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Utilizing solar power for the plant-tending machinery sounds like a good idea, at first... then you realize that plants themselves are solar powered, and therefore every square meter you are devoting to powering the machinery is a reduction of the potential plant-matter production. A possible semi-alternative might be to make the roofs of all homes into solar arrays, thus providing shelter and power simultaneously - of course, the occupants of those dwellings may not want to give up the electricity this would generate.

LFTR-based energy solutions come immediately to mind as a cheap, plentiful, and safe solution to our power needs.

Thorium is fairly plentiful, is produced as a "waste" by-product of conventional mineral-extraction processes, and the US has a stockpile of it large enough to run the entire country (and then some) for nearly a decade. The process of extracting energy from it results in an incredibly small mass of waste, orders of magnitude less than our current plants produce.

To top it all off, it's impossible for a LFTR plant to "melt down", and the startup/shutdown process takes a matter of hours, rather than weeks or months. As a matter of fact, there was a research group who made a reactor in the 50s who simply turned it off for the weekend on Friday, then turned it on again on Monday - they just shut it down for two days, then brought it back up.

As another indication of safety, the US government funded a research group in the 1950s who very nearly put a thorium reactor in an airplane. They stopped not because of safety concerns, but because fission-powered aircraft were not as cheap and expendable as the newly-developed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) technology as a delivery system. Missiles don't require a crew to ride them into enemy airspace.

Speaking of the military aspects of cheap power, one interesting "benefit" of LFTR technology is that weapons-grade fissionable material is not a waste product of the process. This may have something to do with the huge number of fast-breeder nuclear reactors in the US; their main product (other than energy) is weapons-grade plutonium.

Yet another indicator of safety: This is a pdf from the Thorium Energy Alliance that has, on its front page, a picture of enough thorium to satisfy a person's lifetime energy needs being held in a bare hand. You see, thorium isn't nearly as "radioactive" as other nuclear materials - it's not fissile, it's merely fertile.

If the US isn't careful, they're going to lose any ability to utilize this technology; Both China and India are working on thorium-based reactors currently, with China's expressed goal being to monopolize the IP rights - yet another reason to abolish the current Intellectual Property system?

More information on thorium and thorium-based technologies can be found here.

Utilizing solar power for the plant-tending machinery sounds like a good idea, at first... then you realize that plants themselves are solar powered, and therefore every square meter you are devoting to powering the machinery is a reduction of the potential plant-matter production. A possible semi-alternative might be to make the roofs of all homes into solar arrays, thus providing shelter and power simultaneously - of course, the occupants of those dwellings may not want to give up the electricity this would generate.

LFTR-based energy solutions come immediately to mind as a cheap, plentiful, and safe solution to our power needs.

Thorium is fairly plentiful, is produced as a "waste" by-product of conventional mineral-extraction processes, and the US has a stockpile of it large enough to run the entire country (and then some) for nearly a decade. The process of extracting energy from it results in an incredibly small mass of waste, orders of magnitude less than our current plants produce.

To top it all off, it's impossible for a LFTR plant to "melt down", and the startup/shutdown process takes a matter of hours, rather than weeks or months. As a matter of fact, there was a research group who made a reactor in the 50s who simply turned it off for the weekend on Friday, then turned it on again on Monday - they just shut it down for two days, then brought it back up.

As another indication of safety, the US government funded a research group in the 1950s who very nearly put a thorium reactor in an airplane. They stopped not because of safety concerns, but because fission-powered aircraft were not as cheap and expendable as the newly-developed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) technology as a delivery system. Missiles don't require a crew to ride them into enemy airspace.

Speaking of the military aspects of cheap power, one interesting "benefit" of LFTR technology is that weapons-grade fissionable material is not a waste product of the process. This may have something to do with the huge number of fast-breeder nuclear reactors in the US; their main product (other than energy) is weapons-grade plutonium.

Yet another indicator of safety: This is a pdf from the Thorium Energy Alliance that has, on its front page, a picture of enough thorium to satisfy a person's lifetime energy needs being held in a bare hand. You see, thorium isn't nearly as "radioactive" as other nuclear materials - it's not fissile, it's merely fertile.

If the US isn't careful, they're going to lose any ability to utilize this technology; Both China and India are working on thorium-based reactors currently, with China's expressed goal being to monopolize the IP rights - yet another reason to abolish the current Intellectual Property system?

More information on thorium and thorium-based technologies can be found here.

Geeks interested in safe practical thorium power really need to read the history of molten salt reactors here. I hope India and China have the sense to invest in this path. The LFTR is the long term theoretical evolution of the molten salt reactor path. My only problem with the whole LFTR hype is it's pushing for massive research instead of building reactors we know how to build now. We should get back in the game now, first building a new MSR taking into account what we learned in the 60's and new advances since then, and then build a few commercial plants.

