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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?"
Because a number of groups with rather different goals have one thing in common.
Sustainable nuclear power is a threat to their pocketbooks.
You mad
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
- 1/2 the country doesn't believe what scientists tell them: evolution, global warming, birth control/STDs. Why believe them now?
- No new nuclear plants have been built in 30-ish years.
- uranium was thought to be pretty much endless, so why do more research into thorium? (yes, U is getting in short supply now)
- nuclear power still has the stigma of 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl attached to it. It'll be tough to get public opinion on that changed, especially with advances in fuel cell and solar technologies
Nope the thorium reaction path produces weapons grade fissibles.
So still no explanation as to why no common use of Thorium reactors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium
The thorium fuel cycle mainly creates Uranium-233 which can be used for making nuclear weapons, and since there are no neutrons from spontaneous fission of U-233, U-233 can be used easily in a gun-type nuclear bomb. ... some weapons proliferation risk due to production of 233U; ....
India's Kakrapar-1 reactor is the world's first reactor which uses thorium rather than depleted uranium to achieve power flattening across the reactor core.[21] India, which has about 25% of the world's thorium reserves, is developing a 300 MW prototype of a thorium-based Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR). The prototype is expected to be fully operational by 2011, following which five more reactors will be constructed.[22] Considered to be a global leader in thorium-based fuel, India's new thorium reactor is a fast-breeder reactor and uses a plutonium core rather than an accelerator to produce neutrons. As accelerator-based systems can operate at sub-criticality they could be developed too, but that would require more research.[23] India currently envisages meeting 30% of its electricity demand through thorium-based reactors by 2050.[24]
On the one hand, modern uranium reactors (pebble bed, or even well-made light water reactors) are perfectly safe. Using thorium instead is at best a minor improvement.
On the other hand, if using a different fuel convinces members of the general public that nuclear power is safe, and allows the construction of new facilities in less than a decade, that's great, and worth it even if thorium is slightly inferior as a fuel. In short, it can be a PR win.
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 !
And how many genuinely foolproof and fail-safe machines do you use every day without noticing, because they work so well?
We can build nuclear reactors that are safe, and we don't need thorium to do it. We can build inherently safe nuclear reactors today using a variety of techniques. (See "void coefficient".)
But like I said above, if using thorium leads to new public acceptance of nuclear power, it's a win regardless of its technical merits.
Japan, Canada, South Korea
Those certainly use their own tech in nuclear reactors, they actually build them instead of contracting out. But don't have any bombs.
Ukraine is also an interesting example. Not sure how much of a nuclear power plant they can build domestically, but certainly quite a bit...and they had 5000 warheads when the USSR dissolved. Got rid of all of them.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
These days, people only mine Thorium while they're working on getting their skill up to the Fel Iron and outlands level. One thing worth noting is that somewhere in the past few patches, they've made it so you can mine Fel Iron at 275, which is pretty nice. No more running around the Eastern Plaguelands looking for Rich Thorium Nodes for those last few points when you'd rather be in Hellfire Peninsula.
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.
I prefer small chance of it leaking out (which happened only once) more than the routine of "leaking" it out into biosphere on a daily basis, in the amounts no nuclear power plant will match. As do coal-fired plants.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
According to this (see the section called "Fuel cycle concerns"), because there is no need to refine the Thorium fuel, which is the stage where the nuclear power companies currently make their money, they would need to change their business model to cope. We all know how much companies like to do that.
So, you combine the politicians' lack of desire to risk being associated with nuclear power, and the entrenched industry's lack of interest in the business model, and it's suddenly easy to explain.
Of course, if we're going to tackle the problems of the 21st Century, we have to be willing to solve hard engineering problems, but it makes perfect sense to tackle the easier ones first. Especially when it takes years to build and test a reactor, so developing anything really new is apt to take a decade or two before it can actually make money. So far, it has always seemed easier to tweak the existing, mature Uranium technology to deal with its remaining problems.
Personally, I'd love to see a sustained government effort to develop commercially viable Thorium power plants. (I have thought this since the 1970s.) But the reason that hasn't happened yet is Thorium just has too many unsolved problems -- it's not because of some industry conspiracy.
