6 ms·

Why is it so obvious to the internet and no one else that thorium is the future of power? What do they (the experts) know that we don't?

by acchow 13y ago

zxcdw 13y ago
The other party benefits from status quo and we don't, that's why. :) ...maybe
ekianjo 13y ago
Thorium is cleaner than Uranium, and does not produce radiaoactive elements that can be used for weapons proliferation (it does not produce plutonium).
tehabe 13y ago
Because Thorium isn't the answer. What I don't get, that people who care about technology and about freedom prefer a centralised technology like fission power over a decentralised technology like solar or wind, in combination with electricity storage. So far nobody has developed a reactor design which is really better or cleaner than what it is currently available. No "new" design could deliver what it has promised. Not even nuclear power was able to deliver what it has promised to begin with. Well, I guess, we both don't get the other side.
- dragonshed 13y ago
  Wind and solar aren't the answer either, or you wouldn't be having this discussion because it would already have been deployed. The economics of all intermittent power sources make it unfeasible; Installing the necessary transmission lines to all those decentralized sites, the energy lost during transmission to and from storage, the costs of storing that much power, and the other inefficiencies of generating the power, make what you propose very unrealistic. Nuclear power is millions of times more energy dense than solar, wind, and fossil fuels. Though the current generation of nuclear reactors have some significant drawbacks, not the least of which is the inefficient use of fuels leading to nuclear wastes, they still generate much cleaner power than the alternatives. Liquid Salt reactor designs based on Thorium take aim specifically at the nuclear fuel and waste problems. Rather than using 1% of the solid fuel like today's reactors, it's possible for liquid salt reactors to use up nearly 99% of the fuel, reducing the waste problem by many orders of magnitude, and would not contain the transuranics that take 10s of thousands of years to decay. It's a good thing that serious people are looking into radically different forms of nuclear power. The current conventional reactors were based off of designs for producing materials for weapons, and it's high time we set that garbage aside and consider other options.
  - justatdotin 13y ago
    "Wind and solar aren't the answer either, or you wouldn't be having this discussion because it would already have been deployed." I accept that these aren't 'solutions' for those who control the old energy industries and related power structures that are still dominant, but the logic on display here is fundamentally broken. Various forms of Solar, and bi-gas, are already deployed where I live. Tidal, geothermal and Wind are all well underway. These renewable energies already emerging around us are our inevitable future. I'm pretty familiar with hearing the nuclear industry over-promise, then watching them under-deliver, so feel free to bump that 99 to 99.9%. Continue fantasizing about radically different forms of nuclear power: I'm gonna remain focussed on the real detriments of the reactors being built (and up for license renewal) right now.
    - jhartmann 13y ago
      Do the math, with advanced nuclear power (stuff we had working in the 60's and 70's, but was crap for bombs and upended the business model of existing nuclear which is roughly equivalent to giving the razor away at cost and making the money on the blades) you can hold all the energy you will ever use in your hand. A metal ball of Thorium is quite safe as well before it is used in a reactor. A molten salt reactor is a chemical plant running at ambient pressure, a much easier thing to deal with then the steam bombs we have currently deployed. They also don't require crazy coolants like liquid sodium (asking for it, a little water and boom) or fast neutrons (eats up anything containing them like swiss cheese.) The biggest problem with the nuclear industry is that they haven't been innovating since the 60's and 70's, not anything else really. Even the crazy steam bombs we have now are many orders of magnitude safer than other energy sources. How many people have died from installing solar panels, because of hydroelectric power, coal pollution, or petrochemical accidents? Let me give you a hint, all of these are WAY more than the number of people who