Discussion on:

Safe nuclear: India's thorium reactor

As the article points out, our early nuclear power program was *designed* to produce nuclear weapons materials. Our preference for Uranium-powered nuclear reactors is an (unfortunate) accident of history. From the standpoints of waste disposal and reactor safety, Thorium makes better sense.

It too bad that the ridiculously complex nuclear power regulatory environment in this country makes the prospect of Thorium-based nuclear power exceedingly remote.

Thorium is yet another nuclear "idea" being embraced by the struggling nuclear industry to somehow retain their market share of the Energy pie...

The USA should move "full steam ahead" toward Solar (of all flavors) while India and or China spend Trillions on new nuclear R & D; racing Germany (plus soon France and Japan) to Energy Independence powered by the SUN!

Mankind needs to work together and eliminate Wars for Energy and minerals.

YES, Solar (of all flavors) and especially Solar from Space!

These books explain (in detail) how:
The High Frontier by Gerard K. O'Neill,
Colonies In Space by A. Heppenheim??er.
The Third Industrial Revolution by G. Harry Stine
The Space Enterprise by Philip Robert Harris
Mining the Sky by John S. Lewis

It's not quite there yet. In fact, it will never be there until we can create an
efficient way of storing and releasing the excess generated. Solar from
space is frankly insanely dangerous. If you want to get the energy HERE,
you need to either bounce it via a mirror (safe as regular sunlight for the
most part, but inefficient) or you need to convert it into microwaves.
Imagine a satellite in orbit that can "power" an earth station being taken
over and aimed at a city. Nasty.

The problems we face are not so much the war for energy, its a war over ideologies/faiths. You have a virulent form of Islam that is not content to
wait to convert people to it's faith. Granted, much of the terror is fueled
by money earned by selling oil, but it would still exist regardless.

The microwave flux at the Earth side is to low to be a weapon. There are much much better weapons at hand already ready to be used. Your just sewing unfounded fear with an imagined microwave nightmare. Oil will always be a valuable commodity for chemical feedstock even if it was replaced by cleaner energy. In fact the energy would be better used in space without return to earth. The solar flux in orbit is 8 times that of the surface so space energy is practical and mirrors made of super lightweight films (films impractical on earth) could be a solution that is high power and light weight.

I have attended both solar energy and nuclear engineering conferences in the past year. The best-practices solar power plants are still 3x to 4x more expensive per unit electricity produced than conventional nuclear fission, and there is no evidence to suppose that solar research in the West will reduce solar costs any faster than fission research in India and China will reduce fission costs over the next few decades. Wealthy places like Germany and California can choose solar over fission because it makes them feel good, but parts of the world where 40% of the population does not even HAVE electricity will naturally feel differently. And those are the parts of the world where the carbon footprint is growing fastest...

The quantum nucleonic reactor.

Basically you bombard hafnium with x-rays and it releases energy at a rate of 60 to 1 for the energy input. Shut off the x-rays and the reactor goes cold. The ultimate fail safe system.

This is rumored to be the power source of a long endurance Globalhawk drone said to be flying for the US Air Force since 2008.

The design could prove useful for portable power for a host of uses from disaster recovery to powering subs or a moon base.

The value of such an energy source would be far more valuable
in implementation as an energy source for things like tanks, planes, etc.
The removal of the need to stock pile and refuel would reduce vulnerabilities
and cost related to supply lines. Use in a mere drone would be wasteful.

The drone project went public when it was leaked a design was approved for a prototype. The Air Force denies it was ever built, but rumors persist of testing being done out of Wright Patterson.

The Air Force does not deny Globalhawks flew out of there in 2008, but claims that drone program was testing the drones use for weather tracking.

The argument goes that the minimal shielding requirements of the drone, no humans on board, made it the perfect proof of concept platform.

This is part of the Air Forces green plans to get away from using oil based fuel.

Other services may be doing parallel testing in other platforms.

You cannot find Hafnium-178, isomer m2, in nature. You need to "charge" it so to speak using cyclotrons, and you always need to put a little bit more energy into charging it than what you get from discharging it through induced gamma radiation. It's basically a nuclear battery, with the advantage of being capable of storing 5 orders of magnitude more energy than any electrochemical battery ever will.

Thorium, on the other hand, is about 3 orders of magnitude denser in energy than Hf-178m2. Converting thorium-232, the only natural isotope and which is not fissile, into uranium-233, which is fissile, requires one somewhat energetic neutron. A second neutron can fission the U-233, which produces 2.5 neutrons on average per fission plus much, much more energy than what was required to set all this up. Thorium is basically like Hf-178m2 if that was naturally occurring and if it required neutrons instead of photons to induce energy release.

I couldn't agree more tthor, this is key technology and can power both industrial and electrical AND synfuel generation which is potentially economic. The technology is VERY strategic and we (in Europe) have let it out of our grasp. The same applies to high temperature helium cooled pebble bed reactors, and these could be partly powered on thorium. All is not lost however, as sea water contains enough Uranium to be almost economic, and that was based on un-innovative assumptions for how to efficiently extract it commercially. So I say, well done India, heres to a prosperous future to an innovative nation investing and taking risks. LESSONS TO BE LEARNED FROM THEM.

From risk reward!

Although I probably won't live long enough to see it, I can well imagine a time 50 years from now when India is selling thorium-fueled breeder reactors to the USA to help the USA get out of its "fossil fuels crisis."

...we could recycle all the hot air from people who don't understand thermodynamics?

We could also add the thermally enhanced air from those that offer non-specific critique without any demonstrable basis.

the second law of thermodynamics which covers entropy.

We don't need more ways of making expensive electricity.

