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ThorCon Power
- audiodude 12y agoIs there an ELI5 version?
- badloginagain 12y agoIts a nuclear generator factory. It uses molten salt as the catalyst for nuclear reaction, using thorium as the fuel. The molten salt allows passive safety measures, significantly reducing the negative effects of a meltdown. It also significantly reduces the size of the reactors housing. The use of thorium allows for significantly cheaper nuclear fuel, which happens to be very difficult to convert to weapon-grade nuclear fuel. By very difficult, I mean very difficult for a nation state, let alone a small group of bad actors.
- throwaway90446 12y agoSo basically, they are better on every possible front, and the technology has existed for a while? Yet, LWR is still the dominant design. So, what's the catch? There's clearly something preferable about Uranium LWR that causes their dominance, no?
- daeken 12y agoI have little more than a layman's understanding of the nuclear power landscape (I've read a decent bit and watched several talks, but that's about where it ends), but it seems to me that there are at least two reasons: 1) LWR reactors have been built for a long time, so they're very well understood (known risks are better than unknown risks) and the processes are already in place to bring them up. 2) Even though they're dominant, very few LWRs are built. There simply aren't many reactors being built of any kind, so it's unsurprising that the most common type (traditionally) is what we keep building.
- taliesinb 12y ago> LWR reactors have been built for a long time, so they're very well understood (known risks are better than unknown risks) After Fukushima, I don't think most people would agree the risks are well understood, at least as reflected in the actions of the nuclear industry and its regulators. The NRC (and hence most of the world's regulators) uses a "design basis" approach to establish what emergencies reactors should be able to respond to safely without the release of radioactive materials. The design basis is supposed to quantify the known risks. In 2011 we saw just how inadequate the design basis framework was. It failed to predict risks such as multiple systems failing simultaneously, emergency generators being flooded, the plant being cut off from external help, multiple meltdowns happening simultaneously, valves getting stuck open, and a litany of other things that actually happened, resulting in the level 7 accident we saw. While the exact set of events that happened at Fukushima Daiichi is unique, similar accidents could happen in the US, or indeed anywhere (e.g. many reactors are downstream from major dams and could theoretically experience catastrophic flooding). And just as the NRC's computer models deemed Fukushima impossible before the accident, the NRC has largely ignored the recommendations of its own near-term task force in how to improve the regulatory situation in the US after the accident. It is up to us to demand that the nuclear power industry, which is wielding technology of massive destructive power at the behest of its shareholders, transform itself into the transparent, accountable industry we deserve.
- ecopoesis 12y agoLWR is what the Navy used, and the civilian designs were just based on that.
- everyone 12y agoLWR was chosen during the cold war because they wanted to make as much weapons grade fuel as possible.
- aqme28 12y agoAlso because IIRC it made more sense on submarines.
- badloginagain 12y agoWhen nuclear research was first being developed, it was for the specific purpose of building the bomb. When the war ended, and the industry switched to civilian applications, they decided to go with Uranium because they had already worked out many of the issues. Still, the US Airforce wanted a nuclear-powered bomber shortly after the Navy showed their nuclear sub and before ICBM's deprecated "end-of-days" long-range bombers. A water-contained reactor wouldn't work in an airplane, so they funded the development of the MSR (molten-salt-reactor). Unfortunately, when they shuddered the project after the implementation of practical ICBMs, industry politics discredited MSR's in favour of the reactor-types we have now. After fukushima, a grassroots campaign has been undertaken to resume research of MSR's as a replacement of fossil fuels for scalable carbon-free energy creation. If you are interested, you can get a great overview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4
- r00fus 12y ago> Unfortunately, when they shuddered the project after the implementation of practical ICBMs, industry politics discredited MSR's in favour of the reactor-types we have now. So essentially what you're seeing is the result of decades of regulatory capture of the NRC by the nuclear industry.
- angersock 12y agoI think the missing factor is that there are massive regulatory hurdles in the way of testing new designs, no?
