energy from thorium.

[charliebrown]

Does this work?
How much R&D, and capital will it cost to make it a reality, how much time?

Even so, can the world switch from liquid fuel cars to battery cars?
What about the grid? And availability of batteries?

Can it replace coal and natural gas fired plants?

http://www.financialsense.com/contri...n-fossil-fuels

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: energy from thorium.

Using thorium in practical nuclear reactors seems like it could work. Much legitimate scientific research has been conducted on this; the reactions seem well-understood; and some pilot plant projects have been built and tested in the US, Russia, and India.

Battery powered electric vehicles are a separate subject, much-discussed in other threads.

From an engineering perspective, thorium nuclear reactors can probably replace coal, natural-gas fired plants, and uranium-fueled plants.

From a public policy and financial perspective, thorium is a nuclear power plant, all the same debates and constraints apply.

[Starving Steve]

Re: energy from thorium.

1.) Uranium power plants do not need tonnages of fuel. Uranium reactors use tiny amounts of fuel, like a few kilos, or even less. So let's understand that, first.

2.) Uranium has a long half-life, so it has to be enriched to be a fuel. The long half-life uranium is HARMLESS, and I will eat it to prove that point. It is almost non-radioactive. That is why it has to be enriched, and that takes work. Enrichment means you have to find the odd isotopes of uranium that have SHORT half-life and is by definition: very radioactive. That is hard to do.

3.) The spent-fuel from uranium power-plants is in the amounts of a few kilos, NOT tonnages. Uranium is NOT like coal. There are no uranium trains on railroad tracks hauling ore cars. Let's understand that important point, too.

4.) Uranium and plutonium, and all kinds of interesting and slightly radioactive stuff are in the soil everywhere in the world, in trace amounts. Let's understand that point. That stuff is as natural as carbon or gold or lead or iron or zinc, copper, whatever. The problem with uranium is that it is hard to find in large quantities, and it has to be enriched. The enrichment takes work and the process is secret. It has to be spun in centrifuges, etc. Lot's of work... Also, the Islamo-fascists in Iran and Pakistan might get a hold of the enriched uranium and use it for bomb-making. (NOT GOOD!)

5.) Uranium has a long half-life which means it is almost non-radioactive. This is why it is HARMLESS. The good stuff is the SHORT half-life uranium which is highly radioactive. Any short half-life material is highly radioactive. Any long half-life material is edible.

6.) The depleted uranium is uranium fuel that once was very radioactive, and it is almost not radioactive. That is why you can dump it into the sea or store it under my house or make tank shields out of it, or even store it in the floors of power plants. That is a very important point! It becomes COLD, and fast.

7.) The advantage of thorium is that it is very difficult or impossible to make a bomb from thorium. So it is good stuff to use. I also think thorium can be made in a reactor, so it is easier to use. Also thorium is in the tiny amount of atomic waste from reactors. Finding thorium in large enough quantities to use from the natural Earth itself would be a problem because it exists only in tiny amounts from uranium decay and the processes going-on from fission or fusion deep within the Earth. Plutonium, neptunium, californium, berkelium, and other really exotic elements--- what we used to call synthetic elements or non-natural elements---- are rather difficult to use in power plants--- and very difficult to find because they exist on Earth in only trace amounts. Uranium and thorium are much easier to find, but not real easy.

8.) Atomic energy fuels are very energy rich (energetic), so only trivial or tiny amounts provide the energy that a tonne of coal provides. When I say trivial or tiny, I mean a cup or two in a few fuel rods. Got it? That is what makes atomic power the miracle of our time.

9.) The cheapest, and I mean CHEAPEST fuels to make electrical energy with are the atomic power fuels.

10.) The advantage of all atomic fuels is that they do NOT produce CO2 nor any greenhouse gases. They are wonderful for the environment to use. Trees and other vegetation might argue with me, but CO2 is not a wonderful thing to dump into the atmosphere, forever. At some point, the CO2 dumping into the atmosphere has to be reduced, although CO2 is not a pollutant in the strictest sense of the word.

11.) Human cells and the cells of all living things repair damage done by radioactivity. Otherwise, life on this planet could not have evolved. Radiation is everywhere: from trace elements in the Earth and its soil, from foods, from your spouse, from granite, from the Sun, from cosmic rays, from hospitals, from almost everything including your own body.

12.) The only way mankind can continue on this planet and thrive is to have CHEAP energy, and that is energy from atomic power.

13.) The final nail in the coffin of the eco-frauds in Greenpeace and the Sierra Club is that the heat at the centre of the Earth is due to atomic energy from fission and fusion, that is why the Earth stays HOT. The Earth is 4.5 BILLION years old, and the heat in the Earth is quite hot and quite stable. The continents still float on hot magma, and the world's volcanoes are doing just fine, thank you. Geo-thermal heat is really natural atomic power in the Earth, plus some heat from pressure, plus some left-over heat from the Earth's formation 4.5 billion years ago, plus friction heat from the lunar tides inside the Earth--- because the Earth and Moon are really a double planet. But in main, it is ATOMIC ENERGY that is keeping the Earth HOT.

[cbr]

Re: energy from thorium.

i am real curious about thorium as well. i don't think it is quite as cut and dried as the previous post; clearly there are incremental costs associated with nuclear power that don't factor in the same way with other types of power.

i don't believe the costs are as high as the media frenzy would make it out. i guarantee there have been more people killed working with drilling and mining since 1945 than from the nuclear industry, the two bombs included.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: energy from thorium.

i am real curious about thorium as well. i don't think it is quite as cut and dried as the previous post; clearly there are incremental costs associated with nuclear power that don't factor in the same way with other types of power.

i don't believe the costs are as high as the media frenzy would make it out. i guarantee there have been more people killed working with drilling and mining since 1945 than from the nuclear industry, the two bombs included.

Public perception of risk is a funny thing.
Driving a car is relatively hazardous. Still, people perceive the risk as reasonable, because they feel they are in control of the car and it won't happen to them. They feel they are able to affect the outcome.

Nuclear mishaps are out of your control, so people accept far less risk.
The whole topic of acceptable levels of risk are emotional and irrational.

[lektrode]

Re: energy from thorium.

Public perception of risk is a funny thing.
Driving a car is relatively hazardous. Still, people perceive the risk as reasonable, because they feel they are in control of the car and it won't happen to them. They feel they are able to affect the outcome.

Nuclear mishaps are out of your control, so people accept far less risk.
The whole topic of acceptable levels of risk are emotional and irrational.

mishaps _might_ be out of _my_ control, but certainly some people are quite capable of controlling the process _and_ the mishaps, so lets not go gettin all hysterical....

thorium tech surely seems like a safe bet = safer than what blew up in japan, in any case - but no matter _what_ happens, WE NEED NUCLEAR POWER - and _then_ there's electric cars (and no matter how bad ya want it, there isnt enuf acreage in The US to cover what we burn in gasoline in a day, no matter how ya fine tune it ;)

[charliebrown]

Re: energy from thorium.

From wiki-pedia.

After about 5% of a nuclear fuel rod has reacted inside a nuclear reactor that rod is no longer able to be used as fuel (due to the build-up of fission products). Today, scientists are experimenting on how to recycle these rods so as to reduce waste and use the remaining actinides as fuel (large-scale reprocessing is being used in a number of countries). A typical 1000-MWe nuclear reactor produces approximately 20 cubic meters (about 27 tonnes) of spent nuclear fuel each year (but only 3 cubic meters of vitrified volume if reprocessed).^[82][83] All the spent fuel produced to date by all commercial nuclear power plants in the US would cover a football field to the depth of about one meter.^[84]
Spent nuclear fuel is initially very highly radioactive and so must be handled with great care and forethought. However, it will decrease with time. After 40 years, the radiation flux is 99.9% lower than it was the moment the spent fuel was removed from operation. Still, this 0,1% is dangerously radioactive.^[76] After 10,000 years of radioactive decay, according to United States Environmental Protection Agency standards, the spent nuclear fuel will no longer pose a threat to public health and safety.^{[citation needed]}
When first extracted, spent fuel rods are stored in shielded basins of water (spent fuel pools), usually located on-site. The water provides both cooling for the still-decaying fission products, and shielding from the continuing radioactivity. After a period of time (generally five years for US plants), the now cooler, less radioactive fuel is typically moved to a dry-storage facility or dry cask storage, where the fuel is stored in steel and concrete containers. Most U.S. waste is currently stored at the nuclear site where it is generated, while suitable permanent disposal methods are discussed.
As of 2007, the United States had accumulated more than 50,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors.^[85] Permanent storage underground in U.S. had been proposed at the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, but that project has now been effectively cancelled - the permanent disposal of the U.S.'s high-level waste is an as-yet unresolved political problem.^[86]

