Ron's Journal Archive
New twist on alternative energy
12/20/2009
Why make electricity from thorium? It's the other clean energy, it would seem! Stand bye for a few surprises!
I started this online journal with a post about a field hearing of our Ohio House Alternative Energy Committee at the Cleveland-based Aerospace Institute. Today I'm circling back to it.
So, I'm taking a break from the state budget series to examine an idea whose time may be on the clean energy rise, if my source article on this topic holds up. Periodically I find really fascinating material when I scan my monthly copy of Wired magazine. The January issue arrived in yesterday's mail. I'm amazed at what I find on pages 214-219. . .
Two fundamental changes in nuclear power plant design show tremendous promise: use of thorium for fuel and using a self-regulating design that does not depend on massive water cooling and neutron-absorbing rods for controling the fission process. Thorium powered nuclear reactors will be able to generate electricity far cheaper and safer than current methods, according to sources cited in this article. Here is a distillation of the advantages from this article, comparing one gigawatt generating stations:
- Fuel cost: $10,000 per year (estimated) vs. $50-60 million for current uranium plants
- Footprint: 2,000-3,000 square feet and no need for buffer zone vs. 200,000-300,000 square feet plus surrounding low-density population zone for conventional uranium plants.
- Fuel quantity: 1 ton of raw thorium vs. 250 tons of raw uranium for current power plants
- Fuel availability: thorium is plentiful in nature and does not require costly processing like uranium or plutonium. Further, it is only slighly radioactive, ". . .you could carry a lump of it in your pocket without harm," according to the Wired article.
- Spent fuel: very small amounts that need to be stored for a few hundred years vs. much larger quantities from uranium plants that must be stored for a few hundred thousand years. Unlike nuclear byproducts from conventional nuclear power plants, it is said that spent thorium fuel is of no value in producing nuclear weapons.
- Coolant: self-regulating in which the thorium is disolved in hot liquid floride salts vs. water cooling in current designs used in nuclear power plants.
Why do we have uranium-powered nuclear plants, using the water-cooled design? It seems that the ability of uranium-fueled reactors to produce weapons-grade plutonium was attractive in the 60's when the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union was heating up.
It's not that the thorium approach was not discovered, because a working thorium-based reactor was built in 1965 at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This technology went "on the shelf" in about 1973 when 41 contracts were entered into for uranium-based power plants across the U.S. and Alvin Weinberg, the head of the Oak Ridge project and who had pushed for 18 years to use the liquid flouride thorium reactor in producing electricty, was instead pushed out of his position.
Is anything going on toward adopting this technology for generating electricity? Yes, India is on a path to rely heavily on thorium to ramp its use of nuclear-powered electricity generation from 9 percent now to 25 percent by 2050; China recently hosted a major thorium conference and has ordered its mineral refiners to set aside their thorium production for future use in power generation; and, France is building reactor test models using variations on this techology for potential application in its electricity generation, which is already 75 percent nuclear-powered.
In the U.S. things are moving much more slowly. Pending federal legislation would direct $250 million -- far less than would be needed to build a single reactor -- to conduct research by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Wikipedia: Thorium | Oak Ridge Molten Salt Experiment
Energy From Thorium: Blog | Forum
Article Puts Thorium Into Perspective As Energy Source
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