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Q: What is thorium and what makes it special?

A: Thorium is a naturally-occuring mineral that holds large amounts of releasable nuclear energy, similar to uranium. This nuclear energy can be released in a special nuclear reactor designed to use thorium. Thorium is special because it is easier to extract this energy completely than uranium due to some of the chemical and nuclear properties of thorium.

Q: What is a liquid-fluoride reactor?

A: A liquid-fluoride nuclear reactor is different than conventional nuclear reactors that use solid fuel elements. A liquid-fluoride reactor uses a solution of several fluoride salts, typically lithium fluoride, beryllium fluoride, and uranium tetrafluoride, as its basic nuclear fuel. The fluoride salts have a number of advantages over solid fuels. They are impervious to radiation damage, they can be chemically processed in the form that they are in, and they have a high capacity to hold thermal energy (heat). Additional nuclear fuel can be added or withdrawn from the salt solution during normal operation.

Q: Are the salts safe?

A: Very safe. Unlike other coolants considered for high-performance reactors (like liquid sodium) the salts will not react dangerously with air or water. This is because they are already in their most stable chemical form. Their properties do not change even under intense radiation, unlike all solid forms of nuclear fuel.

Q: Have liquid-fluoride reactors been built before?

A: Yes, two liquid-fluoride reactors were built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee in the 1950s and 1960s. These were small research reactors that were built to test the fundamental principles of a liquid-fluoride thorium reactor. The first, which was called the Aircraft Reactor Experiment (ARE) ran for a week in 1957, and the second, the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) ran between 1965-1969 and validated many of the principals of the fluoride reactor concept.

Q: How does a liquid-fluoride reactor make electricity?

A: Fission reactions take place in the fuel salt, making it hotter. This heat is transferred to a coolant salt outside of the reactor. The coolant salt is then used to heat gas that turns a turbine, which turns an electrical generator, generating electricity.

Q: What is nuclear waste and how does a liquid-fluoride reactor address this issue?

A: So-called “nuclear waste” or spent-nuclear fuel is produced in conventional (solid-core) nuclear reactors because they are unable to extract all of the nuclear energy from their fuel before they have to shutdown. LFTR addresses this issue by using a form of nuclear fuel (liquid-fluoride salts of thorium) that allow complete extraction of nuclear energy from the fuel.

Q: What advantages does a liquid-fluoride thorium reactor offer a utility?

A: Unlike a pressurized-water or boiling-water reactor, a liquid-fluoride thorium reactor operates at high temperature and low pressure. Its high power density means that the reactor vessel itself is much s maller and lighter than an LWR reactor vessel; small enough, in fact, to be mass-produced in a factory rather than constructed onsite. Its inert-gas coolant does not boil in the event of a loss of pressure, and the fuel, blanket, and coolant salts do not react with air or water. All of this means that the containment building of a fluoride reactor can be much smaller than the containment of a light-water reactor of similar power output.

Q: What’s the difference between a “fast-spectrum” reactor and a “thermal-spectrum” reactor?

The basic idea behind nuclear fission is that you can use an electically neutral particle, the neutron, to destabilize a nucleus and cause it to split. This is a big deal because it’s very difficult to get charged particles, like protons and electrons, anywhere near the nucleus–they’re repelled by electrical forces. That’s the basic reason why nuclear fusion is so difficult.

But with the neutron, it’s a different story. It just waltzes right up to a nucleus and hits it, and the nucleus never saw it coming.

Here’s an animated gif of how fission works, and a little movie too.

Now the speed of the neutron when it hits the nucleus has a lot to do with how likely a fission is to occur. One might think, intuitively, that if the neutron is going really fast that it has a better chance of “shattering” the nucleus, but that’s not really how it works. Actually, for the fissile nuclei (such as U-233, U-235, and Pu-239) the SLOWER the neutron is going, the more probable fission is.

So you want slowed-down neutrons to maximize fission. And then from fission comes more neutrons, which continue the reaction. Well, mostly right. Actually, the neutrons borne from fission are going really fast. Really, really fast. And they have to slow down to have a good chance of causing fission. That’s where the moderator comes in.

The moderator in a nuclear reactor is the material whose job it is to slow down neutrons without absorbing them. This slowing-down is done by neutrons bouncing off the nuclei of the atoms in the moderating material. For most reactors, moderation takes place in the water that also cools the reactor. For a high-temperature reactor like the liquid-fluoride reactor, graphite (carbon) is used as the moderator.

