Thorium reactors. Anyone heard of them?

Fell across this article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8393984/Safe-nuclear-does-exist-and-China-is-leading-the-way-with-thorium.html

It seems too good to be true. Googling unearths a lot of positives, few negatives, but nothing really concrete. It's still at the theoretical stage.

http://www.thorium.tv/en/thorium_reactor/thorium_reactor_1.php
http://www.abc.net.au/local/audio/2011/03/22/3170512.htm?site=newcastle

Anyone know more about Thorium reactors?

It is part of a campaign by a nuclear industry trying to pilfer the public purse. They always have some miriacle technology waiting in the wings that never actually manages to emerge into the light of commercial viability;


“New reactors” are precisely the “paper reactors” Admiral Rickover described in 1953:

An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics:
(1) It is simple.
(2) It is small.
(3) It is cheap.
(4) It is light.
(5) It can be built very quickly.
(6) It is very flexible in purpose.
(7) Very little development will be required. It will use off the shelf components.
(8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

On the other hand a practical reactor can be distinguished by the following characteristics:
(1) It is being built now.
(2) It is behind schedule.
(3) It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items.
(4) It is very expensive.
(5) It takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems.
(6) It is large.
(7) It is heavy.
(8) It is complicated.

Every new type of reactor in history has been costlier, slower, and harder than projected. IFRs’ low pressure, different safety profile, high temperature, and potentially higher thermal efficiency (if its helium turbines didn’t misbehave as they have in all previous reactor projects) come with countervailing disadvantages and costs that advocates assume away, contrary to all experience.
"New" Nuclear Reactors, Same Old Story
Amory Lovins

India has been working on thorium for a couple of decades and they are still a couple of decades away from from showing that it can do what is claimed.

RENEWABLE ENERGY WORKS NOW

The nuclear industry would have you believe that we NEED nuclear power as a response to climate change. That is false. We have less expensive alternatives that can be built faster for FAR less money. This is a good overview of their claims:
http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E08-01_NuclearIllusion

In a comparative analysis by another well respected researcher nuclear, coal with carbon capture and ethanol are not recommended as solutions to climate change. The researcher has looked at the qualities of the various options in great detail and the results disprove virtually all claims that the nuclear industry promote in order to gain public support for nuclear industry.

Nuclear supporters invariably claim that research like this is produced because the researchers are "biased against nuclear power". That is false. They have a preference,however that preference is not irrational; indeed it is a product of careful analysis of the needs of society and the costs of the various technologies for meeting those needs. In other words the researchers are "biased" against nuclear power because reality is biased against nuclear power. We hear this same kind of claim to being a victim of "liberal bias" from conservatives everyday and it is no different when the nuclear proponents employ it - it is designed to let them avoid cognitive dissonance associated with holding positions that are proven to be false.

The nuclear power supporters will tell you this study has been "debunked any number of times" but they will not be able to produce a detailed rebuttal that withstands even casual scrutiny for that claim too is false. The study is peer reviewed and well respected in the scientific community; it breaks no new ground and the references underpinning the work are not subject to any criticism that has material effect on the outcome of the comparison.

They will tell you that the sun doesn't always shine and that the wind doesn't always blow. Actually they do. The sun is always shining somewhere and the wind is always blowing somewhere. However researcher have shown that a complete grid based on renewable energy sources is UNQUESTIONABLY SOMETHING WE CAN DO. Here is what happens when you start linking various sites together:

Original paper here at National Academy of Sciences website: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/03/29/0909075107.abstract

When the local conditions warrant the other parts of a renewable grid kick in - geothermal power, biomass, biofuels, and wave/current/tidal sources are all resources that fill in the gaps - just like now when 5 large scale power plants go down unexpectedly. We do not need nuclear not least because spending money on nuclear is counterproductive to the goal of getting off of fossil fuels as we get less electricity for each dollar spend on infrastructure and it takes a lot longer to bring nuclear online.

In the study below Mark Jacobson of Stanford has used the quantity of energy that it would take to power an electric vehicle fleet as a benchmark by which to judge the technologies.

