Slashdot Mirror
Thorium Fuel Has Proliferation Risk
Capt.Albatross writes "Thorium has attracted interest as a potentially safer fuel for nuclear power generation. In part, this has been because of the absence of a route to nuclear weapons, but a group of British scientists have identified a path that leads to uranium-233 via protactinium-233 from irradiated thorium. The protactinium separation could possibly be done with standard lab equipment, which would allow it to be done covertly, and deliver the minimum of U233 required for a weapon in less than a year. The full article is in Nature, but paywalled."
Thorium is the only thing standing between us and heat death.
Since the paywalled article doesn't tell us how they think others will get past a decay chain that includes gamma emission, which is the usually cited reason for preferring thorium.
"The full article is in Nature, but paywalled."
Well, then there is no risk of proliferation.
If global climate change is going to be as bad as some people are saying, then it makes sense to just use the damn thorium. We've been dealing with nuclear weapons for more than 70 years.
That would be most of the population. The religious nutters are a small percentage.
Still seems lower than the traditional route. And (FTA) instead of using a special facility to directly bombard/convert the thorium into fissible U233 in a short time, they just let the stuff sit for a month and decay into U233 naturally. And the article states that using the wait-to-decay method, theres also fewer/less radiotoxic byproduct, so it seems like a cheaper/safer method to start with.
They still turn it into U233, the bomb stuff. just a difference in timescale, facility and method. So there was always a weapon risk.
the whole "low prolfieration" thing just came from theoretically being able to spot the facilities doing the converting...though I think leaving the stuff sitting around and waiting for it to decay would also be theoretically somewhat simple to detect.
All in all, it seems like waiting for it to decay naturally is better, unless the ratio of fissible material is significantly worse, sufficient to outweigh the fewer toxic byproducts thing..
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
If the UK gets the U-233 bomb, next thing you know they will be threatening their rich, oil producing neighbor Norway. Norway will restart heavy water production for their nuclear program. France will increase their stockpiles (and make more nuclear weapons). The Germans will opt for chemical weapons. Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg will offer Russia and the US military bases.
And god forbid if the Irish get ahold of a nuke covertly from the British! They'll turn Iceland into a burnt wasteland.
Time to freeze British financial transactions until they give up their nuclear research. Time to end the menace before it all gets out of control.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
The US detonated a bomb in Operation Teapot "MET" in 1955
You do not need religious just fanatics will do.
there was always a weapons risk, cause the thorium still goes to U233. The idea they couldnt make bombs from it wasnt really that they couldnt make bombs, but that they couldnt HIDE that they were doing it cause of the facilities needed to convert the thorium into fuel (in theory....in reality, how hard is it to bury construction). The ratio of source to fuel is still pretty high though (233:1 !!), so you still need lots of room to store it while it decays naturally. Seems like you'd still want to bury it/hide it (leaving construction tell tales) as just leaving it in a random warehouse to decay would be easily detectable by any radiological sniffers.
So really not much changes with this new information. Except for the fat that letting it decay naturally has fewer toxic byproducts, which seems like a win regardless.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
News for nerds, stuff that matters. Not news for zealots, stuff that might matter.
Mind you, they occasionally fail at the former, but this isn't one of those cases. It's news for nerds, and it matters.
Uranium reactors were originally developed over Thorium at least partially BECAUSE you could make bombs with the technology. The nuclear arms race is 'over' in the west but I'm interested to see if this revelation makes Thorium reactor research suddenly interesting to world powers.
If you beer isn't nausea-inducing you're not drinking enough... or it's just flavoured water.
Guessing you're American it's probably the latter.
And how very dare you call us mostly harmless!!? Where's my pen...
This is all pretty standard and well known. It still takes hot cells and an operating reactor to do.
And, there is nothing in it that can't be done right now regardless if there are thorium fueled reactors or not. The irradiation of the thorium can be done in existing research reactors. Thorium metal is available (it's used to increase emission in electrical filaments and in the mantles of camping lanterns).
