Month

James Watt was an obscure instrument maker, whose shop was located on the campus of University of Glasgow in the mid-18th century. The University of Glasgow was probably the only place in the world at that time where scholars would encourage a bright young man to build things with his hands, and Watt’s career as an instrument maker had been nurtured by university professors, who had recognized his talent and had encouraged him to develop and use his skills. Watt was unusual because his education had taught him to think in terms of physics. Thus when Professor John Anderson called Watt’s attention to the Newcomen pump which Anderson was investigating. Anderson wanted Watt to find why the pump stopped working after a few strokes. Watt diagnosed that problem, but beyond that immediately understood the problem that lay at the heart of Anderson’s investigation, the inefficiency of the Newcomen pump. For the next two years Watt focused on the problem of improving the efficiency of the Newcomen pump. He applied physics to the problem. Eventually Watt had his moment of discovery:

“I had gone to take a walk on a fine Sabbath afternoon, early in 1765. I had entered the green by the gate at the foot of Charlotte Street and had passed the old washing-house. I was thinking upon the engine at the time, and had gone as far as the herd’s house, when the idea came into my mind that as steam was an elastic body it would rush into a vacuum, and if a communication were made between the cylinder and an exhausted vessel it would rush into it, and might be there condensed without cooling the cylinder. I then saw that I must get rid of the condensed steam and injection-water if I used a jet as in Newcomen’s engine. Two ways of doing this occurred to me. First, the water might be run off by a descending pipe, if an offlet could be got at the depth of thirty-five or thirty-six feet, and any air might be extracted by a small pump. The second was to make the pump large enough to extract both water and air. . . . I had not walked farther than the golf-house when the whole thing was arranged in my mind.”

Watt invented the steam engine, a “black swan” that profoundly changed the course of civilization. But before we got where we are, some of Watt’s friends from the University introduced him to John Roebuck, an industrialist who was also in the coal business. Roebuck was arguably the first venture capitalist, because he agreed to back the development of Watt’s idea. Later another industrialist, Matthew Boulton, was to recognize the value of Watt’s invention, and was able to buy out Roebuck’s share, and sponsored Watt’s work on improving his invention, and at applying it to industrialization.

Flash forward to late 2008. Civilization is facing a crisis. The course that began with Watt’s discovery, is not sustainable with the technology it uses to generate power. A new energy producing system is required, a new black swan. A small number of people, many who contribute to the ongoing energy discussion at “Energy from Thorium” are convinced that a technology investigated by Oak Ridge National Laboratory a half century ago, is the black swan. Indeed, people at ORNL at the time believed that they were developing the black swan, and Alvin Weinberg foresaw the day when their discovery would power civilization.

We are currently at the critical point, the point at which people who are interested in the LFTR project must decide whether to go fishing or to continue to cut bait. I am for going fishing. Fishing means finding financial backing for the development for the project. In order to do that, there must be a business plan.

The product is the LFTR. My suggestion has been to make it small and produce it in a factory. Plan to produce thousands of them. Why thousands? Because there is a market niche which no other technology is addressing. The American electrical system is dependent on two types of electrical generation. Base load generation, and peak load generation. Base load is handled now by coal fired and nuclear generating plants. At the moment, Light Water Reactors are under consideration to replace the coal fired plants. In addition, Solar and wind technology has been proposed as base load sources. Both technologies at present appear expensive, with one possible exception, appear to be very expensive to implement as base power. Light water reactors are expensive as well. Production of solar and wind generated electricity would be confined to a few favorable localities and would require an enormously expensive upgrade to the national electrical grid to implement.

Neither solar, wind or Light Water Reactors are well suited to load following and because of their high capital cost, all are even less suited for the peak reserve generation role. In contrast the LFTR has excellent load following characteristics, and is capable of being placed on peak reserve standby for long periods of time. Far from being damaged by load following and peak reserve assignments, the LFTR would have its life prolonged by part time and part load duties. The niche then is that of load following and peak reserve-generating source.

In order to fulfill this role, the LFTR must be built as cheaply as possible, without compromising safety and efficient operations. At present utilities rely heavily on natural gas fired turbines for peak demand electricity generation. This technology is cheap to build, but expensive to operate. At the very least, the goal for LFTR peak load generators should be to undercut the price of natural gas generated peak load electricity.

My proposed business plan for would call for first targeting the peak load generation market with LFTR technology. This goal can be accomplished through a develop process that brings the price of LFTR generated electricity in at a cost that will under cuts the current price of natural gas generated peak load electricity.

At the moment the research of Canadian Dr. David LeBlanc seems to hold the best promise for developing our low cost peak generation LFTR. A good business plan would call for going with what we have, rather than hoping that something even better will emerge later. So the plan would call for the development of Dacid LeBlanc’s ideas into a viable product which can fulfill the peak electrical generation role.

David LeBlanc’s concept can, of course, be developed into a full baseload electrical source simply by modifying the peak load design. The first priority, however, should be to get the product out the door. That means going after the unfilled niche first. That means going after the peak load market.

How much will developing David LeBlanc’s ideas cost? Right now no one knows. Lets put the figure at $10 billion. That does sound like a lot, but we are talking about a revolutionary technology that could bring electrical power to billions of people, and profoundly impact the future course of civilization. We are talking about a sustainable technology that could bring us power for millions of years. Of course $10 billion is just a guess. The actual price tag for development could be much less and it could be much more.

There are two courses which the community that is interested in LFTR development can take. It can either wait for the government to get interested in the project, or it can go out and find patrons. My life is on loan, and I don’t know how long it will be before the loan will be called in. Needless to say, I would like to see our day in full sunlight before the loan comes due. That mean that I would like to see the community of LFTR interest forge ahead. To find their John Roebucks and Matthew Boultons. To find sources for the $10 billion or more that would required to launch the revolution, and to plunge forward toward the potential glory and wealth that success would bring.

Go for it!

Rod Adams has had the right idea for a long time. Make reactors small, Rod keeps saying. Of course Rod’s small is my mini. Rod has focused on reactors under 100 MWe. My interest is in Reactors in the 100 to 300 MWe size range. In addition to our reactors being small in output, I see a big advantage in small physical size. My focus on smallness started out with the idea that reactors could be built more quickly and more cheaply in factories than on site. Factory construction favors small, compact and easily transportable reactors. The transportable part limited upward size. Size does not have to be fixed. Dr. David LeBlanc has some interesting ideas on LFTR design. david’s basic idea is both simple and ingenious. Build a reactor with a simple cylindrical core. The core is surrounded by a thorium salt blanket. The cylindrical core design would allow factory built reactors to varie in power output simply by elongating the core cylinder.

Dr. LeBlanc’s design can easily be built as medium size reactors. LeBlanc has calculated that a core that is one meter (a littleover a yard) in diameter, and six meters (20 feet) long could produce 400 MWs of electrical output. Such a core would be easily transportable and would cost next to nothing to build. David’s core is so cheap to build that he contemplates replacing it every 20 years or so, because radiation will inevitably damage its metalic structure.

David is talking about other cost containment measures, including the use of lower cost materials, this would bring the LFTR out of the breeding range, but there is plenty of plutonium in LWR fuel that can be burned to make up the difference. I wrote David that if costs could be lowered enough, the low cost low burn molten salt reactor – could potentially make an excellent peak load producer, that could also provide backup for renewable generators. Periodic power production would actually prolong the life of core materials, and of course with the ability of MSRs to be at peak heat while at standby mode, and build nuclear reaction as heat is transfered from reactor salys to the electrical generating system, David’s low cost MSR could come on line from renewables back up mode as quickly as the closed cycle gas turbine can ramp up speed.

