Credit: Justin Randall
What if we could build a nuclear reactor that offered no possibility of a meltdown, generated its power inexpensively, created no weapons-grade by-products, and burnt up existing high-level waste as well as old nuclear weapon stockpiles? And what if the waste produced by such a reactor was radioactive for a mere few hundred years rather than tens of thousands? It may sound too good to be true, but such a reactor is indeed possible, and a number of teams around the world are now working to make it a reality. What makes this incredible reactor so different is its fuel source: thorium.
Named after Thor, the warlike Norse god of thunder, thorium could ironically prove a potent instrument of peace as well as a tool to soothe the world’s changing climate. With the demand for energy on the increase around the world, and the implications of climate change beginning to strike home, governments are increasingly considering nuclear power as a possible alternative to burning fossil fuels.
But nuclear power comes with its own challenges. Public concerns over the risk of meltdown, disposal of long-lived and highly toxic radioactive waste, the generation of weapons grade by-products, and their corresponding proliferation risks, all can make nuclear power a big vote-loser.
A thorium reactor is different. And, on paper at least, this radical new technology could be the key to unlocking a new generation of clean and safe nuclear power. It could prove the circuit-breaker to the two most intractable problems of the 21st century: our insatiable thirst for energy, and the warming of the world’s climate.
BY THE END OF this century, the average surface temperature across the globe will have risen by at least 1.4˚C, and perhaps as much as 5.8˚C, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
That may not sound like much, but small changes in the global average can mask more dramatic localised disruptions in climate.
Some changes will be global: we can expect sea levels to rise by as much as 0.9 metres, effectively rendering a huge proportion of what is now fertile coastal land uninhabitable, flooding low-lying cities and wiping out a swathe of shallow islands worldwide.
The principal culprit is carbon dioxide, a gas that even in quite small quantities can have a dramatic impact on climate, and has historically been present in the Earth’s atmosphere at relatively low concentrations.
That was until human activity, including burning fossil fuels, began raising background levels substantially.
Yet while we’re bracing ourselves to deal with climate change, we also face soaring demand for more energy – which means burning more fossil fuels and generating more greenhouse gases.
That demand is forecast to boom this century. Energy consumption worldwide is rising fast, partly because we’re using much more of it – for air conditioning and computers, for example. In Australia alone, energy consumption jumped by 46 per cent between the mid-1970s and the mid- 1990s where our population grew by just 30 per cent. And energy use is expected to increase another 14 per cent by the end of this decade, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Then there’s China, which, along with other fast-growing nations, is developing a rapacious appetite for power to feed its booming economy.
And fossil fuels won’t last forever. Current predictions are that we may reach the point of peak production for oil and natural gas within the next decade – after which production levels will continually decline worldwide.
That’s if we haven’t hit the ‘peak oil’ mark already. That means prices will rise, as they have already started to do: cheap oil has become as much a part of history as bell-bottomed trousers and the Concorde.
Even coal, currently the world’s favourite source of electricity generation, is in limited supply. The U.S. Department of Energy suggests that at current levels of consumption, the world’s coal reserves could last around 285 years. That sounds like breathing room: but it doesn’t take into account increased usage resulting from the lack of other fossil fuels, or from an increase in population and energy consumption worldwide.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, as of 2003, coal provided about 40 per cent of the world’s electricity – compared to about 20 per cent for natural gas, nuclear power and renewable sources respectively. In Australia, coal contributes even more: around 83 per cent of electricity.
This is because coal is abundant and cheap, especially in Australia. And although a coal-fired power plant can cost as much as A$1 billion (US$744 million) to build, coal has a long history of use in Australia. Coal is also readily portable, much more so than natural gas, for example – which makes it an excellent export product for countries rich in coal, and an economical import for coal-barren lands.
But the official figures on the cost of coal don’t tell the whole story. Coal is a killer: a more profligate one than you would expect.
And it maintains a lethal efficacy across its entire lifecycle.
One of the main objections held against nuclear power is its potential to take lives in the event of a reactor meltdown, such as occurred at Chernobyl in 1986. While such threats are real for conventional reactors, the fact remains that nuclear power – over the 55 years since it first generated electricity in 1951 – has caused only a fraction of the deaths coal causes every week.
Take coal mining, which kills more than 10,000 people a year. Admittedly, a startling proportion of these deaths occur in mines in China and the developing world, where safety conditions are reminiscent of the preunionised days of the early 20th century in the United States. But it still kills in wealthy countries; witness the death of 18 miners in West Virginia, USA, earlier this year.
But coal deaths don’t just come from mining; they come from burning it. The Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC – a nonprofit research group founded by influential environmental analyst Lester R. Brown – estimates that air pollution from coal-fired power plants causes 23,600 U.S. deaths per year. It’s also responsible for 554,000 asthma attacks, 16,200 cases of chronic bronchitis, and 38,200 non-fatal heart attacks annually.
The U.S. health bill from coal use could be up to US$160 billion annually, says the institute.
Coal is also radioactive: most coal is laced with traces of a wide range of other elements, including radioactive isotopes such as uranium and thorium, and their decay products, radium and radon. Some of the lighter radioactive particles, such as radon gas, are shed into the atmosphere during combustion, but the majority remain in the waste product – coal ash.
People can be exposed to its radiation when coal ash is stored or transported from the power plant or used in manufacture of concrete. And there are far less precautions taken to prevent radiation escaping from coal ash than from even low-level nuclear waste. In fact, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the U.S. estimates the amount of exposure to radiation from living near a coal-fired power plant could be several times higher than living a comparable distance from a nuclear reactor.
Then there are the deaths that are likely to occur from falling crop yields, more intense flooding and the displacement of coastal communities which are all predicted to ensue from global warming and rising oceans.
There’s so much heat already trapped in the atmosphere from a century of greenhouse gases that some of these effects are likely to occur even if all coal-fired power plants were closed tomorrow. Whichever way you look at it, coal is not the smartest form of energy.
THERE ARE MANY REASONS to move away from coal as our primary source of electricity generation, but it’s not an easy task. The list of required attributes for an ideal power generation technology looks intimidating.
First of all, it should offer abundant power.
It also needs to be clean, safe and renewable as well as consistent. And ultimately, it needs to be economical.
Solar power contains much promise as a clean and practically infinite renewable power source. But photovoltaics, the most common form of solar electricity generation, are still a very expensive form of electricity, and lack the consistency to be suitable as a primary source of power – to provide the ‘baseload’ that is, the kind of power you can rely on to be there to keep everyone’s refrigerators humming all day and night.
Wind has seen application in specialised wind farms, both onshore and offshore, especially in Europe where solar power is less efficient than in sunnier climes such as Australia’s. Germany alone accounts for around 40 per cent of the total wind power generated worldwide.
Wind is an effective and clean form of power, but it too has its drawbacks. First, it is uncommon for a wind generator to be operating at more than 35 per cent of capacity, and 25 per cent is more common. This means it’s idle and not generating power for 65 to 75 per cent of the time. Wind power is relatively cheap, with a cost per kilowatt-hour similar to that of coal in some places, although the volume of wind power is limited and often the best locations for wind turbines are far from the populous areas where electricity is needed. Environmentally, wind power poses a minor threat to birdlife, as well as being considered an eyesore in some communities.
While solar power is relatively expensive, and wind is limited in its implementation, both have a highly important role in renewable electricity generation. Unfortunately, even granting considerable advances in technology and efficiency of both technologies, neither has the potential to become a primary source of electricity because of their intermittent nature: neither could ever be relied upon to meet baseload supply.
IN THE 1950s, nuclear power generation, or the so-called ‘peaceful atom’, promised to unshackle us from fossil fuels and provide our society with limitless clean power that was going to be “too cheap to meter”. Like many utopian visions, the truth was considerably less appealing. While nuclear power has for the most part provided bountiful energy without significant environmental impact, what everyone remembers are the accidents: the Windscale fire at Sellafield in 1957, the meltdowns at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986. At a time when the public psyche was reeling from the fear of global nuclear war, the threats from nuclear power plants were suddenly seen in a similar light.
Another issue that caused growing public concern was the disposal of high-level nuclear waste. Some of the by-products of nuclear power include spent fuel rods: mostly byproducts of nuclear fission, including some highly radioactive actinides with half-lives of many thousands of years – which means they remain lethally toxic for millennia. They have to be housed in waste dumps isolated from all possible contact with the environment for up to 10,000 years. This means building a structure that will survive for twice as long as the Great Pyramid of Egypt has to date.
Needless to say, the engineering difficulties involved in building facilities that can safely contain such waste for 100 centuries, are immense – as are the costs.
Then there are nuclear weapons. Some waste can be reprocessed into weapons-grade plutonium. In particular, the processing of plutonium for re-use as fuel for reactors is difficult and, as such, much of the waste is left to build in weapons-grade stockpiles that could pose a serious security threat were some to fall into the wrong hands.
All three of these issues result from the nuclear fuel cycle in conventional reactors.
The typical nuclear fuel cycle kicks off with a quantity of refined uranium ore. This ore is primarily composed of uranium-238 (U-238), the most common, weakly radioactive isotope that has a very long half-life and is not fissile.
This means U-238 doesn’t easily undergo fission, the process in which the nucleus of the atom splits, releasing tremendous quantities of energy.
Usually, a very small percentage of the ore will be U-235. Unlike U-238, U-235 is fissile, and makes up the primary fuel for most nuclear reactors. It is also, incidentally, the uranium isotope that can be used to make nuclear weapons.
This is because when a U-235 atom splits, it releases a spread of high-energy neutrons.