have been affected by Nuclear accidents. Look up deaths per terawatt/hour of all the energy sources and you will see its quite clear that even current nuclear is SO much more safe than anything else, but it has been effectively marketed against by people invested in the status quo. Diffuse energy is economically unviable, it is only being deployed at great cost and things like solar will never solve baseline load. People also don't think about the pollution caused by manufacturing things like solar panels. There are vast areas in China that are full of industrial waste that will not degrade for a very very long time due to solar panel manufacturing. Way nastier stuff the radioactive elements, because anything that is really dangerous has a short half life (iodine is completely gone in weeks), and will clean up rather quickly or it is usable as a fuel (though we in the United States are daft for not reprocessing our fuel like sane countries like France.) Even existing nuclear is way better than anything else, and advanced nuclear is even better still. Nuclear has a marketing problem, not a technical one. If your worried about waste, well you have to realize that the really nasty stuff will all decay in 300-400 years, and anything radioactive left over is something I would be happy to have under my bed as I sleep. Anything radioactive at that point is also really fuel, and advanced nuclear reactors (like a molten salt reactor) will happily burn it up. The whole Yucca mountain crap is just caused by the United States having a silly ban on reprocessing. Another thing people don't mention is that the plutonium extracted from a long running reaction like those used for power is completely unsuitable for making bombs, its really just a bugaboo.
- kyllo 13y ago
  a decentralised technology like solar or wind, in combination with electricity storage. What kind of electricity storage? As I understand it, this is the hard part. We don't really have giant batteries that can efficiently and affordably store the power generated from wind or solar. You can either store it as some form of gravitational potential energy (think like a river dam), or as heat or cold, or as a fuel that you later have to burn. These are all pretty difficult and inefficient in the case of solar and wind power.
- snowwrestler 13y ago
  If we're talking about powering your home, sure, wind and solar are a great answer, combined with improvements in insulation and appliance efficiency. But if we are talking about advanced science and technology, we need ever-increasing power density. You're not going to power the Large Hadron Collider with wind and solar--and certainly not its successor. You're not going to power fusion research with wind and solar. You're not going to power advanced transportation or manufacturing with wind and solar. No battery technology in the world can compete with the power density that is possible with nuclear energy. And if it could, it would be just as dangerous as nuclear.
deelowe 13y ago
My understanding is that there are some very real engineering hurdles to overcome. Molten salts are extremely corrosive and maintenance isn't exactly easy on a nuclear reactor. The theory is sound, but so far, operations costs and materials engineering appear to kill the ROI.
- DennisP 13y ago
  There are some engineering challenges but no apparent showstoppers. With the right alloys, the molten salt isn't that corrosive, and Oak Ridge didn't observe much of a problem after four years of operation. They had some concern that the higher neutron flux of a larger reactor could make things worse, but they thought they'd figured out a tweak to the alloy that would prevent any problems. Of course we'll have to try it to be sure. Also, it's not just one reactor type. There's the full-fledged breeder, which has some complex chemical processing, but you can start out with a simple burner design like the DMSR. An outfit in Canada is going that route.
cma 13y ago
Because nuclear power plants have always been about producing weapons grade plutonium at least in the US; power generation is ancillary. Why else would we cap plant liability at $1billion? A big meltdown will cost way more than that, Fukushima cleanup is now looking to be about $80 billion. Since plants couldn't make the economics work if they had the liability, we had to entice them so we could participate in the arms race.
- welterde 13y ago