David LeBlanc’s simple design concept could be built in varying sizes. The cylinder could simply be longer or shorter. The whole reactor package could be quickly built in factories as modules, trucked or shipped by rail to the set up site, and then the modules could be assembled in a few weeks. Since the MSR/LFTR is very compact, the containment structure would be small. The inherent safety and self controlling features of the MSR/LFTR are such that it does not require an onsite operations staff, further limiting the need for large structures to house a large staff. Reactors can be clustered, thus allowing for the production of the power equivalent of a vary large LWR, without the drawback of a huge loss of power to the grid system when a single reactor shuts down.

There is little doubt that David LeBlanc’s radical reactor design would have a competitive edge on natural gas fired electrical backup generators, currently used for back up power generation, on fuel costs. The natural gas generators would probably have the edge on capital costs. But would capital costs disadvantage knock David LeBlanc’s reactor out of competition? As it is, natural gas cost make the gas fired turbine back up and peak load power plants very expensive t0o operate. Add to the cost of natural gas a carbon tax, and you have real insentives for power companies to look for back up and peak load alternatives. So yes, Dr. LeBlanc is able to design a reactor generating system that can be factory built at a low cost, he might very well have invented the electrical peak load, and backup system of the future. Dr. LeBlanc could very well afford to let the base load generator market go, because the demand for peak load generating capacity far exceeds the demand for base load generators. But David’s basic design is so flexible, that by altering the core component of his reactor, it could be a baee load power source. The base load core would be more expensive, because it would be expected to pump out power 24 hours a day. But the advantages of serial production of other reactor modules, would lower overall costs.

Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, former General Partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, current honcho of his own venture capital firm, Khosla Ventures, agrees with much of what I have been saying about renewables.

Khosla is on record as favoring nuclear power and criticizing environmentalists for their opposition to it:

For every nuclear plant that environmentalists avoided, they ended up causing two coal plants to be built. That’s the history of the last 20 years. Most new power plants in this country are coal, because the environmentalists opposed nuclear. When you ask someone like the NRDC, ‘Do you prefer nuclear or coal?’ They’ll say ‘We prefer nuclear to coal, but we don’t want either.’ It doesn’t work that way; we need power.

They’d like to see wind and solar photovoltaics. Well, it doesn’t work if it’s 40 cents a kilowatt hour, and it doesn’t work if you have to tell PG&E’s customers: ‘We’ll ship you power when the wind’s blowing and the sun’s shining, but otherwise, you gotta miss your favorite soap opera or NFL game.’ That’s just the reality, so you have to be pragmatic about this. What is the most cost-effective way to do it?

When Mother Jones ask Khosla

Would you rather live next to a nuclear power plant or a coal burning plant?

he answered,

Nuclear, and it’s not even close. Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is one of the reasons we have a coal-dependent infrastructure, with the resulting environmental impact that all of us can see. I suspect environmentalists, through their opposition of nuclear power, have caused more coal plants to be built than anybody. And those coal plants have emitted more radioactive material from the coal than any nuclear accident would have.

(Hint to David and Kirk: Khosla is looking for what he calls black swans, revolutionary and unforeseen ideas that change the world as we know it. And Vinod Khosla is not shy about advertising his email address on the Internet. It is vk [at] khoslaventures [dot] com. I’ll bet he would be excited to talk with you.)

Our Day Will Come
Ruby & The Romantics

Our day will come
And we’ll have everything.
We’ll share the joy
Falling in love can bring.

No one can tell me
That I’m too young to know (young to know)
I love you so (love you so)
And you love me.

Our day will come
If we just wait a while.
No tears for us -
Think love and wear a smile.

Our dreams have magic
Because we’ll always stay
In love this way
Our day will come.
(Our day will come; our day will come.)

Our dreams have magic
Because we’ll always stay
In love this way.
Our day will come.
Our day will come

Kirk Sorensen is a visionary. His vision recaptures the vision of Alvin Weinberg. Since last spring there has been a growing Internet buzz about the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. There can be little doubt of the central role of Kirk Sorensen in creating this buzz. Kirk, after all rebranded the generation old Oak Ridge National Laboratory idea of a molten salt thorium breeder reactor, the LFTR. But he did more than that, he created a forum on which people would be free to think about the vision. Unlike many visions, Kirk’s vision had taken real tangible form. I know, because my father had been there, had helped to shape those tangible forms, and he was still alive. I could talk to him, ask him questions, get his recollections of the tangible form of Kirk’s vision.

“Energy from Thorium” has three parts. The Blog, the Discussion Form, and the document repository. Through the Document Repository, I was able to put together my childhood and youthful experiences of my father, with his own documentation of his research. Although largely unseen, the LFTR had been a part of my life for almost two decades. Much of my father’s early work was covered in secrecy. When I asked him what he did at work, he would reply that his work was a government secret. By the time the work ceased to be secret, the habit of compartmentalization of work and home had set in. Every now and then, my father might say a few words about stories that appeared in the Oak Ridge newspaper. Later he was to complain about a peer review of a paper he had written. “They complain,” my father said, “that I refer too much to research that has been done at ORNL. What they don’t realize that the research we do here is the best in the world”. My father was and is a truly modest man, and a master of the literature review. If my father said that ORNL research was the best in the world, it was because he had good reason to think so.

There is no question that when my father started researching molten salt chemistry in July 1950 that ORNL thinking on reactor design was far in advance of of the rest of the world including Chicago. In fact ORNL thinking about reactor design in 1950 was two generations ahead of the rest of the world. They would began to catch up, when NASA asked Kirk Sorensen to look at the idea of putting a reactor into space. As he sought a viable design, Kirk discovered the MSR, but more than that, he rediscovered Alvin Weinberg’s vision. Alvin Weinberg had published a visionary essay, “Energy as an Ultimate Raw Material, or Burning the Rocks and Burning the Sea,” during 1959 in Physics Today (vol. 12, no. 11, p. 18).

Weinberg’s vision was huge is scope as he later explained:

In this essay I speculated on the very long-range future-hundreds, even thousands, of years in the future. Where will our energy come from at that distant time when coal, oil, and natural gas have been used up? Solar energy is one obvious inexhaustible source. Another, if it works, could be controlled thermonuclear energy based on deuterium from the sea (thus “Burning the Sea”). My main point, however, was to stress what Phil Morrison and then Harrison Brown had already noticed: that the residual and all but infinite uranium and thorium in granite rocks could be burned with an energy yield larger than the energy required to mine and refine the ore—but only if breeders, which could burn nearly all the fertile material, are used. I spoke of “Burning the Rocks”: the breeder, no less than controlled fusion, is an inexhaustible energy system. Up till then we had thought that breeders, burning 50% instead of 2% of the uranium, extended the energy derivable from fission “only” 25-fold. But, because the breeder uses its raw material so efficiently, one can afford to utilize much more expensive—that is, dilute—ores, and these are practically inexhaustible. The breeder indeed will allow humankind to “Burn the Rocks” to achieve inexhaustible energy!

In his autobiography Weinberg confessed:

“I became obsessed with the Idea that humankind’s whole future depended on the breeder. For Society generally to achieve and maintain a standard of living of today’s developed countries, depends on the availability of relatively cheap, inexhaustible sources of energy.”

In 1969 as ORNL was, under orders from the USAEC, winding down its brilliantly successful Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, Alvin Weinberg wrote,

The achievement of a cheap, reliable, and safe breeder remains the primary task of the nuclear energy community. (In expressing this view, I suppose I betray a continuing frustration at the slow progress of fusion research, even though the Russian success with the tokamak has quickened the pace.) Actually not much has changed in this regard in 25 years. Even during World War II, many people realized that the breeder was central. It is only now, with burner reactors doing so well, that the world generally has mobilized around the great aim of the breeder.