To be specific about some of the hype I don't like, check out the claimed advantages of LFTRs. Some of the advantages that LFTR theoretically inherit from MSR I wont dispute, including inherent safety, small size, and low operational cost, as MSR research proved that already in the 60's. However, I take issue with "load following" which means ramping the reactor up and down to follow the load. That's what all our other generators are good for, but to get your investment out of a nuclear reactor, you want to take advantage of it's low fuel cost and run it at 100% capacity almost all the time. This also greatly simplifies the engineering involved, and given the economics, there's simply no way our early LFTRs will be designed for load following. Then they claim minimal end-of-life expense. Cleaning up the MSR plant turned out to be massively more expensive than anyone would have guessed, though with knowledge gained from that experience, we should be able to do a better job next time. Then, they assume that the first LFTRs will use a new turbine design, rather than standard steam turbines. That might be where we eventually get, but build the first plants using cheaply available and well understood technology! This sort of hype looks more like fishing for DARPA grants than solving the energy crisis.

Your post was interesting. But defining your acronyms (LFTR, MSR) as you first introduce them would make it even more accessible.

Geeks interested in safe practical thorium power really need to read the history of molten salt reactors here. I hope India and China have the sense to invest in this path. The LFTR is the long term theoretical evolution of the molten salt reactor path. My only problem with the whole LFTR hype is it's pushing for massive research instead of building reactors we know how to build now. We should get back in the game now, first building a new MSR taking into account what we learned in the 60's and new advances since then, and then build a few commercial plants.

To be specific about some of the hype I don't like, check out the claimed advantages of LFTRs. Some of the advantages that LFTR theoretically inherit from MSR I wont dispute, including inherent safety, small size, and low operational cost, as MSR research proved that already in the 60's. However, I take issue with "load following" which means ramping the reactor up and down to follow the load. That's what all our other generators are good for, but to get your investment out of a nuclear reactor, you want to take advantage of it's low fuel cost and run it at 100% capacity almost all the time. This also greatly simplifies the engineering involved, and given the economics, there's simply no way our early LFTRs will be designed for load following. Then they claim minimal end-of-life expense. Cleaning up the MSR plant turned out to be massively more expensive than anyone would have guessed, though with knowledge gained from that experience, we should be able to do a better job next time. Then, they assume that the first LFTRs will use a new turbine design, rather than standard steam turbines. That might be where we eventually get, but build the first plants using cheaply available and well understood technology! This sort of hype looks more like fishing for DARPA grants than solving the energy crisis.

Well, the problem was not with the popular imagination, but the poor policy making. The US would be fully energy independent today, and nuclear would be a brilliant, thriving industry, if only it had proceeded in a different direction. Indeed, the entire world would be a very different place, with the proliferation of cheap, safe energy, and reduced friction over fossil fuel resources. Maybe not too cheap to meter, but energy cheaper than from coal is quite possible with Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors. So are synthetic fuels from nuclear heat cheaper than from oil. As an additional benefit over current reactors, water can be desalinated with the rejected heat. All of this, with unparalleled safety, while addressing all of the waste concerns of present reactors.

Instead of pursing the safer, cleaner, and immensely more efficient liquid thorium reactors. The government poured billions into funding the competing liquid metal fast breeder: a fundamentally inferior solid fueled design which requires an immensely greater amount of fissile material, as all fast reactors do. (Plutonium in this case). There are numerous other downsides, but it suffices to say that the molten salt reactor program was cancelled when Alvin Weinberg questioned the safety prospects of the prevailing light water reactors and the direction of the plutonium breeder program. (This is the very person who invented the prevailing reactor technology, so who is more qualified to make such judgements? Now that the politics have played out, and his fears have been realized, perhaps it is time to revisit the liquid thorium reactor.

Now we face energy scarcity, horrific pollution, and accelerating destruction of our environment on a global scale, not to mention the results of climate charge. Please take the time to increase awareness of this technology; it isn't merely some theoretical hope, they ran a reactor successfully for years. It was and still is a genuine solution to all of our energy ills, which requires nothing but the will to embrace it. Learn more at Energy From Thorium, and please take the time to contact your representatives.

Ok, I just found what you were talking about Tritium with regards to LFTR - the Lithium in the Flibe salt will, over time, capture neutrons, and release some tritium. However, I found a post on the energyfromthorium.com forums which discusses the problem, and mentions some ways they can mediate the tritium problem:

http://energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3175&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&hilit=Tritiated

In short, it looks like a relatively minor problem, with solutions.

[NOTE: edited for readability]


Most people do not appreciate the role energy plays within the economy. Whether it is the fuel oil in that tanker that has brought those manufactured goods across the Pacific, or the fuel in your gas tank that has allowed you to drive to work this morning, energy plays a fundamental role in economic activity.

We have a plan to develop a special machine that will allow us to synthesize carbon-neutral petroleum replacements cheaply using nuclear fission as a primary input. With this safe technology, we can drastically reduce waste through efficiency, avoid the use of water for cooling, reduce manufacturing costs by avoiding the use of a high-pressure cooling system, and scale to many thousands of reactors over the coming decades. With this, we can exceed the current world energy consumption of roughly 15 TW. We can sequester a century's worth of carbon from the atmosphere, safeguarding our shorelines for generations to come. And we can end water shortages the world over through massive efficient desalination.

This Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor is Green Nuclear, and it is THE silver bullet.

The White House petition for LFTR

More information regarding the technology.

Green Freedom - industrial scale synthesis of fuel from nuclear energy

Most people to not appreciate the role energy plays within the economy. Whether it is the fuel oil in that tanker that has brought those manufactured goods across the Pacific, or the fuel in your gas tank that has allowed you to drive to work this morning, energy plays a fundamental role in economic activity.

