Book Review of “Super Fuel”

But we don’t NEED thorium. There’s enough energy in just spent fuel rods sitting around to power us for a very long time:
http://www.businessinsider.com/waste-annihilating-molten-salt-reactor-2012-6
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=smarter-use-of-nuclear-waste

D Marshall;
I know some would have us burn as much coal and oil as possible while waiting for a thorium breakthrough but that’s a potent blend of lunacy and wishful thinking.>>>>
Oddly I cannot think of a single person who thinks we should burn as much coal and oil “as possible”. Nor do I think that the pragmatic amongst us are intent on sitting on our hands until a thorium breakthrough arrives. The pragmatic amongst us are confident that fossil fuels can be used with minimal environmental impact, and that human ingenuity will eventually deliver cost effective alternatives long before fossil fuels are depleted (provided that government intervention into the direction of science research doesn’t first exhaust our financial resources on dead end technologies like wind mills and solar panels).
Thorium is an option, and an interesting one. Who would have predicted the internet or the flat screen TV or the 200 channel universe or the cell phone network or many other taken for granted technologies just 25 years ago? Thorium is one of many possibilities, many of which nobody has even thought about….yet. See you in 25 years. It will be a different world in ways nobody can predict.

I have tried in the past to read warmist books, the last one was Manns howler. I usually have to put them down as soon as I read some BS. But since David has read it I will give it a whorl.
I have spoken to a few greens and they are in favor of thorium-based nuclear power.”The mind boggles with those greens”!
David! You should have said more, I always find your thinking extreamly informative. 🙂

Since doing my first Special Report on Thorium a month ago, I have been studying the two next generation nuclear reactor proposals that are battling for acceptance. They are the Traveling Wave Reactor proposed by a company founded by Bill Gates and Dirk Sorrenson’s Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR). I am working on a follow up report featuring Gates. I am not smart enough to know which of these proposals is better.
But I know that when one of them is finally accepted it will take at least ten years to build and test and install the first units. That means for now we must all work to set aside the CO2 pollutant scare campaign that is strangling our development of new sources of fossil fuels, power plants. refineries and pipelines.
Yes, many greens support the new generation of nuclear power reactors. That is good news to me; perhaps we can all work together to move that forward. I wrote a blog about this when I did my first Thorium report on KUSI. Here is that blog:
“THORIUM will power the world”… That is the bumper sticker of the future.
The ugly debate about energy has gone on and on. It is costing us billions of dollars. It is beginning to cripple our nation. I have been looking for a source of abundant, cheap electric power that short cuts the raging, highly destructive debate; a source all sides can support. I think I have found it. It is thorium.
Thorium is nothing new. It was successfully demonstrated in the 1960s. I am not the only one to find it; there are now 100s, maybe even thousands of scientists, promoting it. But it has largely been forgotten and overlooked ever since the military/industrial complex and their political and bureaucratic servants dumped it 50 years ago.
I am asking for all sides in the climate change, global warming, carbon dioxide, carbon footprint debate to consider supporting thorium. It is green; it produces no “greenhouse gasses”, no particulate pollution, leaves little waste and produces no risk of explosion, radiation or pollution in the atmosphere or ocean. It is cheap; an abundant resource found in the desert salts and rocks in virtually every country on Earth. It is relatively cheap and simple to use.
I see every reason why, despite their huge, continuing differences on other issues, that thorium power can be accepted and promoted by all sides. I think Richard Lindzen and Michael Mann, Joe Bast and Peter Glieck, Fred Singer and James Hansen, Lord Monckton and Al Gore, Roger Pielke and Joe Romm should all set aside their debate long enough to help get the move to thorium electric power generation rolling.
I have just finished my first television report on thorium. It is over fives minutes long; a true monster of a long “package” by television news standards. Yet KUSI-TV News Director Steve Cohen gave his full support and approval and cleared it for telecast today, Monday, May 21st. It can be viewed here: http://youtu.be/F9e64AFieCM
After you have watched, please, do a little internet digging of your own. The Thorium Alliance website is a good place to look:
http://thoriumenergyalliance.com/ThoriumSite/portal.html
http://thoriumenergyalliance.com/
http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com/downloads/ThoriumSummary_Alex_Cannara.pdf
It will take a mountain of enthusiasm from a broad range of well positioned people to move the politicians and bureaucrats to back thorium. It would also be great if a major supplier of generating stations would climb aboard. I fear it is going to take a lot of political donations to move our Congress. And, I don’t think this can move forward without Congress.
If you’re interested enough to learn about thorium power here and now, read on:
—–
Is Thorium the Biggest Energy Breakthrough Since Fire? Possibly
By William Pentland, Contributor
For the past several months, a friend of mine has been telling me about the potentially game-changing implications of an obscure (at least to me) metal named Thorium after the Norse god of thunder, Thor.
It seems like he is not the only person who believes thorium, a naturally-occurring, slightly radioactive metal discovered in 1828 by the Swedish chemist Jons Jakob Berzelius, could provide the world with an ultra-safe, ultra-cheap source of nuclear power.
Last week, scores of thorium boosters gathered in the United Kingdom to launch a new advocacy organization, the Weinberg Foundation, which plans to push the promise of thorium nuclear energy into the mainstream political discussion of clean energy and climate change. The message they’re sending is that thorium is the anti-dote to the world’s most pressing energy and environmental challenges.
So what is the big deal about thorium? In 2006, writing in the magazine Cosmos, Tim Dean summarized perhaps the most optimistic scenario for what a Thorium-powered nuclear world would be like:
What if we could build a nuclear reactor that offered no possibility of a meltdown, generated its power inexpensively, created no weapons-grade by-products, and burnt up existing high-level waste as well as old nuclear weapon stockpiles? And what if the waste produced by such a reactor was radioactive for a mere few hundred years rather than tens of thousands? It may sound too good to be true, but such a reactor is indeed possible, and a number of teams around the world are now working to make it a reality. What makes this incredible reactor so different is its fuel source: thorium.
A clutch of companies and countries are aggressively pursuing Dean’s dream of a thorium-powered world.
Lightbridge Corporation, a pioneering nuclear-energy start-up company based in McLean, VA, is developing the Radkowsky Thorium Reactor in collaboration with Russian researchers. In 2009, Areva, the French nuclear engineering conglomerate, recruited Lightbridge for a project assessing the use of thorium fuel in Areva’s next-generation EPR reactor, advanced class of 1,600+ MW nuclear reactors being built in Olkiluoto, Finland and Flamanville, France.
In China, the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited and a clutch of Chinese outfits began an effort in mid-2009 to use thorium as fuel in nuclear reactors in Qinshan, China.
Thorium is more abundant than uranium in the Earth’s crust. The world has an estimated 4.4 million tons of total known and estimated Thorium resources, according to the International Atomic Energy Association’s 2007 Red Book.
The most common source of thorium is the rare earth phosphate mineral, monazite. World monazite resources are estimated to be about 12 million tons, two-thirds of which are in India. Idaho also boasts a large vein deposit of thorium and rare earth metals.
(I edited out a technical discussion here)
I have no idea whether thorium is the panacea many people claims it is likely to be, but I believe we’ll be hearing more about it in the years to come.
—–
The entire article including the part I edited out is from Forbes at:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/09/11/is-thorium-the-biggest-energy-breakthrough-since-fire-possibly/
There is more to come. Let’s get focused on this concept and try to see it through. It could save our modern, high technology way of life.
John Coleman
jcoleman@kusi.com

D Marshall says:
June 7, 2012 at 8:34 pm
“There’s real potential in developing thorium reactors but, for now, it’s just that – potential.
I know some would have us burn as much coal and oil as possible while waiting for a thorium breakthrough but that’s a potent blend of lunacy and wishful thinking.”
D Marshall,
OK – I’ll bite. If burning as much coal and oil as possible is feasible (and it is and coal is cheap!), why do you deem this to be a “potent blend of lunacy and wishful thinking”? I’m not ‘moon struck’ or prone to fantasies. Please elucidate, for our mutual edification.
MtK

Ric Locke says:
June 7, 2012 at 10:39 pm
Produced weapons grade uranium???? Even Wiki knows better than that. You can’t simply divert 233U. The contaminating 232U decays with isotopes producing hard gamma rays. It is not suitable material for bombs. http://www.articlesbase.com/ask-an-expert-articles/thorium-fuel-cycle-2879587.html
crosspatch says:
June 7, 2012 at 8:16 pm
Indeed. Only 1-3% of the fuel is actually used in these rods. What a waste. A big part of the problem is the solid fuel pellets. These accumulate isotopes (e.g. 135Xe) that absorb neutrons, and the pellets themselves swell and crack. Using solid fuel is a big reason the thorium-based Pebble Bed reactor is not a good idea. A liquid core would not have these problems. A liquid core can have contaminants removed in a continuous process. Some of these can have important medical uses, or other industrial uses.
We have twice as much Th available as U. We should find a way to use up the material in spent rods. It is a waste. Yucca Mountain should never be needed (it was an expensive show that was not necessary anyway – see the ref above). If we use the fuel we have in hand already, we should have enough to last a couple of centuries without digging any more out of the ground.
We should have a goal of 100% energy independence, and using more energy per capita. Energy use is necessary to make ilfe better.

John Coleman gave some good links above and here is a two hour, everything you want to know about a LFTR (liquid floride thorium reactor) down to the automatic chemical processing and U-233 denaturing for those who can absorb the science. It seems to have it all in very good, but long, video.

India seems to have woken up to Thorium a long time ago and has plants preparing it for use in various types of reactors, bottom of the page here:-
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf53.html

As someone who worked in the nuclear industry and supports its expansion, I have to say that I think that the thorium proponents are misguided. They are trying to put together in one facility both a power reactor and a fuel reprocessing facility. They do not explain what/how they will deal with the waste that is generated and removed continuously from the molten fuel. Current reactors that use discrete fuel elements have the option to allow them to sit in reasonably safe, secure storage for quite a long while to make ultimate reprocessing relatively simple in a purpose-built facility. If you combine both activities in one place, you increase the complexity enormously, especially as you have to actively contain all of the short-lived fission-products that can be quite nasty to work with.
The last thing the nuclear industry needs is more demonstration reactors that end up costing a fortune and then sitting idle for years waiting for someone to clean them up. This is exactly what the greens want, so that they can use them to point to the basic technology as unproven, uneconomic, and unsafe.

Ok friends. I work in the fuel cycle business and have many peer-reviewed journal articles. Thorium based fuels (Th/U233) just are not so much different than Uranium based fuels (U/Pu239). U233 has U232 to make it nastier. Pu239 has Pu238 to make it nastier. Waste management: I’ve done the calculation myself and it has been accepted for publication in Nuclear Technology – Th/U233 creates fewer transuranic isotopes is true but doesn’t mean what Th advocates says it does. It also has more Th229 and other isotopes in relevant time periods and turns out to be more radiotoxic than U/Pu239 at key time periods. So the comparison depends on a whole lot of details associated with a given disposal approach. Proliferation – if you use internationally known metrics for comparing options there just isn’t much difference. Safety – a molten salt reactor DOES have safety advantages but one can fuel such a concept with either type of fuel. As a nuclear engineer, I totally support nuclear energy. I also support recycling used fuel. But, Th/U233 isn’t a magic answer to U/Pu239 issues. Molten salt reactors offer much promise but do have significant R&D issues.
Detail point: here’s an example of what you find when you look at the details. The U/Pu239 fuel cycle works by U238 absorbing a neutron, becoming U239, which decays to Np239, which decays to Pu239. Both decays occur quickly. Th/U233 works by Th232 absorbing a neutron, becoming Th233, which decays to Pa233, which decays to U233. Note the similarity. The difference is that neutron-eating Pa233 sticks around longer than neutron-eating Np239. So, to improve neutron balance, the typical plan is to remove Pa233 from the salt, so that it is not eating neutrons uselessly, and let the Pa233 decay to U233 outside the reactor, then re-inject U233 to the salt. But, this gives you fairly pure U233, hence a proliferation concern.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Ridge_National_Laboratory

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/348
I find this discussion rather ridiculous, in that, we have done this successfully back in the 1960’s. My father worked at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation for Battelle Pacific Northwest Research Laboratories who were directly involved at Oak Ridge building and operating a Thorium reactor. The problem I see, is we are wasting time jibber jabbering about it and not doing anything. This is a joke. It’s just another distraction from actually doing anything constructive. We could have fully operational Thorium reactors virtually over night if we really wanted to. I am tired of all of the BS talk about this sort of crap while nobody has the balls to actually accomplish anything. Talk is cheap.

As in the previous thread there seems to be a lot of confusion talking about “power” generating plants. Much of the new concept designs discussed are prototype, demonstration plants. Small reactors of this type have a lot of wiggle room which allow unconventional use of such things as air cooling, gas driven turbine, etc. If a reactor is small and prototypical, one can use jello for cooling and twirly birds for turbines.
But when we talk of large power production, with 1000+ MW(e) per unit outputs, reality of choices are quite limiting. Any exotic process may be used for the thermal production, however the water-steam cycle will remain conventional as well as turbine/generator sets. These are water cooled units.
Some believe to utilize a new heat supply, the conversion of heat to electrical power must undergo similar transformation to exotic processes. Think about the amazing properties, safety and abundant cheapness of water. Now… what are you going to replace it with? At what cost and where are the extremely large supply that is required found. In order to produce 1000 MW(e) nearly 2000 MW(th) is being produced. That is a lot of heat that must be rejected instantaneously when the generator or grid trips. Failure to reject = some meltdown. GK

Just for the record, the Chinese have licensed the German Thorium HTR technology. Germany has stopped its pursuit in 1989 due to cost issues. It works with solid pebbles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300

David Archibald: “One of the wise things that Obama did (the only one?) was to not have the fuel rods buried in Yucca Mountain.”
No, David this was not a wise decision. Yucca Mountain was intended to take all of the waste streams from both civilian and military nuclear processes. This includes all of the wastes from places like Savanah River, Rock Flats, Hanford Reservation, as well as spent fuel and contaminated byproducts from fuel enrichment.
Even if you remove spent fuel rods from the mix, Yucca Mountain is still needed for all the other streams. And if you adopt a policy of fuel reprocessing you need a repository for all of the trans uranics and fission fragments, which Yucca Mountain was designed to be.
No, the cancellation of Yucca Mountain was an incredibly stupid act, serving only to provide seeming justification to the anti-nukes that there is no solution to nuclear waste.

from memory pretty sure the reason thorium was used decades ago is because it is TOO SAFE meaning it could NOT be weaponized and at that time they were looking for a weapon and not concerned about generating electricity.
the technology already exists for SAFE clean electricity production using thorium AND the old “spent” fuel rods.

@Steve Piet:
Although the Pa233 is separated from the blanket for decay to U233, it’s not a good idea to let it cool because some U233 can be extracted shortly thereafter. Decay is a logarithmic process. The half-life is about a month but the first U233 could be produced “immediately” the Pa233 is first produced by decay from Th233. Keeping the salt as a molten liquid facilitates extraction. It’d be at about 500°C, so it’s not easy to walk away with a bucket full of it.

John is correct in his assessment and David left out one critical adjective….ADMIRAL Hyman Rickover over-ruled Throium reactors in the sixties. If you trust Wiki…. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium ….then the first Thorium reactor was Unit 1 at Indian Point in 1962, which was converted to Uranium and shut down in 1974. Thorium has a half life of 14 billion years, meaning low radioactivity and there is four times the amount of Thoruim as Uranium. What “MikeH” said is correct, at a time when the USA still had “industry” the need to have rate payers subsidize the Military-Industrial (GE) use of Uranium over rode the practicle development of nuclear energy.
Carbon Climate Forcing, ‘renewable’ energy and peak oil are the trifecta of government funded science lies. Hydrocarbons are a natural by-product of Earth’s variable fission process and as such, PETROLEUM IS RENEWABLE and it is NOT peaked. Humans are quite possibly consuming Hydrocarbons at higher than the natural production rate, but Hubbert’s peak oil was a Malthus extention and a gross error.

Yucca Mountain was a very poor choice as a site to store nuclear waste. There are better geological formations available in other states, but were eliminated on political grounds.
The state of Nevada is mostly owned by the federal government, and Yucca Mountain does have the advantage of being in a very isolated area in the middle of the Nevada Test Site which is itself surrounded by government owned land.
I lived in Nevada and never believed the hype about the dangers of storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. But the site has many well known geological problems that make it less than ideal.
Still, we need to do something with the nuclear waste, and burying it an a mountain made of volcanic ash in a site that sits about the water table isn’t a good way to take care of it. We need to reuse, recycle and reprocess our nuclear waste. The volume of high-level waste can be reduced by up to 90% in this manner. What to do with the remainder? Bury it somewhere more geologically suited than Yucca Mountain.

From Rob Potter on June 8, 2012 at 5:54 am:

I am going to slightly off-topic here to ask the commentators (who know a lot about the nuclear industry, from their very insightful comments) to comment in a similar vein on the Deuterium-cooled reactors being promoted in Canada. They call them “Candu” reactors (yuk, but we live in a world of marketing) and my simple analysis suggests they are an advantage in using essentially unrefined Uranium so no enrichment issues. Plus, the coolant is its own moderator so much of the engineering seems simpler.
(…) I guess what I am looking for is their downside since all I get here in Canada is the upside.
…

Everything you want to know should be in the Canadian Nuclear FAQ by Dr. Jeremy Whitlock. The Wikipedia CANDU reactor entry is also good.
As read here, besides using un-enriched uranium, they can burn “spent” fuel from conventional reactors, thorium, surplus weapons-grade plutonium, they can even get rid of waste actinides. The radioactivity requirements are so low they can keep recycling fuel and running it through until there’s practically no highly radioactive material left over. They’re also refueled while running, no shutdowns needed except for maintenance. They’re basically everything we could want from a fission reactor, if you’re not making bombs.
They’re also designed with many inherent safety features with automatic failsafes. It’d take deliberate sustained operator malfeasance to mess them up, or a severe natural catastrophe like a direct asteroid strike.
The major downside is, of course, at some point you’ll have radioactive reactor parts, and some lower-level waste. Although as the fuel technically never touches the heavy water coolant/moderator, on decommissioning you could just dump the D2O in the ocean where it occurs naturally and let it disperse. Can’t do that with light water reactor coolant.

The proof of design reactor ran for four years before it was shut down so it is not Unicorn Rainbows and Pixie Dust like much of green energy.
A quick look thru the newspaper will show that although we have had decades of experience with light water reactors we still have irritating problems related to the lifespan of the steam generator tubes. Humanity has been working with steam for hundreds of years.
The technical challenges of heat exchangers with water on one side and something else on the other side will surely be more daunting then a heat exchanger with water on both sides.
The history of other then water cooled reactors has been filled with ‘learning opportunities’.
http://www.gen-4.org/GIF/About/documents/16-Session1-4-OConnor.pdf
US DOE is pursuing research on ‘advanced gas cooled reactors’ .

Found in: Spector on June 8, 2012 at 10:43 am:
“http://ThoriumRemix.com – Kirk Sorensen is asked at Mount Royal University about using Thorium in a CANDU (heavy water) reactor. His response: No economic advantage to do so. Thorium can be effeciently consumed in a Molten Salt Reactor, not in a solid fuel reactor”
Full disclosure time, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Flibe Energy
Flibe Energy is a company that intends to design, construct and operate small modular reactors based on liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) technology.
…
Flibe Energy was founded on April 6, 2011 by Kirk Sorensen, former NASA aerospace engineer and formerly Chief Nuclear Technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering and Kirk Dorius, an intellectual property attorney and mechanical engineer. The name “Flibe” comes from FLiBe, a Fluoride salt of Lithium and Beryllium, used in LFTRs. Flibe Energy Incorporated is registered in the State of Delaware.

Just like when wind turbine manufacturers talk of the superiority of wind as an energy source, especially as to how their turbines are better, I think Mr. Sorensen may be slightly biased in his opinion.

Sorensen estimates that it will cost “several hundred million dollars” to get to the first LFTR, but he is “confident that we will be able to garner sufficient funding to have a prototype thorium reactor in operation” by 2016.
…
In order to timely achieve its goals, Flibe Energy intends to work with the US Armed Services, which each have independent nuclear regulatory authority. Accelerated military development and demonstration can speed later deployment for civilian power production by providing extended materials and operational data to inform civilian reactor licensing through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). (…)

Keep sending money and you’ll eventually get your “small modular” LFTR.
But they’ll be working with the US military, which is facing massive budget cutbacks thus funding from them will likely be constrained. The theory is the military would like to have self-sufficient on-base power generation. But naturally they’d be less than thrilled by the spewing of radioactive materials and hot molten salts after a missile or mortar strike. If this is really an issue the military can’t address with a diesel generator, as they’d always have the fuel on hand for their vehicles, long-lived Radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTG’s) have been used for many decades, in space probes, the Soviets used them in unmanned lighthouses. The US Air Force uses them now for remote radar facilities. Very robust and rugged, portable, no maintenance.
And because they’re working with the military, I guesstimate it won’t be until 2020 when they can begin the process of getting a commercial-use reactor approved, provided their proposed development timeline goes smoothly. Even then, expect about two decades from now until they’re deployed, with regulatory approvals and permit approvals and inevitable lawsuits to wade through.
Meanwhile, thorium can be used in CANDU reactors now. It’s been looked at for decades. Here’s a 2000 paper, The Evolution of CANDU Fuel Cycles and Their Potential Contribution to World Peace.

There has long been an attraction for fuel cycles using thorium as a thermal breeder of fissile material (U-233). Thorium is three times as abundant as uranium in the earth’s crust, and U-233 is valuable as a fissile material due to its high value of fission neutrons produced per thermal neutron absorbed (eta).
Existing CANDU reactors can operate on thorium fuel cycles, with comparable fuel-cycle costs to the natural-uranium cycle and with improved uranium utilization. While ultimate efficiency is achieved with a self-sufficient cycle that relies only on bred U-233, economical once-through thorium (OTT) cycles can greatly extend uranium resources.
Several options have been identified for the use of OTT in CANDU reactors (Milgram, 1984), and on-power refuelling is the key to successful exploitation of this material. Two general approaches have emerged: the “mixed-core” approach, and the “mixed-fuel-bundle” approach (Boczar, 1998).
…
Thorium fuel cycles have additional benefits beyond uranium resource extension. Both the thermal conductivity and melting point of thorium oxide are higher than that of uranium oxide (by 50% and 340ºC, respectively). Thorium oxide is chemically very stable, does not oxidize, and creates fewer minor actinides than uranium. Even with the existence of economical uranium fuel cycles, thorium can be used to simultaneously extend resources and create a “mine” of safeguarded U-233 for future exploitation.

So we can start burning thorium now in CANDU’s, and economically, or wait until that great glorious day when LFTR’s are deployed. From the timescales I’m reading, they’ll arrive just in time to be quickly superseded by fusion reactors.
Besides, what do you get with a LFTR? A thorium-only reactor. With CANDU, you have a vast range of potential fuels, use what’s locally abundant and cheap.

The warmist/green/socialist lunatics (theyve all merged into an indistiguishable blob) dont want cheap, clean or even free energy becoming available because it dosnt fit in with their aims.
If a source of energy became available tomorrow to pull millions of starving africans out of the poverty their millions of kids get born into, the population would just continue to spiral massively upwards, the warmist aim is population reduction not expansion which is why theyre all for subsidies on dis-turbines and other “green” ideologies that keep people in poverty and push others into it.
As for teaming up with the likes of manny and hansen their sums dont add up anyways so anything theyre involved in is bound to fail.

Charles.U.Farley says:
June 8, 2012 at 2:49 pm
The warmist/green/socialist lunatics (theyve all merged into an indistiguishable blob) dont want cheap, clean or even free energy becoming available because it dosnt fit in with their aims.
If a source of energy became available tomorrow to pull millions of starving africans out of the poverty their millions of kids get born into, the population would just continue to spiral massively upwards, the warmist aim is population reduction not expansion which is why theyre all for subsidies on dis-turbines and other “green” ideologies that keep people in poverty and push others into it…..
________________________________
Unfortunately you and the Greenies are incorrect. The most effective birth control is a high standard of living. The USA, British Common wealth nations and the EU all have birth rates near or below replacement. It is poverty and especially subsistence farming (Kids are free labor) that promote breeding like rabbits.
BTW I have all the links to back that up if you want them.

kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
June 8, 2012 at 2:50 pm
…CANDU’s burn spent fuel from light water reactors. We have decades of electricity from used fuel rods on hand, that people are wanting to throw down a deep hole for thousands of years. And CANDU’s are very efficient. See this paper I linked to last post….
_____________________________
Thanks for the info. It is nice to know there is more than one option. I find it rather interesting this is the first I have heard of CANDU. Canada’s well kept secret? The MSM is only interested in denouncing nuclear and not reporting information.
If I recall correctly GE is the company providing fuel rods to US nuclear plants and owns a large stake (49%) of NBCUniversal. GE’s CEO Jeffrey Immelt, head of Obama’s “Jobs Council”, is moving even more GE infrastructure to China. GE makes more medical-imaging machines than anyone else in the world, and now GE has announced that it “is moving the headquarters of its 115-year-old X-ray business to Beijing”. Apparently, this is all part of a “plan to invest about $2 billion across China” over the next few years. But moving core pieces of its business overseas is nothing new for GE…. GE has shed 34,000 jobs in the U.S., according to its most recent annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But it’s added 25,000 jobs overseas…

The comments about the improved safety of the molten salt designs do not include detailed discussions about the removal of the decay heat. Decay heat is one of the two unique characteristics of nuclear plants that raises safety concerns. You have to continue to remove decay heat from the nuclear reaction in order to prevent the release of fission products, which is the other unique characteristic. Fossil fuel plants shut off the fuel (coal, oil, gas) supply, and the machine just cools down. When you shutdown a nuclear plant, you can stop the fissioning quickly, but you are still left with the fission products that continue to decay and release significant amounts of energy for a significant amount of time. The safety systems are designed to make sure that you can continue to remove the decay heat.
Molten salt reactors will be creating the same amount of fission products per unit of energy generated as nuclear plants that use discrete fuel elements. 1000 MW of molten salt capacity will create the same amount of waste/FPs as 1000MW of LWR capacity or PBR or FBR. Those FPs must continue to be cooled, until they are placed into a condition that does not threaten their containment. If you “dump the molten salt into ciriticality-safe tanks” you stop the fission process, but you still have the FPs and their decay heat to deal with. If you cannot cool the tanks, they will melt, and you will lose containment of the FPs. Designing the tanks to be cooled passively is not simple. Gas coooled reactor supporters like to say that their fuel can maintain integrity without active cooling, and they have some calculations and experimental data to back them up. However, in real life there are a LOT of “interesting” scenarios that can challenge the integrity of their FP containments.
None of the nuclear generating options is absolutely safe. The technology has the inherent risk associated with containing FPs. However, I would point out that several hundred people died in Japan when the trains they were on were swamped by the tsunami. No one has really been injured by the Fukushima accident. People have very different ideas about acceptable levels of risk from different technologies that are not amenable to rational analysis or argument.

