is not flammable but materials associated with it, such as binders, may be. 

A PBMR takes about 1,000 tons of both nuclear and non-nuclear graphite to both build and initial fuel.  (A 20 foot O.D. cylinder, 90 feet high, with a wall 3 feet thick of graphite along with about 300 tons of pebbles fuel.)  The world produced 1.1 million tons of natural and 0.16 million tons of synthetic graphite in 2006.  Additional graphite can be made from coal at added cost.  This means the world has sufficient mineral, industrial, and construction resources to make, install, and fuel at least 1,260 PBMR reactors every year if all graphite was devoted to the task and supply remained constant.  That's about 3 PBMR reactors and fuel a day.  I do not know how much graphite could be mined if the graphite market was like the oil market.  Perhaps 3 times as much, with half being synthetic from coal.  Again, this reminds us just how big the job of CO2 fighting is.

CONSTRUCTION PROJECT SCHEDULE: (An Outline Under Construction itself)

Safety trumps everything else.

In times of dire emergency, time is no longer on your side.  You have to "Go with what you got."  We cannot wait another decade while the Generation-IV pebble bed is perfected and tested.  Job 1: Accept the PBMR reactor and PBMR pebble as the only standard high-temperature conversion reactor for the first 1,000 installed units.  Accept that whatever it is, it is "good enough" for emergency CO2 mitigation work.

First Conversions: Under IPCC authority and using South African-built reactors from inventory, build 8 demonstration conversion facilities (on existing old 50 to 100 mWe generating units) in the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, China, Japan, India, Russia and Brazil so local engineers and contractors can see the Coal Yard Nuke power plant modification in the context of their local equipment and construction methods.  This will also give them insight on how they can build additional new very low cost 'Hybrid' nuclear power plants out of locally available equipment using local construction methods.

Concurrent with "First Conversions," Main body of world-wide conversion work:

First 180 Days: Secure 8 different reactor builders in the 8 different countries.  They would have overall responsibility for their products and to subcontract heat exchangers designed to the specific needs of customers using their reactors.  Since several billion pebbles will be needed every year, as many as 20 different countries will need to build pebble manufacturing facilities.

Second 180 Days: Build tooling and production facilities for building reactors, heat exchangers, and pebbles.  Begin engineering on specific conversion projects.

Third 180 Days: Build initial reactors, heat exchangers, and pebbles.  Break ground on at least 16 full-size pilot conversion projects in the 8 different "home" countries.

Fourth 180 Days: Install and test equipment at 16 full-size pilot conversions projects.  Energize.

Fifth 180 Days: tbd

Sixth 180 Days: tbd

Seventh 180 Days: tbd

Eighth 180 Days: tbd

Ninth 180 Days: tbd

Tenth 180 Days: tbd

Project Merlin, Part Three:

Taking advantage of the lessons learned in the computer world.

Standardized devices does not mean identical devices.  Like railroad cars, they only need to be identical where they connect.  Leaving the space in between "malleable" provides space for improvements in safety, cost, performance, capacity, or anything else that may be deemed now or later to be desirable.  Freedom like this always ignites furious competition among us technical geeks.  It always turns out that super-standardization is super-stupid in the long run.

What does this mean for us?  Standardize external dimensions - where things touch and connect to other things.  The external size of pebbles.  Where the pebble bed reactor connects to its steam generator (for a hybrid power plant) or supercritical water heater (for a Coal Yard Nuke).  These are some of the important interfacing points.

The steam generator sizes, temperatures, and turbine steam line connections will have to accommodate whatever temperature, layout, and line sizes the original plant presents.  This would be something like your home getting a new furnace.  Always some "file and fit" work needed here.

Project Merlin, Part Four:

Mass producing pebble bed reactors for the world's power plants.

Any country that can make a superheated steam boiler that will last several years before burning out can make acceptable pebble bed reactors.

Production lines provide substantial quality and cost benefits.  That's good because over 25,000 will be needed.