We have a plan to develop a special machine that will allow us to synthesize carbon-neutral petroleum replacements cheaply using nuclear fission as a primary input. With this safe technology, we can drastically reduce waste through efficiency, avoid the use of water for cooling, reduce manufacturing costs by avoiding the use of a high-pressure cooling system, and scale to many thousands of reactors over the coming decades. With this, we exceed the current world energy consumption of roughly 15 TW. We can sequester a century's worth of carbon from the atmosphere, safeguarding our shorelines for generations to come. And we can end water shortages the world over through massive efficient desalination.

This Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor is Green Nuclear, and it is THE silver bullet.

The White House petition for LFTR

More information regarding the technology.

Green Freedom - industrial scale synthesis of fuel from nuclear energy

For those looking at the energy crisis, it should be abundantly clear that we need to look at cheap carbon-free energy generation, and nuclear is the only feasible way to do that. Unfortunately, conventional nuclear technology has many problems from safety and inefficiency to cost and lack of scalability. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors address these issues and more, and every industrialized nation needs to look intently at this technology. It is the only way out of the conundrum of water shortages, Peak Oil, Global Warming, and all of the other energy related issues we now have. Ignoring reality is to embrace lower net energy, and therefore higher costs and the decline of civilization.

http://www.energyfromthorium.com/

http://reserveenergy.blogspot.com/

LFTR: Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor. Inherently safe, no water required for cooling, and a ton of other advantages for lunar deployment including plentiful supplies of lunar near-side Thorium

LFTRs advantages:

1. - adapt to load and are self-regulating: the molten-salt blanket around the core expands as heat increases and contracts as heat reduces
2. - require no high-pressure containment vessel or water cooling
3. - will auto-shutdown if there is a critical power failure
4. - use a Uranium/Thorium cycle which consumes 99.9% of the fuel, increasing energy output and reducing waste products
5. - use a 50% efficient Brayton cycle gas turbine generator, waste heat can be used to purify water (important on moon)
6. - could be mass produced and delivered on trucks. A LFTR the size of a semi-truck should produce at least 100KW.
7. - waste products that do remain can be contained and become safe in 300 years instead of 300,000 years. (87% waste safe in 10 years, 13% in 300)
8. - proliferation-resistant: removing the only useful actinides for weapons would shut the reactor down, are deadly (hard gamma emitters) which also make them traceable

There are also abundant levels of Thorium on the lunar near-side

The base concepts of the LFTR were desinged in the late 50's by Alvin Weinberg for a nuclear airplane design. Further refinements of the molten salt concept were tested very successfully for four years (1964-1969) at Oak Ridge National Lab.
The project was eventually discontinued because the molten-salt reactors can't be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium and they are very safe relative to almost any other reactor and made fast breeder reactors look bad. LFTR reactors could be mass produced and delivered on trucks, from 100kw to multi-gigawatts.

A LFTR the size of an 18 wheeler should deliver at least 100kw.
The quantity of Thorium on Earth is thought to be enough to power the planet at the current rate for approximately 100,000 years.

Why not fund LFTR research at NASA while they are at it? The Chinese have already restarted all of our original research. If they create a good reactor and patent it we will feel like total idiots.

Energy From Thorium: here

LFTRs advantages:

1. - adapt to load and are self-regulating: the molten-salt blanket around the core expands as heat increases and contracts as heat reduces
2. - require no high-pressure containment vessel or water cooling
3. - will auto-shutdown if there is a critical power failure
4. - use a Uranium/Thorium cycle which consumes 99.9% of the fuel, increasing energy output and reducing waste products
5. - use a 50% efficient Brayton cycle gas turbine generator, waste heat can be used to purify water (important on moon)
6. - could be mass produced and delivered on trucks. A LFTR the size of a semi-truck should produce at least 100KW.
7. - waste products that do remain can be contained and become safe in 300 years instead of 300,000 years. (87% waste safe in 10 years, 13% in 300)
8. - proliferation-resistant: removing the only useful actinides for weapons would shut the reactor down, are deadly (hard gamma emitters) which also make them traceable

There are also abundant levels of Thorium on the lunar near-side

The base concepts of the LFTR were desinged in the late 50's by Alvin Weinberg for a nuclear airplane design. Further refinements of the molten salt concept were tested very successfully for four years (1964-1969) at Oak Ridge National Lab.
The project was eventually discontinued because the molten-salt reactors can't be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium and they are very safe relative to almost any other reactor and made fast breeder reactors look bad. LFTR reactors could be mass produced and delivered on trucks, from 100kw to multi-gigawatts.

A LFTR the size of an 18 wheeler should deliver at least 100kw.
The quantity of Thorium on Earth is thought to be enough to power the planet at the current rate for approximately 100,000 years.

Why not fund LFTR research at NASA while they are at it? The Chinese have already restarted all of our original research. If they create a good reactor and patent it we will feel like total idiots.

Energy From Thorium: here

You need to visit: http://energyfromthorium.com/

Once again your ignorance is flapping around for all too see. I am embarrassed for you.

http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/MSadventure.pdf

Sounds like Italy might be a good candidate to be an early adopter of the LFTR - Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor.

