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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
- 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
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
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
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
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?
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.
A heavy water reactor is the anti-thesis of the salt-based Thorium reactors.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
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
North Korea has nukes, and we leave them alone.
Nah. It's because Seoul (with 25% of ROK's population) is 30km from the DMZ, which means that it's within reach of large artillery and MLRS/Katyusha rockets.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
They have invented a myth that Jews were massacred and place this above God, religions and the prophets. The West has given more significance to the myth of the genocide of the Jews, even more significant than God, religion, and the prophets, (it) deals very severely with those who deny this myth but does not do anything to those who deny God, religion, and the prophet.
Basically, he denies that the holocaust happened. And attacks those who have tolerance of religion or the lack of.
Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism? You should know that this slogan, this goal, can certainly be achieved.
Basically, not only does he think Israel doesn't have the right to exist, but apparently neither does America.
In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country. [...] In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have this.
And he not only denies gay rights, but denies that there were even homosexuals in Iran. Even America didn't deny the fact there were black people who were being oppressed. Some might have said that they weren't being oppressed but no one would be as stupid as to say that there is no such thing as black people.
So in light of a politically unstable region, a leader who has made stupid and dangerous comments, how can we say letting them have nuclear power/weapons is a good thing? If Iran wants nuclear power, how about they let the developed nations build and supervise the infrastructure until Iran becomes stable?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Thank god for the Canadians and their CAN-DU attitude.
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.
How exactly did Israel suffer and how exactly are they accountable, any more than Iran? They weren't accountable when they got nukes, and once they did, they became even less so. They ensure Palestine is essentially a ghetto without real blowback. Nukes gave them the same non-accountability and irresponsibility than Pakistan got with their nukes.
I'm no fan of the Iranian govt, but neither am I of the Israeli one. Instead of teetering on edge all the time about when Israel is going to attack Iran's wannabe nuke facilities with rockets, I'd rather they have MAD. Actually I'd rather there were a regulated peace, but no one (and I mean the US govt here) wants that, apparently.
By the way, it's irrelevant how many allies it has "in that part" of the world. They have the only ally that counts.
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.
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.
"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.
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