If one of these neutrons then collides with another U-235 atom, it can cause the atom to split, releasing more neutrons in the process.
This runaway chain reaction is responsible for the fantastic explosive power of an atom bomb – and for the meltdowns at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.
However, there is too little U-235 in mined uranium ore to maintain enough fission for a nuclear reactor or a bomb. The ore needs to be ‘enriched’, boosting the proportion of U-235 in the ore. Nuclear reactors require around 3 per cent to 5 per cent of U-235, while nuclear weapons often require 85 per cent or more. One of the most popular methods of enriching uranium is a gas centrifuge, where the uranium in the ore is converted into uranium hexafluoride gas and rapidly spun, forcing the heavier U-238 gas to the extremities for separation.
Once a sufficient proportion of U-235 is achieved, the ore can be made into fuel suitable for a reactor. Also, while U-235 is busily destroying itself in the reactor, the U-238 in the fuel is not sitting idly by. This is because U-238 is ‘fertile’, which means it can transmute into other, fissile elements in a process called ‘breeding’. In this process, if an atom of U-238 absorbs a neutron, such as one thrown out by a nearby splitting U-235 atom, it can transmute into the short-lived U-239. This then rapidly decays into neptunium-239, which itself quickly decays into plutonium-239 (Pu-239). Pu-239 is another possible fuel for nuclear reactors because, like U-235, it is actively fissile and can maintain a chain reaction. The problem is that many reactors are not optimised for burning plutonium, and as a consequence large quantities of Pu-239 remain as a waste by-product in spent fuel rods.
Pu-239 can be reprocessed from spent fuel rods and turned into a compound called MOX (Mixed Oxide) fuel. This can then be reused in some nuclear reactors in the place of conventional enriched uranium. However, it is Pu-239 that also represents the greatest weapons proliferation threat. So reprocessing plutonium becomes a very costly and a politically sensitive business. This means it is less likely to be used as a nuclear fuel for a civilian power plant and is less likely to be reprocessed.
Nuclear physics is a complex and messy business, especially when dealing with large unstable elements such as uranium. When the U-235 in nuclear fuel burns down to around 0.3 per cent concentration, it’s no longer of use in a reactor. At this point, the proportion of U-238, along with other fission by-products, including some very radioactive isotopes of americium, technetium and iodine, is too high. Many of these elements are called ‘neutron poisons’ because they absorb neutrons that would otherwise be happily colliding with other U-235 nuclei to spark off more fission.
This spent fuel can be reprocessed – but this is a much more difficult job than basic enrichment because of the high number of fission by-products in the spent fuel. This means that a great deal of spent fuel – highly radioactive as it is – becomes waste that needs to be stored. For a very long time.
THIS IS WHERE THORIUM steps in. Thorium itself is a metal in the actinide series, which is a run of 15 heavy radioactive elements that occupy their own period in the periodic table between actinium and lawrencium. Thorium sits on the periodic table two spots to the left (making it lighter) of the only other naturally occurring actinide, uranium (which is two spots to the left of synthetic plutonium). This means thorium and uranium share several characteristics.
According to Reza Hashemi-Nezhad, a nuclear physicist at the University of Sydney who has been studying the thorium fuel cycle, the most important point is that they both can absorb neutrons and transmute into fissile elements. “From the neutron-absorption point of view, U-238 is very similar to Th-232″, he said.
It’s these similarities that make thorium a potential alternative fuel for nuclear reactors. But it’s the unique differences between thorium and uranium that make it a potentially superior fuel. First of all, unlike U-235 and Pu-239, thorium is not fissile, so no matter how much thorium you pack together, it will not start splitting atoms and blow up. This is because it cannot undergo nuclear fission by itself and it cannot sustain a nuclear chain reaction once one starts. It’s a wannabe atom splitter incapable of taking the grand title.
What makes thorium suitable as a nuclear fuel is that it is fertile, much like U-238.
Natural thorium (Th-232) absorbs a neutron and quickly transmutes into unstable Th-233 and then into protactinium Pa-233, before quickly decaying into U-233, says Hashemi- Nezhad. The beauty of this complicated process is that the U-233 that’s produced at the end of this breeding process is similar to U-235 and is fissile, making it suitable as a nuclear fuel. In this way, it talks like uranium and walks like uranium, but it ain’t your common-or-garden variety uranium.
And this is where it gets interesting: thorium has a very different fuel cycle to uranium. The most significant benefit of thorium’s journey comes from the fact that it is a lighter element than uranium. While it’s fertile, it doesn’t produce as many heavy and as many highly radioactive by-products. The absence of U-238 in the process also means that no plutonium is bred in the reactor.
As a result, the waste produced from burning thorium in a reactor is dramatically less radioactive than conventional nuclear waste. Where a uranium-fuelled reactor like many of those operating today might generate a tonne of high-level waste that stays toxic for tens of thousands of years, a reactor fuelled only by thorium will generate a fraction of this amount. And it would stay radioactive for only 500 years – after which it would be as manageable as coal ash.
So not only would there be less waste, the waste generated would need to be locked up for only five per cent of the time compared to most nuclear waste. Not surprisingly, the technical challenges in storing a smaller amount for 500 years are much lower than engineering something to be solid, secure and discreet for 10,000 years.
But wait, there’s more: thorium has another remarkable property. Add plutonium to the mix – or any other radioactive actinide – and the thorium fuel process will actually incinerate these elements. That’s right: it will chew up old nuclear waste as part of the power-generation process. It could not only generate power, but also act as a waste disposal plant for some of humanity’s most heinous toxic waste.
This is especially significant when it comes to plutonium, which has proven very hard to dispose of using conventional means.
Current programs used for the disposal of plutonium reactor by-products and weapons-grade material using the MOX process are both expensive and complex. Furthermore, thorium proponents say that in conventional reactors, MOX fuel doesn’t use plutonium as efficiently nor in the same volumes as thorium fuel would at lower cost.
So thorium might just be able to kill two birds with one stone. Not only does a thorium-fuelled reactor produce significantly less high-level waste, but it can also dispose of the decommissioned nuclear weapons and highly radioactive waste from nuclear reactors using more conventional fuels. Oh yes, it can also generate electricity.
SO WHY ISN’T EVERYONE using thorium reactors? The main drawback to thorium is that it’s not vigorously fissile, and it needs a source of neutrons to kick off the reaction.
Unlike enriched uranium, which can be left to its own devices to start producing power, thorium needs a bit of coaxing.
Thorium also cannot maintain criticality on its own; that is, it can’t sustain a nuclear reaction once it has been started. This means the U-233 produced at the end of the thorium fuel cycle doesn’t pump out enough neutrons when it splits to keep the reaction self-sustaining: eventually the reaction fizzles out. It’s why a reactor using thorium fuel is often called a ‘sub-critical’ reactor.
The main stumbling block until now has been how to provide thorium fuel with enough neutrons to keep the reaction going, and do so in an efficient and economical way.
In recent years two new technologies have been developed to do just this.
One company that has already begun developing thorium-fuelled nuclear power is the aptly named Thorium Power, based just outside Washington DC. The way Thorium Power gets around the sub-criticality of thorium is to create mixed fuels using a combination of enriched uranium, plutonium and thorium.
At the centre of the fuel rod is the ‘seed’ for the reaction, which contains plutonium.
Wrapped around the core is the ‘blanket’, which is made from a mixture of uranium and thorium. The seed then provides the necessary neutrons to the blanket to kick-start the thorium fuel cycle. Meanwhile, the plutonium and uranium are also undergoing fission.
The primary benefit of Thorium Power’s system is that it can be used in existing nuclear plants with slight modification, such as Russian VVER-1000 reactors. Seth Grae, president and chief executive of Thorium Power, and his team are actively working with the Russians to develop a commercial product by the end of this decade. They already have thorium fuel running in the IR-8 research reactor at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow.
“In the first quarter of 2008, we expect to have lead test assemblies in a full-size commercial nuclear power plant in Russia,” said Grae.
He believes mixed thorium fuels can not only dispose of weapons-grade plutonium, but also be developed into a fuel for many conventional reactors to prevent production of any further plutonium as a by-product.
Thorium Power believes there is a market for about four thorium-powered reactors each in Russia and United States just for plutonium disposal. It’s also aiming for reactors dealing with commercial plutonium by-products in Europe, Japan, Russia and the USA.
Grae is also enthusiastic about the benefits thorium fuels offer the environment. “All nuclear compares well to coal, in terms of no emissions into the atmosphere, including no carbon dioxide,” he said. The environmental credentials of his company are also boosted by the presence of environmental lawyer and former member of the Centre for International Environmental Law, David MacGraw, he added. Grae muses that Thorium Power may be the “only nuclear company in the world with an environmentalist on the board”.
AN ALTERNATIVE DESIGN does away with the requirements for uranium or plutonium altogether, and relies on thorium as its primary fuel source. This design, which was originally dubbed an Energy Amplifier but has more recently been named an Accelerator Driven System (ADS), was proposed by Italian Nobel physics laureate Carlos Rubbia, a former director of one of the world’s leading nuclear physics labs, CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.
An ADS reactor is sub-critical, which means it needs help to get the thorium to react. To do this, a particle accelerator fires protons at a lead target. When struck by high-energy protons the lead, called a spallation target, releases neutrons that collide with nuclei in the thorium fuel, which begins the fuel cycle that ends in the fission of U-233.
