hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4628.txt

Episode: 4628
Title: Nuclear Power Technology Follow Up
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4628/hpr4628.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:15:26 (official HPR transcript)

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4628, for 2026-04-29
Today's show is entitled, "Nuclear Power Technology Follow Up"
The host is Whiskeyjack and the duration is 00:40:00
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Answers to questions posed by listeners in the comments to the series on nuclear power technology"
This is a follow-up to my eight-part series on nuclear power.
In this episode, I will answer questions posed by listeners in the comments to the series.
I would like to start by thanking these people for taking the time to submit interesting
questions.
Brian and Ohio asked two questions.
The first was for a cost comparison between large and small reactors.
The second was for nuclear plant safety compared to conventional power plants.
I think that any answer to the second question is going to be perceived by some people
as politically controversial, so it's probably not a good topic for each PR to address.
The first question, though, about cost of small versus large reactors is an interesting
one, although not one that is easy to give an answer to.
I will restrict the answer to just grid-scale electric power production at ignore and use
cases such as industrial process heat or power for remote mines and communities.
This question comes down to economies of scale versus economies of replication.
Economies of scale center around increased efficiencies of use of materials in labor when
making something bigger.
For example, the amount of steel used by pipe increases linearly with its diameter, but
the amount of fluid that it transport increases with the square.
Economies of replication come from increasing efficiencies which result from serial production.
As you repeat the same design over and over again, you learn how to do things better and
make fewer mistakes.
The exact same principles apply to shipbuilding.
Indeed, a lot of the inspiration for small modular reactors comes from the shipbuilding
industry.
If you build a series of identical ships, then each subsequent ship will cost less and be built
faster.
There are, of course, diminishing returns to this process, so the improvements are less
with each additional unit, and after a sufficient number of units, the cost and time reductions
level off.
However, this doesn't discount the benefits of economies of scale.
What it does mean is that there are two ways of approaching the problem and which way works
in any given scenario depends on such conditions as how big the local electricity market
is, how fast the demand for electricity is growing, the ownership and financing structure
of the electricity market, and the geography of the area which may pose limits on the number
of sites.
According to the finance people who have crunched the numbers, there are two sizes of
a reactor which make the most sense in the above context.
These are 300 megawatts and 1,000 megawatts.
However, take these as very rough numbers rather than immutable laws in nature and other
sizes may work as well.
The key point is that there are the cases to be made for both small and large reactors,
with the large reactor being several times the size of the small one.
On additional factor, it's a building only one reactor does not reap the benefits of
efficiency of our application.
You need to build a series of them on the same site.
So if you're building a power plant, you don't build a power plant that has just one reactor
unless you're right a small market which can only use that much power.
Instead, you should build between 4 and 6 reactors in sequence next to one another.
If you are supplying a large population with a growing demand for electricity, then 4 or 6
large 1,000 megawatt reactors gains both economies of scale and economies of replication.
If you're supplying a smaller population with slow growth in demand for electricity, then
4 or 6 300 megawatt reactors, at least gets you economies of replication.
There is what could be viewed as an interesting example in terms of the above, taking place
just east of Toronto.
There they're building 4 300 megawatt SMRs on a site next to an existing nuclear power plant.
Here are the cost estimates from the government of Ontario.
All costs are in Canadian dollars.
Unit 1 is 6.1 billion dollars, plus 1.6 billion dollars in cost which are shared by all
4 units.
Unit 2 is 4.9 billion dollars.
Unit 3 is 4.2 billion dollars.
Unit 4 is 4.1 billion dollars.
As you can see, building a series of reactors sequentially on the same site results in declining
overall costs.
There are very confident in these costs as a use data from a series of major nuclear power
plant refurbishment projects in Ontario which have been coming in on time and on budget.
Construction began last year and the plant is expected to have a 65 year operating life.
However, the province of Ontario also has plans for expansion of electrical generation
by about 15,000 megawatts by 2050 in order to meet net zero targets.
Given the heavy concentration of population in the Toronto region and the
very high cost and difficulty of building long distance transmission lines and the limited
number of sites which could host new power generation facilities of any sort, I suspect
it is quite likely that subsequent reactors will be large 1,000 megawatt ones rather than
SMRs.
The Wesleyville site, which is further east of Toronto, is tentatively scheduled for
a 10,000 megawatt nuclear power plant.
I would seem to make 10,000 megawatt reactors more likely than 34,300 megawatt reactors.
I don't have a comparable set of numbers for building large reactors to give an exact
apples to apples comparison of costs.
Different countries use different accounting and financing systems and finance makes a huge
difference to overall costs for a nuclear power plant as operating costs are a relatively
small share of the total.
Now to look at another site of this equation, the provinces of Saskatchewan and New
Brunswick which should replace their coal-fired power plants with nuclear power plants.
The populations of these provinces are too small to absorb a large do-of-power plant
into their grids and studies assuming large reactors have foundered on this issue.
New Brunswick already have a nuclear power plant but it was built in the days when reactors
are much smaller.
Both provinces, however, are very interested in small reactors even individual ones in order
to replace the coal-fired power plants that are of similar size.
I think this covers the cost versus size issue.
The more I look into it, the more it becomes apparent that there is no simple one size
fits all answer, but rather there are a series of trade-offs which must be taken in
light of local circumstances.
The next question comes from MNW who asked about the use of Mox fuel in the USA.
MNW asked, I am enjoying and look forward to the rest of this series.
Do you think the US will ever wake up and start recycling its spent fuel?
It seems like such a huge waste just to try to keep a small amount of fuel away from
the bad guys or whatever they are imagining.
My answer to this is as follows.
I think I've addressed this in the original series although not directly with respect to the US.
So I think I can provide some more detail on that aspect of it.
First though, I will review what plutonium uranium mixed oxide fuel is.
As mentioned in previous episodes, military-grade plutonium is not the same as a plutonium
which comes out of commercial power reactors.
This as military-grade uranium requires nearly pure U235 isotope.
Military-grade plutonium requires nearly pure plutonium 239 isotope.
What comes out of a commercial power reactor is spent fuel is not usable for weapons
purposes as the proportion of plutonium 239 is much too low.
However, plutonium recovered from spent fuel can be used as fuel for nuclear reactors in
the same place of uranium 235 when mixed with uranium 238 either left over from enrichment
or extracted from spent fuel.
This is what is known as Mox fuel.
To look at the US history of this however, here's a sequence of events.
The US banned fuel reprocessing in 1976.
However, this ban was repealed in 1981.
In 2005, the US began building a mixed oxide fuel plant at Savannah River in the state of
South Carolina.
However, this plant was not intended as a normal commercial operation and it was not intended
to recycle commercial nuclear power plant fuel.
It was instead intended to convert surplus military-grade plutonium into commercial fuel in
order to get rid of it as part of a armed control program.
The program was suspended in 2018.
There were apparently many complex political issues involved in these on-again off-again
decisions and I won't pretend to have the time or the interest to explore all the details.
Nor do I think most listeners would be interested in hearing about them.
As of March 2026, the US are looking at reviving part of the Savannah River plant to produce
limited amount of fuel for testing of advanced reactors.
The issue driving this is a shortage of uranium and rich to just below 20%.
This fuel is used in certain types of small SMR.
The main commercial supplier of this material was a planted Russia, but certain events in
Europe in recent years shall we say have resulted in that supply no longer being available
to commercial operations in the US.
Fox fuel based on surplus weapons-grade plutonium is intended as a short term quick fix
for that problem.
Another driving force is legal requirements following from domestic commitments for the
US government to dispose of certain stockpiles of weapons-grade plutonium from certain
sites in the US where it is temporarily stored and the solution to that is seen as burning
it up in power reactors.
So the short history is the US banned fuel reprocessing.
Then a few years later they unbanned it.
Then the US government started building a mox plant which was intended to get rid of surplus
weapons-grade material by burning it up in power reactors.
Then they decided they didn't want to do that.
Then they decided they wanted to make mox fuel after all to replace supplies of special
grades of fuel for experimental or prototype reactors.
What is missing from the above history is any actual interest from the US commercial nuclear
industry in mox fuel.
The reason for this is as mentioned in the previous episode, Uranium is so cheap and abundant
that fuel made from pressure-gradium is cheaper than mox fuel.
Some countries such as France wish to recycle spent fuel to reduce their dependence upon
imports.
We call that France's drive to build nuclear power plants was in response to the 1970s era
energy crisis when oil imports from the Middle East were suddenly cut off.
However, the US are not concerned about this issue and should not make it a national security
policy as France did.
As a result, US commercial demand is for cheaper fuel made from fresh uranium rather than
for mox fuel.
Until such time as fresh uranium greatly increases in price, there is little economic
incentive for the use of mox fuel in the US.
However, there is another aspect to this.
If you recall in previous episode, I described a molten salt reactors which used dissolved
uranium fuel.
These reactors inherently reprocess fuel as part of their normal operation.
They just do it as part of maintaining the molten salt chemistry at the correct values,
rather than doing it as a separate process.
If these types of reactors become widely used, then it would be achieving the same thing
as creating mox fuel, but without an explicit separate step.
As a final footnote to the above, the US has almost exclusively used in your exterior
and light water reactors.
As mentioned in previous episodes, there are ways of recycling spent fuel from light
water reactors which do not involve chemically reprocessing it to make mox fuel.
Experiments have been done involving South Korea, China and Canada which take spent fuel from
light water reactors and repackage it to fit into natural uranium heavy water reactors.
What is used up or spent fuel for a light water reactor is high-grade fuel for a natural
uranium reactor.
However, the US has for whatever reason, never built commercial natural uranium reactors such
as our youth and a number of other countries around the world.
If they were to do so, then nuclear fuel could be used twice, once in a light water reactor,
and again in a natural uranium reactor, all without having to turn it into mox fuel in
a separate reprocessing step.
However, this particular alternative would likely face the same issue and the sense that
fresh fuel would still be cheaper than reusing spent fuel.
Next, we have a variety of questions from Clinton.
Clinton asked, I would like some commentary in the current situation.
Why has Henkly gone off the rails? The new American approach? The odd things done after Fukushima?
The new radiation rules in the states.
Question 1. Why has Henkly gone off the rails? Answer.
The question refers to cost overruns at the Henkly point nuclear power project in the UK.
The UK government looked into this issue in a more general sense in 2025.
They published a report on it titled, Nuclear Regulatory Review 2025,
enabling nuclear delivery through regulatory reform by John Fingleton.
There is a link to the report in the show notes. As the report is 162 pages long,
I won't try to cover it all in this answer. I will however give a few simple examples.
The report focuses on civilian nuclear power and the defense nuclear industry as well.
However, it also draws examples from outside the nuclear industry to show that the
problem is not limited to nuclear. It shows that the same problem exists in the offshore wind industry
and in the HS2 high-speed rail project. In the view of the authors of the report,
the essence of the problem seems to be a lack of any degree of proportionality
in terms of mitigating negative effects from any project.
Big nuclear projects make the headlines because they are inherently big projects,
but as I have just mentioned, the effect things like wind power development and rail transport as
well. I will pick one example from Henkley Point specifically. This is K-Study Hinkley Point
Sea Fish Protection. A summary of this is that they spent £700 million of additional money
on the cooling water intakes to protect and estimate at 0.083 salmon per year,
along with 0.028C trout, 6 River Lampray, 18 Alice Shad, and suburb between 100 and 528
Tweight Shad. The report points out that there are ways to protect far more fish
for far less money by spending it in other areas and give some examples.
Again, this problem is not limited to nuclear power and they give similar examples connected with
offshore wind development and HS2 high-speed rail. I would like to emphasize that I am not
expressing an opinion on whether or not any of these decisions were good or bad ones,
or whether the money was well spent. I am just summarizing the report's explanation
of why large projects of all sorts initiated and approved by the UK Parliament
were not turning out as initially expected. I will leave it up to people in the UK
to decide whether or not they are satisfied with the current situation.
Question 2. The New American Approach. Answer. The US have apparently announced changes to the
regulatory system. I don't know enough about the subject to really judge the practical effects
of regulation within the US. However, I have read and listened to many interviews of people
from both the industry and regulatory side of things who are from outside the US,
but who are familiar with it. They generally contrast two different approaches to regulation.
On the one hand, there is the US approach which they see as being more of a box-ticking exercise
than an in-depth safety review. This makes it very hard to get a design other than a traditional
PWR or BWR approved in the US. It has the advantage from the regulator side of things so
that it reduces the amount of work required as primarily requires just following a set of defined
procedures. These people then contrast that approach with the one used in the UK and in Canada,
both of which they see is being very similar to one another. In those two countries,
regulators work with industry to review design from basic principles rather than just seeing if
it meets a predefined list of criteria. This is a results-oriented system rather than a process-oriented
system as used in the US. As a result of this, designers of do-nuclear reactors are going to the UK
and Canada first to go through preliminary review there and only going to the US later.
What designers are looking for is feedback on their design as they go along in order to align the
design with what safety regulators see is being required from their standpoint. They want to go into
review process before the design is finalized so they can get guidance on how they should approach
things rather than trying to add safety as additional features on top of a finished design.
It would take someone with deep familiarity with the nuclear regulation systems to understand
the practical effects of recent changes in US regulatory systems. But it is quite possible that the
people within the regulatory structure in the US have been taking the above on board and trying
to adapt to current circumstances. However, I can only speculate on that. This is about the best
answer that I can give. Question 3. The odd thing's done after Fukushima. Answer.
This covers a lot of topics, some of which are probably political and so are not suited to HPR.
I will try to list a few events however. As a brief summary of the Fukushima events go
however, a historic scale earthquake in tsunami in Japan in 2011 caused huge loss of life
and widespread damage. About 20,000 people were killed by the earthquake in tsunami.
Three nuclear reactors based on 1960s era GEBWR designs were seriously damaged by hydrogen
explosions caused by a loss of power to backup generators when they were flooded by the tsunami.
However, there were no radiation-related deaths or cases of radiation sickness.
Following events in Japan was a general review of designs around the world with various improvements
made in some areas, particularly backup generators and hydrogen management.
It seemed to be conventional wisdom that the Fukushima event caused a number of countries
to decide to phase out nuclear power. However, when I tried to make a list of such
countries for this episode, I found things were not as as often heard.
The countries which decided to get rid of nuclear power had largely started down that road
at least a decade before then and generally for reasons unrelated to any specific events
outside of their own country. In other cases, they reverse that decision or are in the process
of doing so. Japan itself has restarted many of their nuclear power plants and planned to replace
decommissioned nuclear power plants with new ones, although many of the older and smaller ones
were considered not economically worth upgrading at this point in their life to restart them.
The one possible exception to this may be Taiwan, which decided to phase out nuclear power in 2016.
However, I don't know enough about Taiwanese politics to stay with any confidence
that their decision in 2016 was based on anything related to events in Japan.
Or whether in fact they were a byproduct of other political changes within Taiwan
and the shutdown in nuclear power plants happened to be carried along with those.
Currently, Taiwan get most of their electricity from natural gas and coal. Meanwhile,
across mainland Asia, from Turkey to China, large numbers of nuclear power plants were built
or under construction. Taken together on a global scale did anything really change after Fukushima,
or did the countries which had already decided to close down their nuclear power plants
could simply continue to do so, and those countries who decided they wanted more of them
continue to build them. That's a good question for which I don't think anyone has a perspective
to answer at this point. Another side of this, which is hard to just an entangle from it, though,
is the increased use of natural gas for electric power generation, which was happening
at around the same time. Increased use of fracking in a number of countries,
plus increase supplies from Russia and LNG from the Middle East and other places resulted
in falls in natural gas prices in many places. Since combined cycle natural gas turbines
foreign the main competitor to nuclear power, anything which improves the economics of
natural gas will act to reduce demand for nuclear power. This makes it hard to decide to
what degrees the reduction in a number of reactors being built was due to the politically
effects of the earthquake in Sadami, and to what degree it was due to cheaper natural gas
through the fracking and other means. I'll leave that question at that.
Question 4. The new radiation rules in the states. Answer. I'm not deeply familiar with
US radiation rules, but I will attempt to answer the question. Apparently there are a wide variety
of different things being addressed, only some of which have any relevance to the nuclear power
industry. One of these is an epidemiological study on the current exposure limits for workers
in the nuclear industry. This study will take place over about five years. In the end, it may
not result at any changes. This is for a number of reasons. One is that US exposure thresholds for
workers are currently aligned with international standards. It will be difficult for the US
industry to operate on a different basis than the rest of the world when supply chains are global
and kit is designed to be currently rocking nice standards. Another is that apparently the nuclear
industry are not, so far as I can discern, asking for 80 changes to limits. They instead are
looking for changes to how some of the details are being applied, such as for example the criteria
for deciding when respirators are required in low risk environments. Some point to recent changes
in UK regulations as an example of what they're looking for. I will post a link to the new that
is November of 2025 UK regulations and the show notes. This is about as much detail as I think I
can comment on when it comes to this question, as I think it is a subject that requires a
fair bit more practical knowledge of than I have in order to give a thorough and balanced answer.
Question from Antoine. Where or are the designs patented? Hi whiskey jack. Nice episode.
You said AGR based on magnox was a nuclear reactor type that did not sell well outside of the UK.
I then started thinking if it were possible for another country to develop by themselves based on
that project or if it had a commercial restriction for exploration of the technology.
I have yet to listen to the following episodes doing little by little and may learn better on the
choices but I felt free to present to question by now. Thanks. Answer. This is a very good question
because it offers the opportunity to talk about a number of interesting things that have been
touched on yet. Let's cover a bit of the background first. A patent is a time limited right
to exploit a defined bit of valuable technical knowledge. Patents were involved from the very
earliest days of commercial nuclear power and I will give an example of this later. A key point
to keep in mind though is that the nuclear power field moves very slowly and it takes a long time
for new knowledge to make it from the lab to commercial application. Patents will often expire
before they reach the point where they can be used. Contracts on the other hand are legally
enforceable agreements between two parties. A contract may have a time limited life but that is an
arrangement between the parties. A commercial nuclear power plant is a very large and complex
bit of kit and not easily copied in detail. It can be far more effective to cover design
under contracts and licenses than to rely on patents. If a country wish to build their own nuclear
power plants rather than buying them from someone else, there are a large number of companies who
have commercial designs that are willing to license to third parties for them to build themselves.
Indeed, a number of these companies base their business around licensing of designs
or have other reasons for wishing to do so. From a licensing perspective, they could take
decades of work in hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars to take a design from first
principles to the ready to build state, whereas licensing a design can give you a proven design right away.
As mentioned in previous episodes, there are many types of reactor in the world.
The selection of what sort of reactor a country decides to buy often depends
boron commercial considerations revolving around licensing terms and conditions
than it does with respect to any technical considerations. Here's an example which shows how
South Korea decided to license a design, build it for themselves, and then export it to other countries.
Kunmo Chung, professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science at Technology, stated in
interview in 2019 that South Korea wanted to standardize on a single reactor technology in the early
1980s. They had reactors from multiple different vendors, but wanted to license and existing
successful design to produce for themselves and for the export market.
One of the major factors in designing to standardize was to allow them to improve operator training
by focusing on one design. Professor Chung stated that one of the key factors in selecting
a design from ABB combustion engineering was that he personally knew and had a good relationship with
the chief technical officer of ABB combustion engineering going back to a time when Professor
Chung had been studying and working in the USA. On their side, ABB combustion engineering
were having financial problems, and they needed a partner to help further develop their new
PWR design. Also, these stood to gain revenue from this partnership as well.
Based on this relationship, the two sides came to a business agreement, and South Korea
began producing reactors based on this design, while also continuing to develop an
improvement further. Here's an example of a case where the developers of a promising
technology decided that they had more to gain by not patenting their technology.
Instead, they decided to freely share their information in order to get other researchers
elsewhere to help advance the technology so that all could benefit from it. In an interview,
Wacclav Gadowski, Professor Emeritus at the Royal Institute of Technology KTH Stockholm
stated that the Soviets and later the Russians were the leaders in lead-bismath-cooled reactors.
These reactors used lead-bismath-liquid metal alloy as a coolant. In the 1990s,
the Russian Institute working on commercializing test technology were working with Western
partners on nuclear technology in general. They considered patenting their technology,
but at the end decided to simply publish it openly. Professor Gadowski had even smuggled
$60,000 in cash into Russia to finance the patent application in order to get the Russian
Institute to publish their technology, but the money was not needed. They based this decision on the
judgment that it would take 20 years of R&D before the technology was ready for the
commercial market, so they wouldn't see a penny on any patent anyway. They were right on this,
as when it was another 20 years of R&D in Europe, Russia, China, and Korea before lead-bismath
technology was ready for commercial use. It had already seen use in submarine reactors,
but the commercial market demanded a more thoroughly developed technology to satisfy
commercial needs. By deciding to not patent the technology, the original developers gained from
shared R&D rather than chasing the illusory gains from patent licenses on technology
that was not ready for the commercial market anyway. I said that patents were involved in nuclear
technology from the very earliest days, and I will now turn to that story. When I say the earliest
days, I mean probably earlier than you are imagining. I'm talking about before World War II.
First though, I need to give some background information. France and Britain were working on
nuclear weapons from the very earliest days of World War II. In Britain's case, this was called
two BALOIS. Canada also was conducting nuclear experiments, including building an atomic pile,
but it's not clear if this had any clearer practical goals or was done to understand the physics
better. If you read the Wikipedia version of history, it states that two BALOIS was merged into
the Manhattan Project. However, participants have stated in interviews that this was not the case,
and the Quebec agreement which supposedly merged them makes no such mention of any merger of
the projects, just a setting up of a board to coordinate efforts between the three countries.
That is the US, UK, and Canada. In fact, the two projects didn't get along that well,
and as we shall see below, a big part of that was disputes over patents.
The following is based on a paper written by Bertrand Goldschmitt, a French nuclear scientist.
Two of his colleagues, Hans Halben, and Lou Coarsky, played a critical role in early
nuclear research. Halben, in particular, was one of the great greatest scientific names
in nuclear fission. In March of 1939, Halben conducted an experiment showing that neutrons
remitted by the Fissioning of Uranium. In April, Shelyat, Halben, Coarsky, and Perron
had a pretty good idea of how to use nuclear fission to produce energy and to make an explosive
device and decided to file patents on their invention. Each of the four would receive a 5%
share of 80 benefits, and the other 80% would go to the research institute that they worked at in
Paris. Halenel quote from Goldschmitt's paper. The first two patents conserved energy
production, and were entitled, device for energy production, and methamphet stabilizing a device
for energy production. They were roughly defined their principles of the main components
of our present power reactors, moderator, and heterogeneous or homogenous arrangements,
cooling fluid, control rods, protection shield. The third patent called
Method for Perfecting Explosive Charges was less brilliant from a foresight point of view,
though it proposed valid solutions for the trigger, the tamper, and the rapid
obtainment of the critical assembly of a possible explosive device. Finally, you'll be a year
later, after Alfred Dier's experimental confirmation in March 1940 of New York Niels Bohr's
theoretical prediction that Uranium 235, the rare isotope of the mixture in natural uranium,
was responsible for fission by slow neutrons. The French took out an additional patent
on the advantage of using enriched uranium for the chain reaction, and of quote.
In May of 1940, the CNRS, the French Research Institute in Paris, negotiated an agreement with
Belgian mining company, Union Minier, who were the world's biggest producer of uranium at the time
a byproduct of radium mining, a body partnership for the worldwide exploitation of these patents.
However, the agreement was not finalized due to the ongoing events in the war.
At the beginning of the war, the French government had approved the development of an energy generator,
or a nuclear reactor, as we would say today, with the intention of creating an engine for submarines.
With the fall of France, Halben and Koarski traveled to the UK with their supply of heavy water,
where they were received by their UK counterparts, James Chadwick and John Cockroft.
The British were already working on an atomic bomb. In the UK, the two conducted an experiment,
showing that it was possible to create nuclear energy using natural uranium and heavy water.
In 1941, the British nuclear project was reorganized and given the name of two values.
In 1942, it was decided to move the work on a plutonium bomb to Canada,
and Canada would pay for the project. A lab was set up in Montreal and Halben was put in charge
of the project. Halben had negotiated this arrangement by offering to arrange to have the French
patents for worldwide rights outside of France and the French Empire transferred to the UK.
In return, the French team were to be given a key role in the British nuclear project.
The author of the paper I am referencing, Bertrand Goldschmitt,
was a section leader in Montreal and a colleague of Halben from France.
The Montreal group cooperated with the American Manhattan project
and the two shared information and exchanged visits. However, relation between the two began to
break down with the major cause of this being the Americans being unhappy about the French patents
and Halben's arrangement to give the British worldwide rights to them.
The post-war commercial potential for nuclear power was seen to be huge and this was a major
bone of contention. The extensive participation of ICI that is imperial chemical industries
engineers in the two values project was also objectionable to the Americans.
Presumably, this had something to do with potential for ICI being involved in future
commercialization of the technology. The American DuPont company, a commercial rival of ICI,
was also heavily involved in the American bomb project. The eventual result of this was that the
US cut off cooperation with the UK Canada nuclear project.
Finally, Halben was forced out of the project at the insistence of the Americans and he was replaced
by John Cockroft, who moved to Montreal to take charge of the project.
The Americans now restored limited cooperation.
Coarsky was put in charge of building a heavy water moderated natural uranium reactor at a new
site north of Ottawa at Chuck River. This reactor was turned on on the 5th of September
1945, three days after Japan's surrender. So what was supposedly a Titanic war for survival
key allies were falling out with respect to their ultimate weapon over issues of patents covering
post-war commercialization. With the end of the war, the nuclear weapons project in Montreal
in Chuck River was wound up. Halben, Coarsky and Goldsmith returned to France and Cockroft to the
UK where they all played senior roles in the nuclear programs of their respective countries.
John Cockroft played an important role in the development of the Magnox reactors,
which Antoine asked about. The Chuck River site remains as Canada's main nuclear research center
to this day, and Canada was to continue development of heavy water moderated natural uranium reactors.
The first commercial nuclear power plant was commissioned in the UK in 1956,
roughly 17 years after the original French nuclear patents. At that time,
UK patents had a term of 16 years. While I am not a patent lawyer, it would appear that these
patents would likely have expired before nuclear power was ever commercialized.
So to answer the question about patents, the first patents on nuclear energy date to
before World War II started, and the very first two were about nuclear power plants,
and it was only the third which covered nuclear weapons.
Thanks to other listeners, a number of other listeners made comments saying they were
really enjoying the series. I would like to thank the following for their kind words of
encouragement. They helped to make the work required to do this worthwhile. They are,
Brian in Ohio, MNW, Clinton, Antoine, BJB, Kevin O'Brien, Tray, Landru, Archer 72, Jim DeVore.
If you have commented, but I have forgotten your name, or if you show it was recorded before
I got a chance to read your comment, I would still like to thank you.
Conclusion, I would like to thank all the listeners for their kind comments and insightful questions.
I hope that I have answered these questions to the satisfaction of everyone.
I look forward to hearing from all of you in future podcast episodes, including those on other topics.
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