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China trials â€œthorium-based molten salt reactor systemâ€.

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Proud Mary

Mon Mar 21 2011, 10:24AM

Registered Member #543 Joined: Tue Feb 20 2007, 04:26PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4992

Safe nuclear does exist, and China is leading the way with thorium
A few weeks before the tsunami struck Fukushimaâ€™s uranium reactors and shattered public faith in nuclear power, China revealed that it was launching a rival technology to build a safer, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper network of reactors based on thorium.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Daily Telegraph
20 Mar 2011

This passed unnoticed â€“ except by a small of band of thorium enthusiasts â€“ but it may mark the passage of strategic leadership in energy policy from an inert and status-quo West to a rising technological power willing to break the mould.

If Chinaâ€™s dash for thorium power succeeds, it will vastly alter the global energy landscape and may avert a calamitous conflict over resources as Asiaâ€™s industrial revolutions clash head-on with the Westâ€™s entrenched consumption.

Chinaâ€™s Academy of Sciences said it had chosen a â€œthorium-based molten salt reactor systemâ€. The liquid fuel idea was pioneered by US physicists at Oak Ridge National Lab in the 1960s, but the US has long since dropped the ball. Further evidence of Barack `Obamaâ€™s â€œSputnik momentâ€, you could say.

Chinese scientists claim that hazardous waste will be a thousand times less than with uranium. The system is inherently less prone to disaster.

â€œThe reactor has an amazing safety feature,â€ said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA engineer at Teledyne Brown and a thorium expert.

â€œIf it begins to overheat, a little plug melts and the salts drain into a pan. There is no need for computers, or the sort of electrical pumps that were crippled by the tsunami. The reactor saves itself,â€ he said.

â€œThey operate at atmospheric pressure so you donâ€™t have the sort of hydrogen explosions weâ€™ve seen in Japan. One of these reactors would have come through the tsunami just fine. There would have been no radiation release.â€

Thorium is a silvery metal named after the Norse god of thunder. The metal has its own â€œissuesâ€ but no thorium reactor could easily spin out of control in the manner of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or now Fukushima.

Professor Robert Cywinksi from Huddersfield University said thorium must be bombarded with neutrons to drive the fission process. â€œThere is no chain reaction. Fission dies the moment you switch off the photon beam. There are not enough neutrons for it continue of its own accord,â€ he said.

Dr Cywinski, who anchors a UK-wide thorium team, said the residual heat left behind in a crisis would be â€œorders of magnitude lessâ€ than in a uranium reactor.

The earthâ€™s crust holds 80 years of uranium at expected usage rates, he said. Thorium is as common as lead. America has buried tons as a by-product of rare earth metals mining. Norway has so much that Oslo is planning a post-oil era where thorium might drive the countryâ€™s next great phase of wealth. Even Britain has seams in Wales and in the granite cliffs of Cornwall. Almost all the mineral is usable as fuel, compared to 0.7pc of uranium. There is enough to power civilization for thousands of years.

I write before knowing the outcome of the Fukushima drama, but as yet none of 15,000 deaths are linked to nuclear failure. Indeed, there has never been a verified death from nuclear power in the West in half a century. Perspective is in order.

We cannot avoid the fact that two to three billion extra people now expect â€“ and will obtain â€“ a western lifestyle. China alone plans to produce 100m cars and buses every year by 2020.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said the world currently has 442 nuclear reactors. They generate 372 gigawatts of power, providing 14pc of global electricity. Nuclear output must double over twenty years just to keep pace with the rise of the China and India.

If a string of countries cancel or cut back future reactors, let alone follow Germanyâ€™s Angela Merkel in shutting some down, they shift the strain onto gas, oil, and coal. Since the West is also cutting solar subsidies, they can hardly expect the solar industry to plug the gap.

BPâ€™s disaster at Macondo should teach us not to expect too much from oil reserves deep below the oceans, beneath layers of blinding salt. Meanwhile, we rely uneasily on Wahabi repression to crush dissent in the Gulf and keep Arabian crude flowing our way. So where can we turn, unless we revert to coal and give up on the ice caps altogether? That would be courting fate.

US physicists in the late 1940s explored thorium fuel for power. It has a higher neutron yield than uranium, a better fission rating, longer fuel cycles, and does not require the extra cost of isotope separation.

The plans were shelved because thorium does not produce plutonium for bombs. As a happy bonus, it can burn up plutonium and toxic waste from old reactors, reducing radio-toxicity and acting as an eco-cleaner.

Dr Cywinski is developing an accelerator driven sub-critical reactor for thorium, a cutting-edge project worldwide. It needs to Â£300m of public money for the next phase, and Â£1.5bn of commercial investment to produce the first working plant. Thereafter, economies of scale kick in fast. The idea is to make pint-size 600MW reactors.

