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Bill Gates Is Beginning To Dream the Thorium Dream

Posted by Unknown on from the bill-just-wants-a-vat-of-molten-salt dept.

Daniel_Stuckey writes "TerraPower, the Gates-chaired nuclear power company, has garnered the most attention for pursuing traveling wave reactor tech, which runs entirely on spent uranium and would rarely need to be refueled. But Terrapower just quietly announced that it's going to start seriously exploring thorium power, too."

38 of 327 comments (clear)

  1. Finally! by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wow, I finally have a reason to like/admire Bill Gates....

    --

    "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
    1. Re:Finally! by networkBoy · · Score: 4, Funny

      oblig: as long as the cores don't have a BSOD...
      That would be bad.

      But in all honesty, I do like that his efforts are being spent on something like this, where the benefit to humanity is great.

      --
      whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
    2. Re:Finally! by Kazymyr · · Score: 4, Funny

      I agree, it's time we take thorium seriously. And if Bill Gates is the one who makes it happen, more power to him! (pun not intended)

      --
      I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
    3. Re:Finally! by Valdrax · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What about all the stuff his foundation does about malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV? Or the stuff he's doing for sanitation and disaster relief? Heck, even if you're looking for something closer to home, then what about try to fund a better condom so that people will be faced with less of a choice between pleasure and safety?

      I may not like the man and bear a huge grudge for some his more destructive effects on the computer industry, but all of that kind of seems piddling compared to the effect his actions will have on billions of the world's poorest people. I have been forced to grudgingly admire him for quite some time now over his philanthropy and the transparency and effectiveness of his charity compared to some of its "rivals."

      --
      If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
    4. Re:Finally! by Reverand+Dave · · Score: 3, Funny

      Bill Gates as a person, separate from Microsoft does a lot of good in the world through his foundation and personal charitable contributions. When he stepped down as the CEO of MS, he got to hand the asshole mantle to Balmer who is now wearing that motherfucker like no one else can.

      --
      I got here through a series of tubes
    5. Re:Finally! by i+kan+reed · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Don't forget the widespread parasite infection rate due to his work on cheap sanitation infrastructure. The last "generation" of excessively wealthy philanthropists did wonderful things, like build universities, parks, and feed the homeless. This "generation" seems intent on fixing the world, which, while neocolonialist, is really promising in the amount of progress.

    6. Re:Finally! by nojayuk · · Score: 3, Informative

      I saw an announcement recently about thorium fuel elements being loaded into a reactor for long-term engineering research to see how they perform physically. There's not a great demand for thorium fuel cycle operations at the moment though when uranium is so cheap and plentiful.

    7. Re:Finally! by i+kan+reed · · Score: 4, Informative

      The missing phrase in my post here is decrease in, it was not an oblique reference to Windows virus infection rates.

    8. Re:Finally! by almitydave · · Score: 5, Funny

      Rumor has it the new thorium reactors will put out 640 kW, which oughta be enough for everybody.

      --
      my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
      I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
    9. Re:Finally! by RajivSLK · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Good! Take profits from the worst companies and use it for good. Nothing wrong with that- else-wise someone else will just take those profits.

      The arm of the foundation charged with investing and growing the fund should simply chase the best investments without any restriction or influence from the charitable arm. It would be stupid not to.

    10. Re:Finally! by cusco · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The group who do the investing of the Foundation's money is entirely separate from those who are doing the actual Foundation work. As with pretty much every fund manager they're going for the largest return on investment, and they're not going to put the money into some feel-good company distributing handmade baskets with a 1.2% return when Monsanto and Shell return 7%. That's their job, to grow the Foundation's funding. It's up to the rest of the staff to figure out what to do with that money.

      --
      "Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
    11. Re:Finally! by Kwyj1b0 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      For example, in Africa, The Foundation has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in oil companies including Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp, and Chevron.

      The Gates Foundation also has investments in 69 of the worst polluting companies in the US and Canada, including Dow Chemical. It holds investments in pharmaceutical companies whose drugs cost far beyond what most patients around the world can afford and The Foundation often lobbies on behalf of those companies for "Intellectual Property" protections that make obtaining low cost medicines more difficult.

      Other companies in the Foundation’s portfolio have been accused of transgressions including forcing thousands of people to lose their homes, supporting child labor and defrauding and neglecting patients in need of medical care.