"First of all there is the trust we can have in people managing these beasts"

* The physics and chemistry of LFTRs is very favorable for safety. Still need trained professionals building and running them, but they should be an order of magnitude safer - no high pressure steam, no hydrogen explosions, passive cooling.

"Third there is the timing problem. We are late to the train."

But, perhpas you can be "on-time" for the LFTR train. Catch an early train and beat most others to the destination.

"(also notice we did not have plans for an erichment plant, so we would have to buy enriched uranium...)"

* Nice thing about LFTRs is, while they need an initial startup charge of enriched fissile material (a "seed" if you will), they do not need on-going enriched fuel. After you have a few up and running, the existing LFTRs should be able to provide the fissile startup seed for new LFTRs. Also, don't need Uranium.

There is a lot of Thorium in the world (probably some in Italy, but not sure), and since almost no one is using it (at least yet), it should be cheap - it's currently a waste product of other industrial mining activities.

They know that they'll have plenty of radioactive material with which to fuel deep space craft due to their development of liquid fluoride thorium reactors. (That and they'll have limitless electricity as a cool byproduct...) See energyfromthorium.com Currently China is the only state actively pursuing LFTR development, though it was invented in America at the Oak Ridge National Lab.

> ... there is no independant research to show if they are even practical.

Except that there is:
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/

We have been lead to believe that there aren't any safer nuclear power generation technologies. That's simply not true!

See: Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors for a perfect example. An amazing story.

Pebble bed reactors are not as ideal as claimed, and Germany gave up on the program considering the array of problems. Perhaps some may have solutions, but fundamentally, it is still a solid fueled reactor with the associated problems. Solid fueled reactors can not efficiently burn up the fuel due to structural damage, resulting in long-lived actinides, fission products, and unburned fuel to be disposed of, with no possibility of recycling or access to the valuable fission products. (Such as medical isotopes.) So, the safety comes at the expense of inefficient fuel use and a magnified waste stream, which will remain dangerous for thousands of years.

What you really want is a Liquide Fluoride Thorium Reactor. It burns very nearly 100% of the fuel, producing very few actinides in the process. The actinides are the main concern with nuclear waste; without them, most of the fission products will have decayed to safe levels in a few hundred years. (In fact, most of them within 10 years..) Online fuel reprocessing ensures that there is no excess nuclear fuel or waste in the reactor. Coupled with a thermal spectrum reactor, this ensures that the very minimum of radioactive material is required for operation, and only a small fraction of that in conventional reactors of a comparable power output.

Of course, a LFTR is also walk away safe, requires no fuel fabrication, no further mining (is a byproduct of rare earth mining), can burn existing spent nuclear fuel and weapons materials, is scalable over a large range of sizes, can be sited anywhere, and can be mass produced at a cost cheaper than coal. There is a wealth of information available at Energy from Thorium.

I don't really think you've addressed my questions:

That video you linked routinely shows anywhere from 25% to 50% of the US under clouds at the same time - that's a pretty big drop in supply.

"A particular Ohio city is not an island (btw, there has never been a time in recorded history when a city in Ohio has had only five days of sun in 2 months)."

Huh. Go look at the statistic for April and May of this year that we just got off of. Maybe 5 days isn't exactly the right number, maybe it's 10. The point is, it was cloudy and rainy for virtually the entire months of April AND May. I know because I just lived through it.

Yes, a city isn't an island, it's attached to the grid.

Are you suggesting that some areas of the country will purchase capacity and be producing on the order of 100% more energy capacity than they would be expecting to use (e.g. if most of the East Coast is seriously underpowered because virtually everything from Mississippi to Main is under a giant storm system for most of a day)?

You seem to be saying that shipping very large amounts of power across very large distances will not be a problem? I know that advances are being made in superconductors and HVDC lines to reduce losses when transmitting power long distances, but again, if you have several days in a row where a large portion of the country are only producing 10% or 30% of the power they need, that seems like setting the stage for problems.

Natural gas has has limited supply and is pretty expensive (we're in a period where, from what I've seen, NatGas prices have come down a fair amount, because of an explosion of Shale Gas drilling. That may last us a few decades (The Gas Industry Marketers like to proclaim we have 100 years of gas to produce; if you look into the numbers, that's actually about 80 years at current levels of consumption - but we are starting to increase Gas exports to places like China, we are talking about building new Gas power plants, using Gas to supplement Wind and Solar, and even use Gas for transportation - if we try to do all those things, that 80 year supply of gas could become 40 years).

I think we need to think long term. I'm not convinced we can rely on "cheap natural gas" for centuries.

Don't get me wrong, I DO think that solar and wind can, and will play a significant role in our energy mix in the future. I just have not seen a good, strong argument that convinces me that you can reach that 80-100% level.

I see more of a future where Solar and Wind might provide around 40-50%, with a little gas and coal (hopefully CCS coal) maybe being around 10%, and safer nuclear for the other 40-50%.

I don't really like our current Light Water Reactor technology, but I'm pretty optimistic about the potential for the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor.

The short description of the LFTR is that it can burn off the waste from our current nuclear reactors, reducing that waste from a 200,000 year problem to a 200 year problem. We *really* need to burn off our waste anyhow, so if for NO OTHER REASON, we need to investigate doing this.