--Greg
India has Thorium reactors today.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
How many times have we designed things that are supposed to be unsinkable or infallible and then had them sink or fail? If there is a radioactive material being used in the plant, then there is a chance that some of it will leak out.
See, it's fucking dimwits like you that talk about 7-sigma events as if they're 3-sigma events that keep us using fucking coal, with its 100% probability of continuously releasing radioactive materials into the atmosphere. Get a fucking education, or failing that, go die in a fucking fire, you goddamn Luddite.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
As the subject says, there is already a proven and safe reactor design that can use the thorium fuel cycle.
Ian Ameline
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.
Um, I'm no mathematician, but there have been several hundred reactors built (maybe even a few thousand), and at least 2 have failed to some extent (TMI & Chernoble), which seems to put it right around 3 sigma... a 7-sigma event would only happen once for every 390,600,000,000 reactors.
I'm with you on the problems of coal, and I think nuclear is much better, but let's get real here - it's nowhere near 7 sigma.
Such reactors may be less dangerous and the may produce less radioactive waste. But even though. They still produce radioactive waste, which we cannot handle. And it uses still a extremely limited resource. We will eat up the reserves in no time. And it would be again a centralized energy production. We want a decentralized energy production to become independent from big energy companies and to produce the energy more safely. And a large number of small generators are much less vulnerable to a total loss than one big one. Big technology is bad technology.
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
So still no explanation as to why no common use of Thorium reactors.
Same reason we don't use hemp paper, and why anyone thinking we'll move away from oil based cars before the famine starts is fooling themselves.
The existing corporate status quo makes money doing it this way, and they won't change unless made to (by, say, running out of uranium or oil or what have you).
Sure, there's a chance of failure in every system, but good design can reduce it to an acceptable level. There's chance in everything: you could walk outside and be struck dead my a freak meteor.
As for the Titantic: how many passenger liner disasters have there been since her sinking?
Plutonium fears from breeder reactors and the green movement in the 60/70's with their irrational fear of "OMG NUCLAEAR!!!111"(yes I spelled that wrong on purpose). Accidents with things like the sodium reactor in Japan, and so on just give them more fearmongering tools. Instead of "we need to make sure this doesn't happen again, what went wrong and how do we make sure it doesn't happen again." That's why we're 30 years behind the times, and why the US has no functional breeders, and why you're just starting to use MOX again, and why you ship plutonium to Canada, Japan and S.Korea for us to make the fuel for our own reactors.
I realize that people are going to get pissy as I've now blamed the entire environmentalist green movement, reality is that's why there haven't been any new reactors built in the US. You need oh 100 easy, you needed 50 new ones to be under construction 20yrs ago. Even Japan and Canada have a projected timelines for new reactors into 2065 and where/when they'll be built to deal with electrical generation.
Om, nomnomnom...
A heavy water reactor is the anti-thesis of the salt-based Thorium reactors.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
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
This is part of why the whole quasi-conspiratorial story of "why we didn't go with thorium in the first place" is utter nonsense. It was not because "we wanted bombs instead" and were prejudiced against "superior thorium", it is because only if you have an established nuclear industry cranking out materials usable in bombs by the thousands can you build these reactors in the first place. Either you must have natural/low enriched uranium reactors to produce plutonium, or you need large amounts of highly enriched uranium (prime bomb material) to load into thorium breeders.
Also unacknowledged is that the particular type of reactor being promoted, the molten fluoride salt reactor, was and is a complex technology that requires substantial additional development. Only one single reactor of this kind was ever built, and it was an 8 megawatt (thermal) materials test reactor, not a power reactor. We are looking at many years of additional development before construction can start on a prototype full scale power reactor. I agree that this technology should be further pursued, and it may turn out more successful that plutonium breeders (no successful power plants have been built, just several failures) but it is by no means guaranteed.
Hyman Rickover, by the way, was interested in light water uranium fueled reactors because they are a good technology for powering submarines, not because they produce plutonium (they are lousy plutonium producers, the yield is low and the material produced has terrible properties for bombs).
