# Fuel of the future: Thorium-based nuclear power



## topgun31 (Nov 23, 2010)

I've been reading alot about Thorium-fueled reactors and Molten Salt Reactors. 

Is Thorium the Nuclear Fuel of the Future? - IEEE Spectrum
Uranium Is So Last Century ? Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke | Magazine
China enters race to develop nuclear energy from thorium | Duncan Clark | Environment | guardian.co.uk
http://www.popsci.com/technology/ar...reactors-could-wean-world-oil-just-five-years

"Imagine how the nuclear energy debate might differ if the fuel was abundant and distributed across the world; if there was no real possibility of creating weapons-grade material as part of the process; if the waste remained toxic for hundreds rather than thousands of years; and if the power stations were small and presented no risk of massive explosions."

"a tonne of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal"

If this type of energy is so promising, then why isn't wide-scale implementation of this technology? Are the reasons political? economic? Or are there vested interests in industries such as coal uranium that are preventing this tech from being mass-produced? What are the cons of this type of energy production?


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## Elwin (Feb 17, 2011)

topgun31 said:


> Are the reasons political?


Some people hear or see the word "nuclear" and immediately go berserk at the suggestion of building a new plant, even if it will shut down 10 others and as suggested above, produce less harmful waste.


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## topgun31 (Nov 23, 2010)

Elwin said:


> Some people hear or see the word "nuclear" and immediately go berserk at the suggestion of building a new plant, even if it will shut down 10 others and as suggested above, produce less harmful waste.


That's what I was thinking. A combination of an irrational fear of anything nuclear and industry influence.


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## noz (Dec 7, 2009)

this was very eye opening, thanks for pointing it out.

From what I can tell, its only behind for two main reasons-

- it's a pain in the ass to get it into a state of critical neutron exchange density. uraniums quicker/easier.

-research and fuel cycle knowledge of uranium was given priority, since you can also makes weapons from it.


Thing is, if India has like three of these things up and running already..... well, how the hell did we miss this? yes nuclear is touchy, but when you look at all these advantages of thorium over uranium use, its almost inexplicable why we haven't done thorium power yet....
ZERO chance of meltdown? wtfz!

If this was an industry scheme to keep an energy status quo, why hasn't the EPA harped for replacing uranium plants with thorium?? Tons of ppl missed the boat here, not just the energy companies.


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## absentminded (Dec 3, 2010)

topgun31 said:


> "a tonne of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal"
> 
> If this type of energy is so promising, then why isn't wide-scale implementation of this technology? Are the reasons political? economic? Or are there vested interests in industries such as coal uranium that are preventing this tech from being mass-produced? What are the cons of this type of energy production?


First off, I would love to know who exactly came up with that 1:200 ratio. The thorium fuel cycle is dependent on a much longer decay series than the plutonium or minor actinide fuel cycles. Processing the decay products to get usable U-233 takes more work than the Uranium-Plutonium Cycle which requires zero processing to breed new fuel.

That says nothing of U-232 contamination, which has to be processed out of the fuel in the same manner as U-235-based processes. Proactinium-233 is a neutron absorber/poison, which means it has to be removed from the fuel by hand so it can decay into fissile isotopes. It also rules out a thorium breeder reactor, meaning that thorium would be far less efficient than an equivalent Uranium-Plutonium reactor.

Not saying we shouldn't pursue Thorium, I'm just saying that too many people are taking too many liberties in their praises of a fuel just as problem-ridden as Uranium. The amount of infrastructure we'd need is insane, which is why we've missed the boat.


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## topgun31 (Nov 23, 2010)

absentminded said:


> First off, I would love to know who exactly came up with that 1:200 ratio. The thorium fuel cycle is dependent on a much longer decay series than the plutonium or minor actinide fuel cycles. Processing the decay products to get usable U-233 takes more work than the Uranium-Plutonium Cycle which requires zero processing to breed new fuel.
> 
> That says nothing of U-232 contamination, which has to be processed out of the fuel in the same manner as U-235-based processes. Proactinium-233 is a neutron absorber/poison, which means it has to be removed from the fuel by hand so it can decay into fissile isotopes. It also rules out a thorium breeder reactor, meaning that thorium would be far less efficient than an equivalent Uranium-Plutonium reactor.
> 
> Not saying we shouldn't pursue Thorium, I'm just saying that too many people are taking too many liberties in their praises of a fuel just as problem-ridden as Uranium. The amount of infrastructure we'd need is insane, which is why we've missed the boat.


Yes that's one of the main reasons that we haven't pursued Thorium. We already have a sizable uranium-based infrastructure in place, and the costs to construct a Thorium based infrastructure would be tremendous (with our current economic system). But I still beleive we should pursue this because what works now may not be (acutally, will probably NOT be) suitable for future needs and future safety precautions. 

Here's more:
Nuclear Engineering International

From another site:
"Nobel Prize winner Carlo Rubbia of CERN thinks so. Thorium is extremely common pretty much everywhere you dig on this planet, produces far more neutrons per neutron absorbed than uranium, and it cleans up after itself as it degrades. One ton of the material makes as much energy in an appropriate reactor as 200 tons of uranium, or 3.5 million tons of coal. It's literally an energy bonanza.
So, why aren't we using it yet? Because our leaders preferred Uranium reactors, which produce plutonium, which allows them to indulge in their unhealthy fantasies of destroying the entire human race. But, now that we have enough nukes to kill everyone fifty times over, perhaps it's time for some investment? France might not like the idea, since they have so much money sunk into the uranium technology, but we have so few nuke plants we could ramp this up really fast. And, since thorium is plentiful everywhere, and cannot be used for weaponry, it would break the backs of the uranium cartels and give us tech to happily give to nations we would rather not have fissionable material."

