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.
I have a few threads on Thorium at my forum:
http://www.globalwarmingskeptics.info/forums/forum-106.html
and a 16 minute Video presentation:
http://www.globalwarmingskeptics.info/forums/thread-1145.html
Jim G,
Thanks for the link….very useful. I think it might be an engineering challenge but possible to design a controllable reactor. The link by Walt above (1258pm) is also good. It looks like some practical designs may use U fuel as the initial neutron source to breed U233 which would raise the DNF further and make the reactor more controllable. The biggest tragedy in all of this is we stopped research on nuclear power for no good reason.
One of the problems of the uranium LWR route is that it is not walk-away safe. Typically, the amount of decay heat that will be present in the reactor immediately following shutdown will be roughly 7% of the power level that the reactor operated at prior shutdown. One of the reasons that so many of the Fukushima reactors had hydrogen explosions was that the coolant wasn’t kept up to the cores. Once it gets hot enough, the zirconium cladding of the fuel rods reacts with water to produce hydrogen.
At some future time, there may be an EMP attack on a country that has nuclear reactors. What if the electrics of the diesel backup system for the emergency cooling water get fried? The staff of the reactor won’t be able to do anything at all. The reactor will blow and be a festering sore on the countryside until billions are spent cleaning it up.
One of the significant advantages of a thorium molten salt reactor is that in the event of a problem, the reactor fluid can be drained to a non-critical geometry. To be walk-away safe, the containment will have to have passive air cooling that can instantaneously handle 7% of the rated capacity of the reactor. It just means that thorium reactors will have large chimneys associated with them.
David Archibald
Very interesting article. One may only hope that such technology be rapidly proved and applied.
A couple of questions about by products [not] shown in drawing #1:
The drawing shows Pu239>>>38%>>>Pu240 what is the other 62%?
The drawing shows Pu241>>>29%>>>Pu242 what is the other 71%?
…or did I miss something in the drawing?
F. Ross says:
August 9, 2011 at 10:09 pm
The other percentages are fission products. There wasn’t enough room on the slide to show that.
Mr Archibald,
Another design which has similar claims can be found here:
http://www.terrapower.com/
As my knowledge about these technologies is very limited, I wonder how this Traveling Wave Reactor compares to a Thorium Reactor.
Can you share some light on this?
DaveF says:
August 9, 2011 at 2:36 pm
We’ve got lots of thorium in the UK, but we don’t need it. You see we’ve got off-shore wind farms that produce electricity for a mere 25 pence (40 American cents) per kilowatt/hour. That’s right, only four times the cost of nuclear. Bargain.
It’s even better than that Dave, I can see three farms off the North Wales coast and they operate occasionally, but they are brand new, they may corrode a bit out there
About the theory of peak oil:
Some wise guy whose name I cannot recall once said:
“The stonage period did not end because stone-age peope ran out of stones.”
They discovered copper.
Likewise, the oil era will end not because we would run out of oil, coal or gas. In fact, the ‘new’ energy is already there for all to develop and use – nuclear. Meanwhile we still have hundreds of years of known reserves of coal, oil and gas. End then we have calthrates …..Wiki: The worldwide amounts of methane bound in gas hydrates is conservatively estimated to total twice the amount of carbon to be found in all known fossil fuels on Earth. Peak oil? Peak stupidity.
From my layman’s understanding the molten salt plan has many positives but you are left with a chemical engineer’s nightmare of doing almost perpetual separation of all those fission cycle compounds.
This year I learned that my father was one of the scientists who worked on the first electricity generating reactor. He says that he (et al) rejected the fluid Thorium route on grounds of extreme corrosion of the pumps. He went on to design the High Temp CO2 cooled reactor and his preferred design for the future would be the Modular High Temp Gas Cooled Reactor which I believe used Thorium pellets inside ‘cricket balls” of graphite stacked inside 3m tall 0.5m dia mini reactors. It had all sorts of walk-away safety features which he regarded as being a must for any future design. Sadly, the German Greens pushed that reactor out of existence and the S. Africans ran out of R & D funds.
Few nations can fund these major research programs alone any more. Like the International Space Station we may have to look at a multi-national design. Part of that would be to retire stupidly dangerous 1960s designs such as Chernobyl and the Boiling Water Fiascos in Japan.
Great article D.A.
Thanks.