This seems mostly to be FUD.
Breeding U-233 from thorium always creates enough highly radioactive U-232 that makes it unusable for weapon uses, and due to the very close atomic weight is incredibly diffuclt to remove. Random fissions during either assembly of a gun-type weapon or even an implosion mean that you're far more likely to end up with a "fizzle" (very low yield) due to starting the chain reaction too soon, than to get the actual yield that the weapon was designed for. And since the material is so dangerous to handle, the workers who have to put the thing together and maintain it are quite likely to die quickly, as will the electronics necessary to fire the weapon.
There's risk??? That's a four letter word! Kill it with fire!
(Meanwhile uranium reactors are around *because* they could make bomb material.)
This reminded me of a three year old discussion I had on Slashdot before about thorium's fuel cycle yielding uranium-233 ... not sure if new evidence has come to light, can't read the Nature article.
My work here is dung.
I say we nuke Earth from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
There may be a risk of nuclear weapons proliferation if we replace fossil fuels with nuclear. But if we don't, there is a damned certainty that the climate will continue changing faster than it ever has in the history of the human species. We are at the beginning of a global extinction event that has a very good chance of causing our own extinction. Nuclear weapons are barely a minor concern comparatively.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
From the sound of it this proliferation chain could be readily accessed by irradiating chunks of thorium with *any* reactor - for example by using thorium instead of lead to shield the core, or perhaps doping the control rods with it. And since thorium is a very common metal available everywhere in the world, often as waste from other mining operations. I don't really see how using it as fuel would increase the proliferation risk substantially. Well, perhaps by allowing third parties to steal partially spent fuel, but I think it's usually the governments we're worried about is it not?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I'm not so sure that most of the leaders of these countries are religious fanatics.
From what I see they are often not religious - they may pretend to be religious and use religious fanatics as tools and pawns. But they are in no hurry to die and see Allah- they are having a good time on Earth.
Using nukes would mean the end of the nice life for them, so they'd only do that if they are going to lose that lifestyle anyway. Having nukes makes the USA less likely to back them into such a corner.
No, I think you actually need religious with the whole afterlife thing.
Funny how no one right-thinking human being even seriously contemplates a massive, intrusive regulatory apparatus for fertilizer even though it did a heck of a job in the hands of Timothy McVeigh. It's also like common sense sometimes prevails...
He doesn't need to party. Iran has large Uranium reserves. This is mostly good news for India which has poor Uranium deposits but quite rich Thorium deposits. Considering they are one of the most populous nations in the planet they would stand a lot to gain from Thorium energy research advancing further.
And Canada/Mexico doesn't want any of them.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Any evidence Israel is threatening to use their nukes; save only for defense? I somehow doubt they are as it would undermine their position globally.
News for nerds, stuff that matters. Not news for zealots, stuff that might matter.
Mind you, they occasionally fail at the former, but this isn't one of those cases. It's news for nerds, and it matters.
Yeah, that whole science thing. Not for nerds - amirite?
This makes manual handling in a glove box with only light shielding (as commonly done with plutonium) too hazardous, (except possibly in a short period immediately following chemical separation of the uranium from its decay products) and instead requiring complex remote manipulation for fuel fabrication.
I say, lets give it to AQ and other terrorists. We simply require that they pick it up themselves. They will not get too far, and it is detectable.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Thorium may be old school, but it can also be done quickly and safely.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I was worried about terrorists getting their hands on this technology, but then I read "The full article is in Nature, but paywalled.". Yay! Safe from the evil doers!
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The problem they ran into, at Verdun, was that after chemical bombardment of the enemy you cannot tell the difference between (a) dead enemy and (b) enemy pretending to be dead until you get within accurate artillery and machine gun range.
