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1) there are no working thorium reactors 2) breeder reactors are hazardous 3) uranium seawater extraction doesn't exist 4) if uranium seawater extraction were m

1) there are no working thorium reactors 2) breeder reactors are hazardous 3) uranium seawater extraction doesn't exist 4) if uranium seawater extraction were made to work it would use enormous amounts of energy not reflected in this. The depressing truth is this shows that current uranium oxide reserves and nuclear tech could supply global energy needs for only 6 years.

Robotbeat 5y ago
1) Untrue https://sg.news.yahoo.com/china-hopes-play-leading-role-220307940.html https://sg.news.yahoo.com/china-hopes-play-leading-role-2203... 2) Not in any way that is irreducible. 3) wrong. https://www.machinedesign.com/materials/article/21836993/uranium-extracted-from-seawater https://www.machinedesign.com/materials/article/21836993/ura... “Oh, that’s just proof of concept.” Yes, and even 5 grams is enough to disprove your claim it doesn’t exist. Reality is we won’t need it for an extremely long time, so why would anyone do more than proof of concept? 4) still on-net easily pays for itself energy-wise. Thinking otherwise usually shows you do not appreciate just how energy dense uranium is. Belly aching that existing reserves are small, well duh. Demand is small. No one pays massive amounts of money to “prove” reserves when demand is small just to win an Internet argument. But uranium and thorium themselves are super common and in fact there’s more energy in fissionables in a random chunk of the Earth’s crust than there is thermal energy in a chunk of coal. The only thing depressing about what you said is that so many people buy into such poor logic. Look, I’m not a nuclear bro. We will primarily decarbonize with renewables. But so many of these anti-nuclear arguments are terrible.
- dahart 5y ago
  Your news article link appears to state that China hopes to build a thorium reactor. It doesn’t seem say one is up and running, does it, or did I miss something?
  - dodobirdlord 5y ago
    Wikipedia indicates that some test reactors are currently operational, and there are construction projects underway for commercial reactors. The article notes that in 1999 there were 0 operating thorium reactors anywhere on earth, but that no longer seems to be true. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
  - jabl 5y ago
    Be as it may, a thorium reactor is in no way particularly special compared to a uranium reactor [1]. As humankind is able to make uranium reactors work, we can make thorium reactors work. Just like with seawater extraction of uranium, there's no particular hurry to commercialize the technology since uranium so far is plentiful and cheap. [1] There is the issue that thorium by itself is not fissile, so it's a breeding fuel cycle similar to the U-Pu breeding cycle with reprocessing etc. Which, again, hasn't been developed as quickly as hoped many decades ago, as the simple once-through uranium cycle has been cheaper and good enough.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    They’ve built one and plan to switch it on now, this month, and may have done so already. But the list of nuclear reactors that have used thorium as at least part of their fuel is surprisingly long. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle#List_of_thorium-fueled_reactors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle#List_of_tho... I generally discount arguments that are in the form of: “we cannot commercialize this because it has not yet been commercialized.” But do thorium fueled reactors exist? Absolutely.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- throwaway5752 5y ago
  I have followed the nuclear for more than 3 decades and invested in junior E&P for more than a decade. Everyone, understandably, hopes for something to drop in and save us from the situation we're in with the climate and energy intensity. Nuclear will be a part of it, but everything I said in my post was true like it or not. Plans for a thorium reactor do not amount to a commercial thorium reactor. Also, 5 grams is useless and I do discount it - the seawater extraction tech is trivial, but doing it at scale and positive net energy is not. Everything I said can change. But let's not fool ourselves about the current state of tech. Part of the frustration is the "fake it til you make it" culture in tech being a terrible fit for nuclear, which requires thinking in centuries for site placement, staffing, and waste management.
