While Matthew Nisbet opines on peak oil being a uniting cause, this short essay on thorium power is instructive and relevant. – Anthony
Guest post by David Archibald
Early in June, I gave a lecture entitled “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” at the Institute for World Politics (a graduate school for the CIA and State Department) in Washington. From that lecture, following are a couple of slides pertaining to the advantage of thorium relative to uranium for nuclear power:
To run a 1,000 MW reactor for a year requires one tonne of nuclear material to be fissioned. In the case of thorium, only one tonne of waste material is produced with 30 to 100 grams of transuranics (Neptunium and plutonium). Alternatively, the Neptunium could be separated from the uranium and burnt separately in a reactor for that purpose, at the ratio of 49 thorium reactors per one neptunium reactor.
The very low level of transuranics from the thorium route compares to the large waste volumes and transuranic content of that waste from the uranium route, shown in the above slide. The one tonne of thorium from the first slide is shown in scale to the 250 tonnes of uranium needed to produce one 1,000 MWyear in the light water reactor route. That 250 tonnes of uranium produces 35 tonnes of enriched uranium, which becomes the spent fuel volume. Of that 35 tonnes, 300 kg is plutonium. The transuranic content of the uranium light water reactor route is some 10,000 times greater than that of the thorium route.
Once the thorium reactor is adopted as the nuclear process of choice, we will be wondering why we bothered with anything else.
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Both the US and Canada needs to move to this, quickly. Otherwise it will be something else we import from China.
Very instructive
We bothered with the uranium reactors because at the time we were in the cold war and wanted to have a quick and ready source of bomb making materials. This is the 1970s we are talking about. Thankfully, the need for a ready source of those things has vastly diminished. Hopefully as we decommission the old plants, we will replace them with thorium.
This does seem like a very promising route for energy.
The two drawbacks I see at the moment are
1) “The neutron flux from spontaneous fission of 233U is negligible. 233U can thus be used easily in a simple gun-type nuclear bomb design.”
2) “However, unlike uranium-based breeder reactors, thorium requires irradiation and reprocessing before the above-noted advantages of thorium-232 can be realized, which makes thorium fuels more expensive than uranium fuels.”
Both quotes are from Wikipedia. Cost is always a concern, but cost is also relative, and it is certainly conceivable that as the process gets refined, the processing costs will come down. The weapons-grade U-233 is a concern, but that also seems to be something that can be mitigated by appropriate designs for the reactor.
Overall, it is certainly a technology worth exploring further!
So how many of these magical reactors are actually running? Are the paper advantages proven?
If I read this correctly, a 1 Gig Watt reactor can be done with 1/250th starting material and significantly less waste/byproduct? I’m all for it, lets study what can done with the byproduct and get these up and running.
The Indians are working fast and furious on this. There are huge reserves of Th in India.
The better news is that there is enough Thorium within the US to supply our electricity needs for something like 8,000 years (which should be sufficient time for us to finally overcome the technical and engineering challenges presented by fusion).
which is exactly why the gub’mint will never do it.
too late, too little (improvement).
The thorium route still produces nuclear waste that needs to be taken care of for millennia. The reactor sites are vulnerable to natural disasters and terrorism.
Why shall we now follow Michael Mann and James Hansen on their way to a nuclear energy future? They have been wrong before!
Unfortunately I don’t see any interest from mainstream politicians in thr West. Our political classes are tied to wind, solar and biofuels to the exclusion of anything else.
What I know about nuclear fission can fit inside a nucleus of a hydrogen atom but I got to ask some questions. If these graphs are accurate why not use thorium? What are the negatives of using thorium? Are the byproducts of a thorium reaction more poisonous, have a longer half life, harder to store than those produced from a uranium based reaction?
