President Obama in his recent SOTU address said that “this is our generation’s sputnik moment” referring to the need to use science and technology to develop cheaper clean energy (among other things). It seems the Chinese were listening because last week they announced a focused effort to achieve technological leadership in thorium molten salt reactors.
From EnergyFromThorium
The People’s Republic of China has initiated a research and development project in thorium molten-salt reactor technology, it was announced in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) annual conference on Tuesday, January 25. An article in the Wenhui News followed on Wednesday (Google English translation). Chinese researchers also announced this development on the Energy from Thorium Discussion Forum.
See the Press report (Chinese) below along with partial translation:
http://whb.news365.com.cn/yw/201101/t20110126_2944856.htm
(partial google translation follows)
“Yesterday, as the Chinese Academy of Sciences started the first one of the strategic leader in science and technology projects, “the future of advanced nuclear fission energy – nuclear energy, thorium-based molten salt reactor system” project was officially launched. The scientific goal is to use 20 years or so, developed a new generation of nuclear energy systems, all the technical level reached in the trial and have all intellectual property rights.”
What is a “thorium-based molten salt reactor system”? Please see this previous WUWT post on this technology.
Currently there is no US effort to develop a thorium MSR. Readers of this blog and Charles Barton’s Nuclear Green blog know that there has been a grass-roots effort underway for over five years to change this. The formation of the Thorium Energy Alliance and the International Thorium Energy Organization have been other attempted to convince governmental and industrial leaders to carefully consider the potential of thorium in a liquid-fluoride reactor. There have been many international participants in the TEA and IThEO conferences, but none from China.
Will the US accept the challenge or allow the Chinese to dominate advanced nuclear technology too? Using a technology invented in the US 40 years ago no less!
This isn’t a “Sputnik moment” Mr. President, it’s a “shit or get off the pot” moment for US energy policy. The US excelled at the space race, partly because of the swift kick in the pants that Sputnik provided. Perhaps this announcement will be the embarrassment like Sputnik for the US government that will compel them to finally do something about our energy future besides tilt at windmills.
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Thanks to Charles Hart for the tip and info gathering.
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It looks like Asia is the new land of opportunity. America not so much.
If thorium reactor technology is supposedly ready to be plucked off a shelf and inserted into someone’s power grid, and given the huge demand for energy, why has no one worldwide done so? (I don’t believe there is a working thorium reactor anywhere.)
Is it a cost issue? An issue of dealing with unwanted byproducts? A distribution issue? An engineering issue? A physics issue? There must be a stumbling block somewhere. What is it?
The General Atomics Energy Multiplier Module looks good and uses depleted Uranium. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_multiplier_module Someone just needs to get off the stick.
China’s nuclear power expertise (my emphasis):
NUCLEAR STRATEGIC BALLISTIC MISSILE SUBMARINES (SSBNs)
Xia (Daqingyu) Class SSBN (Type 09-2 [No. 406]):
The Xia-class SSBN is a modification of the Han-class SSN, lengthened to house 12 missile tubes. China has stated that it has built two Xia-class SSBNs, each of which can carry 12 JL-1 SLBMs. However, reports conflict as to whether China has actually deployed two SSBNs. Most analysts estimate only one is operational (the 09-2).
The 09-2 SSBN first went on patrol in 1986. It is still unknown if the submarines are deployed armed with nuclear missiles, as China has been secretive about nuclear deployment details in order to enhance the survivability of the launch platforms.
The strategic value of the 09-2 SSBN is questionable; it uses very old technology and is thus highly vulnerable to acoustic detection and anti-submarine warfare (ASW) systems, and has never sailed beyond China’s regional waters, operating for only short periods in China’s coastal waters. Also, a minimum of three SSBNs must be operational in order to have one constantly on patrol. The 09-2 has also been hindered by the low level of reliability of its nuclear power plant. Other questions remain regarding the Xia’s operational status. In August 2000 the Agence France Presse quoted an annonymous Asian military expert saying, “The Xia has not been out to sea for several years and it has not fired any ballistic missiles since at least the early nineties.”
What? You mean China can’t just get the design for a submarine nuclear power plant “out of a textbook”? The U.S. has been sailing reliable nuclear powered submarines that never need refueling and can stay underwater for six months at time for the last 50 years. China still can’t do it. But they’re going to sail right past Oak Ridge thorium MSR reactor expertise sometime soon? What a joke. They’re just trying to save face and distract the rest of the world from the fact they’re building dirty coal-fired power plants as fast as they possibly can. If it was Japan or maybe even South Korea making the announcement I might find it slightly more credible but even those two technologically advanced countries aren’t world class when it comes to nuclear reactor design, construction, and operation in any of commercial, military, or research areas of endeavour.
Well, as long as somebody is doing it (China and India), there’s hope for humanity yet.
When they have it working, maybe we can trade them some swampland in Florida for the technology. As a bonus, they would probably turn the land into productive real estate. 🙂
How to murder a perfectly good Reactor program FFTF:
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2009/06/03/599996/fftf-shutdown-completed-at-hanford.html
Dammit..
“. . . and have all intellectual property rights.”
How’s that? The Chinese invoking intellectual property rights? Just paying off what they owe Microsoft would even out the trade deficit!
Obama knows about much about energy and science as a toad. It may be hard to believe, but this man is truly stupid. And he has infested himself with incompetent crack pots. Browner, Van Jones, etc. Oh yeah. Those are normally educated people.
Sorry, but this could be a bit of a smokescreen. China already has CANDU reactors, which can breed fuel from thorium. CANDU’s are very flexible in their fuel choices, and can burn the “waste” from standard light water reactors, which China also has.
There is no need for such a thorium-only program, especially with the engineering challenges of using molten salts, strictly for energy production. Perhaps they want a dedicated optimized thorium reactor, might have a lot of thorium on hand.
But I think the “intellectual property rights” are what they’re really after. Thorium is touted as “the better nuclear” if you’re worried about weapons-grade material being generated in the waste product. If China has a system they can call all their own, with all the rights, then they have something they can sell. They can also point to the nuclear weapons angle, and gain international acceptance for selling them to countries that sane governments prefer to not even have enriched uranium. They can flood the third world with cheap nuclear power plants, and all those countries will know who they have to turn to for parts, service, and training.
Meanwhile, based on what I’m reading in the Wikipedia Thorium entry, I wouldn’t trust certain countries even with those reactors, they can still extract material suitable for nuclear bombs. I’d rather give them coal plants and risk the globe going up a few tenths of a degree a decade, than risk small bits of the globe suddenly achieving several thousands of degrees in under a second.
If you’re really interested in biofuels, then you should buy your own plant. There are dozens in bankruptcy selling for a small fraction of the capital that was used to build them. And they’re all running at 30% capacity despite $90 oil.
Nuclear could easily be cheap enough if the US decided to allow fast track regulatory pipeline for cookie cutter design plants. There is absolutely NO reason why a nuclear plant should take more than 5 years to build.
Are the Chinese really ahead, or are they playing catch-up?
I recall India making Thorium noises some years ago, and some sort of deal with the USA. I found this page
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf53.html
which gives quite a lot of information (dated Jan 2011). The Indian effort apparently began around 2002, and may be making reasonable progress (see under Thorium fuel cycle development in India) :
“In 2002 the regulatory authority issued approval to start construction of a 500 MWe prototype fast breeder reactor at Kalpakkam and this is now under construction by BHAVINI. The unit is expected to be operating in 2011, fuelled with uranium-plutonium oxide (the reactor-grade Pu being from its existing PHWRs). It will have a blanket with thorium and uranium to breed fissile U-233 and plutonium respectively. This will take India’s ambitious thorium program to stage 2, and set the scene for eventual full utilisation of the country’s abundant thorium to fuel reactors. Six more such 500 MWe fast reactors have been announced for construction, four of them by 2020.”
See also
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/energy/nuclear/is-thorium-the-nuclear-fuel-of-the-future
http://www.hindustantimes.com/US-firm-offers-India-thorium-reactors/Article1-248288.aspx
Dave Springer says:
January 30, 2011 at 9:12 pm
“There’s no reason why they shouldn’t follow the path of every other solid state electronic gimcrack beginning with the transister 50 years ago and get progressively less expensive to manufacture.”
They will get cheaper, but this comparison is false. Solid state electronics got cheaper by miniaturization, solar panels cannot volume may only be reduced in 1 dimension (depth).
One thing is clear. Our wonderful legal system has been transmogrified into the Gordian Knot. We need an Alexander to cut through it. For example:
1)Congress (in concert with the President’s support and approval, as in all references to Congress hereinafter) declares “energy security” to be a matter of utmost national importance.
2) Congress forbids the courts from entertaining lawsuits having to do with energy generation except as described below.
3) Congress passes legislation regarding the permitting and construction of new power facilities mandating: a) a strenuous but reasonable permitting process (No you cannot site your molten salt bath thorium reactor on the San Andreas fault); b) assuming a project passes the permitting test, there is a window of opportunity – “challenge phase” – for complainants to sue to stop the project, on a “loser pays” basis; and c) if the project survives the challenge phase, it goes forward and no suits regarding its operational basis are allowed. (Other suits can of course be brought, but always “loser pays”.)
It’s time to transform the environmental crowd from their current stature as the night creatures in “Soylent Green” or more charitably, Luddites, into something positive like they are “said” to have been back in the 50s (I say “said” because I’ve read some articles by conservative thinkers who state they once acted beneficially. My experience is they have been essentially terribly destructive to the US and civilization in general).
My 2 bits.
Kirk Sorensen, the guy who runs the website http://energyfromthorium.com, presented a talk recently at Google on the vital importance of the U233 that the US gov’t has created and which it is in the process of destroying. U233 play an important role in kick starting the LFTR.
Contact your representative today – save the U233!!!
Could not agree more with Curiousgeorge,
We in the West really need to stop stupidly falling for what our politicians say they want to do and look at what they actually do. Words are cheap!!
When we hire people or make work appraisals – what sane employer would only go by what employees say they want to do? You look at their achievements and performance and largely ignore the rhetoric.
smcg says:
January 30, 2011 at 8:46 pm
I’m with Barry Brooks on this – Australia has “bucket loads” of Thorium (in addition to its already established bucket loads of Uranium).
Australia should be going “balls out” to inherit the US technology and advance it to production standard, especially if the US hasn’t got the wherewithall to do it…
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Yes indeed. But we have the Greens Bob Brown in bed “screwing” our PM Julia Gillard so fat chance well see nuclear this side of the next decades to come.
Ted Gray quoted : “USA FED ENERGY COMMISSION STATED: THE US DOES NOT NEED NUCLEAR OR COAL POWER – OUR POWER REQUIREMENT CAN BE MET WITH WIND, SOLAR AND OTHER RENEWABLE SOURCES
Wed May 6, 2009 12:59am BS”
Spot on. It is indeed BS.
From a foreign perspective, lots of US jingoism,
little in the way of information so far.
Oh well, Chinese jingoism can be just as histrionic . . .
Anyways, back to thorium
The first thorium molten salt reactor was developed at Oak Ridge, TN, USA
by Alvin Weinberg’s team:
http://goo.gl/qQPsd
Funding and development was discontinued because
1/ the US Navy wanted pressurized light water reactors for it’s vessels; and
2/ the US govt and military wanted reactors that would produce copious amounts of plutonium during the Cold War for the US nuclear weapons program.
Current thorium based reactor projects are based in
1/ India. Based on the CANDU design
http://goo.gl/rewge
Btw, the Canadians, meanwhile, are looking to sell off their AECL despite being positioned to take advantage of the thorium fuel cycle:
http://goo.gl/JWVD6
An idea possibly even more short sighted than their beloved and much bemoaned Avro Arrow.
2/ Japan. The miniFuji – IThEMS thorium molten salt reactor project:
http://goo.gl/AqOep
3/ China. As announced above.
A summary of the history of and argument for the thorium fuel cycle:
http://goo.gl/bTwW9
Arguments for and again the thorium fuel cycle: http://goo.gl/jQWs
Other advanced nuclear reactor projects: http://goo.gl/ejIL
I encourage all of you who can spare an hour to watch the video I linked to @ur momisugly around 6PM (above). This is probably the best explanation of thorium reactors I’ve ever seen.
@ur momisuglyDave Springer. Sorry, but you’re nuts. There’s no way wind turbines, solar or biofuels will make a measurable dent in our energy needs in the decades to come. As a country, had we invested even a fraction of the money we squandered on the AGW fraud on LFTRs and other newer generation nuke designs we would be way ahead of the game. We have greedy politicians, avaricious lawyers and the church of environmentalism to blame.
Well!
China has ambitions and finds possibilities for thier nations future.Cheap availible electricity from a newly rediscovered old American inviromental safe nuclear tecnology.Its a proof of a nation that is going somewere while USA and ther rest of the west is going nowere.
Leaders of the west do everything they can to make energy expensive and unavailible by skyrocketing taxes and prices.China is creating the opposit possibility.Ban Kii Moon wants a “revolution” against the free market and market ekonomy.You dont have to be an Einstein to realize whats gonna happen in the future.West is crippled by its leaders with no ambitions for its people whats so ever more than increase thier control and power on the expense of our future.The misantropic elit with MSM and gouvernments in an alliance is the new stealth dictatorship pact ruling our way into to powerty and disaster.We have to surrender our rights and needs under a new order where they say that they know what the “planet needs” and thier interpetation of that need is whats to control our lifes. This new fascism has become the new state religion.And I tell you folks these green fascist that infiltrated our democracys is a serious problem for our future.You now have these faschist implementes in the hole democratic apparatus and they are spread like a virus.