So no, the Germans wouldn't go for chemical weapons. They would go for ballistic rockets and cruise missiles with conventional warheads, just like they did in WW2. And, back on topic, just like other Middle East countries are doing. The Iranians are far more likely to want a precision ballistic missile that can target the Knesset with a tonne or so of conventional explosive than a nuclear warhead. It is far more of a realistic bargaining tool.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Tell that to the Australians.
It is the main source of radiation from coal being burned but coal is not necessarily the best source of it. It is found in granite and in deposits with rare earth elements as well.
Years ago we were looking for an ultra-reliable thyristor with very fast response and thought we had found it in a US manufacturer's catalog - but the result of contacting them was an unexpected phone call from someone who sounded very suspicious, and we never did manage to source them. Later I found out they were for bomb triggers in MAD nukes and were very rad-hard. (With a true strategic missile you do not need to put the thing together till you intend to use it as part of your grand plan, while battlefield and MAD weapons need to be deployed very quickly. The Cuba crisis was particularly severe because the Russians only had strategic weapons; once they were ready for launch they were either going to be fired or scrapped, and politicians hate to scrap things.)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
This isn't really news. The original version of the Smyth Report mentioned research into using Thorium. The second edition deleted that paragraph. It was the only notable change from edition to edition. We're pretty sure the KGB noticed the change and went, like, "Hmmmmm...".
Under likely laboratory conditions, that is.
I like the idea of aneutronic fusion, I really like it a lot, but a theoretician has apparently shown it to be impossible to realize. Why? He did some calculations and figured out that the energy loss in a reasonably-sized thermal plasma from Bremsstrahlung radiation, which is a function of the atomic weight of the atoms in the plasma, causes too much energy loss to be sustained by fusing nuclei. The plasma radiates its heat away too fast, and you can't stop the X-rays and gamma rays within the plasma to keep it from cooling.
The Wikipedia article on aneutronic fusion covers this issue some and provides a few references. But the upshot is Bremsstrahlung makes aneutronic fusion a non-starter. It's physically impossible unless you have a VERY LARGE or VERY DENSE ball of plasma--neither of which is achievable in anything like a tokamac.
You *might* be able to get such a reaction to work in, say, a laser-ignited small fusion explosion, or if you can somehow manage to NOT have a thermal plasma. However, both of those are much harder to arrange for than a D-T thermal plasma.
It's really very sad, but DirTy DT reactions with their associated neutrons may be the only thing we have a chance of engineering any time soon!
--PeterM
Well define offensively? Would they use it as a first strike weapon against one of their neighbors? Probably not.
But what if the Palestinians somehow good enough weapons and training to take out their army? I'm not so sure the Israeli government wouldn't consider nuking them in that case.
So...
You aren't a nerd unless your focus is computers?
You can't be ... ... a materials design nerd? ... a neuroscience nerd? ... a genetic design nerd? ... an atomic reaction nerd? ... a political relations nerd? ... a food preparation (or consumption) nerd?
Google tells me:
1) A foolish or contemptible person who lacks social skills or is boringly studious: "one of those nerds who never asked a girl to dance".
2) An intelligent, single-minded expert in a particular technical discipline or profession.
I find it interesting that a nerd of (a popular) discipline don't want to share this blog with nerds of other (perhaps less popular, or less represented) disciplines. Perhaps it has to do with pride in wearing the label.
I don't think the risk is a state.
Even the pretty darn irrational like Iran and DPRK leadership are rational enough to understand MAD. Anyone in charge of an installed government is in a pretty good spot, and won't want to screw it up. Saddam Husein being a note worthy exception; he could have saved himself easily even after 911 by just throwing open the doors and letting Weapons inspectors do whatever they like, it would have let the air out of the US position.
Most likely its the case Ahmadinejad likes being President and the Iatola (sp?) likes being the supreme leader; they know they'd never be allowed to keep such a position if they actually used a nuke. So they won't even if they believe their rhetoric about us being the infidel they won't do it. The entire rest of the world be line up against them; or they'd be killed in a counter strike.