Electricity is not a practical replacement for the majority of liquid fuel use. And it isn’t a pressing problem unless you buy into the CAGW meme where CO2 is the designated scapegoat. There’s plenty of natural gas and coal and it’s affordable and adequate for electrical generation. What we need is a compatible, LESS EXPENSIVE alternative to fossil gasoline, diesel, and kerosene at least in great enough quantity so we don’t need imports. That will stimulate the economy like nothing else.
I trace the current economic funk back to roots in 2005 where over the next three years the price of oil went from $40/bbl to $140/bbl. That’s gotta end. Notice it’s happening again with oil at $120/bbl after a few years respite and, lo and behold the financial crisis got its second wind this week. Coincidence? I don’t think so. We’re getting played like a fiddle.
Excellent stopgap until we crack cold fusion.
I look forward to anti-nuclear types babbling about thorium bombs.
I wrote an essay about the same subjct:
http://everestlancaster.wordpress.com/2011/03/22/nuclear-power-why-we-chose-uranium-over-thorium-and-ended-up-in-this-mess/
enjoy
Had the Tsunami hit Japanese Thorium reactors [not Uranium ones] there would have been no emergency and it is only the desire for Nuclear Weapons manufacture that led the Cold War opponents to avoid using Thorium being too safe, too stable, highly efficient, low waste and much less complex/expensive machinery. There is masses of Thorium available……….it may be more expensive than Uranium but almost all Thorium is used [with almost no waste] as opposed to very little Uranium actually used and massive waste problems.
It is staring the politicians in the face and they are blind to its potential for almost limitless power and the ability to produce compact versions for outlying civilisations without ugly pylons everywhere.
Is this another of those 20 years away technologies? I know it was 20 years ago.
No one will stop you until you get close, then Big Green will take an interest, at first suport it, and then treat it like coal. In the long run, we could be getting free energy from bananas and they would oppose it for the radioactivity in bananas. It’s inevitably precautionary. We are prepared to pat them on their hands and bop them on their noses with a rolled up newspaper. They are prepared to kill us if necessary. Just give us something real – if you can – and we’ll have it out with them one way or another.
How many nuclear engineers and physicists are we training in our US universities?
Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of.
Better tap the Cold War geezers before they’re all gone
All these variations use the word “nuclear,” so environmentals will deem them “evil.”
Biofuel solves all our immediate problems it just needs to be more economical to produce. That’s happening as we speak. Synthetic biology is where it’s at. It’s near term and a perfect solution. No one is going to invest in a new generation of nukes if they are going to get obsoleted by genetically modified algae that drink municipal waste water and piss gasoline. Such organisms are already alive and patented. The US is, of course, leading the world in this. We innovate and others duplicate. Nothing has changed.
” John Davis says: August 9, 2011 at 9:24 am
So how many of these magical reactors are actually running? Are the paper advantages proven? ”
Yes in the 1960s they ran one for 5 years!
– Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor
We bothered with the uranium reactors because at the time we were in the cold war and wanted to have a quick and ready source of bomb making materials. This is the 1970s we are talking about.
Also consider before that. Uranium was a strategic issue in WW2. Before WW2, the Rockefeller dynasty had been hard at work for decades looking for ways create an economy for uranium and other radioactives they had a monopoly on.
Thorium didn’t figure in their plans for the same reason it doesn’t today. Much harder to monopolise ‘cos it’s more abundant world wide, doesn’t require expensive (& therfore exclusive ) technology to utilise, and not the best radioactive for bombs.
If big government is against nulcear power from Uranium because it provides cheap wealth indiscrimantly to the masses, then they’ll fight tooth and nail if need be to stop thorium power ever taking root in society.
I agree that the thorium route is attractive. I have always been of the opinion that the best route for uranium reactors is a heavy water design run as a breeder to make plutonium, which can then be reused. This route provides more fuel as a byproduct than you put in. The downside of course is the level of transuranics that need to be handled during the reprocessing step to extract the plutonium.
Check out Energy from Thorium, Kirk Sorensen’s site, for all the information needed on Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors. LFTRs need to be brought to the attention of politicians.