Conventional nuclear reactors require some of the world's largest castings and forgings.  Only a few countries can make them.  It's questionable if the United States has the industrial might to do this kind of very heavy work anymore.  China, Japan, Korea, Russia, perhaps Holland and Germany come to mind.

 Pebble nuclear could be considered 'light' nuclear.

(Right) Example of a highly government-regulated, physically large, multi-million dollar product being made at the rate of one a day.

Almost as simple as a farm silo and of modular design to facilitate mass production, Pebble bed reactors are 20 feet in diameter tubes, about 90 feet tall, are made of thick, radiation-proof, high temperature sheet metal, capable of running at very high temperatures like a boiler, are installed in hermetically sealed, very heavily steel bar reinforced underground concrete silos.

Some of the wind is at our backs.  Since these reactors are limited-life and built as a stop-gap solution to an emergency, we can sacrifice a lot of thermal efficiency for simplicity and reliability.  A really good precedent for a generic Coal Yard Nuke reactor was the World War II liberty ship.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship   Read the story, it's inspiring and reminds us of a day when the citizens of the United States were not afraid of their own government and the government wasn't afraid of it's citizens.

There is no steam in the reactor to explode so the traditional concrete and steel steam explosion containment vessels needed by conventional reactors are unnecessary, with reinforced concrete silos with bolted tops being used for reactor containment instead, thereby providing a huge saving in both cost and construction time. 

The competition arising from simultaneous mass production of standardized pebble bed reactors in as many as 8 different countries will bring about an amazing drop in both the reactor's fabrication complexity and cost while creating "build quality" competition.  Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India, Brazil, Holland, Russia, South Africa, or China are possible early manufacturers. 

Countries with High Temperature Gas Reactor programs (Doppler Broadening reactors) include China (Pebble Bed), Japan (Prismatic), South Africa (Pebble Bed), Russia (Prismatic), Netherlands (Pebble Bed), Germany (Pebble Bed, inactive), U.S. MIT (Pebble Bed) & General Atomics (Prismatic), Great Britain (Magnox, old), North Korea (Magnox), India (Thorium CHTR).

http://www.indian-nuclear-society.org.in/conf/2005/pdf_3/topic_03/T3_CP3_Dulera_Paper1.pdf  Indian Compact High Temperature Reactor Paper

Project Merlin, Part Five:

Mass producing pebbles and prisms.

TRISO Pebbles are being produced at the present time ONLY at a pilot plant near Pelindaba, South Africa.  At one time it was suggested that four full pebble plants be built in various parts of South Africa to assure the world a steady supply of pebbles.  The pebbles South Africans are currently making were actually developed by the Germans for a reactor they shut down about 20 years ago.  The German pebble is considered the best spherical design.  South Africa, rich in uranium, have licensed the pebble and its manufacturing technology from the Germans.

Also, not to forget the pebble's sibling, the General Atomics prism-shaped Doppler-Broadening fuel element.  General Atomics is partnering with Russians in the manufacture of prisms so that means a second path to self-controlled nuclear fuel exists and we may have technology, quality, and cost choices.  General Atomics and Babcock and Wilcox are U.S. companies with TRISO Pebble manufacturing experience in the distant past.

The United States produced the very first pebbles, and many others are thought to have produced at least small quantities of Doppler Broadening fuel elements for laboratory investigation.  The technology is not extremely high, is largely ceramic, and has been around for a long time.  However, like conventional nuclear fuel rod manufacture, a pebble's radioactivity demands isolation from human operators so automated production with extremely consistent quality is where the high technology aspect will come into play.

To meet the pebble/prism demands of a three-year emergency program for the "Coal Yard Nuking" conversion of all the world's coal-burning power plants, pebble/prism manufacturing plants will have to be set up in many of the 20 uranium or thorium-rich countries currently mining, processing and selling uranium or thorium ore on the world market at the same time as the mass production of the reactor-boiler modules is begun in perhaps 8 different countries.  Eventually, there would be a big enough stockpile of all kinds of spent fuel pebbles to justify adding recycling facilities to the pebble plants.