I'm currently reviewing a solar proposal at $85/MWh if anyone cares. Admittedly with lots of federal and state tax breaks.

The cost advantage of using thorium will depend on the type of reactor you're using and how the regulatory commissions plan to deal with it. Generally thorium provides the immediate advantage of being accessible anywhere in the world even if you don't have concentrated deposits (terrestrial rock like granite contains 8-13 grams of thorium per tonne). Thorium is also dirt cheap rather than being a special grade of fuel that can only be produced by nations with centrifuge technology, like enriched uranium. So you should save some money with thorium reactors over enriched uranium reactors, but that's negligible compared to regulatory costs anyways.

India's heavy water thorium reactors should be hit with similar safety regulations as any other water-cooled reactor depending on the country. The costs from regulations are arguably the biggest capital bottleneck to building new reactors today, even safer ones. Over 75% of nuclear costs in the US are attributed to regulatory processes rather than the actual material and technical costs of the reactors themselves.

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html

In India and China however, you'll find nuclear reactors cheaper to build and decommission than coal plants, simply because their regulations are more cost and time efficient while still being very severe.

Nuclear will also be required if one ever hopes to go fossil-fuel free in the future, as it is the only clean source of energy apart from hydroelectric dams that can supply reliable enough energy to cover baseload energy needs. Solar and wind simply cannot compete with coal in terms of cost-effective reliability because they are too intermittent.

I agree that fission is well ahead of solar and wind in terms of providing a cost-effective replacement for fossil fuels. Wind is currently almost cost-competitive with peak-load power, and could be more useful if we had energy storage systems on an enormous scale. The cost of the storage system of course would make the wind no longer cost-competitive with nuclear fission. However, if large numbers of drivers switch to battery-powered electric vehicles in the next two decades, and charge their vehicles from a smart-grid that regulates power distribution according to source and load (eg wind variability), then the consumers would inadvertantly provide the "subsidy" (actually not a subsidy it's a free market mechanism after all) for the enormous energy-storage system. In this way wind could get above 20% of the total energy source in some nations, and would displace petroleum (auto fuel) instead of coal (electricity generation). So there is one scenario in which wind in the near future would compete economically with nuclear fission, but it wouldn't have to: with fission providing baseload electricity and wind charging batteries to offset petroleum consumption, they would actually complement each other very well.

While thorium is 400 times more abundant on the planet than uranium, dramatically cheaper - short and long term, dramatically safer in use and potential worst case risks than uranium will ever be, and a logical choice for immediate development as Mark points out - from 1960, we are neither a scientifically literate or logical society. Thorium faces an all but impossible battle in the US against a 60+ year old deeply entrenched uranium industry that owns much of Congress and the military power structure - MIC as Ike called it. No possibility of an unbiased scientific/logical decision to go to thorium in that environment.

We are also currently both privately and publicly pissing away billions of dollars on biofuel development - without distinguishing between non-NPK biofuels and NPK dependent biofuels - and or the fact that NPK biofuels are dependent on the same petroluem industry products they're trying to replace. In addition NPK dependent biofuels threaten our food supply with the accelerated depletion of peak phosphates - for which we have no feasible replacements in sight and this simple and relatively un-discussed fact - trumps global warming, CO2, rising sea levels, and our energy problems. Fortunately, NASA through it's OMEGA program is currently pursuing non-NPK biofuels that will also clean up the coastal environments, do not use peak phosphate, but recover it from sewage instead - while producing biofuels and other products - though in comparatively modest amounts.

Solar is economically here now and cheaper than fossil fuel generated power. Admittedly, practical electrical storage is not here - unless you consider Europe's model of using a nation wide electric auto fleet's collective battery capacity to store 40% of their wind and solar power and send it back to the grid at night. It also makes the auto consumer finance solar energy through the cost of their excess car battery capacity. That may not be all bad in the long run, but it doesn't seem to be getting a lot of traction in the current economic climate.

Natural gas (NG) and natural gas liquids (NGL) while cleaner (less CO2, sulfur and particulates) than other fossil fuels (gasoline, diesel, heating oils and coal) can power our transportation (ground and aviation) and power generation for an extended period - with the penalty of diminished, but continued CO2 production.

In any case, if we want to get off foreign oil independence we are going to have experience at least a transition period (30 years?) of multiple advanced energy sources - thorium, NG and NGL, solar, wind, tide, geo-thermal and non-NPK biofuels. The long term energy source of our future is likely to be beyond our imagination, but no matter, we need to be energy independent now if our economy and nation are going to survive.

"While thorium is 400 times more abundant on the planet than uranium, ..."

Thorium is three or four times more abundant than uranium; that figure is about right for the abundance relative to uranium's rare fissile isotope, U-235.

Yes time to lay the plans of the responsible and aware energy/material balances for the planet.

This is a great short video on how people can use empty plastic bottles to create a "free" solar light and it is ideas like this that should be discussed and shared because every single additional "free light" helps both the Planet and everyone to think green instead of "just" more electric lights...
http://wimp.com/lightenup/

The so called "Canadian" CANDU Reactors can use yellow cake (natural uranium), thorium, old "spent" fuel rods from light water reactors (the ones that have to be kept in cooling ponds that blew up so nicely at Fukushima, can be refueled on the go, can use weapons grade uranium, etc....really the most versatile and safest reactors out there. This is a bit of "old news" really....

They were designed by the Canadian government.

The publicly owned corporation, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited was sold last year by the Conservative government to SNC-Lavalin (the company under investigation for funnelling over $50 million to Gadafi and smuggling out his son.) for $15 million including all plans and rights to the CANDU reactors.

I don't think they're in safe hands any more.