  That argument doesn't fly for reactor research in germany, where Thorium was pursued for the exactly same reason, namely not being able to make weapons grade plutonium. However all thorium based reactor designs tried here were seriously flawed (for example the AVR reactor went almost the way of Chernobyl when water leaked into the primary cooling cycle.. but luckily the reactor was running at an lower temperature at that point in time, so they only had to run the reactor for a year in reduced capacity to get the water out again). As for liability here.. it seems like it's unlimited liability here and at least one reactor operator company is owned by another state (Vattenfall iirc)
- maxerickson 13y ago
  Wikipedia implies that U.S. weapons plutonium was produced in reactors at two government facilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Cold_War_use_and_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Cold_War_use_and_was... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_site#Cold_War_expansion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_site#Cold_War_expansio... What you describe seems like a pretty awful strategic decision (we have plenty enough fissile material to end civilization, add a couple more government sites and you have all the production I could possibly imagine needing).
InclinedPlane 13y ago
People who talk about the awesomeness of Thorium reactors rarely mention the very real downsides and technical hurdles. Such as the gamma radiation issue, or the fuel processing difficulties, and so forth. Moreover, aside from overcoming those issues building a suitable commercial power reactor will take a lot of time and investment. We're on the cusp of the 4th generation of Uranium/Plutonium fueled fission power reactors which represents many decades of improvement in safety, reliability, and efficiency. Whereas LFTR designs are in their infancy. The design deserves research, probably even in the $1 bil/yr range or higher, but we're not going to be switching the base load power plants to LFTR technology in the next decade or even in the next three decades. At this point, from a practical standpoint it's only slightly farther along than fusion technology, if that helps put it in perspective.
- dragonshed 13y ago
  Two nitpicks: LFTR would be much much further along if it had the interest and research that fusion has had. Plus, LFTR went undeveloped for 25 years for some very stupid reasons.
  - redthrowaway 13y ago
    Fusion has the interest and research it does because solving it would solve our energy needs almost permanently. It has a far higher payoff than thorium. And it doesn't matter that thorium research was abandoned because we couldn't vaporize commies with it. It was abandoned, and is decades away from commercial use.
adventured 13y ago
It's a very expensive and time consuming switch-over to thorium. And it has to work at multi-decade reliability levels. That's a pretty big deal to get right. The real mistake was not staying with thorium R&D decades ago. If it works as hoped, other countries will lead in it (rather than the US, although the US will supply some technology); countries like China or Norway for example. China in particular has been very happy to build out large scale nuclear power, and they're not as likely to be beholden to shielding old nuclear plants and tech from new competition.
zmic2 13y ago
Never forget that the buzz around thorium reactors is created by the people who want to sell thorium reactors.
DennisP 13y ago
I'm on a mailing list with a bunch of nuclear engineers who think they are the future of power. Several of them are starting companies to try to make it happen. The main problem in the U.S. is getting the NRC to let you try anything new. Kirk Sorenson is going after military funding, to bypass the NRC. There's a company in Canada working on a small, simple molten salt reactor, with the initial goal of extracting oil from tar sands with less carbon emissions. Last I heard, the Ontario government was being pretty cooperative. There's also a major effort in China, with about a billion dollars in funding and several hundred researchers. They're working on both a molten salt cooled pebble bed reactor, and a liquid-fueled thorium reactor. There are also smaller projects in various other countries. This is a long way from being just an internet fad. Edit: This page at the Gen IV International Forum has a good rundown of recent MSR research: http://www.gen-4.org/Technology/systems/msr.htm http://www.gen-4.org/Technology/systems/msr.htm