TRISO Pebbles are a very versatile fuel form and, in addition to the "classic" Uranium, both pebbles and prisms could take advantage of MOX and Thorium blends, along with various long burn breeding blends, some of which would be designed to produce as high as several hundred thousand mega-watt days (mWd) per ton output, as compared with the typical 40 to 80 thousand mWd delivered by our generation II reactors.  There's a great deal of variety out there to fuel a very competitive new energy market.

Since nuclear fuel pebbles/prisms are small, many different uranium and thorium producing countries could be competing fuel vendors because the transportation costs of nuclear fuel, one three-millionth as heavy for the same energy as coal, would be negligible.  One ton of uranium currently provides almost 100 thousand MegaWatt-Days of electricity per 1/15 recycling in a 33% efficient conventional reactor and an average freighter can carry 30 to 40 thousand tons.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_ship

Project Merlin, Part Six:

Mass producing the pebble bed reactor builders and operators.

(Below) The HTR-10 Pebble Bed Building at China's Tsinghua University              

We could have repowered all our coal-burning power plants to pebble beds in the same time as we've been in Iraq.  The war in Iraq has dragged on longer than United States' participation in World War II.  During the time WWII took, the United States alone built 3,200,000 (that's three million, two hundred thousand, folks!) military vehicles - from Jeeps to tanks to 80 aircraft carriers and thousands of support vessels along with training over 5 million fighting men.  That's a hell of a lot of steel and muscle.  Realize also the Russians, Brits, Japanese and Germans combined more than matched us.  Don't ever try to tell anyone who knows a little WWII history that the entire world combined can't build, make pebbles, and train operators, for perhaps 20,000 pebble bed reactors worldwide in the same time period.  Don't forget we did the entire Manhattan Project in less than 5 years.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project

Today, most reactor operators are trained like airplane pilots on reactor-simulating computers that duplicate the actual reactor control room computers.  There are perhaps six things a conventional PWR reactor operator needs to keep in mind when operating a reactor in "cruise" mode.  I haven't the foggiest notion of what, if anything, is needed to "cruise" a pebble bed.  Simulators have proven to be an effective way to train airplane pilots since before WWII.  Almost every country has at least a national airline, so almost every country knows how to make this type of training happen quickly.

For example:  http://www.microsimtech.com/  PC-based Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (and others) Nuclear Power Plant Simulator for Microsoft Windows XP.  You can download a demo from this web site and take a test drive of your favorite type of reactor.  Available: PCTRAN Personal Computer Transient Analyzer - ABWR Advanced Boiling Water Reactor - ARS Advanced Reactor Simulators  - SFP Spent Fuel Pool Accident Simulator - AP1000 Westinghouse AP1000 PWR (Pressurized Water Reactor) - Areva EPR Generation III-Plus PWR EPR - TRIGA Experimental Pool Reactor Simulator

Also:

http://www.ae4rv.com/store/nuke_pc.htm  Nuclear Power Plant Simulator for Windows PCs - Vista compatible, Pocket PC version available.  $9.95, Download Free Demo.

Project Merlin, Part Seven:

"E" Bonds to Pay For Coal Yard Nukes?

To pay for the power plant conversions, we could be urged again to buy "E" Bonds - this time the "E" would stand for Environment.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_bond

Project Merlin, Part Eight:

Three other ways we can eliminate substantial amounts of CO2

Our buildings: Half the energy used by the average building is for heating or cooling.  Where fossil fuels are now being used, convert residential, commercial, and industrial heating to electrical heating to further reduce CO2 emissions from (typically high-sulfur) heating oil, gas and coal.  Residential gas or oil furnaces would need to have their burner module replaced with an inexpensive electrical module, much like we did when we converted from residential coal to gas or oil right after WWII.   Residential electric heat, heat pumps, and air conditioning are electrical already so no change would be needed there.

