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Thorium Reactors
- TruthElixirX 15y agoSame Thorium hype as usual.
- nazgulnarsil 15y agounlike the vast majority of things, thorium deserves all the hype it gets.
- BenSS 15y agoThis is NOT NEW. The basic reaction chain has been well understood for decades. There are multiple issues to be solved with actually setting up a reactor to deliver power that the article doesn't even consider. Hype.
- forrestthewoods 15y agoIs there a good resource on the topic? I've read countless hype articles but nothing good on the issues that need to be solved for it to actually happen.
- ScotterC 15y agoIt's already been done. Mass production of this type of reactor wasn't pursued for various political reasons mainly concerning the alternate path of a sodium-cooled reactor instead. 1962: September 16. The Indian Point-1 nuclear reactor begins operating at Buchanan, New York. Designed and built by Babcock and Wilcox for Consolidated Edison, it is a pressurized water reactor designed to produce 275 MW of electricity. Unlike other pressurized-water reactors, the Indian Point-1 reactor uses highly-enriched uranium as a fuel and thorium as a fertile material. This combination has a superior conversion ratio in a thermal neutron spectrum than low-enrichment uranium (more thorium is bred to uranium-233 than uranium-238 is bred to plutonium-239). The uranium-233 generated in the Indian Point reactor is later processed into a tetrafluoride and used to fuel the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment.(MSRE) The MSRE program then successfully operated a reactor with a thorium blanket around the U-233 for the equivalent of an 18 month cycle (same as current reactors.
- latch 15y agoBack in the day one of the reasons Uranium was picked was specifically because it resulted in weapon's grade by-products. You got energy + you could build nuclear stockpiles. Also, I don't think this article does justice to just how far ahead India and China are in this field. And all that isn't even accounting of the arcane crystals!
- malbs 15y ago"And all that isn't even accounting of the arcane crystals!" well played, sir!
- jacques_chester 15y agoIt's actually a great example of path dependency. After the Manhattan Project, more was known about uranium than any other fissile material. It was known how to make it react and how to manufacture it in industrial quantities. From there it was a short step to naval reactors, and for the lessons of naval reactor design to disseminate into civil use.
- iwwr 15y agoYou can actually build a bomb out of thorium.
- Bud 15y agoLeave to Forbes to write a massively hyped headline, and then deliver NO useful information whatsoever on the topic at hand. I feel like I knew more about thorium's potential BEFORE reading this. Is it just me, or is Forbes doing this a lot lately?
- _delirium 15y agoSomewhere around 2009 or so it feels like they made the switch from a highbrow Economist-style strategy, targeting upper-income discerning readers of the print magazine, to a linkbait AOL-style strategy, making vaguely provocative claims about economics.
- mlinksva 15y agoI thought they made that switch somewhere around 1996-2000 when Steve Forbes ran for U.S. president (and I still read the paper edition fairly regularly). I haven't read it since, though they do have at least one good blogger these days (who I subscribe to via their personal site's RSS feed, which they've redirected to their Forbes RSS feed; I still don't visit the site).
- cdjarrell 15y agoForbes has a good site, the bottom feels a bit pop-culturish but overall some interesting information
- marze 15y agoThe news industry and the PR industry are about equal in size. Articles like this shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with that fact. Nuclear power is the future. Ideally, the reactor should be a long ways from any valuable real estate, like at least 90,000,000 miles. Fortunately, recievers that receive beamed power from the big fusion reactor are dropping in price at a rate of 30% per year. That fact makes VC funding of thorium reactor technology problematic.
- ScotterC 15y agoMaking them cheaper won't improve their efficiency
- marze 15y agoThe only efficiency metric that matters is $ per generated watt. And that figure is dropping like a stone.
- ScotterC 15y agoyes, but it's easy to miss external costs of power sources like solar such as the land involved and maintenance (i.e. cleaning the panels to eek out that extra 10%). Density of power is what matters in the long run. We need a solution that produces the most power for the given space it occupies. Hence, it's not a question of 'if' we use fission, it's a question of 'when'.