      In the mean time, Bill Gates' net worth has increased by $20 Billion since 2007.

      Ideally, that shouldn't happen. However, if you look at the worlds most profitable companies, I would assume you would find most of the 69 companies in that list. If Gates puts back a significant portion of the gains back into philanthropic work, it would be a net gain.

      Shell and Exxon do not need Gates money. I doubt Gates is on their board of directors. His organization must have bought the shares on the open market as an investment. They should be using the proceeds of that for further philanthropic works. In a way, his organization might end up using the profits of Exxon to undo the damage of Exxon.

      I know the idealistic notion is to say "we don't need blood-money to achieve our goals". And Bill Gates certainly has enough of money to throw at problems. But I'd rather he grow his money and spend the profits on philanthropy than not give to important causes at all.

    12. Re:Finally! by Lord+Apathy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      the nuclear people piss in their own soup http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-07/fukushima-137-billion-cost-has-tepco-seeking-more-aid.html

      The only reason that happened, and most nuclear accidents, is because the anti nuke freaks started wining about it in the '60. A bunch of clueless hippies sitting around smoking weed and carrying on protests about anything that had anything to do with nuclear anything. Because of this all research on nuclear fission was stopped in the '70s.

      If the hippie bunch would have help research the problem instead of being apart of the problem we would have safe nuclear reactors using modern technology today. Crap like Fukushima would never have happened.

      So thank you very much flower children.

      --

      Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification

    13. Re:Finally! by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 4, Funny

      "I Came, I Thorium, I Barium".

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    14. Re:Finally! by nojayuk · · Score: 4, Informative

      The bit about decommissioning costs being paid for by the government is a lie. Nuclear power plants in the West build and maintain a reserve fund to pay for end-of-life decommissioning, usually based on a percentage of the cost of the electricity generated and sold. In the US that's 0.1c to 0.2c per kWh IIRC.

      Government taxpayers only pay for decommissioning non-power reactors such as the ones used to make weapons-grade cores for bombs etc. Decommissioning power reactors is paid for by the electricity consumer in the end. This isn't particularly onerous -- France's electricity consumers pay about 13c Euro per kWh for their nuclear generated electricity and that includes a decommissioning levy. Germany's electricity generated by lignite coal and Russian gas and a small amount of renewables costs twice that much to the consumer while it emits nearly twice as much carbon per kWh generated.

      As for construction costs being paid for by the governnment, that's untrue as well -- there may be loan guarantees from a given government but those loans to pay for the upfront costs of building the reactors are commercial financial instruments, meant to be paid off over forty years and more of the reactor operating and generating sellable electricity. I don't actually know of a Solyndra-style billion-buck default on a loan guarantee for a nuclear construction project.

      You are correct about the cost of fuel being a minor part of nuclear operations though. Thorium is a solution looking for a problem, basically -- there's lots of uranium around, it's dirt cheap, so cheap that major sources can't be economically exploited yet since they're in very remote areas of the world and getting them to market would be more expensive than they're worth.

      The research into using thorium is very long-term. Centuries from now when uranium becomes scarcer thorium might become the go-to non-carbon fuel but right now it's only an interesting laboratory curiosity.

    15. Re:Finally! by Bengie · · Score: 4, Informative

      You do realize that the Gates kids are only getting 2mil each from inheritance. That isn't even a rounding error compared to the amount of money Bill still has. All of his money is going into a charity.

    16. Re:Finally! by nojayuk · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The molten-salt reactor built in the US back in the 60s had a maximum output of 7MW thermal -- it never generated any electricity, the heat was dumped to air. A modern GenIII uranium reactor like those coming on-stream in China and elsewhere produces about 4500MW thermal /1600MW of electricity 24 hours a day, and with downtime for refuelling, inspection and maintenance as needed they are expected to operate for sixty years at least -- a century of operation is not impossible given the extreme overengineering that goes into the core components involved.

      It's a bit like saying someone who built a model aircraft engine that ran for a few hours means they can design a reliable efficient cost-effective truck engine based on the same principles. Good luck with that.

      As for the proposed Indian thorium reactors they are basically standard PWRs and heavy-water BWRs fuelled with a mixture of thorium, medium-enriched uranium and plutonium derived from conventional low-enriched uranium nuclear reactors of the sort in operation around the world today. Thorium (Th-232) isn't a good nuclear fuel by itself, it needs to be bred into fissile U-233 with neutrons from U-235 and Pu-239/240 before its energy can be extracted. India want to go this route because they're not signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and therefore limited in their access to the world's nuclear materials markets and they don't have good native sources of uranium ore. If it were otherwise they probably wouldn't bother.