Why is it so obvious to the internet and no one else that thorium is the future of power? What do they (the experts) know that we don't?

by acchow 13y ago

Why is it so obvious to the internet and no one else that thorium is the future of power? What do they (the experts) know that we don't?

zxcdw 13y ago

The other party benefits from status quo and we don't, that's why. :) ...maybe

ekianjo 13y ago

Thorium is cleaner than Uranium, and does not produce radiaoactive elements that can be used for weapons proliferation (it does not produce plutonium).

tehabe 13y ago

Because Thorium isn't the answer. What I don't get, that people who care about technology and about freedom prefer a centralised technology like fission power over a decentralised technology like solar or wind, in combination with electricity storage. So far nobody has developed a reactor design which is really better or cleaner than what it is currently available. No "new" design could deliver what it has promised. Not even nuclear power was able to deliver what it has promised to begin with. Well, I guess, we both don't get the other side.

dragonshed 13y ago
Wind and solar aren't the answer either, or you wouldn't be having this discussion because it would already have been deployed. The economics of all intermittent power sources make it unfeasible; Installing the necessary transmission lines to all those decentralized sites, the energy lost during transmission to and from storage, the costs of storing that much power, and the other inefficiencies of generating the power, make what you propose very unrealistic. Nuclear power is millions of times more energy dense than solar, wind, and fossil fuels. Though the current generation of nuclear reactors have some significant drawbacks, not the least of which is the inefficient use of fuels leading to nuclear wastes, they still generate much cleaner power than the alternatives. Liquid Salt reactor designs based on Thorium take aim specifically at the nuclear fuel and waste problems. Rather than using 1% of the solid fuel like today's reactors, it's possible for liquid salt reactors to use up nearly 99% of the fuel, reducing the waste problem by many orders of magnitude, and would not contain the transuranics that take 10s of thousands of years to decay. It's a good thing that serious people are looking into radically different forms of nuclear power. The current conventional reactors were based off of designs for producing materials for weapons, and it's high time we set that garbage aside and consider other options.
- justatdotin 13y ago
  "Wind and solar aren't the answer either, or you wouldn't be having this discussion because it would already have been deployed." I accept that these aren't 'solutions' for those who control the old energy industries and related power structures that are still dominant, but the logic on display here is fundamentally broken. Various forms of Solar, and bi-gas, are already deployed where I live. Tidal, geothermal and Wind are all well underway. These renewable energies already emerging around us are our inevitable future. I'm pretty familiar with hearing the nuclear industry over-promise, then watching them under-deliver, so feel free to bump that 99 to 99.9%. Continue fantasizing about radically different forms of nuclear power: I'm gonna remain focussed on the real detriments of the reactors being built (and up for license renewal) right now.
  - jhartmann 13y ago
    Do the math, with advanced nuclear power (stuff we had working in the 60's and 70's, but was crap for bombs and upended the business model of existing nuclear which is roughly equivalent to giving the razor away at cost and making the money on the blades) you can hold all the energy you will ever use in your hand. A metal ball of Thorium is quite safe as well before it is used in a reactor. A molten salt reactor is a chemical plant running at ambient pressure, a much easier thing to deal with then the steam bombs we have currently deployed. They also don't require crazy coolants like liquid sodium (asking for it, a little water and boom) or fast neutrons (eats up anything containing them like swiss cheese.) The biggest problem with the nuclear industry is that they haven't been innovating since the 60's and 70's, not anything else really. Even the crazy steam bombs we have now are many orders of magnitude safer than other energy sources. How many people have died from installing solar panels, because of hydroelectric power, coal pollution, or petrochemical accidents? Let me give you a hint, all of these are WAY more than the number of people who have been affected by Nuclear accidents. Look up deaths per terawatt/hour of all the energy sources and you will see its quite clear that even current nuclear is SO much more safe than anything else, but it has been effectively marketed against by people invested in the status quo. Diffuse energy is economically unviable, it is only being deployed at great cost and things like solar will never solve baseline load. People also don't think about the pollution caused by manufacturing things like solar panels. There are vast areas in China that are full of industrial waste that will not degrade for a very very long time due to solar panel manufacturing. Way nastier stuff the radioactive elements, because anything that is really dangerous has a short half life (iodine is completely gone in weeks), and will clean up rather quickly or it is usable as a fuel (though we in the United States are daft for not reprocessing our fuel like sane countries like France.) Even existing nuclear is way better than anything else, and advanced nuclear is even better still. Nuclear has a marketing problem, not a technical one. If your worried about waste, well you have to realize that the really nasty stuff will all decay in 300-400 years, and anything radioactive left over is something I would be happy to have under my bed as I sleep. Anything radioactive at that point is also really fuel, and advanced nuclear reactors (like a molten salt reactor) will happily burn it up. The whole Yucca mountain crap is just caused by the United States having a silly ban on reprocessing. Another thing people don't mention is that the plutonium extracted from a long running reaction like those used for power is completely unsuitable for making bombs, its really just a bugaboo.
kyllo 13y ago
a decentralised technology like solar or wind, in combination with electricity storage. What kind of electricity storage? As I understand it, this is the hard part. We don't really have giant batteries that can efficiently and affordably store the power generated from wind or solar. You can either store it as some form of gravitational potential energy (think like a river dam), or as heat or cold, or as a fuel that you later have to burn. These are all pretty difficult and inefficient in the case of solar and wind power.
snowwrestler 13y ago
If we're talking about powering your home, sure, wind and solar are a great answer, combined with improvements in insulation and appliance efficiency. But if we are talking about advanced science and technology, we need ever-increasing power density. You're not going to power the Large Hadron Collider with wind and solar--and certainly not its successor. You're not going to power fusion research with wind and solar. You're not going to power advanced transportation or manufacturing with wind and solar. No battery technology in the world can compete with the power density that is possible with nuclear energy. And if it could, it would be just as dangerous as nuclear.

deelowe 13y ago

My understanding is that there are some very real engineering hurdles to overcome. Molten salts are extremely corrosive and maintenance isn't exactly easy on a nuclear reactor. The theory is sound, but so far, operations costs and materials engineering appear to kill the ROI.

DennisP 13y ago
There are some engineering challenges but no apparent showstoppers. With the right alloys, the molten salt isn't that corrosive, and Oak Ridge didn't observe much of a problem after four years of operation. They had some concern that the higher neutron flux of a larger reactor could make things worse, but they thought they'd figured out a tweak to the alloy that would prevent any problems. Of course we'll have to try it to be sure. Also, it's not just one reactor type. There's the full-fledged breeder, which has some complex chemical processing, but you can start out with a simple burner design like the DMSR. An outfit in Canada is going that route.

cma 13y ago

Because nuclear power plants have always been about producing weapons grade plutonium at least in the US; power generation is ancillary. Why else would we cap plant liability at $1billion? A big meltdown will cost way more than that, Fukushima cleanup is now looking to be about $80 billion. Since plants couldn't make the economics work if they had the liability, we had to entice them so we could participate in the arms race.

welterde 13y ago
That argument doesn't fly for reactor research in germany, where Thorium was pursued for the exactly same reason, namely not being able to make weapons grade plutonium. However all thorium based reactor designs tried here were seriously flawed (for example the AVR reactor went almost the way of Chernobyl when water leaked into the primary cooling cycle.. but luckily the reactor was running at an lower temperature at that point in time, so they only had to run the reactor for a year in reduced capacity to get the water out again). As for liability here.. it seems like it's unlimited liability here and at least one reactor operator company is owned by another state (Vattenfall iirc)
maxerickson 13y ago
Wikipedia implies that U.S. weapons plutonium was produced in reactors at two government facilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Cold_War_use_and_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Cold_War_use_and_was... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_site#Cold_War_expansion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_site#Cold_War_expansio... What you describe seems like a pretty awful strategic decision (we have plenty enough fissile material to end civilization, add a couple more government sites and you have all the production I could possibly imagine needing).

InclinedPlane 13y ago

People who talk about the awesomeness of Thorium reactors rarely mention the very real downsides and technical hurdles. Such as the gamma radiation issue, or the fuel processing difficulties, and so forth. Moreover, aside from overcoming those issues building a suitable commercial power reactor will take a lot of time and investment. We're on the cusp of the 4th generation of Uranium/Plutonium fueled fission power reactors which represents many decades of improvement in safety, reliability, and efficiency. Whereas LFTR designs are in their infancy. The design deserves research, probably even in the $1 bil/yr range or higher, but we're not going to be switching the base load power plants to LFTR technology in the next decade or even in the next three decades. At this point, from a practical standpoint it's only slightly farther along than fusion technology, if that helps put it in perspective.

dragonshed 13y ago
Two nitpicks: LFTR would be much much further along if it had the interest and research that fusion has had. Plus, LFTR went undeveloped for 25 years for some very stupid reasons.
- redthrowaway 13y ago
  Fusion has the interest and research it does because solving it would solve our energy needs almost permanently. It has a far higher payoff than thorium. And it doesn't matter that thorium research was abandoned because we couldn't vaporize commies with it. It was abandoned, and is decades away from commercial use.

adventured 13y ago

It's a very expensive and time consuming switch-over to thorium. And it has to work at multi-decade reliability levels. That's a pretty big deal to get right. The real mistake was not staying with thorium R&D decades ago. If it works as hoped, other countries will lead in it (rather than the US, although the US will supply some technology); countries like China or Norway for example. China in particular has been very happy to build out large scale nuclear power, and they're not as likely to be beholden to shielding old nuclear plants and tech from new competition.

zmic2 13y ago

Never forget that the buzz around thorium reactors is created by the people who want to sell thorium reactors.

DennisP 13y ago

I'm on a mailing list with a bunch of nuclear engineers who think they are the future of power. Several of them are starting companies to try to make it happen. The main problem in the U.S. is getting the NRC to let you try anything new. Kirk Sorenson is going after military funding, to bypass the NRC. There's a company in Canada working on a small, simple molten salt reactor, with the initial goal of extracting oil from tar sands with less carbon emissions. Last I heard, the Ontario government was being pretty cooperative. There's also a major effort in China, with about a billion dollars in funding and several hundred researchers. They're working on both a molten salt cooled pebble bed reactor, and a liquid-fueled thorium reactor. There are also smaller projects in various other countries. This is a long way from being just an internet fad. Edit: This page at the Gen IV International Forum has a good rundown of recent MSR research: http://www.gen-4.org/Technology/systems/msr.htm http://www.gen-4.org/Technology/systems/msr.htm