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Thorium, the Next Nuclear Fuel?
mrshermanoaks writes "When the choices for developing nuclear energy were being made, we went with uranium because it had the byproduct of producing plutonium that could be weaponized. But thorium is safer and easier to work with, and may cause a lot fewer headaches. 'It's abundant — the US has at least 175,000 tons of the stuff — and doesn't require costly processing. It is also extraordinarily efficient as a nuclear fuel. As it decays in a reactor core, its byproducts produce more neutrons per collision than conventional fuel. The more neutrons per collision, the more energy generated, the less total fuel consumed, and the less radioactive nastiness left behind. Even better, Weinberg realized that you could use thorium in an entirely new kind of reactor, one that would have zero risk of meltdown. The design is based on the lab's finding that thorium dissolves in hot liquid fluoride salts. This fission soup is poured into tubes in the core of the reactor, where the nuclear chain reaction — the billiard balls colliding — happens. The system makes the reactor self-regulating: When the soup gets too hot it expands and flows out of the tubes — slowing fission and eliminating the possibility of another Chernobyl. Any actinide can work in this method, but thorium is particularly well suited because it is so efficient at the high temperatures at which fission occurs in the soup.' So why are we not building these reactors?"
Even Iran wants nuclear power for this reason.
You sure it isn't because their oil production has peaked and is now declining alarmingly quickly?
Deleted
I am working on the very periphery of the problem, designing equipment to measure the properties of hot radioactive molten fluorides - in the region between 900-1700 C, for European nuclear researchers. Clearly one of the problems which should be obvious is that we are looking at cutting edge material technology to work at these temperatures and neutron fluxes !
Uranium is also abundant and safe, but it's a lot better known than thorium. Thorium is promising, but there's no need for an alternative nuclear fuel at the moment (and probably won't be for a very long time). The nuclear fuel isn't what caused the Chernobyl disaster, it was the reactor, and huge amounts of research has been invested into new uranium based reactors with all sorts of properties making them safer and cheaper.
Thorium looks good and should be researched, but with nuclear fuel we're spoiled for choice. The idea that we need to find a new nuclear fuel for safety or cost reasons only damages the chance of people getting behind the fine technology we have/are-developing now.
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I brought this article up in my government class a few weeks ago (we spend more time discussing what the government is doing than how it's set up), and I couldn't convince a single person that this new kind of reactor was safe. Let's face it: years of not building reactors combined with years of scare tactics from our government about other countries building reactors can't be undone with science. Propaganda > Science
yeah true but so what who cares. I live relatively close Chernobyl the effects of that meltdown has been way overestimated. New research on the matter shows that we where of by 10-100 times in our estimations on the effects of Chernobyl. Nuclear is not nice to humans but it's not such a big deal to our environment. Animal in Chernobyl shows to be at good health, they are in-fact more immune against cancer than animals living in less radiated areas. If we humans want a clean environment and still have the energy there is not many other choices to go with.
The debate has been ranging here in Norway lately, since we hold a lot of the world's known reserves of the stuff (as opposed to many wild guesswork assumptions about possible reserves around the world). The reason why not more reactors are built is quite simply because the technology is not there yet. By most accounts, a functional prototype reactor is 20 years away. It is a very complicated technology, and more difficult to engineer safely than uranium reactors that we currently know a lot about. Several studies, for instance from MIT, cast doubt on whether thorium reactors will even be cost effective. Extracting thorium from the ground is harder than for uranium, and the enrichment process is more difficult and costly. Thorium will also produce dangerous, radioactive by products, and if you have enrichment capabilities for thorium, it is not a far step further to produce weaponized plutonium.
So it may be the future, but apparently no silver bullet.
All this is IANANP (I Am Not a Nuclear Physicist) so I guess someone reading ./ can answer this better than me.
Imho the problem is not primarily safety of operation, but safely storing radioactive wastes for thousands of years without the risk of contaminating the environment / water. Well, at least here in Germany they had contamination after a few decades, because their salt mine wasn't such a good place as they thought ... Ok, they didn't care much if it was safe I guess, it was only meant for testing purposes but got filled with lots of waste, when they wanted to get rid of it.
I wonder, how cheap nuclear power really is, if they include the billions of tax money that are spent to get rid of nuclear waste and cleaning up those places and repairing the damage, if something goes wrong.
Reduced waste is one of the reasons for using Thorium: Not as much, and it decays to safe levels in decades, not centuries.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
There are tons of reasons why "fuel based technologies", which is really an odd statement as even most of renewable energy sources are fuel based on some level, primary among them is we still have a fairly large shortfall between the world energy demands and its energy producing capacity. A situation that will only get worse as we increase our capacity for creating energy ironically enough. It would be irresponsible to not work the problem from every angle possible. This means working on solar, wind, nuclear fission and fusion, and even better fossil fuel facilities, for now. As well as on working on increasing our efficiency in consuming and delivering energy.