    17. Re:Finally! by timeOday · · Score: 4, Insightful

      He didn't mean biological generations. The previous wave of hyper-concentration of wealth in the US was the late 19th and early 20th century. (Wikipedia entry on robber barons.) At this time, recent industrialization had allowed commerce to achieve national scale, but regulation was still primarily state-by-state, so business was running rings around government. This triggered the rise of the federal government and its greatly expanded role in regulating interstate commerce. Globalization, with little corresponding rise in global governance, has lately caused a recurrence of the pattern. I suppose it will also trigger a recurrence of the solution, namely increased regulation of global trade. It will be annoying in some ways, but global corporations have truly made regulation and taxation into a joke by global jurisdictional arbitrage, so it is inevitable.

    18. Re:Finally! by nojayuk · · Score: 4, Informative

      Most if not all decommissioning is paid for over the reactor's operating period. Some funds are not fully paid up yet as the reactors have only been operating for a decade or two or three. By the time they get shut down the funds will be paid up and a bit more probably.

      Decommissioning an undamaged reactor isn't that expensive. It might take a few decades but nearly all of that will be waiting for some residual radioactivity to decay after the last load of spent fuel is removed. The rules about residual radioactivity are ridiculously tight in the US -- "scrap steel from gas plants may be recycled if it has less than 500,000 Bq/kg (0.5 MBq/kg) radioactivity (the exemption level). This level however is one thousand times higher than the clearance level for recycled material (both steel and concrete) from the nuclear industry, where anything above 500 Bq/kg may not be cleared from regulatory control for recycling." Weird isn't it? It's like folks are irrationally scared of nuclear power for some reason.

      The operators pay for the waste storage and treatment too with another levy on the electricity generated. In the US that's about 0.1 cents US per kWh IIRC. The spent fuel, being nuclear material and therefore regarded as strategic is entrusted to the government to deal with. The total fund for dealing with the spent fuel is over 30 billion bucks and rising.

      Finland's current fund for dealing with its spent fuel is well over a billion bucks, raised similarly by a levy on the generating companies. They're spending about 800 miliion bucks building an deep underground depository in granite that should handle a century's worth of spent fuel from their existing and planned reactors, with operating costs covered by the levy paid for by the electricity consumers.

    19. Re:Finally! by almitydave · · Score: 3, Funny

      And thanks to the emergence of electric cars, drivers will use most of that.

      --
      my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
      I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
    20. Re:Finally! by painandgreed · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You do realize that the Gates kids are only getting 2mil each from inheritance. That isn't even a rounding error compared to the amount of money Bill still has. All of his money is going into a charity.

      I'll believe that when it happens. I'd also be that their car, college, and funding for their first business venture doesn't come out of that 2 million. More than likely, there is a trust someplace for them, and they are listed with such a low but concrete amount to show that they are in the will and weren't forgotten or otherwise to cut down on any contesting of his will.

    21. Re:Finally! by nojayuk · · Score: 5, Informative

      Some of the richest uranium deposits known are in northern Canada, in locations so remote they'd have to fly the yellowcake (uranium oxide in the form of U3O8) out in cargo planes. Today the spot price (25th July 2013) for yellowcake is $40 per lb. which makes it uneconomic to work that ore body given the logistics costs involved. If the price of yellowcake tripled then maybe it would start to be worthwhile opening up those orebodies. That tripling of the raw material price would only increase the price of nuclear-generated electricity by about 1.5 cents per kWh though because the fuel is still ridiculously cheap and a minor part of the total cost of nuclear electricity.

      Long time back before WWII, nobody was really interested in uranium, it had little or no industrial uses. After WWII everybody started looking for it but it was thought at that time it was rare hence the early interest in thorium, breeder reactors etc. It turned out that it was actually quite a common substance with lots of easy-to-mine ore bodies in places all over the world. We're still working on the easiest to extract sources of uranium because they're cheap. As they run out we'll dig up more expensive ores, lesser grades requiring more digging and processing and the price will rise.