As all readers of Nuclear Applications & Technology know, the prevailing view holds that the LMFBR (Liquid sodium cooled fast breeder) is the proper path to ubiquitous, permanent energy. It is no secret that I, as well as many of my colleagues at ORNL, have always felt differently. When the idea of the breeder was first suggested in 1943, the rapid and efficient recycle of the partially spent core was regarded as the main problem. Nothing that has happened in the ensuing quarter-century has fundamentally changed this. The successful breeder will be the one that can deal with the spent core most rationally—either by achieving extremely long burnup, or by greatly simplifying the entire recycle step. We at Oak Ridge have always been intrigued by this latter possibility. It explains our long commitment to liquid-fueled reactors-first, the aqueous homogeneous and now, the molten salt. groups working vigorously on molten salts outside Oak Ridge. . . .

. . . indeed, the enthusiasm displayed here is no longer confined to Oak Ridge. There are now several groups wor
king vigorously on molten salts outside Oak Ridge. The enthusiasm of these groups is not confined to MSRE, nor even to the molten-salt breeder. For we now realize that molten-salt reactors comprise an entire spectrum of embodiments that parallels the more conventional solid-fueled systems. Thus molten-salt reactors can be converters as well as breeders; and they can be fueled with either 239Pu or 233U or 235U.

However, we are aware that many difficulties remain, especially before the most advanced embodiment, the Molten-Salt Breeder, becomes a reality. Not all of these difficulties are technical. I have faith that with continued enlightened support of the US Atomic Energy Commission, and with the open-minded, sympathetic attention of the nuclear community . . . the molten-salt reactors will find an important niche in the unfolding nuclear energy enterprise.

Alvin Weinberg’s 40 year old expression of faith now seems at last to be on the verge of fulfillment, thanks to Kirk’s vision and hard work. I once told Kirk that he needed to get ready because his day would come. I now believe that that day is upon us.

The issue of human-induced global warming has been a concern of mine for many, many years and has been the subject of several of my previous blog posts. It is clear to anyone who takes the time to examine the problem that the “low-hanging fruit” for CO2 reduction is the elimination of coal-fired electrical generation, and I have also written emphatically, since the start of this blog, that we should be striving to eliminate the use of coal. Coal is filthy, coal is dangerous, coal is a proven killer.

My co-author on this blog, Charles Barton, has also written in a similar vein on these same issues.

Thorium and the liquid-fluoride reactor offer a very compelling approach for the replacement of coal-fired electrical generation with electricity generated from thorium. Both can generate baseload power regardless of ambient weather. Thorium is even more energy dense than coal and a thorium reactor can potentially take advantage of much of the cooling-water and electrical distribution infrastructure of a coal plant.

Several weeks ago, thanks to the suggestion of my friend Tom Blees, I had an opportunity to participate in a workshop hosted by Dr. James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Sciences, held in Washington D.C. During this workshop, Dr. Hansen had invited speakers on the subjects of energy efficiency, renewable energy, electrical grids, current and advanced nuclear energy, and carbon capture technology to speak.

The workshop was very busy and I learned a great deal. Those who are members of the thorium-forum can read some of the notes I took at the workshop.

Recently Dr. Hansen posted an extended letter on his website called “Tell Barack Obama the Truth” where he summarizes much of the situation in the world regarding global warming, the desperate need to replace coal, and the options for doing so. I encourage readers on this site to take a look at the paper and read it carefully as I have done. Here are some of the points Dr. Hansen makes:

1. Atmospheric CO2 levels need to be stabilized at 350 ppm; currently they are at 385 ppm and growing.

2. New coal plants should not be built; existing coal plants should be phased out by 2030.

3. Energy efficiency, renewables, and grid improvements should all be pursued. There is a small possibility this may be sufficient for the US to eliminate coal. But this is not likely. For the developing world it is highly unlikely.

4. Advanced nuclear options like the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) and the Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) could improve nuclear safety, efficiency, and address the issue of long-term nuclear waste.

5. Policy-makers should move with haste to develop these advanced nuclear energy options to permit the hasty retirement of coal-fired electrical generation, both in the US and in the developing world.

Please read the document and feel free to forward it to those in positions where they might need to hear this message.

James Hansen: Tell Barack Obama the Truth — The Whole Truth

Dr. Joe Bonometti, a great friend of this blog and the cause of thorium, gave a “Tech Talk” at Google this past Tuesday on the subject of Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactors. The video of his talk is available on YouTube and embedded here.

You can also download a copy of his slides here:

LFTR Google Presentation

We really appreciate all of Joe’s efforts to advance and promulgate this important technology!

David McKay made what I would categorize as a blunder in his new book, “Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air”. McKay asks,

Could nuclear power be “sustainable”?

Then he asks a two more questions

How great are the world- wide supplies of uranium, and other ?ssionable fuels? Do we have only a few decades’ worth of uranium, or do we have enough for millennia?

These are excellent questions, but unfortunately McKay goes about answering them in a totally wrong headed fashion and muddies the waters rather than producing greater clarity on the subject. First McKay relies on USGS estimates of Uranium and Thorium reserve. Secondly he greatly underestimated the amount of money that could economically be spent to spent to recover uranium and thorium. McKay reports the world land reserve of uranium to be 4.7 million tons, and if the price of uranium went up to $130 a kilogram an additional 22 million tons could be recovered. Thus according to McKay the world’s total recoverable Uranium reserve from land sources is 27 million tons.

In addition to the uranium

Worldwide thorium resources are estimated to total about 6 million tons, . . .

McKay tells us. This is interesting because in 1969, the United States Atomic Energy Commission estimated the recoverable thorium reserve of the United States @ $500 per pound – may be $2000 a pound at today’s prices – to be 3 billion tons.  At 2008 prices coal with the equivalent energy would cost 100 times more to mine.

McKay does note that

one paper published in 1980 estimated that the low-grade uranium resource is more than 1000 times greater than the 27 million tons we just assumed.

McKay is probably correct that there is not enough uranium in sustain a once through nuclear economy over the long hall, but no one has ever thought there was. Manhattan Project nuclear scientist began to talk about breeder reactors during World War II, because they anticipated a long term uranium shortage.

I was disappointed by David McKay’s treatment of nuclear energy in his new book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. McKay has made the book available for free downloads, but considering the weakness of McKay’s treatment of nuclear power I would have reservations about recommending it as an reliable source on energy issues. McKay failed to make clear, and I suspect did not delve deeply enough into the subject to clarify for himself the potential for energy recovery from uranium and thorium. He failed to identify nuclear technologies that could assure the recovery of the full energy potential of naturally occurring fissile and fertile isotopes. A fissile isotope will fission after absorbing a neutron. A fertile isotope, after absorbing one or more neutron undergoes a transformation into a fissile isotope. TU Delft tells us:

Not all nuclei are fissionable by introducing a neutron, in fact, the number of fissile nuclei is rather limited. However, neutrons interact with all nuclei. One type of interaction is absorption, where the incident neutron is absorbed into a nucleus and becomes part of a nucleus. Usually the resulting isotope is unstable and the newly formed nucleus shows radioactive decay. A special case of neutron absorption happens when a heavy, non-fissile nucleus,absorbs a neutron and decays to become a fissile nucleus. The most important 2 of these mechanisms are the U-238 chain and the Th-232 chain:

U-238 (non-fissile) + n -> U-239 -> Np-239 -> Pu-239 (fissile)
Th-232 (non-fissile) + n -> Th-233 -> Pa-233 -> U-233 (fissile)

In these reactions, new fissile material (nuclear fuel) is formed from material which was previously non-fissile. Most reactors in the world use uranium fuel with 95+% U-238, and in all nuclear reactors U-238 is converted to Pu-239. In a power reactor roughly 40% of all power is produced by fissions of Pu-239, so conversion is an important (and universal! ) effect in nuclear reactors.

