Kirk Sorensen points out its potential to solve the energy problem.
17 thoughts on “Thorium”
Good grief – don’t anyone tell Bambi! He’ll get it banned instantly.
Wow.
Well this sounds almost too good to be true. But it’s what I referred to in an earlier post down below when I said technology will solve the energy problem.
And I like the way he used music from Ironman (Tony Stark Industries). 😉
Barbara – good thought…
Good job Kirk. I’m reading your energyfromthorium.com site now.
After the necessary due diligence, going thorium would be a perfect plank for a Republican candidate in 2012 – to counter the obvious AGW argument, a large research program including working test reactors (at the Nevada test site?)
Nothing’s perfect though. Gotta be something of a downside. We need that due dilligence to illuminate those (like any good scientific paper). If you present it as a perfect solution someone will find the holes.
The problem with introducing new energy technology is that the Left (in particular) has no interest in abundant, cheap, safe, clean energy. Those things, as Mr. Sorensen accurately points out, are required for the kind of life he described. That life is one where people are comfortable, can get from place to place quickly, and have plenty of food. People like that can’t be controlled. The political class requires people in desperate straits to point to as their constituency (and then abandon once in power); they are the ones who never let a crisis go to waste.
The Left has been the opponent of comfort, plenty, and safety for more than forty years because they would become superfluous in such a world. The only drawback of the thorium cycle is that it produces protactinium 231 as a byproduct, and that has a half-life of 33,000 years. It’s only a beta emitter, but enough of one to make separation of U-233 (which can be used as a bomb material) very difficult. But it is a long-lived actinide, and even the proponents of nuclear energy point it out as a drawback.
If thorium ever does get some traction here (India is already baselining it), I expect the Left to go hog-wild over protactinium 231…
I’m a big fan of any sort of atomic energy. We have to go atomic eventually – even shale oil won’t last us forever. Technically, nuclear fission won’t either, but it *will* last us longer than a multiple of current recorded human history.
Collection schemes, such as solar, won’t cut it without staggering collection areas, even assuming ideal conditions. Take Albuquerque, for example – this city is ideal for solar energy- but the collection areas to run the town’s industry and transportation would take up multiples of the city area. You would have to annex all the surrounding ranch-land and indian reservations to pave with collectors.
We would have to do something like farming the desert regions of the ocean for algae to collect enough solar power to run industrial civilization, assuming you can even get positive EROEI for a scheme like that.
****
Thorium breeder reactors would be awesome. The only downside I can see is that the main cooling loop would be a bit hazardous to work on if something goes wrong – molten NaK is a bit more chemically exciting than water vapor. (Perhaps not though – consider the positives: the reactor would not be under any pressure no matter what happens in the containment area, and you don’t get any hydrogen – steam seems to have excitement all of it’s own).
If we had a ubiquitous atomic energy infrastructure, it wouldn’t matter that we run out of light-sweet crude oil. We could do any number of things – driving out negative EROEI shale oil deposits, gassifying coal, pulling CO2 direct from the atmosphere and generating natural gas from it.
Oh, he seems to be referring to liquid fueled – I’d have to check if that can work too – whatever the coolant interfacing with the liquid fuel is though, it can’t scatter the neutrons too much for a fast reaction to work well.
ams: thorium molten salt reactors have tradtionally used a eutectic of lithium and beryllium fluorides (FLIBE) as the carrier for the molten fuel salts, and have been thermal reactors. The lithium is depleted (almost all the 6Li removed) to reduce neutron absorption and tritium production.
India is in the lead here. They’ve been locked out of the uranium market for decades because of their refusal to sign the test-ban treaty, so they’ve turned to their rich thorium reserves as an alternative.
Or, I should say, they’ve been meaning to capitalize on their thorium for decades but have only got the wealth for it recently with their free market reforms growing the economy. They want to produce nuclear energy as a percent of their economy on a level with France, but for 1.5 billion people.
And they’ll need it too. They don’t have the coal reserves that China and the USA do, and burning that much coal would be awful for their air and environment anyway. Thorium is really their only choice.
I don’t know if they’re looking at MSRs though. I know China is.