The neutrons are born from a fission reaction, bounce around in the moderator, slow down, and then cause another fission reaction. This “bouncing-around” process is also called “thermalizing” the neutrons, because by bouncing around in the moderator, the neutrons are brought to the point where they have the same thermal energy as the surrounding material.
This graph shows how likely a fission reaction is based on the speed (kinetic energy) of the neutron that strikes the nucleus is. Cross-section is a concept that corresponds to the probability of interaction–the larger the cross-section, the more the probability of interaction. The energy of the thermalized neutron corresponds to temperature. If a neutron were at the same temperature as the room you’re in (~300 K), it would have an average energy of 0.025 eV. Not very much. If the neutron instead were at the same temperature as the hot fluoride salt in the center of a liquid-fluoride reactor (~1000 K) its average energy would be 0.086 eV. Not much more.

When neutrons are born from the fission reaction, they have energies around 2,000,000 eV, which corresponds to a temperature of 20 billion degrees! That’s much hotter than the center of the Sun! But like hot water poured into snow, when neutrons are that much hotter than their surroundings, they lose energy fast. And most all of that energy is lost through collisions with the nuclei of the moderating material.

So a “thermal-spectrum” reactor is a reactor that has been arranged in such a way so as to optimally “cool” the neutrons so they can cause fission. And as can be seen from the graph, fission is hundreds of times more likely when neutrons are “cooled” down by thermalization/moderation than when they’re “fast”.

So it’s logical to ask at this point, why would anyone want to build anything but a thermal-spectrum reactor? It would seem to have the minimum amount of fuel requirement for a reactor, and it would seem to maximize your chances of getting nuclear reactions. And indeed it does. But there is more to the story.

Uranium is an interesting substance, consisting overwhelmingly (99.3%) of an isotope, uranium-238, that is not fissile. But if uranium-238 captures a neutron it becomes plutonium-239, which is fissile. One more neutron into the plutonium and you get a fission reaction and energy. So you can imagine that it takes two neutrons to “burn” uranium-238.

But there is a very small amount of uranium (0.7%) that consists of the isotope uranium-235, which is fissile and only requires one neutron to fission. Despite constituting such a small fraction of uranium, this U-235 is where nearly all of our nuclear energy comes from today. And the fact that we are burning up this small resource is one of the basic reasons that our nuclear infrastructure is not sustainable. It’s also one of the basic reasons that today’s reactors make so much nuclear waste.

So couldn’t we just burn up the U-238 after the U-235 is gone? Well, to do that, we need to make sure that the fission of Pu-239 (which is what U-238 turns into after it absorbs a neutron) gives off at least two neutrons–one to convert a new U-238 into Pu-239, and another to fission that Pu-239. So how many neutrons does the fission of Pu-239 give off? Well, it all depends on the energy of the neutron that the Pu-239 absorbs. Here’s a graph showing the relationship.

Now this graph shows two lines. One is the line in purple that shows how many neutrons are given off from a fission in Pu-239. As you can see, it’s pretty constant across energies–nearly three neutrons emitted per fission. That seems to indicate there will be plenty of neutrons for fission, conversion, and even some to spare. But the blue line tells a different story. The blue line is the number of neutrons given off per absorption in Pu-239. Why are they different? Because Pu-239 has the unpleasant habit of sometimes just absorbing the neutron that struck it, and not fissioning. This happens more often when the neutron it absorbs is at the slowed-down, thermal energies.

The fact that plutonium-239 likes to eat thermal neutrons and not fission has tremendous implications for our energy future. At thermal neutron energies, the effective number of neutrons given off per absorption isn’t enough to sustain “burning” of U-238. You can see the line dip and weave around the magic 2.0 number at thermal energies (the energies at the left-hand side of the plot). When you account for neutron losses and a number of other things that real reactors must deal with, there’s just not enough neutrons to go around.

Here is the point where the road forks, where two paths present themselves, and one was taken, and the other effectively ignored. One path is thorium, the other path is the plutonium fast-breeder.

The path that was taken, or at the very least, the path that the nuclear community has wanted to take for the last sixty years, is the path to the plutonium fast-breeder. Confronted with the data that you can’t get enough neutrons from a thermal-spectrum reactor to “burn” U-238, they began to investigate what happens if you use a “fast-spectrum” reactor. At “fast” energies (the energies on the right-hand side of the plot) things start to look a lot better for plutonium. It makes significantly more neutrons per absorption than 2, and so the “burning” of U-238 looks to be quite feasible. But now you have a different problem, that of building a fast-spectrum reactor.

But before I go too far, let’s talk about the path not taken–thorium. Thorium is about three times more common than uranium and consists of only one isotope, thorium-232. It has no naturally fissile isotope like U-235, and thorium is not fissile in and of itself. But like U-238, it can be converted into a fissile isotope (U-233) by absorbing a neutron. One more neutron absorption in U-233 causes fission. So again, we ask the question, how many neutrons does the fission of U-233 give off? Is it more than 2? More to the point, is it more than 2 per absorption?