- fennecfoxen 12y ago... well, yeah: placing massive hurdles in the way of potential competitors and their technologies is about half of the premise of regulatory capture...
- agumonkey 12y agoIt's amazing how the state of things may look like a local maximum depending on the root of the research path.
- Animats 12y agoIn light-water reactors, the highly radioactive part of the system is very simple. It's a core of metal fuel rods and support structure, some control rods, and water. All the plumbing complexity is external, and it's on water, which isn't hard to handle. Most of the alternative reactor designs have more going on in the radioactive part of the system, or more difficult working fluids. This usually leads to trouble. Sodium-cooled reactors have sodium fires. Helium-cooled reactors have helium leaks. Pebble bed reactors have pebble jams. (The one in Germany is so jammed it can't be decommissioned.) Molten salt reactors have to pump radioactive molten salt around and run it through a chemical processing plant. In some designs that salt is a fluorine compound. Now you have all the headaches of operating a radioactive chemical plant. Most power utilities don't want to operate a radioactive chemical plant.
- pjc50 12y agoI wondered what had happened to pebble beds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor Most power utilities don't want to operate a radioactive chemical plant This is a brilliant phrase, thankyou.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- _kst_ 12y agoIn spite of the name "ThorCon", there's no mention of thorium on the front page. http://thorconpower.com/features/clean http://thorconpower.com/features/clean says: > And ThorCon obtains about 25% of its power from easily mined thorium which requires no enrichment. http://thorconpower.com/design/thorcon-can http://thorconpower.com/design/thorcon-can says the "fuelsalt" is "a mixture of sodium, beryllium, uranium and thorium fluorides called nabe".
- badloginagain 12y agoInteresting, I wonder if fuelsalt is more efficient or cheaper. I do know that thorium is tightly controlled in the US.
- _kst_ 12y agoI'm pretty sure uranium is tightly controlled too.
- bkeroack 12y agoIf I'm understanding it correctly, the term "meltdown" doesn't even really apply to this design since the fuel is already liquid.
- badloginagain 12y agoYou are correct- I use the term meltdown to encapsulate an event that causes significant damage to the control of a reactor, such as an earthquake followed by a tsunami. In such an event, an MSR has a "drain tank" that sits below the reactor. In an emergency, gravity drops the salt into the drain tank, and the nuclear reaction safely comes to a halt- all with zero human intervention.
- TheSpiceIsLife 12y agoPerhaps it would be better to use the term 'containment failure'. I'm surrounded by vehement anti-nuclear types, you know the ones who get arrested for their environmental activism antics. When talking about nuclear technology with them I find it helpful not to utter certain words like 'meltdown', 'weapons', etc etc.
- baseten 12y agoSo they've finally managed to solve the little problem of the extremely high temperature AND highly corrosive nature of this fuel?
- tshannon 12y agoI think their solution to that is to replace all of the parts every 4 years.
- luddypants 12y agoThis makes me think I do not understand what "walkaway safe" means.
- toomuchtodo 12y agoYou don't have to handle the decay heat with active cooling after stopping fission. You can simply "walkaway safe". They're using physics and engineering design to replace failsafe systems.
- Symmetry 12y agoIf you've got your thorium spread out and not reacting it should no longer be high temperature well before the 4 years are up.
- ChuckMcM 12y agoThis means that in the event of a problem the reactor both shuts down and passively disposes of the decay heat so that it has not chance of going critical (starting up) again (which was a risk at Fukishima without active cooling). At that point you can just let it sit there "forever" if you want. Not that you would of course, you'd want to clean it up.
- digikata 12y agoThe overall concept is good, but there could be things that go wrong in the real world. How fast the heat ramps up vs the failsafe plug in the vessel melting, or the chance of some material failure shedding debris which could potentially plug the drain path.
- CurtMonash 12y agoI took one nuclear engineering class, in 1975. It was clear then that pressurized water reactors should be replaced as the predominant design, either by gas-cooled or molten-salt. I'm sure the same is true now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-high-temperature_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-high-temperature_reactor suggests that gas-cooled reactors tend to be pebble-bed, and that the story gets confused because there's a molten salt version of the pebble-bed reactor as well. Anyhow, googling on HTGR (High Temperature Gas Reactor) will reveal more.