This audience was lost in the first 5 minutes.. probably woke up a little when he said “and what about Earth?” and showed people living next to a nuclear reactor.. but that’s about it.
It was much too wordy for a TED talk.. even TEDx.
The talk wasn’t perfect, but it was good. Thorium reactors work. I thought the fact that they can be shutdown and restarted so easily to be a great selling point. Plus the fact that you don’t have to shutdown to do maintenance is another strong selling point.
I’m wondering how small is practical.
Are these Thorium plants hugely more expensive than your average nuke plant of today?
The price of anything nuclear is a function of political opposition – it’s hard to say. Mechanically, nuclear reactors are no more complicated than any other steam boiler or large industrial process equipment.
In a sane world, nuclear reactors, chemical processing plants, oil refineries, hydroelectric dams, and anything of comparable equipment mass and complexity would all cost in the same neighborhood.
LFTRs, (Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors) have few problems, and many advantages. The flouride salts have low chemical corrosiveness, because the flourine bond is so strong, and a slightly adjusted Hastelloy alloy for plumbing will do the job nicely. The low core pressures of about 4 atmospheres contrasts with the 50-150 atmospheres of the LWRs that are the current standard. The high end temperatures are sufficient to use them for process heat as well as getting higher efficiency in generating electricity. The low end temperatures, around 400 Celsius, are high enough that cooling structures can be *much* smaller and less obtrusive while tossing away that smaller amount of waste heat.
The very attractiveness of their capabilities, combined with their testing in the Molten Salt Reactor of the late 1960s, is already drawing the wrath of various anti-industrialist groups like Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR). These describe handling Thorium the same way we handle Uranium today, and then conclude Thorium would have no benefits, to no one’s surprise.
One great key will be whether Congress includes enough money, this year and in the future, for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to train their people in these, and other 4th generation concepts, so they can write regulations that do more than “just say no”. Cutting that training to save money today would be a penny-wise-pound-foolish move that would please the Deep Ecology advocates.
Mass-produced LFTRs would do more for our energy situation than anything but the Focus Fusion or Polywell fusion concepts moving forwards.
We don’t have an energy crisis. We have a leadership crisis.
Good grief – don’t anyone tell Bambi! He’ll get it banned instantly.
Wow.
Well this sounds almost too good to be true. But it’s what I referred to in an earlier post down below when I said technology will solve the energy problem.
And I like the way he used music from Ironman (Tony Stark Industries). 😉
Barbara – good thought…
Good job Kirk. I’m reading your energyfromthorium.com site now.
After the necessary due diligence, going thorium would be a perfect plank for a Republican candidate in 2012 – to counter the obvious AGW argument, a large research program including working test reactors (at the Nevada test site?)
Nothing’s perfect though. Gotta be something of a downside. We need that due dilligence to illuminate those (like any good scientific paper). If you present it as a perfect solution someone will find the holes.
The problem with introducing new energy technology is that the Left (in particular) has no interest in abundant, cheap, safe, clean energy. Those things, as Mr. Sorensen accurately points out, are required for the kind of life he described. That life is one where people are comfortable, can get from place to place quickly, and have plenty of food. People like that can’t be controlled. The political class requires people in desperate straits to point to as their constituency (and then abandon once in power); they are the ones who never let a crisis go to waste.
The Left has been the opponent of comfort, plenty, and safety for more than forty years because they would become superfluous in such a world. The only drawback of the thorium cycle is that it produces protactinium 231 as a byproduct, and that has a half-life of 33,000 years. It’s only a beta emitter, but enough of one to make separation of U-233 (which can be used as a bomb material) very difficult. But it is a long-lived actinide, and even the proponents of nuclear energy point it out as a drawback.
If thorium ever does get some traction here (India is already baselining it), I expect the Left to go hog-wild over protactinium 231…
I’m a big fan of any sort of atomic energy. We have to go atomic eventually – even shale oil won’t last us forever. Technically, nuclear fission won’t either, but it *will* last us longer than a multiple of current recorded human history.
Collection schemes, such as solar, won’t cut it without staggering collection areas, even assuming ideal conditions. Take Albuquerque, for example – this city is ideal for solar energy- but the collection areas to run the town’s industry and transportation would take up multiples of the city area. You would have to annex all the surrounding ranch-land and indian reservations to pave with collectors.
