Norway is building thorium reactor

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/norway-ringing-in-thorium-nuclear-new-year-with-westinghouse-at-the-party/6421

by sasoon • 14 years ago

231 98 14 years ago

no way!

pjscott2• 14 years ago

This isn't one of the fancy liquid fluoride thorium reactors that people immediately think of. It's a scheme for incorporating thorium into the fuel mix in existing reactors. Still very cool.

leeoniya• 14 years ago

awww, i got all excited :(

dthunt2• 14 years ago

Still a step closer.

I'm not a genuine nuke geek, but hopefully there are a few around who can shed some light into what sort of impact the commercial use of thorium as a fuel is on the viability of the fuel in the long-run.

sterna• 14 years ago

This is not the first time Norway has been interested in Thorium, already in the sixties they had plans to exploit their rather large Thorium deposit. India also has large deposits and also has a trial reactor scheme going similar to the one in Norway with Thorium-Plutonium MOX fuel.

There is a lot of information about Thorium on this site: http://energyfromthorium.com/

specialist• 14 years ago

Agreed.

Also, this is the first I've read that thorium reactors can also use up (dispose) waste. (Not an expert, or even an informed layperson, just a news junkie.)

We need to reduce, reuse, eliminate waste and weapons grade stockpiles. Something less evil than using depleted uranium bullets to convert foreign countries into uninhabitable radioactive hotspots.

From my casual reading, that's meant traveling wave reactors. Having another energy source is just a happy side benefit.

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

kayoone• 14 years ago

While germany is getting out of nuclear power altogether... their "Energiewende" plan is very ambitious but i wonder if its not better to invest into nuclear power to make it saver instead of getting rid of it completely. I dont know much about it though, what do experts think?

tehabe4• 14 years ago

Is that an offer to pay all the external costs of nuclear power? I mean, all of them. From final deposit, over insurance policies in case of a meltdown to environmental consequences of the entire nuclear supply chain?

Nuclear power is just too expensive for an economy. Nuclear power is limited, there is just not endless amount of uranium on the planet. Also globally nuclear power is pointless, IIRC nuclear power has a global market share of 6% for primary energy. Too believe it could solve our energy needs sounds weird to me.

Also nuclear power is inefficient. Efficiency is usually way below 50%, since nuclear power plants are far away from anything you can't usually use the heat an nuclear power plant produce for anything productive, so it's lost.

But of course there are new and better plants in development, they are safer and bigger and produce less waste. But the old plants still exist. You can't replace them within a few years, it takes decades. And the costs for such a programme will be very high.

Since 2005, there is a nuclear power plant being build in Finland, called Olkiluoto III. The reactor was priced at three billion euros, currently the price increased to about six billion. The reactor might go online in 2015, a decade after the construction started.

The reactor will provide 1600 MW of electrical power. For comparison, in 2011 alone wind power plants were build with the combined power of 9600 MW (Europe wide, Germany about 2000 MW, GB about 1300 MW).

I know, this is not directly comparable but it gives you a hint, that you could have easily get the 1600 MW in ten years with renewable sources.

Nuclear power might be an interesting technology, but for me it is just a steam machine, which leaves a huge pile of waste behind. Nobody knows how to handle it, and people got it wrong. Search for Asse II if you want to know more about it. For Germany it will be very hard to find a safe final deposit for all the nuclear waste.

scarmig• 14 years ago

I think many nuke advocates go much too far in the "nuclear power will solve all our problems!"

That said, the strongest arguments for nuclear power has always been as part of a balanced energy diet, not as the off the shelf answer to everything. So, how do we figure out where it's appropriate and where not?

Properly price carbon, and remove all distorting subsidies to all forms of energy, from fossil fuels to solar to wind to nuclear. Then let the market do what it does best: figure out the best way to allocate capital to produce goods.

Nuclear certainly needs proper regulation and safety requirements, but contemporary designs are much lower risk than the Fukushima reactor from the 1970s or the ancient design of Chernobyl: despite that, they're nearly impossible to build. I've heard it wouldn't even be allowed, in the current regulatory regime, to replace those old plants with new ones. Something's broken there.

iwwr• 14 years ago

"Nuclear power is limited, there is just not endless amount of uranium on the planet."

A finite quantity can be quite large. Uranium is not that scarce even with a ramp up of nuclear activity. And even then, there is thorium, a more abundant fuel.

"you can't usually use the heat an nuclear power plant produce for anything productive, so it's lost."