Yes, U-233 not only gives off more than two neutrons per absorption at thermal energies, it gives off significantly more than 2, which is enough to account for the inevitable losses that will occur in a real reactor. This means that a thermal-spectrum reactor can “burn” thorium in a sustained manner and doesn’t need to go to a fast-neutron spectrum. And that has tremendous advantages for safety, economy, and nuclear proliferation.

• check CO2 and global warming,
• cut deadly air pollution,
• provide inexhaustible energy
• increase human prosperity

Our world is beset by global warming, pollution, resource conflicts, and energy poverty. Millions die from coal plant emissions. We war over mideast oil. Food supplies from sea and land are threatened. Developing nations’ growth exacerbates the crises.

Few nations will adopt carbon taxes or energy policies against their economic self-interests to reduce global CO2 emissions. Energy cheaper than coal will dissuade all nations from burning coal. Innovative thorium energy uses economic persuasion to end the pollution, to provide energy and prosperity to impoverished peoples, and to create energy security for all people for all time.

A market-based environmental solution

We can solve our global energy and environmental crises straightforwardly – through technology innovation and free-market economics. We need a disruptive technology – energy cheaper than coal. If we offer to sell to all the world the capability to produce energy that cheaply, all the world will stop burning coal. It’s as simple as that. Rely on the economic self-interest of 7 billion people in 250 nations to choose cheaper, nonpolluting energy.

Energy is about 7% of the economy. We, and especially developing nations, can not afford to pay much more for energy. Many environmentalists advocate replacing fossil fuel energy with wind and solar energy sources, blind to the fact that these are 3-4 times more costly! Global economic prosperity requires lower energy costs, not higher costs from taxes or mandated costly wind and solar sources. THORIUM: energy cheaper than coal advocates lowering costs for clean energy – a market-based environmental solution.

Chapters

1 Introduction: an introduction to world crises related to energy and the environment, and the potential for good solutions.

2 Energy and civilization: the relationship between energy, life, and human civilization, easy energy science, life’s dependence on energy flows, civilization’s progress with the energy of the Industrial Revolution, and the 21st century crises of global warming and energy consumption.

 3 An unsustainable world: global warming and its terrifying implications for water, agriculture, food, and civilization; depletion of economical petroleum reserves, deadly air pollution from burning coal, increased competition for natural resources from a growing population, and the solution of new energy technology, cheaper than coal.

4 Energy sources: the character and cost of current and principal emerging energy sources: coal, oil, natural gas, hydropower, solar, wind, biomass, and nuclear.

5 Liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR): the history and technology of liquid fuel nuclear reactors, the Oak Ridge demonstration molten salt reactors, thorium, LFTR, the denatured molten salt reactor (DMSR), builders, and possible contenders for energy cheaper than coal.

 6 Safety: the safety of molten salt reactors, comparisons to alternative energy sources, radiation risks, waste, weapons, and fear.

 7 A sustainable world: environmental benefits of thorium energy cheaper than coal: reduced CO2 emissions, reduced petroleum consumption, synthetic fuels for vehicles, hydrogen power, water conservation, desalination.

8 Energy policy: current confused policies; failure to reduce CO2 emissions, subsidies, recommendations, leadership.

Recommendations

“This book presents a lucid explanation of the workings of thorium-based reactors. It is must reading for anyone interested in our energy future.”
Leon Cooper, Brown University physicist and 1972 Nobel laureate for superconductivity

“As our energy future is essential I can strongly recommend the book for everybody interested in this most significant topic.”

George Olah, 1994 Nobel laureate for carbon chemistry

“Hargraves’ book contains a wealth of information that I’ve never seen anywhere. Very informative and insightful.”

Steve Kirsch, San Jose entrepreneur and philanthropist

“The book describes mankind’s hope for a sustainable and prosperous future: high-temperature thorium-based reactors. The writing is clear and factual, and the book will helpful to anyone interested in energy choices.”

     Meredith Angwin, Director of Energy Education for the Ethan Allen Institute

“A terrific book-length description of the need for energy solutions for this century, leading the reader to the advantages of thorium fissioning in a fluid of of molten salt. He explains the technical basis for how such a power plant works and why it can be cheaper than making power from coal — the dominant fuel for power plants today. This book will be a valuable aid for the many people who will take this demonstrated technology of the 1960s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee through the rebirth phase and into deployment in this century possibly to dominate the power plants by the later part of the 21st century. Another book about why the molten salt reactor development option was abruptly stopped in early 1970s, even though its demonstration was successful and the use of thorium held great promise is Super Fuel by Richard Martin (2012). For background the reader is referred to The First Nuclear Era by Alvin Weinberg (1994).”
     Ralph Moir, retired Lawrence Livermore Laboratory physicist, expert in fusion and molten salt reactors