      The wonderful thing is that uranium is so compact a source of energy that we don't need to dig up a lot of ore to keep the lights on, not compared to coal or oil or gas. The US' entire electricity demand could be met by a couple of million tonnes of uranium ore each year, without reprocessing spent fuel -- if that was done (at a price) a few hundred thousand tonnes of ore would suffice. In comparison it would take about 4 billion tonnes of coal each year to do the same job.

      The bottom line price for uranium is extraction from seawater -- Japanese experiments suggest that would cost about $300 per kilo of uranium metal although nobody's bothered to build a pilot extraction plant because, guess what, uranium is so cheap right now it's not financially viable to even try. There's enough extractable uranium dissolved in the world's oceans to power the world for millenia if we had to.

    22. Re:Finally! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      He's doing more for humanity than you are.

    23. Re:Finally! by isdnip · · Score: 4, Informative

      Thorium doesn't use fuel rods, so it doesn't need the zirconium, etc. The thorium is simply dissolved in the molten sodium fluoride.
      The main reason it was abandoned in the US is that it was single-use, civilian power only, not dual-use military-civilian. You can't power a submarine with a thorium reactor and you can't build bombs from its waste products. It produces very little waste, a small fraction of what uranium-cycle reactors produce.

    24. Re:Finally! by Arrepiadd · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Gates Foundation has always been primarily a wealth investing and patent acquiring entity. I seriously doubt they are here for the benefit of humanity

      Yes, the Gates Foundation should just use all its money this year and close shop by next year. That will do much better for humanity!

      Guess what, wealth investing has to be a big part of any decent foundation's work. The Nobel Foundation has been around for 113 years and the way they did that was by investing the money they got in the first place. Otherwise it would have ran out a long time ago.

  2. Re:money = future -- I think I read this somewhere by tlambert · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Those with the money control the future, good or bad.

    Yes, I remember now. It was from a book at my local Carnegie Free Library, funded by wealthy philanthropist Andrew Carnegie:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_library

    Or it could have been at Stanford, which was funded by railroad tycoon Leland Stanford:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University

    For some reason people believe governments make wiser decisions than wealthy individuals, but most of the long term projects happening in the world these days, the kind of things that matter to human survival as a species, and not just "the right party" winning the next short term election, are all being funded by wealthy individuals.

    Or to put it another way: focus is no substitute for vision. Government bureaucrats rare have vision.

  3. Good! Now go read up before laughing this off! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    You'll need to start at the beginning of the entire nuclear reactor concept. If you can find it, and it will take a little digging, you'll stumble upon a paper and subsequent decision from 1947-49. In it, the reactor lead engineer who also worked on some of the first nukes, stated we now have 'an endless supply of cheap energy' from a Thorium reactor design.

    Now why wasn't it implemented? It did not produce enough byproduct plutonium for nuclear bombs.

    Hopefully, they'll pull all of the detractors of Thorium kicking and screaming into the future, because this tech. needs to be fully explored and ultimately implemented.

    I'd cite, but I'm on a phone. Sorry...

  4. Norwegians are already on it by Trepidity · · Score: 3, Informative

    Thor Energy started a trial earlier this month.

    Turns out that Norway has one of the world's largest thorium deposits, which is part of the motivation. I guess having huge oil deposits, hydro-energy resources, and wind-energy resources wasn't enough...

    --
    10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    1. Re:Norwegians are already on it by nojayuk · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Good grief, what an utterly crap article! So many things they got wrong... Lessee, the thorium experiment involves eight (8) pellets of mixed-oxide thorium/plutonium fuel in a single fuel rod loaded into a low-powered heavy-water research reactor fuelled mostly with enriched uranium (the reactor is designed to accept other fuel elements like the thorium MOX rod for testing purposes which is why the test is being carried out in Norway). Thorium needs a neutron flux to breed Th232 up into fissile U233 and produce energy hence the mixed-oxide formulation of the pellets mentioned. Assuming the MOX pellets get commoditised they'll need an ongoing future supply of Pu to continue making them and that can come only from either reprocessing fuel rods from regular uranium reactors of the type running today or breeder reactors also burning uranium although the track record of breeders hasn't been too good up till now, lots of engineering problems with molten sodium leaking and consequential fires. Note that the travelling-wave reactor design mentioned in the original article is basically a breeder using guess what? as a coolant. Oops.