Please spread the word about thorium. There won't be mass movement into alternatives - even beyond thorium - if people are indifferent and if 99.99% of the population is unaware of the alternatives.


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## Alles_Paletti (May 15, 2013)

Instead of starting a new thread I'll resurrect this one. 

Thorium nuclear reactor trial begins, could provide cleaner, safer, almost-waste-free energy | ExtremeTech Apparently conventional nuclear reactors can use thorium instead of uranium if you mix in 10% plutonium. That solves a lot of infrastructure problems. I'm not sure whether the need for plutonium is an advantage as the writer of the article claims. 

According to this: China blazes trail for 'clean' nuclear power from thorium - Telegraph there's enough fuel for 20,000 years. 

It's interesting to consider a world with virtually unlimited, clean energy which produces no toxic materials or CO2, as it has become such a fact of life that fuel will run out one day and that using fuel causes environmental problems such as global warming. And now that infrastructure issues are being tackled, it really seems to have a high chance of actually happening (although I would like to hear the opinion of a nuclear physicist). It's really a paradigm shift - I imagine the world will look a lot different in 5-10 years (maybe even sooner) when this spreads.


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## TheProcrastinatingMaster (Jun 4, 2012)

Alles_Paletti said:


> Instead of starting a new thread I'll resurrect this one.
> 
> Thorium nuclear reactor trial begins, could provide cleaner, safer, almost-waste-free energy | ExtremeTech Apparently conventional nuclear reactors can use thorium instead of uranium if you mix in 10% plutonium. That solves a lot of infrastructure problems. I'm not sure whether the need for plutonium is an advantage as the writer of the article claims.
> 
> ...


20 000 years should be long enough to finally make fusion power a reality, I hope


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## Desolan (Nov 14, 2011)

Lets bump this thread because it is still applicable even today.

The first advancement towards thorium though probably needs to be approval of Molten salt reactor 'Burner' designs, where Uranium is still used, but rather than using a light water reactor design using solid ceramic fuels, The uranium is instead dispersed within a salt which becomes liquid at operating temperatures, which vastly increases the efficiency and safety from current reactor designs.

One company has progressed to the point where it actually has plans to submit it's designs for approval and licensing of Small Modular reactors using molten salts in just a couple years:
Terrestrial Energy unveils SMR licensing plans

If this goes through, industries and remote communities could finally have some clean cheap nuclear energy and heating options.


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## HAL (May 10, 2014)

Thorium or not, I'm so pro nuclear.

There are only two ways out of the impending energy crisis which we WILL see this century:

1. Use much less power, _globally_.

2. Nuclear.

Also, fun fact for the day: A single nuclear fission reaction releases a million times more energy than that of burning a single hydrocarbon.

Source: Somewhere in here - https://www.withouthotair.com/


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## HGy (Jul 3, 2016)

Too much money already invested in other industries


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## Desolan (Nov 14, 2011)

HGy said:


> Too much money already invested in other industries


?
So we should stop investing and researching new technologies because the research is expensive? That is ludicrous. I'll counter that argument and say that not enough money is invested into progressive technical developments like advanced Nuclear.
And I'll follow up that argument by asserting that a reason why money towards technical developments is always short is because privatized technical efforts are more focused on optimization rather than unfocused advancement, and investments and investment profits almost always get funneled towards cost reduction and the real-estate market for get-rich schemes rather than towards hard to prove scientific advancements ideas.


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## Sylarz (Sep 4, 2014)

The patent for the plasma screen flat screen was filed in the 1920s.

Sometimes supporting technologies are required for a given technology to become useful. Sometimes costs need to be lowered either by better manufacturing techniques or by supporting technologies or technological realities (such as some other technology being widespread). Sometimes it may be that a raw material suddenly becomes cheaper which makes new technological possibilities possible, such as steel making skyscrapers possible. Steel used to be expensive, used for fine cutlery, and taller building were not possible before. Taller building would have been useful, but were not possible without a supporting technology: steel.

There are many other factors in diffusion of technology. For nuclear power, there are even more hurdles.

I've been following the LFTR technology story for a couple years now. It's very promising, and very cool. Kirk Sorensen explains why it was not used originally and why it is so hard to get going in a lecture somewhere. There are a few technical issues, the starting material for the breeder, but it's mainly political and financial. 

Originally the cold war arm's race incentivized politicians to support reactors that could help produce the necessary weapons grade plutonium. LFTRs were not too good for that purpose.

Today...

Investors are not too keen on sinking millions into risky ventures with unknown returns.

And politics is well poltics. It's a slow beast with not many cluey people in power, and they are busy and their attention is split many different ways.

This is one advantage to a command economy/fascism à la PRC. They may be the first to implement this technology. The Chinese Academy of Sciences is sinking money and man power into the project, as they seem to have figured out its potential. That's also one of the advantages of having half your leadership being trained engineers...

Kirk Sorensen joked, "People ask me how the Chinese figured all this stuff. I usually laugh and tell them they probably just downloaded the pdfs from my website."

What I want to try to get across is that just because a technology is technically feasible and would be great isn't enough. Technological implementation unfortunately doesn't work like that. Technology exists within an economic, societal and political reality.

*Edit*: another example of supporting technologies. Computers are great right? Well, not really. What you think of as a computer is really an electronic computer implemented on an integrated circuit. Those computers are great. It wasn't until the integrated circuit that computers became much more useful. This_ supporting technology_ allowed for computers to flourish beyond being gigantic and slow machines for the military and banks. Computers existed well before the recent boom. The explosion of computer technology wasn't from an underlying improvement in how computers work, what changed was our ability to make them, fast, affordable, small, low power with integrated circuits. You'd be surprised how unsophisticated things get down near the metal. Then computers became the supporting technology for the next things.


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