Bernd Felsche says:
June 8, 2012 at 10:30 pm
@kadaka:
Look up “positive void coefficient”. Then Chernobyl. Then CANDU.
You don’t need graphite for a reactor to become unstable.
CANDU requires active control system response to maintain stability.
If you let a molten-salt reactor “over-heat”, the freeze plug melts and the salts drain under gravity into passively-cooled tanks.

Yes theoretical void coefficient de-rates CANDU’s output slightly, however since light water is a poison to the CANDU fission flux, ordinary untreated water may be used for emergency core cooling, with no need for additional poison addition (neutron absorbing chemical ie boron). This means they can never run out of emergency coolant.

“If you let a molten-salt reactor “over-heat”, the freeze plug melts and the salts drain under gravity into passively-cooled tanks.”

Older CANDUs employed the same dump technique only the reactor simply dumped the entire moderator (D2O), stopping any and all fission. It is not unique to the molten salt technology. GK

Seems we have both a Steve Piet and Steve P!
In comparing options, one has to look at what advocates say and especially what they don’t say; and what the market does. CANDUs with heavy water coolant and heavy water moderator do not need uranium enrichment. The “burnup” is about 7 MWth-day/kg-iHM (energy per kg of initial uranium) and one kg of uranium in ore turns into 1 kg of uranium in fuel. Pressurized and boiling water reactors are now getting about 50 MWth-day/kg-iHM and it takes approx 8 kg of uranium in ore to make one kg of uranium in fuel (via enrichment). So, in terms of thermal power/kg of uranium in ore, CANDUs are slightly more efficient. But, CANDUs get somewhat lower thermal efficiency, so CANDUs and PWR/BWR are about the same in terms of electricity/kg of uranium ore. But, all extract <1% of the energy in the original uranium. To get 80-99% energy extraction, one must recycle in a breeder reactor, but those are politically incorrect. Same result with thorium. Whether U/Pu239 or Th/U233 fuel cycles, if you want to really maximize energy and minimize waste, you recycle used fuel. The political greens will oppose either U/Pu239 or Th/U233 because it means nuclear would have minimal waste & would be more sustainable.
But, the market …. The Canadian's own new and improved concept has heavy water moderator but light water coolant to improve economics. This allows them to get 20 MWth-day/kg burnup but requires some uranium enrichment. Why the change? higher thermal efficiency. less trouble with tritium created in the heavy water coolant leaking to the environment. less cost of making heavy water for the coolant.
Another factor, if I am going to recycle any of those fuels, it makes the most sense to recycle one one with the most residual good stuff. Used PWR/BWR fuel has ~1% Pu. Used CANDU fuel has much less. So, to get the most recovered usable material per dollar spent, one would recycle PWR/BWR fuel, not CANDU fuel.

One last comment. Some people have alluded to the differences of opinion between Alvin Weinberg and Hymen Rickover. I don’t think they really understand the roles of these two people in the history of nuclear energy. Weinberg was a scientist, and a visionary. He came up with the idea for a water-cooled reactor, the PWR, that was chosen by Rickover for the nuclear navy. I believe that he also had a lot of other very innovative ideas about different types of reactors. He never had to actually develop these designs into working machines that made practical, economical power. He was a researcher.
Rickover was an engineer. He had to come up with a design that would fit into a tube less than 50 ft wide, and would make reliable power independent of support facilities, while people were shooting at the tube holding the reactor. All without injuring the operators who lived inside the tube with the reactor. Rickover also was responsible for developing the only truly workable thorium fuel that was tested successfully at Shippingport. Weinberg had the idea, while Rickover had to make it work.
The biggest problem with thorium is that there is no need for it because the cost of uranium is so low. As a percent of the cost of generating power, the cost of the raw material for the fuel is trivial. We could extract uranium from seawater and never significantly affect the cost of electricity generated by LWRs. With the availability of U from seawater, there is no need to use anything else, not even Pu. Thorium, on the other hand, would require the creation of an entirely new infrastructure for fuel manufacture, transport, storage, etc, which no one wants to pay for.

rxc6422 says:
June 9, 2012 at 11:08 am

Oh, and implementation of the precautionary principle basically amounts to giving control of your society to the people who tell the scariest stories. Not the way I want to be governed.

But it’s what you’ve got. I don’t know if putting the smartest people in charge is the answer, but we’re a long way from that anyway, with a succession of slick, wealthy, ruthless types seemingly at the controls, and all doing their best to keep the hoi polloi scared witless with a never-ending stream of bogie-men.
rxc6422 says:
June 9, 2012 at 10:31 am
You addressed only the first part of my second point, and my first point not at all.
In view of the fact that the situation at Fukushima has not been resolved, and accurate reporting hard to come by, I suggest it’s a wee bit early to know what the final reckoning will be, your breezy dismissal of any possible medical problems notwithstanding.
Of course we are bathed in natural background radiation, but that doesn’t address the question I raised about “increasing radiation exposure” above and beyond that, .

I have been avid readers of both of WUWT and Kirk Sorrenson’s websites for many years. It is without a doubt that we are on the cusp of huge changes in the way we do business in this country and energy production. Not only will it allow current business enterprises to flourish, but will allow a huge new growth among those that don’t have the resources of energy production today. Through the use of thorium and Liquid Floride Thorium Reactors we will see a transformation never seen before in the world. IIt will create such an enormous benefit to those that can’t afford importing energy production and will bend the proverty scale back so much the impediment for a decent and respectable life style will a norm. Why would we not choose that choice? I know why. Tyranny!

RE: Solid Thorium Reactor Cores
One thing to keep in mind is that thorium is not fissile on its own. It *must* be placed where it will be struck by neutrons. Thorium absorbs neutrons. Each neutron absorbed changes a thorium 232 atom to thorium 233, a more unstable isotope. That quickly changes to protactinium 233, also an unstable non-fissile isotope. In the molten salt reactor, the protactinium 233 is removed from the reaction chamber before absorption of another neutron can knock it up to protactinium 234.
The protactinium 233 eventually shoots out another electron and becomes uranium 233, which is fissile. This fissile uranium 233 is then returned to the reaction chamber. When a uranium 233 nucleus is struck by a neutron, it will fission and in that process give off, on average, slightly more than two neutrons. That yields one neutron to shatter another uranium 233 nucleus and one more to convert another thorium 232 nucleus to thorium 233.
The fluid state reactor core allows continuous chemical processing of the thorium/protactinium fluid and the fissile uranium fluid. Solid state thorium has been described as very difficult to process as required to continuously remove the protactinium 233 from the neutron flow. However, one might be able to slightly improve the efficiency of high-pressure, light water or heavy water (CANDU) reactors by including some thorium in the mix, given that these reactors only consume a small fraction of the fissile material in the fuel rods. Dr. David LeBlanc says that the real advantage is the fluid state reactor concept that can consume almost 100 percent of the fissile material.
As far as I can tell, the main factor which has stood in the way of molten salt reactors is what Richard Martin describes as ‘technological lock-in.’ Once the design of a working nuclear reactor was accomplished, it became the standard and all nuclear technology since has been required to be ‘compatible’ with that design. It, like the ‘IBM PC,’ became the industry standard, despite the fact that its original designer, Alvin M. Weinberg, considered that design potentially impractical and unsafe for use as a public power generation reactor.

From Spector on June 10, 2012 at 6:15 am:

As far as I can tell, the main factor which has stood in the way of molten salt reactors is what Richard Martin describes as ‘technological lock-in.’

Technically speaking, a full LFTR power plant has never been built. The much-vaunted Oak Ridge National Laboratory Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) was proof-of-concept with the produced heat shed to the atmosphere, didn’t have the heat-to-electricity part. And it “simulated” using thorium, never actually did use any.
Even then, there were problems. The “exotic” alloy Hastelloy-N was selected.

At the time that design stresses were set for the MSRE, the data that was available indicated that the strength and creep rate of Hastelloy-N were hardly affected by irradiation. After the construction was well along, the stress-rupture life and fracture strain were found to be drastically reduced by thermal neutron irradiation. The MSRE stresses were reanalyzed, and it was concluded that the reactor would have adequate life to reach its goals. At the same time a program was launched to improve the resistance of Hastelloy-N to the embrittlement.[8]

For “adequate life” considerations, the experiment only ran about 4-5 years, and “operated for the equivalent of about 1.5 years of full power operation”.
Among the Results:

One unexpected finding was shallow, inter-granular cracking in all metal surfaces exposed to the fuel salt. The cause of the embrittlement was tellurium – a fission product generated in the fuel. This was first noted in the specimens that were removed from the core at intervals during the reactor operation. Post-operation examination of pieces of a control-rod thimble, heat-exchanger tubes, and pump bowl parts revealed the ubiquity of the cracking and emphasized its importance to the MSR concept. The crack growth was rapid enough to become a problem over the planned thirty-year life of a follow-on thorium breeder reactor. This cracking could be reduced by adding small amounts of niobium to the Hastelloy-N.[18]

Thus material selection is crucial for a LFTR to get a thirty-year lifespan. Meanwhile the planned-from-the-start relatively easy core refurbishment of CANDU’s already makes 50 year lifespans obtainable, using materials that are much-less exotic.
And to mention it, while talking safety, what happens in the worst-case scenario of a complete loss of power? CANDU’s have automatic shutdown from control rods held against gravity by electromagnets, they’ll quickly drop into the low-pressure calandria, which is filled with the cool moderator water to absorb the residual heat, etc. Newer light water reactors also can handle such events with designs incorporating coolant water stored above the reactor that’ll automatically keep the core flooded, etc.
But a molten salt reactor? First assume the reaction does shut down. Then the salts cool down and solidify, aka “freeze”. Then you have a lot of expensive plumbing clogged with solid radioactive salts. It’d take lots of careful heating to get that plant up and running. Water-cooled reactors are simpler to restart.
Yet the engineering problems are only a part of the most important obstacle blocking molten salt reactors, and it’s not “technological lock-in”.
We don’t need them.
We have proven technology that works just as good with less hassle. Uranium is plentiful, we can burn thorium without molten salt reactors. Worried about long-lived waste and long-term storage? Use CANDU’s and reprocess fuel. Kirk Sorensen wants to develop small modular reactors. There are many designs being worked on using far more conventional designs, and even simplified by using natural convection instead of pumps for coolant circulation.
Although this Forbes article argues that cheap natural gas has killed the market for SMR’s. Natural gas would have to be about four times more expensive than currently, or likewise made much more expensive with a “carbon” tax, for SMR’s to compete. Of course there are many places in the world, including in the US, without access to that cheap gas, without the sources or the pipelines, where those more-conventional SMR’s will work quite well.
So why do we have to bother with unproven complex complicated LFTR’s at all?

RE: kadaka (KD Knoebel): (June 11, 2012 at 2:28 am)
“So why do we have to bother with unproven complex complicated LFTR’s at all?
I look at that technology as one potential successor energy source after all forms of cheap carbon energy have been exhausted. It appears that we have already taken out all the easily obtainable petroleum in a mere hundred years. Now we are shifting gears to go after more difficult and lower grade sources. So far, there seems to be little hope that any current conventional nuclear technology could be expanded to the scale required to fully replace carbon based chemical energy as a solution for all time in the future.
As for the much heralded green energy, I do not believe it could support any more than a small fraction of today’s population after petroleum and other critical technical resources have been depleted due to the surface area per person required to collect it..
I think we need to prove, once and for all, that LFTR’s *cannot* be made to work well before we might be faced with a ‘great world population decimation period’ due to lack of energy. It may take well on the order of half a century before LFTR technology could be expanded from pilot plant to common use, based on the time it took steam to replace sail on ships.
So far, LFTR is the only potential nuclear technology I know of that fully consumes the toxic transuranic waste. The continuous accumulation and incidental releases of this persistent waste makes the long-term, large-scale viability of other nuclear technologies questionable. The unique low-pressure core design should reduce the likelihood of dispersive explosions. At this stage, the cost of further development should be minimal.

From Spector on June 11, 2012 at 5:28 pm:

I look at that technology as one potential successor energy source after all forms of cheap carbon energy have been exhausted. It appears that we have already taken out all the easily obtainable petroleum in a mere hundred years. Now we are shifting gears to go after more difficult and lower grade sources. So far, there seems to be little hope that any current conventional nuclear technology could be expanded to the scale required to fully replace carbon based chemical energy as a solution for all time in the future.

Pessimistic much? There remains lots of liquid petroleum to extract, with improving removal technologies, as well as our recent natural gas finds. We have well over a hundred years left. And that’s without considering the reserves of coal, convertible to liquid fuels.
We’re in a technology hole for a bit. We need to develop better more-efficient energy storage systems, which is progressing. Solar cells are getting better, reducing area requirements. As our understanding of genetic engineering increases, we’ll be developing micro-critters that live on sunlight and excrete the liquid fuels we need. There are many things underway to supply us with lots more of dependable renewable energy in the decades to come.
Conservation efforts continue. We can build passive houses requiring no heating, likely no cooling. Geothermal heat pumps economically reduce energy demands for heating and cooling with quick payback times. Appliances and vehicles are more efficient. Heck, people now do on smartphones and iPads what they used to do on P4 PC’s which qualify as space heaters.
So as time goes on we need less energy. The major bugaboo of the “running out of energy” crowd is developing nations using more energy, and we can share our high-efficiency tech with them. So the “crisis” is much less than advertised, the crunch point much further in the future.

As for the much heralded green energy, I do not believe it could support any more than a small fraction of today’s population after petroleum and other critical technical resources have been depleted due to the surface area per person required to collect it..

As above, and it has the potential someday. Although I don’t expect much of “Green energy” anytime soon.

I think we need to prove, once and for all, that LFTR’s *cannot* be made to work well before we might be faced with a ‘great world population decimation period’ due to lack of energy. It may take well on the order of half a century before LFTR technology could be expanded from pilot plant to common use, based on the time it took steam to replace sail on ships.

I think we need more nuke plants, period. LFTR has no demonstrable advantage over proven existing CANDU technology. We can have all the energy we need NOW, affordably.

So far, LFTR is the only potential nuclear technology I know of that fully consumes the toxic transuranic waste. The continuous accumulation and incidental releases of this persistent waste makes the long-term, large-scale viability of other nuclear technologies questionable. (…)

As seen, not an issue.

(…) The unique low-pressure core design should reduce the likelihood of dispersive explosions. (…)

Likewise for CANDU’s. The fuel is sealed away from the coolant water, the coolant is in high pressure tubes, surrounded by calandria tubes, with the surrounding calandria moderator being low-pressure. Makes a explosive-type dispersion of radioactive materials nigh-impossible.
Although the LFTR has to deal with highly-reactive potentially-explosive fluorine gas…

(…) At this stage, the cost of further development should be minimal.

Ah, if I had a dollar for every time a raw unproven technology just needed “…a little more money to get finished, then it’ll revolutionize EVERYTHING!”

One more reference:
Here is a Link to a recent University of Tennessee, Department of Nuclear Engineering, webcast entitled:
Design Fundamentals of Molten Salt Reactors
Speaker: Dr. David LeBlanc
Formerly of Carleton University Physics Department, Ottawa
Canada
Currently Founder, Ottawa Valley Research Associates Ltd.
Ottawa Ontario
2/1/2012 1:30 PM Est Length: 01:01:47
http://160.36.161.128/UTK/Viewer/?peid=811fb3c7c7714c93a7954874bad331f5