A nuclear reactor that requires a particle beam to keep it running might seem a bit strange. But on the contrary, this is one of the ADS design’s most attractive features. If the particle beam is switched off, it is impossible for the fuel to enter a chain reaction and cause a meltdown. Instead, the rate of fission will immediately begin to slow and the fuel will eventually cool down and die out. According to Sydney’s Hashemi-Nezhad, a sub-critical reactor such as this has clear safety benefits over uranium reactors. “It has zero chance of a Chernobyl-type accident,” he said.
Another major advantage of this design is that it only requires thorium as fuel.
Hashemi-Nezhad also says thorium is a highly abundant resource “550 times more abundant in nature than uranium-235″.
It’s also an element in which Australia is well blessed – we have the largest known thorium reserves in the world. Thorium mining is also less complex than uranium mining; and the ore doesn’t even require enrichment before use in an ADS reactor.
In a non-proliferation sense, there are also good reasons to prefer a sub-critical thorium reactor, as it is impossible to make weapons-grade materials from thorium.
Even traces of unburnt U-233 in thorium reactor waste products are more difficult to convert into a usable nuclear weapon than U-235 or Pu-239. Imagine the West offering thorium-fuelled ADS reactors to countries such as Iran or North Korea: this would satisfy their demands for cheap nuclear power, but entirely avert the risk of the civil nuclear program leading to the development of nuclear weapons.
The other key advantage of the ADS design is that it can be used to dispose of dangerous weapons-grade material and commercial reactor by-products in a similar way to mixed thorium fuel.
While the ADS design has promise, it presents challenges. First, there’s the design itself: while lab tests have proven the concept of using a particle beam to start the thorium fuel cycle, the physics of scaling it up to the size of a commercial reactor are unproven and could be more complex. Then there’s the way the particle beam interacts with the spallation target and the fuel in order to operate efficiently. Also, while there are plenty of existing conventional nuclear reactors that can be fairly inexpensively converted to mixed thorium fuel, an ADS reactor would have to be designed, built and paid for from scratch.
Retrofitting old reactors is not an option.
Does this make a large-scale ADS reactor viable? CERN thinks so. It recently released a detailed report covering the financial viability of the ADS design for power generation, and found it to be at least three times cheaper than coal and 4.8 times cheaper than natural gas. Any nuclear reactor will have a high establishment cost, but CERN stresses that a long-life reactor will be highly competitive compared to fossil and renewable energy fuels.
Hashemi-Nezhad has been working on the ADS reactor concept with colleagues in Germany, Russia, India and Eastern Europe, and is enthusiastic about it. “The future of nuclear reactors is in ADS because it operates in a sub-critical condition. Only under this condition it is possible to transmute waste isotopes while gaining energy and producing fuel at low cost. And it’s safe,” he said.
He also thinks Australia could play a leading role in the development and promotion of thorium-fuelled reactors. “It is up to the Australian government to make an investment in this research. Huge thorium resources in Australia can provide green energy at low cost for several centuries.” An enticing prospect, to say the least.
CAN ATOMIC POWER be green? Physics suggests it can. And our consumption of energy is accelerating at the same time the climate is being affected by power generation.
Unless we start seriously exploring energy alternatives to burning fossil fuels, erratic and destructive weather conditions could be with us for generations to come. Renewable energy such as wind and solar have bright futures, and will play a large role in any future energy program – but they can never hope to satisfy baseload requirements of a city.
Hydroelectric power is an option – but most of the economical sites have been exploited, and biodiversity suffers when valleys are flooded to create dams. So, unless some groundbreaking discovery in nuclear fusion is made, making it not only possible but efficient and economical – then nuclear fission will remain on the agenda for promising baseload energy alternatives.
Despite its drawbacks, conventional uranium-fuelled nuclear power is a realistic option that is likely to be continued worldwide.
But it is thorium reactors that present a real quantum leap forward. Humble thorium could potentially alleviate three of the most pressing issues facing modern civilisation in the 21st century: the hunger for energy, the spectre of climate change and the need to eliminate nuclear weapons.
Please leave a comment
Please comply with our Community rules.
Tim,
I have read your article and would like to congratulate on its content. Thorium is mentioned by our G’ment’s Ministry of Oil & Energy as an area of added research.
Would you plan for follow-ups on this subject?
BR
Vemund Kaarstad
Oslo, Norway
Tim
Your statement that solar cannot produce base power is quite wrong. It is already doing so in a number of places in the world. CSP with storage is the key and it is capable of providing base medium and peak. Many spin offs make it at least 80% efficient and costs are coming down to competitive levels.
Viv Rendall
Australia
Can you provide a pointer to the CERN report detailing the costs of Thorium power generation? I have been unable to find the report myself. Thank you.
I gave a speech in the South Australian parliament 7 March 2007 recommending this article. Hansard of my speech can be found at http://www.lizpenfold.com
Liz Penfold
Member for Flinders
South Australia
Good work!
I have been referencing this article as the best-written “layman” level article on the subject in letters I have written to Colorado politicians including the Salazar brothers, our United States Senator and Congressional representative. You can find a copy of the letter at http://gunnisondems.org/miscellaneous.html (line below “Another letter:”) or directly at http://gunnisondems.org/ksalazar.pdf. I expect Australia or India to get an ADS working first; I still have hopes for the USA or I wouldn’t be writing these letters. Most of all, I hope the ADS works and will be rapidly deployed in China!!
Don McLeod Gunnison, Colorado USA
P.S. The full cost estimate etc. a previous commenter was looking for is at
http://doc.cern.ch/archive/electronic/cern/preprints/lhc/lhc-96-001.pdf
Myself, I’m skeptical and suspect it’s an underestimate, especially if some costs due to the hyperregulation of nuclear reactors aren’t waived.
Yes we can – the CERN report has an article ID of: CERN/LHC/96-01 (EET).
Best of luck – The Editor
Thank you Ms Penfold, we appreciate it.
We certainly believe it’s worth mentioning in parliament, and hope it is discussed more widely, as this seems to have great potential.
The Editor
It is not widely known that the spent fuel from all US nuclear reactors can be used right now with known existing and operating technology. The only requirement is that the fuel be re-packaged in new non-radiation-damaged fuel tubes. While this is being done the fuel can simply be heated to high temperatures to remove a large fraction of the neutron wasting fission products, but this step is not necessary only more efficient.
The new bundles of old fuel are now fed into CANDU (CANadian Deuterium Uranium) reactors. About half again as much energy is produced from the just repackaged and not reprocessed fuel as was produced in the US reactor from the orginal fuel.
The used fuel can then be sent to a Rubbia accelerator driven reactor to greatly reduce any plutonium and get ten or twenty times the energy that was obtained from the US reactor.
Every growing plant is radio-active and was radio-active before humans even existed. All humans and other animals are also radio-active and were radio-active forever till the beginning of the earth long before Einstein. Also un-avoidable radio-active rays come from outer space in addition to all of the radio-active atoms found in almost every rock or soil. All of the radio-active wastes could be permanently removed from endangering the human race to a degree less than the danger from bananas by simply mixing the radioactive elements with large quantities of soil, sand and rock in a large desert, so that the increase of radioactivity above the natural level is not measurable. If you wanted to be super extra safe bury the mixture six feet deep. Also don’t sleep with a large dog, log or another person which may increase your radioactive exposure by as much as ten percent.
The radio-active uranium, thorium and potassium that are naturally present in almost any soil, take about a billion years to decay to half their present radio-activity, but people only believe that radio-activity only comes from reactors, and they don’t refuse to put fertilizer on their lawn because it is very much more radioactive than the natural soil. At one time, Uranium was valuable enough so that it was removed from phosphate fertilizers, but the failure of the US to build reactors caused the uranium price to drop so low that Uranium now goes all onto your lawn. The radio-active Potassium cannot be eliminated from fertilizer by any means. People don’t know that they always existed with radio-activity, and in fact, the radio-active Potassium may have actually help create humans and other life forms. We have lived with radio-activity forever, and it is likely that life has learned how to survive the current levels as well as much higher levels.
If you believe that any additional radioactivity is too dangerous, never fly in an airplane; don’t use x-rays; don’t sleep with another person or animal; lose all the weight you can down to the minumum; never live above sea level; live in a submarine below the surface but above the sea bottom; live at the shore of the dead sea but in a boat on a fresh water pool at least six feet deep etc. King Tut’s body and your great-great-grand-mother’s body, if still existing, is radioactive waste that will not decay to one fourth its original level in the life time of the earth. Don’t worry about reactor waste; just as we can’t agree on which religion or political party to join, we will never agree on where to store used nuclear fuels; even though, there are many ways to store it statistically safer than crossing a simple two lane road. Are we resposible to protect future generations from fuel rods when there are natural outcroppings of uranium all over the world, and the sun kills hundreds of thousands of people a year by dehydration and sun burn and skin cancer. Turn off the sun for safety first.
Viv is referring to ‘concentrating solar power’ (CSP), the technique of concentrating sunlight using mirrors to create heat, and then using the heat to raise steam and drive turbines and generators, just like a conventional power station. It is possible to store solar heat in melted salt or other substance so that electricity generation may continue through the night or on cloudy days. This technology has been generating electricity successfully in California since 1985 and currently provides power for about 100,000 Californian homes. CSP plants are now being planned or built in many parts of the world.
CSP works best in hot deserts and, of course, these are not always nearby! But with transmission losses at only about 3% per 1000 km, it is entirely feasible and economic to transmit solar electricity throughout Australia from the Australian desert using highly-efficient ‘HVDC’ transmission lines. A small portion of the Australian desert would be sufficient to meet all of the country’s needs for electricity.
Waste heat from electricity generation in a CSP plant can be used to create fresh water by desalination of sea water: a very useful by-product in arid regions.