Our vehicles: Using only nuclear heat, produce only synthetic CO2-neutral gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel made by using the "Air + Water + Energy = Oil" technology.  Our 3-way catalytic converter equipped cars are good to go as they are by just using the new gasoline*.

Our ships: The world's 30,000 large ocean-going ships burn about 5 million barrels of oil every day - 1/4 of U.S. daily consumption.  An ocean-going ship has about a 30-year life.  We would burn only synthetic CO2-neutral diesel in existing ships and equip all new ships with only nuclear engines. http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,2025725,00.html  CO2 output from shipping is twice as much as airlines · Maritime emissions not covered by Kyoto accord · Studies suggest 75% rise in 15 years as trade grows
 

* All countries would have to build their automobiles to California's current "Partial-Zero Emission" standards to take full advantage of CO2-neutral gasoline.  Partial-Zero Emission cars are already available.  Most U.S. and foreign manufacturers have several models of this automobile type in their product line already for selling in California.  I drove a "Partial-Zero Emission" Camry in California's coastal mountains for a week - ran great, very good mileage.

It's possible.   France closed its last coal mine in April, 2004.

Project Merlin, Part Nine:

Financial and Business Aspects of Coal Yard Nukes.

Without having to build and pay for new power plants and their supporting grid transmission lines, substations, cooling water systems, roads, and railroads.  Power plants are the world's biggest, easiest, cheapest, sitting duck CO2 targets.  World wide, at 50 cents per watt, repowering all 143,000 power plants in the world could cost about 1.4 trillion dollars or 233 dollars for every person on earth and take a minimum of 5 years.  For the U.S., it would take about 500 million dollars.

Natural gas is used to generate wind turbine back-up electricity, peak demand electricity, and for heating.  Nuclear electricity can largely replace natural gas.  Most furnaces can be economically converted from gas or oil to electricity using same electrical heating elements found in southern residential heat pumps.  'Hybrid' nuclear power plants using Mininuke reactors could be quickly built alongside existing coal burning power plants for little more cost than today's coal burning power plants.  This would take advantage of the already existing electrical infrastructure.  For the U.S., as many as 200 one billion dollar 500-megawatt new Hybrid nuclear power plants would be needed.

Using nuclear heat to produce both the needed hydrogen and to drive the hydrogenation reaction, the cost for carbon-neutral hydrogenated oil made from algae/biomass feedstock could fall in the 80 dollars a barrel range and take about 10 years to reach a 50% production level.  For the U.S., about 3 million tons of algae per day (17,000 railroad car loads of algae and 400 processing plants) would be needed to replace all our CO2-dirty fossil pumped crude oil needs with CO2-clean carbon-neutral manufactured crude oil.  The sheer size of the oil manufacturing industry would at least double the number of people currently employed in the petroleum industry.  This would make it the greatest source of high-paying "green" jobs.  (U.S. only)

Crude Costs Based Upon Crude Numbers

Reactor Cost:

Putting it into perspective by first thinking about airplanes: We're talking about a nuclear reactor that will be built in the thousands, like an airplane.  The latest and greatest American passenger jet is the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.  With almost 200 orders at over $150 million each pending, it hasn't even flown and already it is a 30 billion dollar financial success.  Check it out:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787 

Upgrading to nuclear to avoid the CO2 (carbon) tax: TECO is the Tampa Electric Company.  Their 'Big Bend' facility is a large coal-fired power plant with three 445 mWe boilers and one 486 mWe boiler for a total of 1,821 megaWatts of power.  A carbon tax of $40 per ton of CO2 produced, intended to reduce CO2 emissions into the atmosphere and thus reduce Global Warming, is being talked about in Washington these days.  Coal makes a lot of CO2.  If TECO continues to burn a lot of coal and make a lot of CO2, TECO is going to have to pay a lot of carbon taxes and then pass that cost on to its less than delighted electric customers.  Also, producing electricity without making CO2, like 'renewables' do, attracts government subsidies like a magnet.  Carbon Tax:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax   EcoTax:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecotax   Carbon Tax vs. Cap-and-Trade:  http://www.carbontax.org/issues/carbon-taxes-vs-cap-and-trade/ 