We would have to do something like farming the desert regions of the ocean for algae to collect enough solar power to run industrial civilization, assuming you can even get positive EROEI for a scheme like that.
****
Thorium breeder reactors would be awesome. The only downside I can see is that the main cooling loop would be a bit hazardous to work on if something goes wrong – molten NaK is a bit more chemically exciting than water vapor. (Perhaps not though – consider the positives: the reactor would not be under any pressure no matter what happens in the containment area, and you don’t get any hydrogen – steam seems to have excitement all of it’s own).
If we had a ubiquitous atomic energy infrastructure, it wouldn’t matter that we run out of light-sweet crude oil. We could do any number of things – driving out negative EROEI shale oil deposits, gassifying coal, pulling CO2 direct from the atmosphere and generating natural gas from it.
Oh, he seems to be referring to liquid fueled – I’d have to check if that can work too – whatever the coolant interfacing with the liquid fuel is though, it can’t scatter the neutrons too much for a fast reaction to work well.
ams: thorium molten salt reactors have tradtionally used a eutectic of lithium and beryllium fluorides (FLIBE) as the carrier for the molten fuel salts, and have been thermal reactors. The lithium is depleted (almost all the 6Li removed) to reduce neutron absorption and tritium production.
India is in the lead here. They’ve been locked out of the uranium market for decades because of their refusal to sign the test-ban treaty, so they’ve turned to their rich thorium reserves as an alternative.
Or, I should say, they’ve been meaning to capitalize on their thorium for decades but have only got the wealth for it recently with their free market reforms growing the economy. They want to produce nuclear energy as a percent of their economy on a level with France, but for 1.5 billion people.
And they’ll need it too. They don’t have the coal reserves that China and the USA do, and burning that much coal would be awful for their air and environment anyway. Thorium is really their only choice.
I don’t know if they’re looking at MSRs though. I know China is.
This audience was lost in the first 5 minutes.. probably woke up a little when he said “and what about Earth?” and showed people living next to a nuclear reactor.. but that’s about it.
It was much too wordy for a TED talk.. even TEDx.
The talk wasn’t perfect, but it was good. Thorium reactors work. I thought the fact that they can be shutdown and restarted so easily to be a great selling point. Plus the fact that you don’t have to shutdown to do maintenance is another strong selling point.
I’m wondering how small is practical.
Are these Thorium plants hugely more expensive than your average nuke plant of today?
The price of anything nuclear is a function of political opposition – it’s hard to say. Mechanically, nuclear reactors are no more complicated than any other steam boiler or large industrial process equipment.
In a sane world, nuclear reactors, chemical processing plants, oil refineries, hydroelectric dams, and anything of comparable equipment mass and complexity would all cost in the same neighborhood.
LFTRs, (Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors) have few problems, and many advantages. The flouride salts have low chemical corrosiveness, because the flourine bond is so strong, and a slightly adjusted Hastelloy alloy for plumbing will do the job nicely. The low core pressures of about 4 atmospheres contrasts with the 50-150 atmospheres of the LWRs that are the current standard. The high end temperatures are sufficient to use them for process heat as well as getting higher efficiency in generating electricity. The low end temperatures, around 400 Celsius, are high enough that cooling structures can be *much* smaller and less obtrusive while tossing away that smaller amount of waste heat.
The very attractiveness of their capabilities, combined with their testing in the Molten Salt Reactor of the late 1960s, is already drawing the wrath of various anti-industrialist groups like Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR). These describe handling Thorium the same way we handle Uranium today, and then conclude Thorium would have no benefits, to no one’s surprise.
One great key will be whether Congress includes enough money, this year and in the future, for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to train their people in these, and other 4th generation concepts, so they can write regulations that do more than “just say no”. Cutting that training to save money today would be a penny-wise-pound-foolish move that would please the Deep Ecology advocates.
Mass-produced LFTRs would do more for our energy situation than anything but the Focus Fusion or Polywell fusion concepts moving forwards.
We don’t have an energy crisis. We have a leadership crisis.