Thorium: The Wonder Fuel That Wasn't

Lasrick (2629253) writes "Bob Alvarez has a terrific article on the history and realities of thorium as an energy fuel: For 50 years the US has tried to develop thorium as an energy source for nuclear reactors, and that effort has mostly failed. Besides the extraordinary costs involved, In the process of pursuing thorium-based reactors a fair amount of uranium 233 has been created, and 96 kilograms of the stuff (enough to fuel 12 nuclear weapons) is now missing from the US national inventory. On top of that, the federal government is attempting to force Nevada into accepting a bunch of the uranium 233, as is, for disposal in a landfill (the Nevada Nuclear Security Site). 'Because such disposal would violate the agency's formal safeguards and radioactive waste disposal requirements, the Energy Department changed those rules, which it can do without public notification or comment. Never before has the agency or its predecessors taken steps to deliberately dump a large amount of highly concentrated fissile material in a landfill, an action that violates international standards and norms.'"

Comments

Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[MetalliQaZ]

Interesting caption to use as the summary.

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[mbone]

Thorium 232 + a neutron -> Uranium 233.

Note that the "United States produced, over the course of the Cold War, approximately 2 metric tons of uranium-233, in varying levels of chemical and isotopic purity" (from Wikipedia. As best as I can tell from the BAS article, the missing U-233 is from "the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility, and the Idaho National Laboratory" - i.e., it was weapons production related U-233, not stuff from a thorium breeder program, and probably a problem of bad book-keeping, not an actual loss of material.

Note that U233 is going to be highly radioactive, due to unavoidable U232 impurities, and will be such a strong emitter of gamma rays that this "makes manual handling in a glove box with only light shielding (as commonly done with plutonium) too hazardous." That, plus a failure to ever produce a non-fizzle U233 bomb, means that this really isn't a good fission bomb source material.

All in all, I actually expect better from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[Mr D from 63]

Just about anyone can call themselves a scientist, or an advisor. I find it incredible the number of people still duped by those claims.

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thorium 232 + a neutron -> Uranium 233.

No entirely accurate.

Th232 + n -> Th233 -> U233 + e

You forgot to bombard the Th 233 with a positron going backward in time.

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[ShanghaiBill]

Just about anyone can call themselves a scientist, or an advisor. I find it incredible the number of people still duped by those claims.

Indeed. Anyone that calls the NNSS a "landfill" and talks about "dumping" U233 there, is clearly trying to push an agenda, and is willing to mislead and distort facts in order to do so. That is not science.

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[Pinhedd]

Both.

Thorium-232 is not fissile, it cannot be used to drive a nuclear fuel cycle. However, Thorium-232 is fertile, it can be bred into an isotope that can drive a nuclear fuel cycle, which in this case is Uranium-233

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[jythie]

From the context, it sounds like he is referring to some officals attempting to dump U233 into a landfill even though it is a bad idea. Looking into the issue it really does sound like they are treating it like a landfill, just dumping containers into dirt trenches and filling them over again.

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[oh_my_080980980]

Really?

"For a terrorist, however, uranium 233 is a tempting theft target; it does not require advanced shaping and implosion technology to be fashioned into a workable nuclear device. The Energy Department recognizes this characteristic and requires any amount of more than two kilograms of uranium 233 to be maintained under its most stringent safeguards, to prevent “onsite assembly of an improvised nuclear device.” As for the claim that radiation levels from uranium 232 make uranium 233 proliferation resistant, Oak Ridge researchers note that “if a diverter was motivated by foreign nationalistic purposes, personnel exposure would be of no concerns since exposure would not result in immediate death.”"

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[Anonymous Coward]

For a terrorist, however, uranium 233 is a tempting theft target; it does not require advanced shaping and implosion technology to be fashioned into a workable nuclear device.

Which is an interesting statement, given that the US government has never been able to successfully produce a working U233 bomb. In fact they've invested a lot of effort into Pu239 and U235, which would be pointless if all they had to do was bread common-as-muck (literally) Thorium into a useful nuclear weapons material for a fraction of the cost.

The reality is that U233 is almost entirely useless on it's own: off the top of my head you might be able to use it to make workable tampers for Plutonium implosion bombs; the evidence suggests that's actually the only place U233 has ever been used in a working weapon. That still wont get you far without the Pu and U235 (for the primary).

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[Pinhedd]

No one is going to be manufacturing a traditional implosion style nuclear weapon out of Uranium-233 any time soon. However, a dirty bomb would contaminate a very large area with gamma emitting Uranium-232, causing quite a headache.

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[elfprince13]

I'm glad someone beat me to it.

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Damn it! I always forget the time traveling antiparticle! Is there nothing cooler in existence? Its like forgetting to get ice cream at the worlds greatest ice cream store.

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[NEDHead]

They haven't yet, but they will eventually

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[slew]

Thorium 232 + a neutron -> Uranium 233.

Not exactly ;^)

Th232 + neutron -> Th233 (which isn't as stable stable)

Then two stages of beta- decay

Th233 -> Pa233 + electron + anti-neutrino
Pa233 -> U233 + electron + anti-neutrino

The problem is with U232 production is because all of these intermediate products are also fissile in the reactor (e.g., can interact w/ stray fast neutrons and undergo extra neutron decay before undergoing beta- decay resulting in U232 instead of U233).

However, the issue isn't that U232 is so unstable it decays with products that emit large amounts of gamma radiation (which in the decay chain, Tl208 is a big gamma emitter so it's really dangerous), it's mostly that you can't use chemistry to separate U232 from U233 (since only the mass is different, not the valence electrons). You either have to use advanced techniques (e.g, laser isotope separation), or modify your reactor parameters so that U232 production is reduced.

The ironic thing is that purported proliferation resistance of U233 is because reactors can be deliberately tweaked to increase the concentration of U232 to denature the U233. However, as I understand it, there is no particular technical reason to do this other than proliferation resistance (except to make it more dangerous to potential nuclear power plant workers as if that was a goal). If a rogue country wanted to operate a Th reactor to create large amounts of U233 w/o a limited amount U232 contamination, apparently it's not that hard to do (basically replacing the fuel more frequent schedule than normal, since most of the U232 yield comes at the end of the fuel cycle where there are more high energy neutrons bouncing around)...

That, plus a failure to ever produce a non-fizzle U233 bomb, means that this really isn't a good fission bomb source material.

If your goal is to simply produce a bomb, (not necessarily a large one with optimal yield), apparently India detonated an experimental U233 bomb as part of their Pokhran-II tests back in 1998... I don't think that bomb was a fizzle...

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[LifesABeach]

Maybe use it as Rocket Fuel? Either one?

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[Dan East]

causing quite a headache.

And tummy ache too. In fact, I bet the tummy ache comes first.

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[ShanghaiBill]

From the context, it sounds like he is referring to some officals attempting to dump U233 into a landfill even though it is a bad idea.

