8 ms·

If I am correctly informed (would love to hear from people who are involved in the project), this project is being done in spite of the Norwegian government's s

by marvin 14y ago

If I am correctly informed (would love to hear from people who are involved in the project), this project is being done in spite of the Norwegian government's stance on nuclear energy. Thor Energy and its associated researchers have tried to stir up support for thorium reserach for years now, but there has been very little support and large amount of uninformed opposition ("nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad"). A number of physicists, notably Egil Lillestøl at the University of Bergen, have talked to official figures about this for a long time about this without getting any kind of traction. Thorium energy seems to be a very promising candidate for safe, clean and cheap next-generation nuclear power. If these researchers manage to develop something without official support, it would be impressive indeed. That the Norwegian government isn't willing to support clean energy research is really quite baffling, given that the energy sector is hands-down the largest contributor to the Norwegian economy. And Norway has the world's second-largest known thorium reserves. For all our supposed good policies, we are still subject to mob rule and completely uninformed detractors.

konstruktor 14y ago
Thanks for, without giving actual examples, telling us that the people opposing nuclear are uninformed and unable to form complete sentences. Without this enlightened information one might have listened to them and judged them based on their arguments. Edit: spelling
- ThomPete 14y ago
  Perhaps you could introduce some arguments for this opposition instead of just do what you complain about.
barry-cotter 14y ago
For all our supposed good policies, we are still subject to mob rule and completely uninformed detractors. To democracy! All hail the will of the people!
jpdoctor 14y ago
> Thorium energy seems to be a very promising candidate for safe, clean Only for some definitions of clean. Forget the radiation, Thorium's toxicity profile is not pretty. Hell, the damn thing is pyrophoric. Hats off to the engineers if they can make a more sensible reactor out of it.
- DennisP 14y ago
  But you need only small amounts of it. In a LFTR, one ton of thorium, about the size of a beach ball, is sufficient fuel for a one-gigawatt reactor to run for a year. Compare that to the enormous quantities of coal ash we produce every day. It's hard to imagine chemical toxicity being a major problem. People used to make lamps out of the stuff. In fact, given that thorium is a byproduct of rare earth mines, and currently considered a hazardous waste, it'd be nice to have something to do with it.
  - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
    People in southern Utah used to go climb the buttes to get a better view of the fireballs from the Nevada nuclear bomb tests. Not sure I'd use what people used to do as a standard to measure against.
    - DennisP 14y ago
      I'm just saying, if people can survive thorium lamps, we can probably manage to use modest amounts of thorium in much more controlled circumstances without undue difficulty.
  - metatation 14y ago
    Great Scott! That's almost enough to power a flux capacitor.
  - three14 14y ago
    I was surprised about "about the size of a beach ball". Wikipedia says thorium is 11.7 g per cubic centimeter, so the one ton beach ball works out to a diameter of roughly 55 cm if my math is right, which is a reasonable beach ball. It turns out my intuitions aren't much use with metal beach balls.
polshaw 14y ago
>nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad Nuclear is not the panacea almost every 'informed' internet citizen thinks it is. It is EXPENSIVE. Wind and hydro power are already cheaper, for example. On top of that, whilst any new nuclear power plant will take many years to produce, costs for renewables continue to fall, and, it obviously has a huge number of risks (not just 'meltdown' but costs, security, long-term storage etc). Off the top of my head i think a wind farm is also more energy dense than a nuclear power plant, given all the space required around it. That is not to say it is 'baaad' because it does have some uses; eg it can provide a baseline power. Basically, we need many different sources, but there are (more?) informed people who oppose nuclear for very good reasons. OTOH thorium could be great, but it has not been proven commercially yet. We'll see what happens but i remain sceptical until proven otherwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_cost_of_electricity_generated_by_different_sources#Estimates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_cost_of_electricity_g...
- DennisP 14y ago
  The cost of power from nuclear is quite competitive. Capital costs are high but, like renewables, amortized over a long lifetime with low operational costs. Your wiki link puts nuclear cheaper than solar or offshore wind, and barely more expensive than onshore wind. Moving to small modular reactors, as many outfits are trying to do, will lower the required investment and time to production. Liquid thorium or fast uranium would largely eliminate long-term storage problem...in fact, we'd eliminate the long-lived wastes we have right now. (In the meantime we should keep wastes in a form we can use for fuel later.) Renewables are great as far as they go, but there are only so many places you can build a good dam, and wind needs either a large oversupply, an economical energy storage system (which, other than the limited hydro, doesn't exist), a drastically souped-up and expensive power grid, or possibly all three. You don't have to worry about that if you're just adding power on the margins, but you do if you want to run civilization carbon-free. Taking all that into account, it's questionable whether wind would really be cheaper, especially as we're forced to expand into less suitable locations.
- marvin 14y ago