Neither side of the great energy debate wants to hear it, but we are decades away, at best, from a real solution to the problem. And attacking the solutions you don't like don't gain anyone a thing. If you think one solution is the best one then do what you can to support it. Technology wars are won by one side winning via whatever merits, not attacking opposing technologies.
Because 'Big-Uranium' bought up all the patents and made them secret. ...... Just like 'Big-Oil" bought up the super-dooper battery patents.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Without realizing it, you've stuck upon the real psychological motivation behind the "decentralized everything" movement: it's political. It's a reflective reaction against the complexity of modern society, and against globalization.
Every honest intellectual person knows that sometimes centralization is desirable. Centralization is cheaper, more efficient, and often cleaner and safer as well. It's a lot cheaper for one building on campus to generate steam than for shack to have its own heater. It's easier to scrub the output of 100 coal plants than that of 10,000 automobiles.
Yet there are otherwise-intelligent people arguing for community-run, small, decentralized infrastructure even where it's batshit insane, like for nuclear power plants. This is not the product of honest reasoning, but an expression to live out the fantasy of living in a commune in the woods.
You want to stem the power of large corporations? I'm with you. Regulate them. But sometimes scaling up an operation is a no-brainer.
The attitude that small is always beautiful is the product of a small mind.
India has Thorium reactors today.
Really? Can you show me a photo of a commercially operating (today) Thorium reactor?
There are certainly designs and plans and prototypes and test reactors.
Deleted
India seems to have come to the complete opposite conclusion with their thorium reactor.
It makes sense too, given that thorium requires no pre-processing and produces reactor-grade Uranium as its primary byproduct. By using the Uranium as well (which they have found difficult to import) they extend the life of the cores out to two years, which is practically unheard of.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
and yet, despite all you say, the supposedly incorruptible Manmohan Singh [*] bent over backward to do a deal with the US that is -- in the long term -- clearly very bad for India if you consider energy independence combined with foreign policy independence. He's accepted an unprecedented level of interference from the US... oops I mean "inspections", we're now committed to buying hundreds (thousands?) of billions of USD worth of equipment from the US (most of the drooling over this deal was from US companies in that line, naturally), and there's no mention of Thorium anywhere on the horizon as far as these bozos are concerned.
[*] to be fair, I think he's still incorruptible; it's just that fornicating Italian female canine has such an influence over him... What bothers me is that President Kalam, who had been talking up Thorium for years (IIRC) and criticising the nuclear deal (albeit gently, considering his status), suddenly veered around and said yeah this is good for India. Now *that* is an achievement. I do believe Indira Gandhi herself could not have budged this man from saying what he believes, so how the fIfc {see above} managed that is beyond me...
Hmm 100 years.. give us time to make lotsa solar panels and wind turbines before we run out, not saying we as a collective will have the smarts to do that, but it will give us an opportunity to advance our technology to a less finite resource. Just cause it will eventually (potentially thousands of years) run out isn't a viable reason for not using it.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
There's only so much carbon fibre in the world to make windmills too.
How is this some arbitrary statement with no backup material at all insightful? Is this insightful:
With the potential for vacum energy extraction in the coming decades, history will show that pumping money into developing thorium reactors was silly as nuclear energy was just a temporary stop gap measure. Far better of would society have been if the money had been spent on developing a better massage table.
> Especially when there is no spare money to procure a wholly new reactor type.
Well that is the problem - and it is mainly because of safety regulations - which are a political area. We all know that the conventional nuclear reactor has a lot of safety issues, but it is certified! Getting a Thorium reactor to the same level of documentation and acceptance would be an expensive and lengthy process. As long as most countries have a de facto moratorium on nuclear reactor construction, there is no money in pushing new technology.
And man - on a technical level Thorium is so much superior that there is really no contest at all.
Sorry to break it to you, but there are only so many years that the sun will be burning and the wind will be blowing. So these aren't sustainable either, right? The truth is, there is a practical method for extracting Uranium and Thorium from sea water. Japanese research shows we could do this for about $120/kg of Uranium - which, if burned completely in a reactor produces a great deal of energy. Since Thorium is more abundant, it should be cheaper.
And the nice thing is that even if we used seawater Uranium to provide 100% of the world's energy (inc. transportation), the rivers of the world would still be adding more Uranium to the oceans each year than we could ever remove. So nuclear fission is not indefinitely sustainable. It's only sustainable as long as rivers keep running to the sea, which is on the same order of magnitude as the life cycle of sun-type stars.