In the 1940s, nuclear waste was dumped into pits in Hanford, WA and we have spent tens of BILLIONS of dollars dealing with the cleanup, and future cleanup costs are projected to exceed $100 BILLION dollars. That is more than the annual cost of the Iraq ware at its peak. If you are seriously suggesting that some government bureaucrat was given permission to do that all over again, please provide a citation, and, no, the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" is not a credible source. If the BAS said the the sun was coming up tomorrow, I would start stockpiling food and fuel.

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[Pseudonym]

Pics or it won't happen.

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[doom]

All in all, I actually expect better from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Really? Why? They are an anti-nuclear, anti-science political lobby organization, and always have been.

Yeah, those former Manhattan Project scientists and engineers sure hated science.

Yeah, and check out the caliber of their Science and Security Board. They've got the author of "The Physics of Star Trek"!

Seriously, James Hansen is on their board also, which is a bit of a surprise. He's staunchly pro-nuclear power.

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[davester666]

They haven't yet, but they will in the past.

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[jythie]

The department’s plan is to take the uranium made at Indian Point, now stored in 403 stainless steel tubes at a plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and bury the containers at a low-level waste dump that consists of trenches that are up to 40 feet deep at the Nevada National Security Site, where nuclear weapons were tested until 1992. Workers will dig narrow “slit trenches” at the bottom of the standard ones, descending another 8 to 10 feet.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09... So yeah, looks like they actually are trying to do this again.

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[PJ6]

Thorium 232 + a neutron -> Uranium 233.

No entirely accurate.

Th232 + n -> Th233 -> U233 + e

You forgot to bombard the Th 233 with a positron going backward in time.

You mean, a positron. Or, an electron, going backwards in time.

BTW most physicists don't believe that positrons are electrons moving backwards in time.

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[bbsalem]

Is the discussion about Th 233 really a Red Herring? I have discovered that when an article takes a prejudged position that the writer glosses over the biased point very quickly, begging the question, and quickly moving off to the main point, a distraction. So, that the reader will not pay attention to his weak rhetoric. I don't know the merits of the discussion about Th 233, even if it has high activity. But it could be a distraction from the crux of the argument about use of Thorium which is the claim that it is too expensive to use.

Now arguments about cost are particularly weak. They may be based only on lack of human effort, and may only say that no one has looked into a process or an approach that drastically changes, reduces the cost. The problem with Th vs. U and Pu in nuclear energy is that the investment has been in high pressure water cooled reactors using enriched U, with about twice or three times the ratio of U 235 to U 238, that were promoted by the AEC in the 1950's because of the yield of Pu for weapons grade nukes. The nuclear industry has sunk costs in this technology and doesn't want someone coming along and claiming that a resource like Th would make a better, safer, cheaper choice, and the cost argument is simply a reflection of where the investment has taken place, and where the established interests want to protect their investment,

This is exactly the same weak argument used by the carbon energy industry about renewable energy sources, they are too expensive. Lots of hidden agenda can be hidden behind economics arguments, as the main reason the renewables are too expensive is that the electric grid is not built out to places where they are plentiful; the grid is managed by utility companies that have made a huge investment in carbon based fuels. They would rather ship highly dangerous crude oil from fracked shales all over the country on decaying and rickety railroads than spend money on renewables.

I am skeptical about some of the claims I've heard about Th as well, but an article that perports informative and fair facts that uses obvious rhetorical tricks does not help the discussion in a day and age where every special interest tries to bend facts and where social media becomes a forum for public relations and propaganda. Finding distortion in recounting of facts becomes at least as important as the facts themselves and demands objective and unbiased sources for the facts.

The issue is, can Th be used in place of Enriched U to generate energy in portable unpressured reactors that are much safer than current technology? There is many times the amount of Th than there is U, it can be mined from common accessory minerals from granite, such as monazite and even sphene, and it does not produce as much fissile isotopes of U or Pu that could be used in weapons.

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[Mozai]

> Thorium 232 + a neutron -> Uranium 233.

I thought it was the number of protons that determined which element an atom belonged to, and different neutron counts were isotopes. Would Carbon 12 + two neutrons = Nitrogen 14 ? or Carbon 14 ?

Re:Is this about Thorium or Uranium 233?

[delt0r]

And you can still just use a depleted U breading blanked for Pu breading for bombs anyway. Fact is any sufficiently strong neutron source is always a proliferation risk.

questionable presentation

[Mr D from 63]

The author can't seem to distinguish between the paths of weapons based programs and commercial nuclear electrical generation. He infers conclusions that he dare not spell out.

Statement of ridiculousness include;

For a terrorist, however, uranium 233 is a tempting theft target; it does not require advanced shaping and implosion technology to be fashioned into a workable nuclear device. The Energy Department recognizes this characteristic and requires any amount of more than two kilograms of uranium 233 to be maintained under its most stringent safeguards, to prevent “onsite assembly of an improvised nuclear device.” As for the claim that radiation levels from uranium 232 make uranium 233 proliferation resistant, Oak Ridge researchers note that “if a diverter was motivated by foreign nationalistic purposes, personnel exposure would be of no concerns since exposure would not result in immediate death.”

But this material is actually extremely difficult to make a warhead out of or use in any weaponized manner other than a dirty bomb. But with little effort, its easy to find that U-233 has the "unavoidable co-presence of uranium-232[6] which can make uranium-233 very dangerous to work on and quite easy to detect." That was conveniently ignored.

So, while it could be used in a dirty bomb, there are much easier, more tempting targets for that. Particularly when its material stored in a highly protected area. "No concerns"? Give me a break.

As for the Nevada waste thing. What he describes as a simple "landfill" is actually a waste area within the Nevada National Security Site.

Its easy to see right through the BS this author has laid out. Its a shame he doesn't seem to care about his own credibility. Just another asshat that does nothing but talk. Its a shame, because there are legitimate issues here to discuss, and it helps when the facts are laid out in a responsible manner.

Re:questionable presentation

[radtea]

Its easy to see right through the BS this author has laid out. Its a shame he doesn't seem to care about his own credibility. Just another asshat that does nothing but talk. Its a shame, because there are legitimate issues here to discuss, and it helps when the facts are laid out in a responsible manner.

Yeah, getting information on nuclear anything from an anti-science, anti-nuclear political lobby group with a grossly misleading name is not a good idea.

When I saw the organization promoting this I didn't bother to read it--life is too short to waste time debunking nonsense by political lobbyists who have zero credibility outside their little bubble of fanatical and fact-averse supporters. So thanks for taking the trouble to slog through the sewage and point out some of the howlers.

Re:questionable presentation

[mellon]

"Other than a dirty bomb?" Yeah, that's comforting. A big fizzle that spreads nuclear contamination across half of New York wouldn't kill as many people immediately as a fat-boy style fission explosion would, but it would create an economic disaster of truly epic proportions. Net effect on the country would probably be worse. Hiroshima has recovered from its nuclear attack, because the fallout was over with quickly. That wouldn't be the case with a U-233 fizzle.

Just because someone finds fault in something you favor doesn't mean they are wrong.

Re:questionable presentation

[fustakrakich]

...it helps when the facts are laid out in a responsible manner.

It doesn't help advertising rates. You need to add excitement, dancing, and cha cha cha.. Embellish, and lie if you have to, whatever it takes for Google analytics to notice.

