The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Paradigm
Posted by Gail the Actuary on January 20, 2009 - 10:05am
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: lftr, liquid-fluoride thorium reactor, original, thorium [list all tags]
This is a guest post by Charles Barton. Charles is a retired counselor who writes the Energy from Thorium blog. His father Dr. Charles Barton, Senior, worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for 28 years. He was a reactor chemist, who worked on the Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) concept for about 2/3 of his ORNL career. Charles Barton, Junior gained his knowledge of the LFTR concept from his familiarity with his father's work. Neither his father nor Mr. Barton will gain financially from the advancement of this idea.
The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Paradigm
Excitement has recently been rising about the possibility of using thorium as a low-carbon way of generating vast amounts of electricity. The use of thorium as a nuclear fuel was extensively studied by Oak Ridge National Laboratory between 1950 and 1976, but was dropped, because unlike uranium-fueled Light Water Reactors (LWRs), it could not generate weapons' grade plutonium. Research on the possible use of thorium as a nuclear fuel has continued around the world since then. Famed Climate Scientist James Hanson, recently spoke of thorium's great promise in material that he submitted to President Elect Obama:
The Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) is a thorium reactor concept that uses a chemically-stable fluoride salt for the medium in which nuclear reactions take place. This fuel form yields flexibility of operation and eliminates the need to fabricate fuel elements. This feature solves most concerns that have prevented thorium from being used in solid-fueled reactors. The fluid fuel in LFTR is also easy to process and to separate useful fission products, both stable and radioactive. LFTR also has the potential to destroy existing nuclear waste.
(The) LFTR(s) operate at low pressure and high temperatures, unlike today’s LWRs. Operation at low pressures alleviates much of the accident risk with LWR. Higher temperatures enable more of the reactor heat to be converted to electricity (50% in LFTR vs 35% in LWR). (The) LFTR (has) the potential to be air-cooled and to use waste heat for desalinating water.
LFTR(s) are 100-300 times more fuel efficient than LWRs. In addition to solving the nuclear waste problem, they can operate for several centuries using only uranium and thorium that has already been mined. Thus they eliminate the criticism that mining for nuclear fuel will use fossil fuels and add to the greenhouse effect.
The Obama campaign, properly in my opinion, opposed the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository. Indeed, there is a far more effective way to use the $25 billion collected from utilities over the past 40 years to deal with waste disposal. This fund should be used to develop fast reactors that consume nuclear waste, and thorium reactors to prevent the creation of new long-lived nuclear waste. By law the federal government must take responsibility for existing spent nuclear fuel, so inaction is not an option. Accelerated development of fast and thorium reactors will allow the US to fulfill its obligations to dispose of the nuclear waste, and open up a source of carbon-free energy that can last centuries, even millennia.
It is commonly assumed that 4th generation nuclear power will not be ready before 2030. That is a safe assumption under "business-as-usual”. However, given high priority it is likely that it could be available sooner. It is specious to argue that R&D on 4th generation nuclear power does not deserve support because energy efficiency and renewable energies may be able to satisfy all United States electrical energy needs. Who stands ready to ensure that energy needs of China and India will be entirely met by efficiency and renewables?
_________Development of the first large 4 generation nuclear plants may proceed most rapidly if carried out in China or India (or South Korea, which has a significant R&D program), with the full technical cooperation of the United States and/or Europe. Such cooperation would make it much easier to achieve agreements for reducing greenhouse gases.
Uranium-235 is the only fissionable material that is observed in usable amounts in nature. Thus pioneering nuclear physicist like Enrico Fermi and Eugene Wigner had no other choice of but to use U-235 to create their first chain reaction under the bleachers of the University of Chicago’s unused football field.
But Fermi and Wigner knew early on that once a reactor was built, it was possible to create other fissionable substances with the excess neutrons produced by a U-235 chain reaction. Thus if U-238 absorbed a neutron, it became the unstable U-239, which through a two stage nuclear process was transformed into plutonium-239. Plutonium-239 is very fissionable. The physicists also calculated that if thorium-232 was placed inside a reactor and bombarded with neutrons, it would be transformed into U-233. Their calculations also revealed that U-233 was not only fissionable, but had properties that made it in some respects a superior reactor fuel to U-235 and Pu-239.
During World War II, Fermi and Wigner, who were geniuses with active and far ranging minds, collected around themselves a group of brilliant scientists. Fermi, Wigner and their associates began to think about the potential uses of the new energy they were discovering--uses that would improve society rather than destroy it.
The capture of nuclear energy and its transformation into electrical energy became a central focus of discussions among early atomic scientists. They were not sure how long the uranium supply would last, so Fermi proposed that reactors be built that would breed plutonium from U-238. Wigner counted that thorium was several times as plentiful as uranium, and that it could produce an even better nuclear fuel than Pu-239.
The first nuclear era was dominated by uranium technology, a technology that was derived from military applications, and carried with it, rightly or wrongly, the taint of association with nuclear weapons. As it turned out, there was far more uranium available than Fermi or Wigner had originally feared, but other rationales propelled scientific interest in developing thorium fuel cycle reactors. First, Pu-239 was not a good fuel for most reactors. It failed to fission 1/3 of the time when it absorbed a neutron in a conventional Light Water Reactor (LWR). This led to the most difficult part of the problem of nuclear waste. Plutonium made excellent fuel for fast neutron reactors, but the fast neutron reactor that Fermi liked used dangerous liquid sodium as its coolant, and would pose a developmental challenge of enormous proportions.
Advocates of the thorium fuel cycle point to its numerous advantages over the uranium-plutonium fuel cycle. B.D. Kuz’minov, and V.N. Manokhin, of the Russian Federation State Science Centre, Institute of Physics and Power Engineering at Obninsk, write:
Adoption of the thorium fuel cycle would offer the following advantages:
- Increased nuclear fuel resources thanks to the production of 233U from 232Th;
- Significant reduction in demand for the enriched isotope 235U;
- Very low (compared with the uranium-plutonium fuel cycle) production of long-lived radiotoxic wastes, including transuraniums, plutonium and transplutoniums;
- Possibility of accelerating the burnup of plutonium without the need for recycling, i.e. rapid reduction of existing plutonium stocks;
- Higher fuel burnup than in the uranium-plutonium cycle;
- Low excess reactivity of the core with thorium-based fuel, and more favourable temperature and void reactivity coefficients; . . .
Thorium could replace U-238 in conventional LWRs, and could be used to breed new nuclear fuel in specially modified LWRs. This technology was successfully tested in the Shippingport reactor during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.
WASH-1097 remains a good source of information on the thorium fuel cycle. In fact, some major recent studies of the thorium fuel cycle rely heavily on WASH-1097. A recent IAEA report on Thorium appears to have been prepared without overt reliance on WASH-1097.
One of the first things physicists discovered about chain reactions was that slowing the neutrons involved in the process down, promoted the chain reaction. Kirk Sorensen discusses slow or thermal neutrons in one of his early posts.
Under low energy neutron conditions, Th232 can be efficiently converted to U233. The conversion process works like this. Th232 absorbs a neutron and emits a beta ray. A neutron switches to being a proton and the atom is transformed into Protactinium 233. After a period averaging a little less than a month, Pa 233 emits a second beta ray and is transformed into U233. U233 is fissionable, and is a very good reactor fuel. When a U233 atom encounters a low energy neutron, chances are 9 out of 10 that it will fission.
Since U233 produces an average of 2.4 neutrons every time it fissions, this means that each neutron that strikes U233 produces an average of 2.16 new neutrons. If you carefully control those neutrons, one neutron will continue the chain reaction. That leaves an average of 1.16 neutrons to generate new fuel.
Unfortunately the fuel generation process cannot work with 100% efficiency. The leftover U-234 that was produced when U-233 absorbed a neutron and did not fission will sometimes absorb another neutron and become U-235. Xenon-135, an isotope that that is often produced after U-233 splits, is far more likely to capture neutrons than U233 or Th232. This makes Xenon-135 a fission poison. Because Xenon in a reactor builds up during a chain reaction, it tends to slow the nuclear process as the chain reaction continues. The presence of Xenon creates a control problem inside a reactor. Xenon also steals neutrons needed for the generation of new fuel.
In conventional reactors that use solid fuel, Xenon is trapped inside the fuel, but in a fluid fuel Xenon is easy to remove because it is what is called a noble gas. A noble gas does not bond chemically with other substances, and can be bubbled out of fluids where it has been trapped. Getting Xenon 135 out of a reactor core makes generating new U233 from Th232 a whole lot easier.
It is possible to bring about 1.08 neutrons into the thorium change process for every U-233 atom that splits. This means that reactors that use a thorium fuel cycle are not going to produce an excess of U-233, but if carefully designed, they can produce enough U233 that burnt U233 can be easily replaced. Thus a well designed thorium cycle reactor will generate its own fuel indefinitely.
Research continues on a thorium cycle LWR fuel that would allow for the breeding of thorium in LWRs. There is however a problem which makes the LWR a less than ideal breeding environment for thorium. Elisabeth Huffer, Hervé Nifenecker, and Sylvain David note:
Fission products are much more efficient in poisoning slow neutron reactors than fast neutron reactors. Thus, to maintain a low doubling time, neutron capture in the fission products and other elements of the structure and coolant have to be minimized.
India has only a small uranium supply, but an enormous thorium reserve. Millions of tons of thorium ore lie on the surface of Indian beaches, waiting to be scooped up by front loaders and hauled away to potential thorium reactors for a song. (For those of you who are interested in the EROEI concept, the EROEI for the recovery of thorium from Indian beaches would be almost unbelievably high, and the energy extracted could power the Indian economy for thousands of years, potentially making India the richest nation in the world.)
India has for 50 years been following a plan to gradually switch from uranium to thorium cycle reactors. That plan is expected to finally come to fruition by the end of the next decade. At that point India will begin the rapid construction of a fleet of thorium fuel cycle reactors.
A commercial business, Thorium Power, Limited, continues research based on the Shippingport Reactor experiment. Thorium Power plans to offer a thorium cycle based nuclear fuel with a starting charge of enriched U-235 for modified LWRs. Thorium Power has sponsored Throium fuel research at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, and a Russian VVER has been used to conduct thorium cycle fuel experiments.
Research on thorium cycle liquid fuel reactors is ongoing world-wide. The best-known effort is being performed in Grenoble, France at the Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie. The Reactor Physics Group there is the only one in the world that has the resources and backing needed to actually develop a fluid core thorium cycle reactor that can be commercialized. In terms of organization size, the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor research group is much smaller than would be required to sustain a full-scale rapid development of thorium cycle reactor technology. The LPSC group thus is working in a business as usual time frame, and has no urgent motivation to do otherwise. After all, 80% of French electricity already comes from nuclear power plants.
Thorium fuel cycle research is also being carried on in the Netherlands, Japan, the Czech Republic. There is also presently a small-scale effort in the United States.
Thorium is extremely abundant in the earth's crust, which appears to contain somewhere around 120 trillion tons of it. In addition to 12% thorium monazite sands, found on Indian beaches and in other places, economically recoverable thorium is found virtually everywhere. For example, large-scale recovery of thorium from granite rocks is economically feasible with a very favorable EROEI. Significant recoverable amounts of thorium are present in mine tailings. These include the tailings of ancient tin mines, rare earth mine tailings, phosphate mine tailings and uranium mine tailings. In addition to the thorium present in mine tailings and in surface monazite sands, burning coal at the average 1000 MWe power plant produces about 13 tons of thorium per year. That thorium is recoverable from the power plant’s waste ash pile.
One ton of thorium will produce nearly 1 GW of electricity for a year in an efficient thorium cycle reactor. Thus current coal energy technology throws away over 10 times the energy it produces as electricity. This is not the result of poor thermodynamic efficiency; it is the result of a failure to recognize and use the energy value of thorium. The amount of thorium present in surface mining coal waste is enormous and would provide all the power human society needs for thousands of years, without resorting to any special mining for thorium, or the use of any other form or energy recovery.
Little attention is paid to the presence of thorium in mine tailings. In fact it would largely be passed over in silence except that radioactive gases from thorium are a health hazard for miners and ore processing workers.
Thorium is present in phosphate fertilizers because fertilizer manufactures do not wish to pay the recovery price prior to distribution. Gypsum present in phosphate tailings is unusable in construction because of the presence of radioactive gasses associated with the thorium that is also present in the gypsum. Finally organic farmers use phosphate tailings to enrich their soil. This has the unfortunate side effect of releasing thorium into surface and subsurface waters, as well as leading to the potential contamination of organic crops with thorium and its various radioactive daughter products. Thus the waste of thorium present in phosphate tailings has environmental consequences.
The world’s real thorium reserve is enormous, but also hugely underestimated. For example the USGS reports that the United States has a thorium reserve of 160,000 tons, with another 300,000 tons of possible thorium reserve. But Alex Gabbard estimates a reserve of over 300,000 tons of recoverable thorium in coal ash associated with power production in the United States alone.
In 1969, WASH-1097 noted a report that had presented to President Johnson that estimated the United States thorium reserve at 3 billion tons that could be recovered for the price of $500 a pound – perhaps $3000 today. Lest this sound like an enormous amount of money to pay for thorium, consider that one pound of thorium contains the energy equivalent of 20 tons of coal, which would sell on the spot market for in mid-January for around $1500. The price of coal has been somewhat depressed by the economic down turn. Last year coal sold on the spot market for as much as $300 a ton, yielding a price for 20 tons of coal of $6000. How long would 3 billion tons last the United States? If all of the energy used in the United States were derived from thorium for the next two million years, there would be still several hundred thousand years of thorium left that could be recovered for the equivalent of $3000 a pound in January 2009 dollars.
Nor would exhausting the USAEC’s 1969 estimated thorium reserve exhaust the American thorium supply. Even at average concentrations in the earth’s rocks, thorium can be recovered with a good EROEI, without making the cost of electricity impossibly expensive.
Thank you very much for posting this. This is one of the few technologies that I consider to have a strong chance of becoming a true silver bullet. We need the 'alternative' nuclear technologies discussed more often.
I'm looking forward to seeing it debated here.
Or at least a Thorium Bullet
Which has a higher specific mass than silver so should have more impact
;)
..and apparently the only ammo that can kill the Tooth Fairy.. (Kidding, kidding!)
The most promising thing to me about this technology is that it might be a way of relatively safely treating the nuclear waste we have already generated and more that we will inevitably generate from existing reactors. We owe it to any future generations to minimize the destructiveness of that toxic material to what ever degree we can.
But that leads to the inevitable moral hazard--that we will latch onto this technology and pretend that it is ok to go on producing more to such waste.
From a larger perspective, I think it is long since time for all of us, but especially those involved in research and development of energy sources, to think deeply about the consequences and purposes of providing more energy to a species that has proved itself (especially under Western ideologies, but often elsewhere to) to be enormously destructive of other species (driving them to extinction at something like 10,000 times the background rate, destructive of whole ecosystems (dead zones in the seas, rain forests annihilated...) and even destructive of the entire planet's ability to sustain complex life forms.
Can we guarantee that vast new sources of energy supplied to our destructive societies won't be used for further, short-sighted destruction? Will electricity no longer be used to more and more effectively convince people to by lots of consumer products that they don't need? Will this new energy no be used to further over-harvest already-threatened species? To transport, on purpose or by mistake, exotic species into areas that have no means of resisting their depredations? To enable developers to create further sprawling suburbs that gobble up farmlands and habitats?...
If this isn't a moment for general reflection on such issues, I don't know what would be.
Actually the Oak Ridge developers of LFTR technologies were acutely aware of environmental issues and the consequences of bad energy choices. ORNL Director Alvin weinbery was the first scientist to inform Congress of the danger of Anthropogenic Global Warming as a consequence of energy related CO2 emissions. We cannot control the wisdom of people in the future, but if we choose to disempower them because they might make bad choices, don't we make a bade choice ourselves?
+1
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
"Dis-empower" seems to conflate two (at least) meanings of power in this context. The physical power conferred on humanity by projects like this, and the other types of power that are not necessarily directly related to the former--political power, spiritual power, intellectual power...
Perhaps we have not learned anything from our grand experiments with vastly powerful technologies. That would be a pity.
But I think we have learned that humans as they exist today do not use physical power of the sort you offer to supply us very wisely. Indeed, we almost always use it in ways that destroys the richness of life. Given this record, it seems reckless to me to place more such power in our hands, at least until we have matured enough as a species to employ it in less harmful ways (that is until we have become more powerful in the other ways I mentioned).
If you invented the first chainsaw, and you were rightly pleased with your cleverness at doing so, would you hand the first proto-type to a six year old?
If you discovered how to make an atomic bomb, would you hand that technology over to your society, even if it was the society of Nazi Germany?
It is part of the responsibility of those developing such power to consider how it is likely to be used. Or do you think in the above examples the inventor would bear zero responsibility for the consequences of his discovery?
Our disagreement then is the disagreement between the party of hope and the party of that dislikes its own kind. Your Judgement then is not about nuclear technology, but a judgement against the human species.
Irrespective of the philosophical implications of whether man is ready for unconstrained power, I found this to be a very educational and fascinating article. Thankyou.
"dislikes its own kind."
Is someone who refuses to give a live chain saw to an infant someone who hates infants?
You are clearly reacting emotionally and non-rationally to my points. Take a walk in the woods, then come back and maybe we can discuss it further.
And please note that I thought the technology was potentially useful, just for a different main purpose than what you propose.