About 0.7% of uranium atoms are fissile U-235. The other 99.3% of uranium atoms are fertile U-238. When U-238 absorbs a neutron it almost always undergoes a nuclear transformation process and becomes Pu-239. Pu-239 is fissile about 2/3rds of the time in most reactors, and that is good enough to sustain chain reactions, so Pu-239 can serve as reactor fuel, although it is not the best possible reactor fuel in Light Water Reactors.

How much of natural uranium can become fissile and be “burned” in the nuclear process? Potentially all of it, but burning it all depends heavily on what technology you chose to use, and the compromises you choose to make. in addition Thorium-232 will transform into fissionable U-233 after absorbing a neutron, and there a are some real advantages to using Thorium-232 rather than Uranium-238 as the basis for a fuel cycle. (I strongly suggest that the curious read WASH-1097, a document that explains a whole lot very well. WASH-1097 is moderately teckie, but learning to cope with teckie talk is the rout to personal empowerment in a technological age. Don’t just take my word for what I write here.)

McKay, unfortunately did not read WASH-1097. It is clear from WASH-1097 that fissile U-233 can be produced by breeding Th-232, and that U-233 is very good nuclear fuel. Among other good qualities is that an efficient thorium fuel cycle reactor can transform 100% of the thorium feed into it, and burn up to 98% of the transformed thorium. The other 2% is transformed into Neptunium-237 that can be burned in fast reactors.

How much Thorium might be available for future reactor use? WASH-1097 contained an estimate from the USAEC that for 500 nineteen sixty nine dollars per pound, maybe 2000 two thousand eight dollars, the United States had a recoverable thorium resource of three billion tons. To understand the potential value of that resource we might compare it to coal. The price of coal last week on the international market was $105 per ton. That price has been depressed by 40% due to the international economic downturn (depression?). It takes about 3 million tons of coal to keep a a one billion watt power plant producing electricity for a year. The coal, at last weeks market price would cost $315 million. One billion watts of electricity could be produced with one ton of thorium. The price for the thorium? $4 million. Thus at a price for thorium that is a little more than 1% of the price of coal, enough thorium is in the ground in the United States to provide all the electricity the United States uses for over one hundred million years. But even this would not deplete the United States’ thorium resources.

How much thorium would be potentially available energy use? Martin Sevior et al state:

The Rossing mine in Nambia mines Uranium at an Ore concentration of 300 ppm at an energy cost 500 times less than the energy it delivers with current thermal-spectrum reactors. If the energy cost increases in inverse proportion to the Ore concentration, shales and phosphates, with a Uranium abundance of 10 – 20 ppm, could be mined with an energy gain of 16 – 32.

Now remember that Savior and associates base this astonishing statement on the recovery of less than 1% of the potential nuclear energy in Uranium ore. Since the energy of all or almost all of the energy found in uranium or thorium is well over 100 times the amount captured by current nuclear technology, the theoretical energy gain from mining uranium at 10 to 20 PPM uranium or thorium with maximum burn nuclear technology would recover 1600 to 3200 times the energy expended in mining. Even when extracting uranium at its average crustal concentration of 1 to 3 PPM, t
he total energy recovery would at least 160 times the energy expended. There are 3 x 10(13) tons of uranium in the earth’s crust, and three to four times as much thorium. It is probable that over time geological processes would bring enough uranium and thorium to the surface to replace the uranium and thorium used in energy generation.

So far I my argument has simply referred to a theoretical maximum energy recovery from from Uranium and Thorium. WASH-1097 offers us the basic facts about nuclear burnup:

The most significant nuclear advantage of the U-233(Th-232)U-233 cycle over the Pu-239(U-238)Pu- 239 cycle in thermal reactors is the potential of a higher conversion ratio. The importance of a high conversion ratio, CR, in assuring good utilization of resources is directly related to the burnup needs. In a converter reactor, CR units of bred fuel are produced for each unit of fuel consumed, and the net consumption of nuclear fuel is, then, proportional to (1-CR). Hence, other things being equal, a reactor with a conversion ratio of 0.6 would consume twice as much fuel per unit energy developed as a reactor having a conversion ratio of 0.8. The higher conversion ratio leads directly to a lower depletion charge in the fuel cycle cost.

In Molten Salt Reactors nuclear fuel is continuously reprocessed. Fission products are constantly removed to insure efficient operation. Thorium once it is sent into the system will typically stay in the reactor blanket or core until it captures a neutron and begins the nuclear transformation process. Once thorium enters the system it remans there until neutron capture leads to its withdrawal, either in the form of protactinium or as U-233. U-233 is then reintroduced to the core as nuc lear fuel.

We have seen that almost all reactors produce some new fuel that helps replace fuel that is used. How much new fuel is replaced is dependent on the conversion ration as TQ Delft tells us:

The ratio of (# of new fissile nuclei / # of consumed fissile nuclei) is known as the conversion ratio. This ratio can be estimated as follows:

1. For every fissile nucleus consumed, X new neutrons are released
2. For a stable chain reaction, one neutron is needed to sustain the reaction: X must be larger than 1
3. To have 1 new converted nucleus for every fissioned nucleus, one neutron is needed: X must be larger than 2
4. Neutrons will leak from the reactor, so X must be appreciably larger than 2 to make a practical reactor with a conversion ratio > 1.

If you are using a solid fuel, h uranium fueled reactor TU Delft tells us:

The value of X is highly dependent on the energy of the incident neutrons, as shown in the figure, and X grows rapidly for high-energy interactions. For thermal energies X = 2.4, which is not large enough to have a conversion ratio > 1. At high energy, X > 3 and this enables a conversion ratio > 1: at high energies more neutrons are available for conversion reactions, and it is possible to convert more nuclei than are consumed.This is known as breeding: the process of making nuclear fuel from material which was previously not fissile

Does it really take 3 neutrons to produce a conversion ratio of more than 1 to 1?

During World War II Eugene Wigner and Enrico Fermi argued about this. Fermi pointed out two problems with conversion in Uranium fueled reactors: (a) One third of Plutonium-239 do not fission when when they absorb slow neutrons. So with fast neutrons X is close to 3 with plutonium fuel, but in ordinary reactors it is under 3. (b) Neutron poisons - isotopes produced by nuclear fission – capture to many of the neutrons produced by fission thus lowering the conversion ratio. This meant that a special type of reactor, a fast neutron reactor, would be needed to produce enough neutrons from Pu-239 fission to overcome the neutron poison problem.

Eugene Wigner pointed out to Fermi that uranium was not the only fertile material that could be used in the nuclear process. Thorium 232 could be converted to U-233, and U-233 was excellent nuclear fuel. Nine out of ten U-233 atoms fission with slow neutrons, and that would produce enough neutrons to produce a conversion ratio of 1 to 1 or better provided neutron poisons could be somehow taken out of the reactor. This was impossible with the ordinary solid fuel used in reactors, but Wigner thought that if the fuel was dissolved in a liquid, it could be continuously processed and the neutron poisons removed. In 1948 a nuclear engineer Ed Bettis invented a reactor that would be fueled with liquid uranium tetrafluoride (U4F) salts as its fuel. Wigners associate, Alvin Weinberg, recognized that such a reactor could convert thorium-232 into U-233 at a ratio of 1 to 1 or even higher if carefully designed. The trick was to design the reactor to also be a miniature chemical plant. Learning how to do that would take a lot of work, but there was no theoretical reason why it could not be done.