Trouble is the Arab uprisings have shown us even thought to be stable governments like Syria and Egypt can be here one day gone the next. Any new government will have all the same things to lose if they thought to use a nuke, so no matter who ends up in power the deal will be cushy enough they'd never nuke anyone. The question is what happens if the weapons go missing during the anarchic period between governments? They could conceivably find their way to hands of some loony with nothing to lose, who might actually use one.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Checking your history, MacArthur was *very* keen to use nuclear weapons in those little skirmishes.
Sure they can, but you can stop them with the Holy Hand Grenade.
U233 created in a thorium reactor will be poisoned with U232 at about 0.4 percent (very dependent on design, but this is an good example of the kind of mix you will see). Even if you segment the protactinium, you are still going to have some U232 in the mix. This can not be chemically separated, and separating the isotopes of something that is hot borders on the insane. U232 has a decay chain that emits a 2.9 MeV gamma ray, and its pretty hot as far as how fast it will decay (Half life of 69 years if I remember right). It decays to Th-228 and in like 2 years into Ti-208 + nasty gamma. Very nasty stuff that will really ruin your day, and any electronics in your nuclear weapon in a hurry. You would be stupid to pick this as a nuclear fuel for a weapon, when you could just make plutonium like anyone with any sense would do. You just put some natural uranium in neutron flux of a light water reactor, wait a month or so, and separate the plutonium. Simple well known technology that works, not some crazy possibility that some PhD dreamed up because he wants to prove a point. Sure you could do it, if your an idiot who wants to make your life really hard and you have a death wish.
Also if you are running a thorium breeder reactor you are running so close to break even on neutrons so if you remove Uranium from the cycle your ability to maintain reactor criticality will disappear. Also you have the same problem if you try and use the neutron flux to make plutonium it wouldn't work. Thorium reactors are shitty for making bombs, that is why we don't have them even though they are awesome technology that would solve so many energy problems. Thorium has little risk of being used to make bombs, and if someone is idiotic enough to do it they will die of gamma poisoning way before they have enough fuel for bombs.
Jeff | MemVance - Memory Advanced | View my blog on memory and study techniques
If the UK gets the U-233 bomb, next thing you know they will be threatening their rich, oil producing neighbor Norway. Norway will restart heavy water ...
Blah blah blah ... here's a version you can listen to instead. You can even sing along!
So what was their excuse for the 1100-odd years before there was a "toxic US policy?"
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
How about blowing up a semi-trailer full of smoke detectors, sitting on a bridge upwind of some city?
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Right, because there never was a movement such as Russian style Communism where a tremendous number of people who didn't believe in a personal afterlife were willing to die because of the projected benefits to future generations. There's never been a war fought to a Pyrrhic victory, where both sides didn't have religion to cause it, so there never was a Mongol horde or an Ottoman empire. No persons who don't believe in an afterlife have ever been fanatics, and if we just stuff all the believers into one big oven there won't be any fanaticism any more. Right. And you have title to this bridge in Brooklyn where a Nigerian prince has a hidden fortune....
Who is John Cabal?
It'd still need to be nation-state fanatics however. Ashley et al. did point out the need for neutron bombardment for this pathway - so you'll need some sort of existing reactor/neutron source. Now there are a lot of those things around, but not many in the exclusive control of non-nation-state fanatics. However, thorium is a heck of a lot easier to get a hold of versus traditional weapon source material, and this proposed conversion removes a lot of complicated barriers to entry from the lab side.
From the article
So, yeah. If one is worried about proliferation - then thorium needs to be considered.
Natural thorium has 232 nucleons (and the trace isotopes all have even fewer), to get U233 you need to add a nucleon, probably via neutron bombardment. And since thorium is pretty stable (14 billion year half-life) you'll have to wait a *long* time for natural decay to provide much in the way of bombardment. The "wait for decay" period discussed is *after* the thorium has been irradiated to become unstable Th233, which then decays to protactinium 233 and then to U233
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Read TFA.