It uses Thorium as the primary fuel, which is about 5X more abundant in the earth's crust than Uranium (every State in the USA has Thorium, pretty much every country has Thorium). But here's the kicker - you need about 1/200 the Thorium as you do Uranium for a nuclear reactor of equivalent output. This means much less mining, and much less waste.

With Thorium reactors, a few mines could power the entire country - it should only take one or two tons of Thorium per year to run a reactor - 1 ton Thorium yields roughly a GW-Year of electrical power.

So, if we want to generate 200GW per year, we need about 200 tons of Thorium per year - that doesn't sound like very much, compared to the millions of tons of coal a year that we need.

Finally, the reactor design has several characteristics which should make much safer than LWRs (although LWRs aren't terribly dangerou

I believe that if we had a more accurate picture of the consequences of trying to move to expensive energy-diffuse sources (wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, biofuels, etc), that we'd be thinking twice about our aversion to nuclear fission. The Green Party (of which I am a member) imagines a renewable future, and their platform explicitly forbids all nuclear development (including fusion). I think this is a disastrous and useless policy: it avoids technology best suited for drastically reducing waste by converting it into fuel (imagine radio-toxicity reduced to mere hundreds of years as opposed to thousands- the disposal problem essentially becomes a non-issue).

This is not a fantasy. Foundations for this technology were developed back in the 60's at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and today we call this the Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor (LFTR or even Molten Salt Reactor). The advantages are numerous: inherent stability (no meltdown possible), abundant fuel (thorium is 3-4 times as abundant as uranium), low start-up requirements (less than a couple tons of fissile material is needed- critical for scalability), proliferation resistant (U-233 is always contaminated with radioactive U-232), more than 100 times as efficient as the current fuel cycle, drastically reduced waste due to efficiency, considerably lower costs due to many factors, especially safety, and the list goes on. We need to be asking ourselves why we are not aggressively pursuing this promising technology. Cheap abundant energy is our best choice for both securing our future and dramatically reducing the prevalence of poverty throughout the rest of the world. The ability for our economy to provide the services we need is utterly dependent on energy.

In case you are not convinced that this path is necessary to avoid the most dire consequences of global economic collapse, I suggest checking out:

Energy lecture by a theoretical physicist: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeGijutBSx0

Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air: http://www.withouthotair.com/

Advantages of LFTR: http://energyfromthorium.com/lftradsrisks.html

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: http://energyfromthorium.com/essay3rs/

Our energy future is not a trivial concern. If we make the right choices, we will revitalize our economy, avoid the worst consequences of our ignorance, eliminate poverty, and live comfortably for thousands, if not millions of more years. Can you think that far ahead?

I believe that if we had a more accurate picture of the consequences of trying to move to expensive energy-diffuse sources (wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, biofuels, etc), that we'd be thinking twice about our aversion to nuclear fission. The Green Party (of which I am a member) imagines a renewable future, and their platform explicitly forbids all nuclear development (including fusion). I think this is a disastrous and useless policy: it avoids technology best suited for drastically reducing waste by converting it into fuel (imagine radio-toxicity reduced to mere hundreds of years as opposed to thousands- the disposal problem essentially becomes a non-issue).

This is not a fantasy. Foundations for this technology were developed back in the 60's at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and today we call this the Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor (LFTR or even Molten Salt Reactor). The advantages are numerous: inherent stability (no meltdown possible), abundant fuel (thorium is 3-4 times as abundant as uranium), low start-up requirements (less than a couple tons of fissile material is needed- critical for scalability), proliferation resistant (U-233 is always contaminated with radioactive U-232), more than 100 times as efficient as the current fuel cycle, drastically reduced waste due to efficiency, considerably lower costs due to many factors, especially safety, and the list goes on. We need to be asking ourselves why we are not aggressively pursuing this promising technology. Cheap abundant energy is our best choice for both securing our future and dramatically reducing the prevalence of poverty throughout the rest of the world. The ability for our economy to provide the services we need is utterly dependent on energy.

In case you are not convinced that this path is necessary to avoid the most dire consequences of global economic collapse, I suggest checking out:

Energy lecture by a theoretical physicist: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeGijutBSx0

Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air: http://www.withouthotair.com/

Advantages of LFTR: http://energyfromthorium.com/lftradsrisks.html

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: http://energyfromthorium.com/essay3rs/

Our energy future is not a trivial concern. If we make the right choices, we will revitalize our economy, avoid the worst consequences of our ignorance, eliminate poverty, and live comfortably for thousands, if not millions of more years. Can you think that far ahead?

Why don't we just fund the development of the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor?

energyfromthorium.com

A potentially truly game-changing technology is Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor). This was a technology developed during the Cold War that uses thorium to breed uranium for nuclear fission in order to generate electricity. It has most of the advantages and almost none of the disadvantages of traditional nuclear power generation. The technology has been tested and a reactor was build and run at Oakridge National Labs for a number of years. Unfortunately it wasn't developed initially due to the emphasis on building weapons - the thorium fuel cycle isn't ideal for nuclear weapons - and the technology faded into obscurity. Recently, however, a group of engineers, scientists, and concerned individuals has taken a serious interest in this technology and is advocating restarting research on LFTR with the goal of developing a commercially viable reactor. You can find more information at http://energyfromthorium.com/.