As originally published:
Abstract

This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition. Nine electric power sources and two liquid fuel options are considered. The electricity sources include solar-photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The liquid fuel options include corn-ethanol (E85) and cellulosic-E85. To place the electric and liquid fuel sources on an equal footing, we examine their comparative abilities to address the problems mentioned by powering new-technology vehicles, including battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and flex-fuel vehicles run on E85. Twelve combinations of energy source-vehicle type are considered. Upon ranking and weighting each combination with respect to each of 11 impact categories, four clear divisions of ranking, or tiers, emerge. Tier 1 (highest-ranked) includes wind-BEVs and wind-HFCVs. Tier 2 includes CSP-BEVs, geothermal-BEVs, PV-BEVs, tidal-BEVs, and wave-BEVs. Tier 3 includes hydro-BEVs, nuclear-BEVs, and CCS-BEVs. Tier 4 includes corn- and cellulosic-E85. Wind-BEVs ranked first in seven out of 11 categories, including the two most important, mortality and climate damage reduction. Although HFCVs are much less efficient than BEVs, wind-HFCVs are still very clean and were ranked second among all combinations. Tier 2 options provide significant benefits and are recommended. Tier 3 options are less desirable. However, hydroelectricity, which was ranked ahead of coal-CCS and nuclear with respect to climate and health, is an excellent load balancer, thus recommended. The Tier 4 combinations (cellulosic- and corn-E85) were ranked lowest overall and with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste. Cellulosic-E85 ranked lower than corn-E85 overall, primarily due to its potentially larger land footprint based on new data and its higher upstream air pollution emissions than corn-E85. Whereas cellulosic-E85 may cause the greatest average human mortality, nuclear-BEVs cause the greatest upper-limit mortality risk due to the expansion of plutonium separation and uranium enrichment in nuclear energy facilities worldwide. Wind-BEVs and CSP-BEVs cause the least mortality. The footprint area of wind-BEVs is 2–6 orders of magnitude less than that of any other option. Because of their low footprint and pollution, wind-BEVs cause the least wildlife loss. The largest consumer of water is corn-E85. The smallest are wind-, tidal-, and wave-BEVs. The US could theoretically replace all 2007 onroad vehicles with BEVs powered by 73 000–144 000 5 MW wind turbines, less than the 300 000 airplanes the US produced during World War II, reducing US CO2 by 32.5–32.7% and nearly eliminating 15 000/yr vehicle-related air pollution deaths in 2020. In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss, and the biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.
http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2009/EE/b809990c

Mods this is the one paragraph abstract shown above reformatted by me for ease of reading.




Then we have the economic analysis from Cooper:
The Economics of Nuclear Reactors: Renaissance or Relapse
This graph summarizes his findings where "Consumer" concerns direct financial costs and "Societal" refers to external costs not captured in financial analysis.

Cooper A Multi-dimensional View of Alternatives

Full report can be read here: http://www.olino.org/us/articles/2009/11/26/the-economics-of-nuclear-reactors-renaissance-or-relapse

Another independent economic analysis is the Severance study:
http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/nuclear-costs-2009.pdf


The price of nuclear subsidies is also worth looking at. Nuclear proponents will tell you the subsidies per unit of electricity for nuclear are no worse than for renewables. That statement omits the fact than nuclear power has received the lions share of non fossil energy subsidies for more than 50 years with no apparent payoff; for all the money we've spent we see a steadily escalating cost curve for nuclear. When we compare that to renewables we find that a small fraction of the total amount spent on nuclear has resulted in rapidly declining costs that for wind are already competitive with coal and rapidly declining costs for solar that are competitive with natural gas and will soon be less expensive than coal.
http://www.1366tech.com/cost-curve/


In other words: subsidies work to help the renewable technologies stand on their own but with nuclear they do nothing but prop up an industry that cannot be economically viable.
Full report: http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nuclear_power/nuclear_subsidies_report.pdf



CBO estimate on nuclear loan guarantees



Note the price - $2.5 billion was to be only for the first plant. Future plants were, according to the assumptions provided by the nuclear industry, expected to have lower costs as economy of scale resulted in savings.

In fact, since the report was written (2003), the estimated cost has risen to an average of about $8 billion.

Wonder what that does to the “risk is that … the plant would be uneconomic to operate because of its high construction costs, relative to other electricity generation sources”?

Now you have to ask yourself, does that risk diminish or increase when the price rose from $2.5 billion to $8 billion?

Planning for the transition

What plans are out there? Here is one where achieving 100% renewable energy is described:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030


Here is a PDF link for another such plan by:
The Civil Society "Beyond Business as Usual"
http://www.civilsocietyinstitute.org/media/pdfs/Beyond%20BAU%205-11-10.pdf

Their website has lots of information:
http://www.civilsocietyinstitute.org/


Also see these other papers by Amory Lovins
http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E09-01_NuclearPowerClimateFixOrFolly


http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E77-01_EnergyStrategyRoadNotTaken

You obviously have discussed this subject before.

I've save it to read later; much of the material is beyond my rudimentary knowledge atm.

I can't even assemble a good tin-foil reason why this science should not be common knowledge, if it is possible.