Most U-233 that comes out of a reactor is formed by protactinium-233 decay.
While U-232 and U-233 are nearly impossible to separate (which is why Thorium has been considered to be proliferation-resistant), protactinium-233 is very easy to separate chemically, and leads to nearly pure U-233.
As mentioned in a comment to TFA, U-232 comes from Pa232. U-233 comes from PA 233. So, in order to get only U-233 out you would seem to need to separate Pa233 from Pa232. Aside from (maybe) less gamma exposure, that should be no easier than separating U232 from U233.
You just have to throw them hard enough....
Anything can become weaponized if you work hard enough. It is the cost of purity that drives the difficulty.
Bunnies can't.
Well, that's no ordinary bunny; That's the most foul, cruel and bad tempered rodent you ever set eyes on! Look, that bunny's got a vicious streak a mile wide- It's a killer! He's got huge sharp-- er, He can leap abou-- ... Look at the Bones!
Excuse for what? You need go back less than 100 years to see them with a democratically elected president (that we overthrew and installed a king... over oil) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Right, because there never was a movement such as Russian style Communism where a tremendous number of people who didn't believe in a personal afterlife were willing to die because of the projected benefits to future generations.
Were all those people in the Gulag willing to die, or made to die? How about the Ukrainian Genocide?
Because:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Reserve_estimates
No, thorium is not the only thing standing between us and heat death.
We have a shitting big nuclear power station 93 million miles away and we can harness that.
Shit, man, why are you idiots against renewables always so bloody alarmist?
However, if you can do this process, the you can already build Nuclear explosives.
It's very hard, and delicate.
So, yes you can build bombs..but so what?
It's still safer, there waste has a substantial lower half life, and it's is still clean.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Protip: On measure alcohol by volume, the other by weight. The actual difference isn't what you think it is.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
not small enough.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Please don't give this more credit than it deserves. But I have seen other stories saying the same thing from long before this story. But no one is ever on the record.
Story
I'd classify myself as much a science nerd as computer nerd (if not more). And I know plenty of physicists who you could at a stretch call nuclear (mostly more along the lines of quantum) who read it frequently.
Also I was under the impression getting 233 from a thorium reactor was rather old news, and the gamma emissions would ruin your day if you actually tried to build a bomb with it.
A Pyrrhic victory is not the same as mutually assured destruction. Your examples are not relevant.
None of them are "we will knowingly destroy ourselves, our enemy, and the chance of any posterity to use either land for a long long time".
There never has been a MAD scenario like the current one that has actually played out.
"No persons who don't believe in an afterlife have ever been fanatics, and if we just stuff all the believers into one big oven there won't be any fanaticism any more. Right."
This has absolutely nothing to do with anything that I said. Taken in context I facetiously agreed with the GP that religious fanatics were needed for MAD.
I did not say that religion is required for fanaticism. I did not say that religious people are bad. And that's what you're implying I said with your sarcasm.
I will however concede that I was wrong and that religion is probably not required to such a fanatical movement but I still think certain religions mixed with fanaticism make it more likely.
Leaving aside any discussion of whether or not this is new and its possible impact on the thorium fuel cycle...there's an even bigger story here that nobody seems to have mentioned.
If someone could make fissionable Uranium easily and covertly from Thorium using only readily available equipment, what's stopping them from just doing it? We don't need a thorium fuel cycle for someone with nefarious plans to use this information.
We've only been able to keep uranium and its byproducts under control because commercially viable reserves are concentrated in a few relatively stable countries and the amount of naturally-occurring uranium that needs to be mined to make a bomb is huge compared to the amount that goes into the bomb itself. Thorium is readily available worldwide in massive quantities, most of which is the right isotope. Controlling the Thorium supply is going to be a nightmare.
