Thorium Reactors

http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/09/11/is-thorium-the-biggest-energy-breakthrough-since-fire-possibly/

by packetlss • 15 years ago

110 69 15 years ago

forbes.com

TruthElixirX• 15 years ago

Same Thorium hype as usual.

nazgulnarsil• 15 years ago

unlike the vast majority of things, thorium deserves all the hype it gets.

BenSS• 15 years ago

This is NOT NEW. The basic reaction chain has been well understood for decades. There are multiple issues to be solved with actually setting up a reactor to deliver power that the article doesn't even consider. Hype.

forrestthewoods• 15 years ago

Is there a good resource on the topic? I've read countless hype articles but nothing good on the issues that need to be solved for it to actually happen.

packetlss• 15 years ago

Google TechTalk about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8

ScotterC8• 15 years ago

There's a wealth of information at http://energyfromthorium.com/

ScotterC8• 15 years ago

It's already been done. Mass production of this type of reactor wasn't pursued for various political reasons mainly concerning the alternate path of a sodium-cooled reactor instead.

1962: September 16. The Indian Point-1 nuclear reactor begins operating at Buchanan, New York. Designed and built by Babcock and Wilcox for Consolidated Edison, it is a pressurized water reactor designed to produce 275 MW of electricity. Unlike other pressurized-water reactors, the Indian Point-1 reactor uses highly-enriched uranium as a fuel and thorium as a fertile material. This combination has a superior conversion ratio in a thermal neutron spectrum than low-enrichment uranium (more thorium is bred to uranium-233 than uranium-238 is bred to plutonium-239). The uranium-233 generated in the Indian Point reactor is later processed into a tetrafluoride and used to fuel the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment.(MSRE)

The MSRE program then successfully operated a reactor with a thorium blanket around the U-233 for the equivalent of an 18 month cycle (same as current reactors.

latch• 15 years ago

Back in the day one of the reasons Uranium was picked was specifically because it resulted in weapon's grade by-products. You got energy + you could build nuclear stockpiles.

Also, I don't think this article does justice to just how far ahead India and China are in this field.

And all that isn't even accounting of the arcane crystals!

malbs• 15 years ago

"And all that isn't even accounting of the arcane crystals!"

well played, sir!

jacques_chester• 15 years ago

It's actually a great example of path dependency. After the Manhattan Project, more was known about uranium than any other fissile material. It was known how to make it react and how to manufacture it in industrial quantities.

From there it was a short step to naval reactors, and for the lessons of naval reactor design to disseminate into civil use.

iwwr• 15 years ago

You can actually build a bomb out of thorium.

Bud• 15 years ago

Leave to Forbes to write a massively hyped headline, and then deliver NO useful information whatsoever on the topic at hand. I feel like I knew more about thorium's potential BEFORE reading this.

Is it just me, or is Forbes doing this a lot lately?

_delirium• 15 years ago

Somewhere around 2009 or so it feels like they made the switch from a highbrow Economist-style strategy, targeting upper-income discerning readers of the print magazine, to a linkbait AOL-style strategy, making vaguely provocative claims about economics.

mlinksva• 15 years ago

I thought they made that switch somewhere around 1996-2000 when Steve Forbes ran for U.S. president (and I still read the paper edition fairly regularly). I haven't read it since, though they do have at least one good blogger these days (who I subscribe to via their personal site's RSS feed, which they've redirected to their Forbes RSS feed; I still don't visit the site).

cdjarrell2• 15 years ago

Forbes has a good site, the bottom feels a bit pop-culturish but overall some interesting information

marze3• 15 years ago

The news industry and the PR industry are about equal in size. Articles like this shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with that fact.

Nuclear power is the future. Ideally, the reactor should be a long ways from any valuable real estate, like at least 90,000,000 miles.

Fortunately, recievers that receive beamed power from the big fusion reactor are dropping in price at a rate of 30% per year. That fact makes VC funding of thorium reactor technology problematic.

ScotterC8• 15 years ago

Making them cheaper won't improve their efficiency

marze3• 15 years ago

The only efficiency metric that matters is $ per generated watt. And that figure is dropping like a stone.

InclinedPlane5• 15 years ago

It'll make them more cost effective. Making them cheaper won't improve their ability to produce power on demand though. That's necessary to replace base load power stations, and neither solar nor wind are capable of it yet.

mnemonicsloth4• 15 years ago

Uh, no.

Prices did go down 30%, but it took ten years, not one. http://gigaom.com/cleantech/solar-costs-dropped-30-over-last...

This is my problem with solar energy. It's getting better. It isn't price-competitive with coal yet. There are already lots of niche applications. But people can't maintain a healthy skepticism about it because it's such a feel-good technology.

To wit, the US government loaned $535 million to Solyndra at about the same time LBNL released that report. Now they're broke and the FBI raided their offices a few days ago. Where else could a company borrow half a billion dollars without ever showing a profit?

In comparison, the entire projected cost for the solar updraft tower that the Southern California Public Power Authority is building is under $30 million.

ETA - No replies yet, but plenty of downvotes. I hope to be corrected if I'm wrong, of course. I tried to find credible sources for what I've said here. I can't source my claim that solar power is an issue where people pay more attention to feelings than facts. You can't prove something like that. But people are downvoting, and they aren't answering...

links:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/02/solyndra-...

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/fbi-raids-connected-energy-fir...

on the updraft tower (which is an awesome piece of engineering):

http://www.scppa.org/pages/projects/lapaz_solartower.html

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/enviromission-se...

SoftwareMaven• 15 years ago

So you are saying solar power isn't reasonable, then point to a project using solar power to generate power from solar energy cheaply? And, fwiw, I wouldn't consider wind turbines to be using solar power (every non-nuclear source would be if I did), but the tower is specifically concentrating the heat from the sun to drive the turbines.

cdjarrell2• 15 years ago

There have been lots of failures not only in the solar industry but in every industry, it doesn't mean we should stop trying. No one answer is the cure-all, but we'll never know its potentials until we fail and build on those lessons learned.

You can't predict how great the 10th generation of a product will be without knowing how the other 9 were

marze3• 15 years ago

PV panel prices are dropping in price 30% per year at present; your link claims 30% for installed system costs in the decade ending in '08. 2008 is just before PV panel prices took their biggest plunge ever, from about $5 per watt to about $2 per watt at present. First Solar claims under $1 per watt, so the end is not yet in sight.

Nice job picking out-of-date numbers.

Moore's law for solar:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/16/sm...

If the 2010 and 2011 data was on the charts it would show an even steeper decline.

justatdotin2• 15 years ago

reminds me of the good advice, that: maybe we should learn to appropriately manage fire in the landscape, before we start messing with nuclear fission.

you can't have your yellowcake and eat it too : if the propeller heads want to feed uranium-cycle waste to thorium reactors, there's an implicit WMD risk, both the risk of diversion for weapons production as well as providing a rationale for the ongoing operation of dual-use enrichment and reprocessing plants. Thorium fuelled reactors could also be used to irradiate uranium to produce weapon grade plutonium.

And the use of thorium as a nuclear fuel alone doesn't solve the WMD proliferation problem. Irradiation of thorium indirectly produces uranium-233, a fissile material which can be used in nuclear weapons. The US has successfully tested weapons using uranium-233. France is suspected of it. India's thorium program prolly has a WMD component - given they refuse to allow IAEA safeguards to apply.

but the worst threat of the thorium reactors is that we'll be fooled into judging the real threats and impacts currently posed by the uranium fuel cycle on the ambitious standards promised by the thorium advocates. The nuclear industry has been over-promising and under-performing for too long - we can't afford to allow their promises for tomorrow to deter focus from today's bitter realities.

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

You're honestly suggesting we abandon one of the most promising sources of fuel in history because you're afraid someone might be able to weaponize it?

I got news for ya bud. There's weapons everywhere, and governments have the resources to make them, thorium reactor or not. Extremists have the drive to source them, thorium or not. Hell, Brevik proved that. Should we ban fertilizer too?

justatdotin2• 15 years ago

not quite what I said; no 'might be able to' about it. As I described, the nexus between fission power (including thorium) and nuclear WMD is well defined. There's enough examples of thorium-based nuclear WMDs, and the perversion of civilian power programs to further nuclear weapons programs, to justify extreme caution. No, I'm not aware of fertilizer WMDs that leave behind sacrifice zones of contaminated wastelands.

rmason• 15 years ago

Thorium was the clear choice for nuclear power from the beginning. That is it was the engineers choice but Gen. Curtis LeMay convinced the politicians it should be rejected because he wanted a large supply of uranium material that could be easily used for weapons. The disadvantage of Thorium is that it cannot be easily weaponized.

I've been a Thorium advocate for a long time and have commented about it on HN.

You know what the single largest impediment to rapid adoption of Thorium to solve some of our energy problems? It's the existing nuclear power industry.

Since 2008, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada., have introduced bills that would direct thorium research begin at the Idaho National Laboratory. We had prototype plants built in the fifties that ran as late as the seventies. There was even a Thorium powered jet fighter in the early fifties. They need $200 million to commercialize the technology and produce a sample pilot plant blueprint and have been met by a wall of lobbying by firms such as General Electric opposing the bill.

dalke• 15 years ago

As an example of how early, the SF story "Rocket Ship Galileo", published in 1947, is based around a rocket ship powered by "a thorium nuclear pile which boils zinc as a propellant." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Ship_Galileo

ghostwords• 15 years ago

"Betteridge's Law of Headlines is an adage that states, "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines

stcredzero• 15 years ago

Newsflash: Can headlines ending in a question mark be answered with "no?"

phasetransition3• 15 years ago

--Providing HN the details about Thorium that the Forbes article lacks--

tl;dr - Read Dr. Alvin Weinberg's book from the late 1990s. Amazon link here: http://www.amazon.com/First-Nuclear-Era-Times-Technological/...

-Background- I discovered liquid fueled nuclear reactors, and the thorium subset thereof, as a consequence of the chemistry minor I undertook in grad school at Georgia Tech (my background is materials engineering). One of the classes I took was taught by Dr. Jiri Janata, and it was functionally a class in analytical radiochemistry. Dr. Janata's expertise is in chemical sensors, and he worked for an number of years at Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL) on methods to detect the spread of radiation in the environment. Dr. Janata exposed our class to the liquid fueled reactors.

-LFR- To read in Dr. Weinberg's book, Oak Ridge was left out in the cold when it came to reactor design. This despite the fact that Weinberg and Eugene Wigner wrote "The Physical Theory of Neutron Reactors," as the definitive first text on reactor physics. Wigner and Weinberg dreamed up many dozens of potential power reactor design concepts in the 40s.

Oak Ridge National Lab managed to procure funding to pursue reactors that might power airplanes. Weinberg is candid about how the concept of nuclear powered flight was nearly fiction, but any grant in a storm! Any grant in a storm is still alive and well, btw.

Out of that work came the liquid fueled reactors, of which thorium could be one of the fuels. The liquids were composed of multi-component molten halide salt solutions that had some partial solubility for certain radionuclide salts. Much of the molten salt chemistry details we have today come as consequence of the research into their behavior from Oak Ridge.

Liquid fuels for reactors have many advantages: 1. They operate at atmospheric pressure (1 atm), so there's no pressure vessel to worry about bursting in an accident. 2. Molten salts have very little vapor pressure, and therefore don't volatilize as readily. 3. The molten salts allow very high operational temperatures for better Carnot efficiency, in part because of 2. 4. The systems is single phase, liquid only. This is in contrast to 2-phase behavior of something like BWR reactors 5. Waste fission products (e.g. iodine) can be scrubbed from the molten fuel during operation. The fuel composition can be monitored and changed as needed during operation. 6. Neutron reflectors are needed to obtain criticality in the system. The molten salt with nuclear material in it is subcritical by nature.

For a liquid fuel reactor, there is no loss of coolant accident, as the fuel is in the working fluid. The amount of decay heat from fission products remaining in the fuel can be lower if there would be scrubbing in place. As the world sees now, decay heat is the tiger in the room for reactor safety.

-Brief Accident Scenario- If an accident occurs, and power is lost, the molten fuel drains back into a core sump vessel which then is cooled to deal with the decay heat. Because the fuel is dispersed, and there are no high pressures to deal with, passive cooling of the decay heat in the molten fuel sump is greatly simplified. Further, natural convection can be stimulated in the sump to help circulate the fuel and remove heat.

-Follow Up(?)- There are some downsides, of course, but this is already crazy long. If the OP is still around in the morning on the East Coast, I'll discuss some of the negatives in another comment.

-phil

mnemonicsloth4• 15 years ago

I wouldn't pick this nit if my link wasn't so awesome [1].

Nuclear-powered aircraft are workable if you don't care about shielding. Who in their right mind would design a flying, unshielded nuclear reactor? A Cold War weapons designer who wanted to build:

... a locomotive-size missile that would travel at near-treetop level at three times the speed of sound, tossing out hydrogen bombs as it roared overhead.

The article at the other end of the link is the most tooth-curling engineer porn I've ever read. It's horrible. But also strangely awesome:

Pluto's designers calculated that its shock wave alone might kill people on the ground. Then there was the problem of fallout. In addition to gamma and neutron radiation from the unshielded reactor, Pluto's nuclear ramjet would spew fission fragments out in its exhaust as it flew by. (One enterprising weaponeer had a plan to turn an obvious peace-time liability into a wartime asset: he suggested flying the radioactive rocket back and forth over the Soviet Union after it had dropped its bombs.)

[1] http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html

phasetransition3• 15 years ago

Wow, I was totally unaware of this project, or how far along they got. The folks at Oak Ridge had hypothesized a horse and carriage type device where the fuselage would trail the unshielded reactor engine. The part about the company that is now CoorsTek is also interesting. CoorsTek still makes lots of important high tech ceramic bits.

phasetransition3• 15 years ago

--Providing HN the details about Thorium that the Forbes article lacks--

tl;dr - While the technology is solid, thorium reactor technology still has some practical kinks to work through, the kind that have already been addressed in large scale pwr/bwr commercial reactors.

-Drawbacks- 1. Thorium fueled reactors can still contribute towards the production of atomic devices, though not as readily, and most likely not the "classic" PU-239 based weapons. 2. The Oak Ridge reactor was built for a very specific purpose, with very high outlet temperatures and as little weight as feasible. It literally ran red hot. This is not the operating conditions under which a commercial power generating facility would operate. See the wikipedia article on the Oak Ridge reactors here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Reactor_Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment 3. The handling of liquid fuels requires a complete paradigm shift in the regulation and methods of the existing nuclear industry 4. There were some hot corrosion issues of the Inconel alloys used in the piping of the MSRE. Evidently the Japanese solved these problems in the 1990s, but I have not been able to find the papers that talk about how. 5. In the US, at least, we will have to overturn Jimmy Carter's ban on nuclear fuel reprocessing to get the maximum benefit of the technology. This needs to happen independent of LFRs.

There are probably other downsides on the tip of my tongue, but I cannot tease them out at the moment. Folks who are interested in more can contact me off HN at the email address in my profile.

merraksh• 15 years ago

Thorium Reactors

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