  5. Re:money = future -- I think I read this somewhere by bryonak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    While Carnegie and Standford are admirable individuals, I think you're somewhat in denial here. The vast majority of long term projects happening in the world these days are funded by governments (whether they matter to the actual survival of the human species is another question, as humanity would survive just fine without any privately funded and without most government sponsored endeavours).
    But take health care for example: all charities in the whole world combined only achieve a fraction of the medical support solely the US health care system provides for, let alone the European ones.
    Private charity makes for very good PR, but simply lacks the mass to come anywhere close to the amount public services require.

    As for vision, both individuals in interaction with government (= active involvement with their own society) and those know-it-better separatist privates can have visions equally. Personally I would take Neil deGrasse Tyson's campaigning over Bill Gates' profit oriented private funding, but luckily we can have both!

  6. Re:money = future -- I think I read this somewhere by Nadaka · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Uh... no. Not at all.

    The entirety of the culture of serfdom was the rape of your own country for the profit of the nobility.

  7. Re:money = future -- I think I read this somewhere by Valdrax · · Score: 5, Insightful

    For some reason people believe governments make wiser decisions than wealthy individuals, but most of the long term projects happening in the world these days, the kind of things that matter to human survival as a species, and not just "the right party" winning the next short term election, are all being funded by wealthy individuals.

    No, many of the long term projects that get a lot of media attention are funded by wealthy individuals. Taxpayer dollars go to many long-term projects that will benefit humanity as well.

    The LHC, Super Kamiokande, and almost all the big physics projects are taxpayer funded. Almost all the big brain mapping initiatives going on today are publicly funded -- particularly through the NIH. Most climate monitoring is done by national governments and universities. Government funding is about the only thing keeping new antibiotics research alive since it's unprofitable.

    Personally, I'd rather vote for people to put the money into projects that won't deliver short-term profits in hopes of greater long-term profits than cross my fingers and hope that if we let some people amass enough concentrated money that they'll spend it on something other than their own, narrow interests. For every Carnegie or Gates there are a dozen Koch brothers, Trumps, and second-generation rich twits like Paris Hilton.

    --
    If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
  8. only *exact quoted text* is wrong by DrYak · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Gates connection is an idiotic myth.

    No, the connection is wrong only as far he didn't literally say "ought to be enough for everyone".
    That the correct quote:

    I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.

    yup, he admit that he had a part in designing the 640k limitation and admits that he though at the beginning that it shouldn't be problematic, but the realised the error later.

    Yes it was due to the design of the original PC, which used 640k for RAM and the rest for video & BIOS.

    The 8088/8086 processor used in there machine has no such limitation. (Hint: 640k isn't a power of two, so very likely, it isn't a bus limitation. The bus is 20bits, meaning that it can address spaces up to 1MB).
    The 640k is purely an arbitrary choice. You have to put the non RAM parts (ROM, Video ram, etc.) somewhere in the address space.

    The most prevalent way to do it back then is to put this part in a fixed range at the beginning of the address space, and then put the ram afterward. That's the way it was designed on most home micro computers.

    IBM and Microsoft (per Bill Gate's own admission) collaborated in the designing of the PC architecture. Surprisingly, they did NOT follow the prevalent way. They opted to sereve the address space 00000-9FFFF for RAM and A0000-FFFFF for the rest. (That's where the 640k come from: it's the first address with a hex "letter" instead of "number" because that the arbitrary point they choose for the RAM/ROM split).

    Had they chosen to go for the most prevalent way, problems would never had arisen, the upper simply being pushed as newer CPUs with wider buses became more widespread.

    But, IBM though of the PC as a glorified terminal with which to talk to their big irons. They didn't see much interest in providing much RAM. The important part was their minicomputers and mainframe, and those DID have more provision built-in.
    Microsoft on their side, came from a background of 8-bit home micro computers, in which 64k was huge.
    As Billy said, 640k could seem to them as being more than anything ever needed. They could write software running inside 64k. The PC could even ship with incredible amount of RAM like 128k. Why would anyone need addresse of more than 640kb.
    Also the first PC were equiped with amounts of RAM varying between 16k and 256k - so it was not "640k of RAM, then BIOS" but more like "a few kb of RAM, a huge unused gap in the address space, then BIOS" - given the huge gap, the address split might have looked reasonable... ...except it wasn't. If they were paying a little bit more attention to what was happening around them, they might have thought a little bit better and thought of a design which doesn't put a restriction on memory.

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
    1. Re:only *exact quoted text* is wrong by adri · · Score: 3, Informative

      Erm.