Re:questionable presentation

[bluefoxlucid]

The material is harder to acquire than other suitable material, hence its existence is less of a threat.

Re:questionable presentation

[sjames]

In that case, you REALLY don't want to think about all those basements with radon gas or all those smoke detectors out there.

Meanwhile, I would suggest de-enriching that U233 and fueling a reactor with it. That way we get rid of it and we get energy.

Re:questionable presentation

[Mr D from 63]

^I see you have put much thought in to what it would take to successfully pull off such a dirty bomb attack, including how much material would be involved. Maybe you could elaborate on what you've considered for the benefit of the readers?

Or, if you blindly trust the author's claims and statements, just say it.

Re:questionable presentation

[oh_my_080980980]

"96 kilograms or 6 percent of the U-233 produced is not accounted for."

Yeah, real hard to acquire.....

Re:questionable presentation

[sexconker]

"96 kilograms or 6 percent of the U-233 produced is not accounted for."

Yeah, real hard to acquire.....

It sure is when it keeps disappearing like that!

Re:questionable presentation

[Em Adespoton]

"96 kilograms or 6 percent of the U-233 produced is not accounted for."

Yeah, real hard to acquire.....

"not accounted for" is entirely different than "gone missing".

I really don't think there's much agenda left to push here, unless someone with a secret containment facility has been sitting on the U-233 since someone first noticed discrepancies in the books.

Re:questionable presentation

[imikem]

Well, to spread across "half of New York", said bomb would have to be of very large explosive yield, and hence by definition, NOT a fizzle. Or have you perfected radiological contamination via glowing fairies riding unicorns through the Manhattan street grid? Do tell.

Re:questionable presentation

[sjames]

Google "Radioactive Boy Scout". There is no need to steal guarded U-233 to make a dirty bomb.

Re:questionable presentation

[Jmc23]

sheesh, don't be silly, everybody knows the fairys don't ride the unicorns! The unicorns are just the traveling nuclear waste refuel ships while the fairies distribute through their own wing power.

The trick is convincing the fairies that the Uranium is actually fairy dust. It's smooth sailing after that.

Re:questionable presentation

[Mr D from 63]

FUD missiles are much easier to deliver, and they have mass impact.

Re:questionable presentation

[aliquis]

96 kilograms or 6 percent of the U-233 produced is not accounted for.

Maybe it have a half-life time of 17 times the time since they last checked how much they had?

Yikes ...

[gstoddart]

Never before has the agency or its predecessors taken steps to deliberately dump a large amount of highly concentrated fissile material in a landfill, an action that violates international standards and norms

What could possibly go wrong?

Re:Yikes ...

[CanHasDIY]

With a purposeful grimace
and a terrible sound,
he pulls the spitting high tension wires down,
GODZILLA!

Re:Yikes ...

[thaylin]

well seeing as what he calls a landfill is a secure site specifically designed for this type of storage, probably a lot less than he implies.

Mystery lead

[T.E.D.]

uranium 233 has been created, and 96 kilograms of the stuff (enough to fuel 12 nuclear weapons) is now missing from the US national inventory

In addition, they have about 96 kilograms of lead that they don't remember ordering. And the situation gets worse every day!

Re: Mystery lead

[Anonymous Coward]

The situation is only half as bad as you might think.

Re: Mystery lead

[preaction]

There's no lead?

Re: Mystery lead

[Megane]

Maybe someone made a zeppelin out of it.

Re:Mystery lead

[Guy Harris]

uranium 233 has been created, and 96 kilograms of the stuff (enough to fuel 12 nuclear weapons) is now missing from the US national inventory

In addition, they have about 96 kilograms of lead that they don't remember ordering. And the situation gets worse every day!

If they started with 192kg of U-233, there'd be a lot more than 96kg of U-233 and a lot less than 96 kg of Pb around at this point.

Re:Mystery lead

[T.E.D.]

If you think this joke went over badly with actual Nuclear Physicists, you should have seen the blank stares I got when I tried it out on a crowd of English majors.

Calling Kirk Sorenson

[Anonymous Coward]

This trash piece gets things wrong on so many levels it isn't funny. For the real deal, follow Kirk Sorensen's blog.

Watch this video by McDowell, he lays it out. All that so called "waste" is fuel for a SNACR reactor design that would eliminate the waste entirely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4

Re:Calling Kirk Sorenson

[sexconker]

All that so called "waste" is fuel for a SNACR reactor design that would eliminate the waste entirely.

Snacks! Snacks! Snacks! Snacks!
New episode of Adventure Time tonight, kids!!

other uses were considered...

[nimbius]

Thorium: the glow in the dark candy
Thorium: Fights dandruff and smells great!
Thorium: 24 hour odor protection
Thorium: Kills weeds dead!

Re:other uses were considered...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uranium 233 may stick to certain types of skin.

When not in use, Uranium 233 should be returned to its special container and kept under refrigeration. Failure to do so relieves the makers of Uranium 233, Wacky Products Incorporated, and its parent company, Global Chemical Unlimited, of any and all liability.

Do not taunt Uranium 233!

Re:other uses were considered...

[Jmc23]

Don't forget.

Sold for novelty use only.

Re:other uses were considered...

[Minwee]

Do not taunt Happy Fun Uranium.

Re:other uses were considered...

[turp182]

5. Profit.

Nuclear bad, buy more coal peasants

[Anonymous Coward]

Hurr durr terrorism.

Dispose of U233?

[nitehawk214]

Why throw it away? Can't it be diluted down to reactor fuel grade material? I thought a significant amount of our current supply came from retired weapons. Maybe that only applies to plutonium.

Re:Dispose of U233?

[mbone]

Different isotopes. This is basically highly radioactive waste, unless you want to burn it in a thorium reactor (which we are not pursuing at present).

Re:Dispose of U233?

[mbone]

I believe that the Nevada Flats facility is basically just "storage" in this context. However, if you read this, you will see that most of the material is in other forms, such as "Molten Salt Reactor (MSRE) traps, Oxide powders and Zero Power Reactor Plates," and that potentially critical material will be "downblended," "driving the U-233 concentration below criticality and security concerns. It is to be dissolved and then downblended with depleted uranium so it can be disposed safely."

In other words, it's not like that they will put bomb components into a landfill, but everything will be converted to some form where it would be fairly complicated to make a bomb out of it.

Sihg... Not valid.

[LWATCDR]

Thorium when used as a reactor fuel does not involve separating the U 233 from the spent fuel. A small amount of 233 can be used to start the reaction but you burn the 233 in the reactor fuel that breeds it. It is also full of FUD.
"The last serious attempt to use thorium in a commercial reactor was at the Fort St. Vrain plant in Colorado, which closed in 1989 after 10 years and hundreds of equipment failures, leaks, and fuel failures."
The problems had nothing to do with the use of thorium fuel. It had everything to do with a badly designed cooling system that used He instead of water.
I just not have time to shred it but it is just terrible FUD! Look up the Fort St. Vrain reactor yourself to see the reports on the problems with the He system. They used bad water seals that leaked into the cooling circuit that caused the problems.
In other words this article has nothing really to do with the Thorium reactors that are being proposed today. Not surprising since samzenpus is know to be anti-nuclear.

Re:Sihg... Not valid.

[Mr D from 63]

^Yeah, I know some article submitters have an agenda. Too bad they feel the need to choose such BS to try to make their case rather than submitting something with a little credibility. FUD is very important to the cause.

Re:Sihg... Not valid.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thorium reactors being a total non-starter is about the only thing this article has gotten right. Everyone hand-waves the most critical and problematic issues with thorium fuel.

Thorium fuel reactors WILL require fuel reprocessing. This is a toxic, messy, and dangerous process. All thorium proponents paint this issue as a trivial issue to be worked out but 50 years later all we have are a handful of research reactors facing the same problem.

The above reason is why molten salt reactors don't work. There is no known way to prevent the mass of molten fissile fuel from building up unwanted reaction products that will eventually stop the reactor from working. Either by creating gasses that have to be contained, eating away the reactor container, or creating elements that poison the nuclear reactions and stop them all together.

Thorium fuel is the favorite meme of so many uninformed tech nerds because they hear some similarly uninformed tech evangelists blathering on about it endlessly. Thorium may be useful in the future but right now it's about as viable as fusion. Always 20 years away from working.

Re:Sihg... Not valid.

[mellon]

In theory, only the theoretical properties of a technology matter. In practice, though, the implementation matters. The fact that an implementation that failed was done poorly isn't really comforting unless there is some reason to believe that in the future it would be done better (not just differently).

Re:Sihg... Not valid.

[lister king of smeg]

Much of the reason that it hasn't been developed after 50 years as you say is because the people writing the cheques for nuclear research want dropable/launchable nukes that they can blow up the planet. So when someone suggest a possible safer option that does not produce the wanted isotopes for making a big boom, it gets very little funding.

Re:Sihg... Not valid.

[bluefoxlucid]

Knowing that an implementation was done poorly, we can then ask: what was poorly done? Then, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission can refuse fuel to implementations making similar mistakes.

Highly-regulated industries face one major advantage: you cannot fuck up in any way related to a prior fuck-up. If your coolant system fucked up because of an improper valve design, your entire coolant system will now require strict testing and engineering standards--meaning other, substantially dissimilar designs that also would fuck up will fail inspection. You may still be able to fuck it up; you'll have to find a new, creative way to fuck up that bypasses all current regulatory guidelines and evades current inspection processes.

Low-risk industries--power transmission, gas transmission, chemical fuel transmission, mass communications, retail, food--only require low levels of regulation. A gas pipe explosion can hurt a few dozen to a few hundred people at worst; chemical fuel spills may cause small environmental and physical hazards; food problems usually make hundreds ill. High-risk industries get more regulation; a nuclear reactor meltdown has large implications, as does theft of fissile material.

Fukushima is not a big deal, but it's not something to be shrugged off: while non-apocalyptic, it does require decades and billions of dollars of effort. It's under control, mostly harmless, but will only stay harmless with constant, high effort. That's the risk in nuclear, hence strict regulation.

Re:Sihg... Not valid.

[Rising Ape]

Indeed, I much prefer my radioisotopes bound up in solid cladding. A molten salt reactor seems to combine the difficulties of a reactor and a reprocessing plant in the same package - except worse, because normal reprocessing plants work on fuel that's had a couple of years to cool off.

They also solve a problem that right now doesn't exist - there's no shortage of uranium.

Re:Sihg... Not valid.

[jythie]

Actually, that has been the classic problem with Thorium reactors. Cooling them has proven to be more difficult then engineers anticipated and each research design has had problems. Hopefully some of the new ones being tried out over the next decade will finally come up with something that works, but the the problems can not simply be dismissed as 'oh, it was a problem with cooling' since that IS one of the problems that need to be sorted out.

Re:Sihg... Not valid.

[jythie]

Molten salt reactors also have had problems with corrosion and otherwise eating through their own coolant system, much quicker then 50 years.

Re:Sihg... Not valid.

[mpe]

The problems had nothing to do with the use of thorium fuel. It had everything to do with a badly designed cooling system that used He instead of water.
I just not have time to shred it but it is just terrible FUD! Look up the Fort St. Vrain reactor yourself to see the reports on the problems with the He system. They used bad water seals that leaked into the cooling circuit that caused the problems.

It's rather harder to make a leak proof system with helium, an inert gas compared with water, a highly polar liquid. Even if you have the water in gas phase, steam, water molecules are considerably larger than helium atoms.

Re:Sihg... Not valid.

[Sarius64]

I apologize for using my mod points too quickly today. Well said.

Re:Sihg... Not valid.

[ColdWetDog]

Interestingly, according to the Wikipedia article, the plant really did well - as a test bed and proof of concept. It had major engineering issues, as test installations often have. A second plant with lessons-learned might have been successful.

It was decommissioned on time and at cost (other references).

Apparently there is one other reactor with the same technology slated to go online in 2021. So it appears that Thorium cycle plants are viable, just not particularly easy or inexpensive.

Re:Sihg... Not valid.

[Chas]

Okay, maybe, MAYBE, if you were talking about a solid fuel reactor.

If you want to say "Thorium is dumb in a solid fuel reactor", I'd say "Yeah! You're right! It is!"

But take a look at a Liquid Thorium reactor

Basically you put the fuel in and pretty much let it burn through it's fuel supply.

You also have NONE of the problems involved in a solid-fuel reactor. Most of the failsafes become passive, rather than engineered.

Not only that, several of the byproducts are actually medically or scientifically useful (U238, which gets used in deep space device batteries), etc. The rest of the byproducts are things that are, yes, DREADFULLY radioactive...for a few days/weeks. Then they break down into stuff that's about as harmful as eating a banana.

What's more, Thorium is orders of magnitude more plentiful than most of the other stuff we're currently burning in reactors. Just the tailings that come up from current mining concerns can produce more power than the US uses in a year.

ON TOP OF THAT, actual use of Thorium would allow rare-earth mining to pick back up in many places around the world.

We need to do this because, otherwise, in 20 years' time, we're going to be buying Chinese-built Thorium reactors.

Re:Sihg... Not valid.

[mellon]

Fukushima is a hell of a big deal. And the NRC has historically shown that it is not willing to actually regulate the industry in any serious way. Can you cite an example of them shutting down a plant an operator wanted to continue operating, as you suggest they would? That's precisely the problem! If I believed that nuclear regulation could be depended upon to have real teeth, I'd be less concerned. History on this subject is not hopeful. Fukushima was predicted, and would not have happened if the engineer specifying the sea wall had been listened to.

Re:Sihg... Not valid.

[bluefoxlucid]

First off: Fukushima is an ecological disaster that requires trillions of dollars and decades of effort to contain and clean up. Fukushima is *not* a nuclear holocaust; it's completely under control. Despite being no big deal, it's very expensive and has just outweighed the entire benefit of Fukushima ever existing in the first place: it will cost more to clean this up than simply running a clean coal plant and scrubbing the air extra hard, and shipping the spent CO2 out on space flights (which is hell expensive).

Second, it's less risky to operate a plant outside its lifespan than to build a new plant. Assume a nuclear power plant has a 50 year lifespan. In those 50 years, it has a 0.001% chance of catastrophic failure. At the end of 50 years, you tear the plant down: package up and transport spent/remaining/refined fuel, tear down radioactive nuclear plant components, etc. This also carries risk. Then you build a new plant which, if not built incorrectly, carries a 0.001% chance of catastrophic failure in 50 years.

In the 50 year operation of a nuclear plant, you will perform required maintenance. You will clean, restore, and replace various parts of various systems in the plant. You may even wholesale replace some systems with upgraded ones for higher reliability and lower maintenance costs. At plant EOL, your plant may have a 0.001% chance of catastrophic failure in a further protracted 30 year operating lifetime.

Given that a further 30 years of operation is exactly as risky as the initial 50 years, and less risky than tearing down and building a new plant, you can minimize your risk by extending the plant's operating lifetime by 30 years. Further, this prospect encourages plant manufacturers to seek guidance from the NRC for maintenance and upgrades which extend plant lifetime in order to increase plant profitability. In all, the extension of nuclear power plant operating lifetime is an important risk decision the NRC should make carefully, but should definitely examine in each case.

Re:Sihg... Not valid.

[gzuckier]

However, the various water cooled reactor designs we use are equally flawed, in particular since it's been demonstrated time and again that a reactor which is inherently unstable and requires active control to keep from meltdown is liable to fail. The idea that, since it works pretty well in a submarine, a big water cooled reactor is the best design for a stationary power plant is about as logical as deciding that a 2 kiloliter Honda motor would be a good bet.

Re:Sihg... Not valid.

[garyebickford]

Also Westinghouse and GE (IIRC), the major suppliers of both nuclear plants and the very expensive fuel rods, have a very strong economic interest in continuing to sell fuel rods. This is analogous to ink jet printers, which are sold at or below cost but the ink is sold at more than 100 times cost. ($5000 per gallon is a typical price.) LTFR reactors threaten their business model. Of course they don't sell the plants at cost, but they do make a lot of money on fuel rods and maintenance contracts.

Never before???

[Anonymous Coward]

" Never before has the agency or its predecessors taken steps to deliberately dump a large amount of highly concentrated fissile material in a landfill, an action that violates international standards and norms."

Clearly this person knows nothing about what happened during the cold war at Rocky Flats, Hanford, and the Savannah River sites.

Re:Never before???

[ray-auch]

And at the supposed "clear up" after accidentally dropping nukes at Palomares in Spain. Where it has since been discovered that they just dug some shallow trenches and buried a pile of plutonium. Guess they hoped no one would ever notice...

Re:Never before???

[garyebickford]

Someone I personally knew (or knew) worked at Hanford in the early-mid 1970s. He was in a management job associated with maintaining and monitoring the big tanks of waste. These tanks are about the most nasty things you can imagine - an ungodly mix of radioactive AND toxic AND caustic goop, that spontaneously generates enough heat to keep the temperature closing to boiling point. It also eats through the tank material - I forget if it was concrete, steel or what. The tanks are huge.

He finally quit the _third_ time he discovered and reported a massive tank leak, on the order of 300,000 gallons per day (about one swimming pool?), and the information was suppressed. He had a security clearance so was unable to go to the press with the information.

That material has been slowly migrating through the underground water table toward the Columbia River. I don't recall when the plume is destined to get to the river. Even without this source, the Columbia is the most radioactive river in the US and maybe the world due to natural radioactive materials that are in the granite the river runs through - those mountain streams with the milky white glacial rock dust give a continuing supply of more stuff.

We should use the moon as a hazardous waste dump

[TheRealSteveDallas]

That would "incentivise" our space exploration objectives!

Re:questionable commenting

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent seems unable to distinguish between his own non-expert opinion and the opinion (true or not) of an expert with long history in the study of this subject matter.

If parent can think of a criticism, it's a safe bet the author has heard it before and believes it has been addressed. Unless parent has evidence that the author is unaware of these concerns, or intentionally misleading the reader of the article, he is just being arrogant.

The fact that it looks like a glaring hole to you (non-expert) doesn't mean it really is.

Landfill?

[jamesl]

On top of that, the federal government is attempting to force Nevada into accepting a bunch of the uranium 233, as is, for disposal in a landfill (the Nevada Nuclear Security Site).

The Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) is a premier outdoor testing, evaluation and training facility the size of the state of Rhode Island. The Site supports national defense as well as many research and development programs for the National Nuclear Security Administration. The NNSS hosts an array of defense and national security experiments for the National Weapons Laboratories, as well as supporting homeland security, non-proliferation testing and treaty verification training, radiological detection and first responder training.

http://www2.nstec.com/Pages/in...

This isn't some hole in the ground full of coffee grounds and soiled nappies.

Send it to the sun

[Daniel Hoffmann]

Really, comic books having been doing this for years...

Re:Send it to the sun

[lister king of smeg]

Really, comic books having been doing this for years...

well they had superman in the comic, we here in reality have space shuttles like Columbia, and Challenger, and rockets like Apollo 1. If we were in a comicbook universe why not just have superman spin a turbine and give us unlimited energy.

Re:Send it to the sun

[Kuroji]

Because without Superman, Lois Lane's stupidity kills her, duh.

Even Lex Luthor can't fix stupid.

Re:Space?

[daninaustin]

Yes. We have a lot of it. Also, what about when the rocket explodes? Cheaper and easier to encapsulate it and bury it in the desert.

"50 years"

[Anonymous Coward]

For 50 years the US has tried to develop thorium as an energy source for nuclear reactors, and that effort has mostly failed.

Actually, it really hasn't.

It experimented for 10-15 years with thorium, early in the history of the nuclear age, until it was established that you can't really make a lot of bombs from the by-products of thorium reactors. And then it moved funding toward uranium-based systems.

There hasn't been much meaningful research into it since about 1969, when ORNL shut down its MSRE.

It'd probably be worth setting up a few not-too-large reactors just so we can burn up some of the nuclear "waste" (read: 'unused fuel) from the current uranium-based reactors.

Re:questionable commenting

[mbone]

Well, I am a physicist, and I think that the article was badly written and intended to produce more heat than light. If the author has heard such complaints and believes they have been addressed, he sure didn't do a good job doing so.

Real Reasons Thorium is Being Held Up

[Scottingham]

After doing a lot of research into the current state of Thorium technology I was able to find the following non-FUD conclusions as to why Thorium and LFTRs in particular aren't working out so well.

1) The liquid medium that is actually containing the fission events is incredibly caustic. This means that the reactor vessel, in addition to dealing with a very high neutron flux, has to handle severe corrosion issues at the surface. The fact that it is done at STP does not provide any help. 2) The salt 'plug' that is often cited as a major safety asset for the LFTR has some major engineering obstacles that have been be able to be addressed yet. 3) The liquid medium has to undergo re-processing on a fairly frequent basis. This is non-trivial as the medium is highly caustic and radioactive. The products pulled out are also highly problematic. This is probably one of the biggest hurtles for LFTR. It is a costly and messy chemical process.

There are other smaller problems, but these are the 'big three' I can recall.

For next-gen reactor tech my money is either on traveling wave type reactors (which never need to be refueled for its entire lifespan..30-100 years). Look up the Toshiba 4s for the furthest along reactor.

There are also sub-critical 'energy amplifier' reactors that use a particle accelerator to drive a proton beam into a spallation target (lead) which causes a neutron flux suitable for fission events to occur, though not enough to cause a self-sustaining reaction. Only 10% of the energy is required to be redirected back to the accelerator (fission rules like that). This one has the advantage of being able to use pretty much any fuel, and waste we have as well as reducing the daughter products to benign isotopes. Belgium is currently in the process of building one.

Re:Real Reasons Thorium is Being Held Up

[Scottingham]

The biggest mistake I can see is: 'For next-gen reactor tech my money is either on' If you take out 'either' then its okay.

Thanks for re-posting it!

Re:Real Reasons Thorium is Being Held Up

[denis-The-menace]

RE: 2) The salt 'plug' that is often cited as a major safety asset for the LFTR has some major engineering obstacles that have been be able to be addressed yet

Can you list a few of these "some major engineering obstacles" ?
The only salt plug I've read about are "Freeze plugs" that melt upon "a bad thing" happening.

Re:Real Reasons Thorium is Being Held Up

[Scottingham]

As far as I can tell, there has never been a sustained system that has been cryogenically chilled in such an extreme environment (eg high neutron flux, >1000C temps).

It's not that they can't create a plug, it's that they have no idea how to do it reliably 24/7/365 x 30years.

Re:Real Reasons Thorium is Being Held Up

[dibos]

Fixed.

Re:Real Reasons Thorium is Being Held Up

[mako1138]

I also think sub-critical accelerator-driven systems (ADS) are a good way forward, since we have so much darned nuclear waste. Right now, the power level required for economical ADS is still a bit out of reach.

Re:Real Reasons Thorium is Being Held Up

[Shimbo]

Thank you for posting this. I'm rather tired by the constant stream of posts here that claim if we just switched to Thorium/Helium-3/Unobtainium, we would have all our energy problems solved by the end of next week. It's good to see an intelligent discussion of the real engineering problems involved for a change.

Re:Real Reasons Thorium is Being Held Up

[Scottingham]

Exactly! Those posts were primarily why I decided to look so deep into the Thorium issue.

Re:Real Reasons Thorium is Being Held Up

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

As far as I can tell, there has never been a sustained system that has been cryogenically chilled in such an extreme environment (eg high neutron flux, >1000C temps).

It's not that they can't create a plug, it's that they have no idea how to do it reliably 24/7/365 x 30years.

I was under the impression that the "plug" (called "freeze valves") concept worked really well in the MSRE, with sources even claiming this was the normal mode of shutdown over the weekends. Cut the power to the cooling fan and the reactor would drain the salt into the storage tanks quite undramatically. (See e.g.: http://nucleargreen.blogspot.s...).

Now of course in this design you didn't need cryogenic cooling, since salt freezes at a rather high temperature. So I'm wondering what the scoop is? Are proposed new designs operating in a region where simple "blow on a pipe" that worked so well at the MSRE not possible anymore?

Re:We should use the moon as a hazardous waste dum

[Rhywden]

Doesn't work. You'd still need to cancel Earth's orbital velocity - which means that you'll have to achieve a velocity of about 32 km/s (in contrast to merely 11 km/s to escape the gravity field of Earth). Which means that a "gentle nudge" won't do.

Re:We should use the moon as a hazardous waste dum

[jfdavis668]

Didn't the hazardous nuclear waste storage site on the Moon explode and throw the Moon out of the solar system in 1999?

Re:questionable commenting

[GarethIwanFairclough]

Parent seems unable to distinguish between his own non-expert opinion and the opinion (true or not) of an expert with long history in the study of this subject matter.

If parent can think of a criticism, it's a safe bet the author has heard it before and believes it has been addressed. Unless parent has evidence that the author is unaware of these concerns, or intentionally misleading the reader of the article, he is just being arrogant.

The fact that it looks like a glaring hole to you (non-expert) doesn't mean it really is.

While I'm no nuclear engineer, I have heard that Alvarez has a rather poor reputation in nuclear circles.

Re:We should use the moon as a hazardous waste dum

[lister king of smeg]

to big of a deltaV to counter the earths angular momentum and drop into the sun you would probably just end up with a very erratic orbit

Consider the source.

[Mike Van Pelt]

As I was reading that article, my thought was "Who wrote this crap?" Tendentious scare-mongering and blatant misrepresentation of ... practically everything he mentions.

Then I looked at the URL at the top of my web browser. thebulletin.org. Ah. Figures. If I'd looked at where that link went before I clicked on it, I'd probably not have bothered.

Ah well, looking on the bright side, at least it wasn't a goatse link.

Re:We should use the moon as a hazardous waste dum

[Rhywden]

Yes. And that solar-collision orbit requires a speed of 31 km/s. You're forgetting that you're on an elliptical orbit around the sun - every nudge towards the sun merely reduces the smaller axis of the elliptical trajectory around the sun.

The "nudge" would work if both objects (target and object to push) were at relative rest. But they aren't at rest. You start out with the Earth's orbital velocity around the Sun.

That, by the way, is also the reason why missions to Mercury are rare - it's quite expensive. By the way: Shooting stuff completely out of the solar system would only require about 41% of the energy you need to get to the Sun. Sounds weird, but that's orbital mechanics for you.

Re:questionable commenting

[drainbramage]

That explains the smell.

Re:questionable commenting

[imikem]

I don't believe you. With such impressive written language skill, "your" clearly an English professor.

Obvious troll is obvious

[imikem]

What a load of textual diarrhea. A bunch of whining about how dangerous U-233 is, and little else. Hey Alvarez, why don't you go swimming in a coal plant slurry pond, since that's what your disinformative pack of lies has the end result of promoting? At the very least, if you were interested in at least some plausible level of credibility, you wouldn't go using YOUR OWN agenda-laden [toilet] paper as a citation.

Bottom line: Fuck off.

Re:questionable commenting

[quantaman]

As a non-physicist I have to agree that the article was badly written and was setting off alarm bells the whole time I read it.

If you have a good point you can generally make it fairly clear and precise.

If you don't you end up stumbling all over the place in an attempt to justify it and avoid the weak points.

Not exactly yellow, but..

[cyberchondriac]

That's good objective journalism for you: " "Bob Alvarez has a terrific article on the history and realities of thorium as an energy fuel... "
Can we dispense with adjectives such as "terrific" that are clearly subjective judgments in describing an article, especially one as biased and contested as this is?

bomb making potential

[KDN]

Do they have this right? I thought the reason Carter went toward Thorium instead of Uranium/Plutonium was because U-233 only emitted 1.3 neutrons (on average) per fission vs U235's 1.9 and Pu239's 2.4. Note: these numbers are from memory over 30 years ago, and I've not been able to find the google in-can-ation that can confirm/correct the values. If anyone has the correct values, or the reasoning, please feel free to chime in.

About the author

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently Robert Alvarez does not think that people do background checks. This article was dated June 13, 2011:

http://atomicinsights.com/why-does-anyone-trust-robert-alvarezs-opinions-about-nuclear-energy/

Re:questionable commenting

[Anonymous Coward]

You're no true scotsman! Blarg!

Numerous Factual Errors

[Izaak]

That article comes of as an attack piece from someone who feels threatened (maybe someone with serious investment in traditional reactor tech?). He makes ridiculous claims about the US spending decades trying to get thorium reactors working (we did not), and about many companies trying to create thorium reactors in past decades (they did not), and makes scary claims about a small amount of thorium 233 and its potential to make bombs (far more refined plutonium and uranium exists and is more easily weaponized). The truth is, the US made only one test thorium reactor decades ago, and it proved the potential for a sustained thorium cycle. The current research challenge is only around extracting waste products from the molten salt fuel mixture, and that is well within our technical capabilities. The only thing stopping the development of working LFTR reactors is the will and funding to do it.

I would pick apart the article in more detail, but I suspect other people have already beat me to it.

Re:questionable commenting

[mbone]

Have you ever run a technical program? If you do so (and I have, a number of times), you frequently have to evaluate technical statements by subject matter experts in areas that are not directly your field. Remember that in physics claims from authority are meaningless, all that counts is the evidence and how it is presented, and you certainly should challenge claims and statements that do not appear to be supported by the evidence. I have said nothing here I wouldn't say to Mr. Alvarez in person, should I be charged with evaluating his work, or at a meeting where this was presented, except that if this was in person, I would expect a better response than a claim from authority.

Sadly, valid

[Animats]

The problems had nothing to do with the use of thorium fuel. It had everything to do with a badly designed cooling system that used He instead of water.

The Ft. St. Vrain story is rather sad. The plant had a large number of minor problems that made it too expensive to run. It was converted to natural gas.

Every reactor design which had something complicated happening within the radioactive parts of the system has been a commercial failure. Standard boiling-water reactors and pressurized-water reactors are very simple both mechanically and chemically inside the reactor vessel. All the complexity is outside, where it can be fixed if necessary.

Sodium-cooled reactors have sodium fires. Pebble-bed reactors have jams. (There's a prototype in Germany that's so jammed it can't be decommissioned.) Helium-cooled reactors have leaks. Reactors which require an adjacent chemical processing plant have all the problems of a chemical plant for radioactive materials. Anything which goes wrong in the radioactive part of the system is a huge deal to fix. The history of exotic reactor designs is not good. Many of the exotic ideas have been funded and built, but the results are not impressive.

Meanwhile, boring old BWR and PWR reactors have a long life and good uptime.

Re:Sadly, valid

[garyebickford]

IIRC the LTFR at Oak Ridge ran close to a decade, getting turned on and off on a daily basis, generating electricity (that was dumped to a big heater outside) very effectively. I don't recall reading about any problems of that sort. It was cancelled and shut down (after firing the primary proponent) by AEC in a largely political move tied to the demand for bomb materials, along with some budget constraints.

The LFTR is a different type of reactor

[isdnip]

The article seems to refer to conventional fission reactors that use thorium mixed in with uranium. I think Bill Gates has invested in a company that pushes that. McDowell's excellent video is about the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, a much safer design that takes a bit of Uranium 233 as its seed and breeds it out of thorium, never creating a high concentration and burning almost all of it before refueling. A conventional reactor leaves over 99% of the energy in the spent fuel; a LFTR leaves very little.

Re:Buy your coal and thorium from the same overlor

[Man On Pink Corner]

In other news, U233 decays into Sn120 through antiproton emission. Hatmakers' stocks are up 140%.

Oh, wait, no, actually, further research reveals that the last part was caused by your post.

About Robert Alvarez

[Anonymous Coward]

http://atomicinsights.com/why-does-anyone-trust-robert-alvarezs-opinions-about-nuclear-energy/

Re:Space?

[ColdWetDog]

Orbital mechanics. It's why they call'em rocket scientists.

Re:questionable commenting

[Zalbik]

Parent seems unable to distinguish between his own non-expert opinion and the opinion (true or not) of an expert with long history in the study of this subject matter.

Parent seems unable to distinguish between logical reasoning and an "argument from authority" fallacy.

The GP has pointed out valid concerns with the article.

"But Bob said so!" is not a valid counter-argument.

Re:questionable commenting

[imikem]

I'd say Alvarez' use of self-citing in that FUDicle is the truly arrogant thing.

Re:Space?

[Rhywden]

It's not actually difficult, it's expensive. The thing is, because we're not dealing with an inertial system but with a rotating system, we need to cancel the orbital velocity in order to actually hit the Sun. One figure I've seen puts the velocity we need to achieve at 32 km/s. Escape velocity for Earth amounts to 11 km/s, by the way.

That's quite a lot and makes the whole thing a bit impractical (Rockets don't scale well and, according to the calculations I've seen, a Saturn V would only have a payload of ~60 kg of actual radioactive material. Don't forget, you also need to shield the stuff in case the rocket malfunctions inside the atmosphere, aside from the higher fuel requirements).

Coincidentally, shooting something into deep space only requires about 41% of the energy needed to reach the Sun.

All numbers without complicated stuff like slingshot maneuvers.

Needs a new title...

[hackus]

This guy is a cuke.

They are already starting the plans for a 4th generation Thorium based reactor to be built in China, which is covered in the Christian Science Monitor.

Does the guy ever step outside a class room?

Re:questionable commenting

[Sardaukar86]

LMOL, yeah your a physicist.....it's my lunch hour so I'm a gynecologist....moron...

WTF? What's so hard to believe about mbone being a physicist? There are plenty of highly-skilled and very intelligent people on this forum.

Your post does lead me to wonder if you wouldn't find a different discussion group more suited to your tastes, say, /b/ perhaps? As a bonus, you won't need to furrow your brow using that pesky written word thing there.

Re:Space?

[Sique]

Yeah, to the layman things are simple that makes the expert scratching his head.

The problem with hitting the Sun is that you are starting out with the speed of the Earth around the Sun, approximately 30 km/s. Only if you manage to decelerate an object to a speed of 0 it will hit the Sun. Anything else will start to orbit the Sun, and if started out from the Earth orbit, it will have an orbit that crossed the Earth orbit, not to mention that it will also cross the orbits of Mercury and Venus, and might get disturbed by their gravitation and catapulted out of its orbit to any arbitrary other orbit.

Re:Space?

[Jmc23]

That's not a problem.

That's the stuff that makes math geeks salivate!

When the hell did everybody lose the enthusiasm for doing something properly?

Thorium - a classic acadmic reactor

[cmdrxizor]

The Economist had an article about thorium reactors recently too. It was a bit rosier than this one. Anyway, all this press I've seen recent about thorium reactors reminds me of an article Admiral Rickover wrote in 1953 about the difference between academic and practical reactors. It's a good read, and there are definitely parallels here.