  That would be a rational, well-informed counterargument against traditional nuclear power plants. It is not a counterargument against seed-level funding for R&D towards a completely new reactor technology, which has different economic and safety characteristics. Accelerator-based reactors, which are what have been proposed for publically-sponsored research in Norway, are a completely different beast. Yet they are treated as if it was a proposal to build 1050s Soviet-style reactors. I am not trying to be hostile here, but you are making the exact same assumptions and fallacies as most of the Norwegian detractors to thorium reactor research. Although the criticism I was referring to in my post was rather the type you most commonly see: Uninformed dismissals of the type "We're still feeling the effects of Chernobyl", "Nuclear reactors are inherently unsafe" and "Nuclear waste cannot be handled in a safe way". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcritical_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcritical_reactor http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf35.html http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf35.html Traditional counterarguments to nuclear energy should not be enough to dismiss using a couple of million a year to look into promising, alternate solutions.
emiliobumachar 14y ago
Being cynical, perhaps the fact they're swimming in oil makes them disintersted as a nation in developing alternative energy.
- elux 14y ago
  "Norwegian crude oil production peaked in 2001 and as of 2012 it has declined about 50% from the peak. This fact has been overshadowed by the oil price growth in recent years." http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9166 http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9166
- judofyr 14y ago
  95% of the power generated in Norway comes from hydropower[1] so we already have a sustainable and green power source. I think it's more likely that the government sees power generation in Norway as a "solved" problem, and wants to be careful about introducing nuclear power. The general opinion is basically "nuclear is dangerous!", and no-one wants to be the first politician to support it. [1]: Source: http://www.ssb.no/energi/ http://www.ssb.no/energi/ (Norwegian site)
- snom380 14y ago
  Actually, that's not being cynical. A lot of engineering brainpower goes to the oil industry since it is so big. Almost any engineering company has oil and gas companies as their biggest customers. In comparison, hydroelectric is mainly maintenance and upgrades since most of the waterfalls have been built out.
  - marvin 14y ago
    Good point. The Norwegian oil companies are, in fact, swimming in money (mainly due to high oil prices), but getting oil up from the North Sea in 2012 is vastly more complex than drilling a hole in the ground and attaching a hose to it. There are lots of incredibly smart and dedicated people working in these companies.
- chromaticorb 14y ago
  No, no, theyre fully aware of that. The people behind this are the Halden Reactor Project, they already operate this small nuclear reactor that was (don't know if it still is) used to power a paper mill. The whole thing is just for some clout in world research. Leave it to the Norwegians! They're a wonderful bunch of people, I had the chance to study some safety in software engineering principles with them, about 6 months ago. I had no idea they were planning to implement Thorium. They do a huge bunch of research in Human Factors, and half of the team basically hack about with Kinects as their job designing AR solutions rehearsing dangerous nuclear sites/oil rigs
mtgx 14y ago
Wasn't uranium-based nuclear energy supposed to be very cheap, too, and then it turned out it wasn't that cheap? I worry the same will happen with thorium. Also how much safer is it? Can it be set-up just a few KM outside a city? Is there any dangerous waste to deposit at all? I do think that if we are to continue research in nuclear energy it should be based on Thorium, rather than uranium, but in the same time, I would much rather have the focus of the energy industry be solar energy right now. I hope countries in the future are powered 70-80% by solar, and 20-30% by other sources like nuclear energy (at least until we figure out how to store solar energy cheaply for night use), than the other way around. And we can only get there fast if we have the industry's almost complete focus on solar energy, and have them invest billions into researching it and lowering the cost of solar panels.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  Power consumption only drops to about 50% of the daytime peak at night[1]. Unless you have somewhere to store that solar, you have to plan on "other sources" producing at least 50%, and more likely significantly more. I consider Utah to be a pretty sunny place, but it is still cloudy nearly a third of the year[2]. Sure, you can couple wind and solar, but that still doesn't help when we get a valley fog inversion for most of January that reduces sunlight to 30% of already short days and no wind is blowing anywhere nearby. Utah doesn't really have the spare water capacity to use it as a potential energy store, either. The point being that, as great as renewables are, without a way to cheaply store vast amounts of renewable energy or a way to shuffle energy from great distances, it isn't going to work on its own. We need a solid baseline, which, of course, is coal today, but I'd much rather keep looking for better nuclear. There's a lot of energy in those bonds; I have a great deal of confidence we can find a way to leverage it without all of the nasty side-effect. We just need to get past the knee-jerk reaction of "nuclear is bad" and to a better place of "today's nuclear leaves a lot to be desired, but it doesn't mean tomorrow's will"[3]. 1. http://www.mpoweruk.com/electricity_demand.htm http://www.mpoweruk.com/electricity_demand.htm 2. http://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Utah/sunshine-by-month.php http://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Utah/sunshine-by-month... 3. http://www.quaker.org/fep/CES1.html http://www.quaker.org/fep/CES1.html - You can see that Nuclear is far less deadly than coal, but, when things go wrong, it costs a whole lot more than coal.
Ras_ 14y ago
Norway might not support, but Finland is majority owner of Fortum (51%), which the news article states as a partner. So governments aren't completely out of the picture. Fortum actually has slightly more nuclear power production in Sweden than in Finland. But your sentiment rings true, indeed only Finland is pro-nuclear in this common energy market (NASDAQ OMX Commodities Europe, previously Nord Pool).