[charliebrown]

Re: energy from thorium.

I do agree with point #12. Without cheap energy space ship earth might only be able to support half of our current population.
Who wants to be first to jump into the incinerator?

Uranium is chemically toxic, I would not choose the "Big-Gulp" size.

Thorium is more prevalent than unranium in the earth's crust.

More from wiki-pedia
Thorium, as well as uranium and plutonium, can be used as fuel in a nuclear reactor. A thorium fuel cycle offers several potential advantages over a uranium fuel cycle including much greater abundance on Earth, superior physical and nuclear properties of the fuel, enhanced proliferation resistance, and reduced nuclear waste production.^[14] Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), has worked on developing the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors. Rubbia states that a tonne of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal.^[15][16] One of the early pioneers of the technology was U.S. physicist Alvin Weinberg at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, who helped develop a working nuclear plant using liquid fuel in the 1960s.

[Starving Steve]

Re: energy from thorium.

One of the BIG debates (fights !) between so-called, "environmentalists" and the supporters of atomic energy is what is waste from atomic-power plants. And I say seriously that the waste from atomic power plants is just a few cups per day ---- the amount of fuel in fuel rods plus a few iron filings and bits of corrosion from metal inside the core of the reactors. The rest of the so-called "waste" is NOT waste. Furthermore, the few cups of waste per day become COLD ( almost non-radioactive ) in a short period of time. That is why the armour on tanks in the U.S. military is depleted uranium. The armour is harmless and that is why it is used in the military.

Furthermore, aircraft carriers and submarines in the U.S. military and other militaries are run on atomic power. If it were true that tonnes of waste were generated from their reactors ( and similar reactors in atomic power plants on land ) then how could such aircraft carriers and submarines float?????????????

Another point, my uncle has a cut-away (open) fuel rod in lucite plastic on his desk, an award presented to him by General Electric Co. That fuel rod is still technically radioactive but HARMLESS. Would the water that the fuel rod is dipped into be deadly? Would the iron filings and corrosion from the core of the reactor that the fuel rod sits in be deadly? The period of time is a matter of weeks or months until the materials at the core of reactors are HARMLESS.

Finally, one more point, the cups of waste from atomic power plants are held in sealed casks in the floor of atomic power plants. That waste could be dumped into the sea and DILUTED to trace amounts of basically nothing, but the eco-frauds objected to that and created a big hysteria about that silly issue. That hysteria was in the 1950s and 1960s. And the trivial amount of real waste from atomic power plants becomes COLD ( almost non-radioactive ) in a matter of years. But the eco-frauds would not allow the waste to be dumped into the sea nor even stored at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

As you wrote, the waste becomes 99.9% non-radioactive (depleted) in forty years. But once the public hysteria gets going, it would seem that you can't argue with them. The issue is settled, and Yucca Mountain is closed.

Sadly, as a result of public hysteria and mis-information about atomic energy, the world is moving back toward using coal to generate electricity. This is why I am upset and trying my best to get the truth about atomic power to the public. And I do NOT get paid one-cent for doing this. My only interest in atomic power is some stock that I hold in Duke Power Company and in General Electric Company. And my total holdings are worth about $ 5,000 or $ 10,000 in value. So, I am really doing this as a human-being and for the benefit of mankind everywhere.