- legulere 12y agoThey can have their own problems. The THTR-300 for instance is one of the few commercial HTGR we had. They had several operational problems like water leaking into the primary circuit (which could lead to hydrogen and oxygen buildups at that temperature). The decommissioning currently is a huge mess. Sadly the English wikipedia doesn't have as much information as the German one about it.
- trhway 12y agoimpressive - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor#AVR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor#AVR " There exists currently no dismantling method for the AVR vessel, but it is planned to develop some procedure during the next 60 years and to start with vessel dismantling at the end of the century." German methodical planning :)
- detaro 12y agoAs long as it is relatively secure, monitoring it and otherwise keeping away is probably an ok strategy. At least the half-lifes are only in the decades if I remember correctly.
- rmason 12y agoPeople have been trying for twenty years to find $300 million in government funding to create a new reference design of a modern thorium reactor. TVA's old reactor which ran until the seventies was based on forties research. But the past three presidents have not made it a national priority. China and India have funded research and so has one private individual, Bill Gates.
- sosuke 12y agoAre they already in production, is it being sold, do they need funding, are they going to do a Kickstarter? (half joking, I can imagine it happening) This tech sounds cool, but the site doesn't say anything about implementations.
- audiodude 12y agoI think it's mostly just designed to raise awareness. There's no "Get Involved" link, but I'm not sure how your average citizen gets involved with nuclear tech in general...
- LarsJorgensen 12y agoNo we are not in production. Yes we do need funding but this is not on a kickstarter scale though. This will require hundreds of millions of dollars to become real so we do need to involve a large corporation or some wealthy folks.
- pkaye 12y agoThey should call it the "Thorium Brotherhood".
- driverdan 12y ago> ThorCon can produce reliable, carbon free, electricity at between 3 and 5 cents per kWh depending on scale. How does this compare to traditional nuclear power and other forms of power generation?
- blfr 12y agoSupposedly much cheaper than the coal one[1]. Although I don't know how representative this 1000 MWe coal plant is. [1] http://thorconpower.com/costing/bottom-line http://thorconpower.com/costing/bottom-line
- nfriedly 12y agoI pay around 7.5 cents/kWH for coal-based power. (+ $30~40/month in various fees and taxes.)
- Gravityloss 12y agoIf one could sell one reactor's worth, a gigawatt, of continuous power at that price, it'd be 1,8 million dollars per day and over 500 million dollars per year. Over 30 years it'd be 15 billion dollars. You have to put up quite a few windmills and solar panels to get to such numbers. On the other hand, the Olkiluoto three 1,6 GW nuclear plant has taken more than a decade and countless billions and still isn't ready.
- LarsJorgensen 12y agoWe expect to be around 1/8th the capital cost for the reactor itself. We plan to use off-the-shelf turbines&generators marketed for coal so those costs are pretty well known. You still have to add in the switch yard and transmission lines which we won't provide any advantage in. Overall, though we expect to come in below the cost of coal and natural gas including the cost of capital. One can always use the regulatory system to drive up costs like has been done in the US.
- ScotterC 12y agoHey Lars. Thanks for working on this! I used to work at Westinghouse and had a very similar concept of using thorium as the primary system and hooking it up to existing coal secondary systems. I really hope you find a way to easily get the material for the initial core. Instead of shipping containers, my thought was on using the existing rail systems, although that's very US centric. What's the next step? What can the HN community do for you?
- tracker1 12y agoIs it just me, or did anyone else expect to see plans for a convention based around the Norse god / Marvel character?
- joshuaheard 12y agoI wasn't sure if the link was to some new technology or a cartoon character.
- green7ea 12y agoIt seems that thorium reactors produce less nuclear waste than uranium reactors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle#Fission_product_wastes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle#Fission_pro.... Could someone with more knowledge on the subject give a rough estimate of the amount of waste we would be talking about?