by marvin 14y ago

konstruktor 14y ago

Thanks for, without giving actual examples, telling us that the people opposing nuclear are uninformed and unable to form complete sentences. Without this enlightened information one might have listened to them and judged them based on their arguments. Edit: spelling

ThomPete 14y ago
Perhaps you could introduce some arguments for this opposition instead of just do what you complain about.

barry-cotter 14y ago

For all our supposed good policies, we are still subject to mob rule and completely uninformed detractors. To democracy! All hail the will of the people!

jpdoctor 14y ago

> Thorium energy seems to be a very promising candidate for safe, clean Only for some definitions of clean. Forget the radiation, Thorium's toxicity profile is not pretty. Hell, the damn thing is pyrophoric. Hats off to the engineers if they can make a more sensible reactor out of it.

DennisP 14y ago
But you need only small amounts of it. In a LFTR, one ton of thorium, about the size of a beach ball, is sufficient fuel for a one-gigawatt reactor to run for a year. Compare that to the enormous quantities of coal ash we produce every day. It's hard to imagine chemical toxicity being a major problem. People used to make lamps out of the stuff. In fact, given that thorium is a byproduct of rare earth mines, and currently considered a hazardous waste, it'd be nice to have something to do with it.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  People in southern Utah used to go climb the buttes to get a better view of the fireballs from the Nevada nuclear bomb tests. Not sure I'd use what people used to do as a standard to measure against.
  - DennisP 14y ago
    I'm just saying, if people can survive thorium lamps, we can probably manage to use modest amounts of thorium in much more controlled circumstances without undue difficulty.
- metatation 14y ago
  Great Scott! That's almost enough to power a flux capacitor.
- three14 14y ago
  I was surprised about "about the size of a beach ball". Wikipedia says thorium is 11.7 g per cubic centimeter, so the one ton beach ball works out to a diameter of roughly 55 cm if my math is right, which is a reasonable beach ball. It turns out my intuitions aren't much use with metal beach balls.