That is a problem with conventional low-temperature high-pressure designs, however LFTR (low-pressure high-temperature) produces high enough temperatures to be usable in industrial processes directly (700C). Designs can be modified to get to 1000C or so which is useful for hydrogen production.

"But of course there are new and better plants in development, they are safer and bigger and produce less waste."

LFTR not only produces less waste, but it can be used to burn existing waste. So if we consider the costs of long term security and storage, just developing LFTR to process waste is going to be worth it.

"Since 2005, there is a nuclear power plant being build in Finland, called Olkiluoto III."

That is indeed a problem with all large industrial/construction projects that need government funding or complex regulatory processes. If you are arguing against nuclear power you should be against all such projects.

One problem with wind power is a poor ability to provide base grid load. Yes, if you have a widely distributed (continent-wide) network things may even out. But then that means you have to waste energy in the transportation network, as well as investing in powerlines. The same argument about inefficiency starts to come up.

The main argument then for wind and solar is that the costs scale linearly with output, whereas for a government-backed power plant the costs tend to escalate (bribes, kickbacks, cost-plus etc). That is acceptable, it just means people can become more independent of the inherently inefficient state-run grid. But with a state-run renewables system you have to contend with a centralized and potentially oversized grid. You trade away centralism in one area (identical turbines or panels) and have to buy it back in another (large scale power distribution system).

lispm• 14 years ago

Germans have more than one goals: more renewable energy (to replace conventional power plants) AND no nuclear. The latter is not optional.

jfaucett• 14 years ago

It seems this has sparked some debates on nuclear vs renewable energy so I thought I'd add a ted talk that explains some pros/cons of each for those interested: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mackay_a_reality_check_on_ren...

gingerbreadman• 14 years ago

Kalpakkam, India has already been in works for years! The design for it according to wikipedia had been started in the 80's.

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

allerratio• 14 years ago

The title is misleading. They only test thorium in an already built conventional reactor. Meanwhile in Germany they developed a conceptionally more safe reactor type powered by thorium, built a test reactor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor) and an industrial reactor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300). They're both shut down now, partly because of safety concerns: Water leaking into the cooling circuit can lead to explosions (which happened in small amounts)

So I guess only time will tell if new reactor types really are better than current ones.

marvin3• 14 years ago

If I am correctly informed (would love to hear from people who are involved in the project), this project is being done in spite of the Norwegian government's stance on nuclear energy.

Thor Energy and its associated researchers have tried to stir up support for thorium reserach for years now, but there has been very little support and large amount of uninformed opposition ("nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad"). A number of physicists, notably Egil Lillestøl at the University of Bergen, have talked to official figures about this for a long time about this without getting any kind of traction.

Thorium energy seems to be a very promising candidate for safe, clean and cheap next-generation nuclear power. If these researchers manage to develop something without official support, it would be impressive indeed. That the Norwegian government isn't willing to support clean energy research is really quite baffling, given that the energy sector is hands-down the largest contributor to the Norwegian economy. And Norway has the world's second-largest known thorium reserves. For all our supposed good policies, we are still subject to mob rule and completely uninformed detractors.

emiliobumachar• 14 years ago

Being cynical, perhaps the fact they're swimming in oil makes them disintersted as a nation in developing alternative energy.

elux• 14 years ago

"Norwegian crude oil production peaked in 2001 and as of 2012 it has declined about 50% from the peak. This fact has been overshadowed by the oil price growth in recent years."

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9166

judofyr• 14 years ago

95% of the power generated in Norway comes from hydropower[1] so we already have a sustainable and green power source. I think it's more likely that the government sees power generation in Norway as a "solved" problem, and wants to be careful about introducing nuclear power. The general opinion is basically "nuclear is dangerous!", and no-one wants to be the first politician to support it.

[1]: Source: http://www.ssb.no/energi/ (Norwegian site)

snom380• 14 years ago

Actually, that's not being cynical. A lot of engineering brainpower goes to the oil industry since it is so big. Almost any engineering company has oil and gas companies as their biggest customers. In comparison, hydroelectric is mainly maintenance and upgrades since most of the waterfalls have been built out.

chromaticorb• 14 years ago

No, no, theyre fully aware of that. The people behind this are the Halden Reactor Project, they already operate this small nuclear reactor that was (don't know if it still is) used to power a paper mill. The whole thing is just for some clout in world research. Leave it to the Norwegians!

They're a wonderful bunch of people, I had the chance to study some safety in software engineering principles with them, about 6 months ago. I had no idea they were planning to implement Thorium.