- badloginagain 12y agoUranium reactors use something like 2% of the total energy available in the uranium. Molten-salt-reactors use something like 98% of the available energy. Additionally, the 2% that is waste contain extremely rare derivatives that can be used as cancer "smartbombs", metals pivotal to deep space NASA missions, etc. This has a pretty good overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4
- fordiman 12y agoA MSR breeder can potentially burn 98% of the available energy; ThorCon is a converter, but not a breeder. From what I can glean from their website and documentation, it looks like they get about 20% burnup.
- LarsJorgensen 12y agoThere are many different thorium designs based on different objectives. The original designs assumed that we would run out of uranium so the primary objective was breeding. It is clear now that we have much more uranium than they thought. We should start with an understanding of how much waste is there currently from today's reactors. Roughly one coke can would hold all the waste generated from one person's electricity (European standards roughly 1kW) for a lifetime. We can reduce the volume of waste readily by removing the uranium and re-enriching it. This can be done with virtually all reactors including todays reactors. This will remove 90% of the waste volume but does nothing to reduce the hazards of the waste. We can remove the elements that are heavier than uranium (transuranics or TRUs). This is the long term hazard. This material can be recycled into a reactor to be fissioned (destroyed forever not simply buried). This can be done to a very limited extent in some of today's reactors. But either IFR or molten salt reactors would really be the appropriate way to eliminate the long term hazards of nuclear waste. Such a process will be limited by our ability to separate the TRUs from the fission products. We expect to achieve around 99% separation so to reduce the long term hazard 100 fold. The near term hazard comes from the fission products. These will decay in a reasonable time. Every 30 years the radioactivity will decay by half. So by 300 years you are back to roughly background radiation. 300 years is short enough we know how to build containers to last that long.
- sremani 12y agoIndia has very rich monzanite deposits. If the claims published are real, India has found one awesome solution to address the present energy crisis.
- ajaimk 12y agoProblem for them is the time and non-Thorium resources needed to enrich the thorium. They're set for 50 years from now. Not today.
- LarsJorgensen 12y agoThe design choices have been specifically made to allow for a short development cycle and rapid deployment. There is no need to enrich thorium as virtually all thorium in the world is Th232.
- novalis78 12y agoLooks like an expert crew and quite thought through design. Now all it needs is an Elon Musk to push it into existence in record time.
- pm90 12y agoOK, so here is an idea for disposing nuclear waste that might sound outlandish: with the current progress in putting stuff in space, couldn't be compactify all that waste and throw it at the sun?
- ScotterC 12y agoNuclear waste is extremely dense and therefore extremely heavy. It would cost an incredible amount of money to launch it into space, let alone the sun. The corollary is it's also really valuable since it still contains an incredible amount of energy, our current reactors only burn 5% of it where as future reactors will be able to burn all of it. An analogy I often use is we're burning just the kindling and our 'waste' is the hard oak that's harder to burn.
- joeyo 12y agoWhat do you do when the rocket explodes on launch?
- carey 12y agoAny rocket that could deliver nuclear waste to the sun would use an awful lot of fuel, given the density of the waste, and would be a very big problem if there was a failure shortly after launch. Also, anything that could deliver radioactive waste to the sun could deliver it to a major city just as easily.
- badloginagain 12y agoEasier to build a modern nuclear reactor that can use nuclear waste for fuel- there are projects in the works to do just this.
- gilgoomesh 12y agoThat question is asked and answered here: http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2r43nl/why_dont_we_just_shoot_nuclear_waste_of_our/ http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2r43nl/why_dont_...
- wyager 12y agoThe risk of fallout and the fuel costs are too significant.
- batemanesque 12y agoI mean this in the nicest possible way, but you guys need to redo yr site - a lot of the design cues make it look like a one-man fringe project which (assuming that's not the case here) is unfortunate edit: more specifically, it's not about making it look more expensive/complex/modern but moving away from the specific aesthetic it has right now