- InclinedPlane 15y agoThis is not entirely true. If solar were super cheap and battery technology were also super cheap and significantly improved from what we have today then distributed solar power (on rooftops, for example) could be feasible. But that's a lot of ifs.
- ScotterC 15y agoAs I mentioned in another comment, if battery technology is super cheap then it benefits all power generation, even coal, because it would marginalize the fluctuating operating costs. Nuclear would actually be perfect because current nuclear reactors are kind of like diesel engines, they thrive when operating at a steady, ongoing power so we could fill up batteries all day and night.
- justatdotin 15y agoreminds me of the good advice, that: maybe we should learn to appropriately manage fire in the landscape, before we start messing with nuclear fission. you can't have your yellowcake and eat it too : if the propeller heads want to feed uranium-cycle waste to thorium reactors, there's an implicit WMD risk, both the risk of diversion for weapons production as well as providing a rationale for the ongoing operation of dual-use enrichment and reprocessing plants. Thorium fuelled reactors could also be used to irradiate uranium to produce weapon grade plutonium. And the use of thorium as a nuclear fuel alone doesn't solve the WMD proliferation problem. Irradiation of thorium indirectly produces uranium-233, a fissile material which can be used in nuclear weapons. The US has successfully tested weapons using uranium-233. France is suspected of it. India's thorium program prolly has a WMD component - given they refuse to allow IAEA safeguards to apply. but the worst threat of the thorium reactors is that we'll be fooled into judging the real threats and impacts currently posed by the uranium fuel cycle on the ambitious standards promised by the thorium advocates. The nuclear industry has been over-promising and under-performing for too long - we can't afford to allow their promises for tomorrow to deter focus from today's bitter realities.
- sliverstorm 15y agoYou're honestly suggesting we abandon one of the most promising sources of fuel in history because you're afraid someone might be able to weaponize it? I got news for ya bud. There's weapons everywhere, and governments have the resources to make them, thorium reactor or not. Extremists have the drive to source them, thorium or not. Hell, Brevik proved that. Should we ban fertilizer too?
- justatdotin 15y agonot quite what I said; no 'might be able to' about it. As I described, the nexus between fission power (including thorium) and nuclear WMD is well defined. There's enough examples of thorium-based nuclear WMDs, and the perversion of civilian power programs to further nuclear weapons programs, to justify extreme caution. No, I'm not aware of fertilizer WMDs that leave behind sacrifice zones of contaminated wastelands.
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- ghostwords 15y ago"Betteridge's Law of Headlines is an adage that states, "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines
- stcredzero 15y agoNewsflash: Can headlines ending in a question mark be answered with "no?"
- phasetransition 15y ago--Providing HN the details about Thorium that the Forbes article lacks-- tl;dr - Read Dr. Alvin Weinberg's book from the late 1990s. Amazon link here: http://www.amazon.com/First-Nuclear-Era-Times-Technological/dp/1563963582/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1315794920&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/First-Nuclear-Era-Times-Technological/... -Background- I discovered liquid fueled nuclear reactors, and the thorium subset thereof, as a consequence of the chemistry minor I undertook in grad school at Georgia Tech (my background is materials engineering). One of the classes I took was taught by Dr. Jiri Janata, and it was functionally a class in analytical radiochemistry. Dr. Janata's expertise is in chemical sensors, and he worked for an number of years at Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL) on methods to detect the spread of radiation in the environment. Dr. Janata exposed our class to the liquid fueled reactors. -LFR- To read in Dr. Weinberg's book, Oak Ridge was left out in the cold when it came to reactor design. This despite the fact that Weinberg and Eugene Wigner wrote "The Physical Theory of Neutron Reactors," as the definitive first text on reactor physics. Wigner and Weinberg dreamed up many dozens of potential power reactor design concepts in the 40s. Oak Ridge National Lab managed to procure funding to pursue reactors that might power airplanes. Weinberg is candid about how the concept of nuclear powered flight was nearly fiction, but any grant in a storm! Any grant in a storm is still alive and well, btw. Out of that work came the liquid fueled reactors, of which thorium could be one of the fuels. The liquids were composed of multi-component molten halide salt solutions that had some partial solubility for certain radionuclide salts. Much of the molten salt chemistry details we have today come as consequence of the research into their behavior from Oak Ridge. Liquid fuels for reactors have many advantages: 1. They operate at atmospheric pressure (1 atm), so there's no pressure vessel to worry about bursting in an accident. 2. Molten salts have very little vapor pressure, and therefore don't volatilize as readily. 3. The molten salts allow very high operational temperatures for better Carnot efficiency, in part because of 2. 4. The systems is single phase, liquid only. This is in contrast to 2-phase behavior of something like BWR reactors 5. Waste fission products (e.g. iodine) can be scrubbed from the molten fuel during operation. The fuel composition can be monitored and changed as needed during operation. 6. Neutron reflectors are needed to obtain criticality in the system. The molten salt with nuclear material in it is subcritical by nature. For a liquid fuel reactor, there is no loss of coolant accident, as the fuel is in the working fluid. The amount of decay heat from fission products remaining in the fuel can be lower if there would be scrubbing in place. As the world sees now, decay heat is the tiger in the room for reactor safety. -Brief Accident Scenario- If an accident occurs, and power is lost, the molten fuel drains back into a core sump vessel which then is cooled to deal with the decay heat. Because the fuel is dispersed, and there are no high pressures to deal with, passive cooling of the decay heat in the molten fuel sump is greatly simplified. Further, natural convection can be stimulated in the sump to help circulate the fuel and remove heat. -Follow Up(?)- There are some downsides, of course, but this is already crazy long. If the OP is still around in the morning on the East Coast, I'll discuss some of the negatives in another comment. -phil
- merraksh 15y agoSee also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2723675 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2723675 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1009869 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1009869 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1763472 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1763472
- tambourine_man 15y ago“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…” A few hundred years is a helluvalot. It may all in all be better than fossil, but definitively not too good to be true.
- ScotterC 15y agoIt's all context. Nuclear waste (as in from commercial plants) has yet to kill anyone in the U.S. and it decays to lead eventually. However, mercury, which never decays, is a byproduct of many processes (not to mention coal burning) and kills/maims many.
- jff 15y agoI'd gladly trade an uninhabited part of Nevada for cheap, safe, non-polluting power.
- aasarava 15y agoThe concept of Thorium-fueled reactors is not new. In 2005, I wrote an article for Wired News about some of the market issues impeding Thorium adoption. TLDR, at the end of the day, it seems the cost is too high when compared to uranium. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/07/68045 http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/07/68045
- tokenadult 15y agopg has thought about this before: http://www.paulgraham.com/ladder.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ladder.html "After all, projects within big companies were always getting cancelled as a result of arbitrary decisions from higher up. My father's entire industry (breeder reactors) disappeared that way." My comment is that any Baby Boomer who read about physics as a kid (like me) heard about thorium DECADES ago, and is amazed that the blog writer has apparently never heard of anything that was written about before he was born.
- dmfdmf 15y agoMaybe thorium is better, maybe it isn't but its probably too late now... first mover advantage and all that with light water U235 enriched or MOX fueled reactors. Moreover, I'd discount any claims to thorium, pebble bed, etc being safer because we have actual 50+ years of operational experience with light water reactors which swamps any marginal technical advantages wrt safety. Operational experience is a major unknown for new designs and a real factor in safety for current designs. The current designs are safe enough, we need to start building reactors now, not 20 years from now.
- unwind 15y agoQuite surprising to see a columnist/article in Forbes use "b-f-d", at least to me. Isn't language like that ... kind of frowned upon, by typical mainstream media in the US? Not saying I was offended, at all, just thought it was interesting.
- niels_bom 15y agoBill Gates gave a talk on Thorium reactors at TED last year. http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html
- niels_bom 15y agoScanning the video again: I'm not entirely sure if Gates is referring to Thorium reactors..