Further information about CSP may be found at http://www.trec-uk.org.uk and http://www.trecers.net . The many problems associated with nuclear power are summarised at http://www.mng.org.uk/green_house/no_nukes.htm .
Robert Palgrave
Given the fact that Australia has the world’s largest reserve of Thorium, it only makes sense to pursue a research program with the aim of producing a viable Thorium reactor. One initiative being explored world wide (US, Czech Republic, France, Russia) to develop Thorium technology is based on the Molten Salt Reactor (MSR). This reactor design is quite innovative: it uses a mixture of molten Lithium and Beryllium Fluoride salts as the working fluid in the reactor. Added directly to these molten salts is a relatively small amount of Thorium and Uranium-233 Fluoride salts. The resultant salt mixture simultaneously works as a moderator, coolant, and fuel medium. As it happens, the technology was first successfully tested in the 1960s, but recent advances in materials, fuel processing, and energy recovery systems, have made the technology very compelling.
The advantages of such a technology are numerous:
-The reactor system is the only practical way of utilizing the Th-U233 fuel cycle, which unlike the U235-Pu239 fuel cycle, produces almost no transuranic nuclear waste. As a result, the waste products have decay times measured in hundreds of years, as opposed to millions.
-The Th-U233 fuel cycle is unique in that it can be configured to produce more fissile material than it consumes without requiring the fast neutron spectra and exotic coolants that doomed the previous breeder reactors.
-The nuclear materials from the molten salt reactors contain as a byproduct of the reaction U232, which is a strong gamma radiator. This makes the reactor products impossible to redirect for illicit purposes due to the inherent detectability of U232. This property is essential in effort to prevent nuclear proliferation.
-MSRs tend to burn up most of their nuclear waste; this property can be utilized to eliminate excess plutonium waste from other sources if desired.
-The design of MSRs enables the possibility of including a very small on-line fuel reprocessing loop within the reactor structure. This prevents the need of shipping nuclear fuels over long distances to be reprocessed. This also lowers dramatically the operating costs, as the plant may be operated indefinitely without shut-down.
-MSRs have an inherent, strong negative coefficient of reactivity as a function of temperature. This means that there is absolutely no possibility of the runaway thermal event that occurred at Chernobyl, which had a regime in which there was a positive coefficient of reactivity.
-MSRs will be designed with passive safety systems. For example, should the core overheat, a salt plug at the bottom of the reactor would melt, and the working salt mixture would flow into tanks below the reactor. Since the tanks have no graphite moderator, the reaction would become subcritical and immediately stop.
-The molten salt coolant has a very low working pressure, as opposed to water moderated reactors. Thus the single most catastrophic event for a water moderated reactor, namely, a container vessel rupture, would not be a particularly dangerous situation for molten salt reactors. And, due to the low working pressure, such a rupture is much less likely.
-Because the boiling temperature of molten salts is so high (1500 C), MSRs can and will be designed to run at higher temperatures. This makes them much more efficient at converting thermal energy to electrical energy (50% as opposed to 35%). This also enables them to use dry air cooling instead of water cooling. The latter fact is important as this, for the first time, enable reactors to be built far from water cooling sources like lakes or rivers, and therefore further away from population centers.
-MSRs can be designed to be much smaller than conventional reactors due to the low pressure/ high temperature operation. The compact design should significantly reduce the initial capital costs. (Some have even suggested building them on floating platforms in a central factory and transporting them to their final destination!)
In short, Molten Salt Reactors promise to be inherently safe, efficient and clean, and as such represent a significant departure from present designs. I believe that Australia, with its large Thorium reserves, would benefit immensely from such a technology.
i like both your articles and may be if i looked into the mirror i turned a bit greener(radioactive)now that i read em.
i liked the idea of the savetyswitch in a ,thoriumreactor , very much
i don t like people but human kind
In the article Tim Dean wrote “One company that has already begun developing thorium-fuelled nuclear power is the aptly named Thorium Power, based just outside Washington DC. The way Thorium Power gets around the sub-criticality of thorium is to create mixed fuels using a combination of enriched uranium, plutonium and thorium.
At the centre of the fuel rod is the ‘seed’ for the reaction, which contains plutonium.
Wrapped around the core is the ‘blanket’, which is made from a mixture of uranium and thorium. The seed then provides the necessary neutrons to the blanket to kick-start the thorium fuel cycle. Meanwhile, the plutonium and uranium are also undergoing fission.”
This approach leaves a number of problems unanswered that are inherent in solid fuels. The fuel rods will accumulate fission byproducts. Some of the thorium will absorb two neutrons to become other element isotopes (such as Nu234, Po234, U234). All solid fuels require reprocessing to separate the wastes from unburnt fuel, which creates large amounts of radioactive byproducts.
This one of the biggest problems in the power cycles currently being pursued, including the ADS idea.
Having the fuel present as a molten salt in a Molten Salt Reactor avoids the requirement to reprocess fuel and it would seem makes the breeding of fuel from Thorium easy. I refer people to Idaho Natiional Lab at
http://nuclear.inl.gov/gen4/msr.shtml
and the Energy from Thorium blog
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/
Every growing plant is radio-active and was radio-active before humans even existed. All humans and other animals are also radio-active and were radio-active forever till the beginning of the earth long before Einstein.
What a crappy arguement you are making, not because you a factually incorrect, but because you seem to be attempting obscure the very real dangers of anthropogenically concentrated transuranic elements.
I believe that dihydrogen oxide is dangerous as inhalation can lead to suffocation, but I’m not going to stop taking baths or ingesting it in small quantities. Yes, I’m taking a risk, but a managable one under my control and that is the critical issue for many people. They choose when they will fly and have an x-ray as they see fit, but they have little control over a soon to be derailed trin headed for Yucca mountain.
So continue with your snarky half-baked rhetoric, you are winning yourself no converts. You should have had the good sense to stop at the reprocessing claim.
As someone else has mentioned, this is an unusually clear, well-written article.
Until recently, I would have agreed to the use of thorium for nuclear power generation as he has described, but it’s no longer necessary except as a means to clean up the nuclear waste we already have.
Recently, Nanosolar in San Jose, California, USA, developed a breakthrough high-efficiency solar panel that only costs a tenth as much as the best conventional high-efficiency silicon solar panels. Their panel is printed onto rolls of thin aluminum sheet, in a process similar to that used to print newspaper. It only costs thirty cents per watt, and is already in high-volume production: thirty feet of solar panel per minute, continuously. Nanosolar expects to install their product, which they call PowerSheet, on the roofs of 100,000 homes per year.
As the story points out, solar power is of little use at night and on cloudy days without a means of storing that energy. A couple of years ago, Altair Nanotech of Reno, Nevada, developed the perfect complement to this solar panel: the NanoSafe battery, which can be fully recharged in just minutes, is made of non-toxic materials, has high energy density, high power density (the ability to deliver lots of power quickly for applications such as electric vehicles and power tools)… and will not explode or catch fire if crushed, baked at hundreds of degrees, punctured with nails, or overcharged. It also will likely last for several decades without failure.
The combination of the Nanosolar panels and stationary batteries to store the energy generated would have advantages over even the cleanest, cheapest power delivered over a grid: with decentralized energy, a homeowner would be less vulnerable to blackouts that can leave entire cities without lights, refrigeration or working appliances. When a homeowner creates his own energy and there is a failure, there is more likely to be a neighbor nearby that can help. Home solar panels mean no monthly power bills and more autonomy, and the homeowner can use his power to charge an electric vehicle as well, providing nearly cost-free transportation.
Phoenix Motorcars of Ontario, California, an EV manufacturer, will be using the NanoSafe batteries first. They will be used in a full-function freeway-capable 5-passenger vehicle that is big, powerful, and yet only costs less than three cents per mile for electricity.
The thorium solution proposed is complex and, according to the article, has not yet been scaled up for use in a large power plant; attempting to scale up such a system may have expensive unforeseen problems.
If we begin to use a combination of widespread solar power and batteries to power our homes, vehicles and businesses, we’ll produce no carbon dioxide to exacerbate global warming, we’ll dramatically reduce ozone levels, and eliminate tons of batteries from finding their way into our landfills.
The thorium solution is a good one, it’s just not as favorable as a good solar system with storage. I do hope that the thorium can be used to detoxify existing nuclear waste, however.
http://www.altairnano.com
http://www.phoenixmotorcars.com
http://www.nanosolar.com
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/flat/bown/2007/green/green_animation.html
The statement: “nuclear energy produces no greenhouse gases”, is untrue. The entire life cycle of a nuclear power station requires huge amounts of energy for construction of the plant, mining and milling of the ore, and disposal of the waste. Read Helen Caldicotts book: Nuclear Power Is Not The Answer, for more information.
I read the article with great humour. It would be great if the world ran on logic decided by informed intelligence. Unfortunately, the world runs on emotion by uninformed ignoramuses. While the argument presented by the author makes sense, current policy makers will rather go to war and possibly destroy the planet before proliferating nuclear power.
If you ask an average person where radioactivity comes from, most likely they will say it’s from artificial nuclear sources. I mentioned to some about electromagnetic radiation emitted from a light bulb, and they were terrified they may get sick, without realizing that light is electromagnetic wave. In fact, many people signed up to ban dihydrogen monoxide (http://www.dhmo.org/) just by hearing about it’s effects and not knowing what it really is.
These are the same people who vote. So would they vote for any policy that increases their source of radioactivity that could result in 3 headed fish as in an episode of the Simpsons? I doubt any mention of “nuclear” will be successful.
