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calendar   Monday - February 01, 2010

Green Nukes

Getting a lift from LiFTeR

Liquid Floride Thorium Reactors



image

graphic from energyfromthorium.com



Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have neighborhood nuclear reactors, each one hardly bigger than a tractor trailer? Wouldn’t it be amazing if these reactors took in a radioactive substance at the front end, produced electricity for low cost, and what was left over couldn’t be made into bombs? That’s how the LFTR system works:

Benefits of The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor

# Burns up existing highly radioactive waste from light water reactors.
# Burns Uranium 235 or 233 fuel in the thermal spectrum allowing 98% burn-up.
# Liquid salt allows Xenon poison to be removed continuously.
# Breeds fertile Thorium into fissile Uranium 233 for insertion in the core in a closed cycle, onsite chemical separation process removes need for expensive isotope separation.
# Liquid salt high melting point allows for much smaller containment structure, no steam to contain.
# High temperature allows for use of combined cycle reheat Brayton turbine machinery improving efficiency to 50%, air cooling sufficient.
# High temperature also permits elemental breakdown of water to produce hydrogen for production of ammonia nitrate fertilizer, dimethyl ether diesel fuel, and methanol gasoline fuel.
# High negative temperature coefficient of reactivity, salt expands and contracts making reactor self regulating, no control rods needed.
# Fuel already tested and certified from HRE-2 in late 1950’s, 10 year certification process waived.
# Potential 30-50% specific cost reduction compared to existing LWR facilities.
# Proliferation resistant due to Uranium 232 contamination in Uranium 233 core, hard gamma emitter makes bomb use impossible.
# Freeze plug feature, passively safe reactor design.
# Scalable from 100MW semi trailer size to typical 1GW large plant size.
# Abundance of Thorium is 400 times greater than fissile Uranium 235, 3 times greater than Uranium 238.
# Specific high level actinide waste is 1/30 of conventional LWR and has 300 year decay time vs. 10,000 year.
# Platinum, Americium, and Strontium 90 decay chain products are highly valuable and useful to medical industry.

source

It turns out that this isn’t really new technology. The same guys who figured out how to make nukes figured this out back in the late 40’s and 50’s. But the idea got shelved, because you couldn’t make bombs out of the leftovers. They made a thorium reactor just for fun, and used to run it 5 days a week. They shut it down every weekend because nobody wanted to work the OT to watch the thing. But it worked just fine, and started up easily again each Monday morning. And then the idea was put away and forgotten about.

Thorium is very common stuff. The US has hundreds of thousands of tons of it. India has so damn much of the stuff, they have beaches made of it. Thorium is not a highly radioactive element, nor is it fissile. That means it doesn’t go boom - it can’t attain a critical mass. But put enough of it in one place, get it primed and running with some highly radioactive materials like U233, and it generates lots of heat. Enough heat to melt salt. And all that heat can generate lots of steam, and power turbines with it. And if the reaction gets too hot, it shuts itself down.

I’m not a nuclear scientist, and I don’t understand too much of the advanced chemistry. I first heard about Thorium reactors in last month’s Wired magazine, but it turns out that the rest of the world has been working on this for decades.

Here’s a little video that I found at How Stuff Works, and there are several other helpful videos at that link.

You can get an actual nuclear physics lecture on thorium reactors here. It runs a full hour.

Loads and loads of links all over the internet on this topic, but here is an important one: thorium may be the only way left open to us, due to the latest dictate from Lord Obama:

Recently it was reported in Defense Daily that the White House Office of Management and Budget has moved to remove all research in fast-spectrum fission reactors from the DOE budget. This in turn prompted an outcry from the Secretary of Energy, Stephen Chu, who stated:

“Prohibiting research and development on fast reactors under the fuel cycle research and development budget line effectively selects the once-through fuel cycle as the only fuel cycle to be pursued in the United States”

With all due respect to the Secretary, there is another option. This is precisely the fork in the road that visionaries like Wigner and Fermi saw back in the late 1940s. If you pursue closed-fuel cycles based on uranium (and predominantly uranium-238) then Chu is right--the fast spectrum reactor is the only option for a closed-fuel cycle, since only in the fast spectrum can U-238 be productively consumed.

But...if you consider thorium as the basic fuel, as Wigner advocated, then you can have a closed fuel cycle WITHOUT a fast spectrum reactor, since thorium can be productively converted to energy in a “slow” neutron reactor (called a thermal-spectrum reactor) and thorium is the only option for this approach.

Be aware that the Obama administration has not said WORD ONE about this technology. They think they’ve just put the screws to the whole nuclear paradigm. But after years and years of research by other countries, this technology may be about to become mature. And it costs a whole lot less too, far less even than coal. So when this idea starts to spread, the White House can’t claim credit.

And we right wingers may have to eat a dish or three of crow on this one, because the same folks we’ve been beating on with hockey sticks are also behind LFTR:

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

It may be worse than I think. It may be that the greenies have all been working on this for ages, and we just haven’t been paying attention. Many of the articles I’ve found on this subject are also soaked with Gaia-love Climate Change Carbon Offset shit that you’d think the Sierra Club wrote them.

A thorium reactor is different. And, on paper at least, this radical new technology could be the key to unlocking a new generation of clean and safe nuclear power. It could prove the circuit-breaker to the two most intractable problems of the 21st century: our insatiable thirst for energy, and the warming of the world’s climate.

BY THE END OF this century, the average surface temperature across the globe will have risen by at least 1.4˚C, and perhaps as much as 5.8˚C, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
...
The principal culprit is carbon dioxide, a gas that even in quite small quantities can have a dramatic impact on climate, and has historically been present in the Earth’s atmosphere at relatively low concentrations.

Hey, at least crow is a renewable resource. And with enough Tabasco sauce they probably taste Ok.

All sorts of links ...
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/joomla/
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15048703
http://yottawattsthorium.blogspot.com/
http://www.itheo.org/
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4971
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/003536.html
http://newenergyandfuel.com/http:/newenergyandfuel/com/2009/01/21/the-liquid-fluoride-thorium-paradigm-part-i-thorium/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-kirsch/the-most-important-invest_b_402685.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patrick-takahashi/there-is-something-about_b_410825.html
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/thoriumbased-energy-our-next-challenge-kakodkar/564880/1
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15048703

I do believe this is the very first time BMEWS has linked to HuffPo. And I think I’ll get a pass on the slice of humble pie with a side of extra crispy black bird. I’ve always been in favor of nuclear energy, but I’ve never specified what those reactors run on. And it still pisses me off that the greenies put Three Mile Island and Chernobyl in the same sentence together as if they were equivalent events. Not true. Not true even by 4 orders of magnitude. But I’ll try to put that aside. Thorium may be the way to go; it looks like some reactors can even be retrofit. Why pollute or put people at risk when you don’t need to?

Heck, we hardly even need to mine the stuff. A gigawatt coal fired power plant produces lots of coal ash, and that one plant’s annual heap of ash contains about 13 tons of Thorium.

For the year 1982, assuming coal contains uranium and thorium concentrations of 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively, each typical plant released 5.2 tons of uranium (containing 74 pounds of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons of thorium that year.

This is really starting to sound like the Golden Apple. 


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 02/01/2010 at 03:02 PM   
Filed Under: • Amazing Science and DiscoveriesOil, Alternative Energy, and Gas Prices •  
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Oh, and here's some kind of visitor flag counter thingy. Hey, all the cool blogs have one, so I should too. The Visitors Online thingy up at the top doesn't count anything, but it looks neat. It had better, since I paid actual money for it.
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