Finding Big Bend's annual CO2 output by the 'CO2 per kilo-Watt-hour' method;  Big Bend's maximum generation capacity is 1,821 megaWatts, or 1.821*10⁹ W, times 24 hours/day = 44*10⁹ W hours / day,  * 365 days / year = 16*10¹² W hours / yr,  or, converting to kiloWatts, 16*10⁹  kiloWatt hours / yr.

Calculating the CO2:  16*10⁹  kWh / yr * 2.0 lbs of CO2 / kWh = 32*10⁹ lbs or 16*10⁶ tons CO2 / yr.  That's 16 MILLION tons of CO2 a year, or 44,000 tons of 'Greenhouse Gas' CO2 a day, folks.  (coal's CO2,  http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/FTPROOT/environment/co2emiss00.pdf  table 4 )

Carbon Tax at $40 per ton of CO2, Big Bend's annual CO2 tax: 16 million tons of CO2 / year * $40 per ton CO2 tax  =  $640 million per year CO2 tax.

Incidentally, according to my TECO bill, Big Bend's electricity retails at about $0.10 per kWh.  So, 16*10⁹  kWh / yr * $0.10 / kWh = $1.6*10⁹ or 1.6 billion dollars per year from Big Bend.  That $40-a-ton carbon tax is going to boost your TECO bill by about 30% if they don't upgrade to nuclear.

A single facility containing four 500 mWe size reactor-boilers patterned after the THTR-500 might be built for $800 million.  The reactors would be about 15 feet in diameter by 25 feet high sheet metal silos in a 50 feet in diameter by 40 foot deep underground concrete silo.  The boilers, with a house-size footprint, would be above ground, extending about 50 feet above grade.  How much would a mass-produced 500 mWe reactor-boiler unit cost these days?  How much to build the facility, install the reactor-boiler units, and then connect to the adjacent fossil fuel power plant?  How about its pebble handling machine?

Thinking of pebbles as if they were only charcoal briquettes, and ignoring their nuclear aspects, and considering that the burner-boiler part of a 500 mWe fossil fuel power plant generating unit has a direct field (installed) cost of about $200 per kW these days (out of the $1,000 per kW total installed cost of a fossil fuel power plant - Black and Veatch), we get a rough cost of about 100 million dollars for a basic pebble reactor-boiler module.  Typical fossil fuel power plant items covered in that $200 per kW fossil fuel plant cost are everything necessary to deliver steam to the generator turbine: the boiler, coal handling equipment, coal pulverizer, both forced and induced draft fans, fly ash precipitators, water treatment, condenser, heat recuperator, and one-half the cost of the stack. 

Doubling that 100 million to cover everything else besides the reactor-boiler unit would give us a rough cost of around 200 million dollars per 500 mWe reactor-boiler unit figure.  Big Bend needs four such units, so that would run the price tag to 800 million dollars.  Not having to pick up the tab for TECO's carbon tax is a good deal for TECO's customers, TECO is sure to make money on the deal somehow with that much money flowing through their hands, and a fossil fuel plant repowered to a full-power, zero-emissions power plant would be a wonderful environmental gift not just to Florida, but to the entire world.

A second opinion, using 3 smaller reactors per 500 mWe generator turbine: Using MIT's complete pebble bed power plant analysis as a template, and removing all non-boiler items since we are upgrading an existing, running power plant, my order-of-magnitude guess for Big Bend's upgrading project would be about $40 million per pebble bed reactor, or, about a half-billion dollars for the entire conversion project.  Since this is the first project, we're talking hand-made, not mass-produced reactors.  PBMR's 20 feet in diameter, 88 feet long reactors have been designed from the start to be mass-produced in substantial quantities like airplanes and to be sold at low per-unit cost.  PBMR's company name stands for: Pebble Bed MODULAR REACTORS - a large, but readily shippable load for both ships and sea-going barges along with many river barges.  A pebble bed reactor would occupy a 24 x 90 foot double-long, triple wide "High-Cube" shipping container dimension on container ships and over land would be limited to select route trains and trucks.