I am perplexed by the numbers game, once again. Yes, it is amazing that spent fuel from a thoruim reactor would need only be secured for 500 years rather than the present 10,000 years of safe storage needed for present day fuel disposal. It is a curious and interesting scientific recognition. Yet, in pracical terms, it is 500 years. Five hundred years. That means that, if disposed of today, it would be easy to dispose of the safer material in the year 2508! Socially, environmentally and ethically is this still a reasonable burden and risk to place on the future? We will all be loooong gone in five hundred years to ask them.
Every energy form of energy generation has some impact on the environment. Thorium waste is about as radioactive as coal ash – the latter of which is not regulated, and just buried in landfill. Oh, and coal particulate emissions kill a couple of hundred thousand people every year. yet coal is the #1 form of energy we use.
There’s no perfect form of baseload energy. It’s just which is better.
Sam
im sorry tim you are quite wrong, to produce the amounts of power similar to that produced in one power station using solar power a surface of 26 km2 would be required at a cost of $17 billion, ten times that of what the power station would cost. This would price out the poorer regions of the world.
thanks for information..
In the real world, the newest major solar plant, Nevada Solar One had a total finished cost of $3.75/watt including all costs.
The World Nuclear Association estimates that new nuclear plants cost $4.65/watt assuming a 40y life and no problems. Oh, and the government picking up the tab for long term waste storage.
Which makes traditional nuclear power a total loser even before we consider that in the real world the US alone has had 28 reactors shut down in less than 40 years with some like Shoreham lasting less than a year before major problems forced a shut down!
Hiya. Another option for the inherent burstiness of solar: the Solar Grand Plan published in Scientific American (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan). They propose storage of the energy as compressed air underground, in the same kind of natural spaces as natural gas reserves. All the tech in there is commercial-grade proven now (doesn’t assume technological breakthroughs or lab-grade efficiencies) and allows for year-on-year increase in consumption. The assumption is landmass for solar panels, which Australia has in abundance.
The thorium idea sounds good for disposal of existing plutonium stocks, though.
You state: “This runaway chain reaction is responsible for … Three Mile Island.”.
The meltdown at TMI occurred while shut down as a result of conditions including an undetected coolant leak. There was no runaway chain reaction.
There is a third alternative – the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. The liquid form of fuel allows the immediate removal of neutron-absorbing fission products like xenon gas. This improves neutron efficiency and allows the reactor to sustain the reaction without any external help in the form of a particle accelerator or other fissile materials.
This type of reactor is also meltdown-proof. If it heats up the liquid expands, reducing the reactivity. This creates a robust self-regulating effect where the reactor generates exactly the same amount of heat that is removed from the core for power generation. The liquid fluoride fuel form remains liquid even under extreme temperatures without boiling. This allows the reactor to run at atmospheric pressure, making it much safer than current high-pressure water cooled reactors.
There is no energy source that doesnt produce GHG. Do some independent research, nuclear fares better than the current enviromental darling solar panels, on GHG vs wattage generated.
Instead invest into fusion. There are many alternative designs than the notorious Tokamak, some of which are already tested to produce much more than break-even. Fusion byproducts do not last for centuries, if a right reaction is chosen the decay time is likely to be less than a day. It can be much smaller, safer and cheaper to operate than a nuclear reactor.
One of the most simple, cheapest and safest of possible concepts is promoted by www,focusfusion.org . Estimated 5 million to research, 5 million to build prototype in less than 10 years.
If you count the emissions to build a nuclear power plant, you should also include the emissions for building a solar power plant.
Of course, if we had an electricity grid running on nuclear or solar, then the building of both types of power plants could be GhG emission free.
As elegant as solar is, there needs to be an element of pragmatism…. In my opinion the first priority is to turn off the coal power.
You state that the Thorium can’t sustain a chain reaction on its own, because the U-233 doesn’t pump out enough neutrons to sustain the chain reaction. That’s not true for the molten salt reactor you discuss. U-233 produces something like 2.4 neutrons on average in a low-speed (a.k.a. thermal) fission. 1 of those sustains the chain reaction, 1 is used to convert Th-232 to Th-233 and thence to U-233, leaving 0.4 to be wasted.
Thorium Power Inc is proposing to put solid-phase thorium oxide fuel into pressurized water reactors. In this configuration, more than 0.4 neutrons from every U-233 fission will end up absorbed somewhere unhelpful, and the Thorium fuel rod needs something else to boost the reactivity so that it sustains the chain reaction. Pu-239 works well.
In the molten salt reactor, which you discuss, there are fewer things to absorb the neutrons (less structure, no coolant water, and fewer fission products), so the reactor can break even without help from the Pu-239. So your statement is a misinterpretation and a bit confusing.
It is the ability of molten salt reactors to seperate fission products from fuel while operating that makes it possible for them to burn all their actinides, and thus have shorter-term waste. This aspect attracts me to the design most of all.
gubbhish gabble gobbish gubble
Not very smart or logical.
You compare coal deaths to nuclear deaths.
Coal doesn’t have a half-life of when it emits a less deadly radiation.
Coal doesn’t seep into the groundwater and then irradiate you and your children for the REST OF YOUR LIFE, IF YOU LIVE THROUGH IT!!!
Ignorant, ignorant, ignorant.
Don’t you dare compare the two- nuclear is way worse, even though coal is destructive and dirty as hell and should not be used as a power source.
Coal doesn’t require storage of spent rods that any mathematician worth his salt will tell you is an equation of death waiting to happen- it’s just a question of WHEN.
The market for a small and safe nuclear powerplant is huge, but it is easy to forget these posibilities. The realy good thing about thorium powerplants is that they can be build very small and safe. So small that you can fit them in airplanes. Not that i would want a thousand flying nuclear powerplants over my head, but it would revolutionize shipping. A small, efficient and encapsuled reactor would be perfect, not only for ships but cities, islands and even future ekranoplanes. It is realy sad that the USA stopped the development of Molten-salt Fueled Reactors in the middle of the 1970s, and this world have been slaves to oil far to long. Count Norway out of it. Norwegian politicians are like syrup. A sticky and slow mass that don’t move much at all. The market is out there, no doubts about that. Honestly, what ever country or company that solve the problems, are going to end up very wealthy.
Alekssander ,Norway
(Tired of syrup politicians.)
Yeah, solar can deliver erratic power for 5x the price of normal steady power, and then solar needs natural gas burning backups. Certainly not a solution of anything but few percent of A/C demand in summer perhaps, for upper middle class who can afford solar.
These pie in the sky lies we’ve been hearing for more than 3 decades. Where is any realistic application? Solar 1 shown that CSP is not economic by a large factor. Solar Tower was scrapped as an investment fraud. EtcEtc
The only effect of this overblown solar hype is that *real* and *proven* alternative to coal and other fossil fuels, that is nuclear power, is “not needed”. The believers become complacent, because they have a so-called “plan” which (they believe) will solve the immediate problem of dangerous fossil fuel wastes in 50 years. Well,actually about fifth of the problem, they say.
Complacency is the only real product of these solar installations.
Nuclear is cool!
Urainum and thorium litter every coal fired plant in the world. The dirty little secret is that there are no requirements contain these elements as with the good stewards who work at nuclear power facilities. So if you’re worried about radioactive elements seeping into you life it is likely that they already have seeing that you have the argument backward. It’s best to do some homework first.
Thorium seems more promising short term than fusion.
Renewable energy, best I can see is combo of wind/solar *and* biomass such as wood, veg oil. To succeed with this people would also need to consume *less* energy.
It only really takes 1 hp/750 watts to propell you at up to 60 mph/100 km/h in a velomobile. Similarly, only a small amount of energy is required to heat a small living space of a modest home to room temp, the rest of house/storage could stay at just above freezing during coldest winters.
We could easily design a comfortable life around 1/4 of the energy we now consume.
thanks
The LPS “MaxFelaser” laser,” generates tunable, coherent, Ultra-high power, while a MaxFelaser beam shares the same optical properties as conventional lasers such as coherent light, the operation of an MaxFelaser is quite different. Free electron lasers can generate terahertz out put. LPS MaxFelasers uses a Proprietary excitation system (other details require NDAs) to produce a laser beam powerful enough to flash water to steam driving a turbine/generator. The power of the MaxFeLaser comes from its Fuel “Thorium”. The amount of free energy contained in thorium fuel is 20 million times the amount of free energy contained in a similar mass of chemical fuel such as coal making thorium an ideal source of energy. The investment opportunity is not in the thorium itself, it’s in the technology that unlocks the value of thorium. The MaxFelaser system is that technology. see: http://www.laserturbinepower.com
If it’s that good then why don’t we get it started on a commercial scale. It solves the energy problems and its safe, cheap and cleans up nuclear waste. Hurry up then!
But I guess that when it is established then a problem or two will eventually come up, then environmentalists will complain hard enough to cause a headache like they do now with other things no matter how minor. They will always have something to on about.
Very good idea thank you… ipekyolu
THE words “”Imagine the West offering thorium-fuelled ADS reactors to countries such as Iran or North Korea:”" stinks of arrogance. You are following the line of the Pentagon and painting the people you do not like – BLACK. Please note that such politically biased statements mar this interesting article.
Some of your facts are wrong. The article says that Thorium will produce fission products less dangerous and smaller than other types of reactors. That is false. The fission products produced from Thorium, the waste products, will be just as formidable as the fission products produced from other reactors. It is true that on average they will be slightly smaller but the size of the atom does not determine the degree of hazard. In any case, many of the fission products produced will be the same as for other types of reactors.
Also, the article claimed that adding plutonium to the fuel would allow the waste products to be consumed. No details were given, but I doubt that also. My opinion is that the article is very poorly researched with many errors.
– A nuclear scientist
After thinking about it again and looking at the website of the company that is promoting Thorium technology, I have an additional comment. The only way that the Plutonium can be consumed is by fission, which gets us back to the problem that this article claims is avoided. The fission of Plutonium will consume plutonium but it will produce the same type of radioactive waste that is produced by current reactors. While it would get rid of plutonium, which has its own problems as a weapons type material, it does not eliminate radioactive waste, in fact it adds to it.
- A nuclear scientist
According to a article that I read on Wikipedia, the sludge that is removed from the scrubbers is buried on site in unlined landfills. That sludge contains all sorts of toxic material, which in a unlined landfill will eventually make it into our drinking water. As I understand it coal plants are not required to treat this waste product as a “hazardous waste.” I would hate to live around one of those things.
I like the concept of this new nuclear power plant. Our state has a number of nuke plants, this type could add to the capacity to sate an energy appetite that never seems to diminish, it maybe even help lower our energy costs. But Puh–leeease, enough with the Man Made Global Warming Hoax crap ok. It’s a bogus pile of Bull dung.
thanks
Keith anchorBeach.com Kalish
This is not feasable
The problem I have with this article is that it completely ignores the most promising Thorium reactor in favour of the ADS, a theoretical technology which may not even be capable of producing more power than it consumes, and a new solid fuel reactor, which will still suffer the same problems as other solid fuel reactors, namely limited burn-up of available fuel and production of intractable, long-term waste.
The stand-out candidate for the Thorium fuel cycle is the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor.
Let me offer a brief, concise description of the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor.
Liquid: The fuel in this reactor is a molten Uranium salt mixed with Lithium and Beryllium salts. The reason for a liquid fuel form is that the fuel can be continuously circulated through the reactor vessel, allowing continuous processing and continuous addition of fuel.
Fluoride: The salts used are Fluoride salts. These Fluoride salts are stable at high temperatures and high radioactivity and can stay in use beyond the life of the reactor. They can also carry more energy than most reactor coolants, allowing greater efficiency and more diverse use of the heat produced. A liquid Fluoride reactor running at high temperatures could ‘crack’ water to produce fuel for Hydrogen powered vehicles.
Thorium: Thorium is a fertile fuel, meaning that it must first be converted into a fissile form before it can produce power. This is done by circulating it around the outside of the reactor core where it absorbs neutrons which convert it into Uranium 233, the fuel used to power the reactor. Virtually all the naturally occurring Thorium is able to be used as reactor fuel, as opposed to the 2% of Uranium which is useful as fuel. One pound of Thorium has the same energy as 20,000 tons of coal. One ton of Thorium can power a one gigawatt reactor for a year.
Reactor: This device is a nuclear reactor, but not like any reactor you’ve ever heard of before. This is a non-volatile system, extremely resistant to proliferation and producing a small amount of short lived, low toxicity waste which is completely benign within 350 years. It costs less to build, because it doesn’t need a massive pressure vessel and it costs less to run because Thorium is a relatively cheap, plentiful fuel. LFTR power can provide energy security cheaper than coal for thousands of years with no carbon footprint.
There is probably no more convenient fuel than oil and gasoline. That is why coal to liquid will be making all the difference. Statistics disagree as to how much is left and how long it will last but the statistics I have read say the US alone has enough coal to last some 500 years. No we won’t be burning it like we used to but we will be making it into liquid that is better and cleaner than the oil, diesel, and kerosene we presently use.
Is not this called MSR or Molten Salt Reactor elsewhere??. Some interesting numbers here. If the efficiency of a MSR and a Coal Fired plant are roughly equal – and a MSR consumes almost all the Thoriumm, it would seem that a Gigawatt Power Coalfired plant would require 40.000.000 tons of coal/year, whereas the MSR require 1 ton of Thorium.
Noted is also that while everybody comments and agree to the need of new base energy sources – very few comments on the when.
The current financial crisis and increasing unemplyment rates can just as well be read as signals of a coming paradigm shift. Now, in which direction the shift will go should be in the hands of the current world population and the leaders this population has chosen. Unfortunately nothing much is happening.
The downhill scenario is requrrent steep and deep crisis at shorter and shorter intervalls resulting in permanent contractions and destroying the global ability of sustaining basic standards of living for a steadily increasing number of people. This kind of melt down can be very bad.
The new future is on the other hand requiring an intense peak effort at this time in order to shift global systems into a sustainable future situation before present base energy resources run out. We need a new basic energy source to drive thousands upon thousands of ships across the seas. We need a basic energy source to move huge amounts of goods across great landmasses, whether that be nuclear powered trains, barges on inland waterways, or the fantastic Australian trucktrains. At WTO they repeatedly say that trade is fundamental to World Development. But Trade is dependent on physically moving billions of tons of cargo in a really complex pattern. Now, without effective energy sources for transportation, this stops, or is seriously hampered. Envisage coalfired ships, barges, trucks and trains. Imagine the industry required to transport coal, transform coal, mine coal as well as developing modern technology coalfired (or derivatives thereof) engines, setting up the fabrication of them, fabricate and distribute the engines by the hundreds of thousands. Clearly it must bind that much capasity that World Trade would be hurting. And the waste that will be produced – not good.
No, the solution must lie in the direction of MSR for basic mass cargo transportation systems. Stationary plants for the powering of railroads and other heavy duty energy consumtion in large scale industry complexes.
Several comments are aimed at specific climate conditions such as abudant sunhours per year – or wind – or others, where the point is energy for housing produced by built in or local production facilities. Clearly it is time to discuss a division in the energyproduction and supply where private production can be set up locally in each house or small community. Some places the legal systems easily allow for that. Other places Goverments and big time – often State Owned -Electric Companies runs a Monopoly situation in the name of Safety and Secure Supply and possibly various taxation schemes. It is so that taxing energy supply is a lucrative business, since it is easily quantified. When a million households each pay say USD 200/year for being on the grid, it is hard for the goverment to let go of an income of USD 200 million. Anyhow, for the private energy consumption there is a host of solutions already, and not so difficult to set up generic rules and regulations providing the necessary incentives to have solutions installed. For private transportation, it seems the electric car is here already with acceptable specifications such as horsepower, speed and range. But the huge massproduction car plants making the car are missing. Now, they should be cranking out a sufficient number like yesterday. Instead we see a contraction in the car making capasity, and not a lot of innovative measures by the remaining lot either. In fact I am getting quite exhausted just by thinking of all that has to be done over the next few years. The Price of Wales says 8 years about the Climate. Now that is a statement in line with a relative of his, who said “Something has to be done”. At this time, it is required far more to the point decisions of the leaders. In some ways comparable to the decisions and leadership required (and delivered) for rebuilding 2nd World War ravaged countries across the World.
When it comes to future worries, I fear the energy crisis far more than Global Warming.
I’m just shaking my head at some of the unsubstantiated “climate change” propaganda being regurgitated here.
It spoils the cred of what is an otherwise good article.
The content of this article can’t agree more
Will up follow up with more article or maybe second publication.
Looking forward your next publication.
Awesome article, more of this needs to be shown to the public, however i fear that the media will not allow it to be shown as it is feared because of events of the Cold War. I hope with the next generation people will stop being motivated by fear and start looking at facts on this issue of incredible importance but it may be too late.
You state: “This runaway chain reaction is responsible for … Three Mile Island.”.
The meltdown at TMI occurred while shut down as a result of conditions including an undetected coolant leak. There was no runaway chain reaction.
I think there is always room for new research regardless. I know that the Oakridge National Labs have in the past done some wonderful work vis LFTR.
Here in Australia we don’t have any sort of nuclear power plants. Our main source of energy is coal based, some wind farms and hydro – electricity. I think we need to look at all options. We would be starting from scratch when we go nuclear, and when we do, I want us to have the very best system available. LFTR may well end up being the best, but robust research into ADS is essential to determine what is best for our country and our needs.
From the official docs: “Nevada Solar One… with a nominal capacity of 64 MW and maximum capacity of 75 MW, as of June 2007. The project required an investment of $266 million USD[1] and electricity production is estimated to be 134 million kilowatt hours per year.”
Pay attention, the “nominal capacity is reached only at noon twice a year when the sun is at the vertical… If you calculate the average output from “134 million kilowatt hours per year” you find average “estmated” wattage 15MW… From the data I have it’s around 10 MW for the best year so far…. cost of sollar is 266 / 10 = $26/watt…
Westinghouse built nuclear plants in China cost 1.2 Billion per 1.2 GW power 24/7… cost of nuclear is 1.2 / 1.2 = $1/watt
In the US the cost is about $3/watt only because of interest for delays caused by malicious environmentalists and government bureaucracy.
Actually, TMI occurred because a technician didn’t believe what the instruments were telling him and he overrode that safety systems. Basically if the humans had just done nothing the reactor would have shutdown automatically.
This was an excellent and informative article. Thank you. The one thing that you didn’t mention was the molten fluoride salt thorium reactors (called LFTRs) that the US was experimenting with in the dawn of the atomic age. They had all the desireable characteristics of Thorium reactors mentioned in this article and were run for several years. But, since they didn’t produce weapons material, the plug was pulled on that part of the research. From what I have read on other Thorium sites, this seems to be a more attractive option than the conversion of current reactors, though the current reactor use is a good stepping stone. Perhaps you could do a followup article on this other possibility.
don’t know when this article was writen but i would like to know what is going on with it’s development.I’ve read the comments made about this article,please, we are all well informed on all the negetives.why don’t we try to focus some of this energy on a positive solution. thorium sound like a start in that direction.
The thing “anti-nukes” need to understand is that “pro-nukes” are not excited about nuclear waste or other problems with nuke plants. The thing is I (a pro-nuke)would love to see solar and wind plants that could produce steady power outputs to the grid at a very competitive rate. But they CAN NOT. Not now, maybe in the future but for most the future is to far away to change how we produce energy. Solar and wind are not options. They are areas we could put money into so that maybe in 20-50 years they are a real part electrical generation in this country. But again…they are not now.
Overall point, pro-nuke does not equal anti-solar.
The reactor was shut down, that is, the control rods were inserted and the nuclear fission process ceased. The heat that partially melted the core is called decay heat and is the heat released from the decay of the radioactive products of fission. The decay heat is not inconsequential and must be removed by continued core cooling. A simplified outline of what occurred was that after the reactor was shut down, a relief valve on the reactor opened (as it was supposed to), but did not close. This resulted in a loss of reactor coolant. The operators did not know that the relief valve was open because an erroneous indicator light said otherwise. The automatic safety systems responded as designed to inject coolant into the core to replace what was lost through the relief valve, but the operators reduced the flow to prevent overfilling the reactor coolant system. Without adequate cooling to remove the decay heat the reactor core started to melt. The rest is history…
Actually the Japanese have also demonstrated a full scale reactor as this article illustrates called the Fuji reactor. The issue in Japan is not implementing the reactor it is that they keep on losing their top scientist that can talk about this to competing universities and the subordinates have to pick up the slack so to speak.
We now have the technology to do this. It is the washing machine technology that gets us there and no lead needed to initiate the reaction but just like the ADS the Fuji system shuts down when the 80kw of proton emitting stops. A reactor that throttles is very appealing especially no China Effect and the latent heats are too low to catch things like graphite on fire which is what happened in Chernobyl.
To those that advocate solar. Price to date at best all inclusive is $10 per watt. Halving that is the the best we can do within the solar technology. Solar though kills desert turtles and was the significant barrier in California as some of these are endangered species. Wind is simply dangerous. It kills bats and it kills livestock and people if an earthquake or a tornado knocks it over. But the biggest impediment is the scale at which space they take up as compared to a 1GW reactor. These failed arguments are what is keeping high school level of concepts in coal fired power-plants not going anywhere. It is not the issue of replacing technology into existing reactors that is so important, it is the issue that the coal industry changes to mining rare earths and provides the needed thorium to the nearby reactors that have replaced the coal fired plants. Same generators just a different cleaner way to heat to steam.
You state: “This runaway chain reaction is responsible for … Three Mile Island.”.
The meltdown at TMI occurred while shut down as a result of conditions including an undetected coolant leak. There was no runaway chain reaction.
Solar power generation requires literally thousands of acres to produce the same amount of power that a reactor will yield from a site of less than 100 acres. SP plants of 1,000 to over 2,000 acres are typical and visible from space. Grading and otherwise modifying that much land for solar arrays is a profound environmental impact that reaches far beyond the destructive nature of the SP plant site construction. Both SP and hydroelectric systems requires long transmission lines, sometimes VERY long lines, since generated power must be transported from the point of production to the location of use. A reactor, especially the inherently safer types such as the Thorium reactor can be located much closer to consumption sites. SP requires good insolation, which in turn tends to limit SP sites to remote desert regions, which, assuming that an SP plant was abandoned and razed would take considerably longer to recover than a rain forest. It also completely destroys habitat for animals that are supposedly protected, e.g. desert tortoise and kit fox. Besides, solar and wind generation plants are just plain ugly.
Re: fusion – They are building an experimantal tokamak fusion reactor in France.
http://www.iter.org/
I’ll be interested to see the results of this experiment when they finish building it!
Their goal is “From 50 MW of input power, the ITER machine is designed to produce 500 MW of fusion power—the first of all fusion experiments to produce net energy.” …
Regarding other possible energy sources: what about geothermal power?
We hear very little about it in the media.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/41685
http://www.greenrock.com.au/geothermalBenefits.php
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/indonesia-to-lead-on-geothermal-energy-20100426-tn7k.html
I agree, why doesn’t Tim Dean talk about molten salt thorium reactors, which, back in the 1950s mind you, were considered the best option for thre civilian reactor program. Needless to say, they were canned by the US military for not producing enough plutonium. Is Tim Dean a stooge for the uranium industry?
testing comment
Thanks for the feedback
Bing
I have worked at a nuke plant under construction with a completed operating unit while there and i feel that i was safer there than at many active petrolium facilities that i worked at h2s is some really nasty substance that can kill you and many others very fast before any rescue is possible i have taken the course h2salive that teaches you the dangers of h2s ways to avoid it and measures in a emergency at a operating nuke a lot of things would have to fail before your life would be in danger and then you would have lots of time to escape not so maybe in the case of a massive h2s leak at a sour gas plant or any petrolium facility that has any sour gas or any oilthat might have any h2s in it at a nuke to die fast one would pretty near have to do some really stupid thing like try to enter the locked vaults where the operating reactors are i have worked in virgin vaults before any fuel was put into the reactors so i have seen the interiors of vaults and the candu reactors for the 935 megawatt units so there is a lot of hysteria about low doses of radiation nature itself produces a good amount the sun is a thermonuclear reaction and causes way more deaths because of people abusing it laying in the sun and then getting skin cancer than all nuclear plants together and maybe even the two nuke weapons that where used well these thorium nuke plants do seem interesting concept
I like to write about how we need cheap batteries for RE storage and for EV’s. Yet, most of the time I hear about nuclear, it is just the same old LWR. These light water reactors are INHERENTLY dangerous because they operate under high pressures and do not employ passive shut down. These machines have to go… But we need clean energy in the meantime.
I’m not sure which of the closed cycles is best from an engineering pov, but I am sure that they operate under normal pressures and are INHERENTLY safe do to thermal expansion of “the mix” creating equilibrium. I wonder what it takes to “eat up” LRR wastes. I mean, you can’t just throw old fuel rod, zirconium and all in the mix and simply chemically separate later when molten… Or could we?
Nevertheless, it is time to DEMAND THE CLOSED CYCLE! (Because RE and its storage is still too expensive to prevent fossil fueled depletion in a warming biosphere).
Hmmm
Thorium reactors are NOT “new” technology. Westinghouse Corp (before your time perhaps?)actually built and operated a working prototype in the early 1970′s Yes the 1970′s! Once the concept was proven the Oil companies went to work to ensure that this technology did not take hold for obvious reasons. They had a ready accomplice in the US Dept. of Defense. Thorium reactors cannot be used to produce weapons grade plutonium. So it was Jimmy Carter that signed an executive order effectively banning Thorium reactors.
Think what would have happened (or not happened for that matter) if this PROVEN technology had been allowed to advance. No dependence on fossil fuels.
No global pollution from fossil fuels. One has to wonder what Old Jimmy thinks when he looks in the mirror. If he had just signed an order making the
conventional nuke plants illegal instead the entire world population (minus the richest 1%) would have benefited for generations.
I really enjoyed the article, and read another recent article talking about the thorium reactor development going on at Arogonne and Livermore labs in the US. Give me 500 years of these type energy sources and we can let other generations develop what comes next.
The lack or ignorance of global weather adjustment is confounding. It is happening and like a nuclear reaction, it just doesn’t stop like a light switch. Developments taking place now will continue for generations, both good and bad effects. The real concern is possible heat damage to food production. Past societies have fallen for just these reasons and there may be side effects of virus and bacteria productions that change our lives we can’t even see until too late.
Oil and other fossil fuels are finite and going to become less abundant for two reasons, one because we are using them at a faster rate then we are finding them, and two because the world population is growing and becoming more “middle class.” more people using these fuels to advance development in large population countries.
Worry about our current path and unless we want to go back 500 years, we need consistent energy sources to stop heating up the planet.
Would there not be Carbon emissions from.
1. construction of plant (concrete/ steel etc)
2. ongoing from
a. ppl working at plant (transport to plant)
b. resupply and maintenance (transport)
3. resource extraction and preparation and transport
sure coal, alternative fuels has these overhead carbon emissions also, however can the life cycle carbon emission figures be added?
cheers,
Fabio
Unfortunately, this article does not cover Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors. Originally developed at ORNL in late 1960′s. Using liquid flourides in a two fluid system with inner active core (mostly U233 salts) and outer blanket of thorium salts, it is possible to build an inherently safe reactor that does not need to have U235 or particle accelerator to supply neutrons. See flibe-energy.com This system is simple, self-regulating, and promises to be very low cost. No enrichment, no expensive fuel rods (Thorium is just ground up into a powder and flourinated before mixing with the lithium beryllium salts). Ambient pressure means no expensive containment building.
Time did tell that solar was a complete myth. There is nowhere enough silver in the world.
In 2011 the solar manufacturing plants are going out of business because the output is so low. The energy to manufacture is high. And the horrible chemicals in our water supply are the worst kind.
The efficiency was way too premature.
Had we bilt thorium reactors instead of solar, it would have made a huge impact on the world by 2012.
Look up the medieval warming period, which was much warmer than today, and when dinosaurs walked the earth, CO2 was 10x higher than your deathly predictions.
Also, concerning comparison graphs of co2 vs temp, its always shown that there is a lag, the heat rises, FOLLOWED by the CO2. CO2 is not the cause, its the effect.
People are so stupid to believe the IPCC and Al Gore, Whose almost achieved billion dollar status with his 9m waterfront house (ironic) from milking idiots like you
Why is there wall of silence on this subject
The Watt is a measure of power. To measure energy, you have to look at kiloWatt-hours.
Admittedly Nevada is a good place to collect solar power, but most of the USA, and nearly all of northern Europe, is not!
But even if the sun shines all day, and your collectors follow it from dawn to dusk, a one kW solar installation gets you only 12 kWh in a day for your $3,750.
If they are static, the best you can expect is 8 kWh.
One kW of nuclear gets you an average of 90% capacity, anywhere, so in 24 hours you get 21.6 kWh for your $4,640
In terms of energy, nuclear is the better bargain.
How many coal burning power plants have been shut down by Nevada Solar One?
“The site takes up about 300 acres and contains 760 mirror arrays measuring about 100 meters each. Roughly 184,000 mirrors are installed at Solar One, a 64-megawatt solar thermal plant”
A typical coal burning power plant is nominally 1000 megawatts, and runs at a capacity factor of 75..80%. If those 184,000 mirrors follow the sun, and there are no clouds, you can expect 32 megawatt-days of energy per day. The coal plant will give you 750 megawatt-days per day. You’ll need 23.4 times the Nevada Solar One, or over 7000 acres, to get enough electricity to supplant just one coal burner.
I’m not sure if anyone in this thread has mentioned it already, but the problem of the “long” life of some transuranic isotopes is inversely proportional to their actual radioactivity.
Radio-potassium, uranium, and thorium are so long-lived that Earth would have gone solid before vertebrates could evolve, if the radioactivity had not kept the core molten, and the polar magnetism sufficient to protect us from the solar particle wind.
But if you have 10,000 atoms of Pu-239, half-life 24,000 years, and 10,000 atoms of radium, half-life about 1,500 years, then in a year about 16 times as much radium as plutonium will have disintegrated and shot alpha particles at you. Most isotopes of polonium are much shorter lived, and per ounce that much more lethal. Radon, half life measured in days, is really> dangerous, and natural if you live near granite rocks.
The USA generates about 50 to 70 tons per year of really dangerous fission products, and wisely keeps them in storage while most of the radioactivity decays. The rest will disappear to 1/1024 of their quantity in 300 years. The transuranic elements, even in non-thorium reactors, ought to be consumed by continued fission in fast neutron reactors. The classic LFTR produces U-233 from Th-232, and fissions it. Uranium 233 is of course anthropogenic, but obviously not transuranic. Anyway,the transuranic elements differ only slightly from the actinium, thorium, and protactinium that precede uranium in the table.
As far as I understand from the MSR design, thorium fluoride in a liquid fluoride solvent is easily promoted with fissile isotopes of uranium and plutonium simply by adding them also as tetrafluorides to the solution. During operation, no solid fuels are involved. There is indeed a problem of too much protactinium-233 absorbing an additional neutron and decaying to non-fissile U-234. I understand that some designs sequester the protactinium from the neutron bombardment to minimize this problem.
The U-235 powered U238->Pu239 breeder reactor also produces no transuranic waste.
The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR), which was canceled by the Clinton Administration in 1994, was designed to produce only fission waste, and showed that it could do so, and that it was immune to the conditions that caused the Chernobyl disaster about a week after the IFR, by actual test, showed itself immune.
Like the LFTR, the IFR design uses no pressurised coolant.
The liquid fueled, thorium fluoride reactor that creates and consumes its own fissile U-233 may actually be superior even to the IFR, but I’d like to see Obama launch a National program to launch both technologies, and put coal, oil, and gas, out of business, and abandon this nonsense with wind turbines, ethanol, and biodiesel.
The actual business of the nuclear industry is selling biiiiig installations and a lot of “fuel”. If you want to establish a new gen of reactors you’ll have to fight against this lobby.
Manuel
Spain
it costs like a billion dollars to instal 1 panel no exageration
This is bull ****
I rekkon
As we develop vibratory generators so variable as to discover the resonant wave frequency of matter, then we will be able to speciate the matter into the next phase, until ultimately we can use virtually any matter for the potential energy. Thorium definately has a significant future in the long chronoligical timeline of discovery of resonating wave generators capable of bombarding the matter with correct wave frequencies allowing us to captivate and convert the energy into forms that power our current instrumentation, ie:electricity—bombarding thorium with neutron generators at the proper wave frequency we can change the polarity of thorium phases, making it emit radioactive waves similar to those generated by uranium it its nuclear active phases, so closely that much of existing nuclear reactor assets may be used to actually replace the current generators powered by uranium into a fcility that can use thorium as source fuel, which becomes non-radioactive, when the neutron generator is turned off.
The most abundent form of matter, containing high concentrations of hydrogen is water, which, when we discover the instrumentation capable of releasing the nuclear energy by breaking the hydrogen atom (for want of a better word) as in fussion or fission processes of energy captivation, then the cost of energy will reside in its transportation, in our current form of electric energy distribution, the means our future energy may hold, will probably eliminate the need for transmission and distribution processes. if we continue to embrace instrumentation and its ongoing discovery—or not, I dare mention this because in my life time, hold witness to the rise of a world leading labratory, NASA, dismantled by executive order, or the worlds largest culture who regard futuristic discovery with disinterest, our largest trading partner, and the modes operanda of our current administration.
Given the reality our rulers are fueled by lust and greed I see a dismal future of humanity, and our probable end when our natural orbit around our universes center reach another ice age
As far as I can tell from internet searches only 31 people have died from radiation poisoning from the Chernobyl disaster and to date 0 from Fukushima; Put into perspective, Oil and gas deaths are in the tens of thousands since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster proving with out a doubt that nuclear energy is a safer mode of power. There are many stories circulating around about hot particles contaminating the planet and causing death to thousands of people by cancer but no word on the effects of the tons and tons of depleted uranium used for ordinance of war in the Middle East and Africa in the last 11 years. If it is true that modern breeder reactors can utilize 98% of existing nuclear waste and weapon stockpiles for fuel and leave the remaining 2% for medical isotopes then the disinformation is much more of a travesty than even the global warming fraud. It is long past the time to stop using the power of the atom as a tool for creative destruction in the maintenance of empire and put it into civilian use for the betterment of all mankind.
Tim Dean, I liked your article except for mistakes others pointed out and the propagation of bad science information used in your statement. “There’s so much heat already trapped in the atmosphere from a century of greenhouse gases that some of these effects are likely to occur even if all coal-fired power plants were closed tomorrow.”
well i,m affraid what happen to human when nuclear comes to war rental mobil bogor
”I mentioned to some about electromagnetic radiation emitted from a light bulb, and they were terrified they may get sick, without realizing that light is electromagnetic wave. In fact, many people signed up to ban dihydrogen monoxide (http://www.dhmo.org/)”
That is sad and very funny in my opinion. Every time I see something about banning H2O or buying dehydrated water I crack up.
Ignorence can be a wonderful thing, but sometimes it really doesn’t help XD. After reading your comment I think I want to see I can get someone to freak out over light bulbs.
The effect of the nuclear is really a global issue apotek online that need to be attention of all human kind
I just required some information and was searching on Google for it. I visited each page that came on first page and didn’t got any relevant result then I thought to check out the second one and got your blog. This is what I wanted Mont Blanc Etoile!
Superb! Generally I never read whole articles but the way you wrote this information is simply amazing and this kept my interest in reading and I enjoyed it Hublot Classic Fusion.
I am so glad this internet thing works and your article really helped me. Might take you up on that home advice you Christian Louboutin Tall Boots.
Fletcher places his hand on my chest, and the silver implant vibrates beside my heart where Mr. Franklin installed it. Once again with feeling: Australian science tugs heart-strings · Music neuroscience Do humans really wear cartier tank watches their hearts on their sleeve?
which makes it an excellent export product for countries rich in coal, and an economical import for coal-barren lands. much more so than natural gas, for example – deep tissue massage los angeles
Fletcher places his hand on my chest, and the silver implant vibrates beside my heart where Mr. Franklin installed it.Fletcher places his hand on my chest, and the silver implant vibrates beside my heart where Mr. Franklin installed it.
He simply ignores the questions and moves on. Rodger What this book fails to deliver is on the post-1997 era,
where the accounts are more related to the daily rigmarole of his government rule for 13
years. For example, if a woman has some discharge and is worried that it is a sign of a serious issue, the availability of an accurate
and comprehensive pregnancy book would let her get
some answers even as she waited for a physician to return
a call.
It could prove the circuit-breaker to the two most intractable problems of the 21st century: our insatiable thirst for energy, and the warming of the world’s climate. military boots
This technology has been generating electricity successfully in California since 1985 and currently provides power for about 100,000 Californian homes. CSP plants are now being planned or built in many parts of the world.personal finance articles
Thorium seems quite impressive as an alternative to preventing a full nuclear meltdown. The safety and clean factor alone make it worth exploring
Massage Los Angeles
The School Bond Guarantee Program provides credit enhancement to voter-approved general obligation (GO) bonds issued by school districts. The program provides savings to state taxpayers by pledging the full faith and credit of the state to the payment of voter-approved school district GO bonds.
It is too bad the author missed the best chance for thorium fueled power plants, Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTRs), the Leanest, Cleanest, Greenest Power option bar none.
Remarkable. In 2007, while a member of the ALP, I wrote a policy paper advocating thorium-based nuclear power. It sank without trace, no doubt due to the lack of science qualifications in our politicians and their staffs.
http://www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/Australia-Labor-policy-07.pdf
Leave a Reply