George E. Smith says:
August 9, 2011 at 7:44 pm
I’ve never had anything but bad things to say about ethanol production using feedstocks such as corn, beets, sugar cane, or cellulitic agricultural wastes. Sugars and starches are too valuable as food crops and require agriculturally productive land in their production. There’s too much labor and energy devoted to growing, harvesting, processing, transportation, fermentation, and distillation. That’s a boondoggle from the word go in almost all cases and I’ve saying so for years. While agricultural waste doesn’t particularly need any productive land committed to it such waste is usually plowed under to revitalize the soil and if it isn’t plowed under that’s going to create problems. The processing required for conversion of cellulitic matter into ethanol is far more costly than using sugars or starches. That’s a non-starter too. Vegetable oils converted to biodiesel is a slightly better approach with less processing involved but the source crops are still difficult to grow and harvest, the yield per acre is too low, and vegetable oils are valuable as food.
Geneticially modified algae on the other hand have all the characteristics that other avenues are lacking. They can be produced anywhere there’s a source of non-potable water and plenty of sunlight. Municipal waste water is ideal because it’s loaded with nutrients. Brackish water works fine as does seawater although those need some nutrients added. We’re looking at 20,000 gallons of fuel per acre per year at a price equivalent to $30/bbl oil. And that’s just the first generation of an infant technology. Subsequent generations should be able to do an order of magnitude better in cost effectiveness. The best producers we have now in conventional agriculture can produce about 1000 gallons of fuel per acre and it’s a lot more expensive to produce per gallon. On a level playing field conventional crude has to be selling for about $200/bbl before conventional biofuels are competitive with it. National economies will fall like a row of dominoes if liquid fuel gets that expensive and stays there.
The only good thing that came out of turning corn into ethanol fuel is it spurred the development and widescale deployment of vehicles with motors which can self-adjust to gas/ethanol blends anywhere from 0% to 85% ethanol. Without modification a gasoline engine can only tolerate about 10% ethanol.
And by the way, speaking of Scientific American, which only dissed agricultural waste into ethanol schemes in the latest issue, you should read an article from earlier this year:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=in-search-of-the-radical-solution
Sorry you have to subscribe to read it all. I subscribe.
It’s an interview with Vinod Khosla who is considered the leading green technology investor in the world. He’s heavily invested in fuel production from genetically modified algae and is hated in Washington because he says investing in ethanol-from-corn is a mistake. They hate him because it was he who got that particular ball rolling in the first place 20 years ago by investing in it and lobbying Washington, D.C. for support. He figured out it was a mistake after the first several years but by that time Washington had too much time, energy, money, and political capital in the program to just pull the plug on it so the big boondoggle continued and is still continuing today with the unintended but predictable consequence that it made food prices shoot up as staple crops and agricultural land were diverted to production of ethanol feedstocks .
J.Knowles. says:
August 10, 2011 at 8:52 am
As the Fonz would say, exactamundo! Molten salt at 1500F laced with a plethora of even more corrosive radioactive byproducts and a fry-yer-ass-in-a-millisecond neutron flux is so destructive in so many ways there is simply no collection of materials needed for the plumbing and pumps and whatnot that can hold up for long. This is just glossed over by the cheerleaders of this technology who somehow think that the needed materials can be easily engineered. It’s an engineering nightmare and it just ain’t gonna happen. Or it at least ain’t gonna happen soon enough to solve any problems. Adding insult to injury there is no pressing problem in generating electricity. Liquid fuels are the big problem and electrical generation from nuclear power plants isn’t going to solve it. The number of electrically powered commercial and personal vehicles is so small it’s laughable. There isn’t enough niobium in the world to make enough electric motors to replace all the internal combustion engines. The electrical grid can’t a vastly larger load inherent with replacing liquid fueled motors with electrical motors. WE NEED LIQUID FUEL THAT IS CHEAPER THAN FOSSIL OIL. This is where the energy crisis lies. Electricity just isn’t a practical replacement and because we have a very large domestic supply of affordable coal and natural gas it isn’t part of the crisis.
Dave Springer says:
August 9, 2011 at 4:48 pm
Other than overcoming engineering problems with no known solution, however long that might take,
Molten Salt Reactors are on the Gen-IV International Forum’s ‘TODO’ list.