I find it interesting the way you took what he said and made it into something else. I suggest that you re-read what he actually said. He makes a valid point even if you do not like what he is pointing to.
An excellent article and probably about the most promising alternative energy source that exists today. Failing the development of controlled nuclear fusion, thorium breeder reactors would appear to be almost as good in terms of fuel security and environmental impact. Unfortunately, the more useful an energy source is, the more that it permits the exploitation of other resources and thus damage to the environment. That is after all, exactly what harnessed energy sources are intended to do.
This discussion brings us back to the problem that we live within perpetual growth machine, on a finite land space, with finite material and biological resources. We therefore face the problem that giving human beings a fantastic new energy source, would allow growth based economic systems to reap even more damage on the planet. This is a fundamental problem with any living system that grows within a finite environment. It can either choose to reach a stable state, or it can continue to grow until every resource is consumed and die off like bacteria in petri dish. Unfortunately, a cooperative Power Down or species-wide self-limitation would appear to be impossible in the present global political environment. The only way out of this paradox is for humanity to collectively agree to reduce population size (as China has taken steps towards achieving) and allow continued per capita economic growth. This would allow individual living standards to expand even as total GDP remained static. Gradual progression of technology, the development of compact agricultural systems, car-free cities, integrated waste management, etc, would allow environmental impact to gradually decline. Such a development would require the leadership of a body like the UN.
Ultimately, growth would appear to be an endemic characteristic of all living species and is only held at bay by physical restraint. This does not bode well for a species that is limited to the surface of only one planet. For this reason I think that anyone within post-oil community that still clings to the idea of economic growth or even technological growth for humanity in the future, either hasn't thought the problem through and is relying upon blind hope, or must be a space travel enthusiast.
The thorium electricity is clean for all practical purposes. A clean, abundant power source will enable us to do more with less resources and less pollution.
False. If you study some demographics you'll realize that urbanization and industrialization leads to much reduced nativity. In much of Europe, the population pyramid is inverted. Also, rich countries have all implemented stricter environmental standards, which poorer countries can't afford.
We can argue about the distant future, but for now, growth and tech is the only hope for humanity and the Earth. Without growth and tech, the population increase won't stop at the projected 9-10 billion, environmental standards won't continue to improve, and all available resources will be utilized by increasingly desperate peoples until collapse. The only way to go is forward, and I'm saddened that you and others strive in the opposite direction, putting your hope in authoritarianism and socialism, which have always proved counterproductive in the real world.
"A clean, abundant power source will enable us to do more with less resources and less pollution"
Ever heard of Jevon's Paradox?
"Without growth and tech, the population increase won't stop at the projected 9-10 billion"
How does that make even the slightest amount of sense?
Jevons' Paradox does not apply when resource constraints are present.
Isn't this nothing more than diminishing returns? Jevons' applies to a point, then declining returns begin to dominate?
Cheers
In OECD economies, it looks like the take back principle that Jevon's describes is only 10-50% depending on the sector and the technology used. So, we can expect 90-50% of the gains in energy efficiency to be net gains. There's not a lot of research on the dynamics of this, so it's not clear what the diminishing returns will be after more efficiency gains are achieved. Higher capital costs of the most efficient products as well as saturation effects (macro economic and micro/individual) appear to limit Jevon's Paradox as well. Case studies are rare for such an important subject, though.
You keep saying that.
Do you have any examples?
It sounds illogical.
Resource constraints are always present.
The example is the original context: Coal in the UK.
Coal mining is more efficient than ever in the UK, but the amount produced is lower than it used to be, as there is not that much coal left there. The UK consumes 1/3 as much coal as it did in 1965.
So coal mining became so efficient that it caused UK coal production to decrease?
Crazy.
(And this is because EROI fan Margaret Thatcher closed the coal mines because of those horrible low EROI coalminer/strikers demanded subsidies and the increasing availability of higher EROEI North Sea gas and ability to get higher EROEI coal shipped from Australia and South Africa.)
Jevon's paradox is alive and well.
Well, as I said, the data is quite clear-cut. Take a look at this gapminder graph.
Jeppen,
Have you lost your mind? Sustainable growth is a patent oxymoron and technology is most certainly not energy.
The human resource is a prime economic input. What faster way to deplete the earth's remaining non-renewable resources than to continue the practice of growing economies and populations?
Out of curiosity, what mechanism do you forsee that will force the global population to level off at 9-10 billion? If such a mechanism exists, what would be the negative ramifactions of throwing the switch now? Is 9-10 billion some form of optimum number? If so how was it derived?
Anyone got an idea of the dissipation involved with transitioning virtually all global energy requirements to electricity? Would ramping up all electric power consumption to support 9-10 billion people provide enough dissipation to continue global warming? Just curious.
I didn't say anything about "sustainable growth". I said growth is our only hope, and I mean short-term, say 50-100 years. Please realise that the energy used to create a certain amount of GDP (in constant dollars) has fallen about 25% in the last 15 years. Arguably, growth might not be sustainable forever, but for the next few centuries, it most definitely is.
The mechanism is empowerment and urbanization of women, mostly. Tech, growth and efficient agriculture makes people move into cities, get educations, get careers and so on. That makes birth rates drop like stones.
The negative ramifications of empowering women faster? Well, none, except for the odd conservative backlash, such as the Iran revolution. Please be my guest and fast-track this development.
No, 9-10 billion is not an optimal number. It is what demographers see as the most plausible peak. (Demographic forecast is not as uncertain as one might think. If current social and economic trends continue, this is what we'll get. If economic growth abates considerably, however, population growth will continue.)
Dissipation is not and will never be a cause of significant global warming. It is the trapping of heat that creates global warming, not the antropogenic creation of heat. Our creation of heat will always be insignificant compared to heat from the sun and from the Earth's core.
chitowncarl You have elevated a questionable supposition to the the status of unquestionable truth. Many resources are not in short supply, and can be substituted for resources which are. Recycling can also fill resource gaps. There is enough recoverable thorium to powere the world economy. Long term hlobal warming is unlikely because of Peak oil, Peak natural gas, and peak coal Thus whether yu think that the primary problem is peak fossal fuels, or anthropogenic global warming, the fact is that LFTR technology has the potential to rapidely replace fossil fuels, and to bring abundant energy to a world populatiob of 9 to 10 billion people.
Population growth is very much a function of energy availabilioty. many high energy societies see populations growth stop completely, and even population decline, thus a high energy global economy would be an economy that would not see population exploding.
Charles Barton: Population growth is very much a function of energy availabilioty. many high energy societies see populations growth stop completely, and even population decline, thus a high energy global economy would be an economy that would not see population exploding.
Speaking of questionable suppositions, that is grand one. Would you care to provide historical evidence of this function.
BTW the rates in the Stop Gap graph are misleading as regards gross increase, which is the number the planet and stressed communities feel each and every day, as the percentage rates of increase are now factoring upon such large bases. The 'gains' are also offset by the fact that as wealth might divert effort from reproduction it re-aligns it toward consumption.
Essentially, human behavior all comes down to the socially dominant, and thus re-inforced purpose(s) for living. It used to be family, and hence high birth rates, although only in agrarian societies, especially disenfranchised ones. Now the benchmark is wealth and status at the top end, chaotically desperate struggle at the bottom, and a mix of the two across the middle as people look both up and down from their rung on an increasingly slippery and isolating ladder.
You'll no doubt cite efficiency gains as an offset to consumption increase, but these efficiency measurements are always limited and linear evaluations. Unless people are pinned down and actively stifled each extra one will have considerable impact on the other people and the landscape around them.
Your simplistically confident view of the mechanics and trajectories in play is tragically common in the managerial class. Gaia help us.
If Dohboi, we had a clean unpolluting source of energy then perhaps we would not be removing mountain tops, or strip mining our landscapes for coal or other sources of power.
We think should lessen our impact on other species by not destroying their habitat...and also less auto pollution as well.
I see enormous gains and benefits.
Yes we are destructive. We destroy to get power.
We need to stop such activities and learn to live a more balanced life.
Will turning into savages fighting over a few remaining dregs of fading energy lessen that sceanario?
Airdale-I still watch and read about BLP..hydrinos for Eric Blairs sake....yet promise is shown there in Rowan Univ study and tests of the BLP reactor/whatever....so we seriously need a real breakthru...
As much a doomer as I am I will still root for my children's future.
This is the first GOOD news I have read in many moons.My gratitude to the author of this submission. Thank you Sir.
airdale,
the drawbacks of this technology are not listed in this article, but you can be assured that they are there because every "silver bullet" has had a drawback. Sometimes the drawbacks are so significant that the technological advance turned out to be no advance at all.
Whether it is Nate or Dohboi pointing it out, as long as new technologies are deployed within a mental paradigm that does not recognize the limits of the planet, we will simply destroy the planet faster.
Trains, cars, computers, airplanes, nuclear fission, the Internet: all were supposed to be the magic fix to bring prosperity and peace to the whole world.
Why hasn't world peace and global prosperity occured? Could it be that there is something else guiding how all these technologies are being used?
As far as I can tell, the only way out of this is a transformation of how we relate to and operate on the planet. Since that is unlikely to come in time, the other mechanism will get the job done: exhaustion of our resources until we have left the planet thoroughly denuded and no longer the biologically rich, wonderful one we inherited when we all arrived.
aangel wrote,
The words" the limits of the planet" are rhetorical. Some planetary resources are very limited. Some planetary resources can create environmental problems if they are used extensively. A thorium based energy economy could be sustained for several thousand years with no special mining for thorium. So unless you see extracting an already mined mineral from mine tailings as somehow exceeding the limits of the planet, then availability of thorium would not be a planetary not be anything like a limiting issue for quite along time.
Any nuclear technology will create radioactive byproducts. This is understood. One of the primary advantages of LFTR technology is that it includes a superior system for the management of radioactive byproducts. Superior that is compaired to other nuclear technologies. Depending on the byproduct management system employed the LFTR would either creat a small amount of waste - small that is compared to other forms of nuclear technology - or virtually no waste at all. The LFTR effectively destroys transuranium isotopes, which are alwys seen as the most serious component of nuclear waste. For this reason, scientists in both the United States and Russia have proposed that LFTRs be used as nuclear disarmament tools. LFTRs have some potential to create nuclear weapons material, as all reactors do. But that potential is limited by practical difficulties. It is unlikely that would be nuclear proliferators would chose LFTR technology as a route to nuclear weapons in preference to other well known, less technological challenging, and less expensive pathes to the development of nuclear weapons. Building LFTRs in the United States does not increase the likelihood that Gabon will acquire nuclear weapons.
So there are the challenges of dealing with radioactive materials, although the LFTR carries with it superior tools for the management of radioactive materials. There is also a theoretical use of the LFTR as a proliferation tool, but would be nuclear weapons builders would most likely choose simpler to master and technologically less challenging routs to the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
The LFTR does produce some waste heat, but waste heat can be more efficiently used by increasing LFTR thermal efficiency, or by using LFTR waste heat for space heating, or in sea water desalinization. It is hard to imagine LFTR waste heat exceeding some planitary limit.
The LFTR would occupie a small spacial footprint, Present NRC policy requires a land buffer around nuclear plants. Such buffers become in many instances nature preserves. Thus existing nuclear plants do not make lage environmental intrusions, although it might be argued that this is not the case for uranium mines. But there is no reason to mine thorium for a long time, because lots of it is already above the surface. Thus LFTR technology occuipes little land and much of that will be a virtual nature preserve.
Since one low cost LFTR housing option involves the placement of LFTRs in underground chambers, that would be immune to conventional terrorist attacks, terrorist would likely choose less hardened targets.
Thus the planetary limit argument would appear to be empty of content.
Charles,
I think your defensiveness is making you dense.
That kind of black-and-white rhetoric in response to a thoughtful response is just silly.
FACT: Thus far, every weapon system created has been deployed and used.
FACT: the employment of technology has brought us to the brink of our own destruction.
This shows ZERO ability as a species to manage our impulse control. We are like a child beguiled by balloons, who then pops them just for the fun of the pop.
The point is one we must tackle and must succeed in suppressing. Unlimited power leads to unlimited destruction. The reason lies in your response: arrogance. The arrogance of those who possess power in believing they can contain and control it is massive.
Your response to angel was no better. He, too, was pointing out our uncontrollable appetite. He was *not* talking about thorium, but of the consumption of other resources that unlimited energy would almost certainly, given the above point, allow. I do not think you read angel carefully, but skimmed and jumped to a conclusion.
ccpo, being very tired when i post does lead to writing mistakes. Is it not a matter of black and white thinking already, when someone makes the comment that human judgement is so poor that humanity cannot be trusted with this thechology? i take that resource over use is not a long term problem because ebentually recycling will be the cheapest form of mining. Aangel did raise the resource limitations issue in the context of a discussion of thorium, and although I was aware that he was talking about many other resources as well, It was reasonable to suppose that his observation both included and was directed to a thorium based energy economy. He certainly did not say, thorium excluded for the next few million years.
You accuse me of "black-and-white rhetoric", and then you make black and white statements like "the employment of technology has brought us to the brink of our own destruction". Technology and technological advances have had their dark aspects since the stone age. But it is black and white thinking to emphasize the dark side only. i would not argue that technological advances cannot have their dark side, but I would strongly deny that arguments that we should keep advanced energy technology out of the hands of future civilization because the pose real or imagined dangers. I favor handing the future options and tools that might solve some of their problems, and trusting a future society to choose its tools wisely. I dislagree with the argument that people are never capable of making wise choices.
FACT: it is extremely difficult to use LFTR technology to make weapons, and it has few of the drawbacks of e.g. climate change and toxic emissions associated with fossil fuels. It appears that both your objections 1 and 2 are ill-supported.
That's true. To be fully disclosing, we'd have to admit that the neptunium at the end of the fission chain might be used for weapons, and there's a reason for getting it out of the reactor as it improves the neutron efficiency (although it could also be left in to fission off).
Of course there are far easier paths to making a nuclear weapon. Countries that we're worried about getting nuclear weapons also use a very small percentage of global primary energy needs (Iran for example doesn't use a lot of electricity, so the reasons for Ahmedinnejad's nuclear program are clearly not much about electric power).
For an apparently intelligent man, and judging by your handle a self-considered Renaissance Man, you make some blindingly simple errors.
Re-read. The context of my comment has zero to do with thorium as a weapon fuel or with thorium reactors being an inherent problem.
Cheers
The response was to E-P, not to you.
And my response was not to you. Check the threading.
Ah I see that. But I actually do think you have a point, at least partially, since it's possible to make weapons through neptunium from LFTRs.
If I understand correctly,in LFTRs we can develop a fancier reprocessing in order to eliminate even Np and heavier elements, until Am or Cm, with no criticality constraints. This is particularly important if you feed at least the first reactors with a plutonium-transuranics fissile start-up
That doesn't make sense to me at all. Reprocessing doesn't eliminate Np - indeed that's the problem, it gets it out of the reactor. Np can be left in the reactor to fission off by excess neutrons, but it would be more efficient, from a reactor operating perspective, to get it out. The difference may be small, however.
Perhaps you mean this new reprocessing scheme contaminates the Np (with what?), rendering it useless?
Bear in mind that a LFTR has a miniature reprocessing plant working on line. With a fancier reprocessing you can put back into the reactor Np and heavier elements in order to trasmutate them to plutonium 239 and other fissile elements, at this point all elements eventually can be fissioned
IIRC, the "reprocessing" for LFTR is limited to:
There appear to be no steps that could effectively separate Np from Pu and Am (I'll take enlightenment from anyone with better knowledge).
Neptunium is just as easily removed by fluorination, and then it shouldn't be too difficult to do the separation by centrifuges since we're talking about a gaseous substance (although there may be other principles that could be used).
Engineer-Poet
As I understand it, the extraction of Neptunium-237 from core salts does not pose a major challenge, the rationality for doing so is that neptunium-237 is a neutron poison, and allowing it to stay in the reactor would lead into the problem of transuranium isotopes. Stripping it our leads to a proliferation issue. I regard neptunium to be potentially a far bigger proliferation issue than the extraction of u-233 from core salts. However, I also regard the Neptunium-237 problem to be solvable, by limiting LFTR sales to countries that already possess nuclear weapons, and countries that can be counted on to protect nuclear materials.
Yes, I am fully aware of that, and this is what the US would probably want to do. The problem is there's an economics 'excuse' if you will, to remove Np from the reactor as it is a neutron poison and getting it out is relatively easy (as you probably know from discussions on the thorium blog forums). So I understand the critique that this could eventually give some proliferation risk.
How can we trust the nuclear engineers and thorium reactor designers to make proliferation security their top design tradeoff priority?
They will be sorely tempted to remove pa-233 from the reactor blanket to facilitate reactor criticality. To be clear, the proliferation resistance of the thorium fuel cycle in the Lftr depends very much upon the details of how it is implemented.
In detail, on the one hand, hard gamma radiation from U-232 makes the U-233 from high burnup U-233-thorium fuel cycles more of a radiation hazard than plutonium.
On the other hand, because of its low rate of spontaneous-neutron emission, U-233 can, unlike plutonium, be used in simple “gun-type” fission-weapon designs without significant danger of the yield being reduced by premature initiation of the fission chain reaction.
In the case of the molten-salt U-233 breeder reactor, it is proposed to have continual chemical processing of a stream of liquid fuel in both the core and the blanket. Such blanket salt reprocessing arrangement offers a way to completely bypass the U-232 contamination feature because 27-day half-life Pa-233 could be separated out before it decays into U-233. Such production of pure Pa-233 must be avoided.
In any case, no fuel cycle involving the separation and recycle of U-233 would approach the proliferation resistance of unreprocessed U232/U233 core salt fuel mixes from which the radiation dose rate is on the order of one thousand rem per hour at one meter for decades after formulation.
The design of the Lftr must keep mixtures of U232 to U233 on the order of 5% to 10%. For proliferators, survival after such high radiation exposures is on the order of one to two days. However, the useful bomb fabrication working time of proliferators before incapacitation is on the order of only an hour or two.
Note, my proliferation safety criteria are higher than the lAEA criterion for nuclear fuel self-protection of lOO-rem per hour at 1 meter.
In deployments to countries where security cannot be guarantied such as the Philippines, Cambodia, or Vietnam, to guaranty that U-233 cannot be chemically separated from U232; the Lftr cannot be constructed with a blanket that surrounds the core.
In deployments to the first world, blankets may be permissible. It is in this blanket that Pa-233 is created and from which pure U-233 can be separated. If external reactor security cannot be absolutely guarantied, the blanket must be excluded. This will make the Lftr failsafe.
Chemical core salt reprocessing cannot isotopically separate U232 from U233.
It is important to note that any source of thermal neutrons can be subverted to produce pure U233 from thorium. This includes fusion, proton accelerators, and other reactor types including heavy-water reactors.
They can't divert significant amounts of Pa233 or U233, because then they run out of neutrons. As you noted, if they have a source of neutrons, then they don't need the reactor.
Since NO ONE has ever diverted U233 for bombmaking because it's so radioactive, so hot, so easy to detect, why would "they" use a LFTR for this purpose? Its so much easier to simply use an off-the-grid research reactor to create plutonium (as...Israel, Pakistan, North Korea have done). It is how Argentina, Libya, Brazil were *going* to make WMD. The LFTR is bascially proliferation resistance enough to discourage people from using it for U233...especially as ever LFTR made will be watched.
It is a specious argument, IMO.
David
Can it be that proliferators have no imagination or maybe they have bought their bomb making plutonium technology from AQ Khan?
Imo, The U233 bomb is a gun type device which is far easier for a terrorist to build than a plutonium bomb.
It’s the U232 mixed in the U233 that makes “it's so radioactive, so hot, so easy to detect”. Why do you insist on pure U233; that is a dangerous and foolish idea. My post lays out a path for a safe Lftr. Don’t you agree with it?
A rogue state is easy to deal with compared to terrorist because such a state can be deterred by the treat of destruction. A terrorist is not deterred by the treat of destruction.
Watching depends on people. People can fail. Such failure is catastrophic. Isotopic denaturing is passive and endures for all times and cannot fail. Why don’t you agree with it?
janap128 no nuclear technology is proliferation proof, but nuclear technologies are and can be proliferation resistant. This is the case for the LFTR. Rogue states choosing to build nuclear weapons would most likely choose the shortest, lowest cost and least technological rounts to nuclear proliferation over more challenging, and expensive routs. Since it is possible to produce weapons grade plutonium from natural uranium using graphite pile reactors, at a fairly low cost, the possession ofLFTR technology is unlikely to increase the probaboility that rogue states will build nuclear weapons. In the case of stats that aew deamed untrustworthy, the Pebble bed reactor his highly proliferation resistant, and would be an acceptable energy alternative.
Charles Barton, I am not concerned with rogue states. They have been controlled by the world for some time and have not yet acted in an irrational manor. On the other hand, terrorism is not controlled and is highly dangerous since terrorism is highly irrational and suicidal.
Terrorists cannot be allowed to get their hands on pure U233. If Lftr designers insist on producing pure U233, then the Lftr cannot under any circumstances be deployed in “states that are deemed untrustworthy” because of possible subversion by terrorists. That is most third world states including Pakistan and India.
I agree that the deep burn Pebble bed reactor is highly proliferation resistant, and would be an acceptable third world nuclear energy alternative to an Lftr using pure U233.
To be clear, Lftr using pure U233 can only be deployed in the US, UK, France, etc. But an Lftr using isotopically denatured U233 can be deployed anywhere in the third world.
Why can’t the Lftr internal design be centered on denatured U233? It seems like such a simple but absolutely essential safeguard to implement. Especially since such denaturing is an IAEA requirement through isotopic mixing for U235(20%) as well as U233(12%).
I'd be interested in seeing your proposal for generating sufficient denatured U-233 to supply unreliable nations. Or are you suggesting that only for the initial fuel load, and relying on a breeding ratio roughly equal to 1 to keep their systems running without any extraction of fissionables or protactinium required?
Obviously, denatured U233 can come from the blankets of Lftr breeders in the first world: US, UK, France, etc.
Yes, but how much? I didn't ask you if the material would be available, I asked you if it would be sufficient.
I seem to recall the potential breeding ratio of 1.09:1 for thorium. If the first world runs at 1:1, the third world would be limited to about 9% of the power of the first world. Do you think they'd settle for that?
I have noticed that the advocates of any energy technology never discuss its week points; so to with the Lftr. You’re getting close to understanding the Lftr dilemma.
The safer that the thorium fuel cycle is made through denaturizing the blanket salts with U232, the lower the maximum potential breeding ratio becomes. Removing PA-233 on a three day rotation gets the ultimate max breeding ratio to 1.09:1. The longer the removal frequency and/or the more denaturing that is done the more the breeding ratio drops. If we want a fail safe thorium fuel cycle, the breeding ratio may drop to under 1:1, that is, the reactor becomes subcritical and needs supplemental neutrons to stay alive.
There is a powerful temptation for the Lftr reactor designer to tradeoff proliferation resistance against breeding ratio to where the Lftr might become proliferation dangerous. But more neutrons can be added to the core by a periodic addition of enriched U235 light water reactor fuel to keep the reactor critical, but that costs an additional million or two dollars a year for operating expenses based on the size of the reactor.
I think that it is better to add other neutron producing technologies to a subcritical Lftr core reaction to form a fail-safe hybrid reactor. This will greatly clean the Lftr waste stream to the radiation level of coal ash in only a few hundred years. Adding additional enriched U235 extends the reactor waste cool down period to about 1000 years.
Human based security such as hot boxes and guards to make pure U233 safe will only be secure in the first world. The third world will just need to use windmills and solar panels, TRISO nuclear fuel, and coal. This is one of the unfortunate costs and consequences of terrorism.
But there is always a danger that a ‘no nothing’ politician may export this reactor type using pure U233 to the third world without appreciating the terrorist danger that is involved in his decision. To be very safe, an Lftr design that is failsafe in any situation and during any time in its long 100 year lifespan is what I would like to see happen. The engineers say perfect is the enemy of “good enough” but not for me.
janap128 You seem obcessed with prolifferation with a reactor that will most certainly be bought by nuclear powers, or by nations that coould easily become nuclear powers without LFTR technology. The point is not to build a proliferation proof reactor, but to sell the reactor to countries who are unlikely to use it for proliferation either because they possess nuclear weapons or because they they have signed an agreement to not do so, and have demonstrated a willingness to abide by that agreement. The United States has no motivation to use LFTrs to produce weapons grade materials, bercause it has a large surplus of U-235 in storck. Nore does likely customers, for exampleindia is building a fleer of LMFBRs which are much better proliferation tools. Ditto for Russis, China and Japan. France already has built two LMFBRs and coud build more if needed. These would be some of the prime customers for LFTR technology. How would selling LFTRs to these countries increase the risk of nuclear proliferation? The French are working on their own LFTR design, and unless they drop the project they will probably hbe producing them about 2030. So how are you going to stop france from selling LFTR to whom ever they choose?
We have seen from the operation of pakistani and South African proliferation efforts that proliferation is pervented by political obsticales, not by trying to control technology. You fall into the trap of trying to control the future, rathe4r than working toward international institutions and treaties that will control proliferation. What will stop an americaqnm politician from selling LFTRs to unreliable 3rd world countries, not to mention unreliable French politicians, indian politicians, russian politicians and Chinese politicians is an international treaty that they not do so.
Mankind is not universally directed by the better angels of our nature. It is prudent to rely on the unchanging constraints of physical laws and universal processes rather than the promises of leaders or international institutions or treaties between nations. These devices of man can change, be repealed, rejected, or ignored for the most mundane reasons. When the universal and unchanging processes of the universe are within our reach to protect and advance mankind, let us take full advantage.
True, nations can be controlled by either reason or by fear. But those who use terrorism to advance their agenda are not so controlled. We cannot permit the slightest possibility, take nothing for granted, leave no stone unturned, that such a potent power for good be subverted and delivered into the hands of suicidal madmen that are intent on the destruction of our civilization.
In this line of thought, we really shouldn't build dams either, since you can blow them up with diverted fertilizer. Hey, maybe we shouldn't use fertilizer either. Life is risk, and you just need to prioritize.
Any statement that begins with the sexist word ::mabnkind" is going to be a sweeping generality that is unsupported by fact. Do you believe that you know better what is good for "Mankind" than your feelows do? But this hadly justifies your anouncing a standard that if 5 times higher than the current international standard with only sweeping philosophical generalities to back you up.
Ok, let me restate the proposition in the most base and common terms. I will discard sweeping generality that is unsupported by fact. It is a matter of base emotion: hate.
IMO, terrorists are no better than roaches or rats and need to be dispatched as fast as possible, especially those who are planning to take out a city. In that light, I am lobbying for a better and faster insecticide. You and the IAEA just don’t hate enough; soft on terrorism.
By the way, for a 5% mix, the kill probability is an order of magnitude more than you support.
If you hate terrorists so much you'd want us to stop buying oil from them as quickly as possible.
But that doesn't seem to be your goal.
Why is that?
The Shippingport reactor ran a breeding ratio > 1.0 despite having no Pa-233 removal and the handicap of light-water coolant absorbing some neutrons, so this seems rather unlikely. Besides, the only need is to keep the reactor critical for its design lifespan; this might be achieved by e.g. re-arrangement of core reflector elements as the reactivity drops.
This introduces two major problems you didn't have before:
Half-baked fixes won't get you too far.
This is very good news; so why is there so much resistance to U232/U233 isotopic mixing?
I fear there is a definite need for “Half-baked fixes”.
There is less than a ton of U233 in the world right now so something must be used to breed U233. I favor neutron sources other than U-235/U238 for the reasons you list.
U233 breeding must be done only in the US, UK …etc; not third world countries.
The IAEA most definitely will regulate these breeders.
There are disadvabtages to denaturing LFTR core salts, It would be harder to breed using a denatured LFTR, and you would be be creating a transuranium problem that wuld be better to avoid if possible. LFTR core salts would be contained in a highly radioactive hot cell. Terrorists wishing to enter the hot cell probably would not live long enough to extract core salts. Security arrangements should make it unlikely that terrorists even enter the hot cell.
It’s a neutron economy problem then, which basically boils down to cost. In terms of cost, it does not make much sense to send 10 billon dollars to scan large numbers of cargo containers at all the ports of entry in the first world for nuclear bombs from terrorist, when a few extra dollars spent at the production point of the nuclear material will absolutely guarantee nuclear security.
Look around for some extra neutrons from more enriched core fuel, or from lasers, or from proton accelerators, or from fusion so that you can breed failsafe U232/U233. Or the Lftr designers may need to do some additional design work.
A transuranium problem( lots of plutonium in the waste) only comes from using U238 as a denaturant. 5% U232 mix won’t cause any transuranium problems.
I am concerned about out and out bribery, Pakistani or Saudi reactor operators simpatico to terrorists, or doing favors, threats to reactor operators or their family members, or fatwa’s requiring reactor personnel to provide U233 to their imams; the possibilities are endless and cannot all be foreseen let alone countered.
In short, the human flesh and spirit are weak and the terrorists are ingenious, but isotopic denaturing can only be defeated by using an easily detectable two billon dollar isotope separation plant that terrorists can’t afford, can be seen from space, and has a well policed and easily subvertable supply chain: i.e. Iran.
Janap128, Would a 1 to 20 U-238 to U-233 ratio really prevent weaponization of core uranium? Should LFTR's be sold to countries which cannot be trusted to protect core salts? Could diversion be prevented by limiting LFTRs sold to unreliable countries to one to one conversion ratios? Would terrorists have access to chemical processing facilities required to extract U-233 from fluoride salts? It seems to me that LFTR design should be undertaken first for the American energy market and for the energy markets of other nuclear powers, as well as countries which have proven track records of protecting nuclear technology from diversion. Pebble bed reactor technology should be the preferred technology for countries where there are concerns about diversion.
The IAEA rule is 12% (1 to 8) for U238 dilution. The IAEA rules for U232 denaturing is about 1 % (1 to 100), but for me, please make it (1 in 20).
No…… But back in May of 2008, G. W. Bush tried to trade Saudi Arabia nuclear plants for Oil. Realize, you can never tell what these politicians will do!
Any breeding ratio is acceptable if the denaturing of U232 to U233 is 5%. It’s up to the engineers to make it happen.
We must absolutely prevent terrorist access to pure U-233, no matter how it is implemented; better that pure U233 is never created; IMHO, the only failsafe way.
How can we stop politicians like G. W. Bush from doing crazy and dangerous things? It is better to make the Lftr idiot (...politician...) proof from the beginning.
janap128 what qualifies you to judge that the IAEA's U-232 denaturing rule is inade4quate. You views seem close to those of Jung min Kang and Frank von Hippel who appear to be unaware of the difficulty of extracting protactinium from liquid fluoride salts. But even Jung min Kang and Frank von Hippel that a 1% 232 content would produce a dose rate of 127 per hour, and thus is not fatal quick enough to suite you/
My father researched the problem for a number of years, and a complete protactinium cycle every 27 days might not be possible for a single fluid reactor. In a two fluid LFTR a 27 day cycle would not be necessicary. The Indians, at any rate plan to breed thorium in heavy water reactors, and it would appear that they are about to enter into an agreement with AECL which would likely lead to a technology transfer. You are perhaps aware that breeding thorium in heavy water reactors is an effective way to avoid producing U-232. Thus proliferation via thorium breeding will have to be controlled by an international effort, not by opposing LFTR R&D, or so denaturing the U-233 that it becomes effective breeding becomes impossible.
The heavy tampers used in less sophisticated U233 weapon designs typical of possible terrorist bomb efforts can provide much high levels of gamma attenuation - a factor of 100 or even 1000 over a modern light weight design with absorption that would be unlikely to achieve more than a factor of 10 attenuations.
The U-232 gammas also provide a distinctive signature that can be used to detect and track the U233 weapons from a distance. But, current bomb detectors are just retreaded industrial equipment. This crude bomb detection equipment currently deployed at ports around the world might not detect such a well shielded U233 weapon.
Until the sophistication levels of these port radiation detectors are increased, it is prudent to add an increased safety factor onto the standard U232 denature specification, IMO.
This disagreement may be academic since in an Lftr reactor where the fuel is reprocessed and recycled, the U-232 level could build up to 1000 - 2000 ppm (0.1 - 0.2%). In a system that is specifically engineered to maximize the U-232 fuel mixtures, concentration levels in the range of between 0.5 - 1.0% can be reached. However, I hope that some very good engineer can do more.
By the way, I am not opposed to Lftr R+D. I am opposed to any system that is engineered to produce pure U233.
Engineering a LFTr to produce pure U-233 seems unlikely. Engineering sa CANDU type reactor to do it seems much more a possibility And the Indians are very skittish about having their nuclear workers exposed to even nominal ammounts of radiation. 1% U-232 is the international standard, and its seems reasonable since many skilled workers would have to be sacrificed to build a U-233 bomb. Provided, and thei is very implausible terrorists could get a hold of the U-233 in the first place. My bet is that terrorists would find easier ways to carry out mass destruction.
There's really much bigger things to worry about. If a country wants weapons, they'll get them without being sneaky with a power reactor. You could easily make weapons with CANDU's, but no one does because its not a very economic choice.
So if I paraphrase your original objection:
"Things humans do create problems that can leave us f***ed, so even if we do our best to make technologies that don't create any serious problems, we're still f***ed."
You will excuse me if I don't find this either logically convincing or philosophically interesting.
We need calm, well reasoned arguments. This discussion is not going in the right direction.
I will delete whole threads, if need be. I suggest not discussing this further.
In fairness, you should have deleted both if you were going to delete at all. It was not I who was incorrect, after all. Leaving his there leaves an incorrect impression.
C'est la vie.
Cheers
Why do we need calm reasoned arguments?
The world doesn't work by reasoned arguments, it works at an emotional level, covered over by reasoning.
If someone believes in God, should scientists discount them, theirs no rational arguments for God.
Sometimes it is useful to acknowledge discontent.
Sunnata - That is a sublime understanding that is completely invisible to most technicians.
Until humanity honestly and sincerely grasps the nature and beauty of its own irrationality it will continue to plunge into waters too extreme for it optimal health and survival.
Currently only the media and and advertising sectors have their hands openly on the tiller, and they plot humanity's course in accord with the highest bidder. Science and its devotees seem entirely oblivious to this reality.
Put a better mousetrap in a brothel run by knaves and it is still a brothel run by knaves. Renovation is a metaphysical question, not a technical one.
This brothel is run by volunteers not knaves, and we only have so much time to spend and would rather not spend it babysitting. We have kept the forum open and free for almost 4 years and that format has many advantages. All Gail meant was to keep things civil. Disagreements, with facts and counterpoints, are part of the process. Opinions are welcomed too, if stated as such, logical and polite.
Nate
I appreciate your sentiment, but it seems you've taken the observations made by myself and Sunnata far too narrowly. They variously, and I thought quite obviously, refer to the breadth of global circumstance and not singularly to this forum, although it is very pertinent to this topic.
It is a popular notion amongst self-consciously rational people that emotion should play no part in a serious discussion. In reality this is an irrational belief. Emotion is indivisible from anything that anyone ever does or thinks. It governs what people see and do not see, and thus determines the quality and range of inputs that they have to process through their prized rationality.
What varies greatly in today's world is the degree to which people don't recognise and/or mask the expression of their emotional drivers. Thus considerations, processes, values, etc., can appear 'scientific' whilst being loaded with emotional color.
Sunnata made useful observation of this important but rarely acknowledged truth. I thought it worth applauding and expanding upon.
I agree the overhead created by unruliness or irrelevancy is a demanding issue. Where to draw the line is not an easy decision. Too quickly can censor important and enlightening expression that only threatens some people's sense of order rather than orderliness per se.
The problem of a new energy source feeding accelerated environmental destruction, has more to do with what human beings will DO WITH THE ENERGY, rather than the nature of the energy source itself.
For example, even if petroleum had turned out to be a clean, healthy fuel, with zero emissions and available domestically in almost unlimited supply in every nation, it would still have given us the problem of urban sprawl, mass-production farming, mass urbanization, mining and waste, deforestation, etc, and all of the terrible environmental destruction that these activities brought with them, simply as a result of the power that it gives us over our environment and our inability to sensibly limit and control our aspirations. The cheaper, the cleaner, the more available and more applicable the energy source is, the more it will tend to feed these sorts of problems.
When a growth based society is trapped within a finite environment, even its greatest successes begin to look like failures.
Antius....: I heat my home with natural gas, I cook my food with NG; heat my hot water and dry my closes. That call ALL be switched to electricity. I could power my car if I had a plug in hybrid or all electric "EV".
My wifes school, already energy 'efficient' could be powered by LFTR electricity. But that is standard.
Here are other "ideas". If LFTRs really provided the basis for "Thorium Economy", that is more electricity produced cleaner and cheaper than the way it is now, we can eliminate potentially huge invirornmental threat: mercury in billions of CFL. That is correct: get rid of them and go back to resistance lighting. Only kidding, I'm not really proposing that, but it's something to think about since the ONLY reason we've filled up our rooms with mercury containing light bulbs is cost of electricity and efficiency. It's all relative, don't you see?
But with massive amounts of electricity and process heat, we could end the use of 'coke' in industry (steel, chemicals), we can try high-energy applications in the chemical industry to create new materials. We can have a *serious* world wide desalination program that could provide potable water to dry regions and save our rivers and streams.
That's few ideas!
DAvid
David, you didn't respond to his point. Not only that, but you changed the topic. I haven't seen any of the three of you respond to this point yet, though it has been raised by at least three people.
Cheers
Agreed. The main point is not being addressed.
However, Brian Czech from the Center for the Advancement of a the Steady State Economy has:
Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train: Errant Economists, Shameful Spenders, and a Plan to Stop them All.
OK, let me block quote it here to refer to it:
I simply don't agree. We are trying to survive, and, live healthy and long lives. It is pretty much fact that the more energy you have access to, the more long lived you are, as a society. But I disagree with the premise, it is EXACTLY wars of energy and the pollution (particulate, chemical and CO2) that IS destroying this planet. That is the whole focus of this discussion.
Not if what we do is regulated. It's a question, ultimately, of politics and policy. Portland, OR, limited it's urban sprawl. European farming practices are simply *better* than American ones. Building mass transit cuts down on how much and how we use energy, cheaper, more abundant power produced locally implies less wars for energy. It allows for BETTER and more wide spread recycling, for example. The above quote is a prescription, again, for *poverty*. We have a huge difference in our views of human potential and the direction we think society needs to go.
Then we have to make this 'finite' (I don't actually agree here since we are talking philosophical differences) environment BETTER and more livable, not less, and you need more and more clean, cheap energy to do that. The LFTR points to this in the future, out beyond 2050 when we develop the Thorium Economy. This includes escaping this planetary environment to the rest of the solar system.
David
To have worldwide regulation enacted would require that we have sufficient people who have personally transformed their relationship to our place on the planet and the 'infinite growth' camp would have to be outvoted.
Good luck with that. I have been working on that for years, to very, very limited success. In fact, in all honesty I would have to conclude that my efforts have been a complete failure when viewed against what needed to be accomplished before time ran out.
DWalters: Portland, OR, limited it's urban sprawl.
Update yourself with a closer view of the latest results of that 'success'.
All sorts of bottleneck problems are becoming manifest due to the fact that squashing 1st World consumers closer together does not limit their footprint.
Smart Growth is a dumb fallacy designed to keep intelligent revue away from an impossible aspiration that is concomitant with unconscionable profit-taking.
And bloated consumption footprint is not just a burden on the robbed. It presents a deadly vulnerability within the physical security of the bloated.
dwalters: We can have a *serious* world wide desalination program that could provide potable water to dry regions and save our rivers and streams.
Arguably we could but without an unprecedented variation within current standards the water would be allocated to increased production and population.
Please tell me where and how it has been otherwise or tell me exactly how it might be otherwise?
I see. So, we condemn the world to continued poverty because you are *afraid* of growth. This is reactionary. It needs to be opposed. Humanity comes first, and to bring the majority of the worlds population out of poverty will require a lot more energy than we use and produce now. Your question is false. It is NOT otherwise...more water, more growth, and...BETTER growth...which comes lower population growth and an increasing standard of living.
David
Two things:
1) It is materially and historically evident that growth has directly caused the poverty you seek to quell.
2) The *better* brand of growth you seek to employ to redress the balance is vaporware. A dream. A Quixotic notion. No? Tell me your plan for it.
Regarding the latter:
Forget Africa for a moment. How are standard of living trends going in Inner East Los Angeles? What about Detroit? I know beyond any doubt that the fringes of burgeoning East Coast Australian cities are decaying into morbid enclaves of alienation and pointlessness. I shudder at the Los Angelisation that is relentlessly underway in SE Queensland, not because it makes any sense but because it makes so much profit for a very few. Most people can't afford the price tag of inner urban 'smart' growth, which is really just a marketing fraud to dress up plain old unsustainable growth, as is being now demonstrated as Portland O., chokes on its ingrowing footprint. Outer suburban densification delivers even worse outcomes. Yet the seeds of its eventual necessity continue to be sown in 'master planned' estates that displace ecology and farmland and implant onerous legacies of undeliverable social desire.
You want to use less coal and make life better. I applaud that. However your method of expanding fission and continuing to increase aggregate energy consumption exacerbates the core problem rather than addressing it. Your faith in the market to silently deliver a sweet spot regarding population is baseless. This crucial outcome has to be decisively sought, energised by its conceptual presence within common conversation. That can begin immediately. If it can't it is only due to self-censorship on the topic, which means it never can and we will have nature impose its ruling upon some inflated future. One delivered by this thorium bullet perhaps.
I want to use less coal by using less energy, delivered via a more modest, less populous, less centralised, more locally aware, locally autonomous and genuinely diverse society. If that is politically impossible due to greed then so is your aspiration for a growth driven transition to stability. The credit crisis begs us to invest in a new way. If enough people do not clamour for a new way out of this crisis, their corrupt representatives will dig the old rut to an even greater and more iniquitous depth.
Using less energy makes many more options possible than does using more energy. But they do require some cooperative thought as their parts are not readily obvious from within the familiarity of the energy fog.
Fond of tribal warfare?
might not be the utopia often imagined. That locally autonomous part can be quite the can of worms.
Fond of tribal warfare?
Fond of a globally homogenous police state?
As the machine gets bigger, us little cogs all get smaller and less significant. And then it breaks and we get 'tribal' warfare with no mores or decorum.
That locally autonomous part can be quite the can of worms.
That depends a lot on:
How you read and interpret history.
Your understanding of the vital parts of culture, the consequences of damage to those parts, when (and often why) that damage was wrought upon local cultures, and what their character might actually have been prior to that damage - ie how 'savage' were they really?
How clearly you perceive and understand the systemic incidence of modern violence.
I am not saying there have not been trade offs, and mind you I have cloistered myself in the taiga but not off the grid, so I certainly don't enjoy too close a contact with the machine but I am still connected.
I've spent significant time with the nonliterate remnant of a preliterate society. I don't claim to have had more than a glimpse of that society's former richness. There have been tradeoffs. I'm near twice the age I would have lasted in most societies predating the one I belong to. There are always trade offs.
My point is you might not get the tradeoffs you expect.
There's a whole sky up above. you know...
Aangel,
Do you know of drawbacks?
If so please state them. Boogy man in the closest is not playing fair.
As well as CCPO down below.
Hiding under bugaboos is not logical.
Sorry to be blunt but time is awasting. We need to fast track something if we are to have a chance. This seems fair to me.
I await the discussion of real drawbacks.Not those that state we will use it badly. That's a given but generations change and new orders come into being. Right now powering down is going to eliminate us unless something changes the future.
Airdale
Airdale
Airdale, i second that, Rational discussions of limitations are positive things, playing the fear card is not.
What you call fear I call "wisdom."
it is prudent to look for negative possibilities, but it goes well beyond wisdome besure that you are going to fund them.
At least one drawback I can see now is what I already pointed out: we'll will consume our planet until it is exhausted unless we fundamentally transform how we relate to the earth and our place on it.
Others drawbacks to this technology will appear over time. They always do. When they first appeared, cars were hailed as the way to keep cities clean from all the horse manure. Only later did we see problems they introduced (traffic fatalities, pollution, suburban sprawl, etc.).
As for our ability to use this technology Charles is advocating "wisely," I think our track record with many, many other technologies is very poor indeed.
I have no idea what you are referring to.
Cheers
Why?
Why would replacing investments in coal with investments in thorium result in faster destruction of the planet? Coal is dirtier and thorium likely won't be cheaper. We'll just replace something dirty with something clean. How can that speed up environmental harm?
Actually, it has, in relative terms. Poverty and wars have decreased dramatically. What remains is mostly due to socialist policies and in some cases due to deep-rooted religious and nationalist ideas.
That can only come about in the wake of prosperity.
No, that is just more of the same type of thinking that hasn't worked so far: "when the circumstances change then the humans will change." Technology is just another element of circumstance. Another way to call your "deep-rooted religious and nationalistic ideas" is being human.
What you are saying has been advocated for centuries in different forms by different people. Advocates of previous changing circumstances (technologies) sounded like this:
* "when rails stretch from sea to sea on every continent, everyone will be prosperous and peaceful"
...didn't happen
* "with the advent of the flying machine, people previously isolated will come to know each other and there will be peace and prosperity"
...didn't happen
* "if everyone has a personal computer, we will have access to the whole of knowledge and everyone will be peaceful and prosperous"
...didn't happen
* "with instantaneous and cheap communication via the Internet, THEN there will be peace and prosperity"
...didn't happen
or, for a little variety:
* "with only one superpower, there will be peace and prosperity."
...didn't happen
Are you seeing the pattern? A bit of research will turn up countless advocates for one technology or another who were thoroughly convinced that this time their invention or pet technology would finally usher in a new era for humans, and all have failed.
That's because transformation of how we live on the planet must happen by each individual on a personal level. It does not depend on circumstances, of which technology is just one of many.
Collectively, we are trapped in a hamster wheel running from one technological "panacea" to the next foolishly thinking that "this time it will be different" when it never is. We are trapped and most don't even know it. The only way out of the trap starts by seeing the trap.
The thorium reactors you and the others on this thread are advocating will do nothing more than prolong our rapaciousness. Perhaps we will push back the boundary of the energy limit, but only far enough for us to meet another limit, far before we reach the 9-10 billion people someone on this thread actually thinks the planet can bear.
Well, aangel, as I said, you're wrong. Tech does brings peace and prosperity, just not completely and right away. I don't know why anyone would expect sudden perfection - I think you overinterpret for the sake of argument.
Tech makes our societies more advanced and prosperous societies. It enables communication and necessitates education. It gives us an abundance which enables us to be generous towards one anouther and to devote attention to environmental issues. The abundance is destroyed by wars, so we avoid them - it is no longer possible for entire countries to benefit from wars. Slowly, science and education eradicates religiosity. That "personal level" of transformation happens large scale because of tech and all that comes with it.
Without progress, there is certain collapse. Perhaps you are right that there is collapse even with progress, but stats ARE improving, and our only chance is to continue to advance tech and grow economically. The next 50 years will prove critical.
The prosperity and abundance which technology has brought to any society has always had a cost.
I would feel more accepting of your POV if I was unaware of that cost. In order to support our technologically based "first world" lifestyles we have taken, by direct force or coercion, the materials we required to build them. In our own countries we remove mountain tops, deforest, destroy topsoil. We destroy the economies and political stability of 2nd and 3rd world nations to make our removal of their resources more efficient. A lot of the techno-gadgetry that we enjoy is manufactured in areas where a good wage is bare subsistence and a healthy work environment is unknown.
I find it humorous that you assert that technology has bought us the prosperity and time to pay attention to environmental issues. Quite likely the promotion of technology has created those issues.
I would have to rephrase your statement and say that "Tech makes SOME societies more advanced and prosperous." Then I would add the caveat that the method by which we have adopted technology has destroyed the potential for advancement and prosperity of others.
Our wars have been economic - this does not mean that folks have not died and environments have not been destroyed. We just don't see it because we do it elsewhere or we control the media sufficiently that our local excesses are not big news.
I firmly believe that every technology has an associated cost. Furthermore, I believe that it is the potential for profit - not improvement to society - which drives the expansion of technology. Cleaning up after yourself costs money and lessens profit, so it doesn't happen. Paying a decent wage costs money and lessens profit, so it doesn't happen. The use of technology does not appear to alter our basic human striving for advantage.
Regards
Al
No. We have generally bought them, and mostly mined them ourselves on our own first world soils.
This is a good thing, of course. It starts a positive spiral in such countries.
Perhaps compared with the 17th century, but not compared with the 1950-ies. We are way past the worst stage of development. Things are getting better, and no developing countries need to have as dirty industrialization periods as we had, b/c tech is better and cleaner now. The only way forward is to continue this path.
You would be wrong. It is far easier for any developing nation to have progress now than before, b/c widely available technology, as well as richer countries' demand for products, present lots of low hanging fruit, development-wise.
Uneducated leftist sentiments, I'd say.
Not compared with older tech. Some things are simply better.
We should be thankful. Profit is an excellent driving force for progress, much better than political whims and monuments.
If cleaning up doesn't happen, then the polluted area isn't owned by somebody that cares. Paying a "decent wage" shouldn't happen - wages should strictly be the result of market forces, so that unemployment is minimized and so that people gravitate towards more productive work. This improves standards of living the fastest. Minimum wages, for example, is sheer lunacy.
Let me guess, you are not an 8 year old battery recycler in Bangladesh.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/09/28/what.matters.dust/index.html
I'm speechless
Al
Well, I'll say one thing. He paints a picture of the company that Nuke advocates have to side with.
and Jeppen Replies:
'No. We have generally bought them, and mostly mined them ourselves on our own first world soils.'
Uneducated centrist sentiments, I'd say. Just ask the Navajo how many reservations they were shuffled away from throughout Colorado, for example, when these otherwise desolate wastelands turned out to have mineral wealth under them.
Pathetic.
Jokuhl: Well, I'll say one thing. He paints a picture of the company that Nuke advocates have to side with.
What about this one?
Comment:
Our wars have been economic - this does not mean that folks have not died and environments have not been destroyed. We just don't see it because we do it elsewhere or we control the media sufficiently that our local excesses are not big news.
Reply:
Uneducated leftist sentiments, I'd say.
!??!
Where to begin to address that?
If someone is not paying attention to evident experience then fact and reality just don't apply within the dialogue. At least not until the walls begin to crumble so close to home that the tremors cannot physically be ignored.
And where would I begin to address THAT?
(What "economic wars" is the guy talking about? Protectionism? Ok, then I agree, but I don't think that is what he meant. It's obvious that first-world presence gives third-world countries enormous possibilities to fast-track their own economies through trade and simple use of knowledge produced by us.)
Read "The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein. It will be enlightening.
Al
I don't really have the time or willpower to actually respond, but hey read this book!
Thhpppt.
I don't really have the time or willpower to actually respond, but hey read this book!
Thhpppt.
I simply thought you were talking about more modern theft from other nations, along the lines of "stealing Iraqi oil". Displaced locals have generally benefited from material extraction and come to enjoy the "first world lifestyles" that that extraction made possible.
Is this the Lullaby that helps you sleep at night?
Iraq (thank you) is a fine example. Niger Delta comes to mind. How about Chiquita Bananas? The Gold Trade, Diamonds, Chocolate Harvesting in West Africa, Uranium in the American West, and the Native health issues that have been conveniently side-stepped..
Not to mention computer manufacturering workers in China, and back office workers in India. but China and india seem to be prispering. And Niguria has a lot of well educated University graduates who someone will probably put to work soe day.
This criticism cannot apply to thorium technology which basically does not require any mining for thousands of years. Advances in mine safety technology would make thorium mining a safe profession for future Navajo miners. Navajo uranium miners were not subjected to more radon than non Navajos during the 1950's and 60's. Thus Navajos were not singled out for victimization by a cruel uranium mining industry.
Alakazaam points out what I should have written in my note: these technologies do not bring universal peace and prosperity, and the peace and prosperity they do bring is highly localized and unsustainable.
People don't often stop long enough to really understand what unsustainable actually means. It means that current trends will both stop at some point —which is precisely what is happening now.
BTW, a modern economy is just another technology, and right now it is in the process of collapse. So your assertion that more technology will do the job seems to make no sense to me. Of course you might say we need a different technology, but that is just jumping on the hamster wheel again.
aangel, what some might see as a collapse, others might view as a transformation. Is it not the case that while old technologies and institutions are dying, new technology and institutions are being born?
In ways they have brought peace, especially in the developed western world. We have not had a major war with one another in over fifty years, well over the average lifespan of less than two centuries ago. This was unheard of before our advances.
The debate here is the right one. Has our increased library and use thereof modified our basic primate behavior enough to allow us to truly prosper on this planet. These debates indicate we are approaching at least the possibility of such.
Access to and comprehension of the library does not progress evenly throughout the race. Maybe we are only at a major pinch point in the distribution and utilization of the information we have garnered and as this congestion is relieved our race's behavior will have been positively impacted enough to warrant at least a longer look at the problem. At least some more growth might be required to relieve the congestion in the information stream.
No doubt we have done great damage, but greater damage has been done when no humans were about. Who here claim's full comprehension of all the possibilities and thus the right to determine the only way forward.
"turning into savages fighting over a few remaining dregs of fading energy"
Airdale, did I suggest or advocate for or even mention this somewhere?
No you didn't state that specifically. It was my comment in the context that if we did not get some replacement energy device online very shortly and relied upon ...well whatever your main thrust was as opposed to the author thesis...then we would be turning into savages fighting....etc.....
Isn't it obvious that without something on the immediate horizon to break this fall that such as I propose regarding savagery would NOT happen?
Its hard to go way back up thread and revisit a post and then remember the replies and statements.
I find you a very reasonable poster. I mean you no disrespect. But I do differ with your views on that subject. Perhaps I overstressed somewhat.
Airdale-I do read between the lines and draw conclusions based on the contextAnd as you know I am very much a doomer but if something really sounds promising ...and I have been searching in vain quite a bit, then I will tend to be proactive on the subject..for what can be lost,,try and miss and forget it? Or try and try to get it.
I see no real pollution or ill effects. The money to test and develop can't be that great ..not compared to the trillions being tossed out the windows as we speak...
not be removing mountain tops, or strip mining our landscapes for coal or other sources of power.
Instead the reason will be to get at DIFFERENT minerals/atoms. Like, oh say, Phosphorous.
read about BLP..hydrinos for Eric Blairs sake..
And yet everytime I ask the 'hydrinos are real' people to show the cold when the energy level returns to the planetary norm, no one can show that.
Charles Barton has a similarly tough task - show that somehow THIS time man's machines and man's maintenance of their machines will be different. Thorium reactors do sound better - but I've heard 'sounds good' talk before. The 1950's rhetoric was about how fission power would be 'too cheap to meter' and how the US would have such demonstratively safe fission power that the US Government would not have to insure the industry. Yet the Anderson bill keeps getting re-upped and the meters keep getting upgraded - not removed.
I'm sure Thorium will be tried, and when it fails I won't be at all surprised. What will be surprising is the technology working as advertised.
This is the first GOOD news I have read in many moons.
And you believe that Hydrinos are real and that somehow YOU are gonna survive from foraging from the land and everyone else will just die. (VS the foraging lands being stripped bare)
Your position reminds me more of http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf than anything else Sir.
Well Eric I have a lot of land to forage on and I am good at foraging.
If others die from starvation then that is not my fault. I heeded long ago the yearnings to get back to the land. I put all my assets into that struggle and now is the payoff.
I can look in my pantry and see my canned goods. I can look to the future of using a woodgas burner to can my tomatoes. I can dig my partially started root cellar and be hopeful.
What are you doing? For yourself that is for I am a bit selfish about my own survival...I still ride my Harley mind you but I also have a very small Honda Trail 90 ..well two of them and some very old VW bugs that I might convert.
As the motto goes "country boys can survive"..quaint bullshit but yet for me I hope I am getting it right..
But would I trade it all for continued advances in the human race via technology and perhaps one day of us going to Mars? In a Chicago heartbeat.
So I follow anything that holds promise and hope for it but cover my bets as far as I can..
What am I doing wrong that tweaks young Eric Blair's nose hairs?
Airdale
Airdale, you are doing what can't be done by everyone. There is simply not enough space.
Powering down and carefully reversing growth, somewhat like decommissioning a reactor before not after it melts down, is the only way to hope to deal with the mess that your own preparations make clear you acknowledge is underway. Why you think the mess can be sorted with a new form of energy is completely beyond me.
Coal and oil are exceedingly dirty, but that is not their most essential impact. Until we can commonly desire, openly discuss and institute the means of behaving better than yeast, we will continue to decimate ourselves with too much energy.
dohboi I don't understand your argument. These LFTR nuclear reactors can provide all 7 billion people of the world with energy. Solar, wind, geothermal cannot provide it at a competitive cost. Why is that a problem?
Sorry to be so long to respond--busy week.
I'm not sure I can explain it better than I did in my first post on the thread,or better than many more eloquent than I who have taken similar stands here.
I would just ask you to imagine what people in the real world are most likely to do with a huge new energy source? Will they likely improve the chances for a livable planet, or will they use the energy to use up, disrupt, and pollute the only planet we have?
I realize that the question is so far outside of mainstream thinking that many will find it incomprehensible or offensive.
But if this point--when PO, GW, sixth and seventh great extinction events...--if this bizarre and unique moment in the history not only of humans but of life on earth is not the time to reconsider deeply held notions about human behavior and humans' place in the world, I just don't know what time would be.
Best to all,
Dohboi
Once more we see why the need for scientific education is so important and must be maintained. Few people (including myself) have enough technical knowledge to even debate this alternative with authority, and certainly the number of qualified technicians and designers able to develop and oversee the planning of a workable reactor of this type must be very small (under 50 people?)
If this alternative can deliver all that it promises it is astounding to me that China and India (both already nuclear powers) are not pushing a very serious and dedicated program to speed the development of a thorium reactor. The reactor could also (if it works as promised) return the United Kingdom to the forefront of technology development if they dedicated development and research efforts to it. Island nations such as the U.K. and Japan would see thorium reactors as the answer to their dreams one would think...and yet there seems to be little excitement there(?) over the last quarter century.
It is said this was one of Admiral Rickover's pet projects, and he was usually a pretty good judge of technology. We definitely must examine this alternative before we can make any valid conclusions, but it does show promise of great return IF it is viable.
RC
There seems to be activity in India on this front. In recent news we read:
India says no private sector in nuclear power industry
US nuclear business delegation visits India
Apart from the burnup fraction other factors in reactor choice must be initial capital cost, speed of construction and running costs. For example I gather a 1000 MWe pressurised light water reactor can cost $4bn plus site costs and take 5 years to build in theory. Maybe that's optimistic. Other costs are fuel in, waste out, water supply and staffing. The LF reactor would have to compare well against several of these criteria.
On thorium supply I gather current uranium mines that have brannerite ores (eg Olympic Dam) are putting aside tailings containing rare earths and thoria. Thus there are millions of tonnes of surface 'ore' that don't even need hard digging.
Given that the useful energy in a ton of Th used in a thorium breeder is ~100x as much as that from a ton of uranium used in a LWR, the thorium in those tailings piles would be sufficient to crash the market for raw fuel for several decades at least.
The high power density of the thorium reactor design could allow mass production in factories and shipping them to the destination from there. It looks like the reactor could be small enough in perhaps 100 - 300 MWe power rating to be shipped by truck (ie get through tunnels and under bridges easily).
Of course, a crash program would also take these production aspects into account.
the US Thorium reserve estimate was sharply increased by the USGS in the latest publication from Oct 2008
http://sev.prnewswire.com/mining-metals/20090112/NY5794512012009-1.html
The latest India/ thorium power joint venture to develop a thorium fuel cycle
Infrastructure player Punj Llyod and US-based Throium Power, which signed an MoU last month to form a 50:50 joint venture company for exploring commercial nuclear power opportunities, are targeting an investment of up to $1 billion in the venture.
I'd just like to point out that you never used the dreaded word breeder.
As far as I can see the 'starter' fuel would be some tons of U-235 or plutonium.
It is irritating when breeder proponents say you don't need 'fissile' fuel; every reactor
has products of fission plus in this case xenon gas waste which must be removed and replaced with fresh thorium.
I'd also like to point out that the Indian thorium program based on heavy water has been a failure; new commercial scale Indian reactors are Russian VVR-1000 LWR.
A thorium gas cycle reactor in Germany has been closed.
Still if this can be run in modified LWRs, that's extremely interesting.
The scientific community in an absolute panic in the face of global warming and is turning to nuclear power against conventional coal.
I am hostile of any expansion of nuclear power however thorium/U-233 does look like the most promising.
If TPTB are going to pursue some nuke thing it should be this.
Retrofit an old 1 GWe unit
like they did Shippingport.
Most people including most nuclear opponents understand the word breeder to refer to Liquid Metal Fast Breeders, that are uranium cycle reactors. I am not a fan of the LMFBR, and so I perfer to not have to deal with the confusion that the word breeder creates. I only ask that the critics of nuclear power to give the LFTR a fair hearing before they judge it.
I am no expert on this technology but wonder, if this essay is accurate, then why all the research into fusion? How do fusion budgets compare to thorium budgets?
Ralph Moir was a fusion researcher during his scientific career. Now retired, he is a LFTR advocate.
0. New technology does not get much money in general - relative to money spent tweaking the old stuff that is the bulk of the economy
1. Nuclear fusion budgets are not that big - less than $1 billion/year and most of that for the big tokomaks
2. Some of the most promising nuclear fusion projects only have a few million each
3. Thorium reactor research has several million/year but it is spread out among different countries
The main thing for both promising fusion and for new thorium reactors is that they are below the level of effort needed to have a clear development plan to achieving commercial reactors. They are in bootstrapping research and development mode.
Where is the example of the best technological option getting the most support ? Most of the money in energy research and development goes to coal and oil. How about the most technologically promising oil recovery technology THAI/CAPRI ? A few million dollars.
Before the crisis how much went to electric cars or hybrid cars in North America ? they spent more developing the next SUV.
This is rather amusing.
The only way fusion works is as a neutron source for a blanket of...THORIUM as was suggested by Bethe.
And in fact a significant part of the fusion research community realizes this may be the most practical path forward. There is speculation that that the Chinese participation in the world's fusion energy program is for just this purpose. Their plans for fission energy development are staggering. Where will they get the fuel?
"I am no expert on this technology but wonder, if this essay is accurate, then why all the research into fusion?"
Fusion involves something really new scientifically: Before fusion the common belief among physicists was that there were three states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. But early fusion research identified a new state of matter which has been dubbed 'plasma'. It is scientifically interesting in contrast to the 'grubby engineering detail' of LFTR. My words are meant to characterize the attitudes of the members of the community, not my own. Me - I attempt to avoid argument with opinionated people. ;-)
The fission bomb and then the fusion bomb are remarkable counterexamples to the general rule that simpler, older science makes for more effective (military) technology.
Really, there are other forces at work rather than pure reason in choosing what gets funded in government research. Or maybe pure reason implies that pure scientific interest _should_ be more important than mere commercial profit ;-)
For some I've read of how thorium is the greatest thing since the pocket in the shirt.
So why isn't it as common as that pocket?
A needed analysis would cover its pitfalls, obstacles to its widespread implementation, and plausible methods with cost and time required to overcome these.
There are a lot of analyses that are needed. Once we started down one nuclear route, it is difficult to change to another route, even if it should prove to be better.
Hopefully we will have other articles in the future on this topic.
A while back, you posted the article on toe-heel air injection for tar sands. The process was to revolutionize tar oil production in an environmentally sensitive manner. (To be fair, as I recall, the article did not tout THAI as a cure-all, but made grandiose claims on it's use as a silver bullet) The problem is that the then untested process works only in very limited situations, situations which presently appear to curtail its use to insignificance.
Is thorium in the same boat? What is it's actual implementation probability? It seems there are more and more solutions to the energy crisis, solutions with energy too cheap to meter, eroi's in the stratosphere. When you ask "Then why isn't it done?" the answer always falls around the government, foolish markets, conspiracies, or if you only knew. Well, I don't know, please explain.
I'm not picking on you or the author, just that I wish we'd have an honest appraisal, a look at both sides, for like Davebygolly below, I'm certain there's alot we're not being told.
Petrobank THAI /Capris oil processes
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/09/petrobanks-capri-thai-processes-for.html
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/01/petrobank-capri-thai-processes-for.html
The Petrobank oil recovery technologies (Thai/Capri) is actually cheaper; for instance, the estimates are that this will cost $20,000 per producing barrel to put a project together, and it likely will be less, whereas your average SAGD (steam assisted gravity drainage) project is $60,000 per producing barrel. So, it's a third, and if you add an upgrader, you can get into the $80–$100,000 per producing barrel.
commercialization plans
http://www.petrobank.com/hea-commercializationplans.html
I just read the obituary of John Stallings Jr. in the NY times and thought the last quote in the notice was perhaps something we should all keep in mind.
"In his 1965 paper about his nonproof of the Poincaré Conjecture, after he had explained his errors “in hope of deterring others from making similar mistakes,” Dr. Stallings ended on a musing note:
“I was unable to find flaws in my ‘proof’ for quite a while, even though the error is very obvious. It was a psychological problem, a blindness, an excitement, an inhibition of reasoning by an underlying fear of being wrong. Techniques leading to the abandonment of such inhibitions should be cultivated by every honest mathematician.”
Why do intel and AMD processors support a zillion different legacy instructions, including a piece of shit stack-based FPU? Why do they have so few registers when it's clear that it would be cheap to implement and a huge speed advantage to having many more of them? Why do they preserve the behaviour of an instruction from an old processor in ugly corner cases for which the manual specifically states the behaviour is undefined and likely to change in future releases? Why do they still present a CISC instruction set to the programmer while decoding all the instruction on the fly to the RISC instructions(micro-ops) that it executes internally?
For each person who owns a processor with the architecture you have another person that could write a useful application or might want to buy your application, for each processor produced you head further down the learning curve and are able to produce them cheaper; the barrier to entry just grows and grows with each passing year. Even the switch to 64-bits is painfully slow and that's with a well developed legacy mode for supporting 32-bit applications on 64-bit OS. Starting over on a clean slate may be desirable but it would be a monumentous project and not necessarily in the best interests of existing players.
Nuclear technology is in the same sorry state. The regulatory environment is geared towards giant ~1 GW reactors(both implicitly in the fee structure which tends towards the same cost per reactor for large and small reactors and sometimes explicitly as in the NRC recently stating that they intend to put small reactors on the back-burner). LWRs didn't take off because they were the best reactors, they took off because the government wanted to use them for sub-marines and air-plane carriers and had already developed them for that use when it handed over design details to private industry under the atoms for peace programme(necessitating only minor refinement for commercialization and power production). After the construction of Shippingport, private industry knew exactly what to expect and had a template for how to design their own. So that's what they did and for each one they built their component suppliers headed down the learning curve, their suppliers became more numerous, the work force capable of working as operators on LWRs grew, the NRC and equivalent institutions in other countries gained experience and expertice in reviewing LWR license applications and the rules changed to conform to the specific quirks of LWRs.
I think you'll need either an international consortium of existing nuclear suppliers and designers dedicated to the task or a major effort by one of the US national labs or foreign equivalents to make serious headway on any kind of nuclear reactor design that's not a derivative of the traditional designs.
"Nuclear technology is in the same sorry state. The regulatory environment is geared towards giant ~1 GW reactors"
Same holds true in the pharma industry. Victor Niederhoffer says in his most recent book that loosening FDA regs. could save 60K more people than are saved by tight regs. He says there is something like a billion dollar minimum entry fee for designing a major drug today and that x large part of this is for complying w/ regs and tests. Sorry to be vague. These are the parts I remember offhand.
Matt
Why? Why do so many run MSFT Windows when Linux is far better and is FREE?
Why. Advertising and FUD.And huge stacks of money.
This technology needs to be put on the fast track and immediately.
I doubt it will get that though. Pity.
Airdale--I run Linux but everyone else uses MSFT so I have to use it as well in order to fix the beast for others.
Whoa! I know both well and I'm calling you on bull$#!†. Linux is a dog and serious people need MSFT to get real work done.
And I am calling you on being an 'appliance user' and not being very well informed.
The net runs on Linux/Unix.
Linux can be installed on almost any older box and will leave MSFT in the dust. Ohhhh yeah tell me about Vista...a real sleazy mousy piece of code.
Read ESR's Cathedral and The Bazaar. Please.
Lalaland!
Airdale-I use MSFT for the people whose systems I work on use it but for me its Linux/Unix all the way. I can therefore FIX code errors and travel on. With MSFT you just get a hugely degraded system,,,BLOATWARE
Appliance user eh? My experience with linux/unix is that it is goddawful slow.
Tell me how one can do the following things faster on a linux system:
I'll bet that not one of those things can be done faster on a linux system. And in the case of some tasks, you might not be able to do them at all. I can think of dozens more tasks that would make a linux system about as useful as a paperweight.
I'll bet that you couldn't name one user-oriented task that linux could do faster than windoze. Including something as simple as cropping a photo.
Off topic, I should not have gone into this.
Airdale
Despite having a horrid development team Mplayer on Linux can do the video processing very fast from the command line. I use sox or mplayer on Linux to do tempo shifts dozens of times a day without having to think about it, and 'cat /dev/null > $1'. If you mean "from a GUI", you can crop that photo faster than I can. I don't need to crop many photos in my line of work.
For you there is probably no advantage to using Linux.
For me, there is.
Why do so many run MSFT Windows when Linux is far better and is FREE?
Lack of programs to run on it? That's my reason. It's why I haven't made the switch. I'd love to. Has the situation improved? Would all the software have loaded now be able to be kept? Doubt it...
What is the state of things wrt software for Linux?
Cheers
Same as the state of things for any operating system:
It depends on what you want to do.
For server side software I'd say there is nothing better. For desktop software it's OK, but not exceptional. There's an awful lot of unpolished software out there for it.
Some specializations don't have best-of-breed software available on Linux, or even halfway decent. Some of these are furthermore not susceptible to being run under Wine with decent performance/stability.
For my money the pain involved in running on Linux is less than I've had from Windows, reasonable people can and do disagree on this.
I make my living on Windows and have played with about 10 different versions of Linux over the years. I recently decided it was finally up to what I needed for a "secondary" desktop, and put up a decent unit, thinking to use it for standard work (documents, spreadsheet models, web) but found that applications which initially appeared quite functional always were missing 3 or 4 small but for me, critical bits of functionality. Adding together the fact that my core CAD, FEMM, Industrial Instrumentation etc. applicationns are only available on windows and the Linux machine has sat un-started for three months now. If I ever get back to playing with the interactive PABX application I put on it, or developing a new controller for my stirling engine, I might re-start it but for now, am resigned to exploiting the un-matchably huge development resources companies like MS put into the core desktop application programs.
Drat! You beat me to it. :)
If thorium isn't already here, then there's a reason and a story we aren't being told.
Edit: Which is not a complaint against the post. It's one of the great things about TOD, that these things get aired from all sides.
history of liquid flouride
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/2006/04/brief-history-of-liquid-fluori...
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/01/cj-bartob-sr-at-ornl-into-1960s...
Admiral Rickover saw that the light water Reactor could power for more than submarines. I would also be useful for powering surface ships, and Rickover realized civilian power plants. Rickover had pushed for the development of reactors large enough to power aircraft carriers. President Eisenhower had called for the development of the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and the aircraft carrier reactor allowed Rickover to kill two birds with one stone. Rickover donated a naval reactor to serve as a prototype civilian power reactor. At the same time, the navy was still able to do research with the reactor.
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12477&page=59
Book on Nuclear pioneer Alvin Weinberg
http://www.springerlink.com/content/m5623np72344x822/
"that light water become the main line for commercial development has been a surprise to me"
Other systems had advantages.
LWR (light water reactors) had proven reliable power for the Nautilus.
moved on land the Shippingport PWR.
The momentum it gave to light water technology was enough to ward off intrusions by competing technology.
===========
first mover advantage to Light water reactor and now 5 years to just to approve another light water reactor of proven design. How long to get a new reactor technology approved ? How many novel nuclear technologies have their been over the last three decades ?
If thorium isn't already here, then there's a reason and a story we aren't being told.
We have bureaucratically painted ourselves locked to the current nuclear technology. On top of the market barriers to moving away from something that worked "good enough".
Drat! You beat me to it. :)
If thorium isn't already here, then there's a reason and a story we aren't being told.
What I'm reading from the article is that they don't have the benefits of producing weapons materials.
Here's what wiki has to say, in an otherwise complimentary article:
"Problems include the high cost of fuel fabrication due partly to the high radioactivity of the traces of the short-lived 232U that contaminates the 233U fuel; the similar problems in recycling thorium due to highly radioactive 228Th; some weapons proliferation risk of 233U; and the technical problems (not yet satisfactorily solved) in reprocessing. Much development work is still required before the thorium fuel cycle can be commercialised, and the effort required seems unlikely while (or where) abundant uranium is available."
What is the magnitude of these problems, are there additional?
doug fir
U-232 is the big problem for would be nuclear proliferators. it is also a big problem for the use of the thorium in solid fuel reactors, but it is not a problem for the LFTR, because all reactor salt chemical processing is automatic and takes place within the reactor hot cell. The presence of U-232 in LFTR core salts is actually view by LFTR advocates as a big plus. It greatly diminishes the likelihood of diversion of U-233 for weapons purposes, and it would make theft of of reactor salts or uranium from the reactor extremely risky.
Much of the LFTR fuel processing technology has already been developed by Oak Ridge scientists, including my father. What remains is to determined which of the options explored in oak Ridge, would be most effective. The thorium cycles for solid core reactors would cause more challenges, but considering the advantages of a liquid fluoride salt core reactor, and the advanced state of LFT"R technology, why would anyone who knows the score want to develop solid core thorium cycle technology?
Damn. I hate cold showers. I was so excited back there. We might have been able to avoid the coming population bottleneck.
Darwin wins-again.
Pity, I was quite fond of the ape.
See you on the other side.
Something Charles didn't say: because the LFTR has no solid fuel and needs only thorium salts, there is no fuel fabrication involved and no on-going market for fuel enrichment or fabrication. If a company is going to make money from LFTRs, it has to make most of it up-front from the construction. This probably deterred companies in the PWR business from destroying their existing business model.
Engineer-Poet and profit will be made though mass prouction and high demand. The Motto of the LFTR paradigm is "if you build 'um cheap, they will come." After you build them reactor service will become a second profit center. And of course increasing energy demands in less developed countries will also be a major business goal.
Thanks Charles and Gail for an interesting post. I had not heard of Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactors. A ray of hope for all us doomers? Let's hope so.
For further reading, gear-heads may want to start with the Wikipedia article on the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment and continue with the references cited at the bottom.
I am sure Charles in aware of my objections to nuclear power however I have stated on a number of occasions that if I had to, for some reason choose nuclear power I would choose thorium. I prefer the accelerated thorium reactor (http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/ViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/G009864/1) as it has no chance of any type of meltdown and produces nothing that can be used for weapons nor can it be modified to produce anything for weapons.
However in saying this I still ask the question WHY?
Firstly focussing on the supply side like this or Barry Brook at Brave New Climate (http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/01/16/put-all-energy-cards-on-the-table-...) is a continuation of what got us into this mess in the first place. Increasing an addict's supply is not usually the best treatment and thorium nuclear is the methadone of the energy supply world. That is, it is relatively safe and clean however it does nothing for the base problem which is that our society consumes too much and wastes too much.
It would be impossible to deploy a electricity system based on renewables as large proportion of supply without major changes the electricity grid. The grid has to be smarter with smart loads that can respond to changes in supply in real time. The grid has to have new distributors like HVDC that can also incorporate storage into the end stations. Also the grid of most countries needs major structural work to ensure that older parts that are nearing the end of their lifetimes are replaced.
It is however perfectly possible to deploy thorium reactors keeping the present creaking grid and, given the high cost of nuclear and the waiting time, there would be much pressure to deploy it as quickly as possible without any changes just to get it done.
Also there are another resources that are abundantly available in completely limitless quantities that require no mining to obtain. They are wind, sun, tide and waves. All are powered from the sun and in the case of tides the moon and are expected to last 500 million years if our present theories of star formation and lifetime are correct. Why solve the problem with methadone for centuries when we have the chance to solve it forever by kicking the habit? We can now setup up future generations with limitless power rather then handing them the problem of what to do in centuries when the available thorium runs out.
The effort and cost required to widely develop and deploy thorium reactors would be no less than the effort required to deploy large scale renewable power that is available today with no development times. The HVDC links, the storage and supply elements are in in place and working today ready to go.
Finally for nuclear addicts there exists nuclear reactors of sorts beneath our feet that we can drill for and pump water down to and extract massive amounts of energy from. All without any mining or building. I am of course referring to geothermal power.
Thorium reactors while seeming to be good do nothing for poorer countries where renewables are scalable from village to city. If we use renewables on a massive scale the problems of deploying this technology to poor countries becomes far easier and we are not being two faced by using nuclear power wastefully ourselves (us being the First World) while expecting the Third World to conserve and use renewables which they would view as second class power systems as we do not use them, only foister them on the poor.
It seems like we need to look at all the options available. Without proper analysis, we can't know which choice is best.
"Renewables on a massive scale" is almost a contradiction in terms. They have so far been slow to scale up.
Gail the Actuary - ""Renewables on a massive scale" is almost a contradiction in terms. They have so far been slow to scale up."
Are you sure this is true? One renewable source is increasing beyond all predictions:
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/magazine/story?id=53498
"The wind power industry in the US has been growing dramatically in recent years, and the rapid pace of development has made it difficult to keep up with trends in the marketplace. Yet the need for timely, objective information on the wind industry and its progress has never been greater. As Figure 1 shows, the country added roughly 5300 MW of new wind power capacity in 2007 – more than twice the previous record set in 2006 – bringing the cumulative total to more than 16,900 MW. This growth translates into roughly US$9 billion (real 2007 dollars) invested in wind project installation in 2007. No other country, in any single year, has added the volume of wind capacity that was added to the US electrical grid in 2007."
or this:
http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/2012/70/
"Little did I know that the United States was, at the same time, on track to actually beat that! A report from Emerging Energy Research, a cleantech consulting firm, points out that the U.S. is now the world's fastest growing market for wind power. Last year 5 gigawatts of wind power were installed, and 2008 will break the record again with 8 new gigawatts under construction. The U.S. will shortly be the world's largest producer of wind energy, surpassing Germany's 22 gigawatts.
If the rate of growth continues, and ideal wind energy areas are exploited, the report says we could hit 150 gigawatts of wind power by 2020! For those of you wondering how much power that is...the average coal plant produces about 800 megawatts of power. So this is enough to displace about 180 coal plants. That's a sizeable hunk of America's power generation!"
This is only one form of renewable that is exceeding nuclear in GW deployed and has done for a number of years. With nuclear stalling due to high costs and uncertain financials it seems that nuclear is the one with massive deployment problems.
Also the new solar thermal systems are just getting up and going:
http://www.ausra.com/news/releases/081023.html
"The Palo Alto, CA-based company, a large-scale solar thermal energy developer and manufacturer, has dropped solar power's costs by simplifying the design of its systems. This also results in the most land-use efficient solar technology. Ausra has demonstrated its ability to manufacture its systems rapidly with a state-of-the-art factory in Las Vegas, NV that can mass produce Ausra's 1,000-foot mirror lines using standard materials to deploy and scale up quickly. The Kimberlina plant was built in seven months.
In addition to providing reliable, cost-effective electricity, the Kimberlina plant also demonstrates Ausra's ability to provide solar mirror fields for industries that need high-temperature steam for their factories, either as retrofits or as part of new plant construction. A range of industries use this "process steam," including: enhanced oil recovery and oil refining; food processing; and pulp and paper manufacturing.
The Kimberlina facility will also serve as the gateway toward developing Ausra's Carrizo Plains solar power plant. In November 2007, Ausra and California utility Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) announced a power purchase agreement for the 177-megawatt power plant in central California. When completed, Ausra's Carrizo facility will generate enough electricity to power more than 120,000 homes."
Or this:
http://cleantech.com/news/1522/pg-e-solel-in-553-mw-solar-deal
"Pacific Gas and Electric made its second deal of the week today, agreeing to buy 553 megawatts of solar power from Solel Solar Systems' planned Mojave Solar Park.
The solar thermal project will deliver enough power to supply 400,000 homes in northern and central California when it is fully operational.
The solar thermal park won't be ready until 2011. It's to cover up to 6,000 acres, or nine square miles, in the Mojave Desert, relying on 1.2 million mirrors and 317 miles of vacuum tubing."
You can't use wind for all your power, no matter how many GW of capacity you install. In fact, the percentage that can come from wind is not all that high.
Furthermore, you have to show some basis for your claim that ramping up renewables is no more expensive than building nuclear power plants. Right now, I don't see how anyone could know that.
In increasing the penetration of wind, you'd have to dump disproportionally more wind power in the absence of cheap storage, but wind itself is cheap and there's also some optimization to be had from geographically isolated sites which becomes more important in higher penetrations.
This reference deals with most issues:
http://www.ucalgary.ca/~keith/papers/72.Decarolis.2005.Threshold.e.pdf
If you look at LWR 'learning curves' in the US things are not looking good. We need a major improvement like LFTR.
Completely false and misleading. For the moment, I'll presume unintentional. 150 GW of wind generation has NO CHANCE of replacing 180 x 0.800 = 144 GW of coal generation. AT BEST, wind's capacity factor is about 25%, meaning your 150 GW of wind will generate about the same amount of power as only 45 to 50 coal stations. Wind's capacity factor in periods of high demand is much lower, approximately 20% or less, depending on location, so without storage, reduce that coal plant count to perhaps 35. [Note: 1) Germany's utilities calculate wind generation a capacity of only 7.5% 2) Ontario, Canada, with 475 MW modern wind generation widely distributed sees many days at midsummer peak demand when wind generation provides less than 2.5% capacity. See Ontario Independent Electricity System Operator - IESO - (Select Hourly Wind Generator Output) ]
NOW. your 150 GW of wind generation with attendant required transmission will cost about $300 billion ($1500 / kw + $500 / kw transmission) while the 35 coal plants will cost about $56 billion ($2000 x 800 x 35)
I'm no fan of coal generation, but think honesty in arguments is mandatory. Solar genration makes a LOT more sense as a renewable than wind, for reasons of a) timing of output b) higher capacity factor c) cheap theermal energy storage.
The primary results of adding wind generation to an existing grid are a) reducing the amount of efficient continuous-run baseload generation which the grid can tolerate. b) increasing the amount of inefficient short-run peaking generation the grid requies. Net result is OFTEN a NET INCREASE in total CO2 emissions. Data available.
Gail makes a good point about the difficulties in converting to renewables on a massive scale. Here is what Vaclav Smil has to say about this possibility http://globalwarming-arclein.blogspot.com/2008/12/vaclav-smil-on-fossil-...
Vaclav Smil does not appear to understand the exponential growth function.
He does, however, appear to understand the concept of the self fulfilling prophecy, although he is implicit about it.
The challenges to building alternative energy based energy systems for the future are indeed huge. Defeatism doesn't help. However, pessimists like Vaclav Smil do serve a useful purpose - they induce greater policy response to deal with the problems.
If you have read many of Smil's works it is clear that he has an excellent command of math and exponential functions.
To me, he comes off as more of a historian and agnostic than a pessimist though he could easily be labeled as a curmudgeon.
Notwithstanding all of the wonderful opportunities we have with renewables, smart grid upgrades, Fourth Generation Nuclear, etc. I would not discount his logic.
I would not discount the fact that many of these technologies are continuing to grow exponential with no inherent show stoppers to the limits that Smil is sceptical about. 30% wind a problem in the US, no way, not even with very little grid upgrade (we might still end up with a crappy grid but not much crappier than it is today). With Barack Obama now president, a lot of incentives are ready to be fired up. I don't discount Smil's logic since it provided said purpose of more attention by decision makers. But for the rest, defeatism isn't very valuable.
Exponential growth is all well and good, but there are obvious showstoppers for wind: It is simply to unreliable. If you have that average 30%, it will sometimes produce 90% and sometimes 0%. Good luck balancing that! You need both big grid upgrades and big investments in reserve capacity. (Denmark rapidly scaled to 20% but then capacity has stayed flat, despite their grid being integrated with European neighbours.)
Look, if we can't scale renewables above 20-30%, and have to get the rest from nuclear or coal, why even bother with the renewables? Today the world use 20,000 TWh electricity. So, to produce this, would you rather have:
1. 4,000 thorium reactors
2. 1,000,000 wind turbines, 3,000 thorium reactors, big grid investments and 500 additional thorium reactors to act as reserve for the wind turbines when there is low wind.
I would personally not opt to litter the world with a million wind turbines to have 12% fewer reactors!
Jeppen, you are absolutely correct! In the real world I would "LOVE" to see 20 to 30% renewables and 70 to 80% nuclear. This means we could *shut down coal forever* AND all fossil generation of electricity on our way to eliminating fossil for transportation fuel. We can't due it seriously with renewables...even Denmark (fully integrated into N. Europe's hydro and nuclear grid) talks about "30%" as a real goal...and that's it.
This is why the focus so many of us environmentalists is so *wrong*, it's not going to solve the real problem, which is eliminating coal and fossil generation. The focus should be on nuclear, LFTRs in the long run, and renewables as supplements to that or bridging the technologies.
D.
dwalters, you are wrong about the Danish plans. The goal for 2025 is 50% of electricity from wind. The 30% number refers to the contribution from renewables (wind, biomass etc.) to the total energy mix (heating, transport, electricity etc).
According to wikipedia, Denmark has stood still at about 3100 MW installed capacity since 2003. They are obviously not working towards that ambitious goal.
Also, please realise that with average 50% wind, the wind parks will sometimes generate 200% of demand and sometimes 0%. That is not possible without nice, big, neighbours willing to absorb the shock waves.
There are no hard thresholds, more important is general economics. Much is explained here:
http://www.ucalgary.ca/~keith/papers/72.Decarolis.2005.Threshold.e.pdf
This doesn't mention future buffer from plugin hybrids and EVs, which can act as flexible time of charging - G2V and when batteries cost/cycle come down, they might also do even more for V2G.
A thorium crash program, in particular LFTR, would be part of a comprehensive energy policy IMHO, but in no way is it a replacement for wind. It simply is too early to tell, and if, on the long run, it turns out to be better than wind, then market mechanisms will optimise that. There is a risk that thorium will not deliver (for whatever reasons) or will underperform at scaling etc. I think these are small risks, but you're not selling me a LFTR will save us argument. Talking about 3000 thorium reactors when we currently have 0 is a bit disengenious, although I applaud ambitious plans.
I would much prefer to litter the world with wind turbines rather than to continue to spew stuff we don't want into the atmosphere. We can dismantle the wind turbines quite easily. Getting rid of nasties in the atmosphere is that much more difficult.
I might have sounded a bit more categorical than I am. For me it's quite ok to scale wind, for now, b/c low penetrations can be accomodated quite easily using natural gas and hydro as balance. That will replace some coal, and that's good. We could do this while scaling conventional nuclear and researching advanced nuclear. But will we?
If we are serious about getting rid of coal altogether, the only viable option is advanced nuclear. Unfortunately, renewables are used as a reason not to invest in nuclear and as an alibi to continue burning coal. Those who think LFTR and other nuclear tech is a threat to renewables has it completely backwards. Renewable tech, sadly, is THE big psychological obstacle on the path to a fossil free world.
I get your point. Economics is important, if new nuclear builds have a very high levelised cost I just can't see it happen on a huge scale. That's why we need gen4 IMHO.
Exactly. Promoting of wind generation makes so much sense economically for owners of fossil fuel supplies that I'm surprised T. Boone Pickens (N gas) and the big coal boys aren't actively promoting it.
Oh, wait.....
Independent investors can make a good ROI with wind so there's no need for conspiracy rhetoric. Independent investors have a very difficult time to make a good ROI with the new gen3+ plants.
Citing the "Pickens Plan" is not resorting to any "conspiracy theory". It's stating reality. And it takes only a short time with high-school physics and math to see it.
And re your investors, pull the plug on the direct subsidies and the indirect "priority in the dispatch order" and "renewables mandates" subsidies and THEN see how much gets built. According to AWEA, near zero.
Citing the Pickens plan isn't conspiracy theory - but what you implied clearly is. Pickens knows how to make money. Wind gives decent ROI. See the connexion?
Of course pickens will also make lots of money with the natural gas part.
So the subsidy argument pops up again. If you pull the plug out of nuclear power - ie completely deregulate the market, the entire nuclear industry will go bankrupt for various reasons (monthly payoff no longer possible, no private insurance available, insufficient ROI on new investment, miscellaneous liability problems, inability to shut down frequently to cover grid requirements, and a bunch of other reasons).
If you do that, you'll guarantee fossil fuels. Oh yes very strategic policy that.
What matters is what are the trajectories of subsidized technologies like nuclear, wind and solar? What are the learning curves, what will the likely long term performance, cost, EROEI be?
Oh, and high school physics don't cover grid dynamics, and neither have you so far. You just make unquantified rhetoric, but when you look at what's possible with real grid data etc things aren't so bad.
Theoretically, grid demands are most easily met with nuclear rather than wind, but we can make do very economically with large amounts of both. At the very least, rhetoric is not helpful (or even relevant) in whether to use wind or solar and/or nuclear, especially not for something quantifiable as levelised cost.
I strongly disagree. Aside from the limited liability item, no subsidy to civilian nuclear power is sufficient to make any difference to any of the several private operators of the reactors. IF you can prove that there is any direct or indirect subsidy to US power reactor operation, then that should be removed and the cost of power sold increased appropriately. You won't find enough to make a hair of difference. The limit on liability has to this point never cost the US taxpayer one cent, is not ever likely to, and is well structured to allow private enterprise to own and operate reactors while ensuring a huge bankrupting penalty against any violater before any taxpayer money ever gets involved. That's what governments are for. You might better rail against insuring beachfront properties from multiple events of hurricane damage.
No "grid dynamics" involved (though if there were I could do it, I've filed patents and written articles on grids). Really. Just basic math and some common sense. Follow the link I provided, download the spreadsheet of wind generation data. It's listed in Mwh by hr, so the calculation of capacity factor for any hour simply amounts to dividing the Mwh provided by the known 475 MW of installed generation. See eg. daytime peak of August 15 2008 for one example of what I'm on about.
If liability is to be fully taken up by private enterprise, then the cost of nuclear, in strict economics terms could be considered infinite since no private insurer will take up the full liability (and no power will be sold subsequently). This is simple economic theory. Not that I think liability is a serious negative for nukes, and economic theory is in this case perhaps too academic.
Subsidies for nuclear are mostly historic. I will indeed advance my argument - without subsidies in the broad meaning of the sense (military funding) we would extremely likely have no nuclear power whatsoever. Important to keep in mind: funding is often needed to jumpstart new technologies. This is not a bad thing at all.
There are various other important subsidies for new nuclear builds: production tax credit, investment tax credit, and loan guarantees, at a rate not unlike wind projects. This is also not a bad thing, these are subsidies that work.
At any rate, the current reactor all in cost does not allow sufficient ROI for private investment to be available; utilities are passing on the extra cost to ratepayers. With properly sited wind projects, a decent ROI can often be had. Gen3+ LWR still has a lot to prove on this issue. I've been very pessimistic so far, but it could be that innovations can improve the business case (MIT donut shaped fuel elements for example). Gen4 I think is more promising in particular LFTR.
So you'r ignoring geographic diversity and the economics of interconnection, and learning curves as well. If I use learning curves for nuclear in the US, it gets more expensive. Strange no?
Now here's a reference for you.
http://www.ucalgary.ca/~keith/papers/72.Decarolis.2005.Threshold.e.pdf
There are other things that could be considered as well, such as biomass CAES and wind. CAES is also synergetic with thermal plants, including nuclear.
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy06osti/38270.pdf
Maybe or maybe not. On a real market-based level playing field, where fossils' external costs are internalized by taxes and nothing is subsidized, run by government or killed with red tape, the market dynamics and innovation would be a whole lot different. I think nuclear - especially inherently fail-safe designs such as LFTR - would thrive in such an environment.
The issue is not the insurance companies. It's the insurance regulators that demand they have some percentage of cash-on-hand to actually do a multi-hundred-billion dollar payout. Most commercial insurers simply don't have that kind of mandated reserve. If the mandated reserve was eliminated from the policies, then insurance companies would be hopping on the bandwagon like crazy since there would never be a payout.
David
There would still be research done even if we had not had a first and second world war and no massive arms races for nuclear wepons. People are curious about how matter works and they already knew about medical uses for radium. I would expect such an alternate history to have a nuclear development based on rectors for basic research and isotope production starting with low cost graphite piles and then heavy water pool type rectors for easy running and fairly low cost. It would then become obvious for scientists doing the math that it could be used for power production and when prices go up and availability down for dirt cheap fossil fuel it would probably be used to boil water in some way. It would alltogeather probably be a lot cheaper then the particle colliders at Cern or the fusion experiments. It would even be the same sales pitch as for fusion power with the difference that it actually would work within a few years.
Actually, the primary reason that the costs of constructing new nuclear went up were due to dramatic increases in the effort and technical legal sophistication of the anti-nuclear industry, mostly lawyers, with I would guess, significant financing from fossil fuel competitors. Nothing at all to do with learning curve.
I searched intensively for the reasons for nuclear cost upward trends, but there appears to be no scientific work (quantification) on what contributed how much etc.
If you have a decent reference on this topic, I'd like to see it.
Do coal companies pay for the deaths and brain damage their product causes? If not should we stop burning coal?
If a Boeing 747 accidentally crashes through the roof of a crowded sports stadium and kills 30,000 people do the airlines have coverage for that loss? If not should we ground the airliners?
If a pharmaceutical laboratory accidentally releases a virus that kills 500,000,000 people around the world, are they covered? If not should we ban drug research?
If an agricultural genetics lab accidentally releases a virus that kills most land based plants, followed by the starvation of most people, are they covered? If not should we stop all genetic research?
Price Anderson coverage is not a subsidy, it is a handicap that no other industry is burdened with.
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2009/1/5/132847/2209/#comment25
My recommendation is to level the playing field. Maximize R&D and pick the best technology whatever it is.
Increased R&D is very important, however will not make for a comprehensive energy policy all by itself. For one thing, promising technologies often need some help early on to get to volume and scale benefits, and get non-R&D learning effects. This will almost certainly be the case for LFTR, and we need to consider some level of policy for that.
We also need to give markets better signals - socially optimum prices by adding taxes on emissions of GhG, heavy metals, SOx, NOx, particulate and all such nasties. This should be based on marginal cost vs marginal benefit of emissions respectively production (of energy in this case).
The issue of the intrinsic value of a human life is difficult because that value is, well, intrinsic. However we can start with getting some experience (institutions, private etc) based on socially optimum tax rates on emissions, conservatively assuming the intrinsic value to be zero (even the sceptics will agree) and using lower values from the scientific literature on costs vs benefits (so there will be a very strong scientific consensus and said sceptics will mostly agree again).
Then, as emissions rise, the marginal cost will go up, and as scientific understanding advances, further damages will become evident that will further increase the cost of emissions. This in itself provides upward pressure on emissions (which is great for stimulating a move away from those polluting sources).
The revenues from the various taxes must largely (>90% eventually IMHO) return to the people; this is to negate the equity effect that this increase in socially optimal efficiency brings. Think payroll tax reductions (plus similar rebates for special cases, such as pensioners).
This is a scientific, quantifiable but conservative approach so most will agree on this. There should be a good chance of passing it socially and politically.
what would the water/cooling requirements be on 4,000 thorium reactors? more or less than conventional nuclear plants?
One of the selling points of molten-salt reactors is that they can run hot enough to use gas turbines as the heat engines.
If you are willing to sacrifice thermal efficiency and use an open-cycle gas turbine with air as the working fluid, you can dispense with the capital cost of cold-side heat exchangers, cooling towers, pumps... and use no cooling water whatsoever.
Once through seawater cooling is also attractive, considering the consistantly low temperature, low system cost, low parasitic losses, and the fact that most of the demand is near the shore. Care would have to be taken to build a diffusor pipe system so local thermal pollution is mitigated (cheap and well worth the extra investment in plumbing IMHO).
Such a reactor can actually use the rejected 'waste' heat from the heat engine to power a thermal desalination plant, having a strong net benefit on freshwater supply.
Still, open cyles or closed cycles with dry cooling offer advantages in siting flexibility at a relatively small cost increment.
Once through ocean-side cooling is the most efficient. But from the papers on energyfromthorium.com indicate, that's not always desirable. We are going to get almost 50% efficiency from the closed cycle Brayton turbines but some of the waste heat from the back end of that turbine is still useful because it comes out so hot. Kirk Sorensen argues that it's almost wasteful not to use this heat for things like distilling fresh water from sea water or waste water from cities.
David
Absolutely. CHP desal is a double edged sword when it comes to water resources, since it produces fresh water while radically reducing cooling requirements. There is still a small amount of cooling necessary even after the thermal desal system, otherwise delta T suffers - the temperature of the heat rejected from the desal plant is still a fair amount above seawater temperature. Since this is a very small amount (less than 20% of initial reactor thermal output) using the ocean will not pose many issues with local thermal pollution, and with a diffusor pipe system, all is well.
"Renewables on a massive scale" is almost a contradiction in terms. They have so far been slow to scale up.
"They" seems to refer to renewable technologies, when in fact it is many energy utilities that have been slow to adopt them. Some have not been so slow, as you will find many utilities run primarily (or to a large degree) on renewable energy, especially hydro in the US Pacific Northwest and portions of Canada.
Energy tycoon Pickens has a staff that has confirmed his projections of wind energy use. MIT has confirmed the scope and scale of the potential of enhanced geothermal systems (EGS). Solar thermal projects are going up around the globe.
Costa Rica generates 98% of it's power from renewable sources.
It comes down to how utilities are incentivized to take action, and penalized when they don't.
Will - You make an excellent point about utility willingness to take action. Not only have they been reluctant to deploy renewables but they have not supported the deployment of distributed renewables by others. For example, how many utility companies do you know of that support the idea of feed-in- tariffs? Implementing a feed-in-tariff program similar to what is in Germany would unleash the entrepreneural spirit here and encourage the significant exponential growth that is needed to make renewables a meaningful part of our generation mix.
Also, some utility executives are keen on seeing a continuing increase energy sales and are not excited about demand side management investments that reduce revenue growth. Striving to reduce revenues is in fact anathetical to most business models. We need "decoupling" on a wide scale to help us get out of this old model and to encourage investments in conservation.
On the positive side, I have been reading "Power" magazine for 30 years and am amazed at how much its content has changed. There are now many discussions about climate change and new renewable generation projects so the visibility on all of this is changing for the better.
A question to the experts: 2030 is mentioned in terms of a realistic time frame for development of this technology under B.A.U if some serious money were thrown at it how quickly could this technology be up and running on a scale that could provide significant power to an Island Nation such as Japan or the U.K?
Japan continues to build conventional reactors, and does not need a radical new technology, But China, India and the United States, will need hundreds of Megawatts woth of new power generating facilities. This can only be accomplishe with mass production of transportable reactors, New sitting approaches, and the use of fissionable materials reserved for nuclear weapons to as starting charges start LFTRs. If a crash program is started by 2012, mas production can begin by 2020. With mass production and a high priorty effort the whole task can be finished by 2030. The project would be similar to the Manhattan Project. This is possible if we accept that a business as usual approach will not solve our problems. The cost however will not be impossibly expensive. Both renewables and conventional nuclear power are labor intensive. The LFTR opens up the possibility of a less labor intensive power source. Les labor means lower costs, and quicker manufacture. I talk about the LFTR paradigm because LFTR technology opens the possibility of doing things differently, and by changing the way we do business, creating multiple efficiencies.
Good on you, Charles. Let's spend gazillion$ on a fleet of Thorium nuke plants that effectively put a vast, distributed renewable energy system out of the hands of our descendants forever. Let's decide to do that even though the bugs have not yet been worked out of the Thorium system and no large working examples exist. Let's do it even though it will mean Oil Redux, with everyone kowtowing to those who have the element in their countries. Let's do it even though there are proliferation issues. Smart man.
Isn't it about time you used the "baseload" argument against renewables?
Mamba I would not advocate the LFTR if I did not believe that it is the lowest cost energy option. I believe that LFTR technology can be launched for less than what the United States spendt in a week during much of 2008 for imported oil. Low cost is the primary reason why I advocate LFTR technology. I also favor a distributive model of electrical production with electricity coming from small mass produced nuclear plants. Renewable energy advocates have not adopted distributive models. In current renewables thinking electricity is to be produced at huge solar facilities in the southwest, and shipped arounf the country by a highly centralized smart grid system using highly centralized HVDC lines. Alternatively power would be produced by hige wind farms located in the great planes or off shore. Similat centralized smart grid.HVDC systems are proposed.
Mamba is talking psychology and you are talking technology.
Please do the technology thing, and let others worry about the psychology. Maybe Obama? Thats IMO what he is there for. He is NOT a nuke scientist/engineer. He is a professional politician.
TOD has been discussing the psychology forever yet the financial crisis stepped all over us and not a warning...well except for Ilargi,who soon after left.
Airdale
Charles,thanks for an informative article and airdale for some spot-on comments.
Unfortunately,every time nuclear is mentioned it brings out a sort of Pavlovian reaction in certain people.They will seldom argue the case on practical grounds but go into paroxysms of rage,including the doomer variety as we have seen in this thread.To the latter I can only say that life,on the personal level, is optional.Others believe that we have to keep trying using the skills and infrastructure which we have.Scepticism is healthy,throwing in the towel is not,and is usually not seriously considered by those who have children.
I believe that,in the energy field,all options other than fossil fuel, should be on the table - nuclear,geothermal,solar thermal,solar PV,wind,tidal.Some are better suited to decentralized applications.Some,like nuclear and geothermal,for base load.From a global perspective,both applications are necessary.
One thing is abundantly clear - we have to get moving on alternative energy sources.The hour is very late.
"The hour is very late",
Yes. Right now we are blasting the tops off mountains for crying out mercy!! Removing them for coal!!!
We have strip mined the devil out of Muhlenberg county and many many other areas. It makes your heart bleed to drive thru and see the destruction.
Yet? Yet? Is there an outcry of anyone here on TOD? Anywhere except for a few musicians gathered up in central Ky and the smokies. They are not making much difference IMO.
Yet we are surely going to strip those mountains down if we keep mining them for the coal.
I remember as a youngster trips to St. Louis and back to Ky. There were no interstates. We crossed the Mississippi in St. Louis, drove thru much of East St. Louis ,Ill and onto route 3 to go to Cairo,Ill.
Let me tell you that the sky was BLACK from the smoke of burning coal in the industries there. Black fallout was everywhere. It was like a living,walk thru absolute hell. I couldn't grasp it.
Bad enough we started using coal in the small towns and cinders were everywhere. More black smoke. Coal dust on your hands. Piles of dirty coal everywhere.
This is not something we need to desire. Its filthy and dirty. Its destroys the land where its mined and the runoff is atrocious.
Some get rich. Others get lung disease. My wifes uncles died a horrible death. His lungs were glued to his rib cage. Opening his thorax the surgeons ripped huge pieces of tissue apart, threw up their hands and sewed him back up to die a long slow death. I was there at his bed side many times. I told his son that it was time to let Jerry go. Jerry was begging to be let go. His wife said no.
We let Jerry go. He was born and raised in a coal mining town in S. Illinois. He served in the navy and raised 4 strong boys. Yet he couldn't get black lung payments.I drove him to Lexington for the tests. He was denied. He died of it.
Most here did not see those days. I did. I don't want the mountains and our precious land to be destroyed for naught.
Lets not pretend we have time and the environment to piss away any longer.
Airdale-read The Coal Tattoo by Silas House and his other books. Its an education on the social level in E. Ky. in the mining country where our very heritage is being totally destroyed.
Bleed, you poor ape.
Do I bleed with you?
Yes.
Every solution must be applied. Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors are good.
If we manage to widen the bottleneck then, in order to avoid ground hog day, changes will have to be made.
To us.
Eugenetics.
Wrest control from Lady Luck. (She ain't no lady.)
A lot less brain stem. A lot less Limbic system. Increase of cortex. Widen spinal column to accomodate. Aversion to alchol.
Experiment while human life is cheap.
Or leave the design of the Son of Man to the females.
No telling what you will get then.
Less bleeding, I want.
Thank you Arthur, I think,
Yes I bleed. Daily for my country. For my nation. For the people.
I bled when they pulled my left kidney out covered with a huge cancerous tumor. I laid there and realized it might come back.The cancer. Later I screamed as I lay on the floor at my farm and the kidney stones in the remaining right kidney were dealing me tremendous pain and agony. Morphine was my solace then. Straight to the veins and another operation on a kidney that was the only one I had left. Life can get rather real at times like this.
I gave some of the nurses kisses for their concern. They hugged me back. I went home laughing. Bleeding like an ape.
Right now it could be metastasizing and I might be a dead man walking but each day I hope. I wake up and slowly realize that I have perhaps limited time on earth.
Yes I bleed. But I will not cry.
I read here for hope. I wish for something so if I die it won't be with the world shutting down around me.
Melodramatic. But cancer can do things to your mind. It plays with you. It tells you little things in the dark of the night.
I wouldn't speak of it but your post was on that order. Or were you mocking?
Airdale
Thirra: Unfortunately,every time nuclear is mentioned it brings out a sort of Pavlovian reaction in certain people.They will seldom argue the case on practical grounds but go into paroxysms of rage,including the doomer variety as we have seen in this thread.To the latter I can only say that life,on the personal level, is optional.Others believe that we have to keep trying using the skills and infrastructure which we have.Scepticism is healthy,throwing in the towel is not,and is usually not seriously considered by those who have children.
This is a classic encapsulation of the misunderstanding at work within the pro-growth mindset.
Firstly there has been next to no 'nuclear is inherently evil' verbiage on the thread, and certainly no pavlovian iterations of it.
Secondly, the bulk of concern hinges around the qualitative social and ecological consequences of maintaining or increasing high energy supply volumes and centralisation of its capital ownership.
Thirdly, there is nothing doomer about seeking a much lower energy plane for socio-economic function. There is ample evidence suggesting that it is mindless doom-seeking to maintain high energy levels simply because the import and complexity of the consequences can't be fully fathomed let alone reliably managed. The apparently low level of awareness and concern toward this range of impact by many posters on this thread is testament to the deficiency. Naive or wilful ignorance is no salvation.
Invoking Liebig's Law, if all other resources were infinite, and they most certainly are not, the lowest plank on the growth barrel would be the human capacity to manage complexity. Our energy rich endeavor is voraciously eroding an immensely productive, dynamically balanced natural system. One that evolved us and can reliably sustain us. We are relentlessly replacing it with a dubiously motivated, designed-on-the-fly synthetic system to which we have to provide ALL of the energy and maintenance. As this task gets larger and more complicated, and as we have less of the original balance and bounty to draw subsidy from, it will become inevitably impossible. Like the sorcerer's apprentice, we have seem to have no clue nor modesty toward the limits of our capacity and the consequences of failing at those absolute limits.
The technology we have to find is the switch that can re-align our sense of identity to another set of aspirations and satisfactions, away from mindless consumption and needless competition for power and toward more simple, more intrinsic values. There is no shame in this if life is viewed as something fuller and deeper than a contest of linear achievement.
The plain but popularly invisible fact is that most of us lose at the current game. Let the credit storm blow a few more months and let's see how far up the first world embankment the poverty swell surges. Yet we can't have our growth machine without debt. Our aspiration requires us to commit our lives to the service and to the inevitable retribution of this monster. Why play a life-game that only a few amongst billions can win, and then only in brevity and loneliness? Because we are robots and can't think or dream otherwise?
Charles - "and shipped arounf the country by a highly centralized smart grid system using highly centralized HVDC lines. "
Obviously you have a problem with the concept of decentralised energy. HVDC links allow energy to flow from remote centers where the energy is abundant however the caveat is "only when it is needed". The concept of smart grids is to use local generation first. If your rooftop PV is generating enough power, or the local storage node has plenty of juice there is no need to go off and get power from the remote station. Even then with storage at the end nodes you will be only going to the end station rather than the remote energy source. Also with a well meshed system you can draw power from multiple sources and also switch off loads intelligently that can be switched off.
You solution favours very large central power stations that need very little meshing. Again it is a supply side solution when what we require is demand side solutions before thinking of new supplies.
Sort of an interesting side debate. Ender wants efficiency, and, wind and solar, yet in the US today it is, basically, a fully 100% centralized industry. ALL wind is built on huge *centralized* wind farms (thank god, I don't want 'em anywhere near my house) and, using utility owned, state regulated high voltage lines, sent to where it's needed. If either wind or CSP is mentioned, it is *automatically* highly centralized...despite Ender's please for non-centralized renewable energy.
Grid Integrated PV (GIPV) is the latest and greatest. They cost from $15,000 to $30,000 depending if it's self-installed (DYI) or by installers and of course, usually you don't pay that much, I help pay for it via my taxes. Regardless, it is done in total conjunction WITH the big, regulated, highly centralized utility, in my case, Pacfic Gas and Electric. And, it only supplies name place capacity for about 3 to 4 hours a day, and lesser KWs a few hours on each side. Thank goodness PG&E provides ALL the power the rest of the time.
The 'smart grid' 'decentralized' power generation is a fantasy. It is not the way 'renewables', even the ones that are actually on line, work. Not in California, not in Denmark, no where. And... "not in 10 years". So you can forget about it, it's not happening.
The biggest so-called 'renewable' source of power in the US today, outside of hydro (wickedly centralized systems those) is wind power, as noted above, HIGHLY centralized. HVDC by default is highly centralized as it represents utility owned, SCADA-run, highvoltage essentially between two points. The Chinese are building the largest HVDC lines from 3 Gorges Dam.
Both 'smart grid'/enhanced SCADA and HVDC make more sense wheeling vast amounts power around, most of which is *going to be* coal, natural gas and nuclear. I want to see the nuclear side, eventually, cancel the fossil side of that equation.
David
Rooftop PV's do not generate power 24 hours a day. Either you need electrical storage - batteries or capacitors - and they are quite expensive. Infact the cost of PV's plus storage turns out to me more expensive than nuclear per KW of 24 hour a day electrical capacity, and far more expensive that LFTRs. Without storage you need PV;s to be hooked up to a grid, and electricity from the grid has to come from somewhere else. Cloudy days and winters also pose problems for decentralized PVs. Current advisories for people contemplating the purchase of stand alone PV systems suggest fossil fuel powered generator backup for such PV systems. So much for PV electrical generation being both distributive and clean!
I find it hard to imagine PV's being a base electrical system for a nation wide distributive electrical generation system.
Charles,
How many thorium reactors can be built by 2050? We need net ZERO carbon by then. Thorium gonna get us there?
NO.
Thorium for space ships? OK. For the next century? OK. But deploying thorium reactors on a large scale now is
1. impossible because it doesn't actually exist and
2. not useful (pointed out above) to poor societies
and
3. would draw funds away from what CAN get us to zero net by 2050.
All in all, a BAD short-term solution.
I wonder what the Liegig's is for reactors? Steel? Water? Locations?
Cheers
ccpo. I assume that mass production of LFTRs coupled with inovative approaches to site location and construction, most of the world's greatly expanded energy supply can come from LFTRs by 2050. The biggest obsticle is not building and setting up the reactors but ib finding the fissionabe material needed to start them. Nuclear armed nations wwill probably be forced to give up most or all of their weaopons in order to make the effort work. But eben then we probaly will not have enough U-235 and Pu-239 to make this work, without resorting to Lasar uranium enrichment on a massive scale. This would of course lead to proliferation concerns, and far stronger proliferations controls would need to be put in place before the technology gets transfered to areas with unstable leadership, for example Alaska.
I rather doubt this. Spent PWR fuel is roughly 0.8-1% plutonium, so 5 core's worth of spent PWR fuel should have more than enough fissionables to start another reactor of similar power density (perhaps several reactors of much higher power density). The USA appears to have enough chemically-separable fissionables in spent PWR fuel to double our generation overnight, if the reactors were available to use it.
That would do for a start. Afterward we would have the exponential breeding capacity of the MSRs themselves (up to 9%/year) plus the on-going stream of spent fuel from PWRs for another 60 years or so. Fluorinate it to convert the uranium to UF6 and remove it, distill the remaining salts to remove the fission products, and what's left should have a high fraction of Pu, Am and other stuff that's nasty to have hanging around but should make good fuel. Once it's in an LFTR or other MSR, it is destroyed. End of problem.
The United States has enough fissionable start up materials to power up most of its LFTRs, but India and even China will be a problem. It will take a lot of new U-235 and Pu-239 to get Indian LFTRs going. And China will need an enormous amount, even if it sacrifices all of its nuclear weapons.
Being kind of hard on our pagent girl aren't ya?
A few Alaskan's could still be miffed about the nuke blown harbor plans at Point Hope (you remember-the test run plans to show feasibility of a sea level canal in Panama}and Amchitka but most of us, like the other oil producers, are looking for ways to keep from burning up what we export. Investing in LFTR tech R/D and production work sounds like a lot better use for our permanent fund capital than the stock market, too bad there is no mechanism to channel it that way.
Somewhat impolite of me Charles, I first should have thanked you for the very clear LFTR presentation and for staying involved in the very enlightening conversation which followed.
I must show my ignorance here, but I am mere citizen not a nuke. Toshiba wants to put a 4S Liquid Sodium Cooled Reactor in Galena, AK as a U.S. pilot project. What relationship does the tech they are planning to use bear to that used in an LFTR?
Luke H,
Not very much. Liquid core reactors have many advantages over the solid core technology Toshiba proposes.
Thanks. I googled around and picked up a little. I'm guessing the waste stream from the solid core would be dirtier than from a liquid core but that didn't just jump out of what I read. LFTR seems to be the cleanest nuclear power I've read about to date, not counting fusion which, if we ever manage to slow it down, is supposed to have no radioactive waste or is that and oversimplification as well.
Fusion will have nuclear waste from irradiating everything with neutrons. Fusion won't have high level nuclear fuel waste.
Fusion will have high level component/equipment waste. But from what I understand it's not long lived.
I'm not worried about the tiny amount of waste an LFTR would produce. The chloride reactor has variants that produce no fuel waste at all. But LFTR looks more promising all things considered. Maybe there will be a few 'waste eating' reactors to complement a fleet of LFTR - the system cost should be low even if the waste eating reactors are expensive since few would be needed with the efficiency of LFTR.
The LFTR is very different. A different 'paradigm' so to speak. Really a completely different architecture.
I want to address two things. The philosophy of human advancement and how to view electricity. The second, on the LFTR specifically.
I agree with Charles Barton in his response on limitless energy. I view this as 'hope'. I'm not for starvation because I think there are too many people in the world; I would prefer education and rising living standards as a way to combat 'overpopulation'. I think if we start with limitless 'things' then we have to also educate ourselves on how to deal with this. Fishing was considered 'limitless' until we learned better after destroying fish stocks. Now they are managed. Human can, and have, learned. To get the world out of the morass it is in, we can't start by institutionalizing poverty, which is what it means when we don't have the electricity to provide the *material* basis for developing economy.
I have no problem with automobiles, even though I prefer mass transit. My problem is with the carbon emanating from said autos. If we switch to electric cars, along with high speed trains and maybe synthesized diesel fuel (Di methyl ether) all produced from the high temperatures of a LFTR, why is this BAD???? Moreover, why can't we expect people in poorer parts of Africa and Asia not emulate this? Why would we not? Especially if the energy to power it is not something to fight over; is not a cause of energy scarcity.
On the LFTR.
1. The LFTR can produced on ONE TON of unenriched thorium, 1 GW Year of power. That is one ton over one year. A LWR uses about 33 tons enriched uranium fuel a year for the same amount of power. The Th is simply 'milled' to get rid of the dirt and spoil, leaving pure Th. You mix, say, approx 7lbs of it in some liquid fluoride and *pour* it into the fuel stream. Once a day. That is it.
2. Thorium abundance. The survey quote above is actually out of date. Thorium Power has a reserve in Idaho of 600,000 tons proven (30%, I believe, pure Th oxide). They believe that their is another 1.5 million tons available. So, point one above, 1 ton = 1 GW year. You do the math. The US government has over 3000 tons of refined Th in cans buried in Nevada. This is enough Th to power 100 1 GW reactors for 30 years.
3. "Breeding". All LWRs breed some. The LFTR can breed slightly more U233 than it uses, enough that every 9 years or so, a whole new load of U233 can be siphoned off as a start up charge for a new LFTR. At the end of, say, a 60 to 80 year run of a LFTR, the amount of U233 in the salt stream can be bottled up and used in a brand new LFTR. And so on, ad infinitum.
4. Waste. My favorite. 1 ton of Thorium IN, 1 ton of Spent Thorium Fuel out. In 60 years it would produce 60 tons. That would, maybe, fill up my living room. Probably not. As the papers Charles notes explain, since most of the nasties in the STF can be chemically removed because the fuel is in a liquid state to begin with, and the fissionable re-injected into the fuel stream, fission products removed, and overall anticide and transuranic nasty material is extremely limited in its production, if any...the expected danger of these wastes bound up in the STF is only dangerous out to 300 years, not the 100,000 years expected from the waste of a LWR (I believe it is fact closer to 10,000 years but that's another discussion and completely irrelevant anyway).
5. Because of use of inert gas as coolant (via a heat exchanger) we can use gas turbines instead of steam turbines. Due to the known differences in efficiencies, the gas turbine is close to 50% efficient (as opposed to the steam turbine's 33%). This means we can *reduce the size* of the turbine by about the same amount: less materials = cheaper. It also means that we don't need nearly as big a temperature drop from the outlet of the turbine. Ergo, no big cooling towers or big condensers that use hundreds of thousands of gallons a minute of cooling water. We can use air cooled condensers without much of an efficiency it.
6. The since the temperature of the outlet of turbine is high we can use that high gas temperature to employ flash-distillers to crack fresh water from sea water if we wanted to.
7. We can use some of the hot gas at the front end of the turbine to run a hydrogen distillation plant; or divert this to even greater quantiies of fresh water from sea water; or, and this is what we really expect the LFTR to be used for: process heat for chemical plants, for aluminum plants, for anything that takes vast quanties of heat nomally produced by burning coal or coke or natural gas.
And...that is just to start...there is more!
Given the architecture of the LFTR is is completely scalable. From 10 MWs of heat to 1800 MWs of power. We can factory produce (see Charle's blog at nuclear green) 100 MW reactors and *stack* them where we need them. We can easily bury them underground and they wouldn't even show up as you drive by them (who WOULD you hit something in the ground with an airplane?). Very important: since the LFTR is NOT a pressurized water reactor and the fuel stream exists in atmospheric pressure *everything* can be built to industrial specs in factories without the huge wall thicknesses of containment, pipes, etc etc. The bottom line is that we fully expect the modern LFTR to be less than half the cost of a modern Generation III LWR.
We can place the LFTR almost anywhere that is socially and community acceptable to do so. We can, for example, and both Charles and I have talked about this on our blogs, use the LFTR to replace a coal plant AT a coal plant site. 1 MW of coal replaced with 1 MW of thorium produced power.
Isn't this a "good thing"? Write you Congress person today. Write the NEW Dept. of Energy. Make your voice heard!
David
dwalters - "The LFTR is very different. A different 'paradigm' so to speak. Really a completely different architecture. "
Before you gush anymore over LFTR reactors lets summerise the current position. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Currently operating commercial LFTR reactors - 0
Current operational experience with LFTR - 0
Pilot LFTR reactors - 0
Remember that nuclear one day would "be too cheap to meter" so lets take your projections with a grain of salt until you have at least 10 years of a operating LFTR reactor under your belt. Then take a look at your predictions and see how many of them are true.
Assuming that you could produce them on a production line can you ensure quality? Are the required material needed for the high temperatures available at a reasonable cost. How long do cost effective material last at the high temperatures of the reactor? What happens when the operator in Haiti drops something and damages the reactor (remember your reactors are going to be everywhere).
While LFTR is an unknown as yet renewables by contrast are going from strength to strength. If the cost of renewables is about the same as an LFTR power solution why should anyone now back an unknown rather than technology that is in use today and can be scaled up to the required size?