It seems to me that this blows the lid totally off of the proliferation situation. Pretty much anyone with the resources needed to build an atomic bomb could do this to get the material they need. How can we possibly hope to keep this situation under control?
we all know the best thorium veins are in the insect hives in Feralas and its a PITA to get them and compete with the other miners. I dont think the risk of making bombs is high because most people just bypass this zone and go for the endgame mats that sell better.
No one is ever in the caves mining thorium so there is no need to worry :) :)
My recollection is that the spontaneous fission rate for 232U or 233U is orders of magnitude less than for 240Pu. It's the 240Pu that makes making a gun type bomb from Plutonium impossible, though the spontaneous fission rate with 239Pu is at least a couple orders of magnitude larger than 235U and 233U. The critical mass for 233U is smaller than for 235U, which would make a gun type bomb easier.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Not the full article, I quit after I got this far. There's a thing called Google out on the internet that often can find you free sources for paywalled material in just a few keystrokes.
http://phys.org/news/2012-12-thorium-proliferation-nuclear-wonder-fuel.html
This doesn't matter.
Common but obsolete design BWRs can also be used for weapons production.
So the Thorium reactors prime advantage remains: safety.
No risk of thermal runaway.
Implicit safety by auto-shutdown.
Etc, etc etc,
OK, I'm going to say something crazy.
Energy is dangerous. All energy is dangerous is treated the wrong way. Period. We use gas every day and it is one of the more reactive and dangerous material out there. However it has a high potential energy. Just a like a chemical reaction that takes place in a bullet. The amount of kinetic energy is great, and if you point it at your eye, yeah a bit more dangerous.
So yes. Take ANY source of energy and I bet I could prove a way to make it potentially a lot more dangerous. However in this case it seems more of a mental excercise. Yes you can change Throium into weapons grade stuff. Would you? No you would not, because you would likely die in the process, it likely wouldn't work well if at all, and there arer much easiers and better documented and proven ways to make weapon grade stuff from other means.
What people don't seem to realize is that MOST of the reactors that were build long ago, the technology was selected for the exact oposite reasons we are discussing today, and if you think about it, why didn't they go with Thorium when fuel is so easy to come by? Because they needed nuclear weapons, and if it can be created as a by-product from an energy source, then WIN-WIN! So peoples arguements about this seem very silly to me. It might make sense if you totally shut down all other reactors, were going to build only thorium, then might say that while difficult it is possible to make weapons, etc... Its like having gun store on every corner, with free guns for everyone, and then getting worked up about someone posting the design for a particular part of one type of gun on the internet. Yeah, you could maybe figure out how to build a gun and hurt someone, however it would be hard to do, and you're likely to kill yourself in the process, particulary when you can just walk down the street and just get a gun anyway. A totally horrible analogy and an exageration but whatever.
Ya, that was totally a troll post. Thank you faceless gutless enemy who happened to get mod points.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
. . . . which is why you get someone else to build the bomb for you.
No, seriously. Design your chemistry equipment and machining operations using small quantities or lanthanides ; double-check that it works ; change the feedstock to use your "hot" material and hire some illegal immigrants to pour chemicals and drain vessels. When they die, bury the bodies somewhere quiet.
People who are going to build home-made nuclear weapons are unlikely to have high moral standards otherwise.
Actually, scrub the "home-made" in that previous sentence.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
By ruined day I was more talking about spurious signals in your electronics (leading to unpredictable behavior) and ionization of your chemical explosive detonators (both of which may lead to premature detonation). I don't know if these issues have been solved and I can't cite a source other than that I've overheard several other physics types disucussing it and that it fits reasonably well with what I know (although checking the decay products/energies, it's not as bad as I recalled...maybe the issue had to do with protactinium and thorium impurities?).
The result was that it was not something you'd want to make a bomb you would keep out of.
If, on the other hand, there were some person/group with the technical ability to build said bomb and the ability to steal the uranium who wanted to detonate it immediately, then I would think there would be plenty of other things to worry about (such as said person sabotaging one of the archaic positive feedback reactors still in service).