There were several advantages of using the Th-232 + n -> Th-233 -> Pa-233 -> U-233 conversion system. Because U-233 was such a good nuclear fuel it left very little nuclear nuclear waste behind it. Out of every 100 thorium atoms introduced into the liquid fueled reactor in the form of liquid thorium-fluoride salt, 98% can be used up as nuclear fuel inside the reactor. The other 2%, converted by the nuclear process into Neptunium-237 can be used as a nuclear fuel in fast neutron reactors. Thus a reactor that uses the liquid fluoride thorium fuel cycle could potentially convert 100% of all thorium introduced into the reactor into nuclear fuel, and burn 98% of it. That meant that a Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) could produce a billion watts of electricity in a year from a ton of Thorium. Geologist estimate that there are between 120 and 160 trillion tons of thorium in the earths crust. In the 1960’s, Rice University geologists explored the Conway Granite formations of Vermont looking for thorium deposits. They reported finding it in concentrations of 56 + or – 6 ppm everywhere the looked. They even drilled down to the bottom of the huge granite massive and found reported that the Conway Granite formation is 1000 feet deep. They calculated a thorium content of 3 X 10(6) metric tons of thorium per 100 feet of depth. This calculation is based on a total outcrop area of Conway granite of 307 square miles.

Of course not every granite formation is as thorium rich as the Conway Granite formation. The Conway Granite is by no means unique, Helen E. Carter, Peter Warwick, John Cobb, and Geoff Longworth reported finding 17.544 ± 0.626 PPM uranium and 47.099 ± 4.326 PPM of Thorium in 5 samples of granite from the UK. Clearly then there is enough recoverable Uranium and Thorium in granite to keep us going for a very long time.

The EROEI from mining Conway granite for thorium and using the thorium as a basis for a nuclear fuel cycle in LFTRs would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 10000 to 1. Avin Weinberg recognized that uranium and thorium were the key to abundant and inexpensive energy, and coined the phrase “burn the rocks” which as Weinberg noted contained “an inexhaustible source of energy — enough to keep you going for hundreds of millions of years”.

The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor is considered a chemists reactor. As such its operations will probably be evaluated by the so-called 12 principles of green chemistry. The Wikipedia describes the 12 principles of green chemistry. According to the Wikipedia:

“the principles cover such concepts as:

* the design of processes to maximize the amount of raw material that ends up in the product;
* the use of safe, environment-benign substances, including solvents, whenever possible;
* the design of energy efficient processes;
* the best form of waste disposal: do not create it in the first place.

The 12 principles of Green Chemistry are:

1. Prevent waste: Design chemical syntheses to prevent waste, leaving no waste to treat or clean up.
2. Design safer chemicals and products: Design chemical products to be fully effective, yet have little or no toxicity.
3. Design less hazardous chemical syntheses: Design syntheses to use and generate substances with little or no toxicity to humans and the environment.
4. Use renewable feedstock: Use raw materials and feedstock that are renewable rather than depleting. Renewable feedstock is often made from agricultural products or are the wastes of other processes; depleting feedstock are made from fossil fuels (petroleum, natural gas, or coal) or are mined.
5. Use catalysts, not stoichiometric reagents: Minimize waste by using catalytic reactions. Catalysts are used in small amounts and can carry out a single reaction many times. They are preferable to stoichiometric reagents, which are used in excess and work only once.
6. Avoid chemical derivatives: Avoid using blocking or protecting groups or any temporary modifications if possible. Derivatives use additional reagents and generate waste.
7. Maximize atom economy: Design syntheses so that the final product contains the maximum proportion of the starting materials. There should be few, if any, wasted atoms.
8. Use safer solvents and reaction conditions: Avoid using solvents, separation agents, or other auxiliary chemicals. If these chemicals are necessary, use innocuous chemicals. If a solvent is necessary, water is a good medium as well as certain eco-friendly solvents that do not contribute to smog formation or destroy the ozone.
9. Increase energy efficiency: Run chemical reactions at ambient temperature and pressure whenever possible.
10. Design chemicals and products to degrade after use: Design chemical products to break down to innocuous substances after use so that they do not accumulate in the environment.
11. Analyze in real time to prevent pollution: Include in-process real-time monitoring and control during syntheses to minimize or eliminate the formation of byproducts.
12. Minimize the potential for accidents: Design chemicals and their forms (solid, liquid, or gas) to minimize the potential for chemical accidents including explosions, fires, and releases to the environment.

The LFTR conforms to the principles of Green Chemistry in many ways, first by
1. Prevent waste: Design chemical syntheses to prevent waste, leaving no waste to treat or clean up.
The fuel cycle of the LFTR is the LFTR is the thorium fuel cycle rather the Uranium fuel cycle of the Light Water Reactor. In order to produce the same amount of power produced by one ton of thorium in a LFTR, the Light Water reactor wastes 200 tons of depleted Uranium and over 18 tons tones of U-238 in the form of nuclear waste. Thus the LFTR is about 200 times more efficient that the LWR in its conversion of the materials found in nuclear fuel into energy. The materials that are left over after nuclear energy has been extracted from thorium are not waste, and indeed have many uses. Thus the LFTR performs the first principle of green chemistry.

2. Design safer chemicals and products: Design chemical products to be fully effective, yet have little or no toxicity.
The electricity produced by a LFTR is no more toxic than electricity from any other source. LTFRs produce some material byproducts. And some are toxic. Toxicity is, however, a function of concentration. In high levels of concentration, many common substances essential to life and good health, including common table salt, iron, vitamins A and D, chlorine, oxygen and even water are detrimental to life, but their absence is even more detrimental to life. If all toxic materials were removed from chemical use, modern civilization might well be impossible. If human beings are completely protected from every substance that it toxic, our lives would be impossible, quite literally. According to green principles, life itself has been poorly engineered, and needs to be redesigned. It should be noted that LFTR byproducts are far less toxic than the waste from LWR’s, and from coal fired power plants. The LFTR, if properly designed and operated, would not produce toxic plutonium, which is produced by LFTR. In the case of most byproducts, “green” chemistry can convert then into non-toxic forms in consumer products. In the case of radioactive byproducts, the very properties that make them toxic also make them valuable, for example the uses of radioisotopes in medicine. Radiation from radioisotopes, can prolong the shelf life of foods, and kill off undesirable microbes in human and animal waste, thus protecting the environment.

Thus the production of relatively small amounts of toxic materials by the LFTR does not automatically and need not lead to undesirable human and environmental outcomes, especially in an overall system that is governed by green principles.

Finally the LFTR can eliminate the discharge of CO2, which is toxic to the planet earth. In comparison, wind and solar generation systems. “Soft path” energy guru Amory Lovins, acknowledges the continued use of fossil fuels including natural gas, in future “green” electrical generation systems. Thus until the reliability and base load problems associated with renewable electric generation are solved, all renewable generation systems require the continued use of fossil fuel burning and CO2 emitting electrical generating plants, if reliable electricity is to be available on the grid. Thus renewables, in their present form, are toxic to life on the planet earth.

3. Design less hazardous chemical syntheses: Design syntheses to use and generate substances with little or no toxicity to humans and the environment.
While this is a lofty goal, it is also completely impractical, and indeed when applied to electrical production systems, this principle if systematically applied would make not only nuclear but also solar and wind generating systems impossible. Wind generating systems use large amounts of steel and cement. The manufacture of both produces a large amount of planet toxic CO2. Solar is metals intensive, and uses a large amount of glass, that requires heat that is produced by burning fossil fuels in its production. Renewables advocates have not indicated how they will remove CO2 from renewables building materials.

On the other hand reactors require far less steel and cement than wind, and require no glass and far less metals than solar generating facilities per amount of electricity generated. The LFTR uses less steel and cement in its manufacture than conventional reactors. Thorium and fluorides, the two principles material input into the LFTR, have already been mined, and are at present considered waste. Energy inputs into their extraction from existing mine tailings would be minimal. Further more, the LFTR can produce a great deal of electricity while consuming small amounts of thorium, and no fluorides. Fluorides are recyclable in LFTRs. At the very least,
the LFTR is a candidate for the title of least toxic electrical source possible.