Lot’s of interesting materials science research is taking place….
http://www.gen-4.org/Technology/systems/msr.htm
Well in Australia the Greens are working on a Red Ochre liquid grease reactor housed in a bark hut….. You hit it with a wooden stick to get it to work and the only waste it produces is time and money…… apparently. 😉
I agree, and this is how you power internal combustion engines with nuclear fuel:
http://www.lanl.gov/news/newsbulletin/pdf/Green_Freedom_Overview.pdf
Note that the costs per gallon quoted are mainly capital costs. Meaning after amortisation the cost/gallon would drop significantly. Plus there are lots of opportunities for further cost reduction from this proposal.
Oh, there’s the reference I had seen. It was posted over at the Reference Frame by the gallopingcamel:
Nine years ago, Charlie Bowman built an “Energy Amplifier” on his farm in Virginia that was tested at the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. This work received minimal funding from the US government but it has blossomed into an interesting international collaboration. The latest proposal uses 20 MWe as input for a 1,000 MWt (300 MWe) output. The program committee includes Charles Bowman, Bruce Vogelaar and Carlo Rubbia.
Check out the Ganapati.Myneni.pdf at:
http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com/ThoriumSite/TEAC2.htm
Strictly speaking these guys are working on Rubbia’s ADR concept but it can be used to process all kinds of heavy elements. Because the fuel is “sub-critical” nuclear reactions require an external neutron source and it is the cost of neutrons that has prevented this type of reactor becoming attractive for commercial development. The Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge has set a new standard for “cheap” neutrons as can be seen from Charlie Bowman’s estimates in the TEAC3 update of the Ganapati presentation:
http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com/ThoriumSite/TEAC3.html
James Vanderhaeghen says:
August 10, 2011 at 2:39 am
I can’t shed any light on the travelling wave reactor. It seems that the proponents don’t have much more than a concept.
Pardon me for stating the obvious. As the orange box in the diagram near the top of the article suggests, Thorium-232 is NOT fissile. A Th-232 nucleus needs to acquire a neutron, and then undergo beta-decay, in order to form a U-233 nucleus, which is fissile.
Guess where that friendly neutron comes from? From a conventional nuclear reactor. Why is this important?
There are many hurdles to overcome, before we can transition to thorium reactors for electrical generation on a large scale. Some of the hurdles relate to nuclear engineering. Others are regulatory in nature. But even if policy-makers suddenly became thorium cheerleaders, it would take time and conventional reactor resources to generate the ‘seed’ U-233.
In the long term, a ‘thorium economy’ may be the wave of the future. But it ain’t gonna happen overnight.
Regarding biofuels – one of my colleagues at the University of Illinois in Urbana quoted the following in a powerpoint presentation on algae biofuel production:
It’s taking some time to do implement a program of this scale, but it will happen eventually. One algae company, Solazyme, just raised about $200M in a public stock offering. All of the major oil & energy companies are chasing this brass ring, someone will get it right eventually.
My lab is growing microalgae with over 50% oil content at several times the growth rate of competing processes, so watch this space.
Dave Springer says:
August 10, 2011 at 9:55 am
Liquid fuels are the big problem and electrical generation from nuclear power plants isn’t going to solve it. The number of electrically powered commercial and personal vehicles is so small it’s laughable. There isn’t enough niobium in the world to make enough electric motors to replace all the internal combustion engines.
Dave, you’re glossing over all of the problems with algae exactly the same way you accuse the thorium backers. It’s nowhere near commercialization, press releases not withstanding. Open pools in the Texas panhandle face an unsolved problem of contamination. All sorts of unwanted species would be perfectly happy to compete with the good algae in your ponds and while sealed systems can obviously do a much better job keeping the critters out, their expense is not where it needs to be to be competitive. Don’t get me wrong. I do think that some sort of biofuel is the only practical long term mobile energy source, but algae ain’t close to being it. I see lots of press releases on Joule’s website, but not many demonstrated numbers. If you seriously believe that algae today can make ethanol for $30/bbl equivalent –sorry $20/bbl on one of their press releases–, then I’ll happily buy your IPO after you demonstrate those numbers. I suspect I won’t be investing in your company any time soon. I do retain some hope for Coskata’s pyrolysis process, but they haven’t done a very good job of meeting their milestones either. Oh, and Khosla loves them too.
If you need a practical replacement for oil in the next few years, the only game in town is shale gas. Good thing it’s a good game.
BTW, unless you intend for the non-viable electric car fleet to be even more non-viable by using superconducting motors, then I think you meant Neodymium and not Niobium. There actually is enough of it in the world, but we don’t produce enough of it in refined form on an annual basis. You can thank China somewhat for that.