Dumping U233 is a good way to kill LFTR

[Baldrson]

U233 is the limiting resource for starting a thorium economy.

Dumping it is a good way to kill LFTR as an energy source.

Re:Space?

[HuguesT]

Well you certainly need to lift the material out of the gravity well of the Earth, and that, by itself, is not practical. Expensive and dangerous.

Re:How fizzly is a fizzle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Other than just blow chunks of the stuff over a small area? A huge, huge amount of energy. It's one of the heaviest and most dense elements you can actually hold in your hand. It's not easy to machine or grind either, so you're not going to be able to turn it into very fine powder before hand.

Off the top of my head I'd say the energy required would be in the order of, ohhh, a small nuclear weapon. Couple of hundred kt.

Re:Space?

[Rhywden]

Well, that was pretty much a given form the start ;)

Thorium is a real thing?

[axl917]

And here I thought it was just the step between mithril and fel iron.

Thorium: The Wonder Fuel that Will Be

[Glock27]

All in all, I actually expect better from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

You would think. Clearly, though, this is just a hit piece on thorium, even though it has nothing to do with modern thorium reactor designs.

Thorium is well suited to molten salt reactor designs, and in fact is best used in liquid form. These LFTR (Liquid designs will fission 90%+ of the fuel, instead of the 0.5% fissioned by conventional reactors. This means a lot less waste for the amount of energy produced. Also, the waste from such reactors is dangerous for much less time than that from conventional reactors.

Thorium reactors are being developed by Russia and China. In the US, Flibe Energy is working on LFTR designs. There's lots of interesting information in their site.

Thorium power should most definitely be developed. It's a clean, safe source of baseline power - and doesn't take the vast space required for (inconstant) solar and wind. Plus, eventually it will be great for space applications.

Re:Thorium: The Wonder Fuel that Will Be

[Glock27]

Whoops, I hit submit before I was ready...

That should read "...LFTR (Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor)...".

Re:Thorium: The Wonder Fuel that Will Be

[delt0r]

Molten salt designs where originally proposed to solve the problems Th gives you. It is no cleaner than traditional Uranium fuel cycle with reprocessing. It is not a panacea doesn't stop nuclear being nuclear and needs lots of development before it is proven.

Re:Thorium: The Wonder Fuel that Will Be

[Glock27]

It is not a panacea

Oh, but it is. It's the only realistic means available today to replace coal-fired electricity generation worldwide with a CO2-free alternative.

Regardless of AGW, replacing coal-fired electric plants with a clean alternative is a good idea.

Re:Thorium: The Wonder Fuel that Will Be

[delt0r]

its not any better than Uranium with the exception that its 5 times more of it in land based source. So its no more a solution than any nuclear. And good luck getting the general public behind nuclear.

Re:Thorium: The Wonder Fuel that Will Be

[Glock27]

its not any better than Uranium with the exception that its 5 times more of it in land based source. So its no more a solution than any nuclear.

Liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs) are better in many regards:

• - LFTRs are provably meltdown-proof.
• - LFTRs run at lower pressure, so are much safer than boiling water designs.
• - LFTRs don't produce explosive hydrogen, which caused the Fukushima explosions.
• - LFTRs produce much smaller volumes of waste than current U/Pu reactors for the same power production.
• - LFTR waste is dangerous for only a few hundred years, instead of over 10,000 years.
• - LFTR installations take much less space than current U/Pu reactor installations.
• - LFTRs don't require water cooling, unlike current U/Pu reactors - they can be sited inland and away from rivers.
• - LFTRs operate at higher temperatures, making power generation more efficient, and provide waste heat for desalination if desired.
• - There's no meaningful weapons proliferation risk with LFTRs, so they can be exported to growing third-world economies.

And good luck getting the general public behind nuclear.

Education is a good thing. If people actually understood the risks and mortality figures from fossil fuel production, they'd see even conventional nuclear is a no-brainer. We've been operating around 100 nuclear plants in the US for decades with no significant issues. France has also had a great track record with nuclear. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of people a year die from coal electricity generation alone. The total toll from all nuclear reactor problems ever doesn't even come close to one year's worth of coal power.

There's also mercury pollution, and ocean acidification to consider...

Then there's the "climate change threat"...anyone who's serious about lowering CO2 output will have to accept a role for nuclear, as there's absolutely no meaningful way to lower CO2 production without it.

Regardless of public opinion, I'm confident the grownups will make the right decision sooner or later.

Apple, meet orange.

[Dean Edmonds]

The failed attempts at "commercialization" of thorium reactors that the article describes were all for reactors which were designed to breed uranium for other uses. Extraction of that uranium was what made them uneconomical. A thorium reactor designed purely to generate power would not have that problem.

Re:Space?

[Stuarticus]

A rocket scientist might stop to wonder about all those comets that somehow survive flying quite deep into the sun's gravity well and shoot right back out the other side lightly toasted. Science, how does it work?

Re:Space?

[Jmc23]

omg, because we haven't ever heard of slingshot manoevers before!! What will we do??

Oh no! Now, I might have to use math to combine some vectors, oh the horrors!!! I might even have to understand the difference between centripetal and centrifugal forces!! oh woe unto me, how can I survive the horrors of the job???

Even a moron doesn't have to wonder about that, because we know why it happens!! In fact, it's part of how we keep track of all those objects!

If science was easy, slashdot wouldn't be full of whiny people who don't understand it. The fucking idiots here think I'm putting down science just because they can't seem to understand that complex problems like this are what scientists actually ENJOY working on.

Re:Numerous Phantasmagorical Eros

[TheRealHocusLocus]

I would pick apart the article in more detail, but I suspect other people have already beat me to it.

Yeah, I had started to jot down a list of (yawn) never mind----

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
CONFESSIONS OF A SLASHDOT LFTR FANBOI

It's fun to discuss nuclear energy on Slashdot ... sometimes you just have to point things out point by point ...
some confuse Weinberg's '300 year best-fit for waste' two fluid design for other single fluid designs ... or using solid fuel Thorium, which is pointless so long as uranium is available ... yes it's full of dangerous glop, but it is useful and happy glop ... yes, I think a LFTR could be developed and built within $4B ... every path to biofuels leads to scorched-earth disaster, Thorium energy gives us the surplus to generate synfuels ... a move to LFTR may be the only way to preserve modern society in the face of disaster (volcanism, Maunder minimum) ... utility-scale so-called 'renewables' non-solutions have a gazillion points of failure, gigawatt LFTR plants few, and it is my belief they will save NOT fail us ... aside from your own yard or roof, solar and wind are losers ... with LFTR surplus we could begin making diesel and fertilizer ... do it for the children ... and you my friend -- you would look especially good in space ... an Admiral Rickover fact check (severe tire damage) ... LNT (linear no threshhold) needs re-examination ... no I'm not risk adverse, just risk conscious ... one must sift past the fear-hype, especially regards Fukushima ... a look at Electricity in the Time of Cholera ... on the new coal powered IBM Power8 chips ... Thorium lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help.

Think of me as the Trix Rabbit of Thorium.

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Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburt