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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This is the UN’s goal, Jeff K. The only wait to hoist global government and statism on the people is to break the US. As long as we remain a power (particularly economic) they cannot institute their plan.
The sad part is the players involved in this attempt openly state this as their goal, yet anyone that points it out is a conspiracy theorist or some sort of right-wing nut job. Go figure. It is maddening.
Mark
I was in Shanghai in September, 2010 to attend the World Expo…..you are not allowed to flush used toilet paper down the loo, since their sewage treatment system (whatever it is) can’t accommodate the loading. Therefore, each public bathroom has a rather smelly pail filled with soiled TP.
I guess I’m really not all that world about Chinese world dominance. Shanghai looks lovely & impressive, but it is a true Potemkin village of new skyscrapers, designed & build by American firms.
They are a competitor for resources, but not terribly innovative. Nice folks though, the guys on the street, vendors etc. were very friendly & helpful.
The Department of Energy [DOE] has funded the network of national laboratories, university and private institutional research since WWII.
Two points:
1. An audit of the investment vs. results is sorely needed. In my opinion, the labs and DOE itself are emblematic of governmental mismanagement.
2. Those, who argue for the green economy around the corner should take the political lead by demanding independent report from congress an of the last 60 years. Or alternatively, stop blogging… shut up.
thttp://www.science.doe.gov/National_Laboratories/index.htm
Funny. Back in the 90s, when I was getting my grade in math, I had this odd friend doing his PhD in nuclear physics. He was frustrated because nuclear physics was essentially useless those days, with more and more nuclear centrals being dismantled (I’m Spaniard, so dealing with nuclear weaponry wasn’t something he even considered). From his point of view, studying nuclear physics had no future.
How many decades (and money, work, and real progress and welfare) have we wasted thanks to the green paranoia? Even worse, when you find a fault, there surely are lots of other faults undiscovered. I wonder how many bright projects and young minds are being wasted right now in the name of superstition.
Richard S Courtney says:
January 31, 2011 at 3:28 am
Dave Springer:
“Your trolling of this thread is becoming annoying. As others have pointed out, everything you have posted here is blatant nonsense.”
Your ignorance is saddening.
“Biomass is a “new technology” that is “in its infancy” so can be considered to be among the list of new technologies first displacing then replacing older technologies“!!!??”
“Biomass” includes, among other things, ethanol generation from agricultural waste products. That and other means of processing waste into useable fuels are infant technology. Read up on it then maybe you can keep your foot out of your mouth in the future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass#Biomass_conversion_process_to_useful_energy
If you have an attention span longer than 5 minutes, which is a matter of great doubt at this point, try to read the whole article.
Does anybody remember the wonderful old Life Science Library books? I have most of them here on my bookshelf at home. In the volume entitled Matter, there is a brief breakdown of the uses and properties of each chemical element. Under the heading of thorium it says this:
“THORIUM, form Thor, Scandinavian war-god; discovered in 1828. Thorium can be used instead of scarce uranium as a reactor fuel because it is readily converted into uranium. Almost as abundant as lead, earthly thorium contains mor energy than all uranium, coal, oil, and other fueld combined.”
I remember reading these as a kid and wondering why we weren’t working on it. The book was first published in 1963. Go figure.
I guess I’m really not all that world about Chinese world dominance. Shanghai looks lovely & impressive, but it is a true Potemkin village of new skyscrapers, designed & build by American firms.
—–
Sorry, meant “worried” and “built”!
Shanghai skyline….
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shanghai_Skyline_2009.jpg
Dave Springer says:
The irony* of these two statements, coming from you, is saddening, but expected.
Mark
*assuming the colloquial misuse of the word irony, of course.
Dave Springer says:
January 30, 2011 at 5:56 pm
Hmmmm…. I wonder where Gun Powder came from?????
CRS, Dr.P.H. says:
January 31, 2011 at 8:12 am
“I was in Shanghai in September, 2010 to attend the World Expo…..you are not allowed to flush used toilet paper down the loo, since their sewage treatment system (whatever it is) can’t accommodate the loading. Therefore, each public bathroom has a rather smelly pail filled with soiled TP.
I guess I’m really not all that world about Chinese world dominance. Shanghai looks lovely & impressive, but it is a true Potemkin village of new skyscrapers, designed & build by American firms.
They are a competitor for resources, but not terribly innovative. Nice folks though, the guys on the street, vendors etc. were very friendly & helpful.”
I spent a fair amount of time in Taiwan in the late 1990’s migrating as much as practical of Dell’s laptop engineering to Compal and Quanta. Substantial guidance and oversight remained requisite but it could be done through daily conference call between me and their engineering team. I also worked extensively with Acer in Hong Kong migrating desktop engineering in the same way with the same result as in Taiwan – substantial guidance through daily conference call going through the issues one by one remained necessary. I have great respect for their diligence, attentiveness to detail, work ethic, desire to please the customer, and the exceedingly polite culture but creativity stayed in short supply. Every culture has its strengths and weaknesses. Americans are spoiled and lazy in comparison as a general rule but are exceedingly creative and tend to work smarter instead of harder. I’m a prime example. When I took over engineering outsourcing to China there were two people working at it full time with disappointing results. Within six months I was the only person left as the engineering interface, I spent about 10 hours a week at it in daily (actually nightly in my time zone) conference calls, and we had twice as many projects going at one time and all of them were very successful.
Wasn’t there a severe nickel corrosion problem with the early molten salt reactor we tried? Is that an issue that has been solved?
Is a MSR required for a Thorium reactor or is it preferred for heat transfer?
Mark T says:
January 31, 2011 at 8:53 am
“The irony* of these two statements, coming from you, is saddening, but expected.”
Way to not address the issue and just dodge it with a cheap sniping comment. Typical.
Yes, these technologies have been around in a prototype/research design for many years. The problem is no one has attempted, to construct a large COMMERCIAL operating demonstration yet. This is where the rubber meets the road. To take such designs and scale them up to extremely large design (>1000MWe units) will probably create a expensive “white elephant” initially (an accident may also be involved). From these initial attempts, engineers will perfect an efficient, practical model, for universal benefit.
Having commissioned 8 of our largest fission reactors, I see no reason for concern in our “stand-by” mode as we allow India and China to make the first attempts at “up scaling”. We will all learn many lessons from their efforts. Since they do not have to worry about political realities (public opinion) and crippling environmental concerns – it seems only logical and fitting. We are in a pretty good position, to rapidly take advantage of any PROVEN design concept.
I realize that many are disappointed… that others are in the spotlight, but must we always be the ones who shoulder, all the risk and costs. GK
Not clear to me what a thread on thorium molten salt nuclear reactors has to do with the state of sh*tters in Shanghai or with “Chinese world dominance” or what US fears of “Chinese world dominance” has to do with thorium reactors.
American architects are flocking to places such as Shanghai as that is where the money and the work is.
China is now the 3rd largest economy after the EU [1st] and the US [2nd], having recently surpassed Japan [4th]
http://goo.gl/eFQO
Anecdotally I’ve noticed a significant increase in original research papers coming out of China.
The US response, if this thread is anything to go by, appears to be one of histrionic demonization just as it was with Japan.
The heavy water thorium reactor will be less troublesome than the liquid metal versions, but I would remind readers that the US Navy tried liquid metal back in the fifties (using NOTHING slide rule calculators and chalkboards and analog meters and drafting boards – complete with plastic 3D models to analyze designs!).
Two full reactors were built: The USS SSN 575 Seawolf prototype engine room and power plant in Schenectady NY (inside a steel containment dome) and the full submarine USS Seawolf in Groton CT at Electric Boat shipyards.
I started decommissioning planning for the Seawolf back in the late-80’s – after her replacement pressurized water reactor had been running for almost 30 years – but no one was willing to discuss what design problems or design threats required the (very expensive!) change-out from liquid metal to pressurized water for her first reactor. There had been no accidents, but “near-misses” ? Too hard to maintain? Too hard to keep operating with liquid metal always threatening to “freeze” out in the pipes and pumps and reactor? Leaks? Excess radioactivity? Easier to only have “one version” of reactors? (Probably not – Rickover kept “his” prototypes up almost forever – hard to figure him admitting his second liquid metal reactor design was a mistake unless he was really, really finding problems that threatened the rest of his much more successful, less expensive, less complicated, more forgiving, more robust, easier to maintain conventional light water programs.)
This from
http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/usw/issue_34/one.html
“Second Nuclear Sub, But Another First-of-a-Kind
The U.S. Navy’s second nuclear boat also presented unique design challenges. Preliminary development work on nuclear power involved the investigation of a number of reactor design concepts, but only two were chosen for construction: the pressurized water reactor used on Nautilus, and the sodium-cooled reactor used on the follow-on nuclear submarine USS Seawolf (SSN-575).
As with Nautilus, the development of Seawolf’s liquid sodium plant involved the construction of a land prototype plant. Seawolf was launched on July 21, 1955, and conducted sea trials in January 1957. After acceptance, Seawolf operated as an active unit of the Atlantic Fleet and in 1958 made a record-breaking submerged run of two months, traveling more than 13,000 miles submerged, producing air and water for her crew the entire time.
Seawolf operated more than two years and steamed 71,000 miles on her sodium-cooled reactor, but, in 1958, the Navy had her refitted with a pressurized water reactor similar to the one in Nautilus, and that design is still the standard today. On her replacement plant, Seawolf steamed for another 27 years, finally being retired in 1987.”
Matt says:
January 31, 2011 at 8:46 am
“I remember reading these as a kid and wondering why we weren’t working on it. The book was first published in 1963. Go figure.”
Expansion,contraction and metal fatigue become big issues at 700 °C.
The forging temps of many metals are just too low.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forging_temperature
The ‘nuclear’ part is the easy part.
The hard part is the materials for the pipes, valves etc.
30 years ago we hoped breakthroughs in ceramic technology would yield us a new class of materials for high temperature applications. It just didn’t happen.
Dave Springer, several places re biomass energy:
Biomass has been one of those motherhood buzz words for a generation – it did manifest itself in converting food grain to ethanol and causing serious hikes in food prices. A seemingly little understood matter about biomass is this is not a waste. In the forest sector, it has served to protect seedling trees and to ultimately convert itself to fertilizer for the new forest. In agriculture, cornstocks etc are also not waste, but rather also fertilizer that introduces organic matter back into the soil improving tilth, moisture retention and adding mineral nutrients back. To take this and make it into fuel, causes… guess what … higher food prices and impoverishment of new forest growth. Somebody has to take the green crowd and detoxify them of their y=mx+b thinking and teach some systems math. Had we done this earlier, they wouldn’t have brought us the mercury curly light bulbs to save energy. Science is fun but you got to do the grub work, too.
The financiers are worried about regulatory risk and activist obstruction. Eliminate these two items and the numbers work out great.
Dave Springer says:
January 31, 2011 at 1:12 am
Total system levelized costs (US/2008) for new power plants per megawatt/hour:
Advanced Nuclear – $119
Biomass – $110
Much of that is regulatory costs. Using a cookie cutter design approach drops that number significantly.
Dave Springer, are you the same one that otherwise posts intelligent responses here? Seems odd if you are.
Unless we envision a future of stagnant advancement & population decline, the only reasonable long-term future energy source is nuclear-based. It’s a matter of energy-density, as I think you would know. Solar & wind will never, ever cut it in that respect, other than specialized applications.
If France & China can cut thru the bureaucratic-regulation mire & enviro-scare-mongering, so can the US or the rest of Europe. The only alternative is to eventually surrender the future to others, and then we’ll really be dependent on foreign technologies & resources.
Time to grow up, I think.
Dave Springer says:
January 31, 2011 at 9:04 am
Typical? Is it typical of a 30-year engineer, one that knows so much about the real world as you – “trust me I’m right because I know,” to fail to dig into any of the details of his claims?
I don’t need to “address the issue.” It has been addressed, sufficiently in fact. I am only pointing out your apparent inconsistency in claiming others are ignorant, because they refuse to educate themselves regarding things that you just know, while at the same time you are incapable of educating yourself regarding things you might not know.
Education: it’s not just for smart people. Learn to do the same and maybe educated folks like me won’t wholly dismiss claims from the likes of you simply on the basis that you haven’t done your homework. If you at least gave the impression that you were willing to dig deeper, a characteristic any engineer should have even before calling himself an engineer, people would tend to take you much more seriously.
Mark
wobble says:
January 31, 2011 at 9:43 am
Any of the so-called “clean fuels” also benefit from huge subsidies for research and development, not to mention implementation and usage (tax breaks, etc.,) which keeps costs down. The real cost of such sources of fuel should include these offsets.