4. Use renewable feedstock: Use raw materials and feedstock that are renewable rather than depleting. Renewable feedstock are often made from agricultural products or are the wastes of other processes; depleting feedstock are made from fossil fuels (petroleum, natural gas, or coal) or are mined.
This criterion is built on the confusion of sustainable and renewable. I received the following comment from donb on Nuclear Green yesterday:

With regards to sustainability, it strikes me that the “greenies” are stuck in the old paradigm of fossil fuels. In this old paradigm, the major sustainability concern is with the fuel, which is consumed in vast quantities, and thus becomes more scare and harder to extract as time goes on. The minor concern is with the materials needed to burn the fuel and use the energy. One of the results of this mindset is the less-than-critical examination of “renewable” energy sources such as wind and solar. These sources must be “good” because the fuel is inexhaustible (within the lifetime of the earth orbiting the sun).

The new paradigm that must be adapted is that with advanced nuclear (and renewables), the fuel is essentially inexhaustible. That being the case, we then need to look at the resources needed to harness the energy. Nuclear wins hands down due to its extremely high energy density, and the ability to produce energy on demand, not just when natural conditions allow.

Donb thus argues that nuclear fuel, unlike fossil fuels is inexhaustible in an practical sense. This viewpoint has received substantial support. Arguments that nuclear fuels are a limited resource have been found to contain numerous errors, and aappear to have never been published in peer reviewed scientific journals. Thus the case against the sustainable resource view of nuclear fuel does not appear to be strong.

5. Use catalysts, not stoichiometric reagents: Minimize waste by using catalytic reactions. Catalysts are used in small amounts and can carry out a single reaction many times. They are preferable to stoichiometric reagents, which are used in excess and work only once.
Here again we have to ask how realistic such a principle is. Is it practical or even possible to produce all the chemicals we would chose to have, by limiting chemical processes to those which can be conducted with catalysts. Until this point is clarified, the Greenness of this principle is open to question.

6. Avoid chemical derivatives: Avoid using blocking or protecting groups or any temporary modifications if possible. Derivatives use additional reagents and generate waste.
Not involved in MSR/LFTR operations.

7. Maximize atom economy: Design syntheses so that the final product contains the maximum proportion of the starting materials. There should be few, if any, wasted atoms.
Here again we encounter a conceptual problem with the so-called Principles of Green Chemistry. It is quite possible, with the LFTR to have an output of useful materials with a number of atoms that considerably exceeds the number of atoms in the original process materials input. The explanation is that thorium input atoms have undergone fission. However, most nuclear material from the thorium atoms is discharged from the LFTR process as useful materials. Much of the rest will be in the form helium, which is a potentially useful material

8. Use safer solvents and reaction conditions: Avoid using solvents, separation agents, or other auxiliary chemicals. If these chemicals are necessary, use innocuous chemicals. If a solvent is necessary, water is a good medium as well as certain eco-friendly solvents that do not contribute to smog formation or destroy the ozone.
No solvents are used in the LFTR, or in internal processing it fuel or the recovery of fission products.

9. Increase energy efficiency: Run chemical reactions at ambient temperature and pressure whenever possible.
In terms of EROEI the LFTR is quite possibly the most energy efficient electrical source ever devised.
In order to produce electricity the reactor must operate at far above ambient temperature but it does operate at ambient pressure, unlike Light Water Reactors.

10. Design chemicals and products to degrade after use: Design chemical products to break down to innocuous substances after use so that they do not accumulate in the environment.
It would appear that the LFTR produces little or no chemical waste. Material inputs into the process are largely accounted for in the output, or recycled into the reactor, radioisotopes output will break down to innocuous substances, most of which have uses.

11. Analyze in real time to prevent pollution: Include in-process real-time monitoring and control during syntheses to minimize or eliminate the formation of byproducts.
The formation of byproducts from the nuclear reactor is inevitable, the byproducts are almost all either desirable materials, or highly desirable materials, and properly managed they are very unlikely to produce pollution.

12. Minimize the potential for accidents: Design chemicals and their forms (solid, liquid, or gas) to minimize the potential for chemical accidents including explosions, fires, and releases to the environment.
There is no potential for explosions or fire with LFTR technology. The LFTR possesses notable inherent safety features. Although leaks are unlikely, a system of fission product recovery and multiple containment barriers will prevent fission products from escaping to the environment if leaks do happen.

Conclusion: Significant questions have emerged from this discussion concerning the Green Chemical Principles. While the goals of preventing waste and pollution are undeniably laudable legitimate questions can be raised about the practicality of several of these principles. The problem of toxic chemicals would appear to be more complex than assumed by the principles. Finally the applicability of some of the principles to electrical generation in general and to the operation of the LFTR is questionable. The 12 Principles of “Green Chemistry” clearly are not canonical science and are unlikely to become so in their present form. However, from the viewpoint of its low materials input, high-energy output relative to energy input, lack of waste in materials output, safety and lack of environmental pollution as a consequence of its operation, the LFTR would seem to fulfill the objectives of Green Chemistry. The failure of the LFTR to fulfill all of the principles of Green Chemistry are thus due to the inadequate formation of some of those principles and/or the lack of applicability of those principles to the LFTR, rather than any failure of that reactor concept to meet green goals.

The “green” status of nuclear power has been challenged because nuclear power allegedly does not conform to alleged Green principles; whether or not the supposed Green principles are in fact environmentally sound is of course open to question. The current post, however will not travel down that route, rather I intend to demonstrate that one form of nuclear reactor, the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, conforms to “green” standards.

The 12 Principles of Green Engineering are said to be:

Principle 1: Designers need to strive to ensure that all material and energy inputs and outputs are as inherently nonhazardous as possible.
Principle 2: It is better to prevent waste than to treat or clean up waste after it is formed.
Principle 3: Separation and purification operations should be designed to minimize energy consumption and materials use.
Principle 4: Products, processes, and systems should be designed to maximize mass, energy, space, and time efficiency.
Principle 5: Products, processes, and systems should be “output pulled” rather than “input pushed” through the use of energy and materials.
Principle 6: Embedded entropy and complexity must be viewed as an investment when making design choices on recycle, reuse, or beneficial disposition.
Principle 7: Targeted durability, not immortality, should be a design goal.
Principle 8: Design for unnecessary capacity or capability (e.g., “one size fits all”) solutions should be considered a design flaw.
Principle 9: Material diversity in multicomponent products should be minimized to promote disassembly and value retention.
Principle 10: Design of products, processes, and systems must include integration and interconnectivity with available energy and materials flows.
Principle 11: Products, processes, and systems should be designed for performance in a commercial “afterlife”.
Principle 12: Material and energy inputs should be renewable rather than depleting.

1: Designers need to strive to ensure that all material and energy inputs and outputs are as inherently nonhazardous as possible.
Materials inputs into the structure of the LFTR, its fuel and carrier salts, are not highly hazardous. The reactor can be built from a variety of materials, and a variety fluoride salts can be used as carrier salts. Most of the hazards of LFTR are internal to its operation, and can be controlled through the application of the principles of containment barriers to the design of LFTRs and their housing facilities. Containment barriers will protect the biological environment, by preventing accidentally released hazardous materials from reaching it. The LFTR makes little to no intrusion on the landscape. There need be no tall towers associated with the siting of LFTRs as there is with windmills,. Indeed LFTRs can be sited underground or underwater and thus have absolutely no undesirable aesthetic aspects. Unlike “green” windmills, LFTRs can be built to be wildlife safe. Unlike huge solar or wind arrays, LFTRs use little space, and thus are far less likely to have unintended negative consequences for local ecology.

2: It is better to prevent waste than to treat or clean up waste after it is formed.
The material outputs from the fission process in the LFTR can be inputs into industrial processes, or can be used in medicine, agriculture, food preservation, and sanitation. Heat not lost to the second law of thermodynamics can be put to a variety of uses. All long lived hazardous materials can be recycled as fuel in LFTRs until they are completely dissipated.

Principle 3: Separation and purification operations should be designed to minimize energy consumption and materials use.
Proposed fission product separation and extraction technologies are energy efficient and they would be operated either continuously or periodically as part of the reactor system. Extraction and purification systems are understood to be a vital and required part of LFTR design.

Principle 4: Products, processes, and systems should be designed to maximize mass, energy, space, and time efficiency.
The LFTR is outstanding performance in its minimization of mass, energy, space and time efficiency:
* The structure of the LFTR requires less material per kW of electrical output than conventional reactors.
* The LFTR requites fewer materials inputs per KW of rated electrical output than solar or wind generating system.
* The fuel and coolant inputs into the LFTR are tiny compared to conventional nuclear power plants. The LFTR can be air cooled, eliminating water use.
* The EROEI of the LFTR is potentially superior to the EROEI of not only Light Water Reactors, but also wind generators, and all forms of solar electrical generators. The EROEI superiority is at least two orders of magnitude.
* The LFTR is smaller than Light Water Reactors and its gas turbines are also smaller the steam turbines of LWRs. Since the LFTR produces a small percentage of the radioactive byproduct produced by the LWR, far less space needs to be devoted to the storageof radioactive fission products.
* Not only is the energy density of LFTR is superior to conventional LWRs, but is superior by several order of magnitude to either solar generation or wind generation systems.
* The LFTR produces as much energy per unit of time as the LWR, and it produces far more electricity per unit of time than solar or wind generation systems with comparable output ratings.

Principle 5: Products, processes, and systems should be “output pulled” rather than “input pushed” through the use of energy and materials.
The LFTR potentially has a materials, and energy output to input ratio to any other electrical generation system. Virtually 100% of the fuel input into the generation process is potential useful output. The EROEI of the LFTR is far superior to any “renewable” generating system.

Principle 6: Embedded entropy and complexity must be viewed as an investment when making design choices on recycle, reuse, or beneficial disposition.
The energy input into recycling, reuse, or beneficial disposition of reactor materials and fission products is a far smaller fraction of total electrical output than is the case with either conventional LWRs or “renewable” electrical generation sources. Heat not lost to the second law of thermodynamics can be recaptured for space heating, water heating, low temperature industrial process, and desalinization.

Principle 7: Targeted durability, not immortality, should be a design goal.
Nearly 100% of the fuel input into the LFTR is recyclable. The extraction and separation of many recyclable materials is part of the basic LFTR technology. Carrier salts can be reused. Materials used in the construction of the reactor are recyclable.

Principle 8: Design for unnecessary capacity or capability (e.g., “one size fits all”) solutions should be considered a design flaw.
The LFTR has outstanding potential for modular design. Factory production of small 100 MW to 300 MW LFTRs, and the clustering of several small LFTRs allow for the production of large amounts of electricity without the enormous capital investment required for both large conventional reactors and large renewable power generating projects.

Principle 9: Material diversity in multicomponent products should be minimized to promote disasse
mbly and value retention.
A high degree of materials standardization is possible with the LFTR. The LFTR can easily be designed to facilitate decommissioning, and the recycling of parts.

Principle 10: Design of products, processes, and systems must include integration and interconnectivity with available energy and materials flows.
The LFTR is unique among reactors in that its system is designed to facilitate the integration and interconnectivity of energy and materials flows. In this regard it shows superior qualities to renewable electrical generators and conventional reactors. It possess the ability to respond instantaneously to electrical load demand, and can serve as back up generating capacity.

Principle 11: Products, processes, and systems should be designed for performance in a commercial “afterlife”.
In this regard the LFTR is far superior to the LWR and superior to renewable power generation systems. Not only does the LFTR produce far fewer materials outputs than the LWR, but its materials outputs can either be safely recycled as useful and even valuable materials, or have value in medicine, industry, food processing, agriculture, and sanitation because of their radioactive properties. Waste heat from electrical generation with LFTRs can be reused for space or water heating, or in desalinization.

Principle 12: Material and energy inputs should be renewable rather than depleting.
All materials use in electrical production are either present in the earths crust in such large amounts that they cannot be depleted given the efficiency of the LFTR or are indefinitely recyclable. The amount of recoverable thorium in the earths crust greatly exceeds the amount that would be to produce all human energy till the time that solar evolution destroys the potential of earth to sustain human life. Thus the capacity of LFTRs to produce massive amounts of energy is indefinitely sustainable in cosmic terms, and has equivalent sustainability to other renewable electrical generating systems.

It is clear that not only is does the LFTR meet the requirements for green engineering, but far surpasses many of the “green engineering” characteristics of other renewable electrical sources. It possesses superior EROEI to all other renewable electrical generating systems. The LFTR makes more efficient use of all of its inputs compared to both LWRs and other “renewable” electrical generating systems, and the use of its outputs is only limited by the laws of nature.

We are in the middle of an energy paradigm shift about.

Old assumptions are no longer true and even the outlines of the new world is not clear to most people. They were however, clear to a few far sighted people long ago. Both M. King Hubbard and Alvin Weinberg (see numerous posts in Nuclear Green) foresaw the transition form fossil fuels to nuclear energy over a generation ago. We can call this the nuclear energy paradigm.

A second post fossil fuel paradigm has been offered the renewable energy paradigm The Gore Plan and the Google Clean Energy 2030 Plan might be considered as poorly thought out examples of the renewables paradigm. My argument is that when the renewable paradigm is well thought out it falls apart.

The recent objection to Nuclear power is its cost. The overnight cost of Nuclear power was around $2000 Per KW in 2002. It has been estimated that the cost will have risen to $4000 this year, and that it will rise to as much as $8000 by the middle of the next decade. Some authorities suggest that the cost of Nuclear power will rise even higher with the figure of $12 Billion Per GW being offered. In time that figure is plausible. The cause of this rapid cost escalation is the Asian construction bomb. The rapidly expanding economies of India and China demand construction commodities and finished parts for energy plants. This demand has doubled the cost of building new power generation facilities and is expected to continue the rapid inflation of new power plant production for the foreseeable future.

The materials inflation is expected to impact the price of renewable power generating facilities even more than it will impact the cost of new nuclear pants. One of the flaws about the renewables paradigm is that it is rather vague about the source of base electrical generating capacity. Base capacity is those electrical plants that are producing power all of the time. I have recently argued that renewables generated base electricity required by a fully implemented renewables paradigm would be very expensive, perhaps as much as $25,000 per KW in the middle of the next decade. This would be two to three times as expensive as nuclear generated base power.

Other factors come into play. For example the cost of both fossil fuel fired power electrical generating facilities is rising, and fuel costs are rising as well. Last winter the price of Appalachia coal peaked at $300 on the spot market. Asian demand for coal fired electrical energy is pushing the price of coal as well as the price of other commodities. The price of natural has risen. New gas supplies have been tapped, but they are expensive to recover. And of course the cost of building replacement coal and gas fire power plants also has to be considered. Although some advocate the clean coal paradigm, in fact, at least 57% of the useful energy produced in a coal fired CO2 sequestering power plant, and possibly as much as 75% of it, will be used to power the sequestering and other gas cleaning operations. Thus a heavy fuel cost would be added on to the very expensive cost sequestration related equipment.

In 2007 the Tennessee Valley Authority put a reactor back into service after having been mothballed for two decades. The Browns Ferry Unit 1reactor had been refurbished at the cost of $2 billion Dollars. During the first year the Browns Ferry Unit 1 reactor was in operation, it saved TVA $800 million. That was the ammount that TVA would have had to pay, Thus the Browns Ferry reactor will pay for its rebuilding in 2 1/2 years. It will pay for its rebuilding and interest in a little more than 3 years. Encouraged by such how quickly the Browns Ferry reactor is paying for its rebuilding, tVA has decided to complete an old partly completed reactor, Watts Bar Unit 2. In addition TVA has two other partially built reactors, Bellefonte 1 and 2, that it is now considering completing. In addition TVA is planning two new more reactors at the same spot.

If we look at the cost of new coal fired generating facilities and add on top of those costs the cost of fuel, then even the $8 billion nuclear plant no longer seems so expensive. Compared to the new renewable bade electrical generating facilities, the cost of nuclear facilities is quite a bargain. This does not mean i am entirely satisfied with the present form of nuclear power, i am not. i am satisfied that the new Generation III+ reactors are very safe, and that they will produce electrical power for a very long time, perhaps as long as 100 years. I am not satisfied that the Uranium fuel cycle, with once through fuel technology is the best possible approach. I am not satisfied that once fuel leaves a Light Water Reactor it becomes waste. I am not satisfied that light water reactors are the lowest possible cost nuclear power generating reactors, clearly they are not. I am not satisfied that proposed storage solutions to the problems of nuclear waste are a resonable approach, and I am not satiasfied that no nuclear solution to the probl;em of load following or peak power reserve has been offered for the nuclear market.

At the moment the Light Water Reactor is the best technology on the market for post-carbon fuel electrical generation. But the shift to the nuclear paradigm will not be completed with Light Water Reactor technology. Because we have no other choice, we must begin to replace coal fired power plants with Light Water Reactors. We must begin to do this quickly, and with considerable numbers. This would be the case even if we were not concerned with global warming. The triple concerns of glonal warming, peak oil, and demand forced inflation of coal, makes it urgent that the shift to nuclear power be made quickly.

We out also to move quickly to improve the nuclear option. To decrease the cost of new nuclear facilities, to make them even safer. To solve once and for all the problem of nuclear waste, and to create new energy from spent reactor fuel, and useless nuclear weapons that only represent a danger to civilization.

The shift to the nuclear energy paradigm will talk place. There are very serious flaws in the renewable paradigm even if Al Gore and Google like it. We would be entering an early stage of the nuclear paradigm during the next few years. The final form of the nuclear paradigm is beginning to take shape in the minds of a few dreamers.

In honer of the 10,000th post on Energy from Thorium.

I do not count myself as a top down thinker. Top down thinkers spend a great deal of time thinking about their methods before the start working on problems. During my father’s scientific career his approach to an assignment was to always do a literature review first. Once he completed the literature review he had identified what was known about the subject, how new knowledge could be acquired, and obstacles, if any to acquiring that knowledge. His approach can best be illustrated by the assignment he received in the mid-1950′s to report of the compatibility of plutonium with liquid fluoride salts. People in the small community of interest that focuses onthe Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor recognize the importance of the assignment my father was given, to the rest of my readers I will only say that my father’s answer to the question may have important implications for the future of the world’s energy.

When my father did his literature review he discovered a significant obstacle to his research. His primary research tool, the glovebox, was defective. During the 1950′s gloveboxes were used by AEC facilities both to conduct plutonium research, and to machine plutonium for nuclear weapons. But there had accidents including fires with plutonium gloveboxes at AEC facilities, My father did not like the idea of working with unsafe tools, so hew set out to perfect the glovebox. In short he found solutions to the problem of designing and building safe gloveboxes. His glovebox techniques quite literally were text book. In fact he wrote the glovebox chapter in a manual on physical chemistry techniques.

Once my father solved the glovebox problem he proceeded to answer the plutonium question. That is a top down approach.

Where my method diverges from that of my father is that when I start looking at a question i google it, and then see what I come up with. Once i get an answer in hand i start analyzing it. Then on the basis of my analysis, I formulate a question, which I Google again. I then do another analysis. Then I look for comparable cases and start the process.

I often do case studies. I have a number of ongoing case studies which I conduct on the future potential for wind generated electricity. One of my most useful case studies is based on the simple question, “can wind provide the power that will run my Dallas, Texas air conditioner during the summer?” My answer has been, in a single word, no! And if you live in Texas and a power plant cannot provide electricity to run air conditioners during the summer, it just can’t cut the mustard. Well in Texas wind can’t cut the mustard during peak hours of summer electrical demand. I did a case study to find if this was a local problem in Texas. It is not, indeed it turns out that there are similar problems with summer wind in California, the Southeast, New England, the Great Plains, New England and Canada.

It has been argued by Sanford University researchers that by linking many carefully selected wind generating sites the wind can be made reliable enough to be considered base power. The Stanford study found that by linking windmills at 17 Southern Great Plains locations, 21% of their rated power was reliable enough to qualify as base power 79% of the time. Unfortunately, this approach does not solve the Summer wind problem. There were several problems with the Stanford study. It did not address the Summer electricity issue. The study briefly noted a rapid drop drop off of wind availability after the 79% threshold, but did not say when. However, enough data is available about the wind performances of the 17 locations to get an idea, and clearly there is going to be a problem. If we looked at the idea of linking the 17 locations as a means of providing summer peak electricity the whole project would be a non-starter. Summer wind generated electricity in texas is not simply unreliable, it is largely unavailable during periods of summer peek electrical demand.

Renewables advocates have an answer to the summer wind problem, build solar generating facilities to handle peek electrical demand. There are some simple but obvious problems. First electrical demand remains high during summer evenings in Texas. Temperatures may remain above 100 F at 10 PM, and wind speed in the Southern Great Planes does not return to annual average as soon as the sun goes down on hot summer days. So it looks like we are going to have an evening shortage of peek electricity. There would also be another problem with the solar peek approach – its cost. My own review of the cost of solar thermal generating facilities suggest that the current cost is at least $4 billion pre nameplate GW output. But we are not talking about facilities that will be built today, inflation makes cost a moving target. During the next decade when such facilities are likely to be built, inflation is likely to drive their costs to $8 billion or even higher per name plate GW. Now this is an interesting figure. because it is the current cost of nuclear power plants, being bandied about as too expensive by nuclear critics is also in the $8 billion or above range.

Now, lets look what the southwest base wind system will cost. Renewables advocate Dr. Ben Sovacool recently put the figure of $1700 per nameplate KW in play in discussions with me. That figure is probably low. I have reason to believe that the cost of a fully installed windmill in November 2008 is closer to $2500 per name plate KW, but the lower figure will serve to illustrate my point. If we assume that our project to replace Texas fossil fuel generating plants with renewables by 2030, as the Google plan would require, how much is it going to cost? Lets assume that we decide to go with a all renewables system, with wind base power. Assume that the same rate of inflation for electrical generating facilities that we have seen during the last 5 years. That would bring our wind facilities capital costs to $3400 per nameplate KW. But remember that only 21% of nameplate capacity can be counted as base load electricity. In order to figure the cost of building base load electricity we have to divide the cost of a KW of of wind generating capacity by 21%. That gives a figure of something over $16,000 per KW. But hay, that is not the end of our cost, since our base load electricity cannot be relied on during summer days, we are going to need back up solar facilities. We have already counted that costs as $8000 per KW during the next decade. That gives us a cost of $24,000 per KW of semi-reliable wind and solar generated electricity. Semi-reliable because we know that there will be after dark hours of high electrical demand when our wind system will not be able to supply electrical demand. So far we have a system that is not 24 hours a day reliable. How much will it cost to give us some assurance that we can keep those Texas air conditioners running 24 hours a day? We could use sodium-sulfur batteries @ $3500 per KWh capacity. 4 hours of battery back up brings out price to $25,400 for each 24 hour a day KW provided to Texas by a renewable system. Needless to say renewables advocates have not and will not perform this exercise, but the it does illustrate the value of case studies for exposing future energy costs.