  - tim333 5y ago
    Yeah but reserves != resources so your problem isn't a real one.
    - throwaway5752 5y ago
      1P, 2P, and 3P reserve categories are something I'm quite familiar with and I have broadly invested in a long term increase in UO2 prices. Uranium is a fascinating basic material, and there are several ways to extract it. You have higher grade ore deposits that are directly mined. There are in situ leaching techniques, also. Increases in prices will make new techniques economically viable and 2P+ reserves will be reclassified to 1P. "My problem" is that there is a physical cap on this with fuel extraction: EROI. A trillion dollars a pound for ore will not matter if it takes more energy to recovery a resource than it takes to produce it. The seawater recovery part of this story is dubious at best at the recovery factors used in their calculations.
- ortusdux 5y ago
  Re: #3 & 4, I've toured that lab and seen that experiment in person, and it is extremely promising. Their original tests we able to produce yellowcake uranium at roughly 2x market rate, which is amazing for a domestic source. They are now working on scaling and unique applications to bring the price even lower. I believe that they are looking at post filtering desalination brine. The process extracts many heavy metals, which can make make for good alternate revenue streams, further decreasing the price.
  - throwaway5752 5y ago
    The Stanford group? That's great news on the production prices. I still doubt the extraction rate assumptions in the articles, but I think renewables plus scaled down nuclear will be the path forward.
blendergeek 5y ago
> 1) there are no working thorium reactors This will likely soon change. > 2) breeder reactors are hazardous France seems to use them safely. > 3) uranium seawater extraction doesn't exist It will once we use breeder reactors. The reason seawater extraction doesn't exist is that it isn't economical. With breeder reactors, the calculus would change. > 4) if uranium seawater extraction were made to work it would use enormous amounts of energy not reflected in this. It would produce significantly more than it consumes.
- hannob 5y ago
  > This will likely soon change. It's almost like nuclear fusion, just with much smaller numbers. Thorium reactors are always just a few years away - since the late 1980s.
  - p_l 5y ago
    No, they were a thing in 1950s-1960s. Things moved in other directions, especially with how USA pretty much stopped approving any design other than LWR and PWR variants where Thorium fuel cycle didn't offer much (there were non-molten salt thorium reactors)
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    > It's almost like nuclear fusion, just with much smaller numbers. It is kind of the same. Scientists say that we can make fusion work in ten years given X amount of money. Government says, here's 5% of that amount, how long will it take then? Well, maybe two hundred years. Fifty years later people say, why no fusion?
api 5y ago
(1) is like the old argument against reusable rocket boosters: there are none, so it's not possible. The US ran a thorium reactor decades ago experimentally. The "if it hasn't flown it can't fly" mentality that Elon cited in aerospace is actually pervasive across Western thought in regard to larger scale or more challenging capital intensive physical (as opposed to information) technologies. (Elon is not superhuman. He is only a "good" engineer and probably not a great manager. His superpower is rejecting conservatism and actually doing things.) (2) is true for current generation uranium breeders that use ill-tempered working reagents like liquid sodium. The phrase "liquid sodium" combined with "power reactor" makes me want to buy a good pair of running shoes, as Derek Lowe of "Things I Won't Work With" fame might say. Thorium is a better idea. Those molten salts are nasty but they tend to stay in one place and do not spontaneously ignite when exposed to oxygen or water. (3) true, but rendered less important due to (1). Thorium is much more abundant than uranium. (4) also true, but probably not relevant. I think the seawater thing is a canard. Lithium for batteries from brine on the other hand is feasible, though maybe not economical given that there are vast easier to get reserves of lithium. That being said, I think the renewables + batteries path looks much easier to deploy given other issues such as politics, up front capital requirements, and gradual scalability. Also AFAIK a fully nuclear grid (with no fossil peakers) would require grid scale power storage to load level since nuclear is slow at load following, but not as much storage capacity as a fully renewable grid since you don't have to bridge long periods with no sun or wind.
- p_l 5y ago
  2) Thorium molten salts are heavy on fluoride, so... ;) Thing is, we don't need to use either in breeder reactors - SVBR is a proof, although Bismuth production is a problem - but that's what pure lead version is for.
  - api 5y ago
    Fluoride is better behaved when it's paired with a good BFF as it is in a salt. Free fluoride should invoke the "run away!" clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
kohlerm 5y ago
Yes, those assumptions are very optimistic. If at all it would take to long to develop all this technology before it is too late.
p_l 5y ago
1) Because we got rid of them for being annoying 2) Untrue. There are even breeder reactors with passive safety and very nice safety records, waylaid only by funding and partially by geopolitics (ok, coolant is expensive as hell, but that's because we don't mine enough bismuth) 3 & 4) Won't cover, not my area The thing is, where are you picking up ridiculous 6 years amount? Because it sounds like very, very cherry-picked value.
- throwaway5752 5y ago
  "The thing is, where are you picking up ridiculous 6 years amount? Because it sounds like very, very cherry-picked value." That's directly from the linked article, except I rounded 5.7 years up to 6.
- jabl 5y ago
  > There are even breeder reactors with passive safety and very nice safety records, waylaid only by funding and partially by geopolitics (ok, coolant is expensive as hell, but that's because we don't mine enough bismuth) Reactors cooled with lead-bismuth eutectic have a somewhat nasty problem of polonium production. To the extent we'll see lead-cooled reactors I'm more hopeful about plain lead. It has a higher melting temperature yes, but it seems workable. There are a couple of promising efforts in this direction.
  - p_l 5y ago
    The polonium production due to short half-life of the specific isotope was found to actually increase safety, as it made detection of leaks easier (root cause was fixed and isn't present in later models) and cleanup easier as well (minute amounts of polonium that were easy to spot and cleanup). Most importantly, it undergoes alpha decay, which makes shielding easy.
yholio 5y ago
If efficient, safe and low cost fast breeders become available, you don't need thorium or sea extraction. Just transmute the vast quantities of U238 that have been stockpiled as depleted uranium into fissionable Plutonium 239 and run reactors on that for decades. Large nations have about one milion tons of depleted Uranium, in oxide or hexaflouride form, that's about 1 trillion megawatt-days, enough for 150 years of current energy consumption, or decades of geometric increases of energy use. Only then we need to go after existing proven mineral reserves, and only after that, maybe at the turn of the 22nd century, we would need to ponder sea water extraction.
ortusdux 5y ago
Re: 3) & 4), Uranium seawater extraction does exist, and it is cheap, easy, and requires very little energy. I toured PNNL and viewed their uranium extraction project in person. It utilizes thin, high surface area fibers of plastic impregnated with a molecule that binds uranium and other heavy metals. A rinse with a dilute acid (acetic, citric, etc) releases the metals. The substrate can then be reused indefinitely. The deployed system is fully passive - basically fake floating kelp beds, anchored to the sea floor, deployed in high current areas. They would be hauled in every 3 months or so, rinsed off on the boat, and then redeployed. Everything could be done using standard bivalve farming methods, but with lower impact on the environment. They are now looking at a way to use the same material to post-filter desalination brine. https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514 https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCF3k_EbGiU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCF3k_EbGiU

Robotbeat 5y ago

1) Untrue https://sg.news.yahoo.com/china-hopes-play-leading-role-220307940.html https://sg.news.yahoo.com/china-hopes-play-leading-role-2203... 2) Not in any way that is irreducible. 3) wrong. https://www.machinedesign.com/materials/article/21836993/uranium-extracted-from-seawater https://www.machinedesign.com/materials/article/21836993/ura... “Oh, that’s just proof of concept.” Yes, and even 5 grams is enough to disprove your claim it doesn’t exist. Reality is we won’t need it for an extremely long time, so why would anyone do more than proof of concept? 4) still on-net easily pays for itself energy-wise. Thinking otherwise usually shows you do not appreciate just how energy dense uranium is. Belly aching that existing reserves are small, well duh. Demand is small. No one pays massive amounts of money to “prove” reserves when demand is small just to win an Internet argument. But uranium and thorium themselves are super common and in fact there’s more energy in fissionables in a random chunk of the Earth’s crust than there is thermal energy in a chunk of coal. The only thing depressing about what you said is that so many people buy into such poor logic. Look, I’m not a nuclear bro. We will primarily decarbonize with renewables. But so many of these anti-nuclear arguments are terrible.

dahart 5y ago
Your news article link appears to state that China hopes to build a thorium reactor. It doesn’t seem say one is up and running, does it, or did I miss something?
- dodobirdlord 5y ago
  Wikipedia indicates that some test reactors are currently operational, and there are construction projects underway for commercial reactors. The article notes that in 1999 there were 0 operating thorium reactors anywhere on earth, but that no longer seems to be true. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
- jabl 5y ago
  Be as it may, a thorium reactor is in no way particularly special compared to a uranium reactor [1]. As humankind is able to make uranium reactors work, we can make thorium reactors work. Just like with seawater extraction of uranium, there's no particular hurry to commercialize the technology since uranium so far is plentiful and cheap. [1] There is the issue that thorium by itself is not fissile, so it's a breeding fuel cycle similar to the U-Pu breeding cycle with reprocessing etc. Which, again, hasn't been developed as quickly as hoped many decades ago, as the simple once-through uranium cycle has been cheaper and good enough.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  They’ve built one and plan to switch it on now, this month, and may have done so already. But the list of nuclear reactors that have used thorium as at least part of their fuel is surprisingly long. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle#List_of_thorium-fueled_reactors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle#List_of_tho... I generally discount arguments that are in the form of: “we cannot commercialize this because it has not yet been commercialized.” But do thorium fueled reactors exist? Absolutely.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
throwaway5752 5y ago
I have followed the nuclear for more than 3 decades and invested in junior E&P for more than a decade. Everyone, understandably, hopes for something to drop in and save us from the situation we're in with the climate and energy intensity. Nuclear will be a part of it, but everything I said in my post was true like it or not. Plans for a thorium reactor do not amount to a commercial thorium reactor. Also, 5 grams is useless and I do discount it - the seawater extraction tech is trivial, but doing it at scale and positive net energy is not. Everything I said can change. But let's not fool ourselves about the current state of tech. Part of the frustration is the "fake it til you make it" culture in tech being a terrible fit for nuclear, which requires thinking in centuries for site placement, staffing, and waste management.
- tim333 5y ago
  Yeah but reserves != resources so your problem isn't a real one.
  - throwaway5752 5y ago
    1P, 2P, and 3P reserve categories are something I'm quite familiar with and I have broadly invested in a long term increase in UO2 prices. Uranium is a fascinating basic material, and there are several ways to extract it. You have higher grade ore deposits that are directly mined. There are in situ leaching techniques, also. Increases in prices will make new techniques economically viable and 2P+ reserves will be reclassified to 1P. "My problem" is that there is a physical cap on this with fuel extraction: EROI. A trillion dollars a pound for ore will not matter if it takes more energy to recovery a resource than it takes to produce it. The seawater recovery part of this story is dubious at best at the recovery factors used in their calculations.
ortusdux 5y ago
Re: #3 & 4, I've toured that lab and seen that experiment in person, and it is extremely promising. Their original tests we able to produce yellowcake uranium at roughly 2x market rate, which is amazing for a domestic source. They are now working on scaling and unique applications to bring the price even lower. I believe that they are looking at post filtering desalination brine. The process extracts many heavy metals, which can make make for good alternate revenue streams, further decreasing the price.
- throwaway5752 5y ago
  The Stanford group? That's great news on the production prices. I still doubt the extraction rate assumptions in the articles, but I think renewables plus scaled down nuclear will be the path forward.

blendergeek 5y ago

> 1) there are no working thorium reactors This will likely soon change. > 2) breeder reactors are hazardous France seems to use them safely. > 3) uranium seawater extraction doesn't exist It will once we use breeder reactors. The reason seawater extraction doesn't exist is that it isn't economical. With breeder reactors, the calculus would change. > 4) if uranium seawater extraction were made to work it would use enormous amounts of energy not reflected in this. It would produce significantly more than it consumes.

hannob 5y ago
> This will likely soon change. It's almost like nuclear fusion, just with much smaller numbers. Thorium reactors are always just a few years away - since the late 1980s.
- p_l 5y ago
  No, they were a thing in 1950s-1960s. Things moved in other directions, especially with how USA pretty much stopped approving any design other than LWR and PWR variants where Thorium fuel cycle didn't offer much (there were non-molten salt thorium reactors)
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > It's almost like nuclear fusion, just with much smaller numbers. It is kind of the same. Scientists say that we can make fusion work in ten years given X amount of money. Government says, here's 5% of that amount, how long will it take then? Well, maybe two hundred years. Fifty years later people say, why no fusion?

api 5y ago

(1) is like the old argument against reusable rocket boosters: there are none, so it's not possible. The US ran a thorium reactor decades ago experimentally. The "if it hasn't flown it can't fly" mentality that Elon cited in aerospace is actually pervasive across Western thought in regard to larger scale or more challenging capital intensive physical (as opposed to information) technologies. (Elon is not superhuman. He is only a "good" engineer and probably not a great manager. His superpower is rejecting conservatism and actually doing things.) (2) is true for current generation uranium breeders that use ill-tempered working reagents like liquid sodium. The phrase "liquid sodium" combined with "power reactor" makes me want to buy a good pair of running shoes, as Derek Lowe of "Things I Won't Work With" fame might say. Thorium is a better idea. Those molten salts are nasty but they tend to stay in one place and do not spontaneously ignite when exposed to oxygen or water. (3) true, but rendered less important due to (1). Thorium is much more abundant than uranium. (4) also true, but probably not relevant. I think the seawater thing is a canard. Lithium for batteries from brine on the other hand is feasible, though maybe not economical given that there are vast easier to get reserves of lithium. That being said, I think the renewables + batteries path looks much easier to deploy given other issues such as politics, up front capital requirements, and gradual scalability. Also AFAIK a fully nuclear grid (with no fossil peakers) would require grid scale power storage to load level since nuclear is slow at load following, but not as much storage capacity as a fully renewable grid since you don't have to bridge long periods with no sun or wind.

p_l 5y ago
2) Thorium molten salts are heavy on fluoride, so... ;) Thing is, we don't need to use either in breeder reactors - SVBR is a proof, although Bismuth production is a problem - but that's what pure lead version is for.
- api 5y ago
  Fluoride is better behaved when it's paired with a good BFF as it is in a salt. Free fluoride should invoke the "run away!" clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

kohlerm 5y ago

Yes, those assumptions are very optimistic. If at all it would take to long to develop all this technology before it is too late.

p_l 5y ago

1) Because we got rid of them for being annoying 2) Untrue. There are even breeder reactors with passive safety and very nice safety records, waylaid only by funding and partially by geopolitics (ok, coolant is expensive as hell, but that's because we don't mine enough bismuth) 3 & 4) Won't cover, not my area The thing is, where are you picking up ridiculous 6 years amount? Because it sounds like very, very cherry-picked value.

throwaway5752 5y ago
"The thing is, where are you picking up ridiculous 6 years amount? Because it sounds like very, very cherry-picked value." That's directly from the linked article, except I rounded 5.7 years up to 6.
jabl 5y ago
> There are even breeder reactors with passive safety and very nice safety records, waylaid only by funding and partially by geopolitics (ok, coolant is expensive as hell, but that's because we don't mine enough bismuth) Reactors cooled with lead-bismuth eutectic have a somewhat nasty problem of polonium production. To the extent we'll see lead-cooled reactors I'm more hopeful about plain lead. It has a higher melting temperature yes, but it seems workable. There are a couple of promising efforts in this direction.
- p_l 5y ago
  The polonium production due to short half-life of the specific isotope was found to actually increase safety, as it made detection of leaks easier (root cause was fixed and isn't present in later models) and cleanup easier as well (minute amounts of polonium that were easy to spot and cleanup). Most importantly, it undergoes alpha decay, which makes shielding easy.

yholio 5y ago

If efficient, safe and low cost fast breeders become available, you don't need thorium or sea extraction. Just transmute the vast quantities of U238 that have been stockpiled as depleted uranium into fissionable Plutonium 239 and run reactors on that for decades. Large nations have about one milion tons of depleted Uranium, in oxide or hexaflouride form, that's about 1 trillion megawatt-days, enough for 150 years of current energy consumption, or decades of geometric increases of energy use. Only then we need to go after existing proven mineral reserves, and only after that, maybe at the turn of the 22nd century, we would need to ponder sea water extraction.

ortusdux 5y ago

Re: 3) & 4), Uranium seawater extraction does exist, and it is cheap, easy, and requires very little energy. I toured PNNL and viewed their uranium extraction project in person. It utilizes thin, high surface area fibers of plastic impregnated with a molecule that binds uranium and other heavy metals. A rinse with a dilute acid (acetic, citric, etc) releases the metals. The substrate can then be reused indefinitely. The deployed system is fully passive - basically fake floating kelp beds, anchored to the sea floor, deployed in high current areas. They would be hauled in every 3 months or so, rinsed off on the boat, and then redeployed. Everything could be done using standard bivalve farming methods, but with lower impact on the environment. They are now looking at a way to use the same material to post-filter desalination brine. https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514 https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCF3k_EbGiU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCF3k_EbGiU