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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."
"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.
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.
You do not need religious just fanatics will do.
that should have been
The US detonated a U-233 bomb in Operation Teapot "MET" in 1955. The U-233 was bred from thorium.
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.
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!
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.
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
We need to stop bothering about proliferation risks and get concerned about cheap and safe generation of power. Thorium research is useful because it is more plentiful than Uranium in this planet. That is about it. Because of so called proliferation risks nuclear recycling research has been stuck since the 1970s. For all we know we could be separating all the waste with laser separation and burning the actinides in a high temperature nuclear reactor by now. We don't do it because laser separation technology also enables easier separation of Plutonium from the spent fuel for nuclear weapons. Instead the people who want the Plutonium have to use more polluting chemical separation methods such as PUREX. This insanity needs to stop. If the country already has nuclear weapons in its possession why do we need to bother with such concerns? We only reduced nuclear weapon stockpiles due to bilateral treaties. Lack of further technological development is not an obstacle to producing more nuclear weapons for an industrialized nation.
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?
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."
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
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.
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
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?
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.
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"
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.