Mark
Jeff K,
“History will look back and show how the greenie religious movement took the most advanced nation on Earth and turned it into a third world backwater intent on navel gazing while the rest of the world has their eyes on the stars.”
It’s not just the US being turned into a third world backwater. the UK is led by a prime minster who is so far into eco zealotry, he makes Barack Obama seem like James Delingpole :).
That was lip service. The bashing is fully justified because while Obama did do those loan guarantees, they are meaningless because the problem with Nuclear in America is that no one wants the waste stored anywhere near them. The solution was Yucca Mountain. Obama Killed the Yucca mountain project just before it was set to open. With no national storage area for the waste to make sure that NIMBY doesn’t kill a project, those loan guarantees are meaningless. Any local government will block a nuke plant because the locals will thoroughly oppose the storage of nuclear waste near their homes. This isn’t new to Obama or any administration, pay lip service while backstabbing those projects your allies dislike.
So yes, bashing Obama for his failure to encourage nuclear power is fully justified. In fact he is helping to kill off nuclear in this country.
A lot of people want to praise Obama for his human spaceflight funding too. The problem is this, The shuttle is due to retire this year. There is no replacement. Obama killed off the Orion project (as bloated a piece of federal pork as it may have been), and has offered no replacement. As of next year, the United States, unlike China and Russia, will have no manned spaceflight. Now some praise this and say, “well NASA is a bloated federal agency, not the nimble organization of motivated nerds it once was.” And they are correct to state this. However, NASA occupies less than 1% of the federal budget and its endgame represents the future of humanity. When was the last time any rational responsible parent spent less than 1% on their children’s future?
Obama = Just another politician, spineless in the face of requested political favors.
Two words that should always be found in any discussion regarding dissimilar energey sources: Energy density. This is why nuclear power should always be considered the superior source of energy. Of course there are considerations that must be addressed, but it seems the considerations are not viewed as problems to be worked out but are roadblocks to stop use of this superior source altogether. That is not to say that fossil fuels are not a good source of energy as well, as they will be superior for automobiles until either there is a scaled down nuclear source for transportation (unlikely) or the road system itself delivers electricity from a nuclear station directly to the moving automobile. Battery powered transportation again runs up against the problem of energy density.
A few people have correctly pointed out that China lags a long way behind the US in technology.
CRS, Dr.P.H. wrote:
I guess I’m really not all that world about Chinese world dominance. Shanghai looks lovely & impressive, but it is a true Potemkin village of new skyscrapers, designed & built by American firms.
Dave Springer wrote:
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.
If I could travel back in a time machine to London in 1851 at the time of the Great Exhibition when British industry was in advance of that in all other countries, it would not surprise me in the least if I overheard people make similar comments about the threat from rising powers such as Germany and the United States, but we all know now that any such comments would have been very complacent.
Many of my ancestors came from Dowlais, a small town adjacent to Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. For much of the 19th century Merthyr and Dowlais dominated the world’s iron industry. Not many Americans are aware of it but South Wales had a powerful influence on the industrial development of both the United States and Russia. The early American railroads and the Trans-Siberian Railway were built using rails made in Dowlais.
Later on the US Government caused a lot of damage to the economy of Dowlais by imposing high tariffs on the import of rails in order to protect the American iron and steel industry. When it was a developing country the United States did not really believe in free trade just like the Chinese don’t really believe in it today!
A Welsh industrialist, David Thomas, was largely responsible for the development of the US steel industry and a lot of skilled workers emigrated from Wales to Pennsylvania to work in the steel works there.
David Thomas (industrialist)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Thomas_%28industrialist%29
Similarly, another Welshman, John Hughes, was responsible for the development of the steel industry in the Ukraine and Russia and quite a few skilled workers emigrated from Wales to the Ukraine to work there. The town where the industry started was originally called “Hughesovka” after John Hughes but when the Communists came to power its name was changed to Donetsk.
Hughesovka
http://www.alangeorge.co.uk/hughesovka.htm
China today may depend on foreign technology. It may also depend on foreign experts as well as on Chinese people who have studied in American and other Western universities. There is nothing very surprising about that. China, and India too, are following the same path as countries such as the United States and Russia 100-150 years ago.
There is no reason for complacency. As Britain discovered a country trying to catch up with the leader can make much faster progress than the leader did.