In the long term, we don't have any experience in building a storage facility that will remain secure for the duration of the decay of the isotopes.

If we burned the waste from light water reactors in a Liquid Thorium Fluoride Reactor the resulting waste would only be dangerous for about 300 years. See energyfromthorium.com

A good long term solution is to burn the waste as fuel. A Liquid Thorium Fluoride Reactor will do that, and produce waste that's dangerous for far less time. See energyfromthorium.com

You conveniently exclude the nuclear testing in Nevada, which is claimed to have released 20 times the amount of radioactive Iodine over Chernobyl. The problem isn't so much the Iodine, as the fact that no one was told, and so preventative measures were not taken. That is not the case now, unless you are proposing some sort of worldwide conspiracy to cover it all up this time.

As others have mentioned, the Mercury in the oceans is of much greater concern, and not being able to eat fish worldwide. Pollution from coal is vastly more damaging, and most of that has no half life. Consider that Mercury is only a small part of what coal is putting straight into our environment, and have a look at the rest. An interesting fact, is that we could extract almost 15 times the chemical energy of coal, if we burned the included Uranium and Thorium in reactors instead of dumping it into the environment.

The Fukushima-Daiichi Incident, Dr. Matthias Braun, AREVA, March 29, 2011 (3.7 MB Powerpoint show) can be viewed with free LibreOffice

Conventional nuclear is more expensive than coal, but where the evidence that it is not economical? Furthermore, this comparison is far less favorable if you include carbon capture and sequestration. Let us re-compare once the externalities from burning fossil fuels are included: global warming, ocean acidification, massive pollution (including groundwater), environmental devastation from mining, lost life, and frequent wars. Now, how does it look?

Even so, nuclear could be cheaper than coal with Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, on both capital and operating costs. Nearly every last drawback of conventional nuclear is directly attributable to water-cooled solid-fuel Uranium reactors, and indeed this was a poor choice. They are still safer than the alternatives, but I agree that they should be phased out and replaced with modern reactors.

There is no "waste" problem though, it is merely a policy problem in the US. Almost all of the ~35T of "waste" per GWe*year can be recycled, and only tiny fraction can be considered actual waste. For a LFTR, which burns up the material entirely, there is only ~1T of fission products per GWe*year. In 10 years though, 83% of those have decayed to stable elements, a number of which have significant value. Some of the radioactive products also have significant value as medical isotopes, and for other uses. So, at most 0.17T of radioactive byproducts from each GWe*year need to be stored for ~300 years.

You are comparing Bill Gates' accomplishments to the science behind splitting the atom, really? Nuclear energy was one of the crowning achievements of the last century, and that it failed to live up to its promise is a tragedy caused by politics, nothing more. In perspective, it is still the safest and cleanest source of energy we have, and that doesn't even consider all of the deaths due to wars motivated by oil.

It might surprise you to know that the inventor of those "exploding nuclear reactors" was actually opposed to their being used for commercial power production. Dr. Alvin Weinberg was pursuing a far better alternative, which could not explode, could not melt down, burned the nuclear fuel completely, and produced very little (and short-lived) waste. It also didn't produce Plutonium for the weapons program, which was likely the deciding factor. Unfortunately, questioning the safety and direction of the nuclear program lost him his job as director of ORNL, and here we are today, left to wonder, "what if?"

It isn't too late though; the idea is sound, and indeed they did operate a liquid floride reactor for five years without incident. All we need is public awareness of this tragically wasted opportunity, so we can pick up where they left off, and fulfill the promise of nuclear. Unlimited safe, cheap, and clean power--along with an end of the use of fossil fuels and associated pollution and conflict.

I forgot to include a link I was intending to, in my previous post.

If you would like more information about Thorium reactors, check out:

http://www.energyfromthorium.com.

A more thorough rebuttal of the so-called "fact sheet"...

Nice "fact sheet" by people who are clearly not experts in the field and obviously have an anti-nuclear agenda. Most importantly though, it is anything but objective; it is highly selective of the "facts", full of half truths and strawmen, and has a clear intent to deceive the reader. While I have little desire to sift through their drivel, I fully expect that they have similar "fact sheets" for many other competing energy sources. What we could use is a real fact sheet for fossil fuels, and especially coal...

Just to start with, anything with a half life of 200,000 years is so stable, that it is only technically "radioactive", and poses no health risk whatsoever, beyond possible issues of toxicity. Any residual radiation remaining after a few hundred years is below the background level; the only reason to point out things like this is to incite fear and induce hysteria.

Otherwise, while some hypothetical straw man reactor in once-through mode might suffer from some imaginary reprocessing problems, real designs such as the Molten Salt Reactor are conveniently ignored. There is no solid fuel to start with, no separation necessary, and the "reprocessing" is basically just removing the reaction products, and can be done online.

The amount of real waste from such reactors is so small, and the timeframes so short, that it is ludicrous to even begin talking about geologic storage. For a comparison of the waste and mining requirements, see this presentation. In terms of raw environmental devastation and heath effects, it would also be nice to see a comparison with coal.

What you don't seem to understand is that I speculate with the information that I have access too. I'm not willing to invent boogy-men; I was at some point this past week genuinely worried for my two little kids, although I live on the very opposite part of the planet.

I find this very sad. You've been told all your life that nuclear power is dangerous - life-threatening, planet-threatening dangerous - and you've swallowed this propaganda (yes, that's what it is) without question to the point where you start worrying about your kids halfway across the globe from a nuclear accident (that incidentally is yet to produce any deaths from radiation).

Open your eyes, please. You don't seem averse to do a bit of googling, so google for "energy production deaths" and read a few of the links. You'll see that nuclear power production has a historical death toll of four hundreths of a death per TWh, far lower than any other form of power production - solar, wind and hydro included. It really is the safest form of power production there is - and we can make it even safer. Google again for "pebble-bed reactor" and "molten salt reactor" and realize that these forms of nuclear reactors are passively safe - if the plant in Japan had been one of these types nothing would have happened at all.

Finally, some reading about nuclear fuel. The uranium/plutonium fuel used in today's reactors are only used about 5%, that's one of the reasons the "waste" fuel is so hard to handle. Thorium, on the other hand, as used in a liquid fuel thorium reactor, uses almost 100% of the fuel, leaving very little waste at all. Read about this on energyfromthorium.com. Thorium has two more wonderful properties when used as nuclear reactor fuel - it's dirt cheap (really, it's a byproduct from rare earth mineral mines and so cheap they have to give it away) and one of the byproducts of burning it in a reactor is uranium-233, an isotope that is very rare and that can be used in cancer treatments. It is also abundant, far more so than uranium and plutonium. The Thorium produced in a year at one single rare earth mineral mine (about 5000 tons) could cover the whole world's energy needs for that year - if only there were enough reactors to burn it.

So please as a first request, since you sound to you have some insight on the subject, answer clearly this. My understanding of a plausible scenario, based on my limited grasp of the intrisics of nuclear plant, not necessarily nuclear energy, is that a major radiation leak on Fukushima site could have forced the company to evacuate and abandon the plant to its fate. Then a leak in a spent fuel pool could have emptied it, at which point a zirconium fire could have started (I dismiss re-criticallity as little plausible). At least it appeared that some people either at TEPCO or at the US government were worried about that. So in that very case, with all the zirconium going up in smoke, or maybe another bad scenario that according to you was possible at some point: what kind of radioactive cloud would have formed? How far would have it spread? How many people would have been seriously affected? What could the consequences have been?

Worst case scenario is pretty much what we've seen at Fukushima. A Richter 9+ earthquake, a 30ft tsunami, no power for the cooling systems and unknown or failed integrity of the different containment structures.

But it's not that we have a dearth of speculation on what could happen; google "fukushima worst case scenario" and read a bit.

Here's what John Beddington (UK government chief scientific officer) says:

In this reasonable worst case you get an explosion. You get some radioactive material going up to about 500 metres up into the air. Now, that’s really serious, but it’s serious again for the local area. It’s not s

Fast breeder reactors can burn that waste leaving material with a half life of mere decades.

And nuclear proliferation and a bunch of other isotopes and other things which have half lives far from "mere decades".

Quite realistically, the best way forward as I see it, is to develop LFTR technology.
It'd be particularly beneficial in earthquake prone areas as the molten salts would cool and go subcritical and end the main reaction.

For more info, see: International Thorium Energy Organisation
Energy from Thorium has a nice piece about the current situation in Fukushima Daiichi.
LFTR in 16 minutes - for those who are time poor. Explains why you're on Slashdot.
Wikipedia - for those who want citation, please.

Yes, IAANP

I wrote the summary to prevent the "summary doesn't tell me what the heck a molten salt reactor is!" complaint. What should I have written? "China starts a new nuclear reactor project, and it SUX!" :P

And, yes, it is that simple. Do a bit of research.

http://energyfromthorium.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=google+thorium&aq=f

Wikipedia now has a dozen or so informative articles on Molten Salt Reactors, Liquid Thorium Fluoride Reactors, etc. It's a good place to start. There is a website supporting the LFTR: Energy From Thorium. I note that I believe a lot of the PR out there regarding thorium is produced by a company that presently owns a huge percentage of the mining rights to thorium deposits in the US. Which is fine by me. :)

I would rather listen to these people than some random commenter or on Slashdot.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=smarter-use-of-nuclear-waste

http://energyfromthorium.com/

Have we become more risk averse thereby safety measures more expensive? Extra regulation? Is fuel more expensive now than it used to be?

Yes, yes, and yes. And I'll add a few more:

1) site selection is next to impossible.
2) Westinghouse and GE used to compete on plants. GE absorbed Westinghouse's nuclear division years ago
3) Liability insurance.
4) Lack of qualified workers sends labor costs up.
5) (the big one) Fuel isn't recycled/reprocessed anymore. The design of our nuclear plants, using uranium, wasn't only to produce electricity. One of the byproducts of uranium fission is plutonium, which is useful in building nuclear warheads. The way the nuclear power industry was set up, all the fuel has to be purchased from the government (NRC/DOE), and the government was charged with taking care of the waste (so they could extract the plutonium). As long as the government wanted plutonium, it worked fairly well. But when several presidents signed executive orders to stop the processing of spent commercial fuel (Ford and Carter being the first), the stuff just started to pile up, becoming a big fat security risk for nuclear power plants. Now that Yucca Mountain is not available, it's just going to sit there that much longer.