polshaw 14y ago

>nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad Nuclear is not the panacea almost every 'informed' internet citizen thinks it is. It is EXPENSIVE. Wind and hydro power are already cheaper, for example. On top of that, whilst any new nuclear power plant will take many years to produce, costs for renewables continue to fall, and, it obviously has a huge number of risks (not just 'meltdown' but costs, security, long-term storage etc). Off the top of my head i think a wind farm is also more energy dense than a nuclear power plant, given all the space required around it. That is not to say it is 'baaad' because it does have some uses; eg it can provide a baseline power. Basically, we need many different sources, but there are (more?) informed people who oppose nuclear for very good reasons. OTOH thorium could be great, but it has not been proven commercially yet. We'll see what happens but i remain sceptical until proven otherwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_cost_of_electricity_generated_by_different_sources#Estimates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_cost_of_electricity_g...

DennisP 14y ago
The cost of power from nuclear is quite competitive. Capital costs are high but, like renewables, amortized over a long lifetime with low operational costs. Your wiki link puts nuclear cheaper than solar or offshore wind, and barely more expensive than onshore wind. Moving to small modular reactors, as many outfits are trying to do, will lower the required investment and time to production. Liquid thorium or fast uranium would largely eliminate long-term storage problem...in fact, we'd eliminate the long-lived wastes we have right now. (In the meantime we should keep wastes in a form we can use for fuel later.) Renewables are great as far as they go, but there are only so many places you can build a good dam, and wind needs either a large oversupply, an economical energy storage system (which, other than the limited hydro, doesn't exist), a drastically souped-up and expensive power grid, or possibly all three. You don't have to worry about that if you're just adding power on the margins, but you do if you want to run civilization carbon-free. Taking all that into account, it's questionable whether wind would really be cheaper, especially as we're forced to expand into less suitable locations.
marvin 14y ago
That would be a rational, well-informed counterargument against traditional nuclear power plants. It is not a counterargument against seed-level funding for R&D towards a completely new reactor technology, which has different economic and safety characteristics. Accelerator-based reactors, which are what have been proposed for publically-sponsored research in Norway, are a completely different beast. Yet they are treated as if it was a proposal to build 1050s Soviet-style reactors. I am not trying to be hostile here, but you are making the exact same assumptions and fallacies as most of the Norwegian detractors to thorium reactor research. Although the criticism I was referring to in my post was rather the type you most commonly see: Uninformed dismissals of the type "We're still feeling the effects of Chernobyl", "Nuclear reactors are inherently unsafe" and "Nuclear waste cannot be handled in a safe way". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcritical_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcritical_reactor http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf35.html http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf35.html Traditional counterarguments to nuclear energy should not be enough to dismiss using a couple of million a year to look into promising, alternate solutions.

emiliobumachar 14y ago

Being cynical, perhaps the fact they're swimming in oil makes them disintersted as a nation in developing alternative energy.

elux 14y ago
"Norwegian crude oil production peaked in 2001 and as of 2012 it has declined about 50% from the peak. This fact has been overshadowed by the oil price growth in recent years." http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9166 http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9166
judofyr 14y ago
95% of the power generated in Norway comes from hydropower[1] so we already have a sustainable and green power source. I think it's more likely that the government sees power generation in Norway as a "solved" problem, and wants to be careful about introducing nuclear power. The general opinion is basically "nuclear is dangerous!", and no-one wants to be the first politician to support it. [1]: Source: http://www.ssb.no/energi/ http://www.ssb.no/energi/ (Norwegian site)
snom380 14y ago
Actually, that's not being cynical. A lot of engineering brainpower goes to the oil industry since it is so big. Almost any engineering company has oil and gas companies as their biggest customers. In comparison, hydroelectric is mainly maintenance and upgrades since most of the waterfalls have been built out.
- marvin 14y ago
  Good point. The Norwegian oil companies are, in fact, swimming in money (mainly due to high oil prices), but getting oil up from the North Sea in 2012 is vastly more complex than drilling a hole in the ground and attaching a hose to it. There are lots of incredibly smart and dedicated people working in these companies.
chromaticorb 14y ago
No, no, theyre fully aware of that. The people behind this are the Halden Reactor Project, they already operate this small nuclear reactor that was (don't know if it still is) used to power a paper mill. The whole thing is just for some clout in world research. Leave it to the Norwegians! They're a wonderful bunch of people, I had the chance to study some safety in software engineering principles with them, about 6 months ago. I had no idea they were planning to implement Thorium. They do a huge bunch of research in Human Factors, and half of the team basically hack about with Kinects as their job designing AR solutions rehearsing dangerous nuclear sites/oil rigs

mtgx 14y ago

Wasn't uranium-based nuclear energy supposed to be very cheap, too, and then it turned out it wasn't that cheap? I worry the same will happen with thorium. Also how much safer is it? Can it be set-up just a few KM outside a city? Is there any dangerous waste to deposit at all? I do think that if we are to continue research in nuclear energy it should be based on Thorium, rather than uranium, but in the same time, I would much rather have the focus of the energy industry be solar energy right now. I hope countries in the future are powered 70-80% by solar, and 20-30% by other sources like nuclear energy (at least until we figure out how to store solar energy cheaply for night use), than the other way around. And we can only get there fast if we have the industry's almost complete focus on solar energy, and have them invest billions into researching it and lowering the cost of solar panels.

SoftwareMaven 14y ago
Power consumption only drops to about 50% of the daytime peak at night[1]. Unless you have somewhere to store that solar, you have to plan on "other sources" producing at least 50%, and more likely significantly more. I consider Utah to be a pretty sunny place, but it is still cloudy nearly a third of the year[2]. Sure, you can couple wind and solar, but that still doesn't help when we get a valley fog inversion for most of January that reduces sunlight to 30% of already short days and no wind is blowing anywhere nearby. Utah doesn't really have the spare water capacity to use it as a potential energy store, either. The point being that, as great as renewables are, without a way to cheaply store vast amounts of renewable energy or a way to shuffle energy from great distances, it isn't going to work on its own. We need a solid baseline, which, of course, is coal today, but I'd much rather keep looking for better nuclear. There's a lot of energy in those bonds; I have a great deal of confidence we can find a way to leverage it without all of the nasty side-effect. We just need to get past the knee-jerk reaction of "nuclear is bad" and to a better place of "today's nuclear leaves a lot to be desired, but it doesn't mean tomorrow's will"[3]. 1. http://www.mpoweruk.com/electricity_demand.htm http://www.mpoweruk.com/electricity_demand.htm 2. http://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Utah/sunshine-by-month.php http://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Utah/sunshine-by-month... 3. http://www.quaker.org/fep/CES1.html http://www.quaker.org/fep/CES1.html - You can see that Nuclear is far less deadly than coal, but, when things go wrong, it costs a whole lot more than coal.

Ras_ 14y ago

Norway might not support, but Finland is majority owner of Fortum (51%), which the news article states as a partner. So governments aren't completely out of the picture. Fortum actually has slightly more nuclear power production in Sweden than in Finland. But your sentiment rings true, indeed only Finland is pro-nuclear in this common energy market (NASDAQ OMX Commodities Europe, previously Nord Pool).