Yet any hope of state support seems to have died with the Coalition budget cuts, and with it hopes that Britain could take a lead in the energy revolution. It is understandable, of course. Funds are scarce. The UK has already put its efforts into the next generation of uranium reactors. Yet critics say vested interests with sunk costs in uranium technology succeeded in chilling enthusiasm.

The same happened a decade ago to a parallel project by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). Franceâ€™s nuclear industry killed proposals for funding from Brussels, though a French group is now working on thorium in Grenoble.

Norwayâ€™s Aker Solution has bought Professor Rubbiaâ€™s patent. It had hoped to build the first sub-critical reactor in the UK, but seems to be giving up on Britain and locking up a deal to build it in China instead, where minds and wallets are more open.

So the Chinese will soon lead on this thorium technology as well as molten-salts. Good luck to them. They are doing Mankind a favour. We may get through the century without tearing each other apart over scarce energy and wrecking the planet.

ConKbot of Doom

Mon Mar 21 2011, 12:30PM

Registered Member #509 Joined: Sat Feb 10 2007, 07:02AM
Location:
Posts: 329

Grain of salt here,
Light water moderated reactors are safe from meltdown because if they get too hot, the water boils to steam which doesnt moderate the neutrons anywhere near as much as liquid, providing negative feedback.

or so they say. ;)

I'm not saying I'm against thorium based power, just against potentially misleading statements.

I'm no expert on the subject, but the CANDU reactors look interesting, the wikipedia image makes it look like quite the nuclear omnivore.

But also, new passively cooled (in emergency situations) reactors look interesting. The Westinghouse AP-1000, and GE ESBWR. I'm sure in any industry, as simple as possible but no simpler, is a good thing.

Steve Conner

Mon Mar 21 2011, 01:33PM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

Every reactor technology has its champions who claim it is the safest, most efficient and so on.

The CANDU can burn anything, but it can't achieve a very good burnup of it. It also needs a vast quantity of heavy water.

As a stopgap measure it would be tempting to burn thorium using neutrons from an existing reactor. As far as I know, if you have a fast breeder reactor you can just put thorium in the blanket. In the long term it will be interesting to see whether electrically driven neutron sources become big business. Maybe the Farnsworth fusor will finally be good for something.

Nuclear plants have to operate for 25-40 years to return the investment. That means the technology that matters most right now is the one that some managers picked 25 years ago. I think the Americans were already running their second generation fast breeder at the NRTS by then, complete with on-site reprocessing.

Patrick

Mon Mar 21 2011, 06:06PM

Registered Member #2431 Joined: Tue Oct 13 2009, 09:47PM
Location: Chico, CA. USA
Posts: 5639

[quote]
[size][b]
... thorium does not produce plutonium for bombs. As a happy bonus, it can burn up plutonium and toxic waste from old reactors, reducing radio-toxicity and acting as an eco-cleaner...[/quote1300730603]

They make it all sound just so perfect dont they !? Im highly skeptical of its "cleaning" abilities.

Conundrum

Mon Mar 21 2011, 07:57PM

Registered Member #96 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4061

About the only major headache I can see is if China gets the reactor itself to work reliably but it turns out that the accelerator is unreliable because running at higher energy causes issues with the magnets.

Oh, and there are proliferation issues with these as well, see

-A

haxor5354

Mon Mar 21 2011, 08:47PM

Registered Member #2063 Joined: Sat Apr 04 2009, 03:16PM
Location: Toronto
Posts: 352

so the reason why we dont have thorium reactors because it doesn't produce plutonium needed to make bombs?

Steve Conner

Tue Mar 22 2011, 09:10AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

The first generation of nukes were all designed to cook up plutonium for bombs, and any electricity was a byproduct. You can make of that what you will. I think the design decisions made then (burn uranium fuel in metal canisters) acquired so much inertia that the next two generations of production reactors ended up the same, even if it wasn't necessarily the best long-term solution.

Champions of the uranium cycle argued that the plutonium was supposed to be reused as a fuel in power reactors. Hippies countered that the whole nuclear power program was just pursued to ease the Manhattan Project's guilty conscience, but with the paradoxical effect of making it easier for anyone to have a nuclear bomb. In the words of alpha hippy Amory Lovins: "A reactor is a bomb's idea for making bombs"

Ash Small

Tue Mar 22 2011, 05:47PM

Registered Member #3414 Joined: Sun Nov 14 2010, 05:05PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4245

Having read the article linked to above by Conundrum,

I'm even more convinced that we should increase funding to the ITER project for fusion power.

Patrick

Tue Mar 22 2011, 06:58PM

Registered Member #2431 Joined: Tue Oct 13 2009, 09:47PM
Location: Chico, CA. USA
Posts: 5639

Ash Small wrote ...

I'm even more convinced that we should increase funding to the ITER project for fusion power.

Ooooo, I have a follower! Now another 200 million peeps and were set!

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