They do a huge bunch of research in Human Factors, and half of the team basically hack about with Kinects as their job designing AR solutions rehearsing dangerous nuclear sites/oil rigs

konstruktor• 14 years ago

Thanks for, without giving actual examples, telling us that the people opposing nuclear are uninformed and unable to form complete sentences. Without this enlightened information one might have listened to them and judged them based on their arguments. Edit: spelling

ThomPete2• 14 years ago

Perhaps you could introduce some arguments for this opposition instead of just do what you complain about.

barry-cotter• 14 years ago

For all our supposed good policies, we are still subject to mob rule and completely uninformed detractors.

To democracy! All hail the will of the people!

jpdoctor• 14 years ago

> Thorium energy seems to be a very promising candidate for safe, clean

Only for some definitions of clean. Forget the radiation, Thorium's toxicity profile is not pretty. Hell, the damn thing is pyrophoric.

Hats off to the engineers if they can make a more sensible reactor out of it.

DennisP3• 14 years ago

But you need only small amounts of it. In a LFTR, one ton of thorium, about the size of a beach ball, is sufficient fuel for a one-gigawatt reactor to run for a year.

Compare that to the enormous quantities of coal ash we produce every day. It's hard to imagine chemical toxicity being a major problem. People used to make lamps out of the stuff.

In fact, given that thorium is a byproduct of rare earth mines, and currently considered a hazardous waste, it'd be nice to have something to do with it.

polshaw3• 14 years ago

>nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad

Nuclear is not the panacea almost every 'informed' internet citizen thinks it is. It is EXPENSIVE. Wind and hydro power are already cheaper, for example. On top of that, whilst any new nuclear power plant will take many years to produce, costs for renewables continue to fall, and, it obviously has a huge number of risks (not just 'meltdown' but costs, security, long-term storage etc). Off the top of my head i think a wind farm is also more energy dense than a nuclear power plant, given all the space required around it.

That is not to say it is 'baaad' because it does have some uses; eg it can provide a baseline power. Basically, we need many different sources, but there are (more?) informed people who oppose nuclear for very good reasons.

OTOH thorium could be great, but it has not been proven commercially yet. We'll see what happens but i remain sceptical until proven otherwise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_cost_of_electricity_g...

DennisP3• 14 years ago

The cost of power from nuclear is quite competitive. Capital costs are high but, like renewables, amortized over a long lifetime with low operational costs. Your wiki link puts nuclear cheaper than solar or offshore wind, and barely more expensive than onshore wind.

Moving to small modular reactors, as many outfits are trying to do, will lower the required investment and time to production. Liquid thorium or fast uranium would largely eliminate long-term storage problem...in fact, we'd eliminate the long-lived wastes we have right now. (In the meantime we should keep wastes in a form we can use for fuel later.)

Renewables are great as far as they go, but there are only so many places you can build a good dam, and wind needs either a large oversupply, an economical energy storage system (which, other than the limited hydro, doesn't exist), a drastically souped-up and expensive power grid, or possibly all three. You don't have to worry about that if you're just adding power on the margins, but you do if you want to run civilization carbon-free. Taking all that into account, it's questionable whether wind would really be cheaper, especially as we're forced to expand into less suitable locations.

marvin3• 14 years ago

That would be a rational, well-informed counterargument against traditional nuclear power plants. It is not a counterargument against seed-level funding for R&D towards a completely new reactor technology, which has different economic and safety characteristics. Accelerator-based reactors, which are what have been proposed for publically-sponsored research in Norway, are a completely different beast. Yet they are treated as if it was a proposal to build 1050s Soviet-style reactors.

I am not trying to be hostile here, but you are making the exact same assumptions and fallacies as most of the Norwegian detractors to thorium reactor research. Although the criticism I was referring to in my post was rather the type you most commonly see: Uninformed dismissals of the type "We're still feeling the effects of Chernobyl", "Nuclear reactors are inherently unsafe" and "Nuclear waste cannot be handled in a safe way".

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

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf35.html

Traditional counterarguments to nuclear energy should not be enough to dismiss using a couple of million a year to look into promising, alternate solutions.

zackmorris• 14 years ago

Don't forget to consider the cost of externalities (environmental damage, health costs), which probably roughly double the true cost of nonrenewable fuels:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_cost_of_electricity_g...

Also, as for the comments that oil is still king in terms of absolute price, keep in mind that we probably peaked around 2004:

https://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/2008_fot...