      The IBM PC, PC/XT has an 8088 (or clones with 8086's) that has a 20 bit address bus. It's still a megabyte, no matter what.

      It doesn't matter where you put the BIOS - beginning or end. It's still a megabyte.

      The BIOS is up the end there because the 8088 reset jump vectors are at the end of RAM, not the beginning (like the Z80, etc.) So you need to have something at that memory range for the CPU to start executing.

      The 8086/8088 software interrupt vectors are at the beginning of your address space. So, there needs to be RAM there. The interrupt handler, NMI handler and all the software vectors can't be in ROM - well, they can be, but then they'd have to jump to RAM at some point to do anything flexible.

      So, you:

      * need RAM in the first 4k for jump tables and such (0x00000000 -> 0x00001000)
      * need ROM at the end for the reset/power-on vectors .. so, the IBM PC memory map makes sense.

      The IBM PC architecture also assumed people would build ROM add-on applications, like BASIC (which they did) but also word processors, spell checkers, etc. That's why there's 8 ROM slots on the PC and PC/XT. But people soon adopted disk applications rather than ROM applications.

      So, I don't buy that "it's Gates' fault." The only things I can see he could've done differently are:

      * advocate a 68000 CPU - but then he'd have issues at 16MB - and Amiga/MacOS had exactly that
      * add more RAM and less peripheral address space - but you're still capped at 1MB
      * advocate for an EMS (page-flipping) architecture early on, and encourage people to make use of it.

  9. Google "Moonshot" video about thorium reactors by schweini · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There's a fascinating video on the "Solve For X" site that follows this Thorium advocate around. It's very convincing!

    https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/thorium-an-energy-solution-thorium-remix-2011

  10. The point of thorium is no plutonium. by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Thorium is a solution looking for a problem, basically -- there's lots of uranium around, it's dirt cheap, ...

    The big point of thorium reactors is that they don't produce plutonium. This made it less attractive during the Cold War, when producing plutonium for building bombs was considered a plus. Thus they were what was developed before opposition to nuclear plants made designing and building new ones uneconomic - at least in the US.

    In the current age of avoiding nuclear weapon proliferation, this potentially makes such designs less expensive to build and operate due to lower regulation and less need for defense against interception of spent fuel by budding bomb-makers, to convince the bureaucrats to let things proceed.

    Such lower regulation and lower costs might make it possible to proceed with the necessary research, design, and deployment and still hope to make a profit.

    --
    Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
    1. Re:The point of thorium is no plutonium. by nojayuk · · Score: 4, Informative

      Power reactors didn't produce weapons-grade plutonium anyway. PWRs and such salt the Pu-239 they breed from U-238 with Pu-240 when it captures another neutron and that screws up implosion weapon designs to the point where they don't work right if at all. There were some dual-use reactor designs like the British Magnox and the Russian RMBK-4 that could be operated to breed purer forms of Pu-239 but by the time they came on-line in the 60s the major Powers had made all the Pu-239 (a few hundred tonnes in total) they'd ever need from dedicated short-cycle breeder reactors in places like Hanford and Windscale. You don't need reactors at all to build U-235 weapons of course, just enrichment facilities.

      The good news is that molten-salt thorium reactors work by breeding Th-232 into U-233 and that can be easily extracted and turned into quite usable nuclear weapons (the US fired off a couple of test U-233 shots in the 50s, I don't know if the Soviets ever did). Given that a molten-salt thorium reactor positively requires a reprocessing plant which can extract the U-233 to keep it running is just another bonus for any wannabe new entrants to the nuclear weapons club assuming molten-salt thorium ever gets productionised.

  11. Uranium would be in short supply by isdnip · · Score: 3, Informative

    The market now may not be tight, but the world's total supply of U-235 is very small. Plus it takes vast amounts of energy to refine it out of the ore, since over 99% of the uranium is U-238. And if I understand the process correctly, it's refined by making it into UF6, which is spun in a chain of centrifuges. Now how do you make UF6? With FOOF! Look that one up... fluorine dioxide. Nasty.

    If we really tried to power the world's electric supply with U-235, we'd soon run low. (Or die from meltdowns.) But there's a virtually infinite supply of thorium. It's not just cheap; it's practically free, since it's a waste product of rare earth mining, and we need to refine tons of neodymium in order to have good magnets for motors and generators. Yes, the MSBR needs a seed of U-233, but enough of those reactors do exist.