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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?"
- 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]
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 !
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
and worth it even if thorium is slightly inferior as a fuel. In short, it can be a PR win.
Based on the article, I'm not sure that thorium is an inferior fuel. At the very least, it seems more efficient and more abundant, as well as less dangerous than uranium. To me, that's more important than raw power output, especially given that thorium cannot be weaponized.
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
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).
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.
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
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.
By most accounts, a functional prototype reactor is 20 years away.
The designer of the molten salt Thorium reactors ran his reactor non-stop for over 10 years IIRC. This was in the 1960s. What is unproven exactly?
Extracting thorium from the ground is harder than for uranium,
Which we will run out of in 10 years.
Thorium will also produce dangerous, radioactive by products,
And Uranium produces candy canes and puppies? If Thorium really is harder to refine or weaponize than Uranium, we'd be better off switching to Thorium, so you contradict yourself.
Also, Thorium reactions do not produce plutonium. The fact that Thorium reactions do not produce weaponized by products is one of its huge advantages, above and beyond its abundance and higher efficiency as nuclear fuel when compared to Uranium.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
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.
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
The "uses more carbon to produce than it saves in its lifetime" charge is a persistent myth. It seems just "shocking" enough to be true, and happens to coincide with what many rich interests would like to be true. As a result, it comes up quite often in non-fact-centric talk shows and as a result is something that a lot of people just "know". Unfortunately, it's just not true.
I have researched this and haven't been able to find a time when it was EVER true, but it certainly isn't true of either modern solar cells (even in small-scale deployments) or wind turbines. Moreover, as the general power supply becomes "greener", the carbon footprint for manufacturing (a huge portion of which comes from the energy needed to produce, not raw materials) also declines.
Example calculation for mid-size (office building) solar deployment: http://greenestofthegreen.wordpress.com/2008/09/08/solar-panels-the-smallest-footprint/
- Calculates a carbon break-even point of 15 months, for a product expected to last for 25 years on the inside.
- Obviously comes from the company making these, so take it with a grain of salt, but it's not likely to be off by the order of magnitude or more needed to make your statement true.
I can't find similar calculations for wind turbines fro a quick Google search, but the return on carbon "investment" there is shorter-term (assuming a windy area and fairly large-scale deployment of multiple wind turbines in a pass). If you have a citable reference stating otherwise, please share it with the class.