Finally, for all of your complaints about molten salts I wonder if you actually read the concluding paragraph in the ORNL link you provided. Here’s an excerpt that interested me:
“Although much experimental work remains to be done before the construction
of a complete power reactor system can begin, it is apparent that
considerable progress has been achieved in solving the material problems
of the reactor core . A strong, stable, and corrosion-resistant alloy with
good welding and forming characteristics is available .”
I remain agnostic on molten salt reactors, but the physics of Thorium are pretty compelling regardless.
Read up on the Ft St Vrain nuclear power plant that used high temperature gas coolant and uranium plus thorium as fuel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_St._Vrain_Generating_Station
Peach Bottom 1 was also fueled by uranium and thorium. Fuel was different, but it also used high temperature gas cooling. Fuel in both was carbide coated particles embedded in graphite.
As Larry Fields pointed out in different words;
Thorium is a nuclear poison. It absorbs neutrons.
So you need to burn a nuclear fuel to get the neutron flux to convert Thorium to U-233.
That isn’t free.
So if you do have a high temperature, molten salt coolant, what happens if you get a leak?
How do you cool pumps?
Do you really want water in the vacinity?
(Earlier I said enhancement of U-20x to U-235, I meant to say enrichment).
And the complaints about Chernobyl, it would not have failed had the operators not overridden safety features and violated operational restrictions in order to perform their test. It wasn’t the design that failed, it was the decisions made that put the plant in an unsafe condition.
Jim G makes the fair point that operator error caused the Chernobyl disaster and that the design did not fail, however, the manner in which humans operate a potentially devastating industrial plant IS part of the design of the plant. At Chernobyl it would seem they had used the spin-down time of the massive generators to provide in-house electricity on previous occasions. A diesel generator could have been up and idling on stand-by. Why not have an outside power line from the grid or from one of the other Chernobyl reactors?
My father inspected numerous Soviet facilities during the 1980s and he commented that NOT ONE of them would have been given a license to commence operation under UK regulations.
With some of the molten salt proposals leaks are not too drastic as the reactor chamber operates close to atmospheric pressure and as soon as the hot liquid oozes out, it spreads out, becomes sub critical and solidifies.
Pumps are easy to cool with liquid CO2 loops.
I’m all for developing the LFTR but maybe also another design along the conventional solid core idea because we have so much engineering expertise to draw on.
J.Knowles,
Chernobyl most certainly was not primarily caused by operator error. Sure the plant COULD be operated safely within a narrow operating envelope but it was not inherently stable outside that operating envelope and that envelope was not very large. It was rather like trying to operate an F-15E without its “fly by wire” controls. It was modified by graphite but cooled by water and had a positive void coefficient and power coefficient at the time of the accident.
Doug Badgero, -I agree that the RMBK-1000 is inherently unstable, especially at low power operation but a dozen similar units, albeit with modifications, are still operating. It is a sad reflection upon the Soviet political mind-set that Legasov’s recommendations to improve the many dangerous aspects of the RMBK dinosaur were only implemented after he hung himself in protest.
The combination of poor reactor stability, poor operating procedures, under funding and a constipated political hierarchy could all be cited as contributory factors.
Let’s see now you anti nuclear weirdos. Umm we all starve to death versus nuclear energy. Ever heard of Peak oil or more simply. No Oil! Wonder what you will say when the lights go out and your petrol car is a giant paper weight and theres no food! The facts are that nuclear is comparatively safe in any form. Even if you have a meltdown. Using greeny logoc we should ban all cars and planes because you might have an accident. More people die in car accidents every day than ever died from nuclear. Thats how ridiculous the anti nuclear argument is. Fukishima was hit by one of the largest earthquakes in history. That all of sudden that makes nuclear Unsafe? How many other major accidents have there been? Chernobyl. Ok the Russians are not exactly noted for advanced technology. 3 Mile Island. No one hurt. Coal. tens of thousands affected and the damage to our planet? What about all the waste (with no half life) spewed about by coal burning generators. Waste with no half life. It lasts forever and some of it is radioactive. The clincher though. The absolute clincher. YOU SIMPLY CANNOT RUN A COUNTRY ON RENEWABLES. If you covered the whole planet in frigging windmills and solar panels you wouldn’t have enough to run the US. What about your baseload? You can’t just switch a grid on and off like a light switch. Geezez the Greenies are just as responsible as the Oil companies for the mess we are in.