Check out the 2005 IAEA survey document (http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/IAEA-TECDOC-1450.pdf) for a good summary of the thorium technology options and prospects.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
'Because everyone that has nuclear reactors also builds bombs...'
In this case, one can't blame Canada!
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
What the Chernobyl exclusion zone demonstrates is that from the animals POV, humans are worse than a nuclear disaster.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
What type of nuclear reactor to use it completely unrelated to what fuel to use to power cars.
You aren't going to stick a nuclear reactor in the trunk, and how the grid gets its electricity has no impact on electric cars either.
My point is there is an existing system that involves large amounts of profit in doing it the old way, and the people making said profit have no reason to foster change just because science said so. In fact, given the dismal state of the US education and patent systems, companies often can actively push back by simply hiring, destroying, or buying out people with new ideas.
Look at digital music, for example -- we had to drag the music industry kicking and screaming into the 21st century, and they only came along after they had time to get their lawyers and executives to put down their clay tablets and abacuses long enough to think up some admittedly pretty innovative ways of screwing the rest of us over.
I guess a more succinct way to put it is that corporations have used profit to make science and progress their bitch this past century, and I see no reason why this won't continue going forward.
Because everyone that has nuclear reactors also builds bombs, so they go hand in hand, and cost less in the short run.
No. South Korea, Japan, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, have nuclear reactors and do not have nuclear weapons. This is not by any means an exhaustive list either.
You do not need nuclear reactors to make nuclear weapons. You can make nuclear fission weapons by using U-235 or Plutonium. If you have a centrifuge cascade like Iran does, or some other means to separate fuel, you can make U-235 weapons without owning a single nuclear reactor. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima (Little Boy) was of this type.
What 'heat' other than strongly worded letters did the State of Isreal take in response to their Gaza attacks?
They're not even part of the Non-proliferation treaty. Your assertations need citations.
Blar.
I'm hugely in favour of solar and wind power, but evidently you need to understand "intermittency" and "storage" a little better. Like what keeps the lights on after 5 cold still cloudy mid-winter days...
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
Buffoonery. It's business, pure and simple.
We have an established process and no one wants to buy that system. There is no reason to build a new system, which will still generate wastes which no one wants in their back yard, and small amounts of weapons grade material which no one wants, and basically no energy producer is willing to fund for fear that they will be betting their entire company on a system that will be hindered.
Progress-energy and others have spent a ton of money only to be held up by regulators (NRC) for 24 months! Figure the vig on a 5 Billion dollar loan for 24 months! This hold-up is PARTIALLY because of the political fear that nuclear is BAD. These power producers are borrowing BILLIONS of dollars and paying INTEREST every day on these dollars to build a very long term system, only to be held up by all manner of interests (Federal, State, and local).
You want nuclear of any kind? You need to guarantee some loans. Nuclear simply isn't politically correct. Period.
Simply put, it MAY BE the safest power system that the planet has to offer, and no one wants it because it is "nuclear". NIMBY. Average Joe doesn't want it. Period.
It won't matter if it is plutonium, uranium, thorium, pebble bed, liquid fuel, gaseous fuel, or run by fairy dust! People are scared of nuclear, and it will take a ton of long term education the change that. "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. "
And by the way, I know a couple of aspiring nuclear engineers who would love to work on thorium reactors, but there are no jobs in nuclear right this second. Hiring freezes abound. Also, you can build a perfectly good bomb from Thorium by-products. U-233 Teapot MET 1957 20+kt bomb anyone? And you can build a perfectly safe reactor from highly enriched U-235. Or plutonium. Finally, you can build a suitable explosive device from your water heater! Go watch Mythbusters and scale up according to need.
Pedal your conspiracies elsewhere.
Your humble senior reactor operator.
thorium? are we not on to saronite yet?
Life is what you make of it.
"Fail-safe" does not mean "free from failure". Fail-safe means that when said machine fails, it always fails in such a way that minimizes harm to equipment and operators.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Posting anonymously because it's bull. 200 years to peak oil there? Maybe if they don't sell any.