T Jeffersson:
“Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the ‘wall of separation between church and state,’ therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.”
What a ‘Sputnik’ moment would be for me is Obama on a single trip to the moon.
What a hack.
A molten salt reactor is a sweet reactor to run. according to the researchers at oakridge. The work left to be done on it is materials testing. the fission product are processed online, which is one reason it burns up most of the fuel. You also have to develop a heat exchanger.
The reason no one has built one is you need a bunch of U-233 to start it. The government has all there is. U -233 is expensive to make but once you get the reactor going it makes its own u-233. So the government has a bunch of expensive u-233 which you could burn in any reactor. so what do they do with it? they pay someone to bury it.
China will this year send 100,000 students to study in the USA according to jon Huntsman jr, ambassador to china. So who is kidding who about where the knowledge is now.
Liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs) have one big advantage. They start the reaction further down the periodic table with the result that they produce one ten-thousandth of the transuranics that any uranium-based process does. That is 30 grams of plutonium versus 30 kg from a light water reactor, per Gw year of output.
The second big advantage over plutonium breeder reactors is scale. Because plutonium fast breeder operates in the fast neutron spectrum, it must use molten sodium and because of the low thermal capacity of sodium, the reactor must be six times larger than an equivalent LFTR.
For neutron economy reasons and thus a positive breeding ratio, the LFTR has to be a two-fluid liquid reactor. Thus the Indian thorium effort is a dead end.
This development has the potential to make China the Boeing of the nuclear industry – pushing out a reactor a day. And don’t believe the 20 year bit – the J20 fighter came out of the blue and very fast. Buying a conventional nuclear reactor is like ordering a car and having it assembled in your front yard over several years.
The Chinese will have first mover advantage and economies of scale. And it will bring enormous political leverage too. As the oil runs out and coal is bid up to the oil price in energy terms, getting electrical power is going to be expensive and tricky for many countries.
I recommend Googling “Kaya Bey powership”. The Pakistanis find it difficult to run a national electricity generating system, so they ordered a 250 MW, Turkish-built ship which is now sitting in Karachi harbour providing power from burning diesel.
The Chinese could and will offer a similar service – 250 MW powerplants that just sail in and are connected to the grid. Regimes find it easier if their populations have cheap, reliable power. If the Chinese are the only ones offering that service, they will get enormous leverage from that in getting countries to toe the Chinese line.
As far as getting a Western LFTR up, it won’t involve anyone from the current scientific establishment, which are so stupid that they believe in global warming. We will adopt the Chinese solution in putting an electrical engineer in charge of the effort.
Dr. Dave says:
January 30, 2011 at 11:29 pm
“We have greedy politicians, avaricious lawyers and the church of environmentalism to blame.”
That’s a credible claim in the United States but it’s a big world and hardly explains why other industrialized nations aren’t building out a vast number of nuclear power plants. The Soviet Union is a prime example. They’ve had nuclear expertise equivalent to ours since forever. If it made economic sense they’d do it. They don’t have to deal with greedy capitalists, environmentalist whackos, or public opinion. If it was cheaper than fossil fuel they’d just do it. Yet they didn’t.
The following table is all you need to look at to determine why the world isn’t going crazy for nuclear power:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_cost_of_electricity_generated_by_different_sources
Advanced nuclear is 20% more expensive than conventional coal and whopping 50% more expensive than conventional natural gas. Nuclear power is a largely failed experiment which began in 1970, saw a flurry of construction which lasted until 1985, and hasn’t grown since then with fewer and fewer new reactors under construction every year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_Power_History.png
You might be in denial but the people who put their money at risk to build these hideously expensive things are not buying into it. Follow the money.
Dave Springer said:
Innovation in engineering just doesn’t come out of China
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Just hold that thought, Dave, while the West continues its relative decline.
This kind of racist jingoism and complacency is reminiscent of the last throes of the British Empire, on which the sun was never going to set because of the inherent inferiority of people in the Colonies.
Anyone with direct experience of Chinese effort in technology (including training up a whole generation who are starting to make their mark) knows that what you say is arrogant foolishness.
If China and/or India can get thorium plants up and running, they will be doing us all a favour. I just wish the world was arranged so that people like you could be marooned with nothing but ‘renewable’ energy sources, paying the full cost, of course.