He mentions why thorium reactors haven't taken off in the past:

(…) Spectrum: Even though thorium has always looked attractive theoretically, why hasn’t the technology taken off yet? What are the impediments?

Sinha: There has been interest in thorium in some other countries because of its proliferation-resistant nature, but no other country had the problem of uranium supply like India. In other countries, the economics were not in favor of thorium, so uranium became the fuel of choice.

Read the rest at:
http://seekerblog.com/2010/08/14/indias-reactor-strategy-inverview-with-thorium-reactor-designer/

...economics all to hell.

So we could wait 30 more years to see if this could be 1) actually done safely throughout the entire full fuel cycle (unlikely) and 2) for less money than the renewables that are ready to go right now; or we could just stop acting like junkies looking for a nuclear fix and build renewables.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x626150

If we are going to have nukes this is what they should be.

Meltdowns would be virtually impossible.

So we don't know what can go wrong yet other than speculating. We can speculate that it is safe, but a lot of work needs to be done, including testing to determine that.

for generating weapons grade Uranium so it was mothballed.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor>

Thorium is placed around an operating thermal fission reactor to be bred by neutron absorption to Uranium 232.
U-232 works about as well in reactors as U-235.
But it has a nasty gamma emission that renders it unsuitable for use in atomic weapons .
This is similar to what people would know as a "breeder" reactor.
In that design Uranium 238 captures a neutron to become Plutonium, Pu239.
Thorium cycle leaves almost no weapons grade fissionable lying around for Republicans anyone to false flag use.
If we must have nuclear power it's a better choice than the Uranium cycle.

Thorium reactors have the promise of being much safer, meltdown-proof (OK, so the LFTR has fuel that is melted by design, and is also the coolant, and if it gets to hot, it melts a salt plug under the reactor, and the fuel drains into a cooling tank), useless for generating weapons, much nicer on the environment, runs on plentiful fuel, and is capable of burning up all the radioactive waste made by uranium reactors, which is a far more realistic way to deal with it than throwing that waste in a hole in the ground and hoping nothing happens to it for half a million years.

The U.S. has already built one experimental reactor. This is very achievable technology, so if we're going to use nuclear technology, we should be building thorium reactors rather than rolling the dice with existing technology.

trying very hard to stop Thorium.

We are at peak Oil but we are also at peak Uranium.

Or at least have been historically, specifically, during the Cold War.

The military-industrial complex wanted not just nuclear reactors, but bombs. Thorium reactors are useless for building bombs, so they got shitcanned.

Thorium fuel cycle development in India

The long-term goal of India's nuclear program has been to develop an advanced heavy-water thorium cycle.The first stage of this employs the PHWRs fuelled by natural uranium, and light water reactors, to produce plutonium.

Stage 2 uses fast neutron reactors burning the plutonium to breed U-233 from thorium. The blanket around the core will have uranium as well as thorium, so that further plutonium (ideally high-fissile Pu) is produced as well as the U-233.

Then in stage 3, Advanced Heavy Water Reactors (AHWRs) burn the U-233 from stage 2 and this plutonium with thorium, getting about two thirds of their power from the thorium.



WNA India page

They are the most expensive way to meet our future needs and they simply are not needed.

Where did you learn the false belief that renewable energy cannot meet modern society's needs?

!
V

society we are going to be looking at minimum 30-50 years to get there.

LFTRs would allow us to burn up a good deal of the spent fuel we are sitting on and act as a bridge to were we want to go.

1) 30-50 year transition to "straight renenewable society"

2) We 'could' (would allow) use LFTRs to burn spent fuel.

3) More nuclear is needed as a bridge.


I believe that behind those beliefs are these assumptions, (or other beliefs):

1) the 30-50 year time frame is a barrier set by technology that cannot be altered unless there is a "breakthrough"technology

2) Solving the nuclear waste problem requires construction of more reactors of some kind.

3) See assumption 1.

So here is the question:

Suppose you knew that the barrier to a transition to a straight renewable society was not a function of technology but instead a matter of economics (actually building the manufacturing base) and policy support within government.

Suppose further that we are further down the road to building a renewable manufacturing infrastructure than we ever expected was possible even 5 years ago.

Suppose you were to learn that instead of having the effect of being a "bridge" to renewables, nuclear energy instead was known, without question, to have the effect of crowding renewable development out of the market and was functionally a step away from a renewable system.

Would you still think that building more nuclear power plants should be the only way we consider handling the nuclear waste issue?
Would you then concentrate your support on energy issues towards renewable deployment instead of nuclear power?

All of the "suppose" statements are true, btw.