In my mind, we crossed the peak when diesel became more expensive than gasoline, because that meant that availability/exploration became the primary cost instead of refinement (because diesel has more energy and is easier to refine).

In fairness, we won't reach peak coal for at least several more decades, but my guess is that the externalities associated with coal will become unpalatable once a category 5 hurricane takes out New York City or Florida is under water. Or, when disaster relief crosses say 50% of the government's budget.

I forgot to mention that I'm against all new nuclear unless it can burn waste and plutonium. Partially because I saw the reactors underwater outside Omaha and realized that we are only a human error away from a Fukushima event here in the US.

TeMPOraL3• 14 years ago

> Off the top of my head i think a wind farm is also more energy dense than a nuclear power plant, given all the space required around it.

I checked some facts; 2W / m^2 for wind[0], 1000W / m^2 for nuclear[1]. Even if they didn't account for some infrastructure, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't decrease that number 500 times.

Nuclear fission is one of the most powerful energy sources (in energy per unit of mass of fuel) known to mankind, to be replaced only by fusion and annihilation. Renewables on Earth don't even begin to compare.

[0] http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c4/page_33....

[1] http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_16...

ThomPete2• 14 years ago

Wind and hydro does not begin to address the need for exponentially more energy and neither of them are the future in any important factor.

Furthermore. It is estimated that 100.000 people die from the use of coal to generate energy every year. More than nuclear power have ever done ( 4,000 people ever).

The only thing that is problematic with nuclear is storing it, a problem which can be solved.

temphn• 14 years ago

This is a factual disagreement, hopefully a resolvable one.

Take a look at this book by David MacKay, Cambridge physicist. He presents detailed calculations on each energy source and, despite being anti-nuclear in initial orientation, agrees by the end of the book that nuclear energy is far cheaper and more scalable than any other renewable.

http://www.withouthotair.com/

"Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to be pro-nuclear. I’m just pro-arithmetic. — David MacKay"

mtgx• 14 years ago

Wasn't uranium-based nuclear energy supposed to be very cheap, too, and then it turned out it wasn't that cheap? I worry the same will happen with thorium.

Also how much safer is it? Can it be set-up just a few KM outside a city? Is there any dangerous waste to deposit at all?

I do think that if we are to continue research in nuclear energy it should be based on Thorium, rather than uranium, but in the same time, I would much rather have the focus of the energy industry be solar energy right now.

I hope countries in the future are powered 70-80% by solar, and 20-30% by other sources like nuclear energy (at least until we figure out how to store solar energy cheaply for night use), than the other way around. And we can only get there fast if we have the industry's almost complete focus on solar energy, and have them invest billions into researching it and lowering the cost of solar panels.

SoftwareMaven2• 14 years ago

Power consumption only drops to about 50% of the daytime peak at night[1]. Unless you have somewhere to store that solar, you have to plan on "other sources" producing at least 50%, and more likely significantly more. I consider Utah to be a pretty sunny place, but it is still cloudy nearly a third of the year[2].

Sure, you can couple wind and solar, but that still doesn't help when we get a valley fog inversion for most of January that reduces sunlight to 30% of already short days and no wind is blowing anywhere nearby. Utah doesn't really have the spare water capacity to use it as a potential energy store, either.

The point being that, as great as renewables are, without a way to cheaply store vast amounts of renewable energy or a way to shuffle energy from great distances, it isn't going to work on its own. We need a solid baseline, which, of course, is coal today, but I'd much rather keep looking for better nuclear.

There's a lot of energy in those bonds; I have a great deal of confidence we can find a way to leverage it without all of the nasty side-effect. We just need to get past the knee-jerk reaction of "nuclear is bad" and to a better place of "today's nuclear leaves a lot to be desired, but it doesn't mean tomorrow's will"[3].

1. http://www.mpoweruk.com/electricity_demand.htm

2. http://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Utah/sunshine-by-month...

3. http://www.quaker.org/fep/CES1.html - You can see that Nuclear is far less deadly than coal, but, when things go wrong, it costs a whole lot more than coal.

Symmetry• 14 years ago

Generally when talking about how safe a given sort of nuclear power is the most important thing to consider is whether it has a positive void coefficient or not. That is, if the reactor starts to overheat will that make it generate more power or less. In light water reactors, such as pretty much all existing commercial reactors, you need complicated feedback systems to keep the reactor under control. And if those are damaged, as at Fukushima, you're looking at a melt down.

fleitz2• 14 years ago

Canada has already solved most of the typical nuclear problems with the CANDU design and ecosystem.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/CANDU_fue...