This isn't flamebait at all. None other than Dick Cheney was running around telling everyone who would listen that there was a huge production problem in the middle east. He had a great quote to sum it, something like, "If the Saudi's have so much more oil, they would have to be finding other fields like Gawar, and they haven't been". In fact, he calculated out how many Gawar size mega fields anybody would have to find, simply to meet existing demand, and they aren't out there.
Suddenly we find the USA sitting in Iraq, for what reason? The whole Bush administration's energy policy was essentially to get the dibs on the last remaining oil taps in the world, its own coastlines, interior, and in Iraq, essentially to buy time for its other plan of shoveling money at alternative energy projects would kick in.
This is my sig.
> 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.
Gee, if you're so easy to scare, try this out: Building industrial-scale photovoltaic installations might raise the albedo of the Earth so much that it will disrupt climate patterns and kill you with lightning. That's totally possible. I'm sure you can come up with your own nightmare scenarios for any reasonable technology.
But you know what scares me? The fossil-fuel-burning status quo, which is what your dumb fears are (perhaps unintentionally) perpetuating.
It's called a pebble-bed reactor, and the reaction is automatically limited in the mixture of uranium as the reactor heats up through a mechanism called neutron cross section broadening.
It is failproof.
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)
No. What if a giant picks the reactor up and uses it to hammer pedestrians? Didn't think of that, did they? Failproof, my foot.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
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.
But that would take large capital investment of hundreds of millions if not billions in R&D, production of new facilities, etc., which would decrease short-term profit statements--and executives want to avoid decreases in profit statements at all costs so they can keep stock prices as inflated as possible, and milk their yearly bonuses. The current corporate structure punishes good long-term planning and rewards short-term profitability, so it's not surprising that no one's interested in innovating if it costs too much in the here-and-now to build increased profitability in the distant tomorrow.
Hell, one of the first things "forward-looking" executives do when they get into power is cut short-term costs by any means necessary, even if it means crippling the entire company's future by, for example, spinning-off the expensive R&D operations which have kept the company innovating into new companies so their budget gets off your books. Cf. "Agilent" and "Lucent"--after being spun off, their parent companies stagnated grossly, with the venerated HP a shell of its old self and the "original" AT&T imploding through corporate greed and stupidity with SBC buying up a relatively-empty husk. Oh, and in the process AT&T bought Olivetti Research Laboratory, "Europe's leading communications engineering research laboratory," only to shutter it 3 years later to save money. Corporate asshats at work.
Remember all those financial wizards who melted down the whole economy by discovering new ways to make a quick buck, at the expense of--well, the whole country? How many of them are in the unemployment line now, and how many are still making millions? Yep, thought so. Those car-maker execs who failed to innovate and took the whole American auto industry from best-in-the-world to also-rans--how many of them are collecting unemployment alongside the factory workers they put out of work? Yep, thought so. A few of the top execs lose their jobs whenever big corporations get run into the ground, but they always [golden-] parachute into a new company right quickly.
The whole corporate system is FUBAR, and I have to blame it on globalization--which pushes governments to deregulate lest multinationals scale back in-country operations for laxer overseas venues. So no, no one will willingly invest hundreds of millions to billions to get "4x more product from the same ammount of raw material" and "re[duce] production cost per product unit, increase margin and make a step ahead from competitors" if they can make more short-term profit by business as usual.
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."--Andrew Jackson
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.
Radioactivity is a concentration problem. Radioactivity, just like chemical pollution, is dangerous only beyond a certain threshold: we are right now exposed to cosmic rays, but that is not a cause of cancer, because our bodies can handle that level of radioactivity: they evolved for millions of years in this environment.
That's not the generally accepted view, which is that any dose of radiation could cause cancer, with probability proportional to dose (up to a point). Your "dangerous beyond a threshold" argument is only true for the acute effects of radiation, not its carcinogenic characteristics. If the standard model is correct, the radiation from coal plants certainly does cause cancer (as do cosmic rays), it's just hard to detect because cancer is so common anyway.