Cleaner Nuclear Power?

An even better thorium fueled reactor was in development at Oak Ridge National Laboratory using a molten salt based liquid fuel. Such reactors are orders of magnitude safer and cheaper than current solid fuel LWR's. http://energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=166

Thorium Power's fuel cycle is much better than the CANDU thorium fuel cycle.

In the Thorium Power fuel cycle, Uranium-233 is burned as fuel in the reactor as it is being produced.

In the CANDU thorium process, or any other thorium process, the Uranium-233 is a waste byproduct of the fuel cycle. Since Uranium-233 is valuable, it can be reprocessed and re-introduced as fuel into the reactor. Reprocessing is a very expensive proposition – which is the real reason why there isn’t a single thorium fuel reactor in the world. Thorium Power’s process is plain common sense – and well ahead of any other thorium-based concept.

Less water use? I think your "facts" are off.

This fuel solves most of the issues in the nuclear industry today.

Renewable energy will never produce the amount of MW needed the world needs for power generation going forward. Nuclear will need to have a major role and the point is to get nuclear as safe, clean, and efficient as possible which is exactly what thorium fuel does.

That works for France, which is small, but there is not enough economically recoverable U235 to power the world.  U235 reactors will also be a minority of the world's power.  Please read MIT's report The Future of Nuclear Power (http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/).  The U235 supplies I remember MIT citing were sufficient to power 1000 1GW reactors for 40 years.  Breeder reactors (using U238 or Th232) are a different story, but the world has so far avoided breeder reactors because of proliferation concerns.

It is funny and sad to see the France argument again. It's getting very old now.

- French power is a socialistic dream but a liberal's nightmare. Solution: liberalise. But then, without subsidies (ie taxpayers money) it will not be as cheap as it is now.

- France has access to the European grid, which can be used as a buffer ('battery') to allow a higher percentage baseload generation (which nuclear is right now). There is a discrepancy between the CF that contemporary nuclear power plants provide, and what is actually needed (demand CF and shape of the curve)

Solution: load-following nuclear power plants. Unfortunately these do not yet exist in our solar system however I'm convinced that they may prove to be cost effective in the future.

Abundance ratio of Th:U235 is only 11:2, but the article states that the Th only needs replacing every 9 years instead of every 2.  So the "years of available fuel" ratio is 11*9:2*2=99:4 or almost 25:1.  That will buy us lots of time, while we work out how to do U238 breeders safely.

I would never forget the proliferation threat. All governments foreign and domestic have a lifetime, at the end of which weapons become available to seperatist parties. With pure thorium without reprocessing, at least it would only be a dirty bomb, not a fissioning nuclear one. And not nearly as bad radiologically as a Uranium one with all the bio iodine isotopes.

It is a major advantage, in the lifetime of the actinide series isotopes. Thousands of years shorter dangerous halflifes for thorium.

Sure, no problem, if I had a 1000-acre lifeless salt flat for a backyard, and you were going to pay me (and my heirs) handsomely to use it.

The Untold Story of Creation
God was letting the angels help with making the universe.  Michael happily reported that Earth was almost done.  "You did remember that they'll need someplace to put their nuclear waste, didn't you?" asked God.  "WHAT?!" exclaimed Michael.  "Gabriel said that was all going into hell!"  Upon hearing that Gabriel was just funnin' him, Michael ditched his plans for a giant inland sea, and made Nevada instead.

Only if I and my great great grandchildren can make a lot of money storing it safely.

One key factor that is ignored in the anti-nuke arguments of many environmental hucksters is that while nukes also need mines for its fuel and generate dangerous waste, it is the relative scale of it that separates Nukes from the rest. The amount of fuel and waste in terms of weight/volume of fuel/waste per kilowatt capacity for nukes is miniscule compared to other power sources. Perhaps there should be a weighted index like a hypothetical unit of pollution or toxicity per kilogram or cubic meter per kilowatt-hour of power generated. Nuke may even beat solar/wind here. Renewables also needs materials to be mined, equipment to be manufactured, transported, installed, maintained and disposed of. Transportation costs cam be huge considering the potentially wide geographical dispersion of low capacity generators.

Another factor that is ignored is land area required. Nukes require the least amount of land area per watt of power capacity by a huge margin. This is a major advantage for obvious reasons – especially in densely populated regions of the world. We could build fewer extra-high capacity nukes concentrate and hide them in a few remote and undesirable low grade real estate, instead of blotting the landscape with large number of low capacity solar/ wind power generators. Just ask Ted Kennedy.

As with anything in the environemental sphere, it is somewhat akin to the environementalists saying that the Glenn Canyon dam and Boulder Dam would be full of silt by now and wouldn't be generating any power or water for people or agriculture. They told me this back in the 60's, but dams built in the tropics without land clearing like here in the civilized world do generate significant amounts of greenhouse gases. There are methods of extracting the thorium if done soon enough before the oil runs out to make it very co2 tolerant. After that the collapse of society would curtail further need for it.

U233 would be a good bomb material, if it were not for the following fact: The U233 that is created in a thorium reactor comes mixed with a small amount of U232, which is unstable (70 year half life), and starts a sequence of radioactive decays that emit enough nasty gamma rays to necessitate expensive and difficult remote handling of the U233. U233 and U232 are chemically indistinguishable, so removing U232 from U233 would necessitate a centrifuge or other mechanical process, which would not be practical because of the radioactivity. Even if somebody were crazy enough to make a U233 bomb, he would have to put lots of heavy shielding around the bomb to make it possible for somebody to deliver the bomb without being incapacitated or dying before reaching his intended destination. If this were not the case, the United States, Soviet Union and others would have been making U233 bombs many years ago.

The resulting nuclear pit of uranium 233 generated from thorium reactions is so radioactive in gamma, that the little techs working on building it would have to be in a long line to replace the ones sick from exposure. We have built these 233 cores, but with our waldos that third world terrorist countries don't need, as they have allah instead.

     Comment on MakeSense’s first two paragraphs: If the thorium rods remain in the reactor for nine years, they will probably make lots of U233, and probably lots of the U233 will fission thereby generating plenty of power. My main question here is: How can the thorium rods remain in the reactor for nine years without radiation damaging the pellets too much? Almost every time a U233 nucleus fissions, two “fission product” nuclei result, which cause pressure to build up in the pellets. Some of the fission products are gases at reactor operating temperatures, which further increases the pressure inside the pellets. The pellets grow and distort under such pressure, and will eventually break apart. In conventional reactors, fuel rods are removed before unacceptable damage to the pellets occurs, which is a whole lot sooner than nine years after they were initially loaded into the reactor. Thorium rods could avoid such radiation damage if they are placed in low power regions of the reactor - say in core “blanket” or “reflector” regions. However, Peter Fairley’s article implies that the thorium rods are placed in or near high power regions of the reactor to expedite conversion of TH232 into U233. This concern is not unique to TH232-U233 rods, and applies equally to U238-PU239 rods. Regardless of whether we are talking about TH232-U233 of U238-PU239 rods, the fundamental difficulty is the same. It is hard to have it both ways. If the rods are placed in low power regions, they will not make much fissile material (U233 or PU239), but they will last a long time. If the rods are placed in high power regions, they will make plenty of fissile material, but they won’t last very long. Thorium Power’s reactor might work. However, I would need to know more about the design details before saying so.
     Comment on MakeSense’s second two paragraphs: The real question is not whether a reactor breeds or not. The distinction between breeder and non-breeder reactors is somewhat arbitrary. All reactors convert some sort of fertile material like TH232 or U238 into some sort of fissile material like U233 or PU239. A reasonably high gain converter reactor should stretch uranium resources sufficiently to buy plenty of time for developing future reactors that make better use of thorium and/or uranium resources. In fact, it may be best to increase nuclear electricity generation as rapidly as possible by replicating designs of reactors already operating or by considering only those new designs for which formal licensing applications already have been submitted and which need at most only minor changes to satisfy regulatory authorities. Reprocessing and recycling of fuel could be deferred since it would not be necessary in the short term. The world needs to reduce generation of greenhouse gases NOW! Also, burning oil to make electricity is CRAZY! Oil should be conserved for uses for which oil is uniquely suited such as plastics and lubricants. It is not necessary to invoke the funding of global terrorism by oil revenues to see that it is time to cut back oil consumption! It may very well turn out that the world needs to ramp up nuclear electricity production for only a few decades, after which time the world would move on to using some sort of renewable energy.
     Overall comment: Just because we CAN build a better nuclear reactor does not mean that we SHOULD build a better nuclear reactor. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE. We should not impede deployment of nuclear reactors that we need NOW by studying-to-death nuclear reactor designs for the future - regardless of how attractive such designs might appear and how much fun people might have working on them. [I can’t believe I just said that.] Imagine how much better off the world would be if the energy mix in the United States were like it is in France (2006 electricity production - 88% nuclear and 95% without emitting carbon dioxide - http://www.edf.com/122168i/Accueil-fr/EDF-and-power-generation/generation/in-France.html)! If the United States had done what France did, wouldn’t the emerging dominant economies of this century - e.g. China - be bringing more nuclear and fewer coal-fired plants on line? Perhaps countries with large thorium reserves, like India, might push thorium technology. But the rest of the world? THIS IS MY MAIN CONCERN ABOUT THORIUM POWER.