Yeah, which brings up another important point: The Thorium does not need to be enriched - you just throw natural Thorium into the reactor and it works. This means fewer dual-use enrichment plants (the kind we want to bomb in Iran) so a much lower proliferation risk. But also: Much lower fuel cycle costs.
I suggest anyone seriously interested in our energy future to take the time to go through this report called "Technofixes" by CorporateWatch UK
http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/?lid=3126
According to this report, only wind and solar come out as having the potential to be both socially desirable and effective in combatting climate change. Hypothetical 4th generation nuclear reactors, even if decided upon, would be too little too late because it takes long to deploy at great up-front cost, and the waste problems remain unsolved (despite what you may hear about the magic of breeder reactors etc.)
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
Um... and you think the parts just happen to exist in their usable form in the earths crust, eh?
We just dig up a usable wind turbine ?
Not so.
The carbon footprint of making one 60m high wind turbine is approximately the same as the carbon footprint said wind turbine will save in fossil fuel in its lifetime. The addition of pollutants like solvents, heavy metals and other bi-products adds insult to injury.
Best of all is that these products are all finite resources as well.
So which heap do you want to dig from ?
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> The carbon footprint of making one 60m high wind turbine is approximately the same as the carbon footprint said wind turbine will save in fossil fuel in its lifetime.
No. Not even close. Orders of magnitude wrong.
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Molten fluoride salts are not known for safe handling.
Experience suggests otherwise. Any dangers due to fluoride salts are more than compensated by the fact that the reactor does not suffer from steam explosions or regulation complexities of a light water reactor. Furthermore, several molten salt reactors have been built and run for extended periods of time. This technology is proven.
And fusion is at least 30 years out, I guarantee you. The only promising fusion possibility is Brussard's Polywell, and if that pans out, we're talking about a whole new untested technology that will take decades to refine.
Thorium is tried and proven right now.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Centralization is to some extent the direct result of specialization within society. Nuclear power is extremely complex and to work in it, one needs highly specialized training. The direct result is that only a small subset of the population will ever be able to build and operate nuclear power plants, and thus nuclear power generation will always be highly centralized. The same is true of coal power or natural gas power generation, or, for that matter, food and clothing production. The less time I spend managing these things myself, the more time available to me to improve in my own chosen area of specialization.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
It's not just about getting oil for ourselves, its being able to control it for everyone else. It's also about using up someone else's oil before taking desperation measures for our own.
Ah, yes, invading other nations "to take their oil" isn't a "desperation measure", but investing in domestic industry is. What world are you living in?
I think the expectation was that everyone was surprised about the apparent "ease" of Afghanistan, and assumed that it would translate to Iraq
Nobody with any understanding of the situation was at all surprised about the ease with which the US took Afghanistan. We were a bit surprised by how quickly Iraq folded, though, and were quite surprised that they didn't use any gas or chemical warfare.
That's all irrelevant, though. By the time of the Iraq invasion, the US had already been involved in the Afghanistan effort for almost 2 years. Therefore the people planning the invasion - even if they were completely incompetent - would have had to know that their military commitment to Iraq would be 2 years at a minimum. Given the projected figures for Afghanistan at that point, they would more likely have been planning for a 6+ year effort, although they would have underestimated the force levels required. Therefore it would still have been MUCH cheaper to invest in domestic industry, instead of going overseas to steal other peoples resources. Your argument makes absolutely no sense.
If you think that first world nations fight wars over resources, then you really don't understand globalization. We fight over ideology, we fight to project power, and we fight to maintain our dominance and increase our security. If we want resources, we fucking buy them because it's a hell of a lot cheaper. Of course, some countries that we're interested in will also happen to have natural resources. In such cases it makes sense to try and secure some of those for our own use. However, that doesn't mean that the natural resources were the reason for the invasion - they may simply turn out to be a fringe benefit.
I say "may be" because, if you look at the Oil deals that Iraq has been making, you'll notice that the US is getting the short end of the stick.
Who exactly is arguing for community-run nuclear power plants, anyway? People want fuel cells, solar and wind so they can get off the grid, and get over the guilt of contributing to the pollution problem. Distributed power generation is potentially the biggest game changer since gasoline (which, ultimately, was also a massively distributed power generation scheme - see the automobile). Gasoline enabled the suburbs and the settlement of vast interiors of the US.
Distributed electricity generation will probably result in another renaissance of rural development, and ultimately the telecommuting society that was envisioned 10-15 years ago.
Oh, and a "commune in the woods" is also known as a "town." I'm pretty sure that before this plot of land had a desk and a computer, it was full of, you know, trees.