Made of heavy, high-temperature sheet metal like a boiler, a pebble bed reactor silo is simple when compared with a typical conventional nuclear reactor.  No huge castings or forgings.  It does have a one meter thick graphite cylinder around it's 20 foot outer circumference.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_graphite  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite   

Since there is nothing under pressure in the radioactive portion of the reactor, it is incapable of exploding so doesn't need to be very strong.  As seen in the drawing #8, above, the reactor silo is installed in a thick underground silo designed to transfer "Doppler Broadening hot idle" heat to the surrounding ground while also insuring that no radioactive material can escape.  Pneumatic tubes are used to carry pebbles, inert dilution spheres, and moderator spheres to and from the silo to monitor the state of the pebbles.  It is estimated a pebble will make 10 to15 trips through the reactor over a three year period of time before being removed from use.

Fuel Cost:

Here are some numbers for thought - according to figures published by the Nuclear Energy Institute the average cost of generation (in US dollar cents per kilowatt-hour) from various sources in 2006 was as follows: Petroleum - 9.63, Gas - 6.75, Coal - 2.37, Nuclear - 1.72.

Conventional fuel rod nuclear electricity costs about $16 per MegaWatt-hour to make (Rod Adams, Atomic Show # 53, citing industry figures) and electricity generally sells for about $100 per MegaWatt-hour.  Big Bend is a 1,800 Mega-Watt Electrical plant and there are 8,760 hours in a year, so we're talking about 1.6 billion dollars a year gross income here.  One pebble makes 0.33 kilowatts of electricity per year and costs $10 (Kemm).  So, [1,800,000 kWe/yr / 0.33 kWe/yr per pebble = 5,450,000 pebbles * $10 per pebble = $54.5 million annual pebble bill]  1.6 billion dollars income from perhaps 55 million dollars worth of pebble heat a year isn't bad.  A person should be able to make a decent living doing pebble-power on an old, amortized power plant even after making the mortgage payments on their new Coal Yard Nukes..

PEBBLES:

Comparing pebbles and coal.  The reactor, rated at 165 mWe, divided by 0.4 thermal-to-electrical efficiency comes to 412 megaWatts thermal input.  For 3 years worth of hours = 412x10⁶ W t x (24h x 365d x 3y) hours = 10,800x10⁹ Wh thermal.  10.8x10¹² Wht x 3.41 BTU per Watt-hour is 36.8x10¹² BTU.  According to the EIA, (Oct 2007) delivered coal was $1.52 per million BTU in the U.S.A.  $1.52 per 10⁶ BTU x 36.8x10¹² BTU = $56 million for the equivalent BTU heat in U.S. coal.  That means that $56x10⁶ divided by 0.452x10⁶ pebbles = $124 per pebble.

Or, a single pebble might be worth $124 of coal.  At the present time, PBMR's pilot pebble plant is supposed to make 270,000 pebbles per year, or a little more than enough to keep one PBMR reactor well-fed.  A PBMR reactor takes about 450,000 pebbles.  Thought you'd like to know the whole story.

(Einstein's first wife always checked his arithmetic.  I sure ain't no Einstein.  You better check both my thinking and my arithmetic.)