There is a much safer nuclear fuel available, and even some tested designs, but there seems to be zero interest in building one in the US. Much of the cost of nuclear power is going to lawyers these days, and if you can build something that is at least as safe as a coal plant, but without CO2 emission, I would think you'd have people knocking down your door wanting to get in on it. But it has that nasty n-word (nuclear, not the other one), the third rail of power generation.

The report compares running costs of a solar plant against the running costs of nuclear PLUS construction costs. Not only that but also chooses the most expensive plant designs, and takes the extremely high end estimates.

Taken from http://energyfromthorium.com/:

Fuel costs. Thorium fuel is plentiful and inexpensive; one ton worth $300,000 can power a 1,000 megawatt LFTR for a year – enough power for a city. Just 500 tons would supply all US electric energy for a year. The US government has 3,752 tons stored in the desert. US Geological Survey estimates reserves of 300,000 tons, and Thorium Energy claims 1.8 million tons of ore on 1,400 acres of Lemhi Pass, Idaho. Fuel costs for thorium would be $0.00004/kWh, compared to coal at $0.03/kWh.

Capital costs. The 2009 update of MIT’s Future of Nuclear Power shows new coal plants cost $2.30/watt and PWR nuclear plants cost of $4.00/watt. The median of five cost studies of molten salt reactors from 1962 to 2002 is $1.98/watt, in 2009 dollars. The following are fundamental reasons that LFTR plants will be less costly than coal or PWR plants.

LFTR's will render these things irrelevant. http://energyfromthorium.com/lftradsrisks.html

What's with the LFTR design, is that just some crackpot idea or is is the canine testicles?

... but can we spare a couple hundred mil for a real alternative?

Also this forum is, in a sense, developing the "open source reactor" by its forum members Click Here

BTM

Open source reactor? now I'm truly terrified.

Do a google search on LFTR, a Liquid Fluoridic Thorium Reactor. A LFTR does the same thing as described: It consumes 99 percent of its waste or, even better, you can feed it existing nuclear waste and it will happily consume most of it while generating electrical energy. Check this Youtube video out (16 minutes) Thorium LFTR described in 16 minutes

Also this forum is, in a sense, developing the "open source reactor" by its forum members Click Here

BTM

The problem is that carbon plumbing is required and the only form of carbon they have tried, graphite, has a problem with swelling and turning to carbon black under neutron bombardment so it loses its structural integrity.

Fortunately there is a solution to this problem: glassy carbon plumbing.

Unfortunately, the capital markets have failed to put money in the hands of even a few of the right kind of people.

It may be the most important tool for saving the planet is the guillotine.

Yeah!

There are quite a few Gen IV reactors.

My favorite is the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/

Or for 10000 ft level overview
http://rethinkingnuclearpower.googlepages.com/aimhigh

1/2000th the amount of waste. Small footprint, AIR cooled, cheap fuel, thorium is a prevalent as lead. etc

Based on the Thorium fuel cycle so it pretty much sidesteps the whole proliferation issue.
(it can produce U233 which has been used to make a bomb but it can be spiked with U232)

Nuclear power is NEVER a viable solution to ANY problem for the simple reason that the knowledge to create nuclear power is the knowledge to make nuclear weapons. For the simpler people in the crowd, NUCLEAR POWER EQUALS NUCLEAR WEAPONS. There is NO SUCH THING as a "peaceful" nuclear program. All nuclear material can and will be weaponized. For this reason alone nuclear power must be forever abolished and forgotten.

Thorium reactors don't make plutonium. No need for a light water or breeder reactor for it. I'm told that the fission byproducts are an order of magnitude safer as well, but I haven't seen the math for it yet.

Please check Kirk Sorensen's Google Talk about thorium nuclear reactors. And here are the actual slides used in the presentation.

From the Introduction and Basic Principles of thorium based reactors on Kirk's blog: A liquid-fluoride thorium reactor operating only on thorium and using a "start charge" of pure U-233 will produce almost no transuranic isotopes. This is because neutron capture in U-233 (which occurs about 10% of the time) will produce U-234, which will further absorb another neutron to produce U-235, which is fissile. U-235 will fission about 85% of the time in a thermal-neutron spectrum, and when it doesn't it will produce U-236. U-236 will further absorb another neutron to produce Np-237, which will be removed by the fluorination system. But the production rate of Np-237 will be exceedingly low because of all the fission "off-ramps" in its production.

-k

Sure the cost of the turbines are cheaper but the overall cost of wind power is more.
See for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power
Or the recent article in slashdot about Austin's alternative energy's woes.

Nuclear power, especially in the form of the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR), could potentially produce power for about $0.02 kWhr.
See http://rethinkingnuclearpower.googlepages.com/aimhigh

ORNL's LFTR documentation has been put on the web at: http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf

I can't help but think the people after this stuff are more interested in grant money than in solving the world's energy problems.

Comments from someone who's worked on these problems:
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=240#1536

As others have pointed out here, launch costs are a problem, but even barring that, you need 10 square kilometers for the receiver, and the other economic factors make it uncompetitive.

It's a shame that only "sexier" energy schemes like this get attention.