CANDU runs on natural uranium so the waste products are actually less radioactive than what we take out of the earth, as well CANDU can burn nuclear waste from light water reactors alleviating the need for Yucca mountain.

Lets look at it's meltdown profile, CANDU reactors need heavy water to function, if you replace the heavy water with light water fission stops, no meltdown. Also before the reactor would ever get to that point the fuel bundles deform, halting meltdown.

CANDU reactors are designed to put less radioactive material back into the earth than came out of it, and when problems occur in a CANDU design it fails safe.

politician2• 14 years ago

Uranium fuels were never deployed because of cost or safety, they were deployed because various militaries funded the technology for use a) producing plutonium for weapons, and b) producing energy for large Navy customers.

Civilian nuclear energy based on the uranium fuel cycle is a spin off from a warfighter's R&D project.

Compare that with the thorium fuel cycle which does not produce weaponizable byproducts.

Ras_• 14 years ago

Norway might not support, but Finland is majority owner of Fortum (51%), which the news article states as a partner. So governments aren't completely out of the picture. Fortum actually has slightly more nuclear power production in Sweden than in Finland. But your sentiment rings true, indeed only Finland is pro-nuclear in this common energy market (NASDAQ OMX Commodities Europe, previously Nord Pool).

NatW• 14 years ago

For those who haven't seen it, I highly recommend this video on liquid-fluoride thorium reactors (LFTR): https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=...!

I passed the video by my uncle who was an expert/engineer dealing with control and safety of water cooled reactors. This is what he had to say:

"I found the video very informative technically, as well as being effective in countering many of the the arguments of those who profess to be against nuclear power in any form. I also found the details of the design of the liquid thorium fluoride reactor intriguing. To become an advocate for further investment in this concept, I would have to learn more about how the concept deals with the safety issues involved in the handling of fluorine gas and fluoride materials."

politician2• 14 years ago

I just watched that video (2 hrs!), and I have to agree with NatW on his recommendation. Really, really well done.

gregsq2• 14 years ago

There's no insinuation in my posting this link, and it's not directly pertinent to Thorium reactors, but the free PDF downloadable from here is a good reference for these kinds of discussions, I think. Helped me with perspective anyway.

http://www.withouthotair.com/download.html

henrikgs• 14 years ago

According to an article in a norwegian newspaper[1], there are much bigger challenges in extracting the thorium from the ore in Norway. The thorium in India is supposedly easier utilize.

The technology today requires use of a lot of nasty chemicals to extract thorium. I think this is a big issue for the government in addition to running nuclear reactors.

[1]In norwegian: http://www.aftenposten.no/okonomi/Gigantisk-energikilde-i-Te...

patrickk• 14 years ago

Peter Thiel's class had an interesting part on Thorium: http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/23787022006/peter-thiels...

ScotterC2• 14 years ago

Interestingly this has already been done in the U.S. kinda. Back when I was working on Indian Point Units 2 & 3 I found a paper about Unit 1 where - about 30 years ago - they mixed in some of the fuel bundles with Thorium to see how well the neutron flux would turn it into Uranium and possibly breed more fuel. It was really fascinating but, although they had some success, there was really no need for it in the U.S. because Uranium is not in short supply and as this article points out, solid fuel reactors kind of dismiss all the advantages of thorium.

s_henry_paulson• 14 years ago

Even prior to that in the 1960s the US invented Molten Salt Thorium nuclear reactors at Oak Ridge.

They were shelved not because of the abundant supply of Uranium, but rather because they could not be used to make weapons.

http://energyfromthorium.com/history.html

ScotterC2• 14 years ago

Yup. And we had a running MSR at shippingport PA for awhile.

Empro• 14 years ago

Awesome.

teeja• 14 years ago

"I think from a long-range standpoint--I'm talking about humanity--the most important thing we could do is start by having an international meeting where we first outlaw nuclear weapons and then we outlaw nuclear reactors, too." - Hyman Rickover, January 28, 1982

Andrea1• 14 years ago

A Liquid Fluoride Thorium Ractor is as safe a unit as is possible. Look it up online. Much safer, cheaper, and more versatile than a bulky CANDU. It can be throttled and scaled which is a huge advantage. There is plenty of easily accessable thorium worldwide. It also can generate radioisotopes that are extremely useful and much more readily extracted from the reactor than those currently used. Time to begin building these.

Norway is building thorium reactor

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