At 80,000 MegaWattE-days per ton of uranium, Big Bend should go through about 8 tons of uranium a year.  (Your car weighs about 2 tons).  8 tons * 2,000 pounds per ton = 16,000 pounds * $100 per pound of uranium yellowcake (today's street price) = $1.6 million for the basic uranium ore. The other $52.9 million in pebble cost goes to the pebble people for enriching the 0.7% radioactive U-235 Uranium ore to about 8% Uranium-235 and making it into pebbles.  In real life, enrichment will cause them to go through maybe $20 million worth of ore with the depleted, non-radioactive U-238 being stockpiled for sale later when we get a fleet of breeder reactors so we can make the non-radioactive U-238 into radioactive Plutonium-239 and then burn that up as "Energy Metal".   Pebble production is a process not unlike a gosh-awful high-tech brick factory.  Now you understand why PBMR is building a pilot pebble plant.

Non-radioactive Thorium-232 can also be bred into radioactive Uranium-233.  Since, with breeding, there is more Uranium-238 available than mankind will ever conceivably use, and there is three times as much Thorium-232 as Uranium-238, I don't understand critics of nuclear electricity saying that we will run out of Uranium in a couple hundred years.  Just remember:  Radioactive Uranium-235 is like matches and non-radioactive, but breedable, Uranium-238 and Thorium-232 are like firewood.  Don't let them trick us by talking us into burning up all our matches by forbidding breeder reactors.

CONVENTIONAL POWER PLANT COAL COST: Compare that with the 6,400,000 tons of coal Big Bend is burning up every year (from "Big Bend" section, above).  At today's street price of about $35 per ton, that comes to $224 million for coal.  (I'll bet that's why TECO bought their own coal mine).  Using pebble beds to supply the refinery processing heat for those 25 synthetic gasoline-from-coal refineries we don't ever seem to be getting around to build, that much coal might make over 40 million barrels of Fischer - Tropsch synthetic crude oil ($2.6 BILLION at $65 per barrel - go figure why the coal companies are selling so cheap) or about 2 days supply for the entire United States!   Climate Change is crazy costly in every way!

"CLEAN COAL" COMPARISON: For a "Clean Coal" CO2 cost comparison, here's an announcement of a real-life Carbon-Capture and Sequestration Project:  "Powerfuel (UK) Signs License with Shell for 900 MW Power Plant - U.K.-based coal producer and power generator Powerfuel PLC, which is 30% owned by Russian coal miner Kuzbassrazrezugol, has signed an agreement with Royal Dutch Shell PLC to use Shell's patented technology to build a near-zero carbon emissions coal-fired power station. The project is expected to cost about GBP1.1 billion to GBP1.2 billion (US$2.2 to US$2.4 billion) to build. Construction will take three to four years and may involve building a pipeline (not budgeted) to transport carbon dioxide to storage sites in the North Sea."  (Much more costly, but this does get you a complete brand new power plant that's going to burn coal inefficiently for at least the next 50 years).

From the Shell press release:  "The UK unit of oil giant Shell has signed a license agreement with Powerfuel that entitles the company to use Shell’s proprietary gasification technology in its proposed 900MW integrated gasification combined cycle coal-fired power station in Hatfield, South Yorkshire. April 21, 2007" - And this plant is only about 1/2 as powerful in MegaWatts as Big Bend.

The big upside of using nuclear heat wherever possible in huge industrial plants like Big Bend is that our children and grandchildren won't have to starve and freeze in the dark forever just to keep Global Warming at bay.  They can continue to make vehicle fuels, traffic jams, plastics, fertilizers, etc., for longer than 600 more years out of the coal and other fossil fuels we don't have to burn just to make electricity and air pollution.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/sym/1999/kemm.htm  Kelvin Kemm's comprehensive 1999 description of the details and costs of the South African Pebble Bed.

http://web.mit.edu/pebble-bed/Economics.pdf  1998 MIT (Andrew Kadak) economic analysis of pebble bed reactor construction costs.  (ESKOM had a lower estimate for their Koeberg pebble bed powered power plant in South Africa).

http://nuclear.inl.gov/deliverables/docs/ngnp-methods-dev-programc-04-02293.pdf  2004 U.S. in-depth summary of all known Doppler-Broadening reactors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants