Talk:Project PACER

We need a disambiguation page!

I just came here to check if Wikipedia has an article on PACER, the online filing system for U.S. federal courts (it stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records), and discovered this article instead. See the PACER Website: [1]. It looks like we will need a disambiguation page at some point. --Coolcaesar 07:48, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Try PACER (law). I'll add a link - Jack (talk) 20:08, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Dead link

During several automated bot runs the following external link was found to be unavailable. Please check if the link is in fact down and fix or remove it in that case!

• http://sumaris.cbuc.es/cgis/sumari.cgi?issn=03779211&idsumari=A2004NPART_AV000029
  • In PACER on Mon Jul 17 14:19:55 2006, HTTP Error:
  • In PACER on Thu Jul 27 00:26:24 2006, HTTP Error:

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maru (talk) contribs 04:26, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Article needs data

The article has a lot of supposition at the end as to why this project wasn't ever built - it needs hard data, as in: X energy is speculated to be produced at a cost of Y, compared to just burning coal, which produces Z energy at the same cost. Tempshill (talk) 21:30, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Out of interest...

Any reason it couldn't be used as an alternative to dismantling, for the purpose of reducing inventory? 203.160.126.177 (talk) 07:44, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

Because it's insane. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 222.152.194.44 (talk) 05:37, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Because it is, presumedly, more economical to use the nuclear materials contained within in conventional reactors. profits $$$ are a real incentive driver.

Boundarylayer (talk) 13:38, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

PACER Advantages

I made a PACER page edit. It may not have been wise (there are few citable documents on the subject). However, I thought some of the ideas were worth saying as the article was unnecessarily writing off PACER without (I thought) giving it as fair a hearing as it deserved. Any comments (and calculations!) appreciated. PS: 1 Megaton = 1,162,222,222 kWh AnInformedDude (talk) 23:05, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

I have RVed this edit. Don't take it personally! The material was, in essence, a personal reflection. There's also some of this left in the article, which came from my initial edits WAYYYY back. So I'm going to re-write this, including your concepts but in a reffed form. Maury Markowitz (talk) 17:01, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Ok all done for now... see what you think! Maury Markowitz (talk) 21:05, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Modifications to PACER Article

ACER fusion comments. Thanks for your input. I should make some points concerning how you have edited (albeit with citations) what I posted. I can understand your position – previous studies seem to show the idea is not as economical as initially hoped. Having said that, I don't think the idea's a write-off just yet:

1)Do any of the studies you have mentioned show HOW the economics of the amount of nuclear energy gained from a nuclear explosion SCALES with the yield of the device used to produce the power? Of course, it may appear ludicrous to detonate something in the 100kt-1MT range within a confined space BUT the economics of doing this may be better than the economics of using a 10kt device which obtains a relatively small fraction of its energy from the fusion process .

2) How can it be the case that, on the one hand, large amounts of energy are invested into the isotopic separation of lithium deuteride (Lithium-6 Deuteride) and, on the other hand, this energy is not recouped via the thermonuclear explosion? Of course, significant amounts of this energy will be conducted/radiated to the outside environment BUT new technology may significantly mitigate this. I am aware that Lithium Hydride (presumably Lithium-7 Hydride predominantly) can be used for shielding nuclear reactors, but imagine that Lithium Deuteride's more valuable use in thermonuclear warheads precludes it being used in this way due to its practical significance.

3) Is it not possible that current technology (which would enable more efficient reclamation of the energy of nuclear fusion via the use of, say, Heat pumps), and which might economically enhance the manner in which nuclear fuel breeding occurs, would significantly alter the economics of this power generation method?

4) I partially believe that the idea that New nuclear weapons would need to be developed for PACER to work is incorrect/biased – there are (according to FAS), in excess of 19,000 nuclear warheads in the world (potentially an underestimate). So existing nuclear weapons, deployed for military purposes, could be deployed for a PACER-Operation Gnome project WITHOUT the need for the production of nuclear weapons (not from scratch, anyway). The idea weapons production (from scratch) would have to be pursued seems problematic unless you can indicate (in an absolute way) why this would not be possible in a world heading towards nuclear disarmament...

5) The link to http://sumaris.cbuc.es/cgis/sumari.cgi?issn=03779211&idsumari=A2004NPART_AV000029 does not seem to work. This may have nothing to do with you.

6) There may be SOME economic benefit gained from the rare nuclides which are derived from a thermonuclear explosion, especially when taking possible breeding applications into account. This might be cancelled out/mitigated by the potential radiation risks imposed by the detonation of a device in close proximity to molten salt or other materials. I will look into the references to see whether they go into numerical detail about this and other issues.

7) It may be the case that one of the efficiency limits of the PACER system is the use of power generation turbines. Equally well is the fact that a large amount of the heat energy of the thermonuclear device is lost to the environment via radiation/conduction. Do recent advances in materials science (very good insulators that are poor conductors) improve overall efficiency if used?

Some of these points require going into detail and may be difficult to address without a quantitatively detailed report with calculations, etc...

AnInformedDude (talk) 21:28, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

Economics figures presented in comparisons to yellowcake costs...really?

Everything I've ever read about the price of fission-electricity from conventional reactors, states that the eventual cost of electricity production has little to no bearing on the price of uranium. I've read many diverse publications, including the MITs a few years back on the future of nuclear electricity and they all state that the raw natural uranium fuel costs, make up much less than 1/10th the cost of electricity produced and even then, it varies considerably depending on the primary cost variables: the type of reactor design, the enrichment level used, its rated nameplate power output, O&M costs/the salary of the operators etc and that's before we get into capacity factor.

So with the knowledge that you can't directly compare the economic competitiveness of different types of reactors, by only looking at the price of yellowcake available to each country, how was it intended for people to ever derive a meaningful idea of the cost of PACER?

Figures really should be in $/kwh. Which is the conventional method of pricing electricity, not the dubious pointing at yellowcake costs. You could just as well point at salary costs and it would make as little sense as this curious attempt at economic comparison by solely stating the cost of yellowcake.

Unless I'm missing something? Boundarylayer (talk) 13:56, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

@Boundarylayer: you're missing only one thing... "has little to no bearing on the price of uranium" today.

The cost of fuel in a modern reactor is indeed about 1/10th the total OPEX (well, sort of), but it used to be much higher, closer to 1/3 to 1/2. And that price was expected to skyrocket when there were a thousand reactors in service, all competing for what were then only a few known reserves. People were talking about yellowcake prices ~$150/lb in the 1980s. That's why there was so much investment in things like fast breeders and fission-fusion hybrids during the 70s, and why everything was compared using this metric.

But what happened instead is that construction stalled out at a couple hundred reactors, new ore reserves were found, and new techniques caused the price of fuel processing to plummet. Today's price is $18.50/lb. Other fuel sources, like breeders, simply cannot compete, not even close (although the Russian's disagree apparently). Today the fuel is so cheap no one uses alternative sources except to burn off old bombs.

This report is a good one to read, look at page 18 and especially 19. At the time that was being prepared in the late 1970s, the cost of fuel made up about half of the total LCOE. Note the price on ore at $40/lb as the low-end estimate, and $160 as the high-end. Today's price inflation-adjusted to 1980 is $6.30/lb, so low they didn't even consider it. If you plug that into these diagrams you can see how the economics of devices like this could never compete.

So basically, the rapid falling prices in yellowcake, the results of which you are talking about, killed off a lot of alternatives like PACER (and LFTR, FBR, and lots of others too). Maury Markowitz (talk) 14:32, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

Your explanation is both lucid and endeavors to be encompassing Maury Markowitz, you have my deepest appreciation. I had always been frustrated by the seemingly contradictory statements made in respect to the cost of breeders from other historical accounts. How do you suggest we proceed so that this article does not cause any further confusion? A document that charts the history of fuel price as a function of the cost of (modern) reactors would be ideal? So that we may communicate the estimated cost of PACER as it was envisioned in the 1970s in units of $/kWh.

Though to continue the discussion on the comparative cost of present LWRs that you bring up, we can only hope that countries start noticing the hidden cost of the once-through fuel cycle. As it may be cheaper to operate such a LWR if you're just building one. I think when you start factoring in the disdainful eyes of the public however, you're losing market share because of the bad publicity around the nuclear waste they generate. Thus you might've been better off trying to build the initially more expensive "waste-burners"/breeders. As they're something far more likely to win wider public support and therefore get built on a larger scale. I think IFR was a great design as is the safely operating BN-800 and the ~ 2019 ASTRID (reactor), however due to the Sodium involved, they're a public relations nightmare to convince people of the inherent safety. So that just leaves us with molten salt breeders and burners and perhaps lead too. In summary, I'm not a pessimist, the Stable Salt Reactor+pyroprocessing looks in particular, fairly cost competitive. Burning "waste" reactor-grade plutonium is a "free fuel" that a lot of people/"countries" would pay to have taken off their hands. Ultimately a win-win scenario for everyone it seems, again despite the cold calculus stating "just bury it", an analysis that doesn't take the real cost of public opinion onboard.

Though I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on the matter?

Boundarylayer (talk) 17:42, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

I understand your frustration... there's an endless stream of "new ideas" that the industry brings up, listing all these advantages, and then you never see one actually being built. It seems they're on a wheel, each one re-appeaing every 10 years or so... breeder, pebble bed, LFTR, breeder... Trying to find any information on why they don't get built can be a real challenge. I only came across the paper I linked to because I was working on the [article], otherwise I may never have seen it.

So as to how to consider the problem of PACER economics... the issue here is not the fuel cost per-se, but the cash flows over time. With a traditional plant, most of the cost of the power is payments on the CAPEX. One would expect that would be lower with PACER (maybe), but the cost of the fuel is much higher. So if you run the equations, dropping bombs is like buying fuel at $325, and you can actually buy it at $40, so there's not much point in the design.

As to the bigger picture, that's more difficult. Actually yesterday I was reading a great report on CAPEX but now I can't find it... damb, it was excellent. Wait, I found it. here. There's a CANDU outside my window, so I went to page 37. Note that the reactor and first cooling loop ("Steam production and discharge processing") is only 1/4 the cost of the plant. That may be lower than typical due to the way the CANDU is built, but I don't believe it's more than -5% from anyone else. So basically if you consider the modern price of a AP1000 any ~$7.50/Wp, the non-nuclear portion is about $5 to $5.50 of that total.

You can buy a wind turbine for $1.50/Wp, fully commissioned, everything in. Adjusting for CF, that's about $4.50/kWh(eff). That's less than the nuclear plant, and I haven't even built the reactor yet. As far as I can tell, it doesn't make a difference what reactor you design, the plant will still be much more expensive than a wind turbine. To be competitive, the reactor would have to cost negative dollars. This is also why I think fusion will never happen.

The Rankin cycle is dead! Long live the Brayton!

That doesn't mean we shouldn't build burners, especially in places like France where they don't have a lot of places to ditch their old fuel. But we should consider them not to be economically attractive so much as a better way to do reprocessing (Camenco is about 40 minutes away from me, I should note). I think the industry got into a lot of trouble when they tried to sell it as both a great way to burn bad stuff and make-lots-of-money. Perhaps we'll end up with a single breeder somewhere, processing everyone's waste. Maury Markowitz (talk) 21:19, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Is This Even Real?

I did some background research after a friend pointed me at PACER - some of the the original project documents (e.g. "PACER Program FY-1974 LASL Activity"[2] [3]), have been released to the public, and could be linked in the article. I found really little in the way of scientific WP:RS on the whole idea; most sources are popular media, news magazines, and "grey" literature (scientific bulletins, not peer-reviewed). One Turkish professor has more recently published some scientific papers, but he seems to basically treat the original PACER concept as unworkable, but perhaps convertible into some unusual type of molten-salt reactor...

This is weird. Trying to find something about "R.E.Roush" turned up very little, and nothing of substance, even with pertinent additional keywords. Similarly, trying to find material on PACER using Robert [Gadsby] Shreffler as a lead came up with nothing much except the project reports. Then I tried searching for Shreffler using the addicional keyword "nuclear", and boy oh boy, an entirely new rabbit hole opened up. This guy really should get a Wikipedia article. And now it makes sense that PACER went at such lengths discussing nuclear bomb design (and goes for a unusual and to-be-developed design) but was almost cheerfully callous about what would seem to be the actual engineering problems at hand: the stability of the cavity, the fact that halite and superheated water mix quite well indeed, the method to safely store and precisely deliver the bombs into a raging nuclear inferno, etc. What nukes to use would seem be among the least of the problems to be solved, but it figures prominently in the project report.

Eventually I landed at Gaffney (2014) "Euromissiles as the Ultimate Evolution of Theater Nuclear Forces in Europe" (doi:10.1162/JCWS_a_00435), which is basically a narrative of Gaffney's time at NATO Nuclear Planning Group, commenting on an earlier article by Kristina Spohr. According to Gaffney, Shreffler ("a kindly old gentleman [about 50 years old] who had designed the B-57 [sic] bomb") was so insistent that NATO needed to somehow circumvent the Non-Proliferation Treaty that he lobbied internationally, to the point that he got a White House gag order in 1968 (Gaffney phrases it as "We on the U.S. side were appalled at this initiative") and apparently even got himself fired from a top-tier NATO post which was only created 2 years ago, and to quite some extent with him in mind. Later - in the late 1970s and early 1980s -, he published little science (most of his published science work was before 1960) even though he still seems to have been on the Los Alamos payroll or worked for them freelance, but he wrote a series of opinion pieces lobbying for the deployment of low-yield/miniaturized and/or high-radiation nuclear weapons ("suitcase neutron bombs") in large numbers, even to the point of calling for the abandonment of NATO conventional defense. This remained a lunatic-fringe opinion. Shreffler's argument that his proposed bombs would not be considered escalatory and therefore "safe to use" in enormous quantities - 1.000s or 10.000s, due to their intended yield of 0.1-10 kilotons - was widely rejected by politicians and generals alike, for obvious reasons. Gaffney comments:

"In the 1970s, officials from Los Alamos National Laboratory would come to the Pentagon every year trying to sell their proposals for miniaturized nuclear weapons. The idea was that the use of these “mini-nukes” would cause so little collateral damage that the other side would hardly realize that nuclear weapons had been used and would not retaliate with nuclear strikes of its own (i.e., NATO would “sneak in under the Warsaw Pact’s threshold”). Such a wild idea had long been rejected in Washington."

These LANL "officials" would seem to be first and foremost Shreffler and his associates, as revealed by his publications of that time. The PACER bomb design anticipates those "mini-nukes"; the PACER proposal was for an initial yield of 10-100 kilotons, lower if possible. Even as late as 1988, with the Warsaw Pact essentially moribund, Shreffler reiterated his ideas in JSPES, which is a rabidly anti-communist and white-supremacist screamsheet with no notable scientific merit, none whatsoever as regards nuclear physics or reality-based international policy. I have not read this paper (Proquest has the first page as preview), but it should be insightful - and maybe even on PACER, given that together with Gaffney's narrative it establishes that the PACER studies directly followed the first open publication (and second "general rejection") of Shreffler's "only possible rational" mini-nuke idea. His bilious hubris in the JSPES article's introduction speaks volumes.

So, I wonder: was PACER ever a real proposal? Or was it a sort of hoax/Potemkin village of a Jack D. Ripper type of guy, using the "unlimited fusion power" angle, a nod to the long-shelved (due to being unworkable) Plowshares/Gnome studies, and the geopolitical backdrop to hide the actual project - presumably a flagrant violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and certainly nothing many people at NATO or DC would want anything to do with if presented openly? The only working component that was ever studied thoroughly, and not at back-of-an-envelope/high-school lab level, seems to have been the design of the nuclear bombs, which might not even be ideal for the intended purpose (I'm not sure, but the comments of "Cal Able" here are quite revealing in the scope of Shreffler's main work). Referencing "the present energy crisis" and "clean, thermonuclear explosives" at the very start of the PACER project abstract is, in retrospect, a blatantly obvious giveaway.

What are we left with? A design study that is by all accounts unfeasible and superficially done except for the nuclear-fission aspect, and gets buried without a funeral after the oil crisis is over. A study leader who is a two-faced "kindly old gentlemen"-cum-fanatic hell-bent on starting a nuclear war, driven and single-minded to the point of alienating the PotUS, Manlio Brosio and the rest of the NATO leadership, and the Pentagon top brass with his insubordination. One whose life-goal of being the person "causing nuclear war to prevent nuclear war" dominated his entire career and activity for 2 decades - before and after PACER, which was a mere blip in his career -, and who never before or after this blip of less than 2 years had any inclination to ever think about nuclear fission except as a tool to "stick it to the Reds", and presumably found it immensely frustrating that even Nixon/Kissinger were unwilling/unable to deploy his beloved baby B57 against "Charlie".

The following sources I have found but not read. They are probably not or little pertinent to PACER, but are highly illuminating wrt Shreffler, and put the PACER project into a larger context of his work. Given that PACER was all but ignored by the scientific community back in the day (it was mentioned in newsletters and popsci media - someone ever check for patent applications? There should be some, even at this early stage, if the project was not fraudulent), and given that serious doubts exist about the project's feasibility, and given that Shreffler's biography strongly suggests that PACER was just a sort of maskirovka for his "wild idea" of illict "mini-nuke" mass-proliferation, I cannot decide what to do with them. Certainly, PACER shold not be presented as if it were the straight dope; everything about it suggests it wasn't, the maths never was thoroughly done, but the lack of dedicated sources makes it impossible to be sure. Also, I don't know how reliable Gaffney is - but his introduction of Shreffler as a homely geezer, only to "ironically" reveal him as an insane warmonger later on, the blatantly obvious (if you know your who's who) "officials from Los Alamos National Laboratory" and "fought against [mini nukes] for years right through [...] 1977" leaves little doubt that he and Shreffler fell out within 1-2 years after their initial meeting in 1967.

• Shreffler & Bennett (1970): "Tactical Nuclear Warfare" LANL Report LA-4467-MS (memorandum)
• Bennett et al (1973): "A Credible Nuclear-Emphasis Defense for NATO" Orbis 17 (re-edit of the preceding as a full journal article)
• Bennett et al [1974]: "United States National Security Policy and Nuclear Weapons" LANL Report LA-5785-MS (this was written during or right after the PACER studies LA-5754-MS and LA-5764-MS. As the latter was published in January 1975, LA-5785-MS might have a publication date of 1975)
• Shreffler & Sandoval (1975): "Nuclear Weapons, Their Role in US Political and Military Posture, and an Example" LANL Report LA-6078-MS (probably written soon after the preceding)
• Sandoval & Shreffler (1976): "Nuclear Weapons and Their Role in NATO Political and Military Posture" (re-edit of the preceding as a full journal article. Unclear if ever published.)
• Shreffler (1978): "The Neutron Bomb for NATO Defense: An Alternative" Orbis 21
• Shreffler in Barnaby (1978): "The New Nuclear Force" (Proceedings of a SIPRI nuclear disarmament symposium, where Shreffler is some sort of advocatus diaboli)
• Shreffler (1978): "The U. S. defense problem as it pertains to battlefield nuclear weapons" LANL Report LA-7173-MS
• Shreffler (1988): "The Defense of Western Europe: An Indictment of NATO's Posture of Flexible Response & What Can Be Done About It" JSPES 13 (comment on Gann (ed.) 1987: "The Defense of Western Europe". Given the title and introduction, probably a strongly-worded opinion piece. At that time, Shreffler was about 70 years old. He officially retired at age 79 or 80, according to the obituary of his wife.)

tl;dr: There is something fishy about the entire project - considering Shreffler's other contemporary work, PACER looks like a front for his mini-nuke project, but how can we present it on Wikipedia?
The project report should be reviewed and added to the article - it is LONG, but mostly raw experimental data and basic stuff; apart from some (then) cutting-edge nuclear computer simulations (which may be the prime reason for the PACER studies - access to computing time to simulate his beloved bombs), the actual science is low-grade and/or very preliminary, between high-school-lab and engineering college level, not what one would expect from a cutting-edge project by LANL and R&D Assocs (a DARPA spinoff). The concept drawings are almost invariably crude and/or naive, only some minor components (useless on their own) are discussed and presented in detail. It's all very weird. The modern-day revivals of the idea seem to assume that "the math was done" thoroughly back then, but nothing I have found suggests this was the case.

Sorry for the wall of text. I have never come across something as messed-up as this. It is not a clear-cut case of scientific fraud, but at least there is a lot of egregious dishonesty involved here. 2A02:908:4B33:BD80:0:0:0:38B3 (talk) 02:40, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

ADDENDUM: Shreffler in LANL Report LA-7173-MS claims:

For the last seven years I have worked with colleagues at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory on the subject of a more reasonable U.S. political-military posture. A number of us had served in various capacities in Western Europe and were appalled by the construction of the NATO military machine. In our investigation we were privileged to work in the relatively unconstrained atmosphere of the Los Alamos Scientific Labora­tory to develop our ideas in what we felt to be in the best interest of the United States.

The time period in question would be 1970/71 to 1977/78. PACER falls right into the middle of this. Shreffler is quite explicit about his work focusing first and foremost on the development of miniaturized nuclear weapons to overturn NATO doctrine and sabotage nuclear non-proliferation ("proliferation is about as sure as death and taxes" according to Shreffler, meaning the treaty is a lost cause anyway. He was wrong.). Anything civilian is a subordinate by-product of that "political-military" aim at best, and a fraudulent scheme to further this aim at worst. This is about as close as we can expect to get to him admitting the whole thing was a scam, but it's pretty close already. If the article is expanded with context, the cited statement may be referred to as a caveat emptor, which I am quite sure now this article urgently needs. Given the weight of evidence for Shreffler's underhandedness and singular obsession, an uncritical presentation of the project cannot be considered NPOV. 2A02:908:4B33:BD80:0:0:0:38B3 (talk) 02:54, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

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